Approaching Nemeta: How I Teach

Approaching Nemeta: How I Teach

Little red schoolhouse in Friendship, Maine, where Johnny learned to read
and write and all the trouble began.

§ Upon going through the overhaul of Nemeta in the summer of 2022, it occurred to me to distinguish what I teach from how I teach it. I am convinced that an explanation of how I teach will benefit newcomers in approaching Nemeta.

Rather like a “larping autist,” I appear on the campus at Nemeta in different guises or assumed identities. Veteran students fondly call me “the Maine professor” to imply “main, primary, basic,” making a pun on my hometown. The pet name may fit, but be assured, I do not mainly or exclusively teach one thing. I am certain that the “main” difficulty in approaching Nemeta is the diversity and magnitude of the topics on offer at the School. It may be helpful if I list the various and sundry roles or assumed identities at play in my delivery:

• A professor of the Humanities. Define Humanities: the study and application in life of the moral values and guidelines expressed in exceptional works of literature, poetry, painting, architecture, sculpture, music, the performing arts, including in modern times, cinema. The tap-root of the Humanities in Western civilization is found in Greek and Latin works from antiquity, but in a broader sense, the Humanities can be traced to other cultures as well. Indigenous cultures do not supply the material of the Humanities which are the product and privilege of a literate and educated class, wherever and whenever it appears.
• A self-taught scholar covering the history of religions, philosophy, and occult and esoteric systems
• A critic of belief-systems. 5 Metacritique
• A proponent of goddess reclamation
• A contemporary Gnostic heretic
• A proxy of Socrates
• An instructor in applied noetics, theory and practice
• A veteran of the Sixties, skilled in entheogenic practice and the special case of the telestic trance
• A beneficiary of Modernist tradition, poetics and literature
• A revivalist of the Romantic Movement of the late 18th and 19th centuries, extending into the late or post-Romantic Movement of the 20th Century
• A lyric poet in the Modernist tradition
• The lead of a forensic team investigating the crime scene of the human condition
• The whiz kid who decoded the Mandela Effect
• The creator of Celestics, the astrology of the future
• Creator of a new genre, directive mythology
• A sky-diviner who teaches naked-eye astronomy and sidereal mythology
• A comparative mythologist who emphasizes the supreme guiding narrative, the FGS or Home Story
• The navigator of the Gaian Navigation Experiment
• The public relations agent for the Maitreya Process
• Alter ego of Asuramaya, a mystical poet from the mirror world of the earth, located in the M31, the Andromeda Galaxy
• A key figure in the Company of the Grail or Grailkeepers who find their reflection in the Grail Legend
• A terton or treasure-finder  who discovered the Terma of Gaia Awakening
• A modern-day telestes who intends to show how to practice Gnosis today. This program of upscaling Gnostic teachings includes the telestic method of trance-learning, “instruction by the Light,” which was the secret practice in the Pagan Mysteries of the Levant. The autobiographical work (due to appear in 17 The Terma and the Terton), titled “Severed Rose,” describes many intimate details about this technique of experimental mysticism.
• A preceptor of moral ideology. Preceptor: someone who sets out the initial terms of a worldview or moral agenda. Course 12 Ideosophy presents a refutation of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology.

And, if that’s not bad enough, there are some comedic roles:

• A counterpart to Colombo, the detective in the famous TV series starring Peter Falk
• Other outlandish guises such as Deputy Dawg (another detective trope), Lash Larue (American comic book cowboy), the Lone Ranger (another comic cowboy hero), and Lone/Long John Silver of Treasure Island.
• And finally, the salacious madman Lama Luv Mutt who teaches DOG ZEN, an outrageous and irreverent takedown of Buddhism in all its sizes and flavors

[Note the exception: I do not claim to be an historian although in the 15 or more years since Not in His Image appeared, I have dedicated a large part of my time to investigating historical revision, or historical review. This is the discipline of considering received and so-called official accounts of history to see if they are supported by solid evidence and first-hand sources. My focus here has been on the history of Germany in the 20th Century, coming forward from the foundation of the modern German nation in 1872.]

§ Who is the real John, the central core person? He is the one who describes all these roles and uses them openly and conscientiously as stylistic tools, whereas none of the roles can describe him. Obviously. Genetically considered, the core person is the Son of the Widow.

Master of the Game

So much for the delivery, now about the content. Here are five key terms which characterize the content:

There are five ways to describe the style of teaching you find here:

1 heuristic: huyr IS tik. enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves.

“a ‘hands-on’ or interactive heuristic approach to learning”

2 maieutic: MY you tik.

3 hermaneutic: hur-ma-NEW-tiks, assisting interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts

4 semantic: the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. The two main areas are logical semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference and presupposition and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them. Not semiotics: the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. A subset and largely extraneous to my purposes.

5 experimental: every topic or theme treated comes with the option to experiment with it.

The Five Master Metaphors

The Latin title of Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game is Magister Ludi, “master of the game.” To be a master of the game you not only play by the rules, you define the rules, the setting of the game, and the way it is to be played.

Functional metaphor: Not merely a figure of speech — the stench of lies, the raw sewage of TikTok videos, a sea of grief, a roller coaster of emotions — but ALSO an actual phenomenon or nature, or an historical-existential situation to be engaged. Example, Alchemical Tree, symbol and instrument (explained in audio). I do not traffic in symbols, signs and archetypes in the conventional way, and I do not merely interpret myths unless there is a way to show how to engage the myth dynamically, live it out and test it. Hence, I teach directive mythology.

1. film making, the parable of the extras
2. dreaming, Sophianic narrative
3. sailing, GNE
4. forensics, MED
5. gaming, in two versions
   1. The Motherdream
   2. The gaming metaphor

These metaphors may be described metaphorically(!) by comparison to a driver in IT.

A driver, or device driver, is a set of files that tells a piece of hardware how to function by communicating with a computer’s operating system. All pieces of hardware require a driver, from your internal computer components, such as your graphics card, to your external peripherals, like a printer.

These master metaphors are the drivers of the content but also function as the peripherals that deliver it.