The Mystical Dreams of Descartes - Exploring the Origins of Rationalism and Modernity

Thank you for this excellent video! It was lucid dreaming at an early age that caused me to question the consensus about reality. So, I appreciate that you note how the dominant philosophy that emerged from the so-called Age of Enlightenment suppressed and repressed a huge category of human experience and expression as irrelevant to knowing truth. In doing so, Western intellectualism essentially developed a collective delusion about what Truth could and could not be. FInally, yes, reading in dreams is possible. Like a previous commenter, this is one of the ways I test for lucid dreaming, and sometimes I can indeed read, but not often.

Closet full of black metal tshirts, I feel u bro!

Speaking of which, if u wanna make a one off just for fun video on the influence of mysticism in metal, that would be really cool.

I had to pause the video and give you props for that banger of a French joke, absolutely saw it coming but it was still fire

You call aristotle a physicist yeah , Aristotle was a rational mysticist . It clearly states that intellect and reason is due to the nous . Slaves were seen to be driven by instinct, they lacked the capacity to reason he goes on to state that the intellect and reason is not of the senses , for him reason was due to the higher mind or self the nous , non material soul or self . He also describes god as the non movable mover . Yet some of the descriptions he gives when describing animals clearly show a sort of natural selection process. I wouldn't be surprised if he described woman in his culture as being ruled by the senses . The democracy shit people equate him with is the participation of Greek males in politics , the rational ones that is , not women or slaves evidently . To say Aristotle was a natural scientist would be true in some respect , he attempted to use epistemology while studying . Evidently not in relation to the soul , which many have misinterpreted .

Aristotle probably wouldn't have been so well accepted, but superb illustrations go a long way. 🤡 But seriously those helicopters are awesome!

Philosophy and mysticism? I haven't found any philosophy people that entertain mystic ideas.

Sounds like Descarte had a DMT trip and found the machine elves.

the description of enthusiasm has me thinking of "fire in the head" as described by some religious and mystical sources. I've experienced this while meditating and while playing music a few times. It's like the top of your head opens up. And in the case of playing music, time dilates.
The band Killing Joke, who are so into esotericism they found 2 of their band members with a spell, describe such an experience during one of their performances in the movie "The Death and Resurrection Show".


PS Wolves in the Throneroom! Saw them years ago. Great band. Furious!

What a wonderful lecture!
I have been able to read in dreams (and occasionally, but not with complicated lines,) re-read sentences. I can also do sums but subtraction is difficult

"The foundations for Modernity may be Rationalism, but the foundations for Rationalism appears to be Mysticism. And Modernity would be well to come to terms with that."

Really enjoyed this. Subscribed.

You should be talking to Jonathan Pageau

I have to note,although this is kind of irrelevant to the topic, that most of the time I can read in dreams.

I love this video so much. It reminds me so much of the relationship of Kant to Swedenborg. Absolutely fascinating

It returns!

It needs t be bbrought intoo llight lay out the dreams!

You may be interested in hearing that my apologetics professor at seminary has extensive lectures on the influence of mysticism, alchemy, hermeticism, etc, on the ancient world into our modern day. People around here joke that one of his courses is essentially alchemy 101. So its interesting to hear a similar set of theses from a much different corner of scholarship.

I first heard about these dreams from Terence McKenna lectures where he said Descartes had a dream where an angel told him "The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.” I used to repeat this story until I saw this video now and researched a bit more that McKenna had invented aspects of his story or misremembered and that based on the period evidence there was a different nuance to the details.

The jokes were fresh and spicy this episode 🤣

Great video. Such knowledge is being repressed, and for this reason these days people don't own up and claim their ideas for themselves, but dreams are often the "inspiration" for ideas, even in hard science. For instance, the 19th-century German chemist August Kekulé claimed to have pictured the ring structure of benzene after dreaming of... wait for it... a snake eating its own tail.

This is wild

One of my favorite dream stories was from a college roommate of mine: where in his dream he visited a gypsy fortuneteller -- who showed him snapshots from his dream the night before.

There's an interesting story about Isaac Singer, who invented the first practical household sewing machine. He was working on the problem for years, but was frustrated with making it work. Until one night he had a dream of a snake that zoomed in and paid special attention to l the eye on the snake's head. And as the story goes, Singer then woke up and realized the solution to his problem was that he needed to put the eye (hole) of the needle near its point, instead of its back end as is the case when you sew by hand. Don't know if the story's apocryphal or not, but I do think dreams overall tend to focus on what's important to us -- even if for some reason they tend to do so very often in strange and unusual ways.

I am a muslim i do istekhara (muslim prayer) sleep and see exactly what God wants me to do and eventually it happens

Thank you for enlightening us.

hear, hear.

I've read in dreams! It usually goes haywire but sometimes comes out as names of really weird places or words or just plain silly

Really your videos are always a treat, never regretting my donation

in my experience you CAN "read" in your dreams, however I find it exhausting because it requires active effort. In my case the first few lines are there and they're easy but then something happens to the way i'm processing the dream and the text itself and suddenly i have to try to find the words on my own, as if it suddenly it turns into a lucid dream or have to translate a grammatically challenging sentence/slang from a language I do understand

There's scholarly work on Leibniz and Kabbalah by A.P. Coudert.

" Method On Discourse" is an amazing book by Rene Descartes;, and like Aristotle very logical. Thank you.

Ok, so I normally just listen to your lectures, but the on screen commentary is very silly, the Natural Light bit got me.

Such an interesting discussion, thank you. Just to say that I have had the experience of reading inside my dreams. It is possible.

After watching this the first time, I watched it again with my friend. This is a perfect example of philosophical irony. It's extremely upsetting though that the rationalists are trying so hard to keep this stuff under wraps.

Reminiscent of the structure of the benzene ring being discovered in a dream.

I feel like you could make an episode of “ancient aliens” about this topic

"We doubt our way to the truth." Damn right.

I too have had dreams where I am bent in a terrible position unable to move correctly. This I always associated with my dream awaring myself to my own paralyzed body. Same with speech being weak. I've even had dreams where people usually my brother will tell me that all this is a made up world inside a sleeping body. It's incredible to know that Descartes had the bent dream, and you even realize it was sleep paralysis!

NOTE: You can't read in dreams, however you can kinda. Text can show as a image, or symbol. Like if you are familiar with some phrase, and know it's written form, you can dream that, but it's just an image in your mind of it as it looks, it's not really word by word reading.

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I just included this episode in my first year bachelor course "Diversifying Philosophy". It worked very well to show the students the exclusions that are generally made in the philosophy curriculum. Thanks for your valuable work!

Couldn't it also be that Descartes embedded his philosophy in divine inspiration to appease the Church?

Rock on Sledge, another coffee for you

A "logical" explanation for finding valid solutions in dreams or thoughts seemingly out of nowhere is the fact of the human brain having two almost totally separate hemispheres that communicate with each other very little, one of which deals with what we are intentionally paying attention to while the other is aware of the things on the periphery like the snapping twig of a predator sneaking up on you while your focused on something like picking up nuts or some other task. You may only have a vague feeling of uneasiness because you didn't consciously hear the snapping twig.

I have a dream journal spanning about 25 uears now and have had dreams that threw me for such a loop I had to consult esoteric spiritualists to sort them out, so I feel poor Descartes getting so disoriented after awakening.

I have also clearly read text in dreams. Not very often, but it's definitely possible.

Now we just have the religion of science