This philosophy club was held in central France on April 28, 2024 (1)

This philosophy club was held in central France on April 28, 2024. It begins with a further report from Dr. Thomas Daffern about his recent philosophical work for peace and a discussion of the deep causes behind the outbreak of further violence in Israel and Gaza and Palestine. Dr Daffern also mentions his recent offer to host a mediation between Gaza’s Hamas, Israel and Iran, dealing primarily with the religious aspects of this complex matrix of conflicts, most urgently in Gaza but now threatening to erupt further afield in the Middle East. Also in this meeting of our Club we discussed the work of Dr Matt Segall and his studies of Schelling, Hegel, Fichte and the Jena set. We also had an update on the recent full moon ceremony Thomas attended and the fact that we are just experiencing the end of a 14 year cycle and the commencement of another (Jupiter / Uranus conjunction), We also discussed the Annual day of Mulltilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace, as well as what the word Mulltilateralism actually means. We also discussed links between the Periodic Table of the World’s Religious and Philosophical Traditions elements of Slavic Paganism (Primal Traditions, 17) and Christian Shamanism (Christianities, 139) as well as the relationships between two Gods from the Tarot of the Gods (Liber – Ace of Water) and Osiris (the Fool in the Major Arcana). In the face of the continuing horrific violence in Gaza and the grinding conflict in Ukraine we looked at things philosophically through the eye of these analytical tools (Tarot, Periodic Table) and asked what insights they can offer us to resolve and heal these conflicts so humanity as a whole, can understand, learn and move on. Thomas used the Tarot of the Gods to pose these questions – (see https://tarotofthegods.wordpress.com/ for more details). He also used drew on the Periodic Table of the World’s Religious and Philosophical Traditions (see HTTPS://iipsgp.wixsite.com/periodictable) – We closed with a discussion of French philosopher Étienne de La Boétie (1530 – 1563).

so greetings hello welcome to the philosophy Club here in uh middle of France in the province called lur it’s an old CED part of the world very rural but there are pockets of um intellectual activity and the French are interested in philosophy and have been so um it’s a good place to run this from um so just a few words of introduction about the um this week it’s been um another roller coaster week um we had a full moon on the 23rd I tend to go to um a kind of gathering on the full moons of uh Kindred Spirits so that was quite interesting and we learned in that that um we’re at quite an important time um in astrology because the organizers are astrologers and we’re we’re we’ve just finishing a 14-year cycle in astrology uh when Jupiter and Uranus are conjunct and they haven’t been for 14 years this happens in the heavens every 14 years approximately and so we were asked to think you know what were you doing 14 years ago because that’s the end of this cycle and I was thinking well I was actually on 14 years ago pretty much exactly I was moving into the castle in Scotland on Lo Goyle I drove up to Scotland from Sussex in the summer of of 14 years ago fell in love with the place um the view of the Lo and then moved everything up um in September of that year which was an an enormously you know complex move involving huge lores and all kinds of things because of my huge library and everything and I stayed there for seven years and then I came here to France and I’ve lived here for seven years so that’s my 14e cycle so I’d ask you to reflect on what were you doing 14 years ago and do you think that’s you know were you doing something significant is this a cycle that you can now say okay that’s finished um and then look forward to the next 14 years so the other thing we were asked to do is like where do you want to be 14 years from now and uh in the exercise I came to the view well um I mean I’m my primary duty is writing and teaching and I’m leaving a legacy of works for future Generations I hope that they will find even if this current generation are too obsessed with you know the mintii of of everyday life so they don’t have time to study my works I hoping in future Generations they will and I’m leaving behind quite a you know deep Legacy of stuff so in the next 14 years I want to publish one book per per year for 14 years like not small things when I do a book it’s like a multi volume thing like the um the tarot of the Gods that’s that’s one so I want to do 14 more things like that substantial major pieces of work and I’m currently thinking what are the 14 I’m going to do do I mean one of them is to complete being and knowledge which I’ve I’ve got the drafts for but I haven’t published yet all 10 volumes I’ve done I’ve only published two volumes so that’s that’s a Year’s project that itself would take about that that length of time and then there are others um when I lived in the borders of Wales and England for seven years I wrote a cultural Encyclopedia of the Welsh marches I fell in love with the area and it covers all the cultural history the intellectual history art history history of philosophy history of um religions and poetry and music on both sides of the border between England and Wales the English side and the Welsh side and I looked at this right from you know before the English actually turned up on the island the Welsh were there it was their Homeland then the Romans came and um and eventually the English turned up so it’s it’s a very interesting microcosm of history that I studied living there I was teaching in Montgomery I lived in an ashram near Montgomery in pois in in Wales and got very inspired and I discovered a lot of very interesting people lived in the Welsh marches poets like John Dunn who was um very close friends with Magdalena Herbert who’s buried in the church in Montgomery and um I’ve always Lov John D’s work as a PO and also uh Lord Herbert of cherbury cherbury is a little village exactly in the Welsh marches there and he was the first deist philosopher in England who was um part Welsh and he straddled the border and he lived in Montgomery castle where I used to go in the evenings and have a walk it was near the ashra and he was the first uh English philosopher to write a treaties on the nature of Truth which he wrote in Latin de veritate and he came up with this idea of all religions have a common root they all share five um common Notions as he called it and therefore whatever the religion on the pyramid table um you know whichever color box you’re in according to uh sir Edward Herbert you’re you’re within one overall framework and he tried to map that now that’s quite important to have done that in the 1600s and I I’m a great fan of Herbert’s work and he’s technically known as the founder of deism um which was the school of thought that said there are many varieties of truth but there’s one ultimate truth and he um he was the um you know he was the um Earl of um Montgomery at the time there’s an interesting story I discovered when I lived there and this is all in the cultural Encyclopedia of the wsh marches which is a thousand pages and that’s going to take me a year to finally publish that I’m sorry it’s taken so long but it’s coming out in the next 14 years it’ll be one of them there’s a great story about um sir Edward Herbert he was really an intellectual he didn’t want to be a fighter a warrior um or there was a knight sir Edward Herber he was supposed to be available you know emergency to the king and the King was having a problem with the Civil War at the time King Charles I had encountered some opposition from Parliament let’s put it like that and they were ultimately they chopped his head off difficult dangerous Dark Times um there were fanatics on the Parliamentary side like Cromwell who then went and did huge damage in Island destroying a lot of the abies killing people for being Catholic Cromwell was was um you know motivated by an anti- Catholic sort of Witch Hunt he was a pres Presbyterian and he felt the God’s righteous Army the Puritans should therefore go out and kill the anglicans who were suspected of being too Catholic anyway it was all scary times and montgom um Herbert of Montgomery was in his castle studying with a vast library trying to research the nature of Truth and he was an anglica but a very moderate one like me he wasn’t fanatical at all in his religious views and he certainly didn’t believe in killing people because of their religious views he theism stands for the complete opposite of that anyway this parliamentary Army turned up outside his castle and demanded that he surrender the castle and hand over the keys he only had a skeleton force of 15 people defending it with a few old rusty guns and there was a few thousand of these parliamentary people saying if you don’t surrender we’ll smash the doors down and come and kill you all anyway he he could have held out he could have sent to the king to send reinforcements he could have done a heroic martyr’s death but instead like a true scholar he negotiated to surrender and by the agreement he and his entire Library were filled into wagons and then transported to London where he knew that he would be welcomed by some of the parliamentarian intellectuals particularly John Seldin who was a great friend of his and who was like him also a deist although technically he was on the Parliamentary side he was um in the ins of Court he was a legal figure um and he was a great expert actually on Ancient Syriac Pagan religions and on the history of Jewish and um Aramaic and he was fluent in Hebrew um and he was called the rabbi of England at the time even though he was like um like Edward Herbert of cherry an Anglican so anyway he went he went to London and just carried on with his studies and that to me is what a scholar should do in time of War you know protect the library and just remove yourself from the battlefield discuss I mean should he have fought I mean but anyway I um so that’s an example of what’s in my cultural encyclopedia the Welsh marches I put like five years of study into that multiv volumed work which is going to be one of my 14 that I’m going to be working on over the next 14 years um and there are you know many others um so that’s exciting it was great to go and check in with the the full moon circle and and get this thing about the 14year cycle um the following day the 24th of April it was the annual day of Multicultural multilateralism and diplomacy of PE for peace which is an official un day so the French government you know the Canadian the British the American were all signed up to this idea of having a day every year to discuss multilateralism now that’s a a new buzzword come into diplomacy it wasn’t around when I studied diplomatic history at the London School of Economics um but it’s come up in the last decade or so it’s a sort of it’s got many meanings and one thing I think that needs clarifying is what do we actually mean by multilateral ISM way back in the 80s when it was referring to nuclear weapons um the word first started being used to mean that it was the opposite of unilateralism so unilateralism is that the state would suddenly decide to get rid of all its nuclear weapons like Britain just immediately disarm and there were people on the left in the labor party and and further left than that who said let’s do that let’s have unilateral immediate disarm get rid of all our nuclear weapons and that’ll be the righteous thing to do because they’re wrong they’re evil they’re immoral and ber and Russell and CND advocated unilateralism okay against that view was people that said no we we can’t do that because like we’ll leave ourselves open to attack by Russia or China or whoever else has got nuclear weapons we need to do this multilaterally so negotiate with all the other nuclear weapons powers and then we’ll all get rid of them simultaneously like all at once rather than skewing the boat so that one lot puts down its weapons you know and then the other lot just come and trample on you so that was the multilateral position um I’d set up philosophist a piece at the time so we were sort of thinking through these options and and looking at it from all Which Way um I think I I agree with both arguments my problem is that as an intellectual I can see it from all sides so I can see the aru for unilateralism it’s you know convincing ethical stand and ENC categorical imperative if something’s right you just do it you don’t worry about the consequences on the other hand I can see the argument for multilateralism anyway that debate has now shifted and so we’re talking about the day of multilateralism means means Collective efforts to improve the situation of the planet Collective efforts to make people’s lives better um instead of um unilateral decisions like like Putin invading Ukraine that was a unilateral position taken by Russia that we’re going to go and attack um you know Ukraine because it’s going to make things better I mean I presume Putin thought that that he had some mental justification for his action um I don’t believe it was justified but that was that was in his mind it was getting revenge for Russia’s mistreatment it was in in Revenge for the West um doing its own unilateral actions like invading Iraq after in 2003 and for making a false connection between the events of 9/11 and Iraq so in a sense you can see why Putin was fling around he had to do something because because he and his friends felt the West had been abusing its power since um they had a lot of cultural capital after 9/11 and then blew it by attacking Iraq for God’s sake um which had nothing to do with 911 so so this resentment have been building up in Russia over the years and um and then attacking Libya um an Islamic socialist then um forting unrest in Syria allying with some rather extremist Islamic um forces um so you know again I can see it from all sides simultaneously I can see the rationale but my my job as a philosopher is to try and heal the situation to heal these planetary conflicts um and to diagnose their causes it’s we have we have a problem in that we have a mental health epidemic breaking out among world leaders and look at Trump I mean he’s he’s a even an American president was elected who has some some some mental health issues I would say and and that’s backed up many psychiatrists have said this um but we have that also in Russia and we have it in other countries so what do we do okay that’s what that that day was all about I attended a conference discussion on Africa um gave a brief warmup talk about my work with mediation about Gaza and um attempting to get some peace agreement between Hamas and Israel and Gaza I mentioned this last week you know so I was like doing an update on that and then we heard a talk by um Joseph ceri who’s a Australian international relations expert who did a brilliant overview of the last 10 or 20 years of world politics um and again he was trying to explain how we got into the current mess um and I asked him a question at the end well what’s the role of intellectuals in in in this this mess he answered very well so I’m hoping he’ll be coming to the world intellectual Forum meeting which is coming up on Tuesday um the 30th of April and um you know I think there’s a lot to be done I also attended a talk on that day which was very interesting by the scientific and medical network uh which I belong to I’m signer of the Galileo commission statement what we’re asking for is a re a re-examination of of this notion that science is about materialism that science is is sort of wedded to an ideology of materialism and therefore won’t discuss spirituality or religions or philosophy of metaphysics or um and we’ll explain everything in material terms now that is not actually what science is about that’s a presupposition by some scientists who take a materialist position and what we’re arguing scientific and medical network is that actually we need to reexamine this debate I mean dayart who I’d actually have a soft spot for he came from near here in France he said okay so there’s the material plane of things we can study that mathematically but there is this noetic sphere the realm of God or we could say the gods or the spirits or the be divine beings dayart never said that doesn’t exist um he said no that definitely exists he was a Believer himself but he said that he didn’t quite know how science could study that in his day in the 1600s science wasn’t far enough Advanced um I mean he was a sort of deist like George Herbert Edward Herbert um it was his brother by the way who was George Herbert the poet great metaphysical poet like John Dunn but um no Edward Herbert the deist and dayart had a lot in common and what I’m saying is that okay thank you dayart but it’s time to actually reopen that debate we should now study the noetic sphere um with as much precision as we can scientifically and that’s what the Institute of noetic Sciences is doing in America founded by one of the Apollo Astronauts Ed Mitchell I’ve been a member off and on of that for years and it’s what the scientific medical network is saying um and we had a brilliant talk by Dr Matt seagull who’s a young American philosopher just finished his pH he teaches at the California Institute of integral studies and he’s a young chap who’s done a lot of inde depth research on on um shelling who was a very important member of the German idealist Tradition at the time of Hegel and um fcta and all these great German intellectuals that mostly congregated around J which was this University Town very beautiful on the S River um and which gave them intellectual Freedom it was an interesting University where you could go even KL Marx did his Doctorate through there because they wouldn’t have him in Berlin or anywhere else he finally got it through in Jana um somewhat later he he didn’t meet shelling um to my knowledge but I know that um shelling later got the chair at the University of Berlin as professor of philosophy and the young Engles went to see and hear his lectures um but of course you see marks and Engles were wedded to a Mater materialist ideology so they wouldn’t have liked shelling because shelling like me wanted to reconcile matter and spirit their philosophy was to try and explain how matter and spirit coexist in this crazy world that we live in it seems to seems to shelling that we humans are the sort of the meeting point we have a spiritual life but we have a material life and we we are the sort of fulcrum of that that ongoing work of synthesis and healing anyway he was also important for pioneering the ideas of the unconscious and he got into studying mythology he believed he was a Christian but he was not a normal kind of Christian he was more of a gnostic who believed that that within God there are opposing forces and that God himself is an ongoing process and that um you know God the father and God the son are having a long long conversations through history um and he then Associated that to the the stories of Cronos in Greek mythology and dionis who’s the son of God um who was then killed very similar to Christ and yet then resurrected and becomes the god of immortality for the ancient Greeks when you did the dionan rituals you were reborn like diis well shelling quite rightly said look hang on this is this is like Christianity So within Christianity there are these traces of ancient Greek thought and he pioneered all this stuff amazing thinker and um KL young young in a sense just picked up the Baton which shelling dropped when he died um so anyway Matt seagull gave a brilliant talk about all this although he he focused more on schelling’s philosophy of science because um shelling was friends with um Alexander Von Humbolt and Wilhelm Von hbol and Gerta who lived close to Jana in viar it was a 15minute um Journey sorry 15 M horse ride and Gerta was often going across to Jana and schilla the poet who wrote the um OD to Joy which is the European national anthem now Beethoven put it in his Ninth Symphony Schiller also lived in Jana so they were having these incredible discussions like a like a philosophy Club you know back in the 1800s so we learned all about this and thank you very much to Matt for for sharing this with us and that was the subject of his own PhD thesis um and then on um the 25th um there was a book club where we discussed a book that’s come out about this about the Jana work called um magnificent Rebels uh by a German British historian who’s written a detailed study of all this um Andrea wolf I think she’s called very interesting study which I recommend to people um so I’ve been busy um also active you know doing my writing and so on um I just I just work in the faith that the work of intellectuals does matter and that you know okay politicians don’t listen to us they don’t bring us up and say you know is it a good idea to invade Ukraine or not I mean they ought to and I would have counselled Putin no don’t do it whatever you do don’t do that you know yes you want to get back at the West yeah but that’s not the way um but I think history will bear out that the work of intellectuals is is important and and that therefore you know it makes a difference um I wish that we could speed up the the time I just want to mention one other thing um that I’ve also been doing this week which is in relation to the crisis in Gaza which is still going on um I I see the Americans are now building a jetty and yet tragically they were fired on um so there you know America’s doing its best under Biden to get some Aid into these Palestinians I just hope that that goes ahead they get substantial Aid in and I hope that they’ve said enough to dissuade Israel from doing their invasion of Rafa where they’re going to be bombing 10th city with a million people in it and okay they want to get at Hamas who are in the tunnels but there’s got to be another way than that anyway so there’s an interesting filmmaker called David sanki I believe his name is um or might hanky um forgive my ignorance here um who has made a film about um the events of October the 7th which of course we all are told was um you know um Hamas gone crazy and they’re all to blame and that’s the justification that Israel has for going in and slaughtering people in Gaza this filmmaker who made another film called Dark Legacy about the um assassination of Kennedy which is worth watching and which fingers and names George Bush the senior president as being involved in the CIA actions against Kennedy himself I didn’t know that that’s pretty major stuff and I’ve looked at Kennedy’s history and the assassination obviously wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald so this film Dark Legacy is one of this chap hanky’s early Works came out a few years ago now he’s made this documentary about what happened on October 7th and I would I would recommend everyone that listens to this to watch it if you want to email me I’ll send you the the the kind of you know the link um it’s it raises lotss of very important questions and I think the most important thing it asks is the border between Gaza and Israel is one of the most highly defended policed and surveilled borders in the world security-wise there are there’s a huge wall um an actual like concrete wall then there’s then there’s a fence and then there’s a really big fence there’s also laser equipment which shows if people are moving about there’s film equipment point ing at every inch of the wall and every few hundred yards there are towers with machine guns on which are fired remotely by operatives sitting you know somewhere away so that the in theory nobody should be able to get out of Gaza and the film documents all this in great detail and even if somebody does you know uh begin to approach the wall there are these spotters every so often be like in kind of bunkers with with um cameras watching because the cameras are in drones or they’re um mounted on the wall and they can see every square inch of the the land approaching this wall um and the spotters did actually say they alerted their higher ups there is an attack happening we’ve seen people approaching in in vehicles it looks very dangerous you know you need to call somebody in and stop this um and most of these are young women in the Israel Defense Forces they’re you know i’ I’ve known Israeli young women that have to go by law you you volunteer well no you don’t volunteer you have to go and serve for one or two years in the Israeli Defense Forces so these are 20y olds who were watching and shouting and they were completely ignored so they they sent the information up and it was never acted on you see if that information been acted on the Israeli Defense Force has the capacity to send in helicopters uh Apache helicopters within 5 minutes they could have been over the wall shooting down the people approaching but instead absolute silence there was just nothing and these poor women were shouting and saying look help you know and what happened according to the film and I suspend judgment I mean it’s you know but it’s certainly worth investigating um their their pleas for help were completely ignored and eventually Hamas broke through and then came and slaughtered a lot of these young spotter women um because they had no defenses their little Huts or where they were hiding you know a few a few 100 yards from the wall were just overrun and they were killed um so there are many many questions to ask about how is it possible that um you know this this incredible defensive Shield of Israel could have been so porous just on that day of October the 7th and there are interviews with this Israeli Defense Force serving people who say no it was deliberate the only explanation is this was deliberate um in order to then provide a reason to then go and attack the people of Gaza and and all the propaganda that came out immediately about mass killings and rapes and babies being put in ovens all of which turns out to be pretty much untrue um although can I suspend judgment you know um it it was all pre pre uh pre-ordained that it was it was a sort of part of this this overall um false flag anyway that’s what the documentary um alleges I suspend judgment I’m an academic here working for peace but it is important isn’t it and I think we should look at the evidence fairly and if if I get u a green light to do the mediation in Paris I will be asking these questions I’ll only do it if both sides agree to um tell the truth you can’t mediate conflicts like this if people are lying you can’t mediate when people are lying it’s the first law of successful mediation so um these facts should come out and as an intellectual I’m saying they should come out now sooner than later and I’d like to thank this chat for making this film and there are other people he’s not the only one other people have put this evidence together harat’s newspaper and Israel has published information cooperating this um but I think it’s you know his is the most chilling um single documentary I’ve seen um so yes if you want to watch it ask me and I’ll send you the the details um right I think that uh the situation is so Grim that we need some Divine assistance here so let’s go and look at first we’ll look at the periodic table see if there’s any rational way of of elevating the discussions on the planet that are going on between you know um crazy um you know Psychopaths I mean I mean if if it’s true and I suspend judgment if it’s true that Netanyahu is behind a plot to to allow Hamas to break out and and then use it as a justification if some of his War cabinet and him know this and we’re doing it willingly then then it’s psychop pathology we’re talking now what what thinking would be behind that well um you know you have to look at it medically I think this is where I go back to my work as a philosopher Pythagoras said I’ve come not to teach but to heal I’m in that Pythagorean tradition as a Healer and I think philosophy is a therapy and poor old Netanyahu definitely needs some therapy as do the Hamas people I mean they went along with this they they played some role um we don’t know what we need to get to the bottom of it as a planet because a genocide has been committed because of it um and that needs to come out okay so how can how can scholarship help let’s let’s have a couple of these Faith traditions and see what we can find out um so I’m interested by the 17th Premier Slavic number 17 yes okay okay that’s jolly good that’s the ancient Pagan religion of the Slavic peoples number 17 um and okay and and I got um the Christian tradition called Liberation theology uh number 138 um yes so that’s that’s going to be interesting to look at these two in contrast um and I’m going to cheat a bit because um the Pagan Slavic one is particularly associated with a deity called perun and perun actually has his own tarot card um so I think what we’ll do is we’re going to look up perun um and we’re going to see you know what what what perun would make of all this um um as he was the chief deity of the the Slavic peoples um okay um so I I I studied Islamic history I’m in a historian at the University of London at the school of slavonic and East European studies which is now part of university college it used to be an autonomous Institute and it had a lot of the great Slavic historians and and thinkers um in British history it was set up during World War I by uh Czech intellectuals Thomas masseri who was a great Czech philosopher and sociologist who then became president of the first autonomous czechoslovak country and he wrote about slamic history he was a great intellectual in his own right um so I kind of studied all this stuff as a young man in my 20s and and fell in love with Slavic history and culture so interesting and we of course in the west don’t really ever study it um I learned about the Polish Messianic philosophy of Adam misit and others who came to Paris Poland was always the Messiah nation in Europe because it it was never taken seriously by the great Powers they kept carving it up um only Napoleon gave it a sort of autonomous nationhood but the Russians and the prussians and the austrians didn’t really take