u/IcyAd8672

What if the nightmare you were living wasn't the real world? An Enigma Trapped Inside a Dream Story is a surrealist story about a man at the edge of everything — financial ruin, social collapse, global war — who steps through a mirror and into a dreamlike apocalyptic revelation. Woven with poetry and steeped in Kabbalistic and mystical imagery, it asks: what does it mean to truly wake up?

What if everything modern philosophy has told us about language, selfhood, and meaning is backwards?

In this work, I begin where Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger left off and attempt to push past them. Drawing on Michel Henry's radical phenomenology of Life, I argue that language does not shape who we are. Rather, it is our shared, invisible, felt subjectivity, the inner reality of being alive, that makes language possible in the first place.

Weaving together phenomenology, Neoplatonism, Gilbert Durand, Hermeticism, and Kabbalah, Life Is the House of Language builds a case that the fundamental error of the Western tradition is its obsession with what appears, the visible, the exterior, the object, at the expense of what cannot appear at all: the autoaffective, pre-reflective Life that each of us lives from the inside, before the first word is spoken.

Along the way, the book tackles the philosophy of gender, the nature of culture and religion, the meaning of tragedy, the alchemical tradition, and the phenomenological significance of the Name of Jesus, arriving at a vision of human existence as a vocation to complete what nature, left to itself, cannot.

For readers who have felt that something essential is missing from both secular philosophy and conventional religion, this book offers a path inward, one that runs through Plotinus and Goethe, Blake and Paracelsus, Michel Henry and Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, toward the invisible Life that is closer to us than anything we have ever perceived.

There is a deeply fascinating book called "Dasatir-i-Asmani" written by a Persian Zoroastrian priest named Azar Kayvan. From what I've read, it resulted in a distinct Zoroastrian sect (Azarkeivanianism) that is influenced by the Illuminationism of Suhrawardī (and, being a big fan of Henry Corbin who wrote a lot about Suhrawardī, this immediately piqued my interest).

Furthermore, this book, Dasatir-i-Asmani, was written in a unique mystical language, akin to the Enochian language developed at around the same time by John Dee and Edward Kelley. This language is called "Āsmānī zabān". But while I have obtained an English translation of Dasatir-i-Asmani, I've found no examples of Āsmānī zabān either written down or spoken aloud. Does anyone have any examples of Āsmānī zabān? I'm very curious to know what the language looked like and sounded like.

The story begins in Prague, 1600, at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. There, the Chief Pataphysician Valentinus presents a painting of a woman. She stands with her back turned, and she is rumored to be holding a secret. Using a tuning fork that produces colors instead of sound, Valentinus draws her out of the painting to see what she is hiding.
But when she comes out of the painting and turns to face the court, they see it: she has a full beard. She is cursed, not only with the beard but with no memories as well.
She is given the name Galatea and sent to the Castle of Animiatry, a place where curses are healed and fractured souls are made whole through a discipline called animiatry. There, she meets a fellow patient named Thomas, who falls for her the very day they meet. The condition of his own curse, however, means that confessing his love would kill him. And Galatea, who has quietly begun to fall for him too, cannot imagine that anyone could love her back, not with her beard.
What neither of them knows is that the witch who cursed Galatea was pulled from the same painting by a black magician, and this witch does not want the curse undone. She lurks in the forest surrounding the castle, patient and watchful, doing everything she can to make sure Galatea doesn't heal.
And then there is Bob. He is a black cat who loves cheese. He is perhaps the most important character in the book.