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Cover: Modern Hermet

The Hermeticum

Modern Hermet

Operational Hermeticism: a modern school of attention, energy and agency

  • 12 chapters
  • 4 interludes
  • 12 practices for an ordinary week

Get it on Amazon Kindle edition · 12.99 USD

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Out now. The book is finished: an opening, twelve chapters and four interludes. The Kindle edition is on Amazon. The four parts and the contents are below.

The first page

The day was full and nothing is left of it. Thirty open tabs, four conversations, two decisions moved to tomorrow, and by evening the quiet certainty that something important went past while you were busy. There was no shortage of hours. There was a shortage of presence in them.

This is not a flaw of character and it is not a problem of motivation. It is worth being precise about what happened, because named separately these look like seven problems and they are one.

The book takes this day apart and gives each piece one practice.

How it works

  • One distinction per chapter. Attention, energy, pattern, systems, planning, relationships, technology, agency.
  • One practice for an ordinary week. No rituals, no retreat.
  • Sources with their dates. The old Hermetic texts read as what they are, and our reading named as ours.
  • A limit for every claim. What a practice does not promise is said plainly.

Twelve chapters, twelve lines

Every chapter ends on one sentence. Here they all are.

  1. 01AttentionWhoever directs your attention takes your decisions — make sure it is still you.
  2. 02EnergyDo not count the hours. Count what you will do them with.
  3. 03Self-KnowledgeAn insight after which not a single condition has changed was reading about yourself, not observation.
  4. 04PatternDo not look for signs. Read the records.
  5. 05SystemsDo not ask yourself whether it works. Look at the colour — at the trace it leaves.
  6. 06PlanningPlan for the person you will be on Wednesday evening, not for the one you feel like on Sunday.
  7. 07RelationshipsA relationship is the only thing you build strictly in real time: it cannot be caught up on and it cannot be delegated.
  8. 08TechnologyThe tool is not the enemy. The enemy is the moment you stop noticing whose intention it is carrying out.
  9. 09AlignmentBefore you align anything to yourself, make sure there is a self to align it to.
  10. 10TransmutationDo not discharge tension. Give it a form.
  11. 11AgencyDo not ask for permission. Ask for the fulcrum.
  12. 12IntegrationRead the pattern. Align the system. Act with energy. Transmute the result.

No prophecy. No guru. No secret laws.

Get it on Amazon Kindle edition · 12.99 USD

I

Read

Read yourself, people, systems and symbols.

II

Align

Align action with values, energy and body.

III

Build

Turn recurring chaos into systems.

IV

Transmute

Turn knowledge into practice and result.

Contents

  • The Opening
  • Before You Can Read Anything
  • 01 Attention
  • 02 Energy
  • 03 Self-Knowledge
  • 04 Pattern
  • The Man Who Only Read
  • 05 Systems
  • 06 Planning
  • 07 Relationships
  • A Well-Run Wrong Life
  • 08 Technology Open chapter
  • 09 Alignment
  • What To Do With What Happens
  • 10 Transmutation
  • 11 Agency
  • 12 Integration

The history in this book follows published scholarship, with sources named. The exercises and their arrangement are the author’s own, and each says what it does not promise.