Esoteric Coffeehouse

Hi everyone,

I have decided to expand the scope of my Esoteric Coffeehouse blog and to provide Esoteric news through Twitter. Hence I will try to send any interesting Esoteric news, links, articles etc I hear about on my Twitter account which you can follow at http://twitter.com/johedesan . If you don’t have an account, it’s really simple to make one at http://www.twitter.com.  Once you’re on, you can click on ‘Find other people’ and type johedesan; it should come up. Note that the Esoteric news I will send will be headlined as Esoteric (I’m saying this because I sometimes twitter about other things I’m involved in).

See you on Twitter

Jo

I will start by saying something more or less disturbing: I am not a big coffee drinker. Sure, I used to drink coffee everyday at work, but this was more of necessity than pleasure: I am not a morning person. If I drink too much coffee I get giddy and antsy and rather short-tempered.

That being said, I do admire coffee for the following reasons:

• It’s dark. There is a purely earthly quality to coffee in its dark and ‘thick’ nature. In other words, there is a mystery in coffee that only coffee addicts can explain.   It has the potential of creating a haven and a world of its own making.
• It’s liquid. I see the element of water as a symbol of the uniting fluid that lies beneath all things. Thus, in my mind, coffee stimulates esoteric discussion. Its fluidity is also given by the endless combination of coffee products that exist: mocha, Americano, cappuccino, frappucino etc.
• It’s fiery. Coffee gives that boost that people need in coping with the ‘real’ world. People come in a coffeehouse, drink a cappuccino and leave refreshed and energized to their own purposes.

I believe that ‘coffeehouses’ have brilliantly capitalized on the qualities of coffee I already mentioned above.

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Welcome to my Esoteric Coffeehouse – I am your host, Jo, and I invite you to take a look around my place and then have a sit in a comfortable couch, sip on a virtual coffee (or perhaps a spiced chai) and engage in a real discussion on esoteric topics.

First, it is perhaps desirable to clarify the term “esoteric” in our conversation. To be sure, there are numerous academic definitions of what is meant by the term “esoteric”, which I will expand in a future post. However, we are not here to engage in a purely academic discussion, but a friendly exchange on a topic broadly defined as ‘esoteric’. Surely, as it happens with every interaction, the definition we will use for ‘esoteric’ is bound to evolve.

To begin with, I will propose to start with a fairly large perspective of ‘esoteric’ as ‘a spiritual vision of what lies beneath the ordinary’. I believe that the esoteric is actually about an attempt of ‘seeing’ beyond the surface, hence challenging common perceptions. In this, ‘esotericism’ is a meeting between the intellect and the spirit; moreover, it is generally associated with a practice or technique that allows someone to delve into the vision. In this framework, I envisage such wide-range topics as:

• Alchemy
• Magic
• Hermeticism
• Rosicrucianism
• Alternative medicine
• Astrology
• Neoplatonism
• Scientific views
• Philosophy
• Mysticism
• Freemasonry
• Sufi practices
• Movies and books with esoteric theme
• Art & music
• Mythology
• Folklore
• Esoteric or esoterically-related thinkers
• Academic esotericism
• Esoteric lifestyle
  

What I am basically proposing through this blog is to incite in-depth, substantial and thoughtful discussion on esoteric themes.

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