In my anthology of epiphanic readings The Other Road Ahead, I have employed Jacob Boehme's ideas and writings throughout the book. Sometimes directly but mostly they are used as the environment for other ideas.
The book has been characterized as a phenomenology. There is no story line, plot, or characters instead the selections are like traveling a gentle country road of thoughts that are not common to the average person. Together they form a different view of reality, one that is not consumed with scientific materialism or the aggressive modernism that forms our current weltanschauung.
As a phenomenology it recalls the more poetic view of the world as by Martin Heidegger or Friedrich von Hardenberg and assumes the work of Carl G Jung as well as Sophiologists like Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev and Nikoli Berdyaev. However, without the foundational vision of Boehme none of this would exist.
By opening the Protestant world to mystical revelations Boehme inaugurated a portal into the vast wisdom of the Sophianic Western tradition that had been buried by a thousand years of dogmatic Catholicism. Perhaps as an act of prescience Boehme inserted this alternative worldview anticipating the coming resurgence of spiritual materialism with the cataclysmic repercussions from the Battle of White Mountain (8. November 1620, first surrender of the protestants).
It was indeed the ability of Boehme to recognize the mystical vision in the underground philosophy coded into alchemy. Alexandrian Gnosticism had been successfully concealed as alchemy and hidden from the Roman Church minders for centuries until it could sprout in the bosom of Europe.
The problem with the implied phenomenology of Boehme is that it has been difficult to popularize this way of thinking without trivializing it. So it must be protected from the materialist overlords with various methods to keep it from being canceled or attacked as outlandish.
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1) My humble works bring Boehme into the conversation in small doses. For instance:
In less than one hundred words I introduce the readers to Boehme's vision of the universe in a direct manner inviting people to explore this insight rather than trying to guide an explanation.
March 14 Creation
In the theology of Jacob Boehme (d.1624) before the beginning there was the bottomless uncreated will of God or the mysterium magnum from which the eternal Abyss was formed. Within this mysterium He fashions a “mirror of imagination” where the image of Creation; the colors, shapes, figures, energies, and all opposites are reflected so that everything in heaven and earth became manifest in His imagination.
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2) Here again I adopt a very concise use of words to entice the reader to Boehme's ideas using a the more familiar William Blake as a jumping off place then adding the contemporary concept of a hologram to embellish the point.
July 9 Holograms
The entire universe is revealed to us in all things and as William Blake (d. 1827) said, “To see the world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower”. This expresses a very old idea carried through religion and art. It is also the most advanced notions of holography and quantum physics. Jacob Boehme (d.1624) saw evidence of the Trinity in each thing that exists.
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3) This illustration of Boehme comes straight out of his epistemological views. It makes a point of the non material nature of the world without directly challenging the "scientific" viewpoint. This material could come from Zosimos of Panopolis while at the same time it comports with the latest beliefs in quantum physics.
November 5 Light
As soon as light leaves a flame it is free from it and cannot go back to the point where it was first generated. The light is not the flame and neither is the heat which comes forth also. Nor is heat the same as light although they both have a common source. We can feel heat and we see light but both disappear from our senses when they pass us by. (Inspired by Jacob Boehme d.1624)
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4)In a few of my selections I include ASMP (Anonymous Social Media Posts) that I have found to be very insightful, I call them “#Voices”. Sometimes people express these opinions in this manner because in their situation spiritual ideas are frowned upon or not allowed.
Boehme's Sophiology is examined by Berdyaev and is likely found as the Holy Spirit.
February 13 Voices
The Anon [Nickname] known as, @slavorus8, seems like he has been reading Jacob Boehme who observed that the Divine Sophia was within us, "The fact the divine can be approached through our own unconscious minds shows us that only a self-imposed barrier separates us from a living divinity. Cultivating receptivity toward the unconscious is a spiritually restorative act that is medicine for our whole being."
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