Since releasing this people have been asking me where they can find similar material. The short answer is nowhere. JSD is uniquely schizo. The long answer is he is on a continuum of people writing on similar topics.

SYNCHROMYSTICISM reading list:

1. The Rebirth of Pan, Brandon
2. Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Hoffman
3. Sinister Forces, Levenda
4. The Most Dangerois Book In The World, Bain
5. Blackjack, Bain
6. Twilight Language, Hoffman
7. Carnivals Of Life And Death, Downard
8. Mr. Downard, Downard
There is a whole cottage industry of writers and YouTubers that have spun off from this tiny core, whether they are aware of it or not (I think most of them are).
9. The Mystery Of The Cathedrals, Fulcanelli.

Not strictly related to synchromysticism but I'd recommend this to anyone who follows me.
This list will be moving away from strictly synchromystic topics to cover surrounding material that nonetheless feeds into it.
10. The Morning of the Magicians, Pauwels and Bergier
11. Transhumanism: A Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas, Farrell (special mention, this is really good)
12. The Great God Pan, Machen (yes fiction - it's all here in 1894 no less. Perhaps the best horror story ever written)
Just gonna be dropping books I've read in the past year or so that have contributed to my understanding of the 'phenomenon', in no particular order.
13. Prophet Of Evil, Ramsey
14. Egyptian Magic, Budge
15, Hamlet's Mill, Santillana and Dechend
16. The 'Hancock Trilogy', Hancock (technically not read this year but I always refer back to them)
17. The Orion Mystery, Bauval
18. The Temple In Man, de Lubicz (again, not technically read this year)
19. Serpent In The Sky, West
20. The Hiram Key, Knight and Lomas (blew my mind)
21. Ancient Egyptian Myths and Legends, Spence
22. The Pyramid Texts (the Allen translation is good but I prefer the Faulkner)
23. The Book Of The Dead, Budge
24. The Doctrine And Ritual Of High Magic, Levi (I recommend this translation over the AE Waite one, called 'Transcendental Magic')
25. The Three Magical Books of Solomon, Crowley and MacGregor (the three Goetic grimoires compiled in one volume)
26. The Magus, Or Celestial Intelligencer, Barrett
27. The Adam and Eve Story, Thomas (not a real person, censored, and thanks to @sinklord )
28. The Secret History Of The World, Black (read a long time ago, but relevant).
29. The Secret Teachings Of All Ages, Hall
30. The Death Of Gods In Ancient Egypt, Sellers (a little more than 'Hamlet's Mill for ancient Egypt, but close enough. Absolutely fascinating. If this list were in any kind of order it'd be near the top)

More from All

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

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