Mysticism has a perennial charm. One does not have to go back to early Greek and Christian or medieval thought for authentic instances of it; in our own time are those who have taken the mystic way. This path leads to the paradox: reason dispenses with reason; philosophy renders philosophy useless. The great thinkers, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, St. Thomas, Spinoza, Bergson, with keen dialectic and profound argument seek the absolute good, and once this is attained, argument and dialectic are left behind and pure and perfect satisfaction becomes the possession of the soul. In more recent times a new door to the secret of life has been set ajar. It was indeed long ago unlocked by the followers of Dionysus when intoxication by wine disclosed to its celebrants the heights and depths of experience hitherto undreamed of. In the last century, however, with the discovery of anesthetics the veil over the unseen reality has been again lifted. Mr. Blood says: "It was in the year 1860 that there came to me, through the necessary use of anesthetics, a revelation or insight of the immemorial mystery which among enlightened peoples still persists as the philosophical secret or problem of the world. It is an illumination of the cosmic center, in which that field of thought where haunt the topics of fate, origin, reason, and divinity glows for the moment in an inevitable but hardly communicable appreciation of the genius of being." "It is the initiation of man into the immemorial mystery of the open secret of being, revealed as the inevitable vortex of continuity." Fourteen years afterward he published "The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy" wherein he showed the impotence of philosophy to produce the great experience. Even the Revelation itself is not a solution, but a satisfaction. Recently, when he was past eighty-five years of age, he completed this work, the aim of which is to "signalize the Anesthetic Revelation." In it he presents many subjects - Duplexity, Idealism, Monism, Cause, Self-relation, The Negative, Ancillary Unity, Jesus and Freewill, and the Anesthetic Revelation. After all that is said by the philosophers, Mr. Blood maintains that in the experience of the moments when we are emerging from the anesthetic sleep we have an immediate consciousness of the secret of existence. His writing antecedent to this work won cordial appreciation from Professor James, - who described him as a pluralistic mystic and wrote of him in the Atlantic and the Hibbert Journal,-Tennyson, Sir William Ramsay, and many other philosophers and scientists. Professor H. M. Kallen has written an introduction. Mr. Blood closed his work with this sentence: "Yet one little dream I would have come true: Somewhere, anywhere, though hopefully at some not unfrequented garden-side, my dust, with its 'all-obliterated tongue,' should seem to inspire the legend-low by the veiling grass, but cut deep in enduring stone: "GREETING-IF THOU HAST KNOWN!" -Homiletic Review, Volume 80 [1920]

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Pluriverse, the final work of the American poet and philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, was published posthumously in 1920. After an experience of the anaesthetic nitrous oxide during a dental operation, Blood came to the conclusion that his mind had been opened, that he had undergone a mystical experience, and that he had come to a realisation of the true nature of reality. This title is the fullest exposition of Blood’s esoteric Christian philosophy-cum-theology, which, though deemed wildly eccentric by commentators both during his lifetime and later in the twentieth century, was nonetheless one of the most influential sources for American mystical-empiricism. In particular, Blood’s thought was a major inspiration for William James, and can be seen to prefigure the latter’s concept of Sciousness directly.

Pluriverse, the final work of the American poet and philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, was published posthumously in 1920. After an experience of the anaesthetic nitrous oxide during a dental operation, Blood came to the conclusion that his mind had been opened, that he had undergone a mystical experience, and that he had come to a realisation of the true nature of reality. This title is the fullest exposition of Blood’s esoteric Christian philosophy-cum-theology, which, though deemed wildly eccentric by commentators both during his lifetime and later in the twentieth century, was nonetheless one of the most influential sources for American mystical-empiricism. In particular, Blood’s thought was a major inspiration for William James, and can be seen to prefigure the latter’s concept of Sciousness directly.

من دون الهواء، تتوقّف الحياة على الأرض، وهو غير مرئي ومع ذلك حاضر أبداً بطريقة أو بأخرى، وطالما ربط الناس بينه وبين الطيران، والروح، والتسامي، والتفاؤل، لكن تغيّر مفهوم الهواء مع تزايد سيطرة البشر عليه، عبر الإتصالات، والحرب، والسفر. والإستكشاف العلمي، فلم يعد الهواء جزءاً موثوقاً من حياتنا اليومية، وإنما قسماً آخر من البيئة يجب أن تخضع جودته ونقاوته لمراقبة وثيقة يتفحّص مادة الهواء معاني الهواء في القرون الثلاثة الماضية، بما في ذلك قلقنا الحديث من الإنبعاثات المفرطة وتغيّر المناخ. ومن الواضح أن قلقنا يستند إلى أسس صلبة، فقد أثّر البشر على الجوّ منذ إستخدام أكسيد النيتروز مروراً بتطوير التدفئة بالغاز والإنارة. وينظر المؤلّف البارز ستيفن كونور في هذا الأثر بإستعراض الظواهر الجوية الراديوية والغاز السامّ، بالإضافة إلى الخوف من التلوث الناجم عن إحراق الجثث، والقلق من الضباب. ويناقش الكتاب أيضاً الإفتتان المتزايد بالهواء والعملية الهوائية عبر إغراء الفوران وتطوير الموادّ المتفجرّة، ويقدّم كتاب مادّة الهواء نهجاً ثقافياً لتاريخ الهواء، ينهل من الدين، والعلم، والفنّ، والأدب، والفلسفة لوضع تاريخ شامل لفهم الناس للهواء.