The Grand Praxis Series
A Sunday Reflection
Dear Readers,
As we navigate increasingly turbulent times, I wanted to take this Sunday to highlight what I consider the philosophical foundation of everything I write here at Notes From The Circus.
The Grand Praxis Series—now freely available to all readers—represents my attempt to articulate a framework for holding coherence in a fragmenting world. It’s a philosophy of truth without ideology, love without sentimentality, and meaning without surrender to spectacle.
For those who’ve joined recently, or for longtime readers who haven’t yet explored these essays, today offers an opportunity to engage with the deeper philosophical current that runs beneath my more topical analyses.
The Twelve Essays of The Grand Praxis:
A Treatise on Purpose: How meaning is made, not found, and why that matters
The Grand Praxis: A philosophy of creative tension and harmonization
The Mythology of The Matrix: Using popular narrative to understand our epistemic condition
A Treatise on Love: How love functions as an epistemic force, not just an emotion
Meaning and the Landscape of Consciousness: How meaning exists in the space between us
Filling The Space and Opening the Void: The dual movements of meaning-making
After Hours at the Circus: A meditation on what remains when the spectacle fades
The Sun Is Rising: Finding hope in an age of disorientation
An Evening Performance at the Circus: How we become conscious participants
Socrates at the Circus: Ancient wisdom for modern challenges
The Grand Finale: The last note from inside the ring
The Fifth Chair: An epilogue on philosophical inheritance
They are not an ideology. They are a stance.
A way of being with the world that doesn’t collapse under pressure, doesn’t surrender to cynicism, and doesn’t mistake detachment for clarity.
Two plus two equals four.
There are twenty-four hours in a day.
And as our shared reality strains under the weight of incoherence, these essays offer not answers, but orientation.
Whether you’re reading them for the first time or returning for deeper understanding, I hope they offer you something: a deeper grasp of the world, or moral ballast for what’s coming.
The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold.
In solidarity,
Mike.
This is, after all, a philosophy blog.
Just a quick note - there are NOT 24 hours in a day. A 'day' is simply a word for how long it takes for the Earth to spin 360 degrees on its axis.
'Hours' and 'days' were concepts pasted relatively recently onto a very old mythology called 'time'. In the spirit of your writing, 'time' and the way in which it was parceled up into quantities such as 'hours' and 'days' deserves to be re-examined, as modern physics has called those ancient assumptions into doubt.
Although I am a much older person than you seem to be, I think you are onto something very important and valuable. If I can be of assistance, I am happy to help - although financial assistance is perhaps less important to you than to so many others.
But what seems to be missing from your writings so far (having read only portions of your voluminous writing, I may not yet have come upon these ideas) is a serious effort to place our species' current struggles into the larger picture of evolution on the scale of geologic time. Although I take your concerns about the loss of meaning in the face of AI and hyper-technology very seriously, I wonder if you might not find some strategies from our species' deeper past to be valuable.
For example, how exactly is it that science in the Renaissance managed to avoid being completely extirpated by the Church?
How did the large Asian cultures manage to survive and (at least in part) overcome the rigidity of excessive obedience to their god-emperors?
And how is it that neolithic human cultures in the northern hemisphere not only survived the Ice Ages and extreme population bottlenecks, but have become the most powerful cultures our species has ever known?
I don't have answers to these questions, and I don't believe academically approved answers are even very valuable. But the questions themselves may be sufficient to illuminate, however slightly, the path ahead...
Bookmarking for a rainy day read through. I’m thankful to have recently discovered your writing. Some days it gives hope, and other days a pause for reflection. A good stretching of the mind is useful exercise. I appreciate the opportunity to find something in your daily posts to keep hopeful, or sometimes just confirm I’m not crazy.