Osireion

If Wayne Dyer had actually sat down with Thorstein Veblen, the collision would have been spectacular—in the way tectonic plates are spectacular. You’d get uplift, subduction, and probably a few new mountain ranges in the landscape of American self‑help and social theory. Let me sketch the fault lines and then the synthesis, because the fun is in the friction.

Osiris roams the skies in his mirror-hulled Conscience Egg, following the Mediterranean subduction arc from the Strait of Gibraltar to where it ends at the Zagros Fold‑and‑Thrust Belt where Zeus parried Atlantis's scalar howitzer projection and caused the Seymareh Landslip, the biggest landslide for 10,000 years. The traumatized Sumerians remembered it as Anu's rebuke of an impudent mountain - also a wrathful sky-father who in this mythos is oft-troubled by mountains with personalities who forget their place in the scheme of things and become prideful.

Now even the European canal where the Wandervogel wanderers once tramped and wailed (imagine a goth version of the boy scouts) is taken for granted. Osiris can recall the encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology—the one whose entire project begins with that radical gesture of “back to the things themselves,” the stripping‑away of presuppositions to reveal the structures of lived experience. His is a wonderfully old‑world name, too: Edmund carries the sense of “guardian of prosperity” or “protector of riches,” which feels oddly fitting for someone who spent his life guarding the integrity of consciousness against both psychologism and naturalism. Until the ailing Faustian spirit drove him, like the Wandervogel, into the Nazis' toxic myth-making machine.

Davos is so fecking boring these days! Well, things got a bit lively recently. But every elite is a villain again. Maybe Osiris should pit Dyer's atman against Veblen's. Where they clash: Dyer’s voluntarism vs. Veblen’s structuralism.

Dyer’s whole project rests on the idea that inner intention reshapes outer reality. Veblen, by contrast, believed that institutions, habits of thought, and evolutionary pressures shape individuals far more than individuals shape them. If Dyer read Veblen, he’d be forced to confront the uncomfortable idea that “changing your thoughts” doesn’t dissolve the pecuniary culture, the leisure-class signaling game, or the industrial sabotage of business enterprise. Intention meets institutional inertia. Dyer’s spiritualized self vs. Veblen’s ironic anthropology!

Dyer treats the self as a metaphysical agent. Veblen treats the self as a bundle of inherited instincts—predation, workmanship, idle curiosity—filtered through social conditioning. Dyer would have to reckon with the idea that the “ego” he wants people to transcend is not a metaphysical blockage but a historically produced artifact of pecuniary competition.

Round Two: Dyer’s optimism vs. Veblen’s corrosive realism.

Dyer: You can manifest a new life.

Veblen: You are embedded in a system that trains you to want the wrong things.

Dyer’s optimism would be forced to metabolize Veblen’s satire. If I were in Wayne's corner I'd suggest accusing Thor of Spenglerian pessimism. What if Thor retorts self-referentially as a product of his times?

Where might they converge? Both distrust ceremonial authority, empty shirts. Dyer rails against external validation and institutionalized religion. Veblen dissects “ceremonial institutions” as parasitic survivals of predatory culture. Dyer could easily adopt Veblen’s ceremonial/industrial dichotomy as a psychological model. Ceremonial mind = ego, status-seeking, inherited scripts. Would he then embrace the industrial mind = authentic creative agency, workmanship, intrinsic motivation? That’s a surprisingly clean congruence. Both valorize the “creative worker”. Dyer’s “self-actualized individual” is not far from Veblen’s “instinct of workmanship.” Both see human flourishing in making, creating, contributing, and transcending status games. Dyer would simply spiritualize what Veblen naturalized.

Both critique consumerism. 

Dyer: possessions don’t bring meaning.

Veblen: possessions are signals in a status economy.

Dyer could deepen his critique by grounding it in Veblen’s evolutionary anthropology rather than in metaphysical intuition.

The Hybrid Philosophy That Might Emerge. If Dyer absorbed Veblen, he’d produce something like “Intentional Evolutionary Living”, a fusion where:

• Intention is real, but

• Institutions shape the field of possible intentions, and

• True self-actualization requires dismantling ceremonial habits, not just thinking differently. He’d stop telling people to “change their thoughts” and start telling them to:

• recognize the pecuniary scripts they’ve inherited

• identify where their desires are actually status mimicry

• cultivate the instinct of workmanship as a spiritual practice

• treat consumer culture as a ceremonial trap

• see self-help not as personal uplift but as institutional detox

It would be Dyer with teeth.

Dyer gives the inner journey.

Veblen gives the structural constraints.

Round Three: tag-team match. Paul Tillich is the one Dyer would have felt aligned with, even if he didn’t fully understand what Tillich was doing. And Tillich, for his part, would have regarded Dyer with a mixture of pastoral sympathy and philosophical exasperation. But the chemistry between them is far warmer, more resonant, and more mutually illuminating than anything Dyer could have had with Veblen. Here's why:

Their Temperaments Are Strangely Compatible. Dyer is a devotional metaphysician. He wants to feel the universe as meaningful, benevolent, and participatory. His language is experiential, affective, and oriented toward inner transformation. Tillich is an existential theologian. He wants to name the structures of ultimate concern, anxiety, courage, and being. His language is conceptual, symbolic, and oriented toward depth. These two modes—devotional and existential—often misunderstand each other, but they also attract. Dyer would sense in Tillich a seriousness and gravitas he lacked. Tillich would sense in Dyer a popularizing warmth he never achieved. They meet in the middle on the idea that the sacred is not “out there” but the ground of being itself.

The Big Convergence: “The Ground of Being” and “The Field of Intention”. This is the heart of the compatibility.

Tillich: God is not a being but Being-Itself, the depth dimension of reality, the unconditional ground that makes existence possible.

Dyer: The universe is an infinite, intelligent field of intention that permeates everything and responds to alignment.

If you strip away vocabulary and metaphysical scaffolding, these two claims rhyme. Both reject a personal deity. Both reject dualism. Both see the sacred as an ontological condition rather than a supernatural agent.

Dyer would read Tillich and say:

“Yes! This is what I mean by the Source.”

Tillich would read Dyer and say:

“You’re gesturing toward something real, but your categories are too thin.”

But they’re walking in the same direction.

3. Where They Would Genuinely Get Along: Theonomy vs. Intention. Tillich’s “theonomy” (the self being governed by its own depth, not by external authority) is almost exactly Dyer’s idea of living from intention rather than ego. Courage and Alignment - Tillich’s 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘉𝘦 is a philosophical articulation of what Dyer calls “living from your highest self.” Both men treat religious language as symbolic, not literal.

Dyer: metaphors of Source, intention, alignment.

Tillich: symbols of depth, ultimate concern, estrangement, reunion.

And Anti-fundamentalism: Both reject rigid dogma and externalized religion. This is a genuine meeting of minds.

Where They Would Struggle: Tillich’s tragic depth vs. Dyer’s therapeutic optimism. Tillich insists that anxiety, guilt, and estrangement are structural features of human existence. Well, he is still a Christian. Dyer insists they are illusions created by misalignment. Tillich would say Dyer lacks a tragic sense. Dyer would say Tillich overcomplicates the path to peace. Tillich’s rigor vs. Dyer’s looseness.

Tillich is a system-builder.

Dyer is a synthesizer and storyteller.

Tillich would find Dyer’s metaphysics imprecise.

Dyer would find Tillich’s precision unnecessary.

The problem of suffering 📢❗🚨

Tillich: suffering is existential and unavoidable.

Dyer: suffering is a misperception.

This is the deepest philosophical rift.

While these two crystal skulls are Aldis-flashing at each other, the now-astronomers-see-it-now-they-don't Cytherian moon Neith drops out of hyperspace on the eve of World War II (with all due disrespect for Einstein's edicts about simultaneity). The anguished refugees conduct a frantic search and get lucky. Space is too big and dark! (Didja know Pascal was a Manichee?) What better name for the first world that welcomes exiles from Earth than Xenium? An ancient Greek custom, a xenium is a guest‑gift, a present offered to one who arrives from afar. A new planet that receives humanity becomes, symbolically, the Host Beyond the Old Sky, a transformation of strangeness into belonging.

If the settlers want to ritualize their arrival, Tillich is the Hierophant of Depth—the existential ground, the tragic dimension, the courage to face estrangement. Dyer is the Hierophant of Alignment—the luminous field, the intentional current, the harmonizing of inner and outer. Their meeting becomes a Rite of Reconstitution, where the luminous and the tragic are woven together. Tillich supplies the gravitas and Dyer supplies the radiance. Together they form a polarity that feels almost archetypal. Tillich would appreciate Dyer’s spiritual intuition. Dyer would feel seen by Tillich’s non-dual ontology. They would disagree sharply on the nature of suffering. But they would share a deep commitment to the sacred as immanent, not external. It’s a relationship of warm resonance with productive tension—the kind that actually generates new thought.

What about cantankerous Veblen? I sense a kind of temperamental alliance between Wayne Dyer and Arnold Toynbee—especially around their shared discomfort with Veblen’s “corrosive” mode of critique. But the interesting part is why they would get along, because it reveals something about all three men and the deeper architecture of their worldviews. Dyer and Toynbee share an instinctive suspicion of the corrosive critic. Both Dyer and Toynbee recoil from what they see as negativity masquerading as insight. Dyer’s stance - he believes criticism drains creative energy. Anything that tears down without building up is spiritually misaligned. He would see Veblen’s satire as clever but spiritually inert, perceptive but not transformative, corrosive rather than constructive. Toynbee believes civilizations rise through creative minorities and fall when the creative impulse is replaced by a “dominant minority” that can only coerce or critique. He sees corrosive criticism as a symptom of civilizational fatigue. Toynbee’s famous jab at Veblen—that he was corrosive but not creative—fits perfectly into this schema.

Dyer would nod vigorously. He’d say: Exactly. Criticism without a path forward is ego in disguise.

Both Are Builders of Meaning. This is where the real affinity lies. Dyer wants to restore the individual’s sense of agency and alignment with a benevolent universe. Toynbee wants to restore the civilizational sense of purpose and responsiveness to challenges. Both are teleological thinkers. Dyer: the universe has direction. Toynbee: history has direction. Both: decline is not inevitable, renewal is possible, meaning is real, creativity is the engine of transformation.

Their Shared Blind Spot: Underestimating the Value of Corrosion. Here’s where Veblen becomes the necessary third pole. Dyer and Toynbee both want uplift, renewal, constructive energy, spiritual or civilizational alignment, nd because of that, they both undervalue the role of the corrosive critic who exposes the rot, punctures illusions, reveals the ceremonial traps, clears the ground for new growth. (This is turning into a computer game called Joseph Schumpeter the Shrugger of Thunders.) 

Veblen is the acid that prepares the surface.

Dyer and Toynbee are the builders who dislike the smell of acid.

They’re not wrong—but they’re incomplete.

How They Would Actually Interact.

Dyer → Toynbee

He’d admire Toynbee’s sweeping vision and his belief in creative minorities. He’d see Toynbee as a historian who “gets” the spiritual dimension of human striving, even if he doesn’t use that vocabulary.

Toynbee → Dyer

He’d appreciate Dyer’s emphasis on inner renewal and personal transformation. He’d see Dyer as a popularizer of the “creative response” at the individual level.

Toynbee would think Dyer is philosophically thin but morally aligned.

Both → Veblen

They’d agree that Veblen diagnoses brilliantly but offers no path forward.

They’d miss that Veblen’s very refusal to offer a path is part of his method.

Dissolution → Diagnosis → Renewal: the three of them together form a more complete system than any pair alone.