Seven Secular Sermons

A question I’m frequently asked is whether I use LLMs to produce my poetry.

Here is a trick for casting the Sermons (or verbally guiding any meditation, really) that has repeatedly proven to improve the experience of my listeners and seems worth sharing.

I did the premiere as I had planned at the Less Wrong European Community Weekend 2025 in Berlin.

I have spent much of the past weeks preparing, printing and improving the four new PDFs (Sermons/Songs x English/German) that are now on the Downloads page.

I am German and the most salient aspect of that identity is that I am of a people that has burdened itself with incomparable guilt.

With publication of the German language version of the 7th Sermon, the main part, the hard part, of this project has been complete since January.

Sechs Sutras waren das jetzt schon.

Das ganze Leben, jedes Wort und dieser Atem jetzt erschein’n im Denken, jenem Ort der alles das vernetzt.

This is a true story.

A new translation of Herrman Hesse’s beautiful German poem “Stufen“.

The excellent Twelve Virtues of Rationality by the even-more-excellent Eliezer Yudkowsky, simplified to fit into the Common Meter.

German translation of The Words our Voices raise.

This quarter, I got very bad news.

Wenn du den Kopf bewahrst, den sie verlieren und Dich beschuldigen für ihr’n Verlust, Kannst du allein Dir selbst Vertrau’n spendieren, Obwohl der And’ren Zweifel wohl bewusst, Kannst unermüdlich wartend Du verharren und als Objekt der Lüge ehrlich sein,…

Oh hell yes, she did it again: a much better recording of the fourth Secular Sermon!

A brilliant British lady named Wry, with the voice of a trained actor and a heart for poetry that Aleister Crowley could only have envied, has thoroughly outclassed my own recordings of the first three Sermons, and magnanimously allowed me to share them w…

Of course ritual is an art form.

The seventh Sermon is complete, barely in time for me to get on the operating table and have specialist surgeons take care of my large brain tumor.

Six sermons we have had so far.