Magic Monday
Dec. 5th, 2021 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will more than likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.The illustration? An astrologer at work. I've begun studying financial astrology, using the writings of Walter Gorn Old (aka Sepharial) and David Williams as initial guides. Since my mundane astrology project has gone very well so far, with several hundred subscribers, I figure it's time to start expanding the range of things I know how to do, and I feel rather like the guy in the image -- well, except I don't wear a ruff.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 05:29 am (UTC)1) I have a question about meditation. I went through some of my meditation notes for the past year to see what would need revision cross-checking with the knowledge lectures and I noticed that I seem to prefer a "constructive" approach to meditation. As an example, in the first meditation I would imagine the seed, I would then try to build up upon that as I usually do when I think things through by examining the contents of what would most closely link to the topic from the things that I already know. Some time ago I mentioned that when following a particular thread I kind of felt something that would link next but that I couldn't really tell what it was besides a nebulous something that would be there if I knew a word for it. I couldn't really figure out what to do there. Reflexing on this I think this is because I am doing the meditation "actively", instead of passively by letting thoughts rise. How can I become better a letting images rise? Perhaps that is why I couldn't figure out the next link, because I didn't have the contents to describe it but by "listening" it might come?
2) I've been getting nudges towards understanding "Love". But to me, perhaps out of the heavy sucrose marketing, love feels like dripping honey. However, some people write of Love as a "force" and as an apprenticed to magic that description sounds more congenial to me. What have you found helpful for understanding this notion as an occultist?
3) Why is it that some magical workings have a distinctive signature of the magician? It seems to me that there is a play between the magicians aura and the magic that flows through him in the same way that a draftsman has a particular way of making lines by his muscle memory that is the average of the movements he has made before. Doesn't this imply that the magic you can do is very tightly limited to what you've become and what you have been able to integrate?
Thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 05:38 am (UTC)2) "Love" is one of the vaguest words in the English language and it means a dizzyingly wide range of things. The idea of love as a force has never made sense to me; maybe you can figure it out and explain it. ;-)
3) That's an important element of magic. The more you study and practice magic, the less formal magic you have to do, because your life becomes a magical ritual -- but what you can do with it narrows, because your ritual is ultimately a reflection of who you are. That's one of the things tangled up in the notion that every Magus proclaims the word of an Aeon.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 06:07 am (UTC)2) Ah yes, that is very true about the multivalence of the word and, I'll certainly try once I can find some literature about it to leave my brain soaking on it. How about "Love" as in the set of powers and experiences related to the heart center and its role in its macrocosmic counterpart?
3) I like that! So you are quite literally embodying and manifesting the sum-total of your experience as a magician. How's that for be the change you want to see in the world. ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 06:23 am (UTC)2) Sounds like a good theme for meditation. ;-)
3) Exactly. The magus becomes the word of the Aeon, speaks it through every thought and word and action, and the world is transformed.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 07:12 pm (UTC)The modern English language seems to be hopelessly lacking in vocabulary for nuanced metaphysical and intellectual concepts.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 11:47 pm (UTC)What I had in mind with Love is perhaps more closely related to Agape from those three as what I had in mind was the dynamic, unifying power that springs from nothingness in the Hindu lore in the form of Shakti or the power that made Jesus walk to be staked into a cross willingly and knowingly in order to spread a message of salvation, though perhaps those two are not related.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 06:06 am (UTC)a. I tend to like Robert Heinlein's definition of "love" as "Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” It seems to pretty well cover the different flavors of love for romantic partners, family, children, friends, and so forth.
b. I find it helpful to look at different kinds of "love" and think about what they have in common. Back in college, a fellow I met asserted that the Greeks better understood love because they had different words for different kinds of love: "eros" for sexual/romantic love, "philadelphia" for brotherly love, and so forth. I had recently been introduced to Owen Barfield's thought that earlier, more "primitive" language was more likel to use one word for many linked concepts than to have specialized vocabulary, due to a recognition of "sameness" - such as "spiritus" meaning "wind", "breath", and "life force" all at once. Barfield proposed the unified meaning was older, and the splitting up into different concepts was later. So I pointed out that while there was value in being able to distinguish between what two friends feel for each other, what two brothers feel for each other, what a mother feels for her child, or a husband for his wife, the fact that English recognizes that all of these feelings are some kind of "love" is perhaps interesting and worthwhile.
c. Some relationships/experiences are going to hit you over the head. Losing my mother made me realize what I had had with her in a way I took for granted while she was still around. Having my daughter has at times overwhelmed me with feeling for her.
d. This one deserves an extra-large grain of salt: Before certain spiritual experiences brought about by following the kind of practices we discuss here, I took a shot with mind-altering substances, and besides some deep insights into my own psychology, I was left with the impression "love is the truth". It just seemed self-evident that kindness, empathy, and a warm recognition of connectedness was the right way to understand the world, and that fear, competition, anger, and so forth were some kind of error or misunderstanding, perhaps building on the errors of others. Here, "love" was a much more abstract, but also perhaps more "cosmic", force
e. Since giving more credence to the kind of things we talk about here, I have also found reincarnation a useful tool for extending "love", or at least empathy. For example, When I see a spider or cockroach or the like, I think about the fact that maybe that's a soul learning what lessons spiderness or cockroachness have to teach, and that in doing what they're doing, there's no ill-will, or if there is, maybe that's something they need to experience. I'm not going to let them crawl all over me or my food, mind you, and I might still squash them if they seem to have a chance of biting me or contaminating my food or something, but it's more thoughtful and less angry than it might once have been.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 07:07 am (UTC)I didn't know philadelphia was Greek nor that it related to love. I wonder if there is a good amount of camaraderie in Philly.
I like that notion that Barfield refers to and I think we lack a lot of it today. I wonder if that is why the nature of correspondences is so hard for the contemporary mind to understand --it seems like a beautiful way of looking at things to me.
Thanks for sharing about your mother and your daughter, that's beautiful. I took prayer to Venus last year, as I got a nudge about needing to know about Love and what better than a Goddess of Love right? One of the things that happened shortly after was that I needed to solve thing from past relationships and that manifested in having to resolve them with someone else other the original person.
d) and e) relate more to what I was actually thinking, I was thinking something along the lines of a binding force and that definitely relates to the idea that we are One, though I can't speak much about it myself but at least by practicing magic and being grateful about the food that I eat and recognizing that my body is the Earth I feel some of the outer edges of the notion. I wrote something tangential about it yesterday that also uses the notion of "wind", funnily enough, though it's a little kitschy. If you have some spare time, you and anyone else if interested can find it here: Hallowed Winds
Tarot Tuesday?
Date: 2021-12-06 09:42 pm (UTC)Can someone please provide a link?
Re: Tarot Tuesday?
Date: 2021-12-06 11:26 pm (UTC)Because of the kind of obsessive approach I took with my magical practice, the Levi book club, the OSA work, side projects and the actual work I do for a living, and seem to take with many things apparently, on top of the rest of the mess my life has been for the past decade I went through a whirlwind of personal events that needed pressing action and also needed for my psychic senses to be appeased and controlled (both for balancing my mental health and to give accurate readings to people that drop by) so Tarot Tuesday hasn't happened yet again for the past month. Most of that has been solved and calibrated. However, you can find a previous iteration here and if you like what you see, I'll gladly read yours. I have it scheduled to restart the week after New Year the 4th of January 2022. (Yes, I keep an agenda now, wuhuu!)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-07 12:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-07 04:34 am (UTC)Also, please accept my apologies and condolences for your deceased mother, I was tired yesterday and I couldn't really understand what you were saying and rereading my reply today I'm afraid I sounded insensitive. That's got to be really rough, since it's pretty clear you loved her. I hope you are not being too hard on yourself for taking some things for granted, we've all got things going on in our lives and that doesn't mean you weren't appreciative of her.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 05:23 pm (UTC)Naturally there are nuances to this statement. It's not the attention we pay most of the time, which is largely the human ego seeing itself reflected in the world. It's more of an unflinching experience of another 'Ding-an-Sich' without recourse to labelling or a premature need for understanding. As such, it might be reasonable to call it the only force, as the direction of attention is about as primary to the experience of being a conscious part of the universe as anything could be.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 11:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-06 07:19 pm (UTC)For 2, you're right that the concept of "love" is a bit tainted by marketing. Rather than thinking of love as a force, I'd think of it as an action, or a choice. Our culture sells a passive version of love, hence the concept of "falling in love," like it's a state you just happen to trip into. True love is something you choose every moment you experience it.
My personal meditation has brought me to "compassion." Similar to your description in 1), I was looking for a way to be more systematic in my meditation, and chose to park myself on the concept of compassion for a while. If love has too much cultural baggage associated with it, perhaps picking a related concept with less baggage will allow you to explore love from another angle.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-07 12:19 am (UTC)We definitely need better words for Love and I definitely need to find a word that expresses not only the bursting feeling that comes from realizing a deep unity with someone but something that speaks of the unifying awe that can come from realizing the Unity that mystics speak about or the creative powers that spring existence into being in the Hindu lore and the Genesis --or the Shout of Joy that burst wholly co-instantaneously with the sound of the name of God proclaimed by Himself that is spoken of in Barddas. Now that you've brought that into my attention in the same paragraph it was Einigan the Giant who heard the voice --in three vocalizations as it is said-- when he found himself existing co-momentaneously with the voice. Thanks! I think now I know where to go look for my answer and it was, after all, "meditate on it!". Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I ask Einigan the Giant to tell me more about it.