Toward Ecosophy

I was reading back over the old Well of Galabes essays and found the discussion regarding being able to use any strong emotion for polarity magic. This and the mention a few Mondays back that a couple practicing polarity magic before their relationship became physical may result in the relationship settling down into friendship rather than anything more got me wondering whether polarity magic could finally be a productive use for and way out of TDS. But there are the following difficulties:

0) This is naturally assuming the point of the ritual is to discharge one's strong emotions towards a locally positive and constructive result with the practitioner left (hopefully permanently) divested of said strong emotions. It is not for feeling proud of one's self for having had a tantrum with the intent of throwing another one next week. That ground rule being set...

1) What is the ethical dimension of this type of working? Does polarizing with an unsuspecting person with whom one has strong parasocial feelings nonetheless have an effect on that person or can one assume they are working with their own personal inner polarization?
2) Would the energies of extreme anger towards someone be a pragmatically safe source of power for a magical working or would the noxiousness of said energies be a safety concern either causing direct harm to the practitioner or poisoning the results of the working?
3) Obviously the God Emperor is not omnipresent (yet?), will not likely have time to be personally present for any ritual of this kind, and probably doesn't care that He is living rent free in the practitioner's head. Can polarity magic work with a single mage polarizing with, for example, an image of the person they have strong emotions toward without the other person present or personally invested in the working?

I recently started talking with someone which I really, really liked and never thought she would be interested in me. After I had the guts to reply back her messages --for as much as they were not romantic at all but just a general sense of interest-- I was bombarded with a psychic discharge, so the speak, that literally makes me feel dizzy sometimes and I have to get a grip of my feelings so they don't go overboard. We've seen each other a few times and it tends to feel great, except when I start wanting to go faster than the situation merits and it's been more than once that it's been interfering with me keeping my cool and even feeling too vulnerable, to the point I feel my emotions depend on her. As I type this, a message of her came through and can't stop smiling! (and when she doesn't I have a bad day) It made me think of the chapter on Magical Equilibrium by Levi:

"When the magnetic atmosphere of two people is so balanced that the attractive qualities of one absorbs the expansion of the other, an attraction is produced that we call sympathy; and thus imagination, in evoking all the rays or analogic reflections that it is experiencing, creates a poem of desires which carries off the will, and if the persons are of a different sex, there is produced in them, or more often in the weakest of the two, a total intoxication due to the astral light, which we call passion, in the precise sense of that word or love"

Now, I am sure I sound like a teenager when I write this, I certainly haven't felt this since I was one, but I would like to ask.

What is going on in the metaphysical sense? I certainly qualify as the weakest of the two and I do feel intoxicated.

What can I do to balance things out and not screw things up with her? I certainly don't want to fall out of love with her but I don't want to scare her, given that I feel the polarization of the two of is discharging heavily on my end and I might come off too intense. Nobody wants to date someone that is clearly dying for you, even though she clearly likes me. What has worked out for me so far, is to remove some of my mental attention from her and diffuse some of the energy by talking or hanging out with other women... but that clearly goes against my intentions. And... masturbation thinking about her seems way out of proportion right now. I don't want her receiving raw sexual energy just now, but it needs to go somewhere or I will explode! More than magic itself, can I take into advantage the occult philosophy about the dynamics of this exchange, to crassly describe love, and make it work in my favor?

Dear JMG,

I have a few questions about the model of the planes you’ve written about.

1. Do what we call emotions range across the planes? I believe in your model emotions are considered etheric, but does an emotion, for example love, extend upwards into higher planes? What I mean is that along with the feeling of love (etheric), there are the symbols of love (astral), and the idea of love (astral, mental)? And/or is it more that concept of what love is that changes across the planes? In other words, on lower planes, love is closer to lust, and perhaps more like agape on higher planes?

2. Taking this further, I am trying to understand why certain religions place love and compassion ahead of other emotions. The model of the planes you use seems to imply that thoughts and feelings get clearer as you recenter yourself up the planes. Is the result of this recentering what those religions mean by compassion - i.e. the experience of recentering on a higher plane is the same thing as what those religions call compassion or love? And this is why those religions place importance on them?

Many thanks in advance!

Hello JMG and all!

Thanks for hosting this space. I am wondering about dream tools/objects being used for healing— and also how the objects that hurt us also have the power to heal us.

I had a dream a few years ago where I was in some orange tinted desert wearing cowboy garb and stuck in a pistol fight with some unseen assailant.

I ended up getting shot in the leg, and some mustachioed dream man appeared next to me and helped dig the bullet out of my thigh. Then, he handed me the bullet and said, “here, don’t forget to use this to dig out the energy wound” I promptly began to shovel what seemed like goo out of the wound, and when I looked down again the wound had completely healed.

Now I’ve mentally held onto that same bullet, and during a period of intense daily meditations I imagined it in my hand and used it to “dig out” places in my body where I’ve been hurt before.

It was especially effective on a wrist I’ve broken twice. I became overwhelmed with tears and vivid memories of being bullied as a child as I dug out the goop.

Do you know of any writing on something like this that I could look into? To further my understanding of what I’m actually doing.

Also any writings or books about how weapons that cause hurt can also be used to heal?
I faintly remember in a Robert Anton Wilson book Sigismundo having to track down a sword that sliced someone so that they could use it to heal the same person, but I could be wrong.

Final question:
Have you ever read or engaged with the books of Thomas Pynchon? His novels regularly use tarot and the Kabala as themes, and at least I don’t find them dull, others may. He has a new book set to be published in October about a midwestern PI hunting for a Wisconsin cheese heiress in 1930s Hungary.

If you took the time to read all this, thank you! Wishing you all what you need on this spring Monday.
J.

1) Wanted to share a comment I thought was interesting on twitter from someone who said he's a fan but disagrees with you about the difference between buddhism and christianity:

Your comment:
"It was in the early nineteenth century that Western scholars first really began to notice that Buddhism wasn’t just one more exotic flavor of Pagan idolatry for Christian missionaries to sneer at—that it was a prophetic religion comparable to theirs, with theological, philosophical, sacramental, and ethical dimensions in no way inferior to those of Christianity. What made this realization excruciatingly difficult for them was that the ethics of Buddhism are very similar to those of Christianity, but its doctrinal and philosophical underpinnings couldn’t conflict more totally with Christianity’s if someone had sat down and worked them out with that in mind.

It’s indicative of the difference we’re discussing that the salvation offered by Christ is confirmed to his believers by their faith that he returned from death, while the salvation offered by the Buddha is confirmed to his believers by their faith that everyone else returns from death but he did not and never will. It’s equally noteworthy that Christian teaching rests on the idea that each human being has an immortal soul that needs to be saved from damnation, while Buddhist teaching insists that the idea that any of us has an enduring self at all is the very source of our damnation. The two faiths are irreconcilable at levels deeper than most people, and even most theologians, are willing to go."

Their reply:
"I think the relationship is much more like that between Newtonian and relativistic gravitation: Buddhadharma is a general, observer-invariant description of what are mostly the same underlying (meta)physics.

For example, kenosis ("[self-]emptying") is a central concept in Christian theology. In Buddhist terms this is very easy to "cash out" as anātman ("egolessness") + śūnyatā ("emptiness"). Similarly we can read "original sin" as beginningless ignorance (anādyavidyā). From a Buddhist perspective the traditional Christian denial of rebirth may be understood as a kind of heuristic teaching (that is, a neyārtha) emphasis on the preciousness of taking birth as a human being, which is one of the four traditional "mind-changings" regarded as preliminary to practice.

Christianity can make spiritual and intellectual-historical sense of Judaism and Islam, however it struggles to categorize anything other than these two as anything other than "paganism." This is tied directly to the exclusivity of the Christian claim on liberation (mokṣa): in effect, from a Buddhist perspective, the Christian claim is that Jesus is the only Buddha who has ever appeared or will ever appear. This in turn is tied to the central Christian emphasis on humanity: Jesus is explicitly the savior of human beings, to the extent that nonhuman beings are effectively written out of the soteriological picture. Notoriously, this shows up as the "do dogs go to Heaven" problem: "officially" (e.g. in Aquinas' Summa), nonhuman animals have no "rational soul," therefore at death they are not eligible for either salvation or damnation and so their consciousness is simply eliminated entirely.

In sum, if you took Buddhist ethics and (meta)physics, but instead of making them perfectly general for any possible sentient being at any possible spatiotemporal location, you treated "birth as a human being" as a kind of Newtonian classical limit, the resulting (meta)physical picture would look very close to, if not identical with, Christianity."

JMG,

Thank you for your wide contributions to the esoteric community. I've read several of your books with great interest.

You seem to have a well-developed theory of the energetic body so here is my question:

You sometimes talk about the ability of stones and metals to affect the subtle energies via natural magic. I myself have four titanium screws holding my sacrum to my illia (sacro-illiac joint fusion).

If I were to practice, say, the middle pillar or some form of raising energy from the base of the spine, would these titanium screws make such a meditative practice unsafe, energetically? Would they act as "field disruptors"?

Thanks again for reading.

Brad