Fnord wrote:
A lot of people talk about spiritual realms, psychic talents, and unmeasurable energies, but no one has ever been able to demonstrate any of these under controlled conditions without resorting to fakery and stage-magician's tricks.
I feel bad for the group who hangs so much faith on those things. Then again maybe not always, as you mentioned there are a lot of lazy new agers out there who want this stuff to be served up like an adventure and they indeed will pay people to serve up creative BS if it strokes their egos in some way shape or form. The one I have to laugh about lately is the 'drink this! It'll decalcify your pineal gland!' - a lot of people will throw common sense out the window and go as far as poisoning themselves if someone tries selling them a shortcut.
@all:
(if tl/dr don't complain - just scroll down to the next post)
The integrity in mysticism and magic is really somewhere else, and it's in a place closer to Sam Harris's approach to Buddhism. Much like he touts what mindfulness can do for a person's grip on details and overcoming obsessions, you have people in groups like the Golden Dawn, A.'.A.'., Rosicrucian and Martinist orders, where first and foremost what they'd be doing - if performing rituals and creating planetary or archangelic talismans - is using those seven planets something like file-folders for ideas or concepts, engaging in a very detailed and nuanced ritual to have a chat with their own subconcious and stack the cards in that conversation, and then having that talisman dedicated to Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, etc.. is meant almost like (well, not almost like but rather deliberately harnessing) a placebo for someone making that talisman who, say, lacked strength or presence in certain traits that one might attribute to that planet under old Ptolemaic models of the universe. Similarly invoking and evoking archangels is on the same order - grabbing a psychological trait in it's positive state, agitating it, and then calling the demon historically associated with it to meet in the middle - ie. you.
Similarly when people get into the ancient Greek stories that seem to relate to the stories of Jacob's ladder and the Sumerian descent of Ishtar to see Ereshkigal, they talk about the concentric (geocentric model of the solar system) shell of worlds around the earth and how the soul comes in by way of Saturn and gets locked into the fabric of time, and in each planet down the chain - Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury, and Moon, they take on another hallucination of materiality until they land on earth in a thick stupor with no answer to the question 'What does it all mean?'. Then, like Ishtar going back up the stairs through the seven gates, that's their soul's job as well. These stories can sound quite antiquated and dopey, particularly being based on cosmological models we know not to be true, but perhaps its more interesting to look at what's symbolically attributed to those planets and take apart the puzzle of what they were trying to say about their perspective on consciousness itself and what they felt the stages meant to them.
The whole point of this though - most of your ability to govern your life is rapped in red tape. Reason can reset and adjust your motivations somewhat but there are tons of things, I think everyone agrees, that they'd love to want to do but can't find that in them. That part of your behavior and motivational fuel really gets set by subconscious patterns, to look at recent scientific research most if not all of our behavior comes from precisely that zone - ie. our thoughts and actions are formulated before they happen. In that sense magic and mysticism, on a very practical level, are hacking that and trying to get a good communication loop going back the other way, to the subconscious, telling it in it's language what the conscious life of a person needs, wants, needs to address, all because the subconscious needs symbols as that's how it processes things.
Even though I meditate on the tarot (been in BOTA now for 2 1/2 years) I'm still iffy on what I can actually do with casting cards and reading them. An author named Peter Caroll suggested that it is the subconscious mind card-counting and it's better to shuffle just for a few moments so that your deeper mind doesn't get lost on their positioning. In that case it's just another way of petitioning your subconscious for its opinions and getting a dialog ginned up. What's far more interesting to me, and this is really where Qabalistic tarot goes, is meditating on the symbols and putting them within myself as a logic map. Particular decks like the Rider Waite, BOTA, Crowley's Thoth, were very specifically thought out in terms of their constellation of meanings and they're meant to relate to one another. One of the better books out there for a beginner on what some of that is and how it works is Robert Wang's Qabalistic Tarot. All of this is a bit like how when you see someone whose a bit immature, has the facts but can't link them in the right manner - and you can see this but realize words could never convey the message of how to correct their error, this kind of symbol library is an attempt by various thinkers and schools to impart certain things they've come to experience which, in their details, just don't translate well into language. The subconscious can grasp these things through symbols but that's about it.
I guess my point being that the better side of this stuff is really an excuse for depth psychology, taking control of one's own deepest levels of emotion and motivation, no Harry Potter involved, and having a healthy agnosticism for whether or not there is actually a panentheistic panpsychic force that one actually steps into in the higher stages of this. You'd keep that agnosticism partly to fuel the placebo and partly because we really don't know, albeit by way of people like James Randi we have hunches that it isn't there on mechanical lines that can just be grabbed up be anyone who has a hunch that they can see the future and, outside of just pure mechanical reasoning with or without synaesthesia (something I think that makes people believe they're reading astral templates when really they're cold reading and don't know it), that may not be within the validity of how it works. Israel Regardie even, after decades of this stuff, said that the things he'd witness always seemed to send him back and forth on the wind in that respect - ie. he'd see something, say 'Ah - that was my own brain', believe the stuff was all just the mind utilizing hypnogogia in a waking state (it is either way - which is why nothing impressive will ever show up on camera), but then as soon as he started to get comfortable with that outlook something would happen that seemed to mechanically reach too far past himself for him to believe that it was just his brain, and then back and forth it would go. For someone who hates artistic imagery, feels like it's a breeding ground for BS, you can try short-cutting this by just trying to make it superclinical and throwing out all the woo-woo feeling stuff but you have to remember that the part of your self that you're trying deal with, deep in your brain stem, is the oldest layer of brain development, is riveted to it's primitive instincts, and you have to either come up with your own way of getting over your distaste for the abstract, otherwise the alternative is to just give up and say that this is a pursuit for a different kind of person.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
04 Mar 2016, 7:18 pm
