I'm really learning that most of the western mystery traditions and Kabbalistic/Qabalistic outlooks are pretty darn close to Buddhist cosmology and outlook on deity. Sure, they'll play with YHVH on the tree of life and work with concepts like Ehyeh, Elohim, Adonai, Shekinah, etc. but it's really nothing like a personal or theistic God - its much more like what exists at the nexus of atheism, pantheism/panentheism, and animism. I'd add that while I don't know a whole lot about Buddhism, and I doubt A P Sinnett ( an early 20th century theosophist) is the best to go by, I have heard echoes from some of what he said in Manly P Hall (some would still consider dodgy but someone who sincerely tried to weed the crap out in a lot of areas) that you have beyond the concept of nirvana the concept of paranirvana. It's not that nirvana or paranirvana are nonexistence, it's more like all frames of reference we have for identity are put through the blender and superseded beyond any recognition.
I see that in the west, in some edges of the formal philosophic community and a lot of the more cerebral portions of the occult community, there's an increasing convergence on a sort of animistic or panpsychist naturalism. It's a world that functions in most ways materially and scientifically in ways we'd expect, there are a lot of oddities under the hood that we haven't looked as closely at as we could (mainly because trying to vet or measure subjective or largely subjective experiences against one another is still a project we're hardly up to the task on), and any magician worth their salt has had so many experiences if they've stuck with it that they may try to rationalize away as psychological (many actually start with that model) but the more they look at it or the more the examine the quality of their experiences over time the less that model really holds.
Overall it seems like theism is making less and less sense, the best case you can make for Christianity is that Adam Kadmon as Jesus was trying to tame a kind of malignant chaos by electrifying it into shape around Himself (through a profession of faith) but if that were true he wouldn't have taken his hands off of the wheel and the last 2,000 years would have been filled with dispensations of knowledge to offset our cultural changes and continue to guide our frame of reference. The bible comes nowhere near achieving that purpose and the further along you get the less the mystics sound like devout catholics and the more they start sounding like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, then like Jakob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg, then more like Eliphas Levi, HP Blavatski, and Rudolph Steiner. The grand narrative clearly broke down, my guess is that Christianity may have had a sort of egregore stronghold but over the middle ages and beyond with all kinds of controversies in the church that choke-hold broke and even as far back as John Dee and Edward Kelley they were getting hippy transmissions of light, love, no hell, no sin, and reincarnation (and messages from spirits are about as likely to be accurate as messages from a tree or your dog - ie. they're not outfitted for human moral or 'truth' oriented integrity - they're just consciousness being and they'll play any game you want, Eliphas Levi's warnings about the so-called astral light seem to fit in well with this category of problem).
I really think the time's coming, soon, where we do start taking a more rigorous look at the subjective than we ever have in the past and we may really start looking at the anomalies more closely rather than trying to beat them down with tautology. Sure, people are tribal, their families are bible and bleep truth - family over truth - choose bible. I think we'll be able to eventually come to something closer to having a more naturalist approach to this sort of thing, and as some people have put it an 'animistic essentialism'. In that sense I think it'll be less important to worry about what people are doing who could care less about what's actually true and it'll be much more interesting to see what people are finding out on the cutting edges of neurosciences, on the cutting edges of physics, even on the cutting edges of occult and psy research, and as our expectations of these fields get less grandiose we'll notice smaller effects - profound in their ramifications even if not of a sort that we can easily ramp up to industrial scale the way we have with the physical sciences. I think mostly though it'll be us learning not to get in our own way, learning how many things we're doing that we shouldn't be and we might be able to eliminate a lot of pain and friction from our societal, political, organizational, etc. functioning by simply following rule sets for conscious matter or conscious currents that we simply didn't previously know or believe existed and when we had previously believed in their existence they were too badly muddied with the baggage of theology to be particularly accurate or helpful.
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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.
21 Jul 2018, 11:22 am
