New Age spirituality has become a cesspool of garbage

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DeathFlowerKing
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30 Nov 2022, 1:43 pm

I guess my upbringing has been pretty absurd... :|



auntblabby
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01 Dec 2022, 2:10 am

many of us were not blessed with an especially nurturing upbringing.



techstepgenr8tion
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01 Dec 2022, 4:23 am

A thread on trauma that got exceptionally good due to someone very knowledgeable on the topic chiming in:

viewtopic.php?t=410167

The popular narrative about trauma, at least at the lay level in recent time, is that once received you're permanently broken. That's ultimately not true but what has to be done to deal with trauma involves a kind of technical introspection that we're not taught to be comfortable with in the west.

Thinking if I dropped a bit of a bombshell earlier there's some luck at least in the discussion of what solutions can look like happening almost simultaneously.


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naturalplastic
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01 Dec 2022, 6:34 am

DeathFlowerKing wrote:
I guess my upbringing has been pretty absurd... :|


Well...the point is that you just had a self-realizing epiphany. These ancient goddesses were like a therapeutic Rorschach inkblot test to get at this realization about your own mom.

It was never about goddesses. Its really about sorting out your relationship with your mom. So you can now build upon that realization.



DeathFlowerKing
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01 Dec 2022, 9:44 am

naturalplastic wrote:
DeathFlowerKing wrote:
I guess my upbringing has been pretty absurd... :|


Well...the point is that you just had a self-realizing epiphany. These ancient goddesses were like a therapeutic Rorschach inkblot test to get at this realization about your own mom.

It was never about goddesses. Its really about sorting out your relationship with your mom. So you can now build upon that realization.


I think that's a very interesting way to look at this. :)



DeathFlowerKing
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01 Dec 2022, 3:05 pm

Of course not every Goddess I felt drawn to was a monster. I also felt drawn to Hestia the Greek Goddess of the Hearth who protects the home and family (she is like my sheltered homebody nature).

Also lately I have felt drawn to Inanna the Sumerian Goddess of Love and War due to feeling so drawn to The Burney Relief. Unlike Lilith who is the epitome of toxic femininity masquerading as "feminism", Inanna actually WAS an example of true feminism in ancient times.

Then there's Columbia the "American Goddess" who is not exactly an object of worship but a symbol of the United States itself often used in art. There have been many theories linking her to actual pagan goddesses and she represents concept of "The New World".



techstepgenr8tion
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01 Dec 2022, 3:39 pm

DeathFlowerKing wrote:
Then there's Columbia the "American Goddess" who is not exactly an object of worship but a symbol of the United States itself often used in art. There have been many theories linking her to actual pagan goddesses and she represents concept of "The New World".

This really peels my mind off in a different direction. I'll unpack why.

I'm thinking, especially with figures like Our Lady of the Barricades and very boldly and self-consciously in the case of the pro-Ukraine meme 'St. Javelin', it's the creation of a protective egregore. Rather than pinning down some aspect of nature as a god or goddess you can appease this is something that flows in the opposite direction - ie. signaling 'she who has 10,000 names' to structure her energy in a new way consonant with goals to protect and bless the side of a conflict seen as 'good' to those who help manifest this variation of her. Especially when it's some further distillation of a Mary figure you can tell they're borrowing the power of Mary for extra protection in a given instance.

The Statue of Liberty is a bit more complicated because, from what I've read, the French Masons who built it were really out to make a sort of replica of the Colossus of Rhodes which, to their reckoning, was a statue of Apollo adorned in such and such way. Technically the depiction seems endogenous enough to take in either direction and we chose for somewhat similar reasons to Marify our sense of Helios / Apollo as where we have the statue is a powerful symbol to immigrants coming over by boat of protection from persecution and protection of right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Emma Lazarus's The New Colossus describes this quite concisely and elegantly.


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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


techstepgenr8tion
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01 Dec 2022, 3:45 pm

Further on this topic, BOTA Key 2, Gimmel, The High Priestess:

Image

The waters flowing down at the bottom of her robe signify her as 'prima materia' or 'virgin substance', ie. unimprinted by human thoughts, ideas, or intention, coming in to our reality, and when she's been utilized in human thought she manifests as Key 3, Daleth, The Empress and her garden:

Image


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


DeathFlowerKing
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01 Dec 2022, 3:49 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
DeathFlowerKing wrote:
Then there's Columbia the "American Goddess" who is not exactly an object of worship but a symbol of the United States itself often used in art. There have been many theories linking her to actual pagan goddesses and she represents concept of "The New World".

This really peels my mind off in a different direction. I'll unpack why.

I'm thinking, especially with figures like Our Lady of the Barricades and very boldly and self-consciously in the case of the pro-Ukraine meme 'St. Javelin', it's the creation of a protective egregore. Rather than pinning down some aspect of nature as a god or goddess you can appease this is something that flows in the opposite direction - ie. signaling 'she who has 10,000 names' to structure her energy in a new way consonant with goals to protect and bless the side of a conflict seen as 'good' to those who help manifest this variation of her. Especially when it's some further distillation of a Mary figure you can tell they're borrowing the power of Mary for extra protection in a given instance.

The Statue of Liberty is a bit more complicated because, from what I've read, the French Masons who built it were really out to make a sort of replica of the Colossus of Rhodes which, to their reckoning, was a statue of Apollo adorned in such and such way. Technically the depiction seems endogenous enough to take in either direction and we chose for somewhat similar reasons to Marify our sense of Helios / Apollo as where we have the statue is a powerful symbol to immigrants coming over by boat of protection from persecution and protection of right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Emma Lazarus's The New Colossus describes this quite concisely and elegantly.


Well to be honest you're probably more an expert on this than I am, but here was an interesting Reddit page I found on the theories of Columbia as being basically some sort of Death Goddess connected to sugar sex and other forms of debauchery. Not to mention conquest through war and bloodshed.

I dont normally read conspiracy crap on Reddit but I thought this sounded interesting :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/com ... _322_lady/



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01 Dec 2022, 3:59 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Further on this topic, BOTA Key 2, Gimmel, The High Priestess:

Image

The waters flowing down at the bottom of her robe signify her as 'prima materia' or 'virgin substance', ie. unimprinted by human thoughts, ideas, or intention, coming in to our reality, and when she's been utilized in human thought she manifests as Key 3, Daleth, The Empress and her garden:

Image


Speaking of The High Priestess and The Empress in tarot.

I have been reading a tarot guide book by a Jewish author who appears to be influenced by something called Kaballah. It's titled "78 Degrees of Wisdom".

Anyways the author mentions something about how according to some Jewish mystics that Adam was believed to have originalltly been two genders in one until he was split in half to create Eve.

With the first few cards you have The Fool that represents the hermaphrodite Adam before taking a great leap forward (the fall of man basically) and he splits into the first man being The Magician holding his phalic wand, and the first woman being The High Priestess.

Buuut this lead me to wonder something. The High Priestess is followed by a second woman aka The Empress who appears in her garden with a pregnant bellt wearing a maternity gown.

Sometimes I wonder if the High Priestess is linked to Lilith in her role as the true first woman while The Empress represents Eve giving birth to all of mankind?

I'm not an expert on Kaballah or Judaism but what do you think of this idea?



techstepgenr8tion
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01 Dec 2022, 4:18 pm

DeathFlowerKing wrote:
Sometimes I wonder if the High Priestess is linked to Lilith in her role as the true first woman while The Empress represents Eve giving birth to all of mankind?

I'm not an expert on Kaballah or Judaism but what do you think of this idea?

Admittedly this thread can be a bit tricky to follow and there's places where your handling and placing of Lilith is, rightfully, your own as the goddesses are part of your personal tool kit and it feels wrong / off-point to be like 'but-but-but.. there's this and this too!' if I feel like that's what's under discussion.

I was in a Hermetic Order for five years called Builders of the Adytum where the core of the lesson plan is.... tarot, Hermetic Qabalah (post Renaissance European reimagining of the concepts of Jewish Kabbalah), and alchemy.

As I learned it:

Key 0 - The Fool - Superconsious mind, can be read either as Source or in the individual sense as ones own Holy Guardian Angel / higher self. The Fool walks fearlessly off a cliff because it knows it's infinite and immortal and it's looking forward to it's next incarnate adventure the way a teenager might be looking forward to the latest Marvel movie (well... maybe less so these days but you get the drift). It's eternally childlike in its good nature and curiosity because nothing can actually harm it, and it knows that. There's a lot more to be said of the fool's garments, the bag on a pole, the number of globes on the fool's belt, the eye or sometimes eagle on the bag, the dog, etc. but I just wanted to describe the nature of The Fool in the context of something like the BOTA deck or the Rider Waite.

Key 1 - The Magician - Focused attention. Drawing down self-aware focused attention, through the wand, into the four elements (ie. the manifest world).

Key 2 - The High Priestess - As said earlier, virgin substance of the cosmos unimprinted.

Key 3 - The Empress - The substance of the High Priestess imprinted with ideas gestating into reality, where the wheat is symbolic of those ideas coming to fruition. You'll also see the river of the High Priestess's robe both here in the waterfall and pond and in The Emperor.

Key 4 - The Emperor - Measurer and evaluator of how the imprinting on Prima Materia has turned out to be a good or bad thing. You could say the 'gardener' but equally when you hear people like Jordan Peterson or Jonathan Pageau talk about Greek 'Logos' as well as it's found in the Gospel of John, it's that - ie. when functioning properly and not micromanaging that which monitors, equilibrates, and 'sets right' (in a way I see The Emperor and Justice having a lot of similarities here).


I'm keeping to these five cards right now because they're a drive-train description of how consciousness augments the world.

If you ever find yourself really interested to learn about Hermetic Qabalah and want to go to some of the more prominent and well-known Golden Dawn and diaspora authors Dion Fortune's 'Mystical Qabalah' and Gareth Knight's 'A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism' cover it well. DF's book only covers the ten sphere's but she writes it almost as if it were for engineers (ie. very lucid and clear analogies). Knight gets into the additional 22 paths, ie. the connections between the 10 spheres which are also the Hebrew alphabet.

If you're looking for an even more impressively condensed version of these two books - like getting Fortune's 200+ pages and Knight's 700+ pages in just 300'ish pages - along with comparison of five different tarot decks in the context of Hermetic Qabalah, get Robert Wang's 'Qabalistic Tarot'. While I'm glad I read all three of these books Wang's book IMHO pretty much gift-wraps and ribbons it.


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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


techstepgenr8tion
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01 Dec 2022, 4:22 pm

If you want to know something like the most basic overview of what kabbalah / cabalah / qabalah is, it's really intended to be something like a manifestation map of Source / Pantheos from raw being into various levels of modification and distillation of energy (which interrelate via the paths) until you have manifest reality as we experience in the bottom sphere - Malkuth.


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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


DeathFlowerKing
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01 Dec 2022, 6:04 pm

I admit it sounds very complex to me and I try to understand it to the best of my ability. I will look up those books if i can manage to save up enough money.

Honestly my financial situation is the biggest obstacle against me ordering books on subjects like these.

And it can all be so overwhelming i have a hard time figuring out where to really start. :?


Also what do you think about Appalachian Folk Magic? I think my great grandmother was into it but I never got to know her because she passed away when I was only 8 years old. But i hear stories about her that makes me think she was a witch too, but like many of the old wise women of the mountains would have never called herself a witch.



techstepgenr8tion
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01 Dec 2022, 7:34 pm

DeathFlowerKing wrote:
Also what do you think about Appalachian Folk Magic? I think my great grandmother was into it but I never got to know her because she passed away when I was only 8 years old. But i hear stories about her that makes me think she was a witch too, but like many of the old wise women of the mountains would have never called herself a witch.

The weekend I actually met Mark Stavish was when he was hosting presentation on eastern Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic, particularly Brauche / powwow. Most memorable thing was making the SATOR squares and putting them in these red velvet pouches with asafoetida and some other herbs. It sounds like they had a tradition of blending their Christianity with Jacob Boehme, Emanuel Swedenborg, and even some Rosicrucian techniques. Mark's uncle was apparently a pretty early AMORC member (San Jose based Rosicrucian group founded by H Spencer Lewis in 1915 which had lodges all over the US and France), he was in it for a while himself but found the older lessons to be better, he was in Philosophers of Nature along with actually one or two of the ladies I'd see sometimes at my BOTA meetings.

I was actually in both BOTA and AMORC for almost the same time, left AMORC because the pacing of the lesson plan was at first too slow and then too parabolic to get any direct evidence of effect (a knee-jerk reductive materialist might say 'no sh-- - you got had') whatever it is I felt like I'd be losing any sense of real contact with the lessons. BOTA was much more cognitive, other than the pronaos rituals which were beautiful to partake in, but they managed to keep the lessons coming without putting the strange ultimatums on effect at the wrong times that AMORC did (AMORC's 6th degree particularly started losing me, didn't leave until 9th). The reason I finally left BOTA - I had to put my lessons on pause from 2018 to 2020 because work was so outlandish that my choice was either work all the time or have my projects implode and not pay bills. Eventually I had to pay so much attention to the Machiavellianism in the work and social worlds that the almost strictly white light approach of BOTA didn't seem like it was lining up with the lessons my life was forcing on me so I eventually called it quits there as well.

I'd add that I was also in a local OTO body for a few years but I never decided to take first degree because I had too many questions about how well I fit in politically (they were really good at not being overtly political but you could still sense it a bit) and I consider that joining first degree is when you're, at least in the OTO's eyes, obligated to pay monthly dues for the rest of your life or be in poor standing and I took the decision too seriously to just jump in (and ultimately, for reasons that somewhat rhymed with leaving BOTA, decided not to).

Admittedly I met a lot of wonderful people, have active Facebook friends that I have positive exchanges with on Facebook regularly from all three groups, but I felt like my own life had pressures coming in from angles that would, if not break any prefabbed occult system, frustrate whatever internal changes that are supposed to occur to such a degree that the work would probably be rendered useless.

I'm still in a funny place where at times I get flashes of insight, of sorts that suggest that I'm still progressing but much more through self-dialog and inquiry, journaling, etc. than ritual or formal meditative practice. To be fair, for what my upbringing with ASD has been like I was forced to take on that habit very early to make my life more tolerable and to some degree it's served me well although it still doesn't and, as far as I can tell, won't close missed developmental milestones.

Sorry if that went one partial paragraph on Dutch PA folk magic and the rest on my memberships, the esoteric community (or at least the various traditional and Victorian Hermetic communities) are a relatively small and interlaced set of circles and stream-of-consciousness seemed to grab me for reasons I at least found important.


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02 Dec 2022, 6:08 pm

I think Appalachian Folk Magic is worth checking out. :)



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04 Dec 2022, 6:18 pm

Here is an interesting article I was reading about Lilith from The Library of Lilith. I like how this blogger admits that Lilith is a vampiric demon goddesses who sucks your life force and that every main deity in the world had similar horrific traits from Yawheh being a genocidal mass murderer to Zeus being a serial rapist.

When you invide a deity, any deity, into having control over your life I guess it can lead to trouble. :skull:

https://libraryoflilith.com/articles/st ... -illusion/