New Age spirituality has become a cesspool of garbage

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techstepgenr8tion
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27 Nov 2022, 6:50 pm

DeathFlowerKing wrote:
I personally see her as more dangerous than "evil" (im uncomfortable with labels like good and evil drspite still being in the habit of using them...).

Just because she's not evil doesnt mean she's safe to dabble with. She represents the dark side of mother nature like the creatures who devour their own mates and their offspring (such as snakes and spiders).

She also keeps humans in line from overpopulating and drstroying the world. Like the wolf who keeps the deer from overpopulating and destroying the eco system of the forest. That's one beneficial role she holds in nature, even if that is not necessarily good for us humans.

Fair enough.

I tend to think they meet people where they're at though. When you look at situations such as possession - they're extremely rare and almost agnostic to people's involvement with esoteric practice. The degree to which outside forces intrude on a person to a dangerous degree almost seem arbitrary.

I am relatively early in this work, ie. 2/3 of the way into Qliphotic Meditations, and I'm looking to see what kinds of things I learn as I go along with the process. Most of what seems to be happening is understanding that any of these symbols have a place in my own psychological space to dock and rather than having direct contact with deities it feels more like I'm sculpting that space within myself.


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DeathFlowerKing
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27 Nov 2022, 6:56 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
DeathFlowerKing wrote:
I personally see her as more dangerous than "evil" (im uncomfortable with labels like good and evil drspite still being in the habit of using them...).

Just because she's not evil doesnt mean she's safe to dabble with. She represents the dark side of mother nature like the creatures who devour their own mates and their offspring (such as snakes and spiders).

She also keeps humans in line from overpopulating and drstroying the world. Like the wolf who keeps the deer from overpopulating and destroying the eco system of the forest. That's one beneficial role she holds in nature, even if that is not necessarily good for us humans.

Fair enough.

I tend to think they meet people where they're at though. When you look at situations such as possession - they're extremely rare and almost agnostic to people's involvement with esoteric practice. The degree to which outside forces intrude on a person to a dangerous degree almost seem arbitrary.

I am relatively early in this work, ie. 2/3 of the way into Qliphotic Meditations, and I'm looking to see what kinds of things I learn as I go along with the process. Most of what seems to be happening is understanding that any of these symbols have a place in my own psychological space to dock and rather than having direct contact with deities it feels more like I'm sculpting that space within myself.



Im probably more of a newb at this stuff than you are despite having an interest in it for years.

Maybe ill never get beyond my intetest with cartomancy? But i feel more confident in my card readings now than i used to. :)



naturalplastic
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28 Nov 2022, 9:33 am

All of these deities were attempts at putting a human face upon abstractions.

Forces of nature, etc.

Or other things -both internal, and external.

Things within your own soul - as Tech was alluding to.

Or external things. Like...you may have been on to something about the origin of lilith.

Folks didnt start having high infant mortality and deaths from infectious diseases until they started living close together in cities, and had to worry about plumbing and sewerage. So its not surprising that the culture that invented the possible precursors of Jewish goddess Lilith were the Sumerians (who -essentially- were the inventors of civilization, and of city life, itself), and first began to experience those things- and needed to put a face upon infant mortality.

My point is to use these deities as symbols (like something in a dream) and not as literal beings (who might 'take you over').



Last edited by naturalplastic on 28 Nov 2022, 10:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

DeathFlowerKing
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28 Nov 2022, 9:48 am

naturalplastic wrote:
All of these deities were attempts at putting a human face upon abstractions.

Forces of nature, etc.

Or other things -both internal, and external.

Things within your own soul - as Tech was alluding to.

Or external things. Like...you may have been on to something about the origin of lilith.

Folks didnt start having high infant mortality and deaths from infectious diseases until they started living close together in cities, and had to worry about plumbing and sewerage. So its not surprising that the culture that invented the possible precursors of Jewish goddess Lilith were the Sumerians (who -essentially- were the inventors of civilization, and of city life, itself), and first began to experience those things- and needed to put a face upon infant mortality.

My point is to use these deities as symbols (like something in a dream) and not as literal beings (who make 'take you over').



Yes exactly. I believe you are right with this idea about Lilith. And I guess i do take it to the extreme with these deities by treating them almost like real people.

They really should be regarded more as symbolic of the different aspects of nature itself than treated as actual beings to the point that it becomes an unhealtht obsession.



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28 Nov 2022, 10:26 am

One of the best meditations on mythology ever IMHO is the 1989 poem by Ishmeal Reed entitled:

"I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra"

Cant find a way link to it, or copy and paste it.

You will just hafta Google it.



techstepgenr8tion
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28 Nov 2022, 10:33 am

Treating them as real / external is a double-edged sword. On one hand treating them as autonomously real gives them more leverage, OTOH doing this and keeping it between guard rails is like being the kind of skateboarder who can tear up a skate park and do six foot rail rides or being the person who can take double-black trails through an indoor or outdoor mountain bike course.

Hermetic Magic, especially stuff like Elus Cohen, Hermetic Golden Dawn, A.'.A.'. ritual and self-transformational work is a bit like an internal extreme sport. If you're a huge Jungian introvert who'd want to do that sort of thing anyway and have the capacity to gauge your stability and know your tap-out points where you've got to ground yourself in external reality again - great, similarly if you're the kind of person looking to build those kinds of reserves and internal skill sets who knows how to take it slow enough not to have your brain jump out of the cradle - also great.

For ontology, particularly with respect to consciousness and the paranormal, I tend to subscribe to the superorganism model, sort of a functionalist take on panentheism, as we see evidence for consciousness creating independent layers / canopies within our own organisms, we can see these small biological nanobots in cell-splitting processes almost work by remote control (the atoms they're composed of at least don't seem like they could hold all the instructions for their behavior) and to the degree that we see groups in some fish, birds, or insects behave as one quite often there's a case to be made that you can have organisms where the individual birds, fish, or insects are like loosely coupled cells for that organism.

That paragraph immediately above signals to me how someone could encounter both an internal and external version of a god or goddess, ie. if it turns out to be the case that many of these motifs are fractal in nature in that they occur both within us and at higher levels then we'd experience those higher level aggregations (such as collective human unconscious and who knows what else) as at least being in an intersubjective / interpersonal space and if it's at a higher level who knows. This is where I think if we're dealing with relatively strong group minds or egregores you could see strong synchronicity being something like a twitch, a sneeze, an instinctive reaction from the unconscious or semi-conscious levels of that upper-level being to what that cell is doing. The striking correlations of synchronicity and their equally superficial / orthogonal nature seems to indicate that (working from the assumption that there is something there) this is the reaction of a system that only has superficial grasp on it's own constituents, meaning it doesn't know all of our hopes, dreams, fears, etc., in a similar way to which if there's internal experience of what it's like to be our cells or our organs we also only tend to have superficial connections to that like experiencing pain, pressure, etc..

This is where, while I still don't know if I've ever experienced it (and I've experienced some very strange things that are difficult to write off as mind tricks), I find listening to people like Josephine McCarthy, Jake Stratton Kent, Aaron Leitch, and the rest of the top brass of the Traditional Solomonic magic, Goetic magic, or Thelemic magic still interesting because it sounds like what they're describing is getting in touch with these offboard loops and having some degree of social / mental contact with higher turns of these fractal concepts and ideas (which means yeah - I think there are forms of consciousness who will respond to angelic, archangelic, demonic, elemental, jinn names but it's more like a different version of the same process that happens when you try to imagine them - ie. you're reaching up into something else's subconscious mind and triggering it's archetypal processing).

On a side note - I'm really enjoying listening to people like Joscha Bach these days, and speaking of him there was a really amazing discussion that he had with biologist Michael Levin on Curt Jaimungal's Theories of Everything channel where Joscha was talking a fair amount about neural networks. I think the more we play with neural networks the more I think we're going to see the kinds of optimization that happens in nature, within brains (like having control of different body parts radially inverse such as your feet at the top of your head, left hand and foot right hemisphere, etc.) and also independent and sealed systems at different levels of the same group having significant separation (maybe not 'conscious experience' per say but at least confirming why such separations work well - say from an opponent processing standpoint).

Lots of fascinating work in neuroscience, biology, philosophy, and the occult (mostly as top practitioners triangulate their experiences against one another's and attempt a semi-empirical approach) right now and I'm fascinated to see where all of these things tie out.


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DeathFlowerKing
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28 Nov 2022, 10:06 pm

Know another monstrous goddess I find fascinating lately? Ammit the Egyptian Underworld Goddess with the head of a crocodile, body of a lion, and feet of a hippopotamus. She was known to devour the dead souls of those who were judged by the gods as unworthy of the afterlife.

https://ancientegyptonline.co.uk/ammit/

She was never regarded as being evil but as a destroyer of evil.



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29 Nov 2022, 8:07 pm

Maybe instead of obsessing so much on deities i should do more research instead and find some more spells and tricks?

Besides cartomancy i also know a bit about candle magic and using jar spells like a "sweet thoughts" jar or making a batch of war water to curse people.



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29 Nov 2022, 8:50 pm

more spells, esp. if they work better.



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29 Nov 2022, 9:05 pm

DeathFlowerKing wrote:
Maybe instead of obsessing so much on deities i should do more research instead and find some more spells and tricks?

Besides cartomancy i also know a bit about candle magic and using jar spells like a "sweet thoughts" jar or making a batch of war water to curse people.



No; forget the spells, candles, Ouija boards--and please don't go making any "curse water" or whatever--especially if you're concerned about so-called "evil" deities. Your mind is all over the place. What's the point? What's your overarching framework? What is your starting point, and what are your principles? What are your ethics?

None of the gadgets and trinkets are going to do a damn thing if/especially because you don't realize that the power you need is already within you. I know that sounds terribly trite, but it's true. "Magick" comes from the person, not the tools.

Do you even know exactly what you hope to achieve? I sincerely hope that you're looking to develop yourself spiritually, rather than "conjuring" something tangible. Whatever else you want to do, I strongly recommend you pay attention to the people you admire (ask yourself why), the company you keep, the intentions you nurture, and the actions you take.



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29 Nov 2022, 9:21 pm

Hmmm good points.

In fact I have wonder, why AM i attracted to such malicious and sinister female deities/spirits like Lilith, Lamashtu, Lamia, Echidna, Ammit, and Tamamo-no-Mae?

I mean I'm not a woman myself, and yet I have somehow connected true power in my mind to the darkest of the dark feminine.

I was raised by a mother who suffers from PTSD and to be honest she hasnt always been the nicest mother to me. Maybe that left some kind of weird mark on my psyche?

Im 32 years old and to this day she is the one with absolute and total control over my life.



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30 Nov 2022, 8:41 am

I guess it maybe stems from the fact that I was raised by a domineering single mother who hated men and somehow my mind got twisted into thinking that was something to actually admire. Because within that I see power.

Yeah I know I'm a total basket case. :|



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30 Nov 2022, 9:06 am

you and me both. :alien:



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30 Nov 2022, 9:45 am

auntblabby wrote:
you and me both. :alien:


:mrgreen:



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30 Nov 2022, 1:04 pm

Me playing around with dark deities in a nutshell I guess...


"Evil Tim has beckoned them!" :twisted:

https://youtu.be/15SAUy3TJ0k



techstepgenr8tion
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30 Nov 2022, 1:26 pm

IMHO it's pretty clear - you're processing absurdity in your upbringing. Just keep that face-front and seek solutions while you work (particularly as you try to take your own power back).

I'm in somewhat the opposite situation - very decent but, at least when I was a kid, relatively naive parents who believed anything doctors, psychologist, psychiatrists said as they were the 'professionals' and my nightmares always started with getting on a school bus or getting in the car to go to work. My teen years got taken by psych meds and their side effects, which I didn't realize at the time - life is a 24/7/365 race and this just left me further behind. The thing that I found the most absurd was the sense that caring what was true on any level, not being purely Machiavellian, was seen as the most unforgivable weakness. I had to eventually conclude that my personal character and general development meant nothing if it wasn't backed with not only capacity to bully but frequent enough use of that to prove that I wasn't just a genetic weakling trying to grace my way through life by being good (which - when I was a kid I was a nerd, had no interest in sports, so that also didn't help). In my case the lack of dysfunction at home (not even a brother or sister to fight with) caused me to be completely unprepared for the dysfunction I found in other places.

The end result - I'll probably never move out (won't make enough money), probably never get married or have kids. I'm too used to the world being a solipsistic Darwinian insane asylum and occasionally getting fired from jobs for not rimming the resident bullies and then, when I do have a job where the social situation is satisfactory but the pay isn't it's like picking up the pistol and playing another round of Russian roulette where the next idiot could destroy my future.

To that end its seemed like the world, as it stands, only accepts either psychopaths or their supplicants, not autonomous people and especially no one with integrity.

I think that's where I felt like I needed to work with the Qliphoth, to haggle with these forces a bit and get to know them better. I have no clue if I have any right to power that I can't clinch and knee out of another guy's face. These aren't my rules and I never wanted to live by them but admittedly there's no exiting this system either (other than checking out early) so I have to make do with the world as I find 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


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