Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight as I write this, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Let's start things out with a quote again: 

 

"Discipline has long been interpreted as self-control, or as some would say, "the overcoming of the lower nature.' The difficultiy is that such words as 'conquest' and 'overcoming' suggest an entirely inconsistent aggressiveness of technique.  The true metaphysician is not a wearied man wrestling with his lower nature; rather he is poised and relaxed, achieving through realization instead of conflict.  Avoid the process of suffering your way into a spiritual state." 

 

That's from Manly P. Hall's Self-Unfoldment by Disciplines of Realization, arguably Hall's best book and one of the classics of the Golden Age of American occultism. (The image to the left, on the other hand, is one of Augustus Knapp's splendid illustrations for Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages.)     

Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

 

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed -- see you next week!***

***AHEM. THIS POST IS CLOSED. Please quit with the political bickering!***

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com!

Comments

Re: Trump, Miller, and COVID-19

[1wanderer]

I don't want to turn this into a political discussion and we obviously aren't going to agree on political principles anyway, which is fine. My point was that it's unhelpful to see the current conflict as between "the Right" and "the Left", but much more helpful to see it as a relatively trivial squabble between different wings of the Liberal Monoparty which has consolidated its grip on the political systems of most western countries. And such squabbles are, by definition, the most bitter and most violent, paradoxically because the stakes are so small (think Freud, but also think magical movements, or even academic politics, which is one explanation for the bitterness of the SJW movement.) The two tendencies within the Monoparty agree on soaking the poor and giving money to the rich, but disagree violently on access to toilets and use of pronouns. One tendency is trying publicly and violently to wrest control at the moment, as often happens in one-party states.
The Liberal Monoparty did not happen by accident, although its creation is easier to understand outside the US, because political evolutions there are very untypical. They first took over parties of the Right from the 1970s, and I can't imagine a Burkean conservative like you would have been very happy at the whirlwind economic and socially revolutionary consequences for those parties. Then they came for the Left, and, because there was an ideological edge to the confrontation they couldn't just promise power, as they did to the Right; they had to trash the traditional ideology of the Left as well. Thus, the contempt of politicians like Clinton and Blair for the principles of the parties that had brought them to power. (As I pointed out, such politicians never claimed to be from the Left, and never stopped sneering at its principles) Thus also, the substitution of Liberal, elite middle-class ideology, whose greatest exponents are the management consultant, the financial analyst and the contract lawyer, for any set of principles based on what people actually want and need. I don't know whether you have this phenomenon in the US, but in Europe, you are starting to see a rapprochement between the traditional (pre-1970s, non-liberal) Right, and the traditional (pre-90s non-liberal) Left, on issues like sovereignty and the defence of communities.
We can debate the relative merits of political systems. I was born just after WW2, and grew up in a society with free health care and education, jobs for all, and, most of all, opportunities for people from very ordinary backgrounds to succeed in life. That's why I didn't have to leave school at fifteen to do unskilled work in the local light engineering factories, but could spend another decade in education, and why I'm typing this at the moment. My children's generation are worse off in every way. For me, this is an adequate argument for supporting policies of the Left, but of course such views remain subjective at the end. What isn't subjective, though, is the replacement of the traditional Left/Right scheme of politics by a dominant Monoparty with a radical Liberal ideology on the one hand, and a mass of people who are disenfranchised on the other.

Re: Trump, Miller, and COVID-19

[ecosophia]

Whereas I disagree, and see the current struggle as involving meaningful differences between a Left that has always been a vehicle for the professional-managerial classes and a Right that has been largely taken over by a populist insurgency against those classes. That said, you're quite correct that this is not the place for a political debate, and doubtless also correct that neither of us is likely to agree with the other's viewpoint.