Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. 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!***

Comments

Re: Magic Resistors and Covid

[ecosophia]

My suspicion -- though so far it's just a suspicion -- is that it's not the coronavirus that was the blowback, but the vaccine. But we'll see...

Re: Magic Resistors and Covid

[mollari]

Would it also have the energies from the millions of people who desperately wanted the virus to be a source of mass deaths? (The people who wanted an excuse to stay home; or wanted particular figures to die from it; or wanted to be proven right by watching people who disagreed with the lockdowns die, etc.)

Also, what kind of blowback would Hughes' "Magic in the Time of Coronavirus"* have if this is the case? Breathing in pain and suffering seems like a very bad idea to begin with, but the following lines are creepy as frack:

"May I be free of suffering; may I be at peace.
May you be free of suffering; may you be at peace.
May all beings be free of suffering; may all beings be at peace.
May all be healed and blessed.
Amen. (Or so be it or so mote it be)"

The reason I find it creepy as frack is that here, and I think the rest of the English world, peace is often associated with death: "Rest in Peace", "Kingdom of Peace" to refer to heaven; etc. Then it also supposedly comes from a Buddhist context (I don't know enough to confirm this, but am going with the claim), and asks for an end to suffering. While, in Buddhism, life is suffering, so to stop suffering you must die. So, drawing in suffering and then saying a prayer that uses symbolism associated with death strikes me as a very, very bad idea, especially when millions of people are terrified of mass die offs....

https://michaelmhughes.medium.com/magic-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-mass-meditation-for-healing-and-compassion-35a153a0c36b

Re: Magic Resistors and Covid

[ecosophia]

Well, we'll just have to see. From my perspective, the practice of Tonglen is something that should be done only by experienced mystics -- anyone else will draw in the pain and suffering, and manifest these things in their own lives, and expel peace and healing, and not manifest those things in their own lives. That said, I'm not a Buddhist of any kind, much less a qualified Tibetan vajrayana practitioner, and I'll listen to anyone who disagrees.

Re: Magic Resistors and Covid

[mollari]

Well, I strongly hope that I'm wrong and that none of this turns into an issue, but I think if the vaccines are the blowback to the Magic Resistance, then it'll get really ugly.

As for Tonglen, I'm sure that if it is a traditional practice, that it has its uses, but stripped from that context very likely to be very dangerous. I doubt it's as dangerous as mishandled kundalini yoga, but I think it's up there.

Re: Magic Resistors and Covid

[(Anonymous)]

Former Buddhist here... This is a new low, even by the already abyssal standards of pop-buddhism, so I'm not sure where to begin.

To start, Tonglen is usually rendered as "giving & taking" which I regard as having much stronger interpersonal connotations. JMG is mostly correct. It is usually an advanced practice for laymen and an intermediate one for monastics, but not always. My teacher introduced me to it fairly early in the curriculum, but that is unusual. The normal safeguards for this practice are part of the surrounding philosophical context and not part of the practice itself. With that in mind, these instructions are shockingly bad.

Addressing Mollari in more detail:

Yeah, this practice would go spectacularly off the rails if somebody trained in western esotericism tried to do it. It is deeply grounded in eastern ideals of karma and merit, as well as the boddhisattva ideal. The verbal formula I learned was similar but noticeably different, "May I be free of suffering and it's causes. May I discover happiness (ananda, I believe) and it's causes." The next step wasn't "you" then "all beings", it was somebody you like, somebody you don't care about, then somebody you dislike/hate. The final stage (all beings) explicitly doesn't have a formula. The closing is done by allowing the light to fade and returning your attention to you breathing for a time. In mahayana (the larger school of thought that encompasses Tibetan Buddhism), it is believed that it is possible to exist in the world and be personally free from suffering as a Boddhisattva, but this assumes that you are actively working towards helping others attain liberation/insight.

I think there is a very good reason for having such a visceral response to it, though I don't think it will fuel the pandemic. The way the instructions are set up on the website, I believe they are guaranteed to simply draw in suffering, allow it to reverberate freely through their own life, and cut themselves off from the healing they so need. The instructions are very inward focused, especially in comparison to the original. The instruction page absolutely reeks to me, and I felt sick as soon as I opened it and immediately got better after closing it.

For more personal theories, I think this might be some of the very magical blowback that is being discussed. Remember that both the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa have both been accused of being fascists / white-supremacists / insert-insult-here. If some of their malignant-magic ended up targeting the Buddhist community, it is entirely possible that they ended up getting the attention of one of the Dharmapalas; and this might be a manifestation of its displeasure.

Regarding the vaccine as blowback, I really hope you are wrong, unfortunately I think the same thing. My attempts at scrying the vaccine have consistently been bad, and that theory seems to have a lot more metaphysical weight than the normal theorizing on the internet, for whatever that is worth.

Re: Magic Resistors and Covid

[(Anonymous)]

Current Buddhist here - could the bad be by design ?