ecosophia | Magic Monday

It's just past midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) 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. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.

The image? I'm still tracing my lineage in photographs. At some point after the death of Bishop Shaw, a question arose about the legitimacy of the apostolic succession of the Universal Gnostic Church. John Gilbert arranged to settle the matter in the traditional way by receiving sub conditione consecration from Archbishop Herman Adrian Spruit of the Church of Antioch; that's Archbishop Spruit in the photo. Sub conditione? That's the technical term for a second consecration given to a bishop in case the original one didn't have valid lineage, and Spruit was the man to give it.

He was born in 1911 and started out his religious career as a Methodist minister, but he became convinced that a more sacramental and less dogmatic approach to Christianity was needed, and so he joined the Independent Sacramental Movement and was consecrated as an independent bishop. At that time there were sixteen different lineages of apostolic succession outside the control of the established churches, and squabbles between independent bishops about the validity of the different lines were common. Spruit ended that in an exceptionally graceful way. He arranged to be consecrated sub conditione in all of the lineages, and then conferred the same consecration on any bishop or qualified candidate for the episcopacy who requested it. These days practically every bishop in the Independent Sacramental Movement has all sixteen lines -- yes, including me -- and the squabbles are over. Bishop Spruit's Catholic Apostolic Church of Antioch remains an active independent church, and so do many of the other independent churches who received his blessing.

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I now have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

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

~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hi JMG - You've posted a couple of things recently proposing that plants and other "lower" life forms are souls that are just a few grades behind us, so we should offer them love and blessings. I am not trying to troll here, seriously asking: How is that compatible with feeding ourselves? Not only do we kill plants for food, but when I garden I rip up weeds and throw them in the compost, or cut the woody mess back as well as possible. I don't stop to apologize to or ask permission of every weed seedling, and really can't. Doesn't being a heterotroph require me to suspend love and compassion for some organisms, at least sometimes?

Related question, I know some occultists and others assert that all souls are eventually supposed to get to our level and beyond, even those that are now just bacteria. But we could not live on this planet to experience growth if there were not plants to eat, bacteria to break down waste, etc. Doesn't this make it inevitable that when the last sentient beings to live before the Earth's destruction are living, there must also still be plants and bacteria, which won't get the chance to progress to intelligent life? Has anyone speculated about what will happen to them?

Thanks very much for tolerating weird questions!

-Translucent Jejune Octopus

Why do you believe that love and compassion for some being is incompatible with killing that being? Everything that lives is born to die and to become food for others. Eating and being eaten are the very heart of life. (Yes, I know that this deeply offends our modern Western sensibility. That hard fact highlights a major defect in our sensibility, not a defect in life.)

1) What Robert said. ;-)

All life lives on death. Every living thing feeds on the bodies of the dead; even plants send their roots in search of nutrients from the bodies of dead animals and plants. That's not a bad thing -- it's an essential glimpse into the nature of reality. "All things have died so that you might live." The food chain that ecologists talk about is a marvel of mercy: each of us gets to eat so many times, and only has to be eaten once! So when you eat a plant or an animal, give thanks to the being who gave its life for you; when you harvest a plant or slaughter an animal, make it as gentle and clean an act as possible -- knowing all along that you will eventually be harvested and eaten by Nature, too.

2) You're assuming that this is the only planet there is, in the only solar system there is. Those beings who can't complete the process of evolution in one world can do it in another.

What our host said! JMG, I really like your "each of us gets to eat so many times, and only has to be eaten once!" ever since you first said it in your blog so long ago.

A great deal of food for thought there, thanks. (Suddenly the phrase "food for thought" makes me wonder if the little thoughtforms are silently screaming as I gobble them up.)

-Translucent Jejune Octopus

Point 2 might actually help resolve the Fermi paradox. The universe is full of habitable planets, and they do have life, but it isn't part of the spiritual development of the beings inhabiting these planets to interact in any substantive way with beings from other star systems. For those whom it is, either (1) they incarnate in globular clusters where the stars are much closer together and/or in systems with multiple habitable planets, (2) they get this experience through alternate means (e.g. isn't sailing to a barely-discovered continent in its own way almost as "alien" an experience as traveling to an alien planet, and doesn't it require a lot less in the way of nonrenewable-burning high tech?), or (3) their home planets have the resources needed to actually do that.

And I suspect that by the time you as a soul have made it to the point where you actually do have to deal with cosmic matters on a day-to-day basis, you've passed into (possibly beyond) Gwynfydd and no longer have nor need a physical body... nor, for that matter, physical radio transmission.

Edited (grammar issue, typed "part spiritual development" not "part of the...") 2022-11-29 00:59 (UTC)

That's certainly the implication of Dion Fortune's metaphors in The Cosmic Doctrine. In her vision, souls move from planet to planet within a solar system, incarnating in physical matter on one such planet and in other, less dense embodiments on other planets; once the long trip up and down the planes is finished, the souls do various things within the solar system as a whole, including helping other souls advance; and each soul, when it's ready, makes contact with the Cosmos as a whole and begins the great adventure of traveling up and down the twelve Rays of the Cosmos, which takes them through uncountably many systems, of which those that consist of the kind of matter we know are a tiny fraction.

It's a big universe out there. Fortunately, we've got countless aeons of time to explore it.

Re: 2: If my lone (actually possibly one of two at this point) apparent past life dream is in fact that and I remember it correctly, then it is possible for even individuals at the human/human-equivalent level to bail from a world whose star is late in its life cycle to continue their development elsewhere - I'm a living example, my last incarnation lived on a planet orbiting a red giant/a star late in the process of becoming a red giant and was becoming uninhabitable as a result. If that's possible for my own soul, I assume something similar can happen for souls who aren't at the point of reincarnating into bodies at the human level of development.

(I'm not sure it's common, mind - I actually wouldn't be surprised if the advent of new divine sparks ceases before a planet becomes uninhabitable and the remaining souls of plants/animals/unicellular organisms are souls reincarnating in lower forms as the souls who are going to complete the evolution process basically evaporate off, either into Gwynfedd or by finding the gates between worlds, nor would I be surprised if the former is much more frequent. But it should be possible.)

- pretentious_username

It would make sense, wouldn't it?

Magic Monday

Being Kind to Plants

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