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. 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 picture?  I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me. Sylvester Gould, last week's honoree, was an active member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, one of the more interesting occult orders of the late 19th century. (After many reorganizations, it's still around as the Church of Light aka Brotherhood of Light.) The H.B. of L., as most people called it back in the day, was founded by two British occultists, T.H. Burgoyne and Peter Davidson. The photo is of Burgoyne. It's also the photo of another gentleman, one Captain Norman Astley, who took over the reorganized H.B. of L. in America from Burgoyne, married another H.B. of L. adept -- the remarkable and talented Genevieve Stebbins -- and helped Benjamin Williams aka Elbert Benjamine aka C.C. Zain re-reorganize the H.B. of L. into the Brotherhood of Light aka Church of Light. Yes, Burgoyne and Astley were the same person. It's a complicated story. But Burgoyne and Peter Davidson, whom we'll be talking about next week, were among Sylvester Gould's teachers -- and behind them stands another and a considerably stranger figure.

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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 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!***

Comments

[jdecandia]

Hey JMG, wondering if you are familiar with the ideas of Bernardo Katsrup and his metaphysics rooted in Idealism. I find the metaphors that he uses in his books "More Than Allegory" and "Materialism is Baloney" to be extremely poetic and match my own experience.


That being said, I have been practicing the SOP for about a year now on a nearly daily basis at varying times of the day (I do shift work during the day and sometimes over nights). My query to you is...his metaphysical view and many others like it explain the world in models of ever widening consciousness. However such models could make it appear that after death your individual consciousness could and seems to be absorbed back into a greater mind.

However occultism and various other religions talk about your individual soul as something that somehow maintains its own individuality throughout incarnations.

My own personal experience with magic hasn't lent contact with other spirits or entities as of yet so I haven't had any personal evidence that there do exist separate, more advanced mental entities. And even if I were to make contact with what appears to be a separate entity, how could I tell if it were indeed an individual entity and not just a mental process of mind at large? I'm not sure what the distinction would even be, and I've mostly been involved in the occult philosophically a I have yet to have a direct experience. My query stands, then; what does your occult training say about the retention of individuality after death? And what does individuality even mean if all individuals come from a vast mental process?

That being said, the change in my own world view has been immensely helpful and rewarding regardless of any "supernatural " evidence.

[ecosophia]

1) No, I haven't read Kastrup. I tend to take philosophers one at a time, and really soak myself in their thought before going on to the next one; right now Sri Aurobindo is getting that treatment, and such spare time for philosophy as I have is going into some thinkers I need to address and challenge in an upcoming series of posts.

2) The occult tradition rejects, in no uncertain terms, the claim that the human soul just dissolves into some sort of generic cosmic glop after death. The occult teaching is that at the core of each human soul is a center of consciousness and will that persists from life to life, passing through the process of reincarnation into new experiences. The occult teachings also include the idea of karma, that is, the rule that how you lived previous lives played an important role in shaping the kinds of things you encounter in this life, and how you live this life will have an important role in shaping the kinds of things you will encounter in future lives. Eventually you will outgrow the need for a material body, but that won't be the end of you; it's at that point that your soul finishes its childhood, reclaims its memories of its past incarnations, and goes on to do more interesting things in other realms of being.

[(Anonymous)]

Kastrup is well worth reading: he's a computer scientist as well as a philosopher, and his dismissal of materialism is an excellent piece of popular science writing. He's also written an interesting book about the nature of religion, called More than Allegory, which argues that what we think of as religious myths are in a very real sense "true."