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Magic Monday
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. I'm going to jump back here a bit because I managed to trace down another significant figure from a lineage I've already discussed. Bishop Richard, Duc de Palatine was an Australian spiritual teacher and Gnostic bishop who played a crucial role in bringing the alternative sacramental movement to the United States, and strongly influenced both of the bishops who consecrated John Gilbert. Born Ronald Powell in 1916, he became a member of the Theosophical Society and then a bishop in the Liberal Catholic Church. After the Second World War he moved to Britain and founded the Pre-Nicene Christian Church, one of the major fountainheads of Gnostic Christian spirituality in the English-speaking world, and later traveled widely in the USA and elsewhere, teaching students, ordaining priests, and consecrating bishops, until his death in 1977. I've recently had the chance to study more of his writings and have discovered that he was much more influential a source for the Gnostic material I received than I'd realized -- so he's this week's honoree.
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Good evening JMG and everyone,
1) We seem to be always a part of something else. The more I look into it and the more I meditate on the symbols of my day as if they were a tarot card the more I realize that I am indistinguishable (symbolically) from things that happen outside of me. Escaping that is like trying to escape life, no hope in that. Would you say then that the way of 'becoming' is more an act of better navigation rather than actually doing something truly by yourself? I don't know if that is a clear question, but I think for most of my life I have tried to distance myself from the world (ugly bullying) instead of trying to engage with it and see what currents I can surf. But it seems to go deeper than that, for example, it is very clear that my family has been experiencing synchronicities related to my occult practice, in their own way.
2) What is this medium that seems to reflect things from one brain to another and from one being to another? Is this part of the functions of the astral light? Acting like a sort of fractal perhaps.
3) A geomantic question. I am getting a little confused with loss and gain because that it a little bit like the half empty or half full glass analogy. As an example I tried to come up with, say, if one is having a rough patch and asks a question about if doing X will help improve the situation and the Judge is Colled, could that count as losing the sadness? The same for Llosgwrn and Pen Y Ddraig. The beginning of something is the end of another thing. Or am I just getting tangled in overthinking it?
Music to share: Cymande - Dove
no subject
2) Lévi would certainly describe it as the astral light.
3) You're overthinking it. Try to ask questions that avoid such ambiguities. "Will X help" is fairly good -- if you get Colled, no, X will be a waste of time.
no subject
Many thanks!
1) My brain definitely seems to want to grasp some conclusion in the process of meditation. Perhaps it is just feeling the pressure of the work and wants to squirrel away and arrive at something. You might be delighted to know that when I asked, I got The Wheel of Fortune, Death and the Two of Swords... I'll keep circling the meditative roundabout and see where it takes me :-)
3) That helps a lot actually. If I want clear answers, I have to ask clear questions!
--Dinji Lenticular Platypus
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(Anonymous) 2023-01-23 02:26 pm (UTC)(link)Your comments about navigation reminded me of something I read in an interview with Ian Mackaye (Fugazi, Minor Threat) about a month or so ago. They resonated with me and I made a note of it... here is what he said, with a link to the full interview. He was asked a question about "survival", which was the theme of the issue for the magazine, and this is what he had to say in response...
"It’s the word survival – the idea you would ‘survive’ something. I understand that people, melodramatically, may consider life something one has to survive. But you’re alive, that’s what life is, you are surviving. It plays into this idea that people’s lives are narratives – that it’s a film or book and you have to survive all this craziness. I think it’s a disservice, ultimately, because it makes others feel like their lives aren’t crazy enough.
In my mind, life is not a war – although human beings create conditions that make it feel that way – and I think that navigation is a fairer term. I see life essentially as an empty field. The construct of that empty space has to do with society, but it also has to do with us. The only real question is how are we going to navigate that space, from beginning to end. If people thought of themselves as navigators, maybe they would have more purchase. Navigation is about having a say in the matter, whereas surviving is about dealing with things being thrown at you. With navigation you get to decide whether you want to be in that situation in the first place."
https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/music-2/ian-mackaye-survival-issue-interview/
Happy meditations, and it's good to look at this theme again myself.
JPM
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(Anonymous) 2023-01-23 04:18 pm (UTC)(link)JLfromNH/Polka-dot Grimy Frog
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Oooh. I like the compass analogy.
Here are a couple images to get the imaginative juices going
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(Anonymous) 2023-01-23 11:15 pm (UTC)(link)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9obPq8wawg
JLfromNH/Polka-dot Grimy Frog
no subject
Hello there JPM,
I really like this! After all, if our Gruppenführers keep us in survival mode, that activates the sympathetic system which destines resources to fight or flight, instead of higher order thinking like reflection and thought-out decision making. That is rather convenient if you want to herd people instead of having individuals that think and act by themselves.
We are dying and living at every moment --every inhalation and exhalation even!-- so removing the hooks that make us think we have to be running like rats all the time to pursue artificial goals to arrive at somewhere we can consider 'safe' is perhaps one of the greatest forms of rebellion. 'What do you mean you are not selling your soul to buy an overly-sized house and a new car (phone) every year like every other person?' For what, to draw symbols in the air and intone words of power? Yes :-).
I like the navigation analogy too, always on the move carrying the essentials and ready to take the next step if necessary.
Happy meditations!
--Puce Meditative Squid
Navigating / Return to the Trunk
(Anonymous) 2023-01-23 10:57 pm (UTC)(link)I'm glad you found that useful. I thought some more of the article as I went about my day and recalled he also mentioned something that he found useful from C.S. Lewis that he had read in his twenties...
"There was this image of life as a tree and each decision we made was a branch. And then every decision we made, once we were on that branch, were smaller branches and smaller branches until you got down to the twigs. The author explained that if you are on the wrong branch, if you made a bad decision, you have to go back to the trunk – because once you’re on that branch, every decision will be wrong. That was such a great thing for me. I was just navigating, I made a mistake, so I have to go back to the trunk. Because back at the trunk, life – simple life – is always right."
So yeah, navigating, and returning to the trunk as needed, before going on a different branch.
I like the images you posted to anon as well up above and I also like what you said here too:
"removing the hooks that make us think we have to be running like rats all the time to pursue artificial goals to arrive at somewhere we can consider 'safe' is perhaps one of the greatest forms of rebellion."
It can be weird when you don't chase the same rats as everyone else who is running around. But it can also be peaceful.
This is also useful to me as a reminder that when the prevailing winds aren't blowing towards the direction I've set for myself, their is probably a trick or too that sailors know for staying on course.
Umber Fuzzy Raccoon / JPM
Re: Navigating / Return to the Trunk
The quote works very well for the discussion below too.
It can certainly be peaceful, especially when you realize 'in' is the only way 'out' and perhaps sometimes that means docking at port for a while with provisions and a few bottles of rum as reserve.
--Periwinkle Slithy Piglet