Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's almost 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 and the teachers who influenced them in turn. Last week's honoree, Theodor Reuss, got the idea and many of the teachings that went into the Ordo Templi Orientis from this man, Carl Kellner. Kellner was an Austrian chemist and a successful industrialist who made a tolerably large fortune by creating and patenting a new process for manufacturing wood pulp for paper. He was also, as the photo shows, something of a dandy; let it never be said that all occultists are dowdy!

In his off hours, he was an active Freemason and a student of occultism. A member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, he also studied with European students of our old friend, Paschal Beverly Randolph, and with several Hindu gurus and a Sufi shaykh. He drew up plans for an occult order that would pass on Randolph's sexual gnosis using rituals like those of Freemasonry. Before he could complete the plan, however, he was struck down with a sudden unexplained illness, recovered somewhat after a long hospital stay, and then suddenly died. (There's some reason to think that he'd been experimenting with kundalini yoga -- not the modern, simplified, safe version, but the old robust teachings that can drop you dead in your tracks if you don't have a guru watching you on a daily basis.) Since I'm not a member of the OTO, my only connection with any of that story is that one of my teachers was taught by a student of a student of a student of Kellner; still, thin as it is, the connection is there.

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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

[(Anonymous)]

While that flooding may well have quite a bit of distraction mixed up in it, I would be cautious in attributing the whole thing to a simple lack of discipline. Whenever great floods of images (not exclusively visual, of course) come into conscious awareness, especially when they seem dreamlike or nonsensical, that’s the subconscious offering those images up for the conscious to begin contemplating. Perhaps those unstoppable downloads, while your conscious is busy meditating, are precisely what your conscious meditations have inspired your subconscious to imagine and offer up for contemplation. Have you tried gratefully receiving those images and then contemplating how they relate to and inform the topic of your meditation?

The deeper self/subconscious/soul is much older and wiser than the conscious, so it doesn't tend to make distracting mistakes with anywhere near the regularity that the conscious does. Perhaps your soul is simply trying to guide your conscious' meditations to where deeper insights lie buried. Would that really be something you would want to put a stop to? The vague line between getting distracted and entering into a deeper state of consciousness is actually quite thin and easily mistaken. Accepting and appreciating whatever wisdom your soul is generously offering up might even be the fastest route to attaining deeper states of consciousness.

The parts of the subconscious are always yearning for the conscious to become aware of them and to unpack their mysteries. It can take them an awful lot of effort to be able to break through all the conscious' defenses. For them to go to all that effort only to then have the conscious label their gift as just another distraction is unlikely to encourage them to go to that effort again soon.

Maybe your subconscious soul, your friend and guide, is reveling in the deeper states of consciousness you have already managed to awaken. Maybe those imaginative floods are what its excited reveling feels like. The deeper parts of you may just be grateful that you have begun practicing reaching out towards them. Are you equally grateful that they have begun reaching back towards you?

— Christophe