I would like to thank you for bringing the essays of John Gilbert to a wider audience. It is a real treasure! I am on Chapter 2 of “The Tree of Spirit” and it’s been an eye opener already. I realized how much work I have ahead of me if I want to gain even a speck of the vast knowledge of the occult. It is exiting! But it immediately brought some questions I need help with.
1. When J. Gilbert writes about subconscious mind represented by the High Priestess does he refer to the concept similar to your GSF concept of subjective mind? I may be mistaken, but if that is the case why did you choose to name it differently? Is it because the term subconsciousness has been overused by pop-psychology to the extent that it nearly lost all its original meaning? Or is it actually a different concept?
2. J. Gilbert states that when we decide to incarnate we choose the place, the time, the challenges, our responses to challenges, and the whole entourage beforehand. Does it mean that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, already happened and known in advance? All we need is to play our part in a play already written. A true tragedy, in the sense that we know what will happen, we know the outcome, but we still play the part and we are not free to change our response because it was already chosen by us before we incarnated. We just go through the motions and our free will is an illusion. The only time we exercised free will was our will to incarnate.
3. But then how we can change ourselves (Strength) in the true meaning of the word change? It seems impossible because even that “change” was chosen in advance and is not a real change. How is it possible? Is it the Divine intervention we opened up to, The Chariot? Deus ex machina? Therefore, we did not know who we’d become and needed to incarnate to get the Divine intervention? So, the self-creation is actually self-co-creation, because without the Divine we’d be just “spinning the wheels” in a totally deterministic world, unable to evolve, to create, and to change.
I guess I worked myself into a corner now and cannot get out of it all by myself :) Am I even on the right track? Please help :) Thank you.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
The Tree of Spirit
Date: 2023-03-20 04:18 am (UTC)1. When J. Gilbert writes about subconscious mind represented by the High Priestess does he refer to the concept similar to your GSF concept of subjective mind? I may be mistaken, but if that is the case why did you choose to name it differently? Is it because the term subconsciousness has been overused by pop-psychology to the extent that it nearly lost all its original meaning? Or is it actually a different concept?
2. J. Gilbert states that when we decide to incarnate we choose the place, the time, the challenges, our responses to challenges, and the whole entourage beforehand. Does it mean that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, already happened and known in advance? All we need is to play our part in a play already written. A true tragedy, in the sense that we know what will happen, we know the outcome, but we still play the part and we are not free to change our response because it was already chosen by us before we incarnated. We just go through the motions and our free will is an illusion. The only time we exercised free will was our will to incarnate.
3. But then how we can change ourselves (Strength) in the true meaning of the word change? It seems impossible because even that “change” was chosen in advance and is not a real change. How is it possible? Is it the Divine intervention we opened up to, The Chariot? Deus ex machina? Therefore, we did not know who we’d become and needed to incarnate to get the Divine intervention? So, the self-creation is actually self-co-creation, because without the Divine we’d be just “spinning the wheels” in a totally deterministic world, unable to evolve, to create, and to change.
I guess I worked myself into a corner now and cannot get out of it all by myself :)
Am I even on the right track?
Please help :)
Thank you.