Magic Monday
Apr. 9th, 2023 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
It's just on 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 or comment 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, Violet Firth Evans aka Dion Fortune, had the great advantage of coming of age when the British occult community was close to its apogee, and she had plenty of teachers. Some of them, such as Moina Mathers, have already appeared here; some of them, such as Maiya Tranchell Hayes, apparently didn't leave any photographs behind -- but there are several others, and this is one of them: Frederick Bligh Bond, who was the official church archeologist at the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey between the two world wars, and discovered a whole series of lost features by digs that just happened to go to the right place. Then it turned out that there was no "just happened" about it; he was using spiritualistic methods to talk to the spirits of long-dead monks, who told him where to dig. The church threw a fit and dismissed him, but he went on to publish several volumes about his experiences, at least one of which can be downloaded for free (here). Dion Fortune studied with him for a while and also did trance work with him; her connection with Glastonbury continued to the end of her life, and in fact she's buried there.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
Post on Narcissism and MOE Tree of Life Visualizations
Date: 2023-04-10 04:05 am (UTC)For those who observed it today, a happy Easter, and to our Jewish friends, my apologies for not extending best wishes for Passover last Monday. For everyone else, I hope April showers are falling on fertile ground.
To Share: Not /directly/ occult, but my latest post is summing up what I've learned about common, or garden variety, narcissism (as opposed to full-blown NPD) from the blog /The Last Psychiatrist/, and I think it might be a relevant topic for those pursuing personal growth and/or spiritual healing for yourself or others: https://jpowellrussell.com/#narcissism_and_me
To Ask: I've been a bit slow in getting to the Tree Of Life-based advanced practices for the MOE, but I'm starting to look at them. Two quick questions: 1) Should the visualizations of the tree on your body be done at the same time as the daily empowering of your healing hands, or as a separate exercise? 2) Are there any considerations for compatibility and/or timing for these visualizations versus others? In my case, I'm getting close to wrapping up the second grade of the Dolmen Arch, and so in the third I'll be starting up the cauldrons/Grail exercise, and I wanted to make sure there wasn't anything to worry about there.
As always, thanks very much to JMG and everyone else here for good thoughts, good talking, and good cheer.
To any who will have them, I put forth my blessings and best wishes,
Jeff
Re: Post on Narcissism and MOE Tree of Life Visualizations
Date: 2023-04-10 04:11 am (UTC)2) It shouldn't be a problem as long as you do the Dolmen Arch work at a different time from the MOE work.
Re: Post on Narcissism and MOE Tree of Life Visualizations
Date: 2023-04-10 09:15 am (UTC)Re: Post on Narcissism and MOE Tree of Life Visualizations
Date: 2023-04-10 04:47 pm (UTC)Also, in your second example, I'd say the "always" is more potentially a problem than the "you".
Re: Post on Narcissism and MOE Tree of Life Visualizations
Date: 2023-04-10 10:22 am (UTC)Thanks for condensing The Last Psychiatrist's musings about narcissism. So narcissists feel they are "faking it" and get angry when you challenge their identity.
This provides an interesting perspective on my experience as a software engineer. People who try to herd software engineers (like project leaders, scrum masters or middle management) get angry when you question their development skills. When they ask for an estimate, they treat your answer as an arbitrary fake, and adjust it to fit their needs. When deadlines pass, people have to work weekends, even if this doesn't help progress at all.
Perhaps they are not only faking it, but believe that everyone else must be faking it too. So they do not feel anger when deadlines pass, but do feel anger when people question the deadline itself. The mental energy they spend on identity maintenance must be enormous. This could explain the burnout and turnover rates.
Your suggestion "who might I be hurting, and what can I do to stop?" may be useful for introverts as well as for narcissists. This is a good area for me to work on for the coming week!
A peaceful Easter Monday to everyone, and I hope the rumors about peace coming to Yemen turn out to be true.
Re: Post on Narcissism and MOE Tree of Life Visualizations
Date: 2023-04-10 04:52 pm (UTC)As someone who has worked as a scrum master, your characterization strikes me as reasonable! And yes, that's something that TLP talks about that didn't make it into my condensation: one reason narcissism is so corrosive is that it can become a self-reinforcing vicious cycle where you don't connect with people because you're too focused on your own identity, then you want to connect but suspect that they're just as fake and insecure as you, so you reject their attempts, which makes you more isolated and focused on your identity, and so on. I think a focus on "but what am I/are they actually doing?" is so important.
Re: Post on Narcissism and MOE Tree of Life Visualizations
Date: 2023-04-10 09:42 pm (UTC)—Princess Cutekitten
Re: Post on Narcissism and MOE Tree of Life Visualizations
Date: 2023-04-11 01:06 am (UTC)At its best, folks deal with less red tape or hassle about how the project is run and spend more time focusing on getting the work done. At its worst, you have just as much red tape/hassle, but now it's being sold to you as this great alternative that you're expected to pretend to be excited about. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which end of the spectrum is more commonly seen.