Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting toward 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, past Chosen Chief of OBOD Philip Carr-Gomm, received most of his training in Druidry from Ross Nichols, who is this week's honoree. Nichols was a poet, a watercolorist, and an educator, as well as a good friend of Gerald Gardner, the inventor of modern Wicca. He became a member of the Universal Bond, one of the most active Druid organizations in Britain, in 1954. Ten years later, during a dispute over the leadership of the UB, he founded an order of his own, first called the Bardic Order of Druids and thereafter renamed the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, which he headed until his death in 1975.  He was the author of three books of poetry -- Sassenach Stray, Seasons At War, and Prose Chants and Proems -- as well as The Cosmic Shape, a programmatic essay on nature spirituality with a set of poems attached, and The Book of Druidry, which was published after his death.

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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.

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

[ecosophia]

1) Human astral perception is a mix of things projected from inside your own consciousness and things projected from outside. One way to think of it is to imagine that your aura is a transparent screen; you're projecting images on the inside of the screen, the universe is projecting different images on the outside of the screen, and you see all of it muddled together. That's how dreams can be a mix of symbolism from your own life and images from the astral cosmos.

2) They can't. That's what heaven and hell are: the experience of the astral plane after death, as good or as bad as your mental state at death and your karma more generally make them. Reincarnation provides the meat parachute to get you out of it.

3) Personal spiritual development changes the level of the astral plane to which you resonate, and thus gets you to the better neighborhoods of the astral. You can't think clearly on the lower astral because that's part of the experience of the lower astral -- it's far enough from the mental plane that thoughts are muddled and confused.

[athaia]

1) Oh, that's a great analogy! So the trick in dream interpretation is to tease out which is which...

2) Err... is the amount of nightmares one has an indication of the destination one is headed for after death? I don't have that many nightmares, but if they're any indication of what the astral plane can be like, I'd rather not end up there permanently. Can we on the physical plane do anything to help, say, relatives who have died, if we're worried they might be stuck in a not so nice place over there?

3) I guess that means daily banishing and meditation as the absolute minimum... and trying not to be an a...hole in daily life. If the lower astral is so confusing because it's so far away from the mental plane, why do we (generally) have more common sense when awake? Isn't the material plane even farther away from the mental plane?

(Sorry for the many questions, this happens when I start digging into a topic...)

[ecosophia]

2) Not necessarily. Nightmares can also reflect the astral condition of the place where you're sleeping. Yes, you can do quite a bit for dead people -- that's the whole point of praying for the dead. Your positive thoughts help them lift themselves out of the lower astral.

3) The material body is an insulator, and keeps the lower reaches of the astral plane from affecting your astral body as much as it otherwise would. When you're asleep and dreaming, your astral body drifts partly outside your material body, thus the increased influence.

[athaia]

2) I've long suspected that my current residence has some, uh, unhealthy residue, on pretty much all levels. One reason I*m planning to move. As for the dead, guess that means I need to work on cultivating forgiveness, sigh...

3) Ah, that makes sense. Thank you!