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. I'm currently tracing my Martinist lineage.  That's rendered complex by the Martinist tradition that one does not name one's initiator, so we'll have to go back through less evasive routes. Last week's honoree, René Chambellant, became head of the Eglise Gnostique Universelle on the death of his teacher and consecrator, Constant Chevillon, whom I'm honoring this week. Martinist, Rosicrucian, Freemason, and Gnostic bishop, Chevillon was born in 1880, showed remarkable intellectual gifts in youth, but went to work in the banking industry while devoting his free time to occult and spiritual pursuits. He wrote seven books and many essays about Gnostic theology and practice, and his integrity and spiritual qualities won the respect not only of his fellow Gnostics but of Catholics and nonreligious people. In 1944, he and other leading citizens of Lyon were taken hostage by the Nazis in revenge for activities of the Resistance, and shot to death. He is considered a saint and martyr by most modern Gnostic churches; the day of his martyrdom, March 22, is his feast day.

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

Comments

[ecosophia]

I don't know of any, I'm sorry to say. Anyone else?

[robertmathiesen]

This is something I've had to deal with, on and off, for decades, with both short-term pain and with ongoing pain. There isn't, so far as I know, any one-size-fits-all method, but different sorts of pain require different methods. So I'll give some examples of what has worked for me. Maybe they can help you.

First of all, though, a general remark. One esoteric author I think well of remarked that pain is as a sense, like the classic five senses (touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight). It gives people a crude (and useful) awareness of their surroundings, that's all. [Malidoma Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community (1993), pp. 37-38.] Since it is a sense, its input can be thought about, worked with, and even tweaked, as one goes through one's life.

Now for a few personal examples:

#1: Trancing out to deal with pain.

At one point in my life, there was some reason to think I was allergic to novocaine. Eventually it turned out that IO did not have that allergy, but in the meantime I had to have a cavity filled. I had a sympathetic dentist at the time, and we planned that he would work slowly and use a low-speed drill, while I would trance out as he worked. It wasn't a picnic and I still felt what he was doing to the tooth, but it wasn't awful either, and we got the cavity drilled and filled.

Something similar happened later with another dentist, far less sympathetic: she didn't have time that day, she said, to wait for the novocaine to take effect. I tranced out much more deeply, and told her to call me back gently when she was done. She drilled and filled, and I felt almost nothing. But when she had finished, she brought me back by shaking me fairly roughly, which hurt almost as much as the drilling would have done. To this day I can't decide whether my trancing out so deeply had scared her, or whether she was something of a sadist -- or maybe both. In any case, I never went back to her.

#2: Deliberately using the placebo effect on oneself.

[The placebo effect is one of the odder and more powerful phenomena in nature, and shows the surprising extent to which thought can affect the body's functioning, including the operation of the senses.]

I had to have a very minor, but somewhat painful surgical procedure done on my face. The surgeon forbad me to take either aspirin or ibuprofen for, IIRC, as much as a week ahead of the surgery, but recommended tylenol instead. Tylenol, however, usually has no painkilling effect on me (I may lack the receptors for it). So I found a differently shaped, brightly colored form of tylenol for children in the drugstore, and I spent a week in advance "deliberately knowing" -- I don't know how to say it more clearly than that -- that those odd pills were a new, as yet unnamed powerful painkiller. On the day of the surgery, I took two of those pills in advance, and I felt no pain during the surgery.

Note. It used to be thought that placeboes only worked if the patient did not know he was taking a placebo. More recent medical research has shown that this is not so. (And my own experience shows that the patient can even activate the placebo effect for himself, without any participation by a physician. Incidentally, the placebo effect can account for the genuine effectiveness of a great deal of magic.)

#3: Changing the way I characterize my pain to myself.

For some four decades I have had chronic, fairly low full-body pain, probably an effect of a very stressful professional life in my university. On the recommendation of my PCP, I went to a pain managerment clinic, only to learn -- after several visits -- that they had no effective means of dealing full-body pain if it could not be centered to any specific site of the body where they could inject some medicine.

So, if I could not change the activity of the bodily sense that is called pain, I could at least change how I thought and talked about the pain to myself (and to others), and also how I reacted to it. So, first of all, I deliberately stopped characterizing my pain as any sort of "suffering." And second, I deliberately made myself ignore my pain, as much as possible, as I went through life. I still hurt, but left the pain I was feeling out of account (as much as possible) as I went about my life. (This was made much, much easier by the fact that the pain was relatively low-level. It might not be possible for a person in intense pain to use this method effectively.)

Training myself to this habit of thought was a slow, slow process, and I haven't always been successful. But I have been very stubborn about it. I will not be taken captive by pain. It's nothing but pain, a mere sense. The only power it has over me comes from my fear of it. To paraphrase, Frank Herbert, "Fear of pain is the life-killer." After all, it's nothing but pain.

[ari_ormstunga]

Thank you for the response, Robert, I greatly appreciate it. I'll see if I can work with this, should the need arise.

[robertmathiesen]

You're very welcome, Ari. Best wishes for success!

[(Anonymous)]

Occult? Depends on how you define it.

But I have dealt with frequent episodes of debilitating pain for most of my life, and have learned a few things. YMMV. NSAIDs screwed up my gut lining and I haven't been able to use them for decades, I'm not willing to use anything stronger because of the potential for addiction and nasty side effects, so finding "alternative" ways to deal with pain has been a big deal for me. Caffeine is at best a temporary band-aid and at worst just prolongs the episode, like hitting the snooze button on an alarm clock. Here's what works:

1) Water. Obviously, it's going to depend on what resources you have available to you and the nature of the pain, but my first line of defense for pain is always water, whether that's crouching under a scalding shower (muscle pain), dousing myself in ice water, or floating in a lake-- water helps. It's not a cure, but it loosens the grip of pain.

2) Plants, sun, and fresh air. I know. This sounds so trite. It's not. Getting some sun regularly helps, in a way that supplementing vitamin D is not really equal to. Breathing the air outside helps. Hanging out with my plants and checking up on them helps. If you've got any trees you're friendly with, pay them a visit, lean on them, talk to them. I don't know why it helps or how, but it helps. Maybe they just have a longer perspective on things ;) For back and hip pain, my herbalist friend taught me to find a sturdy smallish tree-- not a sapling, but not something you can bend and narrower than your own trunk-- face the tree and clasp hands around the trunk horizontally (like, not reaching up or down, but straight out from the shoulder), with knees bent, back straight, and just sort of lean/pull for as long as you can manage, as though you could teach your spine to imitate the strength, and straightness and suppleness of the tree. Repeat often.

3) Prayer/meditation. Helps if it's repetitive. I'm not going to be doing anything discursive while in extreme pain, but I can handle repeating a short prayer, and it helps to have a set of beads or a knotted rope to keep count. Not because it matters how many, but because it helps me keep going even when I want to quit, and I need repetitions in the hundreds to get where I'm going. I keep a regular pattern of breathing with the words, focus on *being* in my chest (it's usually my head that hurts, no good being there), and this can often get me at enough of a remove from the pain that I can be aware of it, but it's not an urgent concern.

3a) I'm religious, so it's not a big step to go from here to re-framing pain as "OK, I'm paying attention, God, what do I need to learn here?" Which is an act of trust, and just try to relax and hold onto the state I've drifted to by meditating, and listen. Be attentive. I won't say I've had any grand revelations this way, but a) it feels like the right thing to do, and b) it re-frames the experience as an opportunity to learn something, rather than just something awful happening *to* me, and this is extremely helpful. Pain that you can't do anything about is like that old kids' game: "Can't go over it, can't go under it, can't go around it... gotta go *through* it!" Any time you sidestep, try to avoid, curl up and self-pity (been there lots) you're giving up the opportunity to learn what it wants to teach you. But you can decide to go THROUGH, consciously, with that end in mind. And you will learn things. It's maybe a bit like bodybuilding. Maybe you don't *like* the exercise, but doing it regularly, on purpose, with good form, does build muscle. So perhaps when the opportunity is handed to you, try to treat it like leg day at the spiritual gym. At the very least, it gives you a sense of agency.