ecosophia | Magic Monday

It's just past 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 via slightly less evasive routes. Last week's honoree, Dr. Gérard Encausse, who wrote about magic under the pen name Papus, didn't act alone in reviving the Martinist tradition and founding the Martinist Order; he had the capable assistance of this man, Augustin Chaboseau. Papus and Chaboseau were medical students together, and were startled to discover that each of them had received the Martinist initiation by way of two different lineages. They each initiated the other, and thereafter worked together to preserve and transmit the Martinist tradition. Chaboseau's wife Louise was famous in her own right as a leading French feminist, and one of the first female pharmacists in France.

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Archdruid,

This is a weird one.

As part of my tantric studies I've recently started meditating on the nature of material reality, and I had the insight that material reality is largely the entanglement of various streams of Will and consciousness, vibrating at different frequencies and moving in different directions.

All things are at their core composed of Will and Consciousness, and that means the material universe is actually malleable to an unlimited degree...within specific limits.

For example, can someone convince a mountain to will itself to become an ocean? Well yes, but that doesn't mean a mountain can instantly become an ocean. The entanglements of its being dictate that it is a mountain and not an ocean, but after years of meditation and development of conscious movement of will, it could change into an ocean. Now it may take longer than the life span of the mountain to accomplish that level of ability, but it is in fact possible. It would then have to progress through every intermediate state between mountain and ocean, mastering the new movements of Will and the conflicts of Will that come with those new movements. It would take a tremendous amount of work, but it's definitely within the realm of possibility.

To be free of those entanglements entirely is to resolve all ones Karma, and at that point one is both the ocean and the mountain.

Well, yes -- but whose will and whose consciousness make those decisions? A mountain is a mountain because it wills to be a mountain. That's not a light and passing thought! It's been willing its own mountain-ness for millions of years, and the fact that some pipsqueak human who's only there for an eyeblink of time wants it to become something else is unlikely to make much impact. Further, the mountain's will is one expression of the will of the Divine, which has its own very good reasons to choose to have a mountain there for that ten-million-year interval of time, and will respond to a human being saying, "Mountain, can you please hurry up and turn into an ocean?" with an indulgent smile and a pat on the head...

Oh, I absolutely agree. That's the law of limits at work. It's not that things can't change, it's that they have their own reason to be as they are, and no amount of argument on our parts can change their courses.

What this line of meditation does indicate is that the Siddhis or powers that magical/spiritual practitioners gain seems to come from the untangling or patterns of Will. I have a hunch that the closer a being moves toward Moksha, the more powers they attain as their Karma untangles itself from the patterns that existing creates.

To add to what JMG said: sometimes people want things instrumentally, because they want them to get other things. If you look at this process the wrong way, you might think there was nothing but an infinite regress of wanting going on, that it wasn't conditioned by anything external. Similarly, you could propose a cosmology where there was just a mountain wanting to be a mountain because a deity wanted it to want that, and some higher thing wanted the deity to want it to want that, and so on, all of it just will and consciousness. But I think a lot about cosmologies where there are further constraints that shouldn't straightforwardly be interpreted as will and consciousness; it's just that their relationship to things that actually happen in our experience is very indirect and abstractly processed from many layers away, so that it would be hard to make anything out from this remove. in particular, I strongly suspect that materiality and reductionism may prove to have a lot of flavor in common with a major part of whatever such a far-away constraint would turn out to be.

Magic Monday

A meditation on Will and material change

Re: A meditation on Will and material change

Re: A meditation on Will and material change

Re: A meditation on Will and material change