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. Papus and Chaboseau, the honorees of the last two weeks, each got their Martinist lineage by a tangle of mostly forgotten figures, so we can jump straight back to one of the founders of the tradition, Louis-Claude de St. Martin. St. Martin was born in 1743 in an aristocratic family and became a student of the elusive master Martinez de Pasqually, learning the distinctive system of theurgic magic Pasqually taught. Later in life, after Pasqually's death, he focused more of his attention on Christian mysticism, studied Jacob Boehme's writings, and penned a series of influential mystical tracts under the pseudonym "The Unknown Philosopher."

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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.

With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG,
You thoughts, if you would be so kind, on an odd use of the Middle Pillar Exercise.
I'm a lifelong insomniac, and with age have begun to wake in the middle of the night, unable to get back to sleep again. (I could write a book on clever ideas to counter insomnia, by the way.) One night, in desperation, I tried mentally doing the MP Exercise, lying in bed and just repeating the names of the spheres and trying to move the energy up and down, and soon found myself apparently dozing for a few seconds, or at least forgetting where I had got to. After a while, it became clear that a lot of time had passed, without being sure that I had actually slept. I've continued doing this from time to time: at the very least it's better that being consciously awake. From your knowledge of the MP Exercise, what do you think is going on here? And is it the sort of thing you can do for long periods of time without risk?
Thank you.

[ecosophia]

That's a very worthwhile thing to do. There are states between waking and sleeping; if practicing the MP in that way helps you enter them, good -- because in those states your body can rest, and the energies of the MP will continue to flow through you and heal you. Yogins practice a similar exercise called yoga nidra that is actually more healing and refreshing than ordinary sleep.

[(Anonymous)]

This is basically what monks are doing when they get up for midnight offices. I have tried it myself, when unable to sleep, and can report that an hour or two of intense prayer/meditation followed by maybe two hours' sleep is as good as the canonical 8 hours.