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)]

For what it's worth, I mean I haven't experienced this myself, but it's a commonplace among the Western Buddhist authors I read that practically anyone who gets far with certain kinds of meditative practice will eventually start "directly perceiving" that their brain was always attaching suffering to every experience, or something like that. I guess the idea is that, in uncultivated consciousness, there's never any point at which one is standing from the place where one could perceive the suffering as distinct from a possible background of not-suffering, so it never stands out.

It seems that the claim of "all phenomena are unsatisfactory" is meant to be first a technical claim about a purported truth about human consciousness that anyone could in principle verify with enough training, and only after that is it assumed to also validly imply a philosophical claim about the existential condition of all experiencing beings (so that existential nausea about this unsatisfactoriness could be considered a progress-milestone). So making an "I refute it thus", of people sometimes being happy, is sort of talking past the core claim without engaging with it. But at the same time, it seems like maybe there's a motte-and-bailey argument pattern going on, and it's important to challenge the connection between the motte ("nearly all humans have an unnoticed bad constant background level of suffering") and the bailey ("any state of experience more concrete than nirvana is intrinsically a sucker's game, net-suffering-wise").

Of course it's possible that the suffering, even if it is "directly perceived", is an observer effect -- an artifact of the meditative process used to allegedly train introspective perception up to that point, rather than something intrinsic to everyone including those who haven't practiced meditation.

I don't know what to make of this possibility. My current guess, from the reports I've read, is that there are some kinds of quite avoidable suffering that normally any human has, from their brain attaching suffering willy-nilly to not getting all sorts of things they want, as a sort of commitment device -- the same way one person might commit to retaliating against another for not giving them what they think they deserve, just using internal mechanisms of retaliation:

https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/07/core-transformation.html

But there might be another kind of "suffering" associated with having erroneous anticipations, or with having attachments to possibilities (perhaps possibilities that one couldn't have known at the time were infeasible), as in the Predictive Processing cognitive-science paradigm for how brains push themselves to navigate spaces of possible combinations of future details when selecting actions. If that kind of "suffering" is part of what an advanced meditator discovers, I'm not sure how much this should be counted as suffering. Conceiving of that as "suffering" might be like conceiving of water as always finding higher altitudes "uncomfortable" and that that's why it flows downward whenever there's a downward to flow to. Extending that conception, to the idea that all concrete existence is a web of undertows that tries to ensnare all experiencing beings into a sea of suffering, might be like extrapolating to the idea that being at the earth's surface is torture for water and it's a moral emergency that all the water on the earth isn't at the earth's center.

While I was looking for the previous link I found another link that was about the question of whether the introspective experience of "dukkha", conceived as one unified treatable form of suffering, was just such an observer effect:

https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/12/dukkha-created-vs-discovered.html