Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just before 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 1.1 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 image? I field a lot of questions about my books on magic these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book on the left is the current edition of my fifth published book, The Encyclopedia of Natural Magic. I got tired of the torrent of wildly inaccurate books on herb and stone magic, and decided to write one based entirely on medieval and Renaissance sources -- granted, it helped that I'd gotten fairly good at reading Latin by the time I got to work on it.  I wrote this before I studied hoodoo with Cat Yronwode, or it would have had much more traditional American conjure in it.  It's still a solid book, and one I use myself whenever I need to look up the magical properties of an herb or what have you -- and it's the oldest of my books that's still with its original publisher, for whatever that's worth.  If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite bookstore if you live elsewhere.

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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 -- as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Good day, JMG and commentariat,

I have a couple of questions about some experiences I've been having.

First, for about 6 months I've been noticing that I'm increasingly synced up with time. When I look at the clock throughout the day, it's 3:33 or 11:11 or 5:55, or exactly the top of the hour. Even when I wake up in the middle of the night, it will be at 2:22 or precisely 3 am. It occurs so often that there's no way it's a coincidence. And even stranger is that it happens just as often with my bedroom clocks that are set ahead of the actual time. What do you think might be causing this? I have started getting more in depth with my spiritual work during this time, if that might be a factor.

Second, I've been practicing magic for probably 6-7 years (Dolmen Arch, DMH, some CGD), though I'm admittedly not very good at it. But I've always been drawn to the mystical path, and I've been exploring that off and on for the last year or so. I've been increasingly having deep feelings of gratitude and love--for the universe, for all things, and for my life. And when I try to practice contemplative prayer, I can feel the love outside of me, all around me. But I get so overwhelmed by the immense feeling of it all that I start weeping. It probably sounds strange, but I feel like I could cry forever or burst from the beauty of it all and my gratitude for being able to experience it. It's not sadness that I feel - though to me, beauty and grief feel so close to each other.

Have you or any of the commentariat heard of anyone, mystic or otherwise, having this experience, or is it just something going on in me? I won't make a very good mystic if I can't stop crying!

Thank you!

~Magenta Befuddled Dragon

[ecosophia]

1) The subconscious mind has roughly the same intelligence as a dog. You can think of it as your onboard puppy, in fact -- and you've managed to teach your onboard puppy a fun new game. It'll keep waking you up or drawing your attention to the clock at such times as long as you give it attention for doing so. I'd encourage you to let it have its fun, so long as it doesn't do you or anyone else any harm.

2) Good heavens, yes. That's actually quite common among mystics of all traditions -- it's quite common for Zen masters to burst into tears at the moment of their enlightenment, for example. You'll make an excellent mystic if you let yourself cry, because those tears of joy and gratitude and grief are expressing your own rich and honest reaction to the wonder of things. Let yourself cry -- just learn to keep praying through the tears.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for this! Your kindness and generosity in sharing your wisdom with others are among the many things I'm grateful for in this world.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

~Magenta Befuddled Dragon

[robertmathiesen]

To your second question, our host is quite right that what you describe is quite normal for mystics, or for anyone with a gift for the path of the mystic. You seem to me to have this gift, and it is a blessing to have it. You're flat-out wrong to think that "I won't make a very good mystic if I can't stop crying."

What I would add is that there is no reason why you can't be both a mystic and a magician at once, though it is not a usual combination. Here is how that works, IMHO.

There are two quite distinct approaches to mystic practice, which some writers call kataphatic and apophatic.

Kataphatic mystics proceed by way of their thoughts and their sensations, which they enhance and elevate toward an apprehension of Ultimate Reality. But this Ultimate Reality is so far beyond the reach of our sensations and our thoughts that no matter how high you elevate and refine them, It still escapes your best efforts in the end. If you are so rash as to suppose you have grasped Ultimate Reality, you have deluded yourself.

The apophatic mystic proceeds otherwise. He realizes at the outset that human thoughts and feelings always fall short, and knows that each human thought or feeling, however elevated, is an illusion that keeps him from encountering Ultimate Reality on its own terms, as it really is. Therefore he denies and rejects each of them as it occurs to him. Eventually he is left with nothing, a featureless blank. But this, too, is the final illusion, and he also denies and rejects that, too.

Then, if he is graced with the gift, his entire self suddenly becomes an organ not of thought and sensation, but an organ that experiences what is beyond all human experience, that perceives what is beyond all human perception: it experiences and perceives everything as a whole --everything that is and that is not as a single whole, without any limitation of time (now or elsewhen) and space (here or elsewhere). This is sometimes called, by Hindus, "Indra's Web" -- yet it is no earthly web of matter and energy. Rather, this Web itself is not wholly unlike a sentient earthly being, not wholly unlike a living earthly being, not wholly unlike an earthly fire that warms and loves and consumes.

And wih this grace comes the ability to change things within the realm of time and space, of matter and energy: one simply extends something that is like a limb, yet is not a limb, and very gently -- ever so gently -- "tugs" at an appropriate strand of the Web, thereby effecting change. But also with this grace must come the vision to know all the unforeseen consequences of that tug (however slight it may be) and the wisdom to weigh all the consequences of that tug against one another. More often that not, the result of such weighing is against tugging at all on the Web. But sometimes the balance may favor the tug.

As with the mystic, so with the magician. What we have been discussing from day #1 on our host's blogs is kataphatic magic, magic worked by thought, word and deed, by symbolic and patterned behavior, and by other such means within our familiar universe of matter and energy constrained within time and space. In contrast, the ability to effect changes by directly tugging on the Web may be called apophatic magic, and it is the magic of the mystic -- or is it the mystic's miracle-working rather than his magic?

It does not seem good to say very much about this sort of magic, and I hesitated whether to respond at all to Magenta Befuddled Dragon in public. I hope I have managed to do so in terms that will make sense to her(?), but not bring harm to others.


(Note for further reading: the best sources I have found on this are Eastern Orthodox Christan ones, and they do not call it magic at all:

Two early ones are both anonymous, and each is very brief, mere pages long: [1] The Mystical Theology by an author who lived around 500 CE and used the pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite; and [2] "On the Three Methods of Prayer," preserved in The Philokalia, and usually (wrongly?) attributed to Simeon the New Theologian, who lived around the year 1000. Online English transaltions can be read at [1] http://esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/MysticalTheology.html
and at [2] https://orthodoxchurchfathers.com/fathers/philokalia/symeon-the-new-theologian-the-three-methods-of-prayer.html

An excellent modern source is Vladimir Lossky's The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, which can be read online in English at https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Vladimir_Losskij/the-mystical-theology-of-the-eastern-church/