Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's a little 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 these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is the current edition of my seventh published book, The New Encyclopedia of the Occult. I'd gotten irritated about the lack of decent reference works on occultism, and Llewellyn, the publisher I worked with in those days was enthusiastic about the idea of helping to fix that. It was a fun project, and includes a certain number of quiet and rather abstruse jokes; there are other occult encyclopedias available these days but this one still stands up fairly well -- though I'd make a lot of changes if the publisher was interested. (This also turned out to be the last book I did with Llewellyn for a long while, due to some issues involving their treatment of another project of mine.)  If you're interested in the encyclopedia, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite book venue 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

Integrating GSF and 5 Rites

[diletpoly]

Once again, thank you so much for hosting these. I've been rather busy the last few weeks, so I haven't been able to read all of them, so I hope I'm not duplicating a question that's already been asked.

As the subject says, I'd be interested in your thoughts on how to handle beginning doing the exercises you suggest in the 5 rites if you're already following the GSF. Particularly, it seems the two Solar Plexus exercises are either duplicative or at least similar enough to take some caution when doing both.

Since I've only started the 5 Rites in earnest this past weekend, I've been maintaining the GSF Solar Plexus Exercise, and doing the 5 minutes of SP Focus when I can find the time, but not stressing too much if I skip a day. For example, I'm likely to go do it now, before I head to bed, but I woke up extremely early today, so may just head to bed. We'll see how I feel after I press send on that. I do feel that the extended focus is actually showing more signs of benefits in just a few days than the more brief exercise has in months, but I don't know if I should combine the two, so that I 1) Sit upright while doing it, in a western meditation pose, 2) do the breathing portion of the GSF exercise, and 3) do about 5 minutes of focus on the SP while breathing at the end, rather than the 3 breaths you recommend.

While I'm asking questions, I'd be curious your thoughts on cold exposure, as we discussed a few weeks back WRT Wim Hof. I don't do it religiously or anything, but once or twice a week I turn my shower to cold at the end and let myself get used to it for somewhere between 30 seconds and a few minutes. I feel it is an overall benefit to my health, I'd be curious your thoughts on if it's going to set my occult development back.

Once again, thanks for your time and the the forum.

The Dilettante Polymath

Re: Integrating GSF and 5 Rites

[ecosophia]

1) I'd encourage you to continue doing both of them -- the focus and the exercise have different purposes and compliment each other. Yes, you can certianly combine them.

2) You're in ground that hasn't been explored for most of a century. If you like to continue the cold exposure practice, by all means, but pay close attention to what your other practices feel like on the day when you do this.