![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Magic Monday
Midnight is just a few minutes away, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and 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. 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. And further: I've decided that questions involving the evocation of spirits are permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I'll have a post on this on the blog in due time. 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 was my thirtieth published book and, in sales terms, one of my least successful works yet. I was invited by a small psychology press, Karnac Books, to write a book about the psychological implications of peak oil. It was an interesting project and one that I accepted with enthusiasm; it got a nice clean editing job and a good cover, and saw print. The result was one of my better books, a tolerably crisp analysis of the cascading mental health consequences of the mismatch between the modern mythology of progress and the reality of decline. Those few psychologists who noticed its existence at all, however, responded with horror or flat dismissal. Its sales have been so modest that, while it remains in print (with a firm that bought out most of Karnac's titles), the distributor that supplies stock to my Bookshop store doesn't carry it. You can get it from your favorite online bookstore.
Buy Me A Coffee
Ko-Fi
I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.
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.
***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
Souls of those who commit suicide, etc
(Anonymous) 2024-06-10 10:34 pm (UTC)(link)What in your opinion happens to the souls/conciousnesses of those who commit suicide? Do they suffer their fate, as some esoteric schools maintain, only as long as their natural life cycle would have lasted? Is there such a thing as eternal punishment/damnation, souls which are irredeemable? Is there "universal salvation" as even some Christian scholars/theologians like David Bentley Hart or Richard Rohr (and many of the early Christian schools) maintain, or is there annihilationism for such souls? Finally, do you think there are human beings who are literally "soulless", i.e. lacking the 6th/7th principles, and thus incapable of compassion, love, remorse?
Thank you!
Re: Souls of those who commit suicide, etc
There are no souls that are irreedemable, but there are souls that destroy themselves. That's very rare; it requires immense spiritual power combined with depraved morality, but it does happen. Far more often than that, you get souls who lock themselves into some negative pattern and won't leave it; since they have free will, they can't be forced out, and whole cosmic cycles can go by before they finally run out of energy and go tumbling back into the cycle of rebirth. Ultimately, any soul that doesn't destroy itself will be saved, but it can take a very long time.
According to some teachings, there are souls in human bodies that are not human; some are elementals, others are animal souls not yet ready for the human state. They're not actually soulless but they come across that way to us, because they are spiritually retarded and so don't have the qualities you've named. If they keep on incarnating in human bodies, they'll learn those, but it will probably take them a great deal of time and pain to do so.
Re: Souls of those who commit suicide, etc
When I was younger, I would sometimes disassociate myself from others, imagining them to be robots or automatons, pretending to be human without anyone upstairs. To some extent, this was an avoidance tactic I used with ppl I didn't relate to, but there may be a genuine basis for that. For example, I came across a xitter discussion (I know, it's a trashfire, but bear with me), about mentally visualizing objects/scenery, and it came out that there are people who aren't capable of doing so! At that point, I have to question whether you're human, and to what extent.