Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

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.

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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.

With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

[ecosophia]

You've doubtless seen me comment about the Watcher at the Threshold. This is among the forms the Watcher takes -- the terrible vision of an empty, lifeless, meaningless world of meat objects lurching through automatic routines. It's a known landscape along the inner path, and it indicates that you've made some definite progress on that path.

The only way out is through. Keep doing your practices, remember that the Watcher is a transitory phenomenon, and you'll come out the other side into a world of renewed life and meaning. Stop, and you stay where you are.

That style of debased American Buddhism, by the way, is very much reworked for the sake of productivity -- that's why corporations push it so hard. I don't recommend it to anyone who wants to be more than a lifelong corporate slave.

[jdecandia]

Thank you for this. I have read your comments on the Watcher not only here but through some of your written works. I have also heard it mentioned by a number of other occultists...even mentioned once in an interview by Damien Echols.

I didn't think this would grip me the way it has, which prompted me to reach out to this forum so it helps to hear this is progressnot a confirmation of nihilism. Furthermore, this experience has me wondering if societally we encourage the watcher. It seems to be the default/exalted mode of thinking. I grew up thinking this way so it is very familiar to me in a way, but to be living in it again as I pass through this gate is a good reminder of what that philosophy feels like to live through...I can't believe I lived that way for so long or that so many people I see now are stuck in it currently.

I appreciate you JMG and this forum. This is a particularly vulnerable post for me, and I am thankful that there are those who have set wayposts ahead for me. It seems to me that true spiritual communities would hold space for this kind of raw growth

[ecosophia]

I'm glad this is helpful for you.

That's an intriguing point, about our culture encouraging the Watcher. Certainly this form of the experience is fostered by a lot of current ideologies; it makes me wonder just how many people who dabbled in spirituality during the various pop-culture fads of the 20th century got stuck in the Watcher experience.

[jdecandia]

I would say a good amount. Look at any of the arguments on mister ingram's validity of his claim that he is a modern arhat And you will see how people only talk about the truth of emptiness and sende of nihilism that comes from attaining this mode of enlightenment.

To be honest struggling with right now it is a bit of a headspin because in a way I do see how my prior conceptions of truth and solidity are empty of their inherent value. But to take the Buddhist idea of emptiness and state that all experience just a phantasm of state of minds that attach itself to a thing that itself is ultimately not there and that is ALL is extremely disheartening.

The emptiness to me seems to be the emptiness of materialism as the only way...but there does seem to be something there.

All I know is I'm going to practice to see if I can start to sense this more. Having the ground shift underneath you and no idea if there is another solid shore is disheartening...probably why it is used by pop psychology so much. Which, in a twisted sense, gives me a sense of hope as I've come to distrust corporate/pop culture so much as of late.

I also apologize for the typos. I have no computer, so the autocorrect keeps attempting to switch between English and Italian with poor results.

Thank you all again for your insights.

[ecosophia]

I didn't know that Ingram claims to be an arhat. That proves, by the way, that he's not one -- just a common or garden variety religious egotist. No genuine arhat proclaims himself or herself to be an arhat. (I suppose that's the dividing line between an arhat and an a**hat...)

[(Anonymous)]

I'll do you one better. He signs his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha "The Arahant Daniel Ingram" on the author byline. A lot of competing teachers say he's redefined Arahant to be second path, so they call his version of Arahant "Technical Fourth path".

I will say his work is helpful in some ways because it normalizes altered states of consciousness and trials and tribulations of the spiritual path which he borrows the term "The Dark Night of the Soul" for. It's helped me understand certain things. Ingram is a medical doctor and practices chaos magic, though he remains ontologically agnostic towards it from what I can tell.

To OP (and JMG if so inclined), I lump in the whole pragmatic dharma movement with what I call "The Cult of 0" which is my term for the vein of society under the spell of reason and meaningless. I'll be honest, it's pretty much the same thing as the Radiance in The Weird of Hali. Just ask yourself if in 20 years you'd rather be like the well known occultists of today or like the well known pragmatic dharma practitioners. Pragmatic dharma is incredibly insular and vapid if you pay attention to it long enough.


Luke Z