Magic Monday
Aug. 12th, 2018 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
I'm going to be shocking and launch this week's Magic Monday a few minutes early, since I'm here on Dreamwidth,. (The picture is Thomas Taylor, the great Regency-era Platonist and worshiper of the Greek Gods, godfather of the modern Neopagan revival)Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer, though it may be Tuesday sometime before I get to them all.
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 the button below to access my online tip jar.
***This post is now closed to new questions. See you next week!***
Passive and Active Paths
Date: 2018-08-13 01:53 pm (UTC)In Magic Monday two weeks ago, when asked to expound a bit on the conflicting requirements and results of ritual magic and psychedelics as a spiritual path, you wrote (https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/29000.html?thread=1613896#cmt1613896): "Magic is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. It works by developing conscious control over states of mind, and when you interact with what (for present purposes) we'll call the unconscious mind, you do it in a deliberate fashion, in which the conscious mind is never submerged. Clarity of mind, strength of will, self-knowledge, and self-mastery are essentials of the path of magic.
The psychedelic path, by contrast, requires you to be ready to give up control over your states of consciousness. While you're working with a psychedelic ally, the ally is in control, and it's only afterwards that you reintegrate your experiences with your conscious experience of the world. Clarity of mind and strength of will aren't useful in that work; it requires a receptive approach rather than an active one. (In this way it's rather similar to mysticism.)"
While, with effort, I can think of a very few activities which require purely an active or passive approach (Tug Of War, say, which requires pulling but no pushing; or the extreme passivity required to remain still as a doctor performs necessary and delicate surgery on you in a situation where anasthetic is unavailable), for the most part any complex action is necessarily a combination of alternating activity and passivity. A martial artist who always punches and kicks but never dodges or blocks will not get very far; likewise one who always dodges and blocks but never punches or kicks. And a conversationalist who only talks and never listens-- or only listens and never talks-- is not holding a conversation at all. You also made the analogy of not being able to go North and South at the same time. While this is true, don't most people sometimes wish to go North, and sometimes South?
Is not the path of ritual magic also filled with passivity balancing the activity? For example, discursive meditation may be active but it requires stillness to be able to think with clarity-- and it is often unclear whether the profoundest thoughts come from inside or out. And it may be active to ask the gods to help to balance you, but it is passive to actually be worked on. How is consulting divination to determine the best course of action meaningfully different, in terms of activity and passivity, from consulting a psychedelic ally, of whom you can also ask questions and receive cryptic but enlightening answers? This train of thought extends even to the very motivations for doing magic. In the introduction to the Cosmic Doctrine, Dion Fortune suggests that if one can answer the riddle "Why do you want to study occult science?" correctly, they possess the key to unlock the Gate. If I understand her correctly, her answer seems to be "I long to know in order to serve". And is not serving others a perfect balance of active and passive? One subsumes selfish desires in order to serve; but there is still leeway in most situations to make one's own choices about the best ways to serve.
Or perhaps I am not understanding something about what you mean exactly by an active path and a passive path. For now, I think I will boil this down to two questions.
(1) Is Ritual Magic necessarily active, and psychedelic spiritualism necessarily passive?
(2) Assuming for now that they are those things. What is the utility in focussing one's efforts so fully on activity or passivity?
Re: Passive and Active Paths
Date: 2018-08-13 11:45 pm (UTC)Re: Passive and Active Paths
Date: 2018-08-14 03:51 am (UTC)Of course ritual magic has receptive elements and psychedelic practice has active elements -- in the real world, the One Drop Fallacy does not apply. The point I was trying to make is that there is an active core to the one path and a receptive core to the other, and these don't combine well -- the qualities that lead to success in one conflict with the qualities that lead to success in the other
Re: Passive and Active Paths
Date: 2018-08-14 06:10 am (UTC)Thinking about why I framed the question this way, and fell into the One Drop Fallacy, it is in part due to a conversation with a close friend who practices a more psychedelic path. I tried to describe to her your characterization of the paths as active and passive, and she objected to the notion that her path necessarily be passive. On the contrary, self-described psychonauts often believe they are blazing untrodden trails, a far cry from a passive mindset. I wasn't able to find a way to explain in meaningful terms why you held this opinion-- beyond the single conversation in the forest you described-- as I myself didn't really understand. From there sprung various leaks in my thinking, and I used the One Drop Fallacy to attempt to patch them.
Having now found the source of the leak, I believe, I will ask a different pair of related questions... on a different Magic Monday. Thanks always for your time and attention!