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 noted below, 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 about getting goodies from spirits are also 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've discussed this in a post on my blog.

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. As I mentioned last week, once I found a publisher willing to bring out my fiction, a lot of it found its way into print in a hurry, so we're going to be in tentacle territory for a while now.  This was my fifty-second published book, and it's another tentacle novel, but it's not a part of the core Weird of Hali sequence. The Shoggoth Concerto came slithering up out of my subconscious while I was hoping to get the rest of the Weird published but things weren't looking especially promising; I thought that an independent novel set in the same fictional cosmos might be able to get a hearing at one of the big publishers...and then I started writing, and it turned into the oddest of my many odd books.

You know all those stories about someone who has brash new innovative ideas and gets bullied by the defenders of tradition?  This is a story about someone who wants to do something traditional and gets bullied by the avant-garde, which is of course much more common these days. It's also about love, memory, magic, and shoggoths, and to my taste, it's still the best of my novels. I did submit it to a big publisher; I actually got a personal response, which is rare, saying that it was too quiet and too weird -- those were the editor's exact words -- but that if I wanted to write something more publishable I could send it directly to her. I rolled my eyes and found someplace else to publish, as bending the knee to the shallow fashionable clichés of big-brand fantasy and SF is the last thing I wanted (or want) to do. If shoggoths or classical music appeal to you, you can buy a copy of The Shoggoth Concerto here if you're in the US and here if you're elsewhere.

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.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Buddhist meditation and discursive meditation

[(Anonymous)]

I previously noted a few years ago that Tibetan Buddhism has a very similar approach to discursive meditation called "analytical meditation", where the practitioner meditates on a verse, a text in an analytical way.

Through my studies I have come to realise that the broader Buddhist meditation framework actually covers this under the rubrics of shamatha and vipashyana meditation. I use the Sanskrit instead of Pali as I think the Pali terms have become a bit loaded and the Sanskrit is more inclusive of the Mahayana schools anyway.

The main confusion that people have is that shamatha often takes the fore, or some modern approaches to vipashyana, such as Goenka's method, have come to dominate the meaning of the term while being very idiosyncratic.

Shamatha practice brings about a focused and concentrated mind, and the focus produced from entering and exiting very deep states of meditation is very strong. These are the dhyānas. They are not strictly necessary according to Buddhism but they are just very helpful for the deep focus which they bring about.

With the focus produced by these strong states of meditation, one then analyses the component's of one's consciousness in vipashyana.

Discursive meditation as taught by JMG also has a short period of breathing, with the same effect as shamatha, but without the explicit goal of deep meditative states.

Then the discursive meditation itself is analogous to vipashyana, just the themes differ.

Anyway just putting this out there to share.

Re: Buddhist meditation and discursive meditation

[ecosophia]

Thank you for this! Can you recommend any good English or French sources on these kinds of meditation? One of the books I plan on writing in the next few years is a textbook of discursive meditation, and I'd like to include Buddhist perspectives if that's possible.

Re: Buddhist meditation and discursive meditation

[(Anonymous)]

For the jhanas (dhyanas), you might consider Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas, by Leigh Brasington.

Re: Buddhist meditation and discursive meditation

[ecosophia]

Thank you for this.

Re: Buddhist meditation and discursive meditation

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, I should have clarified that the recommendation of Leigh Brasington did NOT come from the OP!