Hi JMG, thanks as always for hosting this Q&A! I have a few questions today:
1. I've been practicing discursive meditation off and on for a while. Over the past few months I've taken up a more focused daily practice, working my way through Gareth Knight's Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism. It seems much easier to stay focused in discursive meditation compared to breath-focused or mind-emptying meditation - so much easier, in fact that it makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong! How can you tell the difference between focused discursive meditation and simply "sitting quietly and thinking"? Is there a difference? I'm used to meditation feeling like a grueling mental exercise in which all insights are hard-won, and I'm having trouble trusting the apparent ease of the discursive style. Am I just overthinking it?
2. A few weeks back, you fielded a question from someone about an old method of magical combat. The gist was that one person attempts to "outbid" another person's offering to a god with a more lavish tribute, in hopes of denying them their desired outcome. Do deities, in your experience, really operate in such a transactional way? It seems at odds with the claim that they're more spiritually developed than we are. Unless perhaps the method of "outbidding" is more about working to realize the deity's worldly priorities (e.g., oil spill cleanup as an offering to Neptune) than about giving the god "more stuff". What's your take on this way of understanding deities?
3. What, if any, is the relationship between kundalini energy and the telluric current? I've seen lots of spiritual exercises that seem to involve calling on one or the other, often using similar imagery (rising serpents, up-thrusting pillars of fiery force, etc.) Is this simply a morphological similarity, since both are rising currents of power, or are the energies linked in some way?
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branchandroot
Meditation, gods, and kundalini
Date: 2025-01-13 08:26 pm (UTC)1.
I've been practicing discursive meditation off and on for a while. Over the past few months I've taken up a more focused daily practice, working my way through Gareth Knight's Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism. It seems much easier to stay focused in discursive meditation compared to breath-focused or mind-emptying meditation - so much easier, in fact that it makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong! How can you tell the difference between focused discursive meditation and simply "sitting quietly and thinking"? Is there a difference? I'm used to meditation feeling like a grueling mental exercise in which all insights are hard-won, and I'm having trouble trusting the apparent ease of the discursive style. Am I just overthinking it?
2. A few weeks back, you fielded a question from someone about an old method of magical combat. The gist was that one person attempts to "outbid" another person's offering to a god with a more lavish tribute, in hopes of denying them their desired outcome. Do deities, in your experience, really operate in such a transactional way? It seems at odds with the claim that they're more spiritually developed than we are. Unless perhaps the method of "outbidding" is more about working to realize the deity's worldly priorities (e.g., oil spill cleanup as an offering to Neptune) than about giving the god "more stuff". What's your take on this way of understanding deities?
3. What, if any, is the relationship between kundalini energy and the telluric current? I've seen lots of spiritual exercises that seem to involve calling on one or the other, often using similar imagery (rising serpents, up-thrusting pillars of fiery force, etc.) Is this simply a morphological similarity, since both are rising currents of power, or are the energies linked in some way?
Thanks again and hope you're well!
- Fred