Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is almost here, 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 that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted.  If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.2 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.  This was my sixty-first published book and my third anthology of short pieces, including all my best essays from my post-Hermetic period (the Hermetic essays were released earlier in my 2019 book The City of Hermes). It's probably the best one-volume introduction to the whole range of my ideas and interests, for anyone who wants to risk plunging down that N-dimensional rabbit hole.  It also includes my most widely cited essay, "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse." On the off chance you're interested, copies can be purchased here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere.

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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, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

[executedbygandhi]

Hello JMG,
you sometimes write that this or that person has a lot of work to do in the interim. Could you explain in more detail what this work looks like in the period between two incarnations?
Thank you very much!

[ecosophia]

Sure. Once the dying process is finished -- the shedding of the material and etheric bodies -- the soul has to process its experience from the incarnation that's just ended. That's done on the astral plane, and it can be heaven, hell, or anything in between, depending on how the incarnation has been spent. The soul basically relives its life experience, except that it can't hide from its memories or lie to itself about what it did -- it sees everything exactly as it was, complete with all the effects of every action as those cascaded outward to affect other people. This isn't a matter of reward or punishment -- the soul needs to absorb the lessons from the life just ended in order to grow -- but it can definitely feel like one or the other!

That's the main work a soul does between life. The more awake the soul has become, the more capable it has become of reflective self-knowledge and clarity, the more it can interact with other souls on the inner planes and, under some conditions, with the incarnate as well. As clarity and self-knowledge increase from life to life (and death to death), the soul can also start taking a more active role in its own learning processes, and can start to help shape its future lives. But the basic process remains the same as long as we continue to reincarnate.

[(Anonymous)]

Not the OP, but this is fascinating.

I'm guessing we only know these things at all because of souls that have become 'awake' enough to return into physical incarnation with intact memories of these processes. Is that right?

And the more we can become aware of our unconscious habits, make amends for past mistakes, and process repressed emotional pain during incarnation, the fewer nasty surprises we face after death when we have to review it all with eyes wide open?

[ecosophia]

1) We know about the opening phases of the death process from near-death experiences, which have been going on as long as our species is around -- one of Plato's dialogues describes a classic NDE, for example. We know about the rest of it partly from people who return to incarnation with clear memories, partly from the experiences of shamans and visionaries who have encountered the souls of the dead, partly from interactions with gods and other nonhuman spirits of high degree, and partly from apparitions of the dead to the living -- as I noted, some souls can get in touch with living people for one reason or another. None of these channels of communication are foolproof, but all of them tend to tell a consistent story.

2) Exactly. You can do the work now or you can do it later, and the more of it you do now, the easier of a time you'll have when you have to tackle all of it.

[(Anonymous)]

Just curious, but is this process limited to humans, or do all beings that die go through the same thing?

For example, does my dog revisit his life as well? How about the higher mortal beings?


This entire topic could make for a fascinating fictional movie or TV series...

[ecosophia]

It varies depending on just how much of an individual the soul becomes. At lower levels on the ladder, the group oversoul of the species handles that process and the individual soul doesn't hace to. By the time you get to relatively intelligent creatures such as mammals and birds, the group oversoul still does much of the work but the individual soul starts doing some. Your dog is doing some of it when he's dreaming, just as you do, and the more distinct he is as a personality, the more of it he does. Every fully intelligent species -- humans, dolphins, and so on -- does that sort of work between lives, and after we finish our material incarnations entirely, a lot of work has to go into getting everything sorted out in full consciousness.