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

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG and commentariat,

Are you familiar with Stephen Jenkinson, a retired Canadian palliative care practitioner who is traveling about speaking about death and how our culture is 1) death-phobic and 2) bereft of elders. His claim is age doesn't confer elderhood automatically, rather it's a learned skill presumably from other elders.

The experience that he commonly saw on people's deathbed was a terrorizing fear of ceasing to exist. He reports that many people at their end had to be drugged up to a point of half-consciousness to escape that all-consuming dread.

One of Jenkinson's issues with current popular thought is the pervasive theme of limitlessness. If I understand him correctly, he chafes at the idea that we continue on after death, that it's a transition. I think I get what he's going at, but esoteric philosophy teaches that some part of us does indeed carry on beyond incarnation.

I'm curious what your thoughts are on this as you (JMG) used to worked with elderly people. I'd also like to hear from others what they think of this one aspect of Jenkinson's observations.

[ecosophia]

No, I'm not familiar with him. I'm a little baffled by the paradox you've laid out here -- he insists people shouldn't be terrified of ceasing to exist, and yet he gets irritable if it's suggested that we don't cease to exist!

In my experience with elderly people, a recognition of the reality of life after death is a very important factor in mental and emotional health. It's not just a cure for the terror of nonexistence, it also helps encourage the old to explore their memories and make sense of their lives, and it gives them a framework to deal with the paranormal experiences that so often occur to the dying. Since there's plenty of evidence for an afterlife, too, it's only reasonable to encourage people to take it into account.

[(Anonymous)]

There is no paradox if what is terrifying for him is the prospect of an afterlife-- or just continued existence. A lot of materialists hold the view that nonexistence is better than (excessively long) existence. (Others want to live forever using technology, of course.)

Does this have anything to do with the "Attraction of Outer Space" in the CosDoc?

[ecosophia]

That's an interesting question. In Fortune's metaphor, the attraction of outer space is the pursuit of individual will wholly out of balance with the rest of the cosmos -- but I suppose a will to nonexistence could be one expression of that...

[jenniferkobernik]

That’s interesting. Most of my not inconsiderable experience with dying people has been that they’re mostly ready to get on with it. If they needed to be drugged it was typically for pain, which wasn’t the least of the reasons they were ready to move on. But my experience is in a rural Texas agricultural community, where older people especially tend to be Christian believers as well as pretty matter of fact about biilogical realities and often more than usually beat up by old age (especially the men).

[(Anonymous)]

Having watched the dynamic with my own family, I've long wondered how much of the fear of death is being projected onto the elderly from their younger relatives; people who are terrified of it, but unwilling to admit it could pretty easily start to insist that the elderly are the ones terrified of dying...

fear of death

[ritaer]

I have read that people who work with the dying have a term, seagull. This refers to the relative who 'flies in from the coast and sh*ts on all the plans' that the relatives who live closer have made. This usually takes the form of insisting that everything possible be done regardless of the wishes of the actual patient.


Rita

[(Anonymous)]

Makes me think of Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt." Everyone has to go to the button moulder when they die, get melted down and molded into new buttons. But Peer fears losing his "Gyntishness" in the process.

[(Anonymous)]

Today's local paper has a headline, "K9 officer passes away after battle with kidney disease." So, even dogs don't just die: they must "pass away."

[yogaandthetarot]

Very interesting discussion. I’d like to contribute that perhaps some of the “dread” observed with the dying may have partial physiological causes? The deterioration of the body includes various organs malfunctioning. Would guess most of us have experienced the “dread” that comes with food poisoning or a hangover. What was that old saying ? “You're only a-live as your live-er, or something like that. Often the liver is severely compromised after an illness or as we age.

[(Anonymous)]

Surely there's something that hits its wall at death, if it hasn't already found it in itself to stop short of its own accord. Perhaps Jenkinson feels it necessary to tell people "everything hits a wall", because he unconsciously sees the alternative message as being "nothing you're actually attached to hits a wall, just some things you can safely blithely tell yourself you already don't care about and go on without having to change anything about yourself".

Then, of course, there's the problem of where we might be encountering Jenkinson with respect to his initiation of the nadir or whatever. If someone is under a carefully-managed maya where they think the responsible thing to do is "admit" the limitations of blank materiality, and try to reason forward from that premise as to what chimerical hopes it makes the world better to tell people not to invest any resources or hope into, of course they're going to say things like that.

I can't really speculate usefully beyond that point since I haven't read anything by him.

[(Anonymous)]

(reposted with fixed formatting)

Surely there's something that hits its wall at death, if it hasn't already found it in itself to stop short of its own accord. Perhaps Jenkinson feels it necessary to tell people "everything hits a wall", because he unconsciously sees the alternative message as being "nothing you're actually attached to hits a wall, just some things you can safely blithely tell yourself you already don't care about and go on without having to change anything about yourself".

Then, of course, there's the problem of where we might be encountering Jenkinson with respect to his initiation of the nadir or whatever. If someone is under a carefully-managed maya where they think the responsible thing to do is "admit" the limitations of blank materiality, and try to reason forward from that premise as to what chimerical hopes it makes the world better to tell people not to invest any resources or hope into, of course they're going to say things like that.

I can't really speculate usefully beyond that point since I haven't read anything by him.