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Magic Monday

Midnight is breathing down our necks 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 is my sixth-fourth published book and sixteenth novel, and it's a sequel to my first novel, The Fires of Shalsha. Like that earlier novel, Journey Star is set on the second planet of Epsilon Eridani, which in the story was colonized two centuries back by a generation ship from Earth; like the earlier novel, it starts with a standard sort of conflict between seeming good and evil, but doesn't stay there. Having villains who are bad just because the heroes need someone to scorn and annihilate makes for dreary fiction; maybe, just maybe, even the most monstrous actions can be justified or even necessary in the eyes of those who do them...

And that's all I'm going to say about this strangest (so far) of my novels. All things considered, I think it worked fairly well. If you're interested, you can get copies here if you're in the United States and here if you're elsewhere.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

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

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I have been exploring this question myself, but I wanted to ask about your viewpoint on this in addition to any of the views of the commentariat as I hope I am not deluding myself in this matter simply due to wishful thinking or due to the fact that I do not have years of benefit of practice.

In my limited spiritual experience, I had an expanded sense of self. As in, I looked around as I was hiking outside and realized that plants/my dog think in much the same way I do. I had an experience of the interiority of other living beings. When I looked out into the ocean, I had a sense that "I am also that!" and a sense that as far as my vision expanded, I was somehow also that. I was ecstatic and felt somehow at home. There was a deeply felt sense of this being something I forgot, and somehow more real. As in- how could I have forgotten this?

The reason I am bringing this up is because I have been reading a lot to help me understand what this experience was. I find the concept of a "witness" consciousness to map most closely to my experience. I have also read Bernardo Katsrup books, and your writings have previously led me to Schopenhauer which gives me an intellectual framework to understand this interiority that I felt I experience in other beings.

That being said, I have also come upon the idea of "emptiness" in Buddhism. This was not my experience at all. I felt MORE myself, although myself was not connected to my body. It appeared that whatever I turned my attention to, I was also that (somehow...it's a hard thing to diminish into words). When I have engaged with other Buddhists, there is so much talk about annihilation, emptiness, void, and our experiences as an illusion.

I understand this idea in principle, but I experienced myself as a void only in the sense that I was a "no-THING". But I somehow felt more real in this state. Am I deluding myself? It is hard for me to doubt my own experience, but a lot of what I am reading from the Buddhist perspective is that "you are not that", you are "also not that". I feel that I definitely understand more on what you write as in "you are not your personality", but I felt hat I was going into a vaster version of myself.

I hope that I am not deluding myself by just wanting to go to my preferred version of spirituality. The idea of the void as emptiness, the talks of annihilation in Buddhism scare me. I understand the void as being something that I came out of to exist here today, it is a generative force. But the texts I am reading point to "zero" in an absolute way that feels nihilistic. I am sure that this is because I have just begun my practice and have a distorted view of what is being talked about; however, I am hoping that by posting here I can at least get a better intellectual grasp of what is being said.

That's an aspect of Western presentations of Buddhism I also find distasteful and inaccurate in terms of my own experience. I've had Buddhists of considerable experience, however, inform me that the whole emptiness-and-annihilation business is what you get when you try to translate certain very subtle and complex concepts out of the cultures that created them into a culture that has no good way to talk about them.

The experience you've had is quite common among Western mystics and occultists, for what it's worth. The idea is that the personality we each have is a temporary narrowing and concentration of focus of a consciousness that, ultimately speaking, is not separate from the Infinite.

It's also well documented in Hinduism, in which one classic phrasing is Tat Tvam Asi, literally, "that also art Thou" -- whatever you look at is also you. It's one of the four Mahāvākyas or "great sayings" from the Upanishads; the others are Ahaṁ Brahmāsmi, Prajñānaṁ Brahma, and Ayam Ātmā Brahma, which mean respectively "I am the Absolute," "The Absolute is the highest level of consciousness," and "This very self is the Absolute." If these make sense to you, why, there are plenty of good English translations of the principal Upanishads; you might consider reading one.

Thank you. This makes a lot of sense to me. The experience had me feeling less afraid of death, as in the journey will continue on even if I cannot take all of "me" with "me".

Thank you. I just have gotten such a nihilistic response when talking to Buddhists (mostly online I admit) and I understand that there is a depth to the emptiness/annihilation teaching; yet, I cannot negate this experience of a vaster self. While I try to comprehend what I have seen, it gives me comfort to hear from you JMG as someone who is much farther in their journey that I do not have to tip over into a given nihilism. This also goes with my suspicion that a certain type of understanding of Buddhism has been readily accepted by many of the engineers and larger culture here where I live in Silicon Valley as it can easily be folded into a materialistic/atheistic viewpoint.

Oh dear gods, yes. Tech-bro Buddhism would make the Buddha himself puke. I hope to see Hindu mysticism get more traction here in the US, as it's wholly incompatible with any kind of atheist materialism; it would also be nice to see more attention paid to the kind of Buddhism I mostly connect to, Japanese esoteric Buddhism, which is very comfortable with Shinto's 8,000,000 gods and doesn't offer much room for atheist materialism either. And of course there are all the rich and varied Western occult traditions, ditto...

Thank you again for your insight:)

Please consider an Ecosophia post on Japanese esoteric Buddhism.

Hmm. I'll consider it, though I'm hardly an expert.

David Chapman, a Western Tantric Buddhist (and funny enough, given your other comment below, an atheist and tech-bro-adjacent Buddhist), interprets the notion of emptiness as "nebulousity" — a lack of definition, of being definitely one thing/way or another.

The paradigmatic example he uses is that of clouds: there is no fact of the matter which molecules are part of a particular cloud and which are not, or where one cloud ends and another begins. (The term "nebulousity" was chosen specifically because it's literal meaning is "cloud-like-ness.")

But on the other side, following the Heart Sutra, he says that emptiness is inseparable from form, or in his terminology, pattern: there is no fact where a cloud begins or ends, but nevertheless there is a cloud there and insisting otherwise when you clearly see it is silly.

So, he says, everything is marked by both emptiness and form; or in other words, everything is both nebulous and patterned, because these two things are always present, though sometimes one is much more evident than the other (a rock is pretty far over on the pattern side of the scale, a cloud pretty far over on nebulosity side). One of the things Buddhism is asking you to do apply this notion to your sense of self.

This may or may not be how Asian Buddhists actually think of sunyata and rupa, but when I was looking at Buddhism seriously I found it a lot more helpful than the usual prattle about "the void" and "no self."

Edited 2025-02-11 00:04 (UTC)

Some synchronicity tonight: after writing this comment I finally remembered the URL of the Buddhist website where I first learned about Pure Land Buddhism. This would have been around 2010 and I wrote it off as "not real Buddhism" at the time, only to become very interested in Jodo Shu and Jodo Shinshu a few years ago, which sent me off in some very fruitful directions.

Better still, the Daily Meditation for today on the site is directly relevant to my comment above:

The Void is not of the nature of a black abyss or a bottomless pit.
Rather is its nature 'vast and expansive like space itself'.
It is apprehended as 'serene, marvellous, all-pure, brilliant and
all-inclusive'.
Above all does it partake of the nature of light.
And it is not anything.
For Void is Mind Itself, and Mind Itself is Void.
- Ask the Awakened by Wei Wu Wei

Ah, thanks for this. From my own perspective, I'd say that the Pure Land tradition is as real as any other kind of Buddhism, and probably more accessible to Westerners than most of the others!

Oh, I agree now. But it's basically the polar opposite of how Buddhism is usually presented in the West: about cultivating faith, full of rituals and supernatural beings, and relegating the historical Buddha and meditation to secondary roles compared to Amitabha and nembutsu/nianfo.

I occasionally lurk on r/PureLand and I've seen several posts by Buddhists saying they had initially written off the Pure Land traditions as fake or inferior forms of Buddhism, only to later find themselves powerfully drawn to it. If Pure Land traditions are taking hold here, I think that's a very good development, and probably the best chance Buddhism has of staying relevant in the West in the centuries ahead.

Interestingly, in Jodo Shinshu it's sometimes said that just hearing or reading Amida's name is enough to set you on the path to his Pure Land. While I don't subscribe to anything like a literal reading of Buddhist theology, both my personal experiences and reading posts by others has given me a sense that Amida is willing and eager to help people who are lost spiritually to find their way to a fruitful spiritual path, whether it's Pure Land Buddhism or something else.

Yep. The way I was taught, Amida's great vow is that anyone who repeats the nembutsu even once, with faith, will receive the blessing of Amida's limitless merit and will be reborn in the Western Pure Land. (I know this may not be strictly canonical, but that's what I was taught.) The teaching has a lot in common with Christian ideas of salvation through faith, of course, and it's interesting that Shinran lived right about the time that the idea of salvation through faith alone first stirred in European theological thought.

It wouldn't surprise me if Amida also leads people to other appropriate spiritualities. I've seen that happen with Jesus, interestingly enough.

In case readers are wondering: the nembutsu is the mantra Namu Amida Butsu, "Hail to the Buddha of Limitless Light," and it's pronounced "nah-moo ah-mee-da boo-tsuh," with each syllable equally accented and equal in length. If you repeat it more than once, leave off the final "tsu" until the last repetition:

Namu Amida Bu
Namu Amida Bu
Namu Amida Bu
Namu Amida Bu
Namu Amida Bu
Namu Amida Bu
Namu Amida Bu
Namu Amida Bu
Namu Amida Bu
Namu Amida Butsu.

Edited 2025-02-11 03:12 (UTC)

You know, the thought has occurred to me that Shinran's Jodo Shinshu school resembles what might happen if one combined Calvinism with Universalism.

On the one hand, its focus on tariki (other-power) over jariki (self-power) is so extreme that even saying the nembutsu and achieving shinjin (faith, more or less) is considered more something Amida does for you than something you do yourself. On the other hand, it's believed that Amida's vow is so all-encompassing that eventually everyone will be drawn to his Pure Land.

Putting those two things together, the idea seems to be that everyone will eventually go to the Western Pure Land, but only when Amida is good and ready for them!

Thank you for this. It really comports with the insight that I had in that I am not my body, or what I normally see myself as, but I am truly something far more nebulous. I am not the personality that I am today, but I am closer to the thing that can change my conditioned habits, thoughts, and patterns (both physical and mental). In this way I am more "cloud-like", but still I found this to be a GREATER sense of me, not a negation of me in a very real but hard to describe way.

I'm very happy I could help!

If you want to dig into Chapman's thought more, the best place to start is probably this page and it's successor. That site is mainly interested in talking about meaning as a nebulous/patterned phenomenon, but those pages lay out his ideas on the two concepts.

If you want the pages where he writes specifically about Buddhism, take a look at vividness.live. Chapman was a member of the Aro gTer lineage of Tibetan Buddhism — a Dzogchen lineage rather than strictly Tantric but it includes Tantra.

There's also his unfinished web novel, Buddhism for Vampires and his extended commentary on rationality (and why rationalism isn't rational), In the Cells of the Eggplant, and his critiques of modern AI, bluntly named Better Without AI. (He's an atheist and tech-bro-adjacent, but he's a dissident voice in both circles.)

Changing gears, if you want to dig into the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta — which is similar to Buddhism but concludes that the Self is very real and is in fact the only real thing — and you do video, I recommend Swami Sarvapriyananda's lectures on Dṛg Dṛśya Viveka and Aparokshanubhuti, the two main texts of Advaita Vedanta.

Oh, one more thing: Chapman has an excellent article on the problems of mindfulness meditation, including the fact that it is a modern reinvention by a tradition whose goal is difficult to distinguish from becoming an emotionless zombies.

Obviously not JMG, but if our gracious host is fine with me chiming in, there are strands within multiple sects of Buddhism that affirm the self in the way you have described and find scriptural support for this in both the Mahayana school and the pre-sectarian parts of the Triptika. It's a minority opinion of course, but, in my understanding of things, I think it has the more persuasive argument. Bringing it up to Buddhists online is a bit like going to a Christian space and openly proclaiming a Christological heresy though.

A very brief survey:

https://nirvanasutranet.com/
https://archive.org/details/earlyselfnonselfinearlybuddhismjoaquinperezremon_202003_499_W
https://essenceofbuddhism.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/seeking-for-the-self/
https://zennist.typepad.com/zenfiles/2012/06/the-real-doctrine-of-no-soul.html

I’ve been reading a good bit on adhyhatma yoga (Hindu teachings), and one similar concept is ‘destruction of the mind’ - which at first may seem nihilistic as well. However the idea in more depth is to eliminate the filters the mind is applying that distorts the information coming in (this is good, this is bad), in order to more directly experience the ongoing reality. It’s as if one is wearing a pair of glasses that twist and distort the view, with the goal of removing the glasses in order to see better. Perhaps this is a similar concept that the Buddhists are trying to convey?

Hello there!
Such fine advice (as always) JMG re Upanishads. May I humbly suggest the Taittiriya Upanishad to start. Any reader/ commentator in this group will find many similarities in this Upanishad with the planes of existence as presented therein. It is also mercifully short and concise;) And ends with the most beautiful hymn of praise and bliss describing (as is humanly possible ) an ecstatic non- dual state.
Best
Jill C

It might be a problem with who you're reading. I've seen American Zen Buddhist texts mention the experience of a sufficiently clarified "not" or "void" being actually an affirmation, on some level that is difficult to refer to. (I think one of the authors I've seen writing this way was Joko Beck?) I am not sure what exactly the affirmation would be of, but I think the way they described it, it had something to do with "everything that is happening" or "all the experiences that are incoming".

Not on quite the same note, but there's a famous line by Dogen that I haven't myself gotten into the state to really independently recognize what he might have been saying by it, but which goes, "That the self advances and confirms the myriad things is called delusion. That the myriad things advance and confirm the self is enlightenment."

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