ecosophia | Magic Monday

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Magic Monday

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 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 1.3 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-eighty published book, and -- like some of the other things I've written -- it landed me in a certain amount of hot water. I noticed, not long after I started doing the kind of intermediate astrology that involves tracking transits of planets across natal chart positions, that most of the resulting predictions worked very well, but that those involving Pluto didn't. I then noticed that political and economic predictions involving Pluto -- not mine, in this case -- also flopped spectacularly. That launched me into a research project that convinced me that Pluto is in fact not a planet, but that it functioned like one in birth charts and mundane charts during the short period while astronomers mistook it for one. That led me to write The Twilight of Pluto, which talks about the complex way that planetary discoveries and downgradings relate to astrological prediction.

The reason this got me into hot water is that Pluto has a huge astrological fan club. It's weird; no other planet has that kind of frankly addictive emotional hold on people. No other planet sees people make one false prediction after based on its movements, and just keep on doing it, without ever noticing that they're making fools of themselves. I didn't get into that in this book, but Pluto fans took offense anyway because I dissed their favorite planet. The book's sales have been slow, though a remarkable number of people seem to know about it. I still think it makes a valid case, I don't use Pluto in my political astrology...and, ahem, my predictions are more accurate than those who do. If you're interested, you can get copies here in the US and at your favorite book outlet elsewhere.

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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.

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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 all next week!***

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The experience of "nondualism" happens any time you get a temporary glimpse of a plane where you don't yet have a vesture (a body or a sheath) for your soul. Since the vesture is what defines the distinction between the soul and the cosmos, when you access a level where you don't have a vesture, there's no boundary between yourself and your surroundings. If a cabbage were to glimpse the astral plane, it would have a nondual experience of that plane, since most plants have no astral vesture.

That sort of experience is apparently useful in some forms of spiritual training. Too many Westerners who have it, though, make the mistake of treating it as a glimpse of ultimate reality rather than recognizing it as simply one of many phenomena that consciousness can experience. It can also become addictive, especially if there are things about your self you don't want to deal with -- subjectively dissolving the self in the cosmos is a great way of hiding from those.

I always found advaita vedanta to be a tad life-denying due to the focus on the one-ness (which felt specious to me in some way but I never understood why), to the exclusion of everything else, but I haven't gone super deep so I may be wrong.

Do you think that these types of spiritual practices end up inadvertently causing people to make false ontological and epistemological claims (or even deny them)?

My friend's text to me:
"More or less people came to see (this is shared language of the retreat leader and participants) that their true self is not anywhere in their body but is a huge all-pervading awareness that has no shape, edges, boundaries and is formless and timeless. Everything arises in this awareness and is essentially empty. Additionally everyone who realized this in a deep way had extreme reaction of compassion. They felt this awareness was essentially loving and they also started to ask questions like how evil can exist and how this loving awareness even pervades murder, genocide etc. and they felt immense sadness and compassion for everyone else in the world who hadn’t realized this view

I understood that this is one awareness that is all-pervading. But this awareness is refracted like a light through our bodies, the causes and conditions that make us different. So it’s not like the fully enlightened teachers experience themselves as a hive mind with multiple bodies to manage, it’s more nondual - both and. Each person is able to experience that they share a true self - which is this one awareness."

This sounds very interesting but nothing like either what I've experienced personally, or read in the more western mystical texts or philosophy. The awareness he refers to sounds like its on a plane higher than the mental, and it skips all the other emanations (gods etc completely).

What do you make of it?

Is there a reason why say the greeks and the neoplatonists were much more concerned with trying to describe the structure of reality also beyond just experiencing the mysticism?

1) It's an example of what I was talking about. I'm always a little uncomfortable with people talking about how sorry they feel for those who don't share their viewpoint -- that turns into evangelism and persecution of dissidents far too easily. (Always, of course, "for their own good.")

2) The ancient Greeks invented logic. It's hardly surprising that they applied it to their religious and philosophical lives so intently!

Edited 2025-03-03 17:49 (UTC)

I too dislike the language used by many western buddhists.

It seems like the maps they've created to traverse the territory involve more focus on these types of mystical experiences. At the same time, the buddha was supposed to have gained all types of knowledge after his enlightenment. Are these sources of knowledge similarly on planes above the mental?

(You've mentioned how Steiner got things wrong. Similarly I've heard a perhaps apocryphal story about how early buddhists, despite having access to knowledge that the earth was round from indian astronomers of that era, continued to uphold that the world was flat because it was something the buddha "saw" and instructed his followers on, and they didn't want to doubt him.

I guess my question is, what's going on in these cases (in terms of real sources vs confabulations)?

It just makes me feel a tad pessimistic if even the buddha's epistemic powers were limited.

Of course the Buddha's epistemic powers were limited. Until his parinirvana, at least, he was an incarnate being, and thus finite by definition. This giddy way of assuming that the founder of a tradition had perfect knowledge is one of the worst of the bad habits of Piscean spirituality. The important thing in a teacher is not whether he or she knows everything, but simply whether he or she knows more than you do and can teach it.

Is there anything else you can say about what types of knowledge and awareness is available to us as long as we are incarnate (even at high levels of "enlightenment") versus post-incarnation life?

(Also it seems highly enlightened people can confuse the level of knowledge they have access to, Steiner in your older examples).

It's hard to say anything at all about such things, since our language isn't suited to it at all. As I understand it, though, we can only access the lower regions of the mental plane while incarnate, and then imperfectly, while beings who have shed their material bodies once and for all and have mental bodies can get to work mastering the whole of the mental plane -- though this isn't a fast process. Think of the number of incarnations it takes to work up from earthworm consciousness to human consciousness; a comparable amount of time and effort will be needed on the next level.

...and there are three full planes above that. Absolute knowledge is a very, very long way off!

I remember coming across speculation that the Buddhism that came down to us is not complete; that some of its teachings, particularly involving the stuff about dissolving into Nirvana, was censored and concealing something about higher reality. Whether it's censorship, corruption, or just incomplete knowledge, I suppose the effect is similar.

When souls of our current swarm eventually form their mental bodies, they no longer have material bodies since they can only have three bodies at the same time. Can those souls with mental bodies experience "nondualism" on the material plane?

It's an interesting question. I've never encountered anything that suggests this but I suppose it's possible.

MOST plants, that's a very interesting caveat!

So, people who have NDEs and report visions that are presumed to be of the afterlife (aka astral plane) often talk about green fields, flowers, etc. Presumably these are not the souls of grasses hanging about, but artificial simulacra -- set design, so to speak, for what those people would find a good "wish fulfillment dream" to use Dion Fortune's term. But PETS seen there, on the other hand, are developed enough to have an astral form so it really is good ol' Fluffy and not the astral equivalent of a robo-pet. Is that right?

1) It's a necessary caveat, because trees have astral sheaths -- they're the bodies of the most evolved souls in the plant kingdom, and when those souls finish evolving astral bodies they incarnate as animals.

2) The vegetation seen in astral experiences isn't a collection of simulacra -- it's how minds used to material forms experience certain of the simpler entities of the astral plane. They're not plants, but we perceive them that way because they have the same vibe. Fluffy, though, has a well-developed astral body -- most human pets are mammals or birds, which are the bodies for highly evolved animal souls, and some have evolved the first trace of a mental sheath, which means that when they next incarnate they'll enter the bodies of humans, porpoises, or one of the few other animal forms that are transitional to the next level up. So if you treated Fluffy as a person, and noticed that she seemed to be "almost human" and could understand some words, you bet you'll meet her on the astral...and the two of you may well be born into the same family, or otherwise come into close and affectionate contact, when you reincarnate.

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