Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is upon us 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 seventy-eighth published book and nineteenth novel, a stand-alone (so far) tale set in 2095 or so. You could call it cli-fi (the current cute label for climate change fiction) if you like, or deindustrial SF; I'd call it a deindustrial noir Shinto science fiction spy thriller with Gnostic overtones. Jerry Shimizu, the two-fisted, gun-toting, half-Japanese tough guy who narrates the story, and the world in which he lives are interesting enough, at least to me, that he may get a sequel...but we'll see.  If you're interested, you can get copies here in the US 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

Re: Reincarnation

[(Anonymous)]

There's also the question of what the "I" would be which had the connection to the person who died, or more generally of which different kinds of "I" would turn out to have which connections to which persons who had died. Now, we don't really have the introspective skills or the information needed to do any particularly good job of breaking open these questions. However, ultimately, such questions would have to find their ground in the same continuum of principles that questions about what the nature and relevance would be of connections between the steps of a present life and details of a past one would also have to find their ground in.

One way to start there would be to ask, "what policy would I have ideally advised myself to follow, with respect to acting on information about past lives -- or even ordinary memories -- that might unreflectively have seemed to be 'mine', if I'd been 'one' or 'both' of a twin partly conjoined at the brain, or if I were to 'be' 'a' severe epilepsy patient who'd just had a surgery to sever 'my' corpus callosum, or indeed if I were one of two conjoined twins that had been joined at the brain but then surgically separated, or if I were to have transcranial magnetic stimulation suspending the operations of one or another of my mental faculties?"

And then, if you got anywhere with those questions, you might think through, say, the reports about the effects of heart transplants.

I expect that some of the important underlying entities in abstractions like 'I' or 'my past' are smaller context-dependent bits of behavioral tendencies and acquired knowledge and skills, plus little bits of learned information about the typical consequences of loosing or restraining such tendencies. And if I was designing a system of karma, one of my big concerns would be to come up with a way to even-handedly promote or inhibit the propagation or alteration of such little bits of tendency, according to their demonstrated (even if only presumably-inevitably contextual) fitness for whatever larger purpose I might have had in view. Reading between the lines of this universe and its apparent karma system, the corresponding hypothetical larger purpose seems to partly cash out in terms of its implications as something like, "don't waste too much attention trying to work out out how to build systems out of propensities that would be ultimately self-defeating and make the system non-functional if the system were larger", except a lot more Taoist than that formulation might make it sound like.

Maybe that's not speaking to your direct questions, but your questions are partly made out of some underlying questions that are interconnected. I hope I have managed to sketch how those questions are interconnected.

Re: Reincarnation

[(Anonymous)]

And thank you too! Yeah, the whole bouncing "I" thing makes me think of Buddhist objections thereunto. I used to wonder how there could be ethics with no (absolute) selves, or anything else, but one lama I admire explains that love and compassion arise from dissolving the barrier between "self" and "other." So it works out the opposite to the way I had been thinking!