Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's almost midnight, 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 not be put through.  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've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share.)

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

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 further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Zarcayce

[(Anonymous)]

If things go right, ego can motivate undertaking practices that have beneficial effects on the structures that the ego is built on top of and depends on, working through systematic back-channel sorts of routes invisible to the ego's centralized threat-recognition and obstruction. The beneficial effects create a kind of distributed resilience, that undermines the ego's ability to centrally compel dysfunctionality (and/or exist, to whatever extent it may be that the existence of the ego means the same thing as the perpetuation of an illusion). But often, ego tries to steer toward sticking with basically-counterfeit practices, that stay within spheres wherein it can continue to stack the deck in interpreting one's actions and their consequences as reflecting well on one's existing self-concepts and existing attachments to imagined futures containing events consistent with one's favorable self-image, so that it can maintain and continue to amass control.

(Though, even counterfeit "controlled opposition" sorts of practices can sometimes produce good effects, if the practitioner is somehow consistently prevented from changing the rules of self-evaluation whenever their implications become inconvenient.)

By way of analogy, think of how a society can identify as being a society of "open scientific inquiry", in a way that motivates it to do things like maintaining open discourse, allowing publication of inconvenient results, and creating institutions for academic freedom. These practices, which result from that society-level ego identity, may, for whatever length of time, push the society towards believing fewer falsehoods and discovering and acting on more practically relevant truths than it otherwise would have.

But usually, a society like that will face a problem of people who are motivated to invoke the formal protections of the norms of open science, but who present or attend to evidence selectively and tendentiously, being motivated by some obvious consistent form of mental derangement or partisanship inconsistent with the underlying spirit behind the explicit norms of science. These people can eventually form their own subcultural identity factions, perhaps even threatening to overturn the saner and more even-handed mainstream. The most convenient thing to do in this case is to solve the problem by rewiring the workings of society's ego a bit, redefining the identity of "scientificness" so that such people are "unscientific".

However, unless there is some consistent source of inner renewal, this just leads to a slippery slope, where more and more subpopulations following the forms of open scientific inquiry are reclassified as "unscientific"; while it starts by cutting out people who are only following the forms outwardly, it goes on to cut out people who are acting from the spirit that the forms were made for. (And that's not even talking about what this does to people working on problems where it was always necessary to have moved beyond those forms. Imagine what might have become of the Allied project of sabotage of the Nazi nuclear program, if straightforward speculative extrapolation of the possibility of nuclear explosives had been deemed to be an "unfalsifiable" "extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof", and therefore to be already guaranteed in advance to be false.)

Eventually the society corrupts its conception of "scientificness" so that it stops becoming a matter of verifiable outward forms. "Scientificness" starts being more of an untethered consensus term, that the social ego can redefine increasingly however it wants, against groups that are opposed by whichever form of partisanship happens to be in power at the time. If the targeted group doesn't already have "unscientific" beliefs, it can be caused to have them through a structurally-emergent systemic effect of contrarian polarization. If that doesn't work, the targeted group can still be credibly imagined as being a hotbed for unscientific beliefs, because of imaginary commonalities between its "antinomian defiance" and the defiance of other groups against which the emergent polarization structural "tactic" did work.

In the process, the society's ego gains by degrees the ability to change the rules of evaluation of truth of scientific propositions or success of science-driven policies that it had idealized and identified with, so that flops are silently forgotten, and anyone who tries to make reforms by calling attention to them is invisibly consensus-scootched over into the "defiant" category and devaluated. The ego's "attempt" to get rid of the ego thus, to that degree, gets co-opted into the ego.