Youngins in the Western Tradition

[RiverSnake]

Reading posts like these really blows my mind. Are people In the Western Tradition really this silly....or is it just the Youngins like me?

 

As some one whom has spent a lot of time on the cushion learning to purify the mind....the fact that learning to still the mind is even a question in ones progression on the path through me threw a loop. I felt the author did a good job of answering the question. Has anyone else had similar experiences with people in the Western Tradition?

 

 

 

 

Integration of Meditation and Magic

 

"One of my teachings that people can find most vexing is my insistence on meditation as a cornerstone of the path. It can seem counter-intuitive to people that are magically minded. Meditation asks you to sit still, magic often asks you to move around and make potent gestures and signs. Meditation asks for silence, magic usually asks for arcane formula and grand invocations. Meditation asks that you treat all visions, messages from gods and spirits, and psychic experience as a distraction to be ignored, and return to the meditation itself. Magically minded people are often built specifically to experience such things, and tend to place great importance upon them. For this reason, my insistence on meditation can be

For example, recently I got an e-mail from a student that simply does not want to meditate and does not see the point:

 

"I have to say that I find your insistence on meditation frustrating and I really dont think it has as much to do with magic as you think. The magic I am interested in involves talking with spirits, traveling the astral, and raising and controlling the energies of the body. Meditation seems like a side issue."

 

My answer: I think that talking with spirits, astral travelling, and energy work are great. Meditation is getting to know and control your own mind. What part of those things do not involve your mind?

 

Spirits? Do you think you hear them only audibly with the normal ear?

Astral Travel? Is your mind not essential to this? Is the astral not a realm of mirror-like appearance that can fool and deceive?

Energy Work? There is no system of yoga, chi-gung, or anything else that does not recognize that the subtle winds are linked to mental processes. Literally none.

 

Setting all this aside, even just normal waking experience of reality itself is only known through the mind. Every day we all perceive reality through a deeply flawed lens. Not only are we a slave to the heuristics that we use to make sense of what we take in, but our mechanistic slavery to what can only be described as the programming we all hold, keeps us from seeing reality-as-such and acting accordingly. If this is the case with normal reality, how more susceptible are we when we start dealing with subtle realms and mystical states?

 

Meditation is the best way to know the tool that you interact with all experience through. It is the best way to clean that tool and keep it sharp. It is the best way to keep yourself from getting carried away by your own bullshit.

 

Still though, if we are not just mediators but Sorcerers and Sorceressess, we need to know how and when to let the visions in, when to listen to the gods, and when to make the potent signs and grand invocations. Another student of the course is doing a lot of meditation and mentioned that she knows she is supposed to ignore the awesome visions, but finds it hard.

 

The trick here is harmony in your practices. When I and other teachers tell people to ignore visions during meditation, it is mostly because we do not want people to confuse visionary and trance work with meditation. Once you know that, there is no reason that you cannot explore those visions outside of meditation. You can either finish your session and mentally attempt to revisit them or explore the vision right when it happens and make time afterwards for more meditation. The trick is knowing that you are departing the meditation in a mindful way for a purpose, not getting distracted from your meditation by shiny spirit baubles.

 

While potent and meaningful visions are not meditation itself, they are a sign of progress in meditation. By reducing clinging to old perceptions, surface level mental chatter, and base karmic traces, you are making room for deeper stuff to manifest. In fact, meditation can sometimes be a better way to generate such visions than specifically visionary or shamanic methods, as well as leaving you in a position to deal with them critically.

 

I will leave my thoughts on self-critique for my next post: The Usefulness of Doubt." Jason Miller

 

http://www.inominandum.com/blog/integration-of-meditation-and-magic/#comment-12416

 

My 2 cents, Peace

Edited April 8, 2013 by OldGreen

[Protector]

Sometimes... or maybe usually, "magically inclined" people don't have their knowledge based in reality

[三江源]

If we think of anomalies as 'stupid' we feel alienated and upset and frustrated and confused.. right?

 

If we think of them as 'ignorance'.. it becomes simple.

 

"Information is power..."

 

"a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.."

[RiverSnake]

If we think of anomalies as 'stupid' we feel alienated and upset and frustrated and confused.. right?

 

If we think of them as 'ignorance'.. it becomes simple.

 

"Information is power..."

 

"a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.."

Hmm.....apologize if I came off a bit negative, got caught up in my own surprise. Just changed the title. Was curious if this is a common theme in the Western Mysteries?

 

My 2 cents, Peace

Edited April 8, 2013 by OldGreen

[RiverSnake]

Thanks for the clarification Viator.

 

My 2 cents, Peace

[Zhongyongdaoist]

I am a little pressed for time, but will attempt to address some of the issues raised.

 

recently I got an e-mail from a student that simply does not want to meditate and does not see the point:
"I have to say that I find your insistence on meditation frustrating and I really dont think it has as much to do with magic as you think. The magic I am interested in involves talking with spirits, traveling the astral, and raising and controlling the energies of the body. Meditation seems like a side issue."

The Western tradition is not responsible for the type of idiots attracted to it. Regrettably for these types of people there is no "magical thinking" in Magic, just hard work, study and discipline. When I was teaching, my public lectures attracted much more intelligent students then the average, still I stopped teaching magic because of general mentality of the "aspirant". A better title for your original thread might have been "Stupidity in potential students of the the Western Tradition?".

 

I think there is a misconception by a lot of people who have not spent much time studying what magick is about that it is just running around and chanting things and waving your arms and having stuff happen (or in the case of those who think it is all a bunch of crap, pretending stuff happens). It stands to reason that if this is the understanding of what magick is then the person would have a hard time seeing how meditation could possibly relate to it or aid them in their cause.

The main thing that Crowley advises when starting work in mysticism is training in various ways of controlling one's consciousness. He stresses not only meditation but also asana and pranayama with the specific intention of achieving dharana, dhyana, and samadhi. It is always clear in his writing that this is an arduous process. In chaos magick, those intending to join the Illuminates of Thanateros are expected to work with Liber MMM for at least a year I believe. This is a regimen of meditation and mental training as well. I do not know of any serious occult organization that does not stress the importance of mental discipline.

With all due respect Viator, Crowley is a poor choice in the sense that he does not represent the "tradition”, he may be the most influential person on the magical revival of the 20th century, but he is an example of East/West syncretism, not the tradition. By his own account his introduction to mental discipline was from an experience with the famed mountain climber Oscar Eckenstein, and he continued his studies with Allen Bennett, his mentor in the Golden Dawn, after Bennett had decamped to Ceylon and converted to Buddhism.

 

The Hindu/Buddhist type of mental discipline which Crowley learned is not the same as what would have been emphasized in the Western Tradition, since the Indian traditions take as their starting point a position similar to that of Parmenides, usually refered to as "mind only" or the atomism of Democritus, usually called "the doctrine of aggregates". In the West these were superceded by the Platonic Contemplative tradition originally described in Plato's Symposium as the “ascent to the Vision of the Beautiful”. The idea of which is to turn the mind to the source “ideas” which are the generative principles both of our mental experience and of the world which we experience through sense. The result is a transformative experience which connects us a co-creators with the creative power behind the Cosmos. I could cite a lot of passages from Agrippa, the late Platonists and the Hermetica to support this, but I don't have time now.

On a practical level one should investigate the “art of memory” a technique that was used by rhetoricians in the Hellenistic period to remember the topics of speeches, but since magical invocations and conjurations can be conceived of as a type of as a type of Rhetoric, and by the way, Plato makes the reverse comparison, seeing rhetoric as a type of spell or enchantment, the ancient practitioners would have been sure to adopt such techniques.

 

The chief tool of the Art of Memory, the memory palace, had a big revival in the Renaissance among Hermetic and Neo-Platonic thinkers. The most famous of which was probably Giordano Bruno. For an interesting read see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. I also found Jonathan Spence's study of Matteo Ricci, the first Jesuit missionary to enter China, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, a fascinating read in itself, as well as a good discussion of the theory and practice of memory palaces, though much indebted to Yates. My own “Feng Shui Meditation” which I developed for Inner Sage Tao, is just a memory palace based on the feng shui compass.

I hope this information is interesting and useful.

 

[BaguaKicksAss]

I have found that unfortunately many who are drawn to magic are looking for shortcuts. Some figure magic would be easier than hard work. LOL, those folks have nooooo idea!

 

Also, like anything else, 100 people are drawn to it, and out of that 100 only 1 or 2 will take it seriously and make something of it. The rest will all whine about how meditation isn't necessary...

[RiverSnake]

Thanks for all the input guys. Guess this situation just really caught me off guard. In my view of magic there is nothing more important than having absolute concentration and focuses intent. But I guess there are a lot of (to steal another occultist's phrase) McWiccans out there.

 

I was recently surfing around on another occultist's blog and saw that a 13 year old kid was asking questions about artificial spirits and their usage.....I thought I started young in the esoteric field, geez, best of luck to them. Hopefully I will live another 50 years, its interesting to see where the esoteric culture in the west is moving towards.

 

My 2 cents, Peace

Edited April 9, 2013 by OldGreen

[BaguaKicksAss]

I worry about anyone starting that young without a teacher to guide them.

 

My teacher started when he was 7, but he had someone to teach him.

 

I find that even older folks have to practice for a time to gain what I call magical maturity, for lack of a better phrase.