Barbelith Underground > Temple

I don't really think we're qualified to say yay or nay unless any of us have had major success in this area, i hope someone has and can advise us on this. I've tried some of this stuff and got nowhere

That’s what I mean though. I’ve moved in occult circles for a fair few years and met a lot of people, but I haven’t met a single person who has followed one of these curriculums start to finish and come out the other end as some kind of empowered ubermensch type character, free from neuroses and effective at every level. I don’t think this actually happens. I think you can convince yourself that this stuff is working and draw a degree of empowerment from that self-hypnosis, but really that’s not much different than investing in a religious faith. Swap the rosary beads for ‘deconditioning exercises’ and the internal processes might be pretty similar. I’d have to respectfully disagree with your comment that we’re not equipped to comment on the efficacy of these techniques unless we’ve achieved success with them. Isn’t that a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy? You can’t take a critical look at something unless you’ve had success with it? How does that work?

Reading back over my post from last night, I think that two things are getting conflated here, probably because I was half asleep when I posted. There’s the issues around ‘de-conditioning exercises’, and the issues around the desire to ‘transcend reality’. These are two different things, but there is some overlap between them, often ‘transcending reality’ is the grail offered at the end of these courses of self-modification.

Basically, I've read quite a few first person accounts of "mystical" experience

I’m not suggesting that there’s no such phenomena as ‘mystical experience’ or that such things aren’t of value, but I’m not sure that this type of experience is directly synonymous with ‘transcending reality’ in the way that it’s often aspired to.

I suspect possibly that the way occult literature works though, is to highlight this sort of gnosis as somehow superior to everyday insights into one's our day to day lives and behaviour.

I think that’s one of the things I’m most uncomfortable with. It came up in that thread the other day as well, a dichotomy between everyday reality and magical experience. The term ‘transcending reality’ assumes that our everyday experiences of reality are in some way wrong or problematic, and should be overcome by an effort of will. Which I think is a bit of a dodgy proposition to base your approach to magic on. It leads very easily to a mindset that considers anyone not engaging in this sort of practice to be somehow ‘lesser’ or ‘mundane’ – like the people in the Matrix who don’t realize that their day-to-day experiences are a simulation. Which, I would hazard a guess, might in fact be a load of self-delusional bollocks.

He reports just four instances of it, after a lifetime of devotion. This behooves me to ask if an experience is going to happen so infrequently in an individual’s lifetime, what do we do with the rest of our lives?

The notion of ‘transcending reality’ implies in its wording that this transformation is to some extent permanent or lasting, rather than the passing moments of cosmic insight that you seem to be referring to. These moments of psychic clarity are often associated with the Eastern meditative disciplines but I think they can crop up in any branch of magical practice, or just suddenly happen out of the blue regardless of whether you’re a magician or not. I’ve had several ‘occult incidents’ where my notions of what constitutes ‘reality’ have been turned on their head, and I’ve walked away from these experiences irrevocably different – but I certainly haven’t ‘transcended reality’. I don’t even know what that means. I think this sort of area is a lot more messy, abstract, and just plain mysterious than a lot of the step-by-step guides tend to suggest.

Deconditioning?