| |
|
It's easy to invoke the tricksters name, sure, but to invoke the trickster and invite him into ones home (instead of blissfully ignorant to his hiding behind the sofa) is a different thing entirely.
I wish someone would tell this to the legion of trickster figures we’ve had marching through this board, disrupting our rigid reality tunnels with their krazy ways. It’s a message board trope that one gets a little tired of, y’know?
Whilst photoshopping an image may not be as magical to you compared to whatever it is that you consider to be magical, to me it is, especially if in its creation I've managed to leave a semi-lasting impact on myself and the world I live in. It's even more magical to me because it's a syncretic blend of what I've been practicing over the past couple of decades.
Fair enough. I can totally see how developing new skills using software, or creating collages and artwork would absolutely be “magical”. The example you presented lacked any wider context so I was a bit snarky, my apologies. Stilll, when I read the example you mentioned above I thought, “is that it?” Is that really magical practice? Just altering a photo of two work colleagues in Photoshop?” If this is magical, why is it so? I’m still not clear on this. How has using Photoshop caused “a semi-lasting impact on [yourself] and the world [you] live in”? How is it a “syncretic blend” of your practice?
what do you recognise as a magical practice?
I don’t really know if I want to define what I think is “magical practice” is in a didactic sense. I’m not the Pope, after all, and I don’t think I can offer up some kind of catch all definition. Even writing a “definition” makes me think someone should tell me to shut up (hopefully someone will!). However, I’ll take the plunge: what I’m interested in, what I try and do myself and what I see in writing I admire is some combination of the following:
Challenge. If you’re practicing, on some level, you should be looking for things which challenge yourself. This might mean deliberately being more compassionate in day to day interactions, it might mean getting up half an hour earlier to perform a certain ritual or meditation every day for a year, it might mean studying a language so you can better understand a sacred text. It might mean finding the time, money and courage, to learn a martial art. I’ve done all of these, on one level or another.
Creativity: I think this can’t be overstated. “Writing one’s own qabalah”, the creation of art, warping the techniques or whatever one has read about to fit one’s own life. Thinking creatively about one’s limitations and setting out to challenge them.
I would like to see some combination of the above in every discussion of practice in The Temple.
I do lots of things and just about everything I do I consider to be magical in some way
I think the problem here is that magic or magick if you prefer is such a free-floating signifier it can mean pretty much anything. If magic is simply “everything you do” how do you critique this? How do you share it with someone? How do you improve? How do you know you’re not lying to yourself? I’ve seen several people in this forum present acts and claim they were magical when IMO they were simply bullshitting themselves. The example that springs to mind is one poster’s claim that reading Ian Brady’s autobiography, and the subsequent stream of worried ideations he had, was a magical act. I really don’t think it was, and I think the identification as “magican” was just a little cocoon he was building.
in regards to moving you and teaching you I don't think the onus should be on me; if you can't be moved or taught, then perhaps you're simply starting to stagnate because you're too caught up in trying to be moved and taught, and doing so more out of habit than any real commitment?
Yes I may be jaded. In fact, I definitely am with regards to this board. I am annoyed with the limits to change imposed by the software and I am definitely growing apart from it. This is the longest post I’ve written for an eternity. However, what I’ve written above is a honest response to your posts on this forum. This is my reaction and it isn’t all simply me being a an old cynic. If you put stuff on a public forum, people are going to respond to it, snipe at it, disagree with it, react to it. Otherwise, why be on a discussion space?
In a sense, I’m trying to push for experiential, exciting writing on the board, rather than vague abstractions. People talking about magick in the abstract is singularly the most boring thing imaginable (Decadent Nightfalling, I’m talking to you as well). Vague wishwashy cosmic musings, back of a Rizla packet philosophising. For The Temple to be a good forum, a space worth coming back to and worth reading. it needs thoughtful experiential writing, grounded in experience.
Now personally, I would love to hear more about:
trying to combine BodyBuilding with QiGong, counselling a rape victim back into magic, and OOBE in order to storm dance with some elementals and offer some drought relief to my country
All of those grabbed my attention immediately. And I think a report on any one of those experiences, or a discussion of the issues and questions arising from them, could make a great thread (lots of sensitivity required with the second, obv). Whether you chose to share that stuff or not is up to you, but personally, is these kind of topics and others that I would like to read about it and would enjoy discussing. It's that kind of stuff that I take inspiration from. |
|
|
