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Have you ever wondered if reading too much, talking too much, thinking too hard is killing your groove?

17:51 / 29.04.05

In a field that draws so heavily on subversion and controll of rational thought I've been suspecting that my potency of effectiveness as a practicioner of "ye fine occult artse" wanes when I'm reading, thinking about ways to improve it.

has anyone else noticed this?

Unconditional Love

02:13 / 30.04.05

erm yeah, i go through cycles of absorbing info, contemplating new ways to use it, thinking far too much, and generally being a magickal wanker.

and then the bubble bursts and i am doing shit all over the place with what ive learnt in these research sessions, it doesnt seem like research at the time, but its how i concieve of it after.

the problem tends to come when i procrastinate and get stuck in the if i think magic i am doing magic rut, which is common if the emphasis is on book work rather than hand and leg work, or just lack of communication.

i find alot of the magic discussed in here as well as what i read, becomes very creative when i am working, talking to others and fueling with ideas to inspire imagination. alot of magic in the research phases seems very useful latter on when applying it, consciously or unconsciously, with later realisation.

04:43 / 30.04.05

I get totally stymied. Sometimes for damn near forever. I had to quit keeping a journal because it was making me schizo. I would argue every angle back and forth, ad freakin' nauseum. Choronzonic Interference. Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip... And so on. What's the best way to break that?

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

08:44 / 30.04.05

The key to jazz is to learn everything there is to know about music...and then forget it all - Charlie Parker

Seems relevant

10:21 / 30.04.05

I find that sooner or later, If I read too much, my mind gets "thick", for lack of a better word. I lose my awareness of the surrounding world, and that's a problem. If I'm not aware of my world, then I'm not aware of it's nuances. If I'm not aware of it's nuances, I can't practice effective magick, for to do so requires timing, and an awareness of various factors in operation. I suppose it also depends upon whether one is ecclectic, or practices a specific system. Then elements of a system are meant to mesh togeter for a specific effect. That requires a lot of study. If one is ecclectic, sometmes it's better focus on general principles, and have periods of "specifics" study alternated with periods of letting it "stew" in. At least that's what works for me.

10:56 / 30.04.05

Taken from here:

“I have been wrestling with this whole positionality vs. experience thing. I am becoming weary of feeding people's perspective on life. Sometimes I feel like I am just giving them more material to remove them one step further from their real experience. Folks can end up thinking their lives away. This is the problem with religion - when misapplied - it becomes the window of a lonely place through which someone evaluates and tags the episodes of their lives. And the window gets smaller as they become intolerant of disruptive information. Soon their lives are predictable cycles waiting with fear (though ultimately with relief and thankfulness) for the next crisis.

I am starting to teach people how to relinquish their positions once it has given them the access they wanted it for. Trade it in for the actual experience and then notice what is with you afterwards. I think we learn much more fully with our muscles and bones than our consciousness. Oh I get its contribution to language and the creation of reality - but I think we are also separated so much from the Truth and each other by its fearful scramblings to make meaning of stuff that is still meaningless. Yet here I am respecting my own consciousness too much. I need to play basketball.”

Taken from an e-mail to Margaret Wheatley – 17/1/03

It's referring specifically to leadership training (hence the references to positions - leaders craving titles but not what the titles allow them to do), but there's still much that's relevant. A talking point - I'll come back to it later when I've mustered my own thoughts.

My position is very similar to Money $hot's quote in practise. I usually hate one liners, but if it's a music metaphor I can get behind it more often than not!

--

16:34 / 30.04.05

WEll, it is possible to think too much at times.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

18:43 / 30.04.05

I definately think it's a balance. I mean, going into things totally blind is a bad idea. You can't just give into every single impulse without thought, and you can't freeform everything, some of our little playmates have teeth. On the other hand it's so easy to get into paralysis by analysis, breaking everything down into smaller and smaller fragments until there's no cohesion, no coherence, any more. You've got this really narrow twisty little path to walk between a very sceptical, analytic mindframe (which can freeze-dry your practice unto its death) and the unstructured practice and hyper-credulous attitude which can turn everything into mush.

Nalyd Khezr Bey

17:30 / 01.05.05

My experience is along similar lines that have been mentioned already. I go through long sessions of occult study to the point of burn-out and then when I say "fuck all" everything just seems to become clear and the practical side comes out in full force and everything I had been studying has been put in a post-modern deconstructionist blender and gets mixed and/or synthesized and then regurgitated in creative new forms. The studying is part of the practice for me. Though I go to both extremes I tend to balance the study and practice fairly well.

rising and revolving

12:54 / 03.05.05

For me, the big issue (and it's been touched upon already) is simple - is your knowledge getting in the way of your gnosis? Or, to put it another way, are the things you know second-hand stopping you from evaluating your own first hand experience?

To be honest, despite the fact I read voraciously and have internalised vast amounts of theory, most of it is secondary to being open to the actual results of my practice.

By the same token, it's nice to have a system to fall back on when things get hairy and for after the fact analysis..

05:00 / 04.05.05

I definitely find that I tend to get addicted to info and thinking. so much that it gets in the way of actually having real experiences (rather than those mediated by data repositories like books and internets). sometimes i need to force myself to sit and meditate, try to hold onto a mantra and just stop the thoughts. or to get out and live without constant analysis. i think it's harder and harder to be an idle processor in the global brain these days. but you have to. you have to absorb experiences in order to generate creative output. otherwise you tend to just stagnate in the same loops.

wrt occult practice, i tend to go through highly logical phases of working with the symbols and concepts, then highly pragmatic phases of just trying to absorb novel experiences. i think for me the dialectic between the two is the meta-process of magick or the underlying narrative of trying to live a magickal life. these cycles of course weave in with the usual emotional, territorial, biosurvival currents of existence as a human being, the trials of which are themselves a magickal process of gradually externalizing and becoming aware of the soul.

Unconditional Love

05:55 / 04.05.05

something that strikes me as very important their is living a magickal life, and finding magick in the things that are easy to gloss over, ie going for a walk, shopping, going to the cinema, eating food, bathing/showering whatever, its seems at least to me that developing that awareness of magick in everyday activity including work is very important, and its largely missing from many traditions that tend to ritualise or operate outside of the everyday. in that context its easy for magick to become escapism rather than the engagement with reality it can be.

08:40 / 04.05.05

I think Mordant's right, it's all a question of balance, it's like anything. You can't just run at it willy-nilly hoping it's going to work, but equally, there's no point becoming the world's expert on the theory of a subject when you've actually never put it into practice.

Quite apart from anything else, the practicalities only become clear when you do a thing. Equally, some things only come with practice. For example, one could read about the techniques for hula-hooping until one was word perfect on the subject but it's only when you start swinging your hips that you become any good at it. The same goes for magick; you don't get good at lucid dreaming by reading a book on it, you get good at it by setting your alarm clock for hideous o'clock in the morning lots and faithfully writing everything down.

Studying magickal theory is part of the magickal path - we all all aware that to study is to learn, but as any GCSE chemist knows there's only so much knowledge you can garner without getting the Bunsen Burner out. And if you ask me, a bit of practical explosion will tell you a million things that the book didn't.