Back in January I said (with some moving around for clarity):
I had a conversation with Gypsy Lantern recently in which he pointed out that if little more than half a dozen people suddenly stopped posting in the Temple, it could and in all likelihood would revert back to... all that "invoke Neo to help you cross the road, by which we mean the Neo who lives in your head! wank over this picture of Zatanna to get laid! 23!" stuff.
This seems more true than ever.
It's odd, the Temple seems to exist only in two strong polarities with very little in between, you know?
I think I can address that... I'm new at magic, and new at Barbelith. I wonder if some of the more experienced magicians in the Temple are forgetting what it was like to try on a magickal mindframe for the first time.* New magicians are bound to engage in some silliness because the whole idea of magic is so much... fun.
There's a ton of stuff I wanted to discuss in the Operation Coincidence Driver thread, but the thread got forcibly un-threadrotted by the person who started it. Gypsy Lantern had a lot of interesting things to say. I have enormous respect for hir position, especially since ze has a legitimate practice as a magician. Maybe I'll bring it to the "Reality-Based Magick" thread. It seems we were getting into a whole discussion on the philosophy of magick, what it's for, what does and doesn't work, whether magick exists to aid in survival or can be turned to more abstract purposes, etc. I'd love to get into this more, and not in a combative way; I just have some ideas and I'd love to spar with other magicians in order to hone my reasoning, drop what's spurious, flog my favorite issues, and be exposed to new ideas. I'm kind of excited by the fact that the more experienced magicians on the Temple don't pull any punches. It shows that they take magic seriously.
I've been keen to join Barbelith ever since I've learned of its existence. Pretty much the *only* forum I was interested in was the Temple. Hopefully I'll branch into the Comics or Switchboard forums. The reason I'm interested in the Temple is that I'm serious about magick and I want to be able to learn from and discuss with others.
But so anyway, the whole OMG! 23!!!!!! silliness that flips rapidly into seriousness can probably be attributed to the fact that new mages, sorcerors, whatever (what *do* we call ourselves?) are like kids with a new toy. Eventually, some kids will get tired of the toy and move on to something else, and some kids will sit down and learn to "play" with their toy in a much more serious and in-depth way.
*I'd like to see a thread on how people got into magick, what it was like for them when they started, what stupid mistakes they made, what early successes they had that inspired them to keep going, and how their practice differs now from when they started. Maybe this thread already exists; if not, I may start one. |
