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Wider Life...How 'Temple' Experiences integrate into Meatspace

  
  

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Unconditional Love
13:00 / 21.01.06
This is how it feels, i feel like everything ive ever been taught is a lie, that i never consented to be taught christianity or science, yet its inside of me, like the fucking parasites they both are, feeding on my insides.

I want to cut and dig them out of myself and the world around me, and then burn them both.

I feel a total utter rage and hatred towards both these institutions that were forced into an otherwise playful loving child. As far as i am concerned they are both corrupters of my innocence and the world around me.

Both these beliefs raped my mind without my consent, taught by teachers who were brainwashed themselves and perpetuate the same fucking bullshit.

Thats how it feels.

I will get back to your questions when i am ready to think about it, but it wont be today.
 
 
Quantum
13:05 / 21.01.06
Uh, THI, if you could perhaps start another thread to berate the mostrocity (sic), this thread is for discussing how magic integrates into the rest of your life.

Have you ever read Fight Club? Dead Megatron

"Narrator: This is crazy...
Tyler Durden: People do it everyday, they talk to themselves... they see themselves as they'd like to be, they don't have the courage you have, to just run with it."

See that, Mordant? That's you that is, Tyler Durden is your mum. You *luuuurve* the crazy voices, do a Petey Doherty and get on the Horse, a good scag habit will sort you right out.
 
 
Unconditional Love
13:15 / 21.01.06
Perhaps any child sexually assaulted in his first year of school by the same teacher that taught him hymns to praise god would think that.

Perhaps any system that then perpetuates that abuse and tries to ignore that abuse and allows that abuse to continue can create a person that feels the way i feel.

Any philosophies that can contain that abuse as being okay and acceptable become targets as well, especially when you learn as an adult that both church and psychiatric services just want you to shut up and fuck off.

I feel hurt, accussed of being a liar and angry all at the same time. I have every right too.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
13:18 / 21.01.06
Aaaaaaanyway...

Kicking and screaming back to the topic at hand, how do my experiences of teh maggycx interlock with my fridge door and the breakfast I skipped this morning...

Way-ull...I have to say I find the dichotomy completely false...Experience, in my world, is just experience, and the notion that anything is compartmentalised and somehow seperate and enshrined from anything else is a nonsense, to me...

I like the buddhist notion that if you take absolutely anything, anything at all, for granted, then you completely lack the appropriate gratitude to your circumstances.

This is probably the single defining result of my exploration into so-called magic (SCM) so far...An overriding, profound and completely consuming sense of very-present gratitude for everything...

This, inevitably in such an environment as the hallowed halls of Barbelith, leads quickly to the notion of : Gratitude to whom or what?

OK : Gratitude, first and foremost, that there is. Because, it seems to me, there so easily could not be. And I like it. For all of its madnes, and fury, and pain and sorrow and heartache and loss and devastation, I really, really like it. It is, for the most part, hugely fun, and funny.

Whatever it is that creates, and there surely is a whole load of stuff, it strikes me that it has a wicked, right on the money sense of humour. I mean, it makes me laugh. Which I like.

So, first and foremost, I'm really fucking glad to be here. I thank my mother and father, and their father and mother, and their father and mother, and their father and mother, and so on, back, back, back, back to....what, exactly? How far does that gratitude extend? If you go far enough back, where do you end up? Answers on a postcard, please. I, personally, am hugely grateful to the archetypal, eternal, ever-present Father-Mother of the Cosmos, without which, there Would. Not. Be. But there is. VIVA!

Next, I am grateful for my lot. For my beautiful, glorious family, my wife and son, who ground me, provide my energy for invention, keep me focused and aware of the Other, engage me with That which is Not Me to the expense of My Desires. Yes, getting married and having children irrevocably moved my focus and attention away from My Bullshit, and onto The Wellbeing of Others. Specific Others, in the first place, but as time wears on, just others generally. A creeping, glowing recognition that Nobody, anywhere, has any time whatsoever to Entertain My Bullshit. And that interest in them, and their concerns, is the natural succession to having food, clothes and a roof over my head.

Gratitude also to this Beautiful Mother Earth. This phenomenal, beautiful, Blue Green Paradise we call home, and which will suffer our abuse and ignorance and still provide, this Ground, my platform, for its Unconditional Suppoprt throughout my life, and all of my lives, ever. This beautiful provider, of all that I hold dear but take so easily for granted in order to make my egoic, slef-centred concerns TEH MOST IMPORTANT THING EVAR!11!!! only to realise I am a blinking passing Dream and my sense of importance and immanence is the desperate clinging to permanence of a brief, passing and non-existant ephemeral expression of chance and re-iterated unfinished business, receiving culture, only, and creating nothing

Gratitude to my teachers, every experience, every moment, every person, place or passing fancy which has ever impresseed upon my memory/mind a lesson I needed to pay attention to, an incident in which I noticed that which I had previously taken, in my arrogance, for a given.

And Gratitude to myself, this marvellous, miraculous organism, for surviving, for negotiating this Ocean of Complexity, and Remaining, Being, Fighting On in the face of the hopelessness, the darkness and the frustration, the madness, the nonsense, the sheer inescapable fucking WHAT!!?!?!?! of the entire gamut of the journey so far. I'm O-Fucking-K, you know? It will be alright. Nothing is wrong. It simply IS.

How does this relate to my everyday life? This is my take on Life. I am Life. Everything that happens, every single thing, is perfect as far as I can see. My attachments and fears, my hopes and dreams, my desire for change, is the product of my imperfection within a perfect system. WHO THE FUCK AM I to question this process EXACTLY AS I FIND IT? The egoic nonsense of the World around me is Nothing I can or desire to Change.

I have no more interest in my own passing, changing flimsy notions of what should and should not be. What is, is. And I recognise its glory, its beauty, its oscillation between 1 and 0, the perfect, present unity of that which I, based on my own attachments and imperfections, divide into this and that, light and dark, good and evil, bad and worse, good and better, here and there, inside and outside, within and without, above and below, him and her, father and mother, right and wrong. My sense of self is the boundary which creates and perpetuates these illusions, and it is inescapable, but it can be understood and it can be silenced. Hence my interest in this forum, because, the One is what I aspire to. My goal is Union.

How does this dovetail into experience of the Everyday?

How does it not dovetail into that experience? What is experience without that knowledge? Nothing, to me. Nothing but killing time, watching TV. I feel involved.

I am a better person by my involvement in these practices. I am freed, or free-er than I was, from the attachment to my own stories. They are just stories. I am accepting of Life in every manifestation, 'good' or 'bad', which requires a 'me' to suit in the middle and adjudicate. i have no time for adjudication, I am busy being (and, as far as possible, avoiding doing). I take this process as it is given to me, for who the FUCK do I think I am to judge it and complain?

I have the sensory illusion of options. I have the sensory illusion of freedom. I know, deeply, that I belong here and here belongs in and with me. And I am endlessly full of love, for this.

My take, my tuppence, my Wider Life.
 
 
Morgana
13:36 / 21.01.06
Sorry if this is seen as threadrot, but I actually think it fits quite well with the topic of magical vs. wider life, as long as you see them as opposing, which many people actually do.

To produce feelings of fear and hatred against concepts like Christianity, atheism or a scientific worldview seems to be very common in occultist and pagan circles. And I've witnessed many discussions which became very unfair against those worldviews. Exactly as a magician wouldn't want to be called a nutcase or some kind of public enemy, christians, atheists and scientists have the same right to be accepted as what they are. Generalisations are always wrong (haha), because not only do they distort our perception of reality, but they also are doing wrong to the group of people in question.

I can understand that a world generally not accepting your point of view makes you feel like an outsider - I have experienced that myself. But IMHO the way to deal with this feeling is not to wail about the bad, bad world, but to go out and try to change it.

Of course I won't be able to prevent Bush to start another war somewhere. Which will not caused by materialism or christian belief, btw, but will only instrumentalise those worldviews to justify the strife for even more influence and power. There have been wars for exactly that reason throughout human history - long before Christianity or materialism existed.

But what I can do is to try and generate some understanding for my worldview - which, of course, only works, if I'm willing to accept and understands other people's ways of living, too.

All in all, I found that living in peace with the world makes it much easier to live in peace with myself, too.
 
 
Morgana
13:57 / 21.01.06
THI: Sorry, I hadn't read your last posting when I wrote the above. Still I don't think it's "the system" you should blame, but the wrong was done by special people, not Christianity in general.
 
 
LVX23
15:19 / 21.01.06
I'd echo Money and say that the biggest problem is language and division. In my experience there are far more similarities between people than differences. We get hung up on terms, genres, classes, affiliations, nationalities, races, etc and create walls around ourselves based on these definitions.

Einstein was arguably one of the greatest scientists produced by humanity, as was Da Vinci and Newton. Yet if you study any of them, you find a deep strain of mysticism and spiritual awe. Small minds restrain themselves by their definitions. Great minds expand across such illusory borders and try to encompass as many aspects of human experience as possible. To see God in the complex stew of hydrocarbons that yield Nature is no heresy to either Science or Religion. It's wholeness.

I wouldn't categorize myself as a magician or a scientist, nor a Christian or pagan. I like to surf. I enjoy music. I study neuroscience and martial arts. Yet none of these things adequately describes me. I live in the chunk of geography called America, yet I don't find any value in calling myself "american". I have light skin but does that make me Caucasian? These are all labels thrown on top of the simple fact that I am a human.

To the original point of the thread, again echoing other posts, magick has helped me become a better person, has brought me personal strength and integrity, and allowed me to face challenges and obstacles with persistence and faith. I have stayed with my partner for several years through the sudden deaths of her parents and through the deep Abyss that followed. I watched them each die. If it wasn't for the magick I was able to wrap around these experiences, if it wasn't for the deep ritual work I've been doing to keep us strong and together, I would have left her and probably succumbed to a deep self-destructive nihilism and misanthropy.

There is no science or philosophy that can help heal the deep wounds of the Soul that all of us acquire. There is only communion with the nameless wonder of existence, be it love, new life, nature, or freedom. To suggest that such a thing doesn't exist (as is often the implication when science-minded atheists attempt to address the mystical) is to deny the very experience of existence. Reductionism and materialism are conveniences that allow the rational mind to forget about those things that are simply too big and numinous for it to grasp.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
17:46 / 21.01.06
A lot of the posts in this thread--especially Money $hot's and LVX23's--are very moving, and I can't find anything in them that I would argue with. And yet, when it comes down the the details of what I do, I find I cannot justify it in those terms ...

See, I do have a sort of absolute standard of 'real' that I'm always holding my own work and experiences up to (and yes, I know--brains in jars in Margate, are we living in The Matrix, did Schmuky the Cat create the world last Thursday, and so on and so forth). I guess I mean real like this laptop, or real like the concept of a miscarriage of justice. Real in terms of having a demonstrable effect on the world around me. I need what I'm doing to be that kind of real. It's very, very important to me.

I never quite know how to explain why that is, but I'll try.

First off, there's the am-I-nuts aspect to consider. And before anyone quotes Alice in Wonderland at me, let me clarify that: Am I likely to become a danger to myself or others? Think about that for a moment. We joke about it, but what if we woke up one morning and read that one of the Temple regulars had, I dunno, axe-murdered hir entire family because ze thought they were demons? Yeah, that's an over-the-top example, but untreated mental illness isn't exactly a picnic for those in the general vicinity of the sufferer. It's confusing, disturbing, even frightening.

The other aspect is harder to put into words. I suppose what it comes down to is this: resources. If someone is spending an appreciable amount of time talking (and perhaps more importantly listening) to invisible people, that time cannot be spent writing letters for Amnesty International or mowing an elderly neighbour's lawn or acting as a buddy for a PWA, or (insert laudable activity here). I'm not trying to suggest that people don't do those kinds of things as well as all the woogly stuff because I know that we do, but if you're going to make a serious commitment to this kind of work then you accept that it will take up a decent chunk of your time, energy, and other resources which can then not be spent on anything else. If what you're doing isn't having a beneficial impact on yourself or the wider community proportional to the resources expended doing it, it's just a big fat waste. You're another spoiled Western git pissing away the advantages that dumb luck has bestowed upon you. And yeah, there are worse things you could be doing, but that doesn't make it okay.

And that right there is a convincing argument as to why one should maybe just pack it all in... except that I can't do that either, because if what I'm doing is real then it may also be really important, the payoff in terms of what I can give to the world could be quite significant.

So to me it matters if what I'm doing is real or if I'm just standing around talking to my imaginary friends. It matters more than anything.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
17:55 / 21.01.06
Hello Healing Image,

Any philosophies that can contain that abuse as being okay and acceptable become targets as well, especially when you learn as an adult that both church and psychiatric services just want you to shut up and fuck off.

I think that to an extent I understand where you're coming from. Institutions that engage either in a lot of bureaucracy or rest on a contradictory or unclear system of faith can feel like a brick wall when you encounter them without a fundamental belief in them.

science directly and physically contributes to the percieved power of christian fundamentalism

You need to question what your real problem here is. Science or the systems that support it? I have problems with the way the pharmaceutical industry licenses drugs, not the drugs themselves. I have problems with christian fundamentalism but not because of the things that are in opposition to it. I know that you are expressing emotion but you also have to extend your own sense of what is fair to your criticisms. If you don't do that then you can't isolate what you believe to be true and just from what is happening around you and that's the path to losing yourself.

The reason that we try to engage with our minds rather than feelings here is that it's quite difficult to get across the depth of feeling, the reason for it, when you're typing text and people can react with just as much feeling and it can hurt when someone is angry at something you are emphatic about.
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
18:24 / 21.01.06
I'm grateful for Money $hot's post of gratitude.

Joseph Campbell proposed that Religion was a means of coping with the religious experience.

first the overwhelming epiphany, then the search for an explanation.

messages of support and hugs from the stars? Sure.
present mindfulness? excellent.
humble gratitude? outrageous.

it feels (to this humble perceiver), that we're exploring the notion of personal pantheons created from the preexisting.

the Mayans took to praying to Christian gods (ie Saints), because the divine have no quarrel with mortals, despite all the holy wars in history. They saw their gods meeting with the spanish gods in the heavens. They had never met before.

If each culture has its own gods, and each person has their own pantheon, then everyday society becomes a negotiation of all this incongruous, overlapping, distantly familiar observation.

and any structure upon which this experience can be strapped, organized into a recognizeable pattern, like the tao or i-ching, or twelve nights of the epiphany, or the kabbalah, etc, the more the meaning that can be breathed into it.

or twisted out of it.

--not jack
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
21:09 / 21.01.06
and a certain faith that there's more to 'lithers than pixellated messages on my moniort.

--not jack
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
21:10 / 21.01.06
monitor even

--not jack
 
 
Unconditional Love
13:55 / 22.01.06
I know i was projecting alot when i wrote yesterday. To an extent thats easier than actually facing the internal feelings head on, it gives them a social context tangible things i can lash out at in the here and now, rather than being a victim in the past, a helpless child being over powered.

In the face of such big institutions i can still feel like a helpless child being over powered.

Trying to get back on topic,i got a greater awareness of my circumstances by practicing chinese internal arts, concentration on the dantien resurfaced the memories completely. Tantric practices of body awareness also helped me be introduced to the idea of memories being locked into muscle groups by trauma and stress. Meditation and ritual on emptiness particularly helps at the moment in relation to overwhelming rage problems and tears i am not ready to let stream yet.

On the other side i am beginning to examine counter cultural figures like william burroughs, hakim bey, allen ginsberg and aleister crowley in a very different way, i am beginning to see there pushes for greater civil liberties as excuses to indulge other appetites.

What gets me the most is the silence and isolation of my own voice and other victims of these crimes. Society wants to know everthing about the perpetraitors but nothing of the victims, without a voice for the victims it is so easy for the abused to become an abuser (i am not a sex offender) rather than a protector.

The more i learn about this area in relation to counter cultural figures the more disturbed i am becoming by some of the cultural personalities involved, ive had an awareness of this since 2000, but i never had the memories to give me a context to why i felt an association with these figures or the other abusive people i have had in my life. Knowing i was abused has given me the context to see certain pieces of art and personalities within counter culture as abusive and abusers.

The temple has been a great help in helping me understand this process as it is a place that i feel that i can express my feelings and get feed back from others who may have a greater insight into what i am feeling, in this sense i see the temple as a kind of heart shop complementing the head shop, Perhaps when magic is being analysed that should take place in the laboratory where scientific investigation takes place, temples arent places of science imo. I am not a thelemite and now know why i will never hold thelema with any regard what so ever, to me it has become the propagation of an abuser and his abusive philosophy. That has been further given credence by a younger thelemite relating to me how she had the cock of a higher ranking member stuck in her mouth in one of the lower degree initiations, maybe in the future she would consider prosecuting, i hope so.
 
 
Unconditional Love
13:58 / 22.01.06
BY the way, i now know with absolute certainty and reality that i am not mentally ill, life and my interactions with the temple have helped me sort that out as well.
 
 
Unconditional Love
15:59 / 22.01.06
By the above i mean, i was diagnosed as schizophrenic, well i now actually know i am not, but alot of my behaviour can resemble that particular mental illness and others.(in particular post traumatic stress disorder)

I start cognitive behavioural therapy this week on a one to one basis and in a group setting, i will be dealing with the whole experience over a period of time and other abusive situations i have found myself in in my life.

If the content of my posts came through as very disturbing to some of you i apologise, the cold rage i feel will find its correct position eventually and be put to a more positive use.
 
 
LVX23
16:33 / 23.01.06
...Heart shop...

I like that.
 
 
LVX23
16:34 / 23.01.06
Ah, for context...

...i see the temple as a kind of heart shop complementing the head shop
 
 
Quantum
18:59 / 23.01.06
Good luck with the CBT Healing Image, it's usually really helpful. I think I know of the Order your friend encountered, I don't think most Thelemites have such extreme practices.

So to me it matters if what I'm doing is real or if I'm just standing around talking to my imaginary friends. It matters more than anything. Mordant Carnival

Hear hear! I think that's one of the reasons I am cautious with my practice, the nagging fear that a crisis of faith will leave me feeling I've been wasting my time and effort being a twat.
I think in fact I have hit a point where I have to throw myself into it wholeheartedly or give it up, and it doesn't look like I'm giving it up anytime soon...
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
10:29 / 24.01.06
I am not a thelemite and now know why i will never hold thelema with any regard what so ever, to me it has become the propagation of an abuser and his abusive philosophy.

No it isn't. The only way to understand Thelema is to try to understand it without reference to Aleister Bloody Crowley and the various shit-fingered muppets that populate so-called "Thelemic" orders.

"Every man and woman is a Star" is not an abusive philosopy. To me it describes the experience that you have on really good E, where you temporarily shed your character armouring and the mesh of fears, ego games, jealousies and power trips - and experience every single human being as a source of wonder and beauty.

"Do as Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" is not an abusive philosopy. I see it like a bill of rights. We each have the right to live according to our own true nature, like a star moving perfectly within our own orbit. It doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. It doesn't mean a license to impose your will on another. It's just about honesty. Seeking to understand yourself and what you're truly about, and then cultivating that without fear. Understanding implicitly that every man and woman is a star, and acting in accordance with the implications of that. Striving, every moment of the day, to be brave enough and strong enough to live according to your nature and encourage others to do the same in whatever small ways you can. It is an assertion that this freedom is The Law, the natural way of things, and everything that denies it is a perversion of the Universe. The True Will (or natural course) of an individual, and the True Will (or natural course) of the Universe are synonymous. Like the course of a stream, the growth of a tree or the flow of blood through arteries.

"Love is the Law, Love under Will" is not an abusive philosophy. Love is the Law. The entire diagram of the Tree of Life can be mapped onto the planetary symbol of Venus. No other symbol can. Love is the Law. Love and Will.

I don't have any problems with any of that, and in that sense I am a "Thelemite". The whole concept of a Thelemite is a contradiction in terms though, as the point is that the Law of Thelema applies to every man and woman not a bunch of "special" people who have read certain books, and certainly not the exclusive preserve of turgid, filthy-arsed, doley crowley's who get kicks out of abusing the power structures of debased 19th century orders in order to stuff their flacid diseased todgers down the throats of the impressionable. As "Leão Voado da Verdade, Empregado do Juramidam" would have it in the other thread: deceived.
 
 
Unconditional Love
12:05 / 24.01.06
@GL > Well mate all i can say is your experience informs you in one way, my experience informs me in another, there are plenty of places those values exsist without the trappings and associations of thelema and crowley and its those seas i shall be swimming in. The island of thelema is sinking as far as i am concerned.Either that or i am taking a well needed rest from the net and magick in general and am just going to concentrate on myself and healing.

So some of my opinions at the moment are heavily influenced by internal rage and sorrow so its probably best i take a rest from all of this for the time being and just concentrate on healing.
 
 
Morgana
12:48 / 24.01.06
The island of thelema is sinking

Because they didn't fortify it?

Sorry, couldn't resist...
 
 
LVX23
19:06 / 24.01.06
From my perspective, a cursory view of the current state of things in this world reveals The Book of the Law to be one of the most prescient documents of the 20th century.

The warrior child walks the earth amidst fire and light while the old gods destroy each other over archaic dogmas.

And kudos to GL, as always.
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
23:54 / 24.01.06
it's not "do as you like."

--not jack
 
 
Tryphena Absent
10:58 / 25.01.06
the Law of Thelema applies to every man and woman not a bunch of "special" people who have read certain books

Yes, people say the same about the bible and it's blatantly untrue. A religious/magical text can't apply to everybody unless you're applying it within a structure. You're not aware of the law unless you've read it. You don't practice within those limits unless those limits mean something. Are you talking about the intention meant for the law?
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
11:11 / 25.01.06
The Law of Thelema is supposed to be the fundamental rights of humankind, rather than a philosophy to be practiced and adhered to. Whether you are aware of it or living in accordance with it isn't really a factor, as it's not supposed to be a set of commandments or ethical requirements to be a good little Thelemite - it's meant to be an exposition of a fundamental Law of Nature. Taking it all at face value, and assuming for the sake of argument that the text genuinely is a "transmission from beyond", the fact that something like "every man and woman is a star" is not being put into practice by most of the human race doesn't really contradict its status (in terms of Thelema) as a law of nature. It's a law that is being broken, and really that's the whole point of it in a less literal, more metaphoric sense.
 
 
illmatic
11:16 / 25.01.06
I actually think that the whole concept of the "Law of Thelema" only begins to work when you get it out beyond the circle of practising occultists and Thelemites. It makes a lot mroe sense if you see it as a far-ranging statment about humnankind, our potentialities and our aspirations rather than as a "badge of membership" for the Thelema club.

One doesn't need to be pissing around with occultism to do one's will.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
11:19 / 25.01.06
Strong truth ect. It's a shame that law often seems to get self-applied without reference to the Star-hood of the other guy.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:16 / 25.01.06
Yeah, %why is that%?

(Sorry, person whose first experience of magic was at uni listening to annoying boys use Do What Thou Wilt as excuse for being selfish macho elitist arsewanks. The kind of stuff GL is talking about put me off anything to do with 'magic' for years)

Me, my techniques and experiences are all about healing, of myself, and enabling that of other people. I try to remember that it's very easy to get over-focussed on myself, which isn't good for me, what I do and tends to send me out of balance/mess me up.

And I guess the stuff I'm talking about, energy work, for want of better term, is very easy, compared to some of the stuff people are talking about here, to integrate into RL.

And I'd say that I don't really separate 'RL' from 'energy work', but then as I say, what I do doesn't often require that.

(note: this is possibly me thinking that I don't need to switch off because I am terrible at it! I'm ok in work environements, the boundaries and frameworks usually do their job, but I'm certainly guilty of giving way too much emphasis to energy and emotion, and not enough, say, to physical states of being)
 
  

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