Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Exploring the Philosophical side of the Occult.

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Cybernetic_Jazz
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Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

As I've been pacing back from my practices (and working 80ish hours per week) my drives to work are getting philosophical again, especially considering how many of my core precepts have been rattled.

I'd have to say that I'm first of all having a tougher time staying in the theist or pantheist camp and a sort of atheistic animism is ringing more truth bells at this point. Some people theorize that consciousness is trying to expand into space and that said animism will become a pantheistic deity at sometime in the future - that's all well and good, and I don't discount that possibility, just that I see a great deal of life just being ice-cold chance and all kinds of suffering that there's absolutely nothing to learn from morally unless one considers cynicism and atheism a gain.

In this I've had one idea come back to me again that I always thought was a bit crazy, at first I ran from it just because I assumed that I was too much of a lumpen and rationalite/materialist-lite thinker but I have to say, it just seems like a really really bad idea.

I don't know the proper name for it, whether it's truly a Rosicrucian axiom or just a popular Golden Dawn one, and it's what Aleister Crowley dubbed the 'paranoia pledge':

'I will look upon at every circumstance in my life as a communication with God'

Some things I'd absolutely have to knock this down with:

1) Being at Hobbsian workplaces where everyone's keeping a conformity and 'displayed weakness' dossier on the next person. What is God telling you there? Ape's gotta eat and the meal tastes even better if it's taken at another person's expense.

2) Being in the position where people seem to want to kill you for being different, as if some planetary immune system has encountered a foreign element. I'd have to suppose that's God telling us about His right new right-hand deputy who replaced Lucifer after his fall - Conformitas. I've often make the deity mixology joke of there being a Jupiter Carlito (half Zeus, half Carlito from NWO) who spits apple in the face of the uncool at the final judgment and sends them to hell, a place that smells a lot like apple cider. Is cleanliness next to godliness, or is it conformity's next to godliness, or is it just having center-of-the-bellcurve genes that's next to godliness?

3) In public interaction the people who move power are generally people who've weaponized their pathologies. It's also an environment generally speaking where stroking one's own ego with inanities or demanding that the next person does to takes far more precedence to truth or problem solving. What's God telling you with these encounters? Mendacity's the spice of life maybe?

4) The way the genders generally are damn near forced to treat each other from biology that short-circuits choice well before it reaches volition. I won't even take a guess here.


Overall we seem to be in a world where organized evil makes as little sense as organized good. It seems overall like we're in a wrestling match with the remnants of evolution, adaptations - even amoral ones - which gave us procreative advantages over other primates. When dodging the back-stabs of hungry coworkers, stopping for the person who refuses to use turn arrows because the people around them just aren't worth it, or having to read pages and pages of contracts because people will exploit any loophole they can find - even the ability to draw silver lining gets abstract enough that to place the praise for it at God's feet seems like a stretch. Also - I think it's really clear that if a person's life is absolutely stomping them out they're at much higher risk, and it's an incredible torturous idea to think that a self-aware being with immense power is not just watching every moment but actively rolling it out 'for your own good', or the good of most people around you if you want to multiply it on grotesque scales.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernici

Post by violetstar »

If we look into the original Jewish Kabbalah we discover that God,while being essentially good has the inherent capability to become evil.Basically it is inherently a component of His necessity to dispense Divine Judgement in order to combat sin.Thus to rectify sin and re-install good,an act of evil is required.

The nature of evil, its origins and its relations to the divine realm are questions that Jewish philosophers and Kabbalists were interested in. Kabbalists gave different answers to these questions,yet many of them agreed that the roots of evil were to be found within the divine system, and that the power of evil was dependent on an imbalance or disharmony between the Sefirots.

According to many Kabbalists,the source of evil was to be found in the fifth sefirah called Gevurah or Din, judgment or power.One of the earliest Kabbalistic texts, sefer Ha-Bahir,identifies it as Satan and as the attribute of evil.We learn that the Holy One has an attribute whose name is Evil. And it lies to his north.
As it is written,out of the north evil shall break forth. What is it? It has the shape of a left hand,and it has many emissaries, which are all called, evil. Later Kabbalists did not accept this view. For them, the powers of evil emanate from Gevurah, but as long as this sefirah is balanced by the powers of mercy, it is not evil.Gevurah becomes evil from midnight until sunrise.

Nonetheless, when divine judgment is not mitigated by the attribute of mercy,the powers of evil emanate from Gevurah and become independent.According to another perception which is found in one of the sections of the Zohar called the Idra Rabba,evil was formed from imperfect realms that were emanated before the Sefirot and were destroyed because they did not have a feminine counterpart.

The Zohar proposes that an allusion to this imbalanced realms can be found in Genesis 36 verse 31. "These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites." The Zohar explains that the kings of the Israelites are the Sefirots and interprets the kings of Edom as the powers of Evil that preceded them. Isaac Luria and his disciples further developed this idea,claiming the potential for evil already existed in the En Sof, before the zimtzum.( the process of creation by "contracting" his Ein Sof (infinite) light in order to allow for a "conceptual space" in which finite and seemingly independent realms could exist.) According to some of Luria disciples the roots of judgment were concealed within the infinite Divine light.

Hope this helps in some way.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernici

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

It helps explain that a lot of what's going on in Kabbalah, at a minimum even if it weren't literally correct, is an attempt to yoke the universe into concepts and unite some human system of understanding to nature and deify certain collections of function with similitude - ie. give them conscious personalities - in order that they could be civilized.

I've heard in different places that the experience of samadhi had a lot of influence over the philosophy and so they came to the conclusion that the joy and bliss of the one central light was largely surrounded by apparent meaninglessness or something close to it. If they were as abstract and non-committal perhaps as Buddhists in that they meant YHVH only in the most abstract 'what would we call paranirvana' kind of sense I would leave it go.

I do think there's a cultural clash though in a lot of the west, I especially notice this here in the US, where a lot of people have made Rosicrucianism sort of their fundamentalist Christianity and I have noticed a lot of the orders I've been a member of do believe the whole concept that every experience in your life is an interaction between you and God but even though few of them are ostensibly Christian what remains of their baggage still seems to do a lot of the interpreting on that - ie. they seem to internalize a bit the idea that all of the good and bad things in their lives must have a meaning that reflects back on them.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I think you're saying that this phrase is just more slippery than incorrect because it was originated by people with a much more abstract definition of God. That could be, I just think we're doing a number on ourselves with it in the west.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernici

Post by violetstar »

Well,in this abstract story the Bride is seduced by the lustful Serpent and he defiles her.The Bridegroom flees lest she now defiles him.Meanwhile,everything they had built has been destroyed.In order to resolve this,God has no choice but to punish the Bride after which she is purified but in doing so intrinsically punishes the innocent Groom-which is an act of evil.

At the time when the powerful Serpent on high awakens,because of the sins of this world,he dwells and unites with the female, and defiles Her.The Male departs from her,because she was defiled,and she is called impure.It is not proper for the Male to come close to Her,for woe if he becomes impure by Her when She is defiled.
The powerful Serpent on high has awoken,and poured his filth in a place he shouldn't have,uniting with the female.And the hair of the male grows,and the female is defiled,and her hair grows long,and her fingernails grow long.Then judgment begins to emerge in the world and everything becomes defiled,as it is written "for he has defiled the Lord's Sanctuary.God's sanctuary is defiled because of humans sins."

The Serpent on high is the demonic male figure, Satan or Samael.The female which he defiles and the male who separates from the female are the masculine and feminine Sefirot: Tiferet and Malkhut.Zohar describes how when the power of evil awakens and becomes strong,he can penetrate the divine system.Then he dominates the divine female,contaminates and defiles her,and thus causes a separation between the divine male and divine female.

When Malkhut is dominated and defiled by Satan,she becomes a demonic figure herself,and her hair and finger nails grow wild.Thus,then stern judgments govern the world and God's sanctuary,the Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed and defiled.According to the Zohar, human sins are the reasons for the dramatic event that it describes,the Awakening of the Serpent on high,the Defilement of the Divine Female,and the Destruction of the Temple.
When the Serpent sleeps Malkhut and Tiferet are reunited and the Temple restored.However,at midnight Gevurah again becomes evil and its demons seek opportunity to shatter the two vessels again.The way to thwart this eternally impending rift according to Judaic belief is through dedication to God,prayers sacrifices and observances.Central to that belief is the idea that damage to God's emnations can be healed through acts of goodness on earth.Other cultures have similar beliefs but the Kabbalist also believed that God sometimes needed a blessing himself.

A fascinating story found in the Babylonian Talmud tells us of the high priest,Rabbi Ishmael, who met God inthe inner sanctuary of the temple during the Yom Kippur service.According to the story,which is found in Tractate Brakhot,God asked the high priest to bless him.
In the story,it is God who is asking for a blessing from a human being.The blessing the high priest offers God is,"May your mercy suppress your anger and your mercy prevail over your other attributes,so that you deal with your children according to the attribute of mercy and limit your strict judgment."

The gist of the story is that God needs human blessing in order to increase his mercy and overcome his anger and strict judgment.In turn this exempts him from committing acts of evil.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernici

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

I'm starting to wonder then if Qabalah, even if abstracted, synchretic, and big-tent-hippy, still owes enough of it's thinking to that to where I'll find myself increasingly unable to relate to it.

When I hear about serpents I can't help thinking we're talking about analogies for Fohat, which makes me then ask what seems like the obvious question. Kabbalah as far as I can tell is a pantheistic system. If Kallah merged with some sort of energy there isn't any room for it to be properly 'satanic' (at least in any Christian sense) in that it couldn't be foreign to God, and perhaps the only story that makes much sense at all to account for that, at least for me, is the idea that what we call 'God' is still expanding outward, still metabolizing what's really an infinite or near infinite plain of entropy, and where God's borders of harmony mix with that entropy you might have a world with something like good and evil mixed and evil really only seems to amount to antisocial/anti-civilizational urges that come from prior runs of evolution, ie. habits that made one heck of a stud or alpha chimp but make for tyranny and retrograde motion in civil society. It's a bit like the first taste of a new plane is quite bitter, it's the first twitching of either RNA or something like it, from there billions of years of cruelty, cannibalism, and barbarism ensue until something intelligent enough to organize it into something better arises, starts building larger feedback loops where the sort of protoconscious 'stuff' in their vicinity starts acting like a buffer to help keep them from destroying themselves and starting from nothing again once the technology gets precarious enough (like it has in the last hundred years or so), and from then on the planetary egregore matures, society unifies, lots of painful fits and purges still happen as past strategies for survival are deemed dangerous and culled, and from there who knows exactly how things meld. Some people have said space seeding, ie. that we're in something that's becoming but not yet God - it makes a certain kind of sense if information is so entwined with spacetime, matter, etc..

A lot of what happens in between all of that of course involves exquisite agony, barbarous stupidity, cruelty, and domination. The increase in numbers, what it takes to be top dog or control one's environment, all of these things seem to have a hand in turning ambition to at least pronounced cruelty and even baseness.

It's really tough for me to think of another story that fits with with the Kabbalistic narrative, and then trying to fit it in it seems like there's an awful lot of Madonna/Whore complex in it. I can't take it in the literal, ie. if it were simple moral curmudgeonry it would be stupid, and who knows - considering past centuries it could be nothing more than that. To try and sensibly abstract it out though I have to put my Jordan Peterson hat and start talking about order, chaos, and clean rooms. The dark goddess, really any of them whether Tiamat, Lilith, Kali, etc., would fit as something like a ground level energy meant to bring life without necessarily bringing order because without at least some cultivation of that there's no place for order to latch on - and order, or really the whole Logos impulse would have nothing more than kelp and lichens to try and bring its will through - to which it probably wouldn't get all that far, which who knows - that's a good reason for the bridegroom to step away until he can actually do something with what's there. I also have to say, Lilith's been interesting to me because the story of her as Adam's first wife sounded like it wasn't a discussion of an insubordinate wife but of a natural world full of animals that were dominating and eating men and women, that Eve might be an analogy for the start of the agricultural revolution. Similarly I think of working with Lilith as a goddess as working with someone who U-bends the perigee of energy, as it sinks and putrefies it she transforms it, a bit like composting certain kinds of psychic energy, and that pet black snake that's wrapped around her is likely none other than that energy on the return, ie. that she's quite akin to a western Kali in being not just a dark goddess but a goddess whose in the business of managing power and teaching people how to cultivate and regulate it.

Hopefully I'm not abstracting this stuff into something it isn't, guys like Dillahunty or Dawkins could be right and a lot of it could just be blunt literal backwardness of human thought at the time. I have to at least partially decline their analysis because for there to be as much congruence across cultures in these stories, again going the Peterson or Weinstein direction here a bit, this has to be in a way channeling the voice of nature itself and telling us something about the story of evolution, the consciousness of evolution, the flavor of evolution, and when we were in our sort of magical dream time culture where the hunter gatherers had their tribal shaman our forms of more discursive logic were still in the oven and, like the words Nietzche mentioned of Sophocles saying of Aeschylus - they operated subconsciously but did what was right. For as much as people try to invent pure fiction at times I don't think we'd have the faintest idea how to, and similarly these tales I think have to come from somewhere even if trying to deal with them at an archetypal level can be daunting.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernici

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I suppose I am in the minority when it comes to actual definitions as to what God is, i.e. I spend my time trying to rationalize a God that functions mechanically and creatively as opposed to anthropomorphically; a creator God in lieu of a personal God. Of course I have the luxury of doing so since life doesn't have any hardships to speak of, and I don't require any answers from God as to why my life appears to have been dealt a sub-standard hand that requires some sort of explanation or resolution - aside from all of my injuries from years of MMA Sparring, but that is my own doing. So other than that all is well, and I have nothing to complain about really.

I believe that God establishes the best possible system for creation that does not account for each individual aspect, but as a whole. And again this would not be analogous to some mundane mental anthropomorphic process, but a divine one which of course transcends human thought in some obscure way. Perhaps as just doing or knowing what is optimum without the error prone thought process, or trial and error type thing.

I believe the pieces of the puzzle have fallen together for me rather well since I started my contemplation from a science/theoretical physics entry point which is more heavy on the objective rather than the subjective processes. I then branched out into a mystical/syncretic paradigm from there and got really lucky in choosing Qabalah since both Models begin with a Zero Volume Existence, e.g. I can make no distinction between a "Singularity" and a "Primordial Point" which I believe to be paramount, and I haven't run into any snags really. So I feel I have chosen the correct path.

Anyway, I don't believe the Divine Source is the type of existence that will yield any compassion or explanation for a lack thereof, but perhaps lower down in the universal hierarchy where there are beings that are closer to us where we can relate more to each other, e.g. Angels, et cetera perhaps, but I don't have any relevant type of experience with such beings in this regard, and can't say the results would be any more rewarding. So maybe we are on or own to resolve any shortcomings.

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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernici

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

Spida wrote:Of course I have the luxury of doing so since life doesn't have any hardships to speak of, and I don't require any answers from God as to why my life appears to have been dealt a sub-standard hand that requires some sort of explanation or resolution - aside from all of my injuries from years of MMA Sparring...
Ahh! A fellow martial artist! I knew I liked ya for a reason. What styles?
Spida wrote:I believe that God establishes the best possible system for creation that does not account for each individual aspect, but as a whole. And again this would not be analogous to some mundane mental anthropomorphic process, but a divine one which of course transcends human thought in some obscure way. Perhaps as just doing or knowing what is optimum without the error prone thought process, or trial and error type thing.
One of the things that was helpful for me was going to a BOTA retreat and talking to the minister as well as some of the other veterans with the order and I think they'd agree also that they, and most kabbalistic/qabalistic orders don't interpret the tree of life as a deific system that interacts with us in a typically Abrahamic or self-conscious or humanly attentive way. That's a huge relief because I really can't look out at the universe, or even within, and see a supreme guiding force that would do that. Angels, gods, goddesses, saints, sure, but a very clear or direct feedback system - at least not without rigorous interpretation and having excluded most straight-forward or obvious interpretations - doesn't seem to be available to us (and perhaps its true that no such thing does exist necessarily unless enough human adepts invent such a thing).

Spida wrote:I believe the pieces of the puzzle have fallen together for me rather well since I started my contemplation from a science/theoretical physics entry point which is more heavy on the objective rather than the subjective processes. I then branched out into a mystical/syncretic paradigm from there and got really lucky in choosing Qabalah since both Models begin with a Zero Volume Existence, e.g. I can make no distinction between a "Singularity" and a "Primordial Point" which I believe to be paramount, and I haven't run into any snags really. So I feel I have chosen the correct path.
The way I'm thinking of it there may be no ultimate meaning, there may every well be multiverses and this particular universe could simply be on of infinitely many. Still, it's clearly - at least as far as I can tell - very haunted in content and listening to Gordon White and Conner Habib recently I can relate quite well to what they called animistic essentialism - ie. a bit like naturalism in its feel and structure but really with a panspcyhist twist.
Spida wrote:Anyway, I don't believe the Divine Source is the type of existence that will yield any compassion or explanation for a lack thereof, but perhaps lower down in the universal hierarchy where there are beings that are closer to us where we can relate more to each other, e.g. Angels, et cetera perhaps, but I don't have any relevant type of experience with such beings in this regard, and can't say the results would be any more rewarding. So maybe we are on or own to resolve any shortcomings.
A couple thoughts on this:

1) Mark Stavish, in his Sanctus Spiritual Fire lectures on Youtube (Institute for Hermetic Studies channel) relates that Agrippa wrote about the saints and that many magicians, as well as Catholics, have sought just that - ie. what's closer to us and more relatable, and it makes sense.

2) I've actually found some of the dark goddesses, especially Lilith, quite approachable and I think there's something to the notion that you can examine your life, examine what you need, examine who'd already like what you have in you, start touching base with them increasingly over the course of a year or two and the relationship can flourish. That said, for the moment I'm still not the kind of person who typically has something like verbal conversations with said deities that I remember. I'm more the type of person who'll get woken up at 3AM for a snuggle, sometimes have something shooting itself in through the top of my head or trying to work its way into the soles of my feet (the later are usually just annoyances and occasionally I will hear them verbally threaten me before they wake me up), and at other times throughout the day I'll get loud/notable ringing in one ear or the other. What I still still have yet to work out is what it means to have the right ear ring rather than the left, or vice a verse, and if that says anything about what's talking to you or whether its simply an arbitrary thing.

Any which way I do have some additional good news - I was working 60-80 hours a week (and driving two hours round trip five days a week) for work for the last three or four months pretty solid and it looks like I might not only have a free weekend now but this craziness might even be dialing back to 40-50 hours of work per week again. I'm hopeful that that's the case, some of the stress will be relieved, and I'll be back to doing what I like to do in my free time - like martial arts, reading philosophy (occult and otherwise), studying my monographs, and maybe even getting a spell in or getting back into music production here and there when I have the chance.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

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1. I think too much time is spent on Kabalah (like everyone else here said.) Trying to stuff all systems into some Jewish chart is stupid. Also it makes it seem like there is some kind of roadmap and progress where there really isn't, and it can make you feel like you are getting somewhere when you are not.
2. Too much attention is paid to planetary hours and phase of the moon. Go try it and see if it actually improves your magick or doesn't really seem to have an effect.
3. Astrology, - I can't make heads or tails of it, too much math, plus it just seems to fate based, like this is what your chart says so this is what you are stuck with.
4. cHaOs MaGiK as if noobies jerking off to a sigil is going to produce anything. Honestly, I think even solo sex magick should be reserved for more advance practitioners who have at least some understanding of how energy systems work, else it could just fail, maybe even backfire.
5. Psychological Model - Don't get me started on the idea of magic being all in your head, it isn't all in your head, there really is a collective unconsciousness.

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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by Shemuel Ben Sabbatai »

Jastiv wrote: Fri May 15, 2020 11:40 pm 4. cHaOs MaGiK as if noobies jerking off to a sigil is going to produce anything. Honestly, I think even solo sex magick should be reserved for more advance practitioners who have at least some understanding of how energy systems work, else it could just fail, maybe even backfire.
Did you really use the term “noobies”?

I’ll respectfully disagree on your point about Kabbalah, but i do feel like people can apply it arbitrarily, like, the tree of life is 1 diagram, it’s used for charting the sefirot, but people just slap it on anything. Have you seen the correspondence tables between the sefirot and chakras, like, why? Why is that a thing?
“Is it true that Mashiach [the Messiah] will come in a generation that is either wholly good or wholly evil?”
“Yes.”
“Then which direction should we take?”
“The Evil Inclination is the Mother of the King; but Holiness will be the first to greet Him when He rises from the dust.”
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

First of all I had no clue this place was back up and running - some of the responses kicked off email notifications.

That OP was actually written at what was the start of what was probably the worst year of my life in terms of work. By January 2019 I was on 60 mg of Nexium, had to fast three or four days at a time and stay on a liquid diet because work and coworker conflict were taking that much of a toll.

Some slight changes of tune I've had since then:

- I've been listening to more of Mark Stavish again lately as he's had a bit more time on his hands to talk about occult matters in general and more than just Egregores. hearing him talk about the path of Tau reminds me that what would be revelant on the ToL, if anything, would be Malkuth and the Path of Tau. The rest, unless you're scrying in the astral in quite a literal sense or making a lot of progress with dream yoga seems like it's more just an exercise of rote memorization that feels interesting for a while until it fails to yield results.

- Last year I finally 'got' what Donald Hoffman was talking about with his Conscious Realism, and it maps on quite well with my take that occult entities and flows of consciousness flow in a way quite well described in the philosophy of mind called 'functionalism with multiple realizability'. He's also a consummate Darwinian, suggests that we've evolved not to see reality but rather only fitness payouts and that any organism seeking truth, competing against an equally complex organisms who sees none of the truth but only fitness payouts, will just about lose hands down every time (no kidding - our culture's an epic reflection of the power of cluster B personality disorders).

- The Portal happened and I've been getting that much more interested in mathematical physics since Eric brought up Sir Roger Penrose's 'The Road to Reality' on Lex Friedman's channel.


Would I still hold the same view on the Exempt Adept pledge? I'd either say 'yes' or I'd say 'I'll leave that for exempt adepts - I'm not one'. There are a lot of ideas out there that tend to have far more in the way of ramifications than they'd seem to on the surface like they're right on point but applying them in an environment that's utterly indifferent gets dangerous fast. As I see it I'm quite willing to remodel my contract with my occult work but I see that in the form of far more humility - sort of along the lines Jean Dubuis often brought up that this is incredibly slow work with equally slow progress, to such a degree that if you can't heal at a distance there's hardly a point in trying to count how many incarnations you have left. While the occult path fit me because I was spiritually oriented and too geeky for mainstream religion it's also hit me that a good part of my run at it was not being able to stand this world, wanting to blast off like a rocket out of it, and as far as I'm concerned at this point that part of my thinking is what had to go - ie. it's simply not an option and if anything I was probably trying to fight against more involution that I still had yet to complete.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

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First of all I had no clue this place was back up and running - some of the responses kicked off email notifications.
I feel like Dr. Frankenstien here "Let there be life." Mwhaha But I will spend some time hanging out here to improve the quality of this forum beyond and above what it once was even.
While the occult path fit me because I was spiritually oriented and too geeky for mainstream religion it's also hit me that a good part of my run at it was not being able to stand this world, wanting to blast off like a rocket out of it, and as far as I'm concerned at this point that part of my thinking is what had to go - ie. it's simply not an option and if anything I was probably trying to fight against more involution that I still had yet to complete.
Yeah, the Left Hand Path (or LHP) and Kali Yurga is where it is at now. You might want to shut yourself up in a monastery, but not going to happen. So basically, being backed into a corner and thus doing magick for the the purpose of bringing drastic changes upon the world, and not just the mere find a lover, get a job type stuff.

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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by LoD »

Ave,

Maybe I´m oversimplifying things and perhaps I am going to look stupid, because I just didn´t have the patience and was basically too lazy to read through all the Kaballah stuff... and maybe that´s also the reason why I mainly immerse myself in the so-called "Left Hand Path" rather than Theosophy or the whole Tree of Life thing (although I have to admit I find the Qliphothic Tree quite remarkable and do readily commune in a spiritual sense with Lilith... guess I just like Her)

I kind of looked at the core of some comments... and it basically boils down to what we define as being good or evil... what we define as being wholesome or harmful... because, all these issues that could be seen in the original post and some following this touch upon disagreeing with or even condemning what other fellow humans may be doing. It doesn´t mean I don´t agree with most of these problems with said human behaviour, but there is of course a flip side to all of this. I also sincerely believe as a moderately intelligent person, that certain behaviour by others around me is just unacceptable. Question is: Unacceptable to whom? Well, to me... and in my mind I wrongly believe that it is also unacceptable to all. This is the point... does the person doing "wrong" also believe he or she is doing wrong? I am pretty sure there are very few who do what I perceive as wrong and fully believe they are doing wrong and go ahead and do it anyway. I´m not talking about premeditated murder, rape or similar crimes... these are simply wrong from a human collective point of view. However, if we touch upon things like beliefs, politics, ideas and philosophies we get into rather treacherous territory. One person´s right may be another person´s wrong. Some adhere to the old adage of survival of the fittest, which means the weak simply have to perish... others feel that the weak must be supported and helped in their survival by the strong... Each have an argument which in itself is true for both. One side is that nature would normally ensure the weak don´t survive so the species can get genetically stronger. The other side is that homo sapiens is a social being and therefore would always support and help those of its kind who are in need...
So if there is "God", what would this God decide? Whose side would this God be on? Which section of humanity would God wipe out to satisfy the needs of the rest? There´s religions who claim God is on their side, yet oppose other religions who basically say the same. I think a lot of this is about perception and I am as guilty of this as anyone else. People irritate me regularly and I find no understanding within myself for their behaviour... that´s my opinion. Does it make me right? According to my view it does, but to another person I may be wrong.
I liked something I heard somewhere which touched upon the purpose of creation: If God exists, God was created without a purpose. Therefore, our creation would also be without purpose.
Perhaps we are just mere entertainment? Who knows, but I don´t think we can clearly define what is "good" and what is "evil"and therefore we cannot identify whether "God" should intervene... because everyone would want this "God" to intervene in a different way! I sure as hell would hate to be God...

LoD

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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

I'm getting at a mentality where the right thing to do with anyone who isn't like them is jam a pen in their eye for having been born.

My biggest concern for that sort of flailing anti-self-control narcissism - I've been listening to a lot of people like Eric Weinstein, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, etc. for a while and particularly to Daniel's rather concise point - exponential technology meeting rivalrous competition is self-terminating, whether that's extinction or whether that's the sort of long-term 'humbling' that James Lovelock and John Gray have talked about in some of their exchanges.

As far as culture's concerned I really have no idea of what to make of where we are other than that I'm starting to wonder if the overwhelming majority of people have severe psychiatric disorders of some type that aren't properly diagnosed. It makes me think of a lot of things that Dr. Ed Dutton / Jolly Heretic has been saying about genetic determinism with most people, ie. that we're seeing the limitations of the human race and it almost seems to be telling us that it can't go on as a project either without a massive die-off in numbers to where the planet can handle this degree of crazy at a smaller scale or an incredibly jack-booted totalitarian system that forces us to be exact replicas of one another with absolutely no art, differentiation, or anything that could look like status competition being allowed. It's like knowing that no matter what you do your future, meaning, and purpose, will be checked and destroyed by turd-flinging monkeys. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to read Seneca because he's an example of one of the Stoic philosophers who was caught up in Nero's orbit, knew the guy was a mad man, knew that he'd eventually have him killed, he tried several times to leave but couldn't get leave from Nero to do so, and sure enough - as he called it - he was forced to commit suicide by Nero's orders for a conspiracy he likely wasn't a direct part to save the life of his family. Western civilization is starting to feel like that much of a psychotic time-bomb.

I sometimes think where things are right now it's actually easier to be a reductive materialist atheist because at least then you get the sense that this was all an accident, that it never had a purpose, and that it's just as well if it vanished by means of Fafka-esque absurdity. Anyone else is forced to look at the broader system and say 'Really?.... this is your best?'.

There is some good news in my life - I might be getting in with some people where my desire to do some kind of good might actually have leverage and I'm fine even if it's unpaid volunteer work. I just hate the idea that a zombie of the 20th century media and communications systems along with another zombie system, globalist neoliberalism which started imploding as far back in 2008, are somehow running our culture into madness while all kinds good ideas for ways of reworking social, economic, and technological ideas from small scales upward again are getting talked about but not acted on.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by LoD »

Ave,

Cybernetic_Jazz... we think alike in many ways. Yes, in my opinion humanity is slowly devolving instead of evolving. The majority adhere to the small pleasures offered to them by those in power. This doesn´t necessarily mean politicians, presidents, kings and queens... Let´s not forget the media, entertainment industry as a whole, so-called "activists" and "social media influencers". So, back to the small pleasures which are of no major consequence to the well being of our species. Give a dog a treat and it will perform a trick... as long as it doesn´t start thining independently!
Let´s be honest, there is a form of creating collectivism at the moment. Yet not the kind I like to see coming into being. I think you may know what I mean.

LoD
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

Yeah, I think Bret Weinstein summed it up at a Future Salon a few years ago quite well - that in a way we 'know' the purpose of human life, it's the same purpose as for spruce trees and squid, and it's not an interesting purpose - ie. that for the faculties we have we really should be able to do better than simply living for fecundity. I see some sliver of hope in a lot of the stuff that Jean Dubuis used to talk about, and it's somewhat along the Whitehead / de Chardin angle, just that it's a bit more of a Hermetically / Kabbalistically informed version of it.

I guess with Kabbalah, TBH, I really don't have a problem with it as an organizational system for concepts, and if there is an objective reality to it at some level I just wish that the bulk of people teaching or writing about it, even when you go looking for the cleaner cut authors who seem to avoid new age like the plague it is, seem to talk it up as if you're going to have the 'fire on the hills' experience within five or ten years, you then go to where people have been doing it for 30 or 40 years of their lives and of hundreds or even thousands you're lucky if you can count even one, and then that one usually had a lot going for themselves before they joined said order. If people could honestly just say 'this is what there is / isn't to it, it's going to take a heck of a lot of entanglement chaining / quantum Darwininism, over multiple lives, to do much of anything with this but - it's the best show in town with the second best show being living for sex, entertainment, drugs, and capitalism while you waste away toward death'. When you don't get honesty out of people you end up completely mis-budgeting your energy and motivation, hitting a wall from being misinformed, and then having to stop for a while to then pull yourself back to reassess things. IMHO if people can't be sold on doing something like that for actual benefits rather than Theosophy level claims of masters, 'manifesting things', etc. that's a really sad reflection on the state of human priorities and I get the impulse, like in martial arts, to spin up belt-factories where people can say they're Ipsissimi in five years and goofy things like that, it's something Manly P Hall used to rip on a fair bit.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

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To add, it poses the question as well - ie. how did any of us end up as practitioners or even researchers in this area?

I think a lot of us looked around at the game that was on offer, saw it completely corrosive to any degree of self-development or discovery, it's a world that essentially tries to feed you roofies and then process you through the Acme green paint slapping machine, and the idea is when they're finished with you you won't know up from down, you'll need them for guidance, and you'll be part of what's really an emergent autopoitic matrix of social control where each person who can't handle dealing with reality on their own gets to play hot-potato with their trauma and pass it on as fast as they can to the next person in that human chain. It also seems to be a large part of why they seem to absolutely loath integrity, it's someone showing that they could do something that they, at some given point, either refused to try or refused to try any longer.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by LoD »

Ave,

Mmmmh... I can´t speak for everybody else, but perhaps we ended up as practitioners or students in whatever form of esoterical/occult subjects we chose because we were looking for a truth which nobody else around us could or would provide... Yes, it is also about enlightenment, but what is enlightenment if not knowing at least part of the whole truth. Now I could start a whole discussion on what is considered truth, because, more often than not, truth (very much like "good" or "evil") is also a matter of perception. We could say that sciences like physics, chemistry and biology are obviously factual truths, but is that 100 % true? I´m a scientist myself so I actually had a bit of a hard time making that last statement... however, the supposed rules of nature have been known to be either bent or altered, right?

Take care and stay out of trouble,

LoD
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

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LoD wrote: Mon Jun 01, 2020 3:03 pm Ave,

Mmmmh... I can´t speak for everybody else, but perhaps we ended up as practitioners or students in whatever form of esoterical/occult subjects we chose because we were looking for a truth which nobody else around us could or would provide... Yes, it is also about enlightenment, but what is enlightenment if not knowing at least part of the whole truth. Now I could start a whole discussion on what is considered truth, because, more often than not, truth (very much like "good" or "evil") is also a matter of perception. We could say that sciences like physics, chemistry and biology are obviously factual truths, but is that 100 % true? I´m a scientist myself so I actually had a bit of a hard time making that last statement... however, the supposed rules of nature have been known to be either bent or altered, right?

Take care and stay out of trouble,

LoD
Sounds interesting... What do you know about " the truth " then?

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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by LoD »

Ave,

I do not nor ever will claim to know the whole truth, because I guess we may disagree on what this truth is. As I said in my previous message, the truth while we wander in this physical existence is more often than not subjective. I am still searching and, when free from the distractions of this existence, occupy my mind with this search.... analyzing, philosophizing, sometimes writing these thoughts down to expand upon them at a later time. Can I tell you what "the truth" is? No, I can only tell others what I think may be true, but nothing more. However, I have learned from my "studies" not to believe everything I am told without question... particularly when it comes to the supposed truths offered to us by the media, governments, religious institutions and the likes. I don´t follow ideologies blindly.

Take care and stay out of trouble,

LoD
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

I was watching a discussion Daniel Schmachtenberger had with Stoa a couple days ago and he pretty much nailed something that I've seen for a while - ie. that we live in a world defined by, really perpetually held hostage by, what he referred to as multipolar traps which are an analysis of arms races, deals no one can refuse if they want to live, and these most often mean races to the bottom, depletion and destruction of the commons, and it's because if one sociopath or group of sociopaths want to set up a game where they can win locally at some gain-maximization that comes at the long term harm of other players or future generations and what they're doing is within the lines of the law it means that everyone else in that industry needs to run full speed at what they're doing to stay in business. Similarly you have the same kinds of arms races in politics toward dogmatism, emotion, and violence where you get either one cartoon caricature of a view or it's opposite and nuance gets you killed.

This gets back to where I can't possibly imagine this world actually wrapping around any given person as a representation of what's going on inside of us, that is unless the messaging on that is that we're constantly fighting off waves of cancer as more and more cells in our body are finding the short term gain of going rogue and reproducing as fast as possible as a run at their own immortality. Anything past that in terms of the physical and social environments being a 'dialog between us and God' really reminds me of a glassy-eyed 'Yes Jesus loves me, yes this I know, yes Jesus loves me - the bible tells me so'.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

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Is the Earth separated from the economic and spiritual processes of the galaxy?

What then are the external constraints upon species using the Earth?

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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by Kath »

astrology is my nickpick.
don't get me wrong, people are more active during a full moon because there's an instinctive knowledge that you can hunt at night in the moonlight. tides rise & fall and affect life. the sun is obviously pretty important. and what time of the year you are born might (possibly) have some influence on your development.

but when a distant planet passes near an arbitrary group of stars which looks like a fishie or a ram, etc. I do NOT realistically expect to interpret that into a financial opportunity in the coming week or anything of that sort.

I also tend to let my eyes glaze over for talk of the mystical usefulness of crystals and spices. As a ritual tool? sure whatever you wanna use. But as a literal object of magical properties? ehhh... I probably have more infused intention, emotion, and ritual contact in my favorite drink mug than in some matter which is in it's frozen state at room temperature.

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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

Kath wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 3:10 pm astrology is my nickpick.
don't get me wrong, people are more active during a full moon because there's an instinctive knowledge that you can hunt at night in the moonlight. tides rise & fall and affect life. the sun is obviously pretty important. and what time of the year you are born might (possibly) have some influence on your development.

but when a distant planet passes near an arbitrary group of stars which looks like a fishie or a ram, etc. I do NOT realistically expect to interpret that into a financial opportunity in the coming week or anything of that sort.
I'd fully agree on the physicality of symbols not having causal power. What I don't know, and I take this from something I've heard recently from Jason Reza Jorjani and his conviction that there actually is something to this stuff and my backing onto my own theories from several years ago as to how something could hold no astronomic accuracy but seem to 'work' is that it would be a network effect. Trying that one on from the perspective of Donald Hoffman's claim that the universe is a social network of conscious agents, adding to that the physicalist interpretation by Stephen Wolfram of the universe as a 'hypergraph' of interconnected dots almost at Plank scale, it suggests that if enough of us believe in BS that the universe around us will to some degree start showing tendencies in those directions. The limits to the power of that would probably lead to little or nothing happening that seems to break the laws of physics because those particles or really low-level agents have no more power than they themselves have.

That's made me wonder, occasionally, if one could project into the mass mind metaphysical or ontological systems that achieve the same end results but have fewer pernicious departures from reality. I see a lot erupting in the public unconscious, part of it's problems from accrual of social power in some places but part of it is unconscious that seems like it's primarily Darwinian and hasn't been made as human-friendly as we'd like for maintaining a forward-looking civilization rather than the sort of Frank Herbert idea that we'll be a pit of inescapable violence by design necessity pretty much until the end of our species.
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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

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> physicality of symbols not having causal power

Think of a symbol as a TV antenna. It has to be the right shape, right materials and right orientation to work.

If a symbol does not literally resonate with (allow ampified access to) some aspect of Reality then it is not a symbol but rather an emblem.

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Re: Mainstream occult ideas that you consider really pernicious?

Post by Kath »

Cybernetic_Jazz wrote: Wed Nov 11, 2020 6:21 pm stuff
That's an interesting perspective. The idea that we create astrological effects through the collective consciousness.
I'd have to dwell on that some I think.

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