I've been involved in occultist/metaphysical/pagan/new age spirituality the majority of my life and enjoy talking about it. So lay it on my comrades!
I've been involved in occultist/metaphysical/pagan/new age spirituality the majority of my life and enjoy talking about it. So lay it on my comrades!
Do you have a specific set of writings you like, or do you pick and choose based on what 'resonates' with you? Your post lists 4 pretty different sets of thinking, so I'm curious more what you lean towards.
I've read alot over the years and been involved with a few covens.
I always recommend Liber Null, the elder Futhark, awakening the energetic body, initiation into hermetics.
So I guess I have explored and picked what has resonated with me, eclectic path for sure! However a core tenet of my faith is that there are no gods and no masters over me.
Chaos magic is definitely pretty interesting. I started in Thelema and other Crowley stuff as an edgy teen, and moved onto Chaos magic. Funnily enough, that took me to Robert Anton Wilson, and lot of the Discordianism stuff has moved my perspective to be overall less magical. I'm definitely more of the mind that magic is just changing yourself, rather than changing anything in the world, though my history with mental illness may be flavoring that view, so I'm hardly dogmatic about it.
What you described is how I view high and low magick or left hand / right hand path.
High / right hand magick is about influencing the self and experiencing other means of conciousness, while low/left hand is about manipulating the world around you.
Crowley has some good texts liber 777 is good but I disagree with his penchant for drugs. If you cant trance or maintain a force of will sober why would you do a ritual inebriated.
I have entered a trance and done astral travel sober but i do find various intoxicants can really lower the barrier to entry. And I'm not going to preach the gospel of DMT but holy shit it has taken me places more profound then I thought possible. Even after years I remember the things I've learned while tripping.
Without a doubt! Super powerful tools for when you want to use them. Personally I wanted to develop some ability and confidence before using an Entheogen
Oh yeah, both he and Discordanism stuff has big drug themes, which I have some issues with. At the same point, while I've avoided drugs for personal reasons, both the occult books and beat generation books spoke to me a lot with their discussions of altered consciousnesses, and depictions of hallucinations, so even if I don't directly agree with it, those types of writing have still been very useful for me to find my own sort of stability.
Right! And when you see scrying to me that is quieting the self enough for the stream of conciousness to flow and with practice a stream of images, but discernment has always been important to me to validate my experiences and it's hard to do that on drugs.
What is an interesting example of low/left hand magic that you've done?
When I got fired for union organizing I cursed the business which subsequently shut down during covid about a month later.
Also had some good results from money magick, found a $100 bill on the ground a week after doing one.
Do you see practical revolutionary uses for this? Are you hoping to go down that road?
In regards to material changes not really, taking material action is how you make material changes but I do think it's useful for finding what ones own pinnacle is useful for an individuals contribution. The development of the lower dan Tian was useful to Chinese soldiers.
Also philosophically I find the permanent revolution to be applicable to the tipareth sephira, while neoliberalism the path between chesed and netzach while an anarchistic approach could be cached in geburah to hod.