[Help] Help me reconsile my path and my love of the world.

[Rusty64]

I've been practicing magick of one form or another for years, and ultimately it stems from a desire for knowledge, that's why I'm so drawn to hermeticism and Thoth, I want to know of things seen(this one is pretty easy and the reason I'm in college) but also unseen, I want to understand the workings of the universe. I also love the physical as much as the spiritual, not the wealth or the people particularity. But the natural world I love almost nothing more than that, I love ecosystems, Dense forests and open plains, the beauty of the frozen Canadian north or vibrant reds of the American south west. Both the Mercy and brutality of the cycle of life, I love decomposition it's a beautiful thing watching the body of a once living thing return to serve the forest it was a part of.
I say all of this because a lot of Ideas in hermeticism and general Knowledge focused schools of magick are deeply anti-material. In hermeticism the physical is made by god but still illusory and false and therefore "evil"(I understand this isn't like christian go to hell evil but still). How do I reconcile these two parts of myself, Particularity because in my UPG I feel closer to divinity in natural spaces than I have in any temple, church, or house of worship. Could it be that the world has truth in it, that the physical part of the world is more than just an illusion to be discarded when I ascend?

 

[sydward]

Yes! The microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. The physical world is not an illusion, simply a different world than the spiritual world. I am a firm believer of interdisciplinary study, and magic has much to gain from analysis of the physical.

I think a big reason why the older texts forsake the physical world so heavily is that they were trying get people to understand a world beyond the physical. However, the physical world is as divine as we are. We are all nodes in the fungal network that is god–we are the universe experiencing itself.

 

[Favonias]

This is part of the "Divine Paradox" in which we must acknowledge the illusion but learn to operate within it as though it were real. As a reflection of the divine it encompasses both the good and the ill...beauty and goodness and evil. The trick, supposedly, is to not move as a sleep walker, buffeted about and trapped within it but to move with consciousness to better learn the mind of the divinity within us. This is part of what I gleaned from The Kybalion and other writings at any rate...I believe that a lot of the thinking about pure evil is an addition from the Cathars/Gnostics

 

[Rusty64]

Yes! The microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. The physical world is not an illusion, simply a different world than the spiritual world. I am a firm believer of interdisciplinary study, and magic has much to gain from analysis of the physical.

I think a big reason why the older texts forsake the physical world so heavily is that they were trying get people to understand a world beyond the physical. However, the physical world is as divine as we are. We are all nodes in the fungal network that is god–we are the universe experiencing itself.

Thank you for your kind words. And quite the coincidence, I'm currently writing an article for class about fungal networks(Mycorrhiza AKA the wood wide web). Sometimes things just happen to line up like that, I usually take them as a sign.

 

[AbammonTheGreat]

I've been practicing magick of one form or another for years, and ultimately it stems from a desire for knowledge, that's why I'm so drawn to hermeticism and Thoth, I want to know of things seen(this one is pretty easy and the reason I'm in college) but also unseen, I want to understand the workings of the universe. I also love the physical as much as the spiritual, not the wealth or the people particularity. But the natural world I love almost nothing more than that, I love ecosystems, Dense forests and open plains, the beauty of the frozen Canadian north or vibrant reds of the American south west. Both the Mercy and brutality of the cycle of life, I love decomposition it's a beautiful thing watching the body of a once living thing return to serve the forest it was a part of.
I say all of this because a lot of Ideas in hermeticism and general Knowledge focused schools of magick are deeply anti-material. In hermeticism the physical is made by god but still illusory and false and therefore "evil"(I understand this isn't like christian go to hell evil but still). How do I reconcile these two parts of myself, Particularity because in my UPG I feel closer to divinity in natural spaces than I have in any temple, church, or house of worship. Could it be that the world has truth in it, that the physical part of the world is more than just an illusion to be discarded when I ascend?

Read the divine poimandres again. Specifically the part where man looked down at nature and loved what he saw, and so he descended into it and nature loved man and embraced him.

Hermeticism is creation affirming. It says right in the divine poimandres that we chose to come here and the natural world embraces us. That is why we have a dual nature, its why we are both mortal and immortal. Hermetism is unique amongst its mileu because of this. The middle platonists, stoics, and gnostics viewed the world as decay, imperfect, and a trap while the hermeticists embraced their role in it as demiurgous. That is why it says in the divine poimandres that we are brothers of the craftsman.

 

[sydward]

Thank you for your kind words. And quite the coincidence, I'm currently writing an article for class about fungal networks(Mycorrhiza AKA the wood wide web). Sometimes things just happen to line up like that, I usually take them as a sign.

Once you align yourself with the universe, the synchronicities grow and grow <3

 

[Beyond Everything]

I say all of this because a lot of Ideas in hermeticism and general Knowledge focused schools of magick are deeply anti-material. In hermeticism the physical is made by god but still illusory and false and therefore "evil"(I understand this isn't like christian go to hell evil but still)

I'd suggest relinquishing those fairy tales about a god 'creating' the world. And good and evil don't really mean anything absolute- they are subjective and emotional labels. That said, whether the world is a debased realm or even a trap or prison, what one can say with surety is that it is limited.

. How do I reconcile these two parts of myself, Particularity because in my UPG I feel closer to divinity in natural spaces than I have in any temple, church, or house of worship. Could it be that the world has truth in it, that the physical part of the world is more than just an illusion to be discarded when I ascend?

Natural forces are ultimately unrefined masks of supraphysical cosmic forces.

Ascension does mean leaving behind the physical world and existing in higher dimensions. Although one could theoretically keep consciously incarnating.

 

[HoldAll]

My own take is that the material world isn't illusory at all, it's as real as it gets. It's only our interpretations of it, the feelings we harbour towards it, and the value judgements we make about it. Say you stub your toes on a stone. That stone is real and so are your toe. The illusions start when you get angry at the stone as if it was a person, or begin to lament the fact that you're trapped in this physical body, and those illusions include judging matter as evil. Matter just IS. The beauty of nature wasn't created specifically for you, the phenomenon of toothaches wasn't created to torment you personally; wishing that one was pure spirit instead means falling prey to yet another kind of illusion.

Let's not forget that all these texts were written in times when healthcare was as good as non-existent, when war, famine, plagues, etc. were a real constant threat, and life expectancy much shorter than it is today. People back then had every reason to hate the body – we don't.