I gotta say

[HoldAll]

To be fair, this forum does have a Religion, Spirituality and Meditation as well as a Philosophy and Psychology section. Staff doesn't enforce compartmentalisation too strictly and usually only intervenes in clearcut cases, e.g. when somebody's looking for book recommendations in General Occult Discussion where such posts don't belong. In theory, you could simply ignore the forum sections you're not interested in but I have to admit that there've been posts in General Occult Discussion that don't really belong there. It should be readily apparent from the respective thread titles (ahem) which posts are specifically about occult subjects, are idle speculation pure philosphy, or discuss spiritual systems but it's the nature of the beast that borderlines become frequently blurred.

Posts such as yours are important. We need to be reminded that our flights of fancy have to end somewhere and that it's always a good idea to keep your epiphanies to yourself as per the "Keep silent" rule, or start a forum journal if you feel absolutely compelled to tell the world (it may make for embarrassing reading in a year or two though). There has also been vociferous pushback on occasion whenever somebody chose to reveal to us The One Unassailable Truth. It all evens out eventually. There'll always be factions as soon as you begin a dialogue with a larger number of people. I may indulge in all sorts of of philosophising privately but I'm always prepared to join the utilitarian camp publicly .

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 11:03 AM

Or rather 'utilitarian-ish', I realise now that I'm guilty of having written philosophising replies myself.

 

[MorganBlack]

Holy moly, ahathoor, those are some of the most insightful observations about online esoteric discussion dynamics I have ever read. I will be thinking about this for a while.

(and oregano, thank you for shearing too! I know we value the individual effort, while we also try to speak to an ideal group we all have in our heads. This stuff can be a lonely path, sometimes.)

Like ewiz, I was on Yahoo Groups as we had more sharing of... and let's call it for now: narrow-band, focused speculation based on shared experiences and boots-in-the-circle experimentation.

Years ago, there was a forum where people signed on to a short-term experiment and just did the Headless Rite for a month, and then reported back in to compare ritual notes. With no pre-programming from anyone's personal framework of what they would experience, aside from existing esoteric literature. More of that please.

Now we have WitchTok and other pay-to-play esoteric groups or forums, who all act like there are no longer any open questions. Instant enlightenment, and infinite magic power SOLVED for all time! (Thank God for these wise, and benevolent sages and witches in our midst.) So pack it up folks! Job's done. Nothing further to add.

 

[Frater M.M.]

Yep, yep. I wish I could track down the quote, but I think it was chaos magican-animist Gordon White who said:

"When in ceremony, treat it all literally; when out of ceremony, treat it all as metaphor."

This is what I did early on, even as as a secular-brained person. Fully step into the mythos. Treat spirits, demons, saints, and forces as objective, living entities. For me this was in the 1990's with the Grimorium Verum - long before any of the excellent academic knowledge we have now on the history of the "true nature' (cough) of the GV daimons. Dumb GV works just as well. Full faith, imagination, and immersion just works. Even if you have to fake it.

I think what we're trying to get at is that all this snarky, post-modern detachment or suspicion inside ceremony kills the necessary state of focus and right-brain immersion.

That's a nice quote. It's quite artistic as well. I personally prefer the word "hypothesis" instead of "metaphor" but the sentiment is pretty close either way. [Sidenote: I only discovered last week that both White and Carroll had sadly died this year -- a great loss for the magick world, IMO].

Yeah, for sure, all that snark and suspicion inside the ritual leads to a dead end, IMO. I would add, I've sometimes found results with sincerity and an open mind but I think this is different to just fooling around in a ceremony.

To expand with an example (as others have been good enough to share their experiences on this site/thread):

This year I have been getting into working with Greek deities and I began asking for daily advice (in a sincere and open way) from them via daily (3-card) tarot draws. I've discussed readings on ChatGPT and got it to create me a journal with all the draws as entries, to extract trends and to build up a dictionary of my meanings for each card. The data never really shows predictions but a lot of very on the nose synchronicities in draws and solid advice have appeared, and trends show a fair amount of similar cards re-appearing in similar positions/orientations with consistent themes for advice, etc.

So, during the ceremony I am nowadays fully immersed into communicating with the deities, am grateful and consider the advice seriously. However, in the cold light of the day, post-ceremony, I have various concurrent hypotheses about the data:

(1) chance/luck,
(2) psychological projection onto interpretation and significance of cards,
(3) contact with archetypes/higher-self/alien entity dressed as the Greek pantheon,
(4) brain psi powers activated by ritual,
(5) contact with the actual Greek pantheon, etc.

As I collect more data, some of these may look more likely than others. However, the real measure for me is: does this practice help me move towards my values or not, am I getting the results I want? The answer is yes, so I keep doing it. The ritual certainly feels real in the moment now, but if somehow all this turned out to be explained by one of the first 4 options, that wouldn't make the practice worthless to me if it kept producing results.

Personally, I like just being a regular person most of the time, and maintaining a 24/7 religious devotion or alt-lifestyle wackiness is not fun for me. I have morning and evening prayers to maintain connection with my allies and the living reality of my mythic-religious framework. But for most of the time, I am just me. A regular, if a bit spooky dude.

....

I highly recommend paranormal writer Joshua Cutchin's work on the fluid and liminal nature of the paranormal / sublunar reality.

Yeah, my take on things is that I don't really see a separation between sacred/spiritual and profane/mundane. So tidying my room or going to the gym could be an act of devotion or an offering if I want it to be. However, that doesn't mean when I go to do my groceries in the afternoon, I walk down the road to Tesco in a toga wielding a caduceus in one hand and singing hymns to Hermes. And also, like you, most of the time I'm busy working, watching TV, reading or paying bills, etc.

Thanks for the recommendation on Cutchin. I'll check him out.

 

[Kepler]

a lot of occult discussion both here and elsewhere online reads like an amateur philosophy debate forum. This is not how I generally conceive of magick.

Part of my understanding of the spiritual path as it relates to the archetype of The Wizard is that at a certain point, what was once called "knowledge", ie the theories, propositions, hypothesis, models, philosophies, frameworks, etc that are discussed and debated as a search for some kind of universal truth, eventually fade away into the background and are no longer the focus of the wizard's endeavors. They become a means rather than an end. The time for analytical thought for the purpose of discovering what is "the truth" has ended, and the time for action and experimentation has begun. In other words, you've done enough "finding out" and now it's time to "fuck around".

I'm not saying that philosophizing and debating about philosophizing is any kind of bad thing per ce. Just that it's not the focus I'd expect a magick group to have.

Am I way off base?

There seems to be some confusion between the beginner state of choosing a path and studying it for basic modification to even begin experimentation, and the path at a stage of mastery where the best efforts of the Wizard have been codified through experience and detached from when encountering the Abyss.
In Fallibilism there's never a guarantee to possess the absolute truth, only increasingly better approximations of it. Have you considered that maybe there's adjustments from experience being worked out?

 

[Nembra]

Personally I'm not interested, I will skip threads about "The Universal Truth about the Universe and Everything" and prefer practical discussions, sharing resources and helping others out in specific matters, but to each its own.

I love them, that's where the most deliciously deranged takes are.

 

[Keldan]

You’re not entirely off base, but you’re looking at only one side of what serious magick practice requires. A lot of occult discussion online does devolve into endless theory. Some who never move beyond concepts and frameworks, for whom magick remains an intellectual hobby rather than an actual path. But discussion, theory, and debate are not misplaced in a magick group. The problem isn’t the presence of theory, it’s the absence of discernment and practice.

Magick especially as lived by working practitioners becomes experience first. You do the work, you have tangible encounters and phenomena, your life changes, and you learn from what actually happens, not from what sounds cool in a thread.

Yes, there is a lot of theory everywhere, not just on one forum. But because I actively practice, I can discern which posts are pure speculation and which are real, lived experience. That’s the big difference. I practice spirit work and I work with a ton of spirits, all of them are all outside grimoires, so my base of experience is already different from those whose framework is based on grimoires. I respond to threads that arise from practice and to those where practitioners are asking for methods or techniques born out of direct work.

There are entire layers of magick you simply cannot understand without practice. If you haven’t done the work, then no amount of reading or exposure to practitioner accounts will change the fact that their reports will tend to be dismissed as “just theory,” or misunderstood, overlooked, or written off as crazy ideas. If your exposure is mainly to grimoire spirits and discourse around them, you simply won’t have access to many of the currents and spirits that practitioners like me are engaging with. So when we share certain experiences, if your practice hasn’t touched those currents, they may look theoretical or philosophical to you, even though they are verifiable practitioner experience.

If you want real knowledge, you need discernment. Discernment between speculation and experience, and discernment to recognize when someone is speaking from actual work, even if their vocabulary or framework differs from yours. With that discernment, it becomes straightforward to identify threads that contain usable methods and validated experience rather than just endless theorizing.

I tend to drop information in small, targeted ways rather than dumping everything at once. I share pieces of lived experience and method that will resonate with certain practitioners when they’re actually ready to do the work. The core skill here isn’t arguing better philosophy, it’s discernment. You’ll know exactly where the real magick is happening.

 

[r4zorenigma]

a lot of occult discussion both here and elsewhere online reads like an amateur philosophy debate forum. This is not how I generally conceive of magick.

Part of my understanding of the spiritual path as it relates to the archetype of The Wizard is that at a certain point, what was once called "knowledge", ie the theories, propositions, hypothesis, models, philosophies, frameworks, etc that are discussed and debated as a search for some kind of universal truth, eventually fade away into the background and are no longer the focus of the wizard's endeavors. They become a means rather than an end. The time for analytical thought for the purpose of discovering what is "the truth" has ended, and the time for action and experimentation has begun. In other words, you've done enough "finding out" and now it's time to "fuck around".

I'm not saying that philosophizing and debating about philosophizing is any kind of bad thing per ce. Just that it's not the focus I'd expect a magick group to have.

Am I way off base?

This isn't a magick group.. This is just a forum for magick related topics. I think you expected a bit too much from a forum online when forums are kinda dying out on the net.

I've been involved deeply with the occult for many years.. I have only gotten back into it recently as there have always been techniques, ideas, concepts that I've utilized throughout my time, even when I steered away from my major practices. Truth is most of us who have developed facultities to create great outcomes dont care to spend time on internet corners -- we usually have covens, temples or are apart of networks of friends/fellowship that we can relate to --rather than talk to some people who we know nothing about.. I no longer am apart of any network or covens related to my occult practices however, so i am here-- mostly just to share my experience and wisdom.. for those interested.