What metaphor or image has shaped your magical thinking? (a notebook exercise)

[Romolo]

I propose a thread to share one gem from your notebooks: quotes, aphorisms, anything not longer than one paragraph. Focus on a text fragment that has ultimately shaped your magical thinking or the way you approach the occult/esoteric/magic. It could provide the other members of the forum with a portal to delve into a new book. No further explanations are needed as to why the quote is powerful, but it should be chosen with care. My contribution (and very curious to read yours):

“There is but one road to the Path; at its very end alone the "Voice of the Silence" can be heard. The ladder by which the candidate ascends is formed of rungs of suffering and pain; these can be silenced only by the voice of virtue. Woe, then, to thee, Disciple, if there is one single vice thou hast not left behind. For then the ladder will give way and overthrow thee; its foot rests in the deep mire of thy sins and failings, and ere thou canst attempt to cross this wide abyss of matter thou hast to lave thy feet in Waters of Renunciation. Beware lest thou should'st set a foot still soiled upon the ladder's lowest rung. Woe unto him who dares pollute one rung with miry feet. The foul and viscous mud will dry, become tenacious, then glue his feet unto the spot, and like a bird caught in the wily fowler's lime, he will be stayed from further progress. His vices will take shape and drag him down. His sins will raise their voices like as the jackal's laugh and sob after the sun goes down; his thoughts become an army, and bear him off a captive slave.” (from Madame Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence)

 

[Xenophon]

I like the query.

Personally, I was struck by Miguel Serrano's, "Humankind does not have a destiny; only some few humans: to recover lost divinity."

 

[HoldAll]

I could cite all kinds of quotes that have given me spiritual insights over the years but what really affected my day-to-life in a purely practical magical sense is this passage from Draja Mickaharic's "Magic Simplified" (I've uploaded a selection of his books including this one in Book Shares):

Even this deceptively simple relaxation exercise will require at least a year of daily work to really master. Do not be impatient - the time will pass you by in any event. If you really master the exercise you will gain something from the passage of time. If you do not master the exercise, you will have lived through the time, but you may well have gained nothing of permanent value to your real being from having done so.

Ok, Draja Mickaharic is playing Captain Obvious here but for me, these words were huge. Franz Bardon's IIH and other books describing mandatory (and very boring) preparatory exercises before even beginning to think of your first ritual (Josephine McCarthy's Quarea comes to mind) kept me baulking at meditation, breathwork etc. for years, so when reading these sentences, a lightbulb went off in my head: "Of course! I could spend another year of despair and frustration, reading about such exercises with a growing sense of exasperation and get nowhere, so I'd better try and institute some daily practice instead!" The quote from a very mild-mannered and tolerant author may not be a surefire antidote to the all-too-common general laziness of baby magicians but it hit me right where it hurts at the right time.

What's more, all these traditional books requiring preparatory exercises have simply added to the nagging suspicion that casual operations involving chaos magic sigils or the overly simple GoM methods were not all what they were cracked up to be and finally convinced me that some groundwork was in fact required first in order to make them effective.

 

[8Lou1]

for me the picture of baphomet. with the masonic comment that the name is derived from the prophet mohammed and that calvinism was created due to the fact that islam had too much truth calvin could handle.

such shit makes me smile....

 

[JMPtD]

Dr strange doing the ring finger and Wanda doing the tai chi master finger harpy. Also picture of Merlin makin things happen in ancient aliens with the hands up. And goku being blue. There are great energetic energies in them. Plus jewel in the lotus can really get manifestation and enrichment momentum happening.

 

[KjEno186]

"Is it necessary to speak more clearly? The milder and calmer you are, the more effective will be your anger; the more energetic you are, the more precious will be your forbearance; the more skillful you are, the better will you profit by your intelligence and even by your virtues; the more indifferent you are, the more easily will you make yourself loved. This is a matter of experience in the moral order, and is literally realised in the sphere of action. Human passions produce blindly the opposites of their unbridled desire, when they act without direction. Excessive love produces antipathy; blind hate counteracts and scourges itself; vanity leads to abasement and the most cruel humiliations. Thus, the Great Master revealed a mystery of positive magical science when He said, "Forgive your enemies, do good to those that hate you, so shall ye heap coals of fire upon their heads." Perhaps this kind of pardon seems hypocrisy and bears a strong likeness to refined vengeance. But we must remember that the magus is sovereign, and a sovereign never avenges because he has the right to punish; in the exercise of this right he performs his duty, and is implacable as justice. Let it be observed, for the rest, so that no one may misinterpret my meaning, that it is a question of chastising evil by good and opposing mildness to violence. If the exercise of virtue be a flagellation for vice, no one has the right to demand that it should be spared, or that we should take pity on its shame and its sufferings." - Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic (The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic)

 

[Xenophon]

"Is it necessary to speak more clearly? The milder and calmer you are, the more effective will be your anger; the more energetic you are, the more precious will be your forbearance; the more skillful you are, the better will you profit by your intelligence and even by your virtues; the more indifferent you are, the more easily will you make yourself loved. This is a matter of experience in the moral order, and is literally realised in the sphere of action. Human passions produce blindly the opposites of their unbridled desire, when they act without direction. Excessive love produces antipathy; blind hate counteracts and scourges itself; vanity leads to abasement and the most cruel humiliations. Thus, the Great Master revealed a mystery of positive magical science when He said, "Forgive your enemies, do good to those that hate you, so shall ye heap coals of fire upon their heads." Perhaps this kind of pardon seems hypocrisy and bears a strong likeness to refined vengeance. But we must remember that the magus is sovereign, and a sovereign never avenges because he has the right to punish; in the exercise of this right he performs his duty, and is implacable as justice. Let it be observed, for the rest, so that no one may misinterpret my meaning, that it is a question of chastising evil by good and opposing mildness to violence. If the exercise of virtue be a flagellation for vice, no one has the right to demand that it should be spared, or that we should take pity on its shame and its sufferings." - Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic (The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic)

Like usual with old Elphias, even when I agree with him I find myself squirming. Yearning the pithy epigrams his countrymen are often capable of. I see several candidates in the above word-stew. Mebbe

 

[pixel_fortune]

This explanation re: the pillar of form / severity. Before that, I understood that restriction was necessary for moral governance, but not how it was an intrinsic part of creation

"There is a deep mystery in form. The world is made not of things, but of patterns. In our minds we accept the reality of these patterns, and forget that the sweet, white stuff we put in our tea and coffee is just one of an infinite number of patterns of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.

Carbon is just one of a large number of combinations of protons, neutrons and electrons, and so on. We forget that “War and Peace” is just one of an infinite number of combinations of letters of the alphabet. The patterns are our reality, and I suspect that only the patterns are real - there is nothing more real than patterns waiting to be discovered."

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Now I really think of everything in terms of patterns. For example, people think of bones as solid and static, but they're not. They are constantly breaking down bone and growing new bone, just like muscle tissue does. Osteoporosis isn't caused by bones getting weathered, it's when bone is broken down at a faster rate than new bone is built

The point being: your bones are in constant flux, they might as well be flowing water, but since they are constantly flowing through the pattern that says "femur", they appear fixed

 

[Xenophon]

Nimrod de Rosario had a metaphor of the cosmos as a balloon. "Creation" was the Demiurge yanking it inside-out and fekking all up. See "Gnostic Fragments" for the short version. "Elements of Hyperborean Wisdom" for the long (long) version.

 

[Roma]

I was not much into notebooks but I remember an event.

I stood on a planetary energy line that was blocked. I pushed light out of my third eye along the line in front of me.

After about a minute I was hit in the back of the head by my energy. The line had unblocked and flowed around the planet.

There were 4 other blocked lines there, so I said: I will have a go at those.

"No you won't" was the reply

So I did not.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Sabine Hossenfelder: "Entropy is not a measure of disorder; it is a measure of possibilities"

And as a pair:
Aleister Crowley: “In this book it is spoken of... Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.”

Werner Heisenberg: “we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.”

 

[Nereus]

The litany against fear from Dune was very very helpful to me.

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."

 

[Mannimarco]

"You don't get what you deserve, you get what you can negotiate"

This actually describes my shift from religious to magickal thinking quite well

 

[Taudefindi]

Page 11 of the book Mage The Awakening Second Edition:

Spoiler: swearing

"I'll tell you the ultimate secret of magic.Any cunt could do it."

 

[Robert Ramsay]

That's John Constantine, unsurprisingly

 

[DiLoco_DelEted]

To advance—that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn’t matter in the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue.

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[Robert Ramsay]

To advance—that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn’t matter in the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue.

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Anthony Trollope, one of the most prolific novelists of his time, advised to write for at least an hour before breakfast. "What you start writing may be complete rubbish, but by the end of the hour, you will be WRITING."

 

[DiLoco_DelEted]

There was a movie .. a detective P.I. type thriller where everyone but him worked magic of some kind.
Kind of like when I worked mortuary transport for four months and everyone but me was strapped.

 

[Vandheer]

This was from Supernatural. "Nobody gives us the right, we take it."

From my start of practicing till this day I stuck with this idea, no matter what author said otherwise so.

 

[Xenophon]

I was not much into notebooks but I remember an event.

I stood on a planetary energy line that was blocked. I pushed light out of my third eye along the line in front of me.

After about a minute I was hit in the back of the head by my energy. The line had unblocked and flowed around the planet.

There were 4 other blocked lines there, so I said: I will have a go at those.

"No you won't" was the reply

So I did not.

If a stick I threw hit me in the back of the head, I'd simply assume it was a boomerang, not that I could wing it all the way 'round the world. Guess I'm just modest.

Post automatically merged: Nov 27, 2023

This was from Supernatural. "Nobody gives us the right, we take it."

From my start of practicing till this day I stuck with this idea, no matter what author said otherwise so.

A fine epigram. But I bet you don't get invited over to folks' houses much anymore, eh wot?