Tag Archives: esoteric

Occultism and Esoterism, Philosophy, Spirituality and Psychology

On The Esoteric Meaning of Meditation (and Where Magic Power Comes From)

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Often people associate meditation with the quest for aha-moments. There is more than one kind of meditation. While realizations can come from any kind, the one that tends to produce them is discursive meditation, where attention is fixed on a symbol, image, phrase, prayer or problem.

Meditation, understood as simply sitting somewhere, catching one’s attention in the act of wandering off and bringing it back, does not necessarily entail the reaching of any conclusion on any particular subject, although it can foster clarity, which is conducive of finding solutions.

Many occult schools and spiritual organizations recommend meditation, and even though I am no longer part of any of them at the current stage, I think it is for good reason. The stilling of the “monkey mind” before ritual work is only the most obvious of the benefits of meditating.

Deeper than that is the fact that meditation is not a state we get into. It is a state we get out of and must return to consciously. Our attention’s natural place is here, next to us. Our attention is like a blade: it belongs sheathed on our belt, ready for action when needed. Instead, we spend our time swinging it about maniacally, blunting it by hitting it against anything that crosses our path.

There is tremendous power in keeping our attention by ourselves, in the present moment. Here and now, being and changing coincide one with the other, and together they coincide the the state of initial void from which the power needed for magic comes.

All too often I hear phrases like “you are the magic” or “the power comes from you.” Although these are supposed to be empowering statements and they mean well, they are founded on an egocentric misunderstanding typical of our age, where old ideas that would otherwise be dismissed as superstitions, like magic, seek to survive by psychologizing themselves.1

But Magic is the art of creating vessels for spiritual forces to dwell in. We, too, are vessels. Magic comes through us, not from us. In meditation, with our attention sheathed by our side, we slowly make room from something other than our ego to incarnate through us.

MQS

  1. This is not meant to discredit psychological work, which can and often is necessary in our line of work. But psychology is not spirituality or occultism. ↩︎
astrology, Occultism and Esoterism

The Esoteric Side of the Loneliness Epidemic

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In scrolling on youtube I must have passed the third or fourth pompous video essay on the loneliness epidemic and the atomization of society. Then I had to laugh as I looked at myself from the outside, lonely in my office, my eyes glued to a stupid screen, which is usually what these videos complain about. I don’t like complaining, but I do like observing.

From an astrological standpoint, loneliness is ruled by Saturn, the greater malefic. Let me stress the word ‘malefic’. Generations of people better than us had no problem calling Saturn and Mars malefic and acknowledging the presence of evil in the world, yet the Becky’s and LaRhonda’s of the world who spend their time deluding themseves manifesting on social media think the concept of evil is beneath them.

It is, by the way, no moralistic notion of evil. Evil is simply that which is contrary to life (life being understood not vitalistically, but as outward expression of the metaphysical process of emanation).

Saturn is evil, greatly so. Even the few gifts it has for us are laced with poison: its deep wisdom, discernment and secret philosophy are often accompanied by illness, depression, poverty, general gloominess of circumstances. Saturn is not the cantankerous but loveable teacher that it is made out to be in pop astrology.

This doesn’t mean that Saturn is an unaccountable Satan like that of the exoteric tradition of many religions: Saturn does actively take part in the process of creation, but it usually does so by fulfilling the destructive and separative part of the equation. For instance, in some old hermetic and astrological texts Saturn is said to rule the first part of the pregnancy. This is the part where the soul becomes bound to the biological process of an individual body.

Through Saturn we become ‘this thing here’, before the other planets add their traits. Because we become ‘this thing here’ we also become subject to death, also ruled by Saturn, who is thus the first Planet we encounter descending and the last one we encounter ascending. Our being one thing, one individual, is the result of Saturn’s work.

As such, our existence as individual, ‘saturnian’ beings is also the basis of our loneliness, which is the presupposition of all we can do and achieve in life, all the social, political, cultural and economic structures we can weave together with other people.

It is not casual that all totalitarian ideologies seek to break down the ties that bind us to other people. All ideologies aim to push a certain image of humanity that corresponds to that ideology’s idea of good, but this image is usually the product of the ideologue’s deep delusion and would never occur by itself. The ideologue’s push becomes therefore a push for the reconstruction of humanity from the ground up.

And what is the ground? Saturn! The isolated individual, the one who has been torn from his or her social, moral, spiritual fabric is an individual who has been reduced to the Saturn phase of his conception, the phase where all we can say about them is that they are one thing, but before the other planets (let alone life experience) have added their specifications. The ideology then seeks to add its own imprint on this amorphous thing.

We do not live in times of totalitarian rule (anyone who argues the contrary has likely never experienced the horrors of totalitarianism). But we do live in times where there are people who profit from our isolation in a similar way.

So what is the conclusion? There is no conclusion. This is just a collection of notes as I observe the world around me. I am not suggesting any conspiracy or any evil master plan. I am merely observing who profits and who doesn’t from the current state of affairs. It is a simple reflection on what it means, from a magical standpoint, to isolate people.

MQS

astrology, Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology

The Objectivity of Magic

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Since it’s Leo season I’m rather busy creating Sun talismans and “recharging” old ones (I am not fond of the idea of talismans as something to be charged, but I digress).

This reminded me of one time, a couple of years back, when hubby was in somewhat of an existential crisis as far as his job was concerned. I was working on a Sun talisman, but didn’t tell him (he knows of my esoteric interests but doesn’t interfere, and I don’t keep him abreast of all my workings).

The night after the consecration, hubby woke up at dawn, something that rarely happens, and was drawn by the rising Sun. Inexplicably he was compelled to open a job-searching app he hadn’t opened in a while. Right in front of him was the perfect job opportunity. He applied and got the job.

This little episode, I think, is a good example of how objective magic’s power is. Of course, if by objective we mean “amenable to consistent, quasi-scientific manipulation” then magic is not objective. The presupposition nestled in the heart of science is the possibility of endlessly manipulating reality, while magic has its unbreakable patterns.

Furthermore, white magic tends to have less dramatic (sometimes hardly noticeable) effects than dark magic, because it largely harmonizes the person with the patterns available in their life rather than running against them (if someone is saying that they’ll bring back the love of your life with white magic, they are lying).

Finally, magic doesn’t work as reliably as the technology stemming from science, and never will. If the remote doesn’t work you know you must either change the batteries or see if some wires have come loose inside. But pinpointing what’s gone wrong in a magical operation is much harder, and sometimes things simply don’t work because screw you any old mortal.

But magic is objective in the sense that its influence on reality becomes undeniable to those who have had to do with it. Just like with divination, it is really hard to find excuses and rationalizations.

Also, magic is objective in the sense that it forces us out of our ego and in contact with objective forces outside of us. Some may argue these forces also exist inside of us, and that’s true. In the esoteric constitution of humanity the seven planets are all present, but in so far as their activity is bound by our limitation it is relatively useless, which is why it becomes imperative to overcome those limitations by coming into contact with those same forces outside of us.

Way too much emphasis today is placed on the psychological side of magic and spirituality. This is in part a survival mechanism adopted by our forebears to allow magic to survive the scientific revolution (you can’t disprove me if I’m just an inner feeling).

Working on ourselves is certainly a great idea, though rarely in the sense that this is done nowadays, which usually plunges people even more deeply in their narcissism. However, I believe much of the value of the esoteric arts is that they force us to come out of our selves and in contact with something objective and far greater.

The famous esoteric/philosophical motto “Know thyself” has been reinterpreted in the most abstrusely psychological ways recently, but it is very unlikely that this is what those who wrote it meant by “knowing ourselves”: in the old view of the cosmos, it was impossible to know oneself without knowing one’s place in the scheme of things and therefore not eluding reality, including higher forms of reality, and experiencing the point of juncture between the individual and the universal.

MQS