In our journey through the neglected kingdom of Yeats’s A Vision we have now reached one of the points where many previous explorers decided to give up and go home. Not coincidentally, this is also where we move from the material Yeats put into the 1925 version to some of the new material he added in the 1937 edition. This new material is nothing like as lively or as accessible as the introductions and the stories of Michael Robartes’ madcap friends. We are moving into the deep places of Yeats’s occult philosophy, and passing from the relative approachability of the four Faculties to the more unfamiliar realm of the four Principles.
The Principles appeared briefly in the 1925 edition of our text, but what Yeats had to say about them was brief and rather confused. In our present text, by contrast, the discussion is very precise and detailed but it is also very condensed; Yeats covers a vast amount of teaching in a fairly brief space. This is the sort of material, familiar to readers of old magical and spiritual literature, that quite literally has to taken apart sentence by sentence and word by word. Try to read it in a rush and you’ll end up hopelessly lost in an unfamiliar landscape.
Let’s go step by step, then, into the realm of the Principles. There are four of them, as already noted, and they are the innate ground of the Faculties, the underlying structures of the soul on which the Faculties are built and on which each incarnation rings its own changes:
To Will corresponds the Husk, which is the template for the body and its senses.
To Mask corresponds Passionate Body, which is all that the Husk seeks to experience.
To Creative Mind corresponds Spirit, which perceives and then embodies ultimate realities.
To Body of Fate corresponds Celestial Body, which is the unity of the ultimate realities or divine ideas, as in Plato’s thought.
These four Principles, diverse as they may seem, are all phases or aspects of the Daimon, the immortal self. The Daimon itself is a unity, symbolized by a sphere. The consciousness of incarnate human beings can only perceive things through contrast, though, and so we can only become conscious of a unity by dividing it into its various factors or expressions, which define one another through their difference. The term Yeats uses here is antinomy, which comes from the Greek for “opposed laws”—an antinomy is a set of two things that follow opposite rules or principles. (Don’t confuse it with the word “antimony,” which is a metal used in alchemy—I’ve seen this mistake made surprisingly often.)
Antinomies, or at least the ones Yeats discusses, are created by human consciousness. Thus the Principles are simply facets of one Daimon, aspects of it that we can perceive as distinct realities only by seeing them as opposing forces. This is important because the Passionate Body and Celestial Body are the same realm of divine ideas experienced through two different means, and the Husk and Spirit are the same capacity for knowing perceived by us, while we are incarnate, in two different ways.
The Principles, as Yeats says, reveal reality through their conflict but cannot create. The power to create belongs solely to the Faculties, and so is only active during incarnations. The wheel of the Faculties, as we have seen, completes its movement between birth and death, while the wheel of the Principles encompasses the whole cycle, including the time between lives. Symbolically, the two wheels are at right angles to each other—Phase 1 in the wheel of the Faculties is equivalent to Phase 22 in the wheel of the Principles—but this is best left for later, since it will not make sense until we have covered much more material.
The Principles vary in their importance depending on where you are on the cycle of birth and death. While you are alive in a material body, the Husk and the Passionate Body take the lead; the Husk, again, is the template of embodiment, the Principle that gives you a body with senses and organs that allow you to interact with the world, while the Passionate Body includes everything you have come into incarnation to sense and interact with. When death comes and ends each incarnation, the Husk and Passionate Body fade into the background—“disappear,” in Yeats’s terminology—and Spirit and Celestial Body take the lead. Notice how this is reflected in the wheel of the Faculties: in the antithetical half of that wheel, Will and Mask are free and Creative Mind and Body of Fate enforced, while the reverse takes place once the Will circles around into the primary half of the wheel of phases.
This distinction between the two pairs of Principles is crucial, because (among other things) it explains the purpose of incarnation in Yeats’s system. The Daimon, to whom the four Principles belongs, seeks to perceive the Celestial Body—the divine ideas or ultimate realities as a unity—using its Spirit to do so. The Spirit, however, can only perceive what has already been known by the Husk, and builds into itself what it perceives. In other words, each of the divine ideas has to be experienced first in its reflections in space and time, as part of the Passionate Body, and this can only take place in incarnation. After each life, the Spirit reviews the experiences of the life just ended and thus adds to the collection of divine ideas that it knows. By doing so it grows and develops, for it becomes all that it experiences.
The Celestial Body is not passive in this process, though. The divine ideas that compose the Celestial Body are themselves Daimons, and desire to be known; the Passionate Body exists, Yeats’s instructors explained to him, so that it may save the Celestial Body from solitude. In the mythological language that plays so important a role in the old esoteric traditions, the Celestial Body is sometimes portrayed as a princess in a tower or a treasure hard to attain, but sometimes it is portrayed as a frightening, persecuting presence, chasing after the Daimons in an effort to make itself known to them even against their will. All this is myth and fable, but it reflects realities in ways that can make sense to us.
During incarnation, when the divine ideas take forms in space and time as the Passionate Body, the soul is guided by destiny, which to Yeats is a force that always comes from within the self and represents the will of the Daimon. The more powerfully the Daimon can express itself through the individual person, the more that person will act in spite of reason—and, one might add, the more the things that happen to that person will also tend to defy reason, following instead some passionate narrative the Daimon has composed for its own purposes. It is when the Spirit takes charge that destiny gives way to fate and necessity, which always come from outside the self and represents the limits imposed on the soul by its environment. Keep this distinction in mind when we get to Yeats’s discussion of the time between lives.
Now we move into a detail that has left a good many students of this lore baffled: the relationship between the Passionate Body and light. Back in the Middle Ages, philosophers wrestled with the nature of light. They didn’t have any of the concepts we use to make sense of the phenomenon; the idea of energy propagating through space was incomprehensible to an age that thought of energy as physical force transmitted from one object to another, the way one billiard ball knocks another into motion. Theirs was also a much more visual culture than ours, since literacy was rare but everyone could see the Bible scenes carved on the walls of churches. Light to them, therefore, became the basic raw material of existence.
To medieval thinkers, it was obvious that God should have begun creating the world by saying “Let there be light.” Light is the fundamental substance. How do we know that something exists? We see it, and the fact that we see it shows that it is a form in light, made of light. To the medieval mind, there was no actual darkness anywhere—this was shown by the fact that some animals can see clearly when we think it’s pitch dark. The illusion of darkness, to the thinkers of the Middle Ages, was produced by a decrease in light combined with our feeble vision, just as the apparent reality of evil was an illusion produced by a partial lack of goodness combined with our moral weaknesses.
The Passionate Body, then, is light as we experience it with our eyes, physical light. The Celestial Body is light as we experience it with our minds, spiritual light, the kind we talk about when we understand something and say, “Oh, now I see how that works.” The two are not actually different, but they appear different to human consciousness, which cannot experience the wholeness of being except by dividing it into an antinomy of contrasting forms.
The relationship of the Principles and Faculties to time is another part of the teaching that requires close reading and careful thought. Passionate Body, the world as we see it and desire it, is the present moment. Celestial Body, the sum total of the ultimate realities, is the timeless, and these two form an antinomy, a set of contrasting forms. Spirit, which perceives ultimate realities, is the future—it is still coming into being, growing with each experience, and will only exist in its completeness in time to come—while Husk, which perceives physical realities, is the past, partly because we can only know something physical after it has appeared to us, partly because all our physical perceptions fall into recurring patterns shaped by our previous lives. The diagram above shows the mandala made by the four Principles in relation to time.
The Faculties also have their correspondences in time. Here the Will is the future, for it always strives for what has not yet come into being; the Creative Mind is the past, for it reflects on what it has already experienced; the Body of Fate is the present, since it stands for the sum of all experiences pressing in on the soul at each moment; and the Mask is the timeless, since it is an ideal of perfection outside of time. This is shown in the mandala to the right.
If you remember the relationships between the Faculties and the Principles set out at the beginning of this essay, the result of all these correspondences is fascinating and startling. The Will is the expression of the Husk in incarnation, but one is the future and the other is the past; Creative Mind, similarly, expresses the Spirit in incarnation, and the same opposition occurs between them. Equally, Mask and Passionate Body, and Body of Fate and Celestial Body, are linked and opposed in the same way. These relationships are shown in the mandala below.
Yeats makes a subtle distinction here about the difference between the Principles and the Faculties, and he does it in a typically offhand way. From the point of view of the Faculties, he notes, the past is a series of judgments made by the Creative Mind. It’s not what happened, it’s what we remember and what we think about what happened. From the point of view of the Principles, which is also that of the Daimon, all the events of life are eternally present, and the past is simply that set of events that relates most closely to the Husk. The same thing is true of each of the Principles; this should be no surprise, because the Principles are simply how we, bound to a world of opposites, have to think about the Daimon.
The Daimon, the ultimate reality of the self, is neither one nor many, concord nor discord. This insight is not new to Yeats, or to the occultism of his time, and it goes far to explain the seeming paradox of free will and divine foreknowledge. The fact that spiritual beings already know what you are going to choose does not mean you have no freedom in choosing; being outside of time, they see all the choices you make in a single timeless glance, while you encounter them and make them one at a time. This enables them, under some circumstances, to tell you about your future long before you have made the choices that bring that future about. For them, after all, the present moment is not “long before” those choices and their results; to them, there you are, making all your decisions and reaping their consequences right now in a single eternal moment.
Because we can have only the most tentative and abstract idea of what it means to be out of time, the occult traditions of Yeats’s time and ours put the same thing in a more comprehensible form. This is the source of ideas such as “Akashic records” and “pictures in the astral light,” the phrases occultists use to talk about the glimpses of other times and lives that come sometimes in meditation, vision, and psychic experiences. What lies behind these images is simply the knowledge of the Daimon, the eternal self: more specifically, the Passionate Body, those things in space and time that the Daimon-as-Husk seeks to experience in what we call past, present, and future, rather than the Celestial Body, which the Daimon-as-Spirit contemplates beyond time once they are revealed within time.
Next, as we proceed through our text, we reach one of the few places where Yeats tries to correlate his ideas with those of other philosophers. Typically enough, the one he chooses is Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism and one of the great philosophical mystics of the Western tradition. (George’s influence will be strong here, since she studied the ancient Neoplatonists closely.) The resulting passage, which takes up the first half of section V of “The Completed Symbol,” takes the compression of this chapter to an extreme and so is pretty much incomprehensible for those who haven’t read Plotinus.
Very, very roughly, however, Plotinus sorts out the cosmos into four levels: the Henadic level, which consists solely of his first principle, the One; the Noetic level, which consists of the Ideas or Forms, which Plotinus sees as divine beings, mighty thoughts thinking themselves and understanding themselves outside of time; the Psychic level, which consists of souls in the usual sense of that term, conscious beings with thoughts, feelings, and passions; and the Hylic level, which consists of material bodies. The first three of these, in the translation Yeats used, are called the three Authentic Existants. The Celestial Body, Yeats suggests, is the One, the Ideas in their absolute unity; the Spirit exists on the Noetic level as one of many minds contemplating the One; the Passionate Body belongs to the Psychic level, and the Husk descends onto the Hylic level. He admits that these correspondences are tentative, and other schemes could be offered; still, these are the ones he presents us.
Finally, Yeats presents us with a series of patterns whereby the Principles and Faculties interact. Here we are not talking about the Faculties as reflections of the Principles, but of both Faculties and Principles as independent factors coming together to shape some part of human life. Most of the interactions Yeats offers us relate to the creative arts, which should come as no surprise—all the arts fascinated Yeats and played a very large role in his life and activities. The point that matters here, though, is that the Principles are not distant abstractions. They, and the Daimon in whom they are a unity, act on the incarnate person in various ways, and those actions can be sorted out in meditation.
There’s much more still to cover in this chapter—we have only covered the first five of eighteen subsections—but I think it’s best to stop at this point, before plunging into the complex geometrical and zodiacal symbolism of the sections that follow. These first five sections have presented, in summarized form, an entire philosophy. If you want to understand it, the only way is to read through these sections (and this commentary) a little at a time, and think through every statement until you’re sure you understand it. This isn’t easy, but it’s a very effective way of training the mind, and it also provides—as we will see later on—a potent set of tools for making sense both of individual spiritual experience and of the great cycles of historical time.
Assignment: At some point before next month’s post goes up, read through the next five sections and do your best to make sense of them. We’ll have our work cut out for us in September…
I have a question: Is it possible to write a fantasy novel, book, or comic using “A Vision” as a reference? So that Yeats’s entire worldview is in the background of the comic (for example), while the story uses fantastical elements like those used in Warhammer 40,000
“After each life, the Spirit reviews the experiences of the life just ended and thus adds to the collection of divine ideas that it knows. By doing so it grows and develops, for it becomes all that it experiences.”
This is a beautiful philosophy to me.
“The more powerfully the Daimon can express itself through the individual person, the more that person will act in spite of reason—and, one might add, the more the things that happen to that person will also tend to defy reason, following instead some passionate narrative the Daimon has composed for its own purposes. It is when the Spirit takes charge that destiny gives way to fate and necessity, which always come from outside the self and represents the limits imposed on the soul by its environment.”
Hmm. As I reflect on these, it’s struck me that there are certain parts of my life that follow extremely strong narratives (my love life for instance) in which I act in completely absurd fashion and then things end up going in equally absurd directions; but other parts of my life are completely and utterly ordinary given my basic personality. A moderately impulsive eccentric who is more than willing to use his skills in martial arts to protect other people is not exactly going to have a quiet life; but tolerably often my life is exactly the sort of thing that you’d expect from that description.
This also tends to vary over time; for example, there are times when I spot some insane opportunity, jump at it, and my entire life spirals around some narrative and everything falls into place for it for a few months to a couple of years; and other times where my life is fairly straightforward given my basic personality. I think it’s probably worth some careful reflection on the differences between the parts of my life (both domain and time) that are dominated by the Daimon as compared to those dominated by the Spirit, because I think that could reveal a lot about where I am in my spiritual journey.
Zarcayce, I have no idea if it’s possible; the only way to find out is to try to write such a novel, and see what happens. If you do, I’d be delighted to read it.
Justin, it seems to appeal to a lot of creative people. Yes, you can take that as a compliment if you like.
William, that strikes me as a very sensible idea.
I was confused when I read the list of Principles and their corresponding Faculties near the top of the post. It looks like you wrote “Celestial Mind” where you meant to write “Creative Mind”, if I understand the rest of your post correctly.
Thank you for explaining these subsections so clearly! When I made my first quick read-through of The Completed Symbol, I became totally lost very quickly, but it makes more sense with your post guiding me. I’ll re-read the first five subsections with your commentary by my side before I venture into the assigned reading.
“To Celestial Mind corresponds Spirit, which perceives and then embodies ultimate realities.”
You mean “Creative Mind” instead of “Celestial Mind” here?
I spent a lot of time with your Occult Philosophy Workbook. I’ve come back to different parts of it, but the part regarding Fate, Will and Destiny was something that has really stuck with me and I return to more often. To hear about destiny and the daimon explicated here in this ways is wonderful.
& yes, I know that feeling of things defying reason, and also the way certain myths and stories can offer a guide to experience that defies logical & reasonable fact.
Thank you for this Work.
Thank you, John. It means a lot to me. Especially on days when I keep on bashing my brains out at the keyboard wondering where it will lead. But I have a sense that the Daimon is guiding me.
Synchronous you refer to privatio boni when I just finished Aion where I first read of it. Arthur Young refers to a photon of light as the quantum of action and as wholeness. I think he might have said somethiing like it being the raw material of existence too. JMG, would you agree or disagree with Jung on darkness having an equal status as the light? Or would you say it is indeed simply a lack of light? IMO, psychologically/spiritually, darkness is an equal to light, but I don’t know about other contexts. Asking because I think you’re presenting this idea from the frame of Medievals and I’m curious on your own thoughts on the matter.
John, not exactly the right spot to ask but not sure how to reach you with this request. You wrote a post about the country of Iran several years ago, and it was very enlightening. Any chance you could repost somewhere?
Thanks!! (By the way, your bound “Archdruid Reports” are an anchor in my library … wonderful work, imo.
Jim
First of all, yes, “Celestial Mind” was a typo — thanks to the several people who caught it. It’s been fixed.
SLClaire, trust me, the first time I tried to make sense of “The Completed Symbol” I was completely lost, too. The same was true of the next half dozen times. I’m glad to be able to show others how to pick their way through the complexities.
Justin, I know the feeling! Keep bashing.
Luke, I’ve wrestled with this concept for a long time but after much reflection I think the Middle Ages had it right. I’ve known some genuinely evil people in my life, and in every case what was wrong with them was a lack; some basic component of goodness should have been there but wasn’t, and in its absence, they spun into ever more destructive forms of imbalance. What clinched the matter for me was the realization that somebody who was entirely evil, who had no virtues at all, would be the weakest and most miserable being in existence. Without courage, without daring, without self-discipline, without energy, without the capacity to evoke and command loyalty and love from others, what villain of history or literature could have accomplished anything at all? Or consider the seven deadly sins — they quite literally cancel each other out: you can’t be wrathful and slothful at the same time, or avaricious and gluttonous, or envious and proud. By contrast, all the virtues support each other, and the more virtues you possess, the happier and more productive your life will be. Now of course this has to be tempered with the realization that absences, lacks, voids, and vacuums exist, and can be very destructive — the concept of privatio boni, evil as a shortage of good, doesn’t make evil less miserably damaging and painful to live through.
Chickenlounger, was it by any chance this one?
https://ecosophia.net/dancing-on-the-brink/
I have to say that of my recent predictions, those in this post have done very well…
JMG,
Thanks for that. I like your argument very much. I have to admit, I was a bit enamored by Jung’s argument while reading, but hadn’t heard the other side.. Of course, privatio boni doesn’t have to diminish the Shadow in any way if you think about it. I will weigh the two opposites and see what emerges.
This is actually easier to follow than a lot of the preceding material (partly because it is less baroque).
I recall a saying from Buddhism, “If you want to know what you were in your past life, look at your present circumstances. And if you want to know what you will be, look at your present choices.”
Of course, Buddhist rhetoric usually presents incarnation as negative, while Yeats presents it as necessary and desired by the Daemon. And then there is the issue of whether there exists some kind of permanent self…
Thank you for the life preserver. I thought I was drowning in the early parts of the book, but this one has been a whole ‘nother level.
I do notice his talk of the stages the individual passes through between incarnations, reviewing the life and making it part of the self and shedding bodies along the way, reminds me a lot of the process I’ve heard from Dion Fortune. Do you think they got this from a common source? Read one another? Something about channeling spirits made the message consistent?
@13 Ambrose
If we are born out of and eventually sink back into a Source in time, then on the eternal perspective there is no permanant self…or rather we are all expressions of one permanant Self.
JMG,
For someone who the Daimon expresses itself powerfully through, could having a creative outlet be an effective way for the energies of the Daimon to ground instead of having them discharge in wild ways into the material situations of said person?
Thanks John, that was exactly the article I was searching and searching for! Your “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush” has a prominent place in my collection, too.
Your work has made a huge impact on my life – thank you!
My two next door neighbors are professors at VT and are feeling the administrative push to “show the earned income, hard value, of a college degree” in the seeming face of declining interest and enrollment.
One graph I ask people to look at is “the history of the world’s reserve currencies”. It doesn’t answer the question of “why?”, but it sure gets some people scratching their heads.
Most, however, fall into the either blaming Trump (or Putin), or using the snarl words (again, h/t to you) “Marxists”, “Socialists”, “Communists” or “Leftists”.
Professors Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson, like you, are touchstones.
Hello, JMG and commentariat, we’re again in a post about Yeats Vision meaning and ideas.
“The consciousness of incarnate human beings can only perceive things through contrast, though, and so we can only become conscious of a unity by dividing it into its various factors or expressions, which define one another through their difference. The term Yeats uses here is antinomy”
I’m guessing this way to become conscious could be understood as a “lesser evil”, compared with upper ways to achieve deep knowledge; according my personal interpretation. Am I right or wrong?
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“in the antithetical half of that wheel, Will and Mask are free and Creative Mind and Body of Fate enforced, while the reverse takes place once the Will circles around into the primary half of the wheel of phases.”
After having read this phrase, I’ve imagined an old style pendulum clock, and a crane counterweight. I wonder I thought in these examples properly.
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“the past is a series of judgments made by the Creative Mind. It’s not what happened, it’s what we remember and what we think about what happened.”
Well, there’s a difference between real events which happeend, and our memories and our interpretation about them. Even nowadays materialist psychollogy says we never remember things as they happened in the real past, but according our present emotions, feelings and rationalizations.
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“From the point of view of the Principles, which is also that of the Daimon, all the events of life are eternally present, and the past is simply that set of events that relates most closely to the Husk.”
This idea of an “eternal present” in all the events of life, makes me remember someone in JMG blog usually has written about the present as the only one real thing in his/her life, and maybe in everybody lives. Maybe commenter Scotlyn?
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“Typically enough, the one he chooses is Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism and one of the great philosophical mystics of the Western tradition.”
Yes, Plotinus the great first Neoplatonist, so occultists master too. Not casually, he’s been attacked and despised by every rationalist and materialist modern philosophers and pedantics alike, until the present.
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(Off topic) I’d like to ask you, John and commentariat, what do you think yesterdays total eclipse over Northern Spain and another countries (Greenland, Iceland, Northern Portugal and Russia) meaned in astrological terms, if you know it. Thanks on advance…
Zarcayce # 1:
“Is it possible to write a fantasy novel, book, or comic using “A Vision” as a reference?”
I think it’s a very good question. First, it would be necessary to understood well and learn Yeats ideas in his “Vision”; then, to imagine how this philosophy could be expressed, in a beautiful literary way. I tend to think it’s achievable, if the writer has mind level enough to pass these two stages (IMHO, it doesn’t seem easy). Personally and honestly, I don’t see myself able to achieve such a big feat…
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JMG # 11 and Luke:
“I’ve known some genuinely evil people in my life, and in every case what was wrong with them was a lack; some basic component of goodness should have been there but wasn’t, and in its absence, they spun into ever more destructive forms of imbalance. What clinched the matter for me was the realization that somebody who was entirely evil, who had no virtues at all, would be the weakest and most miserable being in existence.”
Your paragraph as a part of your answer to Luke echoes, to some extent, part of my own personal life experiences in my past. I think I’m slightly luckier than you, because I met only very few evil people as you depict them: “genuinely evil”; but I’ve seen the same pattern in them. There was a lack of goodness in them, in general terms, and they weren’t never happy, unless the short moments when they managed to “win” over others hurting them (for example, over me, until I escaped fron these evil people).
So I tend to believe medieval educated people was right in their idea about light/goodness and its lack (evilness/darkness).
I have been thinking about light a lot lately. Specifically, about light and time and space. From the perspective of a photon, its creation and absorption happen at the exact same instant no matter how far apart (in time or space) those two events seem from our perspective. ( this happens because light travels at the speed of light and for an observer the closer you get to the speed of light the slower time moves.)
So it has me thinking that first moment of creation the Let There Be Light moment (big bang) some of that light gets reabsorbed all over the universe all the time from the beginning to the end. Maybe the last thing that happens in the Universe is the final photon from the Let There Be Light moment is reabsorbed. And for that photon the entire existence of the universe happened instantaneously.
I am getting more comfortable with the idea that all past, all present, and all future are one integrated whole.
Eternity from the Divine perspective
But I am in the Eternal Now
Conscious of only infinitesimal parts of the whole moving along the time dimension in one direction only.
Luke Z and JMG: C. S. Lewis also came to the conclusion that evil is a lack or imbalance. From the preface to the Screwtape Letters: “No being could attain a “perfect badness” opposite to the perfect goodness of God; for when you have taken away every kind of good thing (intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself) there would be none of him left.” I think we’ve all experienced people who exhibited admirable traits in the pursuit of unadmirable goals!
“The power to create belongs solely to the Faculties, and so is only active during incarnations.”
Would it also be correct to say further that the power to create is active only “during [the waking parts of] incarnations”?
Are the astral planes that we frequent while sleeping more like the soul doing the work of “review[ing] the experiences of the [day] just ended and thus adds to the collection of divine ideas that it knows”?
Or is the sleeping self still able to experience divine ideas “in space and time, as part of the Passionate Body… in incarnation.”
@ Chuaquin # 18
“This idea of an “eternal present” in all the events of life, makes me remember someone in JMG blog usually has written about the present as the only one real thing in his/her life, and maybe in everybody lives. Maybe commenter Scotlyn?”
I will hold up my hand as the person musing upon the different characters of past, present and future, in which my reflections do not lead me to say that the present is the only “real” thing in life, rather that the present (both Here in space, and Now in time) is the only placetime in which a person may exercise their own power.
How I have put it is like this. That in other times, other places, our minds can certainly dwell, imaginations can roam, memories can be relived, but that in those other placetimes, we have no option but to dwell powerlessly because our bodies are not able to act in any placetime other than in this HereNow.
If there is a “reality” here, it is the reality of ourselves as beings incarnated in bodies, which, on the one hand are limited by time and space, but also – and this seems to be Yeats view, too, as per this post – which are the sole vehicles for the expression of our creativity (power? agency?), even when said creativity/power/agency is informed by the whole person, including the Daimon.
Regarding evil as the absence of good, how might one unite that with Dion Fortune’s idea of (positive) evil as people working aligned with the ring-chaos?
Still following along here.
With regards to fate and destiny. If I understand then essentially they are the same thing viewed as an antinomy by us during incarnation.
Fate and destiny then are more how we percieve our path through life rather than actually distinct.
The only way I can get anywhere in holding both these ideas simultaneously is if the nature of ‘choosing’ is very different to how we percieve it. Perhaps we are choosing what part of the unity we percieve rather than what actually ‘happens’.
I also notice on your mandalas the horizontal axis, from left to right is how we percieve time, from past to future; and the vertical axis is how the daimon might percieve it. There seems to be a strong link between our perception of time and of fate/destiny
Could it be that our perception is like a spotlight that shines a narrow beam, revealing only the present moment in a timeless ‘sea’ of everything (the unity). Our perception of past and future is the movement of the spotlight our perception over the surface ( or perhaps through the depths) of this sea.
Hi John Michael,
I’d appreciate a bit of help tonight! 🙂 Far out man, some weeks are more trying than others.
I know it’s way off topic, and work demands has meant that I’m yet to even read your most excellent essay this week, however my website has been denied access due to (I believe) a server level arty-fish-al program known as Monarx. I so hate this stuff, and have reported them to my hosting service – and have requested that their access be removed.
In the meantime, I’m unable to post any comments on my own website. Nice huh?
Grumble, grumble, grumble – headache!
I’d appreciate you posting this comment so the lovely readers of my blog at least have some idea that things have gone haywire on my end and I’ve not been abducted by aliens… Always a risk don’t you reckon? 😉
Cheers and my plan was to wade into your blog waters this evening, but I’ve mentioned this to you before, I must have done something very bad in a past life to have to work this hard. Oh well…
Hope you’re doing better! 🙂
Double Cheers,
Chris
Luke, oh, I don’t claim to have the one true answer to that question. I simply find that the medieval answer makes sense of my experience.
Ambrose, like most Theosophists, Yeats had a very nuanced relation to Buddhism, with points of agreement and disagreement. It interests me that the whole business about no permanent self never found much of an audience outside of Buddhism (and gets finessed in some Buddhist denominations).
Kyle, all of the above. Both of them were Theosophists, and absorbed a great deal of material from that source; it’s not impossible that Fortune read the first edition of our text, and Yeats knew her early work with Bligh Bond; and there’s always the chance that the spirits they worked with compared notes.
Luke, yes, and that’s typically what enables someone to live a life in phase rather than out of phase.
Chickenlounger, you’re most welcome. I hope your professor friends have backup plans when the university folds out from under them, as a good many will.
Chuaquin, I wrote about the eclipse in my Patreon and SubscribeStar accounts. Have to pay the bills somehow!
Dobbs, that’s a fascinating point, and yes, it makes sense.
Roldy, many people don’t know that Lewis’s day job was as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. He was one of the best medievalists of his generation, with a brilliant grasp of the medieval worldview — his book The Discarded Image is to my mind the best one-volume survey of how people in the Middle Ages and Renaissance thought about the world — and his theology was based solidly on medieval Christian Platonism. So he got the idea of evil as the absence of good straight from the source! (He also got much of the cosmology of his planetary trilogy from a medieval Christian Platonist, Bernardus Sylvestris — the Oyarses, for example, were not Lewis’s invention.)
Scotlyn, I don’t think Yeats discusses that. On first principles, though, it seems as though the soul in sleep reverts to its afterlife state.
Anonymous, it fits very well. For a person to be caught up in what Fortune calls positive evil, they would have to be lacking some quality that would bring them into balance with the Ring-cosmos, and that imbalance would lead them to be drawn toward the Ring-chaos.
Free Rain, good. Keep brooding over it!
Chris, sorry to hear it! I trust that Monarx will be duly beheaded. 😉
Dobbs # 20:
You’ve written about the Big Bang, a cosmological theory which is accepted by most nowadays scientists. However, I can tell you there isn’t any direct evidence of that first event in the universe, because evidently, it can’t be replicated in a lab nor in our actual universe. So Big Band evidences are indirect and circumstancial…and Cosmology hasn’t any better than them. I don’t have any degree in “hard” sciences like Physics, but there are some smart fringe people who doubts the B.B. really happened as as single event, or at least they say there aren’t today sound evidences enough to prove it. There are some fringe hypothesis about the current universe not starting really in the B.B., for example.because there was another kind of universe before, so universe would be eternal?(I don’t know wether in a stationary way from ever and forever, or in cyclical Big Bang/Big Crunch-I’m not an expert-).
Some scientists say the origin of the universe (if they was really an origin for it) it’s more a philosophical topic than a full scientist one, due to the problems to prove it only by indirect evidences.
This topic could be opening a can of worms about some realted topics, but I’ll respect JMG main topic post, and I only would like to encourage you to seek online some serious information about the B.B. and its main competing theories about universe (fringe but not fully defeated theories, methink).
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Scotlyn # 23:
“my reflections do not lead me to say that the present is the only “real” thing in life, rather that the present (both Here in space, and Now in time) is the only placetime in which a person may exercise their own power.”
Thank you for answering my question, about the present. Well, I’ve understood better your point of view about this topic, due to your qualification.
“If there is a “reality” here, it is the reality of ourselves as beings incarnated in bodies, which, on the one hand are limited by time and space, but also – and this seems to be Yeats view, too, as per this post – which are the sole vehicles for the expression of our creativity”
With such an explanation, I can tell you I agree…
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In addition to my previous comment about evil people, I can say that, according my personal experience, I’ve seen very few real evil people (I mean: people who lack goodness in most of their words and acts). I think it’s more common within human beings the kind of “mostly good guys who sometimes do evil things”(me myself included in this cathegory). Most people seems to hurt others due to their ignorance more often than due to do it on purpose (in these cases, personal apparent benefit or ideologies help to justifiy their willing evil words or acts, ahem).
Finally, I’ve known very few good people who always or near always say and do goodness for others. It isn’t strange the number of heroes and saints isn’t never high within all societies and historical times…It’s a very difficult way of life, by evident reasons (often, heroes and saints haven’t a long life).
“You can’t be wrathful and slothful at the same time.”
Challenge accepted! 😉
So I’m having a pretty chilled out sense of Cosmos (that which is beautifully ordered) right now so I’ll comment my current intuition and relate it to the current post. You often hear in online occult circles that all the associations you memorize in various systems are a “mental filing cabinet”. I do not like this metaphor. If you order the associations in a way that unfolds from the archetypical layers on the inside (number, geometry, myth) to the associated concrete contents on the outside, you have a mandala pure and simple. It enfolds from the center/1/point outwards. In occult practice, we are literally organizing our consciousness into a mandala, molding our minds to groove along the patterns of being and unfolding of archetypal patterns. So I guess you could call it a mental filing cabinet, but it’s an extraordinarily elegant one. And this/these mandalas are the frameworks for ritual and we should aim to make them the framework of meditation ( I think Dion Fortune says all thoughts in meditation should be followed until they form a circle). To tie it into Yeats, his Wheel is not literally the phases of the Moon, but it is a symbolic representation and can be used as a mandala within a mandala and you can have a “Moon node” in your mind that points to Yeat’s wheel (among other things). Alright, I digress.
“Zarcayce, I have no idea if it’s possible; the only way to find out is to try to write such a novel, and see what happens. If you do, I’d be delighted to read it.”
“I think it’s a very good question. First, it would be necessary to understood well and learn Yeats ideas in his “Vision”; then, to imagine how this philosophy could be expressed, in a beautiful literary way. I tend to think it’s achievable, if the writer has mind level enough to pass these two stages (IMHO, it doesn’t seem easy). Personally and honestly, I don’t see myself able to achieve such a big feat…”
Thank you for your replies. The original intention was (perhaps) to bring Yeats’s vision to other people who are not occultists, through fantasy fiction.
Now that I have read your answers, I have come to the conclusion that writing a fantasy novel (science fiction or other genres, and with “A Vision” as a backdrop) would also be a very good exercise in magic for the writer because the writer would have to understand Yeats and his book. In my opinion, that’s pure magic.
Me writing a novel like this?
First, I don’t know if I’m a good writer.
Second, with the existential crisis I’m going through these days… it’s difficult to write…
Hi John Michael,
My friend, truer words have rarely been spoken. After a night’s sleep, I could think more clearly about this new arty-fish-al horror, learned it’s hiding place and smited that despicable chunk of code. Or is it more correctly: smote?
I am left with a headache though.
For your interest given you also run a WordPress site. Turns out, the software somehow inserted itself a few days ago as a WordPress plugin. You may notice a new ‘Security’ menu near the top of the dashboard menu on the left hand side of the screen (it’s got a Monarx sub menu). Now it’s not your usual plugin and cannot be disabled through the plugin menu. The software ain’t there to be seen so it runs at the core level of WordPress. To disable the thing, you have to edit your wp-config file and add some disabling PHP code, which is a job for a tech literate geek person. Clear the cache, and the thing is gone.
If I may observe, plugins which can insert and then run themselves, resemble the same activities that Malware undertake. I’m not into that.
Oh well, mate, you gotta be onto everything these days.
I shall now read your blog. 🙂 And thanks for posting the comment, it was hit or miss last night whether any comments could be posted on my interwebsite and wanted to alert my readers as to the goings on! Appreciate the good work you do here.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Dumb question for you: Is Mr Yeats referring to the growth, testing and development of a person’s will?
I’d assume that the Daimon, just is (thus the unity), and a sort of accumulation of experience and skills, although I’m unsure those are the correct words. Dunno.
You’re not mucking around, this knowledge and perspective is complicated.
Cheers
Chris
In fairness to the medieval position that darkness doesn’t really exist, I’ll point out that there is a greater electromagnetic spectrum of which visible light is only a small range of, and lots of objects glow in infrared or radio waves. Moreover, back when Richard Dawkins was primarily a science popularizer over an angry atheist, he wrote that echolocating bats probably “see” data from their sound waves in their reconstructions of their environment.
Cynthia, ha! Thank you; that gave me a good belly laugh.
Luke, no, you don’t digress at all. That’s a crucial dimension of what Yeats is doing here.
Zarcayce, so noted. Don’t worry about whether you’re a good writer or not — let your readers judge that. As for the existential crisis, that’s another matter; I’ll simply note that I had more than one of those pack its bags and leave for good when I started writing some book that was struggling to be born.
Chris, the parts of the verb “to smite” are “smite,” “smote,” “smitten.” The noun form is, of course, “smith.” (A smith is one who smites.) You’re welcome — and thank you; I’ll keep an eye out for Monarx that need to be loaded into a tumbril and hauled to the guillotine. As for your question, in a certain sense, yes, but the Will is only one part of the whole person; the Creative Mind, Mask, and Body of Fate, and their corresponding Principles, are also getting a thorough workout.
Patrick, medieval philosophers wouldn’t have been surprised at all!
@ Cynthia #30
Very funny!
Also, a not uncommon clinical situation. If I may explain in the TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) terminology I was trained in…
Slothfulness promotes a downward movement of qi. Wrath promotes a stirring upwards of qi. When you have a situation where stirred up anger is deliberately forced into quietude it becomes what most people call “frustration”, in other words the energies of stirred upness and quieten downness battle on the inside of the person, and produce a stalemate that we call “qi stagnation”. (For which we have treatments…)
JMG might call this “a divided will”. It certainly happens in the real world.
JMG # 28:
“It interests me that the whole business about no permanent self never found much of an audience outside of Buddhism (and gets finessed in some Buddhist denominations).”
I agree, no permanent self seems one of the main (if not the only one) distinguishing features of Buddhism in front of another traditions (or at least the common places understood as Buddhism within its Western supporters). You’ve also written some Buddhistts denominations have finessed this topic. I think Buddhism hasn’t never had an orthodoxy nor an only one sacred writings canon…
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“I wrote about the eclipse in my Patreon and SubscribeStar accounts. Have to pay the bills somehow!”
OK, no argument here…I had forgotten it.
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Well, in my comment # 29, maybe some “little people” changed my aim to write “big BANG” and I wrote by mistake “big BAND”. I’m sorry, though I also think it’s a funny mistake, (ha ha!), especially thinking in such a serious and cosmic event like that (if it happened like mainstream Cosmology consensus tells it).
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Luke Z. # 31:
“It enfolds from the center/1/point outwards. In occult practice, we are literally organizing our consciousness into a mandala, molding our minds to groove along the patterns of being and unfolding of archetypal patterns.”
It’s an interesting image. By the way, when mandalas are painted as an entertainment, or even better, as a self-knowledge tool, it’s said you can draw them and then paint them like you want, but if you start from their center, it means you want to get out your inner emotions, feelings and thoughts (form the outside toward the center: you need to find your own center). It’s also interesting some people (like me) prefer to begin painting mandalas starting from their center.
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Zarcayce # 32:
You’re welcome…
“Me writing a novel like this?
First, I don’t know if I’m a good writer.
Second, with the existential crisis I’m going through these days… it’s difficult to write…”
I don’t know evidently what are your personal circumstances (and I don’t want to know them with details due to discretion), and I wrote that planning such a novel wouldn’t be easy to be done. However, I think if you don’t try to do it, you’ll never know wether you were capable to pass that challenge or not (after some eventual willing attempts). So you must decide your choice, if/when you think you can be ready for it, according your full skills.
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Patrick H. # 35:
“Moreover, back when Richard Dawkins was primarily a science popularizer over an angry atheist, he wrote that echolocating bats probably “see” data from their sound waves in their reconstructions of their environment.”
Oops!, those times are very far into the past, according my own life as a subjective measure of time. Since I remember him, Mr. Dawkins has been “always” an angry atheist (or maybe I’m fooled by my memory and by generations difference). By the way, I’m not exactly a young guy, though not old enough to remember directly this or that thing.
However, I’ve read he was a neodarwinist science popularizer in his “old good times”, though he popularized an unfortunate term: “Junk” DNA (which maybe it wouldn’t be junk anymore if sciences manages in the future to guess at least part of their hypothetical functions).
“As for the existential crisis, that’s another matter; I’ll simply note that I had more than one of those pack its bags and leave for good when I started writing some book that was struggling to be born.”
This rings very true to me. I will note that it seems the worst aspects of my neuroses, problems and crises departed as I did more & more of what I always have known I needed to do: write.
Related to occultism, mysticism, magic & spiritual matters for those interested: My latest feature for Igloo Magazine went up last night. It focuses on the album Mount Analgoue by funk bassist turned ambient master and producer at large, Bill Laswell.
The piece traces the themes surrounding Mount Analogue in his earlier work, such as on the Axiom Ambient album and the song “Holy Mountain” to his friendship and working partnership with fellow musician, producer and avant jazz legend John Zorn, looking into Zorn’s separate album also called Mount Analogue, and related works such as their collaboration on the piece Jodorowsky. It then dives into the spiritual and artistic milieu surrounding G.I. Gurdjieff, Thomas de Hartmann, Rene Daumal (author of the scif-fi / visionary / mysical novel Mount Analogue -he died in the middle of writing its last unfinished sentence), the inspiration of Jarry and pataphysics, and the influence all this had on surrealist filmmaker, comic book writer, tarot reader and strange spiritual dude Alejandro Jodorowsky. …Jodorowsky himself had one of the people who claimed to be Gurdjieff’s daughter as a lover who transmitted to him her own take on Gurdjieff’s work. Jodorowsky also famously worked under Marcel Marceau and had Leonora Carrington as one of his artistic mentors and teachers. All of this can be seen in his film “Holy Mountain” with its rich symbolism and over the top play on alchemy and his own take on Daumal’s novel.
Going back to the book club on Eliphas Levi, I consider all of these works and artistic pieces to be part of a great magic chain, so my article could be seen as an exploration of this particular chain, made by these particular artists and seekers, and all of their individual pieces (novels, films, albums) like the peradam’s in Daumal’s novel, these being “a clear and extremely hard stone… a true crystal… harder than diamond.” These stones came to seekers at peak moments of realization, and were used to pay the guides who would lead them further up Mount Analogue… artistic works that merge magic and the occult are like these alchemical stepping stones that help the traveler up the slope…
… consider joining me in Seeking Mount Analogue…
https://igloomag.com/features/bill-laswell-p-st-mount-analogue-sub-rosa
@38 Chuaquin
Dawkins was an angry atheist and Neodarwinist popularizer his whole career. I think I read that speculation about bat senses in The Blind Watchmaker, the very title of which is attacking a creationist argument. But he was known for being a science popularizer. Now he’s known for being an atheist.
JMG, Scotlyn: Thanks, glad you liked it!
Scotlyn, of course I had been making a joke and was thinking more about somthing like a beer drinking sports fan yelling at the referee on TV from their comfy chair if any real world example at all, but now there’s something more interesting to be had here. Now I’m sure the question I’m about to ask is to ask for years of learning to be compressed into a nutshell, so obviously there’s some contraints here about what’s realistic for me to expect, but how do you learn to recognize conditions such as qi stagnation? Meaning in general, conditions in which you are in conflict with yourself? What kinds of things are involved in the treatments you mentioned?
Chuaquin: Some years ago I read The Selfish Gene by Dawkins, came away really impressed and feeling quite informed about the subject matter, and read it again more recently just for a refresher. This book was written in 1976 and doesn’t to the best of my recollection contain any “angry atheist” stuff, it was strictly about how genes propagate. In the 2010s I got some entertainment out of some of his angry atheist writing, and then started to get bored with it and left all that behind, but I still think The Selfish Gene is a great and very informative book. I would go so far as to say it’s fundamental to my understanding of biology.
Sorry, that got pretty wordy there. All that is to say there was a time when he wasn’t so concerned about the angry atheist stuff and I think he did his best work then, even though there was a period where the angry atheist stuff was a real hit with me.
JPM @ 39: Jodorowksi, Daumal, Gurdjief’s putative daughter (was that the one he fathered on Jean deSalzman and who lived in Venezuela?), Mt. Analog, pataphysics. Have you read “A Night of Serious Drinking” btw? Maybe you knew that those names would “rattle my chain.” These days, however, I think I’ve moved on. I’m comparing Yeats and Fritjof Schuon, trying to figure out which one is more impenetrable, and which one is more worth reading. I think it’s a tie. These posts help with Yeats, but I seriously doubt that JMG will spend a post delving into Schuon.
@ Cynthia #41
Yes, that is a big question, and I am happy to be reminded to expand on it at the next open post.
But, in short, it is in the nature of qi to flow, so if it is stagnant it is because something prevents it flowing, the most common thing to prevent it flowing is qi trying to flow in the opposite direction setting up a line of “stalemate” where neither can flow, but neither stops TRYING to flow.
In physiological terms there are a million symptoms, but their common feature is some form of “stuckness” and people often use this word to describe what is going on.
The reason I’ve started to think about it in JMG’s term of “divided will” is that I think of the qi that flows within a person is doing something like knitting all the parts into a single whole. And we say that qi follows [mind] intention. So the qi is flowing around knitting body with mind, but which mind to flow to? The mind which intends this? or the mind that intends that contradictory thing? (eg. the mind which wants to walk north or the mind which wants to walk south.) Both are equally strong intentions and both lead the qi, but in opposite directions, and so the body stays stuck in one place, unable to be completely knit to the intention to walk north or the intention to walk south, while fruitlessly expending twice the energy it would take to pick one and walk that way.
Anyway, that is a short answer, and probably all that is permissible here without going off topic, but let’s revisit at the next open post.
Blessings!
JMG (no. 28) “like most Theosophists, Yeats had a very nuanced relation to Buddhism…”
Me too!
“It interests me that the whole business about no permanent self never found much of an audience outside of Buddhism (and gets finessed in some Buddhist denominations).”
Jayarava Attwood writes about this. He thinks it boils down to people needing reassurance of life after death, and also wanting a “just universe” in which karma can exist.
Patrick H. (no. 15) “If we are born out of and eventually sink back into a Source in time, then on the eternal perspective there is no permanant self…or rather we are all expressions of one permanant Self.”
Yeah, “self” is ambiguous. There have been debates along these lines (both intra-Buddhist as well as inter-religious) since ancient times. We wouldn’t even need procession / retrocession–maybe we’re one with everything (like the proverbial hot dog) right now!
Justin Patrick Moore (no. 39), I’ve got that album on right now! Very New Age. Thanks for linking it! I have a longstanding interest in Mr. G. and his cultural tendrils.
Hey Phutatorious. Glad to hear from you. I guess my chain rattling worked : ) Actually, I knew you had been into various Fourth Way material, but I didnt know how deep.
My own reading of Daumal has consisted only of his pataphysical essays and Mount Analogue. I came to him first by way of Alfred Jarry. I havent read any Gurdjieff or Ouspensky. I have read a fair number of Jodorowsky’s graphic novels and seen three of his films including Holy Mountain ( El Topo and Santa Sangre are the others). I have skimmed his tarot book. I woukdnt mind reading his biography.
As for hus lover who claimed to be a daughter of Gurdjieff, he met her in Mexico City at an El Topo screening…
…Jodorowsky was in Paris in the 50s and so Jean Salzmann’s circle would have been around. Most of my research into this area has been done for the article. I write to learn and explore my obsessions.
Dont know anything about Schuon yet. I like Yeats and western mystery tradition too, but am always open to explore these other areas, especially when intersting artsists, writers and musicians are involved.
So a lot of this w
Chuaquin, I have to say that if our cosmologists changed their minds and announced that the universe was started by a Big Band I’d be delighted. No doubt it was Duke Ellington, there at the beginning, doing the a-one-and-a-two-and routine. 😉
Justin, one writer I’m familiar with used to describe the consequences of not writing as a sort of psychic constipation. Thanks for the link — I’ve bookmarked it for a close read, since the weirder cultural consequences of occultism are always grist for the mill.
Phutatorius, nope. Of all the big name Traditionalists, I find Schuon the least interesting — lacking the Latin verve that makes Guenon and Evola readable even when they’re being idiots, his work plods drearily on in a monotone of “I have the one true Tradition and you don’t!” Bleah.
Ambrose, I tend to see Buddhism as a fine example of a weird elite fad that was hijacked into something interesting by later writers. The historical Buddha was the archetypal poor little rich kid who couldn’t bear the fact that the universe wasn’t what he wanted it to be, and he finally got over himself by the somewhat extreme method of convincing himself that he didn’t have a self to get over. That was very popular among the comfortable classes in late classical India, for the same reasons that watered-down American Buddhism is popular among our privileged classes, but it imploded when the Roman and Han Chinese empires both collapsed, India no longer profited off the trade between them, and the comfortable classes stopped being comfortable. In the meantime, though, a bunch of fringe thinkers had decided that the historical Buddha couldn’t have possibly been as big an idiot as he seemed, fused Buddhist ideas with borrowings from Tantra and Nestorian Christianity, and created the Mahayana tradition, which then spun off along its own giddy way through most of Asia, backed by a torrent of freshly manufactured scriptures that veered far away from the historical Buddha and his teachings. Odd, but it worked…
@JMG
Do you think egregores and other deities are filling in for the historical Siddhartha Gautama, who in your scenario probably died without developing a mental body and reincarnated like almost all people do?
“In the meantime, though, a bunch of fringe thinkers had decided that the historical Buddha couldn’t have possibly been as big an idiot as he seemed, fused Buddhist ideas with borrowings from Tantra and Nestorian Christianity, and created the Mahayana tradition, which then spun off along its own giddy way through most of Asia, backed by a torrent of freshly manufactured scriptures that veered far away from the historical Buddha and his teachings. Odd, but it worked…”
Would be interesting to see if a bunch of fringe thinkers decide to fuse American Buddhist ideas with whatever else is coming out of American religious landscape to create a new Buddhist tradition.
“Some years ago I read The Selfish Gene by Dawkins, came away really impressed and feeling quite informed about the subject matter, and read it again more recently just for a refresher. This book was written in 1976 and doesn’t to the best of my recollection contain any “angry atheist” stuff, it was strictly about how genes propagate. In the 2010s I got some entertainment out of some of his angry atheist writing, and then started to get bored with it and left all that behind, but I still think The Selfish Gene is a great and very informative book. I would go so far as to say it’s fundamental to my understanding of biology.”
Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was also written from a materialist perspective, so from a non-materialist occult perspective there are huge gaps about for instance how forces on the higher planes affect gene propagation on the material plane.
JMG @ 46: “…Bleah.” Yes, I knew that was your take on him, and I wasn’t trying to provoke you. As I’ve commented before, Schuon is impenetrable while Guenon is merely tedious. Back to Yeats.
From your post: “After each life, the Spirit reviews the experiences of the life just ended and thus adds to the collection of divine ideas that it knows.”
Forgive me if this is a dumb question (asking for words to define the divine), but how do you think Yeats meant by ‘divine idea’?
Only got to this post properly today and a minor synchronicity – re all the talk about light in your post and the comments, yesterday I added an unexpected verse to a litany I use as an aide memoire/meditation:
Arise!
In a field of light
Holding the spheres of emotion and thought in my hands
All emotions and none
All thoughts and none
The coiled moving stillness of quiet focus abides
The Ideal in mind
An opening flower
Turn within
The bridge to beyond
I Am.
It seems to work for me [which is nice], but maybe I’m too close to see it neutrally… does the verse hold together for you?
Sorry, I garbled 2 questions into one there:
a) What did he mean by ‘divine idea’ as an ultimate reality?
The idea that my life might reveal an ultimate reality to the divine spark amuses me no end!
b) Did he come to the concept via Plato, Theosophy or channelling?
Reading some of A.E. Powell’s work – the details on the different bodies/planes and what goes on at these elevated levels was boggling in its extraordinary detail… and very subjective to the practitioner?
Cannot remember if it was Brunton, Khan or someone else noting that Western mystics never seemed to meet Krishna or Shiva and the Hindus never seemed to meet with Christ. It kind of goes nicely with ‘First Man must make God, and then God will make Man’.
Just to clarify… “The idea that my life might reveal an ultimate reality to the divine spark amuses me no end!“
I get the general sense that the soul is using the vehicles to do something, my amusement is that for me as the personality of incarnation, my life is mainly one of bewilderment, and if the sum of this incarnation’s experiences reveal a Divine Idea, that gets an unexpected belly laugh because it seems so incongruous in regards to my life.
Our friend Jim spent a good part of his life linking laughter with the divine – we spent a lot of time laughing at ourselves and our own foolishness and mistakes – so many mistakes and stupidities that Jim had T-shirts made for bona fide members of ‘The Fool’s Club’.
The club had a rotating presidency determined by who had performed the finest stupidity. Some years the competition was pretty tough.
That Joy and Sadness can both produce tears is a marvel. A wise person once reported that “The laughter was so strong that the tears were running down my legs!”
Makes me think of the old phrase “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Both can be good, but laughter is a useful ‘leveller’; the ability to laugh at oneself a much underappreciated therapeutic lifesaver for the ego/mind.
Cosmic Laughter
Blend a telluric smile with solar laughter and find a human belly-laugh.
Take it further, as the tears and fire of laughter call out,
Resonating with the Beauty of Life beyond the human form,
And then, find yourself beyond,
Laughing in the midst of a smiling galaxy
Expanding in the delight of loving laughter
To play a new part in the Cosmic Comedy
Fool’s Club FAQs
Q1: What is the aim of the Fools Club?
A1: To become the Transcendent Fool.
Q2: What is the Transcendent Fool?
A2: The state that arises when the sheer number and extent of foolishness, mistakes, errors and stupidities collapses the ego through laughter. In that moment the solar plexus is activated, the fountain of light flows and the Inner Isle shines.
Q3: How do I become a Transcendent Fool?
A3: It is inevitable, though may take some number of lifetimes.
Q4: Is it possible to speed up the process?
A4: It is, but the Culmination of the Fool is not for the fainthearted.
Q5: Are there any rules?
A5: Never mention Fool’s Club to Fools who cannot laugh at themselves.
JMG and Justin P., about writing as a personal “therapy:
I’ve never tried to write a novel, long or short, though on the other hand I can tell you that reading has worked to some extent like a therapy for me. I’ve met some people in my life until present day who haven’t been capable to write a long text (not everybody can be a novelist), but they told me they liked to write a personal diary. And this everyday task has helped them to improve their mental health.
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Patrick H. # 40:
Thank you for your brief explanations about “Mr. Dawkins case”. I can tell you there are some Spanish translations of his books in which he supported fiercely his “evangelical” atheism, in bookstores and public libraries here, but I haven’t seen his books which were written by him more to popularize science than “evangelize” in his angry atheism, except “The Selfish Gene”, methink.
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Cynthia # 41:
I haven’t read “The Selfish Gene” (yet), I know its translation has been printed again in recent times here, so I don’t have a sound opinion about it. However, I’ve read online that Dawkins has been criticized by some non creationist people, even by some Neodarwinist scientists (who aren’t exactly believers, but usually agnostics or atheists). Some people admit that book it’s right, but they also think Dawkins explained only partly the evolution… Maybe I’ll read it some day.
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Justin P.# 45:
You’ve written about Jodorowsky, so I’ve also remembered he met Dali the great painter, and Moebius the great graphic novels artist. Indeed, he helped Moebius in some of his legendary works.
There’s even today some controversy about J. being a real occultist or a fraud (I don’t have a serious opinion on him yet).
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(To be continued)
Here is an essay I have been contemplating writing for a while now. It explains my spiritual history in a matchbox. I present it here because I was very much impressed with Yeats’ A Vision as it parallels my experience somewhat. I downloaded a copy of the essay and look forward to hearing more about A Vision from this blog. I hope you enjoy this offering.
https://philosopherspeashooter.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-dead-buddha-on-way.html
Scotlyn: That short, permissible answer gave me something to think about, so thank you for that. I may come back to this at Open Post time – actually, I think that’s right around the corner. Thanks for reminding me how it’s done here – I shant go off on a lengthy tangent at this time.
(Narrator: “At this time,” she said forebodingly, giving the dreaded hint of kiloliters of hogwash to come promptly that Wednesday.) 😉
Anonymous: That doesn’t bother me. If other people find that book or any other work of limited value for reasons such as that, then they do and that’s fine with me. I had a whole thing to say about that but I am reminded that there is a topic here. Short answer: quite so, and that’s fine.
—
The whole music thing is getting hard to keep track of. Harps = heaven, accordion = unheaven, the universe was started by a Big Band. Please tell me there’s no elevator music purgatory.
JMG # 46:
I agree. No argument here…A Big Band deserves a lot of respect and admiration, even by the most boring cosmologists, ha ha…
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I’ve never read any Schuon writings, but I’ve read something from Guénon and Evola. I tend to think the first one seems IMHO more interesting than the second one, in spite of Guénon strident Egocentric attitude (well, Evola was also a jerk in another way like Guénon, methink). So if you find Schuon even less interesting for you than Evola, I’ll take you into consideration…
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Anonymous # 49:
Well, Dawkins ideas were evidently limited by his very narrow materialist bias, so he deserves to be criticised by an occultist point of view. The funniest thing in Mr. Dawkins controversial views, is that some equally materialist scientists think he was too narrow minded, even by another different materialists views.
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Earthworm # 52:
After having read your paragraph about western mystics who never met Hindu gods, and non western mystics who never met Christ, as a non expert, I think there are different mystic experiences to some extent, according their own culture/beliefs; but it’s also interesting to point that some mystics seem to have reached a “level” where they find “something” who/which they’re unable to define with words. I’d be very cautious before to identify this being (?) with a personal god like Christ, Allah and others. Especially when those experiences are always very personal and subjective.
“Reading some of A.E. Powell’s work – the details on the different bodies/planes and what goes on at these elevated levels was boggling in its extraordinary detail… and very subjective to the practitioner?”
It should be subjective since the individual lacks the full set of senses or experiences to fully comprehend what is going on. Think of the blind men and the elephant or the Cylon complaining his human-form body could not directly see x-rays.
As for the junk DNA, it’s been upgraded to non-coding DNA and does indeed do several somethings but indirectly instead of building a protein for a task.
https://news.cuanschutz.edu/dbmi/what-is-junk-dna
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
This leads to the somewhat embarrassing conclusion Lamarck was partly correct. The environment can change the expression of particular genes without changing the genes themselves.
@JMG: I hope the article is useful to you and anyone else who happens to read it. I had a lot of fun researching these people and putting it together. Psychic constipation, yeah that is a good way of putting it, and I want to make sure I am filling my imagination up with plenty of psychic roughage to keep things flowing and avoiding stagnation.
@Ambrose: Glad you like it! The various projects Laswell produced -and he is extremely prolific and now in his seventies- are all very much worth checking out and full of a ton of different styles and flavors. I really like the epic guitar piece “Jodorowsky’s Peradam” as the second part of this double/triple album, but the entirety is worth getting lost in repeatedly.
@ Cynthia #41 and @Anonymous #49
Re Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene”…
It is funny, but that particular book of Dawkins’ always struck me as being a deeply religious book. It is as if the religious concept of eternity had to be given a materialist face, and he recruited a putative (and invented) “Selfish Gene” to fill that bill.
In biological terms it was as if someone had claimed that a book is selfish and exists to replicate itself eternally, and that books therefore create libraries and printworks and publishers in order to keep replicating themselves.
It made no sense at all in biological terms, but a great deal of sense in the civic, materialist metaphysics of our day.
Chuaquin: Was there any sort of environmental impact study done with regards to this idea of replicating the Big Bang in a lab? Also, I’m sure this would encroach upon the neighbouring properties according to any version of a municipal code. Actually it’s hard to imagine getting a permit for this even if the neighbours are fine with the whole thing and cooperating.
There would be some good news following a successful attempt at this. Cancer would vanish overnight, for example. The Long Descent would cease to be any sort of concern as well. There would be a significant reduction in police brutality. There would be no more constraints on speech due to wokeness. Ill feeling between North and South Korea would end abruptly. Justin Bieber would release no new music from that day. Income and sales taxes would all be abolished. And that problem where the USB won’t plug in until you flip it over *again* would no longer be a thing.
Motley Crue would retire for real!
I think I’ll stop before I talk myself into campaigning for this.
😉
“The whole music thing is getting hard to keep track of. Harps = heaven, accordion = unheaven, the universe was started by a Big Band. Please tell me there’s no elevator music purgatory.”
There’s also something about the devil being a fiddle player and losing a contest against a human fiddler, though I can’t quite remember where that came from.
Chuaquin: Well, if you do read it, I think I can say with some confidence that it will be intellectually stimulating at least, even if you don’t find it as informationally solid as I do. If you get to it, that is. Life offers many options of which that is one. No one has enough time to do them all.
@Chuaquin
1. For decades, Dawkins evangelized for atheist materialism by popularizing evolutionary science, like Carl Sagan did with astronomy. In the 2000s, and maybe before, he became more obviously an angry atheist. But he still promoted science. In 2011, he wrote a children’s book that I haven’t read called The Magic of Reality. From discussion on the Internet, he felt threatened by the popularity of Harry Potter– children are feeling a sense of awe and wonder from fantasy worlds AND NOT THE MATERIAL UNIVERSE AS REVEALED BY SCIENCE? He must counter that. I don’t know what he is doing now– the Internet Atheist scene split up into pro-SJW and anti-SJW factions which were absorbed by the mainstream woke and populist right factions respectively, while Dawkins stood his ground.
2. Evolutionary science is materialist. Maybe the next High Culture’s science will develop a science that takes the higher planes into account. In The Selfish Gene, he popularized a gene-centric view of evolution that was and is not universally accepted by evolutionary biologists. He was on the wrong side of the punctuated equillibrium debate. And since he was writing books for laypeople, he had to dumb down and distort concepts so they could be understood by his readers.
Whoever thought accordions equal inheaven has obviously never heard a polka band. They probably dont like to have fun either.
@Chuaquin: I dont think Jodorowsky is a fraud, but he is a definitely a trickster, and he might be a little crazy: but he is an amazing artist. I have read the comics he created with the late great Moebius. Fantastic stuff! I plan on reading more of his non fiction and watching the other films he made.
JMG, it also seems to me, for people that the Daimon expresses itself powerfully through, they might be more likely to be carriers/recipients of other people’s projections?
@anonymous,
The thing with the devil and a fiddle was a famous song from the 1970’s by the Charlie Daniels Band. ” The Devil went down to Georgia.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBjPAqmnvGA&list=RDwBjPAqmnvGA&start_radio=1
Scotlyn: Well you’re entitled to your opinion. I don’t see it that way.
Hmm, this all makes perfect intuitive sense to me, in that he is working with antinomies, and giving them full free play and scope and distinction, while fusing them on the wheels. It reminds me of two things – the old saying that TIme exists so everything doesn’t happen all at once, and the scene in Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, where the main character beholds her life in living, moving, yet carved images on a temple wall, and can finally (in some sense) see them all at a glance.
Justin Patrick Moore, re accordion detractors, possible stance of same against fun: Per last week’s discussion, that would be Gary Larson of Far Side fame. I’m just the messenger. For my own part, if accordion is good enough for Weird Al Yankovic, there won’t be a word against it from me!
Also, re hereafter music: there could be a much worse soundtrack for it than the Charlie Daniels Band as far as I’m concerned.
Clay @ 68: and, before Charlie Daniels, there was Guiseppe Tartini who dreamed that the devil sat on his bed and taught him this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7rxl5KsPjs&list=RDz7rxl5KsPjs&start_radio=1
Apparently, there’s a long tradition linking the devil with the fiddle. According to Wikipedia, there’s even a Madam Blavatsky angle here, of which I’d not previously been aware.
Hi JMG and y’all,
🟠Thanks for y’all’s prayers and wishings-well.
Just checkin’ in. Hangin’ in there. Dog days of August, hot and humid; quite balmy. I am looking forward to cooling times of autumn (northern hemisphere) along with, I hope, moderate winds.
Plants and animals are bringing subtle, early preparations for winter though nothing obvious. No leaves have turned color yet. (I can tell that trees are wrapping things up, invisibly).
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Patrick, good heavens, yes. The historical Buddha gets very little attention in most Mahayana sects anyway — it’s all other cosmic Buddhas and bodhisattvas, who can usually be identified very promptly with other deities via comparable archetypes. (Between the Virgin Mary and Kannon, Bodhisattva of Compassion, to cite only one example, the differences have to be measured with a micrometer.)
Anon, oh, I hope! It’s such a disappointing movement, it would be so great to see it give rise to something worthwhile.
Phutatorius, so noted!
Earthworm, it’s Plato’s notion, and that’s almost certainly where Yeats got it — Platonism, more specifically that movement known as Middle Platonism, is the usually unspecified subtext of nearly all of Western occultism. The ultimate realities are a set of fundamental patterns, ideas, forms, or functions (however you want to think of them) that have often been described as the thoughts of God. As for your bewilderment, that’s the proper response of the incarnate soul faced with reality; when Socrates was called the wisest of the Greeks because he alone knew that he knew nothing, he was stating a profound truth. (The litany works, btw.)
Jon, thanks for this.
Justin, the best accordion player I’ve ever known loved that cartoon, and told all kinds of jokes at the expense of his instrument. He also made a decent living as the leader of a polka band…
Luke, that’s an interesting speculation; I’m simply not sure.
Celadon, Yeats would have loved both the saying and the scene.
Phutatorius, don’t forget all the bluesmen who met the Devil at the crossroads at midnight to get their blues licks. Old Nick definitely has a taste for music.
Northwind, glad to hear you’re doing okay.
Hi y’all,
> accordion
I just hafta add my two cents.
Accordion = dance.
Who is not inspired to dance to a polka band that has an accordion as one of the instruments?
https://youtu.be/MC3Ztal5gzc
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Over the past couple of weeks, my Bible study buddy/teacher has been doing sessions on Genesis and the creation story. He’s made several comments about our modern concept of “light” (photons) vs how the Ancient Near Easterners conceived of it.
So I was quite struck by your comments above, between the words “Back in the Middle Ages, philosophers wrestled with the nature of light… just as the apparent reality of evil was an illusion produced by a partial lack of goodness combined with our moral weaknesses.” I thought my study buddy would find it interesting, emailed that whole passage to him last night, and he saw it this morning.
Well, he launched. In two hours he prepared a whole lesson based on what the Bible says about ‘light’, and that was today’s study session. In Old Testament Hebrew, ‘light’ is the word ‘owr’. It’s both a noun and a verb. As used in various verses in Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Job, Ecclesiastes etc, it seems to relate to ‘shekina’; to the light Jesus emitted when he flash-banged Saul on the road to Damascus, and is used in Numbers 6:25 as “The LORD make his face shine upon thee…” While it is emitted or channeled by the Sun, Moon and stars, it isn’t necessarily the same as them.
It was a really interesting discussion, and thank you, JMG, for triggering it.
On Mahayana’s freshly manufactured texts:
https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/necrophiliac-dakini .
JMG: ‘the usually unspecified subtext of nearly all of Western occultism’
Fascinating!
JMG: ‘btw’
Thank you.
JMG: ‘bewilderment, that’s the proper response’
I should probably get some new T-shirts made up!
My Latin is not as good as Brian’s ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdqXT9k-050 ) but if sodalitas stulti fits, I’ll consider a coat of arms – perhaps an owl with ruffled feathers in there somewhere – a Monty Python / David Lynch mash-up… or perhaps a nod to Idries Shah using the Latin for ‘Wisdom of the Idiots’.
Siliconguy # 58:
The blind men and the elephant is IMHO, a timelessness and near eternal metaphorical story to see how we see outside reality (or realities) from our differents points of view (all of them limited due to our human limited brain).
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Thank you for your links about the supposed “junk” DNA. Yes, it’s quite embarrassing Lamarck was partly right, to some extent. Indeed, Neolamarckism isn’t dead yet, because there’s a fringe group of scientists outside the Neodarwinist orthodoxy, like Máximo Sandín here. And some famous “science stars”, like Margulis and S. Jay Gould, in spite of their claims about being Darwinian too, seemed to see evolution in a “slightly” different way as Dawkins did, though they were materialists too.
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Cynthia C. # 61:
I guess you’re kidding…Well, the Big Bang repeated again by some hypothetical scientists would need not a lab, but the entire universe to be made as direct evidence, due to its huge 1:1 scale. So I bet nobody would never like to repeat it, ha ha…
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OK, I think life is too short to read every book has bern published in human History; but on the other hand Dawkins views puzzle me, to some extent. He wasn’t “happy” enough with his unending angry attack against religions (hiding his materialist philosophy under the fig leaf of Darwinian science), but he hated philosophy and philosophers too (I remember he said/wrote somewhere that Aristotle was very stupid-ahem-).
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Patrick H. # 64:
Thanks for telling me on the short form the amazng story of Dawkins and their other angry atheists friends. When you’ve written about his reaction against Harry Potter “threat” against Science, I’ve smiled…
You’ve written C. Sagan was another anti-rreligious propagandist…errr…popularizer. Yes, I’ve noticed some people I’ve met during my life who are atheists often they’ve been “Cosmos” and another Sagan works hardcore fans…Indeed, “Saganism” biased History view shows a perpetual struggle between goodness (materialist science) and evilness (religious beliefs), a view I don’t share.
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(To be continued)
Justin P. # 66:
Maybe “trickster” fits better than “fraud” to depict Jodorowsky life and work. He’s been controversial, according what I’ve heard of him, in the sense of his apparently serious references to magic, occultism and so on. A mere dilettante or a deeper occultist? (At his point, some suspicions about a likely fraud as an occultist). This controversial doubt doesn’t affect his virtues as an artist, methink (I hope I’ve clarified to you my point of view).
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More about Traditionalists guys:
My main problem with Guénon isn’t his (apparently) boring writing style, but his megalomaniac Ego. I think he understood that being a wise man meaned to be a selfish arrogant writer, who despised others opinions, as the smartest guy in the room, who knows all the Truth. His worst mistake, IMHO, was to label as evily evil “counter-tradition” every spiritual teaching he especially disliked (maybe because it was competing with his DIY traditionalism).
My problem with Evola is quite different. He was egocentric too, but the elephant in the room is his will to mix what he understood as traditional (mainly Paganism, methink) with fashionable ideas from his time (like Nietzsche and Italian Fascism, ahem). I think his work has aged badly.
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Accordion, fiddle…
In addition to your previous comment about devil and music, I think you’ve forgotten the piano, or better said, some pianists bizarre attitude and behavior. It’s said quite proffessional pianists tend to be arrogant and selfist jerks. A dark legend agsinst them? I don’t know, but selfism and arrogancy rhyme well with Satan “way of life”. A composer said a time ago (maybe Saint-Saens?) that there are some feral animals in orchestras, named pianists. Well, maybe an apocryphal quote, but “si non é vero, é ben trovato”. I’ve seen too many overacting and/or overexcited pianists in videos, so I could think they’re possessed or pretending (evidently, I’m kidding), though to some extent, it seems a similar spectacle like we can see in rock guitar players “onanist” solos…
@JMG
I’ve suspected that the Virgin Mary was not the mother of the historical Jesus. Luke 2 & Matthew 12 indicate she didn’t understand her son’s mission, and the latter reveals the historical Jesus despised his family. A goddess of compassion working with the Risen Christ (who has similar goals to her) makes sense.
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 8/17). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below or <a href="at the prayer list link.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Atmospheric River’s gall bladder full of gallstones heal and be filled with such vitality that her current stones diminish, her comfort increases, and her gall bladder remains free of new stones.
May Angelica’s heart be soothed and blessed as she grieves the sudden loss of her cat, Sophie.
May 12-year-old Amya from Lake County, Ohio make a speedy recovery for a pair of sprained wrists after a fall from her scooter.
May Gary of Geauga County, Ohio’s carpal tunnel surgery be successful, and may he return to mobility as full as his circumstances allow.
May Holly of Geauga County, Ohio’s back tunnel surgery be successful, and may she return to mobility as full as her circumstances allow.
May Northwind Grandma’s husband Jeff, who passed away unexpectedly on July 22, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination; may he be healed of the “wound in his heart” that he held in life.
May Jeff’s cat Henry accept, twice a day, Northwind’s giving him his Flovent inhaler dose and pill, and let her take him to the veterinarian once a month for an injection.
May Anonymuz get the strength and resolve he needs in his endeavors for justice, and may truth and justice be served.
May Lukeszy’s father’s post-surgery swelling be healed.
May Helen in Oz be free of inflammation in her biceps and shoulder, and may she be successful in the slow process of regaining pain-free range of movement and increased muscle mass and strength therein.
May JC of Geauga County, Ohio, who is fighting cancer, be blessed and uplifted so that he may receive the healing he needs and recover as best as possible.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, who is still undergoing chemotherapy in preparation for a surgery, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment; may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, who still has some lingering issues in his ongoing recovery from a heart condition, be healed and strengthened.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s reconstructive surgery on his left ureter go well; may his right kidney heal; and may his empty nose syndrome abate.
May Brother Kornhoer be able to afford his son’s international surgery.
May Alex R. be blessed in his efforts to resolve his financial situation, and successfully get completely out of debt within the current year 2026; may he find opportunities toward that end, and also the wisdom to recognize and seize them when they come.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused.
May Geoff G’s sister Lindsay, who suffered a stroke at the end of May, recover to the fullest extent possible, and be blessed and supported in her mental wellbeing throughout.
May Mathew Damon Gallowglass, who has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, be treated successfully for his condition and make a full recovery.
May Lisa C be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from breast cancer.
May 6 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Bob W of Lake County, Ohio’s treatment for cancer go well so that he may heal and recover as quickly as possible.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
My God, now pianos too! Before long any person who’s applied meter to two tones of the Western music scale, however briefly, will be consigned to the Grand Symphony of The Bad Place!
JMG: Does that word need to be euphemized? The Bad Place, unheaven, etc, the word that means that? Asking both about actual references to the putative place bad people go, and about usage as an intensifier.
Chuaquin: Yes, that’s the nature of the joke I made, and I’m glad it survived translation. I hadn’t been sure. There was a smaller joke hidden in there as well – I spoke of a number of things coming to an abrupt end, but when it came to police brutality I spoke of a mere reduction, like the cops would still find a way even though the earth has been destroyed and all of humanity wiped out.
Thanks for teaching me a new word for brilliant artistry: onanist!
That too is a joke. I know what onanist means.
— Talking to the group in general now, not just Chuaquin.
First: For the record I do not subscribe to the paradigm of Good Science vs Evil Religion. I also take dualism to be self-evidently true and I think the idea that the soul somehow emerges from meat or the electrical activity of the nervous system is balderdash. That is to say that I certainly don’t accept the man’s entire worldview wholesale. I do not.
Now, with that out of the way…
I’m finished with talking about Richard Dawkins and his work around here. I think some of the things that have been said on that subject here this week are ludicrous and it’s annoying me. I’ve written and deleted responses that probably would have been deleted for me if I’d tried to post them, not only for being lengthily off-topic, and a lack of bad language notwithstanding. I worked around the language constraints as I do and made my meaning expressively clear, but it’s really not worth my energy. I have made revisions to credibility estimates where necessary and now move on from it. Y’all think what you will about Dawkins, his work, and The Selfish Gene in particular. I don’t give a brown grape.
@Chuaquin: Well, I’m not there when Jodorowsky is doing rituals or meditations or whatever other practices he engages in, so I can’t know 100% if he is actually an experienced practitioner or not. I do know he wrote an entire book on his use of Marseille tarot, and that he has been a fixture in Paris as a tarot reader, so I am inclined to think he is not a fraud. Also, from my viewing of Holy Mountain, he put in some very legitimate symbolism around alchemy, along with all the other heavily loaded symbolism throughout the film. I would have some quibbles about how he portrayed the work of the planets, but he is a really weird artist. He has written some other books about his specific practices. Some he seems to have made up out of the stew of his influences. I don’t care about lineage or tradition as much as “does it work?”
What I respect about him, regardless of what his work is about and portrays, is that he ACHIEVED his goals in bringing those very marginal, weird, strange, visions to life and got them out to people. That in itself is a triumph that bespeaks some knowledge of will, discipline, and imagination (three faculties of the mage).
Yeah, he’s controversial, but being controversial doesn’t mean one is a fraud. It just means some people take offense to the stuff you make, as was evident when Holy Mountain caused such a major scandal at its Cannes premier in 1973.
All of that is enough to make me think he really IS a magician of some kind.
@ Cynthia # 69 and # 83
Respect! 🙂
I am from Green County, Wisconsin. I can attest the polka is splendid to dance along with the schottische.
I’ve been trying all week to think of something to say, but alas. All I can think to say is that I’ve decided I was wrong about being Phase 11, and that I am, in fact, Phase 19.
In retrospect I see why I made this error: I don’t want to be Phase 19, because “enforced failure of action” frankly sucks. “Enforced belief” is how I wanted to see myself. I’ve also come to see that this explains a decent bit about my life: essentially, I tried to swap my Mask and my Body of Fate, with less than stellar results.
Carl Sagan was a total hippie. “Cosmos” is full of epigraphs quoting Laozi or whatnot. Being an atheist doesn’t negate that, he was just irritated by people like Velikovsky.
Patrick H. (no. 81) “I’ve suspected that the Virgin Mary was not the mother of the historical Jesus. Luke 2 & Matthew 12 indicate she didn’t understand her son’s mission, and the latter reveals the historical Jesus despised his family. ”
Uh, all this could be true (and indeed, has the ring of truth), and she still be his mother. Life isn’t always a Hallmark card! (Even though Hallmark makes actual cards featuring the Holy Family.)
JMG (no. 46) ” The historical Buddha was the archetypal poor little rich kid …”
The earliest references to Sakyamuni Buddha come centuries after when he would have lived (which is itself highly unclear, to the point that we can’t even be sure of the century). So I don’t see any “historical Buddha” to reconstruct. The lore about the prince who leaves his palace and encounters four people, is obviously highly systematized (whenever Buddhists number things, you can assume it to be a later tradition!) and on the face of it, doesn’t seem terribly likely (a boy who grows up ignorant of sickness and death?) If there was a historical figure at the bottom of all this, I assume that he resembled other renunciates of his time, and followed the then-prevailing theology. Unfortunately, it is hard to know what this might have been. Some of the personal names in the sutras suggest a matrilineal tribal structure very different from the highly Sanskritized Buddhist tradition as it enters the historical record. It’s a bit like arguing over what Noah was like, and then trying to decide if it makes sense to speak of a “historical Noah” without a worldwide flood, all the animals, etc.
Cynthia #61 Chuaquin Acording the philosophical materialism of Gustavo Bueno there are four types of matter: M1, object of all branches of physics c and chemestry ;M2, sensations and feelings; M3, abstractions like the idea of straight line, theorems, etc. And another kind of matter wich exist but is not M1, M2 or M3 and wich is called M and includes many things and the matter before and during the Big bang because It is out of reach of our senses and our intelectual capabilities because before the Big Bang didn’t existed time and space.
I’m sorry the following may not be strictly topical (although if I thought about it I could probably make it so along the lines of positive or negative evil and/or Ring-Chaos, but I haven’t elaborated many thoughts on it just yet)..
But, I think others here might also be interested in the following wonder- a draft scalar physics paper, written in the strictest academic format, on the topic of “demonic entities” considered as “entropic [Ring-Chaos?] parasites”…
https://scalarphysics.com/Montalk_(2026)_Entropic_Parasites.pdf
Patrick # 81:
I’m not a theologist nor a skilled occultist, but I’ve scratched my head a bit puzzled, after having read your reasoning, to deny Mary was Jesus mother in an human biological sense. Often, mothers love doesn’t mean understanding their children. Indeed, some mothers have arguments with their sons (like I’ve seen in my own family). On the other hand, I’ve met some people who despise their family so they leave their parents home ASAP, and they share clearly DNA with their hatred parents and brothers/sisters (sad but true: “blood” doesn’t mean always love). Maybe Jesus was too rebel for his biological family.
Of course, my reference to Mary and Jesus is for them as human beings under usual psychology patterns, not as over-human likely beings (I repeat you I’m not an expert in that another topic).
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Cynthia # 83:
Pianos: Maybe the devil affects more to some pianists than the “machine” in itself. I don’t know wether those overacting pianists are feeling too much their own music or they pretend it, “punishing” their instrument (ha ha). By the way, I like a pianist named James Rhodes, I’ve seen and heard him live in concert, I think he plays music well and honestly.
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Jokes:
Yes, I understood your main joke but not the “smallest” one until now…thanks.
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Onanist/onanism are words also known in French and German too, methink, to depict lonely acts you’ve guessed easily with a loose biblical reference…
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Well, I understand your explanation about Mr. Dawkins topic, so…no argument here. I only will tell you, on the short form, that my main criticism against him isn’t his “gene-mania” nor his angry atheism, but his attacks against all philosophy and philosophers (except his own narrow minded materialist philosophy disguised with the Science coat). I see his attitude a bit dishonest in an ethical and intellectual sense.
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Justin P. # 84:
You’ve pointed some facts who could be evidences in favor of Mr. Jodorowsky being a true magician an occultist. I’ll take note of them. However, sometimes I’ve found in my country artistical current context this or that artist who pretend being “spiritual” when he/she wants to sell his/her work. Well, it’s an amusing change from the old school leftist fake intellectual babble-speech, but another kind of dishonest imposture. Some other artists use spiritual world ideas and images to do art, but they’re honest enough to depict themselves as non religious nor occultists, only interested in the thing in a cultural way. And a few seem really to believe in spiritual things.
Honestly, I haven’t known the whole J. work, I only know a part of his art; so I’ll see more of it before pointing wether he was a true or a fake magician (or partly one thing and another one). Some people say he was true, another ones he wasn’ it.
By the way, my admired Moebius (who was J. artistic fellow for a while), seemed truly interested in meditation (interesting!).
By the way, I’ve thought recently in another controversial man, not an artist, but a guru: J. Krishnamurti. Some “spiritual” people love him, others say he was a fraud (more often, “Guenonian” traditionalists, who endlessly points him as “counter-traditional”-what a surprise-). I’ve read some J. K. writings, and I personally think it was a real philosopher; sometimes I agree, sonetimes I disagree with his statements.
Northwind, er, well, I’m not. I don’t dance; I suffered through repeated attempts to teach me how, which were at least as upsetting and unpleasant to my partners as they were to me. Dancing takes a level of motor coordination I simply don’t have.
Cicada, delighted to hear it! He’s quite correct, of course; those first words by God in the creation myth of Genesis in Hebrew are yehi owr, “let light be.”
STS, ha! That’s very well written — and quite accurate. My taste in Buddhist scripture tends toward the slightly more mellow and wordy — the Mahavairocanasambodhi sutra and the Vajrasekhara sutra, in particular. Yes, I grew up with a Japanese stepfamily who are Shingon Buddhists; how did you guess? 😉 But they’re no more “authentic,” in terms of their relation to Buddhist origins, than the Buddhakapala David Chapman writes about so colorfully, and they contain their own forms of weirdness.
Earthworm, your Latin is superior to Brian’s; sodalitas stulti is “the fellowship of the fool.” If you want to indicate that there’s more than one fool, it would be sodalitas stultorum.
Patrick, I have no idea; I wasn’t there at the time, you know! I know quite a few Gnostics who believe that Jesus’ mother was an incarnation of the aeon Sophia, in which case it’s probably not too far off to suggest that she could be described just as well as an avatar of Kannon.
Ecosophia, thanks for this as always.
Cynthia, nope. Hell, meaning the place, is a perfectly acceptable word; I can think of plenty of maiden aunts who, in religious conversations, name it without blushing. As for Dawkins, you’ll notice I didn’t join the discussion. He’s one of the thinkers about whom very few people nowadays can speak calmly.
Slithy, I get it. Trust me, “forced disillusionment” — the Body of Fate of phase 18, which is my phase — also sucks. Most of the third quarter generally has unpleasant Bodies of Fate, alas.
Ambrose, in that case just put a little more stress on the word “archetypal” in the comment of mine that you quote, and it still stands. Indian Buddhism was very popular among the wealthy commercial classes of the Maurya and Gupta Empires, and the image and narrative of Sakyamuni Buddha (whatever their actual origins) they prized was not that far from my admittedly light-hearted description; equally, the collapse of the Gupta economy once the trans-Eurasian trade routes shut down had the effects I’ve described.
Scotlyn, interesting — and one more piece of evidence that ideas shoved out onto the fringes, as scalar physics has been, cross-fertilize with other forms of rejected knowledge in the strangest ways!
@Chuaquin: You shall know them by their fruits. Jodorowsky seems to have some fruits, IMO.
As for Jodorowsky, I don’t necessarily have to agree with all of his views or ideas portrayed in what he creates to think that he is legit. He is 97 years old by-the-way, which makes me think he was doing something right. Certainly he is possessed of a great degree of life force. Such strong life force makes me think he has been engaged in various spiritual practices for real, make of them and his out put what you will.
BTW, I’d say there exists on the right a kind fake moralistic/ethical babble-speech that is yet another kind of dishonest imposture.
Polka:
This dance was popular and famous even in India. Indeed, a lot of years ago I bought a cassette with some traditional Indian music themes, and there was a polka, played with Indian instruments by Indian musicians (very bizarre!).
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Ambrose # 88:
Yes, to some extent Sagan was quite hippy; but he was very cautious to quote spiritual thinkers only as cultural references, not believing them in a too deep sense, methink. By the way, he was from Jewish origin, but I think he didn’t go to the “Bar Mitzva” (I hope I wrote it right) ceremony when he was old enough to have done it, so I bet he gave up soon religion and embraced materialist philosophy/science.
Ironically, Mr. Sagan history view was evidently based and biased by his frantic manichaean narrative about how good is science and how evil are religions, a binary fighting which is very similar to Abrahamic religions simplest narratives (God and Satan)-not all of them-.
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“Historical” Buddha:
Some years ago, a Buddhist guy told me he and some other Buddhists believed there was a historical Buddha, but he wasn’t a prince, but a man born in a quite rich family. Well, I’ve heard Buddhism hasn’t an orthodoxy to save, nor a closed sacred writings canon; so they seem to be one between several different opinions about the “historical” Buddha in that philosophy/religion.
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Anselmo # 89:
It isn’t a surprise for me that G. Bueno classified matter according his materialist point of view (of course, if he hadn’t done it, it hadn’t been a materialist philosopher).
I’ve got a “small” problem in understanding and sharing how he puts abstractions as part of the matter. In a rough way, I could think abstractions are thoughts, and thoughts are chemical-streams in our brains; but for example mathematical abstractions don’t really exists in this material universe, outside human minds. If this was Mr. Bueno will to fit conscious mind abstractions in the bed of Procustus of matter, I only can say: a good attempt…
There are another philosophers having another ideas about abstractions.
Scotlyn: Thank you, and the respect is mutual. I feel like since I’d already said the thing to you when another thing inspired me to write the second, stronger version of it, that you might have got more of that message than was necessary. I apologize.
Chuaquin: I read what you said in the prior comment about guitar solos and had this really funny imagining of the singer of a rock band misunderstanding that word and introducing his guitarist as a “spectacular onanist” or telling the audience they were about to get “an amazing display of onanism” or something like that! 😀
Frank Zappa agreed with you, by the way, in case it interests you to know that.
I’m not cultured enough to name any pianists but I love that instrument. I don’t play it, but I love the sound of it.
I may have found something to agree with in the remainder of what you said, but I said I was done with that topic and that is indeed for the best.
Separately from that guy himself, I would say in favour of materialist philosophy that it makes only one claim about the unknowable: that the soul is emergent from conventional matter and energy. They picked a whopper for sure, but it is only one. Only agnosticism can claim a cleaner sheet than that. It doesn’t though, because it isn’t sure.
Anselmo: That sounds like an attempt to make a sensible order out of things that some thinkers refuse to touch. I think that’s a good thing. To put it in those terms, I think the soul must come from something that’s in M category: something beyond the reach of our senses, something not accessible to us, possibly incomprehensible to us even if we could access it, something quite Other.
“sodalitas stultorum”
Sweet. Thank you very much for that. I’ll pass it on to my friend Jim… I can hear him laughing already 🙂
JMG: Ok, thanks! I may still substitute words sometimes. I find your language policy sometimes makes me find a better way of saying something, such as yesterday when I found a way to say succinctly how little I don’t give, not just that I don’t.
As to Dawkins… yes, I see that! It is said in some circles that he may be a doo doo head! I shall be more careful moving forward!
@Chuaquin
I am proposing that the historical Mary is unrelated to the Virgin Mary Catholics revere. It seemed she only was made important retroactively, starting with the Gospel of Luke. I could easily be wrong– perhaps someone put the anti-family rhetoric in Jesus’ mouth to persuade new converts that they should become estranged from their pagan families, and it didn’t reflect the relationship between Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and their other children. After all, James became head of the church in Jerusalem.
Are there any good books on the relationship between the Virgin Mary and Kannon?
@Chauquin #94
re: historical Buddha
I think that view, that the Buddha was a rich man but not a prince, is probably correct. I know some people go further and deny Mr. Gautama any existence at all but I find these arguments as unconvincing as the similar arguments that Jesus didn’t exist. In both cases I suspect much of the appeal of those arguments comes from sheer wishful thinking by people whose worldviews would be less troubled if one or the other never existed.
If anyone is interested, Bhante Sujato and Ajahn Bramali, both Theravadan monks, make a good case in their book The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts (available for free online: https://sujato.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/the-authenticity-of-the-early-buddhist-texts/) that Buddhism almost certainly began when and where it claims it did and that the early texts show all the signs of being a mostly-faithful recording of an oral tradition originated by a single person and his close disciples.
But of course that’s a far cry from establishing that the Pali Canon is the Infallible Word of the Buddha or that Theravada is the One True Buddhism, or the Buddhism is the One True Dharma. I suspect both authors — being Theravadan monks — believe something close to that, but they had the good sense not to make or defend those kinds of claims.
@JMG
“Trust me, ‘forced disillusionment’ — the Body of Fate of phase 18, which is my phase — also sucks.”
I’ll bet. Of all the bodies of fate, that’s one of the few that sounds worse than my own. I at least I have the hope that if I could get what I wanted, it would be most of what I hoped for. And also that my next life should be, if not more pleasant, at least more productive.
Given how many of us here are in phases 17–19 should we form a Third Quarter Support Group? (But then imagine having to hear Phase 20’s complain that they’re far too important and successful…)
On devilish pianos: there is no way on a regular piano to avoid the “tri-tone” or augmented fourth. (It’s known as the devil’s interval.) However, on a modern electronic instrument with an onboard computer, the “tri-tone” interval could be disabled each time the performer attempts to play one. So, the modern electronic keyboard is potentially less devilish than the conventional piano. Who says there’s no such thing as progress?
Last week I neglected to mention that the harps in Heaven never go out of tune. The 2nd law does not apply in eternity.
Earthworm, delighted to hear it. The years I spent learning Latin, and making all of the same mistakes as Brian of Nazareth, sometimes come in handy!
Cynthia, that’s one of the main reasons I keep the policy in place. Most profanity is stunningly dull; encourage people to do something else, and they get more creative.
Anon, if there are, I’ve never encountered them.
Slithy, when I followed your link it took me, after another step, to the Stygian regions of “page not found.” Fortunately a little searching turned up links that still work:
https://ocbs.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/authenticity.pdf
Thanks for this, btw! As for a third quarter support group, yeah, we’d have to find some way to get the Phase 20 types to go elsewhere…
Phutatorius, that would indeed require divine omnipotence. Still, harps aren’t the worst. I recall a joke among hammered dulcimer players:
Inquirer: “I know that harps stay in tune for fifteen minutes or until someone opens a door. What about hammered dulcimers?”
Hammered dulcimer player: “‘In tune’? What is this thing you call ‘in tune’?”
“Forced disillusionment” is at least an improvement over “Enforced loss” (the Body of Fate of Phase 17). We of Phase 18 have the capacity to learn from our dreams not lining up with reality, before we fall for other illusions.
JMG —
Thanks for persevering with this very valuable way into the cosmos of A Vision, making it accessible in ways that other studies of it do not. I hope this brings it back into the world esoteric pursuits as a living method, and not simply as a historical or literary curiosity.
A Christian equivalent to what Slithy posted about early Buddhist scriptures is F.F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable – available as a PDF here
https://www.scribd.com/document/892790448/The-New-Testament-Documents-PDF
Patrick, oh, granted. Yeats talks about that; the person of Phase 18, having accepted disillusionment, can get on with life and have some happiness.
LeGrand, gods, I hope so. It’s a brilliant system and deserves to be used, not simply stuck on a shelf.
BeardTree, thanks for this. I can’t get Scribd to work for me for some reason, but here’s another source:
https://www.cob-net.org/docs/translation-NT-Documents-Reliable-Bruce.pdf
JMG: Funny, that almost makes it sound as if you’re keeping the policy in place against some factor that would work in favour of dropping it. Anyway, thanks for fixing that boo boo for me. Any other place, once you hit send, that’s it, so much appreciated.
A thought about the questions being variously raised here about diverse scriptures, diverse divine persons and the connections (or lack of connections) thereof is this.
When a question is asked such as, is X scripture reliable – there is a gigantic ambiguity. Do we mean will it reliably inform us on historical facts about people who existed? Do we mean will it reliably train our spiritual endeavours and devotions? These are quite different matters, and therefore, imply quite different scales of reliability.
JMG, you are welcome, thanks again for creating a space with a balanced combination of law and order and liberty – which I see as a goal of the founders of our country.