In this post we will complete our first pass around the wheel of the lunar phases, the central symbolic mandala of William Butler Yeats’s occult teaching. It’s been a long journey from the first stirrings of consciousness, three quarters of the way around the great arc of spiritual unfoldment Yeats traces out. Now the journey comes full circle and ends where it began.
To people raised in modern industrial societies, all agog with the cult of progress, the thought that the process of spiritual evolution might be a circle rather than a straight line is quite often deeply troubling. What’s the point of existing at all, the attitude seems to be, if we can’t look forward to some kind of grand reward at the end of the process? Yet there’s a curious ambiguity in this attitude. Religious and secular thinkers alike have learned, sometimes the hard way, that it’s unwise to be too specific about the wonderful new world waiting at the rainbow’s end.
Detailed descriptions of heaven, like the equally detailed descriptions of the pseudoheavens brandished about by supposedly secular thinkers, tend to leave readers feeling a distinct sense of letdown. That’s inescapable, because the fantasy of perpetual progress treats any condition at all, however glorified, as something to surpass. You can see this displayed in high relief in the last volume of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. That series, as most of my readers will already know, dresses up Christian theology in the language of Victorian children’s literature. Inevitably, there must be some version of the Book of Revelation—and indeed there is.
So The Last Battle is fought, Narnia ends, and Lewis’s Christ-substitute Aslan the talking lion leads the characters on a headlong rush through one shining new world after another, each of them bigger and better than the one before. It’s a perfect transcription of the myth of progress into the language of Christian faith. All Lewis’s efforts can’t erase the suspicion that the point of all that hurrying from world to world is to keep readers from wondering whether all these brave new worlds are really that much better than the fairytale world the characters left behind.
It’s one of the interesting features of occultism in the Theosophical era—the period from 1875 to 1930 when H.P. Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society dominated the occult subculture across the Western world—that it launched an all-out attack on this way of thinking. Theosophical teaching affirmed reincarnation, to begin with, horrifying Victorian audiences with the thought that after death they would have to return to the very same world they had just left.
Far more shocking was the teaching that the great swarm of souls to which human beings belong, after it works out its destiny on this planet, will simply cycle to another world and go through the same process in a higher key, and keep on in the same way. There were said to be seven worlds, of which Earth was the only fully material one, and our swarm of souls has to go through all seven of them seven times, taking up countless ages in the process, before we move on to the next set of experiences needed for the development of our souls. Sure, we become wiser and stronger all the while, but that just means we get to take on more interesting challenges. It’s hard to think of a more comprehensive rejection of the linear timeline of mainstream Christianity.
Yeats was a member of the Theosophical Society in his youth, and his life neatly bookends the Theosophical era—he was born in 1865, when the revival of occultism set in motion by Eliphas Lévi was still finding its feet, and died in 1939, just a decade after the Theosophical Society’s self-immolation in the Krishnamurti scandal of 1929. His understanding of reincarnation was shaped by the same cultural pressures as Blavatsky’s, and his theory was as cyclical as hers. Still, he was his own thinker, and his narrative was written on a far less gargantuan scale than hers.
Nor was Yeats’s scheme as focused on collective issues as the Theosophical vision. As we’ll see later on, when we get to the material edited out of the 1936 edition of A Vision, Yeats left room for groups of souls passing through the cycles of reincarnation more or less together, but the focus always remains on the individual soul. The vast soul-swarms and planetary rounds of Blavatsky’s scheme have no place in our text. Nor is the soul’s journey through incarnation anything like as prolonged in Yeats as in the writings of the Theosophists; between 312 and 384 incarnations in a human body, depending on how many times a soul has to repeat phases 8 and 22 in each cycle, are enough to learn all the lessons human existence has to teach.
And then? Unlike the Theosophists, Yeats included something more or less like heaven in his scheme. The Thirteenth Cone—we’ll discuss the reasons for that odd label later on—is a realm in which all discords and oppositions are resolved at last. Of that state of being, Yeats says next to nothing, and since all human language depends on discords and oppositions, there is arguably nothing that can be said. He does mention that the vision of beauty the soul contemplates in the 15th phase becomes the luminous body the soul inhabits when it passes to the Thirteenth Cone, and he speaks of Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone as angelic beings who, having finished the cycles of becoming, descend back into manifestation to help those still bound to the Wheel.
Thus the last quarter of the Wheel isn’t the antechamber of Heaven, or anything of the kind. It’s the process by which the soul finishes working through the implications of the unique energy that sent it out from the formless darkness of Phase 1, the new moon, in quest of the equally unique vision of personal beauty and meaning that it will achieve at Phase 15’s full moon. At the same time, it is the quarter of the Wheel on which conventional religious sentiments focus, and this is not accidental. As soon as Phase 22 is left behind, the soul becomes capable of what Yeats calls “the Emotion of Sanctity,” which is the beginning of contact with life beyond death.
Sanctity itself, in Yeats’s system, is the renunciation of any merely personal salvation. The sort of spirituality that seeks only an exit hatch from existence, to Yeats, doesn’t deserve to be called spiritual. The path of the sage or saint in our text is one of acceptance; in place of an ego-driven striving for higher things, the soul embraces the experience of existence and is transformed by it. The last phases of the Great Wheel, in turn, are crucial in that process of transformation.
It is to those final steps on the journey that we now turn. This quarter of the lunar wheel corresponds to the element of fire, because in it, all is consumed and becomes one.
Phase 23: The Receptive Man
In Yeats’s view, the “final boss” that the soul must overcome in each phase is always itself. Whatever its greatest strength may be at any given point around the rim of the Great Wheel is the enemy it must defeat to go forward, and the harder it works to build this or that power, the fiercer the struggle to let go of it and accept its opposite. That conflict reaches its fiercest intensity at Phases 8 and 22; in the latter, the soul must renounce the attempt to make the world correspond to its own subjective vision of truth and beauty—the vision that has been the mainspring of its existence for half the wheel—and learn to experience the world on its own terms, for itself.
As Phase 23 dawns, the soul has for its task the challenge of letting go of all abstractions, all systematic thought, so that it can experience the concrete reality of existence exactly as it is. It has to stop seeing things in terms of its own personal desires. All the capacities and technical skill it has achieved through the antithetical phases of the Wheel are now placed in the service of primary experience, and the result of this, the Body of Fate of this phase, is “Success;” great technical ability used to express what everyone can know and see is always welcomed.
The great challenge in this phase is the struggle to set aside the Mask and learn instead from the Body of Fate. To seek the Mask instead is to go out of phase, to embrace the false Mask, “Self-pity,” and to fall into the grip of the false Creative Mind, “Self-driven desire.” Success is still their fate, but their success makes them moody, unhappy, and selfish. It is only when the pursuit of the Mask is set aside that the true Creative Mind, “Creation through pity,” becomes possible, and this brings the true Mask, which is “Wisdom.”
Phase 24: The End of Ambition
The next step in the unraveling of all that was built up in the antithetical phases takes the soul, freed from intellectual abstraction, into the struggle against moral abstraction. Here the essential instrument is a code of behavior that calls the soul to action, and forces it to judge its actions not by its own perceptions but against an external yardstick. That code is not chosen but given: inherited from a family or a social class, imposed by a profession or a church, or in some other way forced on the self. Impersonal service is the soul’s ideal in this phase, expressed through the Body of Fate, “Objective Action.”
As with the other phases of this quarter of the Wheel, It is common for people passing through this phase to fall out of phase through an embrace of the false Mask. Here this is “Isolation,” which cuts them off from the sympathy toward others that alone can make a code such as theirs tolerable to others. The false Creative Mind, “Authority,” follows inevitably, and we have the moral tyrant who demands that everyone follow the same code and spends life lashing out in blind fury at all those who fall short of an absurdly rigid standard. Incapable of insight or even hesitation, such people are full of resentment, discontent, and self-pity, but place themselves on a pedestal of their own imagining.
In phase, people of this phase focus instead on their Body of Fate and achieve the true Creative Mind of this phase, which is “Constructive emotion.” Self-surrender becomes the keynote of their lives, and the code they have been given is embraced as a personal challenge rather than being imposed on others. This involves a tremendous effort and no small amount of pain, but in response the true Mask of the phase is achieved, “Self-reliance.” As with all the true Masks of the phases of the fourth quarter, this cannot be sought for itself; the soul has no capacity to do this, and will fall into the false Mask if it makes the attempt; the true Mask must be, can only be, a gift that arrives unexpectedly as a result of renunciation.
Phase 25: The Conditional Man
As the 23rd phase purifies the intellect of abstraction, and the 24th does the same for the moral sense, the 25th phase brings about the end of personal beliefs and opinions; the mind must be freed of the habit of clinging to its own viewpoint, and some established creed is the tool through which this takes place. The Body of Fate of this phase, “Persecution,” is a two-edged sword; out of phase, the person of this phase will persecute others, while in phase, he will be persecuted by others. One way or another, this is not an easy incarnation; the tinctures are opening, for the first time since they closed in Phases 18 and 19, and this time they open on the transcendent reality that Yeats, true to his cultural background, calls God.
Out of phase, this leads straight to the false Creative Mind, which is “Spiritual arrogance,” and the false Mask, “Self-consciousness.” People of this phase who are out of phase become utterly absorbed in themselves, indifferent to the sufferings of others, and convinced that they have a mission from God and anyone who disagrees with them must therefore belong to the Devil. That certainty drives them to persecute those around them, in whatever sphere their life affects. It’s a familiar type and is responsible for a vast amount of pointless human suffering.
In phase, by contrast, they achieve the true Creative Mind, which is “Rhetoric.” Instead of trying to force others to obey commandments thickly larded with egotism, they set out to persuade others to follow the impulses that come streaming to them through the opening tinctures. Their convictions are strong and vivid because, being impersonal, they draw on the collective mind of their time, and so they find it easy to convince others. In great or small ways, they become vessels for new beliefs rising in the collective consciousness, and if those conflict with established interests—as they usually do—they are persecuted for those beliefs. In this way they achieve the true Creative Mind of this phase, which is “Consciousness of self.”
Phase 26: The Multiple Man, or The Hunchback
With these final phases we encounter the part of the Wheel most readers find most difficult to understand. Our entire culture makes it hard to make sense of the sinking of the exhausted soul into its source, and this is especially true of the 26th phase, the crucial first phase of its triad. It doesn’t help that the Body of Fate is one of the two most obscure in the system: “The Hunchback is his own Body of Fate” is practically a Zen koan, one of those incomprehensible statements that can be understood only by the enlightened.
Still, the basic situation is simple enough. The tinctures have opened fully in this phase and the soul must let itself fall into a unity experienced as God, or whatever image of the transcendent its cultural setting offers. The true Creative Mind, “Beginning of the abstract supersensual,” represents this opening to the transcendent, and if the soul accepts and embraces this it is given the true Mask of this phase, “Self-realization,” the wordless knowledge of its own transcendent nature. Yet this can be refused. The soul can, out of phase, flee from the light, abandon its own spiritual potential, and plunge into whatever its culture defines as sin, in an attempt to recover the world of ordinary human passions and experiences it has already irrevocably lost.
“Self-abandonment” is the false Mask of this phase and “Fascination of sin” the false Creative Mind. These represent the doomed revolt of the soul against its destiny. Monstrous behavior is one of the ways this can work out, as the soul does everything it can think of to offend and outrage the Divine. Some physical deformity always comes with this phase, thus its second title; in phase, this is experienced as a penance to be embraced, while out of phase, it helps to set the person at odds with, and often at war with, the rest of humanity.
Phase 27: The Saint
The experience of contact with supersensual realities has its own pathologies, and these come boiling up in this next to last phase unless the next steps toward union with the divine are taken. Here the false Mask is “Emulation,” and the soul out of phase tries to copy some image of sainthood as part of a craving for spiritual authority. As the last connections to ordinary human life and consciousness come unraveled, the soul out of phase falls into the false Creative Mind, “Pride,” and uses domination of others by claims of authority to prop up a crumbling ego. All this cannot delay the sinking of the soul back into its source, but makes the process much more painful both for the individual and for everyone else with whom they come into contact.
In phase, the true Creative Mind, “Supersensual receptivity,” comes into play; the soul opens itself to its spiritual environment, call it what you will, and follows its guidance. The Body of Fate of this phase is described as “None but impersonal action;” out of phase, this becomes the blind flailing of a dissolving self, while in phase genuine sainthood comes into play and the person acts under the direction of spiritual forces having a wisdom greater than anything human.
Phase 28: The Fool
The final phase of the cycle sees the last shreds of thought flicker out, leaving nothing but pure physical activity. The term “fool” in Yeats’s time was still acceptable as a description for those we now label “developmentally disabled”—doubtless this term will be rejected someday soon in its turn as too pejorative—and this is what he is talking about here: those people who, for one reason or another, do not have the normal human capacity to think.
“The Fool,” we are told, “is his own Body of Fate.” This is a little less gnomic than the similar phrasing in Phase 26, for life in a state of profound developmental disability does indeed impose a fate on those who undergo it. Lacking active intelligence, the Fool cannot choose to live in or out of phase; that choice has been made by the last few incarnations. Out of phase, the Fool embraces the false Mask, “Malignity,” and may become one of those developmentally disabled people who burns down houses or commits violent crimes out of a kind of animal cruelty; instinct, the last trace of mental activity in him, takes the form of the false Creative Mind, “Cunning.”
In phase, by contrast, the true Creative Mind is “Physical activity;” the Fool acts at the prompting of the supersensual, and as Yeats says, would know all wisdom if he could know anything at all. The true Mask, which comes as a gift, is “Oblivion.”
*****
Next month we’ll sum up the circuit of the Wheel with a close look at Phase 1, and then return to some of the more complex interpretive tools Yeats gives us, before moving on to the wider perspectives of “The Completed Symbol.” You may find it useful to review sections VI through XVII of “Part Two: Examination of the Wheel” before then.
Do political movements circle about the wheel as well? It seems to me that a lot of the madness of the left from 2016-2024 looks a lot like the description of the 26th phase, handled badly; while the actions of the last year and a half or so look a lot like the description of someone out of phase in Phase 27. More broadly, the entire arc of the Left since FDR appears to my mind to have been following the trajectory of this quarter of the wheel…
My view of reincarnation will probably offend almost everyone; I view the soul as a gigabyte vessel gathering information as it cycles through incarnations. When I was seven years old and in the hospital with a broken leg my parents got me book called “The World We Live In”. Inside was an illustration for the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle and the water cycle. That’s my vision of the soul cycling through incarnations and gathering information. I view at as a fairly mechanical process. If there really is a higher existence: which I honestly doubt, then union with the source means our souls get eaten by the source, the information we’ve accumulated is devoured and digested and the empty husk of our souls is crapped back into the system to repeat the process.
Fascinating. I notice that the first few phases of this quarter essentially replay the phases of the second quarter backwards: the ideal constructed in the second quarter, having been progressively renounced in the third quarter, is now actively dismantled.
Also, if as you’ve suggested Western civilization as a whole is currently in Phase 27, the fact that we have Phase 28 to look forward to as our next stop is ominous. Since we have decidedly lived out of phase these last few phases it suggests a future of even more profound dysfunction awaits us. I always knew we weren’t going to take the Long Descent well but this is something else again.
William, yes. Yeats says that every social or political movement, every artistic or literary style, every nation and community, everything human without exception follows this same cycle. This concerns me, since I could very easily see the last scraps of the Left falling into the mindless malignity of violent terrorism, lashing out uselessly as it goes out of existence.
Moonwolf, I remember that book! You’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but I’d note that calling anything “mechanical” is using the most barren and lifeless metaphor possible for it. The universe needn’t be experienced that way.
Slithy, that’s a useful way of looking at it. As for the broader picture, I still have some hope — the stirrings of the Second Religiosity are potentially a vehicle for a less hopelessly out of phase Phase 27 than we might otherwise get. Since we’re still in the early part of Phase 27, there’s still time to improve things.
This has been all along the quarter that’s held the most fascination for me, and has been the most opaque. I re-read Yeats’ phase descriptions earlier this week, and found them nearly indecipherable! I don’t know how you’ve managed to extract such clear descriptions of personalities out of Yeats’ notes, but I imagine a greater familiarity with the four functions makes each of the phases easier to construct from first principles.
Since phases 26 through 28 have such vivid titles, I’d like to propose three titles for phases 23 through 25: The Cathedral Builder, The Servant Leader, and The Prophet. Open to suggestions and improvements!
I don’t have an individual phase-by-phase breakdown this time, but in all your descriptions of the last quarter phases I can see the life stages of an aging individual who decides either to let go little by little of worldly authority and embrace the freedoms of limitation rather than responsibility; or on the other hand who tries to cling to the past and sinks into old age as a crabby old geezer who lectures everyone and is listened to by no one.
Those who age well, as they push their own opinions less and less, become the genuine elders whose soft voices resound loudly and embody the collective wisdom of their culture. (My late grandfather and grandmother aged poorly and well, respectively, and my whole family has discussed the contrast and taken the lesson to heart). Physical deformity (Phase 26) and senility (Phase 28) are natural phases of advanced old age, in which there is no shame if the proper preparations have been made.
On another family note, my late aunt had Down’s Syndrome, and lived to a ripe old age well-loved by her community. Although people with Down’s display the same range of emotions and temperaments as everybody else, I have always been struck by the capacity of these individuals, when they are generally happy and content with their lives, to be *exceptionally* happy and content. That Yeats places them as the culmination of human experience, right next to sainthood, just makes me smile and feels very fitting to me.
Interestingly, Jesus himself doesn’t always promise a grand reward. “Well done, good and faithful servant, because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things.” (Matthew 25:21) The result of successfully meeting your responsibility may be…more responsibility!
Can an in-phase Fool follow the promptings of a demon or malevolent ghost, and so outwardly imitate an out-of-phase Fool?
1) Christians always have the vaguest conceptions of heaven. It comes from them being sold a vague product and then they resist all attempts to define it. The only real definition I’ve gotten out of them is “it’s perfect”. Wouldn’t you get bored of perfection? When I tell them my idea of Heaven (covertly Gwynfydd) and that it’s similar to our current world but a lot better because a lot of challenges are removed (essentially fear of death and instinct to reproduce and all it’s tangents) and that we probably still have to work, they don’t like it.
2) Can you remind me what phases one can get off the wheel again?
I feel those horrified Victorian audiences. It’s one thing that bolsters the credibility of reincarnation to me.
“Sweet release of death”: Too good to be true.
“Same schist, different incarnation”: That’s a lot more like what I’ve come to expect.
(Sorry. I think “shale” is weak. Frack, however, substitutes nicely, though I haven’t had call to use it yet.)
@8 Luke
There is a specific Christian view of Heaven, but it’s so unappealing that most don’t take it seriously, though they know of it.
The saved live in mansions in neighborhoods with streets paved with gold (however, this part is doubtlessly metaphor). They spend their days worshipping God in great services involving music-making, and when they’re not doing that they’re feasting.
Slithy Toves #3: “I notice that the first few phases of this quarter essentially replay the phases of the second quarter backwards…”
Aided by a website that has been cited here repeatedly (https://www.yeatsvision.com/Wheel.html), I am beginning to sense the phases as seven groups of four. For instance, Phases 2, 14, 16, and 28 can be seen as different versions and inversions of each other, as the four Faculties swap positions but remain in the same geometrical relations to each other. All of these phases have a theme of ‘Simplicity’, just as the tetrad 3/13/17/27 has a theme of ‘Intensification’ and 4/12/18/26 has a theme of ‘Synthesis and Consolidation’. (I am just sketching a pattern here, so revisions will have to be made).
There is also a hint here about how the Faculties as dynamic bodies in motion act as karmic cause and effect to each other. Why must a phase of failure be followed by a phase of success, and then one of renunciation? On a superficial level, it’s because each phase lays the groundwork for the one following, and even on the physical plane every ascent up a staircase must be followed by a descent, and vice versa. But on a more complex and hidden level (which I haven’t grasped yet), these four things (Will, Mask, Creative Mind, Body of Fate) are spiraling through a cone-shaped notional space, and the angles and interplay of their dance lead to karmic circumstances that may seem surprising and non-sequential as they manifest in physical life.
The image I’m using for this thought is that of the spiral wishing wells or ‘coin vortexes’ that I used to see at the zoo when I was a child. There would be this big plastic funnel with a slot at the top for loading in coins, and the coins would roll out of the slot and into the funnel in wide loopy spirals, getting faster and tighter as they neared the bottom of the funnel. If you can imagine feeding in four coins, two going clockwise and two going counter-clockwise, you would have a nice visual approximation of the motion of the Faculties around the Wheel, and as a bonus, the increasing speed and precision of the circles as the coins spiral lower would symbolize the soul’s increasing sophistication as it rounds the Wheel multiple times.
A video example is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=TzSu14mOvqk
and a sample photo here: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/3ft-spiral-wishing-well-coin-funnel-460171663
This is something of a tangent, but it seems to me that even in the Theosophical scheme there is something of a Faustian element, just much-delayed: after the seven cycles of seven worlds, there is something even bigger and broader to look forward to.
I understand and generally agree with the idea that we are still children, spiritually, and essentially still in a kind of school phase of our overall existence, and will eventually graduate to a wider kind of life, but then what? Do we continue graduating forever, do we reach reach a final state of maturity, or do our souls eventually experience a kind of spiritual senescence followed by a kind of death so that we can start the whole process over again?
(The Wheel is fractal is nature, with each part of it recapitulating the whole; but perhaps the whole as we experience it in turn just a recapitulation within one phase of an even higher cycle of itself?)
I’m not expecting you to answer this! This is all hopelessly beyond our current grasp, but it hints that the model — any model — almost surely breaks down not too far past what we can see.
Maybe if the West experiences 28 out-of-phase, the wars, crime and abuse of citizens by governments will thoroughly alienate most people, who will adopt some other collective identity and so Faustian civilization will quickly dissolve and sanity will be restored.
I think the 23 phase has its own Van Morrison theme song
In the Garden
“No Guru,
No method,
No Techer
Just you and i
in the garden
misty wet with rain”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYsXeRYLVSY&list=RDuYsXeRYLVSY&start_radio=1
(a fun live version from the Masonic Temple in San Fransico )
Was the physical deformity of our Hunchback phase obesity?
Luke Z #8: As I recall, C. S. Lewis’ description of the Narnian ‘heaven’ that our host refers to makes clear that this new realm (‘Aslan’s Country’) looks just like the country called Narnia that the characters have left behind, only it feels more vivid and real. Aslan explains that this is the real Narnia, of which the country they lived in previously was only a shadow. This is a pretty clear reference to the climb up out of Plato’s cave into the realms above, which are not separate from this world or ‘perfect’ in the conventional sense of the world, but rather the vibrant source from which the physical world springs. Kind of like…. Gwynfydd, as far as I’ve understood descriptions of Gwynfydd discussed here.
There also seem to be further Narnias, even more real, to which Aslan invites the characters to run with him. I think the ‘hurrying from world to world’ that our host names in his description was just Lewis’ narrative sleight of hand to indicate that the final destination of this journey into the heart of reality (if there is a final destination) is incommunicable to those of us still in the physical world. And the tongue-tied Christians you’ve talked to might have a similar sense of ontological humility when it comes to discussing what their hopes and dreams are built on.
Just a thought to add to the discussion, as I personally think the viewpoints discussed here have more in common than they have differences from each other.
The description of phase 24 made me instantly think of Margaret Houlihan from MASH especially at the beginning of the series though she mellowed somewhat by the end.
Moonwolf8: Ha ha! I looked in a lighthearted “ok, I’ll play that game” way to be offended by that, but I totally failed. It gives me that same feeling I just talked about here earlier this morning, of “you know, it *would* be that”, meaning the machine dropping out the empty husks to do it all over again. It’s also really funny!
“As the last connections to ordinary human life and consciousness come unraveled, the soul out of phase falls into the false Creative Mind, “Pride,” and uses domination of others by claims of authority to prop up a crumbling ego. All this cannot delay the sinking of the soul back into its source, but makes the process much more painful both for the individual and for everyone else with whom they come into contact.”
Yeah, I’m terrified for what European Faustian civilization are going to be doing in the next few decades, if the prediction that it has entered phase 27 are right.
Disclaimer: My idea on what “heaven” is not some claim of certainty. It’s just what I’ve arrived at after much meditation.
Dylan, one of my great-grandmothers had Downs syndrome. What I’ve been told — I never met her — was that she was a painfully shy woman, red-haired and plump, who never learned to write her own name but was the best cook in Grays Harbor County and was unfailingly sweet-tempered and kind. (I modeled the minor character Fern in my tentacle novels on the stories of her I heard growing up.) Her husband adored her and considered himself the luckiest man alive to have her as his wife. My paternal grandfather, who was one of her sons-in-law, learned to cook from her, which stood him in very good stead during his twenty years as a firefighter; he was a hard, bitter man, but his face took on a gentle look you never saw there at any other time when he reminisced about her.
Roldy, what Jesus taught and what Christians believe don’t always have that much to do with one another…
Patrick, nope. The opening of the tinctures opens the soul to the whole supersensual world, not just to the mutterings of this or that spirit.
Luke, (1) it’s a Piscean thing. The idea in all the Piscean faiths is that the goal to be attained is the opposite of life in the world. (2) We’ll get to that. It’s complex.
Cynthia, “shale” became standard here because fracking (i.e., hydrofracturing) oil shales was a hot topic in the peak oil scene a decade and a half ago, so references to that lent themselves to faux profanity. For a while really annoying people got labeled “boreholes” on the same principle.
Slithy, I’ve found it most productive to think of material incarnation as the prenatal state of the soul. We haven’t been born yet until we leave the womb of matter once and for all; after that, our prenatal development ends, our real life begins, and whole realms of growth and learning open to us that we can’t even imagine in our current condition. If the metaphor holds, that doesn’t continue forever; there is a maturity and old age in the soul’s far future.
Patrick, notice that you’re treating the civilization and the people as two different things. I’m far from sure that works.
Dobbs, a fine theme for meditation!
Anon, granted — not least because of what pride traditionally goeth before.
@Dylan #11
Thank you for this. I’m aware of the site and have used it as a reference for the various phases but I admit most of it goes well over my head. If I may ask, what do you make of the 5-11-19-25 group? I’m pretty sure I’m in Phase 11 so this is relevant to my interests.
From my brief review just now, those phases each follow a phase in which it became palpably clear that something is gone and it’s not coming back, or that something is coming and it’s not going to be stopped. And whereas that phase is about recognizing that turning-point, the 5-11-19-25 phases are about taking the first tentative steps toward acting on it.
As for the spiral wishing-wells, that’s a great image: I’m lucky enough to have some fond memories of playing with those as a kid, so I immediately knew exactly what you were talking about. (Of course you try to drop two coins in as close to each other as you can. It’s what you do.)
@JMG
You’ve mentioned that each phase tends to attract those of the phases immediately before and after. If I’m right and I’m Phase 11, that puts me exactly one quarter of wheel away from you. I wonder if that generates a kind of kinship as well and explains why I find you so fascinating (and sometimes frustrating!).
@JMG
But the tinctures are still open in an out-of-phase Fool. Do they instinctively reject the guidance of the supersensual world they sense?
JMG: I remember that, or at least those being a recent coinage. That dates back to the late-mid days of the Archdruid Report, right, like around 2012? That’s about when I started reading about Peak Oil and found out about you. It happened to be right when people were going, “oh, thank god we have fracking now and can forget about Peak Oil” that I took an interest in the future of oil and what that would mean for us, and I guess the way I worded my Google searches led me right to were I’d get educated about how fracking isn’t a new technology, it was one that we were resorting to out of necessity, and that it was gonna be a pretty short-lived deal.
Anyway I read all of the Archdruid Report, a few of your books, some of which I owned, and some of this blog, although I most of the time I haven’t participated in the comment section. A notable exception: Remember years ago when some idiot linked to his post about how we should induce panspermia in the exoplanets so life doesn’t die out? Well, some idiot, at your service.
I don’t advocate for that anymore. 🙂
I even remember using “borehole” as you described, although I guess that didn’t catch on long term. I don’t remember if others used it then. It may have had its day by the time I showed up.
Hrmmm
Deformities of the Hunchback phase….
If i look at the differences between Americans from the 19th century vs 20th century i would say we are taller, obese, cancerous and old. (deformities from abundance?)
If we really have entered the Saint phase it is no wonder I see the myth of Lucifer as a key to understanding what is happening in the world. I think most people (especially those with a lot of social power) are out of phase with the Saint. Pride, hubris and the desire to dominate seem to be options A, B and C for many.
@Cynthia
I admit I really like “schist” as a faux profanity.
Another term you might like that got some play for a bit here is “a flustered cluck” — a neat little Spoonerism calling to mind a furious chicken acting out its anxieties in a rather unproductive manner.
Hello, JMG and commentariat:
I’ve found some interesting phrases and paragraphs in John today current post, so I won’t beat around the bush, and I’ll begin to comment them, according my own view:
“It’s a perfect transcription of the myth of progress into the language of Christian faith. All Lewis’s efforts can’t erase the suspicion that the point of all that hurrying from world to world is to keep readers from wondering whether all these brave new worlds are really that much better than the fairytale world the characters left behind.”
An interesting example of Faustian Christianism. In spite of C.S. Lewis claims of supporting traditional Christian beliefs, and apparently being a conservative (at least in social and cultural matters, methink), he was a child of his own time…like every person who has lived in known History, you and me included. You can make some criticism about most stupid and evident commonplaces shared by most of people, influenced by mainstream ideologies and media; if we make an effort; but we can’t run away from every bias and blind spot during our time society.
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“and died in 1939, just a decade after the Theosophical Society’s self-immolation in the Krishnamurti scandal of 1929.”
I’ve read some online writings about that last storm in the complex history of the theosophical Society. I hope not to be too off topic now, but what do you think (John and commentariat), about the own Krishnamurti? (before and after 1929). I’ve read only some of his writings, and I like some of them but I dislike another ones, though I won’t bore you too much with a detailed list of them (by now).
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“The path of the sage or saint in our text is one of acceptance; in place of an ego-driven striving for higher things, the soul embraces the experience of existence and is transformed by it.”
This idea reminds me that, at least some mystic people from different religions and spiritual traditions, have pointed there’s not real spiritual change without controlling the own ego; it seems the most extreme cases of true mysticism apparently have left behind the ego. For example, some Sufi masters usually say the “miracles and wonders” made by some gurus (which to some extent could be seen as paranormal phenomena or maybe something more…), are bad for the true spiritual path: indeed, they only show a self-centered dangerous tendence. I’ve written it only as a dilettante in these topics…
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“As Phase 23 dawns, the soul has for its task the challenge of letting go of all abstractions, all systematic thought, so that it can experience the concrete reality of existence exactly as it is.”
It seems IMHO an epic and titanic effort for every human being, even in that phase. For example, it’s very common to mistake wishes with reality.
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“The false Creative Mind, “Authority,” follows inevitably, and we have the moral tyrant who demands that everyone follow the same code and spends life lashing out in blind fury at all those who fall short of an absurdly rigid standard.”
If I’m not wrong, this attitude and behavor seem very similar to the Victorian moralists and current woke crazyness (which I hope it keeps its decline in the West, though without not too much hope: anti-woke right wing is likely to return to a new-old rigid moralism as a near future revenge).
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“Their convictions are strong and vivid because, being impersonal, they draw on the collective mind of their time, and so they find it easy to convince others.”
I think I’ve met a few of these people like you’ve depicted them in this phrase. I only can say they’re worth to be heard (and let them convince you). I’m far from that level, because I must admit I’ve got my own opinions yet (though I see them as personal opinions, not as real absolut truths).
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“Yet this can be refused. The soul can, out of phase, flee from the light, abandon its own spiritual potential, and plunge into whatever its culture defines as sin, in an attempt to recover the world of ordinary human passions and experiences it has already irrevocably lost.”
So, the soul can choose to abandon it own potential, if I understand you well (maybe it seems a silly question, but I want to be sure of it).
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“in phase genuine sainthood comes into play and the person acts under the direction of spiritual forces having a wisdom greater than anything human.”
Unfortunately, I’ve never met any person in my everyday life who can fit in your depiction of true sainthood, though I’ve read some stories about saints (not only Catholics, but from another beliefs).
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“Out of phase, the Fool embraces the false Mask, “Malignity,” and may become one of those developmentally disabled people who burns down houses or commits violent crimes out of a kind of animal cruelty”
I’m lucky enough to not have met any Fool with this dangerous behavior, but MSM have told their audience some cases of this Malignity; of course, often newspapers and another media have been very reckless and sensationalist, so they’ve loved to depict those cases to “show” every disabled people can be a danger for average people, until recent times…
William # 1:
“Do political movements circle about the wheel as well?”
I think you’ve made a good question. Although I have a rough understanding of Yeats Wheel, I bet they circle about it, too.
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JMG # 4:
“Yeats says that every social or political movement, every artistic or literary style, every nation and community, everything human without exception follows this same cycle. This concerns me, since I could very easily see the last scraps of the Left falling into the mindless malignity of violent terrorism, lashing out uselessly as it goes out of existence.”
I’d like to disagree, but I’m afraid you’re right. It’s likely the Left sinking ship in near future will be tempted to fail in Nihilism, first in its thoughts, and then in the old Russian sense…
https://social.vcoins.com/twih/the-assassination-of-tsar-alexander-ii-march-13-1881-r369/
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Patrick H. # 13:
Your depiction of future seems interesting for me, as work hypothesis…
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JMG # 20:
“Roldy, what Jesus taught and what Christians believe don’t always have that much to do with one another…”
I’m afraid Jesus has been until today one of the most famous men in known history, and one of the most misunderstood men, too (by His followers). For example, at least during last century until now, Jesus seems an involuntary hostage held by the western “Christian” right wing, to justifiy in His name the worst human tendences…
Dylan,
I wasn’t referencing Lewis. I was referring to Christians I’ve had this conversation with in person. One such conversation happened two days ago. He heard my definition of heaven and said “I’m holding out for something better”. When I tried to find out what that was it was some vague mixture of “light, perfection, God, and family”. I don’t think being with my family for eternity would be very satisfying if we were floating in some light prison. I give it three days before I get bored. My opinion is the concept of heaven is a fnord in many minds. I wouldn’t attribute humility to the explanations I’ve encountered since they look down on more thought out explanations. If someone wanted to say what heaven was from a Christian perspective with humility, I imagine it would look something like “I don’t know what it’s like but I trust in God”. Hopefully I’m not coming off too abrasive. I appreciate your posts in this book club.
While the lunar cycle is extremely important in many ways, and I generally love the works of Yeats, I think it only broadly applies to reincarnation….As thousands of regressions by Dr. Weiss and Dr. Newton, and even some by yours truly, demonstrate, the purpose of our lives is to progress in maturity and what I’ll broadly call virtue…the goal being to rejoin our father the Maker of the Universe(s)….Some souls progress more rapidly, some slowly…but since time doesn’t seem to exist in the Spirit World, our rate of progress doesn’t seem to matter….
Mention of the worlds beyond Narnia made me think of Astrid Lingren’s “Brothers Lionheart,” where a young pair of Swedish brothers die and go to a kind of D&D themed heaven called Nangijala. Then, when one of then dies in *that*, he goes to the even higher realm of Nangilima (which is not much described).
An acquaintance of mind–who is an atheist–used a translation of these books to prepare his children when one of them developed brain cancer.. I mean, how do you even talk about something like this with small children? Everybody in their circle read that book (including me).
Slithy, Yeats doesn’t get around to mentioning that, but it’s at least plausible.
Patrick, as I tried to suggest, that choice gets made in their previous two or three lives; if they’ve lived those out of phase, that pretty much guarantees that they’ll live their 28th phase life out of phase too.
Cynthia, I have a dim memory of somebody saying something like that; I can certainly imagine how I would likely respond to it, and I apologize if I flayed you alive!
Dobbs, I know. I think there’s a chance that our 27th phase won’t be dominated by those, but it’s not the most likely outcome, unfortunately.
Chuaquin, er, that’s a lot of comments. I’m going to choose one of them at random to respond to and leave the rest. With regard to the challenge of the 23rd phase, yeah, it’s a tough one, but every phase has its own huge challenge. Yeats sees the entire point of incarnation as being constantly challenged to accomplish the hardest thing that’s not actually impossible.
Pyrrhus, the validity of that argument depends on whether you accept regressions as valid evidence, and I don’t. There are very good reasons why hypnotically obtained evidence is not admissible in any court in the United States; the most important is what’s called confabulation — in trance, the mind makes up fake memories in response to prompting from the therapist. (They can be shown to be fake, in turn, because in situations where the actual facts are known, the “recovered memories” have no correlation to what actually happened.) The subconscious mind, which is what’s contacted by this means, is extremely good at picking up on subtle prompts, which is one of the reasons why any given hypnotherapist will tend to get “recovered memories” from clients corresponding exactly to his or her preconceptions. This became especially notorious in the “Satanic ritual abuse” panic, but it’s also very evident in UFO abduction studies — it’s interesting, for example, that researchers who believe that aliens are benevolent consistently “recover memories” from patients reinforcing that belief, while those who believe that aliens are hostile just as consistently evoke imagery reinforcing their belief instead. It’s not that the researchers are dishonest — it’s that the technique mirrors your preconceptions back at you.
Ambrose, for small children, something like that is a very good choice; it makes the crucial point — death is a transition, not an end — in a lively narrative way that they can easily grasp. Since a great many people never get much past childhood in terms of their grasp of realities, in turn, such metaphors are worth keeping in circulation.
Hey JMG
I’ll be honest, of all the things in this essay series, the fact that the ultimate endpoint “The Vision’s” entire cycle of spiritual development is to become mentally disabled is the most unusual and controversial thing that it has described so far. Its certainly very humbling and profoundly antagonistic to the more “linear progression” models of spiritual development that is the standard most commonly expected.
Slithy Toves: Thank you, and yes, I do like “flustered cluck”. Spoonerisms are just about my favourite way to dress up profanity to go to the ball! I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to use “fumblebuck”.
Everyone: Words want to be free! If you see a fumblebuck, call it!
Er, no, don’t, that’s a person. Someone chose that name.
Oops, had this thought a minute too late to include in the previous.
Reflecting on it a bit, I think the best substitute for the scatological reference profanity is the age-old “shoot”. It’s better even than schist. One syllable, same start and stop sounds, and no limiter sounds. It’s perfect. There’s a reason they said shoot when they meant that.
“Frack” is almost as good at it’s job. It’s so close as to make no difference in fact. That weak little “r” sound barely gets to rise to its 3’6″ height and say “excuse me” before the draft created by the swift and mighty passage of “ack” upsets its balance and sets it on its bum.
Frack! No weakling word, that. In fact I’d better say Mr. Frack so I don’t get beat up. Mr. Frack, sir.
Not like shale. Shale gets regularly beaten up by darn. Even gosh took its lunch money once.
“I’ll be honest, of all the things in this essay series, the fact that the ultimate endpoint “The Vision’s” entire cycle of spiritual development is to become mentally disabled is the most unusual and controversial thing that it has described so far. Its certainly very humbling and profoundly antagonistic to the more “linear progression” models of spiritual development that is the standard most commonly expected.”
I’m pretty sure that the phase 28 is not the ultimate endpoint of the cycle of spiritual development, since one just goes back to phase 1. Rather the ultimate endpoint is when you leave this cycle entirely.
@Cynthia #33 and #34
“Frack” also has an established history as an f-word substitute in the show Battlestar Galactica (spelled “frak” in the reboot but “frack” in the original), as well as in Warhammer 40k (where it’s also spelled “frak”).
Which gives me a thought: in the original BSG, the word “felgercarb” is used as a substitute for another word meaning the manure of a bull… since we never really settled on a substitute for that here (“bullshale” isn’t that catchy), maybe it’s worth adopting.
JMG: Ha ha, well it stung a bit at the time, but I would say that “flayed alive” is overstating the severity of it considerably. Also, it was more than just a sharp response to my harebrained scheme (though it sure did its duty there!) it was an invitation to think about the beauty of long-undisturbed things.
Now, I wonder sometimes why the bloody heck we think it’s ok to deface Mars the way we are, and for what possible goshdarn reason anyway. I feel that’s a good thought, and while I can’t trace the pedigree of it all the way back to what you said, but it’s sure possible it started there. I would like to thank you for it.
Plus it’s kind of funny today. 🙂
I’m reading After Virtue. The author talks about how one of the moral philosophers views humans/moral agents as “impartial” observers devoid of all context and role. In modern society, one of the ways that seems to manifest is these floating, “impartial” brains criticizing, condemning, and commenting on every little thing. There’s more to it, but I embarrassingly forgot a lot of my thoughts on the topic because the book is a slog. Does this state correspond to one of the phases on the wheel? If it does, I’m not yet able to discern it, but I am having an intuition that it belongs to one of the phases of this quarter, maybe out of phase, because our society as a whole is here.
Thank you for your essay – fascinating! I don’t have any comments at the moment, just taking it all in.
“As for “The term “fool” in Yeats’s time was still acceptable as a description for those we now label “developmentally disabled”—doubtless this term will be rejected someday soon in its turn as too pejorative…”
You are behind the times, John :)) At least here in San Fransicko , it’s “alternatively abled”.
Returning to the topic of the post:
Elaborating on the idea that the primary and antithetical perspectives see the other as evil, it seems to me that from the standpoint each pole (Phase 1 vs Phase 15) of the cycle, the cycle can be seen as a journey from heaven to hell and back, with the goal of enriching the one paradise with the experiences it gains in its journeys in the other.
For example, you can spin the story from the start of Phase 1 as leaving from the bliss of pure unity with the divine into the world of sin and death, culminating in the creation of something new, acquired in full at Phase 15, which is then returned to the divine source through a process of surrender and reintegration.
But from the standpoint of Phase 15, the story is one of leaving the bliss of a world made just for you into the cold, harsh world of limitations and conflicts, where others can place their burdens on your back, culminating in the discovery of something of value that is wholly other, which becomes raw material to fashion a new and greater self, and a new and greater personal paradise.
@Moonwolf8 #2: your view of reincarnation doesn’t offend me at all. Maybe it’s not really a view of reincarnation: Maybe what you described is better named metempsychosis. I can’t claim to be an expert. I find the doctrine of reincarnation quite comforting, if it really means we’ll go around as many times as we need until we finally get it right; painful as the process might be. That seems to be Yeats’s position, reflecting theosophical claims. On the other hand, the Christian “good news” is saying that we get just one chance, and if we mess it up, then we are done for. That one chance seems to require believing in some pretty arbitrary sounding claims that common sense or a thoughtful nature would probably reject. That doesn’t sound at all like good news to me. Metempsychosis (though I’m no expert) appears more complex, somewhat as you described. Worth exploring.
J.L.Mc12, but it’s not the ultimate endpoint. That’s exactly it. It’s just one more stage through which each soul passes — the stage when they set aside the life of the mind and fully experience the life of the body. Then they go on to other things.
Cynthia, I’ve long been fond of “shuck.” Since the shuckings of corn are thrown away, it has the same connotation of waste product. My father was fond of “cripe,” which is of course a euphemism for “Christ,” but has a good solid sound to it. “Oh, for cripe’s sake” in a tone of utter disgust definitely communicates.
Slithy, felgercarb! I’d forgotten about that. Now I’m remembering other bits of faux profanity from science fiction. Tanith Lee, in a couple of her early novels, had some good ones: “droad,” which means “f***ing dull;” “thalldrap,” which is a woman’s sexual organ; and “farathoom,” which is roughly “bloody f***ing hell.” For that matter, in one of my otherwise forgettable early fantasy novels, I had a disgusted soldier growl an imprecation about “that thrice-cursed dog-futtering whoreson of a wizard,” which I think got the point across. 😉
Cynthia, thank you. That’s very kind of you!
Luke, that’s definitely a fourth quarter attitude! I’d put it at Phase 24 out of phase, with the false Creative Mind of “Authority” and the false Mask of “Isolation,” in this case isolation from context and role.
Inna, why am I not surprised? I give it five years before that’s rejected in its turn…
Slithy, that works very well indeed.
Slithy Toves: That’s interesting. “Frack” does seem to be a real natural at its role, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there’s been a language somewhere back there in human history where that set of sounds was the real featured event, the actual word I mean to say, not the polite-setting substitute.
I remember reading an SF book from, I dunno, 1960 or 70 or something? And the author of that book had his protagonist be a potty mouth, and he settled on “bowb” as the substitute for all swearing. It was very distracting. I think I finished the book, but I couldn’t tell you much else about it. I think the main character was some kind of space marine called Biff or Buff or something. But I think the author would have been better off to go with real-world softeners like “malarkey” and whatnot and save the invented words for the spaceships and other fantasy tech.
(That’s how I felt about the Heinlein book that featured “grok” also. Very distracting. Didn’t like it.)
Agreed that “bullshale” doesn’t really go, but, and I’ll say this even though I’ve come out as not a fan of shale, but how about “bovine shale”? That has a bit of a ring to it, no? I think shale really redeems itself with that one.
Besides, the real word is kind of sexist against cows. Why isn’t their product an example? 🙂
JMG: Oh yeah, those words definitely feel like that type. Shuck shares the same sharp phonetic attack as frack and the word it substitutes for. “Cripe”.. that feels like a potentially serious word too. Hard starter sound, and the ability to put some pressure into that p. I have no doubt that word communicates.
Those are good examples of phonetically good swear words, as far as I’m concerned. Made of sounds very suitable for the purpose. I don’t know if that’s just me, or English speakers in general, but some words are just made up of sounds that are great swear words. Shuck and cripe are prime examples.
I feel happy I brought it up with you about the panspermia thing. 🙂
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 6/8). 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.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
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 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 Kallianeira come to understand or face the entity or issue that seems to have trapped them, causing problems in her material circumstances, causing expensive troubles that threaten to force them out of home and mind, and leaving her burnt out and overwhelmed despite every attempt to find real help. May she quickly find out what to do and how to act to overcome these hardships.
May Patricia Ormsby’s journey to Shikoku for a religious retreat and training course on June 12-17 go successfully and safely.
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 Princess Cutekitten, who has made no comments on any of the Ecosophia blogs for a year now, and hasn’t responded to attempts at contact, be blessed wherever she is and in whatever form she may exist.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, whose cancer has returned, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment, and may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany, who is experiencing complications in her pregnancy due to an influenza infection, recover and have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
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 Pierre’s young daughter, Athena, be healed from her fatigue and its root causes in ways that are easy, natural, and as holistic as possible.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
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.
If we can jump off the Wheel to the Thirteenth Cone during any phase on the second half of the Wheel, we do NOT experience 312-384 human incarnations, or twelve cycles. That is the minimum number:
If we all experience just 12 cycles of human incarnation, then the last human incarnation for everyone would be the phase of the Fool. To jump off the Wheel at say Phase 20, one would have to begin their first human life at Phase 21 without previous human lives to gain the capacities of that phase. They would have had to been artificially bestowed on the soul by higher powers, which contradicts the purpose of us cycling through the wheel in the first place. (I assume all first human incarnations are Phase 2, but if capacities developed during animal incarnations can substitute for the first couple primary phases, then maybe the first human incarnation can begin at Phase 4 or 5. No later.) So 12 cycles must be the minimum number. If a soul fails to jump to the Thirteenth Cone during the twelfth trip through the second half of the Wheel, the soul would have to wait until the next Phase 16 for the next opportunity.
Another possibility, I suppose, is that serious occult, magical, or mystical practice during Third or Fourth Quarter phases can help the soul make the leap in less than twelve cycles, rather than just reduce the number of additional Third or Fourth Quarter lives needed. But souls that do not put in that work usually require 312-384 human incarnations to pass to the Thirteenth Cone. Or Yeats was wrong about the significance of twelve cycles through the Wheel.
Thinking about “The Hunchback is his own body of fate”… if “The Fool is his own body of fate” means a lack of agency perhaps the Hunchback is the opposite of that, a surfeit of agency, at least along the axis where it matters most, and thus whatever fate befalls the Hunchback, it is his own fault.
In any other phase there is generally some excuse for living out of phase: ignorance, fear, genuine weakness, trying to do the right thing, trying to do the sensible thing, etc. But the Hunchback who gives in to “Fascination of sin” is like Dr. Faustus walking into his contract with Mephistopheles knowing exactly what the terms are.
Similarly, during Western civilization’s passage through this phase a recurring theme was being warned exactly what the consequences — the environmental consequences, international consequences, the political, economic, social, cultural, you name it — of our actions would be and then we did it anyway.
Then those consequences landed we did our best impression of Faustus in the final scene, shocked that the fate we agreed to had finally caught up to us, and responding by doubling down on our sins the way Faustus responded by calling out to Mephistopheles even as the angels offered him genuine salvation if he’d just repent.
(This is not to indict every individual in Western culture — corporate guilt is not individual guilt. I feel need to say this since the confusion between them has been been at the heart of a great deal of our dysfunction for the past half-century: either by excusing ourselves from our ethical responsibilities because we cannot be individually blamed for the outcome of collective failure, or because we do the opposite and desperately seek out scapegoats to punish individually for collective failures.)
Luke Z. # 28:
“I don’t think being with my family for eternity would be very satisfying if we were floating in some light prison. I give it three days before I get bored.”
Well, I think your idea of heaven as a light prison is IMHO a bit narrow minded. Although Christians usually don’t know exactly how afterlife for fair people could be, they usually agree in a idea of happiness and freedom. They like to think living nearer to God is a good reward and so on.
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JMG # 31:
Oops, I’m sorry, John, but your essay has been “too” interesting for me that I’ve commented a lot of your phrases without being able to choose only a few of them…
“With regard to the challenge of the 23rd phase, yeah, it’s a tough one, but every phase has its own huge challenge. Yeats sees the entire point of incarnation as being constantly challenged to accomplish the hardest thing that’s not actually impossible.”
I take your ideas about Yeats system into account. Well, nobody said life was going to be easy for everybody…Of course, “difficult” doesn’t mean the same as “impossible”.
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Luke Z. # 38:
“The author talks about how one of the moral philosophers views humans/moral agents as “impartial” observers devoid of all context and role. In modern society, one of the ways that seems to manifest is these floating, “impartial” brains criticizing, condemning, and commenting on every little thing.”
I didn’t know that book you quote. I think 99’9% of real people is unable to be impartial (me included), so I also tend to think imparciality is an utopian mind state, only achievable by a very few people. So I can say (unfortunately) most of “impartial” brains you’ve depicted criticizing every human being attitudes and behaviors aren’t impartial, and they fool themselvers to think they’re above others.
An important teaching from Jesus according the gospels is His famous phrase ” Do not judge and you will not be judged”. I’ve found some Christian people (and even not Christians) who follow that wise idea, but unfortunately, a heck of believers in Jesus don’t do what their Master said…so they condemn everybody because they don’t behave like they would like they do. It’s a pity…
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Phutatorius # 41:
I understand metempsychosis isn’t the same as reincarnation. I’ve read somewhere the same idea about those two related but not equal terms. However, I can’t understand well and exactly what are the differences between the two ideas, so if you (or John or another commentarist) don’t mind, could you explain it in the short form? thanks on advance.
First of all, I read voraciously, and I’m very used to understanding most things quickly, often grasping concepts in school before my peers. That said, this whole concept of Yeats’ Wheel is a bit much to deal with. I get the basics of it, and it seems reminiscent of the cycle of Samsara, or maybe the Fool’s Journey through the Major Arcana of Tarot, but other than that, alot of the details are rather cryptic.
JMG #20: You said,
“after that, our prenatal development ends, our real life begins, and whole realms of growth and learning open to us that we can’t even imagine in our current condition. If the metaphor holds, that doesn’t continue forever; there is a maturity and old age in the soul’s far future. ”
This is rather concerning. What is this “maturity and old age”? Could it be the Unknown Death, or something else? If you mean attaining godhood, then that seems like a zenith rather than the decline & senescence suggested here.
Hi John Michael,
Oh my! The silly sausages of the fourth quarter. Oh well. Nature certainly suggests what is needful, if anyone cared to listen, but can the folks in this dark quarter do that? Was there a hermit phase? I now forget. Consider the hermit… 😉
Wasn’t spiritual pride the deadliest of all sins way back in the day? The bloated egos, regaled with mock thorns and blood, disregard the lamb – at their peril. Dunno where that last sentence came from.
Cheers
Chris
@ JMG “Yeats sees the entire point of incarnation as being constantly challenged to accomplish the hardest thing that’s not actually impossible.”
I’m going to hang on to this perspective on the “forest”, since I’m finding that the thickets have gotten me very disoriented and tangled up.
(I’m still following along, but more for the “white knuckle” feel of an incomprehensible flow of concepts and ideas than for understanding)…
On the other hand, the spur to compassion, and perspective, that exists in all of this, at the “forest” level, is the idea that one can say of *anybody*, no matter what they are currently doing or saying or experiencing, “well, they’re on the Wheel, aren’t they? …and who knows what almost, but not quite, impossible challenge they happen to be facing just now!”
Now to go and really think about what, in my life, looks almost, but not quite, impossible…
I have found the idea of reincarnation to be quite comforting. I also don’t have to “believe” it, per se. Just the idea of it gives relief, very much in the vein of what Phutatorious is saying in #41. Having a sense that “there is still time” really makes me not feel as much pressure to get it all done in one one go, which I think both atheists and Christians feel. There is the sense, with that belief, that you can’t frack up, and the sense that you have to get it all in -the bucket list syndrome. Yeah, there is stuff I still want to do and things I’d like to see and experience in this incarnation, but ever since I did meditations on the idea of reincarnation in the Occult Philosophy Workbook, I’ve felt less pressure from within myself. Whatever I do here, will have an impact later. The idea that spiritual disciplines, ethical actions, and there was one other one from OPW, on the tip of my mind, can have a resounding effect throughout an incarnation is likewise comforting.
I guess that brings to mind my album recommendation of the week to the Ecosophia community: The Australian hard garage rock/ punk band Amyl and the Sniffers and their 2021 album Comfort to Me:
https://amylandthesniffers.bandcamp.com/album/comfort-to-me
(Key songs: Freaks to the Front, Choices, Security, Hertz, Snakes… but the whole thing is really good if you like that kind of thing.)
I always wondered too, if the Christians who have had spouses who passed away before them, got to become polygamists in heaven, and how that might work out for everyone involved.
Cynthia, it would be worth researching swear words in other languages to see if they have the same phonetic patterns, or if not, what the variations are.
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
Patrick, Yeats isn’t precise about any of this.
Slithy, you’re very likely correct here. Thank you!
Xcalibur/djs, why on earth does that seem rather concerning? Presumably the soul, having completed its vast pilgrimage through aeons of time we can’t even imagine, winds up its affairs and sinks back into some kind of cosmic oneness or the like. It’s only the Faustian delusion of endless onward-and-upward that makes that seem anything but normal and natural.
Chris, I see you’re channeling a past life as a medieval monk, or something similar. It’s a valid warning!
Scotlyn, granted — Yeats’s ideas are a real challenge to grasp; it took me something like thirty years of repeated reading to get even as much of a sense of it as I have. That spur to compassion, though, is a powerful one, and worth reflection.
Justin, it’s a powerful concept. As for bands, are you familiar with Lubricated Goat, an Australian noise-rock band from late in the last century? I picked up a cheap copy of one of their CDs the other day, mostly because it was titled The Great Old Ones — clever name for a greatest-hits album. Not my usual fare, but it’s surprisingly listenable. With regard to Christian polygamy, Jesus fielded a question about that — you’ll find it in Matthew 22:23-33.
@Luke, @Patrick: I don’t know where the streets of gold come from. The gospels don’t go into details at all about heaven. There is the metaphor of “being in Abraham’s bosom” and “there are many mansions in my Father’s house”. There are a lot of affirmations, e..g in the Beatitudes, that can be applied to the afterlife, but need not – “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied”. Pau’s epistles use a whole other set of metaphors that don’t have a lot of currency today, for example “putting on Christ” (like clothes). I think the epistemological humility would come in very handy there.
The idea of being reunited with family for all eternity is very clearly rejected, on the other hand. It is obviously absurd for widows and widowers who remarry, and Jesus said that in so many words when questioned.
@JMG: Your idea about the soul’s prenatal life and then development until its end has some points of contact with the thought of Origen of Alexandria. He taught that all rational beings develop, mature and get purified over as many aeons as they need to, each at their own rhythm, until they reach their final state, which is similar to the beginning.
Chuaqin,
1. I am simply citing my discussions with Christians on the subject. It’s all very vague to them which is why I think the concept of heaven functions as a fnord in the minds of many people. Also, I’m not talking out of my behind here. I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school for 11 years, went to Church every Sunday, you name it. I have never met a Christian give me a philosophically coherent explanation of heaven. In fact 99% of them don’t attempt to explain it, hence the vagueness. This whole lack of thinking led to me becoming an atheist for ~2 years (long time ago) before I picked up occultism. Please note, to anyone reading my posts on this subject, I am arguing one nuanced point here (vagueness in understanding of heaven) and not criticizing Christianity as a whole. I think the Catholic Sacraments are beautiful and an excellent way to be spiritual. I’ve also observed them with psychic senses and they’re still powerful.
2. I agree. I think it’s impossible for humans to be impartial. The moral philosopher I mentioned apparently thought it was though.
@JMG 54: Your Bible knowledge is impressing me. Maybe a new career as a traveling evangelist awaits you. Imagine the blurbs before your appearances about how you were once an occultist but had “turned your life around.”
As to profanity substitutes: why resort to profanity or to clever substitutes at all? Aren’t they just verbal filler, like “uh” or “like” or “you know what I’m sayin’?”?
Uh, like, you know what I’m sayin’?
Hey, John, not familiar with Lubricated Goat! I will familiarize myself though! I agree that is a clever name for a greatest hits album, especially by a band with that name. I would have done the same and bought it on that title alone. I’ve done a lot of that in my record shopping over the years, and made some great discoveries. To trade spots on the musical spectrum, I happen to have picked up a Michael Hedges tape recently…
The Australian & New Zealand noise-rock / punk-rock / pop-punk / twee & jangle pop scenes are really really good. Some of my favorite groups on the jangly end of guitar pop have come from Australia and NZ… here I am thinking of The Stroppies, Goon Sax, The Beths, and Courtney Barnett…
I forgot about that verse in Matthew. It’s interesting, because the church I was raised in really did teach bodily resurrection, the kingdom of heaven on Earth for 2000 years after the Apocalypse and all that kind of stuff. They weren’t too big on hell, but the lake of fire was their for those who didn’t want to join the festivities following the final judgment. All the theological reasons and endless sermons about why this is so (according to them) lost me in their knotted convolution some time ago.
Reincarnation, yeah, that still sounds comforting to me.
JMG–There is no prompting whatsoever in a properly conducted regression…..Nor is there any other explanation for young children speaking in extinct languages or remembering in very great detail aspects of a previous life, including details that were not available anywhere, like the young boy who remembered dying as a military pilot attacking Japan and recalling the names of crew members and their wives….His family had to petition the Pentagon to release documents regarding this, as they were skeptical of his account as well….
@ Slithy Toves #40
Re the road from Heaven to Hell and Back… very nice! very, very nice! Especially that it goes both ways…
It segues very well with some rumination I did a while back with the “Sphere Six as Road between Heaven and Hell” correspondence in JMG’s “Revisioning the Tree of Life” book.
Thank you! 🙂
Since profanity has become secondarily topical, if I may…
“…roughly “bloody f***ing hell.” ”
To which I would observe that there are fashions in profanity as in everything else…. because in many of the books I read in my youth, which were written and published in Britain, this phrase would deffo have appeared as:
“bl**dy f**ing h*ll”
The English epithet “bloody” being a contraction of the religious term “by our Lady”…
JMG: The existing data I have available on that topic suggests that people find other-language swearing decidedly unsweary. Chuaquin and I have discussed a bit about swearing as you’ll know since you moderate all this. None of the words he mentioned to me feel like swears to me at all, even after years of frequent conversations with someone for whom they certainly were swears and used them as such.
There’s a Mandarin swear that I’m waiting for an opportunity to fit into the following: “You say to-MAY-to, I say [the word].” I can’t say the word here of course, but it’s close enough to “to-MAH-to” to make the joke work. I’ll probably never get a chance to say that though.
Anyway though, I can’t take the time to pursue a whole language research project. I’ve learned that having a spirit play bass and keys through an app I built is conditional on me showing up for it. I’ve learned I can expect problems if I get lazy and ignore the work. He didn’t like it when I took a day off to play Civ and do a mickey of Canadian Club the other day. I had a conventionally inexplicable problem getting the app going again the next day. Lesson learned. He provides me a real gift, but I am expected to show up for it. I don’t have to be at it every waking hour, but I’m not allowed to get lazy or overly distracted either. I am not completely my own person anymore, which tradeoff I happily accept.
There is no speech as such, but we communicate.
The historical aspect has me thinking that, if the Saint phase lasts as long as the Hunchback phase did (about 42 years or so) … I wonder if the period between 2068-2110 (if it is closer to 44 years, I could make a Rush joke) will be characterized by greater number of birth defects and the like. It seems the climate change situation, global health and damage from centuries of chemically enhanced living might have some greater side effects along with the lower birth rates. Just a thought. …
This is kind of cool too, to think of how it might be applied to deindustrial fiction… speaking of which I have a new short story up in that genre: Something Translated While Working at a Refujaunt Camp
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/something-translated-while-working-at-a-refujaunt-camp
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/something-translated-while-working
Aldarion, Origen’s thought is very much to my taste — I think of him as belonging to the saner end of the Gnostic spectrum — and this is a good example.
Phutatorius, I read the Bible for the first time at age eight. We had one in my childhood home, though nobody else apparently ever touched it. I don’t have to think of it as the inerrant and divinely inspired word of the Christian god (a claim that appears nowhere in the Bible, btw) to recognize it as one of the world’s great spiritual writings! As for profanity, no, it has a function our language otherwise mostly lacks — the function of intensification. There’s quite a bit of difference between “Just wait a minute” and “Just wait a fracking minute!”
Justin, glad to hear it. Having looked up Lubricated Goat and learned a little about the Australian noise rock and, er, pigfrack scenes, I’m delighted to have a new candidate for the top ten clever band names of all time — Beasts of Bourbon. Heh heh heh…
Pyrrhus, no overt prompting, perhaps. The facts remain that the legal status of hypnotic regression is what it is, for the reasons I mentioned, and for every bit of demonstrably valid information — especially common among small children with or without hypnosis, for reasons Ian Stevenson explored in his book Children Who Remember Previous Lives — there’s at least as much provable nonsense out of hypnotic regression. Thus I consider it a dubious basis for knowledge of that or, really, any other subject.
Scotlyn, there are indeed. I have a reprint of Francis Grose’s fine 1788 A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, the first good English dictionary of profanity; at that time, the standard rude term for the female sex organ was the most unspeakable of profanities — Grose never spells it in full — while the four-letter word that still clings to that status today was much less offensive.
Cynthia, oh, I wasn’t suggesting that you take it on. I was simply wishing that somebody at least as autistic as I am would find it an interesting project. 😉
Justin, thanks for the story. I’m afraid you may well be right, though a civilization can be retarded even when no more of its inhabitants than usual have that status.
Scotlyn, re bloody: Wow, that makes it a much more serious word than I realized. Hitherto I’ve used this word to mean “I here signal intent to swear without any actual bad words.” But it means “by Our Lady” AND the actual word is bloody? Wow, that sounds profane beyond my intent to be so and in ways I don’t mean. Thanks for that info, I think I’ll avoid that one from now on. I’ll stick to gosh and darn. Unless you have helpful info about those too? 🙂
Hey JMG
I probably should have phrased it better, but nonetheless the way Yeats has incorporated mental and physical disabilities into the process of reincarnation and spiritual development is extremely unique and thought-provoking. Most people would assume that if someone was born disabled in some way, then there was either some kind of mistake or that they were being punished for some transgression in a past life.
Out of curiosity, do you think that there’s any meaning behind the increase in various forms of disability that exist these days, in the context of Yeat’s system? Assuming that the increase is real and not just some media-caused delusion.
@55 Aldarion
According to Google, the streets being paved with gold comes from Revelation 21. I checked Bible Gateway to make sure.
@slithytroves I also find myself very insistently linking myself to the 5-11-19-25 GROUP and perceiving it as a group, on that cross quarter lane where tinctures are opening and closing, equidistant and poised between all the ‘solstice’ and ‘equinox’ points. Rather in the cross quarter days…. And I can’t be sure, am I conditional man reaching towards consciousness of self over self-consciousness or am I the pure builder reaching towards true rejection. Or the intellectual reaching towards the generative beauty of nature while my body of fate instead pulls me towards a dissolving with the divine. But the axis is definitely home, fellow traveller! Funny that we are both operating expressly ‘Through the Looking Glass’
Jmg, I especially appreciate your pointing out that “As with all the true Masks of the phases of the fourth quarter, this cannot be sought for itself; the soul has no capacity to do this, and will fall into the false Mask if it makes the attempt; the true Mask must be, can only be, a gift that arrives unexpectedly as a result of renunciation.”
Hi John Michael,
It is true isn’t it? And bad news is coming thick and fast on an economic front, so that sooner, or later, the whole render unto Caesar thing will be like new, all over again. I get the distinct impression that an epic smash is on its way. Oh well, I never thought that the locked-in policies of the last three decades were any good in the first place, otherwise I’d be more excited about them.
On a more related to this week’s essay note, have you noticed how extreme all the characters of the final bit of the wheel are? There is capacity in that space to do great good, yet equally as much evil. It’d be nice if the middle path were chosen through the mess, which may be seen in the attributes of moderation and good grace. It’s not too much to ask is it?
Cheers
Chris
From last month’s post:
“That conviction gives considerable power over others, since most people lack strong belief and so are swayed by those who have it. The trap this sets for people of this phase is that they may come to value conviction not for itself, but for the control it gives them over others. This is the the false Mask, “Domination,” and it calls up the false Creative Mind, called “The Unfaithful,” which picks up and puts down seeming convictions the way an actor in some traditional forms of drama picks up and puts down masks, caring for nothing except the effect on the audience.”
I suspect this is well worth careful thought, but something that has occurred to me is that in a lot of ways, despite emulating the American Left, the Canadian Left is acting as if it is in a different phase; witnessing the way in which prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party have been capable of changing opinions on a whim and convincing so many Canadians to go along with it over the last decade through sheer force of will looks an awful lot like the description of the False Mask of the 19th phase; and over the last century I think the Canadian Left has more likely been in the Third Quarter of the Wheel.
First, an awful lot of oddities of Canadian politics make a lot of sense in light of this. Second, this implies that viewing the Left as a monolith on a global scale is not practical: given the fairly close cultural and political ties between Canada and the US, if the Canadian Left is in a different phase than the American Left, then it’s almost certain that the Left from other countries will be a different phase. Maybe this is why the Left has been so dysfunctional around the world: trying to emulate a movement in a different phase would always mean being out of phase yourself; even if the other movement was itself in phase.
OT: Dean Radin appeared on Joe Rogan’s show today. Seems like a good counterbalance to some other episodes mentioned on prior ecosophia posts.
I suspect my father is a phase 24. Less sure about my mother. Maybe 19. Conviction as true mask and Domination as false mask make sense. Although Enforced failure of action as body of fate makes less sense because she is conventionally successful. Is conventional success possible for a phase 19, JMG?
Patrick H, I just saw your response. That sounds dreary. You could call it a metaphor or thought stopper. Not sure which.
JMG: Thanks for the story about your great-grandmother! She sounds like a wonderful person. I’ve never heard of a Down’s Syndrom person marrying and having children, which just goes to show that past eras included freedoms and possibilities that our present-day versions of history seem to have forgotten.
Slithy Toves #21: I’m not as familiar with Phases 5-11-19-25 as you are, but a quick review suggests to me that ‘Collision With Limits’ could be a theme. These are high-energy phases that are about challenging physical, intellectual, emotional, and social limits, respectively. And I’m so glad you recognize the spiral wishing wells! It was a jaunt down memory lane trying to dig up a photo online. Whoever came up with those was a money-making genius, because of course every kid wants to try every size of coin, and to intentionally try to make them smash into each other at high speed 🙂
Luke Z #28: Maybe that just goes to show that we all have different conceptions of what the Good actually is. Instead of ‘family’ I would say ‘belonging’ when describing heaven, and I’d be describing the same thing as your interlocutor without dragging in unpleasant earthly connotations. If you and me and the Christians you’ve talked to all agree that life after death, for those who have lived lives of virtue, is on the whole a better place than where we are now, then I guess I’m less concerned about what it actually looks like. (I also appreciate your comments on these posts!)
Slithy Toves #47: I had come to a similar thought about the interpretation of the Hunchback’s Body of Fate. By this point in the Wheel, karma is sharp and clear and impossible to ignore. This is someone who is a born realist, with no illusions to be dispelled by life’s hardships because they’ve known the evidence of that hardship in their flesh from their earliest memories. They can go the way of Quasimodo, alive to the real cruelties and kindnesses of the world but seeking grace, or the way of Shakespeare’s Richard III, wreaking diabolical havoc and offering absolutely no excuses for their behaviour. On the level of Western civilization, it is the cynical self-awareness and introspection of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the supreme Faustus moment of Faustian civilization, as you’ve illustrated well.
Phutatorius #57: Ah, but what you see as verbal filler, I see as the stuff of linguistic art! Take the closing statement of your comment, for example, and translate it into African American slang: ‘Nomsayn?’ How can you beat seven words condensed into one, but carrying all the same meaning? Also, I can’t wait to visit the alternate reality in which JMG is a travelling evangelist 😀 I’d buy his Bibles, no question!
Scotlyn #61: Thank you for that explanation of the swear word ‘bloody’! I don’t think many people in the Western hemisphere know of that religious origin. Here it’s only used by fictional characters who are meant to sound British, and it’s assumed to reference bodily liquids because over here all good swears have to do with sticky bodily stuff. In Quebec, on the other hand, French profanities are mostly religious in nature. Maybe that says something about the Anglo-American idolatry of the human body.
J.L.Mc12 #66: About the increase in disabilities corresponding to Western civ’s Hunchback phase: the blogger known as Midwestern Doctor has me convinced it’s the childhood vaccine schedule, along with all the other toxins floating around in our air and water. The karmic fruits of techno-utopianism, reaped in the flesh.
@Patrick, thank you, I had forgotten about that. Of course, there is no way to read “gold, transparent as glass” other than allegorically.
I went through the very useful exercise of meditating on what a person who is my mask, or anti-self, would look like. As a phase 17, I am basically picturing an in-phase 3 as what I yearn for but can never be. In truth, I don’t like a lot of things about the 3 while admiring others, but I believe that’s how the mask is supposed to work: what we cannot be, or dread to be.
And since my body of fate trying to chase the mask is loss, I began to wonder if it would be equally useful to imagine the person who is a ternary of the two phases. Someone who is capable of expressing both sets of in-phase qualities. Would it be helpful or even possible, though I can’t be phase 3, to work on those aspects which are weaknesses to achieve some sort of wholeness between the two?
For example, you write of phase 3: “It is the spirit of the child who can grasp every experience freely because he clings to none.” Even before digging into this, I notice that as my magical and spiritual practices deepen, I have been drawn to strengthening this trait in myself, whose natural inclination is to dwell in abstraction. Experiencing each thing anew and letting it go, moving on to the next. This is not quite the false mask of dispersal, since I am not getting stuck in a wide range of abstractions, but more like developing a living capacity for contemplation without distractions creeping in. Might developing this and similar capacities be beneficial? It does feel like a simplification through intensity, throwing out my dreamy distractedness for the few moments I can manage in order to appreciate the beauty before me. Meanwhile, of course, simplifying myself and pursuing my creative writing (which would tend to represent phase 3 in certain ways).
Re “The Fool” — this thread of the conversation prompted me to go look up Down’s Syndrome on Wikipedia.
My goodness those poor souls have to contend with a lot of physical ailments and glitches. But on the other hand, I have heard from multiple sources that when a Down’s Syndrome person is joyful, their joy is powerful and absolute.
One of the Christian singers had a brief interview on the radio. One day his son, who has Down’s Syndrome, came up to him, folded himself into the man’s lap, and sighed, “Ah, better.” The singer told us, ‘you know, we need to have that attitude towards our relationship with God… just take pure simple joy in being enfolded in His arms.’
@Scotlyn and @Cynthia
The notion that “bloody” comes from “by our Lady” is a folk etymology not supported by any actual evidence. In fact, the evidence contradicts it: the earliest records of the use of “bloody” as an oath do not show any sign of it being particularly blasphemous or offensive, and there is evidence that it came to English from Dutch or German by way of French.
The reason for the folk etymologies like “by our Lady” and the equally-dubious “God’s blood” is because in the 1800s it suddenly rose to prominence as just about the most offensive word a British person could say, and no one today can figure out why. The most plausible theory I ran across looking this up is that early Victorian Brits convinced themselves it was a scatalogical reference to menstrual blood (that’s not really plausible either) and got thoroughly squicked.
JMG #54:
Maybe it’s the Faustian spirit that keeps me asking, “but then what happens after that?”. But if our soul-swarm goes through all seven Cosmic Planes, and makes that grand tour seven times, and we’re just in the first phase of that, then there really is nothing to worry about, since we have vast eons to work with.
I mentioned the Narnian afterlife in an earlier discussion, and you did a fine analysis here. Yes, I suppose it’s the marriage of Faustianism and Christianity that made it seem so appealing to go “further up and further in!”. To be fair, there’s a bit more to it, including Plato’s Theory of Forms & Allegory of the Cave, in which mortal Narnia was a shadow or reflection, and all the good things are preserved in Aslan’s Country, without the positive or negative evil, which presumably would end up in Tash’s Country. Still, you’re right, and it goes to show how difficult it is to break out of one’s civilizational mold.
JMG: Ok. I don’t know why I read that as an assignment. That was kind of silly of me I guess. Anyway, agreed, such a study would be quite interesting and if I ever come across anything like that I’ll let you know.
Justin P. # 53:
“I always wondered too, if the Christians who have had spouses who passed away before them, got to become polygamists in heaven, and how that might work out for everyone involved.”
Sadducees Jews asked your same question to Jesus to put Him in a predicament, to attack belief in resurrection of dead people; but Jesus answered them (in a clever way, methink), that after dying, people won’t have sexual love with their former mates, because they will be equal to angels… (Luke 20,27-38).
So maybe I guess there would be a kind of friendship without sex between everybody in heaven, according this idea.
I don’t know wether you didn’t know this part of gospels or you don’t want to think Jesus said really that thing, due to your view about Christianism.
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Aldarion # 55:
“there are many mansions in my Father’s house”.
Depending of how can be understood that metaphor, we can open a can of worms, mainly for the “toughest” Christians…
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Luke Z. # 57:
“I have never met a Christian give me a philosophically coherent explanation of heaven. In fact 99% of them don’t attempt to explain it, hence the vagueness.”
I think the main strength and main weakness alike of Christianism is that it’s based in the “jump into faith”(you must accept reason has its limits), so you can’t explain it as a whole using rationalist philosophic points of view. There’s people who accept this situation so they believe, and some another people who don’t fit in this view, so they reject Christianism, going to atheism (when they think they’re the smartest guys in the room), or occultism (which it’s another option more deeply clever, methink). However, I can point not every occultists and esoterists leave Christian views, indeed there are some cases of occultists/esoterists who were Christians too, and I cannot believe every of them weren’t pretending it…
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William # 70:
“viewing the Left as a monolith on a global scale is not practical: given the fairly close cultural and political ties between Canada and the US, if the Canadian Left is in a different phase than the American Left, then it’s almost certain that the Left from other countries will be a different phase. Maybe this is why the Left has been so dysfunctional around the world: trying to emulate a movement in a different phase would always mean being out of phase yourself; even if the other movement was itself in phase.”
I think you’ve written an interesting hypothesis, based in Yeats system, to explain the nowadays political circus in which the Left has become around all the world, especially in the West. Beyond rehashed and usual materialist explanations for current havoc coming from most of leftists, your idea of different phases in different leftisms in different countries is worth to be thought.
Canada Left can imitate sooner the American liberal last fashions in crazy occurrences than European leftists. I can also say that, IMHO, Spain Left seems to adopt without any serious criticism every silly tendence shown by Democrats in USA, but I’ll dare to point I think they adopt them with at least 6 months to a year of delay, to say it rougly. I bet ideological texts translation from English to Spanish could be a reasonable cause for this delay, or maybe Spanish “progressive” politicians and ideologues need to adapt last woke crazyness to our local culture…
On the other hand, I’ve got the feeling (maybe right, maybe wrong) the new sordid woke ideas imported directly from USA, seem to delay their arrival to the French political spectacle, maybe due to the still strong ideology named “Jacobin Republicanism”; a view you can like or dislike more, as a whole or in part, but I think it resists quite well the wokesters siege until present day in the “Hexagon”.
So finally, maybe Spain Left is in a previous phase before current Canada and USA Left, and France is in another different phase, but I’m not able to point which one we’re living here and beyond the Pyrinees…
In my last comment to William, when I say woke occurrences imported from USA Democrats are delayed in Spain and France before being parroted by mainstream leftists, I really mean that delay in France seems IMHO longer than here, because French people (due to their “Republicanism”) maybe resist better foreign influences, and they’re in different phase than Spaniards. I’m sorry if you didn’t understand well my point of view.
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I’d like to say Yeats idea about mentally disabled people, living in that Phase 28 (The Fool), has made me to think that Down Syndrome people seems near always happy and optimist, at least people with a mild level, who can speak about themselves with average people.
It’s sad but interesting to compare that Down Syndrom people with a lot of mental health patients, who often seem unhappy,angry and depressed (due to their disorders), usually during their worse times, but sometimes even after being under therapies and/or chemical treatment (I’ve witnessed personally these tendence).
To some extent, even mentally “healthy” people seems to be affected by this bitter tendence. I read somewhere that children usually smile more than 100 times in a day, but adult people only smile 15 times per day (with luck). “Normal” people often like to think too much around silly problems to get bitter with their life.
So I can say intellect by itself doesn’t ensure a happy life, after comparing Down Syndrom people with average or even some “smart”, but unhappy people.
@ JMG 64: I apologize for my flippant comment concerning your biblical knowledge. I grew up in a Methodist family with frequent exposure to selected, familiar Bible stories — and complete ignorance regarding the less often visited parts that you only encounter if you read the entire book.
I know the term “pigfrack” and like many of the groups associated with it… Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch / The Jesus Lizard, Flipper, Scratch Acid…
There is also the term “scumfrack” for a related kind of sound, mostly associated with the despicable but darkly fascinating G.G. Allin. Underground artist, writer, musician, performer Lisa Crystal Carver was in a group called Suckdog, who made some interesting music in the loosely aligned “scumfrack” genre. Tangentially, some of her books have been published by a Pig Roast Publishing.
These pieces are typical of Suckdog’s unhinged approach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg2rLOUaqQ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka6ifrqj9PY
The album Onward Suckdog Soldiers is a particular favorite.
https://suckdog2.bandcamp.com/album/onward-suckdog-soldiers
as is the three songs from an aborted album:
https://suckdog2.bandcamp.com/album/the-1999-sessions-ep
Her memoir Drugs Are Nice is a particularly riveting tale of the byways of unpopular culture and the underground of the underground.
Thinking on these characters, and members of bands like The Butthole Surfers, has got me wondering what kind of phase some of these people might be in. I recognize a particular kind of disintegration, coupled with personal vision, that might be 17… but I am not for sure.
All of this kind of stuff was at its peak during the Hunchback years. G.G. Allin could have well been a poster child for the Hunchback. So “pigfrack” and “scumfrack” music might be a very particular kind of sound that could only be produced during these times. The “performance art” at the shows where this kind of stuff was played… yeah, it could very well be the sound of “the fascination of sin” and self-abandonment.
And as far as politics goes, I think the Hunchback is equally active on both ends of the political spectrum and in the main politicos from those years.
J.L.Mc12, oh, I grant that Yeats messes with our preconceptions! You’ll notice that all through his system, he rejects the idea that this or that kind of life is a punishment or a reward for past behavior. Each life is a unique experience through which the soul ripens. As for your question, yes, I think that’s what’s to be expected in the twilight of the current cycle of Western civilization. Everything is breaking down, including our expectation that most children will be born healthy and able-bodied, as we move through the last phases before the Moon goes dark.
Alice, thank you. It’s a lesson I’m having to learn in a different context, though I’m very much in the third quarter in this lifetime: in certain kinds of spiritual work, there are things you can do for yourself, and then you have to stop and wait for the Divine to respond. It’s not always, or often, an easy wait.
Chris, I’m not sure how soon the epic smash will arrive, but that one’s on the way? I don’t doubt that at all. As for the extreme character of the final phases, I’m not sure moderation is even possible there. In phase or out of phase, the end of the cycle breeds extremes.
William, that makes perfect sense. Canada and the US have different histories and their leftward parties even more so, so it would make sense that — within the vaster cycle of Western civilization as a whole — they would be at different points in their individual cycles.
Dylan, until the pseudoscience of eugenics became fashionable in the early 20th century, especially among intellectuals and the medical profession, that happened all the time. The concept of mental retardation was an invention of that pseudoscience. Before then? “Bert, yeah, he’s kinda slow on the uptake, but he’s a real hard worker and the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet. Me and the boys, we keep an eye out for him and make sure he knows what to do. What he needs is a smart girl to marry him and make sure no fast-talkin’ rascal puts anything over on him.” In a society less dependent on literacy and numeracy, it was just one of the common variations of humanity.
Bert probably found a smart girl to marry, too. I knew a couple not too different from that, many years ago. Ernie was a big, strong, gangling guy who worked in various unskilled and semiskilled trades; he dropped out of school in 8th grade and was functionally illiterate, but he was a hard worker with a good reputation and he always found work in and around the rural Washington State town where he lived. His wife, LaRose, had gone to community college and worked as a bookkeeper; she was a voracious reader, though most of what she read was popular novels. When I knew them they were in their seventies, and they adored each other; she loved to talk about how loyal and kind and hard-working he was, and he was delighted to have married so smart and capable a woman. Those two contributed more to human happiness, simply by the way they lived, than just about anyone else I’ve ever known.
Kyle, I know the feeling! My Mask is Phase 4, and the instinctive wisdom of that phase is quite literally as far from anything I have as it’s possible to be. In response to your question, yes, taking the mask as an ideal can be very productive, as long as you never make the mistake of thinking you’ve achieved it. You’ll find that characters who embody your Mask phase will give your fiction a great deal of energy; I’ve always used them as secondary characters, as my viewpoint characters are always a little too autobiographical, but if you give at least one important character in your stories a good jolt of Phase 3 you won’t regret it.
Cicada, Downs syndrome is a difficult challenge to face but it’s interesting that it seems to attract souls who are capable of so much radiant joy. In Yeats’s terms, a good many of them must be in phase.
Xcalibur/djs, if Aslan had led everybody up one level to the True Narnia, Lewis would have been true to his Platonic model — he was one of the last of the red-hot Christian Platonists, after all. It’s the “further up and further in!” that shows the Faustian influence, and it’s odd that to me, that whole theme (and the end of the novel generally) has always rung false. I wasn’t a great Narnia fan, but by and large I enjoyed the novels — except for that one. It actually cemented my youthful rejection of Christianity.
Cynthia, I’m delighted to report that one of my other readers forwarded me a link to just such a study!
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-022-02202-0
Phutatorius, good heavens, you don’t need to apologize! I was just explaining the reason behind the odd fact that a well-known Druid knows the Bible tolerably well.
Justin, thanks for this. More samples of a rather distinctly squamous and rugose world I didn’t know about! I suspect you’re right that those musical styles were unique to a Hunchback phase of history, and Allin himself reads to me as a very out of phase Phase 26 himself. Others — well, you’d have to study their biographies one at a time.
Here is a magic meme for you if you haven’t seen it before:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fhealthy-boundaries-v0-491i4jocrsg81.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df28c342ea1b655973905af5d4f70c12a9a5be7b7
Since C.S. Lewis has come up in this month’s post, I wanted to voice a throwback thought related to last month. Yeats often uses very specific and now-obscure examples of artists and writers to illustrate the phases, and being unfamiliar with most of them I’ve been coming up with my own examples.
I think Lewis was a Phase 18. ‘Emotional Philosophy’ is a great way to describe his Christian non-fiction, and it seems to have emerged out of his tremendous disillusionment as a young soldier in the First World War. His fiction is also decidedly rhetorical in nature. You can’t read his stories without getting a heavy dose of his worldview, which can be a turn-off or -on depending on how palatable you find that worldview. Our host (another Phase 18) writes fiction that is similarly based on ideas (the nature of history, progress, spirituality etc.) but from a wildly different worldview- again, either a pro or a con depending on whether you enjoy the intellectual contents of the JMG-iverse. (I happen to enjoy both authors).
J.R.R. Tokien, however, was a Phase 17. He lost his parents in childhood and most of his friends as a young man fighting in the trenches. He then focused his talents on a very specialized set of linguistic skills, and his fiction shows a similar obsessive focus on a single imagined world and set of narrative themes, endlessly elaborated. His stories convey a definite worldview, of course, but the authorial voice is harder to pin down to any particular set of ideas, and the overall effect is of a contagious aesthetic rather than a persuasive argument in narrative form. Hence readers of wildly different ideological persuasions have adopted Tolkien as their hero and need not know anything about the author’s real-life opinions.
For Phase 19 I would nominate Yuval Noah Harari. He seems to be a soul without a guiding star, though he has persuaded a great many people of his brilliance, and he seems destined to be proven wrong by the course of events.
For Phase 20? Stephen King, James Patterson, and similar paperback heavyweights. Their writing may not be the most sophisticated, but man do they have a talent for telling the stories that people want to hear.
JMG, I think you missed my question, accidentally probably, since I tucked it at the end of a paragraph. I’ll ask again – could someone who the true and false masks of Conviction and Domination make a lot of sense to for, be a phase 19 if they are conventionally successful? Obviously the Body of Fate of Phase 19 is enforced failure of action. I’m wondering if a family member is phase 19. Everything fits except they are conventionally successful.
Dylan, I think I’m mostly in agreement with that.
Chuaqin, this whole topic is mainly me trying to explain why Christianity didn’t work for me. The lack of appeal to the intellect pushed me away from it, ultimately. I am actually a Christian occultist of sorts myself since I still pray to Jesus (among others). Labels are slippery and incomplete. Maybe I should think of myself as a Christian, but I think I like the label Gnostic better.
A few thoughts have crossed my mind on the topic of the Fool:
First, I am no expert in the tarot, but quite a few years back I remember reading a book about the tarot in which the author considered the Fool card to be the last of the 22 trumps – not the first. I’m not sure how radical or prevalent this view is, but it is what immediately came to my mind when I read in this post that the last phase is called The Fool.
The second thing which came to my mind is a phrase that has bubbled around in my mind for so many decades that I have no idea what the source is – the phrase is “we are all God’s fools”. I then recalled a passage in the New Testament, specifically 1 Corinthians 4:10 (“We are fools for Christ’s sake”). I don’t think that it applies directly to what Yeats is saying, but I suppose it reveals what I think about “fools” (and am not bothered by people who consider me to be a fool).
Third, regarding the term “fool” being a common term for a person who is “developmentally disabled” in Yeats’s time, I recall a situation from my youth in which I was introduced to a very devout Hindu family in which the eldest child (in his early teens) was severely mentally disabled and somewhat physically disabled (possibly a neurological thing). I did not enquire about this child’s condition, but for some reason the father opened up and told me that when he and his wife realized that their child was severely disabled, they went to speak with their guru, whom they trusted completely, to ask the obvious question of “why us?” And their guru told them that in their previous life they were devoted to another guru – a self-realized soul – and earnestly desired to perform lots of service to the person of that guru but did not have that chance. Shortly before dying, this guru told them that he knew of their desire and so he would be born as their son in the next life in which they would have plenty of opportunity to do service. Since the time that their guru (in this life) told them this, they have been content with their fate, happy to serve a being who had burned all his karma but chose to incarnate purely out of compassion to his devotees.
Fast forward a decade and I come across a very similar story – but this time much closer to “home”. My wife comes from a very pious family. She had a brother three years her junior who turned out to have muscular dystrophy and died of the disease at age of 15. Her brother was physically disabled, but had a brilliant mind, great musical gifts, and was wholly absorbed in religion. He was always enthusiastic and jolly and never showed any fear of death. When he was four or five years old and it became clear that there was something physically wrong with him, my wife’s parents spoke with their family guru (different from the guru mentioned above) and they were told pretty much the same thing about wishing to serve a guru in the past life but being unable to do in that lifetime.
Now, some people may say, “oh, this is just a good rationale used by wise men to prevent people from endlessly asking questions for which there is no answer” – fair enough — but maybe there is some truth to it. Because here’s the kicker. Soon after my wife’s brother died, a holy man came to the family residence and spoke to them. He was not familiar to them. The old man asked if somebody had just died in the family. When they answered “yes”, the holy man told them not to worry about his soul, as he has attained the heavenly abode. And then he told them that a few nights previously (which was the night of the boy’s death), he was holding vigil at a temple on a hill nearby and saw a bright white light emerge from the roof of their house and go straight into the heavens to become a star (it is an age-old Hindu belief that the stars in the sky are the souls of saints and sages who once walked the earth). My brother-in-law was not a “fool” in terms of a mental disability, but he was otherwise disabled. I just felt internally compelled to share this personal story.
You’re welcome…
Thats what I was thinking: Allin as an out of Phase 26. Some in that scene may also have been, others just along for the ride. Not a fan of him, btw, but he was a strange character and I find myself thinking of him now and again.
Suckdog, well, I find sone of it spasmotically entertaining.
Lubricated Goat has a song called “Psychic Detective” btw…
On saints and fools in general (and particularly thanks to Ron M): Eugene Vodolazkin’s novel Laurus is one of the best books I have read in the last decade (thank you to methylethyl for mentioning it!). The title character goes through many changes, but the longest and maybe best part of the book is his being a “fool of Christ” in 16th century Russia.
Re: Fictional characters as mask…
I didn’t do this on purpose as I started years ago, but my two main characters, though very different, have a mix of 17 and 3 traits. Each is trying to learn, through difficult experience, how to strike his correct balance. And the series on the whole is a sort of meeting of the intense abstract images of phase 17 with the robust physical world of phase 3. It seems like I was trying to reconcile them before I even cracked A Vision. This sounds natural for a 17, that through a creative pursuit I was reaching towards the daimon.
Tim Ferris wrote something interesting recently which captures a lot of why I follow this blog and particularly the book club series:
“the market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind, at length, on a subject it has bled for—might just get smaller, weirder, and more interesting”
(https://tim.blog/2026/06/12/has-ai-already-killed-nonfiction/?utm_campaign=5bf&utm_medium=convertkit&utm_source=convertkit)
Hi John Michael,
Oh! Such extremes as you’d find in the final quarter, eventually crash and burn. Hmm, does this suggest that it is a phase to be gotten through one way, or another, rather than a slow build of a souls experience (as in reincarnation)? Perhaps in this instance, ’tis the crash which provides the reset?
Man, it’s not hard to see roughly where our civilisation is on the wheel… 🙂 When businesses which appear to lose mad cash, are valued among the biggest of all, then the alarmed mind wonders what the value of these IOU’s really is.
Cheers
Chris
“As for profanity, no, it has a function our language otherwise mostly lacks — the function of intensification. ”
Both Mandarin and Thai use an intensifier with pretty much every adjective. Hen (=very) for Mandarin and mak (=much/many). Though because the intensifiers are all but mandatory, they don’t sound very intense to my ears.
If one wants to study profanities in other languages, Russian and Ukrainian are famously rich in them.
JMG: That’s very interesting and I thank you and your other reader for that!
So in light of that study, here’s the thing about shale, and here be it understood that this is a word your community has been using in a particular way for over a decade and it will remain so, but for me, the fact that that word ends in an approximant makes it just… not unpleasant enough to be a swear. If I had to guess what shale meant, and here’s something to amuse y’all’s inner 12 year old, those of you who are well used to the local usage I mean, but if I had to guess what shale meant, my first guess would be that it was a type of craft beer, like IPA or wheat beer but not those, a different thing. My second guess would be it’s something similar to trail mix. But something basically pleasant. “Would you care for some shale?” “Sure!”
Honestly, the poor word got a “shale” deal before you guys ever got to it! I’m gonna stop slandering it now! 🙂
Hey JMG and commentariat
Would you believe it, but a substack writer I like has just posted an article about Down Syndrome, and the “spiritual evil” inherent in the hatred a lot of mentally disabled people receive in the modern world. He makes some very similar remarks to what you yourself have said already.
https://librarianofcelaeno.substack.com/p/system-of-a-downs
@Kyle #74,
Thank you for sharing your meditation. As a fellow 17-er, I find it very helpful.
@Aldarion #89,
Thank you for mentioning Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus. I just want to add that in Russian culture and literature a “fool of Christ” (юродивый) is a known stock character deserving of kindness and respect. To treat him badly or consider him as somehow lesser than you is a very bad omen.
Are people of Phase 2 “developmentally disabled,” too?
Justin, thanks for that one. It’s a keeper.
Dylan, hmm! That seems very plausible to me, not least because my tentacle novels are, in a very real sense, a sort of modern polytheist Chronicles of Narnia, right down to the planetary symbolism.
Luke, yes, I seem to have missed it. If Yeats is correct, there’s got to be some sense in which a person of Phase 19 is constantly confronted with the failure of their actions to accomplish what they want. That’s not necessarily opposed to conventional success, if the person hoped that conventional success would be a bridge to something else they really wanted.
Ron, if reincarnation is a reality, and I believe it is, something like that would almost certainly have to be involved, when you have one of those remarkable children who is at once severely disabled and weirdly gifted — whether that takes the form of intellectual or creative gifts, or simply a remarkable capacity to bestow happiness. The karma of the parents would almost certainly have to involve something of the sort you’ve described — and of course in the cultures of the subcontinent, service to a guru is a very important religious act and one that’s believed to bring great karmic benefits.
Justin, good to know. I’ll see if it shows up in my prowls of record stores.
Aldarion, thanks for this.
Kyle, if Yeats is right, every creative person who’s in phase will be drawn to do something of the kind.
KAN, thanks for this. Ferris is right that one kind of nonfiction is dead on the scene with a chatbot driven straight through its heart: the kind that’s just a convenient regurgitation of information. I think he’s also right that that’s going to force the deeper and more interesting forms of nonfiction to up their game.
Chris, nah, the soul that stays in phase may get really weird but will wander through those last phases unharmed, protected by the blessings that descend on saints and the providence that protects fools. Unfortunately our culture isn’t in phase and shows little interest in getting there. As for the fantastically overinflated asset bubbles that prop up the purely notional wealth of our kleptocratic godzillionaires, the best working assumption is that its actual value is right around that of Chinese hell money…
…and will go up in flames the same way. (Those are 100 million yuan notes in hell money, btw.)
Jessica, oh, I know. I’ve been told that in ordinary conversational Russian, every third word is a profanity.
Cynthia, hmm! Yes, I could see shale being something like stout or porter.
J.L.Mc12, glad to see this! Thank you for posting it.
Cicada G. # 75:
“My goodness those poor souls have to contend with a lot of physical ailments and glitches. But on the other hand, I have heard from multiple sources that when a Down’s Syndrome person is joyful, their joy is powerful and absolute.”
Yes, I agree. People with Down Syndrome are IMHO, during all their life, like small children in that aspect. I can add to your comment Down Syndrome people are equally children-like, in their honest views when they tell you their opinions. They haven’t any filter, so they usually never hide their opinions beyond a polite nor hypocritical mask, like “average” people do . I can tell you a personal story. Some years ago, I was riding a very loaded bike near a small town. When I began to climb a slope, I found a group of Down Syndrome teens who were going for a walk with their teacher. Some of them looked at me and told me: “You’re riding a very heavy bike!”. I was quite tired so I got angry with them, but I admited soon they were right: my idea of loading my bike with too many things had been wrong…Down guys weren’t mocking me, they told me honestly without evilness their thoughts about me and my bike.
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Luke Z. # 86:
Thank you for explaining your occultist view. Of course, I respect your spiritual path, and I can tell you I’m folllowing my own path, which isn’t exactly an occultist/esotericist way. I agree, we mustn’t depend of labels. I haven’t any problem with occultist Christians or Gnostics, I think they’re in another different “ships” sailing the shared sea of life, to use an old metaphor…
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Inna # 96:
“in Russian culture and literature a “fool of Christ” (юродивый) is a known stock character deserving of kindness and respect.”
I had heard something about that interesting attitude within Russian culture. I think those people in a Western or Westernized culture could end unluckily locked in a mad house, or even worse (chained in a wet cellar), and under “scientific” treatment (you can see how well worked it during early times of Psychiatry, hard treatments for apparently crazy people…ahem). Nowadays, to some extent those fools of Christ, could be labelled as mere schyzoprenics, so “healed” with pills, which maybe can be depicted as a shame…
I’ve read a book, written by Víctor Kavod, titled “Thanatos”. It’s an interesting and provocative essay, between philosophical and esotericist, and occultist, about likely options for human afterlife, without dogmatic statements, he points his views more or less as work hypothesis. It seems it’s only written in Spanish.
I find very interesting he doesn’t present “souls” different fate ideas, according several religions and philosophies, as incompatible situations, because he thinks there could be different levels and “places”, at the same time, for different people, depending of their spiritual and previous behavior state of this or that person at the moment of its death.
I remember now its opinion about metempsychosis and reincarnation. He writes there are related terms, but not the same. He thinks metempsychosis could affect only to low awareness living beings, like insects or grass; but reincarnation could “work” with self-aware beings, so he points human beings…and maybe some mammals with a glimpse of self-awareness. It’s said some apes, whales and dogs, to some extent, have at least primal thoughts, so do the math.
Metempsychosis seems maybe more “mechanical”, and reincarnation could imply to some extent a half conscious human/over human will, if I’m not wrong. Unfortunately, this writer doesn’t explain this aspect of these topics…
Kavod also writes that, according some Hindu teachings, a very reckless and bad human being, when he/she dies, can reincarnate into an animal, losing his/her human status, due to karma. He doesn’t explain it clearly, but I guess after reading this idea, it could work in a inverse way: a mammal with rough basical thoughts would reincarnate into an human being. What do you think about this idea?
@ Dylan and @ Cynthia
In re the religious connotation of the swear word “bloody”.
I was thinking that we don’t really distinguish between profanity (ie words intended to profane something held to be sacred) and obscenity (ie words intended to drag us down to basic physical drives and bodily functions).
One might call these the Luciferic swearing traditions vs the Ahrimanic swearing traditions. 😉
@ Slithy Toves #78
“The notion that ‘bloody’ comes from ‘by our Lady’ is a folk etymology not supported by any actual evidence.”
Thank you for that. It is good to be aware of the evidence (or lack of it) for my folk etymology. 🙂
However, on further consideration, I might add that this “folk etymology” is something that lives, moves, and has its being in common “folk thought” – the same place where the meanings of all of the other words we use also live , with or without dictionaries and etymological studies.
Somehow I know that I, and many other people have sufficiently absorbed the “by our Lady” association with the swear word as to mentally “hear” it in our minds when I the word “bloody” is used .
Scotlyn: Interesting. I see that yes, there is a distinction there, but as regards my own attitude towards and usage of the words, I don’t really observe the distinction.
(Incidentally, I don’t think equating us with our physical drives is “dragging us down”, either. To me, we are animals, those drives are core to what we are, and as animals, the fact that we’ve done some neat tricks with our opposable thumbs doesn’t make us somehow better than the others, although I’m not about to become a vegetarian over it or anything like that.)
There is a distinction that I do observe. I’m an ex construction worker of a couple of decades and in real life, I have a tendency to talk like it. Not excessively, I don’t think, but I do. Let’s say I just make the top 35% of potty mouthed people. Also, nearly all swear words are fair for use as far as I’m concerned.
But not the “c” word and now, not “bloody” either. The one that means “female dog” has been ever more noticable by it’s absence in my usage in recent years as well. I haven’t given it much thought until now, but this is related to the fact that I have gender dysphoria that causes me to imitate the female of the species. It doesn’t feel right to do that, while at the same time using bad words that profane things female. Actually I probably shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place, but I can’t improve my past, only my future.
I think I’m going to discard the ones that refer to Jesus as well. Not that I’m Christian, I’m not, but it’s time to stop attacking Christianity. We made our point – we are allowed to have risque movies, heavy metal records, and irreverent cartoons. This is from the perspective of someone whose teen years were the 80s.
If Jesus came from the 13th Cone and physically incarnated into a human body, would he then need to go through all the phases again?
JMG # 98: “Dylan, hmm! That seems very plausible to me, not least because my tentacle novels are, in a very real sense, a sort of modern polytheist Chronicles of Narnia, right down to the planetary symbolism.”
That’s a hilarious comparison, and I’m glad my hunch led me there. So you’re the author of the Nancy Druid series as well as the Chronicles of Arcania!
Sorry I missed your story of Ernie and LaRose further up. They sound like really wonderful people.
One thing I’ve been wondering is how the spiritual experiences of the fourth quarter differ from those of the third. You and Luke Z have both mentioned supersensible experiences as a result of occult training, but is there perhaps a difference between that and the fourth quarter person’s unsought sense of the power and presence of God?
There’s a saying in the Waldorf scene that the very young and the very old are closest to the spiritual world, and that people in midlife are at the lowest (read: densest and most materialistic) point on the arc of incarnation. That would lead me by analogy to expect that souls in phases 2, 3, and 4 are also very open to and aware of the spiritual world. But Savonarola fits in the second quarter, and he seems to have been a somewhat holy man. And of course Yeats and George were drenched in spiritual experiences despite being high in the third quarter.
I guess my question is, if everybody’s potentially capable of having spiritual experiences, what do we gain spiritually in the last three phases of the fourth quarter, and how does that differ from prior brushes with the Unseen?
Ron M #87: I’m so glad you shared those stories. This puts a whole other lens not just on the lives of disabled individuals and their role in society, but also on the nature of karmic reward and the goals of spiritual growth.
Years ago I had a part-time gig going for outings once a week with a severely autistic boy, 11 years old, who had some physical limitations as well. He liked gazing at different architectural forms in the city centre, listening for and naming bird calls as we walked, and zooming around the local outdoor skate park on his two-wheeled scooter. I loved getting down on my knees next to him to try and see through his eyes when he got that concentrated look on his face.
I also sometimes imagined a parallel reality in which he was a fully functional, brilliant but troubled teen, who had had some kind of delinquent brush with the law and was assigned community service as a part-time caregiver for… me, middle-aged and handicapped to the point of being nonverbal. Occasionally, when I asked myself why spending time with this kid felt so meaningful, I would answer, ‘well, I’m just paying him back for what he’s doing for me over in that other reality.’ It was an idle fantasy at the time, but your stories put a new and thoughtful spin on it for me.
Scotlyn #101: The Luciferic and Ahrimanic swearing traditions! That just about solves the mystery for me. I’d never thought to distinguish between swearing high (profanity) and swearing low (obscenity). And of course, the Christ-impulse balancing the two is to say precisely and only what you mean, without exaggeration either way. Matthew 5:33-37 says pretty much that.
Speaking of music, Australia, and the Hunchback, Saint and Fool phase, has anyone read Nick Cave’s novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel?
The main charachter is a mute subject to heavenly visions… born into rural poverty and abusive alcoholic parents.
Might bear relation to the themes…
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men has come to mind as well.
@AliceEm #68
When I realized that I was in the 5-11-19-25 group, I personally hesitate between Phase 11 and Phase 19. What decided me on Phase 11 was a combination of noticing that the general course of my life has been away from stock ethical and belief systems toward my own private judgments and syntheses, that I keep coming back to such efforts instead of being able to adopt an easygoing agnosticism (enforced belief as my body of fate), and also that the thing I most want but can’t have is precisely for some already-formed system to be given to me (mask at Phase 25). (H/T to Kyle’s comment #74 for helping me flesh out this realization.)
I hope this helps you work out where your Will is!
@Dylan #72,
Ooh, “Collison with Limits” does make sense. I keep wanting a prefab belief system and yet I keep running face first into the limits of all of them. Something to think on. Thank you!
@Scotlyn #102
You’re welcome! And I certainly don’t mean to tell you you have to use words you don’t feel comfortable using. For myself, I like “bloody” not only as a fan of old Britcoms but also as a fan of its use as a profanity in The Wheel of Time, where it is a reference to the longer phrase “blood and ashes” or better yet “blood and bloody ashes.”
On the subject of Narnia, my favorite books are The Silver Chair and The Magician’s Nephew. Together they are, IMO, the two most philosophical in the series while also being ripping good fantasies.
In particular, I think Puddleglum’s argument with the Lady of the Green Kirtle, after the latter has cast a spell to make the protagonists believe Narnia isn’t real, is a genuinely deep and subtle argument:
“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.… I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if here isn’t any Narnia. So… we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.’”
The otherwise quite good (if very campy) BBC production of the movie mucks up the argument by replacing the key words “more important” with “better,” turning it into something more akin to Pascal’s wager, and C.S. Lewis is a letter muddies it by comparing it to Anselm’s ontological argument (but note that Lewis had a neurotic habit of lying about the meaning of his works).
But I don’t think Puddleglum’s arguing that the world sucks, so let’s play make-believe because that will feel better (which would be a very un-Marshwiggle-y argument). It’s not really about how nice the world is at all. It contrasts a worldview in which there is no meaning vs. one in which there is, and concludes that there is no consistent argument from inside the former against adopting the latter.
Of course I just could be doing the thing where I read my own thoughts into someone else’s work! In particular, the part of the quote I elided is probably easier to argue for the Pascalian interpretation, but I think it’s also possible to read it as talking primarily about meaning rather than pleasure.
Hi John Michael,
Hmm, staying in phase sounds a lot like reaching acceptance, and then acting with good grace even when people and life is stressing on you. It never lets up either, but then ain’t that karma? 🙂 Does that sound about right?
And I had no idea that such practices took place, or that people in the afterlife had financial problems which needed to be addressed. I did note the recent aberration to include other material items and err, mock ladies, as offerings. Now sadly stomped upon, so they’re back to hell money. Sounds like there’s a lot of partying going on in that ethereal space! But sadly, the ever larger denominations, suggests that the fundamentals of economics 101 applies equally in this life, as well as the next.
That now passed on Milton Friedman bloke, famously suggested that: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” I tend to agree with the guy, and you’d hope he’d at least try to knock some sense into the denizens of the spirit world?
Cheers
Chris
JMG: I was gonna say that if you and I both associated the word with craft beer then there must be something to the “sound symbolism” mentioned in the article, but then if you take the “sh” away the word is literally “ale”, so I guess it’s maybe not as indicative of that as I’d thought. 🙂
I think I have found my place on this wheel now, and it’s somewhere in this 4th quarter. 22-25 maybe. I feel like I’m the only commenter here who resonates somewhere here?
Like the 3rd quarter, I have a memory of a vision of beauty (15) but unlike those in that quarter, I have no creative talents with which to express it. I have tried, and failed. (For those who’ve seen the film Amadeus, I am Salieri).
So I now find myself renouncing any pretentions of greatness, and learning to embrace the (ordinary) reality of who I am. Also in accepting the world and all its problems for what they are, and my own limited ability to do much to fix them right now.
I’ve tried seeking that phase 15 vision of beauty in nature, but the earth’s natural ecosystems are so denuded I just have to make do with what’s left. That said, it’s still a beautiful planet.
I’ve also tried to find it in seeking spiritual “truth”, but realised it’s impossible (I’ve tried) – it’s “a pathless land”. That all religions and doctrines are just a symbolic representation of something that’s beyond human understanding.
However there is a point to following a path – not “truth”, but self development. My chosen path is now occultism (but without any aspirations to do magic, because I don’t feel I’d be much good at it, and would be a waste of my energies). I’m just doing the work with the aim of becoming competent, rather than a great adept.
Having realised my own creative and intellectual limitations, I’m now (humbly) on a path to learn from others. Including yourself, JMG 🙂
Odd though, that the aim of this path is to expand consciousness, which I’m starting at a phase where my capabilities might be diminishing. And I have the “joys” of the hunchback, fool, and 1st and 2nd quarters to look forward to. Hmm. How can I maintain my way through this?
First of all, I can tell you that, before to send you my second last previous comment (before # 100), I had some trouble for doing it, because a strange error screen prevented me to upload my opinions…I don’t want to fall in my worst times paranoid thougths, but after trying to send my comment again, I deleted a few words I won’t write here (loosely related with mainstream woke taboos, ahem), and oh what a surprise, I managed to send you my second last comment…???
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In addition my # 100 comment, when I thought in mammals with some kind of a smart mind, maybe I must add to my list elephants. Indeed, their known high level memory is only a part of their interesting clever behaviors; for example, their custom of protecting or going with the corpses of their mates, friends or relatives within the herd for a while before fleeing…I bet elephants, to some extent, feel and understand the terms “death”/”to die” (and I’m not the only one to think it).
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Dylan # 105:
“There’s a saying in the Waldorf scene that the very young and the very old are closest to the spiritual world, and that people in midlife are at the lowest (read: densest and most materialistic) point on the arc of incarnation.”
I partly agree. According what I’ve seen in the many social circles in which I usually I’ve been allowed in (more or less related with spiritual matters), spiritual views seem more common and stronger, as soon as people gets older beyond midlife. And I’ve lived some interesting experiences with some children who go beyond usual materialistic points of view…On the other hand, according my own experience, I can tell you I’m beyond my midlife, but more or less since my mid-30s, I’ve been very interested in religious/spiritual things. Of course, I think I’m a “single verse” within my own generation, who’s been very secularized, at least here.
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Profanities, obscenities, and so on:
I can tell you I live in a town surrounded by some rivers and canals (of course, it’s not Venice!), so me and another citizens can see a lot of plants and animals on the water and the water’s edges. Well, there’s a shy bird which can be seen sometimes here. I don’t know its English name, but its current name nowadays is “gallineta” (little hen, in literal translation). It’s funny and sad alike, because its old times name was “polla de agua”(little water hen), which I think it’s a more accurate name for this bird which is similar to a small hen, and it likes water…
What’s the problem with the old name?
Ahem, Spanish old name to depict a bird similar to a young/little hen, in a dirty metaphorical sense, is also a mild obscene word to depict penis. So nowadays you must say here you’ve seen a “gallineta” if you don’t want to be mocked or be frowned upon…for apparently having seen a phallus in the water (ha, ha).
Here, a picture of this innocent bird…
https://seo.org/ave/gallineta-comun/
Oops, I’ve just read its name in Catalan is like the old one in Spanish…Interesting. I’m not skilled in that language to guess if it isn’t a obscenity/profanity in Catalonia, but I tend to think it…
@ Cynthia #103
Thank you! 🙂
“(Incidentally, I don’t think equating us with our physical drives is “dragging us down”, either. To me, we are animals, those drives are core to what we are, and as animals, the fact that we’ve done some neat tricks with our opposable thumbs doesn’t make us somehow better than the others, although I’m not about to become a vegetarian over it or anything like that.).”
I actually entirely agree with you on the point that our physical drives do not “in themselves” drag us down, and that our animal nature is an essential aspect of our incarnated selves, with which we are better to appreciate than to suppress.
In my comment, though, I do think there is a way of thinking/speaking that relegates us to being “nothing BUT” animals (which some call “Ahrimanic” thinking) and that this kind of thinking is reductive, perverse and demeaning.
And not only for humans… other animals are also never “nothing BUT” animals; they, too have depths and breadths that are beyond our ken. 🙂
On the issue of swear words, per se, though, I should tell you that Irish people (among whom I live) are notoriously given to swearing, even compared to other English speakers… and this is not due to lack of eloquence, since Irish people are also culturally given to speaking fluently with silver tongues… 😉 So while I personally do not object to their use on principle, I am happy to fully respect our host’s rules here, especially since said rules give all of us so much scope for really interesting conversations with people of many different ways of thinking! 🙂
I’ve been reading over A Vision, and have finally caught up to where the book club is. Since we got into the phases, I’ve been consumed with one major question – where am I on the wheel?
It’s been quite difficult to pin that down. I’ve had to look very critically at my own life, the things I’ve sought after, my projections, thought patterns, and what the world around me has consistently served up to me in my life. The process itself has been quite the instructive form of self examination, and examination of those around me. Long before I settled on a phase for myself, I saw the various phases that people in my life seemed to fit, and realized that Yeats’ system is quite exhaustive – I have yet to meet anyone who couldn’t be fit into one of the points on the wheel, in or out of phase.
After careful cinsideration,I believe I am a soul in phase 23. The first half of my life was spent chasing after idealized intellectual dreams of how the world should be, and always with disastrous results. It was only when I began to accept life as it was served up to me, and learned to work with it, that I began to find success in life. Self pity, 23 out of phase, has been a crippling downfall for me – the feeling like life was unfair, I deserved better, that I had been cheated out of the life I should have had, that those around me weren’t doing enough – this has always torn me down into bitterness and misery. Reading this made me actually realize it for the first time – I had thought if it as rage, depression, addiction, or so on, but it really was self-pity at the root of most of my life’s failings.
I am at my best when I just accept that life seems to require me to work a lot harder than most people around me, but also has given me the drive and technical skill required to do so. I stand tallest when I pull miracles out of my backside, building and fixing things others consider impossible, never in service to my own dreams, but rather those around me.
This search has been quite instructive, and I thank you for prompting me onto this journey of self discovery. I have a question for you. What phase do you believe you are? Given your intellectual capacities of self expression as a writer, I would hazard a guess you are somewhere in the 3rd quarter, but I’m quite curious as to your thoughts on the matter.
@112 Sidaway
I think you are more likely third quarter. From JMG’s descriptions, I infer that creativity is not guarenteed for Phases 16-18 and a person of Phases 17 or 18 might waste their potential (“Dispersal”/”Curiosity” false masks). What does come automatically is perceiving the world through a subjective filter. Phase 19 blunders, but you might not have the capacity for their strength of conviction– feigned or authentic. Phases 20-23 have a body of fate of success. Phases 24 and 25 are moral phases– I think Phase 25 might seem to be more creative than 24 as they can promote new ideas rising in collective consciousness rather than just using a moral code imposed on them.
@Slithy Toves #109: When I was a child, I didn’t like The Silver Chair because it was so much about doggedly persistence, but today it is also one of my favourite books in the series. It has so many literary associations, not only to Plato in the scene you quoted, but also to the Divine Comedy – the transformation of the witch into a serpent has a lot of allusions to Inferno XXV, 103ff., the river of fire in Bism recall Paradiso XXX, 58ff., and there are others (e.g. the giants standing in the ravine).
The rubies and diamonds that you can eat and drink in Bism seem to me a beautiful expression of a similar insight as the “gold, transparent as glass” in Revelation mentioned upstream.
I do agree with your interpretation of Puddleglum’s speech – Lewis had a lot of respect for the Norse attitude of knowingly going into defeat at the side of the gods you served. I just don’t understand when you say Lewis had a habit of “lying” about his own work – isn’t the author free to interpret his own work in different ways on different occasions?
I didn’t read *Narnia* when I was of the age for it, and the one time I tried I found Lewis’ tone to be unsufferably smug and quit after a couple chapters (the smugness is present but toned down in his novels for adults).
Scotlyn: I’m of the opinion that animals, human and otherwise, are indeed nothing but animals. I’m also of the opinion that it’s not any kind of a reduction or put down to say that. Being an animal is pretty good! You get mobilty, a nervous system, feelings, and the ability to make choices. And you might even believe, as I do, that they have spirits* that might get reincarnated. Not so bad in my view. Beats being, say, a rock. I guess I mean to say that “nothing but an animal” is a phrase somewhat akin to, “nothing but a Nobel laureate”.. umm.. that’s pretty good! 🙂
(I’m more sure about this with some than others. A cat has a spirit, as does a pig or a kangaroo or a hyena. Not so sure about an amoeba. Or a bee.)
I thought quite a while before I came up with that answer, by the way. It felt like maybe there should be more to say about that, but I didn’t find what it is.
I too like the language policy and I feel that JMG does moderation well.
This is a bit orthogonal to the topic, but I was wondering – speaking of systems of personality with occult ties, I was thinking of something very basic (partly because Yeats has so many phases, it is hard to keep them all in my head)- the four Humors of Galen (and the four temperaments). I was wondering what JMG and the others here think about it.
Also, what does occult lore say about people who are born into one category who try very hard to evacuate their psyche into a different category. So to use a humoral example, supposing one tried to go from melancholic to sanguinist temperament using force of will, how might that go? There’s probably equivalents to than in the Yeats categories as well. Going from one Phase into another, not through evolution, but by force of will?
My own theory is that multiple options are possible. A complete transmutation (from one humor to another) would be option, but it seems unlikely. A mix of the old and new seems more like it, but there’s at least two ways thing can mix – mixing evenly into a compromise between the two, or mixing unevenly (like oil and water) into an unstable emulsion. Of course, some kind of reversal is also possible, but it doesn’t seem preordained either.
@ Cynthia # 119
Thank you. 🙂
I guess I can’t help thinking that even a Nobel Laureate is not reducible to being “nothing BUT” a Nobel Laureate…
But, you know, it would be deadly boring and dull if we all thought alike! 🙂
Cynthia and Scotlyn # 114:
“In my comment, though, I do think there is a way of thinking/speaking that relegates us to being “nothing BUT” animals (which some call “Ahrimanic” thinking) and that this kind of thinking is reductive, perverse and demeaning.
And not only for humans… other animals are also never “nothing BUT” animals; they, too have depths and breadths that are beyond our ken.”
I agree. Indeed, I wrote my idea before you about how some mammals can have a “rough” mind, awareness and/or soul, in my comments about reincarnation and metempsychosis. It seems, according some scientifical studies with those animals, that Descartes idea about stupid soul-less animals, except human beings, was very wrong…
I haven’t any problem in accepting we’re animals too, which for example can be seen especially in sex/pregnancy: we’ve got a biology, so we’re influenced (but not determined) by it. Human brain/mind can allow more will and freedom than another animals, methink. Reductionism isn’t never smart nor ethical nor realistic to understand every part of human experience.
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Aldarion # 117:
“isn’t the author free to interpret his own work in different ways on different occasions?”
Yes, I think authors are free to interpret their whole work in different ways, because everybody has the right to change their opinions…However, I also think it’s an act of ethical and intellectual honesty to explain why and how they’ve changed their ideas to say this or that thing about their books (their right is correlative to their duty).
I haven’t read C.S. Lewis different opinions about his books, so I don’t know if he explained well and in a reasonable way his different opinions.
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Cynthia # 119:
I understand your view, but I tend to agree more with Scotlyn in this topic about human nature. So I think we’re animals, but not only mere animals. It seems some spiritual/occultist tendences believed (and believe today) human beings indeed are fallen angels. Although I don’t believe this idea in a literal sense, I think about it as work hypothesis.
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Sarhaddon # 120:
Well, the four humors of Galen is a slightly off topic idea, IMHO, but also very interesting. I can tell you I see myself as a melancholic kind of person. I can also say the humors theory is admitted even by some hardcore materialist scientist/doctors (ahem, grumbling), as an outdated but early scientifical-like theory about human beings (especially, how human body and mind could work).
“supposing one tried to go from melancholic to sanguinist temperament using force of will, how might that go?”
Human will, when is strengthened since childhood, is a powerful engine to change human life; but if you never practice it, your will and freedom will be probably weak. I mean, I think psyche can be changed by the own person, but according some serious psychiatrists and psychologists, as soon as you’ve gone beyond your teen years and become an adult, it’s harder to change your mind (into better attitudes and behaviors); because your personality is “solidified”, to some extent. My personal experience with my own changes can be said in the short form: I’ve bettered some aspects of my personality since my late 30s (for example, I’m more patient thanks to meditation), but my “humor” is the same now; in spite I’ve tried to be less melancholic. Of course, maybe you’ve got another life experience. However, I can say to some extent, I agree it’s possible to change your humor into another one, but I think the more you get old, the more it gets harder and harder…but it could also depend of your own personality.
@JMG #42 Re: Profanity Substitutes
Not exactly faux/replacement profanity, but when my first daughter started to more actively repeat words she hear me saying, I gave some thought to trying to cut back on the profanity (less successful while driving than otherwise, but I keep trying). I tried to come up with phrases/insults made up of normal words that still sounded bad. “Frog botherer” was one I enjoyed, but my absolute favorite was “pig tickler.” It has the added benefit of almost always making me laugh, which tends to short-circuit any anger. Even more fun when you an string them together: “You good for nothing, frog-bothering pig tickler!”
Cheers,
Jeff
Ah, can’t resist.
A father is playing with his infant son. The son for the first time says “mother”.
The beaming father calls out to his wife: “Honey, did you hear that? He said his first half-word.”
Hi All
I got a bit behind with this book club but I am making the effort to catch up now and hope to be back with you on the next instalment!
I have just got through the 2nd quarter and have a thought on Yeat’s Image and what it means that I want to share and perhaps get your feedback on:
P61: “All thought becomes an image and the soul becomes a body”
P62 Yeats says: “Caught up in contemplation, the mind’s eye
Fixed upon images, that once were thought”
P94 ” Life is an endeavour, made vain by the four sails ( or indeed vanes 😉 ) of its mill, to come to a double contemplation, that of chosen Image, that of fated Image”
So from this I understand Image is linked to Mask, but not synonymous. Image is created through a habit of thought, driven by the interaction of Mask, Will, Creative Mind and Body of Fate and can be useful when driven by in phase harmony or to be overcome or ‘broken’ when driven by out of phase discord and deception. It seems the second quarter is particularly centred on this process.
Also P59 Yeats refers to “mere images” “found, after the manner of his kind” perhaps Images are the minds attempts to grasp what is beyond, or perhaps at the very edge of what a human is able to percieve. Perhaps as we repeat the wheel our Images become truer, less muddied by discord and in antithetical phases closer to Mask, ( and in primary plucked wisely from Body if Fate?)
I also think section IV of Examination of the Wheel on p86 is describing Image, and how they are influenced by the 4 faculties, even though Yeats never says the word ‘Image’ in this section. He talks instead of photographs and paintings. If so he states “When the will predominates the Mask or Image is “sensuous”, which seems to be when Image and Mask coincide. But if I am correct in my understanding, he goes on to explain how Images are influenced by when the other faculties predominate, and in these instances it seems Image and Mask are more distinct, and perhaps can even be in opposition. See “When however, the Creative Mind decieves the Will in an antithetical phase, by offering it sone primary image of the Mask, or when the Will offers to the Creative Mind an emotion that should be turned towards the Mask alone, the Discord emerges again in its simplicity because of the jarring of emotion, the grinding out of Image.” P94
Scotlyn: Yes, vive la difference! FIRMLY agree with that!
Chuaquin (but still Scotlyn as well): I think you’ve identified the root of the difference there with “angels”, Chuaquin. I’m not sure where I am with angles, yet. I was about to say that I don’t believe in them, but then a whole train of thought started setting itself up to handle that question right as I was typing this comment, so I guess my answer has to be kind of like, “sorry, this page under construction”, like an unfinished webpage.
I think the most valuable insight into matters spiritual or regarding what else there is besides the material plane and this crude stuff, and I might remember this inexactly but this is the version I’ve taken to heart, is: “our ideas about these matters are akin to a two year old’s idea of what daddy does at work all day.” (thanks, JMG!)
So I guess that means all the “webpages” about that are necessarily always under construction.
I think all the learned masters who’ve spent a lifetime studying the spirits might have something like a 26 month old’s idea of what daddy does at work all day. So that’s one grain of salt I take all this with. A newbie like me might have an 18 month old’s understanding of what daddy does at work all day.
I’ve got an idea that this is not my first rodeo (incarnation) and that I’ve got some practice thinking through these ideas, but then we always do think that, don’t we? I don’t hear many people who believe in reincarnation saying, “Oh yeah, there’s old souls all over the place but I’m green as can be! First life!” Ha ha! And if they weren’t so good they were Gandhi they were so awful they were Hitler, but never just some schmuck.
(A darn novel again. When I started this comment I thought I’d struggle to say anything at all.)
GM!
This fourth quarter essay brought to my mind the Minor Arcana tarot suit of Pentacles: from the old man content perspective in ten thru the portrayals of appreciation, letting go, co creating, acceptance etc up to the “unification consciousness” of the ace….
Thank you always for your insights!
Warmly
Yogaandthetarot
@ Cynthia #127
Exactly! Exactly! (and I love the “webpages under construction” metaphor).
The thing about a “nothing BUT” description is that it expresses complete certainty that there ISN’T any more to know. (I am equally attuned to the profligate use of the word “just”, as in “just a milkman” or “just an amoeba” or “just a reflex” or “just a movement of hormones”, which again is an expression of certainty that there ISN’T any more to know about whatever it is.
There is very little that we can be certain about, certainly not about “what Daddy does all day in the office”, nor even about whether there is nowhere Daddy goes BUT the office, when he’s not around… 😉
PS… the fact that when you open parentheses you are meant to close them – and this is easily forgotten – is my personal grammatical cross to bear. 😉
“I think all the learned masters who’ve spent a lifetime studying the spirits might have something like a 26 month old’s idea of what daddy does at work all day. So that’s one grain of salt I take all this with.”
I can say I agree with this phrase. Spiritual worlds are a near unknown territory (“terra incognita”), even for more skilled people for grasping at least short flashes of these worlds.
@Luke Z # 86, and @JMG # 98 —
There’s a tragicomic short story about a man who played football in high school and college, and went on to a successful pro career. The American dream, right? No, not to our hero! All he ever wanted was to sing opera. He never gave a fig for sports; his true love was music!
Good points overall on the influence of Plato, Christianity, and Faustianism on CS Lewis! And yes, the marsh-wiggle was one of the best characters, and the argument he makes at the decisive moment is very good. It’s a solid rejection of rational-materialism, which assumes that only things you can observe & measure exist, ie if you can’t observe & measure it, then it’s not real — a very narrow-minded, blinkered way of looking at the world.
Another interesting thing about the Silver Chair is the portrayal of Experiment House, the school Eustace & Jill go to, which is recognizably run on Progressive Liberal ideology. Of course, this leads to a dumpster fire of cliques & bullying, which eventually gets its resolution, but it’s striking that CS Lewis felt the need to parody wokeness all the way back in the 50s!
Scotlyn, Chuaquin: Great chat, look forward to the next. Oh, and my C compiler refuses to get it if there’s a missing close parenthesis, but I don’t. 😉