Resolved
Hmmm…. Well, thanks a surge of blogging yesterday, and some helpful feedback from a few people I feel like I have resolved a moral or idenity crisis I had been having. Wow, that’s all it took? Communication sure is neat.
The “crisis” (such as it was) was that I wasn’t really sure how to reconcile my interest in magic & witchcraft with gnosticism. The long and the short of it is that I eventually realized that it’s not any different from trying to reconcile Gnosticism w. Krav Maga.
If we accept the idea that there exist different worlds - physical, astral/psychic/affective and spiritual, then all of these different disciplines simply reflect the desire and ability to compete or participate in different arenas and levels of being.
Krav Maga is a fighting system, so of course that is physical.
“Occultism” and witchcraft deal with the affective ream - the world of astral images and impressions, deities and demigods, spirits, etc - a mixed bag of emotions, ideas, truth, lies, healing, hexes, etc.
In the gnostic cosmology these things would be termed “psychic” since they draw from a world that while it is “real”, is not the “ceiling” (though many people mistake it for the ceiling) of reality.
It’s more like the reception desk. Its fun and exciting and dengerous to move in that world just like it is fun and exciting and dangerous to practice martial arts. It can be spiritual but it isn’t necessarily and it sure isn’t necessary to be involved in the occult to be a gnostic.
The main analogy I see is with the concept of siddhis, which is drawn from hinduism and buddhism. These are seemingly miraculous abilities that people gain as the result of personal spiritual evolution. There are all sorts of warnings about siddhis, that they are a distraction from the path, that they are no proof of spirituality, that people can become hypnotized by their glamour, etc…
the basic idea is that if the phenomenal universe is mental or illusory than psychic abilities are nothing special - its like bending a spoon in the matrix, you’re still in the Matrix and the spoon isn’t real anyway, so so what?
Anywho, I do think there is a lot of value to be had from the practice of magic just like there is a lot to be learned from martial arts, but these are dealing with different levels of reality than gnosticism (or buddhism or sufism) are. They are techniques, right? Shamanism is a technique, it has no particular spirituality attached to the set of techniques even though shamans in different cultures do work with different spirits.
In way I almost feel like these things can be useful to gnostics as a way to balance things out. You need to be able to defend yourself, you need to eat, if you are dead or starving (I have been close to both several times) you’re not in the ideal position to share information, which is what this site has always been about for me.
That said, I’m probably not going to write too much more about magic here, though if there is information I thiink would be useful to share with people and I can do so in a way that will be helpful for others, I will. Not because I think that stuff means that anyone should believe what I have to say about gnosticism (they shouldn’t) or because I think I’m cool (I’m not). Just because some of it might be useful to the journey of self-knowledge for other people, albeit in a very general way.
Now, having said that, I can share in a very general way advice I would give to anyone who wanted to learn how to do certain things which I personally have found to be very important. Take or leave it, its just advice, it may not mean anything to you.
Oh shit, that’s my boss on the phone, and I just thought of the perfect anecdoe to describe and wrap up how a lot of these concepts really do fit together in a practical way, and how I see spiritual vehicles, so I will leave that for the next post. I think I willtell a story about my friend Kevin.
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