Here's my Ritual Night Talk from last night. The long awkward pause at the beginning is due to Facebook rolling out a new interface and me standing there waiting to make sure I was live before I started speaking. I was fine with the old Facebook interface - no idea why they felt the need to change it up.
Anyway, this talk focuses on the idea of True Will, which in my opinion a lot of people explain in an incorrect or at least incorrectly limited way, and an introduction to the idea of the Holy Guardian Angel. I'll be talking about the Holy Guardian Angel and Liber Samekh in more detail next week.
The biggest misconception I see about True Will is the idea that it's a task, a calling, or a vocation. Certainly tasks, callings, and vocations can be in harmony with your True Will, but they aren't the extent of what True Will is. Rather, True Will is about being as true to your fundamental nature as you can possibly be from moment to moment and situation to situation in a coherent fashion.
It's like "following the Dao" corresponding to your specific nature, and there's a reason that Aleister Crowley was a fan of Lao-Tsu and Daoism.
Anyway, this talk focuses on the idea of True Will, which in my opinion a lot of people explain in an incorrect or at least incorrectly limited way, and an introduction to the idea of the Holy Guardian Angel. I'll be talking about the Holy Guardian Angel and Liber Samekh in more detail next week.
The biggest misconception I see about True Will is the idea that it's a task, a calling, or a vocation. Certainly tasks, callings, and vocations can be in harmony with your True Will, but they aren't the extent of what True Will is. Rather, True Will is about being as true to your fundamental nature as you can possibly be from moment to moment and situation to situation in a coherent fashion.
It's like "following the Dao" corresponding to your specific nature, and there's a reason that Aleister Crowley was a fan of Lao-Tsu and Daoism.
If what you say here about mental conditioning were widely understood, it would put a lot of behavioral therapists out of business!
ReplyDeleteThe behavioral therapists have it more correct than the psychoanalysts do. They actually work with conditioning loops, whereas psychoanalysis is built on the idea that you can think/visualize/actively-imagine your way out of them without directly engaging the conditioning system. It's a profoundly inefficient approach.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I have the impression that these days psychoanalysis seems to skip even that part and go straight to the pharmaceutical prescriptions.
ReplyDeleteWell sure, because their whole psychodynamic system does not work in any meaningful sense of the term. Yes, I'm being snarky there, but still. Also, in order to become a psychoanalyst you have to first be a psychiatrist, so as a medical doctor you can prescribe medications. Clinical psychologists can't necessarily do that.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of cases where medication will work better than talk therapy of any kind, behavioral or otherwise. Work on your mind can change your brain chemicals around, but it's a slow process that takes dedicated practice - keeping up a meditation practice over a long period of time, for example, and that can cause other problems in some cases.