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Here is the video of last night's Ritual Night Talk with more on Scientific Illuminism. The donation link is here.
Continuing the discussion of Scientific Illuminism from last week, I go into more detail about chaos theory and its role in magical success, the importance of journaling to track your results, and empirical testing of rituals. I also cover a couple of pitfalls to avoid in the course of pursuing the magical and mystical path.
Enjoy!
4 comments:
You've been knocking these ritual night talks out of the park, Scott. Easily some of the best presentations and discussions I've seen in the occult world. Well done.
I've seen a bunch of people recently taking philosophical stances against the mixing of science and magick. Materialist skeptics think the notion of magick even existing is laughable, and actively ridicule any paranormal research initiatives. A fair few occultists online complaining about the usage of scientific language or concepts in occultism. I think a lot of them are afraid the validity of magick will one day be confirmed officially, they mostly seem to be invested in asserting the truth of their worldview rather than finding the truth of the world.
Anyway, I wanted to ask about perception of spirits. Is there any way I can increase my sensitivity to be able to notice when they're around? I know weirdness in a ritual doesn't actually have an effect on the overall outcome, but I really like the weirdness and would like to see more of it. I suppose an evocation for the path of the moon would help, since that rules clairvoyance.
Also, do you have any tips on training scrying? I haven't found much more than the basic instruction of meditate while looking at a scrying surface until something happens.
Oh, those chi exercises seem to have helped. I've done a few more evocations and sigil launches with decent results so far, and the weakness onrush hasn't reoccurred, so thank you very much for that!
Thanks! I try to keep them interesting and relevant.
Yes on working with the Moon because it rules clairvoyance. Also Water, which rules "crystal-gazing" and is more specific to scrying. That power includes work with both crystals and dark mirrors. Beyond that, keep up your daily practices and be as diligent as you can about them. They activate your psychic senses so you can perceive spiritual things better, but it can be a slow process.
You can also go for technological help. My natural scrying ability isn't very externally visual so I'm not normally that good at it. But one of the things I've found is that I can do it pretty successfully if I use a "light and sound machine." These are devices that use binaural beats and flashing diodes to induce particular brainwave states, especially in the visual and auditory cortex. They're mostly sold as meditation and relaxation aids.
The model I use is a Nova Pro 100:
http://www.photosonix.com/products/nova-pro-100/
It's expensive compared to some of the others on the market, but you can find cheaper ones that should help scrying. What you're looking for is an alpha-theta meditation program, and you'll want to run it for about ten minutes before you start scrying. The alpha-theta is one of the most common programs and should be supported by most if not all manufacturers.
Glad to hear the energy work helped! Much like people who argue magick and science don't mix, I get confused by the handful of magicians out there who apparently think energy work isn't relevant to magick. They range from chaos magicians (Peter Carroll was down on energy work) to grimoire practitioners (who think spirits do all the work so you don't even need to do daily practices). It's weird to see that because energy work is so obviously effective.
I'm getting better with keeping up my practices, but I still have periods where i lapse. I'd say overall i do them a bit over half the time. I'll try making them my first priority on my to do list when I get up in the morning, see if that does something for me. It only takes about 15 minutes or so to do them all, that's barely anything.
How much time of consistent daily practices would you say it takes to develop a noticeable increase in spiritual perception? It varies wildly based on the person, but on average would you say something like three to eight months?
I'm half remembering a quote from Liber Null here, something about how magick could only be respectable once the last mystic has been strangled with the guts of the last astrologer. I get that chaos magick came during a revival period that was solely focused on effective results, but having open hostility to a huge portion of our predecessors techniques and experiences seems countereffective.
Oh! Is there any word on Mastering the Thirty Aires? I enjoyed the other two books in the series, and have been looking forward to reading the third.
I would say it is difficult to guess how long a person would have to do practices to start noticing the effects of psychic senses working better. What I do know, for sure, is that the more regularly you do them the faster they will work. So if you can get up to the point where you are doing them every day they will develop the fastest. If you were very regular about them I would expect you should be able to notice something somewhere in the 3 to 8 month window.
As I see it, chaos magick was a necessary backlash against the pomposity of a lot of lodge magick that was floating around at the time. It's entirely reasonable to break down the techniques as simply as you can as long as they keep working, and then use that model to eliminate unnecessary material from your rituals. Carroll's idea of making magick "respectable" has to do with what I consider to be a fundamental error in the model he presented in Liber Kaos. Belief doesn't power magick. Doubt on the part of practitioner can impede it, which is what I think Carroll mistook for belief = power.
It sounds simple, but the ramifications of that difference is huge. It leads to most of the "excesses" that came out the chaos magick movement, including that nonsense about mystics and astrologers. It also gave us "invoking superman" because children around the world believe in cartoons and belief = power. Likewise, he had this idea that magick worked better the more overall people believed in it, which has shown up in a number of novels about wizards and the like - but if you look at it as doubt = resistance instead of belief = power, it becomes obviously clear why those suppositions are wrong.
Oddly enough, Carroll didn't like energy work either - and as far as I can tell it has a lot more to do with available power (in the form of probability shifts) than belief does, as long as you don't doubt yourself and what you're doing.
You won't need to ask me when Thirty Aires will be available. As soon as it is, I'll be yelling it to the rooftops here and on social media. I'm looking forward to it too, along with a bunch of other folks at this point.
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