Friday, October 16, 2015

Reincarnation and its Discontents


Reincarnation is a fundamental belief in the mysteries and one that has consequences if we take it to heart.  You will find references to reincarnation throughout the Hermeticlessons - thought experiments on things like retro-incarnation, recovered insights from past lives, etc.

In this post I discuss why one would want to recover their magickal memory and warn against the standard new age problems of remembering you are Cleopatra or that you know everything already. Working on your magickal memory helps communication between the lesser countenance and the greater countenance within you.  We are all at different stages in this journey and some people return to help others.  As I believe this I am not racist, sexist or ageist.  I value and listen to the opinions and wisdom of young people and older people alike.  I respect the fact that younger practitioners can advance far along this path and that older practitioners can have had their growth stunted by poor choices or late starts.   Being older does not automatically make you superior.  Wisdom depends on life (lives) experience and varies widely between individuals.

When I was perhaps too young I worked in a nursing home for ex-mental patients and saw the terrifying realities of aging and insanity, this certainly increased my understanding of the reality of the human condition.  I also worked in radiotherapy, cardiology and acute medical conditions for more experience.  After obtaining my degree in Biochemistry I worked in an Alzheimer's Day Centre for a long time before working in a secure mental ward with more advanced cases of mental disease. I also worked in an asylum for a time dealing with the victims of schizophrenia.  Even then I listened - the soul can speak out through these conditions and in fact can often be heard more clearly when the ''impatient'' ego of the individual is debilitated by the disease. I have learned a lot from both the old and the insane.

As I began work in education I also learned to listen to young people.  A progressive approach to education means that we don't belittle young people but see them as partners in a journey towards becoming a life-long (lives-long) learner.  This partnership is the secret to engaging that spark of the individual that will turn into a roaring inferno and its also the secret to reawakening the passion of the learner in yourself.  The default hierarchical thinking of the WMT, that older = wiser is a great impediment to the advance of our tradition and one that must be abandoned as rapidly as possible.  

We are in this, whatever it is, together - as peers.

During my life I have witnessed extremely wise and good young people taken from this world by tragedy.  Often I believe these people were angels in human form and simply too good for this world. Children are extremely sensitive from a psychic perspective and it is always worth considering their imaginings from that position - they can come out with absolutely precious nuggets of wisdom - conversely an older practitioner, weighed down with cynicism and a lifetime of failure and embarrassment can produce tosh and ignorance.

Here I discuss details of the kind of material that can be unearthed from the soul through the use of techniques aimed at recovering magickal memory - regaining one's former spiritual allies and esoteric knowledge.  My artist is still working on bringing this map to life but I hope to have it out in the next month.  In searching for and embracing memories from my past life and communication with my higher self I have made significant progress on the Western Mystery Path.  If you are on this path it is likely that you have been here before - you too would do well to search in the recesses of your soul.

Finally in this post I discuss the notion that there is no such thing as the present - and in some sense what we experience is all memory.  These are quite demanding ideas.  Throughout my experiments and discussions on time travel with Raziel it has become to clear to me that presentism is a deeply flawed philosophical basis for reality.  Presentism is actually one of the reasons that some people think, erroneously, that older automatically = wiser because we see things from the narrow perspective of linear time. Magicians who are presentists are a confusing bunch as so much of the mysteries speak of Eternalism.  Eternalism has scary implications for free willc so generally magicians don't thoroughly explore properly and end up with paradoxes buried in their philosophies that they are often unaware of.

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