why are you into this stuff?

[daojones]

I am curious as to what people who frequent this section of ttb are studying and practicing and why. It just seems like such an amorphous subject area to me and i am trying to get a handle on it. Is it practical, does it provide a philosophical, ethical, or metaphysical/cosmological paradigm?

 

What would you call what you are studying/practicing and why? (For bonus points)

[GrandmasterP]

It's a part of our history, who doesn't like magic?

[idiot_stimpy]

Why am I here?

Where am I going?

Where have I come from?

[三江源]

It's a part of our history, who doesn't like magic?

 

Most people arent interested in studying or following the hermetic or occult. The vast majority are not interested, make no effort to find out.

 

We are.

 

idiotstimpy assumes we know why and if not, invites us to speculate..

[GrandmasterP]

No disrespect Cat but if you look at the bookshelves in any English supermarket about one fifth of the paperback offer will be hermetic, occult, Templars themed and suchlike tales.

People are fascinated by it, always have been.

Fair enough very few get past that initial interest in a good yarn, but a few do in every generation hence it carries on.

Ebbs and flows occur as in most interests. Possibly there were more working hermeticists around before the first world war than afterwards, a blip in the late sixties ( you're likely too young to remember the Pyramid 'craze' and what stemmed from that) but there's a substrate of hermetic-practice continuity sometimes more to the fore in the public imagination than at other times.

Edited December 30, 2012 by GrandmasterP

[Birch]

Crosstraining.

[MERCELESS ONE]

true science!

[GrandmasterP]

Crosstraining.

....

Cracking metaphor K ( and a super fitness regimen too).

[三江源]

No disrespect Cat but if you look at the bookshelves in any English supermarket about one fifth of the paperback offer will be hermetic, occult, Templars themed and suchlike tales.

People are fascinated by it, always have been.

Fair enough very few get past that initial interest in a good yarn, but a few do in every generation hence it carries on.

Ebbs and flows occur as in most interests. Possibly there were more working hermeticists around before the first world war than afterwards, a blip in the late sixties ( you're likely too young to remember the Pyramid 'craze' and what stemmed from that) but there's a substrate of hermetic-practice continuity sometimes more to the fore in the public imagination than at other times.

 

The populist books about the knights templar etc spawned by da vinci code , are not "studying hermetic and the occult" which is what this forum is for. This isnt a chat room about populist texts. Members are hoping for a lot more content than that. This is a forum for practitioners, who have drive and sustained impulse to go deep.

[Thunder_Gooch]

I am curious as to what people who frequent this section of ttb are studying and practicing and why. It just seems like such an amorphous subject area to me and i am trying to get a handle on it. Is it practical, does it provide a philosophical, ethical, or metaphysical/cosmological paradigm?

 

What would you call what you are studying/practicing and why? (For bonus points)

 

 

 

Don't expect any real answers to your questions, because you won't get any.

Edited December 30, 2012 by More_Pie_Guy

[GrandmasterP]

Sorry Cat, the OP threw me back there.

I am buttoning my coat as I type.

:-)

[三江源]

Well, morepieguy is right that it is a challenge to give answers.. I just found one though, I was looking at the Paul Brunton notebooks that VMarco linked to and straight away saw this:

 

 

Pascal said in Le Mystère de Jesus: "Thou wouldst not seek Me, if thou didst not possess Me."

 

I'd guess that most of the time we are looking for objective correlatives.

[Thunder_Gooch]

Well, morepieguy is right that it is a challenge to give answers.. I just found one though, I was looking at the Paul Brunton notebooks that VMarco linked to and straight away saw this:

 

 

 

I'd guess that most of the time we are looking for objective correlatives.

 

So you are looking for stories that serve a symbolic purpose?

 

Wouldn't studying literature provide the same effect?

[ShenLung]

The same reason my bookshelves are double stacked, sagging, and fill the house, I suppose .. Curiosity.

[三江源]

So you are looking for stories that serve a symbolic purpose?

 

Wouldn't studying literature provide the same effect?

 

Looking for a map of territory out there, which is an objective correlative of what we feel inside. So we might, for example, feel relief when we begin to understand what the tree of life is really about.. at last a map that explains what we feel to be true.. and so we can begin to study in depth and get articulate whole brain understanding of what was previously a less than clearly felt experience or intuitively shaped experience.

 

Yes, literature does this job. Occult and hermetic literature does this job for occult and hermetic inner experiences, and barbara cartland, or shakespeare, does it for love.

[GrandmasterP]

Kant....

 

Our minds may attempt to correlate in useful ways, perhaps even closely accurate ways, with the structure and order of the various aspects of the universe, but cannot know these "things-in-themselves" (noumena) directly. Rather, we must infer the extent to which thoughts correspond with things-in-themselves by our observations of the manifestations of those things that can be sensed, that is, of phenomena.

[Thunder_Gooch]

Looking for a map of territory out there, which is an objective correlative of what we feel inside. So we might, for example, feel relief when we begin to understand what the tree of life is really about.. at last a map that explains what we feel to be true.. and so we can begin to study in depth and get articulate whole brain understanding of what was previously a less than clearly felt experience or intuitively shaped experience.

 

Yes, literature does this job. Occult and hermetic literature does this job for occult and hermetic inner experiences, and barbara cartland, or shakespeare, does it for love.

 

 

 

I can relate, I listen to alan watts for hours on end and take notes as he had many profound insights that resonate with me.

 

Perhaps this is the aim of people who study occult/hermetic philosophy.

Edited December 30, 2012 by More_Pie_Guy

[GrandmasterP]

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet,

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

 

W.B. Yeats

 

[Zhongyongdaoist]

I am curious as to what people who frequent this section of ttb are studying and practicing and why. It just seems like such an amorphous subject area to me and i am trying to get a handle on it. Is it practical, does it provide a philosophical, ethical, or metaphysical/cosmological paradigm?

 

What would you call what you are studying/practicing and why? (For bonus points)

 

Here is one reason:

Then, in this way know God; as having all things in Himself as thoughts, the whole Cosmos itself. If, then, thou dost not make thyself like unto God, thou canst not know Him. For like is knowable to like [alone]. Make, [then,] thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all measure; leap forth from every body; transcend all Time; become Eternity; and [thus] shalt thou know God. Conceiving nothing is impossible unto thyself, think thyself deathless and able to know all,—all arts, all sciences, the way of every life. Become more lofty than all height, and lower than all depth. Collect into thyself all senses of [all] creatures,—of fire, [and] water, dry and moist. Think that thou art at the same time in every place,—in earth, in sea, in sky; not yet begotten, in the womb, young, old, [and] dead, in after-death conditions. And if thou knowest all these things at once,—times, places, doings, qualities, and quantities; thou canst know God. But if thou lockest up thy soul within thy body, and dost debase it, saying: I nothing know; I nothing can; I fear the sea; I cannot scale the sky; I know not who I was, who I shall be;—what is there [then] between [thy] God and thee? For thou canst know naught of things beautiful and good so long as thou dost love thy body and art bad. The greatest bad there is, is not to know God’s Good; but to be able to know [Good], and will, and hope, is a Straight Way, the Good’s own [Path], both leading there and easy.

 

It is from Corpus Hermeticum XI, usually titled Mind unto Hermes, the complete text may be found here:

 

http://www.gnosis.or...H-v2/th223.html

 

To the wise a single word is deemed sufficient, you have a whole paragraph. Live and Learn. Learn and Live.

[Apech]

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet,

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

 

W.B. Yeats

 

 

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave

A paradise for a sect; the savage too

From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep

Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not

Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf

The shadows of melodious utterance.

But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,

With the fine spell of words alone can save

Imagination from the sable charm

And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,

'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'

Since every man whose soul is not a clod

Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved

And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

Whether the dream now purpos'd to rehearse

Be poet's or fanatic's will be known

When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

 

John Keats.

[GrandmasterP]

Ben Jonson has that scene in his 'The Alchemist'

 

MAM. A certain touch, or air,

That sparkles a divinity, beyond

An earthly beauty!

DOL. O, you play the courtier.

MAM. Good lady, give me leave --

DOL. In faith, I may not,

To mock me, sir.

MAM. To burn in this sweet flame;

The phoenix never knew a nobler death.

DOL. Nay, now you court the courtier, and destroy

What you would build. This art, sir, in your words,

Calls your whole faith in question.

MAM. By my soul --

DOL. Nay, oaths are made of the same air, sir.

MAM. Nature

Never bestow'd upon mortality

A more unblamed, a more harmonious feature;

She play'd the step-dame in all faces else:

Sweet Madam, let me be particular --

DOL. Particular, sir! I pray you know your distance.

MAM. In no ill sense, sweet lady; but to ask

How your fair graces pass the hours? I see

You are lodged here, in the house of a rare man,

An excellent artist; but what's that to you?

DOL. Yes, sir; I study here the mathematics,

And distillation.

MAM. O, I cry your pardon.

He's a divine instructor! can extract

The souls of all things by his art; call all

The virtues, and the miracles of the sun,

Into a temperate furnace; teach dull nature

What her own forces are. A man, the emperor

Has courted above Kelly; sent his medals

And chains, to invite him.

DOL. Ay, and for his physic, sir --

MAM. Above the art of Aesculapius,

That drew the envy of the thunderer!

I know all this, and more.

DOL. Troth, I am taken, sir,

Whole with these studies, that contemplate nature.

MAM. It is a noble humour......

 

I kinda agree with old Ben that it is a noble humour indeed to be ataken with the Hermeticals.

[Apech]

"We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."

 

Bard too ... Avon calling.

[RiverSnake]

My practices in the Western Tradition are generally comprised of meditating on the Qabbalistic Tree of Life and Tarot.....both practices which i find very rewarding.

 

In regards to why I practice.....I found that I was simply drawn to work with the Tree. I feel there is a lot of depth there and I see it as a vehicle which I can use to constantly refine my personality and energies....a very useful and fun tool for me on the path.

 

Also i found I was drawn to using the Tarot and have found it to be a very useful for divination as well as introspection and also a useful to helping others.

 

-My 2 cents, Peace

[Seth Ananda]

More Pie Guy, you are not welcome in this forum if your only wish is to disparage the Occultists here, and I really cant imagine you would have any other interest here, so stay out.

 

If you remember back a little while, this forum was started in part as a result of conversations with you, where you insisted on shitting all over our threads with your ignorant views of this topic. Stay out or you will be reported.

 

Same rules apply as for Buddhists accosting the Vedantins in their Forum, or new agers mumbling on in the Taoist forum.

[Apech]

Looking for a map of territory out there, which is an objective correlative of what we feel inside. So we might, for example, feel relief when we begin to understand what the tree of life is really about.. at last a map that explains what we feel to be true.. and so we can begin to study in depth and get articulate whole brain understanding of what was previously a less than clearly felt experience or intuitively shaped experience.

 

Yes, literature does this job. Occult and hermetic literature does this job for occult and hermetic inner experiences, and barbara cartland, or shakespeare, does it for love.

 

Are you really lumping Cartland and Shakespeare together?

 

Apart from anything else there's a failry strong argument to say Shakespeare was a hermeticist or at least he knew of and understood hermeticism.

 

http://www.scribd.co...-and-the-Occult

 

The premise of this course, as well as its speculative exuberance, is that theliterary Kabbalah of Moses de Leon coupled with the theurgical Kabbalah of AbrahamAbulafia, transmogrified over 400 years in Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Germany,Italy and England, reappeared in the dramaturgy of the Shakespearian ethos and poesis.

Edited December 31, 2012 by Apech