Too much, too soon?
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@Marlowe said
"During today's meditation, I was rather taken aback to find myself touched by each of the angels with their various instruments, particularly that Michael pierced me - albeit painlessly - with his sword. The others, thankfully, were entirely gentle. During a later physical ritual, I saw all four angels leaning in towards me"
For starters, Michael is associated with the element of fire so he should be holding a fiery wand. Raphael is air so he should be holding the sword.
I would be curious to hear how your patients in the asylum respond to your steady practise of the LBRP. Are they more calm, less volatile, or are they responding more aggressively and unpredictably toward you?
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Thankyou, this is the kind of thing I want to learn about. Cicero's Essential Golden Dawn has them portrayed as I described them. My associations from Tarot work would have them the way you describe. I know something about elements but not much about angels and while I've bought a few standard texts, the experience of others is also important. I would like to start using the Middle Pillar exercise, but I feel I have to be patient in laying my foundations. While experimenting and building are important, I need to know what I'm getting right before I start tweaking or adding anything. I find discipline is invaluable in early practise in all walks of life.
From looking on different forums, I hear bits of information about when elemental associations are the way I understand them and others where they apparently differ. I have to begin somewhere with what I'm visualising, but I don't want to use my uneducated preferences to visualise incorrectly. I'm also cautious about how things develop if my basic images are at fault.
As regards work, some of our clients are so unstable that I wouldn't put any changes down to my use of the ritual at this stage. I have a very credible history in terms of cooling people out, but I'll be relying on my orthodox methods for the time being. We do use terms such as 'psychic assaults' in the psychotherapy field, which has correspondences with magick, but rather concretely as interpersonal exchanges rather than transmissions of energy. Projection is another connecting concept.
I'm keeping a diary of course and will be examining workplace experiences for anything of clear significance, such as any feelings similar to those I have while performing the LBRP. My hands get warm sometimes, but that might be adrenaline. If I find something definite, I promise I'll let you know. What is worth noting in terms of your question is that the settled members of the ward don't seem to have been stimulated by it. More than anything, I've found its a great exercise for detoxing after a hard day. I haven't slept so soundly and consistently for a long time.
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I personally found the mental health services to make things clear to some degree.
I am a paranoid schizophrenic in accordance to their pigeon holing technique.
So that i take a lot off medication, but and this is strange i suspect, to keep a blessing from turning into a curse.
I have diminished real feeling for the world but i do find that some things are very much as possible as originally.
I did magickal work before the diagnosis and will not be stopped by it -
Well, yeah. Who else are you going to go to? They're the doctors.
Seriously, if I could go back.... I'd say, "Hey, Marlowe, careful not to assume your experience with crazy people directly applies to the initiate."
I've been close to the argument lately, and the nerves are still a little ...sensitized.
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My experience with patients was meant to be comparable in terms of my meeting people with an alternative system of thought that is very personal in expression and requires a less concrete sense of self. Most of the people I've worked with have a very conventional view of life and when reality is either too hard or too soft, they're pretty much lost at sea. Its people with unusual experiences and perspectives that are easier to engage with.
Symptoms differ, but psychosis is fundamentally a symbolic state of mind. Sadly, the symbols have lost their spiritual/collective representation and become concrete and therein lies the problem. Psychotics and magical practitioners may inhabit the same plane of existence but the former drown where the latter swim and suffering people need help. I'm not pursuing this interest to evoke a negative psychotic experience. That may be a risk for me though and I have to pay heed to what patients have told me about it. I'm hoping magical work will add an extra dimension to my professional understanding. I didn't really want to bring up my professional life, but its evident there are parallels and I hope the magical community will accept the validity of psychiatry as a means to psychological health, much as I'm hoping to find that magic is.
If you see a psychiatrist to discuss non-physical or preternatural experiences, he'll assume you came with a problem and need his help. Its fair to say there are very few people in psychiatry who explore unusual forms of consciousness as a healthy idea because hardly anyone who practices magic comes to our attention. They're pretty comfortable with their experiences and may prefer to discuss their problems with other practitioners or someone in the spiritual profession.. The fact that magical practice considers a non-material plane of perception from a healthy perspective is part of what attracts me.
My first step in any ritual is to shut my curtains. I'm sure that if my neighbours saw me performing a banishing ritual, they'd think I was crazy and saying I wanted to work with magic wouldn't soothe them at all. But it doesn't put me off. I dare say there are forum members who've suffered psychological distress and some may have a diagnosed illness. I wouldn't expect any line of human interest to be different though. Aegis55 and Alien696 I could be wrong here, but from what you imply, I hope someday mainstream psychiatry will appreciate your efforts are valid and health focused, even if they don't quite get it.
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@Marlowe said
" I hope someday mainstream psychiatry will appreciate your efforts are valid and health focused, even if they don't quite get it."
I think this is what Israel Regardie hoped for as well and I recall him calling on future generations of practitioners to go into this professional field. As far as I understand and have read, the "magicians" of old were the psychologists of their day. Just briefly scratching the work of Carl Jung has solidified to me that there is value in pursuing this line of thought. My conclusion as of now is "we" as people have a much greater effect than we think on our environment and life around us.
One of the best pieces of advice I've heard echoed here on the forum and elsewhere is to do away with fear and when things get rough to practice a bit of aloofness to the situation. "Yeah, that's a scary image or a suprising image, but so what...lets see what else is going on" or perhaps "Why is this 'scary' or why is this popping up right now?" In magickal practice my results are on a lower spectrum then what some describe as far as their interactions with images, beings, etc. on other planes. However, I've had some other intense experiences where I know that "taking myself out of a situation" has helped (while still being in it of course - most of the time easier said than done!).
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This whole thing was kickstarted by my reading about Israel Regardie's views. I've put together a basic magical library, which includes his "Tree of Life" and "Middle Pillar" tomes. I've had to focus on exam work lately, actually in psychotherapy as it happens. Although psychotherapy is the closest field of mental health work to magic, sitting exams means I couldn't allow too much lateral or left of field thinking. As of tomorrow, I can sit down and read for pleasure and Regardie will be a primary choice.
I heartily agree with your idea of aloofness. Some of my workplace encounters are very concrete in terms of dangerousness, but I have a good idea of when to confront and when to avoid. Unfortunately, I'm not in a place where I can avoid said encounters permanently. Your questions are very valid - sometimes for self-preservation and sometimes for planning. Knowledge is power as shown by my knowing enough to run very real risks on a material level but find non-material beings more worrying to me because I'm more likely to be out of my depth.
Jung, hoped for the same thing as Regardie. I started reading Jung many years ago and got along fine with his psychoanalytic and therapeutic concepts, though again, traditional Jungian psychoanalysis is quite ritualized and 'far out' compared to, say, contemporary Lacanian or Kleinian schools. Works like Aion and Mysterium Coniunctionis are so deeply laden with neologisms and magical sounding phrases that I'd rather read Regardie first.
Then again... "It is not in the least astonishing that numinous experiences should occur in the course of psychological treatment and that they may even be expected with some regularity, for they also occur very frequently in exceptional psychic states that are not treated and may even cause them. They do not belong exclusively to the domain of psychopathology and can be observed in normal people as well. Naturally, modern ignorance of and prejudice against intimate psychic experiences dismiss them as psychic anomalies and put them in psychiatric pigeon-holes without the least attempt to understand them." Jung, 1963 Mysterium Coniunctionis p547
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Marlowe, thank you spelling all that out. I agree wholeheartedly.
http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2004-6/738102/1heih.jpg
I must admit, I think Jung may be just a touch more my spiritual father than Crowley. And I don't say that lightly.
The Master Therion's work is a masterpiece involving the whole of his life and soul. For some reason, however, I still feel I stand just a touch aloof in the good doctor's corner. That's where I go to find my objectivity again.
But... I'm not always objective. It gets so simultaneously tense and boring. lol..
That's how it is for me, anyways.
Peace.
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" "It is not in the least astonishing that numinous experiences should occur in the course of psychological treatment and that they may even be expected with some regularity, for they also occur very frequently in exceptional psychic states that are not treated and may even cause them. They do not belong exclusively to the domain of psychopathology and can be observed in normal people as well. Naturally, modern ignorance of and prejudice against intimate psychic experiences dismiss them as psychic anomalies and put them in psychiatric pigeon-holes without the least attempt to understand them." Jung, 1963 Mysterium Coniunctionis p547
"That'll preach...! lol..
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@Aegis55 said
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"I work in psychiatry and I always stress to patients that overcoming an illness and the increased understanding that results are not the same as being suitably trained or 'enlightened' for want of a better word. People learn lots of good things about themselves while recovering, but some experience a temptation to 'free the others' as you put it, by immediately becoming self-appointed counselors. Whatever their potential, I wouldn't call someone's recovery complete until they address that notion."My apologies. This is a hot button for me. But no one is talking about psychiatric patients currently.
We are talking about normal individuals having normal enlightenment experiences.
That some call them abnormal and try to prevent! prevent! prevent! is the very heart of the problem.
Your thoughts?"
Just to make it more clear, he wasn't speaking about enlightenment, but being suitably trained to help others or 'enlightened' as to how one can help others with psychiatric conditions. -
@Frater Sardonyx said
"Yes, but I'm ...I'm turning a blind eye to that one right now.
But I'm not sure how that theory explains the origin of this methodology in the first place.
It didn't come from someone already trained.
Chicken, egg, angel?"
For example, if you have just got out of depression, then that doesn't condition to make you capable of getting anyone else out of depression. It's as if you had gotten out of the sea, and completely exhausted, without getting a rope or something, you go back to the sea to get the others out.
It's the same with everything. Just because you have done something, for example, you're a good cook, doesn't make you a teacher.
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@Vlad said
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@Frater Sardonyx said
"Yes, but I'm ...I'm turning a blind eye to that one right now.But I'm not sure how that theory explains the origin of this methodology in the first place.
It didn't come from someone already trained.
Chicken, egg, angel?"
For example, if you have just got out of depression, then that doesn't condition to make you capable of getting anyone else out of depression. It's as if you had gotten out of the sea, and completely exhausted, without getting a rope or something, you go back to the sea to get the others out.
It's the same with everything. Just because you have done something, for example, you're a good cook, doesn't make you a teacher."
What about the idea that you don't actually have to know something yourself to teach people. Like for instance, someone who never got out of his or her depression teaching others how to get out of theirs? Or do you think that whole idea lacks usefulness.
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Teaching by instinct is possible but fuzzy in it's efficiency. In nature, the primary means of function is instinct and its often debatable whether adult animals 'teach' juveniles as opposed to show them: that the adults act in accordance with their nature and their offspring follow and copy them. Animals are far more at home with their unconscious drives and have less of a need for civilized life. They have a sense of family and herding that preserves the species and within that will be a pack defense against predators who hunt in packs. Otherwise, adult life and death is one's own responsibility. Primates and certain highly developed species are exceptional, usually because they have a structured language.
In terms of depression and some other mental illnesses, there's a lot of value in support groups, but putting someone in charge who's actively ill is highly risky. With an illness like depression that can be episodic, someone who's experienced depression and currently in good health can be an effective leader for a support group but they would have to withdraw from the role if they relapsed. They have a greater need to focus their energies on getting well again, otherwise by focusing on a leader who's ill, the group will pick up that person's negative energy and feel even worse.
If we think of this in terms of moving energy, rather than using 'professional' language, having a healthy leader means someone is using positive energy to set limits and direction on the negative energy. That way it's used in a positive manner and becomes positive. For very sick people, good and bad energy can become confused or appear identical. Another idea is that by expressing the negative energy in a focused manner, the underlying positive energy is also identified and built on. To lead such a group, you need to have a strong ego to handle the energy, a conscious understanding about the dynamics of the illness and a supervisor to manage your own health as you channel the negative energy. One powerful quality of a healthy leader is a person who understands how the group communicates and gets them to work on a symbolic level. For a group where people are dealing with depression, this could be something like a relaxation session, symbolic identification of the problem, drawing / painting the symbol and then disposing of it. Or telling a personal story and then re-imagining the ending or writing an epilogue.
Support groups focus on a collective problem. If you have no experience or training for managing the particular problem, the group will at best lose faith and at worst become even more sick. To prevent that happening, they may unconsciously attack you. If you manage to convince them that you have the capability and you don't, the negative energy will be dumped into you, the group will become dependent on you and everyone ends in a real mess. The energy expands the ego like a balloon, but without the strength and elasticity that comes through knowledge and training, it pops and spills everywhere. Alternatively, the energy doesn't overload the ego, instead it takes control. It causes a radical change in the leader, who tries to manage the energy by 'acting out'. In acting out, the group appears to recover, but the leader expresses all the bad habits and negativity that everyone else first brought with them.
This applies to groups of all sizes and once the leader is actively channeling everyone's negative energy, the problem becomes infectious. Corruption, bullying, harmful rituals (patterned behaviours) and substance misuse are common indicators of such a problem. The group is no longer a team with a positive focus, it's become a club that protects it's own negativity and acts aggressively toward others. What's needed is a third person perspective that's rather like friendship but has formal boundaries and responsibilities attached, but there will also be a need for direct intervention. An extreme example of this would be that street gangs benefit from the efforts of youth leaders, but there's also a need for law enforcement.
If we go back to the 1:1 rescue analogy, the idea I first mentioned about recovering is that its not enough simply to recover your own immediate health. Its a very commendable human act to go back and rescue others, but you have to get past your happiness, understand your natural limitations and spend time in everyday life before you can help others. The desire to make things better can be detrimental in itself. Some people will struggle more than you did, some will be in a state of panic and some will even pull you back down with them. To be a life-saver, it isn't just a matter of learning to swim, you have to be a strong swimmer. This even extends to emergencies: the fire service might commend you keeping a crowd away from a burning building, but they don't want you running in there with them. If you can't commit to fundamental training and education, your ego isn't disciplined enough to protect you, let alone for you to help. You don't have to be excellent, but you do have to be good enough. This isn't a matter of personal judgement so much as creditable performance. If you've achieved a particular qualification, people who recognise it will have faith in you and respond accordingly. If its left to you and only you, of course you do what you can for both of you to survive, but you look to help as soon as it's possible.
When things do run smoothly, the shared experience of group working is very powerful. The freedom to experience others discussing a shared problem stops one feeling alone and cut off by it, which is a big deal in itself. It also offers education and encouragement, creative thinking and a sense of improvement through regular attendance. These are all ways of expelling negative energy and recovering positive energy. The popular term these days is empowerment. I'm sure people with magical experience can say a lot more on this. I have no doubt there are comparisons, but I haven't had the training or experience to speak with authority.
If you have a group leader who hasn't been ill in the same way the group members have, they need to have enough mileage behind them to work more as a supervisor than a leader, something like a forum moderator, but with legal registration and accountability. For that you need a strong supervisor and a strong group. A group that can operate this way is largely made up of people who're currently healthy and working on safeguarding against relapses. Their higher level of function is that of a charity: positive press, advising professional workers and supporting other groups.
In summary, illness imposes limitations, but ignorance imposes dysfunction. There's a lot to be said for a common cause, but without knowledge there's a lot of risks and without training, you'll take a lot of time for a little progress.
Unless, of course, you're a genius!
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@nameless said
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@Vlad said
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@Frater Sardonyx said
"Yes, but I'm ...I'm turning a blind eye to that one right now.But I'm not sure how that theory explains the origin of this methodology in the first place.
It didn't come from someone already trained.
Chicken, egg, angel?"
For example, if you have just got out of depression, then that doesn't condition to make you capable of getting anyone else out of depression. It's as if you had gotten out of the sea, and completely exhausted, without getting a rope or something, you go back to the sea to get the others out.
It's the same with everything. Just because you have done something, for example, you're a good cook, doesn't make you a teacher."
What about the idea that you don't actually have to know something yourself to teach people. Like for instance, someone who never got out of his or her depression teaching others how to get out of theirs? Or do you think that whole idea lacks usefulness."
People in similar conditions may support eachother, but I think we need something else too. You do have to know something: if you're in that condition, you already know something.
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@Marlowe said
"Teaching by instinct is possible but fuzzy in it's efficiency. In nature, the primary means of function is instinct and its often debatable whether adult animals 'teach' juveniles as opposed to show them: that the adults act in accordance with their nature and their offspring follow and copy them. Animals are far more at home with their unconscious drives and have less of a need for civilized life. They have a sense of family and herding that preserves the species and within that will be a pack defense against predators who hunt in packs. Otherwise, adult life and death is one's own responsibility. Primates and certain highly developed species are exceptional, usually because they have a structured language."
I feel teaching is often the result of needing to escape a sense of isolation and self-obsession. If you've had any serious encounter with a personal problem of any kind you can either regard yourself as unique and singularly put upon by fate, or see the problem as extending beyond yourself, including possibly a whole class of people. This makes teaching—defined as the ability to share experience and knowledge—both a political gesture and attempt at self-therapy.
As such, teaching is one side of a toggle. This toggle pits the feeling of personal unfairness, or self-pity, against the perception that your problem is also the same problem many others are subject to, and which needs to be addressed as such. Hence, people who have undergone terrible divorces become divorce counselors; people born into crippling poverty become advocates for the poor. In this sense teaching is a way to heal oneself and escape the stigma of being all alone with ones problems—a cry baby, selfish and only interested in one's own prospects.
In this regard, if you have not been a victim you cannot teach people how to overcome their victim-hood. It's a general truism among people struggling with alcoholism that non-alcoholics cannot really help you.
I can see this model easily extended to include and explain magickal practice and instruction. Or by simply considering the possible answers to this question: why did Crowley teach?
Love and Will
