Duality and Thelema
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@Dar es Alrah said
"Nobody on this forum goes to sleep worrying about the personal success of the others here, and when we aren't reading each others words or trying to figure out something, I doubt we think of each other at all.
I love to see good people get on, but I don't get upset when they don't either. If I did then it would just make me a part of their problem in some fashion or other."
Agreed to an extent, but I do know that most of us wish each other well.
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OK, I know this may be going further off topic, but I have to say it:
participating in the discussions here is not just 'reading & posting on some internet forum' etc. --- what we open our perception for, what we allow to enter into our span of attention, one way or another, creates what we are!
every single 'input from the outside' that we experience modifies our consciousness. some inputs are smaller, some we recognize as greater, etc. but every single one does it.
thus, so far, from my experience, chit-chatting here with all of you guys is changing my life
and I actively accept being thus passive
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@danica said
"I actively accept being thus passive
"That's exactly what I was getting at! The terms are very useful, but it shouldn't be forgotten that, in practice, they are deeply intertwined. Any individual object can be in both roles for a myriad of other objects.
93, 93/93.
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Good evening, everybody!
Good luck in your devotional practices to your non-gender-specific, de-personified, goddish concepts!
Hail to that thing that is an old abstract concept in its setting! Even unto that thing that is an old abstract concept in being satisfactorily related to others! That passes from one mind to another in its idiom at the apparent downgoing of the sun. Wisdom is a good thing for guidance, and heartfelt emotion is good motivation. Hail to the old abstract concept from the metaphorical abodes of day!
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Hmm... Interesting segue...
Well, if you liked what I wrote, then that actually explains some things to me.
"Success is thy proof - so tell me! Do you go up a grade when you can add this abstraction to the tree? "
Don't know.
"Does it help in meditation or ritual towards the two essential tasks of the magician? If so - how? (And please be as specific as you can if you attempt this.)"
Yes, bhakti devotional practice aids in "enflaming oneself."
"Does it aid you in expressing yourself as sexual beings? "
Yes.
"Perhaps resolve some type of Amfortas wound? "
Perhaps.
"Or help you in your relationship with your mother or HGA? "
Absolutely.
"Does it help to confront your demons? "
Forces it, actually, when the mind is forced to hold the image of the particular energy in its most psychologically positive form.
"How does it mesh with your projections?"
It helps categorize them and make sense of them.
"Infact - does it do anything besides providing your ego with yet another place to stand?"
The ego has to have a place to "stand" in order to take "the next step."
Your line of questions seems set up to be belittling to the advanced magician, as if such things would be beneath him or her. But you gotta start somewhere. That's really my whole point.
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Not speaking for Sardonyx, but giving answers from my p.o.v. "over here" ...
@Dar es Alrah said
"How do you appreciate bhakti practice as 'passive'?"
Great question. Bhakti is inherently affirmative, "active," passionate. OTOH I think there are... more nuanced answers here than this off-the-cuff.
On any matters of love, and especially of sexuality, I think we have to keep in mind that both the pitcher and the catcher are on the same baseball team; that both pitching and catching are essential functions; and that, despite their names, both the pitcher AND the catcher throw the ball and catch it.
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"Or help you in your relationship with your mother or HGA? "Absolutely."
Curious! In what way?"
One of Phyllis' favorite passages to quote instructively, from Liber VII, Chapter 5:
*46. Nor by memory, nor by imagination, nor by prayer, nor by fasting, nor by scourging, nor by drugs, nor by ritual, nor by meditation; only by passive love shall he avail.
47. He shall await the sword of the Beloved and bare his throat for the stroke. * -
"I cannot see that it's of any use to women, and it seems a little unfair to your partners if you project the idea of 'passive' onto them so that you can 'take the next step'. I know you say that you don't do that anymore, but I think that perhaps intellectually a man can become comfortable with the idea that there is both masculine/active and feminine/passive forces in him and in the woman, while still operating on an unconscious fundamental dualistic level - projecting out what he expects his 'passive' and agreeable anima onto the woman and then blaming her for not being the illusionary abstraction he wanted. "
See, this is it right here. This is why you get so pissed. You cannot believe that we are not deluding ourselves. This is the projection that continues this argument without end. This is the reason you can't hear what I am really saying. It's all knotted up for you: system of instruction AND belittling abuse.
Regarding the belittling abuse of considering women passive... I forget that this exists. I forget that A.C. said some really antiquated stuff about this. I simply ignore it. I don't know what else to tell you. My wife is Sun in Leo/Moon in Aries, and at times I wonder if there is a passive bone in her body. Where you find this error, stamp it out.
But regarding the system of instruction, with active and passive, male and female all over the tarot, as well as the presentation of Hadit and Nuit as a divine male/female pair, I'm for leaving it as it is. The psyche doesn't begin as whole. It begins with separated concepts. It's not the instruction that teaches this. These are archetypes so deeply present in the human consciousness that they may well be described as universal. It is from the human depths that these separated, unintegrated symbols arise. It is the Work that unifies and integrates, but not without working through the aspirants psychological associations to mommy and daddy, male and female, action and passivity.
The first thing that has to happen to create a happy, healthy magician, (at least how I was taught) is that they must do the personality work of the tarot. The Emperor is going to work pretty hard on people who have negative associations with male power and the abuse of strength. The concept of male power itself arises naturally in the symbolism of the unconscious. It is the baby talk of the unconscious. Likewise, the Empress is going to work pretty hard on people who have negative associations with feminine love. You were asking "how" above. I'm trying to explain. The first thing that needs to happen is that consciousness needs to focus on the energies represented as the Emperor and the Empress in their most psychologically beneficial and healthy light.
It is very natural for humans to associate these energies with mommy and daddy and their personifications as Empress and Emperor. Step One is to bring order to the chaos of negative male and female associations - associations that already exist as masculine and feminine in the unconscious, but in a chaos of positive and negative associations. This is how these concepts help with relationships and sexuality - they provide order and psychologically postive images for the more chaotic naturally arising associations, and once this is achieved, many blocks arising from negative projections are cleared.
It's not that after you reach a certain level, they tell you to forget everything you learned before. It's that the initial work, the groundwork, lies in untangling psychological knots that do have pre-existing associations with male and female.
After the knots are cleared, and the energy begins to flow again, then a person can begin to understand the energy itself more clearly and recognize the projected maleness or femaleness is exactly that - a projection. But not until you clear the psychological blocks that keep the energy from flowing.
The reason that I react to your suggestion that we remove all the male and female stuff is that then we are left with no tools to work with the psyche's own language. You do away with the ability to make the association itself, and thus remove the ability to work with individual's gender-based psychological energy blocks. I absolutely think it all goes back to mommy and daddy and brothers and sisters. And as long as an individual's magical worldview is tainted with negative associations for male and female, they can't get any closer to seeing things as they really are.
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@Dar es Alrah said
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What is 'passive love'?There is love that is given. There is love that is received. I have no idea what passive love is, Jim!"
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www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/passive
1a (2) : **receptive **to outside impressions or influences
3a : **receiving **or enduring without resistance" -
@Dar es Alrah said
"What is 'passive love'?"
I would say: In stillness, to be unresistingly, vacuously receptive.
"There is love that is given. There is love that is received. I have no idea what passive love is, Jim!"
Though I'm not at all convinced that such a thing exists in human relationships (see my prior remarks about pitchers and catchers), in the meditative-mystical sense it would be utter receptiveness without assertion.
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"But that's only going to work if you could recognise passive in mam and active in dad, otherwise there won't be associations in your unconscious to make those connections to. Right? "
Actually, that's inconsistent with Jung's theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. While our own mothers and fathers influence the archetype's interactions in our indvidual dream lives, the archetypes themselves are considered to be built up in the human species from millenia of stronger, taller, more aggressive males and weaker, smaller, more nurturing females. It's considered to be the imprint of the evolutionary memory of the species.
And at this point, I've pretty much exhausted my knowledge and theories on the topic. You can choose the disagree with Jung about the nature of the archetypes, but for me personally, it's counterproductive. It just moves me backward into the direction of psychic disorder and chaos.
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@Dar es Alrah said
"Utter receptiveness would be regarded as an active process rather than a passive one."
I suppose you could define it that way, but it isn't how most people relate to the word.
I just now decided to check a dictionary - and dictionary.com was all I had at hand here at work. It's interesting to me that they don't define passive so much in terms of REAL inactivity, but of apparent inactivity. Various definitions include phrases like "not reacting visibly," "not participating readily," "not involving visible reaction," or in any fashion being the object rather than the subject of the action. (And the latter is perfectly consistent with the grammatical usage.)
Personally, I like more rigorous, literal usage and would tend to prefer a usage state where passive=inactive; but I see that this isn't conventional usage, as recorded by dictionaries (which tend to focus on how people actually use language).
I do think you're making a sound point here, and that "passive" is too frequently used for atavistic reasons when "receptive" is the more accurate descriptor.
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I love you guys
Intellectually, I can't keep up, as I'm only 17 and have lots of brain yet to develop.
But emotionally, I follow you all more than I can express and seeing you all battle each other with such honor truly helps my own battles, while giving me many directions to follow all along.
I wish I could be up there with you all! One day, one day... -
@Dar es Alrah said
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I must say - you're a very well read young man. I'm not sure I'd heard of the Eleusinian Mysteries when I was your age, never mind looked into them. I find myself being continually impressed by just how educated young people are these days about a broad range of topics. I assume that's down to the internet, with innate intelligence and curiosity making the most of the these avenues open to it. In short - you seem quite 'up there' to me. "I have my moments
I've felt a draw to mythology since I was five or six years old, so it's always been something I could sit down and talk about. It frustrated me when I was younger that no one else seemed to realize the fact that all the religions everyone seemed so worked up about were just cultural redundancies of older and far more sublime mythologies. Zeus and Hermes made a much better Christianity in my eyes than the Father and Son of my mother's leaning. Ending up in Thelema was just the natural progression of that kind of thinking.And I can tell you that my education(and that of my peers) had absolutely nothing to do with my schooling. In fact, I dropped out last October. The sheer insanity of the school system in this country(the U.S. of course) nearly drove me over the edge. Tainted history, outdated science, taught by people with no handle on their egos whatsoever is not the kind of institution to look for psychological progression. No learning, only superficial memorization of information. Even though I got A's on all of my tests, I was considered a delinquent by the powers-that-be. Then, once I was opened up to Crowley(and all of the Karmic madness that surrounds such an occurrence!), I had my alternative path and out the door I went.
It's like this for so many young people here. We look to our parents, our trusted elders, and we see them even more lost, scared, and confused than we are. Just egos self-destructing in the face of all the chaos. All we can try to do is get out of the way and hope they don't make too big of a mess of the Earth we all hoped to inherit. But I can also tell you that there is a phenomenon altogether unique and magical occurring in the minds of the young. There is an Indigo fire burning behind their eyes; the children readily await the coming of the Hierophant, to be taught something REAL by a teacher that deserves our attention, and to unleash our true creative capabilities.
So, again, thank you for showing me that there actually are adults in the world that are still setting an example and foundation for true evolutionary progression. Warms my heart
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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
@Dar es Alrah said
"I was watching a couple of Ted talks by Sir Ken Robinson about **(http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_148916&feature=iv&src_vid=iG9CE55wbtY&v=r9LelXa3U_I:fnlpg5ne)."
Neat, I watched those same talks myself a while back, and I agree with much of what he says. He is certainly a noteworthy contemporary in my book.
By the way, my own understanding of "passive" has rarely been rendered as "intert/incapable" in the framework of my own mind. Although I have come across that in my readings, I more often understand it better as "recieving," which I have always understood to be an action in its own right. "Observation" also comes to mind as an appropriate example.
Activity is no less apparent to a silent mind. In fact, a silent mind would seem to me to be even more aware of any action taking place. By my take, Nuit is all-embracing of Hadit's lordship, even as maintaining the peace of perfect stillness is in itself a call to action. Indeed, how can any of us hope to "achieve Hadit" without the embrace of Nuit? This, of course, implies a reciprocal of equal importance, and I think this thread could use a good dose of 0=2, whether the reality of either of the two parties on the right half of the equation are being imagined or Not (see Liber NV and Liber HAD).
I hadn't realized definitions like "inert" which, to me, imply such underpinnings as "incapability," had become in anyway predominate to people's understanding the concept of "passive." While that emphasis may be important in certain situations or circumstances, it in no way relates to how I commonly understand the term, and I felt a need to come back here and clarify that.
Love is the law, love under will.
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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Dar, that etymological analysis was enlightening; thank you for sharing that.
It is now absolutely clear to me that there are indeed important distinctions between "passive" and "receptive" that beg to be clarified for all intents and purposes.
I have to agree the "giving/recieving" terminology is a much more accurate discriptor than "active/passive" for multiple reasons, many of which have already been enumerated.
Love is the law, love under will.