New in magick

Uni_Verse

"But you refer only to the active use when a dose is in the bloodstream.."

When it is in the blood stream it first numbs the body, once that it does it begins to cross the blood brain barrier and causes euphoria.

@ThelemicMage said

"
When one has undertaken the possible folly of being even slightly addicted to them, cutting the dose and even coming off of them is completely opposite: it opens everything up. In other words, your brain has learned to use more of itself, in a state of constant comfortableness. When that comfortableness is removed, the entire brain pathways and system of such is revealed to be open.
"

Cutting the dose certainly opens you up more...
It opens up what was closed while in the blood stream.
There is nothing new there...
By taking the dose you have point fully or inadvertently cut off or narrowed sensations received through/from the body.
Once the effects ends the only thing that opens up is what you have closed.

@ThelemicMage said

"
If we are truly men and women of science, we should enjoy the sickness, openness-of mind and emotion, and enjoy a walk into nature with such active consciousness of such things.
"

Enjoy the sickness?
I feel there is so much wrong with that statement I do not quite know where to begin...

ThelemicMage

"Cutting the dose certainly opens you up more...
It opens up what was closed while in the blood stream.
There is nothing new there...
By taking the dose you have point fully or inadvertently cut off or narrowed sensations received through/from the body.
Once the effects ends the only thing that opens up is what you have closed."

Actually, Uni, you are quite mistaken on this one.

When one has finished puberty, one has a specific number of opiate receptors in the body and brain. When one undertakes the use of opiates, MORE opiate receptors grow in the body, especially in the brain, due to the excess amount of opiates your brain and body haven't learned to use yet.

Cutting the dose, in essence, makes you more aware than you ever have been in your life.

As far as "enjoying" the sickness, you should wake up a little bit a realize that pain is illusion anyways. Nature put the poppy here for just that specific reason. It it not to be shrugged off as another downside to life, but as a gift from the gods waiting in a horrible little wrapped gift box.

Just as certain types of pain completely confound, overtake, and make childhood completely unbearable, those exact specific types of pain end up being required to, and enjoyable after one grows up.

"Grow up, human race. I do not care if you vomit, scream, cry for your mommy, or think you are in pain worse than death. I will throw you these things throughout your history to get you up off of this god-damned softness and into the flight of angels." -M. Nature

ThelemicMage

..And learning to enjoy pain and sickness, after realized as just a type of consciousness moving around in the body, is part of the Tibetan model of enlightenment. Something our man Crowley worked with, so did his disciples, so did Leary, Metzner, Huxley, McKenna, and anyone else who had a brain betwixt their ears.

Uni_Verse

@ThelemicMage said

"When one has finished puberty, one has a specific number of opiate receptors in the body and brain. When one undertakes the use of opiates, MORE opiate receptors grow in the body, especially in the brain, due to the excess amount of opiates your brain and body haven't learned to use yet. "

Yes, your cells, over time do develop more opiate receptors.
However, this is at the cost of stunting the development of other receptors.
It is not a matter of growth, it is a matter of specialization.

@ThelemicMage said

"As far as "enjoying" the sickness, you should wake up a little bit a realize that pain is illusion anyways. Nature put the poppy here for just that specific reason. It it not to be shrugged off as another downside to life, but as a gift from the gods waiting in a horrible little wrapped gift box.
"

Sickness is a wake up call that the homeostasis of your body has been distorted.
The "sickness" in particular from opiates is a result of your body no longer naturally producing opiates, or at the very least it is not producing enough to fill all the receptors that have been replaced with ones design to be filled with opiates.

@ThelemicMage said

"Just as certain types of pain completely confound, overtake, and make childhood completely unbearable, those exact specific types of pain end up being required to, and enjoyable after one grows up. "

Yes, learning to deal, all most enjoy the pain is part of the process.
With the end result learning to invoke these states of mind without the use of ingested substances.
Filled with the warmth of the divine presence, overtaken by the euphoria of Love.

Drugs, mind altering substances, as I stated earlier can be useful tools.
In the end, they are the toys of the children, peepholes through the gates, not keys.
They must be set aside so that the real Work can begin...

Uni_Verse

@Dar Es Allrah said

"I don't believe in 'control'.

'Control' is an ego concept that oedipus men and electra women enjoy.

I believe in balance. You don't control and set yourself up out of wack with your disparate parts - you flow and balance with the axis.
"

Control is freedom, as they say.
My own thoughts on control, at least in regards to the maintaining of balance, equilibrium:

When a person is in control, they are aware of the imbalances which arise from their actions and subsequently take action to restore the balance.

Uni_Verse

I feel as if you may have miss understood what I was trying to convey...

I did not meant to infer one could control equilibrium directly, but that you can effect it.

Say, you get sick. You could just throw up your arms and say "Oh well, I am sick... going to have to ride it out!"
Or you can go to the doctor, take supplements or many other actions which may restore balance and health.

In some respects, coming to be in control of one self in the purpose of the Great Work.
To gain command over they being in order to perform ones True Will.
After all one Willfully surrenders unto the Beloved ; if you have no control over anything, what have you surrendered?

To harken back to an earlier vein of discussion... If there is no control, why are you trying to change the LBRP to something that suits you better? That is assuming you have control and can manipulate things to your liking.

Jim Eshelman

@Dar es Allarah said

"You're a man. You don't have any problems with calling your angel in the same gender as you are."

Something I haven't interpolated into this discussion so far, where I find myself disagreeing with you, Dar.

First, the place I think we agree: Everybody needs to find the formula of communion with their own angel - and the depths of their own soul in general - and not get stuck in what somebody else says works best; and what a woman needs isn't necessarily the same as what a man needs. (I think you'd put a different balance / emphasis on those statements, but that they broadly are consistent with your thinking.)

Where I disagree (with you are apparently saying) is that I don't at all think this is gender-for-gender predetermined. From what you have said, I have no doubt that your core link to your Angel is in feminine guise, and of course you should go for that! And yes, my Angel is primarily male in identity (and some of the early breakthrough experiences had to do with deep aspects of my own male sexuality); but, mostly, the feeling relationship is gender independent, and she has appeared to me in female guise more than a little. (If you've seen my Liber Amoris, you will have seen how the adoration of the Angel moves back and forth across gender lines as convenient.)

Getting outside of you and me, Phyllis Seckler's experience of her Angel was pretty much always male. She experienced Him as husband to her own bride-identity, fulfilling a cross-gender union. (At the same time, her deeper experience was that it was gender independent. She complained about the cover of Black Pearl No. 6 that the portrayed angel had obvious male genitals and, even though she'd always described her own Angel in masculine terms, she felt that this much gender specificity was all wrong).

And I've known men whose experience of the Angel has been primarily or exclusively female.

I suspect this has to do broadly with what gender-balance issues a particular individual has. Few people are as androgynous in the experience as the reports from Crowley (who readily admitted, repeatedly, that the Angel is male or female as convenience dictates).

Bottom line, I don't think there are any rules on this, and that the generalizations I could conceive are so broad and variable that I'm loathe to place any reliance on them or confuse the issue by expostulation.

On the "identifying HGA with my own gender" side of it, Dar, here is a passage from my 5=6 diary (on the second day of the formal operation) that shows one side of it. I kept getting reminded of this when you would write above about your need for the female expression:

"[Sex] with Sor. C. First since commencing the Operation. I anticipated more effective identification of my partner with the HGA, and this did not occur at all. I noted that fantasies were running, as they have this last week, to very phallic homosexual images. However, it was entirely clear to me that I did not desire such a liaison at all. At the time of my orgasm, the explanation became quite clear, however. The phallic male sexual energy within me, my own orgasmic energy, became very identified with the Sun, and with [the Angel]. This was an unexpected (though theoretically expectable) phenomenon, and a clear foundation of a solar-phallic cult."

As mentioned above, this was only one side of it, though. Here's another entry from a bit more than the half-way point through the operation, and describes something that became pretty routine for the rest of the time:

"[Did the invocation.] The presence was very strong, but not very personal. There was power, and presence, and light, but no great intimacy at the heart. However, the manifestation was intensely sexual, to which I was utterly female without losing my manhood, offering my breasts and vulva hungrily, generously, to Adonai (by which I mean [the Angel]), as well as my phallus and anus. I was eventually subsumed by the God, who spoke the Formulæ of Manifestation, and we settled together into meditation for a little while."

During much of the last half of the whole operation, it was pretty routine that I was simutanously male to the Angel much as an extended cosmic-scope penis fucking the yoni of the infinite heavens while simultaneously taking it up the ass from the Angel's penetration of me. It gave a whole new meaning to, "I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy."

Jim Eshelman

Thanks. The only place I see us perhaps disagreeing is that I don't think there is any such rule. The psyche goes wherever it needs to for the relationship. There are entire systems (mostly tantric in form) that explicitly teach that the HGA (not necessarily under that name) needs to be visualized counter-gender. (I almost mistyped it as cunter-gender <g>.) Now, that's just method, nothng more, and I would expect (and have seen, here and there) about as many people accepting that as rejecting it.

The Ideal is post-gender or trans-gender. But our relationship to it is a very different thing! And I've enjoyed you stirring things up around here.

PS - Yeah, you're kinda yang in your writing. Probably made it easier for you to survive and thrive on forums that are traditionally male hang-outs. But I really value your presence here specifically because you aren't bringing the same adolescent dickhead perspective <vbseg>. You are such a [4-letter c-word], and I love it!

ThelemicMage

I will defend Dar by bringing up an old "Wives Question", (instead of Wives Tale

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? No matter what, the "chicken" always comes first, (well, the female pre-version that gave birth to the actual chicken, if you wish to go the other route.)
Evolution proves this. Before there was an egg to hatch, there was always a reptile or bird that gave birth to it.

I will no go the extra mile, despite corniness of reference:

The Son of Man, (no, I am not Christian, I'm a Thelemite,) was born from a divine seed, implanted into a "virgin". (Not a real virgin, but an assumed spiritual virgin that was not given seed from Earthly phallus.)

(My real guess is that a Hermes-like evolution took place, but where he can manifest Himself in a worthy mother whenever he chooses. I cite the hidden work of Osiris and Horus.)

So, Mother always gives birth to the egg or baby, even though the daddy may be far away.

Yes, it goes both ways, but I was trying to match ideas with Dar.

Takamba

Thelemicmage, you make a good point about mother and egg, but remember - before the egg was hatched into a chicken, it's mother was a dinosaur - so therefore, which came first; the chicken or the egg? The egg - but at first it thought it was a dinosaur egg.

Jim Eshelman

Well, the implied question is, "Whivh came first, the chicken or the [chicken] egg?" As an ornithologist, then head of his department in a leading university, told me years ago: Only chickens can lay chicken eggs.

Takamba

ah, the rare occasion when I disagree with James. I don't infer that question, I take it at face value: chicken or egg. The egg was first.

[Edit] I do infer that most people that ask the question don't assume evolution and believe that God created everyting singularly "after its kind." So yes, for them, the question implies [chicken] egg as no other kind of creature could have produced a chicken bearing egg. [Edit] According to that thinking.

Simon Iff

The egg was first. The first chicken egg, laid by an animal that was not yet completely a chicken.

Didn't you people discuss something about opiates, control, and what makes sense to deal with that or not? The U-turn was a bit abrupt; there I wanted to inject myself into the self-control (or not) debate and then the damn chickens come up ... or is this still, indirectly, the same topic?

Jim Eshelman

@Simon Iff said

"The egg was first. The first chicken egg, laid by an animal that was not yet completely a chicken."

But that wasn't a chicken egg. It was a deformed or mutated pteranadon egg or some such thing. Only a chicken can lay a chicken egg. It predecessor can only lay a "broken" egg of its own species.

PS - This thread wasn't originally about opiates, either. Read the initial post. All the opiate posts were off-topic, but so multitudinous that I felt I shouldn't just go through and delete them. I feel that at present we are derailing the off-topic digression. Would anyone like to get back on the original topic?

Simon Iff

@Jim Eshelman said

"But that wasn't a chicken egg. It was a deformed or mutated pteranadon egg or some such thing. Only a chicken can lay a chicken egg. It predecessor can only lay a "broken" egg of its own species."

Isn't that a tad creationist in onlook? I mean, as Tim Leary said, there is no such thing as a "pure" species, we are all mutants. Following your train of thought, we would be ultra-broken versions of some single-celled ancestors who were somehow less deformed than we are.

You can shove the limit around, but if, assume, chickens stem from pteranodons, there must have been a generation where the line deep in inbetween grey territory was crossed (at least it can be seen like that in retrospect). So at some point you have something that is "not-yet-a-chicken" give birth (well, lay egg) to a ""just-so-already" chicken, no?

And actually it is more complicated than that as the change from one "species" to another usually takes thousands of generations - and not one mutation, more like also hundreds - until the new life form can no longer have offspring with the older version or the other branches from the older version, this is the definition of species, as far as I know.

Applied to the older discussion, I'd suggest control and letting-go / flow are two sides of at least one coin and have to be seen as such if one is to solve the questions of intention and ethics of, say, presumed opiate use for personal or even transpersonal development.

Uni_Verse

While I have taken the form of a man in this incarnation, it is my body that is male, not I.

Simon Iff

@Dar es Allarah said

"I think that, to truly have control then a person must be able to truly control their place in time and space. I believe there are people like that, looking as regular as you or I, and living on this planet, but they aren't human beings."

I am curious about that idea - what makes you think that?

Takamba

I'm pretty sure the original topic has been exhausted. Hi new person to the forum named James. I wouldn't recommend Goetic practices for a beginner.

Quad Nine 9

"As long as you have a body, and certainly as long as you have something that passes for a personality, you wil have illusion. In fact, you will continue using illusion as the essential functional parameter of your psyche and life. (Maya isn't illusion as such - it's the substance out of which particular illusions are formed.)

Rather than "becoming liberated from... illusion," I suggest a much more valuable practice (at the heart of magick, in fact): the ability to assume one illusion or another at will, and to move through them as they are useful."

I agree wholeheartedly.

Of the statement;
"Maya isn't illusion as such - it's the substance out of which particular illusions are formed."
Do I take you to be saying that Maya and the Human Being are one and the same?

Love is the Law, Love under Will.

Jim Eshelman

@Quad Nine 9 said

"Of the statement;
"Maya isn't illusion as such - it's the substance out of which particular illusions are formed."
Do I take you to be saying that Maya and the Human Being are one and the same?"

No. I wouldn't call a human being "the substance out of which particular illusions are formed." (Or, in the narrow sense that this might be arguable, it would only be one particular example.)

Think of Maya as the modelling clay of perceivable reality: The mind is the molder. The illusion is the particular shape into which the mind molds the clay. This is especially why Maya is called the mother-substance. (Think of the Path of Beth striking and inseminating the the Great Sea of Binah as a directed attention from the still Self in Kether.)

Consider from Liber Magi (thinking of the Magus in this sense as especially the Path of Beth):

@Liber Magi said

"1. In the beginning doth the Magus speak Truth, and send forth Illusion and Falsehood to enslave the soul. Yet therein is the Mys-tery of Redemption.

By a Magus is this writing made known through the mind of a Magister. The one uttereth clearly, and the other understandeth; yet the Word is falsehood, and the Understanding darkness. And this saying is Of All Truth.
Let Him beware of abstinence from action. For the curse of His grade is that he must speak Truth, that the Falsehood thereof may enslave the souls of men. Let Him then utter that without Fear, that the Law may be fulfilled...."