Liber Resh timing, and sleep schedules
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I have a few questions about the performance of Liber Resh that go hand in hand.
Firstly - how accurate should one get when doing the timings? Is midnight-ish sufficient for the last one, or does it have to be a certain exact time after sunset or before sunrise? Same for the rest of them. Am I doing a disservice to myself by not being surgically precise, or is that not expected?
Secondly - How does one work around having a sleep schedule that involves sleeping through one or more quarters of the day - for instance, if I work at 7 am, and I get to sleep at, say, 10 at night... during the summer, I simply don't see midnight. Should I wake up every night to do it and then go back to sleep, or just do it before sleep? Same thing with the schedule shifted in the other direction, waking up very late and being active until the early AM hours.
What do you do, and what things do you think I should avoid?
I apologize if my questions are unclear.
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@Ash said
"Firstly - how accurate should one get when doing the timings? Is midnight-ish sufficient for the last one, or does it have to be a certain exact time after sunset or before sunrise? Same for the rest of them. Am I doing a disservice to myself by not being surgically precise, or is that not expected?"
The issue is proximity of the Sun to the horizon or meridian. Presuming you/ve take various astronomical factors into consideration (adjustment away from Daylight Saving Time, consideration of distance from time-zone meridian, etc.; or simply calculating the exact minute that is halfway between sunset and sunrise), we can calculate our sense of "tolerance" or leeway from what we know from astrology.
Anything within 4 minutes is indistinguishable from "dead on."
Anything within about half an hour (28 minutes, to be more exact) is very strong.
Anything more than an hour off has lost the buzz.
"Secondly - How does one work around having a sleep schedule that involves sleeping through one or more quarters of the day - for instance, if I work at 7 am, and I get to sleep at, say, 10 at night... during the summer, I simply don't see midnight. Should I wake up every night to do it and then go back to sleep, or just do it before sleep? Same thing with the schedule shifted in the other direction, waking up very late and being active until the early AM hours."
Complicated long answers are possible. They all boil down to: Figure something out to make it work as best as possible.
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@Jim Eshelman said
" The issue is proximity of the Sun to the horizon or meridian. Presuming you/ve take various astronomical factors into consideration (adjustment away from Daylight Saving Time, consideration of distance from time-zone meridian, etc.; or simply calculating the exact minute that is halfway between sunset and sunrise), we can calculate our sense of "tolerance" or leeway from what we know from astrology."
I don't really know how to go about performing this; where should I start?
I.e. I don't know how to calculate rising, mid-day, setting, and midnight times from my location.
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You can google astrological clocks that will calculate these based on your location.
Here's one.
www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunrise.htmlGot an ipod touch or iphone? There's an app for that
www.veltema.jp/SunriseAlarm -
@Ash said
"I don't really know how to go about performing this; where should I start?
I.e. I don't know how to calculate rising, mid-day, setting, and midnight times from my location."
I see you've already been given a tip that's helpful to you. One that I was going to give was also a phone app, a great little thing called MoonTalk that's available for BlackBerry devices. And there are a lot of other programs for computers to do this, and a great web site:
www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-application
(You can even print a sunrise/sunset table for an entire year, customized to your location.)Local noon ("sundial noon") is always exactly halfway between sunrise and sunset. Local midnight is always exactly halfway between sunset and sunrise. Sunrise and sunset times are given in almost every local newspaper every day.
As an example: In Los Angeles today, sunrise was at 7:21 am PDT and sunset will be 5:51 pm (call it 17:51). Add these two times and divide by two, and you'll get the time of actual noon: 7:21 + 17:51 = 24:72; divide this by 2 = 12:36 pm PDT. (Calculation of noon by a sophisticated astrology program gives 12:36:38 pm.)
You probably want to use one of the above methods, but I'll also give you a brief account of how to calculate this in your head to include some of the usual variables.
Daylight Saving Time has to be stripped off. Thus, if you lived exactly at a time zone meridian (a longitude that is an exact multiple of 15°), noon under Daylight Saving Time occurs, on average, at 1:00 PM. You have to make this adjustment.
Second, you need to adjust how far you are from the time zone meridian. For this, you need to know your local longitude to the nearest quarter degree. For example, Los Angeles is 118°15' W. (You can fine-tune it better than this, but you only need it to the nearest quarter degree.) Four minutes of time are equal to one degree of longitude. Los Angeles is 1°45' east of the Pacific Standard Time meridian of 120° (120° - 118°15' = 1°45'), and (at four minutes of time per degree) this converts to seven minutes of time. Because we are east of the meridian, this means that noon gets to us 7 minutes earlier than it it gets to the center of the time zone. BOTTOM LINE: On average, local noon hits Los Angeles at 11:53 AM when we are on standard time, or 12:53 PM when we are on Daylight Saving Time.
I'll give one more example of that to make sure the instructions are clear: For example, Washington, DC is 77°02' W. (Let's call it 77°00' since we only need it to the quarter of a degree.) This means that Washington is 2°00' west of the Eastern Standard Time meridian of 75° W., and (at four minutes of time per degree) this converts to eight minutes of time. Because Washington is west of the meridian, noon gets there 8 minutes later than it it gets to the center of the time zone. BOTTOM LINE: On average, local noon hits Washington, DC at 12:08 PM Eastern Standard Time, or 1:08 PM Eastern Daylight Saving Time.
Against this average, the true time of local noon can vary by roughly half an hour either side. This is due to something called the equation of time. You don't need to know much about this but, to state it simply, it's caused by the fact that the Sun doesn't advance the same distance in the zodiac every day, so the length of a noon-to-noon day varies over the course of the year. Mostly you just have to know that there is this variation, and that it is taken care of when you actually calculate local noon by one of the methods given above (e.g., halfway between sunrise and sunset).
Astrologically, we know that the the point in each day when a planet is at its strongest when it is exactly on the horizon (Ascendant or Descendant, rising or setting) or meridian (MC or IC, culminating or anticulminating). We perform Liber Resh at the times when the Sun is astrologically strongest - when the solar consciousness has the greatest potential link to human consciousness. It makes sense (and matches experience) to measure the efficacy of this connection by the same rules that determine strength astrologically.
Thus, a planet within 1° of one of these angles (4 minutes of time) is essentially as strong as if it were "dead on the money exact." A significant threshold of planetary strength is within about 7° of the angle, which is a 28 minute leeway. Rarely is the strength highly noticeable beyond 10°, or 40 minutes away, and by 15° (an hour) it has dropped off the charts. This matches experience on efficacy of Resh in terms of having that clear, locked-in-to-the-Sun sense.
But notice that this only gives you an extra advantage. It doesn't mean that you can't do Resh some other time. It just means you don't get any extra help from the universe in this regard.
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I recently had the opportunity to quantify the extent to which angular planets conform to inner magical states. In Visions & Voices, I compare each vision from Crowley's Liber 418 to the horoscope for the moment the vision started (and changing patterns during the course of the vision).
Planets on angles when Crowley began each vision prove to be quite significant. In most cases, such a planet meaningfully characterized the tone or theme of the vision. (Usually, the angular planets described the overall tone or theme; but, sometimes they only described the early moments of a vision, as if portraying a street scene encountered outside of a building before entering.)
How often is “in most cases”? Of the 35 visions included in the book, no date or time was given for two of them, and four had no planets on angles at their start. This left 29 visions beginning with one or more planets on the angles. I used a seven-point scale (from +3 to -3) to rate the match of the angular planet to the nature of the vision. Of the 29 testable visions, in ten cases the symbolism of the angular planets matched content of the visions so closely as to be rated “nearly flawless” (+3). In another 11, the match of the vision themes to its angular planets was “solid” (+2). That means that in 21 out of 29 visions (72%) there was a “solid” match between the symbolism of the angular planets and the symbolism Crowley experienced in the vision.
You can check for yourself. The visions that had the "nearly flawless" scores for angular planets were as follows (with the planets listed that were angular when they started). Note: Some angularities became most important at the time during the vision that the planet exactly crossed the angle.
24th Aethyr - Jupiter - Chesed & Samekh dominate the vision
22nd Aethyr - Sun & Mercury - Tablets &c for Mercury + decisive solar characteristics
20th Aethyr - Venus & Jupiter - all Jupiter/Kaph!
10th Aethyr - Saturn - “the terrible 10th Æthyr” (+ Uranus-Neptune supporting)
8th Aethyr - Mars, Uranus, Neptune - Ur-Ne transformative + Strenuous
7th Aethyr - Venus, Uranus, Neptune - Venus totally!!
4th Aethyr - Venus - Rapturous love-making
2nd Aethyr, Pt 3 -Moon, Venus - Babalon!
1st Aethyr - Uranus, Neptune - The Crowned & Conquering Child
2nd Aethyr, Pt 4 -Venus - Goddess mysteries