How to start someone on Enochian?
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@Takamba said
"You aren't as smart as you perceive yourself to be, whether it is because you are misunderstanding us, or you are misrepresenting us."
Maybe you could clear this up right now.
Do you, Takamba, believe in non-corporeal spirits that exist beyond the mind, which can affect material reality and various outcomes? Do you believe in reincarnation of an eternal spirit into another body after death, or in an afterlife of some kind? Do you believe that people possess magic powers? Do you believe that the book of the law is a dictation from a spiritual source?
If yes to any of these things, please give an explanation as to why Los' perspective is flawed.
Forgive me as well if I disagree and think you give people too much credit. Just read through some of the stuff on here.
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There is so much evidence for the reality of other universes, or higher demensions in quatum mechanics, that these days they say it is more likely we do not occupy a "universe", but instead a "mulitverse". In realizing this, and the vast amount about the workings of "reality", how is it so impossible to admit something more that's possible? Maybe "magic" is "real" yet simply not as we may THINK it is. In other words, the truth may be somewhere in between, and in some places we are wrong, and in others they are wrong, yet there is something more to know.
To assume you know all there is about reality and therefore deny magic outright is just as arrogant as those in the past believing it was impossible to fly, or travel to the moon etc.
I think the real problem here is in the subtle, intangible nature of magic. It is something tenuous and undefinable based on hard objective science, which is simply unacceptable to those hard nosed skeptics. That's just the nature of it - its the same as if we argue about the "reality" of chance or probability, which some argue doesn't truly exist. No one can truly explain for example WHY chance happens as it does, the laws behind chance. Why is it that a coin falls always approximately 50% on either side, what force regulates this? It gets technical of course, and I'm no expert, but I do read lol.
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@Horus Amin said
"Do you actually evoque beings? Do astral travel?"
Not anymore, but at one point in my "magical career," I most certainly did invoke certain imaginary beings and experiment with astral travel.
"How could you not trust Jim if you communicate with beings yourself?"
I "trust Jim" to the extent that I accept that he honestly has had certain experiences. I don't accept factual claims that he makes on the basis of these experiences, including the factual claim that he received an honest-to-goodness "communication" from real, honest-to-goodness spirits. And it's not just Jim's claims: I don't accept any supernatural claims made on the basis of such experiences, for the reason that there is not sufficient evidence to support such claims.
"You consider your own enochian workings as a way to talk to your own "imaginary friends"?!"
Correct.
"Also, with your knowledge of psychology and yoga, why would you deny the "building in some other world" part? Do you think it's building up in the HEAD?!"
Any other "worlds" that a practitioner "builds" are entirely make believe, yes.
" And reincarnation, again from knoledge of psychology and yoga and kabbalah, isnt the most logical(i didnt say scientific fact) hypothesis? Why not?!"
Because all of the evidence we have suggests that everything that can be said to be "you" emerges from your brain and that "you" die when your brain stops working. As one minor illustration of this, people who suffer traumatic brain injuries often experience drastic shifts in personality.
I'm not sure how you think "psychology and yoga and kabbalah" furnish evidence of life after death, let alone reincarnation, but they don't. There are thousands of possibilities for what could happen to a person after death, aside from reincarnation, and none of them (including reincarnation) have a shred of evidence to support them. That, all by itself, would be enough reason to discount belief in any of these thousands of possibilities, but we additionally have evidence that suggests that everything that can be said to be "you" is rooted in your physical brain, suggesting very strongly that you will vanish forever when your brain dies.
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@David S said
"I'll take the bait.
I believe in reincarnation, non-corporeal spirits and that the Book of the Law is a dictation from a spiritual source.
Why is that such a problem for you?"
Well, the relevance of your admission, for this specific sub-thread, is that Takamba just got finished saying, "Between you and me, you are the only one seeing people make those claims." He was, of course, implying that people on these boards don't make these kinds of supernatural claims and that I therefore am the "only one seeing" it (as in I'm falsely interpreting what people on these boards are saying).
But, as you've just demonstrated, Takamba's wrong on this point. You are an example of one of the people here who does make these kinds of claims, so in at least one case I'm not just "seeing" it (as in falsely interpreting what you're saying).
I contend that lots of other people here, like you, David, also seriously believe in these things without sufficient justification.
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@Jason R said
"how is it so impossible to admit something more that's possible?"
I don't have any problem admitting that magic might be possible, but that's no reason for anyone to accept that magic actually does work.
For example, there are real people on these forums who claim not only that magic "might be possible" but who claim that magic really does work and really does enable them, for example, to "remote view" information or really visit an actually-existing "Temple of Time" in an imagination world.
Yet when we test those claims, we find that they are indistinguishable from daydreams and fantasies.
"To assume you know all there is about reality and therefore deny magic outright is just as arrogant as those in the past believing it was impossible to fly, or travel to the moon etc."
I don't think that anyone here has claimed that we know "all there is about reality" or that magic is "impossible." Certainly, I've never "den* magic outright" -- I spent a lot of time investigating these kinds of claims before reaching a conclusion based on evidence.
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A linguistic model explaining an experience cannot be "true". Whether you call something a goblin or a gravity field, it's just a metaphor.
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If the goal isn't to simply jump through the hoops our intellect puts out, but to create the best system for helping students progress, then a model should be evaluated based on its success at that goal.
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You haven't produced a shred of evidence that your concepts help students progress any better than the concepts you criticize.
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We don't need a one size fits all approach to Thelema. Barf!
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If you spent half the effort you spend here trying to tear down other peoples work, on demonstrating the supposed superiority of your system in the real world, then people will no doubt be flocking to learn from you.
Its a big deal, right? Enough to dedicate your life to, right?
You really can't afford to waste your time on a forum, where you have no way of knowing of your being effective. You need to have students, and keep accurate records on their progress, so you have some evidence proving your opinion.
After all, we need evidence to make a justifiable claim, right??
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"A linguistic model explaining an experience cannot be "true". Whether you call something a goblin or a gravity field, it's just a metaphor."
You're wrong. It's true to say that my car is parked outside. It's not true to say that there's a space ship parked outside.
That's the discursive context in which I'm speaking. In the same context in which I can validly say "It's not true to say that there's a space ship parked outside," I can say, "It's not true to claim that real, honest-to-goodness goblins exist."
"If the goal isn't to simply jump through the hoops our intellect puts out, but to create the best system for helping students progress, then a model should be evaluated based on its success at that goal."
Well, the "goal" in many of my conversations on here has simply been to evaluate claims being made about reality, which is a worthy goal in and of itself.
With regards to applying this topic to Thelema, I've argued that this "talking to goblins" stuff ultimately hinders people's ability to discover the True Will. By definition, accepting any claims that are not true hinders one's ability to discover the True Will.
"You haven't produced a shred of evidence that your concepts help students progress any better than the concepts you criticize."
You're wrong again. Since the True Will emerges from an individual's nature in conjunction with the environment, then any individual with a skewed or flawed perception of the environment will, by definition, be hindred in discovering and/or carrying out their True Will.
"We don't need a one size fits all approach to Thelema. Barf!"
Good thing no one's proposing that, then. I've just been talking about evaluating factual claims about the world, which is very relevant to the practice of Thelema, as I demonstrated above, but not specifically tied to Thelema.
Non-thelemites can also care about whether claims are true or not, you know.
"If you spent half the effort you spend here trying to tear down other peoples work, on demonstrating the supposed superiority of your system in the real world, then people will no doubt be flocking to learn from you."
This is a highly dubious claim that also involves you leaping to the assumption that I want "students." Boy, are you wrong about that.
"After all, we need evidence to make a justifiable claim, right??"
Yes. Feel free to post again when you have some.
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Los,
Question. IF you equate spirits and "Gods" or the HGA to simply internal imaginations, if they are a part if us, AND you say the TW is part of us, or our "authentic self", how can these not have worth in discovering it? Barring of course the objective realities of them you deny, how can you deny their personal subjective power in discovering the TW? It should stand to reason with your theory, that all aspects if paid attention to should help us if utilized. It seems fir example, you practice in some way Enochian, so what is THAT doing for you?
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@Los said
"
"You haven't produced a shred of evidence that your concepts help students progress any better than the concepts you criticize."You're wrong again. Since the True Will emerges from an individual's nature in conjunction with the environment, then any individual with a skewed or flawed perception of the environment will, by definition, be hindred in discovering and/or carrying out their True Will."
See. No evidence. You're just restating your hypothesis (that a student with a perception you view as flawed will be hindered) and calling it evidence.
p.s. As far as evidence for the opposite (that a student can attain in spite of 'flawed perception') the many examples of adepts and magi through the ages who attained in spite of having mistaken ideas about the physical universe.
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@Jason R said
"Los,
Question. IF you equate spirits and "Gods" or the HGA to simply internal imaginations, if they are a part if us, AND you say the TW is part of us, or our "authentic self", how can these not have worth in discovering it?"
Because pretending to talk to spirits happens on the level of the mind/imagination, which is precisely what obscures the Will in the first place.
Now, indeed, a magician could "invoke" beings with the object of distracting the mind as a prelude to concentrating on his deeper Self (this is exactly how Crowley describes Samekh, for instance), but in that case 1) pretending to talk to spirits would be nothing more than a run up to the real Work...the actual Work would still involve paying attention to the Will and course-correcting in the moment, and 2) pretending to talk to spirits actually isn't that useful for this kind of task because it can be too distracting, making it difficult to actually concentrate on the Will while doing it.
And all of that is beside the fact that most people seem to have a backwards understanding of how the process works and think that merely pretending to chat up spirits can, in and of itself, reveal their True Will, which it cannot.
"It seems fir example, you practice in some way Enochian, so what is THAT doing for you?"
Well, I don't practice Enochian any more these days (expect for the little bits in the Opening by Watchtower, which I still do occasionally when the mood strikes me).
Back in the day, I worked Enochian magick for various kinds of "results," which I now recognize was nothing more than coincidence, and to visit the aethrys, which I recognize has zip to do with "attaining" anything and everything to do with entertaining myself. And, for the sake of clarity, other ceremonial rituals I do -- like the Opening -- are largely for entertainment and enjoying the feelings they produce. They also have the effect of impressing certain ideas upon the mind, but all of those things are preambles to the real Work. The Work happens in day-to-day course-correction.
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"
See. No evidence. You're just restating your hypothesis"No, I'm not "restating [my] hypothesis." I'm explaining how my conclusion necessarily follows from the definition of True Will.
I'm not sure what kind of "evidence" you're interested in because we can't gather empirical evidence -- since each of us can only ever observe one single True Will -- but we can draw necessary conclusions from definitions, which is what I did above.
"As far as evidence for the opposite (that a student can attain in spite of 'flawed perception') the many examples of adepts and magi through the ages who attained in spite of having mistaken ideas about the physical universe."
That's not evidence -- what makes you think, for example, that these people actually attained or that they wouldn't have been better able to manifest what we're calling "True Will" if they had a more accurate view of the world?
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If it's impossible to measure a persons progress, then you're just making a blind appeal to faith based fanaticism. If it can't be measured, it ain't real, right?
Proof that people have attained before exists in the many schools and systems that gave been passed down. Unless you imagine that these existed as some useless function, waiting for people to be able to actually make progress.
Heck, even if you say Crowley was the first adept ever, it's still an example of sometime attaining I'm spite of having ideas you disagree with.
As far as whether it's possible that a student could progress better or faster with a different set of ideas, why yes, I'm open to that possibility. But it's not a proven fact; it's a testable hypothesis.
Frankly, if you don't have a good method for observing and measuring another persons progress, you have no business teaching. And if you can't figure out a way to test your hypothesis, you have no business expecting the rest of us to accept it as fact.
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"If it's impossible to measure a persons progress, then you're just making a blind appeal to faith based fanaticism."
It is indeed "impossible to measure [another] person[']s progress" in the sense that one person can never know another person's "level of attainment," for lack of a better term. That is to say, in terms of Thelema, one person can never know if another person is acting in accordance with his or her True Will or not.
Of course, a thelemite can know if he himself is acting in accord with his True Will. He's the only one who can ever detect or know that. No one else can.
But the mere fact that one individual's True Will isn't knowable to anyone else doesn't mean that we can never make any claims at all about what a True Will is, in general, and how we go about discovering it, in general.
It's not a "blind appeal to faith" to say, "Here's the definition of True Will, and certain things necessarily follow from that definition."
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So your claims about the effectiveness of the teaching methods here aren't evidence based.
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Los continues to sidestep Takamba's (and mine) points about the semantic nature of his argumentation - which I find a little interesting.
In that vein...
@chioa khan said
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Do you, Takamba, believe in non-corporeal spirits that exist beyond the mind, which can affect material reality and various outcomes? Do you believe in reincarnation of an eternal spirit into another body after death, or in an afterlife of some kind? Do you believe that people possess magic powers? Do you believe that the book of the law is a dictation from a spiritual source?If yes to any of these things, please give an explanation as to why Los' perspective is flawed.
Forgive me as well if I disagree and think you give people too much credit. Just read through some of the stuff on here."
Now I'm not Takamba, but there's two ways to answer these questions, the short answer and the long answer.
The short answer is "yes", but the long answer, while being a better one and more useful, needs a long preamble and a back and forth discussion about what we mean by those things. Sometimes a simple "yes" is better for the flow of discussion, so that we don't need to go through the accepted ground every single time.
For example, for the long answer I would need to know what exactly you mean by "spirit"? I would suggest that most people have only a very surface understanding of the subject matter implied by the word in this context and there is a difference between people saying spirits to refer to purely imaginative creatures from fictional stories and to those implied by the occult context. The same word being used is certainly grounds for confusion, but the correspondence is there to teach us as well. It is not entirely coincidence the same word is used after all. Confusion and illumination can come in the same package. It's what you do with it, after all.
The same applies to "gods" as well and I know well the usual atheist retort to this: that I am merely switching the meaning of words around and I don't, for example, really believe in God even when I say I do. It is certainly true that I do not believe in "god" as meant by Christian fundamentalists or - funnily enough - by atheists, for example. But I would say that I am not simply switching meanings around (any more than everyone employing a word or symbol is actually doing that), but that most people are uneducated in the matter. Education in this subject means having had the type of experience which is classified as religious (which might only be a chemical reaction in the brain, or might be that and something else that we dont' yet understand fully). Yet, while I do not subscribe to all the notions of divinity espoused by the typical Christian, I can sometimes see that they are talking about the same experiential ground. Thus, the word god works well.
Now.. a question that I can agree is worth asking is that do these archaic terms have more worth than they prove a hindrance. If their use in these systems promotes utter confusion, mental health problems, invites the wrong kind of people into the practices and the like, which I think they certainly sometimes do, I can agree it is worth considering. I can't help but think that the hurdle is there for a reason though and that the esoteric side of wisdom is not really ever (in the immediately foreseeable future) going to be commonly accepted so it takes a mind that is able to see past the confusion. We could substitute the old words for new words, but the fact would remain that the keen mind would still be required to see past them.
Also, this thread has gone on a tangent, which I apologize for my part, but the discussion is certainly interesting.
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"So your claims about the effectiveness of the teaching methods here aren't evidence based."
Well, that's not entirely true -- they're supported by the evidence of my own Work, but that's obviously hearsay to anyone who's not me, so I don't rely on that specific evidence for my argument when I have these kinds of discussions.
Instead, the argument I present on here (and in other places) is a logical one, not an empirical one: it draws necessary conclusions from the definition we all (supposedly) accept.
To put it another way, if we take the definition of True Will that Crowley gave -- the one that, theoretically, all of us accept and that we can use as a starting point -- then I contend that certain conclusions logically and necessarily follow from that definition. Those conclusions are necessarily accurate if the original definition is accurate.
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@Deus Ex Machina said
"Los continues to sidestep Takamba's (and mine) points about the semantic nature of his argumentation - which I find a little interesting."
Feel free to repost anything that you think I haven't sufficiently addressed. I'm doing my best to address the substance of every post, but I admit it's possible I'll miss something that you think is important. So go ahead and draw my attention to any points you want me to talk about.
"Yet, while I do not subscribe to all the notions of divinity espoused by the typical Christian, I can sometimes see that they are talking about the same experiential ground. Thus, the word god works well."
No, it doesn't. In the example you gave, you clearly don't believe in the Christian god, but you do believe in an experience that Christians misinterpret as being their god (or sent by their god).
That's an important distinction, and it's not just "semantics" to insist on being clear on what we're talking about.
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@chioa khan said
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@Takamba said
"You aren't as smart as you perceive yourself to be, whether it is because you are misunderstanding us, or you are misrepresenting us."Maybe you could clear this up right now.
Do you, Takamba, believe in non-corporeal spirits that exist beyond the mind, which can affect material reality and various outcomes? Do you believe in reincarnation of an eternal spirit into another body after death, or in an afterlife of some kind? Do you believe that people possess magic powers? Do you believe that the book of the law is a dictation from a spiritual source?
If yes to any of these things, please give an explanation as to why Los' perspective is flawed.
Forgive me as well if I disagree and think you give people too much credit. Just read through some of the stuff on here."
I do not believe in non-corpoeal "spirits" in the sense that I am certain they aren't just parts of me projecting experience for myself or others when they believe they encounter them. In plainer words, I remain agnostic to the existence of Angels and Demons in the sense you describe, but do believe in there being something useful to the perceived experience of them.
I don't "believe" in reincarnation, I know it. My knowledge is not the style of Jim's, who claims to have a continuous memory of past lives equivalent to his memories of going to middle school, but based on natural law called the conservation of energy. Everything visible recycles. In this recycling, the core remains the same (molecular, atomic, sub-atomic - you pick and choose which you prefer). So I know this, I know that all things change and nothing is destroyed. I call that reincarnation. That's probably not the answer you expected. Also, I don't give much credence to it right now anyway - I live here now, not then there. And the laws that apply to the visible, based on something I was taught that I forget the name of, must most likely apply universally also to the invisible (mind, psychology, etc).
I believe that Crowley believed the Book of the Law was a dictation from a spiritual source. This is not by me, and I like to believe not by Crowley, defined as some may think it is defined. "Spiritual" is a contextual thing only relative to homo sapiens. We call it spiritual because any label will do. It's really a profound kind of psychology, the deep part of the right hemisphere of the human brain, the stuff that dreams are made of. I don't devalue it just because I don't understand it, I don't devalue it just because it doesn't easily fall under my conscious control, I also don't devalue it just because it is dependent on the same systems the rest of my body is dependent on. I value it and I suspect you don't. As far as Crowley's right brain creation of the book, regardless of how he intentionally or unintentionally came to it, it somehow seems to apply universally and effectively proves its own value to me in that regard. I question it constantly! It's the answers that you can't believe (and shouldn't, because they are my answers and I'm not bothering to waste my time telling you them).
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Points, lines, linear figures do not actually exist.
However, through their use we can come to certain conclusions and practical uses.
Gods, spirits, demons do not actually exist.
However, through their use we can come to certain conclusions and practical uses.All sciences, systems are based on axioms, which by definition are unprovable.
Thus all systems are false... ( ie unreal and unprovable)
Regardless some systems still have practical uses.
It is the Aspirants task to determine which systems are useful to them.
