Invoking without initiation
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- I was wondering if anyone has an opinion as to what new aeon and old aeon initiation do you need to actually invoke IAO or VIAOV or HRU? I haven't had any initiations whatsoever, so am I able to invoke these? Further is it pointless to try to invoke without any initiation?
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I can only say this comparing my pre-initiation invocations (not of IAO but others) and my post-initiation invocations. My answer is there is nothing you should imagine barring you from doing your will in this matter. Invoke as ye will. Mark your results. Learn. Improve. If you truly seek initiation, it will find you.
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Sean White,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
@Sean White said
"Further is it pointless to try to invoke without any initiation?"
When your mother gave birth to you, she initiated you to Life. Now, this most sacred event of all events, is what I call initiation! No later initiation will ever come close to that which you have already experienced. By giving yourself to life ("To me! To me!") and all it's experiences, without resistance and without making a difference between "any one thing & any other thing", by living through all of it's ordeals wholeheartedly; thereby comes growth and understanding.
All of Gods Angels are anxiously waiting to assist you on your own path to self-realization... Our most honorable prophet has even come forth, sending his blessings from the grave:
"To advance—that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn't matter in the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue."
Be brave and just go for it...
Love is the law, love under will.
Peace
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"No later initiation will ever come close to that which you have already experienced."
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
― Mark Twain
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My take on initiations is that they are literally experiences of being initiated into new ways of thinking about reality - new experiences of reality of various qualities.
Invocation of a specific entity can be its own form of initiatory experience, but formal initiations can also serve to help one understand an experience with invocation on a previously unexperienced level.
In a nutshell, that's how I'd say it.
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My take: you don't need to have had any prior initiations to work with the formulas you're looking to work with. You can work with those formulas independent of an initiation.
However, the context of those formulas will be different if and when you get initiated.
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Thanks for the encouraging and very thoughtful replies everyone. I read a book by Lon Milo DuQuette on Kabbalah and he suggested trying to invoke the Divine names etc. I had a try and the only experiences I've had from it are that the higher I go up the tree, the more sick and close to fainting I feel. When I invoke Kether, it's feels very frightening and unpleasant. It feels like Kether is very angry and I'm confused by that and I doubt my impressions.
I really enjoy tarot but I find that often I just don't feel a clear connection especially when I'm reading for myself. When I do feel a good connection, the cards seem very consistent and clear, but when I'm emotional the cards seem very affected by that and come out both very negative and also very positive - they will totally contradict themselves and then I get all worn out. Recently I've had times when the tarot cards have started moving by themselves during a reading and it made me worried. The reading that time was clear but I don't understand why such a thing would happen. I've seen this kind of thing in a haunted house but my cards aren't haunted!
I wondered if initiation helped with this kind of thing. When I vibrate the words well, it often goes well but I wish I was more consistent I guess. I'm encouraged by comments that I can develop without being dependent on initiation. Thanks everyone
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Things get clearer over time. Your own psychological patterns are at play and being reshaped as you go as well.
I did also want to comment that I enjoyed the contrast between my use of the term "entity" and Shariyf's use of the term "formula."
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Out of curiosity (research
), what sort of a method are you using to invoke the Divine Names? -
Hi Gnosomai, I don't do anything special but I'm new to all this so I don't know if I'm doing things the right way. I just vibrate the Divine Name or if I want to be elaborate, I perform the invoking or banishing ritual. I don't have a wand, so I just use my hand. I deliberately take my time and that seems to help.
Liber Theta has methods that I use with tarot and they seem to work well for me and so I get to really know each card. Does this seem like a good way to go about it?
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@Sean White said
"Hi Gnosomai, I don't do anything special but I'm new to all this so I don't know if I'm doing things the right way. I just vibrate the Divine Name or if I want to be elaborate, I perform the invoking or banishing ritual. I don't have a wand, so I just use my hand. I deliberately take my time and that seems to help. "
Hi Sean,
I have a few questions for you:
What resources (books, websites, etc.) are you using to educate yourself on magick and the practice of magick?
What rituals are you performing?
Are you performing invocations for divination purposes?
How long have you been practicing?
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What is your quest?
What is your favorite color?
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@Sean White said
"Hi Gnosomai, I don't do anything special but I'm new to all this so I don't know if I'm doing things the right way.... Does this seem like a good way to go about it?"
From my own perspective (and please only take it as that, suggestive of one particular viewpoint that may or may not be useful to your own work) the best thing you can do at the beginning of the path is to test out various practices and note how they work (or don't work) for you. This isn't to say, try a bunch of things and see what feels good. It's more along the lines of, find a specific set of instructions, follow them to the T, repeat this practice for a sufficient amount of time (a few weeks, a month, several months), and record anything that you notice happening to you, in you, or about you. And then change something about it and see if you note changes in the results.
I would recommend practices that solidify your own vehicle as a preliminary to actual experiments of invocation. Relaxation, 4-fold breath, the Lesser Pentagram rituals, Middle Pillar, Resh and the like. Create a daily routine that integrates these practices into your life as a way to begin to focus and balance your own energies.
In her intro to The Golden Dawn, Cris Monnastre recommends doing just the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram for a year while reading up on things. This seems a bit intimidating but... well... the Work is work.
I don't have any personal experience to back up this evaluation, but I would suspect that your discomfort as you invoked the divine names of the higher sephiroth might have been connected to trying to climb the tree faster that you were ready to. Until you've attained a high level of skill, none of these things will just "magically" work on a first attempt (and maybe not even then). They all require much repetition and much refinement to get the gears turning together. Slow and steady.
If you are looking for guidance towards a plan of action, have a chat with Al-Shariyf. He's more than a few steps ahead of me on the path and his posts have definitely helped me to sort out a lot of what's what.
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Hi Al-Shariyf - thanks for your reply
"What resources (books, websites, etc.) are you using to educate yourself on magick and the practice of magick?"
I don't trust any websites aside from this one. If you have any recomendations, please let me know. I've found that a lot of articles on Thelema and magick in general seem somewhat unreliable at least to me. The Golden Dawn sites I've looked are pretty angry places and not very useful.
I have a lot of books. I have most of Dion Fortune's books, I've read pretty much everything by Israel Regardie but I'm not a great fan of all of his work, I've read all the Equinoxes besides the commentary on the Holy Books which I've just bought. I read the book of Thoth regularily for many years and I've just bought "The Law is for all". I've read "Magick without tears" and Magick (book 4) too. I have 777 and 776 1/2 and I really like both of those books. I have Visions and Voices by Jim Eshelmann too and that is very good but I find it a bit overwhelming.
I've got a lot of Lon Milo DuQuette's books but aside from his book on the Thoth tarot and his own tarot deck and it's book, I don't really enjoy his books. I read "Initiation in the aeon of the child" and I really didn't like it. I read Kenneth Grant's "Nightside of Eden" and was very disappointed in it and I don't intend to read any more of his work. I've read Frater Achad's QBL and I liked it, but he seemed a bit like Kenneth Grant.
I've read most of the AA first grade reading list but I don't like the I Ching or Taoism. I find Elphias Levi to be frustrating.
I have an interesting book by David Griffin called "The Ritual Magic Manual" and that has all the step by step instructions for all the first order GD material so I refer to this quite a bit. The author fights a lot of people from his website but the book seems good.
"What rituals are you performing?"
Mainly just the qabalastic cross and the lesser banishing of the pentagram.
I've tried invoking and banishing planetary forces and that seemed ok. I have trouble with sephirothic invocations that go above tipareth but I'm ok with Binah. I'm very reluctant to go near Enochian magic as it seems very powerful and I don't understand it. I like Regardie's Middle Pillar exercises. More than anything, I'm always invoking HRU.
"Are you performing invocations for divination purposes?"
Yes, I practice tarot for divination and I always perform the invocation to HRU. I read tarot or meditate on the cards every day and I love tarot. I would like to know how to do better invocation when it comes to tarot but there isn't any serious information available. I suspect I would invoke Tipareth and use HRU's sigil but since I don't really know I haven't tried it. I find that my divination is greatly affected by my emotions especially when it comes to reading for myself.
"How long have you been practicing?"
I've been reading about magick and doing tarot for maybe thirty years but I've only been really trying ritual magick for about a year. I've done decades of Theravadan and Vajrayana Buddhist meditation so I'm pretty good at that but not much more than that.
Although I experience a lot of sensation when I practice, my magickal invocations don't have any results. -
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My quest is I'm not really sure, and favourite colours are purple and orange hehehe
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Thanks for the suggestions Gnosomai,
I've been thinking along the lines of what you suggest. I'm ok with doing the basics for a long while because I'm the kind of person who likes to understand something thoroughly. I guess my big issue with invocation and initiation is knowing how to measure my progress. I mean having a physical sensation or a vision of some sort is one thing, but I don't know how to gauge if Im doing things correctly especially when I guess I don't get the fruit of what I try to invoke.My tarot invocation seems inconsistent when I read for myself especially. I wondered if HRU isn't too interested in me since I'm not connected to any magical current. If I just pick up the cards and make up some stuff then I feel like I'm wasting my time. It's the same with invocation to gain money, success in life etc - I feel power during the invocation but I don't get a result. I wonder also if all this wanting is like being a big spoilt baby but at the same time I don't want to let the vision of my life overwhelm me. I want to make my will shape my world and I want some power too.
I think about AC when he was old and needing money to get his teeth fixed in dreary cold old England and I worry if magic is just a sporadic and unreliable thing. I've always found my intuition and magick to be a bit inconsistent but still real nonetheless. I guess that's a big fear for me that basically I'll read, study, practice.. And nothing will be behind the veil for me. I see most religions spending most of their time making excuses for their deities and denying themselves, and I don't want to take that path.
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@Sean White said
"I think about AC when he was old and needing money to get his teeth fixed in dreary cold old England and I worry if magic is just a sporadic and unreliable thing. I've always found my intuition and magick to be a bit inconsistent but still real nonetheless. I guess that's a big fear for me that basically I'll read, study, practice.. And nothing will be behind the veil for me. I see most religions spending most of their time making excuses for their deities and denying themselves, and I don't want to take that path."
Are your doubts because he wasn't able to generate the money, or something else?
If it's the money thing, this is actually an example of the extreme consistency of magick, not the opposite. When Crowley was young and naïve, he took a magical oath that, if only he would be allowed to attain, he would give all wealth, all love, etc. He didn't have to take the oath (that is, no external authority required it), it's just what burst out of his then-Christian soul. However, he did take it, and the core truth of a genuine magical oath is that the universe accepts it and, thereafter, it defines the parameters of your existence.
He did attain - more than almost anyone in the history of the world, it seems - and, in exchange (his offer, which the universe automatically accepted) he expended his wealth to the Great Work and then was left without it. He never had a persistent love relationship and barely had anything resembling a persisting friend. And so on.
The magick never stopped working.
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A brief comment, based on what I have read here White:
Keep up with the banishings, pick up some more purifying rituals.
This will clean out the "dirty" feeling when you invoke (over time)
The feinting should also be reduced, though that may require practicing the particular invocation. -
@Sean White said
"I've found that a lot of articles on Thelema and magick in general seem somewhat unreliable at least to me. The Golden Dawn sites I've looked are pretty angry places and not very useful..."
What I find ridiculous is that, when I started searching for a door 15 years ago, the landscape was exactly the same as it is today. This forum (aside from the occasional post on LAShTAL) really is the only place online where I've found people actually engaging in the Work and willing to offer useful, non-dogmatic guidance to others.
"I'm ok with doing the basics for a long while because I'm the kind of person who likes to understand something thoroughly. I guess my big issue with invocation and initiation is knowing how to measure my progress. I mean having a physical sensation or a vision of some sort is one thing, but I don't know how to gauge if Im doing things correctly especially when I guess I don't get the fruit of what I try to invoke."
Get Out Of My Head!!!
But seriously, the thing I've been learning over the past year or so (and no, the learning has not been easy) is that you really just have to trust that it is in you to judge whether you are doing it right or not. Not in your day-to-day self or your personality mask, but in your True Self. Teachers/gurus are a great thing to have and if/when you find your own door to initiation, you might have the fortune to work with a good one. But, ultimately, they can only offer guidance, suggestions, structure. At the end of the day, it is your True Self that is the teacher. And, if you put your trust in that (dare I say, faith?) you will start to notice that It is there to guide you aright.
Or at least, that's what's been happening for me, a guy who, since he was about 9 years old and realized his family were a bunch of idiots for believing that a guy actually walked on water, has balanced on the thin line between agnosticism and atheism. A scientific materialist throughout.