What does skrying do for us?
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What does skrying the 22 sacred Hebrew letters/paths do for us? What good outcomes does it really have? Crowley said it should produce a pang of pain if done correctly. Is this heartache?
Also are they basically waking dreams? I understand that my Self sends me messages in my dreams at night about my shadow and what I am ignoring/neglecting. Is this the same process that happens during skrying?
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In a sense they are waking dreams, since you are positioning yourself at the same level of (1) consciousness and (2 reality where dreams occur. That's a little to simplistic, but that's a start.
What you get is... enormous. You are opening yourself to consciously navigate realms of reality more subtle than, and to some extent separate from, physical reality. It's the start of the Neophyte's opening from Malkuth to the inner realms of the entire rest of the Tree of Life, starting a journey that continues at deeper levels as you go.
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Just spitballing on the "pang of pain" bit...
To accept a genuinely new piece of data is at a minimum, a subtle chipping away of some illusion about our universe. If something isn't a genuinely new piece of data, then it's easy to smile and accept it into our existing framework, pain free. I think that's why it's been said (serious paraphrasing follows) that one sign of the division between the personal and the collective realms of our imagination is that once we get beyond the personal, and into the collective, there can be an accompanying feeling of otherness, shame, embarrassment, the hot sting of realizing our own limitations, etc.
Kind of like when you're in therapy, or talking to a trusted friend, and you realize another perspective that changes the context of your own self-image. There's a bit of a pang of pain there.
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About the pain.
Thing what brings pain is our complex, misleading, deep rotted psychological mechanism from what we cannot separate, because we identify with it, and if its hurt we feel that our ''true self'' is hurt and humiliated or abused so we try to punch back and defend our ''rights''. This is just an example that it is. There a lot has to do our close people and society for they form all this crap that later by ones who cant tolerate this must be endured. Now i think this serves for spiritual purposes, really think of what would be if we all would live in the garden of eden and filling our bellies with applies... without a sin there could be no joy.
Now there are two ways i see people endure this. First - one pumps on as many practices as he can, and in this hell, where all his potencies are heightened he tries to understand this true will. Second - one tries to understand his will by creating his surrounding intensively, this involves many new friends, activities, journeys, or opposite destructing everything one had, or combining both variants. Sometimes one ''gets'' what he is, and what other are from the very early years and sometimes one just wake up at the mid age and start doing what he is.
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@Jim Eshelman said
"In a sense they are waking dreams, since you are positioning yourself at the same level of (1) consciousness and (2 reality where dreams occur. That's a little to simplistic, but that's a start.
What you get is... enormous. You are opening yourself to consciously navigate realms of reality more subtle than, and to some extent separate from, physical reality. It's the start of the Neophyte's opening from Malkuth to the inner realms of the entire rest of the Tree of Life, starting a journey that continues at deeper levels as you go."
What about self-understanding for example let's say I want to find out what needs adjusting in my existence. Do I therefore skry Lamed-Adjustment for wisdom and info on that specific aspect? Is that how it works? What about Shin Aeon? Does skrying Shin help me with how I need to attune to this aeon? How about the others? Does each specific path have a lesson like this?
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"Just spitballing on the "pang of pain" bit...
To accept a genuinely new piece of data is at a minimum, a subtle chipping away of some illusion about our universe. If something isn't a genuinely new piece of data, then it's easy to smile and accept it into our existing framework, pain free. I think that's why it's been said (serious paraphrasing follows) that one sign of the division between the personal and the collective realms of our imagination is that once we get beyond the personal, and into the collective, there can be an accompanying feeling of otherness, shame, embarrassment, the hot sting of realizing our own limitations, etc.
Kind of like when you're in therapy, or talking to a trusted friend, and you realize another perspective that changes the context of your own self-image. There's a bit of a pang of pain there."
Yeah I've had therapy and note that Jung said,"consciousness is not achieved without pain"
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@gerry456 said
"What about self-understanding for example let's say I want to find out what needs adjusting in my existence. Do I therefore skry Lamed-Adjustment for wisdom and info on that specific aspect? Is that how it works? What about Shin Aeon? "
For that sort of thing, meditating on Atu VIII 10 minutes a day for three to six days is much more likely to give you an answer.
Journey into the Path of Lamed in Yetzirah is going to introduce you to landscapes, concepts, experiences concerning those principles in the abstract, and (depending on your needs and circumstances and readiness) possibly beings who are in immediate service to the forces of Karma unfolding in human existence. What happens next... entirely depends and you and the conditions. It is, after all, a relationship.
If you are an Adeptus Minor, then journeying that Path may also start to prepare you for your Next Step - since that would be one of the two Paths right before you.
At an earlier stage - returning, say, to the training level of 1=10 I mentioned earlier - direct experience of the Paths gives you greater understanding of the ways its energies work, which will make you more effective in ceremonial magick involving the Paths. Thus, if you were doing a ritual of the nature of Lamed, then having had several journeys into Lamed in Yetzirah and interacting with the environment and beings will make it easier to make those moment-to-moment decisions that arise in the source of your later ritual.