So Frater RO recently wrote up his brilliant work with a Pneuma Alalon to silence a pestering presence in his life. He followed this up with what he is appropriately terming an “enlightenment bomb” to help speed up that persons spiritual growth. Really good stuff. It seems however that several people objected on a number of levels, which more or less amount to:
1. How dare you effect the free will of another?
and
2. Who do you think you are? Only someone at Jesus’s level would have the knowlege to do that properly.
Lets take the second one first. I hear something similar in the Dharma community as well. If you use any of the Sadhanas for practical purposes, or god forbid actually claim to be getting any kind of result from your practice at all, someone will inevitably argue that that is the kind of thing reserved for great MahaSiddhas – not you. This has been a problem for a long time amongst people who want to wallow in spiritual trappings but not do anything that might actually effect change. In fact Milarepa’s students seeing the kinds of miracles that he could accomplish, once pestered him to tell them what Mahasiddha or God he was the incarnation of because surely he MUST be special to do the things he could do. He chided them because to think that only people born under special circumstances can accomplish great feats is to not have faith in the Vajrayanas power (or in our case, magic in general).
To put the argument back in Christian terms, I have always liked Athenasius’s description of Theosis “God became man to show man how to become god”. The whole idea is to become that kind of being! If you constantly reject that anyone real and tangible and human can make even the smallest stride towards that goal, than you are sort of saying you don’t buy into the whole thing at all. What you want are a group of dead saints to venerate as great, than go around dressing like them and preaching their word all the while refusing to accept that they are ultimately no different than you are.
So if we get rid of the idea that magical actions are only for beings that are fully enlightened or born as demigods, we are left with the basic moral question of whether it is ok to tamper with peoples lives and free will.
A lot of people consider any kind of magic that effects any other person in any way without their permission to be black magic.
In this I am always reminded of the quote from Victor Anderson, “White Magic is poetry, Black Magic is anything that actually works”.
Here is the thing folks: you extend far past your skin. There really is no inner and outer. You are not separate from other beings and they are not separate from you. When you do a real investigation to see where the boundaries of the self lie, you have a hard time finding them anywhere. Frater Sincerus Renatus reveals his fundamental misunderstanding when, during his critique of RO he states ”Shouldn’t spiritual development and psychic maturity mainly come (or originate) from within the person, and not from any outside influence?” No Good Frater, there is no shutting out the outside. Every moment of your life has been impacted by countless trillions of events and influences. At this moment the thoughts you are having are effected by: what you had for lunch today, what your regular diet is, where you live, how much money you have, how much money your parents have, how they raised you, whether you drank coffee or tea today, etc. The list is endless, and to be perfectly honest with you 99% of the time, these external factors don’t just effect your thoughts and decisions, they make them for you. Escaping the gravitational pull of these causes and conditions is the work of a lifetime, and while you can use meditation and other methods to cut through them somewhat, it helps if you can cultivate useful causes and conditions in the process.
Now one could argue that Frater RO could not possibly know every possible repercussions of his actions. That is true. That takes a level of clairvoyance that neither he nor I possess. But that is not a good argument for non-intervention. The reality is that no-one knows all the possible repercussions of ANY action. Take magic out of the equation for a moment. You might save someones life with CPR only to have them rape someone next month, do you let that possibility stop you from performing CPR? Of course not! You make a decision based on the facts you have, deal with whatever fallout you can, and know that there might be repricussions that you just will not have control over, or evem ever find out about.
In other words, its a messy world that you are a part of. Deal with it.
The difference between Frater RO’s actions and those of a normal person is that whatever information RO cannot see, or even gets wrong, is at least patially compensated for by his spiritual guidance. In general the HGA will give you a heads up if something is a disaster waiting to happen.
So, basically, what I am saying is shut yourself up and shut everything out and call yourself a mystic if that is what you want to be. If you are going to be a magician, someone who walks through the world making their inner illumination reflect outward through action, than get to it and stop being a hater.
I personally think that God does not “play” for no reason. Excellent post btw
Quite happy you weighed in brother, and your words ring true as always.
the victor anderson quote gave me the first smile of the day.
Nice! Too many so called magicians nowadays spend way too much time contemplating the karmic consequences of their magic and by doing so cripple themselves from doing any magic at all. The word “karma” itself just means action, and any act we do has repercussions, good, bad or neutral. All magic is manipulative (we are manipulating energies/natural forces afterall) and affects others to some extent or another. When you weave the threads of the web of fate to your benefit (or that of a loved one) it nonetheless affects the threads of fate of others (in a positive or negative way) whether we intend to or not. We are all interconnected. We are One, and as the quantum physicists say the movements of the wings of a butterfly in one part of the world may affect the weather in another part of the world. So rather than worry and walk on pins and needles when it comes to our magic we need to focus on the outcomes we wish to produce and let the chips fall where they will. Learn to live with and enjoy the consequences of your actions, and let the gods enjoy their play.
Psalms 82:6 I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.
Isaiah 41:23 Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it together.
John 10:34 Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?
As Dr. Hyatt says, “We believe it is time that we begin to act like the gods we were created to be.”
Good post! The same fear-based arguments rise with every type of empowerment- magical or technological. The “Prometheus Fallacy.”
Great post! I read RO’s whole discussion and agree with him (and you). However, fear of consequences is the greatest obstacle for the so called “white practitioners”. If we really measured how much we affect the world around us, it would be clear that focused actions are better than fearing their repercussions.
I, too, have been following R.O’s posts and the resultant discussion with interest. Consequently, I thank you for bringing wisdom to the silliness propagated from some quarters of the magical community. In many ways, allegations of doing ‘black magic’ are just a lazy attempt to disparage anyone who has the audacity to expect objective results from their magical work. It’s a simplistic way to dismiss/denigrate those who actually strive for mundane results and who are not totally satisfied with mystical navel-gazing. Not that there is anything wrong with mysticism, but the moralizers fail to realize (as you point out) that all actions, magical or mundane, have the potential to impact outcomes in unforeseen ways.
I’ve been a magician a long time and I’ve seen a lot of b.s. and self-deception that hides under the ‘cover’ of so-called ‘white magic.’ I’ve seen a lot of well-meaning people excuse/ignore rampant fraud and duplicity because exposing it as such is indicative of ‘psychic immaturity’ and not being ‘spiritually evolved.’
As Ghandi said, “Cowards can never be moral.”
First, one of the things I’ve noticed in regards to the “greater than human” category is that it puts less pressure on the individuals that are underneath the teacher. If it is literally impossible for the follower to surpass the teacher then the follower can’t be expected to accomplish anything which results in a big decrease in pressure on the student and a commensurate increase on the teacher.
Second, I have met people who I would call practitioners of “black magic”. I would say they come around approximately once per decade, if that. From my experience they are that rare because they have to be amoral in the extreme(to the point of being either a true sociopath or very, very close) and also be willing to take the time to become good at magic. Of course there are also people who are mages who happen to be douchebags. I don’t really count them as “black magicians” as much as “mages who don’t think things through as much as they should”.
I think that mages who fiddle with objects external to them(banditos, bananas, etc.) is that some of them think it through enough and it works out ok or it doesn’t and some of them don’t think it through as much as they should and sometimes it does or doesn’t work out. However I am very reluctant to call anyone who fiddles with objects external to them “black magicians” or even “mages who aren’t thinking things through as much as they should” as that would be a very poor categorization in the logical sense(meaning it would put a lot of people in the category that shouldn’t be there and would leave out a few people who really should be in there).
This should be the introduction to every Occult text on the market. Excellent points!