Daily Advice 12.10.20

[readoldthings]

My apologies for the sparse posting over the last few days. I'm sure I can give you a fine excuse about how busy I am, but since these posts only take a few minutes, let's skip that and attribute it to a momentary failure of will.

And now let's move on.

Eliphas Levi, the famous 19th century occultist, wrote that

There is only one doctrine in magic, and it is this: the visible is the manifestation of the invisible.

Levi was, indeed, writing for people who wish to practice magic, but this idea is immensely useful whether you have any interest in magic or not. Visible things are manifestations of invisible things. We know this from our every day experience, don't we? Every person you know is known to you through your senses-- you see their face and their clothes, their expressions and their actions, hear their words, shake their hands. But you believe that those actions, words, expressions, clothing, and so on are visible expressions of something invisible-- the person themselves, as they exist in and to themselves. 

(Either you believe that, or else you're a psychopath. Or a materialist, which is another way of saying the same thing.)

Following this idea, we can see that every visible thing is a manifestation of something invisible. And this, furthermore, suggests a doctrine which is, indeed, magical: We can cause change in the visible world by reaching higher, into the invisible. 

Look around you. Consider your physical space. Consider your life. Are there things you wish to change? You can. 

All of them?

No, not all-- and this is where we need to keep in mind the doctrines of the Stoics which we've been exploring lately. But many of them-- and probably more than you think. 

How?

Let us turn again to Levi:

The intelligence and will of man are instruments of incalculable power and capacity. But intelligence and will possess as their help-mate and instrument a faculty which is too imperfectly known, the omnipotence of which belongs exclusively to the domain of Magic. I speak of the imagination, which the Kabalists term the DIAPHANE or TRANSLUCID. Imagination, in effect, is like the soul's eye; therein forms are outlined and preserved; thereby we behold the reflections of the invisible world; it is the glass of visions and the apparatus of magical life. By its intervention we heal diseases, modify the seasons, warn off death from the living and raise the dead to life, because it is the imagination which exalts will and gives it power over the Universal Agent.