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Daily Advice 1.19.21
Jan. 19th, 2021 05:06 pm Today, another note from Eliphas Levi:
Most of you are already familiar with this idea, but it bears reiterating. Not all of our thoughts-- in fact, I would argue, very, very few of our thoughts-- are our own. Thoughts have their own lives, and they leap from mind to mind, animated under their own power and influencing the behavior of all those they contact.
It is worth noting that this is exactly the idea of the meme, as originally formulated by Richard Dawkins-- no friend of occultists! The only difference is that a materialist would say something like "A meme is a self-replicating unit of culture which is spread from brain to brain by imitation," and would deny that there could be a transmission of memes without some direct physical contact. And actually, that point of dispute is both very old and academic-- the same issue was being debated by Thomists and Franciscans 700 years ago, and by the followers of Aristotle and Plato a thousand years before that!
To my mind, it's important to note that transmission of mental "substance" can occur without any obvious physical contact; simply being in the same space as what Levi calls a "diseased soul" is enough to do the job. But you can follow along with this discussion even if you're a materialist or a Thomist who doesn't believe in such things.
There is a respiration of the soul, exactly like that of the body. It inhales what it believes to be happiness, and exhales the ideas that result from its inner sensations. Diseased souls have an evil breath and vitiate their moral atmosphere-- that is, they combine impure reflections with the Astral Light which permeates them and establish unwholesome currents therein. We are often surprised when we are assailed, in public, by bad thoughts which we would not have thought possible of ourselves, and we do not realize that they are due to some unhealthy person nearby. This is a secret of great importance, for it leads to the manifestation of the conscience, one of the most incontestable and terrible powers of the art of magic.
Most of you are already familiar with this idea, but it bears reiterating. Not all of our thoughts-- in fact, I would argue, very, very few of our thoughts-- are our own. Thoughts have their own lives, and they leap from mind to mind, animated under their own power and influencing the behavior of all those they contact.
It is worth noting that this is exactly the idea of the meme, as originally formulated by Richard Dawkins-- no friend of occultists! The only difference is that a materialist would say something like "A meme is a self-replicating unit of culture which is spread from brain to brain by imitation," and would deny that there could be a transmission of memes without some direct physical contact. And actually, that point of dispute is both very old and academic-- the same issue was being debated by Thomists and Franciscans 700 years ago, and by the followers of Aristotle and Plato a thousand years before that!
To my mind, it's important to note that transmission of mental "substance" can occur without any obvious physical contact; simply being in the same space as what Levi calls a "diseased soul" is enough to do the job. But you can follow along with this discussion even if you're a materialist or a Thomist who doesn't believe in such things.
Levi concludes this paragraph by telling us that this is the idea that leads to "the manifestation of conscience," which is "one of the most terrible powers of the art of magic." What could he possibly mean? Tomorrow I want to return to Sun Tzu to explore that idea with regard to the ongoing spiritual warfare, and begin to raise the question-- How can we take the fight to the enemy?
