Sorry for the light posting this week-- it'll probably be this way on and off during the Summer, as I have far more spouses and children at home than I'm used to. But let's take a look at our next Beatitude, the Sixth, in The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, Verse 8

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. 

The Inner Vision

Every Beatitude follows a simple two-part formula: first we're given a prescription, then a promise. Let's begin with the promise, in this case. By following Jesus's path, we shall "see God."

What does this mean?

Remember our definitions of God. God is the One, the transcendent principle through which all reality is brought into being. God is the Most High God, the chief and leader of all the spiritual beings that dwell in the immaterial world of the spirit and care for the material world. God is YHVH, the particular God of the Jews, whose name means "He Brings Into Being All That Exists," and who has-- perhaps-- been revealed as the High God of all peoples. 

And Jesus tells us we will see Him. 

How? With our eyes?

Of course not; God is not visible.

Recall what we said about the Nous. It is the highest faculty of the human soul, transcending what we ordinarily mean by soul. And it is a kind of eye-- an eye which is open to spiritual realities, by which we perceive spiritual realities. 

Once again, Jesus is teaching us metanoia-- "repentance"-- that is, how to change our Nous. By doing so, we will attain the Kingdom of Heaven, which is already within us, and we will see God directly.

The Cave

Do you remember the Allegory of the Cave from Plato's Republic?

If not, let's have a quick recap.

Imagine, (says Plato), that you had spent your life imprisoned in a cave underground. You were chained in such a way that you could look neither left nor right, up nor down, but only at the cave wall in front of you. Next to you were many other prisoners, all in the same situation. Now behind you there is a fire, which casts its light on the wall ahead. All day long, men walk back and forth between you and the fire, carrying cardboard cutouts in the shape of trees and houses and dogs and people. The light of the fire throws the shadows of these images on the wall in front of you, and these shadows are the only things that you have ever seen, so that you think the shadows of images of trees and houses and dogs and people actually are trees and houses and dogs and people. 

One day, someone frees you from your chains and leads you up, out of the cave, into the real world.

At first you can't see very much, because it's too bright, and your eyes need time to adjust. You can only really come out at night, when the light is dim, and so you're still only seeing the shadows of things. Slowly, your vision improves, and you're able to go abroad in the day and really see the actual trees and houses and dogs and people. Eventually, after a long time perhaps, you'd be able to look up and see the Sun itself, and see that it casts the light by which you can see everything up here, in the real world.

Plato concludes his allegory thusly:

Dear Glaucon, the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the Sun, the journey upwards, the ascent of the soul to the intellectual world. It seems to me that in the world of knowledge the Idea of Good appears last of all and is seen only with an effort, and when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally in public or private life must have his eyes fixed.

Eggheads

Reading Plato or his successors in translation is dangerous, in the same way that reading the Bible is dangerous. As we've discussed here before, the word "Intellectual" in a Platonic context doesn't mean the thinking mind, and Philosophy is not just a bunch of eggheads sitting around a college dorm talking about some real stuff, man. The word "Intellect" is a translation of Nous. Over the course of time and the degeneration of Western culture it has come to mean discursive reasoning, which is a lesser (though still important) faculty, called Dianoia in Greek. Plato's ascent to the "Intellectual" world is an ascent to the Noetic world, the realm of the eternal beings which create and shape and care for material reality. At the height of that world is the Idea of the Good, which is the source of the light of the Noetic Realm, and which is the image of the Good Itself, the closest we can get to attaining It. 

Remember that the Good is another name for the One, which is God, and the Idea of Good is also called the Son of the Good. 

Purity

In this Beatitude, then, Jesus is teaching us the manner by which we may open the eye of our Soul-- that is, our Nous-- to the Vision of God. 

And how shall we do this?

By "purity of heart."

What does this mean?

Let's answer this question by grasping it from the other direction. 

In Chapter 18 of the second book of the Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, Eliphas Levi discusses the work of enchanters. As an aside, it's very interesting to read this chapter in full, as it discusses the means by which a person can put another under their power for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Read it, and you will understand exactly what men in the "Pick Up Artist" community-- and their female opposite numbers-- are doing. It's black magic, pure and simple. In any case, Levi writes that:

To reduce the action of intelligence is to augment in equal proportion the opposing forces of mad passion. Love of the type which evildoers wish to inspire, and of which we speak here, is a veritable stultification and the most shameful type of moral servitude.

Like the word "Intellect," Intelligence doesn't refer to discursive reasoning-- or, to be more accurate, it doesn't just mean that, it also means the power that extends above Reason, into what we would ordinarily call the Spiritual Realm. 

Now, the work of an evil sorcerer is of the same type as the work of the Devil, and is a subset of it. The heart-- in the context of this passage-- is the source of all of our passions and emotions. When these are disordered, overwhelmed with the chaotic impulses that come from our society; from deliberate evil intelligences, whether human or otherwise; and from our own animal nature-- that is to say, from the World, the Flesh, and the Devil-- then our Intelligence is reduced our Nous is clouded, and we are unable to see God.

Levi is talking specifically about sexual seduction, but evil magic of the same type is endemic in our society; we normally call it "advertising." Its purpose is to reduce activate the passions, reduce the intelligence, and, thereby, to render you a slave.

By purifying the heart of all that is foreign to it, we open the Nous to the Vision of God. 

What is the One that Precedes the Multiple?

Let's close with some lines from Plotinus. In the Fifth Ennead, he is discussing the three levels of existence above the physical. First there is the Soul; but above the Soul, or at its very height, there is the Nous, which is also called (in translation) Intellect and Divine Mind. And then there is that which is beyond Nous.

Our own soul is of the same nature with this by which the gods are divine, so that to consider it purified, freed from all that is adventitious, is to see how precious the essence of the soul is, far more honorable than anything bodily...

But over this Soul there is a diviner still, its prior and its source; for though so great a thing, Soul is but an image and an utterance of Divine Mind, the stream of life sent forth by It to the production of further being, the forthgoing heat of a fire in which also heat essentially inheres. Sprung from Divine Mind, Soul is intellective too; for its perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind which may be thought of as watching over its child.

Bring itself closer to Divine Mind, becoming one with It, Soul seeks still further: What Being, now, has engendered this God, what is the One preceding this multiple? Before duality, there must stand the Unity

How comes it, then, that possessed of such powers, we do not lay hold of them, but for the most part let them go idle, some of us indeed never bringing them to effect?

We remain unaware of them because the human being includes sense-perception too. If there is to be consciousness of what is thus present, we must turn the perceptive faculty inward and hold it to attention there. Hoping to hear a desired voice we let all others pass and are alert for the coming at last of that most welcome of sounds; so here, we must let the hearings of senses go by, save for sheer necessity, and keep the soul's perception bright and quick to the voices from above. 
 


My apologies for the light posting lately. I'm studying for a professional exam that I have to pass, and that's taking up a bit of my time. There's something else, though, that's kept me from writing, and it's something that I really don't like to talk about-- but it directly bears on the theme of this whole series of posts. So I'm going to try discussing it and making sense of it in light of the ideas of Sun Tzu that we've ben discussing here.

Three years ago, I went through a series of traumatic experiences, one after the next. I say three years ago, but that's just when it began. It went on for an entire year-- a series of disasters, one after the next after the next. By the end of that time I'd moved twice, lost a job that I loved and that paid me very well, and lost one of my cats. And those were not the worst things that happened, not by far.

Again, the worst of it was over after a year-- in April 2019, to be precise, when my cat disappeared. Shortly thereafter, we found out my wife was pregnant, and it's been uphill since then. But the ill effects of the year of hell have stayed with me. Emotional pain, intrusive thoughts and memories seem to erupt out of my solar plexus and take over my psyche; when it happens, it's all that I can do to make it through the day intact and take care of the kids. Writing, reading anything not found on a cell phone, or complex thoughts of any kind are not really possible.

For a while, this was pretty much the constant condition of my life. I'd swing back and forth in terms of which memories and which emotions would overtake me, but it was always something. Always. Gradually, over time, things have mellowed out. It went from every day to once or twice a week, and from there to a few times a month. Now it's every few months. Every time the mental storm passes I think "Well, that's probably the end of it." And every time, it returns-- but the gaps are longer each time.

Now, how can I make sense of this all, from Sun Tzu's perspective?

Well, first of all, we need to start with our goal. For me, the goal is the accomplishment of what Eliphas Levi calls the great work:

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.
 
That is to say, the total conquest of the soul. The soul, remember, consists of all of our actions and mental representations. 

When the Mental Storm comes over me, I lose this. I retain control of my actions, but only enough to accomplish the bare minimum of is required of me. My representations are clouded. It's like a thin, grey film is placed over my eyes, coloring how I see the world. 

The terrain of battle is my mind, especially my emotions and my representations. Certain external terrains seem to have an impact, including anything that triggers memories of the Lost Year. The cycle of time appears to be every couple of months, now; I've been unable to correlate to any particular lunar or astrological cycle. Every night before I go to bed I do a tarot card reading for the next day, and one card in particular tends to indicate that the Storm is coming.

What of the general, and what about method and discipline? 

We could think of the general as me, or as whatever spiritual powers I call upon for aid. I tend to prefer the latter, and to view myself as the sovereign. Here, things become more complicated. Certain spiritual powers that I work with, whatever their merits are otherwise, have been not merely useless but altogether counterproductive. Doing certain magical rituals seems to reliably bring on the Storm, for reasons that are not at all clear. I don't want this to be the case, because I like doing magic, but at this point it can't be denied. 

So it looks like I need a new general, and a new, or additional, behavioral strategies and coping mechanisms. I have some thoughts on that, but I'm going to keep them to myself for now, keeping in mind the virtue of Silence.

Finally, we need to keep in mind Sun Tzu's dictum that we must know ourselves, and know our enemy. I've done my best to know myself, and to outline that knowledge in the foregoing. What of the enemy? Based on this list of symptoms, what I'm talking about is clearly some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. I don't like admitting that. It feels like weakness. But it is what it is, and just because you don't want to admit that the enemy's forces are at the gate, doesn't mean they aren't there.

Tomorrow, I'm going to begin wrapping up the Sun Tzu posts with the final 3 chapters of The Art of War. I will probably be more personal in the posts that follow, and discuss Sun Tzu in relation to the war going on in my own psyche. See you then. 
Sorry for the light posting lately-- I've been struggling with the text, and with some things in my personal life. But as I said to someone the other day, you can have the best reason in the whole world for not watering in your garden, but your plants are still going to die. So let's continue.

Chapter 9 of the Art of War goes on to discuss the details of fighting in mountains, rivers, marshes and plains. The details are useful and necessary, if you are conducting an actual war with an army. But what does it mean for us, in our struggle to master our own souls?

For help in understanding, I want to turn again to Eliphas Levi.

In Chapter 4 of the second part of Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, Levi discusses the elemental spirits-- the sylphs, salamanders, undines, and gnomes. These are the spirits, respectively, of Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. In the worldview of Levi and of classical occultism generally, these spirits are ever-present and in great numbers. Their influence of the elements extends well beyond the material substances that bear their names. The material earth, the air you breathe, the water you drink or bathe in and the fire on your hearth are only physical expressions of ideas that are present at every level of existence-- and that very much includes the internal environment of your own soul.

Now, each element has its characteristic vices-- these are the ways that the elements express themselves in the unawakened soul. But each has its characteristic virtues, as well. The true magician has complete mastery of the elements of his soul. Levi tells us that

 
To overcome and subjugate the elementary spirits, we must never yield to their characteristic defects. Thus, a shallow and capricious mind will never rule the Sylphs; an irresolute, cold and fickle nature will never master the Undines; passion irritates the Salamanders; and avaricious greed makes its slaves the sport of Gnomes. 

In order to overcome the vices of the elements, we must master their virtues. And so Levi continues: 

We must be prompt and active, like the Sylphs; flexible and attentive to images, like the Undines; energetic and strong like the Salamanders; laborious and patient, like the Gnomes: in a word, we must overcome them in their strength without ever being overcome by their weaknesses.

The elementals dwell within us, and rule the internal landscapes that correspond to Sun Tzu's mountains and marshes, deserts, plains and rivers. In order to master them, we must cultivate the virtues of the elements-- and in that way overcome their vices, and, in our own way, raise the entire elemental creation toward union with the Divine.
 Sun Tzu ends Chapter 3 will the most well-known quotation from all of his work:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
 
What is there to say here? This is the key to the whole work and to success in any field of endeavor. Know yourself as far as you can and in particular as it pertains to your goal. Know your enemy, which is the sum total of all those forces that stand between you and your goal. 

Now, in Sun Tzu's context, self-knowledge means knowledge of one's army, its composition and disposition, its fighting ability, its logistical needs, and so on. The enemy is the opposing army, its country, and every other detail pertinent to winning a war. 

For us, self-knowledge means knowledge of our particular capabilities and weaknesses as they pertain to accomplishing our objectives. To give an example-- I know that I do very well at jobs in which I have to work with people, speak in public, or manage a team. I also do manual labor very well. Give me a difficult task and leave me alone, or put me in charge of a project with a crew under me, and I'll get the job done. But I am absolutely terrible-- I mean unbelievably, hilariously bad-- at any kind of office job in which I'm to be left alone in a room with a computer connected to the internet. You can put me in that room at 9:00 in the morning with a single task to accomplish, and I won't get it done. Come back at 4:30 and I'll have 30 browser tabs open, ranging from news and political analyses, classic works of philosophy, tips on cooking and homebrewing, guitar tabs, histories of my favorite sports teams or UFC fighters, Google street-view explorations of countries I'll never go to-- anything but that one boring online task that happens to be my actual job. 

(Even these posts, which are both short and enjoyable to write, are hard for me to focus on from beginning to end. Right now, I have 16 tabs open, including my email, 2 Facebook conversations, 3 articles on election fraud, a youtube video of a mass at a Catholic church in New England, two Amazon kindle books, Sallust's On the Gods and the World and chapter 4 of Machiavelli's The Prince. I think the technical term for this is "ADD." )

The point, though, is that I know this about myself. If I decide that I need a new job, I'm going to look for either something where I'm either in charge of a group or doing manual labor, or both. Most types of office work are just not for me-- not unless I want to commit to getting fired after a month or two, anyway. 

This is a rather quotidian example, but underneath it lies a very important principle. Eliphas Levi wrote:

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of a man by himself. That is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future: it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will, assuring him the universal dominion over Azoth and the domain of Magnesia, in other words, full power over the Universal Magical Ancient. 

The conquest of the self is precisely that conquest of our own soul, its liberation from the rule of passions and external and chaotic forces, its placement under the rule of the spirit and the gods, that we've been discussing over and over in these posts. And in order to achieve this conquest, we must have two things: knowledge, and the capacity to act on that knowledge.

Who are we really? How are our actions constrained by our innate capacities and the weight of our habits? What do we want to achieve, and how can we work with our innate capacities to do so, and how can we expand those capacities?

Those are the great questions, the answers to which are the work of a lifetime and the heart of spiritual development. 
Here is Sun Tzu's second essential for victory:

He will win who knows how to handle superior and inferior forces.

To which our translator adds:

This is not merely the general's ability to estimate numbers correctly, as Li Ch'uan and others make out. Chang Yu expounds the saying more satisfactorily: "By applying the art of war, it is possible with a lesser force to defeat a greater, and vice versa. The secret lies in an eye for locality, and in not letting the right moment slip. Thus Wu Tzu says: 'With a superior force, make for easy ground; with an inferior one, make for difficult ground.'" 

Now, how shall we understand all of this in terms of Spiritual Warfare? I suggest five ways:

1. The soul is its own place, and it is nearly always difficult ground for the Enemy-- if we make it so. To do this, we can't wait until the hour of need. Remember that Levi says that each of us carries Heaven or Hell with us, in our aura. To dwell in Heaven, we need to establish the Kingdom of God within us. We can do this only through regular devotional practice. (What practice? That's up to you. There are many valid paths and many valid traditions. How do you pick one? Ask yourself the question: Who do I want to be? And then learn about different traditions, gods, and spiritual practices. Does this sound like it could lead you in the direction  you want? Okay, now meet as many people who follow that path as you can. What do they act like? What does it feel like to be around them? Do you want what they have? Follow their path, and you will have it.)

2. Let us remember, though, that "soul" in Latin is "anima," "the animating principle," "that which moves." The soul is a place, and it is also an activity. It often happens that we find ourselves defeated on our own ground, and we descend into addictive behavior, rage or lust or despair, or that kind of grayed-out, emptiness that characterizes much of life. How do we find safe ground then? 

By doing something. The saying to remember here is "Move a muscle, change a thought." And we will often find that one of the very best things that we can do, when we ourselves are at our worst, is to go find someone else that we can help. Bill Wilson employed this principle when he was in early recovery from drinking. Out of town and down on his luck, he found himself pulled toward the bottle, but overcame it by phoning a local branch of the Oxford society and asking them if there were any alcoholics in town that he could go and help. It works!

3. The soul is not, of course, isolated, but impacts and is impacted by the surroundings. Knowing this, we can use it to our advantage. When we find ourselves in hostile ground, we can retreat within ourselves-- provided we have created an inner space we can retreat to. We can use defensive magical techniques, and we can connect with our deities, and we can pray silently for ourselves and those around us. 

The same is true in reverse. When we find our minds overthrown by the Dark Powers and Hell manifesting within our auras, we can go to a place that is Heaven-like, and restore ourselves. Simply stepping into a healthy woodland, garden, church, or shrine is often enough to do the trick. 

In Santa Barbara, where I used to live, the local Franciscan mission had the Stations of the Cross, a traditional Catholic devotional, set up along a walking path in a large and beautiful olive grove. Interspersed among the olives were many rosemary bushes, yarrows and sages. I used to go there regularly after work, when my mind was at its most chaotic. I'd gather a bit of rosemary, which is strongly purifying, and walk the way of the cross. After the 14th station, which is the burial of Christ in the tomb, I would sit on a bench and spent 5-10 minutes or so in meditation. The effect of this practice on my consciousness was profound. Often I'd go back to my car and turn on whatever podcast or radio program I'd been listening to, which is usually political in nature, and immediately turn it off in horror as the contrast between it and the peace I'd found was so extreme. 

It can be easy for those of us who like to live in our own heads to forget the outside world. Make use of holy places for spiritual regeneration-- that's what they're there for!

4. Be aware of psychic currents, and don't set yourself in opposition to a current that you can't resist. Whether it's a new trend in politics, religion, art or culture, psychic currents have a force behind them. That force is by definition easy ground for the powers behind that current, and if you set out to directly oppose that force, you will lose-- unless you have a superior force. Right-wingers and Christian pastors may have railed against the hippies in the middle of the '60s; it did no good, and in fact strengthened the hippie movement. Fifteen years later, the energy of the hippie movement was exhausted, and the early punk movement was able to conquer most of its territory in the alternative cultural space. Fulton Sheen condemning hippies in 1968 only strengthened them; Joe Strummer publicly declaring that "Hippies can shove off" in 1983 had quite a different effect.

In Chapter 11 of Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, Eliphas Levi writes:

Every enthusiasm propagated in society... produces a magnetic current that is also conserved or augmented by that current. The effect of the current is to enchant and often overly stimulate impressionable and weak persons, excitable constitutions, and temperaments predisposed to hysteria or hallucinations. These persons soon become powerful vehicles for magical power and strongly project the astral light in the same direction as the current; thus to oppose oneself to manifestations of power is in a way to fight destiny.
 

Levi goes on to describe how the Pharisee Saul set himself in the path of the incoming Christ Current, and so was transformed into Paul, the apostle. The Emperor Diocletian accomplished much the same thing-- though he did not convert himself, the effect of his persecutions was to convert many others. Our latter-day Diocletians are likely to accomplish the same thing. 

It's worth noting that many, many of the people involved in our entertainment industry qualify as "impressionable and weak persons" and "temperaments predisposed to hysteria or hallucinations." To consume their products is to expose yourself to their enthusiasms. Do so with caution.

5. Finally, I want to suggest that the internet is nearly always easy ground, and social media is the easiest ground. Direct, person-to-person communication, without the mediation of technology is difficult ground. As the new censorship regime tightens, those of us who dissent from the prevailing order of the day will do well to stay out of the way of the big tech giants, and to move our operations to smaller, more obscure websites and, especially, in-person contacts. 
A new administration takes power in America today. The astrological conditions for the event are almost comically terrible; JMG posted his analysis a few weeks back and later today or tomorrow I'm going to post my own writeup over at Vox Caelorum. Astral conditions are as bad as they've ever been in my lifetime, and a clairvoyant friend who is old enough to remember 1968 says that they are worse than she's ever seen them.

Sounds like a good day to discuss the spiritual warfare, with the aid of our old friends Sun Tzu and Eliphas Levi.

Sun Tzu tells us:

In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to capture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.

The territory on which our war is being fought is the soul. We will understand what that means better if we remember that "soul" is the English translation of the Latin word "anima" and the Greek word "psyche." Anima is the root of "animate," meaning "that which moves." "Psyche," of course, is identical to "mind," and consists of all of the contents of our minds. And so we could define "soul" as "the total contents of our minds and our actions."

Let's turn to Levi for a moment:

And now the nature of the conflict clearly presents itself:

Part of our souls lie under the dominion of the Enemy.

Which parts?

For the specific purpose of this discussion, the Enemy is the demonic power which is driving people in the United States and around the world into a frenzy of rage over political issues. It first manifested itself in the deranged reaction to the election of Donald Trump and the successful Brexit referendum by members of the liberal classes in the United States and the United Kingdom. But it is active on the political Right as well, and has now exploded into full force among certain Trump supporters in their reaction to his electoral defeat.

Expect it to continue to evolve and mutate and to take many forms in the years ahead. It will change its story and its appearance, but you can always tell that it's there. Watch for the following signs: Excess emotion, especially rage; willing indulgence in fantasies of violence, which then become acts of violence; a complete lack of reflective thought. If you are sensitive to these things, you can feel its presence in a tightening in your various energy centers, as though someone were squeezing your throat or punching you in the solar plexus. You can see it in others in the glazed looks in their eyes and the incoherent justifications they give for violent actions.

Our goal, let us remember, is to live in peace. This doesn't necessarily mean an absence of physical violence. It means the subordination of all of our actions and all the contents of our minds to our spirits, our wills, and our gods. 

Let's turn back to Sun Tzu, then, with this in mind.

Our goal is to "take the enemy's country intact," not to "shatter and destroy it." What does that mean in the war for our souls?

Two things come to mind.

First, we want to be live in such a way that peace, as I've defined it, comes naturally. If we're spending time straining and struggling within ourselves, we're both suffering and wasting a ton of energy. The classic example of this, of course, is the devout and scrupulous Catholic who is trying to avoid "sexual sin" by a constant internal struggle. The result is a person who feels blocked up, constipated, and irritable, and is unable to get very much done because of all the energy they're spending trying not to think about masturbating. Even if they "win," they've done so at great cost, and have certainly "shattered and destroyed" much of the country of their own souls.

"What you resist you strengthen." Don't fight the demons and the passions by resisting them. Instead, as I've suggested before, simply do other things with your time. Things which matter and have meaning to you. Above all else, pray, meditate, and engage in spiritual practice. If you feel "tempted," don't fight against it-- use the energy to do something good with your time. 

Now let's turn to Levi, because I want to add another piece that we haven't discussed before:
 
Magnetic respiration produces a radiation around the soul of which it is the center, and it surrounds itself with the reflection of its works, which makes a Heaven or a Hell for itself. There are no solitary acts and there can be no hidden acts; all that we truly want, that is to say all of which we confirm by our acts, remains written in the astral light, where our reflections are kept; these reflections continually influence our thoughts through the mediation of the diaphane, and it is thus that we become and remain the child of our own works.
 
Our souls are not isolated units, and don't exist in a vacuum. They are more like whirlpools of astral substance. You can define the boundary between the whirlpool and the river, but both are made of the same water. It's not enough to act in isolation and pursue personal fulfillment. We have to do some work to purify the waters around us.

And how do we do that?

Let me allow another one of the great ancient masters of magic to answer that.

You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thy enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. 46For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this? And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this? 48Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect.

Today, and every day, pray for your enemies. If, like me, you're not a fan of Joe Biden or his party, today is a good day to pray for them. Don't pray that Biden will become a Republican, a Populist, a Socialist or whatever you wish he was; just pray that he will be blessed by God and guided in the presidency. If you're Christian, a candle for the guardian angel of the United States, and the Virgin Mary as patron saint of America under her title of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception would be appropriate, and doubly so since Biden is at least nominally Catholic. If pagan, an offering to Jupiter would accomplish the same thing. 

And while you're out in the world, spend your time blessing people. This is especially easy to do when you're driving, for two reasons: 1. you will encounter a lot of people and 2. most of them will make you angry. Use the energy of the guy that just cut you off to send a blessing his way, and honestly mean it. A simple "May you be blessed," is enough, if you can say it and mean it.

Finally, in addition to prayers, this is a good time to make offerings. (Actually, there's never a bad time.) If you follow the planetary deities, you can synchronize your offerings with the days of the week; Chris Warnock has details here. But you can always pick a cause you care about, invoke your God, and make a donation in their name. In this way you will increase the amount of good in the world. It will return to you, but you must do it without expectation of reward. Do good and allow yourself to love the Good for its own sake.

In these ways, we can begin to reconquer our own souls, and the Soul of the World around us.
 Today, another note from Eliphas Levi:

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?

We'll return to Sun Tzu tomorrow. Today I want to check in with our old friend, 19th century occultist Eliphas Levi. 

In Chapter 6 of Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, Levi discusses the nature of the Astral Light. The Astral Light is his term for the total collection of shared images, feelings, and impulses which act upon us as individuals and as a society. Whether or not the Astral Light "really exists" is totally immaterial to what follows. 

Levi writes:

People who renounce the empire of reason and who love losing their will in the pursuit of reflections of the astral light are subject to alternative bouts of furor and sorrow which remind us of all the wonders of demonic possession.

Does that remind you of anyone?

If you've been watching the news for the last.... ever, it should.

But now I'm talking about other people. 

I've noticed that, when I let my mind think about the news, or about politics, it does the following. First, it conjures up an image of someone on the Other Side. When I was younger and liberal, this was a conservative; now that I'm older and conservative, it's a liberal. Then it sets the image into motion; like an idiotic puppet, it repeats whatever the Other Side's propaganda line of the day is.

Freedom! 9/11! 'Murica! You're with us or with the terrorists! God, guns, and guts! Terrorists, terrorists everywhere!

Racist! Sexist! White privilege! Anything I don't like is Hitler! Russians, Russians everywhere!

I then respond by becoming angrier and angrier. Sometimes-- not always, but often enough-- may God forgive me-- I find a real-life person who reminds me just a little too much of the image in my mind, and I lash out at them. I'm always thinking that telling people how dumb they are will convert them to my cause. Somehow, it keeps never working.

This, of course, is precisely what Levi is talking about. The cartoon caricature of the Other Side is an image, reflected in the Astral Light. There are many, many such reflections, and when our minds are left to their own devices, they are led about by them like a dog on a leash. 

The Astral Light directs the animal instincts and battles against man's intelligence, which it tends to pervert through the lavishness of its reflections and the lies of its images...
 

The Astral Light-- the ideas and images that we live with-- the memes that compose our culture from moment to moment, if you like-- are always present. So what can we do to free ourself of its domination?

Levi is clear:

To isolate oneself from the Astral Light, it does not suffice to wrap oneself in woolen material; one must also, and most importantly, have achieved an absolute tranquility of the mind and heart; have left the domain of the passions; and have made sure of one's ability to keep an inflexible will while acting sincerely. One must also repeat these acts of will often, because... the will is secured only through acts, just like religions have no power or duration over time except through their ceremonies and their rites.
 
Meditation, prayer, and spiritual practice are the only methods I know for achieving this. At times like these, when the Astral Light is filled with maddening reflections driving the most ordinary people to violence, spiritual practice is especially important. Pick a God, any God-- just pick God, or the Devil will surely pick you. 



Over at her blog, my friend Violet has some very good suggestions in this regard.




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.

 

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