Now this is an important practice when done right; accepting and owning your own faults, sins and shortcomings is good and healthy, and trying to evade that acceptance stops all spiritual growth. It doesn’t take much thought to see the massive problems caused when people are unable to ever admit they have failed or done something wrong. An obsession with always having to Win and be Right is very dangerous.

However, I realized that this practice formed some long-term thought habits that have created problems for me. Given that you tend to become whatever you are focused on - you tend to find whatever you are looking for - the self-examination was teaching me to scan my life, past and present, for things that were wrong - guilt, or blame, or shame, or hurt, or anger, or fear, or anxiety. Along with daily examination of conscience this included periodic examination going back over my entire life.

This formed a thought habit in terms of how I viewed my life.

The net result is that every time I looked back at my life, what came to mind is everything that was wrong with it - every placed I have sinned, or fallen short, or feel guilt or shame. I have been carefully training myself to do that for years now.

What I realized is that, by this point in time, looking over the landscape of my life was like looking over Hiroshima the day after the bomb hit. It was a smoking crying wasteland, and I could immediately bring to mind everything I had done wrong, everywhere I felt ashamed or guilty, every time anyone had hurt me or frightened me or made me angry or...

And there in the middle of the scene of my life, blocking the view, was this massive pile of filth, of sh*t - everything I felt bad about, all the ways I screwed up, all my failures and weak points and wounds. That is a distinct streak I have noticed in much Catholic and East Orthodox spiritual writing - an awareness of God’s holiness combined with a focus bordering on obsession with one’s own unworthiness and filth - I remember one Orthodox text in particular how often the writer kept returning to his own filth, repeating it over and over like a mantram.

The Catholic tradition East and West is very good for focusing on your sinfulness, but not good at all for getting past it and moving on. You get down on your knees and never really get up again.

And that is what I could see in my own life - this massive mountain of my own filth.

But, over time, especially since leaving the Church, something has changed.

By now it was a pile of compost.

Why? Because I’d been turning it, over and over in my mind, to the point that it was processed and over-processed. It was ripe and over-ripe, more than ready for me to quit obsessing about it and move on.

At this point I realized I needed to break that habit of scanning my life for everything that was wrong with the world and with me.

Practice of Gratitude

Here is where I realized I need to make a conscious choice to view things differently. It came to me that I should make an effort to look at my life through the lens of gratitude, and make that my practice.

Gratitude exercises - thinking of things that I am grateful for, starting with right here and now.

Interestingly, whenever I start thinking about gratitude I always start with my body here and now - I’ve got some physical issues but for the most part I really like how I feel now - relaxed, calm, flexible. If I happen to be feeling pain it doesn’t take much to be grateful for the fact I am here and can feel. At rock-bottom minimum there is always the gratitude for the sheer miracle that I exist and am consciousness.

In the Hindu tradition it is said that the core of existence is sat-chit-ananda - being, consciousness, bliss. The bliss of the sheer fact of being, and being conscious. Think about that.

I realized that, to be fully grateful, I have to be fully in my body awareness. That brings me out of my head and back into present tense experience. Even just looking around the room I am in I can find a wealth of things to be grateful for - everything I feel, and hear, and see, the home I’m in, the breakfast I just had, the people walking past my window with their children and pets - those thousand little things that are so precious if you pay attention.

So it occurs to me, as I dwell on gratitude, that it is time for me to go back over my life and look for the people and events I am grateful for.

Please note carefully that I do not mean where I “succeeded” or was “good”, but where I am grateful for the experience and can look back on it with thankfulness. Whether the world would judge it as “successful” or a “win” or not makes no difference to me. I’m not looking for pride or self-satisfaction, but acceptance and gratitude.

And wow, is that opening up a treasure! I can already tell, from just starting to work this discipline, that there are dozens of situations I can think of, some spanning years, that I am just wildly grateful I was able to experience.

And meanwhile there is this massive pile of compost blocking my view. Something needed to be done with that.

Enter Ganesha

I’m in the habit of starting my day with japa, or mantram meditation, using a mala or string of 108 beads. I also do rosary meditation and have for a long time, so this is not particularly a Hindu thing for me. It is a style of prayer I find very rewarding. Taking a simple short prayer or phrase and repeating it over and over has a compelling power.

This particular morning I was doing japa to Ganesha, the Hindu elephant-headed god, remover of obstacles. He grabbed my attention recently, and I find that doing his mantram consistently makes me smile and brightens my mood.

So this morning I was chanting to Ganesha as usual, when lo and behold, he shows up in my minds eye in front of me, driving a massive earth-moving bulldozer - headed right for the mountain of compost.

As I sat there chanting I watched Ganesha bulldoze that mountain of compost off a cliff and into a ravine, where it could settle into the earth and take part in the renewal cycle it was intended for.

That cleared the mountain blocking the view out of my way, and the sun was shining.

Practicing Gratitude

It is clear to me now that I have my exercise for the near future mapped out for me - to go back over my life with the filter of gratitude, looking for people and experiences I am grateful for. I already know there is a lot there for me to relish.

My goal is to get to a point where I can look at everything that ever happened to me and everyone in my life - including all of my own past history and actions - and feel simple gratitude for it. There are many situations where the clearing from the previous self-examination will be crucial for me to get to that point of complete forgiveness, loving acceptance and gratitude.

That may take me awhile, but I’m in no rush.

Saint Paul says that we are to rejoice and give thanks in all things. I am just barely beginning to get what he means by that.

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Photo: Marcin Konsek, Singapur, Little India, Świątynia Sri Veeramakaliamman, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
Matthew 7:1-2

This post is a built around one of the most basic rules of mental and magical hygiene - anything sent out recoils on the sender.

What you put out, you get back. Another way to put it is, you become what you think about - or better, you become what you focus on or obsess about - even if it is something or someone you hate.

Especially if it is something or someone you hate.

This works on the individual level; it also applies to the collective level.

We live in a media-dominated society, and media is all about shaping public thought to get people to act and react in particular ways. That is what advertising is all about, and by now the “news” is actually more accurately described as influencing propaganda.

You can think of media influence this way as a form of magical spell-casting or sorcery. I’m not using that comparison to make it sound exotic or mysterious. It is pretty widely recognized by now that the guidelines of modern advertising and influence parallel, and likely draw on, the tradition of Western Renaissance magical techniques. The classic book on the subject is by Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. More recently there is Mauricio Loza’s The Hounds of Actaeon: The Magical Origins of Public Relations and Modern Media.

There are different kinds of spells; some empower people, others seek to manipulate and control. Either way the basic rule applies that whatever you put out, you get back. What you do unto others is done unto you in return.

If you bless others you receive blessing in return. If you curse others the curse recoils back on you. You can take that word curse and euphemize it as influence, or persuasion, but the same rule applies. How you influence others determines how you in turn are influenced.

If you are uncomfortable with the word spell or curse, substitute the word psyop - they mean the same thing.

---

What I am concerned with today is the ongoing, sustained magical persuasion curse being placed on Russia by the media in the US and Europe.

A curse? Yup. Much or most of the media coverage about Russia is highly negative, and often has no relation to the actual state of affairs in Russia. It is all about painting the state of Russia in the most dire and negative terms possible. The motive is to take down the existing Russian government order. That is as negative an intent as you can get; I’d call that a curse.

Remember, you get back what you put out. Especially with curses where the victim manages to fend off the attack, the curse then recoils back on the head of the sender.

Here is how the Western media has been portraying Russia since the war began in 2022.

- The head of government is increasingly unpopular and is losing the support and respect of the people. The government is showing imminent signs of collapse.

- The economy is very unstable, having frequent shortages and climbing prices, and is showing signs of collapse.

- There is increasing division and unrest among the people, with large demonstrations and increasing violent incidents. There is increasingly harsh crackdown on protests and suppression of public opinion and dissent.

- The military is overextended and showing signs of collapse.

(hmm... does any of this seem at all familiar?)

What I am describing here is the main, party-line narrative about Russia put out by the main media in the US and Europe pretty much since the war began. If you take time to check news sources outside of the US and Western Europe it quickly becomes obvious that this is deliberate falsity, a psyop meant to demoralize and destroy. Recently, if anything it seems to have become more shrill and violent, exaggerated almost to the point of parody.

If you know anything about casting negative spells, aka curses, aka psyops, when they start to reach the point of shrill self-parody, that is a sign that the spell is collapsing, losing its effectiveness and recoiling on its senders.

Given the basic rule of mental and magical hygiene, that what you put out is what you get back, it is worth pondering what the US and Western Europe are drawing down on themselves by making this sustained media attack on Russia.

Think, and look around.

---

As it turns out I am moved to write this piece on July 4, 2026, our country’s 250th anniversary. With that in mind I would like to raise a toast:

America, may you get back from the world what you put out.

I realize that, by wishing this on the US, I am wishing it on myself. I am aware of that, and I welcome it.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
-Matthew 7:3-5

I am spending much of my time these days working on the beam in my own eye.

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Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

- I have never watched the films of the 9/11 planes hitting the Twin Towers in New York.

- I have never watched the videos of George Floyd’s death.

- I avoided all videos of Charlie Kirk’s killing.

- I am avoiding all videos of the recent Minnesota shooting.

This is quite deliberate, and I want to talk about why.

---

By now I take it as a given that a high percentage of mainstream media news reporting is there for persuasion purposes - to get me to gut-level react a particular way.

That is why I ingest all my news in text form.

Videos, especially well planned videos, can have a visceral, gut-level emotional impact that it is quite hard to over-ride by conscious thought. It can have a sort of emotional trauma effect.

It can also create an instant, gut-level sense of complete conviction, the sense you are 100% sure you know what really happened - when you’re actually reacting to an emotional hit. That is hard to over-ride once the impact has been made.

I don’t want to let media mess with my mind that way.

With text it is much easier to keep a sense of distance and perspective, and to question what I am reading - it takes work, but it can be done.

I don’t trust mainstream media. They have a long, long track record of misleading, manipulating and lying for political agendas. I do not want to expose my mind to that.

Therefore, I make a point of getting my news from multiple sources, from places whose integrity I have learned to trust from experience.

And, I read my news. This gives me a better chance to step back, get perspective and think.

Is this a perfect strategy? No, but it gives me more of a chance to actually be able to think about the news I ingest, and choose my response.

I choose to eat a healthy diet, and I don’t put poison in my body. I don’t want to let media put poison in my mind.

---

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images</a> from Pixabay.

MINNESOTA SHOOTING JUST HAPPENS TO OCCUR RIGHT WHEN IT COULD DRIVE THE MINNESOTA FINANCIAL CORRUPTION SCANDAL OFF THE FRONT PAGE

And as far as I can tell it worked like a charm - both sides are screaming about the shooting.

Given that the news cycle has an attention span shorter than the average housefly, anything more than two days old is ancient history unless the screaming is renewed daily.

Score one for the progressive left - nice job.

So, lest we forget:

In my previous post - The Kingdom of the Heavens - I talked about a unitive state of consciousness - a state of consciousness that is within me, and within all, and that is omnipresent and connects all. If you read Whitman's Leaves of Grass, or Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy they give a good feel for what that is like, and they talk of it in a way that they are inside all, see all people and accept all, connect with all, and connect with a sense of oneness that is eternal and a feeling sense and knowing that one is immortal.

In another of his books Edward Carpenter has a very elegant scheme of consciousness going through three distinct stages, that I find very useful for understanding my own experience.

The first stage you can call animal consciousness. It is not reflexive or self aware, but alive and aware in a way that is still linked to the world around it - a sort of natural felt sense of oneness.

The second stage is our normal human state, what you could call ego consciousness. This is where you think of yourself as a separate person or "I" residing in a separate body, and out there is the world, which includes other people who are separate from you. There is no sense of the oneness, but instead a sense of manyness, of self and otherness, of subject-perception-object. This is the world we live in where we have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Carpenter's idea is that we are moving towards a new third state, that has been attained by many people throughout human history, but is not the norm. He uses the term cosmic consciousness; I prefer calling it Unitive Consciousness. This a known sense of oneness, where you experience and know that subject and object are one, that we are all part of a larger whole and in some way each of us contains the whole. This is not theoretical, it is experiential, and it can be cultivated.

Here is Carpenter's description of that state. This is from his book The Art of Creation.

Finally, with the complete antagonism of subject and object, of 'self' and 'matter,' and all the antagonisms which follow in its wake — of intellect and emotion, the individual and society, and so forth — and the terrible disruptions of life and society which ensue — comes the third stage.

When the illusion of separation is complete and the man has sounded the depths of grief and pain which accompany this illusion, then, one day, often suddenly, the third form of Consciousness dawns, or flashes, upon him — that which has been called the Cosmic, or universal, Consciousness.

The object suddenly is seen, is felt, to be one with the self. The reconciliation is effected. The long process of differentiation comes to an end, and reintegration takes its place. The knower, the knowledge, and the thing known are once more one — " Objects turn round upon themselves with an exceedingly innocent air, but are visibly not the same."

This form of Consciousness is the only true knowledge — it is the only true existence. And it is a matter of experience ; it has been testified to in all parts of the world and in all ages of history. There is a consciousness in which the subject and the object arc felt, are known, to be united and one — in which the Self is felt to be the object perceived ("I am the hounded slave"), or at least in which the subject and the object are felt to be parts of the same being, of the same including Self of all. And it is the only true knowledge.

---

I find this framework very useful because it gives me a sense of where I am now, and the direction I want to be heading - towards an increased sense of this Unitive Consciousness, this awareness that we are all one. This also gives me guidelines, a framework I can use to make choices - how I see the world, how I think of and treat others and myself. I can choose to think and respond to the world in a way that takes this Oneness to be the truth of who we are.

I think this is particularly important and useful today in our media dominated world that has reached a state of unhealthy emotional and ideological hysteria, a state of mind that breeds anxiety, fear, panic, self-righteous rage and hatred. It also breeds a great deal of political polarization. That sort of atmosphere is not conducive to any sense of oneness, of health or of peace; quite the opposite.

This framework of moving towards a sense of Oneness gives me guidelines for disciplining my mind and emotions, include my reaction to any news media. I have to back off, think things over, and consciously choose how I wish to respond rather than getting caught up in knee-jerk emotional hysteria that sweeps away any reasoned thought in a tide of reckless emotion.

For me to do this I find that I increasingly need to distance myself from news and social media, spend much less time online, and be very cautious about what news media I do consume. Since there is a mass mind, group hysteria effect I find this means I need a good amount of time alone, with Internet and media turned off - time to think, to read, to reflect, to meditate, to pray. I need that quiet time to let the hysteria subside so that I can think clearly and choose what state of mind I wish to cultivate.

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I have gotten just enough of a touch of this sense of oneness in prayer experiences I have had that I recognize what Carpenter is talking about. I don't live in that state all the time, nor do I think I have mastered or fully understand it, but I have enough experience to go on to recognize it. I also find that I touch that state most often, and understand it best, when I cultivate quiet prayer time.

It seems to me that my task now is to continue to develop and nurture that sense of oneness, let it permeate more of my identity, and move my sense of self increasingly in that direction. I want to be acting more and more from a knowledge that we really are all one, all connected, and that anything I do to anyone else I also do to myself. This means cultivating a state of mind where the love of God, love of neighbor and love of myself all merge together and are essentially one at their root. This is not platitude, this is reality.

I think that sense of oneness and universal compassion is very badly needed in the world today. Frankly I think being able to cultivate that state of oneness and sympathy, and to act from that state, is an increasingly important survival skill to navigate the very turbulent times we are living in. I am doing what I can to help move the world in that direction by taking responsibility for and cultivating the one garden I have control over - the garden of my own consciousness.

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Photo by SoulRiser, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

The old nature spirits became the new demons.

We have warring spiritual hierarchies, and the net effect is to de-sacralize nature, our bodies and the world, and to put a split in reality. In this post I am starting to explore ways to heal that split and re-sacralize our lives in Nature.

I am experimenting in this post., since what I am speaking of here comes from my prayer life. I want to try to describe realizations that arise from my prayer experience as a way of pointing ways that we can re-enliven our connection to the world and make prayer the sort of vibrant and empowering reality it should be.

I do not think I am doing anything new here, but rather recovering a connection that should be there and has been lost. These thoughts are from having prayed these basic prayers, over and over, and really paying attention to what the words say - to realize the promise contained in the prayers.

The Spiritual Hierarchy Connection

The spiritual hierarchy, the host of angels, spirits, what the Greeks called daimons, are the living connections in consciousness between us humans and nature, between us and the divine. I am learning in my prayer that these spirits communicate with us, and we with them, through a certain kind of inner feeling. which is an inner connection to the living world around us. We become more connected to the outer by getting in touch with the inner through cultivating this inner feeling sense.

I think the Christian church tradition made a really big mistake in setting up their angelic hierarchy as over against the natural "pagan" hierarchy of living spirits, Daimons, which they re-labeled Demons. This also set the Christian religion over against all other religions and spiritual paths, and the bloody cost of that throughout our history has been brutal and ugly.

The single most important task today is for us to heal that split in our minds and in the world, and to acknowledge that the Christian hierarchy of angels is the same as the "pagan" hierarchy of daimons etc. Historically that makes sense - in an earlier post I pointed out how the Catholic angelic hierarchy, through Dionysius the Areopagite, has its origins in the Neoplatonist or "pagan" hierarchy of daimons.

Healing this split involves recognizing that the world around us is filled with living divine forces - in nature, in our bodies, in the larger world of the heavens and in the cosmos. It is all of a piece and all alive. so instead of us being cut off from a dead world outside of us, or attacking a demonic world besieging us, we are communing with a living host of angelic spirits.

The Kingdom of the Heavens

I want to look closer at the crucial Christian concept of the Kingdom of God, or Kingdom of the Heavens - the two phrases refer to the same reality.

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them, and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.
Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
- Luke 17:20-21, KJV

The Greek translated "within you" here can also be translated, "among you" or "in the midst of you". I think we need all three senses to get the full meaning.

I think this is the pivot concept here to getting a feel for this state of consciousness. You need to keep all meanings in mind at the same time - the Kingdom is within and among and in the midst of. (I will refer to the Kingdom as That here to resonate with another tradition.) That is within me and I am within That, and That also includes the entire world. Very importantly, That also includes all other people, and we are one with That and with other people in our hearts. That oneness is within and without.

Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven are synonyms, and Heaven would more accurately be translated, The Heavens, meaning the sky above us, and it is important to keep that physical connection in mind. Instead of Kingdom, it may help to think of Realm or Domain or state of consciousness. This is something we are constantly surrounded with, inside and out, and it is a matter of opening our inner spiritual living eyes, AND our physical eyes and senses, to this dimension.

The Kingdom of the Heavens is not meant to refer to a separate spiritual location Up There somewhere - a sort of separate spiritual city like a celestial Cleveland we go to after death - but rather a dimension of the world we live in now that surrounds and interpenetrates us. Jesus here is trying to point to something present and ready to be recognized. Take some time to consider the Parables of the Kingdom throughout the Gospels, and I think you will find that they make far more sense that way.

Through prayer we connect to the Divine Realm which is a living active presence within us, and without us, and in the midst of us, we in it and it in us. That art Thou and Thou art That

The Divine in Nature and Our Bodies

In my experience the critical thing is re-connecting to the divinity in the natural world and in our bodies, and not just in an abstract or spiritual sense. In that context, prayer is not an offering to a being in an other world separate from us and Up There Somewhere, but a connection to living divine forces. It is definitely an inner connection, but it is a connection from within to without and without to within - the without is out there and in here at the same time - again, think of the three levels of the Kingdom, within/among/in-the-midst.

This is recovering in a higher, self-reflexive aware sort of way, a natural connection that is always there, but gets lost as we mature and think of ourselves as separate individuals with other people being part of a world Out There. I think this sort of connection is there at one level in our animal selves, and here we are seeking to renew the living contact at a higher self-aware level. It is a sort of spiritual awareness coming of age.

The Orthodox Trisagion Prayer

I want to approach this same realm using the opening of the Trisagion prayer that is ubiquitously used throughout East Orthodox liturgy, one that I have prayed and meditated on many, many times Consider taking these words seriously and listen to what they are saying.

Oh heavenly King, the Comforter, the spirit of Truth, who are everywhere present and fills all things, treasury of blessings and giver of life, come, and abide in us, cleanse us of all impurities, and save our souls, O gracious Lord.

Everywhere present.

Fills all things.

Giver of Life.

Spirit of truth, intelligent, alive.

Comforter, strengthener.

Take those words seriously.

From praying that prayer over and over, and praying into those words, I get a sense of an all-encompassing, benevolent and living intelligence that I exist within the way a fish lives within water.

That is within me - my consciousness contains That presence - and this also means there is a sense that my consciousness, when I connect with That, is everywhere present and fills all things. That is not someone upstairs I pray to, That is a living presence I am surrounded with and one with.

That is within us. That is also among us and in the midst of us, meaning that this presence, this consciousness, binds us all together - so when we are in the world, with other people, or even just out among plants, stones and sky, there is That which binds us together, makes us one, and That is within me and I am within That.

Walking Prayer

I am experimenting with praying this prayer slowly and mindfully while I am out walking, having the heavens above me, and passing grass, trees, flowers, stones, bushes, all kinds of plants, squirrels, rabbits, other people...

I become conscious of the whole world around me - my mind reaches up and out to the skies - and it binds me to the living things around me. I pay attention to the trees, and since they are alive I take time to look at them, wonder at them, bless them and talk to them - and also to listen to them, pay attention to them. There is a certain inner feeling sense where I think we are connected and communicate.

Interestingly, as I pray this way and let my consciousness expand, I become very sensitive to the feel of my body and all my senses.

Since I have been doing this as a prayer discipline the net result is that when I walk I am surrounded with a wildly alive and vibrant world, and am passing among living family. The familiar trees start to feel like good friends, and it feels like common courtesy to greet them as I pass. Even when I pass houses that are bordered with large stones - not cement bricks but actual rocks naturally formed in the earth - I get the sense of these stones being living presences that are watching me in their own slow, deep way.

Interestingly, when I walk in this state of mind I am much more likely to have people I pass smile and greet me, and sometimes stop and talk a bit. I am signaling an openness to the world, and people respond to that.

What binds us together here is feeling. a sort of seeing-by-feeling. There is a correlation or connection between feeling, and not exactly inner images but definite sensations I can understand as a kind of communication.

I think of the plants, trees, stones and so on as being living spirits, or as having living spirits. You could think of these as the spirits or angels of the trees, the spirits of flowers, and so on - and I do not mean that as pretty poetic images but as describing actual real living intelligences. There are spirits of the trees and bushes, spirits of the air and the earth...

With plants and stones, and with rivers, and natural bodies of water, there are nature spirits - if you pay attention it is obvious they are alive, you can communicate with them, and that they respond to your attitude towards them - and again, the connection is from within through feeling - I experience feelings as being within me but they can indeed be communications from "outside" of me - though when you talk about feeling the whole concept of inside and outside doesn't really apply - and that is part of the point.

The world is filled with living spirits, including us. We are constantly passing in the midst of angels and are often unaware.

The Lord's Prayer - the Sun and the Son

Consider now the opening phrase of the Lord's prayer:

Our Father who art in the Heavens

If you start with the most obvious literal meaning that is referring to the Sun, Lord of the Heavens, and to the Heavens themselves. In giving this a spiritual meaning it is very important to keep it connected to the obvious physical meaning.

When Jesus says, I and the Father are one, in one sense He is saying that He is the Sun - and when he says the Kingdom of God is within you, there is a sense that the Sun is also within you, in the heart. We are stretching language to the point where words become paraoxical since they are not designed to carry this level of meaning. That is why Jesus speaks in parables and images since they give us a way to get past the limitations of literal language.

This Kingdom of God or Kingdom of the Heavens can be experienced as an actual living realm - a field of alive and conscious energy - so I am not praying to someone Up there or Out there - but to Someone who reaches me through the Sun in a very real way - and the Heavens then are a kind of omnipresent unifying consciousness I am part of.

The Father is the Sun - this is the physical Sun, and at the same time the Sun stands for something greater, and in yet another sense the Sun is a kind of portal or connection, a symbol or sacrament for some greater power that enlivens us, physically, but not just physically. This is not Sun worship in a reductionist materialist sense, but more like recognizing the Sun is something greater than just the physical Sun - and the physical world is something much, much more than just the physical world.

---

There is a whole other dimension of spiritual life there that Jesus points to in the Lord's Prayer and the Parables of the Kingdom.

it is far, far safer and more real to give worship to the Sun as giver of life than to sever the connection between the physical Sun and God for fear of idolatry.

With these words we are praying to attain an awareness of that state of consciousness where we realize the living oneness. We are praying to regain a sense of that greater order, and to order our lives to it.

How would you live and act - how would you think of yourself, others and the world around you - if you constantly were aware of yourself as inhabiting the Kingdom of the Heavens?

Image by Alex Bennett from Pixabay.

This post is a sequel to my previous essay in which I talked about Oswald Spengler's book, The Decline of the West.

In Spengler's context, we are late in the life cycle of our culture which has now progressed, or aged, or decayed into a Civilization. We are largely urban based, cut off from Nature, and materialist, cut off from any larger living spiritual context.

Our civilization is rationalist in the sense that it recognizes nothing higher than human reason as guidepost or standard. We have reached a point that we lack roots in anything other than ourselves and our own isolated human minds.

Consider how thoroughly we are lacking roots in nature. We are cut off from walking on the living earth - insulated by concrete roads, by rubber soled footwear, by floors, buildings and platforms. We are isolated from natural water, which reaches us through municipal water utilities, or filtered, processed, and bottled - or to natural living foods sans processing, preservatives, additives etc. It is an entirely artificial world in the sense of being artifice, crafted by human ingenuity and technology.

This rationalist, materialist, and technological world is a kind of isolated artificial bubble cut off from anything real - isolated from any god or divine power above or within us, isolated from the earth below us, isolated from the people around us. There is an apparent sense of freedom that rooted cultures do not have, but it comes at a high price - a tension, a lack of rootedness, of insecurity and of isolation.

Even further, we are isolated and insulated by layers of techno reality - computer, iphone, tv, radio - an artificial media reality that is its own world that many people spend the majority of their waking time engaging with.

It is an artificial world, a product of artifice, human created devices. It gives some freedoms, but they come at a high price.

it is a brutally hard and unnatural way of life - it has a peculiar artificial emptiness, and people choose different ways of coping with it, some mindful but most mindless.

The Second Religiousness

What happens to religion in an artificial, materialist context like that? I want to quote from Spengler here, talking about what he calls the Second Religiousness.

Throughout this essay the quotes from Spengler are in italics, while my comments are regular font. All highlighting and emphasis throughout are mine.

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Materialism would not be complete without the need of now and again easing the intellectual tension, by giving way to moods of myth, by performing rites of some sort, or by enjoying with an Inward Iight-heartedness the charms of the irrational, the unnatural, the repulsive, and even, if need be, the merely silly.

And that "merely silly" can include things like - religious rites. They are not the same in our urban materialist civilization that they are in a young vibrant culture - they lack roots, they lack context, and often there is an element of a kind of routine of nostalgia, a wanting to believe rather than a simple unselfconscious belief.

We are not the first civilization in history to have this dilemma.

The Isis-cult in Republican Rome was something very different both from the emperor-worship that succeeded it and from the deeply earnest Isis-religion of Egypt. It was a religious pastime of high society, which at times provoked public ridicule and at times led to public scandal and the closing of the cult-centres.

The Chaldean astrology was in those days a fashion, very far removed from the genuine Classical belief in oracles and from the Magian faith in the might of the hour. It was “relaxation," a “let’s pretend". And, over and above this, there were the numberless charlatans and fake prophets who toured the towns and sought with their pretentious rites to persuade the half-educated to a renewed interest in religion.

Correspondingly, we have in the European-American world of to-day the occultist and theosophist fraud, the American Christian Science, the untrue Buddhism of drawing-rooms, the religious arts-and-crafts business (brisker in Germany than even in England) that caters for groups and cults of Gothic or Late Classical or Taoist sentiment.

I confess that I cringed inside when I read that last paragraph.

Take into account that Spengler wrote these words over a hundred years ago. He describes the world I have lived in for most of my life - of "New Age" and Theosophy, of New Thought and Positive Thinking, of the various neo-pagan and feminist-pagan movements - the world of crystals and tarot cards and astrology. We were playing like kids after hours let loose in a toy store. My house is littered with artifacts of "the religious arts-and-crafts business".

There is a "let's pretend" aspect to this - I think of it as LARPing or Live Action Role Playing, as in Dungeons and Dragons fantasy world games. That is what a lot of the New Age and pagan ritual I participated in felt like - LARPing. Let's play Pagan!

What I did not realize until much later is how very shallow a lot of it was, and how thoroughly it was corrupted by whatever the political and cultural fad of the moment happened to be. For example, to be into tarot and astrology meant you were pagan and feminist and progressive and democrat and anti-capitalist - all trendy political issues that have nothing to do with any religion or worship, but often infiltrate and even take over the spiritual practice.

This artificial, Let's Pretend, LARP quality is bigger than just the area of religion - by now that fake shallow "let's pretend" quality applies to many other parts of our lives. I increasingly get the feeling that something is off or fake here, but we play along and don't say that out loud. In many ways we are living in a Let's Pretend world. and that is enormously stressful as it is not grounded in anything real.

Everywhere it as just a toying with myths that no one really believes, a tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real belief is always the belief in atoms and numbers, but it requires this highbrow hocus-pocus to make it bearable in the long run. Materialism is shallow and honest, mock-religion shallow and dishonest.

But the fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly, but soon emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking-consciousness.

He is on to something important here - for all its shallowness the New Age and pagan movements, and the various sorts of alternative spirituality outside of the mainstream churches, were and are an expression of a real spiritual hunger, of an inner emptiness that needs filling - and we tried, and try, to fill it in the only ways we know. For many people the traditional churches leave them empty, which is why they search elsewhere.

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This next phase I call the Second Religiousness. It appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which time-periods cease to mean anything.

I think he means time periods like life phases, where we forget we are part of a living culture that ages and changes, and starts thinking of itself as everlasting, as if the current situation will last into perpetuity.

This is evident in some versions of fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. There is a lack of any sense of historic context, and the belief that the way one is thinking and acting is True in this form for all time. There is no awareness of how very different this modern form of worship is from earlier historical periods of Christian faith and belief.

Churches and religions are living entities and are part of the Civilizations that are their context. And, as with all living entities, Religions and Churches grow, flourish, age, decline, decay, and die or morph into something else. It is very easy to forget that and to think that your church, and your way of understanding and practicing that, are timeless and eternal.

This is one of the really important insights that are possible in a late stage civilization: There is no eternal unchanging Church or religious Truth, and coming to terms with historical context is complex and difficult.

In both phenomena the creative young strength of the Early Culture is lacking. But both have their greatness nevertheless. That of the Second Religiousness consists in a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness.

But neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of the Roman Imperium is there anything primary and spontaneous. Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itself — it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness — only otherwise experienced and expressed.

This is important.

The sort of naive, unself-conscious, whole-hearted religious belief characteristic of a young and growing Culture is no longer possible today. We lack the roots, we lack the context, we lack the support from the culture around us, and from all of the rest of our lives.

There is a sincere piety, motivation, a wanting to believe - but it is hard for that belief to have depth when it exists in an environment cut off from its own depths. It's like trying to talk yourself into being convinced about something - not quite at ease, natural, relaxed, secure.

This explains a sort of incoherent and rootless shallowness that I experienced in Catholic churches - people were going through the motions of worship, often quite sincerely, - and yet there were ways that how they act contradicted what they claimed to be doing.

It starts with Rationalism’s fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.

There are two important points here. The first is an attempt at a return to the roots or early core of the faith. We see that in the rigid and fundamentalist/materialist strictness of a lot of the Christian revival going on now. The motive is good but there is an element of a sort of desperate nostalgia there, wanting to return to the security of the faith but lacking the roots and context. There is a rigidity, a rules driven mentality, a defensiveness and a sort of brittleness - and also a tendency to mistake specific details for the roots of the living faith - again, well meaning and sincere, but unstable.

There is also a strong moralistic, rules driven side, and even that gets narrowed - for instance, a lot of new conservative christian spokespeople act as though the core of their faith consisted of forbidding sex outside of marriage. Look at how often that topic come up and get harped on.

There's another side that Spengler calls a 'popular syncretism', and I think there are healthy and unhealthy forms of that. At its worst, you see this in a lot of current mainstream christian liturgy, including Catholic. There is a kind of faceless, bland smooshing of things together and blurring of details so as not to offend anyone. The current Catholic liturgy is not quite Catholic and not quite Protestant, not quite traditional and not quite modern, not quite anything definite, and vague around the edges - it ends up satisfying few while trying to offend no-one.

I think there can be a healthy syncretism, but it involves keeping what is strong and distinct in your own faith while acknowledging what is distinct and worthwhile in other traditions. That takes a high level of self-awareness and tolerance.

There is a genuine searching here, a genuine spiritual hunger, an attempt at return to the roots, to a living core. That is not easy to do in a thoughtful way in our late godless civilization. The places we would traditionally look, the churches and religious leaders, are part of a structure that is corrupted, watered down and out of focus.

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Every “Age of Enlightenment" proceeds from an unlimited optimism of the reason — always associated with the type of the megalopolitan — to an equally unqualified skepticism. The sovereign waking-consciousness, cut off by walls and artificialities from living nature and the land about it and under it, cognizes nothing outside itself. It applies criticism to its imaginary world, which it has cleared of everyday sense-experience, and continues to do so till it has found the last and subtlést result, the form of the form — itself, namely, nothing.

With this the possibilities of physics as a critical mode of world-understanding are exhausted, and the hunger for metaphysics presents itself afresh. But it is not the religious pastimes of educated and literature-soaked cliques, still less is it the intellect, that gives rise to the Second Religiousness.

Its source is the naive belief that arises, unremarked but spontaneous, among the masses that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality (as to which formal proofs are presently regarded as barren and tiresome word-jugglery), and an equally naive heart-need reverently responding to the myth with a cult.

I think he is describing the kind of traditional religious renewal that Dostoevsky was looking for. He hoped for a renewal of Russian Orthodoxy from the Russian peasantry, the common people rather than the educated intelligentsia... but the irony is that Dostoevsky himself is part of this intelligentsia, as am I - and as is Oswald Spengler himself.

Even among us educated intelligentsia, I think there is a mixture of a sincere motive and a kind of pious yearning, combined with often superficial forms. It is difficult to give that pious yearning a living depth of form, and it takes a lot of conscious hard work to do so.

The closest thing I can see here in the West is a sort of neo-evangelical Christian revival, but that is compromised by political agendas - as is pretty much everything in our civilization today.

Where Do I Belong?

I want to wrap up these reflections on a personal note.

In my case, my roots and heritage are Catholic Christian, but I have learned that I am not at home in the church.

I have a living faith and a living prayer life, which is getting more real and vivid as I get older, but it transcends the borders of the Church. It has to be open-minded, and I have to balance honoring the tradition with my own independent judgment. I am increasingly aware that the God I worship transcends any of the prayers I use or the ways I think about it.

I think there is a need for the Church itself be critiqued - both by its own history and the fruits thereof, and by the witness of other spiritual traditions - and by being open to admitting they have made some fundamental mistakes, not superficial but fundamental. The Catholic Church does not seem to be ready to openly own that it is not the last or only word, and that other world philosophies and religions have something equally valid to offer.

Meanwhile, I continue to pray, and to search, and to think things through as honestly as I am able.

The title of this essay is the name of the most important work by German historian and philosopher, Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West was first published a little over a century ago, near the end of the first world war. I still find his system to be the most useful overall framework I have found for understanding what is going on in the world during my lifetime.

It is a rich, dense, poetic and evocative work, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Briefly - countries and cultures are best understood as living beings, and they have life phases just as biological creatures do - birth, childhood and youth, early maturity and flowering, decline, senility and death. Our current Western civilization, which you could call Euro-Anglo-American, is far into the period of decline, a process that takes centuries.

In Spengler 's terminology a Culture describes the young and mature years, still rooted to a land and a people, and with a living vibrant spiritual and religious structure. The late phase he calls Civilization, marked by increased urbanization, loss of roots, and increased self-consciousness, and a loss of coherent values. Here in the West we transitioned from Culture to Civilization a few centuries ago.

Each great world civilization has a characteristic worldview or metaphor that acts like a framing filter giving structure and meaning. Our Euro-Anglo-American he calls Faustian, based on the physical metaphor of infinite space and time, and of infinite expansion in all directions. In our late stage Faustian culture we are seeing the results of vast expansion now growing thin and weak, over-extended and starting to collapse in on itself. It is a useful metaphor, and it explains all kinds of things.

Spengler's great historical structure has been the underlying framework for how I make sense of the world for at least a couple of decades now, and it gets richer as I get older.

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When I look over all of the various topics I find important, they make most sense if I view them in a framework of old age and decline. It applies at all levels for me, including personally.

It applies to understanding where America is now, as part of the larger Euro-Anglo-American civilization in decline.

It applies to the Western Christian Churches, especially the Catholic church that I have been involved with in the last few years. A lot of things about the Roman church make sense if you view it as an aging structure in decline, and that perspective gives a way to understand and criticize the Church today.

It applies to our late stage Western technological economy and civilization. I think that even the current infatuation with AI is not a symptom of a grand new breakthrough to a new level but a sign of late stage decline, including the increasing disparity between overhyped promises and actual implementation that is so very characteristic of our now overblown Faustian attitude.

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Take this framework - a late stage civilization in decline - and I think it points out the kinds of issues we need to deal with to navigate the changes coming in the following decades.

The great need in America now - we are a country in decline and we had best admit it and deal with it. That includes admitting our weaknesses, our errors, and what I am tempted to call our phoniness and overblown arrogant hubris. It takes a great deal of courage and integrity to admit when you are wrong and failing and to deal with it, and at least so far I do not see anyone in our political life that has that level of integrity and just plain guts.

With the Western Christian churches, especially the Roman Catholic, Her situation makes most sense viewed as a church late in its life cycle and is in decline. This is a time of examination of conscience for the Church, admitting where She has gone wrong and dealing with the fact that She is neither Infallible nor Immortal, and coming to terms with that.

And - for me personally at age 73 it means dealing with the increasingly intrusive signs of my aging and decline.

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What kinds of activities are appropriate in decline, in old age?

Above anything else it is a period self-examination and reflection; of examination of conscience, with a pronounced. level of self-honesty, admitting my strengths and my flaws, the things I have done right and wrong. This means admitting, and accepting, who I now am - and in my own experience now I think the gracefully accepting is the hardest part.

I maintain that this same perspective & framework is exactly what the US as a country needs to be doing now, because the dilemmas we are in can only be dealt with if we face and admit them.

This includes admitting where we have made mistakes, big mistakes - admitting we are neither invulnerable nor everlasting - and, admitting the things we can no longer do.

That is a characteristic weakness of our time now - the inability to admit that we can ever be wrong - that we have made mistakes - that we have lost - and that the posture that we still rule the world, and that we are still the great power that the entire globe looks up to and trembles - that stance has gone past the point of being empty posturing to being a kind of self-caricature.

This is also a time of dis-illusionment, of admitting the places our stance is phony.

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I don't want to concentrate here on political issues - it is not my strong point, and there are many, many other good writers and reporters doing a far better job than I ever could.

I wanted to touch on it here as part of the overall framework that I find useful for understanding what is happening in the world today.

In the coming essays I want to concentrate on the Christian Church, especially the Catholic Church. I am Christian, and the great Christian prayers and symbols are deeply wired into my heart and gut, for better or worse. At the same time I am dealing with Church institutions that are deeply compromised, deeply corrupt, and showing signs of senility, decay and decline. I am in the uncomfortable position of being in a Church where I feel like I am digging around amidst rot and decline, trying to separate the wheat from the tares, to get at the living heart of the Church while dealing with institutions that feel like decaying shells of the great vibrant living being She once was.

If I sound ambivalent and disappointed, you're right - it is hard being part of a Church tradition in decline. I have tried other traditions, and read widely in other world philosophies and religions, but nothing else sticks; nothing else is rooted in my gut. I no longer feel at home in the Church, but I know I will never be at home anywhere else - and that is hard, very hard.

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Image by voffka offka from Pixabay.

A newly deceased person has awakened in Heaven, and Saint Peter is taking her for a walk around the place. At one street corner they pass a large, Gothic style church, and they can hear the sounds of bells and Gregorian chant coming from within. When the person asks Saint Peter what is happening here, he replies,

SShhh!.. Those are Traditional Catholics. They think they're the only ones here...

A little further down the road they passed a little one-room square building, with sounds of singing and shouting. When she asks about them Peter replies,

SShhh!.. Those are Jehovah's Witnesses. They think they're the only ones here...

And so on...

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I want to dwell on this point here since I think it is one of the greatest weaknesses of some of the most vibrant and alive parts of what could be Christian renewal today. This illustrates a narrow-mindedness, and a sort of literalist materialistic fundamentalism, that is unfair to other world spiritual traditions - and sometimes to other Christian denominations. This attitude has some serious ramifications.

- It misunderstands other religions that it criticizes, sometimes willfully so.

- It creates divisions and fractures between groups that could be working for a similar badly needed spiritual renewal in a degraded, selfish materialist culture.

- It creates fractures between Christians and the "outside world" - and that includes fractures between exploitive humanity and nature, that leads to a degradation of people's attitudes and actions towards a "fallen" natural world, and towards the energies of their own bodies.

- It obscures focus on the real enemies - the very real presence of active evil in the world.

I am convinced we need to heal these divisions in order to heal the split between humanity and nature, and between competing groups, and to re-sacralize the world.

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Recently I have been exploring East Orthodox prayer and spirituality, and along with their very rich liturgical prayer I have started practicing the Jesus Prayer, a short prayer repeated many times, often using what they call a prayer rope. I use a set of Hindu prayer beads I have for the Jesus prayer, and Jesus seems to get along with them just fine.

I have been doing some reading on the Jesus prayer. While much of what I am finding is excellent, I keep coming across this one annoying quirk, where the author wants to make very, very clear that this practice has absolutely, definitely, positively nothing in any way whatsoever to do with prayer practices from other world religions that happen to involve repeating the name of God over and over, often using a set of prayer beads to keep track. No connection. None.

With due respect for their motive I think that a bit of reflection can demonstrate it is mistaken.

These first few quotes are from the Orthodox writer Anthony Coniaris, from his book on the Philokalia, p 45

There are some who see a close connection between the practices of Orthodox spirituality and some non-Christian religions.

Disclaimer: I am one of them, and I have read Hindu writings on Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion, that shed great light on the path of Christian devotion to Jesus and Mary. I am familiar with that "non-Christian" religion in a way that Coniaris is not.

When Orthodox Christians pray the Jesus prayer, we are praying, as repeating continuously, and calling upon the almighty name of the Lord of the Universe, Jesus Christ.

That is also a very good description of how some Hindu devotees view chanting the name of Krishna - as calling upon the almighty name of the Lord of the Universe, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, known by many names (including Jesus Christ!), but best adored by his supreme name of Krishna.

But in yoga or zen, the person practicing this kind of prayer repeats continuously a word that is incomprehensible to him.

With due respect for his intent, that is just, Wrong. Even a small amount of familiarity with people who practice yoga or zen would demonstrate that.

...if one inquires about the meaning of the incomprehensible word, one will discover that it is the name of some idolatrous deity, that is, some demon.

Blowing off Krishna as "some demon" is very short-sighted and disrespectful, and is an example of the worst sort of condescending Christian Chauvinism. I think that sort of parochial narrow-mindedness is way past its pull date in our modern global, interlinked, multicultural world.

Here is an example of a translation of one of those incomprehensible, meaningless phrases - the Gayatri mantra, which may be the most used and revered prayer in the Hindu tradition. This translation is by the teacher and scholar Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo: "We choose the Supreme Light of the divine Sun; we aspire that it may impel our minds."

Sri Aurobindo further elaborates: "The Sun is the symbol of divine Light that is coming down and Gayatri gives expression to the aspiration asking that divine Light to come down and give impulsion to all the activities of the mind."

I will leave you to decide if that sounds like mindlessly mumbling the name of some demon.

Much as I admire the work Mr. Coniaris has done, and much as I love to work with prayers in the Orthodox tradition, this sort of narrow-minded parochialism does not put Orthodoxy in a good light. To me it makes it look like the Orthodox Church is pitted over against all the rest of the world.

When I walk into a Church the world should get larger and not smaller.

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These next quotes are from a book titled The Jesus Prayer, by "A Monk of the Eastern Church". Overall it is a beautiful, literate, devotional and scholarly piece of work.

p 23

The veneration of the divine name occurs among nations other than Israel. It is found again and again among the Mandeans, and also in the cult of Isis and Astarte...Only a superficial criticism would conclude, in the light of these similarities, that the Biblical attitude toward the name of God is no more than a survival from pre-rational ways of thinking.

This is a peculiarly modern Western form of intellectual arrogance, assuming that all civilizations prior to the age of the Greek philosophers were "pre-rational" - hence ignorant, primitive, superstitious.

The use of the name Yahweh does not stem from magic; it is not an arbitrary formula used to produce certain effects.

That is a childish, Saturday morning cartoon, Harry Potter style caricature of what magic means - and it likely has nothing to do with how the Divine Names of Isis and Astarte were used by those poor, benighted, primitive, pre-rational folk. For the most aware practitioners, real magic has nothing to do with arbitrary formulas.

...the name of Yahweh is a revelation of his person, an expression of the divine essence...(this) indicates man's entry into a new, personal, practical relationship with God.

That is likely a pretty good description of how the worshipers of Isis and Astarte viewed invoking and chanting Her names - as attuning to Her divine essence and developing a new, personal, practical relationship with their God.

I am friends with people who are part of the Hare Krishna movement, and I have read writings by their teacher Prabhupadha. I can confirm this is how they view chanting Krishna's name - as a way to have a relationship with Krishna in their hearts. They believe that Krishna reveals Himself to His devotees when His name is chanted - to quote a lovely phrase from Prabhupadha, Krishna dances on the tongue of the devotee when His name is chanted.

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In the second part of this essay I want to expand on a point I made in my first post in this series, talking about the how the Greek word daimon meaning intelligent spirit, was degraded to mean an evil entity or demon in the usual modern sense of the term.

This quote is from an essay by Catholic writer Thomas Mirus criticizing a book by Sebastian Morello that he views as dangerously occult.

Thus Morello’s framing the Church’s sacred rites as a form of magical theurgy (the method by which Neoplatonists tried to summon demons)...

That is a gross misrepresentation of the Neoplatonists, most notably Iamblichus, who wrote the most important surviving text on the art of theurgy.

The Neoplatonist cosmos, which forms the framework for the traditional Catholic cosmos of Thomas Aquinas, has a multiple level hierarchy of non-physical intelligences between the highest heavens and our lowly sublunar earthly sphere. Aquinas in turn took this model from Dionysius the Areopagite, who was most likely a student of the Neoplatonist Proclus. In the Catholic model these intermediate intelligences are the Angels, Archangels and so on. In the Greek the word for those intelligences is daimon or demon. Same word, same meaning.

Some Eucharistic prayers have a variant of the following phrase:

Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of Heaven...

A Neoplatonist would phrase it like this:

Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Daimons and ArchDaimons and with all the company of Heaven...

The word Daimon means Angel or non-physical intelligence. It is only the later debased Catholic usage that took the word daimon or demon to mean evil entities. I can't tell if Mirus is being disingenuous here or is deliberately mislabeling what Iamblichus is doing. At best, reading the modern debased meaning of the term demon back into Iamblichus is an historical anachronism.

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I want to flesh out the ramifications of this misunderstanding of daimon and demon.

The core here is the documented historical fact that the angelic hierarchy in traditional Christianity goes back to Dionysius the Areopagite, who was likely a student of the Neoplatonist Proclus. In the Western church that angelic hierarchy is featured in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who in turn quotes very widely from Dionysius. Daimon in Neoplatonism was re-branded Angel in Christianity.

What do we make of this inconvenient truth? There are a couple of ways to view it, and each of them has serious ramifications in how we view ourselves and others, including the natural world.

The Protestant approach is just to do away with any traffic with angels, daimons or any being other than God through Christ, period. You have God and Christ up in Heaven and Humanity down in our fallen world, with nothing in-between. This cuts out any intermediary between the transcendent God and the fallen, demonic world .

This effectively de-sacralizes the created world, including nature and including our physical being.

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The traditional Catholic Christian approach, including much of Orthodoxy, is to oppose the two hierarchies to each other, where daimons/demons and angels are pitted against each other. This means that within the Church, and only within the church, are you dealing with angels - and anything outside of that is traffic with demons. The neoplatonist daimonic hierarchy becomes the infernal demonic hierarchy, in an eternal war with God's legions of angels.

Effectively this lumps other world religions on the side of the infernal hierarchy. That is how you fall into the idiocy of labeling the Gayatri mantra or the Hare Krishna chant as mindless invoking of demons.

These leaves traditional Catholics at a loss to explain that embarrassing connection between Dionysius and Aquinas on one hand, and Proclus and the Neoplatonists on the other. How do you explain mirror image hierarchies that look suspiciously alike - especially where we have convincing historical evidence that Dionysius was likely a student of the Neoplatonist Proclus? Did Dionysius take an evil, infernal hierarchy and flip it on its head to get angels?

Again, this effectively de-sacralizes the world - only here not only is the world not divine, but positive evil, demonic. At its most extreme this is where you get the traditional Catholic labeling working with yoga, acupuncture or any form of touch healing (other than an ordained priest's laying on of hands, of course) - exercises that work with perfectly real and natural subtle, non-material energies - as opening you to possession by demons. That puts Christians at war with most of the cosmos, including the subtle energies of their own bodies - energies that are to be "mortified" - that is, killed.

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The third option, which is the one I espouse, is the most logically coherent, true to the historical facts, and the most healthy.

That is, to recognize that the Catholic angelic hierarchy is identical with, and a re-labeling of, the NeoPlatonist daimonic hierarchy.

The non-material intelligent entities called gods and daimons by Neoplatonists, were repackaged by Dionysius the Areopagite. Catholic angels are the neoplatonist daimons with the serial numbers filed off.

This approach has several advantages with far-reaching ramifications.

- It honors the history of ideas, the historical connection between Dionysius and Aquinas on the one hand, and Proclus and late Neoplatonist thought on the other.

- It allows a way to heal the fractured rift between God and the created natural world.

- It lets the Christian churches deal maturely with other world religions and recognize what is good in them. In today's multi-cultural world that is only common sense. This gets away from pitting different religions against each other, makes for understanding and tolerance.

- This approach also opens up a way for the Church to learn from those who have been keeping the hermetic and esoteric arts and disciplines alive and well, disciplines that the institutional church is has lost touch with.

I will be exploring the ramifications of this in future posts.

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I want to make clear that this is not to deny that there are evil forces in the world - demonic in the usual negative sense of the term - nor does it say that all paths through life are equivalent. In fact, combining the best insights from Christian tradition with the best of Platonist and esoteric traditions allows us a way to better better identify the very real forces of evil that are destroying the world, without falling into the Christian Chauvinism trap of damning everyone outside the church.

I very much agree that there is a serious problem with evil demons in the world - but this judgmental Christian chauvinism clouds the issue by labeling much that should be welcomed as positive, benevolent and healthy, as evil and demonic. Looking for places across various world spiritual traditions where there is consensus on what forces are positive and healthy and which are evil, very much helps clarify the picture.

That is what I want to talk about next time - dealing with evil in the world and in our own minds.

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The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Peter Breughel the Elder - from Yair Haklai, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

This post is the second of a series I am doing on the interface of the Christian Churches, especially Catholic, with hermetic, esoteric and occult traditions and practitioners.

In this context that is the meaning of the word esoteric - the inner or hidden side of life, especially of worship. That scary word occult means the same thing, but by now it has picked up so many bad connotations that I mostly avoid using it.

I have a few main points I am making here:

- There is an inner dimension of worship that is either problematic or missing at most mainstream churches.

- It is the lack of that inner dimension that has led to the falling off of the mainstream churches.

- It is the practitioners of the hermetic, esoteric and occult disciplines that are keeping those skills and that awareness alive. The church would do well to dialogue with and learn from her hermetic brethren rather than throwing mindless anathemas at them.

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In thinking about how to start to approach this topic, as I am trying to give words to a dimension of worship that most modern people are oblivious to. I want to find ways to point to it here.

As I said, almost all the people I know who are aware of this dimension of worship, and most skilled at it, fall in the domain of hermetic and esoteric studies. I have some experience and awareness of that area, that dimension of worship, so it gives me a sensitivity to what is going on in catholic worship service that I suspect many if not most Catholics just do not have - laypeople and priests both.

I am not saying this makes me a better person than others, or more spiritual or evolved - but it does give me an awareness and sensitivity that I think is very important. I am sharing my experiences and intuitions here in hopes that you will find something to resonate to in your own life.

If you are one of those fortunate Catholics - or other Christian denomination - or for that matter, some other worship path - who are completely satisfied with your church and worship life - consider yourself blessed. I do not mean anything I say here to be at all critical of what you have found.

I am speaking to those who are hungering for the Bread of Life, and may perhaps have tasted it - but get the sense that something is not quite right - that something is lacking with the churches you have experienced.

Sensitivity

Some people are aware of this inner dimension of worship, and are sensitive to it, some are not; I am.

It has to do with the aliveness, the energy - you could call it the aura or what the children of the 1960's used to call the vibes. It is the difference between a service that is alive and vibrant, to one that falls flat - or one that feels discordant, at odds with itself - or worse yet, one that sucks the life out of people. I have experienced all of those in churches I have been in.

Some churches are alive and healthy; some are tired; some are neutral; some are dangerous. Being aware of that is seriously important - and, cultivating and trusting your intuitive reaction to that is very, very important.

Some people are consciously sensitive to this, and some are not. I am arguing, here and in future posts, that most people do pick up on this on an other-than-conscious level and act accordingly, and that it explains much of the decline of the church over the last half century since Vatican II and Novus Ordo were forced on the Church.

The Awareness of the Priest

In a healthy church with a fully functioning ritual, priests should be trained in the awareness of this side of worship, and traditionally it is likely this was an integral part of a priest's training. That has been lost in the modern church.

My sense is that there are not very many priests who have this awareness and skill. I call it a skill because it takes training - bringing to awareness, and learning to work with, dimensions of experience that are other than physical, including working with the energies that a functioning ritual raises. I suspect that some priests have this awareness at least on an intuitive level, but I suspect that many do not.

Some priests seem to have this sensitivity but are not fully aware of the energies and how to "work" them, and this may be related to the epidemic of sexual scandals in the church. These are not monsters, "perverts" or evil people, but well-meaning sincere people who are wrestling with energies with no training, energies that get out of control - and mere will-power alone is not sufficient. There is a transmutation and directing of energies that is supposed to be happening that just isn't, and the energies can find an outlet in unhealthy ways. You can view these priests a victims of a broken system, of a church that has lost the inner keys to its own worship.

Hocus Pocus - Empty Rites

The original article by Thomas Mirus which inspired this series of essays had this interesting passage:

But Catholics do not and have never believed that the “special words, special objects, and special concentration” involved in sacramentals and prayer have power simply as words, objects, and concentration. Rather, the power is God’s...

That is a double-edged sword.

His point is that the power of the sacraments - the words, the gestures, the objects - come, not from man but from God, and that is a very valid point.

However, the Church's position is that if you just have the right words, objects and gestures that the sacrament is valid, period. The danger there is putting one's faith in just getting the words right. (I have seen heated discussions online as to what are the minimum words needed for a priest's absolution to be valid.) The focus is on the words and not on God's power, or on the actions and disposition of the participants.

If the priest slurs the words, or accidentally leaves out a word, or changes word order, is it still valid? Does God care about that?…

At its worst you get empty words with no power. That btw is where the phrase "Hocus Pocus" originated - it's a Protestant coinage, and it's a garbled form of the Latin words in the Mass for consecrating the Host - This is My Body.

Going back to the quote from Mirus you can argue that it is Catholics who believe in the "Magic Words". Aware esoteric practitioners know that the words and symbols have no power in themselves. They mean nothing until used with awareness - and it is precisely the awareness that gives the power.

You can tell when a priest has that awareness, and when a priest is basically just burning through the words and going through the motions. That is likely where the criticism of hocus pocus came from - the belief that it is the words that are supposed to be magic words, in that just the saying of those words is supposed to have efficacy.

---

I recall a confession that I did once in a Latin old rite church I was visiting while I was traveling. The priest mumbled the words of absolution in a low voice, talking very rapidly, and I heard something like this:

egoabshmlvblivuh

The phrase took maybe 2 seconds - and my reaction was, Oh.... he just said the Magic Words... I guess that means my sins are forgiven.

That to me is Hocus Pocus.

---

I have a vivid memory of a Marian litany that was supposed to be part of a May Day blessing of an outdoor statue. To my ear it was whipped through at a pace that is faster than I can think, and it really did feel like it was being read and gotten through as fast as possible to get it over with. That to me is a dead rite - a litany where the phrases are rattled off faster than I can think them - and it left me with a sense of deep sadness; I felt like I had been betrayed. Every time I passed that statue after that, when I paid attention I could sense a certain grim sadness from Mary. (There is a reason one of Mary's titles is Mater Dolorosa.) The sadness felt not so much like Mary was neglected (though that was true), but that She has so much to give that people are not seeing...

This seems to be reflected in the general church attitude to that Marian statue.

A few weeks after that ritual there was a picnic in that courtyard - and there was a food truck maybe ten feet from the Mary statue, and people sitting on chairs on the grass, eating and talking, just a yard or two away from Mary, completely ignoring Her presence. That hurt.

How we pray is reflected in how we act. The oblivious neglect at the picnic is a logical result of the empty rite. I do not think those people at the picnic thought they were being disrespectful; there was just a lack of awareness. It is precisely that oblivious lack of awareness that is the sickness in the Church today.

That experience was an important milestone in my growing awareness, including the importance of trusting my own reactions.

Hungering

I will be doing a post where I talk about the Novus Ordo mass rite, as I find there are a lot of places there where the symbolism seems to me to be incoherent or contradictory, and I can tell it affects how people act, during the service and outside of it. With my being aware of these things, those discordant symbolisms act like a sort of jarring irritant to me.

I need to make something very, very clear here - this does not mean that there are not good sincere priests, or that there are many people who make the Novus Ordo services work for them. If that is your situation then please continue to relish what you have... I am speaking to those who have a sort of nagging emptiness or a sense that this is not the fullness of what worship is supposed to be about.

You shall know the tree by its fruits...

There is a certain quality I call sweetness (the Latin word is dulcis, and it is far richer) that I used to find with some people, especially older women who had been ripened by a life of worship... Sadly I find that quality seems to be becoming much more rare - not extinct, but rare. I do find more emptiness; more of a sort of harriedness and tiredness; more of a sort of absent-minded distraction.

Mostly I find good decent well-meaning people who are hungering. I don't know if I would call myself always good and decent, but I am definitely one of those who are hungering. Sermons, lectures and moral exhortations do not feed that hunger.

So how do you feed that hunger? That takes work and developing awareness.

Developing Inner Sensitivity to Symbols

There is an important basic principle in esoteric practice - performing an act of ritual or worship, a prerequisite is a process of thorough meditation on, and mastery of, the meaning of the symbols, words and actions used. The symbols are like seeds, potentials, and they need to be watered and sprouted with meditation and attention. Without that you are just going through the motions - and that is exactly what I see happening in many Novus Ordo rites - an obliviousness to the symbols and actions.

The sort of attention and awareness which you develop in slow, sustained and regular meditation is the key to making the rites come alive. It is the key to prayer - and, it is even the key to really thinking - prayer, worship and real thinking are far more intertwined than we realize.

This is the best way I know to develop inner awareness - slow, sustained and mindful meditation on symbols. This is viewing symbols as sacraments. The symbol can be an image; it can be a prayer. It can be a ritual action like dipping your finger in holy water and making the sign of the cross - that can be an empty gesture or a flaming banishing with light depending on your awareness.

It is important to develop mindfulness in how you perform ritual actions, or say prayers, or attend services. Some people do it; most don't. In this case my being an adult convert to the Catholic Church is an advantage. Since I came to these rites as an adult I have had to think about them a lot. Also having been members of multiple churches and groups in my life, Christian and otherwise, I have the advantage of being able to compare and learn things I could not otherwise.

Symbols

In Eastern Orthodoxy they refer to the Nicene Creed as The Symbol. This is not a set of dogmatic statements you have to agree to; there is a lot more than that going on. The Creed does not become a living Symbol until it is meditated on, and the phrases and images in it come alive.

The Sign of the Cross is a Symbol. The Our Father is a Symbol. The Hail Mary is a Symbol. The Jesus Prayer in Orthodoxy (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner) is a Symbol, one of the most primary of all.

The Mass, the Holy Eucharist, is, or should be, the central Symbol - and it needs to be done mindfully. I have been at masses where the light was so vivid I felt dazzled and almost giggling - and masses where it felt like lukewarm decaf coffee. Far too often I have experienced Masses where the Presence in the holy communion was obscured or dissipated, squandered by what surrounded and followed it.

Holy Communion is not an automatic process, like swallowing a pill or taking a dose of medicine. It takes a mindfulness on the part of the receiver at least - and hopefully on the part of the priest - for it really be a valid sacrament. (Can a mindful communicant compensate for an absent-minded or oblivious priest? Up to a certain point, yes, I think so.)

Without that mindfulness I do not think it is a sacrament at all. Taking communion distractedly, or while busy doing something else, shows the same obliviousness, the same lack of reverent awareness, that I mentioned at the picnic in front of the Marian statue.

Cultivating the Awareness

How do you develop this sensitivity? How do you get these Symbols to come alive - in a sense, how to you crack open the shell of the Symbol to get the living core to blossom?

Let me give an example with prayer, and specific prayers.

An orthodox priest I once knew taught me how to pray the Our Father by going through it very slowly, one phrase at a time, and relishing, tasting and dwelling on the meaning of the words, like savoring vintage wine or rare chocolate. (Oh taste, and see that the Lord is good...) That has become a habit to me now, to the point that I find whipping through it rapidly to be very jarring, and rushing through prayers in general feels sacrilegious to me.

(Yes, there is a place for repeated liturgical prayer that moves at a good pace without being rushed, but that is another issue - and frankly I do not think that sort of liturgical prayer really comes alive unless the psalms and prayers have first been meditated on.)

There is an experience I sometimes have with those prayers that I have prayed thousands of times. Like with the Our Father - I remember a time I was praying it, started the prayer and said those two words - Our Father - and, blam! I had to just stop cold... You could say they came alive, or there was a light and presence there, or they spoke to me in a new way - but I had to stop and dwell on the Presence evoked in those two words in a whole new way.

That has happened to me multiple times with that prayer, on different clauses. After praying it for years I understand it in a whole new way because I know it from the inside now, and it continually reveals new dimensions. By now I can just sit and think those two words, Our Father, and I am right back there.

That is a Symbol coming alive.

One of the most important skills is to learn how to leave space for it when that happens, allow time to relish and digest it. If you just keep on truckin and rush through the prayer you can lose it.

That coming alive experience has happened to me with the Hail Mary, which has its own very distinct feel and presence.

Most recently that is just starting to happen with the Jesus Prayer, which I now am starting to realize sums up all of the Christian process of what the Orthodox call theosis in its few clauses. I expect I may begin to understand that in another ten or twenty years if I live that long...

I mentioned the Orthodox call the Nicene Creed the Symbol. I have prayed it often enough over the years that I have sensed the Light and Presence in those words.

A Living Network of Symbols

When you get to the point that you have that meditative awareness on the basic prayers and ritual actions then you have a whole live interconnected system of symbols - and then new prayers and symbols can be approached that acquire a resonance with the rest of the symbol system.

That is the best way I know of to develop this sensitivity - pray into these prayers and symbols - slowly, thoughtfully, mindfully, regularly - and repeatedly. They come alive, and they cohere - and, when there is a lack of cohering in a worship service you can tell.

It is rather like the advice I heard from a master jazz guitarist on how to learn to improvise - he said to learn the scales and chords, and then practice them daily for ten years...

The key words are - slowly, thoughtfully, mindfully, regularly, repeatedly - it takes time and it takes space, internal space, and it takes attention.

And, as I mentioned earlier, most of the people I know who develop those sensitivities are in the esoteric communities I frequent. I will talk more about that in future posts.

---

One of the reasons that I am moved to journal in this series of posts is that I can get more "juice" out of one Our Father prayed mindfully at home than out of many if not most masses I have attended. After Mass I am often left with a sort of funny nagging emptiness, like something is not quite right - either the Presence just isn't there, or it is weak, or it gets dissipated.

Lecturing Does Not Replace Worship

Praying takes time and discipline, just as real thinking takes plenty of time, silence, space and discipline. If you don't make the time you don't pray and you won't learn to think.

This is not the same as preaching or being exhorted about these things.

I recall the irony of hearing an overly long and wordy sermon on the importance of silence... and I could feel no silence coming from the words of that sermon. Also, the amount of actual silence in that particular service added up to less than a minute or two overall. There was a feeling that is so very common in our modern world, of a kind of frantic busyness and constant pushing that feels to me like a fear of silence. With the exception of the few brief places that silence is mandated by the rite, it feels like every last moment was crammed with something, including some things that I don't think belong in the worship space and that detract from it.

For me I get a similar reaction to the Church's harping on the whole subject of the Real Presence in the Eucharist - I hear sermons and exhortations and dogmatic lectures - and there are so many things in the Novus Ordo as it is usually celebrated that work against that realization... a lack of a sense of awareness of the presence of the sacred, of sacred time and space.

If you are one of those fortunate people who get a living sense of Real Presence in eucharistic worship - consider yourself blessed. I am still searching.

Praying, Thinking and Journaling

There is another key practice - regular thoughtful journaling as part of prayer. It might be on a psalm, or a Bible reading, or a sacred image that catches me. The journal is a place to harvest the insights I get. This is one of the places where God and the Angels talk to me.

I usually bring a notebook and pen with me when I go to a worship service. Sometimes there are elusive thoughts I need to catch, so I jot down just a few words or a phrase as a hook to get me back there and dwell on later. (There are some kinds of worship where having a journal there is not appropriate, but when you have a service that includes a lot of talking and sermonizing it can be helpful.)

Open Ended Meditation

Note this is not quite the same technique as what I have seen as the mental prayer outline in older Catholic books. That is quite a rigid process that feels like it has guardrails set up to keep you from thinking for yourself, and guaranteeing you come to the "approved" conclusion. Those have a way of turning into moral sermons, and that is not what I mean.

If you do the Rosary, what they call the fruits of each of the Mysteries is a pale echo of the process. For instance, the Joyous Mystery of finding the 12 year old Jesus in the temple still feels like one of the oddest and most suggestive, even weird and eerie - and to boil that down simply to, Obedience to your parents and superiors, is a shallow almost caricature, a kind of dumbing down. The Mystery itself is much, much richer and eerier than that.

There is this twelve year old boy Jesus who is in the Temple, blowing the minds of the learned rabbis with his wisdom - and the message we're supposed to get is, be a good obedient boy and go home with your Mom and Dad? Something much, much stranger is happening here.

I am not talking about deriving moral maxims from your meditations, although that can be part of the process. It is much more open-ended and alive than that.

Final Thoughts

The image that came to my mind just now, as I was reflecting on this essay, was of someone walking into a restaurant, being handed a menu - and then gulping down the menu and rushing out...

I am realizing as I write this essay that it is part of my own internal searching - trying to sort out my reactions to the churches I have been attending the last few years - what has worked, what has not, and what I still am hungering for. I suspect I have not yet found my church home. So, please do not take these words as someone who knows what he is doing, but as someone who is searching and hungering.

I have found just enough of a taste of what I am searching for to keep me going. The Christian prayers and Symbols are burned into my soul now after years of repetition and they are alive, so they will remain a central part of my search.

---

candle image - NCCo, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

If all goes well this is the first of what I plan to be a series of essays on this general theme.

An interesting conversation seems to be picking up speed online recently. For me, the conversation started here with this essay -

Occult subversion of traditional Catholicism

Apparently this started out as a critique - or rather, more like a hit piece - on this recently published book by Sebastian Morello.

Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries

First of all my thanks to Thomas Mirus for the heads-up - I now have a new book on my shelf and a new writer to follow.

The essay widens to include attacks on other writers that the author views as insufficiently orthodox or as downright (gasp!) heterodox. Again, my thanks - I now have another half-dozen writers to check out.

---

Why am I making these notes?

I occupy an interesting position in that I straddle both Catholic and Hermetic worlds. I joined the Catholic church back in February 2023, and from previous experience I know the Hermetic and occult scene pretty intimately. I have been actively involved in it all my life, and grew up in a "New Thought" church (Unity, a Christian Science type church founded over a century ago and still going today) that was on the mainstream edge of the Hermetic world.

That also means I come to the Catholic world with the eyes of someone who knows the Hermetic tradition. I notice different things that people brought up in the Church are likely unaware of.

Also, I am in a position that I have no dogma, party line or purity test that I have to defend - I have no reputation at stake - so I can share my observations without worrying whether I am being "heterodox".

Wake-Up Call

The author and Substack blogger Michael Martin, another writer I follow regularly, is one of the people attacked in this piece. He has this comment on a later blog entry of his own.

First of all, thanks to those guys talking trash about me and my work recently—book sales and subscriptions have soared. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Sebastian Morello said a similar thing in an essay he wrote -

It seems that this little polemic between us has also considerably boosted book sales

There is a reason for that.

There is also a very good reason for declining attendance in mainstream western churches; for a growing lack of respect and credibility for the Roman Catholic political institution; for the growth of interest in alternative spiritual approaches like the various forms of Hermeticism; and, for the growth of interest in the East Orthodox churches.

Mainstream Christian churches, pay attention - there is something that people are craving in their worship that has been missing in you for a long time. Some of the clues to what is missing can be found if you take the time to become familiar with the Hermetic tradition, both from the past and as it still exists today.

Unpacking the different dimensions of what this means will be the theme of this series of essays. For today I want to comment on a few of the specific points Mirus makes.

---

I have read this essay by Mr. Mirus several times, and I think it has some serious problems. He is scoring points by misrepresenting what he is attacking, and from my point of view he is woefully ignorant of what Hermeticism, Christian and otherwise, is actually doing. Also some of the attacks are unfair and drawn out of context. Mirus is demolishing paper tigers.

Here are some examples. Quotes are in italics.

Thus Morello’s framing the Church’s sacred rites as a form of magical theurgy (the method by which Neoplatonists tried to summon demons)...

That is a gross misrepresentation of the Neoplatonists, most notably Iamblichus, who wrote the most important surviving text on the art of theurgy.

The Neoplatonist cosmos, which forms the framework for the traditional Catholic cosmos of Thomas Aquinas, has a multiple level hierarchy of non-physical intelligences between the highest heavens and our lowly sublunar earthly sphere. Aquinas in turn took this model from Dionysius the Areopagite, who was most likely a student of the Neoplatonist Proclus. In the Catholic model these intermediate intelligences are the Angels, Archangels and so on. In the Greek the word for those intelligences is daimon or demon. Same word, same meaning.

Some Eucharistic prayers have a variant of the following phrase:

Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of Heaven...

A Neoplatonist would phrase it like this:

Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Daimons and ArchDaimons and with all the company of Heaven...

The word Daimon means Angel or non-physical intelligence. It is only the later debased Catholic usage that took the word daimon or demon to mean evil entities. I can't tell if Mirus is being disingenuous here or is deliberately mislabeling what Iamblichus is doing. At best, reading the modern debased meaning of the term demon back into Iamblichus is an historical anachronism.

Here is that quote again:

Thus Morello’s framing the Church’s sacred rites as a form of magical theurgy (the method by which Neoplatonists tried to summon demons)...

Actually there are for more real parallels between Iamblichan Theurgy and what should be happening in Christian worship than most people realize. It would be to the Church's advantage to be aware of that as a way of critiquing their own weaknesses.

---

A little later on:

The book’s cover advertises the names of the infamous Satanist Aleister Crowley...

Once and for all - Crowley was not a Satanist. He was weird, he was emphatically not Christian, but he was not a Satanist.

---

Although perennialism is in principle a form of religious indifferentism...

No it is not. If all goes well I plan an entire essay on what Perennialism means, since it is very close to my own position.

---

Later in the essay Mirus has some very nasty things to say about the traditionalist Catholic writer Peter Kwasniewski.

So there is a sad irony in arch-traditionalist Peter Kwasniewski publishing a book advocating Hermetic magic, when he isn’t busy inventing a novel ecclesiology by which priests are morally obligated to disobey their bishops, or referring to the Novus Ordo as a “gangrenous wound”.

The essay by Kwasniewski containing that phrase "gangrenous wound" is here - “Hyperpapalism and Liturgical Mutation: The Case Against the Novus Ordo”.

I took the time to read it, and again I think Mirus is almost caricaturing what Kwasniewski is saying in that essay. Kwasniewski gives multiple examples of the ways the Novus Ordo has distorted, censored, blurred and warped the traditional rites in serious ways, and I think he makes some very good points. (Interestingly to me, he does not criticize what I consider to be the main ritual and structural weaknesses of Novus Ordo.) The Novus Ordo drastically warped and changed the traditional rites and was forced onto the Church, and this caused a radical discontinuity.

What Kwasniewski is saying is that superficially tweaking the Novus Ordo will not correct the serious problems it has. Here is the quote from Kwasniewski in context.

It is not enough to set aside abuses or to reintroduce traditional elements pell-mell—a little incense here, a fiddleback there, an introit today, ad orientem tomorrow. This is like piling up plasters on a gangrenous wound, or treating a cancer with multivitamins. No, something much more radical is required.

It is well worth taking the time to read and ponder on some of the valid critiques that Kwasniewski makes of the Novus Ordo. Whether they care to admit it or not, the Novus Ordo Mass and Daily Office rites have some serious problems, both structurally and textually. Just because they have been in place for over half a century does not make the problems go away; nor does defending Novus Ordo basically because the Church is stuck with it at this point.

---

Here is a summary of my own stance.

1) The modern Roman Catholic church has some serious problems, and their rites and worship have some serious deficiencies, which are related to, and likely helped cause, the precipitous decline in interest in, and respect for the Church in the last half century.

2) There is a reason for increased interest in the Hermetic tradition, Christian or otherwise. People are finding something there they are not finding in the mainstream churches.

3) It is my contention that the mainstream Church has much to learn from the Hermetic tradition to become aware of and correct its own deficiencies. Rather than drawing up dogmatic battle lines or throwing "ism" labels to discredit them, I think the Church would be much better served by dialogue here.

The Hermetic tradition just may hold some of the keys to what was lost by the mainstream churches.

I hope to unpack some of the dimensions of that in future essays.

My first gut reaction was, that pic looks AI generated.

And so does this one.

My second gut reaction was, this feels like media choreographed theater. I've seen this movie before - I live in Minneapolis so I watched the George Floyd Mostly Peacefuls up close. I learned a lot from that media extravaganza.

The third reaction was, there is big money and coordination behind this. Shortly later I found this article.

REPORT: Evidence Suggests LA “Riots” Over ICE Raids Could Be Government‑Funded

I don't claim to know what is going on, but I am convinced there is a very large element of media theater manipulating people's reactions. This is a show and we're supposed to get very upset. We’re also supposed to stay glued to our screens, when we’re not gossiping about it on iphones and social media.

We’re supposed to be caught up and hypnotized in this street show.

Whatever is really going on, we're not seeing it. We're being treated to a summer made-for-TV extravaganza.

I give this show 9 Rotten Tomatoes.

The general theme of this essay is the human tendency to think in binaries, either/or, polar opposites – and the problems this causes. This post will be a bit anecdotal as I want to come at this topic from different angles.

--

Here's the incident that led to the train of thought I am exploring.

Back on May 8, a few hours after I heard news of the election of the new Pope Leo, I received an email from a close friend of mine.

>> What is your opinion of the new Pope?

My first reaction was – whoa, wait a minute – I just heard about him and I already need to have an opinion? So I responded:

>> I don’t have an opinion; I know next to nothing about him.

When I thought this over, it occurred to me that I was expected to have an opinion on the subject. In fact, it seems assumed that I am supposed to have an opinion on pretty much every subject.

Further, it seems that the opinion is largely a matter of taking sides, choosing one way or the other, and the choices are extremes, polar opposites. Do I approve of this Pope, and do I think he will help move the Church in a good direction? Or, do I disapprove, and think he will do yet more to accelerate the Church's decline?

One, or the other, thumbs up or down - which is it? So choose already!...

I have now had a chance to read up a bit about the new Pope from various sites I frequent. I noticed that the opinions I saw were predictable, and told me more about the person writing the piece than they did about the Pope. I could also see that, given the lack of any substantive data about the new Pope, most sites were hallucinating into him what they hoped or expected to happen.

Some progressive sites were making much of the fact that the new Pope Robert Prevost was of mixed race, with Creole background on his mother's side, and so he would likely be progressive politically.

Do we have a Pope who isn't white? Maybe. Does it matter? Maybe.

More conservative sites either downplayed the Creole background or didn't mention it. They were hopeful that the new Pope Leo would likely be more traditional than Francis was, take a stronger stance on gender and abortion and be more welcoming to those who wish to continue the old Latin mass. Why? Because he chose the name Leo, and the previous Leo was a traditionalist. He was obviously sending a signal there by his choice of name... And the progressive sites didn't say much about the choice of the name Leo. Each picked out the data that furthered what they wanted to say, and their essays were low on content and high on hallucinated agenda.

Is the Pope's Creole background important - or the fact that he is a naturalized citizen of Peru? Probably. How will this work out? We'll see.

Is the name Leo signaling something? Probably, but my hunch is that it has a political or social connotation, and it is too soon to know how that will play out.

My opinion now? In terms of taking sides, up or down vote, I don't have one, and I want to see how this plays out.

I rather enjoy not having an opinion.

---

There are a couple of main points I am exploring in this essay.

The main, overarching theme is our human tendency to think in terms of binaries - either/or, up/down, white/black, yes/no. Related to that is our tendency to take sides, choosing one or the other.

On a larger scale there is the tendency to group opinions in overall stances or ideologies - so, having a given opinion on a given subject then plays out as predictable opinions on a lot of other topics.

I am realizing how this tendency to think in binaries and ideologies pretty much shuts down clear thinking.

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I have figured out that, once I know the general political stance that a given blogger or news site takes, I can predict what they will say about pretty much any news story - and what they say has nothing to do with the subject and everything to do with their chosen ideology. That is part of the reason why there are very few news sites that I follow regularly - if I can already predict what they will say on any given topic that gives me no new information.

There are precious few sites that do not have a defined ideology they are pushing - I can count them on the fingers of one elbow. On some subjects I follow bloggers with different stances to give me different angles on their subjects.

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It seems to be the case that opinions do get grouped; that is illustrated in being able to predict the stances news sites will take once you know their ideology. Sometimes that same ideological grouping works for individuals, but when it does not - as in my case - it makes for some unwarranted jumping to conclusions.

Here is an example of opinions getting grouped and assumptions being made.

If I criticize President Trump about anything I can predict that Trump supporters will attack me for betraying the cause, and Trump haters will applaud and assume that I have seen the light and have joined the ranks of Trump Haters.

This makes it very difficult to have a nuanced conversation. It also makes it harder to think clearly.

Are you a Trump Hater? Definitely not.

Then you support everything Trump does? Definitely not.

If you're criticizing Trump that must mean you regret voting for him, and you wish that Harris had been elected instead.

No - I am very glad Harris was not elected - I think that would have been catastrophic. And no, that does not mean that I voted for Trump.

But... but... but...

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Here is another example - I did a post on Facebook that was critical of a Democratic action - specifically, of a large group of Democrats all coming out with a video statement at the same time and parroting exactly the same script - and I got a response saying the Republicans had a long history of doing the same thing.

Aside from the fact that the answer was irrelevant to the point I was making - it is the But-Mom-Johnny-Hit-Me-First logical fallacy - it occurred to me afterwards that the person assumed that since I was critical of Democrats here that meant that I was Republican.

I'm not.

But... but...

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Watching how this mental process played out in my mind, I have realized that I really like not having an opinion, not having to take a stand on everything. I also like not limiting my choices to either of a pair of two extremes, each of which comes with a lot of collateral baggage. It gives me a mental flexibility that I could not have otherwise.

As soon as I choose a side, I will tend to emphasize any data that support that choice, and downplay or ignore what contradicts it. The choice of sides acts as a mental filter - a pre-judgment or a thumb on the scales.

Media has gotten very bad in this way. Any pretense to balanced or objective reporting seems to have been completely thrown out the window, and replaced with flat-on propaganda designed to support a political agenda. Questions of fairness, or even accuracy or truth, have gone by the wayside.

The only truth is My Truth, and whatever contradicts that doesn't count.

When this is how media operates, this is how people who follow that media will tend think, and assume that everyone else thinks that way.

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I now realize that this tendency to binary sort, to divide people up into two opposing camps, seems to have become particularly extreme in the past few years. I can see how it has affected my own thinking. Politically, I can see how getting an extreme reaction from one side pushed me strongly in the other.

In my own political history, when I was attacked from far progressive left people for having the wrong opinions, this had the result of driving me further to the right, away from their stance. I reacted to an extreme stance on on side by moving more extremely to the other.

It took me quite awhile to sort that out, and to realize that I don't identify with either side.

I also figured out that there are a lot of subjects that I do not have a fixed stance. On any given topic I can weigh pros and cons, and come through the process with no clear stance either way.

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I can see that this same mental process of choosing sides happened when I entered the Catholic Church a few years ago. When I joined there was a mental tendency to swing all the way to one side of a pendulum - I was a professional astrologer who also studied Tarot and Eastern religions, but joining the Church meant that I needed to react against that and put all that behind me.

The net effect of that swing is that after spending two years seriously involved at two different Catholic parishes, I experienced a swing back in the other direction. I figured out there were a lot of things wrong with the Church, a lot of corruption, and a lot of things I had trouble with - so I swung back the other way, quit regularly attending services, and I was happy to reclaim astrology and tarot, and dig my Eastern philosophy library up out of the basement.

But then I was caught in the stance of having chosen against the Church - and I miss the prayers and the services.

Either/or. Swing one way, swing the other.

It is pretty much assumed that when you join the Church that there are a lot of things you are expected to Believe In - a lot of baggage comes with it. The reality is much more nuanced and flexible than that.

I discovered that there are a lot of topics on which the Church is deliberately vague and evasive, and a lot of Church language is content-free, vaguely inspirational sounding verbal fluff. I can think of some Church figures I have followed for years where I have yet to hear them say anything definite. It is a way of taking a stance without taking a stance, or of saying something in such a way that you can't be pinned down for saying it- the late Pope Francis was a past grandmaster of that skill. (In the case of Francis you can tell where his real sympathies were by paying attention to which side he quietly turned a blind eye to, and which side he silenced and shut down.)

With this blurring of language comes blurring of thought - more recent Church language is getting vaguer and vaguer. (My favorite comment I saw about Pope Leo's election - one columnist hoped the new Pope could help clarify what the heck synodality means.) This increasingly vague language blurs clear thought and makes for an increasingly vague and unfocused religious experience.

In one of the Churches I attended, after a year's worth of sermons, I can tell you nothing about their opinions on quite a few important topics. I suspect this is deliberate, and is a way to navigate a minefield of loaded subjects where saying the wrong thing, or even bringing up the wrong topic, can be enough to drive some people away, or to start heated arguments.

Part of what this means is that there are some subjects you just don't talk about.

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Note that I have made two points here - on the one hand I am talking about getting away from needing to have set binary opinions, and the other hand about my frustration with the Church's vague meaningless language. I suspect the two are related, and the vague langue is a political tactic to avoid getting caught in crossfire. There is a reason some subjects are avoided.

What is very much needed for me are ways of thinking and talking that have specific content without drawing up battle lines - and that seems to have gotten much harder to do.

Needing to choose either For or Against the Church, with a lot of baggage either way, did not leave me with any good options. I don't fit completely in it, and I don't fit completely outside of it.

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Traditionally, the Catholic Church and most of the Protestant denominations are creedal - there are a set of statements you are required to assent to in order to be a member.

By contrast, the Episcopal Church is liturgical rather than creedal. There is a common prayer book and liturgy you have to assent to use, and how you think about it is your business. It makes sense - the C of E (Church of England) is used to having to juggle opposing factions, so they have a common rite and a flexible dogma.

Other Christian denominations, including Catholic, seem to have increasingly moved in that direction, and even the common liturgy is getting more flexible. It is probably inevitable with varied Church bodies with long histories, but the net result is that the worship becomes vaguer, less focused, less potent. You can see it in the Catholic Church with the difference between the old Latin rite and the Novus Ordo, and you can also see it in the wide variant of ways the Novus Ordo is celebrated.

The Church isn't falling, it's going out of focus and fading, like an old TV screen that is wearing out.

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So, how do you function without taking sides?

How do you think clearly? How do you communicate clearly with others in a polarized environment where everything is filtered through opposing ideologies?

How do you get past the either/or binary oppositions?

Those are the questions I am now asking myself.

Do I have a definite opinion on what to do about this dilemma? Let me think about it.

I thought it might be fun to do a post on where I get my information and my slant on the world. Everyone is shaped by the media they consume, so I try to be conscious about who I read, since they do a lot to shape my mind.

That is only common sense - whatever you put into your mind determines what comes out of your mouth. I am sure I am not the only person who notices that what passes for conversation is often little more than replaying media buzzwords and slogans that people take for their own thoughts.

Let me start with who I don't read - The "mainstream" sites like CNN, MSN, NPR News (and its local affiliate MPR), the Guardian, BBC, Washington Post, NY Times, Fox News, Breitbart. Notice that I include "right wing" sites in the list. Every one of those sites has a blatant political agenda, slants their stories, and often publishes exaggerations, falsehoods and flat out lies. I consider reading them to be dangerous to mental health and worthless for actual news.

Vade retro, Satana... enough on that.

As to who I do read, let me start with the most controversial.

The Unz Review - https://www.unz.com/ . Unz Review is a news and commentary aggregate site. It includes articles from a very wide variety of columnists, and the one thing they have in common is that they are shut out of the mainstream media. The purpose of the site is to give a voice to articulate commenters who are rarely heard elsewhere. I don't read everyone on this site, nor do I like everything I read here, and some of it I find offensive. But - some of it is pure gold, and it has exposed me to ideas and viewpoints I would never have considered otherwise.

Ron Unz, the editor, is wonderful, and has many long, well researched and well thought out opinion pieces on a variety of hot button topics. He is one of the few columnists who is even willing to touch the worst of hot button topics in our culture - Israel and the Jews, World War Two and the Holocaust, 9/11, the Kennedy assassination - in a sane, well researched and balanced manner. Ron Unz also has some free downloadable ebooks that are collections of essays on hot button topics, including a series he calls, American Pravda - https://www.unz.com/page/downloadable-ebooks/. Highly recommended.

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The next is one of the most entertaining bloggers I know -

El Gato Malo, aka boriquagato - https://boriquagato.substack.com/ . Along with being entertaining and having amusing cat memes, gato is very good at clear thinking and statistical analysis, and covers a variety of topics including covid and vaccines, and media manipulation. He is fun and very insightful, and he helped me stay sane and amused during the worst of the covid oppression years.

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This next blogger is my go-to source for accurate data on war, especially the war in Ukraine, though he does sometimes cover the Middle East.

Simplicius the Thinker - https://simplicius76.substack.com/ . Heavily and even exhaustively documented, with maps, statistics, citing a variety of sources.

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Moon of Alabama - https://www.moonofalabama.org/ - "Where Barflies Get Together". This is a news commentary and discussion site, and I find his analyses to be consistently insightful and very high quality.

This next site is specific to medical topics -

The Midwestern Doctor - https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/ - the name of the blog is, The Forgotten Side of Medicine. The articles here are long and very exhaustively researched and documented. To give you a flavor of the work here, there are recent articles on - The Dark Side of Antidepressants; What We've Learned from a Year of Vaccine Shedding Data; Rebuilding Relationships at the Dinner Table.

(For the record - I am not vaccinated myself, and I am sensitive to becoming ill after being around crowds of vaccinated people. This is one of the sites I turned to, to learn that I am not alone having that reaction.)

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This next site I don't read regularly, but I often check here depending on the headlines. It is the English language news site from Russia, named RT News.

https://www.rt.com/ - Interestingly I often find articles here on American news to be far more accurate and insightful than anything in the MSM sites I listed above. I also find the statements from Russian government figures, including Putin himself, to be interesting and usually articulate, reasonable and well thought-out.

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To conclude I want to mention the only writer and blogger I have followed consistently for over ten years now, who has had a profound influence on my thought and viewpoint - John Michael Greer, who is a published author, practicing Druid and Occultist, philosopher of ideas, and one of the most well-read and well-thought writers I have ever encountered. For many years he had weekly essays on a site named The Archdruid Report, which became widely read during the era of discussion about Peak Oil, the topic of resource depletion and its consequences on our finite planet.

Currently his main blog, which has weekly essays, is here, named Ecosophia - https://www.ecosophia.net/. The topics vary widely, including the environment, the occult, and philosophy. Recently he has been doing a monthly series of essays interpreting Richard Wagner's opera tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelungs, and its political under-story and how it applies to our current world situation.

Greer has a second site here - https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/ - which has posts that are designed to be discussion forums. There are three weekly forums: one every Tuesday on Covid and the Vaccines for those outside of the mainstream narrative; one every Monday titled, Magic Monday, where he fields questions on occult topics; and finally, Frugal Friday, for tips on saving money and reducing resource use in our unstable times of decline.

Greer has also written many fine books that have heavily influenced me, but discussing them would take me too far afield from the topic of this post.

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That is how I keep touch with the world, and why I think about current events the way I do.

Image of silhouette by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.

Image of boys reading by Victoria from Pixabay.

Image of old man by wal_172619 from Pixabay.

This is the final essay in a series on looking at our world as a Sorcerer State, where people are manipulated and controlled primarily by media persuasion rather than brute force. I am arguing that this persuasion scheme violates some of the most basic and important rules of persuasion and of mental magic, and hence is doomed to recoil back on itself and fail by self-destructing.

Here I want to concentrate on what I call the Law of Altruism and Selflessness.

This gets close to the core of a problem in our society, and it is a problem with how we view reality.

The underlying rules are:

- Ultimately we are all one and are connected in consciousness - what benefits one, benefits all; what harms one harms all.

- Thus the only safe way to use mind influence is to use it selflessly, for the good of all. To violate that rule is dangerous to oneself and to others - it causes harm and eventually backfires.

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The particular form that mental and persuasive magic takes in our culture is heavily influenced by a movement known as New Thought. It has a lot of different forms, and is probably best known as the different forms of positive thinking. It is far more pervasive in our culture than most people realize.

I was raised as a member of a New Thought church called Unity, which is part of that movement, so I have studied quite a bit about it as it is part of my own spiritual roots. There are some very crucial truths that are emphasized in the earliest forms of the movement that have been lost sight of, and that we need to bring back.

If you go back and study the work and writings of the pioneers of New Thought, there is a very strong and pervasive streak of altruism and selflessness in them. It operates from the premise that we are all One in Mind, and that our thoughts affect the reality we experience. Thus it only makes sense that, to work with that Oneness, that our motives should be selfless and working for the good of all. To work for selfish motives, or pitting people against each other, is self-contradictory and backfires since it denies the oneness that the whole system is based on.

In some later developments of New Thought that sense of altruism and selfishness was lost, and there are distinctly selfish variants of New Thought that became very popular in the US, especially among educated and moneyed classes - you might have heard of Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich, or the work of Earl Nightingale. A few decades down the road you have the influence of Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking.

At its best this self-centered variety of New Thought can help to give people self-confidence - but at its worst it can be used to further selfish greed and a sense of entitlement.

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In another variant of New Thought, there is a different kind of assumption that external reality is in some ways a blank slate that can be shaped to whatever we want. I talked about that in the essay on truthfulness and persuasion. This is the "You create your own reality" variant of New Thought.

There is another strange contradictory variant, where there are those in media and government who believe they Create their Own Reality that they can then impose on others by persuasion. It doesn't take much consideration to realize that is internally contradictory.

What we see in our modern culture is a kind of highly developed and sophisticated mental selfishness, with no regard for the larger system that we are all part of - both the community of other people, the larger ecosystem of earth, and the yet larger mental and spiritual ecosystem we are all part of.

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When you start messing with the sort of mass mental persuasion or sorcery that our culture deals in you are working at a level of reality where you need to take into account that our minds are connected and can influence each other.

The laws of any sort of mental influence need to include that effect - we can no longer afford to act as if we are separate.

The setting up of the kinds of opposite polarities we see in politics divides people against each other, and violates that rule of our connectedness. Selfishness is self-defeating since we are part of each other.

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There is another consequence of this law that is commonly violated today - using negative magic, or directing negative spells at a person, is ultimately self-defeating since it violates the law of our connectedness - and negative influence always and everywhere backfires on the person practicing it.

Look at how much of the corporate media is devoted to attacks on one group or another, and how much influence now is attack influence based on stirring up feelings of rage, hatred and contempt towards ones enemies. It seems to be particularly bad in our current period - I am writing these worlds in November in the period just around the US election - and the viciousness and dishonesty of the media attacks - I won't call it breath taking but choking.

It destroys the people practicing it, and it tears down the bonds that keep our society together - not to mention how this sort of reckless exploitive disregard also tears down our connections to the larger ecology.

It sets family against family, brother against sister and children against parents, political parties against each other, states against each other - all the way up to the highest level of countries lined up and destroying each other.

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So what do we do? What is the way forward?

We need to acknowledge our interconnectedness, that we are all one in mind and spirit - that we are responsible for our thoughts and words, how they affect our world and each other.

We need to recognize the importance of compassion and altruistic motives in how we live in the world, and that any sort of divisive selfishness destroys the people who practice it.

We need to recognize that when we attack others we are attacking something within ourselves and it divides and destroys us, externally and internally. When we when we attack others or attack evil forces outside of ourselves we are ultimately attacking ourselves.

Making the darkness outside you the enemy is dangerous; the real darkness is within and needs to be accepted and dealt with.

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So, we need altruism; tolerance; getting past demonizing others and learning to work with others; and waking up from the us/them blame game.

In a period where we are badly divided, and so much of what we have been told about the world is ending up being manipulative lies to further divide us, there is a deep need for dialog and cooperation with those we disagree with. We can no longer afford name-calling and demonizing. If we continue on the path of polarizing division we are on we will destroy ourselves.

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To wrap up I want to briefly recap the persuasion rules that I have been talking about. I think when you look at them together you see that they are all of a piece.

The Law of Equilibrium and Balance - push too far in one direction and you will get an inevitable recoil and backlash.

The Law of Truth and Honesty - words have the power of the truth behind them; use words that are deliberately false and misleading and you hollow out your words and rob them of power. Persuasion in relationship is based on a foundation of trust and honesty. Violate that trust and your persuasion loses all power and conviction, and recoils back on yourself.

The Law of Altruism and Selflessness - we really are far more interconnected than we realize, and our thoughts and minds influence each other. Whatever is good for one must be good for the whole or it is short-sighted and falls apart. To cultivate hostility and division where groups are pitted against each other is ultimately self-defeating and collapses in on itself.

I think we are at a point where the not-particularly-masterful masterminds of the Sorcerer State are in the process of melting down and self-destructing. The next few years could get messy as we become aware of problem areas that have been covered over with a veneer of persuasion fiction. To get through, we will need balance; we will need truth and honesty; we will need altruism and gracious mutual good-will.

I think we are headed in the right direction now, and the more of us work with these principles in mind, the better we will do.

We have some serious work to do.

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Image of sun over water by jrm - photo from Pixabay.

Image from the Wizard of Oz of the Wicked Witch melting by William Wallace Denslow, illustrator, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This post is part of series on how the media world we live in today is a Sorcerer State, based on manipulating and controlling people primarily by persuasion rather than force. I maintain that this persuasion model violates some of the most basic laws of effective communication and change work.

In this post I am looking at the Law of Truth, Honesty and Trust.

There are two dimensions to this Law, and they are inter-related.

- First, there is the nature of words and thinking, their relation to creation and to reality as we affect it and experience it.

- Second is how our use of words affects the nature of inter-personal relationships.

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The corporate media today is based on a model of the world which is all persuasion and no truth - or rather, it is operating on the premise that reality can be whatever we wish it to appear to be - that reality is like a TV or computer screen, and we can do whatever we want with the contents.

It has effectively lost all notion of underlying truthfulness, or of there being some sort of actual truth that can be checked against. This can be easily seen in how very often the media broadcasts stories to have a particular persuasive effect, which are found to be complete fiction - not even a biased presentation of fact, but based on no facts at all.

There is a flaw in the underlying philosophy at work here. Awareness of this problem goes back to the writings of Plato/Socrates. The dialog named First Alcibiades has for its subject the difference between philosophy and rhetoric, language used to convey truth or to persuade. The point is made that focusing on persuasion with no regard for truth or for any kind of underlying moral values is questionable at best and very dangerous at worst. We see the fallout from persuasion without truth in the state of the corporate media today, which seems to be in the process of imploding in on itself from a collapse of trust in the truthfulness of the media message.

You hear much in our culture about persuasion, and influencing, and making a good impression, putting on a good face, on marketing and on image. The whole focus is on how you want to appear, with no emphasis on underlying reality. It is all mask with nothing behind the mask.

Plato makes the point in First Alcibiades that is is dangerous to concentrate on persuasion skills until you have a solid sense of underlying values. The young man in the dialog very much wanted to be a political leader and was focused on persuading people he could lead, but he had given no thought to what his values were, or what was true of false, or what direction would be best to go. This is wanting to be a leader with no direction, just to be able to say you are a leader. People like that end up being very easily corrupted by promises of power and wealth - just say what we tell you and you can have the world at your feet. When the power of being a leader is itself the goal with no larger context that quickly devolves to lowest-common-denominator selfishness

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Another dimension of this issue is about the power of words, and how words are used in creation. Numerous religious and philosophical traditions speak of the Logos, or God creating by his Word, You can make the case that in Taoist philosophy the concept of Tao or the Way is analogous to that of the Word - Chinese translations of the Gospel of John say, In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God, and so on.

It is very important to realize that this creative power is not arbitrary. The universe operates within laws, so it is not a matter of, it is true because God said so, but, God must create what is true. Philosophically this is known as the difference between realism and nominalism - realism says there is an underlying reality to creation by word, and nominalism says that creation can be arbitrary. The modern approach to persuasion/marketing/reality is nominalist - it is true because I say so.

The point I am making here is that the universe operates in realist terms. it is not arbitrary, and has underlying laws and structure. When we create, we must abide by those laws, and the power of our words directly reflects how they correspond with those laws.

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For the individual - thoughts have power, and how you think goes far to determine the world you experience. Since thoughts have power you are bound by them and by their consequences - the kinds of things you think, the thoughts and images you hold in your mind, shape you. This shows how the mind has a great deal of power but it is not arbitrary; there are laws.

it makes sense then that working on thinking as clearly and truthfully as possible is good for your mental health, and leads to your thoughts being clear and powerful. It also makes sense that to use deliberate falsehood and deception robs your words of power.

Think about ignoring truth and concentrating just on persuasion and appearance - we see a great deal of that in the media and political sphere these days, people whose speeches and actions are all tailored towards marketing and appearance with no regard to underlying truth. If you do that for any length of time you lose the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between reality and desired appearance - lay down a line of jive and you will inevitably buy your own jive. Get in the habit of lying to persuade and you get caught up in believing the lies.

Our thoughts, our words, are part of our inner connection to God and to the depths of our own souls. It is related to our intuition and conscience, a guiding voice of the divine within us. Live in a world of deliberate falsehood and you blur over and eventually lose that inner . It rots the soul out from within, so that eventually you have people who are all image and no substance, a shell with nothing behind it. It rots out any sense of internal coherence and personhood. When you have lost that inner rational and spiritual coherence then all that is left is the lowest level of physical and animal sensations, desires and instincts - which in turn makes you a sucker for other's manipulation.

There is also a self-defeating loop here - concentrate on persuasion and marketing with no regard for truth and that robs your words and actions of all their real power. This turns into a vicious escalating spiral - as you lose control the tendency is to double down on the persuasion and marketing, with no regard for truth - and with zero respect for the people you are trying to control.

That's the nub - manipulation with no regard for truth shows a profound contempt and lack of respect - for others - and, for yourself. Once people figure that out you are in trouble.

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This is where the inter-personal dimension comes in.

In the study of persuasion and salesmanship one of the core principles for long term success is building relationships, building a reputation for truth and reliability. It is not just a matter of lip-service to say that the best sales people are those who sincerely do operate with the best interest of their clients in mind, who would never take advantage of a customer to close a quick sale and make a quick buck. That may work in the short term, but long-term it is self-defeating.

Any persuasion relationship has to be built on a basis of truth and trustfulness. Once that trust in broken - once a person has figured out that they are being lied to or manipulated - then you have lost all credibility and your ability to persuade drops to zero.

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I recently read an opinion piece that Jeff Bezos published in his Washington Post Newspaper: The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/

There is a delicious and vicious sort of irony here, in that Bezos is announcing that WaPo is breaking with tradition and not endorsing a candidate this year, and that this is being done "on principle" - and we who no longer trust the media are supposed to trust him when he says that.

We have a self-referential recursive strange loop here, where a prominent member of the news media is talking about how Americans don't trust the news media he is part of, and he expects us to trust him when he says that.

As I mentioned, in dealing with persuasion and trust, as soon as trust is broken and people think you are lying to them, your persuasion ability drops to zero - and once that trust is broken it is very, very hard to rebuild.

Bezos makes the usual accusation that there is much "disinformation and misinformation" in what he condescendingly calls "unverified news sources", and neglects to mention the overwhelmingly high level of "disinformation and misinformation" in the so-called "verified" official news sources, including his paper.

Just in the past few weeks I am aware of at least two specific stories where Bezos and WaPo published completely fabricated lies to move things in a particular political direction.

Once people figure out you are lying to them you have broken trust - and Bezos has figured out people no longer trust the media and yet continues lying. The result is to further erode trust.

Through the past few years I have found what Bezos dismisses as "unverified news sources" that I trust far more than MSM - sources that have earned my trust by now. That is where I turn to stay informed.

When official sources are proven unreliable then people turn elsewhere, do their own digging and come to their own conclusions. I no longer trust Bezos or any other "official" or "verified" source for true news. They have proven themselves untrustworthy, and they continue to confirm that distrust daily.

My sense from the editorial - which sounds condescending to me - is that Bezos thinks that just by saying WaPo is an "independent newspaper" with skilled journalists, is enough to get people to trust it again. He also does not realize that, when you lose your respect as an authority, merely declaring yourself an authority does nothing to regain trust.

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So what do we as individuals do about this problem? How do we navigate?

Value truth and honesty over reputation and appearance - in my experience this is much, much more difficult than you realize - until your thinking and exploration takes you into areas that are off-limits to the mainstream consensus. I've discovered over the past several years that I have mental guard-rails set up in my mind - when I would start to explore in questionable areas I would get a mental warning sign and a flash of tension, like a red warning light saying, don't go here - don't even think this - it could get you in trouble. In the past I have nicknamed these mental land-mines, placed there to make sure that certain topics were off limits. It wasn't until I pushed past those warning signals and did my own thinking, that I realized how thoroughly my thinking had been constricted. This in turn created serious problems communicating with people who still had those mental land-mines in place - touching on some topics felt like setting off an explosion.

I've been writing online for well over a decade now, and I can't count the number of times I have started to write something and then thought, wait - this could hurt your reputation - you can't say anything that will turn people off. It is a kind of hard-wired self-censorship that is hard to become aware of. I also noticed that in situations like that there was often a kind of inner imperative there, pushing me to write exactly in those areas - sometimes I would be writing in response to an inner prompting while simultaneously thinking, oh, man, don't make me write about this; you'll get me in trouble.

The best way I know of to become aware of this is to pay attention to your own thought processes, and your emotional reactions to news - and what kinds of thoughts run through your mind before you decide to speak - or to stay silent.

When you start to question parts of the news, pay attention to your motives, your feelings - are you thinking, I can't go there, it will get me in trouble; What will my (fill in the blank) think?

Thinking for yourself sounds easy until you try it.

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Another very important milestone is to be willing to admit where you have been fooled and taken advantage of. Be willing to admit you have made mistakes, have been told lies and have bought them. Again, this can be much harder than it sounds until you are faced with it, and get that ugly sinking feeling where you would do anything rather than admit that. This is particularly difficult where you have said things in public that you figure out were false.

Get some good recipes for eating crow; you will need them.

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In my experience there is also a scary point where you realize that a lot of the authorities you have trusted through your life are corrupt, so that you cannot rely on anyone else, any institution or expert, to do your thinking for you. There is a funny sort of free-fall moment where you realize you are responsible for your own decisions, and your own thinking. Past a certain point there is no-one left to blame and no-place to shift the responsibility. Whether you were misled or not, you are responsible for the consequences of the decisions you made.

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To move past the persuasion model we need to be willing to dialog, be willing to let people disagree without your having the need to judge them or cut them off. Again, this can be a lot harder than it sounds, especially in your personal hot-button areas.

We are so trained into an adversarial model of relating to others, the binary right/wrong model, that getting past that can take work and feel really uncomfortable - I know it does for me.

It is very important to allow other people to think for themselves. to allow that there can be areas where they are right and you are wrong, or that it is more likely a mixed bag where neither side is all right or wrong. Or, sometimes you may have areas where you are convinced you are right, and you need to allow people the freedom to disagree, without rancor or judgment. That is hard.

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Learn to think. Get a good dictionary, and get in the habit of defining important words. Learn to recognize when language is being used on you to obfuscate and manipulate rather than inform. That is not a quick process; it takes work and awareness, and it is very different from the sort of thinking we are trained to do in school, which is largely a matter of rote memorization and parroting back the expected response if you want to get ahead. That is a hard habit to break.

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Choose your news sources carefully. if you agree with me here about the corporate media, now that they have lost authority and credibility, it means you can no longer rely on credentials in choosing your news. The people I now follow online have proved their veracity and trustworthiness to me over time, so I now rely on them, which does not mean I agree with all they say. Over the years I have followed and then discarded multiple news sources, and I now have a small handful of people I read regularly who are my main sources of news.

If you learn from experience that a news source has lied to you to manipulate you - that is a big red flag. Drop it; do not assume that because you are aware of their manipulation in that one area, that you are not being hoodwinked in others. It is so very easy to fall into the trap of thinking you are too smart to be fooled like that. Whatever media you ingest affects your mind, and much of that effect is outside your conscious awareness.

Manipulative media is toxic and brainwashing; avoid it, it is dangerous - And no, you are not above being fooled because you are too intelligent. Some of the most thoroughly brainwashed people I know are the most credentialed and degreed.

If you place a lot of value on credentials, be careful; given the disillusionment going on with authority and trustworthiness, those credentials no longer mean what they used to. By now, my favorite and most trustworthy news sources ares un-credentialed outsider types who have no academic cred. I have to judge sources by their inherent worth rather than their credentials or labeling.

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That next point may be the hardest part - being honest with yourself.

Sometimes there is a price to be paid for stepping outside of popular opinions and being honest. Ask yourself if you are willing to pay it - and don't bother equivocating, because if you lie here you are only lying to yourself - and if you lie to yourself you will never know what trust means - because if you are lying you will have to assume that everyone else is lying also, and that will destroy any real friendship.

If you get in the habit of lying to yourself you are proving you can't trust yourself - and if you can't trust yourself, how can you expect anyone else to trust you?

How in the world can you possibly find the sorts of friends you would like to have if you aren't honest with others? If you are putting up a false front, then how can anyone figure out who you really are?

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We are reaping the consequences of living in a society that places manipulation and persuasion above respect for truth and for others. That world is falling apart around us, and going forward we need to rediscover the importance of the ironclad, unbreakable laws of honesty, truthfulness and trust.

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Image by M. Richter from Pixabay.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/11/06/scott_jennings_trump_victory_an_indictment_of_the_political_information_complex_revenge_of_the_working-class_voter.html

In this essay, quotes from Jennings are in plain italics.

I also feel like this election, as we sit here and pour over this tonight, is something of an indictment of the political information complex. We've been sitting around here for the last couple of weeks, and the story that was portrayed was not true.

This is a remarkably clear and honest statement here. Consider just what he is admitting.

He has clearly and plainly admitted that the media has been lying to people. Period.

I'm interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of just the regular old working class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to. They're not garbage. They're not Nazis.

They're just regular people who get up and go to work every day and are trying to make a better life for their kids, and they feel like they have been told to just shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives.

I'm a white working class man. I grew up in a mixed race working class neighborhood in Brooklyn New York; my dad was a bookkeeper and my mom was a sewing machine operator. My wife was a secretary. I have a college BA but it means next to nothing to me, and I never felt like I belonged there. I live in a mixed race working class Minneapolis neighborhood, and go to a working class inner city Catholic parish.

I know what it's like to be called garbage by the President. Or Deplorable by a Democratic candidate. Or a right-wing extremist and threat to the country. It's not fun - especially when I know it's a lie.

The media didn't just lie about Trump; they lied about people like me.

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The good news is that more and more people no longer buy into the lies - it has gotten so bad that even corporate media itself is starting to wake up to that. (Here is a good piece addressing that - https://thefederalist.com/2024/11/06/2024s-biggest-loser-is-the-corporate-media-industrial-complex/)

The bad news is that there are very many people who are still caught up in the lies, still deluded and traumatized by them. The worse news is that much of corporate media is still clinging to those lies to retain what little power they think they still wield.

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Here I want to link to a handy list from JustFactsDaily.com of many of the major falsehoods that the media has fabricated about Trump over the past several years to turn him into a demon. None of this is new if you've been tracking alternate media, but it can be quite eye-opening and shocking if you haven't.

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Back to Jennings -

I'm a little worried about how Democrats are going to react. They've been told Trump is a modern-day Hitler, or at least he's a fascist, and now Kamala Harris, I suspect, is going to have to wake up in the morning and concede to that person. I'm a little concerned about an election in which half the country was conditioned to believe that the person who just won the national popular vote is going to be a dictator, eliminate the Constitution, and create a bloodbath, and so on and so forth. We have to reckon with that in the aftermath of that argument.

The media has consistently lied to people about Trump to derail him, and here Jennings acknowledges that a lot of people still are conditioned to believe those lies. I think that is the biggest challenge we have to deal with today - the people who are still caught up in the lies.

There are still millions of people who have been traumatized by corporate media to believe that all of those lies I referred to above are true - and those people are in serious and dangerous psychic distress just now. These are people who are convinced that the American people have just elected Hitler On Steroids, and they are terrified. They are afraid of a phantom created by lies.

The price for manipulating people with fear and rage driven lies is devastating, both to those who tell the lies and to those who buy them.

Waking up from this kind of trauma is difficult; I speak from experience here. And that is our challenge - waking up from the damage caused by a media world of lies that is falling apart.

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When you lie to people and they find out, this breaks trust and destroys your ability to persuade. The only way to even begin the long slow road back to rebuilding trust is by admitting that you have lied and to take responsibility for it.

Doubling down on the lies just destroys your credibility even faster.

Evading them, memory-holing them, or quietly changing them, just increases the distrust - it sends the message that you are still trying to con people, and are evading responsibility for what you have said.

The only way to even start to repair the damage from telling lies and manipulating is to stop lying and manipulating.

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Those of us who are starting to wake up have some heavy challenges here.

To stay truthful.

To never resort to bending the truth to get what we want.

To avoid the temptation and desire to seek revenge, or to mock those who are caught up in self-pitying meltdowns.

To be gentle and understanding with those who are still caught up in the lies - sometimes that means just backing off when they are in meltdown mode, when trying to push things would just be dangerous.

It also means continuing to be honest, and being open to ways that we can give people space to deal with how they have been lied to - not to tell them what to think, and not to indulge what we know to be falsehood, but to give them space to wake up for themselves, or to continue as they are as they choose.

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I am looking past this tricky transition period to a post-media-lies era where we can actually begin to have civil conversations again, and can talk about disagreements without allowing them to break our bonds or to make us enemies. I don't expect the transition to be easy, but that is my goal; that is what I think is worth working for.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay.

In the first post in this series The Sorcerer State, I talked about understanding our current predicament as that of a Sorcerer State, where those mindlessly casting the persuasion spells are breaking some very basic rules of effective magic.

In this post I want to talk about one group of those basic rules - of Equilibrium, Balance and Reaction. You can sum them up in this way:

- All systems will always tend towards maintaining a state of equilibrium. This is not stillness but a dynamic, oscillating and cyclical movement, an orderly movement around a center.

- Any disturbance of equilibrium will create a reaction in the opposite direction. The more extreme the original deviance from equilibrium the more extreme the reaction.

- The best way to keep a state of balance is to avoid extremes because they create extreme polarization and tension.

It will be pretty clear that I am writing this from the perspective of a resident of the US, so my comments are colored by that.

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I did a post earlier this year on this topic: Cycles and the Shape of Decline.

That post is about the topic of cycles and equilibrium, of growth and decline, where I talked about our country wanting to pursue a policy of straight line unlimited growth – and, if that growth was not actually happening, to manipulate the news and the numbers to make it appear it was happening, That’s a very good example of pushing a system out balance to an extreme that calls for an extreme reaction back.

The image above is referring to the state of our economy, where the blue wave shows the actual condition our economy is in and the red jagged line shows the official narrative - and if I am right we are in for a serious correction. That wave shape applies to other sorts of cycles also - the wave is the graph of a pendulum moving through time.

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There is another dimension to this media manipulation, which is to push people to wildly polarized extremes. I talked about the tendency to paint things in black/white good/evil dichotomies. That groups people in one extreme camp or the other and pits them against each other.

I will be exploring both these points in this essay.

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I want to use a useful analogy here that I saw in John Michael Greer's book, Dark Age America, in a chapter discussing ecology and the environment. Take a bathtub mostly full of water, and move your hand in it. If you move your hand gradually you will get a series of gentle waves in reaction, and if you remove your hand it gradually returns to rest. The more strongly and rapidly you move your hand, the bigger the waves become, until past a certain point the regular wave pattern breaks down and you get chaotic movement, likely with water splashing all over the floor.

That is the point I think we are approaching now. The persuasion in the media, which is wildly out of balance and out of touch, is like wildly slapping the water over and over in a single direction, rather like trying to pile all the water up in half the tub and pretend the other half doesn’t exist.

At this point the very best thing to do is take your hand out of the tub and Back Off.

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Another dimension of this rule of balanced movement is what I think of as Riding the Wave. Any sort of action is most effective when it is going in harmony with a larger current – riding the wave – and attempting to go against the wave both runs into extreme resistance and also pushes an out of balance system even further out of balance, inviting a yet stronger and more extreme backlash reaction when it does come.

From where I am sitting the politics of 2020 in the US (and apparently in England, much of Europe and even Australia) was a move of desperation, of people who knew they were losing control and tried taking extreme measures to keep it, crossing a line more and more from persuasion into coercion. That control can be powerful, but it is also very brittle – which invites and makes inevitable an extreme reaction, an extreme swing back the other way. That swing back is being desperately resisted, and the longer that happens the worse the inevitable backlash will be.

That persuasion included extreme measures to shut down all alternate points of view, and to harass, vilify, slander and attack those disagreeing with the mandated points. This extreme coercion and censorship was taken to the point of un-personing people who resisted the coercion. (I experienced some of that first hand a few years back, when I had Twitter and Facebook cancel mobs after me to destroy my reputation because I had made some statements that were taken to be politically incorrect. It is all kinds of no fun to be on the receiving end of that.)

In a nutshell I think that is what happened with the covid mania in 2020 and its political ramifications – it was a violent swing in one direction in attempt to maintain control, and it worked for awhile, but only by using some pretty brutally extreme coercive techniques. This was like trying to take a pendulum that was already far over on one side and about to swing back, and using extreme force to push it even further in that same direction.

Here is a quote from Blavatsky that describes this process of equilibrium and reaction with the eastern term karma.

It is man who plants and creates causes, and Karmic law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigor. If it happens to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say it is the bough which broke our arm or that our own folly has brought us to grief?

- H P Blavatsky, Key to Theosophy pp 211-212

The net result is that we have a system that is wildly out of balance and desperately trying to act like everything is going just fine, thank you very much. I expected we will be seeing more than a few dislocated arms in the coming days.

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If I look at the last few years of my life, - since 2016 in a larger frame, and definitely since 2020 and the covid mania - I experienced what seemed to me like our culture taking a very violent swing hard left, and painting me as an enemy of society and extremist in the process. I in turn personally responded by taking a rightward swing in my own opinions for awhile - that was my semi-conscious reaction to reach some sort of balance. This past year, as I calm down and become more aware, I am trying to settle back to a more balanced and equilibrated place, recognizing the best of my experience on the right side of the spectrum while backing away from some of their distinctive imbalances.

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I want to talk some more about this tactic of painting things in stark extremes, setting up polarized opposites against each other. This involves labeling actions, and people, in terms of extreme binaries, like:

- White/Black

- Good/Evil

- Us/Them

That last one, Us/Them, is the worst, since it sets people at each other’s throats and creates violent divisions and fractures in social groups – families, clubs, work groups, churches and so on. Friendships were destroyed, groups and families were torn apart, both on political lines, and on attitudes and actions towards the mandated covid directives of vaccination, masking, distancing and so on. This divided groups on sharp binary lines that fractured any sense of tolerance or cooperation. I know I personally lost my main social communities over those issues.

This Us/Them division is related to the general attitude in our society of lack of context, where something can be good for me or for Us and I can ignore all the rest of Them out there because they don't count - or, I can ignore the greater world and leave it out of account. It's the isolation of exploitive selfishness, and it is an attitude that runs very deep in our culture.

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In trying to manipulate these extreme divisions, part of the way MSM - Mainstream Media, aka Legacy Media since it is in the process of being obsoleted and superseded - MSM appears to be trying to deal with these extreme divisions by getting us involved in yet another holy war abroad as a way of uniting popular sentiment. This has been done before, several times even in my own lifetime. The problem is that this does not seem to be working very well anymore; too many people recall the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Ukraine situation now seems to be falling apart and backfiring. I suspect there may be another try in the Middle East, but there is already a wide split in American culture on conflicts there - and that split is there whether or not MSM acknowledges the split or tries to shut down open discussion. These divisions do not miraculously disappear by declaring a false state of Unity that very quietly (or maybe not so quietly) erases half of the country.

Past a point, finding an external enemy as a way of papering over domestic problems and divisions quits working, and I suspect we are well past that point already.

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There is another metaphor for our unbalanced state that I used in an earlier post, one that is particularly apt for the direction our economy is going, and related to that, the government's actions in funding wars around the world. In some ways our country is like a way over-inflated balloon that is springing leaks, and the strategy to deal with that is to keep frantically pumping more and more air into it to compensate… you can visualize where that will end up.

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Given that we are dealing with a grossly unbalanced and unstable state of affairs, what can we do about it? How can we personally respond to keep from exacerbating the situation and getting caught up in the violent wild swings over the next few years?

Take the bathtub analogy again – when the waves get too disorderly and water starts splashing all over the place, this is a really good time to back away from the tub and wait a bit until the water calms down.

This is a very good time to avoid conflict.

Individually, it is a good time to keep from giving in to violent mood swings, or to get caught up in rage, blaming and yelling. It is good to moderate one’s own emotional responses by getting some distance and perspective from them. This takes some time, some perspective, and some emotional maturity to be able to get a distance from your own emotions to moderate them. It also means taking responsibility for your own emotional reactions rather than blaming them on an outside force.

I find it very helpful to remember that the violent mood swings, pitting people against each other, are part and parcel of the manipulation techniques used to keep people under control by having them rip each other down. By staying calm and refusing to play the rage and blame game I am helping to break the spell.

This is also a very good time to cultivate compassion and understanding – to remember that there are usually more than two sides to an argument; that no one side has a monopoly on Rightness – and to remember that the opposite of a bad idea is usually another bad idea, and to seek another option closer to the middle.

In other words, the best thing to do now is to cultivate a sense of balance and equilibrium in yourself.

For myself, I find it absolutely essential to have a regular prayer and worship life to keep balance – one that includes humility and self-examination – and to take advantage of my faith without falling into the trap of seeing myself on the one Right side while every one else is on the Wrong side. This also means to stay away from the trap of getting caught up in a need to convert others to My Side which has The capital T Truth. Tolerance, understanding and compassion are all virtues that badly need cultivation right now. Remember that the word virtue means power or force, and cultivating these virtues of self-control, discipline, balance, compassion and forgiveness are all very empowering. The closer you are to calm equilibrium the harder you are to knock off balance - anyone who has studied anything about martial arts knows that as soon as your opponent loses their cool and gets angry that the match is over, given skill and patience.

So, the best way to help our society ride the changes coming is to first establish a center of equilibrium in yourself. I am convinced that prayer from a place of calm and balance is far more powerful and effective, and frankly I think we can be greatly helped by many people devoting themselves to such prayer.

When you are not in a place of calm and balance, prayer is one of the best things I know to help move you there.

I also suspect that there will be periods where things can get unstable enough that taking direct public action will be dangerous - there is a potential for actual violence at a local level. Sometimes the best advice really is to stop thrashing the water and back away from the tub until the water calms down.

Don’t just Do Something, Sit There!

There is something to be said for regularly getting to a place of silence, stillness and balance before taking any action. Also, a lot can be done with prayer from a place of silence.

If you are in motion and off-balance, it really helps to slow down and stop moving to regain balance before moving again.

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Part of why I am writing this series right now, at this point in time – I talked about how much of the MSM sorcery is exacerbating things in an extreme direction. I am convinced we are in the midst of a growing swing back from the excesses of 2020 and earlier - aka a backlash - and with this post, if I read things correctly, I am riding that wave and taking advantage of its momentum.

I write this next note for those who have felt frustrated, isolated and unhappy with the direction things have swung in the past few years:

Take heart; you are not alone. Keep your signals out, online and locally – you have friends.

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Here I want to sum up where the whole series on the Sorcerer State is going. To make it through the rough years of transition ahead, both personally and as a group, I convinced we are wanting to move in these directions:

- away from extreme polarization and towards equilibrium and a balancing point in middle.

- away from adversary attitudes and blaming, and towards forgiveness and cooperation.

- away from exploitive, adversary persuasion/marketing and towards dialog and truth.

- away from selfishness and self-isolation towards community, context, ecology, working in harmony with the larger whole - moving with the currents of the greater world.

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In the next essay in this series I want to talk about another set of laws related to effective magic and living an effective life - the laws of Truthfulness, of Honesty and of Trust.

Stay tuned.

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Image of pendulum from Wikimedia Commons.