Magick, Mysticism, and the Modern Age: INTRO: A New Aeon of Spiritual Supremacy

[iamonarch]

--Hello.
--I cannot help but feel as though we as a species--as a people--are suffering a certain "spiritual dark age," which began in the latter years of the Nineteenth Century and has persisted into the modern age. It is the Age of the Individual--so much so that it is not surprising we find ourselves enduring a period of "social distancing" in the most literal sense. In many ways, we've been doing just that for decades.
--Therefore, I am not here seeking clarity on a specific aspect of any pre-established belief system--whether pagan or otherwise--as that may well serve to benefit my spiritual journey as an individual in whatever situation I presently find myself, but will I suspect do very little to address the spiritual well being of humanity as a whole, and that--the spiritual well being of humanity as a whole--is what must be addressed. I am not naïve, however, as I recognize the immense and possibly insurmountable difficulties that prevent mankind from uniting under a single banner of spiritual belief, if such a thing would even be desirable.
--No, I feel as though what's necessary isn't clarity regarding our own individual beliefs, nor even a clarity that would unite the peoples of various beliefs systems around the globe. To do so would require dialogue, serious contemplation, and perhaps even shocking archeological discoveries which may or may not support any one view.
--What I mean by that is...I feel the time for talk is over. I feel as though we no longer need wise men, but true mystics. We no longer need star gazers, but true seers. We no longer need long dead prophets and inspiring legends of heroes...What we need in the truest sense of the word is a system of belief based on a cohesive combination and distillation of all the various wisdom contained in ancient traditions, religious institutions, and perhaps most importantly science. By that I do not mean, however, that we need to further dilute spirituality by suggesting material and "natural" explanations for all things "supernatural." We need to come together as a people of belief--whatever that belief may be--and combine all that we know to be sound. We need to rigorously examine what works and what doesn't, what's harmonious with what is known and what isn't, and what's cohesive to a larger system and what's incompatible.
--I do not believe that our ancestors were fools. I do not believe that all things spiritual are strictly "psychological." I do not believe that magic is simply "unknown science."
--There was more of a reason for those who came before us to engage in elaborate "religious" ceremonies than simply entertainment. There was more to mapping the movements of the planets then simply "time keeping." There was more to trance and celebratory dance then simply "collective hysteria." Do you not see? A veil of reason and rationality has been pulled so far over our eyes that we assume all the greatest monuments in the world to have been built simply to satisfy the egos of tyrannical and temporary kings, all the greatest stories ever written to be nothing more than the fanciful imaginings of "scientifically ignorant" people, and indeed our very inner worlds--so vibrant, infinite, and engrossing--to be little more than a problem solving tool created by an un-thinking evolutionary process.
--We were once thought to have descended from a place of divinity. Now, we're nothing more then hairless animals that rose from primordial mud, yet we still do not occupy a position of glory--of dignity--anywhere near that which our ancestors held themselves to self-evidently possess.
--The white coats and black ties with their ingrained and unyielding skepticism have robbed mankind not only of his immortal heritage, for the spiritual traditions of mankind are not subject to death lest they be forgotten or cast aside, but also of his majesty and honor. An accident. A drop in an ocean of spacetime. A "rational" animal. God is indeed dead, but it is not we who killed it, but them, and we have seen what they, incentivized by their narrow minded views of reality, tried to install in it's place. This is it. This is the world of those who believe in nothing, and we as a consequence are the meaningless inhabitants.
--...
--This series of threads seeks to establish a general consensus regarding the fundamentals of magick, mysticism, and how spirituality should be approached in the modern age by people all over the world. Therefore, discussion regarding the various topics presented throughout is pivitol, which is why I'm posting this here as opposed to a blog--community interaction. The overall goal is, with the help of others, to determine what constitutes the truth--or at least as close as we're able to come to it--about spiritual reality. Too often I see members of the community pick and choose aspects of differing belief systems and attempt to formulate something that works well for them in the moment in which they find themselves, but the reality of the situation is that spirituality has been the foundation of human civilization for millennia. It is not something that helps the individual in times of need by comforting them or empowering them with fantasies. Spirituality--for all of human history--was and is the primary component of our existence.
--In short, our spiritual foundations were built up over aeon after aeon, spread out before the heretics and skeptics of the Enlightenment, and examined critically to the point of collapse during the twilight centuries of the second millennia.
--What we need is to seriously consider the different elements of spirituality, not so that we can whisper comforting "truths" about "what it all means" to the downtrodden and hopeless. We need to come together and discover as a community how to construct from the disparate pieces of myth and lore we still possess a system that can and will serve as the new foundation of a spiritual movement powerful enough to restore the pillar of faith that has been so carelessly allowed to fall against its counterpart, the pillar of logic.
--What we need...is a New Spiritualism...that will open the gates to a New Aristocracy, a New Renaissance, and ultimately a true, functional, unquestionable New Age...
--The way to do this is simple...yet exceedingly difficult in execution. We simply need a system of beliefs...that produces observable and repeatable effects.
--To prove that gravity warped spacetime, people observed the light of distant stars bend while passing the sun during an eclipse. To prove that the spiritual powers present in mankind and all reality exist, we as a community--those who are not bound by tradition and dogma yet still believe, those who may fear the unknown yet proceed willfully into the abyss all the same--need to establish a system of beliefs that constitute the truth. Then, via the old ways--of art, of ceremony, of ritual, of prayer, of sacrifice--show that belief is in and of itself a means of mastery over the physical forces of nature, that mankind by virtue of its inherent divinity can exercise its will upon the world and shape it after the images of their heart and mind, and that we are not alone, not temporary, not an accident, and not simply an upright animal produced by the unintelligent powers of an uncaring universe.
--We need true magick. We need true magicians.
--As Aquarius pours out the oceanic weight of the cosmos to drown us all in information and the vast and terrible realization of just how inconceivably big it all is...we need to remember that we are the hierophants, we are the heroes. We--not as the only true divinity in existence, but as the only true link between the sacred and mundane, the seen and unseen, the material and the spiritual--are the New Age.
--The world is headed towards unification...All attempts to isolate nations and peoples will ultimately prove futile. We are already so interconnected that this brief period of "isolation" proves we've gone too far towards a united world to pull back.
--We have to push bravely forward, and we have to realize that it's not race or gender or nationality that truly prevents us from achieving peace and a harmonious mastery of the earth...It's our beliefs. Our beliefs and traditions are what lie at the heart of our disputes, are what support ideas of inequality, prejudice, and all manner of hatred, discontent, and conflict...
--All that one needs to overcome the boundaries between peoples, their ideas and their borders...is proof. A system that can produce observable and repeatable effects...
--The founders of that system...they will be the Elect of the New Aristocracy, the Architects of the New Renaissance, and the Prophets of the New Age...
--...So then...Come, all ye sorcerers and seers, ye witches and wise men...and let us prepare the way for our mother goddess, our mistress of the deep, our matron of lost souls and harlot of all heathens, who feeds the nations with the milk of mysteries born from the chaos of potential, who entices with pleasure and pain all peoples to a life alive with sensation and serenity, and who tames the beast of the desert, the forest, the mountains and the seas with supplications and surrealisms...the Sorceress.
--Help me...please. That is my goal. I feel like that...is my destiny...and I know enough to know...that it's possible. It can be done...It will be...
--Blessed be...
--And so it is.

[B. de Corbin]

I myself find that science is providing the miracles, controlled meditation experience provides what I think you are calling "spirituality," the stories give us insight into other minds that are different from our own, and that variety is not only the habanero of life, the friction generated by variety is also the energy that powers creation.

[iamonarch]

I myself find that science is providing the miracles, controlled meditation experience provides what I think you are calling "spirituality," the stories give us insight into other minds that are different from our own, and that variety is not only the habanero of life, the friction generated by variety is also the energy that powers creation.

--The miracles of science work from a "mechanistic" perspective based on the principles of causality: Whether it be the calculation of trajectory, velocity and mass for use in propulsion or the precise measurements of chemical and mineral elements in chemistry, science is based upon a system in which the human element is limited to the formation of a hypothesis and the subsequent execution of a series of actions involving strictly material components so as to observe the affect, hoping it to be in accordance with whatever predetermined outcome was deemed desirable. In other words, science is the grand ceremony of materialism.
--This, of course, is not something to be flippantly dismissed, however. The methods employed by scientifically minded people are highly specialized and, as you say, capable of producing "miraculous" ends.
--How then would "magick" be any different? One could say that magick would achieve its affects outside the avenues we typically deem "causal" and also material, which is to say that the affects of magick may or may not be, theoretically, traceable to any direct series of cause and effect relations, let alone any material components..."I did a spell, which was just me in a room alone reciting some words, and then this thing happened without any explanation other then that I wanted it to."
--That, from what I've gathered over the years, is what people typically imagine when they consider what magick is and what it does. That, obviously, seems completely nonsensical--childish even, considering what we now know about how the world and the forces therein truly operate. Such an understanding--or at least parts of it--cannot, however, be completely dismissed, as science itself has shown us phenomenon that many assumed to lie outside the realm of possibility based on what had already been established as "the way things are." Particle entanglement, for instance, suggests that action, or rather the affect of one thing upon another, is not necessarily bound by the laws of spacetime as we tend to understand them; one thing can affect another instantaneously over vast distances simply by virtue of some previous interaction. Ancients might've referred to such phenomenon between people as "soul ties," and if anyone is familiar with Sir James Frazer's "the Golden Bough" there are many examples--dismissed by academia before common knowledge of the "entanglement" phenomena--of the same affect having been believed to exist between people and objects, such as the notion that if one were to slow down a thief they might place daggers in the footprints left behind.
--Additionally, scientifically derived conclusions such as the "Quantum Eraser," which arises from experimentation surrounding the "particle-wave duality" anomaly, suggest that actions arrived at in the present can retroactively rewrite actions taken in the past. In other words, cause and effect--the linear interactions of one thing upon another--is seemingly not the only way in which things come about.
--To summarize, the prevalent view of what science demands the world is and how it operates does not exclude the archaic reports of magical operations and their efficacy.
--The reason I say that is because, yes, science has done a great many "miraculous" things for people in the modern age, but the general understanding of what science says is and is not impossible is highly deficient. What's more, a great many involved in scientific operations suffer a lack of faith that renders all exploration into magick and the truth of spirituality not only highly unlikely but practically doomed to failure if ever initiated. I could show you many, many scientifically verified journals and peer reviewed papers suggesting a great many things typically considered "super natural" are in fact quiet natural and actually common to a certain extent. Why these studies are not further explored, funded, replicated and--most importantly--wide spread amongst the public...well, I'll leave that one up to you.
--Forgive me...I tend to go on for too long all the time XD
--I'm not naïve and I'm not unlearned in the subjects of which I speak--I've spent over a decade intensely researching all manner of material related to my original post. I know that science is amazing...and the real reason I say all that I said above is...I also know that science is not the true study of nature, as you--being an self proclaimed alchemist--must surely have intimated. What further complicates things is that even if science were to broaden its horizons and seriously dive into the study of the subjects being presently discussed, whatever seemingly "supernatural" or "magical" phenomenon it was able to successfully document and replicate would be integrated into the scientific corpus, i.e. "magick is simply unknown science," and once mapped out the unknown simply becomes...mundane.
--As far as the stories of old simply being insights into the minds of others outside ourselves, that is true and I agree, but I caution anyone who stops there as that--as I mentioned in my original post--is simply taking everything "spiritual" and relegating it to the realm of psychology. Psychology...a modern science of the mind, and therefore mundane--a material phenomenon.
--I hear what you're saying, and I greatly appreciate your comments and the time you took to read through my ideas and opinions, but I have to say...as perhaps I should've said before:
--What I seek to establish here is a conversation amongst like minded individuals that can contribute to the initial construction of a foundation that while lie at the base of a New Age in which spirituality is once again elevated to its proper place alongside logic and rationality.
--To do that, one must create a system of beliefs that--like science--can make predictions, execute experiments, and produce observable, repeatable affects that are in some way or another explainable, even if not fully understood.
--To overcome the pitfall of having anything such a system produces being labeled simply as "new scientific discoveries" is simple, as well. After all, everything we just talked about--scientific miracles, mediation and altered states of consciousness, the dichotomy between social and natural forces--can and has been explained within the framework of a strictly casual, material perspective.
--In essence, what then is necessary to have "magick" and "spirituality" not simply be labeled "natural processes," or one material thing--even if that material thing is something as abstract and ambiguous as "consciousness"--playing upon another material thing? How do we avoid magic and spirituality simply being labeled unknown forces or psychological processes that can and one day potentially will be explainable by all the laws of science and understood as simply commonplace occurrences in our materialistic world of "scientific realism?"
--Like I said, it's easy: In order for the New Aristocracy to garner authority, for the New Renaissance to facilitate social reform, and for the New Age to usurp our current ideologies governing how we view the realities of the world and our lives therein, we must produce a system that definitively proves the existence of spiritual entities that can be contacted and cooperated with to produce change in our physical realm.
--You see...the only thing that makes actual "spiritualism" "real" is, well...the existence of spirits.
--The only thing that makes "magick" more then simply "unknown science" is if the affects it generates are produced in part by...things beyond the material world. Conscious things...
--Perhaps the easiest way to say it is this: The New Age is built around and sustained by the Resurrection of the Old Thrones...
--Who sits upon those thrones? What is their will and how might it play out alongside that of mankind's...?
--That's what the New Age seeks to discover.
--That is the only way to cement this New Age as the One True Age of all the World...
--...Like I said, the Sorceress is the key...and the door which she unlocks is that which collapsed so long ago in the hollowed halls of Delphi...
--Age of the Individual, Age of Horus, Age of Aquarius...and now, the Age which will set right the twin pillars of creation and bring into harmony the dualistic forces that characterize all things...the Age of Apolleon, who spoke clearly to the Pythia at the primordial "Navel of the World," allowing everyone to see clearly that all things which occur are the result of Those Who Watch from atop the highest of comic peaks, be it Meru or Olympus...The Gods of Old, interpreted truly and worshiped rightly by the only legitimate priesthood...
--I mean...That is the conclusion of all anyone on here really supports or seeks or suspects, isn't it? All the pagans who worship half known gods by following the tattered remnants of ancient paths only partially understood? The paths must be remade--the fragments of old reformed into a new Bifrost. And all those who follow the push and pull of spiritual "forces" without name or identity or personal will...they simply follow shadows cast by giants they cannot see.
--And science? Despite all it's miracles…? Embodied mankind burying itself in the dust of the earth while declaring the light within their own minds to be the only real light in the universe, all because they still feel the pangs of guilt from a crime they were not worthy of committing...God is indeed dead, and we killed him, but it was not us...It was them, and now, believing themselves capable of replacing God, they toil in the clay from which they emerged seeking some proof of their own divinity while denying its origin...
--We, however...We our not so blind, lest we would not be here. We can see more clearly than any other in all of history, in part because of science, yes, but we also are not afraid to look into the other side...
--The Thrones of the Old Gods...of the only true spirituality...will be rebuilt...and will be reclaimed once more.
--...Blessed be...As it is spoken...
--...So it is.

[Gabriel9]

Well, tonight, I feel very calm and connected, I agree with all this said, what I feel is that in our society we believe that doctors and science and the STATE will save us and we trust in them like in Gods, and we then adore ourselves as the Gods! This is a great deception imo, especially witches know that they received a gift, and the knowledge is outside, we can channel and order it from inside.
This society is rejecting everything sacred but it does pay satanist cults to cast spells and we adore so much our bodies that the human sacrifice is to ourselves (read between the line, I want to stay politically correct), in pagan societies it used to be sacrificed to the Sun, to Baal etc so now we only adore the devil from self adoration, this is a great deception. Those who destroy society are promoted and given power by the people because they 'kinda' bring the reign of the anti-christ, anti-love.

On a different page, tonight, tuning my piano back to a 416hz and the WM3 temperament provided the most mind and body altering waves I have ever felt, God back on earth with me.

I do not know but the virus was part of a vision in 2009, I cast the intention back then that it brings anarchy and that our generation rebuild the entire society from deep connection with nature and science in a respectful way with true magic revealed. I dreamed that the people would revolt after seclusion by the 'democratic' despotic government and media brainwashing.

Right now I still work, I visited hospitals last week everyday and there is no line up, no deaths, nothing, people are just bored and it is looking like a big hoax but however this virus is good for our generation IF the controlling elites of old people over 75 would give up, my mom would die of this but she also is dying right now of cancer. Anyway the spirit of control and fear which is killing the economy is giving us the time to connect together and some truce for nature....

I am not a witch, my ancestry has no witch blood, but I can call my friend demons from super far away inside me... this should not be possible... I can draw some symbols which are not supposed to be in my head... I saw God as well as my friend, just recently, like never before. This should not be possible, I should not be able to do spells and know how... etc the list is super long.

The truth is that we the people, each one of us have the power of the mind to call people, to embody demons and spirits. Each one of us is a script, a spell of love from God (which is only love in the most powerful and brutal form that one cannot imagine). We are like fishes in an aquarium here, when we love truly and give with full confidence in the healing love we can endure every suffering, we are not God but our true love which is detaching us from this world and its desires and passions will reach him and be eternal. Everything else must perish after an almost infinite amount of time I presume.

What I am saying is that whatever deity, pagan cult, inspiration, reaching, love for someone, just do it! Do not be afraid, God created all this. You can channel each others, call through spirit world our friends, cast away illness demons, spirits if we have confidence that Love is stronger than everything else, do not bend to spirits of fear and control, control them, channel them and show them that you are in control! When things fail, when past is full of hurts and incomplete stuff, keep confidence ask for guidance, refocus, never give up.