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Posts tagged ‘Practice’

Tantra keywords: Relational

“This vision, relational being, seeks to recognize a world that is not within persons but within their relationships, and that ultimately erases the traditional boundaries of seperation. There is nothing that requires us to understand our world in terms of independent units; we are free to mint new and more promising understandings. … the traditional view of the bounded individual need not be eliminated. But once we see it as a construction of our own making – one option among many – we may also understand that the boundary around the self is also a prison.” Kenneth Gergen, Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (p5)

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June 13th 2010

Posted by Phil Hine in tantra

Tags: Practice, reflections

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Tantra keywords: Embodied

“I praise the circle of deities innate within the body, an elevated assembly continually present, the end of everything, vibrant and the essence of experience.”dehasthadevatacakrastotra

For this post, I want to discuss some “Tantric” themes which relate to embodiment – in particular, whilst stressing that Tantra constitutes an embodied practice, I also want to point towards a key difference between South Asian and “western” esoteric epistemologies – that underwriting Tantra’s embodied practice is what might be called an embodied theology. Continue reading »

May 14th 2010

Posted by Phil Hine in tantra

Tags: Abhinavagupta, bodies, Embodied, Practice, reflections

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Tantra keywords: Wonder

I’m working on an article at the moment, attempting to explain what for me, are some of the basic orientations of my approach to Tantra practice. Rather than seek safety in definitions, I thought it’d be more interesting to examine my own perspective on Tantra practice by highlighting a few keywords – and so I’m beginning with Wonder. onwards…

May 6th 2010

Posted by Phil Hine in tantra

Tags: Abhinavagupta, Practice, reflections, wonder

5 comments »
ordering-machine: meaning & mapping

One of the reasons that I was drawn to studying occultism in the nineteenth century was its relationship to the colonial enterprise – something which first struck me when watching Adam Hart-Davies’ 2001 BBC series What the Victorians did for us was how much of the Victorian enterprise was bound up with the drive to order the world – be it through colonial management and its practices (census-taking, fingerprinting, anthropometry), mapping, and the emergence of new disciplines such as sexology, anthropology, and comparative religion. Ordering – and thereby managing these emerging ‘territories’ underwrote the great projects of the Victorian age, and I began to think of Victorian occultism as another example of this trend. Continue reading »

April 20th 2010

Posted by Phil Hine in Occult

Tags: mapping, Practice

5 comments »
Theorising Practice II: Habitus/Hexis

One of the consequences of the mind (theory)-body(practice) divide in contemporary approaches to magic (and more widely, spiritual development in general) is the notion that the spiritual/magical is set apart from the material/everyday world. There is a pervasive belief that materiality (and the concerns that relate to it) is a burden to be overcome; that development requires that the concerns of the body be transcended. This kind of discourse tends to privilege abstracted knowledge over bodied experience. Yet all practices (including those understood as inwardly turning, such as meditation or visualisation) involve our bodies. Continue reading »

March 23rd 2010

Posted by Phil Hine in Occult

Tags: bodies, Bourdieu, Embodied, Practice

2 comments »
Playful mind

Meditation is often thought of in terms of stilling the internal dialogue, of calming the endless fluctuations or whirlings (vrittis) of cognition. Often, beginners in meditation find this difficult, and its easy to get into the routine of making meditation a seperate space from the rest of our lives; of practicing it at times when we won’t be disturbed by too many sense-distractions. It is difficult to still the endless flow of cognitions – to lengthen the gap between thoughts. Why not do the opposite? Let the mind play. Continue reading »

March 19th 2010

Posted by Phil Hine in tantra

Tags: Lalita, meditation, Practice, Sri Vidya

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Deity Meditation: Lalita

Meditating on the image of a deity is a very old practice (its generally thought that it emerged from early Buddhist practice around the 5th century BCE). Meditation is not really a seperate “technique” as its often presented to be in contemporary writings (more of which another time) but is an aspect of one’s overall sadhana – inseperable from the visualisation/recollection of any interiorised image or form. The root of the Sanskrit dhyana – often translated as “meditation” is dhi – “to see”. Indeed, the seperation of “meditation” from other forms of sadhana is a relatively recent one, and can be seen emerging at the turn of the twentieth century with the prioritising of internal mental practices over bodily-oriented practices and external ritual. Continue reading »

February 26th 2010

Posted by Phil Hine in tantra

Tags: Lalita, meditation, Practice, sadhana, Sri Vidya

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Scented bodies

This morning, descending the pristine stairwells of the office, I’m hit by a blast of smells from the restaurant on the ground floor. Continue reading »

February 15th 2010

Posted by Phil Hine in tantra

Tags: bodies, Embodied, Practice, reflections

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“That which gives Joy to the Heart”

Many years ago, I was involved in a panel discussion on magic at the Oxford Thelemic Symposium. Someone asked each of the panelists to say why they did magic. My own answer was simple: “I enjoy it.” onwards…

February 5th 2010

Posted by Phil Hine in tantra

Tags: Joy, Practice

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Embodied knowledge – an opening shot

Last Saturday, wandering into Treadwells whilst on one of my pre-xmas rounds I had an enlivening conversation with Ellie and Suzanne – mainly about what Suzanne’s recent (9th December) “Interview with a witch” evening was like. One theme that we batted around was that it’s fairly common for occult books to present information such as theories, correspondences, rituals, etc;, but still people appear to find it difficult to practice this information – to make it meaningful within their day-to-day lives. Continue reading »

December 15th 2009

Posted by Phil Hine in Occult

Tags: Embodied, Occult, Practice

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