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In a recent essay, I posed the question – How do we learn to be magicians? Is it simply a matter of reading books, studying with a teacher, doing practices, and taking on particular beliefs and attitudes? My answer was to reflect on my early dive into the world of the occult in which I introduced the term reflexivity. In this post, I will discuss the concept of reflexivity and propose that it should be accepted as a core occult practice.
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“At one extreme experience (present) is offered as the necessary (immediate and authentic) ground for all (subsequent) reasoning and analysis. At the other extreme, experience . . . is seen as the product of social conditions or of systems of belief or of fundamental systems of perception, and thus not as material for truths but as evidence of conditions of systems which by definition it cannot itself explain.” Raymond Williams, Keywords
I’ve wanted to get some thoughts hashed out on Mandalas for some time now, and following a post-xmas conversation with a friend that managed to encompass the acoustic experiments of Ernst Chladni, the philosophical speculations of David Hartley, Tibetan singing bowls, and the widely-repeated factoid that Dr. Hans Jenny produced an almost perfect Sri Yantra by having a test subject sing “Om” into his tonoscope, I thought that one way to approach mandalas would be to outline some of the ways in mandalas are represented – starting with Jung. onwards…
I keep swinging back to a text which has had a massive influence on me – Berger & Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality – which develops Alfred Schutz’s “Common-Sense” interpretation of human action. Continue reading »
In occult practice (as with much else), it’s relatively easy to have an experience which appears to confirm one’s theories, whether they be implicit or explicit. Continue reading »