I am just going to break some comfortable bubbles instead.
"It is all in your head, you just don't know how big your head is".
a statement by Lon Milo, who aside from being almost obese, useless in real life, with no actual success aside from making his living off his re-hash of Crowley's texts and his own inflation is said to be an Adept. (haha hah)
An accomplished magician some people call him. What exactly is it he is meant to have accomplished? On several meetings with him he is not able to discuss hermeticism or any other type of magick that you actually DO in any depth. His underlying understanding of his idols system is lacking at best and with his nervous ticks and superiority complex added in I have doubts whether he has truly undergone even an individuation process and not just created an antithesis he now inhabits.
"It is all in your head, you just don't know how big your head is"
Popularised by Crowley in his plagiarism of Mathers' Goetia, somehow claiming that demonic (and also angelic, by analogy) entities were aspects of the psyche.
He thought at that point he was the bee's knee's and had found a holy grail that has somehow been lost. "What?" the ancients would say "please enlighten us about the nature of all being held within the mind". That would have made Crowley hard.
We have known, forever, that macrocosmic issues have their correlation in the microcosmos. Nothing new there then.
"You just don't know how big your head is"
Well, claiming that it is all in YOUR head makes it very big indeed. And we all know what is said about people with big heads. They are full of themselves. Ego. Claiming that everything exists inside your own head is quite frankly nothing short of hubris.
Oh, yes, they also mistake the chatter of local gods and godesses trying to give them further understanding of the great mystery as a revelation as they are unable to lay aside their ego. (Cough The- Cough Le - Cough Ma)
"You" is, even psychologically speaking only a tiny fragment of your selfhood. The identification with this is what creates the need for psychological synthesis.
The claim it is all in your head you just don't know how big your head is is probably the instantiation of one of the most dangerous lies that exist in the bullshit outer courts of the western systems.
Belief in this lie will assist you in
1 not getting anywhere except a cumbersome neuro linguistic programming you call magic
2 being one of those larvae who manage not to become butterflies since "everything in that butterfly exists within me already". Get it? God, I hope you do.
Why it is not in Your head:
The mind of the all and you are not the same Being. If you were, you would have attained to what very high levels of alchemy refer to and achieved a mode of understanding that you cannot even conceive of right now. Do you truly deeply consider yourself on par with the mythical Chris(t) or Buddha? Raised anyone from the dead recently? Managed to physically transmute base metals? Been able to fully take over someone elses mind or called upon an entity that people on the street saw and then fled from? No? Then it seems your mind and the mind of the all is not the same thing after all.
Conflating the big world and the smaller world is in its smallest sense, one of the aspects of performing the great work of alchemy. The regeneration of beings into the Adam Kadmon. That you can pretend to be a fish doesn't allow you to breathe under water. That you can, by certain psychological exercises psychologically experience Zen or the great mind of the all doesn't mean that one and the other is actually the same. It means you have managed to imagine it.
Having bought a black belt from the local shop means I will still break all your bones in about 4,7 seconds, not that you are a Master.
So instead of being pleased with oneself and jerking off on sigils to brainwash oneself and playing with the ideas in our heads from a Santa Clause Look alike its time for actually performing work.
Because, in the end, it doesn't matter that magick is not like it is in Harry Potter. Someone can still kill you from a distance, get your loved ones who don't even believe in magick possessed and have them declared clinically insane by western medicine and other fun stuff.
It's a shame that its just in your head. If it wasn't maybe you could get help from the outside or you'd have someone else to blame but yourself.
OUCH girl! You don't hold back. :) As you know, I am with you on the "it's all in your head" schtick. An artefact, for scientific materialistic apologists is what that is. As I have said before - better to blame the magic on the fairies at the bottom of the garden than the 'mind' - their sad little post-modern familiar.
SvaraRaderaI had a wonderfully comment, but my computer acted up at the last minute, so here is another go.
SvaraRaderaYou sir, have an acerbic wit and I love it.
The occult world is large enough for plenty of theories so I don't dislike Don Milo quite as much as yourself, but I believe you are right.
Your point is driven home with the great analogy of the catapillar. It has the potential to be a butterfly, but frankly it isn't. If it was then let's see it jump off a branch and fly ;-). It has the chance to be a butterfly, but needs to grow and have the neccessary changes.
I have always had an issue with its "all in your mind." There are some wonderfully respectful people who partake in the theory and I am sure they feel strongly about it. But to me such a theory dismisses the reality of thousands of years of magical proof that our results are more than inflated psychology--they have real effects in the here and now.
We may one day strive and grow to a point where our mind is closer to the ALL, but until such a time where we can consider ourselves living Christs, I find it completely misleading to assume it is all in our mind.
Now, I'm off to click the "follow"-er "folji" button ;-)
Whoa, you sound like an enormous asshole. Are you 14 or do you just write like you are? You're so incensed by someone having a different way of looking at things that you need to personally attack that person? I don't care how amazing a magician you are, you sound like a disgusting person.
SvaraRaderaHow do you recommend somebody to start in his/her studies?
SvaraRadera@St Balth
SvaraRaderaGrrr etc. :D It needed to be said.
@Ali
Thank you my good man. I don't dislike Lon that much. It is more of a reaction to so many people being stuck to his Ass that somehow made me think it would be valid to bring things down to the real life level. I take issue with idols and the worship of individuals, especially for non-existent or imagined aspects.
Lon almost single-handedly helped rebuild the caliphate o.t.o. and has been a massive help for the existence of that groups social existence. However he is NOT an adept and many things coming from him are not just wrong as theories can be wrong, they are blatantly incorrect and dangerous assumptions.
In the same way as: I am drug-liberal, yet I will still smack whoever hands drugs to a child.
@Dakota
Excuse me? I'm sure when you get a bit older you will learn some polite rules, along the lines of "When in Rome".
I wish I was 14, as that would have brought me closer to your mental age where you believe that it is correct or intelligent to write a comment which mostly iterates the fact how great a magician I am.
When you have learned a bit more etiquette and perhaps learned that not everything you read is true and that people can be dark, witty, cynical, sarcastic or even acidic simply to make a point, then you might also have grasped the nuances of tone that exist in various media allowing you to judge something based less on your hormone ridden reactions (gasp) and more on their message.
Also: Did you know that saying things that are true are not the criteria needed for someone being an asshole?
For example: I'm short and have bad eyesight. Lon is fat and has nervous ticks. Yet his wife is fucking hot. These statements are called true.
@Methos
It really depends what it is someone might want to study.
Alchemy (hermeticism and Theurgy)?
mysticism (theosophy)
or the dual path of Gnosticism?
Why would you want to study anything and what do you wish to accomplish. why would you want to accomplish that.
The real answer is: get fit, get a job you like and love, get laid, get a family and fully sort yourself out. If you still at that point feel like something is missing that prayer to God as the being of all, or whatever religious context you feel comfortable with is not enough, THEN you might want to take up the Great Work.
Just like the hindooooos say :)
Hit me with a comment and we can talk off/blog
Haha, friggin fantastic!
SvaraRaderaI know I'm coming late to this game, but I'll plead that I'm valiantly plowing through my feed reader after ignoring it for the better part of a week.
SvaraRaderaThe funny thing about the "it's all in your head" rap, is that when you hear Lon D. talk about it (as in his interview on "Occult of Personality") you realize that with all of the explaining he does, he ends up pretty much saying that he doesn't even believe that himself, but he never really comes out and say that outright. He waffles a bit. It seems that he came up with this clever sounding sentence at one time, and now it's so intrinsic to his "brand" he's afraid of just admitting it was cool sounding bullshit. A bit of intellectual dishonestly.
That having been said, I have nothing against him, really. I don't know enough about him, his books or his accomplishments to judge.
Remind me never to get on your bad side. ;-)
@scribbler: I know! I have nothing against him, I have a lot against him as a magickal "authority". I don't have a bad side to get on, I have a "thats a lie, this however is true" side.
SvaraRadera