Great essay. The Soul After Death by Seraphim Rose is the most profound introduction to a traditional Christian understanding of the demonic I've ever read and I suspect you would find it compelling as well.
This is great! While I think it is worth trying to understand the strategies and tactics employed by the evil in order to counter them, I am glad for reminders to focus on, and act in accordance with, The Good.
"The nominated property also includes the eight acre hospital cemetery." Eight acres of tortured souls, is my guess.
My personal theory about mental hospitals is that the patients are victims of trauma-based mind-control (TBMC) before they even enter the facility. It could be anything from parental abuse due to unhealed ancestral trauma, to war PTSD, to SRA, to drug poisoning, etc. Ron used to tell me stories (with no names, of course) about the patients he dealt with. Many of them were quite obviously possessed by demons, and many others were clearly victims of TBMC. I mean, to commit violent murder and other such heinous crimes as many of them did, they would have to be *literally* out of their mind. And if they're not of their own God-given mind, they're possessed by demonic entities. Of course, the psychotropic drugs many are given actually open channels for the demons to enter and take up residence.
And I agree that it's all fine and good to be aware of evil, but equally important to live as our Creator intended: In our right mind, fulfilling our rights and correcting any wrongs!
Yes, many tortured souls indeed. Though I suspect the demons in my dream were attracted to the building for 100 years, continuing in a sense to feed off that energy in the grounds and building that has never been cleared.
Thanks, William. This was great. I wasn’t raised evangelical, but became one at about age 20(ish). We raised our three sons evangelical and it has lead to heartbreak and regret. Our fourth child has been spared that experience but the focus on negativity (evil/the devil) is a very hard habit to break after 20 years of exposure. There’s still that nagging fear that maybe we’re wrong now and actually were right before. And we feel incapable of giving number 4 a healthy understanding of God because we don’t feel we possess that ourselves. Will try to focus more on the virtues and the goodness of life. Thanks again.
Best of luck with that, Anastasia. I walked away from the evangelical life at 14, feeling some resentment like I needed to recover the 15 years after that. Though now the more I study the Western magical tradition, I think maybe that early education was necessary
Very interesting and well articulated, William! Coincidentally I was just writing about this question to go with the video I did on And the Flesh Was Made Word: https://youtu.be/Hr5AETbonac. And I was just thinking about the root of my divergence with 'the Tonic 7,' all of whom I like and respect. Mark is someone I was thinking of particularly, with his deep philosophical dives. I think your example might help me explain it.
You write, "The astral is the place of imagination and dreams, which is considered to be as real as the physical. The astral is the primary dwelling place of demons." I entertain the possibility that we are One Mind Dreaming. So when you say "as real as the physical," I question both but not one more than the other. In a dream, is the house any more real than the dragon? Is the creepy sanatarium that you 'woke up to' any more real than the demons? If it's a dream, anything is possible--reptilians, UFOs, psychopaths, flowers, hurricanes, dogs. Nothing is more or less real, except for you as Mind.
What's the value of the dream, if it is one? Jung would say displacement of guilt into fear and blame (which is not to say the guilt is real, only real in our Mind). So the more that we can isolate our self as a figure in the dream and project all the things we're afraid are in us onto other figures, the more that the dream serves a purpose and the more reluctant we are to wake up.
What I consider tonic or healing is the willingness to include all the figures in the dream as aspects of us. If we were stuck identifying with that figure in the dream we want to reject, how could we write the dream to be a peaceful ending for him or her? It's a dream, remember, so the tsunami that wipes out all the oligarchs who take over Lahaina and leaves everyone else is just as possible as a bloody revolution. It's your dream.
When magicians say the dream is just as real as reality, it is good to remember reality is manifold too. Dreaming can be very shallow and very deep. The normal nightly bubbling up of dreams from the unconscious is quite different from long practiced lucid dreaming, as example. That said, imagination as Levi implies is not the astral realm strictly, but the astral seen through our filters. Magic is in part the practice of removing those filters and seeing it true, in the physical and astral.
Hi, William! I don't think I'd say reality is manifold. It either is reality or it isn't. We say that something is subjective reality when only one person sees it, and objective reality when everyone does. So objective reality starts with the dogma that we're separate minds and therefore what we all see is outside of our separate minds. If you were in a dream where you didn't know you were dreaming, and every figure in that dream reacted to the dragon, would that make the dragon objectively real?
I'm clarifying only so that you understand what I'm saying, not to convince you. No one can convince someone else to change their entire worldview with a soundbite. Only your own experience could do that. But it's worth conducting your own experiments in forgiveness, maybe along with experiments into judging people as good or evil--even with those you'll never know personally. Alternate days. See for yourself whether anything changes in what we perceive to be 'reality.' Since changing the world is easy or almost impossible, depending on whether it's a dream or reality, it's worth a try.
I'm going to riff... We in the West like to think of it as a scientific materialist reality. Christians would have a different view. Pagans another. Buddhists another. Native Americans their own, so on and so forth. There are many variations within each of these examples. Reality it seems to me is quite a nebulous term, about as definable as God.
As for that dragon in that dream, western magical traditions would say in a sense it is every bit as real as that tree I bumped into dreaming about riding a dragon. But then the tree is not really a tree, at the atomic level it is not even a collection of particles but more like a field of energy coalesced.
I say reality is manifold because it is at once knowable and unknowable, infinite in variety and fixed in detail. A grand mystery.
Once again, I'm just clarifying. Where Christians, Pagans, Buddhists and Native Americans differ is what reality is beyond our sensory experience of the world. Where they agree is that the world of our senses is real, based on our individual identities being real.
The definition of reality is 'what is.' Our perceptions and theories can differ but unless we're each an individual god, none of us is creating our own reality. Reality exists and everything else is measured against it. There's no basis for knowing if what isn't real is exactly the same as what's real, depending on our opinions.
If we're not individual identities, there becomes a different potential for what's real and what's not. Then the dragon, the tree, the atoms, the particles and the field of energy may all be in our imagination. All that we know is real is the Mind imagining it, "I think, therefore I am." And Reality may be much better than the one we're imagining here.
I think it was Kant who proved we cannot truly know anything for certain. I know that is not a popular idea, but I am fine with that. Eliphas Levi said true magic is the unification or reason and faith. That makes sense to me. Here is some background for where I am coming from:
William, I had to reread our whole thread to see if I'd made mention of Steiner. But that's a crazy synchronicity, that you sent me this link (that I didn't have time to read until I finished my article) and my post starts out quoting Steiner. I haven't finished reading it yet, but just had to put this in.
Tereza you state in your second sentence above — concerning your definition of reality that it differs in the various populations and this begins with Starting Beyond the Sensory in said groups — I disagree. The sensory informs and points to an understanding of ‘Reality’ as much as might be possible given the ultimate unknowns of any capacity we have in attaching words to this endeavor. On Earth, and in our case North America, we now have the understanding that European arrival here found a land modified gracefully by indigenous peoples and this was obviously undertaken by a sensually rich understanding and observation of their Place among themselves and their ‘relatives’ and the Ground that enfolded them. No separation. How could these indigenous peoples sustain their livelihoods for thousands of years without the observations and coherence with the natural world?
I suppose a genocide might be like it's perpetrators trapped in an "egregore", which is different from a mere demon. That is indeed a lot of evil, compounded by the great many people acting in consort, as we are seeing... Lusting after your neighbors spouse without acting on it I suppose would be a lesser evil, but still damaging surely, made worse by acting on it. That said we all have the capacity for evil in us, like the capacity for good.
The spouse thing is merely one example of an infinite variety, and a very general one at that. The egregore is best understood as a mass movement, when the self is lost in the collective, which does not seem to me an inherently evil thing necessarily, considering something like a collective trance state brought on by drumming and dance, for the purpose of opening up to the divine. But that trance state is intentional, while getting caught up in perpetrating a genocide is typically not intentional. Good to be wary about tapping into an egregore.
The lead up to the Rwandan genocide appeared to be intentional. The language used in radio broadcasts depicted Tutsis as cockroaches. Dehumanization was also used in Nazi documentaries.
The egregore as mass movement - merely the outcome, or the instigator?
In any mass movement there are a very few human instigators. Genocide requires a mass of people who then take the cues of those few and then unintentionally subvert their individual consciousness in the collective.
As to the egregore, I think it is like an energetic rift in the astral caused by collective action, that then in turn feeds the collective action. Perhaps in the Rwanda example, the egregore began to form from a generalized resentment about Tutsis, which then was exploited by those few, the many ripe to be exploited. Q-anon was like that too. So was Covid. With Covid the egregore had been seeded for decades with pandemicism, vaccine ideology and fear of microbes. Covidians were and are as mindless about it as Q-anon was, or Hutus running through the streets with machetes.
It is easier to talk about how egregores operate, than anything about it that might be capable of instigating. About that I don't really have any idea.
Egregore (also spelled egregor; from French égrégore, from Ancient Greek ἐγρήγορος, egrēgoros 'wakeful') is an esoteric concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people.
It says entity. This implies agency.
The conventional definition of a mass movement would characterize it as a sociological phenomenon i.e. psychology of crowds. An emergent property as opposed to an entity.
I'm assuming the occult has a different perspective than the fields of sociology and psychology.
This brought tears of joy to my eyes: "I don’t fight evil by obsessing about evil, I fight evil by practicing the good."
There would be a lot less evil in the world if there was a lot more Joy and Wonder.
Amen. 🙏 Thanks for doing your part to shift that balance.
Great essay. The Soul After Death by Seraphim Rose is the most profound introduction to a traditional Christian understanding of the demonic I've ever read and I suspect you would find it compelling as well.
Thanks! Will look into it.
As will I! Sounds like a great book! (And our Librarian friend tends to make pretty solid recommendations!)
I read his posts about micro schools, and I think those recommendations are inevitable.
This is great! While I think it is worth trying to understand the strategies and tactics employed by the evil in order to counter them, I am glad for reminders to focus on, and act in accordance with, The Good.
Thanks Daniel!
Know thy enemy. The Great Work is to know thyself.
"The nominated property also includes the eight acre hospital cemetery." Eight acres of tortured souls, is my guess.
My personal theory about mental hospitals is that the patients are victims of trauma-based mind-control (TBMC) before they even enter the facility. It could be anything from parental abuse due to unhealed ancestral trauma, to war PTSD, to SRA, to drug poisoning, etc. Ron used to tell me stories (with no names, of course) about the patients he dealt with. Many of them were quite obviously possessed by demons, and many others were clearly victims of TBMC. I mean, to commit violent murder and other such heinous crimes as many of them did, they would have to be *literally* out of their mind. And if they're not of their own God-given mind, they're possessed by demonic entities. Of course, the psychotropic drugs many are given actually open channels for the demons to enter and take up residence.
And I agree that it's all fine and good to be aware of evil, but equally important to live as our Creator intended: In our right mind, fulfilling our rights and correcting any wrongs!
Yes, many tortured souls indeed. Though I suspect the demons in my dream were attracted to the building for 100 years, continuing in a sense to feed off that energy in the grounds and building that has never been cleared.
For sure. If there's unresolved pain and suffering, the demons will be there to lap it up.
Enjoyed your take, looking forward to Pt 2.
Thanks, William. This was great. I wasn’t raised evangelical, but became one at about age 20(ish). We raised our three sons evangelical and it has lead to heartbreak and regret. Our fourth child has been spared that experience but the focus on negativity (evil/the devil) is a very hard habit to break after 20 years of exposure. There’s still that nagging fear that maybe we’re wrong now and actually were right before. And we feel incapable of giving number 4 a healthy understanding of God because we don’t feel we possess that ourselves. Will try to focus more on the virtues and the goodness of life. Thanks again.
Best of luck with that, Anastasia. I walked away from the evangelical life at 14, feeling some resentment like I needed to recover the 15 years after that. Though now the more I study the Western magical tradition, I think maybe that early education was necessary
Very interesting and well articulated, William! Coincidentally I was just writing about this question to go with the video I did on And the Flesh Was Made Word: https://youtu.be/Hr5AETbonac. And I was just thinking about the root of my divergence with 'the Tonic 7,' all of whom I like and respect. Mark is someone I was thinking of particularly, with his deep philosophical dives. I think your example might help me explain it.
You write, "The astral is the place of imagination and dreams, which is considered to be as real as the physical. The astral is the primary dwelling place of demons." I entertain the possibility that we are One Mind Dreaming. So when you say "as real as the physical," I question both but not one more than the other. In a dream, is the house any more real than the dragon? Is the creepy sanatarium that you 'woke up to' any more real than the demons? If it's a dream, anything is possible--reptilians, UFOs, psychopaths, flowers, hurricanes, dogs. Nothing is more or less real, except for you as Mind.
What's the value of the dream, if it is one? Jung would say displacement of guilt into fear and blame (which is not to say the guilt is real, only real in our Mind). So the more that we can isolate our self as a figure in the dream and project all the things we're afraid are in us onto other figures, the more that the dream serves a purpose and the more reluctant we are to wake up.
What I consider tonic or healing is the willingness to include all the figures in the dream as aspects of us. If we were stuck identifying with that figure in the dream we want to reject, how could we write the dream to be a peaceful ending for him or her? It's a dream, remember, so the tsunami that wipes out all the oligarchs who take over Lahaina and leaves everyone else is just as possible as a bloody revolution. It's your dream.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Thanks Tereza!
When magicians say the dream is just as real as reality, it is good to remember reality is manifold too. Dreaming can be very shallow and very deep. The normal nightly bubbling up of dreams from the unconscious is quite different from long practiced lucid dreaming, as example. That said, imagination as Levi implies is not the astral realm strictly, but the astral seen through our filters. Magic is in part the practice of removing those filters and seeing it true, in the physical and astral.
Hi, William! I don't think I'd say reality is manifold. It either is reality or it isn't. We say that something is subjective reality when only one person sees it, and objective reality when everyone does. So objective reality starts with the dogma that we're separate minds and therefore what we all see is outside of our separate minds. If you were in a dream where you didn't know you were dreaming, and every figure in that dream reacted to the dragon, would that make the dragon objectively real?
I'm clarifying only so that you understand what I'm saying, not to convince you. No one can convince someone else to change their entire worldview with a soundbite. Only your own experience could do that. But it's worth conducting your own experiments in forgiveness, maybe along with experiments into judging people as good or evil--even with those you'll never know personally. Alternate days. See for yourself whether anything changes in what we perceive to be 'reality.' Since changing the world is easy or almost impossible, depending on whether it's a dream or reality, it's worth a try.
I'm going to riff... We in the West like to think of it as a scientific materialist reality. Christians would have a different view. Pagans another. Buddhists another. Native Americans their own, so on and so forth. There are many variations within each of these examples. Reality it seems to me is quite a nebulous term, about as definable as God.
As for that dragon in that dream, western magical traditions would say in a sense it is every bit as real as that tree I bumped into dreaming about riding a dragon. But then the tree is not really a tree, at the atomic level it is not even a collection of particles but more like a field of energy coalesced.
I say reality is manifold because it is at once knowable and unknowable, infinite in variety and fixed in detail. A grand mystery.
Once again, I'm just clarifying. Where Christians, Pagans, Buddhists and Native Americans differ is what reality is beyond our sensory experience of the world. Where they agree is that the world of our senses is real, based on our individual identities being real.
The definition of reality is 'what is.' Our perceptions and theories can differ but unless we're each an individual god, none of us is creating our own reality. Reality exists and everything else is measured against it. There's no basis for knowing if what isn't real is exactly the same as what's real, depending on our opinions.
If we're not individual identities, there becomes a different potential for what's real and what's not. Then the dragon, the tree, the atoms, the particles and the field of energy may all be in our imagination. All that we know is real is the Mind imagining it, "I think, therefore I am." And Reality may be much better than the one we're imagining here.
I think it was Kant who proved we cannot truly know anything for certain. I know that is not a popular idea, but I am fine with that. Eliphas Levi said true magic is the unification or reason and faith. That makes sense to me. Here is some background for where I am coming from:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-perils-of-the-pioneer/
William, I had to reread our whole thread to see if I'd made mention of Steiner. But that's a crazy synchronicity, that you sent me this link (that I didn't have time to read until I finished my article) and my post starts out quoting Steiner. I haven't finished reading it yet, but just had to put this in.
Tereza you state in your second sentence above — concerning your definition of reality that it differs in the various populations and this begins with Starting Beyond the Sensory in said groups — I disagree. The sensory informs and points to an understanding of ‘Reality’ as much as might be possible given the ultimate unknowns of any capacity we have in attaching words to this endeavor. On Earth, and in our case North America, we now have the understanding that European arrival here found a land modified gracefully by indigenous peoples and this was obviously undertaken by a sensually rich understanding and observation of their Place among themselves and their ‘relatives’ and the Ground that enfolded them. No separation. How could these indigenous peoples sustain their livelihoods for thousands of years without the observations and coherence with the natural world?
Do you make a distinction between 'low level' evil and massive evil, such as a genocide?
I suppose a genocide might be like it's perpetrators trapped in an "egregore", which is different from a mere demon. That is indeed a lot of evil, compounded by the great many people acting in consort, as we are seeing... Lusting after your neighbors spouse without acting on it I suppose would be a lesser evil, but still damaging surely, made worse by acting on it. That said we all have the capacity for evil in us, like the capacity for good.
An egregore then, requires time for preparation.
Whereas lusting after your neighbour's spouse may arrive as an impulse.
Followed by other impulses if said spouse is unhappy in the marriage.
The spouse thing is merely one example of an infinite variety, and a very general one at that. The egregore is best understood as a mass movement, when the self is lost in the collective, which does not seem to me an inherently evil thing necessarily, considering something like a collective trance state brought on by drumming and dance, for the purpose of opening up to the divine. But that trance state is intentional, while getting caught up in perpetrating a genocide is typically not intentional. Good to be wary about tapping into an egregore.
The lead up to the Rwandan genocide appeared to be intentional. The language used in radio broadcasts depicted Tutsis as cockroaches. Dehumanization was also used in Nazi documentaries.
The egregore as mass movement - merely the outcome, or the instigator?
In any mass movement there are a very few human instigators. Genocide requires a mass of people who then take the cues of those few and then unintentionally subvert their individual consciousness in the collective.
As to the egregore, I think it is like an energetic rift in the astral caused by collective action, that then in turn feeds the collective action. Perhaps in the Rwanda example, the egregore began to form from a generalized resentment about Tutsis, which then was exploited by those few, the many ripe to be exploited. Q-anon was like that too. So was Covid. With Covid the egregore had been seeded for decades with pandemicism, vaccine ideology and fear of microbes. Covidians were and are as mindless about it as Q-anon was, or Hutus running through the streets with machetes.
It is easier to talk about how egregores operate, than anything about it that might be capable of instigating. About that I don't really have any idea.
I'm confused by Google's definition:
Egregore (also spelled egregor; from French égrégore, from Ancient Greek ἐγρήγορος, egrēgoros 'wakeful') is an esoteric concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people.
It says entity. This implies agency.
The conventional definition of a mass movement would characterize it as a sociological phenomenon i.e. psychology of crowds. An emergent property as opposed to an entity.
I'm assuming the occult has a different perspective than the fields of sociology and psychology.