 Beliefs Dictionary:
Mysticism
Magick Dictionary
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BELIEF BELIEF What KG calls a "primal obsession" and in Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, he says, "Every magician must discover the word that conceals his dominant obsession, must vibrate it until its energizing elemental is awakened." Myths are never intended to be believed. They are opportunities to restructure our values and lead us to new insights. Goblins need not be real in order to be real. No magician ever believes anything. That includes the current consensus. Gurdjieff went so far as to say, "Believe nothing, not even yourself." Feelings, unless one has trained intuitional talents, can never be trusted to reflect reality. The alternative to believing is simply experiencing or knowing. It is not belief that acts as a placebo, it is the absence of doubt. This is the real meaning of Gnosticism which had no truck with belief, but was concerned solely with knowing (from Gk. gnostikos, good at knowing). You know something by direct experience of the body and mind, not through second-hand evidence or teaching or belief. Healing has nothing to do with struggling against disbelief, it is a relaxing into the experience itself and accepting, without giving way to despair, that whatever happens is all right. When patients say they believe, they really mean they have learned how to relax on the tightrope without falling off. If they had to keep forcing themselves to believe, theyd quickly wither and fall. Meanwhile, 19th Century rationalism is paling to insignificance. Our Xtian children, reared in frustration and boredom, soon desert their native religions and run away to sex and drugs. Then, after burning themselves out, they return in the mantle of shame that we force them to wear, offering themselves to be brainwashed anew in our guilt-ridden, mind-murdering belief factories. There is a deplorable tendency for our society to mention religion and magic in the same breath, as though they were synonyms. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Admittedly, it is an idiosyncrasy of some magi to bristle at religion, chiefly because it is authoritarian, rigid, ignorant and oppressive, and also because it belittles and persecutes creativity. However, a sharp line between magic and religion must be strongly drawn. We are told that magic goes beyond belief. It does nothing of the kind - it shuns belief like the pox! If religion is 100% belief, magic is based in equal parts upon knowledge, originality, perseverance and boldness. Where confusion arises in the popular mind is over sorcery, which uses the trappings of magic and religion indiscriminately, is based on belief and subordination, but at the same time brazenly seeks selfish material gain and ego enhancement. Sorcery is really a kind of credulous business transaction, whose motto might well be the ends glorify the means. Although Judaism and Buddhism are special cases, in Xtianity and Islam, the purpose of religion is individual salvation in the Hereafter. These belief-based religions assure salvation through fixing one's faith on a God or a Paraclete which is other than the self and which, in fact, erases the self altogether. The purpose of magic, on the other hand, is frankly the transmogrification in whole or in part, with or without the invocation of Gods of the hell that our world really is. Since the magician always dwells at the chaotic, creative edge of the present, this transmogrification concerns itself with means as much as ends. He rings in the changes as he goes along, extemporaneously. Nor does the magician cringe and subordinate himself, but acts on equal footing with the pantheistic and holonomic principle that each part is equal to, if not greater than, the whole. Since, moreover, any part, in a sense, is equal to any other part, the magician himself is neither more nor less valuable than anyone or anything else. The individual self is merely unique in the meaning and interpretation of its contribution. Therefore, the magician is always willing to sacrifice himself in any manner that may prove necessary to his work. (See also: BELIEF, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )
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