A few recent thoughts

Of all the things that have had to go bye-bye on the path, I’m perhaps the most surprised about releasing caffeine. It wasn’t even close to the hardest thing to let go of, in fact there were things before it that were harder or more psychological. But I’d say in about less than a week my health improved rapidly on a number of fronts. I wasn’t even the guy who would drink five cups of coffee every morning, one was certainly enough, but it only took a week to feel remarkably better on all accounts. At times it even feels like endorphins are being released as a result, but that’s probably just the sun coming out, the weather here has been incredibly beautiful.

Anyway I’m musing over this stuff lately as I’m reading a biography of an occultist and it is full of drug and alcohol abuse, with the idea that some supposedly high level magicians were also alcoholics, which is something I’m finding difficult to believe in any way. It’s not that I don’t understand that drugs, especially psychedelics, have been gateways of a sort to people questing for their spiritual path, but to maintain these types of habits in a paradigm where the release and healing of shadow elements is of the utmost importance seems to me to be virtually impossible, at the very least it would impede any major progress. It would seem to me that addiction issues are among the most major to be faced when one is attempting to purify one’s inner temple and in my experience most alcoholics can’t even get by on a day to day basis filled with mundane tasks let alone attempt the Great Work in any useful fashion.

Of course on the other hand there are stories of fist fights and violence, others of again supposedly high level magicians who clearly haven’t purified their emotional damage and who act out in childish and immature ways and of course some of these stories end up with people who think they own any particularly initiation current and who alienate others in the quest to control things. And once again I’m left thinking, why haven’t these control issues been faced at all? These kinds of things are just ego games and with these “need to control” issues in place, it’s not really a surprise that at times an occult current is the thing that the ego wishes to control. As if it’s a good idea to adapt the system to our needs rather than we adapting to the system. The system itself then becomes a matter of pride rather than enlightenment and instead of moving to a level where we understand that it’s the ego that is taking slights personally and move away from that, the damage then spreads to an entire group.

Constant bickering in the end is just a hallmark of where things go wrong. It’s a great indication that there is still at least a lot of unresolved mental chattering going on, that the system is still only being appraised (at best) on the mental/thought level rather than that which is above and beyond this. Inner peace is never a matter of people drawing swords over details, it is having a connection to something that ends up making all of that seem awfully silly.

Wee status update

Have been very busy and finding it fairly difficult to explain, but I ran across this pretty wonderful quote in Josephine McCarthy’s “Magical Knowledge: Book II” that kind of explains it perfectly (I laughed out loud when I read this):

But if you rise to the challenge, then more things will be put in your path and the tasks that will be thrown your way might have no connection to the stream of magic/spirituality that you are initiated into. You become a worker in their eyes and they will give you jobs; they don’t care what robes you wear or who’s books you read. If you have a specific ability, then chances are the initiation will wake up and strengthen that ability so that it can be used.

Anyway what it is wasn’t at all what I expected and I struggled and wrestled with it a bit before I surrendered to it. It is having a surprising effect on the people close to me and my teacher is not only really good but seriously funny too. It’s crazy weird adjusting to being happy again after a couple hard years, but it really has been worth it in every way. In the end, however, I think the happy Mike will be blogging less, the kind of things I used to work through here just don’t exist any longer.

Collection Pictures (1)

First of all, I’d like to thank the owner and inheritor of these papers. He’s busy but still finds time to keep working on this when he can and has been incredibly gracious to share them. This collection was part of a library at one point but was removed from the library when part of the collection was stolen.

Anyway the pictures in this group are from the original notebook of Golden Dawn initiate W. E. Humphreys, “Gnothi Seauton” Sunday April 28, 1901. More coming as I can find the time…

Pictures from a Collection (intro)

When I first started working with the Golden Dawn material, I was reading an essay in the back of the New Falcon “Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic” and came across an interesting fact, that one of the cowriters shared both the last name and city of someone I knew. This is a friend I knew from mutual music interests and both of us have in common another friend who not only told me my friend was the essay writer’s son, but much later let me know that his friend was sitting on a large cache of Golden Dawn documents, many of them historical. The person who owns this collection is not of the tradition, but has been instrumental in helping continue his father’s legacy, mostly in the alchemy field. Anyway our mutual friend has put us into contact and slowly I’ve been receiving photographs of these notebooks, including an initial batch of 8 and 33 new ones I received recently. Some of the content of these notebooks include the original of W. E. H Humphrey’s personal notebook (dated 1901), what looks like a photocopy of a 1982 “loan copy” having to do with the Lotus Wand, a Feb 1924 handwritten copy of “Four States of Ordinary Prayer” and a multitude of other documents. These documents were apparently a gift to my friend’s father from Israel Regardie.  And of course I wouldn’t even have some of this information if it wasn’t for the assistance of Peregrin Wildoak and Nick Farrell whose knowledge in this field I can only continue to learn from.

Anyway the plan is to start putting these pictures up here for discussion and sharing as the owner is obviously sitting on a treasure trove and is looking for information on what he owns, but if anyone is interested, I’m also trickling some of these on Facebook, so you’re welcome to join me (Mike McLatchey) there if you’re interested in seeing these. I’m hoping to share some of these here this weekend as well, time depending.

Me Book

The last few months have been amazing, today the best day I can remember for a really long time. For those of you have been of assistance over the last couple years, this is the first time I’ve really been able to say that things are finally improving. I have had massive changes on the personal front and perspective is growing in away that is quite simply leading to service to others and loving it. In the end, the autobiography is getting too large, too personal, too cosmic to feel like I can put a brain around it anymore.

I am still going to do the book, the same purpose, but while before the last few months I thought I’d need surveys and autobiographies to write it, now I don’t. I’ve been doing a lot of research into birth charts and their relationship to the Path of Return and working with an amazing teacher on a personal level and a lot of doors are opening now. All the graceful and astonishing resonances are bountiful now, overflowing. For months, I wasn’t sure, I got thrown a pretty huge curveball in September, but, the lense is a lot cleaner now. This is likely to mean a lot lower activity for a while here, as the writing self funnels its time for the book and service.

Reincarnation and Emotional Wounding

Reincarnation has been the topic of the week in Golden Dawn circles, something I’ve found ironic on a personal level. This started with a post by Nick Farrell on Facebook that caught me by surprise because the argument essentially came across as a straw man, something that is muddied by the unfortunate truth that there are a lot of people who believe in a previous life event that is somehow responsible for their current place in life. The argument that reincarnation shouldn’t be the blame or focus for one’s current problems is an excellent one, a point that really should be highlighted more often. The straw man argument, however, is assuming that one reincarnation model being false or useless means more subtle models are also false or useless. It seems to me that it is reasonable to consider reincarnation as a living hypothesis, something flexible we can talk about, rather than as a statement of dogma, either pro or con.

I’ve never engaged in past life therapy nor intend to, but can imagine it’s as subject to Sturgeon’s law as much as astrology, tarot or anything else the Golden Dawn shares with the new age. In this regard what is always important is what it’s supposed to accomplish and whether this type of therapy actually accomplishes that goal. The idea is usually that we bring a negative karmic balance over from previous lives and the question is what we can do to balance it. I’m unaware exactly how past life regression leads to releasing negative patterns, but there is work out there that implies that the model helps people go onto better lives, in fact even if most of it is just fantasy and creativity it still appears to do this.

But the question is whether we even need a reincarnation model to explain negative patterns, since it’s unlikely there are patterns that can’t be explained by what has happened in this life.  In fact some reincarnation models will posit that the negative karmic balance is a pattern that is duplicated in just this way, via our childhood and subsequent experiences. You, then, don’t actually have to worry about what got you here, you operate focused solely on the pattern’s “inheritance.” The idea in some karmic models is that for whatever complex and varied reasons, you inherit a life situation that isn’t really optimal, usually because emotional wounding had reduced you to powerlessness. This is an important point because nothing else has fixed the problem. We usually want to heal because the Old World has become the problem and we come to the dawning that you have to heal yourself first. This is where reincarnation can become the illusion, all of a sudden a past life is a reason for why we’re stuck, we now have something to blame and the healing stops. But this is just a reflection of the old powerlessness, it’s the old model supposedly giving way to the new. Again is this mode leading to healing or is it just getting in the way?

In the Golden Dawn we purify ourselves for the influx of the Divine. In doing so we reach a point where your buried shit is going to get the highlighter treatment. The modality should always be how the problems get resolved. Someone blaming their past life for being stuck is finding another excuse. Someone who finds a past life therapist who managed to release them from emotional damage and harmful patterns, even if the entire idea of reincarnation is just a nightmare from an Elizabeth Clare Prophet book, is moving to a more purified place, assuming the initiate has worked through Yesod and hasn’t gotten stuck on conspiracy theories or that it “all might be true.”

It is possible to work with spiritual healing models based on the dissipation of karma and not even touch on the idea of what happened in a previous life. In my last post I touched on the idea that the Golden Dawn curriculum may be weak in the area of dealing with emotional wounding, the same emotional wounding that is often considered karmic debt in other models. Really, the debate shouldn’t be about whether or not reincarnation is true so much as whether the model can be used to dissolve blockages on an initiate’s progress. This isn’t an entry/probationer issue because a lot of emotional wounding is unconscious and won’t come up in force until the emotional body comes into play.

I would, however, posit that it is often this very emotional damage that can initiate a spiritual search even if its entirely unconscious when the search begins. Many people in healthy families and relationships will often not have that feeling “something is missing” that often drives people into alternate spirituality or aren’t as likely to hang up when working on the emotional body. Whether we call it emotional wounding or karmic debt or Bill, there is an impetus at work that is likely to continue directing emotionally damaged people to real spiritual systems. And while there are karmic and reincarnational models that can actually help with some of these problems, it seems a bit hasty to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Tumultuosity

I don’t know if that’s a word or something but it seems as good a descriptor as any of the last few weeks. Transformation is a very frightening thing at times, and I think when it gets you to the core, it becomes personal and then after a while shocking and almost hard to describe, and in the end not necessary to describe. At times I actually get the giggles. Having massive change happen in your personal life over night and being at peace with it is very new. Anyway, thank you, and if you think that’s about you, it is.

Issues of Therapy and Body Work in the Golden Dawn

The following is the first of several essays planned to cover topics related to the effects of emotional repression and verbal abuse in relationships on the path of a Golden Dawn initiate. I am of the opinion that when there is initiate fallout, whether in group of self work, that the paradigm of blaming either student or teacher for the fallout is counterproductive and that it is possible that the source of these issues can come from latent emotional blockages sourced in early emotional repression and verbal abuse that aren’t being resolved through the work. In the United States, where antidepressant use is skyrocketing, this is an even more pressing issue, one I can imagine has some bearing on the sometimes poor state of communication between temples and individuals. I hope to further explore and elucidate on the idea that despite the structure of the system, the true Initiator is the Higher Self and as the system is designed to purify the lower self for reunion, it is inevitable that there will be initiates with deep seated emotional blockages that will have these complexes highly exacerbated by latter stages of First Order work. In fact I’d even argue that esoteric systems like the Golden Dawn are magnetic to people who have had difficult childhoods and who are seeking healing and that often the journey begins by the Higher Self leading the person to seek greater healing. 

Going quite well

I like to communicate, thus the blog, but am finding it more and more difficult to do so. Things are going very well now. I’ve been hesitant to really come out and state it because time is a better judge over the efficacy of something, but I spent a good year or two stuck in something of a very painful loop and finally found my way out of it (knock on wood, etc.). The thing is, when you live with something like that for so long you become used to it, and so now I feel like I’m dealing with NOT having it around, which is very, very new.

Essentially the theory of it is that spiritual progress hits the snags of emotional wounding at some point. At a certain point, the intensity of things begins to trigger and retrigger old patterns and often this is not obvious in any way except that you know you’re miserable and don’t see a way out. I was fortunate to come across someone who understands this like a surgeon and in what was essentially one session, I managed to divest myself of the lion’s share of this wounding.

I know this probably isn’t very clear, so let’s just say that for a couple of years it was rare to not have a deep dive into some very uncomfortable emotional places. We’re talking, say, bereavement level grief at some point nearly every day for two years. Sometimes that level of grief coming along and wiping you out for say 30 minutes, only to be completely functional again almost immediately. To the point where you literally dread when it will come up again because you’re not sure what’s triggering it or what’s being triggered.

So I found someone who understood just about every symptom of this whole thing, learned some basic techniques for managing it and then went through what I’d call a healing session. Or let’s just be objective here. I had these issues as expressed above, had this session, and now I don’t have these issues, or if I do they’re at a much more bearable level. Quite frankly the effects of this were immediate. I’ve had no episodes of bereavement-level grief since, when I distinctly remember having them almost every day and sometimes several times a day for about two years.

One day I hope to write about all of this in greater detail, but it’s still a bit new, not to mention it’s all tremendously exciting and extremely profound. And I keep thinking I’m going to have a dive again because I’d gotten so used to the idea, so the fact that I’m not really even coming close anymore is just beyond miraculous. I get the impression the next month or two is going to be highly interesting.

A small update

Regarding the Golden Dawn Survey. First, thanks to those who replied to the survey, it is much appreciated. Unfortunately, it has been a while since I got a response and it’s not looking like I’ll have what I need to write the book. I will, however, leave the survey open with the hope that eventually enough responses come in to justify the project or until circumstances change.

I’d like to write it and have a story of my own as backbone to the project, but one man’s initiation won’t cover the possible range of experiences to be found in working the Golden Dawn system, which is why a survey is necessary to the endeavor. So if you had considered filling it out and passed, do reconsider.

Anyway I will leave the survey up through the end of the year.