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hackingthelema

125 karma · joined August 21, 2021

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hackingthelema··on Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
> In terms of beliefs, I think there’s a tonne of massive, unanswered questions about the universe, and it’s certainly possible that there are forces out there that resemble spiritual concepts. Something vaguely resembling a soul, or an intelligent life that created the universe, that sort of thing. Or not - I have no real opinion on this other than “nobody knows”.

I'd tend to agree that nobody knows for certainty all truths of the universe, but there are well-documented processes like insight meditation that lead to certain altered states of consciousness (jhanas/dhyana & samadhi), that some people call knowledge/experience of the Soul or God. While you might disagree with the interpretation of these experiences as the 'Soul' 'God', the experiences are concrete enough to light up the brain in a brain scan.

> I do think that all popular religions on earth were created by people, though.

They were, but they were based on people who had real experiences of god or the spirit or what have you. Swami Vivekananda said it better than I can in Raja Yoga (1896):

> Religion, as it is generally taught all over the world, is said to be based upon faith and belief, and, in most cases, consists only of different sets of theories, and that is the reason why we find all religions quarrelling with one another. These theories, again, are based upon belief. One man says there is a great Being sitting above the clouds and governing the whole universe, and he asks me to believe that solely on the authority of his assertion. In the same way, I may have my own ideas, which I am asking others to believe, and if they ask a reason, I cannot give them any. This is why religion and metaphysical philosophy have a bad name nowadays. Every educated man seems to say, "Oh, these religions are only bundles of theories without any standard to judge them by, each man preaching his own pet ideas." Nevertheless, there is a basis of universal belief in religion, governing all the different theories and all the varying ideas of different sects in different countries. Going to their basis we find that they also are based upon universal experiences. [...]

> The teachers of the science of Yoga, therefore, declare that religion is not only based upon the experience of ancient times, but that no man can be religious until he has the same perceptions himself. Yoga is the science which teaches us how to get these perceptions. It is not much use to talk about religion until one has felt it. Why is there so much disturbance, so much fighting and quarrelling in the name of God? There has been more bloodshed in the name of God than for any other cause, because people never went to the fountain-head; they were content only to give a mental assent to the customs of their forefathers, and wanted others to do the same. What right has a man to say he has a soul if he does not feel it, or that there is a God if he does not see Him? If there is a God we must see Him, if there is a soul we must perceive it; otherwise it is better not to believe. It is better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite. The modern idea, on the one hand, with the "learned" is that religion and metaphysics and all search after a Supreme Being are futile; on the other hand, with the semi-educated, the idea seems to be that these things really have no basis; their only value consists in the fact that they furnish strong motive powers for doing good to the world. If men believe in a God, they may become good, and moral, and so make good citizens. We cannot blame them for holding such ideas, seeing that all the teaching these men get is simply to believe in an eternal rigmarole of words, without any substance behind them.

hackingthelema··on Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
I just checked, it is 'Low Magick' by Lon Milo DuQuette. The entirety of Chapter 11 is on 'Pop Goes Ganesha'. It might sound a little irreverent, but here is a snippet from the book --

> I first created it to be a whimsical meditation that I could quickly perform mentally to begin and end my morning routine, but it soon became for me something more. In fact, within the context of its goofy simplicity, I have found not only a powerful banishing ceremony, but also a profound and breathtakingly effective technique of invocation.

DuQuette is a great author (Chicken Qabalah, Magick of Aleister Crowley, especially) with a good sense of both humour and the serious, and I'd highly recommend checking him out.

hackingthelema··on Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
Fortune cookies are one of my favourites, too. I tend to use coin flips a lot. Occasionally I'll draw a rune or a tarot card, but I find I don't always understand what they're trying to say until after it's happened.

> In particular I pray to Ganesh to help me let go of negative things I'm holding onto (this was a beautiful outcome of therapy mingling with my spiritual life);

I always find it fascinating which gods magicians end up on. One person looks to Ganesh and Inanna; another to Odin and Hecate; another to Lilith and Satan; another to Jesus Christ alone; and they're all linked in their quest for occult knowledge and experiences. I suppose it depends on their own divine pattern and current 'balance' needs.

Was it 'Low Magick' that Lon Milo DuQuette mentions his work with Ganesh? I remember he had a Ganesh-focused, light-hearted invocation and banishing in one of his books. Was it, 'Pop goes Ganesh', to the tune of 'Pop goes the weasel'?

hackingthelema··on Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
> "Bad" feelings have lost their edge. When I sat with the feeling I discovered there is nothing "bad" about it. [...] With this I have become lighter, freer, happier and more at peace with the experience just as it is, right here, right now.

I'd like to give a heads up that this can and may come crashing down[1]. The 'Dark Night of the Soul' is a very real phenomena, and it can happen out of nowhere -- just a normal meditation session.

I'd suggest giving a search to 'mindfulness' and 'mental distress' or some such, if you continue on with this. It is really helpful to find a framework -- like Buddhism or Raja Yoga (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C4%81ja_yoga#Comparison_with...) -- before diving too deep, to give you something to fall back on when it happens, otherwise it can result in quite unpleasant, hard to overcome and understand situations. Edit to add: The specific framework doesn't matter as much as having one at all (Christianity/Islam/Buddhism/Yoga/etc.).

[1] I just found this article but it seems a decent overview to me: https://ronyabanks.com/the-meditators-dark-night-of-the-soul...

hackingthelema··on Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
> I'm open to the possible existence of the paranormal, but I do not trust it at all and would question the intentions of such entities.

I think you're already making a mistake in thinking about it as 'entities' and 'paranormal'. Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae sub figura VI has a great bit about this:

> 2. In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

Which combined with the Mathers/Crowley Goetia gives more insight into a different perspective:

> The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.

Would you question the intentions of parts of your own brain? :) Maybe! But this gives a pretty different perspective on them than external 'entities' influencing you. In the end, all that matters is that note from Liber O -- by doing certain things, certain results will occur. Whether it is external entities or parts of your own brain is kinda irrelevant to causing results.

hackingthelema··on Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
I practice mysticism and magick. Essentially it breaks down to Raja Yoga-style mysticism and Western tradition occultism (i.e. in the style of the Goetia and Book of Abramelin). I tend to view things through a Thelemic lens:

'Every man and every woman is a star.' - AL. I. 3

'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.' - AL. I. 40

'The word of Sin is Restriction.' - AL. I. 41

'Thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that, and no other shall say nay.' - AL. I. 42-43

'Love is the law, love under will.' - AL. I. 57.

'Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains.' - AL. II. 9.

hackingthelema··on Internet Sacred Text Archive
I've not read that one, but I also found his Dhammapada and Upanishads to be quite nice. His name on a work is a good sign, to me!
hackingthelema··on Internet Sacred Text Archive
To speak to its English contents, not the translations it hosts, as most are speaking of --

'Thelema' is a decent section, but sometimes the versions on https://hermetic.com/ are better (footnotes linked, proper unicode symbols), and https://lib.oto-usa.org/libri/ are probably the most up-to-date (i.e. the fill->kill correction to be accurate to the Stele in AL[1]).

The Theosophy, Grimoires, and Wicca sections are very worthwhile. Where else are you going to get AE Waite's Goetia (etc.)[1] right next to Mathers/Aleister Crowley's Goetia [2]?

Edit to add: scans of original editions of Crowley's works are @ https://keepsilence.org/the-equinox/ , too

[1] https://www.oto.org/legis1.pdf

[2] https://sacred-texts.com/grim/bcm/index.htm

[3] https://sacred-texts.com/grim/lks/index.htm

hackingthelema··on Internet Sacred Text Archive
Have you read Eknath Easwaran's translation of the Bhagavad Gita?

Its structure is Chapter-Introduction, Gita Chapter. If I remember correctly, the authenticated background information is mostly what goes on in the introduction to each chapter (i.e. 'Drona was born a brahmin, a member of the priestly caste, but in search of wealth he took up the way of the warrior and excelled in the knowledge of arms,' since the background of the character is not explained in the Gita itself).

I don't remember much personal commentary in the chapter introductions, and you can easily skip them and just read the Gita translation itself, since there are no commentaries interspersed with Gita translation.

I'm not sure if that meets your 'no personal commentaries' criteria, but I liked the translation. [Edit to add: listing some of the translations you have found wanting might help guide suggestions.]

hackingthelema··on Internet Sacred Text Archive
The record of the Babalon workings of Jack Parsons with Hubbard are on there, at least: https://sacred-texts.com/oto/lib49.htm

More on it @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babalon_Working

hackingthelema··on SF suspends cannabis tax to help dispensaries compete with drug dealers
> Its more than that. I have a few dispensarys in CA and the experience is shit. The places are loaded with cash because they cant legally accept credit or debit cards. So you have to bring cash or use their ATM and get charged a withdrawal fee. This also means they are targets for robbery so security at these places is crazy with guards, waiting rooms and check points. This meeans you have to wait upwards of 20 minutes just to get inside to wait on a counter line for another 10 minutes. The experience is miserable.

That sounds awful to me. Here in Canada, legal dispensaries accept debit, cash, and various credit cards; you can order online for in-person, same-day delivery (within a couple hours); you can order online and pickup in person, too. If you go in-person, you might have to wait if their employees are all helping other customers, but otherwise I can be in and out within 5 minutes.

> I pay $80-100 for 0.5 oz.

That seems obscene, coming from Canada. A decent-quality 28g bag of weed here tops out at 160 CAD, from what I've seen (edit: and I just bought an ounce I am perfectly happy with for 90 CAD). I'm not sure I've seen an ounce for more than that. Half-oz usually range from 60-80 CAD, depending on quality/sales.

At this point I greatly prefer the legal dispensaries to any black market weed for quality, convenience, price -- whether MOM or dealers. I think the only place dealers would have an advantage is more freedom to offer a better price to certain clients.

hackingthelema··on Facebook ads told me to become a certified cryptozoologist, so I did
> There are a few non-fiction books, though I'm blanking on the key author's name.

I don't know if he is who you had in mind, but Robert Anton Wilson -- who was one of the writers on the Illuminatus! trilogy -- has at least two non-fiction books on it. One is Prometheus Rising, the other is Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World. They are both a series of essays with exercises at the end of each chapter. If I remember correctly, Quantum Psychology was more about language and semantics, and Prometheus Rising was more about belief systems and viewpoints.

Quantum Psychology is both written in and a guide to E-Prime, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime (Edit, via wiki: 'E-Prime refers to a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing.')

hackingthelema··on Facebook ads told me to become a certified cryptozoologist, so I did
In Discordianism, there is something called the Law of Fives[1], which says, 'all things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5.' There is also a memo from one founder to another quoted which says, 'I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look.'

Robert Anton Wilson has some interesting personal experiments about this in his book Prometheus Rising, where you go looking for a quarter on the ground under different personal contexts[2]. Other instances are things like the 23 enigma[3] or ancient aliens.

I took motohagiography's comment to be on this phenomenon, where the state of mind, or how you prime the mind (e.g. with images or ideas), changes what you tend to find. It can be applied in all sorts of contexts -- prime the mind with ideas like conspiracy theories, and you see them everywhere. Fnord.

[1] http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/23.php

[2] https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/looking-for-quart...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Enigma

hackingthelema··on Genius Checklist
Have you read Hacker News' approach to comments and site guidelines?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

> Which brings us to the most important principle on HN: civility. Since long before the web, the anonymity of online conversation has lured people into being much ruder than they'd be in person. So the principle here is: don't say anything you wouldn't say face to face. This doesn't mean you can't disagree. But disagree without calling names. If you're right, your argument will be more convincing without them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

And so on.

hackingthelema··on Genius Checklist
Have you tried going 'inside'? Meditation can teach you to observe your own states as an outsider and affect them, kind of like hooking up a debugger to your own mental 'programs'. Once you notice yourself feeling stressed, firing up the debugger (AKA utilising your mindfulness training) and sorting through the contents of your mind can help you defuse it. Maybe you can even change a variable using your 'debugger' to improve the state of your 'programs' ;)

It also helps you sleep, because the difficulties sleeping are controlled/helped by learning mindfulness.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5337506/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6557693/

https://www.vipassana.com/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_en...

hackingthelema··on Genius Checklist
Aleister Crowley had some thoughts on geniuses (specifically religious geniuses, but he believed genius didn't end there) and how any human being can attain towards this level of consciousness: https://sacred-texts.com/oto/aba/aba1.htm

Specifically, from the Q&A, he says:

> Q. What is genius, and how is it produced?

>> A. Let us take several specimens of the species, and try to find some one thing common to all which is not found in other species.

> Q. Is there any such thing?

>> A. Yes: all geniuses have the habit of concentration of thought, and usually need long periods of solitude to acquire this habit. ...

His training system -- the A∴A∴ -- is designed to lead people to their genius. Interestingly, it is very similar to this checklist: it teaches self-discipline (by having to follow a specific training program); studying great people and works of philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics, etc; controlling emotions; controlling thought (including constraining it to a single idea); writing down ideas; etc.

I think Crowley goes much further and was more rigorous in his approach to applying the ideas listed. In his view, you don't _become_ a genius through this work, but connect to the genius that is already inside everyone. Connecting to this Genius and finding out your goals in life is the key to a joyful life -- or, as TFA says, 'Establishing a clear goal for your life should be a priority'.

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