There is a massive incursion in our age that is so insidious, it slithers around us and shapes our thinking and changes our language completely undetected. It’s so subtle that most of you will struggle to realize what it is in entirety, but once pointed out you will see its ubiquitous hand reaching into everything. What am I describing? The incursion of a corporate value system.
With the recent revelation of Prism, people appear to be momentarily concerned about their privacy. It MIGHT just be a problem to have all of one’s data funneling through a handful of companies. It MIGHT be an issue that the government has access to that data, and can use and spin it how it likes. It MIGHT be an issue that we are supposed to simply trust the government will use all of this data that it took the initiative to obtain without asking any other branch about it, or notifying the American people of such practices.
Here lately there has been a whole lot of stuff being written on the metaphysical side about charging for services and how “magick”, or “meditation” or “vast yogic awesome powers” factor into having money, or not. Over at this blog, the case is made that “Magick” isn’t necessarily about rolling in the dough and is often an arduous responsibility particularly on shamanic paths. On this blog, another view is promoted suggesting that magick is “mainly about getting one’s physical needs met”. Whereas on THIS blog, the writer suggests one can do both at once—a sort of middle path. Stepping away from the realm of Magick and into the realm of the Law of Attraction, we find on Melody Fletcher’s blog the view that one should charge for their services, and not fall into poverty for doing spiritual work. That’s a whole lotta views, with a whole lot of seemingly irreconcilable differences.
In the West, there is a strong tradition that suggests practices such as palm reading, tarot, astrology and other divination systems are foreboding. Part of the logic that drives this feeling is the notion that only God can know certain things. Since these arts are efforts to know something, then it must be the case that they are using some evil back-alley system that is not God-sanctioned.
The largest enemy against spiritual growth today is the agreement we have made with one another to honor artificiality. What do I mean by artificiality? I mean those systems we employ which go completely against the rhythms of nature.
The vast majority of ancient cultures performed ceremonies and rituals designed to live in harmony with the Earth. The Native Americans were fastidious where not wasting any part of an animal was concerned. In a relatively short amount of time, roughly 175 years, in America alone we have managed to decimate the buffalo and endangered and rendered extinct many other species. Across the world, however, the Earth has been taken for granted repeatedly and treated as a commodity without any of the necessary respect to keep living our lives harmoniously.
We all tell ourselves stories. We tell ourselves stories to make sense of reality—to interpret the events that happen to us in some way that makes consistent sense. The only problem is, all of our stories are, at a certain level, absolute and utter bullshit. All of them. Why is that? Because all there is is awareness.
I’ve written some other articles on meditation in the past. This one, however, I am going to entitle “The Middle Pillar” meditation,Or if one prefers the Eastern style of meditation present in Buddhism and Hindu styles of religion. (It also shows up in the book or Revelations. Check out Joshua Tilghman’s blog for a detailed run down on that—here.)
In April, there was a lunar eclipse—April 25 to be exact. In May, the 9th to be exact, there was a solar eclipse. As it turns out, this pattern is fairly common. When there is a lunar eclipse, a solar one is not terribly far behind. This makes sense in terms of balance. What do these events mean from an astrological standpoint, though?
Nostalgia. The etiology of the word is thus: algia—pain. Nost—from the base word gnost–that is knowledge. When we unite the two together, we get “painful knowledge”. That’s a curious way of thinking of knowledge as knowledge on its own is “neutral”. It therefore must be the case that knowledge in this instance is being defined through an emotional lens—namely causing pain.