kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with thinking like a mage

Thinking Like a Mage series:

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/thinking+like+a+mage

In the dream I am in Chicago, the city where I was born. I am trying to wind my way home through a sea of concrete and steel. I have one imperative: to get home. The sun is setting in the dream. It's almost never morning or midday. The horizon glows like hot coals being snuffed by the ragged petticoats of approaching night. The feeling this inspires is terror. Chicago was never a friendly place for me. Though both my parents grew up there in the 40s and 50s, by the time I came of age, the criminal element was enough to inspire awe in coddled suburbanites like myself. Nevertheless, Chicago always had the cool factor and its subsequent allure. There is a je ne sai quoi about the place; a beautiful hostility. In my dream, Chicago is the danger presented by the madness of other humans forced to live cheek to jowl. I am often forced to cross dangerous intersections on foot, waiting for brief traffic light signals, or stepping carefully through railroad junkyards, navigating piles of discarded infrastructure. Lake Michigan often figures prominently in the dreams, the edge of which is a flooded road. I drive my car through hip deep water, worried about stalling out.

The Journey of a Trillion Steps

Dreams are personal but not unique. As far as I can tell, Chicago represents the cycle of lives that I dwell in, along with everyone else. We all are part of this age of cheap petroleum, which is as far from the era of natural, easy communion with spirits and gods as the human race is ever going to get. We live in an age of atheists, many of whom who are still faux-faithful and preoccupied by nature-hating religions co-opted by greed. This greed is accompanied by disregard and haughty disdain for the unseen worlds with which religion is supposed to better acquaint us. We live in an age of rampant overpopulation, and as a result we have blotted out every influence upon this world except our own material one. Driven to mass psychosis, we anxiously await punishment for our own hideous wickedness in the form of an Apocalypse that (thankfully) never arrives.

The age in which we live is Chicago on steroids. I am but a cog in the machine, hence the dreams. I long to be home with my Creator, and like all people, animals, and plants born into my age, I travel a long and dangerous road on my way back home.

Sometimes I dream common dreams like the one about the multi-storied Mall, or the creepy School. These are also shared metaphor dreams that speak of the monkey's-paw trap of the meat plane and commercialism. They represent the long, hard educational processes of the soul: how to play nice with others, how to build a mental sheath.

Understanding French Films

Outside the world of dreams, you can get your fill of metaphors simply by looking up a French film that stars the great actress Isabelle Huppert. I kid, but what I am saying is that if you can glean the underlying message of an art film to the point where you can be satisfied by the messages it is trying to communicate, congratulations, you've just mastered a set of metaphors. I am from the Midwest, and what that means is that my tribe doesn't wear its heart on its sleeve. Midwesterners practice a form of extreme Nice that masks a pulsing cauldron of emotion at any given time. What is said is only half as important as what is not said.

In life, knowing when to keep one's mouth shut is a priceless skill -- the art of slamming limits down around one's speech is potent protection. Understanding metaphor is the key to understanding the astral plane. To understand metaphors takes great subtlety and the ability to discriminate between what is the metaphor and what is not the metaphor. There isn't much that is subtle about the material plane but you have to learn subtlety in order to successfully and happily navigate it.

Here's a goofy question for you: If your life was an art film, what would be the underlying messages? If our era was an art film, what would it be trying to say? Personally, I think our era would be a dark comedy about a spoiled child who is given too many toys and throws escalating tantrums when Mommy and Daddy fall on hard times and can no longer afford to buy her nice things.

Everyday Metaphors

At least six times a day, I kneel in seiza to serve my cat a thin stream of water into a bowl. She could drink water out of the bowl like a normal cat, but I serve it to her in a special way to communicate to her, the spirits, and the gods that I love her. This seated position has become a metaphor for my dedication to cats in general, but especially for my passion for my own cat.

Nearly every day, I get into my car and travel to and from work. This is an act of bad faith -- I don't like driving and never have -- and has become symbolic of all the things I do that are against my own will yet feel trapped into doing.

The black and white keys of my piano represent a highly flawed system of music theory (double sharps and unnecessary time signatures, anyone?) that is nevertheless magnificent and the soul of Western music.

Metaphor calls us to pay attention, to suss out the meaning of our lives, and to understand the limits we must work within in order to return to the forces that made us.

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/thinking+like+a+mage

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a symbol is worth a thousand pictures. Symbols occur to us in obvious ways all the time: the red cross that means first aid or health care, the color green on a traffic light that tells us Go, and the very alphabet letters of this sentence, which your human brain miraculously puts together and deciphers a message from me to you.

The human brain is wired to unpack symbols. For this reason, one of the great tragedies of our time was the hobbling of the Christian tradition of discursive meditation. Discursive meditation, once common practice, was nearly done away with during the twentieth century. Personally, I was shamefully ignorant of discursive meditation until well after my college years, and that’s too bad, because I would have been a much happier, smarter, more well-adjusted person had I discovered it sooner.

What Is Discursive Meditation?

Discursive meditation is a procedural method of thinking where one severely limits ones thoughts to a narrow focus and then deeply explores the object of that focus. Discursive meditation is one of the great traditions of the West. European Medieval monks codified exercises of prayer, discursive meditation, and mysticism, commonly using individual Bible topics or passages as meditation subjects. Only in the 20th century did the practice become nearly extinct among regular people. My friend’s father, who is now near the age of 80, was taught Catholic discursive meditation when he studied to become a priest (he obviously decided against becoming a priest).

The picture below is an Orthodox depiction of Saint Benedict of Nursia, a 6th century monk who is considered founding father of discursive meditation.

If you want to try discursive meditation for yourself, all you have to do is pick an object, find a chair, plant yourself in it, and go into anywhere from five to thirty minutes of intense thought about that object. For instance, as I write this, there is a pencil sitting to the right of my right hand. The pencil was most likely made in China as it was part of a Dollar Tree pack of Halloween-themed pencils. It is about seven years old. It is made of soft wood and its writing tip is made of graphite. The pencil was invented by a blind-in-one-eye scientist named Nicholas-Jacques Conte serving in Napoleon’s army. The etymology of the word pencil means “little tail”, which evokes images of the delicate brushes used to illuminate medieval manuscripts. Writing itself was most likely invented in ancient India, though some speculate it was simultaneously invented in China and Sumeria. From what we can tell, only humans engage in it. I can also relate to pencils personally: in the opening scene of my first novel, two characters earn a high school detention because one borrows the other’s pencil. I could go on at length, but I hope you’ve understood that a pencil isn’t just a pencil. With discursive meditation, a mere pencil becomes a treasure trove full of information to be discovered and explored.

When Westerners threw out discursive meditation for the plethora of garbage that replaced it, our ability to communicate and negotiate with each other also went down the toilet. I don’t entirely blame myself for the disaster my brain became as a young person. Television displaced reading as a popular habit in the 1950s and I grew up in a household that was obsessed with it. Nowadays, internet/smart phones are displacing television. In effect, most people born after 1940 became consumerist zombie victims of Madison Avenue and I was as bad as any.

One predicament of the human mind is our tendency to free-associate and daisy chain our thoughts whether we try to do so consciously or not. A simpler of saying this is “we tend to jump to conclusions”. The less disciplined our minds are, the quicker we are to make snap judgements and rash decisions because of the daisy-chains that are always going on in our mental-emotional backgrounds. Discursive meditation is an excellent way of grasping the reins of the subconscious and bringing it into the light of understanding.

There is so much in our rich, weird world to meditate upon. No single human mind could ever get to it all. I recently commented to my atheist, rationalist husband that one could spend an entire lifetime in discursive meditation on a single tarot card. If the tarot card is a trump, one could spend several lifetimes!

Eastern meditation, where one deliberately empties one’s mind, can easily become poisonous and destructive. Used improperly and without the context of traditional co-disciplines, various Hindu and Buddhist meditation techniques decimate rational thought processes and provide a convenient vacuum where ill-intentioned gurus, advertisers, and corporate interests can implant their programming.

Bastardized, out-of-context Buddhist and Hindu meditation of the kind taught in American yoga studios and corporate retreats represses the thought process and prevents it from exploring the potentials of the object by shoving it all neatly back under the surface. The result: The subconscious mind remains a hot mess. Despite frantic efforts to supplant the Christian traditions with Eastern ones, is it any wonder we have four generations since the invention of television who are tormented by depression, anger, greed, and materialism? One way or the other, we have been taught and encouraged to empty our minds. Driven by subconscious urges placed in us by the heads of large corporations and sociopathic mainstream media, we desperately seek refuge in religion, including the godless religion of atheism/Progress. Most religion is eager to tell us that all of our materialistic wishes will come true if we simply believe.

Discursive meditation easily reveals nefarious agendas and renders the forces behind them powerless, so it is no wonder the powers that be have no interest in letting people know about it!

Current Mood: happy

Thinking Like a Mage series:

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/thinking+like+a+mage

It is my sincere belief as an aspiring mage that intention is crucially important.

I was an atheist less than five years ago and before that, a lackadaisical Christian in an extremely secular, why bother going sort of Protestant church. Both as an atheist and as a Christian, I had zero concept of what my intentions were, let alone the importance of them. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is not altogether true, however, I think it can be more accurately restated as “The road to hell is paved with eclectic intentions.” My intentions, much like my personality back then, were all over the place. I didn’t know whether to wish people harm or ill, so I did plenty of both, swinging on a Tarzan’s rope from one set of emotions to the next. When your intentions are sloppy and largely unknown to you, it becomes almost impossible to achieve anything you want to in life, love, and career. For instance, I was once obsessed with landing a low six-figure salary for myself as I thought it would solve various problems in my life, such as owning my own home. Had I examined my intentions, I would have realized that money was not my true desire — instead I craved the feeling of security afforded by resilience. Once I examined and refined my intentions, it became apparent that my much-desired resilience would only be achievable if I trained myself to make do with much less than most suburbanites, and stay rooted in my particular niche career. My career is nowhere near six-figures, but unlike the executive position I once thought necessary, my business is one that can pick up and move anywhere people cherish good music education, and anywhere includes the online realm.

I used to throw around my good and bad intentions rather freely, and though I am not proud to admit it, I often reacted harshly and negatively to both my enemies and general disappointing circumstances. Druidry taught me that it simply is not okay to wish people harm because they cut you off in traffic or because they could not have a rational conversation with you about politics. I wasn’t transformed into a do-gooder, however, I make more room nowadays for humans to do stupid human things. My intention becomes to get out of the way when someone is being an ass instead of attempting to school them on why they are wrong. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and he can take care of that mess. I no longer consider myself skilled enough to try to right the world’s wrongs. I can only do my personal best; the rest I leave to powers much stronger and better than me.

Once my ego shrank to a manageable level, I naturally became a better listener, and not just to other humans. I often converse with non-corporeal beings. Some are ghosts, some are angels, some are just random beings passing through, some are hostile and perhaps demonic, and some I believe are actual gods. I have small intentions of “I am drinking tea and it makes me alert” and “I accept my husband for what he is and not some impossible ideal” but the larger one is always “I am a better person today than I was yesterday, if only by the slightest bit.” My community of various non-corporeal conversation partners are aware of my intentions, as intentions are the currency of the astral plane where they live. Now that I have good intentions, I attract a good community.