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Tag: enlightenment

  • Israel Regardie’s Twelve Steps to Spiritual Enlightmenent (Free Audiobook)

    Israel Regardie’s Twelve Steps to Spiritual Enlightmenent (Free Audiobook)

    https://youtu.be/eno855qTht4

    Israel Regardie was an influential writer and occultist who is best known for his contributions to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an esoteric society that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Regardie was a student of the famed magician Aleister Crowley, and his work reflects a deep engagement with both psychoanalysis and the occult.

    One of Regardie’s most famous works is “Twelve Steps to Spiritual Enlightenment,” an audiobook that has recently been made available for free on YouTube. The work is read by a computer-generated voice, which adds an interesting layer to an already complex and thought-provoking work.

    The title of the audiobook might suggest that it is some kind of programmatic approach to spiritual awakening, but the reality is more nuanced than that. Regardie’s work draws heavily from psychoanalytic theory and the principles of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and he presents a path to spiritual enlightenment that is both deeply personal and universal in its application.

    The twelve steps that Regardie outlines are not intended to be followed in a strict or dogmatic way, but rather as a series of guiding principles that can help the seeker to access deeper levels of consciousness and transcend the limitations of the ego. The path that Regardie lays out is both analytical and mystical, drawing on a wide range of wisdom traditions to create a holistic approach to spiritual growth.

    While the use of a computer-generated voice to read out the audiobook may seem jarring at first, it ultimately adds an interesting layer to the work. It forces the listener to engage with the content on a purely intellectual level, without being swayed by the emotion or inflection of a human voice. It also serves as a reminder that wisdom can be transmitted through any medium, even ones that we might least expect.

    One key takeaway for me, was the addition of Liber Resh to the daily spiritual practice. As a less than observant Thelemite, I vaguely knew this was recommended, but did not realize how core it was to the practice. Needless to say, I have added it to my own daily routine with the help of an app called Helios(beware there’s more than one app of that name), which gives the actual times of the Sun’s quarters and the texts that go along with each adoration.

    All in all a good free audiobook, but for the practicing occultist, it might seem a little light on practical occultism. If you are looking to the occult for a program of spiritual development however, this would be a good place to start.

  • We kill our shamans

    We kill our shamans

    One of the problems I encounter living as a mystic in the western world, is there is no respect for individuals living in altered states of consciousness. Whether drug induced, pursued through meditation or ecstatic practice, or the product of full-blown psychosis. The individual in an altered state is uniformly shunned, feared, beaten, incarcerated, or killed. It has been repeatedly shown even by western science, first in the 50s and 60s, then again starting with new research in the early 2000s that psychosis is functionally the same as dreaming while awake. (Tyrelll and Griffin BMJ 2007;335:91) In the developing world, and throughout history indigenous cultures have treated this as a gift and a source of great wisdom, while western culture has decided that it would rather harm or outright kill the waking dreamer.

    YouTube player

    As a mystic who entered my path as a result of repeated psychotic episodes, I have experienced first hand the carceral abuse and chemical destruction of the mental health industry, even going so far as to join that industry as a worker for a brief time to try and mitigate some of the abuse for the few people I could reach, and to validate the experiences of the psychotic. My research, both academic and subjective has led me to the conclusion that this society has shut out any hope of contacting greater reality in favor of the comfortable somnambulance of the world of death and destruction.

    Plato’s Cave

    Academia and science have had a choice, the whole academy was based on Plato who explicitly stated that this world was an illusion and that pointing out the path to reality would likely get you killed. Furthermore, continuing hard scientific evidence that consciousness is fundamental to the nature of reality gets ignored or explained away when quantum experiments should absolutely prove that we should be studying the power of consciousness. Instead we rely on the medical model and the theory of disease to “treat” those we should be training to reveal visions, heal the sick, and predict the future as well a showing the gate to a realer reality than the one we are interacting in.

    Frater Ponderator, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    On the Tree of Life the path upwards from our material world to the higher dimensions goes through the unconscious at Yesod. The only living people that can guide us on this path are those gifted individuals who are able to tread the unconscious while awake. They are the evidence that there is in fact another world. We can thank them for even knowing there is a possibility of an afterlife. The somnambulist, well adjusted to a sick and dying world, cannot be our guide out of the four-dimensional prison that we are in. While science edges ever closer to the admission that higher realms exist and magic is real, the increasing stress of just existing in the modern world pushes more and more towards psychosis. The disease is forcing us towards the cure whether the doctors like it or not. More mystics and shamans are slipping through the cracks. More weirdos are finding their comfort in alternative spiritualities and finding their voice on the Internet. Listen to them. Not everything the active psychotic says can be applied to the current reality, and you might have a hard time picking gems from psycho-babble but those of us that can travel back and forth between worlds do have something to offer. We need you normies of the West to please stop killing us and give us a space to share our gifts.