Gateways n Stuff...

[martin]

Yes, Laing, and Bateson and his 'double bind'. What happened to all these people and their ideas?
But you are right, we are a off topic and might end up in the open looney bin if we go on like this.

Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children. (Sam Levenson)

 

[maremaria]

From my self-made kind-of –dictionary

Magic : You can’t grab magic with the interpretation of magic, neither with the description of interpretation of magic. Either you sing or shut up. You do not say what I do is singing. “Elytis”

For me magic is when something breathtaking happens to me. Its can be something simple or of greater importance. A meaningful coincidence, a call/mail from a person exactly the time you need him/her , the flow of some matters, an answer of Yi that struck me, the invisible things that suddenly become visible and sometimes the magic of the little creature inside me.

Probably you are talking about something different from what I say but this is , more or less , how I perceived magic.

Bruce said “For me it's 29.Magic can only be experienced in a state of madness….” I can recall some 29 moments that some people could describe as madness, foolishness or more mildly irrational behavior. Then , for me something magical happened or let something to happened . what exactly happened or how isn’t that important to me.

Some time ago , my little niece and I went to a store to buy her a present I had promised her. It was not the first time we went there, we go quite often to buy food. The store has those automatic door and when we were near them they opened . She look at me with wide opened eyes and told me. Look !! Those doors are magic !!!

 

[Sparhawk]

Umm, you mean pretty much what Martin says?

Must be reading diagonally...

 

[Sparhawk]

Luis, Martin and I are three of the sanest people I know online. You can trust us and a lot of what we say. Except for Luis sometimes lol.

That means we are "insane" to someone, somewhere... And listen to what Dobro say about the one with pet dragons...

 

[Sparhawk]

I think much of Bruce wrote is tongue-in-cheek, sans emoticons...

 

[meng]

Hi Luis. No, I was serious. This is something I've spent a lot of private time contemplating. I can't account for it being met with so much opposition, but whatever.

 

[meng]

Maria has no problem with it. That's because she approaches it as a child.

 

[meng]

1.4 Somehow dancing in the abyss. Without fault.

To find new ideas, dare to dance in the abyss and depart from certainty. Inspiration isn't found within fixed rules, old habits or formalities. Creativity isn't making something happen, it is allowing it to happen through you and the tools you work with.

LiSe

 

[martin]

Hmm, yes, no emoticons, and still no emoticons ..

 

[martin]

Some time ago , my little niece and I went to a store to buy her a present I had promised her. It was not the first time we went there, we go quite often to buy food. The store has those automatic door and when we were near them they opened . She look at me with wide opened eyes and told me. Look !! Those doors are magic !!!

Wonderful If children behave like that it's magic too. Breathtaking.

 

[maremaria]

Yes. She already knew how the doors work, but this specific moment she thought that something magic happened to be as faster as she can to the toy’s department
Kids….

 

[luz]

I really don't see the opposition in this thread, Meng. Perhaps I see just a little bit of overthinking? Dobro was trying to define what 'magic' is, to be able to be on the same ground when talking about this subject and then perhaps everybody else went on a tangent a bit, talking about sanity and insanity and so on...

I think you explained further what you meant and maybe people didn't reply directly to your questions (not even Maria, whom you seem to think was the only one not opposing you), but that was just the way things went and not because people opposed your point of view.

Very 38.6, all this

 

[meng]

I really don't see the opposition in this thread, Meng. Perhaps I see just a little bit of overthinking? Dobro was trying to define what 'magic' is, to be able to be on the same ground when talking about this subject and then perhaps everybody else went on a tangent a bit, talking about sanity and insanity and so on...

No he didn't. He wanted a definition. I gave him MSN's dictionary definition, and he debated that. The finite definition, which Dobro, Martin, and initially Hilary seemed to think was so important, had little bearing on what I was talking about.

As far as the rest, this is too much like work. It seems to me the automatic reaction to any remotely new idea or new person on this forum is "No." I've watched it many times repeat itself. Like that haiku fellow who browsed through awhile ago. I thought he was a breath of fresh air to read, but as usual he was treated as an adversary, I guess cuz he thought he had found something pretty special to share. But that kind of open sharing isn't at all what this place is about.

So you see, angel (who comes out only when she smells blood), I don't take it personally any more. I know it's not just me.

Whatever.

 

[maremaria]

IDo you believe in magic?
.

Or anything else you may wish to share about magic

I
I think you explained further what you meant and maybe people didn't reply directly to your questions (not even Maria, whom you seem to think was the only one not opposing you), but that was just the way things went and not because people opposed your point of view.

Very 38.6, all this

Hey ... I answered directly to the first question and to the "or else " ...

Its this a test ?

 

[Tohpol]

1.4 Somehow dancing in the abyss. Without fault.

To find new ideas, dare to dance in the abyss and depart from certainty. Inspiration isn't found within fixed rules, old habits or formalities. Creativity isn't making something happen, it is allowing it to happen through you and the tools you work with.

LiSe

Excellent thread. Beng has hit on something here that does merit re-visiting at the very least.

Assuming that we are rational, reasonably objective beings for a moment, I would say that "magic" in this context and before it was hijacked by Church and the Occult (Magick) is the realm of the child for sure. But like in 17 are task is to strive to embody the best of the child psyche and allow it live through us as an adult. This life is very VERY difficult for most people to find and then retain that sense of wonder let alone genuine creativity.

Myths/archetypes/folklore – it’s all part of the Magic you mention. They form such an important part of the emotional psyche be it a tribe, community or the child. Myths are very common in dreams they have a curious connection to the earth and nature. Creative Imagination is the pathway by which stories and storytelling shape and form cultures. I think in this technological age we have very much lost that connection. Most of us are products of that loss but we don’t even know it. If we’ve grown up in a wholly urban environment and the 21st perception / conditioning that goes with it then it’s little wonder that we don’t know what we’ve lost. How can we if we’ve never known it? We are "consumers" we are urban beings forced to be plugged into a very synthetic life. Obvious maybe but do we really grok how deep that loss is?

Ever look at children aged five or six when they are being read a story? Totally in another reality - completely entranced. Their mouths hang open and their eyes wide. Often the stories are fairy tales - folklore. They are designed precisely to nourish the developing emotional body of the child with precise archetypal motifs. The history of the oral tradition down through the ages remains remarkably consistent in this way. It was a spiritual science imo as fresh and natural as well…Nature, because that was essentially the source of such story telling.

When a child doesn't regularly receive this “magic,” this nourishment - and increasingly they don't - then I think this can leave something missing in their emotional development that can manifest as all kinds of conditions later on. Sure, there are many other factors - but lack of attention to the creative nurturing of the child's myth-making process is a big part of that I think.

This is why Trojan was correct in what she said: "Tv ads are what they chant in the playground not ancient mythology."

Exactly and look around us. We are dying inside.

This Magic is vital and it is the province of the child first and foremost as a developmental stage. The I Ching retains absolutely this multi-dimensional magic within it because I think it is a codified template of the Universal Soul. (That's a mouthful..)

Well...I know what I mean

Actually, the above reminds me of a couple books to recommend:

Joseph Chiltern-Pearce's Magical Child From child psychologist's view (but very unorthodox, beautifully so)

The hard to come by Fairy Tales by Rudolf Meyer - chock full of the esoteric symbolism of the oral tradition from the German angle.

Quote from Magical Child:

"When the capacity for abstract creativity and pure thought does not develop properly, the solution is not to try to force earlier and earlier abstract thinking, as we now try to do. Rather we must provide for full-dimensional interaction with the living earth without allowing abstract ideas to intercede or obscure, so that a sufficient concrete structure may be built from which abstractions can arise.

Our 3-billion-year heritage is truly magnificient; the promise given us is infinite in scope. But this biological plan must be nurtured, and in order to do so, we must first recognise that such a plan exists and then learn something of what that plan is about. We knew about this plan when we were about six years old and a great excitement, longing, and joyful anticipation filled us. Something else happened, of course; and even as it happened, we knew intuitively that it was all wrong. This primary knowing got covered up by anxiety conditioning, which was deep and pervasive, so ingrained, and so continually reinforced and amplified on every hand that the deep knowing has been lost to us."

This deep knowing he mentions can definitely be characterised by one path or branch of the soul reality, which is Myths and folklore imo. There's real emotional wisdom for the child and it is designed for the child so that we can truly integrate such a structure later on in order to be healthy adults.

Topal

 

[martin]

I don't understand what's going on, Bruce. There was no automatic 'no', only reasonable and polite debate. And friendly too, no insults, nothing like that.
Giving much thought to something doesn't automatically lead to agreement of others, you know that of course.
You don't like debate anymore? You did as far as I remember.
Ah, but you stopped smoking! Is that the problem?

 

[luz]

I think this has been an interesting thread too. I really enjoyed the discussion about what is magic and about what is sanity.

I disagree with Meng in that he thinks he introduced a new idea that was opposed by "the others". I think people have talked about this kind of things before. He didn't even share his own take on it. I really don't see all the 'resistance' he sees but that is life, we can't always agree on everything. But it is a provocative subject and I'm sure I would have enjoyed it as well if people had also shared their more 'magical' i ching applications.

For what is worth, I don't think anybody really opposed Electraglide's haiku idea either. I did oppose his tendency to be arrogant and plain out insulting but that is also a matter of opinion, perhaps.

As for whether I only come out when I smell the blood, who knows, Meng, you might be right. I don't really claim to know all of my inner motivations 100% of the time. In fact, I am not always sure of why I come to read the forum as often as I do and I often think I will never post again but then the "spirit" (or the blood ) moves me, like it moved your friend Electraglide, and I post all over again. Not easy to explain, perhaps magical, my tendency to post.

 

[Trojina]

As for whether I only come out when I smell the blood, who knows, Meng, you might be right. I don't really claim to know all of my inner motivations 100% of the time. In fact, I am not always sure of why I come to read the forum as often as I do and I often think I will never post again but then the "spirit" (or the blood ) moves me, like it moved your friend Electraglide, and I post all over again. Not easy to explain, perhaps magical, my tendency to post.

Well i can't see that its anyones business to comment on your motivation for posting. This is after all the Exploring Divination area not the "exploring Lightangels inner motivations" area.

Though personally i always thought you came out to flirt with the guys ()

 

[hilary]

Just spent the afternoon and evening playing Schubert's Unfinished and Liszt's Faust Symphony. All 70+ minutes of it. Phew.

Looks like I missed a lot here - even if no universally-agreed-upon definition of magic. To me the idea includes love charms and whatnot, things designed to control other people in creepy ways, so I'm leery of the word. Since Bruce must mean something else, I thought I'd ask. And then got swallowed up by a monstrous symphony, which is still rampaging happily round my head.

Topal, I love this quote -

"When the capacity for abstract creativity and pure thought does not develop properly, the solution is not to try to force earlier and earlier abstract thinking, as we now try to do. Rather we must provide for full-dimensional interaction with the living earth without allowing abstract ideas to intercede or obscure, so that a sufficient concrete structure may be built from which abstractions can arise."

That sounds to me like perfect advice for divination. Don't try to abstract 'what the line means', instead dive into what the story is, what the carts, oxen, constellations, legend, myth, tigers, birds, nomads, soldiers, ancestors, earth altars, dragons and all feel like to live with. Then you start getting a feel for the thing.

Anyway, belief in divination is definitely what would normally be called 'magical thinking'. We're expecting a physical process to be meaningfully connected with us, just because we want it to be. There's no rational, logical, a priori reason for that to work - no known means by which it possibly could - and saying 'in my experience, it does' doesn't amount to a rational argument. We're all being irrational, or non-rational.

I find that strangely easy to live with.

Every now and again, the non-rationality expands, and I find myself living in an oracle. Books I pick up happen to echo hexagrams, landscapes I go through happen to be made of trigrams, tigers spring up all over the place (startling, in rural England), and so on. Magical thinking run amok - and certainly well within some definitions of insanity.

Anyway, that's how it works out for me. Beyond the act of sorting beads (and asking some odd questions meant especially as 'invitations') I don't do anything to invite more correlation in: no rituals, no feng shui cures. From time to time it shows up anyway.

I'm rambling. Blame Liszt - he started it.

 

[lindsay]

I think there is a distinction between magic and miracle. Both involve the same quality of being outside the limits of normal human experience. Magic is something people do or try to do deliberately. Miracle is something God does. Or, to put it another way, it is the Black Swan, the 1 in 10,000,000,000 probable event. A monkey with a typewriter actually writes "War and Peace" occasionally. I see very little magic in the world, but miracles occur daily.

Lindsay

 

[heylise]

A child comes into a room to show his toy rabbit which can talk and asks what do you do or think or feel when yours talks? Everyone in the room tries to find a definition for what talking rabbits say, or how or why they talk. Child sneaks away again to the garden, to hear what his rabbit tells him.

Maybe nobody said ‘no’ to the child, but did anybody listen?

I think Maria understood.
“She already knew how the doors work, but this specific moment she thought that something magic happened to be as faster as she can to the toy’s department“
She knows how to listen to the rabbit, and her little niece does too.

As far as I know magic is not something you can define. If you do, you end up in a dictionary but far away from anything magical. You can believe in it, make it, be open for it, find rituals for it, live it, fear it, love it, but when you try to think about it, it flies away.

Meng: “What particularly defined psychologies are most at work, in your Yijing related thoughts and divination practices?”
As soon as I start to think, my reading makes no sense at all anymore. I have to literally open the 'gateways n stuff' of my brain, sweep thoughts out of the way, expect a miracle.

When I manage to do/be that, I get a great reading, but more important, it changes me, I feel that I live in a real true way. I don’t know if I use the reading for finding this light, or this light for finding the meaning of the reading.

LiSe

 

[mudpie]

Too much intellectual defining magic, wrings the magic sponge dry. Magic is not something we do or try to manipulate with ( thats the wiccan magic)

there is inherent magic in life's design... to be open to it, you need to suspend the mind..become awake to it. no effort

Tossing the coins is not magical, the magic is recieving a reply, a reply that sends me over the bridge where I access deeper knowing. That's magic, the magic of Life's design, because the reading made a connection evident. And Life is all about conectedness, most of which we remain blind to for the most part.

I have a magic tortoise at mydoor. His smal green head and shell body are what I see when i come home, and the connection is made. No longer just a ceramic turtle, but an oracle of my safety, and my trust. My magic tortoise is on the job, and I know he is on the job because of how I change when I see him, the cells in my body change, lit up by the knowing of evrything I have conciously or Un-conciously associated with magic tortoise

I walked in the park and found a perfect phallic stick, long with the big rounded head. "look at this," I said to my friends, and one said "thats a keeper." true, the magic for me was my connection to the stick that screamed creative power. The earth talks to us, and evryone else too, and the connection is magical if we listen and see, because life has a magical design..

and who hasnt grown up being read stories that connect you to life. that is why children sit spellbound at a story

If we could alwys see the intricate design behind life, we might not call it magic.....we'd see it as natural....... but we would be awed

 

[maremaria]

..... We can, however, attune ourselves to cross-cultural experiences and come to appreciate what their concepts are.......

I missed that . I like it !

This is the only forum I post so not much experience of how forum should really work. But I think is a great opportunity we have to talk with people from cultures different from our own. It’s a virtual company but it could be some people gathered together drinking wine and talk. A 61.2 moment.

Does it matter who is wrong or who is right and who is the one who can judge that ?
And how harmful can be if we listen to one that says something different from what we know or believe?

The other day someone here said that the ways I use to understand Yi answers is not valid. I really was annoyed but when I hear the details behind that rational I understand better why she said that. But still I think is a pity to throw away something we really don’t know about it. I don’t say to agree or disagree but just listen. There are some times here I miss that.

“A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested”. The lion is the only one who can decide for himself what to eat and what not. Should we change his diet ? We are not allowed to do that, imo.
Here is a big table with a lots of food. Everyone brings his/her own food to share it with the others and everyone can eat what s/he likes. I don’t like fish , but I don’t think is polite to say to the one who brings fish “ Hey , the food you brought is awful, I don’t like it. Don’t bring fish again !” Some others like fish , I have to respect them.


(Btw, Luis I write the name wrong. It can be Giorgos, Georgios or George but not Giorgios.)

 

[meng]

Well i can't see that its anyones business to comment on your motivation for posting. This is after all the Exploring Divination area not the "exploring Lightangels inner motivations" area.

Oh shush, y'old sourball.

 

[dobro p]

A child comes into a room to show his toy rabbit which can talk and asks what do you do or think or feel when yours talks? Everyone in the room tries to find a definition for what talking rabbits say, or how or why they talk. Child sneaks away again to the garden, to hear what his rabbit tells him.

Maybe nobody said ‘no’ to the child, but did anybody listen?

Well-spotted.

A child comes into a room to show his toy rabbit, and I listen to the child in terms of toy rabbits, and if I like the child and the look of the toy rabbit, I even have a conversation with the rabbit as well as the child. An adult comes into a room to talk about magic, and I assume we're talking adult talk and so we need to know exactly what kind of magic we're talking about - rabbits out of hats, toy rabbits you have conversations with, voodoo charms, or an ill-defined romantic atmosphere full of meaning and portent. Sometimes I'm like the adults in The Little Prince who just don't get it. But if I know that the situation I'm in is The Little Prince, then I'm okay and I go into Little Prince mode. When your attennae are so alert that you can pick up on exactly which sort of mode the adult you're dealing with is in, you're in a position to have a good time and get something out of it.

 

[martin]

As far as I know magic is not something you can define. If you do, you end up in a dictionary but far away from anything magical. You can believe in it, make it, be open for it, find rituals for it, live it, fear it, love it, but when you try to think about it, it flies away.
...............
As soon as I start to think, my reading makes no sense at all anymore. I have to literally open the 'gateways n stuff' of my brain, sweep thoughts out of the way, expect a miracle.

I know what you mean but it's not like that for me. What is the difference?
I was wondering about it and then I remembered what Shunryu Suzuki once said. It was something like this:

"Before Zen, mountains were mountains and clouds were clouds.
Then, mountains were no longer mountains, and clouds were no longer clouds.
Now mountains are mountains again, and clouds are clouds."

When mountains are no longer mountains, and clouds no longer clouds, that is the time of magic, the time of miracles.
I know that magical land, I spent a lot of time there, and it was, well, magical. But I'm no longer there, I left a long time ago and since then mountains are mountains again and clouds clouds.
So in a sense you could say that magic left me, flew away from me, at least for the time being (perhaps it will return in the future, who knows) but I can't say I miss it. Life goes on and there is something else now. I wouldn't know how to define it but it feels good

 

[luz]

Though personally i always thought you came out to flirt with the guys ()

me flirt?
But yes,the emoticons do play a huge part in my motivations.
I can't help it that they are so damn cute.

 

[dobro p]

Life goes on and there is something else now. I wouldn't know how to define it but it feels good

Yeah, you grow up, and if the development is balanced, then you get something good in exchange for what you leave behind. The boys get new and better toys.

But there's something in what Heylise is saying about thought being second-best. For me, thought is one of the toys I'm starting to leave behind now whenever I can free myself of it, because there's something better - 'no thought'.

I'll define my terms, too . When I say 'thought', I mean any kind of animated mental activity, either intellectual or emotional or even sensation.

 

[luz]

A child and his talking rabbit!
It fits. The child now seems to be throwing a tantrumbecause nobody listened.
I hope he doesn't scare his rabbit away :bows:

 

[Sparhawk]

As far as I know magic is not something you can define. If you do, you end up in a dictionary but far away from anything magical. You can believe in it, make it, be open for it, find rituals for it, live it, fear it, love it, but when you try to think about it, it flies away.

Daodejing, Chapter One...