The Joy of Satan

[RoseRed]

Beautifully written.


Perhaps, he'll be one of the few that escape their grasp and continues on.

But with as much hatred as has already been shown in such a short amount of time - I doubt it.

[Draco20]

I love a lot of things. Jews are not on the list. In order for black magick to succeed, one must hate. Love is contrary to a black magick working. One must not have mixed feelings about anything magick related. Pro tip #1 from the JoS.

I can't relate in any way to a magickal system that relies on intolerance for self-empowerment.

If your interpretation of 'Satan' is that a hateful Deity than maybe you're actually helping the Christians prove their point.

[Rin]

Hello Shinichi,

Most of the practices also leave the practitioner open for what is called "Analytical Overlay," as well as plain old Delusion.

Would you mind elaborating on this 'Analytical Overlay'? It's the first time I've come across the term in regards to meditation practices.

It's a term that was coined among Parapsychology, as part of psychic research, to explain the phenomena of a psychic getting part of their "reading" correct and part of it wrong. It's seen a lot in Remote Viewing studies especially, as well as similar "reading" and "traveling" practices.

To summarize, Analytical Overlay happens when someone psychically connects to a Target, accurately retrieves certain information about it, and then because the undisciplined mind cannot process that information it is unconsciously Analyzed and changed into something it is not. Once this change is made, your unconscious mind creates an Overlay, so that, via your imagination, you will see the Overlay instead of the original information.

For example, suppose a researcher places a sealed box in front of you, and asks you to metaphysically tell him what is inside it. You close your eyes, connect your consciousness to the box to peak inside, and you see "yellow." Nothing else, just "yellow." Instead of saying "I just see yellow," though, your "monkey mind" throws up the thought "hey, bananas are yellow!" Your imagination latches onto this thought, which allows it to analyze and process information that you otherwise were not able to analyze and process, and suddenly you see a banana inside the box. So, you tell the researcher, "there is a banana inside the box."

The researcher makes a little note on his clipboard, then opens the box, pulls out a yellow t-shirt, and places it before you.

You accurately saw "yellow," but the undisciplined mind could not process this information, and so you unconsciously created an Overlay (yellow=banana) through Analysis of the raw information. This is Analytical Overlay.

It is most well known in Parapsychology and Psionics, but it's something that applies to everyone who does metaphysical practices, especially practices that are more sensitive to it than others - like The Sight, Journeying, and so on. The best protection for it is to know it can happen and to be vigilant against it by making practice as objectively verifiable as possible. We can't always verify the things we See, but in the early stages of training especially it is important to make an effort to do so, at least until you gain enough mental discipline and discernment to know what is being metaphysically perceived and what is being overlayed via imagination.

And yes, it even applies to many meditation practices. There is a difference between biofeedback and clairsentience, for example, and it's easy for a beginner to confuse the two or to get trapped in AOL when actually experiencing something. It's also very easy for many people to imagine tactile feelings, sounds, smells, and tastes, to the point of physically feeling them. This Plastic Imagination can also become a tool for AOL, or can become confused for genuine experiences if the mind is undisciplined.

Basically, it all comes down to having a controlled mind. The better your Thought Control is, or the more experienced you are with all these different things, the less susceptible you are to things like AOL and Imagination - you simply learn to tell the difference. Many don't have that discipline or experience, though, so it's important to make them aware of the risks.



~:Shin:~

A bit of a sidenote, but I imagine this is why we perceive spiritual entities differently based on our cultural backgrounds. When I first started studying magic I spent a lot of time wondering why, for example, a gnome should look like a 16th century Europeans idea of what an earth elemental would appear as, when 16th century European culture is a blink of the eye in terms of the timeframe in which earth elementals have existed on this planet.

But this is (roughly) the period (in Western society) in which the image of these spirits became embedded in both occult literature and spread to more mainstream culture. So even before we learn of these spirits as literal beings (assuming, as is the case for most people Westerners, that we're raised to disbelieve in spirituality at all, or outside certain strict religious confines), let alone encounter them, we have an idea in our head of what they look like, and so when we do encounter them, as soon as we get a general sense of what we're experiencing, our mind fills in the gaps with our cultural predispositions (especially since when we first start interacting with spirits, our spiritual senses are generally in the early stages of opening up). Then the image becomes "set" in our mind.

It's interesting to compare the appearance of the Earth elementals in, eg. William Mistelle's work, which is written by a magician trained primarily in the hermetic worldview, and more or less aligns perfectly with their description in European esoteric literature, to the appearance of a group of earth elementals in Kosta Danaos' book Nei Kung (about the author's experiences training in a Chinese system of internal alchemy), where they appear to the author rather differently than the traditional hermetic description.

What I would love to do is take a group of individuals without any embedded idea of what a certain spirit should look like , develop their clairvoyance, have the spirit manifest and see what their reaction is. I can't wait for society to reach the stage where we've united mysticism and science far enough that these kind of experiments can take place.

Sorry, a bit of a digression I know, but I find this stuff fascinating (and quite frankly, the JoS debate is done to death [rolleyes] ).

[Shinichi]

To throw a sidenote on your sidenote, Rin, you should also think about how many "UFO's" and "alien encounters" are in fact spirit encounters, with the spirits simply expressing themselves in physical form as a ball of light. With no other point of reference for mysterious lights in the sky, most modern people quickly attach the experience to the many "alien" theories, which is also a form of AOL. Not to mention the OBE "abduction" cases.

Which isn't to say advanced aliens definitely don't visit Earth, because they might. I honestly don't know. But I do know that some UFO's are very...terrestrial. Just in a different way. Most people who believe in aliens like that can't even comprehend the idea of visitation from spirits like we do.



~:Shin:~