Philosophy/Cosmology

[HailTheOldGods]

I am always fascinated by different Cosmological models. In the spirit of the search for more knowledge, I invite everyone to share their own personal models. Please no arguments about who is right or wrong in this, it is a philosophical exercise commonly used by Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. The idea is to nail down what you truly believe so it can be examined. Which also gives us greater power as sorcerers. It makes things much easier and more powerful when our belief matches our intent and we feel we have some idea of how the universe works. Doesn’t make it true necessarily. I’ve been doing these exercises for a long while and I always benefit from discussion with others. So I’ll start it off.

To preface I am Greek Pagan, so my pantheon is that of the Olympians plus a couple of deities that are not Greek necessarily, but could easily be syncretized as was popular in ancient times.

The universe is a creation of the Gods existence. The various deities create portions of reality by existing. We often think in terms of the elements. All things can be created with combinations of fire, water, earth, air, and spirit. So fire exists because Hephaistos and the other Gods/Goddesses exist. Those deities ARE fire, but they are also thinking beings. So we have fire and it’s concepts, cleansing, transformation, brightness, passion, and so on.
The deities are pillars upholding reality and the various smaller spirits help to uphold and maintain that pillar.

Now this begs further questions obviously. One that comes to mind immediately for me is “Then how were the Gods created?” I don’t deign to even speculate on that. In mythology the only thing to exist is chaos (not by the modern definition) then come the Primordials, followed by the Titans, concluded by the Olympians. I personally place that topic under “unknowable”, some things we are not meant to know while living as a person.

Then come our lives as mortals. When it comes to death pretty much everyone goes to the realm of Hades, to the fields of Asphodel to await rebirth. Minus people like Tantalus…The whole process being governed by Persephone. An interesting note here is that upon rebirth one drinks from the river Lethe to forget their past life and be reborn. I liken this to Julius Evola’s idea of reincarnation. In one lifetime you are a candle with a flame, when the candle burns down a new one is lit from the sputtering flame. The new candle is the reborn version of you, the same yet very different.

Angels and demons even make their way here. Of course to the ancient Greeks they weren’t either one. Daimon was a common term for many spirits. The word angel didn’t exist as it does now, but they still dealt with many of these spirits. I see them as emanating from the Gods. Smaller autonomous beings.

Free will? Now that is interesting. The Fates control the destiny of everything in the universe, except those that take the path of sorcery. Sorcerers are unique, we wield Magick. A primordial force of the universe. For that feat The Fates hand our threads back to us, to do with what we wish. So everyone who isn’t a sorcerer or a deity, is bound by Fate. I know in mythology that The Fates controlled even the destinies of the Gods, but I don’t find that to be true.
So free will becomes a strange topic, because everyone has free will but somehow marches inevitably to their destiny. Unless one is a sorcerer.

Of course this whole topic is much larger and could be drawn out, but I see no need to go on for hours about it when I can break it down to bare bones, essentially.

So let’s hear about your cosmology!

[Mulberry]

For me I tend to follow a philosophy that’s basically taoist (with a small “t”, the philosophy not any of the religions - I’m not religious) mixed in with animistic shamanism and the current models used in modern physics.

The taoist way of describing basic cosmology:
The Tao that cannot be named created the tao that we can talk about. “The Tao produced the One tao; One produced Two (yin and yang); Two produced the Five (elements), The Five produced the Ten Thousand things (everything else).”
(Different versions have different paths, this one is based to teaching of my qigong teachers and it works for me, still it’s more symbolic than actual physics)
The Tao does not exist per se - existence means manifestation, and anything manifest is not the tao, but what the tao made. The Tao cannot be known.

To put it “my” way, the primordial chaos/infinite potential and the closes thing I can get to “god/source/The All” of any kind produced the universe, which in itself is a gestalt entity, and continues to produce energy with the capacity to exhibit properties in a spectrum (- yin and yang are not absolutes they are relational, like hotter or colder), meaning intensity variation exists in energy. Energy in variations of intensity creates the forces (including time) and they create the elements - hundreds of them - and from there the fundamental particles/waveforms, (which make elements and from there molecules) and energies recombine in every way to make everything else.

In this model there’s no such thing as gods. The universe naturally tends not towards chaos, but towards order, order of higher and higher complexity. Pieces develop and then recombine in new ways over and over.

This is because the one driving impulse of the universe is to understand itself, which is does through experience - trial and error. This is the purpose of all existence. It’s the purpose of orders of complexity so convoluted we call them life.

Thus all life in all forms is an expression of the universe discovering itself and one experience is not better or high than another, just different.

Now from an animistic perspective, all these things are sentient. Energy is sentient. Consciousness runs through all of this - the consciousness of the universe. Part of the universe understanding itself is that shards of consciousness isolate themselves to experience without influence. Like drops from an ocean. Every thing that combines multiple pieces of conscious-matter can be seen to have a gestalt consciousness. It may or may not be complex enough to be called self aware.

From here large formations of consciousness coalesce, and these are loosely termed “spirits”. Spirits exist of all sizes but some are complex enough to be self aware and what I call “sovereign”. Sovereign spirits are sometimes called ISBEs in some circles. They have taken millennia, maybe eons (millions to trillions of years) to form.

Spirits then - going back to taoism - can “incarnate” - which means attaching itself into a vehicle. The vehicle serves the purpose of making interaction with a given set of universe contrasts easier and more energy efficient. I tend to call these a “level of reality”.

Thus there are available vehicles for a spirit to incarnate as human by taking on multiple vehicles in order - the causal, the emotional, the mental, the biological energy and the physical biology “subtle bodies”. These then allow a spirit to interact with the causal, emotional, astral, biological or human qi, and physical realities respectively. There is an order of incarnation based on the physics of how these interact.

So now I have a model of a human, which is a spirit “wearing” multiple subtle bodies, each also having it’s own consciousness, and basically being a “gestalt” or aggregate and very complex entity. It is capable of interacting at all of the levels of reality for which is has good control of it’s subtle body at that level.

It is possible for a human to be broken and have incomplete or damaged integration with as well as imbalance or blockages in one of more subtle bodies, and this is displayed in illness or mental/emotional dysfunction. The extreme complexity leads to extreme complication in the issues such a being can exhibit, but also to extremes in experience and the ability to think and manifest new experiences in ways that other being cannot. Hence the value in humans and other complex gestalt beings following similar models.

Death at this point is then a change of how a set of bodies are combined. Incarnation and deincarnation happen in order, so having the entity leave the physical body is called he 1st death - such a being is now called a “ghost”. Removing it from the qi body is the 2nd death. From here the human, still knowing what human it was as it still has the mental and emotional bodies which comprise parts of the personality, can choose to reincarnate into a new qi and physical body. Usually the emotional and mental are dropped as well and this allows the memory wipe between incarnations.

Mages that achieve immortality are often ghosts that find a way to feed the qi body without the physical powerhouse that used to maintain it. This usually doesn’t last more than few millennia at most.

Non-humans may be physical but are more often energy based. The Djinn/Fae are examples of energy beings that also live of the Earth. Astral wildlife also exists as well as physical wildlife. Life exists - meaning, spirits using vehicles to interact with the universe - at all levels of the universe. Most have less developed mental and emotional bodies than humans. The “higher beings” also called variously gods, angels, demons, daemons/daimons, some nature spirits (e.g. stars, planets), ascended masters etc are human-capable or better spirits that did not take physical human animal vehicles.

Re: Free will, this is a fundamental “law” of the universe, as everything IS the universe and it is doing basically whatever it wants, hence so are we as aspects of the universe.
However coercion and probability exist. Strong patterns of probability that look inescapable in the micro level are called “fate” or “destiny”. Some planets have patterns that are so “hive minded” these might as well not exist, others like Earth have strong currents of chaos and instability that allow disagreement and hence more choices.
Choices are strongly influenced by the bodies and the environment the bodies exist in, and the relationships are almost entirely not understood in any detail by the one experiencing being human.
These variations are a reasonable result of the universal drive for variation in experience.

[HailTheOldGods]

Oh that’s all really good stuff there! I’ve studied Taoism a bit and I always enjoy their cosmology. It’s so refined and clean. I also admire the Toltec sorcerers and their view.

That was well written! I like it.

[HailTheOldGods]

@Mulberry Have you ever heard of the individual known as the death defier? Supposedly an ancient Toltec Shaman-Sorcerer that discovered physical immortality?

I realize this is a bit of a segue, but after reading your thoughts on immortality I had to ask.

[Mulberry]

I hadn’t. I’ve read maybe only 3 of Castaneda’s books and don’t recall much about the seers called death defiers. Perhaps these are similar to the taoist immortals or yogis with Siddhis.

I actually have a copy of On the Toltec Path A Practical Guide to the Teachings of don Juan Matus, Carlos Castaneda, and Other Toltec Seers (Ken Eagle Feather) which looks like it gets into this but I haven’t studied it in depth. It uses a kind of relatable but different model.

The 5th chapter “Awareness of the Self Beyond” is super interesting.

A major portion of the Toltec scheme of things is selectively cueing the
first, second, and third energy fields.

So I read “fields” to be the same thing as “subtle bodies” more or less, along with an energy body that overlaps these. They categorize things differently. There’s an energy body which contains the first two fields and such, and there’s not too much detail in this book for working with the physical, mental, emotional and qi bodies and their interactions for overall health, wellbeing and longevity from a technical perspective.

There’s a cool chart on page 122 about developing through Stages of Awareness on the way to becoming a seer, and it seems “old age” is considered the “barrier of perception” or “natural enemy” to get through at the end of the Person of Knowledge stage. barriers keep you locked in a level, so you have to overcome old age to be a Seer, hence Seers are death defying because old age is no longer an issue.

So the Seer end up with full control of reality including time. There’s hints in here from other ideas as well, such as, you have to develop your astral body to be able to soul/astral travel effectively, The qigong kan and li (fire and water) meditations to develop a strong energy body as a path to immortality might agree quite well too.

Which leads to the death defier bit, which is less about immortality it seems and more about gaining full understanding…beyond the human condition… BUT while still being human, which is the super interesting part.

Now what an experience that would be, combining humanity and everything humans don’t normally know in one might be the pinnacle of the current universes experiences so far, and that, imo, is hat really makes humans (and like beings) so interesting to entities as well as ourselves. We have a sort of inherent feeling this is a bit special and most importantly NEW, and hence the species longing for it, leading to myriad mystery schools looking for ways to get it.

[HailTheOldGods]

So I’m talking about one specific person from those works. I’ve read all of Casteneda’s works and still own most of them.

The death defier was an individual who had discovered how to shift reality in such a way, by movement of his assemblage point, that he was physically immortal. Supposedly he’s been alive for millenia. The consequence of this discovery however was that he inadvertently bound his body to that locale. He can’t leave the town.

This is what led some of the Toltecs to adopt new practices, such as the practices of the “new seers”, some still didn’t learn and shifted their assemblage points to that of trees or rocks, binding themselves into that existence. Human consciousness stuck in a rock… yikes. Don Juan demonstrates a few of these to Carlos in the books.

Very interesting stuff and I see a huge set of parallels with the work of alchemists and Magicians like Julius Evola.