Why does a hierarchy even exist

Black Magick & The Left Hand Path
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Well, yes. It’s only logical for it to create such a variety. The more points of view, the richer the experience, no?

However, when it comes to spirits, it’s a bit different. They’re not biological beings. They are living ideas or disembodied minds, rather. They don’t chill in the astral plane sipping on tea, whilst waiting for a light bulb to light up to signify they are being evoked. They are not limited by bodies so they are all interlinked. I’m sure that you know that as you travel up the planes, the separation is less and less. In the physical realm, a normie would not even think that he’s the same thing as Joe who lives down the street. But with spirits, it’s different. I mean, we are all interlinked. The difference is, they are more consciously aware of it, and there’s less resistance due to less density in the astral plane.

You also have to understand how a spirit thinks. When you ask a spirit to describe itself, what will it talk about? His form? His voice? No. You’ll never hear a spirit say “I’m a blonde demoness who lives in an astral penthouse and paint her nails in her free time.” Unless the person is talking to themselves or something. But, what you will hear from the spirits is their titles, but more appropriately, their office.

The spirits who are lesser and more egotistical are the ones who have an exaggerated introduction with many titles and what not. The higher spirit will tell you what they are capable of. They identify themselves with their office. So, naturally, if two spirits have the same office, it would not be strange for one of them to say, “Yes, we are the same.” Or, “Yes, we are one,” Both of these responses are vague.

Yes, we are one <— That’s true, but then again, so is everything else.

Yes, we are the same. Same what? Same spirit? Same being? Same person? Same specialists? If that’s the case, then it’s akin to saying “Yes, we are both neurosurgeons.”

Of course, things are not so simplistic. There are many, many more variables here. But I won’t get into that. I’ve said enough, I believe.

Case in point: Magic is logical. The spiritual is logical. It CAN be understood, you just have to have a working relationship with a spirit, a flexible mind, and GOOD premises.

Magic does not make sense from a materialistic perspective. But from an idealistic perspective, it’s perfectly logical.

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22

You might want to re-read what I wrote there^ I added 2 key sentences. Bolded them.

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Nah, I think we’re largely on the same page, for example I posted this a while ago:

One thing I want to comment on though:

I want to dig into this, so bear with me: in core shamanic practice, you will travel through different realms and see spirits having thriving societies of their own, without names, sigils, or calls for human worship, attention, offerings, anything.

Many spirits will work with you and not give you a name or a seal or anything, you simply call them by their appearance, and they come. You’ll see other spirits there who never interact or try to gain your attention, and the worlds feel populated and complex.

And that method works: I’ve harmed with it, and healed with it, including at a distance and including people who didn’t know they were being worked upon by me, and including animals who can’t have even an element of placebo response.

This was also the approach I naturally took as a child, and with no books or formal training, and it informs my technique now, I will try other things but eventually return to this as my default – treating spirits as “people” with their own agendas, instead of trying to cram them into elemental, astrological, or other tables and make them all out to be “aspects of” a tiny number of archetypes, or anything.

Core shamanism has its critics (most are misguided, attacking strawman arguments) but if you read the source works by Harner and Eliade, they do clearly show demonstrable links to worldwide indigenous practices, and these are cultures separated until recently by tens of thousands of years of divergent evolution, physically, culturally, and spiritually.

All of them treat the spirit world as real other world, with self-aware sentient beings who have agendas of their own, complex societies, and existences outside the moment they are interacting with humans. That got more formalised over time, and gives us the myths of the classical gods, who are also doing their own thing, often unconnected to humans.

Those also have hierarchies, and power struggles sometimes as well.

Could that not because because they are usually approached by humans who want something from them?

Humans such as myself, and i think if I read him right, @succupedia, who are in long-term stable spirit alliances (basically, marriages – a shamanic custom in itself) will have seen many different aspects of the spirits we are close to, including experiencing their emotional reactions to things that happen, to us, in the world, etc.

If spirits are just functions like programs waiting for you to load them, as so many people believe, this would not happen, and yet many people independently report that it does.

Go to any social event, at least in London, and probably most of the developed world, and the first thing most people will ask you socially is “what do you DO?” - what is your job, out of both interest, and to start being able to define you, work out what your status is relative to their own, etc.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of years of humans having a highly mercenary relationship to most gods and goddesses, and many demons and angels, they’re probably over wanting to discuss their hopes and dreams on first evocation!

They know you called them to do something and they lay out whether that’s something they can/wish to do.

Most magick and most religious ritual is a transaction, and always has been. people only even care what a spirit likes so they can give better offerings and get better results. I don’t say that in a negative light, I do it myself, it’s just a fact.

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The way I see it, you are essentially giving form to these beings and places. Because that’s what your mind can comprehend, it’s what it’s used to seeing. Your astral sight is sort of a mirror image of your physical sight. What your mind can conceive, your astral sight can detect. I think it would be folly to take the astral experiences at face value. A lot of the things are you’ll encounter are also symbolic, at least from my experience. There’s an elusive depth behind each experience in the astral. You can take it at face value, and say “That’s all there is to it” but you are robbing yourself of great insight.

The myths you speak of are not all channeled by the way. A lot of them are just stories, made up by people. And most myths are allegories for natural phenomena (like Ishtar’s descent into the Underworld, for example).

As for the spirits, they have their own individuality, they’re not programs. However, they’re not so humane as they would seem. They are KINDA humane, but they are also something far greater than that (as we are, but with them it’s more apparent). The guises they take are for the sake of your mind. It’s by no means the entire picture of what the spirit really is.

And as for the cultures, wars, and so on. It’s not far fetched. These things are characteristic to higher intelligences (with the exception of war unless we’re talking about strategy) so there is no reason why they should not have cultures, customs, and so on. All I’m saying is, the spirit does NOT think like a human. They won’t identify themselves with the form they take when you ask them to tell you about themselves. That’s my main point.

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Not in the least bit, thank you, I primarily care about what works.

I accept the principles in the Kybalion as the most accurate guide to metaphysics and have had the "all is One, I am one with the All " stuff etc, I posted about that at length here: My RHP Experiences ~ Union, Power, And Decay.

How to interact with forms when in the world of forms is the realm of magick, it’s finding the handle or leverage to make a thing happen that was otherwise improbable, or impossible.

I know that “folders” on my computer are not real folders, that I don’t physically “drag” an image of a cat “into” my amusing cat photos folder, but the chances of this working quickly and effectively are far higher than someone trying to physically type the binary code (not even programming language) to make this happen.

Get up close to a human, and we’re more space than solid matter, get up close to an atom and it ceases to exist as a thing, and becomes a potential, and various forms of energy.

Mysticism delivers these “insights” about the spiritual world, but seldom grants ways to use them. Magick delivers this, and core shamanism which grants spirits the ability to show us the forms they wish is even quicker than grimoire trad. to learn and use effectively.

Do I really think talking goats or wolves are their true forms? Of course not, and no shamanic teacher would ever suggest they are, but they WILL correspond with those forms enough that you can summon them more strongly wearing your goat or wolf paraphanalia, so they are giving us a solid user-friendly interface.

Which is why I said the early shamanic experiences of spirits existing separate to humans were “formalised” - often adding in peculiarities specific to the culture they’re linked to.

On that, we are in full agreement, as I posted quite a way above. :+1:

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It is very simple: it is orchestrated according to the structure of your consciousness. Examine your perceptual experience, be self-aware and you will see that your tendency to judge something as “goo”, “bad”, “better” or “worse” immediately creates the hierarchy. Your reality is a direct and instantaneous consequence of your attachment to a perspective. The hierarchy of duality is illusory because there is but One Unified non-judgemental Infinite Consciousness.

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