RE: [BardonPraxis] William Mistele and Evocation

[Craig Bolland <craig@...>]

Hi Peter (and Rawn, if you like).

Why do you think Bardon, who undoubtedly knew what he was doing,
included so large a section of PME if it is 'essentially useless'? Was
he mistaken? What were his motivations?

It seems to me you view the entities discussed as having little
objective reality - to the extent that one person's encounter might be
radically different to another (ie: subjective), or that a genuine
encounter might be *veiled* through expectation, or that, indeed, "this
sort of problem will manifest in almost any 
attempt to contact a spirit that another person has come in contact with
and evoked". If the entities exist only as a manifestation of individual
expectations and filters, perhaps they exist only within the individual?
If an entity has certain observable 'truths' separate from the observer,
then surely one person's account is useful - in the broad sense if not
in the details?

It seems to me that when one is genuinely working at this level, the ego
is largely to one side, and any filters or personal perceptions are
necessarily absent and therefore irrelevant. In short, one does not
perceive these things through the ego-self.

While I agree that the 'everything is an aspect of self / there is no
observed without the observer' paradigm is a valid and internally
congruent metaphor for mystical truth, it doesn't strike me as being the
more traditional hermetic paradigm Bardon worked within, except to the
extent that all mystical streams begin talking the same language at some
point. But moreover - although it's fashionable nowadays to eschew
tradition and objectivity in favour of the personal experience, in order
to understand the author one needs to understand his assumptions and
axioms. If Bardon wrote within a traditional hermetic frame, as he
himself claims to, we need to get within that frame to understand the
truths there, not retranslate it into modern quantum-magick.

The ecclectic/traditional dynamic is a fascinating one in modern occult
circles. I think your argument here is an attempt to mistranslate a
traditional objective approach into a modern subjective one, which is
fascinatingly representative of modern magickal dialectic, but
ultimately flawed. 

And therefore, to allow Ouroboros her course and to trail back around to
my first point, the $64,000 questions that arise from your assumptions
are - did Bardon know what he was doing and believe what he was saying?
If so, why throw in 'essentially useless' information?

LVX,

Craig.