Re: [BardonPraxis] Real vs. imagined communication

["Rawn Clark" <rawnclark@...>]

Dear Daniel, Simon and Paul,

While the paint's drying on one part of my current art project, I
decided to take a few minutes to interject in this important topic. :)

Daniel asked:
>> It is only during grade IX and above that the practitioner can evoke
true external intelligences and not just the contents of his psyche -
bearing this in mind, how come the passive communications of grade V
with one's HGA and the deceased is real and not just brought out of the
psyche? <<

Number one, the Step Five technique is *passive* communication; whereas,
Evocation is an *active* form of communication. The Step Five work is
not *evocation*. Instead, it is passively making the medium of
communication available for the use of the entity you wish to
communicate with.

Secondly, with the Step Five work, the subjectivity vs. objectivity
depends upon several factors, not the least of which is how truly one
has mastered the exercises up to that point. The Step Five exercises
will test the student's powers of discernment and this trains the
student's abilities of *objective perception*, the honing of which are
an absolute prerequisite to the Practice of Magical Evocation. In other
words, the *passive * communication begins a learning curve which leads
to the faculties necessary for PME.

The technique itself does not guarantee that your *initial* experiences
with passive communication will be anything other than completely
subjective expressions of your own psyche. However, consistent
*practice* of the technique *will* lead you to the ability to discern
between subjective self-projection and actual contact with an
objectively separate, discrete entity that is *not* yourself.

Simon wrote:
>> One of the primary problems here is that there is a fundamental
paradox: if the magician is communicating with an external, objective
entity where is the empirical data which validates it's objectivity? <<

I suggest you read http://www.ABardonCompanion.com/Perception.html

>> You have certainly hit upon a conundrum. However, why does it
matter? <<

In Bardon's Hermetics, it matters very, very much. The difference
between a self-projection, or a subjective misinterpretation of the
objective reality, and an objective perception of the objective reality,
is like the difference between theater and true magic. The faculty of
objective perception is *fundamental* to the practice of true magic.
Without it, one builds an initiatory "house of cards" which will surely
collapse, a castle of sand which will surely be washed away.

>> From a hermetic perspective, we are all slivers of divinity,
therefore anything we create is imbued with the same divinity. <<

Well . . . it's more a matter of diminishing returns. :) We create
with only as much "divinity" as we are capable of *projecting*. If we
don't even know the depth of our own divinity then we can project or
pass on only an infinitesimal fraction of what divinity we truly posses.

Initiation is a set of personal-evolutionary or self-evolving techniques
whereby we consciously and intentionally seek to uncover our own
divinity and seek to express it more completely and clearly. Your
argument that anything we create is imbued with the *same* divinity as
we possess doesn't equate from an initiatory perspective. Better
wording might be: "Anything we create is imbued with as much of our
divinity as we are able to project into it."

To my mind, your argument doesn't justify your statement that it doesn't
matter if an experience is a subjective projection of one's own psyche
or an objective reality. In Bardon's magic, it *does* matter. :)

>> It is a truism to say that the magickal world-view finds no
contradiction between saying that an entity is both external to one's
self and completely subjective. If someone says that it has to be one or
the other, they have not fully embraced the idea of their own divinity,
indeed, they are not living in a magickal paradigm. <<

I would hope that as Hermeticists, we would want to look a little deeper
and not take this sort of statement at its superficial value. For this
statement to be valid from an Hermetic perspective, it would need to be
re-written as: "One can have a completely subjective perception of an
objectively external entity." This does *not* mean that the external
entity is therefore subjective. The only thing 'subjective' in this
equation is one's *perception* of the objectively external entity.

But as magicians, or at least as Bardonist's, we are training our
faculties of discernment and perception so that we can indeed
objectively perceive the objective reality of things. It's at the
*objective* level that the magician functions! The objective reality
*is* the "magical paradigm". Therefore it is vital that we be able to
discern between the objective and subjective.

If one cannot tell a subjective perception apart from an objective
perception of an objective reality, then one will *easily* mistake a
projection of one's own psyche as an objective perception of an
objective reality. And conversely, one will *easily* mistake an
important objective perception as a subjective projection and mistrust
what should be trusted. In other words, a lack of discernment in this
arena *will* lead one to a great amount of confusion and take one down
many blind alleys.

My best to you all,
:) Rawn Clark
09 Holiday 2004
rawnclark@...
rawn@...
http://www.ABardonCompanion.com
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