Tim’s provided the basis for what we’ve come to refer to as the Path of Radical Questioning, and I’d like to continue with so [...]

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I hope your approaching mind orgasm is good. Though my last one seemed pretty lame, the afterglow just keeps getting better.

One more post on this before I move on to greener pastures. Thanks Jeremy for saying what I’ve either not been able to or people [...]

What a great thought. Question who or what is doing the questioning as well!

of course, i’ve always found writing to be a magickal act in and of itself, like back when only certain people knew how to write so it was considered ‘magic,’ or like in alan moore’s promethea series (one of the very best ever, imho). again, if you’re following the path of pkd, he never went out and practiced ritual magick or anything of the kind, but turned out some of the most insightful, amazing revelations. your writings on gnosis are some of the best out there at the moment, but you’ve never attended an eg mass. there are no hard or fast rules. i’m not saying you should or shouldn’t do any of this stuff, i’m just sayin’ it’s up to you, and if you dont’ do it, so what? make your own way, mang. you’re not ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ one way or the other.

btw, while we’re tossing around ‘results oriented’ books, the best one i can think of is ‘magical tattwa cards‘ by mumford. that one’ll have you seeing alternate realities in less than a week. the tattwas are some amazing stuff.

There is no “tricking” per se, as you put it, whe you work with altered states.

why not? because you cant?

the paths are infinite.

for a species that basically knows nothing, questions seem to be appropriate…

Isn’t there some passage in Exegesis where PKD talk about questioning god or playing some sort of game with god and no matters what he tries the answer is always infinity - god wins

this i like.

Tim, dont let the dogmatists get you down. thats the lure of the trap “Look at us, we are so happy! We have found the answers! We KNOW something!”

liars.

one
human?

Maybe floor the pedal until you hit the wall - maybe you will disocver that the wall is some sort of paradox.

Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do. It’s easier said than done I guess. I’ll check out that book too I suppose, although I think I’m almost there in terms of OBE without it. I keep reaching a point where it’s just about to happen, I freak out and draw back. It’s exactly the criticism everybody’s giving me about all this stuff in a larger sense…

will check out tonite

And yes, I highly recommend Astral Dynamics. Every other text out there pushes visualisations and such as the exercises to do to bring awareness to the subtle bodies and the manipulation thereof, but Bruce was asked to develop a way to teach these things to a blind man. After some time, he developed what he calls the NEW method to out-of-body. This approach uses tactile stimulation and concentrations to really bring an awareness and control ×10 faster than visualisations would ever.

Language just happens to be my poison of choice. Some people are into hookers and cocaine.

Some people are into all three

ps — rev max, if it’s the you I know from Enemies.com, I just realised that I still have your logo and we’ll throwing up this sticker campaign this summer. I’ll send you an e-mail with images here soon.

Oh yeah! How you doin’? Are you the guy who wrote me about doing a design project parodying civic awareness for Alberta?

I grew up in Ottowa myself. Well met kind sir, dig yer site BTW.

RE: Astral Dynamics - I own a copy but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. Sounds like its worth doing though?

Just keep it in mind when you want to explore an “objective,” sensational approach to all of this. Robert Bruce has developed some very good techniques to easily achieve results in dealing with the subtle bodies and exploring the depths of consciousness. It will aid greatly in your journey to understand without the language.

I think Fell is right- perhaps you do need to ‘take the plunge.’ The book recommend isn’t more language, it’s a ‘how to’ guidse.

It’s like if the problem is language, how can I use language to overcome it?

That seems like one of the big insights of PDK actually - you can take the prison bars and use them to build a ladder out of the prison

Or - from the POV of tantra - if the problem is attachment to desire how can I use desire to overcome the attachment?

Are you mapping the belly of the beast from the inside out? That seems like a good way to discover the limits of its appetites.

Maybe floor the pedal until you hit the wall - maybe you will disocver that the wall is some sort of paradox.

WHat are the limits of intellectual knowledge?

How far can you pursue questioning?

Descartes gave us one solution but its far from the only one.

Fell, I’ve been saying just that for weeks. It’s what brought me to this place. But I think we all are. To say you or somebody else is not is as much of an illusion as anything.

Hehe…

If I might, may I suggest your checking out Astral Dynamics, by Robert Bruce? Easiest way to get some tangible results in all of this voodoo-hoodoo that we do. Trust me when I say it’s worth the $17.

Isn’t there some passage in Exegesis where PKD talk about questioning god or playing some sort of game with god and no matters what he tries the answer is always infinity - god wins

There is an interesting perspective taken by Scott Adams in his “thought experiment,” God’s Debris. The idea that God attempted to destroy itself in an attempt to understand the resultant consequences and possibilities of such an act. And that we’re existing backwards in time, consciously, as we head “towards” a re-unification of the Whole. Which sorta strikes with me cuz there is all this talk of radiation “existing ‘backwards’ in time,” for lack of better descriptions, and the idea that the universe is still composed of all this exotic matter and energy we’re not privy to except through theory.

ps — rev max, if it’s the you I know from Enemies.com, I just realised that I still have your logo and we’ll throwing up this sticker campaign this summer. I’ll send you an e-mail with images here soon.

I am increasingly coming to believe you are a victom of language

Fell, I’ve been saying just that for weeks. It’s what brought me to this place. But I think we all are. To say you or somebody else is not is as much of an illusion as anything.

Anyway, I’m a writer. Language just happens to be my poison of choice. Some people are into hookers and cocaine.

as to whether or not it’s really a good idea to try to bypass your rational mind. From one perspective, it seems “bad” to be constantly trying to trick yourself.

this begs the question: is the “rational mind” really your deepest, truest self?

is the rational mind really in control or is it clinging to the illusion of control

in some shamanic paradigms they believe that people have multiple souls or spirits - 2, 7, 9, etc

maybe one is logic, one is emotion, another personal memory, another ancestral memory, another the divine spark, etc

at the very least we do have three brains that are responsible for totally different aspect sof our consciousness, eg teh lizard brain, mammalian brain, neocortex etc

they work together in a symbiotic way to create the illusion of a whiole with a personal and unique identity.

But when you strip away all the layers of the onion what is let in the middle?

The void? The divine spark? Nothing?

I guess that’s another thing I like about questioning as a path: that it hones your rational mind at the same time that it systematically dismantles it.

Isn’t there some passage in Exegesis where PKD talk about questioning god or playing some sort of game with god and no matters what he tries the answer is always infinity - god wins

Tim, I love your site, but I am increasingly coming to believe you are a victom of language and need to seriously sit down and try a few of these things out that you’re exploring. Scholarship and reason only get you so far, especially in the occult.

There is no “tricking” per se, as you put it, whe you work with altered states. They are heightened, ecstatic states that allows the sorcerer to entrain themselves to brainwaves outside of the normal, everyday beta-wave consiousness. The human mind produces and is enveloped in all sorts of frequencies, these EEGs, and one can see the slight change in consciousness apparent when you watch a movie or are trying to fall asleep: flittering through the twilight phase of alpha waves and the sort of perception & conscious capacities that accompany a relaxed alpha state. Your mind does not start to produce alpha waves when you sit down to watch a movie, but instead it’s consciousness that allows itself to become more entrained to the vibratory affect of alpha frequencies.

Generally, people tend to fall asleep as their body slows down and consciousness is drawn into the lower frequencies — theta and delta:

Theta is the frequency range from 4.5 Hz to 8 Hz and is associated with drowsiness, childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. This EEG frequency can sometimes be produced by hyperventilation. Theta waves can be seen during hypnagogic states such as trances, hypnosis, deep day dreams, lucid dreaming and light sleep and the preconscious state just upon waking, and just before falling asleep.

Ceremonial magic, evocation, states of ecstasy, trance, et cetera… are all ways to coerce the mind under duress to correspond with a state of mind that is not natural to the productive, social mean that we’ve come to accept in monotonous, “conscious” life.

As I pointed out in another comment from this morning, ceremonial magic exists as an intuitive development between sorcerer and outside intelligences. Just because you need to make some sense of it doesn’t mean it’s non-sensical. At this point, it is technically just alien to you.

“Intelligence is restricted. It can deal only with facts discoverable by the senses and experiences related to these. It can act only in the area of the visible, the viable.” Ceremonial magic is, currently, the best methods we have with opening perceptual doorways to communicate and interact with the cosmos in all their brilliance. Our little minds are only privy to a undescribably small sliver of potentiality and probability.