March 2018 Book Club

   March 14, 2018
   John Michael Greer
   129 Comments

   This week's post is the ninth  of a monthly series of open-discussion posts
   focusing  on books  I've  written. Our  theme for  the  present is  Mystery
   Teachings  from the  Living  Earth,  and this  week  we're discussing  "The
   Spiritual Ecology  of Magic" (pp.85-99).  I'd like  to ask readers  to keep
   their  questions and  comments focused  on that  chapter and  the ideas  it
   contains; we'll have another Ask Me  Anything post later this month, and of
   course a substantive monthly post or two in due time.

   The chapter covers a fair amount of  material, but the central theme can be
   summed up simply enough. The common modern pop-spirituality insistence that
   limits  don't  apply to  the  spiritual  realm,  that the  entire  universe
   is  utterly  obedient to  the  thoughts,  feelings,  and attitudes  of  the
   individual, is not merely mistaken but self-defeating and self-destructive.
   Certainly changes in your thoughts, feelings, and attitudes can reshape the
   universe of  your experience  in unexpected  ways, and  some times  in very
   dramatic ones;  certainly a great many  of the limitations that  burden our
   lives are  the product of  our thoughts, feelings, and  attitudes...but not
   all.

   Limits apply to every plane of being.  The Law of Limits, the fourth of the
   seven laws we've discussed so far in this sequence of posts, applies to the
   spiritual realm  just as thoroughly as  it does to the  material realm; the
   limits  are different  but they're  no less  inflexible. The  initiate uses
   these limits  the way  a billiard  player uses the  cushioned sides  of the
   billiard table, as limits off which he  or she can rebound. Magic, in fact,
   can be understood in  one sense as the art and science  of using the limits
   of the mind and spirit to achieve one's ends.

   This chapter  also deals with  magical ethics.  That's a swamp  these days,
   with half the crocodiles mouthing prissy Victorian sentiments and the other
   half insisting  that ethics don't matter  at all, but there's  a simple way
   through the murk, which is to remember that magic is subject to the laws of
   ecology. What  you put into  the world will  cycle back and  influence your
   life-and no, it  doesn't matter whether or not you  happen to believe this.
   Just as dumping  toxic waste into the physical  environment guarantees that
   sooner or later some of it will come out of your own faucets, dumping toxic
   energies into the  magical enviroment guarantees that sooner  or later some
   of that will circle around to bite you in the backside.

   Questions? Comments?  Discussions? Have  at it-subject,  of course,  to the
   usual rules.

                              ******************

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