Originally published at In Pursuit of Mysteries. You can comment here or there.In a marathon session the last two days, I cleaned up the work that I did last week on my thesis, dividing it into two chapters, and wrote another chapter from scratch. I then cleaned up my works cited and rewrote my introduction a bit since I had diverged a bit from my initial ideas last Fall.
With all of this, my initial draft of my thesis is done. It comes out to about 85 pages if you remove the diagrams that I have. I'm not entirely sure that I'm happy with the end of it but I can always do some more work on it.
I sent it off to a few readers that had volunteered to look at it about two hours ago. Hopefully, I have the final copy of this off to my committee in the next couple of weeks.
I know from speaking to my thesis mentor, the head of my committee, that he had no real issues with the first half and would be happy to sign off on it. Hopefully, he and then the other readers feel the same about this.
Given the way that the system works, if I have it turned in during the next month, it probably won't be final approved until the end of the Fall term, around Thanksgiving. This means that at the end of the following term, Spring 2008, I would probably get my diploma. As always with academia, there is generally at least a full semester turn around time on anything. Once I am notified that it is approved, it is just a matter of process though.
Originally published at In Pursuit of Mysteries. You can comment here or there.Now, I admit that I am biased in all things Crowley. I was never a "big 'T'" Thelemite like some people I know, who seem to worship Crowley as a guide or the ultimate guide to life or something. I found the philosophy to have some value and felt that Crowley had a lot of gifts, along with his faults. I still feel that way but I've moved on.
So, I fully expect anything I say here to be dismissed by most as "Oh, he's an ex-Thelemite, so of course he says things like that..."
That being acknowledged, I find it painful to watch people that I know, on and offline, who obviously are pretty gifted spiritually, trying to reconcile Crowley with other spiritual traditions or their own spiritual insights.
People study Yoga closely or a variety of spiritual traditions and find (surprise!) that maybe Crowley didn't know anywhere near as much about a tradition as he liked to pretend or simply (*gasp*) failed to understand it, whether through lack of knowledge because of his era or simply because of his "I'm a wealthy white Englishman studying the brown peoples' backward traditions" attitudes, whether conscious or not.
Folks, you don't have to reconcile the spiritual traditions of the world and Aleister Crowley's thought. Simply put, the man made mistakes or failed to grasp things. If your own growth, insight, or study shows this, it is not simply a matter that you aren't advanced enough to see the more subtle level where he makes sense and doesn't contradict these other traditions. It's that he was, often or occasionally (depending on your view), wrong.
Shoehorning your own spiritual understanding to fit in the "Thelema" box or the "Crowley" box only damages your own spiritual development and insights.
Follow your Will and not Crowley's and grow beyond Crowley. He is not the be all and end all of al spiritual development unless you are a "Crowleyite" instead of a "Thelemite." Heck, why even call yourself the latter?
Ok, smug message over. Flame on!
Originally published at In Pursuit of Mysteries. You can comment here or there.I just finished reading Richard Morgan's new novel, Thirteen. As with all of Morgan's work, I enjoyed it immensely though it was quite violent in places. All of Morgan's work is but a sense of outrage at the injustices of the world comes through.
This isn't the injustice of the universe being as it is. I'm a firm believer in the Buddhist thought that the universe is how it is and the desire to make the universe other than how it exists is one of the causes of our suffering. The world is and this is far removed from any personal desires on our part.
The injustice of Morgan's books is always the injustice which humanity visits upon itself. The petty games and the powerful games. The rapes, the killings, the refugees, the lust for power that lurks in the hearts of many people. The root principle of "I've got mine, Jack." His characters are generally broken outsiders, often conditioned (literally) ex-soldiers who are aware of what they are but unable to change their nature, even with this knowledge. The better of them come to some sort of peace with their natures, or at least acceptance, and use it as a place to work on the part of the world that does not simply exist as it is, the human part. We can debate whether human nature, like other aspects of the universe, is unchangeable but I do believe that individuals can have an impact on the world, a positive one, even if the sphere of influence of this impact winds up being small. We can all bring something better to the world rather than shrugging and choosing to be fucking bastards.
One point that this novel did bring to mind, with the death of a character and the manner in which the death was approached, is the immediacy of death. Sure, we all have read, "Live each day as if it were your last!", but how many people actually sit and spend a while thinking about that and then really pondering the consequences of that death? Even leaving aside that death comes for us all at any point, it still comes for us all. Full Stop.
You are going to die. I am going to die. Everyone is going to die.
Don't rail against it. Don't try to make the universe be other than what it simply is. Even if we discovered an immortality drug, that just makes your death happen (most likely) at some indefinite future point. You will still end just as the universe will, eventually, end.
If you are going to die, you should think about the impact of that and it should inform your life. Look around yourself and at your life. Are you living for tomorrow? Are you living to one-up the other guy or to build that special career to gain the money, prestige, lifestyle, or whatever that goes with it?
Are you really living a life of meaning? How do you define "meaning"?
There are no simple answers in any of this but it can give you an extreme moment of clarity, a crystalline lucidity, to raise your head up and really look at your life and what you live for or strive for in it. The jarring of your perspective can make many things become clear and show how unimportant so many others are when it really matters.
I suggest everyone spend five, ten, thirty, or a thousand minutes pondering this, actually thinking about it before you move on. You are going to die. It is inevitable and it is neither bad nor good. It simply is. In that clear realization, look at your life and your goals and then think about how you want to live your life or how you wish to spend what time you do have in the world.
Originally published at In Pursuit of Mysteries. You can comment here or there.In a rare occurrence, the DNA Lounge in San Francisco is having shows twice in a week that I actually want to see... The last time I saw a show there was when R and I went to see Front Line Assembly last year.
On August 14, they are having Combichrist and Imperative Reaction in a show. I'm a big fan of Imperative Reaction and I like Combichrist quite a bit.
On my birthday, August 19, they are having a show with Android Lust. I've been wanting to see Android Lust play for quite a while so this ought to be fun.
Jisho Sensei will be visiting that weekend. Maybe he'd be up for a little Industrial...
Originally published at In Pursuit of Mysteries. You can comment here or there.The new podcast is now available.
I've put the second part of my interview with T. Thorn Coyle up on the Ex Templo site now.
Enjoy!
Originally published at In Pursuit of Mysteries. You can comment here or there.Some lightweight thought here before I go to bed. Is there a calculus of souls that can be done in regards to ethics and moral imperatives?
Early in life, I was taught, "No," that there is a clear right and a clear wrong. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons or doing the wrong thing for the right reasons was never allowable. There were rules and they were meant to be followed. The world was black and white.
Later on, when I was no longer a child, this black and white turned into the endless shade of gray that so many of us are completely mired within. There was no moral compass provided for us. At best, people could find a moral code or some form of honor and hold true to it. Then when you repeatedly failed to live up to it, you could beat yourself about the head and shoulders but think that at least you had a code of some sort and tried.
Now, I actually live with vows that I have sworn to follow. In their most literal sense, they are like the black and white rules of childhood. Tell no falsehoods and promote truth. Kill no one and promote life.
The truth is that seeing these as black and white rules does one no good. No simple rule lives up to the reality of living in the real world within which we all spend our lives. Tell no lies but when they come for the Muslims and ask you if you know where they are, what do you say? Do you weight the rules or make some have precedence over the others?
The truth of the matter is that the questions that these vows make me ask are probably more important in some regard than the vows themselves. That isn't to say that the vows are then disregarded but they are a living thing that you must contend with, wrestle to the ground, or, if not that, bend and flow with in some manner. The contention, perhaps until there is no contention, somehow, is important.
All things to remember when someone at work asks me if I drank the last of the coffee with a gleam in their eye...
Originally published at In Pursuit of Mysteries. You can comment here or there.After all the hubbub about my thesis, I think I'm getting a lot closer.
We have a new web interface to the UMI records for theses at my program. This allowed me to look through a sampling of theses in philosophy focusing on religion topics in the last few years as well as taking a look at a selection of all of the theses in my program during this last year. This helped me get a better sense of what people in the program have done. This is what I did at 2:00 AM last night when I should have been sleeping.
My gut reaction is that people don't write very long theses a lot of the time. Now, my thesis needs to be, as it turns out, at least 50 pages long. The average thesis in the program is between 45 and 60 pages in the ones that I looked at last night. If you move the page count out to 80 or so, you get almost everyone. The ones that are left vary widely from 85 to 125 pages with a few crazy ones that are more.
Looking at the content, I'm surprised how little some of the theses go into great detail. There are a lot of five chapter, ten pages a chapter, theses out there. That is hardly space to really get into anything, which makes them seem pretty superficial to me. As was pointed out to me on Friday though, the point of the MA thesis, in many ways, is simply to prove that you can do decent basic research and write something longer that hangs together. It is not a dissertation.
My thesis, as of this evening, is at about 77 pages. I spent almost all of today working on my chapter on the Cabalistic parts of the soul and the Sphere of Sensation in the Golden Dawn, which came to a 16 or 17 page chapter. I have a chapter on the nature and work of adepthood (as it relates to the soul on the Tree of Life and the general process of moving up the Tree) and a conclusion chapter and that's it. I scoped down the work I was doing and removed one chapter and condensed another two into the chapter I just wrote. Given the nature of the program and the advise of my thesis mentor, there is no reason to turn in a thesis that is over 120 pages long.
If I had another day or two like today, I might have it done though the chapter I wrote today is likely to be easier than the one on adepthood.
Once I get the draft done, I will be pinging a couple of my earlier readers and a few people that I did not subject to the first half before and seeing if I can get a few people to read through the whole thing. This is mainly to get another set of eyeballs on it to see if it holds together in a general sense, catch the gratuitous typos and the occasional possibility of repeating something for the first time twice...
Interested parties with a decent academic background and/or a decent Golden Dawn background who are interested should contact me, especially if I already know you. I'm less likely to run the whole thing by complete strangers as I do need to turn this in for my degree and don't really want to spread it far and wide first.
Then question after this is whether I want to either try for GTU's doctoral program, which would be fulltime, in a year or maybe, instead, do the Master of Arts in Buddhist Studies that the Institute of Buddhist Studies offers. I know that I don't really need a second master's degree but the program at IBS is largely the program that ministers for the Buddhist Church of America (a Shin Buddhist church) go through. Since I am working towards ordination and a longterm Buddhist path, the material covered, especially the liturgical studies in Japanese, would be useful to my growth in this direction. Additionally, Dr. Payne, who runs IBS, was ordained in earlier years as a Shingon priest and has written the one book on the key rituals used in mikkyo that is out there. A chance to study with him and focus on tantricism in Japan would be excellent. The PhD program is much more intense but the MA program allows for people to go part-time, which may allow me to continue to work at Mozilla.
We'll see how things go once I get my thesis turned in and have some time to breathe and think without it lurking in the background like the rising of Cthulhu.
Originally published at In Pursuit of Mysteries. You can comment here or there.Years ago, back around 1998, I saw a band in Seattle that stuck in my head. This band was called "Numantra." They were an Eastern-influenced act that included an electric sitar. I'm not sure who they opened for but I am pretty sure it was at the Colorbox. That was a now-closed small club in downtown Seattle that showed a lot of small acts. They were probably opening for a local industrial band or Tchkung!, which is why I would have been there.
In any case, they had a CD available at the time but I didn't get it. I was pretty poor at the time and I just didn't feel like it (I guess). A month or so ago, I tracked down the CD on Ebay. I've been quite happy that I found it and it is a pretty good set of music. I just wish there was more of it but I heard they broke up not too long after I saw them.
I just found a circa 1998 music video of one of the songs on the CD, "To Dream Away", this evening. I've uploaded it to Google Video and I've added it to this post below. Enjoy!
Originally published at In Pursuit of Mysteries. You can comment here or there.My mother, Gretchen Faulk, sent me a note today that she's been in both of the local Salt Lake City papers as a local pagan and witch in the last couple of weeks. As most of my friends know, my mother is a 20+ year veteran of paganism and has practiced for that entire time in Utah. She started her own church, the Order of Our Lady of Salt, years ago and they've met for monthly Goddess services open to the public ever since then.
The article in the Salt Lake Tribune is on Harry Potter (of course). It is up here.
Her section of it is as follows:
While the Rev. Gretchen Faulk, a Wiccan priestess, loves the books, she sees no connection between the fantastical potion making in Harry Potter and real witchcraft. But she acknowledges that Rowling did her research into folklore and witchcraft when mentioning potion ingredients.
And in referencing people.
Nicolas Flamel, the famed maker of the Sorcerer's Stone in the first Harry Potter novel, really did exist and was made famous for his work in alchemy.
Animals and plants such as bubotubers and devil's snare don't exist anywhere outside the pages of Harry Potter, but many of the ingredients mentioned in the stories do. The medicinal, magical and seasonal use of herbs and plants has been around for hundreds of years and continues today.
Wiccans often use herbs such as St. John's wort, which falls into all three categories. It is used to treat depression, it acts as a protective herb that is often woven into garlands to ward off negativity, and its yellow flower, which blooms near the summer solstice, associates it with the sun.
Faulk is struck by how often Utahns use natural remedies and herbs in their day-to-day lives. "People here have a lot of respect for herbs," she said. "Pioneer knowledge here is preserved and respected."
But she strongly cautions people to check with doctors and herbal reference guides before putting anything new and unusual in their bodies.
The other reference is from the Deseret News, which hides its linking so you have to search in the archives for "Paganism in Utah." Here are some selections from the article where they quote my mother:
Misperceptions and fear cause many pagans to keep their choice of religion hidden, especially in the workplace, says Maureen Duffy-Boose, founder and president of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist pagans, a national pagan group.
"Even in our culture in 2007, the normal cultural response is that pagans are weird," Duffy-Boose said. "I know people who have lost their children because of this religion. I know people that have lost jobs. I know one person who was actually evicted from her apartment."
Prejudice occurs because pagans have been the subject of "1,000 years of negative propaganda," says Gretchen Faulk, founder of the Order of Our Lady of Salt, a pagan group in Salt Lake City.
One woman, who asked not to be identified, says she lost her job as a public school teacher when it was discovered she was Wiccan.
But Duffy-Boose and Faulk agree that such conflicts are rare, and most Utahns are respectful of pagans. When conflicts do occur, discussion usually leads to understanding, they say.
[...]
  Duffy-Boose said many people seek a religion in which feminine deity play a significant role, and nearly all pagan religions honor both gods and goddesses. That desire led Faulk to create the Order of Our Lady of Salt nearly 12 years ago.
She was raised Christian, but as an adult she lost interest in the notion of God the Father and was drawn more and more to the idea of female deity. Eventually she began to practice Wicca, which emphasizes the importance of both gods and goddesses.
The Order of Our Lady of Salt holds monthly Goddess Worship Services that center on a specific goddess from one of the world's cultures. Faulk and her group have worshipped figures from Norse, Greek, Roman and Egyptian traditions, among many others.
The group has also focused on revered female figures who aren't usually seen as deity, but who "function as goddesses," Faulk says. Mary Magdelene, the LDS Mother in Heaven and even Lady Liberty (the Statue of Liberty) have all been the subject of worship services.
Go Mom!!
