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# Re: Real vs. imagined communication

#### Message 02311 of 3835

- To: <BardonPraxis@yahoogroups.com>
- Subject: Re: [BardonPraxis] Real vs. imagined communication
- From: "Rawn Clark" <rawnclark@...>
- Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 18:18:35 -0800
- References: <c2k34q+277i@eGroups.com>

    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
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BardonPraxis
    http://E.webring.com/hub?ring=arionthebardonwe

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