Tag: Magic

The Battle for your Mind

Posted on by Ina Custers van Bergen

Nowadays the Power of Magic is ridiculed by the media and by the masses. But this in itself is a dangerous development because it puts people to sleep while the biggest battle that we will be facing in the coming decennia is starting right now; the Battle for your Mind!
I will explain you why. Magic is the science of influencing and manipulating the powers of the subconscious mind. It has always been used to help people grow, to heal and to educate societies, to waken people up to higher values of life.

Nowadays this power is ridiculed and has come into the hands of advertisers and propagandists. They use our computers and our television screen to broadcast certain ideas into your mind by advertising campaigns. The place of entities is filled with products like M & M’s that jump from your kitchen closet right on your plate. Magical spells are disguised as jingles and songs that link feelings, desires, images together. Like mantras they enter into your subconscious mind at the moment that you are vulnerable; when you rest on your couch after a long day work and open your rest-brain to relaxation and entertainment.

I am very curious to learn if you recognize this because we need to wake up here to reclaim the freedom of our minds.

 

Magic isn’t real, or is it?

Posted on by Ina Custers van Bergen

The famous Paracelsus thought that epilepsy could be cured magically by grinding the horn of a unicorn in a mortar. That is quackery, isn’t it?

For a very long time, important magical books of great scientists gathered dust in the libraries of the World. The magical grimoires from the Middle Ages until the Renaissance lie mostly undiscovered and undervalued in the cellars of our museums. The presumption is that this material is not worthwhile being translated and studied.

The difficulty of these books is that in order to understand them one needs to train different areas of the brain. In our time, the rational side of the brain is trained continuously, the creative part is often neglected. Among the specific skills of the creative brain are all the arts, but also prayer, meditation and ritual. In ancient times these skills were considered to be crucial to understand the reality, to generate healing and receive insight and inspiration about the Divine Nature of the world surrounding us.

Ora Et Labora

These processes were investigated and described by ancient scientists; to understand the books of the Mediaeval Alchemists, Magicians and Astrologers and to benefit from the results of that training, one needs to follow their methods. They searched for the Divine Principle and Pattern of Creation in each and every appearance. Only by following the same methods we will understand the magical connection Paracelsus discovered between epilepsy and a lightning strike, and why he wrote that the cure of this disease was to grind the horn of a unicorn in a mortar.

Everything present in the greater World is not more and not less, also present in the human body. Similar kinds of wood, stone, herbs etc. that are present in the outer world are also present in the human, only not in the same appearance as in the elements…

Whoever is capable of recognizing the appearances in the human body – thus: this is the sapphire in the human, the Mercury, the Cypress, the Flos Cheiri etc – he has studied the book of the human body and seen through it.

Paracelsus

Fortunately the Magical Grimoires are gradually being taken seriously again the last couple of years. But to extract the pearls from the material, it is necessary to push aside the rational mind for a minute, and to train the spiritual side of the brain; to make a shift in consciousness to an ensouled world, and then you will experience that magic is no superstition, but really works!

Meditation

The nature of reality is not material but spiritual. Matter is crystallized consciousness. The Spiritual Vision on reality learns us: God is comatose in stones, asleep in plants, dreams in animals and is awake in humans.

 

In LVX
Ina Custers van Bergen

If you are interested in developing these meditation techniques then read more about our Solo Magical Training.

 

David Bowie on Magic

Posted on by Ina Custers van Bergen

Bowie writes about his experiences with Magic, and tells joking that it actually works 😉

Q: “So were you involved in actual devil worship?”

A: “Not devil worship, no, it was pure straightforward, old-fashioned magic.”

Q: “The Aleister Crowley variety?”

A: “No, I always thought Crowley was a charlatan. But there was a guy called [Arthur] Edward Waite who was terribly important to me at the time. And another called Dion Fortune who wrote a book called ‘Psychic Self-Defense‘. You had to run around the room getting bits of string and old crayons and draw funny things on the wall, and I took it all most seriously, ha ha ha ! I drew gateways into different dimensions, and I’m quite sure that, for myself, I really walked into other worlds. I drew things on walls and just walked through them, and saw what was on the other side!”

-David Bowie, interviewed in NME, 1997

 

TURNING LEAD INTO GOLD

Posted on by Ina Custers van Bergen

With the increasing popularity of Magic through the internet a lot of people are drawn to the mystery schools with ideas of their own what Magic is about. They try to dominate the discussion in groups and press their ideas onto the community. But Magic is Magic, its rules cannot be altered and that means that Magic is not for everyone.

As Western Mystery Schools we discriminate whom we accept as our students: a lot of changes happened the last few years. I believe every serious Western Mystery School is harassed on the internet in some way or another and this seriously disturbs context for new seekers who are trying to find their way. How did this happen, what is the current situation and how to proceed?

 

Surfacing from the Underground

When Magic surfaced from being an underground movement, it became mixed up with illegal groups. Other underground movements saw this as a chance to become accepted in the upper world as well; With all the popularity and the excitement, our temples became infiltrated by left hand path groups, ultra nationalist movements and attracted the mentally unstable. This caused enormous trouble and started rows and paranoia in the community. It was not clear whom could be trusted, because accepting the wrong student was enabling a schemer to become a member of your temple with the hidden agenda to blow it up.

It forced me to take a really good look at the different groups of people that were interested in Magic and I needed to think deeply about how to separate chaff from weed. I needed to know exactly what type of students became successful magicians and supportive members of the temple. I also needed to think of what function magic serves in the modern world and I excavated some jewels.

 

Purification and Transformation

A crucial factor in benefiting from magical work is in the purification and transformation process. This process cannot be done by reading books. This can only be done on a one-to-one basis, or in temple groups: under the guidance of an experienced tutor.

On a one-to-one basis, magical techniques can help people to heal bleeding psychological wounds: within a particular scope. It can help to explain certain very extraordinary, sometimes shocking experiences of the ‘Otherworld’, that cause people to start the search (and often this search gets stuck in the New Age movement).

Magical techniques included in the meditation process and applied in rituals can offer a new angle to process these extraordinary experiences and a person learns to contain, steer and apply this energy. Applied in the right way, this raw neurological energy pulse becomes real magical power, that will transform blockages into riches (turning Lead into Gold) and cause miraculous healing (the Wind has healing in its Wings).

In temple groups, people need to be willing to undergo and apply these internal transformations, by processing the transpersonal temple material and the psychic stuff that bubbles up on the magical energy. They need to be able to apply the outcomes to their own situation. We all have those personal wounds to a certain extent, there is no shame in admitting that, and there is a world to win by transforming that raw psychic material and put it to use.

 

Respecting the Temple Structure

A temple group can only work if the individuals act responsibly in dealing with their surfacing underground stuff, and do not project that onto their peers or to the leaders. It is of the utmost importance that temple functions are respected. The temple functions are no ego-boosters, but a responsibility: they are servants of the process. Temple initiates serve as projection screens for every member of the group to create awareness of ideal archetypes. The functions serve as transpersonal role models for development of every member. These projections are part of the process of the ‘Illumination of the Interior Stars’, that I describe in my book. Distributing them indiscriminately leads to ego-inflation and chaos. The people who hold the grades need to be able to carry the load and serve as role models.

 

The Great Work

If a person has the abilities to transform personal issues through the transpersonal magical techniques, then these techniques will generate a growth of the talents of that person and the melting down of previous blockages in a person’s life and a person really starts to blossom.

I have seen some real miracles happen and I am very proud of the results the people achieve that work hard at themselves in the Magical Order Temple of Starlight: they use magic as a toolkit to achieve extraordinary goals in their lives. They start to blossom in their own life and in this process the attitude of ‘what is in it for me’ changes to ‘I come to know in order to serve’; this is what the Great Work is all about!

I have tried to explain some aspects of these transformation processes in my teaching novel ‘The Mystery of the Sea.’ I wrote this book in a story form to enable people to identify more easily with the process. I hope sharing my two cents helps the community in developing a sane strategy to expand the community.

In LVX
Ina Custers van Bergen

Merken