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The Slumber of Reason Produces Monsters: Etching by Goya

Occult knowledge --or rather information about the occult-- these days is widely available in libraries, online, in back-alley pdf's, on the witch ridden corners of Reddit and even Youtube and Instagram accounts; with various degrees of quality, in descending order. I am no expert in the occult, for as much as been fairly read in the available literature might tempt me to believe but I have noticed a few things regarding an inappropriate exposure to the occult which I've termed occult fever . This latter phenomenon is a consequence of the easiness with which the information is obtained and more than once I've seen over inflated egos as a result of having read a book or several about occult subjects. There is nothing wrong with reading books about the occult, actually, there are several benefits including as source of inspiration, as a map, or as a way to create rapport with a tradition. One thing however should always be kept in mind when reading such books and that is that no matter how fanciful they sound, or how intoxicating this knowledge can be they are meant one way or the other to the masses and as such they are entry-level books, or in some cases in good tradition, trying to say something else than what is apparent at first.

One who has widely read the literature about the occult might jump in defense of such arguments, which is a reliable source to proving the point, for the bearer of true knowledge doesn't rely on appearances and is often discreet about what he knows and of a calm demeanor when exposing it. There are oceans of difference between knowing something and toying with the concepts a little bit and actually knowing something from within.

There are many reasons why someone would attach their identities to the occult without putting in the necessary training to build the foundation to make sense of it and use it, instead of being used by it. The most obvious one is that people like to pretend to be more than what they actually are, that is easy and feeds the ego in order to attain a sense of self-worth and in some cases of community. Unfortunately that is the same as pretending to be fed by junk food, it certainly gives the illusion of something but in this case more than anything it props up a personality around "being an occultist" but it is as fragile as the health of someone that doesn't have a proper diet. That is why there are so many brittle egos on the scene that would fling a nasty curse at you just by pointing it out. Yes, this happened to me, fortunately it was a lesson on the effectiveness of banishing rituals more than anything else.

Half a step further you find a similar example but among practitioners, which in a way can be trickier to spot and self-correct because the former example requires as much as pointing it out for it to be obvious, but this one is harder to discern since there are actually reasons for the claim of knowing. One thing is that the people that have some degree of experience in the occult are more knowledgeable and thus have a wider array of arguments in their favor, but as with the previous specimen it is just a mirage. This phenomenon often manifests itself as a form of The Watcher in the Threshold, since it is a barrier to avoid self transformation and it takes humility and playfulness to cross it repeatedly. Myself personally I have not seen this, because I don't have much contact with the broader occult community but I have seen it online in forums and on pages whose authors claim adeptship but looking at their lives it makes it hard to believe. Where I have seen it in a different form is among practitioners of various disciplines. Once one has gone through the necessary motions to claim a mask, one stops desiring to go further in favor of enjoying the more polished self-image and progress stagnates.

Here JMG has a phrase very apt for the occasion:

These two desires, mask and reality, move in harmony so long as the magical novice restricts his or her involvement to reading books and taking part in a few community rituals. When the novice moves on to regular practice, though, that harmony shatters; it is possible to [pretend] be a magician or to become one --but not both. The disciplines of magical training are unfriendly to masks of any kind, even the magician-mask; fantasies of magical power and self-sufficiency run headfirst into the reality that the beginning magician can rarely control his or her own thoughts for two minutes together. On a deeper level, the goal of most of the basic magical disciplines is self-knowledge, and it is precisely the fear of self-knowledge that is the motive behind every kind of mask. -- John Michael Greer, Paths of Wisdom.

This is one but among a flurry of effects that the undigested and improperly directed knowledge can manifest as. There is another which I consider one of the worse kinds of occult fever because it is the one that shapes not the personality of the one under its effect directly but how he perceives the world around him or her. Whenever someone primes his mind with an image of a concept you start seeing it everywhere and that can be dangerous if you put a lot of weight into such an image. This happens all the time in diminished form in everyday life which is why inkblot tests like the one above say so much about who we are. "You don't see things as they are but as you are" goes the saying allegedly attributed to Rumi.

Our brains function with a set of images and concepts that we have gathered across our social environments and we use these images to tell ourselves this is this and that is that, this is this letter and that one is the other and so on. On a subtler level this also determines how we experience the world because around certain images and concepts we ascribe a habit of the will in the form of emotions. Whenever we see a dog we feel this emotion and whenever we see a cat we feel that kind of emotion; when we see a beggar we feel this other kind of emotion. Sometimes there are reasons for this, or rather, stepping stones to this and sometimes it is just a mindless reaction based on habit. The validity of how we perceive the world can be argued, and it is actually shown during the first steps of occult training that many things that we might consider real are no more than a habit that has gone underneath our conscious awareness and it appears as though they were true to the conscious mind. As in the matter of a mirror, we have built an image in our minds and it reflects it back at us as a tint covering whatever we perceive.

Here is were it gets slippery because truth is a funny thing once you start examining the things that you take as given. Most of the time we rely in some sort of faith when we talk about things that we take as true and the most deceptive of all are the senses. Whatever we can touch, hear, taste, smell and see we take as true and real. In a subtler level, whatever we can deduct from a set of premises or axioms we also take as true and in a way, real. In a way, funny as it sounds, these are more true than the information that comes from our senses because our senses are quite limited. After all, what we see is not the object that we are seeing but rather we are using light as a proxy to perceive it because of the rays that bounce from it and enter into our eyeballs, which are then filtered and assembled by our mind into something that more or less makes sense. In contrast, the things we deduct or build upon a set of premises or axioms --if they are any good-- don't depend on our physical senses, and though still limited, they have a certain degree of distillation that gives it a particular quality that we find in poems, some philosophical concepts and mathematical theorems. They are real, but you cannot point at them, with your finger at least.

However, and here is were mishandled occult knowledge comes in, if you start taking in images and concepts into the framework of your mind for which you don't have a proper and stable base the way you start perceiving the world can get seriously wonky and you become less functional. You've swapped one set of images for another --or following the allegory of the cave an image above, you've swapped one set of statues for another-- and if improperly assembled then your perception of the world can get distorted in ways that cause psychological and even physical damage. In a way, this is why crazy people are, well, crazy to us. Because they have attached their attention into a set of concepts and images that color their reality strongly, very strongly and since those do not conform to the world of the 21st century or meets the demands of survival either physical or societal we label them as what they are missing --nuts. This can happen by psychological trauma, obsession or what have you and thus the insane starts pointing at things that are not there, talks about things that don't make sense and claim knowledge nobody else has, even though to them it is as true as a beer can sitting next to the poolside.

If you start reading about concepts that appeal strongly to the emotions, such as demons for example, all of a sudden your mind can't stop thinking about it and you start seeing evil everywhere; if you create rapport with something that demands intense secrecy without something to balance it, you start becoming paranoid about everyone and everything and you'll be on the lookout all the time; if you've had unhealthy relationships you'll be on your tip toes all the time looking for manipulative behavior. This is also true, and again, even more tricky to spot, with "good" occult knowledge for example related to divinity or virtuosity. This happens because it is much easier to argue in favor of virtuosity, after all if you think you are right and everything around you convinces you that you are righteous then you can commit any and all kinds of blunders in the name of entitlement. We see a lot of that today.

So what to do about it? Regarding the latter form I just talked about I am reminded of a phrase, which I think I heard from a particular Yogi I am fond off that says: "Whatever good you do, throw it in the well." This is very helpful to keep in mind because if we start wearing our good deeds around our necks our egos will hyperinflate with no way to argument against them and at that point, progress also stagnates. I am convinced this is why the mystical religions put such emphasis in service and volunteering, because this helps you balance the sense of virtuosity by grounding you; and if you do it well, by seeing everything and everyone around you as bigger than you are or perhaps less in a less problematic phrasing, as things that are worthy to be served. Regarding occult knowledge and books, one way that I think it is helpful is to never believe them but also to never disbelieve them. This kind of knowledge should serve as lampposts that guide us to whatever it is that it is trying to point us too, but they can also serve as traps.

Lastly, acquiring tools that allow us to discern these images, place new ones and remove troublesome ones is essential for proper training. Tools that enable us to discern what is coming from our own minds, what is coming from imitating someone and what is coming from the collective mind of our times. Divination is also helpful here, though it can be tricky as well, and that it is why it takes so much effort to do it right, because if we do not hold a mediator stance we might be fooling ourselves into believing something and then use that, under the pretense or right divining that something is true. That is why some occult schools place so much emphasis on meditation and journaling among other techniques of self-knowledge, because by having a criteria and an ability to pay attention consciously you can act and think properly and finally you can wield the sword of knowledge properly without turning yourself into tatters in the process.