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Post by Gregory Peters on Oct 21, 2013 4:07:40 GMT
Allow me to just gush for a moment and praise this board and the members here. This thread is absolutely full of excellent material and ideas that I will need to spend days if not weeks and years following up on!
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Post by astartarosmagan on Oct 25, 2013 19:19:47 GMT
Have you read Moonchild by Crowley? Grant , Crowley, Waite, etc. all these occultists had many Magical Personalities Any open minded magick seeking anthropologically minded occultist will eventually find themselves obsessed with Hunduism and/ or Eastern Asiatic Gnosis. Read Outside the Circles of Time, Magical Revival, etc. you'll see. The Lovecraftian obsession is interesting but he wrote so much more stuff.
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Post by Gregory Peters on Nov 1, 2013 7:49:29 GMT
Somewhat related to this thread, I wanted to repost here some of the information on the Latent Light Culture, of which David Curwen was a member. (reposted from my blog newaeontantra.com/2013/04/16/tantrik-thelema-in-south-india/):Tantrik Thelema in South India Founded in 1905 by Dr. T. R. Sanjivi in Tinnevelly, South India with “the sole purpose of educating people to culture the light that is latent in one and all,” the Latent Light Culture and its inner order The Holy Order of Krishna teach practical yoga methods based of an esoteric and initiated interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita. The founding material of the organization from the 1920?s is attributed to the mysterious author “Bhikshu”, and contains a strong influence of Thelema and the writings of Aleister Crowley mixed in with the initiated tantrik teachings of the Gita. A few excerpts: “Act Thou, therefore, when opportunity confronts you; responding to it, meeting it bravely, utilising it, actively. ‘Do what thou wilt’, say the Masters, ‘Shalt be the whole of the Law,’ of Dharma of Karma — only he who doeth is the Karmi; he who wills to do and doeth is the Karma Yogi; the Deed is the Karma, his future, his Destiny the harvest of his Thoughts and Acts. Your Deed is the expression of your will, the will in you; say then to yourself ‘I Will’ and Act. So acting shalt thou not sin, says the Lord Krishna.” “In this then shall be the Ordinanace (Sastra) for you Karma Yogi, in the dictum of ‘Do what thou wilt’ which shalt be for thee the whole of the law, teaching you comprehensively what to do, what to avoid, this the only ordinance; ‘do what thou wilt, then do nothing else’; we shall repeat it constantly, without end, that you may be unified of will, that in all your act you may bring all the universe that is of you, that in your act the whole of you and not the puny portion of you miscalled ‘I’ at the threshold, at the outer gate of consciousness, may act, and impress itself on the even that anyhow must be.” -Karma Yoga, 1928 “The first and greatest of all priveledges is to have accepted the Law of the Gita: Yatha Ichchhasi Tatha Kuru (Do What Thou Wilt) – to have become free and independent and to have destroyed all fear, whether of custom, faith, of other men and of death itself. “Fear not at all, fear neither men, nor fates, nor gods, nor anything. Money fear not, nor the laughter of the frivolous folk nor any other power in heaven, upon the earth or under the earth.” - From the grade paper of the First Degree of the Holy Order of Krishna. This is the group that originally produced the celebrated tantrik commentary on the Ananda Lahari that was referenced by several of the works of Kenneth Grant in his Typhonian Trilogies. Sadly the organization today seems to shy away from the more esoteric traditions that it was founded on, although the grade papers still show influences of Thelema. Deeper material such as the ritual magic of the Sri Vidya encoded into the Ananda Lahari (the Wave of Bliss, which consists of the first 41 verses of the Soundarya Lahari) is mixed in with a new spiritual interpretation of the Gita.
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Post by Marc on Nov 2, 2013 20:32:42 GMT
I wonder if there are still organizations today that are still very much steeped in the esoteric traditions they were founded on. I'm not very familiar with the various organizations on the eastern side of things.
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Post by Michael Staley on Nov 3, 2013 21:50:53 GMT
Gregory, was the group that Curwen contacted known as The Holy Order of Krishna in the 1930s, or is that a more modern name?
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Post by Gregory Peters on Nov 4, 2013 18:07:45 GMT
The Holy Order of Krishna was and is the name the Latent Light Culture uses for their organization. LLC is the "outer" name and the Order is the working group that has degrees and etc.
I have been trying to get more information out of then about the Bhairavi diksa and the Ananda Lahari commentary. While the current head alludes to their existence, I get the strong impression that they shy away from it now. Perhaps it is locked up safe in their archives in Delhi, unused and unread!
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Post by Gregory Peters on Jan 22, 2014 7:08:43 GMT
In Lovecrafts tales themselves such as Through the Gates of the Silver Key and Dreams in the Witch House, the mindstates described seem to have a correlation with descriptions by eastern mystics of their experiences. Certain eastern practices explore the evolution of consciousness through vast cycles of time, and the results of Kundalini awaking can apparently be horrific for the unprepared. Thats true. Kalachakra tantra is a great example of this, as it deals with techniques that let one experience reality "outside the circles" of space & time. This is the purpose of meditations on horrific entities. I like the idea of Lovecraftian entities as projections in the Tibetan sense. Ive also felt for awhile that the words themselves, Cthulhu, Azathoth, etc, are more like mantras, vibrations which invoke an experience of a certain sentient cosmic pattern or vibration, and like in the East, are personified (theriomorphically) as deities. I like this idea, it resonates a lot with my own observations and experience. Very well put. They are thousands of years ahead of the West on this, and the eastern versions of Typhonian practices have not been suppressed / persecuted to the extent that they have been in the West. Very true. The Tibetan tantrik systems of Vajrayana, for example, are extremely advanced magickal engines, in many cases lightyears ahead of the techniques of western ceremonial. The vajrayana and dzogchen techniques seem to be more equipped for work that is post-Adeptus Minor (to use western GD type terms). In particular, the passage of the Abyss, although in eastern systems it would not be expressed as such, seems to have deep correlations with tantrik techniques. All of the time, effort and energy that the west has put into things like computer tech, the people that developed Vajrayana put into spiritual tech.
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Post by Gregory Peters on Jan 22, 2014 7:09:28 GMT
ugh.. so much for tech. I was trying to quote passages from jcurwen's post and comment on them, but it all got munged together
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Post by nephrenka on Apr 7, 2014 17:13:53 GMT
I can't recall but is there an actual Tree of Life diagram in existence with the Necronomicon Mythos superimposed onto it? Has this ever been produced into an actual diagram? I realize this thread is pretty old, but I have a question/input. I have not read Hecate's Fountain, but a book I have ''H.P. Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark and other Grotesque Visions'', which is a sort of art book by the illustrator John Coulthart, contains a tree of life with Lovecraftian entities superimposed over it, with accompanying evocations by the writer Alan Moore. Have any of you seen/read this? It does begin with the same quote from the ''Qabalahs of Besqul'' that appears in the beginning of ''Outside the Circles of Time''. If anyone has seen it I was just wondering if they are one and the same? It seems both artists have been at least loosely involved with the Esoteric Order of Dagon, as they both appeared in the Starry Wisdom compilation, and Alan Moore is known for practicing the occult (and a fan of Lovecraft). I do appreciate a lot of the correlations on this model, though they differ somewhat from what I generally use in practice, for instance they attribute Azathoth to Daath, where I typically would place Yog-Sothoth.
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Post by Raj Don Yasser on Jan 14, 2018 22:15:39 GMT
I like how Grant explained the Qliphoth and the Lovecraftean monsters as being the shadows of the Ain. They were "demonic" representations of non-being. If you accepted them into your consciousness, they would take you closer to the non-dual state. Granted (no pun intended)this accepting of these entities puts the practitioners ego in a state of terror...the ego becomes terrified of its own destruction. Perhaps akin to the wrathful entities of Buddhism. Quite a few years ago, during a "question and answer" with some visitors at the local Rinzai Zen temple, the priest was asked why some of statues "look so scary". The answer was that the statues of Fudo Myo and Manjushri, who hold swords and could appear frightening or fierce to some, should only induce fear in those who intend to harm the Dharma.
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Post by N0T 2 on Jan 14, 2018 23:33:14 GMT
I like how Grant explained the Qliphoth and the Lovecraftean monsters as being the shadows of the Ain. They were "demonic" representations of non-being. If you accepted them into your consciousness, they would take you closer to the non-dual state. Granted (no pun intended)this accepting of these entities puts the practitioners ego in a state of terror...the ego becomes terrified of its own destruction. Perhaps akin to the wrathful entities of Buddhism. Quite a few years ago, during a "question and answer" with some visitors at the local Rinzai Zen temple, the priest was asked why some of statues "look so scary". The answer was that the statues of Fudo Myo and Manjushri, who hold swords and could appear frightening or fierce to some, should only induce fear in those who intend to harm the Dharma. Reminiscent of the presence of gargoyles on the exterior of Notre Dame. Some things never change, eh?
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Post by Raj Don Yasser on Jan 15, 2018 18:48:01 GMT
Quite a few years ago, during a "question and answer" with some visitors at the local Rinzai Zen temple, the priest was asked why some of statues "look so scary". The answer was that the statues of Fudo Myo and Manjushri, who hold swords and could appear frightening or fierce to some, should only induce fear in those who intend to harm the Dharma. Reminiscent of the presence of gargoyles on the exterior of Notre Dame. Some things never change, eh?
Your post, indicating similar use of "horrific" imagery among the western stone masons, leads me to speculate on whether the Hui population of western China played a role in transmitting this artistic expression to the West (via Knights Templar). They, as a culture identifying as Mohammedan, would naturally been in contact with both Sufi (to their immediate West) and Buddhist (to their immediate East) populations.
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