Who blames them?

The Deep Self is a corporate being consisting of a group of immortalized humans (though anciently it also used to include animals, plants, the land and the sea organized as gods, all connected by energy and a history). I call immortalized humans “old ones.” The ones from long ago should rightly be called “fey folk,” because an animal incarnated into a human is the only type of person who can come here after so long. Questions will be raised about my provenance and I proudly assert that it is all of the above. After a while of interaction, you will start to resemble in energy the fey folk and even the ones who are your most recent elegances. This will come to be a problem. 

When a person is born, a stream of energy comes to them from the old immortalized beings of that particular Deep Self, and it is up to them to stabilize themselves with spiritual practice and/or possibly excellence in a particular endeavor in the world. Sometimes it is one or two people whole and semi-pulverized or asleep, as in the case of my soul (!). They are resting comfortably now. This involves many hours of spiritual activities, including those involving the body–genuflecting, kneeling, dovening, signing, tai chi, sacrifice, and altars–and living according to the higher precepts of that tradition. After perhaps thousands of hours, that human being becomes immortalized and when they die, they are stable and ready for further evolution in the underworld. This should be done in a recognized tradition or two so that the energy of the system can assist and so that they can be recognized and worked with by others within the same system. When someone makes the soul in their own structure, they become incomprehensible in the next world and possibly in this. Unless they are great artists, then they are just marfy.

If a person does not do extensive spiritual work, they often melt into the soul soup of the planet and are eaten by the old ones of their line, who wear them like a sweater. This can happen in as little as a week at the lower chakra energies, and eventually even the higher chakra energies melt eventually and are eaten by many.  People who are wonderful and needed in a given discipline are often incipiently immortalized by their profession, like hospitals for doctors and nurses who are beautiful healers even after death.

Energy is difficult to live in. When a person dies, they reach out for something familiar that is energy work, and do it: make the sign of the cross, call out to Jesus, sing the shema, meditate. Energy comes to them in the old familiar way of the magic of their religion. They come back together into their mind and into a way of being. They do more of it. Energy workers come and begin to teach them. It is a hard lesson to know that everything you were taught about heaven was ridiculous, but that you still have to go on and make the soul.

You have to make a living in the afterworld. Christians are taught that everything is free. Buddhism at least gives you more smarts in the energy world when you die and more adept healers. You can start to move into being in better ways quicker, and you don’t get boondoggled by the ruts of the giant systems. And in the modern world, it doesn’t come with a lot of baggage. Just listening to your breath thirty minutes a day will give you a start.

There is not just you in the underworld. There are other people but they are not easily “mated with,” or interacted with. This makes the underworld boring and lonely.

My Deep Self Asian uncle “Lama Bob” taught me that the Hermetic Tree of Life that I had worked for twenty years is an underworld structure that can include interacting, healing, and expanded evolutionary opportunities for the dead both locally and within your ancestry or close association. If you will meditate and work with it, and try to live by the principles of the energy of it, you will be entering an underworld. It is also an energy structure that heals and assists in many ways as long as it is worked regularly. It accretes to you and you can function in it in life and the slip into it in death.

Cabala was always intended to function in a normal Judeo-Christian underworld. It is very difficult to build oneself into a healthy Cabalist without it. This is not taught in Hermetics, where there is no emphasis on exoteric religion. There is the idea that we Hermetists are better than those poor gulls who go to church and so we just stick to our lodges–and get very twisted by doing so. There are many things that cannot be done with the Cabala without building oneself into a very fine functioning normal Catholic-y or Christian-y person or Jew and being part of a regular community. The regular stuff is better at immortalizing a person anyway. It’s often impossible to immortalize without a community of significant size. The old ones of the church and others make the call, and the old ones of your own Deep Self can’t hear or fathom you without the regular religion and will often strike you. (The regular Catholic church has a lot of problems, though, and should be kept away from children.)

It is also not taught that the underworld–and even where you live after death–is geographical. When you die, you enter the underworld in the place where you die and can often get to where you spent most of your life, but there is an actual geographical location of underworld where you are going to be in the afterlife and it tracks on what is going on in the physical world. When the Russian Orthodox monks first became intelligible to me–they had backed me for many years in Golden Dawn and are the secret backers of the more hard-working Golden Dawn occultists–they stressed the importance of sleeping in the same room for the rest of your life. This builds the sleeping portal where you will enter the underworld when you die. The geographical nature of the underworld is why the Holocaust has been so devastating–they didn’t just destroy the Jews in this world, they ravaged Judaism in the underworld. My father is living evidence of this: an old Jewish soul in a brilliant Mexican who could hardly see without his enormous mechanism in the air but also had much fun.

Your Cabala is also geographical.  Many fey folk, gods, old ones, and people around you participate in building the Tree of Life and it is in the actual soul matter of the earth where you build it. All of that lovely spiritual development–and concomitant life enrichment–is tied to the general location where you build it. You can’t take a Tree of Life with you in its entirety when you move but have to rebuild it at your new location. I learned that the hard way when a wonderful advancement in my career occasioned a move to another state. I made a lot of odd life choices I would not have otherwise, because I was psychically open like a Cabalist but didn’t have my Cabala functioning at full potency anymore. It took several more moves and horrific consequences especially after I started ceremonial magic to learn that a major portal has cords to it and when you break it your entire life and probably the lives of many fey folk and spirits are very confounded. It is also why strange things happen with MAIL. They are always giving me the heads up about this goddamn business of MOVING.

NO ONE TOLD ME THIS in the entire Golden Dawn corpus. I have read all of the major works in this field, and that fact is not stated anywhere. I suspect that Paul Case didn’t know it, or he would not have taken that fateful vacation to Mexico, gotten too far out of his portal, and died of a heart attack.

I am now bolted to a very specific few-block area and building the Tree of Life anew. (THIS DID NOT HAPPEN.) The upside is that I am getting to know the local powers involved in the new site-specific Tree of Life, and they are pulling the whole thing together more effectively now that I am going to mass all the time and just reverent of all of their needs. The old ones coming in from the Deep Self have to build themselves in a geographical spot moving here from different worlds. To a certain extent, they have to lay their sword at the feet of your organization. It is how such systems work, and it is not taken lightly. The structure is not easily changed. If the wizard leaves, some won’t move at all–they’ll just stay right there and work with other people.

Lama Bob teaches that Buddhism is essential for the Cabala because at this point, everyone’s Deep Self is full of many different traditions, and they can’t get along, so the old ones of the East tend to shut down the aspiring Cabalist because the power is interfering with their stuff. Cabala also eats the Eastern old ones if you do not have a lot of them or strong ones, so it is polite to do some Eastern stuff to strengthen them. In many ways, Buddhism is the lingua franc of the East, and work with it can enable you to get along with the old ones of the East, who are incredibly good at functioning in the underworld. Buddhists also help other kinds of people to get along, as do the pagan religions of Europe.

Work with martial arts is also a good idea and not necessarily to fight, but to mate with so many beings, East and West, and to know things about the underworld. When you see those Asian people in the park doing tai chi, they are building the soul in a very wonderful way. The old ones bestowed upon me the gift of martial arts in my youth and it has been with me ever since, a bass line to my entire life. Odin was able to work with me because I am a warrior albeit a girl. There were a lot of armies in Asia, and it is often the case that old Asians started in/worked in warrior work. It colors what Chinese Buddhism is in ways we in the West don’t comprehend. I think Buddhism and martial arts need to be worked hand in hand, or you will miss out on some important tricks, because the Deep Self works in many ways and any time you raise power in the Cabala, both sets of Eastern folks show up to see what is going on, as do the Hindus (!). (Lord Ganesh is the god who got this blog going, so we have him to thank for much.) Lama Bob has a wonderful set of energies that work in martial arts and are an alternate voice to his Buddhist beings. I call them “Ninja Bob,” and many times I trust Ninja Bob more than I do Lama Bob. I know that the Buddhist empire has a dark inveiglement–I can feel it. There are times when I can’t stand the Buddhists and just need a good leg up from the warriors. They are real, and I like them with my gut. (They are also hard to get along with. Their words.)