Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Automatic Personality and Unity

I've always worked to purify the lower self. It has been a focus that I've finally been able to leave behind in large part. Not because I'm perfect but because my lower self no longer interferes in my life. You also get little confirmations telling you it is time to move on. I received one today, even though I already knew, as a friend was relating what someone else said, "Say what you want about Robert but he has done the work." Yeah. Done. Well, I am done with at least part of it. I am sure the lower self will try to jump at me from time to time.

As is often the case, when you transition from one perspective to the next, something defines what you've just been through. In this case, I ran across this article on Yeat's Vision, "The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn." Frankly, I disagree with some of what it says. However, it gave me the perfect phrase for the lower self -- the automatic personality.

This is so true. When the lower self has control you behave without thinking. Oh, yes, we like to think we think but it is really a matter of input - unconscious programming code - output. That programming was broken for me by passing through the elemental grades. So, I will use the 'little personality' line from the Magician of Strovolos as the willful little creature that almost thinks. The one that demands its puny desires be met. The automatic personality phrase will be used to describe the part of us that does not think at all.

Unity

I did another unity meditation last night. As previously reported, this meditation is a spin off from the Manifestation Meditation.  One word: WOW I began to feel the Neschemah come into play. It was just the edges but it was still fun.

There was one of those miscommunication moments. I understood what spirit told me literally but not its application. I must be missing something. I learned that every thought is reflective of what the Greater Neschemah is trying to communicate to the aspirant. It just needs traced backwards to the source. By reverse engineering we can eliminate the impurities and find the original intent of the thought. The problem is that I've tried that in normal consciousness and got no where.

I was also given a vision of a plane trip being very important to me. All I remember is landing in a sunny locale. It could have been anywhere but it was a modern city, probably in the United States. I saw lots of suburbs surrounding the airport.

1 comment:

Scott Stenwick said...

Personally I prefer the term "Automatic Faculty" as used in the article, since to conceptualize this faculty as a "self" or even a "personality" rather than a collection of conditioned responses that may or may not be related to each other in any way is less accurate in scientific terms. But the concept is an important one to any magical practitioner, whatever you decide to call it. Your conditioning needs to serve you, not the other way around.

It's also interesting to see that Yeats and perhaps the Golden Dawn as a whole were starting to work out some of the ideas that would later evolve into modern behavioral psychology back when the only significant researcher in the field was Pavlov and his studies were mostly limited to physiological responses in animals. Working with the Automatic Faculty sounds a lot more like operant conditioning than I would expect based on the period in which the method was developed.