What are you working on?

[feranaja]

For most of the truly serious occultists I've had the pleasure of knowing, the foundation of magickal work is alwasy the personality, and work needs to proceed both on a conscious and unconscious level. Throughout my life I've done and continue to do a fair bt of both. As I've mentioned I've had a longstanding Jungian analysis with sanity breaks (the stuff is fantastic but makes me insane, lol) I think depth work needs to be undertaken during periods of relative stability and calm in the conscious life. But work on myself is ongoing.


So - what are you working on, balancing out in your personality - what aspects do you consider stumbling blocks to spiritual progress?


I am constantly vacillating between detachment and anger, I tend to react strongly to things like hypocrisy for example, when in fact my own anger will do nothing to change the situation - yet I feel somehow this is a part of me and I fear "letting it go", as if to do so would somehow make me complicit in whatever nastiness I'm confronted with. Yet lashing out in anger has never resolved anything other than to further the cycle. I struggle with what my soul wants and what my head insists is best. I hate the idea of acceptance, I really do. And yet half the time this is exactly what one needs, and fighting against whatevr wrong youve encountered will only tire you out or worse.

What about you>? Are there areas of the psyche that seem to constantly pop up and create hassles for you? Do you make the time to deal with them, or is life too busy etc and you put it off? If specific traits seem ingrained in you, or are present in your natal chart (as is my tendency to explosive reactions to things like cruelty and stupidity) can we even hope to overcome them?

I'd like to hear what others are working on, and some success stories would be good too...:yes:

fera

[MythMath]

Great thread theme...:yes:

Application is paramount...
________________________

I'll be back after some thought collection...

MM

[feranaja]

I look forward to it MM, and glad you find it an interesting topic too.
fera

[Aodh]

Well for one, my evershifting balance between neediness and being overly controlling. I can't seem to just be normal as far as that goes. I'm either using and manipulating someone, or letting someone manipulate me.

Magically, this has pretty bad implications because if I'm in a weak phase, than I could very easily be screwed over if I did work with entities or currents that are too overpowering. On the other hand, I could really piss off some gods and angels and such if I was being too manipulative.

Expect more aspects of myself worth changing as I think on this...

[feranaja]

Well for one, my evershifting balance between neediness and being overly controlling. I can't seem to just be normal as far as that goes. I'm either using and manipulating someone, or letting someone manipulate me.

Magically, this has pretty bad implications because if I'm in a weak phase, than I could very easily be screwed over if I did work with entities or currents that are too overpowering. On the other hand, I could really piss off some gods and angels and such if I was being too manipulative.

Expect more aspects of myself worth changing as I think on this...

When Im tackling an intrapsychic issue such as this one, I try to work on as many levels as possible - for example, is this tendency aspected in your birthchart anywhere? and if you work with Qabalah, where would you palce the issue on the Tree, how might you do ritual to correct it? In addition to the usual cognitive work I try to apply magickal technique and see if I can't hit the issue from several angles.

This can backfire though - when I was doing Jungian dreamwork I found I really needed to stick just with that system alone, doing magick at the same time was a bit disastrous.

Neediness and control issue are, on the cognitive level anyway, just two sides of the same coin. What do you think underpins the issue?

I worked on this exact thing a long time and just gave up - if you avoid humans altogether, it's not a problem anymore.:laugh:
fera

[Naomi]

I'm working on tapping into the hidden power and occult secrets of gangster rap music.


Seriously.

[YsetEternal]

Well, my entire life Ive been working on me. Its a life long process, and dealing with issues from the past often frees up the future and changes goals, both in the mundane world and the magickal world...

[Kain]

Very interesting thread fera, I agree with MythMath on this. So - what are you working on, balancing out in your personality - what aspects do you consider stumbling blocks to spiritual progress?Well, even though I have gone against specific "enemies" in the past, I have found all the more that the most successful method for me is by far the alignment (with my model of choice) of my Body of Light, which composes, apart from the physical, also the emotional and mental constitution (also touching on, and completing itself at the top, with what may be classed by some as the "inspirational" faculty) of an individual. I generally perceive my personality in a greatly vivid corporeal fashion (in terms of the BoL, as I previously mentioned) and have managed to train the various faculties to adhering to the ramiffications of the anatomical model it is composed of. This means that by adhering successfully to a correct anatomical representation, I get extreme internal balance and all the faculties follow accordingly, yet if I miss a spot for whatever reason this has a direct influence on a personality trait getting out of hand.

Recently however, I have noticed that aggression and oppositional over-reaction had gone way over from being aspects that had a possitive effect in my life, so even though I always keep an active eye on maintaining a balance all around, currently I am being more actively obstructed by aversion and agression. I seem to be doing a very good job however, at least from my perspective...hehe...

Kain :mad: :laugh:

[Anibis]

Me, the big one is learning to be organized. Also, crankiness and anger are pretty big too...
-Ibisis

[Anibis]

I'm working on tapping into the hidden power and occult secrets of gangster rap music.


Seriously.

Saul Williams?
-Ibisis

[Naomi]

90's Death Row currently.

[Zaii]

I'm mostly working on my ability to choke folks out right now and that's going pretty swimmingly.

Beyond that I'm learning how to get involved in things again since I've spent the last six months firmly detached and it's starting to play hell on some aspects of my life. This is a lot harder than it sounds or seems. Detachment is not always all that great.

Additionally I'm into feeling good just for the sake of feeling good, which I think is a practice everyone should approach more often.

On the subject of rap (though not necessarily gangster rap) Jay-Z's last two albums do pretty good things for me as far as shooting for success in general goes.

[Talkingfox]

Currently my thing is Moderation. Learning it that is. I have a tendency to work until I drop or, to paraphrase my very wise 96 year old grandma, "go at everything like I'm killing snakes" I really DO need to learn to pace myself.

[feranaja]

TF, the more you post, the more I really wonder if you and I were separated at birth or something.

Pacing myself has always been a huge problem for me, I go at things till Im too tired and useless to do another minute. I attribute a lot of this to my Mars placement; do you know where yours is? And what's funny is, I enjoy the sensation of pushing myself, I get teased about liking Martha Sewart - but honestly, I admire her mainly because she can sleep only 4 hours a night - THINK how much we could get done if we could do that!

[Radiant Star]

Something I have been working on for a few years now is distraction. I was one of those children and young adults that could just get into a book or sit rapt in a TV film and not be too bothered about things going on around me.

When I had the children, I found that I needed to respond to their needs as babies pretty quickly. I often had my own and other peoples children around the place and I never really relaxed, always an eye and an ear open for little mishaps and so on.

This kind of alertness set in over the years and I have struggled for the last few years to try to regain a sense of relaxation; enough to sit and read or study and its been truly hard. It has been hard to stay sat down in one place without having to respond to the needs of others here in one way or another, even if its only been to stop what I am doing for a moment to say hello or goodbye as each one enters or leaves the house. Then of course, there is the cat who likes to sit just in front of the keyboard at times and so on; the little things like the sound of the washing machine finishing its cycle and other little indicators that I might need to attend to something other than myself.

Some of it is clearly due to the home situation, we have a full house and my room is one of the first you come to as you enter the house - but the rest is a sense of this not being my home; it still feels temporary after fifteen years and I have never quite been able to feel at home here for all sorts of reasons.

This might not sound like much of a problem, but not resting properly is seriously bad for physical and mental health.

Progress has been made though and the answer was to buy a recliner and put my feet up so that it was just not so easy to keep getting up and attending to things; I also felt comfortable and didn't want to move. My only problem now is finding time to get into it without remembering everything I should be doing. I have managed it a lot more in the last couple of years; I trained the family to rely on themselves more and actually allowed myself to just do things in a quiet manner in the chair. It has been a long haul, but it has been an achievement, although I always did think that it would take a special or comfortable seat to keep me in it.

[MythMath]

"Never underestimate the power of a good chair..."

Herman Miller :laugh:

[emeraldhanael]

I find myself working on organizing my thoughts. Trying to bring my mind to be something more than the random chaos it currently is. I have been making great headway in this. Through the use of various hermetic techniques and simple meditation. I've found that my own background in psychology has been a great help allowing me to step back and observe the chaos of my mind this is really the first step in the process of bringing order and focus.

I've used alot of Golden Dawn and OTO stuff pentagram and hexagram banishings, rossy cross, middle pillar. I've been able to see alot of similarities in this work and the writtings of Jung and Maslow and others.

[Naomi]

I'm working on dealing with "lightworkers" on godlikeproductions freaking them out and being a monkey generally, having a lot of fun too. SO far I've been accused of being a

Vulture
SystemLord
Souleater
Naughty


Also on an esoteric level I feel I am making bridges for that mind circuitboard Ibisis was talking about...


http://www.godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?page=113&messageid=341551&showdate=4/8/07&mpage=1


Also oddly enough, one of them seemed to know what the weird astral visit I recieved last year was about.

Things going smoothly now. And another thing - they are rubbing off on me! It was a real eye opener to what normal metaphysicists think, and not the heh...other system lords. Will be good for each other...


:p

Also poking around OF just for chaos' sake...