[Main Blog Post] The Open-Minded Materialist's Gentle Introduction to Spirituality

[jprussell]

I've written my first "full" blog post of the year and posted it to my main blog here. If you have any thoughts or ways I might make it better, kindly let me know by commenting here or dropping me an email!

Comments

[k_a_nitz]

A great intro!
I was always a bit dubious about Seneca, in that I tend to think twice about following advice on how to live your life from people who committed suicide (even though he was ordered to by the emperor).

re: "The other big flaw in a lot of self-help is that it's mostly about solving problems."
So true. I notice you didn't bring up New Thought as an entry point, though to be honest it has a lot (but not all) in common with most modern self-help. I could never really get into it because it starts with the question of "What do you want?" then gives you the practices to achieve that. But my issue is more that I don't really know what I want, and answering that question as: "What I really want is to know what I really want" has a recursive quality that just does not work for me.
I have also looked at one of the surviving correspondence courses of a hermetic bent, but the first 'lesson' included signing an oath that you would implement to the fullest of your ability everything they taught you. Which, coming from a very Northern view of oaths, struck me as a very dangerous thing to do given that I did not know at that stage what they were going to teach! (Or that could just be my paranoid side ;-)
So at the moment I'm working through a German book by Karl Spiesberger that is focussed on the simple practice of runic yoga. Essentially physical work with relaxation and breathing initially, followed by accompanying visualisations. And supplementing it with reading widely (plus experimenting with divination methods.)

[jprussell]

On Seneca: in his defense, Nero basically said "I'll torture your wife and all your friends until you do." For me, that's much closer to "fell on a grenade for his squad" than "took a bunch of pills to end it all." I give Socrates a similar pass.

As for New Thought and self-help, I have a very simple reason for not saying much about New Thought: I don't know much about it! Basically, what I've learned about it has mostly been through JMG and a few of his recommended readings, and that has been enough to show me how a lot of the modern self-help movement is watered down/commodified New Thought. I'm pretty sure that some of the practices I've picked up as part of occult practice (like affirmations) are pretty firmly New Thought, but that's not the context I'm familiar with, whereas I spent years reading stacks of modern self help books.

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on runic yoga, especially if you have any experience with other body practices! I learned about it back when I first read Futhark, which was firmly in my "this is all just a way to communicate with my subconscious" phase, so I looked at the movements, thought "that doesn't look like a good workout" and ignored the esoteric side of things.

If you do decide a more structured spiritual course would be helpful, I can say that none of JMG's works require oaths to do things you don't yet know about/understand, and the ones I've worked with (The Druidry Handbook + Druid Magic Handbook + Dolmen Arch) have been quite congenial to pair with my own idiosyncratic Germanic religious practice. On the other hand, if you find Hermetic/Golden Dawn-flavored stuff appealing, and you'd like to keep things centered on Northern/Germanic material, Gullindagan's work on the "Heathen Golden Dawn" is pretty far along and might be worth checking out.