MagiAwen’s Occult View

Be good to yourself.

If your goals are to get rich or wield power over others then you will have no true success in Hermetics. Start thinking of your reasons for taking this on.

The person we most often lie to is ourselves, please be prepared to be brutally honest with yourself while you go through this book…it is extremely important. Admitting to ourselves what our weaknesses are is the first step in making ourselves stronger. Bardon spends a good deal of time having the student examine themselves. It is the only way to recognize what the individual needs to work on. Denying you have any weakness or not fully admitting those weaknesses to oneself will only defeat the purpose. And good luck.

Here we go

Initiation I – Theory
“That which is above is also that which is below”, Hermes Trismegistus

**We hear this often these days. Especially in the wake of the creation of Wicca. Though it may modernly be treated as a new thought, it obviously is not. Remember that this is not just about god/goddess…it is about everything that is… from the astral plane to the physical to the mental. That which has a place at the top of things, is a reflection of what is below.

Example: Consciousness is “above” the subconscious…they are reflections of each other. Subconscious thought manifests in our conscious life, however not always as we may think. How you behave in waking life is an affect of the driving force of our subconscious and our past. In order to break out of habits in daily life, we must reconcile what is in the subconscious. Changing the subconscious then changes the conscious.

Someone mentioned higher consciousness to me yesterday. I commented that it is a fancy way of saying talking to oneself. As above so below. If a person has something to aspire to, higher consciousness, then you can only tap into that resource by changing your consciousness…which is only changed by changing your subconscious. If you start to understand things in a dual process…even if the processes become more and more complex…if you just break them down into the above/below thing… you will find it easier to understand how things work according to Bardon. Reading U.S Andersen may also help.

People try to take the above/below concept and apply it to say…angels and demons….but we must remember that between the realms of angels and demons there are other realms…one is not directly below the other. So you cannot get closer to angels by changing your relationship with demons. Angels are considered “above” the material plane…demons are considered below the material plane. Which would mean that below angels is you…and above demons is you. By changing your relationship to demons, you are changing your relationship to the earth, which then changes your relationship to the angels.

Sure, some may say that what I describe has no significance because by changing the relationship to demons you are changing your relationship to angels…true..but if you forget the middle step…it will leave holes in your greater understandings.

Elementals are in a realm sort of with us… they are in that space also between angels and demons. The relevance here is…when you change your relationship with demons, you change your relationship with the earth…which changes your relationship with the elementals as well as any other higher dimensional “being”…like angels. If you have a poor balance with the universe/earth/elementals…you will have a poor time associating with any religious stuff like angels and demons. You are not grounded in the universal pulls that exist here…this is how people get possessed.

And you can be possessed by an angel, just as well as you can be possessed by a demon, elemental, another person or even an idea.

I’ll throw in here that I am not religious, but I do not throw away angels and demons because they don’t “fit into” Hermetics. For me, the nature of them absolutely fits in…though the dogma does not. I do not carry a dogmatic understanding of angels and demons. If it were up to me I would come up with two other terms…but it’s not up to me.
Bardon does not really talk so much about angels and demons, though like I said, I believe they fit in.

So now, I have gone on and on so far with about 700 words explaining just one sentence….and Bardon did not even write it lol.

Remember as you go through the book (Initiation into Hermetics)…there is deeper meaning and a deeper significance to just about everything in it.