WHKeith
Well-Known Member
Re: Sex Magik
Chela, I must respectfully disagree with you on a number of points, including most especially your statements that what works for one works for all, and that the gods of one religion are the demons of another. If the former were true, I would think some thousands of years of trial and error in human faith would have streamlined things down to where we all have the same belief system--the great simplicity you mentioned earlier. And in my experience, what works for all most assuredly does NOT work for me. I can't speak for the corollary, of course!
As for the latter, while conquering belief systems frequently demonize the deities of the conquered, the nature of the deities, in my opinion, is at least partly dependent on the belief attending them. My apprehension of Pan is wildly different from the fundamentalist Christian's understanding of Satan, enough so that I am convinced the two entities are quite different, even though the Church in part turned Pan into their devil, horns, hooves, "panic," and all.
I have invoked Pan in ritual. I do NOT worship Satan.
For this post, though, I'd like to address the idea, quoted above, that we are all old souls, that no new souls are being created. It's a fascinating question, and I'd love to hear what others have to say about it.
We're obviously limited to subjective impression here. It is my impression, however, that there are MANY, MANY "young souls" out there, quite a few middle-aged ones, and a few genuinely "old souls." This impression matches the intuition of those people I know who are sensitive to such things.
Of course, talking about old souls versus young souls is always a dangerous pasttime. It is decidedly uncool to say "Ah, you're a young soul. It's not worth my time to listen to you." Arrogant garbage, of course. Evidence, perhaps, of a young soul's thinking?
In my experience, people struggling through life's viscisitudes with the illusory help of alcohol or drugs often feel to me like young souls. So do the shallow ones, the ones who see nothing deeper in life than a six pack and the Monday night game. As especially do the loud and reckless ones, the inconsiderate ones, and the ones into power games, bullying others, being abusive, being destructive of themselves or others.
But no absolutes. I've known six-pack-and-football types who grew up to be thoughtful and deeply spiritual. I've known addicts who turned their life around through a deep, inward, and transcendent spiritual effort. It's always dangerous to judge another along such lines, and, if you think you understand the soul of another, you're almost certainly wrong.
But here's something to think about. The world population today is an appalling six billion-plus. If new souls are not coming into existance, that means at least six billion were created at the beginning. [We'll know for sure we've hit the limit when the birth rate suddenly drops to zero world-wide!
]
The world population hit one billion sometime in the early 19th century, I believe. [Sorry. I don't have the appropriate reference here with me. That's a guess.] I seem to recall the world population during the time of the Roman Empire was a very few hundred million. Go back to 30,000 BCE and the Cromagnon people, and it's, what? A few hundred thousand, maybe.
So in 1800, only one in six of all souls [at most] was incarnate--17%. In the first century, it was one in ten. In 30,000 BCE it was one in ten thousand, or just .01%.
So what are all of those disincarnate souls doing while hanging around waiting for their next body?
[Sorry. Being silly. I couldn't resist.]
Hypnotic regression studies suggest that the average turn-around time between incarnations is about 80 years. [There's lots of variation here; this is a rough average, and some data does suggest the average between-life time is decreasing.] This doesn't seem to add up--six billion plus souls from the beginning [whenever THAT was] all with roughly the same life experience or "aging."
[The sama data, by the way, drawn from many thousands of case histories, shows that 49.9% of past life experiences are male, 50.1% are female--figures that tally with actual birthrates. They also suggest that the vast majority of past lives were NOT spent as kings, queens, high priestesses of Atlantis, or Cleopatra! Most such lives were lived as peasants, farmers, tradesmen, ordinary people. In other words, past-life data may well be amenable to statistical study.]
There are several factors that could change things. Many pagans of my acquaintance believe we incarnate on other planes and on other worlds. So until recently, most souls were enjoying bodies someplace other than Earth.
There's also the idea of transmigration of souls. Many believe we can be born as other species of life on this planet, including, for some, trees and other plants. I don't believe this myself--not because I'm anthropocentric, but because I have a problem believing the same life energy or soul energy or whatever you care to call it which inhabits a human body also inhabits a cockroach.
If either or both of these are true, I cheerfully admit I must throw out all my numbers. There are trillions of insects on this planet at this moment alone, not to mention trees, clumps of grass, and E. coli. There are plenty of bodies to go around . . . though it seems to me that if we transmigrate, each of us must have spent FAR more lifetimes as a bug than as a human. I have a little trouble wrapping my brain around why we should spend so much time, relatively speaking, learning to scuttle out of sight when the light comes on, and so little learning to deal with love, spirituality, or relationships.
There's also the problem of our perception of time. As has been discussed elsewhere on this board, we may in fact live all lives simultaneously, whatever that means. It's also possible that individual insects get such a tiny portion of initial "soul energy," for lack of a better term, that one "human soul" could simultaneously energize millions of bug bodies.
Since we can't even scientifically prove the existence of the soul or soul energy in the first place, the question I would say is moot.
But speaking from within my own limitations, on this plane, at this time, and in this body, for me Occam's Razor suggests that more and more souls are being created continuously, or, at least, that more and more are being incarnate as humans for the very first time.
I strongly question, too, the statement that ALL events in our lives are the effects of events in previous lives. Geeze, there had to be a first time for everything, at least! Seriously, when someone comes to me with a problem, my first assumption MUST be that whatever it is, it has its roots in THIS life. Oh, sure, there are folks with this-life troubles that originated in a past life; I worked with one young woman who had a morbid fear of water, and past-life trance work seemed to suggest she'd died in a ship disaster eighty or ninety years back.
But . . . how about the classic case of the person who constantly finds him/herself in an abusive relationship? Nine times out of ten, that started with abuse by parents or other family members as a child; the person in question seems to fall into bad relationship after bad relationship as though forever trying to "get it right." There are certainly times when this abuse pattern extends across several lives, but I submit that this is a dangerous assumption. It makes it way too easy to abrogate all personal responsibility for the issue. "I'm the way I am because someone was mean to me in a past life, and there's nothing I can do about it." Nonsense. That's the neopagan version of "the devil made me do it." Most of our troubles can be traced to real-world/this-life events, relationships, and traumas, and part of our growing and evolving, as souls and as people, is learning to deal with them.
Or so it seems to me.
I suddenly realize that this post is out of place in a thread about sex magic. My apologies. To tell the truth, I've been avoiding THAT lovely topic just because it is so often misunderstood and raises such intense passions, usually in knee-jerk fashion. One thing I have learned, though; our beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices are thorough-going products of the culture in which we live. The fundamentalist who believes all sex outside of marriage is evil believes so because of the very narrow [and I don't mean that in a judgmental way] cultural context within which he was exposed to the idea. The homophobe feels as he does within a cultural context, because his culture has certain ideas about how a man or a woman SHOULD behave--ideas not shared by most other cultures [ancient Greek and modern Syrian, for example] throughout history. Surely, among all of the billions of people who have ever lived, and among all of the millions of cultures that have ever existed, the ideas that sex is sinful or homosexuality is somehow "wrong" or "unnatural" must have found expression in only a tiny, tiny minority of people.
Maybe one in ten thousand?
I submit that a very large part of the reason we incarnate at all is to learn and grow by learning how to be tolerant of other ideas, cultures, beliefs, and ways of seeing things.
Bill
Chela said:
Chela, I must respectfully disagree with you on a number of points, including most especially your statements that what works for one works for all, and that the gods of one religion are the demons of another. If the former were true, I would think some thousands of years of trial and error in human faith would have streamlined things down to where we all have the same belief system--the great simplicity you mentioned earlier. And in my experience, what works for all most assuredly does NOT work for me. I can't speak for the corollary, of course!
As for the latter, while conquering belief systems frequently demonize the deities of the conquered, the nature of the deities, in my opinion, is at least partly dependent on the belief attending them. My apprehension of Pan is wildly different from the fundamentalist Christian's understanding of Satan, enough so that I am convinced the two entities are quite different, even though the Church in part turned Pan into their devil, horns, hooves, "panic," and all.
I have invoked Pan in ritual. I do NOT worship Satan.
For this post, though, I'd like to address the idea, quoted above, that we are all old souls, that no new souls are being created. It's a fascinating question, and I'd love to hear what others have to say about it.
We're obviously limited to subjective impression here. It is my impression, however, that there are MANY, MANY "young souls" out there, quite a few middle-aged ones, and a few genuinely "old souls." This impression matches the intuition of those people I know who are sensitive to such things.
Of course, talking about old souls versus young souls is always a dangerous pasttime. It is decidedly uncool to say "Ah, you're a young soul. It's not worth my time to listen to you." Arrogant garbage, of course. Evidence, perhaps, of a young soul's thinking?
In my experience, people struggling through life's viscisitudes with the illusory help of alcohol or drugs often feel to me like young souls. So do the shallow ones, the ones who see nothing deeper in life than a six pack and the Monday night game. As especially do the loud and reckless ones, the inconsiderate ones, and the ones into power games, bullying others, being abusive, being destructive of themselves or others.
But no absolutes. I've known six-pack-and-football types who grew up to be thoughtful and deeply spiritual. I've known addicts who turned their life around through a deep, inward, and transcendent spiritual effort. It's always dangerous to judge another along such lines, and, if you think you understand the soul of another, you're almost certainly wrong.
But here's something to think about. The world population today is an appalling six billion-plus. If new souls are not coming into existance, that means at least six billion were created at the beginning. [We'll know for sure we've hit the limit when the birth rate suddenly drops to zero world-wide!
]The world population hit one billion sometime in the early 19th century, I believe. [Sorry. I don't have the appropriate reference here with me. That's a guess.] I seem to recall the world population during the time of the Roman Empire was a very few hundred million. Go back to 30,000 BCE and the Cromagnon people, and it's, what? A few hundred thousand, maybe.
So in 1800, only one in six of all souls [at most] was incarnate--17%. In the first century, it was one in ten. In 30,000 BCE it was one in ten thousand, or just .01%.
So what are all of those disincarnate souls doing while hanging around waiting for their next body?
[Sorry. Being silly. I couldn't resist.]
Hypnotic regression studies suggest that the average turn-around time between incarnations is about 80 years. [There's lots of variation here; this is a rough average, and some data does suggest the average between-life time is decreasing.] This doesn't seem to add up--six billion plus souls from the beginning [whenever THAT was] all with roughly the same life experience or "aging."
[The sama data, by the way, drawn from many thousands of case histories, shows that 49.9% of past life experiences are male, 50.1% are female--figures that tally with actual birthrates. They also suggest that the vast majority of past lives were NOT spent as kings, queens, high priestesses of Atlantis, or Cleopatra!
Most such lives were lived as peasants, farmers, tradesmen, ordinary people. In other words, past-life data may well be amenable to statistical study.]There are several factors that could change things. Many pagans of my acquaintance believe we incarnate on other planes and on other worlds. So until recently, most souls were enjoying bodies someplace other than Earth.
There's also the idea of transmigration of souls. Many believe we can be born as other species of life on this planet, including, for some, trees and other plants. I don't believe this myself--not because I'm anthropocentric, but because I have a problem believing the same life energy or soul energy or whatever you care to call it which inhabits a human body also inhabits a cockroach.
If either or both of these are true, I cheerfully admit I must throw out all my numbers. There are trillions of insects on this planet at this moment alone, not to mention trees, clumps of grass, and E. coli. There are plenty of bodies to go around . . . though it seems to me that if we transmigrate, each of us must have spent FAR more lifetimes as a bug than as a human. I have a little trouble wrapping my brain around why we should spend so much time, relatively speaking, learning to scuttle out of sight when the light comes on, and so little learning to deal with love, spirituality, or relationships.
There's also the problem of our perception of time. As has been discussed elsewhere on this board, we may in fact live all lives simultaneously, whatever that means. It's also possible that individual insects get such a tiny portion of initial "soul energy," for lack of a better term, that one "human soul" could simultaneously energize millions of bug bodies.
Since we can't even scientifically prove the existence of the soul or soul energy in the first place, the question I would say is moot.
But speaking from within my own limitations, on this plane, at this time, and in this body, for me Occam's Razor suggests that more and more souls are being created continuously, or, at least, that more and more are being incarnate as humans for the very first time.
I strongly question, too, the statement that ALL events in our lives are the effects of events in previous lives. Geeze, there had to be a first time for everything, at least! Seriously, when someone comes to me with a problem, my first assumption MUST be that whatever it is, it has its roots in THIS life. Oh, sure, there are folks with this-life troubles that originated in a past life; I worked with one young woman who had a morbid fear of water, and past-life trance work seemed to suggest she'd died in a ship disaster eighty or ninety years back.
But . . . how about the classic case of the person who constantly finds him/herself in an abusive relationship? Nine times out of ten, that started with abuse by parents or other family members as a child; the person in question seems to fall into bad relationship after bad relationship as though forever trying to "get it right." There are certainly times when this abuse pattern extends across several lives, but I submit that this is a dangerous assumption. It makes it way too easy to abrogate all personal responsibility for the issue. "I'm the way I am because someone was mean to me in a past life, and there's nothing I can do about it." Nonsense. That's the neopagan version of "the devil made me do it." Most of our troubles can be traced to real-world/this-life events, relationships, and traumas, and part of our growing and evolving, as souls and as people, is learning to deal with them.
Or so it seems to me.
I suddenly realize that this post is out of place in a thread about sex magic. My apologies. To tell the truth, I've been avoiding THAT lovely topic just because it is so often misunderstood and raises such intense passions, usually in knee-jerk fashion. One thing I have learned, though; our beliefs, attitudes, and prejudices are thorough-going products of the culture in which we live. The fundamentalist who believes all sex outside of marriage is evil believes so because of the very narrow [and I don't mean that in a judgmental way] cultural context within which he was exposed to the idea. The homophobe feels as he does within a cultural context, because his culture has certain ideas about how a man or a woman SHOULD behave--ideas not shared by most other cultures [ancient Greek and modern Syrian, for example] throughout history. Surely, among all of the billions of people who have ever lived, and among all of the millions of cultures that have ever existed, the ideas that sex is sinful or homosexuality is somehow "wrong" or "unnatural" must have found expression in only a tiny, tiny minority of people.
Maybe one in ten thousand?
I submit that a very large part of the reason we incarnate at all is to learn and grow by learning how to be tolerant of other ideas, cultures, beliefs, and ways of seeing things.
Bill
