Integral Magick II

2006 June 12

by Tim

More about kaidevis’s statements about the omission of Hermetica from Integral Theory…

He accuses Wilber of ignoring the western spiritual traditions, which I think is a fair call. But a little perspective: the Sufis, Jains, the Yezidis, neo-Pagans, Scientologists, neo-Theravadins all have some pretty interesting practices and cosmologies but none of them get much airplay from Ken.

Most of Ken’s examples come from Zen, Vajrayana, Vedanta and occasionally Christianity and Judaism. Tibetan Buddhism and Vedanta in particular seem to have the lion’s share of the airtime in Integral Theory. One explanation is that these are the spiritual paths Ken has travelled and so, when looking for examples, it’s pretty natural to choose them from the paths you’ve travelled.

Also (and I can’t pretend to be well-read in any of this, we’re talking about thousands of years of literature) Tibetan Buddhism and Vedanta seem to be very academic schools: practitioners talk, argue and write a lot about their experiences. A lot of other schools seem to generate a lot less text and focus simply on direct experience with a teacher.

Hermetica has a lot of text, but a lot of it is deliberately obscure, often to hide what was being said from authorities or rivals. Terminology is confusing and often not matched, lineages aren’t clear, schools are in dispute. If I was choosing a spiritual path to mine for examples of states or stages, I don’t think I make Hermetica my first stop.

But I don’t think anyone should interpret omission as a put-down of the path or its practices. Post-Crowley (since the damn of the Age of Thelema?) we’ve gotten into the habit of using “magic” to refer to stagecraft and children’s delusions and “magick” to talk about the art and science. Kaidevis sticks to that usage in his article.

When Ken disses “magic” he’s not necessarily dissing “magick”. This is a guy who is at home with and supportive of Dean Radin’s work on psi, who assures us that our subtle awareness is supported by a subtle body in the Upper Right (individual exterior) quadrant. I don’t think he asking people to ignore “non-local effects of consciousness”, just the a priori givens implied by a pre-modern ontology.

See I can just type that and it sounds convincing… you love it when I say ontology… admit it.

I think Kaidevis’s work is really interesting because it’s an experiment to see what happens when you bring an integral perspective to the mass of stuff in Hermetica and use it as a sieve to add some more depth and structure, which is very much in the western esoteric tradition.

And more of that, I say!

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