Tag: work

Learning to Live with a Horizon of Error

On By IoIn Rethinking Old Ideas, Ritual Practices, Trash Heap Meditations5 Comments

I had a little back and forth with Blogos and Iago over a mistake I had made in my last post and it was a good reminder about how I tend to operate. I can’t speak to how much this true for anyone else, but it seems like the sort of thing it might be useful to post about.

The ritual demands of my spiritual work unfold faster than my understanding of it, faster than my ability to give it coherent conceptual expression. Obviously, I need some conceptualization so that I am not just muddling around in the dark waiting for inspiration, but I have come to expect that most any conceptualization I am using is an error en route to something more truthful which the spiritual practice will clarify.

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Setting the Pace

On By IoIn Basics3 Comments

As I grow a little older, I am increasingly convinced that one of the more difficult challenges of magical work (of any work, really) is pacing. Once we know (or think we know) where we want to go, it’s easy to treat everything between here and there as nothing more than incidental moments, moments that can be elided into a plan of action. Plans of action are all well and good, but realizing them well often demands great patience and attention to the time that falls between steps in the plan.

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Mask, Personality, Synchronicity, Work

On By IoIn and Modernity, Art, Occultism4 Comments

This is a little bit of a sorting post. First up, I’ve updated the “About”; it’s now the “What’s Going On Here” button at the top of the page.

Next, let me see if I can summarize some of the trajectories that I have been taking around the Yeatsian and Jungian material. I know, I’m doing that a lot lately; I’m winnowing and that isn’t glorious work, but it seems necessary.

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What’s in a name?

On By IoIn Uncategorized3 Comments

Back in my university days, I took a seminar with a professor who, whenever the conversation began to flag, would pose the same question in appropriately thoughtful tones: “So, this book we’re talking about is called [fill in title here], why do you think that is?” It’s a bit silly of a question and I’ll confess that as conversation slowed a few of us would glance across the table with knowing looks, waiting for what would inevitably fill the silence. Still, it’s not a bad pedagogical technique. Silly as it is, it would get people talking again and engaged with the substance of the book even if we chuckled to ourselves or rolled our eyes as we were doing it.

[Good advice: don’t be afraid to look silly, but only if you accept an important bit of qualifying advice of don’t try to be silly.]

Which is why for the first post I am going to pose that very question to myself and answer it. I want to get myself talking and this seems like as good a trick as any. It might even be one of the better question I could start with, so thanks Dr. Sullivan.

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