I did my two qi gong forms this morning, and then the tai chi form. At this point in my cycle through the year, I start to get antsy. I’m around 150 days out from the end of the year, and that’s enough to do sort of a reverse-countdown. But it’s also too much time to do a count easily down. It’s not like it’s under a hundred days; it’s still a lot of time.
I am not all that far from another major milestone, though. I did 366 days in year one, and 366 days in year two plus 5 additional days when I lost track. And now 229 days. I’m 34 days out from 1000 days of tai chi. That’s kind of a big deal. It will happen in early December.
Gordon’s most recent column points out that Halloween isn’t so much a day as a seasonality, and a seasonality is rarely about cosmic reality. The Wheel of the Year, with its Eight Greats, isn’t so much a cosmic truth as a model of reality, a way to show the dance of the universe to people who may or may not have thought about Big Questions before. It’s a way of dividing time up into discrete chunks, too.
With daily tai chi, it all seems to run together after a while. One day is much like the next. And so this milestone is going to be quite useful. It’s helping me acknowledge that the dance has starting and stopping points, and that it really doesn’t all run together.
“…its Eight Greats, isn’t so much a cosmic truth as a model of reality, a way to show the dance of the universe to people who may or may not have thought about Big Questions before”
That’s not a bad way to formulate one tradition of esoteric education. I picked up Greer’s Celtic Golden Dawn in part on your recommendation and it’s neat to see that tradition carried out thoughtfully and without any concern for genuine antiquity. It has a constructed air to it, but that doesn’t vitiate what it does do, which is provide a strucutured and orderly approach into deeper waters. It’s a country road through the woods or a dock extended into the bay.
That constructed and artificial air is what I have come to identify as masonic in the broad sense, with all the various orders proliferating around the “suitably ancient” mysteries really just a sort of slow, more genteel, version of the arbitrariness of belief that early chaos magicians went on and on about. Or, alternately, that early chaos magic was just a punk, in-your-face, you’re-not-the-boss-of-me youthful aspect of the lodge tradition.
That chunks of lodge work breaks out and drifts into culture as ‘facts’ rather than elements structured toward an experience…
There lots of good things to think about around this.
There’s benefit to traveling the slow country lane as opposed to the highway, I’m discovering. I’m currently an officer in my toastmasters club, for example, and learning to be an officer of the lodge, and look for opportunities to do my work as that officer, has taught me a good deal about seeing the world through different lenses of consciousness….
There’s also a good deal of benefit to traveling in groups, whether in the Celtic Golden Dawn, the regular (non-fascist) Golden Dawn, British Traditional Witchcraft, or what-have-you… provided that you’re not being subjected to arbitrariness, nastiness, or dictatorial behavior. I’ve found that a group is capable of carrying quite a bit of power… and that the lodge system, for all the arbitrariness of its belief structure, actually carries more weight than an adhocracy. The nominal inclusion of semi-democratic institutions helps rest power in the officers rather than in the personalities…
But again, I think there’s wisdom in recognizing that lodge systems create opportunities for structured experience, rather than providing facts. The Eight Greats aren’t an underlying truth of the universe; they’re a local phenomenon resulting from abstraction, and they’re only true in the temple, the grove, the circle or the lodge. But when the temple, the grove, the circle or the lodge is constituted, they’re as true as true can be… It’s the incommensurability that results when they’re no longer true, that results in the altered state of awareness that magicians and witches and wizards find so helpful…