QS – Magical Thinking and the Fear of the Western Mind (12/10/16)
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37:20 – PQ is joined by Gregory Pleshaw (his work is included in this anthology) who has shared a very interesting monologue that is absolutely worth your listening to!! Â There’s a bit of music, too!!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Attribution by PQ Ribber.  Music is by PQ or used by expressed consent of the copyright holders.  Theme Music by Jimbo!!
Released December 2016 on The Overnightscape Underground (onsug.com), an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and clever hosts presenting unique programs, historic archival material, and nocturnal audio
For your “magic” I look no further than the book of Psalms in the Bible, which used to say, (but has been “magically” altered via the “Mandela effect”) (Pslam 23:7 KJV) “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he…” There is true power in prayer and thoughts, and frankly I have personally seen this manifested many times over, perhaps even daily.
Comment by Jimbo — December 11, 2016 @ 8:00 am
oops Psalm rather that Pslam!
Comment by Jimbo — December 11, 2016 @ 8:01 am
There is a lot of mysterious ‘power’ in our minds and wills and it would appear that those who feel this way should never say it to a medical professional.
Comment by pqribber — December 11, 2016 @ 10:17 am
Agreed, PQ – it’s a running bit of advice within serious mental health circles (among patients) to skip the “magical thinking” report if you want to keep the meds you’re already on. Most psychiatrists seriously do not have the bandwidth or the training. They may *personally* believe in such things, but I would suspect that issues such as DSM-5 and insurance and liability and malpractice issues keep them from saying anything to the patient that would lead them to believe that the patient might be in possession of psychic or psychokinetic behavior. I really need to thank you for letting me put this out and catching me at this point – the experiences of the past week with psychiatrist and therapist (both of whom are very good fair men with whom I generally enjoy a very healthy relationship, despite my resentment this week) was really poignant for me, clearing up that it’s really *not* the case that they wanted to prevent me from pursuing an interesting line of inquiry (piles of historic resentment on that shit, for real.) Now that it’s 22 years later and I have read *tons* of different stuff and studied lots of different things, I can say with some certainty (particularly being back in the Bay Area and recognizing as a much older man that it’s an incredibly “blown out” psychic terrain for even “normal people”) that had I stayed and tried to “follow the narrative” many worse things than what actually occurred in my life might have otherwise.
However – one thing that stayed with me throughout most of the 22 years (not always front of mind, but enough to lead me back here again and again) was this terrible sense that I had “left something behind” in walking away from this incredible experience I was having to simply go become a mental health patient. The sense of having “lost the threads” haunted me for years, because the reality is that inside the experience, I really did feel guided, it really was incredible, I *did* produce a three hundred page manuscript, and while a lot of that is useless, there is a central theme within it having to do with the nature of language that I plan to re-visit as things unfold during my time here.
Though this is a rather long afterthought, allow me to append an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend yesterday:
“Initially, I had thought that *if* magical potential existed within the minds of the serious mentally ill, that this ability was a gift that could be helpful to both the patient and to mankind as a whole. Lately, however, I have been getting a very strong hit on two ideas that I never really understood. One is the issue of competition and natural selection, and a new understanding that “the benefit of all” is an idea that few people are actually interested in. (Yes, this was new to me, despite overwhelming experience to the contrary of this obviously naive belief.) The other has to do with the very nature of “occult” information to begin with – that it is “hidden” and that it is “hidden” for a reason – which is primarily that in the wrong hands, much damage can be done. As a caveat to that, however, let me offer the observation that magical ability within the hands of the unschooled who find it “accidentally” within themselves is as potentially detrimental as running a story about it in People magazine, and that there is really no benefit to the established science to let people “run amok” with magic and to have no guidelines as to how to use it properly.
Is it within the realm of either psychiatry or psychology to make a serious inquiry into this reported symptom that goes beyond labelling it a delusional symptom? Until this past week, I certainly thought so.”
At this point, I am not sure whose balliwick is the issue of “magical thinking” symptoms within the minds of what the West dubs the “seriously mentally ill.” (For clarification, that would be bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and perhaps others.) Western alchemical magical systems are split among so many schools and factions, for reasons of differing philosophies, politics, and personality issues (like all other groups, certainly) pagans are loosely affiliated, the primary *press* among US magic system is Samuel Wieser who kinda publishes “everybody” and then of course there’s ten thousand flavors of “New Age manifestation” authors and systems including those for indigo children and all types of other “fairy folk.” Doreen Virtue is certainly a manifesting guru – but by some definition, perhaps then so too is Tony Robbins. Ultimately, I think looking into this essential if for no other reason than that it is very interesting.
Regards
Gregory Pearl (aka Pleshaw, “Pearl” is my female identity and I am considering a name change to Gregory Pearl to reflect a certain passage in the Book of John that kinda goes like, “when the male becomes the female and the female the male and there is no distinction between the two, then ye can enter into the Kingdom of Heaven,” but I’m too tired to look it up now.)
Comment by Gregory Pearl — December 11, 2016 @ 9:28 pm
Gregory has given me a lot to think about. Fascinating monologue by him – I could have listened to an hour or two more of that easily.
Comment by Shambles — December 14, 2016 @ 7:25 pm