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Showing 406 posts tagged Esoterica
“If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your perception.”
(via occultlucidity)
“Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitations is based on experience of the past. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or what he may do.”
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it is possible for core body temperature to be controlled by the brain. The scientists found that core body temperature increases can be achieved using certain meditation techniques (g-tummo) which could help in boosting immunity to fight infectious diseases or immunodeficiency.
The findings from the study showed that specific aspects of the meditation techniques can be used by non-meditators to regulate their body temperature through breathing and mental imagery. The techniques could potentially allow practitioners to adapt to and function in cold environments, improve resistance to infections, boost cognitive performance by speeding up response time and reduce performance problems associated with decreased body temperature.
The two aspects of g-tummo meditation that lead to temperature increases are “vase breath” and concentrative visualisation. “Vase breath” is a specific breathing technique which causes thermogenesis, which is a process of heat production. The other technique, concentrative visualisation, involves focusing on a mental imagery of flames along the spinal cord in order to prevent heat losses. Both techniques work in conjunction leading to elevated temperatures up to the moderate fever zone.
Assoc Prof Kozhevnikov explained, “Practicing vase breathing alone is a safe technique to regulate core body temperature in a normal range. The participants whom I taught this technique to were able to elevate their body temperature, within limits, and reported feeling more energised and focused. With further research, non-Tibetan meditators could use vase breathing to improve their health and regulate cognitive performance.”
”(via wildcat2030)
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“Tetraphobia: a practice to avoid instances of the number 4. It is a superstition most common in East Asian and Southeast Asian regions. n Cantonese-speaking regions in China, 14 and 24 are considered more unlucky than the individual 4, since 14 sounds like “will certainly die” (實死) and 24 like “easy to die” (易死). Where East Asian and Western cultures blend, such as in Hong Kong and Singapore, it is possible in some buildings that both 13 and 14 are skipped as floor numbers along with all the other 4’s.
This is the building I work at. The main elevators show every floor on the buttons but you cannot access them. Here I have found the service elevator to prove there are no such floors.”
Loved this cultural curiosity from my friend’s travels abroad. In numerology, 13 reduces down to 4 (1+3). For this reason, many feng shui consultants advise against these numbers when buildings are being outfitted. It is not uncommon to see these numbers skipped on addresses as well.
(via age-of-awakening)
“What you are comes to you.”
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Zodiac Man: Man as Microcosm
Part of the Medieval worldview was the idea that man was a microcosm (“a little world”) which reflected the macrocosm of the Ptolemaic universe. As the Earth was divided into regions influenced by the planets, similarly the body of man was divided into “regions” governed by signs of the Zodiac. Astrological signs were thought to influence the body and its health, and sketches of the “Zodiac Man” are common in medical treatises of the Middle Ages.
The concept of man as microcosm is thought to originate with the ancient Babylonians. The Egyptians and the Mayans had analogues, and ancient Mithraic, Hebrew, Chinese, and Vedic traditions also contain similar concepts. Microcosmic ideas are fleshed out in the works of Plato (4th-c. BCE), but the first use of the term “microcosmos” in Western philosophy appears later, briefly, in Aristotle’s Physics. The first modern use of the terms macrocosmos and microcosmos, shortened to macrocosm/microcosm, was by Pico della Mirandola in his Heptaplus in 1490.
There were several subsequent variations and expansions, of course. The idea of man as microcosm was popular long after the Middle Ages and was often used as a poetical conceit. Some hermetic and occult traditions embrace the idea of the microcosmic man still today.
“Alchemy runs alongside the traditional narrative of Western thought like a shadow. Long ignored, often discredited as pseudoscience, it has nonetheless had important effects on the cultures of Europe and the Middle East for the past two thousand (or more) years. It’s always been a hermetic field of inquiry, sealed off from mainstream intellectual pursuits, but its traces linger. The phrase ‘hermetically sealed,’ after all, derives from the ‘Seal of Hermes,’ the nickname for the stopper on the long-necked glass jar used in making the Philosopher’s Stone (the substance that would allow for a direct transmutation of an impure metal like lead into the pure silver or gold). We have alchemists to thank for the French name for a double boiler, the bain-marie (bagno-maria in Italian) — a reference to another apocryphal alchemist, Maria the Jew, and her method of heating slowly using water — and for the fact that we refer to quicksilver as ‘mercury.’”
“Ah, you realize that magick is something we do to ourselves. But it is more convenient to assume the objective existence of an angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernormal power in ourselves.”
(via invisicollege)
“Careful observation will confirm that virtually all spontaneous parapsychological events occur through some form of sleight of mind. It is invariably something hovering just below the threshold of awareness that initiated an unusual event or gave one a curious half sensed feeling that something was about to happen just before it did. The magician seeks to exploid this effect deliberately, but in doing so he must avoid doing it deliberately as it were. Conscious lust of result destroys magical effect, so trickery must be employed to annul it and to activate the subconscious.”
oblongsound replied to Lucid Dreaming and Body Position:
You can sometimes ‘pull’ consciousness into the dream state by attempting to hold your forearm and hand up as you are falling asleep.
Interesting… I will have to give that a try.
Lucid Dreaming and Body Position
Restless and unable to take advantage of a little nap time recently, I resorted to dozing on my stomach. I rarely slumber in this position, but this time it did work — with the strange side effect of lucid dreaming. I was flying through the air while observing streets below me. I had surprisingly good control of the dream sequence and could easily change my elevation and movement. I sensed I could go deeper into the extent of this control, but was intimately aware of my sleeping form being paralyzed. So I “willed” myself out of the dream and back into physical autonomy.
I tossed and turned back on my stomach at least a couple more times with the same result, flying in the dream world yet trapped somewhere between waking and sleeping. I intentionally avoid this position because of the tendency to wake up with sleep paralysis. This experience, however, makes me wonder if body position can encourage certain dream themes or lucidity. My history of sleep paralysis with the added condition of insomnia undoubtedly contributed to this occurrence. I believe the dream took on a flying adventure as we envision soaring entities high above with their backs to the sky, limbs outstretched in a posture quite like the one I was laying in. Perhaps some related credence for embodied cognition?
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