Descriptions:
Video Description
“Most of us live in a WYSIWYG world, what you see is what you get. This video invites us to look behind that simple screen. Lyam Christopher calls the deeper skill non-literal perception, the ability to hold more than one meaning at once. Occult, after all, simply means hidden. Where the surface offers one fixed story, the hidden side brims with many possible ones, and learning to slip between them feels like discovering a whole new room in a familiar house.”
“One by one, he names the traps of literalism: dogmatism, causalism, naturalism, supernaturalism, moralism, personalism, temporalism, volunteerism, humanism, subjectivism, and positivism. Each is a real lens and none is wrong by itself. The trouble only begins when one lens is treated as the only truth. A Tarot card is not a fixed answer but a living conversation. A dream tiger is not just a symbol; it has something of its own to say. James Hillman called the many gods of the old world perspectives, and that plural way of seeing opens the imagination wide.”
“The lesson closes with a gentle warning about reification, the habit of freezing an experience into a single, unchangeable thing and calling it real. That habit, he hints, is the biggest barrier to astral projection, because you can only wander the vast underworld of dream once you stop gripping your concepts so tightly. There is still room for the one behind the many, as Kabbalah teaches with its infinite source that bodies forth countless spheres. The wonder of it all is that reality becomes richer, not thinner, when you let it mean more than one thing.”
Full Video Transcript
Alright, I’ve got a thunderstorm going on here in South Florida, so we’ll see if I can get through this video.
This week we’re talking about the power of non-literal perception.
Those who chat with me and talk with me on a regular basis probably know that I very routinely refer to taking things literally, or I give advice, don’t take things so literally.
And that’s kind of a mystifying statement.
And it’s not the easiest type of awareness to maintain, this non-literal perception.
So what I normally mean by that is you’ve got a WYSIWYG reality.
WYSIWYG stands for what you see is what you get.
And then you have the hidden side of things, which are behind the scenes,
which probably are more accurate as far as what’s going on.
So in other words, this is a YouTube channel about the occult.
a cult literally means hidden and so most of us will tend to focus on the visible side of things
because that’s how our biology has been oriented towards the outward world and so we will tend to
interpret what we see in terms of what we get in other words we interpret things in in terms of
surface level reality uh in other words most of us are superficial and it’s the mark of a cultivated
cultured personality that they become less superficial in other words they learn to
appreciate the hidden side of things the invisibles it’s kind of like when you go to
an art museum are you looking at the visible aspect of the art yes you are but you’re mostly
focusing on the what’s coming through the art what’s being conveyed and of course a lot of
pretentious jargon can come up same thing goes for magic and the occult when we focus on magic
and the occult there is a pretend aspect to it the charlatan aspect to it and there’s the real deal
there are the artists who create the works of art and then they’re the people who collect the art
who pretend to know what’s going on with the art and have all kinds of pretentious jargon uh so
when we speak of things literally it’s not always in terms of surface world so when we
subscribe to literalism a limited mode of perception in which one sees the world only
in terms of a single usually superficial interpretation okay so when there’s one way
of seeing things that tends to be a literal way of looking at it okay it’s also called monovision
it’s also called monotheism there’s one god then there’s one correct way of doing everything right
all right um and this is not to say that relativism is really the way to go either okay and what i
tend to advocate for is a non-dual perspective on the universe what does that mean hmm well maybe
that’s a subject for a later video right now what we want to concern ourselves with is the non-literal
mode of perception in other words you want to avoid literalism so when you see things happening
in the magical universe there’s a tendency to apply only one meaning to every kind of thing
that you see okay in other words if you’re looking at the tarot oh this tarot card means this and
that’s all it means so when you learn how to use the tarot uh it’s more like you learn how to have
a conversation with each card and each card has multiple things many things to say each card is
pretty much a being or a spirit that has its own perspective on things that’s always speaking and
and this speaking spirit says various things.
And if you approach the tarot cards as this card has that meaning
and that card has this meaning, that is the viewpoint of a non-initiate.
A non-initiate tends to see things literally.
An initiate tends to operate in a non-literal mode of perception.
So let’s dissect or analyze literalism.
literalism i came across some cool references to the literalistic perspective that the literalist
perspective uh in this book by james hillman the dream and the underworld i’m not sure it’s
actually this color and really if you go buy one of these um it’s kind of faded it’s been sitting
in the sun but um uh it’s a book about dreams and well and the underworld uh it’s and of course
what he advocates for, James Hillman, is not saying, oh, when a tiger appears in your dream,
that represents the devouring nature of the subconscious. And that’s the meaning of the
tiger. No, no, no, no, no. When a tiger appears in your dream, you adopt an element of curiosity
at what does it have to say? What does it mean right now? I was going to say,
what does it mean for me but that’s also a literalistic way of looking at things like
everything’s about you okay in other words the tigers are rising now what’s what is it saying
about things that are happening like or what is it just simply saying let’s have a conversation
with the tiger so one type of literalism is the most obvious type and that is dogmatism
seeing things in terms of dogma a very obvious one way of being dogmatic would be to say that
the crucifixion of jesus uh that’s the only way that god and man can come together okay or or
through that symbol of the sacrifice jesus that’s the only way that you can get to god or jesus is
the only name by which you can be saved whatever that means uh and so any other you know spiritual
tradition is right out then either it has to be through the image of jesus or curiously if if you
can only be if you can only be saved through the name of jesus um which pronunciation of jesus do
you need to use in order to get the correct one joshua yeshua jesus like in other words there’s
all kinds of different names within that name right only one of them is correct okay well
if there are variations on names there are also variations on images there are also variations on
characters so um can you be saved through the image of the buddha who’s meditating under the
tree do you have to be nailed up against the tree or do you can you be sitting in meditation under
the tree um so um so multiple images uh can convey grace and beauty and um that can be the
saving grace aspect of the universe okay anyway dogmatism another form of dogma would be the more
superficial kind and that is well uh what we’re actually witnessing with the crucifixion of jesus
is a political zealot who is being punished by the romans or the jews depending on how you
interpret the story um and that’s all there is to it just a political zealot who was very religious
possibly fanatic whatever and then that’s all that there is to it there’s nothing spiritual
there at all, blah, blah, blah. It’s just a historical sort of interpretation. A single
way of looking at any phenomenon tends to be literalism. And dogmatism is a really good
example of that. There’s only one story that’s appropriate for each scenario. Whereas as anybody
knows, there are many kinds of stories you can make up about the same scenario. Just ask a police
investigator causalism we talked about this in the last video didn’t we cause and effect or the
lusting for results and um very often it’s obvious when people talk about magic uh that they’re
non-initiates when they talk about oh i did this ritual and it caused this to happen i did this
ritual and it caused this to happen oh i saw this when i went outside the door and then this thing
followed after it was a cause and effect relationship right there’s lots of cause and
effect going on uh and naturally that’s a very superficial way of looking at magic okay and in
the last video we only barely sort of touched upon that there are there there are there’s an
a causal type of causality okay so an initiate would speak of cause and effect in terms of the
vertical dimension of causality okay in other words the universe buds forth various cause and
effect relationships okay and the cause and effect relationships are horizontal this this here causes
this over here and that causal connection that that line you’re drawing between the two doesn’t
really exist because they actually come from the higher dimension both arise together in some
mysterious way and so if you’re going to be an initiate talking about magic it’s going to be the
vertical dimension of causality we could call that meta causality okay so speaking in magic
speaking of magic only in terms of causality uh is another single-minded way of looking at it it’s
not wrong okay to do that to to interpret it that way uh it’s just a single-minded way of
looking at it there are other ways of looking at magic naturalism uh that magic is nature and
everything everything that has to do with magic is natural magic and uh it’s sort of like the
naturalistic fallacy that’s like um well if it’s natural it must be healthy that sort of thing
and oh if your magic doesn’t involve oak trees and squirrels and fawns and fairies and pixies and
streams and earth air fire water if it doesn’t involve the forces of nature then it’s somehow
not really magic okay so there’s the fallacy of naturalism uh is it wrong no it’s not wrong to
view your magical practice in terms of naturalism but if your interpretation of magic all is stuck
in that interpretation it’s limiting it’s literalistic kind of like we look at nature
what you see is what you get this sort of thing then there is supernaturalism i’m glad i spelled
that right um it’s uh one of the problems with supernaturalism especially from a non-dual
perspective is that it tends to be dualistic and that is there is a supernatural world and
there’s a natural world and if i’m going to do a ritual uh it’s always about drawing power down
from the supernatural world into the natural world and all about or all about communicating
from the natural world to the supernatural world okay once again this is not incorrect and many
times when i speak of magic i use the supernaturalist interpretation okay but are any of
these views on on reality correct no they are simply takes on reality or you could say all of
them are correct but um only in part and if you get stuck in one you’re guilty of literalism okay
and of course you’re talking to an adept or some an initiate they tend to not view things
literalistically and like only in terms of one reality or one take on reality moralism this is
a good one oh my goodness yeah a lot of times when people are new to magic it’s all about the black
magic and the white magic the evil magic and the good magic and if you see a hollywood movie
there’s a lot of black magic and maybe some white magic or all magic is black right something like
um and uh even those who say magic is neither black nor white it simply is that’s still a bit
of a moralistic interpretation but it does start to free you up to view magic as something other
than is this good magic or evil magic is this a angel or a demon and i think the most interesting
characters in any drama are those that are neither good nor evil or they appear good at first and
then they reveal their true colors and vice versa so is moralism wrong uh when it comes to your
interpretation of magic no not at all in fact the moralistic perspective on magic um is is really
important um and it becomes a bit of a trap too like um one of the biggest themes in magic
especially high magic or you know ceremonial magic is pride and egotism these are the vices
of satan and paradise lost his pride and caused his fall sort of thing and the magician adopts
magical powers as though he’s trying to usurp the powers of heaven like become a god himself
sort of thing right uh and so moralism becomes really important in magic um mainly in regards
to humility uh and what it really takes and um to become an adept let’s say um a good example of
somebody uh who had trouble with moralism would be somebody like alistair crowley he um they didn’t
they didn’t have a word for what he was at the time i hate to put slap a label on him um but
it’s pretty obvious he’s a he was a classic narcissist uh if you look at what narcissism is
um in terms of a in one of in terms of one of the anti-social personality disorders not just
you know not just being self-centered um almost everybody suffers from that a little bit um
but classic narcissism that uh is like a diagnosis from a psychologist let’s say
um if anybody has known a narcissist then you know oh these people apparently really exist okay
And Crowley apparently was a narcissist, or you could have diagnosed him as a narcissist.
One of the things about narcissists is that that condition is essentially incurable.
I’m not sure whether that’s true, but that’s the way people tend to define it.
Not that the condition can’t be managed.
And one of the things, other than focusing on yourself and your own aggrandizement,
one of the things that’s characteristic of a narcissist is a lack of empathy.
And that is something characteristic of all of the antisocial personality disorders, psychopathy, sociopathy, and narcissism.
And if you look through the writings of Crowley, he gives lip service to moralism.
In fact, there’s a lot of Christian moralism sort of like infiltrated its way into his writing.
and what you’ll notice is that people who lack empathy or seem to be have sort of an anti-social
personality disorder thing going on um they can be very dogmatic about what good and evil is
and they’ll enter positions where they’ll become the inquisitor and then they’ll torture you for
being a witch confess confess and they’ll devise all kinds of horrible things to do to you to get
you to confess so there’s a lot of morality going on in their universe but it’s a twisted form of
morality it’s almost like there’s the psyche is trying to understand what’s wrong with itself
and so it really gets deep into the morality um dramas around it and becomes an inquisitor
or uh you know so moralism can is is very important in magic but of course um got to be
careful with it and if you are listening to this and you are a narcissist um you wouldn’t know
which narcissists tend to, one of the symptoms of being a narcissist is that you simply cannot
see it. It’s weird, isn’t it? Because they also tend to be pretty smart. Personalism.
So viewing magic in terms of personalism, everything is about my path. What’s my destiny?
I must go find and fulfill my destiny. I’m looking for my higher self.
Is there anything wrong with that? No, of course not. So all these various perspectives on magic
crop up as we deal with magic but if you get stuck in one of them and that’s your only way of looking
at it then you are stuck you’re stuck on the surface we’re in the surface world you’re stuck
in one interpretation of magic and the idea of the magician is to be more of a juggler all these
different perspectives are perspectives that you can change or you’re maybe you’re like a mad hatter
put on a different hat and suddenly you have a different perspective that’s like wait a minute
i have a different situation now let’s adopt another perspective for this one so all these
various perspectives dogmatism personalism naturalism uh the all these things are tools
in your toolbox there are perspectives that you can adopt temporalism everything is about the
future of humanity or the past we worship the ancestors and we make them we make our ancestors
is proud and it’s all about the end times or it’s all about time going in a spiral and evolution
so yeah if anybody talks to me on a regular basis you know i do tend to use temporal temporalism
sometimes i speak in magic in terms of facilitating your evolution as though you’re going somewhere
you’re evolving into some bigger great grander form in the future temporalism nothing wrong
with looking at magic this way but it’s helpful to also think in according to the present moment
some people would say the present moment is all there truly is time doesn’t exist there’s a subject
for another video so temporalism can be problematic if you get stuck in that interpretation it’s all
about the future of humankind and utopia or dystopia uh where are we all headed oh we have
to get ready for what’s coming volunteerism this is for people who believe in free will
and so everything’s a choice this will drive libras crazy i think but um but so everything
is about making a choice oh i’ve come to a crossroads in my life and now i need to
pick which way to go everything’s about um everything’s about doing and um doership
is one of the uh big impediments to enlightenment supposedly and that is that if you think that you
can facilitate your own process of enlightenment you are mistaken that’s a christian thing too in
other words you you can’t you can’t do it yourself you need the saving grace like jesus to come and
into your life or something like that um and there’s an element of truth to that as well as
far as um uh so in other words the doership element um the interesting thing about let’s
say meditation is that many people see meditation as something you do and that can be a major
headache for you because meditation really means sitting still and doing nothing so volunteerism
gets thrown out the window okay but there are many forms of meditation where you go about doing
something at least for a while until that drops away and then you can do the non-voluntarism
form of meditation or non-meditation. Humanism, you know, this is one of my favorites because
humanism is something that was big in the Italian Renaissance and it really came as a rescuing
influence after the Dark Ages when the Christian church was telling you that you’re full of sin
and you must be, you know, purged of evil and you must be protected from evil and you must be saved
from the dark powers and um original sin infiltrates your very flesh you know and you’re
all dirty and stinky um and the in the renaissance when the hermetic tradition came back it was
largely about seeing man as the measure of all things the humanity of the human figure is at
the center of the cosmos and um you even get this in buddhism where um uh the most auspicious
form of incarnation is a human form uh because that’s the only form in which you can become
enlightened so um humanism interesting idea but it interprets all of magic in terms of human
connections human will human goodness um humans as the center of the universe um are we the center
of the universe yes and no maybe subjectivism so um what i want to focus on here this is like
you could also say that um people psychologize all over magic and they say the demons are just
all in your head you’re conjuring demons or angels and these are just parts of the brain
that you’re waking up um in other words what you’re experiencing in this grand experiment
of yours which is magic um is confined to the subject of the experiment it’s it’s inside you
it’s not in the universe it’s it’s in your head it’s all in your head it’s all in the subject in
the words a an experiment has such subjects that are being experimented on okay and what they claim
is happening is very often just if they’re giving their opinions they say well that’s subjective
that merely that’s just your opinion man okay uh so subjectivism can also be a way of looking at
magic it’s all in your head it’s all psychological uh it’s all brain chemistry positivism now this
one’s interesting this is not positive psychology this is more the philosophy of positivism
um positivism is easy to understand uh if you think a positive negative okay uh so the positive
side of things according to positivism is the verifiable side the measurable the visible the
things that you can confirm and the things that you can’t confirm which is sort of hidden or mushy
or in the background are negative i guess though i’ve never heard of a positivist refer to hidden
things as negative but positivism tends to focus on what’s in the foreground and visible so
positivists are also very interesting in regards to magic because they will tend to look at only
the things that are verifiable so they’ll they’re the kind of people who will attach electrodes to
your head when you’re doing meditations or when you’re doing rituals to see what your brain wave
pattern is doing when you tilt your eyes up in your head or this is the measure of the alpha
waves that you’re producing you know that sort of thing uh all the measurable aspects of magic
this is where the biohacking comes in because we’re only focusing on the things that we can
measure and see and there’s a lot of cause and effect going on with that too and there’s a lot
lot of focus on the positive benefits of meditation or the benefits of magic or what you could what
you put into it and what you get out of it if magic is a black box they don’t focus on the
black box they just focus on what you put into it and what you get out of it a lot of people do this
too especially the chaos magicians trying to be all scientific and whatnot scientistic so what is
a non non-literal perspective i say it’s an unlimited mode but that means simply a mode that
is not limited to one thing i don’t mean unlimited like it’s infinite um so a non non-literal
perspective or perception is an unlimited mode in which one sees the world through many possible
perspectives interesting thing is james hillman when he talks about the gods of pagan religions
he often refers to them as perspectives it’s a cool way of looking at them um and that’s a
pluralistic way of looking at the psyche too another sort of dogma you could get caught up
inside but of course a pluralistic psyche is is pretty cool because it is not literal because
remember a literal interpretation of something insists that there’s only one meaning of everything
it encounters okay and usually that meaning is superficial not always um but it’s like there’s
one meaning for everything and so if you have a sort of pagan psyche pagan view on things then
you have multiple different gods going on and each one of them has a different way of looking
at the universe kind of cool really because then if you don’t like paganism you can just
adopt a multi-sphere oath perspective in other words the sphere oath on the tree of life
each sphere has a perspective the way the universe looks okay how does the universe look to the greek
god Hermes probably as a big joke sometimes sometimes serious but usually not um and like
the universe according to Aphrodite would be um everything is love and attraction and jealousy
and uh yeah a lot of interesting stuff there so if you’re going to have a non-literal perception
on reality it’s going to be more akin to a sort of pagan viewpoint or at least a pluralistic you
viewpoint if you think about it that’s what makes um so many dramas especially plays if you go to
see a play like with real flesh and blood actors one of the biggest values of that is that you get
multiple perspectives on the same scenario especially if it’s a situational comedy which
can be very amusing because everybody sees something different happening and they’re
interpreting it through their lens and the differences between those interpretations can
be quite funny and this brings us to something called reification i first heard this word in
buddhism and then i later came across it in dream yoga uh and so this is going to be a subject maybe
for the next video okay the problem that we have is that if you have a literal way of looking at
reality like there’s only one truth or one true way of seeing everything um you’re going to tend
to reify it that way that it’s that’s the way it’s real okay you’re saying i mean if you have
a non-literal view on phenomena around you nothing’s quite real because um you have multiple
different ways of describing everything you see so any one of those different takes you have on
reality isn’t quite real okay and so when you to reify something is to crystallize it into one
thing say i’ve got it now this is it okay so um i think i’m going to kind of talk about reification
as the primary enemy of people who want to learn astral projection yeah so uh reification can be
a big problem for uh slipping behind the scenes of physical reality and entering that strange
pagan underworld that we call the astral plane is there a is there room for monotheism in this
strange pagan underworld of course there is you just think of monotheism monotheism the way that
the ancient egyptians thought of it or even the greeks themselves because they were sort of
monotheistic as well even as they had all these different pagan deities there was the one and the
good which was behind them all very interesting so in other words and kabbalah comes to the rescue
there too because it has multiple sphere of multiple levels and each level and each sphere
has its own perspective on reality. And yet all these things are bodied forth from God or
Ain Sof or the unmanifest. All right. So yeah, the value of non-literal perspective is to let go
of the one true way of seeing things. And so if you’re new to magic, you’re going to tend to see
it probably in a causal sort of way in terms of causalism. If you’re Wiccan, maybe in terms of
naturalism okay uh or if you are um if you think see lots of things in terms of parapsychology like
in other words um supernatural phenomena uh that’s supernaturalism you tend to see magic in terms of
supernaturalism which you can kind of get stuck there okay and then there’s a lot of things in
magic that will kind of not be on your radar then like the biohacking and the natural magic with
herbs and stones and you know stuff like that anyway um all right so maybe the next video is
going to be finally about astral projection uh and probably probably mainly about the enemy of
of anybody who tries to um practice astral projection and that is the habit of reification
the tendency to take something you’re seeing to take something that you’re perceiving and say
that perception that i have that’s real you’re reifying it and then that becomes a barrier
because then you can’t can’t get past it can’t get into the astral plane past your you can’t
get past your concepts okay so we’ll talk about that um maybe next video all right until next time
Source: Lyam Christopher