OK, I am the last person in the world who would argue against the pleasures of food, hot baths/ showers, or having a good lie-in.  However, I think I know what Emma meant.  When I was younger, hungrier and had more time on my hands, I was also more open to spiritual experiences; they came more spontaneously.  When you're working 14-hour days, running around trying to get 100 things done, in meetings all day long fighting with admin, etc. it is not conducive to spiritual experience.

Writing, however, especially for sustained periods of time, does put one in a very different frame of mind.  It burns tons of energy; I like to joke that when I'm writing I go down to my fighting weight.  I get sucked into my work, and being hypoglycemic, sometimes enter a kind of trancey state.  I've had very strong feelings of the presence of authors whose works I have studied closely; I can almost feel them in the room with me and hear their voice speak the words on the page. Once or twice I actually felt I was in contact with the spirit of a dead author through their work.  I think this is different from what you describe Toyin, but perhaps it's part of a continuum of similar human experiences.

BB,
Sabina

Sabina Magliocco
Professor
Department of Anthropology
California State University - Northridge
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________________________________________
From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of toyin adepoju [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2011 3:29 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FORTHCOMING: WHO IS THIS PERSON WRITING MY PHD?

Thanks, Emma.

I hope I am able to arrive again at the level of mystical and magical work I was doing at that time. I had suspended those ambitions in the name of completing my BA and was now busting loose!

I was doing meditations and invocations from different traditions three times a day, for about two to three years.

Do you have better spiritual experience when well fend and/or content or the reverse?

Perhaps freedom from the heaviness of food or a sensitivity to the struggles of life could help to make one more aware of life's  possibilities?

One point of view cites examples  relationship between contentment  and peak or expanded consciousness. Colin Wilson bases his explanation of peak experiences in Superconsciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience on that very correlation. He argues for a sense of well being and of fulfilment as central to  expansions of sensitivity to the beauty of living. He correlates  Abraham Maslow's theory of a hierarchy of levels  of satisfaction, with biological needs forming the base of the pyramid and self actualisation at the apex  with what seems to me to be cognitive theory in developing the idea  that the more sensitive one is to the sheer  appreciation of being, of life,  the more one is likely to experience  a sense of enlargement of perception and of self. In another work, Mysteries, he seems to suggest that mystical disciplines, with their training in concentration, are methods of increasing latent sensitivity through concentrating attention from its often the sensitivity of awareness  by focusing its often multifarious scope and thereby expanding the capacity for awareness. I wish I could make his point clearer.

Truly, being well fed, with the cool breeze blowing on one's skin, with worries muted or forgotten, or nonexistent, one might be in a better position to be sensitive to what Heidegger evokes as the often taken for granted fact of being. Mother Teresa, for her part,  describes  the danger of involuntary poverty to people's sense of humanity.

Another writer who argues for well being in relation to expansion of awareness is Karen Salmansohn  in How to Change Your Entire Life by Doing Absolutely Nothing: 10 Do-Nothing Relaxation Exercises to Calm You Down Quickly So You Can Speed Forward Faster<http://www.amazon.com/Change-Entire-Doing-Absolutely-Nothing/dp/B000ENBPJ8/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_10>, who describes how she was led to appreciate the  value of sheer relaxation by observing that she got very good ideas while having an unhurried cup of tea or coffee or while simply enjoying the comforting ease of lying bed.As one reviewer put it, she "argues that paying attention to positive stimuli instead of negative thoughts can be life-changing. One Do-Nothing Exercise, for instance, encourages readers to focus on the pleasure of showering: "I now multitask in washing away my stress and anxieties, by doing nothing but concentrating on the concentration of water spritzing down on me."

One also recalls the accounts  of Descartes cultivating the habit of working while lying in bed, not getting up before midday, and Marcel Proust who was led to some truly intriguing experiences by gustatory encounters with cakes.

Let those so inclined eat and be merry.

thanks
Toyin

On 23 March 2011 14:39, emma wilby <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Toyin - Sounds like the 'daily meditation and invocation' may have been the key re 'concretization'. For myself, I have noticed a direct correlation between a diminishment/lack of spiritual experience and being well-fed and/or content!! Emma

________________________________
From: toyin adepoju <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wed, 23 March, 2011 13:31:58

Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FORTHCOMING: WHO IS THIS PERSON WRITING MY PHD?

Thank you very much, Emma.

Your careful account helps to place things more clearly in perspective.

I hope the presence again becomes as vivid as it was in 1993, when I always sensed it behind me almost wherever I was going.

I was disturbed about it then, but like other encounters with the conventionally enigmatic which have left me wary even though they are the kind of experiences a magician  ought to anticipate and welcome, I will be better prepared if, as I hope,  that level of 'concretisation' occurs again.

Thank you very much.

Its so good to have fora where one can share such experiences and get sensitive, informed and well meaning responses.

All the best
toyin

On 23 March 2011 11:29, emma wilby <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Hi Toyin,

So far as I know a familiar can certainly by acquired without intending to do so. Indeed,  it could be argued that even in traditional shamanistic cultures the 'spontaneous' acquisition of the familiar is just as - if not more - common than the deliberate. From what I have read it seems that the familiar never completely relinquishes its 'autonomous' nature, though the shaman can gain a certain amount of control over it.

What I thought was interesting about your description was your linking of some initial vision and/or strong sensory experience with the subsequent more day-to-day sense of a presence. In shamanistic narratives the familiar is usually initially acquired through one or more 'peak' experiences - often a dream or vision encounter, but can also be a powerful auditory hallucination or experience of physical possession etc. But after this dramatic event it seems to me that a shaman's ongoing interactions with his familiar (that is, in daily life but also healing rituals and intentions not involving public seance) can often be more prosaic. The shaman 'talks to' their familiar and 'listens to' what they may have to say but in the way a Christian might communicate with God through prayer - a process of trying to interpret certain feelings and thoughts as spiritual communications and to understand the senses of presences as opposed to directly confronting and face-to-face interactions with the 'other'.

As for how to take advantage of a familiar - I'm not an expert here. I suspect there are as many ways as colours in the rainbow - shamanistic techniques, ritual magic techniques, wiccan techniques .... Christian techniques ....

With all good wishes,

Emma



________________________________
From: toyin adepoju <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tue, 22 March, 2011 5:31:36
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FORTHCOMING: WHO IS THIS PERSON WRITING MY PHD?

Thanks for your response , Emma.
Please forgive my late reply.
The impressions come and go on their own terms.
Can you tell  me more about the nature of a familiar and how one may take advantage of it? Can it be acquired without intending to do so?
Thanks
Toyin

On 19 March 2011 08:03, emma wilby <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Hi Toyin,

An evocative account of - what seems to me like - the acquisition of a familiar. I wonder - can you bring the sense of the presence to you (through some form of intention) or does it come and go of its own accord and on its own terms?

Emma

________________________________
From: toyin adepoju <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>

To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wed, 16 March, 2011 16:04:49
Subject: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] FORTHCOMING: WHO IS THIS PERSON WRITING MY PHD?


                         WHO IS THIS PERSON WRITING MY PHD?

                                                 Toyin Adepoju

 I ask myself this question in recognition of the sense of wonder that continually emerges for me from the development of ideas in the PhD I am undertaking in Comparative Criticism.

You see, some of the best ideas of the PhD are not written wholly by me. They are developed  in collaboration with someone I don’t know,  someone I am only beginning to be able to identify through subtle cues that define the contours of the person’s personality.

I have chosen to describe this being in terms of a distinctive personality because the entity actually demonstrates a shape representing their nature and style of working.This shape is perceivable in mental terms through subtle promptings about possibilities for developing ideas, through the sense of an invisible personality behind me or at my shoulder as I compose ideas in writing, through a sense of looking forward into a landscape of knowledge I can only dimly sense with an awareness of the certainty of its existence, like an animal smelling water from a far distance.

 Perhaps a more realistic interpretation of this mysterious experience is to understand these cognitive unfoldings as demonstrations  of conjunctions between the conscious and subconscious minds as they work together to constitute a whole,  even though the processes of the subconscious are not often available to consciousness.

This interpretation may clarify  the majestic motions of  ideas as they enter into particular orbits,  mesh and undergo transformation,  but can they explain the sense of an  invisible personality  by my side or behind me  that flashes in and out of my awareness as I work?

What  is the relationship between this current  sense of an unseen  personality and an earlier impression  of an invisible figure that began to  follow me everywhere after about a year of daily magical invocation and meditation in 1993?

What connection could these experiences have to the two experiences  in my living room in Benin in 1996 in which as my mind went to my earlier  interest, abandoned for the previous  three years,  in developing the cognitive  potential of the Yoruba/Orisa Ifa system of knowledge and divination,  I instantly sensed an invisible presence at my side, a  sense of an intangible presence that recurred at various times as I carried out this work on Ifa during my MA at the University of Kent in 2003?

Can these experiences  be related to a particularly striking experience  in the late 1990s in which, as I   reflected on a forest that awed me by the numinous presence that radiated from it, I suddenly found myself elsewhere, in a different room, in non-verbal but eloquent dialogue with a woman. Having ascertained who I was,  that I was not dreaming,  that I was in a strange place in which I had been welcomed,  I opened my eyes to find myself back in my study?

Could these experiences of mine demonstrate interactions between  personal and extra-personal  fields of consciousness?

Full essay forthcoming