Review The Planes Options

The focus of this thread is to overlook each of what are called the plane of existence and analyze what can be considered their practical use in magic.

While that works well I'm finding that I likely may end changing how I care to view the planes.

While that works well I'm finding that I likely may end changing how I care to view the planes.

Is that to say end up changing your view, or putting an end to changing it?

I think that there is an infinite gradient between the physical realm and the source of creation. The division could be 3, 7, 10, 100, or a million, depending on how specific you want to get, and how you want to apply the knowledge. Or, you can just ignore the idea of planes all together, and see one big complicated universe top down, no dividing anything at all, which is also accurate. Creation is paradoxically confined to a single non-dimensional point of being and at the same time spread out into an infinite spectrum of energy in every conceivable state through time, space, and consciousness.

The real value in determining any system of planes or dimensions is expanding your contextual sphere. Given the way I view the planes, I'm able to take various phenomenon and evaluate them on the basis of these points of origin in creation, creating a sort of mystical blueprint of any phenomenon which can then be, by virtue of the 'blueprint', applied to my mystical understanding to fit a new piece of the puzzle into the slowly growing 'whole'. Any other system is the same. In evaluating the usefulness of your system, all you really need to ask is, "Can it offer a blueprint of everything?" Are there any gaps, any phenomenon which are bound to fall outside the paradigm. If so, then the paradigm needs to be expanded or expounded in such a way as to fill in those gaps. Any conception is going to be minimal in the eyes of the divine consciousness, and ultimately an illusion, but it is a means of creating a governing structure within structure that will, for the mage at least, allow a dissection of the universe in such a way as to offer up a way out of conventional structure all together. It's like using the illusion to get beyond the illusion.

These seven planes are a very basic layout, some people like to divide the astral into various layers, some prefer to seperate the energetic into it's component parts, and so on, but ultimately every 'component' is going to be made up of other 'components' so the process will continue ad infinitum. Ultimately, I think it's more useful, personally, to settle on a handful of broad categories within which one can evaluate phenomenon as happening 'within' the category, rather than strictly within it's own specifically narrowed down 'file'.

In any case, while the kabbalistic tree of life is often regarded as a 'perfect' system for this categorization, I don't feel there is any such thing as a perfect system - systems are flawed by nature of the flaw of structure itself, and nothing within a structured universe can be perfect, conceptual or otherwise. So, one should always be willing to update, evolve, expand, etc., their paradigm, as it is the box within which we grow - even a chaos mage has a box, albeit one generally far more readily expanded than those of many others. When you no longer have a box, you're enlightened, i think. But, it's not as easy as just saying "fine, I'll just stop classifying." While at the same time being just as easy as that...

peace