[Help] Help me reconsile my path and my love of the world.

[Rusty64]

I've been practicing magick of one form or another for years, and ultimately it stems from a desire for knowledge, that's why I'm so drawn to hermeticism and Thoth, I want to know of things seen(this one is pretty easy and the reason I'm in college) but also unseen, I want to understand the workings of the universe. I also love the physical as much as the spiritual, not the wealth or the people particularity. But the natural world I love almost nothing more than that, I love ecosystems, Dense forests and open plains, the beauty of the frozen Canadian north or vibrant reds of the American south west. Both the Mercy and brutality of the cycle of life, I love decomposition it's a beautiful thing watching the body of a once living thing return to serve the forest it was a part of.
I say all of this because a lot of Ideas in hermeticism and general Knowledge focused schools of magick are deeply anti-material. In hermeticism the physical is made by god but still illusory and false and therefore "evil"(I understand this isn't like christian go to hell evil but still). How do I reconcile these two parts of myself, Particularity because in my UPG I feel closer to divinity in natural spaces than I have in any temple, church, or house of worship. Could it be that the world has truth in it, that the physical part of the world is more than just an illusion to be discarded when I ascend?

 

[sydward]

Yes! The microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. The physical world is not an illusion, simply a different world than the spiritual world. I am a firm believer of interdisciplinary study, and magic has much to gain from analysis of the physical.

I think a big reason why the older texts forsake the physical world so heavily is that they were trying get people to understand a world beyond the physical. However, the physical world is as divine as we are. We are all nodes in the fungal network that is god–we are the universe experiencing itself.

 

[Favonias]

This is part of the "Divine Paradox" in which we must acknowledge the illusion but learn to operate within it as though it were real. As a reflection of the divine it encompasses both the good and the ill...beauty and goodness and evil. The trick, supposedly, is to not move as a sleep walker, buffeted about and trapped within it but to move with consciousness to better learn the mind of the divinity within us. This is part of what I gleaned from The Kybalion and other writings at any rate...I believe that a lot of the thinking about pure evil is an addition from the Cathars/Gnostics