Shifting my own gears back down from mixing with a few government bureaucrat types this week...
LOL
Anyway that all went very well.
A friend was asking about something to do with this thing that goes on in South Africa, as it does in a lot of modern places that nonetheless have a strong Islamic, particularly Sunni Muslim representation among the communities - various 'magical' practices, sometimes involving ta'wiz, which is the writing of magical charms and placing them into amulets, as well as a very ancient Babylonian-rooted system of incantation designed to create various effects in the psychology of other people. Or 'sihir,' which is much worse.
Dubai boardwalk mosque, right?
Can't be a restaurant, surely...
In fact the discussion started from there, but ended up in this aspect of praying in a mosque or temple, and how to find a specific mosque or temple that was truly an 'holy place,' as such... Therefore, where your prayers would indeed be answered. We were looking at a short video clip, in which a South African who said he was 'a Hanuman devotee' ('Hanuman' is a Hindu god) yet nonetheless went to this Mazar (mausoleum) and 'prayed with devotion,' to Allah, and his prayers were answered...
Traditionally, for example, the Hagia Sofia was seen as such a place by a range of religious peoples.
Well this type of thing is strictly forbidden in traditional Islam - it is a form of kufr (disbelief, and shirk - associating of partners with Allah, or the powers of Allah). Muslims nevertheless do it all the time! There is this widespread tradition of going to the site of the entombment of some saintly figure, and there, apparently, as they seem to think, prayers are specifically answered.
...So from here on in, I want to take you down a path to a different time and place, and you can treat it as a metaphor, and not expressly believe that it is materially true, necessarily.
Anyway, let's look at things from a modern, at least passingly (pseudo-)scientific perspective, sufficient enough to factor into the way we consider matters, much that is well-known to any common school-child.
Harut and Marut come down to Babylon...
In most ancient times, life was theoretically simpler. When the Islamic tradition angels Harut and Marut descended to Babylon, to impart magic and cosmetics to women, and sorcery to men, and chemicals and poisons to both, there would have been not too much going on inside the heads of the local citizens there beforehand. If, unseen, the angels were there listening and watching first, then it would have been far easier for them to apprehend what was going on inside the heads of the people.
Compared with what you might have to deal with today, if you stepped into any main street of some large city. 'Pick up the dry-cleaning, buy the milk, don't forget the doctor's appointment, turn your mobile off when you get into the car, where did you park the car this time, where is the parking ticket, what about that hot woman in the office, not enough cleared funds to pay the rent/mortgage/kid's school-fees...' And on and on.
Let's say I have some technology that allows me to literally hear a digitized voice reading of what the neural nets in your brain are doing moment to moment. Let's say, you are one of three hundred people in a room or a hall.
Cacophony; it's just cacophony.
Make your own stained glass with Sharpie marker pens
I mean we can go into why any mysteriously powerful 'being' is going to attend to you specifically anyway - in another post - but if you are in a large crowd, and the enhanced arousal systems are all being employed, theoretically, at some stage there is this effect called 'quorum seeking' that becomes engaged in the group mind, and then, everyone kind of thinks the exact same thoughts and feels the same emotions all at the same time.
If you are by yourself or in a much smaller group, there is a necessity to focus the thoughts into clear ones.
And in either of these situations, it is easier to 'read' what the human beings are regarding as important, at that specific time.
The 'masters of Illumination' - shaikh-i-ishraq - (ancient philosophers, magicians, sorcerers, even Hebrew prophets, hierophants, et cetera), all believed that Frankincense smoke, procured clarity of mind.
Actually, a modern perfumier, Roja Dove, has made a product he named after the Russian impresario Diaghilev, which uses Frankincense but somehow manages to incite a highly erotic spectrum of emotional responses from his olfactory pyramid in this instance. And so we have to imagine very broad-minded angelic beings listening in on the modern-day evocations by adepts trained by any such idiots like me...
Ah well, we are in the day and age of Cardi B though, right?
Here is an example of 'quorum seeking' techniques used in mass audiences, by means of standard 'enhanced arousal.' Yeah I could have posted the 'all-stops-out' Bach cathedral organ thing, but I didn't! ...This is 'sahar,' or 'sihir;' sorcery. We do this type of thing.
