Well Founded Confidence and Trust
I had a poster ask if you should elect a time for buying incense. Ok, certainly you could elect a time for buying incense, but elections take time and effort to locate and then you may be stuck getting up at 3:32 am to log on and make the purchase. Is it worth it? That's one practical issue.
Next practical issue: since most non-expert elections are going to be something like, "buy incense on a waxing Moon" one is fooling oneself thinking this makes much difference. I mean 50% of everything you do is on a waxing Moon, and obviously there are widely different results for all the activities done with Moon waxing, so there must be more to it than that. This slides into superstition.
And it's easy to get superstitious as a magic user/astrologer/etc,. Ok, what exactly does superstitious mean: "an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural" Now, I need to know what "abject" means, " Extremely bad, unpleasant" Ok, so basically getting too scared, too freaked out. And that's understandable, magic and astrology are pretty new to most people and our society is either afraid of them due to Judeo-Christian programming or dismissive due to atheistic materialism. So it's hard to know if you are making a mistake.
Here's what I do, in practical terms I save the elections for important events, or when they really are necessary, like for actually making astrological talismans. Otherwise, I try to go forward in well founded confidence and trust. Buying incense is an ancillary activity, as far as I'm concerned, so I wouldn't elect it.
You can get in tune with the flow and cycles of the Cosmos with astrology, no doubt, but also by intuition and sensitivity. One example I like is the Balinese and feng shui. This web page says that because of their cultural spiritual and artistic sensitivity the traditional Balinese are able to site and create buildings according to feng shui, but do it naturally and intuitively as well. I'm not an expert on Bali or feng shui, so I don't know if this article is giving a complete picture, but I like the overall thrust here.
On the other hand, I don't want to say, "do what comes naturally" right from the get go, because that's like giving someone a guitar who has never played and saying "go to it" They are going to make a godawful racket, not music. First you need to immerse yourself in the subject, learn the rules and then you can improvise, within the tradition. As I said, forward in well founded confidence and trust!
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