Become Something More

Alchemical Braindamage:

"...getting the shit you want doesn't matter. Not yet anyway. For most people, getting the things you want is like a heroin addict getting a fix. It's only useful insofar as it shows you how far you're prepared to go to get your latest hookup. Save yourself the hassle and go watch Requiem for a Dream, and come back to me.

It's by far more beneficial to go ahead and do things, but pay more attention to the evolving process of your own will, as it begins to purify itself. This purification process, along with all the other skills I've been sharing, lay the groundwork for the biggest piece of alchemical heavy lifting you're likely to attempt on my watch. The statements of intent, the willingness to commit yourself, the cleansing of external influences, the freedom to express your will, even if it's just to yourself. The cultivation of concentration, and a symbolic scaffold to hold the mind together under stress, as you explore and integrate aspects of the unconscious. This is all going somewhere.

This is the invocation of your inner genius, your daimon, your true will, your spirit guide, the holy guardian angel.

...when you're able to open this channel of communication, you are utterly transfigured.

This happening is not as rare as you might suppose. What is rare is undergoing it consciously. Usually what happens is someone gets 'abducted by aliens' or talks to the archangel gabriel, or has some kind of profound visionary experience and then marches off in a transformed state, but having unconscious contact through a symbolic intermediary, carries the traces of that distortion. In many cases various kind of madness and general flakiness ensue.

Not that you can dispense with the symbolic intermediary altogether mind you, that's what we spent the last couple episodes on after all. But if you selected and built the map yourself, and you know it's just made up, you won't commit the cardinal sin of postmodernism: mistaking the map for the territory. ie: if you made the filter, you won't make yourself over in the image of your filter. That's just embarrassing and pitiful.

...What happens to most people who experience this, is for some reason or other that crisis of discontinuity builds up in the deep mind, created by contradictions, fuelled by intense emotions or mystical experiences. At some point the disassociated self images rip loose and force a communication with with the frontal mind, sometimes in a highly allegorical and symbolic fashion. It will present itself in a way that may not be factually accurate, but easier to accept than the truth. Doing it the way I've presented here should sidestep those problems. It'll be slower and probably less dramatic, but you've have the benefit of presence of mind and some influence over the content.

In many traditions it is said that before this process is undergone that all acts of magick are inevitably poisoned by the cravings of the ego. You would simply be feeding the hungry ghosts in your head. There's no guarantee your higher self is less egotistical than you are now, but you will almost certainly find that beyond a certain point your concerns will blend naturally into the universal, the profound, the archetypal and the idealistic.

Some folk may have doubts there is such a thing as a higher self. That humans are what we are and we should just learn to accept it. That idealizing some new form of life is just a pretext to judge and reject others and promote some kind of fascist fantasy trip.

But maybe it's just growing up. Maybe it's just learning to take responsibility for all the powers we really have, instead of judging us all for the actions of a few. Maybe it's possible to have bigger hearts, stronger minds, broader shoulders. Maybe it's possible to be an example and not an object lesson. Maybe it's possible to ask more of ourselves and let others do as they please. Perhaps we can quit being ashamed of what we are, or what we're not, and start making some tentative steps towards something we can hardly imagine right now.

Maybe you can live without excuses, without doubts, without pointless resentments, confusion and fear. Maybe you don't really need that stuff as much as you seem to think you do.

If you've been reading my stuff for a while now, or any of the links in my sidebar, you are hopefully not simply crushed by the weight of the problems in the world today. It's easy to look at the tidal waves of corruption, filth, murder and deceit, and throw up your hands, to turn back to your own concerns and leave the world to fend for itself. That's natural. We're only human after all. And these things seem so far beyond the grasp of any normal human being. The path of the mystic is to rest in the unchanging. To accept the ebbs and flows of impermanence. To treat all things as the will of god.

But the path of the magus is different. You are a part of nature, you can change things, you do have influence, and you don't need to be afraid to use it. Your will is as valid as any other. You will is just as much an expression of god as any other. To do nothing, to do anything. The same. To retire to your cave or transfigure the earth. The same.

...So maybe the solution to our 'human' failings is to become something more."