romancing the universe

[notes from my blackbook]

Since my latest undisclosed mind-opening experience last Monday I’ve found myself aware of psychic realms that are quickly becoming a body of magical technique. Unlike last summer’s breakthrough which was more of a total bodily experience of universal interconnection, this was more focused on the specifics of how to use that connected energy in my workings.

For days I’ve been forming a stronger psychic connection with my muse (HGA, whatever you’d call it). Last year the Teacher and I were on 4-aces and almost succeeded in breaking through the boundaries of selfhood, and I had my first direct experience with that place right behind our heads where the self and the world become one. At one point reality grew so thin that he said if I looked over I could see another being present in the room that was made from the both of us together. At this point my psyche couldn’t have handled it, and I didn’t look. The other day though I had this experience again in a much more controlled and relaxed manner, recognizing that we are connected in a matrix like manner as individual masks on the face of some larger collective entity, and can learn to access that point of connection. So after the usual ritual preparations, circling, yoga, breathing, etc… I meditated on candle flames with half-closed eyes (which I am trying to develop into a scrying technique) and began chanting to my muse romantically as if to summon her into actual being with my love. The energy in the room was gathering rapidly and the flames flickering wildly, and as I got to the peak of my chanting and verbalized that she was here I felt a tangible presence in the room connected around from the back of my head and the wall above my alter began rippling like water, as if something might emerge from the thinness. I knew that if I looked around, she would be there. But I didn’t, because I heard the strange popping noises in the upper corners of my room which has become a call sign for negative energies. Ever since I magically set off the fire alarm interruptive noises suck me into a ‘bad reality’ paranoia and have become inimical to my workings.

I decided that what I needed was a tool that could clear my mind and space, that would act as a metanoic edge to separate the energies I wanted present from those I didn’t and keep me from slipping into the dark. I’m not so familiar with the Golden Dawn system of magic for creating such tools, but recognized that a sword or athame was the right device for the task. Not having a good ceremonial knife handy I picked up the old wooden toy kris dagger my cousin had fashioned for me as a kid, which already has a lifetime of positive and magical experiences gathered around it, and placed it on my alter. The next night I stayed up until I had reached the sleep-deprivation trance state and then as the sky turned from black to gray to blue I did several sun salutations and stood on my head for ten minutes before sitting at my alter with the sword in my hands. It was raining softly outside, and birds were singing joyfully in it. The window was open and these sounds were carried in on the gentle spring wind. All this peace wrapped around me and cleared my mind and I channeled that feeling into the sword with all the memories I had of its past use in my childhood. Then I recited my favorite Rilke quote, which is in itself a mantra of clarity. "Cast the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe – perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying." As I said this the flock of birds in the tree out front took flight past my window and the rain stopped. Then I rubbed fragrant oil over the blade to act as a mnemonic trigger for its new energy, and it seems to work so far. Just touching the object brings me back to that peace of rain and birdsong and clearing the corners of my room with it has made the following rituals much more peaceful and undisturbed by strange noises and energies.

Last night Metachor recommended that I read the latest Maybe Logic Quarterly, and with great joy found Eva Davis’s "Holey Bible part 2" which contained not only a great deal of magical and anarchist experience and a clever retelling of the Genesis story, but an account of trying t o make love to the sky. For a long time now I’ve been learning to become the sky, using breathing to form a yogic dissolution of inside and outside. The way I look at it all our fear and self doubt are like little bubbles of air that get trapped in us and cause tension, and by breathing they are released and join back with the air from which they came. In a tantric sense making love to the sky would bring about such a union, and having realized during Monday’s escape that breathing is the primal sexual experience figured I might as well give it a try. After clearing and some yoga I laid down in corpse pose and relaxed my physical body, visualizing it filling up with a star-filled sky. I let my body float on the waves of my breath, a technique picked up last fall by studying the rocking motion of being in a German wheel which I fortuitously had access to, and began relaxing my energy body. I’ve been doing a lot of work learning to vibrate my chakras recently, with breath and intonation, to the point of being able to recognize and activate their different layers of energy vibration as they play out in my daily life. As I charged them I focused it into an internally erotic feeling similair to that of raising kundalini, so that the breath and energy flowing through me were titillating my subtle centers as they passed, like the world was fingering my soul. As the energy raised through me I felt myself lifted off the ground, and when it broke through my crown and connected around to the world I was swept up in waves of ecstasy with each breath. I was no longer this physical shell writhing in pleasure on the floor, but the air that surrounded it and carried it and flowed through its every cell. The sky and I had finally become one. Then while I was so open and so on I "made love" to my room, to my alter and candles on it, merging with everything around until there was just one. And to think before this I had any clue what the yogic yama brahmacharya actually meant. Practicing total oneness… What next, the sea, the flames, the planet? I feel like I could romance the whole Universe right now, a recognition of the subtle processes of being as inseperate from the spinning of the stars. I think my magic and yoga just got a lot more exciting.