The sun is shining, and even though there’s still an underlying chill in the air it finally feels like one of the first days of spring. Yet in my heart I feel the icy fingers of another case of the pre-apocalypse blues. Maybe it’s all the recent killings, the lack of restful sleep, all the talk of danger on Key23, or the flocks of crows (who will ever be an omen for me of secret and fearsome worlds to come). But I again feel the pull of that hyperliminal headspace where every event seems portentous, and the world seems fraught with a sense of immediacy and peril that needs to be addressed before everything goes up in flames. I suppose the biggest factor right now might actually be all the work I’ve been doing recently to gain access to the deeps of the subconscious, a technique best framed in light of Castaneda’s idea of the assemblage point. In "The Art of Dreaming" the fictional shaman Don Juan tells Castaneda that our perception of reality is a fixed position of the assemblage point, that part of our etheric body where the chaos of experiences gets interpreted into a functional reality. The magical use is in recognizing that our "normalized" view of reality is only one position among infinite interpretations, and that one can learn to shift the assemblage point to interpret a host of other realities where the magician can access powers and insights unavailable or unknown in the normal position.
I haven’t been so interested (yet) in accessing other realities as in the first step of breaking the fixed position of the assemblage point to experience the flow of world itself unfiltered by any analytical interpretation (a technique Castaneda calls Stopping the World, and claims is necessary before creating any new magical world-view). The result of this is a pandemonium of impressions and influences, a flux of potentially meaningful connections unhampered by any previous subjective placement, the metafilter of consciousness stripped bare to reveal the inchoate host of movements that underlie everything. The lines of the world, as they say. The subconscious is not a personal phenomenon but the collective medium for experience, accessing it dips the veil of individuality into the sea of the total, so it comes up dripping with meanings, images, and insights that the individual could not have assembled alone. Little bits of other people’s lives, hints of other realities of time and space clinging like shipwrecked children to the only sturdy piece of flotsam for miles around.
In doing this I have found much of beauty; ideas and dreams full of wonder and mystery and hope that I am still trying to express (through poetry, art, music, spells, and long chaotic ramblings) in order to inspire others and turn them in to the magic and power of this erisian dream-realm. But I have also encountered ontological horrors, fears both personal and collective, glimpses of possible dystopic futures that I for one would not like to see become "real", if they are not already becoming so. Most predominately the threat of global annihilation that seems eminent even in the most lucid of waking states. If you have eyes to see and a heart to feel it is near impossible to not be aware of the coming breakdown of the western mono-civilization and its potential to bring down the rest of the world with it. All it would take is one nuke… or just a continued neglect of the environment that sustains us and makes life on Earth possible.
Over the fall and early winter I was feeling the pre-apocalypse blues something fierce, to the point of nearly falling into abject apophenic madness. I had not yet since my ontological shipwreck and existential reawakening of the summer found solid ground, or the right strokes to swim through the awesome chaos I had opened myself into. Who would have thought total connection to all beings could be such a terrifying thing? One could drown in the waves of implication without the cybernetic steering wheel of a clear-cut metaphysical assemblage (world-view), and I had none. And in the flungness of that confusion where everything is prophetic, my age-old nemesis, the Prophecy of Armageddon, reared its ugly head, forcing me to take some stand. I’ve been studying cultural tales of "the end of the world" since I learned to read, and as long as that future remains a possibility I have to stay sane enough to work towards a brighter future, regardless if the task is mine or if I have the power to change anything. Where there is fear, there is an opportunity for hope.
Recently I read Starhawk’s "The Fifth Sacred Thing," which is itself a prophetic vision of a future of total state control and a small but hopeful group of people who use magic and the joy of interconnectivity to overcome it (incidentally, though this book was recently published it fails to recognize the impact modern technology is already having on the direction of the future, something I feel any realistic prophecy or future-fiction needs to take into account; but that’s another story all-together). Although this story steers away from that of a nuclear apocalypse, it does raise several good points about the nature of prophecy, which while self-fulfilling is still an extension of our hopes and fears. And is thus intentionally directable. Starhawk’s characters talk often about keeping themselves in the "Good Reality," that head space of positive thinking where no matter what terrors you’re facing if you expect the Universe to respond with goodwill it will, and the smallest of positive events feeds back on itself and brings more positive events into being. Hope as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The inverse is obviously the "Bad Reality" where, like Murphy’s Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and will continue to do so in a spiral of disaster until death begins to look like a better option than waiting for whatever tragedy will happen next.
Of course in "real life" the karmic implications of this are much subtler and intertwined, and one person’s hopes and fears get expressed all mixed up with everyone else’s so it’s hard to tell just where one prophecy leaves off and the next begins. But every little bit helps, a single moment of joy shifts the whole tide of the subconscious just a bit in that direction. So now whenever I feel my imagination seduced by the fears of the dystopic nightmare and I start prophesying the apocalypse, I remind myself to stay in the "Good Reality" and go out and spread positive actions and ideas of hope in whatever small way I can.
3.14.2005
3.13.2005
the protocols are stacked against us
A protocol is essentially an agreement over how to interact in a shared space, a set of rules for engagement that define and bound the interactions. But protocols don't work unless they are respected by all parties entering into the arangement. Our society is based on constantly shifting protocols that lay out how we should behave towards each other and towards/ within the larger social organizations, up to but not limited to the organizations of our whole culture, and the whole world, and the organizations of power that attempt to control the protocols for their own ends. The need to interact, and the need to set up codes for interacting may have always existed, but over time these rules have been bent to less allow us to interact in meaningful and mutually beneficial ways, and more to play out and fulfill age old political, economic, and religious dogmas that are rooted in conflict and concentration of power in the hands of a few. This is antithetical to our being connected, and though conflict is a part of connection, it is a part that attempts to lessen connection and make it not possible for people to connect on their own terms. Our present protocols are not designed to allow people to interact in the ways they want, but force them into prescribed roles which only serve to continue themselves and not allow for personal change in the system. The protocols of any free system would have to evolve from the needs and desires and interactions of all the agents in that system, not from the few who've held power of that for themselves.
But though our present system operates under such constraints we agents still maintain our essential freedom to connect as we see fit, and though it seems like we can not actually change the higher level protocols directly, these are built from the ground up, from our daily and personal rules for interaction. And these we still have our own power over. How do you interact with people when you pass them on the streets, when you have to have economic transactions with them in the stores, when you have to work with them and live with them, and share any space in this world with them? What protocols shape these small interactions? Social stigma, hatred and derision, greed and desire for power over others? Or instead the desire to break through the walls and actually interact as one human with another, to interact on that basic level of beings who are connected from the most direct fact of being here together. Why try and deny that? Why try and make that any harder than it already is? Smiling and saying hello are relatively easy, and offers the start of forming new connected relationships to the world around us. Relationships founded on respect and compassion.
Of course that assumes that people might want to form relationships of respect and compassion, or form relationships at all, and if they have been raised their whole lives on violence and hatred and conflict, what experiences do they have to encourage them to shape their interactions in any other way? I do not know if humans are essentially good, or if given the oppurtunity would more naturally tend towardss mutually beneficial relationships. But I do believe that despite how we might choose to interact with each otehr, we are all connected, even if just on the physical level of all being here on this planet together, and having to live up to that (or from that). And once that is recognized it becomes much harder to ignore your fellow humans and attempt to push them away. There's nowhere left for them to go, and our reality is most intimately shaped by us all being in it together that killing can no longer be an option. That's why it's important to treat everything and everyone, especially those who don't or refuse to see it, in a manner that reaffirms that we indeed are all connected. And even if that oppurtunity for connection is rejected by the otehr at the time, it creates a space for it to come back later, in one form or another.
***
Connection is love. Interaction is intimacy, the merging of two into one across all the levels. Every touch, every word, every glance, every thought serves to unify us with the compassionate force of that essential love, but each also carries the seeds of destruction, of conflict. For love and death, beauty and pain, always walk hand and hand, and all instances that speak of connection also whisper of the conflicting struggle that comes before unity and the rending that comes when things begin to fall apart again. The act of love itself can be the most joyous and direct form of connection, from the most physical level up, but at the same time this act serves as a painful reminder of the transcience of such connections. What wonder and what agony it precludes, and reveals in its awakening like a flower unfurling.
Every act is an act of love, perhaps not on the grossest level, but every interaction we have with the world is intimate and connects us deeper within it. And we have the choice to address that as we see fit can either accept it and give ourselves up to this connection and merging, or reject it and in so doing hold ourselves back from the world in fear that we will either lose our precious egos or die. But that choice is always ours...
But though our present system operates under such constraints we agents still maintain our essential freedom to connect as we see fit, and though it seems like we can not actually change the higher level protocols directly, these are built from the ground up, from our daily and personal rules for interaction. And these we still have our own power over. How do you interact with people when you pass them on the streets, when you have to have economic transactions with them in the stores, when you have to work with them and live with them, and share any space in this world with them? What protocols shape these small interactions? Social stigma, hatred and derision, greed and desire for power over others? Or instead the desire to break through the walls and actually interact as one human with another, to interact on that basic level of beings who are connected from the most direct fact of being here together. Why try and deny that? Why try and make that any harder than it already is? Smiling and saying hello are relatively easy, and offers the start of forming new connected relationships to the world around us. Relationships founded on respect and compassion.
Of course that assumes that people might want to form relationships of respect and compassion, or form relationships at all, and if they have been raised their whole lives on violence and hatred and conflict, what experiences do they have to encourage them to shape their interactions in any other way? I do not know if humans are essentially good, or if given the oppurtunity would more naturally tend towardss mutually beneficial relationships. But I do believe that despite how we might choose to interact with each otehr, we are all connected, even if just on the physical level of all being here on this planet together, and having to live up to that (or from that). And once that is recognized it becomes much harder to ignore your fellow humans and attempt to push them away. There's nowhere left for them to go, and our reality is most intimately shaped by us all being in it together that killing can no longer be an option. That's why it's important to treat everything and everyone, especially those who don't or refuse to see it, in a manner that reaffirms that we indeed are all connected. And even if that oppurtunity for connection is rejected by the otehr at the time, it creates a space for it to come back later, in one form or another.
***
Connection is love. Interaction is intimacy, the merging of two into one across all the levels. Every touch, every word, every glance, every thought serves to unify us with the compassionate force of that essential love, but each also carries the seeds of destruction, of conflict. For love and death, beauty and pain, always walk hand and hand, and all instances that speak of connection also whisper of the conflicting struggle that comes before unity and the rending that comes when things begin to fall apart again. The act of love itself can be the most joyous and direct form of connection, from the most physical level up, but at the same time this act serves as a painful reminder of the transcience of such connections. What wonder and what agony it precludes, and reveals in its awakening like a flower unfurling.
Every act is an act of love, perhaps not on the grossest level, but every interaction we have with the world is intimate and connects us deeper within it. And we have the choice to address that as we see fit can either accept it and give ourselves up to this connection and merging, or reject it and in so doing hold ourselves back from the world in fear that we will either lose our precious egos or die. But that choice is always ours...
the emergence of authentic experience
from Gary Zukav's "The Seat of the Soul":
"Each of us is now being drawn, in one way or another, to that same great vision. It is more than a vision. It is an emerging force. It is the next step in our evolutionary journey. Humanity, the human species, is longing now to touch that force, to shed what interferes with clear contact. Much of the difficulty in doing this lies in the fact that the vocabulary with which to address this new force is not yet born.
In this moment and in this hour of human evolution this proper vocabulary and means of addressing that which longs to transcend religiosity and spirituality and assume the position of authentic power is longing to be born. We need to give that which we as a species is touching for the first time a vocabulary that is not clouded so that it can be identified clearly in the acts and judegments of the human race, so that it can be seen clearly, and not through veils of mystery or mysticism, but simply as the authentic power that moves the force fields of this Earth of ours.
Who among us is an expert on the human experience? We have only the gift of sharing perceptions that hopefully can help those on their journey. There is no such thing as an epert on the human experience. The human experience is an experience in movement and thought and form, and, in some cases, an experiment in movement and thought and form. The most we can do is comment on the movement, the thought and the form, but those commetns are of great value if they can help people to learn to move gracefully, to think clearly, to form - like artists - the matter of their lives."
"Each of us is now being drawn, in one way or another, to that same great vision. It is more than a vision. It is an emerging force. It is the next step in our evolutionary journey. Humanity, the human species, is longing now to touch that force, to shed what interferes with clear contact. Much of the difficulty in doing this lies in the fact that the vocabulary with which to address this new force is not yet born.
In this moment and in this hour of human evolution this proper vocabulary and means of addressing that which longs to transcend religiosity and spirituality and assume the position of authentic power is longing to be born. We need to give that which we as a species is touching for the first time a vocabulary that is not clouded so that it can be identified clearly in the acts and judegments of the human race, so that it can be seen clearly, and not through veils of mystery or mysticism, but simply as the authentic power that moves the force fields of this Earth of ours.
Who among us is an expert on the human experience? We have only the gift of sharing perceptions that hopefully can help those on their journey. There is no such thing as an epert on the human experience. The human experience is an experience in movement and thought and form, and, in some cases, an experiment in movement and thought and form. The most we can do is comment on the movement, the thought and the form, but those commetns are of great value if they can help people to learn to move gracefully, to think clearly, to form - like artists - the matter of their lives."
3.11.2005
to be gendered, or not to be gendered?
Though neither of these blogs are relatively new I thought it would be fitting to mention them here, as they both seem to have a lot of promise. Every Woman is a Goddess and Everyday Avatar both offer a celebration and critique of what it is to be a modern woman and man (respectively), an addressing of gender roles that often go unnoticed in our culture and times. Gender is a big issue, we all have one (or at least one), and culture has too many customs and stereotypes for what that should mean. And beyond that we each have our own take on the subject, because we live in an age where everything is up for debate and personal rediscovery, including the roles we choose to play. Just ask a tranny or cross-gendered being, and they will tell you that the definitions of "male" and "female" are too confined and oversimplified to let them express themselves as they feel. (and where's the transgendered site in the blogosphere?) Many of my friends are androgyn, post-gender, etc, or if they do identify as male or female it is certainly not in any of the traditional ways those roles are picked up and played out. I usually identify as male, but not in the stereotypes of either macho man or weakling, chauvinist or nice guy. There are too many shades in between, and none of them really seem to fit my own personal approach to gender. Maybe I don't even want to approach gender (as it creates yet another devide between humans, like race and class), or just don't think about it enough for it to be an issue.
Either way it's good to see at least a few people willing to address this rationaly. I've seen too many groups go about it all wrong. I remember back to my punk days, when the local anarchist collective would meet and talk for hours on end about sexual abuse and gender roles in our community, which would usually just end up in an enraged round of fingerpointing and name calling. The womyn' group would meet and form witch hunts to oust any guy they suspected of showing any sign of stereotypical male behaviour which might lead them to treat womyn poorly, and the men's group would meet and sit around apologizing to each other for having penises that could lead them to do evil things. Really, how ridiculous; I stopped going after a few meetings, finding the whole thing just a bit too sad and laughable for my tastes. But that's anarchists for you. Currently I live in a community where most of the people are open and honest enough about their feelings and intentions that this kind of thing isn't necessary, and when people do meet to talk about gender it is to talk of how those roles get played out in our lives and in culture, to try and figure out just a little bit more what it means to be gendered.
Either way it's good to see at least a few people willing to address this rationaly. I've seen too many groups go about it all wrong. I remember back to my punk days, when the local anarchist collective would meet and talk for hours on end about sexual abuse and gender roles in our community, which would usually just end up in an enraged round of fingerpointing and name calling. The womyn' group would meet and form witch hunts to oust any guy they suspected of showing any sign of stereotypical male behaviour which might lead them to treat womyn poorly, and the men's group would meet and sit around apologizing to each other for having penises that could lead them to do evil things. Really, how ridiculous; I stopped going after a few meetings, finding the whole thing just a bit too sad and laughable for my tastes. But that's anarchists for you. Currently I live in a community where most of the people are open and honest enough about their feelings and intentions that this kind of thing isn't necessary, and when people do meet to talk about gender it is to talk of how those roles get played out in our lives and in culture, to try and figure out just a little bit more what it means to be gendered.
3.10.2005
a play on theory and practice
in which the fool archetype is invoked, and a funhouse mirror is held up to a surprisingly contraversial issue.
3.09.2005
the shaman as signpost
This was written in response to a recent post on Vortex Egg in which metachor mentions the students he substitute teaches asking him if "magic" really exists. In order to not put himself in potential trouble with the rigidity of social intstitutions he told them it did, but that they would have to look for more info themselves. Here's my take on it:
One off the attributes of the shaman is that while they have access to occluded information and present an available outlet for others to gain access to it, they do not do so by "standing in the middle of road" (as Castaneda puts it), waving a big signboard that says "Secrets of the universe... Free!"
Being on the edge means staying in the shadows, dropping tantalizing hints and subliminal sugestions but not explicitly revealing sources to those who seek for them. A shaman's power is precisely that he controls (or cozens with) forces that others do not. If everyone had such access the shaman would cease to exist, except as a redundant figurehead to a time when information was still a costly and dangerous trade.
Which isn't to say that occult knowledge shouldn't be widely available, but that's what the Net is for for the modern shaman. As someone in the precarious position of power and responsibility your choice of telling these young aspirants that magic is real and that they should search for themselves is perhaps not only the safest bet (to cover your own tracks and tail) but jives with the idea of magical initiation. It is the searching for hidden knowledge that opens the mind to it just as much as the knoweldge itself. If a magical world view was just handed to us, we probably wouldn't recognize it (or want it), but by longing for and searching for it we set ourselves up to recieve it in its full import.
Rumi talks of a man possessed by longing for spiritual enlightenment who wanders out into the desert and falls to his knees crying in prayer. The angels are shocked and ask God why he does not answer the prayers since God is the only thing the man has left to depend on. God responds saying that if he fulfilled that need the man would go back to whatever idle amusements attracted him, but that the passion of his longing is enlightenment itself.
Your student's desire to discover a world of real magick is perhaps the surest sign that they will do so, and on their own if need-be. The shaman's role in that is to mirror that desire and reflect it back in the direction of the right trail to follow, or in the direction that there arre trails to follow if you have the courage and clarity to find them.
One off the attributes of the shaman is that while they have access to occluded information and present an available outlet for others to gain access to it, they do not do so by "standing in the middle of road" (as Castaneda puts it), waving a big signboard that says "Secrets of the universe... Free!"
Being on the edge means staying in the shadows, dropping tantalizing hints and subliminal sugestions but not explicitly revealing sources to those who seek for them. A shaman's power is precisely that he controls (or cozens with) forces that others do not. If everyone had such access the shaman would cease to exist, except as a redundant figurehead to a time when information was still a costly and dangerous trade.
Which isn't to say that occult knowledge shouldn't be widely available, but that's what the Net is for for the modern shaman. As someone in the precarious position of power and responsibility your choice of telling these young aspirants that magic is real and that they should search for themselves is perhaps not only the safest bet (to cover your own tracks and tail) but jives with the idea of magical initiation. It is the searching for hidden knowledge that opens the mind to it just as much as the knoweldge itself. If a magical world view was just handed to us, we probably wouldn't recognize it (or want it), but by longing for and searching for it we set ourselves up to recieve it in its full import.
Rumi talks of a man possessed by longing for spiritual enlightenment who wanders out into the desert and falls to his knees crying in prayer. The angels are shocked and ask God why he does not answer the prayers since God is the only thing the man has left to depend on. God responds saying that if he fulfilled that need the man would go back to whatever idle amusements attracted him, but that the passion of his longing is enlightenment itself.
Your student's desire to discover a world of real magick is perhaps the surest sign that they will do so, and on their own if need-be. The shaman's role in that is to mirror that desire and reflect it back in the direction of the right trail to follow, or in the direction that there arre trails to follow if you have the courage and clarity to find them.
3.08.2005
a springtime that does not yet exist
Stayed up all night, not out of the usual restlessness, but with the explicit intention of using the hyperliminal state fosterd by sleep deprivation to dive a little deeper into the subconscious and put a couple ideas into practice that I have been working on recently. After reading this article on practical magical rituals I decided the best way (or at least an effective way) to go about this would be to create a sigil of my intention and let it work subconsciously to get around my metanoia. So around dawn I smudged a circle and did some elemental yoga to center myself, and then corpse to relax and sink down through the locked flilters of my sleeping mind to the place where nothing is waht it seems and everything is much more meaningful. There I formulated the intention of attempting to emanitize the Spring, by becoming an avatar of its qualities of rebirth, new growth, bountiful love, revolution. The microcosm is the macrocosm, so by being the change I already want to find in myself, the total self-revolution of consciousness, the sesons will turn onwards too (and we can finally have some warm days around here).
Then I drew the sigil and meditated on it in the flame of a candle till I tranced, and then trancended. And then I had breakfast and started my day as if I always was up with the sun, with the sigil lurking around the back of my mind. Around eleven when I realized my focus was utterly shot I passsed out and had some dreams at a much deeper level then any I've had in a long time. I won't go int othe details, but I do recalling showing myself the sigil in the mirror, so it sunk in at least that far, planted like a seed or a timebomb, an exploding flower of potential.
When I woke up it felt like I was starting the day over again as I normally would, but with this other layer of the first waking beneath it, so I couldn't tell if I was actually still asleep. And then with the subconscious open and available for pilfering... I wrote.
Can I talk about Spring now, or is it still too early with the snow falling and the cold not yet gone? Springtime is for lovers and revolutionaries, newborn plants and mother earth and the rebirth of the dying god. Isis dragging Osiris across a frozen nordic tundra, a wrong turn on the journey from shadows to sunlight. Runic interpretation of the word paints spring as this longd for hero's journey of rebirth, and all things follow that tale as the season's turn. The plants, the sun, the animals and us, everything is coming out again, being reborn from the thawing womb of the earth. A metaphysics of archetypal identification, we are the dying god, we are the hero, we are avatars of spring, symptoms of nature springing back up, Perspehone dragging herself by her coattails out of the frozen winters of Hades. If we are thus inflicted with springness what's to say we can not act on that, as if spring were already here ad light and love and sense of radical play we bear forth might bootstrap Spring along with it. As Above, so Below, wherever we spin so the Heavens go.
And what of all the assumptions and taboos that we must break for this to be so? That we are incapable of moving the world, that we are small adn follow blindly after the bigger patterns like flotsam in a tsunami, that we are not each a god capable of enacting our will upon the entire Universe, these beliefs and reality tunnels must die or be cleverly sidestepped. Somewhere deep inside I am sabotaging my own divinity, pulling down my internal temples and screaming that my will to power as a false idol. It is, no graven image can ever represent the true nature of existence, but the symbols are all we have to work with, and the manipulation of he profane int othe sacred the only process left t ogive meaning to the essential chaos of our experiences. It's not my reality if I can't be in its center... if I can't feel... If I can't dance? That phrase probably needs some editing to be really potently meaningful, so Emma Goldman won't roll in her grave; most things I say need editing, but they come out as they will or not at all. Any control otherwise is an illusion, we can only steer ourselves across the depths, not driect the flow of the waves. But my vessel can be tricked out to the max, a full bar and pool table, lounge chairs, fully ergonomic mind controls, a time travel module built into the rudder. This is boating in style, a cybernetic cruise ship sailing from port to import in the chaoseas of existence, stopping occasional to pick up a couple passengers for a wild party where we all get drunk and loose ourselves and howl at the moon, while the surround sound systeem pumps out waves of the latest technorganic dance mix. Give me a couple days and I'll rig this beauty with Icarus's wings and we'll sail to the stars.
I mentioned taboos, taboos! This reawaknening of spring is not a rebirth of the old, but a total transformation of life into full realization. No more hiding, no more restraints, only pure unbridled joy and growth. I want to see the sunflowers forget how tall they onc grew, and kiss the clouds; I want to see people forget the boundaries of law and reality and spill into the streets and each other, an orgy of revolutionary potential. I want to see the old gods torn down and a pedestal built to each one of us in everyone's heart. The total worship of reality, the perfect hymn to becoming. I want to see all beings alive with longing for each other, the external suraces of things attracted into temporary erogneous zones, the perfect medium for expressing the light and love that hides inside. I want to touch and be touched by everything at once, to sing gloriously from rooftops and soulfully from streetcorners. I want the sun to shine as if it knew it might be the last time it did so, and us to feel its warmth as if we knew it too. I want... too many things to name, they bubble up in me like sweet wine. To open up to just one desire is to open up to the desires of the whole world, impossible to cork back up; they flow and flow till we are drowning in it. Drowning in desire, so drink deep, this may be the last day left to enjoy it. The world already ended, time died shortly after God, when Chaos was reborn, and this can only make our every action as meaningful as the lasst action we will ever do. If there's another, what a blessed surprise, a bonus gift from the Universe to you. Enjoy it, and enjoy it; it would be an utter waste of a good moment to do otherwise. This is a springtime that does not yet exist, planted deep in our hearts. Like any plant it needs warmth, water,and fertile ground; light, live, and life to sprout and grow. And when it does, it will bloom into a flower of such beauty that all who see it will weep for joy. An ephemeral blossom who's form is always dying, but once sown will bloom again and again, spreading its petals till they brush the ends of space.
Then I drew the sigil and meditated on it in the flame of a candle till I tranced, and then trancended. And then I had breakfast and started my day as if I always was up with the sun, with the sigil lurking around the back of my mind. Around eleven when I realized my focus was utterly shot I passsed out and had some dreams at a much deeper level then any I've had in a long time. I won't go int othe details, but I do recalling showing myself the sigil in the mirror, so it sunk in at least that far, planted like a seed or a timebomb, an exploding flower of potential.
When I woke up it felt like I was starting the day over again as I normally would, but with this other layer of the first waking beneath it, so I couldn't tell if I was actually still asleep. And then with the subconscious open and available for pilfering... I wrote.
Can I talk about Spring now, or is it still too early with the snow falling and the cold not yet gone? Springtime is for lovers and revolutionaries, newborn plants and mother earth and the rebirth of the dying god. Isis dragging Osiris across a frozen nordic tundra, a wrong turn on the journey from shadows to sunlight. Runic interpretation of the word paints spring as this longd for hero's journey of rebirth, and all things follow that tale as the season's turn. The plants, the sun, the animals and us, everything is coming out again, being reborn from the thawing womb of the earth. A metaphysics of archetypal identification, we are the dying god, we are the hero, we are avatars of spring, symptoms of nature springing back up, Perspehone dragging herself by her coattails out of the frozen winters of Hades. If we are thus inflicted with springness what's to say we can not act on that, as if spring were already here ad light and love and sense of radical play we bear forth might bootstrap Spring along with it. As Above, so Below, wherever we spin so the Heavens go.
And what of all the assumptions and taboos that we must break for this to be so? That we are incapable of moving the world, that we are small adn follow blindly after the bigger patterns like flotsam in a tsunami, that we are not each a god capable of enacting our will upon the entire Universe, these beliefs and reality tunnels must die or be cleverly sidestepped. Somewhere deep inside I am sabotaging my own divinity, pulling down my internal temples and screaming that my will to power as a false idol. It is, no graven image can ever represent the true nature of existence, but the symbols are all we have to work with, and the manipulation of he profane int othe sacred the only process left t ogive meaning to the essential chaos of our experiences. It's not my reality if I can't be in its center... if I can't feel... If I can't dance? That phrase probably needs some editing to be really potently meaningful, so Emma Goldman won't roll in her grave; most things I say need editing, but they come out as they will or not at all. Any control otherwise is an illusion, we can only steer ourselves across the depths, not driect the flow of the waves. But my vessel can be tricked out to the max, a full bar and pool table, lounge chairs, fully ergonomic mind controls, a time travel module built into the rudder. This is boating in style, a cybernetic cruise ship sailing from port to import in the chaoseas of existence, stopping occasional to pick up a couple passengers for a wild party where we all get drunk and loose ourselves and howl at the moon, while the surround sound systeem pumps out waves of the latest technorganic dance mix. Give me a couple days and I'll rig this beauty with Icarus's wings and we'll sail to the stars.
I mentioned taboos, taboos! This reawaknening of spring is not a rebirth of the old, but a total transformation of life into full realization. No more hiding, no more restraints, only pure unbridled joy and growth. I want to see the sunflowers forget how tall they onc grew, and kiss the clouds; I want to see people forget the boundaries of law and reality and spill into the streets and each other, an orgy of revolutionary potential. I want to see the old gods torn down and a pedestal built to each one of us in everyone's heart. The total worship of reality, the perfect hymn to becoming. I want to see all beings alive with longing for each other, the external suraces of things attracted into temporary erogneous zones, the perfect medium for expressing the light and love that hides inside. I want to touch and be touched by everything at once, to sing gloriously from rooftops and soulfully from streetcorners. I want the sun to shine as if it knew it might be the last time it did so, and us to feel its warmth as if we knew it too. I want... too many things to name, they bubble up in me like sweet wine. To open up to just one desire is to open up to the desires of the whole world, impossible to cork back up; they flow and flow till we are drowning in it. Drowning in desire, so drink deep, this may be the last day left to enjoy it. The world already ended, time died shortly after God, when Chaos was reborn, and this can only make our every action as meaningful as the lasst action we will ever do. If there's another, what a blessed surprise, a bonus gift from the Universe to you. Enjoy it, and enjoy it; it would be an utter waste of a good moment to do otherwise. This is a springtime that does not yet exist, planted deep in our hearts. Like any plant it needs warmth, water,and fertile ground; light, live, and life to sprout and grow. And when it does, it will bloom into a flower of such beauty that all who see it will weep for joy. An ephemeral blossom who's form is always dying, but once sown will bloom again and again, spreading its petals till they brush the ends of space.
3.07.2005
ludens et arcanum
"Sorcery
THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO PLAY. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity--those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity--those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes.
Sorcery: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results.
The incremental openings of perception gradually banish the false selves, our cacophonous ghosts--the "black magic" of envy & vendetta backfires because Desire cannot be forced. Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins.
No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass--if it's mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science--not that weak blavatskian crap.
Sorcery works at creating around itself a psychic/physical space or openings into a space of untrammeled expression-- the metamorphosis of quotidian place into angelic sphere. This involves the manipulation of symbols (which are also things) & of people (who are also symbolic)--the archetypes supply a vocabulary for this process & therefore are treated as if they were both real & unreal, like words. Imaginal Yoga.
The sorcerer is a Simple Realist: the world is real--but then so must consciousness be real since its effects are so tangible. The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception defines the world of intoxication--but to sustain it & expand it to include others demands activity of a certain kind--sorcery. Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow-- priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web.
A poem can act as a spell & vice versa--but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature--it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies. It is not a critique but a re-making. It rejects all eschatology & metaphysics of removal, all bleary nostalgia & strident futurismo, in favor of a paroxysm or seizure of presence.
Incense & crystal, dagger & sword, wand, robes, rum, cigars, candles, herbs like dried dreams--the virgin boy staring into a bowl of ink--wine & ganja, meat, yantras & gestures-- rituals of pleasure, the garden of houris & sakis--the sorcerer climbs these snakes & ladders to a moment which is fully saturated with its own color, where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where the body becomes all time, the beloved all space.
The tactics of ontological anarchism are rooted in this secret Art--the goals of ontological anarchism appear in its flowering. Chaos hexes its enemies & rewards its devotees...this strange yellowing pamphlet, pseudonymous & dust-stained, reveals all...send away for one split second of eternity. "
from Hakim Bey's Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism
THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO PLAY. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity--those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity--those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes.
Sorcery: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results.
The incremental openings of perception gradually banish the false selves, our cacophonous ghosts--the "black magic" of envy & vendetta backfires because Desire cannot be forced. Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins.
No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass--if it's mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science--not that weak blavatskian crap.
Sorcery works at creating around itself a psychic/physical space or openings into a space of untrammeled expression-- the metamorphosis of quotidian place into angelic sphere. This involves the manipulation of symbols (which are also things) & of people (who are also symbolic)--the archetypes supply a vocabulary for this process & therefore are treated as if they were both real & unreal, like words. Imaginal Yoga.
The sorcerer is a Simple Realist: the world is real--but then so must consciousness be real since its effects are so tangible. The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception defines the world of intoxication--but to sustain it & expand it to include others demands activity of a certain kind--sorcery. Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow-- priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web.
A poem can act as a spell & vice versa--but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature--it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies. It is not a critique but a re-making. It rejects all eschatology & metaphysics of removal, all bleary nostalgia & strident futurismo, in favor of a paroxysm or seizure of presence.
Incense & crystal, dagger & sword, wand, robes, rum, cigars, candles, herbs like dried dreams--the virgin boy staring into a bowl of ink--wine & ganja, meat, yantras & gestures-- rituals of pleasure, the garden of houris & sakis--the sorcerer climbs these snakes & ladders to a moment which is fully saturated with its own color, where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where the body becomes all time, the beloved all space.
The tactics of ontological anarchism are rooted in this secret Art--the goals of ontological anarchism appear in its flowering. Chaos hexes its enemies & rewards its devotees...this strange yellowing pamphlet, pseudonymous & dust-stained, reveals all...send away for one split second of eternity. "
from Hakim Bey's Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
