an existential? no, a metaphysical ADHD

"The interruption of that flow of continuity that makes the world understandable is sorcery"

- Castaneda

from my despair I call

you turned away from accepting it all as

the dream of a dream today.

that's okay; who can say what a dream is

it came with the wind & decided to stay.


flowting like water or rhythm of islands

on postcards of

"I learned that in sexuality as in everything else, my prison had been made by the gods within the sphere of Saturn, but that outside of Saturn I was truly free. I then realized that only the black magician is truly spiritual for he alone lives beyond the sphere of Saturn"

- Michael Bertiaux, VGW

As a student of the history of philosophy and of the world's esoteric traditions, I've constructed arguments and counter-arguments against myself so many times that i literally don't even trust my self any more. Indeed, as a student of these fields as well as a practitioner of a number of esoteric technologies, i've come to realeyes that there is not i I but many i's, which sometimes ceaselessly multiply.

Now, whenever i come to make a decision, i always ask my various selves, 'which of my i's made that decision, and why did the others delegate you to decide?'

"The Empire never ended"

- PKD

I showed her what i really am. What we all really are, in part. I showed her the primordial rage and wrath, the elemental, otherworldly fury that is buried in our collective soul & forever beyond reason. & by using words she might herself use in a different context, i showed her that she was that too. Because that's what i find so esoterically interesting about her, while we're on the topic: her ability to access precisely those kinds of energies..

I would be surprised if she wasn't shaken by the experience. Even i am..

But the thing is, it's not in the words. It's in the way one sort of hurls them with certain emotional charges connected to or embedded in them. This in the briefest summary is magic: the ability to send forth emotional charges powerful and precise enough to achieve actual things in the world. & to close the magical circle, as it were, the most effective energies I've found for these purposes are precisely those primordial, elemental forces

"We do not need to work with people at all. We work at the level of the transcendental Id and there we make all of our advanced attacks and moves"

- Bertiaux, VGW

A memorable fancy


- seeker: You have written that "the advanced adept has already destroyed the very concept of self, at least in their own experience", but is this not antithetical to the very spirit of your vaunted left hand path?


- ll: we've expressed many views, which is true to the Mystery which looks different from various perspectives; & yet arguably the most important part of the process is for you to take these views and reconcile them with your own path. In any case, the masters are almost anonymous in arguing that the fragile fiasco that is the average person's ego must be shattered like an egg-shell at some point or another along the way to make way for something immeasurably greater, so the original statement is technically accurate, even if it doesn't tell the whole story.






Or


These are not simply words and images. In fact, this is a magical machine intended to be as an opening to certain states of awareness somewhat beyond the ordinary. We seek to construct gateways to particular energies or entities, thus providing them with the means to access our world and to bring about what they would like to happen. The reader may want to participate in this little game or they may not but, if not, the reader should know that they do not really matter. Indeed, from the perspective of these energies or entities, the reader does not even exist.



Or


We've shown you our gospel, our grimoire, our book of magickal revelation; now show us yours

& dreams shall flesh

"All I can say to you," don Juan said, "is that a warrior is never available; never is he standing on the road  waiting to be clobbered. Thus he cuts to a minimum his chances of the unforeseen. What you call accidents are,most of the time, very easy to avoid, except for fools who are living helter-skelter."

"It is not possible to live strategically all the time," I said. "Imagine that someone is waiting for you with a  powerful rifle with a telescopic sight; he could spot you accurately five hundred yards away. What would you  do?"

Don Juan looked at me with an air of disbelief and then broke into laughter.

"What would you do?" I urged him.

"If someone is waiting for me with a rifle with a telescopic sight?" he said, obviously mocking me.

"If someone is hiding out of sight, waiting for you. You won't have a chance. You can't stop a bullet."

"No. I can't. But I still don't understand your point."

"My point is that all your strategy cannot be of any help in a situation like that."

"Oh, but it can. If someone is waiting for me with a powerful rifle with a telescopic sight I simply will not  come around"



- castaneda





The black magician will work to establish esoterico-energetic contact with spirits/energies through their own inner dialogue. If the call is made in the proper way, it will only be a matter of time before a response is received from the other side...








The magician has learned to manipulate (a word which, in another time, was not so sinister; or so my reading indicates) the air, or currents, water, or flows, fire, or bursts, and earth, the matrix (also primarily used in the older sense) and foundation. They have learned to hear the secrets whispered through the skulls of the dead


Or


The magician benefits nature, & so nature rewards the magician bountifully


Or


The magician is a means of access for all sorts of otherworldly energies


Or?


The master knows that these are all ways of saying the same thing

An aphoristic interlude

The Master is indifferent to every energy




everything that is averse to my to my taste is what I will seek out & embrace





The Master is a devil from another dimension shaped like a person





I've become so good at wearing these masks that i often forget there's something behind them; & then the play kind of reveals itself.. in a strange way

The following is a selection, translated and rearranged, from the first volume of Friedrich Marby’s Runen-Bücherei. This must be prefaced with a disclaimer, as portions of his work are concerned with, as so much from the pre-WWII period was, racial consciousness. There is, among all peoples, a certain class which subscribes to the belief in their own racial superiority. These thoughts, although falling often under the epithet of race do not preclude religious or other forms of sectarian claims to supremacy, including tyrannical ‘science’ that blinds people to the Mystery, and an iniquitous system that enslaves to temporal concerns. All classes of people, all groups can fall prey to the attempt to raise themselves above all others. In as much as a person finds their identity, their sense of self, in some group construct, invariably inherited from the past, just so much are they incapable of being a true individual. Without little doubt, we inherit certain tendencies from the past - but we have a choice as to what ideas, customs, habits, thoughts we choose to take hold of and attempt to develop in a life’s work. People are in general insecure social animals who follow the track or groove they are placed into at birth, by and large. It takes a certain type of courage and curiosity to reach out and attempt to lay hold of what lies beyond the well worn paths of though and deed. We should not hesitate to attempt to salvage from the dark past things that are worth remembering, and we should remember that all peoples, indeed all people, have their own particular knowledge from which we can learn something worthwhile. It is also worthwhile to remember that tendency of specific groups to attempt to claim that they alone have the truth, that they alone are chosen, that they alone should have the right to determine the ways of life and of death. Now, some of what Friedrich Marby had to say:





Directions, distances, angles, tensions, and currents can be caused by definite body positions, sounds and movements. Thereby we can materialize and de-materialize, shape, transform and dissolve what we want, according to the mass of our knowledge and ability following the direction and firmness of our will.



All living things are the fruit and product of the fields that surround them. Still further: in living creatures, individual spatial fields create structures, apparatus, bridges to connect with each other. Living beings are the organs of the fields of space which are striving towards each other. Living beings are transmitting and receiving stations for the power fields of heaven and earth.



Certain spaces and forms create antenna and transmitter organs. Certain directions, angles, tensions, currents, and movement rhythms build these organs - the bodies of metals, stones, plants, animals, people. All the values ​​which we find in the sphere of space become matter, form, and activity in the bodies of living creatures and in the events of their environment. What we call any thing is the particular material form created by the predominance of certain spatial values.



Every body reverts into rays and waves when it is no longer able to serve the essence of life as a living being, as an antenna and transmitter for rays and waves. The rays and waves themselves later become, when they are not bound again, voltage, angle and directional values ​​of the different spaces.



The spatial sphere of world phenomena has created living creatures as the expression and tool of life and being. It preserves the forms of the creatures for a certain time, develops the forms, builds organs in which life can become conscious. - Can - It is only then, however, when the human being deliberately grasps the currents of life and begins to live fully consciously.



The life circle, the spherical space, made by every living being with its consciousness is different in size. Most people stick to the ground, and will not be so free. They eat, drink, sleep, work and "plant" themselves or not, but they do not pray as life requires, they do not spread their consciousness, they do not embed their consciousness into the other spaces of the spatial sphere, the antennae of their souls, to the heart of Mother Earth and nor to the over-world-space of the Father of all worlds; They do not speak with their spirits down to the deepest depth, nor to the greatest height, and thus do not come into eternal life. They vegetate, and are exposed to all environmental influences and die as if they had never been.



Man can, however, carry rays and waves from the force field of the earth, as well as from the force field of heaven, as well as through thinking, and thus make himself as healthy and efficient as possible and rejuvenated. Moreover, man has himself in his hand to incorporate in himself the knowledge of the nature of the effective forces, and further to gain clarity about his being. Thus he is able to recognize the gods as well as the primordial god, as far as the organism of his antenna and his basic disposition permit him, and so much more if he refines this organism and makes him capable of absorbing every and all waves of any oscillation and wavelength process.

 "Hell is other people"

- Jean-Paul Sartre

There is only one so-called 'secret', really, & those who are told it (mistakenly) think that it is so fucking obvious that it can't be all that important, & not too much of a secret neither. Wrong. It is by far the most effective technique that the magician could possibly deploy. Simply stated, this secret is 'always conserve energy'

[the fall into the house of mirrors]

society is like a hall of mirrors, where people are the mirrors. In their eyes, you see reflections of yourself, but is that punk ass bitch really you? Generally not; people mostly see what they want to see. To achieve their agenda, fulfill their objectives. Which makes you the object.

It only feels right when there's nothing between my ears
like a black whole ready to receive
transmissions

zeuge: of light & time

psst. let me tell you about the biggest con there is, viz. "it is what it is"

you couldn't possibly understand where I went, what happened to me. I went to places people aren't supposed to go. or at least, they aren't meant to come back from...







One of the most profoundly powerful & disturbing experiences I've had in "heightened awareness" is this confrontation with the phenomenological subject, the 'watcher'. 





I think this might be because this is one of, if not the most real ways in which we are divine. confrontation is here used somewhat loosely of course, as this seems essentially impossible, although one can take various 'postures' with respect to the watcher, such as in deep meditation, sort of watch the watcher from a certain angle if you will. this might be because it is not an object at all, but a black hole, a link to another dimension, etc.

"people don't know how to look at the back of their own eyelids"

- Terrence McKenna

Somewhere it is written: “In God We Trust”. The we that are me trust in myself. But what of all the other we’s out there? How do they feel? Who or What is their God? Thoth or the magnanimous Jesus, mayhems? Oh well. All I can tell is that something is there and that it changes. 



My body is not me but it passes in phases thrilling my nerves with never ending pulsating sensations. However in my mind the local is ever at the fore. Mercury, the moon just dots cycling in eternity as I pass these scenes. What, however, does it all mean - if anything? 




I guess only time will tell, but then again maybe we will have to speak that truth into the emptiness. Lines in space passing into infinity with three eyes pointed always at an ever distant triangle. Two ears, one mouth - listen twice before you speak. 

What is that smell that reminds me of… the force of what is not consciously perceived. Abandon all hope ye that enter here, ignorant of geometry. Without plan the trees split and divided into warring factions that may as well be one. Yet ye must eat! And whence from dost though eat but the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Cut down one tree and see only your good fortune spring fast upon thee. Never mind the past, cast your shadow before you as you spell out your life. 



The future is presaged in the past - the closer or larger a thing the less a/effect it has. Always the subtle determines things when it is a question of stability. Always on the knives’ edge of those lines passing through space, still spinning, dancing from one blade to another until those blades will sing, spinning around your central sun.

Throw yourselves off and into the poison paths - disequilibriate and find back your center. Off into infinity you stare at the back of your own head - you are looking into your own mind as the other stares back at you with cold demise. 


Vision, ether, is easy - it is hard to change the face of the body, your earth. Can you feel the strain against the staring pull? Ever downwards, it strives to reduce all to the primordial, undistinguished, one dead sea. Against gravity the force of life works itself out into the surrounding space where it might find new novelty for its amusement. 



To know gravity, is to know the nature of death. Feel the pull and push to and to not move. How do we move? Watch extensively, to see from and to where a thing will be. Not straight lines, but curves show their flowering faces.

If the mystery is true, and that which is within is like that which is without - then those planets tracing loops with the sun way out there have their internal representation correcting the native in its course. 




I am the center of the universe - their motions outside contend and conform to the motions within. They can be felt. Quite quiet. Turn off your tongues and listen merely to the sounds that spew forth from the skies as well as from our fellow beasts.

Smoking’ gun mirrors where is my end, I’m beginning again. Oh well, what’s one more round of beers when this is my friend? I suppose I’ll raise a glass to eternity at last, at least I’ll come back again until I escape that deadly grasp of this planet’s past. Give me a rifled path to freedom and I will ascend without wait to the bright above. No straight lines, He said. The form in our cells is spitting close to that of this space, no coincidence - make haste. 





Slowly, and without restraint.

"man is capable of evolving. The grand task of sorcerers is to bring forth the idea that, in order to evolve, man must first free his awareness from its bindings to the social order. Once awareness is free, intent will redirect it into a new evolutionary path."

"Do you think sorcerers will succeed in that task?"

"They have already succeeded. They themselves are the proof. To convince others of the value and import of evolving is another matter."

- Castaneda

the magician places herself firmly on the side of the future, thereby becoming invincible. these are not just mere words. there is a technique whereby one can defy gravity itself: cleanse oneself of the dross, the energetic deadweights holding them back from becoming all that they can be. thus do they become light enough to move with the waves of time itself, into the future

"what made human beings into sorcerers was their capacity to perceive energy directly as it flows in the universe"

- castaneda

castaneda's seeing is simply perceiving energy directly, which relates directly to surfaces & depths..Interiority as time & exteriority as space





the advanced adept has already destroyed the very concept of self, at least in their own experience. their revolution is not against a person or group, but against certain aspects of reality as such..

the default mode of (socialized) existence literally has no future. it is instead a dance with ghosts, a tired repetition of worn forms in which the future is not simply the unforeseen, but the impossible.


in order to live authentically one must instead have a detailed grasp of the energetic structures of their own life world, so that when novelty, a literally alien structure manifests itself, being a harbinger of the future itself as well as a sign of the changes to be expected therein, one is fully prepared and well able to grasp at it with both hands.




& to follow it.




into a new world...

'we don't know what a body can do'

- baruch spinoza, 17th c.

'we still don't know what a body can do'

- gilles deleuze, 20th c.

& the air, no, space itself shook, and something changed irreversibly

you can be the hero of your own picaresque novel

"You are having a taste of infinity. I know it, because I have been in your shoes. You want to run away, to plunge into something human, warm,
contradictory, stupid, who cares? You want to forget...But infinity won't
let you. It has gripped you in its merciless clutches."

- castaneda

through deep meditation & other methods of introversion, one can alter the very structure of time itself


in dreams, it seems, the magician can examine their life situation from multiple angles, not objectively per se but from different perspectives, which opens the door for them to make changes necessary to improve their life situation





priest(esse)s of a forgotten religion that existed before there was time 




the Timelords

the big con ii: "she's surface all the way down"

A tapestry and a failed transmission. In the layers you will find fake nails, 3 fingers, and trees and flowers in a city that stays warm through winter but is slowly degrading in spite of lush appearances. History claims its victims slowly. a gate. Subtle too subtle...but one can never be too subtle.

"I only bet on my skills against the skills of other people"

- from Lucky You

the magician doesn't just pull a short con & walk away. or they do, but that's not the big picture. the big picture is that the magician lives whole 'lives' in character, for the con.




finesse it.





the magician defeats their opponent by giving them exactly what they want.









& that's how the cunning woman, the woman in disguise, became the first magician

"Nice and slowly...
Beauty is a destructive angel,
how could anything that looks so good be so bad?
But there is no angel as destructive as their greed,
in the end she gets them all
They think they can handle her,
but greed is the only snake that can not be charmed"

- from Revolver

magic? it happens all the time. it happens every day. &, like anything else that can be said to exist, there are ways of attracting it.




the path to power is nothing but sustained focus

“Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.”

-Tom Wolfe

everybody thinks they know the magician.




nobody knows the magician, man.








not even the magician knows the magician.

"Conquer your fear, and you'll conquer your opponent"

- from Redbelt

"Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. You know the escape. You know the escape. Breathe. Breathe. There's always an escape. There is no situation you cannot escape from, no situation you cannot turn to your advantage"

- from Redbelt

"you had your whole life to prepare for this moment. Why aren't you ready?"

- from Spartan

There is a certain type of magick trick that can only be taught by a Master, and it is directly from a Master that one must learn it. Indeed, it can be said that it is precisely by mastering this trick that one oneself becomes a Master.




What is this trick? We like to call it "how to win without even playing in the first place".

"In the mind. That's where the battle's won"

- from Spartan

"The story says that after knocking on the door of that man we've been talking about, and having no success with him, the spirit used the only means available: trickery. After all, the spirit had resolved previous impasses with trickery. It was obvious that if it wanted to make an impact on this man it had to cajole him. So the spirit began to instruct the man on the mysteries of sorcery. And the sorcery apprenticeship became what it is: a route of artifice and subterfuge. Don Juan told me that if we apply his story to a modern setting we had the case of the nagual, the living conduit of the spirit, repeating the structure of this abstract core and resorting to artifice and subterfuge in order to teach. The first thing a nagual does with his prospective apprentice is to trick him. That is, he gives him a jolt on his connecting link to the spirit."

- Carlos Castaneda, the Power of Silence

The confluence of having and being, as concepts, resonate in the child, who seeing other as a not self in their being wishes to bring that alien part of itself into harmony - and what better way to be at peace with a thing, than to be that thing.





This unfortunately brings upon untoward associations when taken in the extreme. Two of the polarities that resonate the most between the young child and the untold other are those represented in the psyche as animals, and as other people. Coming into association, mentally, via local proximity these self-active concepts become a part of us.

As not self, we ponder what it is like to be the self for another active creator. The skin or empty assemblage that embodies this delving into the other are all those perceptions which go to make up that experience as and being our true self. As the mind enrobes itself, however feebly, it dons some aspect of that other being that will remain with it - for a time.




As the soul enclothes itself in thought with the psychic bodies of both concept of being and an imagined sensory skin, it blazes a trail through pre-existence, prior to materialization. A trail once beaten becomes easier to tread - a well beaten one well trafficked. By writing lines of thought inside one's being one is making oneself, and a large part of who we become are the types that we imaginatively put on. Every thought is, at its base, a loop and series of loops. As mind passes through the realm of imaginable possibility, as it rests on a concept - it expands that concept, in a very real sense.

All the attendant images open up with it, and as it spins round in one's head - it lasts. It is easier to open a thought, a book, than to close one. One must deal with one's thoughts with violence and finesse. Associative complexes can only be broken via reassociation - and this is active work: watching and precognizing one's thoughts so that they can be redirected down the righteous path one so chooses. Thoughts as well as events are foreshadowed, you can feel them coming - they have their own feeling to them that begins to well up in waves and blankets you as it passes you by. Like surfing, they must be ridden, and as in tai chi they must be smoothly directed so that you might move in the direction you desire.

As people we move not just in the external world which we 'know' exists apart from us but also in a world of ideas and stories very much an externally existing meta-entity which we run through with varying degrees of skill. They are both linked, but the operational methods that pertain to either are significantly different in their respective normal orientation.

the big con i: 3 card man

the set-up

the truth is that we have not properly understood power

everything you need to become a master magician is here now. so. what's holding you back. time? it's true that time is the only real opponent of the magician, that the magician's survival depends on achieving ever greater things in steadily diminishing periods of time. perhaps, but perhaps not. if it is not time that is holding you back, then maybe it's focus

the hook

"at the end of the day, this is a game of focus: attention is like a spotlight, and our job is to dance in the darkness"

- from Focus

the magician, to become a (better) magician, needs two things. time. and focus, or attention, an almost tangible form of energy (or so Rupert Sheldrake argues in The Sense of Being Stared At). the magician accumulates power by shifting their attention in a certain way, and moving their opponent's attention to specific things at certain points in the game, the goal being to obtain a set amount or a given kind of attention, which in this sense we will term power.



the basic mechanics of this game is much easier to describe in outline that it is either to actually undertake in practice or even apply to specific circumstances. certainly, when one is losing, it is against all natural impulses to stay in the game

"you wanna win the hand, you gotta stay in till the end"

- from House of Games

after all, it involves the magician investing energy and indeed seeming to lose it, at least at first, in order to grab their opponent's attention, then cause them to invest energy as well. this step can and should be repeated as often as needed to secure the magician's set amount or given kind of energy. it is only then that the magician takes what they need, by seemingly winning against all the odds.




"it's called a confidence game. Why, because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine."

- from House of Games

just like in a game of three card monte.




& that's how the magician became the first three card man

the tale, or roping the mark

"as far as I could see, people were always conning each other to get what they wanted. We even con ourselves. Pay attention to that, 'cause we're all conning ourselves in one way or another, just to get through life."

- from American Hustle

"the trick to not feeling cheated is to learn how to cheat."

- from The Brothers Bloom

"it seems to me that in the end, the perfect con is where each one involved gets just the thing they wanted"

- from The Brothers Bloom

but some of these self-righteous, these who claim they care about people will find all this unappealing, even 'evil'.



very well, let me put it to you this way - what if, in some alternate universe/reality, you have already achieved all that you dreamed of, and even more besides?



and what if the only thing standing between that you and this one, is this one? what if you are your own worst enemy, in a very literal sense?



perhaps, then, life is a con game after all. it is the game of conning your present self to do what is necessary to become the self that has obtained all that you presently desire, and more.

"I wanna show you something. This Rembrandt here? People come from all over the world to see this. It's a fake. People believe what they want to believe. 'Cause the guy who made this was so good, that it's real to everybody. Now, who's the Master,  the painter, or the forger?"

- from American Hustle

where's the red queen?

the wire

Western technological science is said to begin with Newton's laws, which consider nature to be static. Eg. Bodies at rest, stay at rest. Etc.

New science would begin from a basis recognizing nature as a dynamic, upon which basis must be determined the method wherewith motion is able to simulate rest. (Apparently various forms of confined motion, ie. cyclic)

Nature is perpetual motion.

But for the last, this is for the most part recognized and known. The only question is as to what has been omitted or passed by, by building on a faulty foundation, and what could be built by beginning with a new, and yet old, corner stone.

The previous description of the choice of center for the local planetary-sun system is an illustration of the equivalency of the static and the dynamic that arises from the relativity of motion. This formal equivalency allows some freedom in choosing what we will consider to be static and unmoving or to be dynamic. This sort of choice can also be made in various aspects of the human condition and experience. 

"A wise man once told me... there's only one rule in this world, a small question that drives all success. The more a man invests in that question, the more powerful that man will become: What's in it for me?"

- from Revolver

the shut-out

the trick is not to win a hand or two while losing dozens. this is what is called luck. rather, the challenge is to this into a long-term strategy for winning overall. this is what is called success.

hey, listen to me. yeah, you, listen up. you're going to be miserable your whole life, and get even more so every day. you'll wish you could reconsider, that you could choose not survival, but mastery

either this statement or the next is not true.



it's better not to fool oneself. the magician is a master con. a confidence trickster. but the magician doesn't play for peanuts, or big bucks for that matter. not if they're very good. the magician plays for energy, for time, for power. and the master magician plays for their very soul.

there is something archetypal and sublime about all this, the feeling that the magician has, through their esoteric efforts, fallen into a game that is eternal, a grand battle between two sides, neither of which is wrong. or right

"One thing I've learned.....in every game and con there's always an opponent, and there's always a victim. The trick is to know when you're the latter, so you can become the former."

- from Revolver

the magician is the outsider, even to humanity itself. this is the magician's edge - and also why they are inherently a con 

"grifters got an irresistible urge to beat a guy who's wise"

 - from The Grifters

Rejoice, magicians & embrace your fate! For you will never be normal, no matter how hard you try. You are not of the fallen. Even if you'd like to be.

"- what do you sell, anyway?
- self-confidence"

 - from The Grifters

the three card man only excels at one thing, but this he does exceptionally, and I mean exceptionally, well.

In near unanimity the ancients proposed that reality is composed of the four fundamental elements of fire, air, water and earth. The intermediate two were thought to originate from the interaction of the two primaries and to allow for the interaction of the diametrically opposed warm and dry, and cold and wet, by the appropriate permutation of qualities.



That air and earth were considered consequents of the interaction between fire and water is indicated by literal descriptions in texts, as well as suggested by the fact that the signs for air and earth are constructed from those for fire and water by the addition of a horizontal mid-line in their respective triangles.



Solomon's seal is a symbolic representation of the four elements with the opposition of fire and water most evident, yet joined by the more hidden consequents of air and earth. Depictions of Solomon's seal can be found where the symbol of Sol, of gold, accompanies the standard depiction by being placed in the central hexagon. The meaning of the alchemical symbol for the sun, as with all alchemical symbols and indeed all things, depends on the context. In the current case this symbol is found to exist in, between, and because of the creative polarity of fire and water and, as these two elements are considered to be the creators of all things, it may be said that the symbol for Sol in this case, and certainly in others, represent the sum of all created things: the One, the transcendental Unity, Perfection.



In a more mundane sense the symbol of Sol represents light, the relation between the sun and light being obvious. It is not surprising then that this quivering, active fluid of the ancients found similar expression in the old conception of the aether as the substrate for both light and all other things.

relate the fall to cumming such that the fall occurs if a man ejaculates

he moves by cumming. not in space or time, per se. but energetically and relative to the lines of others, their habits, energy levels, rising and falling with the seasons. 

Considering both fire and water more directly, we are told they are of two qualities each; respectively warm and dry, cold and wet. Fire is considered to be the agens or activity, water the patiens or matter. Taking their physical counter parts and the interactions between those two we can develop some idea of how the two fundamentals might work upon each other. 



Forgetting for now that light accompanies what we usually consider to be fire we find the most basic contingent of this element to be heat. Indeed this is shown by one of the qualities ascribed by the ancients to fire, which is in no way surprising. As a superlative heat sink, water may thus rightly be called cold. 



The action of heat and cold on water cause rarefaction and crystallization, states of varying solidity as the units of water individualize or collectivize. The boiling over may be said to cause the appearance of air, the freezing the appearance of earth. 



Here we now have some idea as to the two other qualities ascribed to fire and water. When the ancients thought of dryness it was the deserts and their sands that most prominently presented themselves. The primary quality of sand is its composition by distinct particles, and thus that distinction seems to be what the quality dry would refer to. Wetness would then be a corresponding lack of individuality.

(in other words:)

in exchanging energy with the spirits, the magician must seek to strike a strategic balance between personal power and mediumship, by which the magician receives useful information from the spirits. however, in order to obtain this, the magician parts with a portion of power, offering it to the spirits in exchange for seeing things that no human can otherwise see, knowing what cannot be conventionally known.

the balance is important, for what does it benefit a person to know everything that will happen all day long before it does, if they can't really do anything about it?

the sting

con koan: if fire is a card, and water is a card, where is the third card? *

(*: answer at the end:)

bodymind complexi ties ii: toward an esoterico-energetic Vitruvian man

i:        implanting my platonic solid in your vesica piscis

"For a long time in the West we've managed to forget the original meaning of the word 'philosophy': love of wisdom, not the love of endlessly talking and arguing about the love of wisdom. And what's even sadder is the way we've managed to persuade ourselves that we haven't forgotten anything"

- Peter Kingsley

collective id

resonate



golden section

divine proportion

attune



platonic solids

align



137.5

you're alive



& even death is a fibonacci golden spiral breath

ii:        a black magickal interlewd¹, or: how I learned to stop hurrying & enjoy mercury retrograde

& then you enter my sphere
sift & stir &
fall away dirt

who am I, really? is what you should be asking

text 

q: how can we understand the wei wu wei, the acting without acting of the Taoists today?

a: there is a way to know the future, and it is to align with the future.The future is not, after all, a place, but a trajectory that is actualized, being the resultant of other vectors. the magician's task, then, which is demanding but far from impossible, is to clear the rubble, the flak so that they can see these vectors in action, and can follow them into the future.

q: how can one improve in life without compromising the advancement of others, or how can one move up in life without actively causing others to move down?

a: there is only one martial art, but it is not physical in nature; indeed, its adherents hold that to enter into open conflict is already to lose. this method² is really rather simple. In the spring and summer, sow, and in fall and winter reap. by allowing others into their sphere, the black magicians³ obtain a 'lock' on their psychosomatic coordinates. the magician's servitors or allied spirits are then released into these coordinates and they work to, as Bertiaux might put it, 'take over all their magical computers'⁴. this approach is also fractal, relating to the beginning of the week and its end as well as spring and fall respectively.

commentary

ah, the encounter with Death. now we're getting somewhere! Death is powerful and omnipresent, and thinks of mortals as flies.


but the magician is different. Death must seduce, entice the magician.


& those who know know that Death does not like to discriminate, but likes to be on top.

---

1: ah, yes, the so-called 'black magickal interlewd'. well, for one thing, there's nothing black about it: poking fun at that old strategy of labeling powerful (i.e. potentially 'dangerous') esoteric methods with warnings and whatnot. I think we're way past that culturally.


2: the other irony here is that its not really a technique at all; it just tends to do itself. if one is more disciplined and what Castaneda calls 'tight' energetically, streamlined with what is superfluous cleared away, they just tend to move 'faster' than others energetically. I'm sure you've encountered this too: you start learning a new 'game' and soon enough, you're further ahead at it than someone else (it might be useful here to refer to the movie Revolver and the previous legbalodge post that discussed it). now, my own experience is that this experience/technique moves cyclically and is modular; i.e., the beginning of the week is always uphill, slower, you have less of a sense that you know what's going on, as it were. same with the summer and perhaps especially spring, when there's high novelty.


3: a black magician is one who is not employed by a 'higher power', but rather a free agent, if you will

4: the 'esoteric' aspect of the technique: it seems to me that once this energetic clearing/tightening is done, there is a sort of 'infusion', from what the vuduists, spiritists call the spirits and what someone like Castaneda might call the nagual - there is an energetic vector that enters the equation, so to speak, from 'outside'..it is this that is really the guarantor of success in the technique

iii:        on time, and the radiant heavenly city

The night is still long and the watchmen are few. Will
the magnum opus be carried forward to a new stage toward its
completion? Who will be the alchemists, the Gnostics of the
future?

-Stephan A. Hoeller, the gnostic jung

Follow your gut. Following the advice of Alice Bailey, I have begun listening to, talking with really, my abdominal cavity. It truly is a reservoir of great energy - the great store house of the lower human, where feelings still reign supreme. The center of reception, the solar plexus. Listen - I’m really not ready to be swept up in that current of humanly emotion. Listening, right now, just isn’t my thing - maybe one day. In any case this cycle of expression seems to be the dominant one on this planet, at this time - whereas I am, it would seem, predominantly cerebral to the point of having excluded, to a great degree, the other centers of embodied activity: crown and brow, brow and throat, throat and gut, gut and star, star and heart. The major centers are what I seem to be working on at the moment. A little bit of swimming in Aesch Majim - pushing around the waters, but not much; I really miss the times when I’ve had the chance to dive right in and swirl around.


So, the gut broadcasts and the plexus receives. So I’m thinking maybe I can set up a feedback loop between my diaphragm and my bowels leading directly to a return to awesomeness (in my own perceptions, that is). That is yet to be seen...

Long time no throwbacks

We are all, at all times, continuously broadcasting outwards and receiving inwards from the various centers - from entire body really, but the organs and regions each have their own peculiarities. Even if we don't know it this is all going on to one degree or another. Others, assumed to be less in tune with such things, seem to notice what and when I have sent out some feeling or series of word embodied thoughts. They seem to, perhaps mainly unconsciously, respond in kind with a thought, look, or slipped near silent utterance. It is indeed possible to pick up on these quiet or silent responses - more direct access, for me, seems limited to vague generalities about state and character; I've yet to find the keys for attuning to another's internal dialogue, which, however, does appear to occasion itself yet rarely. Success in these things then, for me, seems to arise in the combination of a calm receptivity and a known transmission.

I believe I've said this before, but it has begun to impress itself on me once again as I return to the more hidden things. When one's state is changed, one encounters what more pertains to that state. In my experience, this is predominantly a consideration of the environment of humans I come into contact with. Working in a large city, differences in the 'random' collection of agents whom I pass on the street are apparent. It wouldn't be clear at all that anything was different if always the same set of characters made up these interludes in my routine, though even living in relatively small towns I have found the milieu of different moments sympathetic with my state (more hostile/annoying elements included).

@tune

"There is a wave-motion in the psychic
envelope of our experience, a constant
movement; yet this movement is like the
movement of water, or the movement of waves,
and yet it has its own mode of expression -
its own rhythm or 'beat'..."


-Michael Bertiaux

its vibrations or rhythms






within them are planes, surfaces, quantities




but the oscillations, which are the


more challenging to perceive,






supersede

& how do we know this? simple. changing
quantities, surfaces, changes nothing in our
life. Or if it does, it's a minor and trivial
change.






changing the rhythm, which is not
at all easy, changes things in our existence
so much that we can say without exaggeration
that it makes one into a different person

it is a war, you see

vibe versus quantity.

those black magicians

Even though the external world in which we (usually) act is a three dimensional ensemble of objects, they are all actually processes or (at least) four dimensional objects. And this includes our own beings, and we know this although it may tend to be only a background noise. Yet is this four dimensional world indeed static or must it have its own form of time to which it is beholden, where timelines are like string in the wind. Time as we experience it is full of recurrences leading to suggest that time itself is cyclical in nature; that there is something fundamental in the nature of time that leads to repetition.




There seems to be a force compelling the existence of an ever changing present sandwiched between the two vast spaces of the past and future - a surface of contact between two four dimensional spaces. We can view this surface, which is also a three dimensional volume, as moving along a track at each point presenting a section of a static four-fold reality. We can also view this surface as itself being static with higher objects passing through from either side, future or past.




What we see in our present reality is the collision or interaction of the past and future. The force of change, or time, seems most often to be a pressure coming from 'behind', from the past, but it may just as well be a suction from the future. This order may be reversed or they could be both either of the two alternatives. Pressure and suction, although some of their effects agree, are two different things. Suction takes from a large volume and compacts, while pressure give from a smaller volume and expands. This distinction can be easily discerned from either one's breath or a fan. Hold your hand in front of your mouth while you inhale and exhale, or hold it on either side of a fan, and you will notice a qualitative difference - yet the amount of air moved is the same.




If current scientific big bang cosmology is correct, then the force of the past is a pressure - and this is all they see, yet instead there may be a pulling from the future which is qualitatively different. If we see time as inherently cyclical we need not choose one or the other. Imagine time as a torus, a doughnut shape. A push in one direction is then very much also a pull. If we imagine the torus as cinched then there is both a divergence from the 'beginning' of time and convergence to the 'end' of time. From the analogy with our breath, these forces would manifest as different qualities in our three dimensional present. Perhaps, however, one of the two is truly the original motion.

what does this have to do with esotericism?
simple.
these so-called rhythms are themselves definitive of the esoteric




they are the very texture, structure of
space-time-mind





These rhythms are neither outside nor inside, but rather interact and converse. .

Or at least they should

what interests the esotericist is the nature of these rhythms, which can be 'synced' to various wavelengths, moods, vibes, or spirits, gods, or what you will

Time is best felt through the sensation of moving bodies, including our own. Different forms of bodily activity give rise to different sensations of time. Tai chi or Aikido for example highlight its fluid nature, while a more contact based martial art such as karate highlight its punctuation by distinct events.




Time independent of the body is best experienced in busy places such as a train station. Look at an unmoving point but focus on the entire visual field. Relax your mind and you will begin to notice the echoes of the past in the form of trails 'behind' objects and people. While performing the exercise you will also come to feel the energetic environment more clearly and it is also possible the you will notice time begin to get sticky. You will notice a backwards flow and instants of time being replayed.




Absorption in the experience of the flow of time leads to its linearity breaking down and the recurrent nature becomes evident. In a way one becomes outside of time and the whole eternal cycle of cycles is suspended at that point, dangling by a thread the whole is pregnant with possibility. Deja vu is a similar experience of recurrence, but that comes without effort on one's part - you made similar choices in a past past that led to the same point.




By suspending the moment, you can step outside the well-worn pathways of eternal recurrence and begin to make a new path. It is also worth noting that in such a state you are also more likely to meet other beings for whom time is not so linear.

bodymind complexi ties

"I wonder how this wealth has
made its home in this poverty."

- The Gospel According to Thomas




In theravada buddhism, a technique is taught whereby the meditator learns to experience their body not as a resident thereof who sits in the head and peeks out the eyes, but rather as essentially a field of energy, through which their consciousness moves, scanning it from top to bottom and repeatedly.

This technique is known as vipassana. not ones to mince their words, the buddhists think of this as literally the way to grasp how things (the body, the mind) really are.




Never mind smoking, spending too much time in public can kill you. Get your own room where you can have privacy whenever you need it, & train your body to be comfortable by itself. At first it'll be hard, that's your body signaling it's discomfort at being responsible for itself. Or its the bodies of others calling you because they stand to benefit from your energy. Resist. Learn to become comfortable by yourself. Only then will you be suitably prepared to face your own death.




One who is well versed in the technique will begin to isolate points of tension in the body, knots or blockages, as they're variously called (and both names are accurate to the experience of these areas).

The experienced/advanced bioalchemist will have already identified their own areas for work, or transmutation. The object being to work with these areas of conflict, to turn the areas of stress into new opportunities and real life changes.




its all rates of flow, reality itself is a frequency.

A profound secret of bioenergetics lies herein, and it was stated centuries ago by that thrice great alchemist Hermes, to wit, "That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing".

As the bioenergetic technician works with these areas, and learns the methods of earthing their charges of tension, they will see real and increasingly intense changes to their reality. Changes are effected in the way consciousness arranges reality, and what it chooses to focus on.

Death comes from the right, or it comes from the left. But it always comes from the same direction. & it is always insistent. no. inexorable




This is the bioenergetic magnum opus.

a little death

falling straight down about twenty-five feet I smashed my nose in almost to the point of puncturing the brain, the surgeon said they were very nearly operating on that cerebral organ when they reconstructed my battered face. The interesting thing about my, admittedly painful, experience was that soon after I began my inevitable plunge, my consciousness left my body and I could see myself falling in slowed time before I was transported to a bird’s eye view of a limitless desert and a mechanized city in its midst. What my vision means I cannot be certain, but it seemed to me to say that only machines were left at the far-side of eternity; that we human organisms were fast losing our own immortality by fearing death and believing that the end of the body is the end of the individual.

 ...

in esotericism we often encounter schemes of the subtle body and its various levels of energies. one can understand the well-meaning commentators who have a tendency to rank these energies; surely it is a better investment of time & energy to cultivate the consciousness of higher energies?

those experienced in navigating these realms often report encounters with nonhuman, yet conscious and sentient, beings. many do not, and so, judging by their own experiences, conclude that those who have had these experiences are fabricating, or exaggerating more pedestrian encounters. the truth is much more interesting and complex, and pertains to the logistics of such encounters.

seekers after such experiences are almost universally advised to follow the stock preparations for 'the esoteric life': renouncing excess, maintaining a strict discipline, &c. what is not always emphasized is whether these steps are the means or the end in itself. If one is seeking to encounter what have been variously called allies, or spirits, then discipline is a means to an end.

another reason one might tend to discount these encounters is that they do not happen in a normal waking consciousness. this is one reason to work with the methods of discipline (unless one has the ability to consciously recollect one's dreams, they are unlikely to be aware of such encounters even if they are already having them).

The greatest fear is the fear of death - the fear of an imminent unknown, the ultimate unforetold. What, if anything, of this fear pierces through the veils of sub- and un-conscious processes and finds life in the daily habits of the individual and society?

The fear of the unknown most certainly finds parallels with the fear of death, which is its exemplar, but how does this very real, and at times very palpable, fear resonate throughout the human worlds? In large part it would have to be by the fall back into ritual and superstition regarding separation from the body, that which in this world is often the only thing a person has that they consider themselves capable of knowing.

Certainly death is inevitable for all living creatures, at least outside the confines of religion or the lore of alchemy that posit a life-here-after or a wondrous medicine capable of bestowing a measure of immortality, as well as the wealth with which to enjoy it. But why fear the inevitable?

Or perhaps it is that very certainty which we most fear and not the unknown itself, for there are certainly psychedelic travelers ready to barrel headlong into strange contortions of mental landscape. Some even return after the obligatory eight hours or so with stories of their death and rebirth. So perhaps it is the unwavering certainty and knowledge of the inevitable that human beings fear so much, yet that would mean there is some strange transference going on in our aptitude to pick up ritual and habit, things and activities that we make inevitable and certain.

Ritual can serve to hold our lives together. Something we can always return to, that we know and are comfortable with. Death before one’s time is a tragedy, yet who can say when one’s time is and whether or not departing at a specified date was not the best thing that could have happened?

these experiences most often occur in liminal states which are neither sleep nor dreaming per se, and at times that are neither daytime nor night. nor are such experiences restricted to dreaming - they can occur in any 'break' in normal, waking consciousness, the kind of states that certain meditators actively seek, what a certain sorcerer might call 'stopping the world'. these breaks in consciousness can be entered into, just like doorways or gateways into other, outer worlds. just like (a little) death.

-

the best or worst time for these to happen depends on an intricate machine of factors that includes the astrological configuration, lunar and solar phase and one's own existential circumstances, most prominent among which is whether they have developed, through a strict discipline, the ability to know that they are happening.

these experiences can be used as a component in a sort of machine which the magician can use to control time and space, to control energy. the objective here is not to dominate, but rather to organise ones energetic gestalt in the most effective manner. the magician's ability to seek the latter while avoiding the former will be one of the factors determining the extent of their success.

-

why not advise students to take the seemingly responsible route, to hone in on the higher energies and to ignore the lower? many of those who give this advice are not giving it to people who live in the real world, are not living in the real world themselves, are not (and mystics in general are not) esoteric strategists¹.

those magicians of the so-called left hand path are esoteric strategists. their position is basically that even the dark, the evil, the unclean, can be a means of esoteric attainment. & an attainment of a peculiar nature, it is – not to become one with god, but to become oneself a god.

many modern magicians described as being of the left hand path advocate association with certain energies, intelligences, or spirits as they are variously called, in order to exchange with them knowledge and power, often in return for energies of a 'lower' nature. the argument being that the spirits existing on these lower frequencies of the energetic spectrum accessible to us tend to be business-minded².

both the methods of these magicians and their objectives, seen to be alien to the 'known', the human world, cause them to be described as being of the left hand path, this being understood by some as little more than a pejorative term³.

nonetheless, these technicians have understood the end of esoteric study as the attainment of knowledge and power, and the means as both the most ready to hand and potent of all, these being precisely those which are understood by the layperson to be 'unclean' or inherently dangerous to use (in this manner)...

When you ask someone what they believe happens after we die, they ought to rightly respond by affirming that they do not know – many will say they will cease to exist, others that they will be going to heaven or hell, similitudes to the life we certainly do have some inkling of only transfigured into regions of only good or only bad, some will say that they will be reborn into some other body in some other time.

There are cases of young children who have provided astounding knowledge regarding what appear to have been their past-lives, and this gives some credence to the idea of reincarnation, but the vast majority appear to remember nothing. But yet, where do life and death come from - what is life and what is death? What can we say about the state of being without a body, being embodied ourselves, and why do we fear it? Why are little children scared of the dark?

A vast eternal blackness necessarily without feature would seem to be the closest approximation we have to non-existence, no thought yet still an undeniable appreciation and perception of darkness. It may not be a very full life, but it would still be a life of sorts. And what about the light at the end of the tunnel that many say they have seen after having been on the brink of death or even truly clinically dead?

Light and dark are the two existential phenomena that cannot be resolved into further analogical contraries: Light begins and is life, darkness the end being death, and in between a water wherein the Great Game is played out between the White and Dark forces of the world.

For it is certainly the interplay of water, light, and the dark unshining elements that have created these bodies that we inhabit and use. Without the sun and without water there would be no life. Yet also, without shade and shadow and tempering coolness life would not be. Some philosophies even say that our world and matter is all a shadow cast by higher objects in a greater space of higher meaning. That only with our current habits of mind is there the battleground where life and death and time are real

---

1 indeed, one can (over)generalize mysticism as the 'right hand path' itself. similarly, the magician would be definitive of an adherent of the lhp. if one moves in this trajectory, one will soon come to the (accurate) conclusion that the ideal is a synthesis of the two, rather than any adherence to only one or the other..
 

2 this seems overly materialistic, but that is simply an inappropriate perspective to take. In physics we learn that for every action, there is an equal, opposite reaction. This is a structural 'fact' of our reality. Money is simply a standard for measuring energy, and far from the most accurate one could conceive. in any case, this is the correct, or 'healthy' way to think of the relationship. while it is an important interaction, it is inaccurate to think of it as some kind of 'end'; rather it is to be considered a means toward the magician's own ends.

3 in fact, the problem is not with using these techniques, or aiming for these lofty aspirations. one might easily become obsessed with these encounters, setting aside all else in their favour. even as the rest of one's life comes tumbling around one, all they will be thinking of is the next opportunity to indulge in ones addiction.