Maps, Systems, Mysticism, Magick, Confusion
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Hey y'all
This is my first post to any spiritual forum of any kind (I chose this one because you all seem to have an amazing combination of friendliness, knowledge, and experience. And patience.
)I'm writing because things are moving really fast, to the point that my brain is starting to turn to mush trying to apply words to the shifts in perspective that are happening.
The meat of my spiritual practice has been the yoga/kundalini/tantra meditation techniques documented at www.aypsite.com - these have given the best results out of all of the Buddhist/Yoga/Occult methods I've studied. Coming from an atheistic background, it has what seems like an unbeatable combination of effective, nonreligious, biologically rooted methods.
After meditating really heavily for about 5 years I've had experiences that correspond to the Theravada Buddhist stages of insight, along with what feels like an unfolding kundalini awakening, increased psychic experiences, synchronicities, energy manipulation, visible auras, success with BOTA-style visualizations, divination, etc. This past year has been one of increased purification as the karmic consequences of working magick from the plane of dualism and ego drives (Yetzirah right?) caught up with me - i.e. long-buried psychological insecurities came up and sabotaged what I thought was the Good I Was Supposed to Accomplish.
There's a question buried among all this navel gazing, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to articulate it. What prompted this post was a huge shift in perspective yesterday after meditating. I've been investigating the idea of kundalini/the HGA/God/whatever working through me regardless of what I do, and this led to the practice of going completely hands-off and shifting perspective into that of an observer, simply sitting back and watching both thoughts and actions. This is one of the basic techniques of insight practices, but yesterday was the first time to take the ego out of the equation entirely. As this was coming out of a "Dark Night" point of the insight cycle, it definitely felt like an entrance to a new level.
The ego didn't enjoy this one bit; it was a little like jumping off a building. Initially I had the feeling that I'd turned myself into a roomful of monkeys trying at random to pen the works of Shakespeare. But interestingly, what happened was that all of the "good" and "bad" thoughts came, went, played themselves out, and what was left was making significant progress on several (physical/magical) goals that have lately been psychologically blocked. What was weird was that I had no concept of doing anything - there was free reign to just sit around, watch tv, whatever. And it felt like the magical methods were being invented on the spot by the psyche, of its own accord.
So my question... obviously there is some amount of conditioning and instinct that is taking over here, but I'm wondering if this could also correspond to the KCHGA state of consciousness.
What's interesting is that I've brainwashed myself enough that any spiritual system I investigate now instantly gives supernatural results if I'm looking for them. For instance, not having read a lot about the concept of the HGA, there was an episode earlier this summer where I asked it to manifest, resulting in the first visible spirit I've ever seen, along with strange energy signatures/hebrew letters/hieroglyphics appearing all over the bedroom, followed by several nocturnal visitations where something felt like it was entering my brain. I know that any concept of the HGA that the ego can understand or experience is only a small part of an infinite picture, but....
One reason I'm a bit confused about this experience is because I haven't really been following an occult grade system, or even doing much ceremonial work for that matter. I started with a G.D. curriculum, but have recently put it aside because it felt like the spiritual things that were happening, along with the knowledge and books the inner guru was having me seek out, were sweeping me along at a quicker rate than a self-initiation into the G.D. Having investigated the A.A. (thanks for your amazing book Jim!), I'm wondering if it might be better to jump right in and do this as a self-study course. Or just keep at it with the freeform studies that have paved the way thus far. There's a desire inside to become versed in a magical system in order to give the mystical experiences more "color," along with possibly an urge to join some kind of community/find a teacher, but living in Memphis, TN hasn't availed any of this yet.
Apologies for the epic post length. I'd be eternally grateful for any advice or perspectives that you all care to share... It took a long time to decide to go through with this post out of fear that other perspectives would conceptualize things too concretely, but that time has passed...
Thanks in advance. -
@frater aSP said
"The ego didn't enjoy this one bit; it was a little like jumping off a building. Initially I had the feeling that I'd turned myself into a roomful of monkeys trying at random to pen the works of Shakespeare. But interestingly, what happened was that all of the "good" and "bad" thoughts came, went, played themselves out, and what was left was making significant progress on several (physical/magical) goals that have lately been psychologically blocked. What was weird was that I had no concept of doing anything - there was free reign to just sit around, watch tv, whatever. And it felt like the magical methods were being invented on the spot by the psyche, of its own accord.
So my question... obviously there is some amount of conditioning and instinct that is taking over here, but I'm wondering if this could also correspond to the KCHGA state of consciousness."
This doesn't resemble (1) anything I recognize as the K&C of the HGA, (2) anything I've seen described by others having that threshold experience, or (3) anything consistent with my understanding of it. So, on that basis, I'd say No.
This isn't to say it couldn't a lead-up process to the K&C. It has at least some similarity to the Paths of the Portal (the stages leading to Tiphareth). If I were to take a "best guess" based on experience, it most resembles what I know from the Path of Tav. The results you describe are quite consistent with the advanced stage of the Malkuth grade of A.'.A.'.. (I'm not labelling your experience, just answering your question based on mine.)
"One reason I'm a bit confused about this experience is because I haven't really been following an occult grade system, or even doing much ceremonial work for that matter."
That doesn't really matter.
"(thanks for your amazing book Jim!)"
You're welcome
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Many thanks for your reply Jim. That makes sense - I was in Zelator of the G.D. curriculum and had decided to make it more hardcore and rooted in life/practical experience. So on that basis will continue with the hybrid of practices that's been going on.
Funny note regarding your reply - the tarot card that came up today was The Universe.
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I relate to quite a lot of this; been treading the free-form mysticism path for around a year now. I did a mass to my Angel(whom I hadn't met yet) and Choronzon, then dove right in without any restriction or formal initiation. I came to this very same crossroads, in my own way, and even asked Jim about it! As a matter of fact, I ordered his A.'.A.'. book just two days ago.
I believe that until you start on a formal path, labeling any experiences with the languages of formal paths can be dangerous, unless you've developed a fluid enough ego to never cling to any one way of approaching what happens to you. Opening myself up to whatever my Angel and the Lord of Illusion wanted to throw at me put me through an accelerated year of self-initiatory madness, producing mind-melting results concurrent with the high arcanum of the systems I was simply reading about. But I'd never claim initiation into any of them. What I did was challenged my reality to show me how much it would bend before I started bending it myself, step by step, as a brother of light.
I may be a bad influence here, but you may wish to consider exploring the texts on Chaos Magick floating around. The gems of insight within the works of Peter J. Carroll have given me the tools I needed to incorporate a Chaotic introduction to the mysteries into the discipline of formal gradework.
The one thing Crowley and all the other yogis didn't know was what it was like to be incubated in the post-modern world, and how quickly things can happen here. -
What is Chaos Magick?
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www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/chaoism.html
Read this, if you will. It's a short essay by Peter J. Carroll, the founder of the magical oraganization the "Illuminates of Thanateros", IOT for short. The IOT is the principle order(oxymoron, eh?) practicing and teaching Chaos Magick, and Pete is the best it has to offer.
A large percentage of the esoteric world thinks us Chaoists are just little shits, playing with daddy's power tools.
I wouldn't necessarily disagree with this; they're loud and fun! -
Hi David -
(Diluvium, you beat me by a few seconds with that link
haha)I'm sure this is a gross oversimplification that would offend someone deeply entrenched in the movement but basically Chaos Magick is a postmodern (i.e. 1970's
) paradigm that tries to get to the heart of how magick works by subscribing to total relativism - training one to adopt or disprove any belief system at will. The techniques of evocation, invocation, etc. are still used, but one is free to work with whichever entity one desires, such as invoking Mr. Spock or other pop culture characters. To me the main innovation here is the codification of Austin Spare's technique of sigilization, a practice simple enough that one can do quick and dirty magick at any time, but also elegant enough for one to do fairly advanced work with them. Other techniques taken from Spare include automatic writing and drawing and the creation of one's own alphabet of desire. Probably the two foundation texts are Liber Null/Psychonaut by Peter Carroll and Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine.Of course, saying you are not a movement and that everything is relative automatically makes you another movement, and to me chaos magick has a very definite postmodern-era (i.e. the literature and art movement) "feel" about it, with its own orders (the IOT) and kind of a punk/goth image, with the newer strains incorporating lots of techniques from NLP.
It's hard to talk about where we are now, but most current DIY magick definitely has the influence of the Chaos movement. I really like Jan Fries' "Visual Magick," which isn't chaos per se but has techniques inspired by it (he strikes me as kind of a Werner Herzog of the occult world). Also good is "Stealing the Fire from Heaven" by Stephen Mace, about creating one's own magick system. Other interesting stuff is Patrick Dunn's "Postmodern Magic" and Philip Farber's Meta Magick.
Diluvium - thanks for your insights. I definitely agree about the dangers of labeling oneself, and it's only been in the past few weeks that my ego has gotten fluid enough to realize that "where you are" on a certain map may conflict with other maps or interpretations, and that the universe/one's perceptions will conform to whichever belief you hold at a certain moment.
I'm of the opinion that metaphysical theorizing and maps of this kind are really just to give the rational side of ourselves something to do while the evolutions in biology/consciousness are happening. Not to belittle rationality - if we didn't at least try to conceptualize this stuff it would be almost impossible to stay intelligible to each other, both to other practitioners and to the public at large. Especially at the higher levels, it seems that communication can only happen through a system like Qabbalah or Crowley's mythological imagery, which is a fantastic perk of the A.A. system that obviously confuses anyone who hasn't internalized that particular language. See Kenneth Grant, lol. And at a certain point communication does break down entirely.
There do seem to be marked stages that people go through just because of the way we are put together as humans. To me the innovative thing about the A.A. system is that it combines beautiful, complex syncretic mystical imagery with the biological stages that we go through. For example, if a fully enlightened Zen monk were to meet an A. A. member who has crossed the abyss, they would probably be able to sense each other's degree of attainment; the A.A. adept could probably place the Zen monk somewhere on the tree of life, as meaningless (and perhaps pointless) as that would be to the monk. The monk also would have had an experience exactly equivalent to the KCHGA, without using that terminology or even a conception of an entity. You could also draw interesting connections between Zen koans and the process of gematria, which both use rational means to allow the irrational mind to develop.
From my own practice it seems that meditation is the main catalyst that sets things in motion. But this is from the perspective of my own biases, which were to discount imagination and psychic experiences. For someone more, whatever, whimsical?, explorations on the astral plane could lead them to ceremonial work at a much younger age.
But regardless, someone who meditates, even in Zen style, is eventually going to have the same kind of supernatural experiences/astral explorations that a magician would have, and the energies and images they encounter will be infused with what their subconscious has picked up from their culture and life experiences. The choices they make about how to apply these experiences to their lives are what leads to the kind of artificial mysticism/magick divide so many people write about. I've been getting a lot out of the G.D./A.A. curriculum I've been studying, but possibly the most important thing has been being able to approximate where I am on a given map (the tree of life) and linking it to life objectives, then watching the two play off of each other in beautiful and supernatural ways.
To me, yoga practices are like Zen with a little turbo juice added (wow not to generalize or anything hahaha
), and more suited to my everyday life, using concepts such as the ishta that one can infuse with evolving conceptions of God, the HGA, whatever. Regardless of the flavor of the path, eventually this stuff is going to bring up literally every speck of darkness from the depths of one's psyche, as well as their inverses, and bury one's face in them repeatedly until they are acknowledged and processed. To me magick is a way of integrating these experiences of meditation with everyday life, with non attachment to the supernatural "scenery" a requirement.Sorry to keep rambling on - it just feels therapeutic to write about this stuff
. I really recommend checking out the writings of Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford - they used to update a site called www.thebaptistshead.co.uk . They write from a kind of freeform perspective, but mostly about connecting the A.A. grades with attainments in the Therevada Buddhist map of enlightenment. Also interesting (and for me, essential) is the book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, available for free at www.interactivebuddha.com , which lays out the process and map of awakening from the Pali Canon and gives tips for attaining the jhanas (states of consciousness possibly related to the Enochian Aethyrs?). This was the first place I ever heard of magick.Anyone else been attacking this from a free-form perspective? Insights? Disagreements? I think the largest challenge for someone not connected to a magical order is figuring out which concepts, maps, imagery, etc. have a meaning for everyday life. Choosing the flavors and particular textures of one's path has always been intimidating to me (the confusion itself being a texture/entity...)
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My approach has been excitatory as opposed to inhibitory.
Nourish my brain with constant intake of knowledge, arrange a temple(or not), then take ethneogens. I see myself ignite whatever knowledge was present and produce a quintessence from its' systematic(or absolutely wild) dissolution. I found listening to Tool helps this process for me.
This has been the core of all my Work thus far. Jan Fries would call it free-style shamanism, others would call it laziness. I see it as the Artists' approach, as opposed to the Scholar, or Scientist. It is experiencing the Magical Quintessence as a living force, being, becoming, creating, and simultaniously destroying all Life and Manifestation, bypassing the Mind's meager attempts to rationalize it. It's beyond rationality. Reason is the means to an end that was its' beginning. All these systems and languages are just ripples from ITs ecstatic sublimity.
Until we've touched THAT, all else is dust.But I'm just rambling too.
Very theraputic. -
Thank you both for the key references and summaries of chaos magick. I find this stuff very interesting and refreshingly wild. I personally expect to study quite a bit more calculus before tackling quantum physics and will probably take a few more shop classes before I try to build a house, but I am glad to know about this alternative on many levels.
Every man and woman is a star.
