"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill." - Robert Anton Wilson
Showing posts with label magick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label magick. Show all posts
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Robert Anton Wilson: The Magick of Aleister Crowley
"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill." - Robert Anton Wilson
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
POP MAGIC! by Grant Morrison
via disinformation:
POP MAGIC! is Magic! For the People. Pop Magic! is Naked Magic! Pop Magic! lifts the 7 veils and shows you the tits of the Infinite.
THINKING ABOUT IT
All you need to begin the practice of magic is concentration, imagination and the ability to laugh at yourself and learn from mistakes. Some people like to dress up as Egyptians or monks to get themselves in the mood; others wear animal masks or Barbarella costumes. The use of ritual paraphernalia functions as an aid to the imagination only.
Anything you can imagine, anything you can symbolize, can be made to produce magical changes in your environment.
FIRST STEPS ON THE PATH
Magic is easy to do. Dozens of rulebooks and instruction manuals are available in the occult or “mind, body and spirit” sections of most modern bookstores. Many of the older manuals were written during times when a powerful and vindictive Church apparatus was attempting to suppress all roads to the truth but most of them are generally so heavily coded and disguised behind arcane symbol systems that it’s hardly worth the bother—except for an idea of how other people used THEIR imaginative powers to interpret non-ordinary contacts and communications.
Aleister Crowley—magic’s Picasso—wrote this and I can’t say it any better than he did:
“In this book it is spoken of the sephiroth and the paths, of spirits and conjurations, of gods, spheres, and planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophical validity to any of them.”
This is the most important rule of all which is why it’s here at the start. As you continue to learn and develop your own psychocosms and styles of magical practice, as you encounter stranger and stranger denizens of the Hellworlds and Hyperworlds, you’ll come back to these words of wisdom again and again with a fresh understanding each time.
HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN
Simple. Declare yourself a magician, behave like a magician, practice magic every day.
Be honest about your progress, your successes and failures. Tripping on 500 mushrooms might loosen your astral sphincter a little but it will not generally confer upon you any of the benefits of the magic I’m discussing here. Magic is about what you bring BACK from the Shining Realms of the Uberconscious. The magician dives into the Immense Other in search of tips and hints and treasures s/he can bring home to enrich life in the solid world. And if necessary, Fake it till you make it.
HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 2
Read lots of books on the subject to get in the mood. Talking about magic with non-magicians is like talking to virgins about shagging. Reading about magic is like reading about sex; it will get you horny for the real thing but it won’t give you nearly as much fun.
Reading will give you a feel for what’s crap and what can usefully be adapted to your own style. Develop discrimination. Don’t buy into cults, aliens, paranoia, or complacency. Learn whom to trust and whom to steer clear of.
HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 3
Put down the books, stop making excuses and START.
MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Magical consciousness is a particular way of seeing and interacting with the real world. I experience it as what I can only describe as a “head-click,” a feeling of absolute certainty accompanying a perceptual shift which gives real world transactions the numinous, uncanny feeling of dreams. Magical consciousness is a way of experiencing and participating with the local environment in a heightened, significant manner, similar to the effects of some drug trips, Salvador Dali’s “Paranoiac/critical” method, near death experiences, etc. Many apparently precognitive and telepathic latencies become more active during periods of magical consciousness. This is the state in which tea leaves are read, curses are cast, goals are scored, poems are written.
Magical Consciousness can be practiced until it merges with and becomes everyday consciousness. Maintained at these levels it could interfere with your lifestyle unless you have one which supports long periods of richly associative thought.
EXPERIMENT:
As a first exercise in magical consciousness spend five minutes looking at everything around you as if ALL OF IT was trying to tell you something very important. How did that light bulb come to be here exactly? Why does the murder victim in the newspaper have the same unusual surname as your father-in-law? Why did the phone ring, just at that moment and what were you thinking when it did? What’s that water stain on the wall of the building opposite? How does it make you feel?
Five minutes of focus during which everything is significant, everything is luminous and heavy with meaning, like the objects seen in dreams.
Go.
EXPERIMENT:
Next, relax, go for a walk and interpret everything you see on the way as a message from the Infinite to you. Watch for patterns in the flight of birds. Make oracular sentences from the letters on car number plates. Look at the way buildings move against the skyline. Pay attention to noises on the streets, graffiti sigils, voices cut into rapid, almost subliminal commands and pleas. Listen between the lines. Walk as far and for as long as you feel comfortable in this open state. The more aimless, the more you walk for the pleasure of pure experience, the further into magical consciousness you will be immersed.
Magical consciousness resembles states of light meditation, “hypnagogic” pre-sleep trance or alpha wave brain activity.
APPLIED MAGIC
Is about making things happen and performing the necessary experiments. In these endeavors we do not need to know HOW magic works, only that it does. We prove this by doing the work, recording the results and sharing our information with other magicians. Theoretical magic is all the mad ideas you come up with to explain what’s happening to you. Applied magic is what makes them happen.
THE MAGICAL RECORD
Always keep a journal of your experiments. It’s easy to forget things you’ve done or to miss interesting little connections and correspondences. Make a note of everything, from the intent to the fulfillment. Make a note of dates, times, moods, successes and failures.
Study YOURSELF the way a hunter studies prey. Exploit your own weaknesses to create desired changes within yourself.
BANISHING
Banishing is a way of preparing a space for ritual use. There are many elaborate banishing rituals available, ranging across the full spectrum of pomposity. Think of banishing as the installation of virus protection software. The banishing is a kind of vaccination against infection from Beyond.
Most banishings are intended to surround the magician with an impenetrable shield of will. This usually takes the form of an acknowledgment of the elemental powers at the four cardinal points of the compass. Some like to visualize themselves surrounded and protected by columns of light or by four angels. Any protective image will do—spaceships, superheroes, warrior-monks, whatever. I don’t bother with any of that and usually visualize a bubble radiating outwards from my body into space all around above and below me as far as I think I’ll need it.
Why the need for protection?
Remember that you may be opening some part of yourself to an influx of information from “nonordinary,” apparently “Other” sources. If you practice ceremonial magic and attempt to summon godforms or spirits things will undoubtedly happen. Your foundations will be tested. There is always the danger of obsession and madness. As magical work progresses, you will be forced into confrontation with your deepest darkest fears and desires. It’s easy to become scared, paranoid and stupid. Stay fluid, cling to no one self-image and maintain your sense of humor at all times. Genuine laughter is the most effective banishing ritual available.
Banishing reminds you that no matter how many gods you talk to, no matter how many fluorescent realms you visit, you still have to come home, take a shit, be able to cook dinner, water the plants and, most importantly, talk to people without scaring them.
When you complete any magical work, ground yourself with a good laugh, a good meal, good shag, a run or anything else that connects you with the mundane world. Banishing after your ritual is over works as a decompression back into the normal world of bills and bus stops and job satisfaction. The magician’s job is not to get lost in the Otherworld but to bring back its treasures for everyone to play with.
SIGILS
In the Pop Magic! style, the sigil (sij-ill) is the first and one of the most effective of all the weapons in the arsenal of any modern magician.
The sigil technique was reconceptualized and modernized by Austin Osman Spare in the early 20th century and popularized by Chaos Magicians and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth in the 19 hundred and 80s.
A sigil is a magically charged symbol like this one:
Pop Magic 1
The sigil takes a magical desire or intent—let’s say “IT IS MY DESIRE TO BE A GREAT ACTOR” (you can, of course, put any desire you want in there) and folds it down, creating a highly-charged symbol. The desire is then forgotten. Only the symbol remains and can then be charged to full potency when the magician chooses.
Forgetting the desire in its verbal form can be difficult if you’ve started too ambitiously. There’s no point charging a sigil to win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. Start with stuff that’s not too emotionally involving.
I usually sigilize to meet people I’m interested in, or for particular qualities I’ll need in a given situation. I’ve also used sigils for healing, for locating lost objects and for mass global change. I’ve been using them for 20 years and they ALWAYS work. For me, the period between launching the sigil and its manifestation as a real world event is usually 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 months depending on the variables involved.
I repeat: sigils ALWAYS work.
So. Begin your desire’s transformation into pure throbbing symbol in the following fashion: First remove the vowels and the repeating letters to leave a string of consonants—TSMYDRBGC.
Now start squashing the string down, throwing out or combining lines and playing with the letters until only an appropriately witchy-looking glyph is left. When you’re satisfied it’s done, you may wind up with something like this:
Pop Magic 2
Most homemade sigils look a little spooky or alien—like UFO writing or witchy wall-scratchings. There are no rules as to how your sigil should look as long as it WORKS for you. RESULTS ONLY are important at this stage. If something doesn’t work, try something else. The point is not to BELIEVE in magic, the point is to DO it and see how it works. This is not religion and blind faith plays no part.
Charging and launching your sigil is the fun part (it’s often advisable to make up a bunch of sigils and charge them up later when you’ve forgotten what they originally represented).
Now, most of us find it difficult at first to maintain the precise Zen-like concentration necessary to work large-scale magic. This concentration can be learned with time and effort but in the meantime, sigils make it easy to sidestep years of training and achieve instant success. To charge your sigil you must concentrate on its shape, and hold that form in your mind as you evacuate all other thoughts.
Almost impossible, you might say, but the human body has various mechanisms for inducing brief “nomind” states. Fasting, spinning, intense exhaustion, fear, sex, the fight-or-flight response; all will do the trick. I have charged sigils while bungee jumping, lying dying in a hospital bed, experiencing a total solar eclipse and dancing to Techno. All of these methods proved to be highly effective but for the eager beginner nothing beats the WANK TECHNIQUE.
Some non-magicians, I’ve noticed, convulse with nervous laughter whenever I mention the word “masturbation” (and no wonder; next to wetting the bed or shitting in your own cat’s box for a laugh, it’s the one thing no-one likes to admit to).
Be that as it may, magical masturbation is actually more fun and equally, more serious, than the secular hand shandy, and all it requires is this: at the moment of orgasm, you must see the image of your chosen sigil blazing before the eyes in your mind and project it outwards into the ethereal mediaspheres and logoverses where desires swarm and condense into flesh. The sigil can be written on paper, on your hand or your chest, on the forehead of a lover or wherever you think it will be most effective.
At the white-hot instant of orgasm, consciousness blinks. Into this blink, this abyssal crack in perception, a sigil can be launched.
Masturbation is only ONE of countless methods you can use to bring your mental chatter to a standstill for the split-second it takes to charge and launch a sigil. I suggest masturbation because I’m kindhearted, because it’s convenient and because it’s fun for most of us.
However…one does not change the universe simply by masturbating (tell THAT to the millions of sperm fighting for their life and the future of the species in a balled up Kleenex). If that were true, every vague fantasy we had in our heads at the moment of orgasm would come true within months. Intent is what makes the difference here.
Forget the wanking for just one moment if you can and remember that the sigil is the important part of the magic being performed here. The moment of orgasm will clear your mind, that’s all. There are numerous other ways to clear your mind and you can use any of them. Dancing or spinning to exhaustion is very effective. Meditation is effective but takes years to learn properly. Fear and shock are very good for charging sigils, so you could probably watch a scary movie and launch your sigil at the bit where the hero’s head comes bouncing down the aluminum stepladder into his girlfriend’s lap. A run around the block clutching a sigil might be enough to charge it, so why not experiment?
Try launching your sigil while performing a Bungee jump from a bridge, perhaps, or sit naked in your local graveyard at night. Or dance until you fall over. The important thing is to find your own best method for stopping that inner chat just long enough to launch a fiercely visualized, flaming ultraviolet sigil into the gap. States of exhaustion following ANY intense arousal or deprivation are ideal.
And if you experiment and still have trouble with sigils, try some of the other beginner exercises for a while. I’ve met a couple of people who’ve told me they can’t make sigils work so maybe there are a few of you out there who genuinely have problems in this particular area. Tough luck but it doesn’t mean there’s no magic for you to play with. I couldn’t wheeze “Twinkle twinkle little star…” out of a clarinet but I can play the guitar well enough to have written hundreds of fabulous songs. If I’d stuck with the clarinet and got nowhere would that mean there is no such thing as music? Or would it indicate simply that I have an aptitude for playing the guitar which I can’t seem to replicate using a clarinet? If I want to make music I use the instrument I’m most comfortable and accomplished with. The same is true for magical practice. Don’t get uptight about it. This is not about defending a belief system, this is about producing results.
USE ONLY WHAT WORKS.
SIGILS: DISPOSAL
Some people keep their sigils, some dispose of them in an element appropriate to the magician’s intent (I have burned, buried, flushed away and scattered sigils to the winds, depending on how I felt about them. Love-sigils went to water—flushed down the toilet or thrown into rivers or boiled in kettles. Warsigils were burned etc…. Some of my sigils are still around because I decided they were slow-burners and worth keeping. Some are even still in print. Do what feels right and produces results.)
Soiled paper and tissues can easily be disposed of in your mum’s purse or the pocket of dad’s raincoat.
VIRAL SIGILS
The viral sigil also known as the BRAND or LOGO is not of recent development (see “Christianity,” “the Nazis” and any flag of any nation) but has become an inescapable global phenomenon in recent years. It’s easy to see the Nazi movement as the last gasp of Imperial Age thinking; these visionary savages still thought world domination meant tramping over the “enemy” and seizing his real estate. If only they’d had the foresight to see that global domination has nothing to do with turf and everything to do with media they would have anticipated corporate stealth-violence methods and combined them with their undoubted design sense; the rejected artists who engineered the Third Reich might have created the 20th century’s first global superbrand and spared the lives of many potential consumers. The McDonald’s Golden Arches, the Nike swoosh and the Virgin autograph are all corporate viral sigils.
Corporate sigils are super-breeders. They attack unbranded imaginative space. They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hair-styles. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings. They are a very powerful development in the history of sigil magic, which dates back to the first bison drawn on the first cave wall.
The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summing up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent. The logo is the only visible sign of the corporate intelligence seething behind it. Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, that familiar, cartoonish signature, persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance. People are born and grow up to become Disney executives, mouthing the jargon and the credo of a living corporate entity. Walt Disney the man is long dead and frozen (or so folk myth would have it) but Disney, the immense, invisible corporate egregore persists.
Corporate entities are worth studying and can teach the observant magician much about what we really mean when we use the word “magic.” They and other ghosts like them rule our world of the early 21st century.
EXPERIMENT:
Think hard about why the Coca-Cola spirit is stronger than the Dr. Pepper spirit (what great complex of ideas, longings and deficiencies has the Coke logo succeeded in condensing into two words, two colors, taking Orwell’s 1984 concept of Newspeak to its logical conclusion?). Watch the habits of the world’s great corporate predators like FOX, MICROSOFT or AOL TIME WARNER. Track their movements over time, observe their feeding habits and methods of predation, monitor their repeated behaviors and note how they react to change and novelty. Learn how to imitate them, steal their successful strategies and use them as your own. Form your own limited company or corporation. It’s fairly easy to do with some paperwork and a small amount of money. Create your own brand, your own logo and see how quickly you can make it spread and interact with other corporate entities.
Build your own god and set it loose.
HYPERSIGILS
The “hypersigil” or “supersigil” develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama and plot. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent. Results can be remarkable and shocking.
EXPERIMENT:
After becoming familiar with the traditional sigil method, see if you can create your own hypersigil. The hypersigil can take the form of a poem, a story, a song, a dance or any other extended artistic activity you wish to try. This is a newly developed technology so the parameters remain to be explored. It is important to become utterly absorbed in the hypersigil as it unfolds; this requires a high degree of absorption and concentration (which can lead to obsession but so what? You can always banish at the end) like most works of art. The hypersigil is a dynamic miniature model of the magician’s universe, a hologram, microcosm or “voodoo doll” which can manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of “real” life.
POP MAGIC! is Magic! For the People. Pop Magic! is Naked Magic! Pop Magic! lifts the 7 veils and shows you the tits of the Infinite.
THINKING ABOUT IT
All you need to begin the practice of magic is concentration, imagination and the ability to laugh at yourself and learn from mistakes. Some people like to dress up as Egyptians or monks to get themselves in the mood; others wear animal masks or Barbarella costumes. The use of ritual paraphernalia functions as an aid to the imagination only.
Anything you can imagine, anything you can symbolize, can be made to produce magical changes in your environment.
FIRST STEPS ON THE PATH
Magic is easy to do. Dozens of rulebooks and instruction manuals are available in the occult or “mind, body and spirit” sections of most modern bookstores. Many of the older manuals were written during times when a powerful and vindictive Church apparatus was attempting to suppress all roads to the truth but most of them are generally so heavily coded and disguised behind arcane symbol systems that it’s hardly worth the bother—except for an idea of how other people used THEIR imaginative powers to interpret non-ordinary contacts and communications.
Aleister Crowley—magic’s Picasso—wrote this and I can’t say it any better than he did:
“In this book it is spoken of the sephiroth and the paths, of spirits and conjurations, of gods, spheres, and planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophical validity to any of them.”
This is the most important rule of all which is why it’s here at the start. As you continue to learn and develop your own psychocosms and styles of magical practice, as you encounter stranger and stranger denizens of the Hellworlds and Hyperworlds, you’ll come back to these words of wisdom again and again with a fresh understanding each time.
HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN
Simple. Declare yourself a magician, behave like a magician, practice magic every day.
Be honest about your progress, your successes and failures. Tripping on 500 mushrooms might loosen your astral sphincter a little but it will not generally confer upon you any of the benefits of the magic I’m discussing here. Magic is about what you bring BACK from the Shining Realms of the Uberconscious. The magician dives into the Immense Other in search of tips and hints and treasures s/he can bring home to enrich life in the solid world. And if necessary, Fake it till you make it.
HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 2
Read lots of books on the subject to get in the mood. Talking about magic with non-magicians is like talking to virgins about shagging. Reading about magic is like reading about sex; it will get you horny for the real thing but it won’t give you nearly as much fun.
Reading will give you a feel for what’s crap and what can usefully be adapted to your own style. Develop discrimination. Don’t buy into cults, aliens, paranoia, or complacency. Learn whom to trust and whom to steer clear of.
HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 3
Put down the books, stop making excuses and START.
MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Magical consciousness is a particular way of seeing and interacting with the real world. I experience it as what I can only describe as a “head-click,” a feeling of absolute certainty accompanying a perceptual shift which gives real world transactions the numinous, uncanny feeling of dreams. Magical consciousness is a way of experiencing and participating with the local environment in a heightened, significant manner, similar to the effects of some drug trips, Salvador Dali’s “Paranoiac/critical” method, near death experiences, etc. Many apparently precognitive and telepathic latencies become more active during periods of magical consciousness. This is the state in which tea leaves are read, curses are cast, goals are scored, poems are written.
Magical Consciousness can be practiced until it merges with and becomes everyday consciousness. Maintained at these levels it could interfere with your lifestyle unless you have one which supports long periods of richly associative thought.
EXPERIMENT:
As a first exercise in magical consciousness spend five minutes looking at everything around you as if ALL OF IT was trying to tell you something very important. How did that light bulb come to be here exactly? Why does the murder victim in the newspaper have the same unusual surname as your father-in-law? Why did the phone ring, just at that moment and what were you thinking when it did? What’s that water stain on the wall of the building opposite? How does it make you feel?
Five minutes of focus during which everything is significant, everything is luminous and heavy with meaning, like the objects seen in dreams.
Go.
EXPERIMENT:
Next, relax, go for a walk and interpret everything you see on the way as a message from the Infinite to you. Watch for patterns in the flight of birds. Make oracular sentences from the letters on car number plates. Look at the way buildings move against the skyline. Pay attention to noises on the streets, graffiti sigils, voices cut into rapid, almost subliminal commands and pleas. Listen between the lines. Walk as far and for as long as you feel comfortable in this open state. The more aimless, the more you walk for the pleasure of pure experience, the further into magical consciousness you will be immersed.
Magical consciousness resembles states of light meditation, “hypnagogic” pre-sleep trance or alpha wave brain activity.
APPLIED MAGIC
Is about making things happen and performing the necessary experiments. In these endeavors we do not need to know HOW magic works, only that it does. We prove this by doing the work, recording the results and sharing our information with other magicians. Theoretical magic is all the mad ideas you come up with to explain what’s happening to you. Applied magic is what makes them happen.
THE MAGICAL RECORD
Always keep a journal of your experiments. It’s easy to forget things you’ve done or to miss interesting little connections and correspondences. Make a note of everything, from the intent to the fulfillment. Make a note of dates, times, moods, successes and failures.
Study YOURSELF the way a hunter studies prey. Exploit your own weaknesses to create desired changes within yourself.
BANISHING
Banishing is a way of preparing a space for ritual use. There are many elaborate banishing rituals available, ranging across the full spectrum of pomposity. Think of banishing as the installation of virus protection software. The banishing is a kind of vaccination against infection from Beyond.
Most banishings are intended to surround the magician with an impenetrable shield of will. This usually takes the form of an acknowledgment of the elemental powers at the four cardinal points of the compass. Some like to visualize themselves surrounded and protected by columns of light or by four angels. Any protective image will do—spaceships, superheroes, warrior-monks, whatever. I don’t bother with any of that and usually visualize a bubble radiating outwards from my body into space all around above and below me as far as I think I’ll need it.
Why the need for protection?
Remember that you may be opening some part of yourself to an influx of information from “nonordinary,” apparently “Other” sources. If you practice ceremonial magic and attempt to summon godforms or spirits things will undoubtedly happen. Your foundations will be tested. There is always the danger of obsession and madness. As magical work progresses, you will be forced into confrontation with your deepest darkest fears and desires. It’s easy to become scared, paranoid and stupid. Stay fluid, cling to no one self-image and maintain your sense of humor at all times. Genuine laughter is the most effective banishing ritual available.
Banishing reminds you that no matter how many gods you talk to, no matter how many fluorescent realms you visit, you still have to come home, take a shit, be able to cook dinner, water the plants and, most importantly, talk to people without scaring them.
When you complete any magical work, ground yourself with a good laugh, a good meal, good shag, a run or anything else that connects you with the mundane world. Banishing after your ritual is over works as a decompression back into the normal world of bills and bus stops and job satisfaction. The magician’s job is not to get lost in the Otherworld but to bring back its treasures for everyone to play with.
SIGILS
In the Pop Magic! style, the sigil (sij-ill) is the first and one of the most effective of all the weapons in the arsenal of any modern magician.
The sigil technique was reconceptualized and modernized by Austin Osman Spare in the early 20th century and popularized by Chaos Magicians and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth in the 19 hundred and 80s.
A sigil is a magically charged symbol like this one:
Pop Magic 1
The sigil takes a magical desire or intent—let’s say “IT IS MY DESIRE TO BE A GREAT ACTOR” (you can, of course, put any desire you want in there) and folds it down, creating a highly-charged symbol. The desire is then forgotten. Only the symbol remains and can then be charged to full potency when the magician chooses.
Forgetting the desire in its verbal form can be difficult if you’ve started too ambitiously. There’s no point charging a sigil to win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. Start with stuff that’s not too emotionally involving.
I usually sigilize to meet people I’m interested in, or for particular qualities I’ll need in a given situation. I’ve also used sigils for healing, for locating lost objects and for mass global change. I’ve been using them for 20 years and they ALWAYS work. For me, the period between launching the sigil and its manifestation as a real world event is usually 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 months depending on the variables involved.
I repeat: sigils ALWAYS work.
So. Begin your desire’s transformation into pure throbbing symbol in the following fashion: First remove the vowels and the repeating letters to leave a string of consonants—TSMYDRBGC.
Now start squashing the string down, throwing out or combining lines and playing with the letters until only an appropriately witchy-looking glyph is left. When you’re satisfied it’s done, you may wind up with something like this:
Pop Magic 2
Most homemade sigils look a little spooky or alien—like UFO writing or witchy wall-scratchings. There are no rules as to how your sigil should look as long as it WORKS for you. RESULTS ONLY are important at this stage. If something doesn’t work, try something else. The point is not to BELIEVE in magic, the point is to DO it and see how it works. This is not religion and blind faith plays no part.
Charging and launching your sigil is the fun part (it’s often advisable to make up a bunch of sigils and charge them up later when you’ve forgotten what they originally represented).
Now, most of us find it difficult at first to maintain the precise Zen-like concentration necessary to work large-scale magic. This concentration can be learned with time and effort but in the meantime, sigils make it easy to sidestep years of training and achieve instant success. To charge your sigil you must concentrate on its shape, and hold that form in your mind as you evacuate all other thoughts.
Almost impossible, you might say, but the human body has various mechanisms for inducing brief “nomind” states. Fasting, spinning, intense exhaustion, fear, sex, the fight-or-flight response; all will do the trick. I have charged sigils while bungee jumping, lying dying in a hospital bed, experiencing a total solar eclipse and dancing to Techno. All of these methods proved to be highly effective but for the eager beginner nothing beats the WANK TECHNIQUE.
Some non-magicians, I’ve noticed, convulse with nervous laughter whenever I mention the word “masturbation” (and no wonder; next to wetting the bed or shitting in your own cat’s box for a laugh, it’s the one thing no-one likes to admit to).
Be that as it may, magical masturbation is actually more fun and equally, more serious, than the secular hand shandy, and all it requires is this: at the moment of orgasm, you must see the image of your chosen sigil blazing before the eyes in your mind and project it outwards into the ethereal mediaspheres and logoverses where desires swarm and condense into flesh. The sigil can be written on paper, on your hand or your chest, on the forehead of a lover or wherever you think it will be most effective.
At the white-hot instant of orgasm, consciousness blinks. Into this blink, this abyssal crack in perception, a sigil can be launched.
Masturbation is only ONE of countless methods you can use to bring your mental chatter to a standstill for the split-second it takes to charge and launch a sigil. I suggest masturbation because I’m kindhearted, because it’s convenient and because it’s fun for most of us.
However…one does not change the universe simply by masturbating (tell THAT to the millions of sperm fighting for their life and the future of the species in a balled up Kleenex). If that were true, every vague fantasy we had in our heads at the moment of orgasm would come true within months. Intent is what makes the difference here.
Forget the wanking for just one moment if you can and remember that the sigil is the important part of the magic being performed here. The moment of orgasm will clear your mind, that’s all. There are numerous other ways to clear your mind and you can use any of them. Dancing or spinning to exhaustion is very effective. Meditation is effective but takes years to learn properly. Fear and shock are very good for charging sigils, so you could probably watch a scary movie and launch your sigil at the bit where the hero’s head comes bouncing down the aluminum stepladder into his girlfriend’s lap. A run around the block clutching a sigil might be enough to charge it, so why not experiment?
Try launching your sigil while performing a Bungee jump from a bridge, perhaps, or sit naked in your local graveyard at night. Or dance until you fall over. The important thing is to find your own best method for stopping that inner chat just long enough to launch a fiercely visualized, flaming ultraviolet sigil into the gap. States of exhaustion following ANY intense arousal or deprivation are ideal.
And if you experiment and still have trouble with sigils, try some of the other beginner exercises for a while. I’ve met a couple of people who’ve told me they can’t make sigils work so maybe there are a few of you out there who genuinely have problems in this particular area. Tough luck but it doesn’t mean there’s no magic for you to play with. I couldn’t wheeze “Twinkle twinkle little star…” out of a clarinet but I can play the guitar well enough to have written hundreds of fabulous songs. If I’d stuck with the clarinet and got nowhere would that mean there is no such thing as music? Or would it indicate simply that I have an aptitude for playing the guitar which I can’t seem to replicate using a clarinet? If I want to make music I use the instrument I’m most comfortable and accomplished with. The same is true for magical practice. Don’t get uptight about it. This is not about defending a belief system, this is about producing results.
USE ONLY WHAT WORKS.
SIGILS: DISPOSAL
Some people keep their sigils, some dispose of them in an element appropriate to the magician’s intent (I have burned, buried, flushed away and scattered sigils to the winds, depending on how I felt about them. Love-sigils went to water—flushed down the toilet or thrown into rivers or boiled in kettles. Warsigils were burned etc…. Some of my sigils are still around because I decided they were slow-burners and worth keeping. Some are even still in print. Do what feels right and produces results.)
Soiled paper and tissues can easily be disposed of in your mum’s purse or the pocket of dad’s raincoat.
VIRAL SIGILS
The viral sigil also known as the BRAND or LOGO is not of recent development (see “Christianity,” “the Nazis” and any flag of any nation) but has become an inescapable global phenomenon in recent years. It’s easy to see the Nazi movement as the last gasp of Imperial Age thinking; these visionary savages still thought world domination meant tramping over the “enemy” and seizing his real estate. If only they’d had the foresight to see that global domination has nothing to do with turf and everything to do with media they would have anticipated corporate stealth-violence methods and combined them with their undoubted design sense; the rejected artists who engineered the Third Reich might have created the 20th century’s first global superbrand and spared the lives of many potential consumers. The McDonald’s Golden Arches, the Nike swoosh and the Virgin autograph are all corporate viral sigils.
Corporate sigils are super-breeders. They attack unbranded imaginative space. They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hair-styles. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings. They are a very powerful development in the history of sigil magic, which dates back to the first bison drawn on the first cave wall.
The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summing up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent. The logo is the only visible sign of the corporate intelligence seething behind it. Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, that familiar, cartoonish signature, persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance. People are born and grow up to become Disney executives, mouthing the jargon and the credo of a living corporate entity. Walt Disney the man is long dead and frozen (or so folk myth would have it) but Disney, the immense, invisible corporate egregore persists.
Corporate entities are worth studying and can teach the observant magician much about what we really mean when we use the word “magic.” They and other ghosts like them rule our world of the early 21st century.
EXPERIMENT:
Think hard about why the Coca-Cola spirit is stronger than the Dr. Pepper spirit (what great complex of ideas, longings and deficiencies has the Coke logo succeeded in condensing into two words, two colors, taking Orwell’s 1984 concept of Newspeak to its logical conclusion?). Watch the habits of the world’s great corporate predators like FOX, MICROSOFT or AOL TIME WARNER. Track their movements over time, observe their feeding habits and methods of predation, monitor their repeated behaviors and note how they react to change and novelty. Learn how to imitate them, steal their successful strategies and use them as your own. Form your own limited company or corporation. It’s fairly easy to do with some paperwork and a small amount of money. Create your own brand, your own logo and see how quickly you can make it spread and interact with other corporate entities.
Build your own god and set it loose.
HYPERSIGILS
The “hypersigil” or “supersigil” develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama and plot. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent. Results can be remarkable and shocking.
EXPERIMENT:
After becoming familiar with the traditional sigil method, see if you can create your own hypersigil. The hypersigil can take the form of a poem, a story, a song, a dance or any other extended artistic activity you wish to try. This is a newly developed technology so the parameters remain to be explored. It is important to become utterly absorbed in the hypersigil as it unfolds; this requires a high degree of absorption and concentration (which can lead to obsession but so what? You can always banish at the end) like most works of art. The hypersigil is a dynamic miniature model of the magician’s universe, a hologram, microcosm or “voodoo doll” which can manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of “real” life.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Monday, January 25, 2016
WTF is Magick?
by Gabriel Roberts via Disinformation
In an attempt to not sound absolutely crazy to anyone who might see me mention magick, I’d like to bring some illumination of what magick is. This may prove to be a challenge because the term itself is a moving goalpost of sorts. To some, magick means a man on a stage sawing a woman in half as an act of illusion. Ironically, this can also be seen as a metaphor for our own subjective predilections toward illusion in all aspects of our life.
In order to explain this correctly, I must try to get you to set aside what you think you might know about actual magic and allow yourself to hear me for what I’m saying unencumbered by preset notions.
The Buddhist might say that everything is Maya (illusion) and the ancient Gnostic might say the same, but with the twist that this material construct is a kind of incubator for us to occupy ourselves why Archons feed on our thoughts and feelings without our knowing it (think, people being batteries for the machines to live off of like in the film series, The Matrix). Whether these ideas are true, or not the metaphor that they produce is indeed powerful. In many different ways, these concepts can be seen as true.
Ok, on to actual explanation.
Magick is first a method of transforming the world you see by changing the way you see the world. This requires one to willfully change hard-wired behavior and practices through mental gymnastics. Much of this involves understanding and playing with the thought-form.
A thought form is the primary way we construct ideas; it is exactly the formation of our thoughts. A thought form can also be in some ways associated with what Jung referred to as archetypes. Archetypes are overarching themes and images that we associate with primary things in our life. For example, for many, our fathers represent an image of what God might be like; If our father is cruel, then we may see God as inherently cruel. The thought form of who God is creates a landscape for our reality in a highly subjective and personal fashion and may be entirely incorrect in contrast to the actual truth of the matter.
But we are not looking for truth with a capital T here, because of the paradoxical nature of truth itself. It is like the problem scientists have with the idea that the observer changes the results of behavior simply by nature of observing. Instead we are looking to change the nature of our thoughts and tinkering with the wiring we have in our minds.
So how exactly does one manipulate one’s own thought forms and for what purpose? This is the crux of the magical practice. One must in many ways trick one’s own mind, which is no small feat, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be done.
Think of a time in your life in which you radically changed stances on a subject. Did the way you see the world change? Did some kind of transformative experience catalyze this change? In one way, or another, something changed the wiring of you mind on that particular subject. In one sense, you received gnosis (experiential understanding) on that particular thing. But the fact that this experience happened to you through your particular lens means that it may not have happened to others in the same way, even if the experience has happened to many people. For instance, no two people lost their virginity in the same way, but all were transformed by the experience in some form. The event is highly subjective and personal, though many themes may be similar within the broader context of the experience.
The greatest act of a magician then is to transform one’s self and therefore change the world that they see. In changing our perception, we change the nature of reality. And this toying with perception can change the world from something banal into something divine. Regardless of our cosmology, we can see how this happens to everyone, hence my assertion that everything is magick. If you ask a Kung Fu master what Kung Fu is, he might say the same thing.
In many ways magick is a western term for a traditionally assumed eastern idea, but our western traditions have much to contribute, though they have been stamped down and literally burned in books and people by two millennia of monotheistic suppression. The stigma is palpable and yet our disciplines of science came through these occult channels from ancient sources. Astronomy and Astrology were once one and the same, Pharmacology, Chemistry and Herbalism were once Alchemy.
So in short, the manipulation of one’s own mind to achieve a specific goal in one’s self, or in the world around them is the core of magick. To those who might think magick to be a foul and odious working with demons and other fancied creatures, this is a misunderstanding brought forth by a long tradition of slander. Consider what it means to work on yourself in such a way that your goal is personal growth for the highest goal of society through your own contribution. Consider this quote from the much maligned and misunderstood book, The Black Pullet:
“Do you feel, my son, do you feel this heroic ambition which is the sure stamp of the children of wisdom? Do you dare to desire to serve only the one God and to dominate over all that is not God? Have you understood what it is to prove to be a man and to be unwilling to be a slave since you are born to be a Sovereign? And if you have these noble thoughts, as the signs which I have found on your physiognomy do not permit me to doubt, have you considered maturely whether you have the courage and the strength to renounce all the things which could possibly be an obstacle to attaining the greatness for which you have been born?”
At this point he stopped and regarded me fixedly as if waiting for an answer, or as if he were searching to read my heart.
I asked him, “What is that which I have to renounce?”
“All that is evil in order to occupy yourself only with that which is good. The proneness with which nearly all of us are born to vice rather than to virtue. Those passions which render us slaves to our senses which prevent us from applying ourselves to study, tasting its sweetness, and gathering its fruits. You see, my dear son, that the sacrifice which I demand of you is not painful and is not above your powers; on the contrary, it will make you approach perfection as near as it is possible for man to attain. Do you accept that which I propose?”
If I have explained myself correctly, you will understand that magick is simply a broad term for one working on the improvement of one’s self for the betterment of self and humanity at large through the manipulation of one’s own thoughts and ideas, questioning every notion and challenging each one in practice and critical review.
In an attempt to not sound absolutely crazy to anyone who might see me mention magick, I’d like to bring some illumination of what magick is. This may prove to be a challenge because the term itself is a moving goalpost of sorts. To some, magick means a man on a stage sawing a woman in half as an act of illusion. Ironically, this can also be seen as a metaphor for our own subjective predilections toward illusion in all aspects of our life.
In order to explain this correctly, I must try to get you to set aside what you think you might know about actual magic and allow yourself to hear me for what I’m saying unencumbered by preset notions.
The Buddhist might say that everything is Maya (illusion) and the ancient Gnostic might say the same, but with the twist that this material construct is a kind of incubator for us to occupy ourselves why Archons feed on our thoughts and feelings without our knowing it (think, people being batteries for the machines to live off of like in the film series, The Matrix). Whether these ideas are true, or not the metaphor that they produce is indeed powerful. In many different ways, these concepts can be seen as true.
Ok, on to actual explanation.
Magick is first a method of transforming the world you see by changing the way you see the world. This requires one to willfully change hard-wired behavior and practices through mental gymnastics. Much of this involves understanding and playing with the thought-form.
A thought form is the primary way we construct ideas; it is exactly the formation of our thoughts. A thought form can also be in some ways associated with what Jung referred to as archetypes. Archetypes are overarching themes and images that we associate with primary things in our life. For example, for many, our fathers represent an image of what God might be like; If our father is cruel, then we may see God as inherently cruel. The thought form of who God is creates a landscape for our reality in a highly subjective and personal fashion and may be entirely incorrect in contrast to the actual truth of the matter.
But we are not looking for truth with a capital T here, because of the paradoxical nature of truth itself. It is like the problem scientists have with the idea that the observer changes the results of behavior simply by nature of observing. Instead we are looking to change the nature of our thoughts and tinkering with the wiring we have in our minds.
So how exactly does one manipulate one’s own thought forms and for what purpose? This is the crux of the magical practice. One must in many ways trick one’s own mind, which is no small feat, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be done.
Think of a time in your life in which you radically changed stances on a subject. Did the way you see the world change? Did some kind of transformative experience catalyze this change? In one way, or another, something changed the wiring of you mind on that particular subject. In one sense, you received gnosis (experiential understanding) on that particular thing. But the fact that this experience happened to you through your particular lens means that it may not have happened to others in the same way, even if the experience has happened to many people. For instance, no two people lost their virginity in the same way, but all were transformed by the experience in some form. The event is highly subjective and personal, though many themes may be similar within the broader context of the experience.
The greatest act of a magician then is to transform one’s self and therefore change the world that they see. In changing our perception, we change the nature of reality. And this toying with perception can change the world from something banal into something divine. Regardless of our cosmology, we can see how this happens to everyone, hence my assertion that everything is magick. If you ask a Kung Fu master what Kung Fu is, he might say the same thing.
In many ways magick is a western term for a traditionally assumed eastern idea, but our western traditions have much to contribute, though they have been stamped down and literally burned in books and people by two millennia of monotheistic suppression. The stigma is palpable and yet our disciplines of science came through these occult channels from ancient sources. Astronomy and Astrology were once one and the same, Pharmacology, Chemistry and Herbalism were once Alchemy.
So in short, the manipulation of one’s own mind to achieve a specific goal in one’s self, or in the world around them is the core of magick. To those who might think magick to be a foul and odious working with demons and other fancied creatures, this is a misunderstanding brought forth by a long tradition of slander. Consider what it means to work on yourself in such a way that your goal is personal growth for the highest goal of society through your own contribution. Consider this quote from the much maligned and misunderstood book, The Black Pullet:
“Do you feel, my son, do you feel this heroic ambition which is the sure stamp of the children of wisdom? Do you dare to desire to serve only the one God and to dominate over all that is not God? Have you understood what it is to prove to be a man and to be unwilling to be a slave since you are born to be a Sovereign? And if you have these noble thoughts, as the signs which I have found on your physiognomy do not permit me to doubt, have you considered maturely whether you have the courage and the strength to renounce all the things which could possibly be an obstacle to attaining the greatness for which you have been born?”
At this point he stopped and regarded me fixedly as if waiting for an answer, or as if he were searching to read my heart.
I asked him, “What is that which I have to renounce?”
“All that is evil in order to occupy yourself only with that which is good. The proneness with which nearly all of us are born to vice rather than to virtue. Those passions which render us slaves to our senses which prevent us from applying ourselves to study, tasting its sweetness, and gathering its fruits. You see, my dear son, that the sacrifice which I demand of you is not painful and is not above your powers; on the contrary, it will make you approach perfection as near as it is possible for man to attain. Do you accept that which I propose?”
If I have explained myself correctly, you will understand that magick is simply a broad term for one working on the improvement of one’s self for the betterment of self and humanity at large through the manipulation of one’s own thoughts and ideas, questioning every notion and challenging each one in practice and critical review.
Friday, November 6, 2015
The 7 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Learning Magick
via ultraculture
Avoid these common pitfalls when studying magick, meditation or mysticism
Magick is a very strange hobby. If you’re like me, you’ve probably been drawn to it for lofty reasons: You want to understand the universe and your place in it. You want answers to the questions of life, the universe and everything—not just second-hand faith in somebody else’s proclamations. You want a heightened sense of personal dignity, integrity and power to achieve the goals that matter to you the most. And—most of all—you want enchantment. You want to live an enchanted life—one in which you can immerse yourself in wonders and mysteries, and experience intensity that people who are checked out in front of their phones or TV screens never will. You want a heightened reality, or even to quest for absolute reality itself.
So, for any of these reasons or more, you step into the Circus of Magick. You might spend some time browsing occult Web sites, or visit a New Age bookstore. You might buy a workbook or two, and try the exercises. You might join a society like Freemasonry, a Wiccan coven, or even a Meetup group, and begin to meet others in your community with similar questions.
As you do this, you will slowly be leaving the “consensus trance,” the one created by the daily ritual of Commute-Job/School-Consume-Television. And you will find yourself in a new “trance,” one defined by ideas of magic, personal possibility, awakening, new group dynamics, alternative life paths. You will likely encounter a lot of incredibly inspiring ideas, and also, unfortunately, a lot of disempowering ideas and beliefs.
Here’s a useful way to think about it: Mainstream society is a program designed to work the best it can for the widest number of people possible. Generally speaking, that means good, decent people who are happy to live quiet, decent lives, and content themselves with the victories of career, family, health, happiness and making it through another day. And that’s a beautiful thing.
Outside of mainstream society, however, you will find a very different reality—the
“wildlands” of modern civilization. Its denizens, for one reason or another, don’t feel satisfied by consensus reality. That could be because they’re ahead of the curve, or it could be because they’re far behind the curve. That makes the “wildlands” an exciting, and dangerous, place. The “wildlands” are where society puts the ideas that are too disruptive of its daily activities, for better or worse. The strange ideas, the discredited ideas, the untested ideas, the potentially liberating ideas.
Magick is one of those ideas—or, rather, a gigantic cluster of ideas (a memeplex). Many of those ideas are really cool, and many should stay in the trash-heap.
But let’s be clear: To engage with magick is to begin to sort through society’s trash, looking for anything of value. Glamorous, no? Remember, alchemy is the art of turning shit into gold. “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone…”
Well, if you’re going to go looking for gold out there, at least allow me to guide you through the territory, so that you can avoid the seven biggest mistakes that people make when learning magick (I’ve made them all!).
1. Poorly Defined Goals
What do you want?
It’s a simple question, but most who enter the world of magick and alternative spirituality never ask it, or never fully define the answer. As a result, they’re caught up in the “dazzling lights” of the New Age Pinball Machine, and bounced around between experiences, groups and teachers, never finding themselves or getting to their core issues and drives.
You need to ask this question up front: What do you want? Do you want greater creative skill and power? Do you want to fix a trauma or personal challenge? Are you willing to give up everything and seek enlightenment? Whatever it is, define it now, and then ask yourself if magical means are really the answer, or if more mundane means would be a lot easier. Be clear on this, or you risk getting caught up in the glamour of magick, and forgetting that it’s just a tool, and only one tool of many available to you right now.
2. Staying in the Shallows
Magick is a giant buffet table. Thanks to the shrinking of the world by global communications, you’ll find material from every world faith and esoteric path readily available to you. Hermeticism/Golden Dawn/Thelema; Yoga; Vedanta; Vajrayana Buddhism; Sufism; NLP… the list is limited only by the demand of the New Age marketplace for the next big kick. Just a hundred years ago—in some cases, just a few decades ago—all of these subjects would have been incredibly hard to discover information on. You wouldn’t have been able to just pop down to Barnes & Noble or go on Amazon and have it all handed to you. And in all cases, once you discovered the entry to a path, you would be confronted with a teacher who would explain that the path was the work of a lifetime.
That puts modern seekers in a unique position. We don’t lack access—but what we do often lack is commitment to a path. Most likely, students will browse here and there, reading on a wide variety of paths, or even joining several groups in sequence. This is an incredible way to learn quickly; however, if the buffet table approach takes the place of deep, committed learning in one path or tradition, what happens is you stop making progress. You just get to the edge of your comfort zone in one path before starting over in another, never taking that crucial jump into the unknown. Ironically, this probably takes more time than sticking to one path, at least until you reach that path’s completion stages.
However, if you go in the complete opposite direction, and become a “Path Zealot,” you will make the third mistake:
3. Thinking There is One True Path
Once you’ve experienced peak states or personal breakthroughs in a system, it’s easy to generalize: “This is absolutely incredible… everybody should experience this!”
If you’re not careful, you soon become a missionary, talking non-stop about what you’ve experienced, trying to get your friends or family into whatever practice caused the peak state or breakthrough, or even, at the high registers of “Kool-Aid Intoxication,” thinking that you have found the One True Path, and that all other paths are lesser or deluded.
People can stay stuck in this state for days, weeks, months, or years—even their whole life. It tends to be a blockage to progress. It’s a classic behavior of an individual with a weak sense of self: Deep down, they feel themselves to be inferior or lesser than others, so they place all their focus on an all-consuming ideology or charismatic leader that they derive strength and self-worth from serving. If this sounds like an obvious trap, and one you would never fall for, think again: The “One True Path” disease has been responsible for many of history’s greatest tragedies, including the Third Reich or the many historical genocides committed by overzealous religious missionaries that worked to “convert by sword.”
If your path is the One True Path, it’s time to leave your cloistered room or insular community and experience what life is like for others of different faiths and life backgrounds. Make some new friends.
4. Us vs. Them Mentality
Because people who are into magick and alternative spirituality are often on the fringes, it’s easy to adopt belief systems that reinforce an oppressed identity or “us vs. them” story. This becomes a particularly acute problem when the magick that people are doing isn’t working, or not producing a good quality of life, and instead of changing the behaviors or beliefs that aren’t working, people create a narrative in which some “other” individual or group is keeping them down. These stories about why failure is OK quickly blossom and cross-pollinate, becoming wide-scale conspiracy theories potent enough to infect whole cultures, leaving disempowerment, misery and even genocide in their wake (again see the Third Reich). Examples of this include:
• “The Illuminati are out to get me because I have secret knowledge.”
• “Shapeshifting reptilians/Archons/evil spirits/Satan/etc. are controlling reality and don’t like me.”
• “I’m way too enlightened/edgy/intense/real for mainstream society to handle.”
• “I am a lightworker charged with battling the dark forces, and the dark forces are in control.”
Do you have any of these beliefs, or any similar ones? Let’s take a look at them—what’s the underlying message of all of them? Personal significance. Me me me. All of these scripts allow for personal significance through failure. They all allow you to be a complete fuckup and to simultaneously have the illusion of “winning.”
They are all poison. Jettison them immediately, and instead focus on your personal growth and happiness, and how you can be of service to the people around you.
5. Substance Abuse
Drugs and magick have been linked since the very first prehistoric shaman chewed some strange bark or fungus that let her talk to the spirits of the forest, and the spirits of the forest turned out to have some pretty useful stuff to say.
In recent times, magicians like Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs, Terence McKenna, Carlos Castaneda and others have hyped the spiritual potential of psychedelics and even harder substances. Some of them have also fallen prey to addiction, and the destructive behaviors that come with the disease of addiction. This is one of the major reasons why magick has been so discredited—it allows people to say “Yeah, but you were just high,” or to look at the addiction behaviors of people like Crowley and attribute them to magick instead of their true source, the drug addiction itself.
Drugs may be a fast route to altered states, but they are not a sustainable one. In our current moment—world economic crisis, instability and uncertainty—I suggest that magicians don’t have the time or luxury of drug use. We need to be sharp, frosty—Navy SEALs, not Deadheads. Remember: The Baby Boomer generation could burn decades with drug experimentation because it was the richest, most financially secure generation in history. That is not the case for Millenials or those younger. The world reality is a live-fire situation, a war zone, and you don’t dull your edge or disorient yourself in a war zone.
(It’s not an “Us vs. Them” war zone, by the way. It’s a free-for-all, as everybody scrambles to survive the challenges created by the acceleration of technology and growth of the human population.)
6. Trying to Be the “Best Magician” Instead of the “Best You”
When overachiever types get into magick, they try to learn every single aspect of it and become a Total and Formidable Master. There is no mastery; leave this archetype in the Saturday morning cartoons it came from. Remember: Magick is just a tool. Know your goal, and use the tool to achieve your goal.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be so linear: You may simply be seeking the regular, sustainable spiritual growth that comes from a regular practice of meditation, dreamwork, journalling, yoga, ritual and any other tool you have chosen to use. Wonderful.
The key here is: It’s not a competition. There is no prize, other than becoming more yourself.
7. Giving Your Power Away
Particularly as a young and untested magician, you will likely be confronted with situations or people that tempt you to surrender your power. Whether it’s an autocratic or abusive guru, a regimented and controlling magical order, or even a tightly controlling ideology, you might be tempted or even frightened into surrendering control of your life in exchange for some tangible or intangible reward.
If you do this, get ready for a painful learning experience!
Though it can sometimes be easy to forget, you are the true magician, the true master of your reality. To fully illustrate this point, I’d like to include a story from the author John Fowles, who kindled my early teenage interest in testing the nature of reality. It’s from his 1965 novel The Magus:
Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domains, and no sign of God, the prince believed his father.
But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace and came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling, creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.
“Are those real islands?” asked the young prince.
“Of course they are real islands,” said the man in evening dress.
“And those strange and troubling creatures?”
“They are all genuine and authentic princesses.”
“Then God must also exist!” cried the prince.
“I am God,” replied the man in evening dress, with a bow.
The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.
“So, you are back,” said his father, the king.
“I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,” said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
“Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God exist.”
“I saw them!”
“Tell me how God was dressed.”
“God was in full evening dress.”
“Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?”
The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.
“That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.”
At this, the prince returned to the next land and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.
“My father, the king, has told me who you are,” said the prince indignantly. “You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.”
The man on the shore smiled.
“It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father’s kingdom, there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father’s spell, so you cannot see them.”
The prince pensively returned home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eye.
“Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?”
The king smiled and rolled back his sleeves.
“Yes, my son, I’m only a magician.”
“Then the man on the other shore was God.”
“The man on the other shore was another magician.”
“I must know the truth, the truth beyond magic.”
“There is no truth beyond magic,” said the king.
The prince was full of sadness. He said, “I will kill myself.”
The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.
“Very well,” he said, “I can bear it.”
“You see, my son,” said the king, “you, too, now begin to be a magician.”
Avoid these common pitfalls when studying magick, meditation or mysticism
Magick is a very strange hobby. If you’re like me, you’ve probably been drawn to it for lofty reasons: You want to understand the universe and your place in it. You want answers to the questions of life, the universe and everything—not just second-hand faith in somebody else’s proclamations. You want a heightened sense of personal dignity, integrity and power to achieve the goals that matter to you the most. And—most of all—you want enchantment. You want to live an enchanted life—one in which you can immerse yourself in wonders and mysteries, and experience intensity that people who are checked out in front of their phones or TV screens never will. You want a heightened reality, or even to quest for absolute reality itself.
So, for any of these reasons or more, you step into the Circus of Magick. You might spend some time browsing occult Web sites, or visit a New Age bookstore. You might buy a workbook or two, and try the exercises. You might join a society like Freemasonry, a Wiccan coven, or even a Meetup group, and begin to meet others in your community with similar questions.
As you do this, you will slowly be leaving the “consensus trance,” the one created by the daily ritual of Commute-Job/School-Consume-Television. And you will find yourself in a new “trance,” one defined by ideas of magic, personal possibility, awakening, new group dynamics, alternative life paths. You will likely encounter a lot of incredibly inspiring ideas, and also, unfortunately, a lot of disempowering ideas and beliefs.
Here’s a useful way to think about it: Mainstream society is a program designed to work the best it can for the widest number of people possible. Generally speaking, that means good, decent people who are happy to live quiet, decent lives, and content themselves with the victories of career, family, health, happiness and making it through another day. And that’s a beautiful thing.
Outside of mainstream society, however, you will find a very different reality—the
“wildlands” of modern civilization. Its denizens, for one reason or another, don’t feel satisfied by consensus reality. That could be because they’re ahead of the curve, or it could be because they’re far behind the curve. That makes the “wildlands” an exciting, and dangerous, place. The “wildlands” are where society puts the ideas that are too disruptive of its daily activities, for better or worse. The strange ideas, the discredited ideas, the untested ideas, the potentially liberating ideas.
Magick is one of those ideas—or, rather, a gigantic cluster of ideas (a memeplex). Many of those ideas are really cool, and many should stay in the trash-heap.
But let’s be clear: To engage with magick is to begin to sort through society’s trash, looking for anything of value. Glamorous, no? Remember, alchemy is the art of turning shit into gold. “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone…”
Well, if you’re going to go looking for gold out there, at least allow me to guide you through the territory, so that you can avoid the seven biggest mistakes that people make when learning magick (I’ve made them all!).
1. Poorly Defined Goals
What do you want?
It’s a simple question, but most who enter the world of magick and alternative spirituality never ask it, or never fully define the answer. As a result, they’re caught up in the “dazzling lights” of the New Age Pinball Machine, and bounced around between experiences, groups and teachers, never finding themselves or getting to their core issues and drives.
You need to ask this question up front: What do you want? Do you want greater creative skill and power? Do you want to fix a trauma or personal challenge? Are you willing to give up everything and seek enlightenment? Whatever it is, define it now, and then ask yourself if magical means are really the answer, or if more mundane means would be a lot easier. Be clear on this, or you risk getting caught up in the glamour of magick, and forgetting that it’s just a tool, and only one tool of many available to you right now.
2. Staying in the Shallows
Magick is a giant buffet table. Thanks to the shrinking of the world by global communications, you’ll find material from every world faith and esoteric path readily available to you. Hermeticism/Golden Dawn/Thelema; Yoga; Vedanta; Vajrayana Buddhism; Sufism; NLP… the list is limited only by the demand of the New Age marketplace for the next big kick. Just a hundred years ago—in some cases, just a few decades ago—all of these subjects would have been incredibly hard to discover information on. You wouldn’t have been able to just pop down to Barnes & Noble or go on Amazon and have it all handed to you. And in all cases, once you discovered the entry to a path, you would be confronted with a teacher who would explain that the path was the work of a lifetime.
That puts modern seekers in a unique position. We don’t lack access—but what we do often lack is commitment to a path. Most likely, students will browse here and there, reading on a wide variety of paths, or even joining several groups in sequence. This is an incredible way to learn quickly; however, if the buffet table approach takes the place of deep, committed learning in one path or tradition, what happens is you stop making progress. You just get to the edge of your comfort zone in one path before starting over in another, never taking that crucial jump into the unknown. Ironically, this probably takes more time than sticking to one path, at least until you reach that path’s completion stages.
However, if you go in the complete opposite direction, and become a “Path Zealot,” you will make the third mistake:
3. Thinking There is One True Path
Once you’ve experienced peak states or personal breakthroughs in a system, it’s easy to generalize: “This is absolutely incredible… everybody should experience this!”
If you’re not careful, you soon become a missionary, talking non-stop about what you’ve experienced, trying to get your friends or family into whatever practice caused the peak state or breakthrough, or even, at the high registers of “Kool-Aid Intoxication,” thinking that you have found the One True Path, and that all other paths are lesser or deluded.
People can stay stuck in this state for days, weeks, months, or years—even their whole life. It tends to be a blockage to progress. It’s a classic behavior of an individual with a weak sense of self: Deep down, they feel themselves to be inferior or lesser than others, so they place all their focus on an all-consuming ideology or charismatic leader that they derive strength and self-worth from serving. If this sounds like an obvious trap, and one you would never fall for, think again: The “One True Path” disease has been responsible for many of history’s greatest tragedies, including the Third Reich or the many historical genocides committed by overzealous religious missionaries that worked to “convert by sword.”
If your path is the One True Path, it’s time to leave your cloistered room or insular community and experience what life is like for others of different faiths and life backgrounds. Make some new friends.
4. Us vs. Them Mentality
Because people who are into magick and alternative spirituality are often on the fringes, it’s easy to adopt belief systems that reinforce an oppressed identity or “us vs. them” story. This becomes a particularly acute problem when the magick that people are doing isn’t working, or not producing a good quality of life, and instead of changing the behaviors or beliefs that aren’t working, people create a narrative in which some “other” individual or group is keeping them down. These stories about why failure is OK quickly blossom and cross-pollinate, becoming wide-scale conspiracy theories potent enough to infect whole cultures, leaving disempowerment, misery and even genocide in their wake (again see the Third Reich). Examples of this include:
• “The Illuminati are out to get me because I have secret knowledge.”
• “Shapeshifting reptilians/Archons/evil spirits/Satan/etc. are controlling reality and don’t like me.”
• “I’m way too enlightened/edgy/intense/real for mainstream society to handle.”
• “I am a lightworker charged with battling the dark forces, and the dark forces are in control.”
Do you have any of these beliefs, or any similar ones? Let’s take a look at them—what’s the underlying message of all of them? Personal significance. Me me me. All of these scripts allow for personal significance through failure. They all allow you to be a complete fuckup and to simultaneously have the illusion of “winning.”
They are all poison. Jettison them immediately, and instead focus on your personal growth and happiness, and how you can be of service to the people around you.
5. Substance Abuse
Drugs and magick have been linked since the very first prehistoric shaman chewed some strange bark or fungus that let her talk to the spirits of the forest, and the spirits of the forest turned out to have some pretty useful stuff to say.
In recent times, magicians like Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs, Terence McKenna, Carlos Castaneda and others have hyped the spiritual potential of psychedelics and even harder substances. Some of them have also fallen prey to addiction, and the destructive behaviors that come with the disease of addiction. This is one of the major reasons why magick has been so discredited—it allows people to say “Yeah, but you were just high,” or to look at the addiction behaviors of people like Crowley and attribute them to magick instead of their true source, the drug addiction itself.
Drugs may be a fast route to altered states, but they are not a sustainable one. In our current moment—world economic crisis, instability and uncertainty—I suggest that magicians don’t have the time or luxury of drug use. We need to be sharp, frosty—Navy SEALs, not Deadheads. Remember: The Baby Boomer generation could burn decades with drug experimentation because it was the richest, most financially secure generation in history. That is not the case for Millenials or those younger. The world reality is a live-fire situation, a war zone, and you don’t dull your edge or disorient yourself in a war zone.
(It’s not an “Us vs. Them” war zone, by the way. It’s a free-for-all, as everybody scrambles to survive the challenges created by the acceleration of technology and growth of the human population.)
6. Trying to Be the “Best Magician” Instead of the “Best You”
When overachiever types get into magick, they try to learn every single aspect of it and become a Total and Formidable Master. There is no mastery; leave this archetype in the Saturday morning cartoons it came from. Remember: Magick is just a tool. Know your goal, and use the tool to achieve your goal.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be so linear: You may simply be seeking the regular, sustainable spiritual growth that comes from a regular practice of meditation, dreamwork, journalling, yoga, ritual and any other tool you have chosen to use. Wonderful.
The key here is: It’s not a competition. There is no prize, other than becoming more yourself.
7. Giving Your Power Away
Particularly as a young and untested magician, you will likely be confronted with situations or people that tempt you to surrender your power. Whether it’s an autocratic or abusive guru, a regimented and controlling magical order, or even a tightly controlling ideology, you might be tempted or even frightened into surrendering control of your life in exchange for some tangible or intangible reward.
If you do this, get ready for a painful learning experience!
Though it can sometimes be easy to forget, you are the true magician, the true master of your reality. To fully illustrate this point, I’d like to include a story from the author John Fowles, who kindled my early teenage interest in testing the nature of reality. It’s from his 1965 novel The Magus:
Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domains, and no sign of God, the prince believed his father.
But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace and came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling, creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.
“Are those real islands?” asked the young prince.
“Of course they are real islands,” said the man in evening dress.
“And those strange and troubling creatures?”
“They are all genuine and authentic princesses.”
“Then God must also exist!” cried the prince.
“I am God,” replied the man in evening dress, with a bow.
The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.
“So, you are back,” said his father, the king.
“I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,” said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
“Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God exist.”
“I saw them!”
“Tell me how God was dressed.”
“God was in full evening dress.”
“Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?”
The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.
“That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.”
At this, the prince returned to the next land and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.
“My father, the king, has told me who you are,” said the prince indignantly. “You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.”
The man on the shore smiled.
“It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father’s kingdom, there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father’s spell, so you cannot see them.”
The prince pensively returned home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eye.
“Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?”
The king smiled and rolled back his sleeves.
“Yes, my son, I’m only a magician.”
“Then the man on the other shore was God.”
“The man on the other shore was another magician.”
“I must know the truth, the truth beyond magic.”
“There is no truth beyond magic,” said the king.
The prince was full of sadness. He said, “I will kill myself.”
The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.
“Very well,” he said, “I can bear it.”
“You see, my son,” said the king, “you, too, now begin to be a magician.”
Sunday, February 15, 2015
The Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (or,
more commonly, the Golden Dawn) was a magical order active in Great
Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which practiced
theurgy and spiritual development. It has been one of the largest single influences on 20th-century Western occultism.
Concepts of magic and ritual at the center of contemporary traditions, such as Wicca and Thelema, were inspired by the Golden Dawn.
The three founders, William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers were Freemasons and members of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (S.R.I.A.). Westcott appears to have been the initial driving force behind the establishment of the Golden Dawn.
The Golden Dawn system was based on hierarchy and initiation like the Masonic Lodges; however women were admitted on an equal basis with men. The "Golden Dawn" was the first of three Orders, although all three are often collectively referred to as the "Golden Dawn". The First Order taught esoteric philosophy based on the Hermetic Qabalah and personal development through study and awareness of the four Classical Elements as well as the basics of astrology, tarot divination, and geomancy. The Second or "Inner" Order, the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (the Ruby Rose and Cross of Gold), taught proper magic, including scrying, astral travel, and alchemy. The Third Order was that of the "Secret Chiefs", who were said to be highly skilled; they supposedly directed the activities of the lower two orders by spirit communication with the Chiefs of the Second Order.
Hermetic Qabalah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Qabalah
Four Classical Elements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Elements
Tarot Divination
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_divination
Scrying
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying
Astral Travel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_projection
Alchemy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy
Geomancy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomancy
The foundational documents of the original Order of the Golden Dawn, known as the Cipher Manuscripts, are written in English using Trithemius cipher. The manuscripts give the specific outlines of the Grade Rituals of the Order and prescribe a curriculum of graduated teachings that encompass the Hermetic Qabalah, astrology, occult tarot, geomancy, and alchemy.
Cypher Manuscripts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_Manuscripts
Trithemius Cipher
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trithemius_cipher
According to the records of the Order, the manuscripts passed from Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, a Masonic scholar, to the Rev. A. F. A. Woodford, whom British occult writer Francis King describes as the fourth founder (although Woodford died shortly after the Order was founded). The documents did not excite Woodford, and in February 1886 he passed them on to Freemason William Wynn Westcott, who managed to decode them in 1887. Westcott, pleased with his discovery, called on fellow Freemason Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers for a second opinion. Westcott asked for Mathers' help to turn the manuscripts into a coherent system for lodge work. Mathers in turn asked fellow Freemason William Robert Woodman to assist the two, and he accepted. Mathers and Westcott have been credited with developing the ritual outlines in the Cipher Manuscripts into a workable format. Mathers, however, is generally credited with the design of the curriculum and rituals of the Second Order, which he called the Rosae Rubae et Aureae Crucis ("Ruby Rose and Golden Cross" or the RR et AC).
more can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn
Concepts of magic and ritual at the center of contemporary traditions, such as Wicca and Thelema, were inspired by the Golden Dawn.
The three founders, William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers were Freemasons and members of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (S.R.I.A.). Westcott appears to have been the initial driving force behind the establishment of the Golden Dawn.
The Golden Dawn system was based on hierarchy and initiation like the Masonic Lodges; however women were admitted on an equal basis with men. The "Golden Dawn" was the first of three Orders, although all three are often collectively referred to as the "Golden Dawn". The First Order taught esoteric philosophy based on the Hermetic Qabalah and personal development through study and awareness of the four Classical Elements as well as the basics of astrology, tarot divination, and geomancy. The Second or "Inner" Order, the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (the Ruby Rose and Cross of Gold), taught proper magic, including scrying, astral travel, and alchemy. The Third Order was that of the "Secret Chiefs", who were said to be highly skilled; they supposedly directed the activities of the lower two orders by spirit communication with the Chiefs of the Second Order.
Hermetic Qabalah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Qabalah
Four Classical Elements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Elements
Tarot Divination
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_divination
Scrying
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying
Astral Travel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_projection
Alchemy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy
Geomancy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomancy
The foundational documents of the original Order of the Golden Dawn, known as the Cipher Manuscripts, are written in English using Trithemius cipher. The manuscripts give the specific outlines of the Grade Rituals of the Order and prescribe a curriculum of graduated teachings that encompass the Hermetic Qabalah, astrology, occult tarot, geomancy, and alchemy.
Cypher Manuscripts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_Manuscripts
Trithemius Cipher
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trithemius_cipher
According to the records of the Order, the manuscripts passed from Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, a Masonic scholar, to the Rev. A. F. A. Woodford, whom British occult writer Francis King describes as the fourth founder (although Woodford died shortly after the Order was founded). The documents did not excite Woodford, and in February 1886 he passed them on to Freemason William Wynn Westcott, who managed to decode them in 1887. Westcott, pleased with his discovery, called on fellow Freemason Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers for a second opinion. Westcott asked for Mathers' help to turn the manuscripts into a coherent system for lodge work. Mathers in turn asked fellow Freemason William Robert Woodman to assist the two, and he accepted. Mathers and Westcott have been credited with developing the ritual outlines in the Cipher Manuscripts into a workable format. Mathers, however, is generally credited with the design of the curriculum and rituals of the Second Order, which he called the Rosae Rubae et Aureae Crucis ("Ruby Rose and Golden Cross" or the RR et AC).
more can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn
Life is But a Dream - Essays for the Discordian Occultist
Part 1
“As sunlight obscures the stars by day so too does wakefullness blind us to the fact that we are still dreaming.”
– Liber Kaos, Peter J Carroll.
Everything you experience of the outside world has to pass via your senses into your brain. Your body acts as an instrument through which reality is filtered. Ignorance allows you to focus. You always exclude more than you are taking in. If this article has your full attention it will necessarily be at the expense of other things. If you’re reading it on your mobile in a pub some people will see your focus as ignorant, for example.
It is with your memory and imagination that you decode meaning from the chaos of the external world. You’ve been around in some form or other since the dawn of time. In my experience it’s only recently that any of it has made any sort of “sense” thanks in the main to my memory and imagination.
However, that “sense” and meaning is ultimately decided by you. You get the final call as regards what is or is not “real”. This is the case with everything you have ever experienced.
Sleep is a good expression of this truth. While enveloped in sleep the brain invents scenarios by ignoring most sense data. This act of invention is usually a result of your subconscious mind combining memories and imagination. This video posted on Disinfo recently about lucid dreaming allows you to investigate the dream state further by learning to use your conscious mind to create dreams. There’s plenty of information online elsewhere about the process but a simple three step guide for the busy Discordian would run something like this:
Step one: Resolve to perform frequent ‘reality checks’.
Reality checking techniques vary from person to person but I find pulling my hands up into my line of vision is enough. This is tricky for me to do while dreaming as they usually appear a little slow moving or blurred. Other people switch electric lights off and on or try reading words, in short perform any simple activity you find is usually difficult in a dream.
Do these checks every hour or so until it’s an instinctive habit. The point of them is to trigger the realisation that you are dreaming.
Step two: Keep a dream diary and fill it in every morning.
This principally aids your memory and ability to recall any dreams from the previous night. No point in lucid dreaming if you forget about it the next day.
Step three: Learn not to freak out when you do finally feel lucid within the dream state.
I fell into the trap of waking up each time I realised I was dreaming for a while. This was mainly because I’d get so excited when a reality check revealed I was dreaming that I’d also trigger a ‘fully conscious wake up in the middle of the night situation’.
Step four: Explore the world of lucid dreaming where anything you think is true becomes the case instantly.
Magick is the art of manipulating reality both internally and externally. Lucid dreaming is an interesting preparatory first step. Further magickal exercises will build upon principles you’ll discover as your mind becomes more able to consciously manipulate the dream state. Most so-called low magick is principally concerned with projecting dreams outward into our external reality. There’s little point in doing this if you can’t dream properly.
The phrase “living the dream” owes more than a little to magickal thinking. However, our aim is to live this dream we call reality in a fully conscious ‘awakened’ state.
http://disinfo.com/2012/11/life-is-but-a-dream/
Part 2
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”
- How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, Philip K. Dick
Magick is a highly subjective skill. According to the occultist, Ramsey Dukes, as a discipline it lies somewhere alongside ‘art’, ‘science’ and ‘religion’ [1]. All of these pursuits require a certain state of mind. The magick user who entirely excludes the possibility of magick from his worldview is like a cleric who knows no God, an artist with no appreciation for art or a scientist who refuses to accept the laws of mathematics. It’s not necessarily the case that you will be unsuccessful but it’s significantly less likely. So, for as long as is comfortable[2], it’s time to allow magick to be part of your reality.
This essay includes two exercises, the first will involve noticing magick and the second will involve using it. The first exercise is outlined below in three easy steps:
Step one: Resolve to notice the number 23.
The particular number is not relevant at this stage. Some observe the number 11 or 13 or 7 but as we’re Discordians the number 23 will tune us into the right state of mind for this series of thought exercises. People who are inexperienced in the ways of numerology are advised to watch Eric Cartmen’s explanation of the causes of 9/11 [Mystery of the Urinal Deuce (Season 10, Episode 9)]. A good numerologist can easily spot the 23’s in the numbers 203, 2003, or, at a push, 5.
Step two: Get your dream diary and record what 23 means to you each time you see it.
This diary will now be re-named a “spellbook”. Spells can take years to manifest and there’s no way of checking your effectiveness if you can’t remember which ones you have cast.
Step three: Learn not to freak out too much when the number 23 does actually seem to take on some sort of significance.
I suggest you apply maximum fluidity to the meanings you start to notice here. The number 23 doesn’t usually acquire one meaning and the more you pay attention the more you should realise it’s neither always lucky or unlucky. All we are noticing is it carries a certain significance.
Step four: Toward the end of the week (usually by the fifth day) you’ll be able to explore a world where other random details can also be viewed as significant.
In his occult masterpiece “The Secret History of The World” Jonathan Black nails a description of the sort of mindset we’re trying to invoke here:
“In this history the universe is anthropocentric, every single particle of it straining, directed towards humankind. […In] the mind-before-matter universe that this book describes, the connection between mind and matter is much more intimate. It is a living, dynamic connection. Everything in this universe is alive and conscious to some degree, responding sensitively and intelligently to our deepest, subtlest needs.”
[my italics]
The Secret History of The World, Jonathan Black. P33-34
While dreaming one’s thoughts manifest almost instantly and if you’re lucid at the time this process is easily observed. Now you have entered a more magickal state of mind we’re going to see how long it takes to replicate this process in waking life. This next exercise is similar to one suggested by Pope Bob in the first chapter of “Prometheus Rising”[3]. The only difference is we’re adjusting things slightly to account for inflation and we are not searching for any explanation other than a magickal one. Once again it is a three step process:
Step one: Resolve to evoke a nice shiny fifty cent piece.
Step two: Keep an eye out for the fruits of your evocation.
Step three: Learn not to freak out when you finally do find it. It will be found by you easily and the moment you’ve got it in your hand you will be ready for part three of this five part series where we will finally get cracking on some real high grade Discordian nonsense.
Step four: Wonder why it is that each of these three step plans has had a fourth step?
Part 3
“Thoughts are things” – Prentice Mulford, noted American philosopher.
Previous articles in this series, “Life is but a dream” and “Living The Dream,” have deliberately avoided too much theory and focused instead on practice. One of the reasons we started in Part 1 with lucid dreaming is because it acts as a safe environment for your early magick use[1] while teaching you most of the essentials in a fairly short period of time. For example, in that particular state you will have noticed the slightest negative thought manifests instantly. Furthermore, if you set out to have a nightmare it’s not hard to make yourself wake up screaming. However, few people do this because dealing with such situations usually comes instinctively. After all in that world you are an all powerful great magician who can make even the grass go green.
Now your experiments are moving into the external world where you will have spent years learning how limited your power is. The key point here is that everything you’ve ever encountered has had to come through your own reality filter, otherwise known as your mind[2]. Everything you know about the outside world has had to pass through the bowels of your brain.
During these exercises lets agree for the moment that you cannot order the chaotic external world and focus instead upon the only thing you can control, your mind. Think of the techniques below as safety precautions which have been shown by others to help keep that vital instrument clean and healthy.
1, Cultivate a level of “mindfulness” with daily meditation
Meditation is a good start. I use the techniques taught by Alan Watts[3] as a matter of personal preference. Meditate frequently as part of a daily routine and you may glimpse a sense of what Buddhists call mindfulness. This encompasses a feeling that judging events and circumstances is futile. It’s an excellent way to avoid nightmares as fear requires you to make a judgement. Resources on how to meditate are available elsewhere online and there are many variations on this. In a nutshell here is the three step process I use daily:
Step one: Frame it as an activity which you are doing in the spirit of play, it’s not a solemn duty or task. It’s in essence meant to be fun.
Step two: Find a comfortable place and time where you will not be disturbed. You’re about to ignore the outside world and sit in it without interaction, this will be easier if you’re free of distractions. Set aside around 30-60 minutes. Follow whichever specific procedure appeals to you most but personally speaking I was first drawn in by the simplicity of an exercise called “the mindfulness of breathing”. Here you close your eyes and count, in repeating cycles of ten, the natural flow of your breath.
Step three: Learn not to freak out too much when life gets in the way or when you have an unexpected moment of success.
Step four: !
2, Adopt a temporary moral code.
Try using the beliefs of a “moral” spiritual system for a while and see how it suits you. Magick is a highly subjective skill so which set of scruples you choose to use is entirely up to you. Any theology which has a moral system that appeals will do but personally speaking my favourite option is contained within a short New Age masterpiece called “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz.[4] It takes an afternoon to read and carries less baggage than any of the more serious religious options. Give it a go in the same week you spend meditating and notice how your reality starts to shift into an easier place.
Here is the three step process, contained in more detail within, The Four Agreements:
Step one: “Be impeccable with your word”.
If you say you’ll do something ensure you actually do it. Avoid lying to people and think of it as a weapon not unlike poison.
Step two: “Don’t take anything personally”.
No one really knows you or why you’re doing what you will. If they say or do good or bad things it speaks only of their own character. This is also true of your own judgements. Say nice but truthful things about people and you’re exercising positive internal energy. Keep bitching about people and you’ll emphasise the bad in yourself.
Step three: “Don’t make assumptions”.
Discover the world with your own mind, don’t be led by others. Trust yourself and investigate the reality you personally inhabit. We all live in different worlds and it’s far better to gaze in wonder than become one of those dull characters who assume they know it all.
Step four: “Always do your best”.
Hopefully the above brief description has enticed you to go look at that book. Get it from a library or buy it or whatever, don’t just use my incomplete description of it. However, as with all these essays I am suggesting tools not rules. It’s perfectly acceptable to try Christianity, Islam, Satanism, Judaism, or any of the other deeply moral spiritual systems available in today’s theological supermarket. You’re only doing it for a bit though so don’t go telling everyone, they might get upset if you decide to give their BS[5] a miss later on.
3, Learn not to freak out
The advantage of your path is that Discordianism is a joke religion. Laughter is the music from which our universe is created. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “the angels can fly because they take themselves lightly”. The moment you forget this you might fall into the trap of taking things seriously. So, here’s a quick three step guide to some of the things you need to know before going any further:
Step 1: There is in fact no such thing as magick.
Step 2: Maybe you should stop using the word “is”.
Step 3: A good Discordian never believes anything they can read.
Step 4: As a “High” initiate there is obviously nothing I can ever actually let you know about Discordianism.
4, Cultivate a sense of your true will.
All systems of magick are pretty hot on the notion of free will. Even the control-freak Gods of the the Abrahamic religions recognise in their more sober moments that you must respect other people’s right to self determination. They don’t do this because they’re ‘nice’ Gods, they do it because the consequences for a magick user who tries to control another are not beneficial in the long term. There’s a deep misunderstanding in some forms of modern occultism that bending others to your will is a worthwhile exercise, in my experience it’s not. In fact it locks you into a situation where you will ultimately depend upon them rather than yourself.
A good occultist entices people to co-operate rather than forces them to do so. However, not pushing other people around is the easy part, working out if you’re being true to yourself is far more problematic.
Getting to know thyself is a lifelong task as you are changing all the time. This essay could be a first step towards you really considering that journey of self discovery or, more likely, it’s just a timely reminder.
At a guess your body will likely currently be full of drugs, toxins and ideas that do not really belong there. Is it your true will to drink more beer or are you in fact under the influence of alcohol and by extension the will of the company who sells it? Did you really want that bar of chocolate or did the idea get seeded in your subconscious mind by a clever advertisment?[6]
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not suggesting you need to stop the drink or drugs I’m just pointing out if you’re going to use them make sure they don’t end up using you. Do these things mindfully or they cloud your judgement when it comes to discerning your “true will”. We’re Discordians, not monks. We live our lives but before you use the techniques of magick it’s worth you ensure it’s your drerams you are living and not someone else’s.
If you follow all of the above stages any problems you face will be more easily placed into perspective. Without wishing to lift the magick curtain too much next week you’re about to do nothing more than try an instense experiment in applied philosophy. Unlike Thelemites or other occultists you’ve always got the comfortable back door provided by the fact that Discordianism is a joke, it’s nothing more than a chance to play around with funny ideas.
Part 4:
“Magick has many aspects, but primarily it acts as a dramatized system of psychology”
- “Pope Bob”, Robert Anton Wilson
Here’s one way of making a sigil. It’s partly cribbed from a talk given by Grant Morrison at the Disinformation conference[1] with slight personal additional details provided by my own experiences. Sigils are a low-magick technique which will not fail to get you exactly what you need. It can become a high-magick technique but for the moment we’ll just stick to the basics[2].
One important thing to note is that sigils always appear to work. The distinction being; if I kicked in a window, I’d feel I knew who’d done it. If I cast a sigil which asked for that window to be broken and then discovered a few days later it was now broken, no one can prove a causal relationship between the sigil and the broken window. However I might get the impression that my sigil was involved in the process somewhere.
Secondly, the following is a (in my opinion better) version of other ideas that have been kicking round recently such as, The Secret, Cosmic Ordering, and, to a lesser extent, “positive thinking”[3]. It’s also similar to “preying,” if you think your God lives within you[4].
All these above techniques have common elements. All of them are pretty much in agreement regarding the first part of the process, set your intent. The most effective Discordian occultists spend more time on step one than they ever do on step four.
Step one: Decide upon your will.
– All your workings should be done with pieces of paper and a pen.
This is the hardest part. You need to imagine what it is you want as clearly as possible. Then refine it until you’ve got a vision of what it is you ‘really’ want. Then refine it again after you’ve imagined the earth shifting upon its axis in order to grant this wish over the next few years. Check you’re good with the consequences and then, refine it again. I can’t emphasise this enough. See the further reading section for more details.
Once you’re happy write it out as a single sentence:
EG: I AM A HEALTHY FOURTEEN AND A HALF STONE, ENERGETIC PERSON.
Notice a few things about the above. When I cast this I wanted to be 14 and a half stone. There are many ways this could have happened, some of them include ill health. Hence the words healthy and energetic.
Think of those old fairy stories where someone makes a wish and there are tragic consequences. King Midas wanted everything he touched to turn to gold. He ends up regretting his wish. The difference between your sigil becoming a blessing or a curse is in its detail. Give it lots of thought. Write and re-write the sentence. Check the further reading section for more information.
Also notice, it’s not “I WANT TO BE” or “I AM THIS AND NOT THAT”. Negatives in sigils are just negative! If you write “I WANT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE” look forward to a life of wanting to be a millionaire. Remember what we learned in part one where you began lucid dreaming. What would happen to you if you dived into the dream world with negatives in your mind?
If you truly have followed this series from part one, as opposed to most who will have just casually landed on it and curiously read to this point, why not try to lucid dream your intended future first and try it out a bit? If, for example, having lots of sexual partners gets messy in that world ditch it and come up with a better wish. It needs to feel like a world you are comfortable in. Once that’s the case, state it as if you are already there, in that positive future.
As an exercise imagine you’re in that future calling back into the past when you wrote out this sigil. Try describing and declaring what it’s like in as much detail as possible. Now listen out for your “imaginary” future self shouting “I’m the owner of a brand new convertible and I love it” or whatever. Now, write it down!
Finally a note of caution here. Remember we spoke about ‘true will’ in the last piece? Well, if your dreams and visions involve others do not enchant realities which compromise their true will.
So, for example, don’t put “I am married to Dave who works in accounts”. Ask for a less uncompromising: “I’m married to a bloke like Dave who works in accounts”. This doesn’t rule Dave out of the equation, after all who is more like Dave than Dave? However if he thinks you’re a repulsive creature who he’d rather vomit over than have sex with, you’ve given the poor guy a get out and you can still get what you need. Far better to enchant someone, like him who likes you of their own free will.
It’s not unlikely you’ll encounter minor problems with all this but remember what you learned in part three and fear not: you will live and learn!
There’s nothing to stop you doing another sigil in the future.
—
Step Two: Remove the vowels and repeated letters.
The first step was by far the most important part. These next bits are 1% of sigil craft and the bit you’ve just done was the remaining 99%. However, this 1% which I’m about to explain is the more “magick” bit. It’ll make you feel more like ‘an occultist’ and there’s enormous value in that.
This means you should check you’re comfortable with what you’ve just done as part of this second step. You need to feel good on both a subconscious and intuitive level about the sentence you’re turning into a weird looking symbol. If you’re not it’ll come out in the process later on once the sigil is cast. For now, I’ll assume you are and crack on.
Firstly, sigils are crafted and re-drafted by a process of elimination. Like a sculpture you’re going to chip and chisel that sentence down until it looks like a sort of magical wingding. Begin this by removing the vowels and repeated letters, leaving yourself with a string of consonants, like so:
MHLTYFRNDSGCP
An example of my weight loss sigil in its early stages
Step three: Combine the letters into one big pattern and begin reducing it into a simpler image.
This bit is where most people get in a tizz. Remember the most difficult part of the process was over once you’d finished step one. There are no rules as to how you go about combining the letters but I find it best to jumble them all into one big squiggle. The main picture is an example of the one we’re looking at. Ultimately it was successful and I used a revised version to hit my target weight of 13.5 a year later. This is down from my initial 18.5 stone.
Keep re-drawing it and omitting details as you go along. The point of this process is to lose sight of what it is the sigil means. Keep drawing until the exact point of your work is irrelevant to you. Get really bored of the process and lose sight of why it is you’re bothering with such superstitious nonsense. Make it look more and more “magickal” to you. Hit a point where it starts to become a labour of love which is totally detached from your initial intent.
The finished product must look perfect and beautiful. It represents the total of your efforts. This is now a sigil, yet to be cast. It represents a thought which you are about to plant into the collective dreamworld so it can start to descend into the world of objective reality and your future.
Not quite but almost the finished product
Treasure it a bit. Don’t cast it straight away. Be pleased with it.
Step Four: Cast it.
People are divided upon how exactly you should do this. You’re looking for an intense transcendental experience where you can focus on this image and force it through your mind into the magical dream world while you are fully conscious. Pain, meditation, orgasm, psychedelic-transcendental drugs or all of the above combined are popular methods. Whichever you’re best at. Combine the intense experience with a good solid look at the sigil. Then close your eyes and think of it. Project it into your minds eye and out into the cosmos. Then destroy the paper it is drawn on and forget all about it.
One simple way, which I use, is with a candle. Have the sigil drawn on a piece of paper. Burn it and then let the flame burn (but not harm) your fingertips. At that precise moment close your eyes and picture it in your mind. There we are, it’s cast. The pain should have done enough to distract you and send it neatly into the world of ideas…
There are numerous other methods but the most important part is, as I said, step 1.
Once you’ve cast your sigil you must then aid its descent into the real world. If you asked for a new job, get applying for them. If you wanted to lose weight like I did, stop eating those chocolate cakes.
“As sunlight obscures the stars by day so too does wakefullness blind us to the fact that we are still dreaming.”
– Liber Kaos, Peter J Carroll.
Everything you experience of the outside world has to pass via your senses into your brain. Your body acts as an instrument through which reality is filtered. Ignorance allows you to focus. You always exclude more than you are taking in. If this article has your full attention it will necessarily be at the expense of other things. If you’re reading it on your mobile in a pub some people will see your focus as ignorant, for example.
It is with your memory and imagination that you decode meaning from the chaos of the external world. You’ve been around in some form or other since the dawn of time. In my experience it’s only recently that any of it has made any sort of “sense” thanks in the main to my memory and imagination.
However, that “sense” and meaning is ultimately decided by you. You get the final call as regards what is or is not “real”. This is the case with everything you have ever experienced.
Sleep is a good expression of this truth. While enveloped in sleep the brain invents scenarios by ignoring most sense data. This act of invention is usually a result of your subconscious mind combining memories and imagination. This video posted on Disinfo recently about lucid dreaming allows you to investigate the dream state further by learning to use your conscious mind to create dreams. There’s plenty of information online elsewhere about the process but a simple three step guide for the busy Discordian would run something like this:
Step one: Resolve to perform frequent ‘reality checks’.
Reality checking techniques vary from person to person but I find pulling my hands up into my line of vision is enough. This is tricky for me to do while dreaming as they usually appear a little slow moving or blurred. Other people switch electric lights off and on or try reading words, in short perform any simple activity you find is usually difficult in a dream.
Do these checks every hour or so until it’s an instinctive habit. The point of them is to trigger the realisation that you are dreaming.
Step two: Keep a dream diary and fill it in every morning.
This principally aids your memory and ability to recall any dreams from the previous night. No point in lucid dreaming if you forget about it the next day.
Step three: Learn not to freak out when you do finally feel lucid within the dream state.
I fell into the trap of waking up each time I realised I was dreaming for a while. This was mainly because I’d get so excited when a reality check revealed I was dreaming that I’d also trigger a ‘fully conscious wake up in the middle of the night situation’.
Step four: Explore the world of lucid dreaming where anything you think is true becomes the case instantly.
Magick is the art of manipulating reality both internally and externally. Lucid dreaming is an interesting preparatory first step. Further magickal exercises will build upon principles you’ll discover as your mind becomes more able to consciously manipulate the dream state. Most so-called low magick is principally concerned with projecting dreams outward into our external reality. There’s little point in doing this if you can’t dream properly.
The phrase “living the dream” owes more than a little to magickal thinking. However, our aim is to live this dream we call reality in a fully conscious ‘awakened’ state.
http://disinfo.com/2012/11/life-is-but-a-dream/
Part 2
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”
- How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, Philip K. Dick
Magick is a highly subjective skill. According to the occultist, Ramsey Dukes, as a discipline it lies somewhere alongside ‘art’, ‘science’ and ‘religion’ [1]. All of these pursuits require a certain state of mind. The magick user who entirely excludes the possibility of magick from his worldview is like a cleric who knows no God, an artist with no appreciation for art or a scientist who refuses to accept the laws of mathematics. It’s not necessarily the case that you will be unsuccessful but it’s significantly less likely. So, for as long as is comfortable[2], it’s time to allow magick to be part of your reality.
This essay includes two exercises, the first will involve noticing magick and the second will involve using it. The first exercise is outlined below in three easy steps:
Step one: Resolve to notice the number 23.
The particular number is not relevant at this stage. Some observe the number 11 or 13 or 7 but as we’re Discordians the number 23 will tune us into the right state of mind for this series of thought exercises. People who are inexperienced in the ways of numerology are advised to watch Eric Cartmen’s explanation of the causes of 9/11 [Mystery of the Urinal Deuce (Season 10, Episode 9)]. A good numerologist can easily spot the 23’s in the numbers 203, 2003, or, at a push, 5.
Step two: Get your dream diary and record what 23 means to you each time you see it.
This diary will now be re-named a “spellbook”. Spells can take years to manifest and there’s no way of checking your effectiveness if you can’t remember which ones you have cast.
Step three: Learn not to freak out too much when the number 23 does actually seem to take on some sort of significance.
I suggest you apply maximum fluidity to the meanings you start to notice here. The number 23 doesn’t usually acquire one meaning and the more you pay attention the more you should realise it’s neither always lucky or unlucky. All we are noticing is it carries a certain significance.
Step four: Toward the end of the week (usually by the fifth day) you’ll be able to explore a world where other random details can also be viewed as significant.
In his occult masterpiece “The Secret History of The World” Jonathan Black nails a description of the sort of mindset we’re trying to invoke here:
“In this history the universe is anthropocentric, every single particle of it straining, directed towards humankind. […In] the mind-before-matter universe that this book describes, the connection between mind and matter is much more intimate. It is a living, dynamic connection. Everything in this universe is alive and conscious to some degree, responding sensitively and intelligently to our deepest, subtlest needs.”
[my italics]
The Secret History of The World, Jonathan Black. P33-34
While dreaming one’s thoughts manifest almost instantly and if you’re lucid at the time this process is easily observed. Now you have entered a more magickal state of mind we’re going to see how long it takes to replicate this process in waking life. This next exercise is similar to one suggested by Pope Bob in the first chapter of “Prometheus Rising”[3]. The only difference is we’re adjusting things slightly to account for inflation and we are not searching for any explanation other than a magickal one. Once again it is a three step process:
Step one: Resolve to evoke a nice shiny fifty cent piece.
Step two: Keep an eye out for the fruits of your evocation.
Step three: Learn not to freak out when you finally do find it. It will be found by you easily and the moment you’ve got it in your hand you will be ready for part three of this five part series where we will finally get cracking on some real high grade Discordian nonsense.
Step four: Wonder why it is that each of these three step plans has had a fourth step?
Part 3
“Thoughts are things” – Prentice Mulford, noted American philosopher.
Previous articles in this series, “Life is but a dream” and “Living The Dream,” have deliberately avoided too much theory and focused instead on practice. One of the reasons we started in Part 1 with lucid dreaming is because it acts as a safe environment for your early magick use[1] while teaching you most of the essentials in a fairly short period of time. For example, in that particular state you will have noticed the slightest negative thought manifests instantly. Furthermore, if you set out to have a nightmare it’s not hard to make yourself wake up screaming. However, few people do this because dealing with such situations usually comes instinctively. After all in that world you are an all powerful great magician who can make even the grass go green.
Now your experiments are moving into the external world where you will have spent years learning how limited your power is. The key point here is that everything you’ve ever encountered has had to come through your own reality filter, otherwise known as your mind[2]. Everything you know about the outside world has had to pass through the bowels of your brain.
During these exercises lets agree for the moment that you cannot order the chaotic external world and focus instead upon the only thing you can control, your mind. Think of the techniques below as safety precautions which have been shown by others to help keep that vital instrument clean and healthy.
1, Cultivate a level of “mindfulness” with daily meditation
Meditation is a good start. I use the techniques taught by Alan Watts[3] as a matter of personal preference. Meditate frequently as part of a daily routine and you may glimpse a sense of what Buddhists call mindfulness. This encompasses a feeling that judging events and circumstances is futile. It’s an excellent way to avoid nightmares as fear requires you to make a judgement. Resources on how to meditate are available elsewhere online and there are many variations on this. In a nutshell here is the three step process I use daily:
Step one: Frame it as an activity which you are doing in the spirit of play, it’s not a solemn duty or task. It’s in essence meant to be fun.
Step two: Find a comfortable place and time where you will not be disturbed. You’re about to ignore the outside world and sit in it without interaction, this will be easier if you’re free of distractions. Set aside around 30-60 minutes. Follow whichever specific procedure appeals to you most but personally speaking I was first drawn in by the simplicity of an exercise called “the mindfulness of breathing”. Here you close your eyes and count, in repeating cycles of ten, the natural flow of your breath.
Step three: Learn not to freak out too much when life gets in the way or when you have an unexpected moment of success.
Step four: !
2, Adopt a temporary moral code.
Try using the beliefs of a “moral” spiritual system for a while and see how it suits you. Magick is a highly subjective skill so which set of scruples you choose to use is entirely up to you. Any theology which has a moral system that appeals will do but personally speaking my favourite option is contained within a short New Age masterpiece called “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz.[4] It takes an afternoon to read and carries less baggage than any of the more serious religious options. Give it a go in the same week you spend meditating and notice how your reality starts to shift into an easier place.
Here is the three step process, contained in more detail within, The Four Agreements:
Step one: “Be impeccable with your word”.
If you say you’ll do something ensure you actually do it. Avoid lying to people and think of it as a weapon not unlike poison.
Step two: “Don’t take anything personally”.
No one really knows you or why you’re doing what you will. If they say or do good or bad things it speaks only of their own character. This is also true of your own judgements. Say nice but truthful things about people and you’re exercising positive internal energy. Keep bitching about people and you’ll emphasise the bad in yourself.
Step three: “Don’t make assumptions”.
Discover the world with your own mind, don’t be led by others. Trust yourself and investigate the reality you personally inhabit. We all live in different worlds and it’s far better to gaze in wonder than become one of those dull characters who assume they know it all.
Step four: “Always do your best”.
Hopefully the above brief description has enticed you to go look at that book. Get it from a library or buy it or whatever, don’t just use my incomplete description of it. However, as with all these essays I am suggesting tools not rules. It’s perfectly acceptable to try Christianity, Islam, Satanism, Judaism, or any of the other deeply moral spiritual systems available in today’s theological supermarket. You’re only doing it for a bit though so don’t go telling everyone, they might get upset if you decide to give their BS[5] a miss later on.
3, Learn not to freak out
The advantage of your path is that Discordianism is a joke religion. Laughter is the music from which our universe is created. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “the angels can fly because they take themselves lightly”. The moment you forget this you might fall into the trap of taking things seriously. So, here’s a quick three step guide to some of the things you need to know before going any further:
Step 1: There is in fact no such thing as magick.
Step 2: Maybe you should stop using the word “is”.
Step 3: A good Discordian never believes anything they can read.
Step 4: As a “High” initiate there is obviously nothing I can ever actually let you know about Discordianism.
4, Cultivate a sense of your true will.
All systems of magick are pretty hot on the notion of free will. Even the control-freak Gods of the the Abrahamic religions recognise in their more sober moments that you must respect other people’s right to self determination. They don’t do this because they’re ‘nice’ Gods, they do it because the consequences for a magick user who tries to control another are not beneficial in the long term. There’s a deep misunderstanding in some forms of modern occultism that bending others to your will is a worthwhile exercise, in my experience it’s not. In fact it locks you into a situation where you will ultimately depend upon them rather than yourself.
A good occultist entices people to co-operate rather than forces them to do so. However, not pushing other people around is the easy part, working out if you’re being true to yourself is far more problematic.
Getting to know thyself is a lifelong task as you are changing all the time. This essay could be a first step towards you really considering that journey of self discovery or, more likely, it’s just a timely reminder.
At a guess your body will likely currently be full of drugs, toxins and ideas that do not really belong there. Is it your true will to drink more beer or are you in fact under the influence of alcohol and by extension the will of the company who sells it? Did you really want that bar of chocolate or did the idea get seeded in your subconscious mind by a clever advertisment?[6]
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not suggesting you need to stop the drink or drugs I’m just pointing out if you’re going to use them make sure they don’t end up using you. Do these things mindfully or they cloud your judgement when it comes to discerning your “true will”. We’re Discordians, not monks. We live our lives but before you use the techniques of magick it’s worth you ensure it’s your drerams you are living and not someone else’s.
If you follow all of the above stages any problems you face will be more easily placed into perspective. Without wishing to lift the magick curtain too much next week you’re about to do nothing more than try an instense experiment in applied philosophy. Unlike Thelemites or other occultists you’ve always got the comfortable back door provided by the fact that Discordianism is a joke, it’s nothing more than a chance to play around with funny ideas.
Part 4:
“Magick has many aspects, but primarily it acts as a dramatized system of psychology”
- “Pope Bob”, Robert Anton Wilson
Here’s one way of making a sigil. It’s partly cribbed from a talk given by Grant Morrison at the Disinformation conference[1] with slight personal additional details provided by my own experiences. Sigils are a low-magick technique which will not fail to get you exactly what you need. It can become a high-magick technique but for the moment we’ll just stick to the basics[2].
One important thing to note is that sigils always appear to work. The distinction being; if I kicked in a window, I’d feel I knew who’d done it. If I cast a sigil which asked for that window to be broken and then discovered a few days later it was now broken, no one can prove a causal relationship between the sigil and the broken window. However I might get the impression that my sigil was involved in the process somewhere.
Secondly, the following is a (in my opinion better) version of other ideas that have been kicking round recently such as, The Secret, Cosmic Ordering, and, to a lesser extent, “positive thinking”[3]. It’s also similar to “preying,” if you think your God lives within you[4].
All these above techniques have common elements. All of them are pretty much in agreement regarding the first part of the process, set your intent. The most effective Discordian occultists spend more time on step one than they ever do on step four.
Step one: Decide upon your will.
– All your workings should be done with pieces of paper and a pen.
This is the hardest part. You need to imagine what it is you want as clearly as possible. Then refine it until you’ve got a vision of what it is you ‘really’ want. Then refine it again after you’ve imagined the earth shifting upon its axis in order to grant this wish over the next few years. Check you’re good with the consequences and then, refine it again. I can’t emphasise this enough. See the further reading section for more details.
Once you’re happy write it out as a single sentence:
EG: I AM A HEALTHY FOURTEEN AND A HALF STONE, ENERGETIC PERSON.
Notice a few things about the above. When I cast this I wanted to be 14 and a half stone. There are many ways this could have happened, some of them include ill health. Hence the words healthy and energetic.
Think of those old fairy stories where someone makes a wish and there are tragic consequences. King Midas wanted everything he touched to turn to gold. He ends up regretting his wish. The difference between your sigil becoming a blessing or a curse is in its detail. Give it lots of thought. Write and re-write the sentence. Check the further reading section for more information.
Also notice, it’s not “I WANT TO BE” or “I AM THIS AND NOT THAT”. Negatives in sigils are just negative! If you write “I WANT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE” look forward to a life of wanting to be a millionaire. Remember what we learned in part one where you began lucid dreaming. What would happen to you if you dived into the dream world with negatives in your mind?
If you truly have followed this series from part one, as opposed to most who will have just casually landed on it and curiously read to this point, why not try to lucid dream your intended future first and try it out a bit? If, for example, having lots of sexual partners gets messy in that world ditch it and come up with a better wish. It needs to feel like a world you are comfortable in. Once that’s the case, state it as if you are already there, in that positive future.
As an exercise imagine you’re in that future calling back into the past when you wrote out this sigil. Try describing and declaring what it’s like in as much detail as possible. Now listen out for your “imaginary” future self shouting “I’m the owner of a brand new convertible and I love it” or whatever. Now, write it down!
Finally a note of caution here. Remember we spoke about ‘true will’ in the last piece? Well, if your dreams and visions involve others do not enchant realities which compromise their true will.
So, for example, don’t put “I am married to Dave who works in accounts”. Ask for a less uncompromising: “I’m married to a bloke like Dave who works in accounts”. This doesn’t rule Dave out of the equation, after all who is more like Dave than Dave? However if he thinks you’re a repulsive creature who he’d rather vomit over than have sex with, you’ve given the poor guy a get out and you can still get what you need. Far better to enchant someone, like him who likes you of their own free will.
It’s not unlikely you’ll encounter minor problems with all this but remember what you learned in part three and fear not: you will live and learn!
There’s nothing to stop you doing another sigil in the future.
—
Step Two: Remove the vowels and repeated letters.
The first step was by far the most important part. These next bits are 1% of sigil craft and the bit you’ve just done was the remaining 99%. However, this 1% which I’m about to explain is the more “magick” bit. It’ll make you feel more like ‘an occultist’ and there’s enormous value in that.
This means you should check you’re comfortable with what you’ve just done as part of this second step. You need to feel good on both a subconscious and intuitive level about the sentence you’re turning into a weird looking symbol. If you’re not it’ll come out in the process later on once the sigil is cast. For now, I’ll assume you are and crack on.
Firstly, sigils are crafted and re-drafted by a process of elimination. Like a sculpture you’re going to chip and chisel that sentence down until it looks like a sort of magical wingding. Begin this by removing the vowels and repeated letters, leaving yourself with a string of consonants, like so:
MHLTYFRNDSGCP
An example of my weight loss sigil in its early stages
Step three: Combine the letters into one big pattern and begin reducing it into a simpler image.
This bit is where most people get in a tizz. Remember the most difficult part of the process was over once you’d finished step one. There are no rules as to how you go about combining the letters but I find it best to jumble them all into one big squiggle. The main picture is an example of the one we’re looking at. Ultimately it was successful and I used a revised version to hit my target weight of 13.5 a year later. This is down from my initial 18.5 stone.
Keep re-drawing it and omitting details as you go along. The point of this process is to lose sight of what it is the sigil means. Keep drawing until the exact point of your work is irrelevant to you. Get really bored of the process and lose sight of why it is you’re bothering with such superstitious nonsense. Make it look more and more “magickal” to you. Hit a point where it starts to become a labour of love which is totally detached from your initial intent.
The finished product must look perfect and beautiful. It represents the total of your efforts. This is now a sigil, yet to be cast. It represents a thought which you are about to plant into the collective dreamworld so it can start to descend into the world of objective reality and your future.
Not quite but almost the finished product
Treasure it a bit. Don’t cast it straight away. Be pleased with it.
Step Four: Cast it.
People are divided upon how exactly you should do this. You’re looking for an intense transcendental experience where you can focus on this image and force it through your mind into the magical dream world while you are fully conscious. Pain, meditation, orgasm, psychedelic-transcendental drugs or all of the above combined are popular methods. Whichever you’re best at. Combine the intense experience with a good solid look at the sigil. Then close your eyes and think of it. Project it into your minds eye and out into the cosmos. Then destroy the paper it is drawn on and forget all about it.
One simple way, which I use, is with a candle. Have the sigil drawn on a piece of paper. Burn it and then let the flame burn (but not harm) your fingertips. At that precise moment close your eyes and picture it in your mind. There we are, it’s cast. The pain should have done enough to distract you and send it neatly into the world of ideas…
There are numerous other methods but the most important part is, as I said, step 1.
Once you’ve cast your sigil you must then aid its descent into the real world. If you asked for a new job, get applying for them. If you wanted to lose weight like I did, stop eating those chocolate cakes.
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