Elemental Love Working Month 9

So for a while I was posting my elemental love work in my live journal, but I've moved it over to here, starting this month...though I'll keep the rest in my livejournal as that suits me to keep it there. Nine months in and I just celebrated my anniversery with my wife, and the anniversery of when we met in person. We've been married two years and I did a lot of thinking about that and what marriage has taught me these last two years, and in particular the last nine months. This last month has continued me on that path of being open and vulnerable with her, without expectation....just letting her in and also letting myself in. Seems to me that you can't really know yourself or love yourself until you let yourself in to you...and if that sounds like a paradox, its really not...we build so many shields to other people that we end up putting ourselves outside the shield as well. No one wants to feel again the shame or humiliation for something done in the past, and yet to really be with yourself is to sometimes feel those feelings again so you can really let go of them, instead of holding them in you.

So in opening up to Lupa, I have had to open up to myself...and really that process has been occurring for the last nine months, not just with her, but with other people. Sometimes I've shut it down, not really able to handle that vulnerability...It takes work, a lot of effort, and there's also selectivity, because not just anyone fits the bill in terms of being open with someone...and it takes honesty, which isn't a quality I've ever had an easy relationship with. When you are used to hiding from yourself so that you hide from others, it takes work to stop hiding. For me, a victory is when I can choose not to act on impulse, but can stop, really look at it and then bring it up to myself and Lupa. No easy thing to do, but when it happens, I do feel better for it.

I think what I've really learned about love is that the initial period of being "in love" may seem like the best time to people, but what's really the best time is finding that intimacy, that belief in each other, and in yourself, when you've been in a relationship for a while. That requires a lot of communication, but also openness with someone. At the same time I have to admit I can really appreciate my intuition on who I can be open with...it's not for everyone that I could be so open with. Openness with yourself or someone else takes time...it has to happen at the pace that you're comfortable with, even in the other person wants you to open up at a different pace. But as a person opens and really lets someone in, as well as hirself, it does make for an opportunity to really discover the self and share it.

In thinking about the last nine months of love work and what has been asked of me in this work...As each layer has come away, as each moment has revealed to me what I need to sit with, as each person has come into my life or already been there, or left, I find learning opportunities...desire, intimacy, friendship, openness...and really a challenge to myself is what will you do with all that you've learned...How will you use it, now that you've experienced it...what meaning will these last nine months and the next three months have in the book of your life.

The answer is being written, found, chosen, lived, slowly but surely.

Magic, Culture, Identity

Taylor's latest post helped codify a few things I'd been considering as well in the world of magical practice and the role of identity. As noted previously, a great deal of the influence on my magical and meditative practices are distinctly Eastern, mostly Taoist, Indian, Chinese and Buddhist.  Such practices also have far different identity-concepts for people with magical and mystical inclinations and skills.  The often-eccentric Taoist Immortal, a studious Chinese Fang-shih, an awakened Buddhist mediator, are different identities than the western magician.

Thus I've begun to wonder if the concepts of the Western Magician are not just different - is it possible they are too limited?  Do the identities provided in Western Magic limit who we are and what we can become, especially in an age where we have so much information at our finger tips:

A few factors and things I've thought of: * The aforementioned dominance of Crowley.  I of course consider him talented, but also over-rated, and a person who despite his many experiences, never actually seemed to grow much as a person.  He became very iconic - and perhaps having that icon was too limiting. * The ironic influence of Chaoism.  Chaoism's deconstructive bent was entirely necessary for magical and mystical practices to make any progress because one had to go back to the basics.  However ages later, it appears there's still far more deconstructing going on that constructing.  I feel the deconstructive vein in magic has gone too far, with systems being built up and torn down, but little being made for the long term. * The western role model for the magician.  The west's spiritual heritage is often anti-magical and extremely limited in it's acceptance of mystical experiences.  Thus western magic has an odd undercurrent of negativity running through it - the Faustian image, excessive Crowley, battling secret-societies, etc.  This self-limiting and subconciously negative view of magic is one I find very troublesome and suspect lies as a mild, constant poison in western culture. * The association of magic with rebellion in our culture.  Though understandable given the last item, rebellion is only useful in what comes out of it.  If the Revolution doesn't build something, then what's the point of it? * The rebellion aspect of magic also prevents it from being integrated socially - when you are considering yourself an "outsider" there's only so much one can do with society at large.  Most of history has practitioners of magic not as outsiders in the large, but part of society - even if the society kept them at a distance for obvious reason. * The dissociation of magic from other practices.  Being "a magician" is in a way really limiting - as our ideas of a magician are limiting.

Coming to the Western approach from a mix of being an outsider and an insider, I think our concepts of the magician need to change for magic to evolve and grow, embrace broader identities.  Maybe we need to be practitioners of magic while being more, where magician is part of a larger - but integrated - picture.

A Confession

I have a confession to make.  I'm not really a magician. I realized this the other day, when in the process of decluttering my house, I decided to take my Golden Dawn and Crowley books, as well as copy of Agrippa's Three Books of the Occult into Powells to trade them in for credit. I'd read the books and done the practices years ago, even re-read Book 4 by Crowley recently and the most profound thought I had was, "This is taking up a lot of space and gathering a lot of dust." So when I turned those books in, which could be considered classics of western occultism, I realized my focus about magic had changed. I realized I'd become someone who happens to do magic, and uses it when appropriate as opposed to being someone who is defined as a magician. Of course I still have plenty of occult books that, as far as I can tell, I probably won't get rid of. I've got my William G. Gray, my Franz Bardon, my Pascal Beverly Randolph, my various books on alchemy, Taoist practices etc...but I've also been gradually filling those bookshelves with books on NLP, communication techniques, semiotics, cultural studies, multimodality, Neuroscience, physics and other areas of interest that are relevant to my spiritual practice.

It's not even so much that I no longer have books by Crowley or the Golden Dawn that doesn't make me a magician. Those are just books. They don't confer status, beyond what meaning people read into them. It's the change in focus, the change in attitude, the realization that my spiritual path has grown to include a wider range of studies and interests than traditional ceremonial magic could offer. Instead of limiting myself to one particular paradigm for how life should be lived, I'm interested in discovering the variety of paradigms available and have been for a long time.

I explored the paradigm of Crowleyian and Golden Dawn Western Ceremonial magic a long time ago. I got stuff out of it, but I moved on to other paradigms of western ceremonial magic that I found more useful (and still do to this day). And I continued moving on, but when I reread Crowley and his fervent desire to rehabilitate magic, I realized I wasn't a magician, because the result of his attempted rehabilitation of magic hasn't even remotely occurred, and yet it seems that so many people still operate on that current. I'm just not one of them. I haven't been for a long, long time, so why continue pretending to be something I don't feel fits me?

I happen to practice magic, along with a lot of other practices. I think that works as a better descriptor of the place of magic in my life and the current I'm exploring.

Facial Action Coding and Posism

Something Bill Whitcomb turned me on to recently is Facial Action Coding (FACS). It's a coding system that attempts to taxonimize human facial expressions (just imagine the correspondence charts with that!). For me this is interesting, because I see some related threads in the neuroscience works I've been reading in terms of how facial expressions have been used in experiments with emotions. Add in, what I consider to be some potential for magical work via the usage of facial expressions, in terms of invocations or for identity work and FACS could have some pretty cool applications. Now what's really interesting though is when you can combine posture and gesture into something like FACS. To some degree we do this already on an automatic level, but of course my interest is on a conscious level...and we can thank Pascal Beverly Randolph for some suggestions toward that. In his book Sexual Magic, he discusses a concept called Posism, which is a method where you use body language, gestures, and postures as a way of embodying a concept or emotion you want to work with magically. You can see some of his stage magician background with this technique, but I'd be interested in finding out if he was influenced by 18th century rhetoric schools which taught rhetoricians poses and gestures that could be used to evoke emotional responses from their audiences.

For Posism to work the magician creates a mental state which s/he associates with the gesture. The idea is that the gesture then creates the thought, which in turn acts as an influence on both the magician and the environment around hir. Sounds an awful lot like NLP anchoring, doesn't it? Actually you can probably base some of the influence of ritual poses in Western Magic on Yoga, but also PBR's Posism techniques.

In anycase, Posism, combined with NLP techniques and FAC  might provide some intriguing possibilities in terms of creating different emotional states and other altered states of consciousness through the use of body posture, gesture, facial expression, and of course anchoring. I don't know enough about FACS yet, but I've started using Posism and NLP for certain engagements and it's proving helpful...so when I learn more I'll be sure to update.

At One

I do meditation each day, part of both my morning and evening regime of practices to keep my mind sharp and my spiritual muscles well exercised. Lately, I've been having a really interesting experience that has happened a few times before. I get into a really deep state of altered consciousness and my body feels as if it's melting into everything else. I notice that the lights intensify and it feels like I've become light, like I'm floating in a sea of light. I can feel myself shifting, moving, flowing into eddys, etc. When I have a meditation experience like this, it also seems that the layers of reality have parted to show me what lies between. All the possibilities of the universe are available. I could flow into any of them at a given moment.

I hope to continue working with this particular level of meditation in more depth. I have experienced it the most when I've been able to live on my own schedule, and I think that is a factor in experiencing it because, if you're not on someone else's schedule you do have more time to relax, which in my experience, has always enhanced meditation.

Emotions and circuits

I'm reading The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux. It's a fascinating book, which so far has mainly looked at how psychologists and neuroscientists have tried to explain the role of emotions and where emotions reside in the brain. What I find rather interesting is that LeDoux argues that the notion that the emotions are based in the Limbic portion of the brain is inaccurate...and the reason I find this interesting is because if this was true it would torpedo the Leary-Wilson eight circuit model of psychology that many an occultist refers to, which is at least partially based on the idea that the Limbic portion of the brain controls the emotions. In fact, where you get your reptilian brain, mammalian brain etc is from that concept that the emotions reside in the limbic portion of the brain. So if LeDoux is correct (and I imagine as a neuroscientist who has spent a good portion of his career focused on exploring the role of emotions in neuroscience that he might at least have an inkling of what he is talking about) the eight circuit model might be in need of revision. And this is not such a bad thing really, because the eight circuit model is as much a sacred cow for some occultists as Crowley is for others and challenging that sacred cow is much needed.

One of the many reasons I decided to start reading up on neuroscience was to get a better idea of how contemporary science understands the workings of the brain. I've never found the eight-circuit model wholly satisfying, particularly because it seems to compartmentalized and rigid for my tastes. While I think it can offer a better model for understanding the psychology of one's internal workings than say Freud, it still seems to overly mechanize how it all fits together.

And what I've found looking into neuroscience IS fascinating because it provides a unique view of the universe that is a human body, and offers aspiring magicians a different medium to explore magic in. When combined with psychology it can also explain some of the mental disorders people can experience, as well as offer a potential way to heal or mitigate those disorders via medication, but also I think through magical practice (as I've discussed in some depth in Inner Alchemy).

Of course a lot of the thrill is what still can't be explained...mysteries abound, and where there's mystery, there's magic.

Anyway back to the eight circuit model...a lot of it is based on neatly compartmentalizing what part of the brain is the Reptilian brain and what part is the mammalian brain etc. In fact there's a lot of categorization that occurs with the end result being behaviors mapped out like correspondence tables to the different circuit types. And y'know on the one hand that is an awfully handy system, when you can say "That behavior is the first circuit acting out" It has its uses to be sure...and it can provide a useful model for diagnosing behaviors, though not necessarily a model for changing said behaviors. And while knowledge can be good, application of that knowledge is essential to making it useful when it comes to manifesting significant changes in behavior. And that's where the other hand comes down, because the eight circuit model is just one model among many and yet curiously those other models are seemingly ignored much of the time (though NLP and memetics are becoming increasingly popular models for the occult movement). I think if we can balance the eight circuit model with other ways of knowing...make it one among many, it'll still shine, and in fact might prove a better model when it can be intermixed with other models and consequently practically applied (something which Antero Alli does).

As I continue to read up on neuroscience and apply my magical practices to it, I've increasingly become convinced that the psychological models that are used in occultism need some substantial revision, partially on a bio-genetic level, and partially just to keep up with the current studies in psychology and related disciplines. I've some half-baked ideas of where some of this revision needs to occur (for instance considering the role of identity in magical acts), but as I continue to explore, experiment, and research I will post more about where I think some of those revisions could be applied. Certainly it's proving to be an interesting journey so far in terms of considering just how much we have yet to experience the miracle of our own bodies, let alone what else is out there.

Methods for organizing your mind

Recently I was up in Seattle, talking with several friends and I mentioned a couple projects I was working on. One of my friends shook his head and asked me how I managed to be so prolific with how busy I am. I thought it was an interesting reaction to have, but it relates to some degree with some of the experimentation I've done in the past as well as ongoing work that focuses on multitasking in order to achieve more. I've always been a multi-tasker and also a person with a very non-linear approach to time and concepts of the self. While some people have a single track mind, my mind is always working on multiple tracks, in multiple directions, doing multiple projects. Even when it seems like I'm working on only one project, there's always other parts of me working on other projects in the background. The same applies to books I usually read five to six books at a given time, switching between each book when I ever overloaded on a particular subject, so that I can give that part of myself time to process and digest information.

I have a variety of techniques I use to help myself process and organize information. I'll share one today, which is based off of a technique from William G. Gray's books: Modern Ritual Methods and Inner Traditions of  Magic. The other techniques you'll have to wait on until I finish writing my sequel to Space/Time Magic. In MRM, Gray posits the concept that a ceremonial tool is a symbolic representation of concepts. We use the tools to symbolically access the concept or information they represent. Gray further suggests that through meditating on a particular and the symbolic associations linked to the tool, a person can imprint that information into his or her consciousness and either invoke or evoke it as needed without the presence of the physical tool. The physical tool can aide in the invocation or evocation of the information because it is a physical embodiment of that information. Gray's approaches to interacting with tools as symbolic constructs is somewhat similar to Spare's alphabet of desire. The goal, with either technique, is to create strong associations that can be drawn on to mesh the magician's identity with the information that the symbols represent.

In ITM, Gray discusses the concept of a Telesmic image. The Telesmic image is an evocation of internal resources or information. It's similar to the concept of a servitor, egregore, or a thoughtform.  It serves as a mirror or reflection of the magician, while also embodying particular aspects of the magician or embodying particular archetypes. From Gray's perspectives deities would be Telesmic Images, which have been suffused with all the information that their worshippers have provided the deity through the devotion given to it.

One of the ways I organize my mind involves the use of symbols for containing information. I can bond the symbol to an image as well, in order to create an entity which represents information or concepts of a specific type. This is useful, because I can then direct information to that construct and draw on that same information when I need access to it.

This then is one method I use for organizing my thoughts...Though I plan on going into much more depth in my sequel to STM.

Further discussions of definitions of magic

In psyche's latest post on the definitions of magic, she attempts to use Crowley's definition of magic to address arguments by a podcaster named Deo who had shared an essay on his podcast wherein he challenged the veracity of magic as a real force (Actually his essay is part of what started the initial post she wrote). As I noted in this post, Crowley's definition is not a good definition of magic, because he is sloppy in his attempts to define what magic is, and is unable to distinguish from any other discipline or approach that could be used in a similar way to explain how a person uses a process to manifest something. However Deo poses an intriguing challenge to Psyche and others in this thread on his forum. Something which is brought up is the "models of Magic" Both Deo and Psyche seem to agree that these models are most effective as understanding practical applications and possibilities of magic and magical systems as opposed to being definitive theories or explanations for how the process of magic works. I'd agree with that myself, but Deo then raises an interesting question: "Is there such a thing (ontologically/metaphysically) as magic?..Does magic deserve to be an ontological category? If not, then it's metaphysically uninteresting and a worldview that lacks it can still be a complete worldview."

Deo's question is an excellent question to ask. It highlights the problem with Crowley's definition, because Crowley's definition cannot answer or explain magic in a way that differentiates it from anything else, something which Deo aptly notes, "I don't consider magic to be 'real' as an ontological component of the universe if it merely names a style of activity irrespective of any kind of mechanism underlying its alleged efficacy" An activity is not automatically magical, simply because it is named magical. A process needs to be described that shows how magic is different from something else...in fact a good definition not only persuades someone what something ought to be, but also shows why something is different from everything else.

Instead of relying on the models of magic to answer Deo's question (I've never really used them and I have my own reasons for thinking that while they provide perspectives on practical applications, the perspectives offered are not necessarily the most efficacious), nor will I rely on an aesthetic approach to magic, because while I think making meaning is a function of magic, I don't believe it is the only function. Plus, in keeping with Deo's criticism, it can be argued that making meaning is does not fall strictly in the domain of magic (as a study of semiotics will quickly reveal to a reader).

I choose to take a different tack to defining magic, based on my own definition of magic, one gained from years of personal experience and experimentation. In Multi-Media Magic, I defined magic as: "Magic involves making the improbable possible. It's learning how even the slightest change you make can have a radical effect on the internal system of your psychology/spirituality, and the external system of the environment and the universe you live in. Magic is the realization of an interdependent system of life that needs every part to bring forth the hidden potential. It is also a methodology that can be used as a stress on the interconnected system, to manifest change in it." I go on to note that magic isn't the only stress on a system. In Space/Time magic, I also noted that magic involved being aware of probabilities and manifesting those probabilities into your life.

A definition of magic then is not so much about doing everything with intent as it is about recognizing probabilities and using a process (which we call magic) to manifest those probabilities into reality. Seems simple enough, but even the definition I wrote above has problems with it. I haven't overtly identified the process that magic utilizes which allows it to be an ontological presence. I identify a benefit of magic, that it makes a person aware of probabilities and enables manifestation of those probabilities, but the underlying mechanism still isn't defined. I note that magic can act as a stress on a system, but that could still use further clarification.

What I define as a system is a recognition that all life is interconnected. Everything lives within a system that necessarily requires everything to work together in order for the entirety of the system to be sustained (And we can note the effects that occur when a system is taken out of balance, global warming anyone?). In a systems approach, both intent AND impact are considered. Impact needs to be considered in order to determine if efficacy has occurred, since impact is one means for measuring the process used to generate it (As a side not, it amazes that most definitions of magic do not consider impact at all...too much focus on intent, not enough awareness of impact). The system is not entirely a physical reality, though it is based in a physical environment. It is also based in the mentality and even spirituality of what lives within it. Any system is effected by stress. A stress in this case is a mechanism used to change the system. Different disciplines of science are stresses on a system, because they utilize mechanisms to change the system.

Likewise magic is a stress that can be used to change the system, because of the mechanism that magic provides, which is not provided by the different disciplines of science, because while science enables from a purely physical end of the spectrum, magic enables change through a combination of physical, mental, and spiritual resources. An example of this resource would be the example of embodying a physical/mental resource of the human body, a neurotransmitter as an entity (thus creating a spiritual resource) which could be used to manifest a variety of possibilities, including creating altered states of mind, healing a person's mental state by working with the neurotransmitter, etc.

But what is the mechanism that makes magic an ontological presence, and enables its efficacy? That mechanism is Identity, specifically the ability to shape and change identity in order to mesh it with the identity if the possibility one wishes to manifest into reality. Identity can be considered to be both a state of existence and, in a system, a point or node of influence, connected to other nodes of influence. Magic uses identity as a means of manifesting probability into reality, by creating resonance between the identity of the magician and the identity of the probability the magician wants to make into reality (Think of magic as a string in a web, connecting one node of identity to another node of identity). The magician anchors a potential identity in the form of a probability to his/her actual identity, via magic to enable the probability a greater chance of manifesting than would occur if methods were not used to link the two identities together. Magic is a process of identification that allows the magician to change reality by altering the identity of that reality, or for that matter altering his or her own identity to conform to reality.

Magic uses methods to create resonance between different identities, or if you will between one version of reality and another. Probability becomes reality, when enough resonance is created between one identity and another so that the probability in essence becomes an extension of the existing identity of the magician.

This is my answer to Deo's question. It's also part of my ongoing work and experimentation with magic.