Posts Tagged ‘Ruminations’

A Part of the Whole

BY: Mark

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” 

The above is a quote from Albert Einstein, and the Internet tells me that it is sourced from a private letter that Einstein wrote to a distraught father in Feburary of 1950. The quote came across my desk today as this morning’s daily affirmation of zen, and it struck me as being relevant to the post from yesterday where I mentioned the impact the Universe has on our beings.

The Universe is my shorthand for the Ineffable, the Unknownable, GOD, whatever name you wish to call that thing that is greater than our individual being. Einstein encapsulates the definition nicely in his first sentence: “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’ . . .”

I suffer from a lack of being able to breathe, in a metaphorical sense. I’m pretty good about the physical act of breathing. It is the more spiritual and conscious act that escapes me, all too often. Today was one of those days where I neglected to pause, take a deep breath, and remember that I am part of a whole. If I were a cog, I would have locked and frozen much of the machinery that was dependent upon me.

Later, I had to drop the car off for service and I went wandering up the block. At the corner past the car dealership there is a Buddhist temple. The building was decrepit and looked as if the Buddhists may no longer be using the site, though I am sure the spirit of Buddhism still resides in those walls. If it had been open, I may have gone in and sat for a little while, quieting my spirit.

When you get frozen, it can be difficult to un-stick yourself. To reintegrate yourself with the whole, as it were. One must re-establish connection with what Jung referred to as the lumen naturae.

The Universe Giveth

BY: Mark

The last six months have been filled with, in a few words, many “opportunities for change,” and I can’t say that all of them have been warmly welcome. But I have–eventually–come to see them all as manifestations of the Universe offering me a variety of tests and trials as a means of re-focusing myself on what is truly of value: namely, my own self and the luminous lives of those who are near and dear to me.

The magickal part of it has been the realization that all of existence is but our individual perception, and whatever we are faced with can be dealt with in a multiplicity of ways, but ultimately, the choice is ours to face these things positively. To grow is to live; to hide or flee or otherwise pretend we are not changed by what the Universe gives to us is to die. Maybe only a little bit, but we do die nonetheless.

Life is worth every single excruciatingly raw second of it. Because it makes you realize what is important, what is a distraction, and what truly offers you peace and love and illumination.

So, I look forward to 2012 as a year of self-actualization, of realization of my own potential, as the singular opportunity that it is.

I hope you embrace it similarly.

On Creating Magick

BY: Mark

I’ve been re-reading Aleister Crowley’s definitions of Magick this morning while reflecting on the effect visualization can have on the magician’s internal mood as well as the external world. We begin with his basic definition: “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” Like a number of Crowley’s aphorisms, it seems overly simplistic at first glance, but as you reflect upon it, it unpacks nicely to become a solid foundation upon which to erect further structures. “Magick,” like “Art” and “Science” is simply a term to classify a class of data–be it a rubric of action, a fleeting thought, or a full-on life methodology. Magick, if you will, is a way of thinking, of approaching how we interact with both ourselves and the external world.

If reality is the consensual lie agreed upon by the group mind, then each person’s thoughts contribute to reality. How each person understands reality informs it, and by extension, what you think of reality shapes it as well. While we currently define thoughts as extremely ephemeral states of existence, each and every thought has the ability to create change. Firstly, in our own selves; secondly, and by virtue of their adoption by the larger group-mind, the world can be shifted as well.

Descartes’ axiom–”I think, therefore I am”–can be extended to “I think, therefore I can.”

There are, of course, some physical considerations to address concerning the “I can” part of that last statement, but generally speaking, all change has come about because an individual had an idea and strove to extend that idea beyond the mere thought.

One of the basic complaints held against magick is the “Yes, but why don’t you visualize winning the lottery and be done with it?” argument, and Crowley provides some escape hatches in his definitions for this sort of argument.

Argument III.3: “Every failure proves that one or more requirements of the postulate have not been fulfilled.”

Argument III.4: “The first requisite for causing any change is through qualitative and quantitative understanding of the conditions.”

Argument III.5: “The second requisite of causing any change is the practical ability to set in motion the necessary forces.”

Forcing the lottery to conform to your Will is complicated, after all, and there are a lot of moving parts. Better to stick with things you can influence. Certainly, you can argue that these caveats render Crowley’s entire system nothing more than a thought experiment, but I believe that these caveats simply point out the importance of a more fundamental understanding of Will and Thought.

Before we go galavanting off to making lottery numbers fall as we imagine them, let us consider a corollary to above definitions. Essentially: How we interpret reality is also a magickal act. We are all magicians, and every system of magick is a personal one because it is nothing more than how we Act and React.

Change flows both ways, and our thoughts are constantly creating our understanding of the consensual reality. While we can imagine winning the lottery, our thoughts are not strong enough to effect that change to the consensual reality of the lottery. We, in turn, react to this lack of change by abandoning our vision as being the dominant one. In effect, we retract our Desire when it fails to come to pass.

Yes, I know that wishing does not make it so, but the point here is one of scale. Thinking of change doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. A critical part of being a magician is being receptive to the possibilities that change has occurred. Reacting is necessary piece of participation in the systemic flow of other magickal systems in play.

We are not alone, after all. Everyone else is trying to make Magick too.

Today’s Readings

BY: Mark

In the beginning there was one. From this came two and three. Two and three were polar: yin and yang. As they came from one they were the energetic expressions of the creative force, perpetually changing into each other and, through change, evolving. However, their changes needed to be controlled by some higher consciousness. Looking closer at the yin and yang symbol it is evident that its dynamic form is kept in place by a circle. This circle represents the first idea–the prima materia, the word, the origin of duality, the source of creation yet also the limitation of creative expression.

- Dr. Josef Margraf “Morphogenesis and Plant Signature: The Tao of Connectedness” (Alchemy Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 8 )

The grimoire is a palingenesis. The hack and paste of overlapping ages. Some made to look old, others seeming younger in candlelight than the centuries make them. These texts are the lost, the rediscovered, the rescued from flames, and the outright invented. It is a dog-eared tarot gallery.

- Peter Grey, from his Introduction to Howlings [Scarlet Imprint]

Scarlet Imprint is putting on an event called the Summer of Love. In Brighton, on August 20th. In case you were wondering what to do on a summer evening while in the UK.

On the second night, I called out to my soul.
“I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside myself. Now I have gone through events and find you behind all of them.”

- Carl Jung, The Red Book, Liber Primus, folio ii (r).

I really need a second desk, just so I can leave The Red Book out. Let myself get lost in it a few times during the course of the day . . .

The Great Work-in-Progress

BY: Mark

Visualization, or using the power of your imagination creatively, is a very important part of magick. We are generally brought up in this society to ‘look down’ on the imagination; imagination is somehow thus removed from reality and not very useful in daily life. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have often heard people say, ‘Oh, it’s just imagination.’

Just imagination! The imagination is the most powerful faculty we possess. We are taught to believe that there is only one ‘real’ reality and that the imagination is removed from that reality; but everything that human beings have created in the world existed first only in the imagination of one person. In order to create something in this outer reality, it first must take form in your own inner reality, then be made material through the application of your Will.

- Rodney Orpheus, Abrahadabra, p. 29

In consider issues of ‘reality’ and ‘being,’ I am reminded of Chapter One, Verse One of the Gospel of St. John: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was God.’ The act of naming something–providing the word–is more than just a way of distinguishing it from something else; it’s a creative act, and in a sense anything that has a name has an existence, even if it is a ‘subjective-objective’ one.

- Jonathan Back, Spirits Walk with Me, p. 5.

Alchemy and the Entropy of Being

BY: Mark

Over the last few years, my double life has been increasingly frustrating. The endless juggling of a full-time job with finding time to be a writer was talking its toll, both emotionally and spiritually. Six months ago, I got an opportunity to write full-time, and while I wasn’t so naive as to think that would solve all my existential angst, I hoped the lessening of my schizophrenetic lifestyle would help. And it has, don’t get me wrong–I am doing writerly activities all day long (The Mongoliad has published seventeen chapters in the last three months, and we’ve hit 150,000 words). But, in many other areas, I’ve come to a full-stop.

The myth we stay-at-homes perpetuate about working in our pajamas all day is not too far from the truth. Even though I have a standing desk now, and barely sit during working hours, I am getting less exercise. I’m eating less well–most meals have devolved back to the ‘cram carbs and protein in the pie-hole’ methodology. I might be reading more, though I’m not convinced; I think I am simply getting more frustrated about the ever-present pile of books around my desk because I see them all the time now.

There has been a perpetually unfinished document on my desktop called “blog.rtf” and it contains two quotes. The first is a tweet from Jeremy Keith, back on Nov 5, 2010 where he says, “First Law of Blogodynamics: a blog post in draft tends to stay in draft.” The second is a quote from Charles Dickens. “The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed, but a thing created is loved before it exists.”

The hardest road is the one that lies between creation to construction.

Entropy is, well, entropic, and I have a decidedly difficult time dealing with exercise. I do not like ‘going for a walk,’ because the whole point is to walk and not to have a destination, and I struggle with the essential pointlessness of doing the upright biped version of the hamster wheel. As you can imagine, exercise, in general, is just like going for a walk, but with different scenery. I am constantly searching for a way to trick my brain into regarding the ’round and round’ activities as something other than they are.

Which, round and round, brings me to alchemy.

Alchemical research, both metaphysical and analytical, is the medieval version of the exercise regime: you embark upon lenghty experiments that require rigorous observation and endless repetition of specific steps, ad infinitum. If you are lucky, you produce a few drops of aqua vita, and may then undertake the next step, which is even more complicated, convoluted, and rife with the looming promise of utter failure if your attention wavers in the slightest. The discipline, if you will, taught you discipline.

I am hesitant to have another blog post be about the concept of alchemy, which is short-hand for saying ‘oh, look, I want to talk about the occult, but I haven’t actually done my reading or spent any time thinking.’ And so, I will leave this one with the above idea. Discipline. We afford it less time and practice than we should.

I’ll come back in six months and see if I’ve actually acted on this notion or if i”m still falling asleep on the couch after dinner and let life flow past me.

Mr. Kargel: Fellow Seeker

BY: Mark

Ryan Kargel thinks about trees, and sometimes he thinks about faith, and sometimes he thinks about our faith in trees. Or lack thereof. His twitter bio reads: Gentleman ecologist, writer, member of the Sans-Beard Mennonites.

I officially met Ryan a few months ago when he and I and our respective wives took a road trip to Ashland, OR, to cram as much Shakespeare into our bodies as possible over three days (where, among other things, we saw the world premiere of the stage production of Throne of Blood; yes, a theater production of a Kurosawa movie that, in turn, was based on a play–it is as recursive as it sounds). During the drive, Ryan and I discovered that we shared a sense of curiosity about the world and how it works. What makes talking with Ryan fun is that he’s got a name for the Divine Instrument and I don’t, and yet, it doesn’t seem to get in the way of our conversations.

Sometimes it feels good to be ignorant.  It’s easier, because you aren’t aware of potential flaws in your beliefs. You aren’t aware of how relatively small you are, and feeling small is hard to distinguish from feeling unimportant.  That may be why it was so difficult in the 17th century for government and church to accept the Copernican astronomical model, which placed the earth in orbit around the sun.  Surely God made the universe at human scale.  We were meant to subdue it.  It says so in Genesis.  If the earth isn’t the center of the universe and if the universe is much larger than we thought, maybe we ourselves are less central than we thought.

He blogs at ryankargel.typepad.com/. The above quote is from his entry of November 14th, 2010, entitled “Almost There.”

Thinking and Faith

BY: Mark

Dangerous Minds has an article about Peter Sellers’ fascination with the Occult, highlighting the tragic trap of obsessing about the paranormal.

“Sellers often said he had no idea who he was: ‘If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.’  This was his way of renouncing any responsibility for his actions.  He claimed he found comfort and stability in consulting clairvoyants and fortune tellers, which again only underlines the fact he did know who he was – a control freak, who wanted power over his future.”

To me, the Occult is simple The Unknown–that which cannot be made apprehensible–and you can lump any sort of faith-based religion in there as well. The marvelous thing about this mystery is that we are undeterred by the unknown. We either quest to make it comprehensible, completely oblivious that the act of making something known may very well kill what makes it mysterious, or we accept its existence on faith: both of which demonstrate a vast capacity for imagination. Somewhere in our evolutionary past, we learned how to dream, and this became a critical part of our continued existence. Why? It’s not terribly functional, and while some scientists argue that dreaming is a mechanism by which our brains learn, faith–while an extension of dreaming–isn’t as critical to our survival.

Perhaps faith is the way we create identities for ourselves. An extension of Descartes’ maxim. We think. We are. We are unique and different. And then, suddenly, we realize uniqueness creates loneliness, and we rush to have faith that we are not alone, that there is something grander than all of us.

This is the trouble that thinking causes.

Writing and Alchemy

BY: Mark

I’ve recently returned from my annual retreat with charlatans and illusionists (being a card-carrying one myself), where I was reminded of the similarities between writers and alchemists: so much of the Great Work is performed in isolation, and it takes so much time to accomplish.

However, unlike alchemy, the end goal of writing is not a private revelation.

Both involve daily rituals–regular observance of the basis skills which one must master in order to improve one’s craft. This isn’t anything new–all professional trades involve a modicum of regimented practice and use–but the practice of writing and alchemy (any creative art, really) take into consideration experimentation and drill. Neither of which are activities that are really noteworthy in their execution, unless, of course, the experimentation produces an unexpected and wildly inventive result. But you don’t really know until after the fact, and then, filling in the record can be either (a) time-consuming and boring when you’d rather be out celebrating your success, or (b) complicated by the fact that you may not have kept good records along the way–most discoveries happen so randomly and serendipitously that recreating them is difficult.

This is, by the way, a rumination about blogging, and the point thereof.

I was never a very good blogger, as the shelf of half-filled notebooks in my library can attest (as the ragged history of entries back to the late ’90s that I have archived somewhere; indeed, as the history of this site will show), and I struggle with finding a good balance. Most blogging seems to be navel-gazing in public, noisy attention-seeking, or somewhat embarrassed ramblings that are as embarrassing for the reader as the writer. Mary Robinette Kowal once remarked on a blog of a friend who was obsessively detailing reconstruction work on his truck. While she did not share his enthusiasm for trucks, she found his passion for the subject infectious–to a point where she found herself learning quite a bit more about trucks than she ever imagined she would.

I started this site as something that wouldn’t be just a personal blog, and immediately discovered I had no idea how to make it impersonal. So, perhaps I should let that distinction go. But I don’t want it to be a personal blog, and so some filtering should be applied.

And then I realize I am probably over-thinking the whole thing, in which case, let us move on. Writing and alchemy, and where they collide. The rest will come naturally, a progression born from regular practice. Yes, everything changes the more you explore it. As it should.

The Western Mindset

BY: Mark

One of the underlying premises of another project that I’m involved with (The Mongoliad) is the idea that, while there is no dearth of Eastern martial arts films to be had here in the West, a good, rousing Western-style martial arts adventure is lacking (and, yes, that is what we’re attempting to accomplish). To that end, we’ve begun a rather in-depth course of training and education in the Western martial arts.

These Eastern martial arts films are, of course, suffused with a plethora of magical elements. You can’t seem to go very far into one of these stories without running into someone who has abilities that seem far outside the human norm. Of course, in this world-view, these extra-normal abilities are the norm; they are expressed aspects of the benefits of the martial arts. In the West, we tend to take a dim view on these sorts of abilities, brought about–no doubt–by centuries and centuries of indoctrination by established religious structures that have been telling us that these talents are fake, heretical, and–if they even exist–are manifestations of deals that have been made with demonic forces.

It’s safe to say that such a view is not part of the purview of why we’re here, and so it has occurred to me that in concert with exploring the Western martial arts, it isn’t much of a stretch to explore the mystic and occult side of the Western experience during this same time. I am exploring it already, frankly, and there’s no reason not to dive more fully into this material. It’s a starting point, and we’ll keep moving forward until we get to the current era.