witchery
Published on April 23rd, 2015 |
by Carolyn Elliott
7 INSANE KEYS TO PRACTICAL MAGIC
What I feel to be missing from most discussions of magic
(particularly the magic of practical manifestation, which concerns me
most) is a down-to-earth acknowledgement of the actual hardcore madness
that you need in order to execute it fully and well.
For example – when I’m feeling a bit down and in need of inspiration
(as often happens in the midst of a dreary Pittsburgh winter [
note to self - really must move to New Orleans before it gets cold here in Pittsburgh again!])
– I scour the interweb and bookstores and find that most popular
discussions of the Law of Attraction and creative visualization and even
ceremonial magick simply fail to inspire me.
Why? Because most just don’t give full enough recognition and
permission to how far off the deep-end of consensus reality I actually
have to go (in my own previous experience) to actually make them work.
So I’m here today to affirm for you, dear readers, that in order to
perform magic you really do have to let yourself go rather mad (by
societal standards) and
jump.
Because you’re reading this on the internet, and the internet
loves
lists, I have organized what I know to be true about the insanity
required for magical effectiveness and how to attain it into 7 easily
consumable keys, which I now proudly present:
1. Magic is the art of unveiling your true self,
which means you have to be willing to become immensely intimate with
what’s already present – so much so that you forget to judge against
it.
So here you are. You’re a being full of intense passions and ideals, goals and aspirations, with gorgeous visions of how things
could be – and you find yourself in the midst of this mortal, decaying, messy world.
(The Magician card from the Light Visions tarot by
James R. Eads, my personal favorite)
You notice that you and the people close to you are rife with
tremendous beauty and also with wounds, fears, neuroses, blocks,
limitations, illness – physical and mental disturbances of all flavors.
You notice that the landscape of your world includes lovely sunsets
and adorable babies and tender tree limbs bursting forth in spring – and
it also includes brutally ugly Big Box retail stores, suicides of great
artists, used heroin needles and crack pipes on the sidewalk, children
abused by their own families, tired elderly bag ladies shuffling around
with their shopping carts, and perpetual news of war and disaster and
broadcast everywhere.
So what’s your subjective response to the ugliness and rot in your
world and in yourself? Do you feel offended, insulted, disgusted by it?
Do you want to make it
go away as fast as possible so your shining vision can be unsullied?
Well, pretty much all of us do. But that very attitude of
taking offense maintains you in a position of practical magic weakness.
Not to alarm you – but thinking in biblical terms, it’s actually a
Luciferian
position. The proud Light-Bringer, accustomed to the unending
effulgence of heaven, refused to humble himself and honor the fleshy
mortality of God’s creation, of humankind. In that refusal to bow to the
stinky mess that is humanity and the material world, the bright angel
Lucifer took himself straight to Hell. And that’s actually what most of
us do, all the time.
According to Milton’s classic version of the tale in
Paradise Lost,
Lucifer got bored in his shimmering infernal palace and so he snuck up
into the Garden of Eden, took the form of the serpent, and tricked our
primordial parents Eve and Adam into eating the fruit of the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil.
As soon as they did that, they became aware of their nakedness and
became ashamed
and hid from God. Their shame arose because they ingested Lucifer’s
idealistic point of view – and with it came negative judgment, a
taking offense, at their own nakedness, weakness, material sensuality – which they now saw as “evil” – lacking.
(Eve Tempted by the Serpent by William Blake, who knew his stuff when it came to magic and imagination)
And then just as Lucifer banished himself from heaven, Eve and Adam
banished themselves from the Garden of Eden (the experience of being
alive in a lush, abundant and friendly world) and into the living Hell
of having to work for a living, with all the attendant toil and stress
that you’re probably very familiar with.
To explain a bit more: this created world of flesh and blood and dirt
and shit and death and birth is a dream, exactly the same as our
nighttime dreams, but a bit more solid and slower moving. Lucifer’s
outraged insistence is that the dream be full of pure light, but it’s
not.
This means: as long as you are
taking offense and
wishing to distance yourself
from the scary and sick and perverse and weak things in the dream
(including the woundedness and sickness and nakedness and weakness
in you) then you are
negatively judging the dream from the position of what’s favorable or unfavorable for the
dream character that you appear to be.
Your very negative judgment and taking offense is what makes the
dream seem wildly beyond your control, and causes you to feel like
you’re a victim of it, because it identifies you as a powerless
character and positions you in what Kierkegaard liked to call
demonic despair.
Your very resistance to the ugliness in the dream holds it in place,
energizes it, makes it more dramatic and big. Because that’s the nature
of your magical power. Sorry.
The answer to this magical conundrum is not to ignore, deny, or
overlook the pain and ugliness of the world as the rather uninspiring,
pop-magic Law of Attraction answer would have it. That’s not a recipe
for being a powerful magician. That’s a recipe for being an asshole.
Instead – the paradoxical and intensely challenging answer is to recognize that you, the larger you, the dreamer of the dream,
loves and desires the nasty, bloody, aging world and your messed-up self and all the messed-up people around you exactly AS IS,
with all its wounds and used needles and war and belly fat and
unsightly wrinkles. The answer is to become intensely intimate with the
woundedness and sickness, so much so that you forget to take offense in
it – you surrender to it, you honor it, you celebrate it. You dive into
your aversion to creation and have a party. You do exactly what Lucifer
refused to do.
(Gustave Dore’s classic depiction of Lucifer / Satan from his illustration of Milton’s Paradise Lost)
Let’s think about it a second: what other famous biblical character was
totally willing to get
down and dirty, up close and very personal with the sick, the weak, the poor, and the generally unwholesome and fucked-up? What weirdo was always up for a party?
Oh yeah. That immensely queer, ridiculously insane, highly-laughable,
very very BAD WITCH, the tantric-magician-poet, Jesus of Nazareth.
(wonderful Ted Neeley as sexy angsty hippie lord of hosts in Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973)
2. Your self-concept truly does determines everything.
As long as you take yourself to be the put-upon, insulted, offended
dream character, as long as you’re solidly identified in your aversions and attachments, you
can’t
work real practical magic. You can’t turn water into wine and you can’t
walk on water. You can’t make the lame walk, raise the dead, or
multiply loaves and fishes.
Fuck, about all you can do is sometimes manifest what’s on your
magazine-picture cut-and-paste Vision Board. Or maybe your Pinterest.
And even if you do, if you’re honest with yourself, you find that your
manifestations are
somehow rather remarkably unsatisfying once they appear.
You can’t do all that cool miracle stuff, because all that cool
miracle stuff is only what you get to do if you’re fully lucid in the
dream, fully identified as
the dreamer instead of
the dream character.
That was the immense trick that Jesus, our great queer bad-ass
wizard, managed to do. He saw himself and everyone else and everything
else as the dreamer instead of the dreamed. He didn’t use his own puny
human will to change stuff. He identified so thoroughly with the Great
Will, “the will of God,” the desire that creates all things,
including the shit and the wounds and the horror and the ugliness and the nose hairs and the cellulite – that that Will had no problem moving through him and shifting the dream in his presence.
Just like when you become lucid in a nighttime dream – you realize
you’re the dreamer, asleep in your bed, and you can fly if you want to.
The bad news for us is that the key to this immense trick of shifting
our identification from knowing ourselves as the dream character to
knowing ourselves as one-with-the-Dreamer-of-Everything is that we have
to
assume the attitude of the Dreamer.
And if you think about it, the Dreamer’s attitude to everything is
that it’s orgasmically deliciously perfect, it’s flawless, it’s loveable
and it’s whole in all its apparent twistedness.
3. You need to let yourself believe you’re having a pre-cognition, a revelation that what you want is already done.
Okay, so that’s the first big trick to magic. Profound intimacy and
attention and surrender, non-judgment and non-rejection of what’s
already showing up. Got that down? Great. Check. Next step.
Mmmm… okay, slightly bad news again.
The next step is just as difficult and demanding on your heart and imagination!
(The Millionaire from Nazareth – a classic New Thought book by Catherine Ponder, I recommend it)
The next step is that even as you’re totally loving and present with
the twistedness that’s already apparent, not judging it, not shaming it –
you go ahead and just wildly, insanely,
nonsensically, irrationally assume that your preference for how it
could be different…. is already accomplished!
You see it as a
done deal and
express your gratitude for the doneness of the deal.
You allow yourself to experience your preference as a revelation, a prophecy, a pre-cognition of something which is
inevitably already happening.
Weird magical facts about me: this is essentially how I got my book
published, how I got my PhD, and how I fully healed my
immensely-painful-ripped-cornea-which-was-so-damaged-that-the-best-cornea-doctor-in-the-world-told-me-my-only-hope-to-be-pain-free-was-to-have-my-eye-removed.
Wait wait now – what about hard work? What about taking massive
action? Improving my productivity? Mastering my craft? Getting good
medicine?
Well, you can certainly do all that stuff as a way of keeping
yourself busy while the slow-ish dream moves. I did. But I’m really
clear that the intuitively-received information that directed me to take
the precise action steps that actually worked to bring forth these
goals (in very weird, synchronistic ways) only came to me after I made
the insane, irrational, internal decision that the goals were already accomplished.
But the real work is the inner energy it takes to allow yourself to experience your subjective decision
as truth,
to allow yourself to know that your choice of who you are and how your
prefer the world to be is to be more valid, more true, more solidly
done and factual than what’s “objectively real.”
My book is already published by a major publisher.
(except no one knows that and it isn’t written yet)
I have my PhD.
(yet according to my thesis committee everything I’ve ever written is trash)
My eye is healed, perfectly functioning, and painless.
(except it hurts like a motherfucker, I have to wear a pirate eye
patch, and the World’s Foremost Cornea Specialist says I should get it
plucked out of my head)
Still, whatever. My book is published by a major publisher. I have my
PhD. My eye is healed. That’s my irrationally chosen subjective
crazy-town truth, and I’m sticking to it and basking in the glow of it.
Yay, me! I’m a published PhD with healthy eyes! YAY!
And then it became objective truth. Very fast. That wasn’t the Law of Attraction. That was the Law of Insane Assumption.
Sound like madness? Well, it is. The authorities of the world don’t
much care for that kind of imaginative madness. They’re prone to burning
people at stakes and hanging them up on crosses for it. So. Proceed if
you’re cool with that.
4. You can have everything you want – only after you stop attaching importance to it.
Here’s something big: your subjective decision, your inner choice
that your preference is already a done deal (“Hmmmm, I would prefer this
water to be wine right now so the party can keep raging”) – it
will
become manifest. Sometimes with stunning rapidity. The quickness of it
is really only a question of how thoroughly you’re identified with
yourself as the dreamer.
And it will only manifest if you’re choosing it
for the hell of it, if it’s
no-big-deal to you.
In other words, you can’t be out to
prove anything with your magic. If you’re counting on the external manifestation to
prove that you’re rich, you’re powerful, you’re awesome, you’re healed and healing – well, you’ve just kind of missed the point.
(beautiful Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdelene and Ted Neeley again as the Holy Lamb in Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973)
The point is that there is no point. There’s no point because there actually is
nothing to prove. Your power and wholeness and perfection can’t be proved
because they’re already true. You
already are the dreamer of the dream.
And if you’re really letting yourself know that, you won’t be attaching
any importance at all to the manifestation of your preferences, because
the dream is already orgasmically, deliciously, insanely perfect.
If you’re still attached to proving something, all it means is that
you’re still attached to seeing yourself as the dream character, and
you’re anxious for the dream to prove to you that you’re the dreamer.
Well, it won’t. It can’t. Because you’re dreaming the dream, and it can
only prove to you
what you deeply assume to be true.
And if your boring, mundane assumption is that you’re a separate,
anxious individual with something to prove – well, that’s what it will
continue to show you. Anxiety, separation, and stubborn mundane
boringness.
5. Your imagination is not fluffy pointless stuff – it’s the shaper of realms.
Since the truth is that you are the dreamer, your imagination – that
much-derided power – is not an idle force. It’s what actively shapes all
that you see.
So is the greatest thing you can imagine for yourself a 4-hour work
week, naps in some tropical sunshine, six-pack abs and free time spent
cheating at kick-boxing competitions? (Sorry dear Tim Ferris – you’re a
loveable dude but it’s a Luciferian gospel of linear self-improvement
that you’re preaching.)
If your wildest dreams center primarily on the fulfillment of stuff that would
prove
that you’re awesome, you’re okay, you’re a winner – that would tend to
suggest that the most you dare to hope for is to be a really kick-butt
dream character.
Which is cool and everything, but I invite you to take the
imagination that you have for yourself and get way bigger with it,
because…
6. You can imagine yourself all the way to enlightenment.
This is what Jesus did. He just had a way, way, way bigger imagination than us and Tim Ferris.
And this is pretty much the whole point of all the tantric and
dzogchen Buddhist teachings (which are considered by many to be the
highest teachings in Buddhism): you imagine yourself, you
emanate
yourself, as an already-fully-awake-and-fully-empowered Buddha. You do
this instead of imagining yourself as what Lama Thubten Yeshe calls
“your ordinary self-pity emanation.” Damn, Lama Yeshe, do you know me or
what?
Emanate, imagine, rinse, repeat.
(Tantric Buddhist thodgal tigle – it’s a particle of sparkly light that the dream of the universe is made of)
Obviously this sort of imagination-towards-total-awakening takes some
high-octane focus. It’s not something you day dream about once and
you’re done. It’s something that you practice again and again, deeply,
maybe for years, and along the way you encounter absolutely everything
in you that’s ashamed, that’s demonic, that’s despairing, that argues
against your total awakeness and perfection and power and
oneness-with-the-Dreamer.
You might, for example, hang out for 40 days in a desert meeting all
these protesting parts of yourself, or you might meet them in one night
while you sit under a Bodhi tree. Either way, they’ll show up and you’ll
have to meet them, maintaining your knowing (your imagination, your
pre-cognition) of the truth all the while.
That sounds way more hardcore than six-pack abs to me.
7. You have to be willing to let the objective world fall by the wayside – and walk a thin line.
I’m repeating this last point because I need to get to a full 7 list
items (7 has a sexy magic allure that 6 just doesn’t, wouldn’t you
agree?) and also because it’s an important bit of this
insane dimension of magic that I’m trying to emphasize to you.
It’s not really possible to be both a powerful magician and to also
be completely committed to objective, verifiable, consensus reality. To
do magic, you have to be willing to give giant amounts of energy and
attention to your subjectively-felt truth, the truth that you’re huge,
you’re awake, you’re rich, you’re whole, you’re healthy, you’re the
Dreamer of the dream.
Very few people will give you support and permission in fully
inhabiting this subjective truth. The world in general is way more down
with “objectivity” and “verification” and “proof.” So that leaves you to
take your encouragement from crazy people on the internet like me.
So, with the full force of my not-inconsiderable-craziness - I say,
do it.
Inhabit your gigantic, subjective, unreasonable, irrational, nutty,
beautiful truth. Allow yourself to know it as true, no matter if
appearances and everyone else disagrees. And please don’t forget to
remain in huge, intimate, bloody, celebratory intimacy with the whole of
mucky reality as you do so.
(the stunning Peter O’Toole as a mad man who believes he’s a love god Jesus in The Ruling Class, 1972)
Let go. Love it all. Trust it all. Let yourself assume and know and
remember that your most gorgeous dreams are already true. Feel the mad
exhiliration and fulfillment of that.
Don’t settle for mere Luciferian manipulation and self-improvement, please, darling soul.
A caveat: this whole bit of investing primarily in your subjective
realization of your lucid magician Dreamer-ness is still a funny
balancing act. Even our queer hero Jesus (who
overcame death on multiple occasions,
let’s remember) still argued in favor of at least one part of the “you
just can’t avoid death and taxes” truism. He was really clear on the bit
that you can definitely cheat death, and yet he also said “Render unto
Cesar what is Cesar’s” – meaning- well, you still gotta pay your taxes.
And bills. Shucks.
If being a fully enlightened magician doesn’t get me out of paying taxes and bills, what good is it anyway?
Not much, it proves nothing. And gloriously so. And with my whole-heart I want it for you. Go claim it.
If you’d like some personal help in claiming and owning your
practical magic powers, I’m here. You can inquire about setting up a
free life-changing coaching conversation by writing to me at
carolyngraceelliott@gmail.com
featured image: found on wasbella102.tumblr.com
SOURCE: http://badwitch.es/7-insane-keys-to-practical-magic/
