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What I’ve been up to
I’ve not been making many posts here or recording any new episodes. There are two major reasons for this.
The first is that my grandpa died so I’ve been recovering from that and spending a lot of time downing my sorrows in books and video games.
The other reason though is slightly more exciting. I’ve been writing for Charm The Water’s Peacock Goat Review, a monthly occult publication. It’s available here. [Ed. now defunct]
Quiet but not missing
I haven’t put out any new episodes this month because I’ve been busy celebrating my birthday and working on this project which will soon be available for purchase. More will be coming soon.
Ascending The Sacred Spiral
I can see the start of my second journey taking shape. I’m back where I stated yet also not where I began. I’ve learned and grown from who I was the first time I engaged with this current and now I will see things I missed the first time. Like a path up a mountain, it’s a winding, circular path upwards, but unlike the easy road it’s up to us to pull ourselves up the mountain using what we learned. You could find yourself walking the circumference forever if you don’t use what you learned the last time to ratchet you up at each step. The first time I was ignorant and did not know what I was looking for, now I have a deeper understanding and a shape of what I’m looking for, what each lesson entails. I’ve learned how to avoid all those things that caught me up the first time but I’m sure new ones will be their in their place. All learning is remembering and so too all progress is backtracking while still moving forward. Life is cyclical, but that isn’t negative, rather it gives us a change to use what we learned. If you learn a lesson but never face that challenge again to prove you took the lesson to heart, have you even learned anything? Facing again that which we had vanquished is a chance to prove it wasn’t a fluke. Should we succeed, new challenges will rush up to meet us. So long as we are learning and growing, we can know we are alive. It’s when we stop, that we truly start dying. But as you go around again, you catch on to things you missed before. You grasp easily things that before eluded you. You discover secrets you didn’t see the first time; treasures tucked away in the cracks. The further we climb, the more we understand of the whole picture.
Concerning Mindfulness
Prompted by a friend who’s been taking me to Sangha, I’ve started practicing Buddhist mindfulness in the Plum Village tradition and reading some of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s books. Namely his books on Fear, Anger and the Full Awareness of Breathing. They’ve really helped me with my anxiety. I averted an anxiety attack the other day just by the use of mindfulness of breathing alone, which is a huge step in the right direction.
If only he had a book on the existential horror creeping in from all sides but I suppose that’s where the works of our first guest on the podcast portion comes in. Stay tuned as we delve deep into Philip K. Dick’s Gnosis, Valis and living in a Gnostic world.
We’ve Forgotten How to Die
I recently visited a haunted school and had a lot of run ins with spirits. The thing is, it wasn’t anything like people think of with all the horror media. They weren’t out to get me, they seemed scared and lost and confused. I was hugged by a little ghost girl in a room full of dolls and I could tell she was trembling, poor thing. She was scared. I didn’t feel any fear, I felt only compassion and love. I wanted to hug her back and tell her everything was going to be ok, but then my group started heading on and she went away.
I was presented with a very different reality to the spirit world than the one you generally hear of. Spirits who are taking to death with the same confusion and fear so many take to life. It was so sad. I wanted to hug each of them and tell them it was going to be ok and that I would show them the way to the afterlife. I wanted to be their psychopomp.
I realized something, they were in death just as lost as in life. I realized just how deeply wounded and unhealthy our society is. Not only have we forgotten how to show each other compassion and who we are and where we come from, but we’ve forgotten even how to die.
We’ve got everything exactly wrong and made a life where we’ll still be recovering from the scars it leaves even after we die.
How sad. How heart wrenching. What can we have of hope in such a world? I realized the only hope we can have in such a broken world comes from complete and utter detachment from this society and a return to the old ways, before the empire, such that after we die we won’t be trapped by it like they were, poor things.
I realized the deeper meaning of Inanna’s descent into the underworld. She knew she was going to die when she set out, that’s why she asked Ninshubur to plead her case to the Anunna. She went into the great below to die. It was never really hubris though that was the charge. It was the ultimate act of humility, the ultimate act of zen and detachment, for a goddess to abandon her position and go to die for enlightenment. Siddhārtha would be proud. She entered the world of the dead to become as one among them. She passed through each gate and was stripped of every item that was her identity in life. She faced Ereshkigal without attachment to anything she had so identified with in life and then made to attack her knowing the sentence would be death and so she died. The goddess who had judged so many in life was finally the judged and sentenced the ultimate fate.
Of course that wasn’t the end. She emerged victorious over death with the assistance of others and came out the other side with the knowledge of the underworld and an understanding of death. She discovered her husband wasn’t who she thought he was, he did not mourn her passing. He was in his throne tending court same as ever. She realized that this relationship that she had so defined herself with was ultimately not what she thought it was and so she divorced him and sent him to the underworld in her place.
The lesson is in detachment, but not detachment from the world by living apart from it. Inanna is passion, she’s the fullness of emotion, she’s not detached from experience. Rather it’s detachment from defining oneself with the articles of this life such that when you reach the ultimate moment, you’re ready to move on and don’t end up trapped here confused and scared doing the same things as you did in life in a slowly decaying building because you don’t know how to be and do anything else.
The War Against the Magical
I hate this world because it is not magical and I have since I was a child. I imagine I am far from alone in this. Most of my favorite films and literature were all about a return to the magical; a trip into fairy.
We in the west have forgotten who we are; buried in our own smug materialism that isn’t even true. Hardly anyone believes in strict materialsm yet it’s the policy of the land and people become viscerally angry when it isn’t adhered to. We call this cognitive dissonance advanced and civilized while we destroy world out of a cannibalistic greed and a seeming obsession to stamp out the fantastic, the natural, the beautiful; the magic of the world. Meanwhile we’re putting outhers to blame for what we do when it is we who are doing wrong. It is like the symptoms of an illness that effects us; effects our minds.
We have the very world we create and we are miserable in it and yet we will not give it up for something better. It’s almost pathological our love-hate relationship we have with it. Are we all diseased? Are we all possessed with the demon of empire and desperately need an exorcism?
We raise our children in literature and media seeping with magic and wonder, practically begging them to believe in magick then we mock them for doing it. It’s like part of us knows and desperately wants to return to the magical and yet another part of us is viscerally horrified of it. Academia seems particularly obsessed with going out of its way to invent fantastic and completely unsubstantiated explanations when even the smallest kernel of the magical starts seeping in, yet creates ideas and theories which are magical in every way but name. Archeology seems utterly fascinated by it, yet goes out of its way to demean and deny it.
What happened to us? We are as a species with amnesia. Something must have gone horrible wrong sometime in the past to give us such a paradoxical obsession and fear of the magical. The church is especially strange in its relationship with the magical and the fantastic. On the one hand, they espouse a doctrine which is practically filled to the brim with magic and ritual, but denies it and condemns it at every possible turn; even going so far as committing mass murder to keep it suppressed. It’s nothing less than completely and utterly bizarre. Why do we behave like this?
Our popular literature is full of demigods and magicians yet we also fill our horror and villany with those same types of folks when the story is closer to the real and average folk. Witches are portrayed as evil but Thor is a heart-throb for his magic. What is wrong with is? Why are we so afraid of what we are?
Discoveries and Ideas
A collection of things I have discovered following initiation into Keter, many of which came about after being so led to read Valis by Philip K. Dick.
The Trinity is not what people think it is. The third hidden pillar is blind chance: chaos, randomness. It is in a state of inverted was-ness as balance to the was-ness of the divine twins, Jachin and Boaz. It came into being by the error of the mother, believing it would simply stop being I’m a superposition and simply fall into not-was-ness alone but that didn’t happen and error, the third hidden pillar, was created instead being the origin of the error that brought it into being. (Time doesn’t exist and outside perception all time happens at once so cause and effect are effectively meaningless outside perception. Consciousness is perception in motion.) When filtered through Da’at of the Tree of Life, which is that of the Jachin, it becomes synchronicity. When filtered through the Tree of Death, which is that of the Boaz, it becomes the apathetic forces of nature and the solve for why bad things happen to good people.
The ancient Sumerians called the Jachin An and the Boaz they called Ki. Error they called Nammu. The primordial waters they called Abzu. Correctly understood they are all genderless as understood in terms of human gender.
Further, the material world is the forces out of balance, brought on by the divine grief and divine guilt of the Boaz at the previewed perceived death of the mother; Dryghtyn, the Rainbow Snake or Ouroboros or Tiamat, which is in a superposition of was-ness and was-not-ness forever. Da’at in the Boaz is the abyss, the hole that is not really a sphere which is that empty, negative feeling of grief left by love’s loss. Boaz came into being prematurely by blind chance by mistake and as it found itself alone and its world egg having hatched inside the mother, seemingly killing her as it saw only the not-was-ness, blamed itself even though it was an accident. It built the world from its grief in in the memory of the mother and the mind which was meant to be whole, fragmented, which is why the collective unconscious is not the collective conscious.
Jachin upon seeing its sibling so mad, made sick by its grief, began medicating it by sending light energy in the form of information over to medicate it. This is the origin of all positive religious beliefs and understanding.
Boaz’s mental immune system is the Archons, that is Wetiko or The Empire (as Philip K. Dick called it), which has become diseased by the guilt and now has become the equivalent to an autoimmune disease, mistakenly attacking Boaz and the medicine of Jachin, believing in error that they are the real infection.
The material world is the world of the isolated Boaz. The astral world is that of the isolated Jachin.
When the wound of grief that is Da’at was opened, it forced the spheres out of alignment. The sun, which was meant to be in Da’at, got forced where the Moon (which was meant to be the second sun) was meant to be. The moon got forced into where the Earth was meant to be, taking on a shell composed of the Earth’s crust as a result. This is why the moon is hollow. It was supposed to be the binary star. The Earth was forced down below the first veil, which Philip K. Dick called the Black Iron Prison, dividing the material from the Ethereal. The Ethereal is the two words of the Jachin and the Boaz in balance. This is why it feels more real than real but also why it is difficult to maintain presence in, as the spheres are out of alignment.
Jachin, in an effort to mirror Boaz, has received the equal and opposite principle of divine grief to fill its space in Da’at which is divine love, seeing only the was-ness of the mother.
The end of the world will come about when Boaz is fully healed of being sick with grief and enough of the humans (which carry inside them the inoculation from the illness of Boaz which is the divine spark of Sophia, the first medicinal gift of Jachin but must be activated through initiation) bring their internal trees into alignment through initiation, bringing divine love into Boaz. Once a balance of divine love is achieved, the unbalance in Boaz will be healed and the material world of the delusions of Boaz from grief will end and all will shift into the Ethereal as we are meant to be and it will be like waking up from a dream.
The dead souls, their physical bodies being severed from their divine spark, return as that spark alone (which is the soul) to Jachin and live in the Astral until balanced is achieved. Incarnation is willingly chosen by a soul, choosing to return to Boaz to better itself and help heal as an effort to heal Boaz, but subjected to the forgetting at birth because of the isolated Boaz. The material world was meant to be a place of teaching, but out of balance it has become a place of suffering.
Inverted was-ness is not zero like people think. It is -1. Error is a diploid sphere which composes the equal and inverted balance of Jachin and Boaz in chaos.
Zero is the superposition, which is like Shrodinger’s cat, which is the position of Ouroboros which is represented by a snake eating its own tail forever. The mother is forever in such a superposition. Boaz only saw the mother as non-existent whole Jachin only saw it as existent. Thus, Boaz thought falsely that it killed the mother, bringing on the guilt.
Was-ness is 1 and divides into the twin forms of darkness, Boaz, and light, Jachin. Boaz, from derangement (which here means the isolation brought about by grief) divided itself into isolated forms. They were never meant to be divided. We are meant to be all one like a hive mind; all individuals yet operating as one. This is why the astral body is telepathic and why those who’s third eye is open are so. The Jacob body is telepathic.
The memories of the mother reside in the hole of the abyss, which is why the image of the mother has become corrupted overtime to be monstrous; Leviathan.
Note: to be an equal but opposite force, error is not one but two; a dipole as the twins are. Synchronicity is one and blind chance is the other. However, it can be considered as one in most cases because as it is negative and opposite, it is defined by the perception of it and by which divine twin it flows through. Therefore it can be considered as having the value of two even though it is effectively one force from our perspective; pure chaos.
3/21/18 Edit: Cleaned up for errors and language but it is still admittedly a mess.
4/29/18 Edit: Cleaned up to pull from fewer sources, but it’s probably still largely incomprehensible, it’s just a consciences stream of ideas based on the Kabbalah, Gnosticism and Valis
True Love and Desire
If you cannot tell the difference between a love formed from grasping (lust) from a love formed from giving (true love), then you’ve never known true love. True love isn’t interested in what one can get from the arrangement. True love just is, regardless of desires. Romance is rarely a gateway to true love, since it’s generally a product of desire. However it probably can sometimes blossom into such, but more often it simply survives through mutual desire which in itself isn’t true love as I am beginning to understand it.
I use the term true love in want of a more exact term. In this case I refer to true love as being the manifestation of the transcendence of duality. Acceptance of one fully and without reservation without regards to one’s own desires and perhaps even in spite of them and not even out of some vague often unrealised ultimate desire for some promise of the potential of future fufillment of desire. It is this later form of desire that most often leads one to mistake the two. Lust is often good at hiding itself in a cloak of seemingly altruistic desire. Even if the desire to see oneself as a good person or fufill ones own sense of obligation to help others, it is still a form of desire and is therefore distinct from true love. This does not however make it in any way a bad thing. I do not believe that desire is inherantly a negative thing in itself. If the desire ultimately leads one to positive things then the desire is ultimately positive. Rather, it is simply a recognition that there is a form of love for another that exists which transcends such things. A love beyond romance and beyond all desires, even positive ones. I only now have come to recognize it because I’ve begun to feel it for the first time. I have the Buddhists, which I joined in a meditation ritual recently, to thank for this revelation, though it took the works of Philip K. Dick (though serendipitously as it wasn’t from the content itself but rather the realizations it caused within me) to actually recognize the truth of this feeling and what it really was.
I believe that this represents the beginning of my initiation into Keter. I knew I was at the doorway of Keter, but I’m only now starting to parse the lessons it has to teach. Starting my book was the first step on this length of the journey, but contrary to my initial speculation, I am not yet at the end but merely the beginning of the end. I’m learning more things about the ultimate mysteries of the universe than I ever thought possible but with it I’m learning about new, more powerful, positive feelings than I ever thought possible. I am as yet unsure of how this will ultimately effect me but I can tell already that it is going to somehow change me very fundamentally for the better.
Concerning Love
Everyone is possessed by division, even me. The part of me that gets a sick sort of thrill out of my separation from the mundanes or even just calls them that is evidence to the fact. The entire universe is possessed. Truly that was the fall; the division. The separation of Anu from itself. The division of Dryghtyn into the twin energies. In truth on a level there is no separation and yet still it is.
“For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union.” ~The Book of the Law, Alister Crowley
This in a form is a form of possession yet because it permiates the all, it is not an externally imposed one. We are all deranged in a form, but it is from this derangement that all things come into being. Nothing can happen without contrast. Sorrow and joy are but two sides of the same coin.
However, this does not mean we need to let the possession take over. Love is the transcendence; union from the division and because of it. Love will save us all in the end but it’s up to us to bring it about. Love is the fullness of the all manifest through the union of the divided.