About yesterday or so I was chatting with a good on-line friend I've known for some time (he's from Australia). Despite this person's young age (18) he is very smart and a pleasure to talk to. Yesterday we were discussing a problem I was having in real-life (see my thread "ever get the feeling the universe is playing a trick on you?" in the conversation section). He told me that I spent too much time reading and not enough time actually doing. He told me that I needed to live. I told him that I wanted to "become illuminated, transcend reality, become at one with nature". He told me that he was probably more illuminated and at one with nature then I was.
By this he meant that, though he was prone to angst, loneliness and self-doubt at times, for the most part he really got a lot out of life, had a stable group of friends, spent a lot of time outdoors with other people, etc. He told me that my life consisted of waking up, going to a job I despised, never going outside or having a social life, basically spending most of my time in my room (womb?) obsessing about my health and reading these self-liberation books.
How odd, I thought. Here is a person who is like me in many ways (especially in terms of musical taste and writers), but he's enjoying life, yet he knows nothing of magic, meditation, yoga, deconditioning yourself, etc. Whereas I do know about all this stuff, and I'm not enjoying life at all. What's wrong with this picture?
He told me that I needed to stop thinking about things and "Do It!" This really jolted me as "Do It!" is one of the slogans that appears in Christopher Hyatt's book "Undoing yourself with energized meditation and other devices", which I had just finished reading recently. And if all that wasn't enough, Robert Anton Wilson, in his intro to that book, said that he doubted most people who read Crowley ever actually tried out the exercises (that's me!) and that many people think that reading a self-liberation book alone will change their lives without them doing any work. This really struck home with me as I've read many of these type of chaos magic/self-liberation/brain programming books yet very rarely have I ever tried most of what those books advised... I'm trying to change that now, anyway.
I think my problem was, when I began dabbling with the occult when about 2 years or so ago, I was so eager to become "enlightened" that all I did was read. I realized I had a lot of catching up to do so I studied voodoo, the tarot, the qabalah, chaos magic, Crowley, what have you. But in my rush to gain knowledge I never really mastered any of these things because I was so overwhelmed by all this new mind-warping information. What I should have done was learned about one topic, tried it out a bit until I became comfortable with it, then try something else, rather then trying to become a jack of all trades and a master of none. At the time I had the erronous view that a magician should be a flawless person, but really what fun would that be? Now I try to take things slower and be more patient. Grant Morrison was 30 years old when he had his big life-changing abduction, and he had been practicing magic for about, what, 14 years or so by that point? I'm only 23 and have been practicing for only 2, so I guess I have all the time in the world.
Perhaps one needs to be comfortable in reality before you can transcend it, whatever that means. Or, maybe I should work on having a life instead of obsessing over these cosmological matters. Or better yet, get a life and integrate magic into it. Anyway, the time has come for action. To "Do It!", in other words. |
