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Extreme Gnosis

  
 
trouser the trouserian
08:45 / 13.02.04
As a counterpoint to Illmatic's thread on Mystical Experience, I feel it'd be interesting to discuss the more extreme approaches sometimes employed by magicians to achieve intense states of consciousness. There are the old monastic favourites of course - sleep deprivation, fasting, flagellation; trance-dancing or spinning (particularly in a group) can be most effective. Pain is an old favourite - Chaos Magician Nick Hall (author of Chaos & Sorcery often used piercing as a means of attaining one-pointedness; and I've known magicians who swore (often literally!) by the application of nipple clamps. Dripping hot wax onto sensitive body areas has its merits, particularly if combined with sensory deprivation and being suspended on an X-frame, which brings us to BDSM - interesting intro article on the subject by Jaq. D. Hawkins here.

What I'd particularly like to focus on are methods of intensifying consciousness which involve the assistance of other people, as there's often a subtext of "relinquishing control" involved which in itself is a source of power, and, I'd argue, the experiences are so much more intense. Wanking over a sigil just seems rather 'ordinary' after having been 'topped' by a Pan possessee in the depths of Meanwood Park whilst the rest of the coven lashed us with nettles and thongs.

Anyone else care to disclose their experiences?
 
 
FinderWolf
15:00 / 13.02.04
Poochie says: Experience Gnosis, kids -- to the EXTREME!!!!

Sorry. Couldn't resist. Carry on.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
19:00 / 13.02.04
Remember, XTREME is the exoteric word of Pandaemonaeon and Vin Diesel is its messiah...

...uh by which I mean the most extreme thing I've done for gnosis is probably get both nipples pierced in one sitting. I had a sigil for each but unfortunately lost my cool and couldn't think about anything but "holy shit somebody's sticking metal through me" in the moment. My loss. The endorphin high was something else though, lasting about an hour and a half afterward of woozy giddyness and I recommend this kind of thing to anybody just for the chemicals your body puts out. The pain was unbelievable but brief, the "it's over" feeling after each one an incredible gnosis. Worse than genital piercing I hear. When they pulled me off of the vinyl bench there was a pool of sweat in a perfect outline of my back and head. I have a couple friends in LA who can make me do the most insane things at the drop of a hat in the name of magick, I love them. "Hey, you should get piercing done!" "OK!" "Hey, smoke this unnamed white powder!" "OK!" "Here, eat this grasshopper quesadilla(!)" "OK!" Unfortunately had to take them out as they didn't survive the humid Brooklyn summer.

Other than that I like walking for hours and hours and hours through bad parts of town in the middle of the night or early morning, or alongside freeways. Has the benefit of being an inherently magical experience as well as cranking up your nervous system and senses.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
22:13 / 13.02.04
I have a couple friends in LA who can make me do the most insane things at the drop of a hat in the name of magick, I love them....Unfortunately had to take them out as they didn't survive the humid Brooklyn summer.

Take them out? As in, (makes gun shape out of fingers) take them out, take them out?

I tend not to go for the whole 'achieve point of gnosis to make stuff happen' approach to sorcery these days myself. I suppose I have a few problems with the long-term sustainability of it as a working method. I just think it gets a bit boring after awhile. If you reduce the basic functioning of magic to something that requires an excitatory or inhibitative trance, then the only real way to up your game is to find fresh and more extreme methods of attaining that sort of state. After you've got to the point where shagging tortoises whilst sellotaped to a nun starts to seem ordinary, where else do you take things?

Chaos magic probably got much of its "geet 'ard magic" image from this sort of methodology, but I think you can easily fall into the trap of treating your magic like a pissing contest or something. Which can probably end up being a distraction from some of the weirder, sneakier, and more interesting areas you might otherwise stumble into. I find that in a lot of magic, extreme states of consciousness are likely to arise as a by-product of the working itself, so I'm a bit critical of the school of thought that needs to deliberately provoke these states in order to make something happen in the first place. I'm not really knocking that as a valid approach, but it does seem to get presented quite frequently as the only approach - as if it's some sort of objective fact. A lot of people seem to hold the opinion that this sort of process/inner mechanism is the secret to how magic works, which doesn't really correlate to my experiences and strikes me as a fairly reductionist and overly simplistic way of looking at things.

But to answer the question, I found board breaking quite an interesting method of charging sigils. Draw your sigil on a bit of wood then punch through it, charging the sigil as it breaks. Particularly suited to de-conditioning, as the sigil can represent some behavior pattern or neurosis you want rid of. But y'know, if your doing that sort of stuff regularly, particularly in a group setting, it can be tricky to stop things becoming a bit farcical:

"I was charging sigils with kung-fu last night!"

"That's nowt! I caught ten vipers and drew a different sigil on each one then juggled the fuckers!"

"That's rubbish mate! I tattoed the elder Futhark on a piranha then had it sewn into my solar plexus"

etc...
 
 
--
00:48 / 14.02.04
I suppose the only "extreme gnosis" I've ever done is trance-dancing. I can see how all those other things can be used, though.

Hell, I'm in pain so often I probably should use that for something!
 
 
gravitybitch
01:15 / 14.02.04
I've assisted a friend/lover in achieving shamanic gnosis through pain of the BDSM variety. She journeys pretty far out there, then comes back with personally relevant information, like a heads-up for her father's sudden illness and death. It's truly scary how much pain she can take when she's journeying!

That's not my style, though...not sure what is. I don't seem to fall into trance-state that easily; have lots of trouble bringing information back when I return to the here&now.
 
 
LVX23
05:21 / 14.02.04
Poochie says: Experience Gnosis, kids -- to the EXTREME!!!!

He's very pro-active.

Here, eat this grasshopper quesadilla(!)" "OK!" Unfortunately had to take them out as they didn't survive the humid Brooklyn summer.

I didn't know grasshoppers were so sensitive.

My extreme gnosis experiences have tended to be non-sexual and individual. I think my first exposure was doing long endurance hikes. Once I started getting into psycedelics it was all about trance dancing. First the Grateful Dead, then house music & trance. Many many nights getting way far out there to slamming beats, just feeling a widening circle of power emanating from my core. Very ntense, both sober and flipped. I got a couple of magickal tattoos in as many years on my biceps, but then I wanted to do somethingn real so on my 32nd b-day I got a tattoo across my upper back of the winged scarab. That was pretty sublime. There were some points that were intensely painful, out-of-body experiences. I could only fall back on mantras. The lines that crossed my spine it felt like there were 3 or 4 needles hitting me indifferent areas arcing down the spinal column. I'll probably go back this year for the fill-in. Since then I've been doing a lot of mountain biking and regularly find myself trancing out on the long climbs. Recently I've had some pretty interesting visualizations in this state.
 
  
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