Barbelith Underground > Temple

Probably my main source of frustration with Barbelith at the moment is that I’d rather be there in person with people. Much rather. This is particularly true of the Temple forum. I’m fed up of talking about magic online when I’d rather be doing good work with the people I love. There’s something special on Barbelith in terms of the people who come here. And there are also filters due to the nature of internet communication that block out 95% of my experience of those people. I can’t breathe the same air as them, flash them a smile or put my arms around them and I’m finding that increasingly stifling.

I’m becoming convinced that there is a new magic that has to be explored by people. Something that’s further beyond what we’ve come to know and also simpler at heart. There’s something nagging me at the corner of my vision that is a deeper mystery, an understanding that everything I’ve experienced so far has been preparing me for. I think there are other people here who are on the same wavelength in some way. Illmatic frequently hits the spot for me. He comes up with contributions both on Barbelith and in the flesh that round out or come at a synchronous moment to things I’ve been thinking, things I’m experiencing. This thread, for example.

I don’t think names exist by accident, and certainly not a name as loaded as Barbelith. I saw Barbelith again yesterday, out of the blue at work my eyes became clouded by soft pink light which formed into a circle directly in front of me. Where is this all going? Barbelith is a preparatory force, it brings about a state of readiness and full maturity. It is not a static entity. It IS change, and I’m uncomfortable that it has existed in the same form for such a long time. Of course you can’t consciously create new forms purely as an act of mere will. Sometimes forming a structure around what you want to do prematurely will rob you of the very things you loved about it in the first place. No change can be forced, there is an ecology to it that flows into place at once. I’m not suggesting that simply creating a new space and way to communicate is the way forward because change must be organic.

Nevertheless… how far can we take our friendships and our magic? What else is there? I’m a firm believer - increasingly so - in that old Bajoran proverb, “It is the Unknown that defines our existence,” so much so that I think it forms the basic underpinning of all that we experience, whether we arbitrarily use the word magic because it makes us feel special or not. The word magic is increasingly synonymous with playing in a very shallow pond to me. I think a lot of you will have realised that the subtext of a great deal of my posts is experience: experience unfettered, pure experience, without the shallow tagging and logging we do to make it merely understandable. Mere understanding, mere knowledge… there’s no power in it. Simply knowing all the facts, histories and theories is not even close to enough to finding real change, so much so that I believe it to be an exercise in totally barking up the wrong tree.

I need to live this bizarre thing that I have called a life. And I need to do that in a way that doesn’t create a multitude of hideously jargonised systems that separate me from who I am and what my life is like. I need to do it in a way that doesn’t waste time talking in favour of creating, and I want that act of creation to be collaborative. More than that, I know something in me has become lost and needs to be regained, and that can only be regained in visceral face to face community. That thing is POWER. When I was attending church regularly I was engaged with people in a manner that unleashed something hugely POWERFUL. We took risks. We made decisions on the spot that effected sometimes as many as a thousand people present in the meeting. I felt something when I hit the drums that makes Seth circa Two-Thousand-and-Five feel decadent by comparison. You cannot get that by yourself. No-one is powerful enough alone to compare with a group of flawed and brilliant people moving as one. I’ve felt that feeling enough to know that it exists and that what I’m doing now cannot be considered dangerous or potent until I’m doing what I can to recapture the good of what once was.

What exactly are we settling for? Where is the cutting edge of our lives that excites us, and is this forum fulfilling that? My goal in life is to provide people - myself included - with an experience out of the ordinary. My current practise is not doing that. The game has to be raised.

Other people