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Hey everyone. Just been through some updating of my magickal record and I'd like to post a snippit of it here, specifically regarding a single experience I had–I'm wondering if others of you have had similar/identical experiences, and if you can help me make sense of this one. Sorry for the length, but I promise it's interesting:
[quote]
From Good Antlerhead's magickal record: my experience of disruption of linear time. This may be analagous to the sixth Leary/Wilson circuit or may be the full flowering of the fifth (their model is a bit hazy). I only experienced it for a few hours, but it remains one of the happiest experiences of my life. When I had first come out of the above experience [description of depressive episode earlier in record], and I had been generally feeling a bit better, my hope was that I had experienced one extreme end of the pendulum swing, and that I could eventually take it higher than I had been before, to the other extreme. This was that extreme, experienced, I think, around April or May 2001. It was brought on by my (VERY effective) forced-smiling exercises (I had also been attempting to develop my mouth muscles by smiling as hard as I could for long periods of time, and then pulling down on the corners of my mouth to provide resistance, the idea being that I would eventually develop a natural smiling state instead of a scowl. I should start all that up again), the payoff from ending my practical magickal work as mentioned above, the sunny coming of Spring, my Tae Kwon Do work, marijuana smoked early in the afternoon, and several other factors; I was suddenly overflowing with ecstasy and euphoria, I could barely contain all of it. I was sitting in my chair and I suddenly perceived something I had thought about first when I was sixteen and staying in the Hollywood Roosevelt–I could see the sense of linear time in my brain. A bit hard to put into words, but it was like I could see linear time itself as my brain perceived it. It had the aspect of a ventilation shaft, of cause-and-effect; and I could easily look at it like a snake or a worm. I also perceived that either it was not meant to be there, like a parasite–put there by somebody or something–or that it was something that I had outgrown. Instead of trying to go about removing it from my brain, which I felt would be too destructive and probably wouldn’t work, I decided to approach it shamanistically, like it was a caterpillar, and coax it into turning into the butterfly of quantum perception. There was no ritual involved, only will and imagination. I hatched it and I could see it like a huge, shimmering cross between a butterfly and an electron cloud that I later did a large pencil drawing of. I suddenly was able to see the moment, the infinite possibilities around me, that I really could do anything without the chains of narrative and linear time. The trigger was the growing realization–extrapolated from my Tae Kwon Do work–that both the past, and even more so the “future” are fictions that we use to limit ourselves. Pop-psychology and pop-occultism harp on about how we interpret the past, but that isn’t the problem at all. The problem is that we think we can see the future and predict future events, which amounts to locking ourselves in chains. I would like to eradicate the idea of “the future” in my mind. Then the situation will really become clear and action will become much freer and truer. We labor in our minds over what we can and can’t do, which is laziness. It’s not up to us to determine the results of our actions, it’s up to the world. Otherwise we are “fastening our ankles to stones,” as Leonard Cohen said on the stereo right as I was typing this and thinking about a ball-and-chain, and not living human lives. No future! No future! No future for you!
For the first time, I could breathe. I walked down the hall, floating, dazed, joyfully greeting everyone I met and I went out into the sun... the rest is a blur, and in a day or two the feeling faded, but I could still go back to that feeling; today I’ve slipped back into the old pattern except for the constant low-grade activity of the fifth circuit. I think it was this experience that really awakened that feeling that I had an energy field for lack of a better term, it also awakened normal “psychic” abilities; that is, I soon realized that in conversation with other people, the most important thing was not what you said but the intent in each person’s mind, that what each person was thinking was just as important if not more important than what was being said to good communication. Several other “revelations” followed; it was one of several experiences I had that year in which I could step back and say “I’ve grown up.”
It suddenly dawned on me why so many post-adolescent girls get butterfly tattoos.
I later, startlingly, found references to the experience I had had in other literature. In the 1910 story “The Surgeon,” by the Hungarian writer, doctor, and opiate addict Géza Csáth, translated into English in 1980, in which a surgeon talks to an acquaintance in an absinthe café (bolds are mine):
I have found time in the brain. It doesn’t differ externally from an ordinary brain cell. Yet it’s the nucleus of misery, sickness, the senseless sorrow of passing on. It can be quantitatively greater in one man than another. It elaborates it appendages, its branches and forks like a polyp into the fresh and healthy brain–hence into every aspect of our thoughts.
Of course, this is a great task for the surgeon, but it’s absolutely simple. All we have to know is what to cut. I know it. And I’ll offer my discovery to the man who wishes above all to be rid of time, who is borne down by the idea of passing on... [There is an extended explanation of what the operation would be]
I just spoon out this evil hornet’s nest of human grief. In a few minutes the whole thing’s finished. I hand the time cells round in a dish...
I waken the fellow... This is the man of the future, the really new man who’s able to solve today’s secrets and tomorrow’s truth with his fresh clean brain. He has total recall because facts don’t pass away for him–they line themselves up as equal powers in his consciousness... Time has exhausted itself! All of the psychic energy stolen from us by the silent madness of mortality is left over for us in the form of tremendous life-energy.
All of which is a bit exaggerated and clouded by delusions of grandeur, but the core of what Csáth is talking about is exactly what I experienced, the removal of time from the brain (at least linear time as we understand it). Csáth also seems to think that this would lead to immortality (!) but what he misses out on is the fact that time is a fictional concept created by humans and only enforced on Western perceptions shortly before the Industrial Revolution; it’s the perception of a myth that we’re removing, which has nothing to do with natural cellular processes. As the anarchist writer John Zerzan has said, “cause-and-effect exists, time doesn’t.”
Then, from an Aleister Crowley article in “The Equinox,” Liber LXV (Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente), “An account of the relations of the aspirant and his Holy Guardian Angel”:
I am the Heart; and the Snake is entwined
About the invisible core of the mind.
Rise, O my snake! It is now is the hour [sic]
Of the hooded and holy ineffable flower.
Rise, O my snake, into brilliance of bloom
On the corpse of Osiris afloat in the tomb!
O heart of my mother, my sister, mine own,
Thou art given to Nile, to the terror Typhon!
Ah me! but the glory of ravening storm
Enswathes thee and wraps thee in frenzy of form.
Be still, O my soul! that the spell may dissolve
As the wands are upraised, and the aeons revolve.
Behold! in my beauty how joyous Thou art,
O Snake that caresses the crown of mine heart!
Behold! we are one, and the tempest of years
Goes down to the dusk, and the Beetle appears.
O Beetle! the drone of Thy dolorous note
Be ever the trance of this tremulous throat!
I await the awaking! The summons on high
From the Lord Adonai, from the Lord Adonai!
Again, bolds are mine. One conclusion I could possibly draw from this, if I’m interpreting Crowley right, is that I’ve hit the first step of awakening the HGA (this is the very first passage of Liber LXV, which goes on for several more pages); not that I’m jumping to that kind of a conclusion.
And then, from Robert Anton Wilson, talking about one of Crowley’s drawings from The Book of Thoth:
The serpent is “the rising of the Kundalini serpent,” a Hindu metaphor for imprinting this Circuit V neurosomatic bliss-control... Temporary neurosomatic consciousness can be acquired by (a) the yoga practice of pranayama breathing and (b) for those who can handle it, by ingestion of Cannabis drugs, such as hashish and marijuana, which trigger neurotransmitters that activate this circuit.
I didn’t find these texts until several months after my experience. I’d like to run this by other magicians for their comments, especially those of the Thelemic variety. Further research into Kundalini energy would be helpful, as well. And I’d like to develop consistently reliable methods of reactivating this perceptual shift. |
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