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magical illness

22:32 / 17.03.02

Sometimes, if you become very ill, run a high fever and such, you may tend to hallucinate, or else have somewhat unusual experiences. This is probably unintentional almost all of the time.

However, I'm trying to think of other ways one might use an illness as a tool in magical practice. And I'm not suggesting intentionally becoming sick, but rather, when you inevitably do, not letting the altered state go to waste.

22:38 / 17.03.02

Probably a pretty simplistic idea, but I figure charging sigils would be a great deal easier to do when you're sick. Your mind is sluggish and all you want to do is sleep, so I figure you could charge a sigil and probably instantly forget it because of how crappy you feel.

23:34 / 17.03.02

I currently have a very sore throat. No matter how many time I clear it, it still feels clogged and yuk. Magic!

08:54 / 18.03.02

I'd agree that it's not wise to actually go seeking to make yourself sick. I think I get what you're talking about in terms of accessing different states of consciousness, but there are so many other ways that aren't as dangerous, unpleasant, or snotty.

The flip-side of this would be that if you find yourself ill and in a state in which you can access stuff that's usually beyond your reach, I'd go right ahead and use it. sickness-crises like fevers etc. are often part of a healing process on some level: I can imagine situations in which you'd want to 'borrow' someone else's illness in order to help them through it, or when a crisis would be induced indirectly through some other form of healing. Illness can also be a chance to get away from identification from the body and therefore good for journeying or astral travel or whatever you care to call it.

I think the central thing here is that- trusting to synchronicity- if you're ill, you're ill for a reason, so talk to your body and find out why and what it wants to use the illness to show you, rather than going 'Hey! Sinusitis! I wonder if I can do pyrokinesis now?'

11:31 / 18.03.02

quote: I think the central thing here is that- trusting to synchronicity- if you're ill, you're ill for a reason, so talk to your body and find out why and what it wants to use the illness to show you, rather than going 'Hey! Sinusitis! I wonder if I can do pyrokinesis now?'

I agree, illness is there for its own reasons, with its own lessons. I would use any fever state to go into my illness and see what it has to reveal.
Being ill is a time of subcnoscious involvement, not necessarily a time for conscious magick action.
Don't forget that while ill, one is more vunerable to harmful/powerful energies. Defense is sometimes the best coruse of action. What if the illness was a psychic assault of some kind. Not teh time to be conjouring.

In medicine lore the illness would be attributed to an ill-ease or 'bad' spirit. To heal this one must understand what has caused this situation and make ammends, or have healing assistance to deal with the spirit. Inevitabley the portent is on self discovery and awareness of ones interaction with ones enviroment.

Poisoning is maybe more useful to what you talk of. Most drugs work by poisoning the body into a reaction. These states of mind can be used to magickal/mystical purposes, see here.

I've waffled, sorry. Probably due to the cold I'm coming down with.

19:19 / 18.03.02

quote:I'm not suggesting intentionally becoming sick, but rather, when you inevitably do, not letting the altered state go to waste.

I experienced something similar to this after surgery when I was 13. Fot 3 days I was existing between worlds in my state of illness. During that time I was visited by, for lack of a better term, 3 entities which told me things that took me years to recall. It was like being inbetween dreaming and waking...I would slip between the 2 without the details changing in either state.
The end result was, after that experience, that my entire life changed from that day forward. My parents divorced, I left school, lived on my own and began down this wonerous path I follow to this day. What actually happened, I can not truly say.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

09:01 / 04.04.02

Over the last few days I've been sick with a slight fever; it's having some odd effects on my dreams. The most vivid was about using my mind to fold space/time to create dwellings/spawning grounds for entities (check Deva's dream thread in the Conversation). I've been feeling very close to another region of reality lately- I'm going to try and use the fever state to break down the barriers. Any suggestions as to how I might utilize this unusual mind-state are welcome, but not vital.

(Sorry if this isn't making a lot of sense.)

13:25 / 04.04.02

There are many ways to reach a visionary state. drugs can alter perceptions, this is an easy route. Fatigue, heat, fasting, exaustion, puching the body to where it starts to break, this will also cause visions. Sit yourself in a 4 hour sweat lodge sometime, and you may well see something before you start to pass out. I'll back that one up from experience.

So isn't a fever much the same sort of state? Your mind, twisted, stressed, overheated and starting to cook, starts to break in ways that give you access to other realms of consciousness. It doesn't take a shaman to see how this can be useful, but it may take one to get the most out of it.

00:43 / 05.12.04

I've just come down with a bastard of a cold, got me thinking along these lines. One of the things that I realise is that, for however uncomfortable it can be, I actually quite like coming down with stuff. I think I see it as downtime to reboot. It's another headspace, bringing with it the ability to get a different take on things.

This current bout certainly seems like a reboot. Not being getting much exercise recently and I've even been smoking a bit (bad: I'm not a smoker), this has made me feel a bit crap, but not to the point of doing anything about it. Illness sort of brings these things to the fore, highlights them in luminous red pen. I need to start getting the breath flowing properly because my chest actually hurts. Another thing it's pointed out is how much tension I hold in my shoulders that's tied directly to improper, laboured breathing even when I'm well. There's that unmistakable lactic acid sharpness in both shoulder muscles right now.

If the onset of illness highlights these things, shouldn't I be able to associate them to the illness to the point where flushing my system of the cold virus could be made to work in tandem with healing these other areas? The body goes into overdrive as it produces antibodies to clear this. Why not hijack the process and mentality to fix other things? I don't see why it couldn't equally be applied to personality traits as well as physical ones (although the two are often tied very closely anyway).

I suppose it has slight resonances of shamanic fever, but as I understand it, shamanic fever is a process of using the sickness headspace to assimilate something from the outside, whereas this would be deconstructing something internal.

Unconditional Love

10:28 / 05.12.04

ive had a flu like thing all week and from what i can gather from this time and others of being ill in this way, is that it ties me closer to my instincts, as my immune system clicks in to repair what ever is going on so do the mental unconscious forces click in in my mind.

on wednesday i necked a couple of ibuprofen drank a few cups of coffeee and went to kung fu, to burn it out of my system with that inner fire that arises from practising kung fu, i felt like shit riding there, but by the time of the warm up and then into the pad training something began to happen, and i think this is down to the cold and possibly the mediacation as well, people were commenting of the level of power in my punches and the guy holding the pads was a little more unnerved than usual, i think this is literally because my mind was driven into survival mode by the illness, vast reserves of energy became avalible to me. ive found in the past with tai chi and kung fu if i have a cold dragging myself there often helps.

i think they allow you to blur the border between the conscious and unconscious perhaps, the information exchange becomes easier, if you focus that as unconscious forces in your mind ie thats what your conception is then perhaps it manifests as dreams, if you extend that to every part of the body then that unconscious energy manifests through the whole vehicle, ive also found my intuition increases as these survival instincts come into play.