I've had similar feelings, Ill & Ev. This year I turned 35 and separated from my wife. For the first time in my life I am feeling old. And I feel that in some ways magick has abandoned me. Or rather that I have begun to let the magick slip. Yet I have regular moments of getting swept up in the majesty of creation - watching the clouds blow across a sunset, for instance. Feeling the grace of creation.
I'm in Lyon, France, a bit drunk, listening to Flaming Lips. There's a line to the effect of "you can never know yourself" and this rings true for me. To some degree this human robot of mine is falling forward on the inertia of so much sub-conscious experience, so many patterns and habits and subtle traumas that I'm not even really conscious of. Some days I'm a god filled with power straight from the source, or straight from my ego. Other days find me sad and alone, impotent against the relentless cruelty of life.
In times past, magick has sustained me. In these recent days the ritual of magick has had little place among the trials of my life. And yet after so many years of willingly engaging the infinite, the Absolute, magick is simply a part of my existence. Though ritual ebbs and flows my conception of reality is forever intertwined with the gods and barely a day passes that I don't sense their presence. I can rarely walk down the street without noticing a 23 or a 69 or a bit of grafiti that commincates to me in some way.
So for me magick is evolving, or rather simplifying, to be the steady engagement of life and the personal impetus to create, to manifest my will into reality. Sometimes I'm drawn to ritual in those sudden moments when divinity plainly intervenes in the space of my awareness; when the clouds pass in front of the sunset and I can't help but merge into the vast rhythms of nature and creation, deified and omnipresent, timeless and forever sacred.
For me magick is a set of technologies to help me come to know myself better, to rediscover the god within that forgot itself upon this incarnation; it's the deep apprehension of the incomprehensible immensity and complexity of my being and the world in which I am embedded; the sudden awakening to the oneness of all things seen and unseen; and a map for the mind-shattering and inescapable rearranging of what I think I know about reality, so often pulled out from under me like a rug.
Once you've passed through the doorway, once the consensual mirror of How Things Are Supposed To Be is shattered by the unexpected ingression of novelty, once the seeming hand of god reaches into your world and, without warning and with no attempt to hide itself, asserts its authority to totally fuck with your world, then you can no longer go back no matter how much of the material world you armour yourself with.
I've come to understand and accept that, for me, ritual has its place and is essential to find the path, but once you're on it, once you've integrated the canon of esoterica over many years of engaging the mysteries, it will always flow through you. To me, there is no greater magick than the fact that my Self is directing a hundred billion cells or so to extrude the gossamer threads of thought washing across my cortex into codified semantics that I can then upload to the global digital hyperweb and feed to you.
The moments of apprehending the godhood of our mutual awareness of deity manifest as creation are the proof that magick exists. I think therefore I am magick. |
