| |
|
Ah. Yes, I see your points. And having seen them, I have to wonder why I was trying to fit that experience definitively into one box or the other at all. Thanks!
More detail? Be happy to. I don't have my journal with me right now, so I'll try to give you as much as I can and correct and update later if that's okay.
So to start: Yes, this work was definitely what you'd call a fear ordeal. I'd had that particular phobia for as long as I could remember and, on becoming a magician, decided that it needed to be sorted out. I had, or was developing, the tools necessary for the sorting out. Having this fear bothered me a great deal, as it seemed totally irrational and greatly affected me even though I knew it was kinda stupid. The funny thing is the whole deal telescoped on me. This one intense phobia turned out to have roots and vines growing into, around, and through a lot of other fears and mental blocks. I didn't realize what I was getting myself into.
I found a lot of inspiration and direction in the works of Phil Hine. I used his Auric Egg technique pretty much as found. The general form of my working came out of a not-too-dissimilar working of Hine's (can't find it on his site, but I'm sure it's there. Linkage to come). I knew at the outset that I'd need to put in a lot of time with this work, and remembered hearing something about a person needing thiry days to make or break a habit. I extended the time to forty days, thinking that would give me leeway to fuck up a good ten days of the thing and still get some result. Plus, "...for forty days and forty nights" had some resonance for me.
The collage that I mention in the other thread... That was interesting. It was made of googled images from funhouses. The only criteria I set for them was that they had to scare the shit out of me. When I came upon one that gave me that tensing tingle, I downloaded it. I guess I grabbed about forty or fifty and ended up using about thirty of them. When it came to piecing the collage together, I just let myself work freely. Paste this here, overlap that one and this one. I did my best not to impose reason or too much composition on the thing. It was only ever for my eyes, and that in itself was freeing.
So every night before bed I'd close myself off in my temple, light my white altar candle (which sat behind the collage), a red candle (sitting in front of the collage), and some Dragon's Blood incense (because I read somewhere it imparted bravery). And I would sit in a lotus, relax my body, and attempt to put myself in the darkened hallways of The Funhouse. Sometimes, I would let my mind extrapolate from one of the pictures in the collage. Sometimes, I would just let go and run the dank alleys of my head. Mainly, I was looking for that fear, that feeling of terror that tightened my ribcage. For the first thirty days, I smoked a joint prior to meditation to amp up the paranoia.
Looking back over that changework thread, I just have to smile at the small successes building up to the finale, especially getting skinned by the monsters. There were the little things, too, that popped up during the timeframe of the working that really let me know I was on the right track. Finding that Pete Carrol quote (which I'd forgotten all about). Lucking into a copy of Holst's "Planets" days after mentioning in my journal that I maybe needed a soundtrack. There were a few others. The Holst find was the absolute tops, tho. It was exactly what I needed exactly when I needed it, and brought a whole new dimesion to the proceedings. It also brought me nearest that absolute shittingscreamingcryingshaking terror that I was after.
This had been concieved as a working in Geburah from the start. The red candle throwing pulsing light on the collage was my only physical reminder of that. Then came the Holst's "Mars, Bringer of War". Most of the time, that was the opening track for the meditation. On one of the last nights of the working, I decided it was go-for-broke time. All or nothing. Either come through this night sane or insane. My choice. So "Mars" was the only track that night, and I got myself especially high for the occasion. I cued up "Mars", settled into my lotus, and determined that I would keep my eyes wide open and glued to a particular pic in the collage. I want to say it was some type of menacing, toothy clown, but don't quote me on that. Anyway, the music builds and I find that I'm really having a hard time keeping my gaze on the pic. It's not that I was distracted or anything like that. But I had determined to lock eyes with a horrible horrible thing that WOULD NOT BLINK AND WOULD NOT AVERT ITS EYES. Well, fuck you son. I'm not turning away either.
Now, for those who've not heard it, "Mars, Bringer of War" has a kind of false end about a minute before the real end. The music grows weak, fades down to almost silence, and then bursts back up again louder and more insistent than before in a great confusion of strings and martial horns and gigantic drums. In my concentration and high-ness, I very much forgot about that part. So there I am, staring down a picture, determined to make it through the entire song. Getting pretty scared, to be honest. And the song starts to fade. "Ah, I made it. Phew!" The the collage said "fuck you right back" over a hail of violins. The song comes back up and everything. Just. Fucking. Shattered. My whole body stiffened and I startled back, eyes taking in the whole collage. There was meaning there. Deep, important, and cutting meaning. In that minute, I took in every picture I'd chosen at random and watched as the meaning I'd wanted to impart to myself bled in from the edges. I saw the connections between them all, how they interacted, why I'd chosen them. There was my mother, screaming her signature scream. There was my father, his eyes wild with anger, his face inches from mine. There was me, becoming them. It was all there. I spent a long time drawing out a diagram of the collage, numbering the spaces where the pictures were, and noting the impressions I'd been flooded with.
The last few days of the working were a slow slide down from that terror high. On the last day, just prior to starting the Changework thread, I sat lotus-style in my temple and mentally walked through the collage. I let everything work up inside me. All the fear I'd ever felt of funhouses and my father and my mother and my life and myself. And I fucking screamed. Screamed for every time I hadn't been able scream before. One long, drawn-out "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!" that broke like a wave and degenerated into joyous laughter. I closed the temple, took the the folded collage and the remnants of my red candle, and set them both aflame in the chiminea on my back patio. For whatever reason, whether it was the glue I'd used to make the collage or the violent energies therein, the flame leapt up about four feet from the spout of the chiminea and quickly died. I marked an equilateral cross on my forehead with a bit of the ash, and chucked the rest in the garbage.
You may not have been looking for that much detail, but there ya go. |
|
|
