Walk Away

Not all of those given the opportunity to leave the midnight carnival will do so.
One out of every nine is sure to prefer the illusion of power over sacrifice.
If you slip out from behind the charmed bars of your own reality construct, remember this:

You must never run from anything immortal.
It attracts their attention.

Those things that torment you within the carnival exist in some shape within every dimension. If you move suddenly, they will pursue you, and you will lose your balance.
You must walk away from the carnival with measured steps, keeping your eye on the path ahead.
Don't look back, and never run.
If you panic and flee you bring hell with you wherever you go.

Teachers and Truth

A moment comes when you must make a choice. It is not as simple as choosing truth over illusion. After all, truth wears illusion to be apparent. The choice is subtler.
The choice is in how much we will pay to hold the magic. The payment must be real, drawn from the purse of the heart.
Giving up comforts grudgingly makes not a Guru. Making apparent sacrifice to keep up a pious image buys nothing real.
The less you pay the less you receive, the end result being more illusion, less truth.
As the truth inhabits the apparent it feeds upon it eating it from the inside out. This is transformation. What lives in the end is truth sprung from illusion.
But if your heart is greedy for the illusion, it will withhold its richness and starve the truth. It may be a slow or a sudden shift from opening to withholding or from withholding to opening.
We can never judge accurately the state of another, it is our own heart, our own transformation that we must consider.
For this reason only so much responsibility can rest with the teacher and the school.
Techniques and methods may be introduced, support offered, but the individual makes the effort.
Therefore the best teacher and the best school can produce the worst student, and the most inept teacher in the most inadequate school may produce a great magician.

What does an immortal being do?

Secure in the belief that it exists and will continue to exist forever, what would it want to do?
It does not have the same biological impulse to reproduce that possesses mortal bodies.
It needs no future generation to replace it.
It has no desire to seek others of its kind, what would it need them for?
With eternity spread out around it there is no hurry to do anything.
Will it seek love?
It is likely to bask in its own existence to the point of vanity with no desire to move.
Whole and perfect.
Until it has a doubt.
A doubt that manifests as a physical sensation.
An irritation triggered by something from outside that then grows within.
It must be pushed, it must be bothered, or it will never embark on the Great Adventure.
Left to it’s own devices, an immortal being does nothing.
Nothing but observe and wait.

Trapped Like A Rat

Running through an endless string of moments that can turn anywhere, what does it matter where you turn? Some will be pleasant, some will be excruciating, what is the difference if you are trapped there? As a slave to the maze what can be accomplished?
If I become a master of the maze, in other words, someone who understands the essence of maze running and can choose between corridors and chambers, what can you do with that?
What if you could become lucid in the dream you are having right now, then what? What can you do with a moment?
You cannot escape the maze or master the maze by running it with no awareness that it is a maze, or that you are a rat.
If you can at least perceive what you are and where you are objectively, then you can begin to work with what you have.
What can you do with what you have?
What can be done with a moment?

The Offering of Self

Real Magick requires offering one’s self up.
We can bargain with nothing else.
You can never offer up someone else’s heart.
You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.
To pursue Magick is to pursue your own death.
There may be safety in hiding within illusions, but to join into the midnight carnival of shared delusions is only a mockery of life.
Real life, real Magick requires risk.
We must pay the price.
"What is given burns the hand- what is gone is gone."

Conscious Habit

For something to become a habit it must be done habitually. Through activity we give the essential self, the Being, the true self, the opportunity to live. Any activity whatsoever can become sacred work as long as we are directing the attention inward in a manner that is conducive to changing brain states to allow the real consciousness to become active.
The old Zen saying goes:
"Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water."
It could be further clarified upon by saying:
"During enlightenment chop wood, carry water."
Or perhaps to:
" Before enlightenment post to mad dog blog. During enlightenment post to mad dog blog. After enlightenment post to mad dog blog…"
WARNING: DO NOT WAIT TO FEEL ENLIGHTENED (AKA DOWN WITH YOUR ESSENTIAL SELF) BEFORE CHOPPING WOOD!
Now the idea here is that you may not always manage to change brain states while chopping wood or posting to your blog, but by making the special effort and performing the activity habitually you give yourself the chance.
You will experience periods of over identification in which you will not be able to successfully change states or remember why it is that you keep posting to that damned blog. But if the activity has become truly habitual the habit alone may carry you through until suddenly the real consciousness magickally reappears at the helm.
The deadliest, most horrific, rotten, low down, no good thing that can happen is for your apparent consciousness, (that would be your personality, machine or ordinary personage) to sanction the quitting of the activity and/or the special effort during such a period.
Then not only are you unenlightened but you’re good for nothing to boot!
You are no longer performing an activity in which your real consciousness can reactivate. The bottom line is that in periods of forgetfulness, over identification and general break down remember the "little engine that could" and keep going.
THE HABITS WILL CARRY YOU THROUGH.

Contact Basics

Being to being contact flows from person to person in seemingly ordinary conversations. Our most essential nature is being communicated through every detail of our apparent self. The being can be imagined as a sun, or central point of light. Our apparent self is shaped by the various ways we are filtering and converting that intense radiation. The apparent self is like a protective shroud around the essential self. The energy exchanges between apparent selves act like couriers, bringing packets of life from one being to another, through the sounds we make, even our appearance. This happens whether all of those present are aware of it or not. This is invocation.
Being to being contact also occurs across great distances, and even time. Contact of this nature may flow between individuals who have never met in person or even in theory. It flows between beings with apparent forms and beings that are without apparent forms (like those who are apparently dead.) Consider that you are having being to being contact with the author of this text, no matter how much time has passed since its writing.
In many cases, a person becomes drowsy when the contact flows. Shifting into an altered state of consciousness is not unusual. Alpha and theta states are usually experienced during sleep. Shifting into these states during an invocational interaction can cause the apparent self to believe it should be asleep. In some cases, people may be allowed to sleep. In other invocational settings it may be inappropriate. Be aware that we are very receptive to the subtle flow of energies while we sleep, but we can enter dreamlike brain states without actually snoozing. It is a matter of forming a new and unconventional habit of changing states and remaining awake.

Once The Search Has Begun...

Once the search has begun, something will be found.
What you find, however, may not be entirely welcome or expected.
Often the search is fueled by the desire to escape. When we discover that the only way to move outside is to remain within we won’t like that, not at all.
But having begun the search and glimpsed something, it will be impossible to turn back.
It is much harder to crawl back into bed insisting there is no such thing as monsters when you have just looked one in the eye, than to stay in bed with belief and never look.
In other words, beginning the search was the point of no return… the momentum can only build after that.

Allowing the Storm to Pass

There is no need to confront every minor irritation head on. Doing things that way will prevent you from getting much else done and only causes the irritation to spread.
Just as you should not scratch a rash, you must not tickle your psychosis. Work around it, or work through it, but avoid working against it.
Our climb up Jacob's ladder must always be sideways and in a sequence of unpredictable zig zags.
Wherever we put our attention, that element will grow. Remember that our attention is the instrument for tickling and keep it stimulating the desirable habits.
The placement of attention is an actual flow of strong, tangible energy, flowing from you into anything on which you place it. As the flow of energy is mantained, the thing grows in energy and power.
So work through subterfuge and distraction. Move quietly through the nightime of the sleeping machine habits and keep your attention shining on the path ahead.

Signs of Life

Our views of creation, history, life in the Milky Way, radiate from the point of being human. They are colored by the self-centered assumption that we are the most evolved, intelligent, and conscious life forms on planet earth and in the galaxy. It would never occur to us that what we consider to be our most prized possession, our highly prized and superiorly developed rationality, bears no objective value and that the ideas that flower within it will wither with the death of the individual organism and eventually be extinguished entirely by the extinction of the species.
We have hardly considered that we are only one brief phase in a planet’s life cycle, that just as a reproductive boom for algae 3,500 million years ago changed the face of the planet and set the stage for new forms of life, we are only acting as a catalyst for a new earth age and the form of life that will be preferred will be far from human and without the abnormal consciousness that we cherish.
Have we ever wondered what is the preferred consciousness to act as a vessel of life? Have we considered that the preferred forms for the evolution of life could be plants, or even a fungus and that in the scheme of life we are only meant to act as agents for transforming, or even merely transporting their consciousness?

Nowhere To Run

There’s nowhere to run. Just as in a video game, or a dream, there will be an illusion of having moved from one space to another, but in reality the character has never escaped the screen or the dreamer. As a character in a dream you may change shape, or the shape of the space, but that which pursues you may do the same. What was a horrible monster becomes a family member you’re willing to confront, a family member you avoid confronting becomes a bone gnashing beast.
The only way to end the endless chase is to face that which pursues you. Slay it, or embrace it, one way or another its waters must mingle with yours.
Then something will open up to the new upgraded character: a new playing field.
The way to advance is to seek no advancement or retreat. Remain receptive.
That which pursues you is both cause and effect.

The Namer and his Sister

The consciousness that "names" functions only within the realm it has named.
If it cannot name something, that thing can not exist within that realm. In this way, consciousness creates and then becomes trapped within the structure it has created. The Creator is a prisoner of the Creation.The only possibility for being rescued lies with that other consciousness left outside the walls of the city of the named. The Namer will not be able to see its unnamable and therefore invisible sister. She is not secondary to the Namer, she is other than he.
If the Namer becomes aware of her presence outside his walls, he may fear her. She is after all unknowable to him. To allow her to enter would threaten the structure of the realm, the way that the unnamable interacts with the named is unpredictable, buggy, viral, and full of life.
When they cohabit, a new living language is developed, a circuit is formed between the Namer and the Unnamable and a New Kingdom is born.
This is the way to unchain the Namer and the Unnamable.
Together, they form a true Free Builder.The structure is ruled by their word, but their word is not subject to the structure.
They are then free to roam from structure to structure in an endless act of lustful incestous love and…
Creation.

Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow

Trying too hard, trying to control the out come, these are the best ways to make any activity worthless. Things become very difficult when we get our wires crossed and the wrong part of the self is trying to perform a function that falls outside of it’s jurisdiction.
This generally happens because that center is overdeveloped and thinks it has to do everything but let’s face it, you won’t get far trying to play a piano with your tits, even if they’re great tits.
Therefore I say unto you, you charming three brained mammal you, keep your tits well in hand and...
... let it flow,
let it flow,
let it flow.

Experiment: Alien Walk In

Imagine that you are not you. You are an alien spirit that just woke up in a human body, an alien spirit that has always wanted to be something like human. See yourself, your environment, everything, as if you have just stepped into a scene in a play and from here on you will deviate from the script because you are unfamiliar with it.

Everything is new.

Anything is possible.

Get enthusiastic about doing something you have done a gazillion times- like taking a shower.
Take a shower and feel the hot water as an extreme luxury, the act of conjuring water at will is magic. Enjoy the feel, the smell, and the look of it. Enjoy being in your body. Wash yourself carefully, taking time for the things you usually rush through. Read the label and shampoo your hair twice for the sheer joy of it.
After the shower journal about the things you would do with this body in this play as an enthusiastic alien walk in.

Experiment: Let the Body Lead

You will need to find a quiet undisturbed space where you will have privacy.
Begin in a standing position and place all of your attention on your left hand. Hold it in front of your face so that you can see every line in your palm. Study it with the care and affection you would employ in beholding the face of your true love.
Feel your hand becoming infused with life. Allow the fingers to move first, then the whole hand. It is alive, let it go where it wants to go. Let your newly awakened hand explore.
Follow it with your body. All of your life, your hand has been your servant and you have hardly noticed it. Now you will serve your hand by helping it to explore and enjoy this newfound life.
As your hand guides you through the space feel the life spreading into your arm. Feel it tingling. Let it spread slowly into your whole body. Feel your whole body come alive. Your body has long been a silent servant. Now let it lead the way. Move with your body. Do not try to control it, do not think of ways to move it, let it move you.
Let your body tell its story with motion. Take as much time as is necessary.
Eventually, feel yourself slowing down and gently come to a stop.

Hydra

The real work that we do does not reside permanently within any one activity. It is the attention and presence that we apply to the activity that makes it Work.
In the beginning, it may be hard not to be attached to the activity you have been "Working" through. You may even suffer temporarily from the delusion that there is no other thing to do as "Work".
For example if you have been "Working" by operating a truffle shop you might briefly be convinced that "The Great Work" is making truffles. You might not want to bother with doing anything else, like painting pictures, dancing, or reading to the blind, because after all you only want to do "The Great Work" and that means making truffles.
But the fact is that the more activities you engage in with a "Work" attitude the better.
Having various ways to work helps ensure the continuation of your Work.
If one project is inhibited for some reason it will not stop you from doing "The Work" because you have been doing it in multiple expressions. In this way, the special something you have been striving to cultivate will continue to thrive despite a disruption in one of its apparent forms.
Like ivy, hackers, or terrorists, there will be no one head or root to your Work, making it difficult for anything to impede it entirely.
Where working with another is concerned this is very useful in the sense that by maintaining multiple projects together you are creating multiple points of contact. If for some reason the contact between the two of you is broken in one "cell" there are other "cells" in which the contact may be maintained.

We are an age old battle

We are an age old battle , a tug o war between stillness and motion, nothingness and somethingness, darkness and light.
Certainly one can find arguments to side with the light, but on the other hand the darkness has its merits and neither is objectively better or worse.
Might we suggest not taking sides?
Identify with neither camp, but play them against each other to keep up the game.

Nothing New Under the Sun

What is an original idea?
What can you find here that you could not find elsewhere?

Probably nothing essential.

The essential data is to be found in numerous incarnations.
The differences you find here are the product of evolution, the quarks of this generation.
The original data has undergone a process of digestion.

You see, we ate the teaching, just as our teachers ate it and regurgitated it back into our hungry consciousness, tweaked- enhanced with the flavor of their guts.

Each human processor is a nodal point, a place where multiple patterns converge forming "new" configurations.

Life relies on regurgitation.
The original data is being transformed; the body of God flayed and fed to the disciples entrusted with the art of digestion and regurgitation of the message, the data, the code of life.

Experiment: Lucid Dreaming

This is an experiment to be conducted in part while you are sleeping.
Throughout the day look at your left hand. Whenever you think of it, ask yourself:

"Am I dreaming right now?"

For an answer, look at your hand carefully and tug one of your fingers. If the finger retains its shape then you know you are in this consensual reality.
During the night as you sleep, the procedure is the same. If you begin to suspect you are dreaming remember the experiment and do it within the dream. When you pull on the finger, you will see it extend and you will instantly know that you are in a dream.
At first, the objective is simply to "wake up" within the dream and experience it from a lucid point of view.
Later, as you become more proficient, you will set objectives within the dream and remember what it was you wanted to do once you got there.

Identified

The marriage of the personality and the being is subject to occasional turbulence.
Having begun the work of forming new habits which will make communication between the being and the personality more fluid, there will be occasional breaks in the communication.
At times the personality may slip back into some of its older mechanical habits. During such a break we may find ourselves becoming identified with the personality.
This can happen to the extent that we nearly forget the being and its role.
In becoming identified with the personality we may fall for the old trick of believing that the personality is the real self, the only self.

This is a dangerous trick.

In believing that it is the only real or important self, the personality can fall out of contact with the being. The true self is then severed.
The very most basic step is to establish and maintain the connection between the being and the personality.
Together they form a vessel that can support life.

Separated they are ghosts.

The Miracle

Imagine for a moment that you are a young Helen Keller. Your ability to see and hear was stripped from you during infancy. The world you perceive is dark and silent. There is no language through which you can communicate subtlety and detail. What reason would you have to believe that the world was otherwise?
A teacher enters your life. The way the teacher interacts with you will be unlike anything else you have encountered. She will introduce a language through which to communicate subtleties.
Initially what she attempts to communicate will be meaningless. The teacher will repeat the attempted communication again and again. Keep in mind that she will not only sign the word "water" into your hand repeatedly, she will give you water to pump.
Teaching you the word for water without giving you the action to produce it, so that you may experience it first hand, would be worthless.
Realize as well that, even if you become familiar with the word "water", it doesn’t automatically mean that you know what "water" is.
The miracle occurs when you at last understand what is being communicated, when you can connect it to something experiential. Endowed with this new perception you enter a new world.
Consider that you don’t know that you don’t know until you know.

Experiment: Where I end and you begin

This experiment requires a partner.
You will need paper and pens, paints, crayons, or any other easily manageable medium.
The two of you should sit facing one another with the paper between you and the medium you will be working with within reach.
Take a moment to establish contact with your partner and set the timer for ten minutes.
Begin by making a single stroke on the page with your medium of choice.
Your partner will then make the next stroke connecting it to yours.
You will then make another stroke branching from your partner’s.
Continue in this way until the timer sounds.

Experiment: Repetition is a form of change

Every morning before getting out of bed, touch your nose with your thumb. Do this for 14 days.
If you miss a morning, start the fourteen-day period over.
When you have completed a fourteen-day cycle eat a cookie and start another fourteen-day cycle.
Once again you will touch your nose with your thumb each morning before you rise.
If you miss a morning start the cycle over.
When you have completed the cycle eat another cookie. You may choose to continue for another fourteen days or stop there.
You can repeat the cycle, as many times as you like, but do not stop in the middle of a cycle.
Keep a record of the days you have followed through with the experiment as well as any breaks in the cycle and your observations.

Experiment: Body Presence

You will need a rock. Select a safe space free of obstacles.
You must be able to walk forward at least six feet without encountering furniture, trees, a wall, etc. Having more open space is fine.
Walk from one end of the space to the other and lay the rock down.
Then return to the starting point.

Close your eyes, walk to your rock and lay your hand on it.
Do this without peeking and see how close you get.

Experiment: Playing the Part

Obtain a bracelet, ring, wristwatch, necklace, hat, belt or other accessory.
You will only use this object in connection with this experiment. Keep it entirely separate from the other items of this nature that you would ordinarily use in the course of your life, and never wear it unless you are doing the experiment.
When you wear this item you will become a new character, someone other than yourself. Choose a few traits to begin with, such as a preference for a beverage that you ordinarily don't care for, interest in a subject or hobby that you ordinarily wouldn't explore, and adopt a physical posture or gesture uncommon to
your usual self.
When you have your accessory and an idea of the character you will become, play the part for an hour. Go out as your character, somewhere your character would go. The key is to really become some one else. Let your usual identity take a break. Don't be you pretending to be someone else. Make the effort for the hour to relate to the world as someone else.
When the hour is up, put away your accessory and the new character along with it. Journal about the experience.
Repeat the experiment twice more assuming the same character. Take note of any interesting developments or observations. You may develop the character more fully. Be aware of the characters philosophical views and values, of what motivates them. Let their views be at least slightly different than your own. Commit to these views without your usual judgements while you are in character.
When you have conducted this experiment three times you are ready for the next phase. Be an actor playing
yourself for one hour. Exaggerate your usual postures, gestures, and mannerisms. Overact your usual identity. Once again, journal about the experience.

The Art of Teaching

To teach is a subtle art. It involves a transfer of energy and data from one Being to another, where both are enriched in the process. There can be no "teaching" that is purely a transfer from one to another where the first experiences a loss or no change.
For a circuit to function, there must be a flow of data current through all the parts in the circuit.
We have all experienced the tired teacher, teaching the same subject he has taught for years, bored out of his mind, saying the same words that he has said a million times. That "tired teacher" is no teacher at all for he is not teaching. He is going through the motions, as if he is teaching. He gives the appearance of teaching and the students (sometimes) may find a way to give the appearance that they're learning, but there is no real current. That "tired teacher" is no longer a carrier of a real current and can't truly teach anymore, not in that state.
For a teaching to occur, the teacher must be learning. The teacher must be learning before he teaches. The teacher must be learning after the teaching session. But most of all, the teacher must be learning DURING the teaching session.
Within the Real Teaching space, there is no room for closed minds, for sealed private circuits. Everything must open up once again, fresh and new and ready to begin the voyage, as if for the first time.
When the Teacher stops learning, the Teacher stops Teaching.

Experiment: Contact Hunter

Go to a pet store. Select an animal with which to conduct this experiment.
Certain fish, such as Discus and Betas can be very obliging. Of the reptiles, bearded dragons appreciate this experiment rather a lot.
Having selected your animal, look into their eyes if possible and establish contact. Just as with the contact tag experiment, the objective is to be with your chosen partner with as open a heart as possible. Hold them in a soft gaze, let go of your thoughts and place your full attention on your animal. Do this for the duration of five minutes.
When five minutes has lapsed, thank your partner and leave.

The Sacrifice

For your existence to be possible ten thousand other possible lives had to be blotted out.

For you to be righteous, another has been wicked.

For something to emerge there is a great deal that must submerge.

Behind your so called consciousness, lies your very real subconscious.

What is apparent has grown in the matrix of the hidden.

The motion to rise creates not only the peak but its inverse.

As we extend outward into the broad reaches beyond our horizon, we delve deeper and deeper into the infinite darkness below us.