Beng's Bargain

Beware round which forbidden corner you turn, little worm. You’ve been warned that the devil waits behind the black door, and with old Beng the eternal fire burns, and suffering is assured. You have been shown that there are two paths to choose from at this fork; the path of the righteous- a straight and narrow course, and the path of the wicked- as crooked as an old man’s back. Choose the path of the righteous and your fate is painted over the door of the butcher’s shop and spelled out for you over his block. For see, the straight and narrow is like a conveyor belt carrying you most assuredly through the great factory farm to the bright white light of the slaughter house, and once you’ve settled on that course you’ve no more choices to make. You will be processed and packaged and fed back into the hungry mouth of the organic mass and the heavenly peace of eternal sleep shall be yours. Choose door number two and your foot is in a different shoe altogether, for once you go past the black door marked "yes", you will be assaulted by all the color denied the inhabitants of the two toned world. Here you will be faced with multiple choice, a never ending network of diverging branches, a veritable tree of life through which you must learn to flow like quickened sap. It is a gauntlet through which you will run with no hope of respite. Your lot is not the comfort of an undisturbed slumber, yours is an eternity of wakeful motion, of building beyond binary choices. To live well beyond the black door you must become a god. Hell is everywhere, inescapable but deniable. You were in hell before you chose black over white, you were in hell even after you chose one or the other, but behind the white door you submit to it, sleep through it to deny it, escape the difficulty involved in being responsible for it by ignoring it. Behind the black door you reign in hell, it belongs to you, every torturing moment of existence, all of the tiny and infinite details. You are a small god with the potential to grow, for whatever you can take responsibility for is yours, whatever you can hold suspended with your attention in the great cosmic juggling act becomes you, expands you, or rather you expand into it.
Honestly, worm, looking back, choosing the straight and narrow is like making no choice at all. You will be carried through that door without having made any effort at all. It happens naturally. You are asking me why I insist on calling you worm. You are looking over your shoulder to see if I am addressing some other. No, it is you, exactly you and no other to whom I speak. You are the creepy crawly larvae that must break out of the cocoon. You must crack the worlds shell if you want to fly with the dragons. Staying wrapped in the comfortable blindness of your cocoon is not life at all. You will be offered two choices to begin with. If you sacrifice knowledge, freedom, the power to create and move, you may have comfort and stability. You will be handled by qualified forces. If you sacrifice your personal comfort and stability you may know, move, and build freely. You may become a force at work in the mechanics of creation. We offer no refunds, nor guarantees on either choice. You are offered this moment, as is. You must ask yourself what it means to be alive, and whether it is possible that there is some yet undiscovered value and purpose in living, a possibility not available in the dimension of the binary. It is possible that the value and purposefulness of life can only be reckoned by those who are indeed living. And worm, I can assure you that you haven’t lived until you’ve passed beyond the black door.

I Will Endure

All of these Perceptions, all of these Ideas and all of these Experiments will be like sand through your fingers if you don’t put them into action. Real, direct, passionate and, most of all, constant action.
It is very common to encounter a Path and be very enthusiastic about it initially. That initial enthusiasm is what we would call a "DO", the first note in the Octave. The energy flows without effort, stemming from the discovery of a new treasure, a new way of doing things, a new hope of escape from the mechanical cage. Imbued with this initial enthusiasm you may feel yourself lifted by invisible hands and suddenly able to perform work that you have never been able to do before. Doors may open that have been previously closed and a realm of new possibilities will extend before your eyes. This is all true and not a mirage. These doors can open and the possibilities are there, but this initial enthusiasm, this sudden burst of free energy, is fleeting.
Soon you will encounter a sequence of obstacles that will get harder and harder. Some of these will come from the outside world encroaching on your private work space. But most of these obstacles will flower completely from within you, from the deeply ingrained programming of your biological machine desperately seeking to return to a complacent and comfortable sleeping state. This is true of every single Being that has ever embarked on this process. There is no easy way around these obstacles and it is better to face them squarely and be aware of their true nature.
Your mechanical perceptions will try to trick you. Your machine and the world around it will tell you that what you are doing makes no sense, that it has no real purpose, that it ultimately leads to no gain and to disaster, that you are a fool (and indeed you are), that you have stepped into a great mistake and the best thing you can do is step back into what the machines call "the real world".
The passing of time will rub away at your enthusiasm. Your mind will grow weary when results and intellectual revelations don’t come as quickly as they used to. Your intellect may start looking for other sources of surprise, your movement center may start needing a new way to move and dance, your emotional center will start to search for a new emotional fix… all of it to be expected as you move through the intervals of the Octave. As you encounter these intervals, you may become lost and disoriented. You may forget what you are doing and why you are doing it. In this disoriented state you will become like a ship in a storm and any port will do.
You may encounter a direct experience of the Eternal and be so shocked by the Nothingness that your machine will shrink away in fear, trying to find a safe place to rest and forget what it has seen. The reverberations of shock and awe may linger in your dreams and your daily imaginings, it may pull you away from your work and steer you to what it believes are safer pastures.
The programmed habits of your machine, which may have started to loosen, may come back with an unexpected force, determined to take over their lost inner kingdom. The physical, mental and emotional addictions that you thought were long forgotten, will stage a comeback of epic proportions, taking energy from the caves of darkness where your machine has hidden its most precious treasures. The urges and raw desire may be so overwhelming that you will make terrible mistakes, you will hurt your work and the work of others around you, you will have one emotional explosion after another in a devastating storm of mechanical vengeance.
All of these things will happen, in one way or another. The machine might initially think that the Work is for itself, for its vanity, for its glory, for its pleasure. But sooner or later it will realize its mistake and, when this happens, it will counterattack, with more force and passion than you can easily anticipate.
You live in a mostly mechanical reality. Your quest for Life is a quest that goes against the mechanical inertia of decades and even centuries. The odds are stacked against you. You can’t undertake this quest in a half hearted way. Every bit of true passion, love and energy that you can muster must go into your work. And above all, you must endure. You must find a way to persist through all the obstacles, through all the failings, through all the setbacks and catastrophes that will happen. You are embarking on a great Odyssey, a Voyage that will never be completed.
The Work has no beginning and it has no end.
When I step into the Work, I step into Endless Toil.
Through all the hardships, through all the heartbreaks and tribulations, through every obstacle that the mechanical world will violently throw at my face… I WILL ENDURE.

The Journal

You will begin to keep several journals. You will need three notebooks. One will be used for recording your dreams, the second is for journaling about your daily life, and the third is for keeping a record of these experiments. In each notebook you will date every entry including the year.
Keep the dream journal by your bed with a pen. As soon as you awaken, write everything you can remember from your dreams. If you can’t remember anything, date the page and write "I chose not to remember my dreams." When you do remember, be sure to keep track of details. If you dream of drinking a glass of lemonade in your grandmother’s kitchen, your journal should say precisely that, not something such as: "Dreamed of drinking." Those things which seem insignificant to us are often the most revealing aspects of the dream, so be as descriptive as possible in your account.
The impact of these experiments will be reflected by your dreams. The experiments presented to you in this text will act as magickal seeds. The best way to keep track of the development of these seeds is to monitor the dark soil of the subconscious. This attention to your dreams will help what is taking root in the subconscious to blossom forth within your ordinary consciousness. Do not, however, despair if the design of things does not become "concrete" in a way that satisfies your waking consciousness. Remember that not all plants are fruit bearing, and even without satisfying the hungry ego, they may be deserving of a chance at life.
In the daily journal keep a record of the days activities, the weather, your moods, thoughts, and any major events. Some days you may choose to be brief, and on others detailed, but write something every day.
The experiment journal will serve to keep track of the experiments you perform each day. Keep track of the date and time the experiment was conducted, how much time was spent, your mood before and after, and any thoughts or physical sensations associated with the experiment. In some experiments you will be asked to record particular details, this journal is where those details will be recorded.
Obtain these notebooks and write in your dream journal and daily journal every day for the next 12 days before moving on to the first experiment.
Maintain your sense of adventure and never give in entirely to the urge to "find a point" in either your dreams or the things you choose to write about in your daily record. "Finding a point" can feed a virulent form of "herbicide" that will ultimately ravage the garden these experiments strive to tend.
Every once in a while, look back at your notes. Look for the recurring cycles. Look for the spaces of awakening. Look for the gaps of sleep.
No matter what happens or what is not happening, keep on writing in your journals. Maintain them as the silver thread that keeps you attached to your Real Purpose.

Tartarus

This place is Tartarus, where the sands shift constantly, engulfing that which you desire and offering up a strange emptiness to accentuate the loss of equilibrium. Precisely when you have at last found your footing and identified a new destination on the horizon, that is when it shifts again and your destination becomes unobtainable, the awkward present is all that you can aspire to. There is a great deadly desert in the north of Africa. This place suffers not only under the cruelty of the sun, but under the black and bleeding poison of hearts turned wicked by factors too numerous to tie into a clear knot.
Who gave these dark hearts the Kalashnikov rifles they use to brutalize villagers, old men, woman, and innocent babes? Certainly the desert did not offer them up, but to the desert the brutal feed their offerings. It is into the parched cracks of earth that the blood flows. It is into the dark throats of wells which reach deep to the earth’s gut that children are tossed while their mothers burn alive, lit up like orange hued incandescent Christmas lights bleating out a horrific music. Seeds are spilled to that same ground, when the women first run from the field without hope of escape from the rape and mutilation a horde of glowering youths have earmarked for them. They rend and waste without rhyme or reason, these sons of Abel, herders turned soldiers, the blood of ancient Kush seeping into the unquenchable soil, while nearby in the quietest desolation of abandonment, the tombs of forgotten kings stare questioningly at Jebel Barkal.
What began as a movement to turn the bottom to the top has disintegrated into chaos.
Once the great Empire of Egypt rested upon the brow of the Nubian Empire. Warriors were those men of this same desert who centuries ago boarded ships and traveled from the bottom of the Nile to the top. Before Thebes they bathed themselves in the life bestowing waters and dressed in fresh linens and proceeded to the temple at Karnak to make their offerings. Only after this had been done to the satisfaction of the lord Amun did they loose their arrows into the warlords of a splintered Egypt, those jackals that had been eating the empire from the inside with wanton abandon.
It was a Nubian king that restored pharaonic rule to a once fractured Egypt. This he did with the might of ebony skinned warriors, and then returned to Nubia ruling as Lord of The Two Lands from the tail of his new Empire, down in his beloved Kush.
Where is King Piye now? Sleeping, entombed under a Pyramid in the Nubian desert watching with lifeless eyes the ages of earth fly by in the shapes of storm clouds.
Most will laugh if you tell them that there are Pyramids in the Sudan, and that Egyptian Pharaohs rest in them. To speak of the Sudan now is to speak of the first genocide of the new century, of blood thirsty packs of Salawa hunting for the ones who sow the seeds, frightful gnarled islamic amulets dangling from their sweaty necks. The same rulers of the Sudan which armed these dogs with the bite of lead administer to the building of a dam which will swallow much of the buried kingdom of the black pharaohs of Egypt’s 25th dynasty. Constantly the sands shift, swallowing first one nation, then another.
Which history is revealed is left to the whim of Eris. Who now, and for what, shall they strive? All of the world along with its inhabitants is but a snow globe turned for the amusement of a boredom stricken Mistress of Averse.
If you can, find your footing in some place other than Tartarus.

Invocation

When I first heard the word "invocation", I thought of people in dark robes, standing around a circle, chanting and making strange gestures… scenes from an old horror movie or (in my case) a Mexican comic book. The basic real parameters were all there: the formation of a circle, the intensification of energy and effort through the presence and attention of many, the use of sound, image, voice and emotion, and the calling forth of a greater being from beyond the apparent collective reality. But the particular details were, and are, unnecessary.
A particular way of dressing, a particular vocalization, a particular technique or movement, a particular general tradition, a set of dogmas and beliefs… these are all elements in various invocations, but none of them define what an invocation is, none of them predetermine how to recognize when an invocation is happening or, much less, how to purposefully bring one to Life. As with all language, the word can be useful if utilized clearly, but it can also cloud our vision with prejudices, preconceived ideas and images, child-like fears and hopes, and extraneous connotations and implications that may seem incidental to the definition but can ultimately define or even completely curtail the possibility of an actual experience.
The map is not the territory but the map can definitely limit the territory that we are able to travel. If we restrict ourselves to following the map, then, for all intents and purposes, the map becomes the territory and the rest, the raw untouched chaotic oceanic reality, will remain unknown.
And so, my particular prejudices, ideas, connotations and images about the word "invocation" would limit my possibility of participating in and actually staging a real Invocation.
One strategy to deal with this situation is to banish the most charged words from our vocabulary ("god", "spiritual", "moral", "heaven", "meditation", "yoga", etc.) – all the words that have been used too much, have been burdened with so much extra baggage, so many other implications and intense emotional charges, that far from being useful, they become a great obstacle in the path of any true Searcher. In this case, we would have to start from scratch and redefine the Universe using completely new language (or language that has been deeply modified) to arrive at a completely new map. This can be very powerful and it is very highly recommended.
Another strategy is to re-imprint the old word through new experience. If we have an experience that is powerful enough, full of blinding hot radiating Reality, then it may burn away the baggage of the old word and leave it fresh and clean and ready to be used as new. Once I experienced a Real Invocation, and attached the old, used, stained word "invocation" to that experience, the word became new, powerful and recharged. Additionally, I was able to recognize that I had experienced other lesser invocations in my life but I had not recognized them as such. I hadn’t seen them as invocations precisely because they did not fit with my intellectual idea, my imaginary construct, of what an Invocation was.
There can be no substitute for experience.
You may read about these things. You may study carefully, imagine, conjecture, philosophize, theorize, make diagrams in your mind and come to tentative conclusions. You may do this for years and it won’t get you any closer to understanding the true nature of an Invocation. But one single flash of direct real experience with one Real Invocation will bring it, burning and crackling with electrical fire, speeding to the core of your innermost Being.
When such an opportunity comes, may your heart be open enough to receive it and may your eyes be open enough to recognize its true nature.

Another Day, Another Worm

I am speaking to you from above the clouds within which I recently had a run in with a marble faced archangel in a business suit.
"Going up or down?", He asked me.
I said that I hadn’t made up my mind yet.
"Listen", he said, "I have just the thing for you." and from out his briefcase he drew this spectacular golden feather.
"Here, tuck that behind your ear." he suggested. "I happen to know that this works wonders."
"How’s that?" I asked him.
"I have an intern that’s an elephant, it keeps him flying right."
I contemplated that a bit, looking over the feather. It was rather long and billowy.
"Now, of course," he said, "The feather doesn’t really cause him to be able to fly, but it is symbolic of his wish to fly. The first thing that you have to do is make up your mind. If you wish to go up, tuck the feather behind your ear. If you wish to go down, drop it and see which falls faster, you or it."
I was hesitating still when the heretofore amicable archangel’s countenance changed dramatically. His eyes were filled with storm clouds as he bellowed fiercely,
"Now! Choose now!" Whilst I trembled he drew a flaming sword, "I’m going to make this easy for you, choose now!" he cried and swung his sword ferociously. I tucked the feather behind my ear and ascended hastily.

No matter how tough you think you are on yourself, there’s always someone waiting to be tougher, because you're bound to slip up. We walk a razors edge, the slightest slip of attention and you're off the path. When you forget how dire the matter is you get a little sloppy, just a little. Those that don’t walk this line can weave and bend all to hell. But we can’t afford to blink.

Occasionally a wake up call in necessary. A little reminder that if you think things look bad now, they can get much, much worse. I seek that bottom of bottoms rather unintentionally. How little love this tortured contraption has for itself. It wants to prove that it is the most hideous and unloved mortal bit of rubbish. It wishes to go far past redemption to escape the pain of longing to belong.
They painted monster teeth on planes in world war two. My airplane is the same. I need to get in the cockpit and fly this thing, no matter what it thinks of itself. Monsters are built over tiny innocent kernels of the eternal, sweet and loving and easily bruised. The fiercer the monster the more sensitive it is. Grendel could not bear the shouts and laughter and music of the hall. It grated on him like sand paper over a babies soft skin. That is why Grendel bit off heads and split bodies in two. I have great sympathy for his plight. Yet the monster must be reigned in and trained not to buck against the pain and irritation. If the monster can be held in place under the heat of such extreme discomfort it will be transformed into a creature unimaginable, a new breed of monster, the kind that is king and devil both. The kind that soars over clouds breathing fire.
Welcome to the dragon making factory. We begin with worms, pasty bipedal mammals which wriggle and cry far past infancy in the most despicable way. Even the pretty ones, the clever ones, the kind ones, the successful ones, even they are a sort of undeveloped larvae. They need to be incubated. If they crawl away from the heat because it burns their tender flesh, burrow deeper into the dirt to escape the intensity, then they shall remain worms. If they can be made to endure the heat and friction of the central sun, a process of transformation will be initiated. Worms they will be no more.

Yes the worm dies, but the dragon is born. This is the secret of death and resurrection. What remains after the death of the worm is inconceivable and hideous to the worm. Yet that is the only real option that a worm has. It is quick hot death and transformation, or slow cold death and oblivion. Go up and fly, or down to rot in the clammy womb of the earth. Yes, worm, it is death or death. Die now or later. Pain now or later. But one death gives rise to something magickal and the other results in greener grass to be consumed by Lord Shiva's horse.