Actual Magic
“There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimoire for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.
I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.
In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.”
~Alan Moore
Introduction
I have been contemplative since I was 8 years old, after a particularly brutal beating, staring into a mirror thinking, “this has to be a dream.” I found the old skool methods of drinking and drug abuse to the point of finding myself in rehab in 2010, trying to detox from alcohol and the resulting dual diagnoses that usually follow “an episode.” After I got my diagnoses and my sobriety, I found ashtanga yoga at a fairly late age, 45, and have practiced as close to daily as I can lay claim to. The practice readies the body for meditation and is one hell of a workout, especially if one is a beginner or working on a difficult posture.
I repeat the opening mantra for ashtanga yoga before I begin my daily practice:
vande gurunam caranaravinde
sandarsita svatma sukhava bhode
nih sreyase jangalaikayemane
samsara halahala mohasantyai
abahu purusarkaram
sankhasakrasi dharinam
sahasara sirasam svetam
pranamami pantajalim
“Bowing to my Teacher to find the awakening Joy of my Soul” starts an internal and external journey into the depths of my truest Self
I use the practice as a way to ease my body into different meditative states, also using the practice as a way to devote myself to my universe, both internal and external. I repeat the traditional mantras that open and close my practice, with the closing mantra being the reason I introduce myself this way: may we live, learn, prosper, be governed and love in Peace, Peace, Peace. Join me in this practice or any other like it to open channels of connection, belonging and peace in your world. I offer the following words as a way to open different pathway in our minds, to stretch the limits of perception of who and what you think you are, and possibly a more refined view of your worldspace, so that peaceful evolution may be brought at an ever increasing rate.
Ken Wilber uses the phrase, “altered states turn into permanent traits,” mostly as an invitation to achieve those states through meditation, and I couldn’t agree with him more. He claims that he’s never used psychedelics to help him in his journey. This is my journey, with the intentional use of psychedelic substances.
Psychedelia.
Terence McKenna’s point of view concerning magic mushrooms can be paraphrased: occasional heroic doses. I had decided to work myself up to that insane level. The drug has an LD 50 rating as far as toxicity (meaning that you would need to eat half of your body weight just to get a toxic response. Ingesting 5g is shockingly tiny. The effect to your well fasted system is, well, psychedelic. Haven’t had the experience? Look at the person that told you to read this and tell them to hook you up :) The sequencing and style of a psychedelic trip are subconscious and artistic in nature and not easily described. The trip through the cave taught me at a deep level that our experiences, common and sublime, are had by all, across the eons and all experience. The notion of the Akashic Field has fallen to a low level at the time, but the notion is what I’m referring to: a library of consciousness, added to by each “person” (defined as a being with intelligence), including the Universe as a whole, each adding to the library through each gross, subtle and causal experience, informing the Kosmos with each interaction affecting the morphogenetic field.
Consciousness,
Un, Sub and Altered Consciousness is the gift given to our species. The tantric pointing out method defines this ability: you can see the clouds, therefore, you are not the clouds, but a witness to them. Same with emotions, thoughts, and contemplative experience. If you can see something, that is not You. What you are is the witness to this sideshow we call life.
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from Birth and there by bleed it of all it’s strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analog nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tent show whose ultimate destination after many a pitch and many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.” ~Blood Meridian, pg.256, Cormac McCarthy.
In plain language, we seek to alter our consciousness in a certain way, with specific intention to gain the understanding that our awareness, our consciousness and ability to know that we are alive and experiencing, is the unifying and binding substrate to us all.
“In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records, to my knowledge, date back some 2500 years or more… the recognition ATMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.
Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).
To Western ideology, the thought has remained a stranger… in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other’s eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one, not merely similar or identical…”
- “The I That Is God” as translated in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists (1984) edited by Ken Wilber
The binding of experience is the plurality of consciousness is what makes us One.
Eating the Skeleton/Parable of the Cave
One of the more provocative methods of achieving altered states are psychedelic compounds. The substances used are widely varied, synthetic to natural, LSD to magic mushrooms, and many types of variants in each and other categories. Yes, these can be excellent party favors or ways to space out for a while. Some of us use them in spiritual, religious and profoundly moving ways. Intentionality is key to your experience, whether partying or seeking the Seer, surrounding yourself in whatever energy you seek is as important as the drug. I had been struggling for years, bumbling through my life chasing money, people, experiences, and notoriety not finding satisfaction in any of it. I had been terrified of the psychedelic experience from a gut level thinking that my brain was too special or important to be altered.
Method
I use 3–5g of natural, dried psilocybin mushroom after a three day “green-only” diet with a one day fast before I begin. I’m always outside in my favorite area, the desert and always begin in the morning. I restrict my vision until I come up and meditate, contemplate or spectate as I commune with my Universe. Let me share my very first experience:
Morning.
I wake up and it’s dark under my bear skin. I uncover my face and watch the palms sway and the ferns move, the grass and vine providing a natural camouflage along the low crescent mouth of the communal shelter. I remember dreaming about the hunt yesterday, the stars forming the shapes we rely on to make our way home, the safety of my brothers and the way we move as one. The smell of spit roasting rabbit or mountain goat are strong. The sounds are wonderfully chaotic, mostly coming from the 30 to 50 other people that live in the same tribal cave that had been a part of my life since I could remember. Yelling, grunting, fucking, cooking and all the other sounds that come with human life surrounded me comfortably. Through force of habit and mild animal instinct, I stretch and feel my body. Hands are rough, body slender, morning erection having been satisfied by my woman, I ask, gently, “where are the kids?” “Playing” comes the usual answer. So I decide to uncover my face and take a long look around. I feel at home, deeply, knowing that I’m an integral part of the scene I survey. This place and I are created and formed from the same materials and forces. We occupy the same field of energy and depend on each other to exist. My Mother Earth and Brother Sun, the plants, animals, fire, air and water all exist because of me, and I because of them. We worship each other and communicate without effort. I am home and home is me.
The next time I wake up, I uncover my face and watch the blowing snow in front of the mountain crag of the opening to the communal shelter. Icecicles, boulders and drifting blizzard protect us and keep the heat from the fires inside the cave. The memories of my desert cave are fresh in my mind and I try to tell myself that it was all a dream. My woman is next to me as she was in the jungle, the kids are playing and I remember my beautiful dreams about the hunt, the gathering, eating, and fighting. We start our day, talking, preparing, loving, and hunting.
The next time I wake up, I uncover my face and watch the surf pound outside the communal shelter, with the same people, the same partner, the same kids in different bodies… The human experience, shared in each personal perspective, is the answer to one of the Universal Questions. Who am I and why am I here? This thought is on my mind as I spend my day in the way that I love, hunting, loving, fighting, feeling, synching, communing with the All, and I pass into the depth of my nightly sleep happy and content.
Cave.
What do you think of when you consider the word “cave?” I used to think about someplace dark and dank but always at a steep angle with barely a place to even sit down. My tribal cave, literally and figuratively, is enormous. The color of the stone is granite, worn smooth by the constant attention and maintenance by my people, over many generations. We lovingly refer to the cave as “mother.” She is the source of security, protection and strength. She is the place where we gather, worship, create and recreate, form and dissolve bonds of hate and love. The space is as much a part of life as the body that I wear, and quite literally, we look the same: hard, defiant, ancient, definitely ready for anything. As with the other tribes, our living spaces have as much personality as the individuals, as we are One. As much as our spirit inhabits our body, our bodies inhabit the Earth and, in turn, she inhabits us. A non-dual experience to be certain.
My final cave that I awaken to is the desert, my true home in this life and any I imagine, and I am alone. No person, no animal, no woman, kids or friends, and I am terrified. I wander out of the mouth of the cave, onto the blowing sand, looking for anything familiar.
As with most dreams, trances and psychedelic experience, the scene appears around me and it feels like I’ve always been there. I’m walking through a desert, thirst drunk and hungry. The crow and the falcon swoop and I follow to an oasis of light, surrounded by crystalline trees, lightning strikes, deep and distant thunder and opaque rainbows. The iridescent clouds shimmer above my bodymind and I stumble on a transparent boulder, somehow calling me. I drop to my knees and understand that I have found my own remains from a million lifetimes, perfectly preserved in skeleton form. I begin to move the sand from around the bones as they echo my name, unspeakable and without comprehension. I know that as I consume the structure, my education begins.
Skeleton Chain of Awareness
Red. I understand, in my body/mind, than the bones are mine, and yet they call, eucharistically, to eat. My vestigial tail, marking the first chakra, glows red, first faintly growing in luminescence and becoming blindingly ruby-lazered. As I taste the blood-copper color, I feel the foundation of humanity shift to solid through my bones. I feel the flavor of a successful hunt, the taste and comfort of first blood and the death of hunger. I swallow the crimson and allow the rush of power to consume me momentarily. My feet absorb the power of the globe and I am whole.
Orange. The pubic bone radiates the amber to dandelion pulse that lets me know that this area is next. Connection and communion, sexuality. It’s an interesting place, this second chakra. Where do we go during orgasm? As I swallow the region between the navel and pubic bone, my body turns electric, pulsing in pre-orgasmic bliss without the release. The sensation fuels each greeting and embrace from a fellow being, a well-wish from a stranger or a random, fleeting glimpse of love between entities.
Yellow. Power. I absorb the area between the back of my pelvic arch to the bottom of my rib cage, each vertebrae becoming more intense as the one before. The notion of someone having willpower or “guts.” The notion was expressed by Ken Wilber and it makes sense, especially in the negative. Lack of power or intentionality is seen as cowardly or “yellow.” Lack of yellow. It is also the color of wealth and prosperity if hued to gold or sickness and death if hued to the jaundice bile. The version of color that permeates your third chakra is definitive and specific.
Green. Love. The Heart. I open the sternum like an oyster and drink the light-juice letting it dribble down my chin. An emotion based experience that comes with the realization that you are more than your skin encapsulated ego. Lovers bring the impulse unbidden and sudden as in love at first sight. Infants and children are the immediate experience of this feeling, almost an automatic experience that you can reproduce and share yourself with the World and universe. Art, writing, songs and speech can be infused with these qualities, especially if referring to specific experiences of passion and compassion.
Blue. Speech, communication. The Throat. This is a difficult experience as I have to open This experience is directly known when you reach an understanding with another person, that Aha moment when an understanding is realized and shared. There is a notion in Kundalini yoga that says the voice is the first quality to sweeten when enlightenment is active. Maybe this is literal and figurative simultaneously. If you truly have the experience of knowing that your bioenergetic system is what binds you to all other sentient beings, what happens to your language? Can the harshness, judgement, separation continue for extended periods of time? Maybe, but I would imagine it would start to become difficult to keep your distance.
Purple. Creativity Third Eye. The Mind. Accessing this area, one can see without eyes how one operates in the World. In my experience, this chakra is the most misunderstood. It appears to be mystical and magical with much reference to the capabilities available from mastery ranging from wealth to possession by spirits. I believe the simplest version is also the most accurate: visualization and strangely, the ability to hold a grudge. Visualization is pretty straight forward as an individual conceives of an entity, say Ganapati, the Hindu god of obstacle removal and many other things. He is depicted as being large of body with an elephantine head. Can you picture him now? Welcome to your Third Eye. What color did he appear? Was he dancing or was he seated? Clothed? Notice how with each prompt, your vision of the deity changes and adjusts. Maybe you agree that dancing is a more acceptable version and immediately the figure begins to dance in whatever way you prefer. Kind of fun and definitely the purview of creativity. But holding a grudge? Yep. Conjure the grudge you have held the longest. Picture the person or situation clearly, enough to get your blood boiling. Adding emotion to visualization is the easiest way to feel the power of your Third Eye. Yes, positivity will result as well which then begs the attention of an important question: what is your attitude during most of your awareness? Grudging or abundant? It becomes easy to see that the way you view the world co-creates your experience with other beings. Apply the experience of oneness with all sentient beings and the universe in general, and the experience is worth seeking out.
White. Deep Universal Connection. I take my skull lovingly between my hands and turn my iridescent skull around so I’m looking in my empty sockets, behind which the glow of intense white light is gleaming. As I get lost in looking at the sharp white waves pulsing from my eye sockets, I vanish bodily in a state of samyama. I’m without form. I look for my feet with my third eye and they are gone, so I remember them in all the ways that they exist for me physically, the way I could feel the Earth and her treasures with each step. I look for my knees and they are gone as well. I look for my Root only to see the void but recall that I am deeply grounded and deeply safe as this is the part of the system that binds me and created me. I look for my Sex and find none, but feel super-connected to all that I percieve. I look for my Power and again, peer into the Void, but know that the power that created me is the same power that I derive nourishment from and return that gift to the Provider. My Heart, my Throat and my Third Eye are all the same, but these are more radiant as they form what I would call my Subtle body, or the energetic sheath that defines me in this ethereal state. I have brought my Virtue and my Wisdom into this Universal space and that is all I’m allowed to bring.
I envision the Earth is her beauty, in her depths and in her pain. I see the Moon, mother to so many on Earth and Gaia’s constant companion. I see our relationship and correlation to our solar system and the grandeur and exactitude that explains the laws of this place with absolute clarity and intelligence. I see our galaxy, home to so many inhabited and barren alike, refining and expanding those same laws and expressing a deeper intelligence than our solar system, yet in perfect harmony, just as an adept with a master teacher, synchronicity. I am taken to a place that I can see the whole of the Cosmos, bright and lumescent and glowing like feathers of light, billions of galaxies, millions of billions of homes and deserts, and the multitude of life that teams in this ocean of light just like the bacteria that exist in a drop of water.
I’m finally taken to a place of Unbounded Consciousness, literally looking at all of this wonder, running like quantum clockwork, intricate and intense, chaos bounded by creation, all in an effort to evolve to the next higher plane of existence. I commune with the essence of Creation and can engage in nonduality with the Source and Structure of all my beginnings and closures. Messages flow free of words and feeling witnessing pervades the instantaneous light body transfer of deep Love. It is the goal and the play of Leila, the yin and yang, Shiva and Shakti, Alpha and Omega. It feels like I’m here for a lifetime, witnessing it unfold, becoming more and more complex, more and more conscious. Then I hear the call. I must find my way back to complete the non-dual cycle and I am lost. From this space, this dizzying distance, this infinite territory, how do I find my infinitesimally small meat suit with these few tattoos, these little memories, these aches and pains? I will it so. I command my light body to return, and in the blink of an eye, I open my eyes and I am looking at my little green parrot named Pato and he want to preen my eyelashes, and I know I have found my Path of Paths. Join me.
Much Love, ZZX
