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July 10, 2006
tank says: major boring shit
when the student is ready the master will appear
probably the only older, more widely known "occult truism" than the above is, "as above, so below." and indeed, in this blog post, as above so below. let's get on with what's below.
i'd known about the phrase for ages. i intended to practice occultism/magick of some sort or another for equally long ages. like everthing else i "intended" to do since graduating high school, i Never Really Quite Got Around To It. i tried to set up a daily meditation routine in college, but i had an asswipe of a roommate who made fun of me and my skin, at that time, was too thin to take it. then when i moved in by myself, i got hooked on the internet and had noisy neighbors or something and still never managed to get into meditation. truth be told, i still don't do it.
now i lift and run, instead, which serve the same purpose for me, at times, though perhaps not as fruitfully.
life moved on after college and i got me a job and put the nose to the grindstone. my magickal aspirations fell by the wayside though i still "dabbled" (indeed, i was (am?) one of the hated dabblers) in the intellectual side of things, reading and learning and forgetting and understanding and all that. when i bothered to think about where my erstwhile aspirations had gone and where my life was leading, i lazily excused myself with, "when the sudent is ready, the master will appear."
and then one did. i met someone and we became fast friends. throughout our conversations (lectures, more like), i quickly convinced myself that i had met the master that i needed at the time. (apparently i was "ready".) every minute that we spent together, i learned something new and fascinating, even if -- as was often the case -- it had nothing whatsoever to do with the topic under discussion. my supposed master turned me on to several new physical-mystical practices which remain with me today.
and then, one day, he, to my surprise, asked me if i'd heard the phrase, "when the student is ready, the master will appear." he asked me what i thought it meant, and corrected me. when the student is ready, he explained, the student becomes the master.
initiation from within. the external stuff is just hand-waving and fancy costumes.
that was a bigtime smack upside the head. and yet, it was not enough to smack me out of my complacence. as much as i thought i was, i, the student, was not ready.
much later, long after my shaman had moved on, as shamans do, i realized that the master had appeared, though i hadn't been consciously working toward initiation. (references to this abound on my cruddy little site, too many to link.) of course, i am no all-around master, but i am master of some domains (har!) and have mastered parts of my life which were sorely underdeveloped, and which, having been mastered, have yielded great fruits.
a great profundity struck me shortly after i began my overt romance with 203. i revealed to her some documentary evidence, dated long before i ever met her, that i had "always" been looking for "someone like her." way back when, when i started to really get my shit together, i decided that i wanted a woman who would inspire me, and get me out to do stuff, help guide me toward bigger and better things, and drag me along on adventures. in other words, i wanted a mate who would do all my work for me.
now, that is a good (incomplete, naturally) description of 203. but there was no chance in heaven or hell that our friendship would have lasted beyond the first hike -- much less developed into what we have now -- if i had been the spineless, needy, weenie that i was when i wrote about how i wanted a mate to run my life for me. it was only when i no longer needed her to change my life that she could commence doing so.
"the lord helps them that help themselves." you've heard that one before, right? can't say it's much different from what i italicized way up top in this post.
like a good, humble, bodhisattva, once i had attained this enlightenment (even before), i attempted to subtly guide those around me down a similar path, through word and deed. it may be working, it may not. perhaps i should do more.
the thing about most occult literature is that it's total gibberish until it's not really needed any longer. reading crowley's "book of lies" in my college days, i "ha-ha"d along with the author thinking the joke was on everyone else. now, of course, that i can grasp bits of his meaning, i realize the joke was on me, the me of back-then. but now that i can understand the great one's meaning, i no longer so much need his advice.
which brings me to my thoughts recently on the field of the occult/magick, namely, whether i wish to pursue the practices which i began shortly after i flipped my life inside out last may. on the one hand, these are pursuits which i have intended to pursue since late adolescense -- and lately i've been Getting Around To It with all the shit i've been putting off for the last decade. so there's that, but there's also the sneaking suspicion that i've had, most strongly this morning, that i might just obtain very little benefit.
i have my own spiritual system and now that i am comfortable in my place, i am reaping the benefits of my life's work. i am working poweful magick in the crowleyan sense, the very system which i had always intended to practice. true, i never did manage knowledge and conversation of my holy guardian angel, but we all know what that means anyhow, and there's a good chance i've achieved the equivalent in my own system.
and so it is that i'm coming to believe in a general trend in (at least "my") life: by the time one finds what one needs, one no longer needs it, or at least, no longer for the initially understood purpose.
for example, while searching for tattoo advice, i came upon this site, which now, in my boredom, i am exploring, and this morning, i found these two posts (text preserved below Just In Case):
Boring, solipsistic, self-indulgent and--here's the kicker--not even having a good time.
that's it right there.
where was that when i needed it, 10 years ago? oh yes, i would not have understood it then.
i saw this nice little bit on the internet last night someplace:
good choices come from experience. experience comes from bad choices.
seems i've got some experience now. maybe that's why i've been making so many good choices lately. maybe that's why i've been lately feelin "at one with the universe" and all that shit. maybe that's an invitation to fate's hammer. hope not.
...
post 1:
"I guess that what i'm trying to achieve, magically (see, got it right this time...), is a sense of 'otherness', for want of a better description. I have been in magical situations in the past, in which I felt the touch of other, non-human, consciousness...and I enjoyed that contact very much, I have to say. I've never felt particularly connected to the human world, and people in general..in fact, I tend to find prolonged contact with people to be toxic."
To be honest, I think it would be infinitely more productive for you to not indulge this self-indulgent personal narrative any further by yearning after "the other", whatever that means. What did you enjoy very much about contact with "non-human consciousness"? The license to avoid interacting with the "human world" and bolstering the ego up with fantasies of your outsider self? It's one of the most basic pitfalls that people getting into magic can fall into, and one of the biggest root causes of our planet's ever-growing surplus of rubbish magicians.
You are a human being and exist within nature. You really, really, really need to get to grips with that, find your peace and empowerment within it, and resolve the internal issues that make you consider contact with other people to be toxic - before you start chatting up celestial space squids from Venus. If you don't get the mysteries of being a living, breathing, fucking, fighting, eating, loving, surviving, growing human being sorted out – as your foundation in magic – then there is nothing of any value to be gained by consorting with non-human intelligences. It will just make you more isolated, more ineffectual, more uncomfortable with yourself, and basically just turn you into another ten-a-penny occult waste of space contemplating your own cosmic arsehole while the world burns around your ears and mine.
That's the best advice I can give you. Take it or leave it.
post 2:
futilitarian, calm down. No-one wants you to leave, we just want you to be the best fecking magician you can be. Okay? We're on your side.
If you were comfortable where you are, that would be one thing. Thre's nothing wrong IMO with magic-as-a-hobby, provided you're aware that's where you are and you're happy to keep going at that level of engagment. You, obviously, aren't. Like so many before you, you've got stuck on sigil workings, even though you evidently find them uninspiring.
If people seem to be coming down on you a bit harder than you expect, it's because some of what you're describing--feeling disconnected from the human world, feeling disconnected from 'nature'--well, it's pretty much texbook stuff. Some people never get over it; their magical practice becomes a way of excusing and shoring up isolating and damaging patterns of behaviour. There's nothing wrong with being a bit of a loner or a homebody, but the language you're using to describe the way interacting with other people makes you feel suggests that something less healthy is going on.
There's a heck of a lot of people out there who never get past this point. They never tackle their social issues because it's so easy to make up a comforting little story about how the mundane world oppresses Crystal Children/how you're a lone predator stalking unseen through the mindless herds ect. They never connect with the living world because that's all treehugging hippy crap. And they never break out of an essentially masturbation-based practice because charging sigils is what magic REALLY is, underneath all the superstitious jargon created to blind the sheeple to the truth. Boring, solipsistic, self-indulgent and--here's the kicker--not even having a good time.
What got you into magic in the first place? What was it that drew you in? How did it make you feel? What would you give to feel that way again?
What is really important to you?
note: if you suppose that "my own system" abandons the system of my forebears, wait until you see the tattoo (assuming i ever get it), which, though it violates the ancestral anti-tattoo-taboo, makes blatant note of the fact that the foundation of "my own system" is, unsurprisingly, the system in which i was raised.
it's just that i didn't come to the same conclusion (yet!) as my teachers. such is the nature of thought.