Posted By: Thad McKraken MAY 4, 2016
Over the years I’ve gotten continual requests for magick instruction from readers, which puts me in an odd position. First of all, I think the concept of magick in general is ridiculous. From what I’ve experienced, the only reason we think of this sort of thing as magick has to do with a profound and fundamental ignorance in regards to all things altered states of consciousness. If we knew more about this sort of shit or gasp, studied it, we wouldn’t think of it as magick anymore. We’d call it something else, something less mysterious and vague. And that’d be the other thing, I don’t honestly think you can learn this stuff in books or classes really. At least this has been my experience. You have to learn it by means of direct contact with the spirit world, which typically happens in some sort of altered state. That all being said, it has recently occurred to me I have in fact downloaded a ton of psychic intel into my being over the last 10 years of practice that could in fact be potentially helpful to an aspiring mage. I recently released my first largely channeled book (only a $5 download, it’ll totally re-write your cultural imprinting), but that’s almost an art book as much as it is a magick book, albeit a living art book mind you.
Mainly, when someone asks me about whether or not a particular book or class is a good one, I’ll take a quick look and go, ummm, well, that’s not remotely what I’d recommend, but ultimately I have no clue. In general it strikes me that a lot of say chaos magick is more influenced by atheism than anything else. It’s sort of taking the spirituality out of the equation and from what I’ve been shown, this stuff operates on a deep spiritual level that I personally don’t remotely comprehend. So I think you’re missing probably the most important aspect of the practice if you go that route. In fact, the most continual message that’s come through hypnagogic ether over the years in my microverse is that thought does not arise from matter, but rather matter is comprised from thought. I keep waking up in an alternate realm and having this explained to me over and over again. Look, your world is made of imagination at its core. Then I pull back into the tedium of my waking existence and am like, I get it on one level, but on another I don’t, which is why I imagine why they keep beating it into me. When you take this most fundamental of lessons out of your underlying philosophy, I’m not really certain magick is going to do a whole hell of a lot. In fact, the popular history of the Occult sort of leads one to believe that magick in general doesn’t work at all. More to the point, I’ve been sort of forced to confront the fact that because of organized religion’s calculated slandering of the craft, it currently attracts people who are going to use it to self-destruct quite spectacularly.
And yet you also have the ancient pyramids and all of these megalithic architectural sites which point to a star obsessed spirit science beyond what we’re currently capable of with all our flashy electronic technology. You also have new research into psychedelic drugs which is quite quickly demonstrating that you can create more profound spiritual experiences by calculatedly manipulating brain chemistry than you ever could by singing hymns in a church or reading the Bible obsessively. Another way to put that would be, culturally we think shamanism is a bunch of superstitious bullshit, but science has now formally proven that it’s not. Sorry about the genocide y’all. Our bad on all that. You also have meditation, which has now been repeatedly demonstrated to have all kinds of mental and physical benefits. And on the far end of the spectrum you have remote viewing, which again, has been demonstrated to work over and over again (albeit not nearly as effectively as military interests would have liked), but gets completely ignored by mainstream science and society because we can’t deal with the implications. And the implications are fucking weird to say the least.
The implication of course would be that all consciousness is connected on a level we don’t currently understand, which is why what we currently call magick works. Jung called this the collective unconscious and the concept is represented metaphorically by the internet I might point out. If you’re going to start treading down this path, repeat that mantra to yourself over and over again. Magick works because all consciousness is interconnected. All consciousness is interconnected, which is why magick works. It really is that simple and again, this reality has actually been scientifically proven (then conveniently slandered as pseudoscience and ignored). When you cast a sigil or try and will a plotline into motion, this is possible because everyone is in fact tied together on an invisible level beyond our current understanding. The force that’s tying us all together would be considered the Holy Spirit when put in terms of Christian Gnosticism (refer to my guide to the holy trinity of timespace perception for more details on that).
So, what you’re doing with basic sigil projection is attempting to will a coherent narrative into the collective plotline of humanity. I’ll get to the techniques I’ve tried in that regard in future posts, but the whole process is alarmingly simple and you can read a brief overview here. What’s not simple is de-programming the cultural conditioning you’ve been fed since birth and acknowledging that the objective literal way of thinking you’ve been taught is not only just one way of understanding the world we live in, but also an incredibly limited one that blinds us to the intricate nature of consciousness as much as it illuminates anything.
One of the weirdest things I noticed when I first started practicing magick is what I now refer to as an inverted cosmology. Everywhere you look, inwardly and outwardly, you’re faced with primal dualities. Order vs. Chaos, Angelick vs. Daemonic, Structure vs. Anti-Structure, Good vs. Evil, Yin vs. Yang, etc. Now, I’m one to first dismiss this and insist that nothing in life can be broken down to such simplistically convenient subdivisions, but I’m also further forced to acknowledge that there’s actually some supreme wisdom here, in fact, it represents the basic means of all creation. People are created by the merging of masculine and feminine genetics and computer code can be broken down to zeros and ones. What strikes me as beyond weird is that the shamanic or Occult perspective might as well be a mirrored inverse of atheistic scientism.
No, really. From a western reductionist perspective the supposed physical world is the only thing that’s “real”, and nothing that isn’t recorded in this space or outwardly repeatable supposedly doesn’t exist. From the more shamanic viewpoint, the physical world is an illusion and only inner experiences can truly be considered “real”. They’re 2 sides of the same coin, the problem being that we’re all shamelessly manipulated into thinking that the overtly materialistic perspective is the only true way of understanding our world. While never one to devalue the importance of this perspective, it doesn’t take a genius to point out that this is only one way of understanding reality, and going too far in that direction, as we have, actually blinds us to some obvious truths.
What am I talking about? Well, science only deals with repeatable phenomenon. You know what isn’t repeatable? Every single day of your life. You are never going to live the same day twice. The thoughts in your head are never going to repeat themselves precisely from one day to the next, neither are the day’s events. You might have a similar day, but it’s never going to be the same. Take even something as banal as sports. Seems like one of the boringest most commonplace occurrences in our culture but if you look closely, you see something supremely weird. Namely, sporting events cannot be reproduced. You are never going to watch the same basketball game or soccer match twice. You can even say, well, that team will beat this other team 99% of the time, but it’s never going to go down the same way. It’s going to be a different game every single time because nothing about human behavior is actually repeatable in the way mainstream science would love us to believe it is. Why no one talks about the supreme limitations of this manner of thought I haven’t a clue. We act like modern science is some end all be all of existence, yet it can’t even reproduce something as basic as a soccer match.
It gets even stranger. We’re all taught from birth that there is a supreme importance in separating things into convenient categories of “real” and “not real”, but we rarely ever think of how this blinds us to what’s actually going on. I’ve often said that magick involves recognizing that the world is comprised from consciousness rather than matter and acting accordingly. Part of what I’m getting at with that is that the concepts of “real” and “not real” from a popular materialist perspective lead us to some incredibly dysfunctional conclusions. From this perspective, Spider Man is “not real” and some dude who lives thousands of miles away from me who I will never ever meet falls into the “real” category. The problem is, I will never talk to this person or know anything about him or his life and I could go on and on about Spider Man. I use Spider Man as an example for a reason. Years ago I had what I call an astral contact encounter where I was set up in a lucid dream Spider Man environment by some omni-dimensional spectral weirdo.
I was swinging through a surrealist city that was seemingly being created by my unconscious mind and everything felt hyper-real, for lack of a better term. I could feel the wind against my skin as I cast webs onto the oncoming skyscrapers right before whisking about and over them effortlessly. I was having the experience of what it would like to be the fictional Spider Man, in a dream state, that felt as “real” as anything in my waking life. It would be impossible for me to have this sort of experience in regards to a person who I will never meet or read about (which constitutes the vast vast majority of people). So what’s “real” then?
Well, it’s a largely arbitrary concept but from an Occult perspective or a standpoint of consciousness, fictional ideas that embed themselves into our psyche are actually more “real” than physical things that we will never experience. It’s our denial in acknowledging the potency of these alternate philosophies that’s created an entirely delusional view of the universe and our place in it. We get super excited about the fact that we can detect supposed gravity waves emanating from black holes millions of miles away from us without further conceding that, no one’s ever going to visit a black hole. No one. It’s not something that can be experienced from a human perspective, although, I could in fact have a dream about what we think a black hole is and fly through it in this dream. Hell, in the movie Interstellar, a dude gets sucked into a one and this leads to a spiritual epiphany, as utterly preposterous as that concept is. So, science has created a fictional concept that can’t be experienced literally, but can in fact be experienced as a construct of imagination. Head spinning?
The problem is that we spend crap tons of money studying outer space and love to pat ourselves on the back when we come up with novel theories about what say, black holes might mean. But from a standpoint of consciousness, we couldn’t even get anywhere near them without our bodies being crushed. Then we’d be experiencing death, not a black hole. So, black holes are things that no human is ever going to experience in a literal sense, but dreams are something everyone is going to experience in a subjective sense. So is death. We have an outer space exploration program, but no inner space exploration program, despite the fact that everyone can experience inner space and maybe .000000001% of the population will ever go to outer space. Another way of putting that would be, science, rather than being a candle in the dark, has thusfar kept us in the dark quite spectacularly, or as Terrence McKenna liked to say: “The dominator culture has lead the human species into a blind alley”.
If I was tasked with teaching someone magick, this would be the first lesson. You need to get to the point where you realize that your western cultural imprinting has become a hindrance in understanding the spirit world rather than a tool. As a matter of fact, you have to get the part of you that’s been programmed to think only in this manner to break. You have to get to the point where you understand that it is in fact quite probable that our entire culture is currently full of shit and all our religious, academic, and media institutions aren’t helping us understand something as infinitely complicated as what we currently call magick. As for how to do that, well, you’ve got to really put yourself out there. You’ve got to get yourself past ontological shock and onward towards submission to a higher order of knowing, a deeper level of subjective and metaphorical understanding.
You have to go from faith to knowledge, from belief to experience. I’d recommend Robert Monroe’s techniques for astral projection just as much as I’d recommend intentionally going off the deep end in a calculated manner with psychedelics or projecting sigils, but ultimately, I don’t honestly know the best methodology. I imagine there’s a subjective element to it and what would work for some people wouldn’t work at all for others. This is the sort of repeatability that science should be striving for, but isn’t currently. We don’t need to eliminate death from the human experience, we need to eliminate the fear of death from the human experience. We don’t need technology that will fuel capitalism, we need technology that will destroy capitalism. Those are vastly different goals, and I suppose it takes someone a tad more versed in a more shamanic manner of thinking to point that out. Until next time true believers.