The Cost of Inner Worlds
Manifestation isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be, and it remains a buzzword on people’s lips. People who don’t understand the gravity of influencing events and outcomes they truly desire. You can’t in any sense just will something to happen. It takes a great deal of work to get to that place. So any shortcuts presented that seem to easy to be true usually are.
I often wonder if my lived experience, up until this point, is enough to carry me through intellectually. I read stories by people who’ve had full lives, but mine is quiet in comparison. I ask myself what it is I really have to offer the world, and it’s this self doubt that, funnily enough, holds me in good stead. Anybody who is too sure of themselves and what they can offer in service to the greater good eventually learns how foolish they’ve been. But this epiphany just doesn’t occur in others. I spend a whole lot of time in my head, and I find comfort there. But there is a lack of growth that’s developing, which pulls me out of that comfort.
It is in my lack of new experiences that I begin to falter, and second-guess myself. I’m this way because I chose such a fate. Alan Watts famously said, “A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.” I’m not familiar with the course of Watts’ life or his backstory, but I do wonder if he was subconsciously referring to himself. Of course, there are those who are probably familiar with the events that unfolded in his life, and I could be totally wrong about what he meant. But that’s the beauty of words — spoken or written — we can interpret them as we see fit. I know for a fact I get caught up in the worlds I create in my head and, at times, fall prey to illusion.
I recently read a brilliant piece by somebody who I now consider an intellectual peer, and he expressed concern over whether or not he is solipsistic. My response to this is a lot of us are, but I see no evidence of him being so. That might just be my own biases shining through, because his words resonated with me so strongly. My immediate inclination is to nurture a gentle soul who has fundamentally been labelled by society as somebody who is self-focused. Now I, on the other hand, fully own my solipsism — for it’s deliberate — I choose to count myself as an individual interfacing with the Universe in a way in which I create every encounter I have: other people, inanimate objects, and even animals. Every event seems centred around my interaction to it. And why wouldn’t I feel that way? Perhaps my intellectual peer also feels this way. I’ll have to follow up with him on that.
Just revisiting my original point, manifestation doesn’t involve creating something out of thin air. Rather, it involves transmogrifying one thing into another. You’ve got to have a starting point. We as gods in our own right may not be able to build anything from scratch like the one true God, because we are merely His creations, and there is a spiritual bureaucracy in place. And as Robert Greene put it so eloquently, “Never outshine the master.” That’s what Lucifer did, and it’s why he fell. We must always respect He who gave us life. Despite the problematic passages in any of the holy texts, they deserve a degree of reverence, in my view.
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So where does this leave me? A fiercely independent individual who eschews any and all groups? I become my own master, and in turn, should work against outshining myself. I’m not saying God is not important to me, rather, that as a little god in my own right I have dominion over whatever it is I create. Because after all, we were created in His image, and therefore we share attributes from the most high on down. Any magician that is incapable of reanimation is not yet adept, and I question their initiatory process. I ask myself whether they’re self-initiated, and what that means. The implications of going it alone, like me, and the potential solipsism associated with the act itself. Because it’s very easy to lead oneself to believe they’ve undergone the proper training when they know deep down they slacked off in their studies.
And it is in our studies that we must toil, incessantly, borderline manic, and all encompassing. There is no other way to climb up the magical rungs of the ladder without precarious study of the ancient grimoires so that we may go on to write our own. I wrote my first modern day grimoire and it was incredibly taxing, emotionally draining, and utterly exhaustive. I swore I’d give myself a break when I’d completed the book, but I jumped head first into my current project in under twenty-four hours of completion. A sorcerers work never ends. And it is spiritual training that we strengthen our psychic muscles. On this point, Mat Auryn wrote, “Our psychic senses are our primary senses, the senses we have as spirit beings, and our physical senses are extensions of those primary psychic senses. We come into the world and into the womb with our psychic senses fully developed; it’s only after birth, as a child develops and ages, that these psychic senses recede while our physical senses take over.” This flies in the face of what we’re taught by the mainstream. That we begin our lives without psychic abilities, and we attain them later.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a sensitive, with medium-like qualities. And because I was so attuned to my surroundings, I experienced a lot of distress in a broken home. Any argument or confrontation that took place, I felt deeper than my siblings. And even though possessing the qualities of a medium is a gift, it often felt like a curse. But why is it that some people seem to have more highly attuned sensibilities than others? I guess it depends on the person. We’re all different, and have varying degrees of psychic ability. It’s like anything — some of us are born with specific talents, and others aren’t — perhaps these gifts are God given. I won’t say I haven’t doubted the existence of God at various points of my life. But I have come to believe there must be something out there that’s responsible for having created us. The nature of this entity is not known to me, so I keep as open a mind as I can about the premise.
I’d like to attain a level of detachment in my life where events and experiences don’t leave such indelible impressions on me, but then I wonder what I’d have to draw from, since my life is so dull. Dull by other’s standards. Quite fine by me. Reclusive and comfortable that way. I look at some of my idols lives, and they’re so well-rounded compared to mine. Here I sit pondering the nature of the self sans my relation to other people, and I ask myself, how long will it be before I’m believing my own hype? I don’t want to be that way, but the ego has a peculiar way of creeping up on you, especially in the arts. We see ourselves in that which we make, as artists. Even the most impersonal creative pursuits have remnants of us in them. We can’t get away from it. In this way, art is autobiography. I remember Rick Rubin mentioning art as being a journal entry, in his book, ‘The Creative Act: A Way of Being.’ I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the exact quote, but everything we do is fundamentally that. A record of what we’ve experienced, and the lens through which we see the world. No one can ape that, it’s ours alone. And that’s where originality shines through. If you create from that place, I doubt you’ll ever run out of ideas, because things are happening all the time in our lives, and it’s up to us to translate those experiences into art.
When I first began studying the occult, I was somewhat unconsciously afraid of the imagery that surrounds it — as most people are — and it is only through time and practise that I managed to work my way through some of the harder questions. One thing I always say is that answers are not absolutes, and coming away from any given situation with more questions is more intellectually robust. But I sought some answers and received them fully, in a mystical sense. I sometimes read mavericks and self-appointed authorities making use of magical terminology all wrong, but I don’t dare correct them, because I realise that they, like all of us, are trying to find their way. They may not be there yet, but they’re on a journey of self-discovery, and that can never be a bad thing. The danger is when advice is given to the gullible and naïve by those who have no business giving it out. I’d say it makes my blood boil, but that’d be a lie. I just think there are no gatekeepers worth their salt in occult circles, and to let empty platitudes die a natural death is a better course of action. It is up to us alone to spot the snakes in the grass, to use discernment, and have our own motivations revealed to us through the work. Of course there are other ways to go about it too, but for me, magic has been the one thing that’s yielded favourable results. Do the work. Study. And you’ll go far.
