A handful of years later I was introduced to Sigils through discovering Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and the culture jamming projects of Genesis P. Orrige.... In the end I couldn't stomach the spookiness, and these ideas and psychedelics went into hibernation for decades.
So you go back to thee Temple ov Psychic Youth days, huh? I was not aware of that while it was going on, but have read a bit about it in the last several years.
I was introduced to magick by pure chance following a breakthrough does of mushrooms just before my 16th birthday, which would have been 1994. I knew nothing of psychedelic breakthroughs, magick or anything remotely close, but in the words of Bill Hicks, "Hy third eye was squeegeed quite clean."
The following year I was living in Austin, TX and had someone lend me a copy of Liber Null and Psychonaut, which was the first I knew of formal orders, groups practicing, etc. The z-Cluster and OTO were up and moving at that time too, plus Austin was (and probably still is) full of interesting folks.
Like you, I also mostly put it on the shelf for a very long time, coming back to it in the last few years too.
I've been gun shy to get deeper with psychedelics and magickal trance, but clearly to me I'm heading further in this direction. I haven't yet done any operations while using psychedelics. The things that go bump in the night, I still get the jitters - like I sense things unseen ... I don't know, shadow energies? traces ... when I trip. So learning how I suppose to put my head in the mouth of the lion...getting more grounded...I think in compassion, to make a stronger, ritual connection supported with psychedelics in a Magickal operation work for me.
I hear ya...I don't do it often either, though I must say, my trust in my Allies is now deep and without doubt. Recent events have shown me that the plants were leading me towards something all along, and the relationship I have with them is not a one-way street.
The process of discovering which sacrament works for you with what type of ritual is a fun process. I find lysergamides to be excellent for invocation. Mescaline for cultivating compassion and works of healing, and aya analogues, particularly with caapi, for calling for inspiration. This is a relatively new path of exploration for me, and I'm quite excited to follow it and see where it goes.
Wow, that sounds exciting. I don't know the term Burn. Is this a contemporary Chaos Magick gathering? I can imagine it's like a Wickerman event? Like the ritual of the Burning Man festival?
The Burn is a regional Burning Man event. In this case, Transformus outside Asheville, NC. Not a Chaos Magick gathering, though it does seem to attract a certain kind of person
. I'm not familiar with a Wickerman event, but it sounds interesting. Care to enlighten me?
Do you belong to an Order?
I do not belong to an Order. I started MMM with the IOT a ways back, but my magickal practice just wasn't quite clicking at the time, pieces not quite fitting, so I stopped to practice alone more. Actually, the Burn blew my magickal practice wide open, and I suspect at some point I'll go back in that direction, but ironically, I found a partner to practice with who I have an uncanny link with, so I'm going to play around with that for a bit. You?
This sounds amazing! Was the gathering focused on any particular deity, or was it open to full interpretation? A Fire Goddess? I can only imagine what energies were being invoked and felt.
The effigy was a Celtic Goddess, but I don't know which beyond that. I do know that a whole bunch of women started their periods early at the event, which was a funny little coincidence.
The energy being invoked was beyond anything I had felt before. Prior to the event, I hadn't really thought much on the effigy burn itself (though I'd thought about damn near everything else). I had no idea that 2500 people focusing on one point with altered perceptions could create such palpable energy. I absolutely mush experience the big burn...I imagine just about anything would be possible in the energy created with 65,000 people. :shock:
Thank you for sharing this. You mentioned integrating some positive insights? What were they?
How will you work with these gifts from the experience?
You mentioned how antithetical Magick is to logic and reason in an early post. One map of the territory I call up to keep my scientific mind appeased is considering magick to be a delicate manipulation of the tie between the Observer and the Observed. Sort of an observer created universe thing, and I think physics would agree that the divide between Me an Everything Else is not so clear as it may appear on the surface.
In returning to psychedelics and magick, I had a bunch of baggage to clean out from many years of bad decisions. Throughout the shadow work, collecting the soul shards, I noticed how strongly my reality and the people I encounter reflect back to me whatever is going on in me. It sounds cliched, I know, but discovering joy an becoming a positive light does transform the world around you.
Anything I could say about the effect the Burn had on me would both sound melodramatic and be an understatement at the same time. The joy is palpable.
I've noticed in myself since I've started to smoke cannabis again, and to experiment with psychedelics again, my choices are becoming more ... about compassion. About helping others. A handful of years ago, this wasn't even in the radar. But now, as beastly as my work is, I found time to start volunteer teaching and mentoring at a local high school, and have started to become more involved in my community as well. I attribute this growing social awareness to the psychedelics. Seems natural, the same way it became the foundations for Richard Alpert / Ram Dass.
Ram Dass has been working with Dale Borglum of the LivingDying project, which is about compassion work and conscious dying movement. I have interests here. To my understanding death can pose a horrible, existential crisis for many. Somehow helping to alleviate that suffering may in the future become something for me. I've been thinking about volunteering at a hospice at some point.
So if trance, psychedelics and magick together can help make good things happen, a solid endeavor!
Absolutely! I think this may be a natural trajectory for most people, as we tend to be self-obesessed as young adults and grow to focus more on helping others and creating a better map of reality for everyone as we grow.
An enormous part of my practice (almost all of it) is dedicated to cultivating gratitude an compassion.
It's a small part, but I find great joy and grounding in helping spread teacher plants far and wide to backyard gardeners. The Allies have really given me joy, love...my life...back, and that chance has to be preserved for everyone who is called to it.
Edit: I just wanted to describe my process of mantravidhya real quick.
So for mantravidhya the goal is to attain mantra-caitanya, a state which is quite easy to achieve when on ayahuasca or mushrooms, but sober or just under the influence of cannabis, mantra-caitanya is an uphill climb(the merging of the mantra with the consciousness, the inherent meaning of the syllables become clear and manifest in their full significance)
Of course the meaning is food for contemplation, but during phases when (especially periods of time after mantra-caitanya which serves as the truth-standard for its invocation) I practice the tantric method of simply absorbing myself in the sound and sinking deep into the resonance and overtones. It is during that period of the sounds merging with consciousness that spontaneous mantra-caitanya (where the meaning itself merges) will happen, a state which shouldn't fail to convince you of your immense power as a human-being.
Thanks for this! I'm going to give this a go next time mushroom trip (and probably before, just so it will come naturally then).
One visualization I love it visualizing sound waves flowing through the space in each cell in the body, picturing just how little "stuff" actually exists, how it's pretty much all space...and loosing touch with where the boundary is between the body and the space within and surrounding space. Did you know that if the space was squeezed out of our cells, every person on the planet would fit in a sugar cube?
