An apology

To date, this blog has pretty much been the equivalent of a person who's lived in the trackless desert her whole life, telling wayfarers: "Oh yeah, I totally know the way to the Silver City. Of course, I've never been there myself. But I've talked to people who know people who have! And based on that and on my own experience of the trackless desert, it shouldn't be too hard for us to put our heads together and draw a map..."

Yeah. The ego (including the intellect) is a booster rocket. You'll never get off the ground without it, but you'll never get into orbit with it.

Well. Don't I feel stupid.

So it seems that - whereas I stand by all the analysis that's come onto this blog in almost four years, and some of it actually seems to come from Somewhere in my psyche much smarter than my regular self - especially this, it's pretty hard-core - it's a case of physician, heal thyself.

So tell me, who do you think I was really talking to when I kept yelling over and over again: "You are what you do! You're keeping yourself stuck in oppression, pointlessness and miser! You have to give up your favourite identity otherwise all your schemes and dreams will turn out useless! A revolution / enlightenment means unpredictability, the return of the repressed, all kinds of drama, and if you fear things getting out of control then you, sirmaam, are part of the problem!!!"

Go on. Take a wild guess. Humility is endless, and I'd much rather see all this done than hear about it.

No, not Disneyland

During my early adolescence - 13 to 15 - I started having what you might consider "mystical experiences". I can explain this no better than to say that the veil of reality would slip aside occasionally, and I would see - or thought I was - glimpses of another, better world, where everything really was all right. It was this kind of thing that led me to a short dalliance with a Baptist youth group, and a long one with neo-Paganism. More importantly, since they happened at about the same time I was discovering rock music and electronic pop, the Gates of Paradise have always been associated for me with certain artists (one particular artist who mentioned Gurdjieff and the Sufis quite a lot in her early work), and my career path as a musician was more or less settled. Is it also a coincidence that I first became politically active around this time?

It's often said that the "psychic centres", or whatever, kick in at around adolesence (something to do with hormones, I suppose) - which is why poltergeist activity is associated with teenagers. But to a large extent, these brief "openings" were more trouble than they were worth. The Gates of Paradise had closed by the time I was about 16, and I spent ten years blundering about in the dark wondering how the devil I was going to get back there. One might also say that it might have been better never to have a glimpse of the garden, if I was going to be satisfied with life in the basement. It was only after some major life changes that I began to experience anything like that again - about 2001, I think it must have been. Coincidence, that it was at this time that I became politically active again, and made the first steps towards a practical musical career?

As a wise mystic said, when you're up to your ass in alligators it's difficult to remember that you went in to drain the swamp, and I've been up to my ass in alligators much of my life, due to Harrowing Childhood issues which I won't bore you with. My Daily Self - or nafs - endlessly replays the terrible things that happened to me in my childhood and adolescence, trying to give the story a better ending this time. This Doloras is almost pathologically determined not to live in the here-and-now, where actions have consequences and what's done can't be undone. But if I can't do that, I won't be ready the next time the Gates of Paradise open.

I like the idea that "nothing is ever forgotten", that I never lost anything in growing up, that the Magickal Kingdom is here and now always hiding behind every molecule if you know what to look for, that I had to grow up and suffer to learn how to integrate that world with this one of Horrible Jobs. That the magick becomes real when I get my music right; that if I "remember myself" I can finally cease my eternal battle with imaginary things; and that by acting in the name of solidarity and compassion in this $2.99 material world - through socialist activism, spiritual psychology and radical cultural-materialist praxis - I can be part of a current which will change the world to one where people are less lost and afraid and hurt and cold and angry and mean. And then I forget it again, and that's how I get lost and depressed.

"We shall not cease from exploration / And at the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know it for the first time" - T S Eliot.

Short shameful confession

I used to think that I had spoiled my destiny - that I had made such bad life choices that I'd ruined the purpose of my existence and thus had no real reason to live except that suicide would make it worse. To put it in religious terms, I had disappointed God to the point that She had turned Her back on me. It looks so incredibly stupid when you write it down.

ETA: ... and, of course, in retrospect "God" actually meant "my parents".

The turn to the mystical

Psychic nomad made a useful comment on the 1 Key / 9 Commitments post in that I seemed to be prioritising the Greater Work (the struggle against the false self / nafs / Ego) over the Lesser Work (the struggle against injustice and mass brainwashing in the real world), when really they should go together. He (please correct for gender if necessary) was right, in principle. However, as VI Lenin said, one has to bend the stick to the needs of the present moment. And this ties in with the face that my political mentor (who's obviously kind of enlightened in his own way, although a traditional Marxist and therefore a hard-core atheist) told me ages ago I needed to be "more humble and less sensitive".

The essential reason for the shift of emphasis is the shift of emphasis on real life. It's a combination of two things:
- the actual political experiments I've been involved in have been, to use a Spinal Tapism, quite "selective" in their success;
- the realisation of what my mentor meant by humility; i.e. that so much of my political activism had not, in fact, been motivated by an intent to make it work. Rather, it had been motivated by Ego as we have been discussing it - the desire to be a "bad ass revolutionary" so that people would think I was cool and sexy, carrying with it the concomitant desire to never be wrong about anything, which led to avoiding criticism (and therefore accurate feedback) at all costs, which is obviously certain death to a political project which means actually talking to real people in the real world who don't share your assumptions and whom you can't control.

So I've negotiated a brief leave of absence (certainly not a resignation) from the Lesser Work to put serious effort into the Greater Work for a while. So this means that I need you the viewers at home to give more feedback on whatever you might have been doing in the actual real struggle against injustice. Me, I'll be sitting at home for a while, listening to my Ego screaming at me and waiting for it to be quiet for a little while.

It's as simple as that.

When you boil it all down, all magick is, really, is finding something nice to distract your ego with, while your subconscious and/or transpersonal Self does the real work. Which presupposes, of course, knowing that your ego is not your real self, but a "program" or "structure" developed to enable you to survive in the world as you have experienced it to date.

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I promised a while ago to start posting reports of my own personal work, to give readers an idea of what this might fee like in practice. And finally, I get around to it:

I have been doing some hard and serious work lately, which has been quite painful. To summarise: my own ego is very, very much bound up with the idea that I have to impress the hell out of people. (I am a wannabe guru, politician and academic, in other words - but careful readers will have worked that out already.) But that presupposes a view of the world in which other human beings are divided into (a) docile puppets of my ego; (b) threats. And then I wonder why I have problems with actual human relationships.

So I think I've finally managed to get across to my ego that peace and fulfilment are not to be found that way, because other people are fundamentally not mine to control. But I don't yet have the clear connection with the broader Current of which I have been speaking on this blog - the world-changing, world-invigorating, current that you can call God, or Revolution, or Ourselves In The Future - to find an alternate means of psychic sustenance yet. So I've been sleeping and crying a lot.

Much more prayer/meditation is called for. I am currently backing off from most of my external commitments - both to make this possible, and because quite simply I have been engaging in politics and art for improper, egotistical motives, rather than letting myself be available as an instrument for the higher realities. No wonder my concrete success has been limited.