Losing Reality
(Without Losing Touch With Reality)
Around the time when I was really just starting to apply my ideas about tesseract magic, and trying to make sense of some very intense and weird things, I wrote an essay about being able to lose reality without losing touch with it. Now that I've begun to share my ideas and experiences with tesseract magic with the public (In Konton Magazine, and various online forums) I've gotten two responses, the first from folks who think it is very cool and cutting edge, and those who think it's total trash. As much as I love hearing the positive feed back the latter had been bugging me, until I rediscovered that essay.
After all it's a bit unsettling to have peers tell you what you perceive to be your life's work is bullshit fantasy. It's true much of the magical experiences I relate are fantastical, but I still see myself as fairly grounded in "reality." The first time I was really conscious of the relationship between losing reality without losing touch with it was after a vision I had in the two and a half weeks I spent fasting and in seclusion in the woods of Maine shortly after graduating high school.
During this time I spent my days meditating, tending the fire, and the lean-to I had built. I also engaged in a lot of physical activity, long hikes, tree climbing, that sort of thing. One night as I lay in my lean-to, meditating, I was overcome by a violent vision which engaged all five senses. In this vision I was torn apart, as I lay there fully convinced I was dying, the same unseen force that utterly destroyed me began to reassemble me. Various objects were inserted into me and my left forearm was branded with a chaos star before I was fully assembled. I cannot say accurately how long this vision lasted as I felt no real sense of time during the vision. That and days totally alone and away from anything that can accurately tell time tends to warp your perception of time.
Though I can at times "feel" the objects that were given to me, I don't really think there is anything physical inside of me, rather I see it as a side effect of a devastating experience that had a profound impact on me. After I gained some perspective on the event, I came to understand that the "reality" of whether I had actually been torn apart by some spirit was immaterial. The meaning and effect of the experience made it real. Though it took a long time to sort through I did eventually come to grips with how that vision related to me in the "real" world. Though I lost reality, I did not lose touch with it.
The world is a very strange place and while I'm all for keeping experiences in context and for examining magickal work precisely and logically, shit happens that sounds illogical, shit happens that can't be explained precisely.
This is the difference between esoteric and exoteric occultism. If I can explain to you, to the letter, how to do something, what the results will be, and what it means, like sigils, it's exoteric. If you had to be there and the best I can do is tell you how I went about it and send you on your way, it's esoteric, it's knowledge which is primarily experiential.
The two aren't isolated of course, and strong grasp of exoteric techniques facilitates esoteric understanding, but my point is this; magick will only advance when we share and try to communicate the esoteric. I can turn people on to sigils all day and that's great, but it's not advancing magick (or myself) Get experimental with your magic, don't be afraid to let go of conventional occult wisdom, of reality, but also don't forget it's only useful if you can incorporate it into your everyday version of reality.
This is how belief/perception/will effects reality, without attempting to sever the strand which joins the mundane with the magickal. Whether you're talking about low magic or high magic, whether you're changing yourself as a person or a more concrete facet of your life is of little consequence, the mechanism is still the same. You must first lose the restraints of reality without losing touch with reality.
That's part of what being a magician is about, understanding that the weird shit is valid, it's just as real as anything else, and understandng how the unreal stuff can (and should) mesh with "reality". And yes when you share your more crazy experiences people will doubt you, and you may even doubt yourself, but please don't let that deter you from sharing. There's a world waiting to be born, it would be a shame if you were too self conscious to help us birth it.
