From the Laboratory

Like it says, learn to concentrate.

Listen up kids, this stuff can seriously ruin your life.

The occultist-turned-tragedy-artist is no new thing. Look at the life of Aleister Crowley. Out on the internets, There’s a couple occult figures who’ve generally made a lot of their biographical details available, and to a great extent, you have to wonder why the fuck they keep banging their head into the wall. They take megadoses of drugs. They spend hours a day in extensive workings. They know the territory, but almost every single time it’s like they forget just what it looks like. They’ve dynamited their sense of observer, and looked over every little ugly facet of existence–and then feel miserable, and proceed to do all sorts of ridiculous shit, like alienate everyone they know, get hit with assault and battery charges, exile themselves to the four corners of the earth, wrap their cars around trees, and most of all spend a lot of time freaking out.

Part of this I can understand. There is a tremendous amount of awful shit in this world to freak out over. Recognizing so is not necessarily a bad thing. Considering how much time most people spend glossing over the ugly web of interdependence, beginning to awaken to these brutal facts of life should develop compassion and morality. I also know that it can make you feel awful, too, but compassion and morality–and above all else a sense of humor–can anchor you in the face of this. If something you are doing is doing you harm, you need compassion to stop; if something feels harmful but might be beneficial, you need some distance (i.e., humor) to keep your discernment intact to evaluate your course of action. If you look into the traditions, there are even practices that involve contemplation of the suffering of others, a contemplation these occultist wunderkids have in spades. But sometimes I have to question how their attention came to rest on so much pain and lamentation: Is it coming out of compassion? Is it coming out of intellectual efforts at understanding? Is it the side-effect of the attentionality? Or is it just a shtick? And does it help you pick up goth chicks? You can always say that Jesus got crucified, but he did it in respect to a sense of ultimate compassion, not out of a need to be crucified or to pose for the girls.

I had a coffeetable book that discussed the character of the “Abject Gladiator”. In Rome it wasn’t uncommon for nobles to sell themselves into gladiatorial slavery, or at the least climb into the arena–the movie Gladiator was heavily inspired by this. The motivations are obvious: glory, thrill, physical enjoyment, and an opportunity for socially-sanctioned murder. But there was also the type of the abject gladiator: the narcissist who literally needed to have all eyes focused on him, since he had no way to reconcile his anger and confusion over the suffering of the world without somehow taking it on himself. And it seems like many of these occult types are doing this to themselves. But in the present day this form of masochism is just a vestigial remnant of those ancient role: today, you’re free to exile yourself to some hole in the wall in the middle of the Northwest Territories and live out some psychiatric hell. But unlike the gladiatorial counterparts from a previous millennium, no one is watching today. It’s not reality art, and it’s not exploring a “reality tunnel”: it’s mental illness.

The Western Tradition, it would seem, lures people into madness. The occult already offers enough bait for the insane, but it also seems to have plenty capability at making crazies out of even the well-grounded, not just the foolhardy and the already-mad. In my estimate, I see three particular reasons for this: first, an overseriousness; second, treatable mental illness; and finally, an inability to enter into bliss-states.

Considering how generally misunderstood and often-times laughable occult practices can seem–after all, chaos magicians recommend using laughter to close rituals–it might come as a surprise that occultists in general take themselves too seriously. We have a very bizarre relationship with the seemingly “supernatural” side of the world and our minds. Regular daily goings-on are boring; having space aliens show up in your bedroom is fascinating. Sadly, it’s your job, not the space aliens, that get you to pay the rent and grocery bills. But your job is still boring and you have a lot of time to fixate over those little grey butt-probers. And likewise we’re told that those little things don’t exist, so why did you see them? Were they a hallucination? Or for real? Did the vision have something to say, or was it just sound and fury? You can fixate over any supramundane experience simply because they tend to be so rich and vivid, and so complicated, that it can be far easier to take the event in total as the “meaning”, rather than the specifics of it, and even those specifics tend to be rich in detail. But like I said, none of that pays the rent. And it definitely does not pay the rent to quit your job and leave your spouse to drive across the country looking for “them” again. You don’t even know how they got there–how could you predicate any personal action on a fleeting rapture you don’t even understand? And how could anything good come out of that? It’s best with many of these things, after they’ve passed, to put them into the filing cabinet in the top-secret drawer with “review later” flagged on it.

Secondly, destabilization, dissociation, and all sorts of psychic hurricanes arise in occult practice. Look at some modern occult conceits. “The circle” represents the self; “demons” are just parts of the mind, etc. The dissociation involved, and the “meta” stance an occultist would need to take with “himself”, is palpable. The practices themselves make this more obvious: invoking into yourself various energies and “god-forms”; acts of possession; flagellating yourself while staring at a little squiggle, etc. Magical psychodrama can be really damn psychiatrical. And spending so much time reformatting the self will, without doubt, begin to upset the ego–its behaviors and patterns are trailing behind your mad intentional dash to reach Ipsissimus or Kether or the Space Brotherhood or whatever. The basic definition of psychological health for the past one hundred years has required that someone have a strong and healthy ego so that they can love and work in relative stability. If your ego is getting curb-stomped by ritual psychedelic drug use (another issue for another time), supramundane experiences, and insight into the real nature of things, the ego is not going to be either strong or healthy.

Now, there are plenty of folks walking around today with all manner of neurosis. You probably call them your “family” and “coworkers.” A lot of them probably believe some really stupid shit, like that Ronald Reagan was the greatest President of the United States. So it’s clear that your ego doesn’t need to be that strong, or that healthy, in order for you to be functional, so go ahead and just throw out all those perceptions that “magick makes you crazy”, because in my book a shitload of “normal” shit is just as crazy. But that said, it’s bizarre how much naivety the magickal scene has about itself–it’s almost like these guys don’t realize that the results of their practice, or at least the side effects, are going to lead to some freak-outs that will need to be checked to prevent any bleed-through to daily life. It’s even stranger because all the visions and visitations and bizarre phenomenon are, by standard psychiatric definition, forms of insanity. “To know, to do, to keep secret” works on more than one level, folks.

One thing that I would like to see disappear is the retarded belief that every upset in life is somehow related to “the Abyss” and that it’s an “initiatory crisis”. That might have worked in Joseph Campbell’s undergrad classes, but it’s not going to work here.

So the psychiatric part of the puzzle is two-fold. There’s a lot of bad shit that’s unavoidable, and, it seems, not really treatable by anything barring more practice. Keep your mouth shut about that. But the other part, the “strong and health ego” part, you can work on: don’t be a jerk, don’t lose your job, think twice about ending any major relationship over something some your “servitor” told you in a dream, stop hurting yourself, and get a shrink. Just remember to keep your mouth shut about a lot of it, if only to stay out of the mental hospital. The bonus here is that these relatively whacked-out experiences will probably cause your own psychiatric issues to float to the surface in a way that wouldn’t happen otherwise, so if you approach it properly you’ll have an advantage of knowing what you need to work on.

Lastly, the lack of understanding behind bliss-states strikes me as a gaping hole in all of the Western practices. When reality is putting your face into the belt sander that is the absolute reality of your senses, being able to turn it off and hide out on the third jhana can be a godsend. As an added bonus, all the practice of getting there will provide a tremendous help in developing a sense of stability and self-reliance in the face of adversity. Time and time again it amazes me that how few people have learned how to tune into a sense of pleasure and bliss that they could access at any time, without a drug dealer or self-help seminar. Maybe the implications of being able to change one’s consciousness at will via powerful concentration would be too frightening for many–after all, if your identity revovles around jumping hoops someone else sets up to get a feeling of reward, and suddenly you can find a happiness independent of others, even if you have to pay in knee pain and a bruised tailbone, then it just might be time for a reckoning and a recounting of ballots. I see some other opposition to concentration from some stupid-ass green/orange meme philosophy about how ADD is the new black in an increasingly interconnected media-saturated world or something like that. But none of this means you shouldn’t concentrate! Learn to concentrate! Everything you do–and I mean everything–will be better.

So, there you have it. Don’t ruin your life up even when you’re getting abducted by space aliens, okay?

So you actually did what I said. That’s good. At this point, you may have found yourself wondering why. Or you may have been getting really, really bored. If you had any concentration to begin with, you likely noticed all manner of strange sensations, some of them seeming worthy of your attention and others not so much. Some of them might have been unpleasant. Well, here’s where we’ll start to sort that out.

Meditation is about strengthening the mind. It falls into two categories, both of which are more or less contrived, depending on whom you ask: concentration and insight. You can’t have insight without concentration, but, sadly, you need some insight to concentrate. Some will claim that the two can be developed separately from one another, and to an extent this is true, but after a certain point, the interrelationship will become obvious. As you develop your mind through concentrating, that laser-like focus starts to notice subtler and subtler things. Some people have the ability to simply concentrate exclusively, ignoring these things and getting into some extremely potent, enjoyable states. Others, by virtue of their individual propensities, will investigate these subtle things that come up.

In all likelihood you’re not operating on either level. You’re still waiting to hear what you need to do.

First off, you need an object of concentration. This could be your breath, a mantra, a yantra or mandala, a circle made out of mud, a blue triangle edged with yellow, a feeling of compassion, or anything else that isn’t going to move barring an earthquake. There are some traditional objects that seem exotic today, like corpses, and some that are just creepy, like staring at some guy on a dias. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as the first procedure is the same: while sitting the fuck still, keep brining your mind to that object to the exclusion of all others. Over and over again. Until the timer goes off. For most of us, this probably will be a several hundred times an hour.

But I have ADD
part zero part one

Shut up. Sit down. As long as you possibly can.

For most of you, that’s probably two or maybe three minutes. You sit down to watch TV and can’t even make it through the advertising segments without forgetting what happened in the last seven minute session. If you hadn’t noticed, that’s why programmers and writers devote the first three minutes of the next block of programming to reviewing the previous one.

I can already hear the detritus from the tech-savvy “Generation Y” screaming it now: “But I have ADD!” In fact, I even hear the would-be erudite among you elaborating: “Communication technology makes us ADD! It means we’re more ‘efficient!’” What is this, the cosmic victim script recovery ward? Take some responsibility for yourself. If you want to master using your iPhone and Blackberry simultaneously, there are a billion websites out there to help you completely check out from your actual reality. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. Did you not read the first fucking sentence? Of course you did, you just don’t remember. Turn off the TV. Find somewhere quiet; barring that, some place where no one will disturb you: a construction site is bad, a coffee shop is worse, and a graveyard or one of those Chernobyl apartment buildings is ideal. Shut up. Sit down.

A funny thing happens when you do this: shit starts to come up. A lot of shit. You have decades, and according to some, eons, of built-up shit to deal with. So you might want to start soon. On the positive side, those of you who were worried that “happiness” and “bliss” would cramp your style because your personalities are centered around your own misery are going to learn just how much of that you actually have. And if you’re one of the lucky few who centered his personality around contriving to be “happy” all the time, you’re about to learn just how ridiculously contrived that really is. But it doesn’t matter. Either way, the way you deal with it is simple: sit still.

Take home points:

• Buy a kitchen timer
• Find some place relatively quiet and sit still
• Set the timer for ten minutes
• Don’t fall asleep and don’t move voluntarily until the timer goes off

But My Pain Is Who I Am
Part Zero

A lot of you guys have bad fucking attitudes about your “occult powers”. From what I gather, that’s because you reached the limits of them. The problem is you ran out of reality gas in the ontological equivalent of scenic Newark, New Jersey. A lot of you didn’t even have enough fuel to get out of the driveway, but you shoved some LSD or DXM in the tank, realized in two hundred million colors and shapes that you were eternal and indestructable, and now you want to kill yourself. So why haven’t you done it?

Maybe, just maybe, you might be stuck in a bad trip to learn a lesson. It’s like people who say “Acid makes me paranoid”. Acid doesn’t make you paranoid; remembering just how much of a shit you are while you’re on acid does. So stop being a shit and learn some of these lessons. There’s a couple of them: first off, if you feel like shit throughout your waking life, maybe you need to make some changes to what your doing. Stop stealing, stop lying, stop driving your brain into chemical oblivion, stop eating things you know are bad for you, stop cheating on your partner, and get some exercise and sunlight. I mean all that in the most compassionate way possible. Maybe you should even have compassion for yourself. Gee, tired of getting the electricity shut off and you hate your job at the gas station? The most compassionate thing to do there is to put away the DVD, get some worthwhile skills, and get a better job. Or spend less and pay down the credit card so you can at least keep the power on. Whatever—just do anything to stop doing the things that are driving you bonkers. Maybe you’ll still be a hamster on a treadmill but at least the next treadmill has less thorns.

What’s with all the negativity? Why haven’t I said anything positive yet? Simple—in all likelihood, something you are doing needs to stop. Most every action stems from compassionate ignorance or ignorant compassion either with regards to ourselves or others, and sadly ignorance leads to actions that are the root of more pain. Yes, cigarettes are delicious and feel great but they burn your throat and lungs every single time and then you die. So stop.

But sometimes it’s nuanced. You can’t stop working if your job sucks and you aren’t independently wealthy, you have to stop working at that job and find some other source of income. But if you’re smoking crack, you need to stop. Again, it’s nuanced—the energy you are putting into something bad may continue to express itself, so arrange a container ahead of time, and more importantly, intentionally. But this is where we turn to operant conditioning for some insight—if you want to stop doing something, just stop and sooner rather than later you’ll extinguish the damn behavior. Here’s another example: Crack is whack. So, stop smoking it, now. Delete “your guy”’s number from your prepaid cell phone. Sign up for a World of Warcraft or Second Life account, or take up something equally pernicious like knitting. You’ll have to give that one up eventually too, but it’ll keep you occupied and lengthen the non-crack intervals you experience.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not so nuanced. You aren’t going to be able to concentrate if every time you sit down to eat that lunch you stole out of the office refrigerator you start justifying to yourself how you “accidentally” choked a couple strippers to death at the last few bachelor parties you went to. Sure, maybe those actions are easy to undertake, but when you have 95% of that operating 10% of your brain devoted to that garbage, a career as an occult superstar isn’t in the works.

I might have said “get a therapist”, but frankly, unless you can find a good one, and you probably won’t, you’re just shelling out a lot of money for someone to listen to you.

Then there’s another lesson. Remember how I said to concentrate? If you had some far-out wild experience that gave you some insight into raw reality, it was probably a lot of fun—and you better not be surprised when unfiltered reality leaves you feeling raw, permanently. You may have had such a potent insight that your personality was altered, permanently. But you need a refuge from that constant sandblasting of which you just became aware, especially if you feel that the experience altered you in some way. And chances are, if you used drugs or a degenerate spiritual technique to get to that point, you have no clue where to hide when you’re staring at the bottom of a dime bag after you just realized that the whole universe is interconnected you don’t have a permanent self and oh shit this is going to get really bad. So learn to concentrate—the factors of concentration include, among other things, “rapture”, “happiness”, “bliss”, and “equanimity.” When the fear and loathing are banging on your door, do you think those might help a little?

Take Home Points:

• lay off the drugs
• stop being worthless human garbage
• learn how to calm the fuck down

An Open Letter to the Internet Occult Community/Blogosphere/Whatever

Learn to fucking concentrate. if you spent one third the time you spend on the all important tasks reading “Dr. Christopher Hyatt”, dumpster diving to find your next burning man costume and drinking cough syrup, etc.–if you substituted just a tiny little bit of your post-modern chaos magician schtick with formal concentration practice, you’d understand the mind and what it can do better. And by “better”, i mean by orders of magnitude over anything your boy Tim Leary scrawled in his prison notes and Robert Anton Wilson graciously ghostwrote back into English. The reason you all have so many debates about what is and isn’t possible and what “magick” can and can’t do is because your minds are so ridiculously weak. You all talk some game like you think there’s some magical mental drag-racing strip somewhere on the astral plane, but you haven’t even gotten off the tricycle yet. So ditch the Ritalin, shut the fuck up and sit down.

That, and if you ever learned to get into a bliss state from concentration, you’d maybe be able to calm the fuck down the next time one of your post-modern ritual (read as: mastrubation) sessions actually works, instead of playing out that same played-out power-madness-turned-to-despair routine. And maybe if you could smooth that shit over, you could finally hold a job long enough to stop whining and maybe even get laid.

Not Such A Good Time To Be A Polar Bear

Dollar “Will Bounce Off Key Support” Levels At Zero