Refusing to Die

Much of this has been said before by folks with a better grasp at language.

Magic can be one of the hardest things to break. How does a person smash an already flexible view of reality? It’s something that needs to be hardened and then cracked for the gooey unspeakable phantom crap to burst out like a New Orleans levee. I mean, we could pretend for a moment that magic is the aforementioned unspeakable phantom crap, but all I’ve found is that magic is just a way of comprehending it. We can argue ad infinitum about what events constitute magic, and that, in and of itself, makes the damned thing invincible. Some of it we hold onto tightly; we make legions of conjectural structures on a handful of philosophical points. Some of it we let slip through, hoping that the wash of nonsense will accumulate a universal, true structure that underlies all things. That last one’s the most arrogant and tragic. That view has this arrogance in believing that the measly, slapped-together human mind really can perceive a structure greater than its senses or the cultural structures created in the former work. Isn’t it all just reaction to a spooky world beyond experience? Is it just angry dismissal and reaction against experience? Can we really just sit there grinning about how there’s “just this moment”? I can tell you, when I’m puking my guts out from food poisoning, I’m praying for the moment when it’s out of my system.

Our experience left without validation leaves us without any drive. As a superorganism created from deformed monkey stock, this self-aware and variable mental framework became fragile after separation from direct involvement with natural threats. Apparitions compose most of our societal taxations and structures. Separation from the toil of the hunt has come to the toil of a possibly meaningless occupation of time to receive imaginary liquid assets in order to acquire nourishment that’s been killed on an assembly line or in a threshing machine. Guilt over this lack of participation leads people to go to great lengths to “buy organic” or “fair trade,” in order to assuage their guilt over a total lack of interaction. This framework develops arts of combat, still beholden to rules that keep true savagery at arms length. It brings people to create preposterous tools in order to tackle the ordeal of a natural structure that those who live alongside it would rather just respect and let alone, as the hardship of that environment is a regular occurrence. Many of these excursions leave those primal sources of danger worse off. Who will clean Everest of the litters of oxygen tanks and non-degradable thermal jackets from dead mountain climbers? Still, when pressed to hear the story from a person who has been in physical peril, envy creeps in, then guilt, then defensiveness. The drive to prove the worth of one’s traits by besting the throes of death still lives in the furthest abstractions of life, no matter how divorced it is.

These apparitions and theoretical compositions still have major ramifications. A lack of an arbitrarily decided trading unit in a given area can devastate a population, no matter how hard it works, due to a handful of individuals in decision-making positions attempting to increase the stock of that trading unit for themselves in an overvalued sense of self-preservation. That these individuals will have a legacy of terror means nothing to them; the idea that they will have a legacy at all means everything to them.

Without connection to natural events, cycles of psychological development have become just as dangerous to the individual as the external. Without justification for existence, and without a close connection to nature’s randomness to experience survival instincts, the individual falls into what many call depression, characterized by the passivity and irresponsibility of early development and/or desire for the termination of the existence deemed invalid by the evaluating perspective of the individual. One way to posit depression is to perceive both the passivity and the thanatoic drive as methods for the mental framework to alter itself. Without perception of separation between an individual’s own structures, the perceiving function can draw the action to encompass all levels of an individual being, that function could easily judge the entire structure as invalid. However, the separation of those structures can allow the perceiving function to articulate changes in the individual framework and how the being can respond accordingly.

While the separation might seem inauthentic, perhaps untrue to humanity, this current state nonetheless exists. Once externalized, an idea rarely becomes undone. Often, a flow of events renders this idea obsolete in the acting structure of the psychological landscape of humanity, yet these “obsolete” ideas become valid either through revision or through a separate psychological landscape adopting it for its own means of development. As much as humanity lives in a physical world, its imaginary world seems to equally affect its existence, and often this concept becomes marginalized. Responsibility for the psychological environment equals that of the physical environment, as one often reflects the other. In the darkness of modernity and in the possibility of global devastation, some small fragment of meaning must be found, or the thanatoic response will have the capability of extinguishing the entire species, if not much of what can be considered life.

Snarls from Beneath All Things.

The thought of walking out into the cold and freezing to death seems so appealing. Closing the mind off from the body and letting it die... it's coming around again. It's been years since I've been this depressed. It's getting harder to rationalize my way through it.

I've gotten through it before, but each return makes me wonder if the way through was just finding ways to ignore that darkness. It's completely self-absorbed, but that urge to erase all traces of having existed and wandering into the scary wild with the intent to die feels... right, sometimes.

Much as a personality could make broad, sweeping statements of "nothing can do X" or "everything's just so Z that I can't stand it," it's not so grandiose this turn. The mind meets an irreparable paradox in its framework, and excessive association with the mind can lead a being to ignore its other faculties. The unknown factor of this paradox leads the framework into a state of destruction, although this destruction of identity and association can be confused with destruction of the entire being. We have the technology.

I need the "wilds" again. I must set forth into my own destruction, to preserve my existence. This round has a sense of humor: In the season I feel the most alive comes the inescapable sense of wanting to die.

Der Hexen and Old Timey Crotchety Business

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Homunculus Now.

Ladies and gentlemen, today we dicuss homunculi.

Now, legend has them created by mandrake or chicken eggs, in some spermatogenesis goofiness. However, the notion of personified elements as posited by Zosimos seems at least more feasible to my sensibilities. Still, it's just as silly, thinking about little men going "arrrrgh!" all of the time in some constant gory torment.

I've experienced homunculi in the same manner as nature spirits initially, faces that appear in just about everything while I'm in what folks call the "receptive state," or what most folks perceive as being "zoned out." Eventually, certain faces kept repeating, or had a particular series of advice voiced in those moments, and were a bit more accessable, more obviously drawn from some bit of absurdist creation on my part. That little bit of personalization took those faces out of the matter and shaped them into satellite beings in the mental sphere.

This comes almost as a form of depersonalization of particular traits, making a parapersona to observe, understand, and manage before reabsorbing those traits back into the home persona, of course to move in and out constantly. Much of this relates to dolls, toys, and stuffed animals as a child. In fact, most magic comes from things we used to do as kids put into some comprehensible way of observing and understanding reality in a constantly changing manner, opening up new possibilities. It's admitting to madness and using its trappings to find sanity and completion.

One method I use to understand homunculi is beginning to draw the vague pretenses of a face, and watching what happens from there, in a trance. It isn't always symmetric, it's rarely pretty, but the imperfection of manifestation in any reality is the point: these beings are a part of that massive, multidimensional matrix, and manifestation shows merely one small size of an infinitely-sided being, with that imperfection acting as an attempt to stretch or fold that shape into something understandable. That's the point of paradox: let it happen.

Once the face is finished, put it away, and do something that relates to its manifestation while still awake that day, and don't look at it. Let it do its thing until something says otherwise. It's like a sigil with a personality, relating in that human-to-human fashion, touching on the concept of progeny and creation of life.

Naudh a sammitch.

I began ruminating on the "N"-stave rune: naudh, need, whatever you wanna call it.

Poetic kenning tends to color any person's view of a rune. A lot of it becomes a matter of finding words that sound similar, which would relate to actually attempting to poke around in the roots of language and association. Learning the runes becomes a lot easier to understand as the mind removes itself from a solid, unwavering view of language.

Now, the N-phonetic rune, which I'll just call Naudh for simplicity's sake, has had Trouble, Toil, and Need listed as possible definitions. I've just recently come to understand nith as one of the possible associations with the rune, which I'm sure someone's figured out before.

Either way, the concept of nith seems to derive from a sense of a person's roundabout nature in understanding the world, deviance from cultural morality, and the emotions such as envy, hate, and malice. A nithing is listed asa person who inspires these concepts. In a modern concept, we could see a nithing as any group that Billy Graham or David Duke spits bile about, up to and including that idiocy of "well, she shouldn't have dressed like that if she didn't want to get raped."

If we were to put the runes in a circle, then across from Naudh would lie the rune Ing, based primarily about the spread of the cult of Yngvi. Conceptually, Ing relates to cultural and social elements relating to one's own culture, such as eitquette, relations with family, and community-based religious practices. However, just as the alienating and belligerently xenophobic tendencies flourish in those who follow the passive, charitable, and omni-loving Christ, so too does the Ing rune bear an incongruity with its representations.

Nith, as a companion definition of Naudh, seems to relate to our own individual needs and alienating qualities. Those who follow somewhat primitive and rapturous practices, who test the borders of law and morality, would then begin to enter the purview of Naudh: entheogenic Mind-altering substances, unconventional romances, personal ethic, etc.

Naudh itself relates to elements that challenge the relative ease of existence. Constraint, Trouble, elements that begin to display themselves when options run out. To connect this with nith, these elements arrive when the sanctuary of cultural/societal existence begins to conflict with individual needs. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem leaves a passage about Naudh as a source of help and salvation when heeded. A resolution to the Naudh/Ing dichotomy comes from balancing external, societal operations with personal "taboos", so that both have enough space. Too much time spent dealing with Naudh leaves a person alienated from society, and too much Ing leaves a person bigoted and unfulfilled, in this framework.

Of course, Naudh also stands for undoing tensions, such as creative struggles of bringing the internal world into the external, through creative, technological, mathematical, or athletic ventures. Aren't symbols cool?

Seeds of the Luminescent Pomegranate

There's a star exploding in the center of my chest. It's no big deal.

Still sittin' alone. Old board games bring the Mysteries to mind. Not really sure why.

I can feel the leaves and the sighs of the evergreens. I feel like a cat that comes to a person's door every night, yet will never get in. No harm in trying. It's hard to see clearly through the haze of emotion, and I don't want to give up, like I have before with anything difficult. "This Vagina Mine teaches patience, diligence". A semi-unreachable focus seems to stabilize.

The hemispheres gradually work together. Thought augments Feeling. Senses augment Intuition.

Sounds begin to explode once more into muscle. Sorrow in the civilized world feels nearly meaningless. Slowly, I feel like pieces return to the whole. I feel emotions release. I can see the stars again. I can feel that sticky bioluminescence.

I might need to dig up more of this. I feel a little like I've come out of decade-long funk and my muscles are still weak, yet the endorphin surge seems to push me forward for more: more crazy visions, more spirits, more of God throwing me into the Abyss. They feel like a reward for existing.

Hazards of the Flaming Wind and Ghostly Leaf

Salvia has an interesting way of stripping emotional barriers that are otherwise present, yet that same stripping can allow hostile energies to come forth, especially when stimulated. Sometimes the lesson it imparts is to allow that flavoring, that spitting little dram of cataclysmic fire, to exist and cool down. The key comes from learning that we may experience these feelings without constantly reacting to them. Without that separation, a person can be led to constant distraction and interruption, derailed at the slightest change in plan or change in environment. Invention comes from weathering through that transitional, non-physical discomfort and seeking either reconciliation or later prevention. Of course, those same emotional promptings, if unable to remain tethered, can inspire tremendous movements of action, when used sparingly. That allows drama to be, well, dramatic.

The Eastern Seaboard of the US has been a bear to navigate. Rarely do I feel more pallid and bleak than in the sun. My skin chars with a disturbing ease, and my eyes, accusomed to low light and shade by coloration, overload with the influx of illumination. Both have me clamoring for a nice, cool cavern with phosphorescent fungi in opportune pockets. Light and heat do increase the effects of certain recreational means of mine, and so in those moments I do cherish it. It's all a strange beast to follow.

The Very Real Yet Mythic Individuality within the Universe Great and Small

In a fascinating diagram on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, the Milky Way has been laid out, with a diagram popping up, displaying the placement of our sun and how far everything is within the galaxy from it. The Sun is in a little tangential branch called the Orion Spur, breaking off of the smaller Sagittarius Arm, which runs parallel to the larger Perseus Arm. The smallest little tributary of our galaxy bears the whole of our existence. I'm perked up on caffeine, salvia and chocolate, watching the little green tree in the cafe dance in the breeze and consume the photons from the fancy track lights, senses fighting through the sluicegates of interpretation. Our planet, so full and bustling with information and activity, twirling away in this minor stick of the galaxy, nowhere in the neighborhood of the major metropolitan arms of Perseus and Shield-Centaur.

Sometimes events eclipse certain strong associations and experiences within the conscious mind. The willingness to step back and allow a person to endulge their own need to be the special one can sometimes undo one's own associations and unique expressions of connection. From no shortage of ignorance on my part, I allowed a person's need to take ownership of the spider totem eclipse my own associations, forgetting how I would play in basements full of black widows without any fear, or how I would become enraged when my father would reflexively kill spiders. As I'm writing this, a young lady who has seemed usually very closed off and skittish pours open with adoration towards this retriever that has recently undergone hip surgery, showing no shortage of brightness and love in his presence. The parallell existence that the animal poses has ignited her own totemic energy, and I'm inclined to understand it as originating in what Kundalini would note as the Heart Chakra.

Even then, parallel could very well lack the proper range of expression. Sometimes, instead of embodying similar qualities to an individual, a totem can embody qualities that the consciousness lacks, and the Martial quality of separation for a totem has an attractive quality. The Venal qualities of mirrored traits would best prove examples of the attracting of similar traits, running together through the same current (such as electricity through copper wire). This is where Mercurial observation can diffuse and differentiate, allowing for perspective on the intensity of these matters. Then again, the all-encompassing quality of associative principles may be something that I in particular experience from the symbolic Mars and Venus in the sign of Pisces upon my birth, and conjunct, at that.

Objective observation seems an impossibility. Nevertheless, in acknowledging the bias, the observation can in turn move towards that objectivity. Reason is a silly beast.

Thunder Restores Balance Once Again

Stumbling so far astray from the path, the external world ignites itself. If I said I felt no discomfort, I'd be quite the liar; something I'm quite bad at. Still, more than a few will believe the buffoonery spewing forth from my lips at those moments, even me.

I suppose there's something to be said for realizing one's own disaffectedness and disassociation from otherwise turbulent surroundings. The constant level of change can be hard to map, and sometimes incites strong reactions from the emotions, perceiving certian value judgments that attempt to drag the self-perception into a bearing of comparison with the group. The issue becomes "better" or "worse," when all lives have their own quality that cannot be judged in proper comparison. What kills is being unable to perceive a secret urge subverting all activity, when the operating system feels little more than apathy. Some strange thing keeps clamoring for attention, with no regard for source or truth of emotion attached. Do you know how long it's been since I've felt butterflies in my stomach at the prospect of meeting a woman? It's been something close to eight years.

Perhaps Ahriman was right: once an outsider, always an outsider. It's nice and free out here, but it's hard to navigate, for various reasons.

The Phantasm's Balm

Recently I've ben taken to the act of pondering phenomena regarding ghosts and spectral phenomena.

The Spanish film, The Orphanage, reiterated a point I had forgotten; the atemporal quality of a haunting. From the film's perspective, the emotional severity of the incident that precipitated the haunting would create something of a knot in the passage of time, where the incident, lacking sufficient resolution, would continue in the subjective realms and create synchronous events in the standard model.

Part of me wonders how many of us have created ghosts in our own being? I wonder if the presence of ghosts inside facilitates the perception of ghosts in the external model? Of course, a person who has so many elements of reality within them can see that reflection externally. Of course, just about everyone has some form of unresolved emotional turmoil that results in nervous tics, neuroses, PTSD, and so on. To move toward perceiving these elements within oneself confers the ability to see them outside, as well.

The big problem along these lines is gaining that strength to act on these matters with empathy. Thanks to having a martyr god avatar ruling the mythology of Western culture, too many people attempt that absolutely titanic harmonization without considering that it's oftentimes too powerful of a beast for an individual essence to handle. It's not dissimilar to surfing a mammoth wave on one's first try. The wave might be a good place marker, but the act of surfing itself provides a constantly fulfilling goal than the massive achievement, as the act will constantly provide activity and sustenance, while the wave terminates, leaving a source without a path afterwards. I digress.

To heal otherworldly phenomena requires the most minimal push from judgment, and a level of both humility and charity. The phenomenon will speak as to what it needs, since each has its own resolution and rules beyond what we know. If only salting and burning were all that was needed.

The Lunar Gastropod Sings its Glory

I remember as a child watching octopi on nature programs, fascinated by their ability to change both shape and color, their brilliant minds adapting to a shape that had little or no fortitude against the environment. My mother also had a collection of glass animals, one of which was a green glass snail, ever present in my childhood. Nautili would come to me in dreams, and slugs were common in our temperate gardens.

The snail, however, was the mollusk to truly stand out for me, for their analogues to many alchemical concepts; Both hard and soft, with their bodies kept within a great container formed in a logarithmic spiral, hermaphroditic, and complete with four protruberances from its head similar to the four classical elements. Dimension-snails would slowly ooze their way through my work, sometimes croaking out haunting melodies from blue throats. Reflections of their shells and heads would sometimes reverberate through both my ear canal and throat respectively, and loud choirs of shell organs bellowing steam would herald their arrival to impart great secrets.

Phantoma

It was about that time when I slipped on the green, glowing ectoplasm, when the rattling ghosts dragged their way up to meet me.

Ghosts don't always come from someone who died and wasn't buried correctly, or from cranky, insidious goons whom the brothers Winchester must dispose. Many of the ghosts I've experienced have merely been the haunting of certain lingering, unresolved human essence. Many of these are both borne from and held back by funerary custom, which sprung from our own awareness of mortality. I'm certain that dolphins and elephants have experienced ghosts as well. Domesticated pets seem to find a physical analogue with these spirits, but is that something that they derived from their persistent interspecies contact with humanity?

Something doesn't necessarily want me going into such matters, which is what makes it far more worthwhile to tell, don't you think?

To describe what it's like slipping into the realm of the darkened dead is often thought of being this hole between worlds meticulously partitioned, spackled and patched through which some hulking breach of the universe's order has burst through a wall. Hmmmmmm, a bit overdramatic, and perhaps smacking of camp? Iiiiii'd say so. If we consider that existence acts as a spectrum of low- and high-wavelength frequencies, then those moments when the fantastical meet humanity on its own sensory plane are like those little glitches on a scratched DVD. Unlike a DVD, existence seems to share the organic quality of growing and healing, not unlike the phenomenon of "life", and so those scratches either heal or sometimes scar, and the viewing experience changes around the point of intersection to fit it into the story.

I digress. Many of the beings found at the "ghostly" wavelength have been too solid for too long, and their seemingly disruptive actions are attempts to find change and growth. To use an electron as an example, a ghostly being has been a particle for a tremendously long time, and under their relative existential gravity, they seek to become a wave once again. I'm not certain whether this is a consensus of these beings, but at least the ones that we experience seem to crave this.

Nevertheless, this comes up from a certain phantom likened to a played out situation. These ghosts are more personal visitations; they interact with the human heart and send carrion crows to squawk in a person's ear, as a friendly warning. As the life leaves the situation, the visited individual must follow, or find a piece of him or herself missing. The situation will mean something different for each person, yet the world of the one thusly visited requires a diseased branch be trimmed from its World Tree, to offer forth new growth.

My head pounds, my sinuses fill and drain, and I'm still sweating out the lager consumed to steel my nerves after that harrowing journey out from the collapsing den, yet it's worth it all to know that I've saved a piece of my soul.

Staring into the Exploding Suns of Twilight

Living occasionally happens. Constantly staring at one's footfalls when urged forward can cause one to trip. Eyes forward.

The world has been met with great sorrows and joys. Oftentimes, the seeker must feel the weight of betrayal, not as the recipient, but as the merchant of such materials. This essence remains useless when rationalized. The key to endurance is to move forward, fully aware of the transgressions committed, to know what pathways become torn away with each movement while having no idea where these pathways may lead. This step becomes wholly necessary to those who pride themselves in their compassion, as compassion becomes useless when untested and blithely accepted, as with any virtue. To know virtue is painfully to accept an aspect of vice inherent in that decision.

The shaman isn't what most self-help books would have you believe. This isn't an archetype of a mere serene, kindly soul that sits in quiet judgment, dispensing cryptic wisdom while perpetually tending some fire in a tent or childishly jumping around a jungle. These books would have many forget the dangerous, unsentimental and almost callously selfish actions of a person who communes with spirits and the souls of others. A move at the wrong time could set off an animal current of retribution and horror from the shaman. An offer to meddle in his matters could drown an individual in the current of the shaman's lifestream, and trample the person underfoot. Shamans, while often considered healers, contain an equal amount of envenomating, destructive power that can forever cripple a person's soul. This isn't a power to be envied, but a necessary pathway to open when trafficking with beings greater than oneself. To destroy one's own being, one must be reverent of the ability to destroy another. True spiritual power remains unqualified, with no blazing sword to tilt the scale, no black scythe to drag the universe into darkness. These are elements left only to the universe itself, and its manifestations of either merely pebble ripples in an endless ocean of existence that bears more than our senses and instruments will ever truly perceive.

Yet as still, nowhere near any level of proficiency, I choose to walk this dangerous path, to tread amongst the beasts in my soul and hunt amongst the shelves of poisoned, manufactured foods to make sense of the universe as best as it can choose to show me, and with great difficulty carve new languages to understand its message. With no small amount of fear I step forward, knowing that where my foot falls, I shall be annihilated, over and over again, until the atoms of my being forge together to the point of perpetual death and rebirth, with the discipline to bear that explosive energy within my own form.