Waking up is hard to do, Again.
I feel like I’m waking up after a long sleep.
I’d been slowly dropping away interests and activities that used to matter to me. “Magic(k)” and the “Occult” ceased to be meaningful to me and I sold off over 2/3rds of my Magic Library. I started becoming more and more reclusive. I started leaving my house less often. I reduced talking to people on line.
I found that my motivation to work on any of my projects had stalled. I stopped working on my book. Despite the fact that I hung my shingle to work with people as a Life Coach I didn’t put any effort into promoting the business or getting clients.
I basically lost all motivation to do anything.
I can come up with a number of reasons, or more honestly triggers, for this shift. A romantic possibility that I was a little too invested in collapsed. I suspect this was the main factor. A magazine project I was working on was abandoned by my partners on it. My magic related friends rejected what I was currently interested as irrelevant to them. I no longer had any overlaps for conversation about that aspect of my existence. This was the point where I said if what I was interested in wasn’t magic then I wasn’t interested in magic. A global journey I’d been planning got cancelled by my travel buddy. My closer friends moved away or stopped talking to me. And so on.
Before this downward trend I had been existing in a kind of manic intensity where the possibilities presented by my life were breathtaking. New ideas and revelations were coming thick and fast. And the self-transformative process I was going through was marked and positive. The last things I was working on before the uh black period was integrating Jungian Archetypes and a kind of ideosyncratic Taoism.
I started coming up again perhaps 2 weeks ago. I started a new project, writing a science fiction novel. I started my drawing program again and I’ve gotten decent at what I set myself up to practice. Despite this shift in direction I didn’t… notice it. I was still asleep.
I started reading a couple of crossover occult books again. Both were books that I picked up during the true beginning of the large cycle I’ve been in. The peak of intensity that set the vector I’ve been on for close to ten months now. Both were books that I hadn’t done much more than skim.
The first book was Meta-Magick: the book of Atem by Phillip H. Farber. NLP and Memetics as Magick using group exercises. Unfortunately there is not much that I could get out of the book without some other people to do the exercises with so I put that book down again for now. Synchronistically, though it linked me with an NLP forum where I randomly encountered the author. So the book is serving a purpose for me. I have a forum for NLP kinds of discussion now.
The second book was Towards an Archeology of the Soul: a paratheatrical workbook by Antero Alli and Friends. It’s a reworking of the ritual technology he developed in his book All Rites Reversed but stripped of the Leary/RAW hippie-ness and deepened with a dark Jungian frame. Exactly what I needed, a ritual technology for spiritual rather than sorcerous work using body and space with a Jungian self-alchemy flavour. I highly recommend.
I hadn’t seriously read the book because in that peak I mentioned earlier I projected rather heavily on it. Mostly a dark/negative charge. Relating in part to that romantic investment I mentioned. So it wasn’t until everything was as dark as the charge I’d put on that book that I could read that book. It wasn’t until I’d given up.
So it was early last week that I read the section named “The Alchemical Nigredo” and recognized where I was living. The shock of that recognition woke me up. This blackness wasn’t the end of my evolution and growth it was a distinct and necessary PART of that growth. And from my awakened perspective I could see how this black phase had already started ending itself.
The nigredo experience was not pleasant. I don’t think it would have been as unpleasant if I’d known what it was as I went through it but then I’m not sure I could have gone through it if I’d kept that awareness. It’s kind of amazing to me that I could forget and fall asleep like that given how important the nigredo concept has been to me in the past.
Also interesting to me is the synchronistic way I set up the books to trigger an escape route. The way I’m picking up exactly where I left off when I fell asleep… the way I couldn’t access the message of the books until they were needed. The… artfulness of how I set that up without awareness of setting that up. Just beautiful.
