Pulsation and Breath

Being, becoming, passing away. A tripartite concession to nothingness. What we consider being is always already an abstraction by the time it has been articulated. A kind of retrospective summary and crystallization. The statement “it is” is nothing more or less than an obituary.

Clutching at fixed patterns is a dangerous ploy. We think rigidity is a life raft in the ocean of endless chaos called existence. We can force rigidity to “work” within carefully constructed frames and conditions. That doesn’t mean that any of it adds up right. The more conditional I make my life, choices, narratives of self and other, the more illusions of control I can conjure. This might be a very dangerous thing.

So rigidity seems to afford a measure of safety from the awe and horror of having to endlessly make un- or under-informed choices. A horror and awe that is inescapable. Yet rigidity does not actually reduce the number of choices of these kinds. It merely asserts a set of pre-decided answers, then denies that other options are available or possible. The magic of habit then comes into play, and free will devolves to seeming destiny.

“why do it this way?” “Because that’s what I do.” This reasoning becomes a substitute basis for much of life. I make a choice in order to get through a dilemma, a loss, a fear, a crisis. I make the expedient call or the anxious reaction. Then I build that part of my life around this reactive, tense bodymind set. Then I call this my identity or my character. I certainly come to regard it as my truth.

On that basis I tell myself I have found my truth. Yet it seems more as though I have just constructed it, conjured my “truth” from the process of reifying reactive, short-term survival responses. Soon my anger and fear are recruited to the legitimation of my defensive posture. Thought and belief swiftly follow. “Why are you like that?” “Here are my reasons.” Yet there are no reasons. There are just ersatz invocations of safety, unacknowledged.

The lack of acknowledgement that all my carefully laid out narratives, reactions, and habits are a product of protective clutching becomes a doom. A self-fulfilling doom. I can rumor myself into smaller and smaller dead ends of selfhood. I can confuse cramped posture and cognition alike as my personality. Beneath these pinched surfaces my organismic spontaneity languishes, suppressed, choked, bound and abandoned.

This is a dissociative dilemma. I am relinquishing my internal communication and integration for the sake of the appearance of predictability, safety, and mastery. The narrative self, shorn of embodiment, uses its only tool – reification – to protect the whole. In doing so it takes over responsibility for the whole organism. There is no room for gut feel, heart guidance, or brain hemisphere integration. Just narrative cramp. Fruitless clutching at “meaning” that was scrapped together under duress and passed off as necessity.

The project of recovering spontaneity is fundamental and essential. The project of abandoning safety cramp is essential. The project of redefining responsibility and choice to embrace the unknown is essential. The more I flee from what I cannot control the more it silently shapes me. Control lies in the clutches of the random, the uncertain, the ambivalent yet resolutely playful experiment. It lies in heuristics, not linear prescriptions.

The first step in embracing uncertainty lies in shaking. Shaking the body. Letting it pulsate, tremble, quiver, tense and release over and over again. When we perceive danger we instinctively clench and tighten. The longitudinal patterns of this tensing and tightening – making them habitual and unconscious – is what we mistake for our true nature. True nature, just the hackneyed grab bag of disowned safety reactions in the body!

So we shake, and tremble, and pulsate, and breathe heavily. We make spontaneous movements that make no sense, that have no readily interpretable meaning. Not being able to interpret is important. The inchoate forces us to confront the constricting armor of our habits in a new way and perhaps to loosen them.

The breathing is particularly essential. We ignore, deny, and suppress the breath. Somewhere in my life I held my breath in the face of fear and the danger passed. So I learned that stilling the breath “brings” safety. How ironic that oxygen starvation and carbon dioxide poisoning might be associated with safety! So we have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome with the act of holding the breath.

The antidote is a practice of welcoming and generosity. Instead of clenching the breath in when we face fear, anxiety, anger, uncertainty, confusion, overwhelm, we deliberately breathe out into our fear. Into our projections about the future, the past, ourselves, others. We give something of ourselves, and behold: we empower ourselves. Giving away, we acquire.

This paradox is no accident. Paradox is a fundamental principle of this existence. Extremes become their inverses. Constantly. Duality is always unified according to the field through which it plays out. When I clench and tighten I choose “safety,” and in abandoning “risk” I lose safety, exchanging it for rigid patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that trap me in danger responses perpetually. A poor exchange.

On the other hand, if I recognize and embrace paradox for what it is, that is to say, the primary stitch by which existence is sewed, I generate a different sort of profile as I move through the waters of life. I cease fighting inevitability. I cease insisting on an impossible level of uniformity, pattern, structure. I am no longer asking for impossibility, so I am no longer disappointed.

I no longer need to justify my existence on some basis of moral judgment, which frees me of the self-appointed burden of judging others. My existence becomes a long-cycling dance between breath and breathlessness; inhalations and exhalations. Belly expanding and contracting. Mouth and nasal passages massaged by air in motion. Lungs expanding and contracting, communing with a heart that beats in coordination. Organs can come into their own, flowing, fluid functioning.

Nervous system follows. Not just brain, whole body nervous system. Heart. Gut. Periphery. Sympathetic and parasympathetic (another great duality!). Embracing experiencing breath first, I embrace the duality of scarcity and plenty embodied in every inhale and exhale. My basis of moment to moment awareness ceases to be tectonic – always only one earthquake from total disaster – and assumes instead a tidal character, a rhythmic grace.

When I abandon rigid, protective cramp in favor of the pulsation of the breath, I gain self-mastery. Mastery not as dominion-over, but as oneness-with. Thought and flesh are restored to their original unitary flow. I am not longer enslaved to my protective cramp, that rigidity that I can so easily mistake for my character or personality.

The process of depatterning and repatterning is no easy thing. Many false starts are entailed. So be it, these two may be welcomed as necessary, even integral. There is never anything wasted. So no need to fear or resent suffering, since it too is one part of the movement of pulsation. We are made of water. Water does not resent itself, or fear itself, or try to impose an order upon itself. It is spontaneously self-organizing when we cease to intrude upon its natural and intrinsic logic.

We forget that falling in love, we must also come to terms with what we find annoying and distasteful – even downright intolerable – in the other and also in ourselves. Yet it is precisely this confrontation that leads to our greatest growth.
– Robert Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow

Johnson’s point is palpable. Like it or not, we are married to ourselves and to our being thrown into this world. I can manage the vulnerability of this marriage by constriction, fear, and armor. I can disappear or impose. I can strain, clutch, force, insist, demand. These are not behaviors of relationship. These are behaviors of control and destruction. I visit them on myself as well as the other. The more I use them on the other, the more my own spirit withers. The more my spirit withers, the more pathetic I judge my ability to thrive, and so the more I resort to imposing domination on my world.

The involuntary marriage to self cannot be redeemed through any amount of control clench. We must instead take it over. Declare “thus I willed it,” even if initially this tastes like a lie. Alternatively, perhaps we ask ourselves the question “how would I proceed if I had willed this, too?” This little act of make-believe pairs well with the long slow outbreath into each moment. The deliberate breath and the deliberate thought. Movement follows as a natural course, a water tide.

The corollary of this softening of tightening is that we must embrace even it. Sometimes the intentional recruiting of all of our resources to tightening can free us from its clutches. Sometimes the only way out is to recapitulate with intention and irony. Rather than resisting and giving in to rigidity as we so readily do. Holding my breath too could have its necessary purpose and value. When I have learned I can readily breathe I can learn to hold my breath so lightly that even constriction comes to be seen in its fullness as a natural moment in the oscillation of my flesh psyche. No need to fight constriction, no need to control the urge to control. Allow it to return to its place in the tide of ebb and flow.

If I am living true to these conjectures, it might not be particularly noticeable. There might be little observable contrast from the outside. The point is not to define some sudden, dramatic, and perplexing transmutation. This expectation still secretly mounts itself on the steed of disowned clench.

Instead, I might simply be saying yes to the iterative uncertainty of self-definition and self-recognition, where before I tried to make it be through force of will (so funny, when nothing can be made to be, only witnessed and nourished).

Witnessing and nourishing I become. I honor becoming. So this is an ethical calling also, this call to pulsation, breathing, trembling, seducing ourselves to the nonbinary and the expansive. We leave “should” tattered in our wake, not because we should, but just as a natural byproduct of “how would I proceed if I had willed this, too?” We will even our shortcomings, failures, disappointments, and inconsistencies. Are these not also precious jewels if all experience is a precious, pulsating jewel?

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Relativizing the Ego

Relativizing the ego. The ego, which includes the id – all thoughts, beliefs, memories, expectations, feelings, emotions, impulses, intuitions, attachments, habits, dogmas, doubts, all manner of repetition, novelty, delight, and disgust. Mammal, reptile, human.

How to relativize the ego? Close observation without pursuit, avoidance, or response. The oscillating fury of the psyche is permitted wholly, yet is rendered inert by that very permission. There is no purchase for it. It is already bought. It is priceless, thus free.

To recognize every story as story. To break the psychic fourth wall. To be actor, director, playwright, audience, and stage. The theater of the mind is restored as a metaphor once we understand it to be first and foremost fractal. It simultaneously contains and is contained. Exceeds and is exceeded. Observes and is observed. Creates and is created. Destroys and is destroyed.

Being. Becoming. Passing away. The reel on which the film is wound; the film to be wound on the reel; their gestalt unity (a double truth: 24 frames per second!). In the flow of projection. A film about itself. A film filming its filming. The serpent seeks its tail.

An absolute ego is enslaved to the game of snakes and ladders. A relative ego belies the game. It looks to the hand that rolls the dice. That comes into being to roll the dice. Permitting the game, it transcends it. Embracing the game, it exceeds it. Detached from victory and defeat, it wins every time, even when it does not.

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Racism as Self-Hatred

Racists hate themselves. It is plain to see that I can only do to another what I have first done – psychologically speaking – to myself.

To hate you for your race, I first have to empty out my self-esteem. So much so that my only remaining life raft of self-acceptance is pinned to the flimsy veneer that is the shade of my skin.

The more I hate on you, the more I run away from myself, from self-love. The more I run from self-love, the more I loathe myself, and so the more compelled I feel to hate on you. If I could just outrun myself in the act of hurting you, I might finally have peace.

But the only way to outrun oneself is death. Hence the racist may be tempted to escalate to the point of violence. Secretly, they hope they will be killed. Racism is the mangled expression of a death wish.

Who profits from this death wish? The profiteers of course, that tiny economic elite. They’re so afraid. But they’re much better at manipulating their fear than the typical racist is. They know how to control the fight/flight reactions of millions of racists, each of them enslaved to self-hatred.

This is why racists need to say things like ‘all lives matter,’ or ‘but white people face racism too!’ They know firsthand how much they hate themselves. They know firsthand how little they themselves believe their lives matter. But they are dishonest with themselves about it. So instead of wanting to elevate themselves they would rather drag everyone else down to their level of misery.

This is why racists will never be Heathen, even the ones that claim to be Heathen. Heathenry doesn’t work without the bonds of love – of self, of family, of friends, of ancestors, of spirits, you name it. Racism is a love vacuum, a superficial layer over a yawning chasm. A chasm that will never be filled by more of the very thinking and behavior that fuels it. Racists are in a no-win battle with their own self-hatred.

Now I’ll be first to say that, though I might wish better for them, people are certainly entitled to hate themselves if they want to. The problem is when they are dishonest or ignorant, and as a result choose to lash out at others. The problem is when they conjure specters of evil as a justification for sinking to even worse, actual, expressions of ill doing. That is contemptible. Racists, deep down, know that their stance is contemptible, but they run from that knowledge too, caught in a vicious cycle, projecting disowned self-hatred onto whoever they judge to be ‘other.’

Racism is a cowardly practice, a dedicated running away from oneself. If only racists were to give themselves even one breath of compassion. They might discover they like themselves. They might discover the world is far more beautiful than they ever dared imagine. They might rise up and overthrow the cynics that continue to manipulate and control them. They might learn how to laugh honest, buoyant, delighted laughter.

They might find their way back to being human.

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Heimlich A Laguz Interviewed on Weird Web Radio

I was recently interviewed on the Weird Web Radio podcast by fellow Elhaz Ablaze book contributor Lonnie Scott. We talked about runes, occultism, mystery, Loki, ghosts, chaos magic, Odin, doubt, and the processes of healing. It is a fun, freewheeling stream of consciousness and for the most part, I think I managed to avoid embarrassing myself.

The only thing I forgot to say was that, while I make some criticisms of Edred Thorsson’s whole “you have to memorize five pages of my second-rate poetry to do the most basic magic” trip, I myself do write and memorize long and complex ritual passages, and believe that this can be a deeply worthwhile way to approach magic and devotional practice alike. I just don’t think that it is necessary to get results, and also, well, gods some of his stuff is awful. But I digress…

Part of the podcast is a subscriber-only section (it is super cheap!). If you enjoy the main interview I definitely recommend flicking a buck or two to Lonnie so you can hear the rest; I actually think that last part (which ran close to 30 minutes if I recall) was the most interesting.

http://weirdwebradio.com/episode-29-heimlich-a-laguz-talking-chaos-magic-heathenry-runes-and-spirits/

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Everything is True, Nothing is Permitted

What if the great slogan of chaos magic, “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” were a load of total, utter hogwash? What if it weren’t worth the pixels I just spilled on quoting it? What if it were as far from the facts of things as any statement could be? What if everything is true and nothing is permitted?

Everything is true. All stories bear resonance, richness, woven from narrative palettes that Eliade, Jung, von Franz, Campbell, and others have more than adequately illuminated. The arcing unities across divergences – of duality, quarternity, decay, rebirth – imply a formality among the infinite multiplicities.

Robert Johnson tells the story of a duplicitous client for whom he provided psychotherapy. The client was meant to practice active imagination in their therapy sessions. After some time, the man declared that he had been lying to Johnson the whole time and in fact was fabricating all of the psychological material that he had been presenting. He began laughing uproariously, delighted to have fooled the illustrious psychologist.

Yet Johnson was unperturbed. He reminded himself that in the past when he had been made a fool, the world had not ended. So he waited and watched and let the man’s laughter run its course, until it turned to tears and anguish. Then the client realized that, though his stories might have been made up, nevertheless they expressed the truth of his struggles and suffering in life, and that in spite of his best efforts to obfuscate, Johnson had indeed been guiding him on a healing path.

All those lies, yet woven from truths that would not be denied. Everything is true.

Liars have to convince themselves they are being honest in order to be convincing, after all. Honesty is partly a matter of physiology, of a felt sense. Many a soul doubts their accurate judgment because it conjures sensations of uneasiness. They have forgotten that everything is true.

If everything is true then there no longer needs to be war, fear, famine, or scarcity. Each individual is invited to carve their own creases in the roots of the world tree. We go beyond the binary, either/or, and embrace the complexity, both/and. There is no longer the awful burden of being right, so ideology will naturally soften back into the supple flesh of poetry from which it fossilized. Oh for a world forged from poesis!

After all, if my ability to feel good about my beliefs does not depend on correcting yours then we can skip the wasteful pointlessness of “I am right, you are wrong.” No longer do I have to enslave myself to the mistake that merely listening to a point of view is the same as endorsing or supporting it. Ah, for a world which empowered all to listen! The “Havamal” is quick to recommend that one hold one’s tongue, slow to encourage one to speak up.

But if everything is true? What about when my belief and another’s directly contradict one another? What about when one belief is grounded in exhaustive quantities of credible evidence and another a product of obvious fantasy? Surely if I believe that getting stabbed through the heart is healthy, my belief will soon be revealed as evident falsity. And through this possibility of incommensurate belief, we find ourselves in the grip of conflict, of seeking to impose our truths on one another.

Thus is the importance of insisting also that nothing is permitted. Put simply, the fact of my truth being a truth does not permit me to act. If I want to impose myself on you, I am not permitted to do so, not any more than if I want to help you and act on that belief. If my truth says I have a right or obligation to impose myself on you then I will be at an impasse, since other truths contradict me, and who can honestly make the decision for the right aggregation of truths?

Rather, the only choice, the only way out, is through adopting the stance of curiosity. Of genuinely, open-mindedly trying to listen to myself and to others. If the rightness of my belief is no basis for justifying my impingement on another then all I have left is the process of communication, clarification, seeking understanding. My senses of humor and irony will need to be well developed if this is going to work.

What would a magic built on this principle, “everything is true, nothing is permitted” look like? There would be much less need for egoism, paranoia, selfishness, pomposity. There would not be the grasping desperation that makes spells fizzle if not enacted with inordinate, effortful strain. There would be a lightness, a playfulness, a looseness, a sparkling, dancing, improvisational grace. There would be no groaning, creaking dogma; no clanking rigidity.

Once we stop having to fight about who is right, and once we relinquish any pre-determined right to act, our only remaining options are curiosity and play. We become as the dance of quantum foam, or the artful romance of fire and ice. We are almost obliged to honor the truths of others, and likewise, to genuinely – not just in a shallow or narcissistic or lazy way – honor our own (ever incomplete and changing) truths.

The beautiful thing is, you can disagree with these words to your heart’s content and I will affirm you for it. Which frees my energies to create, listen, adapt, cultivate. I don’t have to fight anyone for my right to exist, so therefore I have no need to oppress either. Victim mentality evaporates (so often it seems that the more power someone has the more of a victim they think they are). Victim mentality chokes creativity. Abundance follows from a surfeit of truths and a dearth of permission.

The elegance of the idea that nothing is permitted: it creates a radical sense of responsibility for the consequences of my actions, since I can never justify my choices (who can claim to be omniscient after all?). This is healthy insofar as it invites me to question the places where my truth, true though it is, might yet be incomplete and in need for expansion. Oh, so now our energies go to learning rather than defending. Sounds magical to me.

If everything is true, then the slogan “nothing is true, everything is permitted” can continue to be valid. Inverting this celebrated formula does not oblige us to abandon it. Why settle for one lens on reality when we could have an infinity?

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Ancestor Worship is Not About Biology

There’s this notion among some Heathens (even, occasionally, progressive ones) whereby ancestry is reduced to biology. This is unfortunate for a few reasons.

First, it is anachronistic. There are interesting saga references by which an individual’s personal orloeg could be inherited by someone named after them – even if not related, in fact, even if the child of their enemy! So if ancestry can be determined by intentional naming, that’s much more complex and nuanced than the crass rigidity of biological reductionism, which really only emerged as a convenient way of legitimating colonial invasions in the last few hundred years.

Jettisoning biological reductionism opens up the realization that a connection to ancestry is rooted in an ongoing relationship, not mere static membership of a group based on some kind of (possibly quite arbitrary) putative genetic connection. After all, geneticists consistently find that there is more genetic variation within specified racial or ethnic groups than between different groups!

Biological reductionism implies that the work of being connected to the ancestors is done by default. This is a short step from basically ignoring the ancestral currents that might be present. If I recognize that ancestral connection is an ongoing conversation, one in which at best I am an equal partner, well that’s going to have a very different implication for what “ancestor worship” might mean to me.

When we look at traditional cultures we see an emphasis on regular personal and ritual practice aiming at maintaining and strengthening relationships with ancestral figures, be they specific individuals or more nonspecific (and that can include animal spirits, plant spirits, spirits of place, etc.). Ancestral connectedness is rooted in practice, not in labels. There is little room for the cultivation of reverence if we burden ourselves with the blinders of biological reductionism.

Secondly, biological reductionism, particularly in the context of painfully modern (and unscientific) racial categorizations, obscures the fact that ancestor worship is not about abstract categories and groupings (like “white” or “Asian” or whatever). It is about my personal, specific lineages, the specific threads of relationships that bind me to the weave of history.

So when the now openly white supremacist Stephen McNallen says he would never have had children with a Tibetan woman because he would want his descendants to “look like us,” he is missing something really obvious, namely that by having children with our hypothetical Tibetan lady, he would be melding lineages with that woman, and thus the Tibetan ‘them’ and McNallen’s white ‘us’ would be united, woven as one. His Tibetan-European children would look like “us,” because in his marital union his “us” would have expanded from what he had before.

Indeed, this applies even if two people of the same race marry, since as I noted genetic variation within groups is greater than between them. Thus, genetically speaking, McNallen might have actually promoted more uniformity in his genetic descendants precisely by marrying and procreating with someone of a different race! I am sure this nicety would be lost on someone as dim as McNallen, of course.

Thirdly, biological reductionism excludes the possibility of spiritual and philosophical ancestors. Figures such as C. G. Jung, Lao Zi, Sylvia Rivera, Milton Erickson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, and Marie-Louise Von Franz are all philosophical or spiritual ancestors to me, even though I am not biologically related to any of them.

Similarly, I have much deeper connection to the people I choose as family than almost all of my biological family – why should that be devalued in the name of biological reductionism? And that’s before I get to the Heathens I’ve known who are not of European descent yet who have taught me such profound lessons about the old gods and ways, and who are clearly and deeply connected to the Heathen current (much more so, in fact, than many, perhaps most, of the European-descended Heathens I have met).

And now I think about it, I have no Heathen blood relatives, so all of my experience of Heathen ritual and community has been shared with people I am unrelated to. Does our at-best distant ancestral similarity somehow undermine the very real depth and power of our relationships? I should think not.

In our book I write about how ancestor worship ultimately articulates an animistic vision of mutual symbiosis, interconnection, and relationship among all things. If I am really serious about worshipping my ancestors, it is arbitrary to say that they end at the elusive and ever-shifting boundaries of skin color or nationality.

Odin, Vili, and Ve are described as creating the first humans from trees. Those trees are ultimately formed from the remnants of Ymir’s corpse, since that is what the whole cosmos is shaped from. How can Odin be the ancestor of any human, therefore, if ancestry merely means biological relationship? Indeed, how can we call him a god when he is clearly described as being of giant stock? And yet we are assured that he is the Allfather, and the highest of the Aesir; apparently his kind of ancestrality transcends mere blood relatedness.

Thus ancestor worship, once it is freed from biological reductionism, opens an infinity of doors. But when it is burdened by biological reductionism it merely amounts to stagnation, hypocrisy, and denial. It takes fertile possibility and makes a barren waste of them.

Ultimately, reducing ancestry to biology is a move from the miser’s playbook. It’s anachronistic as far as Heathenry goes, and it stifles the free flow of the creative spirit. It reduces living relationships to empty, static formalisms. It violates both the primary sources and the philosophical foundations of Heathenry, assuming we understand the Heathen worldview to be based on a vision of wyrd as the interconnecting matrix of all.

Thus: it is really crucial that we divest the concept of ancestor worship from modern oppressive concepts of biological race. Not only for the above reasons (i.e. that biological reductionism undermines the quality of our Heathenry), but because biological reductionism threatens to reduce Heathenry and/or ancestor worship to being an excuse for hatred and bigotry. No thanks!

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Irony and Magical Combat

You know that whole deal about those bad, black magic people, they’re attacking me! Well, sometimes it isn’t entirely rubbish. But that doesn’t mean that all is what it seems! Now read on…

I can’t believe I’ve never written an article about fighting off a magical attack from another person. First time for everything. I’ve had a few experiences of magical combat and I generally seem to do quite well with it.

In the last week or so I’ve been a target (gods, I feel so ridiculous even saying that, like ‘dark adepts of the fifth dimension of evil are persecuting me’ and all that occult stupidity). I think I have the problem addressed for now, and I even am pretty sure about who is responsible (because isn’t it always someone you know? Ugh!).

It got me thinking about an experience I had years ago with being magically attacked, and I think it is a fun story worth the telling. To be precise, I wasn’t the target, a friend (ex-friend) was the target.

I was hanging out with this friend and another person one evening. My friend had been having conflict with her co-worker who was also inclined to the magical arts. She also had a flair for the dramatic and that night managed to summon up a fair bit of drama!

It was so long ago that I don’t remember exactly how it all went down, but something along the lines that while we were sitting around (gods, back when I smoked cigarettes, yuck!) she started reported feelings of pain, discomfort, and then began to freak that her co-worker was attacking her.

From there somehow she found herself dismantling a piece of art he had given her and declared that she had found dried urine on it and that he must have given it to her as an anchor for a curse. In hindsight, I have to say I think she was wrong about the urine, but whatever. A shame, it was cool artwork.

Well the magical attack on her gets more and more intense. In short order she is freaking out, writhing, in physical pain, crying out, melting down. Her other friend and I are wracking our brains about what to do! So I create a little spell.

I set up magic to backtrace the attack to its origin, and once there, to cause the liver of her attacker to start rupturing. Yeah, I know, that seems kinda mean, right? I was pretty frightened for my friend and I was very loyal to her. Someone wants to mess with her? They’ll stop or they’ll go to the hospital. At least if there had been time to think about it that would have been my logic.

I don’t remember how I activated this magic, just some visualization if I recall. I felt the spell connect, the trace was in, and I sent through the liver attack spell. I hadn’t told the others what I was doing, it was totally internal.

So imagine my surprise when, immediately after I had triggered the liver attack, my friend cried out “my liver, my liver, they’re going after my liver!” I immediately stopped the spell, checked my trace, and sure enough the attack was wound in a big loop around her. She was lost in her own magical drama and was attacking herself out of her paranoia that her co-worker would do so. He, no doubt, was utterly oblivious to the whole episode.

I changed tack and with the other person bound up the attack into a psychic box, took it out of the building and down the street, and imaginally blasted it to smithereens. My friend was no longer reporting or demonstrating any symptoms of being magically attacked.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was self-inflicted as I thought she would react badly. Maybe I should have. I think her other friend independently came to the same conclusion though, based on some things he said in passing on a later occasion.

It was a good lesson for me in the dangers of magi who get self-obsessed. She was stunningly clairvoyant but lacked the willingness to question herself and the result was talking herself into a bad magical situation. There were other times where that insecurity/self-blindness cause her (and me!) embarrassment, but thankfully no other occasions I know of where it led to unpleasant magical shenanigans.

The friendship gradually fizzled as our differences magnified and it became clear that our alchemy was off. I haven’t seen or heard from her in many years and I hope she is doing ok. She had some amazing gifts as a psychic, card reader, artist, musician, writer.

The lesson from this story: cultivate a powerful sense of irony. We can destroy ourselves trying to make ourselves safe from our fears.

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Tearing the Veil of the Mentally Blind

From the mentally blind come ideas that are poison; take away the power, a shallow person you will find.
…
What would you do without your pathetic narrow-minded approach to life that reflects your lack of abilities?

– “Mentally Blind,” Death (Chuck Schuldiner)

I could just post these two quotes from the above-mentioned song, but perhaps laboring the point is warranted.

The more that Trump and his cronies lash out, the more empty and pathetic they feel. The more pathetic and empty they feel, the more they lash out. The more they cultivate the cowardice of ‘ends justify means,’ the more they abandon faith in inner spiritual power and embrace their slavery to the veil of Maya. ‘I can only feel ok if you do exactly what I want, and I want you to go away forever!’ What contemptible weakness.

Thus the genesis of the endless hyperbole, straight from the Hitlerian playbook: make the lie ridiculous enough and people will start to believe it. Keep them caught up in their anxiety, fear, confusion, and anger and you can make them do whatever you want: “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” (Voltaire).

Eventually the edifice of tyranny, the tower of xenophobia, paranoia, racism, sexism, undisciplined militarism, and above all the funneling of ever more wealth into ever fewer hands, will fall. The more engorged this leech of arrogance becomes, the more explosive will be its demise. That’s bad, because the rest of us will be the collateral damage.

So fight these small-minded, shallow scumbags. Defeat them before they reach terminal bloat detonation. Fight the infectious stupidity that they seek to promulgate. Fight their pathetic, narrow-minded approach to life that reflects their lack of abilities.

Now, more than ever, magic must be marshaled against the buffoon brigade: the Trump administration and all the white supremacists who have forgotten that the Nazis lost World War II because their philosophy is weak.

Magic must be marshaled to shatter Trump’s mange-riddled egregore of mediocrity and hatred. The rabid pig must be dealt with, and magic must play its part.

Magic must be marshaled, with fierce and unrelenting delight. Delight in the downfall of the jotun in the White House, in the downfall of all his twisted hypocrisy, delight in the technicolor possibilities of a world wrested from the clutches of late-stage authoritarian capitalism.

A simple enough sigil will suffice: Thurisaz Jera Tiwaz. Add a valknut to conjure the blessing of the master of death. Invoke with delighted fury and banish with furious mirth.

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Owls, Wasps, and Vipassana Meditation

About three and a half years ago I had a strange, early-morning encounter. It was about 7am, pitch black winter gloom, and I was walking to work. As I passed by a tree, I looked up and found two gleaming eyes looking back at me.

It was big, and white, and intense. And as the owl stared at me, as I stared at it, a word imposed itself upon my consciousness. “Minerva.”

“Oh, “ I responded, “Minerva, like Athena!”

“NO. MINERVA.”

This bit of insistence on specificity was interesting given how syncretic the Greek and Roman cults were, and given that I was receiving this message from a North American owl that surely didn’t have much of a relationship with ancient Rome.

Ok, well. We stared at each other for a bit longer (it was very close!) and then I continued on my way. Later I found out that there had been a spate of owl attacks on early morning walkers in the area, but not on me. I did spend some time after that researching Minerva, however, and discovered her to be a central goddess for the Romans, ruling over wisdom, social harmony, reflection, even healing. I was jealous of Roman reconstructionist pagans: it seemed like those Roman pagans wrote everything down.

Now. At the time I was experiencing a good bit of psychic turmoil and one day in wrestling with this turmoil it visualized itself for me as a cloud of wasps buzzing about me, stinging me with painful thoughts and feelings. “What can I do about this?” I wondered. Then, an imaginary owl came flying in. “If you do what I instruct, I will drive these wasps away from you. Deal?” Deal.

So the owl came in and swept the wasps away with flaps of her strong pinions. And thus was I obliged. I asked Odin about this odd circumstance of suddenly dealing with an ancient Roman goddess at the behest of a modern North American owl. He could have said, “well I’m an Old Norse god and you’re a modern Australian-American, so what the fuck?” Instead he said, “there is some work you need to do and she is the one to help you do it, so I am stepping back for a little while.”

The first instruction was to write a song in Minerva’s honor. I did that. It is 18 minutes long, very complex and interesting, with lyrics about healing and transformation through radical acceptance. I hope to have a good recording of it by the end of the year. It is fun to perform. People seem to like it.

The second instruction was more challenging: attend a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat as taught by S. N. Goenka. I have wanted to do this for many years, and the stars have never aligned. Now I was instructed. It was a grueling experience, and profoundly transformative. Profoundly. In ways I could never have imagined.

Goenka’s approach to lay Buddhist meditation practice could almost be called Chaos Buddhism: emphasis on traditional structure and philosophy, but only as a means to allow the individual to faithfully and safely articulate their own personal development and realization. No dogma here, just profound discipline (and a lot of physical and emotional pain, the kind that silly Westerners run away from all too readily, not realizing it is the door to healing).

I also discovered that the lyrics for my Owl Song almost exactly paraphrased teachings and technical advice offered in the course of the 10-day retreat. It was as though I had been primed to gain maximum benefit. I was also struck by the many parallels to Jung’s ideas (even though scholars dismiss Jung’s writings on Buddhism, perhaps with reason). The critical advantage of Goenka’s take on Buddhist practice over Jung’s psychology is this insight: the body is the unconscious mind.

(To be fair, I have since noticed that Jung does also say this, but he never decisively knew what to do with it. Undertake a Vipassana retreat and you will know what to do with it).

Since that time I have maintained a strong daily meditation practice. At first 2 hours a day per the course recommendation, but the realities of work, study, family, creative, community responsibilities have meant that I only do an hour a day. Even this has been profoundly beneficial. It is like clearing my path back to the Well of Wyrd each and every day.

My wasps have diminished, but more importantly, I am more indifferent to the pain they cause, yet without having to resort to denial or dissociation. With expanding powers of acceptance come expanding powers of all types. There is nothing passive about the applied technical practice of Buddhism.

Every day, no matter what else happens, I spend an hour listening to the sensations of the body. Gradually stripping more and more layers of conditioning, trauma, amnesia. This is not just “mindfulness of the present moment,” it goes much deeper (though it necessarily builds on that foundation). If you want to really understand meditation you need to go back to the Eastern sources directly. A lot of the Western adaptations, though well-intentioned, are inadequate.

I have to laugh at how I came to become a Vipassana practitioner, the unlikely confluence of influences. North American owls; Roman goddesses in some sort of alliance with Old Norse gods, all conspiring to get me to study Buddhist meditation of a specific Burmese-Indian strain. Well, ok. Chaos Heathen.

Does it work, though? It works, though. Does it distract me from loving attentiveness to the forms, traditions, and trappings of Heathenry? Not at all, it actually increases my faculties of appreciation. Is this story ridiculous or wonderful? Yes.

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The Forest of the Unnamed

Perhaps within you there is something that might be called the Forest of the Unnamed. You might find it waits within you on the very periphery of your awareness, hovering in anticipation of your attention. It lurks hungrily, greedily, its vast unknown waiting keenly to devour and to be devoured. It is a promise, and a gift, and a threat, a tension and obligation, a pledge of self to self.

Perhaps this Forest of the Unnamed has languished. Perhaps it has languished out of mind’s sight, forgotten, its paths abandoned, its ways lost in a haze. Perhaps you have neglected it, ignored its subtle siren calls. Perhaps you have set it aside, turned away from its invitation, permitted yourself to slide past its green embrace.

In favor of what have you declined the call of the forest? The call of pavement and smog. The call of street signs and regulations. The call of authority and order. The call to suppress spontaneity in the name of conformity. The call to deny the natural flow of the body as it is. The call to value the self only in terms of predetermined categories, the blandishments of capitalism, technocracy, reductionism, objectification.

A thing is not a thing. A thing is a door into magic. Anything can be a door into magic. Everything is a door into magic. Magic is another name for the Forest of the Unnamed that waits, forlorn yet hopeful, for your embrace. Yet this secret, hidden in plain sight, has been hidden by authorities, by judgment, by greed, by objectification, by control. Untether a human being from their inner Forest of the Unnamed and you can control them and make them think this is a good thing. You can destroy the world in their name.

The process of recovering one’s personal Forest of the Unnamed is fraught. It requires the embrace of fear, doubt, contempt, rejection, and loss. The price paid to reconnect with the magic within is set high by a world that is twisted into hierarchies of objectification and reductionism, exploitation and denial. When we are beyond the maps we have been given, there and only there can we find ourselves.

The willingness to recall the call of the Forest of the Unnamed is the beginning. It can be a mantra, to call oneself back to that Forest over and over again. Each time we touch that verdant vale of mystery, we might find some new part of self (re-)awakening. This is frightening and painful just as it is exciting and joyous. Facing one’s numbness hurts, yet it is also a gateway to exhilaration.

What do you not permit yourself to be? What thriving do you suppress? What creativity do you stifle, choke, and abandon, expelled into the deeps of the Unnamed Forest within? Will you not dare to foray there, to discover the beautiful secrets that merely wait your loving gaze and embrace?

Authoritarian objectification will say to you that there is no Forest, and if there is, that it is bad, unpredictable, untrustworthy, unruly, in need of management, in need of a rigidity that you will never be able to permanently impose once you allow that Forest to breathe in the sweet oxygen of your loving attention. Do not be fooled by this swindle. The beginning of your journey into the Forest of the Unnamed may have some false starts, mistakes, fumbles, but this is just an artifact of inexperience. The Forest will be your teacher if you but suspend disbelief long enough to allow it to be so.

There will be failure, perhaps at times disastrous. There will be illusions of self-discovery that in time are exposed as mere surface excursions into the mysteries of the deep. There will be truths terrifyingly exhilarating, intimidating like the soaring heights of great mountains. These are all necessary developments if we are to come into accord with the Forest of the Unnamed.

Yet beware the old impulse to think the Forest can be mapped, bounded, controlled. Beware the subtle seduction of the internalized authoritarian, who in the Forest’s Unnamed name would reduce it to strip malls, coal mines, corruption, predictability. Personal liberation and social liberation are parallel processes.

To truly listen to oneself is to cultivate self-empathy. Self-empathy is tending to abandoned forest paths, to learning the names of the beasts, trees, and streams. Listening to the hooting owls, buzzing bees, howling wolves, and groaning boughs within. The Forest of the Unnamed awaits you, biding its time with grace and patience. It is never too late to seek its wisdom: “Forest of the Unnamed, teach me to be your friend!” The journey begins thus.

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