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Transcript of Pause, Play: a Higher Consciousness Handbook
The Higher Consciousness Handbook is a book of practical psychology for the awakened and the awakening individual.
Intended for the advanced explorer of consciousness, this book can be a source of inspiration and experimentation for anybody looking to free their mind and play with their sense of reality.
The Higher Consciousness Handbook seeks to answer a basic question of consciousness change. How can we live our daily lives in a higher of state consciousness? In other words, how can we interact with our world knowing that we are one?
Learn how by trying more than fifty techniques, including mindfulness, magick, sigils, synchronicities, dreaming, breathing, sex, and more.
Copyright © 2011, by Klaas Pieter van der Tempel
Pause, PlayA Higher Consciousness HandbookPause, Play
2011 Clayber Printing Under no circumstances should this text be read near a source of light.
Contact the author at [email protected] design and illustrations by Witte van der Tempel
To the squirrels and the trees in which they dance.
A Higher Consciousness Handbook
Contents
i. Foreword 5
ii.Why the Handbook? 7
Three parts 8
PART I - A Day with Higher Consciousness 10
PART II - Pause, Play: Mindfulness and Magick 22
The Pause: Mindfulness 25
The Play: Magick 27
Conscious + Unconscious 29
PART III - The Techniques 33
How to read the techniques 34
Disclaimer 35
Techniques A-Z 36
Summary: What’s in Your Hands? 137
Index 139
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i. Foreword
Wake up.
Remember what you really are,
step out of the comfort of your mind and recognize yourself
out here:
Out here is you.
Those of us who have experienced what is by now a bit of a New Age cli-
ché – that we are all one consciousness – and who have come back again
with that overwhelming insight, may have gone on to experience the same
frustration that I have. I mean the frustration of coming down from our
euphoria and eventually forgetting it. We forget what we are; we forget that
we are one with the moment and with everything we see, hear, smell, feel,
taste, think, do, and dream. And, as a result, all the powers that go with our
higher state of consciousness are lost.
This coming and going raises an important question. Why can’t we be
‘enlightened’ all, or most of the time?
Part of me accepts it as inevitable; that at this stage in our evolution, we
can only handle being in tune with our power and responsibility some of the
time. That we’re part-time enlightened.
Butanothersideofmeisnotsoeasilysatisfied.It’sthepartofmethathas
never been able to put aside the revelation that waking up was; the part of
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6
me that revels in feeling, and living our simultaneous identity as creation
andcreator.Aslittlemindandbigmind,mereegoandunifiedAll.
This second part of me is what has written this book. The Handbook is
the result of my own research, experiments, and developments in the realm
of consciousness change. In it, I have built up and borrowed a range of dif-
ferent perspectives and techniques. Techniques that help us to focus on our
consciousness of being, choosing, and creating the world with our minds.
It takes discipline and dedication to talk the talk and walk the walk. I hope
that this Handbook will provide you with enough useful tricks to empower
your own discipline, and to engage higher states of consciousness in your
daily life.
Godspeed,
Klaas Pieter van der Tempel
2011
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ii. Why the Handbook?
This book is a guide, a practical handbook for use in our daily lives. From
mindfulnesstomagick,itlistsoverfiftywaysoftranscendingthemind–or
the ego – and opening up to a higher state of consciousness.
Higher consciousness is any state of being in which reality becomes alive,
sacred, playful, and magical. It’s a dimension of being where life is a game -
a waking dream - and anything is possible.
In higher states, which take us out of our ordinary state of mind, we are
suddenly extremely present. Our interaction with the world around us is
taken to a whole new level, a level that is overwhelming and inconceivable
to a mind that hasn’t been introduced to it yet. We become conscious of a
so-called mystical truth: namely, we see that the world around us is us. The
challenge, for most of us who have seen it, is to experience this on a daily
basis.
This is the core message of higher consciousness, and it is the core of this
handbook. Interact with the world knowing that you are it, and that you are
your own creator. You are your own creator.1
Higher consciousness is more than a belief system. It is a level of experi-
ence. Once we are at this higher level, we can take our inner world - our
[1] Which “you” are we talking about? The awakened one, awake to his or her union with reality.
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8
mind, feelings, beliefs, and our experience of life and reality - into our own
hands.2
The more our minds become our own, the more honest and creative our
perception of reality becomes. Instead of getting in our own way and being
self-destructive, we can speed up the steps of our development and become
the artists of our own minds. To this end, the purpose of this book is
to learn how to use higher states of consciousness – an increased
awareness of the so-called spiritual dimension of reality – as a means
to an end. Higher consciousness is a starting point for thinking for our-
selves, knowing ourselves, and transforming ourselves. It is a place of heal-
ing and connection. It is where we can evolve ourselves and rediscover the
true meaning of our existence. Using it allows us any and every day to ask
and answer the questions that give meaning and direction to our lives: Who
am I? What is the purpose of my life? Why am I doing this? Does this make
me happy? What am I learning from this? And what reality am I creating for
myself and for the people around me right now?
Three parts Therearethreepartstothisbook,whatIcallthefictionalpart,thenerdy
part,andthefunpart.Itmaybegoodtoreadthemfromstarttofinish,but
ontheotherhand,youmayfindsomeofitoldnews,uninteresting,oroverly
[2] This is not to say that ‘higher’ consciousness is necessarily ‘better’ consciousness. Yes, it creates more freedom, but this freedom may feel like a burden for those lacking the right tools to deal with it. Hence the Handbook.
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9
complicated. If this is the case you can easily skip around the text without
any problems.
Part one – A Day with Higher Consciousness – is a description of a typical
daywithhigherconsciousness.It’safictionalizedexampleofhowthediffer-
ent methods of consciousness change can be used in your daily life.
Second is the philosophical bit. It describes the two basic elements of liv-
ing with higher consciousness; Mindfulness and Magick. A framework is
presented within which the higher consciousness techniques can be under-
stood, a framework which I like to think of as “pause” and “play.”
Third and last is the practical part. It’s the biggest part, because it has all
the tricks and experiments, mantras, tantras and prayers so that you can
start your day the holy way.
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The following is a fictionalized account of what a typical day in a mind
seeking higher consciousness might look like. It includes some of the tech-
niques described later in the book to show how they might be used.
When Bob wakes up in the morning, he’s fading in and out of a sleeping
statewherehisbedroommixeswiththerealmofhisdreams.Inthisfirst
stage of daily consciousness, he makes a quick note to himself that he is
waking up. “I am waking up, and now I am awake to the fact that I exist
again.” By waking up consciously, Bob is aware of the fact that he has be-
come conscious.
Sound weird? If we simply take it for granted that we wake up every day to
thesameworldthatwewereinyesterday,weeasilyforgetthesignificance
that each day has. We forget that we have put ourselves here, for whatever
purpose, and that we have a new day to live out.
So now Bob is aware of being awake, and he has a sense of purpose.
Soonenough,thedailychoresandresponsibilitiesstarttofloodhismind.
He’s interacting with his wife, Eve, being social, being human. They kiss, she
goes to work. Bob eats breakfast, usually without recognizing the breakfast
forwhatitis,becauseinthemorninghe’srunningonemptyandhefindsit
hard to be ‘on.’
Oncehe’sfinishedhisbreakfastandgottendressed,Bobsplasheshisface
with cold water and wakes up again. He takes a good look in the mirror. He
doesn’t just look at himself, he looks at his self; he’s looking deep into his
own eyes, communicating to himself that he is here. He smiles, albeit with
a trickster’s slanted smile. Go get ‘em tiger!
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Outside Bob gauges the weather. Is it too hot, too cold? He nonchalantly
reminds himself that nothing is real, and that this includes the sensation of
temperature. Cold is an illusion; he is the entire universe, how could he let
something like the weather overcome his comfort level? So if it’s too cold,
Bob labels the cold as an illusion and he walks around tall and upright in-
stead of huddling and slouching over and letting the cold get to him.
He starts walking. Not just automatically, but actively; he feels the tread
of his shoe on the sidewalk, and notes the rhythm and the pace. Is he in a
hurry? Then he’ll slow himself down. He comes to a natural walk, where his
legs are in perfect balance and can now move in perfect harmony without
his direction. It’s a walking meditation.
Now Bob can start to imagine the way he will get to the tram or train sta-
tion and make a smooth connection to where he’s going. He imagines he will
be right on time, that the train is there for him and it’s helping him on his
daily adventure.
Butfirstheneedstogetthere.Bobdropstheimaginingandvisualizingfor
a bit, and as he’s walking along, he notices that he’s looking at other people,
and that they are looking at him. Or not. And as he’s looking and being
looked at, he notices he’s thinking about these people: he makes judgments
about their appearance, their social standing and ethnicity, their vibes.
Mostofitisnegative;there’sjustmoretosayabouttheirdeficienciesthan
their virtues. Bob notices this focus on the negative, and decides to turn it
around. He makes a note to himself that these people he is looking at are
mirrors of himself in his dream world; projections of who he is or might be,
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13
all equal, and all equally him. He doesn’t hate on himself for being judgmen-
tal, but he decides to shift his gaze towards noticing the beauty in others. He
doesn’t like being stuck in a mind that wallows in negativity, so he makes
an effort to smile at them, acknowledging the gods that they are. He doesn’t
know if they can see it; but he knows that a part of them can, even if they
don’t know it consciously.
Now Bob is at work, or in his room, and he’s been sitting still for some
time staring at his computer screen. Like the stillness of his body, the air
itself has become stale, and he decides to do some breathwork. He inhales
deeply, then exhales all the way. Any thoughts or vicious circles of thought-
feeling that were in his mind are propelled outwards with the emptying of
his lungs. He holds the lungs still for a moment as they are totally empty,
andthinks;nowI’memptyagain.Relaxed,andreadytobefilledupwith
something new. Then he inhales deeply, exhales quickly, inhales deeply, and
exhales quickly and repeats a few times until his head begins to feel a bit
high.Hecoolshimselfintoanewflowbybreathingdeeplybutwithouttoo
muchforce,andeventuallymovesontootherthings.Movement,flow,and
energy have been restored to some degree.
Later, as he’s talking to some colleagues or strangers in the hallway, the
conversation is going in a rather mundane direction. It’s small talk. Nobody
is really connecting, and they’re not really talking about anything. Bob is
getting distracted until he notices a drawing he made on the palm of his
hand with a pen the night before. It’s a sigil, a magical emblem, and seeing
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14
it reminds him of the intent he put into it. When he drew the symbol, he
drew it with the intention that it would wake him up whenever he looked at
it; and since it looks kind of like a goofy rabbit, it reminds him to be a goofy
god and play around with his fellow humans. Have fun! Laugh it up with
your fellow gods! So he acts the fool, says something unexpected, and gets
people to step outside of their robotic shells for a bit.
One of Bob’s friends pulls him aside and tells him how he is doing. He asks
Bob if he should seriously go ahead with this ballsy project he’s preparing.
He has no idea what’s going to happen, he says. To take him out of his mind
and his worries, Bob resolves to ground him in reality. That means he’s
going to make him connect to this moment, connect his feet to the world,
to time, to the future, to the unknown; so that he remembers that even the
unknown is an aspect of himself, and that if he should have faith in any-
thing he should have faith in himself. Trust the process of nature, Bob tells
him, and that it will take you where you are going. Just have fun playing the
game you’re in. And if you take a risk and then can’t get out of a tricky place,
at least try to enjoy the ride. Remember that a part of yourself put you there
somehow, and that outside of time, you’ve seen it all before. It may sound
vague, but having the omniscience of the universe and the power over life
and death in your hands can be very reassuring.
Eventually the conversation ends and Bob is back at his computer. There’s
a word that somebody used that struck a note in his mind, so he decides to
lookitupinadictionarytofinditsetymologicalbackground.Thewordis
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15
‘insight.’ What does it mean, and what did it mean originally? He associates
insight with an ‘a-ha moment’. But the word itself is hinting at something
more deeply personal; namely, ‘in-sight’. Literally, the sight into yourself.
Are we all doing this whenever we get an intuition, Bob wonders? Does
the unconscious pop in while we’re not paying attention, dropping off little
goodies that we then take for granted?
At lunchtime Bob realizes that he and his coworkers have all prepared the
same sandwich today – ham and cheese. It’s a funky coincidence and they
have their laughs. But he realizes that it is actually ‘not’ a coincidence at all;
it’s a synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence. There’s probably no hidden
message in the fact that they all have ham and cheese (other than that they
were tuning in to some similar cosmic drive while making their sandwich-
es). But the real message of the synchronicity is not hidden; the real mes-
sage is Hey! This is a synchronicity! Your unconscious mind is calling out to
you through objective material reality! Wake the hell up! And so Bob wakes
up again, and realizes where he is and what they and their sandwiches all
are.
Right after lunch Bob goes to the bathroom down the hallway. It’s empty,
but he’s full; he has a majorly full bladder. So as he whips it out over the
urinal, the tension in his body spills out. His vision blurs in a moment of ec-
stasy, and he takes advantage of the moment to make his vision become psy-
chedelic. In other words, he uses the blur to go beyond what he can normally
see, and lets the borders and dimensions of reality slip away. By alternating
focus and unfocus and maintaining the blur, he can see inside as outside,
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16
and he’s no longer just pissing into the bowl. Reality has evaporated. He’s
a self-contained system that’s sharing tension and relief within itself, all
within the grandiose existence of consciousness. Yes, the toilet itself is an
aspect of his consciousness.
Later in the afternoon Bob is in a boardroom meeting with several people,
including one who he knows to be consciously aware. He knows that if he
looks into her eyes, even for a split second, they can make that connection
and recognize that ‘we are them’ and ‘they are us’. They’ve done it before. It
will help them take the creative heft of the moment into their own hands,
so that they can add a divine dimension to the proceedings. The change
need not even be through the action of their own hands or words; they can
simplyinfluenceotherstoexperienceorcreatesomesortofinspirationor
synchronicity just by being there. They allow magic to happen by being open
to it together, and surprise surprise, interesting and inspired ideas start to
appear in the group.
InthetrainonthewayhomeBobisstuckinrush-hourtraffic.There’s
zombie-like commuters in suits all around him. Bob allows himself a mo-
ment of respite by closing his eyes; he steps outside of the spacetime mo-
ment and becomes aware that it’s a moment of eternity. These people zoning
out after a day’s work are a play-act of eternity, gods being men and women,
and he can choose to be an example to them so they might regain part of
their divinity. He can stand up tall. He can take the sullen look off his own
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face and smile at people. He can feel radiant. And he can project some of
that energy into others. Or he can call out to them in his own mind to wake
them up.
Bob hears some people talking. Their words are angry and offensive. He
listens to which words they are using, and which ones seem to cut the deep-
est. He makes a note of it, and hopes to remember the pain these words can
cause so that he won’t repeat them himself. Most people don’t notice how
powerful their words are, but Bob aims to be aware of what he is saying,
what he means, and how it affects his audience. Listening to how other
people do it is a great way to learn.
At his station, Bob steps out of the train. He grabs the doorway to steady
himself. As he steps out of the door, he makes a conscious move from one
reality to another. From inside the train, that can of sardines full of stress
and fatigue, to outside the train, where there is open space, sunshine, and
fresh air. Bob has made a transition so that he does not need to linger in the
energy of the train.
However, the transition only lasts so long. Soon he catches himself think-
ing, Man, that train ride sucks. He catches himself thinking this because he
notices something else: an automatic thought process that has been kicked
into gear. After thinking the negative thought, he automatically begins to
relativize it. The train ride sucks; and yet, Bob thinks to himself, that’s not
the only way of looking at it. He can also think of it as something amazing,
because here are these clearly dedicated gods putting themselves through
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this torture. That’s pretty crazy. So the train ride is also amazing and crazy.
What’s more, Bob can sit in the train without being disturbed by the other
people’s energies. So why would he look down on them for making their own
choices?
Thenhemakesthefinalstatementofrelativity.Hethinkstohimself,Ev-
erything I say is true, false, and meaningless at the same time. I’m choosing
my own beliefs about my world right now, I’m creating the story that I’m ex-
periencing, and I’d just rather not get myself stuck in a mythology that says
“this sucks.” Bob’s recognized that yes, it sucks, but it doesn’t just suck. His
firstreaction,heknows,isn’talwaystheendofthestory.Therearealways
more ways to look at it.
So there. He’s changed his mind, reprogrammed a thought by relativizing
it. And he’s done this so often, studied so much about relative and plural
forms of logic in philosophy and science, that it comes naturally to him now.
He has a natural thought-checker, so that his mind is still somewhat in his
own hands, even if he’s not fully ‘awake’.
Bob is riding his bike home from the station at night, and it’s cold and
raining.However,thevalveonhistireisopenanditgoesflatafterbiking
just ten meters. So he decides to walk along a bit and think about what to do.
Along the way he inspects other bikes that are parked on the sidewalk to see
if anyone has left a pump on their bike by accident. “By accident,” he thinks,
“because nobody is stupid enough to leave their pump outside in this town.
Anything that isn’t tied down gets stolen.” Bob decides to walk to the next
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19
tramstop,parkhisbikethere,andtramithomeifhedoesn’tfindapump
along the way.
However, he keeps thinking and expecting the worst. “Nobody is stupid
enough to leave their pump outside.” Suddenly he becomes aware of the
negative expectations in his thoughts. He realizes they are helping to cre-
ate a sympathetic reality, where, sure enough, no pump materializes. So he
reverses his thoughts and thinks the opposite; “Somebody, or ‘the uncon-
scious’, has left a juicy pump out here for me tonight.” And then he empties
his mind of both negative projections and of positive expectations. The wish
has been expressed, no need to dwell on it.
Two seconds later, he has an encounter with a beautiful silver bike pump.
A minute after that, he is happily on his way biking home again.
Before going home Bob stops by the supermarket. Inside he’s overwhelmed
by the packaged foods. There’s just so much of it. It’s so neat and tidy; and
yet it looks so dead. There’s frozen stuff, fridges, cardboard and plastic ev-
erywhere. He starts up a mantra in his mind: This is all me, I am doing this.
This is all me, I am doing this. This is all me, and I am doing this. Gradually
the store becomes privy to his personal divine vision, and they are playing
the game of life again. It’s no longer a store full of dead things. It’s him, the
creator of illusion, calling out to play.
At home Bob cooks up a nice dinner for himself and his wife. As they’re
sittingdown, thedelicious foodfilling theirsenses, they takeamoment
to connect to what they’re doing. This food, these plants and animals, are
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20
aspectsoftheallthathavesacrificedthemselvesfortheirenjoyment.Itisa
privilege to eat this juicy pig, and so they say a prayer. They don’t say, Thank
you Jesus for this food. They say, Thank you pig, thank you potatoes, thank
you vegetables, thank you water. And they have instantaneous images in
their minds of the lives that each plant and animal has led before they ar-
rived at their mouths. And they feel gratitude, saying Thank you for joining
us in these bodies, and for giving us your health and your strength.
Dinner’s done. They’ve zoned out with some movie or TV series, and it’s
trash night so Bob goes outside with a fresh bag of garbage. It stinks, as al-
ways. He closes it up quickly to get out of the stink. But as he hits the street
with the bag, he sees dozens of other bags parked on the curb outside every
building. Everyone is dropping their garbage, knowing that it will disappear
in the morning so that they’ll never have to see it again. Into the garbage
bag, the black hole of consumer society, and it’s gone. Bob realizes this is
symbolic for throwing something of ourselves away, something we’d rather
not have to confront: our shadow side. It’s a ritual that lets us keep living the
dirty cluttered lives that we live. And yet it feels unholy to just throw it away
without a thought. Without recognizing what it is: a part of us. So he talks
to it, thanks it, and wishes it a future where it can be useful and admired
again. He loves his trash; he loves what he leaves behind, promising to pick
it up again in the future.
When it’s dark and they’re lying in bed, making small talk and sharing
tender moments and all that, Bob takes a moment to lie on his back. He has
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21
his eyes closed and focuses on the dark. It’s fully dark now; there’s no light,
and the darkness is ready to envelop them for the night. But he looks at the
darkness behind his eyes. He stares deeply into it, slightly up towards his
forehead. He’s literally opening his third eye, allowing mental images to
come forth from the dark spot between his eyes. It’s like a cosmic vortex
that you can stare into as if you’re trying to discern an image in a Magic
Eye book; as if you’re looking at something that has yet to appear, but you
already know that it’s there. And Bob speaks to what’s there. He says, Hello.
I am here, and you are here. Tell me, what is coming tomorrow? And then
he witnesses the images and transitions that come into his mind’s eye, fully
aware that they are streaming out of the unconscious. They do not nec-
essarily make sense. But he has made a direct connection to the uncon-
scious, which doesn’t speak in terms of sense. And Bob has connected to it
not through tarot cards or numerology or people or anything external, but
through this void in his own mind. It’s like talking to god itself, and god has
a lot to say. So Bob listens for a while, and sees what he can learn. Then he
talks back, and asks that tomorrow be a day of learning, interaction, en-
lightenment and play. He prays that it will be that way for all the world.
In this way, by practicing numerous tricks to alter his state of conscious-
ness, Bob has given his day purpose, lived with mindfulness and compas-
sion, and been responsible enough to make conscious changes to the direc-
tion of life itself. He’s made it flow and evolve in divinely creative ways,
and he’s had fun while doing it.
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Everything begins with consciousness. Our thoughts, our feelings, our sens-
es, our intuitions, our experiences, our dreams; in short, our entire reality
is born out of consciousness. But where is our consciousness? What is it?
And are we getting it right?
Nobody really grows up with someone telling them how to operate their
consciousness. There’s no Operating Manual for our heads, no master who
teaches us how we can think, let alone how to meditate or be mindful.
Instead, we’re mostly taught what to think, and to never question these
thoughts again. If something crazy or weird comes up in our minds, we try
to pretend it didn’t happen. Or we are ashamed of it. Or we just get con-
fused, because we have no idea what is really going on inside of us. This
oftenleadstoalifetimeofconflictingthoughtsandemotions,guilt,judg-
ments, self-hatred, loneliness, and cynicism.
In truth, there are wild things going on inside our heads all of the time.
Inside all of us. There are hundreds of different voices, arguing, debating,
getting along, submitting, worrying, poking, admiring, and seducing us. On
the surface, all these voices add up to form what we call ‘me’, so that we can
express ourselves as individual human beings to the outside world.
But this ‘me’, or what we think of as our identity, which gives us our free
will, and which feels like the source of our consciousness, is a trick. It’s real
enough, but it’s not really you.
What we usually think of as ‘me’ is actually an automatic process. It’s like
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a rat in a laboratory. A conditioned mechanism that happens all by itself.
Each and every one of us is some kind of brain-body-mind “thing” which
marches around to the tune that was set up for us by our biological and cul-
tural backgrounds.3 We spend most of our lives wearing this body-mind
like a mask, rarely questioning what lies beneath it. It’s like we’re watching
the movie of our lives through our own eyes, without ever realizing that it’s
a movie.
Try watching your thoughts for a while. Sit comfortably, close your eyes,
andseewhat’sgoingoninside.Ifyoudo,you’llnoticeaconstantfloodof
random thoughts rushing through your mind. Our brain never shuts up.
It’s non-stop, literally; unless you’ve trained yourself (or rather, untrained
yourself) you cannot stop your thinking. Hello, machine!
This is what mystics of all times have called being ‘asleep.’ Yes, we exist.
Yes, we have a mind. But we aren’t very conscious of it (or at least, not as
conscious as we could be). Just like the heart, the liver, the endocrine system
and so on, the mind doesn’t need us, or our awareness of it, to operate. It can
lead us from birth to death without us ever wondering what it is. Without us
ever becoming aware of who and what we really are.
For those of us who are fascinated by the exploration of ourselves and the
deeper truth within, the time has come to turn off the autopilot; to lift the
veil, and face the full reality of our being. It’s time to take responsibility
[3] E.g., the language we speak, our belief systems, our imprints and traumas, our social conditioning, etc.
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forourownminds,andtofindoutwhatwecandowithmindfulnessand
magick.
The Pause: Mindfulness The secret is already out on mystical truth. There’s no use hiding it. The
big revelation, the ‘highest truth’, is that Real reality, the world you live in,
is you. It’s me. It’s us. As the Zen Buddhists say: ‘God, Nature, Man – no
difference.’
While it may feel as though we are all individual beings in separate bodies,
and that we have no idea what’s going on inside anybody else’s head, why we
are here, or where we are going, we can experience a deeper reality
where these boundaries dissolve. There is no inside or outside, no me
or you, no something or nothing. There is only awareness: the awareness
that it is all one. This is it, and it is us. Sound crazy? Sure enough. But what’s
really crazy is that it’s something we all experience when we transcend our
normal consciousness. Whether it is experienced spontaneously, such as by
getting hit by lightning, surviving a deadly disease or having a near death
experience, or whether it is induced through meditation, psychedelics, or
trance dancing, there are endless ways to come to this level of self-aware-
ness.Thetrickisinfindingwhichmethodworksforyou.
How? We can read books, and learn theories. We can go to shrinks, and
hear their analyses. Or we can look in the mirror, and see our physical
boundaries. But only a profound inner experience will reveal to us directly
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26
and honestly who we are. It is through experience, not through words, that
we become one with our truth.
The basic, most readily available technique to heighten your state of con-
sciousness is mindfulness. You can be mindful anywhere, anytime,
by taking a step back from your thoughts and just observing
yourself and your inner world. Mindfulness, in essence, means being
conscious of everything that goes on inside you. It’s like hitting the pause
button on your brain.
A more radical technique, which is perhaps the most powerful one of all, is
to ingest psychedelics. These unique plants, fungi, and chemical compounds
have been used by our ancestors all over the world as sacraments to open
the doors of perception. They are, in a sense, an explosion of mindfulness.
Whichever method we use, in experiencing higher consciousness, we
go from living in our heads4 to becoming aware that we are living in our
heads. This is probably why it’s called ‘higher’ consciousness. It is somehow
above, or outside of our normal consciousness, which is simply mind.
Of course, having the experience isn’t the same as doing something with
it. We could be a mystic for mysticism’s sake, and hang out alone tripping in
a cave our entire lives. To some people, the constant bliss and the ultimate
wisdom, health, radiance, and psychic powers that come with higher con-
sciousness make it good enough on its own. These people have found that
they can leave the world behind for a better place.
[4] E.g. our minds, egos, or illusions.
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[5] Hence the -k at the end of the word, to differentiate it from regular stage magic.
But that’s not the point for most of us. We want to live our lives here, in
society, with the rest of humanity, and help to push and pull each other up
into the light. We want to come back from our ‘high,’ where we paused and
saw ourselves for who we are, and share it.
The Play: Magick Being in a higher state of consciousness allows us to do funny things with
our heads. We can be much more willful, imaginative, creative, and playful
than normal. We basically gain a measure of inner freedom. This change
brings us from reaching higher consciousness, or mindfulness, to using it,
with magick.
Magick, fundamentally, is an ancient approach to freethinking.5 It rests
on a core realization that can be encountered in a higher state of conscious-
ness; namely, the experience that reality itself is an illusion, a dream, a
game, and that whatever we believe about it is an illusion too. Again, higher
consciousness takes us from living in illusions to becoming aware that we
are living in illusions.
If you’ve made this transition in yourself, you probably know that it is
much more fun to choose your own illusions than to have them determined
for you. That’s what Bob, in Part I, was doing at almost every step of his
day. Instead of growing up to believe what we were taught to believe, like
a Hindu child of Hindu parents does, or a Republican child of Republican
parents,wefindoutwhichbeliefs(illusions)suitusbestforourselves.This
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is not an easy task. We have to do what each great prophet, priest and phi-
losopher has had to do: to come up with our own story. And this is where
magick comes in handy, because it helps us to choose or even create our own
illusions: our own stories or belief systems.
Magick, like higher consciousness, is a step above belief systems. It is a
wayofcreatinganddestroyingourbeliefsasweseefit.Bychangingour
beliefs about reality, we change our experience of that reality. We are
willfully choosing our own illusions.
Why?
Simply put, if we don’t determine our own beliefs, our beliefs are being
determined for us. What reality do you prefer to live in? A depressing
drama, a cool adventure, or a playful comedy? At least some of the time,
why not decide for yourself?
We all do magick – we all change our beliefs from time to time. But for
it to be ‘true’ magick, it has to be done consciously. ‘True magick’ seems to
require a higher state of consciousness (or, at least, a previous experience of
it so that you know what you are capable of). If you’ve been in a higher state
of consciousness at any point in your life, you have a reference point for
knowing that all of reality itself is magic, and that anything is possible.
In a higher state of consciousness we can see what’s going on in our own
minds. The mindful magician stands over his own mind, like an engineer
standingoverhismachine,andfiguresouthowitworksandhowhecan
change or improve it.
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One of the keys to doing magick is using words deliberately. Words are
magick, weavers of illusion, and they can make things seem as they are not.
Words create the illusion of truth. And truth is control. It’s like the
blinders on a horse, determining the limits of what we can see. If we uncon-
sciously believe some particular words to be truer than others, then those
words help control our sense of what is real. Words like “this is serious,”
“that’sillegal,”“thisisascientificfact,”“that’sasin,”“that’sjustthewayit
is,” or “I have to.”
If we believe in a truth, we literally put ourselves under a spell. We take the
words, wave a magic wand over them, and say ‘this is the truth’. And so it is.
However, if we really can determine our own truth, then we are free to de-
termine our own behavior. We can change our words to change our beliefs.
And if we can change our beliefs, we can change our perception of reality.
It’s basic mind control; deciding for ourselves which illusions we want to
live in. You choose how you play the game. This is magick.
Conscious + Unconscious Normally, we humans spend most of our time being at one particular level
of consciousness; namely, the mental. We spend so much time being in our
heads, in our thoughts, and being led by our thoughts, that we don’t notice
we’re being led. We’re on autopilot. And it’s an unconscious process that
happens so smoothly that we’re totally used to it.
This concept of the unconscious is key to understanding magick. Psycho-
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logicallyspeaking,theunconsciouscanbedefinedaseverythingwe’renot
aware of. It includes our subconscious thoughts, our suppressed feelings,
bodily processes, hormones, our inner demons and assumptions, etc.
In magickal terms, however, the unconscious is far bigger than this. In
magick, our unconscious is everything we’re not aware of as being us. The
apple you’re eating, the paper you’re reading – the very book you hold in
yourhandsrighthereandnow–thepeskyflyinyourlivingroom,orthe
Earth you’re standing on; you normally don’t consciously experience any of
these as being part of you. That experience only seems to happen in higher
consciousness, when the conscious and unconscious have joined together.
The goal in magick, therefore, is to become conscious of the unconscious
– just like in a psychedelic or deeply meditative state – and then to use this
connection to change your perception of reality. Take, for example, some-
thing as simple as waiting in front of a red light and getting annoyed by it.
With practice, you can become mindful of your frustration. Then you can
moveontorecognizethatthelightisyou,andthatyouareit;firstyouwere
unconscious of this connection, but now you can move on from your nega-
tive state of mind and do something constructive. Imagine the light turning
greenjustforyou,perhapsbecauseitishappytobefinallyrecognizedfor
what it is.
The world is changed when we think. For better or worse, our thoughts
helpdefineoursenseofreality.Butifwecanwakeupfromourunconscious
thought processes, then we can start to project our conscious will into real-
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ity instead.
Now, if we don’t like to send signals to our unconscious that work against
us, we need to become aware of them. We need to practice mindfulness, to
recognize when we are feeling afraid, guilty or ashamed, or being judgmen-
tal of ourselves or others. Here mindfulness and magick work hand
in hand. When you are mindful, you can transcend the automatic
patterns of your mind. And then you can do magick to create new
ones. This is a fundamental way of recreating a higher state of conscious-
ness.
We are talking here about consciously directed thought. It’s conscious
thought directed at the unconscious. We’ve made the link to our higher,
divine, and metaphysically mystical self, and are communicating with it.
If we put it all together we’ll see that all we ever do, essentially, is talk
to ourselves. Everything is self talking to and listening to self. Our words,
symbols, images, dreams, prayers and ideas, loaded with emotion, are a
feedback system between the conscious and the unconscious aspects of our-
selves. This connection is a constant dialog. It’s happening all the time. All
that subconscious chatter, the thought patterns and habits and beliefs and
judgments and likes and dislikes and self-loathing and shame and guilt and
synchronicities and love; it’s all part of the dialog that we’re holding with the
unconscious. And it’s helping to create the world we experience as real.
So, are you an island, and do you believe your thoughts and desires are
self-contained in your human brain? Or are you aware that your every
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thought and feeling is interconnected to every last thing in the cosmos?
Consciousness, thoughts, creation: no difference.
To summarize this chapter, these are the two basic requirements for a
daily life with higher consciousness:
1. Mindfulness. We can practice mindfulness on a long term basis, and/or
compact it into one or more mystical (or psychedelic) experiences. Mindful-
ness is observing yourself. Be aware of what you are aware of. Be aware
of what you are thinking, what you are doing, and what you are feeling.
Remember and be aware of your connectedness with everything. This is
learning how to “pause” yourself.
2. Magick. Think, do, and feel, not just mindfully, but with conscious
intent. Don’t just let reality overcome you; be free to choose your level of
interaction and co-creation. This is learning how to “play” the reality of
your choice. From mindfulness to magick, from pause to play.
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How to read the techniques Now we’ve covered the basics, all the necessary background for getting to
what it’s all about: the practical part of living a life with higher conscious-
ness.
Ideally, the blissful state of higher consciousness is a means, not an end.
We become ‘high’ so that we can play ball with the divine cosmos. This is a
game without winners or losers. Competition is only the surface of things.
The real challenge is to remember that we are playing, and to participate
withallourheartsandallourmindsinenjoyingwhatevergamewefind
ourselves playing together.
We know that play will sometimes end up in scrapes and bruises. Or that
we might get emotional, so that the game either becomes too serious or
stops altogether. Either way, chances are that the higher and connected
state will come to an end, and we are back in our minds, in our worries,
responsibilities, and struggles.
Obviously, we need something to get us out of our mind, so that we can
start to enjoy life and the direction it’s going in and even help direct it our-
selves. There are many basic techniques to try out, techniques that will
reconnect us to a higher state of awareness. These techniques allow us to
use our brain in different ways, either by increasing our awareness of our
mental habits or by restructuring the mind according to our will or desire.
In a sense, these techniques are all a form of neurological sabotage. They
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all require a pause; a stop in what we are doing and what we are thinking.
A pause in time to exit the automatic ego and enter into that state of time-
lessness where ‘magic’ becomes real and reality becomes magical. For sim-
plicity’s sake, the techniques that induce the pause have the Pause symbol
beside them, whereas the play techniques are shown with the Play symbol.
Some techniques have both, and some have the Record symbol instead, in-
dicating that they are intended to be learned and integrated by the mind.
During my own learning process, I found that each technique I used for
waking myself up eventually wore itself out. I’m no spiritual junkie, and
I don’t have a guru complex that makes me chase after the latest greatest
teacher, but I have found that I need to constantly reinvent my approach.
Used tricks lose their meaning and their impact. Hence the long list of tech-
niqueswhichfillsuptherestofthishandbook,sothatyoucanexplorea
variety of methods over time.
Disclaimer1. These techniques are not for everybody. They are intended for advanced
explorers of consciousness. This book is presented to you on the assump-
tion that you, like the author, are familiar with (or perhaps seeking) an
experience of your greater identity – that you’ve had a so-called mystical
experience. Whatever the method, whatever time it takes you to get there
(to really get HERE), it is the experience of consciousness expansion that is
at the heart of this book’s value.
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2. While many of the following techniques can be experimented with at
just about any moment in your life, it may not always be advisable to do so.
You cannot nor should you want to ‘transcend’ or ‘transform’ every single
negative experience you go through. Higher consciousness is not an excuse
to avoid pain or to stop being an asshole. Pain and suffering, as long as you
don’t get stuck in them, are powerful teachers. And there are no ups without
downs. Choose wisely, and try to maintain a healthy balance between being
a control freak who tries to be completely responsible for their own mind,
and just being: letting go of control, and accepting the experiences which
have come into your life.
3. Finally, you and I reserve the right to disagree with anything written
here. Nobody’s perfect :-)
Techniques A-Z The following is an alphabetical list of some of the different techniques
of consciousness change. Read them and try them out at whatever pace to
findoutwhichonesappealtoyou.Someareeasy,sometaketime.Iencour-
age you to investigate deeper into the ones that vibe with your way of doing
things. And most of all, I encourage you to try variations and combinations
and entirely new techniques for your own process of conscious evolution.
You’ll notice that the techniques which have the longest descriptions have
a short summary as well. They describe the what, why, and how of the tech-
nique in a quick and simple overview. But most techniques should speak for
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37
themselves.
And now, without further ado: let the adventure begin! Huzzah!
Accept your dark side
Everyone has a dark side. While
a spiritual path may seem to take
you towards the good, the beauti-
ful, and the pure, and while you
may even have the desire and in-
tent to be as good, as conscious,
and as compassionate as you
can be, you still have a dark side.
Whether it’s in your mind, in your
dreams, in the outcomes of your actions, or in the things you should do
but don’t do, you can’t shake evil. It’s fundamental to what we all are. The
greater the light, the darker the shadow it casts.
It saves a lot of frustration when you accept this realization. You can stop
struggling to be perfect; you can stop struggling with yourself. The respon-
sibility of being pure all the time is too much to bear for any ego. Sometimes,
you have to let go of your striving for perfection, for being better, for being
in control, and accept that shit happens. Allow yourself to pout, to yell, to be
arrogant, to be callous, to think shameful thoughts. And @forgive yourself
for it. Otherwise you keep it all bottled up in your subconscious, until you
can’t hold it in anymore and it comes out and bites you or someone close to
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you in the ass.
If you can accept your dark side, and allow it some space in your life, you
lighten the load that lies on your shoulders. Your transcendental self, your
whole self, is good, and it’s evil, and it’s neither. And so are you.
Act symbolically
Make your acts symbolic.
For example, make a conscious act out of taking
out the trash. Recognize the trash as a part of
yourself that you have discarded; that it’s a part
of your past. Pray to it that it will someday be-
come useful, perhaps as fuel, and not just be forgotten to poison the world
of the future. Thank it.
Sometimes it helps to create a symbolically ‘sacred’ space where you can
do your little consciousness change rituals. And, conversely, to have a place
where you don’t do anything spiritual at all – like in a gym, or during your
daily commute, or at the store. Somewhere where you can just zone out and
not try to be a higher anything.
Everything that happens in the world can be seen as a symbol of some-
thing else, with a deeper meaning that must be intuited or found through
reflectionandanalysis.Everything is symbolic, and you can deter-
mine for yourself what the symbols are and what they mean.
Symbolic of what? Of life, of love, of irony, of duality. The fact that a crow
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just landed right next to you ‘is’ symbolically meaningful. The text on a
billboard – as soulsucking as the advertisement may be – can present your
consciousness with some sort of symbol. The brain works in such a way that
whenyougolookingformeaning,youwillinevitablyfindit.
You’ve heard the expression to ‘act like you know.’ This is a way to prevent
yourself from seeming like a dumb arse in an unfamiliar situation. I say:
know that you are acting. You yourself are a living symbol of yourself;
areflectionofsomethinggreater,deeper,andother.Lifeisastage,andyou
and everything you do can become an act, a symbolic, sacred act. This is
tuning in to the act of creating reality.
Believe
What: Choosing your own illusions.
Why: Because you are free, totally free, to believe whatever you want.
How: By dropping the need for knowing the absolute truth and experi-
menting with relative, useful, and/or desired truths instead. Alternate be-
tween belief and disbelief.
Belief is perhaps the most powerful tool at the
mind’s disposal. Amazing and terrible things
happen all the time because of our beliefs and
the choices they force us to make.
We are all programmed to believe certain
things. Or to accept certain assumptions. But in
higher states of consciousness, we suddenly remember that we are free to
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believe anything we want.
As the ancient Assassin’s creed goes: “Nothing is true. Everything is per-
mitted.” You are permitted to choose your own beliefs. And you are even
permitted not to believe anything.
This means you can change your opinion about anything. The spiritually
inclined may call this enlightenment, or Zen. We could also call it neurologi-
cal mastery.
Your mind is yours to learn how to operate. When you can change your be-
liefs, you can change the way you perceive reality. And when you can change
the way you perceive reality, reality itself will change. This is what makes
belief the most powerful tool of @Magick.
A state of belief is a state of being. If, for example, like a religious nut, you
believe that everyone with a different set of beliefs is wrong and in cahoots
withthedevil,thenyoumayfinditdifficulttolovethem.Inotherwords,
this state of belief makes it virtually impossible to be in a state of love. The
belief “I have the truth” means that you are closed not only to other people’s
truths, but to the people themselves.
On the other hand, you can also use your beliefs to put yourself in accor-
dance with the visions you had in higher consciousness. This way, you can
put yourself into a state of altered consciousness just by making yourself
believe something different. So choose your beliefs. Believe that you are
everything. Believe that everything is alive or sacred. Or that everything is
a gift. Or that you are in a dream. Or that everything happens for a reason.
Believe that the ‘higher’ you rewards conscious thought.
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One good piece of advice is to never completely believe anything, especial-
ly yourself. As Terence McKenna wrote, “Live without closure” and “Over-
come certainty.” You don’t have to know or believe anything for certain. In
fact, it may even be impossible to know something for sure. Instead, learn
to think in probabilities. This doesn’t mean that you have to stop believing
things. It just means that you can maintain a healthy seed of doubt in your
mind. For example, even when expecting the sun to come up again every
morning, you might decide that the probability of it happening is 99.999%
instead of 100%. That little bit of doubt maintains your ability to think and
to question, and, therefore, it sustains your intelligence and your conscious-
ness instead of limiting them.
Reality is what you can get away with. Decide what is real to you, within
limits to be determined by experience.
For more on belief, see @Magick Will, @Have faith and @Metaprogramming.
Breathe
Breathingisthemostdirectcontroloftheflow
of consciousness. Our continued survival, by
linking the inside and outside world through our
lungs, is controlled by our breathing. So: con-
trol your breathing. In and Out. And while
breathing, think about this:
The universe is literally coming in and out through your lungs. When you
breathe in, the universe breathes out. A constant pulse of life, on/off, in-out,
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oxygen for carbon dioxide. But when, I wonder, is an oxygen particle part of
the atmosphere, and when is it part of me? There is no difference. Realize
thatthereisnospecificpointwhenaparticleisinsideorout.Thereisno
insideoroutside,thereisonlytheawarenessoftheebbandflow.
Use this realization of oneness through breathing to become based in
awareness. Outside is me. Inside is me. I am it. As Richard Alpert says, be
here now.
Ourbrainsarealwaysprocessing,fillingthevoid.Turnoffthenoise,and
access your programming. Any way that we control our breathing will af-
fect our minds. Anything ‘abnormal’, like panting even though we haven’t
exercised, or doing yogic breathing, will alter our state of awareness and
help us to pause ourselves.
One easy trick is to simply empty your lungs all the way. First, inhale
deeply and strongly through your nose. Then push out all the air with your
diaphragm, and hold your lungs empty for a few seconds. This ‘ritual’ acts
as a release valve for getting out of whatever mental rut we are in at the
moment. When we breathe in to energize our thoughts, and then focus on
breathingitallout,ourmindisemptiedandcanberefilledwithcleareror
more conscious thoughts. When you empty your mind, just like emptying
your lungs, the universe’s mind will come in and inspire you.
For a more intense breathing technique, do some research on Stanislav
Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork or a similar shamanic breathwork method.
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These are techniques which can get you almost as high as psychedelics, and
all it takes is some thumping beats on your stereo and a whole lot of oxygen.
One or two hours of lying on your back whilst matching a fast and heavy
beat with your breathing should do it. Focus on breathing in forcefully with
your diaphragm, as if you’re gulping air. Then let the exhalation happen by
itself. (This is basically the same as hyperventilating.) Eventually, all sorts
of energy will build up and discharge. And you will get in tune with your
body, your emotions, and your mind.
I once performed Holotropic Breathwork with a group of strangers, and
after about an hour a man across the room started to cry so passionately,
so deeply, and so openly, that it was one of the most beautiful things I have
ever heard. Who would have thought that breathing can be that great of a
release?
Complementarity
This technique, like @Relativism, @E-Prime, and @Expanding your logic,
concerns the fact that there are multiple stories to be told about our one
reality. Multiple stories for us to choose from based on our imagination,
ingenuity, instinct, intuition, reason, and desire.
There are a lot of different, even contradictory ways to describe the world.
And yet everything you could say about reality (or nature, or life, or your-
self, or anything else) is true, at the same time. In a TV show this is shown
narratively, for example, when multiple witnesses tell different accounts of
the same crime. They all saw what they saw. But now the cops have to add up
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their stories to get closer to the whole truth of what happened. The multiple
accounts are all true at the same time, even though they are different. They
addtoeachother,evenwhentheyseemtoconflict.
Inphysics, this isknownascomplementarity.Back in thefirsthalfof
the 20th century, quantum physicist Niels Bohr determined that the best
way to resolve the issue of whether light travels as waves or as particles
(and, traditionally speaking, it had to be either one or the other) is to accept
that both interpretations are true at the same time. The wave and particle
perspectives,whichcanbothbeverifiedexperimentallydependingonthe
apparatus you use, are complementary truths. They add to each other, and
they add to our understanding of the phenomenon of light.
What does this mean for our state of consciousness? If you understand
complementarity, and are open to seeing that everything is true, you can
let go of your one-sided perception of reality (Life is good, life is bad, she is
boring,sheissmart).Lettinggois,paradoxically,thefirststepincontrol-
lingyourstateofmind.Onceyoudothis,youcanchoosefromaninfinite
amount of complementary perspectives on reality. We all see what we want
to see; but you can teach yourself to choose what you want to see.
Compose yourself
Composingyourselfhastodowithdefiningyour
own identity.
Direct your posture, your smile, your breathing,
your feelings. Walk like a king, smile at every one
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like you can win over their hearts. The body is part of how we create reality.
Your stance can determine your state of being.
Defineyourselfandothersasgods.Wefocusontheminutenessofour
scale too much, trying to stay small in our overcrowded cities. Instead,
make yourself big. Put your foot down and speak up. If we hide ourselves
we’re not doing anybody a favor; in fact, it generally tells other people to be
invisible as well. On the other hand, if people see us, and see that we are in
good spirits, they will get to share that feeling.
Once we compose ourselves on the outside, having become mindful of our
posture, expression, breathing, etc, it’s much easier to step outside of our
thoughts and connect to those people who are around us on a ‘higher’ level.
It becomes much easier to play.
Often times we can be stressed, worried, or unsure about ourselves. In-
stead,beconfidentinanysituation:realize,“Ihavebeenherebefore.Icre-
ated all this.” This is one scene out of the whole play of eternity, and part
of us knows exactly what it leads to. By remembering this we can ease up
around other people. Let go. Open up.
Ifit’sdifficulttodoallthisinthemoment,getitdonebeforehandinstead.
Choosea@Mantraor@Metaprogramtodefineyourattitudefortheday.
Decide how you are going to experience things before experiencing them.
If you have a meeting with some important person, imagine the way you
will compose yourself around them. As if you’re doing a practice run where
shared consciousness is central to the interaction.
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Youcanapplythissameapproachtoinfluencingotherpeople.Youcan
compose the tune for others to play. Compose and direct the interaction and
behaviorofpeoplearoundyou;allyouhavetodoislistenclosely,andfigure
out what kind of instrument they are, so to say, to get them to play the right
melody.
One way to clear your headspace and some of your emotional energy is to
go to an isolated area – like the beach, a forest, or a soundproof basement
– and let out a massive scream. Take a deep breath, let the sound well up
from your gut (not your throat), and as you rear your head back in a ROAR
let out the full potential of your vocal chords. Just let it rip, and see how that
feels.
This experience can unleash a whole lot of energy. On the one hand, it can
help you to feel ecstatic and powerful; and on the other hand, the discharge
of pent-up energy can help you compose yourself better when you return to
the public arena.
Experiencing higher consciousness can have a positive ‘side-effect’ on our
composure. Basically, we can make a change from paranoia to ‘pronoia’.
Paranoia is a negative form of self-awareness, whereas pronoia is positive.
Instead of fearing and doubting the intentions of the world around us, and
composing ourselves as insecure beings in a world we never created, we
connect to that part of ourselves that sees the joyful cooperation of the un-
conscious. This is pronoia; believing that the unconscious is ‘on our side’. @
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Meditation and @Psychedelics can help bring about pronoia.
Finally, throughout all of this, remember to laugh about yourself. Smile!
You’re alive :)
Connect with nature
This technique consists of using
plants and animals in our envi-
ronment (home, outdoors, office,
etc) to reawaken our state of con-
sciousness. Talk to them, listen to
them, pay attention.
It’s really quite simple. All you
need to do is look at a plant, really
look at it, and realize within your mind that you’re looking at life. Holy shit,
it’s just over there, and it’s growing. And it’s me. We’re all related by way of
DNA, right? So: cousin tree. Brother donkey. Mother squirrel. Call me crazy,
but when I consciously connect to an animal or plant I can feel their pres-
encequiteclearly.Throughallthenoiseandtrafficofthestreets,through
thesterilityoftheoffice,theyarethere,alive,justpatientlybeingandgrow-
ing.
By the way, this also works with babies and with little children. They are
morein-tunereflectionsofyourselftohelpremindyouofwhatyouare:life
itself.
Another great boost to your awareness, especially if you live in the city,
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can be had by going to a park or nature reserve on occasion. Try sitting
amongst the bushes like a little monkey and feel the timelessness, the
effortlessness, the directionlessness of the nature which sur-
rounds you. That same nature is within you.
A rather surprising technique to connect to the outer world is to simply
sayhellotoit.Onmywaytowork,Iwalkthroughastreetlinedwithflow-
ers, trees, park benches, and so on. By letting my vision wander over all the
different objects, and saying hello to each of them in my mind, I notice what
an overwhelming amount of individual things are out there. Each thing has
its own personality; and, without fail, each thing enjoys being seen and rec-
ognized. This exercise always makes me extremely conscious and present
in space and time.
Out in the ‘wilderness,’ your life is put back into perspective. For all your
hard work, struggles, and worries, there is still nothing much going on in
the grand scheme of things. Connect with nature, and it can give you a
healthy break from your head.
Consecrate
Consecration means making something sacred. Our most valuable posses-
sions, the people we care for, our bits and pieces; these are some of the things
we may have consecrated in our lives.
If we do this consciously, we can imbue an object with a particular
meaning. For example, if you have a tattoo, or a ring, or a piercing, it can
become a physical reminder of waking up. We can ‘consecrate’ it by giving
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it a special meaning. I tried this with a ring once, which I turned into an
‘on’-button for a while. Something to trigger a different state of conscious-
ness. Of course the ring itself didn’t have any powers. It only had what I gave
it. But by remembering the association I had given it every time I saw it or
touched it, and touched it purposefully, it helped remind me to wake up.
So, just associate something with a higher or magickal state of conscious-
ness. When you remember to touch it, you are touching it to turn on.
More generally speaking, you can consecrate life itself, and treat every
single observation and experience as sacred. Address things as ‘Thou’, and
think of them as gods to remember that ‘I am you and you are me.’
Con-Uncon
What: Understanding the relationship between yourself and the unconscious
Why: To connect to ‘outer’ reality with your mind
How: Connect your conscious and unconscious identity with imagination
and will
IhavecommittedtheheresyofredefiningthepsychologistCarlJung’s
useful concept of the unconscious mind (or ‘collective unconscious’). I have
changed it to suit my style of mythical thinking, mystical connecting, and
magickal willing. I call it the con-uncon connection.
To Jung, roughly speaking, consciousness has three levels: there is the
conscious mind, or ego; the unconscious mind, or personal unconscious;
and the collective unconscious. If they were to have relative sizes, the ego
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would be tiny, the personal unconscious would be huge, and the collective
unconsciouswouldbemegahuge.Infinitronhuge.Inotherwords,whenwe
perceive as we normally do, with our egos, then we are aware of very little
of what makes us us.
The unconscious, on the other hand, is the totality of “everything you are
not aware of in yourself.” This ranges from instincts and emotions to the
origin of thoughts and the source of reality itself.
Now,asI’vesaid,I’vefoundthatIhadtoredefinethis.BecauseIbelieve
that for this understanding of the self to have a full impact, it should not
read “The unconscious is everything you are unconscious of in yourself,” but
that it should read “The unconscious is everything that you are not aware
of as being you.” This way, for example, if you were to be fully focused on
cutting your toenails, the unconscious would consist of the entire universe
other than your toenails and your toenail cutter. And, at the same time, that
little bit which you are conscious of – in this case, your toenails – is by sim-
ple mathematical calculation the unconscious of the rest of the universe.
I realized this one day while being my goofy self in a forest. I was walking
along a path with my future wife, Eva, and could hear wild pigs roaming
around everywhere. We even saw fresh tracks and pig shit; but we couldn’t
see the pigs themselves. So I picked up a stick which, to my mind, looked
vaguely like a pig’s head. And then I started tapping it in the air in a three
tap motion, rhythmically chanting “weh, weh, weh,” each time. I was trying
to call out to the piglets by speaking their language, and by speaking to their
unconscious mind; in other words, I was willing them to reveal themselves
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to us. I wanted to see a wild pig.
BAM!Nopigletsemerged,butthenewdefinitionoftheunconsciousdid.
If, as Jung says, the unconscious has a huge effect on my conscious reality,
then I in turn, as a part of the universe’s unconscious, have some manner
of impact on its sense of reality. You can literally work your way into the
mind of a piglet, a rock, a future event, a lottery computer, etc. By imagining
yourself to be the unconscious mind of something else’s conscious mind, or
realizing that you are it already, you can use your will to affect its behavior.
LikethetrafficlightexampleIgaveearlier;ifit’sonredtoooften,youcan
try becoming its unconscious and decide for it how it will interact with you.
This is a matter of becoming aware of the connection between conscious
and unconscious, and reversing the roles so that you can be an agent in cre-
ating the reality that sustains you.
Cosmic Schmuck
I’d like to popularize a technique devised by
Robert Anton Wilson. It’s extremely simple, but
crucial towards learning to ease up on your ego
and to stop taking yourself too seriously.
The Cosmic Schmuck principle goes as follows. Have you asked your-
self lately whether you’ve been acting like a cosmic schmuck? Like
a complete idiot?
If you haven’t, then the Cosmic Schmuck principle says that there’s a good
chance that you have been acting like a cosmic schmuck. You’ve been taking
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yourself too seriously.
Ask yourself the question regularly, and you will condition yourself not to
take yourself too seriously. Be aware of being a total schmuck and you won’t
take things too personally either. Ease up on your ego addiction, and try
laughing at yourself instead.
Dream
You may have heard of the Chinese philoso-
pherwhodreamedthathewasabutterfly.When
Chuang Tzu woke up from his dream, he was so
moved by the realness of the experience that he
wonderedifhewasnowabutterflydreaminghewasaman,orwhetherhe
wasindeedamanwhohaddreamedofbeingabutterfly.
We ourselves may have had similar experiences where the difference
between the dream world and the ‘real’ world was hard to pinpoint. We
may even have experienced that this world is just as much a dream as the
one we visit in our sleep. Engaging the boundary between reality
and dream can be extremely useful for getting into an awakened
state; a state where reality itself becomes a ‘lucid dream’ where anything is
possible.
Lucid dreaming is where we actually wake up and realize that we are
dreaming while still inside our dreams. All of a sudden, we gain the free-
dom of doing whatever we want wherever we want, as if we were the god of
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ourownuniverse.Itcanbequiteoverwhelminglyfun,asyoucanfly,walk
through walls, and so on. But it can be useful as well. Tibetan monks, for
example, meditate while lucid dreaming in order to reach even higher states
of truth. Nuts!
One of the simplest exercises to induce lucid dreaming is to walk around
as we normally do in our waking life. Every time we step through a doorway,
we touch it, and ask ourselves – is this real, or am I dreaming?
The more we do this, the more we build up a reality-check that makes us
question our current reality. By touching doorways and asking the question,
we are questioning the realness of reality. While awake, it should help us
to wake up from our mind, which takes reality for granted. While sleeping,
however, every time we dream of walking through a doorway, we have built
up a habit of automatically touching the door and asking the question: Am
I dreaming? The answer, Yes!, comes as a shock. And then, of course, the
lucid dream begins.
In other words, through this exercise we’re not only more likely to wake
up to the fact that we’re dreaming while we’re dreaming, but we’re also more
likely to wake up to the fact that we’re dreaming while we are awake. Just
close your eyes, and say to yourself, “My dream seems to be real. And my
reality seems to be a dream.”
Everybody dreams. And when we have truly memorable dreams - the ones
that make such a big impression that we want to know, ‘What did it mean?’
- remember that every dream has at least one fundamental message. And
that message is Wake up!
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E-Prime it
This technique is a handy, if challenging way
of getting nit-picky about our language. The
aim is to make our language more accurate and
honest.
When speaking, thinking, or writing, we tend
to use language in a slightly dishonest way. Without even realizing it, for
example, we use the verb “to be,” or “is,” to say things which aren’t entirely
true. To a linguist, saying something as innocent as “I am happy” isn’t prop-
erly true. It implies that you are always and entirely happy, whereas you are
perhaps only partly happy and it may only be true in the moment.
E-Prime, an update to modern English devised by David Bourland, Jr.
back in the 1960s, involves reducing the use of the word “is” in our lan-
guage. For example, instead of saying “God is real,” or “God is not real,” we
reformulate our thoughts by saying “God seems real to me,” or “I believe
that God is not real.” This way, we recognize that our statements are rela-
tive, and not absolute truths (see @Relativize it).
By removing ‘is’, language becomes more accurate and honest,
andonlyalittlebitlessefficient.What’smore,usingE-Primepreventsdis-
cussions from getting boldly aggressive or violent. It becomes much easier
to agree to disagree. And, of course, we become freer in our own minds to
change what we believe ‘is’ real (see @Believe).
Dorecognizethatit‘is’extremelydifficulttouseE-Primeallthetime,
especially in our speech. I recommend learning it between the ages of 1 and
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12. If you do manage to pick it up in your thinking, speaking, and writing,
try to limit your use of the word “is” to situations where you really want
something to ‘be’ what you are saying it ‘is’. ‘Is’ is perhaps the most magickal
word in all of human language. The more you restrict your use of ‘is’, the
more powerful it will become when you do use it (see @Magick will).
Embrace insanity (Enjoy it)
What: Accepting reality and even enjoying its insanities.
Why: Because “shit happens,” but it doesn’t necessarily have to bring you down.
How: By dropping the need to control everything, and sitting back and
enjoying the ride. Like a madman.
Have you ever unwittingly sat next to the cra-
zy guy in the bus or tram, only to hear him or
her suddenly start to laugh about nothing? They
laughed insanely and uninhibitedly, while every-
one else stayed awkwardly silent. And did you
sit there sheepishly, wondering what they were
laughing about? And oh my god, might they be laughing about me?
Crazy people, so-called, teach an interesting lesson; that you can allow
yourself to enjoy anything. This is a neurological freedom which we all
have. It is a choice available to our minds – to enjoy something even when
our programming says ‘this is not fun,’ ‘this is hard work,’ ‘I’m angry as hell,’
or anything else along negative lines. You can be or act as crazy as you want.
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For crazy people it may not be much of a choice anymore. But they have
experienced a breakdown of the mental rules which say, “I have to be angry
right now,” or “I should feel ashamed, or guilty,” etc, and they have lost their
inhibitions. They can laugh at anything for no reason.
For us, who still have most of our wits, it is a conscious choice. And it is
ahedonistic,self-absorbed,powerfulchoicetoenjoyanything.It’sflirting
withmadness.Whywouldyouenjoyhavingyourlegbroken?Orbeingfired?
Orfindingahairinyoursoup?Well,youcanchooseto.Maybeyoudecide
you like to enjoy things more than you like to hate them. Or maybe you just
like experimenting with consciousness, within limits, to see what your mind
iscapableof.Beabletoputyourrationalmindaside,andyoumightfind
that craziness isn’t so crazy after all.
Again, that crazy guy on the bus. Put yourself in his shoes. You’ve lost
all sense of how things are “supposed to be.” And, instead, you realize that
everything in this world is hilarious; ridiculous; insanely funny even. That’s
the whole technique, really. Allow yourself to enjoy anything by opening up
to what may seem like insanity, or at best a lack of sanity. Embrace non-
sanity. Cultivate enjoyment. Allow ecstasy. Enjoy being alive, and accept
everything as beautiful.
Being able to play with madness approaches what in Plato’s time was
known as ‘divine madness.’ It’s a higher insanity; a conscious insanity; an
inspired insanity. You can be in a state of consciousness where all of reality
and all that is happening and happening to you is essentially the same. It’s
a game, it’s an experience, and it’s a joyful ride made for you to enjoy.
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See it as a challenge; to enjoy something you would normally react to with
sharp criticism. Unanesthetized open-heart surgery is probably not a good
place to start. Instead, take a small thing that is bothering you right now,
and laugh at it. Maybe even laugh insanely right in its face, if it’s relatively
safe to do so.
Where do you draw the line with true madness? I’m reminded of an inter-
view I saw long ago, where a criminal psychologist gave advice to women for
iftheyshouldfindthemselvesbeingraped.“Liebackandenjoytheride,”he
said. What a horrible thing to say to a rape victim, “enjoy the ride.” But what
a mindfuck too. If you could do that, would you be crazy?
When I last sat next to the crazy guy on the tram, I awoke thanks to him.
He laughed, and I (assumed I) knew exactly what he was laughing about. He
was laughing about us. Me. You. Everything.
Etymology
We all know that language changes over time. Words, meanings, pronun-
ciations, grammar, they can change from moment to moment. “Jesus!”, for
example, before being an exclamation of shock or surprise, used to be the
name of the Son of God. And before that, it was the name of a normal man.
And before that it was probably a word with a certain etymology, or original
meaning. In this case, the original meaning of “Jesus” is Lord is Salvation.
Who knew?
How many of us can say we have actively examined language and our own
use of it? How well do we know our own minds if we don’t know what our
words are?
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Look up the meanings of words that you’ve never looked up be-
fore. We take so many things for granted, letting our minds follow their
usual patterns. And words are a big part of that.
Just think: how many of the words we use did we ourselves come up with
in this lifetime? Why does this word sound like this? Why does that word
mean that? What does her name mean? How does using this word affect our
consciousness and our mood (See @Mindfulness of linguistics)? If we check
thewordorigin,oretymologyofawordorname,wemayfindinteresting
revelationsaboutthemeaningwecreatenow.Wemayfindthatitconnects
to things we never knew about, which allows the minds of the past to shed
some light on the minds of today.
For example: theword ‘self-reflection.’Wemay say that self-reflection
is subjecting yourself to critical analysis. But it also refers to something
deeper. Without even having to check a dictionary, we can see the poetry in
thesewords.Self-reflectionreferstoseeingyourselfreflected.Sowhenwe
self-reflect,wearetakingabetterlookatourSelf.Wequiteliterallyputup
a mirror to our own minds, which reveals our current self. Just by looking
closely at the word, we have brought its meaning closer to ourselves.
Expand your identity
Many spiritual and psychological traditions talk
about transcending or destroying our egos. Of
destroying our sense of self, so that we can tran-
scend it and become the holy union of oneness or
something along those lines. What I’m saying here
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is different. What I’m saying is expand your Self, by being aware that every-
thing is self. A being in higher consciousness is not an ego-less, all-perfect
being who does only good and loves everything unconditionally. This is a
NewAgedogma;it’safinedogma,butitisjustanotherillusiontofillyour
head with.
Start from your regular you, and work outwards, inwards, deeper, higher,
lower, bigger, smaller. Expand your self by expanding your identity. Out
here isyou.Iamyou,andanythingyousee inmereflectssomepartof
who you are. Connect to the Earth, to the cosmos, to eternity, an unopened
book, a plant, a sound in the distance. These are all aspects or layers of your
identity.
Everything is self. You’ll remember from Part II that magick concerns the
willed change in our identity (who we believe we are). Whether that iden-
tity, or self, be our ego, our daily environment, the entire undifferentiated
cosmos, or a future we desire, in higher consciousness we are choosing this
identity real-time.
Ultimately, be able to see your self as everything and everything
as your self at any moment. And remember, this is not the ego self we’re
talking about, but the transcendental self. You are ‘only’ a part of the greater
picture.
Once we remember this greater aspect of who we are, we can move on to
the next step: play. It’s a divine play with the cosmos.
Here is one very basic way to expand our identity and communicate with
our higher selves: become him or her (or it). Worship, command, coax, re-
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quest, seduce, trade, pray, or just take a moment of spacetime and say: I
am that. And ‘that’ can be anything. For example, it could be something we
wish to understand, like an emotion we might feel towards something but
we don’t want to feel. By becoming the emotion, by identifying as it, we can
change it from the inside (see @Sublimate). Once we relate, we can create.
We can begin by inducing this identity chemically. Psychedelics, incense,
breathing, yoga, marijuana, they can all help us to relate to reality in a sa-
cred, spiritual, or magickal way. Once we have seen that this relationship is
possible, we can do it simply by believing it. No more dependence on drugs
to do it: just make yourself believe it, because you have been there before
and you know that it is so (see @Believe).
Expand your logic
This trick is a combination of philosophy, lin-
guistics, and modern science, and it seems to apply
mainly to men. It comes down to the following.
When we think, we classify. We put objects, peo-
ple, and interactions into categories. These categories are based on a sys-
tem of logic. Usually, our logic collapses things into two categories; that is,
things are either one thing or another. Good or bad, fun or boring, safe or
dangerous, sad or hilarious, true or false, etc. While this works pretty well
most of the time, it is in fact a very limiting set of categories which doesn’t
alwaysreflecttherealitywelivein.
In philosophy, there are many different forms of logic. The common sense
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logic of true-or-false is only one of these. There is, for example, a form of
logic in Mahayana Buddhism which is much, much more complicated. If you
took the statement “Spirituality is a load of crap,” for example, you could
use this logic to say that this statement is true in some sense, false in some
sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and
meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true,
false and meaningless in some sense. Yup. So is spirituality a load of crap or
not? Yes, no, and maybe.
Inmodernscience,specificallysincequantumphysics, therehasbeen
a shift in logic which is similar to this. Some things in physics cannot be
proven to be either one thing or another, either because we don’t have the
technology yet, or because it’s just impossible to test it. To modern science,
if it’s impossible to prove – such as whether God is real or not – then it’s
“meaningless” to speak about it. If it’s still open to discussion, it falls into
the category of “indeterminate.” Unknown. Or, in the words of Robert Anton
Wilson, before the coin you’ve tossed into the air lands on either heads or
tails,it’sflyinginamaybe state. So we have more than two categories again;
true, false, indeterminate (or maybe), and meaningless.
Using an expanded set of logic like Mahayana Buddhist logic,
quantum logic, or Maybe logic expands your mind. It expands the
wayyoucanthinkabouteverything,andhelpsreflectahigherstateofcon-
sciousness in your basic behavior. If you can place your beliefs, feelings, and
judgments into more than one or two categories, you have more than just
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one or two ways to interact with them. In other words, there is more room
for conscious, creative thought.
Next time you catch yourself thinking, for example, “My girlfriend is so
irrational,”or“Myboyfriendissoinsensitive,”tryfittingitintoallthedif-
ferent logical categories. Is the statement true, false, meaningless, or a com-
bination of these, or all of these at the same time? And is it worth taking
seriously anyway? You decide.
Expand your mythology
What: Impose your own plot on reality.
Why: Because otherwise your story is being
told for you, by society, culture, and biology.
How: Keep an open mind and try out different
(mythological) points of view.
We live by the mythologies, or stories, that our environment has given to
us. Our culture, our religion, our history, our heroes, our world-view, our
social norms, these are all mythological narratives in which we play our
particular roles. Many myths are useful; they help us to survive, they help
us make sense of things, they give purpose to life, and they help us to relate
toothers.Butalotofourmythologiesarelimited,inefficient,andharmful.
In fact, some of them are just crap. Especially when they are destructive and
prevent us from exploring other ways of living.
When we believe ourselves to be really smart, for example (a type of nar-
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cissistic personal mythology), and can think very rationally and logically,
we’re more likely to dismiss other people’s stories as bullshit. When we hear
something that seems irrational, unprovable, or illogical, we don’t give it
much of a chance. But not everything can be understood rationally or sci-
entifically.Therearenon-rationalmythsthatarejustasimportanttocon-
sider, and here rationality can get in our way. We need to be able to expand
beyond rationality.
To raise our intelligence and compassion, we need more stories: we need
to be able to try out and create new and different truths and beliefs, even if
it’s just to be practical about the current reality we’re in. Try them out, try
them on for size, and see what they do for you. Learn new myths and meta-
phors and philosophies from all over the world and from all across history.
Attheveryleast,theycanhelpyoutoreflectonyourownmythology.
A state of belief is a state of being (see @Believe). This means that your
beliefshelptodefineyouractions.Themorebeliefsormythologieswecan
handle at the same time, the more states of being we can experience. It
makesourmindsmoreflexibleandadventurous, so thatwecan realize
when our mythologies are coming up short and try something new. So ex-
pand your mythology. Learn to think in more ways than one, so that
you can be in more ways than one. Impose your own plot on real-
ity.
One of the main mythological elements that people miss in their daily
lives, for example, is the magical element: the spiritual, the sacred, and the
mysterious. If we expand our world-view with a mythology that makes life
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spiritual, magical, or holy, our lives can become a constant initiation into
these realms. We start to live a true mythological life, a hero’s journey of
cosmic and evolutionary importance.
If we think of our normal experiences as spiritual, our lives will become
a mythical story. If we think of our normal experiences as magical, we will
make our lives an active adventure. If we think of our normal experiences
as holy, we make every act of living sacred. If we think of our normal day as
mystical, we can be in the here and now - without desires or expectations,
just accepting the world as it is, enjoying it, and fully loving it.
Try reading up on different philosophies, different psychologies, myths
and religions. Study some anthropology to see how tribal people live. Watch
movies and documentaries. Read books. Observe others and the way they
deal with truth and reality. If we can get a general sense of each different
world-view, we have a greater set of tools to work with in the creation of our
own world-view. We can choose to be in a drama, a comedy, a game, a Zen-
like nothingness, and so on. We can choose our own mythology. Impose
your own plot on reality.
We’re all in a story that we are writing together. What would you do if you
were a character in a novel who found out she was in a story? Go nuts? Ac-
cept it happily and play your part? Mess around with the story? Or would
you try to become your own author?
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Eye contact
The eyes are – cliché but true – the windows to
the soul. How we use them can affect the quality
of our own consciousness.
Making eye contact with someone who is mys-
tically aware can be very invigorating. We are
suddenlyallthere,fullyfocused,fullyconnected.It’slikestaringintoafire,
exceptthefireisoursharedconsciousnessofbeingconscious.Weacknowl-
edge to each other that we are gods, awake and alive. There are people out
there who, just by looking into their eyes, can put you into an altered state
of consciousness.
Doing it with those who are not as awake takes a little more effort. The
eyes, as has been said, are the windows to the soul, and like any window
theyallowlighttoseepthrough.Sowecanuseoureyestoprojectthefirein
our own minds. We can make other people trip. Look deeply into their eyes
and project awareness into them.
By projecting onto the mirror of someone else’s eyes, we proj-
ect into ourselves and wake ourselves up as well. How they respond
is now related to our own state of heightened consciousness.
Whatever you’re looking at, a person or a thing, open your eyes and go in
with your mind. Realize that “I am what I am looking at.” Look, connect,
create. (Once you relate, you can create). If you’re looking at a table, for
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instance, think: “I am looking at this table, I am connecting to it as we are
one, and now I am creating it by being aware of it.” You can make this easier
by imagining the presence of an eye on any object, and engaging with it.
Project it where you want it to be, and look into it to connect.
Seeing is being. As Robert Anton Wilson says, “All I know is what I tune
in.” Is the moon there when no-one is looking? Who cares?
Forgive
Thinking, most of the time, means judging (or
labeling).Athoughtisoftensomekindofreflec-
tion, analysis, feedback, weighing of options, or
criticism of the world out there (or in here) and
what we might say or feel about it. In conversa-
tion too, you may notice that we humans do a lot of judging and complain-
ing. It’s like we play a social game where complaining together helps us
bond.
The point is, we spend a lot of our time judging. “This is good, this is bad,
he is dumb, she is pretty, they shouldn’t have done that.” It’s a non-stop
classifying of everything we perceive, and most of what we classify is nega-
tive. This behavior seems to be built into our cultural programming, if not
the genetic as well. This is not to say that judgment is bad, or against the
nature of higher consciousness. It’s in our nature to judge. The problem (if
anything) is getting stuck in judgment, and not being able to let go.
There may be a good reason to judge some aspect of ourselves or others if
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we truly disapprove of it. But judging is (usually) not higher consciousness.
It is mostly unconscious prejudice, and the irony of it is that when you
judge anything you are always judging your Self.
Youwillfindthishandbookgenerallyaddressesthisproblemthrough@
mindfulness, which is an Eastern concept. But there is also a Western, or
more properly Judeo-Christian concept that deals with judgment; namely,
forgiveness.
How do we forgive?
For starters, you can try and change your reaction by changing your per-
spective. In higher consciousness, part of the paradox of the human condi-
tion – where there is no joy without suffering, no knowledge without igno-
rance, etc – is resolved by realizing and accepting that everything is the
way it is meant to be.Evenlogicallyspeaking,itisdifficulttoimagine
that anything in the world could be against the desire or design of ‘the cre-
ator’. All the negativity you perceive out there may be against the desire of
your individual ego, or even of many individual egos, but it wouldn’t have
been created at all unless some*thing* wanted it to exist. Does that sound
logical?
This means that, instead of having to be mindful of every judgment we
make, we can accept the world the way it is (including our judgmental be-
havior). Or, we can forgive (perceived) transgressions against us because
we know that they are part of the way the world is meant to be. It’s all part
of the process. You forgive them as though they were yourself, because this
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is who you are.
As the Irish poet Scotus Eriugena wrote, “Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt”.
All that is, is light. I too try to see all things as equal, as they are all equally
light and equally me. What do I gain by being angry at myself? Or being
mean, excessively critical, or unforgiving?
When you are unable to forgive, you are stuck in prejudice, and stuck in
your mind. The negative thoughts and emotions, the demons, won’t go away,
but will keep on bothering you. In other words, you perpetuate the suffering
in yourself by not letting go. And so you end up hurting yourself.
Why not teach yourself to see every negative experience in a positive way
(see @Relativize it)? If not, it may stay negative forever.
Howisthisdifferentfrommindfulness?Mindfulness,firstandforemost,
is about detachment, about distance. But forgiveness is about direct contact.
It can be an emotionally and spiritually powerful experience to forgive. You
may not always be able to forgive (in which case mindfulness is a great al-
ternative),butwhenyoudo,youregowillbenefitfromittoo.Thereishardly
a greater challenge than to forgive, and overcoming challenges is a favorite
game for any ego. Everybody’s happy, and you can move on.
Have faith
Faith, trust, belief; this is the bottom line when we look out upon our
world, because we never know exactly where it’s going. The future, even
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thenextfiveseconds,isuncertain.Ifyoufindyourselffearingwhatmight
happen, or what could go wrong in your life, tap
into your faith instead. Having faith means
being trustful, trusting that the uncon-
scious us is creating the world for the
conscious us and vice versa. Have no fear.
We are doing it all to ourselves. In other words,
have faith in yourself always. You are it.
Destiny is free will, and we must have faith that we are free to make it all
happen as it is meant to be. (Can you spot the paradox?)
In the sense of our personal world-view, whether it be Christian, pagan,
or otherwise, faith is the key to how we relate to the will of nature (or God,
the universe, etc.). We have no idea why shit happens, we don’t understand
much of anything, but it can be very comforting to have faith (to believe)
that everything happens for a reason. That there is method in the madness,
an intelligence behind the chaos (see @Magick will and @Believe).
As Mark Twain wrote, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” And
that ain’t necessarily a bad thing.
Have fun
Feelings are caused (partly) by chemicals in
the brain. Listening to or playing music, sex,
drugs, exercise, words, thoughts, and so on can
all affect your chemical balance. So pull faces.
Laugh. Make up songs. Fart. Dance. Juggle. Tell
jokes. Stimulate your brain with fun.
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Hypnotize yourself
Hypnotize yourself by looping any word or
combination of words, like happiness, or I am
happy, or love, in your mind. Do it while look-
ing deeply into your own eyes in the mirror. Re-
member: What I say three times or more is true.
(See @Mantras for more).
Know thyself
It was written over the door of an
ancient Greek temple for those vis-
iting the oracle at Delphi: Gnothi
Se Auton. Know Thyself. Be aware
of thyself. Be conscious of be-
ing alive: of being life. By prac-
ticing being conscious of who you
are (which may or may not be fully possible), you are more likely to really be
who you are.
There is an alternative translation of the ancient Greek inscription. It
reads it not as “know thyself,” but as “recognize thyself.” In this version,
the challenge is the same as the core of this handbook: to recognize that the
world around you is you.
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Listen
Close your eyes and focus on your sense
of hearing. Focus on the sounds. Choose one
sound, or choose to take it all in. Realize that
you hadn’t heard it so clearly before, but that
it was there all along anyway. Realize that the
sounds are not out there anymore, but that they are now in your head. And
not only in your head, but in your mind – in your mind. Your entire experi-
ence of reality is inside you. What seemed to be the outside world is now
inside.
But reality has no side. There are no limits in the mind. Realize the disso-
lution of the boundary between outer sounds and inner hearing, and recon-
nect to higher awareness. Out there – out here – is you.
Love it
We all need the beauty of love. Sure, we can
harden our hearts, and shit all over other peo-
ple’s lives and feelings, but in the end, we all
need love. I offer no proof for this; it’s one of the
few assumptions that I’m willing to make. With-
out love we are nothing.
Love is central to higher consciousness. Love is the cracking of the code,
the key to every lock. It opens all doors, makes life bearable, beautiful, and
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even worth it.
Ofcourse,thereisnolovewithoutthecounterpartoffear.Infact,thefirst
experience of higher consciousness often comes about after you have con-
fronted your deepest fears. In such an initiation, you open up to being able
to feel love towards your own fear, and realize that loving it - and everything
else about yourself - is the only way to transform or ‘control’ every little fear
we carry with us every day. Otherwise, the fear controls us. Face your fear,
and you will learn to love it.
The message, in other words, is to love as much as you can. It will set
you free.
However, most of us don’t even love ourselves. It’s very hard to love others
when you despise yourself. In answer to this, spiritual movements like the
New Age, bigwig religions and so on are by and large ways of teaching love
for ourselves and for our world (which is us) in spite of knowing that it is full
of negativity (see @Accept your dark side).
Look up the Devil card in the Tarot. That’s an ugly sonuvabitch. But in
your spiritual and psychological development, you have to get past the ugli-
ness and face up to what this card represents: the Devil inside. Or, in Jun-
gian terms, you have to integrate your shadow side. Basically, you gotta love
him too.
However, because of the Devil’s appearance and our automatic reactions
totheugliness,wecan’tsimplyaccepthim.Ourfearisreflectedinthebasic
attitude of Christianity and other monotheistic religions, as well as Bud-
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dhism and modern science. To many Christians, for example, there is only
roomtofighttheDevil.Thereisnoroomtoacceptorforgive,letaloneto
love the Devil (inside or outside). It’s us against them, black against white.
This dualism tends to trap people in a state of wallowing; wallowing in the
feeling that the material world and our human lives are ugly, inferior, sinful,
painful, and short. “Can’t wait to die and go to heaven,” they think. “Or at
least some place that ain’t here.”
Think like this, and you are living in a Wasteland of your own creation.
The challenge is to see something deeper in the world that is here. Namely,
that the Devil – who symbolically represents the material world, matter,
pleasure, pain, lust, desire, and “stuff” – is us. We are it and everything we
despise about it too. So try and love it. Seek a mystical experience (see @
Psychedelics) to confront your fears and embrace them. Love yourself,
and love life, or else death rules.
Here’s an exercise in love. Every day you receive all sorts of signs, syn-
chronicitiesanddreams.Randomeyecontact,atrafficsituation,aflyin
your soup. It could mean anything. Challenge yourself to decide for a day
that they all mean the same thing. Decide that they all mean that you are
loved; that the unconscious, the mysterious magician hiding behind reality,
is telling you it loves you.
Wake up, and know that you are loved.
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Magic eye for the third eye
What: Transforming pain in your body.
Why: Because we can change any sensation in our minds.
How: By focusing our consciousness on the source of pain, and perceiving
it simply as energy.
This is a technique which is rather
difficulttoexplain.
The term ‘Magic Eye’ refers to
the books that were popular with
kids in the nineties, where 3d im-
ages would pop out of a page if you
stared at it in a certain way. These
books literally trick your senses so
that you can see beyond what you normally see.
One of the best ways to learn Magic Eye is to just believe you can do it.
First you use your eyes to focus and really look at what you’re looking at (in
this case, the page). Then you unfocus, and let your vision become as fuzzy
as you can get it. Now you use this fuzziness as a sort of mist that you can
look through, like you’re focusing through your unfocus on something that
will appear by itself if you just wait long enough.
I tried this once in a different way. Instead of using a book, I used it on my
own body after I had injured my left ankle. With my eyes closed, and do-
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ing some simple deep breathing techniques, I felt the pain in my ankle and
focused in on it. Then I thought to myself; if I can really focus on the pain,
and focus my consciousness on my ankle, I can let go of the feeling that my
consciousness is up here in my head. Instead, since the pain is down there
in my ankle, I should be able to move my consciousness into my ankle, be-
come my ankle, and then tap into the pain as if it were just another form of
energy. Which it is: consciousness, energy, no difference.
So I did. I focused on the pain, refocused the location of my consciousness
into my ankle, and could therefore unfocus the pain itself so that it became
just a ball of energy. It was just this warm electrostatic swirl of energy, not
painful at all.
The result of this experiment was that I could not only change the location
of my consciousness itself, and transform the pain into a neutral energy, but
that the pain actually became a source of intense pleasure after a while. It
felt like an orgasm was taking place in my ankle. Weird! And all I did was
focus, unfocus, breathe a little, and see what was hidden behind the image
of the pain. Just as if I’d been looking at a Magic Eye book.
After this event, I decided it was possible to make almost any negative
sensation in my body disappear or even feel pleasurable, probably to the
benefitofthehealingprocess.
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Magick will
What: Being conscious of our in-
fluenceon‘reality.’
Why: To take control of our mind,
instead of letting it control us.
How: With imagination and will.
Imagine something you desire,
know that it can become real by
being aware that you are everything (creator, sustainer, and destroyer), then
let it go and see what happens.
Everything is magical, whether we can see it or not. Creation, time, evolu-
tion, change: these are all going on without us knowing how or why. Some-
thing must be making them happen. It could be a god. It could be us. It
could be that everything is making everything happen.
Whatever else may be helping us along, magick is one way for us to tap
into the source of that change; to become co-creators, consciously evolving
from moment to moment.
Magick will is just another way of saying that we are engaging
our consciousness in the steering of our mental and physical de-
sires. If I feel like having sex because I’m horny, that’s not magical will:
that’s just unconscious bodily programming. That’s how I was engineered
to be before I was even born. But if I can overcome the fact that I’m being
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unconsciously programmed, and make use of my horniness for my own con-
scious purposes (perhaps because I desire to become a mother or father),
well, then it’s magick will.
Magickwillisthecommandingoftheunconsciousfieldsofexperience.
We participate in creation through intent, through a will that is activated in
deep thought, symbols, rituals, or prayers.
This will is not the will of the ego. This is the will of the transcendental
ego, to which we can attune ourselves through mindfulness and other ways
of changing consciousness. In the end, we arethewilloftheuniverse,flesh
and bone, and the whole secret to magick is to be aware of this. To be mind-
ful of our greater identity.
Ourideasaboutrealityareaself-fulfillingprophecy.Whatwebelieveis
true literally becomes true, within limits to be found through experiment.
All magick means is doing this consciously: believing something because
we want it to create a new truth, a new reality. We project desire into reality
and expect to change that reality. In other words, a magus, or magician,
is an experimental believer. A scientist experimenting with his or her
own (state of) mind.
Anything can happen. And we can want anything to happen. So make
things happen. Don’t just hope for it. Think things to happen. Imagine them
to happen. Ask them to happen.
Most of the time we spend in our heads we are being more or less rational,
constructing visions of the future or reconstructing a memory of the past.
In other words, we are rationalizing and escaping the present by creating
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these huge scenarios of “I should have said this” or “What if that happens?”
Try instead to let the picture of what you are thinking about to become clear
to your conscious mind. Learn what your mind wants (and what it doesn’t
want. See @Mindfulness). Then you can truly project what you want - such
as the positive version of the picture or feeling you were having - and beget
for yourself what you truly wish for. Reality will be made to conform to your
will, once you know what your will is.6 The world responds to your every
thought. You may not always notice the results, as they may happen over
time or in a different way than you expected, but they are there.
Your will is whatever you will it to be. But it has to be your will, and it has
to be willed consciously.
What!?
How exactly do you know what your magick will is?
The best way to know your true will is to transcend your normal state of
consciousness. Align yourself with your higher self. Take @psychedelics,
and be overwhelmed with purpose, will, and vision. Or use mindfulness.
Here, you can catch the moment before a thought determines your feelings,
behaviors, or perception. You can step outside of your mind. How do you
[6] This is the classical interpretation of magick. But you could just as easily turn it around, and say that ‘Your will will be made to conform to Reality.’ In other words, through magick, you can put yourself in accordance with the natural way of things. You accept everything, having understood that everything ‘is you’. This may be the more honest perspective. Which interpretation you use will depend on your preference.
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think about stopping to think? This is obviously a paradox, one which any
student of meditation will quickly be confronted with. You’d have to stop
thinkingaboutstoppingthinkingaboutstoppingthinking,adinfinitum,
beforeyouwouldfinallystopthinking.Oruntilsomethingwouldsnapand
you became enlightened.
Buthere’satrick.Inyourmind,connectthiscircleofinfinitethoughtsback
to yourself. Don’t worry about thinking about not thinking about not think-
ingtillinfinitywearsyouout.Justletyourminddowhatitdoes.Withyour
eyes closed, pass your consciousness through your body. Feel it and be fully
present inside it. Then realize that your body and mind are one with reality.
Realize that you are everything. Since you are everything, it is your intent,
your will, which is the universal will, and vice-versa. As above, so below. Now
realizeyourinfluencethroughthistwo-wayconnection.Realizeyourdivine
influence(see@Con-Uncon).Youcandirectyourthoughts,astheyarethe
thoughts of the all, and you can make them accord with your will.
All you need to do is release your expectations, not expecting anything
to happen simply because you want it to, but having faith that those things
will happen which are in accordance with the universal will. Just be careful
to direct your will towards the reality you want and enjoy, not the one you
dislike. Also, beware of doubts. Self-doubt has a tendency to form a nega-
tive feedback system between the conscious and unconscious mind. Magick
usually works in the cases where there are no doubts; where your intuition
tells you that something will happen. It also works where you’ve completely
forgotten about doing the magick. So listen to your intuition!
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Joseph Campbell once wrote the following. He said that “The best advice
is to take it all as if it had been of your intention. With that, you evoke the
participation of your will.” What Campbell is saying is that we never have to
ask the question “WHY ME??” again. We can ‘decide’ to be our own creators,
and reconcile ourselves with anything that has happened in our lives. We
made it happen, whether it was the conscious or unconscious part of us, and
we made it happen for a reason. Believe that everything happens accord-
ing to your (transcendental, or magickal) wish, and you raise yourself from
being a victim of reality to being its central hero(ine). Make the leap from
“Why me?” to “BECAUSE ME!”
If we always expect things to happen the way we want, and then they
don’t, and we get pissed, we’ve gotten our egos caught up in our magick.
Instead, accept that existence is a mystery. We can’t explain all of it, nor
can we change or predict all of it either. Understand that that mystery is
a part of yourself. Even the things you can’t understand are a part of you.
The reason for using higher consciousness instead of the ego in magick is to
recognize the unconscious, the mystery, instead of wanting to consciously
control everything. In other words, we have to let our projected desire go.
Have the idea, feel it, project it, and let it go. See what happens.
An example: some years ago, I had been single for some time. So had one
of my friends. One day, my friend told me that he woke up in the morn-
ing with an intuitive realization; “I am going to get laid today.” And guess
what? He got some action. That made me realize that I could do the same
thing; simply open myself up to a desire, and will it to happen. So I did. I
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put myself into an altered state of consciousness and told my ‘higher self’
that I was ready to meet the woman of my dreams. And then I let it go, and
forgot about it. A few days later a young woman came to my front door for
a spontaneous get-together with friends. She literally came to me. We hit it
off right from the start, and she has been my girlfriend, partner, and soul
mate ever since. Only after a while did I remember how magick had been a
part of our meeting.
It helps to remember that the balance of forces in reality is always main-
tained. In magick, we should be aware that when we take, we will have to
give something in return. Therefore the most important balance to maintain
is to A) Consciously craft our reality, while also B) Surrendering to the expe-
rience. Take turns being a magician and a robot; being the one who creates
a reality and the one who lives in it. Imagine your reality before you
play in it. This is a balance of submission and control.
Here’s one very simple magic technique I stole off of a soccer player on
TV. After he scored a goal, he pretended with his hand that he was waving a
wand in a circle and then he poked through the imaginary circle. It was like
alittlemagicritualconfirmingthepowerofhiswilltoscore.Ifyouneedto
put your magick will into something, try this yourself: speak out your will,
make a circle in the air, then poke it. As if you’re holding a wand and using
it to give something power. Then forget that you ever did something so silly
and let your unconscious you take care of the rest.
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Or, if you’re planting a garden, create a circle of protection around it by
pouring water around it and addressing the potential predators of your
seedlings. Ask them to take only a bit of your crop, and not to ravage the
garden whole. Or, if someone has given you their business card, write on the
back of it what you hope this person will mean to you.
There are endless ways of applying magickal thinking. All it takes is
awareness - awareness of self-as-everything and everything-as-self - and
the will to co-create this world. And the magick works because you - we -
are the magick.
Wake up! You could be willing right now. Not just doing things; but being
things while you do them. If you practice on simple things, like doing the
dishes, conscious will will come more naturally when you’re doing something
complex. Practice awareness; willed action. “I am. I am doing these dishes. I
am doing this. This is magick. I am doing magick. I am doing. I am. I. I am.
I am magick. Hello, me!” Do magick, any time, for any reason, in any way.
Reread this section again a few times to make sure you’ve understood
Magick and the Magick will. Final tip: engage your love before you desire
something. Love is the link that can make things real.
Mantras
At the right moment, mantras can alter our
state of consciousness and give us a kind of ener-
gy that we didn’t have before. We can command
ourselves with mantra’s. We can sing them,
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speak them, write them, read them. Repetition is the key. Here are some
examples of mantra’s I’ve used to change my state of mind and awareness:
‘I define my Reality”
“It is fake you make it real”
‘I am You and You are me’
“Play!”
“Cultivate enjoyment”
Map Your Consciousness
Study the Hindu chakra system
and other maps of consciousness
such as the Eight Circuit Model of
Consciousness, the Enneagram,
AQAL, Tarot, various neurosci-
ences, and the Kabbalistic Tree of
Life. Once you can speak and think
in terms of different maps of your-
self, you can be more aware of what is going on inside you (see @Know
thyself). And you can understand others better and how to approach them.
Furthermore, you can use the maps to help reprogram yourself. Observe
each chakra, each Circuit, each level of your being. You can do this on a
physical, emotional, social, mental, and spiritual level, to know your pat-
terns and to change them if they need changing.
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Meditate
Everyone meditates differently. To some people it is deep thought; to oth-
ers it is the absence of thought. I’m not sure which I prefer. But I do know
that silence is a healthy thing from time to time.
I challenge you to be silent. With eyes closed, realize you are thinking by
thinking,“Holyshit,Iamthinking.”Applyittoanyspecificthoughtyou
want, like a judgment, an indecision, an insecurity, etc. “Holy shit, I just
thought that,” for example, “I wish I were a vicious rabbit.” When you
watch your thinking, and dissociate from it by being the observ-
er, you can wake up from your mind. You are not your thoughts any-
more; you are, but you are also more. You are being awareness, watching
thoughts. It’s that simple.
In a meditative state, by watching your mind do its thing, it also becomes
clear that we are not really the creators of our own thoughts. Nor are we
directly the creators of reality. Instead, we seem to be conduits; channels
throughwhichcreationtakesplace.Realityflowsoutoftheunconscious
and then happens through us.
Meditation can help open the right channels, so that you can choose what
you think, and therefore what reality your thoughts are helping to create
(see @Mindfulness of creation).
Meditation can help to stop time. Time overcomes you. But outside of
time, you are consciously in control. If you do it every day for longer and
longer periods - if you can stop the sensation of time being something that
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happens to you - then you can pause and restart yourself (and your world-
view) at any time.
Here’s a meditation experiment. 1) Lie down with eyes closed, hands fold-
ed on your chest. 2) Focus your mind on a picture of the sky, with beautiful
white clouds, asking thoughts gently to leave. 3) In full tranquility, picture
an image of yourself in the sky. 4) Allow the likeness of yourself to be in full
focus,tillitseemstomove.Itwillfloatinaserenepictureofdetachment,
moving through other images in contact with the unconscious mind. 5) Al-
lowmessagestofloatintoyourmind,withoutreaction.Don’tfallasleep.
Recordyourthoughts.Noneareinsignificant,andtheymayeventuallybe-
come clear if you pursue their meaning in any way possible.
Another meditation: imagine yourself being a drop of water in a river that’s
coursingtowardsawaterfall,thentumbledownitintoacoolpool.Youfloat
to the surface in a whole new world. Open your eyes and see if and how you
feel different.
Another meditation: think, “Relax ... I am focused ... I am breathing ...
I am here.”
Another: Ask yourself the question, Do I have any idea why I am doing
what I am doing? Keep asking the question, Why am I sitting here doing
this exercise? (Start, for example, with “I am sitting here doing this exercise
because this book is asking me to do this exercise”.) Go all the way back in
time through all the possible causes you can think of, from the invention of
the printing press to the Big Bang or before. This is a simulation of enlight-
enment, and it may take some effort and ingenuity.
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(Self-) Metaprogramming
What: Using higher states of consciousness to
reprogram our normal states of consciousness.
Why: To install programs that create the mind
we want.
How: Re-educating our minds with specific
commands during a psychedelic experience.
Metaprogramming means using a mind-expanding technique to change
the basic programming of your mind to suit your own personal and evolu-
tionary needs and desires.
Wow,that’samouthful.Basically,inmetaprogramming,yourmindfinally
becomes yours to operate. Really yours. (And the more you develop this
skill, the more you will realize that people in general have never learned
how to think for themselves).
One of the greatest challenges enabled through metaprogramming is to
change our brains in accordance with the reality we have perceived in our
higher states of consciousness. In other words, we can restructure the very
way we perceive ourselves and our reality in our ordinary states of con-
sciousness. We’re raising the standards of what it means to be ordinary.
Again, to simplify further; instead of having to continuously use mind-
expanding techniques to ‘wake up’ or be ‘enlightened’ and so on, as monks
and New Agers do, we can trip from time to time (generally with the help of
psychedelics) and retain elements of higher consciousness in our lives after
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the trip. We can upgrade our minds. We can upgrade our minds. We can
upgrade our minds.
This is not the same as going to church, psychotherapy, NLP, or other
standard brainwashing techniques. It goes beyond any standard approach
to the mind. Whereas these approaches are like rearranging deck chairs on
the Titanic, so to speak, (as in they create either minimal and meaningless
change or a change in behavior or self-image that doesn’t reach the core of
why you behave the way you do), metaprogramming involves – no, it re-
quires – a higher state of consciousness. Initiation, self-realization, mysti-
cal experience. If you have had one of these experiences, you will no doubt
count it amongst the most incredible, beautiful, insane, and powerful expe-
riences you have ever had.
Most of what we do in life and learning is creating and living out patterns.
We are mostly robots, operating on ancient biological and cultural com-
mands. Small variations in our daily patterns are fairly normal, considering
the amount of chaos and unpredictability in our lives. But big variations are
rare. In fact, we rarely even realize that we are like robots, and that we can
do things to make ourselves operate better.
This is not to say that being a robot is bad. It’s a basic part of our being.
But to really know the robot we need to get out of our mind, out of the robot,
and into a state of higher consciousness.
Psychedelic experiences are one of the most direct and common ways to
do this (see @Psychedelics). Psychedelic experiences take us out of our pro-
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grams for a while and confront us with our robot selves. We are confronted
with the fact that we are programmed. Scientists and authors like John
Lilly, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson have developed an approach
that makes use of psychedelic and other higher consciousness experiences.
They have described ways of using higher consciousness to de-robotize our-
selves. These techniques are the source of Metaprogramming.
Metaprogramming means learning new ways to pattern our patterning. A
‘metaprogram’ is a program that regulates programs; it’s like the overseer,
the priest king, the inner god that rules over the robot. It’s the voice that
hears and speaks forth to change the other voices. In a way, it is conscious
itself, stripped bare of mind and matter. Activating it means learning how
to use our brains most effectively according to our individual desire and
potential.
With Metaprogramming, we write the picture of what we want
to experience in our minds. We enter a cycle of constantly tran-
scending our programming and learning how to learn new pro-
grams. Think of programs as voices, forces, or frequencies; an orchestra
of instruments of which we are the conductors. It’s our rhythm, our energy,
ourvolumeknob.Andit’sourjobtofindtherightrhythmandharmony.
Programming. We’re all doing it. We can get so good at it (we can get so
intelligent, intellectual, adept, or enlightened) that we can even approach
‘zero programming’ – getting to a point without any programming to block
our direct experience of reality. A point where there are no cultural or bio-
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logicalfiltersbetweentheexperienceandthereality.Inotherwords,wecan
learn to program ourselves out of our programs and into mindfulness. Pure
consciousness (see @Mindfulness and @Psychedelics).
If you are trying the psychedelic approach to metaprogramming, which
is the basic and most powerful way, it helps to have a plan. Create a list of
commandments for yourself with a new set of programs (read this list at
whatever moment feels right; before, after, or during the peak of your trip).
Your new programs are like a map that shows you where to go to during and
after the death/rebirth experience. Read them out loud while looking into
a mirror, listen to a prerecorded message, write it with an ink pen on an
empty sheet. Get someone else to yell it in your face. Just make sure it gets
deep in there.
Metaprogram your system, then play it. Reinforce it by repeating it to
yourself periodically, as if you were reading the bible you yourself have writ-
ten. What can you metaprogram yourself with? I recommend starting, for
example, with the Eight Circuit script. This is a list of positive, empowering
thought structures for each level, or “circuit,” of your psychological makeup
as explained in depth in Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising.
1. The biosurvival circuit
“I will live forever or die trying.”
2. The emotional-territorial circuit
“I am free; you are free; we can have our separate trips or we can have
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the same trip.”
3. The semantic circuit
“I am learning more about everything, including how to learn more.”
4. The sociosexual circuit
“Love, and do what thou wilt.”
5. The neurosomatic circuit
“How I feel depends on my neurological knowhow.”
6. The metaprogramming circuit
“I make my own coincidences, synchronicities, luck, and Destiny.”
7. The neurogenetic circuit
“Future evolution depends on my decisions now.”
8. The neuroatomic circuit
“In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true, or becomes
true within certain limits to be learned by experience and experiment.”
(Dr. John Lilly)
If you’ve encountered blockages and issues in yourself, or catch yourself
on a negative thought or judgment, program a statement that expresses the
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opposite.Youcanbasicallymetaprogramanythingyouwant,fromflowery
goodness to megalomaniacal arrogance; from Jesus Christ to the Devil him-
self. Take Hassan I Sabbah’s credo, “Nothing is true, everything is permit-
ted.” Or Aleister Crowley’s laws, “Do what thou wilt,” and “Love is the law.”
Or Hagbard Celine’s “Never whistle while you’re pissing.” Or make your own
program. What, for example, is God to you? Is God a good-hearted creator,
a disinterested dreamer, or an amoral trickster? Condense your ultimate
truth into a statement, a perspective, a game rule, and use it as your highest
inner code.
Onamoredailybasis,youcanrunspecificprogramsonyourselfaswell
(see @Summon). Program your reality and then live it. Use @Tarot
cards. Use @mantras. Repeat to yourself “Everything is holy.” Or “Everyone
wants to be loved.” Or “Life is a game.” Or whatever you want. Find your
own preferred programs and play around with them. Empower your own
conscious co-creation.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness, in theory, is simple. It holds that we are mindful
or aware of what we are doing. We observe
ourselves on the inside and on the outside. If
we pick up a piece of paper, we do so while real-
izing that we are picking up a piece of paper. If
we are doing the dishes, we do so with our full
attention.
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Thisis‘goingwiththeflow.’Beingthenow,andhavingahumbleheart.
The whole secret to Buddhist enlightenment, some have said, is to go with
theflow,andtorecognizetheupsanddownsoflife.Justrecognizewhen
you’re down and when you’re up.
In other words, ‘being high’, or being in a higher state of consciousness,
doesn’t mean feeling awesome all the time. If anything, it means being
above all the shit that can happen in life. And not in a condescending way,
but with a kind of compassionate detachment.
Of course, thoughts can get in the way of this. They can really get in
theway.Thebiggestblockagetoourflowcomesfromthoughtsbasedin
fear, guilt, shame, and judgments, especially when we get trapped in these
thoughts.
But mindfulness extends to these thoughts and to all other thoughts as
well. The trick here is not to stop judging or fearing, but to love and accept
our judgments, while at the same time holding our love and acceptance open
to what we are judging. Does that sound a bit too complicated? LoveJudg-
ment. @Accept. @Forgive. Don’t stay attached to your judgments; and don’t
judge yourself for judging. To a certain degree, the brain is what it is and it
does what it does. You don’t have to try to force it to change. Preach love to
your own mind, to your own heart. Love your thoughts and your judgments,
and make sure you love whatever you just judged.
On a simpler note, kick mindfulness into gear by recognizing the fact that
you are not focused, not higher consciousness, not mindful. Accepting this
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without judgment, you can take the next step into waking up. Hey, I wasn’t
awake just now! And now I am. Or, simply ask yourself the question: What
is my mind doing right now? Why do I have these thoughts, and what are
they doing for my state of consciousness? (See @Question). It takes practice
and discipline, but the more you do it the easier it gets.
Mindfulness, in essence, is a way of shutting yourself up. Not shutting
your thoughts up; but detaching yourself from them. You detach from your
ego, from your mind, and stand over it just looking at and listening to your-
self. You learn to ride the wave of consciousness as an observer detached
from any imprinted patterns of behavior. Mindfulness is pretty much the
foundation for every other thing in this list of techniques, which puts new
things into your mind, making it essential towards truly mastering most
of those other techniques. Once you can float on the ocean of con-
sciousness, instead of drowning in your head with all your earth-
ly woes, you can expand and learn to choose the wave you want
to surf or sail on. You can enter mindfulness at will for @magick and @
metaprogramming.
Pause time for a moment by closing your eyes and turning your focus
inwards. Pause time, so that you can restart yourself at any moment. Do it
everyday.Iwrotethislineafewyearsago:“Brainisalwaysprocessing,fill-
ing the void: turn off the noise, open up your programming.”
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Mindfulness of creation
Being mindful, and at the same time being
aware of your creative nature, opens you up
to being aware of what you are creating. Your
thoughts, your feelings, your behavior; you
know that they are creating the basis for your
experience of reality. The trick here is to be-
come aware of your intent. Ask yourself: why are you doing what you
are doing and thinking what you are thinking? And what reality or percep-
tion of reality is this behavior creating?
Most of the time we spend in our heads is a combination of fantasy and
rationality. We pre-construct the future and re-construct the past, thinking,
for example, ‘Oh, if only I hadn’t said that’, or ‘I have to remember to call so
and so tomorrow’. What we are doing, unless we are thinking intentionally
or magically, is escaping the present. Try instead to let the picture of what
you are contemplating become clear to your conscious awareness. Don’t
judge it, just watch it. This way you can learn what you want and what you
don’t want, and whether or not your mind is aligned to those desires. Then
you can focus on the positive aspects of or alternatives to your thoughts.
And reality will be made to conform to your will (see @Magick will).
As for the creation that seems to be going on outside of your body, in the
objective world, and which therefore seems beyond your intent: patch in any
patterns that you discern with your mind as if they were intended for you
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to interpret meaningfully. Take even the most trivially normal things in the
world,likethewaythewindisblowing,orthefactthatthefirstthingyou
saw this morning when you looked out your window was a woman cleaning
up after her dog on the sidewalk.
It may sound crazy, but this is actually a way of reading into the intent of
your transcendental Self. ‘Outer reality’ is literally creating messages for you
to notice. The message? “Wake up to the fact that you are creating.”
If you are conscious of being alive - of being life itself - then you can tran-
scend the duality of good and evil and love your own creation.
Some people will give you the advice to ‘Act like you know.’ Pretending
can get you pretty far in life. But every act is an evolutionary act, and since
you are what is evolving, you do know, somehow. You don’t have to act. You
know that you are playing the player. So here’s a different version: “Know
that you are acting.” This is mindfulness of creation.
Mindfulness of linguistics
What: Being aware of the way we think and speak about things.
Why: To know why we feel and behave the way we do.
How: By practicing meditation and mindfulness, and by updating the
words we use.
There’stonsoftricksouttherethatyoucandotochangeandrefineyour-
self. But few people realize how hugely important language skills, or com-
munication in general, are in deciding how you think; and, therefore, what
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you can think of.
Language, thoughts, communication, and in-
teraction are fundamentally manipulative. We
change things by speaking with or connecting
to them;we influence each other;wedemand
something or force ideas upon ourselves or each
other. It’s endless manipulation.
Upon realizing this, some people end up despising themselves, and they
try to isolate themselves from society. To escape from being manipulated,
and from being manipulators themselves.
However, we can’t get around being manipulative. Even if we isolated our-
selves in caves, we would still manipulate ourselves with our own thoughts
andbeliefs.Therefore,thefirstthresholdtopassinbecomingmindfulof
our language is to accept our manipulativeness. How do you do this? By
communicating with love (see @Love it).
You can have masterful powers through language. You can take the lan-
guage of kings, and make it your own. If you change the way you talk about
something, you will change the way you see it. Everything is or becomes
what you say it is, within limits.
The trick in wielding this power is to be mindful of your language. To keep
sight of your metaphors – your private illusions. What you are being
mindful of when watching your thoughts, your grammar, and
your vocabulary is whether or not your words are reflecting what
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you mean. Are you speaking and thinking from the ego, or from higher
consciousness, your transcendental ego? For example, do you cuss a lot, sigh
a lot, say “I wish that...,” or “I hate...,” or “I have to...”?
Again,mindfulnessisthefirststep,asitdetachesyoufromyourthought
process and makes you an external observer to yourself. From this level of
consciousness you have the freedom to choose the meaning of what you are
thinking about. Choosing meaning creates your level of experience - from
ahappy,toasad,toaninformativeorspirituallysignificantexperience.
Of course, everybody creates their own meaning. But not everybody does
so consciously. They let their ego (or the social norms or consensus reality
they are used to) do it for them. So not everyone is mindful of what they are
creating.
We are constantly creating stories about reality because reality is con-
stantly changing. But nowadays the world is changing too fast for our lan-
guage to keep up. World cultures are merging – so languages are merging.
My advice is to enrich yourself with the languages of others. Your metaphors
help determine, empower, and constrain your behavior and experience of
reality (see @Expand your mythology). Learn more languages – and I mean
all kinds of languages, from sciences to accents to personalities – to expand
your behavior and experience of reality. Every language has something
unique to contribute to your way of communicating. Learn to understand
how your language programs your behavior, and how you can reprogram it.
Be more cynical about your words, and choose your meaning.
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For example, you could decide that words are spiritual. Or magical. Not be-
cause they ‘are’ in an objective sense, but because you have said that they are.
Become mindful of the tone of voice or thinking that you are using. Feel
your words as you speak them out. Which voice do you want to voice? Imag-
ine using a completely different voice for what you’re talking or thinking
about right now. Change it from being the inner critic to being the proud
warrior or the mother. Even pretending can work: like jazz musicians say,
fake it until you make it.
Become aware of the symbols that dominate your mind (see @E-Prime
it). Become aware of the self-destructive symbols: the ones that keep you
separate, weak, alone, afraid, and unlucky.
A good way to program yourself into expanded consciousness, and to re-
member who you are, is to say to yourself, for example, This is me talking to
myself, and I’m listening to myself talk to myself. Everything that I look at,
everything that I read, everything that I hear. Every symbol, every sound,
every car rolling by, every time a bell tolls, every ad I see at a bus stop, every
sign I see; even every particle that I don’t see around me is me.
At this point you are basically @hypnotizing yourself, or @programming
yourself with @mantras. You can loop any word, like beautiful, or love, or
play, in your mind. And remember: what I say three times or more is true.
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Mirror
A mirror shows you an outer re-
flectionofyourself.Butamirroris
just sand and glass. It’s a bunch of
particles; it’s electrons; it’s energy.
Everything else is also a mirror
too; everything else also reflects
you. It’s just more challenging to
see yourself reflected in it when
youdon’tseeyourownfacedirectly.Andit’sevenmorechallengingtofind
yourself beautiful just the way you are in it. Especially if you’re looking at
an ugly person, or a depressing housing complex, or a dirty kitchen. This
is the challenge; to see yourself in everything (see @Connect with
nature).
If you do look at yourself in a mirror, look deeply into one of your eyes.
Seethatyoucanseealittlereflectionofyourselflookingatyourselflook-
ingatyourself,infinitely.What’sknownasan‘Infiniteregress’istherein
the eye in the mirror. You are looking at yourself looking at yourself, and if
you could look close enough, you could see tinier and tinier mirror images
ofyourselfgoingontoinfinity.Thisinfiniteregressisanotsosubtlehint
thatrealityisaninfinityofreflectionsofyourself.Thismakeslookingin
the mirror a great trigger for higher consciousness. What’s more, by looking
deeply into yourself, with a devilish glint or a heavenly smile, you can give
yourself a conscious vibe for the rest of the day (see @Hypnotize yourself).
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Move
“Mens sana in corpore sano;” a healthy mind in a healthy body. This one
goes without saying. Almost.
Youneedmovementtogetyourjuicesflowing.It’sthatsimple.Move-
ment is essential to flow. If you’re trapped in your mind, you need to gate
out of there. Visualize doors, walk through actual doors, look at a painting
or a photograph. The more movement through doors like these, the more
exciting and different your state of mind can become. Walk through lots of
doors, until the last door takes you outside to the place you want to be.
Even if you’re sitting still, let your mind move freely. Realize that every door,
mirror, eye, window, song, book, or painting can help you travel between
worlds. Worlds where you can be someone totally different in a totally dif-
ferent situation.
Do a walking meditation: go through your body parts one by one to get
local awareness. Add a new package of awareness with each bit, from toes,
to feet + toes, to legs + feet + toes, and so on, and combine each bit so that
you’recontinuouslyupdatingyourphysicalunity.Thefirsttimeyougetthis
downwillbethefirsttimeyouwalkproperly.Youjustbecomethewalk.You
becomeaware,andyoushutupbecauseyou’refillingyourmindwithyour
harmonizedbody.Andyoumayfindthatgoinglow-lowinevitablyreestab-
lishes your connection up there.
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Numerology
Playing with numbers is a good way to get your rational mind to cooper-
ate with the irrational, and your conscious with your unconscious. In other
words, it’s a good way to stop being stuck in your mind looking for the order
in your universe, and using creativity instead to create a new order in your
universe.
See meaning in numbers that are special to
you. Add them up, subtract them, whatever. For
example, if your name is Chuck, then take the
position in the alphabet of each letter in your
name, and then add them all together till you get
afinalsingle-digitnumber.‘C’is3,‘H’is8,‘U’is
21, ‘C’ is 3, and ‘K’ is 10. 3 + 8 + 21 + 3 + 10 = 45, and 4 + 5 = 9. So Chuck’s
basic number is nine. There are tons of books and websites that will explain
the ‘meaning’ of each number, from Mayan to Hindu to Norse mythology,
but you could of course give them your own meaning.
If you were born on a certain day of the year, or at a certain time, or if the
numerical value of your name is so-and-so, all these numbers which you
can connect to yourself build up a new sort of vocabulary. It’s a vocabulary
of mystical recognition, where any of the numbers you have given meaning
become reference points whenever you see them in the ‘outside’ world. In
other words, by connecting yourself to a number, any time you see
that number in your environment it will help to consciously con-
nect you to that environment.
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23 is a number that has been given great meaning in popular media. You
can see it everywhere in movies and tv shows, as the hotel room number of a
murder victim, or as the day of the month that something life-changing hap-
pened to the main character (see @Synchronicity). It’s like 23 is the symbol
of symbols, a mystery number to open your consciousness and recognize
your environment as yourself. To wake up and realize, I am the symbol, I
amthesynchronicity.AndnowIcanflowagainandhavefuncreating,orby
sublimating the negativity that’s inside or around me (see @Sublimate).
Playing with numbers can be a great reminder to expand your conscious-
ness. Just as long you can get the numbers to connect you to the mystery
thatcreatedthosenumbersandthe‘irrational’numerologyinthefirstplace,
you’re on the right track.
Optimism/Pronoia
Don’t worry, be happy! Practice being an optimist; whatever happens, it
seems to be a much more successful strategy to face the world in an opti-
mistic frame of mind than otherwise. What’s more, if you can detach from
your ego (e.g. with any of the pause techniques) you needn’t fear anything
anyway. See @Compose yourself.
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Pray
What: Talking to nothing in particular/some-
thing higher about what you want or feel.
Why: To get in touch with your will.
How: Just close your eyes and talk.
Prayer is quite literally talking to yourself. There may or may not be a
God ‘out there’ listening to everybody’s prayers, but that’s not the point.
The point is, whether you’re a Christian, a werewolf, or an atheist, there are
results. Prayer influences the unconscious, and it has effects on
your conscious psychology as well.
First off, when you pray, you are putting all your emotions and desires to-
gether in a way that is clear to your conscious mind. When you talk to God,
so-called, or the higher aspect of your self, or the great Duck-Billed Platypus
in the sky, you put your own heart into that higher perspective. That in itself
is healing.
Praying is a way of communicating with your Higher Self. You can become
(one with) Him/Her. You can worship, command, coax, request, or trade
with Him/Her, or take a moment and say: I am that.
Also, realize that praying for someone is actually praying to someone.
If you pray for your grandma, you are praying (talking) to her through the
unconscious. Of course there are shortcuts, and you could just direct your
prayers directly to somebody. I prefer praying directly to something, like my
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food, or my household appliances, or my means of transport, or my books,
etc. You can hold your hands up like a cup, to receive or to make an offering.
Just be clear: say what you mean, and mean what you say. “Thank you food
foryoursacrifice,”“thankyoubicycleforbeingawesome,”andsoon.
Here’s something that some natives do in one of their prayer rituals. With
your eyes closed, look to the four corners - east, south, west, and north. Mark
each direction physically by turning to it, and mark it mentally by visiting
it with your mind as your body turns in darkness. East, south, west, north.
When you open your eyes again you are centered. You have just turned in a
circle, prayed to the four directions that surround your cosmic center. You
remember that you, like everyone else, carry the center of your universe. You
remember that where you are is you, and you are always here and now. Look
around, experience the limits of your bodily self, what you can see and what
you cannot. Become the conscious center of an entire cosmos.
A Meditative Moment
Focus on each in turn and say:
“Earth me below me,
Sky me above me,
Sun me to my right,
Moon me to my left:
I AM, the center of my universe.”
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Psychedelics
What: Taking psychedelics in a
disciplined way to put a mirror up
to the ego and transcend it.
Why: Because they are powerful,
exciting, and sacred. To experience
higher consciousness.
How: Find an expert, someone
you trust and love, and consume in
a safe and supportive environment.
I don’t want to say too much about psychedelics here, because this book
is largely meant to empower a post-psychedelic lifestyle. A lifestyle after
mind-altering drugs, where you get the most out of what you learned while
being high.
I’ll be honest about this. You don’t need a major transformative experi-
ence like psychedelics to become what you are. But I believe you do need
one to become fully aware of what you are. Short of becoming a monk or
receiving instant enlightenment from a leprechaun, psychedelics might be
the way to go for you. Of course they aren’t for everyone; but personally, I
have yet to meet anybody that didn’t appreciate having ingested psychedel-
ics.
First off: it’s not just the drug, it’s how you use it (your “set and setting,”
as Timothy Leary called it). For me, experimenting with psilocybin mush-
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rooms grew forth out of a deep and urgent drive to uncover “the truth,” no
matter what it may be. “What is reality, and how does anything exist at all?”
Icouldn’tfigureitout,andIwantedtofigureitoutmorethananything.
And so, inspired by a spontaneous spiritual experience, I took a disciplined,
anthropological (combining experience and analysis), and relentless ap-
proach to discovering the truth. With mushrooms. And it worked.
In a sacramental, initiatory sense, when we are actively searching for a
deeper or a spiritual truth, psychedelics can cause what is known as ego
death. Ego death, or deprogramming, temporarily shuts down our internal
autopilot. In this state (which doesn’t occur all the time, nor does it seem
to happen to all who try), we realize that it’s all in our heads. Our assump-
tions, beliefs, and generally pre-programmed reality tunnels have to be left
behindtogetbehindthisstrangeexperienceofbeingalive.Tofindourcore
state of being.
Ego death is a symbolic death of the self; a shedding of our identity. Get-
ting to this stage, by letting go of our individual ego (and everything we
haveeverknowntobetrue),canbedifficult,painful,andeventerrifying.
However, it seems that the deeper we go, the greater the reward. Sometimes,
it seems, you need to go through hell to get into heaven.
Experiencing a higher state of consciousness with psychedelics is like
starting a new life. It’s no surprise people call it a ‘rebirth.’ At least for a
moment, we experience the death of the tiny, separate being that
we were – the automatic process of the ego – and are reborn into
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a new identity. In this new identity, we identify with everything (see @
Expand your identity). We identify as everything. We become eternity in
time,infinityinspace,andthemysteryofexistenceitself(“Whatisreality?”
– “Who’s asking the question?”). This expanded self is what we really are,
just as much as – if not more so than – the individual human being who has
a birthday and a name to set him or her apart. Tat tvam asi, the Hindus say:
Thou art that. In L’akesh, the Maya say; I am you and you are me. Quantum
inseparability, a scientist might call it; everything is fundamentally con-
nected. And it’s an I-opening experience to become fully aware of it.
Tripping on psychedelics is essentially a way of transcending old patterns
(see @Metaprogramming). You deprogram your mind and receive a new
vision of reality and of your own identity, from where you can create new
patterns on a whole other level. Stop playing out the same tired issues that
your parents have been dealing with, and their parents, and their parents
without knowing how to let go. Let it go, and play a new game.
Of course these new patterns in turn become old patterns, so you become
an ego-driven robot again. But chances are your ego will be less self-cen-
tered and will run on better programs. This is especially true if you learn
how to integrate the new inner vision – the higher awareness – with things
like @relativity, @mindfulness, @love, and @magick. Then you can learn
togowiththeflowortoupdateyourselfondifferentlevels,whichiswhat
everything else in this book is about.
You can do many things to have a good trip. Find a shaman. Read books
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about psychedelics by people who have been there. Go to the Netherlands
and shop at a respected smartshop. If you’re serious about experiencing
mystical dimensions of reality, you will most likely need to practice. Get a
rhythm going, and take live notes of your experiences. Write, record what
you can, draw. Or not; you can also lie down in a dark room and go deep into
your own internal reality. Make sure you let enough time pass between trips
to process and integrate lessons (I noticed myself that once a month for
about six months was more than enough, but it could easily be less or more
for you). Find which psychedelic works for you – from bustin’-through-real-
ity mushrooms, to beautiful-but-heavy ayahuasca, to synthetic-but-effective
LSD, to the instantaneous-interdimensional-in-your-face Salvia Divinorum.
Trip at home, at the beach, in a park, or in the woods; somewhere natural
and/or comfortable. Especially in the beginning, trip with someone you
know and trust and love, preferably someone with experience. And realize
that once the ride begins, there’s no turning back. :)
Question
Questioning reality starts with questioning yourself.
Awaken yourself with questions. Am I real?
Is anything real? Why is this pissing me off?
Why should I let it piss me off? What other ways
could I react?
What is my mind doing right now?
Do the “is this real?” mantra, and become
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aware of what reality you are creating.
Ask yourself earnestly: where am I? If you can, answer earnestly: ‘Where
I am is me’.
You can ask yourself at any moment: What’s the game to play? What am I
learning from this? What am I doing to create my own reality tunnel? How
am I going to metaprogram this?
As for the questions that seem to have no answers; the magician Aleister
Crowley said that the path of attainment constantly cycles between ques-
tions and answers, certainty and uncertainty. It’s a perpetual dance. So
remember that you’re dancing – dancing with the truth – and that each
answer lasts only as long as the song that’s playing.
Read
Learn how to relate to the beliefs of the vast
majority of other humans by reading up on
things like General Semantics, General Relativ-
ity, Quantum logic, philosophy of science, Jung-
ian psychology, comparative mythology, anthropology, etc.
Learn new metaphors from all spacetime locations. Study the effects of
words, their power, their uses and abuses. Read up on Neurolinguistic Pro-
gramming(NLP)andfindoutallthedifferentwaysthatlanguagemanipu-
lates you (see @Mindfulness of linguistics).
Ideas are technologies. Languages are technologies. Magick is a technology.
Keep exploring what others have come up with, so that you can re-
late better to their way of thinking, behaving, and perceiving.
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Relativize it
What: Relativize your thoughts, your feelings, and your beliefs.
Why: To have some power over your emotions, beliefs, and judgments.
Relativize to be able to see that there is more than one truth, and that every
truth is real. Relativize to be less small-minded and more creative.
How:Thereisnofinaltruthexceptyourown,butdon’ttrustitcompletely.
Be aware of your own relative truths. Learn updated forms of logic that
automatically relativize your thoughts.
What is real? There is no true cen-
ter in the universe from which we
candefinereality.Andtherenever
has been. It is highly unlikely that
ascientifictheorywillevertellthe
objective truth about how things
work, or why they even exist. The
only ‘true’ center you can rely on is
within yourself. Everything in the world is relative to your experience of it,
and it is your experience alone.
However, your center is not necessarily the same as mine. Everything
I know about reality I know from how it is related to me, to my personal
[7] Even when other people share their experience with you, through stories and so on, it still comes down to your personal experience of their story.
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experience. And so is yours.7 We all have our own perspective, our own
particular vantage point on reality.
This is relativity. Relativity comes from relatedness. Everything is re-
lated, and if you can see how things are related, or connected,
you can see that your reality is relative to your own perception.
If you can remember, or better yet be conscious of the fact that everything
is relative, you can relativize your own thoughts and feelings. Relativizing
means putting things in a greater perspective. For example, if a Christian
said to an atheist, “God is real,” the atheist would most likely be cynical and
say, “Bullshit. Prove it.” However, if the atheist could relativize the state-
ment, he would say, without having to think of the Christian as being less
intelligent, “Okay, God is real to you, but not to me.” And if the Christian
could relativize, he would have said it differently too; “God is real to me”
(see @E-Prime it). In other words, thinking relativistically, or speaking in
relativetermsaboutcertainthings,canpreventconflictandmakeusmore
understandable to each other. When we think and speak relativistically,
we can relate better to our inner selves as well as to the world around us.
So is God real? The truth of this statement, as with any other statement,
is relative to your personal development, your cultural background, to the
fact that you are human and can think about whether it’s true or not, to the
language you use to think about it, to the moment in life that you ask the
question,etc,etc.Allofyourthoughtsareinfinitelyrelative,anditcanbe
good to remember that. This is not to say that you should use relativ-
ity to accept everything and anything that people do or say; it just
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means that you have more freedom in how you as an individual
decide to interact with those people, thoughts, and behaviors.
I catch myself relativizing thoughts (or voices) in my mind sometimes. I
do this automatically nowadays. What I usually do is, when I have a negative
thought, I start by thinking what its opposite might be. This puts my origi-
nal thought into perspective. What perspective? It’s the higher perspective,
from which every truth has endless angles to choose from. Basically, you
add the polar opposite to any thought, word, or emotion, and realize that
both opposites (for example, from “Rain sucks” to “Rain is awesome!”) and
everything in between them is true to some degree. Any experience can be
relativized like this to escape cycles of negativity and to maintain your inner
balance. Doing otherwise – sticking to absolute, black or white, and nega-
tive thoughts – often begets suffering. You get stuck in a reality you may not
want or need.
In logic and philosophy, relativity is similar to non-duality. Non-duality
means recognizing the dualities, the polarities of nature – like man/woman,
black/white,true/false–andknowingthattheyaretworeflectionsofone
same thing. Putting them next to each other, I see that they are equally real.
One does not make the other untrue; they complement each other. Squish
them into a little black-and-white ball and you have the yin-yang. Oneness.
For example, I am a man, she is a woman; yet we are also neither, because
we are also the one, the source, which has no gender.
Being able to see more than one reality is crucial to understanding how
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wecreaterealitytogether.Dowecreateit,ordowechooseitoutoftheinfi-
nite possibilities? Non-dualistically speaking, if you can relativize and allow
yourself more possibilities than one or two, then you are creating choice for
yourself. Relativizing is creating choice. And being open to choice is being
open to creation.
Here’s a fun exercise in relativizing. I call it the “Everything Is” game. You
may or may not have heard the expression “Everything is everything.” If
you haven’t directly experienced this truth for yourself, the expression may
sound rather quaint. I mean, duh; obviously everything is everything.
However, what the expression hints at is that all is one; and furthermore,
it means that you can take any single element of the world and equate it to
everything else. I’m talking mathematics here. X = Y, where X and Y are
both anything and everything you can imagine. The trick to the game is
deciding which variables you want to relate to each other, and how they are
related.Forexample,thefirsttimeIplayedthisgamewithmyselfItooktwo
objects from my room, which happened to be a couch and a plastic toucan.
Here’s what I came up with:
“First off, the couch and the toucan are both made of particles, or waves,
depending how you look at it. Secondly, they are physically interchangeable.
Since ‘you are what you eat,’ you could feed a couch bit by bit to toucans
and their offspring would be part couch. Similarly, you could make a couch
outoftoucansbyslaughteringabunchoftoucansandstuffingtheirfeath-
ers into the upholstery of a couch, and then making the frame out of their
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beaks. (Don’t do this at home; I’m just sayin’.) Thirdly, you go hunting for
couches in Ikea; and you go hunting for toucans in nature. But both nature
and Ikea can feel like a *#!ing jungle.”
Of course, you don’t have to take it this far. And you can stick to having
‘everything’ as one of your variables, and create a list of relative realities like
“Everything is true,” “Everything is false,” “Everything is connected,” “Ev-
erything is separate,” “Everything is meaningless,” “Everything is a dream,”
“Everythingiswords,”andsoon.Thevariablesareliterallyinfinite,and
just contemplating them can help you relate your experience to a broader
perception.
Existence is ridiculous. How the hell does it exist??! Recognize this at least
onceaday.Rememberthecosmos,andhowinfiniteandeternalitis.This
way you relativize your very existence (and your ego especially). Relativizing
with endless space and time in mind helps you to stop taking yourself too
seriously, because you are – relatively speaking – just a tiny little part of the
cosmic process.
Finally, understand (or remember) that all words and thoughts say the
same thing, and that your truth depends on which side of the divide you are
on. Are you looking from the perspective of your little self - the ego - or from
the perspective of the world? From ego-self or transcendental-self, which
takes no sides at all?
Or can you transcend this duality altogether, and hold both of these per-
spectives at the same time?
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Beyond that, if it suits you to be in a blissful state of enlightenment, you
can know that there is no difference, no duality, and you can just shut up
about everything. Universe, self, no difference. Delightful silence, without
even the need for thought.
Try relativizing the following thoughts:
‘That guy is a douche.’
‘I don’t feel so good.’
‘This weather is crap.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘White people are the root of all evil.’
Sensory deprivation
What: Shutting down your senses.
Why: To center yourself.
How: Find ways of limiting an individual sense or all of your senses at the
same time. A quiet place, a dark place, even nature as opposed to the city
helps clear your senses.
Every sense – sight, hearing, touch, taste, and
smell – is a union of inner and outer self. Of
body consciousness and universe consciousness.
Realization of that union – of your oneness, or
yoga with reality – is taking place automatically,
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and your senses are where it’s at.
To tap into the oneness that your senses are channeling you can focus
on one single sense. By closing your eyes and listening intently to a single
sound, for example, you can feel connected to the depth of your moment in
spacetime (see @Listen). And listening to it deeply will dissolve the bound-
aries of consciousness, so that the sound is no longer ‘out there’ or ‘in here’.
Try masking a sense. When the eyes are closed, the eye of the mind opens.
Close your eyes: remind yourself that nothing is real. Imagine your will,
your desire, your intent – and then open your eyes to a new time. If you
close your eyes for just a moment like this, you take a moment of silent dark-
ness to reconnect: “I am awake to my creation, and I want to look on it and
see myself.”
Try silencing your thoughts by listening to all the noise in all your senses.
Focus entirely on one sense and all that it’s picking up. And when you look,
see; see that ‘it’ is you, and you are it. Close your eyes to hear, and realize
that the sounds are within you.
You can go even further than this with sensory deprivation. If you shut
down your senses as much as possible, closing out ‘external reality,’ your
reality will boil down to what you are creating with your conscious mind.
Whenyoustepdeepintoacave,forexample,youturnoffyourflashlight
and see…nothing. Pitch black, without an up or a down, without even being
abletoseeyourownhandmoveinfrontofyourface.Atfirst,havingnoth-
ing to look at will make your mind race faster. Your thoughts will become
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louder,andyourmindwilltrytofillintheblackofthevoidanditsgapof
information. Without sight or sound, there is nothing to tell you that you are
really you – a human being separate from its environment. This isolation is
probably why the uninitiated get fearful, paranoid, and temporarily insane
if the lights stay off for too long. Fear of the unknown, of death, secretly
drives our thoughts. But there’s nothing ‘sinister’ about the dark. It’s just
that we’re not used to being confronted with the naked machinations of
our own mind. We’ve never seen it gear up like that and spin out of control
towards the edge. Ironically, we fear that chaos and a loss of control are
lurking there in the dark, when it is our own ego that is creating the chaos.
But sensory deprivation is as honest a mirror as there can ever be; it re-
veals nothing except that which is already inside you. And that which is
insideyouisexactlywhatyouareafraidtofind.
In sensory deprivation, the racing of the mind and the obvious-
ness of its patterns of self-harm and repetition are revealed for
what they are. In other words, through outer darkness, the mind
is put into the spotlight.
The only thing to do now – if you’ve done this before, that is – is to calmly
become aware of your mind, thoughts, judgments, and fears (see @Mindful-
ness). To be awareness. Let the black void take you to the white void. Once
youstepintothatemptinesswithfullawareness,youhaveaninfiniteplay-
ingfieldinwhichtocreateyourpresence.
Somepeoplehaveaccesstoflotationtanks,whereabreathingapparatus
and salt water keep you in as isolated a state as possible. Other people have
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access to caves where there is pitch black darkness. For you and me, in
practical terms, we can just turn off the light at night, cover our eyes, or just
close them. Limiting our senses physically or through willpower like this
can be done at any moment.
Another simple yet effective technique to bring your inner world into focus
is in the shower. In a rather awkward position, sit down and try and wedge
your ears between your knees while letting the water run over your head.
This creates an amazing effect of isolating your mind in a wall of rushing wa-
ter, so that you can enter a different world. Here you can come back into the
moment, meditate, be mindful, imagine and visualize things, and so on.
You know that ringing sound you sometimes hear in your ears? Sometimes
it grows louder; perhaps respective to the diminishing inputs around you.
At night, in a dark, quiet room for instance, it becomes noticeable because
you have little else to pay attention to. Think of that ringing as the buzzing
energy of your own central nervous system: the humming of the brain’s
computer.
Now when you hear the ringing, the high pitch tone, focus on it deeply
until it becomes the complete focus of your awareness, and you become
it by being aware of it alone. Don’t think it: feel it. Ride along its waves all
through your cranium.
The ringing frequency in your brain is a physical manifestation of your
conscious presence: it is like the energy link between the electromagnetic
poles of your brain. If you become it, and consciously ride it full spectrum
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and intensity, you become the full link up between your brain halves and
all the voices that congregate in them. You have connected to the central
frequency of your brain.
Using an eye patch on one eye is also an interesting experiment. Cover
your right eye, but keep staring at something as if you’re still looking at it
with both eyes. Eventually, as your dual-focus adjusts, you will be able to
see both darkness on the right side and the object on the other, creating a
sort of double vision. At the same time, this might get your third eye vision
going so that all the lines, shadows and dimensions of reality blur into one.
Trippy!
Sex
I can only speak to this as a man, but sex and
sexuality are obvious ways to play with con-
sciousness.
Sex magick, for example, uses the moment of
orgasm to project the will into the unconscious. Let your desire go out with
your orgasm, just by thinking of it at the moment of ecstasy. This can be
quite powerful (see @Magick will).
Sex can also be combined with mindfulness (e.g. Tantra) or mind-ex-
panding drugs. Connect with your partner at a cosmic level that melts your
physical bodies together. Use the physical act of becoming one to do
the same on a spiritual level. Pause in the middle of the sex act and
stare deeply into your partner’s eyes. Recognize.
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Sigils
What: Impregnating reality with your artisti-
cally rendered will and imagination.
Why: You decide.
How: Find your will, express it artistically, then
release it and let the unconscious manifest it for you.
Ancient Hindu intellectuals were not all blindly religious, nor were they
carving images of weird gods and goddesses for shits and giggles. Instead,
they realized that the gods they imagined and the symbols they made to
represent them were projections of psychological powers. As Joseph Camp-
bell says, “They [the Gods] are in you, not out there.”
Sigils, like the gods, or any other outer symbols like logos, statues, coins,
flags,etc,areprojectionsofwhatisinsideofyouontotheoutsideworld.
A sigil, in its basic form, is a doodle drawn during class that expresses
your boredom and the desire to do something other than what you are do-
ing. It is a symbol drawn to express some desire or identity.
If you draw or write something with a specific intent, whatever
you have just created is like a magical letter delivered to the un-
conscious. This is a sigil.
Sigils are effective. Just look at the faces on coins or the statues of kings,
pharaohs, and gods. Or the logos of our corporate culture. They all evoke
certain feelings, certain reactions and associations, and they succeed in
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reproducing the reality that they represent. McDonald’s is recognizable
anywhere in the world, and people know exactly what it means when they
see the big M appear at the side of the highway. When you wear the shirt of
some well known brand, you are representing them and their vision of real-
ity, and you are helping to spread it for them.
When you make your own sigils, it may help to be crazy, weird, and eso-
teric about it. Whether random or meticulously designed, sigils shouldn’t
remind you of your original desire or intent. If they do, they will remind you
ofyourexpectationsandwillthusconflictwiththeego.
Also, the sigil is not a command but a request. Use natural or synchro-
nistic things, because the sigil is a living message, a living gateway. Empty
yourself; contact the deep; create and then embrace the sigil; allow it to sub-
merge; close the gap; then forget about it. Drop your expectations of your
desirebeingfulfilled.Thisemptyingmaytakeeffort,butthetransmission
none. Care for the form, nothing else. Don’t think about the results while
transmitting. Success is determined by factors largely beyond your indi-
vidual control.
Personally, I like to ‘keep it symbol.’ Write something on your hand, or
your arm, or your belly or wherever, draw a doodle that means something
to you, and glance upon it during the day to be reminded of whatever mean-
ing you imbued the symbol with. Ozzy Osbourne, for example, has smiley
faces tattooed on his knees, so that every time he takes a dump he reminds
[8] Technically, a symbol isn’t a sigil because it clearly represents something recog-nizable. So a smiley face is bending the rules. In a good way. ☺
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himself to be happy8.
For serious sigilizing I recommend the book Visual Magick by Jan Fries.
Smile
You’re alive!
Smoke cannabis
Cannabis, or marijuana, when consumed in a limited and balanced way,
can be a great tool for consciousness change. Smoke too much, and you may
become too detached; smoke too little, and you may remain too attached.
With the right balance, a cannabis high offers a useful change in perspec-
tive on yourself and your situation in life. It can make you wax philosophi-
cal, as it helps you see through the emotional games and thought patterns
that you have been playing out in your mind. Perhaps most importantly,
cannabis lightens your mood, so that you can remember to enjoy being
alive.
Ittookmeafewyearstofindtherightbalanceformyself.Thishasturned
out to be a matter of smoking (or rather, vaporizing) a controlled amount
once every week or two. Smoking has become a sort of spiritual,
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psychological, creative, and philosophical ritual, quite different in
purpose than that of your average college pothead. I take time to reconnect,
to think new thoughts, to write and to draw, to meditate and to pray. Being
buzzed or high (if you know your own tolerance and preference) can make a
powerful combination with most of the other techniques discussed here.
For those who have absolutely no experience with cannabis, or any desire
to experiment, do with this technique as you would do with any other; pick
and choose as you like.
Stare into the void (Third Eye)
Close your eyes. Look at the darkness. Look
as if you have your eyes open, into the center of
your vision, and a little bit up towards your fore-
head. If you’ve done this before, you know that
kaleidoscopic patterns, faint colors, a tunnel, or images can appear in your
mind. It’s the so-called third eye. Not everybody can see it (yet), but medita-
tion, psychedelics, and marijuana are known to help bring it about.
This third eye seems to be a gateway to the unconscious. The void that you
are looking into is the void of your unconscious mind, projected directly in
front of your brain. Tuning in to closed eye visuals (which seem to be
spontaneously generated by the unconscious), you are enabling direct
communication with the unconscious.
Carl Jung had a nice trick which he called Active Imagination. Basically,
he said, you hold an image in your mind – such as a vision of the Mother
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Mary – projected onto this void behind the eyes, and see what happens to
it. Without any effort, the image should start morphing all by itself. Jung
said to keep note of the different things that appear and the connections you
can see between them, and they will reveal to you the patterns of your own
thoughts and feelings.
An example; if you are nervous right before going up on stage to give a
performance or presentation, close your eyes for a minute and open your
third eye. See what shows up. I did this once before speaking in front of
several hundred people. No other techniques helped to settle my nerves.
But when I looked at my third eye, the face of an overjoyed baby appeared.
It was exactly what I needed to get into the right head space.
Sublimate
Sublimation is a way to escape suffering. Wait,
that’s wrong. No: sublimation is a way to recog-
nize suffering and to do something about it with
your heart and your mind. Basically, what you
do is you change your opinion of what’s happen-
ing in your reality from the negative to the neutral or the positive.
Allacts,events,signsandsynchronicitiesinyourlifetellinfinitestories
about the one basic reality you still live in. At least for yourself, why should
you not read them as love? That way, your basic reality will respond to that
feeling (see @Love it).
The same goes for any experience of suffering, pain, anger, fear, insult,
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and injury. Transform all incoming signals into your desired and
optimal output; turn someone’s anger into love, your jealousy
into compassion. I don’t want anger. I want, for example, to recognize
thatwhichismeanttoangermeandtofindithilariousinstead(butnot
always).
This is also called stopping the Wheel of Karma. You become your fear
and blow it up from the inside out. You neutralize your negativity and the
negativity of others in a playful way.
I learned a simple and effective trick from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat
Han. He suggests that to be mindful you need to recognize the thoughts
that cause your suffering, and embrace them. Literally give them a hug in
your mind; forgive them, and tell them it’s okay. This won’t make anything
go away, but it will transform the pain. It will change your attitude to what’s
going on in your mind and in your life. Hug!
Using a cliché like “Everything is energy,” you should be able to remind
yourself that any feeling, bodily sensation, thought, etc. is an energy form.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed (according to the so-called laws of
science), but it can be transformed. This is similar to the process of transub-
stantiation, where Catholics turn bread into the sacred body of Christ even
though it’s still bread. Without physically changing something, you too can
totally alter your own perception of it.
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Summon
Summoning is a so-called occult
technique of magick (see @Magick
will).
Think of summoning as role play-
ing. Basically, we can imagine any
person, or any role, stereotype, or
archetype that we could be right
now. For example, just picturing
Arnold Schwarzenegger in your mind might make you feel stronger. Think
of a tiger and walk around with a regal prowl. Think of Jesus and walk
around blessing people. Just by thinking you can invoke their characteris-
tics in your own self. Their behavior and their words can become yours for
a while.
Summoning ritual: take an object, stand around it like an idiot doing
some kind of sacred movements and incantations, and at a certain point say
“Now God is in this [something].” You can exchange God with Beelzebub,
Optimus Prime or whatever entity you prefer to summon. The point is, you
will get into a non-ordinary state of consciousness by doing non-ordinary
things.
Synchronicities
Big one. This is probably the biggest one. Synchronicities are the most
down-to-earth reminder and engineer of who you are. Why? Because they
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happen to you. Synchronicities, or coincidences,
are the unconscious at work, revealing itself
through minor or major absurdities. These in-
clude coincidences in things you see or hear, te-
lepathy, Freudian slips, and so on. And you have
to have synchronicities to know that you are in
tune. When you notice a coincidence, you realize that the movie which is
our reality is right on cue. The director is at work, revealing his or her tricks
right in front of your eyes.
Synchronicity is the name Jung gave to meaningful coincidences. The
concept has grown since then, and it covers basically all experiences of co-
incidence, déjà vu, and other such meaningful yet highly personal events.
Whenever you feel like something ‘out there’ is happening directly to you,
andonlyyoucanseethesigns(ormaybeyoushareitwithaspecificper-
son or group), then you are experiencing a synchronicity. In a way, it’s the
‘higher’ you talking to you, the lower you.
Follow the signs! Be inspired by the Invisible Hand that’s directing you.
Here, instead of always talking and trying to be in control of reality, you
listen. Everything is you talking to yourself; so all you have to do is open
your eyes, open your ears, open your heart and mind, and see what you are
trying to tell yourself.
Whether the synchronicities are boring or amazing, interpret them as if
they are meant to be meaningful. Objectively speaking, you cannot know
what they mean, nor should you need to. You can only decide it for yourself.
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Know that, as with @dreams, the main message of any synchronicity is this:
Wake up!
Synchronicities start as a wakeup call. And when you’re awakened by
them, you are free to do anything because you’re in an altered state already.
It’s the pause that allows you to play.
What you might also try to recognize in your daily life is that everything
is synchronicity. We tend to only notice synchronicities when something
appears odd or unusual. But everything that happens, happens for
a reason; it’s you talking to yourself, creating yourself, playing
with yourself.
Write down all of your synchronicities within a period of one or two
weeks. And if you’re not having enough of them, summon a synchronicity
to yourself. It could be one of your prayers. “Send me a synchronicity,” or
something along those lines.
Talk to the void
This is a continuation of the @Stare into the void post.
With your eyes closed, focus on your third
eye. Banish the shadows of thought projection.
Talk to the light of the void with your thoughts;
animate it by addressing it directly. Giving it a
name might help, so that you can literally speak
to it. You can actually communicate directly
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with the unconscious mind through the inner void, or third eye. It can make
images appear out of nowhere. Now, if you equate the blackness with the
unconscious, with the higher self that you are seeking to communicate with,
then just talk to it. Use it as an object to direct your prayers, your desires,
and your questions at. Get into a meditative state, ask a question to the void,
and see what images arise out of it. And then see what meanings and con-
notations the images bring out to forefront of your rational-intuitive mind.
Whoopa!
Talk to self
Thinking is like talking to yourself. It’s in-
ner chit-chat. A whole concert of different voic-
es could be going on just below the surface of
yourawareness,dukingitouttofindoutwhich
thought or feeling is strongest. It’s as if all the organs of your body, all the
different cells, all your memories, every person you ever met or read about
is calling out to be heard inside you.
So talk to your self. Close your eyes, and say “Hello.” To whom? Duh! Just
close your eyes and say, “Hello. I am in my mind right now. But I’m going to
step outside.” And as you open your eyes and look out again, you don’t just
see the world and your body: you see that the world is your body. And you
are now out here. You are all of it. You are all of THIS, right here.
Everything is speaking to you. And you speak to everything.
Try talking to your car before you turn on the ignition. Talk to your com-
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puter when you start up a program. Talk to your plants when you water
them. Talk to the sky when clouds are forming. Talk to time when you need
it to be on your side. Talk to nothing in particular when you need to voice
a thought. Talk to your thoughts when you see them going in circles. And
when you talk to all the ten thousand things, be aware of the fact that you
are talking to yourself; not just ‘talking to yourself’, in your mind, but that
you are reaching out to the car, the computer, the plants, the sky, time, noth-
ing, your thoughts, and all these things because they can hear you; because
they are you. They are us, and we are them; no difference. If we say ‘I love
you’ in our heads to the food on our plate, it is heard, and it has consequenc-
es. If we say I hate you, same story. Whether we call it Karma, magick, or
the logic of cause and effect, just understand that this is a mechanism for
the mind to interact with its greater self.
Talk to self can be a @prayer. It need not necessarily be (in my case, pref-
erably not) to God, but it can be directed to the aspect or totality of self
that I’m concerned with. When I pray, I know that by simply speaking out I
am heard by the unconscious. There is an interesting technique that some
Christians use: PUSH, or Pray Until Something Happens. If you add intent
to your prayer – whoever or whatever it may be to – and release it and your
expectations, you know deep down that something is going to happen. You
can stop praying now.
When you meet people, friends or strangers, recognize the gods around
you. Say in your mind, Hello fellow gods. Recognize the divine theater that
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you are playing in together.
We are always talking to ourselves. So what message are you sending and
receiving?
Tarot
TheTarot,inprettymuchanyversionyoucanfind,isasetofillustrated
cards which tells the story of a spiritual seeker’s evolution. Each Tarot
card is a multi-layered symbol that expresses some aspect of our
true selves (see @Sigils) as we journey along our paths.
However, Tarot cards, like dice, lucky coins, etc, can also be used for
things such as divination. They can shed light on a question or desire by
revealing the answer that is already there in your unconscious. Even though
the operating principle in using them is chance, Tarot cards can tell you
the story you need to hear. And they can help your mind to see the best
course of action to take in the now, in the future, or with regards to the past.
Justshufflethedeck,pickoutarandomcardwithintent,andinterpretthe
meaning for yourself.
If you have a question about yourself, your future, or somebody close to
you,shufflethedeckwiththatquestioninmind.Pullacard,orseveral,de-
pending on your skill, and see what the card tells you. Whatever you decide
it says, that is (part of) what it says. Otherwise you wouldn’t have read it
that way. This technique can help reveal the deeper side of a situation, the
hidden element that might be more obvious if you were in a higher state of
consciousness.
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For example, before going to meet someone, or simply to learn more about
people near to me, I like to pull two cards: one that shows who they are on
the outside, and one that shows who they are on the inside. I then have one
or two reference books on the Tarot that help me determine the meaning
of the cards, which in turns helps me prepare ways to behave around the
person in question (see @Compose yourself).
YoucanalsoplaywiththeTarotbychoosingarandomcardthatdefines
your personality for the day. If you take the major arcana or the court cards
or whatever selection of cards you prefer you can give yourself the daily mis-
sion of developing that aspect of your character. Put the card in a frame on
your desk so that you see it often during the day.
Thankfulness
Thank all of creation for its participation in
your vision. Honor and thank what has come
before; pay your respects to what is coming; and
be what is becoming.
A simple trick to trigger gratitude is of course
to list what’s good in your life. It shifts your thinking. And the bonus is that
appreciation attracts support. Don’t just think “thank you:” feel “thank you.”
Feelgratefulnessandforgivenessforwhathascomebefore,alltheinfinite
cells and atoms and beings and minerals that have paved the way for you to
walk on right now (literally!).
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Threshold awareness
Thresholds. Boundaries. Limits. You want to
pass through a threshold, a boundary, a block-
age, and transcend it? It isn’t difficult.Every
moment is a threshold from one time
frame to the next. As if watching a slideshow of our own lives, we’re liter-
ally passing through thresholds all the time. Gateless Gates of eternity.
Practice recognizing thresholds. For example, you can use any physi-
cal doorway you pass through to say “I am entering a dream through this
threshold, and I can be anyone I want this time around” (see @Dream).
When you look out through your eyes, you see your own hands, maybe
even your nose. They are part of the physical threshold of your self. Check
this physical boundary to the world, then step in. Be here now.
When you look out of a window, into a painting, through a game character
on a computer screen, through a camera, or through glasses, recognize that
it is a threshold from one reality to another. Recognize that you are looking
at yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself.
The more you practice recognizing physical boundaries, and remembering
that you can pass through them (‘transcend’ them), the more you condition
yourself to do the same with mental or emotional boundaries.
Remember: I walk out of the walls I make.
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Touch
Actively engage your environment. Or better said, engage the active prin-
ciple of your environment. Realize that reality is alive. Don’t just touch
a door and ask, “am I dreaming,” but consciously acknowledge the door as
consciousness. Close your eyes, focus on the touch, and center your con-
sciousness on it. Consciousness is not centered in your head; you can be
anywhere, and the point of contact between inner and outer reality – the
touch – is a great way to practice decentralizing your consciousness. This
way you are getting out of your head, getting used to different centers of
consciousness, and you can connect your will to your living world (see @
Magic Eye).
Visualization
Influence your own behavior by
visualizing it before you do it. In-
stead of running through scenar-
ios after the fact (“I should have
said this,” etc), play it out the way
you want to see it happen. Decide
on being composed, well-breathed,
and that whatever the other says,
he/she is you and is playing a role in your story (see @Compose yourself).
Remember your smile, expand your ego, and turn the energy of the conver-
sation in any direction you want. Visualize yourself smiling at them.
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To really feel alive and connected, visualize lines of energy connecting
you to the world. Visualize yourself as a transmitter, sending out waves of
energy across the ether for others to receive. Use your imagination.
Imagine the following magical model of (and key to) the universe, where
you have an energy ball in the palm of your hand. It is a pulsating orb that
you can conjure up anywhere. This ball of power represents the receptive
aspectofSelfwhichyouwishtoinfluencewithmagick.Think(project)your
desired reality into the orb. You can spend any amount of time imagining
your preferred world in this or any other way, no matter how silly or imprac-
tical it seems. The more you do it, the more you realize that imagination is
one of the greatest gifts our brain has given us.
Note:youmayfindthatvisualizationisaloteasierwhenyou’rehigh.
Wake up
Wake up inside yourself after waking
up in your bed. Create some kind of ritual to
wake up inside yourself. Stare at yourself in the
mirror. Recite a mantra or a spell. Say hello to
your bedroom world. Tell yourself something
like “I am creating all of this. And I’m gonna
keep on creating this new day.” Create a feeling of strength, create determi-
nation, create charge. No plans or expectations, just charge and openness.
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Write
When you write, you open yourself up to – you
receive – the words which you use to describe
reality. It is a direct communication from your
imagination. Whether or not we open ourselves
tothisunconsciousflow,wearealwaysevolving.
We are evolving as we speak; you are evolving as
you read; and I am evolving as I write.
Who knows where inspiration comes from? Instead of trying to answer
this mystery, what I like to do to loosen up is to write half-absurd poetry.
Starting with random syllables and sounds, I work towards a kind of recog-
nizable nonsense that projects my desire or state of mind. I imagine some-
thing, believe in it, signify it with words, let it go, and watch it manifest
itself in real life (see @Magick will, @Sigils).9
As a result of your writing, you are imposing your own plot on reality.
Even a word on your bathroom door like “Don’t worry, be happy” can do
good things for you. I wrote this one day as I caught myself worrying about
the way I looked:
Stop worrying about yourself and what other people think of you.
Stop worrying about yourself
Stop worrying
Stop
[9] Watch comic book artist Grant Morrison speaking about the magick of writing at Disinfocon. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6148569602584070911#
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Summary - What’s in Your Hands?
This handbook makes the claim that we, as individual human beings, can
overcome the anxiety we experience in feeling separated from the world
around us by taking control of what is within us. We can reconnect to a
greater identity beyond our thin layer of skin, and start actively co-creating
our lives.
This is a power that was previously reserved for shamans, prophets, high
priests, mystics, and other spiritual leaders. But their tools are now free for
all of us to use.
We too can teach ourselves to live in higher states of consciousness. We
can learn to interact with the world knowing that it is us.
The tools for doing this come down to two simple steps. They are “pause”
and “play,” or mindfulness and magick. Pause yourself with mindfulness by
catching yourself in your automatic patterns and waking up to your identity
– your identity as reality itself. Then, with magick, you are free to decide
how to continue your patterns consciously and playfully. Make your brain
play, like a song that has gone from being a mechanical recording to a live
and joyful improvisation.
Life itself simply happens. That part is the unconscious, the eternal mys-
tery. But how we live it is up to us. Doing it consciously, and mastering the
unconscious patterns that we normally follow, lets us tap into the unex-
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plainable magic that creates our world. When we are aware of the magical
dimension of reality, and tune in with the act of creation and evolution, we
can take our minds into our own hands.
Remember, we are all gods. We are free to do anything and believe
anything we want.
That’s it and that’s all.
It’s not even a commandment: it’s the operating manual of life, the game
plan. It’s the way it is. I’m almost afraid to add a caution, because it should
be enough in and of itself. But I’ll do it anyways: just remember that every-
thing you do works both ways. It always ends in balance, so that what you
do to others you do to yourself.
Love the game. Love yourself. Pause for a moment, and get that it’s all
connected, all us, and play!
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Index
Accept your dark side .44
Act symbolically .45
Believe .46
Breathe .48
Complementarity .50
Compose yourself .51
Connect with nature .54
Consecrate .55
Con-Uncon .56
Cosmic schmuck .58
Dream .59
E-Prime it .61
Embrace insanity (Enjoy it) .62
Etymology .64
Expand your identity .65
Expand your logic .67
Expand your mythology .69
Eye contact .72
Forgive .73
Have faith .75
Have fun .76
Hypnotize yourself .77
Know thyself .77
Listen .78
Love it .78
Magic Eye for the third eye .81
Magick will .83
Mantras .89
Map your consciousness .90
Meditate .91
(Self-) Metaprogramming .93
Mindfulness .98
Mindfulness of creation .101
Mindfulness of linguistics .102
Mirror .106
Move .107
Numerology .108
Optimism/Pronoia .109
Pray .110
Psychedelics .112
Question .115
Read .116
Relativize it .117
Sensory deprivation .122
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140
Sex .126
Sigils .127
Smile! .129
Smoke cannabis .129
Stare into the void .130
Sublimate .131
Summon .133
Synchronicities .133
Talk to the void .135
Talk to self .136
Tarot .138
Thankfulness .139
Threshold awareness .140
Touch .141
Visualization .141
Wake up .142
Write .143
About the author
Klaas Pieter van der Tempel (1984-) is, amongst other things, the second
of three sons in a family of Dutch-Canadian diplomats. Having lived and
learned across four of Earth’s continents, he formalized his broad interests
in the studies of Anthropology (Hon. BA, University of Toronto) and the
Comparative Philosophy of Science and the Humanities (MA, University of
Utrecht).
During his academic career, Klaas was struck by the limits of human
knowledge and intellectual education. Ever inquisitive, he pursued a side
track in exploring truth through experience, not words, and was transformed
by way of a spontaneous “mystical” type experience. This side track - the ex-
periential, introspective, and experimental approach to consciousness - soon
became the focus of his life instead.
At the time of this writing, Klaas is dedicated to sharing knowledge about
mystical-type experiences both in writing and in personal conversations
and consultations. He lives and plays in the Netherlands with his future wife
Eva.
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Create an Empty Space
Feel free to use this empty space to write down your own techniques, your
experiences, explanations or questions. Then pass it on and let the hand-
book grow!
The Higher Consciousness Handbook is a book of practical psychology for the awakened and the awakening individual.
Intended for the advanced explorer of consciousness, this book can be a source of inspiration and experimentation for anybody looking to free their mind and play with their sense of reality.
The Higher Consciousness Handbook seeks to answer a basic question of consciousness change. How can we live our daily lives in a higher of state consciousness? In other words, how can we interact with our world knowing that we are one?
Learn how by trying more than fifty techniques, including mindfulness, magick, sigils, synchronicities, dreaming, breathing, sex, and more.
Copyright © 2011, by Klaas Pieter van der Tempel
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