As I described in the launch post for my chaos magic experiment, I am beginning with Liber MMM: mind control, magic, and dreaming*.
Mind Control
Except for the emotional auditing, Peter Carroll’s “mind control” is basically meditation, and I’ve been starting simple with sitting motionless and breathing concentration. The hardest thing about five minutes a day of meditation isn’t the meditation, itself: it’s sitting down to do it. So far I’ve been managing about every other day.
I’ve experimented with three different positions to date. Sitting cross-legged on my bed, with my arms extended and my elbows resting on my knees. Laying flat on my back on the bed, arms limp at my sides. And sitting in one of those mini-papasan chairs that they sell for dorm rooms, facing my altar, with my hands in my lap. I’ve had mixed results with all three. I have done my meditation in the morning, promptly upon waking, and at night, shortly before going to sleep. Again, the results have been mixed.
Sitting still for five minutes was, in fact, physically painful the first time I did it as a part of this experiment. And, for whatever reason, flatly impossible yesterday morning. I’m not sure why: it’s not like I don’t sit motionless for a lot of my magical workings. Maybe it’s because I’m not focused on anything in particular. Ironically, I think this will get easier as I progress, not because of the practice, itself—though that will absolutely help a lot–because shape and object visualization are things I do more often as a part of my visionary practice.
Magic
Coming back to the Sunrise Temple has made it easy to get back into my practice of daily banishing. For the last week I have begun my day with a banishing pentagram and a Qabalistic Cross. Except for today, which got off to a fuckered start when I woke from some fairly disturbing nightmares that pretty much threw off my whole morning game.
I have also been working on designing a few sigils, and researching different methods of designing and launching them. In addition to Liber Null, I have ploughed through most of Frater U.D.’s Practical Sigil Magic, and am delighted to finally have some grasp of AO Spare’s original Alphabet of Desire/Sacred Language. As someone who has dabbled in conlang, and envies the utility of verbs in inflected languages such as Attic Greek and Classical Latin, I’m really, really, really excited to start developing my own personal magical grammar for complex sigils. I have some really interesting ideas about how to combine this technique with Hellenistic curse tablets and my own theories of art as an act of magic that I can’t wait to try out.
I have finally designed, but not actually enchanted, a set of talismans to give to my friends and colleagues by which they may offer me magical aid, or call upon me for the same. Look forward to further reports in that arena, too.
Dreaming
Like meditation, getting back into the habit of keeping a dream journal has been hit-and-miss. I’m still at a point where, often, I literally cannot remember my dreams even moments after waking. And then there’s shit like today, where the imagery is so disturbing that I just can’t bring myself to write it down in the first moments of my day.
Magical dreaming has always eluded me, in part because I am so violently dysfunctional upon first waking, and this is going to be a major area of struggle for me, personally.
* – Where’s that third M come from? “Morpheus”?