( In an email back and forth with Joe, this issue came up so this partially answers it at least- anyone else have any input on this, feel free to contribute)



Magick
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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Magick is an alternate spelling of magic, coined by Aleister Crowley to differentiate 'the true science of the Magi from all its counterfeits'. Although it is widely believed that this meant distinguishing genuine magic from stage magic, there is no evidence that Crowley intended this interpretation. Crowley got the inspiration for the spelling from its usage by the famous English magician John Dee. His definition treats magic in the context of the paranormal and magic in the context of religion as special cases.

Crowley defined magick as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will". By this, he included "mundane" acts of will as well as ritual magic. In Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter XIV, Crowley says:

What is a Magical Operation? It may be defined as any event in nature which is brought to pass by Will. We must not exclude potato-growing or banking from our definition. Let us take a very simple example of a Magical Act: that of a man blowing his nose.

energies of fiction, creation, elements of transfigurative energy.

writing some of the notions stories (see my links) i felt severely drained afterwords and also bizarrely set apart, almost as if some stories or the energies required / contained within the story ideas were physically coiled up inside my head and were released out o fme when the stories were written. With things like the monkey gospels, there was a definite release/exhaustion energy going on and those stories felt much more like i was just the vessel for a story concept or idea energy to travel through to be made real via fiction.

Grant and Warren Ellis have touched upon the idea of the possibility of interacting with a fictional reality from our world and it raises the point of how much energy is unleashed when an idea goes from one;s mind into a fictional state or reality, surely there is some conceptual energetic framework whereupon the scale and power of said energy can be measured and perhaps harnessed?

there are no coincidences. ( Read more... )

as grant explored in 'the invisibles' as well as many of his other works, the idea of the personality is a mutable one. we are not ourselves, a notion that was very popular in the 1950' sand 1960's with their cold war paranoia, exploration of psychic para-psychology personality as a programmable ( and thereby by implication, also erasable) concept. we are acted upon by so many external influences that we need to be able to decode, deconstruct and ultimately decipher our own layers to ourselves and how our personality scaffolding can be observed, layer by independant layer. to know who we are is part of our journey in becoming a part of magickal consciousness. and part of knowing who we are is knowing 'which' who we are at any given time and how each 'me' functions as part of a greater whole of our own ' memeplexes' and within any other co-relations with external influences.

do parts of our overall layered and stitched selves interact with other people's specific layers or complexes or do we interact on an 'overall' basis? and can we break down our existing personality without suffering the trauma of ultimate existential dread and fear of loss of self and confusion of identity? Can we make it through the preliminary stress of realizing what each of our layers or complexes are in order to separate them out and rebuild ourselves as a more true or 'current' collection of complexes. can we sacrifice the present through getting over the past in order to make a more authentic future self or complex shell for us to inhabit and take upon ourselves our personal power?

magick will give you what you want and what you need to take out of it, from it or put back into it. it is at once us and the other; it is everything we are and can be and it is simultaneously all that we are not and cannot ever be. it contains the all within us but does not let us be the all.

to understand magick, one has to approach understanding itself and become a state of self-enriched enlightenment that will unlock our own ways and means to interact with the magickal reality that is around us and within us. we must shed our old selves in order to become the new self-created/discovered/sculpted persona. we must see the future being shaped out of the present through the pressures of the past. we must let ourselves be reformed without stopping us being our true essential selves.

magick is effecting influence upon external events by the application of a person's will - also can be seen as the acting upon the objective result to bring it in line with the subjective desire.

magick is realizing the power and the potential that there is within and without us and how our sense of self and self perception can change and control those realizations and channel them into our process of being and becoming and knowing what the magickal power surrounding us all is capable of.

(preliminary notes)

one preliminary step in terms of creating one's own guide to the path of self-realization is to undergo the ' treating of everthing within a day as an act of magickal consciousness' to help free the mind and soul of restraints and conventional strait-jacketed thinking processes. within these days, one practices some of one's ongoing growing meditative/contemplative skills within an overall larger relationship to all fremework by letting the universe breathe through us.

we stop interpreting, translating, supposing, imposing, shrinking down and decoding information being shot to our brain every second of every day and we allow our presences to interact freely, powerfully, naturally with what surrounds us. we slow down, we breathe in, we focu on nothing so that nothing can focus on us and we let the world talk to us, talk through us, we let everything show us what it will without us putting a tired shape on everything.

we listen instead of talking; we accept instead of refusing; we observe and do not judge or try to measure. and the old powerful voices speak to us loud and cleary as do the new young energetic ones. and we soak up what the world is showing us and thank it for sharing.

we become aware and shed our false caged persona. we begin to be; we begin to understand what it is to walk and think through magickal consciousness.

talking to meera last night and we ended up talking about the afterlife..so i brought up the idea of the supercontext, another remarkable exploration of ideas by the redoubtable Grant Morrison; quick cliff notes version of supercontext is that its the reality that our reality is a pale reflection of; we are the abridged ' kiddie- friendly' version of their reality- we are the subjective context based variant which is only a tiny fraction of the overall objective supercontext. i have included below a snippet from a Grant interview wherein he looks at the supercontext.

enjoy.


Grant Morrison, 2012, & the Supercontext
There's a new interview with comic mage Grant Morrison, author of The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, Arkham Asylum, and the current run of The X-Men. Here's an excerpt:

CXF: Last, but certainly not least. It's December 22, 2012. As humanity takes its last wistful look at the constraints of space-time and dives headlong into the Supercontext, where is Grant Morrison?

GM: Shagging like bloody Shiva, I hope. I think that if anything happens at all, it's most likely to come in the form of a mass consciousness change - possibly triggered by planetary electromagnetic field alterations predicted to occur around that time - so that basically everyone will start peaking on the acid trip that never ends. 'Individuality' will dissolve and your minds will start to merge into one mass mind, which is likely to seem quite frightening and overwhelming, especially for the sheltered minds, and time will seem to disappear as we identify with the mitochondria in our cells, instead of identifying with the physical individual carrier 'bodies' we use to expedite the shuffling around of DNA.

The world's current social structures should collapse quite rapidly when that happens and chances are, only people capable of handling the immense influx of new information will be those already familiar with heavily-altered states of consciousness. For everyone else, it will seem like the Second Coming, the arrival of the Space Brothers, the Rapture, Hell on Earth, the 32nd path of the Tree of Life or whatever they decide to see - everyone will get their own personal apocalyptic transfer into this new mode of being. Some poor souls will have to be guided out of hell, others will have to be coaxed down from sci-fi Ultraspheres but we'll all be living in a state of permanent psychedelic ecstasy and will have to restructure our entire existence to cope with the new consciousness. I have a feeling that psychedelic drugs provide a flashforward glimpse of this kind of consciousness and help prepare the human mind for when that mode of consciousness is permanent.

If something like this occurs at the end of 2012, and it's also possible that nothing of note will happen - we should see a lot of people freaking out when we re-enter what some Australian aboriginals call Aljira (a word English is not up to the task of translating, so it comes out as 'Dreamtime') and I call 'the Supercontext'. When we see in a new way and become new to ourselves, we'll also see lots of stuff that will probably scare people who didn't know it was there all along. People in delirium and on the brink of death see these crawling, replicating 'wilkie-swilkie men' all over everything and soon, I think, everyone will start to see them. They are 'the spaces between things, come to life…'

As for me, I hope I'll be screaming 'Yes!' like Molly Bloom as the universe rolls up into a silver paper ball for the quantum cats of Hell to play with.

( another and much longer excerpt from the same interview with Grant Morrison...too good to pass up....even if you are not familiar with Mr.Morrison, this is a fascinating and painful piece to read...engrossing and interesting)



One thing I found rather disturbing was a comment you made in an online interview, which seemed to go unnoticed by the site, you mentioned you had felt suicidal at certain points during the series creation.

THE FILTH comic was created as a filter or cleansing plant - a colourful pseudo-kidney, if you like - a disordered Qabalah of failure and exploitation through which I could pass and purify damaging and seductive ultra-violet left-hand material and examine all the bad feelings and images I was coming to associate with life at the start of the new century - the skin crawling paranoia of surveillance film set reality, the endless mass murders in the name of stupid causes that weigh less than farts, Western culture's frightening self-hatred, its increasingly obscene fascination with entertainment inspired by the results of poverty and ignorance, the use of pornography as a narcotic and its subsequent impact on how men now regard women, the incoherent narcissism of 'reality' TV. These were all trends I thought were worthy of satire and mockery, dangling unprotected bollocks of our culture calling out for a brutal conceptual kicking - so I saw The Filth as the visible 'art' part of a much wider-ranging attempt to process so-called 'qlippothic' or 'negative' energy during a 'crossing' of the ABYSS, as it is known to magicians.

To ease the passage, I immersed myself in books about anti-life, death and decay, shame, dirt, chaos, nervous breakdown, mind control porn, humiliation, cruelty, schizophrenic art and disease pathology and fed the sickness back in the form of a cartoon narrative inoculation - no wonder so many people hated it (the project achieved a kind of weird dissonance in monthly form and very few of the people who commented seemed able to extract any meaning from the simple images and words before their eyes. It was fucking bizarre for me to read people saying, of this very meticulously planned and executed story, that 'the structure is a complete mess' or 'The Filth has no discernible plot, characters or themes.', or the meaningless phrase I hate more than any other 'Weirdness-for -weirdness' sake'. I've yet to see anyone attempt to denigrate WATCHMEN as 'superheroes for superheroes sake' or MAUS as 'the Holocaust for the Holocaust's sake' and get away with it). We all hated polio booster injections, didn't we? Nobody likes to feel a prick, after all, even if it's for their own good.

Anyway, I was bigging up The Filth in my own head as a devastating vivisection of Where We Are Today and as usual, I used my life and my work as a laboratory and wrote down the results in the form of a story. Although I was familiar with The Abyss or the 'Ring-Pass-Not' as a concept from various 'Rising on the Planes' meditations way back when I was doing my early Tree of Life and Enochian 'Aethyr' experiments, I was almost unprepared for the ferocity of the state of consciousness which engulfed me and transformed my world. I entered the Abyss shortly before 9/11, I think - on that morning, I woke up in a terrible state, roaring and crying uncontrollably and that's around when it all kicked in. Things became their own opposites - all thoughts, all concepts, all possibilities came equipped with their own annihilating negatives until there was no meaning in anything that was not erased by this process. It became impossible to think of anything at all without also imagining its corresponding, negating complement, all of the time, until eventually all this conceptual particle-smashing vaporised 'me' to fuck and released enough energy to fuel the birth of an inner sun, which then stabilized into a very odd new view of reality (this 'Choronzonic' consciousness and beyond is a hallmark of the Abyss experience). Prior to the atomization, every illusion I had ever entertained about myself and the world was ground to powder and particle in that brutal mill, I have to say. During the period of writing The Filth, which coincided in part with my tenure on New X-Men, I was so distressed and affected by what was happening and by the 'dark' material I was trying to process and resolve, that I hurled myself at a 3rd floor balcony in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard only to be hauled back by Kristan, scarred my chest and stomach with a jagged metal broom handle, and slashed at my own wrists ineptly but with sheer class, using a broken champagne bottle. Among many other idiotic and self-mutilating tangos with madness, designed, you might think, to look good in the biography (please, please, please don't try this at home, folks. the people on stage are professionals and experts, we are assured.). I was NOT MYSELF for a lot of the time and prey to all manner of obsessive disorientations. The same thing that pulled me through when I was dying in hospital in 96 saved me again here; context and the inexorable demands of Real Life. My 'reality tunnel', as Robert Anton Wilson calls it, is one that allows me to conveniently frame every experience and state of consciousness, good or bad, in the context of my magical initiation and progress. The disciplines of magic bring structure, meaning and pattern into the apparently unstructured, senseless and painful times of anyone's life. As do the grounding disciplines of earning a living and sharing a relationship.

To truly embrace Chaos, of course, is to surrender to the ultimate, inflexible expression of Law and Order in our universe - Here Everything Changes. That's about as much as I can say about it until Pop Mag!c comes out with all the wild theory and visionary malarkey. Craig was interviewing me through the worst, darkest period of all this folderol so I'm sure it comes across like a bad smell in his book. You'll literally split your sides laughing.

I have to say I did come to the 'end' of all magic as I'd known it and been practising for 25 years and, like a man standing blinking and dazed, ears ringing at ground zero of a nuclear blast, I'm trying to find novel ways to explain what has happened and present it to the world in the form of Blank Magic. The Filth was written from the eye of the experience. All the really good stuff is still to come.

For anyone who cares to keep up with these things, (and I'm sure many of my readers are practitioners), the Qabalistic wisdom I carried home from The Filth Working is very simple and profound and is expressed by Greg Feely in the scene behind the flower shop - the Crown Is In The Kingdom, and The Reverse Is Also True. And for Enochian magic enthusiasts, Greg can be read as Nemo tending his garden if you like.

Of course it took me a long time and a lyric from the new Monster Magnet record to finally get the real message of the Abyss.

'Shut your mouth, you big fucking baby!'

So I will and Horus, crazy Child-God of the Aeon, will too, if you tell him. IAMIUHUAMI.

Well hopefully you're over that, still hurts I know but you can't freely climb the tree if you confine yourself to the dirt.

Of course. I feel a whole lot better now but times were fucked up for a while and it's shaken me right down to my boots.