I’m a closet fan of the blog Mommy Mystic http://mommymystic.wordpress.com/. Some of what Lisa Erickson posts (and much of the response she generates) is teeth-grindingly New Age-y, but underneath the empathetic deference there’s a sensible, life-is-like-this attitude that’s very grounded in life as it’s lived. She uses her family situation as a useful balance to her more speculative side (see, for example, her comments on her daughter getting a broken-off pencil eraser stuck up her nose), and appreciates that human life is a tough gig. Her latest post, on June 5 – Spiritual Experience vs. Realization (or What’s The Point, Anyway?) – is one of her better ones, and since I’ve posted nothing here for weeks, it offered a good springboard for riffing a post of my own.
Meditation, magick, mindfulness … the whole schmeer has a self-indulgent side to it. I don’t disrespect it for this, and if I didn’t have magick as a refuge from my own obsessions, I would be a more unhappy person. Thelema looks to create ‘stars’: supra-human beings who have transcended false humility, shame and ignorance, and shine in all their inherent glory. I’ve always found this entire notion deeply threatening, and probably could not function in life if I was trying to be that way in its more obvious sense. I was forcefully reminded recently that I have my Sun in Libra (both tropically and sidereally) and Librans must balance things through centring and equilibrating. Macho, extroverted ‘shining’ doesn’t work for us. I also have my Moon conjunct with Neptune in Virgo, so that’s another reason/excuse that I don’t go to a lot of loud parties. A place and state of refuge are as essential to me as black coffee is to aggressive salespeople or beer to football fans.
But the effects of sustained spiritual efforts, as Erickson notes, are nowhere near what the advertising claims. Transcendence of mundane consciousness isn’t that hard with magick – after a few months, or a couple of years at most, something totally Oh Wow happens to any practitioner. Shifts in the intrinsic quality of perception – in the aural soundscape, in the visual appearance of the world, in how we view ourselves or others – can come often, even if for months at a time they can be almost wholly absent. But the mundane world, and the mundane ego inhabiting it, reassert themselves, usually in minutes, and the sense of loss can be as disappointing and frustrating as the buzz was welcome. There can be a manic aspect to the whole business. I occasionally get to listen to people who can’t handle this, explaining why they want to drop out in order to concentrate on X. Whatever X is in their particular case, it is presumed not to be subject to the same oscillations that participation in group work has engendered. And it possibly isn’t. I rarely hear back from such people, so I can’t do a statistical analysis, but I assume a lessening of the highs produced by contact with a group also means some lessening of the lows. More usually, it likely results in a loss of focus and abandonment of committed effort.
It’s a truism in this field that while we can enhance intuitive perception and macroscomic awareness (and you’ll just have to do a year or two’s daily practice if that doesn’t make any sense to you), but the personality structure remains as it always has been. We can adjust personality by digging into past trauma, and by accepting personality’s immutability (thereby making it somewhat mutable) but we can’t eliminate it. It’s there, like left-handedness, the proportions of our fingers, or the pitch of our everyday speech. This is one of the things most people cannot grasp with Aleister Crowley; they ignore his genius, his inspired insights and his best writing, and focus on the smorgasbord of undesirable personal traits he exhibited over his first 60 years. The fact he affected many people’s lives in positive, remarkably liberating ways over that time gets discounted because he didn’t ‘perfect himself.’
But that said, we all do want to be ‘better’ people. We want to be respected and, if we’re spiritually seeking for years, the sense of disappointment is at times grim, or at last baffling.
Acceptance of defeat on this score is therefore one of the major steps we find ourselves taking. I don’t use the active-voice “We take” here because what occurs is forced on us from within, not necessarily adopted as a project. The doors open creakingly slowly for all but a blessed few, and even then we try to shut down again. Aspiration is as often met by internal opposition as it is by visions, and no amount of ecstatic exchanges with archangels necessarily changes that. In real terms, victory is almost always going to be surrender. The fact that it’s a surrender we set out to accomplish in the first place, but isn’t appreciated much when it finally arrives, is just one of the ironies.