Methods in Magick III: Focus
Let me invite you to a great opera omnia. As you read this narrative, allow yourself to expand your perspective to the vastness of the wasteland of the universe, and then focus on individual small examples, for example, a rose unfurling petals in a garden. Please read manifested words as images, concepts, ideas in a magical language that you can invent for yourself, visualized symbols, images, signs, sigils, paintings, photographs. Use your imagination to conjure great landscapes of ideas that are not mere fantasy, but are meant to bridge the land of imaginations with that of platonic ideas. My task is to discipline and order your imagination along this path. I hope you are ready. Let us begin.
In an ideal state, volition moves from action, motive, desire to vision, and vision is realized by action, action produces effects that are solid, tangible or subtle, fleeting. There are three modes here: active volition, which emerges from the illusion of the self-constituting personhood, passive volition, which is a form of reverse mysticism, for after receiving an inspiration, one creates; and joint volition, in which two or more threads converge and create together.
Each event is a flash of energy in a co-dependent, co-emergent world of phenomena, a sequence of such flashes can be called threads, while a sequence of threads is a process of reality. The grammar of these flashes, threads, processes is bound by the objective environment and syntax of physical, chemical, biological, pneumatic, metaphysical and occult laws. Moreover, they have their time, these flashes can be unique, repetitive, sequential, interrupted, occasional, continuous, cyclic, temporary, conventionally immovable or changing.
They have their duration, their beginning, their emergence, their renewal, their maintenance, their decay, their fading, their cessation, termination. I think of them as fields in a topological space that are chaotic in the sense of classical mechanics, like the behavior of the Haley comet interacting with the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn.
It is important to delineate the levels of disorder and organization (entropy). Complete integrability is an maxima of order characterized by a stable and dynamically predictable inclination of the individual sequences, it is a discrete quasiperiodic spectrum. It is characterized by a low perturbation and a stable frequency of unfolding, and it can form whole groups (families) of completely integrable systems.
Under one condition, if we introduce a pertubation, the integrability is destroyed. In Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser integrability, the degree of disorder is non-zero, the sequences can survive a weak perturbation, while they can be easily deformed, yet they remain continuous and impermeable to other processes. If destroyed by perturbation, it can form another structure.
In complete chaos it can extend over the whole phase space, the events are continuous, but to find a typical sequence is complicated, it loses its physical meaning. We can still try to apply maps and models to describe the statistical properties of such an unstable inclination.
A typical perturbation can lead to both regular and chaotic motions. Renormalization time is a process in which a chaotic system bounces from one statistically describable state to another, and the process in between is significant but difficult to capture.
When assessing the patterns of energy flashes (events), scaling is equally important. When we speak of Ursa Major, we do not confuse a bear, an animal, with the constellation of stars. Not only are they not the same entities, either in name, abstraction, scaling, category, or semantics, but they have a completely different makeup, physically, biologically, etc. Such confusion is, counter-intuitively, a very common mistake when people understand, speak and perceive any cognitive entity that either overlaps, is deflated or inflated with given phenotypes of semantic-semiotic mappings.
In terms of scaling, we should address the discipline of optics and focus. The apperture of the lens can be compared to the ability of concentration, attention span, and determination in operations, while the lenses can be compared to the psychomagic filters and tools of the trade that allow energy to move in certain ways. Rays of light that are reflected, refracted or bent diffracted are synonymous with inspirations from the phenomenal world, the metaphysical world and the occult world. The proper lens system in the apperture is critical to the perception necessary to achieve astral effects. The Egyptians believed that Sia (perception) was of great importance to the success of any magical operation. In this sense, a magician is an artist of perception.
Training of perception is similar to training of focus. It is a method of altering consciousness through a series of gymnosophical, intellectual, spiritual, and performative actions that, in well-organized magicians, function like a control panel and can be combined into multi-threaded processing. A well- trained state should be attainable at will. Drugs usually have only a temporary effect on perception, and neither recreational nor ritual use is advised. A controlled perceptual shift in a sober state is a great tool to call upon, whether in meditation, street magic, or simultaneously with other actions such as talking, walking, or dancing. Each tool has specific conditions and dependencies under which it works.
A simple example is bilocation. One must release one's attachment to the body image and fixed incarnation and try to look at oneself from a different perspective, as if another person were looking at us. Since the astral double and shadow follows the inclination, when these subtle bodies are developed, it will place itself where the will wants it. The standard inhibition in magic is the discouraging fact that "nothing happens" or "we feel nothing". Every tool takes time and training, in this case we must not only use the tool and be skilled in it, but also create and train the tool itself. So the first commitment should be to find out what tools we need and what training we need to acquire them.
To conclude this brief theoretical sketch, I must admit that in a perfect scenario the person is stable, firmly anchored in conventional reality, and does not compensate with magic for the mistakes of his life and the shortcomings of his personality. The key words are: Stability, seriousness, ethos, knowing oneself, knowing where one wants to go, astuteness, intelligence, steadfastness, perseverance, critical thinking, the key practices are: Concentration, focus, a platinum class ego and a strong sense of identity from which one can detach at will, artistry, virtuosity, ingenious devices, mastery of one's mind and body, the physical and basic aspects are: health, care of the body and hygiene, care for one's income, work, a good relationship with other people and no abuse through addictions, destructive passions and the like. At the Oracle of Delphi there were three commandments: Know thyself, everything in moderation, nothing in excess, E (Eta, sun symbol for the god within, the divinity without)
I hope I have provided the intelligent reader with enough clues to experiment and use their own solid tools. After all, only fools are led by the hand and nose in this business, while trying to attain mastery is a long, solitary and deeply reflective, introspective, insightful process.