Secular Hesychasm

A Results-Based Mysticism

“Beyond the stage of intellect, there is another stage. In this another eye is opened, by which man sees the hidden….
“This is what is meant by prophecy…. the perception of this kind of thing which is outside the things normally perceived by the intellect….
“Therefore, seek sure and certain knowledge of prophecy [through fruitional experience], not from the changing of the staff into a serpent and the splitting of the moon….
“[I]f your faith were based on a carefully ordered argument about the way the apologetic miracle affords proof of prophecy, your faith would be broken by an equally well-ordered argument showing how difficulty and doubt may affect that mode of proof…. Fruitional experience, on the other hand, is comparable to actual seeing and handling; this is found only in the way of the sufis.” — Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (Al-Ghazali’s Path to Sufism: his DELIVERANCE from ERROR, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal [translated by R. J. McCarthy])

There is a strain of occultist thought known as “results-based magick” or “chaos magick,” which attempts to apply a scientific approach to mystical and occult practices. This approach essentially says that, rather than engaging in belief or disbelief, we ought to put the claims of mystics and magickians to the test. There are rituals, formulas, and methods used in all mystical, shamanic, and occult systems. The results-based magick approach urges us to see if we can scientifically replicate the results of mystics and occultists by doing what they did.

This approach is, in many ways, similar to the approaches of Orthodox hesychasts within Christianity and sufis within Islam. These traditions within Christianity and Islam represent “scientific mysticism.” Mystics like St. Gregory Palamas and al-Ghazali followed a formula — a method passed down through an apostolic tradition, tracing back to the prophets of old. The problem with sufi and hesychast mystics is that they work within a religious framework and tend to get sucked into the snares of dogma. When they do the meditative techniques and the rituals and something happens, they take it for granted that this something happening confirms the objective truth of the particular religious framework within which they are working. If you want to have an encounter with the “divine light” or see Mother Mary or Christ face-to-face, I can tell you how to do that! But the fact that it works does not confirm the objective reality of it. The fact that an experience is real does not tell you what the reality behind that experience truly is. If you smoke salvia divinorum, you may see extra-terrestrial entities — that doesn’t mean that the aliens you encounter are really real.

“In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.” — Aleister Crowley (Book IV)

My current approach to mysticism and the occult is heavily influenced by this results-based magick approach, as found in the thought of people like Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley, Peter Carroll, Phil Hine, Andrieh Vitimus, Alan Moore, and Robert Anton Wilson. I hesitate to say that I adhere to “chaos magick” in particular because — although chaos magic and results-based magick are almost synonymous — I feel that chaotes often drift towards something less scientific. Also, I think chaotes often do solve at the expense of coagula — they can easily deconstruct reality and find themselves unable to piece it back together again. Results-based magick is a dangerous thing to engage in if you are not well-grounded. Furthermore, I do think there is a role for elders or gurus within mysticism and the occult. Spiritual delusion (plani or prelest in Orthodox terminology) is common among mystics and occultists. Having an experienced and well-grounded guide who has walked the path before you is a good idea. One should never take the guru figure as divinely inspired or anything like that but should take counsel from them. Going down the road of mysticism and the occult alone is very dangerous because you will need someone to help you screw your head back on after it floats away from you.

The Shell vs. the Core

They call Islam the “shell” of sufism. In a similar way, you could call Christianity the “shell” of hesychasm. Sufism and hesychasm, at their core, are the same thing. The same mystic tradition pervades throughout all religions. The thing is that mysticism and magick require a symbolic framework: you must have a symbolic system in order to do them. Symbolic systems are largely interchangeable. You can use the Christian system, the Islamic system, the Hindu system, or a Buddhist system, but some system of symbols (language, art, ritual, music) is needed in order to accomplish the task. The gravest error is to assume that the shell, because it makes the magick work, somehow must be objectively true. The reality of mystical and magickal experiences does not — and cannot! — confirm the empirical reality of the symbolic system that was used to achieve them. The experiences can be arrived at through almost any system you can fashion. The systems that lead to those experiences are mutually exclusive if we assume that they are objectively real. Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism cannot all be objectively true. The “shell” of religion, the system of symbols and the psychological framework, are just tools for the attainment of the experience. The experience is the underlying reality. In this sense, all the religions are true — in some sense — at their core, but it is not that they are objectively true. Their truth is subjective. The truth in them relates to the subjective experiences of mystics, shamans, and occultists. It is this experience that is real, not the outward trappings and dogmas.

Skepticism

My general approach to mysticism is hesychastic— and I am more of a mystic than a magickian, though magick and mysticism blur together. The system or “shell” that I use is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I recognize it as a system that works for the purposes of a mystic and an occultist. I don’t assume that the dogmas are objectively true nor do I assume that one ought to take the matter too seriously. I can find subjective truths in the Bible, the Philokalia, and the Evergetinos and grow spiritually as a result. I can use these things and the Orthodox Church’s rituals as a means of self-transformation and a system for obtaining desired results. Prayer is a magickal practice involving incantation for the purpose of manifesting things; the liturgy is a form of ceremonial magick for the purpose of self-transformation. I can look at the world through the lens of Orthodoxy while engaging in ritual and I can recognize that the visions of God and other religious experiences recorded in the Bible were real in the sense that people actually had those experiences (they didn’t just make it up!), but I don’t claim that God really exists as an objective reality apart from those subjective experiences.

Theology & Atheology

“With the exception of Christ in His human nature, nothing in the created world is an image of God.
“This is the reason why we are free to borrow any name or concept and attribut it to God as long as we do so in an apophatic way, because God does not have any likeness in the created world and because there are no concepts in the created world that can be attributed to God as a way of identifying Him. So on the one hand, we do attribute a name to God, but only if, on the other hand, we also take it away from Him. For example, although we say that God is Light, we negate this at the same time by saying that God is also darkness….
“This means that the Fathers do not follow the rules of logic when they deal with theological matters or talk about God. Why? Because the rules of logic are valid, in so far as they are valid, only for God’s creation. The rules of logic or philosophy are not applicable with God. There is not any philosophical system or system of logic that can be applied to God. The Fathers consider those who think that they can approach God via pure mathematics to be terribly näive, simply because there is no similarity between the created and uncreated. What is valid in the created realm is not valid for the uncreated reality that is God, because there are no rules from created reality that can be applied to uncreated reality.
“The Fathers do not say anything about God on the basis of philosophical reflection. They do not sit at their desks like the Scholastics in order to do theology, because when the Church Fathers theologize, speculation or reflection is strictly forbidden. The only sensible way to study the Bible is not to speculate (that is, to try to understand Holy Scripture by employing reason or abstractions), but to pray. But what do we mean by prayer? Noetic prayer, because noetic prayer means that the Holy Spirit visits the believer and prays within his heart. When this occurs, the believer is illumined and becomes capable of rightly understanding….
“If and when someone reaches theosis, he will know from the very experience of theosis precisely what is meant by the sayings and concepts that he comes across in the Bible.” — John Romanides (Patristic Theology, Part 1, § 21)

God is defined as being Absolutely Other. He existed prior to (and outside of) creation. Consequently, “He” belongs to an entirely different reality than the one that we belong to. This is why it is impossible to say anything sensible about God. We refer to Him as “the Creator” and claim that He “exists,” but what the hell do such terms even mean when predicated of God? Causality, as a concept, presupposes the spatiotemporal framework of this created universe. The cause precedes the effect in time. Object x collides into object y at some point in time and causes object y to be displaced or moved. This sort of causality presupposes the framework of space-time. Can God, who exists outside of and beyond our spatiotemporal reality, rationally be said to have a causal relationship to our universe? Can causal categories even be applied to a Being that exists outside of the causal universe? And the term “existence” also does not make sense outside of our reality. We say that an object exists by contrasting it to the empty space in which it does not exist. What does “existence” even mean when applied to something Absolutely Other? It is just as accurate to say that God does not exist and is not the cause of the universe as it is to say that He is those things. In strictly rational terms, both statements are nonsensical.

And what of God’s code of ethics? It must stem directly from Her nature, but Her nature is different from ours. As humans, we came about through an evolutionary process. Natural selection caused us to value certain things. We experience pain and pleasure; and natural selection “designed” us to like the one and dislike the other. Painful things damage the body and can lead to death, whereas pleasureful things tend to preserve the body and/or help propagate the species. We think punching someone in the face for no reason is wrong. Why? Because it will hurt them and we wouldn’t want them to do that to us. God, however, is impassible (incapable of suffering) by nature. She does not have a physical body like we do. She does not have biological urges like we do. She does not feel pleasure and pain and prefer one to the other. God, by nature, cannot sympathize with our suffering because It is Absolutely Other. Thus, God’s code of morality (if It has any such thing) is altogether different from ours. If God can be said to not exist and to not be benevolent in the human sense of those terms, then it seems that atheism is as accurate of a description of the situation as theism is.

When the mystics describe God, they say that He simultaneously exists and does not exist or neither exists nor doesn’t exist. As Fr. John Romanides said in the quote above, any affirmation about God must be negated or contradicted. In Western Christianity (Roman Catholicism and Protestantism), they try to logically explain the mystical theology of the early Church in order to convert non-believers to their rational Christian faith. But, if they truly understood it, they would know that it is non-rational and cannot be explained or understood through ordinary logic and cognition.

“The negative way of the knowledge of God is an ascendant undertaking of the mind that progressively eliminates all positive attributes of the object it wishes to attain, in order to culminate finally in a kind of apprehension by supreme ignorance of him who cannot be an object of knowledge. We can say that the negative way of the knowledge of God is an intellectual experience of the mind’s failure when confronted with something beyond the conceivable.” — Vladimir Lossky (Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology)

The apophatic method of mystic theology is incomprehensible by design. The Orthodox Christian definition of God is incoherent when properly understood. The formula itself functions like a zen koan — a mystery that ever remains a mystery, a problem without a solution, babbling nonsense that is designed to break down the logical mind and lead to enlightenment. Orthodoxy has zen elements. Mindfulness plays a role in the hesychast tradition and the holy fools play the role of zen masters. St. Simeon the Holy Fool used to pretend to have a limp, jump around spontaneously, drag his butt across the ground like a dog with worms, and randomly trip people — all things one could picture a roshi doing in the Japanese Buddhist tradition. Within the Islamic mystic tradition, the sufi sage Nasruddin is said to have been a similar figure.

In trying to rationalize theology and trying to explain and defend the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, Western theology has missed the whole point. According to Orthodox mystical theology, the non-rational (not irrational) nature of the doctrine and the contradictory aspect of it simply is the entire point.

“One cannot attain the transcendent Trinity of θεολογία through the notion of opposed relation…. That is why we have seen the terms of paternity and filiation denied by the apophasis of Mystical Theology — denied by virtue of the principle of nonopposition, which dominates this supreme stage of Dionysian theognosis. How can the two, the Father and the Son, be opposed, when one would need to find an opposition impossible for human logic, the opposition of the Three, in order to truly explain the mystery of a personal God? Since we cannot oppose the Three, absolutely different in their absolute identity, the logic of opposition as well as use of arithmetic numbers must remain on this side of the consubstantial Trinity. Is the Triad not an exclusion of the Dyad, a surpassing of the principle of the opposition of two relative terms? In fact, it suggests to us a distinction more radical than that of two opposites: an absolute difference, which can only be personal, proper to the three divine hypostases, ‘united by distinction and distinct by union.’” — Vladimir Lossky (Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology)

The early Christain mystics defined God in a way that simply does not make sense. The doctrine of the Trinity is incomprehensible nonsense; and when you think you understand it, you don’t! When you have the spontaneous intuitive insight that it is incomprehensible and cannot be understood because there is nothing rational there to comprehend or understand, then you are headed in the right direction.

“It is worthwhile to recall here what we have said before about the negative approach characteristic of Orthodox thought — an approach which radically changes the value of philosophical terms applied to God. Not only the image of ‘cause,’ but also such terms as ‘production,’ ‘procession,’ and ‘origin’ ought to be seen as inadequate expressions of a reality which is foreign to all becoming, to all process, to all beginning…. so causality is nothing but a somewhat defective image…. This unique cause is not prior to his effects, for in the Trinity there is no priority and posteriority….
“According to Maximus the Confessor, God is ‘identically a monad and a triad.’ He is not merely one and three; he is 1=3 and 3=1…. The procession of the Holy Spirit is an infinite passage beyond the dyad, which consecrates the absolute (as opposed to relative) diversity of the persons….
“The dogma of the Trinity marks the summit of theology, where our thoughts stand still before the premordial mystery….” — Vladimir Lossky (The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Trinitarian Theology)

The early Christian Gnostics, like Basilides, who spoke of the “non-existent God” and referred to God as “He Who Is Not,” were essentially expressing apophatic theology and describing the same mystical experience that the Orthodox Fathers were. However, the Fathers were skeptical of Gnosticism because it tended to break down the system that the Church Fathers used to attain gnosis. Thus, the orthodox excommunicated the Gnostics in order to preserve the shell. The problem with the Gnostics was that they were using a conflicting system that could confuse and render ineffective the symbolic system of the Orthodox. The Gnostics, however, were not considered heretics for saying that God does not exist. The Orthodox Fathers said that too. St. Dionysius the Areopagite says the following:

“It is the Universal Cause of existence while Itself existing not, for It is beyond all Being and such that It alone could give, with proper understanding thereof, a revelation of Itself. Now concerning this hidden Super-Essential Godhead we must not dare, as I have said, to speak, or even to form any conception Thereof, except those things which are divinely revealed to us from the Holy Scriptures. For as It hath lovingly taught us in the Scriptures concerning Itself the understanding and contemplation of Its actual nature is not accessible to any being; for such knowledge is superessentially exalted above them all. And many of the Sacred Writers thou wilt find who have declared that It is not only invisible and incomprehensible, but also unsearchable and past finding out, since there is no trace of any that have penetrated the hidden depths of Its infinitude. Not that the Good is wholly incommunicable to anything; nay, rather, while dwelling alone by Itself, and having there firmly fixed Its super-essential Ray, It lovingly reveals Itself by illuminations corresponding to each separate creature’s powers, and thus draws upwards holy minds into such contemplation, participation and resemblance of Itself as they can attain.” — Dionysius the Areopagite (On the Divine Names)

St. Dionysius goes on to speak of “the mystical visions whereby It was symbolically manifested” in Scripture. The language and imagery used to describe God in the Bible are all symbolic. God, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist but the experience of God’s existence is nevertheless real.

He Who Does Not Exist can reveal Himself to us. We cannot discover God, detect Him, or unite ourselves to His essence. However, there are divine energies that pervade all of creation. We can become one with God by uniting to His energies, though we cannot unite with his essence. In doing so, we can attain theosis and theoria (unity with God and divine vision). There are a multitude of incantations, rituals, and practices that help one to attain this state: the mantra of the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”), the lighting of candles and burning of incense, participation in the liturgy, singing hymns, etc.

The experience of the existence of God and the experience of the non-existence of God may just be the same thing perceived from different angles. From one side, a cylindrical object appears to be a circle but from a different angle it appears to be a rectangle. The reality is that the object is simultaneously a circle and a rectangle while being neither a circle nor a rectangle. If you lived in a two-dimensional world, it would be impossible to describe such a three-dimensional object without contradictory descriptions like “circular rectangle.” If there is a God, then They live in a universe with dimensions beyond the three or four that we are familiar with. If you want an accurate description of God, She are one non-existent square circle that actually does exist but He is only many. Of course, all of this is just nonsense. Nevertheless, it is useful nonsense for the purpose we intend to use it for. If we claim that God exists or that He doesn’t exist, then, either way, we are speaking nonsense. At the root of both claims is the same assertion of nonsense as the Ultimate Truth back of all things. Yet, we do not say that it is irrational; we say it is non-rational, alluding to a logic beyond logic or a non-logic.

“These days I hold two ideas about God simultaneously: he, she or it exists and he she or it doesn’t exist. I don’t seesaw between these opposites; I embrace them. I don’t view this embrace as requiring a choice between mere emotion and fact, or between evolutionary biology and spirituality. Reality can’t be so neatly parsed….
“I don’t view my embrace of opposites as some kind of agnosticism. I view it as the way things actually are. An agnostic neither believes nor disbelieves in God. I’m not that person. I believe and don’t believe at the same time….
“[the author is now quoting Howard Wettstein] ‘…Religious life, at least as it is for me, does not involve anything like a well-defined concept of God, a concept of the kind that a philosopher could live with. What is fundamental is the experience of God, for example in prayer or in life’s stunning moments. Prayer, when it works, yeilds an awe-infused sense of having made contact, or almost having done so.’” — Frank Schaeffer (Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God, Ch. 2)

Photo by Jonathan Lampel on Unsplash

Śūnyatā: The Essence of God and Man as Emptiness

God, as understood by the mystics, is without form, indefinable, non-existent, beyond describable, pure potentiality, infinite, etc. The Christian tradition says that man is made in the image of God. This means that the not-God truth of apophatics implies a corresponding truth of not-self. If God does not exist and I am made in the image of God, then I also do not exist. Of course, I do exist in some sense, but the point here is that there is no Platonic Form or definite substance to my being. The human self/soul/mind, like God, is impossible to define, comprehend, explain, understand, etc. When it comes to essence, God (the Supreme Self) and man (the individual self) are both empty. And what is emptiness but another word for openness. The empty space is a void into which we may pour something. The empty booth is the open one.

Adi Shankara, the Hindu mystic, and Guatama Siddhārtha, the Buddha, present two opposed systems. But they are opposed systems that dissolve into each other or blur together at the highest level. They both arrive at the conclusion that reality is fundamentally advaita (non-dual) in nature. Pantheism and atheism resolve into one another. If God is everything, then there is no God over and above the “created” world. Each individual self (ātman) is said by Shankara to be identical to the Ultimate Truth (brahman). And Brahman is without form, indefinable, pure potentiality, substance without essence. The Buddha, on the other hand, says that all things are empty of essence (śūnyatā) and that self is an illusion — he proclaims the doctrine of not-self (anātman), that self is essentially indefinable and lacking any essential nature. These two positions, though opposites, are correlative and represent the same thing stated differently: “the glass half full and half empty.”

The self is empty of essence — this is a supreme truth of Buddhism — but this means also that it is malleable. It is, like God, a “substance” (for lack of a better word) that represents pure potentiality and defies efforts at classification, definition, and representation. Retreat into the cave of the heart and call out for God, crying “my Lord, do you exist?” and He will answer with a resounding “No!” Retreat into your heart and find your self and you will find no there there. But in the act of discovering Nothing, Something shines through. Not-God and not-self give way to the “concrete universality of personality,” to borrow an expression from Nikolai Berdyaev. When you find “no there there,” you will find that there is something there. The Concrete Universal Ontological Trinity is replicated in the concrete universality of the individual and both remain non-existent while they dance and interpenetrate and move through one another perichoretically — and only in this non-existence can true existence be found. If this makes sense to you, you don’t understand. If it doesn’t make sense to you, then you still don’t understand.

“In other words, all that exists is part of emptiness [Sunyata] and therefore ‘empty’, or rather the true nature of all that is empty. All that exists has its source, or its being, or better still becoming, in the empty space [Sunyata]….
“The Buddhist proposition is that Sunyata, is the space of dynamic energy. It is the space where everything happens, everything comes to be, due to dependent co-arising. I think Paul’s God can also perhaps be seen, as such an energetic space that surrounds the entire universe. It is that energy (Sunyata) that is the source of all that exists (form). Maybe Paul was aware of this to some extent when he spoke at the Areopagus (Acts 17: 22- 31). Though he was speaking from a Jewish perspective, he sounds very Buddhist when he asserts firmly, ‘he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being’. This seems to be similar, in some sense, to Tillich’s understanding of God as the ‘Ground of Being’.” — Kadivedu Joshua Samuel (A Comparative Theological Exploration of the Pauline God and the Buddhist Sunyata)

We have mentioned that God logically cannot relate to the universe as Creator if He is Absolutely Other, existing beyond the space-time reality in which we find ourselves. This is true. However, the notion of God as sunyata (emptiness) makes it accurate to refer to Her as the Creator in some sense. As Kadivedu Joshua Samuel said in the passage quoted above, “All that exists has its source, or its being, or better still becoming, in the empty space [Sunyata].” If everything that exists has its source in sunyata, then sunyata can be called the Creator or Source of Being. It is in this sense that the True God is the Creator: the Absolutely Other is sunyata, the emptiness/openness in which we “live and move and have our being” and which gives rise to us.

If I may be permitted to borrow some terminology from the ancient Greeks, sacred order (λόγος, logos) emerged from the primordial void of emptiness (χάος, khaos), and the creation of the universe (κόσμος, kosmos) was the result. The logos is the orderliness and rationality that spontaneously emerged out of the chaos of all-pervading sunyata. The primordial khaos/chaos was the blank canvas on which the kosmos/cosmos were painted. The nothingness gave us the space in which something could happen. In the context of “chaos magick,” the term chaos carries this sense of emptiness/openness and is analogous to the Buddhist term sunyata. The reality is that the primordial khaos or sunyata, the universal void, did not go away when the universe emerged. The “substance” (for lack of a better word) of emptiness is still the ground of being of all that is. The Buddhist and the chaote realize that the primordial emptiness/openness has not gone anywhere. Sunyata/khaos is still the fundamental nature of everything. The chaos magickian sees the primordial chaos as openness and pure potentiality and hopes that he can tap into it in order to manipulate reality as he or she experiences it.

The “Heretical” Gnostic Narrative As Metaphor

The Gnostic “heretics” are often seen as presenting a counter-narrative to the biblical narrative. This, I believe, is somewhat unfair. The narrative they present is the biblical narrative; they merely interpret it differently. In their irreverence, they take it for granted that the things purported in the Book of Genesis actually did occur precisely as recorded. God says, “There are no other gods before me,” but he says this in ignorance. Seeing that the god of the Bible constantly seems to change his mind and repent, the Gnostics suppose that this god must not be quite as perfect as the orthodox Christians suspect. In this way, there is an element of open theism in their thinking. The creator god is not all-knowing and all-powerful. Furthermore, this creator god — or demiurge — cannot be the same God as that Absolutely Other entity beyond our reality. The creator god of the Bible is clearly trapped within the same reality as us. If anything, he is trapped simultaneously in two worlds. He is said to be “the creator,” having a causal relation to the material things that we are familiar with, which means that he is separate from the Ultimate God who is Absolutely Other.

The demiurgic god, in fact, is called Saklas (“the fool”) because he is unaware of the Absolute Reality behind this reality. He is (or, at least, was) delusional. He is also called Samael (“the blind god”), and can be viewed as something akin to Richard Dawkin’s “the blind watchmaker.” The demiurge figure represents the impersonal, intentless, natural processes that brought us into being through millennia of evolution. These natural forces are personified within the magickal system. The demiurge also represents the neutral-become-bad. The evolutionary process is, of course, neutral — neither good nor bad. Nevertheless, it has given us our biological urges, which can become bad. Hunger keeps me alive, but the desire for food doesn’t always stop when I no longer need it. The sexual desire helps create a bond with my partner and helps propagate the species, but lust can drive me to violate another’s trust and do self-destructive things. The biological urges are, in their nature, insatiable. This is “by design” because Natural Selection — the true demiurge — chose them precisely because they are insatiable in us. Life is a constant battle against entropy. We are prone to decay and breaking down. To keep life going, the demiurge needed to selectively breed us for lustful characteristics that are insatiable, constant, seemingly unrelenting. These are our source of suffering because they make life dukkha. They ensure that we remain constantly unsatisfied, wanting more, seeking more. Their insatiability is the cause of our survival because we die if we stop seeking food, but also the cause of our anxiety, stress, and depression. The creator god, as demiurge, is thus the same archetype as Mara in Buddhism and Satan in orthodox Christianity — he tempts us with desires that can lead to our own destruction.

The orthodox Christian conception of God as Creator is true in some sense when we are speaking of God as sunyata (emptiness/openness). God as sunyata is the source of our being or arising. Nevertheless, the notion of God as an Absolutely Other that is literally an Intelligent Designer is untrue. The Designer (demiurgic creator) of this world is not an intelligent designer and is not Absolutely Other either; the demiurgic creator that fashioned us is the evolutionary process of natural selection. Thus, both the Orthodox conception of the Highest God as Creator and the Gnostic conception of the demiurgic creator as an inferior “blind god” are equally true — for each assertion represents a different truth and is true in its own way.

Hesychasm & Mindfullness

The Demiurge/Mara/Satan — the natural evolutionary process that gives us our passions and lusts — tempts us towards self-destructive behavior and keeps us feeling the dissatisfaction (dukkha) inherent in existence. The way out is to transcend this reality and take refuge in another, to take hold of the Absolutely Other and cling to it. Through mindfulness, one can silence the thoughts and desires and calm the storms within that trouble us. And here the heretical Gnostic path to gnosis aligns closely to the hesychast, sufi, and zen paths. And it is only here in the heretical realm of the mystics where one can be a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Baha’i, a Hindu, and an atheist all at once. Indeed, it is only here where one is compelled against their will to “become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”(1 Corinthians 9:22) The path of mindfulness and the insight into reality, the transcendence of duality, is at the core of all mystical practice.

“Do not inordinately retain thoughts in your mind.” — St. Maximos

“My brother, when someone does not work, he becomes preoccupied with the thoughts that come to him; if, however, he is working, he is not at leisure to accept such thoughts.” — St. Barsonouphios

Thus, within an orthodox Christian framework, one can say that since God is sunyata (emptiness), it follows that the restoration of man’s likeness to God can only occur through man emptying himself (kenosis) and, through that emptying, attaining plerosis (fullness) and theosis (deification). That process of emptying is far more than just humbling oneself — it entails mindfulness in the Buddhist sense. The Orthodox hesychast practices what the Buddhist would call “mindfulness meditation,” clearing the mind and letting thoughts pass without becoming attached to them. The hesychast aims for dispassion or detachment from the passions that we usually cling to. In giving up the clinging that leads to suffering, one can transcend dukkha, but one also realizes their own emptiness in the process. I am not my thoughts, my desires, my feelings, my sensations, my emotions, my anxiety, my body, etc., etc., etc. Whatever I am appears to be indefinable, impossible to pinpoint, elusive. In this kenosis — the emptying of the self that leads to the discovery of the nature of the true self — the self becomes like a clean and polished mirror, able to reflect the image of the Absolute. The Absolute, or God, is emptiness/openness/love (sunyata) and this nothing that is something radiates from the emptied mystic who then becomes a true likeness of God, realizing his or her true self. Through kenosis the mystic attains plerosis — fullness emerges from emptiness — and the mystic attains a state of theosis or mystical union with God.

“As the great Denys says, ‘Such a union of those divinised with the light that comes from on high takes place by virtue of a cessation of all intellectual activity.’ It is not the product of a cause or a relationship, for these are dependent upon the activity of the intellect, but it comes to be by abstraction, without itself being that abstraction. If it were simply abstraction, it would depend on us, and this is the Messalian doctrine, ‘to mount as far as one wills into the ineffable mysteries of God,’ as St. Isaac says of these heretics.
“Contemplation, then, is not simply abstraction and negation; it is a union and a divinisation which occurs mystically and ineffably by the grace of God, after the stripping away of everything from here below which imprints itself on the mind, or rather after the cessation of all intellectual activity; it is something which goes beyond abstraction (which is only the outward mark of the cessation).
“This is why every believer has to separate off God from all His creatures, for the cessation of all intellectual activity and the resulting union with the light from on high is an experience and a divinising end, granted solely to those who have purified their hearts and received grace.” — St. Gregory Palamas (The Triads)

By emptying the mind and wiping the mirror of consciousness clean, the hesychast, through theoria, obtains the ability to see the “Uncreated Light.” (Cf. the account of St. Seraphim of Sarov) This light is called “God” in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. The same experience is reported by Buddhist meditators. In fact, meditation-induced light experiences are common in various meditative-mystical traditions. In Buddhism, this light is sometimes interpreted as being ālaya-vijñāna (“store-consciousness”), which in turn is identified with tathāgatagarbha (“Buddha-nature”), which in turn is identified with sunyata (emptiness/openness). If the mystic is receptive, he can become one with this Uncreated Light in some sense.

The Eastern Orthodox Christian mystical tradition of hesychasm and the Muslim mystic tradition of sufism are both based upon ancient Jewish mystical traditions, which the Merkabah and Kaballah traditions within Judaism also arose from. The Merkabah mystic tradition in Judaism involved the recitation of Divine Names, synchronizing the words with your breathing, while assuming a position with the head between the knees. This technique seems to be borrowed from Zoroastrianism, as are the ideas of monotheism, bodily resurrection, heaven and hell, angels and demons, etc. Zarathustra called himself the manthram or “composer of mantras.” The use of yoga-esque breathing techniques, postures, and repetitive recitations (mantras) was likely borrowed by Jewish mystics from the Zoroastrians when the Persian King Cyrus liberated the Hebrews from Babylonian captivity. The proto-kaballistic mystical tradition in Judaism seems to have been copied from Zoroastrian mysticism. The hesychast tradition in Eastern Christianity and the sufi tradition is Islam, in turn, both derived from this proto-kaballistic Jewish mysticism. If this is correct, then the mystical traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Eastern Christianity all share the same roots. They all employ roughly the same method to achieve roughly the same result. Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, however, rejected the hesychast tradition and therefore cannot be seen as being in this same lineage.

Glossolalia and Vipassana
Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is generally not part of modern Orthodox Christian spirituality. Many of the most prominent Early Church Fathers, like Origen of Alexandria, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Augustine, held that the gifts of tongues and prophecy had ceased with the close of the apostolic age. However, this idea seems to have arisen in the middle of the 3rd Century, probably in response to Montanism and Gnosticism, both of which practiced glossolalia. By claiming that the gift of tongues had ceased, the Fathers could easily counter the claim that the presence of glossolalia among heretics proved that the Holy Spirit moved among them. In earlier times, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus had mentioned that the gifts of the Spirit were still present in their time. Tertullian, writing around the same time as Origen, had argued that Marcion must have been a heretic since he didn’t have the ability to speak in tongues or manifest any of the other gifts of the Spirit. St. Pachomius is reported to have spoken in tongues in the 4th Century and St. Gregory Palamas, in The Triads, speaks of tongues as a gift that is still possible to obtain as of the 14th Century, so glossolalia is compatible with hesychast spirituality. In the modern Orthodox Church, Fr. Eusebius Stephanou led a charismatic revival movement, but the Church, in general, has discouraged the movement and it remains a small, fringe movement.

A number of factors led the Church to shy away from charismatic practices like glossolalia. Firstly, speaking in tongues was regarded as a lesser gift of the Spirit to begin with. The vision of Uncreated Light or transfiguration is far more important than the ability to speak in tongues. Furthermore, tongues was seen as often leading to spiritual delusion (as can any mystical experience), so it was generally discouraged. And many heretics, like the Gnostics and the Montanists, spoke in tongues. Glossolalic nonsense speech is recorded in various places throughout the Gnostic scriptures. The phenomenon of glossolalia was also common in Greek mystery cults, shamanic practices, and in Hinduism. The phenomenon is associated with Dionysian and Orphic rites and is mentioned by Plato and Virgil. It is also a feature of Native American and African shamanism. It is also a feature of the cult of Mithra, from which Zoroastrianism emerged. Given the influence that Zoroastrianism and Babylonian mythology had on the development of Judaism and Jewish mysticism, it is no surprise that glossolalia was a feature of ancient Jewish mysticism. In kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, it is said that Adam gave names to all the animals through a process of glossolalia which revealed the Hebrew language. Human language is, therefore, the result of glossolalia. But modern practitioners of Jewish mysticism do not engage in glossolalia. Nevertheless, glossolalia seems to have been a part of Merkabah mysticism within ancient Judaism and is mentioned in the Testament of Job:

“Thus, when the one called Hemera arose, she…took on another heart — no longer minded toward earthly things — but she spoke ecstatically in the angelic dialectic, sending up a hymn to God in accord with the hymnic style of the angels.”

Since glossolalia seems to have been an aspect of Merkabah mysticism, upon which hesychasm is based, and was experienced by St. Pachomius, it follows that glossolalia can have a place within hesychasm. When speaking in tongues, the individual chants a mantra that spontaneously wells up from deep within them. The speaker does not know the language or the meaning of the prayer or mantra that he utters. The “words” that are uttered do not have any meaning that the speaker can discern. The speaker takes a passive role in the activity. Since he does not know the words that he is saying, he does not have to concentrate on pronunciation, grammar, and meaning. Since the mind is not involved, the practice of glossolalia can become a form of meditation. The speaker can clear his mind, focusing on the sound of the glossolalic mantra and so obtain a state of mindfulness. One can pray in tongues in order to clear the mind and attain inner stillness. Upon attaining a degree of inner stillness, one will usually experience visions of light of various sorts, ranging from orbs or stars to illuminating radiance.

If one cannot pray in tongues in order to clear the mind and attain inner stillness, that is no problem. You can easily achieve the same result by meditating with the Jesus Prayer or the Maha Mantra or the Shema or the Shahadah, reciting the names of God in the language that your particular religious tradition has passed down. Interestingly, the Transcendental Meditation tradition has demonstrated that you can substitute random sounds for the divine names and still get the desired effect. The Buddhist traditions of vipassana and zen have demonstrated that the result can be achieved without the use of a mantra at all by simply focusing on one’s breathing.

The One and the Many, the Essence/Energies Distinction, & Interdependent Co-Arising

And the mystical perspective I am espousing here has implications when it comes to the problem of the one and the many. “‘The One and the Many’ names one of the most ancient problems in philosophy — it concerns whether reality is ultimately a unity or a plurality, and how the two relate to one another.”(Yonghua Ge, The One and the Many) How does the particular tree relate to the universal category of trees? How does the part relate to the whole? Within the mystical-theoretical framework we are using, the particulars are just individual instances of the Universal differentiated in relating to itself as the other in a cosmic dance. Yet, the particular exists only as a particular thing in relation to the totality of the other particular things. This cat as a particular thing is defined in opposition to all the other things and so depends for its identity upon all those other things. The thing-in-itself is not a thing at all. When isolated from all the other things that it is in some way related to, which happens to be everything, it ceases to be a thing and dissolves into nothingness. All things, therefore, reduce to emptiness (sunyata) but also have a fullness or being in relation to the totality of every other thing which is also sunyata. Thus, we are proposing a “relational ontology.” And so being emerges from non-being, something emerges from nothing, fullness emerges from emptiness — or, we could say, emptiness and fullness (or being and non-being) reduce to one another, revealing the non-dual (advaita) nature of reality. The opposition of being and non-being or of emptiness and fullness is revealed to be a illusion (maya) and the assertion of the one and its opposite are both just two very imperfect ways of expressing the same reality, such that theism and atheism can both be seen as equally accurate ways of describing the real world, though both equally fall short of describing reality insofar as reality cannot be really known and, therefore, cannot be truly expressed with human language. Human language is a result of the nature of the human mind, which was not “designed” to be able to apprehend reality as it truly is but only reality as humankind needs to apprehend it in order to survive and reproduce effectively.

As far as we are concerned, the thing-in-itself does not exist. We cannot know it. It does not exist the way that things we are familiar with exist. The thing-in-itself is absolutely other, incomprehensible, unknowable, vague to the point of not even being real (non-existent). The thing-in-itself is sunyata (emptiness). The totality of all things-as-sunyata we may refer to as the essence of God. This Absolutely Other Totality is beyond our reach — we cannot even approach it. Nevertheless, we can approach it indirectly. The Orthodox Church Fathers distinguish between the essence of God and His energies. The essence of God is beyond our reach and we cannot ever know anything about it. Nevertheless, we have an indirect point of contact (anknüpfungspunkt) with God-as-Sunyata in the experience of emptiness (sunyata) at the level of the particular that is us as individuals. While we cannot connect to the God-essence (Totality of Being as Sunyata that transcends time and space) directly, we can connect with God via Her energies (sunyata as a localized phenomenon that we can encounter). We cannot encounter God-in-Himself (the essence of God), but we can be united to God through His energies. In encountering our true selves as emptiness, we can encounter the divine insofar as our being is derivative of the divine Being. Our sunyata is derivative of the Universal Sunyata.

Our experiences derive from the totality of experience and cannot be anything without the totality. Our logic is derivative of divine logic in the sense that it is not independent of the totality. The reason our rules of logic work is because they correspond to an order that emerged spontaneously from the relations of all things to all other things. Our thoughts are not independent of the totality of Thoughts nor even independent of the totality of Things. And, as finite, particular things in this world, we are but derivative — derived from something larger, i.e. the totality of existent things. In Buddhist terms, this is called pratītya-samutpāda (“interdependent co-arising”), the notion that everything is conditioned by all other things. Why am I the way that I am? Ultimately, it is because of a combination of nature and nurture. My biology and my environment have made me who I am and I cannot help but being the way that I am. Yet, my biology and environment are also dependent on other things. My biology is determined by my parents’ genetics, which in turn was determined by their parents’. My local environment may be in the United States, but what the United States is can only be defined in relation to all other nations and is determined by other factors. The factors that led to the creation of the United States have their own causes. If we trace those causes back far enough, we come to the “Big Bang,” where all matter supposedly exploded out together from a single point. All things are interconnected and entangled in such a way that nothing is independent of anything else. Every thing is ultimately related to every other thing.

The Magickal Worldview

There is nothing more certain in this world than the fact that magic is real. Despite all of the pontifications of modern scientists, all science can ever really do is observe the magic and explain what takes place. The scientist does not know, and cannot know, why the magic works the way it does. There is a magical force that pulls objects together. The scientist observes the phenomenon and calls this force gravity, but he has never made a single step towards explaining the phenomenon. In fact, all science can possibly do is describe the phenomena of our world. It cannot draw any necessary relation between things; it can merely posit that the magic generally works in such-and-such a way. The magic makes an object of higher mass attract objects of lower mass, and the scientist can call this phenomenon “gravity” all he wants, but he will never be able to explain the logical connection between the phenomenon and the inherent nature of things. There is no logical reason for objects to be attracted to each other. The only real explanation is that some Grand Magician has made it so by His supernatural decree but even that is just nonsensical bullshit.

G. K. Chesterton was right when he said, “A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree.”(Orthodoxy, Ch. 4) I challenge any man to come up with a better or more plausible explanation. If someone were to tell us about a special tree that grows lemon drops and candy canes, we would be certain that he was lying. Yet such a tree is really no less odd than one that grows peaches or oranges. We have simply grown accustomed to the magic trees; this is why we view them as natural and “normal.”

I suppose that if she had been born in Wonderland, Alice would have thought the hookah-smoking caterpillar to be quite normal. Everything in the world is magic, and not a single thing can be explained upon the naturalist presuppositions of scientism. We simply overlook all the magic because we are used to it. Everything in this world is filled with magic and supernatural power. Nothing is “natural” in the scientific sense. That plants can grow sweet-scented flowers is supernatural. That seeds thrown into the garden can magically turn into strawberries or tomatoes is beyond the scope of scientific explanation. That two persons engaging in a naked ritual can cause a third person to come into existence is a very peculiar thing. Sex is akin to the perichoretic dance of the first two Persons of the Trinity that becomes the third Person. It can only be explained by the fact that we live in an enchanted world. That a cut in the flesh can “naturally” heal itself and go away is nothing short of a miracle. The natural is supernatural. Nature is magic. Nothing is supernatural because even magic is natural.

What we call “natural law” is simply familiar magic. It is magic that we are so accustomed to that we have forgotten that it is magic! The natural is magical and everyone is familiar with it. Yet, there is another kind of magic. There is a different sort of magic that not everyone is familiar with. This other type of magic is called miraculous, religious, and mystical. The natural magic has only to do with our bodies and physical things around us. The religious magic, on the other hand, is more subtle. There is an invisible part of us. We have consciousness, a mind, and emotions. This may be called the psyche, or the soul — or, as I prefer, the nothing or the je ne sais quoi. The religious magic affects the invisible part of us. It can transform our souls into angelic beings, just as the natural magic can transform seeds into plants. There are also invisible creatures that can help us on our path to spiritual transformation; these are the saints and angels and gods and whatever-the-fucks. The saints are the elders from the community who have passed on. They are venerated and remembered forever. We can invoke them in a ritual called prayer, where we ask them to intercede on our behalf before God. The realm of religious magic is where the spiritual (psychological) world and the material world come together. For the religious magic to work, however, we must engage in certain rituals. This is not at all unordinary. Even the natural magic requires rituals at times. The farmer must plant his seeds, ritualistically water them, etc. If he does not perform the rituals correctly, the magic might fail and he will have no harvest. If ritual is so important for ordinary magic, does it not follow that it must be much more important for the higher types of magic? The existence of magic is a fact, the necessity of ritual is a fact, and no one in their right mind can deny either of these facts!

I have spoken of saints, angels, and gods but there are also demons, demigods, servitors, egregores, and all other manners of thoughtforms. I say that these exist because they do, but I don’t necessarily mean that they really exist. They exist insofar as you can see, hear, invoke, and encounter them. Nevertheless, just because you can engage with them doesn’t mean that they have any objective reality. They could be all in your head — indeed, they cannot be anything but in your head because everything is in your head. A lot of things are only true because we believe in them. Corporations, nations, borders, economic value, and so much more are only things because we believe in them. If we all stopped believing in them at once, they would cease to be things.

“The words objective reality are just a metaphor for something I’ll never encounter…
“The brain has evolved to do one thing: process our environment and give us an illusion of certainty. We are programmed by our genetic prime directive — survive. This does not equip us to be all-knowing theologians, much less philosophers. We bestow meaning rather than discover it…. Our perception is not reality.
“We create a narrative. We want to see where we fit. Humans latch on to one-size-fits-all frameworks and use our catch-all truths that we label as science, Hinduism, Christianity or whatever, to explain everything….
“When we try to extend our narrative into unrelated areas — theology into biology or science into art — we create stories that explain everything and mean nothing….
“The interface between the universe and our perception of it is an open question….
“Some of my friends like Sam don’t get why I ‘still’ go to church. When they say, ‘Frank, God’s only in your head!’ my answer is, ‘Yeah, whatever. What isn’t?’” — Frank Schaeffer (Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God, Ch. 3, 5, & 17)

Within the Orthodox Christian tradition, to experience the higher magic and learn about the religious rituals, you have to be initiated into the community of the higher magicians. This community is called the Church. In order to become a member, you must learn the basic teachings of the mystic order. These basic teachings are called the faith, and they are laid out in the Creed. I suppose that you are all vaguely familiar with these things, so I need not elaborate much on this. To be initiated into the Church and become a member of the mystic community, you must undergo a period of education called catechesis. Then you must participate in the first ritual, which is called baptism. This is a magical rite involving immersion in water. After one is initiated into the community, then he must learn the other rituals, begin to interact with sacred objects, and memorize magic incantations. The chief among these sacred objects is the prayer rope and the greatest incantation is the Jesus Prayer, a special spell that wards off evil spirits. These things can change your inner being and bring you inner peace. There are other sacred objects, like the cross and the icons (or images) of the saints. Each Sunday the community of mystics gathers together in order to perform a Grand Ritual together. This Grand Ritual is called the Eucharist or Liturgy. It involves chanting a very precise incantation, the sending up of smoke from incense, and the reenactment of the mythos, the most important story told within the magical tradition — the story of how the invisible Grand Magician became visible and defeated the Evil Magician with the deep magic of the Resurrection. There is music sung throughout the event — the chant is both solemn and triumphant. And there is not a single part of the Ritual that is not meaningful and important. From the images in the building where the Grand Ritual is performed to the heavenly smoke that fills the entire place with sweetness, there is not a meaningless thing at all. And, perhaps, the most meaningful things of all are the chief magician’s gown and the food on which the spell is cast. No, perhaps I spoke too soon. I suppose the most important thing is the Invisible World that the symbols point to, that is, the Kingdom of the Grand Magician. It seems that the entire Ritual is aimed at transforming the members of the mystic community into beings that are able to pass from this world over to that Invisible World.

Since I have already alluded to the mythos, I suppose I have no choice but to explain what it is. A myth is nothing more than a story that conveys a deep religious or metaphysical truth for a particular culture. There are different kinds of myths. Firstly, there are natural myths wherein stories are woven into the very fabric of the magical world in which we live. The dead seed falls to the ground, only to spring forth to life again, ascends up towards heaven as a living plant, and beckons us to eat the fruit (its body) and drink the juice of the vine (its blood). When the Grand Magician “created” this world, He artistically weaved this story into the tapestry of nature. Or, perhaps, the tapestry of nature told a story that men replicated and imitated in their religious myths. The glorious Sun comes from the East and drives away the darkness of the night. The moon imitates the Sun as a disciple ought to imitate his master: it reflects the natural light of the Sun and helps to drive back the forces of darkness, yet its light is only derivative. The glory of the moon depends upon the glory of the Sun. All of these things are natural myths — myths painted into the landscape of the world itself. They reflect the deep truth of the Christian religion. Then there came the “pagan” myths. These were stories told by the ancients. They spoke of dying gods, resurrections, and such. Yet all of these myths were based upon the natural myths. They were derived from observations of nature. The pagans personified the forces of nature in their literary stories and poems. The natural myths point to the higher realities in the Invisible World; and the pagan religious myths point to the natural myths and are derived from them. Yet the myths hint at the higher realities behind these things. The final kind of myth is the true myth. The uniqueness of the Christian story is that the mythos is not just metaphorically/allegorically true but historically true! The myth became historical fact. I don’t mean the historical fact of the man Jesus Christ in Judea two-thousand years ago; I mean the historical truth of death and rebirth within the hearts of men.

“In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb the ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him….
“In this descent and reascent everyone will recognize a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the world. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life reascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is a descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced: then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult…. Death and Rebirth—go down to go up—it is a key principle….
“The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of it which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key. I am not now referring simply to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The total pattern, of which they are only the turning point, is the real Death and Rebirth: for certainly no seed ever fell from so fair a tree into so dark and cold a soil as would furnish more than a faint analogy to this huge descent and reascension in which God dredged the salt and oozy bottom of Creation.” — C. S. Lewis (Miracles, Ch. 14)

C. S. Lewis is so bold that he proclaims, “From a certain point of view Christ is ‘the same sort of thing’ as Adonis or Osiris.”(ibid.) The story of Christ really does parallel the pagan myths because these myths were pointing to the same underlying reality. The distinctiveness of the Christian story is that the myth became real. God really became a man and lived in a definite historical epoch. The myth has become more than a metaphor. It has become a concrete fact. The true historical incarnation takes place in every birth and the true historical resurrection takes place in every spiritual transformation.

The Evil Magician (Mara, Satan, the Demiurge) had usurped power over the world that the Grand Magician had created with the primordial hocus pocus. The black magic of the Evil Magician held the world hostage to the darkness of sin — mankind bound to the insatiable desires conferred upon him by natural selection. The world seemed to be doomed, but the Grand Magician suddenly broke onto the stage. He sold Himself to the Evil Magician as a ransom in exchange for the world. But when the Evil Magician took hold of the Grand Magician, he found that his black magic could not affect Him. The Grand Magician enchanted the Evil Magician, stripping him of his powers, and stole back the world that He created. The Evil Magician killed the Grand Magician in a bloody ritual sacrifice to the forces of evil, but the Grand Magician came back to life. He Who Does Not Exist exists, ceases to exist, and comes back into existence. The Evil Magician used his Spell of Death in an attempt to keep the Grand Magician in a state of perpetual slumber, but the black magic did not work. The Grand Magician quickly awoke from the spell, and, with a flash of supernatural light, He chased back the darkness. The dark magic was defeated by the white magic. The power of the Evil Magician was weakened in the battle, the power of his black magic continues to grow weaker every day, and the black magic will eventually be altogether useless. Now that the black magic has been defeated, the Grand Magician has beckoned us to come and learn the power of the white magic. He promises us that if we follow the secret rituals we will be transformed into angelic beings, then He will take us into the Invisible World and accompany us on a new adventure. The Grand Magician is you. Nevertheless, you are not the Grand Magician.

There is nothing truer than the myth, nothing more factual and real than magic, and certainly nothing more important than ritual. It is through the myth that we learn the story of the invisible Grand Magician. It is through the ritual that we learn to participate in His magic. And it is through the magic that we come to see the invisible Grand Magician Himself. We are called by the Grand Magician to become little magicians ourselves and to help Him wage war against the evil forces of the Demiurge’s black magic. The world in which we live really is Fantasia. When we step out of bed in the morning, we step into Narnia.

What Is Magick?

Magic is the art of using thoughts, intentions, desires, symbols, and sounds to manipulate reality. The existence of magic is fundamentally factual. The purpose of true magic is to gain a better understanding of one’s self and the reality in which one exists, in order to cultivate one’s own spiritual/psychological well-being.

Manifestation through Suggestion
When I wish to pick up my glass of water, the desire and thought somehow cause my arm to move towards the glass and pick it up. My body is made up entirely of material things, little cells and microscopic organisms. These seemingly disparate particulars — these cells, and the organelles, and atoms within them (which are apparently each entirely autonomous and independent at the individual level) — take on a collective identity at the macro level and form a person. This collective identity somehow assumes consciousness and then uses cognition to manipulate reality. I think of the mass of particles and cells that constitute my arm moving in the direction of the glass, add intention to that conception, and my arm moves as I desire it to. How exactly is it that the intangible thought results in the manipulation of matter to bring about the desired result? Well…magic. At the most fundamental level, every action entails the manifestation of something through suggestion. Whether or not you believe in the manifestation of things through suggestion, every single thing you do is precisely this sort of magic.

Manifestation Through Incantation
David Graeber says that language is fundamentally magic. Suppose that I see a glass of water on the table. I ask someone to bring me the glass of water, and they do. I have now cast a successful spell. I have now uttered a magical incantation with the intention of manifesting something in the real world, and the incantation has successfully brought about my intention.

Manifestation Through Symbols
Written language can work in the same way. Suppose that I send my co-worker an instant message and ask them to come to my desk, and then they do. I have used a magical symbol, which I have inscribed with meaning and intentionality, to manifest something in the external world. An instant message, text, or email can be a form of sigil magick.

Collective Consciousness & Culture

Influential and popular individuals can say things or write things that will have a definite impact on the world around them. If the Chairman of the Federal Reserve writes a paper saying that the stock market will crash, the very fact that the Chairman has said so will cause it to be so. A sort of self-fulfilling prophecy will occur. If the President of the United States declares that America is going to war with Russia, then America will go to war with Russia. The incantations of powerful people affect the collective consciousness of society in such a way that their declarations tend to become reality. Their utterance ends up manifesting the situation in the real world. This is especially the case if the individual making the utterance is popular and charismatic. When Abraham Lincoln called for the abolition of slavery, the power of his persona brought about his desire. When Dr. King called for equal rights for African Americans, his incantation set about events in the real world that fundamentally changed the world in the direction of his desires. Such magic has been done for good and for evil. Hitler was able to manifest the horrors of the Holocaust through verbal incantation. When a popular figure casts a spell, assigning meaning and intentionality to words and letting those words ring out into the air, the people pick up on it and reverberate it, and the repetition of the incantation brings about a shift in social consciousness and changes the culture of society in such a way as to bring about actions that will manifest a state of affairs like the one that the unwitting magician wished to manifest.

What Stereotypical Magickians Actually Do
On one level, magick works by tapping into those areas of the human mind that are usually subconscious. The realm of imagination is brought to the surface so that it can be explored by the conscious mind. This ought to be done for the sake of “spiritual advancement” or self-improvement. The goal is to improve one’s own psychological well-being by gaining an understanding of oneself. The magician, the psychonaut, and the shaman all seek to follow the age-old maxim “Know thyself.” By gaining a better understanding of yourself and the reasons you behave the way you do, you can be empowered to change the way you behave. Certain forms of magic, like casting sigils or spells, seem to work off the power of suggestion, and they work on the person who performs the ritual. If a person casts a spell to be more productive, the ritual is the process of planting that thought and intention into the subconscious mind, which makes it easier for the person to develop habits that increase productivity. In this way, magic often works as a sort of self-hypnosis. If one channels spirits, angels, or demons, they are generally projecting a mental construct in their imagination from the subconscious sphere into the conscious sphere. Unfortunately, people aren’t always aware of what they are doing, so they often mistake these mental entities for beings that live outside of their own minds. This phenomenon can be seen as analogous to the practice of crafting “tulpas” in modern magick; the tulpamancer simply has a better understanding of exactly what it is that they are doing.

The tricky part is that we don’t really understand how this all works. We know that thought or suggestion can induce the motion of matter. We experience this every day. We know that we have the ability to think about doing something and cause the physical material of our body to do it. Usually, the area of control seems to be limited to the confines of our own bodies. However, this does raise the question of whether or not more general psychokinesis might be possible. Psychokinesis does actually happen. People do use their mind to control matter. We experience this on a regular basis. I think with intention about picking up the phone, and the lump of material particles that constitutes “my arm” magically picks up my phone. That’s psychokinesis. That’s literally fucking magic! The world around us operates on the level of magic at the most basic level. We don’t currently understand how the mind can manipulate matter. And since we don’t understand how this works in the instances when it obviously does occur, we can’t entirely rule out the possibility of it occurring on the macro level. It is at least theoretically possible to use the same sort of power of suggestion that induces the motion of your body in order to manipulate the physical world beyond your body and the objects directly connected to it. I think that “real” magic of this sort is probably quite rare, if it occurs at all, but the scientific mind must remain open to the possibility insofar as there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that such magic cannot occur. Many magickians would probably tell you that the bulk of what they do operates on a psychological level; however, a great many of them will also tell you that they have had experiences that seem to suggest that something broader might be possible. Yet it is important to remember that, no matter what happens, it is really all in our heads because that is where we are and that is all we know. Objective reality will always remain unknowable.

Simplicity

“‘There is no reality but God,’ says the completely surrendered sheikh, ‘who is an ocean for all beings. The levels of creation are straws in that ocean.’” — Rumi (The Grasses)

To manifest things in the material realm and do magick is an interesting thing, but it is hardly the proper purpose of the path. Be a magickian if you must but first and foremost be a mystic. Be an occultist if you like, but first and foremost be. The art of simply being is mysticism par excellence.

“He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love.” — 1 John 7:8

When we speak of God as not existing, we mean by this that he is empty in the Buddhist sense. Śūnyatā means both emptiness and openness. What is emptiness but openness? The empty slot is the open one. When we say that God is love, we do not contradict the assertion that God is nothing. In fact, we are merely saying the same thing another way. What is unconditional love? Unconditional love is openness. When one learns the art of being — learns to simply, mindfully be — , then ἀγάπη (agapē, unconditional, overflowing love toward all things) swells up within the mystic’s heart, filling them with compassion, joy, and peace. Theosis, or union with God, is simply to participate in the emptiness/openness at the heart of reality — and to encounter that emptiness/openness is to encounter pure Love, Reality Herself!

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not Love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, but have not Love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not Love, it profiteth me nothing. Love suffereth long, and is kind; Love envieth not; Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the Truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth. But whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” — 1 Corinthians 13:1–10