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Video Description
Magic is supposed to be a door into life, not a hiding place away from it. In this honest video, Lyam Christopher names the trap that catches many ceremonial magicians: they retreat into books, diagrams, pentagrams, and philosophical language so they never have to process the pain underneath. The result is a tidy world of abstraction, an impressive hiding place that keeps the hard feelings safely labeled and safely out of reach.
Then he brings the idea down to earth with a simple example. A person can say, I walked into the park, the oak bark looked grayish green, so I hugged the tree, or they can flatten the same moment into, I had a meaningful nature experience. Both versions point at something true, but only one keeps the feeling alive. Shadow work, he says, asks for vivid, concrete contact with what actually happened, because an abstraction is often a way of looking away.
The wonder is that ceremonial magic was always meant to help with this. The control we need is not control over other people but over the theater of the imagination, so that the old troubled subroutines from our evolutionary past can rise, be felt, and be gently rewritten. When a magician stops banning the shadows to the far edges and thanks them for sharing instead, the whole practice begins to do what it always promised: bring the self out of hiding.
Full Video Transcript
Many, many ceremonial magicians make the big mistake of using magic to hide from life.
And the way they do that is they use their books and their diagrams and their pentagrams and their hexagrams and all their magical sigil work,
all the barbarous names of invocation and all the philosophical knowledge.
they use that as a place to retreat into, to sort of hide from the world inside a world of
abstraction. And largely they do that as a means of control. So we’ll talk about what exactly
happens. So one of the biggest mistakes that you can make as a student of ceremonial magic
is to use magic to retreat into a philosophical abstract world so that you don’t have to process
the karmic stuff that is involved with achieving enlightenment, right? So, yeah, this video is
about how to stop running away from shadow work. I noticed that when I work with a lot of students
one-on-one, by the way, you can schedule a one-on-one with me, a lot of students will speak
about their experiences and their feelings almost completely in terms of abstractions
and we’re going to have to clarify what i mean by that okay abstractions um when you talk about
your experiences you can talk vividly and concretely about the things you experienced
okay um and then uh you could say oh i went up into the park today and there was an oak tree
its bark was very rough and i thought the bark would be brown but it was actually kind of a
grayish green i didn’t i had never really looked at the tree bark before and i went up and hugged
the tree um and then you could say uh if you if you turn that into abstraction you could say well
i went to the park today and ended up feeling really happy so you’re basically making a general
experiences out of it you’re making an abstraction out of it whereas the actual um experience is
could be expressed in more concrete terms okay if you want to make progress in magic you must be
able to work not only with abstract concepts like the tree of life and pentagrams and hexagrams and
philosophy and diagrams, but you also must, must, must be able to work with concrete imagery,
okay? And we’re going to go into how that works. If you’re unwilling to do that, if you’re afraid
to do it, it can be very painful, then do not do magic because magic will f you up. It will
cause ego inflation and as you see with many ceremonial magicians, they turn out to be
assholes because the ego becomes all puffed up and they become this sort of control tower entity
person who got into magic to try to get control over the troubling aspects of life without
actually looking at them describing them and dialoguing with them and making peace with them
okay what this amounts to though it’s when we engage in this kind of intensive magical work
this shadow work we are confronting images from the past that are still unresolved and haunting
us in our memory in our cell memory not even from this life but from our evolutionary past
humankind has a traumatic evolutionary past in which we were subject to all kinds of calamities
catastrophes predators diseases famines uh you name it so uh we have a lot of evolutionary trauma
that’s embedded in our cell memory that is unresolved and we come we pretty much come
packaged that way sorry and this is why the bulk of humanity is unenlightened because they’re they
are constantly plagued by these unconscious scenarios that are trying to work themselves out
and we’ll we’ll talk a little bit about how that works for let’s talk about about what an
abstraction is okay i can go experience a company uh the way a company is run and and shake the
people’s hands and notice that some people are are skinny some people are fat some people are
bulked up, some people are hunched over their desks and shy, and some people are gregarious and
loud. These are more concrete ways of describing what it’s like to be at that company.
The smell of the cafeteria, things like that. I could also describe the company in abstract terms,
in terms of its departments and its pyramid-like command structure, okay? And so you might be one
of these types of ceremonial magicians who has a bad habit, an old habit of retreating into
management scenarios, into abstractions like this one. So when you think of a company, you just
think of it in terms of its command structure or its process flow chart structure, but not
necessarily in terms of what the cafeteria smells like, okay, or what kind of tiles exist on the
floor. All right, so in order to do magic, you must be able to do both and you must not be afraid
of dealing with concrete imagery as opposed to just abstract imagery. Another type of abstraction
is the flow chart. You could actually go through the process of creating something with your hands
and note what it smells like, feels like, tastes like, what it looks like, but you could also
diagram it in terms of steps okay and so many of us who are very cerebral uh who are very control
tower oriented will automatically think of almost everything in terms of flow charts and pyramid
diagrams and even bubble diagrams like the tree of life rather than confront the actual phenomena
of the world directly okay and that can be a bad habit if that’s what you tend to retreat into if
that’s your way of dealing with the world, then you are one-sided, okay? And so it’s very important
to be able to deal with our experience in the world in terms of the concrete, in terms of visceral,
sensory, disturbing imagery. The calendar is also an abstraction. So I’m filming this video on a
Sunday. Sunday does not really exist. This is one day kind of happening after another, right?
Sun goes down, sun comes up, that’s more the concrete, that’s closer to the concrete imagery,
right? Whereas, does Sunday ever really happen? Not really, okay? But even in magic, we might say
that Sunday is the day of the sun, but that’s questionable, okay? There does seem to be some
kind of repeating pattern in consciousness that makes Sunday the day of the sun, but is this
particular day intrinsically assigned to the sun by god or somebody no no it is simply something
a pattern that might be recognized so sunday is a mere abstraction and here are some other
occult diagram i just saw this one today an attempt to make all kinds of tarot cards
spatially related which i think is really cool by the way but the tendency to retreat into these
kinds of almost mental masturbation mechanics of magic could be a symptom of simply avoiding the
kind of initiation experiences that are truly required of us and initiation experiences require
a confrontation with difficult instinctive primordial images which are of a concrete
sensory vivid nature. Whether or not we apply abstractions to those images is another matter,
okay, and that is also important. And of course the astrological chart is also an abstraction,
a very useful one of course, but if you really want to make progress as somebody who can do
astrology or magic in particular, you must have life experience. You have to know what jealousy
is like. You have to know what wealth feels like. You have to know what poverty feels like and what
what good fortune feels like. And you have to know a lot of stuff, actually. So, granted,
many astrologers who are very good tend to be somewhat old because they’ve experienced enough
of life to know what these various experiences are like. And of course, the tree of life itself
is an abstraction. That’s something to be wary of. Of course, it is very helpful to walk around
in your life and sort of categorize everything in terms of the tree of life okay which sphere
does this experience fall under okay but you should never use that as a means of distancing
yourself from an experience if you have an experience if you file it away to keep yourself
from feeling it fully that can be a problem and that’s the problem that many ceremonial magicians
fall into being too cerebral even sigils like this this is one of the oldest magical sigils in
in the world uh it is an abstraction as well there appear there appear to be two types of
abstractions the ones that are fundamental possibly fundamental in other words they
seem to be the actual principles behind which the universe um behind the universe and the universe
seems to build itself based on those principles we don’t know right seems to be and then of course
there are the abstractions that we create when we look at the world so when we try to see the
principles behind it well we create our own fictionalized versions of what those principles
might be those are also abstractions so when it comes to magic there are the abstractions that we
create from experience which are sort of fabricated there we make them up and we hopefully
they’re right we don’t know and then supposedly there are the the real ones in other words the
the fundamental abstractions that actually do represent like the fractal patterns or the real
geometry or the real philosophical principles that the universe is built upon okay so in either case
there’s a tendency to try to retreat into abstraction as though if you try to retreat
into the fundamental abstractions or if you try to retreat into the fabricated abstractions
it still amounts to the same problem because you’re avoiding confronting your own visceral
physical traumatic troubling life experiences that exist on the sensory concrete level
and i say concrete but many of these troublesome images can be dealt with in the imagination
okay so when i say concrete images i don’t necessarily mean concrete on the sidewalk
outside my window here i really mean the imagery in the mind that’s not a not just a map it’s
actually like a rep it represents a um an actual experience in the world okay and of course mostly
when you dream at night it’s mostly mostly concrete imagery but sometimes you can get some abstract
stuff in there too uh and so if you are the type of person who retreats into abstraction there’s a
couple reasons for doing that um if you are a writer or if you’re learning to write well
you’re developing your vocabulary um it’s it’s kind of difficult to speak very concretely about
things because that requires a lot of vocabulary so what young people or young writers or new
writers eventually they get the bad habit of writing in abstractions because the higher you
go in the abstraction ladder the fewer terms there are to master and also if you if you write
in very abstract terms like philosophical terms of just categories of thought uh it makes you
seem smart okay but the real intelligence of being able to communicate to with people or write you
know to people is your ability to switch back and forth between high level abstract terms and then
low level specific terms okay and the ability to make progress in magic or in enlightenment
practices depends heavily on both of those abilities. And what I’m saying here in this
video is that many people in ceremonial magic have a tendency to retreat from concrete imagery,
from visceral experiences, into the abstract world of bubble diagrams and spheres of consciousness
and enneagram diagrams, hexagrams, pentagrams, all these abstractions. Mainly because these
abstract forms, they tend to, if you’re not being taught very well, they tend to promise you control
over your reality. That is not exactly what they will literally do. They don’t give you control
over your physical reality necessarily they give you control over your psyche okay and your psyche
is the entity that is manifesting reality around you so if you tweak the psyche by using these
symbols to control the psyche the psyche might maybe if you’re good to it reorganize itself
so that it becomes a better manifester of a more i don’t know comfortable life or a more
interesting life at least, a more adventurous life, and a more peaceful life too. And we’ll get,
there’s a reason for that. The more, the better you are at confronting things at the level of
the imagination, the more peaceful your life is most likely going to be. So if you are a person
who retreats into abstraction, you probably are known for using euphemisms. I’ll just go over a
couple of these um so like to say if i am waging war in another country um and i lose a few
civilians get killed it’s funny we used to we used to kill civilians all the time and now we don’t do
that very much anymore that’s nice i guess um but then if a few civilians die we’ll say oops there
was some collateral damage in this military operation of course using the term collateral
damage is a very cold abstract way of saying we killed people or we blew their bodies to bits
okay and that’s why a lot of times when the news tends to cover things they’ll speak in abstract
terms but then they’ll they’ll call a witness on and the witness will tell you what it’s like
to have actually seen it and you have one politician saying oh yeah collateral damage
it was worth it and then you have people on the ground who actually saw it and of course being
able to come to terms with the visceral physical concrete imagery of what happened
being able to handle stuff like that it’s very important because human beings are haunted by
imagery like that even if you’ve had a peaceful life up until now your evolutionary past is
let’s say contaminated let’s say your cells are contaminated with with dark memories from your
evolutionary past of being eaten by predators or falling down into wells or being struck by
lightning or being washed away by a flood or witnessing your all of your relatives die in a
plague these all these horrifying images are still embedded in you in cell memory and they will come
out when we do magic when we do the banishing work they start to come out okay we’ll talk about how
that works in a bit and the one at the bottom here astral garbage that is something that
magicians who are not very well trained in my opinion they’ll use that term so when we do
banishing work on a regular basis these difficult images from our evolutionary past begin to come
out of the woodwork and they might actually manifest before our waking eyes as as hallucinations
okay it’s not really fair to call them hallucinations because that’s another abstraction
to try to kind of dismiss them oh it’s just an hallucination nothing to worry about doesn’t
don’t need to pay attention to it um these things are important because they are manifestations of
trauma that are waving there in front of you saying hey this is something that you haven’t
made peace with yet and this is going to continue to be um part of your troublesome programming
until you figure out what to do with it how does it how’s this how is this supposed to function
you know we’re trying to make um we’re trying to learn from this horrible scenario that happened
to many of your ancestors in the past. And it’s going to keep haunting you until you do make some
kind of sense out of it. Emotions. Why would we bother calling up all this dark imagery from the
evolutionary past? Why can’t we just say, oh, I feel sad today and say, okay. Or I feel jealous
of my friend. Not sure where that’s coming from, right? And then you write in your magical journal,
you’ll say, oh, I felt jealous today when so-and-so did so-and-so. And then you close your
journal and put it away it’s like there i’ve done my journal work right identifying emotions is only
the beginning because when you apply a label to an emotion that’s an abstraction and so you’re
basically locking that emotion or that feeling behind the label and then filing it away pushing
it away so you don’t have to experience it okay now the ability to push it away and objectify it
that way that’s important but that’s only the first step you now have to go into it and explore
it because behind every emotion the emotion is only like your mind labeling it on the surface
i have some trouble here i’m going to call it sadness right i’m going to call this jealousy
okay this is anger um once you identify the anger then you look at how it’s moving in your in your
imagination it has motion and as the motion begins to crank you begin to notice that are various
characters in a scenario emerging what kind of anger is this what’s the scenario that actually
is being triggered because that scenario has been conditioned into cell memory from who knows when
from childhood probably before you’re even alive you know from previous stages of evolution maybe
even from a reptilian form who knows so if just simply labeling your emotions that’s nice but it’s
not nearly enough that’s why we that’s why psychologists don’t go far enough they’ll
basically they need to go into the actually demon summoning work that we do in magic to find out
what’s underneath the emotion what’s the scenario and who are the actors who are kind of like at
odds with each other who are these entities what do they look like how do they behave what do they
want what do they really need scary so this tendency to distance ourselves from difficult
things. Supposedly, that comes to us from the beginning stages of the universe. So, according
to Kabbalists, God himself does this. So, when he decided to create the universe, it’s because he
was restless, okay? We don’t understand what that really means. The Kabbalists say, well,
it’s something like restlessness, but we can’t possibly comprehend what that is, right? So,
he kind of got restless, but he was unable, he wanted to see what he was about. He wanted just
to understand himself. But since God was all that existed, he couldn’t touch himself, he couldn’t
see himself, he couldn’t get to know himself. So, in order to get to know himself, he withdrew from
a space within himself. And that space from within, the space inside himself that he withdrew
out of um he just pretended he wasn’t in that space anymore okay and it opened up a hole inside
of him and into that hole he poured like um almost like a parade of his whole everything inside
if everything he had inside of him that wanted to express itself began to happen in that um space
it’s sort of like a magical theater of the imagination that he created inside of himself
and this is all and this is where we are now in in some big theater of the imagination where
We are all like sort of imagery that’s playing itself out in front of the eye of God, let’s say, right?
This is just a way of looking at it.
It’s not literally that way.
And so this is called Tsim Tsum.
So in order to create the universe, God first had to withdraw from a part of himself so he could just inject the universe into it as some kind of fantastic drama now.
So that was the contraction process.
and of course his ability to contract away from one aspect of himself so he could look at it
that also gives him some amount of control over what happens in that space okay and so as many
of you know the hermetic maxim for magicians is as above so below if god is able to do this then
we are able to do it too on a smaller scale and this is exactly what we do when we have trouble
because we’re restless we don’t know why we are the way we are we can’t figure out why do i keep
doing that how come i keep suffering you you develop the ability to withdraw from a part of
yourself and then to look at this thing that’s that seems to be causing the suffering right
so you you create that theatrical space for yourself so that you can see the elements that
are triggering your suffering let’s say right you can more you can objectify them and so that
simsum process that the entire universe supposedly went under is something that we do in our minds
and in order to do that we draw the magic circle okay and the contraction there is a little
different because basically when we draw a magic circle around ourself inside the magic circle this
is me this is the subject and then everything everything that triggers me to be restless and
suffering and angry and happy and sad um everything that triggers my emotions is out there in the
universe now okay so um you are now the subject that’s observing all of these triggers that are
supposedly like you know demonic forces that are causing you to suffer or causing you to feel
happy or whatever like they’re demonic angelic whatever they are right um so that sets up a
theater of the imagination okay what many ceremonial magicians will do though is they’ll
use that as a means of control they’ll say oh i banished the negative forces from my life so that
now i have some vantage a vantage point from which to regard them and keep them under control okay
this is not that’s not a good habit okay so we we create that separation between subject and object
so that shadow work can happen not so that we can gain control over uh the demons in our lives okay
And so that’s a hard thing to get across to many long-practicing ceremonial magicians,
that they basically got into this as a means of controlling the contents of the mind.
And that’s not 100% what it’s about.
There’s control involved, of course, but it’s more like control over the theater of the imagination
so that then the shadow work can happen.
And the shadow work is something we don’t have much control over.
yeah and of course you can uh we can tell the magicians who haven’t done the shadow work are
the ones that tend to be puffed up you know the ones that tend to have ego inflation
and they tend to have this sort of control tower mentality of um well that subject that you’re
bringing up right now is beneath me i’ve moved beyond that you know i’ve i’ve banished it to
the outermost circle of hell or something like that right and of course we use all kinds of
abstractions to gain control and magic okay but remember the control is not really what it’s
about the shadow work is what it’s about the uh pentagram also being a powerful abstraction i
talked about this a while ago this might be um emblematic of one of the fundamental abstractions
that basically governs maybe a personification process or an incarnation process very interesting
stuff here um but note the tendency to say oh this is something i can use to control the elements
this is something that you can use to cause the elements to move and appear so that they can
manifest all kinds of troublesome images to you which now need to be processed i should repeat
that the the the pentagram here is not necessarily a symbol for controlling the elements so that they
kind of become your slaves right now uh it’s a means of causing them to move and appear and to
disappear so that they will come forth and show you their karmic baggage so that you can now
bravely process it because it’s some of it’s difficult some of it’s quite scary got to keep
that in mind the only control it gives you is the ability to prod the karmic the karmic traces to
manifest as troublesome concrete imagery that is now going to come forth in imagination
so that you can process it make meaning out of it um and we’ll talk about what that exactly means
because it involves like demons demons and angels and entities and things like that so keep in mind
the the the trap is to think that oh i can use magic to get control okay the only thing it really
gives you control over is how things appear and disappear in imagination okay and of course when
you tweak the imagination or the psyche when it’s when it when you rearrange the furniture of the
psyche using magic of course it it’s going to become a better manifestation machine so your
life will probably go better if if you are a skilled magician but really the main power of
control is simply over the the manner in which your karma unfolds okay there’s no stopping it
from unfolding and there’s no escape from shadow work it’s going to find you one way or the other
and if you have a tendency to retreat into abstraction to to keep it keep it away it’s
going to come knocking at your door ever harder harder and harder it’s going to get worse and
worse and the more you push it away by hiding it behind abstraction the more it’s going to start
knocking on your door in physical life making your physical life hard as well karma will first
surface on the level of imagination so you can deal with it there which is preferable preferable
and uh that’s what magic is largely about you’re conjuring forth the karmic traces so that you can
make peace with them on the on the level of the astral so they don’t actually trickle down into
the material level and make your life into a hell that’s very important actually if you think about
it so magicians appear to be doing magic to get whatever they want but primarily what they’re
doing is they’re working with the psyche so that it becomes less troubled and then in turn it
manifests a life that tends to be less troubled than it would have been okay no guarantees there’s
always something to deal with so to be clear it’s helpful to talk about levels of the imagination
because people who have a tendency to retreat into abstraction will go for this top level here as you
can see somebody’s talking somebody’s talking to somebody’s giving you a lecture right and then of
course the audience is now visualizing literally what that person is describing okay that level two
there with a literal imagery that’s that’s what people tend to avoid because it’s too painful
sometimes we have all kinds of imagery and embedded in the imagination or in the memory
from evolutionary past that is haunting us for example if i have a fear of heights and let’s say
i’ve never really fallen off of a precipice before i was just born with the fear of heights
where does it come from my ancestors many of them have experienced some horrifying things in regards
to falling off of cliffs or falling down into dark holes things like that right and eventually
the fear gets embedded as an instinct let’s say as an instinctive fear and it exists as an image
okay there are different types of fears of height fears of fears fear of heights because
one person’s fear of heights might be slipping over a precipice and tumbling over the edge or
something like that another person’s fear of heights might be falling into a dark hole and
getting stuck there and forgotten these are very different types of fears and so it would not be
helpful just to dismiss it with an abstraction to say oh you have acrophobia fear of heights
there problem solved take this drug you know um whereas one person’s fear of heights if they
really confront it and uproot it so it doesn’t bother them so much anymore they would go after
this specific imagery that is haunting them is it the falling over the precipice is or is it
hitting the ground really hard that’s probably what mine is hitting the ground really hard is
probably the one that uh makes me afraid of heights so the um the most important thing is
that we’re avoiding the tendency to defend ourself versus reality by retreating into abstraction so
in other words if you really want to do shadow work you have to be willing to go into the concrete
imagery okay and if you notice when you have dreams at night it’s almost all concrete imagery
because that’s what needs to be processed the psyche is saying look look at this okay now look
at this make meaning out of this okay because this is going to keep coming back and asking for you to
make some kind of meaning out of it until you do. And once you’ve made meaning out of it, it’s going
to either dissolve, self-liberate, or it’s going to function better for you. It’s still going to
be there, but it’s going to give you energy and help you as opposed to simply possess you and
make you do stupid things. Yeah, many of us, the unenlightened state is pretty much a state of
being taken over by demons all the time. We have these unconscious memories from the past which
are unresolved and there are characters within those memories that are still trying to work out
that past trauma and so when something triggers us to remember that trauma that character surfaces
in us and it tries to work out its solution all over the situation that’s happening and of course
that the trauma that is being triggered is not exactly the same as the trigger reality for example
I’ll give you an example of that. If you have a fear of public speaking, that’s usually something
to do with a fear of being banished from the community, which maybe 200 years ago or more
would have been a death sentence, most likely. If somebody sent you out into the wilderness,
you would probably die alone or have a very difficult time of it. So if the community
banished you or rejected you that was really serious and traumatic okay and now we still
have that so if if i’m standing in front of a group of people and they don’t like me it feels
like i’m gonna die okay if i have that fear really strong some people have it really strong others
don’t and naturally you can outgrow it but you have to confront it by either going out and speaking
a lot or you can actually just confront that scenario in the imagination and make meaning
from it uh make peace with it and in order to do that you wouldn’t just say oh i’ve got a fear of
some vague audience somewhere no what does it look like how does it move how does how does it feel
what if you have a fear of public speaking what’s the audience doing how are they how are they move
are they throwing things at you or are they pointing out the gates of the city and they’re
saying go get out go out and die and then you’re you know going off all ashamed ready to die
we want visceral traumatic sensory imagery because this is what’s coming back to haunt us from our
evolutionary past now this is really important it’s important to turn the light around okay so
most of us when something irritates us we are we are the magician inside the magic circle right
and something outside the magic circle is now irritating us it’s like an oh my gosh she wore
that dress again i’m so jealous she looks so good in that dress and i i look terrible in my dress
right and i just feel terrible envy right now um it’s all her fault somebody needs to teach her a
lesson i’m gonna i’m gonna fix her like you know what i’m gonna ruin that dress while she’s not
looking or something like that right um and then then i’ll feel better right i’ll go fix the thing
out there to make myself feel better in here this is what we that’s a really evil way of looking at
but that’s what we tend to do all the time. I feel bad, I’m going to take this drug,
I’m going to reach over here and I’ll fix the external situation so that I feel better and
I don’t have to confront the actual thing that’s bothering me, which is more of a
haunting scenario type thing. So, the old habit is to focus on the object. If something offends me,
I go out there and I fix that thing, okay? And then the new habit though for if you want to
make progress in enlightenment practices is to turn the light around. It’s important to notice
what irritates you and what causes you to suffer, okay? But the most important thing is then to
turn the attention to the entity that is arising in the magic circle. Most people would say don’t
focus on them, focus on yourself. Like if you feel jealous of that girl for wearing that dress,
the problem is yours, okay? That’s fine, but remember the entity that’s arising as you,
this is a jealousy the green monster right it’s not you it’s attempting to arise as you and make
you do something horrible to her dress right so it’s kind of like make gonna make you attack right
and then so but when it arises as you you want to look at that and say oh what is this this is
being triggered by some kind of i don’t know wealth scenario or um made mating competition
scenario from evolutionary past um both men and women can be very competitive when it comes to
the mating dance, right? And so there’s some kind of mating, jealousy, unresolved drama from
many generations past is now surfacing and can be dealt with. Are you going to let that jealous
behavior take you over and make you do something horrible? And then you’ll snap out and say,
why did I do that? Or are you going to look at this scenario and say, oh my God, what is this?
this is like um i feel like harming this other person because they make me feel a certain way
and all i really am doing is trying to get above them in status or something like that you know
and so there’s this entity in me that actually looks very pitiful i see her over there looking
gorgeous in the dress but or me over here i’m kind of like um i feel like oh i’m not good enough
this is the entity that needs to be looked at the the not good enough entity that’s much more
interesting than the evil woman in the dress who looks better than you right um and so we want to
deal with the entity that arises inside the magic circle not the entity necessarily outside the
magic circle the biggest problem that we have as unenlightened beings is we keep trying to fix the
world to make ourselves feel better and i’m not going to say well you need to turn that around
and fix yourself that’s not exactly it either because when you turn around and look inside the
magic circle where you are there’s something else in the circle with you that’s trying to take you
over and it comes up and says let’s go do this and then you go okay right let’s go do that you
don’t have to do that it tries to take you over based on some kind of scenario that’s playing
itself over and over from the past you don’t have to do that anymore if you if you recognize it
happening so yeah it’s nice to identify a recurring painful emotion like feeling inadequate
because she’s more attractive than you are in that dress or being at the gym and all the guys are
bigger than you are sort of thing right um so when the uh the suffering arises if you feel
affronted because it’s been raining all week and you’re getting angry at the at nature for doing
its thing right uh so when that happens you want to delve into the imagination okay when there’s a
suffering scenario arising let’s let’s talk about the fear of public speaking all right um before i
even go in front of the audience i’m going to conjure up in my mind the audience and me then
i’m going to delve into the imagination like what memory is this coming from what kind of
primordial scenario is this triggering how is it moving so what is the audience doing how am i
moving and how are they moving are they throwing things at me are they stabbing me am i being
executed and they’re all ridiculing me or am i being publicly publicly punished like in the
stocks or something like that or are they banishing me which is most likely the scenario
are they going to reject me and then i’m going to die how are they moving so it’s good to identify
how they move uh in this case if they’re banishing you they probably would be like pointing out the
door of the gates of the city or something like that but they could also be throwing things at
you and um it’s all very much the same kind of rejection imagery going on it’s good to see how
it moves because then when you’re actually up in front of a group of people speaking it’s like
they’re not throwing anything at me this is not the same situation okay and so the entity that
is has arisen who is being has stuff um let’s say uh it’s being banished from the community right
how does it move oh it sulks off into the into the wilderness and it’s prepared to curl up and
die out in the forest somewhere right um this is how it’s the entity moves and how it what is it
trying to do uh well maybe it’s trying too hard to please the audience so it will be accepted
and it’s but it’s scared right so it’s trying to please the audience um how has it evolved to
behave in the way it’s behaving to be so afraid and to be so desperate to please the audience
naturally we can see that can’t we how it’s trying to stay alive and that desperation is
kind of sabotaging the whole performance and the really good speakers are the ones who aren’t
worried about dying while they’re on stage right and we can see how it evolved to behave that way
this involves empathy and this is why people who don’t have empathy can’t really make progress in
initiation and enlightenment practices because when an entity is arising that’s problematic
you really have to feel for it it’s like oh and i understand why you feel this way you think you’re
going to die ah now i understand why this reaction keeps coming up right uh if you can’t empathize
like that then you’ll never make progress the whatever reactions you have are simply your
reactions and there’s nothing you can do about it what is the entity that’s arising as you really
need it obviously needs to function better and rather than sabotage your speaking performance
right and this is what you’re going to help it to do now the worst thing you can do is repress it
because it has evolved for a reason and it needs to play out its drama it needs to see for itself
that it’s not really helping in the current in the present form it’s in that it needs to change
in order to be helpful in order to get what it really is trying to do it needs to function better
okay and it needs to see that for itself right that’s why we play out its drama and let it
let it see for itself that this isn’t quite working. And so we want to really play out that
concrete imagery of how if it gets what it wants, it’s not really, that’s not really going to work
in this situation. Yeah, because if I go down to the local bookstore to give a presentation
and people don’t like it, I’m not going to die, most likely. So what does it really need? It needs
to serve better or it needs to simply liberate itself and dissolve completely never to bother
you again that’s also possible how will it feel when it gets what it really needs how will it feel
it’s nice to explore how that might feel how in a if if a particular instinct keeps cropping up
and causing you to suffer but the next time it crops up it actually helps and participates
really well how does that feel okay or if an instinct simply dissolves completely never to
bother you again how does it feel to just have that instinct just dissolve into pure space and
never arise again scary i don’t think so benefits of shadow work so if you’ve done a lot of shadow
work um you gain a good habit basically every time an unconscious impulse arises in other words
a scenario gets triggered and then some kind of entity is attempting to arise as you that says oh
let’s go do this. Oh, let’s go do that. You’re aware of it immediately and it can’t take you
over. Okay. That’s the benefit. In other words, all these were constantly being taken over by
little fix it strategies, little fix it demons. We need to do this. We need to do that. Nothing’s
ever right. I’m uncomfortable because of this. Now I’m uncomfortable because of that. Now I need
this. All these are little clingy, cringy, grasping, groping entities that are trying to
arise as us to get us to do things and we develop the ability to recognize them as they arise
and then we don’t have to listen to them. We could, it’s perfectly fine, but we’re now aware
we have a choice. We are aware of the karmic movements and images as they arise and we don’t
have to obey them anymore. That kind of freedom is really hard to describe, but I sort of described
it right there, but you have to imagine what that would feel like to not have to do anything. You
don’t even have to survive anymore it’s not required of you and it gives you the psychic
ability like not only can you see these entities in yourself but you also see them in others
sometimes you can even see some kind of entity like in your like synesthesia right where you
people say it’s clairvoyance whatever the motion of the way their body language is cringing or
like that you can actually see some kind of entity there sometimes because your imagination will help
you uh because something really there really is an energy form that is sort of um lingering there
from the past that’s trying to work itself out right there in front of you in their body language
in their vicinity in the energy of the room this stuff is very real okay but we we need to really
call it um you know it’s better to say it’s more psychological awareness that gets some whatever
tendency you have to share in that ancestral memory you’ll be able to see it in them it’s
kind of how it works okay and it can be kind of frightening sometimes to see how controlled people
are by these unconscious impulses and how disturbing some of them can be especially
when you become more aware of them and it’s it’s not just you know the crazy people it’s people in
high levels of educational leadership and people that you would think are really smart and have it
all together are walking around almost completely hypnotized by life, controlled by all of these
impulses. One after another keep coming up. Being free of them is fantastic. So when you have the
ability to work with these things on a very visceral, very concrete level, the ability to
categorize them in terms of abstraction is very important. The only problem is that most magicians
will try to just reach for the categories, apply the categories so that they can dismiss these
experiences and not deal with them. Wrong, okay? It’s the other way around. You confront these
experiences and then you see what categories they fall into. That’s very useful because if I deal
with jealous one one jealousy scenario like the girl in the dress right if i deal with that um
there are many other scenarios that are similar to that that fall under the planet of venus let’s say
okay it’s kind of a venus scenario and the strategies used for working with that jealousy
scenario and the the poor hurt little me jealous entity right um the strategy used for working with
that spirit might also work for another spirit that falls under venus as well so you really get
a lot of bang for your buck when you use abstraction that way because the when i learn
how to deal with one venusian spirit then i then i also can probably deal with many more venusian
spirits and then but of course if i’ve dealt with a lot of venusian spirits in my life i might not
be very good at dealing with a mars spirit or a jupiter spirit unless i’ve dealt with a few of
of those as well okay um so the abstractions really come in handy because then you can
take the strategy applied to one entity and apply it to another and so you develop a bag of tricks
basically a way of dealing with these entities that tends to work all over the place uh in all
types of situations and so you can advance very quickly in your ability to handle difficult
karmic formations from our distant primordial evolutionary past and your ability to handle
these things it sounds kind of strange but they happen all the time and your ability to handle a
primordial contracting fear response is so important to be to be free of that because
you can do all kinds of things without even worrying about whereas most people are corralled
by their fear you won’t be anymore you will still feel it probably but it’s not going to hold you
back necessarily okay so and of course we use the tree of life now constructively we don’t use the
tree of life then as a means of categorizing things and locking them away so we don’t have
to experience them okay we use the the tree of life as a means of applying remedies um to various
categories of spirits okay and the nice thing about these kinds of glyphs like the tree of life
is that they supposedly cover all the kinds of experiences they’re comprehensive and they can
also identify which spirits you have trouble dealing with yeah for instance i probably have
some trouble dealing with some of the moon spirits which would be that purple sphere
of yesod down there some degree i’m getting better about it though and most of us have
trouble with sphere number three there which is uh saturn saturn’s always a challenge of some kind
and of course this if there’s any sphere that’s the sphere of abstraction guess what that’s that’s
sphere number three saturn so remember when we are really making progress in life we are processing
troublesome visceral traumatic imagery not always horror necessarily or violence but
also feelings of inadequacy and jealousy and and hunger and of course but one of the biggest for
us is calamity where we’re being threatened by monsters or natural forces like flash floods are
a big one and let many people have dreams of being swept away by a flood or by a tidal wave
that’s very interesting where does that come from you weren’t swept away by a tidal wave when we
you were a child where so where does that imagery come from very interesting and um i bring up this
image here because the horror of being eaten or of sliding down into a dark hole and disappearing
into nothingness that is one of the primordial part of the biggest um trauma or karmic image
that we face if we are doing enlightenment practices because when the ego is about to die
that triggers imagery of literally dying being devoured or fall or being pressed down into
oblivion or falling down into a dark hole and disappearing forever going down the drain right
uh so when the ego construct begins to collapse and enlightenment is about to ensue there’s a huge
usually a huge threat of i’m dying i’m being eaten i’m going to disappear into nothingness
I’m being crushed to death. I can’t breathe. I can’t move, you know, that kind of stuff.
And that there’s a reason why the mouth of hell is such a powerful image in, let’s say,
Christianity, the fear of oblivion. And the interesting thing about that is that when we
work with the energies of the body, what’s like Kundalini and stuff like that with the middle
pillar exercise um the um the ego exists mostly in the head let’s say right as a control tower
entity that is like um uh uh thinks it’s in control of your life and as it collapses it’s all
kind of tumbling down uh and it’s it’s it feels like it’s being um assaulted from below or even
um devoured from below like it’s going to fall down into a dark hole or something like that
yeah um and so in uh in religious iconography that gets mistaken as the powers of hell writing up
rising up to annihilate you so i find it interesting that you know the serpentine
energy of the kundalini um is regarded as the devil who’s going to come eat you like the mouth
of hell and then you’re going to be snuffed out of existence or or or be digested in the bowels
of hell forever uh that kind of stuff right um it’s interesting that this kind of imagery
imagery would be triggered as we engage in enlightenment practices and of course um that’s
why it’s very important for um like in i remember there some there are a lot of um old tantric
practices where the student of magic visualizes himself being eaten by a predator like a lion or
something like that to really confront the horror of that and to make peace with it because when
the enlightenment process begins to happen and the ego starts to collapse you’ll be ready for it
it’s like oh there it is again there’s the lion or the shark eating me or something like that it’s
like oh yeah yeah i just let it let it happen because it’s just an imaginal scenario playing
itself it’s being triggered by the enlightenment experience but um it is not um it’s misfiring it
is not truly applicable to the enlightenment experience something to keep in mind then um when
when life is troubling you let’s say you’re doing banishing rituals on a regular basis and your
life’s getting harder okay because what’s happening is everything uh these these these um
demon scenarios these um troublesome scenarios from our ancestral past are being poofed up and
and so are you like your ego is being poofed up so you can now observe things more clearly
and all of these memories from the past are being poofed up outside the magic circle let’s say right
they are now much more vivid to you um that’s setting up the stage for shadow work so that
you can now engage with these things and then turn the light around and look at you as you’re
reacting with these these triggers right if you fail to do that just remember the the the evil
things that are bothering you they’re basically saying to you well you’re doing the banishing
rituals every day so um if there’s a particular um thing that’s bothering you it’s going to say
to you you pushed me out of your magic circle so you could look at me so look at me okay you’re
doing the daily banishing work so now you’re going to have to process these difficult scenarios
because you’re prodding them into visible appearance when we summon spirits what do they do
they move and appear and then they they play out their dramas in front of you which are basically
old unresolved scenarios from the past that the body somehow feels it needs to learn from
okay and these scenarios will keep coming back unless we cultivate them and civilize them or
train them to function better in our lives okay either that or we will help them self-liberate
we will help them dissolve completely and never be triggered ever again which is also possible
so don’t uh so remember the the biggest habit that we have when something bothers us when something
is causing suffering we tend to try to fix the world so that we don’t have to suffer okay the
the most important thing is that you turn the light around and you look at the entity that’s
attempting to arise as you that’s attempting to take you over and make you fix that thing out
there you can’t fix the world sorry not really uh it’s more important to fix um your uh the
automatic reaction to it okay doesn’t mean you don’t fix things in your environment but um the
primary thing is to if something’s annoying you you have to observe the actual entity that’s
annoyed because it’s not you and if you don’t do that it’s going to keep coming back and you’re
going to keep suffering from being annoyed and eventually when you make peace with this little
entity that’s annoyed when it arises next time it’s not going to be annoying it’s going to be
friendly it’s going to feel good it’s going to be it’s going to be like a little alert oh
you do you need to do something here you’re like no that’s okay thanks for sharing all right so i
hope that was clear um the tendency is uh if you’re if you’re going to get into magic as a
means of control that’s usually going to involve retreating into a world of abstraction so that
you from your abstract position then you can exert your control upon everything in your environment
and everything stays manageable, right?
That’s not the way to do it, okay?
The only control you exert is to basically get control of the theater of the imagination
so that these troublesome subroutine programs can emerge from your dark evolutionary past
so that they can be reprogrammed.
You could say it that way, right?
And in order to do that, you have to feel for them.
you have to empathize with them and then you have to help them rewrite themselves or
reformulate themselves so that they function better okay or they can simply dissolve entirely
because they’re simply not necessary anymore all right i hope that was clear and until next time
see you guys
Source: Lyam Christopher