Descriptions:
Video Description
Some stories about magic feel grand and mysterious; this one begins in a quiet neighborhood bar. In a deeply personal telling, Lyam Christopher opens up about trying kratom at a place called The Hideout and watching a minor habit quietly grow. What starts as a tale of tea and work sessions away from home soon becomes a gentle, honest look at how the mind paints the world when a craving takes hold.
He describes the feeling with striking clarity. A kind of contraction settles in, convincing him that this is just the way things are now, permanent and unchanged, even though he knows the mood will pass. The surprising turn is that this is not a story of shame; it is a lesson from practice. In tantra and ceremonial magic, he says, every experience, even withdrawal, even a grumpy moment in a coffee shop, can become a vehicle for waking up.
The deeper thread belongs to the Great Work itself. The idea of contraction is old in these traditions, and following the daily structure in Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation helps a student notice it when it arrives. By the end, the video is less about a substance and more about a skill: meeting whatever rises, however uncomfortable, and using it to transform.
Full Video Transcript
At our last live Q&A, yes, we do have Q&As, so on my Patreon site for Forbidden Realms, I think it’s once a month now, we’re going to do a live question and answer broadcast.
And the first time around, we didn’t incorporate YouTube, because YouTube had some funky requirements to jump through, and I think it’s all approved now.
So the next Q&A, when we announce it, will also involve YouTube.
It’ll be broadcast on YouTube.
But at our last Q&A, I promised to share a story about personal addiction.
So I just recently went through, you could call it a minor case of addiction,
but these things are not necessarily minor.
Not like, you know, I’m addicted to caffeine, I would have to say,
and that’s not a big deal.
I could probably go for a week without it and then have some headaches and withdrawal and then
be perfectly fine. So here’s how the story goes. I’m now working from home. So that tends to make
you a bit stir crazy, as some of you guys have told me in our live consultations,
because some of you also work at home a lot of the time. So it’s nice to go out and sit in cafes
or various places where you can work just to get out of your regular home environment.
And so I was going to a place nearby where I live called The Hideout.
And it is a kava and kratom bar.
They sell tea and various things, non-alcoholic.
And so I heard about this place, and I thought it was a cool idea to check that out.
I had never tried kava before or kratom.
And so I went there to work. And the moment I walked into the place, I recognized the vibe. And it’s the same vibe that I have seen when I’ve gone to AA meetings, Alcoholics Anonymous, right?
not the Crowley order, but Alcoholics Anonymous, like when you have a friend and they’re getting
their chip and they invite you to come and witness them getting their chip. I’ve been to these
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And what struck me about that crowd is that they have a certain vibe
to them, the addict. And so most of the people in the room had that same vibe to them. And it kind
of goes something like this. They are doing something or just sitting somewhere, but they’re
always shifting, maybe fidgeting a little bit, and looking around as though something over there
is going to make them feel better. Maybe if I go to talk to that person over there, I’ll feel better.
Maybe if I go, oh, what’s she drinking? If I drink one of those, I’ll feel better.
oh what’s he doing over there what’s he got there if i had one of those i would probably feel better
that they’re not saying this but the uh the body language seems to be saying that
and you’ve probably seen this for yourself i think and uh so i sat down in this place
i tend to like uh people who are addicts they tend to be um they tend to be very friendly
probably because they want to approach you to see whether you might make them feel better
and so they tend to be very approachable uh until maybe they realize you’re not really there to make
them feel better and then kind of blow you off right but um so i i i ordered a kratom tea uh
it’s very bitter supposedly and so i got it with some um some monk fruit and um and i don’t really
mind bitter flavors or things like that doesn’t really bother me so i drank the stuff and i began
sitting down with my laptop and I was answering a lot of direct messages on
the patreon site very grateful for you guys and I really appreciate all the
incredible dialogue with the direct messages and in the the group chat as
well if you want to if you guys don’t know about the patreon site it’s called
forbidden realms there’s a link to it below this video if you want to check it
and uh a little probably now you guys are thinking oh when he was chatting with me or messaging me
he was probably high on kratom or something like that and probably a couple times i was because
this stuff is um uh actually makes you uh gives you a buzz i guess something similar to alcohol
maybe between alcohol and marijuana something a little bit between those two and uh it affects
the serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and GABA signaling in your body. It affects your
body very much like an opiate. And as many of you know, we have an opioid crisis right now where
people are addicted to that. So every other day I went to this place and sat down and did my direct
messages with you guys. And I began to notice that I wasn’t getting an effect anymore. And I
really wanted to go back to this place. And so I stopped, I stopped going there. And then
depression set in. So and that was very interesting, too, because the depression
will kind of come over you very much like a spirit will come over you. And so as you guys know,
when you do magical work it makes you hyper aware of all kinds of spirits that um are irritated and
triggered to rise okay so when you do like the lesser banishing ritual the pentagram
it’s going to make you more sensitive uh and it um and it’s also going to the most interesting
thing is that um any of the spirits that want to take you over from inside the magic circle will
get stronger if you’re not ready for them okay and so and one of the major um effects of the
lesser banishing ritual the pentagram is that it causes ego inflation now the ego is essentially
a spirit it’s another one of those spirits that comes and goes it’s one of the big ahas we get
you know when we do magic and we when we’re working with various entities and suddenly
Somewhere along the way, we realize that we are one of these entities too. Not only are we working with dream entities out there who seem to be behind the mechanics of the physical universe, but also that our persona and our ego complex are also spirits, just like the forces that we are working with.
Okay. There’s something very important about that too. On the level of the microcosm,
the personal ego is essentially the same as the demiurge in Gnostic mythology. Okay. So basically
in Gnostic mythology, there’s the God of the universe, and then there’s the false God,
which arises and tries to pass himself off as the actual God of the universe, right? It’s called the
demiurge. And if you’re aware, if you’re familiar with Gnostic mythology, this false god that tries
to pass himself off as the actual god, many people interpret him as the god of the Old Testament,
the one who gets really angry and blows things up and buries entire armies under the Red Sea
and things like that, right? Basically, like a tyrant-like figure that abuses his power, okay?
So, on the level of the microcosm, which is basically your auric field, your manifestation
of yourself, on the level of the microcosm, the entity that corresponds to the demiurge
is the ego, the personal ego, the false self. It’s the face that you put on to confront people
out in the world, let’s say, or just the world itself. But more importantly, it’s the compulsive
face you put on. So if it’s ego, you can’t help it. It’s just there. And it’s trying to control
everything. It’s very clingy. It’s very survival oriented. And it kind of tends to ruin everything
because it’s compulsive and unconscious. It’s not aware of what it’s doing. All right. So
when you go into withdrawal from certain substances, it’ll automatically induce a stress
response quite naturally because the stress response is very simple. Something’s not right.
I need to do something to feel better. That’s the stress response right there.
and the stress response is interesting because we tend to want to portray it as merely a physical
thing it’s something with the hormones it’s something with the muscle contraction
there’s a lot of new age stuff where people try to get you to relax in your muscles or in your
fascia or whatever that you know what’s going on physically right um where eventually as you do
magic, you realize that it’s actually the auric field or the subtle body, the energetic field
that is contracted. So there’s this energy field that bunches up, shrinks up. Let’s say you have
this nice sheet of silk spread out, right? But then the silk scrunches up in the middle into a
big, it poofs up in the middle like this into a big tangle or whatever like that, right?
so this is the um that’s what the ego looks like on the astral plane let’s say it looks like a
scrunched area so and if somebody stresses you out um that kind of contraction um it doesn’t
really happen in the body first it happens on the in the subtle body first on the level of the mind
and imagination that the seamless shimmering fabric of imagination will scrunch up and it
scrunches up into a sense of self in relation to something else over here that it perceives as also
bunching up and confronting it okay so this contraction uh we we sort of contract into a
sense of self and this is an this is this is actually an illusion it’s not real it’s a manufactured
um sort of cul-de-sac of of the astral light that is now contracted into itself so that it
can regard something over there as a threat. Okay. Either as a threat or something that’s desirable
either way. Okay. It’s always a dualistic scenario. Something’s threatening me or
something’s making me feel inadequate because I need it so badly. Okay. So with, um, with the
addiction, uh, obviously it’s the, I need it so badly and then you want to go back and get some
more. Okay. Um, sugar will produce the same effect actually almost immediately. Sugar is very,
very addictive. You won’t know that until you get off of sugar for about three days, and then you’ll
see it, how astonishingly addictive sugar is. And we were designed that way. And so if you go
without sugar for a while, it triggers a stress response. It makes you irritable, and it makes
that ego crunch up. And then it’s ready to look at things that are a threat to it out there.
Okay, that stress response is kicking in. And so I was noticing this happening. And I’m no stranger to these things anymore. But what I was noticing is that it was so powerful that I couldn’t see past it. So the scrunching up happens in the in the ego. And so you get your sense of self gets harder, firmer, and the sense of the world out there, as uncomfortable gets stronger and firmer.
it’s almost like this scrunching up of ego now begins to project unsatisfactory qualities into
its environment because it has evolved to function that way. That’s kind of what’s
driving our entire species. We have evolved into ego creatures and suffering has become our primary
way of being successful as a species. So this sense of inadequacy and threat that we feel when
the stress response kicks in, and then the ego scrunches up and starts regarding everything from
its little tiny little universe of safety, that is the stress response right there. And that when
it when it’s compulsive, when you when you’re like this all the time, defensive or desirous all the
time. You’re in a constant state of inadequacy, and you’re constantly being driven to fix things
out in the world so that you will feel better. This is what started happening with me. I would
look out the window here, and I would notice that, oh, they’re fixing up the neighborhood,
but it looks so soulless now. It looks so generic. At least before, when it was a mess,
it had character. Maybe I should move somewhere else. So I started to feel not okay wherever I
was. And I was sitting in a Starbucks and somebody came out to sweep the floor. And I was like, oh,
she must really not like her job that she has to come out here and sweep and clean up after us
like this. I just had to do I had to do 180 on myself because actual work with the hands has
always been fascinating to me. Like, in other words, I’ve always really appreciated it and
liked it. And yet somehow I was seeing that as something negative and not, I didn’t want to be
around it. And very strange how these things come over you. And the impression is when this
contraction happens, it’ll kind of convince you that this is the way it is now. This is the way
the world actually is. And it’s not going to change. It’s the way it’s always been this way.
And this is the way it comes over you. And you think it’s permanent. It makes you think that
this is the way things are now and that was happening to me as well it was like this is just
the way it is like what’s happening to me i don’t don’t feel good anymore and but at least i was
aware enough because i i’m aware of how these things they kind of come up and then they paint
the world in a particular way and then they pass it’s kind of like having a bowel movement actually
um or like when also when you fall in love and then the love is not returned
to you right and so you uh the the tremendous pain that you feel and the it’s similar to being
addicted because then you look everywhere you look then nothing’s good enough everything’s
inadequate everything is not right because this other person’s not there with you to share it
with you okay it’s really very much the same feeling except with with an addiction to a
substance like that it’s not uh you don’t need the other person necessarily right um so you just
need the substance. Okay. So yeah, the entity that takes over is essentially just the ego being
triggered into full-blown contraction. And it paints the world in a negative light, as threatening
and as not good enough. And this is what in Buddhism is called dukkha, which is basically
unsatisfactoriness. And the funny thing is humans have evolved into this thing. We’re kind of in
this state all the time. And what I was noticing is that the addiction withdrawal was simply
intensifying it. I’ve always suspected this was true because what I noticed with addicts is that
they have what everybody else has. They just have it worse. So it’s actually, if you have addiction
or you have the addictive type personality, that can be an advantage because you feel more acutely
what the rest of us maybe are feeling. And that gives you a chance to confront it big time
because it’s stronger for you okay and uh and if you’re doing the banishing work that’s also going
to intensify your awareness of these spirits that can rise up in the environment and threaten you
and make you feel inadequate and of course the spirit that arises as you which is like cringing
or chasing after things and strung out um feels inadequate because it doesn’t have that over there
these uh this dichotomy of spirits you have to deal with all the time this is what eventually
you become aware of as you do the magical work. And eventually, all these spirits settle down for
you and become familiar spirits. The funny thing is, in one of the definitions of enlightenment,
at least among the tantric practitioners, to become enlightened means to become familiar.
mainly it means to become familiar with um the opened state of consciousness where that that
contraction is largely evened out again not completely okay um but um and you become
familiar with what that’s like not to be taken over by ego all the time and that’s that’s supposedly
what enlightenment is okay and i find that it’s interesting because if you become familiar with
all of these triggering entities that rise up in imagination which aren’t really there okay but of
these entities are there they’re very they’re very much alive in imagination they exist on the
astral plane um if you want to bring science into it there’s a scientific theory about the morphogenetic
field and i suspect this is quite a real thing because any of you who have been working with
let’s say the chakras or with energy medicine or if you’re doing the golden dawn curriculum
on the patreon site with the kabbalah magic book you become familiar with this idea of contraction
is not just being in the muscles of the body or the fascia or whatever that is that the doctors
will say, oh, you need a muscle relaxant, right? That doesn’t help necessarily because the subtle
body is still contracted. And so basically the muscle relaxant keeps that subtle body contraction
from trickling down into the physical body and also turning into a contraction there.
Okay. And the morphogenetic field supposedly controls how organisms move,
behave develop think everything uh the habits that are embedded in nature are embedded in the
morphogenetic field supposedly okay but we could just call this the astral light occultists have
known this all along and so it’s interesting because when uh when you are addicted to a
substance like that and go through the withdrawal the contraction that happens
probably happens in the astral body first and then you can feel it you know your muscles tightening
up and people have a certain body language when ego is activated okay and the ego is not always
on by the way but for most of us it pretty much is the moment we wake up and it kind of like
hangs on all day and gets really tired and then oh thank god i can go to sleep now right
whereas um uh it doesn’t necessarily stay on all the time and let’s talk about that for a bit
because the ego when it’s compulsive it maintains itself unconsciously it can’t seem to turn itself
off it just has to be there all the time because it’s we need to be safe we need to protect
ourselves we need to survive if i let go everything’s going to go to hell everything’s
gonna fall apart right and uh eventually what we learn as we pursue enlightenment is that well
if i relax nothing’s gonna fall apart everything’s gonna be just fine and um the ego i think can it
gets confused because it thinks that um it kind of associates itself letting go with the physical
death of the body okay and there’s a lot to go into there it’s basically because basically because
deeply embedded memories in cell memory from evolutionary trauma are memories of death,
people dying, right? Or calamity or things like that. And so there’s the idea of just letting go
and disappearing and just letting the body be there without any supervision, right? That gets
confused with actually dying. And so eventually the ego just gets stuck, okay? And supposedly
when we get enlightened, the ego dies, it goes away completely, gone. And if we achieve complete
enlightenment, it will not reformulate. There’s a great passage, there’s a great line from the movie
Little Buddha, where the Buddha says, architect, finally, I have met you, you will not rebuild
your house again. In other words, he sees the ego complex as it is, and it keeps rebuilding itself.
and finally he says but it’s not necessary for it to be compulsive like that it doesn’t have to
compulsively hold on all the time and eventually and so for him it just dies completely it does
not come back there are supposedly many people among us who live in this state all the time
who have no ego now you’ll still notice them reacting to things and you’ll still notice them
getting stressed out with the acute stress response but there’s a difference now because
when they contract, it’s not as much. And it’s a healthy contraction. And this is what we just
basically then would call the persona. Okay, so the ego is the persona that is compulsively holding
on. Whereas a persona that is not compulsive is just called the persona. It’s not called ego
anymore. Okay, so not that ego actually exists. It’s just a word we use for that compulsive holding
on that um you don’t seem to be able to control just it has you right and you can’t seem to let
it go because it’s it’s uh compulsive and unconscious and um so when we are enlightened
supposedly right when we finally let go um we still tend to the astral body still tends to
pucker up and form an identity so that we can um pretend to be a person and talk to somebody else
who seems to be a person. And this entity that puckers up like that and still interacts with
the world is called the persona. And so I find this interesting because the persona could be
regarded as a sort of executive function that arises only as it is needed. So in somebody who
has finally let go, who’s sort of like a full-blown adept magician, whatever, the persona is pretty
much just kind of barely there. That’s mostly relaxed. And if something needs to be done or
there’s a dangerous situation, it will form, but the adept will be completely aware of it and say,
okay, yes, I need to become this type of person to get this job done. Let’s do it. And they will
pretend to become the teacher or the counselor or the karate master or whatever it is they’ve
learned how to do. They will adopt that role effectively and probably more effectively than
any ego-haunted person would do. And then when the situation is over, that entity, that persona
spreads out and relaxes again. And of course, it’s ready to come out again if something were
to happen. And that’s kind of how we learn to live as we pursue the work. The way you can see
that then is sort of like Excalibur. And the legend of Excalibur is that the Excalibur only
appears when there is a king needed to do something very important and after the job is
done Excalibur goes back into the water again and recedes down into the water disappears right
and the same the same is true of King Arthur too the legend is that um one day uh he’s he’s he’s
died he’s diminished disappeared but he will return somehow out of the ocean or from the
this mysterious mist and shrouded island uh in the west let’s say right um he’ll come out of there
again or he’ll he’ll or he’ll reincarnate again when he is needed and the sword the sword will
rise again so you can see this sort of um this this uh puckering up of the of the um of the psyche
at forming an identity that gets things done as needed and then when it’s not needed anymore it
relaxes and disappears back into the ocean or back into the collective unconscious or back into your
aura right uh and so this sort of shake and bake between back and forth between um contracted and
doing something and then completely relaxed and not doing anything is the way that a completely
the awakened person, lives. They don’t compulsively stay puckered up all the time
in the astral body, okay? This is not in the muscles, all right, necessarily. But when the
astral body does it, of course, the muscles and the fascia and all these things follow suit,
and you can see it in the body when somebody is compulsively contracted all the time.
They’re difficult to be around if they’re compulsively afraid all the time or compulsively
inadequate all the time it’s difficult to to be around them and when somebody is uh has let go of
that they tend to be pretty nice to be around and a little scary too because nothing seems to bother
them and they’re unpredictable so at least somebody who is habitually contracted all the
time is predictable they’re always afraid of something or they’re always in need of something
you can always count on that right if they’re habitually contracted so the interesting thing
about the magician persona, for those of us who are learning Golden Dawn magic and we want to
become full-blown adepts and magicians, the magician persona is that persona that comes out
as the executive function, who rises up from consciousness and sort of puckers up and then
looks around and then pokes a few things and rearranges a few things, sort of like a gardener
will do the gardener enters the garden fixes a few things and then the gardener goes away again
and the guard and the garden just does its thing okay so the magician is very much like that it’s
not something you are all the time i’m always doing magic i’m always thinking of my next astral
projection trip or i’m always constantly trying to be mindful you know no this is something you
just um you occasionally come out and you tweak like you do ritual once a day like you got many
of you guys are doing now that’s when the gardener shows up to just tweak a few things fertilize the
plants water the plants you know make sure everything in the garden is functioning properly
and then the gardener goes away again and the garden just does its thing okay this is analogous
to you basically doing a little bit of psychic surgery psychic surgery every day you go into the
psyche move the furniture around a little bit make sure the psyche is functioning well that
is comfortable, that is manifesting your life in a reasonable fashion. And then you disappear,
go back out again, and you go about your day. And the psyche functions maybe a little better
because you did a little bit of tweaking on it. And this idea of the magician only appearing
sometimes is very much like the idea of the king only appearing when he’s needed, or Excalibur
rising from the water only when he’s needed and then he recedes back into nothing into pure
potentiality when he’s not needed okay the funny thing is that the so any of you who find yourself
addicted to a substance the the withdrawal and the need and the sense of inadequacy and that
feeling of looking out in the world and nothing’s good enough where i’m sitting isn’t good maybe if
I sit over there, I’ll feel better. Maybe if I talk to that person, I’ll feel better. I just need,
need, need. I don’t know what it is I need exactly. I just need something. Maybe that will make me
feel better. If I get away from this person, I’ll feel better. You know, that kind of
unsatisfactoriness is unnecessary. And yet the entire human race has fallen into it.
And the experience of addiction and withdrawal intensifies it. This is an advantage.
So if you ever find yourself addicted and in withdrawal, you will have a chance to really
notice how the ego works. You just have to keep your wits about you. When it tries to paint the
world as it’s just this way now, you know better because these things come and they get tight and
then they relax again and they go. They come and go. It’s kind of like getting the flu. When you
have the flu, everything looks terrible and you feel like this is going to be forever. This is
the way the world is now everything’s so gloomy everything’s so low energy right and that’s and
then of course you get better and it’s like wow i just felt so bad like um and i think the kratom
was very interesting too because it affects mainly the endorphins and maybe gaba so i hadn’t
experienced um the ego depression quite that intensely and the nice thing is i was uh i was
ready for it in other words when it started to happen i was like oh something’s coming over me
what is this thing and it was pretty bad because i couldn’t really see past it all i could do was
i knew what it was up to and then it took maybe four or five days of day two i started already
feeling better but four or five days uh before the craving went away and before the negative
qualities in the environment went away those imagined negative qualities like yeah so that
the, the sensation that the grass is always greener elsewhere went away again. And I, and
suddenly I was okay where I was again. Thank God. So I just want to point that out to you. So if
you guys are, if you guys suffer from addiction, it could be seen as an opportunity. Okay. I
definitely do not recommend going out and getting addicted to something, obviously. Uh, but, um,
it, it’s bound to happen with something. Shoot. Um, I think I’m, I’m also addicted to lip balms
right now. So I’m going to have to deal with that one as well. And that’s going to trigger
stress response, which is the same way again. Obviously, nothing like Kratom though.
All right. So I hope this was helpful to you guys. It’s one of those examples of how in Tantra or in
ceremonial magic, every experience that you have can be utilized as a vehicle towards enlightenment,
no matter what is happening if you know what you’re doing you develop that skill over time
you can use anything as a vehicle towards your personal self-transformation all right so if you
guys are interested in connecting with me and the rest of a bunch of people who are into this stuff
on patreon down below this video there is a link so you can check it out there are a number of
free articles there. And, uh, so I hope to see you guys there, uh, possibly maybe you could become
a member. Um, there’s free membership and then there’s a $5 a month membership. Okay. And of
course I’m also available for consultations. Um, so if any of you guys are doing ceremonial magic
and you do want guidance as you self initiate, um, and you like this stuff, um, possibly I can
be of assistance too. All right. So until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher