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The Shadow Self: Revisited

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Underpinnings      To impose any psychological jargon on top of what follows will destroy your understanding thereof. The point of this writing is to illustrate how magick effects the mind, not in terms psychological abstractions, but in the actual experience, thought, and emotions of a real person. Let me share an anecdote with you.      At on point in my life, I had a friend named Fred. He was of the most delusional type imaginable: he  constantly complained about having wild hallucinations of psychic networks of light zooming around people's heads, flying penises, and many other phantasms. He thought that there was an elaborate conspiracy to trap him in "psychic prison," and that people were poisoning him. I kept an open mind and empathetic heart and talked to him patiently about his complaints. Eventually, I earned his trust and we were able to share our life's history with one another. One time, he looked me in the eye and said, with all sincerity, "I k
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The Shadow Self

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Underpinnings        Quite often do I either hear or read about ceremonial magick as a form of psychotherapy. In my experience, the distinction between the subtle realms and the psych e— and by extension the sacred and the profane — are not so clear-cut. In my process of ontogenesis, I have come to understand that the subtle reams and the psyche play reciprocal roles with one another. My relationship with the spirit Ga'ap resonates within my psyche, yet the spirits are pockets in the Aether where our thoughts may collect. It would be too simple to merely state "our experiences with them are psychological," or "from the subtle reams arises thought forms within the psyche." The spirits, the gods, angels, and elementals are conglomerations of archetypes, socio-political strife and triumph, and heroic figures from all ages. We are inspired by them, yet they are continually added to in complexity as a function of temporality and stochastic progress in culture.
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