HS!

I have always been very driven to constantly better myself. I’m so driven to be in a constant state of change that I’m a big fan of the “super-effort.” I’ve been criticized many times for lacking the ability to balance my life rather than picking an aspect of my life and myself to work on and diving into one “surge of progress” as VS puts it after another. I’ve gotten better about that in recent years, but this so-called improvement feels unnatural to me and leaves me missing the days when my life was simple enough to allow me the freedom of singular focus. I have a job, a 5 month old son, at 30 yrs-old I’m still trying to finish a college degree, and I have my various social and spiritual pursuits. I generally enjoy my life as it is now, but in the back of my mind I struggle constantly with feeling deeply uncomfortable with my juggling act. Along with this new skill at balancing the aspects of my life instead of my old habit of focusing on one aspect at a time, came this feeling like I wasn’t trying hard enough at anything. The longer I maintain this new skill of balancing how I attend to the various aspects of my life, the greater my stress and anger becomes. Always the stress and anger came from a world that told me I needed to multitask, learn time management, and balance my life. Now it comes from feeling like I can’t excel at anything because I’m too busy. What reading this essay from VS made me realize is that sometime in my childhood I came to believe that unless I was making a “super-effort” at something, I wasn’t doing my best. At some point I became convinced that only a “super-effort” was good enough. By that logic nothing I do anymore is good enough, thus my stress.

Thank you VS for the much needed slap in the face that I needed to understand my current internal conflict. This essay also gave me a new perspective for viewing self-worth. One thing I learned from my father is that the worth of a counselor is measured by how well he/she helps others. Dad raised me to follow in his footsteps of counseling the mentally ill. Since elementary school I’ve been the person others turn to for guidance, and I measured myself by how I helped others. I always put others first and myself dead last. At some of the darker moments of my life I loved only others and not myself. Eventually that extreme lead me to realize that the love I gave to others was not reciprocated because by never putting myself first I was projecting to others that I was not worth being helped. In recent years I have learned that self-preservation is as important to achieving all-accepting love and bliss as is selfless giving. I would love to see you delve deeply into that topic, which you so lightly touched on in this essay.

Zikr

I was encouraged by numerous religious and mystics to think this world was unreal, and based on their interpretation, to be alienated from myself and human experience. Perhaps this was their transformative revelation running counter to the ordinary animal intelligence. Perhaps it was intended to get me off-balanced and submitting to their enslavement-schemes.

Wrestling with these mental gymnastics purported as glimpses into the Real, my attention was held captive and distracted from actual value, personal development, construction of science, and discovery of wisdom. Whether alleging the futility of autonomous pioneering or the expansion of the free will, the whole of that described was strewn with fallacies and delusions.

In the wake of meditation I realized that the bulk of my life and that of others was entirely opaqued, suffused in a gloomy gel of insensitivity, resistance to full embrace (too painful!), and save for a few insights, often separated by time from these intensified moments of present-centered focus, was mere shadows dancing upon a cave wall.

Demonizing Emotions

Emotions are the life-blood of awareness and key to waking up. Demonized by mystics and ascetic advocates, either their buttressing aspects are castigated as evil, or their nurturing counterparts are displaced to ever-receding glories.

In the wake of meditation as I learned it from my God and Abyss, these natural facets of human experienced assumed a proper proportion and significance. Neither my conditioning away from their protective alarm (what some would later describe as ‘negative’) nor my conditioning to idolize and enshrine what understandably attracted me (what some would later call ‘life’s aims and ultimate purpose’) became unfamiliar to me in my new found embrace of all that was natural about my person and the lessons learned from them and their place in my consciousness.

All esoteric knowledge comes to us from ourselves, ultimately. Imagining space aliens or star deities to influence and inform us can have important revelatory effects in the short-term, but ultimately it is but a prop before the beautiful animals that we are. The gods didn’t invent awakening, humans did.

Humble Surprises

The practice of humility in the face of taking the Oath of the Abyss is essential to capitalizing on the reservoirs of potential unlocked during focussed single-pointedness. It is this loosening from the bonds of certitude which allow a shock or leap beyond our ordinary ken through to new levels of understanding and awareness.

What direction lays progress is hardly visible to the bulk of us unused to the intuitive evaluation of energies and postures any individual may present. The Master encompasses the student teacher in a watchful state to clues disclosing opportunities for breaks and open ground.

Always the intention to restraint, even while driving full-force into the Work of the moment, and the tack low upon the rank of the Instructor, make possible the seizing upon an aperture of entry, that quick-slide-through only those with insight might point out before it slips away forever. Recognizing the catalyzing potential of every source-point, therefore, enhances one’s possible success.

Shocking Transformation

The Work does not consolidate and reify inherent conceptual structures as if walking calmly up a well-worn path to the peak of Mount Analogue, or piecing together a block castle of the Interior from a readymade kit.

Instead, apparently unrelated portions of consciousness are challenged and built up, strength is expended to exhaustion, and one is apparently subjected to a repeated ordeal of endurance, craftily and subtlely complemented with encouragement and careful hinting that only a Master can provide.

The Door Prize, understanding, is an ever-shifting panorama of vantage views and hindsight harbours, which, ensconced with authority or requirement, can only fail to yield value in the long of term. So often particular to the Woman, so commonly difficult to transpose to other situations and conditions, the ideal of thinking in new ways, while admirable, tend merely to forestall the chance construction of the Next New Panacea Prison.

This is why in part it is valuable to discern contemporary and restricted projects and movements (e.g. Satanism) and discern these from particular mystical trajectories (the Fourth Way). Recognizing their similarities (e.g. some of their transgressive or LHP, and self-empowerment valences) is important, and it is also valuable to identify ego-reifying and ego-erosive disciplines. They do not necessarily mix well.

One of the problems of describing or evaluating LHP approaches is that, through repetition and proliferation, across numerous aspirants, they cease to have their LHP charge. Wearing a rut into consciousness, they require their own self-ejection to maintain on a course of progress. At these times, if some intuitive insight doesn’t drive one out of that comfort or safety zone and into a shocking transition, only the Master can help.

In this sense, conscious transformation has to be triggered or ’shocked’ into the new configuration by stimuli from *outside* the realm of the known. We may mythologize this as the agency of an extra-terrestrial or extra-dimensional race, or refer to superordinary and mystical True Wills from which they draw their salvific or catalytic power, but this does nothing to help us understand them any more clearly.

Troll Towelhead,
Grand Mufti of Satanism and Keeper of the Green Flame
http://www.satanservice.org/wiki/Troll_Towelhead

peace

I came out to her almost a year ago and have been lightly educating her on the subject since she is reluctant to learn about it herself. Its been difficult, but I have hope she will accept me eventually. If not I will just accept the inevitable. We haven’t had the best relationship to begin with, and we don’t talk often and what she thinks about me hasn’t had much of an impact anyway, since she hates my beliefs, my music, and thinks it is wrong of me to be my true self. It has taken quite a few years to finally accept it myself, and had to find myself, and Im still always learning.

I have had to deal with GID (Gender Identity Disorder) since I was a child, and have always struggled with it, denied it for many years, and finally accepted it at the end of 2010, and all of last year I have been taking the necessary steps to correct my gender, this is just part of my life, and not everyone will experience this, but we all have identity issues in one form or another. Through study and practice of many types of sciences, and the occult sciences I have found who I am, and have been able to accept it. Before it was something I could barely admit to myself, something I would shut out, but spiritual works have led me to my true self, and I am learning more about that all the time. Been practicing magick since 13, and it has helped me discover who I really am. I’m 24 now and still a student. Maybe capable of teaching in some ways, but I can’t ever forget I am always a student.

Thanks for this very uplifting article, Venger.

- Jenny