Waking Up

Waking Up

Eriol Caw

In part, disentangling yourself from mûl-ôl entails “waking up.” Admittedly, the point I am getting at is very much the call to “wake up!” but also to stay awake. For me, I find myself having to devote time to “recovering” myself after work or after engaging in some obsessing task like typing, editing, number-crunching, etc. Or after feeling the overwhelming force of—I’m tempted to call it “the world” but the reality is it’s the culture that wants me to be quiet, to cry in the dark and not bother anyone else, to suck it up, to look away, to feel hopeless and powerless, to distract myself with for-profit addictions, to just lie down and take it, to not imagine myself as anything other than what those in power want me to be. A good worker who accepts the system and moves on. And I find myself spending so much time, it often seems, in ritual recovering myself, reminding myself of what and who I can be, can experience, can live and act as.

Of course, everyone does or tries at some point to recover ourselves from this force, this nightmare of life in this world–no, culture. You get home, and you have a beer, take off your work shoes, sit back, and try to relax and feel “sane” or “normal” again. In a sense, we work to reclaim ourselves from the trance of work, the dream of work. The dream of living in this culture. To do so, we may also seek to trade out that dream with others. We will watch TV or movies or look at our phones or computer monitors, and we will immerse ourselves in other dreams. In all of these dreams, we are not ourselves but some other ego suited to those dreams. In this sense, we adopt another ego that can become hurur, as an expression of the psychic censor and halthaya. At the same time, our experience within these “dreams” constitutes another aspect of halthaya and the censor. It is that dream wherein you are never really living or in charge of or shaping your life. Art can inspire you in your life, and that can include Star Wars or The Clash or comic books or Shakespeare, but “mere entertainment,” to borrow from Adorno, will lull you into other people’s trances until you have to go to work again.

Mûl-ôl is the dream where you cannot have any power or control in your life, in what you desire and will and want to do, what want to enact. My focus here is the magical side of things, and that lack of control should be obvious in its effect it can have on magic. However, I have come to see that the point of “magic” is to get at living and experiencing life as I want it while appreciating the consequences of my choices—the effect my choices and desires have on the world and other people. In these senses, re-enchantment is not just trance states, projection, practical magic, etc., but also living.

Neurological metaprogramming - or recognizing the answer to the question, "who is the Master who makes the grass green" applied here as "waking up."  This is totally my thing.