Magic 401: The Road of Excess

As always, trying to magic without backup is a great way to get hurt. You need a teacher.

I used to really hate the fact that no matter how well things were going for me, I always felt like the enjoyment or pleasure wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite enough. It was as if I was supposed to be fulfilled or distracted by the enjoyment or pleasure, but there was a strange hollowness in it. The emotions of enjoyment or pleasure did not quite distract, could not quite captivate my attention fully. I knew, somehow, that while those emotions were fantastic and fun, they could not stay nor could they ‘rule’ me. I would enjoy them, but they would pass through.

Before I started on this path, I assumed it was some sort of medical or psychological malfunction. Unfortunately, no matter what combination of therapy or medication I was on, it never quite fixed the problem. I have enough self-preservation and self-control to avoid the worst of the behaviors which could have happened, the addiction or destructive sexual behaviors, but it nagged at me. At the time, that feeling of things being not quite enough only happened when things were going well.

Earlier in my spiritual journey, I assumed it was some sort of spiritual imbalance, and did a ton of spiritual work in healing to deal with entanglements and depression. This had the effect of helping me realize that sadness was also not quite enough, not a comfortable state, not a captivating state. There was a strange hollowness in it, too, the knowledge that it would also pass on, pass through, and could not captivate.

I could feel the emotions, but they seemed to be strangely less entangling than they ‘should’ have been.

My godfather used to take us out to drink. It was one part socialization—snacks, beers, and conversation—and one part something else. Some of it was, no doubt, helping us get over the social rules against making noise or being emotive that so many people get here in the US. That false emotional reserve can lead people to avoid all sorts of opportunities for learning and the healing associated with having to face your own emotions and behaviors. Getting intoxicated often bought people’s shit to the surface, airing it to the group and making them accountable for what they would otherwise pretend was not a problem for them.

That experience was something else, too.

There is a William Blake quote which comes to mind here: “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” It is precisely in excess, if you have the capacity to see it, that you will find the means of being able to escape the traps in excess. It’s not doing so much you’re tired of it, though that may happen early in the process. It is by sitting with the emptiness in the emotion, the inability of the emotion or experience to stay and to command all your attention, that you realize that nothing stays. All experiences and emotions pass through, and the pursuit of those experiences and emotions—trying to make them stay—is a part of the trap. To experience them as passing through allows you to appreciate them. You no longer demand of pleasure or enjoyment (or pain and suffering) that it be permanent, something it cannot be.

The experience and emotion can only be the experience or emotion.

When we pursue those emotions and experiences to prolong them, to make them stay, it is because there is an imbalance inside us that needs tending, something unhealed which those emotions and experiences cannot fill or fix. To pursue them because of that imbalance is the soul of addiction, and the cause of the excesses which allow various spiritual entities to be parasitic on the magician. It is the excess, but more precisely the need for excess that stems from imbalance, that will make a magician a slave to spiritual entities.

That excess starts, many times, with the conviction that you need, you deserve, you are owed something, typically pleasure or enjoyment. That conviction is justified by compensating for something, typically pain of some description: “I’ve been so stressed, I just need a little something.” “The universe owes me after my childhood.” “I just want to feel good after all this pain.” “I’m a good person, the world owes me something nice.”

One excess becomes another easily, with this mindset.

The point of a teacher is to help you find that empty space in excess that you must sit with as a magician, to tell you when you are snared, to help you find healing, and finally to find the balance necessary to engage in spiritual spaces without becoming enslaved by something which seeks to foster dependence and the desperate desire for something to stay, stagnant, instead of passing through. It is also a teacher’s job to help you see the difference between ennui and that emptiness. It is not ennui.

You can reliably tell what influences a magician by their degree of stagnation.