Magic 601: A Banquet for Baron
If you believe you are mostly physical, you will cling to the shape of yourself and the current state of your consciousness.
If you know yourself to be mostly spirit, you’re a lot more flexible.
The ego and the mind are a kind of parasitic infection of the soul that you’ll spend lifetimes trying to get rid of. This is a repeated motif in a variety of spiritual practices, the idea that our attachment to ego and mind is not a healthy state of being nor a state of being that leads (purposefully) to growth. You will still grow, but it will be in spite of yourself. The attachment is born new with every incarnation, while the soul retains the characteristics necessary for the attachment—while the person has still not learned to dissolve those characteristics—the ego and mind are free to attach themselves to that soul.
They do, drawing the soul into delusion.
It takes some time (and lives) to reach the point where you understand yourself to be spirit and your body to be a part of that spirit, not the most important part of your spirit. But once you have reached that point, the pace of lessons can change, and you can start to separate your consciousness from ego and mind. A fair amount of the resistance to lessons comes from clinging to the current shape of the consciousness because you are clinging to the current state of the body, which is because you believe you are a body.
That belief and the habit of clinging to the body and current state of consciousness can be trained out of you more quickly, but the process is brutal.
One of the functions of the black division/guede is what I’ve referred to elsewhere as recycling. They govern the various cycles involved in separating the parts of the soul after death: separating the body to rot, the parts of the soul which return to the ancestors, the part of the soul which holds the body together, severing the relationship between the person and their court, etc. Some of these processes are typically done by priests with their help as a part of the death processes for initiates.
Baron can also choose to weaken or remove that connection in the living, “eating” the residual connections which allow the mind and ego to attach themselves—an initiate who understands themselves, via experience, to be primarily spirit has the necessary flexibility to allow this to happen. The person becomes a feast for Baron. They are consumed until only they are left.
As with the training that teaches you that you are spirit, not just a body, the process is brutal.
