Interesting and punishing progress

I've been staring into the black stone and invoking HGA every day for a while now.  The heart symptoms have abated, but new physical ones keep cropping up.  For now, my life is being directed, and I'm twisting like a leaf in the wind.

At the beginning of this working 'I' or 'i' or 'it' decided I'd do two books this year and after a series of interesting visions in the stone I set to work on the second about 2.5 months ago by my reckoning (which isn't too reliable these days).  The art stands complete and now the writing of the thing, the culling together of fragments I wrote down in situ into some meaningful coherence, or rather something that may have meaning to someone other than me.

The words still burn when I look at them and hopefully my rewrites don't water it down too much.

I'm writing each page by hand, which is terrifying, but its nice to see my lettering finally getting better, even if the entirety is in the same style.

I decided it would be best to separate myself from this work, so I've wrapped it in fiction and set it in this world that I keep seeing.

I'm about 1/3 through  writing it, and I think it might be ready to prep for print in a couple of weeks.

HGA 2015

Jan:

     A palpable falling sensation, a little thrilling.  Like a warning?  Or a truth?  What do you call that?

Some sensation of a lost connection, like something that watched over me doesn't anymore.

Probably all of last year?

    I started the working again in January.  The usual way.  Mantra and stillness, nothing external

seems to work, and I tend to want my eyes closed.  Knees have yet to act up from the lotus, I sit until

my feet fall asleep.  Trying seems important, so I try really hard.

    Previous experience granted me the sound of a name and an image to work with.  I should draw a

new one but as of this writing the newest I still have I drew in 2004 (?) I think, which ages the last

time I did a working of this nature.  I cut 12 pieces of illo this week, so maybe I'll do that many

drawings.

    For the last week, serious changes.  I find the operation of my lookout vastly simpler and easier.

However, still developing the new ritual, HGA gets out different every time I do it.  Comes out

and takes a lot of repetition to complete itself.  It likes to complete itself, not for me to complete it.

Still quite nascent and new.

    2 days ago, I experienced a new sensation of arrhythmia.  Last it occurred was Christmas day and

 none before that.  Strange signpost, anxety inducing.  Mind immediately leaps to the natural habitat

of the work I do in the world.  How long can I do that job and live?  Did I miss

some horrible accident that might have been?  With no way of knowing the answer to either of these

questions with any certainty until they.  If I worked hard enough I could probably develop visions

that could 'prove' any number of things.

    I woke up from what I think was a deep sleep with an intensely anxious feeling.  My heart beat

felt rapid and way higher up than usual, not as high as my throat.  The edges of the world became a

tunnel that got smaller and smaller.  I made no accurate measure but what felt like a very long

minute passed like this and then my heart returned to normal and the world stopped seeming to close

in but I felt very heavy.

   I wanted to get up and have a look at myself in the mirror, but I had to wait.  I looked okay, not

sweaty, no sudden dark bags, no noticeable dizziness.  I went back to bed.  It happened 3 more times

that night, the final time around 2:47 am.

   I had chest pain in the morning that persists to now.  Got over a coughing something last week

though, also work with my hands.

    Doctor says probably just benign arrhythmia.  I agree for now.  I can find things that will increase

chances for survival.  If something causes more arrhythmia I can consider it harmful if I choose,

and then white it out or replace it with something else that I attach to my survival.  If I decide to live

than anything that I connect to that basal level becomes compulsory and part of this constant ritual

I'm still working up to.

    I tend to have a high capacity for inertia, but all I've ever decided to do is live.

   

birth

Birth. A powerful threshold experience resulting in a deep and profound impression.  Seems even deeper considering the relative dearth of other impressions at that moment.

That first scream, the result of millions of completely alien signals shredding the nervous system to pieces and then rapidly reassembling it.

How much do we 'know' prior to birth?

Have we already cut pain or pleasure or some other deep canal into our brains by then?  It's hard to imagine any other first binary.  Perhaps our birth itself creates the binary and in that moment the first hard chiselling is made.

Run towards this, run away from that, stay in the middle.

Doomed to walk in that first deep wound forever, any way.

Can an impression this deep ever truly wear off or wear out or grow out?

What happens when this impression does wear off or wear out or grow out or when we manage to transcend it?

Stone

Ghoraji, in a nutshell

The Magician's daughter.

Man falls in love with black magician's daughter.  

Man then finds himself in the body of a jackal, "eating only the dead for all of his days".  The same mind in a different prison.

Continues to practice.

SangaSpandana 1

Karma-yoga.

This term tends to limit itself to a specific set of experiences (experience converts to free awareness in direct proportion relative to the Temperature of the operator).  The common placement of the term "Karma-Yoga" within the form of this era's popular methods of Yoga-As-Philosophy or Yoga-As-Occult-Science indicates either service (often people live in a purifying place and do free service involved in the upkeep or promotion of the place and/or guru-leadership ) or "works" (in the sense of good deeds performed in the expectation of some salvational reward). These then receive further taxonomy into service or works performed with a doomed attitude, or an ecstatic attitude.

These practices serve a transformational-exo-esoteric purpose by creating the habit of service and work meant to be performed either with no reward (in the case of the most dignified aspect of the doomed attitude) or with some extremely delayed gratification either in the next life, afterlife, or after many more lives (in the case of the most dignified aspect of the ecstatic attitude).  This, with a more combined lifestyle effort including daily zero-time (dhyana or "meditation" techniques without mantra) and daily focus-time (dharana or concentrative techniques including mantra or image (yantra), eventually redirects the feel-goods, detaching them from expectation and instead connecting them to the absence of expectation.  Used with good result to defeat guilt.

What else can Karma-yoga mean?

Taking Karma to mean "action" and Yoga to mean "union" it can mean union with action.  Martial arts approaches this by the numbers.  Get better at punching and kicking, learn to respond instead of react, but quickly, efficiently, effectively.  Empty the mind of all thought and everything comes naturally, but only with continual training. Continual discipline, usually performed alone for salvation, delayed gratification but additionally to achieve some type of harmony with the environment and the internal self, a unification of opposites that automatically supposes a third party that observes the union.  At higher levels these practices, which begin with the body,  mirror  most forms of traditional tantric hatha yoga.  Eventually leading to stillness either as the operator begins a still seated practice naturally, or when the operator dies (which appears unmistakably still at least in terms of neuronal transmission (which is really the only movement (let's face it))).  These still seated practices also contain elements of  focus (Dharana) and/or emptiness (Dhyana). Used with good result to defeat shame.

Ishvara pranidhana- self surrender or surrender to the personal god (little g god).
This path requires its participant to develop a devotion to personal divinity and sublimate the mind through constant concentration.  All of life's decisions made by this source, in the absence of mind.  Anxiety depletes and this unconscious decision maker feeds and grows larger and more capable of making decisions as a sculptor.  Ultimately the practitioner seeks union with this internal ideal and sculpts the ideal through concentration (normally focus on a particular image).  This procedure gets pushed below the conscious level after some time, and the results of this procedure then steer the activity of the user.  Decision making sublimated.  Used with good result to defeat the demon of trust.

Sanga Spandana- a confluence of vibration or throbbing or a community vibration or throbbing. If we possess some type of essential vibration unique to either a group or "ourselves", then perhaps the number of completely distinct "essential vibrations" in the wild exceeds no great number whatsoever. Then does everything not vibrate with some "essential vibration?"

Practicing a mantra slowly alters this "essential" vibration, attracting or repelling other sounds depending on the operators deep need for harmony or discord.  Language grasps at trying to project these deep internal sounds, and (under these specific auspices) finding common ground with someone indicates some shared resonance.  Idiosyncracy, internal dictionaries, body language, all muddy the effectiveness of this communication.  But without mind, the operator can quickly learn the internally consistent language of another through awareness rather than observation, and even achieve some semblance of ability to speak back to the interlocutor.

Liber XV, Ch. I, Class A, OWW

I

~~

Oath of the Zelator Atrophamus

That I dwell w'er shades

H'r no one find

secret kept

To sw'l'w sp'r't of h'rm

To sw'l'w poison

To sw'l'w pain

To burn them out

That I give my fl'm

Not snuff it out

Th' close

So thee sp'r't cease

Notes:

What we conceive of, and perceive as, reality constantly changes because of human neuronal tendency-as-unto-compulsion, to error correct. The Real tends toward construction by conversation rather than by jackhammer. Information enters the nervous system and immediately plunges through the storehouse of past sensory impression in emotional centers, memory centers, etc.(!) grabbing countless pieces of data to amend the incoming transmission. Deeply seated impressions in 'memory' grow stronger with every new connection. This data then feeds an adaptive mechanical process that produces a sense of stable cognition. When this machinery gets clogged with data we freak out. Sense impressions that can find no attachment to articles in the hall of memory or impression can cause all kinds of strange things to happen. Anger, disgust, hatred, elation, ekstasis, samadhi. To stop having this conversation, though, what would remain of 'life'? Give no power to the White Worm.

page 9, book 2

If I get stuck on a page, the most effective means I know of to get through that wall is to sit still and go for Dharana. It snowed today, and so I decided not to drive all the way to baltimore to the cabinet shop to make $160. Instead I stayed in and have been working on page 9 of the second issue. I had a slow start this morning. Yesterday I lifted and moved cabinets long distances for most of the day. I had most of the page sketched out already, just loose layouts I had been gradually tightening up. This page has been incredibly difficult to get out of my head AND the holidays have given me less uninterrupted time so it's been slower going then usual. This tends to eventually aggravate some old dwindling demons. So this day off was a blessing. From the semi tight sketched I got about 7/8 of the page pencilled tightly. But the last little bit required that I draw "walking". Ohmnath is moving through space, so a map with his walking route, and a panel between the before and after Brahmari Babas to show that he has walked. I showed the rougher pencils to Pauline last night and asked her what she thought. In this panel I had two hastily sketched legs and feet shown from the side that were in the middle of walking. "You should put something more iconic there, like what you did in the last book." Still couldn't get it out today, went through a dozen thumbnails. Today I finished my tight pencils and breathed deeply seven times. Then I crawled downstairs and sat in Padmasana and went for Dharana. Now I'm pouring over a book of yantras looking for feet I know that I saw.

Moving rumination

Phlegm

Just leaving the mucus thickened woods.  Developed a reasonably severe viral bronchitis this week.  Coughing fits lasted all day and all night for the first couple of days, painful, forceful and completely unproductive.  What came out was the consistency of glue or thick spiderweb.  Eventually down to 2 fits lasting several hours a day, more and more productive. Afraid I might cough myself into pure exhaustion and give up the ghost.  As a child, when this would happen it would invariably develop into something worse and long lasting.  The anxious connection not lost on me.

Deep breathing when impaired.  I couldn't help but remember Bob, a student of mine from one of the retirement communities where I taught Qi-Gong in Maryland.  Bob was 88, had chronic bronchitis, not emphysema, COPD.  He was in the hospital for about 2 weeks during my tenure.  I missed him and worried.  I started every class with a slow and directed series of deep breaths, working their way up from the belly, through the ribs, then up to the chest and back out just as slow.  During this part of class, Bob would often cough into a stained handkerchief that would appear and disappear into a pocket in his shirt.  2 weeks later Bob comes back to class.

"Before we start Chris, I have to tell you something.  I used to think this breathing stuff we did was all bullshit.  I was getting really bad, went into a tailspin at the hospital, then I started breathing slowly and deeply like you teach us, [tears in his eyes now] and I think it's what pulled me out of it.  Thank you for this."

2 days into my illness I propped some pillows up and leaned back to open my chest and breathed as deeply and slowly as I could.  The next morning my cough started producing.  In my youth: Pneumonia.  In my adulthood: deep breathing. Thanks, Bob!

Boredom

I recall, as a child, occassionally encountering a strange sensation, usually the same peculiar sensation.  Complicated, as if splitting in two directions at once, paralyzing in its choice.  Allowing me to do nothing on the threshold of one or several things.  This uncomfortable liminal space where the picture gets larger.  Clearly there was nothing to do.  All I could say was "I'm bored".

I hear it often at my job.  We have a time set aside during the course of the day where kids can engage in a free choice inside.  The structure of their school day melts away into our own fabrication into what do you want to do?  We provide legos, blocks, board games, cards, drawing supplies, scissors, glue, paper, you name it.  Sometimes one of us takes them next door and watches them run around a bit, to get that out.  Invariably, even in the midst of all this choice a child approaches with that same song on his/her lips, "I'm bored, there's nothing to do."

Their boredom contains, at least, an implicit bifurcation of potential action.  The emotions and feelings that generate as a result of this bifurcation can seem quite alien, strange and unusual even to an adult. Humans require novel stimulation to keep interested.  Ideally this stimulation has an internal locus of generation.  One path to this has its end in the realization that every moment has little to no connection to any other moment, keeping every individual moment novel in its experience.  In this way one can do anything and enjoy it permanently so long as one follows a steady plan for the maintenance of its practice.  Along the way this practice begins to cultivate detail seeking behaviors, making it ideal for those with artistic and prosean leanings, I have encountered few limits in details, they seem always to lead to something smaller and something smaller, or something softer and something softer.

Getting there requires tremendous effort.  Working through this feeling time and again begins to beat the wrinkle back.  But the practice requires lots of heat and determination.  I recall, during my early experiments with discipline, the last youthful tears of boredom leaving my eyes, the last kvetching "I don't wanna's" leaving my brain.  This happened, happens, repeatedly.  I still have far to go. The emotional body holds great power over all the other patterns we find ourself interacting with. Still: disciplining oneself to keep interested seems a noble preoccupation to me.  By allowing the flow of emotion a proper and concentrated outlet, over time, clarity develops.

Winter's Pattern

Summer rushes through fall, long after it should retire.  It's bones and sinews older, ragged, kept awake at night by rheumatism and indigestion, powering through the day on a steady drip of adrenaline.  Hits winter's wall: Slow down!  Winter cracks its whip, ice where once was blood.  Movement becomes impossible, the body wants hibernation.  To go underground until spring, exploring caves in darkness where the temperature stays the same. Wiping chalk and blood on the wall, leaving a lasting human legacy like garbage, like plastic, forever.  The sun spit back out again, and the sleepers wake, leave the cave.

At 11 below 0 farenheit, the first breath I take in the morning hurts.  Nose hairs and snot freeze immediately. The ache that takes 20 minutes in 20 degree weather sets in within 20 seconds.  3 minutes later frost begins to form on my mustache.  Having lived in the south for most of my life, I have yet to adapt to this experience.  Cold infiltrates.  Drills to the marrow,  can feel it all day.  Even after I've sequestered myself back in the warmth of my cave for a few hours.

The fascicular spiral, wound tightly round bone in summer has less torque, less potential with frozen tissue.  Warming up seems to take more time, I have yet to master tummo, but still grasp at stoking cellar heat.  I won't give up.  In winter I feel my age, or older.  Aches and pains don't disappear and remain for days before abating.  The heat of practice stills them somewhat, but distracting my neurons seems more effective in most cases.

In the absence of movement I can watch for transmissions issuing forth from the hole in my brain.  Make something out of nothing.  The active brain searches, watches.  The tired brain interprets.  Winter questions survival, brings out the death trance, very peaceful, very visionary.  I write everything down now.  I draw it all into a story.  Winter provides the opportunity to get work done without the distraction of the out of doors.  I can stay in my warm, modern, cave: drawing and dreaming until the harsh season's secret explodes into spring.

12 more pages by September.  I think I can I think I can I think I can I think I can.

Do you remember the first time you saw something that changed your life completely and immediately imprinted some new possibility for reality that you would never have otherwise considered?

The first time I can remember this happening, I was about 5 years old.  My father read a lot, a lot a lot, the house of my childhood had walls lined with shelves full of dusty books. The living room in particular had 2 large bookcases all full of various articles of classical literature and thought: works by Homer, Chaucer, Aristotle, Erasmus, Keirkegaard, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Huxley, etc.  All great magicians in their own right.  On the lower shelves were books with wonderful pictures of dinosaurs, sea monsters, aliens.  A small space on the bottom of the lefthand bookshelf held my father's small comic book collection.  His mother disposed of the collections of his youth (except for a few vital items) when he left for college.  Sometimes, very wisely, he would read to us from this small collection letting our eyes linger on the pictures while he did the voices for the each of the Avengers or for Spider-Man.  I remember having an affinity for "The Vision", but only vaguely.

No, what really stuck, and changed me, happened on one fateful day while I was home sick with strep throat, or walking pneumonia.  My father stayed home to take care of me and I asked him to read a comic to me, so I could follow along.  On this day he pulled three oversized comics off the shelf.  These 3 were reprints of Tales from the Crypt, the Vault of Horror, and the Haunt of Fear, respectively.  For the next couple of hours my father good lord, -choked- his way through every story, pausing after each to survey my wide-eyed, fearful, face to ask if I'd had enough.  "More" was my answer.  On this day I was reborn.  My brain permanently changed.  Bernie Wrightson, my new hero.

Art and magic have an inextricable link.  Change in accordance with personal will broadly defines the goal of magic.  What change?  Environmental changes, physical changes, internal changes, really any change as long as the will accomplishes it.  These changes come much easier when a practitioner learns to communicate with whatever they wish to change, by learning the language either through careful study or intuition.  Change occurs first in the mind, as an idea takes root and begins to prune away long-seated opposition with nimble and dextrous fingers.  As the process continues it works its way through the body, altering motor units to produce, ultimately, some manifestation, some pattern for others to follow.

You can never know what lies inside of another person beyond their anatomy.  The information they spit out through their various signals has a high degree of noise, as does a person's ability to receive it.  Through constant meditation and practice, people seem the same, oneness steps forward, the clay all mashed together, all brown and grey.  Then because sensitivity to certain things inside creates a type of knowledge through its experience,  this can apply itself meaningfully to others.  Thus begins compassion and empathy.  Learning the language of people.

I draw to communicate.  The tandem paradox of spoken words both abstracting and specifying renders them mostly meaningless.  In order to understand someone by speaking to them, so many words have to come out of both people, this vocal torrent constantly checking and editing itself on the fly to ensure the other party understands.  With a drawing or painting, the effect occurs almost immediately, and the viewer can linger in silence.  The imprint can happen immediately.  Art allows the inside to come out, so people have the opportunity to acknowledge internal processes, and sympathize, or empathize with them.  It causes long lasting or permanent change in others as well as in the creator AND it manifests some critical internal idea.

I started writing and drawing a comic in July after a lengthy daily practice and meditation with a singular goal in mind: to reconnect myself to my will (HGA).  What emerged was the germ of an idea I had carried with me from childhood to know, that has taken many shapes and had many false starts.  All signs said "THE TIME HAS ARRIVED".   The Crowelyan true will.  My will's flow interrupted by life, work, sloth, etc.  But I always come back to work on it.  Getting faster every time I sit down.  Working hard at communicating clearly.  Sometimes I have second thoughts.  The trickster universe throws so much in front of what I feel I need to accomplish.  Crowley would say that means I've found the right track.  Slowly but surely, all blame on my father for instilling me with a love of comic books as a child.