The Duelist

The castle of you.

It’s built on sand, you see. Built from sand, upon sand. It looks beautiful but it’s only billions of fragments held together by nothing stronger than capillary action, its form imposed upon it from the outside by a mold.

There is a small dam, also made from sand, protecting it from the onrushing waves. But you can only hold the sea back for so long before it completely overwhelms you.

And it will. It is only a matter of time.

But then, why would you expect your castle to last forever? When you’ve known all along that in the end, it’s only sand upon sand.

Here’s the deal. Last night I went into the astral and I clawed my way to Tiphareth and I pretty much declared war on Science’s banishing spell of Utter Certainty, knowing full well that I was demolishing one of the most powerful pieces of protection shielding me from the craziness that is a magical world.

So why did I do it? Why smash the world’s shell? As Kozue put it in my little piece of fanfiction ‘In the Shadow of Revolution’, why awaken a blissfully sleeping world? Because I was not blissfully sleeping. I am tired of blissfully sleeping. Take this for example: There is a girl out there that I have allowed myself to dream about, allowed myself to want, but I am too fucking scared to have. I dream of having her but my paradigm doesn’t allow me to have her. And all the spells and sigils and hypersigils in the world won’t let me have her if my paradigm cannot contemplate the thought of having her.

Same is true with other things. Vast wealth, mental powers, lightning bolts at ten paces. Part of me, the part that has bought into the scientific paradigm of utter certainty, is utterly sure that I cannot have these things. And for what? To stave of the fear of the unknown. The results that cannot be reproduced in a laboratory setting.

Give me the fear, then. Let me stare the fear in the eye, the fear that you get when you stand on a ledge and realize that the option to jump off, jump to your death, is available and nothing is stopping you from choosing to do so. It’s not the jumping that’s scary. It’s the fact that the option to do so exists.

Give me the fear. The manic, mercurial, orange-tinged fear that gives wings to your feet. Let me grin, giddy and breathless at the realization that everything is possible, in a real, visceral sense. Let me see ghosts standing on street corners, in darkened windows. Let me sense demons clawing at my feet. Let me fear attacks from unknown forces. Let me live. Let me die.

Nothing is real, you see. And I don’t mean this in a postmodernly-hip way. Nothing is certain. And since reality is certain (otherwise it wouldn’t be real) then nothing is real. Not even change is constant. Even change changes. Wrap your brain around that one. Even change changes. And that is really. Fucking. Scary. That’s what everyone is afraid of in the end. Uncertainty. That’s what divination was invented for, prediction, the science of narrowing the choices down to what we can see, a role now largely filled by science.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a scientist because I thought that with science anything was possible. But you see, with science, only one thing is possible. Everything else is extraneous, probabilities that do not occur. Because we want to see how everything works, don’t we. And once we know how everything works we assume that everything must work that way all the time.

But I refuse to open the box to see if the cat is dead or alive. It doesn’t matter anymore. The cat is dead and alive at the same time. And by not looking, the cat is permitted to be both at once. Both at once, and it’s allowed because I allow myself not to be certain. Certainty is the tyranny of what is, what can be. And I refuse to submit myself to the tyranny any longer.

It doesn’t matter to me anymore how these things will enter my life, wealth, power, wisdom, enlightenment, her; what matters now is that they are permitted to do so in whatever process allows these things to come to pass. These things are permitted to occur because I refuse to rule out the outlandish ways in which they may happen. There are no coincidences, only synchronicities.

Nothing is real; everything is permitted.

(Thanks to ceilede for the idea. This is based on the excellent article at Key 23.)

He walked on, holding the chalice in his heart. The destination was clear in his vision; a white tower standing clear in the summer twilight on the horizon. He began the journey almost beaten down, he had forgotten the flame he carried. But the longer he walked and the closer he was to the white tower, the taller he stood, the surer he stepped. He began the long journey almost invisible, nondescript, indistinguishable from the people he passed on the way. Now he was unmistakable. His bearing marked him as the Highson. He treated those he would pass along the way with respect and was respected in return, almost deferred to. In certain plays of the light one could almost make out a halo, or a pair of iridescent wings on his back. He began at first to glow, and then to shine, until one looking upon him at a distance could mistake him for a star.

Or the sun.

Even one looking upon him from so far as the white tower. And he drew ever closer, inexorably. Nothing would stop him now.

When I first began my astral practice with my initial, halting steps using the Silva Mind Control method, the Promontory was where I first invoked my counselors, which is the term for the inner intelligences you contact to guide you with further explorations. Now it is my preferred point of entry whenever I visit the Island, the little corner of the astral that I call home.

The Promontory is, like other promontories, a high point of land jutting out over the ocean. However, the only landmark, and one of the first things visitors see when they enter my little astral nook is simply called the Tree, a large tree that I like to lean against that provides plenty of shade when the sun is high.
Sometimes I go to the astral simply to spend time here by myself, to meditate and collect my thoughts. Other times it’s just a landmark, a stopover before I head to my actual destination, like the Aleph or the Laboratory.

The Aleph is the tallest mountain within my astral landscape. Snowcapped, it overlooks a vast mountain range that is often obscured by clouds. I didn’t look for it or even intend to end up there the first time I found myself at the summit; I actually meant to materialize in my usual spot, the Promontory.

Nowadays I do a lot of my evocation from that spot, particularly hostile or uncooperative entities. The Aleph is a position that probably represents my complete dominion over my astral fiefdom, and to evoke an entity from that position conveys the position of superiority to them. More friendly entities get invited over in cozier accomodations.

The Aleph also allows a strange sort of long-distance scrying. Strange because things scryed from the Aleph appear both as distant events and zoomed-in windows at the same time. I’m not conveying this properly. Let me try again. They appear to be very far away and at the same time no detail is lost. It’s hard to explain.

Now that I think about it, I have never been to the Aleph at night (astral ‘time’), although I’ve been to the Promontory during all times of the day. I wonder why that is.