The Duelist

Cue Final Fantasy X OST.

All the news in the world, all the movies and plays and comics and books… not just the fiction section, but even the how-tos and the get-rich books… even philosophy and cookbooks…

They’re shared stories. They’re thoughtforms that have replicated and disseminated throughout the mental network. That’s why fame is so alluring — everyone knows your story. Everyone wants to tell their story. That’s why the true listener is so attractive; they are so rare.

That’s why the hypersigil works, you see. Even if it’s coded information, bits and pieces of your story spread throughout the network, concretizing it, manifesting it, so mote it be. Astral space is informational space; both spaces are more conceptual than perceptual in nature.

What does it mean to be invisible, then?  To wipe out the telltale mark of ‘you’, the ego that pretends to be all of you? What if you could write anything into the story of reality itself, from the outside? What if instead of branding it with sigils and the fires of gnosis, if instead one discovered a way to weave into the story of everything whatever plots or persons or locations one wished? What kind of magic would that be?

This is my story.

I just met a person tonight who was almost pure id. He lashed out with obvious rage at women, he relished playing this sniper game because he got to bust people’s heads open, and established territory over his bed.

It’s an awesome force. But it’s hiding something. The superego is not dead, and the guilt it is inflicting is so strong that the id has to exaggerate itself so it can suppress the surges of remorse. The ego is whipped but the id is defending it.

I hope he sorts everything out by the time he’s 30.

I’ll tell you why.

It’s because a fragment of my soul is in her. I left it there. I gave it away to her. I can take it back, if I wanted to.

I don’t want to.

She can have it. She can take it with her when she decides to leave.

If the sword is the extension of the will, then my sword has gotten dull and rusty.

I can barely concentrate on a single thing for a long period, unless it’s a game. I can barely make myself study. I no longer meditate. The dissolution of my paradigm was excellent but without the discipline, without the will to hold myself together my drive will dissipate into nothingness. Heat waste.

This has to stop. Tonight I am binding myself to the sharpening of my will into a single point. I am a mage, and without my will that means nothing.

The sword is the extension of the will. And it is only as sharp, as strong as the will.

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.

(With thanks to http://www.key23.net/occulture/post/466 for the heads up.)

Conflicts are beginning to erupt all around. Wars all over the globe, skirmishes in my school after a long period of peace, attacks against the cabal itself. Little arguments with close friends and loved ones. I confess to not knowing enough about astrology to make any sort of correlation with this and the alignment of the stars. Even the I Ching reading regarding the situation confounds me: 15. Modesty to 27. Corners of the Mouth.

What is going on? What is coming to a head? Not to sound apocalyptic, but why is this happening now? What is influencing us all?

It’s interesting to watch the two of you fight. You just clam up and he knits his brow and seems unable to solve some riddle you’ve posed him. Sometimes I have no idea why it happens. I’m looking at you two and suddenly I realize that you’re arguing. And veiling it poorly.

Your fights end when you relent (and tell him the answer to your puzzle) or when he figures it out. And then you’re both back to leaning on each other and being sweet.

Then it hits me. Someday, he won’t be able to answer, and you won’t relent. And that will be the end.

Tall, sheer mountain faces. A translucent bridge of many steps.  Mist, massive white clouds. Snow.

Draw cloak over head, walk on. The eye of the world ahead. The city of sun and stars behind, below.

Wings straining against the cloak. Walk on.

Warmed by the warmth of her memory. The warmth of dreams of her.

A dream within a dream, self-referential recursion within more recursive patterns. There are patterns at work here, patterns that tell the same story over and over again, with new details, switched in and out by the caprices of memory and forgetfulness.

Always walking on. Always moving forward. Always something approached, always something left behind.

To obtain, something of equal value must be left behind.

Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost.

But in order to fill a form with the necessary essence or force, the force that is already indwelling must first be emptied. A vessel must first be emptied before it can be refilled.

It begins as a point, an almost infinitesmally-small bubble in the viscous mixture.

Then it expands, a spherical vacuum, emptying a space that was once saturated with the unwanted substance. Before it has the opportunity to collapse, however, before the space is refilled with the same dross, the alchemist fills the void with the desired essence. Suddenly the vessel contains the element that it previously was too full to hold.

The form begins to vibrate with a different force, and the reactions take on an altogether different path of causality. The very nature of the totality has been altered, has been made to proceed in the manner that the alchemist desires, though the form of the vessel remains unchanged.

To obtain the desired result, something of equal value was lost. But it was not lost as payment; the old was simply discarded to make room for the new.