It is, though. When one of those ‘there’s something out there and it’s in here!’ moments occurs, if you’re going to look a god in its one massive bloodshot eye without shitting yourself, you need the inner composure that meditation offers. If you don’t want to be tipped out of the boat when ‘synchonicities’ are turning your life into total bloody chaos magic, your magical sea legs will keep you from going overboard. Meditation is not only basic training but essential maintenance for a chaos magician.

Furthermore, meditation’s big brother, contemplation, is the core practice of Illumination, and while Illumination is an unpopular subject among some chaos magicians, we shall not be shirking it on this blog.

But I’m guessing that what you really want to know is ‘will meditation make my magic more betterer?’ And – spoiler alert – the answer is most likely Yes. But we’ll get to that shortly. First, a quick roundup.

WHAT FOR?

There are loads of different styles of meditation, depending on what you need it for. Relaxation and stress reduction, developing concentration or visualization, developing awareness- the list is long. And it’s a matter of the tools for the job.

Mindfulness meditation is popular at the moment. Now there’s a case in point. It’s widely touted as a mental health silver bullet because studies have shown, for example, that it both eases the severity of depression episodes and lengthens the intervals between them. Fantastic. But … that’s not what it’s for, and that matters. A lot.

You see, it’s based ultimately on the Satipatthānna Sutta, an early Buddhist text which offers a practice for achieving enlightenment. These days, those in the know call it vipassana. For a simple practice, it yields hardcore results, and it’s not called ‘The Direct Path’ for nothing. And as it’s an Illumination practice, once you’re started the initiatory process, stopping is no longer an option. Great if you’re after enlightenment, but for, say, somebody already challenged with mental health issues, persevering with mindfulness could be like throwing themselves down a bobsleigh run. They can wind up disoriented and feeling out of control, lacking a firm grip on any sense of self, world or values. Scary stuff if you weren’t expecting it.

The Buddha had it right and he instituted the Eightfold Path to help his monks get a handle on their new-found emptiness and behave without getting themselves locked up and sedated or chased out of town. However, your average mindfulness course is basically no more than regular group meditation sessions with no backup from the Dharma and the Sangha, the method and the fellow-travellers.

Mind you, even the most innocuous forms of meditation have been known to result in the meditator suddenly having to deal with terrifyingly intense emotions or traumatic memories. So maybe there are some people who should not meditate at all. If this sort of thing starts happening to you, quit meditating and go get professional help.

TOOLS FOR THE JOB



For the magician, the tools for the job are those mental exercises which develop concentration and visualization, those which develop specific trances, and those which help us keep it together at the shit-fan intersection. Plus any method of contemplation for those who pursue the initiatory path.

Hypnosis. For our purposes here, hypnosis is the practice of paying complete attention to what is currently important in your internal experience. It can be as simple as settling down, fixing your gaze on a spot on the wall opposite, and as you begin to get slight tunnel vision, transferring your attention to what’s going on in your mind or what you would like to attend to. As you become more absorbed in the object of your attention, your conscious awareness narrows and simply interferes less, your body becomes less noticeable, your swallow and blink reflexes are much reduced, and your breathing becomes slow and regular. And those maddening itches subside; you know, the ones that only ever appear when you’re trying to sit still.

Oh look, all requirements to succeed at the Liber MMM practices of Motionlessness-No-Thought and the Concentration exercises, the basic training tasks Peter J. Carroll created for the Illuminates of Thanateros, pinching them from Crowley who pinched them from Yoga. A simple, light trance makes it all go more smoothly.

THE ACCESS STATE

This is a development from the technique above, inspired by the work of Overdurf & Silverthorn (yes, those are their real names) and by the Silva Method of Josė Silva . I call this exercise the Access State as a nod and a wink to the modern Theravada Buddhist trance they call Access Concentration. It constitutes a mild trance from which you have access either to states of greater absorption such as the jhanas and hypnotic trances, or to vipassana. The Access State gives you a steady base from which to go in either direction. You’ll also find it very useful as a starting point for magical trance, obviously. However, as you’ll see from the Silva reference, it’s also useful for remote viewing and remote influencing, and was the basis of a workshop I once co-presented entitled Let’s Get Psychic! Fun times.

This version has the extra benefit of turning down the volume of one’s internal monologue, with its endless repeated loops of thoughts, even unto silence.

Firstly, establish peripheral vision. Do this by looking ahead of you, just above eye level, with your index fingers upraised in the centre of your vision, and moving them slowly out to the sides until they disappear from view as long as you continue to look ahead. Move them back until you can just about see them again, still looking ahead.

Defocus your vision. You’re still looking ahead-and-slightly-upwards, but you’re not looking at anything in particular. You’re just gazing ahead of you, aware of stuff in front of you but not scrutinising any of it. Instead, you’re making yourself aware of the space around, above, even behind you. Expand your awareness all around you.

When you’ve learned this, you’ll be able to do this without the fingers and just gaze ahead-and-slightly-upwards, defocus and expand your awareness.

Allow your jaw to slacken and fall down and forward ever so slightly. The muscles involved in this can tense involuntarily during subvocal speech – you talking to yourself – so deliberately relaxing them helps to foil the internal monologue.

There you go. Play with that. Just being in this state, paying attention to nothing in particular, is a useful exercise. With practice, you’ll be able to bring it on at a moment’s notice to do magic. If you do pathworkings, energy meditations or astral work, you’ll find this a helpful preliminary. For Motionlessness-No-Thought, just get into the Access State and let thoughts arise and fall away without you getting involved with them. Once you’ve got the hang of that a bit, have a go at actively dismissing the thoughts as soon as they arise but again, do not give them, erm, another thought.

Just do this much, oooh, a few times a week and you’ll be streets ahead of most magicians. You can do it as a daily practice but, as my friend and colleague Josh Wetzel points out in The Paradigmal Pirate, once established in the practice then a few times a week is enough to keep you ‘topped up.’ And you will have taken some degree of control over your unruly thoughts.

But there’s more than this, isn’t there? What about that Illumination core practice?

Well for a start there’s the Satipatthāna Sutta. It’s quite short, and the text is easy to find online, sometimes with helpful commentary.

Then there’s The Direct Path by Greg Goode, a series of thought exercises that lead to the experience of nonduality, or the experiments of The Headless Way of D. E. Harding.

And you can, of course, go from the Access State to that expanded awareness I mentioned. In that expanded awareness of Here and Now , simply watch the various sense impressions

seeing

hearing

smelling

tasting

external sensations (what the skin feels)

internal sensations (balance, tightness, movement etc)

and mental impressions

thinking in pictures

thinking in sounds

thinking in the other senses

thinking in words

come and go without getting sucked into them, whether such mental impressions represent memories, rehearsals, fantasies or whatever. This trains you to deal with your experiences with equanimity, and this a key skill at the shit-fan intersection.

A variation for those who would go the Holy Guardian Angel route. Get into Access State as above and hold a sense of invitation. Now Intention matters here. I’ve used this to make mediumistic contact with the dead. I’ve also used it to make contact with other entities, nature spirits, gods, and so forth. The invitation needs to be specific. So to contact your Holy Guardian Angel or whatever you think of it as, invite that. Otherwise you could get any rubbish, like with an ouija board. Ultimately, your sense of invitation is your explicit ‘Yes!’ to the initiatory process in your life.

One point to watch: as this practice teaches you that nothing has any intrinsic, built-in reality or value, you need to balance it with actually doing stuff – labour, meeting people, spells and so on. Otherwise you end up feeling abstracted, vague and purposeless. Don’t go there. The Buddha created his Eightfold Path plan for his monks. You’ll have to make your own. It’s called a ‘life,’ and I see you’re already well into yours.

That’s all you need.