Initiation is a many splendoured thing by Nick Pell

Initiation is a many splendoured thing

by Nick Pell on 2007-06-04 11:33:38

I lived in my parents basement located along a strip of Massachusetts abutting Rhode Island that gets mentioned on Family Guy if that tells you anything about my background. People tend to get it wrong with me because I went to college and can form sentences. They think that I have the same middle class upbringing that they had. I came from fucking nothing. The idea that I would be leaving New England- let alone the country, the material plane and the East Coast- was foreign to me even just three years ago. Crushing northern winters frustrated my progress ever since I returned from Northern Virginia with my tail between my legs to take classes at Harvard while delivering pizzas and generally getting my income in the lowest bracket possible- Uncle Sucker really lays on the gravy once you hit 24, as it turns out, at least as far as college is concerned.So I milked the system. I went back to the Umass Zoo and lived like a pauper king in sweet digs right downtown on a postage stamp that’s played host to Calvin Coolidge, Sonic Youth and Kurt Vonnegut. I found a way to see the world by establishing a home base in the UK, hob nobbing with low class occultist fellow travelers in quaint little English suburbs and big city pubs. I investigated rituals and psychogeography on one of the freakiest ley lines this side of the 33rd parallel. Wandering around Western Europe like a vagabond I never felt freer than when my only possessions were a hat, a watch, a passport, a change of clothes, sneakers, boots and a copy of… whatever. Breaking laws in foreign lands is grand, but not as grand as the land without laws, Amsterdam, the place that waves the XXX flag as if the Stadtholders of old had either a twisted sense of humor or a prescience of mythic proportions. Praha is one of the last places on Earth to preserve the splendour of pre-proto-Modernist forms. I fully expected the Golem to come to life in front of me. But the magick is in the Golem as much as it is in the drunken slag dancing topless on the bar to Abba and her boyfriend rolling skunk like the secret police never existed. Guernica makes you want to pray when you stand in front of it, hanging like an entrance into a world of madness and despair and all those other perennially stylish black self-absorptions.

Coming back home to the postage stamp was hard. The feelings to go do things that could no longer be done- spend a half hour on a train to go look at Dali paintings for free, for example- were impossible to ignore and difficult to deal with. While I was around loved ones I was also rerunning the same tape over and over again. People around me were dying- Rise in Power Jenna Wright and Jimmy Reject- and I felt a little like I was dying too. So I pulled up root again to go try something new, something drastically new. Not finding the job prospects in the Metropolitain area surrounding one of the 20 most dangerous cities in America (Springfield, MA) fruitful and losing a job as a Macintosh salesman and the executive assistant to a loony lawyer fighting an anti-porn bill, I got two subpar retail jobs I had previously held in my shiftless layabout days, worked my tail off and moved to the New Alamut section of Portland, OR where I continue to rub elbows with occultnoid nogoodniks of varying stripes and other forms of allied scum. The bums here are drunk and sleepy and the rainy haze hangs like a blanket of sleep.

The last three years of my life were, to say the least, a grand initiation from a novitiate human seeking a way out of his own self-created prison into a illuminated human able to exercise some amount of control over his behavior and personality some of the time. I was changed by the world but mostly I made a conscious decision to change myself. I embarked upon a path of initiation for better or for worse and it was often both and neither. It was also during this time period that I went through some of the most crushing depths of depression, contracted the clap and watched my lover succumb to the ravages of paranoid schizophrenia. And yet, I think it would be foolish to attempt to separate the good from the bad from an initiatory perspective. At the same time, there are different kinds of initiations and a wink is not as good as a nod to the all-seeing eye of the novice reality and personality engineer.

When chosing a path of initiation there are two basic choices- the Left Hand Path and the Right Hand Path. The Right Hand Path is effectively and to varying degrees always about the central tenet of Islam- submission. The Left Hand path, while often being portrayed as somehow intrinsically blasphemous, diabolical or otherwise devilish, has at least as much to do with Jungian individuation and a Gurdjieffian cultivation of the senses as tools of the Self. Indeed, the Left Hand Path can in a sense be considering the path of the Self. And yet, it is also the path of the Not-Self, as the maxim of â€œI am that I am notâ€ illustrates so eloquently. We are only as free as our boundaries allow us to be. While the Right Hand Path advocates a return to the source, scrambling toward the Monad and sublimating the Self to the All-Self, the Left Hand Path represents the alchemical merger of the Self with the Not-Self for the purpose of total freedom. Nothing is true and everything is permitted. How true is that for you? How untrue is that for you? What isn’t â€œeverythingâ€ to you?

Another way of differentiating the two paths seems elegant enough. The Right Hand Path is the path of religion (that is to say the recognition and exaltation of an external force as the primary reality) and the Left Hand Path is that of magick (the internal force exercising mastery over internal and external forces). To be sure, mystical insight follows from magick but magick does not necessarily flow from the mystical practices. You can concentrate on an upside down â€œAâ€ until you achieve Samdhi for days but it doesn’t mean shit once you leave the trance. The rosy feeling of being â€œwith the System, maaaaan…â€ may give off a glow that attracts moths to the flame, but it does not a revolution make, personal or otherwise. Nor does merely opposing and reacting fit the bill as many understand the taboo breaking processes of Tantra and its American bastard child Toxick Magick to be. The path of true magick transforms both the self and the environment not merely with intent as some claim, but rather in conformity with will. Meditate on the difference even if it seems immediately obvious. Meditate on the difference particularly if it seems immediately obvious.

Who do you want to be? Not who â€œshouldâ€ you want to be from the perspective of some invisible sky bully, your local ayatollah or the whims of â€œthe Systemâ€ but who do you, in Your Holy Will choose to be? Discovering that is the foundation of remaking the Black Iron Prison into a royal palace fit for your own royalty, holiness and divinity. The path of magick is not the path of going with the flow or accepting the state of things as they are are. Magick is the exercise of capital (and lowercase) â€œwâ€ Will, and the cultivation of an anchored Self of swirling chaos, aware of its own Not-Self. Self is not to be sacrificed on the alter of Divine Providence, Kether or whatever pet myth the local reality tunnel or its counterculture has for sublimating the Will. Rather, fleshing out the Self with all the parts of the Not-Self and the realization that there will always be a Self and a Not-Self- a Zos and a Kia- form the basis of Left Hand Path mystical insight. See: Gurdjieff, Robert Anton Wilson and others that knew that they were what they were not. The path of magick is the path of splitting oneself off from everything else, creating a chariot fit for a king to navigate the physical world, the various nonphysical worlds and worlds of which there is no way to speak. The only divine plan is the one you come up with and the only â€œSystemâ€ one need worship is the one that you and other agents create.

It seems worth noting that anyone, anyone, telling you to sublimate your will to theirs or their interpretation of divine providence is a charlatan, a schizo, a control freak or worse. This form of scum that often styles itself as a guru or, more innocuously, a teacher, typically has been fortunate enough to have been living off of a trust fund for years, accomplished most of their goals on someone else’s dime and the fruits of another’s labor, and their primary function consists in telling you what’s wrong with your Will, your desires, your yen to see the world, write a novel, compose a symphony, walk the Grand Canyon and convert to Satanism. The guru is often a former magickian enraptured by the allure of occult priesthood who abandoned their earlier efforts for the greener pastures of control and is quite convinced that they know everything. These people are easily recognized by having their head lodged deep up their ass, a grossly inflated sense of their own self-importance and the moral and emotional temper of Yahweh’s priests in Sodom. Ignore them like socialists selling newspapers and spurn them like the plague. They are not magickians. Rather, the spiritual master is a social parasite in the Age of the Adept, the age of peer-to-peer initiation, of radical metaphysical egalitarianism. Ask them if they think it’s even possible to affect their precious, all-powerful System.

As you may have heard once or twice, initiation never ends. The Golden Dawn program of 10 layers is woefully schematic. Better is the sorcerers initiatory structures of 3 and 4, a much rougher schema corresponding to natural periods in the human life cycle. A model of large initiatory changes can be useful. But the smaller initiations have a gravity all their own. The only constant is uncertainty, and certainty is the enemy of the magickal brain, the death of thought. Magickians must learn to think not only in gestalts but in probability fields. When did people forget to actually listen to Bob Wilson, to not jump to self-fulfilling conclusions and to always test both the Truth around you and the Self and its boundaries. Anything can happen any day as we have all seen in our lifetimes. My life has been drastically impacted by the Challenger explosion, the L.A. Riots, Oklahoma City / Waco / Ruby Ridge, 9/11 and the Iraq War all events of varying degrees of improbability on the day before their occurrence. And yet they happened. What will happen tomorrow? Next week? Ten years from now? In the world? In your neighborhood? To you? How will you react? Adapt and change or fold and be crushed? The path of the mystic glorifies being crushed. The magickian would no longer accept Nirvana than slavery. Without veering too much into the Drill Instructor / Henry Rollins territory, discomfort is one of the things that distinguishes human beings from fungus and homo subgenius from homo pinkus. Celebrate all your challenges as the thing which will not kill you, only make you stronger.

Go out and test yourself today. Do something that you’ve never done. Eat food that you don’t like. Try and learn something that your teachers said you were no good at. Yell at a stranger. Cut off an old friend who no longer seems useful. Make a sculpture of your own shit. Do whatever feels the most unnatural to you. It is only by exploring our own boundaries and then pushing beyond them that we achieve anything which can be considered choice. Fear is not something to be spurned or avoided, it is something to be chased like a prey animal. It is only by engaging our discomforts that we stand any chance of conquering them. It is only by breaking out of our normal, comfortable patterns that we can ever go anywhere.

Nick Pell
May 31, 2007
New Alamut