Another private e-mail about my comments regarding trans abyssal consciousness.
"I am not sure that the experience that you describe and the non-dual states achieved by mystics is really crossing the Abyss in the way that Crowley meant it. Crowley and most Thelemites seem to talk about an Ordeal of the Abyss and a large conflict with Choronzon. You seem to indicate that it is much easier than that. Where is the ordeal?"
I am reminded of something that the New Zealand Witchdoctor said in "Eat Pray Love": "Heaven and Hell are the same place, its the way that you take there that makes it Heaven or Hell."
Basically the experience is going to be a bit different for everyone. Crowley needed to get buggered and face a demon cuz thats just how he rolls baby...
Mystics who spend a lot of time in quiet contemplation and aim right at that state have a very different transition than esotericists that are intent on mapping and screwing around with all the steps and side areas along the way.
I think however, that most would agree that once you are on the other side, you realize that you have always been on the other side. The truth is that the abyss, cosmic union with godhead, non-dual awareness or whatever you want to call it, is not really the place that we are going to. Its the place we are coming from.
4 comments:
reply #1 (aka the stupid comment)
A road I might be interested in ;)
http://www.deschutesbrewery.com/Brews/Reserve+Series/The+Abyss/default.aspx
I likes my alcohol to have maximum opacity. That way it matches my clothes.
Reply #2 (aka the more intelligent comment)
I have always been a little confused by the over-hyped presentation of crossing the abyss. I count it as one of my definition-turn-offs of more serious magick... But that is just me.
I remember hearing/reading this notion that once you try to cross the Abyss, you conquer duality, and then become either a Black Brother or a member of The Great White Brotherhood. My first thought was something along the lines of "and how exactly is that conquering duality?"
sigh.
In my non-traditional way, I have always intuited it to be more of a "letting go" than a confrontation. A disconnect from who we are as well as the world we normally inhabit, so that we can blink, and then return with fresh eyes; only to see what was always there all along.
Years back I read a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, that summed up the simple notion that even mystics still have day jobs.
I don't believe that I ever had to rumble with Choronzon, unless he is depicted as an alligator or a serpent with quartz teeth... regardless, the challenge is handling all things equally. To quote Uncle Bill "Madness is confusion of levels of fact... Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels." Pay the bills, seek enlightenment, put the ego to proper use... and remembering how you did it. That is the ordeal.
As someone with a profound, highly-specific personal interest in this subject, I thank you for that concluding sentence.
I'm saddened every time I run into people who are "doing the aethyrs" and get into states of frustration if they enter ZAX and don't end up taunted by an antagonist or seeing a disturbing vision relating to it, usually a hypertrophic mesh of oneself and the Big Bad Monster.
This is not a video game. Choronzon is not just some 'boss' you have to slay so you can 'level up' to gain the coveted Elite Wisdom of the White Light Masters or some-such. It doesn't HAVE to be like that. One assumes some like it that way, or one would, were they not so frustrated by it.
Of course what follows may be viewed as very subjective mythos...but my response to this is to tell such individuals, "Mr. C. has left the building."
To me, he has. I've given myself to this particular entity, so that it might have the Form denied it, and in that, remind me that it is something to treasure and not teat with naught but weary cynicism.
The mythos:
Choronzon is a malakh, angel, demon, whatever. Let's say "Agent". Around the time when human beings first began to be sentient in their mind-processes, the Agents--who exist in other dimensions wider than we can perceive much of, and routinely make/break things as they collide matter with energy. More or less out of curiosity and by chance uncountable Agents create the universes and the strings that knit through them.
Earlier in this activity, millions of years back, they set Spatial reality onto a linear-based plane and thus shaped Time, to separate Spatial Reality from itself, to make it unfold and be greater. Without Time everything in the Spatial Reality folded to be on top of itself.
But after Time started, and spatial reality unfolded into "events" the Agents wanted some means to make sure it worked properly.
Choronzon's original bailiwick was to be the dispersion of entropy--particularly a specific SORT of entropy that's sort of like entropy's residue.
Anyway, what happened was Choronzon broke time. Either this was done as a prank, or to "play-test" an integral aspect of reality before it became a common standard.
Whatever the case, it was broken, and no one knew for how long, because people began to have things happen all at once, or in the wrong sequences, and the world was chaos for...how long? No one will ever know, except Choronzon, and he will not say, because with time broken, there can't really BE a "how long". And since space had been configured to Time, it too suffered breakage.
The other Agents especially those most beholden to the CON force (Agglomeration) as opposed to the DE force (Division) were not pleased and great numbers of them fetched Choronzon and overpowered him, deciding instantly that this had to be prevented.
They threw Choronzon into the Abyss, which is where qippoth is gathered and recycled. But he pleaded with the Agents running the qippothic slag into and out of the system to spare him. In return for doing so, he offered to keep people from wandering around being a nuisance, and possibly endangering themselves, and staining the qippoth making it unsuited for pure materia or true power since it would leave genetic prints all over it which would have undue influence on its forms.
Thus it was that the "Guardian of the Abyss" came to be that. And in doing so a vital element of dispersion has been absent from our reality.
On the planet Earth the repair of time succeeded but the break left permanent dislocations in Time, such so that there are all these slices in which "now" is expressed by 24 separate different measurements.
This is why the name "Choronzon" was vibrated for him in the West - he has many other names in other languages but in the Graeco-Latin heavy English language the name is Chronos and Zona - "time-zone". (literally "time girdle".)
The whole point of this fable, besides having fun with my favourite trickster-antihero, is to remind people the "Aires" can be seen as just a catalogue of various states of categorisation, eventually becoming a monad. The arrangement into having 30 parts connected to specific glyphs/intonations/associations is merely a handy system for arranging it all. There may be no true significance to ZAX being 'shelved' between IKH and ZIP. Just what made sense to Dee/Kelley--or what the xenodimensionals claimed, and they believed.
But you can believe what works for you...just like they did, or Crowley did.
Take this all with a brick of salt.
When you're finished, leave a message for the Abyssnik...who'll get it when he returns...or if.
;-7
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