Art and the Stories We Tell

Hands-On Chaos Magic: Reality Manipulation through the Ovayki Current - Andrieh Vitimus 2009


Art and the Stories We Tell

Now that we have dipped our feet into a bit of astral magic, let's reexamine the relationship between fiction, visual art, music, and other creative arts. Obviously, I am a writer, but I do draw. When I have interviewed creative performers, such as musicians, dancers, and performance artists, there are similar themes to what I am trying to say in this section. Why do people create art of any sort? Sometimes art creates meaning; sometimes art of different forms can evoke an emotion or transmit an idea. Many of these things relate to creating a state of mind of some sort in the viewers themselves.

In the fluidity of astral space, the mind is free to create visualizations around a perceived meaning or intuitive cues. Because we have been doing several empowering exercises in our astral temple, our minds have much more flexibility for evocative power. When you try to cast sigil magic, or evoke while in the astral state and have results in the physical world, what does it say about the connection of these astral constructs to the physical world?

In practical terms, revisiting the astral temple over and over makes it easier to visualize, feel, smell, and even hear. In a way, the imagined temple gains greater and greater "reality" within the mind of the magician. This is a similar pattern to what we saw while working with entities (in creating larger and larger links). Again, this is why we were building our sensory imagination and our ability to stay in a trance state. In the terms of our astral work, this means staying within the vision and senses of the mind.

When we read an engaging piece of fiction, stare at art, watch a moving performance, or listen to a moving song, it can seem like an overwhelming sensory experience. In fact, a really good creative production can stick with you almost like an emotionally powerful infection of the imagination. For some individuals, this might even seem like an obsession. One can look at the Harry Potter series to see people who live, breathe, and consume this story. They might have Harry Potter pens, underwear, etc. A magician summoning the worst demon might consider such an obsession as unhealthy. Check your favorite story or movie. Doesn't it seem to set your imagination on fire? Even a porn movie, if that is your favorite genre, really gets the imagination going. A person might dream about the novel or movie. The images and sensations created around the story become almost burned into the subconscious and conscious minds. The conscious mind can pull forth the images quickly and strongly.

My personal process of writing fiction feels a lot like my process for developing astral spaces. I don't think that is an accident. When I sit down to write, it is a very visual and feeling process. The story seems to create itself as I go deeper and deeper into the world and worldview of the characters. J. R. R. Tolkien once said he created the entire Lord of the Rings series around the different languages. For him, the languages seemed to evoke and produce the story. He was, of course, a linguist by trade, and that dominated his thinking.

If you choose to go on interesting astral excursions for entertainment, and not results, you will be entertained. Spirits and your mind are great at "giving" you what you want inside your mind, but this hardly means that they will "do" anything to better your life here. The problem with this is the obsessive nature that these visions and visita tions can produce. In the astral world, you can be the hero of a magnificent epic. You can fly with aliens. It can be a lot more pleasing than "this world." Equally, the astral space must be interpreted through the perceptions of the viewer. Whether or not these constructs exist, something will fill in the gaps of the created space and be willing to produce quite vivid experiences that have little to do with the real world. Many authors, myself included, do at times seem obsessed with their own stories till they can finish them. The stories hold their imagination in a sort of grip, demanding to be told.

Let's take a step back, and do a couple more astral exercises to complicate the issue slightly.

Practical Astral Work: Starting Group Work

Clearly, for astral work, I was leaning toward a very orphic way of learning. In a way, I was instructing you to ask friendly spirits who are "congruent with you" to help you learn. This will of course introduce their biases into the equation within your mind, but to write about the finer points of astral work would be a book in itself. Truthfully, I learned a fair amount via direct interaction with different spirits.

However, there are a few experiments that work well in a group setting without the use of a spirit to take you to other realms. Create an astral construct that has a sigil, which acts as a link to that "space" This is exactly what we did in the last chapter. Now, do not describe that astral temple to your fellow adventurers. After they have experimented with their own astral constructs, give them the sigil you have created, explain that it is a link to an astral space, and invite them to visit the space. If they have been following the methods in the previous chapter, ask them to describe what they feel, see, hear, taste, and smell. Compare notes. While the descriptions might not be exactly similar, see if there are common thematic elements. As you play around with this, create forms and servitors that hang out in the space, and tell the other participants that you made a change. See how that change is interpreted.

If some of the adventurers work together, they could create an astral temple and try experiments like the energy exercises, where one person is broadcasting energy and the rest are picking up and trying to describe that energy. Likewise, a group could try to create an energy circuit for training purposes. The key is verification at every step. However, the purpose of this exercise is not to provide exact guidelines for astral work, it is only to provide a means for the magician to gain intuitive knowledge about the interplay of the astral with imagination.

If you do this, you might notice that there are thematic similarities in the feel, description, and perhaps purpose of the described astral construct that just cannot be "waived away" by chance. If there is something to the notion of other worlds being external sources of information interpreted through perception, and it is not just created in the minds of magicians, perhaps authors and artists can tap that world in somewhat safer ways.

Certainly, there are some quantum physicists who would agree with the other-world theories (Arntz 2004). Whether or not these "astral" constructs existed before the artist, writer, magician, or imaginative child created them in the physical world (channeling them from their existence previous to the experience) is irrelevant. After they are created, they seem to have some investment outside of the mind of the creator that other people may be able to access. As stated in the beginning of our discussion, even the act of creating or viewing a piece of art or fiction may be evocative of a set of ideas or emotions.

Media as Evocative Experience

Whether or not we refer to our brain holographically, using NLP terms or other descriptions, doesn't matter. We create "fictional" or perceptual-based continuities all the time. We like an a - b c continuity in our lives that supports and augments the sense of safe, linear time, and we are preconditioned to accept often faulty logic if it seems to fit a certain pattern of continuity.

We construct stories for ourselves all the time. The various forms of media often provide an outlet for that creative impulse, but are these totally innocuous supplications to the impulse? The entire field of marketing is basically focused on crafting appealing illusions to lure the imagination in toward a kind of obsession on certain states of mind that eventually lead to a course of action (usually a purchase). Is there that much difference between constructed media, which provides the illusion of sensory data, and the kinds of sensory data we create around an astral construct (even one that may be pre-existing)?

Some modern occultists maintain the notion that magic equals media at this point, and certainly the purpose of various media is to create different states of mind within the population, but like anything else, when you motion to tell the universe what its rules are, it will throw something out there to confuse the issue (Louv 2005).

Practical Magic in the Creative Arts

Practical magic, in the context of creative arts, is a bit of a mismatched statement, but let's define "practical" in the sense that it evokes or elicits a state of mind within the viewer, or in this case consumer, of the artistic endeavor. Let's try some experiments combining the techniques in our adventure with the production of some form of media transmission.

Now, in this process, I have to admit, our American culture will judge things on "objective" criteria of excellence that happen to be set by various creative experts who make up the rules as they go along. The irony of that never ceases to amaze me, but people will generally like creative productions that elicit an emotional state in them that they are comfortable with or even addicted to. Generally, people will seek out works of fiction, art, music, etc., that reflect some state of mind they enjoy or must experience. Remember, depression is a state of mind that many people seek out themselves, because they are so used to that state. When you receive criticism, ignore the like-or-dislike quality of the criticism, and instead focus on the emotional, informational content. These "emotional" criticisms are verification of success. This isn't a large step from what we have already been doing, but it is a slight tweaking of what we pay attention to while creating the art.

Create a form, just like we did in the last chapter, that personifies a specific emotion or state of mind. Now, in this case, write a story, paint a picture (or draw one), or otherwise craft an artistic work that relates back to the exact form you created. Using the flow game, attempt to push informationally tainted energy that corresponds to the desired emotion into the creation during and after your process of creating the picture, poem, performance, etc. Try to spend some time on the creative endeavor and, as always, go deeper into trance as you are pushing energy into the creation.

When other people view, read, or hear the creation, what is their response? How does it affect their mood? Now try to repeat the exercise with a created form relating to something you want the audience to do. How does the act of experiencing something that is embedded with a sort of compulsion or request affect the audience? (For more interesting studies, research some marketing techniques, and use the intuitive understanding you get from this process to augment your attempts. A full discussion of those techniques is beyond the scope of this adventure, but I encourage you to experiment with them.)

The Creative Impulse and Subjugation

If the purpose of art is to convey and elicit a state of consciousness from the consumption of art, then the art of marketing and most media links a state of consciousness to a desired outcome. This is a gross simplification, but generally it holds true, even when the linking mechanisms are subtle and well hidden. A story or piece of art offers the audience a chance to feed the imagination while allowing that imagination to be carefully manipulated. Marketing creates a story (not always verbal) that links a set of ideas and states of mind to a product. By linking sex or some other need to a product, a marketer only has to trigger the links for that need and frame your product as either the tool to acquire that need or a substitute for that need. Ironically, if people fully and completely bought into the idea, they might actually manifest a result in line with that stream of conditioning. Unfortunately, we are still conditioned to believe that magic is not "possible," as we discussed earlier. A full treatise on marketing technologies in relation to the occult is beyond the scope of this adventure (but may be part of a different Andrieh adventure); however, this brings us somewhat back to the beginning of the book. We started with reconditioning those chains and looking for patterns that were not from the individuals themselves.

The imagination is often more powerful than merely the facts. An idea backed by emotional responses can be seductive enough to enslave many to its cause, whether that idea is a spirit, a piece of art, a cause, or a concept. The majority of people seem content to give away their imagination and creative power. Often, this manifests in letting other forces (advertising, religion, ideas, spirits, whatever) decide what they should do and what they can have and be. This is the power of imagination. It can free us or be our worst prison. Chances are that if you let someone or something take control of your mind, that person or thing probably doesn't have your best interests at heart. Regardless of how we refer to them, all spirits and even ideas can and do lie if it is in their best interests. Some will lie just for fun.

Religion and Myth as Emotive Agents

Before the modern age, where fiction and media have replaced storytelling, religion and the spiritual world seemed to occupy our collective "imaginations" Certainly, a Jungian would point out that those archetypal stories and personas are reflected in our modern artistic creations.

Religion and myths are on one hand inherently political (since they dictate the moral compass of a culture), but they are also emotive. The idea of the Christian God in the Old Testament was a frightful image of a father who, when you disobeyed, would vigorously remind you and test you. Those stories are quite emotive, and in the hands of a skilled orator they become more and more emotive, producing an innate fear of disobedience. This is a myth tied to an emotion with a buy-in hook (Believe in Christ or face this wrath). The idea of god, or myths, or any religious operations, is to provide a sense of meaning to our lives. The ultimate joke may be that the meaning of our lives is whatever we assign to it.

If people didn't want their imaginations, creative power, and ideas to be supplied for them, there would not be suppliers (who do so for a fee). People want to believe in something, and it is far, far easier to be told what to imagine and what will bring them joy instead of determining that themselves. However, even the most radically magical people maintain a linear story of the events of their lives. One event fits within a continuity of previous events. This is a fundamental story of how life flows. The "search" for meaning seems to be an evolutionary consequence of consciousness itself. The impulse for "meaning" can be a powerful tool in itself.

Creating Your Fictional Life

If the search for meaning is an impetus that seems inherent in people, then that impetus can be harvested for magical results. Some magicians would say that they are consumers of experiences that are outside the scope of general reality. Certainly, Peter Carroll argues for the expression of a magical self that is very antinomian (1992). In this adventure, extreme experiences are also needed to provide memorybased sensory data streams to work with. Often, the stories of magicians and shamans are the stuff of fiction itself, even in the modern age. (Despite the fact that odd occurrences are not talked about freely, almost every magician has had weird occurrences or other unexplainable events at some time in his or her career.) If magicians have not experienced those events, they can still tell compelling stories about themselves. The story itself can provide the framework for the mean ing of the events. Ironically, if you sit down and do this, it is remarkably easy to discover the meaning you have applied to any set of events.

Now, through various mechanisms described in this adventure, we can use energy, sigils, and other tricks to rework memories (thus changing ourselves), but how many people have sat down and wrote the story of the events, placing them in a series? This series of events would probably display a "pattern" of thematic elements. In our model, it might even resonate with a few repetitive states of mind. Events that previously seemed unrelated become much more related in the telling and constructing of a story. Keep in mind that the story only has to be compelling to the creator, not to the audience (this is for the creator). By "story," I mean a series of creative productions. So a story could be a multi-piece art series, a series of musical compositions, or a series of performance-art presentations.

This kind of personal mythology displays certain threads of causal behavior within the subconscious mind. If you sit down and read your own story, and then detach from it (change the tense or name), the thematic elements will pop out glaringly. What you choose to include in the creation is a choice based on what you feel is important (which might not be entirely conscious). The meaning sets the tone and possibly a fair amount of interpretation for all future events. Isn't this the by-product of causality on imagination? Now, eating a poisonous berry and then realizing that it makes you sick is a good survival tactic for a species. People in the modern age, however, make associative jumps in understanding that extend beyond what a good survival tactic is. For instance, they may make the jump to the idea that any berry is poisonous. These chains of associations can make people believe that they have limited choices in a situation. These patterns of meaning are often not wholly obvious to the conscious mind, but the process of creating the story (in fiction, which is my preferred means) gives a person the chance to look at the system-wide patterns. Trying the same basic thing and expecting different results is insanity. Stated another way, resonating with similar mental states probably makes it more difficult to find experiences that lead to different states of mind in the external world. (This is because reality and our minds can be fed the information patterns and can replicate them in a synergetic way where one can influence the other.)

Fear not, fellow adventurer, because a story is just a story. If we don't like the story as stated, we can change the memory of the individual events. NLP attempts to do some of this in practice. Taken a step further, we can look at the themes (or general states of mind that the stories relate to), and we can then change the thematic elements. For example, instead of having a theme that deals with the idea of the defeated and broken protagonist, I might substitute a theme dealing with initiatory trials in relation to stealing and developing power (i.e., the events were part of a much greater future that will manifest).

Rewriting the story is not enough to induce the desired changes in meaning. Chances are, when you wrote the first story, you were quite emotionally invested in that account of the story. If push comes to shove, most people would probably give up their "religion" before they would give up their own story with associated "correct" meanings. This means that for this to be a productive idea, the magician has to provide investment in that alternate story. In practical terms, we can pick out the events of a story, go back to the memories, and associate them with entirely different "emotional content" relating to the different themes we are developing within our lives. Each memory mentioned in the story would be a starting place for self-change. In our adventure, we have simple methods for doing this. Basically, we would go back to the memory and use one of our emotional anchors with all of our senses while in a trance state to change the emotional content, factual details, or perceived meaning of any event.

As each event is changed, the story is rewritten. Different events may be included in the creation. At this point, we need to absolutely believe that this new combination of events is the "real" or accurate portrayal of events. I personally have created a sigilized intent and mantra empowering the new story as the "correct story" while visualizing and walking through the new series of events. This has helped me add "credibility" to the new story. Once the new story is established, try to cast enchantments, sigil magic, and other workings in line with the new thematic elements. Is it easier to enchant for the things you want when they are "in line with the story"? To carry this idea further, accept that the story is fanatically correct (if you need help with what a fanatically correct state is, study some of the more fundamental variants of various religions), and then cast enchantments. How does this change your manifestation ability while within the new set of themes?

For a kick, write a third story (or more stories) with entirely different thematic elements and thus correspondingly different "emotional" content for each event. Accept this new story as fanatically and absolutely correct for as long as you can. At this point, cast workings and operations within the thematic context of the story of your own life. Throughout the entire period of experimentation, journaling will become very important.

Once you are done with all the stories for a set period of your life, you might need to have a book published or do a gallery showing of your work. We can compare our journals and see what the impact of investing in a different story was on the tone of voice, content, or even the events a person chooses to pay attention to.

Of course, I am a writer, so I choose to describe this process in terms of text, and there are tangible benefits for me when I write this out or try to express the story in a series of images, drawings, or even animations. Other adventurers might do this solely within the context of deep meditation, memory, and the astral world they are creating.

Long-Term Goal Setting and Stories

A story usually progresses through a series of logical steps. In NLP: The New Technology of Achievement, there are exercises that suggest a process of goal achievement (Andreas and Faulkner 1994). First, you visualize the end goal you are thinking about. If you don't feel good about the goal, perhaps there are parts of it that are not congruent with the current thematic elements of your story. Check the goal with divination at this point, since you should feel really good about it. If it is a goal you believe you need to accomplish, you should be able to shift to a positive feeling. If you have trouble with the goal or with feeling good about the goal, do some self-searching before you embark down the path. Write down each step from the goal backwards to the present. Try to make each step as small as possible, within reason (obviously, listing the exact physical steps you have to take to achieve a goal might be a little obsessive-compulsive).

When you have compiled this set of steps, look at each step you have created as a guidepost. You could break down the progression from one step to another step into smaller steps, until you are absolutely sure you could achieve each step toward your goal. Working backward encourages the conscious mind to be honest about what is achievable in each step. Reaching the end results through steps looks remarkably like a story of linear continuity. You could check any step of the process you are intuitively uncomfortable with by using divination and meditation. Performing a divination is equally useful when you reach a step where you feel stuck. The steps are not the end-all and be-all; they are guideposts. Anyone who has hiked in a forest knows that sometimes a trail is blocked and one must walk around an obstacle. Now, as magicians, we can change ourselves or remove the external blockage through various means covered earlier in the adventure. If our steps are too small, they may not provide us with the flexibility to adapt and keep moving forward.

Now, if we as magicians sit down and write out all the goals we have, we can see that achieving any one major goal will mean sacrificing other potential goals (because there is a limitation of time available to any one person). Part of the fun is to weigh competing goals against the time it would take to complete any one goal. (We can do this through intuition, divination, and intense self-work.) In some ways, the themes we choose to accept might dictate the importance of certain goals at that moment. At first, this might seem like a purely psychological tech nique, but we have more tools to ease the transition through each plot element in the story we are developing. Simply put, we have a plan for a long-term goal, so the magic we will be doing will be more focused on smaller and easier-to-manifest results, increasing the probability of success at each step. All the techniques we have already discussed become linked to performing and striving for much smaller pushes in the right direction of the successful completion of a long-term project. Of course, you can get a huge result with one working, but this idea combines the notion of working in the physical world and working with magic to get the desired results, while conditioning the self to make the needed steps, both physically and metaphysically. It is possible to do a great enchantment to pass a test, but it's probably still more likely (given the constraints of the story that academics condition in us) that you will do better if you have a plan that involves studying.

By looking at that end goal as the ending of the story, we can look at each step in the process as an outline for producing an award-winning novel of our life. That story and creation is ultimately the reward of the process itself, and it can only be given and received by ourselves. We can take each step in the plan and invest it with the desired informational energy content by controlling our moods and thinking. When we do this, we are extremely likely to get the results we have been working toward. This technique is a kind of binding to a particular goal or story. We are willfully putting on blinders to move forward in a story we are creating by and for ourselves. If we willfully let the "excitement" and "joy" of the end goal infect us, we can joyfully and willfully take each step.

For this to work-and it does work-you must strive to make each step a fun adventure in itself. That is largely a story about each step. If you can stay happy and have fun at each step, the story will surely manifest eventually. This process does imply, however, that achieving a goal of note is a sacrifice of time, energy, and will. I will go so far as to relate each magical operation to a long-term goal while I am striving for that huge goal. This is a bit "obsessive," but if you don't strive for some balance, it's easy to burn out on the process (so you have to build things like relaxation into the process). If at any point, you stop feeling that it's fun, you need to go have some fun and possibly get away from the end goal for a short time.

Events will occur that may not have been part of the original outline. No story would be complete without unexpected plot twists in both good and bad directions, but we can decide how those events fit into the story and the meaning we gave the story in the first place. Of course, if they thematically don't fit, we can apply meaning that leads to a more favorable story (or change the thematic elements within ourselves).

Sometimes, the events of the story might skip over steps or come faster than you expected. Once the subconscious mind understands that you are committed to a greater goal, you might just get it sooner than you expect. Magic is. In this, you are becoming the goal, but as with any other story or perspective we can tell, it is only a temporary change.

Obviously, I can't tell you what goals to choose, but I do think that the process of magical development we have discussed will help you clarify what you want and enable you to achieve it. I do recommend that if you set yourself up for a goal-oriented process like this, do have a secondary goal in line for when you finish the first (otherwise, you might feel a bit lost after finishing the first goal).

Fiction, Manifested Reality, and Astral Whammies

As stated, creating a story of the events you want to manifest with suitable imaginative investment often is enough to bring about those results. Part of the issue is imaginative investment and buying the "dogma" of your own story. If you have been experimenting with the story techniques we've discussed, you might find this much easier, especially if the "new" story about what you want is consistent with the internal themes currently present in your chosen story. One way to do astral magic within your astral temple is to get into a deep enough trance and then invest enough emotive-imaginative force to support the story you are creating by imagining it with your five senses enfolding in front of you and allowing yourself to feel fantastic about it. This is a powerful technique, but sometimes it doesn't work, especially when the internal story is not consistent with the story being created.

One idea I have been experimenting with is to link symbolic forms representing real-world events or processes (like those we have created), feed these forms into astral constructs, and then manipulate both the forms and astral constructs into a "conceived story within my mind," which I then physically write down or draw out. So far the results have been promising. Piecing together the specifics of the technique is an exercise for you to do on your own. Or, if you want, talk to me in person at seminars, in classes, or over coffee. My metaphorical stories will be entirely different from yours, but you have some suggested Lego blocks to build your own story in your own way.

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