What is Magic?

Demons taught us humans how to think because thinking requires concentrated effort.  This effort, or being uptight – hiding shame from the past and seeking glory in the future – allows demons to suck human energy.   

This is why adults are usually more uptight than little children, who aren’t yet in a mode of constant thinking.  We adults are completely accustomed to thinking every second all day long.  We don’t realize how much we have to squelch ourselves and our true feelings down in order to maintain this inner dialogue.  This constant thinking, particularly when it’s worried, or angry, or jealous thinking, provides fodder for the demons who surround us.   

In other words, the invention of agriculture wasn’t so much a matter of humans beginning to farm plants and animals for food as it was demons beginning to farm humans for food.   Now, after millennia of breeding us, the demons have us right where they want us.  Earlier generations of humans were hardy, robust, and self-reliant, which is hard fare for demons to digest.  We moderns with our undisciplined, self-indulgent lifestyles have become a toothsome delight for the demons who suck us.  We are fat and complacent, with no minds or wills of our own.  This makes us easy to herd around and lead to the slaughter.      

Our demon masters, who were overjoyed when humans invented agriculture and became a semblance of them, are presently ecstatic that humans have adopted an urban society wholly disconnected from nature.  We are turning the green, loving earth into a hell world.  At least, when most humans were doing agriculture, they were still attached to the earth’s love and the rhythms of the universe.  Now, urban society has cut humans off completely from the earth’s love.  When does anyone even look at a tree anymore except through a speeding windshield or a television screen?   And the food – the soylent green – which people today eat from supermarkets, …  Welcome to hell, folks!  You don’t have to wait until you die.  Hell is right here, right now.   The worst part of it is that most people have been trained to call this heaven.   And the demons are eating it up.  Eating us up. 

            There was nothing wrong with us humans having associated ourselves with demons for the past few millennia.  We learned a lot from them.  We learned how to think, for starters.  Now it’s time we humans went our own way and followed our own star, because continuing to serve our demon masters will just lead to our own destruction as a species. 

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Prior to the invention of agriculture after the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, humans were more or less like any other apes.  They were more intelligent than most other animals, but not particularly smart.  My guides have told me that if we could meet one of our ancestors from that period, we would consider it an animal.  There’s no level upon which we modern humans would consider those ancestors to be human beings.    

It was an alliance that the human race forged with the race of demons during the Upper Paleolithic – early Mesolithic era that made us modern humans the thinking, rational animals we are today.  It was at that time that trapping, fishing, and hunting with dogs were invented – ensnaring game instead of hunting it directly.  Then agriculture was invented – raising animals and plants instead of gathering them directly.   Demons channeled new technologies to the human race through individuals who were inventors and innovators.  They still do.   

These indirect techniques for getting food necessitated a greater sense of planning for the future than direct hunting / gathering had required.   The new social order demanded a new type of consciousness:  perception and cognition tied to linear time.  Planning for the future is what creates the future.  Until the demons taught us about the future, all human beings had to work with was the now moment.  

Linear time is the matrix of our separated, lower self.  Our human ancestors, like infants, didn’t have anywhere near as much sense of separatedness as we do.  They were not as individuated as we are today.  They lived in a more timeless frame of mind, a sense of belonging to the universe.  Their mental process wasn’t a matter of constant thinking, but rather of direct knowing what their ancestors, spirits, and the earth were telling them.  They felt themselves to be part of an ongoing, natural process in the same way that we feel ourselves to be part of our society.   Because they were not as separated as we are today, they felt less Angst than we do, because they had no future to worry about. 

Our sense of linear time is the product of our linear thinking.  If we stop thinking so much, like ancient humans and infants, then the past and future lose much of their meaning.   They are just not as important, so they are not as there.     

If the future didn’t exist, would we care about it?   It’s precisely our caring and worrying about the future that conjures up its existence.  We care about the future, it’s important to us, because we believe there’s glory for us somewhere in our future.  We believe that someday we will win the lottery, or find our true soul-mate, or become famous, or go to heaven when we die.  These sorts of expectations are what trap us into striving towards a future which never arrives.   The other side of that coin is our past, the things that we are ashamed of and are trying to forget about (and would never reveal to another person).  That striving towards a future and away from a past is what creates the illusion that there is such a thing as a future and a past.  When striving ends, so too does linear time.   

Our higher selves are timeless.  Higher self is eternal:  it is our touch with the Spirit.  Higher self has to be squelched down into the straitjacket of linear time in order to create our uptight, niggling little lower self.   We learned how to create a sense of linear time – a separated, lower self which is caught in a loop of constant self-reflection – from our demon masters.   Over the past millennia the demons have taught us everything that we modern humans consider human.   That is to say, our civilization – all of our thinking – is demonic in origin.  The qualities that we modern humans believe elevate us above the realm of animals are essentially demonic qualities.   

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            What are demons like?  They’re like us humans, but are far more intelligent and cunning, and also sleazier.  They’re also really touchy, uptight, and self-important.  They hate being ignored, and absolutely freak out at being laughed at.   The demons which I have met face-to-face, in dreaming, appeared like normal people, but there was something very slimy about them.  That is how I knew who they were.   

Most of my encounters with demons were oblique.  I could feel their presence because I would start getting angry for no reason.  This is because I’m an angry person:  a fearful person they would make fearful, a lustful person they would make lustful, and so on.   

Demons are basically everywhere.  For example, when we are driving and another driver cuts in right ahead of us and we beep the horn in anger, that’s in fact an exchange between that guy’s demons and our own.  Some psychopaths like Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Ted Bundy, got their dazzling, hypnotizing charm from the demons which possessed them.  Other psychopaths like Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein were bestial thugs.  What demons often give their hosts is an extraordinary cunning and a feeling for the jugular.  They sense precisely how far they can go and what they can get away with; and they have no scruples whatsoever about destroying anyone or anything that gets in their way.   

            Not all demon-possessed people become world leaders, of course, and not all are psychopathic.  Many people who are depressed, repressed, angry and irritable all the time, constantly ill, addicted to drugs or sex or whatever, self-destructive generally, are possessed by demons.  You can stand in a supermarket and watch the demon-possessed people go by:  the harried mother pulling her kid in tow as she shops, yelling at the kid and yanking his arm out of its socket to drag him away from the things which normal curiosity leads him to explore;  the old geezer with a perpetual scowl, pushing his shopping cart aggressively with an “out of my way, buddy!” expression on his face; the care-worn, overburdened, downtrodden people dragging themselves up and down the aisles.   

It’s not too hard to tell if people are demon-possessed when they get old.  When they are still young, there’s usually enough of the original person left there so that you can’t see the demons as readily.  As the people get older, however, the demons eat up more and more of their souls and their joy.    

If, as people age, they get lighter and more joyous, then they’re not demon-possessed.  On the other hand if they get more uptight, nastier, depressed, or more self-pitying as they age, then they probably are demon-possessed.  This is why it’s so hard to deal with those old people – you’re not dealing with the person anymore, just with a demon.  

            Demons are not evil.  They’re doing what they have to do in order to eat, just like the rest of us.  There is no evil per se in the universe.  If you want to call the necessity of killing and devouring other beings in order to survive evil, then the one you’ve got to blame for this is the One who made that rule in the first place.  That was not Satan.  Demons have to eat just like everybody else.  What demons eat is what we call feelings, especially uptight feelings.   

            What makes being a demon, or messing around with demons, evil is that there’s no real joy or happiness in it.  The way they feed themselves, and the way we feed ourselves under their influence, is uptight and ugly.  It’s a big rush of self-importance, and then lots of pain.  Then another big rush of self-importance, and then lots of pain.  It’s a spiral of self-importance and pain.  It’s not very peaceful or pleasant.  But it can’t properly be characterized as evil per se.  It’s an extremely popular lifestyle for humans as well as demons.   It’s called society. 

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In our society the stigma attached to believing in demons is quite strong.   Anyone who admits to believing in demons is considered crazy or stupid, or perhaps evil, and is no longer taken seriously.   However, our society’s view of this issue is incorrect.  Becoming a magician requires facing up to this truth and dealing with it, not sweeping it under the rug.  Magicians have to deal with how things really are and not worry about what other people might think or say about them.     

The trouble with all of the false stereotypes of black magic and demons in the popular media, particularly that these things don’t exist, is that they prevent us from understanding what is really going on.  As many fundamentalist Christians rightly believe, demons are everywhere.  In fact, they run the whole shebang.   

            When we talk about demons, we’re not talking about Transylvania.  We’re talking about trouble right here in River City.  Demons are pretty much all over the place, and they run our society.  The government, media, academia, churches – indeed, all of our precious institutions – are of the demons, by the demons, and for the demons.  The movie The Matrix is actually a pretty good picture of what our society is really like, but with demons rather than machines behind the scenes pulling the strings.  Like germs, demons are everywhere.  Therefore, they are not something to be frightened of or worried about.  In fact, the people who are the most freaked out by demons, such as Inquisitors and witch hunters, are usually the most demon-possessed themselves.  Likewise, the people who are the most uptight about black magic are usually the ones who are doing the most black magic themselves.  Most demon-possessed people, like most black magicians, consider themselves to be upstanding, righteous, pious citizens.   

Many people in our society are demon-possessed.  Indeed, it’s quite possible that you may be demon-possessed.   I was possessed for the first 40 years of my life, until my spirit guides pointed that fact out to me and explained to me how to cast them out.  It’s no big deal, really, either to be possessed or to cast demons out.  This will be explained later. 

            Here’s a fictional example which illustrates how people unconsciously call demons in to possess them, taken from John O’Hara’s novel Appointment in Samarra.    Notice how Julian English’s wife calls in a demon of her own in response to Julian’s demon: 

            “He did.  What’s the use of trying to fool myself?  I know he did.  I know he did and no matter what excuses I make or how much I try to tell myself that he didn’t, I’ll only come back to the same thing:  He did.  I know he did.  And what for?  For a dirty little thrill with a woman who – oh, I thought he’d got all that out of his system.  Didn’t he have enough of that before he married me?  …  Ah, Julian, you stupid, hateful, mean, low, contemptible little son of a bitch that I hate!  You do this to me, and know that you do this to me!  Know it!  Did it on purpose!  …  You big charmer, you.  You irresistible great big boy, turning on the charm like the water in the tub; turning on the charm like the water in the tub; turning on the charm turning on the charr-arm, turning on the charm like the water in the tub.  I hope you die. 

            “I hope you die because you have killed something fine in me, suh.  Ah hope you die.  Yes-suh, Ah hope you die.  You have killed something mighty fine in me, English, old boy, old kid, old boy.  What Ah mean is, did you kill something fine in me or did you kill something fine.”   

            This example is a good illustration of the way in which people call in demons to possess them when they feel especially vulnerable and in need of drastic protection.  In most cases the appeal to demons is unconscious.  Once demons are called in, whether consciously or not, they don’t leave unless they are deliberately exorcised.   

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This very sentiment is often expressed by people who lose their lower self willy-nilly after a near brush with death.  They say things like, “Now, I’m just taking it one day at a time.”  What they are saying is that their eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with their death has forced them to drop their self-pity: their customary moods and concerns.  They lighten up, stop clinging to things, stop resenting the past and worrying about the future.  They become more selfless (closer to Higher Consciousness).   

Higher Consciousness means that, while both good and bad things still happen to the person, there’s not as much of a “me” there that things are happening to.  There’s less personal stake in what happens.  Situations just unfold under their own momentum.  Things are taken in stride – philosophically, not personally.    

Erasing self-pity is not easy or fun; indeed, it’s quite painful.  St. John of the Cross characterized it as the Dark Night of the Soul.  Since it is our mind, our constant thinking, which stabilizes our reality and which brings the waking world into focus, erasing it means losing our mind.  Acting with Higher Consciousness means letting go of everything that we cling to; and of course sanity is one of those things.   

Another way of looking at our lower self is to think of it as consisting of concentric rings of decreasing importance, like the layers of an onion.   The brain is at the center.  The rest of the body forms the next ring.  Possessions and intimate relationships form another ring.  Religion, country, hobbies, favorite sports team are an outer ring; and so on.  If any of these rings are threatened, then most people feel that their self is threatened.    

Take, as an example, how most Americans felt about the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.  They felt as though they, personally, had been attacked.  Thus it is true to say that to most Americans, the World Trade Center was a part of what they considered to be their self. 

From the point of view of Higher Consciousness, however, the self is everything.  In other words, to get to our Higher Consciousness, instead of using our brain and body as a central point of reference, we use the world as a whole.  To actually make this shift is not an intellectual feat but an emotional one.  It involves opening our hearts – having compassion for everything instead of just our onion rings.   To connect to your higher consciousness, try using this creative visualization: 

Feel that you are truly connected to the universe;That you have been chosen to save the world; That you have been chosen to reach out to every being that comes in contact with you;That your love knows no bounds and gives you joy such as you never thought was possible. 

Then go on to visualize how this is being expressed in ways that you would prefer.  You can alter the basic formula at will to make it more meaningful to you personally.   Do this visualization twice daily.  You should become imbued with this visualization, thinking and feeling it all day long, like daydreaming, but in the present tense.  Also every day you must sense your connectedness to all that is around you and to everyone you meet.  Reject nothing and no one who comes your way.  Little-by-little you’ll take possession of your Higher Consciousness and shed the lower one.   

(excerpted from Magical Almanac Ezine.  Copyright © 2007 by Bob Makransky, all rights reserved). 

More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac/files  

This constant internal dialogue of self-pity makes us believe that there is a continuing, abiding “me” there. The constant thinking and agitation about a “me,” is what creates that “me” – a shameful, glorious, shameful, glorious, shameful, glorious “me.” That “me” doesn’t even exist in the eyes of other people; it merely exists in our fantasies of how we believe other people see us. How much more flimsy could the thing be?

As we intend to stop pitying ourselves – as we gradually lose our feelings of shame about the things which have happened to us and our seeking glory in the eyes of other people – we also lose our sense of there being a “me” there to whom things are happening. If we no longer particularly care one way or the other about what happens, things no longer happen “to me”; they just happen, period. Our lower self then begins to disintegrate and our Higher Consciousness emerges. As it does so, our everyday, waking life becomes more like dreaming: more vivid and alive and full of meaning.

Most people in their daily lives rarely operate with Higher Consciousness. In most people’s lives Higher Consciousness only surfaces now and then in response to emergencies and sudden, unexpected events. Higher Consciousness emerges to save our lives; to pull us back from the brink; and to warn us away from certain people, situations, and places. Higher Consciousness sees an opportunity and grasps it without hesitation or doubt of any sort.

When we operate with our Higher Consciousness, we are mentally clear, coldly efficient, pitilessly detached, and utterly determined. We no longer feel like our usual, lower selves – trapped in our petty little moods and concerns. Rather, we are exhilarated and free. When our Higher Consciousness surfaces it brushes aside all our doubts and fears. We no longer fear death, and we never say die. In a manner of speaking, our Higher Consciousness is actually the same thing as our death. When society teaches us fear of death, what it is teaching us is fear of our Higher Consciousness. Our Higher Consciousness is a state of unfettered limitlessness, just as our lower self is a state of crabbed dissatisfaction and torpor, symbolized by the prison of the body.

Our Higher Consciousness acts from the gut, not the mind. Our Higher Consciousness doesn’t operate on social conditioning – at least not in our decadent, self-indulgent society. Higher Consciousness was the basis of training in warrior societies which existed on this earth in ancient times. Even as recently as a century ago humans were more robust, self-reliant, and daring (closer to Higher Consciousness) than we self-coddling moderns are.

Our Higher Consciousness acts on our true feelings, not on our thought forms. We cultivate our Higher Consciousness by not indulging our customary moods and concerns – by cultivating the attitude that nothing that happens or doesn’t happen is all that important.

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We mistakenly believe that our body is the source of our suffering, but in fact it is our suffering that is the source of our body.  Our body is “made of” self-pity; that’s what gives it its apparent solidity.  Without self-pity when you bang it, it still hurts; but it doesn’t hurt “me;” it just hurts, period.   The sense of there being a solid “me” there is simply self-pity, which we have learned from our parents and society. 

Self-pity – focusing attention on a “self” – consists of nervous habits like the tensing ourselves up that we feel all the time we are awake; the need to be zipping about, fidgeting and fuming, attending to this or that urgency.  Self-pity is the defensive wall we feel up against other people when we’re having sex with them, or even just talking to them.   Self-pity is the attitude we put on when we wake up every morning, and the mask with which we greet life and other people all day long.  If we were to wake up one day in someone else’s moods and concerns, with a wholly different set of self-pity agendas, we’d feel thoroughly disoriented.  We’d think we’d been jettisoned into an alien universe.    

Our self-pity – the feeling we conjure up with our customary moods and concerns – doesn’t really belong to us at all.  We’ve merely learned it from our parents and society.   Yet that is what we identify as our self, and defend with every fiber of our being.   Most of us are so wrapped up in our self-pity that we don’t usually understand this vital point:  that there is a Higher Consciousness there behind the self-pity.  That’s why we cling so hard to our self-pity:  we’re afraid that that is all that stands between us and annihilation.    

In a nutshell, self-pity consists of comparing ourselves to others:  feeling superior to others, judging and criticizing others, and expecting things from others.  In other words, self-pity exists only in relation to other people.  This is a very important point:  what most people consider to be their “self” is a socialized phenomenon.  Newborns do not have self-pity.  They don’t have a central point of reference, a sense of where they end and other begins.  To newborns things are moment-to-moment, and everything is one.  There’s no abiding, continuing, separated “me” there.   

Self-pity is like a piece missing out of a jigsaw puzzle.  It is wholly defined by the others surrounding it.   It is precisely the belief that we’re better than other people that makes us no better than other people.  That belief is what traps us in our lower selves and hence our bodies.  It is the wall that separates being awake from dreaming.   

Our self-pity is created by our constantly thinking thoughts of shame and glory.   If we analyze our habitual thinking, we will realize that it consists mostly of thoughts about the past and future.  Thoughts about the past evoke feelings of shame, of embarrassment, of things which we try to hide from other people and to forget about ourselves.  Thoughts about the future evoke feelings of glory, in which we revel in fantasies of approbation and vindication from other people – winning the lottery, or being famous, or finding our true love, or going to heaven when we die.   Hiding shame and seeking glory are the engine which motivates all our social striving.  Our thoughts of shame and glory make us believe that we are separate and unique and special – that we have self-existence, that the universe revolves around us.   

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When we use the term “Higher Consciousness” we are not talking about some alien form of mindset attainable only after thirty years of meditation in a cave in the Himalayas.  Higher Consciousness is the mindset with which we were born:  the joy, contentment, and feeling of at-one-ment which was our everyday mind when we were infants and young children.   In most of us adults, Higher Consciousness has been largely replaced by self-pity.  In other words, what we mistakenly believe to be our “self” is merely self-pity in one or another of its forms (shame or glory).

We can get a clue as to what our social training does to us by observing newborns.  Although newborns occupy a physical body from our point of view, that’s obviously not the newborns’ point of view.  Newborns don’t have a sense of being centered or trapped in a body.  They don’t even understand that they have a body.  All they know is feelings, how things feel.  If they are hungry, or in pain, they cry.  However, they have no sense that it is a bodily condition which is causing their discomfort.  All they know, all they are, is a feeling at a particular time.   

Being in a body is an interpretation that infants learn as they grow and discover their bodies.   In other words, our physical body is something that we’ve learned:  we’re not born with it.  Learning how to operate without a body – unlearning what we learned as infants – is what astral projection is all about:  operating outside the box of the physical body.  Astral projection is a technique (or better said:  a cognitive process) predicated upon the realization that the physical body has no objective existence.  The physical body is a cognitive interpretation we have learned to make, and astral projection is based upon an alternative interpretation.    The interpretation that we have a physical body is merely a belief, exactly like the interpretation that we have a body while we’re dreaming is merely a belief.   Being awake is in fact nothing more than a highly evolved and specialized form of dreaming.  Waking consciousness has evolved over millions of years, since the first multi-cellular beings appeared on the earth.  Therefore it has a lot of stability and momentum behind it.  When we’re awake, it really seems real.   The physical body really seems solid.   When you bang it, it really hurts.    In fact, however, the physical body is merely a solider illusion – a more encompassing, more persistent, more convincing illusion – than the body that we have in dreams.  We adults have a much more sharply defined and delineated sense of selfhood than infants do – by which self is meant (body-centered) lower self.   The difference between Higher Consciousness and lower self is that Higher Consciousness says:  “This happened”, whereas lower self says:  “This happened to me.”  Our sense of our having a lower self – a central “me” to which things happen – actually consists of nothing more than self-pity.   

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What is reincarnation?  To begin with, reincarnation does not take place within a matrix of linear time.  It’s not as if e.g. you had a life in ancient Greece and then you died; then you had a life in ancient Rome and then you died; then you had a life in the Middle Ages and then you died; etc.  Rather, all of your past and future lives are going on at once, in an eternal NOW moment. 

Think of it like this:  survivors of near-death experiences often report seeing all the events that ever happened to them flash by them in no time at all.  Thus it would seem that we experience the thought forms of our lives twice – once in linear fashion over a lifetime, and the second time around in timeless fashion at the moment of death.

In an analogous manner, while there is indeed an evolution going on in the universe, this evolution is not taking place in linear time:  it’s all happening at once. Space and time have no objective existence.  They are merely cognitive tools which evolved as sentient beings evolved, to enable them to focus upon one thing at a time instead of everything at once.  The linearity of time is an illusion, a falsehood, which Eastern philosophers have termed maya or samsara.  It is this false appearance that there is such a thing as an objective reality out there unfolding in linear time, which animates the striving of all sentient beings and keeps the wheel of reincarnation – of life and death and rebirth – turning. 

Babies (and even young children, who sometimes talk about memories from other lifetimes) are not as centered in a one-track existence as adults are.  Babies and young children are consciously impinged upon by influences from other lives and probable realities which most adults have learned to ignore.  The same socialization process which props up a baby’s sense of being a unitary, abiding, separated individual also imprisons that individual in a furrow of inexorable linear temporality. 

For most people, 99.9% of decisions are made on the basis of socially-conditioned actions and reactions – what they were taught by their parents and society.  But every now and then everyone has poignant moments – moments of consciousness or conscientiousness or conscience – when they sense that probable realities are branching off this way or that; or they feel echoes from other lifetimes and realities; or they hear voices from deep inside them.  When this happens people feel connected to something more profound than their customary hustle and bustle; and that something is their true purpose in this lifetime – the reason they were born.

 Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats’ channeled masterpiece A Vision explains the true nature of reincarnation – what it really is and how it really works.   Starting in November 2007 Magical Almanac, Bob Makransky’s free monthly ezine of astrology and magic, will be presenting a six-article series which explains the theory of reincarnation as described in A Vision.   This series includes complete instructions for safe and easy techniques you can use on your own to run past life regressions and probable reality progressions; and to recapitulate memories from your present lifetime (thereby releasing the pent-up emotions which you have invested in your memories).  To subscribe, send an e-mail to:  MagicalAlmanac-subscribe@yahoogroups.com 

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“We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother, sister of the next.  Sometimes, however, a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again.”   –  William Butler Yeats, A Vision

Time isn’t a line.  It’s more like a plane, an infinite-ring circus, an eternal NOW moment, in which everything that has ever happened and ever will happen, in all lifetimes and realities, is happening all at once.  But each individual thought form involved thinks that it is a real, separated being with individual self-existence and a personal history and future.  Each of the infinite thought forms which make up “us” – all of the things we have ever experienced or ever will experience; all of the monads of every instant of awareness in all our probable realities from this life and all our past and future lives – thinks that it is the real “us”, centered in a universe in which things make sense.  Each individual thought form (since they are indeed discrete) thinks it’s the top dog (most important).  And from any given thought form we can move to an infinite number of possible futures or remember an infinite number of possible pasts.  And once that decision is made – the decision to move from the standpoint of any given thought form now moment to any other given thought form future moment or remembered past moment – mind will stamp upon that decision the notation:  MAKES SENSE!  (is “real”).  That’s the only reason why things make sense (seem real) to us:  because we are constantly telling ourselves the lie that things make sense.  We tell ourselves the same lie when we are dreaming (that what we are experiencing makes sense, is “real”). 

Admittedly, some probable futures or pasts are more likely than others; it’s more likely that your next thought form will be moving a bit further along reading this sentence rather than suddenly appearing on a Caribbean beach sipping a piňa colada.  That’s the sort of thing that happens in dream consciousness – the jump from thought form to thought form tends to be a lot more haphazard than in waking consciousness.  But it’s nonetheless a random process, shaped by tendencies from human and individual memory, whose only claim to fame is that it makes sense – there’s no doubt about it!   

            Mind is what makes sense out of this selection.  This is easier to see in dream consciousness where even the most bizarre and improbable (from the point of view of wakefulness) thought forms can pop up and yet make perfect sense at the time we are dreaming them.  Similarly, our waking consciousness (experience of everyday life) also only makes sense because we have decided to let it make sense.  That assumption is what traps us in our furrows. 

To lose our sense of linear time implies living moment-to-moment with all of our memories – at least the feeling of them if not the actual thought forms.  Only by recapitulating all of our memories are we in possession of all the memories (feelings) of all our past and probable lives, as well as this one.   At that point we’re not really centered in any given one of them anymore.  The waking state is controllable only as long as it seems familiar and important – i.e., centered in a past and future.  The trick, then, is to be quite comfortable with everything out of control, as it were.  When things are out of control then we are dreaming.  The more out of control we let our daily lives be, the more we are actually dreaming rather than being awake, and the closer we are to our intent – to being able to act on our true feelings rather than our social conditioning.  This is what the practice of magic is all about. 

(adapted from Thought Forms, Copyright © 2000 by Bob Makransky.  All rights reserved).

More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  www.dearbrutus.com

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