music is transcendence

sitting here listening, at random, to a trance classic: robert miles' "children" (dream version). a song that can lift me into the sky and send me back to my college years, or forward to infinite unknown, or, best of all, to right now.

People long for big thrills. Peak experiences. Some people come to Zen expecting that Enlightenment will be the Ultimate Peak Experience. The Mother of All Peak Experiences. But real enlightenment is the most ordinary of the ordinary. Once I had an amazing vision. I saw myself transported through time and space. Millions, no, billions, trillions, Godzillions of years passed. Not figuratively, but literally. Whizzed by. I found myself at the very rim of time and space, a vast giant being composed of the living minds and bodies of every thing that ever was. It was an incredibly moving experience. Exhilarating. I was high for weeks. Finally I told Nishijima Sensei about it . He said it was nonsense. Just my imagination. I can't tell you how that made me feel. Imagination? This was as real an experience as any I've ever had. I just about cried. Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment.

yesterday as i read through my book on chaos magic, i was beset by a pair of thoughts: first, i was pleased that i have, evidently, reached (at last) a state of familiarity with the subject of esoterica and the occult where i can spot fundamental misunderstandings, especially of crowley. second, in spotting just such a misunderstanding, i gained a deeper understanding of crowley, myself, and what "it" is all about.

magic is often defined as: effecting change in the universe in accordance with one's will.

crowley, in starting his own religion, stated as law: do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

unlce al, being, of course, a big fan of subtlety, did not mean "go crazy you wild kids," and this is the subtlety that i think the author of the current book i'm reading possibly does not grasp, or at least, certainly has not made clear thus far. many books on magic (including, so far, this one) talk about performing magic to accomplish various things: cure sickness, bring money, find love. in essence: to improve one's standing in life.

whether one takes as given that these things are possible through the techniques described, it is definitely the case that when crowley said "do what thou wilt" he had a very specific meaning -- a constraint on "will" that i happen to find inspiring and beautiful, which renders rather ridiculous in my estimation people in funny hats and robes mucking about with crystals and incense to get a job or a lover (though crowley himself, in a wonderful example of his Human capacity for hypocricy, many times did exactly that).

the definition of crowley's "will" also influences the understanding of the "will" in the definition of magic that i gave above. simply put, crowley's will had much more to do with purpose than desire. crowley taught that the aim of a magician should be to discover his True Will, essentialy, what it is that the Universe has in store for the magician; what it is that the Universe wants of him. crowley felt, and founded a religion based on it, that each of us is "here for a reason" and that once we discover that reason, we put ourselves in harmony with the universe, at which point, everyhing that we do to satisfy our True Will becomes the easiest thing to do in the entire Universe. indeed, the Universe "wants" us to accomplish our True Will, and thus, once we have discovered it, the Universe will gladly lend us a hand in git'r'done-ing it.

"do what thou wilt" encourages us to accomplish our individual purpose of existence. it is not a license for rape and pillage, and it never was. likewise, crowley would argue that magic being a tool for effecting change in accordance with ones will applies only to ones True Will. all other magic is, in essence, masturbation, and as the story of onan demonstrates, god does not take kindly to the choking of the chicken.

last night, as i drove up the 101 from mountain view to a nicer place, in the pouring rain, with moonlight and headlight and lamplight illuminating the mist, and music which elevates my soul playing loud as it was needed through my favorite set of speakers, i looked out my passenger-side window at the very large front tire of a very fast moving big rig. i was entranced by the way in which it threw off clouds of mist, providing an ephemeral, delicate dance platform for the ambient light. how such a monster of human ugliness barreling down a rude stretch of crumbling blacktop crowded with my fellow idiots could generate so sublime a host for heavenly beauty, amidst a backdrop of musical beauty and speed. at that moment, i felt something amazing, that i've felt before. i felt as though i was a part of the universe, i felt yoga, and that by my actions i had helped bring myself into alignment with my own True Will (whether i believe in such a thing or not) and thus with the Universe itself, and that by my own, insignificant application of Will, i have helped bring the universe a little bit closer to an ideal state.

a moment of transcendence, it was.

a bit of a self-applied head-job, it was.