Mage the Ascension sphere project exploration thingy final writeup.
Tonight, the new moon in Pisces marks the end of Spirit section and of my project. It hasn’t been all that I dreamed it would be, but it has provided some insights on how these extended undertakings work and do not work.
My intention was to spend two weeks focusing on each sphere, to throw myself into the experience of that realm and see what I could learn. Right away, I ran into difficulty with lack of a specific plan. It’s an old bad habit of mine to not set a clear, accomplishable series of tasks or goals and instead just “do as much as you possibly can all the time,” which invites exhaustion and doubt. I specifically avoided goals that depended on success, e.g. “learn how to do x,” because I knew I could get hung up on one of those for an unforgivable period of time without progress, and lust for result would become a problem. But the two week period was pretty arbitrary, and that bothered me somehow.
Between each section, on the new and full moons, I did a ritual to mark the transition and tie it into a hypersigil story that I’d been working on for a couple months. The story was already in bad shape. Basically, the type of constrained writing I was attempting brought way too much entropy into the mix, and the only way to deal with that would be to do an impossible amount of writing. Sort of like if you insisted on adding a few tablespoons of salt to your cake mix every morning, the only way to save the recipe would be to add a huge amount of all the other ingredients. Eventually I set the story aside for a while, but since some promising results did show up in relation to it, I plan to let it sit for a while and then scavenge the major symbols from it, if not into a continuation of the story, then into a reboot or a different format.
I performed some overcomplicated rituals (since I didn’t know what else to do, I knew I wanted some kind of ritual but wasn’t sure how to fill the time) on the moons to dump the power of the spheres into my story, but without a solid structure to receive it, I think all that extra juice just destabilized the hypersigil further. And since the main character was essentially a literary voodoo doll of myself, this confusion circled back to me, then I expressed it back into the story and… yeah. Add to that winter in Seattle, a boxy beige-y apartment without any good walking areas outside, a fuckton of energy poured into me from previous projects, and too much weed for the situation, and you get one very uncomfortable Ringtail.
Fortunately, that’s all it was. Discomfort, building into overanalysis and associated anxiety. By early December it was bad enough that it interfered with my sleep, and I had sensations of constantly needing to stretch and move that focused around my lower spine (probably the fact that I was sleeping on the floor without a mattress didn’t help). I began exercising because my body forced me to, and for a while I did just enough walking and yoga to be able to sleep at night, but the confusion messed with my head and convinced me not to do more through what I now see as a philosophical misunderstanding. Also laziness, veiled by said misunderstanding.
So by the end of the third section I was feeling pretty discouraged, and I quit the biweekly writeups because I felt like I didn’t have enough to say. I wasn’t going to stop the project in the middle, but at this time I also stopped putting a lot into it. I decided I would continue with the rituals and work a little bit with the spheres in between, but not really worry about it. And continue the tattoos, because as I mentioned in the first writeup, I tattoed all the sphere sigils on myself during the corresponding section, except for a couple which were in places that required someone else to do it. Most of them are still unfinished because it was slow and painful as hell until I got the hang of it. But from the first poke, there was no going back or quitting in the middle, and that’s probably the real reason I followed through on the whole project.
It was right about this time, when I stopped going out to get the spheres, that they began coming for me. This was actually right on time with my prediction: from previous experiments, I expected that it would be somewhere around the fourth or fifth section that the universe would start picking up the pattern and sending it back to me. I think this was part of the reason I intuitively chose to begin with Matter; even though it would be kind of weird and difficult at first, the momentum would pick up right as I was going into the more abstract spheres and launch me just as I reached Prime.
In the fourth section, Correspondence, I set up a interdimensional portal thingy at a local park, then semi-coincidentally spent half the section in another state visiting family for the holidays. But the real synchs began the night of the full moon transition from Correspondence to Time, which occurred on New Years. For my companions and I, this was a beautiful night of mushrooms and magic taking place at the house where we now live, during which we ran through a doorway into a new timeline at exactly 12 midnight. Later, I wandered upstairs with Alice Hart into an area with some seriously weird, bigger-on-the-inside spacial distortions, which are present even when sober, but were mindblowing at the time. We found a tiny, neat bathroom with a clock stopped at 12 midnight which we dubbed the Bathroom at the End of Time, and a sort of cat tunnel in the walls that keeps going on and on when you think it should end, which we’re pretty sure leads to Wonderland or something.
The synchronicities were strongest during the Time section, but they kept up through Entropy and into Prime. Possibly beyond that, but it’s hard to tell what goes beyond confirmation bias. Prime section was bordered by a lunar and a partial solar eclipse, the first since the big one last summer, which I thought was pretty cool. To help with my exploration in this sphere, I listened to a song which has a particularly poweful effect on me, which I’d been saving for such a time. Listening to it a few times drove me into an obsessive and very impatient quest to know myself and all the ultimate things
right the fuck now, even though I was aware that this was impossible. All the physical and psychological tension now had a spiritual counterpart. I undertook some bizarre yet harmless actions, trying to sort of muffle myself into an ultimate dissociated realization, which landed me some altered states of consciousness but didn’t achieve what I’d hoped for. I think the callings that I projected had the effect of intensifying everything I was going through even more, and one night when it was all particulatly bad I decided that I had to take action… go to a nature park a short drive away, go there every day. I followed through, and walking around there helped me feel better, got my blood moving. I started jogging, and that cleared my head more. I realized that, if I was going to take the time to exercise, there was no reason not to put my full effort into it. I’d been half-assing the exercise, in violation of a motto that I’ve stated here before, that moderation is for cowards and everything worth doing is worth overdoing. Certain experiments have shown me that below all thought and memory, my baseline consists of a frenetic drive to
orient and
act. Thus, extended peace is not and never will be possible while I’m alive, but by dumping all my energy and struggle into manic workouts and jobs outside the house, I could create relief in contrast, flush out all the tangled inactivity and achieve some temporary degree of respite from the eternal war that is me!
For the rest of Prime and Mind sections, I kept up sufficient activity to reclaim my sanity. I’m now moved into a much less claustrophobic environment where I don’t have to work out as often or as hard to retain clarity, but I know now what I can do, if put in a similar situation again. I felt that Prime section was kind of an offer for me to get back into the project, and with both me and the momentum pushing, there might have been some interesting occurances for the last month. But… I didn’t. My focus was moving to other things. I didn’t put more coins in the machine, and the synchronicities died down.
So, mainly I’ve been talking about the weird personal ride this project gave me. Honestly, it got more personal even than I expected it to, probably because I was calling the magic but then not going out to find and work with it externally. I have noticed an increase in my success with direct magic, but it’s hard to say how much of that is from this project in particular and how much is a continuing trend. In MtA theory, power comes from understanding and the development of a personal paradigm, but with my head as fucked as it was, I didn’t make a lot of headway on that, much as I tried. In the end, complexity can be added but the core mechanism is just magic. If it works it’s because it’s magic, if it doesn’t it’s because who knows. And I’ve been getting better at it, it’s because I’ve been doing a ton of magic toward the purpose of getting better.
Based on what I actually did end up practicing, here is my suggestion for how I would redo this project. Instead of basing it on periods of time, take a day off for each sphere whenever that’s possible, and do the following:
Matter: Spend the whole day working on some kind of hands-on craft(s). Experiment with different tools and materials, and
listen to the medium as you work with it. Challenge yourself. Notice where it resists you and what shapes it wants to take of its own accord. Think of it like a co-creator, and when something happens that you didn’t intend, consider it a suggestion. I find that listening like this drastically improves the rate of learning. If you want, go online and look up where the stuff comes from, its chemical structure, and why it behaves the way it does.
Forces: Go outside on a day when the weather is bad. Try to keep the wind and precipitation off your back. Try to build a fire. Run, climb on things, ride a bike if you have one, do parkour; don’t kill yourself, but play with friction, gravity and acceleration. If you’re brave and there’s ice on the ground, try sliding or not sliding on it. You could do this with virtually any active sport – snowboarding, roller skating, whatever you have access to. While you’re out there, you can try sneaking around animals and people who know what you’re up to, and work on bending light and sound to avoid notice.
Life: You’ll need multiple days for this, but essentially, it’s time to physically challenge yourself. Undertake some kind of intense cardio exercise and push yourself as hard as you can. Notice the changes this produces in your body and mind. Learn your limits. Then, try to do the same workout in every combination of physical state you can think of. Do it after not having slept or eaten for a long period, when you’re thirsty, sick, or on drugs, when you’re especially energetic or depressed, when the temperature is cold or hot. Change up your diet and see how that affects your performance. Try restricting your breathing or hyperventilating (be careful!). Obviously if you have medical concerns, you’ll need to work around those.
Correspondence: Put on a blindfold and keep it on. Wander around, using your other senses to navigate, and work on building a detailed mental map of your surroundings, including compass directions. Try to guess what’s going on in other rooms, who’s at the door, what the cat is up to, etc. Stay away from roads and cliffs.
Time: Dance dance revolution. Rhythm games in general. Periodically try to guess the time before checking it. I don’t know what else to suggest for a single day, since as I said, the way I ended up interacting with this sphere was by expressing rhythms over the course of weeks and then watching the universe pick them up.
Entropy: Get out some jenga blocks, or just use objects you have around, and start stacking. Try to make a precarious tower that will stand even when you push it, then, pour entropy into it and try to blow it down with a breath of air. Play some games of chance. Make a sculpture out of material that will decay, like snow or fresh-cut vegetation, and craft it with an eye toward how it will change over time; make it so it will look as good after three days as it does when it’s new, albeit different. Basically this:
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/02/21 Prime: This will depend heavily on your paradigm, but basically it’s a day to go deep into questions of how it all works. Isolation, more blindfolding, wearing a mask and taking a vow of silence are all good ideas – each of these will bring you closer to the unmanifest. Work on moving energy around, if that’s part of your practice.
Mind: Go out on a busy street corner and try to sell people something utterly useless.
Spirit: Also very individual, but basically, dedicate the day to whatever form of spirits, astral work, or otherworldly shit you do. If you’re not into Faustian bargaining with external entities, hit up your higher self, check out the spiritual imprints of the plants and animals and other stuff around you, and go travelling.
If you do this right, at the end of each day when you close your eyes to go to sleep, the sensations and impressions of the day will be flashing through your mind. That means you’re integrating new information. Rest up and get ready for some vivified dreams.
Viva la Magia!
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Topic: Mage: the Ascension -inspired spheres of reality exploration project... thing (Read 5126 times)