Hands-On Chaos Magic: Reality Manipulation through the Ovayki Current - Andrieh Vitimus 2009
Giving Form to Concepts and Ideas
In the last couple chapters, we worked with increasingly more complex and arguably more powerful methods of entity creation and mutation. In this chapter, I want to take one last step forward and talk about what is considered the law of personification. Any concept, any issue (personal or otherwise) or set of ideas, and any phenomenon can be personified into a form that can be worked with directly. Remember, our brains are set up for communicating with other people or peoplelike things (basically things that can communicate). This means that we can create an entity for any situation in our lives; for natural phenomena like our personal neurotransmitters, molecules, or the planets; for each card in the tarot; or for any other concept we can think of (Ellwood 2007). Working with a created form allows us to gain greater access to our own minds. Likewise, any internal voice, habit, or bad experience, and even pain or pleasure, can be conceptualized into a form and worked with. In bits and pieces, this is exactly what we have been doing before now. In fact, anything that you can conceive or that exists can be given an alternate form and worked with through many of the principles in this book.
This chapter will be entirely practical, but I do recommend staying within your microcosm at first. Personifying prejudice in the world and then destroying it might seem like a good idea, but remember that some of the examples in the last chapter were about copying an "informational" pattern by the process of evocation. All that would be destroyed (or dismissed) is the energy you created, and hopefully you would get rid of some of your own personal prejudice. (Although, if enough people removed prejudice from their personal universe, it might go away.) Use the concepts you want to work with, and let the demons and angels you personify be your own.
Working with Positive Forms
Start out with the situation, issue, or desire that that you want to work on. Write down the issue in a positive manner. So if you have a knee problem, you wouldn't give form to the knee issue, you would give an alternate form to the entire knee. In a second example, for a job issue, you should phrase the issue as finding gainful employment or if it is a specific job you are interested in, work with the job directly as a whole as opposed to the problems with getting a particular job. In general, you want to try to signify the entire core of the idea or thing you want to work with. Then you want to sigilize this into a mantra of the situation, thing, or concept you want to work with.
Before you start doing this, relax deeply and write down anything that comes to mind when you are thinking about the situation, thing, or concept you are working with. Just keep going, writing down every single thing that comes to mind while you are thinking about the concept, until you can't think of any more to write down.
Once you have completed the list, rewrite the list in three columns. The first column will be factual data. Things like specific places, dates, times, specific names, or other factual data should go in this column. In the second column, write down examples of sensory data, i.e., sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or touches. After copying down the sensory data set, try to make the list as descriptive and adjective-like as possible. Now, in the last column, list abstract words you wrote down describing feelings or concepts (such as "balance," "love," or "hate").
Now let's take a closer look at the feelings and abstract parts of this list. For each item on the list, see if there are related classes or families of ideas. For instance, you should group joy and happiness together. Pick one word to represent the family or category of items. Try to reduce the number of abstract concepts to as few as you can. If you have more than three or four general concepts, this may be too complex for the work you will be doing later on.
On a new sheet of paper, take each category of abstract concepts or emotions and try to remember a memory with those emotions or physical sensations. Basically, we want to translate the abstract "concept" or emotion into tangible sensations through the use of memories, images, sounds, feelings, or any combination therein. In some cases, through our adventure, you will already have mappings of some of these abstract ideas to states of mind, and you might even have an alphabet of desire sigil or mantra. All of those correspondences from when we were first training can be reused here. If you come across an abstract concept that you have not explored in your journals, feel free to go back and try to map that concept to sensory data just like we have been doing in the other energy exercises.
Once each abstract concept is translated into one or more of the five senses (which will tell us how to experience each concept) or into an alphabet of desire sigils and mantras, we can then move to the next step. We should translate these abstract words into a series of memories and tangible experiences using the five senses, even if the experiences are fictional or created. The creation of the sensations you relate to the word is the key to using the word in magic. If, in the process of translating these abstract concepts into sensory data and memories, we get some concrete terms, we can copy those over to the sensory data column if they seem like adjectives. For instance, let's say you have love as a general concept, and then you break love down into a list of things like pink carnations, sweet jasmine, soft cuddles, and long walks on the beach. You would then transfer "pink," "sweet," "soft," and "long" to the list of sensory data.
Take the column of sensory data, including sensory data translated from the column of abstract concepts. Rip up a sheet of paper into smaller pieces or get some note cards. Take each piece of paper and write one bit of sensory data on it (or write an alphabet of desire, if you have one). Clearly, a bit of sensory data could be something like pink, in the preceding example. This should not be a memory, but it should be descriptive (although not descriptive in any particular manner yet).
At this point, you will need to take a break and gather some art or writing supplies of your preferred media. When I have demonstrated this technique, I have used crayons, colored pencils, pens, and water color paints, which were all cheap supplies.
From here, we are going to help our subconscious minds give us the alternate form for the situation, natural occurrence, or any other phenomenon we are modeling. Let's go back to the shortened list of abstract concepts. If you have mapped the list to sensory data and memories, these words relate directly to states of consciousness. This is very similar to the various energy games we have been playing throughout the adventure.
Spread out the art supplies and writing materials so you can easily reach them. Place all the adjectives on pieces of paper in front you. Start by relaxing, clearing your mind, and banishing in your preferred style. State your intent as we did before, which was something akin to obtaining a personified form related to x (which represents the situation or concept you are trying to put into an alternate form). From here, start chanting the mantra we created earlier.
Try to chant in a controlled, almost monotone, voice. You are going for a more inhibitory trance state. As the chanting continues, start cycling through memories associated with the list of concepts you are working with. Really let yourself experience those memories. As you slide deeper and deeper into those memories, just stare at the pieces of paper in front of you. Move the papers around (each with different adjectives) in any fashion you see fit, until you believe that they make sense. If some pieces of paper do not intuitively fit, crumple them up and toss them aside. Continue to chant, move the pieces of paper around, and go back to your memories until you get a clear picture of what the alternate form might look like, smell like, taste like, feel like, and sound like. Try to get a clear impression of the form.
Once you have that clear impression, keep chanting and draw, paint, or verbally describe the creation. You may scry a sigil in the art process as well. After you are finished artistically describing your creation (through writing, speech, or visual art), laugh heartily and banish the states of mind you have taken on. A strongly musical person might describe the creation as a melody, and a strongly olfactory person might even choose to sense the creation as a combination of smells. This is perfectly acceptable. Try to keep going with the artistic process until you feel that you have a good link to the impression you are getting. It may be a good idea to write down as many details as possible of the impression that are not verbal or visual. So if your subconscious mind has given you smells or tastes associated with the form, by all means write those down.
Once you have a description, picture, or sigil, you have a link to the alternate form that you can work with. The name of the conceptualized form is the mantra you were speaking before. If you think about it, this is an anchor to what your subconscious gave you. This form is unique to you yourself, and even if two people are working with the same concept or idea, the form should be radically different. Once you have this link, you can use all the techniques of evocation, having a conversation, and invocation to learn more about the idea, natural phenomenon, or situation. The possibilities are endless.
For clarity, however, let's take the situation of getting a new job at a specific company. At first, it may seem like we are only doing NLP work with this conceptualization, but this "fictional" example might present some ideas outside of the NLP framework. First, we banish and then begin to evoke the "form" using some of the techniques in this adventure. Based on what we did in the creation process, we already know what states of mind should be combined and what sequence of memories we should use for the evocation. So we start going through the cycle of memories, chanting the name of the conceptualized form while projecting energy into a containment field of our choosing. From our previous experiments, we know that the energy being pushed out into the containment field has the information that is close to the form we are evoking.
From here, strongly visualize the form in the containment field fully animated and speaking (and if you have a drawing, placing it in the containment field will help). This combination should continue until a suitably deep trance state to have a conversation is obtained.
This representation of an entity is not entirely "in your head." The alternate form for the situation might tell you to wear a certain color tie to improve your chances (because someone in the hiring process loves that color), or it might inform you of where you are in the queue. This actually happened to me once. I used this technique for a specific job, and I was told that there was one person I interviewed with that did not like me. This person would create problems (and I did get her name). Armed with this information, I influenced the head person to ignore her input. Likewise, I could have worked directly with the conceptualized form, making sacrifices to the form in energy and praise, to remove that person's influence from the situation (or to have the other people ignore her input).
Depending on what the original situation is, it may not be possible to completely alter what the form does. For instance, if you were trying to get a better understanding of the sun, this is more purely internal, since while you maybe able to alter the composition of the sun-and if you can do this with verifiable proof, please contact me directly because I would love to talk-it is more likely that you could change your understanding of sun. In another case, conceptualizing another person's physical body or body part could provide a powerful link for reality manipulation, which could be either healing or not so nice. Feeding the form suitable informationally tainted energies has often produced the desired healing or not-so-nice result. Likewise, a body part that is damaged or infected may just need a cleansing. Working with the form, instead of the original "body part," is another technique to slide past the psychic censor. It may be possible to infect another form with the energies of an external entity or even a servitor or viral creation (which can use the created form as a good link for the internal and external components).
As with any other entity, feeding the form will change the nature of the situation, at least for you. However, there may be more variables than simply consulting with an external entity. Of course, this can be used for self-change like the other techniques, but it has produced results with situations that are not completely internal.
As mentioned in an earlier chapter, you can also conceptualize external entities using techniques like this. This allows you to work with the external "force" but have a personal and unique conceptualization that will work with you. Persephone as a punk-rock gothic babe is my favorite.
Working with Negative Forms
In a previous chapter, we were trying to work with more positive forms, or at least the whole picture. It is certainly possible to work with negative aspects of situations, ideas, concepts, memories, etc. We covered some of these techniques previously. Pushing energy that is informationally tainted with the appropriate energy for what you want out of the situation, form, memory, etc., can help to change your perspective on the situation, but it can also have effects in the physical world.
Often when you are doing self-work, you will notice that negative forms have features you despise, or they will converse with you in a hostile manner. For all intents and purposes, this is an entropic part of the situation or idea (in other words, this is an internal demon or maladapted part of the self), but it doesn't always have to be completely personal. For instance, I have had very good luck in conceptualizing a disease in another person as a form, and then blasting the disease away with high-energy protons. (Okay, I used Reiki protons to blast the disease away.) If you think about it, it is possible to do the opposite as well. In other cases, the negative form could be given different energies and willed into a more appealing form by repeatedly morphing the old form into a form created with the desirable aspects.
In other situations, simply conversing with the created form is enough to change the form's disposition toward you. There is an NLP trick that states that any voice-or in this case, internal form you can create-has some positive intent. Since the variables are slightly more complex, this may not be entirely true, but it's worth trying to ask repeatedly what the positive intent is. A diseased form might tell you, "Hey, you don't rest enough, and that's why I'm here." Promising to rest more with healing intentions might fully remove the disease right away. Working from that positive intent, or finding a common ground with the form means that you have a common point of access. Discussion can occur while you are in trance. If you completely hate the form or what it stands for, and you project that state, there isn't any sort of compromise you can reach. Usually, if you feed the form energy with information that is in line with your result, and if you are completely accepting of its presence, you can make progress. More than one religion and philosophy has stated that full acceptance (not just lip service) is the most successful starting point (in this case for productive conversations).
As a personal example, I have used negative forms created in this way. Often, I will call them up and then use a viral servitor (like I talked about earlier) to virally infect and change the part. This has been highly effective, if a bit tiring at times (self-change is). It is somewhat important to note that these negative forms may at first be hostile toward you. If you are evoking them, you should use a strong containment field since, if the ritual gets out of hand, the form will be greatly empowered (all that energy, and now they are free). Likewise, the subconscious will receive the message that there is little you can do to stop these "conceptualized forms." Take the precautions and treat these creations with respect. Conceptualized into forms inside your mind, they will want to live, and if you don't keep control, they will do what they have to in order to survive.
You might note that the end product of this process is very similar to what you can obtain by simply scrying an impression of an entity for a particular situation, and that is correct. These methods are presented only as an aid to help in the conceptualization process, and repeating this type of work has made that process much more intuitive for me (where I don't need the NLP-style training wheels), but this has been a useful technique to get people started.
It's All in My Head ... or Is It?
These ideas of conceptualized forms might seem like straight NLP, but this section will suggest a few uses that expand well past the general NLP scope. Suppose you create a conceptualized form for an illness you have, like a flu. You call up the conceptualized form and have a little chat. In this case, you summon it up and offer to buy it off with energy, or offer sacrifices if it will leave you and go to x person (who you are having trouble with). Is this any different from what shamans would do? It will be more surprising when the other person does get sick.
Another example I have of this is a friend who used a similar technique (although more intuitive) with a car. She talked to the car and told it not to let anyone buy it until she could afford it. She forgot about doing that, and the car didn't sell for months. She had to go back and tell the car to let itself be sold, now that it had a personality.
If the forms are created primarily inside the mind of the magician, there is no reason that they must stay there just like any other servitor. If someone reads about the form of another magician and starts to work with it, does this mean that the form becomes an external entity? What is the process that occurs with this?
The Simpler Method
Now, the first method I presented at the beginning of the chapter helps to prime the conscious and subconscious minds to produce what you want. It is simpler to banish, state your intent, and go into a trance state using your preferred method, with the intent to find a personified form for what you are looking for. I will add a mantra or gestural sigil and then dive into the rest of the ritual. The shadow framework was another example of a process for finding temporary forms. Once you become more adept at different techniques, magic for this type of work can be simple. In our adventure, we practiced scrying, sigils, trance states, banishing, visualization, and more to help make more complicated magic easy. All of those prerequisite techniques can be combined into pretty simple, highly effective rituals, but like any other art, you have to practice each technique.
Self-Change Using Artificial Forms
Much earlier in our adventure, we talked about the different parts of the self. In chapter 13 of the book, we experimented with going inward to find "parts" of the self that resonated with other external entities. That was a limited view of what we could do with the process. We could easily give concepts sensory information and invoke the concepts themselves to retrieve a part of ourselves that resonated with the concept. In fact, a lot of our adventure was about taking on different states of consciousness. Each of those different states of consciousness can resonate with a different part within the self. The shadow framework was given early on because it works with almost everything else that has been presented.
The aspects of you that come out of the shadow rituals are a lot like personified forms, but they are personifications of internal constructs. Initially, we mentioned that we were only trying to have a conversation with a different part of the self that resonated with an external entity. In a first meeting of that part, that is a useful goal, as confronting a hidden part of yourself is never that easy. However, after the first time meeting a part of yourself that resonates with a concept or entity, it should be possible to get far more information via all the methods of magic we have been discussing. You could have a conversation with that impression, evoke it, and even invoke it.
The mere act of forming these gestalts starts to change the makeup of the subconscious mind in many ways, and it definitely changes our perception of the internal issue. Often, this is a way to change unhelpful subconscious patterns. We are asking the subconscious mind to provide combinations of parts that may not always go together. This seems to open up new possibilities as well as increase creativity. Internal links are being formed between the parts of the individual, and the subconscious mind is being encouraged to form those links as the person practices more.
The process of looking at these gestalts is a lot like looking at a very small part of the self from a different angle. Often, we are looking at parts of the whole that we ignore to begin with. Remember the parable of the elephant and the blind men trying to discern what it is they are feeling. None of the blind man can feel the entire elephant at one time, so they have no context for "the whole elephant." What if the self is formless and infinite? We might be like the blind man who can only perceive a small piece of the puzzle. Likewise, feeling the same part of the elephant in a different way would produce very different information. Looking at the different parts as separate from the perceived whole is enough to change our perspective on any one part within the self. The experience will change the conscious mind. The different perspective can open up new streams of information and possibilities, which can help us become more adaptive and successful in our magic.
Once you have the unique link, I recommend having a conversation just like we did with other external entities. With external entities, we may have had incense for offerings, maybe even a mantra/name and sigil. In general, we attempted a get-to-know-you conversation. In the case of a temporary combination of parts (or a servitor), the distance isn't there, because it is you. Now, you could pretend the distance was there and repeat the general conversation method. If you were using this technique to pull forward internal issues, you might have to try a few other methods. In the case of maladapted patterns and negativeself voices, we can interpret those patterns as internal entities. We can ask the subconscious mind to give us a link and form. With that, we already know how to evoke or invoke things, and talk.
First, we must re-assert the idea that we and the voice are "one" The part of the self might be echoing a very "you are x" tone. This internal voice might say all sorts of hostile things, but you, as the magician, have to keep control of the situation. First, after you have done the invocation, force the voice, which may seem outside of your head, to speak through your throat. After you force the voice to talk from within your body, force it to speak with the "we" pronoun when referring to you both. This is a simple NLP trick from NLP: The New Technology of Achievement (Andreas and Faulkner 1994). In this case, the part of yourself will usually have some positive intent once you get it to calm down, and both you and that part agree that you are "we"
In the case of this exercise, we will assume that every combination and part of the self will want to be acknowledged, assimilated, and reintegrated. Darker aspects of the self are not necessarily bad. In fact, primal and base elements of the self are needed for survival (especially in times of extreme testing). Those darker elements of the self can be some of the most aggressive in their protection of the entire self.
Ideally, we would want to invoke this part of ourselves until we were completely comfortable with it. We need to be comfortable with this aspect of ourselves before we can effectively use it as if it were just another servitor. If this book were entirely focused on NLP, we would stop at the point of being comfortable with having integrated that internal part. Once we are comfortable with the part, we have developed a kind of relationship with that internal part. To use the demonic metaphor, we have a pact with this internal part. In the conversations with the internal part, you can ask it to give you a certain form while in a trance state. Once you have made this part an ally, sending it out via an evocation to do things for the good of the whole you is perfectly acceptable and effective.
Evolution, Destruction, Enhancement of the Part
Other authors present different techniques for dealing with different parts of the self. Donald Michael Kraig recommends a technique he calls Identify, Objectify, and Banish (2004). The basic premise of the technique is to identify a problem within your personality, construct a form or a visual representation, and then banish this part from you. While identifying and constructing the form of the internal part is done before a ritual setting, the banishing part is done as a formal ritual where the part is called forward into a triangle and then formally banished (usually with the power of god behind the magician). Once the part is banished, then it should be possible for the magician to grow beyond the banished internal limitation. At least in theory, this is how it should work; however, nature hates a vacuum.
In some cases, there may indeed be parts of yourself that are truly horrifying to the waking mind. In those cases, it might be a good idea to use a variant of Kraig's technique. Bad and traumatic experiences can give rise to internal limitations that can cripple an individual. In this case, we are asking the subconscious mind to give us a link to "the limitation" as a part within the self. Now, Kraig originally talks about identifying the limitation and then devising a representation for that limitation. One method of doing this is to directly get the information and form from the subconscious like we did in earlier examples. We could also ascribe the limitation to a particular created impression, but we should understand how the limitation affects us. In a way, the limitation is being interpreted as an internal spirit. We know entities by how they affect our senses. The same statement applies to this part of the self. How does it affect you? What happens as a result of this part? What do you see, what do you feel or hear? What memories most strongly resonate with the limitation? How do they affect you? If you produce the limitation by using all of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings associated with the memories where you understand that a limitation was clearly working against what you wanted from a situation, you can make this part of yourself seem more real and tangible. If it seems more real and tangible, you will be able to more effectively work with this part of yourself.
Having a link to this part will help with the process. One way to do this is to try to relax and banish. State your intent to find a unique link (just like we have been doing) to the problem area. Then let the sensory data stream of these negative experiences overwhelm you until you get into a solid trance state (although not a happy trance stateto stay in an emotionally negative trance state takes discipline, but it is absolutely necessary). Keep thinking about these memories until you can map out a sigil or mantra that will call up the parts of yourself. It is often helpful to do this after you have evoked friendly concepts or entities into the space (to help you get into a better state of mind). Now you have a unique link to the parts of the self that are causing the problems, and you have created how it will look. This is more than enough to do an evocation.
Usually one experience will be linked to several others, so we could describe this as a pattern of response. Earlier, in chapter 10, this is exactly how we described self-limiting beliefs. Now we are just taking the approach that it is an internal part of the self. In practical terms, any containment field will work, but I will describe the general procedure using the triangle-and-circle method. First, empower your circle with joy and then empower your triangle or containment field with joy. This is done in exactly the same way we have been doing the work throughout the book. Create correspondences to what joy translates to, as far as memories as well as various sensory inputs, and project that energy around the edges of the triangle. For most people, joy is an effective "holding" energy for a limitation, since if they were happy about the limitation, they would not be doing the ritual. You could as easily charge the triangle with god names, angels, or any other power you believe can hold these parts of yourself.
As with the other forms of evocation, try to have a conversation with the part. While it is still you, it is separate from you when it is in the triangle. It will take willpower to face this part as well as to really converse with it. As with the other technique, try to push positive energies into this part (a way to alchemically change its behavior). If you start to see an improvement in the demeanor of the interaction you are having, keep pushing energy into this part, since you will eventually be able to have a civil conversation. The process of "pushing" positive energy toward something is a way of accepting the part, which will help you get over the limitation. Try to make a deal with this part, but if the part is very unresponsive, you can move on to another technique.
Kraig's banishing is one method. In this, you just tell the part that it is no longer welcome in you and you forcefully use "higher" powers to get rid of it. Where does the part go? It's out of you, but is it then released into the ether or something? I will often use a second evocation to forcefully change that part by asking a second spirit, concept, or other part of the self to change the resonance and information pattern of the damaged part. This means a second evocation, or multiple evocations, until I am successful in "transmuting" the damaged part. I have done workings in which the part was just too toxic and selfdestructive to be transmuted. All of the entities involved, including myself, opted to destroy that part entirely. I personally come from a somewhat abusive childhood. In a situation such as that, the easiest course of action is to ask the "other" entities you have evoked to assist you with getting rid of the bad part and replacing it with more adaptive energies. Once the part is in the containment field (the triangle), you really can try anything. I have tried to infect myself with spiritual retroviruses (to change my own pattern), used Reiki to wash away the issues, summoned archangels to heal the issues, used astral weapons to cut away issues, etc. In the end, this is a more extreme and final take on Kraig's banishing. Destroying a part of yourself is a last resort. As the magician, you have to rebuild it with something, most preferably with something of your own choosing.