(Section 16)
In the last section, we talked about reality shaping in the context of creating reality based on idealism and human power. But reality shaping in the general sense is always happening. Every time a person doubts, fears, he is shaping reality. If a person is focused on getting money, or getting sex, or any other individualistic desire, he is shaping reality. Any successful person in any field or pursuit is a powerful reality artist or reality magician, as are many of the world’s victims. Reality shaping is operating in every life. Reality shaping in this context is just a natural force, being neither good nor bad, positive nor negative, black nor white. It just is to be used to create a life. It is much easier to shape reality in the way the cultural frame is going. It is much easier to doubt and fear and create limits because this is where our cultural frame has been heading for 7,000 years. This is like a spiritual gravity. It is easier to focus on the things that the cultural frame is focused on. To break out of the direction of the cultural frame is easier than breaking out of the focus of the cultural frame. This explains why most people go in the direction of the cultural frame in their personal reality, and why most of those who break from this direction get subverted in their personal reality shaping by focusing unknowingly on the materialistic or individualistic pursuits (disguised in some way, hidden from them), or by reacting to these pursuits. This is the gravity that keeps most people within or near the modern cultural frame.
But there is a way to learn to fly. This is special reality shaping in the apprenticeship. This flying of reality shaping requires a constant effort. The dynamics of this flying are very simple, and yet hard to learn because they are simple. The first thing the student has to keep in mind is that she has to keep flying. She should never take flying for granted. Never stop flying. If she takes flying for granted, she will stop flying. When she stops flying, she starts falling back into the cultural frame ... or falls unprepared into the ultimate web. She can correct this by starting to fly again. But after a certain point if she doesn’t start flying again, she enters the pull either of the cultural frame or of the web, and she crashes. Her ability to fly comes from her passionate self-trust that now is embodied in the form of her trusting the teacher. From this trust and faith come the altered reality.
A frame of reality reveals a small patch of the web of all possibilities. It does not remove this small piece of the web. A frame just contains our awareness into the small piece, blocking the rest of the web from our awareness.
The science of physics has found, discovered, created by reality shaping, the quantum level of reality. This is a subatomic level where material particles are barely material at all, only barely not energy. These particles barely “exist” at all, having a “life span” of a tiny fraction of a second. All matter is made up of the relationships among these barely existing particles in empty space. Science is beginning to think that the reason why these particles lead such a blinking existence is that they travel back and forth in time. A particle only exists for/to us when it dwells within our time frame. When it is not in our time frame, it still exists, but for/to us it only exists as a possibility except when it is visiting our time/reality frame. On this level, reality gets weird. A particle appears to be creating itself by entering this time/reality frame from the future. Scientists have run into a problem in observing this level because their thoughts, and even the act of observing, changes the properties of reality on this quantum level.
This is a scientific myth. It is real, true, only because it works on the reality level in which science now believes. It is a myth because it is a story, a work of imagination, an attempt to explain what we do not understand. It is an attempt to explain what we think is the whole reality and is undeniably just a small part of the ultimate reality.
We have said the ultimate reality is the web of the relationships among all possibilities to one another. Each possibility has a relationship to every other possibility. A frame of reality is placed over the web, creating a window onto a part of the web. The bulk of the web which is not in the frame still exists even though it is blocked from our awareness. This bulk of the web is still linked by relationships to the part within the frame. The frame does not cut these relationships off. It just cuts our awareness of them off. We are still in the web, are still a part of the web, when we are in our frame. The web is God.
Each one of us is a bundle of possibilities within the web. This is more true than the myth we will be forced to use because of limitations of language and linear thinking. In our myth then, each one of us is a possibility. As a possibility, we are linked through relationship to all possibilities. This is not limited by frames. These relationships define us and all things and beyond. We would not, and could not, exist outside of the context of these relationships. People usually think of a relationship as an abstract existing between two realities.
In the web, there is not a single center, because each relationship is the center. Each relationship is linked to all other relationships. They are linked in a dynamic interplay, in which relationships, all relationships affect, change, create one another always. Science is beginning to explore this dynamic interplay. This dynamic interplay until very recently has been called and thought of as chaos, patternless events not fitting into the linear reality. It has become increasingly clear that the linear way of reality, the cause-to-effect pattern of thinking and seeing, is just a small fraction of the much larger pattern of dynamic interplay which I have called the web of ultimate reality.
Since language is linear, it is impossible for me to talk about, to even know, the dynamic interplay of the relationships of all possibilities. I have to focus on the relationship between the teacher and the student in the apprenticeship to dig into the web. This relationship is magically special only because it is a living, committed symbol of the oneness of all. It first appears to be a relationship between two people, the teacher and the student. It appears that the teacher is in power, in control within this relationship ... in power over the student. If the student continues in this way of seeing the relationship, he falls out of relationship, falls out of trust, falls out of faith. Then he becomes the victim of the teacher, the enemy of the teacher. This failure on the part of the student to accurately see the true nature of his relationship with the teacher can happen at any point in the apprenticeship ... whenever the student loses the grip of discipline. If he does not find his way back to his faith and trust soon, he will kill the teacher or run away from the teacher defeated. Either way, the student will be a victim. The apprenticeship is becoming not a victim, but rather becoming the center of reality, becoming a servant.
If the student maintains his trust and faith, the teacher will melt into the student, becoming a part of the student as the student becomes a part of the teacher. The relationship becomes an inner relationship linking all possibilities together. Both the teacher and the student are transformed from poles of the relationship to servants of the relationship ... servants both together and to each other. Nowadays, serving is not fashionable. But being willing servants is the only way to be empowered, to not be a victim. This inner relationship of the teacher and the student has powerful effects because all relationships are linked to it.
One of the aspects of this particular magical work which I am involved in is to find a suitable way to do the apprenticeship ritual in our modern western culture. This ritual has never been performed successfully in this culture from a living shaman to living students in a living myth. This makes what we are doing vital, risky, dangerous ... a magical experiment.
Within the apprenticeship, there is usually what appears to the student to be a “personal” crisis in her life. This crisis is in fact the crucial transformation within the ritual. This transformation usually occurs in the second or third year of the apprenticeship. The crisis which you are experiencing is magical, not personal. It is a calling to move from being a student of a personal teacher to being an apprentice to a shaman. Traditionally, this magical ritual process takes seven years. The opening years are focused on removing the social, personal, moral, ethical blocks within the student which would block him from being a clear instrument for magic. This removal process looks to the student to be a linear process called learning, developing knowledge and understanding to make a better person.
In a deeper reality, the shaman is on the front line of a magical war. It is a shooting war. He needs to link with others to create a wider channel for the magic which comes through him and guides him. To create this channel, the shaman takes on the mask of the teacher. Students come and go. The personal soap opera of learning hides from most students’ eyes the real battles, the real victories and the real defeats, the real powerful effects that the student with the shaman are the instruments for. As taboos are broken within the student, the magical effects upon reality are more and more profound.
At this point, the crisis hits. Again, the crisis is not personal, but magical. The student does not see this. He sees it as a personal drama of his personal relationship with the teacher and the other students. As a personal drama of his fears, his doubts, his moral judgments, of his personal past and future. The crisis hits when this personal drama becomes too dangerous. The crisis is the student being forced to realize that his personal fate is not important, forced to realize that the apprenticeship is not a personal training, but a war battle the scope and dimensions of which he does not have any way of knowing.
This crisis can be compounded by the illness of casualness if the student does not keep a disciplined trust for the teacher. Time breeds casualness which is really a low grade form of contempt. When this crisis occurs, the student has been in the work for several years. This magic becomes everyday living which slowly sinks in the student’s mind into a normal unimportance, into the grey world of being taken for granted, of being known and understood and just tolerated. The teacher in the student’s mind becomes just an intimate relationship subjected to the normal limits, labels, and judgments. This casualness can be fatal in the magical realm, fatal not only for the student, but for the people around him and for people he does not know. Casualness can literally kill, cause insanity, trap people in unliving life.
The magic of the apprenticeship raises everyday life into the magical realm in which every act and word has a multi-dimensional effect. This crisis marks an end of the shaman’s ability as a teacher to correct the imbalances caused by the student’s casualness. In other cultures, this casualness is kept in check to a certain degree by a ritualistic formalism. Both because of the nature of the western modern culture and of the nature of our magical work, such formalism would be a hindrance. But even in other cultures, casualness builds up in the student like puss, and he is sent by the shaman on a journey for desperation and awe.
After going through this magical crisis of transition, by accepting the call of apprenticeship, the apprentice is surrendering to the particular magic which comes through the shaman, not through her. She is passionately, joyously surrendering her, her mind, her emotional energy to the magic that dwells within the shaman ... surrendering to be used in any way by the shaman.
Within this reality, she will be an extension of the shaman’s body. The magical life exists within but outside of the normal reality. This requires a complete focus upon the magic that comes through the shaman. This total focus upon the shaman requires a total listening by the apprentice to the shaman. This listening is not just by hearing with the ears. It is listening with the whole body. It is not listening to know more, to understand more. This deep listening is the active, joyous readiness to receive directions, instructions, needs, rituals from the shaman both directly and indirectly, verbally and nonverbally. It will be utterly important for the apprentice to joyously follow these directions and instructions, to fulfill these needs, to perform these rituals in a very mundane manner which contains a magical lust, continuing these magical structures linearly through time, not stopping or changing them.
By entering this stage, the apprentice accepts the total state of unknowing, of not understanding. Within this state, she is a part of the body of the shaman, an instrument of the shaman, for the magic coming through the shaman. Any concern for her personal well-being, personal growth, personal expression, personal desires blocks this deep erour listening/doing. This is also true for linear “why” questions, questions of comparison of realities, and questions for explanations. These linear questions, based on morality, imprison the magic. They create illusions of understanding. They jerk, distort, the magic backward, causing dangerous results. The shaman, as a full magician, has long ago leaped into this not knowing, this unquestioning surrender to the magic beyond morality, devoted his whole life to the battle. For the apprentice, the leap into hidden magic is framed in by time.
What I have so far described looks like blind trust, blind loyalty, blind obedience of the apprentice to the shaman as the channel of the magic. It would be if the apprentice as a student had not worked and lived with the shaman for years. If the student accepts this inner calling to be an apprentice, to be the pure instrument for the shaman’s magical use, the student uses his past years of working and of living with the teacher to make this leap. Because of these years of magical work, the trust and loyalty of the apprentice for the shaman is not “blind”. By entering the period of apprenticeship, she is giving her consent of responsibility to be used beyond moral limits, beyond her personal well-being.
This is pure service. In this magical service, linear questioning, “how” and “why” questions, are dangerous time blocks to the magic. The apprentice does not have the needed dynamic vision to know, to understand. In a different sense, this is also true for the shaman. This makes linear “how” and “why” questions worse than useless to the apprentice. They imprison him in moral judgments within the surface of how things appear, how things feel. All of this will have to be set aside for the time of the apprenticeship.
Another of the major pitfalls of misuse of the magic is that of sarcasm, ironic stabs and cynicism on the part of the apprentice. This distorted humor links the apprentice to the old “normal” world when she does not accept as her own the magical reality that comes through the magic from the shaman. This distorted humor is an attempt to pretend that the shaman and the apprentices are just friends and lovers, together to do art, to grow personally, etc. This is a denial of the fact that the apprentices and the shaman sit in the front line trenches of a spiritual war. Every mundane act and gesture takes on a vital quality. Life is very dangerous in the trenches. One of the main tools of the shaman is humor, the trickster humor. This humor, this playful fun is complex and deep with multidimensional purposes. It is a human humor. The student can confuse this humor of the teacher with the personal soap opera humor. This breeds casualness and contempt. Students and apprentices are not capable of trickster human humor. Apprentices must focus on servicing, loving, without thought of personal gain or welfare.
There are many ways of being a victim. Many people think they are victims of the past. They are. They are victims of the past partly because they believe they are, and partly because it is a major chunk of our cultural frame that says effects run in a one-way linear fashion from the past to the present to the future. The events, the choices, the crises and traumas of the past create the present. The past and the present combine to create the future. In this framed picture of time reality, the past is a fixed thing that cannot be changed. So a large part of the present and the future is also fixed. This gives us only a part of the present that we can do anything about through our will and actions. Within this frame, we are doomed to be victims of time.
But within the mythic frame of apprenticeship, time is not linear, but a living dynamic interplay of the past, the present and the future (to use the only three slots of time our linear language allows). We are always sitting in the center of this interplay. What we do now gives new contexts, new meanings, new patterns to what happened in the past. This totally changes the past. The new past affects the present. The past and the present affect the future. Since our actions (thoughts are actions) always affect the past, our future actions will affect what will be then the past, including this present. Time has transformed from a straight one-way line into an ever-changing ball, in the middle of which we sit creating. In this ball of time, we are victims only if we create, and keep creating, ourselves as victims. This is the seat of power that is the inner relationship of the student and the teacher.
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