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Alchemy for the Brain-Damaged I: The Royal Art 
Saturday, August 20th, 2005
 I thought it might be time to get round to this. I’ve never intended to be a simplealarmist, or a pithy commentator. That gets old rather fast. So let’s run the grand oldexperiment… start with some definitions, a little background, and some operatingpremises.You can peek at the first part of thisif you haven’t already and then come back.It would certainly help to read a good block of what I’ve got on AB so far as well, just soyou get a feeling for my take on magick, but it’s not mandatory obviously.Okay. So are we talking technique, or are we talking visionary experience? Hopefullyboth. From the ’spiritual’ perspective it behooves one to preference the latter, but part of the point of magick is that it empowers the personality to pursue the spiritual moreeffectively. My feeling is that done correctly, technique leads to vision, with the addedbenefit of also having a skill set to implement the vision afterword. In a nutshell, unlessyour natural inclination is towards renunciation and asceticism, or christlike devotion toothers, you’ll get something out of cultivating some skills in this area. so we’ll start withtechnique.Crowley would suggest and most seem to agree, that magick is about change and will.Alchemytraditionally of course revolves around the refinement of the base material of consciousness into ‘gold’. Yoga translates literally as ‘union’ or ‘yoking’ (as in yoking ananimal to a plow). You could look at this as consolidating the scattered and disparate fociof the mind and body into a perfected vessel of the divine. The esoteric martial arts aresimilar to yoga, but slanted toward the practical necessities of battlefield survival, andother forms of violent confrontation.
 
- 2 -For our purposes here, we’ll be treating magick as this: the cultivation of intent. Full stop.That’s it. That covers everything you need to know for now.In terms of models, I’m going to go to what seems like the source of magic ’systems’which to me ishermeticism. You could make a case that shamanism is the oldest form of magick, and I’m not inclined to disagree, but my feeling is that most shamanism was andis idiosyncratic and personal. It’s like jazz. Each shaman makes it up as they go along.And while I have a lot of fondness for that idea, you don’t need me to go and make upyour own shit. So we’ll start with ‘the royal art’.First of all, you could learn a bit in asking why it’s called that. The royal art? Wellsimply, I think it was called that for three reasons. One, only the ruling classes had theeducation and time to learn magick. Second of all, the cultivation of intent is obviouslyquite useful to a priest, or a king, or for that matter anyone who aspires to be a king,chieftan, or a priest. It was sort of the ancient equivalent of personal empowermentseminar or success psychology, but obviously a bit different given the older and morerudimentary psychology of the average person of prehistory. I mean if developmentalpsychologists are to be believed the structure that we think of as the ‘ego’ is a relativelyrecent invention, and is definitely less formed in archaic cultures. Whether it’s a goodthing or a bad thing is besides the point for our purpose, but it’s interesting tocontemplate how much of the ‘modern’ mind is the product of ancient alchemy. You maynot like what’s been done with it, historically, but the fact that you can even question orcritique it, is proof that you enjoy it’s benefits… And Third, this path is sort of asymbolic process of merging with the godhead, which is about as ‘royal’ as royal gets.It’s important to recall that in ancient times the ruler was synonomous with the godhead,and while we’re inclined to think of that as ignorant authoritarianism, those societies andsystems of government endured for thousands of years, while our current ‘democratic’experiment looks to have petered out in less than a couple hundred. So while the modernknee jerk reaction is to assume we know so much better than those stupid peasants andservants back in the day, maybe they knew something that we don’t.But let’s leave aside any further theoretical preamble for the moment and get down tobrass tacks. Surely we will be discussing all kinds of outlandish techniques and tools forexercising and developing the intent, but if you lose sight of what those things are for,namely to help you understand the workings of your own mind, you’re well on your wayto the ghetto of the lost and the doomed. At all times keep in mind that it’s aboutdiscovering the difference between what you think you want and what you really need,and you should be fine. That can be hard to do when reality starts to feel like putty inyour hands, and gods are offering you a seat on the board of directors, but the truth is,even dieties are unhappy sometimes and just because their experiences on a scale of 1 to10 go to 1,000,000 doesn’t change the relative facts of it.So. What I want you to do, provided you’re interested in playing along, is to make a listof what you want. Let’s say ten things. Ten things you want that are achievable from yourcurrent perspective. You may want to be a rock star, but if you don’t think it’s possible to
 
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 for you right now
, then leave it off the list. As well, for the moment, Isuggest you make as many of the things on the list as possible relatively short termprojects. The reason is, you want to be able to complete some of these relatively quicklyand turn over your list a little bit. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. By the sametoken, you want the things on your list to have bit of emotional juice to them. Wanting tomake a sandwich is not so great. Wanting to drive for three hours to the nearest Arby’s isbetter. Wanting to own your own restaurant chain is better still. And yes it’s perfectlyalright to want utterly banal and trivial things. That’s part of the point when we start.That’s the base material which we will proceed to refine.Good enough for now? I’ll be participating in this myself and posting my doings, by wayof illustration if nothing else.Off you go!
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