I find myself anxious, some, about [work], but I feel I’m being too much, so.
The energy we devote to teaching, to social lives, to looking/seeming/performing normalcy is so extensive, so costly.
[Elethis] [ôl-vala/FitE] [lucid] [Corunor]
At the same time, I also feel bad if I don’t push toward some grand arcane insight or if I haven’t filled up several pages. I wind up fretting and not reflecting and softening. And I turn self-possession and relaxation into something else.
I was up for too late last night, and I recall having a conversation with K—and I remember realizing I was having the conversation in something like the second attention, but I let my mind slide, stay immersed in the experience, not jarring out of it as if awakening, and I can recall—sensations (the dreamy eureka quality)—and that we addressed my awareness. A malleability of thinking, experience, was helpful. Even now, a willingness to recall and to project myself into the memory/experience again—
—indeed, I’ve been doing too much too late at night, when I’m sleepy. I want to do more when more fully conscious. Indeed, lighting affects my ability to imagine, to see—and there’s a certain performativity to Otherworldly experience I’m lacking in doing projection while lying down in anticipation of sleep.
I’ve been doing it that way because of time constraints, but there’re more common, more/greater periodic ways I can do it. (Things to do that Presence and Bridge in everyday life.) Acts out ôl-vala, my sight—that also make the Otherworlds far more immediate and Present themselves.
It’s easy to emerge from experiential reality jarringly, as if being startled, and that says something about how tenuous the connection we have to them is. Still, you want to avoid being so submerged in them—any more than you are already in the Earth realm—that you don’t realize you’re there/here. Then the Bridge fails, and you don’t remember or it becomes far too much the dream—mûl-ôl, not ôl-vala. Often, the clarity you seek is not the false, attentive clarity of “truth,” the supposed “I’m fully conscious and aware and perceiving everything clear”—there’s often a low animal cunning attached to that for people with a gloss and veneer of intellectual rationalism atop. Even [Sherlock] Holmes’s perceptions are mostly that, imposing the low order rational web of the spider demon ([whatever psychological explanation you want to attach to Holmes’s character]). But you can see clear and bright, act clear and bright: clear away the detritus of your emotional baggage and expectations, align the levels of your awareness, and—well—there’s a wonder in the clear and bright experience of the worlds. Noticing the interconnections is part of it—
Holmes does so—but Holmes rarely perceives his plodding part of the interconnections. Draw it in but immerse yourself—don’t merely impose from without for then it will never go from abstract engagement.
But negotiating that, those levels of attention is like growing your ability to lucid dream, for you are developing the ability to lucidly live across many lives, dreams of the waking world, and more. And the lucid looseness involves a certain willingness to engage and immerse yourself in the dreams (and the worlds and “here” and “there”)—to acknowledge and to accept their reality even if “a dream,” something you encounter while asleep. But the Otherworlds and ôl-vala and magic also require a willing suspension of yourself within and to bridge the Other, yourself, and your experience.
Accessing that second attention, then, involves allowing your self to skirt the edges of trance, to shift yourself out of normative ego experience and its demands and towards loose conceptions of self that can negotiate the shifting, unstable realities and the selves that experience them.
For we exist as experiential realities ourselves, and our faculty at interfacing with those kinds of other realities entails—we exist as our—the SoS reflects an internalized experience and conception of ourselves and reality, and also our experience within external realms. We cannot conperceive a reality (action, realm, continuum, potentiality, etc.) until we internalize it in some way. To experience the broader realms, we must grow, must want to make ourselves porous, permeable, bring the Otherworlds within and immerse ourselves in them. Mages and mystics focus on one paradigm,—c.m. arrange their SoS as cabalistic, so they only conperceive and interact/remember a cabalistic Macrocosm.
In some cases, that “jarring awake” reflects a collapse of the SoS, briefly, and its intersection with the other reality, or whatever experience. And if we encounter an experience outside of our SoS, we don’t understand, we have no grounding to remember or to think about it. The experience and our memory-experience of it untether from us, and we lose the thread until we can “consciously” reconnect. This is why wearing paths into spacetime, the Otherworlds, etc. help—acclimatizing us to those experiential realities (which may be distinct realms but which may be aspects of even this same realm—cf. psychic censor and what halthaya, etc., screen out).
These experiences, though, include the experiences of actions, power (the power to imagine, to potentialize, to actualize—know, will, dare), things, places, people, ideas, etc. The experience of doing magic and wonders. The experiences that constrain us, as well—anxiety, fear, shame, doubt—
In a sense—an alternate metaphor—we are stories but also writers over those stories, but we compete with other writers who would mold/shape us to their advantage and benefit. But we also have to negotiate our self-authorial awareness and our fictional states, but we exist within shared settings—but everyone wants to be the hero/protagonist of their stories, and make us into very supporting, subordinate roles. Many slide into being stock or background characters—
—consider, though, the nature of characterization and subjectivity over the centuries…are things being molded, or are we trying to realize this aspect of the Otherworlds and ôl-vala—
—which is what I’ve ultimately been addressing…