Journal Building Characters

[nunaphael]

I've been all over the place when it comes to subjects of personal interest to me over the years, but acting always held a special place in the back of my mind. I think that's because when I was younger, I spent almost all of my free-time with my elementary and middle-school friends playing table-top RPGs like Vampire: The Masqurade, Mage: The Ascension, Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Rifts, Exalted, Shadowrun, GURPS, Eclipse Phase... honestly, I'm just looking over at my bookcase right now. I have boxes in storage with old editions of most of those, and I just keep the newest editions of the core books for my favorite RPG systems on my shelves.

I went to community college while I was still in high-school so I could finish early and move straight into an AA program. During that time I changed major twice before I settled on psychology. I minored in theater arts, and I spent a lot of my time hanging out around the theater building with other theater students, sharing notes and ideas, or just thoughts about society and life and stuff that college students talk about in the 10-15 minute gaps between classes. I took a few drama courses, just to see what acting was like. I especially enjoyed the improvisational acting courses I took. I took general intro to acting as well, so I had a taste of different styles of acting, and I'm glad I did because it gave me a huge respect for a few of the big actors that are genuinely talented versus the majority of other ones that are propped up by connections and are rather mediocre and not quite as gifted.

Anyway, I don't want to linger too much on criticism, I'm just saying, I came to better understand what acting requires and what kinds of parts are really challenging to take on and why those actors who do and succeed are actually really impressive. And by extension, whenever I hear about tragedies where some highly gifted and talented actor burns out on drugs or gets caught up in some kind of shady stuff and it costs them their life, I can sympathize and even empathize in a lot of cases. I had friends who really did want to be actors, and it's a rough life when you are starting out at the bottom, with almost no chance of ever making it big, and some really tough decisions and hard realities you have to overcome somehow in order to find it within you to still give it your best shot.

I never had that courage really. I took some acting classes, sure, to get a taste and a better appreciation for the art of acting, but I knew even then there was no way I was ready for that. I made up my mind I wasn't going to be an actor, and I took mostly technician courses, like stagecraft and set design and prop design. I took all the "design" courses, sound design, lighting design, costume and make up design. I even took some of the business and management courses so I could get the chance to be an assistant stage manager for one of the shows they were running. It was a really low budget attempt at Alice, but we got over a hundred people to show up, which was kind of a miracle even back then - like, I'm talking over 20 years ago. I can't imagine that many people turning out for a student run stage production at your local community college in this day.

Now I've been studying a lot of stuff that has led me full circle and brought me back to my old interests in acting, and I think it's time for me to take another dive into that hobby and develop it a bit. I see a way that it can be extremely practical in my own spiritual craft, and I think incorporating the lifestyle of an actor as depicted in the trilogy by Stanislavski, the mindset and the union of the inner and external, is the next step I need to take in my development as a sovereign individual. I believe the next phase of my development requires me to be able to "build a character" and "create a role" and "live as an actor" the way Stanislavski teaches in his three books. This will allow me to shed my skin, my ego, my "self", and step into different "selves", different egos, and become a more of a shapeshifter, a trickster entity.

I recently made a thread about "post-nihilism" and the spiritual awareness that it requires to understand this philosophy, this technique for moving past and going beyond nihilism without rejecting it or trying to "rise above" it. Instead, it requires one to cultivate a more "zen-like" mentality as I describe it, trying to master a state they call "satori", which roughly translates as "no-mind". Every thought, feeling, sensation, and so forth, is recognized as a projection of the ego and given no energy, no attachment - it is allowed to simply exist. You are allowed to simply exist. Everything is permitted to simply exist as such, as it is, for one moment, without being interpreted, without being manifested, and without being interrupted in any way. Everything, for a moment, is permitted to simply "flow".

In such a state, something will organize itself automatically. A small space will clear itself on its own and the deepest parts of your own soul present themselves without you having to expend any energy in bringing them forth. Instead, it is the exact opposite, one allows everything to simply fall away, letting go of the importance of meaning itself, the importance of knowing, the importance of caring, and just completely let go for one moment. To do this actually takes IMMENSE willpower, to even achieve it, let alone to extend it, to make it an ongoing practice and way of life that one cultivates and embodies. It is so difficult because it requires a person to break free from the robotic program living in their mind that Freud called the "super-ego" and Lacan called the "Name-of-the-Father" or the "symbolic order". That is no easy task, and most people will actually work to undermine your attempt to do so, should you choose to. It will not even be enough for their own cowardice to prevent them from achieving what they have decided they cannot, they must also make sure that you do not believe for one second that you can do it either. Crabs in a bucket, as they say.

But assuming you can actually do this, even for one moment, then you can experience what I believe is somewhat analogous to the "single-pointed awareness" described by Peter J Carroll in his book Liber Null and Psychonaut. In other words, I believe that to enter a zen state of satori is very much like entering a magical trance state, or a state of "gnosis", where one can receive information directly from the unmanifest spiritual world and bypass the conscious rational mind entirely. I believe that it will benefit me immensely to get back into acting and practice it as a hobby at least, perhaps even look into taking a few lessons at my local university if I can afford it or make the trip. I really think this is key to my development at this phase in my life, and where my head and heart are right now. Especially after reading MindWar and learning about Xeper and becoming more informed about what the "vampiric way" is. I'm not saying I think I'm a vampire or that I'm trying to become a vampire, but that, in spending the past several months reading everything I can get my hands on that has to do with vamprism and vampires in the occult community, I have thereby become exposed to a lot of currents that I had not the imagination to figure out before on my own. Many of these currents have helped me to mature as a person, without necessarily having to join them and become caught up in any of the cults and orders they present.

In any case, I'm quite excited to finally get back into acting, starting with reading through Stanislavski's trilogy, and then maybe looking into local classes or improv comedy clubs that have open nights for beginners, something like that. That'd be great energy in my life in any case, and just a good decision in general I think. So, yeah. That's my plan for now. Whoever you are, if you actually read all of this, wow! Thank you! I hope some of it was inspirational or helpful to you, or at least amusing! Have a great week.

 

[nunaphael]

In my personalized metaphysical model of "existence" there are five stages that everything passes through before it turns into something I call "loosh", borrowing the term from Robert Monroe, the creator of the Gateway Experience program. As a disclaimer up front, I do not apply the term loosh in the more mainstream way that it has become adapted to mean. I do not consider it some kind of energy that is being harvested from us, and that we are just livestock producing this stuff for some more advanced group of beings. That is complete nonsense to me, and it would also have been to Dr. Monroe. He never meant it to be conceptualized that way. His original concept for it was a kind of rarefied spiritual substance that is the very sublime essence of divinity itself.

I agree with Dr. Monroe's original definition of loosh, and that's how I use it in my own personal model. It is the "end" or "result" of the process we call "existence". Now, I will attempt to explain how my model works in as simple, but not too confusingly simple terms as I can manage.

We start with a stage called "inaction", what we might also call "emptiness", or simply the "Elemental Void" as I like to call it. This is a difficult stage to describe because it is neither active in any way, nor is it substantial in any way, nor does it represent anything, and in fact, the most crucial thing about it, is that it has zero potential to "be" or "do" anything at all. You might say that is the defining characteristic of "void", but here are a few more to really home in on what the energy archetype is here. It is also silence, stillness, rest, detachment, dissociation, nihilism, release, refusal, rejection, negation, nothingness, amnesia, darkness, and death. This is the stage that is hinted at by ideas such as "satori" or "nirvana". It is the first and the last stage in the existence of anything, the beginning and the end of everything.

The next stage is called "becoming", in which, nothing actually exists that has a form or any distinction yet. In this stage, which I call "Elemental Fire", there is only the "absolute", an undifferentiated infinite power that has no name and cannot be entirely defined. However, it can be partially defined without fully embracing or attaching itself to any of the following definitions. The qualities of the energy at this stage of existence are potential, possibility, raw power, energy, pure force, that which is unmanifest, immanent, insubstantial, immaterial, non-physical, and also "spiritual". Thus, this stage is the origin of that which is considered "subjective". The process of going from total void and complete inaction, to this new stage of becoming, is what I call "initiation" (in the sense of being "initiated" into becoming something).

Following becoming is "being". This is "Elemental Earth" in my system. What is important to note is that this is not the same as the world of physical experiences and sensations. This is the realm of eternal, objective reality, what you might also call "platonic" reality, as in, the eternal realm of perfect forms. It is more like Immanuel Kant's concept of the "thing-in-itself", the "noumena" behind the "phenomena" that produces it. Physical objects, in the objective stage of their existence, are not "doing" anything, other than existing in such a way that their existence does not interfere with causality because to merely "exist" as such is not an activity in itself yet, it is a passive initial state. For something to be "eternal" it cannot actually DO anything, because that would involve a temporal narrative of some kind, some kind of sequence of events. So, the qualities of this stage of existence are eternal, objective, "real", manifest, "true", absolute, material, matter, physical, particular, timeless, substantial, immediate, realized, bodily, and everything that actually "is". The process of becoming transforming into being, of pure potential transforming into absolute being, is called "manifestation". That which was unmanifest, without form, without shape, has finally been brought into manifestation and given an absolutely perfect, eternal form that will never change or alter anything.

After that we have "action". This is "Elemental Wind" in my system. Only things which take action, things which become involved in the narrative of spacetime, in the narrative of causality, of cause and effect, of action and consequence, can actually be experienced. Something which is eternal, which is perfect and absolute, cannot be experienced, and subsequently, nor can it be represented. Because something which is eternal cannot be experienced or represented, that means it cannot ever be imperfect, and it cannot ever die. Everything that "opts in" to being "involved" with themselves, and the things around them, have chosen to "act" (I mean literally, they have assumed a role, a task, and a character). Even if we are talking about rocks and trees and weather systems, all of those "things" only exist through their actions, through the changes that they make through interactions they have with themselves and other things. So the essence of this stage is really movement, not "mental stuff" or whatever the traditional neoplatonic/hermetic esoteric meaning of "air" is. A few more keywords for it are, temporary, doing, changing, happening, events, scenes, narratives, stories, lives, living, involving, moving, and effecting.

Finally, there is sometimes a "reaction" that takes place, like an echo or a ripple. This is what I call "Elemental Water". The nature of this stage is representational, everything imitative, reflective, imaginary, conceptual, symbolic, and so forth. This is where we finally have our simulated sensations, which are themselves just projections we conjure up to do our best at imitating the "things-in-themselves" already mentioned earlier, which are forever beyond the reach of the rational mind to ever fully comprehend. Instead, the best we can do is trust in our intuitions, which sometimes give us a deeper way to reflect upon what is really happening to us, and what things really truly "are". It is important to remain at least partially objective though, in remembering that even those, even our intuitions, are just projections no different and no more or less trustworthy than the physical senses are. This is the stage most people become fixated upon and can never break out of, becoming a repetition of a repetition of a repetition. They automatically "act", like method actors do, literally in the exact same manner, except their whole life is their theatrical stage, and they can't ever switch it off for even one second and be a real, vulnerable, helpless person. In any case, this is the final stage of existence that eventually fades into total oblivion, returning to the point where it all began. The qualities of this stage are, illusionary, imaginary, representational, symbolic, signs, replicas, imitations, memories, intuitions, ideas, labels, words, names, stereotypes, knowledge, morals, facts, and rules.

Upon death, or even ego-death, most of that last stage is shed. Only that which is pure remains, the ineffable, inconceivably perfect truth behind all the layers of monkey-minded representations and assumptions and imitations. That incomprehensible grain of perfection is called "loosh", it is like pure divinity itself, pure "worthiness". It is the "philosopher's stone", the "gold" extracted from lead. Everything non-essential falls away upon death, upon embracing "inaction". Call it what you will, embracing the void is the surest way to purify yourself, to get rid of what isn't necessary. Near death experiences were used to generate this kind of attitude in people, which is why in ye olde days, baptismal wasn't just a polite dunk in the tub or the river, it was full immersion until you felt like you were drowning and started to panic. They only let you up to breath once your lungs give out and they see the bubbles from you screaming. That's what it took to WAKE UP. And it worked REALLY WELL, which is why they still do it (symbolically) today.

But what is the original energy source that gets purified and transformed into loosh to begin with?

It is the unknown itself. Not just unknown to us, but what is unknown to ANYTHING, including the stars in the sky. Something even the stars don't know. Things which have not yet even become possibilities in our reality, and so they are not yet even becoming, not yet involved in the process of existing in our reality, they are "uninitiated" in their OWN reality (you could call it "Universe B" or something). This unknown is the true unknown that H.P. Lovecraft loved to dramatize and spook people with, turning it into a form of existential horror. He was right when he said that the oldest and strongest emotion is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. So what is really happening, as things are coming into existence and then fading out, is that the unknown becomes known. However, to be FULLY known, something has to pass through all these phases first, and then "die" as it were, in the final stage, so that only the purified essence of the whole process remains. This is essentially the philosophy of hermetic alchemy, and to a lesser extent, it aligns somewhat with Jungian psychology (although I hate turning everything into psychology and try to avoid using psychological terms if I can).

To really be clear, I believe the energy, substance, concept, whatever you want to call it, that is being refined into loosh... is quite literally pure "evil". Not evil in the way we normally think of it, not evil born out of moral injustice or a sense of unfairness or even emptiness. I'm talking about the primordial origin of evil itself, the "unknown", which Jung calls the "unconscious", but I don't actually agree with that. I think Jung's version is like, swimming in the shallow end with your floats on because you'd rather not put the effort in to learn how to swim and dive and float on your own (either because you're lazy or afraid to risk it). His conceptualizations, even in their darkest most ominous moments, really fail to convey the lived experience of trying to become a spiritual portal for the unknown to enter into this reality. For that, the only thing that actually provides the right framework for understanding this kind of transformation is to look at things like pathworking through the Qliphoth or through working with certain goetic grimoire traditions like the Grimorium Verum and summoning demons. I don't know of any other way, except perhaps for vampiric initiation rituals undertaken by members of the Order of the Vampyre, or the Temple of the Vampire, which often look almost identical in practice and philosophy to working with the Qliphoth (often they differ only in name or just try to reduce and oversimplify them to working with only one being such as Lilith). Maybe learning how to do method acting could get you pretty close to the frame of mind you have to be in.

There was a thread only yesterday someone new to this forum posted asking about the Qliphoth, and that got me to go looking for other threads about the Qliphoth, and now here I am in this synchronicity, talking about the Qliphoth again. Maybe it's time I re-read the Book of Sitra Achra and see if reading it with new eyes yeilds anything fresh? I've had my head completely immersed in studying Konstantin Stanslavski's "system" that maybe something will bump into something else in my head and make something interesting happen. If anything does, I'll report on it here. To my readers, have a great week whoever you are.

 

[nunaphael]

Someone recently posted a book share of a pdf about necromancy. Necromancy is somewhat special to me, so I whenever I see these books I always take a peek at them. After glancing through this one, I felt inspired to talk a bit about my experience working with the dead and some of the things they taught me about the "other side".

It was necromancy, and the naive thought (I was only 16, gimmie a break) of becoming a real "lich" (yes, literally the immortal energy draining skeleton wizards from D&D), that I hate to admit, but was truly the force that "initiated" me into actually going out and trying to find an appropriate book to study and learn how to do this to myself. I was completely blind, raised by a christian family that saw satan everywhere and tried to shelter me from it, forced me to get baptized when I was 9 before I had any idea what it meant and just wanted to be a "good boy" for them, etc. I didn't know where to start, had no guidance, had no calling, and not even any self-awareness. I was completely lost and wandering around at first, with only my instincts pretty much.

Like I have said in previous posts, it was chaos magick theory, specifically Liber Null & Psychonaut, along with a book by Buckland, which nudged me into traditional witchcraft and neopaganism. But that was, of course, merely the beginning. I was a voracious reader and was literally obsessed with my study to the point of it completely consuming my social life, my academic life, my work life, my private life, my ENTIRE life. Every aspect of it was sacrificed to this hunger I felt that could not be satisfied no matter how many books I read, one after another. It felt good to simply read them, it felt like being plugged into a nuclear reactor and receiving juice straight from the SOURCE.

I had this intense vanity, that power was literally flowing straight into my veins, straight into my mind, into my being, intensifying every single molecule, every thought, every vibration and action. I felt like I wasn't just "growing" but also "expanding" and "ascending" and "increasing" and every other word like that you can think of, simultaneously, page by page, chapter by chapter, book by book. Everything my family had denied me, everything I had craved my entire childhood up until that point, was freely available to me, finally. I felt like my computer was a portal that allowed me access to infinite knowledge, which meant infinite power. I could consume endlessly, all that I could ever want, with or without discretion, and nothing could stop me except for only the bare essentials like simple hygeine and diet, basic self care. But beyond that, my ambition to engage with anything but the absorption of knowledge was nearly shut off, as much as possible, and I became hyper introverted. Within a year I was diagnosed as "schizotypal", and they decided it had been something genetic which built up over time.

I didn't listen to the therapists. They tried putting me on many different SSRIs and even mood stabilizers. At one point I was even given an antipsychotic for a few months before they took me off it because it made me so sick. Therapy didn't work, it just pissed me off, or them. They knew it was a waste of THEIR time, and I didn't care because I didn't (and still don't) feel like it was my fault anyway. I didn't even want to go, or take their damn pills. The whole thing was a sham, it only works on certain kinds of people you see. People that actually buy into that crap. But it didn't work on me, so I was a big ass PROBLEM for everyone around me. All I cared about was KNOWLEDGE AND POWER, and that like, just isn't cool man, I guess. Even though I wasn't fucking with anyone or messing with anyone, but hey, all it takes is for you to just refuse to do what's expected of you and most people stop giving a fuck about you and feel completely justified, like, there's no hypocrisy in it whatsoever. They'll call YOU the hypocrite, for literally just trying to be your damn self in a fucked up world. It's outrageous.

So I took care of the "problem" myself. I decided to REALLY become a "lich". Which meant preparing a "phylactry", which I still have with me as a matter of fact. It also meant preparing a poison that was going to literally kill me, which I drank after performing an elaborate ritual aligned with a specific planetary day, hour, and lunar mansion. And that's what it nearly did. After the puking started, the world started spinning, and everything faded out. I ended up being rushed to the ER after I was taken to a poison control center, where I spent a good day and a half puking and going in and out of the worst nightmarish experience you can fucking imagine. During that time, I was in a trance, chanting and rocking back and forth between spews into the bag, clutching the hospital blanket, shaking and sweating, eyes fully dilated, slipping in and out of reality and going through ego-death over and over. It was extremely disorienting and horrifying. It is the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me. It is what is going to happen again someday, only, I won't come back the next time it does (probably). It will also happen to you, only, hopefully you will just black out and die and not come back and have to go through what I did. It would be better to just pass over. Having a "near-death experience" can be a really an awful experience if you aren't ready for it.

Except for the part where I was ready for it. I knew it was going to be like that. So even though it was a fucking rough time and a helluva thing, in the back of my mind, my intention remained clear - this was going to transform me into a completely new kind of being, a new entity. I was not my old self anymore, that being, that "me" had just died. That part of me was dead now, murdered and sacrificed to myself. Just as Odin hung himself from the tree for nine days, that was my self-sacrifice to myself, and it symbolized my true initiation. And during the time that I spent on the "other side", I learned what the "dead" really ARE, and what "demons" or "daimons" are, and "angels" and "spirits" and so forth. All these different names for the DEAD. They are all dead, in a manner of speaking. Even though they are different classifications of the dead, different kinds of entities, their nature is similar, in that they share the same nature as the "dead", they are the same "substance" you could say, as the souls of the deceased that depart from the body upon death. They are all from the same "side" of the veil, the other side of the "hedge".

That is what it means to "cross the hedge", to go over to the other side. Whether it is to commune with angels, demons, extraterrestrials, or ghosts, or gods, you are traversing the veil between life and death. In this sense, necromancy and witchcraft and shamanism and certain grimoire traditions that focus on the conjuration of demons or angels are very similar. They share a very familiar structure, even though they are most certainly not the same. That would be a mistake, to reduce them all to a common syncretic format and distill away all the nuances and "localism" that makes them different and uniquely valuable to study as their own thing, as well as through contrast and comparison. Thus, I felt the need to really expose myself, in all my ugly past flaws and stupidity, where it got me, what it took, how I got here, to provide the necessary context for why necromancy is the central pillar of my whole craft, and has been from before I even started.

Even recently, as I have been delving into the topic of vampires and vamprism, it brings me back to my studies of qliphotic initiation and infernalism, and then that goes right back to my experiences with necromancy. There are those who cross the abyss, and do so again and again in order to make pacts with forces on the other side of it, but then there are those who just live in the abyss and want to go deeper and deeper and almost can't even help it. They become native to it, in a sense, or at least, fluent, familiar, like adopted family. There is always some tension, but there is also acceptance where before there was only conflict, dissolution, oblivion. Something changes. The will to power becomes inverted, like a dying star, it consumes itself, and becomes a recursive self-referential black hole of an immortal, eternal, vaccuous, infinite, all consuming, all devouring, GAPING MAW.

"GINNUNGAGAP."

 

[Morell]

This was humbling read for me. I'm very impressed by your journey and the ritual of crossing over through death. Surviving your own death is a true achievement by itself. Reading about that gave me a lot to think about. Thank you.

 

[nunaphael]

This was humbling read for me. I'm very impressed by your journey and the ritual of crossing over through death. Surviving your own death is a true achievement by itself. Reading about that gave me a lot to think about. Thank you.

It isn't something I'm proud of, to be clear. It is meant to be a cautionary tale, of what happened to me when I was younger and swept up in the current of initiation and almost drowned in it at first. What I did, from an ordinary perspective, was an attempt at suicide. I would never tell anyone to kill themselves. That's far beyond anything necessary to be "initiated" and develop the second-sight. It's just what I thought it would take to become what I foolishly believed a "lich" was, and without any guidance other than my own stupidity, I almost killed myself trying to become one.

What I became instead, is that my ego "died" and a new one was born out of that traumatic experience. This new "self" that I now address myself as when I interact with everyone (including you) has a different given name, which I address myself as whenever I conduct rites, but I only share it with people whom I feel are part of the same current I am and work in basically the same way I do. To everyone else, I still go by my old name in person, and the same online handles I have always used. The change was internal, a step back from the total immersion into this physical body, into a new state where the public facing "persona" is just a sleeve you step into that is attached to the body, and is just one "self" among several others.

I mean, again, if we wanted to look at my present condition through purely profane psychological terms, what has happened is that my schizotypal disorder has progressed into a full on dissociative disorder. I have "dissociated" from my own body and self-image, and instead of feeling as though they are "me" the way a normal person would, I now feel like all that exists are masks, and the real "me", is as I said, a "ginnungagap".

I am pretty much a textbook case of "going insane" and losing yourself in this stuff. You know how they say that can happen? Well, it did. It happened to me. But what they don't tell you, is that sometimes you can still survive that process, and while it is absolute fucking hell and totally unnecessary, if you do survive it, you come out of it with just as valid of a working understanding of things and the ability to harness the same forces and communicate with the same entities as everyone else in the same measure they can, with enough devotion and practice and study. There are no hindrances to my progress, in other words, as there were before. Now, I can simply construct a role, which is to say, I can form a pact with a demon or a deceased ancestral entity to provide a source of energy in return for a boon of some sort, either something I need done internally to my own internal landscape, or something I need done to the external physical landscape. After that, I step aside and allow that being to work through me and carry out the tasks I require, sometimes even making use of my very body to do so.

If you could imagine, for a moment, I will describe what my "reality" (even as I am typing this) is like, by dividing it into three general "realms" I am simultaneously aware of and in subtle communication with right now.

The realm of the "living" is this body, and everything that is in communication with it. What I mean by "in communication" is to suggest that, for example, a stop sign "communicates" to you when you look at it, and everything else that is "doing" something, is communicating something to you by doing that action and not another action instead. If you consider things this way, everything is "talking" about something all the time, and exchanging information back and forth somehow. That exchange of information is the energy exchange happening between living things, it is "life force" energy, living energy. It is the most precious energy, the source of "loosh" energy that feeds "demons" and also allows the "dead" to cherish their memories.

The next realm is the "spirit realm" or just what I call "hell", pretty much. It is literally made of demons. Just as the realm of the living is pure life force being exchanged and transformed and rarefied into "loosh", the same process is happening on the "other side" - it is "demonic" or "infernal" energy which is used by spirits or demons and other such self-aware incorporeal entities, including some other very advanced extraterrestrial races, and including many of us throughout history. That "infernal" energy is the end result of their side of the process, and that energy is then what grants the dead their peace. That brings me to the real "super-task" of the necromancer, what I learned is the real never-ending purpose of the Great Work. It answered the question, why even become immortal? What difference would it make?

It is because, as a necromancer at least, I am called to the role of the "psychopomp" - the guide for the dead, to help the dead find peace eternal. Because the dead become restless when they are either disrespected or when they are not "fed" a portion of infernal energy from "hell", which "demons" or "spirits" or whatever you wish to call them, must first harvest from us through our providing them with our attention somehow. It is the "stored up" attention that we put into consecration ceremonies, sacrifices of "valuable" items, even murdering an "innocent" living creature, these all "release" that attention from the thing, it is releasing the energy that was "bound" through the "wyrd" or "fate" or whatever you want to call it, into that object, place, or action. The "spirits" or demons as I call them (not because they're "evil, tee-hee" but because they are very alien and dont care about our human sense of dignity and even take pleasure in fucking with it just to prove a point sometimes), feed on "attention" pretty much, and the richest forms of attention are the best, because then they grow more powerful and can do more in their own world to provide for the dead.

We do it all for the dead, because we too will one day take our place among them. And if we honor them today, then when we die, we will be honored by them, even if we are not honored among the living. It is more important to look forward and not be too distracted by what is happening around you, but also, to make the most of this life while you have it, which is to be as useful as you can in the "Great Work". To work with demons, and take your place in the great scheme of things, and feel like you are finally doing something truly "great", that your daily work is "great", that's... well, it's great lol. It feels awesome. I cannot ever go back to the lethargic, suicidal person I was before. That person is literally a ghost now, I can even see them in my mind, I can talk to that person, and sometimes I do when I need answers to something about my past, but they have come to accept why they had to die and I have given them a space in which to contemplate what they want to do next. They are presently just wandering around in a garden I created for them, like a zombie, the same way they were the day I killed myself. Lost and hopeless.

Like I said, I still have my "phylactry" with me. I keep it on my bookshelf and I say a prayer to it every day, so the garden remains intact and my old self will just wander around in that garden forever and remain content forever.

Post automatically merged: Thursday at 1:24 AM

I'm sorry, I spaced out and forgot to even explain the third realm.

The final realm is the "realm of the dead", which is literally the abyss itself. It just stretches on seemingly forever, and it is made of the dead, just as the infernal realm is made of demons, and the realm of the living is made of, well, us, and everything here. There is not much to say about this realm other than, it is made up of the essence of what we experience as memories. Not just the memories of the living, but also the memories of the dead, and mostly those. Perhaps that is why it seems so huge to me. I cannot really say. There are things even I have no answers to, just experiences. It is why there are "currents" at all, why there are "archetypes" - again, those are just ideas one man came up with, who was himself part of the current that those ideas stem from, and he did his best using the language in his brain to bring those to life.

I think that's kind of what's happening, the big picture if you will, the "great work". We bring the deepest currents, the "deadest" currents, back up to the surface, from the depths below. We find the sunken treasure and we drag it back up and "resuscitate" the dead. We resurrect "old threads", which is literally against the rules, gee what a coincidence, necromancy is still shunned even today in all it's manifestations. But that's it. That's what being a "necromancer" is all about. Finding really old, dead things, and restoring them to life temporarily, and showing respect to the dead because you know one day eventually you're gonna be hanging out with them, and also with a lot of demons that can be assholes sometimes.

 

[Morell]

You can be at peace about me. I have duties to uphold to my family, so even if I wanted, there is no way I would go through any such dangerous rite, that would get me through gates of death. I don' think I'm strong enough for it anyway, at least right now for sure. Not my path now. Though I cannot deny that I admire those who actually go through with it.

Death is extremely transformative and I believe that some rites of passage, specifically those where young people left into the wildness, are very helpful in personal growth. When one goes into the wildness and faces the world alone, they look death in the face and survive. It's of course less than drinking a venom, but it's still a thing. Changes child into an adult who then is less fearful, knowing death but also being able to take care of themselves and consequently of others too, hopefully. I dislike escape games and other such simulators of danger. It is nothing like facing danger that is actually real. Getting out of real danger grows real self-esteem.

I had one such experience, though not that dangerous. Just travel through mountains during winter on foot. Exhausting and psychologically dangerous, rather than physically. Would not want to do that again, but I could definitely see the value of going through it.... though to be completely honest I do think a lot about that vampiric ritual of blood exchange that makes one into a vampire. My dangerous dream. Maybe one day...

I'm beyond stronger hypes from spirituality. So I kind of understand that calmness/sadness that comes with deeper knowledge of reality. Still, one can get over that sadness or disillusionment and then turns into stronger person and learns to smile again. Odinic journey, what a fitting description. Odinn doesn't smile much himself. I wonder if your previous self still wants to be a lich. In a way he achieved that. Now kind of dead, yet alive and with magic and knowledge of death. A dead or rather undead necromancer is a lich, after all.