Letter to the Warrior, from an aging Magician

“Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!” – from Paradise Lost by John Milton and his Muse.

I, too, have battled in the ancient war. My fire was philosophy and my belly was a breathing ego tattooed with both humbling and exalting histories, perspectives, and teachings. Now, the chiaroscuro has engulfed me; on the ropes, the vinculis, I have a crew struggling around the clock, pulling and wrapping and tying, straining every tendon to rip the chiaroscuro out of the gulf of chaos and invert it within.

–

Once you can see the patterns of your own mind clearly, especially as fixed to your currents of will, you can do some magic.

And once you can see the patterns in histories and elementals striving around you, you can do some magic.

But when you can interface these two patterns, and learn how to operate the gas, clutch, and gears, you can REALLY do some magic.

These patterns aren’t just geometrical, like you’d first imagine. These patterns have inversions and translations and operations and stacks and reflections and redundancy and chaos and patterned noise, they have trusses and foundations, viruses and ribosomes, intrusions and rifts, nests and flocks, fugues and crescendos, membranes, glands, and antibodies, fields, singularities, and fibrations, and their structure vectors operate through ubiquitous media with infinite, nested, shifting, and camouflaged boundaries. Maya. When you can learn to begin seeing in this way, you can begin seeing through time. You will begin naming the animals and conquering semiotics. You will begin to be the magus.

But ultimately it comes down to will, and if you are not tapping into faith, into God, into the Prime Pattern, Tao, if you are moving around in the mother Matrix, amoebalike, contracting and expanding, quivering and copulating and circumambulating over the landscape of powers and principalities, between the Scyllas and Charybdis, over the strange attractors and bell curves, choosing to eat the substrate and not the manna… well, …

The pattern will consume you.

And you will burn.

—

The greatest gift of all is the yoke, the union. Once you accept this you power-up your metabody and don the sacred armor. The portals, hitherto disguised all around you, will reveal themselves. You can battle with all your might. But this is the only way above the flames.