Who are you?
A simple question at first glance, but perhaps increasingly difficult the more you ponder it.
You have a body. A name. Possibly a profession. Numerous skills. Hobbies. Likes. Dislikes.
Are any of these things you?
Do you remember how you got here? When experience started for you?
What is the true core of your being, the very center from which the rest springs forth?
I’ve heard it said that there are truly only two magickal actions:
- Binding – Adding yourself to something or adding something to yourself.
- Unbinding – Removing yourself from something, or removing something from yourself.
Do either of these actually affect our true nature? Perhaps they simply change our perspective of it.
In my article on Orbital Mechanics I discussed how our “True Will” seems to broaden in scope as we progress through awakenings. The same can be said for our understanding of who and what we are. We wake up to the fact that we are, and always were, more than what we thought.
We start out in magick and we see all sorts of books full of spells and instructions. Make a sigil, light a candle, burn these herbs, meditate.
So we give these things a try.
Somewhere along the way some of us encounter instructions for evoking a spirit.
We expect that some hazily defined thing will arrive, and we can speak to it as if it were another being. Perhaps we share some qualities, perhaps we are mostly different, but it is clearly an “other”. Not ourselves.
An invocation works the other way. We’re asking that the qualities of the spirit become present within ourselves. Perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently.
By our above definitions of magick, an evocation is an unbinding (saying this was not part of me, and I am now making this fact explicit) and an invocation a binding (saying this is now part of me, internal to what I am).
So, what happens when our awareness of what we are changes as we grow in spiritual awareness? As it expands to include the “other” as part of the self?
Using the Estes Method one can put on a blindfold, isolate their hearing with headphones that churn through sweeping radio waves and, after asking a spirit to be present, repeat the words they hear. In this way, those around can synchronistically have a conversation with this disembodied entity.
Were the magician in this scenario awakened, and their idea of the nature of themselves widened, what then would occur if they invoked a spirit to converse whose qualities were already included in what they see their nature to be?
Is such a thing possible? Can something be bound to you that is already a part of you?
And when they are prompted to speak by the voice on the radio, who is it then that is speaking?
What would the difference be between them and the spirit if they are of the same nature?
If an awakening is a realization of something that is already the case, what does that say about the scenario in which the magician does not already include the spirit in their view of who they are?
A person may die, and return to live again.
What is it that returns?
The body is different. The time is different. The experiences of the life are different.
But, if it is the same “person”, something must be the same.
We may say it is the same soul, but we can also say it is the true nature of what the person was which has come back.
So, what about the case where someone does not seem to be a direct reincarnation of another individual, as in there are no outward signs of similarity, but through spiritual experience and awakening they come to realize they share the same nature as another who came before?
Perhaps they begin teaching the same things, or maybe they produce art in a similar fashion.
Has that person been reborn as a new individual because the nature of who they are is now again present in the world?
At an extreme end of this, what if a person awakens to the knowledge that ultimately, at the very source of what they are, that nature is shared by every individual who has ever and will ever live?
Countless traditions have within them a variation on the idea of a unity with everything.
“All is One.”
If a single person were to correctly have this realization, would that not necessitate it is true for everyone?
Suddenly the other is gone, and there is only the true nature of what you are.
What everyone is.
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” – Matthew 25:40
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