Shards of Desire

As mentioned several times, the basis of existence, according to the Myth we are considering, is the field of potentials, the Environment, which contains all possibilities and aspects of the Absolute in their unmanifested state.

At the same time, the potentiality of the Environment lies not only in its all-encompassing nature, but also in the fact that these possibilities seek to manifest.

This striving of the Environment toward manifestation is called the Principle of Desire, which is regarded as the foundation of actual being. In other words, within the nature of the Environment one can distinguish two qualities — the quality of the One Being and the quality of the One Desire. Kabbalah describes these properties of the One basis as Universal Wisdom — Bina, juxtaposing it with Universal Intelligence — Hokhma.

We have also discussed that manifestation itself — actualization — occurs when the ordering, naming, and differentiating principle of consciousness — the Spirit — penetrates the unified and formless field of the Environment.

Thus the unified, by its nature, character of Desire as such — the undifferentiated nature of the Great Mother — acquires concrete manifestation, its actual being as distinct objects, through the “illumination” in her depths of various aspects by the Spirit’s radiance — Hokhma.

From this perspective it is clear why desire is considered the foundation of manifestation and why Magic devotes so much attention to the importance of realizing desires — for this is precisely the World Process.

In that sense any object, any being can be seen as a “bubble of desire”, and the hierarchy of these “bubbles” runs “from top to bottom” — from the One desire to “be” — the originating impulse of the Unified Environment — down to the smallest manifestations of desire embodied in bacteria and viruses.

Moreover, it becomes clear that desires of a “lower” level can be viewed as particular manifestations of the desires of “higher” levels, and accordingly each level of beings can be seen as an embodiment, “shards” of the desires of hierarchically higher beings.

It is in this sense that Magic speaks of man as the expresser of the “will of the gods”, just as animals, plants, bacteria, and minerals are, in essence, embodied shards of the desires of higher levels.

Furthermore, it is precisely on this basis that the division of all beings into “free” and “ministering” — that is, those capable of generating desires independently and those who only embody the desires of the Environment — rests.

Note that the human level (in the broad sense) is considered the most “free” in that the contact between the Unified Environment and the Creating Spirit is most balanced at this point.

By generating desires, free beings not only create possibilities for the actualization of the Great Spirit’s new potentials, they also create opportunities for the manifestation of other beings who, in turn, will carry out the realization of these desires on more specific levels.

Moreover, it is precisely people, as the threshold generators of desire, standing on the edge between creation and destruction, creating and consuming, who must be most attentive to the process of generating desires. If, for example, it is not easy for gods to engender a desire that manifests in the emergence of harmful/destructive processes and beings (destruction by the will of the gods is usually constructive and evolutionarily valuable), for a human it’s easy to introduce a dose of poison into the world.

Therefore those aspects of the control of desire that form the basis of any Magical Way are important not only from the standpoint of one’s own development; they also have macrocosmic consequences.

The Magus knows that he is an actor on the cosmic stage, and that his skills, his awareness, his desires are components of the World Process, and therefore treats them with the appropriate attention and responsibility.