Control of Desires

The most difficult dilemma that a Magus must neutralize to ensure the effectiveness of his Way is the balance between control and realization.

The point is that, on the one hand, every arising desire must be acted upon — otherwise its energy strengthens the shadow — but on the other hand, the realization of destructive desires pulls the being further from the Orlög, eroding its sense of self.

Indeed, when a Magus confronts a destructive desire within himself, he faces a choice: to realize that desire and thereby “fall,” to move away from his Way, or to suppress the desire and thereby enlarge his shadow. Both options prove ineffective; both complicate a being’s life and afterlife. Each time one must choose between “bad and worse,” and the correctness of the choice is often highly doubtful.

The only foolproof method is to prevent the emergence of such desires that would lead one off the Way, and we have already discussed that control for a Magus precisely means tracking and filtering desires before they even emerge. This point requires further clarification.

Free will, and therefore control, exist only in the highest layer of the cosmos (whether one speaks of the macrocosm or the psychocosm) — in Atzilut. Only where the duality of manifestation has not yet arisen is there no conditioning. All the other levels — the worlds of Bria, Yetzira, Assia — merely unfold, direct, and make concrete the potentials set by Atzilut, and the embodied world A‑Ze provides the environment for their manifestation. Accordingly, any attempts to limit the creative impulse in any of these levels constitute a violation and distortion of the free flow of energy. In fact, this is the strategy of the Parasite of mind: distorting the energy that flows through the mind leads to dispersion and loss of that energy, and the mind itself is reduced to a poorly structured system.

The conclusion is obvious: in order to truly control one’s mind without creating dead ends, stagnation, or drains within it, one must gain access to the mind’s highest level.

Accordingly, ascent through the levels of the mind is a prerequisite of control, and therefore of harmonizing the whole mind.

The path the mind must take is sometimes called deification — in the sense that the mind must find within itself the primordial, creative level from which the seeds of its future tendencies are born.

Of course, in its fullest sense this state is reached only at the higher stages of individual development, yet insights into it are possible and necessary already from the moment of overcoming the first Abyss.

The state of control is attained by establishing a connection with that higher level — with the Logos of the being — and establishing that connection can occur through special quests (such as a Vision Quest or a “Knowledge and Conversation”), through initiatory Rituals, or as a result of a general cosmization of the mind.

There are many mythological interpretations of this process — but they all amount to gaining access to the “true will,” the creative potency of that psychocosm.

Until, even at the level of insights, contact between the Malchut and Keter of the mind is established — until the personality sees “God face to face” — it will inevitably be somewhat destructive, with a “negative balance” of energies; and even after that contact is made, the losses will be considerable. Yet the knowledge of the Orlög will become an invaluable aid in constructing an effective Way.

And for this striving initiative must come from above: one cannot simply “decide to become” a Magus. First one must hear and respond to the Call — that is, establish the primary contact between the developing mind and its Logos.

The Magus’s task is to remember that Call that summoned him to the Way, and to use it as Ariadne’s thread for entry into the state of control, and thus for the ever‑increasing effectiveness.