Depth of Awareness

Self-realization is the expansion of awareness.

However, awareness is not merely understanding; it is the complex development of the psychocosmos and establishing its connection to the macrocosm.

We have said more than once that the measure of awareness is the effectiveness of actions. That is, to be aware is not simply to understand something, nor even to understand and feel something, but to understand, feel, and act on what one has understood.

A Magus is not someone who knows a great deal. A Magus is not someone who is finely sensitive. A Magus is not even someone who can do many things.

A Magus is one who reflects the world in themselves, not in the Eastern passive sense, but in the sense of actively using the possibilities of self-knowledge.

For the Magus, the world is a field of potentials awaiting actualization.

And the Magus’s actions are precisely this actualization, embodiment, realization.

Thus, awareness is realization.

A Magus seeks experience, yet a Magus’s experience is not that empty skimming across the surface usually called the experience of Bael‘s servant.

People often call “experience” the repetition of meaningless actions. For example, someone who has visited many countries or slept with many partners is often considered “experienced.” However, real development in such cases is minimal because the breadth of experience usually hinders its depth, and one who collects trips accumulates not experience but jumbled impressions, without attention or penetration into the essence — just as one who collects sex neglects love.

We repeat: awareness expands when the perceived element is processed by the intellect that establishes its position relative to other objects, by feeling that finds elements of unity, and by the will that shows the capacity to influence the whole system. Such awareness is possible only when there is a mutual interpenetration of subject and object — their close and deep interaction, impossible in superficial contact.

In fact, the point is that the Absolute, expressed in each object as a mode of its self-knowledge, can be known in that object’s aspect when one fully penetrates the nature of the object.

That is, one can in principle fully realize oneself, for example, by fully becoming aware of the nature of a single tree, stone, or person.

And that would be enough if a person’s life were unique. However, in reality a person is usually bound by a large number of debts and knots running from life to life, forcing one to settle them.

Therefore, the real situation of embodied existence must combine “sliding along the surface” with “penetration into depth.”

As we said, a Magus who has attained understanding sees the world as a field of possibilities, and the use of the world’s possibilities means that the Magus must, on the one hand, free himself from as many debts as possible, and for this, the number of his interactions with the surrounding world must be fairly large (which is why long seclusion rarely suits Magi); on the other hand, his awareness must be as deep as possible, and his interactions must not lead to the accumulation of shadow or to the creating of new bonds.