Distortion of Perception

Everyone knows the saying that «the devil is God’s ape». We have also often discussed that the predators’ preferred strategy that feed on various forms of others’ power is to deceive their victims by distorting their perception, thereby making victims’ resources more accessible to predators.

From the standpoint of the Magical myth, perception is the mind’s reflection of the systems of relations that exist between blocks of energy in the universe, and the ordering of those relations into a hierarchy. The latter is especially important, because although “everything is connected with everything” and the cosmos is essentially one, different kinds of connections vary in intensity and in how mediated they are. In other words, although a change in any element of the cosmos is reflected throughout the whole, it first and foremost affects a number of elements “nearest” to the given one, and then — in decreasing order — the remainder of the whole.

In fact, the very process of knowing consists in establishing, between the energies held in the mind, the same relations that exist between those energies outside the mind, and in determining the “relative closeness” of different kinds of interaction.

If the process of awareness takes place in this way, then the mind includes, by microcosmic analogy, the Macrocosm’s interactions, and it is precisely this that constitutes its activity in transforming Life Force into Personal Power.

At the same time, if the connections established by the mind within itself differ from the connections the Macrocosm favors, then the resulting system won’t be able to fully realize its potential, and part of the Life Force, rather than becoming awareness, will remain unused. It is this surplus that constitutes what predators seek and feed on.

Conversely, if the connections are established entirely inharmonious, the system cannot arise at all, and so the mind notices the error, detects the error, and refines perception.

Thus the strategy of predators is not to create an “alternative world,” but to “adjust” the existing one in their favour. In other words, they gain the most benefit when they alter the order as little as possible, only tweaking it slightly so that the deception goes largely unnoticed, while the entire system is transformed from a system that accumulates awareness into a system that supports parasites and predators.

We have said that at the level of the mind such “substitutions” are expressed in false fundamental concepts — destructors — upon which the human mind, the victim’s mind, is built.

It is also clear that the Way to Power lies in tracking such “substitutes” and replacing them with more productive relations.

Distortions of perception are everywhere. What we see, what we feel, and what we think are already “spoiled” by the efforts of the Qliphoth.

This concept has long been known in the form of the notion of «Yetzer hara» — “the seed of the devil” that corrupts the world from within.

And the essence of this “corruption” lies precisely in subtle substitutions of concepts, in insidious holes that eat away at the mind from within and lead to its dysfunction.

It is also clear that the mind cannot be completely rid of the Yetzer hara — to do that would require its total destruction and recreation, which leads to ending incarnation and destroying the personality. Nevertheless, the essence of the Magus’s struggle is precisely to seek out, little by little, the trace poisons in the mind, remove them, and wash them away, thus opening the way to a fuller transformation of power, and therefore to an expansion of the mind and the realization of one’s potential. There is no task more important than identifying the manifestations of the Parasite of mind, and this is the Magus’s main battle — the battle for authentic being.