Sealing of Experience

Magic is a path to accelerating the evolution of consciousness, consisting in a significant expansion of the range of its interactions. Namely, a Magus is a being who knows (and realizes) himself in a much broader range of actions, contacts, accomplishments and confrontations than an “ordinary” person.

The whole point of Rituals, magical practices and actions is precisely to enable such productive interactions. That is, first, it is necessary to connect the mind with a new energy that allows one to unlock something important in the mind; and, second, to make that contact productive, to draw from it the greatest possible Power — awareness.

Accordingly, for the path to be effective, a Magus must learn to answer two questions correctly: 1) what energies can help him achieve breakthroughs, and 2) how to ensure full contact with them. The first (knowledge) comes from ‘wisdom’ — the Magus’s Power, and the second (method) from his ‘experience’ — his Authority.

An intuitive grasp of these conditions for development exists in every person and manifests as a striving for broad experience and skilled action. That is, everyone seeks, on the one hand, periodically to experience something new, and on the other — to learn to do something well, to become a professional (an expert) in a given field. The Magi only purify and sharpen these natural aspirations, removing from them the taint of the Yetzer hara and adding order and awareness.

At the same time, errors of two kinds may arise.

The first group of errors is connected with mental sluggishness and involves accumulating “empty experience”: the mind yearns for novelty, for impressions, rolling from interaction to interaction, but, unable to plunge into them, does not complete the contact — with awareness — merely reducing fresh perceptions to senseless busywork. People deprived of their own inner fire of the mind easily become dependent on its short-lived “flashes” provoked by a new interest, which they are unable to sustain or fully explore. Such people quickly grow bored with what once seemed attractive, and they move on, in search of new short-lived enthusiasms.

The second group of errors, by contrast, is connected with a tendency to cling, and one of the destructive forces that often go unnoticed in these impulses is the spirit of possession — the mother of all vices.

Indeed, the impulse to “appropriate”, seize, possess experience is not unique to ordinary people; this vice is not uncommon even among the Magi. Entering into interaction with a given energy, a person wants not merely to “open” it for himself, not merely to “know” it, but to obtain it, to possess it. It is clear that such striving only feeds the illusion of separateness, egoism and fixation on Gilgul.

It is clear that both the abandoning development — the desire to “take everything from life”, which in practice turns into nothing but an energy drain and hollow experience — and the pseudo-search, analysis, or practice lacking structure are equally counterproductive. Both extremes are, in essence, mere busywork, the squandering of one’s life, time and resources; the first arises as a distortion of the natural striving for Presence, while the second is a surrogate for the natural need for the path. The key to true development is a coherent system and clear direction — that is, order and purposeful action. Only when our being is mindful, and our actions are ordered and directed, are we truly on the path of development; we truly correspond to our nature.

Therefore the Magi have developed a clear idea of what the result of a productive interaction should be. That result should not be simply “experience”, and certainly not a new possession, but — a new imprint.

By “imprint” is meant the forming in the mind a stable, embodied image of the experienced contact, which includes both the “knowledge” of the object of the interactions — its properties and characteristics revealed in that interaction — and the awareness of the mind’s own dynamics, also revealed in that contact. In other words, in every interaction the mind must answer two questions: 1) What is happening around me now? and 2) What is happening within me now? Given sufficient depth of insight into the essence of these questions, the a union of Being and mind occurs, which is the goal and task of the entire cosmic process. Ideally, having imprinted the entire cosmos within itself, the mind fully realizes itself (in the East this state is called “Mahamudra”, the “Great Seal”), thereby completing and exhausting the universe’s cycle.

Accordingly, it becomes clear that, on the one hand, a Magus must strive for novel experiences, but only on the condition that the previous experiences have been worked through and assimilated, and, on the other hand, for depth of understanding of it — for its awareness and imprinting. Neither “stomping in place” within the same energies, nor skimming the surface of ever-new impressions makes it possible to achieve high developmental efficiency. However, by continually studying and deepening one’s perception, one can realize the Great Seal and free the mind from duality.