Sealing the Breaches

Few would doubt that attaining the dialectical wholeness of one’s being is one of the Magus’s most important tasks.

Wholeness does not mean simplicity or structural uniformity; it means harmony, the pleromness of the Psychocosmos by analogy with the pleromness of the ideal Macrocosm.

Of course, the harmonious development of the mind implies evenly filling potentials with the Light of Power, and accordingly the formation of an internally logical and coherent system that draws stimuli for its development from its own differences in potential.

However, from incarnation to incarnation, from life to life, the mind is under the pressure of parasites and predators, hindering its effective functioning, and therefore, instead of a beautiful tree growing in the open, the being develops like a shoot in darkness and drought, sometimes assuming the most unseemly forms.

With such a mode of development, the mind sometimes grows not in the direction required by its developmental logic, but toward where predator pressure is lower. Such unevenness, the intermittency of development, leads to the usual situation in which a person’s Psychocosmos is a collection of poorly integrated infrapersonalities, “islands of consciousness,” between which normal communication is often disrupted.

As a consequence, conflict arises between the subpersonalities, and to the mind’s total war against the Parasite is added a civil war within the mind itself.

The tactics of internecine struggle among parts of the mind resemble ordinary feudal infighting: a dominant subpersonality tries to forcibly subordinate the other parts of the Psychocosmos, and if they do not fit into its system — declare them enemies and heretics. In the process, most of the life-force is spent holding down such “internal demons,” which are, in fact, parts of the mind, merely repressed. What happens next is known to anyone familiar with psychoanalysis, and discussing these matters is not Magic’s concern. In fact, the key difference between Magic and psychology on this point is simply that Magic asserts that not all “internal demons” are repressed complexes, that within the Psychocosmos there are also real enemies. Accordingly, the Magus’s tactics are aimed at distinguishing “artificial” from “genuine” enemies and devising different strategies for dealing with them.

The Magus’s task is to achieve the totality of his being. In other words, he must not merely identify his subpersonalities; he must integrate them into a single system, filling the chasms between them or, at the very least, building bridges between them. It is crucial, however, not to integrate the predators, separating the “wheat from the chaff.”

“To accept oneself” for the Magus does not mean self-indulgence, but active work toward harmonizing one’s being.

Often the subconscious motive driving people to the Way of Magic is the desire to rid themselves of inner conflict, and because the widespread strategy for getting rid of problems is to ignore them, the simplest way to dispose of frightening subpersonalities is to declare them nonexistent.

Accordingly, a common mistake of magical wayfarers is the premature declaration of having achieved “inner peace,” which on inspection proves only to be driving the problematic parts deeper underground. Instead, the Magus’s task is precisely to bring all parts of himself to light. One might say that the Magus illuminates the subconscious, in the sense that he tries to flood the depths of his Psychocosmos with the light of the mind.

Therefore, whatever surprises his depths may hold, the Magus has no other option but to bring everything hiding in those depths to light and attempt to reunite his parts, casting aside alien intrusions.

To harmonize the separate parts of the Psychocosmos, it is necessary to expend considerable energy sealing the gaps between them until the “puzzle effect” is achieved, and the disparate, seemingly dissimilar parts suddenly form a new orderly and coherent picture.