Stairway to Heaven

The world in which awareness seeks to realize itself is a world of interactions. We have said many times that, from the point of view of the Myth we describe, both the self-aware being and all the objects of awareness that confront it are, in fact, processes, streams whose mutual coexistence manifests precisely in numerous interactions. From both a philosophical and a strictly physical standpoint, the world manifests to the degree that its individual constituents affect one another, and that influence always produces reciprocal changes in all the interacting processes/streams. The world is less a collection of objects than of forces, interactions, influences. Accordingly, all interacting elements are simultaneously subjects and objects of interaction, both generating causes and undergoing the consequences of shared change. In other words, our existence, our awareness, comes down to recording and describing such interactions, their causes and consequences.

Nevertheless, the reciprocity of these changes does not necessarily imply their symmetry, since a change that may lead to the complete transformation of one stream may produce only a minor fluctuation in another.

The degree to which the mind is willing and able to register the interactions it enters into and the range of their consequences determines its effectiveness, since the nature of mind is precisely to name, and therefore actualizing such changes for itself. As mentioned, people who consciously and deliberately strive for high mental efficiency are called Magi, and the lifestyle by which such efficiency is achieved is Magic.

The magical strategy is to learn to find and realize those interactions that lead to maximally expansive and harmonizing changes in the flow of mind. This approach rests on the idea that for each stream, for each individual manifestation of mind, there are particular, most “resonant” interactions in which that stream reaches the maximum of its possibilities, the maximum of its realization.

When Magi say that the chief art is the ability to listen to one’s heart and actualize its promptings (or, in another formulation — to realize one’s true will), they mean precisely this ability to find those basic realizations, whose enactment leads to large-scale and effective reconfigurations of the flow of mind.

Ordinarily a person is not selective about their interactions, drifting in a stream of disorderly fluctuations, impulses and attractions. This way of existing leads to a further accumulation of unrealized interactions, unfulfilled impulses, and therefore to an inefficient and, above all, inharmonious unfolding of their mind’s flow.

The Way of Magic begins when such a disorderly stream discovers within itself a striving to transcend its limits, to become aware of itself as an endless stream, and that striving finds its actualization in an interaction with some other stream/other energy that, however small it may be, is strategically important in its place in the flow, changing the very pattern of how mind unfolds, transforming the mind from slime “smeared across the surface of being” into a living, swift brook.

And the more the mind finds such “key” interactions for itself, or, in other words, the more it comes into contact with Power, the more ordered, internally coherent and harmonious its flow becomes.

The life of a Magus is such a succession of actualizations, a sequence of interactions in which their mind’s flow becomes ever purer, ever more powerful, an increasingly full-fledged and creative participant in the great current of the cosmos. And the more successfully the Magus finds such steps that lead them skyward, into actual perfection, the more effective their existence, the less suffering it contains, and more awareness and creativity.