The False Mastery of Gusion
Experience is the principal result of any activity. Regardless of whether the endeavor succeeds, regardless of how difficult it was and what obstacles it encountered along the way, it can (and should) in any case leave an experience.
Spending an extended period in a single stream leads the mind to accumulate a significant amount of experience in that field, to accumulate precedents and methods for solving typical problems arising in that kind of activity.
As a result, when someone spends a long time in one field, it begins to feel anchored in that field, becomes “experienced” and “knowing,” and this can have both positive and negative consequences for development.
The positive aspect of experience is symbolized by the Genius Lauviah. The name of this Genius means “God Praised,” and the state of mind that this Genius supports corresponds to the state of “benign” experience — an image of the elder who has been through everything, and who offers advice drawn from experience. According to Lenen,
“Gasion (Gusion) — the eleventh spirit, a duke. He is like Xenopilus. He tells everything about the present, the past and the future. He can show the solution to any question you ask him. He inclines to friendship and destroys it, and also gives honor and greatness to anyone. He rules more than 40 legions of spirits.”
Nevertheless, experience is by no means the same as wisdom. Knowing solutions to a large number of problems does not mean being able to solve those problems.
The illusion that the accumulation of experience is the same as gaining wisdom — that a fool, who has lived a long, hard life, will necessarily become a sage in old age — is personified by the flip side of the Gates: the demon Gusion.
The “Lemegeton” is concise in its description:
“Gasion (Gusion) — the eleventh spirit, a duke. He is like Xenopilus. He tells everything about the present, the past and the future. He can show the solution to any question you ask him. He inclines to friendship and destroys it, and also gives honor and greatness to anyone. He rules more than 40 legions of spirits.”
Yet this brevity is enough to understand the nature of the demon.
The form in which Gusion appears — “Xenopilus,” or in some variants “Xenophall” — corresponds to the notion of the “other,” and in the first case emphasizes that “otherness,” while the second emphasizes expansiveness and phallic aspect. Practical experience shows that the demon usually appears as a male baboon, and this image of an alpha male with an erect phallus ready to dominate outsiders accurately reflects the characteristics of the demon’s influence on the mind. The demon’s image underscores his inability to create anything new and only a limited capacity to reproduce what he “knows.” Gusion is devoid of creative activity but is very rich in “reproductive” activity. He can only produce similar approaches and solutions from templates, without going beyond the known. Remaining within the narrow confines of the experience available to him, the demon obstructs any attempts to go beyond that experience and create something fundamentally new.
The undeniable value of experience must not become the sole measure of truth. The world is changeable and diverse, and if the same situation is handled the same way a thousand times, that doesn’t guarantee the thousand-and-first outcome. If something is true for a thousand people, it does not mean it applies to the thousand-and-first.
Gusion robs the mind of flexibility; he diminishes the importance of spontaneity and inspiration, reducing the world to a mechanistic picture. Under the sway of this demon, a person treats experience as absolute, rejects all that is new and unusual, forcing it into the Procrustean bed of old templates.
Gusion only “shows solutions,” but doesn’t teach independent problem solving; he replaces deep understanding of processes with superficial knowledge of appearances, ignoring that manifestations depend on conditions, and that when conditions change, phenomena can change.
The “honor and greatness” brought by this Duke are unstable; he not only “gives friendship” but also “destroys” it.
For the Magus, the ability to resist the demon’s destructive influence comes from cultivating mental flexibility. In the mind’s moving beyond mere “knowing,” in relying on understanding of deep foundations of processes — and also in acknowledging the mystery of the world and its fundamental “beyond the grasp of reason.” A Master for the Magus is not one who has followed the Way for a long time, and not even one who has achieved success on it, but one who understands the Way’s essence, who perceives its inner nature. Accordingly, a Magus attains mastery not by length of practice, but when his mind identifies with the Way.
A good article. I highly recommend it to physics students. It recommends making more pliable what is already dangling like a rag in a continuous wind for the overwhelming majority. The rag will move more effectively if it skillfully dodges the wind currents. What is the name of the demon that shows us increasingly new demons, suggesting we defeat what cannot exist in a stopped mind?
“To dangle like a rag in the wind” is very bad for consciousness, and to avoid this, it must be maximally disciplined: https://enmerkar.com/en/way/the-magus-discipline Nevertheless, it is important to avoid both traps that prevent consciousness from standing firmly on the path of its self-identity and those that substitute this self-identity with a stable way of being, a fixed picture. An unstable consciousness cannot be successful, but neither can a consciousness that has ossified in self-admiration – it is also doomed to fail. The article is not about how the ‘rag moves’, but about how the rag does not turn into a hard chunk of ice in the cold and icy wind, the same empty and useless thing.
To dangle like a rag in the wind for consciousness means to be drawn by the observed illusory reality. A problem arose in a person’s life. An inflexible consciousness looks at it like a ram and thinks: ‘damn, how am I going to solve this problem now’, recalling how others did it. A flexible consciousness quickly builds several possible solutions and chooses the optimal one. And some don’t see any problem requiring attention and resolution, as they observe the world ‘stretching’ over time. They can simultaneously see both the cause of the problem’s emergence and its self-elimination in the future. If the rag hardens, it will become a weather vane – a completely useless option. But what if the rag becomes completely permeable to the wind? The article is not about that – I know. But in recent times, it seems to me there is a demon of creative activity saying: ‘Look, how much you have yet to realize from your creative potential, do this, do that, people need your experience and ability to find solutions. Enhance your creative ability and flexibility of consciousness, and you will reveal something stunning to people. But you will get neither glory nor money. What you will have is a feeling of self-realization satisfaction. And then, having achieved satisfaction, you will engage with your consciousness’. To add something to the article – the plasticity of consciousness can be enhanced by observing how the problem solver attempts to solve a given task. And also – when understanding deep foundations and causes of processes and phenomena, solving a task is no great achievement, but try to do it without understanding (which is often the case in modern science). Or as I used to say in my student years – passing the exam with a 5 when knowing the subject can be done by any fool, but try to pass with a 5 without knowledge of the subject.
Dear GATO, are you hinting that there is a more effective route instead of identifying and confronting demons – the stopping of the mind? But tell me, is your mind stopped right now? And how long can you or your acquaintances remain in such a state? And how to walk the human path with all its twists and turns with a stopped mind?
Determining what I am dealing with (demons) helped me articles by Enmerkar. However, effectively confronting them I began only after applying Eastern methods. Eastern practice is like dichlorvos, there is no need to run around with a newspaper for every fly. With the full so-called stop of the mind, all visible reality disappears, including time. This is the level of great masters with many years of practice. But significantly calming the mind can be done by anyone in principle. And the abilities gained from this will surpass all expectations by a kilometer.
For me, this article is a continuation of our recent discussion about physical and virtual reality. And that video about the future was made with Gusion’s hints. That future world is ‘devoid’ of creative activity, but is very rich in ‘reproductive’ activity… it diminishes the importance of spontaneity and inspiration, reducing the world to a mechanistic picture. And the main thing is that we are denied ‘recognition of the world’s mystery and its fundamentally indivisible nature from reason.’
About the indivisibility from reason, I would say that it is still divisible, our two main tools for understanding, the main poles feeling and reason, are perfect in their ability to reveal the facets of the World, it is just that both, elevated to the absolute, halt development. Much has already been written about going beyond this and any other dualities, moving on water. But for some reason, many calmly accept such a path concerning themselves, their microcosm, while categorically refuse even to imagine that something similar could happen with our World. After all, it is also a system akin to our consciousness, it also lives, develops, and goes through stages of maturation =) And naturally, the longer you live, the farther the horizons. And each (each!) of its potential realizations, new and old conglomerates of energies must find their logical conclusion, give birth to an heir. And if today our World, through mixing people and chemistry, produced gunpowder, do not doubt that tomorrow a gun will appear that, as we know, sooner or later will shoot, no matter how humane it is to people and their desires. The turns of civilization in this video are just a vaguely anticipated path of some aspects of our life; one might say this is just the dreams of some about a certain something. And seeing something about the structure of a more complex washing machine, it would be foolish to assume that nothing new in mechanics can come after SUCH, it will, just it’s not for us yet and not about us, this MAYBE the next step. We are groping our way in the evening twilight through the garden of diverging paths into the fairy tale of the unknown, rather than trudging along during the day on Lenin Avenue towards tomorrow’s factory shift.
I liked this example in the whole story: ‘do this, do that, people need your experience and ability to find solutions. Enhance your creative ability and flexibility of consciousness, and you will reveal something stunning to people. But you will get neither glory nor money. What you will have is a feeling of self-realization satisfaction. And then, having achieved satisfaction, you will engage with your consciousness.’ This is a very interesting story – do what some people supposedly need. And you will be satisfied. I have been observing a certain cluster with a claim to self-realization for quite a while. The main value is declared as being oneself and ‘gifting it to the world’. For some strange reason, for this gifting, and it happens in the form of around psychological consultations and writing books, most often, the sick, either those like me or an audience is needed. It’s a strange kind of freedom that requires the presence of disabled people and admirers as a backdrop… And I think the question is serious. What to do and from what to do if not for others, how to get a reaction from the world, why can we consider our activity a sign of self-identification, and it can be, of course, but how to do it so that we express ourselves?) Here I am thinking…
Besides the standardization of solutions and the expulsion of creativity, Gusion has another unpleasant property. He teaches to accept current reality as the only one given. And equally teaches to accept one of the probabilities as a 100%- probability. In fact, he substitutes the openness of perceiving any outcome with the closedness of EXPECTING a single possible outcome. There are two resulting forces from this vector. Gusion is positioned as a guard at the gates to magic since the current human experience does not imply contact with magical worlds, and the template perception allows a person to see only what fits into the template of previous experiences. The second result becomes the life being cyclical. Expecting standard outcomes from standard inputs leads a person to unconsciously pour intent and power into the standard outcome and inevitably gets it. The creation and destruction of friendship by Gusion has another aspect. If a person’s behavior aligns with standard expectations and standard experience, they are accepted as a friend (even if they may not be one). If such a person does something different from EXPECTATIONS (formed by experience), then they fall out of the friend group. Unfortunately, this is often accompanied by a drain of energy to the demon in the form of disappointment and depression. The world is not as we expected from current experiences, but we believed in it so much, let’s get upset – that’s Gusion’s formula for gaining power. Accepting the fluidity and multi-probability of the world, and the multiplicity of worlds and outcomes neutralizes Gusion.
Thank you. Your comments always clarify the texts of Enmerkar well, who is more succinct.
Conciseness is a hallmark of mastery, in which are intertwined: the value of the spoken word, the value of time saved by what remains unsaid, and a koan for seekers.
The world is like jazz. The maximum of improvisation allows the hidden to unfold.
The knower does not accumulate ready-made solutions; the knower creates solutions.
A Master for a magician is not someone who has walked along this Path for a long time, and not even someone who has achieved significant successes on this Path, but someone who sees and understands the essence of the Path, who sees its inner nature.
Masters do not exist for a magician at all. The concept of ‘master’ imposes a limitation. Everything has a conditional concept. everyone sees as much as they can and as much as they understand.
Creating a hierarchy is also a limitation. Presenting one’s opinion is also imposing one’s will. Imposition goes everywhere.
We turn on the TV and receive the behavior image needed by someone. We turn on the computer and receive the same in the form of conditional limitations and models of behavior.
We sit behind the wheel and remember the traffic rules, which also limits. I understand that one can only go beyond limitations by seeing and feeling them.
Dear Numen, then not only is there no Master for a magician, but there is no magician either, and you do not exist. Existence itself imposes a limitation, with the sole condition – you choose for yourself what and how to limit. To completely exit from limitation means to not exist. Is that what you want?))
And now about existence… You exist in this reality, you sat down in the car, feel your limitations by the traffic rules (actually feeling does not mean exiting), you decided to exit from them, to spit on the system and the rules while sitting behind the wheel of your car, and you will exit… exit into the other world) Question number two: Is this what you want?))
Dear Milita, by seeing and understanding the nature of limitations we gain the opportunity to understand those who impose these limitations and subsequently we will be able to go beyond these limitations.
And when you know the Rules of the Game, you can change them at your discretion.
p.s. regarding traffic rules – this is just an example.
Respectfully.
Why just an example, the big manifests in the small, the small in the big. You know the traffic rules, i.e. you are familiar with the limitations – does that change anything? I do not think that because of these limitations you would give up your vehicle, and why? Because it gives you opportunities. And what is attractive about opportunities? They give you what you want, they can give you freedom, expand the framework… or narrow them, since freedom and limitation are presented in one package. So what do you want? To walk or to have a car, and after buying a car, to drive by the rules or not, or maybe it’s better to just stay home and not go anywhere?))
I do not argue that it is useful to know the Rules of the Game, otherwise penalties in the form, for example, of karma are not pleasing) But is it only in the limitations?
It seems to me that Gusian and Belphegor are the same demon. Am I mistaken?