The Magus’s State of Awakening

One of the important characteristics of impeccability of the Magus is the adequacy of his reactions to external influences.

By adequacy here one should understand the correspondence between the direction and the magnitude of manifestations of Power that arise within the Magus and the forces acting outside him.

Inadequate behaviour is usually unconscious. Accordingly, the degree of awakening reflects how aware the Magus is of his actions and the degree of his responsibility. Magi who are confident in their abilities put more effort into solving difficult tasks than people who harbour serious doubts about their capabilities.

A Magus’s behavioral adequacy is traditionally called his degree of awakening — in other words, the more adequately a Magus responds to the challenges of Power, the more awakened his state. The term “awakening” is used to emphasize the element of energy generation by the Magus’s mind while in this state.

In other words, the more energy passes through the Magus’s mind, the more awareness grows within him, the greater his Power.

Magi proceed from the premise that the very method by which people apprehend the world is energy-inefficient: people try to fit every perception into an already existing sensory template (which has been imposed by the Parasite in the mind and teems with destructors). Magic insists, however, on the necessity of focusing attention on the perception itself and calls this the “secret of the world.”

Magi speak of the “mystery” of the world not to fool ordinary people; such an attitude allows one to escape the compulsive urge to fit every experience into a familiar scheme, and therefore sharply increases the the energy of the experience of the experience itself. A simple example — it is well known how redundant human language is: a person almost never reads a word in full, but, seeing a familiar letter combination, “recognizes” the rest of the word. This, on the one hand, eases the process of reading, but on the other hand can lead to errors and misunderstandings. Just as a single letter can fundamentally change a word’s meaning (threshold/vice, ball/score, etc.), so an “unnoticed” detail changes the meaning of an event and therefore its energy and its significance for the mind.

The Magus “reads the world to the end”; he understands that every letter, every tiniest sign can be evidence of a new meaning, a new interaction, and therefore of new energy.

It is precisely this “living to the last drop” that characterizes the Magus’s state of awakening.

The Magus is passionate about life and drinks it to the dregs, but he never forgets that this is merely a Game, and therefore simultaneously observes the flow of life from the outside, smiling wryly. Yet such a balance requires a high degree of awakening, since the ability to discern both poles of a binary demands a high degree of adequacy.

Accordingly, sound judgment and adequate behaviour are indispensable conditions of the Magus’s awakened state of mind, and therefore of his ability to generate large amounts of energy and, correspondingly, to accumulate Power.