The Traps of Experience

Many religious and magical systems assert that to attain higher states of mind one must achieve a certain degree of detachment from the perception of the world.

At the same time, we have mentioned that the Magical myth we are considering sets the development of consciousness as life’s goal — precisely the development of the mind, which consists in acquiring and accumulating experience.

Doesn’t that create a contradiction?

Obviously, the problem does not lie in perception itself but in the mechanism, the technique by which it is carried out.

A fundamental feature of perception is its cognitive, i.e. recognizing — capacity. In other words, when perceiving a block of energies, the mind inevitably recognizes it as some object from the system of descriptions — the cognitive syntax — already present within the mind.

By that very act of perceiving, the mind introduces two opposing elements — the perceiver (“spirit”) and the perceived (“matter”). At the same time, in the course of this process, the mind loses its identity. It fixes itself on the perceived object, accepts it as reality, forgetting that it is interacting only with a description.

Thus the mind effectively shifts the center of its being — the act of perceiving, interacting, and tuning energies — into the descriptive realm, mistaking the description for the actual object.

It’s fortunate when the mind can grasp an object’s matrix; usually, however, it is so fragmented it perceives only a distorted image — the form.

A simple example — a person walks through a forest.

This means that trees lie within their field of perception.

Constructive perception would consist in seeing trees as forms of Great Spirit’s self-awareness manifested in objects with specific properties and not essentially different from the perceiving subject. In other words, the idea is that one aspect of the Great Spirit, an embodiment of a Monad, interacts with other aspects’ embodiments of the same Great Spirit.

In reality, however, what usually occurs is perception by a subject — a person who functions as the active element of the binary pair — and an object — the tree — functioning as the passive part of the binary pair and “awaiting” active impact upon it. From that standpoint, it appears that the tree is something one can use to build a house, burn for firewood, or use in some other way. The mind abandons self-identity and plunges into the world of forms, and within that world nothing reliable remains to support it because the only dependable foundation — its own self-awareness — has been forgotten.

Thus the acquisition of experience in the interaction of minds is replaced by the illusion of experience gained by manipulating forms, and the mind itself, instead of being an element that orders the world, becomes an agent of destruction.

It is clear that the crucial boundary between constructive and destructive experience is the absence or presence of a consuming attitude, since the latter, being a distinguishing feature of the Qliphothic world, has nothing in common with the development of the mind.

The only way out of this impasse for the mind is liberation from slavish attachment to experience. This is precisely what Magic aims to develop — the mind’s flexibility necessary to move from forcing perceptions into existing templates to perception itself — a direct interaction of energies.