Stairway to Heaven

The world in which awareness attempts to realize itself is a world of interactions. We have said many times that, from the standpoint of the Myth we are describing, both the aware being itself and all the objects of awareness that confront it are, in fact, processes— currents whose mutual co-existence is manifested precisely through innumerable interactions. From both a philosophical and a strictly physical point of view, the world discloses itself only insofar as its individual components affect one another — and this influence always produces reciprocal changes in all interacting processes and currents. The world is less a collection of objects than a constellation of forces, interactions, and influences. Accordingly, all interacting elements are simultaneously both subjects and objects: they generate causes and undergo effects within a shared transformation. In other words, our existence — our awareness — amounts to registering and describing such interactions, along with their causes and consequences.

Nevertheless, reciprocity does not imply symmetry: a change that completely transforms one current may produce only a slight fluctuation in another.

The degree to which the mind wishes — and is able — to register both the interactions it enters into and the spectrum of their consequences determines its effectiveness. The very nature of mind is naming — and thus, in effect, actualizing such changes for itself. We have already said that people who consciously and purposefully strive for a high effectiveness of mind are called Magi, and the way of life in which such effectiveness is attained is called Magic.

The magical strategy is to learn to find and realize those interactions that bring about the most expansive and harmonizing changes in the current of mind. This approach proceeds from the assumption that for each current — for each individual manifestation of mind — there exist particular, maximally “resonant” interactions in which that current reaches the limit of its possibilities, the limit of its realization.

When Magi say that the principal art lies in the ability to listen to one’s heart and realize its injunctions (or, in another formulation, to realize one’s true will), they mean precisely this capacity: to find such foundational realizations for oneself — realizations whose enactment brings about large-scale and effective restructurings of the current of mind.

Ordinarily, a person relates to their interactions non-selectively, drifting in a stream of largely chaotic fluctuations, impulses, and gravitations. Such a mode of existence leads to a further accumulation of unrealized interactions and unfulfilled impulses — and therefore to an ineffective and, above all, disharmonious course of one’s actual current of mind.

The Way of Magic begins when such a chaotic stream discovers within itself an aspiration to go beyond its own limits — toward awareness of itself as a current flowing from infinity to infinity — and when this aspiration finds its realization in an interaction with some other current, some other energy: perhaps small in scale, yet strategically decisive by virtue of its position within the stream. It is an interaction that alters the very ideology of how mind flows, transforming mind from slime “smeared across the surface of being” into a living, swift brook.

And the more such “key” interactions the mind finds for itself — or, in other words, the more it contacts Power— the more ordered, internally coherent, and harmonious its current becomes.

The life of a Magus is such a chain of realizations: a sequence of interactions through which the current of his mind becomes ever purer, ever more powerful, and ever more fully entitled — and creatively able — to be a participant in the great flow of the cosmos. And the more successfully a Magus finds for himself such “steps” that lead him into the sky, into actual perfection, the more effective his existence becomes: the less of it is mere undergoing, and the more it is awareness and creativity.

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