I, Mage
Part 1 — No Victims
Introduction to this 10-Part Series
The Magician knows, enjoys and celebrates herself as image.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Neither real, nor unreal, nor both, nor neither.
Wholly beyond conception or categorisation of the limited and limiting Mind.
Imaginal, if you do want to put words to it. There is a distinction between imaginal and imaginary, as Henry Corbin explained.
The imaginal is the bridge (or intermediary realm) between the material and archetypal.
We each have an imaginal body (also called the energetic, subtle or poetic body), which inhabits and senses this realm. Modern culture does not know about this, but most other indigenous natural cultures do know about it, and held in high esteem those who could navigate it (the shamans, the medicine women, the sorcerers).
The Mage is just this: an Image.
An imaginal body, or imaginal being, who facilitates an exchange of energy and information between the material and archetypal realms.
The Mage is a two-way transmitter: they direct archetypal love, energy and intelligence (a.k.a Magic) into this material cosmos, and they support the embodied beings of this realm to send prayers, songs, and other energetic gestures to the archetypal.
In this way the Mage is a bridge between the materialism of modern culture and the archetypally empowered creativity of next culture.
The Mage is an imaginal identity that anybody can choose to inhabit and embody. Nobody can do this for you. More interestingly, nobody can stop you from doing this.
However: the price of this identity is total deconstruction of your self and world, in order that you arrive at and merge with the Infinite Void — the source of all Creation and Possibility. From here, self and world can be creatively reconstructed again, and again, and again.
Are you ready for this?
Are you ready to not know, definitely or decisively, who are what you are?
Are you ready to create and recreate yourself ad infinitum as an unfathomable and unknowable (i)mage ?
Do you want that?
If yes, read on.
Journey with me to the Mage Interface where reality meets potential, being meets nothingness, transformation becomes possible, and authentic creation occurs.
The path to arrive there is dark, and strange, and the forest is unnervingly alive.
Let us walk.
1 — No Victims
The key resource of the archetypal Magician is conscious fear.
Why?
Well, where does fear take you, if you follow it to its depths?
To the Void.
Where you don’t know who or what you are. Where you are nothing in particular.
And what can you do from that place?
Create anything.
Transform anything.
Become anyone.
Interested? Okay then.
Before we can work with conscious fear, we must be able to distinguish it from unconscious fear. In addition, the present moment feeling of fear must be distinguished from incompleted emotional fear from past events.
When we are identified with unconscious fear – we inhabit the Low Drama role of the Rescuer.
I have dwelt here for many, many years now. But now I have begun to ask a series of dangerous questions. And I have begun choosing to feel my fear.
I ask myself:
Who am I, then, if there is no-one to rescue, not a single victim in the entire world, not even myself, and not a single persecutor or perpetrator of wrong to persuade or convert, to creatively coax into becoming a ‘better person’?
Who am I if there is no fundamental flaw with any thing or any being in the entire cosmos, if there is simply no problem at all that isn’t a story of my own making?
I look out at the world and I see only imperfections. I look inwards at myself and I see only imperfections. Long has it taken me to realise: I am choosing to see these imperfections. Why? Because for so many years, I thought that fixing imperfections would make me into someone. Or something. Something solid, definable, and knowable. Finally! A tangible and reliable identity that I can rest upon!
And every time I think I have it: whoosh.
It melts away again, as quickly as it came together. Or it cracks and falls apart like a fragile pot. And there I am, empty-handed, wondering what I did wrong. Because now it’s just me again, nobody, looking at out at the ocean of imperfections.
And again.
And again.
I am losing hope.
Maybe I will never find a real and true and reliable identity.
At the same time, in a different way, I am gaining hope: because maybe I don’t need to be anyone.
Maybe I don’t even want to.
And with this, a new possibility enters, quietly padding onto the stage from behind the left-hand curtain. She makes her way to the centre of the darkness and into the minuscule spotlight of the Here and Now. From this place, she makes a curious and terrifying declaration.
“I remain undefined, and undefinable.
There is no problem. No identity is real: they are all imaginal.”
Her statement scares me.
Could I too take up this radical non-identity?
Could I remain undefined, and undefinable?
Could I too live from the basic premise that there is no problem, with me or anything?
It is a disturbing possibility.
What the hell would I do with my life?
Without any real problems, the glaring meaninglessness of my existence as a previously helpful and respectable “problem-solver” is thrown into the Void for questioning and interrogation.
This, my friends, is where I begin.
Again.
And again.
And again.
This is where I return to: the Nothingness.
Who are you really? asks the Voice of the Beyond, the darkness that engulfs the stage around the tiny circle of light where I stand, and live, and fumble around for words that I believe in.
Why are you here, and what are you doing?
Now you are finished with this Game of “Rescue the Victims”, what do you intend to create?
I wince in terror. I stare, blank and blinking, into the Void of Total Possibility.
I am speechless.
For who am I without my scripts, the ones they gave me as a child in order to play the Game, and play it well, always acting correctly in order to survive and make my way as an acceptable participant in the Theatre of the Damned?
But now I am shorn of my previously reliable, meticulously rote-learned behaviour patterns.
I am shorn of my dead mechanicities crafted over years into a clockwork automaton “personality” who ceaselessly punches out the correct words, smiles, gestures and mannerisms at the correct times in the Play, never revealing my secret purpose of gaining approval and acceptance of the Other Players — especially the Advanced Authority Players – who might help me on my way by providing scarce and precious material resources for my horrifically vulnerable material body.
Shorn of all this, I stand naked in a miniscule yet expansive NOW, without a plan or reference point, or really any idea what is “going on” at all.
Without such ideas, I arrive in the Total Unknown and all I can do is listen to my fear as it crawls up my spine in electric ripples, blossoming into vicious flowers at my midbrow, flowers which offer terrific and terrifying wisdom:
Your scripts have brought you here, but they no longer serve you. Leave them behind without looking back.
It is Time to detach from the two-dimensional Gameworld of The Linear.
You are ready, now: ready to enter the Openness and rise to your heart’s aspiration to create entirely new Gameworlds, to flourish without a script or plan as an Eternal Improviser: a Free and Natural Being, so much more than Human, grounded in groundlessness, intentionally committed to weaving Beauty from Nothingness in pure and direct spontaneity (this is Magic), in co-creative communion with countless other Creator-Beings upon whom your very life and energy depend — just as they depend on you, and cherish your ongoing participation in the Infinite Game of making the Impossible Possible.
In constant energetic exchange with innumerable living beings, continually feeding and receiving, feeding and receiving, you are responsible for the entire Infinite Matrix of Life, the Immortal Community that some call God: Archetypal Love Incarnate, Self-Formed Emptiness seeking soft fruition as rivers, lakes and rainforests, seeking ecstatic incantation as mountains, skies and soaring eagles, Light upon Light folded in on itself to incubate the writhing evolutionary darkness of water, womb and body, and therein to pour crystalline streams of energetic intentionality seeking hard and vivid fruition as roaring saxophones, pulsing lovers, pounding feet on solid earth, tight-lipped drumskins, deftly-orchestrated hand-muscles gripping pens and teething spells from the Void:
New Scripts to Live by,
New Scriptures to Chant, and later to Burn.
Images to Summon,
Stories to Inhabit,
and Endless Worlds to Weave.
Ancestors to Become,
Children to Love,
and Countless Earths to Inherit.
With these words, unfathomable streams of new possibilities pour in torrents from the energetic ether into the Space of Available and Accessible Options. It is in this Space that I stand, trembling, and ready to choose.
The more intensely I feel my fear, the larger the Space of Available and Accessible Options. The possibilities open and open, multiplying without limit.
We can actually choose to access 100% intensity fear at any time, for no reason, in order access the energy and intelligence of the archetypal Mage, and to use that energy for creation, transformation, healing and beauty-making?
Since 100% intensity fear is the archetypal energy of the Mage, then by definition, being a Mage is the scariest possible thing I could choose to do with my life.
This doesn’t mean it is a bad idea, though. Because when fear is no longer “bad” — rather a trusted friend, guide and resource — this exploration becomes an unspeakably rich and life-affirming adventure.
There are countless paths and futures to explore. And yet, only a select few are accessible here and now. This discernment allows me to bring attention to only those options which transform reality because they are accessible NOW. Once I have them in my awareness, I can choose them.
This is what it means to create at the Mage Interface: connecting what is happening to what is possible in a highly minimised Now, and then acting to manifest those possibilities most conducive to Beauty, Love, Transformation and other such Bright Principles.
It is conscious anger, the key resource of the archetypal Warrior, which enables us to eliminate possibilities in order to choose and decisively making something specific happen (or bringing something specific into being). Without applying our anger we would drown and freeze in innumerable options.
And so, I experiment.
Again.
And again.
Remaining undefined – and undefinable – I am free to assume any identity, to transform any identity and to lose any identity.
I am an identity-maker.
I am an identity-transformer.
I am an identity-destroyer.
AND
I am none of the above.
I remain undefined.
This paradoxical collection of I-statements forms a meta-identity, neither true nor untrue, real nor unreal, that brings untold power to my ability to consciously create and recreate myself without limit.
However: in order to focus my creative power, I choose to impose the limit of being in this body, here and now, where the set of available options is intentionally limited. I craft this set of options so that it is large enough to enable nonlinear transformations, and small enough to prevention dissolution into chaos and loss of focus (for I have a quest to follow here on earth, in this lifetime!). The optimal number of available options ensures ongoing evolution at the edge of chaos.
Like a painter chooses and refines his palette, I do not want to paint with all colours, all the time. I want to choose.
Actually, I want limits. They help me to create. They bring focus and intensity.
As a result, I choose my limits. I am never a victim of those limits (though I do not always remember this, because I have been experimenting with the limit of forgetting that I have chosen the limits).
Sometimes I want soft pastel tones, or melancholic blues, or dark and dreadful shadows. Other times I want golden-white skies, vibrant orange fires and earthy browns, or deep aquatic greens. Just so, I want to craft identities and evolve personalities and create entirely new gameworlds. But I don’t want to ever, ever be ultimately defined or limited by any of these choices. Because I can always start again, or radically recreate and transform what I’ve been crafting. This ongoing recreation is a central part of the Mage’s journey: continually transforming oneself in order to be of most value and service to the Village, to allow the maximum amount of possible magic and beauty and love to flow through one’s being and into creation.
And so I work.
Ever-present, and without need of definition or idea about who or what I am. And yet, I am able to play with an endless array of imaginal ideas about who and what I am. These imaginal identities allow me to bridge the material and archetypal realms, allowing energy and information to pass between them.
I am image, both created and discovered.
Or rather, creating and discovering myself, each and every moment. And the exploration is infinitely deep, and rich, and boundless.
Ongoingly transforming.
Multidimensional identities crystallising and liquidising, crystallising and liquidising.
Refining, subliming, distilling,
Immediate alchemical process, without interruption.
Liquid potential.
Total possibility.
Total freedom to become what I choose, without ever being bound by these choices.
Completely responsible for myself, I am never a victim of circumstance. I am what I have chosen. I am always responsible.
Endless choices. Endless consequences. Endless possibilities.
With this power, I can pass through any conceptual or energetic doorway. And so can you. This is what it means to be an imaginal being, radically responsible for all creation. This is (part of) what it means to be a Mage. You can start your training now, if you wish.
With every choice, every single moment of my life, creation itself is renewed and affirmed.
Go! says Fear, my dear and mysterious friend, Voice of the Unknown.
Go!
And I do.
Creating. Transforming. Destroying.
With thanks to Clinton Callahan, Anne-Chloé Destremau, Rob Burbea, Carl Jung and Henry Corbin. For pointing out the way.
Part 2 coming very soon. You can subscribe to get these articles in your inbox.
