Prunings from the Hedge
From Silence to Will
Habits run in cycles like waves, and on the level of inner talk we ride the waves and are tumbled by them. At certain points in the cycle we seem to be more in control, but when the habit builds up to the peak of its cycle we have very little control. These cycles consume a great deal of energy that the witch would like to have available for work in the quarter of Will. Long-standing habits become the hangouts of inner spirits who live off the energy they waste. These entities resist the dismantling of the habit and it becomes necessary to struggle with them. This struggle is not inner violence but a sort of jiu-jitsu, using the force of the inner spirit to ‘throw’ it when it attacks.
“One thing I am sure of,” a fellow named Ed Tischofer once told me, “is that I’m alone in here.” It is natural to feel this way on the level of inner talk, and recent centuries of scientific materialism, rejecting the church’s psychology of guardian angels and tempters, naturally predispose us to regard any such notion as independent or semi-independent psychic entities as superstition. Add to this the many previous centuries of the church’s proscription of ‘traffic with spirits,’ and the quest of the modern witch to become free of the control of inner spirits would seem to be atavistic in the extreme. But this problem largely resolves itself into one of interpretation. If one prefers to speak of inner ‘drives’ and such (employing mechanistic rather than personal metaphors), the result will be the same provided the approach taken is effective.
While the cycle of a habit seems like a continuous process, increasing inner silence can sharpen the inner vision, spreading it out into discrete steps or phases. It is a like a wave-form photographed in high speed photography. The different steps of a habit-cycle are more or less compelling, easier or harder to deal with. Observing the appearance of a habit and how we fall into its clutches while maintaining as much mental quiet as we can manage will reveal to us which steps in the cycle are easiest to tackle. Suppose, for instance, that you have a habit of scratching your scalp whenever you sit down to read. This doesn’t start immediately when you sit down, but after a while, perhaps when you begin to get bored with the book but continue reading it out of inertia. Suddenly, almost without noticing it, your other hand has risen to your scalp and is beginning to scratch away. You fall into a semi-trancelike state, reading words with half attention and enjoying the feeling of loosening dandruff with the fingernails.
This may seem too trivial a habit to examine, but breaking habit-cycles is so difficult that the witch who has learned a degree of humility in this area will understand why I am mentioning it here. It is not the scratching or the inattentive reading that wastes will-energy, but the state of light trance, in which we abandon our self-control, which does so. In larger matters, this is the mental state in which the alcoholic reaches for a drink and the ‘rage-a-holic’ starts committing violence. The difference between them is a matter of degree only.
Now suppose you achieve a certain shallow level of inner quiet, by eliminating inner and outer distractions, and begin observing the steps of this habit of scratching. The steps leading up to the light trance are much more under our control. The task of the witch, or anyone else wishing to get free of small compulsive habits, is to identify which step, occurring before the beginning of the trance, is the easiest to disrupt. Perhaps you decide to keep some other book next to you that is rather lighter fare but more immediately interesting, and when the feeling of boredom begins, you set down the first book and take up the second. Or you may decide to get up as soon as the bored feeling begins, and go and fix yourself a cup of tea or coffee. Different diversions will work better for people of differing temperaments. Keeping a TV remote at your elbow is also good strategy. The rule of thumb here is to employ a diversion that works quickly; the stronger the compulsion, the quicker the diversion should be to avoid it.
If your scalp-scratching or other compulsive habit (I have deliberately avoided mentioning more disgusting ones) is long-standing, in the days that follow your initial attempts at disruption you will experience your inner moods differently. The small energy trough produced by the habit will be gone; you will feel a tiny bit unknown to yourself. There will be something new in your psyche, a little feeling of resistance. You will have acquired a small aim. You may also run into a bit of rough sledding with your moods as your internal emotional economy adjusts to the new situation. If you deal with these as though they were independent or semi-independent (as the Chaos magicians say) entities, you will avoid identifying with them and will be able to sidestep them.
It is very important to tackle the smallest habits first, for disruption of these leads to inner reactions that can be handled. Do not attempt to reform all your inner compulsions at once. Take a week or two on each small habit before moving on to another. As you spend more time in a quieter frame of mind, you will find that the energy released from some habit will help you to stay on this quieter level and allow you to descend a little farther. As with uprooting tree stumps, you must dig deeper the larger the habit and the longer its roots.
As previously mentioned, disruption of familiar habit-cycles can make us feel a little unknown to ourselves. The witch is starting to descend the inner pillar and at first this is not a particularly pleasant experience. It seems odd to feel calm at times when we are used to going through moods, to fly level instead of going through ups and downs. We feel a little removed from the familiar rough-and-tumble of our everyday lives. This is because the dream-soul is beginning to wake up, that silent partner to the life-soul who can go on spirit journeys up and down the inner pillar to the Summerlands and back. Let the witch endure a little discomfort initially, for the later stages of descent will bring transports of strange delights which are foretastes of the true Sabbat.
In gaining control over compulsive habits, the witch is working with his or her gnome, and cultivating both inner mental silence and physical stillness. The pellets of resistance, or aims, are attractive to one’s salamander, for they are like bits of flint that can be fitted into the inner fire-drill to generate sparks of elemental fire. As noted elsewhere, the Sun-wheel (known as the Wheel of the Year when used as a calendar) is the model of a fire-drill seen from above. The Lady turns the wheel, generating the vital energy that bears and feeds all life. The wheel rotates around the World Pillar, alternating between the outer world of the Oak King and the inner world of the Holly King. Because the cosmos is organized similarly on many different levels, we each carry within us a fire-drill, and friction of resistance against habits generates a psychic heat, called by the Hindus tapas, which lights the inner sacrificial fire of the southern quarter.
After physical stillness has been sufficiently developed and the witch is enjoying a modicum of increased self-discipline from his or her augmented will-energy, it is time to tackle somewhat larger habits. These are called ‘larger’ because they occur more often and go back to childhood. It is quixotic to think that we can overcome them entirely, but the amount of surplus energy we will gain from disrupting them when we can is larger than one would anticipate. These habits are two in number, and may be called the Rehash and the Rehearsal.
The Rehash often appears when we have just come away from a situation where we were speaking to someone. If we are trying to be quietly aware, we may notice that we are mentally continuing the conversation we just had. Perhaps we are redoing it, saying what we wish we had said, appearing wittier or more considerate to ourselves. Or perhaps the conversation was cut off prematurely, and we are finishing it as we wish we could have done. A certain amount of this review is not necessarily compulsive, and may help us to speak more effectively on a future occasion; but the habit of rehashing conversations goes far beyond what is necessary. It wastes an enormous amount of energy, particularly as it often jump-starts moods of regret or narcissistic vanity that lead nowhere. When the Rehash begins, simply turn your attention to sensory details in the immediate moment.
The Rehearsal takes up even more of our time and energy, at least for most busy people. As the name suggests, it consists in mentally producing conversations for future use. Sometimes one knows quite well that the future conversation will never take place, and is therefore purely hypothetical (all future projections are to some extent hypothetical anyway). Here again, a certain amount of rational planning for an impending situation is quite in order; a good example would be an upcoming job interview. But habitual rehearsing encourages feelings of timid anxiety which do nothing to help us cope with a situation when it actually arises. The cure here is the same: turn your attention to your immediate surroundings, live in the present moment awhile until the habit fades away.
If you have time in the morning to wake up gradually, notice the mental clarity and quiet you enjoy until the machinery of the day engages its gears and mental habits take over. You have just ascended from the dream-realm and your mind is operating on a level deeper than that of mental talk. The threads of your last dream are disappearing as inner whisperings are drowned out by the sounds of the day, both external and internal. If possible, try to arrange your life so you do not have to awake to an alarm, as this pernicious device is designed to immediately efface any traces of the dream-realm one has just left. I am aware that I am writing as a retired person, with lots of time on my hands, for younger people who have to get up early, fix breakfast for the children, see them off to school and get to that demanding job. But the effects of gradual waking and prolonging of early morning quiet are so potent that one can make significant progress in the journey from silence to will by merely occasional practice.
It is easy just to drift, skim the surface of the habit-waves, and pretend to ourselves that we are sufficiently in control. Work with elementals is definitely laborious, but it pays dividends in both our inner and outer lives, the realms of the Holly and Oak Kings, respectively. Descending from the everyday level of inner talk to the next quieter one, inner whisperings, may seem to be the whole task; but that is just where one comes into contact with inner spirits living off the energy wasted by habits and resisting any degree of change in our lives. To reach their level is indeed a great achievement, and is called ‘the victory’ in the Craft; but the witch maxim describing this achievement is cautionary: “First the victory, then the battle.”