{"id":5446,"date":"2011-07-01T01:10:21","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T06:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paganpages.org\/content\/?p=5576"},"modified":"2011-06-21T15:00:53","modified_gmt":"2011-06-21T20:00:53","slug":"prunings-from-the-hedge-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/2011\/07\/01\/prunings-from-the-hedge-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Prunings from the Hedge"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Silence to Will<\/strong><\/p>\n

Habits run in cycles like waves, and on the level of inner talk we ride the waves and are tumbled by them. \u00a0At 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.\u00a0 These cycles consume a great deal of energy that the witch would like to have available for work in the quarter of Will.\u00a0 Long-standing habits become the hangouts of inner spirits who live off the energy they waste.\u00a0 These entities resist the dismantling of the habit and it becomes necessary to struggle with them.\u00a0 This struggle is not inner violence but a sort of jiu-jitsu, using the force of the inner spirit to \u2018throw\u2019 it when it attacks.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne thing I am sure of,\u201d a fellow named Ed Tischofer once told me, \u201cis that I\u2019m alone in here.\u201d\u00a0 It is natural to feel this way on the level of inner talk, and recent centuries of scientific materialism, rejecting the church\u2019s psychology of guardian angels and tempters, naturally predispose us to regard any such notion as independent or semi-independent psychic entities as superstition.\u00a0 Add to this the many previous centuries of the church\u2019s proscription of \u2018traffic with spirits,\u2019 and the quest of the modern witch to become free of the control of inner spirits would seem to be atavistic in the extreme.\u00a0 But this problem largely resolves itself into one of interpretation.\u00a0 If one prefers to speak of inner \u2018drives\u2019 and such (employing mechanistic rather than personal metaphors), the result will be the same provided the approach taken is effective.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 It is a like a wave-form photographed in high speed photography.\u00a0 The different steps of a habit-cycle are more or less compelling, easier or harder to deal with.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Suppose, for instance, that you have a habit of scratching your scalp whenever you sit down to read.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 Suddenly, almost without noticing it, your other hand has risen to your scalp and is beginning to scratch away.\u00a0 You fall into a semi-trancelike state, reading words with half attention and enjoying the feeling of loosening dandruff with the fingernails.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In larger matters, this is the mental state in which the alcoholic reaches for a drink and the \u2018rage-a-holic\u2019 starts committing violence.\u00a0 The difference between them is a matter of degree only.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The steps leading up to the light trance are much more under our control.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Different diversions will work better for people of differing temperaments.\u00a0 Keeping a TV remote at your elbow is also good strategy.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The small energy trough produced by the habit will be gone; you will feel a tiny bit unknown to yourself.\u00a0 There will be something new in your psyche, a little feeling of resistance.\u00a0 You will have acquired a small aim.\u00a0 You may also run into a bit of rough sledding with your moods as your internal emotional economy adjusts to the new situation.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

It is very important to tackle the smallest habits first, for disruption of these leads to inner reactions that can be handled.\u00a0 Do not attempt to reform all your inner compulsions at once.\u00a0 Take a week or two on each small habit before moving on to another.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As with uprooting tree stumps, you must dig deeper the larger the habit and the longer its roots.<\/p>\n

As previously mentioned, disruption of familiar habit-cycles can make us feel a little unknown to ourselves.\u00a0 The witch is starting to descend the inner pillar and at first this is not a particularly pleasant experience.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We feel a little removed from the familiar rough-and-tumble of our everyday lives.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In gaining control over compulsive habits, the witch is working with his or her gnome, and cultivating both inner mental silence and physical stillness.\u00a0 The pellets of resistance, or aims, are attractive to one\u2019s salamander, for they are like bits of flint that can be fitted into the inner fire-drill to generate sparks of elemental fire.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Lady turns the wheel, generating the vital energy that bears and feeds all life.\u00a0 The wheel rotates around the World Pillar, alternating between the outer world of the Oak King and the inner world of the Holly King.\u00a0 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<\/em>, which lights the inner sacrificial fire of the southern quarter.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 These are called \u2018larger\u2019 because they occur more often and go back to childhood.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 These habits are two in number, and may be called the Rehash and the Rehearsal.<\/p>\n

The Rehash often appears when we have just come away from a situation where we were speaking to someone.\u00a0 If we are trying to be quietly aware, we may notice that we are mentally continuing the conversation we just had.\u00a0 Perhaps we are redoing it, saying what we wish we had said, appearing wittier or more considerate to ourselves.\u00a0 Or perhaps the conversation was cut off prematurely, and we are finishing it as we wish we could have done.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It wastes an enormous amount of energy, particularly as it often jump-starts moods of regret or narcissistic vanity that lead nowhere.\u00a0 When the Rehash begins, simply turn your attention to sensory details in the immediate moment.<\/p>\n

The Rehearsal takes up even more of our time and energy, at least for most busy people.\u00a0 As the name suggests, it consists in mentally producing conversations for future use.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But habitual rehearsing encourages feelings of timid anxiety which do nothing to help us cope with a situation when it actually arises.\u00a0 The cure here is the same: turn your attention to your immediate surroundings, live in the present moment awhile until the habit fades away.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 You have just ascended from the dream-realm and your mind is operating on a level deeper than that of mental talk.\u00a0 The threads of your last dream are disappearing as inner whisperings are drowned out by the sounds of the day, both external and internal.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

It is easy just to drift, skim the surface of the habit-waves, and pretend to ourselves that we are sufficiently in control.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 To reach their level is indeed a great achievement, and is called \u2018the victory\u2019 in the Craft; but the witch maxim describing this achievement is cautionary: \u201cFirst the victory, then the battle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0At 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.\u00a0 These cycles consume a great deal of energy that the witch would like to have available for work in the quarter of Will.\u00a0 Long-standing habits become the hangouts of inner spirits who live off the energy they waste.\u00a0 These entities resist the dismantling of the habit and it becomes necessary to struggle with them.\u00a0 This struggle is not inner violence but a sort of jiu-jitsu, using the force of the inner spirit to \u2018throw\u2019 it when it attacks. \u201cOne thing I am sure of,\u201d a fellow named Ed Tischofer once told me, \u201cis that I\u2019m alone in here.\u201d\u00a0 It is natural to feel this way on the level of inner talk, and recent centuries of scientific materialism, rejecting the church\u2019s psychology of guardian angels and tempters, naturally predispose us to regard any such notion as independent or semi-independent psychic entities as superstition.\u00a0 Add to this the many previous centuries of the church\u2019s proscription of \u2018traffic with spirits,\u2019 and the quest of the modern witch to become free of the control of inner spirits would seem to be atavistic in the extreme.\u00a0 But this problem largely resolves itself into one of interpretation.\u00a0 If one prefers to speak of inner \u2018drives\u2019 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.\u00a0 It is a like a wave-form photographed in high speed photography.\u00a0 The different steps of a habit-cycle are more or less compelling, easier or harder to deal with.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Suppose, for instance, that you have a habit of scratching your scalp whenever you sit down to read.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 Suddenly, almost without noticing it, your other hand has risen to your scalp and is beginning to scratch away.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In larger matters, this is the mental state in which the alcoholic reaches for a drink and the \u2018rage-a-holic\u2019 starts committing violence.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The steps leading up to the light trance are much more under our control.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Different diversions will work better for people of differing temperaments.\u00a0 Keeping a TV remote at your elbow is also good strategy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The small energy trough produced by the habit will be gone; you will feel a tiny bit unknown to yourself.\u00a0 There will be something new in your psyche, a little feeling of resistance.\u00a0 You will have acquired a small aim.\u00a0 You may also run into a bit of rough sledding with your moods as your internal emotional economy adjusts to the new situation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Do not attempt to reform all your inner compulsions at once.\u00a0 Take a week or two on each small habit before moving on to another.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The witch is starting to descend the inner pillar and at first this is not a particularly pleasant experience.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We feel a little removed from the familiar rough-and-tumble of our everyday lives.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The pellets of resistance, or aims, are attractive to one\u2019s salamander, for they are like bits of flint that can be fitted into the inner fire-drill to generate sparks of elemental fire.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Lady turns the wheel, generating the vital energy that bears and feeds all life.\u00a0 The wheel rotates around the World Pillar, alternating between the outer world of the Oak King and the inner world of the Holly King.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 These are called \u2018larger\u2019 because they occur more often and go back to childhood.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If we are trying to be quietly aware, we may notice that we are mentally continuing the conversation we just had.\u00a0 Perhaps we are redoing it, saying what we wish we had said, appearing wittier or more considerate to ourselves.\u00a0 Or perhaps the conversation was cut off prematurely, and we are finishing it as we wish we could have done.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It wastes an enormous amount of energy, particularly as it often jump-starts moods of regret or narcissistic vanity that lead nowhere.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As the name suggests, it consists in mentally producing conversations for future use.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But habitual rehearsing encourages feelings of timid anxiety which do nothing to help us cope with a situation when it actually arises.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You have just ascended from the dream-realm and your mind is operating on a level deeper than that of mental talk.\u00a0 The threads of your last dream are disappearing as inner whisperings are drowned out by the sounds of the day, both external and internal.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 To reach their level is indeed a great achievement, and is called \u2018the victory\u2019 in the Craft; but the witch maxim describing this achievement is cautionary: \u201cFirst the victory, then the battle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}