Magic is the
practical application of what the soul perceives.
When you become
infatuated with someone you hardly know, what you have actually fallen in love
with is an unrealized potential in yourself.
You have a big crush on what you yourself secretly wish to become.
The subtle is that
which cannot be perceived by the ordinary senses because it is pre-physical.
Dreams and waking
metaphors are how your subtle body conveys what it knows to your rational
mind.
If you think of
attention as a form of wealth (a currency we rightly speak of
"paying"), the average American gets robbed several times a minute.
"Boredom"
is just a negative way of labeling free attention. It's what we say we're feeling on those
increasingly rare occasions when our attention doesn't know what to do with
itself.
Self-knowledge is
extremely important when you begin to encounter other beings in the subtle
world. It's how you distinguish self
from other when there are no physical bodies to define who's who and what's
what.
The subtle world is
just that: subtle. Nothing there can be
seen, heard, or touched.
What most of us are
used to calling our "will" is actually a form of thinking: our
conscious intention. What we call
"willpower" is our effort to make that intention stick, to force
ourselves to act in accordance with our thought.
The Great Work is a
process of reincarnating into your own life.
You can't eliminate
pain, but you can alleviate suffering by subtracting the fear, which comes not
form loss itself, but from our anticipation of loss.
Misfortunes aren't
accidents. They are lessons,
specifically designed to teach you something you need to learn.
When fear is
transmuted into confidence, the suffering of others stops freaking us out. We no longer have to distance ourselves by
blaming the victim. When passion is
transmuted into devotion, we don't have to identify with others in order to
care about them. Instead of imagining
what they are feeling, we perceive it directly.
When territoriality is transmuted into integrity, we don't have to
borrow our strength from the weak. We
respect the autonomy of those we are trying to help.
Whatever is
confused, neurotic, and unfinished in you is its prima materia.
Take your dark night
as a compliment. It is a mark of
progress, not a sign of a screwup.
