The purpose of Buddhism – at least insofar as I understand it – is to get a few exceptional people fully enlightened.  The purpose of the practice of magic is to get the mass of people somewhat enlightened – i.e. enlightened enough to save the human race and the earth.  No major upheaval in present society would necessarily be required to make this shift, unless humankind stupidly proves to be incapable of responding short of a total crisis.  There are probable realities which go either way, which we as individuals can choose or decline to participate in, by believing what we choose to believe.  All that’s required to save humanity is for most people (not necessarily all) to lighten up just a little bit.  We don’t need everyone to don sackcloth and ashes and take to caves and become enlightened; nor do we need everyone to fall in line and believe as we do.  All we need is for most people to become just a tad less greedy, selfish, suspicious, intolerant, closed-hearted and shameless.  Just for most people to lighten up a teensy bit is all that’s required for the human race to enter into lucid dreaming together. 

 In the state of lucid dreaming everyone instantly knows the truth, so pretense is impossible.  By contrast, most of what transpires in waking consciousness is a pack of lies:  people are talking about one thing, but what is really going on under the surface is something altogether different.  It isn’t like that in lucid dreaming – what we see is what we get.  There’s no room for phoniness because those importance coverings don’t exist in lucid dreaming – that agreement is more important than truth.  Yes, Virginia, Truth does indeed exist.  All that’s necessary to find it is to cut through all the yada-yada twaddle of our decadent, degenerate society and listen to what our hearts are telling us.   We magicians do this by going to trees for validation rather than to our fellow humans. 

To enter into lucid dreaming from a position which starts from being awake is the same thing as astral projection.   Talented dreamers have a facility for astral projection, and this can be the quickest way for them to go.  But it would take most people too long to learn astral projection; it’s easier for them to come at it through lucid dreaming.  This is a better path for people who think too much, since it minimizes thinking.  We have to start from being asleep, and then beckon our separatedness thought form to come to us without its covering of importance.  If the covering of importance comes too, then we wake up.  That’s why so many of us find it difficult to maintain ourselves in a state of lucid dreaming without waking up:  one must be calm in a lucid dream, otherwise one tends to beckon importance.

 Lucid dreaming is not something essentially different from waking consciousness, only we get to it from a position of being asleep.  When we start out from a position of being awake, we call it “everyday life”.  What do you suppose the horseless carriage is?   Or the radio, TV, airplane, space rocket, computer?  They are all wild, crazy dreams.  A hundred years ago that’s exactly what we would have considered them.  And that’s all they are – dreams.  Humankind just incorporated that dream material into waking consciousness.  That’s the sort of thing waking consciousness is good for:  to originate dream material of that sort.  That kind of business requires slow, patient development over generations; and the dream plane is too unstable and mutable to do that kind of stuff on.  The dream plane is too here and now.  Since dream consciousness is more timeless than waking consciousness, it doesn’t allow for the detachment that a sense of past (history) and future (planning) can give.   We need a greater sense of separatedness to be able to do things that slowly.  That’s why it is so difficult to do things like dial a phone number or read a sentence in a normal dream – these activities require a greater degree of separatedness than normal dreaming affords, to be able to bring that kind of minute detail into focus.

 That’s the genius of waking consciousness:  we lose scope and agility, but in return we get focus and a methodical way of getting at things.  Waking consciousness is much more clearly focused and delimited than dreaming, even if we all become extremely myopic and uptight in the process. 

The practice of magic is about turning our everyday waking lives into lucid dreaming, cultivating a somewhat “altered state of mind” as our everyday mindset.    As we do this much of our sense of separatedness dissolves and we feel more inner peace and sense of oneness with our world.  Spirits start talking to us, as they did to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.   Our everyday life becomes more like dreaming – i.e., more magical.  This is the road that each of us must travel as individuals; and which the human race as a whole will have to follow if it is to survive and prosper.  It is the road of entering into a state of lucid dreaming from a position which starts from being awake (instead of asleep, as usual).  This means understanding that waking consciousness is lucid dreaming; and the only reason we can’t see that is because we must keep up the pretense that what we’re doing is “real” and important.  Therefore we can’t see that it’s all just a dream. 

At this writing there don’t seem to be too many lucid dreamers out there; but there are lots of people merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily dancing a jig on their descent into the coming nightmare.  It’s time now for everyone to wake up. 

 

excerpted from Magical Almanac ezine, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac

More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  http://www.dearbrutus.com.  To subscribe to Bob’s free monthly Astro-Magical e-zine, send an e-mail to:  MagicalAlmanac-subscribe@yahoogroups.com