Although I’ve spent the past several years delving into
folk magic, Neopaganism, and the Western Mystery Tradition, my primary
spiritual orientation is Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta is a form of Hinduism
that I was introduced to nearly 40 years ago. It is a system that dates back to
about the 7th century and is primarily founded in the Upanishads.
The Upanishads are the philosophical portion of a set texts called the Vedas,
the earliest written record of Hindu thought and praxis.
When I first began writing La Maga A Story aboutSorcerers and Magi in 2004, I was absorbed in Vedanta and related Eastern
philosophies. And so concepts distilled from my then spiritual practice are
represented in the work and intermingle with fanciful as well as some authentic
motifs about magic.
The spiritual journey in
Advaita Vedanta is, in part, about intimately realizing the connection between
one’s own true nature and the Divine and also realizing that “the world is in
the mind, like space in a jar”—as stated in a text called the Yoga-Vasishtha—which I worked into the very last chapter
of La Maga. Advaita Vedantist philosophy is concerned with the idea of
projection—the problem of not experiencing reality as it is but as dreamlike mental
projections—colored by bias, fears, ignorance and automated habits and conditioning.
For this reason, my characters sometimes contemplate the nature of reality and
illusion. They also ask the question: What is it to wake up
from the idea of yourself? To paraphrase thoughts I attributed to the antihero
of the series, the sorcerer Leo de Lux:
Becoming truly real, conscious, and capable of free will begins by realizing the whimsical and fabricated nature of one’s own being—the idea of self—and then detaching from the automaton (the robot) of its personality, habits, and conditioning. Then the person who is the life beneath the mask of selfhood opens his eyes and watches himself reveling through the motions of daily life like a dreamer reveling in lucidity and exercising free will in it.
In the last
published book in the series, The Savior at the End of Time (available in
Kindle format), I have the main character of that story--a whacky Christlike
figure who is a chaos-magic-practicing sorcerer named Aurelio Zosimo--deliver a
sermon that basically crystalizes what I’ve come away with from my exposure to
Eastern spirituality and spirituality in general, including magical
spirituality:
Excerpt from
Chapter 20 of The Savior at the End of Time
About 42 days after his confrontation with Lord
Consul Tau-Bridge, Zosi began to be spotted in flamboyantly full ceremonial
regalia within the Mercury Gardens. He would wear a tunic of thick raw silk and
tightly fitted, black leggings that were made of tanned leather and full of
straps and whips of lacings. Over this, he would wear high boots that matched a
mottled, purple-black tanned leather cope embossed with images of ourobori,
moondragons, and griffins. His hair was meticulously plaited and decorated with
pins and ribbons. His head was topped with a black double-cone hat that was rakishly
crimped and folded over so that the tips of the horn-like cones, embellished
with opalescent jingle bells, menacingly flounced and jangled in front of his
face. He wielded a rather large and tall staff, the core of which was made of
slender poles of cedar and fennel stalks. It was wrapped in embossed leather
that matched his ensemble. Like a sinister maypole, the staff’s leather sheath
was itself wrapped in a filigreed design of cords and leather straps on which
gadgets and flotsam were affixed and that dangled, flail- and
cat-o-nine-tails-like, from the staff’s finial, which was a gold spearhead in
the shape of a fish with an acorn protruding from its mouth.
Like that, he would stroll about the Gardens and
then stop here or there to deliver a sermon that attracted larger and larger
crowds as word of the spectacle grew. He would begin the rant in a gentle voice
with the words, “See the illumination at the center of being,” and materialize
some small sparkly object that would fascinate and mesmerize onlookers.
“The body and all phenomena arise causally and
provisionally within absolute being,” he would continue, yet still in a very
meek and quiet voice. It would be trembling and barely audible despite his
ferocious appearance. “There is no time and no dimension to space, both being
mere adaptive projections of mind. The personality is an interdependently
arising construction of circumstances and experiences, driven by reactivity
bred by conditioning devoid of awareness or true will. What is it to wake up
from the idea of yourself? Heaven, hell, God, the Adversary, pleasure, pain,
and all the pairs of opposites are projections of your own consciousness. You
project ideas out of yourself. Treating them as independent entities, you go
into them, fear them, and allow them to have power over you although they are
your own creations. No one is there to deliver you; you must deliver yourself.
Glimpse self-effacement and the root of your existence. Reality is silent,
blissful, self-composed Being. This is the Redemptive Principle, the Christos,
the Ground, and the Life beneath the mechanism.”
