Chickened of the Sea

OK, so I decided that perhaps I should expand myself, that I should make my shoulders as big as the sky as I walked so as to and embrace those around me, be willing to feel all that I could about the subtle environment in which I and others were embedded (this was all new to me in and of itself)... I was standing in line at a drug store and a woman was standing a couple of feet in front of me. I expanded my consciousness to include her. Not a few seconds later, I anticipating it, reading it even, she turned around and gave me a totally funny look; not sure how to respond, I immediately withdrew my thoughts from her and looked away. She quickly moved to another line.

"OK," I tell myself, "a vampire is bound to get bloody thirsty under these circumstances... or a quick stake through the heart!" My ineptitude begs the question of how I, if a vampire (?!), have managed to survive all these years (as opposed to thrive, I imagine).

The night before I had been standing in another line: A woman tapped me on the shoulder and I turned to see who it was. It was someone whom I had greatly cared for and who I had thought I would never see again. The moment I recognized who it was, my heart nearly leapt out of my chest -- but here's the odd thing: it wasn't my heart, or not as I knew it to be, and something did leap. I realized with a shock that I had ejected a mass of tendrils out of my chest and that I was seeking to embrace her in every way possible, to engulf her, to pull her close, even (dare I say it?) to feed. I quickly killed the desire (hey, she's married -- damn my thoughts).

So, great, now I get to walk around not only imagining a disconnect from people but knowing what the gas-line looks like. Plus, I'm a friggin' octopus.

So, is there a question in all this? Yeah, but it's mind-boggling. Besides, all I need to do is find the correct page in the AB to start getting answers.

I do have questions about even bringing things up like this, though, of speaking from personal experience. It all sounds so needy or, alternatively, egotistical, or, alternatively, stupid. One also has a sense of the sacred and of not wanting to lock-in or violate the kind of unknowingness (?) that gets one toward new sensibilities. On the other hand, if you put a bunch of people in a room who are familiar with these kinds of things, do they just sit around and give each other knowing looks?

How do you (un)spell C-O-N-F-U-S-I-O-N?

Your post was a bit confusing but yet pleasant to read. Thank you for sharing your experiences and mind, it is great to see people doing so here in the community.

I have a question though. You said there are always questions to all of this confusion and situations, but that although being mind-boggling, you can always get the right answer if you can find the correct page inside the Asetian Bible.
Is this true? If so, how does it manifest and why do you think it happens? Can you share any real life experience where that happened?
Please forgive my curiosity if I am asking for something too intimate, but I found very interesting how you expressed it, and in a way, I believe we all in here can paralel with that thought, one way or another.

Jonathan

Hi, Jonathan --

When it comes to the Asetian Bible, I do consider it a case of starting to get answers and that only. Beyond that, nothing more will come, I imagine, without experiment (and this seems to be what the Asetian enterprise, by its relative silence, encourages)... I must also admit to a wry and forlorn smile as I wrote that line (a kind of As If! I Only Wish!), which I then, out of respect, sought to disguise. (It's wonderful -- that's what forums are for! -- that you zeroed in on just what I considered to be the weakest point! )

My post was a bit confusing (in how I expressed the time-line mostly), I agree, and I had second thoughts, but I decided to stick with the stream-of-consciousness as it was, partly due to the pressure (light though it may be at times) of trying to compose and post these things on the job (I am sans-home-computer these days).

So, no, I can't say there's any magic bullet in getting answers from the AB (though I do like sticking my finger in at random). I think it's more a matter of slowly mapping oneself to what it offers or it mapping to oneself... all via a matter of testing, contemplating, not swallowing it whole! (Remember, it's a bible to Asetians, their expression, not a bible of Asetianism in the same way that one would think of a Christian bible).

But there are right answers to be had. I'll see if I can come up with what I found particularly interesting in the book and note it here...

The first couple of things that occur to me are extremely broad and one of these isn't even a part of the Asetian Bible per se. I had read elsewhere (which makes it suspect off the bat) that the Asetians respect and possibly incorporate Thelema and The Book of the Law into their understandings. Reading this immediately put me in mind, as I am a Thelemite, of choosing to see how the AB fits the framework of what I take to be Thelema... or, as the case may be, of how Thelema fits the framework of Asetian knowledge (or "both cases" if there is a kind of identity). This was kind of the foundation from which I began to study the AB.

The summit of what drew me to the AB was simply Aset, and of that I am more circumspect (and often very reluctantly, I must admit, since I am a gab-hound) in what I have to say. That the AB is infused with the spirit of Aset is an understatement and that alone has the power to draw one into the study of the book. It's from this, this overall sense of devotionalism in the book, that I derive my feeling that "OK, some of this may be suspect, some of it mythologized (I really can't say for sure), but, damn, it sure feels good!"

How these two elements combined (Thelema plus Asetianism) served to propel me into some areas I had been overlooking or afraid to consider is a thought for another day.

I don't have the AB with me right now, but I'll see if I can come up with a couple of "right answers" that I discovered in the book, along the lines of what you requested (but I hope I've been clear on the idea that I don't consider the AB to be a talisman of answers or some-such -- when answers are forthcoming they can be had anywhere -- it's a workbook, an invitation). By "right answers" I mean what you mean, something that hit me like a revelation.

I've already mentioned above about my experience with psychic tendrils, which is what I assume they were. As is often (usually? always?) the case with psychic experience, one is left with the idea afterwards of "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" In my case, I had read of the idea of tendrils in the AB some weeks before, so one could make the case that I was not in fact forming tendrils that I was suddenly shocked to recognize were there but that, instead, I was applying my imagination to a feeling. That I can say "No, I'm pretty wise to the difference; some things "imagine themselves" so-to-speak; this is structural" won't fly for someone who has never escaped his imagination into what one could call the imagination of the world. So, for me, this was a revelation, but it wasn't even the revelation-regarding-tendrils that got me started.

The revelation was simply being able to tie something in the book to something that was already in my own imagination from before but that I had never been able to read as speaking of something actual. In my case, years before, before an interest in vampires (which didn't even include this concept), I had formulated a fictional character who made extensive use of tendrils and in a way somewhat similar to how one might imagine a vampire (according to this new understanding) using them. This was a mapping from my own life, then, to something in the Asetian Bible, and from this I began to ask why that should be so. I think this asking why is what opened things up to the possibility of experience...

... I have to cut this short, I'm afraid (hey, I'm at work!), but I do want to mention that this is the kind of thing, I believe, that one should look for. One could start by asking why he finds the AB so attractive (if he does) and what in his own life may have been speaking some of the same things found in the book. Here's how one forges one's own understanding, outside of the book, using the book as a tool. The right answer is a call to question one's own assumptions and to follow one's own leads. There are a whole slew of books out there that can help one do that.

Gotta run (damn, I think I busted a blood vessel).

... [Ah, better now!... Gotta watch out for those Asetians, geesch. Semi- ]

I agree the post was kind of confusing and long.