Jesse Moynihan on The Secret Sun

Go have a look. Christopher Knowles of The Secret Sun has an interview up with Jesse Moynihan, creator of the webcomic Forming.

The Essence of Magic

The essence of magic is the tension and the dance between all individual, particular character and the infinite, indefinite and eternal nature of all that is.

Coelacanths of the Id

Cast down your nets into the darkness you hide. Draw them up, the fossils that tell us about ourselves.

If you want to very quickly know more about who you are as an individual human being on this planet my advice would be to try writing some sexual fiction. I’m embarrassed as I write that, but it’s essential that I write it. I cannot tolerate being embarrassed by writing about something that of itself hurts no one and is one of the primary experiences of being human. Sexuality creates sickness under three conditions, firstly when you lock it away in a closet, secondly when you force it onto others, thirdly when you erase too many of your existing boundaries too quickly. Writing sexual stories only has the potential to erase the boundaries within you and is one of the fastest ways of bringing up material from the subconscious that is suppressed, repressed and hidden a majority of the time in life.

Finding out who you are as an individual human being is only as interesting and enlightening as you happen to be already. It’s a compounding process of the other connections and complexities beyond the limits of your individual self. So this process my not be for you if you don’t have anything worth dredging up. It’s not going to expand you, but it will open you. Or perhaps you have real darkness to work on within yourself before you want to start dredging up more unseen things. I’ve worked on my self. I’ve meditated and contemplated for years. I’ve engaged energetically and spiritually in every way that seemed like it could take me deeper and further. I’ve thinned myself out to the point I could begin to see into the centre of things, but you can only go so far, or I can only go so far within myself and beyond myself before descending back into everything that I would rather have gotten away from. Each time I traverse that inner darkness it becomes thinner, and I have traversed it many times. Each time I can see and feel more clearly that nothing could ever really be so horrible as this realm tries to convince me that it is. It’s just a form and you can take it or let it go once you have released its power through your experience of it.

I have things that are really worthy of shame and embarrassment within my memory of this lifetime, and beyond it. I have caused real pain and anguish, which I will always try to mend, heal and alleviate. For these I can be forgiven because I have seen and been shown the circumstances that created me and my actions, and because I must forgive or the cycle of suffering will never end for me or for those I have harmed. I have no room within me for the deathly fear, shame and embarrassment that is attached to sexuality that harms no one and is of profound importance to the development of the psyche.

Sexuality is repressed for the same reason that it is so useful in revealing elements of the subconscious. It is powerful, drug-like, elides boundaries and has an almost direct connection to the human subconscious. These are dangerous, volatile qualities and should be handled with care and wisdom, but being alive is dangerous and volatile. If you try to escape it you are trying to escape life itself. There are far faster and more efficient ways of achieving that end than sexual repression.

Sexuality is a vanishingly small aspect of my sense of self, but has been important to the journey that I have chosen in life. Understanding the dynamic tension between shame and revulsion on the one hand and desire and attachment on the other has been very important. You cannot free yourself until you enter into full awareness of your attachments. Emotional energy is a thing of half awareness and the subconscious. Seen clearly in the light of the waking mind these energies dissipate.

Pulp is the key. Pulp as in old pulp magazines and novels. Stereotypes, prejudices, the primacy of the id. The river of the unconscious and unexamined symbols that your dreaming mind uses to cut the world into pieces that make sense of experience. These are the keys to finding attachments and beginning to end them by seeing them clearly. By end I mean that the unconscious power of images and symbols within your mind will become conscious. Their creeping influence and power over you will be ended because you have opened yourself enough to see and work with them. This process will change you. It is not about leaving or escaping, but about dissipating the emotional power of subconscious desires and symbols by fully seeing and experiencing them as they truly are, not as they are imagined or held within the subconscious.

For me this process is not about erasing all boundaries within myself. It is about becoming aware of my own structure and identity. It is about becoming cognizant of and responsible for the energies which are within me whether I speak of them or not. Some boundaries will be erased because they serve no purpose and hinder rather than help, hold back energies that should be let forth. Other boundaries exist for definite reasons, to separate energies, actions and thoughts that react, conflict and harm one another or cannot exist in each others company. Learning what needs to be released and what needs to be held is the benefit of experience.

Sacred Fire III

The process of the sacred fire is one pole of the reaction that the light of god engenders within living beings and physical matter. The opposite pole is much more straight forward to me because I have no need to embellish it in life. It is the complete, absolute forgiveness and acceptance of your true self and all life. Knowing that you and all that you contain is perfection and a manifestation of god that can never be made unholy by any action or deed.

A Sharp Sign

As a result of my interaction and eventual synonymity with the Music from Beyond the World I do not reflexively distinguish myself from others. I perceive thoughts and feelings with exquisite clarity, their hues, locations and intensities, but applying the semiotic butchers blade of “I” and “you” is now the function of intellect or a powerful individuating emotion, not natural behavior. I get the words reversed without noticing, particularly with people from whom I hide myself, or those from whom I hide nothing.

The Apocryphal and the Authentic

I have learned more about the nature of my personal reality and potential through fiction and games than I have through genuine mystical texts or the accounts of healers. I have learned even more by living and expressing those truths. I work with and help human beings who have been terribly abused and who have suffered greatly. There is an ego need that my nature and what I do be authentic and pure, not frivolous or trivial, but I have never been able to find the reality of those ideas. To me the inventions of children bear the same weight as the words of ancient sages. I find truth or discard them as they speak to me. Things that are not, that cannot be literally true have the power to change the world. Not all of these stories are lies, or just playing with words. Some of them speak to us. Make us uncomfortable because somewhere in the depths we know that they are true at the same time that we know they could not be. They have not simply the power of lies, or illusions, but the power of transformation.

Sacred Fire II

Suffering-for-its-own-sake has nothing to do with light, clarity, truth or knowledge.

Suffering-for-its-own-sake is part of the incurving nature of shame, of separating yourself from all that is with darkness, pain, recrimination and isolation.

The locks on our hearts are old and born shut with rust, rime and deep time. Some of them can only be touched in the light shed by the dying embers of life, or found in the unending vacuum of despair. Violence, or the slow creep of the unbearable, are sometimes the only keys.

Open the locks, 1 by 1. Inch by inch worm. It lets in the horrible night and day, but it’s the only way… Out. The truth will smash you open. If you keep looking you’ll see that it was just a clay doll full of insect puzzles. Where am I? Chase the stars and they’ll always run away. Let them come in the night. Lucid light. Behind the eyes. Felt in the lymph. Seen as clear as day.

The light of god is terrifying and absolutely amoral. It will compel the truth from you. The truth of your own nature, beyond literal fact. The light is utterly annihilating. It will move through you until there is absolute clarity throughout your being, or you close-off, or you die.

Ordinary human life protects us from the light of god. It must, or we could not be born and live as beings of fragile living flesh and blood, fragile emotion and need. Our forms must grow in the amniotic protection of this physical world.

The sacred fire is one pole of the process that the light of god engenders within physical life and matter. It is a process by strong resonant transfer. Energy reordering matter into higher states of refinement and potency. It is an inherently consumptive process. It is not life nurturing.

That which is transformed through the process of the sacred fire takes on a nature that elides the less refined order from which it came, revealing the grains of more refined nature within it. The process of the sacred fire is traversed many times and all conditions of refinement are by degree. Refinement is not known through comparison or reaction, but through the actions born of self nature.

The physical laws of this universe bear no internal relationship to the process of the sacred fire or the light of god, but in the presence of those forces there is distinction, but no separation between the transformation of the spiritual and the physical.

Sacred Fire

“Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” – Slacker, 1991

I used to be a healer. I still am, but I can’t look into human eyes any more and say “I’ll help you to be whole” when all those eyes see and want is their own pain. Humanity is cannibalizing itself. They are screaming “won’t someone end the suffering!” Still unconsciously, habitually, tearing away another junk of flesh to be consumed and burned on the hidden and profane alter to ignorance and craving that we carry inside of us. I have known this in the sanitized reign of quantity, statistics, distant geography, economic “realities” that would make Kafka blush, but now I feel it in the universal microcosm of every human soul. The Western Lands seep with blood and infected shit.

I have the light and fire of god beating in my heart and beating in my brain. It was the greatest gift to all things. Once you see it lives within, you can’t abuse it. You can’t. I can’t give power to the wretched, even within myself. I can only give myself to the ones who have suffered enough to let go of their suffering.

Unresolved Threads at Present

The impulse to return home, from physical reality to a more unified and whole state beyond the physical.

Alchemy in a broad sense, conflicting between the pursuit of physical power (knowledge) and spiritual transformation.

The tension between the pursuit of spiritual refinement and maturation as a physical life form.

The unity of the apocryphal and the authentic, re: the green language and pop-cultural synchro-mysticism.

My longstanding self affiliation with Burroughs as both authentic and apocryphal.

Spirit of the Times

“Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is.
Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore
and wishes he could go home.”
-Philip K. Dick