Paradigm Shift

Do not do what you want, do what is necessary
Take all you are given, give all of yourself
What I have, I hold
When all is lost, and not before, prepare to die with dignity ---- Robert Cochrane




I've banged on the idea of paradigm shift quite a bit in my series of posts and I think that now might be a good time to explain what I mean. Cochrane beats on this topic relentlessly throughout the letters. Chumbley does so in Qutub. The Mystery is the survival of Death - which goes directly into Cochrane's Laws and to his poetic lines paraphrased from Amergin: "I am a wonder, for I have survived Death." In this survival of Death, Time, or its perception, is re-ordered. In terms of human perception, the entire cosmos - the way it is perceived - is inverted. Time goes from a flowing line moving from "past" to "future" to a hub stretching out in three and more dimensions to eternity. All of Time becomes "mythic time" this is to say "now."

Why do I call this a paradigm shift? Because all of human perception depends on how two forces are understood: Time and Light, and these two depend upon each other. Cochrane says "These two may be seen as twins, but may in fact be the same person." The Book of Enoch states flatly "The supreme King of the world is Time."

This reordering - destruction and recreation of the perception of Time - has drastic consequences for Awareness. Since all of perception depends directly on the perception of Time and Light, and reordering the perception of one reorders the perception of the other, then to invert the perception and understanding of Time means that ALL of human perception becomes drastically altered. The cosmic paradigm shifts dramatically, as I've outlined above. In mythic terms, the Flood consumes the world in fire and water; darkness covers the land at midday, the earth shakes, the dead leave the grave and the veil in the temple is rent from bottom to top.

Let's take a look at these items. The Flood, Cochrane describes as Time. Time destroys the world, not via a slow process of erosion but rather by the action of a single, catastrophic instant. Why is this so? The answer is obvious: The perception of Time - and therefore the filter through which it is perceived - is destroyed. So now, let's check to see exactly what is being destroyed. The answer, of course, is "the world." This is to say, in ancient terminology, the entire cosmos *as it is perceived.* If we look to the Gospel of Matthew, from which I draw the other imagery, we see that the Son of Man - the Man - has indeed been crossed. So, of the three "consciousnesses" - Beast, Man, and Archangel - the Man is destroyed, along with its perceptions of the world. The next item to examine is "Darkness covers the land at midday" - in other words midday becomes midnight. Time, or the perception of it, is completely inverted. Next up: "The earth shakes," and here we see again that the perception of reality is altered. That which was seen as "solid" - the ground - is revealed as shifting, and shaking out of all possibility of control - "all the ground is shifting sand" as the old hymn goes. I doubt the church lyricist quite intended those words to be so far reaching, but indeed they are. "The dead leave the grave," is our next item as we can find all sorts of parallels for this. The most immediate lies in a condition that some call "shamanism" where the world of spirit, and the dead within it, oft appear more "solid" than do the living. ( There's an old dead fellow who sometimes stands at the intersection of SR 512 and South Tacoma Way, who has played merry hell with me more than once, stepping out in front of my car as I turned through the intersection. The first couple of times he did this, I hit my brakes only to discover he'd vanished.) Finally we have the veil in the temple. This has a two pronged thrust to it. On one hand, a Temple is a cosmological model, so we can see the rending of the veil as the rending of Time, ergo the Flood. On the other hand, the veil masked the Holy of Holies - the most Tabu place in Judaea - and its tearing renders that place - once restricted to a ritually prepared High Priest - accessible to anyone. Tabu is deliberatly violated and rendered null in the process of this destruction of the Man or the Crossing of the Son of Man. (same idea) who, interestingly enough, in being a crossed abomination - a cursed Nephilim - becomes the most blessed figure in the West for more than a thousand years. Talk about inversion ... in spades. With Holy of Holies standing open: *Nothing* is tabu ... All subsequent "tabus" are revealed - as my friends Nicholaj and Griffin point out in their writings and in conversation - as illusions. So much for the "holy of holies," the "sacred circle," "sacred space," "holy ground," and so forth. There is no ground that is not Sacred, and the formerly "profane" is, in fact, a part of it.

The rest we know. The Stone of Fate is rolled away from the grave after three days (and back to Cochrane's Laws again) and the World - Time - is reordered. However, now the Apostles can see the dead. Tongues of fire appear over their heads ("I am a Devil with a mind of fire" says Taliesin)and all languages are as one to them (again formerly perceived divisions are erased.)

Back to the idea of paradigm shift. Where does this lead us? Whence now? Two friends of mine, Griffin Ced and Arnett Taylor have both offered answers for this: The Witch's entire life is consumed by the search for Truth. It becomes, simply, a huge Sacred Act, made up of dextral and sinistral choices that must be made and their consequences - Necessity - accepted. The Witch, seeing through a combination of the Archangel's eye and the Beast's instincts, finds that the world of form becomes an ellusive shadow, difficult to grasp and with which to deal. "If you are not of this world (form and illusion, the world of the Man) the world will hate you ..." the Gospels of Luke and Thomas both advise us and so it does. We have flown in the face of Fate, accepted the deadly Kiss in the crossroads and our paradigm - our worldview - stands completely inverse to that of those caught up in the illusions of the World of the Man - politics, riches, influence, and so forth. (This is my "why" for my criticism of any focus on politics in a witchcraft stream. Politics is, by nature, the manufacture and mass marketing of illusion and those who court it are caught up in the snare of the Lapwing. This is also why I liken religio-political ideologism to crack cocaine ... Yet the Duty of Care compels us to aid our fellows while demanding we maintain our freedom - another tricky razor blade to walk. In order to understand the "truth" about politics one must needs cut away the layers ideological nonsense and expose the flagrant self-interest of the politician.)

So now, a final thought. Another person once raised a point that I think many folk have overlooked, and that demands address. "Can this be related to rite / praxis?" My answer is an unqualified "Yes, it is needful so." I can think of several rites and parts of rite that, in fact, do so to the point of depending upon it. A piece from my own strain that does so, is one I've partly quoted in this blog several times. I won't quote it directly in its entirety for reasons of my Word, but to paraphrase a bit:

Thus I betray thee with a kiss
And Bless and Curse thee all in one
With vision to see too far
With something like a heart to know too much
And with the voice that may never lie

FFF,
Trystn