Speak through me, O Mercurius, O Logos, O Christ, O Spirit of Wholeness

Psychological development in all its phases is a redemptive process. The goal is to redeem by conscious realization, the hidden Self, hidden in unconscious identification with the ego. - Edward Edinger, Ego and Archetype



Imagine that before you hangs a great tapestry, like the kind that hugged the cold walls of medieval stone castles.

This great tapestry possesses a stunning beauty. 

With shining threads of every color, the tapestry depicts the cosmos: humans in joy and in torturous despair; water, earth, air, and fire; all sorts of animals and plants; angels singing and demons dancing; stars and black holes; every kind of pleasure and every kind of pain.

This great tapestry is you.

The wisdom (logos) that weaves the strands of the tapestry together into an intelligible, meanginful, purposive design is love: fondness, desire, eros.

Logos is Eros, Eros is Logos.  Love is the Law, Love Under Will.

Your inmost Self is the Wholeness of everything that exists, exquisitely, inextricably, interdependently intertwined:  hot and cold, life and death, instinct and spirit, masculine and feminine, kindness and cruelty, gain and loss, good and evil. 

Like it or not, you and me - everyone - we each contain the entire tapestry.  We’re all microcosms of the macrocosm. 

To realize this wholeness - fully, consciously, deliberately - and to act in alignment with it is the purpose, the destiny, the telos of our human lives. 

To realize this wholeness and to act in alignment with it is an accomplishment with many names: the fulfillment of the Great Work, the attainment of Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, the achievement of individuation.

This accomplishment gives us meaning, purpose, inspiration, joy, and power.

We humans, uniquely capable of self-reflection, constitute the nervous system of the Earth, we (and beings like us elsewhere in the cosmos ) are God’s sole chance at becoming known to Godself.

How very sad it is, then, that most humans remain almost entirely unconscious of their wholeness - that is to say - they remain one-sided.

A one-sided person does not recognize a fondness for pain, cruelty, stupidity, and evil within themselves, but only in others. 

A one-sided person lives under the delusion that they only like pleasure, kindness, intelligence, and goodness.

When such a person encounters the polar opposites of these, as we all must in the course of our lives, they tend to imagine themselves a tragic victim of an utterly alien, unrelated force - of wicked “others,” cruel Fate, or a meaningless, barren cosmos.  Furthermore, they tend to go to war against those “wicked” others who they see as the source of their troubles - a war that takes various forms: actual battle, break-up and divorce, political polarization, and self-destruction in every form of addiction.

As I write, a plague of one-sidedness has torn our contemporary culture in the United States apart.  We experience now a higher rate of divorce, depression, anxiety, suicide, and drug overdose than we ever have before.

Yet fondness for pain, cruelty, stupidity and evil - when recognized and lovingly made conscious in oneself (for every strand belongs to the tapestry and makes the tapestry beautiful), can be consented to and loved.

  In this consenting love, our darkness can be rendered volitional, somatically experienced and integrated with the ordinary conscious ego.

When this integration happens, a person re-owns all of their projections.  With this re-owning, a person realizes their own Wholeness, their own complete Self, ceases to see themselves as a victim of wicked others, gains a great sense of humor and resilient humility, and becomes capable of contributing great genius to the world. 

Such a person isn’t perfect, but they sure are fun to be around.

Because one-sided people lack this recognition and integration, though, their fondness for pain, cruelty, stupidity, and evil remains entirely outside their conscious knowledge and volition. 

This means that one-sided people impose pain, cruelty, stupidity and evil on themselves and on other people “sideways” - accidentally, unconsciously, and entirely without realizing what they’re doing.

As Jesus Christ said of the one-sided Roman soldiers who jabbed him with spears as he hung on the cross:

“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

The post Mirabilis appeared first on Carolyn Lovewell.

In the years since I first discovered and wrote about Existential Kink in 2017, I've learned a whole lot.

I've learned a lot of powerful theurgy, I've learned way more about dreamwork, and I've learned very many things from my mentor Dr. Robert, including how to resolve acute painful memories and how to communicate with my husband David in a way that keeps our marriage strong.

Since my mind really, really likes to torture me, sometimes I think "oh gosh, all this is other stuff is so great, maybe Existential Kink isn't that great"...

... AND then... my team puts in front of my face another fat stack of emails from people around the world ecstatically exclaiming how much the Existential Kink meditation and attitude has completely changed their lives for the better.

The fact is, Existential Kink helped me when my mind and heart and body were still too jammed up with madness to be able to be reached by all the other great stuff I just listed.

The fact is, Existential Kink helps people every day whom nothing else reaches.

There's something about Existential Kink that's playful and sexy and to-the-point and able to really make sense to suffering folks when every other "transformative" modality on Earth strikes them as too far out, too complicated, too goody-goody.

There's something about Existential Kink that gets people who have been stuck for years with their issues to just FLIP A SWITCH and experience themselves and their lives in an entirely fresh, hot way.

In short, I've learned that Existential Kink, the ability to erotically surrender to the unconscious will long enough to fully feel it and celebrate it, is the essence of powerful magick.

Indeed, if you're a complete weirdo like me and you care to read the most notorious magickian of the 20th century, Aleister Crowley, you'll see that in his final commentary on the Book of the Law, The Law is for All, he says all sorts of stuff that supports the thesis "Existential Kink is the essence of powerful magick." 

For example, Crowley instructs in The Law is for All:

"Unite the conscious will with the true Will, and the conscious Ego with the Silent Self." (41)

"It is bad Magick to admit that one is other than One's inmost self.  

"One should plunge passionately into every possible experience; by doing so one is purged of those personal prejudices which we took so stupidly for ourselves, though they prevented us from realizing our true Wills and from knowing our Names and Natures.

"The Aspirant must well understand that it is no paradox to say that the Annihilation of the Ego in the Abyss is the condition of emancipating the true Self, and exalting it to unimaginable heights.

"So long as one remains 'one's self,' one is overwhelmed by the Universe; destroy the sense of self, and every event is equally an expression of one's Will, since its occurrence is the resultant of the concourse of the forces which one recognizes as one's own." (95)

In other words, learn to get off on your Fate, understand that it's your own true Self who's "doing it to you" and make love with that Self.

Indeed, Existential Kink seems to be a practice that gets at the heart of the Book of the Law's injunction to "remember."

Hadit gives a very specific instruction in the Book of the Law:

"Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains."

There's no more direct way of "remembering that existence ... is pure joy" than by practicing Existential Kink. 

I could go on and on about this, and maybe I will in an essay devoted to Existential Kink & the Magick of Thelema and the New Aeon...

... but my point here is, me and dear spooky Uncle Crowley both are here to tell you: yes, the deepest magick is in erotic surrender to what your will actually is, not to what your conditioned mind *thinks* that you want.

I created PENETRATE: the Existential Kink coach training program for these 7 reasons:

1)  Judging from my emails, the world hungers for way more Existential Kink help and instruction

2)  Even if I coached clients morning til night every day, I would not be able to match the overwhelming demand for Existential Kink coaching

3) I really, really want everyone to know how to "make the unconscious, conscious" quickly and easily

4) I am always desiring more people to talk about Existential Kink and magick with

5) I want a vast phalanx of brilliant alchemical healers (trained Existential Kink coaches) to sweep the world

6) I am super-judgy of 99 percent of online coach training programs - i.e., I think they straight up suck and are boring, so I wanted to create one that completely does not suck and is far, far from boring

7) I really need more people to exist who can help me get off on my own self-torturous bullshit.  I'm thankful every day that I trained my friends Lucy and Laila (the lead teachers of PENETRATE) as Existential Kink coaches because they're able to see right through me.

If you're reading this in June 2024, applications for this year's round of PENETRATE are still open.  You can click here to learn more and apply.

The post why I created PENETRATE: the Existential Kink coach training program appeared first on Carolyn Lovewell.