Ecstasy, chaos magic, transformation.

[kiya]

Two of the keywords on this userpicture are "Cult of Ecstasy" and "chaos magic". (The third is "new fruit". I'll get to that.) When I designed it, I was thinking that the 'chaos magic' was riffing off the idea of taking the fictional as real if it happens to work at the moment, and running in that system for a while, and thus having it keyworded off a bit of self-identification within a gaming system was a nice little metajoke.

Like a lot of that sort of thing, though, it's truer than it looks.

As a Chaote, I'm pretty much a dabbler. I collect truths, lots of them. I don't believe everything/nothing is true (on the 'It patently isn't' principle), but I have no problem with having a big bucket of superficially contradictory truths to call on as they're the appropriate form of contextual leverage for a particular situation. (Basically, I find a lot of hardcore Chaos magic too dogmatic. This has the bonus value of amusing the hell out of me.)

What I really get focused on are toolsets that I can use to change my internal frame of reference, my state of mind. Altered consciousnesses -- which is a goodly chunk of why I made the Cultist of Ecstasy icon in the first place. (My current state of thoughts behind this post are partly rooted in the post immediately previous, and partly rooted in trying to articulate what the essential core of my BDSM practice is to pantryslut for purposes of getting book recommendations and coming at altered consciousness, personal transformation, states of mind.) It's my most essential and flexible tool; I feel a profound need to know what it will do under a variety of conditions, as well as wanting to explore what various conditions can bring out in its results.

This is something that I recognise a significant paradigmatic difference with other people about, when I've observed conversations about it -- the way altered consciousness and control interact. I find my sense of self-control and self-possessedness is enhanced because I know, for example, what my brain and body do when I've got alcohol in my system; I have the knowledge and capacity to use that effect if I want to, I have a good sense of what it does to my limits and perceptions, and I'm prepared to deal with it. (A long time ago, I had a very strange-from-my-perspective with Kristopher on either rasfc or rasseff about hallucinogens. I'm not sure we understood each other, but I feel like that a lot about Kristopher.) I mean, I can see the 'I have to live in this mind for the rest of my life, I don't want to risk damaging it or have it go out of control on me' perspective? It's just not how I process.

My identity is fluid enough that I'm always processing in a dynamic system in any account; knowing how it works under various conditions strikes me as a natural outgrowth of that. Knowing when I'll shift personae, how to induce that, is just the basics of it. Knowing what conditions render the body most functional, how to make it work, how to minimise the difficulties of various issues. And beyond that -- rattling around inside the head, trying to figure out how to straighten things that are bent or broken, how to get things that need to curve angled right, how to make the connection patterns work. And we get into the transformative magic, the alchemical process, the road to enlightenment here -- which strikes me, at least in the instant of writing, to be that full possession of the capacities of the mind and the ability to use them as appropriate. Like yezida's quoted meaning of compassion, the ability to act freely and correctly in all circumstances. Or the discussion we were having this training quarter of self-possession, the fully human and fully divine.

There are a myriad tools for this. Music is one I've always used, finding the shape of them and sliding myself into them, putting them on like a second skin. otter3 and I used to discuss around that one every so often. Dance is an interesting, self-conscious one for me, one I haven't grown into the use of, though I can get there through the music if I do it right. Pain, impact, those are energy-raising techniques that I've used for years, that and centering. (And a milder form of that is in yezida's body-patting at the end of major ritual work, the great magical working of "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes".) Better living through chemistry. Sex, in a variety of permutations.

I keep coming back to work with power -- one of the major foci of my BDSM stuff -- as a major place to work with this, the place I can find this essence. A different set of constraints, stretching out different things, compacting others, bringing out places where certain transformational points appear to be achievable. Ways of revealing different sets of mental limits than can be gotten at in other contexts. It's a focus, something I keep coming back to and reaching towards, something that answers one of the deep hungers for self-comprehension, self-realisation, illumination. It pulls at the dynamic between the Shadow, the regenerating Nun, the ocean of possibility, and the explicit, named world, going out on the rough edges where names may be known, but are not yet spoken: rooted in infinite potential, and then focused through into the manifest -- which is an edge that has always fascinated me.

When I designed this icon, I was riffing on a line in the Code of Ananda, the Cult of Ecstasy's ethos: 'Even trees rent by lightning may grow new fruit'. A lot of what drives my exploration of my mental states is the seeking the new fruit, the sense of the transformational that comes after the ordeal.

A while back I made a comment that in many ways I view Set as a god of initiations.

I watch the lightning and know -- joke's on me.