"Lost in the Labyrinth" August 20, 2023

"…madness.  I am drowning in madness and inner question, blocked in my movements through the labyrinth …"

June 26th, 2023

June 27th, 2023

I come to the gate of the Isha Institute, yet it is locked.  Despair moves through me, and I feel blocked by the universe yet again, my attempts to bring myself into balance wasted on the long journey south.

There is nothing for it but to return to the cooling energies of the canyon, to stop and rest for a moment in the backyard of the Mimosa Cafe which had held space for me so many times before.

July 11th, 2023 – Facing Shadows (Again)

It is then that I start to wonder, what madness has held me in it's sway? Have I been crazy all these years? Have I been blocked from even recognizing the nature of the magic and my lack of effort? How could I have been so blind? How could I have been so lacking in remembrance or awareness?

I am desperate to change this thing, to anchor my consciousness between heaven and earth before I burn out my earthly vessel.  Though still shocked by my incoherence regarding the Sadhguru iniitiation, I do a waning moon ritual with Cassandra to try to clear out the impressions I know are holding me back.

Their phrasing in the Mythica is a simple one, and I vision us in the keep employing the magics we learned so many years ago at the Academy beneath a violet sky reminiscnet of the crown's descent into the ground.

We continue the magicks, with Cassandra birnging forth an invocation to shift the texture of the ethers …

Mind of Madness – Ritual

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Palo Alto – 2023

As we moved from the mountains of Tahoe to the valley of Palo Alto a new chapter opened, one which brought everything that had come before into a new focus.  Like many times before there was a sense of crossing a threshold, and in that crossing becoming a new version of myself, one imbued with new perceptions of the reality which I was already living, which brought both question and answer to the trials and tremors that pushed me from within.

But then I considered, was I magician at all? Or a bard? Was I cultivating the ability to willfully shift my reality to another shape, or witnessing the play of the realities that were going on before me? If such was the case, I wasn't appropriate to give people advice on how to transform their lives through changing their limiting beliefs or other karmic patterns, but I was deeply capable in sharing with them the nature of the quest itself, the investigation into one's sacred purpose and how that related to the much larger collective of the world.

I can't say for sure when I realized it was all happening collectively.  Like so much of the quest it was a gradual recognition, a coming-to-clarity over the sensations I was feeling and the images and concepts that were happening within me.

July 19th, 2023

And then I remember I had forgotten.  That I had become so enveloped in the creation of the Mythica inside my space, so used to living inside my bubble that I had forgotten the green.  The trees were a reminder then, of the breath that I had not been breathing, the movement through the outdoors that I had not been doing, at how much I had forgotten about my own primal roots.

Coastlines have a certain energy to them, as they are literally the place where the land meets the water.  There's a texture to the malleability of the sand and the timeless push of the waves that reminds me of the akasha.  It's the realization that just as life first crawled from the ocean so does our own regeneration be renewed in her presence.

Most recently a labyrinth appeared on the quest in kairos with my taking of a class in applied mysticism from Ariane Labyrinth, the aka of the ethers literally arriving in the form of a labyrinth on the coastline!!

Walking through the labyrinth, especially one framed by two minotaur and appearing en route to my rendezvous with Ariane was filled with potency.

This was significant to me, for Ariane was the aspect of the self I had encountered on the quest who embodied the application of one's siddhic focus into the body, teaching and transmitting that to the people.  She spoke the language of light as I did, yet had cultivated moving it through her form and embodying the nature of the tantric sorceress.

Ariane had always been meaningful to me on the quest.  I had loved her from first glance, recognizing a kinship in the realms of magic that resonated deep within.  While we had only touched briefly across the stories I nonetheless held her in a high regard, and any meeting with her aspect was auspicious.

I wanted her.  More importantly, I wanted that dimension of myself.  To be strong in my body and enjoying the intimacies of the world.  It was my Heart's Desire, and I struggled to hold onto it … to use the magic of Story to help me move along my own rainbow road.

Yet she reminded me that I DID want that.  That I DID want to connect, to be intimate, to be in wielding with my powers and heal the longstanding difficulty I had in my relationship with the self.

July 27th, 2023 – Steve Shoptaugh

Seers of Shasta

Worse, the self hatred rises up again, this time filled with sharp edges and nigh-endless agitation.  I had realized that I had to do the daily practices to stay grounded and that I was potentially blocking myself from moving forward with the Mythica through subconscious shadows, yet I was STILL shifting in my mind, and desperately weaving together the story to make sense of it.

The call to Darius proves memorable as I discover Kelly Nicole Shepard, a divinator of no small ability and her reflections from the sacredness of the mountain on my path.  There, together, we do a massive clearing around any karmic contracts I have with Cassandra, my intent being to release myself form any subconscious patterns connected to her preventing me from gaining the financial agency necessary to move into a new dimension of being.

Still, it was here that I had another revelation, that perhaps I had not simply come from a higher dimensional place to the mortal plane for the first time but that I had done so much work, so much yoga and so much clearing of the memories which made up matter that I had returned as a blank slate.  It as a sense of potential grounding, and I grasped at it, desperate to find some way to anchor what felt like travel through the shadowlands of madness.

During the Seers of Shasta episode, I came across one of his writings once more, a piece entitled Subconscious ReProgramming / (Waters & Sound).  In it, his voice and tone, the brilliance and the grounding were clear.  It showed his intent to phrase things in an easeful way to the people while bringing forth his excellence regarding sound and the subconscious, and it reminded me how much I appreciated his brotherhood along the quest.  More than this, I took it as a reminder from the universe in the form that was most appropriate for me redouble my efforts to clear the subconscious patterns which were clearly holding me back.

By this time I was feeling deeply uncomfortable being in Cassandra's presence.  While she was helping me out on the quest and acting as an ambassador of the Divine Mother, her continued insistence that I was centerpoint in her idea of the multiverse was hammering on me.  Coupled with the sense of being trapped within the self and only starting to get any kind of a grasp on how to muster my own will to escape, it became untenable.  I found myself becoming cruel towards her, wanting her to stop perceiving me the way she was inside her mind, and was growing increasingly frustrated by her unwillingness to let go of it.  It felt like a violation of the very principles of real communication and real transformation, where she just would not move on her absolute certainty in her own reality.  I knew I had to get out, that Ihad to acheve the victory of publishing and connection with the world, healing my mind and my body and getting away from my proximity to her vibrations.

It wasn't that she wasn't kind.  Nor was it that she lacked compassion.  In so many ways, Cassandra was an embodiment of those things.  Rather it was the massive pressure that I was under, the feeling of my own question of madness and majesty and the sense of not feeling grounded in the world.  While I appreciated her assistance it also spoke to the reflections of my inner substance and the subconscious patterns which continued to work against my conscious will.  The necessity remained to develop a spiritual practice of grounding out my intelligence, of focusing into the root chakra and doing the work to heal the patterns within the persona that had been blocking me.

Things were coming together, but as they were, I was coming apart.  The spell of weaving stories to bring myself into clarity was doing it's job, yet in it I was coming to see the madness that had tormented me in precise detail – I was becoming aware that I was not aware on yet another level, and it haunted me.

Of course, I longed for company, for connection and rejuvenation from the many allies of the Galactic that I had felt kinship with, and yet I was still in the pattern of reaching out and barely being responded to.  I did not feel I had a grasp on the transformation of my own subconscious patterns, and that I was only just coming up to the surface once more in what was a lifelong treading of etheric water.

Was I destined for this, I wondered? Part of the web of madness that I saw within Cassandra? Was I destined to come apart and the seams without a grasp on how to heal myself, or could I pull it together with my diminishing resources, overcome the self-hatred that had defined me for so long and which I felt was restricting my connection with the world?

• —

I felt my self unraveling, my mind, going to places of anger and frustration, which felt unclear. I feared that my proximity to Cassandra‘s vibration was affecting me adversely, and had to remind myself that I was in better circumstances than I had been in years, Abell at last to settle into the writing and healing of the self.

I was coming to see more and more clearly that I had been in karmic spirals, afflicted by what I started to call the “Tantalus curse“,. The repetitions of my reaching out to community and barely getting response or being outright rejected and ignored compounding over the years into a sense of despondency.

It was, and continued to be a horrifying question. While I had achieved great victory in the creation of a medium to map out the magical world And visualize the subtle arts, my own application had been negligent, and I felt my self in amaze of my own words and letters.

Despite this or perhaps because  love it, and, I was having great success in my ability to create the story, gradually using the wiki built into Craft to compensate for the flickering nature of the memory prison. I was starting to get into my body, facing the frustrated sensations that sat within, and longing to have that which the Tantalus curse was preventing.

And why was I experiencing such extremes of emotion and agitation? On the surface, everything seemed fine, yet within, I was a bundle of incoherent and frustration, feeling that no matter what I did, I was stuck in a repetition of psychic imprisonment.

What was going on? Was this part of a long haul across the subconscious territories of the underlands involving my empowerment that had taken a half a century to traverse? Why was I in a circumstance with an ally, who strove to be loving and provide yet whose presence felt psychically Unclean and dangerous to be around?

Yet even the ideal of a more heavenly earth, and its context of the true self, as compared to its shadow, was in constant. I felt a detachment from the ideal that defined the alchemical movement, and that of the spiritual self, I deep, rooted disgust and rage, and at my having to tolerate The constant idea of shadow work and the lack of safety within the self that it implied. It was as if the ideals of kindness and unconditional love were a burden, and where I was resentful at feeling imprisoned and unable to understand.

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Ariane Labyrinth