UP FROM RUINS begins on JULY 1. SIGN UP/GET DETAILS HERE.

In conjunction with the many insights I’m getting as I ready for my online course UP FROM RUINS , particularly in relation to destiny, I’ve decided to offer some of it up as blog posts. The first one, on economy, money, and destiny, is here. A post on three bad concepts of destiny is here. And I consider the question, “Does everything happen for a reason?” in the light of Destiny here.

Friends,

What does it mean to be initiated?

Many of the old paths of spiritual initiation included rites to activate potential initiates so they could participate in the spiritual reality of their own lives, of society, and of the world.

These rites are famously unpleasant, and many of them simulated death experiences, such as sensory deprivation, temporary burial, hallucination, great states of pain, starvation, and more.

It doesn’t take much searching to find variations of these rites sold by spiritual and self-help influencers today. Maybe you’ve bought one or more of them:

• An ayahuasca retreat with a “real” shaman
• Taking an extreme sports challenge like Tough Mudder, etc
• Following books that tell you how to do mushrooms while in sensory deprivation
• Engaging in elaborate ceremonial magick rituals
• Heading to a wellness retreat where you “cleanse” yourself
• A Buddhist extended silence and meditation retreat
• Taking a masculine/feminine energy workshop (often involving kambo or some other mind-altering substance coupled with sex)

Obviously, these are just a few examples. Initiation rites – wherein the old self is peeled away or obliterated so that the new self may begin – are now a part of popular culture.

The idea pulsing in all marketable forms of initiation, as well as the old ways of secret societies, is that if you can contain the transformative experience by ritualizing it, you can guide someone into a new way of being without killing them.

As for the attendant teachers and coaches of said initiations, they may or may not have their shit together. But they will definitely project some form of wisdom either way.

And that includes the people who tell stories about those teachers, too. The narrative of exploitative initiation has been thoroughly popularized by writers and producers who present a “reality-check” about the process. The warning against initiation usually goes something like this:

“Life is random and painful and everyone is messed up, there is no secret way out! The spiritual teachers are just fucked up and broken in a charismatic way!”

And these claims are bolstered by psychoanalysis and therapy. The therapist and the writer and the producer, of course, ignore the fact that they themselves are posing as the ones who know the ACTUAL truth, and also ignoring the consequences of their own truth-proffering.

So… Is initiation possible (or desirable) through the methods above? Can anyone teach us how to be initiated?

The answer to both questions is no.

We have to admit that since initiation has been mainstreamed, its ritualized usefulness and effectiveness have been diminished.

Far from the integral studies, new age, and modern shamanist cries that we’ve lost touch with initiation and need these rituals to heal the woes of our time and our lives, the truth is, we couldn’t be more in touch with initiation rites.

We do not need more initiation rites.
We need, instead, to discard the ritualization of initiation all together.

I’ll talk more about this in the course, but let me hit on a few points here.

Since the secrets of the occult were revealed and popularized in dominant culture – by hugely influential spiritual and artistic figures like Rudolf Steiner, Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, Wassily Kandinsky – initiation has entered into mass consciousness.

In the back of our minds, we know that fully transformative experiences are available to us now, now, and now again. Because this fact is with us, it is in our consciousness. This marks a change from before, when we expected only a few to have access via society or divine selection.

This means large part of what initiation is – the knowledge we all have that there are truths and desires within ourselves, others, and the cosmos, that can change us entirely – has already been accomplished. To put it another way, a part of the collectively uninitiated self has already died.

In the quote at the top of this post, from anti-fascist christian magician Franz Bardon, we see a different picture of initiation.

Initiation is something that is happening to us all the time, at every moment. Sometimes it happens through practice, but other times it happens through what Bardon calls fate. I refer to it as Destiny.

That means  every moment of our lives pulses with opportunity to see or not see every moment’s depths. And that the more we look at everyday life with the initiation consciousness, the more we will have access to the wisdom of an initiate. Each approach to our own lives in earnest deepens our capacity to receive wisdom.

So:

Can you think of a time you’ve been initiated?

It could be a huge event. For instance, a painful experienced that we know transformed us, like when I was assaulted by my ex-boyfriend.

Or it could be a small event that later was viewed as a footfall on the right path; maybe you decided to get coffee, and in the coffee shop you saw the person you ended up being in a relationship with.

The past joins us in the present to help understand the profundity of life. Put more, uh, occult-ish-ly, the living being of Time, emerges to give us perspective and wisdom. Sometimes, with this helper, we can see that events happened for a reason.

But because every moment in our lives represents the opportunity for freedom, everything that has not been reconfigured as having happened for a reason has still happened for us.

Using this model, we can see the world as our Mystery School, and our own lives as the sacred texts to be read.

The reason why ayahuasca retreats, wellness rituals, and feats of  physical/mental endurance prescribed by spiritual influencers generally don’t have a lasting effect is because they are polluted by lesson-ness and teacher-ness.

I’m sure this will sound familiar to you:
You do some potent spiritual ritual, only to find its effects disappearing later. Where did they go?

Participants of initiation rituals are sucked into a spiritual state, and when they come down, still feel that they have a piece of it. But they find that they do not have spiritual substance in their hands.

This is the message of the folk tale in which a traveller to the fairy realm is given gold only to find, upon returning home, that it’s all turned to crumbs in his pockets.

Furthermore, because that state seemed so special, it often causes the participant to think that the rest of life is not initiation constantly in progress, offered to us by the arc of Destiny.

No ritual will be as profound as your life.

No one can offer you initiation. It’s already happened.

There’s a lot more to say and plenty of holes in the picture I’ve presented above. So let’s work on this together in Up from Ruins, starting Saturday, July 1.

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UP FROM RUINS:
USING DESTINY-WORK TO CONNECT SELF-DEVELOPMENT & WORLD CHALLENGES

• ∴ Exclusive new offering UP FROM RUINS: USING DESTINY-WORK TO CONNECT SELF DEVELOPMENT WITH WORLD CHALLENGES, 90 minutes, streaming on July 1, available as a recording July 2
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• ∴ LIMITED option for one-on-one Destiny-work meeting
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• investigate deeper, poetry, a playlist, and more.

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