Getting Fitted for a Ball Gag

Backing into enlightenment.

I've been trying to achieve enlightenment in a half-assed manner.

I don't know if that's good or bad.

A few good things:

• Achieving aloofness from the real world leaves you feeling elevated (and superior).

• Finding silence and solitude takes on the characteristics of a mosh pit at a thrash metal concert (but with no served alcohol, since it's all-ages).

• Shelving desires of all sorts—epicurean, carnal, career-based—so no need to burn calories acting upon them (only they come roaring back twofold).

A few bad things:

• Meditating is time-consuming. It requires time usually allocated to learning how to defend Aoki locks on Instagram, having your unpopular opinion about the overrated “greatest band of all time” confirmed on Reddit, engaging in workplace gossip involving memes none of us came up with on our own, and browsing useless but cool products being pimped to you by Facebook ads.

• Asana and pranayama yoga are taxing on the body. They're just as time-consuming as meditation but they have built-in components of discomfort, a double negative. Not worth it.

• Performing banishing or invoking rituals of pentagrams, hexagrams, and dodecahedrons results in having the shapes dwindle apart without the aid of a compass or functioning air-conditioning. Besides, why should spirits care how I doodle? Will playing a mean air guitar get me nubile groupies? That's what I thought.

After months of this Great Work business, I still get bouts of self-loathing and nihilism. Author David Shoemaker (Living Thelema) says that hitting this wall is when you grow, because you are forced to adapt. Pshh. We shall see.

It's a tough ask to demand an aspirant surrender time and effort to this path when the aspirant doesn't know where the path leads. As I educated myself in this stuff, there were promises of strange elixirs, lush gardens fully stocked with houris, mysterious instruments that concocted otherworldly melodies, and stacks of finishable crossword puzzles.

All I know is that this plane of existence doesn't cut it. I've been called an old soul by those who I assume detect this deficiency. That’s insulting: it makes my soul out to be a pile of dampened ashes instead of a lotus flower. Yet they're not wrong.

So what am I to do? Continue on the path? To wonder off the path is just a stalling mechanism, but there is an erotic siren song wafting my way from over that green hill and I think I smell mesquite-fired tacos al pastor on the opposite side.

So are these worldly distractions stalling or just living? No one forewarned me of the lack of signposts on this journey. I need to be burped on my way to nirvana. If I didn't need to be, then I wouldn't need nirvana. Get it?

About two years ago, I did a deep dive into the esoteric. This took me on an astral journey across the centuries, beginning in Egypt and ending in this very moment when I write this. Greco-Egyptian hermeticism rubbed elbows with early Christian Gnosticism; medieval alchemy linked arms with Jewish Kabbalah. Western Solomonic evocation did a minuet with the Rider-Waite tarot deck.

The journey has been fun, but tricking your ‘75 Chevy Bel Air with hydraulics and fuzzy dice dangling from the rear -view means squat if you don't take the G-ride for a roll.

So I decided to take a roll. And nothing.

I know, I know. Rome wasn't built in a day. But shouldn't four months of daily meditation get you an aqueduct or something? C'mon, man. And all those flaming pentagrams traced in the air to invoke elements and archangels—where's the payoff other than having supernal beings cover their eyes with their wings in shame when I do something I probably shouldn't? I don't need celestial company if they're going to just stand by and be spectators. I've given them assignments. They should be binding my jiu-jitsu partners in chains of iron and cutting down literary agents with fingers poised over the “NO” button with swords of diamond. You know, God's work.

Maybe I'm too skeptical to buy into it all. I don't want to be a secular humanist anymore. I certainly don't want to be human, and I tire of being secular. Where's the Big Cheese when I've dropped to my knees? I'm surrendering myself unto You. Show me a sign, Foo.

I want to be like Ezekiel. We shall all reserve the right to be like Ezekiel. I'm no socialist, but I want government-subsidized visions of chariots in the sky, of wheels within wheels. I want state-sponsored prophecy. I want tax credits for out-of-body experiences. Let's incentivize this shit. Maybe then perpetual initiates like me will get their act together.

I just rounded off the two-year-long syllabus of esoterica by rereading the great Perdurabo, by Richard Kaczynski. It's a comprehensive biography of the Great Beast, To Mega Therion, 666.

You may know him as Aleister Crowley. This dude looms large in the world of the occult, and for good reason. He has gained cult status since the 60s. His output of magical tracts, novels, and poetry remain unparalleled. His poetry is lyrical and passionate, and he comes in hard as an accomplished prose stylist. I think he would today make a killer essayist. But he's mainly known as the founder of Thelema, a comprehensive amalgam of everything worth giving attention to in the Western Esoteric Tradition.

I sort of regret rereading Perdurabo. Why? Because the Great Beast lives up to his name. And 666 may be the ticker count of every time he screwed someone over. There are instances of callousness toward family and friends, all done for the benefit of the Great Work. There are abandoned fellow alpinists caught under avalanches, abandoned children continents away, forsaken wives, jilted lovers—most of them having participated as a revolving cast for Crowley's Scarlet Woman, who played the pivotal role in his sex magick operations.

What I'm getting at is—where was his greatness in the Great Work? I get it: his legacy is what he left on paper, not the havoc he wrought with the lives of those sharing meatspace around him. He was prolific as all hell, and that alone is to be commended. (He beats Kramer and Frank Costanza put together.) But how am I to buy into it when there is nary a trace of evidence pointing toward transcendence? He seemed as worldy as all get-out. His strict religious upbringing obviously played a part in this antinomianism. If there's bliss to be had in wallowing in filth, then let's get me fitted for a ball gag posthaste.

Have I been flogging myself wrong all along? The cat-o-nine-tails I use is Marquis de Sade-approved, but I might be striking at the wrong angle. Did one of the tails fall off by overexertion? Are eight tails inadequate? Shall I be still more patient? Will the pain receptors pass the baton to the dopamine receptors? Do they even share the same frequency? Should I go back to single malt scotch and road rage? Is cocaine more cost-effective than guided meditations on Telegram?

Show me a sign, Lord. Let me know it's You in the comments.