the timboucher experience

“I Will Create As I Speak”

I don’t really do Google searches anymore. I mean, not the way I used to. Truth be told, I search for images about 10 times more than I do text searches anymore. I’ve come to a place where images hold more impact and meaning for me and teach me more and do so more immediately. When I want specific information on something, I’ll usually hit Wikipedia instead of hunting and pecking through Google. They are going to have to get hip to this way of operating quickly, I think, or else face the consequences.

Can’t remember where he talks about it (maybe his autobiography?) but I remember Jung saying that when he would see certain patients, he could tell that they were on the verge of a psycho-spiritual crisis or some such. In these extreme cases, all he could do was load them up with the proper symbolic content, and essentially just wish them luck. Because by that point it was too far to turn back and the journey must ultimately be made on your own.

I guess you could say I have been trying to prepare you for your crisis.

Don’t worry though. It’s not that bad. I mean, it is, but it’s also not really. You’ll be better for it.

I wish to impart some advice in your general direction, but I fear that it may only speed you along in your deterioration. But it may also simultaneously push you through the worst of it more successfully. It’s not really up to me. It’s up to you and what you decide to do with it. And your results will be directly related to your power of will, your focus, your singleness of mind and your ability to navigate the Dark Waters of Mystery™.

I want to talk also about how you’d better only do this sort of thing out of the Wellspring of Love™, or else You Will Be Fucked™, but we will come back to that. It may be one of those lessons you can only learn on your own anyway, so here goes.

If you haven’t already done so, I strongly recommend you go back and read my piece on Supercharging the Symbolic Mind and become skilled in the simple exercise described therein. In fact, I don’t really think any of what I’m about to describe will probably even work if you’re not able to do that effectively. “That” being the whole thing about getting your symbol generator part of your mind to actively dialogue with your other part. Everything - as far as I can tell - hinges on this.

Once you can reliably do the question/answer exercise and learn how to adequately decode/translate the information you receive, you will be ready for the next step. Brooke of Supernatural Things turned me onto a great link about “image streaming,” which is the logical next step once you’re able to do this quasi-Jungian “active imagination.”

Basically, you close your eyes, get into that meditative state where imagery starts appearing and once you do so, begin narrating out loud what you are seeing and experiencing. Here’s a quote from that other site, rather than just paraphrasing:

• Whatever impression you find, trivial or no, even seemingly meaningless colors or lines

• Describe them aloud, to an external focus - live listener or your tape recorder. And,

• Describe rapid-flow, in sensory detail, sustained at length even if it was only a glimpse, which will force more free-images to come.

• Regardless of whatever tactic you use to get some sort of impressions and a descriptive flow going, notice when the scene changes or other images come, and describe these.

• Let yourself be surprised by what your images reveal to you.

I have personally found this exercise to be especially helpful in the diagnosis and treatment of personal ailments, specifically for the unfreezing and moving of frozen “engrams” which are blocking you psychologically or spiritually. I did this yesterday as an experiment in probing my childhood fear of water/drowning and had some interesting results in which my body triggered very literal fear & panic responses as I delved deeper into the exercise.

I think it’s important to point out here that these exercises are NOT visualization exercises. I have found visualization exercises to be personally useless when it comes to spiritual and psychological exploration (with some exceptions which I will get into later perhaps). What you are doing is posing a question, and waiting for images to pop up - of their own accord. With the “image streaming” exercise, you are then narrating detailed descriptions of those images as another layer. And very importantly, you are observing changes which occur within your body and emotions - down to the smallest detail - as you do this.

It pays to be very scientific with this aspect of the exercise. Act as though you’re an impartial observer in a laboratory (the crucible of your body) and you are writing down all of what is happening on a clipboard which will be typed up in a scientific paper later.

I also recommend that you put this into some kind of repeatable ritual container to strengthen your mind’s ability to easily slip back into this place again (create anchors and triggers, in other words), as well as to announce to yourself your intentions as you enter into this very much altered state of consciousness. You can come up with whatever you like, but maybe doing something like a little introductory official scientific-sounding litany would help. Something along the lines of:

Initiating image-streaming exploration sequence, in which I will receive symbolic messages, describe them in detail and note their effects on my body, mind, emotions and person. May this exercise be fruitful and may I be protected in this work.

Something along those lines. You get the idea. You could make it more religious, or more technical sounding, or whatever. The point is making a statement of intent, a declaration as to what is happening. And you need to say it out loud so your body hears yourself saying it and confirms the alignment of inner and outer intention.

How’s that sound so far? I’ll come back sometime and compress all this information once I’ve had time to sit with it, but I think this works for now.

What you’re likely to find, especially if you use this exercise as a problem-solving or healing tool (is there any real difference?) is that the images which appear will have corrective effects on you. Your own experience will certainly vary, but dipping into this well of images tends to restore balance, activate latent energies and abilities and have literal and concrete effects on your body. I’d imagine that this tends to be the case because the source of these images is the “higher self” or some such type jargon, the purpose of which is to lead you into fullness and fruition at all times. It may of course have to lead you through some thorns to get there though, so bear that in mind. And then there is the subject of “the Deceivers”, but we will have to come back to that later. Suffice it to say that the net effect of this exercise should be positive. If it’s not, you need to strengthen your focus, your resolve, your natural God-given ability to discern truth, and maybe re-write your “mission statement” and ritual container into something a little more trust-worthy. Steve Pavlina also has some good tips for helping you to discern whether or not the images you receive are coming from your “ego or intuition“.

It’s absolutely integral that you go through these preliminary stages before you go any farther with what I’m about to describe to you. Because you need to *have* a car before you can try to take it on a ten hour drive. Not to mention that I have personally found what I’m about to describe to you as, well, psychologically dangerous, because it takes you right to the edge of what society considers as an acceptable view of reality. I’m hoping that my presentation of it will clothe the whole thing in enough tools that you’ll be able to get through it, but I assume no responsibility if you end up in a padded room as a result of what I’m about to divulge to you.

We could use lots of words to describe this if we wanted. We could call it magick or “sorcery” or we could use any number of the fun neologisms I’ve crafted over the past several months. Let’s do that for the sake of forging a new connection in your mind. Let’s just settle for the word “symbolinking” for now. In a nutshell, once you have developed symbolic awareness and literacy, you can begin to telesymbolinkly latch together sympathetic gyrocompass points and manipulate one as though you are manipulating the other.

Frazer talked about this in the Golden Bough, calling it “sympathetic magic”, but his information is - shall we say - less than practical. So I’m just going to give it to you straight. Once you start doing a lot of image streaming, active imagination, or dialoguing with your subconscious mind, you’re going to notice that particular images come up again and again for you. This is closely tied into what I have in the past referred to as “keyword clusters.” My own particular set of symbolic recurring keyword tag cloud cluster thingies might look something like this

sun moon rose lion virgin mary magdalene jesus robin hood elk stag stone diamond heart sword angel wings eagle word holy spirit logos white bird green man plants king arthur adam eve noah’s ark serpent devil apple garden dog horse goat rabbit

You get the idea. The more you develop your awareness and ability with images and symbols, the longer this list will be and the more prominent these things will become. In fact, if you’re doing the above exercises effectively, you are likely to see an INCREDIBLE bursting through of these symbols into your every day reality. Jung called these synchronicities, things that pass the psychoid layer, the threshold between mind and matter. The further you get into this, the more these things will happen and the more likely you will be to seriously crack up as reality begins feeding back on itself. (I’ve also talked about this elsewhere - how important it is to gather reference points of things you love, as this process will invariably massively pump up the occurrence of these things in your experience of reality)

Symbolinkly latching things together just so happens to be the essence of computer programming. You create a variable and then assign it a value. In a computer program you might say something like:

num = 5

And then instead of calling upon a “5″ all the time, you can just use the variable “num”. We could go on and on about that, but symbolinking is more or less exactly the same. What you are doing is defining, naming and - most importantly - renaming (the power God gave to Adam in the Garden). You can’t just do this with any two things though and expect to have success. You need to attach together two (or more) things which have sympathetic characteristics or vibrational resonance. I don’t know how to explain this quite, but you should begin to see it the more you do the symbolic exercises.

For example: [ROBIN HOOD] & [GREEN MAN] have resonance. As do [MAID MARIAN] & [MARY MAGDALENE]. As do [JESUS] & [LION] (a la CS Lewis’ Aslan). Beware, as your brain can make a connection between any two things that it wants to - this is after all it’s whole purpose. But there are some things which are better and closer connections than others and its up to you to develop the ability to discern vibrational resonance. The success of these techniques depend on it, from what I’ve experienced.

Actually, once you’ve been doing the symbol dialoguing for long enough to generate a list of common ones that come up for you, you might want to spend some time generating correspondence pairs like I did above. See which [SYMBOL] = which other [SYMBOL] and just make lists. That’s probably very worthwhile. This is also a major part of what I have been talking about for months with “reference point collapses”. You basically fold two or more resonant reference points on top of one another to increase their potency or something.

So here’s where the tricksy dangerous part comes in: You ready?

What you’re going to want to do is start assigning these values to actual variables from your real life. In other words, if you know someone named Joe, you are going to assign a variable like this:

Joe = ([LION] + [JESUS])

You have now symbolinked a real world reference point (and it can be a person, place, thing, etc) with something from your unconscious symbolic mind, and you have also taken your first step towards both stark raving insanity, as well as healing and fullness.

I want to tread lightly here, but I also want to tell the truth of the situation that faces us. First of all, your mind is ALREADY doing this all the time. You think you’re acting all logically and shit, but what you’re really doing is playing out an unconscious script based on existing symbolinked projections you’ve been carrying with you your whole life. You just aren’t aware of them. The reason what we’re describing here is “dangerous” is that when you begin tinkering with the value of your variables, you are very likely to “break” the programmatic script according to which your mind and life are operating.

This is, sadly, very necessary if you want to become “sane.” See, we have this problem in our culture where we like to say the opposite of what is true. We say that certain people “go crazy” when they break from culturally accepted views of reality. But the fact of the matter is that our culture is crazy and when people undergo profound transformations, it is their natural God-given in-built truth-seeking heart-alethiometer device™ attempting to make them SANE. That is, if you’re living honestly and authentically, you are bound to clash with how fucked up our cultural programming is. Some people clash much more violently than others. I am hoping to soften the impact for you.

But just because “our culture” is crazy doesn’t mean that becoming sane and whole and healed is “safe.” Anything but. Your own worst enemy here is going to be yourself because you will have to delve deep to dismantle and reconfigure the reality variable definitions which exist within you. These things go deep. They consist of childhood experiences you don’t even remember anymore. They are clothed in terrifying faces of demons and traumatic emotional moments. Dredging all of this up to the surface is going to KICK YOUR FUCKING ASS. Do not underestimate this. If you are not doing this in a psychologically (and physically, financially, emotionally, etc) safe environment, then you probably shouldn’t do it. You may not be able to function normally in your day-to-day life as you get really deep into these reality rearrangement exercises. You WILL undergo extreme turmoil. And you need to keep your wits about you, as well as good people. And this is where being guided by and committed to LOVE above all things is going to really pay off.

Okay, so once Joe = ([LION] + [JESUS]), what then? First of all, you have to make sure that “Joe” is vibrationally resonant with both [LION] and [JESUS]. Does Joe share characteristics or qualities of either one? Maybe he has a beard and long hair and is gentle. Maybe he wears lion t-shirts or really likes lions. It doesn’t *really* need to be anything more complex than that.

Actually, I should give another warning here: if you are going to start intentionally giving archetypal variable energy assignment renaming etcs to *real people* you have to be really careful. Because these people are invariably NOT going to live up to these things. Because you are tapping into Platonic Ideals, essentially, and no one can realistically live up to them. You have to give people the space to be real humans with flaws, failings, etc. Very important.

Even more important: be careful in which archetypal role you cast yourself: you WILL begin to live it out, so you better like where it ends.

You also run the risk of having your new symbolink definitions very rapidly overtake your ability to distinguish between real and not real. Because if you have a lot of willpower and can direct your internal energies to truly support these new variable definitions, then they WILL become real. And you have to CONSTANTLY be aware that (1) you created them as (2) an act of will and (3) you can use another act of will to (4) redefine them and (5) eventually drop them.

The best defense here then will be to constantly re-define, constantly re-shuffle. Maybe one day Joe is [JESUS], maybe the next day Frank is, and the third day Claire is. You’re likely to confuse the living shit out of yourself while you are constantly redefining though, so be forewarned. But it’s the best defense I found against becoming too solidly stuck in your new variable definitions. (Because the goal is to eventually let these labels go and allow things to be *what they are*)

All that said, how exactly do you “symbolink” together things? I have been doing it a lot on my site, so you probably already know. Remember that time I said I met the devil at a party? You have probably noticed that I have been slipping in and out of symbolist shorthand to describe my experience of the real world. That’s the easiest and probably the most effective way to do it. You can just start actively referring to people - either vocally or in your internal monologue, or both - by their new names. The Devil. The Alien. The Bear. Jesus. Mary Magdalene. Those are some of the ones I have been using.

From a “practical magick” standpoint, you may also use objects as stand-ins. From the Symbolist Manifesto, they talk about “perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.” You give a form which something else vibrationally resonant may inhabit, essentially. Remember that movie Clash of the Titans? Check this out real quick.

The Gods on Mt. Olympus have a room full of little statues of everybody in the movie and everybody on earth. The statues look like them (sympathetic vibration) and stand in for them. They are like voodoo dolls, basically. The Gods run around and pick up different statues and put them into different situations within their little play room, and then the corresponding people on the mortal plane below get sucked into the dramas the Gods are churning out on Mt. Olympus.

And that’s an elegant and important way of getting to the crux of the matter here. As you set up these symbolinked variables, what you are essentially doing is creating a set of actor/characters. The next logical step, of course, is to put on a performance. This is why I have gotten so into the whole “musical” idea lately. The idea is basically that you begin to creatively play with your new definitions of reality so as to unlock hidden relationships, unblock stagnant energy and literally re-route the flow of your life and of reality. I mean, this shit actually works if you do it right. So be careful.

Going back to a “practical magic” angle again though, you can simply design a ritual using your stand-in objects (like avatars on the internet, almost) in which they act out the change you want to see occur in reality itself. It’s as simple as that, although how to get it to actually *work* you’ll have to find out on your own through trial and error (but it involves how much of yourself you’re willing and able to put into your performance). Just remember that depending on what kind of musical you write and what kind of ritual/performance you put on and how strong of a director you are, you WILL attract corresponding energies & entities who are looking for willing portals into manifestation in our reality. This is another majorly dangerous area to fuck around with as well.

With maybe two or three exceptions, I have found it mostly not worthwhile to get too down and dirty with the more hardcore “sorcery” side of this stuff. Mainly because it works. And if you’re not strong and you’re not sure what you’re doing, you are going to end up with unintended consequence. But I know that’s not a strong enough wording to stop the foolhardy, so go on right ahead. You’ll learn these lessons on your own without me. But don’t say I didn’t warn you sternly.

If you are going to write a musical that re-defines your life and reality though, I recommend being totally on the up and up about it. Why spend a bunch of time trying to force people into roles they don’t want to play (aren’t sympathetically resonant with) when you could work together collaboratively with your friends and cohorts to write for each person the role they’ve always wanted to play in the story that excites and enlivens them the most? It’s a no brainer, really. If everyone’s having a good time, then, well, everyone is having a good time. Mutual abundance is the name of the game here. No one needs to have less because someone else has more. That’s just a failure of imagination when so many potential solutions and musical storylines exist. And as I said, if you’re *really* doing this stuff right and it’s coming from the right place, what will flow out of it will ALWAYS be healing, it will always make you and everyone else more alive, more whole, more beautiful, and more capable of feeling the Bounty of Divine Love™.

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