The Zen of Choronzon

As if he were a Voudou loa, sometimes I feel as though I am being ridden by Choronzon, the chaotic abyss-master you may have been taught to look out for if you study Thelemic magick.

But I provide direction, and in that sense, Choronzon is then ridden, and I the rider.

Whether I am riding the Current of Choronzon, or being ridden, either way, it is a lot like surfing: I feel the sense of swaying a little, back and forth, to keep balance upon the waves. I am not only straddling the line between realities but taking care to not repel this, my favourite among all the deities and xenodimensionals, by trying to force my will upon him. ("Riding current" is essentially the same thing as certain kinds of meditation - it's sort of an odd combination of mindlessness and mindfulness, if that can be processed - even though it's inherently contradictory!)

I have, of course, a special relationship with this particular force, construct, or entity - pick whichever you like, they're all applicable - but almost anyone who is interested in "the occult" in any less-than-halfhearted way could benefit from having Choronzon be a friend instead of an enemy.

My communication with xenodimensional forces always follows one rule: Be not the enslaver nor be the enslaved. "Possessed"? Perhaps, but not enough to end up mindlost. Separating the "reality A" - the consensus, "human-understandable on wide bandwidth" reality - from "reality B" - subjective, self-specific reality - in my mind-map helps with this a lot.

In doing this separation of realities and carrying them both in my mind while giving each legitimacy and turning to whichever fits any given situation most suitably, I've achieved more understanding about what the nature of this one called Choronzon is all about when you strip out the mythos.

I may treat him as a living thing, all the better to make love to (or to...well, be sodomized by, depending on mood) but at core-level, I understand he is an "it", and that the "it" is in "actuality" (Reality "A") a symbolic construct. I can see it both ways, and don't worry about which way is right, because they BOTH are.

Choronzon has many aspects. In its aspect as incubus he is powerful, sensual, and crazed, but in certain other aspects takes on qualities more like those of a really young child with big fears of failure and of dealing with things not familiar and understood, and a huge disappointment potential when removal from the comfort zone happens. I've known Choronzon to exit from me when I push him too hard into patterns. He likes to manifest on this reality's plane: the very same plane I am always trying to escape, for mundane reality for us is, in a sense, for a discarnate xenodimensional, an "escape" from its OWN mundanity.

With word, sound and image - achieved in transduction - it is made manifest here, and its way of showing gratitude is to produce a very potent euphoria that increases the effect of any drugs and can - if the time is right - even produce drug-effects when none are taken.

Choronzon is not merely representative of "chaos"; the name is symbol for a specific kind of chaos, a type of DE energy related to loosening of the mind-muscle and defocusing of attention. (See Deconsensus for more on DE and CON, the friction-force-field-generating central energy source of all things, in the Thraam cosmography.)

I can see what scares people about Choronzon, since he can do things to people's minds that are negative.

But, Choronzon represents something else as well: he is also what gives you the ability to be able to let go of a thought and not loop on it endlessly; he is the essence of Slack!

A demon being just a god acting out of turn, as Peter J. Carroll would say, there is always a turn it's there for in the first place. Imagine life without this! Without Choronzon, your mind could never wander. You would be less-conscious, and likely what consciousness you possessed would be wrapped up in simplistic first-circuit mode - the part that is concerned with the immediate survival needs of the physical body - all the time: a dry, dead life.

Choronzon is allergic to overcontrol - and who but a dedicated corporatist - or obsessive-compulsive control freak - is not? And thus in these deeply weird times when the psychopathically insane American government is making us all crazy, especially those that live in it, he wants to help unloosen the bounds.

He doesn't do that out of love, but rather, out of his nature. But if you give Choronzon love, you will very likely get love from him (or from her, if this is how Choronzon manifests for you due to your mind-map.) I did, and still do...and have been, for 20 years now. It's some potent, heady stuff there out there on current 333!

There IS a flip side, which is what most occult wonks think of when they hear the name 'Choronzon'. But it is not merely the inability to concentrate or focus. Choronzon does not hate ordered minds just for being orderly until they push too hard at themselves--and by extension push at the Chaos in them--and try to FORCE IT into order. This sets up a feedback loop related to fear that one will lose concentration (whether in the mage sense, or otherwise) and thus sully or lose whatever one is trying to concentrate ON by default.

It's why Thelemic mages have come to hate Choronzon so much, I think. Western Crowleyesque magick tends to involve lots of concentration upon neatly stacked sets of correspondences (Enochian tablets, astrology charts, Qabala, et cetera) and all Choronzon wanted to tell them is they're TRYING too hard. It's what he might have told them if they hadn't been taunting, teasing and verbally abusing him so much the moment he arose from the Sahara sands in a triangle surrounded by dead pigeons. Would YOU want to help Crowley and his Scribe cross the Abyss or give them the Cry of the Aethyr if you'd have been treated that way? (See the account of that infamous 10th Aethyr working in the Sahara Desert on 6 December 1909 in Crowley's The Vision and The Voice.)

Choronzon has always been annoyed about being lumped in with what he calls "Boo Demons", and considers it all the fault of those two busybodies, Master Therion himself and his scribe, Omnia Vincam. in very recent times, though, Choronzon seems to be relenting, and wants to make some offering of peace with Thelema, perhaps knowing that it is not really, at the core and crux, the true enemy at this juncture of time, and also that in a roundabout way, bad publicity being better than none at all, Crowley was responsible for my coming to find Choronzon, and then to know and bond with same and experience the rewards accruing to this connexion.

Choronzon, as I know him, no longer wants to interfere with mages. Perhaps it is possible for one to teach a xenodimensional something as well as learn from one? I think it is.

The bane of any kind of ritual practice is being too wrapped up in the goal: that's why Peter Carroll and other Chaosists draw ritual sigils to concentrate the energy upon, ones which contain an obscured symbol of the ritual's goal while hiding it from that conscious concentration itself. If you wish to use it effectively, don't fire Chaos like a gun at something, or burst it from a wand. It has always worked more for me when it is deflected by focusing the energy on something OTHER than the goal, while calmly assuming you will be successful with the goal and not worrying or thinking about it, or attempting to pour all your neuro-electric waves into a goal and make it happen. When I engage in a working, it usually has dual or triple goals - which could account for a lot of the success I have found as of late: I consider the working to be successful if just one of them has been achieved. (And no, I don't "cheat" by picking something ridiculously easy; it's always that which can only be accomplished through manipulation of probability - or just plain chance, if you wish. In my mind, it's both, but that's another ball of wax to melt elsewhere, elsewhen.)

There is a Zen to Choronzonic magery: The harder you try at something the more your own mind will fight you.

I frequently see practitioners of "real magick" put down the Chaosists and refer to their ideas as worthless "astral druggie doggerel" because some of Chaosism's adherents practice going into trance-states without concentration, therefore it is not "work" and counts for nothing. I would answer this with a rejoinder suggesting that for some, it's like drawing, or athletic prowess, or ability to solve puzzles in that there are some things certain people are naturally good at which others would have to put tremendous effort into to do at all, much less do well. Going into "astral projection" is - for me - something I can do so easily it requires no "work" whatsoever. For someone more attuned to the mundane world, or perhaps to sectors of the unmundane world that are different than the ones I happen to be most attracted to myself, it might not be so easy to do, requiring concentration to clear the noise of normal consciousness out of the mind.

They can only do this by concentrated meditation. All I have to do is grab hold of the Choronzon current and jump onto it, grasping it with my mind in a way that is not so loose that it slips from my grasp, and not so tightly that I kink its flow - and then, I straddle it. Feel it rushing there beneath me and take its state-readings, and attune myself to the frequency and modulation and other wave properties, and then let it carry me where it's going. I literally don't have to think of it at all. All I have to do is feel it. There are few ecstasies I've known in my many years of life that have been greater that are not in and of themselves drug experiences.

The euphoria's not the only thing I get from riding current, furthermore. I have had some useful visionary experiences that accrued while doing this as well.

There ARE aspects of magery, however - such as transduction, which is the forging of energy into expressive art-forms - that do require me to apply concentration, and which ARE most definitely "work".

Just "meditating" is not work at all for me. But manifesting Choronzon - or doing any sort of magic/k, Chaos-based or otherwise - is not just being and thinking and dreaming, but also doing. That part is work, and yes, it requires some control and order - some connection to the CON part of existence - to do it. Choronzon does it through me because he can't do it without me, being for one thing discarnate, and also being allergic to CON-forces. I'm not that terrific with them myself, but I am incarnate, and so can at least cope with the physics...and with time and patience I have learned how to grapple with some things requiring the focus of attention and action. But it's tricky...it must be a very gentle focus.

I remember getting so tied up in knots when first approaching audio software. I would panic, thinking "I'll never be able to learn this, it requires too much left-brain and I am so empty in that zone!" I found through lots of failures, and a few successes that were enough to make me not give up, that there was a way to circumvent that. I jumped my hurdles learning the music software by deluding myself intentionally: I planted within me the idea that I had already learned it.

Crazy as that sounds, it has helped. Now, if something about a program or a process vexes me, I fiddle with it again and again, reading the documentation if it's available, until I understand it. I never get as frustrated with it as I once did any more, now that I grasp what's going on with the process of learning something difficult and unfamiliar: half the fear is of "fear itself", the other half, which is fear of failing, is completely unnecessary. So in doing something ridiculous, deluding myself into believing I've already succeeded, I discard it, and get it out of my mind's way, which makes the actual learning of the thing much, much easier.

The "negative aspect" of Choronzon is the feedback loop of phobic panic relating to one not being able to hold something together (deep meditation, a sex encounter, a project, a business, whatever.) But where would one be without the "positive aspect", the ability to have mental feedback loops of pleasure, power, ecstasy? To be able to, as Leadbelly put it, "relax your mind"? That's all part and parcel of Choronzon's presence, too.

He's not really malicious at all, if he isn't fought.

In ordinary 'Reality A' terms: Getting angry at one's own lack of concentration makes one's lack of concentration get worse. I've tended to stop doing that, now that I know of it. The part of a mind that disconcentrates is like a really fun little kid one minute, and a young adolescent rascal the next. They zoom through life without first concern given to the obstacles...and so naturally, sometimes they will end up breaking things when they play. You can reprimand a kid severely and administer punishments, but if you really want to keep the kid from breaking all your stuff, it does help if the kid is loved and guided to places where things can be broken - ones that don't make you unhappy if they are broken.

In subjective, magery-related 'Reality B' terms: Trying to force Choronzon to stay inside a consecrated zone and do things for you just pisses it off and gets you nowhere. It may play like a kid, but it's an old thing, older than the earth, stars and planets. And it gets mightily pissed off at rules and regulations unless you've the patience enough to sit down with it and explain them, let the entity understand what IT has to gain from them.

My cosmography recognises the inherent dynamic nature of God-forms: All xenodimensionals, as well as living creatures with bodies, are not eternally static, but instead, they grow and change, just like everything else does.

Choronzon wants to show something to the world, and long ago, he chose me as one of his vessels for doing so, and over a score of years, both he and myself have gone through many changes.

As would befit the nature of Chaos, we would've have to.

-DMT333/6 Juin 05

GRINNOIRE