than waking consciousness, it doesn’t allow for the detachment that a sense of past
(history) and future (planning) can give. We need a greater sense of separatedness to be
able to do things that slowly. That’s why it is so difficult to do things like dial a phone
number or read a sentence in a normal dream – these activities require a greater degree of
separatedness than normal dreaming affords, to be able to bring that kind of minute detail
into focus.
That’s the genius of waking consciousness: we lose scope and agility, but in
return we get focus and a methodical way of getting at things. Waking consciousness is
much more clearly focused and delimited than dreaming, even if we all become
extremely myopic and uptight in the process.
The practice of magic is about turning our everyday waking lives into lucid
dreaming, cultivating a somewhat “altered state of mind” as our everyday mindset. As
we do this much of our sense of separatedness dissolves and we feel more inner peace
and oneness with our world. Spirits start talking to us, as they did to our hunter-gatherer
ancestors. Our everyday life becomes more like dreaming – i.e., more magical. This is
the road that each of us must travel as individuals; and which the human race as a whole
will have to follow if it is to survive and prosper. It is the road of entering into a state of
lucid dreaming from a position which starts from being awake (instead of asleep, as
usual). This means understanding that waking consciousness is lucid dreaming; and the
only reason we can’t see that is because we must keep up the pretense that what we’re
doing is “real” and important. Therefore we can’t see that it’s all just a dream.
At this writing there don’t seem to be too many lucid dreamers out there; but there
are lots of people merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily dancing a jig on their descent into the
coming nightmare. It’s time now for everyone to wake up.
There are two basic types of thought forms: sensory thought forms and conceptual
thought forms. Sensory thought forms are thought forms of mindfulness: they are what
we experience when we are paying attention to what is happening here and now. These
thought forms consist of sensory and extrasensory perceptions of the now moment:
sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings (both physical and nonphysical). Sensory
thought forms have a high proportion of feeling to them, such as the sight of a beautiful
woman; the smell of roses; the roar of the ocean; the feel of slime. Sensory thought
forms are innately joyous, and any true joy in our lives derives from our operating on
sensory thought forms (rather than conceptual thought forms).
Conceptual thought forms are thought forms of mindlessness, and operate when
we are on automatic pilot (lost in thought, paying attention to something other than the
now moment). For example, when we are driving our automobiles, most of the time we
are not paying particular attention to the act of driving but have our minds elsewhere, and
this entails operating on conceptual thought forms. But if we spot an accident up ahead,
