Book description
This current volume moves more explicitly into the practice of magic -
that is, the ongoing journey of claiming our lives more fully and
deeply. This cultivation of intentionality and vision, though never a
one-time decisive victory, can become a more habitual attitude. To gird
these hard-fought realizations, this volume presents the other four
voids in detail. 1. Nothingness: Individual things and the thing-sets
with which we populate our worlds are the set-dressings that illustrate
the scripts guiding our life plays. 2. Meaninglessness: The world will
never, to us, yield either fundamental meaning, or some ultimate
"point". The process of meaning-making is the meaning of life.
3. Freedom and Responsibility: Only through claiming life in its
structural truth, through a responsiveness to the imaginal reality of
life, can we truly live out the freedom that is always, already, our
birthright. 4. Change and Finitude: Nothing abides and any clinging to
concepts rooted in "permanence" will yield a bitter and morbid
shadow. Taking a hard gaze at the "imagination of magic",
these texts endeavor to bring us more fully face to face with the
existential voids that define the true limits of our lives, but also
create the stage upon which our lives unfold. We are storied creatures,
living our narratives with every act, every intention, and every value
judgment. We hunger to claim our authority, our authorship, but we
scarcely know how. Doing magic - as opposed to being done by magic - is
the process of claiming some of the technology of meaning, desire,
choice, intent, language, representation, and identity for our own ends.
This is Volume Two of Imaginal Reality, a work that has been described
as "The finest book on contemporary existential magic I've ever
read" (George Holochwost, Magus (1), Illuminates of
Thanateros).Readers will dive deeper into the imagination of magic and
learn to develop the fictional gaze necessary to claim authority and
authorship of their lives. This second volume contains an extensive
glossary of over 300 scholarly entries on esotericism, existentialism,
psychology, and the magical revival.
