CHAPTER THREE: THE REVOLUTION WILL BE MAGICKAL

on somatics, the shadow, and the unification of the conscious and unconscious

When I am dating or becoming friends with a new person I often find myself encountering the question: what is magick? Why magick with a k instead of with a c? And some of the questions I ask myself are: Why does magick matter in this era/aeon/time? Why is it worthwhile to invest in a magickal education? And how do we remain discerning magickians who are using magick as a way to be in deeper relationship with the world AND eternity, instead of as a means to disassociate from the world and remain separate from it?

Magick is a path of connection. Magick, I believe, connects us to a force that flows between all things and connects all things. Magick is Love in action. Magick is a practice of consciously working with, relating to and engaging with God or Source. Magick, rather than being the force itself, is a way of being in relationship with the force. Magick is a way of touching the force and learning to work with it and align yourself with its Will.

In many ways, magick is about making the conscious choice to Love. It is about aligning our Will with Love. Magick is a path of knowing oneself and knowing God and learning to work with God in order to become a co-creator in Maya. We use magick to cultivate the power to affect the dream that you/we are dreaming in this here-now.

To be a magickian, we must wake up from the illusion that this is anything but a dream.

We must remember what we have forgotten, and we must sip the sweet waters of remembrance (Mnemosyne) so that we may remember who we are and what we have the power to create when we embody our true Self.

Here, I do not say true self as some “real” egoic self or personality that you will find after sufficient time in the self development world doing “the work”, nor do I reference it as someone that lies behind the mask behind the mask behind the mask that you wear every day. The quest for a “true” egoic self that lies behind all of your masks is bullshit. Instead, when we pull mask from mask from mask from mask, we realise that far from being the mask, we are the consciousness behind it. We are changing and evolving from lifetime to lifetime, putting on different costumes, holding up different masks, but there is always only that Oneness which lies behind the mask and there is only ever One hand.

As magickians, this is the true Self that we are working to meet and ultimately unify with in holy matrimony.

The greatest magick we will ever do is the marrying of our conscious and our unconscious will. Our conscious self is the part of us that we might think of as “us”. Our unconscious Self includes all of those parts of us that we habitually reject, shame, disown and cast into the shadows. If we are to know ourselves fully, and if we are to know ourselves as God, we must learn to connect once again with these cast off parts and bring them back into our ultimate wholeness.

Magick, then, isn’t a journey of sunshine and rainbows - of (only) love of light. Magick is a journey of the underworld. Magick is a journey of meeting the shadow and learning to love it, and magick is a way of changing the seat of our consciousness from a deep identification with our small, limited self (our ego) to a deep identification with our large, eternal, inviolable Self.

We work our most powerful magick when we are not only motivated by our small I’s desires, but carried by the hell YES of the unconscious desires, impulses and urges which live within us. Whatever the unconscious is saying YES to is what we will see manifest in our lives. So many people spend time focused on manifesting and getting on the side of their conscious self, when it is a far more worthwhile effort to get on the side of your unconscious Self.

The conscious self is like a drop in the ocean of the unconscious Self. In her book, Existential Kink, Carolyn Lovewell speaks about the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious self in getting what we want, and ultimately makes the argument - or offers the gnosis - that it is in fully “getting off” i.e getting into total approval for the often violent, taboo, societally unacceptable, sado-massochistic desires of our shadow that we may know ourselves as God and begin to manifest more of what we truly desire for ourselves.

This does not mean we become violent, power hungry people who act on our impulses for power and domination. Contrary to popular belief, it is when we become conscious and accepting of these urges that we are free to make different and more loving choices about them. It is the unconscious possession of humans by our desires for sadism, power and domination that makes the world a far more dangerous place than the conscious approval of these desires do. When we bring these desires into the realm of consciousness, we may also begin to play with them through healing and consensual forms of power exchange like kink and BDSM. When we shun these desires, we are more likely to act on them from impulse and in ways that make us ashamed.

When I think of the relationship between the shadow and the ego, the conscious and the unconscious, I think of an ocean and a single drop of water, or a beach and a grain of sand. When we say “I am Tumi! I am a younger sibling, a child of my mother, a magickian and somatic practitioner, a lover!” - all of the things that we might identify ourselves with are simply less than 1% of our being and who we truly are. Another way to think about it is as an iceberg. Who you think you are is that which lies above the surface. Who you really are is that which lies above, and absolutely everything that lies below.

Why does all of this matter? Well, we live in pretty crazy times where there is so much suffering going around. And for hundreds of years, in order to realise one’s true nature one would need to become a Buddhist monk, or a medicine person, or traditional healer, or a village witch’s apprentice. Now, there are so many more paths open to the unification of consciousness, and so many invitations into realising the nature of magick in our world.

Magick is about noticing and revealing patterns. It is learning to see the spirals of nature and then become one with them, dancing harmoniously in a symbiotic flow and motion. Many magickians think that magick is about learning to bend the universe to your small will and that magick is about domination of the world and command over it. To me, magick is relational. It is not about domination or command over. It is about learning to deeply listen to and surrender to our deepest pulse of desire in each moment, for that is how God shows us how our story is meant to unfold.

A relational magick emphasizes some higher aim too, as the magickian Nema speaks about in her book Maat Magick. In this book, she makes the argument that we are moving into a new era of consciousness - in magickal speak - a new aeon - and it is the aeon of Ma’at - an aeon defined by themes of truth and justice. Ma’at sits with her scales, and at the end of your life weighs your heart against the lightness of a feather, only letting those whose heart holds this lightness pass through the gates of the afterlife. In the aeon of Ma’at, she says, we will learn to come into a group consciousness, one where we are able to feel each other, deeply empathize with one another and even have psychic abilities that allow us to hear what the other is thinking. While this can sound fantastical, I don’t think it’s far off. Somatically, this is what I see with my clients all the time.

When we are able to attune to our own bodies, and attune to the bodies of others, we are able to sense miraculous things about them that may make us feel psychic and make them believe we are psychic too. You could call this psychic power through the lens of the magickian. You could call this deep attunement through the lens of a somatic practitioner. I say its both.

When Nema shares that we will move into an aeon where there will be this Maatian consciousness, I interpret that as meaning we will move into an aeon where we will learn to be so deeply empathetic and compassionate with each other; that we will ultimately learn to be deeply attuned to one another and sensitive to what is happening in the people around us. Our current era (at least in the Western world) has been defined by secular materialism; by the belief that matter is matter and devoid of spirit or consciousness, and by the belief that we are not deeply interconnected beings. This wound of disconnection goes deep. We believe ourselves to be disconnected not only from other humans, but also from the land, from other animals and creatures and other spirit beings like our ancestors.

We have become consumed by the belief that we cannot accurately sense what is happening inside of us as we are in connection with the world and even if we can sense we believe that we definitely can’t trust that which our body is sensing. We learn to distrust ourselves and distrust the signals and intelligence and communication that comes into our body in every moment. To be fair, it would also be exhausting to always be sorting through this feedback from our environment, as many neurodivergent folks know well.

In this new era, I think we will see a switch to the other side of the pendulum. Humans will be so connected to their environments and each other that we will be able to be so much more loving and compassionate to our world. Part of why we are this disconnected is because it doesn’t serve the coloniser or the colonial establishment for us to be deeply connected to our bodies and the land. When we are deeply connected to our bodies, we say no to the poison-masking-as-food that is cheaper than fresh, quality organic produce that comes from the earth. We say no to fossil fuels and to technologies that hurt our body and our larger body, the earth. We say no to a work week that kills our creativity and humanity and sucks the pleasure out of being alive. We say no to shame and shaming influences that try to dictate who we should be as sexual beings. We say no to big corporations who are poisoning our air and soil and water and we say no to bombs being dropped on thousands of humans and we say no to genocide and senseless wars. When we are connected to our bodies and our power, we can exert love in action.

Dominator consciousness, which underpins all systems of oppression - including colonization, cisheteropatriarchy, white body supremacy, and capitalism - has a vested interest in keeping us disembodied and disconnected from land. Our deepest resistance will arise from our connection to our bodies. It will be these bodies that say “no, no more”. It will be these bodies that rise up in defiance and rebellion. It will be these bodies, when connected to their blueprint of resiliency and worthiness, that will lead the revolution. Our deepest resistance will arise when we learn to relate to the land again - as lover, as caretaker, as family, as kin - and when we learn to relate to all of the beings who we share this land with, including the ancestors, and all those who have risen from and fallen back into this land.

Our world is obsessed with band aid solutions. We think that we can solve these complex challenges by shaming people, by beating ourselves and others into shape and by shoulding all over ourselves. But what we will need is a deeper transformation. We will need a transformation of consciousness. We will need a paradigm shift, otherwise the same conditions that we are currently experiencing by a different name and face (but same energy footprint) will arise.

We need an embodied revolution. This is part of what magick can offer us. Many people think of magick as something that is floaty and airy. But in my experience, the best magick is earthy and grounded. In Thelema, and other magickal traditions that make use of the Qabalistic tree of life, it is said that all magick must start and end in malkuth which is the lowest sphere on the tree of life. All magick begins in this material realm and all magick ends here. Even if that magick takes us up the tree of life, even if that magick takes us into astral planes and dimensions beyond our wildest dreams, it must start and end in this dense, earthy realm. The seeds we plant must be here. The fruits we harvest must be here, not in some other dimension.

In this way, magick is a very embodied medium. It offers us a path to the here and now so that we may enjoy this earthly realm and enact change within it, allowing it to unfold into our wildest and most abundant dream and into our truest and most collective happily ever after. What we often don’t account for is that our happily ever after includes the dragon and the monster and the perils and the getting stuck in a tower and the pricking of our finger as we fall into a deep sleep. Our happily ever after is not only that moment where we ride into the sunset on the white horse. Our happily ever after includes the painful trials, the failures, the villains and the heroes. In our modern culture it is popular for us to only want the “good” parts of the fairytale. We only want the parts that are easy, breezy and beautiful. But life is about all of it, “good” and “bad”, and that is one of the first things we forget when we incarnate here. We forget that we are here to explore and experience it all, and that the most compelling stories are often the ones with the most adversity, with the most fascinating villain and the most compelling drama. Until we wake up to this truth - that we are here for it all - we will continue to feel miserable in this material realm, feeling that every “bad” thing that happens is being done to us and is a slight to us from a big bad universe that wants to see us suffer and perish.

This is far from the truth, and it actually hurts us to believe this more than it hurts us to be with the clean pain, as Resmaa Menakem puts it, of our challenging human experiences. But what do I mean by this?

In our brains we have something called the reticular activating system. As humans, our brains are getting so much data at every moment. We have millions of data points coming in each second, minute and hour, and in order for our brain not to be overwhelmed we need to pick certain things to focus on. This is largely unconscious until we make it conscious. So how does the brain do this? Well, the brain will look for data points that align with your deepest beliefs about reality. So if you believe that the universe hates you and is out to get you personally (which I often think - don’t worry, you’re not alone!) you are likely to see evidence of that in your day to day life.

Conversely, if you believe that the universe ultimately loves you and is ultimately benevolent with your best wishes at heart, you are more likely to perceive data that aligns with that belief. This does not mean that you won’t still have hard, painful days, or you won’t still experience things that don’t make you feel ooey gooey squishy feelings of “the universe loves me so much”. It does mean that you might have a slightly different relationship to these things when they happen and also that circumstances that happen in your day that you might have made mean “the universe hates me!” suddenly take on a different meaning and roll off you like water off a duck’s back. This also doesn’t mean that you’re walking around your life disassociated or that you’re in a burning house saying “this is fine”.

Mindset work can only take you so far. When you’re in a burning building, you can’t just think “I’m fine” - you need to take action to get yourself out of that building. The revolution must be embodied. When we begin to change our beliefs around reality, they cannot simply happen in our mind as a thought experiment; this change must happen in our heart and body and soul and be reflected through our actions.

Magick is a path. It is a way of working with the fundamental forces of reality in order to create more harmony, beauty and art. It is a way of getting closer to God and (it can be) a way to embody a more relational disposition to life and reality. Magick is not about dissociating from our reality, blocking our ears and going “la la la” - magick is a way to deeply engage with our reality, to engage with the parts of our reality that are challenging and to engage with the parts of our reality that bring us great joy and pleasure.

The greatest magick is embodied because it is happening in the here and now. Your body can only ever be here-now and in a state of presence, even if we are emotionally, spiritually or energetically leaving presence with the body through disassociation. In the present here-now where the body dwells we find God and consciousness. Our body is our vehicle to God, and magick is our vehicle to God, and we get to bring the two together in union. Magick is ultimately the art of Will and a path of consciously working with the unconscious. We are all magickians, exercising our will in the world to varying degrees of accuracy and success. Magick is the act of becoming more willful. It is saying yes to the hero’s journey of knowing our true will.

Magick allows us to heal the divide between the conscious and the unconscious will in order to know truth. Conscious and unconscious are simply inaccurate perceptions of a truly undivided reality from our limited perspective as isolated “separate” beings. Magick is a path to realise this truth and to come home to ourselves and the divine beloved. Throughout history, many have referred to this process by many names. Alchemy, magick, personal development, enlightenment. It is all the same. It is a road home. Alchemy, for so long, was thought to be the transformation of one substance into another (like lead into Gold). While some alchemists, surely, spent time trying to master this physical alchemy, many more worked to master processes of emotional and psychic (internal) alchemy - to turn the lead of suffering and our human experience into the gold of enlightenment and self realisation (aka, to find the jewel within the lotus and the lotus within the mud).

The greatest alchemy we will ever do, often referred to as the Great Work, is the alchemy of the soul. It is the alchemy of our consciousness and the alchemy of our shadow, making the unconscious conscious and remembering who we truly are. So why do we need magick in this time, I ask myself again? Well, as Carl Jung said, “until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our life and we will call it fate.” What we are seeing right now, at a mass and global scale, is the grand drama of the human unconscious. The human unconscious is fascinated with war, violence, rape, murder, genocide and colonization - in other words, having power and control over other conscious beings. Conversely, because divinity experiences all things, the unconscious is also fascinated with the experience of having no power, being powerless and being controlled.

Until we as humanity reckon with this shadow, and instead of turning away from it by saying “wow, we have no idea where that comes from. what is wrong with THOSE people over there?”, we choose to turn toward it - we will not know peace. When we shame these parts of ourselves, when we habitually turn away from them as bad and unlovable - when we disapprove of them - we drive them deeper into the unconscious and they find new ways of presenting themselves in the collective until they are seen, loved, looked at and integrated. The shadow only wants to be witnessed, seen and loved. The shadow wants our attention and our approval. The shadow too, seeks union, but its union can only become possible when we love and approve of it. So, we must set out to become people who approve deeply of our shadows, who do not look away from who we are but instead say “yes, that lives in me”.

We are often under the false delusion that things are safer when left underground, but they are actually much safer when we bring them into the light, look at them and see them for what they are. We can agree to see the so-called monsters in the light and notice that they kind of look like us (and maybe that is okay). We are in a moment as humanity where we have a choice. We can drive ourselves (and many other beings) into extinction, or we can begin to reckon with our shadows. I choose the path of the latter. That is ultimately the greatest work of the magickian.