The Charge

What gives a thing power? I have been circling that question since the last crossing, so I will set it down while it is near.

Say a man wants money. The usual roads are all around him. He can petition a deity for it. He can stand at the mirror and repeat that it is already his. He can arrange his wanting into one of the manifesting methods that trade under new names every few years. And suppose he goes further than most and decides to cast a spell for it. Now he has a problem he may not notice for years: he has to believe the spell works. Words said in a particular order. A shape drawn just so. I could never get there honestly. It is as arbitrary as singing the alphabet on one foot and waiting for the sky to move.

But here is where it turns interesting. Dress the same nonsense up. A robe. An altar, black candles, cups of what looks like blood, a script chanted by friends who are in on the ruse, performed in front of people who are not. The ones watching believe it. And their believing is contagious. The room rises on it, and the man in the robe rises with the room. Repeat it long enough and he believes too. And then, strange to say, he gets his money.

I am not recommending the theater. I am pointing at what the theater accidentally proves. The power was never in the words, or the candles, or the blood. Those were scaffolding for the only thing that was ever working: belief. Thought is the power in everything, and this world is nothing more than thought. Not all of it our own. But only thought, and thought we can alter.

Going from disbelief to belief is one step. There is no in-between.

Charging the mind is a crossing of its own kind, a small one. You do not climb gradually out of disbelief into belief. You are on one side of it, and then you are on the other. The theater is just a long, costumed run at that single step.

For me, the crossing itself is the shorter road, and the honest one. I cross, and some times there is no answer waiting. No voice, no instruction. It does not matter. If all I carry back is the connection, the work is done. I come back charged. Truths I could not tell you are within me and part of me, and I know things I was not taught. Does the charge run out? Only as much as I buy back into this world and call it the real one.

I of myself can do nothing. That within me does the work. On this side of the veil that sentence reads like modesty, or like madness. Cross, and it reads like plain arithmetic, because you have seen what the I is and what the that is, and that they were never two.

I will not detail what the last crossing showed me, only what it has been doing. Things are working out in several corners of my life at once, some because I suddenly knew what to do, some by simply happening. There is a flow to it, and I am in it.

And I know exactly how I would lose it. Get bogged down in the mire of this world, down into my own head, into the hive-mind that thinks on our behalf, and I become one more of the sleeping. So: awake. But not to this world.

Asleep to this world. Awake to there.