Busy reading, writing thinking . . . .

In Zen they say:

If something is boring after two
minutes,
try it
for four.
If
still boring,
try
it for eight,

sixteen,


thirty-two,


and so on.



Eventually one discovers that it’s not
boring at all
but very interesting.
–John Cage

Description of the Archetype: The Magician “Claiming and Naming the Journey”

(Image by Sharon Pulermacher)
I felt a surge of nervousness cut through my solar plexus. I was awakening. The awareness of myself had started to become familiar to me but I was not fully in control of it. It had begun though, to break through the fog of the dream, it had begun as a mixture of not knowing what was going on and the foreboding sensation that the commensurable was just around the corner. - Carlos Casteneda

Adventures don’t begin until you get into the forest. That first step is an act of faith. -Mickey Hart

The Magician starts the journey of creating your conscious existence. He puts into form the magic that the Fool handed him. He points to our potential skills and creative abilities. He wakes us up to our unexplored possible future. The transformation of chaos into order has begun. His wand materializes the visions and dreams of your Fool. You use the Magician to communicate to the world what you are here for, what you want to create, and what your vision is. The Fool’s gifts of imagination and inspiration can now take form through the Magician’s energy and power. Now you can now respond to the material world around you and create. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run With the Wolves writes the following about responding.
“To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of thought, feelings, action, and reaction and to put these together in a unique response, expression, or message that carries moment, passion, and meaning.”

Your belief in this archetype’s ability to communicate this vision of yours to the world, will determine how well your communication will be heard. Robin Skelton writes that, “whenever we pray or wish intensely we are verging upon spell-making; we are sending telepathic messages with great energy.” As children we all boldly proclaimed that when we grew up we were going to be this or that and do great things. That was our Magician talking and claiming our potential and our destiny. Your desire to be a painter, designer, scientist, or farmer begins with the pronunciation of the Magician. He sets the stage and grasps the amount of fire you will have to play with this lifetime. He is the power behind your creative process and your belief in your abilities. Naming your destiny unleashes the power for you to know who and what you are.
The Magician must learn how energy flows, the ways of the world, mechanics of achieving, interacting with others, transformations of the soul, lessons of love, and all the twists and turns to get through life with his fire lit. He is your creative spark that lights up all the other players in your psyche. He is the archetype who coaches, encourages the other archetypes and reminds everyone that this is just a show, an illusion, but insists that it be played out in style. He will warm your heart with his fire, amuse you with his tricks and proclaim your wonders to anyone who will listen.

He walks beyond fatigue, beyond the limits of endurance and the frontiers of self , and somewhere along this path he loses his balance, he falls off the edge of his sanity, and out here beyond his mind’s rim he sees, for the first and only time in his life, a vision. - Salmon Rushdie


Experiencing the Magician as a Doorway/Hole
All the archetypes can be doorways into your psyche that allow you to fly further, move on in your story or they can become a hole that you get stuck in. In the two lists below, put a check beside the words that best describe how you are experiencing this energy and add up both sides. Which way are you leaning? What do you need to do to balance this energy in a positive way in your life?

Doorway Hole
imagination / tunnel vision
passion / selfishness, self centered
inspiration / manipulation of others, trickery
ability to inspire others / egoism
ability to communicate / wanting center stage at all times
ability to turn visions into reality / unsure of wants and desires
belief in your self / no faith in yourself to be creative in
life or to be successful or fulfilled

Learn what the magician knows and it’s not magic anymore. - Richard Bach

We are at the heart of a labyrinth and we can find our way out while becoming labyrinths ourselves. -Salvador Dali

If you block your desires, you block your natural avenue of growth. - Deepak Chopra There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. - Martha Graham Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. - Jeanette Winterson

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness, concerning all acts of initiative (and creation). There is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas & splendid plans: that moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents & meetings & material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power & magic in it. Begin it now.” - Goethe

During the next two weeks play with honing your intent. For 5 minutes a day visualize your life as being precisely how you would want it to be. Focus all your emotional, psychic, intellectual and physical energy on your desires for 5 minutes. Do not dwell upon any lacks, just visualize yourself living your desire. Then forget about it. Then in one way or another make one physical gesture or act that is in line with your belief or desire. In your journal write about how you make choices; intuitively, by looking at all the options or by asking others?

How do you know when your choices are appropriate?

2. What choices have you made in your life for yourself that you have not carried through?
3. How could you explore those dreams or choices now?
4. Write about a time in your life when you felt and acted powerfully.
5. When you were growing up who in your family embodied this archetype? What did you learn as a young child about your power? Were you allowed to own it?
6. As a young child what was your relationship to magic? What is it now?
7. What was your favorite story about magic?
8. When in your life is your Magician allowed to shine?
9. What is your relationship to this archetype now in your life?

Working with Archetypes

A few weeks ago I started facilitating two new archetypes groups. In these yearlong groups we explore by using art, poetry, images, and story a different archetype very two weeks. We began the journey by engaging with the archetype of the Fool. Being with this archetype, means letting yourself be in place of 'not knowing'. It also means you are reaching for new possibilities, exploring new experiences and realizing new talents and gifts. Risking change or following the Fool archetype awakens our ability to see. Michael Fox writes; “...to see life again as a child, to see wonder, the awe, the marvel, the simplicity of the blade of grass.” This archetype can open doors that lead to our unrealized hopes and desires. We only have to risk opening the door. Sometimes we have no idea where we are going, in what direction or for how long. But that’s the risk we have to take if we want to become more, see more and understand more of our self.

Working with the Fool Archetype:
How does it feel to take a big risk?
What are some of your fears when you took a risk or started something new?

In your journal:
a) List your beliefs about yourself.
b) What could you risk changing on this list?
c) What would be the cost of taking this risk?
d) What would be the benefit of taking this risk?

Quotes that describe Fool energy:
I live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.
Jeanette Winterson

During every really creative act, the artist finds himself homeless. To overcome this state he has to call up his last reserves of strength. This mobilization of all his creative and formal resources, this passionate struggle with the medium, cannot be imitated. It is every man for himself. This explains the magic power of art.
Asger Jorn

Every trip we take deposits us at the same forking of the paths: it can be a shortcut to alienation-removed from our home and distanced from our immediate surroundings, we can afford to be contemptuous of both; or it can be a voyage into renewal, as, leaving our selves and pasts a home and traveling light, we recover our innocence abroad. Abroad, we are all Titans, so bedazzled by strangeness that we comically mistake asses for beauties; but away from home we can also be Mirandas, so new to the world that our blind faith can become a kind of higher sight.
PICO IYER

My old stuff made me sick. In the living world that I’d suddenly discovered, it looked like a rotten corpse that somebody had forgotten to bury. But the new world wouldn’t come to my hand. I couldn’t catch it, that lovely vibrating light, that floating tissue of colour. Not local colour but aerial colour, a sensation of the mind; that maiden vision.
- Joyce Cary

What I most want
is to spring out of this personality,
then to sit apart from that leaping.
I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.
Rumi

Every time a human being makes real progress in consciousness, the whole world for him has changed; relationships change and the outlook on the outer world for him has changed and on his own situation changes. There is complete rebirth of the world.
von Franz