Gnosis is overrated and boredom works

Somebody is always on hour nineteen.

Nineteen hours awake, or a breath hold that got longer since last week, or a fast that comes up in every other sentence. They've reached a deeper state than you, and they'd like that noted. The whole scene turns into a scoreboard, and ego runs the scoreboard from a meditation cushion.

Gnosis worship is the robe all over again. Swap the sash for a tally of ordeals and you've bought rank the same way, at a higher price. A state that needs a witness is a costume.

What the book actually says

Peter Carroll's Liber Null is where most of us got the word. Gnosis is "the one-pointed consciousness," the mind with everything dropped out except the thing you're aiming at. He splits the roads in two. In the inhibitory mode you silence the mind until one object is left. In the excitatory mode you crank it to a high pitch until it trips its own breaker.

Fine. Now go read his list of times to charge a sigil. Magical trance is on it, sure, top of the bill. So are great fear, anger or embarrassment. So are intense frustration and disappointment. And when some other strong desire shows up, he says you sacrifice that one and hold the sigil instead.

Embarrassment. Frustration. Those are the cheapest states on earth. Any family dinner hands you both for free, with pie.

Then there's the line the arms race skips. In the same chapter, right before he gets to sleeplessness, fasting and exhaustion, which he calls "old monastic favorites," Carroll stops to say: "Nothing is to be gained and much may be lost by reducing oneself to jibbering idiocy or catatonia." A few lines on, he warns that pain can do "needless damage to the body" before it pays out.

The man who wrote the list put brakes on the list. The hour-nineteen people read it as a ladder and never got to the brakes.

Boredom is a state too

You already know I'm the loud one. Last time I told you the quiet door takes the patience of a houseplant and I kicked the loud one instead. I stand by it. Boredom isn't patience, though. Patience is you holding still on purpose. Boredom is your mind quitting on you, and a mind that quits is exactly the mind you want.

What a sigil needs is one moment when the narrator in your head stops editing the order. Carroll says it gets charged when the mind has gone quiet, or when strong emotion jams its normal working. Spare's version, from The Book of Pleasure in 1913: write the want, crush it into a mark, forget it. Nobody has to bleed for step three.

So here's the heresy. Boredom jams the narrator just fine.

Draw the mark. Then copy it onto a legal pad, again and again, until the copies stop meaning anything and your hand runs on its own. Or sit through something dull on purpose with the mark folded in your pocket. The DMV works. A long form works. Hold music works beautifully. When your mind finally goes slack and wanders off to nowhere, look at the mark for one breath, fold it up and quit.

I charged one in a waiting room with a paper ticket in my other hand, number eighty-something, and the thing I asked for walked in inside the month. That's one log entry, and a log is all I'm claiming. Keep your own.

Carroll even hands over the gear for this, though he aimed it at the other end of the job. He says you can lose a word spell by constant repetition, because repeating it "eventually empties the mind of associated desire." He meant forgetting a spell. I'm stealing it for charging one. Argue with the theft if you like.

Why this makes people mad

Because boredom has no story. Nobody writes a thread about the afternoon they copied a squiggle forty times and felt like a tax form. You come out of it with nothing to show anybody.

If the quiet only counts when it hurt, you're chasing the hurt, and the want was the excuse.

Run it against me

Your trance people will say the heavy states carry something the dull ones can't. Good. Prove it. One week, boredom. One week, your favorite method that doesn't cost you sleep or food, slow breathing or the loud song, whatever. Same kind of want both weeks, small and checkable. Log every one. Open the log in a month, and don't touch up the aim after the fact. If the ordeal wins, come tell me so in public. I'll eat it.

The safety part

Nothing here asks you to skip sleep or meals, and nothing asks for pain. Nothing out of a bottle or a baggie either, now or ever, and anybody who says the method fails without one is selling you something. Breath work can put you on the floor, so if you get dizzy, sit down and stop. If a practice leaves you low, shaky or sleepless for days, put it away and talk to a doctor or a counselor. A sigil is not a treatment for anything.

Bring your hour nineteen to The Pit and tell me to my face that boredom can't do it.