Turn it up until your head goes quiet

You don't need a lineage to shut your head up. You need four minutes and a pair of headphones.

Chaos magicians call the state gnosis. Peter Carroll's Liber Null uses the word for one-pointed consciousness, the moment everything drops out except the thing you're aiming at. That's the whole mystery. A gap. The narrator in your skull steps out for a smoke, and for a few seconds you can walk a want right past the doorman.

You've been there already. Front row at a show. Mile three of a hard run. The middle of a laugh that took all the air out of you. Nobody needed a grade for any of that.

The loud door

There's a quiet door too. You breathe slowly into it, and it's a fine road if you've got the patience of a houseplant. I don't.

Carroll split gnosis two ways. In the excitatory mode, he writes, "the mind is raised to a very high pitch of excitement while concentration on the objective is maintained." His own list of ways in includes dancing, drumming and chanting. That's my door. I kick it.

Three ways through it, all mild enough for a weeknight, none of which ask you to push anything to a breaking point.

One, the loud song. Pick a track you know so well you could hum the drums. Headphones, not a stereo, and keep the volume where you could still hear somebody talking to you across a table. No louder. The hair cells in your inner ear don't grow back, ever, and ringing the next morning means you overshot. Stand up. Play it once through and make yourself move. Skip the performance and let the beat shove you around the kitchen like a shopping cart with a bad wheel. Somewhere around the second chorus you'll notice you stopped composing sentences in your head. The narrator went out for that smoke.

Two, the short run. Ten minutes, outdoors, at a pace that still lets you breathe through your nose. Can't run? Walk fast. Can't walk? Pump your arms in a chair. Count steps to eight, over and over, and when you lose count start at one. Somewhere in the middle the counting eats the whole head and what's left goes quiet. Stop at dizziness, chest pain, numbness or anything that isn't plain tiredness. Stay off dark roads. And if you've got a heart or lung condition, clear it with a doctor first.

Three, the noise. Find something with a steady hiss: a box fan, a shower, a radio parked between stations. Sit with it and let it fill the room until you can't find the edge of the sound. About two minutes. Stop when your jaw unclenches.

Slide the want through

Have your sigil drawn before you start, flat on the table or in your hand. When the head goes quiet, look at the mark for one breath. Say nothing. Let the song, the steps or the hiss run out. Walk away. Eat something salty. Don't check on it.

No candles, no circle, no ten pages of preparation.

Now be straight with yourself. You made a gap, and you don't know yet whether the gap does anything. Nobody does until they log it. Write down the date, the method and the want, then what happened a month later. Run the song one week and the run the next. Compare. A dozen of these and you'll know more about your own head than a guy with the whole shelf of grimoires and a pristine sash.

The rest of the list stays on the shelf

That same list in Liber Null also holds fasting, sleeplessness, pain, flagellation, forced over-breathing and drugs. Skip every one of them. You don't need them, and people get hurt chasing them. I've never had a sigil ask me for a fast.

If something makes you sick, frightened or dizzy, stop and sit down. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than learning it the hard way. If a practice dents your sleep or your mood for more than a night, put it away and talk to a human.

Pick the song now. The loud one. The one your neighbors already know the words to.