I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net

that the initiate must recognize the deceptive and negative nature of maya,
and break from its hypnotizing snares. In contrast, the left-hand path
magician is encouraged to partake of the same god-like powers of the mayin,
transforming the stuff of reality in accordance with his or her will. Maya,
then, is the medium with which left-hand path magicians practice their art.
With practice and discipline, the magician, a juggler of reality, can learn to
play with maya with the same dexterity that a sculptor shapes clay, molding
the elusive material of manifestation according to will.
After a few years of demonstrating just how malleable this medium
is, you would think that the magician would come to realize just how
illusory the substance of the world he or she continually alters – and even
the mind of the magician itself – really is. And yet this moment of
awakening rarely comes – the psyche clings so dearly to the reassuring
solidity of phenomena and thought that even the jolt of magic cannot always
free the tenacious grip.
Many Western magicians do not progress beyond the resultsoriented
play of sorcery to the deeper regions of initiation, in which
questions of identity and the nature of core reality itself become essential.
Once sorcery is mastered, most Western magicians remain fixated on
playing with seemingly external reality for decades, as if the data that is
delivered to their senses can actually be considered an "objective" reality, in
the traditional scientific sense so beloved of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Even though he or she has demonstrated that willed manipulation
of that same sensory data can radically transform reality, very few are
willing to take the next step of initiation.
This would be as absurd as if those who had come to see that the
shadows on Plato's theoretical cave were nothing more than shadows
64
continued to stubbornly treat them as reality, even after their release into the
light outside the cave. In the early twentieth century Tantric text
Tantratattva, we are provided with a relevant metaphor suitable for a lefthand
path understanding of magical reality. The author compares the
awakened initiate's perspective to a theatergoer. The other members of the
audience react to the events they perceive occurring on the stage as if they
were really happening, having no awareness of the art of acting. The lefthand
path magician knows that what he or she observes on the world's stage
is only an elaborate make-believe, although it is a make-believe interpreted
with utter seriousness by those watching it. Beyond the border of the
obviously magical, this common human inability to differentiate between the
maya of "theater" and "reality" has been infinitely exploited by politicians,
advertisers, propagandists and other professional deceivers.
It is a keystone of our understanding of magic's underlying identity
with maya that magic is not a comfortable niche to be settled into forever.
Instead, it is a transitional vehicle, a means to an end. Magic can be the
awakening agent that frees its practitioner from certain illusions, allowing the
flash of insight that transcends all philosophical inquiry. Through magic, the
mind can learn that there is not one indisputable reality. There is an endless
multiplicity of realities, none of them ultimately subject to categorization or
label. The direct confrontation with maya that sorcery allows might be said to
be magic's primary objective. It is this confrontation that permits the sorcerer
to viscerally understand how deeply his or her own shifting subjective
overlays influence that which he or she perceives – an understanding that
may hasten the transformation of human sentience to divine consciousness.
Just as likely, it must be said, magic can become a self-delusive trap
of its own, an addictive activity binding the magician ever more deeply to the
maya mirages he or she projects. This is the double nature of Maya, who
blinds and reveals with each alternating step of her sinuous movement
through time.