Posted from White Wolf:
From an ancient and powerful language to an unseen sense of the ebb and flow of magic all around them, the Awakened have a leg up over the Sleeping masses. None of it would be possible without that one pivotal moment of supreme insight known as the Awakening, though, and that's what we focus on today and tomorrow.
A soul, once stirred, is either sent in a dream or ecstatic vision onto strange astral pathways, or plunged into a "mystery play," a hallucinatory experience whereby the common, mundane phenomena of the world are transformed into highly symbolic and meaningful ciphers. A person experiencing an Awakening is called a seeker. Many seekers think they're going crazy, and in a sense they are. The insane sometimes perceive meaning in random events, but the mage sees how no event is truly random in a vast Tapestry woven by consciousness.
From an ancient and powerful language to an unseen sense of the ebb and flow of magic all around them, the Awakened have a leg up over the Sleeping masses. None of it would be possible without that one pivotal moment of supreme insight known as the Awakening, though, and that's what we focus on today and tomorrow.
A soul, once stirred, is either sent in a dream or ecstatic vision onto strange astral pathways, or plunged into a "mystery play," a hallucinatory experience whereby the common, mundane phenomena of the world are transformed into highly symbolic and meaningful ciphers. A person experiencing an Awakening is called a seeker. Many seekers think they're going crazy, and in a sense they are. The insane sometimes perceive meaning in random events, but the mage sees how no event is truly random in a vast Tapestry woven by consciousness.
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Portland
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Astral Journeys
Mon, August 1, 2005 - 1:54 PMThose people who for various reasons refuse to see the world as full of enchantment might instead find it in their dreams. People often deny the call, but if the call is urgent enough, it cannot be avoided forever. In dream, deep meditation, or the reverie of an ecstatic experience, the mage's consciousness is propelled across the Astral Threshold and into the vast infinities of his own soul. Although he does not yet know it, the path he follows leads to one of the five Watchtowers. Whether he reaches that tower before he is drawn back into bodily awareness is the challenge.
Inside the soul, the normal rules of reality do not apply. The environment could appear to be a featureless plain, a dense jungle, a shining cathedral or the depths of intergalactic space, and may change instantly. The same is true of the figures that populate this space, as people, animals, plants, spirits, and objects might appear as they are normally seen or transformed into something else. While such appearances and transformations can seem nonsensical, they are nonetheless bound to a kind of dream logic designed to offer the seeker a chance to raise his awareness. -
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Mystery Plays
Mon, August 1, 2005 - 1:54 PMAlso called a "waking world dream," the seeker essentially experiences the real world as if it were a dream. People and places appear strange, and can even take semblances and roles alien to them. A truck-stop waitress might appear to be a shining maiden dressed in gossamer robes, bearing the ambrosia of the gods (in reality, a $1.00 slice of apple pie). The truck stop itself might appear to be a filthy den of trolls, strewn with the bones of their kills.
For the seeker, this dream world is real: The ambrosial pie is truly divine; the trolls are truly nasty. Yet only the seeker experiences this "truth." To everyone else around, including any other Awakened mages, it's just a normal truck stop, with a dumpy, middle-aged waitress and a stale, two-day-old slice of pie. To their eyes, the world is mundane. To the eyes of the seeker, it is alive with enchantment and pregnant with possibility. Every action, every thing, communicates the deepest truths about the universe and the seeker's relation to it. The seeker has but to play along to turn the key to Awakening.
Anyone who doesn't realize that the seeker is experiencing an Awakening might think him crazy. When he begins addressing a homeless beggar as the King of the Elves, his friends think he's surely lost his mind. The seeker himself is usually unaware that he is undergoing a conversation with his soul. The Awakening's reality and verisimilitude is indistinguishable from normal waking consciousness. -
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Initiation at the Watchtower
Mon, August 1, 2005 - 1:55 PMThe ultimate end of both a mystery play and an astral journey is to deliver the soul to a Watchtower for initiation. The Awakening is sometimes named "the Call." It's the Watchtower that does the calling. The soul, hearing its name whispered from the Supernal World across the infinity of the Abyss, either responds and enters the trance of Awakening, or refuses the call and remains in Sleep.
In a mystery play, the Watchtower can be nearly anything in reality: a skyscraper, a phone booth, a grove in the woods. Its true form is evident to the seeker, but to no one else. It is the archetypal Castle Perilous, the tower of testing, before which the seeker might be found wanting. If he passes the tests—by proving his perseverance throughout the Awakening—he is admitted into the tower, where he sees a multitude of names carved onto its walls. With a knowing beyond reason, he recognizes the empty space reserved for his name and begins to write, carve, or will his name onto the surface. Even the illiterate know how to do this, for the process of writing is an archetypal image, not a literal act of writing. It is the Awakened one's first spell, the declaration of his true self and his right to stand in the Supernal World. By virtue of this name and its expression within the Watchtower, the Awakened soul gains sympathy with the Supernal Realm in which his name is written.
Again, this process is archetypal and can take many forms. In a mystery play, the seeker might write his name into the ledger at a bank, although the clerks there might believe that he is merely signing up for a safe-deposit box, unaware that he now claims a much greater treasure than all the assets within the bank. Or he might instead sign his name outside the window of a lover he courts, initiating a marriage of his soul to the Supernal. The permutations are endless, but the symbols mean the same—a divine initiation.
Once he has established his name in the heavens, the seeker returns to bodily awareness in the "real" world, no longer a Sleeper. He is now a mage.
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