My main goal these days is to heal and process an abusive childhood. I will use any tool available to me, and that includes magic, which I think is potentially a very powerful one. What is magic, in large part, but directed consciousness? Sounds to me like a perfect tool for healing a damaged psyche.
Now, I'm by no means an expert, and am more or less figuring this out (and/or making this up) as I go. But I'm an artist, and the idea of sigils, symbolic pictures made with intent and a specific purpose, is very intriguing to me right now.
So what I want to do is change my thinking, and I mean truly change it.
I am finding that, in me at least, there seem to be three distinct layers of knowing. There is the top layer, the conscious brain, the one that logically knows for example I am a good and decent person. The problem with this layer, though, is that it's just too near the top--I can try to change the thoughts of just this layer, sure, but it doesn't really take. It's like putting a layer of pretty paint over a wooden chair that is structurally weak; it doesn't really fix anything. (This is why, incidentally, I can't stand cognitive behavioral therapy. It's just faffing about on the surface.) I suppose you could call this layer the layer of belief, rather than true knowledge.
Then there is the deep layer, the one all the way down at the bottom. I don't know if it's quite the same as the unconscious mind, but in me at least, it is that bedrock layer of me, the one that knows that I am (again for example) that good and decent person. It's an unshakeable knowledge, that layer; perhaps it is the Soul level of things, I don't know. We'll call it the layer of knowing.
The top layer of belief, and the deep layer of knowing, are often in agreement; but the thing is, they tend not to really connect, at least in me (and I suppose I should make the disclaimer that this is entirely based on my own experience and I don't know that others feel the same way; I suspect they might, though, which is why I'm posting this here).
But there is the third layer, the middle layer.
This layer is not a natural thing. It is the layer put there by others for their own gain. It is a layer of lies. I think that probably everyone has something like this, even if they did not grow up in an abusive household, because this society in general is functionally abusive and toxic. How many thin women out there are completely convinced they are fat (and therefore horrible), for example?
The thing about this middle layer, though, is that it has been installed there as replacement for that deep layer, the true layer of knowing. This is the layer that constantly shrieks (for example) that I am a bad, bad person and I should be ashamed of pretty much everything.
This is the layer that hates you. And in me, at least, this layer is fucking huge. I have been trying to untangle it, to find out why it is saying what it is saying, and indeed I can understand some of it--if, for example, your father is a hoarder and absolute control freak, who can't be bothered to install a water heater that someone gave him because he values that control more than he values his family's welfare (his reason why not to install the thing basically came down to You can't make me) then you learn that you are not worth hot water. That you don't deserve the basic necessities. This is the layer that repeats all the toxic things, over and over and over.
It's a mimic, though. It's been installed there not just to block that deep layer of knowing, the deep intuition that something here is not right, the part of you that detects the bullshit of the world, but to take its place. Over and over in my own experience, I would believe (top brain) that I was for example a good person, but I would 'know' that I wasn't. But that 'knowing' is actually that middle layer, the lie layer, not my true Soul's knowing. It just looked like what my 'heart' was telling me.
So. In reading about magic lately, it has occurred to me that that old standby of Haysean psychology (if you can call it that), the affirmation, is really just a form of chaos magic. You are, after all, trying to get something down into your un- or sub- conscious by repeating things about yourself, very carefully phrased as positive statements in the present tense.
And for me, affirmations definitely work. If I've been telling myself I am beautiful it doesn't take too long before I start having dreams that there are strange and numinous new flowers growing in odd parts of my yard: Ourania lilies by the greenhouse, a magnolia tree in the corner, yellow merrybells in front of the house, great weeping rose trees heavy with fragrance right in the front yard.
So I sat down today to try to make some basic affirmations into sigils. My thinking may be a little opposite the usual, though; these aren't meant to be sigils you forget, for one, nor are they to put something in the unconscious. Rather they are to bring something already there, the deep knowing, up to the conscious level. I suppose that is just a different way of making something manifest. But these are meant to connect that deep knowing with the top brain, and so hopefully make that middle layer's shrieking a little less powerful.
Accordingly these are simple concepts, very simple, foundational. The usual kind of Sparean sigil is okay, but for me what use is there to will a Cadillac into my life if I still don't understand on some level that I am worthy of hot water? Besides which, how is that kind of magic even going to work if I don't think I deserve to get what I'm asking for? I need to start with the foundations.
I tried at first to do it the usual way, by taking an affirmation like I am beautiful and crossing out multiple letters then working those remaining into a symbol; but I didn't like the way it looked. Instead, I did a little trance-journey down to my Inner Temple (as per Christopher Penczak's book The Temple of Shamanic Witchcraft, which year-and-a-day course I will finish with the new year).
In the library there I again pulled out the book On Sigils and made my intention clear, then opened to a 'random' page. I looked up four basic affirmation sigils, and this is what I got:
Anyway. So maybe these are only uniquely resonant for me, I don't know; but the reason I'm putting them here is that maybe someone else will find them useful. If you do, please, take them and use them. I really hope they might help.
I've said before I'm not really one for secrecy, or keeping things to myself. Oh I can understand self-defense and privacy, certainly, but if these can help someone else than that is very very good by me.
