a thought on psychonautics and magick…

nohumanvoice:

Lately I’ve seen some posts for beginner magicians saying that, to be a witch, you “don’t need to be a psychonaut, don’t take drugs if you don’t feel like it’s your thing”. I’d like to say a thing.

I totally agree about not taking drugs if you don’t feel like doing so, but I feel that whoever wrote this sentence misunderstood psychonautics, and this could lead many beginners to ignore something really important.

First of all, psychounautics doesn’t need drugs. Psychonautics doesn’t mean taking drugs. Psychonautics needs alterated states of consiousness. A psychonaut is someone who “seeks to investigate their mind using intentionally induced altered
states of consciousness for spiritual, scientific, or research purposes.”¹
It literally means to navigate the soul.

And actually I think as psychonautics as a mayor portion of magick. I’d say magickal work can be divided into psychonautics, divination and witchcraft.
Psychonautics is the part where you observe, study and experiment, you aim to the unknown and you wander. You’re receptive.
Witchcraft is when you act toward a purpose; you’ve got a clear target and you’re focused.You’re active.
Divination stays in the middle, acting as the bridge between vision and manifestation.

Drugs are used by many psychonauts, because they chemically forces you into alterated, unique states of consciousness. But drugs aren’t the only way, meditation is also used by the most, and so is lucid dreaming, self ipnosys, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and so forth and so on. Anything that forces your mind in an unusual state.

Psychonautics is the first step of magickal work; You study the world around you, you wander and see what you can find. You push your mind over it’s boundaries and out of your comfort zone, just to see what’s there. You drop your truths and change your paradigms to get an unfiltered experience and different point of view.

Then comes divination, which works like a translator; most of the experiences you have while meditating, or exploring the dreamworld, or breakingthrough on dmt can’t be put into words, so they’re not easily understood by our conscious mind. Divination works filling the gap between these experiences and our comprehension, giving us the symbols and a grasp on them. Divination gives us the language to represent the ineffable.

When we finally use that knowledge, we cast a spell and we reprogram our minds and our realities; that is witchcraft. Any system, be it either shamanism, celtilsm, wicca, ritual magic or whatever system works for you, gives us the the means and the methods to put our will and knowledge into work.

I’m writing this just to say that anyone who’s taking the first steps into magick should actually work with psychonautics first, to get the knowledge needed to make your witchcraft work. You need to meditate before you get to visualize and project properly.

Side note :This splitting of magickal work is arbitrary and not strict, is just for an easier understanding