Excerpt (Pages 27-30) from Modern Alchemy and Occult Psychology, by D. Lawrence Meredith.

Magik is a conscious process of deconstructing the strict Newtonian and Piagetian spatiotemporal causal world. It is like being put back into the embryonic state of blissful existence. In fact, the state of consciousness in which we develop in utero is that same state that we will ultimately experience psychologically if success emerges in the path of Magik. This process is described in western Magik as becoming a babe in the abyss. The abyss is the state of unification, where the chaos of indifferentiation of all mental stimuli creates a state of timelessness and nonexistence, when thoughts are observed in primitive forms and vague emergences, and the mind is fully accessible. Many researchers (i.e., Freud, Jung, etc.) have suggested and provided some evidence for a type of primordial embryonic consciousness. Consciousness separated from the developed brain that can be fully accessed in adulthood. The concept of embryonic regression, a return to the oceanic natal state of utter indifferentiation, is a topic of immense interest in cognitive psychology. And as said, this analogous prescient state, the natal bliss of pre conceptual consciousness is the initiation into the chaotic realm where one becomes a Magikal Babe in the Abyss. This process is the crux of the Magik and metacognitive path that is discussed in this book. Daath is the name of the Qabalistic sephirot where one plunges into a non-dualistic state of consciousness and begins the final steps for the process of illumination. The abyss, Daath, is a state of primordial entanglement. Daath is the chaos upon which all concept formation is brewed; it is also the infinite process of differentiation from which our mental and psychophysical realities are differentiated. This profound idea is the myth of Tiamat, or Tammuz, the deep, the kthulu of H. P. Lovecraft's stories, the id of Freud, the collective unconscious of Jung, the primal substance of the alchemists, the akasha of the Vedas, the Duat of the Egyptians, [Daath to the Qabalists], and the underworld of the Greeks. Daath is the realm of chaos. It is mysterious, invisible, and secretive. It is considered the realm of occult knowledge. It is mysterious because it’s nature cannot be contemplated. It cannot be contemplated because its entrance is outside the threshold of human reason, it must be entered Magikally. There are characteristics of both of these primordial states of consciousness that do not deconstruct with the annihilation of the physical and causal world. The elements of consciousness that remain and sustain consciousness throughout the process of deconstruction, or regression into the primordial, prenatal state of unitary or rather mono hemispheric consciousness, are the last remaining components of the symbolic spatiotemporal consciousness that enables functionality in the lower developmental stages. The beginning of the breakdown of the strictly censored perception of reality as wholly material, i.e. mind is brain, is the threshold to the abyss, the Qabalistic sphere of Daath. This is the true beginning of metaconsciousness and Magik. Natal consciousness can be symbolized as an alpha consciousness and the illuminated state acquired through deep mental contemplation and ritual and the cognitive restructuring that is effected can be symbolized as a type of omega consciousness. The similarities of these two temporally discrete realms are qualities such as pre-egoic orientation, conceptual and temporal undifferentiation, a state of oneness and primordial unity, meaningless-ness, perceptually and cognitively structure-less, distinction-less, and boundary-less. Freud described this state as oceanic, James as a blooming buzzing confusion, and again Magik calls it the Abyss. The massive impact of entering into a primordial state of consciousness, a state where the mind does not attach meaning and causation to its perceptions and sensations, a world where time does not exist, and motion is not continuous is what typically causes the dispersion of the soul. The dispersion of the soul is the idea that without the proper training, one will not maintain the proper psychical state at death, their central nervous system will become erratic, and their consciousness will disperse into oblivion. Bardo is the process described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead whereby one is guided through death into the afterlife. Bardo describes a process ultimately, where the walls of space and time that materially bind the soul to the body are loosened, and the priest guides the recently deceased through the process where their nervous system ceases operation, and guides them into crystallizing their soul for journeying beyond death and into the Bardo regions. The Egyptian Book of the Dead also dictates the complex procedure and the terrible ordeals that the Khu (one of the characterizations of the Egyptian soul) must undergo after death, when it travels through the millions of years into the immortal realm of Osiris, astrologically located in the constellation Orion. During death, the illusion of the reality of a lawful, reliable, predictable world completely vanishes and the true chaos, the entropy of the realm of the soul and the mind is revealed. In a sense, death and the transmigration of the soul is the return to a state of pre-consciousness, or uni-consciousness of infancy and embryonic existence, before synaptic pruning shaped our perceptions and structured how we process information in the material and causal world. The intense trauma of birth is a complete environmental shift of a catastrophic level. A memory of this event is imprinted into the newborn's memory because the bloodstream of the mother is flooded with ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone), a chemical critical to memory. This is used as an evidence that, contrary to common cognitive theory, neonates are unable to recall memories of birth because they lack the biological neural connectivity that is critical to cognitive development, like memory. In other words, we cannot possibly remember our birth because our brains are not developed yet. However, people do recall memories. So where do these memories exist if not in actual neuronal connections like is commonly believed? Is there a consciousness and memory system that is continuous throughout and separate from that which develops from a mature central nervous system? For instance, mRNA contains memory, as do entire cells, and there's no neural circuitry, so why does science reject the same for the complete underdeveloped organism? It's suggested by some (i.e., Wade, 1996) that prenates and neonates exhibit many types of knowing (i.e., auditory and spatial knowing) before birth, or pre-birth. This knowing may precede and proceed physical birth and death.