Water is the principle or element of things. All things are water.
Thales of Miletus
We know that we are all psychic when we are young and then have it educated out of us and the classic Roald Dahl story Matilda speaks to this experience. An actor I was working with on Kingdom Come said that seeing Matilda the Musical had changed his life. The following week I worked with Laurence Olivier award winning Eleanor Worthington Cox the star of that same musical on the set of roman adventure TV series Britannia. These events were clearly entangled. Through conversation with my partner, who is both a big fan of Matilda and the Little Mermaid, we developed the concept of ''Mertilda'' - the psychic mermaid.
One of the great limiting factors stopping people from developing or rather redeveloping their psychic powers is will vs desire, very little of the former and a great deal of the latter. I often think the rise of the popularity of ''working with spirits'' as opposed to developing your own powers is because this is the easy way. This is a more important topic than I want to address in this post but we all remember our youthful Matildaesque experiments with psychic powers and our discovery that psychokinesis takes a lot of effort and its often easier to just ask or ''command'' someone else to pass you the pencil rather than levitate it into your hand with your mind. Favours for favours though.
Another limiting factor, and the real subject of ''Mertilda'' is the nature of the conductive medium. Most magicians these days, almost entirely deprived of both willpower and imagination by the internet, dutifully live in the delusional 3d reality and then conceive of models that justify/explain their magickal approaches - typically either an energetic or psychological model which does not need to challenge the existence of the material world or a ''spirit model'' which hypothesises some kind of other reality beyond the veil of the physical where spirits ''live''.* Either way they conceive of themselves as an object in an objective world, relating to other objects, be they people or items, in and through space. In this 3d world people believe that the medium which separates them from the things they want to influence is (typically) air/gas/atmosphere.
The early pre-Socratic philosophers argued about the nature of the universal substrate - fluid, gas, fire, number and pure thought were suggested as possibilities - and subsequent pre-Socratic philosophers tried to invent schemes that fit some or all of these ideas together - like the four elements of Empedocles or the Atomism of Democritus. Some of the weird assertions of Parmenides in ''On Nature'' - for example, there is no such thing as movement or size - make a lot of sense when you analyse the universe as a mental phenomenon.
As the Hermetic Lessons have established we only exist in the mental universe, the existence of the physical universe itself being a massive leap of faith. The nature of this mental universe absolutely mirrors the structure of the biological cell - the nucleus of the cell being the psychic impression of our own bodies and the feeling of being ''in'' our own bodies, and our perceived environment being the cell that the nucleus is contained within, this finally being membrane bound by the limits of our outer mind and connecting to the bloodstream of time.
In the perceptual bubble of this cell, the space around us, we believe that we are surrounded by the gas of the atmosphere and that this is the medium between us and other individuals/objects but how would our existence, including our psychic abilities, differ if this medium was liquid, i.e. if you were a merperson? It would change the way sound is transmitted, the way your voice would work, the way you move, the way your body feels, how it would feel to breathe, etc. Extend this further and imagine what it would be like if you were separated from the other people around you by a solid, that you were all encased in some kind of rock in the fossil record. Create little thought and dexterity exercises, move your fingers through the air and imagine they are interacting with these different mediums - feel the liquid dripping through your fingers, feel the pressure of the stone encasement - or even better go for a swim, explore the sensations and then try to bring them back and apply them to other environments.
In our true psychic reality, as some of you will discover, the medium is more gelatinous - something in between oil and wax mirroring the cytosol/cytoplasm which makes up the majority of the cell i.e. 70% water admixed with various other components ends up resulting in a kind of gel. Some of these ideas have been explored in the Quarry of Magic Strange but really throughout the Hermetic Lessons there are detailed references to this cellular state of existence and the applications that become available once you embrace it.
''You seeemed so far away,'' Miss Honey whispered, star struck.
''Oh I was. I was flying past the stars on silver wings,'' Matilda said. ''It was wonderful.''
Matilda, Roald Dahl
*Neither is necessary in the time dependent model. Mirror dimension is the reversiverse, astral dimension is the future or past.
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