"The Books of Magra" is fundamentally concerned with inspiring and cultivating the exploration of consciousness. When I originally began the work in 2000, this understanding of its intent was not clear to me. All I knew was that it was concerned with the nature of "Being" - but that's all I knew.
The work had come suddenly one day as a vision of a beautiful and powerful ritual. I wrote down everything I saw and felt, it even came with the unusual names of places and people that would be a part of the greater narrative that it is currently evolving into. In all, I wrote only four pages at the time, but when I had written the last sentence, I knew that what had been given to me was something quite extraordinary.
The experience of receiving the work was at once euphoric and depressing (a quality I had known with other mystic experiences or altered states of consciousness). This was because at once it was so compelling and true to me, yet the scale of the undertaking was daunting and intimidating. Regardless, I went ahead and chose to work through my fears and the unknowns because the call of its need for me to explore Being was so strong.
I realized I was no longer making it, it was making me.
I worked on other creative projects as I worked on "The Books of Magra." They were often collaborative, fun and I gained new skills. But they were nothing like working on "The Books of Magra." It was always about Being and so it immediately related to and informed my life - it was always profoundly self-reflective as I contemplated and wrote about Being.
Over a few years of writing, plotting diagrams, building symbolic matrices and designs, I gradually changed how I spent my days and what I gave my attention to. I did fewer and fewer other projects. I realized I was no longer making "The Books of Magra," it was making me. This was frustrating at times because what it needed of me did not always fit well with the other aspects or demands in my life - whether they were personal or professional.
With the intention to reconcile what wanted to come from within me and my life around me, I inadvertently pushed against the work as I pushed against my life around me. I could not find functional balance, and when the structure of my life fractured and dramatically changed, "The Books of Magra" revealed something to me that I had never really recognized or understood.
What I believed to be Being was not enough, it was inaccurate, incomplete. It lacked a component that fleshed it out: Being Of.
"The Books of Magra" is a special Context.
Being is a powerful idea, but perhaps we humans, at times unintentionally, far too often miss how separate we make that idea. We place ourselves in conceptual isolation from the rest of the world to realize ourselves, and we are prone to over exaggerate our capacity to observe and work an idealized objectivity. I did...and still to this day I find myself succumbing to it at times.
What I realized was that "The Books of Magra" was not a task to complete, not some obligation, no matter how wonderful I thought (think) it is. Even as it may arise as images, ideas and patterns in my mind, as music and sound, it is not a tangible thing. "The Books of Magra" is a special Context.
The space and time needed to create is both external and internal, it is the relationship where one may lose a sense of place and time, of self and all about you, because those definitions and dimensions succumb to another experience of Being. It is Being Of, where one is the context and the context is you. Even with a goal or intent, such an experience dwarfs any product or outcome.
I may be writing a series of books and recording a series of albums, but all of that enables me to benefit from the context for its creation. This is the state of Being Of it...it Being Of me.