Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power (A method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don't)

by Carolyn Elliott

“Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.”

“Fear is excitement without the breath,” as Fritz Perls said. Well, often sensations that we experience as terrible or painful are just pleasure without approval.

Becoming whole means we recognize our dark, kinky side, and that we not only accept it, forgive it, and take responsibility for it, but that we love it, enjoy its antics, and finally integrate it into our whole being.

The magical worldview is this: As above, so below. As within, so without.

The basic formula for profound alchemical change is solve et coagula, which means: to first utterly dissolve (solve) an existing form and then to carefully bring the dissolved and purified elements together again (coagula) in a whole new, more potent and finely organized, permutation.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

To cast a spell is to communicate with your personal unconscious and the collective unconscious in a way that generates specific results through synchronicity.

If you want to know who you unconsciously believe you are, just take a look at your life, your surroundings, your relationship. Your life mirrors those deep beliefs.

The paradox is that once you fully commit to being who you already are, having what you already have, and hugely celebrating it, you become a masterful practical magician, a force of nature capable of shifting circumstances very easily.

Here's a rule of thumb: If we're talking about an annoying pattern that seems to recur specifically for you, and you know a lot of other folks who are free of that particular pattern, chances are good that it's something that's being created specifically by your own personal unconscious. But if we're talking about endemic human problems like war or racism or child abuse, odds are it's more of a collective unconscious issue.

it's magically useful to take an aesthetic, imaginative, artistic approach to your life and feelings rather than a dire, moralizing approach. Perhaps this is true because the great magician, God, is a Creator, and what is a Creator if not an artist, an author?

It's impossible to desire something without also fearing it a bit, and it's impossible to fear and dislike something without also desiring it.

Often the enjoyment in Existential Kink can be felt as jolts of electricity or genital sensation. Just as often it can be felt as a movement of emotional energy. Sometimes it's felt as lightness and laughter, or just a soft sense of relief. That's “getting off” in Existential Kink.

every unpleasant feeling we have has an unconscious motivation. Some part of us believes that by feeling the yucky feeling, we'll “get” something that will enhance our survival. This part of us who believes in the survival value of yucky feelings was generally correct in childhood, and there it got a lot of validation for its theories (people came and took care of you when you cried!), but the theories of this part of us are generally incorrect in adulthood, where feeling bad just drains your energy instead of winning the help of caretakers. So feeling bad/guilty/wrong as an adult doesn't actually improve your odds of physical survival, but it does, however, guarantee the survival of “you as you currently know yourself to be.” In other words, if you lost your ability to feel bad, you might hardly recognize yourself. You'd be stepping into an unknown horizon. You might risk offending people in your life who expect you to feel bad and who believe that certain situations require feeling bad. None of this would actually kill you, but it would kill your old idea of who you are. You'd experience a major ego death and transformation.

Car Triumph—Louisa

You don't need a reason to do anything. Your own kinky, hot, fucked-up desire to do it is enough.

According to Diotima, Eros is the cherishing of divine beauty, “the beauty that is not beautiful and is not ugly.” In other words, Diotima sees Eros as the love of the context in which all life and beauty unfolds, the formless context that is beautiful because it holds all possibilities.

When you succeed in getting off on a given topic in Existential Kink, you are succeeding in releasing your fixation on ordinary beauty (or the lack of it), releasing your fixation on the content of your experience, and instead opening up to the larger beauty “that is not beautiful and is not ugly”—the context, the fundamental love that is You.

Compassion means “to feel with” or “to experience with.” Compassion isn't pity; it isn't trying to protect or save people from the consequences of their choices.

Desire evolves through fulfillment,

As creepy uncle Aleister Crowley said, “Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”