Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  I couldn’t agree more. Often we risk spiritualizing our egos rather than peeling away the layers. We shift one egoic identification onto another. I don’t mean to sound harsh, because I have certainly done that myself, but that’s where the real work, the real dedication, comes in, peeling away until we reach the core, and then peeling some more. That’s why I don’t look at my—or anyone else’s—relapses as failures, especially if we use them as opportunities to remove more layers of what brought us back to the bottle or the needle or the poker table or the fast-food restaurant. If we use those times to explore what hurt in our lives causes us to relapse, then they absolutely were not failures at all.

  Damien reminded me about all the excuses people resort to when they obscure that core. “Sometimes they’ll say, ‘I was acting from an ego place.’ That’s a spiritual cop-out. It’s no different from people who used to say, ‘The devil made me do it.’ Now it’s ‘Ego made me do it.’ If you’re aware enough to know that your ego is influencing you, then you’re aware enough to stand up and not give in to it.”

  How do we go about peeling away those layers? I wanted to learn a bit more about what Damien meant when he wrote about initiation when it came to Magick.

  The most fascinating, sincere, terrifying, and wonderful thing about it is that it never ends. “Initiation is a process. It’s similar in nature to what baptism in Christianity was supposed to be. It wasn’t a onetime thing that symbolized something. Initiation is not a symbol; it’s an actual process, an actual thing. For example, imagine you have a book that you like. You read that book, get a lot out of it, and then put it on the shelf. A year later you take the book down and read it again, and you get even more out of it the second time than you did the first. That’s initiation. It’s a constant way of going deeper into reality, deeper and deeper into the process of growth.

  “That’s why Magick and art go hand in hand. Art is meant to be an initiation. I work as an artist, and I’ve tried to take Magick and turn it into art because they’re similar processes. Art was never meant to be something that you bought because it matches your couch.” Damien explained that art and Magick should transform us. It could be a big transformation, a slight one, or maybe one we don’t realize for years. That encounter and subsequent evolution are the initiation. “It’s one of the reasons art and Magick have always been interwoven like the strands of our DNA, like the caduceus of Hermes—the snakes intertwined. Art and Magick are different sides of the same process, and when we live life the way we’re truly meant to live it, everything becomes an initiation. Not just the couple of hours a day that you spend on your meditation cushion. Not just the time you spend practicing yoga. Not your rituals, if you’re a ceremonial magician. Every single aspect of every single day should become about interacting with the intelligence behind reality.”

  I dug that—every single aspect of every single day. It’s what I’m talking about when I say “everything mind,” because everything, material or not, is imbued by spirit (or God, source, life, Buddha mind, Brahman, etc.). There’s not a time or place in our experience that the intelligence behind reality, as Damien calls it, is not present. To me, this is the essence of spirituality. However, I’m also aware that if you ask a hundred people what spirituality is, you’ll likely get a hundred different answers, but again, for me, spirituality imbues everything always. We must open ourselves up to it and be aware of it and make ourselves available to it. Some times are tougher than others. What role did Magick play in helping Damien survive almost two decades on death row, ten of them in solitary confinement? And what about now?

  There were many different levels to Damien’s answer. First he spoke about the mental realm. “Magick gave me something to focus on other than my surroundings, other than my prison environment. By the end of my time in prison, I was dedicating up to eight hours a day to Magick practice, to ritual, to meditation, to energy and breath work. During those eight hours, I would become almost oblivious that I was in prison because I was so focused on my spiritual practice. It kept me from losing my sanity.”

  There was also the tangible, the physical realm. “I was in a tremendous amount of pain at one point; my teeth hurt because I’d been hit in the face and severely beaten several times. In prison, they don’t do caps or crowns or root canals. Your choices are live in pain or have your teeth pulled. I didn’t want to lose my teeth, so I had to find a way to cope with the pain. Honestly, that pain is one of the things that drove me deepest into my Magick practice. I was forced to get better and better at what I was doing.”

  As with anything, when it’s self-taught, Damien learned a lot through trial and error. “I found one Magick technique of working with something that pretty much every culture except for ours has a name for. The Chinese call it chi and the Japanese qi; in Hebrew it’s called ruach; and in Sanskrit it’s prana. Westerners seem to be the only ones who don’t have a name for it, so I refer to it as energy, because that’s such a nondenominational term. I began channeling this energy into healing. I’d channel as much as I could, sealing it with the intent to heal, to stop pain. When I started doing this, I experienced considerable success—if I did it for an hour, the pain in my mouth would completely go away for a week. Eventually, I had to do it for two hours to get rid of the pain for the same length of time. Then three hours of practice would get rid of the pain for only a day or so. As time progressed, I had to do it nonstop, and it was still only blunting the pain, not completely killing the pain as it was in the beginning. Then I had an epiphany, a realization that went off in me like a nuclear bomb: Everything on the spiritual level—what we think of as the spiritual level of reality—mirrors everything that goes on the physical level of reality. They are two sides of one coin: heads, tails. In the physical world, you don’t inhale forever. You have no choice but to exhale. You can’t drink water forever; eventually you pee. I realized I was taking in tremendous amounts of energy toward a purpose and not letting anything out. I began to practice a grounding technique that took maybe sixty seconds, and I felt a huge flush of energy rush out of me into the earth. From that moment on, I never had pain again. It was completely gone.

  “Not only did I have physical teachers of Magick in this world—people who’d authored books, people who were widely known, people who were lesser known, who took time and energy to teach me while I was in prison—but once we reach a certain stage in the initiation process, the Magick itself becomes the teacher. It starts triggering initiations and realizations, which is what happened to me more and more as time went on.”

  These insights into initiation and spontaneous realization made me think of something Krishna Das has said about how life is the guru: “Don’t wait for a guru. Your life is your guru.” You don’t need a saint or guru in the flesh. If you have one who’s the real deal, then that’s cool, but life is the great teacher if you’re open and present to it. If you’re ready to be taught.

  Magick was first and foremost for Damien, but Taoism augmented those teachings for him and helped him reach deeper levels of understanding. “That’s because Taoism is so sparse on dogma and belief and focuses almost entirely on the actual physical practices: the breath work, the visualization, the circulation of chi. Once you master those very basic practices, you can start expanding them and taking them into other areas of your life. There are no limits.”

  Damien has other influences as well. “While I was in prison, I had a Zen teacher who came from Japan to the prison and eventually gave me ordination in the Rinzai tradition of Buddhism. It’s the same tradition that was used to train the ancient samurai. One of the things I realized from that practice is that most Westerners, especially the younger generation, aren’t going to have the patience and the discipline to keep following these practices. They’re not going to sit for two, three, four, eight hours a day without looking at their Facebook pages or whatever it is. The whole thing with Zen practice is that it’s training you to stay in the present, to be with life from moment to moment.�
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  Just as Zen has been diluted in the West, Damien has seen that happening in the New Age movement with Wicca. “Now it’s all about flowers in the hair and the Mother Goddess and all that kind of stuff, but real, traditional ceremonial Magick can be very hard to understand, because most of the good books were written in a time when people didn’t speak exactly the way that we speak now. They can be very complicated to read. You can have one book that you study for your entire life and still not get everything out of it because of the way it’s written. What I discovered with Wicca is that it’s basically a watered-down version of ceremonial Magick. I would read books on Wicca about rituals that were done to honor deity, honor Divinity, and break those down and compare them to what I was reading in ceremonial Magick. They would take something that I thought was complicated and hard to understand and suddenly I would have this epiphany or realization due to the simplicity of Wicca. Then I’d be able to take it and simplify it myself in a way that didn’t have as much of the dogma attached to it.”

  Magick is the fire in his life, then Zen, Taoism, and Wicca are “the gasoline that caused it to roar. And then there’s the Bible. It’s probably the single greatest book on Magick ever written. You should read it for the instruction, not for the stories. For example, there’s a lot about speaking in the Bible; it begins all the way back in the book of Genesis: ‘God said let there be’ this and that. There are all sorts of different things about using the voice that carry all the way from the Old Testament into the New Testament, where Jesus said things that we don’t even pay heed to. In Mark 11:23, Jesus told his disciples, ‘If you say to this mountain, move, it will be moved, it will be cast into the sea, it will happen.’ He didn’t say, ‘Ask me to do it.’ He didn’t tell them to ask God to do it. He didn’t say to get down on your knees and grovel and talk about how unworthy you are. He said to tell this thing to move, and it will be moved. It’s all about how powerful our words are. That’s because our words convey energy. They convey chi. Our words can take things from the more etheric levels of reality and speak them into existence in the physical world.”

  Damien shifted the conversation into a direction I wasn’t anticipating—televangelism—and kind of blew my mind. “I used to watch this televangelist who said, ‘Don’t talk to God about how big your problems are. Talk to your problems about how big your God is. If you focus on the negative, you’re feeding the negative energy. You’re feeding chi to it, enhancing it, and strengthening it. When David fought Goliath, he doesn’t step up and say, “Oh my God! This guy is a giant! What am I going to do? He’s got a sword, and I’ve only got this sling.” No. He didn’t magnify the problem. He didn’t say, “This guy is huge. This guy has killed a hundred people before me.” None of that. He stepped up and he looked at Goliath and didn’t even call Goliath a giant, because he didn’t want to feed energy to that. He looked at Goliath and said, “This day I will feed your head to the birds of the air. You come against me with sword and shield. I come against you in the name of the almighty God.” ’ It’s another illustration of using our words, using our voices, to shape reality so that we become co-creators of the physical world.”

  I loved that Damien used the word “God” when he spoke, because there’s probably no more loaded word in our language. It’s sad that “God” has so much heaviness around it. I understand why: There’s no shortage of fundamentalist, hateful rhetoric that’s used “in the name of God,” but the beauty of that word and what it can symbolize is so important—to me, at least.

  Damien got where I was coming from. “God is one of the first things I address whenever I do the Magick classes, because I want the experience to be as nondenominational and all-encompassing as possible. I want people to feel comfortable, because if you don’t feel comfortable with what you’re doing, then it’s not going to work. I tell people, ‘I might use the word “God” sometimes and other times I might not, but whatever name you want to use, whether it’s God or the Divine mind or the source, whenever I’m using this word, I think of it as the source that all things came from and the source to which they will all one day return.’ Strip away everything else. I’m not talking about a man floating in the clouds and judging us. I’m talking about our individual understanding of the source of all and all creation in a very nondenominational, stripped-down, nondogmatic way.”

  This talk of God reminded me of a quote attributed to Rumi I’d read on Damien’s Facebook page: “I learned that every mortal will taste death—but only some will taste life.” The passage took Damien back to when he first got out of prison after almost twenty years and a decade of solitary confinement. “Nobody in this world understood the level of shock and trauma that I was going through. People thought I was going to be happy and excited that I was out of prison, and I was, but I was also completely and absolutely destroyed to the core of my being, on every level. I was mentally alone; I could no longer read, watch television or movies. I would try to read a book and I would read the same page over and over and could no longer even remember what I was reading when I got to the bottom of the page because I’d been so psychologically devastated. I would meet a person and introduce myself two or three times because I couldn’t even retain their face or their name or any of those sorts of things. I was scared all the time.

  “It was a completely different world from the one I knew when I went into prison. Little things, like everyone used a debit card with a PIN number at the store—I didn’t understand any of that. Things that most people took for granted absolutely paralyzed me with fear. It got to the point where I needed someone with me twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That’s a big aspect of spiritual practice: making yourself go into things that scare you, things that you aren’t comfortable with. That’s tasting life, that’s making yourself expand beyond your boundaries and go into new areas. If you don’t do those things, you’re not living.”

  I could identify with that, because for me, that’s what living a life of true recovery is all about: going into the places that scare you and boldly exploring why you’re scared in the first place. It’s not easy work, nor is it the quick “five steps to freedom forever” kind of thing that’s so popular on blogs and in certain self-help books, but it’s real, it’s authentic, and if you stick with it, it will do its job of healing. That said, like everyone, I still have times when I want to turn on the TV or eat a pint of rocky road to take myself out of that moment, and as tough as it is, I also recognize that there is no way real healing or growth is going to occur unless I face this darkness, this fear, this sadness and loneliness, and sit with it. Again, in no way do I mean to compare my situation with Damien’s, because there is no comparison to what he lived through, but I appreciate his being so raw and vulnerable about his experiences. He lived the truth of “the only way out is through.” It’s not pretty, it’s not easy, but that’s life; it’s tragic and it’s beautiful, horrific and illuminating.

  There have been times when I’ve found myself in my own horror. Case in point, the experience I wrote about at the beginning of this book. From there, however, there’s nowhere else to go but up. I think of it as “crawling toward comfortable,” something the character Claire Fisher said in an episode of Six Feet Under. While crawling toward comfortable, the underlying experience was always one of pain, but pain can be one of the greatest catalysts for change if we’re willing to work with and transmute it. As Damien said, “The number-one thing that causes us to grow as human beings is pain. The more we experience pain, the more we’re able to empathize with other people, the more it cracks open our shell and forces us to let life in. What it comes down to is, the bigger the battles you face, the greater the victories you’re going to have. If you go through your life seeking out little battles, then you’re going to have only little victories. We should embrace the things that scare us, the things that hurt us, the things that aren’t fun.”

  While I wouldn’t advocate you go out and relapse or pick up a drug habit if you’ve never
had one, I understand what Damien was saying, and agree (within reason). Damien and I had similar childhoods. We both grew up in rural areas (though mine wasn’t as rural as his). We were both outcasts as teenagers, listening to bands like Slayer and Metallica and interested in occult symbolism and ideology. I remember that at times it felt like hell, which is why these days I’m so passionate about working with young people who’ve felt “other than” or who’ve struggled with addictions, self-harm, or depression.

  Damien had some words of wisdom for the younger people who are struggling with being labeled, picked on, or bullied, or with loving themselves for who they are. “For me, spiritual practice is always about practicality, what’s practical. Not about thinking good thoughts and let’s hold hands and be friends. It’s about what works. The way I approach things is not always the gentlest way, because I don’t necessarily respond to the gentlest forms of teaching. I learn the most from the hard times. I learn the most from the times that I’ve experienced pain. The thing I always tell people is that you can either be a victor or be a victim—you can’t be both. If you’re going to sit around and cry and be all angsty, you’re going to live as a victim your whole life. As harsh as it can sometimes sound, one of the best spiritual practices, the best spiritual teaching you can give somebody, is ‘Knuckle up, buttercup.’ This ain’t no fun ride. You better dig in and get ready to fight for what you love, for what you want, or give it up. We have two choices: We can give up the things about ourselves that the world doesn’t like, that the world taunts or torments us for, or we can embrace those things and say fuck you to the rest of them. It’s one or the other. If you give up the things you love because of the pressure that outside sources are putting on you, then you’re not alive. You’re not living the life that you’re going to enjoy.