How I’ll Pursue the Great Work: A Life of Experiment

The Great Work cannot be read out of a book. It has to be experienced and lived. Experiments need to be made, methods and ideas prodded and occasionally broken open to see how it all hangs together. This won’t be a sermon, even when I post my personal mythology. I’m going to construct it, piece by piece, as a matter of plain experiment. This blog will be an account of what I try, what holds together, and what does not.

I’ll tackle this with a foot in each of two worlds: science and magick. The science gives me structure: hypothesis, testing, revising, data. It’s the world of specificity, of asking myself, “does the idea endure reality?” The magick gives me imagination, symbolism, ritual. It’s how I recall that meaning isn’t discovered but created. Combined, they make a loop: observation fed by intuition, intuition sharpened by observation.

My tactics will be tiny, functional, and repeatable. A new small habit. A ritual. A change of scenery. A new process or piece of equipment. Every one will be an experiment in change, not transcendence – a strategy to make daily life more deliberate.

I’ll also discuss traditions and methods which I don’t employ – either due to not owning the paraphernalia, or I don’t feel a resonance with it. Whatever may work for you may be something completely other than that which may work for me. A living, viable system must do good for more than one individual.

Some of these experiments will fail gloriously. Others will form the foundation of something enduring. Either way, the outcome will be authentic because the end isn’t perfection. It’s practice. The Great Work isn’t remote enlightenment – it’s the Act of Becoming real, competent, and self-reliant by trial, error, and curiosity.

If you read along, don’t anticipate finality. Instead, anticipate questioning, essays, personal mythology – and a call to you to try it, too! Anticipate the messiness of a person struggling to make philosophy real. Anticipate alchemy, pure and simple: not lead to gold but turmoil to order, moment to moment, philosophy turned into experiment.