In Exile: Goêtic Meditations on Wage Labor
This two-part essay collects my personal reflections, as a practicing goês, on the nature of working life. I have spent 25 years in Corporate environments, as well as in temples and caves, on mountains and in forests. To the same degree that my knowledge and skill as a goês have increased over this period, my wage labor has turned into an experience of being in exile. That is, in a place that I still know how to navigate and survive in, but where there is no belonging and increasingly little ingenuity of personal expression.
I wrote this essay, first and foremost, as a note to myself after an unusual intense period of work life, which left little space for everything else. Writing about my experience in exile has helped me to recognize it as such. It has also helped me to stop myself from throwing judgement and verdict at myself for failing to navigate both worlds in better synchronicity. Finally, when it was done, captured on paper, and I read it back, I realized it contained much of the advice I have to offer after a quarter of a century in the working life. It might not amount to much; but it roots in real life. In my life.
I offer it now as a quiet nod to those of you who are - or soon will be – on similar journeys. We are not alone. And our own judgement often is the worst enemy we face. Despite how much we might despise the tension, grappling, turmoil and pain we all experience in our day jobs; it’s precisely these experiences that probably have made us humbler, a little wiser, and enabled us to cut our teeth in places where we can’t break anything more serious than our career. Compared with any magical expedition among deities and daemons, that is a marker of truly safe ground for practice.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
Men of good fortune, often wish that they could die
While men of poor beginnings want what they have
And to get it they'll die.
— Lou Reed, Men of Good FortuneI.
The dominant experience for many of us today in everyday life is characterized by spending time in places we would rather not be and adopting attitudes we would rather avoid.
We wake up and find ourselves in traffic jams or trains, in concrete or virtual jungles. We rush and hurry, looking for shortcuts and ways to accelerate. Breathlessly, we hunt for the idols of efficiency and indispensability. Obsessed with our adoration of qualities that once were intended to measure the How and not the Why or What of a day’s work, other humans around us degrade to mere obstacles. Fleshly barriers between where we are now and where we intend to be next. A carnal mass of noise, ever ready to dilute our sacred obedience to duty.
The extent to which we associate this rushing and hurrying from one place of duty to the next with the idea of performance, competition, winning, and standing out is only of peripheral interest. Even if we manage to escape the ubiquitous production incentives of externally controlled self-esteem, our haste remains a fundamental characteristic of how we spend much of our mundane lives. And in this hurry, the other becomes an obstacle, an object, a cell in the amorphous body of mass. Precisely that poisonous mass which constantly threatens us with deceleration, distraction, and seemingly parasitic intrusion into our hard-earned self-determination.
Our omnipresent absence in the here and now — in order to get to the actual or the next thing, i.e., to the there and then — stands in stark opposition to the weariness of time we all experience as well. Because boredom and ennui torment us just as much as haste and hurry.
Once arrived at our places of civic duty, we linger behind bars made of working hours, working days, working years. Once the actual craft has been learned, a yawning abyss opens up in front of us – its depth measured by meaninglessness and its breadth by repetitiveness. As such, we rush from cage to cage, either driven by mindless haste or mind-numbing tedium.
Despite much of their worthlessness, it’s the actual hours spent in the cage - which we rush towards daily and then blindly surrender ourselves to - that have become the currency of self-worth and moral capital of our times. No longer is it what we created or contributed that matters, but how long we have toiled over it, how hard we have groaned in the process, how busy we have looked — in short, how far we have carried the cross of hardship without any intention of arriving anywhere. The daily grind of surrendering ourselves to the industrial twins of haste and boredom, have become the moral purpose of a society that finds its validation only in the empty gestures of gritted teeth, tense muscles, and honorable battlefield exhaustion.
So far, so terrible. Nevertheless, I am not a fan of viewing our current times as particularly special in any way. Historical comparisons have proven too often how similar we are to our ancestors, and how similar our lives are to theirs. The theme of the corrupted youth is as old as Socrates; the acceleration of time has been described and researched in great detail at least since the invention of the letter press; and the advent of the apocalypse remains an evergreen headline among all kinds of plagues and epidemics, continental wars, and collapsing empires. Against a more recent historic backdrop, it’s clear that my life today is a walk in the park compared to that of the last three European generations before me.
My intention with such historical comparison is by no means to downplay our — or my own — current concerns and hardships. I am certainly not asking for more teeth grinding and muscle flexing! Quite the contrary: I want to acknowledge these adversities of everyday life as a common foundation we share with our ancestors. This pain, this trouble makes us more common, more alike than different with the people who have come before us. Here is an offer to no longer define us by our uniqueness of torment, but rather by the communion in which we stand with the dead, who lived through them before us. To accept this offer, all that is required is a small and subtle shift: To feel seen in our pain we need to stop painting ourselves as the lone Prometheus, and begin to see us as a member of a species that is in love with pain.
Matthew S. Champion wrote, “time’s fullness remains beyond reach, just as it did for those fifteenth-century subjects who sought to rise to an approximation of God’s vision of time from eternity.”[1] And time’s fullness remains beyond reach for most of us, on most days of work.
II.
So for a moment at least, let’s presume that we cannot alter this fundamental human experience. Let’s also presume that ours is neither the path of the hermit or monk, who withdraws from this condition through total renunciation, nor that of the profiteer or investor, who indulges without restraint in the inherent economic meaninglessness. Let’s suppose, instead, that we are magicians of the 21st century, just as some of our ancestors have been magicians of the 19th, 17th, or 15th centuries — and many other ages before. What we share with these dead goês and mages is this: We all stand with one foot bound in the abyss of vacuity and repetition of bread-winning wage labor. With the other foot, though – at least in moments of sure economic footing or in the even more liminal interval between daybreak and nightfall – we are free to play.
See, the working hypothesis I'd like to explore with you here, is that much of what wears us down in this constant oscillation between frantic labor and boredom is not the experience itself, but rather the absence of a strong contrast. The hypothesis goes somewhat like this: I suggest that our days are much longer than we allow ourselves to believe. There is, likewise, a mostly unspoken — perhaps even shameful, yet nevertheless genuine — satisfaction in answering dozens of trivial emails, sitting through the same weekly meetings, or running the same errand for our boss the hundredth time. For all of these experiences - beyond their reality as boredom – also reassure us of safety. They are evidence to familiar territory and at least a minimal amount of competency, as well as the right to exist as a laborer in the here and now. After all, it is a scientific fact that just as some of us find contentment in cleaning, ironing, or vacuuming, so do we all find a quiet satisfaction in the repetition of tasks in which we experience ourselves as at least moderately capable.
Over time, however, this satisfaction fades into the background — not because it diminishes, but because it is supplanted by something else. And it is precisely this something else that we so often overlook. Like a blind spot, it eludes our gaze. Like a ghost, it appears only at the edge of our field of vision and becomes all the more transparent the more directly we attempt to stare at it.
This specter — Harper and I call it the ghost of the small world. Much of our fatigue, our exhaustion, our daily work routine — regardless of what form that work takes — does not come from the work itself, but from the bitter reality that we allow it to consume us so completely that we lose sight of the big world. The small world adorns itself with the crown of the big world: Microsoft Team Meetings pretending to be as important as waterfalls; quarterly results simulating the gravitas of omphaloi, altars or underground temples; conversations with bosses and colleagues faking the sensual relevance of the scent of fresh thyme or the clear air after a storm. And by falling for these thousands of tiny traps, we turn ourselves into prisoners of our own miniature cages. Cages so small that not even our identity as workers fits completely inside them – let alone as mothers, sisters, human beings, goês or magicians.
Now, before we proceed, I should take a moment to better define the terms of this hypothesis: The small world is easily described as the horizon of experience that unfolds for us in the course of our daily wage labor. For many of us, this horizon is marked by paid performance, power structures and hierarchies, dependencies and obligations, as well as the fundamental capitalist dynamics of clients, service providers, banks, and shareholders. It is important at this point to withhold judgment and avoid assigning moral or any other kind of value to this small world. Whether we enjoy inhabiting it is secondary; when things go well, it is the small world that enables us to pay our bills, sit in a warm living room, and share dinner with friends. In the best cases, it even offers us moments of achievement, challenges through which we grow professionally and personally, and a social fabric of colleagues, clients, and contacts who may enrich our lives — even though they place relentless demands of performance upon us.
By contrast, the big world encompasses, for most people, all those areas of life not involved in wage labor: our roles as family members; experiences of illness and loss; holidays and adventures; the geopolitical and ecological realities in which we are entangled as citizens; and all forms of pleasure, self-expression, and fulfillment for which we don’t expect to get paid.
Now, for the goês and magician, I would like to narrow the meaning of their big world a little further. For this tiny niche of people — to which you may count yourself — relating back to the big world means bringing awareness of one’s magical contacts and presence to the foreground. Whatever deities, daemons, or sacred landscapes we work with — wherever we stand in living relation to something beyond ourselves — that place is from where the big world opens up. Our big world begins where living contact beyond the human realm is experienced. The big world, for goêtes and mages, is the horizon at which we step out of the narrowness of our own species and open ourselves to the richness of a cosmos overflowing with non-human presences and intelligences, all waiting to be sensed, acknowledged, and explored.
A plain and yet essential way to differentiate these two worlds as goêtes is thus the following: The big world is the place where we as individuals will always appear as peripheral and never central. In our small world of wage labor, we might strive to become someone, to make a name for ourselves, and to increase our market value. Achievement on this axis can be marked, e.g., by the compensation we receive, by job titles, office sizes, company cars, or simply respect we acquire from people who matter to us. In the big world, the narrative never unfolds around us as its centre; in the goêtic world we are participants at best, and move in hives, travel through ecosystems, and blur the boundaries of our skin, self, and soul. As such, reconnecting our sense of presence with the big world comes as an inherent relief from the individualistic pressure of needing to prove our value, find validation or - more practically - employment, and to please other people in order to get paid. The goês or mage within us, thus, finds themselves in exile when consumed by the small world. This exile, however, is not an expression of a flaw or fault, but a necessary experience of being in this world as a human being.
Let’s keep these definitions in mind as we turn back to the small world and consider the instruments that might keep us from being wholly swallowed by it.
Unfortunately, the tool that will, in the end, cut through the bars of the small world is not forged from better work, shorter hours, new jobs, or even smarter bosses. All these are twists and turns we perform within the cage of the small world. They, too, can be helpful — sometimes we even gain a few additional inches of freedom behind the bars. Optimizing the small world has its place and its moments, but it will not reveal the specter that sucks the life out of us while we busy ourselves with the daily grind.
For this is the point: our wage labor itself is not the heart of the problem; the real danger lies in our attachment to this work, which blinds us to what is happening in the background: How the specter of the small world suffocates our imagination, cuts off our capillaries from the wilderness, and gradually reduces our lungs’ ability to sing with the spirits. Let alone listen to them.
If we follow this hypothesis, we can indeed safely enter the small world — as long as we have enough anchor points to pull us back out, and to remind us of the true wonder and vastness of the big world. Just as the rope secures the climber to the rock face, a part of us must remain tethered to the big world even as we shrink ourselves down and slip into our miniature selves to engage in the miniature world of work. There is beauty and impact, social value and much learning in these miniature worlds of work. We do well to accept their rules and to explore their ambiguous gameplays in full. And yet, they will turn upon us like vampires on virgins, if only we let go of the rope that connects us to what lies beyond the current rock face.
III.
So what is the nature of this rope — and how do we best hold on to it?
What constitutes the raw experiences that pull us back into the big world, of course, is a deeply personal matter. The thousands of possible answers we might give, however, share a common root in the most existential of our experiences: birth and death; exposure to the raw forces of nature; ventures into the anticumene — that is, into realms typically inaccessible to humans and thus requiring particular conviction and skill; and — perhaps most surprisingly — the sudden experience of chaos, confusion, and laughter.
Each of these experiences breaks through the bars of the small world, stimulates regrowth of our capillaries into the wild, and expands the distance between us and the miniature world of daily labor — precisely because neither of them are mundane, routine, or common.
For the goês and the magician, even more potent tools are available: the bolt cutter of daily ritual practice, the rebar pliers of meditation, and the collective scrap shears of occult lodges, orders, and working groups. All of these instruments function admirably — so long as they serve not only to sever the bars of the miniature world of work, but also maintain living contact with the realm beyond the human. These three best-known tools of the magical practitioner, however, also come with obligations, limitations, and, at times, with drawbacks. Therefore, let us examine them briefly one at a time.
Our daily practice essentially demands not only discipline, but also a clear routine or curriculum to work from. Once we arrive at more advanced stages, daily practice also requires sharp intent and clarity about what exactly is being sought in one’s engagement with the practice. Are we just serving ourselves, or are we practicing in service of something or someone else? Are we practicing for stability and continuation, or for change and upheaval? Maybe most importantly, who else is participating in our practice with us - for in the goêtic realm we hardly ever stand alone. All these questions bear significance, as we progress with our daily practice over the years. And they become especially relevant, if we dare to avoid inoculating the virus of the small world into the big one: to smuggle in, unnoticed, that same reverence for pure efficiency and productivity while becoming blind to purpose and necessities.
Occult practice, then — particularly at the beginning of one’s path in both work and magic — is an excellent rope, securing us to the rock face of daily lives while also offering a direct lifeline back to the big world.
After a few decades, however, it can become less effective as a daily tool, unless we are willing to radically revise our understanding of what counts as practice. Such decline of our daily practice as a rope leading out of the small world is tied to the following dynamic: After a decade or more of consistent practice, most of us no longer follow a prescribed curriculum. At this stage, our work no longer unfolds along a path of defined exercises and chapters. Instead, a central aspect of our craft becomes defining one’s own path, slowly uncovering it, step by step, from darkness. This form of advanced practice challenges us in new ways. At the same time, we often find ourselves — somewhere between the ages of 30 and 60 — under immense pressure from work and family responsibilities. In other words, even though we are now capable of practicing at a higher level, we frequently lack the time, space, and energy to do so. As mastery deepens, structure dissolves, while external demands peak. Our magical work must adapt, or risk either becoming hollow repetition or vanishing beneath life's intensifying grind.
Such slowing down of practice need not be considered a negative development; in most cases, it is temporary. However, it does require that we develop additional techniques during these years to avoid being fully absorbed by the small world. As an older colleague said to me during my first days of my wage labor: What the young man loses, the old man never regains.
Now, meditation is a million different things, depending on the practitioner’s definition — and, if they have one, depending on the orthodoxy of their tradition. In the present context, what I mean with the term is the withdrawal into silence, and more specifically, the withdrawal of sensory perception from the physical world. Of course, one can also meditate on the taste of a peach or the noise of a busy intersection. Yet, that is not my concern here. As another rope leading out of the cage of the small world, meditation in the Buddhist sense — whether in its Tibetan, Japanese, or Indian expression — is one of the most thoroughly tested instruments known worldwide. In principle, I want to recommend this practice without reservation.
In fact, it would take a considerable degree of discipline, skill, and obsession to apply this technique beyond the recommended measure. The only drawback that remains with this technique — particularly from a goêtic perspective — is that the kind of meditation referred to here withdraws the senses from the physical world. In old gnostic lineage, such withdrawal can lead to well-known side effects, which I consider at least potentially dangerous: First, stepping too often into deep meditation can result in a devaluation of fully engaging with reality — a kind of otherworldliness that robs the physical world of its necessary bite and sting. Second and similarly in its exterior expression, an excess of meditative stance in everyday life can then result in withdrawing one’s hands from the coals of existence — turning one into a spectator of rather than a spark within the world around us.
In such rare cases, life may continue to shout at us, slap us, or trip us up — simply to make us pay attention, listen, and change course. And yet, instead of responding, we sit cross-legged on the floor, blinds drawn, growing ever more permeable to pain rather than recognizing it as a vital signal for change. At least, from where I stand, it’s close to impossible to sit in samadhi and at the same time experience each event in my life as a conversation with the divine. Transcendence and immanence don’t like to share a bed, and neither the heart of a human. So, we each need to observe and decide according to our personal scale, at which point our retreat into silence turns into submission.
Such side effects have no place in my vision of either goêtic or magical practice.[2] Rather, they tend to remind me of the classical distinction between mystic and mage: the former sets out on the direct path to the divine, while the latter remains in the garden of creation — at the foot and along the slopes of the holy mountain — devoting themselves wholly to co-creating with daemons.
Finally, the collective scrap shears of occult lodges, orders, and working groups have a lot of to offer when it comes to securing us at the rock face of the small world.
Human beings — I am being told — are inherently social creatures. As most of them don’t interact with daemons, nothing shapes and conditions their worldview more profoundly than the exchange with others of their species.
Occult lodges and magical working groups can offer fertile ground for rekindling one’s sense of belonging and resonance with the magical realm. Though access to such spaces may seem easy today, their true value lies entirely in the quality of the people and practices they contain. What comes easily is not always what nourishes us; truth does not multiply with headcount; and the fruits of genuine wisdom rarely grow on the branches of occult degree trees.
Still, even a loosely knit magical gathering—lacking deep practical rigor — can, at the right moment, help us lift our gaze beyond the cage of the small world. A little imperfection has never harmed a sound technique. And most of us — including yours truly — don’t need a guru or enlightened master to hear the one word that knocks us off-center just when we most need it. For the most part, occult practitioners have been far too preoccupied with not casting their so-called pearls before swine — rather than gladly, and with pragmatic resolve, retrieving genuine pearls of wisdom from the common pigsty.
I guess, I should add, that many experienced magicians I know and respect would likely disagree with what I’ve just said. For them, magical practice is something close to sacred — something that must not be diluted. From many conversations, I’ve come to understand that they find it difficult to recognize value in occult groups that perform little dedicated ritual work — or if they do, then without genuine inner contact, hovering constantly on the edge of performance and pretense. To them, such circles offer little beyond a sense of social identity, perhaps a safe space for conversation, and often the air of a chess-club that no longer plays, but meets to get drunk in nostalgia of great games played decades ago.
Personally, I see no need for such harsh judgment.[3] There are years — sometimes even decades — in which we quite knowingly will not be doing the best magical work of our lives. These chapters are not about testing radical new frontiers, but about holding our shit together, paying bills, raising children, or surviving serious illness. To disappear entirely from the magical horizon during such hard times — simply because our standards are so impossibly high — serves no one, and least of all ourselves. In such periods, even loosely knit social connections centered around a magical theme or lifestyle can be immensely useful. Certainly, they will not challenge us to transcend ourselves, and if all goes well, we will eventually get bored by them. But in the meantime of the hard times, they can act as a legitimate crutch — allowing us to show up at the margins of the magical realm and fire off a small life-signal: Look — I stand here bruised, slightly cracked, but still alive on the inside. Don’t write me off yet, daemons and dead ones. I will be back with steadier hands and a fresher heart.
Having briefly surveyed such common methods by which we may remain peripherally tethered to the big world, we shall, in the next part, begin to look further. What might we do — how might we also approach the affairs of the small world—so that it no longer appears to us as such a harsh exile? It will become even more obvious than that we are not on a path to uncover silver bullets, but rather to arrange ourselves with the mess of everyday life in a manner that is at least somewhat genuine. Apparently, we are not on a search for grand redemption here, but for prudent accordance with ourselves. Someone once told me, when I asked how they had managed to live such a rich life and build such a remarkable career: The most important trick is never to be too proud for a solid solution. Take them all. Don’t hesitate. Because it's those who look for perfection, who will get stuck in the mud the deepest.
Footnotes
[1] Matthew S. Champion, The Fullness of Time - Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017, p. 198
[2] In light of this, I want to emphasize that the terms big world and small world should by no means be misinterpreted to imply that small equals the physical world and big some spiritual beyond. Even as a seasoned goês or mage, our work still anchors in service of this world where roses bloom and foxes steal chickens.
[3] If anything, I’d judge a group by the interest and sincerity of its members—not by how much practical magic they’re performing at any given moment. Finding thoughtful, principled people who share my values is hard enough. To further narrow my already modest social circle based on who's chasing the next magical summit would be to abandon myself to a juvenile disregard of what life actually asks of us all.
