Existential Kink

Metadata

• Author: [[Carolyn Elliott]]
• Full Title: Existential Kink
• Category: #books

Highlights

• “Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.” (Location 99)
• When you do this work, when you integrate your shadow, you become much more capable of receiving big beauty and big bounty in your life because you’re no longer accidentally, unknowingly rejecting it. This is magic. The magical worldview is this: As above, so below. As within, so without. (Location 313)
• This means: reality is fractal and holographic. Tiny changes that you make within yourself can have dramatic effects in the “external” world because you and the “external” world are not truly separate. In other words, magic is possible because of the fractal and holographic nature of reality. When you change something “small” within yourself or your immediate environment, you automatically change something very “large”—the whole world. (Location 316)
• 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. (Location 329)
• Human souls, like butterflies, start out as wormy incipient forms that need to be dissolved and re-formed before our full glory can emerge. (Location 334)
• “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” (Location 352)
• I propose that all our suffering and stuckness in life comes from forgetting that we’re divine sparks playing a wild kinky game and that great miracles can come forth in our lives when we reverse the process of forgetting by deliberately reclaiming the pleasure of the game—not just in our minds, but in our hearts and genitals. (Location 454)
• But it simply stands to reason that if we want to consciously embody our whole divine inheritance and become true magicians, to become people who are capable of attaining our most meaningful aims and experiencing bountiful fulfillment, healing, and love in our daily lives, then we need to wake ourselves up in the midst of this great freaky game, by savoring it, enjoying it, grieving exquisitely for it, getting off on it … just like God does. (Location 458)
• The Self with a capital “S” is the primal Selfhood of everything and everyone, which is (paradoxically) also our own real inner selfhood. This is so because the Self is infinite consciousness. It’s as if all of us humans are light bulbs, and the Self is the electricity that powers us. In becoming more identified with this underlying whole that we share with everyone, we paradoxically become more uniquely individual because we become free of our attachment to conventional, socially prescribed roles. (Location 558)
• To cast a spell is to communicate with your personal unconscious and the collective unconscious in a way that generates specific results through synchronicity. (Location 573)
• 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. (Location 580)
• You are not who you think you are. Whoever you happen to think you are, I assure you, you are not that. I suggest that you remind yourself of this often, because it makes this work easier. When you brush your teeth in the morning, think to yourself, “I’m not at all who I imagine myself to be. I’m something entirely different and far more vast and strange. Hmmmm. I wonder what I really am?” (Location 591)
• You see, the super-power of the spirit is total approval, total embrace, total celebration, the total perception of the already-existing perfection of life. When the spirit exclaims “perfect!” the conscious mind/the ego tends to hear that as “make things more perfect! They suck now!”—but actually what the spirit is saying is “everything is perfect right now!” (Location 614)
• That experience of total approval and total embrace, total absence of shame or aversion, is what the spirit is always trying to teach us about and it’s ironically what our conscious mind mistranslates as all those “shoulds” and judgments. (Location 618)
• 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. (Location 640)
• The game and the invitation of Existential Kink are to practice letting ourselves be madly, irrationally turned on and playfully excited by “strokes” in life that we would usually use to turn ourselves off. (Location 768)
• How turned on and approving you are tends to have a lot to do with whether you’re willing to playfully perceive your life as a wild, kinky game or whether you’re hell-bent on taking it seriously and believing that it “should” follow a certain ego-pleasing pattern. The more you allow yourself to be “turned on,” the less resistance you offer to the positive, creative current that’s always attempting to move through you into manifestation. (Location 777)
• The more you give yourself permission to be shameless, the more the channel of communication between your conscious and unconscious mind opens, and the more effectively you can generate positive results. You are the only one who can grant this permission, at the level of your actual agency. (Location 810)
• 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. (Location 904)