Mesmerizing

What does it make it? Mesmerizing, as soon as there is some light integrating the realm of fantasy, imagination, even of god, with the realm of touching, grounding, earthing, the material that leads us to take action to decide. At times, the decisions can be very blurry, or they cannot be absolutely defined.

Since I was little, I was always wanting to stay in this liminal place where I could still be dreaming awake. I would see colors, listen to sounds, and be mesmerized by the stimuli that my senses were perceiving, but was that real, or was that something I was making up? Fast forward many, many years, now I feel that this is how inspiration lands: it lands because I hear something, I see something, I am stimulated by my senses, or even better, by my emotional body. The senses are trying to translate into a form, to a shape, to a sentence, to an idea, into something that must make sense.

I like this liminal space that we are in right now in the collective, where most of the things that are revealed are possibly waking more people up. The conspiracy theorist already knew this because we were able to sense these anomalies. We were able to trust our bodies with the knowledge of what really was going to hurt us or not.

As an artist, I work not with less is more, but I start with more is more. The more, the merrier. I get stimulated by music or landscape or even just words and ideas, and then I go through a whole journey of accumulation of these, gathering them either printed on the wall or in places that I can have a distance and observe them. This practice is super important, not only in art but in life. The accumulation of stimuli can sometimes distort what we see, our perception. If our perception is distorted, then the narratives we create can have severe consequences.

What happens when I can no longer create that distance?

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

These times and in the next 18 months, we have the possibility to really grasp beyond this timeline that you perceive as reality. Like Ulysses in The Odyssey, who gets lured by the sirens, it is not his sexual appetite that moves him, but the appetite for knowledge, for knowing what is real in that moment. We all get lured by fantastic shapes, by possibilities of self-glory, by being loved by someone or a whole group of people. In reality, can we really see ourselves? How is our reality mesmerized or not?

Odysseus gives me another question: can I listen to the song without surrendering the direction of the vessel? was the danger the song itself? if not, the danger appears when the lure smashes the direction with a false sense of authority.

Let us explore the word “mesmerizing.” Etymologically, mesmerism takes its name from Franz Anton Mesmer.¹ He believed that an invisible, universal force could operate through and between bodies, something he called animal magnetism. What passes between a body and an image, between one person and another, between memory and perception, that gives something enough force to enthrall us?

I love this word because, throughout my artwork, I have been told many times by my commissioners, clients, and the public that my work has this capacity to mesmerize, to hypnotize, leading directly to Hypnos, sleep. I keep returning to this language throughout this inquiry: dreaming awake, waking up, illusion, delusion, awakening from a dream. Perhaps mesmerization exists somewhere along that threshold, where I am awake enough to perceive and still capable of dreaming what I perceive into another form.

In a way, I see myself as mysterious at times because I do not even understand the definition of how I am seen or how I see myself. Depending on the perspective, I could see myself more as a logical intellectual wanting to find out the meaning of things, or sometimes as the loopy, foggy persona that wants to keep things in the mystery because it is a safe place to be. Now, it is neither one nor the other, because I have not been going back and forth. I have been integrating how these qualities served different purposes.

Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind.

I will zoom out a little bit so you can connect to what I am saying. If you zoom out in your life, let us say one month, one year, one decade, and possibly more, and you go back to what was motivating you in your childhood to be curious and fascinated by how reality worked, find yourself in the room when you were a child and see what you were surrounded by:

-Did you have musical instruments?

-Did you have posters of people that you loved, movies?

-Did you have a rack of books?

-Did you have a space in the garage that had many tools or vehicles?

-Were you always out in the field running around behind a ball, a football, or bouncing one on the court?

What kind of motivation was luring you to pay attention to something or someone where you could feel included and feel taken?

In my case, it was always between two things: being with a large group of people, laughing, dancing, playing tricks, being a menace for the group because I always had crazy ideas and I was not perhaps the most sane leader in the group. Giggles will lure me, stupid jokes will fascinate me, but at the same time, those are very silent, well-kept, mysterious questions that wanted to go and investigate:

-Read books.

-Watch movies to get lured by other people’s narratives.

-Heavy journaling and always creating something (a young photographer and clothes-maker).

-Ponder how reality was possible.

-Were the planets real planets?

-Could I reach them?

-Questions like this simply became: Where did my father go once he crashed his car and perished?

-Where do dead people go?

-Can I communicate with them?

-Can I read his underlined books to find him?

-Why do I have to believe religion telling me that he actually is in heaven?

-What and where is heaven anyways?

The questions, little questions about how things work, became existential, and that has been my path. I got mesmerized by the bigger questions, perhaps induced by the absence of my father or the willingness to be so close to him. I created a whole new reality that mesmerized my life. Only in the last year have I been able to understand this kind of projection, because if we take how projection works, it is fascinating. In order to project something, you need a machine, or a device. You need something that emits light, and it is pointed at the surface. The distance from the lens to the surface is going to determine the size of it.

This is where the word projection becomes almost literal in my life, from the Latin proicere, to throw forward. The English word first appears as an alchemical term for casting a powder onto molten metal to transmute it. Something inside throws an image forward. The image lands on a surface outside of me, and distance changes its scale. What I carry inside can suddenly appear enormous simply because of where and how it is being projected.

Now, take it that you understand a little bit about lenses. You will have to have the capacity to focus. Use a lens, like the one in the eye, to focus so that what you see is clear or not. Without the focus, you just see smoke or light being projected, but you will not have any refined image.

And no one else can focus that lens for me. Someone may point toward the image, question it, love me, confront me, or stand beside me while I look at it, but the adjustment of focus belongs to the person looking through the lens.

Even our projections in life, sometimes coming from very strong emotions that were not resolved in childhood (AKA trauma), can create narratives, create images, create opponents, and create enemies.

If we feed them and we surround ourselves with situations, people, and things that are feeding that urge, we may arrive at places or situations that are absolutely detached from what we all call reality. I know I am speaking in tongues. I am mostly trying to talk about something that I have been witnessing, but there is no need to tell the details of my life very directly. It brings, at times, pain and it brings joy, depending on what perspective I am looking at.

So what feeds a projection until it becomes powerful enough to recreate reality? Repetition? Emotional charge? An unresolved need? The validation of others? The pleasure of finding confirmation for an image we have already decided is true? At what precise moment does fascination become possession?

Projection becomes especially hungry when it is trying to fill something that has been missing. Then every new event can become evidence, every person a character, and every coincidence can be recruited into the narrative.

All I know is that every day, every morning that I wake up, I want to confront my life with what is the dream and what is the reality that I am building. This idea of mesmerization can be very positive if I am aware that I can create beauty, but at the same time I can create awareness. We are one week away from a very powerful eclipse, and I have been studying a little bit the fixed stars, the guardians of the sky. They do not move or they don’t seem to be moving as they are so far, far away. The angle from which I measure them does.

The upcoming eclipse is going to have the fixed star Fomalhaut, the mouth of the fish, the Watcher of the South, directly next to the full moon in Pisces, at 4°. Granted, my Saturn is exactly that degree, so this eclipse is going to land on my first house with the ruler of my South Node. Saturn is the structure I built without a father, from the inside, through my own experience. Fomalhaut asks that vision survive contact with the ground instead of dissolving into fantasy. The eclipse is lighting up the exact site where I already had to become my own architecture.

I have Alphecca, Corona Borealis, on my Moon in Scorpio at 12° in the ninth house, conjunct my MC. The ninth is the house of looking for truth. My Moon there is already balsamic to Neptune in the tenth, already dissolving toward the divine instead of holding a fixed shape. Alphecca is the crown of eloquence and artistic sensitivity, carrying a shadow of sorrow or scandal through love when the gift is not held with care. The crown sits on my feelings, not on my identity, so what reaches the world is emotional truth wearing a crown.

I have Antares, the Watcher of the West, on my Black Moon Lilith at 11° Sagittarius, in my eleventh house. Lilith is the energy that cannot stay quiet. Antares governs the spirit of adventure and obstinacy, vulnerability and truth, and in my chart it plays out inside groups, since the eleventh house is where it sits.

I have surrendered by now, after my second Saturn return, any guilt, any sense of burden, anything that I brought from the past. I have, without a real authority, like a father figure, been able to build my own inner and outer authority based on my own experience. There is a sweetness and bitterness at the same time, the bittersweet knowledge and understanding that it is with the absence of my father that I actually found my own authority. That is a truth of my story, my narrative, but it does not have to be, and it never was, a sad one where I made myself a victim. On the contrary, trying to look for his image in everything he mesmerized me with when I was little is where I found my own truth, my own knowledge, my own capacity for trial and error. I owe to the system my place, and he also has a place in the system as the guardian and the compass of a life.

Authority belongs next to mesmerization. I spent years looking outward for an image, following traces, books, questions, memory, and meaning. Eventually the search generated an authority built through my own experience. The image of my father could remain meaningful without having to become the authority through which I interpreted my entire life.

Regulus is also going to be important in the eclipse. It sits on the other side where the south node, the sun and mercury will meet, and being the King. The crown is very much desired, and when one cannot have it, one can envy it and be enraged by it. There is only one position that a person with responsibility can afford to have, and it is the regal knowledge that you do not, as the Sun or a king or a queen, have to prove who you are. You just are. That is the difference between a diva and a queen, by the way.

This is precisely where lack meets the crown. The hunger to prove, to be vindicated and loved, to possess the position, can make a projection tremendously seductive. Inner authority changes the relationship to the image because the crown no longer needs to be supplied by somebody else’s gaze.

The danger that I find is when one is lured by the projection, and the projection becomes our reality. It is based on something that has been missing, so it has been fueled by lack. It is engaging with the motivation created by that lack, and it becomes very hungry to fill it. The projection becomes the scope, and it becomes, unfortunately, the way life is going to be enacted because it is so hungry to fill the space that it detaches us from our own reality.

Mesmerization begins with attraction. Projection throws the image forward. Lack gives the image appetite. Repetition gives it substance. Eventually the image can become the lens itself, and once it becomes the lens, everything entering the field appears to confirm it.

Take, for instance, somebody with:

-A full moon in Taurus at 26° in the seventh house where Algol sits

-The Sun and Neptune in the first house in Scorpio

-Mercury in the 12th house in Scorpio

-The South Node in the 12th house in Libra

Algol carries the myth of the Medusa, the head Perseus severed and still held, still capable of turning a gaze to stone even after death. The star marks that head, the eye in a face no one could look at directly without being turned to stone. It is a star that blinks, its brightness visibly changing over a few days, and old astrologers associated it with the demonic head and its ominous gaze.

If you have a planet or a point in your own chart conjunct this star, it is worth looking at closely, because Algol carries the narrative of wanting to behead something or someone, rage that rises until it possesses the life around it rather than moving through it. In this particular configuration, and in the person I am describing, if the projection is so strong that the illusion or delusion does not allow them to see themselves, they can actually start to suspect or not trust others. Everything becomes a lie, and people are stealing from them. The rage is there as well, and it rises to a place where the whole life, or part of it, becomes based on trying to fulfill that narrative.

The question is: is it true, and how much of this narrative is attracting others to sustain it because it is convenient, or because they do not know better? It can actually create so much harm that even if the people around them have love and patience, it just destroys it. It is very powerful to be aware of what provokes this motivation, and it is usually, again, a sense of lack or a traumatic experience that has not been integrated fully.

Not long ago, I saw this play out with someone near my sphere, and it is so difficult to watch because there is nothing anyone can do about this projection except that the person has to awaken from their own dream and their own mesmerization.

You could have, for instance, Mars retrograde conjunct Algol, which could carry an enormous amount of rage, frustration, or the impulse to cut something off, but that same Mars could be in a trine to Pallas Athena in Virgo in the ninth house. And suddenly the story changes. Athena brings strategy, discernment, and the capacity to look at the situation from another angle. In the myth, she gives Perseus the reflective shield through which he can see Medusa without looking at her directly. That is perspective. The same Medusa is there, the same head is there, the same power is there, but there is another way of seeing it and therefore another way of using it. It is all about perspective.

What interests me in witnessing something like this is the terrible autonomy of the projection. Love from the outside cannot automatically dissolve it. Patience cannot focus another person’s lens. Evidence may even become incorporated into the projection itself. There comes a point where awakening belongs entirely to the person dreaming.

There is something sobering in understanding that another person’s inner reality remains their territory. I may perceive the distortion, I may experience its consequences, and I may stand at a distance where the image becomes visible to me, while the person inside the projection may experience it as completely real. I cannot enter another person’s lens and turn the mechanism of focus.

What have you been projecting?
What have you been feeding?
What are you mesmerized by?
What is feeding the thing that mesmerizes you?
Can you create enough distance to see the image while you are still inside the experience?
Can you recognize when imagination is opening possibility and when projection is beginning to organize the entire field?

We are all given the possibility to look at what we are projecting and possibly change timelines, meaning waking up from the dream before the dream consumes us, and taking inner responsibility and authority for the reality we are creating.

Maybe this is what I am ultimately interested in: remaining capable of being mesmerized. I want beauty to move me. I want mystery to remain mysterious. I want an image, a sound, an idea, a person, a star, or a question to open a door in my perception. I also want to know that I am the one looking through the lens.

Can I remain mesmerized by life without surrendering my capacity to see it?

“Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

— Dante, Inferno, Canto I, trans. Longfellow

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I recommend listening to the conversation below with Parker Lewis. It gets technical at times, but it is worth it.

Money can be mesmerizing. Fiat can be mesmerizing. Bitcoin can be mesmerizing too, especially when you do not really understand how it works, what you actually own, where the yield is coming from, and who is projecting what.

Parker is very clear that if you want to save in Bitcoin, the simplest thing is to own Bitcoin. The conversation goes into treasury companies, Digital Credit, volatility, cash, and even the price of a ribeye.

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1. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), proposed the existence of a universal, invisible fluid that permeated living bodies and whose flow could be influenced or transmitted between individuals. The word mesmerism derives from Mesmer's surname; mesmerize originally meant to subject someone to mesmerism before acquiring its modern sense of captivating them.

See Iain Chalmers, “Mesmer’s 1780 Proposal for a Controlled Trial to Test His Method of Treatment Using ‘Animal Magnetism,’” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 98, no. 12 (2005), and Merriam-Webster, “Mesmerism” and “Mesmerize.”