Chapel Perilous of The Entropic "BOB"

"Chapel Perilous is a stage in the magickal quest in which your maps turn out to be totally inadequate for the territory, and you’re completely lost. And at that point you get an ally who helps you find your way back to something you can understand. And then after that for the rest of your life you’ve got this question: Was that ally a supernatural helper, or was it just part of my own mind trying to save me from going totally bonkers with this stuff? And the people I know who’ve had that kind of experience, very few of them have come to an absolutely certain conclusion about that.

Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I,” cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason, and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.

That’s what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous book. Chapel Perilous is tricky that way."

(RAW / POEE)

"BOB" artificially induces shock in Initiates, so that the brain learns to habitually Disconnect under stress. Thus, it works on intuition alone - direct knowledge. (...) With this comes tremendous powers, called 'Siddhis'. We've all heard stories of emergencies in wich some normally wimpy mom, in order to save her kid from a burning car, suddenly acquires the strength of a thousand madwomen and rips all the doors off their hinges. Utilizing this effect, Dobbs sets up fake emergencies to inflict on his followers so that they're jolted out of 'Sanity'.

"BOB" calls this method 'The Zen of Terror' and his 'little accidents' are called UltraKoans (Koans are the bulldada 'impossible questions' that regular Zen Masters pose to their students). They are perfect for While-U-Wait ego-breaking. The pupil or 'John' is shocked into into 'Displacement Mode', in which he feels he is 'standing to one side' of himself and reality - seeing it all, but no longer in it. One foot in the water, one on the ground, so to speak.

The soul becomes the smoke from "Bob's" Pipe, drifting towards Slack..."

(13013)

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