There’s an old saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Which is a rather extraordinary state of affairs, and I must confess that until very recently I did not understand what it meant. However , recent events have given me an insight. Nu Magick practitioners often have a very powerful experience early on in their work, which they quite naturally find horrendous. Quite simply they find themselves either in magickal work or in a dream (which in Nu Magick is not very different) having to kill a spirit, who may appear as a black magician. I often get an email the next day on what happened. Spirits are an energy, and as we know from physics, energy can not be destroyed, so what is happening? It seems that what is really happening is that the Nu Magickician is actually destroying an aspect of him or herself - a false persona, not only of the self but of the views of the world. With this magickal action, there is a tremendous liberation, and the magickal abilities immediately start to work on a new level. Killing this spirit kills many of the false ideals or views of spirituality that we accumulate during our lives. I must stress that in every case, the imperative to ‘kill the Buddha’ was not pre-meditated, at least on the part of hte Magickian, although Spirits may have led the magickian to do what is necessary.
In western magic, there is a phenomena known as the doppelganger - a spiritual version of the aspirant that is never met - for to do so is very dangerous. It seems that the doppelganger and the ‘Buddha’ are one and the same, and with Nu Magick we have the mechanism for moving on to the next level of spirituality.