All experience is perspectival. Which is to say, whatever the present experience is like, there are other alternatives that could have been experienced but aren’t now. That’s what “perspective” means. It means no matter what the experience is, it’s never reflective of every possibility. It’s also precisely because of this we don’t rely on evidence. Evidence lies.

This implies choice, selection. It implies volition. So subjectivity implies volition.

And vice versa. If we start with volition, we’ll end up with subjectivity.

Because of that, whoever is reading this, know that you can’t ever die. Your conventional body could die and if or when it dies, it disappears as a vision in front of you or in front of others. It dies because someone is there to see it die. You were never born. All you can do is transform your perspective. But your perspective isn’t created or destroyed except maybe from another perspective! But those other perspectives are just that: subjective perspectives! Not the truth. Not anything objective. Not gospel. Not data. Not dogma. Not “how it is.” Even 100 billion such perspectives seemingly working together do not and cannot depart from subjectivity. If 100 people like strawberry ice cream, it doesn’t make it less of a preference than if only 1 person liked it.

So if you understand this properly, you’ll realize your own perspective should be the most important perspective for you. Your own perspective is the perspective by which you live or die, by which you rise or fall, and by which you feel pain or pleasure, and by which you experience wisdom or foolishness. Let me repeat: your own perspective. Your own. Not mine. Not hers. Not his. Not its. Just yours!

So a conventional image has a problem in that it’s a story of limitation. For example, you’re a man or a woman, but you can’t switch or be both according to convention. (A hermaphrodite is neither man nor woman because to be both man and a woman means to satisfy the conventional demands of both men and women, and hermaphrodites cannot satisfy either such demand.) Nor can you be a neuter. According to convention you can only be in one place and not in two places at once. And of course there are more limitations that I don’t have the time to enumerate. So that’s the limitation a specific kind of self-image imposes, the kind that appears to be common wherever I look (I probably have something to do with it, yea?).

So don’t bash your ego. Don’t bash your image. Don’t deny yourself or try to destroy yourself. Whatever you do, you’ll always be something or someone experiencing something. Always. You don’t have to be human. You don’t need to have a body seemingly made of flesh (which is to say, you don’t have to revolve around a tactile/kinesthetic structure in your experience). You’ll never succeed in ridding yourself of yourself in any kind of metaphysical sense.

Listen, whatever you actually are, you can never change it. And whatever it is you aren’t, you can never become it. So if you are anything, you can’t get rid of it. And if you aren’t something already, you can’t become it. Think about it long and hard.

So when you perform magickal transformations, including when you transform your image or persona, please understand. There is something that transforms. And something that doesn’t transform. If you have no idea what it is in you that doesn’t transform you’ll never achieve greatness. And if you think you’ll someday be ego-less, you’re just wasting yours and other people’s time with that dead-end idea. You’ll always experience something and not something else. Even if you experience everything, then you’re not experiencing a small fragment, so even “everything” would be a choice, and a limited one.

What’s never limited is your potential. Your potential is not limited now. Hasn’t ever been. And never will be limited. But whatever fragment of that infinite potential you will want to emphasize, stabilize, make bright, familiar, and reliable, it will always only and ever be a fragment. And that’s OK.

So you’ll always have some self-image. You’ll never get rid of it. The best you can do is stop being unconsciously inflexible about the specifics of what and who you appear to be to yourself and to others. Stop bashing yourself because some Zen moron called “Zen master with an inka” told you to. Stop seeking mindless annihilation, because you won’t find it. But if you think you can find it, fine, do it. Go ahead.