Thanks for all your post, my expierances are almost exactly the same as many of yours with the demon. Currently I have destroyed my old magicial self and all of its paradigms of belief. I think the demon came about because of conflicting ideoliges in the back drop of my conciousness. Kabala seeming to be the main influence behind the conflict, so I have abandoned it complety along with my magical self so I can recreate from scratch. I get that same blurry vision affect when choronzon is present, my mind goes numb and its hard to think. I'm glad to see some posts, its reasuring in times of doubt, especially when dealling with this demon.

Thank you all.

Head in oven door.. right there! I notice some physical manifestations - bad things simply happening like slopping on self and whatnot but I always seem to avoid anything like that - good with the reflexes.. Drop to spill? I got it!

Taken down a couple of notches this week - had feelings of fear for future success. No longer. Instead using fear for advantage, getting back on the horse so to speak. . .

When I've noticed Choronzon pop up, it's never been in any physical or other visually identifiable form, rather a feeling where days are speeding past, everything you do seems to work without effort, so you stop putting effort into anything and you get a sense that you're too skilled/talented/etc. to be doing whatever it is you're doing. This could happen over the course of weeks or days and suddenly....bam, you've been taken down a peg or two and need to work doubly hard to get back to where you were.

If this manifests in a social sorta place, you'll likely have suffered damage to your reputation/ability to get a raise/etc. In a more personal setting, it's more like, "I dunno why I bother. I might as well slam my head in the oven door a couple hundred times" mopey sorta feeling that not only takes work to get past but makes you fear for future success.

Hyperventilation, blurred reality visually, (basic panic attack) feelings of being "better" than everyone else, feelings that there was nothing else for me to learn - that I knew it all because I could get something to work for me.

The demon attacks you when you feel "better" because it is supposed to bring you down, it makes it difficult for you to make friends or keep the ones you have, it attacks you when you jump the gun on technique and mastery. You can't make decisions. You are on the fence. It makes you look disgusting to yourself, it makes you angry, and negative reactions manifest themselves easily in your every day life. Instead of feeling better, you feel worse. What do you do about this? Kill the ego because you're not better or worse than anyone else. Never assume the power or knowledge of anyone you come into contact with and always remember that you are as everyone else is - as low as staphylococcus(LIBER777) in the scheme of reality.

My experience with this - and your post on it even - is taking me waaaaay down to where I belong (for the mean time). Learning always. I won't make the mistake of a fat head again :/

I have also seen Choronzon in dreams around the time (starting a few days before) of your post. In the dream he was large, naked, hairy, scaley, and had the usual Beast's horned head. . . it said "You're going to fuck up. You don't belong acting this way."

Thanks for the post. I needed the humbling and the forced jump into a serious daily study.

If I'm way off the mark here, and experiencing something else, feel free to let me know.

-- always learning. . .

so for those of you that have experienced the demon choronzon, how did it manifest itself? What kind of energies, visuals and thoughts did you get from it?

and thank you for all of your words.

I would have to agree with both Po and Anomoly. The demon served as a shifting of paradigms within myself from a time of complete self consciousness and selfishness to consciousness (of nothing) itself. I realize that parts of me are still being eaten away by this force but I am learning how to drive it back and I believe that my continuing "series" of sigils and practices are helping me to drive this demon completely out of my life. Even after experiencing ego death the self continues to rise up in the fringes.

Instead of the attempt to remove your ego pieces at a time, make it happen, dive right in.

You could post this under the general magical chat topic...

This demons function is to destroy the ego in the Thelemic tradition, which is the symbolism you have been using when dealing with it. My recommendation would be to just abandon ship and destroy the ego. It would seem that if the demon had nothing to attack, you would not have to worry about it. Metamorphosis acts as a gate way to the realization that the ego merely exists as the illusion we erect to shield ourselves from the big bad world. Carroll has written, “Because our beliefs imply a rejection of their opposite they severely restrict our freedom.” This makes sense because you have erected a self which invites attack from the demon. I am sure you are capable of non sense; why not fight back with a little bull shit of your own. That which you resist persists comes to mind. In the Thelemic tradition, this demon is meant to be mastered, but it would seem that the demon has mastered you at this point. Fight fire with fire. Call that fucker up and cast it out. Why not laugh in its face and then invoke the void as a defence? You could not attack something which has no outer structure.

The demon Choronzon in the Chaos Magic current is viewed as the obsession of any by products of the genius which are in turn considered the genius its self. The genius, consciousness and magic have no inherent qualities at their core, but the by products of these phenomenon may at time seem so amazing that they become representations of them for us. I would compare this occurrence to fundamentalism where in the mythos and the logos have no apparent separation, dirty dirty dogma!! I experienced this long ago through a magical personality which I created named Fate. I accepted the reality of the pseudo personality and all of the beliefs which it entailed. It took some time to banish as my friends would verify. The unwilling obsession of this pseudo reality took me to new highs in low. I attempted to banish it with paradigm shifts but this merely led to divergent obsession, which was fun in itself. Only after I full heartedly decided to abandon all representations of self and destroy the ego did the tremendous flux of selfhood subside, a humbling effect occurred and I became a representation of nothing. Consistently searching for the self leads no where, especially when we search for the self in representations of what the self could (be). Only after realising what the self could do did I function on a different level, a more balanced level where in the self became an expression of a force and not a solid structure created by it. Since this happened, I have clung to no characteristics of the self, I have realised that just as the occurrences of the universe exist in a transitory way, so does my self or selves. I would seem completely unrecognisable to myself six months ago and yesterday, and I relish this. I attempt new expression of the self on a daily basis in search of liberation, and I feel that I have become adapted to change in ways that seem odd to me even at this moment. I can not completely relate what I experience on a daily basis when it comes to this liberation, but I also would not say that I have become adapt at this demon, just used to it, lol. If we shall continue to produce creations then we must continue to deal with this demon. I would say that learning to deal with this demon successfully leads to a modest approach in life.

A good little exercise would also be to use Carroll’s Chaoist Haiku as a mantra

We believe in nothing,
The chaotic void within
The chaotic void without
Between nothing and nothing
let us conjure great doing

Create, use, banish, destroy

In my experience, Choronzon manifests when I get over-confident and it serves to remind me to keep my head on straight.

I say manifest rather than appear since I've never actually seen or interacted with the demon so much as become aware of it through events that it's thrown my way.

These events typically appear as what would normally be simple mistakes having massive negative consequences - often things you'd never think twice about on any other day but when they hit and you reflect on them the root cause for the event occurring was your own massive overestimation of your abilities, or feeling that you didn't need to cover the basics because you were essentially "too good" to have to.

For many years I had no idea what was going on, but reading about Choronzon seemed to fit pretty well and gave me some experience in keeping an eye out for signs that he might still be getting ready to show up again. I find that it's much more common the more responsibility I take on in my life.

As for banishing: I've found the best thing is to find something you normally do well and fail at it in a spectacular way - something that leaves you thinking, "why in the world did I ever think I was good at this?"

In a way it's kind of like inoculating yourself from the demon by knocking down your own ego before the demon comes into play (in this sense, the demon is kind of a pressure valve and not necessarily something evil at all!). The best part about this forced failure is that you can control the outcome so it's not terribly intolerable and at the same time test your own limits so you can "rebuild" yourself to be better than before. It's up to you to design these experiments, but I find that they're kinda cool, even if I don't look forward to them (fortunately, when one takes a proactive approach to this, they become less common than otherwise, at least IME).

I suspect that thinking about choronzon is only going to keep feeding it power. In this case I think the best way to deal with it would be to forget (the forced failure experiment will give you something to focus on rather than the demon, which should cause it to pass sooner.