When I was a teenager I almost went to Jerusalem in the year before I went to university, but I didn’t in the end—and I almost volunteered at the charity shop Oxfam, but I didn’t in the end. Yet, over a decade later, I did both. I think there are things that you are just meant to do—and that must be done, one way or another. The only thing your conscious will can do is twist these, pervert the energy. There are women I have met that I somehow felt a tension with and then ended up sleeping with years later (even though, when I felt the tension, I had no intention to sleep with them).
When we think about Socrates and his daemon, when we think about Joseph Campbell with his “follow your bliss”, when we think about Carlos Castaneda’s “does this path have a heart?”, when we think about Aleister Crowley and his “Holy Guardian Angel”, and when we think about Christ’s injunction “man cannot serve two masters” it is to the above situation which we refer. You either serve the daemon or you serve Mammon (social respectability). I could have given you rational reasons to do with why I wanted to go to Jerusalem—to do with politics or a career, but those were just made up. Truly, there was a force within me that said, “You must go.”
It helps to still the conscious mind and wait for “the void” to speak—these imperatives are in no way conscious, and they have no justification (“So you’re in Jerusalem because you’re really religious?” “No—but I just felt I had to come here. Call that religious if you like, I also felt I had to sleep with a certain girl—is that religion, too?”). It’s integrity, not goodness—it’s loyalty to what is higher in us. I call my daemon “Horus”, because the Peregrine Falcon was my favourite animal as a child. Horus tells me what to do.