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Going My Own Way….The Path of Eclectic Paganism

Mar 2nd, 2012 by

Pagan

Eventually the road will end and you'll see just how free you really are...or aren't.

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

As a modern Eclectic Pagan, Ralph Waldo Emerson has had huge a huge impact on me spiritually. Emerson’s pantheism and belief that all, regardless of belief and practice, have access to what he called the Over-Soul who was for him the best way to describe the reality of Immanent Deity formed, forms me, an intuitive comprehension of Deity that makes sense.  He believed, as I do, that we are all ultimately of one substance, sharing in one Spiritual Reality that merely takes cultural masks so that we may more easily experience it. I would later learn that this realization is the heart of all mysticism. For Emerson, the mystic was someone who was a master of will and choice and one who saw the moral truth behind appearances, getting this awareness not primarily from intellectualism but from the immanent reality of their own experience. This experience flows naturally from the mystic’s own spiritual awakening. As someone who has frequently been the recipient of both paranormal and spiritual experiences and as someone who could rarely, if ever, take anything on faith so long as there was a path to available validating experience. Emerson’s point of view has always resonated very powerfully with me and still does. Since first reading Emerson long ago, the factors influencing my practices and beliefs have become far more diverse, but I have never lost sight of either the simplicity or elegance of Emerson’s spiritual worldview.

Within the last few weeks the blogosphere has been a bit of a buzz regarding the relative merits of traditionalism vs. those of “making things up.” Ian Corrigan, through his blog Into the Mound has been doing a unique spiritual working that involved calling forth the Court of Brigid a distinctly Celtic Pagan rite of spirit art of a kind that I have never seen in Pagan magick before. This working caused another magickal blog personality Rufus Opus to offer up his somewhat controversial opinion, an opinion that seemed to both reject and envy Ian’s work at the same time. Then Jason Miller (indomandium) added his opinion to the mix, an opinion that was somewhat more reasonable than R.O.’s opinion.

Over the last few years, I have noticed a, in my opinion, ridiculous and unnecessary schism between Magickal Traditionalists and Magickal Eclectics. I was a solitary practitioner of witchcraft/magick and so was nearly everyone else I knew and before the rise of social networking and blogging I never noticed that such a schism even existed. I had totally avoided Myspace while it was in its heyday because, rightly or wrongly, I saw it as a titanic waste of time. I largely avoided Facebook as a waste of time as well until maybe two years ago when I broke down and, at the request of a friend who wanted a way to keep in touch with me, created a Facebook page.

Well, I am happy to acknowledge that I was wrong. Facebook, like any other tool, is only as good or as bad as how you use it. As soon as I got comfortable with Facebook I quickly made a point of networking within the Pagan and Magickal Community. I was rewarded by being  exposed to ideas, practices and inspiration that I had never encountered before along with colorful and engaging individuals whose presence I came to value. Unfortunately, this cornucopia of knowledge, inspiration and communication was joined with a concurrent ugliness and pettiness of human egotism as I quickly found myself surrounded by folks obsessed with their practice being the “One True Way” who judged others were “fluffy” and ignorant of real Paganism and magick. Ironically, I was nearly universally unimpressed by the levels of either knowledge or wisdom possessed by those busily mocking others unlike themselves. To note, I claim no vastly enlightened or peculiarly insightful understanding of magick, the occult or witchcraft (…well maybe a little bit) but still I remain unimpressed.

Fortunately in the aggregate my experience of Facebook has been far more positive than negative but I have to admit that if I was a younger man, less confident in my beliefs and practice, this onslaught may have turned me from the Pagan and Magickal Community altogther. In any case there have been plenty of times where I was, and sometimes still am, left staring at shaking my head at the arrogance I see expressed by some at those who do not share their point of view.

Pondering the schism between Traditionalists and Eclectics I am forced to quote Thomas Paine when he said, “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”

One cannot be exposed to great wisdom of traditions outside one’s own and not be changed from that exposure.  Allow me to state categorically before I continue , that true traditionalists, those who seek to reconnect us with our ancestral pasts lost due to the onslaught of Christianity have my deepest respect. By seeking threads of continuity, Traditionalists do the Pagan community as a whole a great service.

However, just as some Eclectic Pagans are nearly whimsical in their choices, some Traditionalists are hidebound, rejecting out of hand anything that wasn’t practiced by their ancestors. Both are, in my opinion, missing out.

I personally couldn’t be anything other than an Eclectic Pagan because I have found that once one sets foot upon the road of studying comparative mythology, world religions and their wisdom, and the various mystical practices of the world’s great religious and spiritual traditions one begins to see things differently. One is forced to face and attempt to integrate different spiritual paradigms. How does one come to terms with the differences between the Hindu Chakras and the Taoist Elixir Fields? How does one integrate philosophical Monism with the Buddhist conception of Dependent Origination? How does one square Panentheism with Polytheism? Is there a way of integrating the reciprocal relationships our ancestors had with the gods and the ‘pure religion’ of devotion seen in monotheistic mysticism? What portions of what you’ve learned is relevant to your belief system and spiritual practice and what is not?

Pagan

Candy can be great.......but it can also rot out all of your teeth and cause you to gain 100 pounds.

All these questions can be answered via study, contemplation, meditation, inspiration, experience and intuition.  There are no hard and fast answers. No one is going to tell you that you are correct or incorrect. The surety of faith found in traditionalists who have teachings handed down for centuries or millennia  is not something that Eclectic Pagans have. The awareness we possess comes not from the security of structure but from the fluidity of experience. This fluidity is freedom.

We have freedom to explore, to seek, to know and to experience well beyond the boundaries of those who cling to any single set of doctrines or dogmas. We are free to blaze new spiritual trails and be inspired in new and wonderful ways. We also have the freedom to fail to be accountable, to drift aimlessly, to allow ourselves to wander down blind alleys leading nowhere and to wind up as “jacks of all trades while being masters of none.” So no, Eclectic Paganism isn’t all wine and roses.

Eclectic Paganism is a tough road for the serious practitioner and she will have to develop three core skills without which she will not make any discernable progress despite what seems to be years of practice.

The first quality is discipline. Discipline is a quality of strength and determination that allows one to drive through the arid moments of one’s practice which will come. One certainty in any type of spiritual practice is that there will be times when you no longer find joy in your practice and that the gods seem distant. The world’s great mystics have experienced moments of spiritual aridity so, unless you are suffering from a profound entitlement complex, you must accept that you will as well. At such times I recommend seeing these periods of dryness as tests. Press on, all the while offering up your experiences, hopes, fears, and doubts to your gods. In time this time of testing will pass and you will be rewarded with new levels of awareness, peace and trust in yourself, the gods and your path.

The second quality I recommend the Eclectic Pagan develop is intuition. By intuition I am not referring to psychic intuition but instead the intuition of an adaptive unconscious mind that, upon receiving new information, organizes and integrates that information allowing the Eclectic Pagan to experience true ‘eureka’ moments of true inspiration based on a wealth of experience and study. This type of intuition allows one to develop truly unique insights based on previously absorbed information from potentially countless sources. The only way to feed the intuition of the adaptive unconscious is to study and practice, study and practice, study and practice. There are no shortcuts. If you do this, you will be rewarded with stunning magickal and spiritual insights that will guide you in ways that no external teacher, no matter how well meaning or wise, ever could.

The third necessary quality that must be developed is spiritual discernment. Spiritual discernment relies heavily upon one’s intuition and is what I like to call one’s “Spiritual Bullshit Detector” or (SPD). Your (SPD) is an internal protective mechanism that too is based on consistent study. To develop your (SPD) study comparative mythology, comparative religion and the universality of mystical experience. There is a thread of commonality that weaves its way through the worlds spiritual traditions. Of course there are differences between the world’s spiritual traditions and their mythologies but they are often different cultural masks as opposed to intrinsic differences. The works of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung are invaluable in seeing through the cultural costumes worn by various myths and getting to the heart of their meaning…which tends to be universal spiritual truths and/or profound truths of the human condition. In combining this kind of study with the work you are doing within the, even loose, system you have chosen you will find that you will be sufficiently grounded enough to prevent a charlatan (whether New Age or Old School) from taking advantage of you.  Like the skill of a cultivated intuition, the skill of discernment is more an art than a science. However, despite that, your sense of well-developed intuition and spiritual discernment are your best defenses, as an Eclectic Pagan, against being taken advantage of or being deceived.

Don’t allow anyone to claim that your path as an Eclectic Pagan is somehow invalid. Ultimately for all of us, whether Eclectic or Traditional, the truth of our spirituality is in the sense of fulfillment, wisdom, understanding, compassion, connection and success it offers us and not the superficial criticisms of others. It has been said that the success of a recipe is in the tasting. The success of your Eclectic Pagan spirituality is in the depth of your relationship with your chosen gods or spirits and ultimately it is only your opinion and their opinions that matter.

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To Blaspheme or Not to Blaspheme…That, Dear Readers, is the Question

Jan 27th, 2012 by

Blaspheme.....yes.....blaspheme.. serve Satan!

“There is only one blasphemy, and that is the refusal to experience joy. ”
- Paul Rudnick

 

I’ve been going through some pretty profound spiritual changes lately. I can’t get into the specifics here, because our subject today is Blasphemy. Because great minds think alike, my friend and fellow Pagan Galina Krasskova, also posted on the subject of Blasphemy and I highly recommend her erudite article on the subject. Now, dear reader, don’t be expecting such a cultivated exposition on the concept of blasphemy from your’s truly. No, I’m taking another tack. I going to talk about a personal act of blasphemy. Blasphemy as an act of liberation.

After stripping down my altar and, with some difficulty, storing away the Egyptian statuary and iconography I had been using as part of my spiritual practice. I just looked at the empty space hesitant out of a near primitive impulse to not offend the gods. So, I thought I would give it some time before setting up my altar with the regalia of the path that had been forever in my bones, Witchcraft. In the meantime I thought to go through my books and rearrange my library. I had a ton of Egyptian Pagan related books that I wasn’t going to be referencing again in the near future so I thought a good use of my time would be to lovingly box-up these books so as to make room for books more relevant to my current path.

And pack I did, and pack and pack. So much stuff that I wouldn’t be using again anytime soon. Damn boxes of books get heavy. Luckily I’m virile and strong for a forty year old man otherwise my back would have been at risk. If my back would have went, I would have known who to blame…not my lack of exercise recently…but the angered Egyptian gods, particularly Isis, who was assuredly smiting me for my faithlessness.  Thankfully, due to the blessings of the Lord and Lady, my back didn’t fail me and I was able to clumsily take several heavy boxes into the attic.

With my old books put safely away I began sifting through books on Witchcraft and Wicca so as to decide which books on these subjects would adorn my bookcase. During this long process, I stumbled upon a book I had purchased, fingered through and put away, the legendary Mastering Witchcraft by Paul Huson. This books is old school. It’s witchcraft in the sense of mixing and matching pretty much any available, workable form of practical magick. It isn’t about any sense of internal consistency, its about magick that works. Well, I had already read through the book and largely wrote it off because my prior magickal training over the years covered pretty much everything Huson writes about several times over. However, there was a portion of the book I had never paid much attention to.

This is where the Blasphemy comes in. Paul Huson recommends that no matter what sort of non-Christian you are in a Christian culture that you should…hold onto your britches Martha…recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Yes, I said it, recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Paul Huson suggests that, in order to finally shake off the shackles of Christian indoctrination, we should recite the most sacred prayer uttered by Jesus backwards (You know him, “Jesus loves me this I know because the Bible tells me so…”) This is the first prayer many of us learned as Christians. I learned it from my father and used to, as a child, say the Lord’s Prayer prior to bed every night.

According to Huson, this act of Blasphemy will help the magician to shake off the final bonds of Christian indoctrination by forcing us to face up to any remaining Christian programming deep in the subconscious mind allowing us to regain power long lost to such conditioning.

Well, I thought about it for awhile. But felt compelled to do it. Partly out of an inner impulse to be free of such onerous unconscious programming but also because I was curious. I was curious the way I am curious to see a new horror movie. And without giving too much away the results of the rite and the effects of a horror movie were not all that dissimilar.

In order to begin the right, I typed out the words of the Lord’s Prayer in reverse. These are found in the book and later I found, to my chagrin, that the phonetic version of the Lord’s Prayer in reverse was is to be found on the internet. Here it is for those interested:

The Lord’s Prayer backwards spelled phonetically for ease of use.

He's coming!

 

NEMA! LIVEE, MORF SU REVILLED TUB NOISHAYTPMET OOTNI TON SUH DEEL SUS TSHAIGA SAPSERT TAHT YETH.
VIGRAWF EU ZA SESAPSERT RUA SUH VIGRAWF DERB ILAID RUA YED SITH SUH VIG NEVEH NI SI ZA THRE NI NUD
EEB LIW EYTH MUCK MODNGIK EYTH MAIN EYTH EEB DWOHLAH NEVAH NI TRA CHIOO.
RETHARF RUA!

Scared yet?

After typing it out, I printed out the barbarous words of invocation on a fine, clean sheet of imitation parchment. I set up my altar in the traditional manner. One statue, on the left representing the Great Mother, another on the right representing the Allfather. On the left and right of these statues are candles but I left these unlit because for this rite only one candle was to be lit, a central candle I had set upon my altar pentacle.

I set a playlist on my computer of relaxing, yet somewhat dark, music and settled in grounding myself as I normally do and then, via the gesture of Rending Space, created sacred space. After I blessed the space in the name of the Mother and Father of all life I pulled out my blasphemous sheet of faux parchment and read the words aloud in a clear, sonorous voice while at the same time seeing great bolts of lightning shattering the manacles of Christianity that bound me neck, wrists and ankles.

Then something interesting happened.

With the shattering of the manacles and chains. I was suddenly flooded with images of my childhood. Images of being taught Bible stories as a child came first. These which were innocuous enough  but then transformed into images of pain and rejection from when I was a young teen who, at one point, wanted to be Christian. Images of Sister Janet, the Principle of Saint Nicholas’/Saint Mary’s School pulling me out of line for communion because I hadn’t yet been baptized or confirmed into the Catholic faith. I was suddenly really angry, “Would Jesus have turned me away because I wasn’t yet baptized or confirmed?” I was angry, “No he wouldn’t!” I angrily spoke to myself.

The images, words and feelings kept arising from the well of my unconscious mind. Mrs. Quack (seriously that was her name pronounced ”Kwalk”) telling me that I deserved hell because of Adam and Eve’s sin and no matter how good a person I was I was doomed unless I accepted Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, death and resurrection as a fact (I just couldn’t). Up from some lost and forgotten pit within my unconscious was the terror I felt that my mother, who being herself a Witch, was doomed to Hellfire for her rejection of Jesus Christ. Streams of long forgotten fears, angers, hurts and resentments arose and fell in waves for a period of about twenty minutes. It all ended when I finally allowed the image of the Catholic parochial school and it’s attendant church to burn in a monstrous conflagration that was very satisfying to witness.

Then, when my reverie finally ended I found myself sitting in silence looking at the candle the was quietly burning upon my altar. I felt a mixture of peace, emotional exhaustion and liberation. I was spent but felt quite good.

As directed in Huson’s book I performed the rite two more times, on two consecutive nights prior to retiring. Each rite had some modicum of effect, but nothing like the first rite. After all was said and done I must say that performing this rite was a positive experience. Not only does it free one from superstitious fears of hell and a wrathful Yahweh but more importantly it frees one from the dark pit of guilt, pain, and the sense of being inherently flawed or sinful that comes part and parcel with indoctrination in a Christian culture.

So, if the question is indeed, “To blaspheme or not to blaspheme?”  I say blaspheme because when done with the intent to liberate it can be quite powerful indeed.

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Book Addiction

Jan 18th, 2012 by

It begins early.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
- Henry David Thoreau


 

Is there anything better than a brand-new, crisp, clean, book? I mean the kind of book that smells like it was just printed and you were the first human being to lay your hands upon it? I love them. I love walking down my favorite aisles in a bookstore and just browsing the selection.

I love getting boxes from Amazon, ripping them open and touching my shiny, new, unblemished book before I place it, with reverence, on my bookshelf, to be surrounded by a press of other books who were each, in their time, reverently placed on the bookshelf.

The new, pristine book will sit as an icon of my dedication to my magickal and mystical pursuits. It will serve as an icon because there is a damn good chance that the book in question will have little if any practical benefit outside of offering me a self-congratulatory sense of, “Wow, look at that library” every now and again.

That’s right. My name is Christopher DeGraffenreid and I am an occult information addict.

I just can’t help myself. I get involved in a specific practice such as, for example, energy work and I will feel an undeniable compulsion to purchase every single well-regarded book on the subject. I don’t just randomly buy books, no, my compulsion is far more sophisticated than that. My addiction is thematic and qualitative as opposed to quantitative. I have to check and assure myself that I’m buying something of value. After the realization, “Hey, this is a good book”, I’m as doomed as a fat kid in a candy store. That book will be bought.

Then, unfailingly, after a couple of months I’ll find that I’m not as in to a given practice as I thought I would be (it happens) and I’ll stop reading about it. The would be fine if I hadn’t bought seven books on the subject but read only five of them. This wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t mean that I haven’t read maybe 20% of the books I’ve ever purchased. And, because I rarely if ever give away or sell books and because the overflow in my bookcases eventually becomes too great, these unread books wind up in carefully marked boxes in my attic. Over the years I have dumped a lot of money into books I’ve never even read.

I just can’t help myself. I’ll see a book and very quickly assess quality of content. Then if I judge it to be a good book I’ll say to myself, “I know I don’t need this right now, but one day soon I might and what if it goes out of print? You’ve seen that happen before Chris, the book you didn’t buy that got rave reviews went out of print and you had to pay $60.00 on ebay (bidding wars happened all the time back then) because you just had to have it. Fourteen dollars now is better than 60.00 later right?” How can anyone argue with that logic. The rationalizations are bullet-proof.

My son could have gone to a good college.

I know I’m too far gone to be saved. I know that I’ve tweaked my brain-chemistry one too many times. There isn’t even a wagon for me to fall off of. I’m writing this as a warning to you, dear reader. Don’t become what I have become, an occult information addict. Once it begins, you’ll chase that dragon for the rest of your life.

You’ve been warned.

 

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A Course Worth Taking – A Review of Jason Miller’s Strategic Sorcery Training Course

Oct 30th, 2011 by

If I were a Tarot Arcana, this would be me.
“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a
mistake.”
- Meister Eckhart

 

I’ve always been more of the Hermit than the Magician, more mystic than magus. Contemplation and meditation come more easily to me than do complex magickal rites. Even the magick I have practiced, mostly Wiccan spellcraft, and Golden Dawn type Ceremonial Magick, has largely been geared to the esoteric pursuit of illumination or enlightenment as opposed to concrete physical outcomes. Over the last two years however, for a number of reasons, my interest in practical magick has increased dramatically.

About two years ago I stopped working with Golden Dawn magick altogether due to a number of factors the least of which wasn’t the realization that my temperament and desired aesthetic was thoroughly Pagan in outlook. I was never a fan of invoking the Qabalistic names of YHWH. Of course I realized that YHWH, in Qabalistic parlance, is more akin to the Infinite Impersonal Absolute of Brahman than the Near Eastern tyrant of the Hebrew Old Testament. It didn’t matter. I just couldn’t connect emotionally to the Divine Names that were a part of the rituals I did daily despite my best efforts to do so. If I don’t feel it in my guts, deep down where I live, I’m not going to be able to long continue the work.

So, even though I loved the Hermetic Qabalah for its completeness…and I am a sucker for internal consistency and completeness…I decided to go back to my Pagan roots.

Ok, enough about me.

This blog post isn’t meant to be an autobiographical account of my journey but instead a review. So, let’s get to it.

Fast forward to a point over a year ago. I decided that I wanted to become more of a practical magician and though I have a library of books dedicated to practical magick of all sorts I wanted to go step by step in order to refresh myself. I decided to, after purchasing Jason  Miller’s book Sorcerer’s Secrets, to enroll in his Strategic Sorcery Training Course.

Prior to enrolling in Jason’s course I had considered joining the B.O.T.A or the Servants of the Light but after careful deliberation and divination I concluded that they would be more of what I was already familiar with, so I decided against joining either group and it’s a decision I am glad I made. The last thing I needed was more Qabalistic theory keeping me trapped in my head.

The Strategic Sorcery Training Course is a 52-week training course in numerous aspects of practical magick. The training begins where it should, in my opinion as a long-term practitioner of meditation, with a discussion of the importance of meditation and assigning the student a goal of developing a daily meditative practice. This wasn’t new to me as I had been meditating daily for some time, but it was refreshing to see another magician who valued the practice as highly as I do. Meditation strengthens the will, helps the student learn to relax the body/mind complex, and aids in the cultivation of both the clarity of mind and concentration skills necessary to most effectively practice magick.

From meditation the course moves on to a copious number of topics and techniques including:

Zone Rites

Offerings (very important and something not touched on in the vast majority of magickal texts and trainings)

Elemental Workings

Planetary Workings (including a new set of Planetary Sigils…I was wondering when a modern magician would actually do this)

Magickal Materials (are the right materials important or not in magick?)

Discussions on the nature of God, the gods, consciousness and how this relates to the practice of magick

Using your environment to empower your magick

Working with spirits

Constructing your own spirits

Necromancy (working with the spirits of the dead specifically)

Astral Projection

Grimoiric Magick (plus a new Strategic Sorcery Mini-Grimoire with new spirits and new sigils…again, it’s about damn time)

Mysticism vs. Magick (they aren’t at odds)

Financial Magick

Time Management (where does one find the time for magick and everyday life?)

Divination and Magickal Intelligence Gathering

…I could go on, but there wouldn’t be a point. The fact is that this is truly the most impressive all-around magickal training I have yet seen, The course’s strength is in its eclectic nature. Jason’s influences range from Tibetan Buddhism, to Christianity, to Greco-Roman magick and it shows.

Through this course one learns to trust one’s self as a magician. One learns that the goal is to learn from the past, but not to ape it, not to do things exactly the way they were done centuries or millennia ago but to develop the skills needed to forge your own magickal path or adapt your current magickal path/tradition to your own needs. There is no “best” or “right” way to do magick and there is no greater skill for a magician to develop than self-trust. To be a magician isn’t to be a little clone of Crowley, Regardie, Agrippa, or any other magickal luminary, to be a magician is to Know and to Dare…to know yourself and your chosen system and to dare the adventure of forging a new path for yourself when the time is right.

The Strategic Sorcery Training Course is delivered weekly via email in PDF format and includes homework assignments that Jason requests you email him so he can review your work. I admit that I was incredibly lax in the homework department, not because I didn’t do the work, but I was busy working Jason’s techniques into my existing practices. This naturally lead me down different rabbit holes of experimentation based upon a given week’s work. Sometimes this would lead me to create a variant of a technique or practice that would take me somewhat far afield causing my current experimentation to be quite different from the assigned work.

I would recommend that if one is a beginner in magick, one should stick with the course material and assignments as presented. For a beginner, that is the best way to learn. You have to walk before you can run. However, for myself with two and  a half decades of occult practice and study, I found myself immediately cutting, pasting, adding and subtracting techniques as the muse struck me. As I always do, I was doing what my intuition and self-awareness guided me to do.

I’m actually considering handing in some homework, but only time will tell…but time is in short supply these days.

As I continue to write new blog entries those who’ve taken the course will be able to see the influence the training has had on my work. Those who haven’t taken the course will be left thinking that absolutely everything presented on this blog is solely the offspring of my own brilliance…not that I have a problem with that.

The Strategic Sorcery Training was the single best magickal investment I have made in a very long time. The course helped me to build a personalized magickal practice that fits into the magickal paradigm in which I work. That’s another benefit of the training, the techniques presented throughout the course can be incorporated into just about any magickal system imaginable so long as the magician is comfortable making the appropriate changes to his or her current mode of working and isn’t hamstrung by a slavish devotion to a given tradition.

I’m not sure certain whether or not Jason will be raising prices for the next cycle of the Strategic Sorcery Training Course but in its entirety, the course cost me about $3.00 a week. One hundred and fifty dollars for a year’s worth of training. I have yet to see a value like that in regards to magickal training. Because so many books on the occult and magick simply regurgitate the work of what a hundred different authors have already written, I have a couple thousand dollars worth of books in my attic right now that haven’t taught me as much as this course did.

To learn more about the course and to contact Jason Miller for more details go to: http://www.inominandum.com/home.html. I’m happy I took the course and, odds are, if you want to learn some effective practical magick in manner that is very modular and can be adapted to your current magickal practice, you will be too.

 *Just as a disclaimer, I have no connection to the Strategic Sorcery Training Course except as a student and don’t know its creator Jason Miller save through this course and his books. I have received no remuneration of any kind for this review.

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The Challenge of Acceptance and Faith

Oct 22nd, 2011 by

Faith

“Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there’s all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action; acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens”

-Arthur Gordon

 

Just beyond the horizon of our need to control and cajole reality into forms most suitable to our preferences we find ever-present, like some dark and unwelcome visitor, the unyielding reality that all things must end. Whether in the absolute finality of our own death or in the little deaths reflected in the impermanence of circumstance we must all, in our own time, make peace with endings. We must, for our own sake, come to accept such transitions as a necessary aspect of life.

In youth we don’t consider the reality of endings, for us the sun will shine forever, the rose, in perpetual bloom, will always be fragrant and the love we feel will be eternal and we, immortal. We haven’t yet entered into the fullness of life, haven’t tasted its full measure but instead have only sipped the sweet foam at its head.

It is only as we mature that we drink fully of life’s cup, experiencing the many flavors of its entire offering. Beneath the sweetness of our first sips, we encounter the sweet and the bitter in ratio according to our cup and no others’. For some, tragically, the sweetness of life is drowned early on in a depth and bitterness so much so that its sweetness is only the vaguest memory or not at all. For others, those many would consider blessed or lucky, the sweetness of life seems to be a perpetual undertone, a flavor that can be clearly enjoyed throughout life until the draught is done and the cup finally put down.

It is most common in our culture of happily ever after that many perceive endings as failures. According to this myth, anything that does not last forever (a fundamental impossibility) is seen, not as having value in and of itself, but instead as a total loss. As if life were a simplistic spreadsheet in which all events and circumstances can be broken down into wins and losses. Besides the skewed and unrealistic perspective that this imposes upon the truth of the human condition, this myth inflicts deep psychic scars upon those who embrace it. For those who embrace the myth of happily ever after, the toll is high in regards to a damaged sense of self-esteem, a general sense of being a failure, an ever-increasing cynicism and ultimately a loss of hope that leads to a sense of fatalistic resignation regarding the nature of life itself.

The belief in happily ever after is not, in and of itself, destructive so long as it is seen as one potential amongst myriad other potentials. It is when happily ever after becomes a necessity or even an entitlement, at the outset of any endeavor, that it becomes a tremendous source of suffering.

What inspired me to look at this subject was a recent event in which a friend (who we’ll call Amy) found herself suddenly single after a long and meaningful relationship of over six years. I had been, over the course of years, witness to the cumulative history of conflict that led to her final and absolute separation from her significant other. I saw the frustration and pain inflicted one upon the other until there was nothing left of the relationship that could be saved. Ironically, though it is often a couple’s history that helps them to work it out and salvage the relationship, sometimes there is just too much history to allow things to ever be made new. Such was the circumstances of Amy’s relationship.

Sometimes Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back together again.

Naturally Amy’s grief came in stages, first with an honest sorrow, next a furious assigning of blame, then the dawning of a clear and mature assessment of her own level of responsibility in the relationship’s ending, followed finally some time later by an acceptance of things being as they are. In other words, Amy handled the ending of her relationship as most do. However, there lingered within her a subtle sense of failure. It was as if her relationship of over six years, all she had shared, all she had given, and all she had felt was somehow made invalid by the very fact that it hadn’t culminated in a happily ever after.

Beyond destructive self-recrimination and the haunting sense of personal failure that comes from the dashed expectation of happily ever after, beyond the pain and the shame of “What’s wrong with me?” there exists a state of mind that transcends finding fault and shifts one’s focus above the ultimately pointless mathematics of calculating blame, to instead focus upon what can be taken from the ending so as to support a new beginning. To get to this place we (Amy and indeed all of us) need to change the lens through which we view the sometimes painful passages of our lives.

To get to this place we need to disabuse ourselves of the belief that endings are failures. We must come to a place of accepting that the magick of life is not contained in the attainment of some goal whose specific criteria of accomplishment must be met before we can consider an endeavor a success. We must accept that if we are to experience the joy of living, that joy is to be found in doing for the sake of doing.

Faith

In love we must love for the sake of that love. In giving we give for the sake of giving. In offering compassion, we must do so for the sake of that compassion. We must offer friendship for the sake of friendship. If we choose to do these (and countless other) things for any reason other than these clean motivations we are setting ourselves up for tremendous disappointment.

Ultimately, the disappointment we will experience is rooted in the fact that if we do what we do for the sake of some future reward we will often discover, rather quickly, that we are guaranteed no reward or reciprocity for our efforts.

Sometimes the brass ring is none other than horse you are riding on.

I’m not writing from a Pollyanna perspective attempting to convince you that you will always welcome painful experiences with open arms, that no positively dreadful circumstance will ever come along and utterly upend your new expanded perspective on life’s challenges. No, but what I would like you to do, starting now, in this very opportune moment is to begin looking at life challenges as teachable moments. Start being mindful of your motivations particularly in regards to your intimacies. Decide to truly be in the moment, motivated out of love as opposed to the desire for future gain. Being mindful in this manner takes practice because we are often rather ignorant of our motivations. However with time and a commitment to real self-honesty, mindfulness gets both rather easy and rather illuminating.

Seek the grace that can be gained, not by a fatalistic resigned acceptance of life’s pains, but through the fully conscious embracing of life as it is, warts and all. Acknowledge that life is as it is for all of us. Life has always contained triumph and tragedy, beauty and ugliness, compassion and cruelty, love and hate, these realities are non-negotiable for all beings. So, by necessity, if there is a Divine Consciousness that underlies all of this, then life is meant to be exactly as it is.

This realization, this understanding, is the heart of faith.

As a Pagan Mystic I have the humility to admit that I cannot comprehend the “whys” of life’s most terrible aspects though I have faith that all things rest within the warp and woof of Divine Will. My personal understanding is the challenging aspects of life form a kind of crucible of the soul whereby we may learn more quickly and more deeply the lessons of spirit in a manner unavailable to us any other way. In the crucible of the soul, suffering may bring forth compassion, loss may bring forth a deeper sense of valuing, and life’s most painful moments may cause us to seek depth and meaning.

That search is the heart of all spirituality and the grace it provides is its fruit.

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Overcoming Resistance to Entering Trance

Oct 10th, 2011 by

Stress

“When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

 

It goes without saying that in our information saturated, multi-tasking society that many would find even the most basic forms of conscious, directed relaxation quite daunting. In The reality is that cumulative stress, over time, conditions the body to maintain a state of constant hyper-alertness making simple relaxation exercises (the kind of which was detailed in my previous blog entry) very difficult. Well, in this blog post I am going to introduce you to effective modern resources that will make conditioning a state of rapid relaxation quite easy. The last thing you need is to feel stressed about your inability to relax.

Many of us involved in esoteric/occult pursuits tend to look toward the past for clues on how to best direct our spiritual/magickal development. This is fine, broadly speaking, but to ignore modern innovations for the sake of doing things the way “great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandma” did is to toss the baby out with the bath water. The fact is that the ancients did what they did because they discovered a given technique to be effective. A given technique, once shown to be effective, was then made a sacred element of dogma or practice. Spiritual traditions have a long history of appropriating or developing effective techniques of psycho-spiritual development and then obfuscating them with sectarian elements. The purpose of this post is to help you to see that effective relaxation, the entering of trance, is something that can be taken out of the sectarian sphere with effective modern techniques that will speed your progress dramatically.

Trance, for the sake of this discussion, is nothing more or less than a state of focused, relaxed concentration in which the body and mind are both deeply relaxed yet the mind is alert and aware. That’s it. There are deeper states of trance, states where one can effectively work with techniques such as astral projection and past-life regression, but if one is looking for a useful state of trance from where one can practice magick or enter into deeper states of meditation, this is where we begin.

In modern parlance we are looking at what is called the “deep alpha brainwave state.” This is where most trance happens if you are looking for any degree of conscious control while in trance. There are deeper states such as “theta” and “delta” but these states are very elusive unless and leave one’s consciousness adrift on the tides of the subconscious mind unless one possesses a high degree of trance training through some years of practice. Also, “deeper” isn’t always “better.” You need the right tool for the job and in this case the alert, yet relaxed, state of the “alpha” brainwave state is the hammer to our nail of effective trance training.

The key to consistently entering trance is practice because practice leads to conditioning. We are looking for a Pavlovian trance response whereby your body/mind complex recognizes the trance state and, via that recognition, allows you to enter that state at will. Fortunately, with modern tools you can achieve this level of competence within a few weeks or months as opposed to years.

The most effective, and non-invasive, means to enter trance is through a combination of visualization, affirmation and modern audio technology.

For the last fifty years, give or take, it has been known by neuroscientists that certain tones of the proper amplitude can consistently induce states of awareness that are only experienced normally by long-term meditators. This audio technology is referred to as “beats” and these beats come primarily in two varieties Isochronic beats and Binaural beats. Isochronic beats are well-known by anyone who has used a drum to enter into a shamanic state of consciousness. The drumbeat creates a “frequency follow response” in the brain that guides the practitioner into the desired state of consciousness. That’s it. That’s the magick, along with a dose of cultural conditioning that causes the drum to represent a portal to  the trance state. This is not to deny the power of the shaman’s drum as a potent magickal tool in its own right, but that is not our concern here.

Drums work well enough but using a drum or a drum CD is far from your only option in regards to entering trance. Plus, as a matter of aesthetics, some people just don’t like drums, finding them distracting as opposed to trance inducing. Perhaps this is cultural, but no matter what the case, some do not find the sound of drums aesthetically pleasing enough to allow for the relaxation needed to enter trance.

This is where modern audio and digital encoding comes in forever liberating us from the use of any one tool for entering trance.

Now I am going to point out a few top notch resources you can use to support your trance explorations. I have used each of these products and can vouch for their effectiveness. Unless otherwise noted, each of these products require headphones in order for you to reap the full benefit of this audio technology.

 

Recommended Resources:

Ocean Waves (Alpha Relaxation Solution) by Dr. Jeffrey Thompson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thunderstorm with Alpha Brainwave Pulses by Dr. Jeffrey Thompson

 

 

 

 

 

Alpha Relaxation System by Dr. Jeffrey Thompson

 

 

 

 

 

 Songbird Sunrise and Thunderstorm by Dr. Jeffrey Thompson

 

 

 

 

 

Sacred Ground: Music and Window Frequencies for Meditation by Kelly Howell

This 4-CD set is a great value. For conditioning yourself to enter the alpha state, the first CD is of particular value but the entire set is worth having.

 

 

 

Each of the above CDs/CD sets will make entering trance easier than you ever thought possible. The key to using these resources effectively is in using them with a consciously directed technique of trance entry such as the technique I describe in my previous post ( ). You are using these CDs not merely as relaxation aids where you allow yourself to drift off into a blissfully calm reverie but to consciously engage the trance process (using your will) and condition, through repetition, your relaxation response. As a magician you are seeking self-empowerment and these CDs or audio tools like them (of which there are many) will aid you if you use them properly.

These CDs are best thought of as training wheels for the mind. You use them as you need them but when you are done with them you set them aside. Your goal is to be able to enter trance at will, not to become dependent on a tool.

 

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A Technique for Entering Mystical/Magickal Trance

Sep 25th, 2011 by

magick, mystical, isis, meditation, trance, relaxation“If we know the divine art of concentration, if we know the  divine art of meditation, if we know the divine art of contemplation, easily and consciously we can unite the inner world and the outer world.” – Sri Chinmoy

 

No one in any way familiar with magickal training can doubt the need for meditation not only for its documented  spiritual benefits (thousands of years of Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu practitioners/masters attest to this), but for the benefits the practice offers in regards to physical and mental health (brain science and psychology attest to this). Any quick internet search regarding the benefits of meditation can allow one to easily discover them so I won’t belabor them here as such details will add needless length to this post without adding much of anything useful to the information provided. The one thing I will state emphatically is that if one intends to grow spiritually both as a mystic and a magician, one must meditate. One’s choice in regards one’s preferred style is a personal one as there are many styles of meditation to choose from. What matters isn’t one’s preferred style of meditation, what is important is that one includes meditation in some form in their spiritual/magickal practice.

There is a common misconception that relaxation and meditation are the same thing. They are not. Relaxation is the gateway to meditation, a necessary prerequisite to the practice but it is not meditation itself. However, without initially relaxing the body and mind, one may find it difficult to meditate effectively at all because relaxation aids in concentration and concentration is one of the true keys of true meditation. Being able to effectively and quickly relax will go a long way toward allowing you to become proficient in any meditation technique you decide to add to your practice in the future.

Well what is relaxation?

To put it succinctly, relaxation is nothing more or less than the release of both psychological and bodily tension, allowing the body to enter into a quiescent state. This state is accompanied by a concomitant reduction in brainwave frequency whereby one enters what is commonly referred to as the “alpha” state. The alpha state is most often encountered when one is engrossed in a good book or television show, daydreaming, or laying back and enjoying some music. The alpha state is the target state for entrance into magickal/mystical trance which can serve as a gateway to deeper meditative experiences or other interesting spiritual or psychological practices such as shamanic trance journeying, instant magick, self-hypnosis, active imagination processes as found in psychosynthesis, etc.

The exercise that follows is based loosely upon a common occult relaxation exercise found in both Donald Michael Kraig’s Modern Magick and Jason Newcomb’s Book of Magick Power. Both books are highly recommended if one is interested in Golden Dawn style magick in the Western Esoteric Tradition. I have strongly modified this exercise to reflect my personal magickal/mystical philosophy and interests. I have made a point of adding footnotes to the exercise so that you can easily personalize this exercise  for yourself. This is important because any exercise that you personalize according to your personal philosophy will become far more powerful…for you…than one borrowed from the insights of another. However, it is worth noting that you should learn the structure and purpose of the exercise before making modifications.

 

 Entering Magickal/Mystical Trance

Step 1: Getting Comfortable

Find a comfortable place to sit, somewhere where you will not be disturbed. Maybe stretch a bit to get the kinks out then take a few deep breaths and begin to relax. Feel your body becoming peaceful.

 

Step 2: The Invocation of Isis1

I call to thee Isis, You who are the Mother of the Universe,
You who are the sovereign of all the elements,
You who are the origin before the centuries,
You who are the totality of the divine powers,
You who are the queen of the spirits, the first of the celestial ones;
the unique image of Deity.

 

Step 3: Building the Solar Sphere 2

Imagine, with your eyes closed that a sphere of brilliant sunlight, with about the same diameter as your head, is floating about one foot above you. Now, using your imaginal faculties, make this brilliant sphere as real as you can. Feel its light and heat washing over your head and shoulders bringing relaxation and comfort. This sphere is the light of Divine Consciousness, the Light of Isis, and along with the warmth it radiates, feel the love Deity has for you…the love that It is. Allow yourself to feel this and to know that it was your invocation to Isis that called the sphere forth. Bathe in the light and the love for a few moments. Don’t worry if you aren’t able to achieve a very clear sense or visualization of the sphere at first, just sense it there and that will be enough.

 

Step 4: The Descent of the Solar Light 3

1. Imagine a shaft of this solar radiance, this light of Isis, entering the crown of your head. Feel, sense and intend that the solar radiance is filling your head with light. As the light fills your head allow the top of your head, your scalp, your face, your cheeks, eyes, lips and jaw to relax. Allow this to take as long as necessary but not so long that your mind begins to drift from the purpose of this practice. After your head is completely relaxed affirm silently to yourself, “Isis is all, all is Isis.” 4

 2. Allow the solar radiance to enter into your neck and throat, completely relaxing your neck and throat. Once this region of your body is relaxed affirm, “relax, relax, relax” and then “Isis is all, all is Isis.”

3. Allow the solar radiance to move down into your chest, shoulders and upper back, completely relaxing your chest, shoulders and upper back. Once this region of your body is relaxed affirm, “relax, relax, relax” and then “Isis is all, all is Isis.”

4. Allow the solar radiance to flow downward into your arms, hands and fingers, completely relaxing your arms, hands and fingers. Once this region of your body is completely relaxed affirm, “relax, relax, relax” and then “Isis is all, all is Isis.”

5. Allow the solar radiance to flow downward into your abdomen and lower back, completely relaxing your abdomen and lower back. Once this region of your body is completely relaxed affirm, “relax, relax, relax” and then “Isis is all, all is Isis.”

6. Allow the solar radiance to flow downward from your abdomen and lower back into your groin, hips, and buttocks, completely relaxing your groin, hips, and buttocks. Once this region of your body is completely relaxed affirm, “relax, relax, relax” and then “Isis is all, all is Isis.”

7. Allow the solar radiance to flow into your thighs all the way to your knees, completely relaxing your thighs and your knees. Once this region is completely relaxed affirm, “relax, relax, relax” and then “Isis is all, all is Isis.”

8. Allow the solar radiance to descend from your knees into your shins and calves all the way down to your ankles. Once this region is completely relaxed affirm, “relax, relax, relax” and then “Isis is all, all is Isis.”

9. Allow the solar radiance of Isis to flow downward from your ankles into your feet, relaxing your feet all the way to the tips of your toes. Once this region of your body is completely relaxed affirm, “relax, relax, relax” and then “Isis is all, all is Isis.”

Allow yourself to sit in this state. At this point, you are nearly certainly feeling deeply relaxed and comfortable but not only that you should be experiencing an invigorating, pleasant and loving sense of connection to goddess Isis whose holy energy you have (through your intention and Her unconditional “yes” to those who honestly seek her out 5) invoked through this disarmingly simple yet effective rite. Take some time to observe your physical and emotional state at this time. Note the peace, the tranquility, the relaxation and any other feelings you sense at this time. Silently affirm to yourself that you are memorizing these bodily sensations and emotional feelings and that you can and will be able to return to this state of consciousness more and more easily each and every time you practice.

When you first enter trance you may experience any of the following (see them as confirmation of your entry into trance):

  • A sense of warmth
  • A sense of coolness
  • A sense of lightness
  • A sense of happiness
  • Minor twitches in your fingers and toes
  • A sense of floating or sinking into the surface upon which you are sitting
  • Most obviously a sense of being deeply and comfortably relaxed

At first you may find it difficult to stay awake or to maintain concentration while attempting to enter trance. Try to concentrate on the process as best you can. It will get easier and easier to concentrate over time. Do your best not to yield to sleep too often because we are, with this exercise, attempting to condition a relaxation response and NOT a sleep response. However, if you find yourself too tired to avoid falling asleep it may be that your body simply needs some rest. Take a nap, get some sleep and then attempt the exercise upon waking.

Upon finishing the practice, take the time to write-up your experience in your magickal diary, book of shadows, grimoire, or journal. Writing things down is a great way to record your progress, but also has a nearly magickal way of making your experiences “real” as opposed to having your experiences being merely “in your head.” There is a little mind-science behind this but it isn’t important for the sake of this post.

Practice this exercise once or twice per day for 3-4 weeks. By doing so you will condition yourself to effortlessly enter a state of magickal/mystical trance. This will form the foundation of much of your inner work to come and form a springboard for deeper meditative practices.

Footnotes

1. The nature of the invocation (in this case of Isis) is one of first recognizing Deity as sovereign in context of this practice and secondly of literally calling forth the power of immanent Deity to overshadow the working and bless the work. As an Isian (or Isiac…a term that I’m less fond of for aesthetic reasons) I have chosen Isis as the deity who is to represent the Absolute Divine Consciousness though those of different spiritual leanings could easily invoke the deity of their choice with equal effectiveness. If you don’t work with deities you could just as easily invoke your Higher Genius, Holy Guardian Angel, Higher Self, etc. The choice is yours.

2. The Solar Sphere represents the divine energy of the deity (or inner divine nature) invoked in the initial invocation. The imagery of the Solar Sphere was chosen because solar deities such as Isis, Christ, Apollo, Ra, Horus, and others  are spiritual illuminators in that they banish the darkness of ignorance and illusion. The Sun is the perfect symbol of spiritual illumination and has served as such throughout history. If however you are a devotee of a deity who has a nature as a  non-solar illuminator such as the goddess Hecate you can easily work with her traditional symbolism as a Torch Bearer and one who lights the way. Using  Hecate as an example, you could instead imagine the flashing flames of Hecate’s torch in place of the Solar Sphere. Allow your knowledge of the deity you work with to be your guide.

3. The process of The Descent of the Solar Light represents the in-filling of the practitioner with the illuminating and loving power of  Deity. The purpose of which is to literally “enflame thyself with prayer.” This practice, over time, will not only bring a deep sense of peace to the practitioner but will also energetically shift him or her into alignment with the power invoked so that one can become more truly a vehicle of Divine Will or True Will such as the case may be.

4. The statement, “Isis is all, all is Isis” is an affirmation of the core principle found in Crowley’s Gnostic Mass “There is no part of me that is not of the gods!” This statement affirms the essential oneness and indivisibility of the material and the spiritual worlds as well as the essential oneness and indivisibility of the self and Deity as understood by the great mystics and masters throughout the ages. Just as in other portions of this exercise you should feel free to affirm your inherent oneness with the deity or spiritual power of your choice and tradition.

5. As immanent and ever-present reality, it is the nature of the Absolute to say “yes” to all attempts at contact. Divine grace and presence is always available and the act of invocation is an acquiescence, on the part of the practitioner, to that reality. In other words, invoking Deity does not so much call the deity into the presence of the practitioner as it invites the practitioner to peer through the illusion of separation long enough to see that Deity has been there all along.

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A New Beginning

Sep 18th, 2011 by

Sorcery, magick, bhakti, Isis, MysticismThe Breeze at Dawn

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

- Jalaluddin Rumi

 

Well, where to begin? It looks like a new beginning is in store for me in the blogoverse after Google shut down both my Mystic Wicca blog as well as my Gmail account. It’s a long, troublesome and annoying tale of betrayal, password hacking, and seedy emails. Suffice it to say I had nothing to do with the malfeasance attributed to the blog or the email  account in question. I apologize to those of you who followed this blog only to find that it disappeared one day.

As I don’t accept the concept of accidents I presume that despite my frustration at the loss of my blog, Mystic Wicca’s time was up. Now, looking back in retrospect, I am certain it was.

A great deal has changed since Mystic Wicca’s demise. I can no longer, in all honesty, call myself Wiccan despite my deep connection to the faith, its aesthetics and sensibilities. As a point of fact, I can no longer define my path at all save that I am a magician and a mystic spiritually devoted to the goddess Isis in the manner of the bhakti yogi who surrenders him or herself to the Absolute in the form of their Ishta Devata or chosen deity. Via the vehicle of ritual and meditation, the bhakti yogi seeks to transcend the ego-I and in doing so achieve self-identification with one’s chosen god(dess) who is none other than the Self inherent in all things. Thus one’s Ishta Devata is the wayshower to the God(dess) beyond God(dess) who is the numinous, fundamental ground of being called Tao, Brahman, Awareness, The Self, The One and so on.

This is a snapshot of my mystical leanings.

On the magickal side…

Over the last year I completed Jason Miller’s Strategic Sorcery course which really opened my eyes to the power of cross-system magickal practice. Through this course I have become, in regards to magickal practice, a chaos magician (small ‘c’) insofar as I see no one system as being more or less valid than another. The fact that a Wiccan spell, a goetic evocation, a novena to Catholic saint, or a shamanic journeying ritual can be equally effective (depending on the skill of the practitioner) has demonstrated to me that one’s choice of practice is an aesthetic choice, a choice based on the unique psycho-spiritual constitution of the individual and not based on any inherent superiority of a given path or practice. This is liberating indeed and also has the side benefit of reducing the ego investment of having one’s own path being the “one true way.” The need to be part of the “one true way” is a terrible burden, a set of spiritual shackles, that not only separates one from others, but blinds one to the wisdom to be found in the teachings and practices of what might be wildly divergent spiritual and magickal paths.

Freedom is a wonderful thing.

I have become, paradoxically, more practical in my magickal work despite my greater devotion to the path of the mystic. I no longer see the practical and the esoteric as a duality but as a holistic expression of a balanced spiritual life. If all is Deity, then so is the practical, grounded work (magickal and mundane) one must do in order to create the life one wishes to live. It does no good to become so heavenly minded that one becomes no earthly good.

This new blog, Sorcery and Spirit, is going to be a sort of magickal/spiritual journal/travelogue where I will be detailing elements of my personal practice, book and course reviews, as well as my personal recommendations regarding “best practices” ie. those psycho-spiritual/magickal practices which are, in my opinion and experience, necessary in order for one to successfully travel the path of the magician and the mystic no matter what your personal spiritual aesthetic.

Stay tuned….more to come.

 

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