Back at it- I think

Well, I've been away from practice for awhile, but I'm try to re-integrate daily ritual- at least the LBRP.

It's funny though, all the things that I was working toward have come to fruition- I remembered what I want to do with my life, andd re-discovered my true purpose at this stage. So maybe the time off was actually good- it allowed gestation and ego deconstruction.

Now the hard part- start meditating again. Whew.

Stay tuned.

Satori?

I had a myself a genuine moment of revelation yesterday. I actually knew something without actually knowing it. For just a second I felt and knew the divinity I had been working to know this whole time. It was just for a scant moment, and it didn't last past the vibration on the first god name YHVH, but it was there, nonetheless, and it was accompanied by an intense visualization of the inscribing of the pentegram. My visual imagination generally works in fits and starts, and always seems located deep inside of my brain, and not in the front, where I feel that I perceive visual information. This time, it was directly in front of me, and it was very, very REAL.

Today also had some very real elements to the practice. I found an excellent recording of Dr. Israel Regardie going through the full Middle Pillar Ritual here. Using that to help with the fairly complicated god names through the five Sepiroth in the exercise was quite helpful, but even more than that was the importance of actually believing that this was divine space, and that I was performing these exercises not out of duty, but out of a genuine understanding that the Light I was manifesting in my mind and from my astral body was the Light of God (which sounds cheesy to me, and gives me pause as I type it, but is true nonetheless). Again, the reality of the exercise was palpable- I could feel the shaft of light descend from Kether and into my throat. In fact, my throat still feels as though it has something a bit jammed in there, but not in a bad way. I had some issues being able to make the ball of light real in my solar plexus, but Dr. Regardie explained that the ball of light should be in the chest, and only sit on the diaphragm, rather than having the diaphragm be the center of the ball, which is how I had previously understood the process. As soon as that was explained, my chest filled up, and I vibrated YHVH Eloha va Da'at to make it manifest as a reality. The next ball was also challenging, and, truth be told, I never quite got it right. But the ball representing Malkuth at the soles of my feet worked just fine, and the circulating of the light actually cause me to tingle in the direction that the energy was flowing, and it happened before my conscious mind had really heard the words of Dr. Regardie telling me to do so. Another interesting thing was that when I was perfectly attentive to the vision, Dr. Regardie and I began the vibration of the god names at precisely the same moment very often.

After the exercise, I felt that my awareness had been shifted. I came down to write this straight away, and it has subsided a bit, but is still largely present.

Finally, something real.

Light of Malkuth

I had just come in from a long walk and I sat down before I headed into my ritual space to run through my daily practice. Youtube was on the screen, and I decided to check out the one video posted there about the LBRP (which can be found here). The intonations are very different than how I do mine, and his movements are much more cut-and-dried, whereas mine tend to be more fluid, and sometimes a bit clumsy, by comparison. With this on my mind as I headed into my ritual space, I thought that I might make today an experiment- why not try it his way? After all, this is supposed to be a laboratory, right? So I tried it his way.

It was sort of a disaster.

I was so busy correcting my movements and regulating the intonations, that I would lose the visualizations, which seems to me the whole point of the exercise. Consequently the ten minute meditation afterwords was hell. Concentration shot. No good.

This is rather sad, as I had I pretty fruitful sit-down-and-breathe yesterday. The visualizations were pretty clear (never totally clear) and the breath meditation facilitated a moment of silence where I found myself confronted with a single point from which all things manifest. By that I mean that I registered visually a small point out in the infinity (this was all with my eyes closed) that seemed to be gushing forth- kind of like one of those deep sea volcanoes. Somehow, without knowing it exactly, I perceived that what I was seeing was the physical location of that idea called Malkuth, the place where the light of the Limitless comes down into matter. But, maybe that was just more mind games, who knows? But I got a couple of seconds of quiet. That's what was really impressive.

And then there was today. I spent the entire LBRP trying to correct my motion, and my whole meditation as restless as can be. I think the there is something to be said for doing it (roughtly) the same way every time.

I'll try again tomorrow.

• The above image comes from Qabalah Map.
  

If I Can Just Stare at this Candle For Another Five Minutes...

Meditation is the green leafy vegetable of magickal practice. It's good for you. It makes you more centered, more aware, more able to harness energy. Jesus and the Essenes used it. Obviously, Siddartha used it. Crowley made such a big deal out of it that acccording to him, if you didn't do it, you weren't really doing magick. You even really want to do it (just like eating green leafy vegetables). But it can be the damn hardest thing in the world to talk yourself into doing.

And here's the rub:

You have to keep doing it.

Like, you can't just plop down, get lost in the candle flame or the rhythm of your breath for a second or two, and then go about your day. The point is to keep doing it. And then, you have to do it again tomorrow, and hopefully do it a bit longer. And then all the rest of the week. And then the next week. And then forever.

Like forever forever. The really long one that runs until the end of time. From right now on out.

Well, only if you ever want it to work. Whatever that means.

At least that's what I'm learning as I try to re-integrate meditation into my regular practice. Yesterday was so frustrating that I couldn't even write about it after I finished the practice. A dog was barking crazily across the street. As though the dog had gone insane, and was almost screaming right at me- or so it seemed at the time. Today it was the phone. Any distraction is amplified about a million times. One of the funniest parts of it was the feeling that swept over me after the phone rang the second time- the only thing that I can compare it to is road rage. Such a malevolent anger, so filled with all sorts of ugly nasties, and in such an odd setting. Strangely, the incongruity of sitting in meditation with so much anger in my heart shocked me enough to jolt me back into watching my breath. I finshed my ten minutes (fifteen due to interruption) of eating my leafy green vegetables.

Tomorrow, I'll try to eat for a minute or so longer.

• The above image was borrowed from The 8th Side
  

Leitmotif

I keep coming back to the same things in my rituals- obviously the chatter, the mind gibbers and complains. I have tried to add some relaxation work in today's process to make it smoother. Of course, this has just the opposite effect, and I get the most complete feeling of dread as I stand up to do the LBRP- the dialogue is telling me that my life is a mess and that this is a stupid thing to be doing with my time. Anyway, I do the LBRP with all the gusto that I can muster, and follow it up with the Middle Pillar. But the dialogue returns to the same theme every time that I work:

Am I doing this right?

Am I supposed to literally be able to see and feel these things, or am I using active imagination? What does this feel like when you do it correctly? Does it feel like this? The books are all very unclear about this. I've read at least twenty different version of the LBRP, and none of them ever really come to what this is supposed to feel like- and I suppose that makes sense, as I'm going after my True Self here. I mean, who else has or will ever experience what it feels like for me to go in search of the Knowledge and Conversation of my HGA?

I'm lusting after results. It's problematic, and it always results in the breakdown of the Do It Every Day promise.

Middle Pillar Ritual

I just completed my first Middle Pillar Ritual. There were many difficulties, as I had not memorized the God names beforehand, and found myself buried in a book for much of it. Much of magick feels very mechanical to me, and that feeling is both somewhat alien, and terribly comforting. Alien, in that it always seems to me that a practice that gets you back in line with your own True Will should feel natural and not academic or difficult. Comforting, because I am really beginning to realize that it is by the mechanism of consistency that the greatest acts of genius are accomplished.

The Middle Pillar seemed no different. I enjoyed it, as I have really been interested in the deeper meanings of the Kabalah as of late, and my understanding of the Middle Pillar is that it is an activation of the Sephirot of the Middle Pillar that align themselves with some of the seven chakras of Yoga in the human being. It seems like a reverse of the activation of Kundalini energy, but that is just a speculation based upon an cursory reading of both. I have no first-hand experience of actually drawing up Kundalini energy.

It's strange how things manifest as they become necessary. I read an interesting post at a Chaos forum that basically asked the question "If we are always Banishing, Banishing, Banishing, when do we Invoke?" That question has since gnawed at me a bit, forcing myself to wonder if magick isn't some sort of silly safety blanket for me, protecting me from all the nasties out there. So, though I am aware that the LBRP is certianly developmental to the magicians Will, I have been thinking a great deal about the need to Invike; to take a more active process in my own Creative Evolution. Obviously, I was aware of the Middle Pillar Ritual, but I had somehow made it an extension of the LBRP in my mind, and so devalued it to myself. That was a mistake. The Middle Pillar functions to me at this point much more as an Invocation- a remarkable exercise in the engagement of energies that are called from "outside". Even though I was aware of the Middle Pillar, I didn't use it due to a decision about it that I had made arbitrarily. But due to my interest in the development of the Sephirot, I have re-discovered it, and am really happy about that. It felt, for all of its clunkyness, like the right thing to plug into my ritual space at this time. I'm going to try to do it every day.

I'd like to make a promise to myself, and keep it. Keeping this promise has turned out to be the single hardest thing that I'll ever engage in: Do It Every Day. I usually disappoint myself if I try.

More info on the Middle Pillar by Israel Regardie:
http://www.davedavies.com/splanet/magic3.htm

Golden Dawn Tarot

I just completed a reading that has taken me almost three months to pull all the cards for. This might seem like a long time for a single reading, but I was doing it in conjunction with the LBRP and a tarot contemplation exercise (that was sometimes successful, sometimes not). The basic structure went like this:

1. LBRP
2. Tarot selection and contemplation
3. Meditation and attention to breath
   

Sometimes, I would add a relaxation ritual, some yoga, or some exercise from Christopher Hyatt's Undoing Yourself with Energized Meditation and Other Practices. Often, the meditation would be short, or even nonexistent, if the mood wasn't on me. I didn't draw a card everytime that I did the LBRP either- sometimes if I was rushed, I would only get the Banishing Ritual done, and feel like such a hurried time was wrong to pull the card.

The deck was the Golden Dawn Tarot, and I used a reading style right from the booklet that was included with the deck. The reading used no inverted cards, instead relying on a large number of cards to provide context to the cards beside them. The layout is the above image.

The significator that I decided to use (even though the tarot reading style that I had chosen didn't call for one) was The Magician. I chose this because the central question on my mind was whether or not ceremonial magick is the right path for me, and whether it makes sense to pursue it. In the above diagram, I use "0" to indicate the significator card. The rest of the cards fell as follows:

1. Prince of Wands
2. 11 Justice
3. Princess of Wands
4. 2 High Priestess
5. 4 Temperance
6. Four of Pentacles
7. 17 The Star
   
8. 0 The Fool
9. 9 The Hermit
10. Three of Cups
11. Two of Wands
12. Six of Cups
13. Three of Wands
14. Nine of Pentacles
15. 10 Wheel of Fortune
    

Card 1 is the Querent (me)
Cards 2 and 3 help describe the Querent's situation and with 1 are the most important in the reading
Cards 4, 8, and 12 represnt the natural course of life
Cards 7, 11, and 15 represent forces outside my control
Cards 13, 9, and 5 represent possibilties for alternate action
Cards 14, 10, and 6 are to assist the Querent in making a decision and represent the future.

What I find really interesting about this is that all the cards seem to point towards a positive outcome. Even the possible negative meanings of the cards seems to be mitigated by the cards around them to produce an overall feeling that this endeavor will be succcessful.

But maybe I'm reading them wrong?

First Things First

Flashing lights that hyptnotize, otherworldy beasts with menace dripping from mordant eyes, the massive pulsation of power that courses throught you like wave after wave of electric clarity... these are some of what my once active imagination declared "magickal". If you've ever read a book about the Western Mystery Tradition (or any aspect of the occult, really) you've likely encountered the idea that magick is mostly something that people should do rather than something people should just read about. Unfortunately, I must begin this blog by noting that I have been reading about magick and the occult for many, many years. There is much information about magick floating around inside my skull, but the real practical stuff has eluded me, because I was long one of those smug cretins that thought that knowing about something was all that was required. About a year ago, I realized that I had imagined all sorts of results from magickal workings (like the ideas at the head of this post), but that I had nothing but a couple of attempts at astral projection in high school to illustrate to me what magick was and how it worked. So I started doing magick.

Robert Anton Wilson says that if you want to do anything at all, if it's worth doing, you'll do it every day. If becoming good at something is the goal, you have to practice, practice, practice. Do I practice every day? No. But I would very much like to, and that's where this blog comes in.

The need to do the practice every day is only slightly more important than keeping a detailed log of the journey, so say the books and teachers of the esoteric traditions. This is my attempt to keep a journal, and to make a magickal working truly open for others to participate. It's also a kick in the ass to remind myself that other people are out there looking at my progress and judging me a bit. Maybe that will help me do it every day. Maybe- I hope.

Anyhow, about me:

nothing

That's the only catch... I'm not going to tell anyone anything about my identity as it is right now. I really think that it's a bad plan to tell anyone about the deepest parts of my ritual process and have them be able to track it back to me in reality. Could you find out who I really am? Sure, but that's not the point of this place. This is an interactive ritual and dream diary that gives you and I the chance to share techniques, practices, questions, theories, and whatever else we encounter on the path.

There are certianly information that I willl have to fill in about myself in the context of ritual, or this process will be valueless. So here's some of the things that come to mind:

What tradition do I follow? Not a single one by any means. I work with Ceremonial Magick, meditation, imagination, some yoga, and other odds and ends. I try to do the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP) at least once a day, and generally succeed in doing it about 2-3 times a week, with similar occurances of meditation. I do something like yoga about 4-5 times a week. Intellectually, I'm interested in the Golden Dawn, Theosophy, Thelema, Chaos Magick, sigils, mythology, zen, and lots of other stuff. It can be said that I follow the Western Mystery Tradition pretty closely at this point, as I have no teacher and am pretty new at this stuff. Hopefully, as time goes by, these interests will merge, develop, evolve, mutate, or do something else spectacular that will make life interesting for the reader and me. For now this is the place to detail my daily ritual activities.

I have yet to see any monsters, leave my body, see anything paranormal, or feel in the presence of divinity. Magick is as yet internal, transforming my consciousness by making me more aware, more attuned to my body, with an new imagination that can be channeled into whatever I need.

Why do I do this? Because I have only one real belief: that we all have a purpose dictated by our True Will, and that until I am sure what mine is, I will do research on myself using these techniques as ways to find out what it is I'm meant to do.