Month: January 2012

Who stole the Lightning?

The Lightning Bolt path vs the Middle Pillar path

You told me at the beginning of our study that balance was one of the things in which was THE most important thing to you as we did this. You expressed that although you wanted to do this apprenticeship, you also had responsibilities as a father/husband and provider. As the person overseeing this study, I have a DUTY (and responsibility) to keep you balanced and functional.

So, I made the decision with great thought, care and meditation to go directly up the middle pillar.

We will spend as much time as you need to develop the understanding and deep appreciation for the sephora’s on the ‘branches’ of the tree (Hod, Netzach, Geborah, Chesed, Binah, Chokma). We will do it by securing tightly to the trunk and reaching out, and not necessarily walking out on the branch. Between each session of ‘reaching’ we will spend time back on the middle pillar to re-group, re-balance and gather our energies before moving forward.

I think this middle pillar path will serve you in ways you have yet to experience in your other previous Kabbalah study. It will give you a perspective in which maybe you didn’t have with the sephoria’s before, Which is also the point of an apprenticeship.

Above all in this journey, stay balanced.

It is important.
As for the ‘path’ we are taking….
The lightning bolt path is a very common way of teaching Kabbalah, and there are pro’s and con’s to do it that way. It is usually the one referred to when reading about Kabbalah or doing Kabbalah study. If I were to be in a weekly coaching setting where I could sit across from you face to face and do an apprenticeship that way, I would take the lightning bolt path.  The lightning bolt path is – like lightning.  It is strong, fiery, fierce, and only the strong survive a strike.  When traveling that path it is EASY to get off balance, burnt out, and especially get energetic overload.

Those things are not balanced.

Instead, since you are so far away and I have no way of monitoring or mediating the energy, (or doing hands-on healing if you get too off balance), AND you told me up front that being balanced and functional is #1 Priority.  I choose to take you directly up the middle pillar. By slowly stepping up the middle pillar, you will be able to maintain a high level of balance (and any imbalances will show up immediately and be able to be addressed immediately). As compared to going the lightning bolt path, you are ‘off-balance’ THE ENTIRE TIME… (which is the point of that path of study – to find and live the imbalances).

Does that help?

An Exercise in Faith

JUMP!

I’m in a curious period of freefall, poised for either great success or another slammin failure.

I’m used to failures; they don’t hurt me so bad. The only time I get emotionally anxious is with the whole money thing, which I am slowly, slowly working through.

See, I’ve opened up more doors for wealth and abundance than I ever have before; thrown them open, you could say, putting together sales pages and information products and affiliate programs; I’m ready, and open, and willing for massive amounts of wealth to come to me now.

That’s most of my job, right? Get ready, get open, clear all the blocks out of the way, and then wait and see if the universe will deliver on its promise.

It’s been a great exercise in following my own work. I’ve been on this whole Manifestation Magic kick for a long time. Trying to figure out exactly how it works. And I learn best by teaching, by codifying the principles, because its one of the only ways I can get myself to follow them.

This week, I’m scraping the bottom of my financial barrel once again. Only a few dollars here and there to my name. What’s illuminative is that I’ve been in this state for weeks, and everything gets paid.

There is too much serendipity around me to ignore. Like having just enough cash to pay the bill that has to be paid tomorrow. And when the next imperative bill comes up, the money magically manifests for that, too.

So I’m going with it. All my intuitions and divinations show that this is the right time, and the right move. I did a reading on the Amazing Life Formula yesterday, and this is what I got (Celtic Cross spread)

  1. Knight of Wands
  2. The Empress
  3. The Priestess
  4. Ten of Cups (Sateity)
  5. Lust
  6. Knight of Disks
  7. Knight of Cups
  8. The Lovers
  9. Seven of Wands (Valour)
  10. The Magus

Spreads like that don’t come often. I looked over the multitude of trumps and knights, the conscious and subconscious influences, and I was once again fortified that this is the right move for me in my life.

I keep launching these huge projects, that take me away from my core business that makes money, and it catapults me into a new class of professional and artist every time I do it. This time, when I feel like I should be scared because there’s no money coming in, I’m trusting that the money thing is taking care of itself, because its been doing so well.

Besides, I’ve opened up all the financial doors. I’m letting energy in. I am allowing.

By taking my own medicine (nice that I’ve been writing on it for the past few weeks, and creating exercises for me to use) I am moving into a place of calm, where I know there are demons around me, and catastrophe is just a hair’s breadth away.

While I was doing Parkour, I learned how to live on this edge, how to confidently trust my abilities and my judgment of risk. That’s what I’m doing now, running forward to that impossible jump, trusting in my training and willpower to get me over the gap.

The prelaunch begins tomorrow. Its open for seventy two hours. I will manifest eleven thousand dollars in this period of time.

And if that plan doesn’t work, I have trust in the synchronicity that is happening all around me, continually right now, to take care of all of the minor expenses that always seem to get paid.

Moving away from fretting and into confidence: that’s what my whole journey about money has been about.

The Beautiful Surrender. (In Netzach)

Surrender is a beautiful movement in which you gracefully, willingly, languidly fall, only to find midway that you have been gathered into some unimaginable embrace. Surrender is letting go, whether or not you believe the embrace will occur. It’s trust to the hundredth power – not sticking to your idea of the outcome, but letting go in the faith that even the absence of an outcome will be the perfect solution.

Surrender is diaphanous and fluid. It’s the giving up of rigidity of every kind: rigidities of the mind that design outcomes to occur in very specific ways; rigidities of the body that refuse to receive the touch that could heal, the passion that could transform; rigidities of the soul that congeal and congest the spirit, causing it to imagine it has a life apart from the body and mind.

Surrender is meltdown of every rigidity we’ve ever been committed to, the conscious and unconscious dismantling of how we though things should be, to make way for the way things will, in fact, occur. It’s a kind of being surprised by joy, of happily swimming into greater consciousness that’s always operating on our behalf. Just as a child, learning to swim, discovers, amazed, that the water does hold him up, so surrender buoys us up, supports us for the fulfillment of our destinies.

Surrender requires purity of intention. In the absolute freedom it grants in response to our letting go, it requires an absolute commitment of holding onto nothing. Whatever you thought you had – the idea, the expectation, the plan, the hope of how things should be – you must let go of it fully. Surrender is stepping away from the certainty of your categories into the no-man’s-land of all possibilities.

And it is in surrendering, in letting go into the void – into the mysterious, unnamed, mystical, formless future, into the arms that are invisible – that we become finally ready to receive it all. Surrender is the giving of your all to the All, the waiting with an absolute absence of expectation for the totally perfect thing to occur. <3

~Daphne Rose Kingma

On Evil.

The simple answer is, I don’t believe it exists.

As the storytelling goes, anyway. The concept of a dark villain, who wants to destroy because his heart is black; the fantastical Lord Sauron, who wishes destruction of all that is good; I don’t believe in these things.

That’s not to say they don’t exist, I suppose. In the context of our apprenticeship conversation, we are talking about cosmic forces; and there are many of these that are beyond my ken.

Keeping this in mind, I have a suspicion that spiritual forces that others interpret as malevolent are merely ambivalent to our own codes of morality. I once heard a Balinese mask described this way; with the big bulging eyes, and the pointed teeth, all of these masks impersonate deities in this way, because this is how the teeth of the most beautiful woman in the world would look…to a shrimp.

Evil, as we tend do define it, entails an uber-malevolence that is motiveless. Sentient beings – and even non-sentient beings – all have motives. When our motives come into conflict, that is where we create division, where we call one good and the other bad, one dark and one light. We often create villains in storytelling because we need a foil to the hero, who is the proof of the characteristic we are trying to embody. Unless the villain is given his own motives beyond ‘destroy, harm, undo all that is good’ then he is a shallow foil, and featureless in all real aspects.

I did a thesis on the Hero – Victim – Villain relationship once. (Masters in Physical Theater, and all.) These are the three main characters in traditional melodrama. They all serve their core roles. In good stories, the villain and the hero could be defined based solely on perspective. They both have agendas, they both can be brave or cowardly, strong or weak, powerful or impoverished, depending on the story; however, they both act decisively to attain their goals.

The only identifiable difference between a hero and a villain, when all else is torn away, is in their treatment of the Victim. Heroes protect and save the Victim. Villains take advantage of, and harm, the innocent.

Evil, then, in mortal affairs, could be distilled to this essence; harming others who have done you no wrong and cannot defend themselves. Witches have an easy edict to remind people of the Google maxim, ‘don’t be evil’: ‘An it harm none, do what ye will.’ For if it harms none, there can be no evil in it.

A protagonist in an interesting story could be faced with a moral complication, as in the fable of the hero who has the chance to kill Hitler as a baby. Kill an innocent child, and save thousands. What is the noble act? What would be evil? Which victim do you save?

These convolutions only obscure the fact that villains are heroes with an agenda opposing that of the audience’s moral bias, and heroes share the moral bias. Forgive me for interpreting this question theatrically, but that’s where my training comes from, and for many deep questions this is the thinking to which I revert.

To take a step up in perspective, from the cosmic perspective, I know we must eventually tread into the Qlippoth. I have avoided this subject in my studies, for the same reason I have avoided invocation; I don’t like to go into places like that unprepared, and I don’t know that I would ever like to go unless absolutely necessary.

Not because I fear evil, but because upon the right scale, against certain other entities I am nothing more…than a shrimp.

The Void

As we prepare to move up and out of Yesod, I have an obligation to prepare you to step into the void.  The void is like nothing we have experienced yet, and yet, this is where our bodies will be as we stand on Yesod while reaching outwards to touch Hod and Netzach.  The void is a place we will again visit after our time in Tipharet. And the void is a very powerful place to be.

Everything is created in the void.

Everything.

It is the womb of the mother, the silence before the blueprint.  When stepping into the void, there is no room for any attachments, no room for any thoughts. it is the blank slate of creation where the energy gathers before it flows out.  It is the moment between the in-breath and out-breath. It is the point of light between the yin and yang, it is the moment in the midst of polarization.  If the law of the Universe is to create perfect balance, the void is the moment of balance.

The void is the law.

Who are you in the void? Who are you when everything else is gone?  What is your truth?

1.  What is the truth about your mother?

2.  What is the truth about your father?

3.  What is the truth about the relationship with yourself?

4.  What is the truth about your relationship with the Universe/God/Energy/Ensof?

5.  What is the truth about your career?

6.  What is the truth about your finances?

7.  What is the truth about your health?

8.  What is the truth about the relationship with your spouse?

and on and on an on…. what are your truths? Where do you stand with yourself when you are naked to the rest of the world?  Who are you when you stand naked in the void?

The void existed before anything and will exist after everything is gone.  The void is everywhere and no where at the same time. When you touch it, you will know, yet it is hidden.  It is nothing and everything, no time and all time, brilliant light and infinite darkness, silence and sound all at once.  It is you. within you. and outside of you.

The void is real.

How do you know when you have touched it?

Parting thought: “Reverence is a more holy place than power.”

Why?

Yesod review.

I’ve gone through all the notes you have sent me concerning Yesod. Most of it I had read, some I had worked with, and the last, large document of the 22 notes, I had only skimmed prior to this evening. I’d like to review everything thats happened in this sphere, so we can move on; the idleness has set in.

In many ways, I can see this sphere’s influence over so many aspects of my life. My son was born in this sphere, on the day of the Full Moon, to a clan whose patron is Artemis herself. Things have been waxing and waning, I have struggled with and redefined my defining addiction, and my lifes work has become clearer with the launch of my first information product, the culmination of four years of study.

Now I understand why I have been inexplicably drawn to Purple as the branding color for the ALF. Indigo, violet, these shades are all colors of this sphere, and I have been designing websites and PDFs with this color palette for weeks.

I had a revelation about the human experience, thanks to catching my son and considering his experience as an entity. Within the womb, he is in Earth, ensconced in the world around him. He then moves into the element of Water, where his existence is surrounded around his new digestive system, and providing and managing the liquids that come in and go out is a large part of my parenthood. For years he will be working out the consumption and elimination of resources, until he attains a state of flow.

As a child he will be hungry for learning, filling the width of his mind with Air. I remember my long decades as a scholar, relishing every opportunity to learn new things. For the time, I thought there would be no better purpose to life than to study and learn all day long.

As I grew into a man I understood the importance of Fire. The Will is what allows you, as an individual, to control your world, create your world, and define your place in it, by declaring it through Will. This is now my stage, the stage of manifetation; and this is the path of the elements that we walk to maturity.

Being mature, however, comes with a set of vices, and as co-creators endowed with Will, we can choose our vices. While there are subconscious and repressed influences behind all vices and addictions, with a proper application of will any addiction can be temporarily, and sometimes permanently, nullified.

I have made frequent periods of abstinence part of my practice in my lifelong addiction to marijuana. Spending the occasional month without smoking gives my body a chance to cleanse, my tolerance a chance to raise, and my mind a chance to clear. I typically have gone through a brief period of abstinence a couple of times every year.

Yesod has given me greater opportunity to examine my addiction, because I find myself coming up on a year without stopping daily pot smoking.

I’ve had occasion to examine this state, ask myself if it is appropriate to my life, if it needs to be changed, what the causes of it are, and how to handle these causes in the future.

[pausing, actually, to light a joint]

The only reason I struggle is because there is a part of me deep down that still believes that drug use is inherently limiting to the human system. (I won the contest in 4th grade to design the DARE program’s new poster for our classroom.) I started smoking post for predictable reasons (I was a long haired smartass in a poor suburb who hung out with smokers) and I continued smoking pot because…I like it.

A lot.

My mind is so active, especially due to my chronic caffeine addiction, that I can’t readily ease myself into the state of mind necessary for relaxation or meditation. I use it as a segue, to step into a different mindset, like I’m changing my mental clothes.

I also react in an odd way to pot: I don’t get hungry. I actually use it to put off hunger pains, because there was a large part of my late teenage years where I sometimes didnt have enough money for food, but I always had pot. Smoking would keep my food intake down to once a day.

While under the influence of pot, I often feel the urge to do vigorous exercise, or enter deep meditation, and I slide into doing these things so easily, in a way that is totally different from my non-stoned state. When sober, I have to plan exercise, and set aside time for it, and prep for it, and argue with myself about whether I’m going to do it or not;

or I can smoke a joint, and fifteen minutes later I’m fitting yoga poses into everything I’m doing. I start juggling, and focusing my reflexes really intently.

I fall into dance.

I am called to move into ritual, and engage with the spiritual currents I can feel coursing through heightened awareness.

My accomplishments while I’m stoned are, in large part, responsible for the quality of person that I am today. I wouldn’t be nearly as healthy, as fit, as calm, or as productive without pot.

And, most importantly, I would be a shitty father without marijuana.

While I’m stoned, I can give my kids my full and complete attention. I can shut my mind up and just play. It’s become so essential to our family life now that whenever I am transitioning out of focused time (work, or running errands, etc) into a time when I am going to be hanging out with the kids, I just get stoned. I hang out with my kids…everyday.

Kids are a constant and unending demand on your time and attention. They require patience in order to handle the level of interruption that is constantly present, and patience comes easier with pot.

Most importantly, as a Capricorn, I can turn into a grumpy bitch sometimes. Pot is an easy, surefire way to turn that around, 95% of the time.

So as an emotional management tool, pot is really incredible for me, in a lot of different areas of my life. I asked myself last week, why do I keep thinking I need to stop?

Part of it is the illegality of it. Heavy drug laws here. Transitioning from having a medical card and being able to walk through downtown Portland smoking a joint – into a country where all drug users are equated with drug smuggler – it’s given me an opportunity to reassess.

Looking at everything, I’m recognizing my feelings that I should find a reason to stop smoking for a while come from the lower unconscious, which is one of the aspects of Yesod.

I thought it would be the other way around – that my addiction would have a deep seated lower unconscious root. But I really don’t struggle with my pot addiction like I do with caffeine, or like I did with tobacco. (Those are the only three drugs I’ve ever done, so this is the breadth of my addiction repertoire.) My struggle, especially since we moved into Yesod, has been over how to manage the withdrawal period, and find other ways to keep my emotional state on an even keel, because I obviously have to be quitting smoking for a period of time coming up soon. This is the longest consecutive period of smoking I have had without a break since I was probably nineteen. My habits feel off balance, since I’m accustomed to taking a break after smoking consecutively for so long.

For the first time I’m beginning to consider the idea that I could, if I chose, be a daily pot smoker for the rest of my life.

My lower-unconscious reaction to that idea is that I can’t expect to keep my wits about me or my body healthy.

This is despite the fact that while under the influence of pot, I have been able to create and sustain a business, I’m happier, and I’m physically healthier, due to my penchant for wanting to dance, exercise, and do yoga when I’m high.

And I wouldn’t be a third of the magician I am without pot.

So I’m grateful for this time in Yesod, to see that I don’t have a problem with trying to keep an addiction away; I have a problem with allowing a beneficial addiction to be a permanent part of my life.

This is a very different struggle than the one I thought I was having.

Foundation.

Appropriately, I am reassessing my foundation.

After the birth of my son, things have started to return to normal. Things that have been abnormal for nearly a year. Before I left it all and moved to Costa Rica, even. I am in the period of reassessment I knew was coming when we ascended to Yesod; finally, today, I have felt the introspection go down to the foundational level of my psyche.

There’s been some wacky astrological imbalances over the past few days. It wasn’t until Friday the 13th, your birthday, that I recognized how off everything had become. Then I looked back over the days before that, and I’ve had heightened senses ever since, noticing how things have been in a state of imbalance.

Finally, today, things began to right themselves again. It felt remarkably similar to a Mercury Retrograde; if you have any insight on what’s been happening, I’d love to hear it.

Recently I’ve reinvigorated my ritual practice, which has been necessary. I went a day or two too long after the birth before cleansing the house, and it was sorely needed when I finally did it. I love this small house, because i can smudge the entire dwelling in under twenty minutes. I’ve even got a secluded meditation cove in the jungle, just a short stroll from my back door.  I went here today, as I go most days, but at a different time of day, and with a different purpose. Instead of cleansing myself and resetting myself through my daily rituals, I went to listen. To become one with the world around me.

I chanted Om for a long time, letting the vibration reverberate all of the resonators in the front of my body. The jungle represented the highest culmination of that vibration, abundant and overflowing life. I vowed to return daily, and I am upping my Qabalistic Crosses to three times a day, morning, noon and night.

I’ve also been reading more on The Middle Pillar lately. I picked up an English book here titled Yoga and Magick. Just my kind of reading; finally, after ten years as a student of yoga, I read someone describing the theoretical underpinnings of yoga from an occultist’s perspective. I have never been drawn to the eightfold path because it’s always been described with a cultural and religious context that is too foreign to me; but when described in terms of esotericism, I finally got it.

I realized that the energetic blockage that produces my seizures, which I suspected was around my throat, was not in my throat chakra, but in one of the nadis. These are intertwining energy currents that rise from the root, revolving around the chakras in opposing directions, to meet at Visshudha, the 5th chakra.

A brief psychic exploration showed me that, yep, that’s where I’ve got something going on. Big victory to find that out. I have no idea how to move energy through the nadis, but now I’ve got some homework to pursue in the near future.

In the appendix of this book it described the Middle Pillar ritual, as given by Regardie. I expected to flip through it, as a review. I was surprised to see omissions that I considered integral to the ritual, and a large devotion of description to something I had always glossed over, the Three Circulations.

With the necessary work on the nadis, integrating these three body-wide circulations around the aura will be most useful. I will likely wait until the new moon to try it; I have some reading to do first. I have downloaded a PDF of Regardie’s The Middle Pillar, and I’ll study that for more visualizations on the Circulations.

My ramble here has served mostly as catch-up on where I have journeyed as of late; I will engage more fully with the work you have given me over the next few days, so I have more relevant things to report to our present discussion.

I invite you to describe your stages of experience and your revelations to me. While it is very helpful for me to have someone to tell these stories to, I gain nearly as much from hearing of another’s perspective; and you too, I suspect, would benefit from having a friendly ear.

Talk away.

Housekeeping

I’m pulling you into WordPress.

You have no choice in the matter. I’m going to start writing exclusively on this blog for our communication, and by Hod, you’re going to be doing the same.

The purpose of this blog will be for us to communicate. I can even change the settings so it’s private, and only logged in users can see it. (I don’t feel a need to do this, but if it would help you be as candid as you would in an email, it’s what I recommend.)

I’ve sent you an invitation to contribute to this blog. Accept it, get a WordPress account, and add a post.

Also, be sure to click ‘Follow’ in the upper left hand corner. Then you will receive an email anytime I post – since I ‘Follow’ this blog, I will get an email anytime you post.

It’s like we’re emailing each other, but we are keeping the correspondence on this blog for review.

Eventually, you will be able to post the correspondences as clickable attachments on this blog.

It’s inevitable…you + wordpress.

Yesod. Moon. Water.

This has been a very auspicious time.

My wife is having a baby any day now. (Tomorrow? My birthday? I hope so.) I follow the Mayan calendar a bit, and there’s a supercharged period going between Christmas Eve 2011 and Sunday, January 8, the next full moon.

I’m hoping my son is born sometime in this timeframe.

Last night, I made a fire in front of our house. We sat around, the entire family, watching the flames, and above us the bright, waxing moon looked down at us.

I feel great connections to the moon. Artemis is the patron of our House. She is also the goddess of childbirth, and as my son waxes full in his mother’s belly, I feel her protection covering us.

Moving into Yesod for this period has been especially comforting, because here, I can comfortably operate in the field of the unknown. Mysteries don’t scare me, because there is an odd strengthening of faith within the acceptance of the unknown.

Yesod, the moon, and the unknown, are watery elements. This is the element I have always felt least balanced with, and swimming in the pool on my mountain has been very helpful to soothe that imbalance.

Last night, after the fire, when everyone went to bed, I took a hot bath. Immediately I felt un-agitated, although I didn’t know that I was in a state of agitation before. This happens a lot with immersing myself in water, so I am going to do it more often.

There is a lot of water in the air here – it is a very humid place. During the rainy season (Sept-Nov) I was uncomfortable in my body a lot of the time, and cold, and I took lots of baths for relief.

I’m spending this time ruminating on the elemental correspondence of this sephirah, because I’m having realizations about my own elemental tendencies. I only realized it about a month ago, Air is where I feel most comfortable, and I didn’t expect that.

In my birth chart there is no Air.  Earth and water, through Capricorn, and plenty of Fire (moon in Sagittarius) but no Air.

However, it is a masculine element that deals with intelligence, and this is the personal skill that I am most confident in.

My body was weak before my twenties, and my emotions have always been unstable; my will, a forceful and stubborn thing, is only controlled by my rational mind. And my mind is incredible.

I aced the SATs. My IQ was off the charts in third grade. I never studied for tests before college, because I just…got it. I learn so fast, and I have so much enjoyment of learning, that my intelligence has always been my favorite cardinal skill.

So of course, Air, right?

But I never thought of that, during all my years of magical study. I never compared this element as my favored cardinal element, but it makes plenty of sense.

My business is all about communication. I spend all day on a laptop. I praise my children for their cleverness above their caring. (We have a house rule: if it’s really funny, you don’t get in trouble.)

Despite all of these obvious indications that Air is my element, I’m still surprised by it, maybe even a little abashed. I learned a lot about myself as an Earthy capricorn, and assumed that as an Earth sign, this must be the cardinal element that guides my steps.

But I was wrong. It’s always been Air, and short of brain damage, it will always be Air.

During the Elements class, I was so uncomfortable in Earth and Water, and the period of Air gave me so much relief and joy and energy that I was surprised by it. In retrospect, it was like coming home.

While watching the fire the other night, I became entranced by the smoke, watching it chaotically curl and churn. Air is fast, and follows patterns that are too complex to comprehend. That’s my world. That’s my speed. That’s my element.

I come to this realization within Yesod, in the realm of the unknown, except I come to it as the unexpected. As a tool for self-knowledge, the Tree is certainly providing itself as a fast way to learn.

I’m prepping for some thoughts on addictions, which is another essential signpost on the path through Yesod. More later.