caelanmac – Page 5

Meditation in a Clear Mind

I have a very busy mind.

This is an advantage for many aspects of my life; being an idea generator keeps me from ever becoming bored, and I have gained a truly astounding number of skills due to my ability to learn.

However, while reading a book titled Leaving the Body, about Astral Projection, I came across an innocent passage that threw my entire worldview into disarray.

You are more than your ability to process thoughts. You are also a center of energy.

Of course, the light bulb labeled ‘Eureka’ said inside my head. My status as an energy nexus is possibly more important to my livelihood, my enjoyment of life, and my abilities as a magician, than is my ability to think many variegated things.

I enjoy thinking. It is one of the things I am best at. However, it also interfered with very necessary aspects of my being that do not need to employ thought.

This morning, as I sat down to meditate (which I grudgingly force myself to do for under five minutes each day) I had a series of thoughts come into my mind, unbidden, as usual. My favored technique has been to observe the thoughts as they come into my mind, and allow them to slide away as I return to neutrality.

I cannot keep this up for very long, because I begin to grow restless. My need for accomplishment and experiment drives me to move on to a ritual, an affirmation, a place to direct my formidable will.

But what I am neglecting is my formidable energy. I am a powerful being, and so long as I continue to ignore the needs of my energy body, I am going to continue thwarting it.

Yesterday I did not meditate in the morning, or spend any time at my rituals at all. The effect was apparent throughout the day. Calming my thoughts was so difficult as to become impossible; this is easy enough to focus into productive work on a work day, but on a Sunday, I had no outlet for these rampaging musings. At the end of the evening, I sat with my glass of wine and a book, and read recreationally for the first time in ages. While perusing Leaving the Body, I tried some of the breathing exercises that yogis have used to achieve OBE (Out of Body Experiences). But I could not devote my attention fully to this experience without simultaneously continuing to read.

My mind is my hungry ghost. It is insatiable. Continually wanting to consume more new information, it is relentless in its need to find new material to interact with, consider, digest, and assimilate. If alone, I cannot even eat without reading.

Since my Kundalini awakening, I have had energy rampaging through my body. Instead of developing myself as an energetic being, I have dedicated myself wholly to the mind, neglecting the very explosiveness that I could use to focus to my purposes.

What, then, should I do? I fear I cannot entirely leave the pleasures of the mind, especially while my career and livelihood involve working on the computer and on the internet. But I can reserve sections of my week to build myself as an energetic being, and work on those exercises that would help me to grow in this area.

First, then, a compilation of exercises is in order. My mind will be satisfied first before I can move into the simplest, purest answer; only after I have exhausted every angle of speculation will my eager mind let a subject rest, so that I may contemplate it in neutrality.

Amazing Sunrise

Last night, I entered the element of Fire.

In Amanda Jones’ Elements Series, we progress through each element for 2 weeks. Earth and Water sucked, Air felt more familiar than I expected, and now, I am in my true element: Fire.

This morning, I rose at 4:30 in the morning to drive down to Eugene for a job interview. I got a job offer yesterday for a lesser-quality job; cold calling in a cube for 8 hours a day. A good environment to invoke the element of Fire. I am optimistic about my career prospects with this assitance.

After sunrise, there was a mountain ridge to my left, and I pulled into a rest area. Crossing the freeway on foot, following a path to a fence, nimbly hopping over and walking across the dewy grass, I looked up to the mountains before me, and watched the sun rise over it.

The shafts of light to either side of the mountain heralded the growing light that was on its way. Their angles changed, and the skyline on the ridge began to glow bright white. The silhouette shifted above and below the ridgeline, so I would alternately see a line of white, then black, then white, that matched the rugged curves of the mountain, overlapping and shifting above it.

Then the first pinpoint of light came over, and I felt the touch of Fire.

It was not blazing hot, as I had expected; it was more like the invocation last night: gentle, steady, warm. The flame, not the spark.

It grew slowly, and my eyes were faced with something greater than I could comprehend. Literally. I squinted my eyes and watched through my watery eyelashes, and a long streak of white light came down from the sun to the base of the mountain. Although I knew it to be a refraction of my own eyes, I still smiled at the Sword as it manifested in my vision.

Then some amazing things happened with color. The white of the sun became enveloped by flashes of purple, and the pyrotechnic display reminded me of the ‘flashing colors’ I have read about but never employed. Except here, it was not two colors set side by side to create an intentional visual effect; this was the effect itself, happening within the majesty of nature.

As the sun rose to the top of the mountain ridge, the colors stabilized, white, blue, yellow and purple, crowning and cradling the newborn sun. I drank in this majesty for a while, then stepped into my day, accepting the bounteous gifts of nature as part of my birthright.

Technical notes: I cast a circle, performed the Calling Upon and the Qabalistic Cross. Rather than perform more rituals in the field, I opted instead to set the space and allow nature to interact with my magically-heightened senses.

It’s a big step for me to use magic, not as a force that I try and inflict upon reality, but instead as a container within which I can examine reality.

Journaling: a necessary practice

Absurdly, I do not journal every day.

As a writer, and a lover f words, I understand that my mind processes things best when I can write through them. Yet despite my incredible advances in personal growth through study of the esoteric arts, I shirk this one necessary practice.

Why?

I suppose I do not attribute the time spent journaling as productive. I could be working, or researching, but more likely I am surfing facebook or pawing through my email for the eighteenth time that day. Before wasting time on any of these little trivialities, I must ensure that I have had the time to download my thoughts through my fingers by logging into this private blog and journaling.

I have the ritual at my hand for subjects; draw a card, out of my new Giant Rider-Waite deck, and contemplate it on my life. There is plenty to discuss on this once a day and can be done in ten minutes.

A new commitment, then. As I must learn a new deck, and move into a lost habit, I will journal on a card once every morning.

I am satisfied with the meditation portion of my morning routine; I now have a series of rituals to go through, and now that I have included the Middle Pillar in the lineup I feel more cogent. Daily practice of this ritual, while necessary for Golden Dawn proper, is not recommended by the Modern Mystery School. I find it inappropriate to banish this personal invocation of power from daily use, especially when it is essential to the work and craft of magicians from such a closely related order. On a tangent, I have stopped doing the 7-directional pentagram every day, since it banishes forces in my sanctum that I don’t wish continually cleansed. The daily cleansing of sage, yes; in nomini padre, yes; but this pentagram cleans the space in a way that leaves it stale, and I need a magical batina in my personal sanctum.

I have a project stirring around for a more comprehensive website, based on magickal arts and study; a resource, full of pages of SEO optimized content, with lots of hits and affiliate programs and advertisers on all of the pages. Maintenance of this site would be an easy job to maintain while living in the tropics.

Now that I am in the element of Air (my first time through Amanda Jones’ elements series), possibilities are openeing on all quarters. My wife has fallen in love with the idea of Costa Rica, and for more reasons than I can list, this is the right move for our entire family. Now, I must manifest it.

Now, I must describe the life I wish to live. The man I wish to be.

I visualize the future, fluently.

We live in a villa just minutes from the ocean. I run down to the sand every morning, performing my rituals in a secluded little space I have laid claim to. I swim in the ocean to start my day. I come home and eat fruit and coconuts with my family, and we laugh and play in the sunshine.

I get to work when I feel like it, and I love my work. I spend a few hours on the computer, being creative and communicating with my contacts back in the states. Skype is essential to my livelihood. After a few hours of tinkering with my websites and delegating tasks to my team, I take siesta with my family. We laze in hammocks and talk about the world, numbers, myths, and history. We speak in three different languages in the house. We have a grand time together, and we all enjoy our fun.

Then my wife and I leave for a date, and we stroll through San Jose, enjoying our new community and culture. We are seen as the exotic, magical couple, and peopla are in awe of us. I like it that way.

I live a life fuilled with ease and prosperity. I love my life. I love my life.

Surrender.

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. ♥

~Daphne Rose Kingma

Magical study group

I’m having breakthroughs left and right. I hope you two are as well; I’d love to hear about them.

Since it helps me to process something by writing about it, I’m going to through these revelation-bombs your way. Maybe a better step would be to set up a blog to hold my magical musings, but for right now, you are the exclusive readers of the metaphysical-blog-yet-to-be. (Whoa. Heady.)

Today I felt really grateful to have the tools at my disposal that Amanda introduced to us. My whole household was thrown into disarray; the preschool attached to our house starts summer term tomorrow, and the two teachers both quit today. My wife and her mom run the school together, and my mother in law has a real habit of stewing in anger over negative things. I saw this building, and so I put up my defenses, and had to use a couple of the rituals multiple times.

Even though everyone else in the house was on an emotional roller coaster, I alone was able to ride the waves with an even keel. When one of the teachers called and had an hour long nasty phone call with my wifes mom, I stayed upstairs with the kids, cleansing the space and praying. Even with the fireworks going off, they were kept very calm by my work. I came downstairs to sage off my wife, and then her mom, and she accepted it gratefully. They’re both from New Mexico and understand sage.

When my mother in law wanted to start bitching about the situation though, immediately after three ‘In Nomini Padre’s, I had to stop her and say, ‘You can talk to Johanna about this, but I can’t talk about it. My responsibility right now is to hold the light for the house.’ I didn’t want to get trapped into the duality illusion and participate in the (sometimes) necessary decompression known as gossip.

She snapped at me and put up all these defenses about what she had been meaning to say; I recognized that she had just gone through an extremely negative confrontation, apologized, and left the room. My kids are sleeping soundly. I’ve protected them, and done what I could for those going through the thick of the negative energies.

I’m much more sensitive to these waves of energy now. I can feel them coming, prepare for them, manage them, and analyze them after they’ve run their course. This added perspective on existence is another one of the joys of this work.

Check in letter 2

For the first time I used the meditation on page 40 of the manual, ‘Steps to Enter your Sanctuary.’ Wow. Amazing. Utterly amazing, that I have these tools of personal growth and introspection available to me now.

And protection! I have felt so out of whack energetically since the initiation, as my baseline, but doing the rituals every day has really helped to steady me and return me to center. I feel like the newborn foal with all these long legs and a very wobbly understanding of how to use them gracefully, but surefire knowledge of the power to soar these new legs are giving me.

Check in letter 1

Wow, amazing results!

I have been practicing my rituals every morning, and it is so centering to start the day with some protection and cleansing. It’s funny, the one I have been having a hard time with is the Calling Upon (the ‘square’), because we didn’t practice it nearly as much as the others. Thank you, Amanda, for these amazing tools.

I had an experience today that illustrated how much more sensitive I have become. I have noticed the energy shift drastically in the Arbor Lodge New Seasons, since one of their employees was murdered last week. She worked in the deli in the mornings, and th physical space there is saturated with the grief and disbelief everyone has been feeling. (I’ve been putting together a volunteer campaign for energy workers to treat the staff and the space, too.) I have been avoiding the store because of its energy, but today I went to set up logistics for the volunteer energy workers to come in. As soon as I sat down in the conference room, someone came in and told us to clear out because the victims parents were here. I gave them my card, we decided to set it all up over email, and then, it happened. I passed by the grieving family on my way out, and it felt as if I had been blindsided by a truck. I scurried out of the store, found a corner, and wept. As soon as I could get to a safe place, I used my rituals to put my protective walls back up. Lesson learned; even though I am more sensitive and powerful than I was before the initiation, I still have a lot to learn before I can handle this higher grade of sensitivity. I’m counting on you, Amanda, as my mentor, to teach me.

Yasmin, Shivoso, I would love to hear about something amazing that happened to you this past week. And I’d like you to join me in making a list of people who you will personally talk to about taking miss Jones’ next initiation.

Initiation – Modern Mystery School

After 6 years as a solitary apprentice, I took my first initiation through the Modern Mystery School with Amanda Jones.

Technically, not through the school; Amanda broke with the school, but still has the authority bestowed upon her by the Hierarchy of Light to give initiations, and to share these tools. It was a perfect time for me, because now I am continuing to learn off the grid, outside of a structured organization.