Wow, Jason just had an awesome idea on FB. Someone asked how to get a fast $400, and Jason’s suggestion was to offer to tutor four people in something they know well for $100 each.

Not bad. Friggin’ brilliant, even. Check your skills and talents, determine what they’re worth to someone looking for a specialist in what you’re really good at, and sell it! Awesome!

I’m going to do it, and if you choose to, please feel free to advertise what you want to sell in the comments here along with some contact info for anyone interested in your services.

I would like to make a fast $1,200.

So, for $300, I’m offering to do one complete manifestation rite for any one thing you desire, for the first four people who can pass and agree to the guidelines:

1. If, after hearing your request, I think you are an idiot, we will be done and I will go on to the next one.
2. If your desire is reasonable, you agree that we will do a divination on the outcome of any magic performed on your behalf.
3. If, after divination, it looks like you won’t get what you want, we pick something else that you actually can have, or figure out what we can do to get you to a point where you can have what you wanted.
4. You agree to take advantage of the material opportunities to manifest your desires when they arise.

If you are interested, and you have $300, please send me an email with the subject: Jason’s Brilliant Idea.

You should know, my dearest brother, that the best and most noble gift that God has given to humanity in this world is knowledge. By knowledge we become acquainted with ancient things, and the causes of everything in the world, and what more immediate causes are causes of other things, and how one thing corresponds to another. By this we can know everything that is and why it is, and why one thing is raised above another in due order, and in what place exists the root and beginning of all the things of this world: that thing by which all things are dissolved, and through which everything new and old is made known. 

For this truly is the first, and it lacks nothing, nor does it need anything else except itself; it is the cause of all other things, and does not receive its qualities from another. It is not a material body, nor is it compounded of material bodies, nor is it mixed with anything other than itself, but rather is all things in itself. Therefore it may not be called anything except the One. 

Properly speaking, it is the sole truth and unique unity, and from it, anything united receives its unity. It is also the primal truth, and does not receive its truth from another; rather, everything receives truth from it.

The Picatrix, Book 1, Chapter 1

THAT THING.

That is the thing. That thing. That’s what I’m after in my Work. I’ve sniffed it out through the ancient mysteries, and I’ve sniffed it out through the aethers. I’ve conjured spirits of the Celestial Heavens, and I’ve conjured dark entities who roam the darkest underworld, and they pointed me to the Way of the Primas Res, the Way of the First Things.

Call anything you can imagine, from cosmologies to deities to spirits to friends to your very own self  “It.” It starts in darkness, as a light. The light grows and the darkness recedes, and its shape can be known. It reaches its potential, and the light fades, and the darkness grows, and it returns to the nothing it came from.

It passes through a non-existent veil, a membrane between the unmanifest and the manifest as it comes into being, it passes through again as it returns. There is a friction, a frission that is sexual and orgasmic as it passes through, penetrating deep into the womb of the Earth, the Mother of us all. It is sexual, orgasmic. Those are adjectives, metaphors. I’ll make them similes so it’s clear: It comes into being in a process that is like sex, in that it is a pleasurable, highly energized, wonderful insertion of the eternal into the temporal; It is made manifest in a moment of planting, of sowing that is like an orgasm, bursting outward all at once in radiance, leaving the awareness completely calm and centered and focused.

And like the sex act, after the orgasm, the participants can fall gently into sleep, deep enough to dream of the thing they have created, and what it means, and implies, and represents. We experience the situations, the results, the manifestations of that thing as It comes into being.

This experience of It is its consumption. Little by little it returns to the unmanifest, filtered through our senses, digested back through that membrane, moving from materia to memory, traveling down through our underworld rivers of forgetfulness and pools of remembrance. Father Time, Kronos, consumes his children, and the things that we have brought through his gate into manifestation return through his gate to the realms from which they sprang.

Our lives are manifestations of It, of that thing, that primum materia, primum mobil, the universal substrate that is the framework of everything and the universal solvent that flows through and around the substrate. And then through us It also manifests more of Itself. We are Light in Extension, extending more light yet again.

Think of Agrippa’s Three Orders of the Elements, the pure essences, the first combinations thereof, and the near-infinite levels of possible mixtures you can imagine. The mother and father individually, the married unit, their offspring. The King and Queen, the Hermaphrodite, AZOTH. We purify the lens so the light within can be focused into the world at our fingertips.

Three realms, represented in your mind and thoughts and plans and ideas, and in your awareness of the moment and interaction between that inner world and all the senses of the flesh through which you perceive and interface with the events of your life, and in the material things and people outside your fingertips that you have brought into being. Through the three realms a ray of light streams and takes form in your mind, the world around you, and the mediative sensate realm that processes the flow of stuff through time through your skin. That light is manifest in all the things you create, sustain, nurture, and consume moment by moment, returning it all to the source, enriched with the joy of existence.

All of this stuff we do with magic, that’s why we do it, and how we do it. That’s what we do.

Every time we turn up the heat on our lives magically, every time we try to go deeper and squeeze a little more of that true nectar of the gods out of the creation of the world around us, more crap bubbles to the surface to be skimmed off, or consumed and transformed in hotter fires, or lower heats over longer times. There are brutal sessions of self-awareness that reveal the parts of us that have to be maintained, endured, weighed, measured, consumed in fire, and replaced with something entirely new. There are internal transformations that have to take place, and extended rigorous magical exercises that build up spiritual muscles. There’s a spiritual fitness that has to be achieved and maintained if you want to keep going deeper.

Verily, there is a lot of shit to go through to get any kind of attainment when it comes to magic.

And why do we do it?

Why do we go through it over and over again? I mean, once a magician can create the most desired and fundamental goals of the people of our culture, riches, hot sex, fine wines, expensive cigars, delicious gourmet meals, options to live in whatever climate they desire, why do we keep going deeper instead of enjoying the rewards?

The reason we don’t stop is because the process of getting these skills, scenarios, things and abilities, that process of ascending to the heavens and returning in power to create the world… it is wonderful. It is an experience of exquisite pure distilled awesomeness. It is chilled liquid orgasm of the Intelligence, the Spirit, and the Body of the magician that hits in perfect harmony across the planes of existence and the realms of the manifest and the unmanifest allatonce.

And after experiencing that, the money, comfort, material luxury that we can manifest just doesn’t mean as much as they used to. They’re still nice, don’t get me wrong. But when you have experienced something better, the absence of that “better” is noticeable, and makes you long more for the thing that was better.

It’s like when you’re alone doing magic and analyzing and recording the results, vs. when you’re with your lover discussing the ritual you’ve just completed together, writing up notes in your spiritual journals, and running divinations to get clearer details on the results of the Work together. Yes, you can do it alone, but it’s not as good. It’s still good, but …

It’s not as good.

When you’ve had better, you want more of it. And the more you get, the more you can get. It’s like exercise that way, the more you lift, the more you can lift.

Doing practical manifestation magic, getting what you want, it’s all a big trick. It takes advantage of your desire to have a thing, to live a lifestyle, to own a car and a boat and have a hot lover, and it teaches you how to do so, and at the same time teaches you that those things, though really cool and pleasing, are nothing compared to what they can be with magic. The things you want become magical things that make sense in the life of a magician doing magic that works. The lifestyle you want becomes a magical lifestyle, where you use the charts and tables of the grimoires to make your daily teas as well as your astrologically timed talismans. The fast cars and boats teach you that it was the love of controlled movement through time and space that you were after the whole time. The hot lover reveals the steaming intercourse between the manifest and unmanifest united as One in which we are, all of us participating in every moment.

Your life, your kingdom, it just sort of realigns itself to contribute towards the Great Work, all the time, and you look for ways to squeeze more of that feeling, that action, that union and harmony out of your existence. You play with it in your intellect, in your emotions, in your flesh. You breathe it in, and let the friction of the winds become a smoldering coal that ignites a fire in your soul. You push that creative force through yourself on all the levels at once, and you change the world.

The more we do this, the more we can do it. A pure desire for the experience of the creation (and destruction) of the world, your world, and the things in it will keep you focused on the reasons we are here, and why what we do matters.

This pure desire is a Holy Hedonism.

So this is why we do it, we ecstatic Hermetics. We love creating and experiencing things. We are mad scientists curious and entertained by their own inventions. We are children at play with our Genius, for the joy of the playing together instead of the the joy of The Game* played.

So the real reason we keep going deeper is because the deeper we go, the more of this we can experience and enjoy. It keeps getting better, like a beautiful romance. The more we do, the more we can do. We learn to help ourselves, and when we have more than we can need, we have time to look up and notice there are others who don’t have enough, and we can pass that on, and keep getting more for our own enjoyment.

Hm… how else to put it? That’s it, but too … passive, I think.

Rank hath its privileges.

We get to do things other people can’t do, too. We can take for granted that the magic we do for our resources will work, and so we can focus on collecting and assembling the resources as we see fit. We’re artists with infinite supplies, we just have to put in our orders. We’ve learned how to manifest things** and how those things fit together to make new things. We can help other people. We have established, well-used good healthy relationships with the forces of the celestial, terrestrial, and chthonic realms. We get to conjure spirits that can only be commanded by those with the power and skill to handle them.

This is where it starts

Ok, so yesterday’s post focused more on the things I disagree with Frater Acher about than the things I agree with him about. That’s totally not fair, because I do think he’s awesome in his own way, and I want to make sure everyone knows I respect him and his path. It’s just not for me… and I disagree that magicians should not focus on miracles and the manifestations thereof.

I think what he’s doing is trying to get people to focus on expectation management. Too much focus on the materialization of the spirits can make you lose your perspective and mistake a vision obtained for a successful rite, and overly focusing on the physical stuff you get as the outcome can blind you to the real benefits of magic and this hermetic stuff we do.

I think that’s what Acher is focusing on in his advice, the outcome. And he values the internal outcome the most, the changes to the inner man within the magician, because that’s what brings the peace, the stoic contentedness that he believes is an enlightened state. He is totally right, too, it is the internal changes to you that matter most. The person you become as you do magic, the harmonization of your spheres, the learning who and what you are that make you capable of doing whatever it is that you’re here to do… That’s the real reason we do the magic to manifest the world, because the process changes us into who we are, it teaches us the things we have forgotten while incarnated. It makes us fully human, i.e. divine and in the flesh at the same time, in harmony. That’s beautiful. And that is more important than the flashy magics, in the long run.

But here’s the thing… I also think people should be happy. I believe happiness is a spiritual tool, an indicator that points directly back to their True Will, their Providence, their Fate, their Destiny, their Raison d’être. I don’t think there’s a better or more pleasant way to discover and apply your Will than to go after the manifestation of what you want. Nothing will make you happier than achieving harmony between the things you do and the things you want to do. When your life manifests your desires, your Will becomes obvious. You learn Who you are, and Why you are as you pursue the things you want. You develop the ability to discern what you “really” want when you manifest things that you thought you wanted and they don’t make you happy. You learn the spiritual lessons that reveal what it is that really makes you happy underneath the physical situations, relationships, or material things.

NLP is total bullshit. Its methods are bullshit methods, its science is bullshit science, and its anecdotes are bullshit. Just bullshit bullshit, pure and simple, bullshit.

Take a look at the core principles. Let me google that for you, because while there is a ton of overlap, everyone “teaching” NLP has something different to say about it, because it’s basically … bullshit. Not to overuse the word or anything, but there it is again. Take a look at three or four of the results, and scroll down to the principles parts. Read through a sample of it, and get a real good feel for what they’re saying. Then do the following fucking fascinating experiment:

1. Write down what you can remember about the core principles of NLP. Most of the links have a bulleted list, and you’ll remember a couple of them, and have a general sense of what you think the principles are; this is what NLP has come to mean to you based on your reading. Hurry along now, don’t write a fucking essay, just summarize the top three things you remember. We’ve got a mission here, don’t get bogged down on step one.
2. Read this article by Witchdoctor Joe.
3. Re-read what you’ve personally written down, each principle individually, and answer the next question about each:
4. Is it Kangaroo Magic? Is there anything in the principles that you’ve recalled that is absolutely true, something that can be applied across the board?
5. Now go back and re-read the principles of NLP, keeping in mind that question: Is it Kangaroo Magic?

I did this, and guess what? It’s all bullshit. I couldn’t believe it. None of the principles are really true at all, I can think of way too many personal experiences that prove that shit doesn’t work that way in the real world. Each is also really appealing. It would be really fucking great if there were a simple set of rules that worked all the time that could be used to your advantage the way NLP tells you there are. Especially these principles, each one telling you that the universe is secretly working for your own personal happiness in every situation, if you only can figure out the secret code to take advantage of it… You too can unlock the fullness of existence in terms of sex, money, and immunity to the will and whim of any other human, because they’re really little more than objects designed to fulfill your personal happiness, right? Everyone and everything exists to make you happy, if you just got it, got the secret, got… IT.

Do You Get It?*

And whatever the thing they tell you is “IT” is not IT at all. It’s obviously not true. You can remember times that shit they say doesn’t work. People are not always in a state of hypnosis. What one person can do, not everyone else can do. Confidence won’t make you thin or attractive, it will just make you the ugly fat douchebag that nobody likes.

Bullshit.

But … useful bullshit, eh?

Frater Acher recently wrote a book review that was more of a persuasive argument. He strongly recommended this book because it tones down your expectations from magic. It teaches you to settle for non-wonderful results, to not pursue the miracles of living magic. He recommends it to noobs and grimoire magicians especially, because he thinks noobs and grimoire magicians are too focused on the flash and power of immediate results. He thinks you get a more valuable return on your investment if you focus on the inner transformation of the magician.

He’s continuing a recent theme. I noticed it when he started the reviews of Emil Stejnar’s “Hermetic” magic works. His basic premise is that grimoire magi who focus on desires and results are fuckin’ it up and robbing themselves of the true power of the Hermetic system. I’m paraphrasing.

As you can tell, I disagree. We discussed it a bit on FaceBook. I am all about ecstatic pursuit of the exciting and awesome manifestations of god, being gods, working with gods, creating and enjoying our worlds like gods, and earning the wisdom and knowledge of the gods through hands-on experience.

But both approaches, the one that glorifies awesome miraculous results-oriented magic vs. the kind that looks a lot like sitting and reading and thinking about magic more than doing it… both approaches are bullshit. I think his approach is more obviously bullshit than mine, because he himself has had the awesome amazing firework-type results that made him appreciate the long term inner changes within himself. And my approach is bullshit because the whole time you’re going after the instant gratification, you’re putting yourself through the exact same transformative fires that Acher’s approach brings about, only with extra beautiful exciting dramatic beauty. And I like that. Other people … they like quiet lives.

And that’s ok.

In both of our pursuits of the Work, we use our beliefs that are, admittedly, bullshit. We take advantage of the usefulness of pretending like we are right for the moment, and it works for us. The universe really does reward ecstatics. It really does reward ascetics. It really does bring wisdom to philosophers. It rewards us with the same kinds of inner attitudes and insights and appreciations of life. It’s useful bullshit. And it has the power to change everything.

But it’s still bullshit, because it is not the actual way, the truth, or the life that either of us have. It’s just a tool, a set of practices and beliefs and insights that happened to work for us. And we like them better because we came up with them ourselves. The same way you will, by reading our bullshit and using that to grow your own way.

I went through some experiences over the last few months that have changed me a lot. I found out some stuff that was really simple, and it’s really good, and it makes everything feel wonderful. I’m going to start talking more about how to do this, how to experience it, and how to make your life as fun as mine has been.

It takes a bit of work, it takes some inner transformations, it takes some discipline, and setting aside your selfish safety to risk being honest with yourself about what you really want. It takes doing magic for instant results. It takes going to the highest heavens and returning in power to create and rule your world as a God-Emperor, a Sorceror-King. It takes going to the cracks of the Earth and finding the black secrets of the Universal Solvent. It takes casting your awareness into the Sun to see how everything is connected and working together in a cosmic orgasm of creation and experience and destruction all at the same time.

And it’s a ton of fun, even the sore and achy muscles part.

But as useful as it is, please remember, it’s bullshit.

Bullshit that can change your life.

* Oh, and just so you know, I am firmly in the “there is something to get, and I totally get it, but the it that I get is that there is no it to get, and you get to make up your own it as you go” circle, which tends to look a lot like very confused in the center of the graphic.

Saavik: Admiral, may I ask you a question?
Kirk: What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?
Saavik: The Kobayashi Maru, sir.
Kirk: Are you asking me if we’re playing out that scenario now?
Saavik: On the test, sir… will you tell me what you did? I would really like to know.
McCoy: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Starfleet cadet who ever beat the no-win scenario.
Saavik: How?
Kirk: I reprogrammed the simulation so it was possible to rescue the ship.
Saavik: What?
David Marcus: He cheated.
Kirk: I changed the conditions of the test; got a commendation for original thinking. I don’t like to lose.
Saavik: Then you never faced that situation… faced death.
Kirk: I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.

We do what we want to with what we’ve got to work with, and sometimes all that makes a difference is your attitude. Your character. To a large degree, we have the ability to redefine who that character is. Larger than we often believe, at any rate. We can be heroes, or we can be losers. We can be doctors, lawyers, bums, or magicians, and there’s no blame. No suffering besides that which you cause, and that which you experience. If you can think of a story that logically and rationally leads from your current state of being to another, you can act it out and experience the results.

Even if it takes cheating.

Skip, witches! Hop, toads! Take your pleasure! —
for the play of the Universe is the pleasure of
[Your Name Here]

There is only one thing you need to learn to get whatever you may want in life, and it’s a really simple thing to get. It’s free, even. It’s the key to the universe in a way that magical symbols and occult practices will never be, because without this Key, you’ll never learn magic at all.

I’m not talking about a piece of information here, either. It’s a process that you need to have to be a successful magician. Over time it becomes an ability, a skill that you can develop and hone into a skeleton key that will open every lock, tear down the walls between you and your desires, make straight the way and short the path.

I figured it out the way I figure all this shit out: I took a look at myself. My lover was telling me I was awesome, and while I’m the first to tell OTHER people how awesome I am, I’m mostly kidding. On the inside I had to wonder wtf she was talking about, because I don’t really think of myself as being all that special.

It’s not my good looks. Although I am rather handsome, I’m not much better looking than the average geek who takes care of themselves. It’s not my intelligence, because even though I’m smarter than the average bear, most of my friends are smarter than I am. I thought it was my adaptability for a while, because no matter what situation I find myself in, I find a way to excel. I rise to the top. I figure out the process, and go through the steps, and then the next thing you know, I’m at the top of my field, hobnobbing with the elite.

In conversation with my lover last night and this morning, I realized what it is for real though. It’s a skill, an ability. It’s a skill my mother developed in me, and raised me to believe in. It’s a thing I’ve used naturally and consciously to get ahead, to achieve great things in the occult realms, to win awesome friends and influence beautiful people, to make six figures a year and to be the kind of man who attracts the most amazing women.

It’s something that other people don’t have. The Bud Light Brigade, the food stamp using, potato chip eating, coca cola drinking, gas station working, Wal Mart shopping hu-manatees don’t strive for anything better because they don’t have this Key to the Universe.

Wait, that’s not true. They do have it, but no one ever told them, no one ever encouraged them to develop the skill. No one pointed out to them that they were doing it, or showed them they could apply it to every aspect of their lives to make things better for themselves, their kids, their spouses, their parents, their friends, their co-workers, everyone on the planet.

I’m talking about the ability to learn.

Everyone has the ability to learn. We learn things all the time. The stoner at Burger King making Whoppers had to learn the process. He watched videos about the broiler/toaster machine, learned the order of bun-meat-cheese-pickle on half the bun, mayo, lettuce, onion, tomato on the other, the pinch of bun and tomato to keep it from falling apart as he deftly flips the top on the bottom, wraps it in a fluid motion and tosses it into the window for pickup. Dude can make a Whopper in less than 15 seconds during the rush. And he had to learn to do that for half a dozen sandwiches, the fry station, and the single station. And how to do the prep work necessary for him to be able to make a Whopper in less than 15 seconds. And how to break down the broiler and clean it at close, and how to reassemble it at open. And the rhythm of the lunch and dinner rushes, to know how many burgers to put through so he doesn’t run out.

He had to learn a lot to do that job. The process he went through is the same process on a small scale that an Engineer goes through to learn to design and build microprocessor based ROM circuit boards for kiosk machines or nuclear armature circuitry. It’s the same stuff you go through to get a professional certification in project management, or the same stuff you go through in a university to get a PhD. It’s the same stuff you go through to learn a new magical technique.

You gather information, you see how it fits together in predictable ways, and how to apply that knowledge get specific results. That’s learning. We do it all the time. All of us.

But there’s more to it than that to become a raging success machine. There’s an attitude that separates the hu-manatees from the entrepreneurs who rage their way to the top. I believe I can learn. I believe there is nothing anyone else can do that I can’t do too. I might not be able to do it better, but I don’t have to. I believe there is a process, a series of steps that I can perform that will lead me to a place I want to be, and that if I perform them to the best of my abilities, I will end up where I want to be.

I said my mom taught me to do this. She was 36 when she had me. I was a high risk pregnancy in the ’70s. I was not planned, if you haven’t figured it out. I was a surprise. My mom had done moved on from the baby-raising days, and diapers and shit were not her preferred past time in her late thirties. She wanted her career back, and her time was precious. She didn’t have time to teach me all the shit that you have to teach little kids, so she fucking cheated like a boss. She taught me I could figure stuff out on my own by watching, by asking questions, by trying, and seeing how shit worked out for myself. She encouraged that because she didn’t want to have to teach me all that shit herself.

And I am so thankful.

Most of my really awesome successful friends are the types who have had, for one reason or another, to figure shit out on their own. By circumstance or design, they ended up learning that they could learn anything and put it into practice for themselves.

Assess yourself: has there been anything in your life that you’d like to do, and you think, “I don’t even know where to start,” and then you stopped there?

Here’s some stuff that you should use instead of giving up on things you really want:

Google.com
Yale Open and Free Education
MIT Open and Free Education
JSTOR

And … Magic. Magic helps you put the information together, to learn, to absorb the processes, to put it together into a useful set of reality-manipulation tools. Do the magic of the spheres while you’re studying, while you’re learning. It gives you the edge to lead a charmed life. Blessed. Holy. Awe-inspiring.

Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,’
Like the poor cat i’ the adage?
– Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7

Like the cat, fain fish wad ye eat,
but ye are laith to weet your feet 
-Scotch Proverb 

Are you afraid to be the person you want to be? Are you afraid to go after what you really desire? Are you a cat wanting fish, but you don’t want to get your feet wet?

I have been, often in my life. Obesity, bad relationships, terrible jobs… I put up with all kinds of shit that I didn’t like instead of trying to get something I wanted because it seemed too hard, too painful, or too uncomfortable to endure for the time it would take. There are things even now that I want, but do not try to achieve because I am not willing to go through the perceived discomfort involved in getting my desire.

But here’s a thing I’ve noticed… Time passes whether or not you are doing what it takes to get what you want. It might take months to get to a target weight and physique, or it might take a year to go through divorce proceedings, or it might take years to get a degree, or months to get a certification, or 10 years to get the experience in a career field that makes you happy.

But that time is going to pass regardless. At the end of that time, you will be somewhere, experiencing something. What you do between now and then will determine what you’re dealing with when the time comes.

In August, will you have lost weight and be enjoying your awesome body, having become an inspiration to some and the envy of others? Next February, will you be celebrating being out of a miserable relationship on Valentines’ Day? In 2015, will you be getting your Associates degree?

Or … not?

There’s no promise that the cat will get the fish, but they will definitely have wet paws. There’s no guarantee that things will work out in your favor, even if you do the work that should lead to your desired success. There’s a risk that you will suffer, and still not have what you want. There is definitely a chance that we shall fail in our attainment, but if we fail? We fail! And what of it?

We could be in a worse place, or we might be further away from our goals, or a million other possibilities. These are chances, real chances we take when we risk going after what we want. But there’s an absolute guarantee that you will still be obese, in a miserable relationship, or in a dead end job if you do nothing to change your life.

And you know what? Fuck that.

I started research last night so I can present an actual coherent conversation about the deity of man. Jason’s comments on the guru trip post, and private discussion, and Facebook, and beamed into my head through the aethyrs have demonstrated that I have failed to make a clear and concise (or coherent) argument that clearly defines terms, postulates, theorem, or even a useful thesis statement. I’ve also been challenged to a formal debate on the subject in the Forum by a classically trained rhetoricist, my long time brother in the Work, Logan.

So I started researching. I went back to my familiar resources, the divine pymander of the corpus hermeticum, and also the bible. Both have clear references to the divinity of man. Pymander explains we are gods who are in mortal flesh, of two natures, united for love.

I liked that opening. It is my functional core model when it comes to magic, the Pymander. The dual nature of man is clearly stated. Later it talks about the path of ascension to become a power, what it looks like, and how it is performed. Demonstrating that process as the great work is pretty simple.

Then I looked up what it says in the bible about the deity of man. John chapter 10, if you want to play along at home. I’m blogging on my phone from my bathtub this morning. I might paste quotes and links later, might not.

Jesus is telling people that he is in the father and the father is in him. A basic occult statement, something we all get, kether is in malkuth and malkuth is in kether. As above, so below.

The crowd was not just in disagreement, they were upset. Offended even. Pissed. They started stoning him. He says, wait what? You ate the food, you liked being healed, why are you now pissed?

Because you are a blasphemer! they said.

Wait wait wait, said Jesus. Look to the Scriptures! Doesn’t it say ‘haven’t I told you, ye are gods?’ That’s scripture, the same scripture you are claiming makes me a blasphemer. (He’s quoting psalms at them.) If the scriptures said men were gods when they received the word of god, how much more so would that make me a god when you experienced the miracles you have seen? If you don’t believe my words, judge me by my acts!

And the crowd grew peaceful, thinking on his wisdom, and returned to learning from him.

Lol! Not really. They kept trying to kill him so he was all, fuck this, and went home.

This isn’t an easy topic to discuss. There are thoughts and ideas about it that are intractable. I don’t think I can change anyone’s mind, nor prove anything conclusively to a skeptic. I can demonstrate results and experience to those who will receive it, but I don’t expect to prove anything through the evidence of the senses either, or even by the success of others performing the same rites I performed. Some thoughts are too much.

I haven’t decided whether to take a lesson from Jesus or not. Probably won’t. I’m the little brother who has to prove he can do it too.

But I went back and looked up Alan Chapman. Jason keeps mentioning him as someone who claims enlightenment and then makes an ass out of himself.

Funny thing is, reading his writings about attaining enlightenment, I totally know exactly what he’s going through. He used the wrong words to express his results, imo. He’s pathetic because he gets butthurt when the world doesn’t want to hear it.

It’s easier to learn from Chapman’s mistakes than Jesus, for sure. Arguing about where I’m at in terms of state and stage has proven ineffective and counter productive.

And really that isn’t even the point. It’s not about me. It’s about you. And joy. And happiness.

So I will rise to the occasion in the Forum, in hopes that the rhetoric will result in a cohesive argument. It might even be fun.

But going forward here, I’m going to try to just focus on letting results be proof. No promises that I will succeed, but I shall try.