Eventually.

Remember when Clinton went on Arsenio Hall and played the sax?

Remember when your biggest fashion conundrum was resolved entirely by figuring out which flannel shirt smelled the least bad?

Remember when we saved the world from Y2K?

Remember when we built the internet?

Remember when we didn’t really have any hope for the future, but it was alright, because there was slack?

Where did the slack go? I’ll tell you where it went.

The 1% took all the slack.

Sure, some of us are a bit bitter and resigned still, some of us are having the same reaction I had at first to this OWS thing.

“Oh, you’re getting fucked? Welcome to my world, trapped between the boomers and Gen Y, and nobody’s ever given a shit about us, but we do everything useful anyway.”

Here, it’s put much better in this Gizmodo article: Generation X is Sick of your Bullshit.

But some of us are not putting up with it. Some of us are remembering you can’t steal slack.

And we’re taking it back.

Because this is how it happens.

Ok, so I gave everyone a heaping pile of SHIT about meeting at Starbucks to plan OWS, did I not?

Well, I was APPARENTLY a bit hasty. Check this shit out:

Here’s the idea they came up with: Americans themselves would start
lending to small businesses, with Starbucks serving as the middleman.
Starbucks would find financial institutions willing to loan to small
businesses. Starbucks customers would be able to donate money to the
effort when they bought their coffee. Those who gave $5 or more would
get a red-white-and-blue wristband, which Schultz labeled “Indivisible.”
“We are hoping it will bring back pride in the American dream,” he
says. The tag line will read: “Americans Helping Americans.”

THIS.

This is what I was talking about. Subsidize small business, I said. Get small businesses moving, and the jobs will follow. And it’s STARBUCKS, the very corp I was knocking who’s making it happen. Fuckin’ figures.

But fuck it, I support this.

Start your own online business for under $100. 

Jump into the gig economy. (Got that link off Gordon’s latest Apocalypse post, which is chock full of nougatey goodness.)

Plan on growing your business over the next year to where you are the job creator. Don’t wait for corporations to do it for you, even though apparently they aren’t all evil greedy bastards with no solutions, only ways to get more money. Don’t wait for Government to do it for you, though I’m starting to feel this weird feeling of hope that there might actually be something good that comes from all this OWS stuff. I still suspect nothing good will come of it, but … it would be nice if I’m wrong.

And then magic your Business to Success.

And while I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to use credit to expand and grow in the digital age, we now have access to it if necessary. Maybe a couple grand here or there will get you the materials you need to take things to the next level in your product line, increasing demand and allowing you to hire people. Who knows? It’s an option though, when a couple weeks ago it was not.

Do it yourself. I’ve already got one part time employee helping me out with my online business. She’s gathering materials for talismans, handling incoming orders, taking care of shipping, and doing a lot of the administration, freeing me up to concentrate on providing the occult services and writing. Business is booming. I’m telling you, it’s not only possible, it’s effective.

Things are really changing. Who knew?

Hey Magician, how’s it going?

You know how pissed everyone is that the wealthy elite control all teh monies?

How pissed would they be if they knew a handful of occultists around the world were the primary movers and shakers of this shared reality we experience?

How many magicians* actively participating in the creation of their experienced world do you think are at work today?

Based on book sales statistics for the last decade, about 1.1% of the population is interested in spirituality, self help, occult, and new age beliefs. Out of all the people interested in these topics that you know, how many of them are actually actively creating their world?

Purely as an estimate based on my personal observations in three states over the last twenty years, I’d say there are probably two competent practicing reality engineers for every fifty people who buy books about this stuff, of various paths and traditions. And that’s a generous estimate, in my opinion, as most of those folks are still figuring out how to do it, and a lot of them will get distracted for years at a time. So that’s 4% of the 1.1%.

That’s 0.044% of the population that’s actively participating in creating the world using occult means, spiritual assistance, eastern occult philosophies, or new age techniques of some kind.

And guess what most of them were focused on?

• Sex: Fuckin’ and relationships is the number one magical service requested, and most people’s first attempts at spellcraft were related to someone they wanted to fuck.
• Money: Wealth and prosperity is the number two magical service requested. Moving up through the ranks of society, getting an edge, making businesses profitable… In other words, doing everything in our power to become the 1% the OWS is railing against.

That’s right. As the great philosopher once said, “Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.“**

It’s Elemental

The good news is that most of us, if we’re serious about using magic to make money, eventually realize the role money has to take if we’re going to be successful in conjuring it on demand. It becomes the servant, and not the goal. That’s the key.

And we stop trying to get to be the 1%. At least, that’s what’s happened to me. I don’t want to be at the top, I simply want to be free to pursue what I want to pursue when I want to pursue it. For years I figured that meant amassing great stockpiles of money, the interest on which I could support a decent lifestyle. In other words, becoming the 1%.

I didn’t want billions, just $4.2 million. Not a lot, really, when you think about it.

But see, that was the means to the goal, not the goal. The actual goal is to get out of the game, to play my own game by my own rules, to rule myself.

OWS is about giving more people the opportunity to achieve that goal. The grip on the wealth held by the wealthy is tight, and they are strangling the 99%, making sure they can’t get in on the deal, pushing them even further away from the end goal.

More on that later, it’s miller time.

But before I head out, I should acknowledge that I may have been wrong about Soros funding the OWS. It wouldn’t be the first time.

But we’ll see where things go when Adbusters starts rolling out their demands. It’s entirely possible their planned demands get washed under the masses they’ve organized though, at this point.

* Or sorcerers, root doctors, folk healers, shamans, masters, gurus, priests, goes, theurgists, or whatever you want to call them.

** to which Philosoraptor replies, “But didn’t Biggie say mo money mo problems?”

For those who have not yet looked at what’s going on politically in America from a spiritual perspective, from a firm foundation of history, here’s a simple graphic explaining it all as clearly as I can:

They’re both movements primarily started by the wealthy elite. Adbusters started the OWS, and they’ve got a long term agenda planned for it. It starts seemingly seemingly at random, but then it starts putting out a cohesive message. They’ve already talked about it here:

“Down the road, there will be crystal clear
demands coming out of this movement,” he said. “But this first phase of
the movement is messy and leaderless and demandless.”

Do not make the mistake of thinking that this OWS was spontaneous, or unplanned. Maybe Soros did or didn’t have anything to do with funding OWS, but do not think for a moment he will not profit off the unrest. See Rule 162.

Herr Von Faustus wrote a neat post about Cynicism the other day, and it really got me thinking. I had thought for some reason the Cynics were a second century doomsday cult. I can’t seem to find the source that made me think that,* but his post and the wikipedia explanation make it sound right up my alley lately.

Since I started doing the Gates Rites regularly, I’ve been harmonizing within and without, and it’s changed the way I see things. If you read the introductory material of the Rites, it’s apparent that they are aspiring towards something much more than wealth and prosperity. It’s not about becoming King and being a tyrant, jockin’ the bitches and slappin’ the hos.

It’s about taking responsibility for your life. It’s about taking ownership of your existence and your experience. That takes courage, power, authority, and compassion. You become the patriarch or matriarch of everything and everyone in your world when you harmonize your consciousness with Destiny. You see how they all work together to create the one thing that is your life, and you see weaknesses and strengths, potentials to shape, projects to accomplish. You get inspired, and your life becomes your Art as you express yourself through yourself, becoming the fulcrum between the Seen and the Unseen realms.

It’s a process of decompartmentalization of your life, in many ways. You see that they all feed on one another, your happiness, success, family, work, society at large, global population, the environment, space, time, and all the illusions of differentiation. It’s all a bunch of arbitrary lines marking off similar subjects, but it leads to the illusion of separation. It’s all attached, it’s all one big shiny thing, your life, and it’s fucking brilliant.

The reason the Gates Rites take you down through all the spheres along the chain of manifestation is to build up a resonance in your sphere of manifestation. In other words, it makes you powerful in all the different ways things manifest. Hermetics supplies a map of the forces, organized by qualities and similarities, but it’s all one big process, and we use the phase gates of the process to work with it. At a high level. More granularly speaking, there’s a lot of conjuration of helpful entities that goes on in practice.

We’re in that current of manifestation all the time, but we’re not of it. I’m fond of the Crowned Creation interpretation of where our ability to do magic comes from. I believe we’re made in God’s image, and we’re loved by everything because of that, and that’s why spirits work with us and we get to do magic. I think “made in God’s image” is code for Thou art God, but I’ve always put St. Heinlein a few notches above St. Paul when it comes to scripture.

Jake Stratton-Kent believes you get your magic powers from the pacts made with the spirits, specifically the parchment or Liber Spiritum which contains the covenant between the Spirits and the Magician. The agreed exchange is the magical effects for the offerings of fire and smoke, and other things we do with the spirits. You don’t pay the spirits, you don’t get the magic, like in any business venture.

Functionally, we both end up with a Liber Spiritus, and we both burn candles and incense, so what difference does it make? I think it’s one of those areas of doctrine where there’s enough room in the universe for multiple interpretations with explanatory force. However you interpret it, you end up with the power to create your personal world.

You’re not like other people when you do that shit.

Ok, so to recap:

• Man’s the fulcrum between the Unseen and the Seen worlds
• And it’s one big current manifesting above and below simultaneously
• And regardless of where the power to do magic comes from, the reclamation of your race and value, or the pact between you and the spirits, magicians have special authority over their lives
• This authority is how the Universe is made
• You’re special; you create your world

For most people, the world is their whole world. For us, it’s our playground, our laboratory. It’s where we practice being gods. Practical magic. Practice. See that? Isn’t that neat?** So when it comes to society and worldly things, we’re in the world but not of it. We have a perspective on the forces that are manifesting as the Occupation, the Arab Spring, the Tea Party, the entire global recession in general that most people don’t have.

Manifestation is hierarchical. Hierarchies of spirits are maps and tribes, it’s true, but they are also a lesson in relationship. “Man” is a spiritual class of entities with a role to play in manifestation, the role of god of their world. The secret Joseph Smith missed was that you don’t have to wait to die to get your own planet, it’s already yours. It doesn’t feel like it because there are forces out there you can’t control, market forces, economic fluctuations, natural disasters, but that’s just because you’re looking at it as if they were separate things. They really are part of that one big current of manifestation.

And you’re part of it too, but separate. Detached a bit because you’re special. You can do magic. You can create your world. You work with what you’ve got. The world is your laboratory, the stuff that happens is your materia, and your magic is your equipment.

You work with what’s really going on in the world. You become aware of the force and how one facet of it is manifesting in your world, and you have established a relationship to it. You’re in a relative position to everything that’s happening. If you’ve recently lost your fortune to the economic downturn, you’re position relative to the big dick of economic hardship is bent over. Positional relationships.

You learn to read the current as a magician. You learn to adapt to it, as well as adapting it to you. You harmonize it with your desires. You harmonize with it too.

Dropping it down a level, less abstract, say you’re working on getting money, and there’s an Occupation of Wall Street going on, it’s a good time to start selling T-Shirts with slogans on them. Or if you’ve got political aspirations, and there’s a protest going on, you join in and see how many people you can convince to support your platform. If you’re a day trader and the economy’s taking a nose dive, you focus on strategies for making a profit in down markets.

Magicians, that’s us, only not so specialized. We’re doing that all the time with everything that’s going on at once, on some level. Strategizing. working with what we’ve got. Using everything to our advantage. Bullshit makes the flowers grow, and that’s beautiful. War, peace, they’re both good for business.

And I’m using money metaphors here because it’s a language I understand, because I’ve focused on it a lot. But don’t think that just because I talk a lot about money, that’s all I care about. I talk a lot about it because it matters a lot, and also, to a much much lesser degree, because I used to be really greedy. Wealth was goign to answer everything, wealth and prosperity were the ticket to everything I wanted.

And I still see money as a means to an end, but my desire has shifted from the means to the end. As a result, the focus of my magic has changed, and things have gotten a lot better in my world. And money is the easiest thing to make in the world, as a magician. Money, once you see how easy it is to make, loses value. Rob it of its mystique, and it has no power over you.

Greed is not an issue when you’re being a good King. Philosopher Kings know the truth and harmonize with it. The cynics taught to give up everything and live in harmony with nature. I agree completely, Hermetically speaking. Give up attachment to all the compartmentalized pieces of the current, and live in harmony with it instead, harmonizing it with you, harmonizing you with it, playing, creating, in tune with everything else, using what you have to work with and crafting your world.

Do that right, and the money just flows in. Like a flood. Whenever you need it, address the means and the end, and do the magic to harmonize it to your desired outcome, be willing to adapt as necessary, and you’ll find it just moves right where it needs to go. And the money was never the point, the resolution or acquired result was the goal, and that’s where your intent and attention was focused. That’s the trick of all this. Awareness of your relationship to everything else, and creation of your world.

Money serves you. Jason teaches that fundamental concept in his financial sorcery classes. Make money serve you, or else you’re serving money. Someone’s got to be the bitch in the relationship.

But that lesson applies to everything, and there’s more to it. You’re either serving your job or its serving you. Your family, your spouse, your boyfriend/girlfriend, your pets. Are they serving a purpose in your life? You’ve got them in your life for a reason, what is it? Are the situations serving you by providing you with the rewards you should be getting?

I like being a dad. It’s cool. I like having kids. They’re awesome. I love the parenting process, shaping little minds and hearts and aiming them at the future, having progeny, knowing my genes have been passed on. It’s awesome. It’s like emanation in the flesh. Little pieces of myself that will go on after I’m gone, bringing me wisdom, love, and happiness as a father. Fatherhood serves a purpose, it makes me happy.

But for it to make me happy, I have to do it right. There’s nothing wrong with being a hedonist if you accept the responsibility that comes with getting the pleasure you seek. I have to be a GOOD dad to have good kids who do good things that make me happy. If I fuck them up, my life will be hell. I won’t get any pleasure out of being a father if I screw up. So I have to do it right.

Which means I end up in service to them.

Service, it turns out, is part of rulership, intrinsically linked, aspects of the same principle. You aren’t a good king if you’re not ruling in compassion, serving your kingdom by creating it beautifully. Everyone else in the world, no matter what they look like, or what they believe, or how they vote, they’re all in our world. They’re our brothers and sisters, as well as being part of our Kingdoms, part of the manifestation of that One Thing. To be happy Kings, we have to serve even them.

* Try googling that and see where it gets you. Teh Intertubes are clogged with bullshit and I can never find what I need anymore! Fucking 2012 has ruined any kind of decent results you can get on ancient eschatologies. And Camping hasn’t helped at all.

** You’ve got to listen to this story about Lonnie Sue Johnson, it’s kind of a downer until you get to about 7:28 or so, and then some of the most profound wisdom comes out, pointing to the Mystery of the interconnectedness of the One Thing in relation to the role of Man in creation.

In my rant against the Occupation, I bemoaned the fact that the Occupiers have no view of History, no idea of where they’re at in the decline of civilization, and they ought to be doing (basically) the Great Work to really change the world.

But the truth is, I am the one who lost perspective on where we’re at socially as a global community, and that’s something Magicians, Kings, Sages, Sorcerers, and other forms of entrepreneurs really, really can’t afford to do. Not if they’re serious about the fundamental axiom “As above, so below.”

Basically, and I’m being brief because it’s important to get this up and then I gotta get back to work, there are currents manifesting across the world, and it’s manifesting all over. Tea Party, Occupation, Arab Spring, London Riots, Drug Cartel wars… There’s revolution in the air. And it’s all related, somehow. Here’s a neat pic for you to chew on, M.C. and BtF:

It’s a bit simplified, but it’s interesting, nonetheless.

And the main thing to remember, imo, is that these are profitable times for magicians, my brothers and sisters. Times of unrest send people flocking to us for help and answers in droves.

[EDIT: And you’d damned well better be able to offer them something useful if you’re going to offer anything at all.]

I’ve reconsidered my stance on the whole Occupation thing. I still think most of the people are idiots, but I think it needs to be done, and it’s got my full support.

I was wrong in attacking the whole thing. And I was a dick about that. Sorry.

The last post was a bit controversial. I got a hair across my ass when I was watching the videos of the protesters that are being posted on YouTube. I was interested because I, like everyone else in the middle class, support the brutal financial rape of Bank of America as vengeance for their ongoing raping of their clients. And the same for every other major corporation that abuses its consumers. I want to see some white collar criminals go to jail for their crimes and evilness that have fucked over the country. I think the greedy patricians and oligarchs ought to pay for abusing me with their stupid ways.

And I was all set to go Occupy Baltimore, too, to express my disgust with the corporate hierarchs.

And then I saw a video of a guy holding up a cardboard sign that said “We are the 99%.” And I got this vision of the whole entire world, and I remembered the Global Rich List calculator, and that I’m something like the 50,000,000th richest person on the planet, out of 7 billion. That puts me at about the top 7% of the planet, and the 99% bottom of the US at the same time.

And then I started seeing all the plastic bottles of water these guys were carrying around. And I saw they were organizing in Starbucks. And they were wearing all their obscure t-shirts they ordered online, wearing their designer hipster glasses, sporting carefully crafted couture. And I watched the folks who “know what’s going on” saying that no one person stands for the movement, there is no one voice, what unites them is their disgust at the current situation. And then I saw someone saying to those considering joining the occupation to take the time to figure out what you believe, ten or fifteen minutes so that if you get interviewed, you don’t look like an idiot on Fox News.

And it dawned on me that most of those folks showing up were idiots. They don’t have any historical perspective, and they think any changes that they manage to get will be more than cosmetic. Hell, they don’t even watch what is happening in Egypt right now, today. Hello new boss, same as the old boss. 1% controls the most, everyone else makes due with as much as they can scramble up and horde. It’s the way of the world, and it always has been when more than a couple hundred or so humans are living in the same place.

A long time friend said I had the most cynical stoic perspective she’d ever seen in response to one of the comments along those lines I made on FaceBook. It’s not, I don’t think, because that’s just how it is, was, and regardless of optimistic idealists’ hopes and dreams, that’s how it’s going to remain forever.

Ok, maybe she’s right.

But why does it have to be that way?


Because the way people do things in groups is fucked up.

When the revolutionaries, peaceful or bloodied have won, they divvy up the spoils of war along the lines that they all agree are right and fair for everyone, right? Ever? No. Even in a completely democratic process, there will be factions who walk away feeling dissatisfied. Look at Washington. People don’t agree on things.

The idea that forming a group to do group activities to change the world will make it better is infantile, and stands bald faced against the solid evidence of history, and the evidence of the eyeballs in our heads right now. Right now goddamnit. Search Google News for what’s going on with the Arab Spring. Today.

My Idea of a Solution

But there is an answer that will fix everything. If every one of those protesters out there in the street stopped making their event an occupation, and started making their lives a protest, things would change fundamentally.

If they unhooked their reliance on the system, and plugged it into themselves, and then started doing the real work of picking the right institutions to invest in, living ecologically sound lifestyles, destroying their reliance on the public energy grid, starting their own businesses, creating jobs themselves as they grew and profited, and voted sane, center-political candidates into office that would work together to get corporations taxed and regulated, small businesses subsidized, and the distribution of taxation fair, they would change the whole world.

When I start seeing them saying, “I got ripped off by corporate America because I trusted them and signed the contracts without reading the fine print or understanding the risks I was getting into, and I’m not going to do that ever again,” then I’ll have respect for this movement.

If they just tended their gardens, the problems they have would go away.

A group of enraged Bank of America people all went to BoA to close their accounts at once in a big protest, and they got arrested. Some people were like, “whoa, it’s a crime to close your bank account, see how fucked up it is!” I see your point, you’re right, but really what did you expect? An angry mob goes to the bank, the cops will be called.

If people would just calmly, quietly walk into their large banking institutions and close them down like sane adults, there wouldn’t have been any uproar, the cops wouldn’t have been called in, and the banks would be feeling a deep, cold dread that would spread to every corner of corporate business.

Put your money where your beliefs are. Find small local institutions, and put your money in them. Credit unions. Don’t put it all in one place. Have some land somewhere, have something that produces something useful available.

If you must work with big corporations, read the fine print, shop around, and get screwed the least. It’s complicated, it sucks, and that’s life. It can’t be simpler because there are too many of us involved now. That’s the world you live in, and it’s not going to change at the core, it will be complicated, and the rich will control the most and the poor will control the least. It doesn’t matter if the outer form is capitalist, communist, or religious, democratic or tyrranical. Oligarchical patricians will still rule the world, and stack the deck in their favor. Gerrymandering, it’s like that.

But this social outcry could do something positive, and I’d rather see people rioting in the streets than eating cheeseburgers while they watch Jersey Shore. I guess.

But really, they’re doing it for the same reasons.

Occupy Wall Street! Meet at Starbucks to Organize!