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I went through a bad time over the summer while I was unemployed. Shit rose to the surface, and needed to be burned away. It was a good thing to have happen, it’s cleansed a lot of crap away. The house wasn’t the only thing that burned.

It’s all part of the Work, and I’m grateful. Nothing less than this would have changed my heart about things like taking care of what I spend so much money and time on. Family are a given, but I didn’t appreciate the house and stuff in my life, not really.

There is a value to material posessions that brings security. It’s not spiritual peace, and it’s not of eternal value, but we’re flesh as well as soul, this side of the grave. The body needs food, shelter and clothing. It feels better when it has it. A happy, healthy, secure Guf is every bit as important as a happy, healthy Ruach in tune with the Divine Source.

It’s a tapestry of stories, this “catastrophic event” thing. It’s a crystal with lots of facets, and each gives a different view of the interior of the crystal, a different perspective. With all the different views, you get a more-complete understanding. Not only that, each facet changes what you’re looking at through the facets. Each facet is like a lens, changing how the experiences viewed through it appear, giving you a completely different depth of meaning that you could never have had without the lens.

Having good insurance helps a lot.

Does anyone have the old “NI CelestialB” font installed on their machine? The Geocities site I got it from years ago is gone, and the font’s on my old HD, one of the files I didn’t know I needed to copy over. If someone has it, please let me know.

Edit: Found by Harry, an astute course member. w00+ness!

I’ve been avoiding talking about this, and it’s probably time to bite the bullet.

After the fire, I started getting checks in the amounts that I have been requested from Bune. My weekly rites to Bune for wealth seem to have worked out really well, if the only results that matter are the dollar amounts. Unfortunately, the results included things I hadn’t thought about.

From one point of view, it’s experience that brings the same old lesson I’ve been learning for years: be specific when you do magic. I could keep doing Goety and remember to always say, “may no one be physically, mentally, or spiritually damaged as you bring about the results I desire, and let no harm or catastrophic event like MY HOUSE BURNING DOWN occur.” But that’s not really going to fix much.

The fire is an event that led me to take spiritual inventory. Bune’s been great at getting me money, and I have no complaints about his effectiveness in getting cash. He definitely brings riches to a man. But it’s been consistently temporary, consistently accompanied by pain and stress. Right now, I’m thinking that there’s a time and place for Goety, but maybe it shouldn’t be my primary focus. In the Modern Goetic Grimoire, I talk a lot about going through the spheres and getting intiiations so that we’re empowered to do the Goetic magic effectively, but I think I should have been focusing on more than just the personal empowerment. It was irresponsible.

I mean, why do I always need a lot of cash windfalls? Because I don’t save or spend wisely. Maybe I should be focusing on the root problem instead of putting in requests for massive amounts of cash that have to come through extraordinary events. I mean, really, in your every-day life, how many ways are there for $5,000 to just appear?

I didn’t do one of the most important things I tell others to do: PLAN. Jason talks about it in Sorcerer’s Secrets or on his blog STRATEGIC Sorcery, that you really need to create a plan for the spirits to work through in order for it to materialize. He talks about how you can’t do a rite to get laid and then sit there on your computer, not shower, never go where women are, and expect the spirits to bring a woman knocking on your door asking for sex. The same applies to all magic. I asked for money, didn’t specify how it should come, and the spirits allowed something terrible to happen that resulted in the money coming in.

What a drag. Everything I’ve said about how spirits work is true. I really can manifest a lot of money using them. But without strategy, without a plan, there’s no telling how it’s going to come. It’s just plain dangerous to do Goety, or any other kind of magic without fore-thought.

So my magic in the present and foreseeable future isn’t going to include Goety, or much interaction with the spirits closest to the material plane. Instead, I’m going back to the Work of changing my self, fine tuning my planning abilities, focusing on changing bad behavioral patterns, and developing the heart and mind to accomplish my goals.

You know how embarrassing this is? I mean, really, I think pretty highly of myself as a magician. To fall into this trap, the very thing I’ve warned about is just humiliating.Worse than that, my family is suffering because I fucked up. I’ve got more money in the bank right now than I’ve had in years. Big deal. I failed to proactively assess potential methods to manifest the cash, I failed to do any divination, and I failed to keep my family safe. Yes, we all got out alive, and as everyone tells me, “That’s the most important thing.”

It’s true, things could be much worse, and I’m sure my magic to protect my family mitigated some of the worst possible effects.

But that doesn’t keep my son from getting weird looks at the Scout meeting when he has to tell everyone what happened. He doesn’t say, “My dad needed money, so he did magic, and Bune burned down the house and we’re all fine, but we lost our HOME for 3-6 months.” He doesn’t say, “My dad was too lazy to clean out the furnace room even though Mom told him to a week before the fire.” He doesn’t even say, “My dad was too ignorant to perform the maintenance on the the furnace and water heater that would have revealed the problems that resulted in the fire.” He just tells it like it is from his point of view, “My house caught on fire, and we’re safe, and my cat’s safe, and now we live in a hotel.”

But I know. I know I failed to protect my family from the trauma we’re going through. I failed as a husband and father. I failed as a magician. I failed as a man.

It’s not the end of my life or anything. It’s an eye-opener, and it’s definitely given me a reality check. I’m “powerful,” but clumsy. I’m experienced, but lazy. I’m wise, but irresponsible. I am NOT a complete failure, but I recognize that in this instance, I failed.

So I’m addressing that failure magically. I’m owning it, because it’s mine. I earned it. I’m not condemning myself or thinking I can never amount to anything more than a man who failed in so many ways, but I’ve got to be honest about it, honest with myself, and make the changes that have to be made.

So over on the follower’s list, I’ve gotten rid of the appeal to Bune. I’m hesitant now about making a blind evocation of Goetic powers. I’m not “blessing” people using Goetic Spirits any more. I’ve gained a respect for the powers I play with that I was lacking before.

Now, I know I may seem like I’m beating myself up in this post. Please, rest assured that I still think pretty highly of myself. I’m damned awesome, an asset to anyone’s circle of friends, and I’m pretty cool too. I’m publicly owning up to mistakes I made because this blog is primarily about the Great Work, and this is some shit that I have to go through in the process.

BJ Swain, Deputy Lodge Master of Blake Lodge in Baltimore is providing a course on traditional Merkavah this week. I should have plugged it earlier, but you know how things are.

For more information, please click this link.

BJ’s a frickin’ genius, one of the best Thelemic Magicians I’ve had the pleasure to meet. His experience and knowledge of occult practice and the accomplishment of the Great Work is a rare combination, and worth seeing in action.

I can tell my stress levels are increasing because my brain isn’t working right anymore. I can’t write, I can’t focus, and my meditations are annoyingly interrupted by thoughts of television and work. Television shows I have no interest in, even. Work issues that aren’t even issues. It’s weird how the brain deals with shit.

Even though the spiritual exercises I’ve been doing help, I’m still waking up feeling like I’m stuffed in cotton. The things I write seem dead. I’ve had three or four posts I’ve tried to write that just come out sounding like shit. Total shit.

The most annoying part is that I’m aware of the problem, I’ve taken steps to alleviate it, but I’m still feeling fuct in the head. It’s like being smart enough to know you’re not as smart as someone else, only the someone else is you yourself. Not that I’m all that bright most days, but still. I’m only partially functioning. It sucks.

I probably need more vitamins. Since moving into the hotel, my favorite food has been delicious chicken alfredo from this little delivery joint around the corner from the hotel. Man, damned good food, and it’s all comforting and starchy. There just isn’t a lot of Vitamin B in the pasta, cream, or butter they use to make it.

Delicious butter. Mmmmm.

I’m going through the whole mental process of dealing with the fire. It’s a lot like the stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, the whole Kubler-Ross model. Being a magician makes it easier, I think, but I still go through the phases. It’s weird how they hit about different aspects of my life throughout the day. I find myself in denial about some things, bargaining about others, depressed about some, and accepting about still other aspects of it.

Anyone pick up interesting dietary suggestions to help deal with “any form of catastrophic personal loss”? Or anything else that would help get me past this crap? Especially the brain-dead feeling that seems worse today than usual.

Please post ’em in the comments, yo! My brain NEEDS you!

Just got word from the people cleaning my stuff, and the hand-made Cthulhu I got from Suzanne Illes LIVES! It was cleaned and cured from all the smoke damage. Woot!

Happy New Year!

[Insert warm sentiment and well wishes here.]

Well, it’s been a busy end-of-the-year, as you can imagine. I just got around to setting up the yahoo groups for the Hermetic Merkavah and Supernatural Assistant courses starting tomorrow. If you signed up, check your inbox. If you meant to sign up and haven’t yet, email me at frredactumopus@gmail.com to save your spot in the course. I’ll be shutting down enrollment next weekend.

I’m a little frazzled with the events of my life. It’s not fun losing everything to fire and smoke, and even though I know deeply that things will be alright eventually, and I’ll end up coming through this “smelling like a rose,” there will be days of nausea and angst to come. I’ve been doing a lot of contemplation of my Source and I’ve managed to maintain a pretty level outlook on things in general.

You know what, I don’t have a lot of time to post today, I’ve got a lot going on, but damn it, this is important. I tried writing a decent post about this a few times, and I can’t find the right words to make it a masterpiece, so I’m just going to put it out there the way I see it, it’s important, I think.

People have said I have a good outlook. One dude said I’m a “happy bastard” because I have a lot of spirits helping me. A few people have suspected I’m in shock, and they were probably right to a degree. But the truth is, I’ve seen fucking eternity stretching out for-fucking-ever, and while I deal with the bullshit and walk out my part in it to get to the best end-result possible, it’s a given that this crap will pass. As a result, I have a positive outlook on things.

Eventually, no matter how much bullshit you’ve got to deal with, it ends. You either die and go back to eternity, or you live and things get better. There are days of feces, and there are days of bliss. You put up with the feces to get to the bliss. That’s my core philosophy when it comes to dealing with crap. I’m a magician, and I’m not bragging or anything, but come on, this isn’t that bad, really. It’s a huge opportunity to start over, re-evaluate priorities, and set things right that weren’t before. I can design my entire lifestyle based on what I know works and what doesn’t now. I have a clean slate at my house, no bills, no mess, no piles of crap to take out of the furnace room before it catches on fire. It’s already too late, you know? I’ve written it off, and moved on to where I’m at.

One of the main reasons people get into magic is to make their lives better. It provides a means to deal with the crap that comes with life, a means to change the world and ourselves. I gives me a perspective on my life that brings peace. It gives me tools to engineer things better, and to react to things better. It doesn’t make life perfect, but it makes things better.

This is how I think magicians respond to things in their lives. Ideally, I’d have avoided the situation magically, but I can’t think of everything, and I have sorely neglected divination for years. There’s no means in my daily life for spirits to provide warning, and even if they did, I would have ignored it and gone on to getting more money a few weeks ago. Priorities were a little skewed, and I had no frame of reference to even notice it.

Things have changed. That’s what happens. Life goes on, and we get on with it as long as we can. I still can, so I do.

Anyway, happy new year, may your life be blessed with Peace and Prosperity. But especially Peace.

In Science class, I learned about open and closed systems when I learned about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Ok, maybe I learned about it from the link over there. Anyway, POS post reminded me of it. I liked his post, it was appealing. The last paragraph is what I wanted to draw your attention to:

It is important to know which tool to use for which type of magick. I saw little need to ask the universe to sacrifice to make this goal happen. Nor did I see a need for any other human to sacrifice anything financially for this. Frankly, it is only important to me. Sometimes practical magick can be purely internal.

I totally agree with the sentiment he expresses. Sometimes practical magic can be internal, and he’s got a great methodology to deal with paying off debt by doing magic to make him responsible in his money management. I need to do similar magic to get the power to overcome the ongoing temptation to splurge when I can’t afford it. Every character flaw we address using magic will have a huge reward in practical terms when we stop behaving in ways that sabotage our success. I couldn’t agree more about that, and that’s his main point, or at least the main point I took away from his post.

But in the paragraph, he uses the word “sacrifice” in a way that prompted me to write this post. I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the premise he’s working from is that the universe is a “closed system,” that is, the universe exists and all that is within it is all there is. Ergo, if you do a ritual for money, the money has to come from somewhere. Like the Universe has a bank account with limited funds, and taking a withdrawal for yourself results in there being less left over for anyone else to use. So the universe or someone else has to “sacrifice” some of its stuff to take care of your magical request.

In a closed system, entropy is always accumulating. Eventually, in a closed system, everything becomes a jumbled chaotic mess. There is a tendency for disorder to accumulate. It’s like if you pour salt into a bag, and then pour pepper on top of it. When both are in the bag, it starts out neat and ordered. The pepper is all together on top of the salt. If you start shaking the bag, the pepper and salt mingle, and the more you shake it, the more mixed it will get. No amount of shaking will result in the pepper gathering together and the salt gathering together, statistically speaking. It’s extremely improbable.

One of the arguments for Creationism is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. People say that if the Earth is a closed system, life wouldn’t have evolved on it because that’s order accumulating, and not disorder. (I think an argument could be made that life is actually a manifestation of disorder, but it becomes moot when you consider the obvious.) The Earth is not a closed system. The Sun is constantly adding its radiation to the mix, asteroids crash into it, and comets bring water and hydrocarbons from the bowels of space to power our vehicles. (You don’t REALLY think decaying carbon-based life forms turn into oil under pressure, do you? They don’t. That’s a theory from the 1700s. If that worked, we could produce oil. We can’t. It comes from comets.)

So if the Universe were a closed system, magic done for money for me would potentially be magic that takes money from you. However, if we really look at “money” (for example) and where it comes from, we find out that it’s completely created. The Federal Reserve just added a few billion dollars to the economy by simply printing it, inflation be damned. It’s poor economics, but it reveals that there is no limit to the amount of “money” that can be conjured. It doesn’t come from a closed system.

Now, before I go any further, I’d like to point out that the following parts are all theory, not fact. Belief, interpretation, conjecture, and opinion. I’m not saying I’m right, I’m just saying this is how I see it and it works for me. Your mileage may vary.

In my cosmology, the Universe is not a closed system. God created it, emanated it, extended it from his infinite self, and part of that infinite self is temporarily encased in denser parts of itself in the form of matter. I believe God is present and active in the universe. I speak with him and/or his agents on a regular basis. I think he’s still pumping stuff into being in this universe at a constant rate, and that the moment of Creation never ended.

I see the relationship between the Sun and the Earth as a reflection of the relationship between God and his Creation. The Sun transmits power that is absorbed by plants and turned into oxygen and other useful things. The Sun is a finite source, so it’s not a completely accurate analogy, but the snapshot of the Sun powering the Earth to offset entropy is a good representation of how I see God’s influence on the Universe at large.

When things are requested by magicians, I don’t think it comes from the “Universal Bank Account” that has a fixed sum. I think it just manifests out of thin air. It has to come down through the heavens following the chain of manifestation, of course, and by the time it reaches us, it looks like it came through from completely “natural” means, but it still started as an Idea in the Mind of God that manifested on our behalf when it was necessary.

The idea that it’s a sacrifice for the universe to provide for us seems to me to be off. It’s like we’re saying, “God, you did all this, made the heavens and Earth and stars and planets, but now you’re at Rest, and you don’t do anything anymore.” That’s a popular belief, and there are a lot of Deists or near-Deists that believe basically that. There are Christian doctrines that teach that God isn’t present and active anymore, except through his Holy Spirit as it operates through the human members of the Church. On the seventh day, God rested, and that’s where he’s been ever since (except for those thirty or so years in the flesh).

I disagree with them too.

I used to debate with a guy named Logan online in a lot of message boards. Those who had to suffer through our debates likely remember them with a shudder. We got evil with each other. It was fun, we managed to maintain mutual respect despite our sometimes vitriolic attacks on one anothers’ characters.

He and I had the closed- vs. open-system debate, and there are valid pros and cons to both approaches. I personally see the closed-system magical model as restrictive to magicians. If you think your magic to bring you prosperity is going to leave a family in Indonesia poverty-stricken and homeless, you won’t feel it’s ethical to do prosperity magic. You can’t really do healing rites for people either, because you’re taking the healing that would go to someone else and applying it to whomever you love. You can’t even pursue enlightenment, because that would be stealing someone else’s enlightenment too, right?

When I look at the magical models we have to work with, eventually I see in all of them the point where we reach something akin to the Pleroma, or in kabbalistic terms, the “Ain Soph Aur.” Light without limit. It is from this pool of limitless light that all things come and are manifest. If it were a pool of limited light, I could understand the assumption that there’s only “so much” that is available for everyone to share, and that the Universe would be sacrificing some of its stuffness on behalf of POS to pay for his car.

But it’s not. It’s limitless. Infinite. Eternal. The Light is constantly flowing down through the Tree and its spheres, constantly washing through each, taking on characteristics from each and then ultimately manifesting in the patterns and structures we experience in this realm. Yes, there are rules, and there are limits, and there are Natural Laws that all magic has to operate within, but it all starts from an infinite pool.

I’ve come to use the Emerald Tablet of Hermes as the standard operating procedure for magicians performing the Great Work. We rise to the heights, tap into the Power, and bring it to Earth. Thinking of the pool magicians tap into as a closed system, in my opinion, is opposed to the revelations we have of the nature of the universe within our magical traditions.  Having seen the unlimited Light of God, I am not comfortable at all thinking that we’re stuck with what we have on hand to work with.

And again, I’m not disagreeing with POS’s approach to paying off his car. I think it’s the most responsible use of magic I’ve seen in a long time, my own practice included. I just think it’s also important for us to remember where we come from, and what our potential truly is.

Ha! I totally got my computer. I have to fire it up (so to speak) and make sure the data’s still there, but it looks fine from the outside. I also found all my course material in the original word documents stored on a thumb drive, thank the spirits. Life is good.