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After COMPLETING all Seven Sphere courses, the students wanted to do a “Seven Spheres in Seven Days” thing. So we set it up and we’re doing it March 16th. People not in the original course student group have expressed interest in this kind of thing too, and while I’d love to add you all to the group of people who went through the course, that’s a problem.

First off, they paid money and went through a lot of drunken me explaining the mysteries of the spheres in ways that only a drunken magus can convey. They have become friends and understand each others’ issues. They are basically a coven of awesome planetary magicians. And introducing people to that who weren’t there isn’t fair to them, and taints the work.

At the same time, going through Seven Spheres in Seven Days is AWESOME and it changes everything, and everyone should do it at least once in their lives.*


SO, you are cordially invited to participate in a Seven Spheres in Seven Days event, beginning March 19th. I’ll still be in the previous Seven Spheres Course Members 7 days exercise, so what could possibly go wrong for me, eh?


Fuck it.


I’m setting up a FaceBook group:


https://www.facebook.com/groups/1595558160726419/

I expect you to have bought one of my books, so there’s no charge for this exercise. If you haven’t, buy it here:

Seven Spheres Book Orders

* Note, this isn’t “safe” and some people had terrible things happen to them immediately after, but then things got a lot better for most people still capable of posting to facebook. It’s not like we ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND how magic works, ffs.

For those of you who have bought my awesome book, Seven Spheres, and have actually been doing the Work, chances are that you’re going through some … exciting times. Sisters and brothers, I feel your pain. But it gets better, lots, and the trip itself is fun, after a while. Trust me. The chaotic phase of rapid change can be spooky, but hey, I get it. I totally get it.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been pumping plantary powers into my sphere, transforming my life and my self into something … else. I’ve been grabbing onto my power as a divine being in a material world, taking authority over my life and the things that happen in it, and learning how to be a good king, in a creative and productive way.

Iovis Maximus … WTF!?

I felt a lot like Tetsuo from Akira at times, overcome with this power that I couldn’t really control. There were great times, and weird times. It was not entirely unlike puberty, but at last things are starting to settle down. I feel like I’ve hit a point now in my practice where I can calmly approach the business of manifesting my life without the manic expansion in one sphere that happens when you conjure without balance.

And frankly it happened this week. This week has been one of those weeks where you can draw a definitive line in the sand as the end of everything that led up to this point, and the beginning of what comes next. In a lot of ways we can do that every day, but this was more clearly and undeniably one of those moments than usual.

In the last week, Harper and I bought a house in Minneappolis together, and we’re settling into our new lives. I received a full time offer of employment from my contract job. And I went through a week long spiritual retreat that culminated in receiving my formal initiation as a Neophyte into the A:.A:. last night.

For years, Jason Miller has been telling me about the usefulness of meditation, but I didn’t have the training, dedication, appreciation, or inclination to actually meditate daily. Thanks to the A:.A:. requirements, I’ve been sitting for fifteen minutes doing pranayama and fifteen minutes in asana and various meditations for the last few months. The results are undeniable. It really is just like it says in Magick in Theory and Practice. If you do it every day for three weeks, you’ll experience exactly what is described, and if you keep doing it, things will improve, exactly as described.

I don’t know if I can attribute the A:.A:. work with the coming together of everything and the feeling of calm preparedness I have now regarding my Spheres. I also have done a shit ton of magic on the regular for years. It could be that I fianlly have hit a level of integration where the vast cosmic powers I channel are finally in equilibrium. It could also be that the A:.A:. stuff came as a result of integrating the forces released in my initiations, I don’t know.

But I do know I am ready for what comes next. I’ve got the awesome physical foundation for the next fifteen years. I have books in process that will be going to the publisher soon. I have classes to run, and students to teach. I’m continuing in my advancement through the degrees of the OTO and the EGC. I’m hanging out with some of the greatest magicians of our time, and I’m having a blast.

So, for those who are going through the shit now, hang in there, get your head on straight, let go of trying to keep shit the same, and let your life go to hell so it can get better. You might feel like Tetsuo for a bit, but you’re getting experience and perspective, and wisdom.

You know…

Gnosis.

Rock it!

Hot

Well, tis the season for hot Venus lovin’!

Valentine’s day is coming up, and it’s the time of year when we turn our attentions to the sweeter aspects of life: romance, chocolates, flowers, and the aesthetics of beauty and of Love.

In honor of the upcoming holiday, I’m offering $70 off the Venus talismans from the Key of Solomon. Their descriptions and sample methods of use are provided below.

You must purchase them using the Buy Now button below in this blog post to get the discount.

Quantities are limited. I’m offering only seven Graceful Desires pentacles and seven Come to Me pentacles at this discounted price.

Note that it is highly unlikely that you will get these in time for Valentine’s Day, since I am posting so closely to the date. However, even if you did, like all magic, these would take time to work. Usually… Some people report results as soon as they place the order, but they might be suffering from confirmation bias. I don’t argue with them, but I don’t tell people to expect that kind of thing to happen every time. Most of the time it takes a couple weeks after doing the rite to see the results.

Ok, so here’s the purchase button to use to get the discount:

(Nota Bene: I’m not updating the price on my KoS pentacles page, so if you buy them from that page you won’t get the discount. Ain’t nobody got time updating codes and forgetting to update them back later. Use this button or pay more money.)

Sold Out

Pentacles of Venus:

2nd Pentacle of Venus: Graceful Desires – Shown to the right, it is the one I am selling for wealth and prosperity for folks with Jupiter issues in their natal charts. Description from the KoS: These pentacles are also proper for obtaining grace and honor, and for all things which belong unto Venus, and for accomplishing all thy desires herein.

4th Pentacle of Venus: Come to Me – Not shown, but really beautiful. This one I won’t make for just anyone, so far I’ve only made it for a root worker who convinced me she won’t abuse it TOO much, without good cause… like making a decent profit. Description from the KoS: It is of great power, since it compels the spirits of Venus to obey, and to force on the instant any person thou wishest to come unto thee.

Using the Talismans


I’ve developed a couple methods of working with the 4th Pentacle of Venus (Come to Me!) talismans, mostly because these are selling more than any others, of freaking course.

Method 1 is pretty simple, Method 2 is a little more Hermetic-Magic-ey.

Method 1:

Take a picture of the person you want to come to you, and place it on a table. Place the talisman over the image, with the 4th pentacle side (with the square design on it) facing up. Light seven green candles in a circle around the talisman and photo, and speak the names of the spirits (Achelia, Nogaliel, Nangariel, and Jocodia), and say “By your names and the seals of these Pentacles, I call you. Receive this offering of fire, and bring to me [Name of person], draw (her/him) to me, bring them to me in love and desire, let them have no rest until they contact me, bring them to me now.” Picture the person you want the whole time you’re saying this. Let the candles burn all the way out, if possible (I use tea-lite sized candles for this kind of thing because they burn out in a relatively short period of time). This method can take a couple of weeks to get the result. If you don’t have the result in a couple of weeks, do it again.

If you have purchased an hour of my time, please check your emails for scheduling requests. I’m having a hard time reaching some people who bought the time and I really don’t want to refund anyone. 😀

If you haven’t purchased an hour of my time, and you think you should, you totally should. Here’s the link to the page to do so:

http://headforred.blogspot.com/p/ros-personal-consultations.html

Thanks!

Hey Y’all!

So last weekend I tried to cram about 6 hours of awesome into about an hour and a half.

Shockingly, I failed.

BUT!

But I, like any awesome magician, learned from my mistakes and am rescheduling things appropriately. Instead of ONE lesson with three HUGE topics to cover, I’m making it into two, because fuck you, 10 pound bag, I’ll shove 12.5 pounds of shit into you anyway.

So for those who caught the “How the courses will work with Boring Tech Writer Consistency” and “Everything I’ve Ever Said Before about Hermetic Cosmologies for Fun and Profit,” you’ll have a chance to hear these two things AGAIN this afternoon at 12:00 pm Central.

Er, yeah, today.

AND all you folks who I forgot to send the email to with the time and dates, this is your chance to catch up too! I think I got it out to everyone about ten minutes ago.

BUT WAIT! There’s more!

I didn’t even make it to the conjuration rite of the Seven Spheres Course I had wanted to cover last week. So we’ll have ANOTHER presentation to cover that at 6:00 PM Central. You should have a link in your email to the course.

And then we’ll do Jupiter is Awesome on like, Tuesday night or Wednesday night or something. Probably in the afternoon or evening.

Watch for a schedule here later today!

Hi all! Kids are in town and I’m having a good time with them this week. I’ll be back and answering emails and makes no posts about seven soheres stuff soon! Thanks all for your support, and I will be getting to all the folks buying hours of my time ASAP to schedule your appointments!

I just watched an excellent series on YouTube called Children of the Stones. Old Brit show for young adults. Ian, the guy who drew the cadceus on my blog introduced it to us tonight. Part of the plot is that some of the people are all happy, too happy, and too smart for their own good.

That was what made them super creepy.

They were happy. And they could do math.

Math!

Friggin’ pagan bear cult ley line magus interstellar black hole sun transmission and world domination. And time travel.

Anyway, good show, but it’s weird to me that the writers chose intelligence and joy as the symptoms of the people being brainwashed. It’s like they’re saying, hey, those guys are happy… WTF is their problem? There must be something wrong with happy smart people. No one can be that smart and not be a bitter cynic. No one who can be happy can also do all that … that … that math!

When I started processing some of the things I learned in my Work, I found myself ebullient with joy and feeling pretty insightful. I was excited and wanted to tell everyone. I admit it, I had a touch of the old insufferableprickitis. But that’s ok. Because this time it was different, I had this understanding of how things worked, I could see how people had trapped themselves in terrible lives by telling themselves convincingly that they had to stay there. I’d done it so well myself.

And what I saw was that it is the same ability to convince yourself that you are stuck that is the power of speaking things into being. The thing Hermeticists learn how to do really well in the Great Work, the operation of making the unseen idea in our head into a manifest reality. It’s why aphorisms work, it’s the power of New Thought (The Secret) and all the things it teaches that work, sometimes. We are that which can turn things imagined into an experience that we and others can participate in.

But when you do that, you are pretty happy. You’re aware of what’s going on in your life. You know which currents are currently manifesting, and how they will impact your sphere to bring about your current project. You have a framework that lets you predict outcomes, you have an overarching goal in place, and you’ve got several experiments running in parallel that are bringing you closer every day. You are satisfied at your progress, excited about your latest discoveries, and already working towards what comes next.

And that, apparently, scares the everloving crap out of people.

Like in The Matrix, the first simulated world was perfect, and no human brain could accept it, and they lost whole crops. So they created an imperfect world, our world, and humans thrived.

We can’t accept the idea that people can have good lives, be smart, happy, and content. There’s something wrong with those people. Something strange. Something just not right.

That’s why I’ve been on this interview schtick lately. I have proof that I’m not alone, and I’m not crazy. Or a fraud, or a guru, or anything like that. I’ve got friends who are doing it too, making their lives work, and making it happen.

Charming Glamourists, who doubled their sales from one year to the next, doing what she teaches others to do. Bearded frothing mad Bards telling stories of emergence that grip you by the hypocampus and make you see the timeless moment. .Net programmers doing the whole full-on Abramelin rite on the side that matters, the inside. Professional sorcerors managing their kingdom and providing income by talking about sex, and magic.

They’re doing it, they’re speaking their worlds into being, creating the situations and experiences they want to participate with. And yes, they are terrified, and thrilled, and angry, and prosperous, and insane, and masters, and total noobs all the time with a sense of wonder that pervades all they do. Sometimes it’s wonder in an awed sort of way. Other times they’re wondering WTF they’re doing with their lives.

But they’re all doing it, sometimes they’re doing it anyway, all pursuing the manifestation of their reality in accordance with their will. They are doing it. Manifesting branches and fruit of Yggdrasil. By seed and root and stem and bud and leaf and flower and fruit do we invoke Thee, they say, making the unmanifest manifest.

And why?

Because they can’t NOT.

They’ve got to, mister. They can never stop doing this thing because it is what makes them happy. It fulfils us to do this. We ascend the spheres and return in power, and we create the world. We’re tweaking our approach, honing our techniques, passing on the things we do for others to see, try on, and keep what works for them as they put together their own magical practice.

The thing that drives them is what I mean when I say Joy. Ecstatic mysteries aside, joy is that feeling of awesome thrill when you’ve done something cool, and it worked. Sometimes it’s even noticed, rarely it may even be appreciated.

Even if it is, though, that’s not the point.

We do it because we must. We must feel that joy. Nothing else matters. We all found our way to it, and we do what works for us, because we like it.

And that’s the point. I say:

Joy.

It doesn’t matter what you create, creation itself is the thing that brings it to you:

Joy.

It’s what tells you you’ve done it right, well done, be proud, and what’s next?

Joy.

Existence, the active and interactive experince of existence… is pure joy.

Fundamentally, what I’ve always experienced as “The Christmas Spirit” is the feeling of celebration of life itself. Sostice is about that, the return of the Sun. Christmas is about that, the coming of the savior of the world. In the darkest of days, a glimmer of hope comes to remind us that Spring is around the corner, and to hang in there, the Holly King will fall, and the Oak King shall return to rule another season.

We exchange gifts to celebrate what we have, what we hope for, what is to come. We celebrate the things we can so-easily lose sight of in the darkest depths of winter, when the days are so short, and we are struggling to get through to daylight again.  We celebrate to remind us of the things we lost sight of in the daily bullshit of life. We are Scrooge, who has gotten cynical and needs the reminders and touchstones with bright joyful times of the past and present to avoid a grim and cold future.

That’s what the magic of the Christmas spirit is all about, and that is what was lacking this year in the HF-RO HQ Midwest Division.

Harper and I were talking the other day about how the Christmas Spirit hadn’t descended upon our house. It wasn’t that I was feeling un-cheerful, or un-grateful, or un-celebratory, quite the opposite, in fact. I am joyful and so very thankful for every wonderful aspect of my life. What’s missing this year isn’t the feelings of Joy at all.

What’s missing is the absence of this feeling the rest of the year.

We were talking about it again Christmas morning, and about what makes what we have so cool. Most of the things we do in our lives, we would do regardless of being in a relationship together. We have similar goals, goals that we have each spent a long time figuring out will make us happy. We have similar incomes, the results of our hard work, and the good fortune granted by our invisible friends. We have both been through enough of life to recognize the basic processes that need to be in place to have a happy life, and we do those things together, but not for each other; we would each do so individually, regardless of our relationship.

And that’s sort of the thing. Our relationship is based first on our own individual happiness. That’s a key piece we both realized after years of trying to do things with people who made us feel badly about ourselves. We both understand that if the things we do individually aren’t compatible, no amount of wishing, trying, or sacrificing on our parts will ever make the other person happy. In fact, we recognize that neither of us can make the other person happy. No one can make anyone feel anything. And neither of us are interested in making another person feel anything. We want to be appreciated, sure, but we want it to be honest. And if it’s not something the other person feels honestly, well, ok. They aren’t the reason we do what we do, we do it for us, and if the other person appreciates it, so much the better.

And we’ve been fortunate to find another person who appreciates the things we do, the work we’ve done, the accomplishments we’ve made, the beauty and joy of our lives, and how much better it is to merge them together. We express our gratitude and joy regularly, because we can. We don’t resent one another because we don’t sacrifice for one another; we don’t have to.

There are some tips and tricks we use to have a great relationship, it’s not like we don’t do any work to maintain what we have. We based our relationship on the same levels of communication and honesty that our friends in the Polyamory communities use, when they are successful. We had frequent checkpoints to touch base and see how each other were feeling in the first year or so. These days they happen a lot less often, but still pretty regularly. We discuss things that cause us to have feelings we don’t like, things that make us sad that happen, and we listen to each other without interrupting. We don’t defend ourselves, and we care about each other very much. We don’t expect the other person to change because of our feelings, but we trust each other to help us deal with the feelings in ways that are mutually beneficial.

So I was thinking today about how the “Christmas Spirit” is something we experience all year long, and how it’s the result of the recipe we have for our lives. We each tried the recipe with other people and it turned out badly, but basically our recipe is a good one, and I’d like to share what we do with you on this Christmas day, so that maybe part of our recipe will be something you can add to yours to increase your Joy all year long:

Be happy with yourselves. I’m not saying be at rest with how you are and make a bunch of excuses for your shitty behavior. If you don’t like who you are, if you are working against yourself for some reason, making choices that leave you unhappy, broke, or further away from your heart’s desire, then change yourself. It isn’t easy, but it isn’t impossible either. Whatever you change, you’ll find you aren’t really changing yourself as much as you are revealing yourself, and it’s a process that never ends. But you should be happy with yourself when you’re alone. If you aren’t happy alone, you won’t be happy anywhere with anyone. This is a big part of the Great Work. Or maybe it’s just a side effect that I appreciate a lot because it’s such a huge difference in comparison to how I felt about myself for so long.

Have a good income. Make some money. A “good income” covers all your monthly bills with 25-30% left over for savings and fun stuff. If you make $1000 a month, you should spend no more than $750 on your monthly expenses. The rest should go to a savings account and for treating yourself well. The variables you can influence are your monthly income and your monthly expenses. Raise the income, lower the out-go, or both. Career training, educations, and certifications can help increase incomes, and there are a ton of resources available about budgeting that you can find in an afternoon on Google. But I’ve found that if you are saving 20% of your income and have 5% of it available for fun stuff, you’re going to have a steady financial experience that eliminates most of your stress in your life.

Be grateful. Being grateful is the natural result of having a low-stress life, I think. It’s also one of the keys to ceating one. We spend a lot of time paying our attention to things that we think, feel, and experience. What we pay our attention to in life grows. The more we think about things, the bigger they get in our lives. So if we pay attention to all the negative things more than the positive things, the negative things will keep growing bigger, and the positives will keep growing smaller. I’m not saying if you think positive, everything becomes positive at all. I’m saying if you give a little time each day in appreciation for the good things, you’ll start to see more of them, and they will grow larger and more influential in your life over time, and the negative things will shrink down to manageable portions. Having a good income helps.

These are the main things that seem to be the key ingredients for the recipe we use to have a joyful life all year round. We spent the time doing the work, and now we get to reap the rewards. We have goals we are working toward, and we are doing the Work now that will result in our desired outcome. We are physically heatlhy, mentally challenged, and romantically engaged with one another. We celebrate our lives, daily.

On Christmas we celebrated each other’s company with our family, opened presents, and had some really good lamb and pasqalina. An excellent time was had, and it was special and joyful in ways that we don’t get to celebrate every day, but it was entirely in keeping with the standard of joy in our lives.

Merry Christmas to all! And may your year be full of Cheer!

The unedited version is here, for your amusement. I might go through and make it better if it gets too silly at the end. I don’t really remember the last bits of what we talked about, besides just having a really good time.

I totally drank too much and had to take a nap.