Decision Time

[Draconabeth]

I have been interested specifically in the occult for about 3 years, but have had a fancy for it my whole life. I practice solitarily. I am getting close to moving out, and the years of dabbling and hypothesizing are drawing to a close. So far, I have explored meditation and psychokinetics, demonology and shamanism, ritual magick, lucid dreaming, and currently, chaos magick. Through all of this, I have learned a lot, but hardly anything has happened that really stood out to me or made me want to decide on the direction I want to go. I had a few experiences with trance, but nothing too impressive; just some extremely lucid visualizations and light hypnotic states. I have a little claircognitive ability, but I feared that bringing attention to it would only make it go away; it's been less frequent lately. Only here and there have any of my rituals or spells made a barely noticeable impact. I have been recording my dreams and am currently attempting lucid dreaming for the sake of learning astral projection. I have been reading about chaos magick, and the philosophy and methodology behind it really strikes my fancy. I have experienced what Chaotes call "gnosis", and I have succeeded in only brief moments of thoughtlessness. I consider myself a newbie, and I have had little persistence with anything thanks to my explorative, teenage mind; but there has been at least a little bit of success in everything I've tried.

Basically, I am really confused about what I want to do from now on in the occult. I am interested in lucid dreaming, astral travel, and ESP, but i also want something more solid and tangible such as ceremonial magick or chaos magick; something less internal and more external. I am curious about my claircognitive ability, and I am wondering if I would be better off practicing divination, altered states of consciousness, and meditation rather than magick, sigils, and spells.

I am an artist, and my main desire is to see my imagination put to use or manifested in some way other than paint and pencil dust. It seems like I would be satisfied with any kind of occult practice, and I am too impartial to choose what I want the most. I can't keep myself spread so thin. I have to make a decision if I want any REAL progress at all. I have only read a little, and most of what I have learned has come from the writings of various online articles and PDFs on chaos magick and the like, as well as my own personal intuitive conclusions.

How does one chose what to do in such a broad field of various practices and infinite possibilities? [metaphorically speaking]: it's not like school, where you can pick a pre-existing subject and get a pre-existing diploma by doing X-Y-Z. It's as if you have to invent the subject yourself and then do things that seem completely irrelevant in order to attain a diploma that never existed until you invented it. In such a flexible speciality as the occult, how does one set specific goals and follow through with them?

[magari]

Find where you are on the path towards mastery, move forward.

Find the parallels in myth, energy, religion, science.

[Eremita]

I am an artist, and my main desire is to see my imagination put to use or manifested in some way other than paint and pencil dust.

Without exaggeration, that is one of the coolest sentences I have ever read on this website. Bloody brilliant. Alan Moore would say that is exactly what magic is about.

How does one chose what to do in such a broad field of various practices and infinite possibilities? ... In such a flexible speciality as the occult, how does one set specific goals and follow through with them?

By focusing on one thing at a time. The occult world is massive, of course - so don't try to take the whole thing in at once. Say for instance you're interested in divination. Great! You could read as much as you can on divination and put the other stuff up on the shelf for now, until you feel you have learned enough for the time being to move onto a different subject.

The other option is to involve yourself in a tradition or system of practice in which the path is laid out in front of you (to some extent). You can accomplish this by joining a magical fraternity or coven, or by dedicating yourself to a written program of study, like Donald Kraig's Modern Magick or Franz Bardon's Initiation Into Hermetics.

[cyberdemon]

I am an artist, and my main desire is to see my imagination put to use or manifested in some way other than paint and pencil dust.

Without exaggeration, that is one of the coolest sentences I have ever read on this website. Bloody brilliant. Alan Moore would say that is exactly what magic is about

I'd say that's not far off. Concerning the archaic most form of magick (or civilization itself) we now have electricity - magick to the people who haven't lived in the mere past two hundred years or so. As such, you might want to look into digital art techniques.