biax wrote:
"Make payment, make contact" with... who? what? I thought we were all one and that I'm god?
2) What's your way of obtaining self-knowledge?
4) Mind giving a few examples of what desires you've made and it came to manifest? (And how long it takes.. and how you know when to take it).. Or otherwise suggest what's actually possible.. otherwise I'll be praying for the unrealistic absurd all the time hehe.
5) Not in that sense, I'm 30/m. Since my mind's accustomed to the material world with a total NO to spirituality, I now need to alter my mind radically. In fact, I've always been trying to use flawed inner verbal logic that decides what I do. So now I gotta add visualization to it, how should I even begin? Everything blurs instantaneously.
1 & 2. It's a model issue, again. Take spirits or gods, for example. Some magicians argue that spirits exist externally to us in a manner similar to which you and I exist. Their willingness to respond to you depends on a lot of factors, and what they may want likewise depends. Some magicians argue that spirit entities do not exist outside of ourselves and are instead the expression of unconscious (and universal) impulses or desires. That's why ancient pantheons repeated types of gods (ie god of war) because they are actually expressions of twenty-two universal archetypes within the human mind (Jung's personality archetype theory is a favorite of a lot of modern magicians.) Your relationship with them may also matter. If you walked up to me and asked me for fifty bucks, I'd tell you to buzz off. Your best office-friend may lend you the money, and your mom almost certainly would. Since spirits don't take American Express, you have to figure out a way to pay them for their services, rather like you'd pay a plumber. How you act to a spirit and how you pay it is dependent on the spirit as well.
Why would you bother with a spirit when we're all one? Well, yes, we are all one, but we maintain practical separation from each other that we quantify as a separate, unique existence, and spirits do as well (you might say from their point of view
we exist in the spirit world, and they're the normal ones.) The fact that you are God actually helps your case in dealing with certain spirits. Take the Goetia, for example. By and large the spirits out of that mini-system assume that they are on the bottom of some divine pecking order, and they may only ascend through it towards God by doing the bidding of creatures higher up in that divine pecking order, which happens to include humans. Therefore, you're doing them a favor when you whistle them up and demand things of them - and often you can get away with a demanding attitude and orders because the model assumes that and those particular spirits respond well to it, generally speaking. Why would you want a spirit? They're independent entities capable of doing work on your behalf.
Let me give you a specific example. My brother was out of work and has a baby on the way. His wife tried her leetsauce Wiccan stuff and it didn't work so he asked me to handle it. I have been working with Santa Muerte. Her portfolio (if you would) is very broad but certainly does include intercession in work/life matters. I decided to apply Santa Muerte to his problem. The usual format for a big spell involving her is a play in three acts: first, you give a gift to her and the spirits that guard the graveyard at the graveyard (the tributa); second, you perform the actual spell itself either at the graveyard or at your altar, which may involve chanting, candles, enticing offerings of things she likes like apples and chocolate and tequila, etc; and third, the payment for what it is she did (the ex vota.) I took my offerings for step one down to the graveyard at 6 am on a Sunday morning. Normally you leave the the tributa at the graveyard gate after asking for the intercession of the spirits you need. I approached the gate and felt an odd impulse to walk into the graveyard and leave it by a grave. This particular cemetery has about two thousand graves in it, so I wandered into the graveyard and looked around for a few minutes, feeling pretty damned clueless where I ought to go next. I saw a large double headstone a bit off the path with the wife's side unoccupied. When I spotted it I had an odd "found it" sensation, rather like I feel when I've been looking for my car keys for half an hour. I went over to the grave. I wasn't sure which one it was initially since the two rows of headstones were jammed in next to each other since it's a pretty crowded public graveyard. I looked down, and on the back lip of one of the headstones I saw that someone else had stacked a bunch of copper coins. Leaving coins for the spirits of the dead is a common graveyard offering; I had seven silver coins already in my pocket for the exact same purpose. I plonked down my tributa, made my offerings, and I felt that I must take some grave dirt. I had also taken water in a jar to give to the dead, and after I dumped it out, I filled it with some grave dirt. Keep in mind at this point I was operating completely off-script; I had only intended to go down, leave the offerings at the gate, thanks the spirits, and leave. I took some photos of the headstone with my phone so I could look up the guy later and went home. He had died pretty young, in his thirties, and I wondered if someone had left offerings at his grave because he was famous locally for some reason and I just didn't know it (maybe he was an actor that died in an accident or something and I'd never heard of him) Well, his online obituary wasn't a fancy affair. It was one of the prewritten ones you see in the paper so often, formulaic, but someone had popped an interesting tidbit in the middle - he had been a plumber, a member of the local pipefitter's union. My brother is an electrical contractor - and if you had to pick out a dead man to help him find a job, a fellow tradesman is absolutely perfect. Now, I either wandered into the graveyard and randomly selected a dead plumber whose grave was already being used for magic (out of a pretty full cemetery, and occupations aren't listed on headstones) or you can reason that I was led to that particular grave. The "random chance" argument is less believable to me, especially given the evidence of how I felt during the proceeding.
I had to heavily modify the ritual I intended to perform since I hadn't planned on using grave dirt at all, but since it had been given to me it seemed stupid not to use it. I performed it over a period of nine days. I initially offered to repaint the globe on Santa Muerte's altar statue (I have a cheap Mexican prefab on which the paint job is sloppy) and I also offered to take an ad out in the local classifieds thanking her for her intercession (this is a typical gift to a Catholic saint for their intercession, and the method I was employing to work with her mimics Catholic saint worship, so it seemed appropriate.) On the second day of the nine day ritual, I had been visualizing Santa Muerte standing in front of me, and the mental image I had of her abruptly changed. In my mind she had been wearing the seven-color robe, and it suddenly changed to a skeleton wearing a fancy golden wedding dress. I also felt a sort of curious pressure of "wanting" that wasn't mine - I had no idea where I would get one, how I would afford it, where I would put it, or exactly what I'd do when it arrived. Yet, I felt it was necessary, so I asked Santa Muerte, "Is this what you want?" Somewhere near my inner ear I heard a whispered "yes." Well, crap, I thought. Where am I going to find one of these things? I went digging around. Often practitioners will have dresses made for their Santa Muerte statues, and I was debating finding a reasonably sized doll pattern and having one made when I found a man selling Santa Muerte statues on eBay that already had dresses. He wasn't selling a gold one, though, so I messaged him to see if one was available. Naturally, he'd just gotten some in stock, and would be delighted to send me one, just bid on whichever statue auction and he'd just send me a gold one. I marched back out to the altar and said, "Santa Muerte, get my brother a job and you get statue with a gold dress." My brother now has steady work, and I now have a Santa Muerte statue on the way with a pretty gold dress - ex vota achieved. It was a week before he got the steady work. How long would I have waited? If I hadn't seen any action within a month or so, I would have resorted to diagnostic divination techniques to find out what went wrong. Why a month? Why not? It's hard to say how long you should wait to see a magical operation take effect. It depends on what you tried to achieve and how well you managed to achieve that mental state where you pushed probability in your favor. I like a month. It seems like a good round number to me.
Of course, you may not need the intercession of a spirit at all. I wanted to attend a program in college that had a long waiting list, and I decided to try to use magic to hedge my chances. I made a sigil encoding what I wanted (to sidestep the waiting list) and chalked it on a crosswalk downtown in the bar district frequented by college students. The idea was that the repeated tramping of the college students (what I wanted to become) on the sigil encoding what I wanted (to sidestep a college waiting list) would lend it energy one footstep at a time. I put my name on the program list. Two weeks later you were to present yourself to the admissions people for the department, and they'd check your paperwork to ensure your eligibility for the program, and then put you on the real waiting list. List priority was not a function of GPA, or when you first started the prerequisites and declared your major. List priority was assigned to whomever had attended the community college earliest, ie, if you got a degree in culinary arts in 1978, you would take priority over someone who started their prerequisites in 2003, even though your culinary arts degree didn't have a damned thing to do with the new program. When I went down to the college that day there were probably six hundred or so people standing in line. The program only had 140 spots, so those who were in line who had all their paperwork in order would be waitlisted for as long as it took. My heart sank when I saw all those people. I had only been going to the college on and off for three years, getting my prerequisites squared away, and I was pretty worried that my priority on the list would be pretty low. I was standing in line for about twenty minutes when I heard a woman calling my name. I looked up. She was one of the program instructors, and she was walking the line with her list, calling my name only. I poked my head up and answered her. She pulled me out of line and walked me straight to the front. I have a distinctive last name that I share with my mother. She and one of the other instructors had worked with my mother for a number of years, liked her, and decided to put me at the top of the list because I was her daughter. Would they have done so anyway without my sigil? I don't know if it broke any college rules or not, but they just as easily had the option to not grant me that courtesy (I asked my mom later if she'd called on my behalf, and she had not.) So, there's that.
4. There's no one way to obtain self-knowledge. I read about the idea that performing things abhorrent to you can lead to a state of new awareness. Since I wasn't about to go murder a puppy or something, I decided to take a copy of a book that I really cherished and burn it. I felt a glimmer of sick panic when the pages started to brown and curl that I really didn't expect, and it proved an interesting point to meditate upon for a long while. I was curious about the nature of random chance, and decided to live my life according to a die roll for an entire month. This applied to all questions that came - I wound up learning how to ride a motorcycle right out of the blue, and those long night time desert rides have lead to a number of interesting magical and spiritual experiences that I would never have had the opportunity for if I hadn't rolled a "3" on a die. Some attempts at self-knowledge have been through direct magical operation - the astral temple suggested in the Cthonos Rite published as an audio CD by Carroll has a ritual room dedicated to this purpose. Initial attempts should focus on getting your bearings, in my opinion. I know I harp on getting a good grip on the basic boring exercises no one likes, but some video games you HAVE to play the tutorial... so to speak.
5. I dig it. I like approaching magic with semi-scientific language because I don't really have any spiritual legs to stand on - or at least I didn't when I started this. That's why I began my studies with chaos magic, reading Prime Chaos by Hine, Liber Null by Carroll, and some others. Chaos magic tends to approach metaphysical concepts in scientific terms so I found it an easy bridge. Honestly, the book that really helped me make that transition doesn't have any thing to do with chaos magic at all. It was the Tao of Chaos by Katya Walter. She is a mathematician whose firm grounding in statistics was shaken when she scoffed at someone throwing I Ching coins as just randomness, and then the coins promptly called her a fool. She began to study the coins as a mathematician, and the book details how it changed her thinking by making her analyze the relationships between events. It's a very good read, the first half, anyway (the whole thing, if you want to learn a lot about the I Ching.) I applaud your dedication to trying the Golden Dawn stuff first, but given the material I'm not surprised you're lost, to be honest. I already said I'm biased, keep in mind, but I would recommend picking up some books like Prime Chaos. You may find the explanations easier to digest. As for visualization, you need to first be able to sit still and focus your mind. Try sitting completely still for five minutes. If you can master that (it's weirdly hard) then you can practice the so-called evil eye - the fixed stare of focused awareness characteristic of a trained magician. Once you get the fixed stare down, you've mastered sitting still and focusing your mind. Now, try a green crescent and work from there. You won't master this in two weeks. Trust me. [wink]