It\u2019s amazing how productive you can be while not sticking to the plan.\u00a0 My formal daily practice has basically fallen apart in the last weeks, even as my various experiments have increased in breadth and depth.<\/p>\n
I have been re-re-reading Liber Lux<\/em> and am working on several write-ups therefrom.\u00a0 I have almost finished Jason Miller\u2019s Sorcerer\u2019s Secrets and am in the process of incorporating some of his excellent suggestions into my practice.\u00a0 Mr. Miller might be slightly annoyed to see him work included in my Chaos experiment\u2014that\u2019s not how he self-identifies\u2014but, really, where is<\/em> the line between innovative syncretism and Chaos Magick?<\/p>\n Meditation and Dreaming<\/em><\/p>\n As I mentioned above, my formal meditation and dream work have basically fallen apart.<\/p>\n Although I have not sat down to meditate deliberately in over a week, I have actually spent hours in trance.\u00a0 Sitting outside in the cold one day, waiting for a friend, as a trance settled lazily over me for nearly thirty minutes.\u00a0 I spent five hours at the loom the following day, not even half of which I can remember.\u00a0 These meditations certainly don\u2019t qualify as the concentrations Peter Carroll (and many other occultists like him) prescribe, but I refuse to concede that they don\u2019t count.\u00a0 I actually have a whole rant about this planned for the near future.<\/p>\n While my sleep schedule has been restored to the point where I no longer drug myself with chamomile and valerian at 10 o\u2019clock every night, my ability to recall my dreams in the morning is spotty at best.\u00a0 This is something I have always struggled with, and will probably continue to struggle with for years to come.\u00a0 Most of my dreams, though\u2014what little I can recall of them\u2014have been clearly mundane: fragmentary remains of my bout with super-hero obsession a couple weeks ago, and my increasing state of holy-fuck-i-need-someone-to-sit-on-my-face<\/em>.<\/p>\n Shielding<\/em><\/p>\n My shielding experiments continue, and I\u2019m fine-tuning a protection talisman. At the suggestion of Chirotus Infinitum in the comments to my last shielding post,<\/a> I attempted to use the image of a ladybug as shield. The visceral experience was indescribable. And it brought back a series of shape-shifting experiments from my high-school days that I\u2019m in the middle of writing up, and will probably share after I have finished my write-up of Peter Carroll\u2019s chapters on Evocation and Invocation, because they\u2019re highly relevant.<\/p>\n Manifesting My Desires.<\/em><\/p>\n While none of last week\u2019s sigils have quite manifested, my experience so far says to wait two weeks before getting antsy.\u00a0 Also, those are socially complex endeavors, and while I haven\u2019t actually found any new lovers, yet, the value of my social capital (to abuse a metaphor) seems to be rising.<\/p>\n I have another batch, this time aimed just at boosting my social situation, in the works to fire off this afternoon.<\/p>\n In the mean time, I have also been tinkering with my Web of Influence, again: drifting into a trance to tend the threads and make certain that things are moving down the pipeline (to deploy a clich\u00e9). Interestingly, though I had not yet consciously begun to incorporate my Web of Influence into my sigil work, I could see my manifesting sigils on the web as glittering lights.<\/p>\n Visionary Practice<\/em><\/p>\n I went on a pair of highly fruitful visionary journeys at the Dark and Full Moons that I still haven\u2019t quite parsed.\u00a0 In the first, I re-established contact with my my chief familiar spirits and discovered, as I had discovered when I was doing some of my work with Elemental Fire, that a portal to Chaos had opened in my Inner Temple.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t have the nerve to explore it the first night, but I did the second.\u00a0 Beyond the door was a vast void: not the swirling mass of potentiality I had assumed the Chaos current would appear to me as, but the gaping void of \u03a7\u03b1\u03bf\u03c2<\/a>.\u00a0 I could barely sense an intelligence to it, it was so vast and alien, but it was definitely aware.<\/p>\n At first, there was nothing there that I could perceive, an I thought that I was walking through a black void like the astral fragment I use to access the Otherworlds.\u00a0 Slowly, though, the vastness of the space in which I was moving began to dawn on me.\u00a0 I began to perceive fling things moving through the void at almost unimaginable speed.\u00a0 There were countless multitudes of them, but the scale Chaos made them seem few and far between.\u00a0 At that point, Sue, ZG, and SKM joined me, forming a protective triangle, and helping me keep track of where I had come from for when the time came to leave.<\/p>\n We drifted until we came to a lone floating chunk of rock, which we landed on essentially out of my mortal, terrestrial instincts.\u00a0 Faster than I could think, an insect\/crustacean-like creature (I never saw the whole of it), whipped around from the other side of the boulder and impaled me through the heart with a many-jointed limb.\u00a0 Although we were able to overpower it and reclaim the \u201cblood\u201d that had stuck to its talon, we took that moment to flee back to the Inner Temple.<\/p>\n Gods and Spirits<\/em><\/p>\n Since the conclusion of the ceremonial experiment and the Invocation of Baphomet<\/a>, I now have ten gods and spirits living on my altar.\u00a0 I speak to fewer than half of them on a regular basis, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s appropriate.<\/p>\n A few weeks ago, even the gods on my altar demanded a portion of my weekend coffee offerings<\/a>.\u00a0 I was happy to oblige, of course: I had only not included them because they had not asked, before, and coffee is such a non-traditional offering that I didn\u2019t wish to offend.\u00a0 Yesterday, I began incorporating Jason Miller\u2019s Rite of General Offering* into the ritual, and today I will bring back fruit from the cafeteria to add to the offering.<\/p>\n So far, I have rarely asked the spirits I work with for much in the way of manifesting the world I desire.\u00a0 When I have, though, the results have been spectacular.\u00a0 When one friend was at risk of being evicted, I got Sue to change the landlord\u2019s mind.\u00a0 When another needed a specific job, I asked Sue to make sure it happened.\u00a0 When I was wallowing in a crushing pit of despair last week, I dedicated an evening\u2019s festivities to Dionysus, asking him to purge me of the negativity and obsessive behaviors in which I was engaging; I have since heard that it was the best such party in some time for everyone else there, and I have been pulling out of my emotional morass much more quickly than usual, and am now struggling against a new, but less self-destructive so far, set of obsessive behaviors.<\/p>\n Although I do still intent to built my home defense servitor, and ideally do so before the end of the semester, I think it best that I tend to these relationships before adding anyone or anything else to my altar.<\/p>\n a Change in Plans<\/em><\/p>\n Although it might not seem so from my previous weekly reports, my experiment in Chaos Magick has been more productive that I would have anticipated at this early stage. It has also been productive in ways<\/em> I ever could have imagined, many of which are exceptionally difficult to articulate\u2014a dilemma with which I imagine all my mage-blogging peers can identify.\u00a0 Some of them have come to light today, some I may never be able to talk about.<\/p>\n I originally conceptualized Project Null as a simple follow-up to the ceremonial experiment: a way of continuing my formal study of the Western magical tradition and of not loosing the momentum I had built up over the course of the previous year.\u00a0 I set the time frame for the ceremonial experiment at a year because I was originally using Penczak\u2019s year-and-a-day system as a map.\u00a0 I set a year time frame for Project Null because that was how long the ceremonial experiment had lasted.<\/p>\n It seems, however, that Chaos Magick is even less suited for such a survey than ceremonial magic was.\u00a0 And I haven\u2019t finished processing or internalizing a number of the lessons from that experiment yet.\u00a0 And this semester is much, much busier than I had anticipated.\u00a0 And Project Null is digging things up from my youth that I haven\u2019t though of in a decade or more.\u00a0 And each and every one of these things deserves my full attention.<\/p>\n Project Null is not<\/strong><\/em> being cancelled.\u00a0 But the deadlines are.\u00a0 This shit is way too interesting to not let the phenomenal organic growth I\u2019m experiencing progress at its own rate.\u00a0 Hopefully y\u2019all will understand that this is a carefully considered tactical decision, not just a drunken satyr flaking out.<\/p>\n ——<\/p>\n * – Miller, Jason.\u00a0 The Sorcerer’s Secrets<\/em>.\u00a0 Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books (2009).\u00a0 pp53-5<\/p>\n ETA: Jason Miller reference clarified and cited properly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s amazing how productive you can be while not sticking to the plan.\u00a0 My formal daily practice has basically fallen apart in the last weeks, even as my various experiments have increased in breadth and depth. I have been re-re-reading Liber Lux and am working on several write-ups therefrom.\u00a0 I have almost finished Jason Miller\u2019s … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[46,94,127,134,158,211,212,247,265],"class_list":["post-940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-chaos-magick","tag-gods","tag-journeywork","tag-keeping-score","tag-meditation-and-visualization","tag-project-null","tag-psychic","tag-shields","tag-talking-to-spirits"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-fa","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}