Weird Shit not Bullshit A new approach to the tarot and magic – all of the useful stuff, none of the crap

There's information everywhere

April 15th, 2012

One of the ideas that I've been playing with for a while is that the Universe is constantly bombarding us with information. Information which is of direct use to us, which is designed to ease our path and make it easier for us to progress in life.

Quite often I get asked 'how does the Tarot work?' (so often I wrote an article on it), but we might equally ask 'how does astrology work?' or 'how does I-Ching work?' or 'how does Gematria work?' What people are often asking, I think, is 'what mechanism allows these things to work?' What force arranges cards so that they are in a meaningful order, what mechanism causes the position of planets to influence our personality at birth, how are languages structured in such a way that 'meaning' can be found in the numerical value of letters?

There is, let's face it, no satisfactory answer to these questions. You can give one, if you wish, and many people do, but the follow up question of 'And how do you know that to be true?' is the point where it all bogs down again. The only reasonable answer to 'how does the Tarot work?' is really 'We don't know. It just does. Let me show you. That'll be £45 thank you.'

But from a spiritual point of view, I think we're asking the wrong question. The spiritual Universe seems not to be terribly concerned with mechanism, but only with result. At the spiritual level things like mechanism, cause and effect, time, get a bit… blurry, anyway. I think a better question is 'What is the best way to allow the Universe to communicate to you what it wishes to communicate?'

I think the best perspective to have is that there is information everywhere. Everything around us has a message for us. Not simply the content of dreams, the arrangement of cards, the position of planets, but random conversations, coincidental happenings, the shape of clouds, the colour of your toast in the morning. There's information everywhere. The Universe is bombarding you with it. The problem is understanding what it's trying to pass on to you… and separating the signal from the noise.

Humans have come up with thousands of forms of divination over the years. I've tried a fair few of them myself. I've found that, on the whole, they just work. You don't even have to try very hard – deal cards, and they'll turn up in a meaningful pattern. Flip some coins and consult the I-Ching. Throw some runes. They'll all give you results. Make up your own form of divination involving dropping sticks in a stream, or taking photographs of clouds, or taking random results off Google. It'll give you something to work with and think about. But you may find what you get varies in terms of quality, depth, and ease of understanding.

The advantage of well worn divination systems is that when you set out to learn them you can explore the thoughts and ideas of many smart, well informed, and experienced people. They have each contributed their own logical, psychological and spiritual insight into the system. The problem with creating a new system just for yourself is… well, we all have blind-spots. We have areas of life, experience or spirituality that just don't interest us (or don't interest us yet). We are ignorant of some things, even whilst being brilliant at others. If we are working with a system that is entirely of our own making the results we get back will be tainted by our own thoughts, beliefs and lack of experience. We may never notice we've left something out, or that we've included something in the structure like 'anger is always bad' before we've had the chance to figure out the fact that sometimes that just isn't true.

Systems that have passed through many hands, and that have been worked with for many years, end up being more polished, more rounded, and more complete. It's unlikely any is perfect (containing the entirety of human experience and need in a single deck or book seems deeply unlikely) but the more established systems of divination have proven themselves through use. They contain a rich understanding of human experience, and when used well have mechanisms within them to prevent an individual reader going 'off on one' – letting their own obsessions or preconceptions taint the information they are being presented with (which is why I prefer my information to come through a structured medium like the Tarot rather than something completely free-form like scrying – the nature of the cards pins you down and prevents you getting lost in your own fancies).

People can get lost in obsessing over what manner of 'ray' emanates from the planets that influence the daily life of people, or what 'spirits' change the orders of cards in a Tarot deck, or indeed how savants managed to 'build in' spiritual wisdom to the structure of language. I think it's much simpler to think in these terms – there's information everywhere. The Universe wants to help out, wants to answer questions, wants to give you guidance, wants to interact with you. But it can't speak directly into your ear – you have to give it a method to get the information across to you. Divination gives us a set of methods to do just that. But so does dream analysis, or psycho-analysis, or the synchronicity that happens around us all the time. To make use of this information we have to learn to engage, to be open to it, to notice when a message is coming through and to try to work with it.

The system, the mechanism, doesn't matter nearly as much as the information. We should judge the system we are using (and the results we get) with a healthy scepticism to try to filter out our own blocks, fears and prejudices (and this is where working with others, or professionals, can help), and to look for distortions and blind spots within the system itself, but as we embrace the system and the perspective it brings us then more and more information will flow to us and we'll be much the healthier, and wiser, for it.

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Just because it's channeled doesn't make it true

August 18th, 2011

One of the things that makes my heart sink is when I read that a particular spiritual technique, or a particular belief system, or a particular 'truth' was received by 'channeling'.  I hear too many people accepting channeled information at face value – if a particular idea was 'channeled from the Archangel Gabriel' then that's that, that's the truth according to Mr G.  No more consideration or analysis is required.  A surprisingly large chunk of the New Age material out there revolves around channeling to one degree or another.  Why do people assume that if it's channeled it must be correct?

Channeling information isn't actually that hard.  By which I mean, it's not actually that difficult to sit down and start producing ideas, words, images and concepts whilst having no conscious awareness of where they are coming from.  These ideas may present themselves using a difference voice, unusual vocabulary and unfamiliar sentence structures.  But this doesn't mean that there is anything supernatural or spiritual going on – just ask a fiction writer.

Most people who have experimented with writing fiction will be familiar with times where they are 'in the zone' with their writing, lost in what they are doing.  It's most obvious when you read back over something you've written a day or two later and go 'bloody hell, this is good.  Where did all this come from?'  While you were writing you didn't have any real conscious awareness of the creative process happening, you just wrote and the words just flowed.  Characters spoke to you, and seemed to have their own ideas about what they wanted to do.  Later you may marvel at just how clever your characters seem to be and how elegant some of your phrases and metaphors were.  But you will rarely conclude that your characters really exists and are somewhere out there in the ether telling you this stuff.

I think people who buy into information that has been channeled grossly underestimate just how creative they are and how powerful their unconscious minds are.  Some seem to take the fact that they 'couldn't possibly have come up with' their ideas as evidence that it didn't come from them, that it must be an external spirit.  Some point to the complexity of the ideas that emerge as proof.  Others point out the unusual language, accents, or idioms that their channeled entity uses as evidence.  Yet anyone who has spent some time doing dream analysis will already have discovered how complex the imagery of the unconscious mind can be and just how sophisticated it can be of creating the worlds, characters and storylines which spontaneously appear in the mind overnight.

So all channeling is rubbish? Well, actually, I suspect not.  I suspect it is possible to be in contact with parts of reality that behave very much like they are external conscious entities.  But the point is, you must start from a point of scepticism, begin by assuming what you're getting is from you, and put the burden of proof on the source of your information.

Crowley is justifiably heralded for doing just this.  Any time he came into contact with an entity (which frequently spoke through the person, usually woman, who he was with rather than through his own mind) he would challenge them, at some length.  He would get them to prove their credentials over and over through requiring complex kabbalistic proofs that they were who they said they were.  Frequently he would send the entity away (and these are entities who, to all intents and purposes, appeared to be gods) informing them that he had no interest in what they had to say at that time.  He assumed that if it was real it would return, it would prove itself, it would make sure that any important message got across.

I think many of us are so keen on the idea of getting a bit of weirdshit in our lives, of having a mysterious event or receiving some wisdom from 'elsewhere' that we grab at anything that seems like channeled information.  We are disinclined to 'test' it, or attempt to hold it back, for fear it will go away and never come back again.  Are spirits so easily offended that they'll go off in a huff if we just ask them to demonstrate they aren't our own unconscious mind playing silly buggers with us?

Information from the unconscious mind can still be valuable – again, dream analysis can reveal a great deal when done well.  But I think when we receive information we should remember we can't be certain of it's source.  'It' might tell us a name, or tell us a story about who it is, but that doesn't mean that that information is true.  Taking the stories of the unconscious mind as being revealed truths can lead to all manner of obsession, confusion and instability… it can become deeply unhealthy, as the stories we tell ourselves tend to reinforce, not challenge, our preconceptions, fears and prejudices.

Being able to channel is a useful skill, and worth exploring, but I think it's vital that it is a technique used with caution, and never as the soul source of information on a topic. We are just too good at telling ourselves stories – and convincing ourselves that they are true – to trust unsupported material.

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Meditation Insight – The brain is an organ that generates thoughts

August 7th, 2011

I randomly came across this quotation on a podcast somewhere a few months back, but it's stayed with me and the more I've thought about it the more I've realised it's a very useful thing to consider during meditation.

The idea is this – just as it is your heart's nature to pump blood and your lung's nature to draw and release breath, it is your brain's nature to generate thoughts.  Left to its own devices your brain will just chatter along, generating thoughts, ideas, playing with concepts, replaying memories, generating fantasies.  It continually does this and we are continually aware of this process.

The important point of this perspective is that it allows us to begin to cease identifying with our thoughts – to stop thinking of our thoughts as who we are and realise that a lot of our thoughts are almost a mechanical process of free-association.  Our thoughts just happen as our brain does it's thing.  We don't have to be our thoughts, we can simply observe them.

As I've said before, not identifying with our body ('I am not my body') is a relatively easy step; more challenging is 'I am not my emotions' where we realise that we have an awareness of emotion and a choice about how to react to that awareness ('I feel sad' rather than 'I am sad').  'I am not my thoughts' is a lot more challenging, particularly in this cerebral age (perhaps more so for someone like me who has always been very cognitive and proud of my intellectual capacities).  However, starting to notice that one's brain is just doing what a brain does, that it is just following along lines of thought and making connections, that a lot of it is a pretty automatic process… that allows 'me' to take step back and think in terms of observing my thoughts, rather than being my thoughts.  At times many thoughts don't seem to have any real volition behind them anyway (for instance when one starts to meditate and one chooses to think about a particular thing, but finds oneself re-living a particularly interesting TV episode instead).  So why not just let them do their thing – let the brain think, and realise that we can just sit back and watch and let it happen.

Of course, being able to directly control that thinking process (and indeed cause it to cease for a time) is damn handy, but in some ways it's a more useful insight to realise that you have a brain that is generating thoughts and that you are not to be found within your thoughts.  Observe the thought generator as closely as possible without getting lost in the narrative of those thoughts… it gives another useful clue as to what this whole 'I' concept is all about.

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Why magick is important

August 6th, 2011

It occurs to me that I may have inadvertently done a disservice to magick in my previous post – when I was writing about Magick, Religion and Spirituality it may have sounded as if magick isn't all that important, that it was really just a practical skill for getting laid and getting job opportunities when you need them.  Given I'm a huge advocate of magick as a lifestyle and a practice this seems very remiss of me.  So to balance things out lets talk about why magick is so damn important – in essence, magick may not do everything on it's own, but it is hugely valuable in supporting other practices.

Let's look at them in turn -

Magick and Religion.

Even when young I can remember talking about 'dead' churches and 'alive' churches.  Some churches seemed to have something real, meaningful and living going on within them and some did not.  I now recognise that some vicars and priests have a real connection to the divine, and some do not – some can give their celebrants an opportunity to be genuinely within the presence of the spiritual, and some can do no such thing.  What it comes down to is that some of them can do magick and some can't.

This difference between a 'good' priest and a 'bad' one is so much greater within pagan circles, particularly as in many cases we act as our own priest or priestess, forming our own personal connection with the divine.  In some people the divine connection is palpable, and one is left in no doubt that when they call on their god their god hears them and draws closer.  This is an act of magick – without it we are  reduced to observing our gods from afar, or hearing tell of them, or seeing representations of them, rather than genuinely communing with them.

One doesn't necessarily need to study the theories and practices of magick in order to understand how to draw the gods near (I suspect very few of the 'good' Christian vicars have ever done so), one can just 'stumble upon', or be guided towards, the right way of doing it.  However, learning the basics and practicing some magick can really accelerate the process of understanding what works and what doesn't, how to get a message through and how to be 'open' to the energy that comes in reply.

Magick and Spirituality.

One can certainly be entirely successful in the spiritual quest for enlightenment without ever using magickal techniques.  However, I see magick as acting as a terrific accelerator for personal growth when used correctly.

One clear example of this is the concept of the Holy Guardian Angel.  The idea of the HGA is that it acts as your personal tutor and guide towards the goal of enlightenment.  So the first serious act of a magickian is to make contact with their HGA which from then on can act as a guide to take the magickian through the rest of their initiations as efficiently as possible.  This isn't a necessary part of the spiritual path, you don't need your HGA to get there, it's just that an HGA does seem to make certain parts of the initiatory learning experience rather easier and quicker.

As I've written elsewhere, I also feel that the very act of doing magick brings about change and transformation.  My belief is that if you do a concentrated work of magick either you bring about the result you desire, or bring yourself face to face with the barriers that are preventing the manifestation of the change you desire.  This is why it can be useful in some circumstances to repeat a work of magick – if at first you don't succeed, you'll be brought into situations where you can learn enough to transform into someone who can succeed.

This, I believe, is why a ritual like The Bornless Rite is not performed once, but daily for a prolonged period.  It is designed to bring about the Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel, but your average magickian is unlikely to be capable of achieving that particular level of spiritual contact the first time they perform the ritual.  However, the ritual puts out a very powerful intent into the Universe that says 'this is my goal' – so if the ritual cannot 'succeed' in the Universe as it presently is (because the magickian doesn't have sufficient skill, or insight, or has psychological blocks, or any of the other reasons that they aren't in full contact with their HGA) the ritual begins to move the Universe towards a state where it can succeed. It begins to transform the magickian, and puts him in situations where he has the opportunity to learn and adjust and gain insight so that he may progress towards his goal.  Repeating the ritual continues to put pressure on the magickian to continue to learn and transform so that eventually the ritual can actually succeed.  Hence the simple principle – don't give up.  Keep pushing and paying attention to the lessons and messages that are coming your way, transformation will happen.

This need for transformation before magick can be successful can create deeply frustrating results.  Less experienced magickians may become concerned, and dispirited when an act of magick to achieve a particular end actually seems to make the situation worse.  Rather than simply 'getting what they want' they find themselves getting sucked into a mini-life crisis concerned with the change they were attempting to bring about.  For instance, they try to invoke for a new relationship, but actually they have a miserable weekend when they overhear two people they are attracted to discussing how they act weird and dress funny.  What may be happening is that their reality is currently incapable of bringing about the change they are trying to invoke (they are putting people off because they act weird and they dress funny), so instead the barrier that they need to learn to overcome is presented front and centre – they become even more aware of their desire but also the thing that is frustrating that desire.  If taken correctly this is a great opportunity to learn and understand what the real blockage is.  Often, however, it may be greeted with frustration and sulking for a while.

Magick is about bringing about change according to your will.  If it is your will to progress spiritually, even if that isn't uppermost in your mind, then practicing magick will keep bringing you into situations where you are given the opportunity to progress – even if you are working on mundane problems there will be a spiritual component to the results you receive… for good or bad.

As I've written previously, magick pushes the accelerator of life – it gives skills and insights which are exceptionally useful in pursuing many goals, including forming a personal relationship with the divine and in spiritual transformation.  Mundane magickal tasks are a great way of practicing your skills because you can get immediate feedback on whether you are succeeding or not (and examining your failures can teach you a great deal about yourself and magickal technique).  Neither religious nor spiritual practice requires magickal understanding, but I've found experience with magick has been invaluable at enhancing my abilities in both.

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Meditation Insight – How do I know I am experiencing this?

August 3rd, 2011

I believe that one of the key goals of Insight meditation practice (that is practice designed to move one towards greater understanding and enlightenment) is to observe and understand the fundamental way in which we experience reality.  It doesn't take much work to realise that a great deal of what we think we are experiencing of reality is actually our brain 'filling in' details.

I was speaking to someone the other day about what it's like to lose part of your sight.  If one of your eyes becomes damaged so that you can no longer see from a particular part of it you might expect this would be very obvious and easy to notice.  But in actual fact in some cases people don't realise that their sight has been damaged until it's tested by a professional.  You might imagine if you could no longer see down and to the right from your right eye there would be a black patch down and to the right at all times.  But that's not the case.  Instead your brain simply fills in it's 'best guess' for what might be down and to the right at the moment.  You appear to have a complete field of vision – but some of it isn't what you are seeing, but is actually guess work, or what your brain last remembers there being in that location.  Our brains are great at 'making up' details of reality.

Deep insight meditation rapidly reveals this is going on far more than we realise and that most of the time we are interacting with a reality that is a product of our brains and isn't 'out there' at all.  Fortunately for all practical purposes it's a pretty damn accurate 'guess' at what reality is like – but we aren't actually experiencing reality.  We are experiencing what our brain is telling us is reality.  And the problem with brains is that they are all tied up with our personality and our emotions and these things can pretty easily put a bit of a twist on our brains calculations for what reality is really like.

Discovering this for yourself is pretty easy – but it does requite a reasonable level of concentration and focus, which is why concentration practice is considered to be so essential.  Concentration practice is simply meditation on a single thought, sensation, word or sound and by doing so improving your concentration and focus to the point where you can get it to do what you want it to do for a reasonable length of time.  Once you have reasonably good concentration skills you can play with some insight techniques, like 'How do I know I am experiencing this?'

This is the best way I can think to describe my approach to this technique.  Simply relax and rest in a light trance state and then 'realise' you are experiencing something.  That 'something' can be anything in your awareness – an emotion, a physical sensation, a thought.  Physical sensations are probably the easiest to start with, emotions are harder and thoughts harder still (because they go quickly and it's very easy to get lost in them rather than observing them).  So, for instance, you may realise that your right knee is aching.  Now ask the question 'How do I know I am experiencing this?'  What, in your awareness, is telling you that your knee is aching?  Find the sensation that is telling you that you are having this pain.  Now really focus on it, put all of your awareness right on that sensation.  A funny thing usually happens at this stage – you'll suddenly find the sensation will vanish.  It just won't be there any more.  You may notice you are still under the impression that your knee is aching, but the actual sensation has gone missing.  Your tricksy old brain is still telling you you are in pain, but in actual fact the sensation of that pain has ceased.  It'll be back again – it will probably pop back into existence relatively soon – but then it'll leave once more.

The funny thing is that the sensations we are experiencing come and go.  Our brain takes these floating moments of sensation and puts them together into a constant picture and calls it 'reality'.  But it's no more reality than the images on a cinema screen are constantly moving – it's just a series of individual moments that our brain connects together into a coherent whole.  And a good job too, otherwise the real world would be terribly dull and confusing.

I'd strongly recommend doing this same exercuse with an emotion.  If you feel sad, try to work out how you know you are feeling sad.  What sensation, what thing you are experiencing right now tells you you are sad.  Focus on it, keep your mind on it, see if it's constant (it won't be).  You may be interested to discover how hard your brain is working to keep up the impression that your emotions are constant – or present at all.

It turns out that reality – that which we are really experiencing – is a lot less permanent, a lot less stable, than we think it is.  Our brain is constantly working hard to create the impression of a stable, coherent, continuous, emotional, reality… and that really does make getting the shopping done an awful lot easier.  But to really start moving towards awakening it is well worth starting to understand what reality really is – so we can get a sense of who we really are at the centre of it.

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Religion, Spirituality and Magick

July 28th, 2011

The whole area of spirituality is pretty damn large and complicated.  There as so many threads, traditions, currents and schools all moving around each other, informing each other and frequently lobbing insults at each other.  I was recently thinking about the components of these different approaches and it occurred to me that there are three fundamental things going on here – and they are present to different degrees in different places.

Religion, in this context, I am using to mean the veneration of gods – be that a single god, or goddess, or a whole pantheon.

Spirituality I'm going to use to mean the pursuit of enlightenment – spiritual progress towards a point of transcendence.

Magick is 'getting stuff done' by magickal means – that is having an impact on real events by hidden means.

Some approaches or organisations really only contain one of these things.  In your average Anglican Christian church you are going to find religion, but no real sense of spirituality or magick.  Buddhism is by and large a spiritual tradition, with no religious or magickal techniques included.  Chaos magick, and other 'post-modern' approaches to magick emphasis the 'practical magick' of making things happen, with gods being a means to an end and spirituality largely written out.

But there are many variations, tones and complexities.  Gnostic Christians have a very strong spiritual tradition, using techniques like centred prayer to achieve spiritual progress.  Other evangelical Christians emphasise 'praying for miracles', which is basically a magickal technique.  Some schools of Buddhism treat the Buddah very much as a god to be revered, whilst others have noticed that all of this intense meditation practice gives you the ability to make things happen in the real world if you focus in the right way.  Chaos Magickians, by their very nature, are very diverse and many combine techniques from more religious and spiritual traditions.

The point of this, really, is that one spiritual path is not equal to another, nor will one magickal 'current' take you to the same place as all of the rest.  Many pagans are primarily religious in their practices, whilst using magickal techniques as part of their work, but may not engage with the process of enlightenment in the same way a Buddhist might.  Thelema is an interesting mix, having gods front and centre in much of the writing and you can't read any of Crowley's work without coming across the term 'The Great Work' which is very specifically about the process of personal enlightenment, although many people come to it looking for magick.  Some spiritual traditions believe that learning any magickal technique is immoral, whilst some magickal currents have dismissed concepts of enlightenment as Victorian elitist mumbo-jumbo.

My journey into weirdshit very much started with magick – the idea that magick was possible was fascinating to me, so I immediately wanted to find out exactly what was possible, how and why.  However, with time I realised that the limitations on my magickal abilities were very much the limitations of my own personality so more and more of my emphasis went into gaining insight into myself and trying to understand the workings of my own personality.  Which slowly but surely began to open up a greater interest in spiritual practices – particularly when I realised they were working.  Religious practices have never really been my thing, although I do have the odd divine relationship and I see it as a very valid approach.

In recent years Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford over at The Baptist's Head made a fascinating journey from post-modern magick to spirituality, as they realised that The Great Work was a real, meaningful and achievable thing.  I'm hugely impressed with their body of work (apart from some weird conspiracy theory stuff in the middle), and I hope more and more people pay attention to what they've done.  One important point they make over and over again is – not every path is the same.

I entirely agree.  If you perform certain practices certain results will be achieved.  But I think it's important to have a vocabulary to understand what those results are so you can decide whether it's what you want and whether it's enough for you.  Magick is a good way of generating opportunities, getting you laid, having some adventures.  Religion is a great way to build a personal relationship with the divine, to access guidance, to be taken on a meaningful journey through life.  Spirituality is the way to get enlightened.  Most traditions, paths, schools, contain a blend of these three things – but they are rarely in equal proportion to each other.  Individual teachers and practitioners are likely to be stronger or weaker, more knowledgeable or less knowledgeable, about these different components.  Each of the three brings richness, meaning and success to live – but they are different, have different results and you shouldn't be learning to use a screwdriver if you want to hammer in a nail.

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Example Reading – Chaos Star Spread

July 26th, 2011

Some time back I posted about a Chaos Star Spread which I'd come across online, designed by a Phil H (his blog has some nice stuff on it).  I've been meaning to give it a go and write about the results, so here goes:

My reading, for myself, came up as follows:

  1. External Conflicts – Queen of Wands
  2. Mental State – 5 of Cups, Disappointment
  3. Sex and Passion – Lust
  4. Self Confidence/Ego – 2 of Wands, Virtue
  5. Love/Relationships – The Lovers
  6. Wealth – Knight of Discs
  7. Self Destructive Habits – 7 of Swords, Futility
  8. Magickal Self – The Hermit

Note: I laid out the cards clockwise, rather than anti-clockwise as Phil H did – this is purely because the clockwise configuration agrees more closely with how I'd normally visualise the Chaos Star.

So what does that all mean?  I'm never terribly good at reading for myself, but actually as readings go this is pretty clear for me.  I'll go into details of what I think these cards are about after the jump, but the short version is that this spread makes a lot of sense in terms of what's happening to me in life at the moment.  It gives a good 'snap shot' of the present time – no great detail is given, but this spread looks to give a good way of 'checking in' with a range of general areas and concepts.  There are things that are missing (nothing about health, for instance) but then, that's the limitation of the original symbol.  But if you're at least somewhat magickally minded this would appear to be a useful spread to whip out now and again and get an over-view.  If a particular position seems interesting or confusing it would be a good prompt for a more detailed spread covering a specific area.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Meditation insights – "This"

July 26th, 2011

One of the peculiar things about going deep into a meditative trance is that, much like when one is dreaming, one tends to accept ideas and concepts as being perfectly normal and mundane which under other circumstances one would find quite unusual or noteworthy.  A number of times I've done some meditation, or vision work, come to the end of it and thought "Well… I guess that was disappointing… not an awful lot happened there" and then an hour or two later I've been going about other business and remembered something from the meditation practice – and it's struck me as quite extraordinary.  There's then a quick scrabbling through my mind to try to remember the details of exactly what I experienced when and how exactly it happened… which is usually a bit futile by that stage, as I can only draw out fragments of fading memories.

Of course, I say this is a peculiar thing about meditative trances – it could just be a peculiar thing about me.  I actually do the same thing with dreams.  Often I'll wake from a dream, think about it, groan at how tedious it is and dismiss it so that I think of it no more.  Only to later realise it was potentially packed full of symbolism.  Something about that half normal/half elsewhere state of consciousness seems to make me terribly dismissive of the experience I've just been having.  (Now I'm wondering if this is in turn connected to my, slightly bizarre, inclination to always lie if someone wakes me up with the question "Did I just wake you up?"  I always say no, when I'm first awakened, even if there is no possible negative consequences to me having been asleep.  A fear of appearing vulnerable, or just childhood guilt about oversleeping?)

Anyway…  A few days ago I had one of the first really deep meditations I've had in a long while.  I've really struggled with meditation over the last few months but I seem to be making progress once again.  As part of that meditation I started doing a practice that seemed quite reasonable and mundane at the time, but afterwards I realised was perhaps more interesting that I initially gave it credit for: when I became consciously aware of a sensation, a thought, or a desire I would greet it with the world "This" then let it go and move on.

I was doing a kind of insight work – that is trying to make myself consciously aware of the sensation and thoughts I was experiencing, but also reminding myself that I was observing those thoughts and sensations and that I was not those sensations.  My mind began to also draw forward the concept of acceptance – accepting the world, and myself, as it is without feeling the need to change it.  Allowing it to be, allowing things to be present in whichever way they chose, and allowing myself to be conscious of them without needing to have a particular emotional reaction to them.  What is, is – there's no need to get upset about it.

These concepts all concentrated down into a single word "This."  Each sensation I became consciously aware of was noted with "This".  Each thought was "This" and let go.  Each dream, fantasy, hope, emotion, belief, facet of personality – "This".  By it I meant "I am aware of this thing.  This thing is not me.  This thing is not something I need to change.  This thing is not something I need to feel a particular way about.  This thing is something I accept.  This thing is my current reality.  I can allow this thing to be and it needn't threaten me, or worry me, or excite me or move me in any way.  It needn't have meaning.  At this time, in this place, it is just this."

But I never set out to do this practice – it just came about naturally, spontaneously, during the deepest part of my meditation.  After returning to full wakefulness I realised what I had been doing and thought "fair enough."  Then about half an hour later I remembered what I'd been doing and thought "Hang on a sec, that's actually pretty interesting…  I could get a blog post out of that."

And so it proved to be the case.

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Posted in Meditation, Meditation insight | 2 Comments »

Card of the Day – 4 of Wands, Completion

July 10th, 2011

I'm going to write about the meaning of the Tarot cards in my deck, but rather than doing it in some dull old logical order I thought I'd just cut one out of the deck when I have the time and see which one turned up.  With time this may even turn into a complete, if slightly eccentric, guide to how to read the Tarot.  I'll also try to figure out if they are turning up randomly or if there's some meaning in which card turns up at which time.

Card of the Day – 4 of Wands, Completion

4 of Wands from the Deck of Thoth - CompletionAnother wands card, so again we are in the area of fire – passion and enthusiasm, those things that drive us and move us.  But this is an unusually calm wands card – the reason is very much in the title – Completion.  At this point we've actually got something, we've finished, we've got things in place.  Simply by looking at the card we can see that the wands are in balance with each other, the figure is nicely symmetric and in the middle, things aren't bursting out all over the place but instead they seem quite comfortable and contentedly in place.

If this card comes up to refer to the person that I'm reading for, then the phrases I will often use is 'you've got what you need' or 'everything is in place'.  It refers to the fact that a person has the resources that they need to deal with a particular situation, or that they are no longer dependent on external support, are, in some ways, self contained.

It's meaning when referring to an external issue or project is rather more clear – Completion tells you what it means.  Things will tend to get done, fall into place, reach a satisfactory conclusion.

Occasionally this card will appear to refer to a relationship and in that case the meaning can be a little more complex.  It can, depending on context, simply refer to the fact that things will fall into place with the current phase of the relationship (particularly good news if a couple is, say, going through a difficult move, or are trying to settle after a period of stress or disharmony).  However, sometimes it can say something that is a little more difficult to convey.  The positive nature of this card will always be present, but not necessarily in a way that the client is expecting.  So referring to the future of a relationship it may mean something along the lines of "This relationship will come to an end soon, but you will walk away without regrets, and with little pain, knowing that it has run its course and there is really nothing to be sad about."  Most people are deeply fearful about the end of any relationship so trying to tell them that their relationship is going to come to an end – but in a good way! – can be a little difficult.

As a card for the day Completion is very positive – it suggests it will be a good day for making progress, for getting things finished, and perhaps for dealing with difficult tasks that have been hanging on for a while.  It suggests that things will finally, finally, get done – probably with few, if any, lose ends.  Which is always nice to hear.

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Posted in Card of the day, Learn the Tarot, Tarot | 2 Comments »

Why so negative?

July 10th, 2011

I've recently made a series of posts about things which are bad for magick – magick, in this context, standing in for all spiritual practices.  It's just that magick is what I tend to do most of when it comes to spiritual doings, so how I tend to think of spiritual practices.  This series of posts about the things that make spiritual practice hard may seem to run counter to my normal cheerful, positive, optimistic outlook on life. [Note to friends - the internet has not met me.  It does not know.]

The reason for the current theme of problems is pretty simple – I've been having problems.  With my magickal practice anyway.

A few months ago I'd got some real momentum going with my daily practice.  My meditation was becoming stronger, I had thoroughly learned the rituals I was using, my ability to perform those rituals with focus and conviction was growing greater by the day.  I don't tend to 'see' an awful lot when I do magick, but I can often feel things, and I was feeling some very powerful energy shifts happening during the work I was doing.  And the work was starting to have an impact on 'normal life' – I was having vivid and interesting dreams from time to time, I was feeling energetically strong, and slowly but surely I was getting a trickle of 'insights', both in meditation and outside of it.  It all felt rather splendid, and like I was building up to some kind of climax – hopefully being the Knowledge and Conversation of my Holy Guardian Angel, given that's what I had been working towards for some months.

I managed to keep all of this going through losing my flat to a flood, having to lodge with the Scarlet Girl, and coping with the other background distractions that everyday life brings over a period of months.

But… then came moving house and then came being ill.  And although that was all a three months ago now, I still don't feel that my practice has recovered.  That's an awfully long time to feel like you aren't doing terribly well at something that was going very well just before that.

As I wrote previously, moving house filled my head with a huge 'to do' list that wouldn't go away even when I was meditating or doing a practice.  Being ill exhausted me and left me feeling unable to fully energetically commit to the acts I was performing.  These events seemed to break my momentum and I've struggled to get it back.  Too often since then I've felt like I'm 'going through the motions' when I'm doing my practice, that my mind isn't really where I am and I'm not fully committed.

Most irritating of all is that recently its felt like I can't meditate.  Or at least I can't meditate 'properly'.  My ability to focus and control my thoughts is reasonably good (although shaky due to lack of practice) but for some reason I don't seem to be able to 'go down' in the way that I normally could.  Although the clarity of my focus has never been as good as I would like my ability to sink pretty fast into a trance state is something I've been proud of – often I can just sit and sink and I get the tell-tale 'feelings' of going into a trance (heaviness of body, a sense of warmth and comfort) but just recently….  I sit, and… nothing.  Just me sitting there.  So I control my thoughts and focus and… nothing.  I can control my thoughts, but no trance happens.  I'm denied that ever so nice feeling of sinking down, and down…

So poor magickal practice and nothing much going on with meditation.  What's a mage to do?

There's only one thing I could think to do – keep going.  Keep up the daily practice and wait for something to change.

Actually, that's not all I did – I'm very fortunate in knowing some smart people and some very spiritual people, so I asked around… but there was no great insight to be had.  It was just something I was experiencing, so I choose to experience it as openly as I could, figuring that perhaps at some point later it would make sense.

Right now… I think it might be getting better.  There's been movement with my daily practice over the past few days – a new way of working with it that seems to be bringing new results – and just the last couple of days I've found meditation becoming easier again.  Still early days, but… perhaps it's time to move forward again.

And perhaps it's time for a change here too…  up next – things that are good for magick.

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Posted in chat, Daily practice, Magick, Meditation | 2 Comments »

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