If you have a question, I'll be happy to ask the coins using geomancy. That said, divination is like weather forecasting not a tablet of truth handed down from above, so take the advice I give you through the reading as such. The conditions that divination taps into are also in constant flux, the same as atmospheric pressure and the Moon. Be sure to ask questions to which you want to know the answer.

If you wish to make a donation for the readings, though it is not required, you can do so through Paypal by clicking the pentacle. Other than that, if your situation requires urgency, privacy or a more elaborate reading and conversation message me and we can arrange a 45 minute Tarot reading through Zoom or other virtual lobby software and look into it. Thanks for stopping by!

A couple months back I flirted with the idea of doing a series of posts about Mexican shamanism, mysticism and traditional medicine following the works of researcher Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum and do a commentary from the perspective of traditional Western occult philosophy and the Mesoamerican mystery tradition. I got a fair response to that initial post so I got in contact with her daughter while I was in Mexico last year and we were in talks about translating this sprawling series (and perhaps some others) into English and find a publisher given the ripe grounds for strange lore here in the United States.

I have now committed that every month I'll post at least one new essay about the subject and for as long as Jacobo, other authors, the commentariat or myself have something to say about it we will be exploring and discussing about Mexican shamans and the Mesoamerican Mysteries in general. In that spirit here are the acknowledgements and the introduction to the first volume translated, with some quotes and stories from the documentary --which I am told by his daughter isn't really that good, there is a new and better one coming up-- but the introduction of that one was great despite its tendency to a kind sensationalism worthy of a binge watching night on History Channel, so I've used it here.

"Talk to me, Muse, of the contrivanced path of the man who for long remained wandering. Even, with the passing of years, a time arrived when the gods had fixed that he returned home, still then he wasn't safe from danger even in the company of his own."

--The Odyssey, First Song - Homer

"I write in exile from a remote and obscure planet called Earth. My story starts in Andromeda, a galaxy where we practiced meditation, telepathic communication and the knowledge and handling of energy. ( Read more... )

I am sure everyone has noted how different people have different degrees of presence. Some of them stand powerfully or dress well and speak properly and eloquently; others you can almost see their ideas whizzing by enveloping them analyzing the words you just said, in a second. Both of those tell us how "present" someone is in a situation and is something that can even be felt.

In the last decade, I've noted a severe decline of the feeling of presence, of the consciousness behind the eyes of the people walking by. This year it was stronger and quicker, leaving many as Michael Ende's proverbial Grey People but instead of grey they are in a colorful trance, we might as well call them The Sparkling People as if the grey shell was possessed by an ad. Whatever it is, I just feel like the place is less crowded, even though their bodies are still there.

Where are the people? Have they been uploaded to the web? Have you noticed this?

That's Wilhelm Heinrich Schüßler above, the discoverer of Cell Salts as homeopathic remedies.

For the past year and a half I experimented quite a bit with Cell Salts and other modalities of traditional and alternative medicine and wanted to talk about how they fit in a world were commodity has priority over well-being. I've found out that a few adjustments need to be made in our mindset to make the best out of cell salts --and homeopathy and naturopathy in general-- since these methods of healing evolved in a society that was very different than ours and was also slower and more aware of the densest and most concrete of the vehicles that house the soul; in contrast with ours that is used to instant results and hardly able to tell anything apart if it's farther than "right now", albeit with its own technological prowess and economical expansion.

This has been a huge reason why homeopathy isn't popular these days. For homeopathy to work best, you need to put work and make health a working priority in your life, not just a nuisance when you don't have it. Most people are not willing to do that; or even farther, they don't even have a framework to think about a world were energetic methods like homeopathy work, since very little in our society provides a language, education or set of experiences for it.

I don't want to bash pharmaceuticals, they are not evil and indeed they can save your life but they are drugs and as with all drugs they are easily abused. More, they promote the fallacy that anything is able of curing the human body and it's conditions. Nothing is able to cure the human body, all a medicine can do is allow for the body to heal itself easier or more efficiently one way or the other. They are a chemical crutch and if you don't need it then your own capacity to heal is compromised by lack of use. That's why you don't use a crutch unless you need it, your ankles become weak and your muscles lose mass. Traditional and alternative medicine suggest, under the scrutiny of their studies and the weight of their results, that pharmaceuticals and other strong therapies must only be used once and only the body has lost its own capacity for healing not used in order to replace those capacities, unless they are irrecoverable. That is much less common that one might think though is sounds straightforward. The problem is that we have become averse to pain and work, (or lack self worth for that matter) and healing, true healing, takes all of them and more.

When we are sick these days what are we encouraged to do? Take pills to suppress the uncomfortable purging reactions of our body, numb it, and then target the infection or otherwise with another pill; take rest until you feel like going out of bed and watch movies all day or similar, for many people. And for the rest it is a need to go and attend their work duties without feeling they are dragging their bodies, though they do, without noticing it. This isn't the right way to care for your body or train it to be resilient. I personally have found that taking lots of rest when I'm sick but forcing myself out of bed to let my body know that we need to move and to get my blood circulating to get the vital oxygen to the places it needs to in order to repair tissue damage has done more for my health than taking an Advil.

The thing is, none of those things are comfortable to do when you are feeling weak but in my experience it makes you heal faster and also makes your body stronger for it to better endure further sickness. That's what I like about Cell Salts, they focus on providing the body with vital cell food and energy for the body to do its work best. However, if your body isn't resilient, and here lies the catch, it's much harder for your body to respond to them. Cell Salts and homeopathy work best to restore health if you usually take care of your health. That makes enormous sense to me. Health is like a muscle, the more you use it and take care of it the better it responds and the more skillfully you can handle it in daily life and in rest.

I can attest to this from direct experience. I suffer from regular gastritis and the accompanying acid reflux. I've been on proton pump inhibitors --emphasis on inhibitors, also called anti-acids like omeprazol-- for 10 years and I haven't been cured at all. However, I started taking the proper Cell Salt combination and shifted my diet to something lighter and lo and behold. Within the month I was mostly healed! I still get the ocasional upset stomach, mostly because my habits haven't changed completely but to me it feels more like a recovery of health instead of a management of disease. Most people I know with gastritis take anti-acids and keep having bad diets, that helps us with the vice of over eating but not with the inflammation in the body, and the stress it puts on it.

The same goes for my allergies to dogs and cats, it's infrequent but it still happens. I consulted and allergist and he suggested a two year plan to train my immune system to target the allergen before it gets to interacts with my body and cause inflammation. Honestly, that's pretty cool tech. However, I didn't think I needed it. I would consider that necessary for severe allergies that could cause blazing atopic dermatitis or anaphylaxis and death, not a runny nose. And perhaps my limited immunological resources can be put to better use. So I did what biochemic doctors did and took the proper cell salt combination for balancing watery conditions and... Within the week my allergies were gone. I don't know yet if they are gone for good, it took several repeats of exposure to dogs and cats and taking the proper cell salt but I can feel my body becoming more used to responding correctly to allergens and I haven't had anything resembling allergies ever since, even after frequent contact with house pets.

I consider, in this out loud musing, that the balance between corrective medicine (most of modern medicine) and traditional medicine that makes you stronger needs to find a balance in todays world when sickness produce all kinds of imbalances. The key to this seems to be to recognize the long forgotten bridge between mind and body, between ourselves and the rest of the cosmos, between the personality and our intuition. It is this energy we've lost words for that binds the two and solves the apparent opposites of two views of healing the body. Prana, chi, pneuma, Spiritus, ruach, you know it, Energy.



If you are the meticulous type, I also take grammar and orthography corrections as I still have some bad habits to get rid off that I got while learning the language. Thanks for reading!

Before I get back to the States I wanted to complete a project that has been long in my mind, a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. I didn't know where to place her nor what was the traditional way. Since I am by no means a traditional Christian not least because I am a polytheist occultist I ended up following a Mexican tradition of placing her near a water source so the top of my parents garden fountain is her new abode. The difference in the place is palpable and I am eager to finish the consecration process tonight.

Hail Mary full of grace
The Lord is with you
Blessed are you amongst women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us faithful
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.

This is an interpretation by the band Light in Babylon of a poem by the Hebrew Neoplatonic philosopher and poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c. 1022 to 1058-70) who lived and worked in Spain and contributed to the intellectual culture of Saragossa.

Lyrics (Hebrew transliteration below)

Kipur (At the dawn)
At the dawn I seek Thee,
Rock and refuge tried,
In due service speak Thee
Morn and eventide.

‘Neath Thy greatness shrinking,
Stand I sore afraid,
All my secret thinking
Bare before Thee laid.

Little to Thy glory
Heart or tongue can do;
Small remains the story,
Add we spirit too.

Yet since man’s praise ringing
May seem good to Thee,
I will praise Thee singing
While Thy breath’s in me.

Kipur (Shachar avakeshcha)
Shachar avakeshcha
Tzuri umisgavi
Eeruch lefanecha
Shechari ve gam arbi

Lifenei gedulatecha
Eemod ve ebahel
Ki eneicha tire
Kol machshevot libi

Ma ze asher yuchal
Halev ve halashon
Laasot uma koach
Ruche betoch kirbi

Hine lecha titav
Zimrat enosh al ken
Odcha beod thiye
Nishmat eloha bi

It is common among people of our industrial societies these days to feel uprooted given the unhealthy habits they promote due to excessive visual stimuli and information overload. In particular, but not exclusively, the mindless scrolling of the web. It is part of some teachings that a tree cannot grow any taller than its roots for it is the foundation the allows you to reach new heights safely. Balance is essential for human beings as it is for trees and it is also for the same reason that an arrow that is too head heavy won't hit the target if it manages to fly at all or the shaft doesn't break given the inertia of a heavy head meeting the sudden acceleration before that, crushing it in between them.

In today's world we have a tendency to empower people more than what they can handle to meet the fast paced demands of our frenetic culture, or to make you gullible enough to make use of you, and one consequence of that is that our minds tip over as easy as a broom does when it's upside down. We are lacking a proper foundation and strong roots that can give us the stability needed to endure speeding winds. I've felt this many times in my life, in fact it is probably the thing that I need the most. Earth. Earth as in a strong contact with the planet and the elemental energy it represents.

There are some symptoms that I consider to be telling of someone needing some grounding of which some of them are:

• Lack of attention to your surroundings and the present moment
• Clumsiness caused by lack of attention (not motor skill!)
• Irritability and swaying emotions
• Fast switching between tasks
• Head in the clouds
• Headaches due to overthinking or other mishandlings of the mind
• Feeling of being uprooted, disconnected or floating
• Disorganized thoughts
• Vertigo and anxiety

For this reason I started developing a grounding visualization that has helped me to deal with the above successfully. If you are interested read below:

You can do this inside or outside. It is best if you do this barefooted but it can also be done with shoes. If you are Christian you can start with a prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe or to the Blessed Virgin Mary to help you and bless you in this work of grounding. If you are a Druid you can pray to the Welsh Cêd the Earth Mother or the Irish Danu; if a Heathen you can try Frigga or Erce or if you prefer the Theoi you can pray to Demeter. Any other Earth and soil god or goddess will do.

Stretch a little bit or massage yourself if you need to as to release muscular tension.

Sit about halfway from the edge of a chair so that your back doesn't touch the backrest and you can place your feet solidly on the ground and the weight of your legs doesn't hang from the chair. Afterwards, put your feet together, hands facing downwards on the middle of your lap, arms should be allowed to hang like a rope, and your back is comfortably erect. Head tilted slightly downwards, eyes closed. Take a few moments to bring your mind, body and energies into stability. When you are ready take a few deep breaths and feel your mental preoccupations and bodily tensions draining down deep into the earth away from you where they will decompose and reintegrate into the energetic cycles of the soil. Pause for a moment.

Now, dedicate a few minutes to the sensations on your feet. Then extend that awareness to the floor or the soil beneath them and bit by bit all the way to recognizing the whole planet that holds you in place, from its surface to its core and the gravity thereof. When you feel you are ready or the focus starts to weaken release the imagery.

Next, imagine that from your lower legs and feet two strong and big roots start growing downwards, sinking and branching deeper and deeper into the earth. Imagine the roots sinking first into the soft soil and reaching downwards until they eventually hold firmly into solid bedrock. As you do this feel all the sensations and try to engage all your senses --from the sound of growing, sinking roots, to the warmth of the soil and the unmovable solidity of bedrock. Holding this image feel yourself as stable, unshakable and grounded and concentrate on what that represents.

Depending on how you feel either take the roots back into yourself or leave them there firmly in the ground. The latter will leave you solidly grounded and rooted, if you feel chronically uprooted you might want to try this a few times while the former will leave you balanced and rested having touched ground to recharge if this is a sporadic issue. Depending on your spiritual path, needs and intuitions is what you should do. The same goes for when to practice this exercise. I didn't design this as a daily practice but rather as a method for grounding as needed. Your mileage may very.

When you are done thank the earth and the powers that have helped you.

A week ago, after two years of a seemingly elusive nature, I caught the bug that has had a stranglehold on the collective imagination of our species for most of two years now. I am not smart enough to take apart the sociological, political and psychological dimensions of the phenomenon, for that I'll wait to read more keen authors but today I wish to speak about Magic and disease.

First off, in good ecosophian manner, let me start by saying that I am not a doctor of any kind, heck I don't even call myself a magician just yet so this is, at best, pure speculative nonsense in the eyes of today's accepted notions and approved ideas. These are just my opinions on the subject and should not be taken seriously. None of this is meant to be taken as a means for diagnosis or information in the treatment of disease, for that please consult your trusted licensed health care provider.

With that out of the way here I mean to make some remarks on the mental notes I've had ever since I had first hand experience of what western occultists call The Astral Light and many other traditions, literally all cultures except our industrial cultures, call in one way or another The Life Force --the hidden, to modern eyes, energy that pervades everything from the farthest stars to our guts and among other things, it has an important role in health. As a matter of fact, the Japanese still use a phrase similar to "how is your chi doing?" to refer the the state of health.

So let me start with a couple of stories first. On a retreat that I went as a volunteer I had a nasty ear infection due to me nervously scratching it with dirty hands. One day I woke up and noticed the clear signs of infection and got worried. On that same day, just after my daily practices, my whole ear canal was swollen shut and I had the most painful headache that I've ever had. I felt as if my head was going to explode. I was in the middle of the Tennessee forest, so I got worried about getting medical attention and at the moment I did the only thing that I could do and thought might work.

There is a breathing component that is part of my practices that we've been taught can be used for self-healing, and I really never had the chance to try it so I figured --why not? I sat down in a particular way and held my right hand, since the infection was on the right ear, in a special gesture and started breathing and directing "prana" to my ear. I did this for about 10 minutes when I started feeling the clear sensation of reduced inflammation. In the next 5 minutes, seriously in the next 5 minutes my ear canal went from being swollen shut and me not being able to listen at all to it being completely open as if nothing had happened, well, with the exception of the signs of infection of course.

Having being raised in an industrial society I was completely and utterly shocked that I could do this, so much that I went straight and told all my fellow volunteers that the techniques we were taught actually work and still, among people that actively do this practices every day, I was met with skepticism.

The healing effect of that act lasted for about 4-5 hours until I started feeling the inflammation kicking-in again. I was not expecting to be cured by this at all, I don't know of any practice strong enough to get rid of actual bio-organisms invading your body, but it gave me enough room to actually push some antibiotic drops inside my ear and let it ventilate to avoid further suppuration .I have no idea what would've happened to me if I hadn't been able of doing that, the pain was the worst pain I've ever felt and just breathing in a particular way did more than the strongest pain-killer that I was given that day ever did.

Here is a second anecdotal evidence that the life force exists and has an important role in disease. A friend of mine has gone deep into the shamanic path. On one occasion he was having a darting pain in the kidneys, for which he got tested and got the results back saying that he had kidney stones. In an ayahuasca session, in the middle of the effect --good lord I can't imagine that-- he started having really painful symptoms and since the vine mixture makes you vomit he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. If he vomited that forceful motion could cause more damage and pain, but if he didn't he would be stuck on a bad trip.

The Taita officiating the ceremony, this guy on the bottom, noticed this, approached my friend and asked him what was wrong. My friend duly explained and the Taita's action was quite remarkable from a shamanic stance. He asked him if the medicine, that is how shamans refer to the ayahuasca mixture, was still strong in him, to which he nodded in negation. Taita Sebastian gave simple directions, to drink more and come back to him once the plant had noticeable effects on him. My friend told me that in that moment he almost fainted, but still, in an act of confidence he did and came back.



When he did, Taita asked for the location of the pain and started chanting in his language and waving a set of plants around my friend. A few moments later my friend felt something pulling from his kidneys, the pain going away and that was the end of it. He has not had issues with that ever since and it's been two years. On asking the Taita the next time he saw him he told him. "You cured me" To which Taita Sebastian replied. "No I didn't, it was her, the plant, and I don't know how it does what it does I am just the conduit".

When he told me that I was seriously impressed. One thing is to get rid of inflammation and quite another is to fix a problem of that magnitude. It only got me thinking about just how much we probably knew about medicine before, medicine that uses the life-force instead of altering the chemical balance of the body and how much of that has been lost; and how much of that would be ignored in today's society if not actively prosecuted like the ill-fated Dr. Wilhelm Reich and his orgone accumulator.

To be fair, probably some well-intended doctors would be right to doubt on this tales, there are quite a few charlatans on the alternative scene after all and quite a few of them have done immense harm out of incompetence or wishful thinking. Something is clear however, there is something potent in harnessing the life-force for healing and we used to know much more about it. If we as a society manage to bring these techniques back and fuse them with modern surgical techniques for example. Could you imagine?

As a closing note I would like to mention, for those actively practicing ceremonial magic, that stopping your practices during disease is probably a mistake. I did, at the peak of my fever, and I couldn't have regretted it more. My mood was obliterated and my bodies ability to heal seemed also greatly impaired. After I performed the LRP in invoking mode I was back on my feet. Just how much can magic and alchemy be harnessed for healing purposes is a field that definitely needs to be explored further in the opening stages of a declining civilization. Unfortunately is also one that needs a lot of preparation and guidance from magician-doctors we don't have any more, but we used to. So we need to do a lot of dumpster diving, for example the writings of Paracelsus and see what we can come up with for a future with less energy and resources.

I've seen alternative medicine starting to grow considerably, among my own friends I know someone who went from the pains of studying as an MD and then getting trained in traditional Chinese medicine. Here is to hoping!

Occult knowledge --or rather information about the occult-- these days is widely available in libraries, online, in back-alley pdf's, on the witch ridden corners of Reddit and even Youtube and Instagram accounts; with various degrees of quality, in descending order. I am no expert in the occult, for as much as been fairly read in the available literature might tempt me to believe but I have noticed a few things regarding an inappropriate exposure to the occult which I've termed occult fever . This latter phenomenon is a consequence of the easiness with which the information is obtained and more than once I've seen over inflated egos as a result of having read a book or several about occult subjects. There is nothing wrong with reading books about the occult, actually, there are several benefits including as source of inspiration, as a map, or as a way to create rapport with a tradition. One thing however should always be kept in mind when reading such books and that is that no matter how fanciful they sound, or how intoxicating this knowledge can be they are meant one way or the other to the masses and as such they are entry-level books, or in some cases in good tradition, trying to say something else than what is apparent at first.

One who has widely read the literature about the occult might jump in defense of such arguments, which is a reliable source to proving the point, for the bearer of true knowledge doesn't rely on appearances and is often discreet about what he knows and of a calm demeanor when exposing it. There are oceans of difference between knowing something and toying with the concepts a little bit and actually knowing something from within.

There are many reasons why someone would attach their identities to the occult without putting in the necessary training to build the foundation to make sense of it and use it, instead of being used by it. The most obvious one is that people like to pretend to be more than what they actually are, that is easy and feeds the ego in order to attain a sense of self-worth and in some cases of community. Unfortunately that is the same as pretending to be fed by junk food, it certainly gives the illusion of something but in this case more than anything it props up a personality around "being an occultist" but it is as fragile as the health of someone that doesn't have a proper diet. That is why there are so many brittle egos on the scene that would fling a nasty curse at you just by pointing it out. Yes, this happened to me, fortunately it was a lesson on the effectiveness of banishing rituals more than anything else.



Half a step further you find a similar example but among practitioners, which in a way can be trickier to spot and self-correct because the former example requires as much as pointing it out for it to be obvious, but this one is harder to discern since there are actually reasons for the claim of knowing. One thing is that the people that have some degree of experience in the occult are more knowledgeable and thus have a wider array of arguments in their favor, but as with the previous specimen it is just a mirage. This phenomenon often manifests itself as a form of The Watcher in the Threshold, since it is a barrier to avoid self transformation and it takes humility and playfulness to cross it repeatedly. Myself personally I have not seen this, because I don't have much contact with the broader occult community but I have seen it online in forums and on pages whose authors claim adeptship but looking at their lives it makes it hard to believe. Where I have seen it in a different form is among practitioners of various disciplines. Once one has gone through the necessary motions to claim a mask, one stops desiring to go further in favor of enjoying the more polished self-image and progress stagnates.



Here JMG has a phrase very apt for the occasion:

These two desires, mask and reality, move in harmony so long as the magical novice restricts his or her involvement to reading books and taking part in a few community rituals. When the novice moves on to regular practice, though, that harmony shatters; it is possible to [pretend] be a magician or to become one --but not both. The disciplines of magical training are unfriendly to masks of any kind, even the magician-mask; fantasies of magical power and self-sufficiency run headfirst into the reality that the beginning magician can rarely control his or her own thoughts for two minutes together. On a deeper level, the goal of most of the basic magical disciplines is self-knowledge, and it is precisely the fear of self-knowledge that is the motive behind every kind of mask. -- John Michael Greer, Paths of Wisdom.

This is one but among a flurry of effects that the undigested and improperly directed knowledge can manifest as. There is another which I consider one of the worse kinds of occult fever because it is the one that shapes not the personality of the one under its effect directly but how he perceives the world around him or her. Whenever someone primes his mind with an image of a concept you start seeing it everywhere and that can be dangerous if you put a lot of weight into such an image. This happens all the time in diminished form in everyday life which is why inkblot tests like the one above say so much about who we are. "You don't see things as they are but as you are" goes the saying allegedly attributed to Rumi.

Our brains function with a set of images and concepts that we have gathered across our social environments and we use these images to tell ourselves this is this and that is that, this is this letter and that one is the other and so on. On a subtler level this also determines how we experience the world because around certain images and concepts we ascribe a habit of the will in the form of emotions. Whenever we see a dog we feel this emotion and whenever we see a cat we feel that kind of emotion; when we see a beggar we feel this other kind of emotion. Sometimes there are reasons for this, or rather, stepping stones to this and sometimes it is just a mindless reaction based on habit. The validity of how we perceive the world can be argued, and it is actually shown during the first steps of occult training that many things that we might consider real are no more than a habit that has gone underneath our conscious awareness and it appears as though they were true to the conscious mind. As in the matter of a mirror, we have built an image in our minds and it reflects it back at us as a tint covering whatever we perceive.



Here is were it gets slippery because truth is a funny thing once you start examining the things that you take as given. Most of the time we rely in some sort of faith when we talk about things that we take as true and the most deceptive of all are the senses. Whatever we can touch, hear, taste, smell and see we take as true and real. In a subtler level, whatever we can deduct from a set of premises or axioms we also take as true and in a way, real. In a way, funny as it sounds, these are more true than the information that comes from our senses because our senses are quite limited. After all, what we see is not the object that we are seeing but rather we are using light as a proxy to perceive it because of the rays that bounce from it and enter into our eyeballs, which are then filtered and assembled by our mind into something that more or less makes sense. In contrast, the things we deduct or build upon a set of premises or axioms --if they are any good-- don't depend on our physical senses, and though still limited, they have a certain degree of distillation that gives it a particular quality that we find in poems, some philosophical concepts and mathematical theorems. They are real, but you cannot point at them, with your finger at least.



However, and here is were mishandled occult knowledge comes in, if you start taking in images and concepts into the framework of your mind for which you don't have a proper and stable base the way you start perceiving the world can get seriously wonky and you become less functional. You've swapped one set of images for another --or following the allegory of the cave an image above, you've swapped one set of statues for another-- and if improperly assembled then your perception of the world can get distorted in ways that cause psychological and even physical damage. In a way, this is why crazy people are, well, crazy to us. Because they have attached their attention into a set of concepts and images that color their reality strongly, very strongly and since those do not conform to the world of the 21st century or meets the demands of survival either physical or societal we label them as what they are missing --nuts. This can happen by psychological trauma, obsession or what have you and thus the insane starts pointing at things that are not there, talks about things that don't make sense and claim knowledge nobody else has, even though to them it is as true as a beer can sitting next to the poolside.



If you start reading about concepts that appeal strongly to the emotions, such as demons for example, all of a sudden your mind can't stop thinking about it and you start seeing evil everywhere; if you create rapport with something that demands intense secrecy without something to balance it, you start becoming paranoid about everyone and everything and you'll be on the lookout all the time; if you've had unhealthy relationships you'll be on your tip toes all the time looking for manipulative behavior. This is also true, and again, even more tricky to spot, with "good" occult knowledge for example related to divinity or virtuosity. This happens because it is much easier to argue in favor of virtuosity, after all if you think you are right and everything around you convinces you that you are righteous then you can commit any and all kinds of blunders in the name of entitlement. We see a lot of that today.

So what to do about it? Regarding the latter form I just talked about I am reminded of a phrase, which I think I heard from a particular Yogi I am fond off that says: "Whatever good you do, throw it in the well." This is very helpful to keep in mind because if we start wearing our good deeds around our necks our egos will hyperinflate with no way to argument against them and at that point, progress also stagnates. I am convinced this is why the mystical religions put such emphasis in service and volunteering, because this helps you balance the sense of virtuosity by grounding you; and if you do it well, by seeing everything and everyone around you as bigger than you are or perhaps less in a less problematic phrasing, as things that are worthy to be served. Regarding occult knowledge and books, one way that I think it is helpful is to never believe them but also to never disbelieve them. This kind of knowledge should serve as lampposts that guide us to whatever it is that it is trying to point us too, but they can also serve as traps.



Lastly, acquiring tools that allow us to discern these images, place new ones and remove troublesome ones is essential for proper training. Tools that enable us to discern what is coming from our own minds, what is coming from imitating someone and what is coming from the collective mind of our times. Divination is also helpful here, though it can be tricky as well, and that it is why it takes so much effort to do it right, because if we do not hold a mediator stance we might be fooling ourselves into believing something and then use that, under the pretense or right divining that something is true. That is why some occult schools place so much emphasis on meditation and journaling among other techniques of self-knowledge, because by having a criteria and an ability to pay attention consciously you can act and think properly and finally you can wield the sword of knowledge properly without turning yourself into tatters in the process.

“The flow of time is always cruel… Its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it… A thing that doesn’t change with time is a memory of younger days.” --Sheik



There is something that touches me deeply when I read about the spirituality of the ancients. Now that the crumbling of our world is in a stage were it seems to be painfully obvious that those days are long gone I can't help but think that there existed a time, not everlasting, where harmony with the world and the spiritual realities of our existence used to be a common theme of everyday life.



Doubtless, hardships have been a reality of every age but there is a whisper from antiquity that compels me to imagine being in such a place in my mind. A place where the song of the cosmos is met with silence and welcomed within; a place were the simple play of a string brings you closer to the divine realities that pervade the universe at every moment.




There is something beautiful about imagining such a scene, a joyful scene, were people gather around a brazier at night under the heavenly vault with multi-colored and intricate tapestries that adorn the surroundings. In such a scene people would come together at particular junctures in the cosmic clockwork to attune themselves to the Mysteries and celebrate a change of tide --to be initiated into the mystical forces that brought this material substance into being by welcoming you into the adventure of the spirit. Imagine such a scene, after days of preparation. You are instructed a chant to go along with your journey and just before starting the veil over your eyes is lifted and you see the path you have to walk in peregrination, while the adepts of your tradition wave green branches in rhythm to fill the reverent silence of crickets along the way.




I am sure such a time will come again once the Great Winter passes but I am also sure that by that time, a thousand or so years from now, I must surely won't be here. Meanwhile, as the Long Descent keeps tumbling down what is left of civilization I'll spend sometime, sometime in my mind imagining such a future among temples in the distance surrounded by majestic valleys brought to life once again and were the rivers flow into the deepest corners of the Earth where one could hear a monotone drip telling you that you've arrived.




Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OACSI6KpWzU