How to be a Living God

Live like a god.

A couple of years ago, my friends and I started doing Jupiter magic once a week. A couple of years later, most of us are making a lot more money than we did when we started, and most of us are living dream lives.

It's no secret what we did. Conjured up a deity or intelligence or archangel of the greater benefic, said the Orphic hymn, meditated on a set of sigils, and talked about money and opportunities that came our way to each other.

The last part of the Orphic hymn is the part that became our statements of intent, a request for health and necessary wealth. Once a month we do the rites, some of us once a week. Blessings accumulated. Wealth flowed. The 'health' of Jupiter is a zaftig kind of health, so we all got a bit pudgy.

Money didn't fix anything. I was still in a miserable marriage for various justifying reasons, like for the kids, or for her health, or it's cheaper to keep her, or something. Always something. It was an unpleasant life, but familiar, and I really thought it was my fault things were bad. And in a way it was my fault.

Because I didn't leave. Divorce was scary. Splitting up was scary. The house we owned together, the kids we had together, the history we had together, all that made it really hard to split up. Divorce would be harder and more painful than staying, I thought.

Eventually things got so bad that it hit a crisis point. I was planning on leaving my ex when the kids were 18. Figured it was the best thing I could do for them. I had checked out of the relationship in my head, but was letting it zombie shuffle around for like a decade to avoid the expected painfulness of a divorce.

Of course it fell apart.

In July.

And everything went to shit. I crawled into a bottle for a week. Or so. I got a shitty one bedroom efficiency. I signed a terrible agreement with the ex hoping we would reconcile, because fuck, it was so different it hurt.

And I did a lot of magic. Magic to bring me and my ex back together.  It worked, but we still hated each other and couldn't handle it. So I did other magic, black evil magic, and it worked, and I had to call on Deb to teach me how to undo it, because it made me feel worse, not better.

And then I gave up on that life. Fuck it, said I. And I did more magic, seven spheres in seven days with the intent to be reborn, rededicated to the hermetic great work as I understood it.

And then shit got weird.

I started having fun. I drank and smoked and went to social events and met interesting people and did interesting things. I found out who I was without my ex and all the definitions I had taken on, husband, father, home owner. I discovered that the names I had let myself be called and internalized for 12 years were bullshit. I embraced a term I knew was right and fun, 'magician' and let it take me where it will, Schmendrick style.

Since then, it's been a trip. I do magic, my world gets better. I make a lot of money. My divorce goes well. My magnum opus is on track to manifest in 2013. I lost thirty pounds and have taken control over my body's shape.

It's pretty awesome.

It's not always fun though. I live in a shit hole apartment in Baltimore. I wept one night a couple weeks ago looking at it. I am an occasional emo wreck in many ways. I miss my kids, I worry about them. I have trust issues. Working out the divorce is not fun. Some days my ex hate-texts me for hours. Though I haven't in a while, some days I respond in kind.

But things keep improving. It's a matter of perspective. Divorce sucks compared to hot red-headed sex, for example, but it is way less painful than living in a terrible relationship was on a daily basis. I have something good to think about every day, something awesome if I remember to look for it. Something that makes the bad shit not so bad, really. 

I figured something out, we actually buy our experiences, we purchase every moment we experience using the only currency that matters: our attention. What we spend our attention on becomes magnified in our experience. I can pay attention to how I spent 12 years sinking literally hundreds of thousands of dollars into a house, cars, clothes, and a really cool kitchen and now I'm starting over from scratch with nothing but a battered Volvo and not even a stick of furniture to my name, and I'm going to have a shitty time. I can pay attention to the fact that if this is what I have to show for my career, my life's decisions, my time and effort for over a fucking decade, then I am obviously a failure, right? I can buy that for myself.

Or not.

I can pay attention to the fact that I can write my epic books now without interruption or guilt. I can pay attention to how I do magic and shit works itself out in my favor (more on that later). I can pay attention to my lover, and how things started great and have only gotten better in that area of my life. I can pay attention to the fact that I'm in transition from one bad phase of life to whatever I want my life to be, with my imagination and work ethic the only limitations standing between me and complete domination of the entire universe.

So ... I feel pretty great most of the time, not miserable most of the time. For 12 years that was not the case! I didn't even know I was miserable or that I didn't have to be miserable. I didn't know life could be fun.

So I'm excited about it. If you are unhappy most of the time, I want to tell you it doesn't have to be like that so you can wake up and start having fun with me. Because it's contagious. And if everyone caught it, wow what a world, eh?

So here's the trick to being a living god:

Live like a god.

• Figure out what you want.
• Do magic to get what you want.
• Look for what you want to manifest.
• Do what it takes to get your results.

The last part is the hardest. You won't succeed most of the time because of that fact. Doing what it takes is not usually ecstatically blissful. It's usually boring, irritating, or fucking painful. It always feels like it's taking too long, and until you have what you want, you worry that you won't get it. Often.

That's normal.

Also, magic is like strength training. You do more magic and you can do more magic. But you don't start out a god-level magician. You get stronger, you learn to us it better, you aim for the right goals. It's a process.

And like developing muscles, you are usually sore from one initiation or another. You can pull a muscle working on it too hard, and then you have to heal. It hurts. You can't pull down forces of creation without them changing you, and change isn't easy.

It's work. But ... it works.