NYNY: Prompt 1 - Make Way!

GTFO the way, RO's coming!

That's how I figure the universe feels whenever I start getting organized.

The first prompt of the New Year, New You experiment is about Making Way, clearing out the old crap that stand in the way of whatever we've got planned.

I posted three of my major projects I'd like to tackle this year, and when I stilled my mind enough to really think about getting started on it, my mind just sort of shut down. See, I'm a busy guy. A very busy guy. Back in April I started doing major Jupiter rites on a regular basis, and the expansion and flow of blessings came right in. A lot. And brought a lot of work with it.

So I need to clear things out before I even have the space to think about starting anything new. The major things I've got to get done are finishing up the Red Work series of courses, and a ton of client work.

I do, however, have a ton of work to do on my car and house...

Actually, I have a ton of work that needs to be done on my car and house. There's a difference.

See, I'm not a mechanic or a handyman. I'm the unmechanic, the unhandyman. I tried to replace my broken window on my car last night and broke the door. So I have a broken window and a broken door now instead of just a broken window. I have holes in my walls from when I tried to fix the handrail on the steps. I have holes in my ceiling where the plaster fell down when I tried to fix the paint that had bubbled when my air conditioner's condensation pump blew a hose. I have holes in the plaster on the walls in my living room from trying to hang curtains.

I'm a writer, not Bob Villa. So I'm going to write some money-making stuff and pay someone else to do that shit. Know your strengths, know your weaknesses, and make your strengths support your weaknesses. For me, that's writing paid copy.

After I finish the Red Work series of courses, and the client work.

Clearing out my headspace is a bit more difficult. I've got stress from work, and stress from home. My day job is in a precarious position at the moment because America's Congress SUCKS MOTHERFUCKING DONKEY BALLS. My contract was cancelled because the automatic cuts that went into effect last time they couldn't set aside their differences and run the country impacted Medicare, and my job was to come up with a way to save $10.2 billion. We were making progress, but not quickly enough, so they canceled the project and told Obama they'd save the $10.2 billion somewhere else. So I need to do some magic on that, and get something lined up to pay the mortgage next year that's a little less sporadic than online occult sales.
My home-based stress is just your normal father-of-three crap. November 21 is my son's birthday, followed by Thanksgiving, my daughter's birthday December 12th, Christmas, my spouse's birthday January 14, and my other daughter's birthday January 25th. I hate November through January. The stress has been known to overwhelm me.

But the solution to this problem is to catch up on the client work. For example, by doing the Hermetic Diagnoses for other people, I travel the seven spheres and spend hours in contemplation and meditation, communing with the spirits. That in and of itself is really good therapy, and it melts the stress. Other client work will further get me done with stuff.

So those are my plans for Making Way for the projects I have planned.

How to post links in comments

With Deb's New Year New You thing going around, people are posting links in google's blogger comments that you can't click on.

I'm guilty of that. But I don't like to have to select the link, hit copy, go to the browser address bar, hit paste, then hit go when I could just click a link.

So here's how to post a link in a comment on blogger:

Type this:

<a href="

Then paste your link.

Then type this:

">

you'll have this:

<a href="http://link_address.com">

Or this:

<a href="www.link_address.com">

Now type the text that you want to link to the site. Like "My blog post participation."

then type this:

</a>

Altogether, you'll have:

<a href="http://link_address.com">My blog post participation.</a>

And it will look like this in the preview of your comment:


My blog post participation.
 

And then you can add "HTML Programmer" to your resume.

New Year, New You: I'm in!

Deb is acting on the prompts of her Genius again...

Duhn duhn duhn!

One thing I've learned is that when the Genius starts kicking a magician, interesting times are on the way.

So what's it all about? Basically it's all about doing magic like a motherfucking boss. Living as a magician. Using the powers that we've earned through our spiritual progression to make the world what we want it to be. Acting as if what we believe were really true. Here's how she put it in her post:

Get up, get up!  Don't miss this moment.  Create magics great and small, mundane and mystical.  Find everything you've been looking for, mysteries revealed in every form of divination and song and when you fuck it up, when you are too tired to try, bring each other up from bloodied knees to get back up smiling.  You are all made of stars and you have stardust in your veins.  Do something about it.

Regular readers of my blog know that's what I'm all about, and it's how I live my life. I do magic for everything. I do magic on my kids to help them at school, I do magic on their teachers and administration, I enchant my local government and neighborhood businesses, I enchant the fuck out of my company, and there are literally no issues in my life that I have not done some kind of magic to influence at some point. My car runs on magic.

I started living this way a few years ago. Last year, I got a bit more organized, but I'm behind on several aspects of the projects I started. I have several major magical projects underway, including but not limited to:

• Consciously Integrating the Forces and Lessons of the 8th Sphere
• Continued Kingdom Management
• Centers for Applied Hermetics

There are other less major things, but these are the largest things on my list. They're already in process, but I think they'll count for this project. I'll make the parts public that I can, and I'll be responding to her prompts as they arrive.

I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes. It's not often I get a chance to participate in someone's Genius-prompted-excursion that doesn't involve dipping into the High Weirdness, and I feel really at home there.

So what are you up to? Ready to jump on in and do magic like a boss?

Opening the Book of Lambspring

Plug Saturday continues! Though technically it's Sunday now here.

It is with great joy that I get to review the latest work by Fr. AIT, of Heavens within Earth and the Book of Coelius fame, founder and expounder of the Ordo Octopi Nigri Pulveri, true Priest of Kronos, and generally Good Egg.

He told me about The Opening of the Book of Lambspring before it was published, and I got an advanced copy and spent a few hours going through it with him, comparing notes and exploring the symbolism of the images. It was a good afternoon. It was one of those moments where we got to talking like old school Hermeticists. We didn't always agree, but we each had something really cool to bring to the table for discussion. If you've  had a chance to talk shop with someone who's done as much Work as you have, you know what I mean. We were riffing off each other's insights as we harmonized with the Emblems and talked through what we saw.

But I'm probably getting ahead of myself. First, a bit about the Book of Lambspring. It's a series of alchemical images that reflect different phases of the Great Work pictorially. Each image captures the phase of the Work, but all in the language of the birds. The imagery that is meaningful if you're a fellow alchemist who understands the Ideas behind the forms they take. But there are few on the planet comfortable enough to claim to understand it, and fewer among those who have any right to make that claim.

Fr. AIT is among the ranks of those who know the language. He provides an analysis of each of these images, an interpretation as seen through the eyes of the Hermetic Magician. It's one of the most interesting pieces of occult information I've had the honor of working with this last year, in fact. Each image is a key to a phase of the Work. Each image is a gate as well, but more on that later.

Many of his interpretations are based on his personal experiences and training within the Golden Dawn Order to which he belongs. And he wrote during and after an incredible initiation based on the mythography of the "Great Rite," so there's a lot of emphasis on the holy sexuality of these images. He provides such broad hints at the mysteries of sex magic that anyone with an inclination towards deciphering the hidden meanings will find their way paved and easy, and won't have to jump sacred fences and score tech in back alleys the way I had to. Here's a hint: there's no jacking off over sigils involved.

I rarely mix sex and magic these days, though when I do, it sends out seismic waves that make the richter scale.* In our conversations about the meanings of the emblems, I tended to focus less on the sexual interpretations than he does, but that doesn't mean he's wrong in any of them. Everything he says about each emblem is true. I prefer the parts where he sticks to the straight "Hermetic Magic" interpretations, though I suspect he'd argue they aren't as separate as I like to think. And he might be right.

I found it incredibly useful to treat each Emblem as a Gate. I would turn each emblem into a small astral rite, passing within each, becoming a part of the image, and seeing what it meant from within. Most of my observations lined up perfectly with Fr. AIT's, and where there were differences, there was still harmony.

This book touches on the deeper mysteries of the Alchemical process, and what it means to magicians attempting the Great Work through magical practice. It's definitely on my list of things every magician should read at least once, though in all honesty you could spend a lifetime exploring each image, comparing experiences, and applying the lessons of each.

*That's hyperbole right there. That earthquake was a coincidence.

Deb's Having a Sale!

It's Plug Saturday!

Well, not yet, but it's about to be.

Deb's announced a sale over at Charmed I'm Sure. I ordered some stuff right away. Aurora's Mojo Hand Feeding Oil will be used ritually, often, and Britania's Basil Money Drawing Oil too, for other things.  

Support your local* bloggers this year! Keep the money where it's going to do the people you care about the most good.

If anyone has anything else they'd like plugged, let me know. I'm into supporting people I know and like instead of corporations who pay their CEOs 45 times their average employee's salary.

* Local being a metaphor, we're in your house entertaining and educating you, so that's local enough.