It’s not a lamp quite yet…

Last night I set about crafting the lamp for my Sorcery Illumination.  I lamented for quite a while about what I would use for this purpose.  At first I thought about a ring, as I have an excellent goldsmith that I have used for projects in the past.  I decided against a ring because I rarely wear the ones I have, including my wedding band.  I then thought about a pendant, which wasn’t a bad idea, I just didn’t have a terribly good way of crafting one that wouldn’t be the size of a cowboy’s belt buckle.

I finally decided on making a little pocket-sized trinket that I can either pack with me, or sit conspicuously within my normal line of sight.  I made it out of polymer clay and a purple crystal that I’ve had for some time.  The reason I chose that specific crystal was primarily for sentimental reasons.  My wife bought it for me at a local casino at the very beginning of a wonderful, relaxing weekend of play.  As my goal with my illumination is to handle stress in more effective ways, the thought of the peace, happiness, and relaxation is embodied in that crystal seemed like a perfect thing to draw on for positive energies.

The design of my trinket isn’t terribly complex.  The clay comes up around about half of the crystal from the bottom, and resembles a broken eggshell.  It has a simple circular base that it rests in, and the crystal sticks out of the top.  The symbolism of the egg comes from when I was a child.  I used to eat my breakfast while watching television, and I would get so lost in my thoughts and what was going on, that sometimes I wouldn’t have any recollection of having eaten.  This is the same result that I want when I try to relax, especially through short-session meditation.  I want to experience nothing but what I am focusing on, which is nothingness.  I want to be so engrossed in the void that I have no recollection of the what is going on around me, even if I choose to slip into the void while sitting on a bench in a crowded place.  That specific goal will take a while to achieve, but success will be just the first reward of such controlled thought.

I still have work left to finish the lamp; it needs to be embellished, painted, and run through my ceremony/meditation/bleeding ritual that seems to be working so well.

IO Chaos!

Moving forward with the Liber KKK…

I’m still moving forward with my Liber KKK training.  While I’m really excited to work towards later parts of the book, I think I’m moving a bit too fast.  I was rereading Liber Kaos today and ran across the portion where Carroll states that one success with a particular conjuration should be the minimum done, and he recommends that you have five successes before moving forward.  Throughout my college days, I was an A student.  it had nothing to do with being smarter, it was just a matter of dedication and effort.  I have a feeling that if I rush too fast through the foundation level portions of this training that I’m not going to truly have what I need to continue well with the process.  So, I’m going to relax a bit, do a few more enchantments, a few more evocations, some divining and continue work towards my illumination and invocation.

On that note, my Tarot cards are helping me choose the subject for my Invocation.  I haven’t quite narrowed it down yet, but I’m sure it will be a good choice.  For my first Illumination, I have decided that my lamp will be a necklace.  I will start crafting the pendant this week.  In the interim, I have tons to do with work, the new house, and a family that all need plenty of much deserved attention.

Tarot, Spirits, and Debunking: A Weekend Tale

It has been an eventful weekend.  Less so with esoteric matters, but an eventful weekend nonetheless.  We are currently in the process of packing up all of our belongings in preparation for our new house, so that leaves me with a lot less free time than I’m used to.  Luckily, Saturday night I did get to spend some time with my wife and the cards; two of my favorite things to spend a long evening with.

Our series of questions to the Tarot focused primarily on a strange event that happened on Friday (spontaneous object movement), and we didn’t really drift too far towards any tangents during our session.  At the end of our session, I asked my wife if she felt any presence in the area, and she said that she did.

The reason that this is noteworthy is that I’m usually completely oblivious to the presence of any entities.  We both concurred that the mood in the room changed drastically about ten minutes before we finished.  The room somehow felt smaller than it did moments before, and there was a (very uneasy) part of me that just knew that something was there with us.  It’s very hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t had this feeling before.  In fact, it was very difficult until I met my wife to confirm what this type of feeling was at all.  It almost annoys me how calm my wife can stay through experiences like this, but I guess anyone would get pretty used to it if they could do it their entire life.

I also debunked something this weekend.  I have a history as a skeptic, which is why certain people are so shocked that I’m getting into magic.  Like I told them: if I can test it, I’m willing to try anything.  My debunking was quite simple.  On Sunday morning I saw a human shadow pass across the wall of our living room.  My wife was sitting in a chair, so it wasn’t her, but my father was nowhere to be found.  He came in just a moment later and, when asked, said he hadn’t been in the front yard at all; which is the only place the shadow could originate from.  I went out front and checked, and the front gate was open, and there were footprints in the tall grass.  The neighbor kid must have come over to retrieve some sort of errant toy.

Why should I bother telling such a simple story?  I tell it because people who aren’t willing to put in a minimal amount of thought and effort to help validate/dispel their beliefs drive me nuts.  Just because you can disprove a shadow on your wall as being something special doesn’t mean there won’t be others that you can’t debunk.  I guess I’m strange in the fact that I really don’t care what the answer is, I just want the answer.  Once I know the truth, I can easily make a rational decision and progress.  Trying to force everything into my specific belief system would just make me lose faith in everything.

Side note:  If you want something fascinating to watch, check out the Clovis Wolfe Manor episode of Ghost Adventures Season 3.  It’s available on Netflix instant play, and was a great addition to my weekend.

An encounter with an entity…

After work last night, my father, my daughter and I ran off to get some dinner, while my wife chose to stay at home and squeeze in a little bit of personal time.  My wife has been a sensitive ever since she can remember.  She grew up in a very secluded are, with little contact outside of her family, so she was surprised when she learned at an older age that other people couldn’t see and hear what she did.  Much like with the aura experiment that we did, the information she gives has been very confirmable in the past, so I have no reason to doubt what she says she experiences.

One of the nice things about where we live right now is that it’s a relatively calm area for paranormal activity.  The land has been in my family for generations, there have been no deaths on the property, and we have had no history of heavy paranormal activity in the entire period we have lived there.  That’s why last night was such a surprise.

After we got home from our dinner and paint swatch quest, got my daughter in bed, and started relaxing ourselves, my wife calmly said,  “There was a guy here earlier. “  I asked her what he wanted and she said that she had no idea, he just walked up the driveway, back out to the road, and then disappeared.  I finally figured out what she was saying and confirmed with her that she was not talking about a solid, tangible person.  While our property is not entirely devoid of activity, something of this magnitude is a truly rare occurrence.

As I found out hours after it happened, I wasn’t terribly shocked when my sweep of the area turned up nothing on my gadgets and gizmos.  My wife said that whatever it was left, or was at least out of her range.

Now, I must warn you, this is the part where I will lose most of my audience.  As I have said in previous posts, I have been a student of the tarot for a number of years.  They were one of my first big steps into the unknown, and they provide amazing insight, even if they don’t always tell me what I want to hear.  So, we have had a saga going with the cards for over a year now.  It involves my wife’s sensitivities, her future with her abilities, and a foretold encounter with a dark entity.  I told you, it gets a bit convoluted.  When we inquired with the cards, it indicated that it was a fairly powerful, hostile entity that was still in the area.  It was drawn to my wife (the specifics I will not explain here) because of its desire for that kind of energy.  According to the Tarot, this is the precursor to the dark being we have been warned about for well over a year now.

When we first started dealing with this kind of reading we didn’t put much credence into it, but we are really starting to wonder now.  Too many things have lined up just to be coincidence in my opinion, and I guess that’s what has me so intrigued by what happened last night.  The bad news is that, if the story the cards have woven is true, it’s not all wine and roses.  It will be a difficult time for the entire family, but it will be devastating if we do nothing about it.  I guess we have no choice in the matter, so all we an do is change our reality to push our future the direction we want it to go.

On the nature of Chaos…

Yesterday was a beast.  I’m working on a huge project at work that I haven’t had much time to apply myself to.  I got a lot done Monday and Tuesday, but yesterday was a total waste.  I spent six hours trying to figure out how to align some video inside of a 3D environment to eliminate some graphical anomalies I was getting during rendering.  I finally figured out what’s wrong with it this morning, and the term  “facepalm “ is all that comes to mind.  You might be wondering what in the hell a hard day at work has to do with Chaos, but I promise I will eventually get there.

Do you remember when one of our mars orbiters crashed?  The problem was a small oversight in the conversion of measurement units.  This small, nearly insignificant problem, when extrapolated over a massive distance, meant the lander turned into a lawn-dart, instead of doing what was expected of it.  That is a textbook example of chaos.  My problem at work turned out to be a very similar phenomenon.  I forgot that computers start counting at zero, instead of one like we do in our everyday lives.  So, to make a long, very technical story short, I included zero on both ends of my squares, so every damn one of them overlaps by a pixel on both the x and y planes.  A small oversight that caused massive changes in the final outcome of the project.

In Liber Kaos, Peter Carroll suggests that we should change our history to change our present.  While you can’t go back and dig the martian orbiter up, hit it with some Elmer’s glue, and start over, the versioning I do on my project files allows me to do something similar.  I need to revert my file and tweak it (just a little) so my final product will have the outcome and look that I need to be successful.  We attempt to do a similar thing with Chaos Magic when we cast spells.  Sometimes we want to affect the future outcome of a certain situation, but we can also change our present reality, and the only way to do that is by changing the past.

While I’m not saying I can sit down, light a candle, and wave my hands to align all 864 square properly, the concept still holds as a solid comparison to Chaos.  Magic would be more like making a subordinate do the work for me so when I arrive at the office tomorrow, the file is in the state of reality that I desire.  Sadly, there are none who know how to do what I need, so I have no choice but to do it myself.  It’s laborious, but job security is a wonderful thing.

Wand Building: Phase One

As I’m still figuring out what I’m going to build as a lamp for my Illumination, I decided to start constructing my wand last night.  I had a brain-melting day at work yesterday, so I figured something fairly simple was just what my mind needed to unwind for the evening.

I selected the wood for my wand a little over a week ago out in our woodshed.  I found it in a wheelbarrow that just had random wood chunks in it, leftovers from a dead tree removal we had done over a year ago.  This made the wood ideal as it was bone dry, and it hadn’t developed any splits.  I stored my selected piece with my sacred objects while I waited for an opportunity to work on it, hoping it would become accustomed to the other items.

I started by removing all of the bark with my AthamÈ.  Even though it’s still not consecrated, using the AthamÈ in the creation process will help bind the two objects together.  After I removed all the bark I went out to our shop and used a bit of modern equipment to finish the rough shape and the first round of smoothing.  I don’t mind doing things the old way, but using a dull knife on the bark was enough for me.  After basic shaping and smoothing, I did the final steps with plain old sandpaper.  I didn’t try to get every little nick and bump out for a couple of reasons.  First, I think it adds character to something to have those little imperfections in it.  Second, most of the harder to remove marks were caused by my AthamÈ, and I didn’t want to remove its influence from the wand.

Just to keep the wood from getting wacky after I removed its natural protection, I put a single layer of a light oil finish on it.  It’s not the final finish it will receive, but it will protect the bare wood from insects and other harm until I finish it.  I also anointed it with a couple drops of blood to start the processes of binding the wand to my will.

Before I consider the wand complete, I will engrave some relevant elements on the shaft.  I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet, but both my AthamÈ and the wand will need some form of personalized inscription before the process is finished.  If fact, the other two objects I have left to make (chalice, pentagram) will also have to be etched/engraved before I perform the consecration ritual.  I’m just happy that I don’t have to hurry in this process.  Yes, it is taking me a while to get to everything, but I feel like I’m making more thoughtful decisions, which should help the efficacy of the entire journey.

Time to build my lamp…

As I near completion of the Sorcery portion of the training, I still have a lot left to do.  I have done enough divination work over the past couple of weeks to make my head swim with tarot card images, and I have been fairly good about recording everything into my journal for later review and use.  I’m going to wait a bit before I declare myself finished with Conjuration Two  – Sorcery Divination, only because I’m waiting on some short-term events to unfold to help measure the accuracy that my readings produce.  While I have already made a post about it, I’m still working on enchantments from Conjuration Three, but that will most likely turn into an ongoing practice, rather than something that I restrict to this training.

I’m going to save Conjuration Four  – Sorcery Invocation for last, as I see it as something that I want to put a great deal of thought into before attempting.  I wouldn’t want to try such a spell for arbitrary reasons, and I wouldn’t want to channel a force that I don’t understand very well.  So, that leaves me with working towards Conjuration Five  – Sorcery Illumination.  I have a problem with improperly handling stress, so better skills in identifying when stress is coming on, accepting the outcome after I have done my part, and release after the situation has been resolved will be my primary focus for my Illumination.

Yes, that does sound like a lot to take on, but nobody said change was easy.  Even magic takes work, thought, education, and dedication.  If the time comes that I am ready to move toward the Shamanic portion of the training and I still do not feel complete in this step, I will consider progress a success and move forward.  The nice part about moving forward is I can use the new skills I learn in later conjurations to help my overall process of Illumination.

I haven’t decided what to make as a lamp yet.  I consider it to be a major part of this process, so I feel it needs to be something I make with my own hands.  Just to keep snoops away, I’ll etch/engrave the piece with Theban letters, so nobody will know the intention of the piece but me.  I don’t tend to speak about my beliefs outside the anonymous world of the Internet, the area I live in is terribly backwards in its level of tolerance.  A local fellow received death threats just for selling the Magic CCG at his comic shop.  The wild, wild west still has a bit of the  “Law West of the Pecos “ running around in the shadows.

Conjuration Three – Sorcery Enchantment: Update

No, I didn’t post anything over the weekend, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t busy!  Not only am I preparing to move into my new house, I spent a bit of time frolicking over the weekend.  But, that’s not really you’re here, is it?

I decided to try meditating with the enchantment that I made in my last post, and the results were wonderful.  I lit a couple of candles, sat out my meditation figure, fired up a bit of incense, and kicked on a binaural beat at 6.0 Hz.  I started out with an object focused meditation, and cleared my mind.  After about five minutes of getting my thoughts to still, I closed my eyes and was quickly able to visualize my light, and stepped right out of my body and into the void.

I kept it to a very short session of only about 15 minutes total, but it was refreshing and informative.  I saw the design for the tattoo that I want to get, and for the first time I experienced falling while meditating.  To me, it was a very different sensation than the sensation of falling while dreaming.  The experience felt perfectly real, and so does the memory.  I think that’s one of the things that I was surprised about with meditation, is that the experiences and memories feel no different from real life.

The other goal that I had during this session was to try to verbalize what I was experiencing as it happened.  The first reason I wanted to do this is because I wasn’t sure how time worked while I was meditating.  When we dream, even a really long one happens over the course of only a few seconds, but it turns out that my meditation experiences happen in real-time.  This means I’m not slipping into some sort of REM sleep during my sessions, which is a really good thing.

The second reason I wanted to see if I could talk without interrupting my meditation is for the Shamanic Divination portion of my training.  Since I will be continuing to use the runes as my primary form of divination, this could make the imagery too complex for on-the-fly interpretation during a vision quest.  If I can just verbalize what I see, along with a solid memory of events, it should make interpretation afterwards fairly straightforward.  This could also help me in achieving good results from the vision, as I won’t have as much of a chance of having my mind obsess over things if I know I don’t have to concern myself with interpretation at that time.

In my opinion, my meditation enchantment worked exactly as designed.  I was able to enter a deep state of meditation in about one-third of the time it used to take me, if I could enter the state at all.  And, more importantly, I spoke what I was experiencing, without interrupting my meditation.  Obviously, I’m going to have to do more testing with and without the object present, but I think the initial test was very encouraging.  Now I just need to figure out what else I need to make an enchantment for.

Conjuration Three – Sorcery Enchantment

So, I gave a serious stab at Conjuration Three last night.  The post I had yesterday inspired me to make something that would help me in my meditation.  I made a smallish figure out of modeling clay, who is seated with his legs crossed, meditating.  My intention is to have this enchantment help me when I meditate to allow me to reach deeper levels.  With modern modeling clay, and quick oven-bake times, it was a fairly simple process to complete, and the size of the figure meant I didn’t have to use much blood to anoint it.

The Liber KKK recommends two to three of this type of conjuration should be done per week, which I don’t think is an unreasonable request.  With time, this amount will decrease as I involve myself deeper within the book, and spend more time learning the ways of Chaos.  It was a fun and interesting conjuration to make, and with the excellent finish I’m putting on it, it will make a welcome addition to my office.

Back to the Tarot…

I have been lamenting over the past couple weeks about divination.  The Liber KKK states that I should use a simple method of divination, such as the runes, because a method like the Tarot may be too complex for later usage.  I have been using the runes for the past couple of days, and I just can’t seem to get into a good groove with them.  Yes, they are far easier to interpret than the Tarot, but on the more in-depth issues, the answers seem very vague.  I feel that this would lead me towards interpretations that have been tainted with my own desires or perceptions, versus the far less cryptic answers I receive from my cards.

I guess that’s the one thing that has always kept me drawn to the Tarot over all of these years.  The answers it gives me aren’t always what I want, but they are correct.  Just as things are with life, it doesn’t really matter whether you like something or not, it is what it is.  That, of course, is one of the things that draws us to magic, we desire some control over our reality, so something being  “the way it is “ isn’t necessarily the only possible outcome.

It will take a while before I get to Conjuration Seven  – Shamanic Divination, so I plan on trying a few experiments before that step arrives.  First, I plan on doing a series of readings using my traditional method of interpretation, then a few weeks later (when I have forgotten the reading), I will try to interpret the same cards quickly, one at a time.  I think this will be a decent test of how well my basic instinct guides me in my readings versus the broad view interpretations that I currently use.  I also want to try to see if I can get to a point in my meditation where I can speak while I do it.  If I can achieve this, it will allow me to describe what I see for interpretation later.  Although, if you read yesterday’s post, there seems to be no problem remembering a profound experience while meditating.  I’m still having a hard time not accepting that as a memory of my physical body.  All of my senses were engaged so heavily that I can still remember every moment as vividly as if I were still there.

I’m currently working on the portion of Conjuration Two which has me divine short-term phenomena to help me determine a reliable idea about the accuracy of my readings.  Things aren’t quick when you’re learning, but they do keep on moving.