Friday, April 10, 2009

The Most difficult thing about...

... Magick isn't believing it's there. Nope. How I ask, could you NOT believe in Magick? In this world where a guy two parties have never met before can 'conjure' paperwork and then bang a ceremonial gavel and grant one ownership of land, children, money (and make no mistake, those little bills that represent value based on bajillions of sequences of 1's and 0's are some of our society's STRONGEST Magick) or any number of other privileges, rewards or punishments, Magick is the bread and butter of what we experience. Or I could always challenge nn-believers to visit Washington D.C. and tell me that it is not the most meticulously occult place in the country. Seriously, the a giant obelisk in front of a reflecting pool? Really...

But no, believing in Magick is not the hardest part of it. Nor is learning it. At this point there are a million books (most being watered down repackagings of Crowley's mostly illegible ramblings, Austin Osman Spare, Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine) that can teach you the rudimentary philosophies and some methods that will get you going. No, the hardest thing is what's known as the Lust of Result.

Lust of Result is especially exacerbated in this day and age where everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE has ADD to some degree. Computers and the Internet, high speed cable broadband hoo-ha has affected MTV, which has affected advertising, which has affected Hip Hop, which has affected everything else (begrudgingly) and even information, as we know it, has been slim-lined, streamlined, stylized and miniaturized so that we get so much so fast we can hardly hang on to any of it (comparatively). Lust of Result is wanting the result you are trying to influence the Universe to give you, which of course inhibits your ability to get it. Crowley said it the best when, to paraphrase a passage in Book IV he points out, "How can you hope to produce changes in the world around you via nothing more than your Will when you cannot even control your own body or thoughts." In other words, I'm sitting here right now drinking a Sierra Nevada, fidgeting with my legs, oop - there's an itch on my neck, that when scratched starts one up on my elbow, earlier I was having trouble writing so I got up and snacked on crap food even though I wasn't hungry, then I vacuumed and compulsively cleaned for about twenty-five minutes, etc. etc. etc.

See my point.

This is where Crowley, who for all his outlandish and often douche-like behavior, not to mention his penchant for not practicing what he preached all of the time, was really quite a remarkable man (top notch mountaineer and part of the first team to locate and attempt to climb the path up Pakistan's K2) with many a valuable insight for Magician as well as Human, would begin talking about the benefits of Raja Yoga.

I wish I had the attention span for yoga of any kind, esp. of the Raja variety. However, referring again to the previous paragraphs here, I do not.

Could I train myself to better my attention span? Yes, I guarantee it is something that could be fought back. However, I would probably need to trim out some of the drinking, which I have no intention of doing (3 beers, on average, a night is I feel not too much to ask). But the point is, it's the concentration on this routine that combats concentration on other, more spiritually fortifying ones that would help in my enhancement of any preternatural skills I may or may not have convinced myself that I have.

In the end one thing I've taken from all the reading and practicing I've done is that there are no set ways to approach hacking into the local reality grid* - so I keep pulling half-assed attempts at performing in ways that are quick and clean and slight on the preparatory. However, if I ever move into a home with a concrete floor in the basement, you can bet I'm buying a whole shit ton of colored chalk and cracking out my Lesser Keys of Solomon text. Always wanted to try to devote some time to recreating some of those Golden Dawn-era rituals, just hard to do when your renting. But not even a massive sale on Guinness could keep me from that. Besides, I always fancied Constantine's mate Brendan's idea - conjuring the Perfect Pint!!!

...........

* thanks to GM for that imagery

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Lost in Triangulation....

Whenever I get the chance to spend a day flitting around the ol' In-tro-net I inevitably stop by a lot of the blogs here on e that I used to have the time to ponder on a daily basis. I never seem to have the time or attention span to do more with this network of invisible passageways than log on, check my email, write my Chudblog and then log off, as I've really tried to up the ante with my writing (and shopping the fucking writing too, which usually puts me in a foul mood) and don't wander as much.

Anyway.

It always fascinates me and makes me a bit sad to read all the glorious diatribes and ideas that go down on my Ohio friends' blogs. Dayton is something of an adopted foster home for me (through my wife) and the city, as well as all those glorious folks I know back there (what's up y'all!!!) have such a community - something I do not have AT ALL - that it makes me miss them and the place all the more. I always find myself wondering, what would it be like to know a place so well that the names of the shop keeps and the daisy chain of acquaintances who expand out from around them border and frame my own understanding and subsequently interaction with the place, so that whether I'm three feet in front of my house, five miles away in a bar that I like or buying a new set of strings from a music shop I'm in the presence not just of neighbors, but people. People not as in 'yeah, what else walks around on two legs and opens guitar shops, runs roller derby leagues or stumbles out of a bar into traffic I'm actually interacting with people - people who I know or know of, or in at least one case in the above make a mental note to recognize and never interact with again. No, out here in vast sprawling Los Angeles I have no neighbors - not next door to me or down at the bar. Not in the coffee shops I might breeze into and out of as quickly as possible or at the restaurants I've chosen to adore. It's definitely down to my own damn fault at least 60%, and it's also the uprooted factor that accompanies leaving behind everything you know, but it's also the product of my own distancing from the things around me for the things I'm trying to train and translate within me. This of course is something that must be done, but I cannot help but wondering what I would write if I could live in a place like Dayton for a year.

Maybe one day we'll know, eh???

...

Sit, please.

Thank You.

So, we really liked the book.

Thanks. I put a lot of time into it. Would you say it's ready to be published?

Maybe. We've got a couple of crack editors we'd like to run it by. There's some small stuff - you tend to use more passive verbs than active ones, sentence structure. Stuff like that. But for the most part the story is there, so if you feel comfortable with it...

Oh yeah, believe me, I've waited for this for some time. And this one was a lot easier than my first one, which I just recently started going through again and sprucing up.

So what we'd like to do is tell you a little bit about our firm and the way we do things, what we could do for and would expect of you, and then if everything is still good, well, we can sign a contract and start looking at some of the other stuff you've got.

Excellent.