Space is the Place part 3

Two weeks ago, I found out I was getting a divorce. Needless to say that kind of threw me off when it came to magical work, but in truth it also lent itself to my work with space. We still live together but I moved into my own room. Getting used to having my own sleeping space has been rather interesting, especially since it's not something I've had for the last four years. Tonight I finally did my third working to Thiede, in this case to claim my new space as my ritual space. I pulled out nine stone eggs and arranged them in a circle around me, pulled out the memory box and got elephant's permission to open the gate of space/time. Then I evoked Thiede, and placed my hands on the memory box and let him guide me on a journey to claim my space.

He asked me what had changed in my space, and I told him my perspective, my sense of freedom, my place with different people. Then he showed me how to take the spatial awareness that we'd been cultivating and apply it to the room I was in. The room become a dome, like a bucky dome actually, with different matrices forming and in each matrix was a perspective, a place of awareness about not only the physical space I was in, but also the space of my life. Thiede asked me if I was really ready to claim my space, not just the room, but my space as a person. Was I ready, he asked, to be true to myself about what I wanted in that space.

And I thought that for the first time in my life I can be honest with myself about what I really want...or more honest than I have been, because I'm through with buying into certain societal expectations about what I should want in my space, from another person, etc. I realized that I don't want to compromise my sense of space for someone else, not if that means I'm unhappy as a result.

I claimed my physical space, but also my metaphysical identity space, to be true to what I want in that space, so I can be true as well to who I allow into that space. And I recognize as well that every other person has his/her own space and so each person must respect his/her own space...I claimed my space, and my awareness of that space. Thiede told me than to do another working with Elephant and get ready for Purson...

In other news...

Panthea-con schedule is up. I'll be teaching the class on Space/Time magic on Saturday morning at nine.

Space is the Place part 2

I worked with Thiede again last night, or rather he took me on another journey into space. This time he made the point that the notion of space being empty is another cultural construct, but that space is never empty. There is a lot of different things in space, so to speak. It made me think of the little motes of light that I see in everything around me. I've seen these motes of light for as a long as I can remember and Thiede had me focus on them and when I did so I could also see lines connecting each mote to the other. This, I might add, is something I've seen before with Thiede, years ago, but this time I had a different appreciation, because what he showed me with it is how everything is connected together. How all of this comes together and creates this overall experience of the world that makes sense on a sublime level. And that was it tonight. I'll work with him again soon, and I'll finish this post then. Worked with him again tonight. I saw a central hub connected to spatial points. I was inclined at first to view it as an experience of movement, but Thiede corrected me, noting that thinking of space in terms of movement is derived from being a moving being and applying how one physically navigates space to the experience of space. But navigating through space isn't the same experience as space itself can be...and as I thought about it, my own changes of awareness in a given space has much more to do with a change of perspective than actual movement. Movement is a convenient metaphor to explain or situate space for a person, but I haven't necessarily moved from a space I'm in so much as changed my perspective about that space, because my awareness of it shifts to something new. It's an interesting way to think about space...I always exist in the same space, but my awareness changes how I understand that space.

Space is the place

Tonight I chose to work With Thiede, my guide for space. Anyone who is familiar with the character of Thiede from the Wraeththu series will remember that he's character who is able to alter the awareness of space and time, to put people into different spaces. Tonight I chose to do my first working to him, in the context of the element of space. It was a very interesting working. He just had me meditate on the concept of space without trying to apply movement to it. He told me that the inclination with space is to apply some kind of movement or activity to fill it up, or to associate it with time to give it a sense of movement, but that such associations may be incorrect and more so the result of human perception and the need to do something with space (and Edward Hall alludes to this very issue in his work on space and culture). Meditating on space without defining it, experiencing it is so different because it suddenly treats space as an entity unto itself, instead of as a background or something to be filled or moved in. In fact, in one sense Space can't really be moved in, so much as it can be moved around. I don't know how else to put that. I'm sure further meditations will provide more clarity.

What I came away with is a different awareness of space. I'll be doing more meditations, and may make the dancing I do tonight part of the experience of space from this new perspective that Thiede has gifted me with.

On a different note, I was struck to today how easily we create stories and perceptions about other people that aren't remotely true. That someone who seems successful might be suffering a lot more than how s/he displays it...just how private a person's world can be, and what may never be noticed unless you actually begin to interact with that person (and even though how much will you really know?).

Travels into time

I went into my ritual room day. I'd fully cleaned it yesterday, and I was ready to get started. I place different pictures and statues of Elephant around the room, including a poster of Elephant made by Ravenari that Lupa got me as a Christmas gift. I dressed in my ritual garb, including a necklace for elephant and a bracelet of elephant hair. I put on my robe and ritual pants I have. I placed all my time magic tools in the center of the room and then sat down and when ready touched each painting for each of the time and space entities I'm working with and asked for an audience with them. I then unlocked my memory box and used it to travel into the spider web of time and meet Elephant, Thiede, Purson, and the Spider Goddess of Time.

First I apologized to each of the entities in turn. I haven't done much in the last with this working, partially because of having a house guest in my ritual room, but in some ways moreso because of ongoing business busyness. Needless to say something I've realized is that I don't want to sacrifice my spiritual life to my business life so I'm working on trying to get a better work-life balance into place.

After that the spider goddess directed me to look into a window she presented me. When I looked into it, I saw images of the coming year, different moments that could occur. She told me she was giving me some information that would be useful for specific moments coming up, and that I'd have access to it when I needed it.

After that I did a meditation with Elephant, a recap of what we'd been working on before, i.e. learning to be present in the present, but also some further direction in terms of some personal issues I'm working with right now that have illustrated to me how much I sometimes invest my attention into possible futures. The direction boils down to a realization I had earlier today about the awareness of an energetic blockage and how I could stop feeding that blockage by learning to see how it showed up in my behavior to encourage situations that I didn't necessarily want to deal with. If I could dissolve the sensation of the blockage it could help me with the tension I was feeling. Elephant explained that the same awareness of that tension could be used to also get focused on the present moment...so we'll see what happens with it.

In other news, here's a couple of links to a podcast interview of me and Lupa and a book review of Multi-Media Magic

Interview with Erotic Awakenings about Kink Magic

A very good and balanced review of Multi-Media Magic.

Into Time and Space

After I finished my emptiness ritual and had cleansed myself of the paint, I moved right into the ritual to accept time as the new element. I put on the bracelet of elephant hair, and the elephant necklace and put before me the painting to elephant. I asked elephant if elephant would allow me to enter the gates of time and was told yes. Then I evoked Purson and Thiede as my guides through the silver web of time and space. I did an exercises of putting increments of time into each other until the increments become meaningless.

I opened the memory box, which is my gateway to the silver web and put both my hands on its sides. And I traveled along the silver web until I came to the center, where the Spider Goddess of Time awaited me. She held up the book of her mysteries and said, "It's good you have this back, now paint what I show you."

I pulled out my paintbrush and waters color and painted a web of time. Just one colors, lots of silver-gray...I asked her...was this really it? And she told me that my perceptions of time were too limited by human made standards of time. That what I painted wasn't even so much a symbol as a way of relating to time and space, a way of moving past the linear perceptions and measurements that mark time by human standards. She told me that this year would be a move away from the mystical path I've been on, back to more of a focus on magic, but also a focus on changing those limited perceptions on time...that all the material she'd put in my path the last couple of months was partial prep work for the workings ahead.

And with that, she stopped my hand, looked at my work and said, "Start with this and see what it teaches you."

Then I closed the gate to the silver web of time and gave my thanks to Thiede, Purson, and Elephant...and to her, the spider goddess of time. And so that's the beginning into the element of time.