The Evolution of Spirits

I wrote a post a little while back asking if people thought spirits evolved. My own conclusion is that they do evolve and the best way I can demonstrate that is through examining several on-going relationships I have with different spirits I work with.

The first case study is Bune. Bune is a goetic demon of wealth and death. My work with him has focused on his patronage of my businesses. In working with him on my business, what I've been struck by is how much he has actually understood about business and how that understanding has manifested in my life. Even though it can be argued that he is a spirit, that identity doesn't automatically stop him from growing or evolving or being aware of the modern world. He has actually explained as well that by helping me learn about what I need to learn for my business he is also learning through me, which suggests that there is an interest on his part to continue to evolve his areas of expertise.

The second case study is Purson, another goetic demon with a focus on time. In working with him, he has shown me the connection between vibration and time (which isn't surprising since one of his tools is a musical horn), and in fact this has also pushed me into a direction of exploring some aspects of music and magic. As with Bune part of my on-going relationship with him involves a transference of information I learn in return for his insights. There is a decided interest in evolving and learning on his part, as well as on mine.

The third case study involves working with elemental spirits. As readers of this blog know I don't stick with the classic western five elements, but have branched out into working with other elements such as emptiness, love, etc. This has occurred in part because of my work with the elementals, and with their suggestion that elemental magic has evolved beyond the classical consideration of it, and that an exploration of elemental magic from a contemporary consideration of elements could be useful.

Finally there's Thiede, a pop culture entity from the Wraeththu series by Storm Constantine that I've worked with since the later 1990's. Many magicians wouldn't consider him a real spirit, but I've found that he seems to have all the characteristics of other spirits. He's shown me a lot of information on space as well as the leyline that connect planets and stars with each other. He's evolved significantly in the context of our workings together and continues to have an on-going presence that changes in part due to our interactions as well as his work with others.

I think that something which is ignored in working with spirits is the possibility that one of the benefits they get from us is an interaction that allows them to learn more of our perspective, even as they share their perspectives with us. Not all spirits are necessarily interested in our world or our perspectives, but I suspect the ones that get as much from the interaction as we do.

Web of Time and Space Tattoo

On Tuesday I got my latest tattoo. It's an hourglass surrounded by a web and it represents the web of space and time, as well as being dedicated to the Spider Queen of Time, Purson, Thiede, and Elephant. I'd promised them and myself that when Magical Identity was published, I'd get this tattoo as a way to honor their contribution and as an affirmation of my work with space and time.

Shortly into getting the tattoo I felt the endorphins hit and I entered into a light altered state of consciousness, where I then evoked the aforementioned entities. My offering wasn't just the tattoo, but also the experience, and at the same time as I experienced it, they didn't just come for the offering, but also took me to the web of space/time and continued to instruct me in it, and in possible avenues to take it further. I'll just say for now a lot of it has to do with movement as a form of being, but it's given a me a lot of food for thought on how to take Magical Identity into new directions.

Working with Purson part 2

This morning, after my regular meditations, I decided to do a working with Purson. In this working, we ended up discussing the limitations of the concept of time. Purson noted that time is ultimately a subjective experience, used as a way of indicating change. But time does not age us, nor does it cause a building to go back to nature or cause the sun to rise and fall. We might attribute those events to time, because time is a comfortably abstract concept that can explain all of that. the reality is that nature is responsible for these kinds of changes. Just as water and air erode a rock over time, so to does a building gradually get changed by the caress of nature. The sun doesn't even rise, so much as the Earth moves around it. And as for the human body, the biology of the body inevitably changes, so that eventually death occurs.

Yet so often is much if not all of this attributed to time, partially because we use time to measure the rate at which these changes occur, but partially because time has become a metaphor for change. Purson's point, however, is that it's important to recognize the limitations of that metaphor so that we can understand and work with the concept of time with more accuracy.

He suggested that I work with my body's sense of time more closely, specifically working with it on the cellular level so that I could understand how time works on the biological level. So I have my next experiment set out for me...how gracious Purson is!

At the same time, We discussed how the biological markers of time are what allows a person to find variants of him/herself or if you will possibilities of him/herself...which makes sense. I did such work using the DNA as a way of finding possible versions of myself.

Purson also noted that the concept of time is really useful for working with possibilities, because it lends itself to helping a perceive those possibilities and bring them into reality.

Overall an interesting session. I have some directions to move in with my time work, some of which is a continuation of previous work, but from new angles.

Working with Purson part 1

Tonight I did my first working with Purson, who is a goetic Daimon of Time, and is also the guardian of time in my elemental time work. I first asked Elephant if I could open the gates of time and space and he allowed me to do so. Then I called to Purson. I had the painting of his Seal on my right and the image of him in the Goetia on my left, with the Memory Box, in front of me. I placed my hands on the memory box, and journeyed into the spider web of time, where I encountered him. He was riding the bear and he blew his horn the silver gossamer strands of time vibrated in the sound.

He asked me if I understood the purpose of space and I explained I did, that each point of space represented a place, and that space itself was stillness not move. He told me then that time is the movement through space and that we move from space to space through time.

I felt a sense of movement in myself and he told me that was the silver strands of time. Each strand represents a multitude of possibilities, and when it is vibrated some of those possibilities can be accessed and turned into reality. That process occurs through the melding of the movement of time, to spacial stillness, which grounds the possibility into reality.

I saw then all these strands as webbing across spatial nodes, a spider web of time, where webbing could be sent in any direction to reach any nodal spatial point. Purson told me it was our linear limitations that made us think of time as a straight line, as a 2d experience, when it's really a multi-dimensional movement of possibility. He also told me that it was important to vibrate strands of time gently, not to force it, but rather to use just the slightest touch or sound, and then blew his horn to demonstrate, the sound rippling onward and onward and onward, never fading so much as changing our perceptions of it, because of how it changed the movement of time.

I thought then of Cerontis, my time entity and he said that what Cerontis did was act as a gravity well for the strands of time, directing them toward me. I had the perception then of these silver strands in my hands, wrapped around them, and that I didn't even need to move my hands to vibrate, but could gently direct my awareness to a given strand and start the process of movement that would generate the possibilities that I would want to manifest at a spatial node. After that Purson told me we'd work more later, but to meditate for now on what I learned and I realized as well he'd sent some of this information to me this past week, because I'd already been thinking along these lines, but now all the pieces fit together.

Time Magic: Purson

When I got home on Sunday from Fall Eq, one of the first things I did was go back to my ritual room and get started on the next painting for the time magic ritual I'll be doing in October. This time, the painting was for Purson, one of the Goetic Daimons of Time, and one I've been working with closely for some time. Purson is one of two guides for time, in my paradigm. The horn he blows in a symbol of sound and its relationship to sound, in terms of tuning potentialities into actual realities. Purson, as a guide, provides safe passage on the silver web of time, and can act as an intermediary for the magician, when the magician wishes to work with the Spider Goddess of time. As an interesting aside, Purson stabilizes time, while the other guide stabilizes space. Below is the painting I created as a Seal for Purson.

First part of a new time magic experiment

It's nothing too glamorous though. I looked through the Goetia and found each Goetic Daimon that has some relationship to time magic. I've already been working with Purson for a while, but I thought it might be useful to expand my horizons and work with other goetia that focus on time work as well. My first step was simply to read up on them, and then transcribe their seals onto pieces of paper. After that was done, I put them in my memory box. Later on this week, with the help of Purson, I'll start making contact and see what develops from there.

The act of transcription is the first connection, the first interaction. It's not very overt or dramatic, but it is focused and it serves as a knock on the door as it were.

Time Experiments, Ethics part 2

On Friday, my group and I did some work with time magic. The first two experiments we did were based off of Jean Houston's book The Possible Human. We did one experiment, where we would experience our consciousness as a unit of time, such as a second, minute, year, 100 years etc. Eventually you lose track of the units of time and enter into a non-linear state of experience with time. Each of us who did this exercise experienced a very similar state of mind.

The second experiment was one where we worked with three segments of time on a yardstick, as it were, but altered which segment of time (past, present, or future) was more prevalent during the meditation. It was an interesting experiment, again because of the state of mind it put us in, moving us out of a linear state of mind and into a non-linear state of mind.

Both of these exercises are useful ones to do, to put you into a very receptive state of mind for doing time magic. They don't take very long to do, but they condition your mind to push itself outside of the constraints of linear time.

The final exercise was done with the Goetic Daimon Purson. In the mythology I've created around my own use of time magic, Purson is a guide on the silver strands of time. I introduced him to my group last night, partially as a way of thanking him for his services and patronage and partially as a way of helping the people I work with learn a bit more about my own approaches to time magic. We used the tesseract board to evoke him and my experience with was of two trees twisted together. I thought that rather odd until late that evening, I came across Ipos, another Goetic Daemon of time...so I'll be contacting him soon.

So an update on the Ethics book. I've started working on chapter one and it's coming together nicely. I got some responses on the first post, both from commenters on this blog and from a blog entry by Augogeides along the lines of arguing that magic is a technology and puzzlement that there's a need to write about ethics as it pertains to occult culture. It was also argued that ethics as they applied to magic boiled down to being able to determine if an action was ethical or not, regardless of whether it was a magical action or a non-magical action. That's the gist of it, or at least what I got from what was said.

When I talk about ethics and magic, I'm talking about taking a proactive approach to ethics, which incorporates practical magical techniques into how one approaches ethics in his/her life. However, I don't think merely determining if an action is ethical or non-ethical, and then making your choice to follow through on that action or not, is really ethics...or rather I think of that as reactive or cover your ass ethics, ethics utilized as a way of making sure you aren't doing anything wrong (or aren't getting caught). I don't really think of that as a useful approach to integrating ethics into one's life because it doesn't make ethics part of your life process and growth. Instead it's just a convenient code to check on occasionally to make sure you are in the clear. I have a lot more to say about this, but I'll save it for the book. Suffice to say my and Vince's approach and outlook on ethics and their role/integration in magic is decidely different from what I've usually encountered in the occult community.

Book Review: The Evolving Self by Mihayli Csikzentmihayli

I wish I could say this book really represented an evolution in psychology or how we conceive of the self, but the truth is, it really doesn't. If you read this author's other works, then this work can be thought of as half a step beyond those works. At times the author is judgmental, condescending, and whiny, and he doesn't offer much in the way of a concrete definition of self. The final few chapters predictably focus on flow, but don't  provide anything significantly new to the theory that he hasn't offered anywhere else.

Two out of five

An experiment in Magical Economic Activism

As you might recall, I'd written a post a little while back on here about economic activism. For a good definition of economic activism, see my article here. Of course, being me, I also wanted to turn this into a magical experiment, and so I have, along with some other people I work with on a regular basis. The working isn't fully finished, but tonight was a major step. Several weeks ago we agreed we'd focus on creating an entity that helps people with networking.  We then took sometime to list what the entity does and what it doesn't do.

Tonight, Bill W took over for the part of the experiment where we'd determine the name of the entity. We also spent a lot of time figuring out the elevator speech, essential for networking purposes. Once we'd done that, I invoked Purson, the goetic demon of divination to help with the working, while Cobalt and M also did their own workings to feed energy into the creation of the entity. Purson had me shuffling a tarot deck a lot of the time and ended up creating a divinatory enchantment for the networking entity that emphasized it's focus on making connections, providing a balance of power in the networking and other essential skills for successful networking.

While all that was happening, M did some I-Ching readings, and Bill W used a pendulum with mercury to first determine the number of syllables and names for the entity we were creating. Then he used the pendulum to determine the letters for the name. It was an interesting process to observe, and a bit different from how I've created entities, so I definitely felt like I learned quite a bit from watching him, but also want to actually learn how to do the technique, by doing it.

We did come up with a name for the entity, but we still have some more work to do in the creation process. Look for future updates here!

Review: Flow: The psychology of optimal experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This book explains what optimal experiences are and how they relate to the psychology of happiness. This book also provides some intriguing definitions for consciousness, attention, and intention, which I think are useful in reconsidering how to purposely use such elements of our behavior to prompt flow. It's a good book overall, with the author providing some excellent examples of how people have used flow states to overcome adversity as well as create works of genius. It also presents some psychological theory which isn't rooted in Freud, Jung, or the eight circuit model, which is refreshing to read, and much needed in order to better appreciate psychology as a discipline and how that discipline can be related to one's spirituality.

If there's one area where this book suffers, it's that the author is sometimes too wordy and overly repetitious. While I enjoyed this book, there were times, I felt the author was repeating himself too much, in order to get a point across. That said, it's definitely worth picking up, to broaden your understanding of psychology and optimal states of experience. 4 out of 5 psychologists

A day of ritual work

Right now Portland is experiencing an unexpected snow storm, which has pretty much shut down the ability to travel in the city. I'm not one to spend my time idly, however. So I decided to do some ritual workings today and have another I'll be joining astrally later tonight for the solstice. I first decided to the second invocation of Atem from Meta-Magick: The Book of Atem by Phil Farber. In the second invocation you create a magical circle in which you anchor specific attributes of attention, passion, fitting, trance, language, and making into the formation of the circle. These attributes are used to form the entity of ATEM. By anchoring the attributes into a physical space, the magician not only creates ATEM, but also utilizes a physical space for Atem and the associated entities of the attributes to reside in. It's a clever approach. I like how it ultimately utilizes the physical environment of the person to create a space where ATEM resides, strengthening the connection it has with the person working with it.

I also did another space/time Tarot invocation of my future self, as well as the evocation of Thiede, Purson, the spider goddess of time, and Xah. I've thought about the role those entities have in this type of working. Thiede is my Space/Time guardian spirit, Purson is finder of potential, and the spider goddess is the weaver of those possibilities into reality. Xah, as my personal Daemon, is both the future self I invoke and also the fox spirit that walks alongside me whenever I walk the silver strands of the web of time. With this working I did my invocation and evocations and then invoked Xah, entering into a trance wherein I could interface with all of the entities while letting my future self shuffle the cards of the second deck. It felt odd to shuffle the cards and yet be in a trance...the movement was much less directed, so the shufflking continued for a while...It actually helped increase the trance. The working itself showed me the steps I needed to take...a lot of it being confirmation of some situations in my life...so I think for the meantime, I'll likely hold back on doing further space/time tarot work until those situations are fully taken care of.

Tonight, I'm going to take a ritual bath and use music, chanting, and trance work to synch in with the solstice working...and enjoy relaxing in the comfort of my home while doing it.

Meeting the Spider Goddess of Time

My grandmother died on Veteran's day. I never really knew her. I met her maybe half a dozen times in my life. But I did feel sad for my father, who even though prepared for it, is still sad. I don't attribute any special significance to her death in regards to emptiness itself, so much as I recognize that death is an ending, and emptiness is about endings and beginnings. She's left one form of life and rejoined the cycle of life. After I found out she died, I decided to try and use my new meditation to try and make one last connection out of respect for her presence in my life, and also a bit of sorrow for missed opportunities. I wanted to pay my respects to her in some form or manner that would let me connect with her, even though she is now gone from this plane of existence. I used my special meditation for emptiness, arms outstretched, one eye open, the other closed, my mind drifting across all time and space. The eye that is open is only partially open, with the eye-lid half closed, so that you only see partially out of one eyelid and there isn't much focusing. The focus of the eye shifts inward, so you're looking across time and space. I called the name of her once, out load, letting the vibrations carry out across the spiral rhythm of time, onto the web of the spider time goddess. I found her in memories, I found her ready to join the dead, and she asked, "Why have you come after me, my grandson?" And I said, "To help you on your way to the land of the dead, she who was and will be..." We walked, nothing said, just walking across the silken strands of time, visiting moments of intersection in my memory briefly and then coming to a river, my ancestors across the way waving to her. She turned to me and said, "This is goodbye". I said, "Goodbye my grandmother, goodbye she who was and will be..." We embraced one time, then she flowed on to the land of the dead, back into the cycle of life.

As I came back from the land of the dead, I met the spider goddess of time, weaving her web of wyrds and fate and destiny. She looked at me and said, "You are one of mine, even as you belong to the other time gods. The emptiness you seek is the doorway to our domain, to the infinity of time and space, all things and none. Use your guide and the infinity sign to keep finding us. In them is the eternal beat of the spiral rhythm of time, the silken vibrations of my web, the pulsing red star light of Thiede, Purson's promise of all secrets revealed and more. We named you ours early on, and we're coming to take our due. Seek us in the emptiness, seek us in the depths of all and none, the zero and one through which you've seen the crystalline perfection and the star eyed one who is you, as you are hir."

I bowed to her and thanked her, and she said, "Thank the one who departed. It's her gift to you." I thanked my departed grandmother for her gift of this journey that allowed me to meet the spider goddess of time.

Everything is perfect in the moment when you have no control over anything. When you surrender and let it all overwhelm you and take you somewhere no one else can go. Tonight, I surrendered to the current of time and let it sweep me somewhere I'd never gone...perfection. I lose myself in that current sometimes, whether in a meditation like tonight, or in the rapidly turning pages of a book, where I'm caught up in the creation of the time and space in the pages that turn and the words that burn into my mind a different world and place. My awareness of time slips out of linear and into a place where time is very circular, spiral, all over the place. Times' always been something very mutable and malleable. One moment shifts into another, but a moment can last for an infinity or it can be gone in the blink of an eye, which is one reason I'm fascinated with time as an expression of reality. The spider goddess of time, as grokked from Oryelle's writing and met tonight on my trance passage is enough another expression of temporal slippages. I've walked on her silver silken strands before, but this time I met her. I'm sure we will meet again.

Deity, service, bargains, needs, etc.

A while back I posted a few posts about deity and service The first one is here.

The second one is here.

The third one is here.

As I woke this morning I thought back to a situation where I could have potentially dedicated myself to a deity. I'm glad I didn't, because the truth is I'd make a horrible dedicant to a deity. I'm very casual about my relationships with any deity. I put the occasional offering out, but when it comes down to it, for me any relationship I have with a deity is ultimately not about service to the deity or its various fellow worshippers or the tasks it wants me to do. For me it's about the bargain. It's what can I do for you that will get you to do something for me. Or it's about forging a relationship of mutual benefit and friendship.

The role of priest or priestess isn't a role that fits me. While I can respect that people are called to that role, I couldn't ever see myself serving a deity in that way. Likewise I find the concept of being a god-slave unworkable for myself. I recognize that it might fulfill the needs someone else has to be in that role, but for me, it could never work and there's a fairly simple reason for that.

I'm blasphemous. I'd always question and challenge the god. When I was a Christian, long ago, I was always dissatisfied with the idea that I had to submit to some nebulous force that had all the answers and was willing to let people suffer in order to prove themselves to it. The comic Preacher, to me, represents the most accurate depiction of the Christian god, a cruel tyrant who seeks to force others to love him because he is fundamentally unable to deal with his own sense of fear and loneliness...so he creates a permanent co-dependent relationship with humanity, in order to get them to love him, while also tormenting them. I could never understand why a god would want unquestioning obedience and so if I couldn't give that to the Christian god, why would I give it to another god?

The posts I wrote above reflect that as well as my own beliefs about the gods. I agree with the Buddhist conception of deities, which is that they are ultimately enslaved and attached to their own power and consequently can't operate outside of what they represent. They becomes filters and doorways to access deep concepts, but in doing that they are also can't evolve or become anything else...unless of course they have interaction with human beings. By being served by humans they get access to experiences they might not otherwise have. For example, Invoke a god and what you do is provide a gatway to yourself, access to your energy and experiences. Of course you get access to that deity's energy as well and that can be useful for some people, but there's always a price. I've seen that price paid and the effect it's had on the people paying it, and I'm not sure the price is worth any power received.

I prefer bargaining to service, because service is ultimately submission. There is no guarantee you will get anything for your service, but with a bargain there are set conditions. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm a friend to a deity or demon...some people have argued that they prefer to create relationships with such beings that are friendly, but there's a question they don't ask, which is whether or not the deity/demon even comprehends the concept of friendship, or if it does, have they considered that the deity/demon might have an entirely different concept of friendship than what you have? They might think of you as a cat or a dog for instance.

So I go with bargaining. If I want something and I find I can't accomplish it through my own resources I find a being who can accomplish it, and we talk. What does it want in return for accomplishing something specific for me? In Purson's case, he wants a dedication to him in my next book on space/tiem magic and his sigil on the cover of my solo occult books. Fair enough, I can do that. I'm happy to give him credit where credit is due.

In the last nine months I've been working with Babalon. In fact, the situation I was reflecting on today was a possible dedication to her. Working with her has been challenging. She definitely demands a lot when you work with her. Last October when she made it very apparent that I would be working with her for a year in my element of love balancing work, she told me it would get harder before it got easier and it did get harder before it got easier. Even now as this working is descending into the final three months there are definite challenges she has for me. I wouldn't have it any other way. She told me she'd be my guide for the year long love working, that she'd help me get balanced about love. And she is. At one point I did dedicate myself to her, but in a moment of clarity I realized I hadn't dedicated myself to her, for her sake or my own, but someone else's, and she agreed that such a dedication wasn't something that she wanted. She is still with me for the next three months, perhaps even beyond, guiding me in my journey about love...and her price for it is not service to her or tasks to be done, but rather simply to know that I will continue doing the work for the course of this year and beyond to keep myself balanced in love and to really understand how to manifest love for myself and to others. I can live with that...and it occurs to me that a deity with that understanding of me is a deity I can respect because that deity isn't necessarily out to have my service, but does want some kind of understanding to exist.

In fact, my experience with babalon shows me that experiences with deities are subjective and end up occurring at exactly the level that is needed for a person. While one person may very well need to be a god-slave to a god, another person may just need a guide for a year. And yes it does boil down to need. I think a very important question any person needs to ask about serving a deity is: What need within myself does this service fulfill? There is always a need being fulfilled. Certainly working with babalon is fulfilling some deep needs within myself...needs that are becoming balanced. Could I have fulfilled those needs without working with her? Perhaps, but I believe it would've taken a very long time, whereas working with Babalon brought the situation into detailed focus. And so perhaps those people that seem to pay a price in my eyes, aren't really paying that price. They serve the deity in the way they do, and yet they get a need fulfilled, a need which they may or may not be conscious of, but yet if that need went unfulfilled...I think it comes down to an essential issue of identity, which is how much a person's needs define the interactions and experiences a person has, and who/what those experiences occur with.

I watch Lupa and her growing relationship with the spirits. We are definitely going on some different spiritual paths. Yet I also see that her spirit work is definitely fulfilling needs within her. It's helping her refine her path, serve other people, etc., but it's also meeting some needs within her. She seems more balanced to me as a result of doing the spirit work she's doing.

As for service...I think my own service is not to a particular deity or whatever concept it represents. My service ultimately goes to the communities I am part of, the people I interact with, the choice to help someone find his/her potential and realize it. That is my service...not to any one being or belief, but rather to the realization that we are all connected and so if we can help each other grow and realize the effect we have on this planet, on the other life forms on this planet, and on each other, we can choose to make that effect be beneficial instead of detrimental.