Re: Bath Re-Birth...

It's Memorial Day, and I'm sitting on my front porch as I type this, enjoying a simply spectacular Spring day. It's the perfect temperature, the sky is a brilliant shade of blue, with little wispy, cotton clouds. The air smells of warmth and life and flowers of all kinds, with the occasional scent of the sea carried in off the canal on a cool breeze. The courtyard below is a hundred brilliant hues of green and red and pink and yellow and orange and violet, and the sound of the fountain tinkling softly is as comforting and relaxing as a babbling brook. And I can't help but remember that only 6-months ago, I could not enjoy this. I might have been able to look at it and call it "pretty", I might even have been able to sit out here and pronounce it "serene", but I could not have truly enjoyed it. Not like this. I was simply incapable of experiencing these feelings; of perceiving on this level. The only thing in my life that I could find joy in, was getting high. Escaping into pleasure, into sex and drugs. Disappearing into fictional worlds, losing myself in other lives. Taking refuge in baths.

I can pinpoint now where that all began to change, though I was unaware of it at the time. It was one particular bath, back around the beginning of February. I still don't know where exactly this compulsion came from, but for some reason, when my bath was over and I started to get out, I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to simply shut out the lights and lay back down. So I did. The water was tepid, only slightly above room temperature, as I'd already been soaking an hour or more. I was, as usual, drunk and high. And in the pitch blackness of my small bathroom, I laid down in the still dark and attempted to submerge myself as completely as possible. I leaned my head back to fill my ears with water. I kept my eyes open, staring into the black, watching starbursts of color dance kaleidoscopic waltzes in the void before me. I listened to the sound of my breathing, hearing it through the water and through my body, rather than my ears. It was indistinguishable from the sound of the ocean crashing repeatedly against the shore. My life of summers at my family's cottage on Bethany Beach (the one my grandfather sold shortly before he died, the proceeds from which became my inheritance) have granted me an inherent familiarity with that sound. How many thousands of hours have I played in that very surf? How many hundreds of nights have I fallen asleep to that very sound? To this day, I use a white-noise machine when I go to sleep, tuned to replicate the sound of ocean surf crashing against a beach. I know that sound, that rhythm, as I know my own voice. Pull back, rear up, crescendo, CRASH, reach out, pull back... And I could hear it in my own breath in the still darkness. The great, vast ocean, within me. Dark beyond all dark. Seemingly endless. But there is movement within it, a rhythm repeated. And underneath it all, the steady pulse of a heartbeat. The heartbeat of the world. The heartbeat of life. My heartbeat.

Despite my purple prose description here, at the time, I thought the experience to be quite boring. My breath sounds like the ocean. That's kinda neat. But, so what? I recognized that what I had just done amounted to a minor sensory deprivation experience (not the full equivalent of being in a sensory deprivation tank, but close enough), but I didn't feel that I had experienced anything worthwhile or inspirational or transformative, or even really interesting. I didn't feel like I'd learned anything or that my circumstances had changed at all as a result of it. I didn't feel any different afterwards. So I just filed it away in my mind under "useful meditation/trance techniques" for possible use in some later ritual or exercise, and got out of the tub. I didn't know it at the time, but everything actually had changed just then. And the next day, I would begin to notice the difference.

It wasn't until several months later, after all of these events had transpired, when I was telling my family this story of my recent epiphanies and transformations, that I began to understand why this experience triggered a series of changes in my life and my Self. As I came to this point in the story, the sense-dep tub experience, I explained that I knew this was where everything had changed, but that I hadn't yet figured out why that was. My stepmother, an ordained minister in a local church, said, "Well, it's obvious, isn't it? You had a re-birth experience. You went back to the womb." It seemed so obvious when she said it. I can't believe I hadn't noticed it before. Of course, that's exactly what I'd done. And that's exactly why after that experience, I began to see everything in new and different ways. I'd gone back to the very beginning. It was as if I'd re-started my Self; hit the RESET button in my mind.

Funny enough, the first new thoughts and feelings I experienced, were stirred up by a cartoon of all things. I guess that makes sense in its own way; if I'd just been re-born the day before, then it'd be like I was a kid again, so why shouldn't I be moved by a cartoon? It was an episode of Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender. The plot of this particular episode revolved, in large part, around the spirits of the Moon and the Ocean. These spirits resided in two Koi fish that lived in a sacred pool; one fish was black, with a white spot on its head, the other was white with a black spot. They circled each other continuously, endlessly chasing each other's tails, their swirling pattern forming a dynamic tai-chi in the water. The interplay of the fish was supposed to mirror the interplay of the Moon and the Ocean: locked together, eternally united, the two separate but as one, push and pull, give and take, advance and retreat, back and forth, cycle and tide, their constant movement creating a perfect balance. It was an expression of the principles of the Tao. In a kids' cartoon show. And it reminded me of the eternal mystery that I had been attracted to for so long. It reminded me that it didn't matter whether magick was real, whether I'd been deluding myself or not; the fact remains that there is a world to be explored behind the curtain, there still is mystery in life, if I cared to look for it.

I was attracted to this representation of the Tao in a cartoon. I was inspired by it! I hadn't been inspired by anything in months! And then I was further inspired by the realization that I'd just been inspired! I suddenly knew that I had to do something with this information. I had to take this event and make something out of it. Something to do with the Moon. And Tao. But what, exactly? Then I remembered a story I'd heard on the news that very morning about a total lunar eclipse coming up in a few weeks. I immediately jumped online and began researching. I learned there would be a total lunar eclipse on February 20th. That was also the night of the Full Moon. And, in fact, the two events synched almost perfectly: for our area, the eclipse would zenith at 10:26p and the Moon would reach total Fullness at 10:31p. And what's more, I remembered that day was also the Equinox! My mind nearly exploded with this realization! It was as if our local corner of the universe was going to be aligned almost perfectly to represent cosmic balance! First we'd have the Equinox, the very essence of "balance", when the Earth was at its most upright on its axis, and poised perfectly between the Sun and Moon. Then we'd have a total eclipse of the Full Moon, yin and yang merging in the heavens, a gargantuan tai-chi shining down on us for a few brief moments, infusing all the Ten Thousand Things with eternal Tao. The cosmos would be vibrating to the frequency of "balance", "harmony", and "Tao", and I knew that I had to do something to harness that energy! I knew that I had to perform some ritual or ceremony or pathworking or something during this cosmic event in order to synch my self up with that current. And even though I had no idea what I would do, exactly, I didn't care; it felt incredible just to know something, anything, with absolute certainty again. I knew what I had to do, and nothing else mattered just then.

The weeks went by, and my certainty faded bit-by-bit, as I fell back into old patterns. I was growing more and more anxious about the coming event, about which I still had no idea what to do, but still felt I had to do something. The morning before the eclipse, I suddenly realized, out-of-the-blue as I was getting ready for work, This is the Spring Equinox. How could the *Spring* Equinox be in February? Wait! The Spring Equinox is in MARCH!! I was completely floored by the absolute DUH of this realization. It was like waking up from a dream and suddenly realizing that you were, in fact, only dreaming. But I'd been awake the whole time. How could I possibly have spent 3 full weeks believing, absolutely, that the Spring Equinox was going to take place on February 20th?? How did I even end up thinking that in the first place?! I couldn't remember. I still can't remember. I believe now that I had to think this in order to be inspired and roused to action. That would be consistent with the fact that I can't remember how I became convinced of this in the first place, that I managed to go for 3 full weeks believing something so obviously wrong, that none of the people I told about the Equinox/Full Moon/Eclipse cosmic triumvirate during those 3 weeks ever realized it themselves and corrected me, and with the way it all suddenly hit me at once out of nowhere while I was thinking about something completely unrelated the very day before the big event. It was as if a spell had been lifted.

But that realization came later, after the fact. At the time, my main concern was, what did this mean for the working I had been planning to do the next night? The entire premise that had inspired me was based on a fallacy. It wasn't an Equinox and a Full Moon and a total lunar eclipse. It was just a Full Moon and a total lunar eclipse. I had been inspired by the idea of all 3, and now thinking of just the latter 2, I wasn't sure what it meant anymore. I didn't know if I should still go ahead or not. And if I did go ahead, should I go ahead exactly as I'd been planning to do, or did I need to change my plans to fit the new scenario? And if so, how exactly? I was right back to having handfuls of questions with no answers. I didn't know what to do anymore. I couldn't figure anything out. All I knew was that I definitely did not feel inspired by this turn of events. I felt stupid and disappointed.

The night of the Full Moon eclipse came, and I still didn't know anything. I hadn't figured anything out. I still didn't know why I'd thought it was the Equinox. I still didn't know what a Full Moon total eclipse meant to me, if it meant anything at all. I still didn't know if I should do anything anymore, and if so, what, and to what purpose. I was still agonizing over all of these questions when the appointed time came. I was ready to just give up and get high and go to bed. And then Precious said to me, "Just do it. The worst that could happen is that nothing would happen again, just like the other times. But at least then you'd know one way or the other. And who knows? Maybe it'll work and something will happen and you'll feel better. You'll never know if you don't try." I still haven't thanked her enough for saying that. I wonder if she even knows that she almost certainly saved my life just then, with that little bit of thoughtful compassion. I hope so. It's important for her to know that. It's important for her to know just how much her Love means to me. How much it's changed me. How she's helped me to be a better man.

I took her advice, of course. It's good advice. I decided to go ahead and do it, even though I still didn't know what "it" was, exactly. I decided to just figure it out as I went along. I didn't want to do anything big or elaborate; no ceremonial rituals, no sorcery. Just something small and spare and straight to the point, whatever it was. Just kind of put myself out there, and see what happened. I put on some simple ritual clothing. Then I lit a single candle on my altar. I turned on a CD of Taoist monks chanting. Figuring out each step as I did it, one after another. I lit some incense designed for astral illumination work. I decided to sit down in front of my altar and put on my Mindfold and see what happened. Then at that point, I decided to run though an energetic banishing ritual that I had used a lot a few years back, when I was doing a whole lot of heavy sorcery.

I visualized myself sitting in front of my altar as I was, as though I were standing behind my body looking down at it. I "moved in" and visualized my brain in my skull. Then I "moved in" again and visualized the corpus callosum at the center of my brain. Then the individual dendrites, axons, and synapses in the corpus callosum. Then the individual cells that make up a single dendrite. Then the nucleus at the center of one of those cells. Then the genes inside the nucleus. Then the protein at the center of a single DNA helix. Then the chemicals that make up that protein. Then the molecules that make up one of those chemicals. Then the particles that make up one of those molecules. Finally, I visualized my point of view moving into the center of one of the electrons of one of those particles. Inside the electron, I found an endless, white expanse of nothing. The Void. After a moment of stillness and silence in the Void, I visualized a tiny black dot at the very center of the endless white expanse. I visualized the black dot growing, so that it quickly grew to encompass my entire field of vision. I "backed out" to the particles, and the black dot engulfed the electron I had been in, growing out of it, and quickly grew again to engulf all the other particles and encompass my entire field of vision once more. I "backed out" again to the chemical-level, and the blackness followed me again. Back to the proteins. Back to the genes. Back to the nucleus, the blackness following me all the way. Back to the cells. Back to the dendrites. Back to the corpus callosum. Back to my brain. And once the black dot expanded to this point, all the way from the very center of my mindbrain, I willed it to stop, leaving a 2-dimensional black circle about 2-inches across, floating in the center of my brain.

Next, I visualized eight rays growing from the circle to form a 2-dimensional chaosphere. Then I visualized that the 2-dimensional image "popped" into a 3-dimensional one, and began to slowly rotate counter-clockwise on the point of one ray. (I'm going to dispense with the formality of typing "I visualized" before each event from here on out; it's getting irritatingly redundant at this point, and I'm only about a quarter of the way through the description of this banishing ritual as it is. Please simply note that everything I describe regarding the events of this banishing ritual from here on out, I willed to happen. I visualized things happening this way, and so they did; I did not passively witness these events as they were happening to me.)

As the chaosphere began to rotate, its movement created energy. This energy was attracted to the magickal tattoos that I have on my chest. (They were created to act as batteries for "chaos" energy; one is positively charged, the other negative.) The energy (or ch'i) arched like lightning bolts from the chaosphere to each tattoo, then arched between the two tattoos, forming a triangle. Then it arched from the two batteries on my chest through my body, to a third tattoo on my back (this tattoo represents my magickal will and potency), located over my spine, directly between the two on my chest, forming a second triangle parallel to the floor that crossed through my upper body. Finally, the ch'i arched from the tattoo on my back, back up to the chaosphere in my mind from which it had originated, creating two more triangles, and forming a tetrahedron of glowing lines of ch'i extending from the center of my brain down to the middle of my upper body. Then the chaosphere poured ch'i into the tetrahedron, filling it in, until it was solid.

Next, I copied the tetrahedron, and grew its double up, down, and out, until I was sitting inside a solid tetrahedron of glowing ch'i that extended from a point just above my head, down to the floor, with the original tetrahedron still positioned in my body, extending from the chaosphere in the middle of my brain down to the three tattoos on my chest and back. Then I copied the larger, external tetrahedron, but this time the copy was directly below the original, such that now I was sitting in the center of a diamond shape of glowing ch'i, made from the two tetrahedrons stacked together, base-to-base. Then I began to slowly spin the tetra-diamond clockwise. Then a little faster. Then a little faster. Picking up speed, more and more, until it was spinning at a blur. I heard the high-pitched whine of a hyper-accelerated engine. And the energy this spinning tetra-diamond created began to pour down from the point above, and up from the point below, forming the beginnings of a spherical shape. The tetra-diamond spun and whirred and the energy accumulated from the points until the two hemispheres met in a flash, leaving behind a solid sphere of glowing ch'i, surrounding a solid tetra-diamond of glowing ch'i, inside of which, I sat, cross-legged on my meditation cushion, hands folded in my lap, in my ritual clothing, with my Mindfold on, and a glowing tetrahedron of ch'i extending from the slowly rotating 3-dimensional chaosphere in the center of my brain, down to the three tattoos on my upper chest and back.

Now that I had created the energy construct that would mark my working space, I proceeded on to the last part of the banishing ritual, wherein I prepared myself to perform the work at hand (whatever that happened to be). Using a directed breathing technique, I began to draw a line of ch'i down from the chaosphere, down my spine, all the way to my lower tan-t'ien (one of the three "sacred spots" in Taoist internal alchemy, it also corresponds to the perineum or root chakra). I continued to draw down ch'i, collecting a pool of it at my lower tan-t'ien. When I had collected enough, I formed it into a black lotus pod. Then, continuing to draw down ch'i from the chaosphere using the breathing technique, I opened the Black Lotus at my lower tan-t'ien. Next, I repeated this process for my middle tan-t'ien (the second sacred spot, in the middle of the chest, corresponding to the heart chakra), pulling the energy down from the chaosphere to my lower tan-t'ien, and then up the front of my body from the lower tan-t'ien to the middle.

Once I had opened the Black Lotus at my middle tan-t'ien, I began to cycle the ch'i up from there to the upper tan-t'ien (the third sacred spot, corresponding to the pineal gland in the brain, and the third-eye chakra), which is also where the chaosphere was floating. This circuit, down the spine from the brain, up the front back to the brain, is the reverse flow of a ch'i pathway known in Taoist internal alchemy as "the microcosmic orbit". Once I had opened a third Black Lotus at my upper tan-t'ien, I began to cycle my ch'i in this pathway, down and back up, down and back up, faster and faster, until it built up enough speed and suddenly shot a white line of glowing light like a laser up out of the top of my head and down out of my root. This line of light extended to the edges of the universe, as far as reality goes. It represents the Axis Mundi, or "Axis of the Universe" and it is the "pole" from which all of creation hangs. Now that I was connected to it, I was, essentially, at the center of creation.

All of this took maybe about 10 or 15 minutes "real" time. It's much more complicated to describe than it is to actually perform, believe me. I spent several minutes just visualizing myself that way. Sitting inside my tetra-diamond which was inside my sphere, glowing tetrahedron inside my head and chest, rotating chaosphere in the center of my brain, the three Black Lotuses at my tan-t'ien, connected by a cycle of ch'i flowing between them, and an axis of white light extending from one edge of the universe, down my head, down my spine, out my ass, and on to the other edge of the universe. After a while of simply sitting there, wondering what to do, I felt that I should go to the Moon and witness this cosmic event for myself. So I let my astral body (the energetic copy of my physical self) rise out of my physical body along the axis of light. I floated up and up and up (still filled with all the various energy constructs of lotuses and geometric shapes, still surrounded by the tetra-diamond inside the sphere) and up and up. I saw my town as if from a plane, and then it turned into dots of light in a grid pattern, and then there were just collections of lights from several points all over, and then I was looking at the mid-atlantic section of the eastern seaboard, and then I was passing through the clouds, and looking down at the entire east coast of the US. And finally, I was floating free above the Earth, in outer space, with the Earth directly below me, and the Moon directly above. I rotated my astral form slightly to orient myself, so that the Earth was behind me and the Moon directly in front.

And the sight that greeted me there was simply awesome, in the truest sense of the word. I was overwhelmed with awe and reduced to tears at the beauty of the vision before me. But that's going to have to wait until next time. Until then, remember, "All Things that Are, are Fire."

The Tower Falls...

I knew this was going to take forever. It's been a month now since my last entry, and it's been almost three months now since the experiences I'm trying to recount here occurred. If I don't get this shit out of my head soon, I'm going to fucking lose it all, I just know it. But I'm not going to give up. I have to get this out.

So, February, 2007. We needed to move out of our apartment so that they could renovate it. The company that had bought our building was kind enough to let us live in one of the other units in the building while they were doing the renovation work, so we only had to move across the courtyard. Still, it was absolutely horrible. For starters, we hadn't done any preparation for the move, at all. Being stoned and exhausted all the time, and working 10-12 hour days (when you factor in the 2-3 hours of commuting time), we just couldn't bring ourselves to spend what little time we had to rest each day tearing down our comfortable home that we had worked so hard to make and that we Loved so much. So, when moving day came, we were absolutely unprepared. Daniel was there to help us, but even so, there was no way we were going to get it done in one day. Again, the company helped us out, and provided a team of people at the last minute to help us pack up and move. I cannot convey how traumatic an experience it was to have a dozen strangers speaking a language I couldn't understand crawling over every inch of my home and tearing it apart. On top of that, I'd been doing lines of Ritalin in order to try and summon up enough energy to keep working all day long. Between the speed-psychosis, and the emotional toll of having my home torn apart in front of me, I was a complete fucking wreck. I remember that by the end of the day, the work still not done, I just sat down in the middle of my nearly empty living room and wept. It was not the first time I'd been reduced to tears that day. I was exhausted, and I felt broken and homeless and violated. And it wasn't over. The next day, Daniel and I had to finish the rest of the move by ourselves. In the snow. Swear to gods, it was snowing the whole day. I was terrified and crippled by anxieties too numerous to identify individually. I wanted to die.

The next day was my 31st birthday. It rained ice all day long, and I was trapped in our new apartment, a run-down, broken, smelly hole above the developer's office. Surrounded by random cluttered piles of all of our belongings, my feelings of homelessness and dislocation and nameless, paralyzing anxiety continued. I knew that all of this was for the best, that we would be getting an even better home out of this relatively minor sacrifice, but somehow that provided no comfort at all. I spent the day getting high and holding back tears and trying not to think of the direction my life was headed in. Had this really been what I'd wanted?

I decided I needed to try and make the best of this experience. I recognized that what I was going through was a classic trial or initiation; an experience where the core of Self is tested and assaulted. It is an opportunity like no other for growth and development. And I decided to use it for exactly that purpose; I wouldn't let all this pain be for nothing, and I wouldn't let it all be just for a fancy new condo. I needed it to be worth more. Having my external life completely uprooted, destroyed, transformed, and reassembled in a new state provided a perfect opportunity for me to do the same with my internal life. Making changes to the Self is notoriously difficult, even for the most powerful magickians. Crowley famously struggled with heroin addiction his entire life, and was never able to kick, despite his adamant belief that magick could overcome any aspect of personality or mind or reality. But I theorized that it would be easier to change inside when everything outside was changing at the same time, almost as though I were simply going along with the current of things. It would be easier to think differently and perceive differently and behave differently, when everything around me was different and new, as well. Suddenly being in a brand-new environment would likely change me in some way, as it was, as it does anyone; and if that were going to happen, I might as well try to direct it and use it to my advantage.

And at first, it seemed as though my theory were correct. There were several aspects of myself that I wasn't happy with and wanted to change: my sometimes uncontrollable temper, my violent mood-swings in general, my apathy, my complete dissatisfaction with my job, my need to feel accepted and approved of by my peers, the annoying and embarrassing habit I had developed of twitching and making strange, loud noises whenever I got nervous, etc., etc. But the main demon that I wanted to exorcise from my Self was my constant drug-use. I didn't want to stop using drugs altogether, I just wanted to stop doing them all the time. I still didn't consider myself an addict, but I could tell that I was using way too much, and that it was making my life a lot more difficult than I wanted it to be. So, that had to be the first thing to go. And during this period in our temporary apartment across the courtyard, I did make headway on this one area, at least, even if I didn't manage to affect any of the other changes I had desired. I managed to reduce my drug-use to "occasional", meaning several times a week, but not everyday. I developed a complicated set of rules to determine when it was "acceptable" to smoke and in what ways, and when it was not. A few times I even managed to go a week or more without smoking any pot at all. On those occasions I would usually substitute some other drug, like ephedrine or alcohol or some pharmaceutical opiate, in order to overcome the constant cravings that I struggled to fight. But, still, at least I wasn't smoking pot. I did start smoking cigarettes again during this time period, after having quit three years earlier. I reasoned that no matter how bad anything else I did might be, it wasn't as bad as getting stoned, since that was my main desire, and therefore, anything that helped me overcome that was a good thing. I could always cut down on my drinking later. I could always quit smoking again later. I could always stop using speed later. None of them would be as difficult as quitting pot. That was what I had to concentrate on. Stop Smoking Weed.

Two months after moving out of our apartment, the renovations finished, we bought it from the developer, and were allowed to move back in. I realize now how incredibly naive it was of me to think this, but for some reason, I honestly expected that it would only take a matter of a couple months or so to get our new home completely in order. After it took us nearly a month just to paint the damn place before we even started moving in, I began to realize that maybe I'd been just a bit optimistic on that count. Two months later, when we were still living out of boxes and only had two or three of the pieces of furniture we needed, I had to begin admitting to myself that this wasn't going to be a matter of "move in, set up, and get started on your fabulous new life" like I'd thought it was going to be. (As a matter of fact, it's been just over a year now since we moved in, and we still don't have all the furniture we need, and we've still got a pile of unpacked stuff lining our living room. For the record though, we have come a long way since then, and the place really does feel like our home now. Just a home with a big pile of stuff in it.)

I had been struggling very hard with my addiction when we moved back, and through that struggle, had come to admit to myself that yes, it really was an Addiction. I was an Addict. That had been easier to accept than I'd expected, but it didn't make it any easier to deal with, either. Every waking minute of every day (and most of the sleeping ones, as well), I wanted to get high. I was successfully avoiding the pipe, but it was a constant struggle. Telling myself "no, you can have some later; no, you can have some later; No. You can have some later" ten thousand times every day. I was rolling a boulder up a mountain, and each day was a little harder than the one before it. So I found myself really counting on this "New Life" I was moving into to give me the strength and the impetus to keep going with this daily battle with my darker side. I knew that it would be easier to not-smoke in this new life, because that life simply didn't include smoking. Everywhere I looked I would be surrounded by constant reminders of this new life; reminders of the new person I had become. And that person didn't smoke. So, it'd be easy. But, I also knew that if I gave in, if I smoked again, even once, then from that point on, smoking would be a part of that new life, and there'd be no way to undo that. And it wouldn't be easy anymore.

When I began to realize that it was going to be a lot longer than I thought before I got my "new life", before I got to be my "new Self", when I began to see just how much work it was going to take to get that life I needed so badly at that point, I got very, very depressed. I began to wonder if I'd made a huge mistake. It felt like I'd thought that I had almost rolled that huge rock all the way to the top of the mountain, only to realize that I had just reached the first ledge, still near the bottom. All the fight simply drained out of me. It had been so hard to keep fighting by that point, as it was; the only thing that had kept me going was the knowledge that it was almost over, that I'd almost reached my goal. And the realization that I'd barely begun just made the entire task suddenly seem utterly impossible. I'd never wanted to get high more in my entire life. I began to sneak into Ing's purse while she slept to get the keys to the trunk where we'd kept all our drugs and tools locked up these last few months (locked up from me). I'd sneak out to the living room and smoke a bowl, maybe do a line or two of some opiate or other, and get completely fucking wasted. More than once, I felt there was a good chance I'd gotten so high that I'd die sometime that night. My moods darkened even further at that point, knowing that I'd ruined any chance of using this massive external change to affect the inner changes I'd wanted, too. Getting high was now a part of my "new life" and there was no way to take it back, no way to undo the damage I'd done. This new pain only made me want to get high even more; being stoned became the only times I ever felt good at all. Eventually I confessed to Ing what I'd been doing, but only so that I wouldn't have to wait for her to go to sleep or leave for work in the mornings anymore. Once she knew that I was using again, I wouldn't have to hide it anymore, and I could start using freely again, anytime I wanted. I felt no remorse at all for violating her trust, or her privacy. I knew at that point that there was absolutely no doubt about it anymore: I was an addict. But I couldn't have cared less. I just wanted to stop fighting with myself, get stoned, and feel good. Beyond that, everything else was just noise in between bong hits.

During this entire period of moving out and moving back in, struggling with my addiction, etc., I was also trying to help prepare for the coming AGM in September. I was in charge of setting up the public seminars that go on for the first few days of the AGM. This is the period of the meeting where we give lectures, discussions, seminars, etc., and invite the public outside of the IOT to come participate. It's the one time of the year when we open up our doors and invite the outside world in to see what we're all about. Preparing for this was a major undertaking, to say the least. I had to find speakers, arrange their travel schedules, make sure they had all the props and equipment they'd need, arrange for advertising, make sure we got enough non-members to come to make it worthwhile (we needed to make a certain amount of money off of this just in order to cover our expenses), handle all the registrations, cancellations, questions and queries, etc. And I'd never done anything like this before in my life, so I had absolutely no experience to draw on. I'd never even attended the public seminars before! I always skipped them when I went to an AGM so that I could save some money on registration and travel expenses. (All I really cared about was the members-only half of the event, anyways; that was where we did all the magick.) And as if that wasn't pressure enough, I knew that my 2nd degree was on the line with this thing, as well. So, if I fucked up, not only would I completely humiliate myself in front of all my peers, but I could kiss the degree I'd been working towards for the past year goodbye, as well.

Spring flowed into Summer; the apartment was coming along nicely, if not quickly, and the AGM was fast approaching. I remembered my past experiences at Annual Grand Meetings. Surrounded by the best magickians in the world, working magicks of every kind for a solid week, partying every night, I always came back a very different person than I was when I'd left. (This was a rather disconcerting effect for Ingrid to try and deal with, to say the least.) I remembered that at my first AGM, I participated in a group healing ritual, with the intent to stop smoking. The next day, I started to get ill every time I smoked a cigarette. This effect got worse and worse until I quit shortly thereafter. I began to see this upcoming AGM as my next great opportunity to try and become the person I wanted to be; strong, sober, in control of my emotions and my desires. This gave me the impetus to start the addiction-struggle all over again. I used the AGM as the end-goal to reach towards just as I had with the new apartment a few months before. Towards that end, I decided to use the final weeks before the AGM to take on a monasticism. Basically, just as a mystic will sometimes fast from food in order to alter their consciousness and gain insight into reality, I decided I would fast from pot, in order to gain strength and to prepare myself for the final, massive transformation that would come at the AGM.

I performed invocatory rites of my warrior-self, reaching back through my bloodline to the Viking warriors that I descended from and summoning their spirit into my blood, giving myself the strength to keep up the fight; giving myself a warrior's mindset so that rather than being drained by the struggle, I would actually be energized by it, invigorated by each new opportunity to demonstrate my massive strength. I began to perceive my addiction as a demon-spirit that possessed me, using my ingrained rebellious streak to help me resist it. (Perceiving it as something I wanted had made me want it; perceiving it as an outside force trying to force me to do what it wanted, made me want to tell it to go fuck itself and do the exact opposite of what it wanted, just to spite it.) I performed more spells to attack The Demon, to imprison it, and to destroy it. And in a lot of ways, all of this worked. I changed my perception, it often was easier to resist the temptations, and I did feel a lot stronger and more capable than I ever had before. Still, despite all the changes and the new found powers and perceptions, it remained, as ever, a constant struggle. And no matter how strong I was, no matter how long I managed to maintain my virtue in that struggle, eventually I was bound to tire, and all it took was a single moment of weakness to undo everything I had accomplished up to that point. During the entire six weeks of my monasticism, I never managed to make it more than 10 days without smoking at least once.

I guess in hindsight, it was predictable that the AGM would turn out to be nothing that I expected it to be. Where every other AGM I'd ever attended or even heard tell of was a spiritual event without equal, my experience at this meeting was as mundane as a high school home-economics class. I didn't expect anything spectacular from the seminars; I just tried my best to do my job. It was work, nothing more. But I thought the work would end when the seminars did. Instead I found that throughout the entire event, I was expected to support everyone in any capacity that was required. While everyone else partied on the first night, I had to spend several hours developing the ritual schedule. While everyone else was experimenting with altered states of consciousness, I was required to sit outside the door and babysit the environment for them. When someone needed something, I was expected to get it. When something went wrong, I was expected to fix it. I couldn't even get a decent night's sleep before someone would wake me up first thing in the morning with some complaint or another. The experience couldn't have been more stressful or banal; there was nothing even remotely spiritual or uplifting or transcendent about it. I was simply working my ass off to make sure that everyone else could have a spiritually uplifting and transcendent experience. Predictably, I reacted to this stress and this disappointment by numbing myself with drugs. I smoked every night; I did lines all day, every day; I drank every chance I got.

And it got worse from there. Just before the AGM, George confided in me that he was done with chaos magick, and that after the AGM he would be leaving the IOT and dedicating himself to the practice of Buddhism. This really upset me, but I couldn't figure out why. I thought it was simply because he was my friend, and I knew that if he quit the IOT, I'd never see him anymore (as it was the only time I saw him was at Temple meetings). But then at one point during a conversation we were having at the AGM, he referred to himself as my mentor. I'd never thought of our relationship that way before; I'd always just thought of him as my friend. But he was right. He was the one who'd brought me into the IOT. He was the one who'd guided me through MMM. He was the one who'd initiated me, both times. He was the person who's opinion I sought on most matters related to magick and/or the IOT. He was the person who's approval I always sought, but never admitted I wanted. He was my mentor, and I'd never realized it. And no wonder I was so upset at his leaving! It's always a traumatic experience when the mentor releases the student, but even worse than that, he wasn't just saying "I've nothing left to teach you, it is time for you to go out on your own, young Grasshopper;" he was saying "I no longer believe in what I've been teaching you; I'm going to go devote myself to something completely different now." He wasn't telling me that I didn't need a mentor anymore, he was saying that he was turning his back on the system he'd been mentoring me in; the system I'd dedicated a third of my life to mastering at that point!

This situation naturally led me to begin to question whether the path I'd devoted my life to for so long now was really worthwhile. What if I'd wasted all those years on bullshit superstition? Combined with the utter banality of the AGM experience for me, this questioning mindset I had stumbled into led me to look at my peers in this group differently that I ever had before. I'd always just seen them as "the greatest magickians in the world." But when I looked at them now, I saw broken down old men and deluded outcast children, all trying desperately to convince themselves that they were really gods among men, just so they didn't feel so worthless, so they could convince themselves that they weren't really the failures that they were afraid to admit they really were. Where once I saw powerful sorcerers, I now saw drunks and addicts and psychotics. I began to look at the IOT and wonder if that was really what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Did I really want to be 45 years-old and dedicating myself to these wannabe satanists? I began to think that maybe I didn't want my 2nd degree after all. I take my oaths very seriously; they aren't just empty promises, and you can't just take them back later. An oath is for life. And the 2nd degree oath describes a level of committment that I was no longer sure I was willing to make.

Thus began a deep questioning that would last for the next six months, and strip me of every belief I thought I knew. Each question led to another, and I couldn't find any answers. What if I'd wasted my life on a spiritual pursuit that meant nothing, when I should've been concentrating on things like work and school and home? What if the IOT were just a bunch of deluded misenthropes? What if magick were just a complicated 12-step program for losers? What had sorcery ever really gotten me anyways? Yeah, it got me this beautiful house. But what had that cost me? The money came from an inheritance, and in order for me to get it, my mother had to die, my grandfather had to sell the house at the beach that had been in our family for over 30 years, and then he had to die shortly thereafter. If any of those things hadn't happened, or had happened in a different order, I wouldn't have had the money to buy this home in the first place. And what about the home itself? In order for this place to transform from the ghetto it had been to this rich, urban center, all the poor people had to be pushed out. All the people who had been my neighbors for the past decade. My neighborhood was originally settled by freed slaves just before the Civil War; it had been a black neighborhood for the entirety of its existence, over 150 years. Not anymore. I ended that period of history. Or helped it to end, anyways. But if it was my sorcery that brought the rich, yuppie developers, then I couldn't see how I was any less responsible for it than they were.

And had I really caused my mother's death? I remembered one of the last times I saw her. It was just before Thanksgiving, 1999; I was in the middle of my MMM. She was in the psych ward of our local hospital for her last failed suicide attempt. She'd taken a bunch of sleeping pills, and my Dad had found her nearly dead in the bathtub. They'd had to pump her stomach. I only remember two things about that visit. I remember her excitedly telling my father and I, "I know how to do it now! Before I'd always used prescription medications like Xanax and Tramadol, because I assumed they would be stronger. But this time I just used plain, ordinary, over-the-counter sleeping pills, and they said that if I hadn't gotten to the hospital right when I did, I'd have died. I've never been that close before! I know how to do it now!" She said all of this with a smile on her face, like she was sharing some wonderful insight she'd discovered. I just kind of sat there, smiling politely, numb from shock. Also, by this point in my life, I'd sort of shut off my feelings for my mother. It was a lot easier than feeling the pain that her existence caused me. But my father began to freak out. "How can you say that?! Don't talk like that! Do you know how much it scares me when you say those things?!!" My mother seemed genuinely confused by his reaction. "But, I figured it out." Like, "don't you get it?" And then I remember leaving here there. She walked me to the automatic doors that separated the psych ward from the rest of the hospital. I said "see ya", gave her a little hug, and then walked away. I didn't look back. And it wasn't until I got to the elevators down the hall that I registered that she had stood there and watched me walk away as the doors shut between us and locked her in again. That was the 2nd to last time I would ever see her alive. (The last time was Christmas morning. She didn't make it to Thanksgiving dinner that year, being locked up in the psych ward, and she'd be dead by New Year's Eve.)

After I left the hospital, I decided to try and use magick to help her, if I could. I was young, and stupid, and still exploring the realms of what was possible with magick. My mother was obviously in a lot of pain, both physical and psychological. If there was any chance that I could help her, I really needed to try. I obviously couldn't help her any of the normal ways; our relationship had changed too much for me to expect that simply Loving her would make any difference at that point. So maybe magick could help. I was just starting to study Heathenry, and I felt certain that I could use that to our mutual benefit. I hadn't designed a ritual in that paradigm yet (hell, I'd only designed a handful of my own rituals in any paradigm at that point) so it would be an opportunity to learn and practice, as well. I went back to my father's house and designed a ritual with the intent of "end my mother's pain and bring her peace". I decided that since Odhinn was the head deity of the pantheon, and the god of magick, I would do a ritual to petition him to bring about my desire. I know now what a mistake that was. Odhinn is also the god of death. And though he is the head deity, as it were, he is not a friend of mankind. Ancient heathens were afraid of him, and would often not speak his name for fear of gaining his attention. His concern was the ordering of the universe, and if that required delivering massive suffering upon humanity, then so be it. Eventually, he would bring about the end of the world, because that was the way it had to be. The god that takes care of mankind, the god that people would pray to, was Thor. Never Odhinn. People who worshipped Odhinn were thought of as outcasts, crazies, lunatics, psychos, and were shunned by normal folk. But I didn't know any of that at the time.

So I wrote my Odhinnic ritual, designed to end my mother's pain and bring her peace. And then I went out into the woods around my parents house in the middle of that dark, cold November night, to a sacred spot that had been special to me for many years, and made my call to the Allfather. And I nailed it. Something that experience with magick will show you, is that when you totally fucking nail a ritual, you can tell. You can feel it. There's a sense about it when you just hit the nail right on the head, and reality has heard you and shifted to your will. And I nailed that ritual. I went home feeling content; feeling like I had finally helped my mother, when everyone had been helpless to do anything for her for so long now. And when I got that call from my father that New Year's Eve morning a few weeks later, one of the first thoughts that went through my head was my memory of this ritual, and the realization of what I had done. Don't think about that, I told myself. Maybe you did cause this, maybe you didn't. But since you'll never be able to know for sure, there's no point thinking about it. You're just going to bring yourself a lot of pointless misery that you won't be able to do anything about. And you've got more important things to deal with right now. So just don't even think about it. And so I didn't. For the next eight years, anytime that thought popped into my head, I would repeat that same thing to myself and push it aside. It got to the point where I almost forgot about it. But now I couldn't forget about it. Now I couldn't ignore it. What if I killed my mother? No, I had killed my mother. If I believed in magick, then I had killed my mother. And if I hadn't killed my mother, then how could I believe in magick?

Did I still believe in magick? And if I wasn't a magickian, then what was I? I always knew that part of the power of magick lay in self-delusion. The whole point is the power of belief. Nothing is really completely, objectively True. There is only perception, and belief. And people get trapped by their beliefs, thinking them to be objective, universal Truths. But there's really no reason why we can't choose what to believe at any given moment. We just have to try. There's nothing inherently contradictory about it, though it might seem that way on the surface. When we believe something, it is true for us. And when we believe something else, then that becomes what's true for us. And the power of the chaos magickian lies in being able to believe something completely enough to make it true, to make it real, and then believe something else completely different when the situation calls for it. I could believe in Heathen gods one day, and Voodoo loas the next, and put them all down to adopt a completely materialist worldview the day after that. The more we do this, the more flexible reality becomes for us, and the easier it becomes to shift our perceptions at will. And that's what magick is; the ability to make our image of things the reality, simply by believing it enough. The techniques we use, the belief-shifting, the trance states, the particular instruments and techniques of any given paradigm, etc., are all just different ways to essentially trick the mind into this believing intently.

But what if that's all it is? Tricks, self-delusion. What if all we're really doing is tricking ourselves into believing that we're powerful magickians so that we don't have to face the fact that we're essentially weak and powerless and unable to take care of ourselves? Why is it that magick always seems to attract the outcasts and the losers? I'd always thought it was just because those who were shunned by normal society were the ones most likely to look beyond the bounds of what's "normal" to try and make their way. But what if it's really just that the outcasts, rejects, and losers were the only ones who needed something like magick to believe in, in order to get by? What if it was that we were the only ones who weren't capable of making a decent life for ourselves if we didn't find some way to convince ourselves that we were special, that we were really better than everyone else, better than the ones who'd rejected us?

I couldn't answer any of these questions. I just didn't know what the answers were, or how to figure them out. And I found that as soon as I questioned my belief in magick, as soon as I started to wonder whether magick was real or just bullshit, I couldn't do magick anymore. I tried. I tried a lot. I kept doing rituals and spells and trying to manifest my will, but nothing would happen. As much as you can feel when a ritual is dead-on, it's just as easy to feel when there's absolutely nothing there. And that's what was happening now, every time. I likened the experience of ritual and magick at that point to masturbating with novacaine: I went through the motions, but I didn't feel anything, and ultimately, nothing came of it. I just felt like I was talking to myself. I felt silly and stupid and weak and useless. And if I couldn't do magick anymore, then I really wasn't a magickian. But if I wasn't a magickian, then who the hell was I? What had I done with my life? Had I wasted the best years of my life on bong hits and ridiculous superstitions that only deluded me into thinking I was better off than I really was?

Every question just led to more questions. And I couldn't find any answers. And at this point, I had questioned everything so much that I had no idea who I was anymore, or what I'd done with my life. Or who I wanted to be or what I wanted to do with my life, either, for that matter! It got to the point where I couldn't even figure out what I wanted to eat for lunch or what I wanted to watch on TV. I just felt like I didn't know anything anymore. And that, for me, was an incredibly miserable place to be. I couldn't enjoy anything if I couldn't understand it at least a little bit. If I had no idea whether something was good or bad, how I could be happy about it? Or how could I know that it was a problem that needed to be fixed, either, for that matter? I couldn't take care of myself, I couldn't better myself, I couldn't do anything effectively anymore. I felt broken and utterly useless. I spent months in this state, constantly asking the same questions over and over again. Trying desperately to find some answers, coming up with anything I could imagine, but only ever finding more of the same questions. Eventually I simply couldn't stand the pain anymore. I'd been using drugs regularly since the AGM, but after a couple of months of this existenstial angst bullshit, I really dove into using. At least pleasure was something real, something I could believe in. If I couldn't find joy or answers anywhere else, then I would just get as high as I possibly could. Then I would be happy, and then I would know exactly where I was and exactly what was going on.

I gave into every sensual desire I had, immediately, and without question. I masturbated constantly, and I had sex whenever I had the energy and the potency. I did every drug I could get my hands on. I was even doing coke for a couple of months during this period. I drank constantly. I mixed oxycontin, coke, scotch, and weed in my system without thinking twice about it. I nearly died on more than one occasion. An average day would start with two bowls, two scotches, and a line of some opiate or other. Then I'd drive to work. At lunch, I'd go out to the liquor store and buy 4 minis of scotch, and pound two of them at lunch, hopefully with another half a pill or so; the other two I would pound during the drive home from work that night. When I got home, I would drink and smoke and do lines until I passed out. Then I'd start all over again the next day.

I also started voraciously reading fiction. I'd always read both fiction and non-fiction, always feeling a bit unbalanced whenever I read too much of one category or the other. But now I found that I couldn't read non-fiction. Anytime I'd try, I wouldn't be able to focus my attention on what I was reading, and I'd find that I'd read the same page or paragraph or sentence a dozen times and still had no comprehension of what it had said. But I became addicted to reading fiction. I picked up the Wild Cards series again, which I hadn't read since college. They are a series of science-fiction superhero stories that get very involved, with an emphasis on realism ("what if the real world were suddenly populated by a bunch of people with strange powers?") and there are 18 books in the series so far. The perfect escape. I had a history with the stories, so they brought comfort, and because of their emphasis on fantasy-realism, and the sheer number of volumes, I could completely disappear into this other world whenever I wanted, and to my heart's content. And disappear into it I did. I remember at one point, while I was reading about a war between two different factions in the series, I ended up crying to Ingrid about it, weeping into my hands. "They're all dying! All my friends are dying! And I have to hear their last thoughts, and read what it feels like for them. It's horrible! It hurts so much!" Still, it was infinitely better than facing the emptiness of my own life at the time. Anything to get away for a few minutes. Anything to forget who I was and just feel something. Something enjoyable. Something other than a giant, empty question mark.

I started taking baths. I hadn't taken baths since I was a kid. From middle school on, it had always been showers. But now I really enjoyed baths again. I would smoke a bowl, do a line, grab a scotch and my current copy of Wild Cards, and go soak in a tub full of steaming water. The hot water accentuated the high, and gave me a perfect, relaxing environment to read in. Many days I'd take two or even three baths. Eventually, I started enjoying the baths themselves, rather than just enjoying them as an accentuation of my other forms of escapism. I started taking baths every morning when I woke up. I started looking forward to my next bath, getting excited about it, having a hard time taking my mind off of it. I'd get upset when it was time to get out of the bath and get depressed, knowing that it was going to be so long until my next one. I found myself getting through my work day by looking forward to getting home and jumping straight into the tub. There was no doubt about it: I was getting addicted to baths.

At the time, I didn't think anything of it; compared to my other addictions, baths seemed safe, and almost normal. But it would turn out to mean so much more than I could have ever anticipated. Next time, I'll reveal the strange story of just how baths ended up saving my life. But, that's going to have to wait for now. Until then, remember, There's Nothing Good nor Bad in this World, but Thinking Makes it So.