Hail ManniMoonYin (2.20.08)...

I wasn't cold. I remember being surprised by that. Floating in outer space, thousands of miles above Earth, I somehow expected I would feel cold. But, then again, I wasn't in my body just then, either. It was only my astral body, my self-image, a mental projection of my Self, that was hovering there in the darkness; surrounded by a pseudo-spaceship of geometric forms woven from my own ch'i, the three Black Lotuses flowering at my tan-t'ien connected by a line of ch'i in the loop of the microcosmic orbit, the Chaosphere slowly rotating counter-clockwise in the center of my mind, and my form firmly attached to the glowing, white light of the infinite Axis Mundi passing straight down through my head, my spine, and out to the ends of everything.

I also hadn't expected the Moon to be so goddamned big. It was ENORMOUS! It filled almost my entire field of vision and appeared to be much larger than either the Earth or the Sun behind me. I had apparently arrived just in time for the eclipse, as there was only a sliver of glowing white Moon left visible on the left hand side of its face. Behind me, the Earth was ringed in a corona of fire, as it was positioned directly between the Sun, and myself and the Moon. I was left awestruck at the beauty of these sights, and I just floated there, overwhelmed, as the shadow crept westward across the surface of the Moon. As it inched closer and closer towards the westward edge, towards the totality of the eclipse, my anticipation grew. I eagerly awaited that penultimate cosmic moment when the eclipse would zenith, and the heavenly bodies would align, and the vibratory frequency of the universe would begin to resonate "harmony", "balance", and "Tao". I didn't know what to expect, exactly, but I knew that was the moment I was waiting for, that was the event I was working towards. Finally, the big moment arrived, the shadow moved that final inch, the Moon completely disappeared beneath the shadow of the Earth, and...absolutely nothing happened.

I sat there for a few moments, waiting for something, anything to happen, but nothing did. The sensation was very much as if a symphony had just worked up to its climax, and then everyone had suddenly just stopped playing; no cannons booming, no cymbals crashing, no horns crescendo-ing, nothing. At first, for a moment, I was simply confused. How could this be happening? But quickly I transitioned into disappointment. Once again, I felt like a fool. I'd gotten my hopes up, but once again, I'd ended up just talking to myself. I felt useless and stupid. As the shadow began to move off the westward edge of the Moon, and the first crescent of white light appeared on its eastward edge, the eclipse now ending, I decided it was time for me to leave, to return to my body and go to bed. But just then, I heard a voice in my mind, completely distinct from my own internal monologue, say:

"All things that are, are change."

I knew this was the Spirit of the Moon. The Spirit of the Moon, speaking directly to me. And for some reason that I still cannot explain, instead of being completely elated by this turn of events (after all, this meant that I hadn't failed, after all; that I wasn't just talking to myself out here), instead I felt bitterly disappointed by what the Moon Spirit had said. It was a paraphrase of Heraclitus: "All things that are, are Fire." And it was an idea with which I was intimately familiar, and had been for a long time. So, yeah, the Moon Spirit was talking to me, but it still didn't change anything; it was just telling me what I already knew. It was telling me that the only constant is change. That nothing lasts forever. That everything is mutable. Basically, the philosophy that had guided me for the past ten years. And so I sarcastically replied back to the Spirit:

"Yeah. Tell me something I don't know."

To which it immediately replied, "You cannot be good. You cannot be bad. You can only be."

The realization of the truth of this statement hit me like a hammer blow. It was as if God himself had just personally forgiven me of all my sins; had told me, in fact, that I could never have even sinned to begin with. Of course, I can't be good or bad! How had I not realized that before? "Good" and "bad" are arbitrary concepts; ideas that each individual person defines for themselves in any given situation based on their own experience and point of view. That doesn't make them real. The only thing that's real, the only thing I can be certain of, is that I exist. Cogito ergo sum. That doesn't mean, "I exist because I think." It means "The only thing I can be certain of is my own existence, because there has to be some thing existing to think of the question in the first place." "I am" is the only universally true statement. Everything else is relative.

I really hate to resort to the cliché "it felt as if a weight had been lifted off of my chest," but in this case it's absolutely true. I physically felt lighter, as though I had finally dropped a weight of chains that I had been carrying coiled around my body for months now. I knew something with certainty again. What an incredible feeling! I had found one tiny piece of solid ground to stand on, after being adrift and lost in an endless void of empty questions for so long. And I wasn't a bad person. And I wasn't a good person, either. I was just Michael. The months of self-abuse, of giving in to my desires, of escaping into selfish pleasure, of hurting the people I Loved most just because I didn't know how to care about anything else...none of it mattered. It was done, and I couldn't undo it, or make up for it. But it didn't make me who I am, either. What's done, is Done, and in any given moment, I am free to define myself as I see fit, regardless of what has come before. I am only who I decide to be. I wept uncontrollably with joy, and relief, and the overwhelming knowledge of all the possibilities inherent in life.

As I wept, dazed and dumbfounded, the Moon Spirit continued:

"Your new mantras will be 'Look on the bright side.' and 'Make the most of it.' This is the only life you get. 'You walk but once among the living, so no regrets, and no forgiving.' And since 'there's nothing good nor bad in this world but thinking makes it so,' then find the good in everything. Even your mother's suicide was a good thing when you figured out how to look at it the right way. Choose joy, and you will be joyous."

And again, the sheer force of the truth of the Moon Spirit's words drilled right to the core of my Self. My mother had been right. In fact, she was the only one in the situation who had been right. With her repeated suicided attempts, she was telling us that she had to go. She kept trying to leave, but we wouldn't let her. It's not just that she couldn't take the constant pain and depression any longer. It was that she knew that she was destroying our family; dragging all of us down with her into her madness and into the agony of her slow death. Her suicide wasn't a selfish act. It was a self-less act. It was an act of Love. The ultimate act of Love, in fact. She had given her life so that we wouldn't have to suffer. She'd died to save us. All I have to do to see the truth of this is to look at our family now, and then imagine what it would be like if she were still here. Looking at where each of us is now, and the lives we have, there's simply no denying that we wouldn't have anything we have now if she were still alive and suffering and mad. Our lives are better in every way now than they were then, and things would only have continued to have gotten worse for everyone if she hadn't died. She would've gotten sicker and sicker, and crazier and crazier, and fallen deeper and deeper into addiction and abuse. And we all would've gone crazy ourselves trying desperately and futilely to help her and to keep her alive. It sounds so horrible to say that our whole family is better in every way because our mother committed suicide, but as horrible as it might be, that doesn't change the fact that it is also unarguably true. She was right. She was trying to do what she needed to do to save her family. But we wouldn't listen to her. We wouldn't let her go. We wouldn't even let ourselves entertain the possibility. "How can you think that? What's wrong with you? How can you say those things? You have to live! You have to stay with us!" As though she didn't have any choice in the matter. As though she didn't have any say in how she lived her own life.

We were the bad guys here. She was the hero.

So then, that would mean that the part I played in bringing about her death was a good thing, too, wouldn't it? My intent had never been to kill her. My intent had been to "end her pain, and bring her peace." And isn't that exactly what happened? She wasn't suffering anymore. And neither were the people she Loved. Yeah, it hurt a lot when she died. But we're all better off now because of it. I didn't want to hurt her. I Loved her. As crazy and abusive and fucked up as she was, she was also wonderful and caring and thoughtful, and I Loved her. My ritual that night had been as much an act of Love as her suicide had. I just didn't want her to be in pain anymore. And obviously, she felt the same. So what's the point of beating myself up about it? Yes, I could truthfully say "I killed my mother." But I could also truthfully say "I saved my mother, and our entire family from a slow, painful death." It all depends on which side of the street you're standing on. And if they're both true, then why would I choose to view it from the side that makes me into an evil monster, when I could just as easily view it from the side that makes me a powerful savior?

I knew then, that everything would be different from here on out. I knew, with absolute certainty, that nothing is good, and nothing is bad. Everything is both good and bad. The only thing that changes, is our perception. So I would "look on the bright side." I would "make the most of it." I would try to find the good in everything from now on, and not let myself get depressed or miserable or angry when things didn't go the way I wanted. I'd know that, in those situations, there really isn't anything wrong or bad to be upset about; it's simply my point of view that would make it appear that way. So I would change my point of view. I would choose to be joyous.

To say that I was overwhelmed at that point (as I've said several times already here myself) would be a gross understatement. I felt absolutely transformed, transfigured, transmogrified! I felt changed on a genetic level. I could feel my focus slipping, my grip on the mental image beginning to loosen under the effects of such a deep and profound catharsis. Sensing that it was time to go, I bowed low to the Moon Spirit, in deep gratitude and sincere appreciation, and thanked it profusely for showing me so many truths. As I began to descend along the Axis Mundi back to my body, the Spirit said to me:

"There is one more thing you should know before you return. You are amazing. And so is everyone else."

Aleister Crowley said, "Every man and every woman is a Star." Jesus said, "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone." We are all human. We all live the same human lives, on the same planet, spinning through the same universe. Just as "good" and "bad" are merely points of view, so, too, there is really no such thing as a person who is "better" or "worse" than anyone else. Think of all that we are capable of! Memory. Emotion. Reason. Language. Consciousness. Science. Magick. Each and every human being is a truly magnificent and amazing thing. The probability of our coming to exist at all is basically nil, and yet here we are, doing the most extraordinary things. The idea of another person being better or worse than me is just an illusion created by the angle of my view. And I also can't let myself forget, that I am one of these amazing monkeys, myself. No matter what I do, no matter how I fuck up, no matter how down on myself I might get, I am still amazing. Just the mere fact of my existence is miraculous, in and of itself. So I won't beat myself up when I don't live up to my own standards. And I will count every human being as my brother or my sister. And when they do something that hurts me, I won't consider them inferior to myself; I will remember that I have done similar things myself, that everyone has, and that in a similar situation, I could appear to someone else just as they appear to me now. And when I meet someone who seems greater than myself, I will remember that they are just a person, like me, and while they may be able to do some things better than I can, there are also surely many things that I can do better than they.

Still reeling from the weight of so many epiphanies experienced so quickly, I descended through space, through the clouds, down to Earth, and back into my body. It felt as if I'd been gone for at least an hour. I removed my mindfold and looked at the clock. It had been only 20 minutes.

That night I slept peacefully and deeply and contentedly, in a way that I had forgotten was possible.

But it didn't end there. Over the next few days, this experience, and the four truths I learned here, would continue to challenge and change me, and lead me to even greater discoveries and epiphanies, which would result in the most profound personal transformation I could ever have hoped to experience. Until then, remember, You Cannot Be Good, You Cannot Be Bad; You Can Only Be.

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.

Who Are Yooooooou, Too?...

In the same year of my mother's suicide, and the beginning of my Love with Ingrid, I also experienced the next great shift in my spiritual development. I had left the Golden Dawn a couple of years earlier, after only a few months with my teacher. I found their system ultimately hollow and unfulfilling. It had nothing to do with the real world; it was only about their system, their organization. If you bought into what they were selling, and worked hard, you could eventually become very powerful in the Golden Dawn. But being powerful in the Golden Dawn only matters to other people in the Golden Dawn; outside of that tiny group, it meant exactly nothing. I thought I'd found "real" magick, but it turned out to be just more new-age bullshit. I continued studying the occult and practicing my western ceremonial rituals, though, still seeking for ultimate power and control behind-the-scenes of reality.

My best friend, eminent trip-partner, and blood-brother, Daniel, had been studying Peter Carroll's system of Chaos Magick, and he introduced me to it as well. It wasn't long before we were studying and practicing together on a regular basis. Chaos Magick, finally seemed to be what I had been looking for all along. The system eschews ancient mystical systems and order-centric ceremonies (the province of the Golden Dawn and just about every other magickal system out there) in favor of learning the mechanics behind magick that make it work, so that the magickian can create their own magick that works for them. The ultimate in postmodern relativism, it teaches that reality itself is inherently a subjective experience, and therefore it can be influenced using basic trance techniques combined with various methods of self-hypnosis. The idea is to study any and every system that appeals to you, learn what techniques you can, gain what experiences you can, and then move on to another system and do the same. This technique of "paradigm piracy" will inevitably reveal the fundamentals behind the systems, the common elements, the under-the-hood workings of magick, if you will; ultimately garnering the magickian an arsenal of magickal techniques and knowledge from throughout history and around the world that they can draw upon in order to create their own spells to accomplish whatever they want. Spells that really work. Whereas every other occult system I had ever studied relied upon rote memorization of ancient rituals of dubious origin that produced no real effects in consensus reality, Chaos Magick was a system that allowed the budding magickian to learn the basic skills of magick in order to affect actual change.

A year earlier, Daniel had applied to the IOT (the Illuminates of Thanateros; the occult Chaos Magick order founded by Peter Carroll and other progenitors of the system) but had been passed over for initiation because he was under 18 at the time. He came of age while we were practicing together, and in 1999 he was contacted by a friend of ours in the organization and asked if he still wanted to join. He did, and he recommended me, as well. I was invited to join, and along with a couple of other area magickians, we began the 6-month long IOT initiatory process known as MMM.

MMM is an intense regimen of daily meditation, detailed journal recording, and constant magickal study and practice. Each of the four of us were assigned a magickal paradigm (or belief system) with which we had no experience that we were required to learn over the course of our MMM. We would also have to develop several rituals in the style of our assigned paradigm. Daniel was given voodoo. I was given Heathenry, or ancient northern European paganism (most commonly referred to as Asatru); the spiritual beliefs of the vikings: Odin, Loki, Thor, the Runes, etc. Through my experiences in MMM, I fell in Love with the practice of Heathenry, and adopted it as a religion, practicing it alongside my other magickal work. I had studied many religions since I left the orthodox church (some in the course of my Seeking, some as part of my paradigm jumping), but this was the first one I had ever wanted to practice. Until I encountered Heathenry, all I had ever wanted to be was a Sorcerer. One of the other two people in our MMM group, Brian, was a specialist in the Heathen system, and a godhi (or pagan "priest" in the Heathen tradition). Our mentor, George (the friend who recommended us for initiation and guided us all through our MMM) was also growing more interested in the Northern paradigm, and between the three of us, everyone else in the group became interested in Heathenry, as well. So much so that the night we were initiated on April 21, 2000, the five of us formed an IOT Temple dedicated to pursuing Chaos Magick in the Northern style. We called ourselves Temple Gotterdamerung. Later that year, Brian formed a Heathen Kindred for those of us interested in exploring the religious traditions of the northern European pagans as well (as opposed to the magickal beliefs and practices we explored in Gotterdamerung), and on December 21, 2000 I joined Einauga Kindred. The oaths I swore to these two organizations that year were, at that time, the most important promises I had ever made.

For the next several years, my spiritual development continued on and off in this vein. I continued to practice both Chaos Magick and the Heathen religion. I met monthly for group work with Temple Gotterdamerung, and celebrated the holy days with Einauga Kindred. I studied many paradigms that interested me, with the Runes as my base practice, and developed an extensive archive of techniques and experiences from which to draw upon. Slowly but surely, I began to make things happen around me. I influenced people with talismans and, unbeknownst to them, got them to do the things I wanted them to do, even though it was quite contrary to their normal behavior. I cast a spell to get a new car, and two days later my father called and offered me his sister's old one, out of the blue. I performed a ritual to get ecstasy, and two hours later someone called me up out of the blue and offered me pills. I had learned how to work real magick, and I had the results to prove it. I was finally a Magickian!

I also became a godhi during this period, taking over Einauga Kindred from Brian after he moved away. But it wasn't long before everyone else's interest moved on to other things, and Ing and I were left as the only remaining members. We continued to observe the holy days, but it wasn't the same; without the large group, it became more personal and intimate of an experience than it had been before. They became our gods; our holidays. I stayed in the IOT, working with Temple Gotterdamerung, and then with Temple Lya'o when Gotterdamerung dissolved. Temple Lya'o was dedicated to studying the intercession of three of my favorite paradigms: Taoism, the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, and Drug Magick (utilizing the altered states of consciousness brought on by various chemicals in order to perform magickal acts and experience mystical states). It felt like a truly perfect fit.

I came to realize several important things about my spirituality during this period. I summarized them in a series of journal entries in 2003:

"My religion is my way of connecting w/ my planet in a way that is very hard to do in modern times (and getting harder to do w/ every tree that's cut down & w/ every farm that becomes a factory) & in a way that I feel it is very important to do.
The rise of Industry = The decline of Agrarian Society = The loss of our connection to our planet and its natural cycles and rhythms & The loss of our association w/ our planet as the giver and SUSTAINER of our lives (though it still is) = The loss or, perhaps, decline of magick in the world (it's not the only reason, but it's a big one)"

"Taoism - As long as I can remember, I have been attracted to dualities. Everything, it had always seemed to me, had an equal and an opposite. And it seems that in almost every instance where I perceived and classified a duality, I found that I fit into both categories. In those instances where I didn't, I tried to change to fit into both. I have tried to make things equal in my life; to keep balance in all ways between all poles of opposites. I have tried to find the middle path. All of this before I ever studied Taoism. I have since come to know that all 2's are the emanations of the 1 that is 0. And now I am just beginning to study the Tao."

"My personal belief structure begins with Taoism; my perception of reality, at its base, is a Taoist one. This is the core of my spirituality. At the next level of my spirituality, that of the more chosen or willed, active practice (though all is, in reality, Willed, some aspects of my life,such as religion, seem more obviously CHOSEN; at the core level of perception, it seems much more like "discovery of the nature of things" than it does "choosing a belief system") I follow Heathenism because I find its culture to be not only powerful, but rich and beautiful, as well. Also, it provides me with a connection to an aspect of human existence on Earth that I feel we have only lost very recently, and that I feel is important as it provides another connection to the world that is outside of me. And I am also very appreciative of the fact that Heathenism is not an EX-clusive religion, meaning that the belief structure of Heathenism allows room for the incorporation of other belief systems. Finally, at the third level of my spirituality I use the power that I have built within me from the first two levels in the practice of Magick. I do this in order to participate in the workings and construction or formation of my reality, and in order to raise myself up, in every way, in every world I walk in."

On September 17, 2004, I was initiated into the 3rd degree of the IOT, and given the leadership position of Temple Lya'o. At my initiation, I was required to renounce my pagan gods and re-dedicate myself to the pursuit of Chaos Magick. I didn't really want to do it, but I had also always considered my religious practice secondary to, and an expression of, my magickal practice, so if I had to choose one over the other, it was obvious to me which one had to go. I wanted to be a sorcerer a lot more than I wanted to be a godhi or a heathen. But that night, I felt like I left a part of myself behind, and over the next several years, that little hole remained; a constant nagging feeling that a piece of my life and my Self was missing somewhere.

In every other way, it seemed that things were going great for me. Over the next 3 years, Temple Lya'o developed into one of the biggest and most potent Temples in the North American section of the IOT. I studied Taoism in its many varied forms (mystical, alchemical, energetic, religious, magickal, shamanic, etc.), worked with the darkness and madness of the Cthulhu Mythos, and discovered drugs I had never heard of before. By this point, I had been smoking pot every day, morning, noon, and night, for almost ten years. Bong hits were my best friends. I'd get up in the morning and do some bong hits. When I got home from work, I'd smoke bowl after bowl until it was time to go to bed. I could tell that the effects of being constantly stoned were taking their toll on me; I was always tired, I never had any energy or motivation, everything felt like a constant struggle, I gained a lot of weight, when I ran out I would have wild mood swings, etc. But, as far as I was concerned then, those negatives were outweighed by the perceived benefits I received from pot (relaxation, pleasure, and mystical experiences). Besides, it's not like I was addicted. I'd seen my mother struggle with addiction for years, I'd gone with her to countless AA and NA meetings, I knew the signs, I knew the program, I knew addiction. And I wasn't addicted. And when and if I ever did get addicted, I would know exactly what to do. Not only did I have much more intimate knowledge of addiction than did the average user, but I was also a powerful Magickian. Reality bent to my fucking Will! What did I have to fear from something as minor as weed? I'd be fine, I told myself. I experimented with dozens of different drugs; some designer, some natural, some legal, some illegal, some for spiritual or mystical reasons, some for simple daily pleasure. I never turned down any experience.

Ingrid and I had gotten married on October 13, 2001, and six years later, we were still enjoying our newly-wedded bliss. Things were getting better and better for us at our jobs. The wealth magick that Ing and I had performed every full moon for two years had paid off, and within 3 days of each other, first our building went condo, and then I received a large inheritance that allowed me to buy our apartment. Our apartment complex was completely renovated. The courtyard that had been empty save for rotting wood planks and a large brick planter filled with barren dirt that would never support life became a lush garden almost overnight; and from the center of that empty planter where we had made our many sacrifices of blood and life and money, there now sprang a giant black fountain. Our apartment went from industrial carpeting, cracked walls, and broken down appliances, to hardwood floors, granite counter tops and marble tile, and a fully-stocked compliment of state-of-the-art technology. The entire neighborhood changed around us overnight, and what was once an aging ghetto of a neighborhood became a beautiful (and rich) center of young urban life. The annual international meeting of the IOT (the Annual Grand Meeting, or AGM) was coming back to the United States for only the 2nd time ever, and Temple Lya'o was hosting it. I had been tapped for my 2nd degree, and my performance in helping to put on the AGM would go towards proving my worth for the position. The whole world was turning in my favor.

And that's when everything fell apart. Which brings me to the real story I wanted to tell, the story that was the impetus for this blog in the first place. But that's going to have to wait until next time. Until then, remember, Everything is True, and Nothing is Permitted.

Who Are Yooooooou?...

Alright, let's get this requisite bio bullshit out of the way as quickly as possible. I was born on Valentine's Day of America's bicentennial, in suburban Maryland just outside of the Washington, D.C. beltway. My parents had been hippies in school and were then trying to build a life together now that the world was moving away from the Peace and Love of the 60s, and towards the Money and Mine of the 80s. Growing up, my father worked hard, and wasn't around much. When he was, he always seemed on the verge of exploding in violent anger. My mother was angry a lot of the time, as well, and was actually much more violent than my father (she kicked the crap out of me at the slightest provocation), but she also was one of the most Loving people I have ever known. She had a very dual personality (violently Loving, compassionately Angry), which might go a long way toward explaining my own dualities of Self. And since she was the one who basically raised me (my father working 3 jobs and going to school), I got to know her wholly, in a way that I didn't know my father. The violent outbursts were common, but they weren't the rule; 90% of the time my parents were warm, Loving people who took good care of me and made me very happy. And so, despite all of the anger and the violence and the beatings, I never, never, had any doubt that my parents Loved me more than anything in the world, and that is what I remember most about my childhood: feeling Loved and supported. Even when she was beating me unconscious, I knew I was the center of her world. If she didn't care, she could never have gotten that upset. And I saw how hard my father worked, and I knew he did it all for us.

My mother taught me the importance of Love above all things, and that the only person's opinion of me that mattered, was mine. She impressed upon me the importance of being myself in the face of a world that told me I was wrong. It doesn't matter what other people think; all that matters is that you're happy and Loving. I was an extremely inquisitive and curious child, and my mother never hesitated to answer any question I asked her to the best of her ability. Since her parents were cold and distant and emotionally abusive, it was always very important to her that I knew that I could say anything to her; I could tell her any secret and it would be just between us; I could ask her any question and she would give me an honest answer. And I took every opportunity to avail myself of this aspect of our relationship. We were very close. I was her first born son, and she was my mentor and my best friend. She was also my abuser and I, her victim. It was a complex relationship, to say the least. But I Loved her more than anything in the world, and I knew she felt the same.

She taught me that sex and drugs were incredibly dangerous and to be respected and feared, and that they were also two of the greatest pleasures humans could experience. My parents still smoked marijuana, still of the hippie mindset that "it's just an herb", and was inherently much better for you than the alcohol that was the mainstay-drug of their parents' generation. (I found out in my twenties that my father had used it to season our family's pasta sauce on more than one occasion, and that they felt no qualms about letting their infant son partake of the drug-laced pasta at family meals. They honestly believed it was good for you, and not poisonous or addictive, like alcohol.) She told me in explicit detail of all the joys and terrors of her drug experiences as a youth, informing me of what to look out for as well as what to look forward to. And being of the Free Love generation, countering the repressed mindset of the 50s, sex to her was something wonderful to be explored and expressed and enjoyed as much and as often as possible. Not something to be feared and hidden away in a dark room as though it didn't exist. As an example, I was toilet-trained, in part, using Playboy magazines; when I used the potty correctly, I would be allowed to peruse one of my father's Playboy's to my heart's content. And it worked like a charm; I LOVED using the potty. And so while it wasn't until much later in my life that I would discover the pleasures of drugs, it was at a very early age that I discovered the pleasures of sex.

I began masturbating at 5 years-old. I had my first orgasm at age 7. I remember being really scared by the sensation and asking my mother at the earliest opportunity what had happened. It felt like I was going to pee myself, and I was afraid I was going to wet the bed. She explained it all to me, naturally, and reassured me that nothing was wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact, she explained that what I had experienced was a wonderful thing. After that, I became even more curious about sex. It was that same year that I found my first regular sex partner, a caramel-colored playmate of mine named Travis, with whom I would have many pleasurable adventures over the next several years. Again, being a Free Love Parent, my mother didn't hide the concepts of straight and gay from me; I knew that some people Loved boys and some people Loved girls, and either way, it was all Love and therefore, beautiful. So I never discriminated on gender when it came to sex. The idea of Loving someone based on the shape of the skin between their legs seemed as ridiculous to me as Loving someone based on the color of their hair, or the number of fingers and toes they had. You Love people, not bits of people.

But still, at that early age, girls are this weird "other" that is hard to understand, and even harder to get close to; the two sexes interacting largely like alien cultures meeting on the playground battlefield. And being a boy myself, I understood the mindset of boys a lot better than girls. So it was a lot easier to get closer to them. And a lot easier to get into their pants. Being sexually curious, open, adventurous, and highly-educated on the subject (compared to the other boys around me, anyways) I found young boys incredibly easy to seduce. And I Loved to seduce them. I initiated sexual encounters with every one of my male playmates growing up, several of them developing into long-term sexual relationships. (Though the idea of monogamy would remain completely alien to me until my teen years, and even then it felt like an uncomfortable set of chains someone forced someone else to wear for fear they would run away without being locked down.) The Sleep-over was my favorite thing growing up. They were opportunities for all-night orgies of dirty, fun sex while our parents slept down the hall. I had a fucking ball! (Pun very much intended.) I also seduced every major bully who plagued my neighborhood-world at one point or another. They always left me alone after that, afraid I would reveal them as "faggots" if they ever hurt me again. I never would have, of course, because I'd have had to admit my own faggoty-ness in order to do so. But they didn't know that, and so, like the Cold War we were nearing the end of at the time, the situation remained a stable, if uncomfortable, stalemate. (Thinking of it now, I realize there was a Tao in that, as well: overcoming violence, hatred, and prejudice, with sex and intimacy and Love.) I knew that I liked girls, too, though (my potty-training wouldn't have gone nearly so well if I hadn't), but they were like this elusive creature that was almost impossible to get a hold of, so it wouldn't be until high school that I had my first sexual encounter with a girl.

My parents were slightly spiritual (hallucinogens will do that to you), but not very religious (they'll do that to you, as well). My father was more religious than my mother, who didn't really care much about religion one way or the other, and so our family was raised in my father's faith, the Russian Orthodox church. My father always wore a crucifix on a chain around his neck (with the crossbeams of the sign above and the footrest below that are characteristic of the orthodox christian faiths), but we very rarely actually went to church. Ostensibly this was because the closest Russian Orthodox church was 2-3 hours away from our home, but I also believe that it had something to do with my parents simply not considering religion or spirituality to be very important. It was just a fact of life, not a reason to live; something that was always there, but not something you want to waste time focusing on. God made you when you were born, you lived as much by the Ten Commandments as possible, you prayed when you needed help, and when you died you'd go to Heaven if you'd been good, and to Hell if you'd been bad. That was just how things were, and there really wasn't any point dwelling on it. But for me, as a child, this view of life, the universe, and everything scared the shit out of me. I felt like there was this big, grandfatherly figure in white robes way, way up in the sky, watching everything I did, judging everything I did, and if he didn't like me, he would torture me with fire for all eternity. As such, I was a bit of a twitchy, anxious child in many ways, to say the least.

But I Loved our church. It was all gilt in gold and marble and lit with candles, the priest wore elaborate robes and a big, fancy hat; the services were chanted in an ancient dead language, while clouds of frankincense billowed from swinging censers, filling the room with an exotic spicy smoke that was quite intoxicating. The whole thing vibrated with Mystery and called out to me to seek and search and find The Answers. It was a beautiful, dramatic production that rung with The Divine. But the whole story behind the scenes, the meaning that all those rituals represented? God, Heaven, Hell, Judgement, the Crucified and Resurrected Man-god, etc.? All that stuff made me want to pee my pants and hide in a cave somewhere.

At the beginning of my 8th grade year, when I was 13, my mother gave birth to her 3rd son. Just a few months later, she became suddenly paralyzed along the right half of her body. Eventually the doctors diagnosed her with Multiple Sclerosis, a disease of unknown origin that causes brain tissue to deteriorate at random, consequently destroying the information contained therein. It is a fatal disease that could kill at any minute (an attack in the part of your brain that controlled your breathing or heartbeat, for instance), or could take 20 years to wear someone down to a useless sack of meat. It was a devastating blow to our entire family, who had just been so high with the joy of a new son, a new baby brother.

That was also the year I began to rebel, though whether those two events were related, I still can't rightly say. I became interested in Satanism and I started listening to heavy metal. I found that there was power to be found in darkness, in fear. People who had once picked on me mercilessly left me alone once they thought I was a crazy devil-worshipper. In high school, this gradually morphed into an interest in real occultism. I had long ago dismissed christianity as a religion of sheep and fools, being controlled by power-mongers and zealots because they simply found it too difficult to think for themselves. Calling myself a Satanist and pretending to do magick rituals to evoke The Devil had helped me to reject the fundamental teachings of my childhood, but these things ultimately left me feeling like an idiot, too. I knew I was just pretending, creating an image in reaction to my family and my peers, not really expressing who I was. I wanted real power. I knew there was real magick out there, and I wanted to figure out how to do it. I spent a lot of time in our local wiccan/new-age store, pouring over books about crystals and mysticism. I learned about Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn and the OTO and the IOT. I wore a lot of black, and read Camus and Sartre and Nietzsche (though I never understood a word of it). This disaffected outcast image I wore finally garnered the attention of the opposite sex, and it was during these high school years that I had my first female Lovers and my first steady girlfriend. I even managed to sneak some boy-love in here and there, too, which wasn't easy in a world where even wearing the wrong style of clothing or haircut could get one permanently branded a "faggot".

By the time I was in college, I had found the persona of the Gothpunk. And it fit me like a latex glove. Darkness was beauty. Evil was good. Bisexuality was the accepted norm. Gender blurring in both dress and attitude was the fashion and the philosophy. Magick was the mystery, flesh was the altar, and pleasure was the god. We wore garish makeup like nightmare clowns. Hair of every imaginable color, but clothing always black. Combat boots and lace. Fishnets and chains. Rubber and silk. Leather on our backs and spikes through our skin. Black fingernails like claws, and ribbons in our hair. We were the Beautiful Damned, and the night belonged to us. When the Sun went down, it was as though the universe was giving us permission to come out and play, and when it came back up again, it was time to hide from the glaring light. Hide in our rooms of thick curtains; hide in our lives of school and shit jobs. We danced, we drank, we smoked, we tripped, we fucked, and we did it all with a feeling of righteous badness, as though we were the shit of the world, cast off in disgust, and that we were made glorious for it.

I started using drugs regularly at this point. It had started off with cigarettes (at age 14), then alcohol (at age 17), and then pot (age 18). By the time I was a gothpunk at 19, I was dropping acid every chance I could get. My friends and I would drive around the valley where we lived, going up one side, back down, and up the other side and back again, like we were skating a gigantic half-pipe with our town in the center. We spent that whole summer tripping our faces off. We found strength in the madness and insanity that LSD brought, purpose in laughing at the obvious purposelessness of life. And with every trip I learned things about myself, about the world, about life, about reality. Each trip was filled from one end to the other with things I had never even conceived of, points of view I could never have imagined, ideas that surely no other human being had ever thought before. It was these experiences that gave me my first conscious knowledge of the mystical. When you're tripping, everything is magick. I remember one summer evening in the park with 4 hits, I turned into a dog. I wasn't trying to; it just happened. I felt like a dog, I thought like a dog, I sensed as a dog, I experienced the sights and sounds of the world around me as a dog. I ran across the wide expanses of grass chasing ducks at a full lope, and I could smell the fear of the young couples that I encountered walking on dark paths when I bared my teeth at them and growled.

I Loved drugs. They made everything better in every way. More pleasurable, more interesting, more magickal, more powerful, more enchanting, more everything. I would do any drug I had an opportunity to do, and I guess I have to call it Luck or Wyrd that it would be 10 more years before I ever encountered anything seriously destructive, like cocaine or heroin. I was able to get high, laugh my monkey ass off, and go about my day without much consequence. It was in the midst of these experiences that I also finally met a "real" magickian, an honest-to-gods Adept of the secret occult society, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The same Golden Dawn that gave Crowley his first initiatory experiences. It wasn't long before I had convinced him to initiate me into the order, and through him I would come to learn the basic underpinnings of the western mystery tradition. I studied Kabbalah and Tarot and Egyptian Magick, I practiced the Lesser and Greater Banishings of the Pentagram, the Middle Pillar, the Rose Cross, the Circulation of the Body of Light. I studied Hebrew and astrology and read "Modern Magick" like it was a college textbook, believing I had discovered the great secrets of the universe, and knowing that one day, this path would lead me to greatness.

In my 23rd year, just before the turn of the millennium, I discovered the Love of my life, standing right next to me. We had been best friends since high school, even though we had always run in completely opposite circles. While I was a gothpunk, she was a theater nerd. While I was a druggie, she was a ballet dancer. While I was a college dropout after 3 semesters, she went to a prestigious school and got her BA. While I Loved and lived with open abandon, she was shy and reserved and frightened of living. But throughout everything, we were always friends, and always took care of one another whenever and however we needed. Her name is Ingrid, and you will find her hereafter referred to variously by that name, or Ing, or Snowflake, or Dollface, or Princess or Strawberry or Peaches or Gorgeous or Strumpet or Blondie or Precious or any one of a dozen other titles. But her real name is Love. Everyone seemed to know this was coming, except us. My last relationship had ended (very badly, I might add) when the girl I was living with left me because of the closeness of my relationship with Ingrid. But we had never even considered being anything other than friends. Until one day, it was as though we woke up, and realized what had been right in front of our eyes the whole time.

That year ended quite oppositely of how it began. On December 31, 1999, my mother was found dead in a hotel room a few miles from my apartment. She'd taken her life with a bottle of sleeping pills. She'd been suffering greatly from the ravages of both addiction and MS for many years at that point, and she was a broken, crazy shell compared to the woman who had raised me. Where once she had been beautiful and Loving, she had become ugly and viciously cruel. She was in constant pain from the disease, and she abused her pain medication, which hurt her even more, leaving her in near constant withdrawal, and almost bankrupted our family. She was miserable and demented and constantly high, and she made everyone's life a living hell. I left home to get away from her, but everyone else did their best to try and take care of her. She'd tried committing suicide several times before, the first of which during my first semester away at college, so this wasn't really a surprise, but it's also always a surprise. I awoke to my ringing phone, and the sound of my father's weeping; "I couldn't save her this time. I couldn't save her." I felt like I'd been preparing for that moment for years, but you can never really be prepared for it. I did my best to let go and say goodbye. I didn't hate her, I felt sorry for her; I didn't blame her, I told myself that she was sick, and that she had died from her disease. And further proof that every high brings an equal low, and vice verse: that night, as we watched the fountains of fireworks pouring off of barges in Baltimore Harbor, shivering in the cold, warm in our inebriation, celebrating the lives we still had to live, Ingrid told me for the first time that she Loved me. There's an undeniable balance to things, when you just stop to see it.

There's more to this introduction, but I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it here for now; this entry is far too long as it is, and there's still a lot more to cover before we get to the real story that I want to tell. Next time, we'll get into my discovery of Chaos Magick and the Heathen religion, my initiation in the occult order of the Illuminates of Thanateros, my development into a true Magickian, and the events that led me to the spiritual crisis and renewal that was the original point of writing this blog in the first place. Until then, remember, Change is the Only Constant.