The Devil

As in the Tarot Card.

All the majors are, for me, neither good nor bad. They are all Good, as in part of the Law. The Devil is a wonderful friend. He prepares you to have your illusions of bondage torn away. He makes it possible for you to feel those chains and to desire to be rid of them. He is the part of g*d that allows us to alchemize even the most tawdry of experiences. Like the experience of feeling separate, or fearing the dark, or wanting to feel good even when we know we are destroying ourselves. The Devil is what allows us to take those experiences and do something Good with them. Among other things.

Driving to the Unaffected Coast

I think a lot about the wounds I carry. It has never seemed very fruitful to think of the injustice of it. There are always others worse off. I am never completely innocent or less deserving of receiving a random share of unfairnesses. But looking forward, I can see in the wounds, the possibility of something else. By staying with the pain, I can sometimes open up to something amazing, a connection, a feeling of being larger than I thought I was. Each wound becomes an opportunity to do this thing. 


 Also, hammocks are awesome. 

 

A Parliament, Sudden and Momentary

It was mid-afternoon,
still and bland.
The sunlight clear,
the day's tasks lay undone.

And then, a small rustle turned huge
as a parliament blew in, filling
the big-leaf maples in my backyard.
They swept in and suddenly
the trees were heavy with black bodies,
swaying and flapping their wings
they yelled and cackled.
They were a great wind,
swirling up from somewhere,
forcing my attention to them.

I could not understand their dialogue.
I don't know what matter of great import
was being debated, but the arguments
flew back and forth with a fury.
I could only imagine what political maneuvers
were in play, what family houses held
their honor on the line, what epic crow
poem was being enacted before my eyes.

 Then they were gone.
A few stragglers
  came through
 over the next hour,
but they were too late
for the main event and
for the most part no one paid them much attention.

2 of Pentacles

In martial arts we are taught that being tense slows us down. When we force stillness upon ourselves, we hold our bodies in place by pushing inward from all directions. Isometric. It takes a lot of work to do this bit of nothing, and it slows down your response time. Any time you decide to move in one direction, you must first relax everything that's pushing you elsewhere. But if you start relaxed, you can immediately move in any direction quickly, as needed.

What You Learn In School

All this matter we call the universe swirls around at the bottom like so much silt. High above, the waters clear and eventually, if you swim high enough, you may glimpse that wonderful mythic Sun all the fishes whisper about in school.

A Spell for Darkness

9 yards of rain
5 perfect kumquats
a thimbleful of old odds and ends no one remembers the names of

Sit in darkness and feel the rain fall. Shake the memories, filling the darkness with the voices of the past. After they have settled down, eat one kumquat. When the taste just lingers on the tongue, eat the second. There are times when we must feign insanity. Eat the third kumquat. For really bad cases of darkness, eat the fourth. Otherwise, bury it with the fifth. Cover the seeds with memories and let the rain soak the ground.

The Speed Of Consciousness

Modern occultists, alchemists, and magicians will sometimes say that consciousness speeds up evolution.  Dion Fortune was a proponent of this. She was pretty experienced when it comes to things like the nature of consciousness, much more than me, so I certainly don’t want to second guess her. But I really don’t think the point of existence is to get through it as fast as possible.  It’s not a race.   

It's not that we are speeding up evolution by doing alchemy. It's that consciousness slows down and complicates the way to the divine source.  Consciousness makes the path tricky.  Consciousness adds turns and switchbacks, dead ends, detours, and the occasional roadside tourist trap.  What had seemed in childhood like an obvious and delightful traipse up the mountain because a lifetime walking in your own shoes.

And I note a cool thing about the effect of consciousness.  It’s like how sometimes, everything just goes by so quickly and other times it goes by slowly.  Consciousness can affect those rates. Sometimes we enter a state of heightened consciousness and it’s like flow. We are apprehending many things at once, easily, a billion points of existence all at once with ease, and we come out of the state to find that hours have gone by in what seemed like a timeless moment. 

And sometimes, consciousness is like a road trip through the back way.  You leave behind the mindless interstate that transports you unchanged to your destination and instead see every tree and roadside attraction, you feel every turn.   You pay attention to all the small places on the map. Consciousness may make evolution go faster, but it also gives us more to evolve.  We end up not going any faster than non-conscious matter, but we have so many more opportunities for doing so, so many ways to do it.