Neurological Termite Mounds

You think you are an individual with a rational mind or at least a single consciousness in control. You are wrong. You are a termite mound, a hive being.

And the conscious part of the mind is not the driver. You are the marketing department. Your job is to justify to the rest of the mind the decisions made by the subconscious and to convince yourself that was actually why you made that decision.

You are a thrumming hive mind, a bag of accumulated instincts and automatic responses masquerading as a single mind.

Don't Invade Russia in Winter

Every lesson applies to every circumstance. No exceptions.

Don't invade Russia in the winter means don't go into that interview unprepared, it means pay attention to the realities of the rhythms of your chronic illness.

There are no exceptions. That one you're thinking right now, your special circumstances that I don't understand. Yes that one too. Every lesson applies to every circumstance. No exceptions. You are special just like everyone else.

There is somebody who has overcome your challenges, and with more setbacks and in worse conditions. Yes. Yes they have. Get over it. Your suffering is not noble. Your suffering is a choice. And it is a choice to not live your life in favor of being the star of your own Greek tragedy

That's your choice. But it is always a choice. Everything is a lesson. And ever lesson applies to every circumstance. Yes. Even yours. Even that one.

You Die in the Bonelands

Underlying all magic is an attempt at remaking the world to match our assumptions, our biases, our own taboos and fears. Underlying all magic is the idea that the world would be better if it conformed to our story.

The Bonelands don't care about our story. And this is why we die there.

Unsorted Thoughts, Number 2

Stop hiding what you want behind what you think is reasonable to ask for.

You don't have to take from others. You can build what you need and take others with you.

You may very well be hurting people by depriving them of fruits of your creation.

Unsorted Thoughts, Number 4

What is to give light, must endure burning.
Viktor Frankl

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him

What Gods Need

There have been thousands of gods through the years that have received the worship and devotion of humankind. And thousands of gods thus stand dead or forgotten. Their laws are now ignored or transgressed unless some new upstart deity has adopted their codes. The chances of the god into whose worship you were born or introduced is in some way special amidst the divine mob is minuscule. Therefore, if you are going to interact with and make deals with the divines, you should do so with a healthy sense of what they are.

"What does god need with a starship?"
Captain James T Kirk

Allegory of the Whisperer

A Quote from the book Gaia's Garden, "Each need not satisfied by another component of the design becomes work for the gardener; each product not used becomes pollution. "

What Religion Is

Religions are collections of useful lies constructed to latch onto the human imagination and burrow into our collective cultural memory. You can say this is good or this is bad. I will simply say that it is.

Pragmatism

The hoarding instinct. It might be useful later. This tendency holds back and hampers the modern first world naked ape. But one upon a time resources were valuable and hoarding and repurposing existing resources kept people alive.

Why should magic be any less pragmatic?

Lost in the Map

Magick, language, symbols, the whole of the Shadowlands are a hologram, a map of what they represent. We navigate using the map. We shouldn't walk on the map.

If you get lost in the map, you will never reach your destination.

Hebrews and Glue

According to the Hebrew god, he made the world in six days and rested on the seventh sometime after the Sumerians invented glue. According to the Norse Eddas, Midgard -that's Earth- sits upon the Yggdrasil World Tree which is somehow not visible from space. Why do the Yama Kings' control over hell cease at the borders of the middle kingdom? Why don't Incan and Egyptian mummification rituals follow the same mystic and Ecclesiastic rules? Why does the rainbow serpent stay in Australia? Why did Thor never travel to Punjab to honor the warriors there? Why did Ganesha never inspire a Pagan European Shaman?

We have catalogued fossils and other geological and anthropological evidence tracing the origin of the modern human back to roughly two hundred thousand years ago. And yet; the oldest gods and spirits of which we can find evidence- recorded in stories and rock art from Australia- are a mere forty thousands years young. Gods are so much younger than humanity that our general belief in their immortality is astonishing. And if we cease to limit our musings to modern humans and include all human species then the timeline jumps to around two million years depending on current evidence. And then I wonder: do apes have gods? Do birds follow spirit guides on migration? Do whales sing in religious devotion?

And this is why Chaos Magicians eschew traditions. If our gods are younger than us, then we have the hierarchy reversed. This is why Grant Morrison summoned John Lennon in deity form with the same willingness as he did when communing with scorpion gods and Hellenistic goddesses alike.

To assume that our gods exist outside us is to ignore the weight of history. Any power or magick our gods possess they obtained from us. And thus, we can use or modify, create or banish them as we need. They serve us and we are their creators. It is only power hungry priests and would be god kings who have labored to convince us that the reverse is true.

Excalibur and Us

Since watching Star Wars, I had always dreamed of being the chosen one. drawing Excalibur from the stone, inheriting my father's lightsaber, I always hoped to be heir to some ancient lineage some destiny to carry on.

Richard Dawkins said that we are lucky because we will die. He said that most people will never die because most people will never be born. He pointed out that the number of possible humans outnumbers all the grains of sand on all the beaches on all the possible worlds. and then he said that amongst all those are poets greater than Keats and scientists created Newton, and yet here in our ordinariness are we.

And yet we are the chosen ones. We are heir to a great lineage. We are heir to 6 million generations of heroes and warriors- across two million years of human evolution. Little self programming informational algorithms running in the computers using chemical fire, wearing bodies forged in the hearts of dying stars. This is who we are. Star children. Heirs to all of human history. The chosen ones amongst near-infinite possible humans. We've already drawn Excalibur.

As Warren Ellis argues through Axel Brass in the graphic novel Planetary, that if you save the world then it will repay you a million times over. And as Morgan Freeman's character points out to Lucy in the movie by the same name. "The point to life is to pass it on."

A Manifesto for Good Ancestors

Long ago in the future time was a wheel. The locust king conquered the world and hammered time into a flat line. The future no longer led back to the past. The locust king devoured the future to feed his empire in the present. And one day there was no future left.

Standing at the end of the line, with no future before them, the children of the present had to weave the future back to the past in order to survive. Time had to be a wheel in order to last forever.

The line will break. The circle will return.

Beginning in the Brain

You can't escape your inner fish. To bring you home was built upon the brain ancient prehistoric fish. You're ever so many great great great grandfather was a little slug like fish. It now bears the name Pikaia and it was the first chordate, that is the first creature with anything resembling the spinal column. All of our culture and our learning, all of her songs and literature, all of her science and our philosophy, all these things are built on the foundation of a little sea slug with a spine.

And with each successive generation. Each time we bred and did not die before reaching sexual maturity, each of these successes added a new layer to the tapestry that would be our culture that we would hard code into our DNA, into our brains.

Air breathing. Courtship rituals. Fight or flight response. Herd mentality. Social rituals. Rearing our Young. From reptile brain to neo cortex , our genetic history is built into our culture, built into the very fabric of our social norms. Or at least it was, until ten thousand years ago. Then the heresy, then the blasphemy, then the treason against billions of years of evolution. Then the cities. Then came the Locust King.

Excalibur in the Rust, Mythopoetic Design

Excalibur in the rust.

The concept of a mystic artifact, and one neglected is too universal to neglect. My wife has suggested the concept of a Mystic compass. Diviner's pendulum hanging under a gyroscope compass. Maybe with sextant. I like this, traditionally this is a sword or a weapon. I love the idea of something used for navigation and exploration as a cultural artifact.

By contrast we have Mistletoe. The Scythe of the Locust King is a corrupted sickle. Forged when the false king took the mirrored mountain and transformed it into the glass tower

The Dose makes the poison

-

Tim Ferriss

Plans for Des Occultus Aranea

So NEOvirtual shamMAN is a blog of my own occult journey primarily. I hope, obviously, to present that occult journey in a way that is interesting and useful to other occultists and would be occultists.

To that end, I have been endeavoring to put together a resource for local occultists. The solution I have settled upon takes the form of a podcast consisting of interviews with local occultists of various disciplines. The idea is that these will help me progress upon my own journey, they will help local occultists bring awareness to what they do, and provide a useful general informational resource to occultists who are not actually local.

That's the plan.

I have the first interview in the can. Said interview is with ceremonial Hermetic Magician and Freemason: Troy the Devil Man. The audio is better than expected, but still rather rough in spots (read rubbish, you will hear my dishwasher and both of my dogs during the course of the interview).

I will be posting that interview once I have the minimal editing done that I intend to do.

In the meantime, here's a list of topics that I hope to cover as subjects of discussion on future podcasts.

• "What is Magic?" a discussion on the definition and nature of Magic.
• "Mythopoetics and Appropriation" A discussion on syncretism, mythopoetics and the politics of cultural appropriation in the occult.
• "Why do you bother?"What is the benefit that Magical practise provides to one's life? A Discussion.
• "Education in the Occult" a look at courses on the occult available in the Lower Mainland- such as Enochian.org and Scholomance.

Anger Management

Anger. I feel a thousand ghosts scrambling about in my wake. They tear with jagged claws against ever surface I pass. They, my inner selves, reveal my own hypocrisy. I hate this world, even as I cling to it. I know nothing else.

What am I to do? I put on a strong front for those whom I know need to believe in my strength. And I believe in my strength as well. But I need permission to have bad days. I need to rage and snarl and gnash my teeth. But my venting will scald those around me more fragile than myself. And so I bottle up my rage. I feel that this is not the wisest course. I need a better solution. No. What I need is an actual solution. What I have made do with previously has been only a bromide.

Update on Interview with Troy the Devil Man

I sat down with Troy the Devi Man- one of the Rain Coast's most experienced Ceremonial Magicians. We spoke at length, and even remembered to record some of it! We generated about 90 minutes of really interesting occult discussion.

I am currently reviewing the audio and adding intro and outro audio, and will be uploading the whole interview shortly.