#plotinuslovemachine

Magickal practice is not about removing yourself from the world. Isolation is not good. Magick is about becoming more effective within the world.

It doesn't matter what you call it. Name its sorcery, witchcraft, magick or just "being spiritual and not religious." You don't work a "practice." Your "practice" works on you. Your category of spiritual practice is an initiation into the nature of your being. The only choice you have is to say, "yes, I am here...I choose to take this road." The outcomes are beyond your control. You accept what life throws at you, and you learn. This art is the art of the warrior.   No doubt our view of initiation will upset those with a more Crowley based idea of magick. That still applies. Do what thou wilt is still the whole of the law. What you don't understand is what your actual "will" really is. Your self-identity is getting in the way. Until you comprehend your will in a thelemic (lower case t intended) mode, your practices are little more than silly wish fulfillment.    Bring me money, bring me a lover, and so forth are fine. Nothing wrong with fulfilling a desire. However, is this your true will? Maybe it is. For most people, this is enough. We all need to pay our bills and put food on the table. A little help is always welcome.   When you call out into the ocean of the transpersonal, you awaken powerful psychic forces that don't give two-shits about your beliefs in karma or good vs. evil. What we call morality is a human concept and mainly a human conceit. Human decency is the safety of the shoreline. You have sailed out beyond good and evil. To initiate is to declare simultaneously: Ego sum Deus and Deus ego sum Dominus Pestifer.   I am a god. I am the destroyer of god.   If you don't have a good grasp on reality, you will drown out there in your little boat of self-identity.  Perhaps it is best, as H.P. Lovecraft writes in this gothic horror tale,  The Call of C'thulhu,   The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Perhaps, the most fatal consequence of classic liberalism is it reduces us down to the economic. Our value is seen only in our productivity. This merges unhelpfully with the so-called Protestant work ethic where the meaning of life is to be found in industriousness. Idle handles are the devil's workshop, therefore leisure and joy are frowned upon. Our churches uses to be Cathedrals and clapboard meeting houses, today, factories and office buildings take their place. Today's totalitarians make their decisions from the boardroom rather than the rectory. So happiness can only be seen in hedonic terms - we must be participate in the creating and consuming of stuff or the unthinkable will happen - our economy will stagnate and even die. Rather, we should consider eudaimonia as the standard for creating a healthy lifestyle.

A warrior who is afraid to walk the path of grief becomes a murderer.