[alfabok-blog]

Blood Red Bullets

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I am whole.

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I am many pieces.

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I am the whole of each piece

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And I feel the air between my shards...

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That void whose currents grasps the entirety.

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I am the Void who is Whole.

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~ Glóa Rós Álfadóttir

[alfabok-blog]

Glamoring!

First Notes

This is a silly introduction to Glamor magic and it will be expanded upon. It is also posted privately in my group, The Dark and Light.

(Warning for occasional language)

Introduction

Glamor magic is the practice of utilizing subtle energy for the art of illusion. While it does not create physical illusions or accomplish impossible feats, it can be useful for very many different things. In essence, glamor magic is a combination of impressions, perceptions, senses, mundane action (depending on the glamor), and emulation.

Usually, spirit workers and travelers are accustomed to using their impressions to be able to sense a spirit or a place. Glamor is taking that perception and altering it by projecting and emulating impressions rather than having them. Even if one is not familiar with sensing and consciously directing energy, glamor can still be practiced. Here are some examples of how they can be done.

Sneaky Sneaky

Most people understand this concept as invisibility in the form of making one less noticeable. Typically, accomplishing this is done through blending personal energy with surrounding energy, silencing, or making something or something obsolete in the minds of others. It can be used for shielding, making people forget things, and for trying to call attention away from you.

Exercise: when you are out and about, notice who is paying attention to what. Gather their perceptions in your mind and play up what they are already noticing while projecting the feeling upon yourself that you are not there. The goal of this exercise to weave yourself into your surroundings until you are markedly less noticed than you were before (be safe with this, as you dont want to be in a busy place where not noticing you can cause injury)

Beacons

This is especially useful for tracking small items. What a beacon glamor does is it makes the energy of person or object loud bright or otherwise easy to find. You have to be careful with this because it will not only be easier for you to detect, but for other people and spirits as well. This is accomplished much in the way of the first, except that you making things more noticeable. Another useful bit about this is that if you are in a group in public, you can make your company/group of friends/etc. beacons so that you can easily find them if you are lost. Coupled with mundane methods of finding people, this will help you gravitate towards the beacon (and they, you, if you make yourself a beacon to them).

Exercise: Take a pen or something else that is small that you easily lose and notice the impression it gives you. Feel this impression growing stronger for a time until the small object has a larger presence. Take some clothes and spread them on the floor, standing away from them, and toss the item into the clothes behind you. Practice turning around and immediately identifying the object or at least gravitating towards it until you are sufficiently tuned to the energy of the beacon. I like to take my hand and, while turning around, point in the direction that feels right to me.

Tuning Bridges

This one is specifically for tuning realms (originally so I could bring spirits into an area that did not resonate with their homes. Alfar typically dont seem to venture out of where theyre comfortable at). This is accomplished by calling up the energy of a specific place and tuning it into the energy of the existing physical place. If you ever noticed that different times can alter the impression a place gives you, then this next exercise will be a lot easier for you.

Exercise : When you have the chance, take in your surroundings. Recall every time that particular place has felt a certain way and then recall what a realm does or would feel like to you. Feel the presence of both places merge in this space you create. Notice how the realm feels more and more like it is there with the physical place. Notice how it manifests for you each time you practice it as it may be different. When you are done, cleanse the space or dismiss the "bridge" you have created. When that is done, you'll begin to notice the place as it was before.

Its Called Acting. Look It Up.

Ever feel like you just aren't prepared to handle a situation as you are now? This is your avenue. I've used this to emulate personality traits to the point where they've become integrated into who I am as it was my method of coping with things. I've found a passion for entertaining people because of it.

Exercise : As with any other glamor, personality traits will also rely on impression and emulation. Take a role model or even just traits you'd like to have but don't already. From here, you can go one of two ways; magical personas (which is described in another thread) and gradual integration. The latter deals with practicing having these traits for multiple periods of time. Either way, you may feel silly when you practice having traits you don't already have. The point of this exercise is to overstep your typical boundaries and explore the self. It's actually useful for a number of things.

Go Away!

This was one of my first shields, actually! It was a simple little thing I put on my door and around my bed and I found everytime it happened, I wasn't obnoxiously woken up by my family members. Similar in the goal of a shield, this type of glamor deters people from entering a space or talking to you if you feel like a hermit sometimes. It can also work for getting a specific person or group of people to not talk to you because sometimes people can be annoying little shits.

Exercise : Determine the target of your glamor (yourself, a place, object, or another person) and begin with noticing their impressions and presence. Project the feeling that people should stay away from the target. You can visualize barbed wire or you could just pour your grumpy emotions around the target so other people will get a "Bahumbag" feeling, which typically makes people go away. You can use anything really, so long as the intent is to deter people from something or someone else.

Who Is the Fairest of Them All?

Many, many, maaaaannny people use this in at least a mundane way. We all like to be at least semi-presentable, right? If you're someone who is a bit more vain about your looks like I am, this is a fun one to do.

Exercise : Look in the mirror and let your presence sink into your mind, visual and all. Look at each of your features, but don't put them down. I don't care if you think you're rotten ugly, the point of this glamor is to feel visually beautiful, or handsome, or whatever you want to go for. Really look at your features and notice how awesome they are. Play with your facial expressions. Look at yourself from different angles. Be playful, fierce, sly, maginificent. Now when you go out or interact with other people, radiate that feeling to other people. Make them notice the you that you notice.

You Dun Fucked Up, Son.

Curses are just plain fun. Especially when you really, really have a reason to curse someone. This glamor involves warping a person's life by altering how other people view them. I will warn you, this could get potentially nasty.

Exercise : Think of a person (either one you know or a certain type of person. Your imagination can run wild with this) and build up an image of them in your head. This will be your "spiritual poppet" that you can warp to your hearts desire. The goal is to use this poppet to alter the perception others have of said person to the point where they react sourly to the target and then bad situations ensue. You can do something like making a beacon out of their actions or traits to let others realize what kind of person they really are or you can just have at it in any creative way you can come up with. Really, there are a lot of possibilities for it.

[alfabok-blog]

Sensation & Direction - A Beginner's Guide to Energy Work

First Notes

Also posted here as well as in my Hall, The Dark and Light. This will also be expanded upon.

Introduction

I find that a lot of animals and children tend to be more psychically in-tune with their surroundings because they don't have society telling them (yet for children) that what they're experiencing is not real. So in essence, I try to get people to re-learn what they already know instead of teaching them something entirely new when it comes to energy sensing and direction.

Cosmology

Everyone's beliefs are different and I encourage people to develop your own understanding of how things work (even if that means you have an understanding of an existing one). To start people out, I talk about the cosmology I was introduced with. Exposure often leads to curiosity and further research.

Physical - Bound by the laws of science, this is where our waking consciousness resides most of the time. Magic and other spiritual matters do not directly change this plane, but can influence it.

Examples of Typical Work - Science, medicinal herbalism, altar building, physical expressions of various traditions.

Etheric = The densest of the subtle planes, many of the realms and other places tend to be tied to physical places. Energy work here is typically harder to do if you're not used to it.

Examples of Typical Work - Remote viewing, projection to physical places, more direct influence of the physical plane (without actually changing it directly: an example is Sillieh's Soul Sprig work), and a portion of deep trances such as mediumship

Astral = Considered a cosmic plane, energy work, in my belief, is mostly done here by most people as it is less dense and easier to work with. Realms and other locations in this plane aren't typically associated with physical places.

Examples of Typical Work - Pathwalking/projection to realms not tied to the physical, magical work to create influence various situations, higher self work, communication with spirits, and various other things.

Some things to keep in mind with this paradigm are concepts like subtle body theory (where we exist in all planes at once) and that each plane is a template for the one next to it (As Above, So Below/Sympathetic magic best explains this as actions in one plane reflect actions in another. This is why we don't need to consciously sense and direct energy to perform our spiritual and magical practices.

Beginning Sensation

When it comes to physical sensation, our sensors fire off information through our nerves to our brain to process and then that is sent back to the original sensors for us to finally consciously know we felt/heard/saw/etc. something. I find that similar is true for sensing energy, so let me explain something;

Our conscious mind is very linear and analytical, so it does not process energy very well on its own. I find that our subconscious processes the energy we sense with our subtle bodies in a way that our conscious minds can understand better. This tends to be why we can better understand energy while in altered states of consciousness (meditation, trance, etc.).

With this in mind, there are two things that I like to remind people to think about when sensing energy: impression and intuition. Going back to the comment about building upon what people already know, I want people to think of a time where they felt there was something "more", like they were not alone or if they had a strong feeling that they should do something and it turned out to be beneficial.

Recognizing that sensation can manifest in any form, people can differentiate between it and mundane sensations by paying attention to their intuition. Everything will have a physical explanation, but if you pay attention to your instincts, you'll most likely develop a stronger sense of energy.

I think it is also important to note that I had troubles sensing energy when I had expectations of what it should feel like. I concentrated and focused too hard, which developed a mental block that I had to overcome. Once I recognized how the sensation of energy felt like to me, it was a lot easier to sense other kinds of energy and further the distinctions in my own mind and thus, my understanding.

To recognize energy on a grander scale, I (and plenty others) like to talk about how everything is connected. I like to get people to try sitting outside and sway a little bit. Recognize that every physical thing and person has a spiritual aspect as well. I then tell them to pay attention to what they feel when they are recognizing this connection. Spend some time getting to recognize the flow of things as, said before, it is different for everyone. It is important (to me, at least) to recognize the flow of energy and when someone connects to something larger than themselves, I feel it helps them realize their subtle body more.

Shaping Energy

The most basic form of shaping energy (in my opinion) is evocation, where one calls up energy outside of the self. Just as the subconscious uses sensations to help us better understand energy consciously, we can use sensations to call up energy. Most often, this is called visualization, but I find it extends to more than just visual sensations (and we'll get that more later). For example, to call up the energy of fire, one can recall the sensation of being around fire. The warmth, the scent, the colors, the feeling fire made a person feel. All that is used to bring up the energy again.

When working with energy, we can utilize different sensations to help direct the flow of energy. It is important for beginners in occultism to realize that anything we do with subtle energy alters the flow of the stream, rather than builds a dam to stop it, so to speak. This means that that, while we have the power/ability to affect change in our lives, we are not the only ones to do so. Literally everything in existence shapes existence.

Examples of shaping internal energy often shows up a lot in martial arts. Expanding on the "experiencing energy larger than yourself" concept, one can learn to direct the flow of energy of their subtle bodies (which may not be the same shape as their physical body) and a common exercise to do this is by utilizing the image of a tree. The subtle body is used as the trunk of a tree; the practitioner then reaches to the core with "roots" and to the cosmos with "branches" and then directs energy flowing from the roots, into the branches, and back down to the roots in a constant, ovular fashion.

Etheric Energy Work - Subtle body exercises that deal with aiding the physical body is one form of etheric work. For example; when one heals the subtle body to reflect in aiding the spiritual body. Another form is to curse another person by affecting their subtle body. To my knowledge, malicious Seidhr falls under this form.

Astral Energy Work - Shielding is a common form, even if not everyone uses it. There are many ways to shield, but the most basic form is to recall a feeling where one feels like they cannot be touched. It is this safe haven formulates a "barrier" of negative or unwanted energies. While it can be adapted to etheric energy work, most people do not (as again, I feel that most people that I've observed in the occult communities actually work more with astral energy work on a conscious level.

[alfabok-blog]

Fortifying the Fleeting Mind

First Notes

This has been posted in my Hall, The Dark and Light, privately as well as on Alfadraumar. 

Introduction

I practice altered states of consciousness very often and I find one technique very useful when I cannot get into a deep trance for one reason or another; fortifying the fleeting mind. This is a technique that uses visions and other sensations much like any other spiritual practice, except that you are visualizing yourself writing this down for later to remember key points of an experience. I find this most useful for people who are forgetful (a la me), need to sort their thoughts (a la me), have trouble entering trance, or have trouble remembering their dreams. Typical meditation has one clearing their mind, but this technique actually uses that barrage of thoughts that just will not seem to go away and collects them in a manner useful for later.

The Technique

Begin with starting a mundane task that is automatic for you that does not require your full attention (for safety reasons); this can be clearing clutter, washing or rinsing the dishes, folding laundry, sorting books, or anything else you do that is a "mindless task" such as rearranging pencils in front of you. The point is to be engaged while letting your mind wander instead of imposing strict focus on it.

As the thoughts come in, think about whatever you want or let your mind do its own thing. When you think of something you want to keep because of its profoundness or it is something you can build on later, picture yourself writing this idea down. See yourself holding a writing utensil and inscribing the thought on paper. Let the visual of the inscribed thought sink in for a moment and then continue as you were, letting the thoughts swirl and take shape in your mind. Repeat this process until your task is done or until you feel that the thought should be recorded physically. Go over each time that you inscribed a thought and let each one flow back to your mind until you remember all or most of them (don't feel badly if you don't right away. I didn't at first).

You can save this memory for later if you cannot physically record your inscriptions right away or you can get onto recording them right away (this is advised if you are just beginning this practice and wish to develop it before).

How It Works

Fleeting thoughts come and go really fast and often times, we cannot latch onto them because we are in an altered state such as trance or hypnogogia/hypnopompia (falling asleep and waking up, respectively) or we are too distracted and busy with mundane tasks to solidify our thoughts (this actually happens on a daily basis for me). When we have profound experiences, they stand out in our subconscious; coupled with repetitive visualization, we are more likely to remember the thoughts we inscribed on our mental notepads because these catch the attention of our subconscious. I have seen the subconscious described as a two year old that needs something bright, or melodic, or loud, or jingly to keep their attention and I actually find this true. When we work with rituals, it catches the attention of our subconscious, which tends to make them more profound for us because the subconscious is what houses our feelings, instincts, and other concepts that are abstract to the conscious mind.

When you remember these mental notes, often you will remember the surrounding thoughts that are typically more fleeting, such as remembering a sweet scent and warm feeling when you recall the image of a cozy house (whereas that scent and feeling would not have been brought to the forefront of your mind otherwise). It is through this that you are slowly building up these fleeting thoughts to be more profound and solidified in your mind by stringing them together with thoughts that are already profound for you.

Adaptations

Using this technique can be practiced at first while in waking consciousness and then later in a state of waking up to help build memory for dreams. It can also be used in other, deeper altered states of consciousness to recall events from trance (they can be spiritual or psychological in nature. We just have to know the difference between something purely mundane and something spiritual as well as mundane and often times, that distinction is made with recognition of the latter as well as paying attention to instincts and base feelings while a thought is occurring).

[alfabok-blog]

Forms of Dream Work

- and how I go about them.

First Notes

This is not complete and I will expand on this (and perhaps fully re-write it) as time goes by. It was originally posted privately in my Hall, The Dark and Light.

Recall

One of the most common things mentioned for this is having a dream journal, but sometimes it takes more to remember dreams. For me, something as simple as turning my head can jerk my awareness out of remembering, so when I wake up, I like to stay as I am and act as if I am still experiencing the dream. Concentrating too hard on trying to remember can cause a mental block, so it is best to let things happen naturally (let it flow, let it floow, I am one with the dream and miiind).

Once you are awake enough to do anything besides open your eyes and still retain your slumbered experiences, there are a number of mnemonic devices you can use in addition to jotting down notes. What I like to do is make sure I at least mentally go through my dream as if I were telling it to someone else. You can even be dramatic and imagine sitting around a fire and using exaggerated movements to captivate your audience. It is completely natural to remember things at later, seemingly random times.

Lucidity

Probably the most sought after dream work technique and probably one of the least important to me; this is where you have partial to full control over your dream. Many sources will tell you about sleeping a certain amount of time, waking, and then resting and all this other complicated crap I never did. My mother taught me how to lucid dream as a child by telling me to remember I'm dreaming while I am in a dream state. My first dream with such control was only partial and it took years of gradual practice to steadily lucid dream, so it's okay if you don't start to get results right away.

Speaking of which, it's okay to not lucid dream or only partially lucid dream. While you can get spiritual communication, projection (which I consider iffy in correlation to lucid dreaming), and ritual work done this way, there are practices that do not involve having control over anything in your dreams; psychical omens, dream reentry, and interpretation.

Reentry

This is a technique that utilizes trance to enter the dreamworld or recall a dream while in a waking state (I have found this technique in one book on Australian Aboriginal practice and nowhere else, however, I use it as a standalone technique; hence the double meaning). It can be used in the same manners as lucid dreaming as well as for deeper insight in the form of 'reliving the dream' and being able to ask questions to people, places, and objects that you might not have been able to before (it can also be ideal for people wanting more personal meanings for interpretation in a state closer to the waking conscious state and therefore possibly easier to understand).

As for how to do it, I would suggest utilizing whatever technique for entering trance fits best for you as well as remembering the dream. As I said before, let it flow and recall it as if you were still experiencing it to minimalize mental blockages.

Walking

There are two ways to go about dream walking and both involve your consciousness (sometimes spirit) entering another person's dream. The first way is synchronicity where both parties involved have the same dream and this could be due to higher selves communicating with each other, riding the same energy tide; you name it, it's probably a possibility. The second utilizes lucid dreaming and does not require both parties doing things to happen.

This is arguable one of the hardest dream work techniques as not everyone can recognize when it happens if it does happen. I don't have personal experience with this one, so it may be easier for others (different people have different strengths and what not). What I do know is that any of the other dream work techniques and uses can be utilized alongside dream walking if they have the conscious ability to do so.

Inspiration

I shall close the initial post of this thread with one of my core values; inspiration (from dreams in this case). While not all dreams are spiritually and contextually relevant, they can be utilized as places and concepts to visit again when not dream working. An example is visualizing a place from a dream while meditating, calming down, evoking emotion, or creating space to work with spirits (the list is endless, really).

As an artist, I utilize almost every aspect of my dreams whenever I can and in whatever way. It is my hope that others will be able to do so as well.

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Welcome To Alfabok

I am the user alfadraumar and this is a content only side blog (with a side of replying to conversations I feel are relevant).