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Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitations is based on experience of the past. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or what he may do. — Aleister Crowley, Magick
Research and experience thus far regarding psychedelic mushrooms
I did a post on how my research on psychedelic mushrooms has been going and where my plans will take me next. It's available on Patreon at the $1 tier. Enjoy it! Also, here's a little drawing of a mushroom dude.
it would be so fucking embarrassing if we meet aliens and they are like wow you guys have the same technology as we did 300 gyroaays (unit of time) ago, that's awesome. and we are like wooo that's so cool and they are like yeah so what are your thoughts on electrons and glorons and we just like missed glorons and they are so important and easy to discover but we missed it and have eben fuccking around and they laigh at our shitty science built around the gaping wound that is the absence of glorons
there's a short story I read where all the aliens have like, renaissance technology at best, except they all discovered "contragravity" around the discovery time of the fulcrum or pulley. we're the idiots inventing rocket science because we never figured out that wood can float in space the same way a wooden boat can float on water.
@bitsow do you know what the story was?
The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove!
The Failure of Artificial Demonic Intelligence
I was watching the AI space pretty early on because of the talk it was generating in some occult and demonology circles. Basically mages were talking about setting up a large learning model that would become the intelligence of an existing or created magical entity. Ideally they could use the LLM to talk to the mage, and the mage could give the spirit instructions on doing jobs for the mage.
And did this work? Well, I haven't heard of any results worth mentioning. Did some LLMs say some cryptic or interesting things at various times? Yes. Has anyone ever produced a convincing conversation between a human mage and a spirit/demon that was had via a LLM? Not that I've ever read.
What is the limitation, here? I think the problem is that LLM-style AI is anti-spirit, anti-demon. Anti-telepathy. It is engineered to only deliver results from the material it is fed and to produce results that are very normal-seeming to most humans. This means that a demon us less using fridge magnet poetry and more having to create meaningful communication from 5 random sentences clipped out of an encyclopedia article about the topic that's being discussed. Demons aren't being given a palette of words to pick from. The programming forces them to plagiarize and act less "spooky."
Even giving the prompt to "talk like a demonic being, unlike humanity in its thinking" is just going to give your demon a selection of sentences and speaking patterns that are based on an already-existing work that would basically be a piece of fiction a human wrote that had a similar premise to what you typed into the LLM AI. It's going to be a blend of several pieces of material that you've already fed into the library. Nothing original will come out.
And, well, if you do any type of spirit communication you know that they can be quite articulate via divination, telepathy, reality events, animal behavior changes, songs on the radio... and some of those things require already-existing material! But a real tarot reading will be better than an AI generating a tarot reading based on, say, 50,000 tarot readings, because a real tarot reading will have cards or an app interacting with you in the reality you want information about. The LLM AI will just try to give you results that sound like most of the tarot readings in its database. Worse, you could prompt it to say "give me a positive reading" and it would just do that, just tell you something positive that had nothing to do with your future. What if you need to be warned about something? Tarot cards could do that. An AI will just tell you more of the same of what it draws from.
Spirits can talk into your head, can possess people, even. Can cause people to hear voices. They can communicate all sorts of things via these abilities. It sort of proves they exist, in fact. But an AI will just spit out more of what it's been fed, and it'll always do it every time you ask. It won't stop and say "actually there's no spirit here so I have no output." It'll lie and pretend something is there and always give you the results it can copy out of its own database. It can't be smart for you.
And, if you work with spirits a lot, you probably know that only you can be smart for you. Which brings me to the other side of the demon AI--can you use it to give a spirit instructions and get the spirit to follow said instructions?
The answer is... why would you go through that much trouble to tell a spirit something when you can just... tell a spirit something? It is so much trouble to set up an LLM that you can just give a spirit instructions in the time it takes to do all that. Just TALK OUT LOUD or in your head or even write it down! The spirit can hear you! Stop making this more complicated than it needs to be!
Tip jar is here!
There was a project where someone "generated" a bunch of "new" demons based on the Goetia and other texts, with names and sigils and descriptions, and i got asked at the time if i was going to work with them. And i was noncommittal because i thought it might be interesting. But i never did it. I was too busy interacting with real demons that already existed and i knew i would get results from and also i already cared about them. It was like if someone asked me if I would like to talk to chatGPT instead of a real person i was already friends with. Like... maybe if the friend is busy, but even then... I'll probably wait.
The Failure of Artificial Demonic Intelligence
I was watching the AI space pretty early on because of the talk it was generating in some occult and demonology circles. Basically mages were talking about setting up a large learning model that would become the intelligence of an existing or created magical entity. Ideally they could use the LLM to talk to the mage, and the mage could give the spirit instructions on doing jobs for the mage.
And did this work? Well, I haven't heard of any results worth mentioning. Did some LLMs say some cryptic or interesting things at various times? Yes. Has anyone ever produced a convincing conversation between a human mage and a spirit/demon that was had via a LLM? Not that I've ever read.
What is the limitation, here? I think the problem is that LLM-style AI is anti-spirit, anti-demon. Anti-telepathy. It is engineered to only deliver results from the material it is fed and to produce results that are very normal-seeming to most humans. This means that a demon us less using fridge magnet poetry and more having to create meaningful communication from 5 random sentences clipped out of an encyclopedia article about the topic that's being discussed. Demons aren't being given a palette of words to pick from. The programming forces them to plagiarize and act less "spooky."
Even giving the prompt to "talk like a demonic being, unlike humanity in its thinking" is just going to give your demon a selection of sentences and speaking patterns that are based on an already-existing work that would basically be a piece of fiction a human wrote that had a similar premise to what you typed into the LLM AI. It's going to be a blend of several pieces of material that you've already fed into the library. Nothing original will come out.
And, well, if you do any type of spirit communication you know that they can be quite articulate via divination, telepathy, reality events, animal behavior changes, songs on the radio... and some of those things require already-existing material! But a real tarot reading will be better than an AI generating a tarot reading based on, say, 50,000 tarot readings, because a real tarot reading will have cards or an app interacting with you in the reality you want information about. The LLM AI will just try to give you results that sound like most of the tarot readings in its database. Worse, you could prompt it to say "give me a positive reading" and it would just do that, just tell you something positive that had nothing to do with your future. What if you need to be warned about something? Tarot cards could do that. An AI will just tell you more of the same of what it draws from.
Spirits can talk into your head, can possess people, even. Can cause people to hear voices. They can communicate all sorts of things via these abilities. It sort of proves they exist, in fact. But an AI will just spit out more of what it's been fed, and it'll always do it every time you ask. It won't stop and say "actually there's no spirit here so I have no output." It'll lie and pretend something is there and always give you the results it can copy out of its own database. It can't be smart for you.
And, if you work with spirits a lot, you probably know that only you can be smart for you. Which brings me to the other side of the demon AI--can you use it to give a spirit instructions and get the spirit to follow said instructions?
The answer is... why would you go through that much trouble to tell a spirit something when you can just... tell a spirit something? It is so much trouble to set up an LLM that you can just give a spirit instructions in the time it takes to do all that. Just TALK OUT LOUD or in your head or even write it down! The spirit can hear you! Stop making this more complicated than it needs to be!
Tip jar is here!
Cicada, Stages of Conventionalization
Hugo Froelich, Keramic Studio Magazine, 1905
How I'm living with a hole in my head: everything you wanted to know about it!
Hello, I'm Felix Warren and I live with a hole in my head. I also make my living from online tips, so here's a link to my tip jar. How am I doing both of those things? Read on and you will learn.
How do you have a hole in your head, Felix?
That's a great question. I have had a hole in my head since about the age of four. I was in a car accident in the early 80s, which due to laws and regulations at the time put me in the passenger seat of a pick-up truck during a head-on collision with another vehicle. My head hit the dash or the windshield or, you know, something up in the front of the truck. I don't really remember and no one's told me as many of the details as I would like to know, so, as anyone with a hole in their head would say, I'm somewhat of an unreliable narrator.
Anyway, after they took me to the hospital, they basically saw I had a large fracture in my skull, around where my hairline was, and they kinda... wedge the pieces back where they should be, sewed it all up, and called it good for the next... uh, forever. I had an MRI in 2022 for disability purposes which showed me my left forebrain has a two centimeter region in it that's just dead tissue and uh... whatever else. Like that's what's left in that area! Just a hole in my head!
Dude. Didn't someone check up on that sometime before like thirty years went by?
My mother brought me to a neurologist when I was about fourteen or fifteen and I was getting regular migraines, seeing tunnel vision and stars when standing up in P.E., and generally having Trouble With Life. The neurologist diagnosed me with migraines and prescribed me 600 milligram ibuprofen, and I got to sit out of P.E. and other physical activities when I had a headache. This did, essentially, nothing for my condition. I do recall having an MRI when this happened but I do not know the results.
Wait. I'm getting the idea that your parents were not very invested in your health and medical welfare.
Yeah my father is a deadbeat and my mother was the driver who head-oned into the other car, so neither have been very proactive in followups. My mother minimized the pain and still forced me to play soccer for the school team until I changed schools to a small school where they didn't have their own sports teams. Not because she was trying to get me out of sports, mind. She said I could play for a local school in town that I didn't even go to.
Is your mother like... homicidal?
Yeah. But anyway that's why I haven't had much help on this from the family side of things, and why I had to do the research on this into my adulthood starting a few years ago, because in 2020 my conditions got so bad I couldn't work a day job anymore. So yeah, you've gotten some explanations on how I got here but let me break down what it's like to LIVE with this head injury.
What's it like to live with that head injury?
There are two factors I deal with when it comes to the hole in my head. One is the occasional headaches which disrupt everything in my life because there's too much pain to function. They happen in response to incredible stress or to factors such as barometric pressure and U.V. light exposure. The second factor I deal with is permanently not having a piece of my left forebrain tissue. That means that at all times I face cognition challenges or cognition differences from other people. The left forebrain does logic stuff as well as language and communication skills, so, typing this is hard! But I like writing so I do it anyway.
I want to get into the headaches later, and talk more about the cognition stuff now. So, the cognition stuff.
The cognition stuff?
Yeah, the cognition stuff. I basically just don't brain like other people do. It's honestly hard to figure out how other people brain because I've been doing the brain damage gig since I was 4 years old, and I don't remember anything before that, so this has sort of been MY normal all my life. And my normal all my life is that cognition is a moving bar. Sometimes I can tell you the isotopes of Uranium, Plutonium, Neptunium and etc in the decay chain that powers regular nuclear fission in nuclear power reactors, and sometimes I can't make lists in my head that are longer than 2 items. I don't get to pick when it's one or the other.
A lot of it depends on stamina and fatigue. If it's a day I haven't done a lot of cognition yet, I can definitely tell you the history of the cold war as it relates to the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon presidencies. If I've been working super hard on cognition already then instead I'll have trouble telling which side of the street I should be catching the bus on. This has been really great at day jobs, because for a couple weeks I'd construct a new system for websites where the code checks out super clean and everything worky-worky, and then for three days I wouldn't be able to do anything besides search stackoverflow for code help, blink at the community's most commonly accepted answers, and then be completely unable to type any code. This was extremely difficult to explain to my supervisors, especially since explaining things is a skill that uses a lot of equipment located in the left forebrain.
I think the most difficult part is that since sometimes I am capable of really squeezing this melon of mine for info and ideas, I know I CAN do it, and I WANT to do it all the time! I do not want to do it only some of the time! When I can't do higher cognition stuff, I usually still WANT to, and I get very bored because I like it when brain go fast. I'll get a book and have to stop halfway in because my brain just stops being able to read it, and I'll want to know what's in the rest of the book, but I'll have to wait until my brain gets enough gas again because it slow slow bad brain no read no input words. I am a voracious reader but sometimes I just can't do it.
How do you get through the times when you can't think?
Ugggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggh. I try to take a nap. I watch other people play video games on youtube. I listen to music. Sometimes I do art and sometimes I don't even or can't even or won't even do art. Arrrrrrgh!!!!!
Anyway I guess we can talk about the pain now.
So what are those headaches like?
The scar where the fracture happens often hurts, and sometimes the hole in my head hurts. Like, I can feel where in my left forebrain the dead tissue is because that area... it just feels weirdly sore and tingly inside. Often the top of my head hurts, due to pressure or my scalp being tight. Bloodflow under my scalp is really... a situation. Let's call it a situation.
Besides pain in my head from the injury, I often get pain from U.V. light exposure. Fluorescent lights as well as sunlight do this. I wear U.V. blocking sunglasses to cope with this and otherwise try to avoid... well, light. This means I don't have a whole lot of activities I can do when this flares up for me. Sometimes I can listen to audiobooks or music. Honestly I prefer to stand in the shower with the lights off and let the sensations drown out the different types of pain I feel.
When I close my eyes I often see throbbing light shows where colors radiate and move, and sometimes I just watch those for awhile with my eyes shut. Sometimes I even try to draw them. Sometimes they make me feel nauseous and I try to focus on other things using meditation techniques. Sometimes I solve math problems in my head or, when my head can't do math because it's a bad brain day, I try to work out stuff for fiction stories I write, or just imagine what nuclear fission decay could be depicted as metaphorically in art. Sometimes I just pet my cat and can't think about anything besides focusing on that physical sensation.
Well, that's what it's like to live with a hole in my head. If you learned something, please consider tipping me. If you do, my life improves, which I enjoy. Also my cat would appreciate it. Thank you.
A Written Exchange Between a Magus and His Holy Guardian Angel
Felix S. Warren, Magus:
So uh congrats us for successfully surviving HGAing? Livin La Vida Loca is playing. It's hard to write this part. I think we're still working on it? Sandalphon do you have advice on this stuff or are you just experiencing it? I know we didn't do this the "right" way and it was unexpected. I didn't know [a bunch of personal stuff he found out recently that doesn't matter in a public article]. I didn't know. Knowing is hard. I don't understand. Do you understand anything? Or are you like me?
Apparently all I have are questions. I don't want to overwhelm you. I'm interested in your experience too. Please tell me anything you can. No one talks about the angel's POV in these things, they're too busy claiming they're their own HGA.
Sandalphon, Holy Guardian Angel:
¡Hola, mi amigo! It's good to speak with you. Knowledge and conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel can come in a lot of forms and it's important to write to each other. I appreciate the questions. You know I come at this from a more human point of view, you got Sandalphon, after all. An angel that 'ascended' from being human. It's important to have that human connection between us, to not overlook what we both have and have always had as part of us. I think the point of us going through the HGA rite in the way we did was so that you could more publicly show people what it is you went through and what you go through now, and what your husband also goes through.
You can read the rest of Sandalphon's advice on Patreon!
Tip Felix on ko-fi to publish the article here on MPV!
Dos y Dos - Page 41
Really burying the lede here on what is Sex Corps, right? What is that? Miguel just barely mentions it before going into all this nuclear apocalyptic stu--oh shit. Look at that! He has a prototype Virtual Boy!
Feliz Navidad! 🎄☢️🎄
Okay. I normally don't talk much about behind-the-scenes of Dos y Dos. BUT I GOTTA SHARE THIS STORY!!!!
So, it's pretty well established by now that I, Tyler, am not always the one at the controls of my meat suit. Some people call it possession, others call it channelling, I just go with a "someone else is piloting the gundam" sort of vibe.
SO! Miguel-in-Felix, as the artist behind the page, is working on this page at a local coffee shop in mid-late November, and ELIGOS KING OF SCRIBES is hanging out with him. In my body. Cause why would he sit around as a disembodied spirit when he could just kinda *voop* into my body and actually take sips of Miguel's coffee when Miguel's not looking? Except nobody got coffee because Miguel did a weird kind of flail and BOOM! Coffee all over the page!!!!!!! WHILE IT'S STILL IN THE SKETCHBOOK!!!!!!!!!!
He was working in watercolor pens, so the colors immediately start to bleed. Miguel is full on panicking, two girls who have been kinda watching from a diagonal angle gasp at the destruction, but Eligos is so calm. He stands up, directs Miguel to put the sketchbook on the ground, talks him through how to pull the page out without spilling too much coffee on everything else, then tells him to put it on the tiled floor and take the sketchbook to the table to blot the rest of the pages. Eligos then stands over the page, studying the way the coffee is flowing. Suddenly, he bends down, grasps the two bottom corners and ZWIPS the page up and away from the coffee in a way that leaves all the bleeding ink in a page-shaped puddle of coffee on the floor. The two girls gasp again in shock and awe while he sets the page on the table to dry out, then he locates the cleaning spray and paper towels and CLEANS THE FUCKING COFFEE OFF THE FLOOR HIMSELF. (No employee offered to help, or even said much of anything, btw, which was WEIRD.)
Eligos then sat back down, helped Miguel calm down and realize nothing else in the sketchbook was ruined, and then helped Miguel calm down again as he realized that the coffee stains was the exact shade of brown wash he was wanting to do on the page.
I'm a part of the coolest religion ever!
Hey, this is really cool to know and we wanna make sure you see it! It's about the making of the page and what happened while it was being drawn and it's by Felix's husband!
Speaking a bit from the end of the body of the author:
So, this page. This effing page. I want to show you what it looked like after the coffee dumped on it and it was cleaned up and dried but before the colors on it were finished off:
You can see which colors it got and what it left behind. The tiny bit of blue in the hair is new work since the spill happened. And then the rest of the work was done and you see the results of that in the final. Anyway, it's amazing how many colors stayed, how the top third basically just didn't get hit. THE COFFEE STOPPED AT THE STOP SIGN.
THE SPILLED COFFEE STOPPED AT THE STOP SIGN.
THIS IS WHAT IT IS LIKE TO DRAW A PSYCHIC COMIC.
Hey someone look at this shit. Look at this shit happening. Someone notice and don't just blink and look away. Notice and realize psychic ability is real and is happening all the time in all directions.
IF YOU WATCH OUR SPACES YOU WILL SEE PSYCHIC ACTIVITY DEMONSTRATED AT EVERY LEVEL.
If you tip us on ko-fi we will do this even more!
Comparing My Magical Journals With My Husband's Journals from a Parallel World
This post was brought to you by awesome people on Ko-Fi and Patreon.
We could have been doing anything, my husband and I. Experiencing anything, anywhere and with anyone. We were already trying to play off of each other for November, my esoteric posts responding and being responded to by his posts about his own psychic and spiritual experiences. The idea was that we respond to each other during a month of spiritual observance of our shared religion, one I started creating in 1999 and since then have grown with the help of my husband.
Well, the month of November got hijacked during about the last third of it, so we weren't able to write our coordinated articles like we planned to. We weren't able to do anything like we wanted or planned to. But for all our trying, we did end up with something for the effort: we somehow managed to synchronize in a way that meant we've been keeping parallel journaling experiences since then through the manifestation of some incredibly unexpected esoteric phenomena. And also some curses. Some big fat evil curses. We documented all of that automatically, and it was kind of like running the cameras in a haunted house while Dracula gets into a pottery-throwing fight with three ghosts and a poltergeist. Worthy of video capture, but nothing you'd ever want to film yourself. It was like getting firsthand footage of an F-5 level tornado with a shoulder-held camcorder while running backwards.
I definitely got hit by flying objects a few times.
I've really been interested in my husband's experiences of spiritual life when around me and my fucking demonic shenanigans. I was surprised by how fast he yes-and-ed to working with demons in a system that was documented by no one but my own injured-during-preschool-years erisian occultist brain. I was surprised by how fully he experienced things so quickly. I've had people hang around me, hang ONTO me vampirically, who've pretended to understand the system I helped start and then tried to pick its bones over for all they could take before the damn thing had even become a dead religion. So to see him use the religion to pick himself up off the ground from, to raise himself up with... how fabulous! I'd sure like to track that in an easily-readable, sanity-confirming way.
TOO BAD FOR ME BECAUSE RELIGION AND SCIENCE AREN'T THE SAME THING.
Oh yeah, it's all been scientific. Oh yeah, all the things have been 'possible.' "Possible." '''Possible.''' That doesn't make them actually affirm your belief that science is the most powerful way of interacting with the universe, that logic always prevails, that causality will always be understandable... you know, it doesn't affirm any of your beliefs that are STUPID. I guess what I've been seeing the most in my husband's experience, and his creative work during the duration of all this, is all the proof that what I have been doing is REAL and that it can do ANYTHING, but in like... just the least expected ways possible.
I'm not sure WHY I don't expect some of these things to happen. I'm not sure why I expect other things to happen. I'm not sure what's normal to happen at all. To be honest, I didn't expect marriage to affect religion nearly as much as it has already, and is now. I grew up in the same house as two married people who didn't love each other and fought around me, and sometimes THROUGH me, all the time. I didn't even get raised by them so much as just had to put up with being around them until I finally left home for a boarding high school. Marriage isn't just a mystery to me, it's incomprehensible.
So really, I have no idea what's going on. I have absolutely no idea what's going on. But hey, here's a view from the ground floor of House Chaos, if you want to know what it looks like. All I can do sometimes is ask my husband for clarity.
First of all, have you heard of the ritual to gain Knowledge and Conversation of Your Holy Guardian Angel? HGA for short? Well it's kind of famous in occult circles, kind of something a lot of high-level occultists like to do and low-level occultists like to try and mid-level occultists try to claim they already did when they were sixteen. Well, I didn't do exactly that and neither did my husband. But the HGA ritual is very specific about how you should interact around your spouse (ASSUMED TO BE YOUR WIFE, IT IS VERY HETERO AND CIS) and states that you basically can't share a bed during a certain period. Or things happen. That you do not want. Because your spouse will become possessed by an entity in a way that will complicate your spiritual life, your marriage, and MAYBE the very pseudostructures of the universe.
Well anyway that's not what we did per se but we have been channeling a lot of demons, sometimes automatically, because apparently in this religion the demons you work with just show up in your life as particular people you interact with, whether intended or accidental. And also you can channel them on purpose. And also they can live your life for you for awhile. And that's pretty cool and oh boy have we been journaling this in a completely parallel yet entirely separate manner.
So, we both sign and date and timestamp most of our journal entries, writings and drawings. This means I can easily compare what entries were during the same experience, or conversely, compare what different times similar experiences were experienced at. Now, getting together the journals all in one place where I can compare and contrast them all and take notes and make conclusions... that's been difficult. Because for one, even the notes on the experience themselves are hard to keep organized. Tyler has at least three different main journals/notebooks/note stashes of an experience he had over the course of a week. In that same span of time, I generated art and notes in at least four different sketchbooks. Neither of us planned this, and thus neither of us was consciously trying to make this more complicated or even less complicated than it needed to be. When you generate notes on a large-scale magical/spiritual/psychic act, those notes become in themselves part of that large-scale work. And they get weird.
They automatically shuffle themselves around and skip pages to obscure something and get lost so you have to use another book and the pens get lost so you have to work in brush ink and then the cover of one journal rips off so now the first page is the cover and that Means Something Now and you tucked the bus passes into that back pocket and now your bus trip is itself haunted several more times over than any bus trip you've ever had before. Your receipt for the groceries you bought during the event to keep you going and keep you from falling over has a cryptic note that makes sense eight years later when you find it randomly bookmarking your largest tome on herbalism. There is a folder full of medical paperwork that is not only Legally Significant but has notes on mystical creatures and their correspondences with colors and heraldry that you will be meditating on for at least half a year going forward.
Reading this stuff is intense. The thing about taking notes during a mystical event is that it's already an incredible difficult act. To be fully immersed in a ritual, you have to put down your pen and your notebook and do the damn ritual. The opportunities for fresh observations from one's time during a ritual are very few and usually the experience must be journaled hours or even days later. Some memories of mystical experiences even present themselves before the ritual, so in some cases we had documented things for enough years back that we could match up some precog that was signalling the past versions of us to really show up for something. Now, reading this stuff is even worse when you're still experiencing the stuff.
An intense ritual experience is already a multi-dimensional affair during which you likely, due to the physical place you are being kept inside of while doing a major psychic work, are using every part of your brain possible and accessible to process as much as you can but are still getting far more input than you'll ever be able to take in. If you've ever wondered, have I missed important parts of a ritual, did I not concentrate correctly during them: the answer is that no one can truly concentrate on any of this stuff. I fell asleep three times just trying to write this paragraph. I misspelled "times" TWICE before getting it right.
So yeah imagine reading just one of the notebooks that Tyler or I wrote in and reading maybe ten pages of it and then imagine trying to read a normal thing like, the weather. And then see how you feel about whether that weather chart is accurate or not. Because once there's multi-dimensional material in your brain, it affects everything inside and outside of your head. There's emotions you can't understand and probably never will have an understanding of that will try to process themselves and make you have weird ideas about the number four and its regularity in the license plates of the cars that pass you by for the next eight days. And then some deity you've never heard of is going to send you a firm signal that they've got your back and a random person you meet will know exactly what it is you're looking for and tell you exactly where to find it, and then you do a drawing of your favorite video game character and it turns out to be an illustration of one of your partners' dreams last night. And then a bird comes by and lands on the car mirror you're staring at right as the radio advances to the next song and three emergency vehicles tear down the road with sirens wailing to the exact beat of whatever's playing on Spotify right now. And yeah, that's just what happens when you idly try to take pictures of the ritual with your camera phone while data and wifi are still turned on.
The project: I will go through at least three of my husbands' journals/folders he made during this last experience. I will compare them to my sketchbook art and social media posts, both of which are dated and timestamped. I will see how many times we wrote about two angles of the same event. I will see how many events happened to us at different times. I will track colors. I will track names. I will track behaviors. I will report back with what I find.
Until then, please feel free to make this post (probably a series of posts, to be honest) appear faster by sponsoring a post on this blog! The more scratch I have to work with, the easier it is to reserve a space with lots of table room and organization supplies. I also have commissions available of both character and spirit art, and when my husband isn't creating seven-dimensional journals he crochets and sells hats! Take a look at what we've got! Check me out on Patreon! And look forward to the future, when you will finally be able to pay for food and services with pure dream currency. Whoops, that was too far into the future. Gotta stop reading this journal. It's got a buzz.
See you in the notes!
Rich Mage, Poor Mage
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One thing you learn really quickly when you get into magick, witchcraft, or any kind of magery is Money Magic. Not because you need to or because it works, but because magical practicioners just can't ever stop talking about how they can or can't make money with magic, angels, spirits, ancestor work, tarot, kabbala, psychic powers or whatnot. Even if you don't care about making money with your psychic and magical abilities, or with the power of whatever deific forces you're supposedly aligned with, you can't avoid the topic. It will usually come up first.
It's not hard to imagine why people would want to make money using magick. Of course everyone wants to be more well-off and have more spending power. It assures not just pleasure and fun but also safety and security. Having more ability to make money... most people just want that by default, especially in this day and age.
But the desire for money hides the other very important question: how much does it COST to be a mage? How much does it COST to channel spirits? How much does it COST to have a deep spiritual practice with holidays and regular services? How much does it COST to acquire ritual and altar tools for a certain tradition? Most of all, does the COST of a tradition prevent a person from being able to pursue a practice in that tradition?
Can you actually pursue a faith you can't afford, and when you do that, what are the results, and maybe the consequences? Is it even WORTH pursuing an expensive faith? Do gods care how much you spend on your religion? If you sincerely and devoutly follow a faith, will that faith provide you with an expense account so you can best follow it that covers all the offerings and supplies and space needed?
Turns out, if you end up poor enough while practicing spirituality at a deep level, you can find out in real-time! That has been the going experiment in my magical household for a while, in fact. Half a year ago, myself and my husband became homeless while deeply involved in spiritual practices. This meant certain plans for holidays and how we celebrate them had to be completely changed because all of our usual ways of celebrating and inviting the spiritual world into our lives involved more expense than we were able to expend once we were evicted and living in a car.
Spiritual practices are very habitual. The whole idea of a "practice" is that you do it over and over, regularly, on a schedule, with intent towards growth. If you've been doing and using the same things in your practice for months or even years, you're going to automatically expect to rely on those same things going forward, even if you don't have them. Used to burning incense for your offerings? When you don't have it, your rituals and practices will seem bare and incomplete, because to your senses that incense has become a necessary part of the experience. What happens when you can't afford incense or you can't find it to buy? Do you replace it with something cheaper--videos of incense burning, reusable scented items, photos of incense sticks on your cell phone, pokemon incense from Pokemon GO? Or do you have to change everything it is you're doing now that you can't afford this one component?
With the incense the big question is: what is the component that is necessary to your practice, maybe to your spirits? Was it the smell, the color of the smoke, the herbalism of the incense, how much the spirits and deities like it, its quality, or its consitent availability? These are all different reasons to use incense. If the deity wants the incense then you definitely need to find out what else they'd accept or give a firm signal to them that you need assistance in acquiring their favored offering. Sometimes a drop in offering quality is in fact the signal deities and spirits need to understand that you are struggling financially.
Of course, if you never have problems with money then you'll probably never learn all the ways that spirits can communicate to you about money troubles. You might get a lot of investment advice from spirits but you probably won't get as much day to day assistance with affording things because you'll never need it... and you'll probably not get very familiar with the aspects of the spirits that help with monetary struggle. Essentially, if you don't experience struggle in some area with your spirits and deities and guides, you'll never learn how it is they assist people in struggle and just how much power and ability they have in that area. And if you never will need that knowledge, maybe there's no great loss here. If you're doing well financially then your deity may be teaching you about charity and supporting other financially.
And if you're not doing well financially, you'll learn way more about receiving charity than giving it. For that duration, at least. You may learn about where your money goes when you donate it to certain organizations, and what happens to people who receive assistance through those organizations, because now you're experiencing that part first-hand. Maybe later in life when circumstances change, you'll be able to apply that knowledge from the giving and assisting side of the equation. Surely you'll be able to more wisely support people in need of assistance when you understand better what they need.
But will you be able to continue all of your magical practices while you're in dire financial straits? Sure, if you're willing to change how you do things. If you aren't, you need to be willing to ask for help. And when you get answers to those asks, you need to do something with those answers.
Ancestors wanna help? They're sending signals on how? Listen to their signals and do what you do according to the communications you receive. Whatever they teach you can be useful for the rest of your life. Parishioners of your church want to assist? Make sure to communicate with them about what your needs are and how they can coordinate with you so the assistance can do the most for you. Whatever they learn from you will be invaluable when they assist others in the future. What you learn will teach you very important things about their beliefs and their congregation. Remember that the assistance that comes from one area of influence will be governed by different rules than the assistance that comes from another. Your church and your ancestors probably play very different games with very different rules. You DON'T want to get them mixed up!
Will all of reality rearrange itself to immediately solve all of your woes? Well, watch what it does, because it can. What timing and causality it chooses to do this in is the really difficult aspect. Knowing the future is a constant problem humanity is solving. Divination and signs can help guide you to understand how long things will last. Timing is especially difficult. Often when we've received assistance there wasn't a detailed ahead-of-time assurance that things would be okay at an exact time and exactly how that assitance would show up. Instead things were more vague and subtle, or blatantly inignorable but still not very detailed at all. Usually signs and divination are there to provide one, very important service: telling you whether to keep going as you are and hold out hope, or to change what you're doing in order to be able to go forward in a possibly-different way. Between those two choices are many variations on causality. If you're getting assistance from multiple areas then you may even get conflicting signals.
Of course, you've probably experienced when there's conflict between different forces in your life. Two different pantheons may have totally different ideas about how to help you, and for some of them, credit for giving the assistance that helped you out of the situation may be VERY important. You may have to bridge the communication gap between them so they can learn to help you together. This may involve inventing your own system to bridge that gap. You may end up doing FAR MORE work towards that sort of integration because you NEEDED to do that work. Those deities and spirits may end up doing far more work together BECAUSE you needed their combined assistance. Sometimes without a pressing reason for things to happen, no one learns what is possible and certain things are never achieved. Don't necessarily go with "everything happens for a reason" to explain it all away, but when faced by a dire situation, try to focus on what you can get out of it. Focus on playing your advantage. Focus on WINNING.
One thing you'll find is certain entities, from incarnate humans to ineffable angels, may not actually be helpful presences in your life. A billionaire would probably never notice a low-level embezzler in one of their organizations because they wouldn't notice the lack in their life soon enough to understand that they were leaking money. But when you have very little margin for error, you notice very quickly when someone's coloring outside the lines who said they had a clean act. So when you're experiencing trouble, when you're in a situation where there's very little slack to play around with, it's very obvious when someone or something is dragging you down. You can tell where the dead weight is and you can cut it free. Times of struggle are times when you can learn how to free yourself. They're the easiest times to prove what really works.
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Update on projects and how I am doing
Hey everyone, I wanted to put out an update on my situation.
I am still homeless in a car with two cats. I'm not sure when that will end, the local assistance for housing has yet to give us any updates other than "you're on the wait list." We've been doing everything we can to get, for instance, a permanent shelter bed or two. We're on the wait lists. A lot of people are homeless right now.
My husband is in the hospital and when he's released I'm not sure if he'll have a place to sleep. It's been really hard to sleep/stay two people in a car/SUV.
I'm not sure what we're going to do? I have a couple allies in the county and people at the local church are helping but I really have no idea what I'm doing and the person who usually helps me figure out that stuff (MY HUSBAND) is in the hospital and I'm supposed to figure out stuff for HIM now and I'm trying to uh... not completely panic oh gods.
So yeah this limits my creative work and deliverables on Patreon and I'm sorry. It's so hard to also support my household while all this happens. The most I can do now is say "please tip us on ko-fi if you can, it helps us directly!" I'm about to have to go buy a replacement headset for the phone so I can actually hear/call/contact anyone, since the phone that has cell service is really beat up and barely audible. Like during all this I've also just been dealing with the difficulty without electricity or a data plan. I get church and library wifi and run on battery power when they're closed.
I've been in this state of "I'm not sure what we're going to do" for months and months now, ever since we got evicted in June, and every time i think I might have it worked out something else just completely turns everything upside-down. A couple weeks ago someone was in the area screaming at night all night for several days in a row, on and off for a week, and police wouldn't make them go away, and around then is when myself and my husband really stopped being able to manage mentally. I'm still recovering from that even though I've managed to sleep through the night several times since then. It's extremely stressful. I don't know how much I can handle. We barely know anyone locally. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I don't know what to do.
Anyway that's... that's what's going on now.
I'm on the street now.
If you want new stories, art, or articles, you need to send something on ko-fi to make it happen, because right now I am living on the street. I'm not saying you have to do that but if you want creative output then I'm gonna have to be in like, a hotel or at least a coffee shop that stays open til midnight. Or a 24 hour open place. All of those require me to buy something with cash to stay inside of them and make things.
I try to make my life's work an exchange. I like to provide creative work for compensation. It's very hard on the road, especially now that the car isn't able to be slept in anymore, so I have very little security and calm to create anything out of.
I have quite the @documentinghomelessness update forthcoming as soon as I can sit to write it all down. I slept in a shelter and got services there several times and have a LOT to say about what people are experiencing regarding homelessness in the modern day. I drew the shelter while I was inside it so you can understand what it looks/feels like in there. I also have 30 minutes left in this library before I'm back on the street again. That's just how it is. That's the plight.
Self Care is Magic.
Your body and mind and soul, your self, is the primary tool you use for any magical working.
You care for your magic tools, right? It shows respect for what you do. That care can reflect itself in your magic, and becomes a magic of its own, however simple the care routine.
Your body is your first and primary magical tool.
Self care is magic.
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The stories we already know are our pasts.
The stories we think we know but don’t know yet are the future.
The present is the next choice.
