New world

During my priesthood service this month something changed, I have no more desire to perform sorcery (to make small changes to occur). Bad weather? I don't care. I don't know why, but I just don't feel like changing anything lately, it's like this life was just temporary and didn't mean anything anymore, like none of it ever mattered.

Wisdom of Kabbalah, part IV

5 lights of NaRaNCHaY
To understand Etz Khaim properly, we have to learn about five lights and related terms.

Kia
Kia (vessel) is our physical but also our spiritual form. Imagine it as an engine and imagine that ist fuel is a light (aur).
Kia in its basic stage cannot receive the aur directly from Creator because kia isn't pure enough, for that reason there is a collection of filters that reduces and adapts this light for kia.
These filters are: Worlds of AK and ABYA, sephirots, and five lights of NaRaNCHaY.

Five lights
There are five lights in total. Each light is result of each given filter but for ascension to be possible, each light also contains spark of the light above. Highest light in one sephirot contains spark of light from the sephirot above. For example the highest Aur of Malkuth contains spark of lowest Aur of ZA. This is also a reason why lower sephirots contain fragments of higher sephirots: through the light.

What NaRaNCHaY stands for?
NaRaNCHaY is a short of names of lights:
Nefesh
Ruach
Neshama
Chaya
Yechida

Nefesh is the lowest Aur in the sephirot and Yechida is the highest one with spark of Nefesh of next sephirot.

When we ascend through all lights, through all sphirots and through all worlds, we will be able to obtain the whole light from The Creator, this light is called Ein Sof Aur.
This state is commonly called Salvation, Reunion or Samadhi.

Problems of modern society.

I have been planning to write this article for around one year now, problem always was to name the main issue correctly and to provide a suitable set of arguments supporting my thesis, now I can do both :).

Tradition

So, where to start? We, humans, are little scared creatures, whatever makes us nervous is a reason to get rid of it and we do so for thousands of years. This way we used to get rid of demons, bad dreams, bad luck, then to get rid of witches, sorcerers, devils, then to get rid of church and finally, to get rid of all the sanity.
Consider our perfect education system. Do we really study truth? Yes, of course, at least a certain portion of it. You might learn something about Pythagoras' triangle, but you will hardly learn about his pentagram or about his occult activities. Same applies to Archimedes, same applies to Platon... We got rid of the "supernatural" bogey-man but as the result we do not accept anything supernatural, just mentioning it on public will lower your prestige. Magick is taken as a complete opposite of science, as something completely unscientific and "childish".
Yeah, of course, someone forgot to mention those silly horoscopes, right? Some fool just takes some symbols and puts them down on the circle and... And now we should explain something: those "funny" horoscopes don't use random silly symbols in random silly order. These symbols are symbols of zodiac, symbols of 10 star constellations of zodiac, and are placed into the circle in the exactly same order as they can be found on the sky.
Magick, including astrology and alchemy was a foundation of modern society, foundation of modern science, alchemy with its knowledge of chemicals and herbs was foundation of chemistry, astrology gave complex set of rules and methods known collectively as Mathematics, it also gave us clear understanding of astronomy. It was an astrologist who said first that Earth isn't flat, it was an astrologist who said first that Earth isn't centre of the universe, I hope you can conclude that geometry exists thanks to astrology, as well.
Time changed, we once again became scared of what we don't know and we found another shell where we can hide ourselves, the tradition. Scientists became traditionalists, traditionally rejecting anything "silly" and modern "magicians" became traditionalists in rejecting anything new or scientific. We made this split between science and Magick but even after this virtual split, truth is still the same, science isn't any different from Magick, science is Magick's child, identical in more things than you can actually see, unfortunately...

Observation - divergent and convergent thinking

Now we are getting to the sad part, why similarities between science and Magick are not seen? Education... As I said, we are not taught the complete truth in schools. We are not trained to use divergent (intuitive) thinking, we are trained to focus on convergent (logical) thinking. We are trained to reject our feelings in sake of logical thinking. Do you think that Archimedes discovered his law under conditions of controlled experiment? No, he was in the bath when he yelled "Eureka", he got the aha moment when he was bathing and AFTER that he used convergent thinking to validate the experiment.
Don't take me wrong, logic has its place. It helps us to deduce same or similar qualities and possible usages from observation. Logic gives us structure we can use to search for new values of already learnt, it helps us to build solutions based on previous experience and also to analyse our past experiences.
Bad thing happens when we are exposed to something outside our scope of convergent thinking, to some situation we consider "irrational", situation that shouldn't exist in our little world. That's the situation when we should switch to divergent thinking and obtain new knowledge, new understanding of the situation, but can we do that? Were we even taught there is this possibility?
This is not a problem of science or of Magick, this is problem of tradition, problem of dogma.
Go and study the daughter of mysticism: psychology. You will find amazing things: Exercises for relaxation and meditation, methods how to fight stress, how to fight our demons. You will also find out a lot of sad things about our society. Results of experiments that could improve our situations, but no change ever happened... Did your teachers teach you how to learn effectively? Or did your teachers act with everyone in the class as with a talented student?

Pygmalion effect

There is this nice think called Pygmalion effect. Experiment was done where psychologist randomly selected a group of "talented" kids and "foolish" kids and a new teacher was notified of these students as if they truly were parts of these groups. This experiment has shown a very shocking result. Students taken as talented had improved a lot from their previous state, they didn't only obtain better grades, their intelligence advanced, as well.
Why? Observer (in this case teacher) had a certain formula in his structure and he subconsciously affected the process of observation to match this structure. As a result these students, marked as talented, were really seen as talented and acted with as with talented students, which motivated them for better performance.
Same thing applies to "untalented" group, as well. They truly were observed as fools and many of them had to try their hardest to break this view, unfortunately many of them stopped trying and acquired worse results, their motivation was gone.

Human development

Human being needs a set of things for correct development. This set is well known by psychology. Things and supports or damages intelligence of children, things that should be followed or avoided during education and interaction. Psychology teaches about both convergent and divergent thinking, psychology teaches about relaxation, it teaches about importance of love, just like about influences of these things on the development. But our society still funds old and deprecated institutions, it still funds services that are proved to limit our brains, to limit our minds and our ability to discover, to invent... There was so much talent wasted in this and in previous generations. Do we really want to waste next generations, as well? Do we want to limit our children? To expose them to same issues and faults as we had experienced before them? Is that really what we want?

What to do

Study psychology. You will see mistakes. Mistakes that were done by your parents, mistakes that were done by your teachers, mistakes that were done by you. Psychology is not science about something, it is science about you and me, it is science about all of us and we all can learn from it. Learn what you can and spread the word. Do so through communication with your friends same as through publications, through public service or through courses. Do what you can to change this society, what what is our responsibility as Magicians, bring enlightenment to this world just like our predecessors did.

Oath Breaker: Priesthood

Introduction

Priesthood nowadays is a term exchangeable with clericalism, but in Magick the priesthood means still the same thing. Adept* of Magick should take a role of priest and do common actions associated with priesthood: Blessings, exorcisms, healings, confessions listening, public service and at least 1 month each year, during this time the adept should follow a simple set of rules to remain pure.

Rule #1: No exceptions

Whether a person in need is of opposite religion than you are or a complete skeptic, there is no reason to avoid your duty, you should also be able to pray in any holy house whether it is church, mosque, pyramid or ancient temple. If you do not believe in God then you can pray to and bless through divine force or whatever sounds appealing to you.

Rule #2: No anger

I personally hate this rule, no matter whether someone just stomped on your foot or burned down your whole house, there is this "no anger" rule and whenever you start having any kind of anger symptoms, you have to immediately banish them by sending blessings to the person that is causing you the trouble.
The blessing can be as simple as saying "May God bless you" with the cross gesture or as complex as a complete 2 hours ritual (be creative).

Rule #3: Nobility

No vulgar words, no curses, no paid occult related services, priesthood must be executed nobly and for free. You also must dedicate yourself fully to the priesthood, even if just for that one month per year.

Advantages

Priesthood is categorized as one of the Greater Oaths, that means the successful execution and finishing of the priesthood will greatly improve your willpower, cleanse your astral body from any external influences and improve your personality (rule #2 is great anger management exercise). Priesthood is also one of very few oaths that also increases your spiritual authority, that will be fully apparent even after finishing the first priesthood cycle.

Notes

Definition of Adept in this article is a bit different than what you usually consider an adept to be. Modern definition is a person that is very skilled in occult phenomena, an enlightened person if you wish, definition used in the article is the older one: Adept is a person aspiring to the next degree in Magick.

Recommended reading

Sometimes people ask me what book they should read. I usually recommend works of Papus, Levi, Crowley but also non-occult books. Magicians nowadays tend to forget one fact, we are still inhabitants of this planet and learning something about it is not a bad idea. Books regarding science, psychology, herbs, alternative and modern medicine and biology can turn to be of a far greater value than New Age books like "Are you an Atlantean?".

But most importantly, before you start buying books like crazy, think about what do you want from Magick? What is your goal? Our goals in Magick reflects on our paths and without a goal you will get nowhere in this divine art.

Finally

I finally understand why Anael manifested in that weird look, Papus talks about Anael as about the king of salamanders, that would explain the eyes wide apart or the cross shape formed by the face (mark of kings)

Late calling

I really need some magickal condenser. I found out that my mirror is depleting pretty fast and reason might be lack of the condenser.

Unfortunately the herb I could use doesn't grow now for winter reasons. I guess I will have to wait for next season.

Joke's on me.

I should really stop looking for occult forums, I just found one "underground" forum where people believe that hypnosis is a black magick and deadly dangerous, funny enough I got picked by same people who use "Hail Satan" as a greetings phrase.

Papus, where are you when I need you?

Recent update

I have memorized about 99% passages from the bornless ritual. Now I have to sort them out to know in which order they come.

Last few days I also have a very good dream recall, about 4 dreams per night which is very good result if we consider I am not focusing on remembering all my dream.

I thing I am slowly converting to high magick.

Today's study

.I spent today by memorizing Bornless ritual by Crowley.
During morning travel by train I was sitting facing the train's entrance door. Strange thing happend. When memorizing the passages from the ritual, this door opened. It was quite creepy as this was the first time I have ever seen it. The door should be blocked during the ride.

I would like to say I have memorized half of the ritual already but after learning third set of names starting with Roubriao, I have quite troubles recalling previous 2 sets of names.

Maybe I am just tired.