Occupying Main Street

It is evident that across our nation, people are frustrated and angry. Democrat or Republican—it makes nary a difference which corporate puppet is elected. Our nation will continually be at war to make money off far-away natural resources. In these hard times of the Great Recession, the rich continue to get richer, and it’s no surprise where that wealth has trickled up from. Many people are out of jobs and unable to find work. They are losing their homes and gathering impossible debt. They are figuring out how to cope as they no longer have access to the money economy.

The protests in Egypt earlier this year were more widely reported in mainstream American news than the protests on Wall Street. It is a challenge to find news reporting on what is going on in my own country, and I imagine if I was not seeking it out, I may never know that people were protesting on my behalf. They call themselves the 99%--those who can’t afford lobbyists, who don’t have influence in politics. They are the unemployed, often over-educated—those who listened to talk of the American dream, pursued it vigorously, and found it dissipated once they arrived prepared and ready on the scene. They are often young, wondering why no one bothered to fix the broken system they are inheriting. (I should note, I am nearly 40, and I’ve wondered the same thing the last 20 years.)

It comes as no surprise that our government is heavily influenced by those who hold the purse strings. We all know this. It comes as no surprise that our media is heavily influenced by those who hold the purse strings. We all know this. Does it surprise us that a handful of tea party protests are heavily covered in the media while a massive peoples’ demonstration in the heart of the beast is largely ignored? It’s disgusting, but no surprise.

We look at those who profit from the actions of corporations—those who continue to benefit. It seems they feel themselves invincible, and that is an incredible weakness and shortcoming. Traditionally, when revolution is imminent, those in power capitulate in order not to lose total control. The New Deal is a good example. In the 1930s, the Wobblies and the anarchists were growing in numbers, as were the poor and unemployed. Massive protests encouraged lawmakers to parcel out funds to provide jobs and food in order to quell uprising. Our nation can no longer afford that route, as the tea partiers constantly remind us.

What can our government do? They have merely the illusion of control, as we find out, the more of us that step up and speak out. There is not enough in the way of resources to control us all. As more of us drift away from our brainwashing/upbringing as Patriotic Americans(tm), we find ourselves more aware of our actual circumstances. We find ourselves operating in an economy based on what we have in abundance—our time and our willingness to share what we have. This is the basis of the economy of the community.

We stop listening to the rules and regulations of the corporate government that benefits from controlling our actions with the threat of violence (whether this violence is mace in the eyes during a peaceful protest, or an eviction from a home we could afford if only access to the money economy—jobs—were available) and instead listen to our consciences. There is a large number of surplus homes as the numbers of homeless swell. Any person with a bit of common sense can hook together this supply and demand conundrum that those on Wall Street can’t seem to figure out. This is a mere drop in the bucket of common sense measures that our government can’t seem to grasp. (Whoever started buying up debt because debt is an asset deserves a $100 billion bonus, heh.)

We demand honesty from those in our circles of interaction, especially from ourselves. Our way of life is disintegrating in front of our eyes. We welcome this, knowing that this crisis will give birth to something more meaningful. As we look around what was formerly the most wealthy nation in the world, and see utter poverty while also seeing those who benefit from the control of corporations sipping champagne and smirking while protected by the public police, something is stirred deep within us.

I do indeed consider myself a patriotic American, though not in the way of throwing more money after unjust wars and standing up for the rights of corporations to throw money at politicians because that’s all free speech means anymore. I have always rooted for the underdog, and to me, that is what America is about. We ourselves are freedom fighters, throwing off our blinders and blazing trails anew. This opportunity arises on occasion, and the invitation is extended to us. We can see through the illusion of control, and disregard it. We can find out for ourselves what freedom means—not relying on tea partiers to define it for us. We can take it upon ourselves to develop the responsibility to each other that makes our near-useless government completely so. We find security in our freedom and responsibility to each other—way more than Social Security could ever give us. We can realize what it is like to have our nation for, by, and of us, not for, by and of those who benefit from corporate profits.

Yes, I’m a revolution cheerleader, and I’m not the only one. I am eight months pregnant ,and it is my hope my child will be born free and raised in a new paradigm. I am doing what I can to enable this to happen, and I invite you to join me and the other 99% in reclaiming ourselves and our country, creating together lives worth the effort of living. We may not have much in the way of money, but we have each other, and that is enough.

How to not smoke when you thoroughly enjoy tobacco

I love tobacco, but I decided from the beginning that I was more of an autonomous human than could be dominated by her. With that mindset, cutting back and quitting can be fun: strength training for your will. When you get a craving, acknowledge that you have it without wallowing in guilt or any other emotion that arises. If it's really intense, drink some water and go for a run. If you have to stay away from other people when they try and smoke, that's fine for a while but eventually one learns to deal no problem.

I like to chew cinnamon sticks for the flavor, they're soooo dank. Some people prefer licorice roots. Cinnamon's kind of an upper, and licorice is for mellowing out. They are both healthy and can be ingested in large quantity, so I suggest BOTH to you. You can find both at a health food store, or your preferred online distributor.

Actually SMOKING when you don't want to give in to tobacco is another option. You can wild harvest and smoke these herbs. There's nothing with nicotine that's typically grown around here except tobacco. They taste good without being so poisonous, and some of them are actually supposed to be good for you.

Mullein/Verbascum thapsus
This is a great herb to smoke as you quit tobacco, because it will help your lungs heal and feel strong. Dry the leaves and flowers in the sun, crumble it up, and smoke it out of a glass pipe. You can find it growing in a lot of places. Primarily dry places next to paths and railroads.

"Indian Tobacco" Lobelia inflata
Amazing because it has the same feel on the tongue and throat and lungs as you smoke it. It also has lobeline in it, so you get a bit of a buzz without any of the addiction.

People will put catnip, spearmint and licorice in there for more flavor. If you want to get frisky with another human, damiana is a good smoking herb too.

Another good thing to help is this part of yoga that is about breath control. Part of the appeal of smoking for a lot of people is taking deep breaths- this will help you do it. I particularly enjoy the Nadi Shodhana.

what does a holy guardian angel look like? a mouthpiece for your ideals

If you could have an emissary to the source of existence, to keep you linked up while you were sober and before you became an adept, would it matter what it looked like? I'm talking about the holy guardian angel from Hermetic Kabbalah, yes; but the use of a daemon, a guiding spirit, is not restricted to the initiatic line that has brought us to this. So yes it's appearance matters, and its character- but only to you, unless people could be said to derive meaning from the art you produce under its direction.

I thought for a long time that my HGA's appearing clearly different, and separate from everything else, because it is such a special thing that it would have to be above the rest of it? Sacred and profane, you know? This, however, was a misguided assumption. I could have guessed! I'm a mystic- I don't turn off my high vibrations deliberately, and I work to re-attune them efficiently when I fall off my horse. The overblown thirst for novelty is another possible source of misconception, god bless it.

I was hands off on this one. I desired for the spirit helper to just appear to me, as it seemed that developmentally I am ready for it but too busy to write a big ritual- and besides, I wanted to give it room to make an entrance as it would, once I put it out there that I was in the market. It did show up, then, just like that, and in in the most meaningful context it could: while I was doing impassioned work that had the force of my idealism behind it.

I was sitting at the library. It was about 3:30 AM, and I was enthralled with a lab report that had all my enthusiasm pouring into it. It was a demonstration of the "stream continuity concept", basically just that something that happens upstream happens downstream, too. The amount of dissolved oxygen, organic sediments and creatures at any given point in the stream are a result of what was happening in the direction from whence the water flows. Playing in streams is what I remember most clearly from my childhood experiences in nature. The fun there made me connect as much with nature as I did human culture, if not more. So besides being fascinating to me, and possibly assisting in job prospects as a stream quality monitor, the subject of the studying was near and dear to my heart from childhood.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little angel flitting around. It was clearly in my imagination, and very high up: visible as someone on the other end of a soccer field. They were wearing robes (sometimes they seem to be orange and green in my memory, and at other times blues and reds and purples), and had big strong wings. It did some lazy, looping laps above my head. I smiled at it, wondered if the prescribed amount of adderal I had taken was helping to coax the critter down, and it flew back above the range of my vision.

The next time I heard from it was during meditation, two months later. I was at a Vipassana retreat, and after the dross emotional had burned away in the furnace of focus- just attending to the spot on my upper lip where breath passes over as it exits the nostrils- it started speaking to me. I was so unusually quiet, that the tathagatagarbha spoke up clearly about what I could do that would be worth stopping the sitting for.

It is difficult for me to write to an abstract audience, for some reason. I will just quote what I told my friend the other day about what I heard:

"Over winter break, I decided to grow mushrooms during a marathon meditation sesh with a Goenka Vipassana school. Theravedan Buddhism is cool, but it's pretty outdated and rough if you ask me. Still, I have to say that the visions of mushroom growing- really inspired ideas, like I had an artistic angel sitting in my brainstem, tossing paper airplane notes to my frontal cortex- were worth the suffering. My idea is to chip these damn bush honeysuckles that grow all around Cincinnati, OH. Coppice them, and put their chips in swales on the less steep parts of the steep, slippy hillsides- and grow oyster mushrooms in the chips! That way, when it rains they'll be sure to flush, and as they devour their substrate, I can just keep adding chips at the end of the ditch. At the end, organic matter will have been worked into the hillside as terraces, and I can plant persimmons and hardy pecans. Yum. Permaculture!"

The angel or whatever wasn't telling me anything I wasn't already desperate to hear- it just came up from deeper than I am used to coherent thoughts coming from, and it was charged with such ecstatic excitement that it sticks with me, even after that gnarly meditation retreat was over.

Emile Durkheim said that totems, gods of tribes, are living symbols of everything that the tribe stands for- our ideals. Let us assume that Durkheim is right- God serves as the embodiment of a culture's ideals, and is imbued with enough of the groups moral authority to act upon the command. So, when the little voice inside says "do this, don't do that", then you believe it- even if it's exactly what the rest of the culture says you should do, it is the internalized voice that you HAVE to listen to.

But what about the totem of someone who is a culture of one? You have to make your own god, period, we all do- sometimes people try and Xerox from the Bible, or some sutra, and say its theirs. But they didn't write it! You god has to be more than you are, and of the best of you- it has to be open ended enough to pipe through innovative thoughts, like these, but coherent and discrete enough to be credible for you to act on your intuition. I'm making meaning up as I go along, with the best praxis I can glean from diverse groups that have pieces but not the whole of what I am to embody.

I'll post pics of the shrooms once that happens. In the meantime, my brother Ben and I are in the brainstorming stages of establishing a homebase in Athens for post graduation. Read about it as it unfolds, here

BTW, I am calling my HGA Raphael. THE Raphael is alleged to be a healer, and the personal guide and guardian of Tobit from tradition who normally is the Semitic angel that lives in the Sun. Also, supposedly he is watching over and tending to the tree of life in Paradise. Maybe I can bum some seeds? :) The name just came to me, though. Sometimes words just pop into my empty mind like that. I stopped discarding them when I realized they might be significant, back at Mountain Gardens in '07. Belief in Fortune is a reality I've created for myself. Believing life matters because I have agency and direction, the path opens up ahead of me as I cultivate insight and act on it.

Ran Prieur: For any system to control you, it must...

Don here. Sorry to be lame and just copy someone else's work. Rare weekend of full-time net access. Catching up on some stuff.

Ripped straight from the archives of Ran Prieur: April 12, 2010.

I've been thinking more about Anne's provocatively pessimistic statement (in this post) that without any tech crash, just a financial crash will have us all standing in line for coal mining jobs. If we ask why, we open a deep hole that leads to the enclosure movement, massacres of Indians, and every repressive system in history.

For any system to control you, it must stand between your work and your food. I know there are other needs like shelter and water and warmth, but in most regions, food is the big one. In a forager hunter tribe, or a family of subsistence farmers, your work directly creates your food. You might be poor, but you're free. In industrial civilization, you probably have a job that has nothing to do with producing food, where if you challenge your superiors, you'll be fired, and no longer receive the tokens that are required for food and shelter. You might be surrounded by dazzling technology and comfort, but you are owned.

Now, if this system collapses, you're free but you're hungry; your need for food, and your ability to work, are like two poles of a battery. If you can't connect them yourself, you need something to connect them for you, a social machine that can use your work and give you food. This could be a nice community farm, a crime gang, or a new complex domination system that's worse than the old one.

I'd like to imagine a new complex system that is much better. We can tell wonderful stories about a gift economy information utopia, but at some point we have to ask: where does the food come from? Is it grown by slaves? Suppose it's grown by free people -- and I don't mean free in the watered-down American sense, but economically free, where they could easily not work for anyone but themselves, but they choose to grow extra food because they get something in exchange. What do they get? Lots of money? Which they then use to hire farm workers who are not economically free? And then, when the people who do the actual work want to own the means of production, they have a revolution? We've been through that, and I fear we're going to keep going through it again and again.

I can see only one way to have a non-repressive society of any size. Every person has to have the ability, whether or not they use it, to connect their work (or the work of their close friends and family) directly to their food (and also shelter). And on top of that foundation, if we want universities and airplanes and computers, those functions are bought by autonomous food producers with surplus food.

I touched on this a few years ago in a post on Malthus: "How can we have a dense population center that does not grow all its own food, but does not deplete the land that its food comes from? The answer is simple: the people in the city must not own the land, or otherwise control it." An unsustainable city owns the farmers around it, and a sustainable city is owned by the farmers around it. So the question is not, "What do we give the farmers to make them feed us?" It's, "What non-food jobs do we farmers want to create?"

repotting the tree of knowledge

Henceforth I shall blog with a community of other writers at THESE OLD NEW TRADITIONS. Solve et Coagula, my voice is over there now. Peep it =)

The son of the Sun will be born in France

It seems like it could really happen: everybody's putting up the cash to make infinite energy a reality. The being's lifecycle involves temperatures so high that no earthly metal can contain it. So, the magicko-technicians will be housing it in donut shaped super magnet, where it can float freely as it's Hydrogen atoms fuse.

You are now leaving the State of Ohio

Bezahn, friends! I invite you to listen to music during your stay here. As I wrote this, these tracks are two of what I listened to, when I wasn’t sitting in silence.



When I stop thinking about my story, I feel even more like a character in it. My strange and illimitable will and desire for the Good dictated that I write myself into the story of the Shawnee United Remnant Band three years ago. The experience of this quickly evolved past the visible, original tobacco-seed extraction parameters into learning about a different culture, and the development of a cluster of friendships. This is an account of my third encounter with my Shawnee friends, whose company I enjoyed for the third time over this past weekend.

One thing you need to know about the Shawnee is that they love alligators. They have an alligator on their flag. This is because of the crucial role those crocodilians played in their nation’s history. We have to go back to the beginning of their oral history for this; I have yet to receive the full story, but here’s the start: about one thousand years ago, the Shawnee were part of the warrior/worker class of the Mayan Empire. The Aztecs invaded the Yucatan, and the Shawnee decided they’d rather not fight that battle so they dipped out. Half of them skirted Northeast along the Gulf Coast, and the other half paddled straight across to Southern Florida. Two years later, the groups reunited. Having been foraging and fishing in unfamiliar ecosystems during that time, they were very hungry by that point. So they devoured all the alligators they could find; caymans had been a delicacy back in the rainforest, and they were easy big scaly meat lockers. The gift of the alligator was reverently appreciated for renewing their energy level and putting a little meat back on their ravished frames, so they carried the eggs farther North into Okeefenokee Swamp and beyond, extending the alligators’ range beyond what it had been previously as a show of thanks.

The alligator shows up again in a cave underneath their parcel in rural Ohio. The cave is how I found these “Indians”, via the internet, back when I wrote this post. The cave tours are fun, all the people tell slightly different stories as they move through them. The cave itself would tell this story: a million years ago, a meteor hit the Earth nearby to this place, fracturing the bedrock in jagging rays. The water circulating through as it does, did gush through these cracks and carve out grottos that no human has ever fully fathomed, for the danger of it. The inaccessibility of breathable oxygen to this immense aquifer would not be a problem for underwater panthers. Going down 200+ feet and hitting water, and then another 100 feet to the bottom did sweep away the only diver who ever attempted descending into what “the bottomless pit”. Supposedly he washed up 6 miles away out of a seep hole in the side of a ditch. Anyway, when the Shawnee made it up to the Eastern Woodlands, they embellished a feature in the cave to accentuate its alligator shape in honor of their beloved sustainer. The alligator is not the same as the underwater panther, however, which I think is probably still living down there in the buried ocean.

They have a campground, and they give cave tours, on the summit of the Bellefountaine “Outlier”. The rock here juts up so hard (dolemitic limestone) and so high (peak of Ohio at 1550 feet), that the last glacier broke itself over the place and jutted up a mile high into the sky. When the climate warmed up, the glacier fell and smacked the top of the mountain and broke two of the cave systems. Hence the deep drainages on the top of the mountain, complete with rocks from the tops of their former roofs.

The Indians are paying off their land, which they bought back from the dominant culture’s inheritors. Who’s ancestors stole it from them. FUCK. They aren’t bitter towards me, though. Only those who trash the land and hold people and planet as profane can raise their bile to froth. They host hippy jam band festivals during the summer to pay off the bank. Soon they’ll have washed their hands of this, and then more attention will be turned towards the regeneration of their culture. In the meantime they have been starting that task. They experiment with gardening, preserving their pristine woodlands, hosting pow wows, getting their tribe recognized by the State and telling their stories. They like the 3 sisters idea, but from what I saw there is a missing link they need before the system will work. Perhaps I can connect them with the successful permaculturalist Susana Lein, who has mastered co-creating the corn beans and squash as a flourishingly productive, no-til polycult.

I have yet to attend a pow wow, but as I gain in appreciation for what the elaborate costumes signify and what the people are dancing for, I’m staring to wonder why I haven’t! Hahaha. I found blue cohosh and spikenard on their property, in the middle of this sea of corn and soybeans, like wo-OH! There is something special about this land. There is a family of wild badgers living here, and an extinct species of raccoon, and a light bulb that is not connected to electricity that illuminates the community center all night every night. Perhaps related to the fact that the cave underneath the community center drains your cell phone battery if you leave it on during the tour?

Some details from a plant walk with the clan mother Melassa: they use the root of spicebush to make a tea. They eat the whole violet, saying it’s loaded with vitamin C. They suggest eating the roots of waterleaf in the autumn as a potato. They call plants “green people”, or ahnzahnzaki nawbe in their Algonquin language.

For efficacy of understanding, I hit the zen/pause button on my internal narrator frequently while I was there. Letting my heart receive every gift and scrap, soaking it up and enjoying the ride as it hit me. I engaged my agency to let the Band people know of my appreciation for their hospitality, and to link my story and those of the other college students with theirs. That kind of active listening builds bridges of affection and understanding, and it is also very tiring. I guess I was unconsciously feeding on the vibe of extreme receptivity, though I had to push myself to remain more of a vessel than a torch. It takes both yin and yang, but in anticipation of the upcoming autumn of self-directed research, classes and crusading for Gaia it was more yin than those activities. Learning to moderate my Mars aspect, active-ism will become a greater portion of my balanced modus operandi than it has been this summer. Now, after visiting these Indians who have been keepin comin on for so long, I feel ready to stay strong and steady.

because sometimes facebook status updates have to exceed 420 characters!

initiates of the mysteries may hone their skilll and accelerate, by probing more deeply into the meanings contained within the myth cycles we have been given by nature, god and the evolution of our ancestors. i ponder this, now: when herakles the hero was climbing a mountain, he came upon poor chained prometheus. the hidden father had punished prometheus for bringing the fire of creation to earth, and teaching the previously unenlightened humans its use. prometheus was punished for acting out of turn, by being chained to a rock and having a great eagle tear his belly open and eat his liver. since he was a titan, he regrew his parts at night, but had to experience getting murdered everyday. herakles saw the eagle and bashed it to pieces with his club, and tried to cut prometheus free. however, an immortal had to sacrifice themselves for prometheus' freedom. so chiron, the centaur who learned perfect medicine by treating an incurable wound, came forward and committed sepuku. the light-bringer arose from punishing torment, the wounded healer was laid to rest, and the hero went on their merry way.

part 3: smiling with dragon eyes, through the madness and into the heights of clarity

So last post explained gaining control of my lunar energy, through zealously pursuing self-regulation and respect via ritual and journaling. This entry will touch on the later, Solar heart-opening experience. This description is pulled mostly from a letter to my pen-pal C.D.

My recent banishing of the fear of being queer was accomplished at a festival, called Starwood, with the help of my gay friend N. Having ingested soma w/ bff B.K. and new gf C.G., I wandered out into the world as they focused on grounding themselves. I adopt a shaman's outlook on these processes, for it helps to remain inquisitive and positive within a carefully chosen setting. I walked down to a fire, and cuddle up with N. beyond the fire, beyond the rings of dancers and drummers. He layed his head on my chest, and the Victorian fear of queerdom and I squared off, Eyeball to cloud of smog. "I shine like the Sun, and I will not be afraid of erotically admiring hot yang energy embodied in male humans." The cloud inside me, palpable and thick in my torso, dissipated and lingered only in my extremities as I pursued the intent of the declaration. My qigong training has cleared my inner vision somewhat, so such precise and literal pictures are not so rare for me as they once were.

All of a sudden, I saw the number 666 (which in Gematria, one may deduce from the numberical values of the letters in Christ's name, and that of the Great Beast) and felt a being of light descend from above and behind me, to live in my heartspace. This was beautiful, and with that white radiance I drove out the last of smoggy fear, and hugged N. That in itself was the unabashed confrontation that I have sought for some time, the victorious uniton with the unassuaged intelligence of my heart's will. The heart mediates between the lower worlds and the higher, & I could not feel like traversing all the Heavens that I would if my Merkabah had a trunk filled with fear of the pure, unadulterated yearnings to LOVE that I have felt, towards men and women. I gave my lover a kiss, and received his to seal the deal, and then went back to the tent and slept by my lovely lady friend.

part 2: you got there without drugs?!

I don't know if I ever told you, but the reason that I went back to school is that I got a message in my heart. The message was a response, from a force that answered to "God". It was summer 2008, and every day I was doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, the Middle Pillar exercise, meditating, plus those 5 Tibetan Rites I posted about. These are energizing practices, practiced and designed to bring one's concentration to a quiet focus. I had the confidence to catalyze growing into my inner life, because I wanted more success in seeking my fortune in this world that felt like cruel and unforgiving. I could see, dimly, that those were both qualities within myself that I expereinced as coming from my environment. But more than from my mind, I also could see that the world can be a tricky place and that I needed some subtle power to penetrate and unlock the precise reality for which I feel seeded to blossom with. So using these techniques, passed on from sibs of the blossoming tree/rosy cross, I hacked out a free space for standing and channeling light.

It was spiritual calisthenics. Every day. Going to a forest clearing at the pinnacle of Enright ridgeline, to bellow the sacerdotal words of some barbarous semitic language. It was psychological isometrics in the basement of my girlfriend's apartment during the coldest months of winter. Bringing illumination into arenas of my being that I would no longer tolerate being isolated. I would stand in the snow by a frozen creek and guide LVX to stream up through my feet, all the way out the top of my skull. These exercises provided an opening for novel decisiveness to my yinned-out, self-critical personality.

excerpt from my journal, Thursday April 17th (2008)

"...God spoke to me today. I came through to him at the end of the Middle Pillar. My question: What to do with my life? Horticulturalist and shaman. Do the Work of Creation- express the Divine ideal by bringing forth permaculture lifeforms. This with the alchemical quintessence so well expressed that just being in the garden will resonate with our desire to pierce the veil. Awestruck by the Fathomless Beauty that'll be expressed at the scene, people will be be freer to transform themselves and manifest thier best in brightest in the vocation that speaks to them..."

It felt right to proceed farther, sometime around my birthday (5/13), with an experiment. I would address the source of my shift, which may have simply been the soothing seepage from my light-sensing pineal gland, as if it were a discrete, though completely interdependent, being of omnisentient benevolence. The question: WHAT I should be doing with my life to characterize its next phasze?! Cuz I had no fucking idea how to more fully manifest the Mars Silvanus, Greenman energy in my sphere of sensation. On the field of endeavor, I was feeling impatient and exhausted at what felt like a mighty effort and what looked like lolly-gagging on my destiny. I agreed that I would sincerely and fully explore whatever God told me directly was best for me to do, and that if the question needed further qualification, unforseen nuances and details could sort themselves out.


This is the stage that was known as Neophyte in the Golden Dawn. Probationary, testing you out to see what you're made of and whether you wanted to go on with more rigorous training. That's what being a Neophyte is about.

Eventually I was ready for the big mojo. In an epic session out by the overlook, beyond my momma's Eco-Village, did I span the inner space. Pentagrams on the pinnacle. "God, I've reprogrammed myself to believe that you, as a diffused benevolence that created the Universe and continues to act as the Prime Mover, truly enough exist to give me an answer. The ground of my being is enflamed with prayer, and the question is sincere. So even if it were only that part of my psyche which has the characteristics that I ascribe to you, I would still listen to you, because you have access to knowledge that normally now I can only dream of. So please tell me, what am I to do with my life at this stage so that I may fulfill my mission on Earth and enjoy myself to the fullest? I'm ready to execute whatever plan it is, and I'm ready to adhere to your version of it."


The answer was immediate, and very simple. "Go back to college."

"FUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK"

Whatever, I should have known that was coming. On some level I did, and it was unavoidable. I needed credibility, training, social skills wisdom experience. Connections and knowledge.

College. Getting there was Neophyte. That fall, I stood on Bong Hill, overlooking Athens and wondered what further progress was going to look like. Would I became a minor adept by the time I graduated? What would that feel like? What would that look like, and what would I be doing from an exhaulted station where the energy of the Sun could heat me and ray out of my heart to illuminate the world? I felt that it would happen. Then I plunged into a dark night of the soul, as I came to terms with the fact that I could not contain a successful student life in the container of poetic madness.

Fast forward through my life chapters that were shaped mainly by academics, qigong and N*. We may peer into my recent journal to read why now, I am calling myself Zelator, the task of whom is to zealously gain control of the foundations of one's being.

This is a journal entry that has been groomed for public consumption:

6/28/10

I experienced a kundalini awakening last night, at J!'s place. He is a recipe master of the sweat lodge.

There were 4 gates, corresponding with the four directions. We stripped off our outer garments and prayed by a blazing fire. Following that, we then went inside the towel-covered frame of woven boughs. We sat in a circle, our butts resting on boards over a sand floor. Sunken into the middle of the place was a brick invagination, where J! would lay down red glowing stones, saying "Welcome, all my relations" in Lakota/Sioux.

"Find your prayer", and "let the steam and the stones help you carry it up". These were my instructions… Opening to the possibility of transformation, I asked spirit to guide me and I vowed to follow its lead. The need to heal my Martian spirit, the body god of the heart, occurred to me. I saw that I had allowed my wholistic sense of self to be warped as I sacrificed balance to continue Beyond Coal battling through the Spring quarter, especially. I asked that my inner warrior be equilibritated with my ideally balanced and masculine self, so that I may laugh and feel the simple joy of living without feeling a constant desire to vault through life, driven always and solely by the battle daemon of Mars and instead welcoming in the equilibrating influence of, who would it be, Khamael according to the Big Tree Chart. I could feel this happening, as I experienced the thought in its fullness. Later, when the steam was burning my face and sweat poured from my chin, I began offering a verbalized prayer. J! opened the door to the lodge as I began, and I paused. A! sat to my left, and urged me to finish. Thank you, A!. It was my truth in the moment, and was an admirable declaration. When we emerged from the womb, there was lightening flashing in the sky and it continued for the rest of our time. Mars had heard me and showed his response with the flashing bolts of Thor. We talked about stars outside for a bit, me mentioning Astraea to the Scorpio and Libra audience. A! informed us about a cluster of guardians who live out by Titan, saying that a "mothership" is out that way also which can be seen with the naked eye.

I decided to do a ritual whereby I would fill myself with the pure planetary energies to experience them, and then wash myself clean with Lux. I had already gotten this experience with Mars, who is very close to home and responded with a happy, care-free side of me that I had not thought before as being the same part of me that can deal with conflict…. pause to read and rest…

God I have a killer stomach ache! I feel like a different person than whose consciousness was merged with such larger patterns last night. However, I know that the pain is something I need to work through... By recording this story, faithfully detailing the evidence of this truth that is no longer in the forefront of my thinking, it can find a home by integrating it into my habitual self. That will make the surface of this pond as good as clarified, because I know what lurks beneath and what is reflected from above (the daemonic and the angelic). The mead of inspiration hath ceased flowing, but fills my cup.
I'm indebted to Alan Chapman (page 25 Advanced Magick for Beginners) for elucidating this for me. I'm used to thinking of doing what has to be done in the ephemerally appropriate now as a chore, but the small haze of pain won’t keep me from harmonizing with the Dao. Doing so is easy and more richly gratifying than I previously realized.

Lodge. Returning, I filled myself with Venus, which I pictured as emerald plumes of color descending throughout my pa hui/jew cap area of the dome, and expanding into my whole body. Self-induced experience, the energy I was picturing introducing seemed to respond (remember to keep an objective tone, it will help you maintain an objective outlook) to my invitation as I felt: 1) a sentimental love, 2) generalized erotic loving for my self and 3)other, as if I and all were one unit of pleasing flesh. Truly a yummy feeling! I remember feeling this before, looking at myself in the mirror after a shower last week or the week before, and exclaiming that "Nobody's got curves like this!" in affection for the way my lower back transitions down. Then I purged the eroticism of Venus with white light followed. It took more work of will than flushing out Mars, and it seemed that I was aware of some other part of me that was there without filling with Venus energy, like part of the hardware of my physical makeup is governed by Venus and that I had stayed tuned into it after being completely awash. As I would write in my journal if I didn’t have the focus to be scientific, “But the excess energy did dissolve, overpowered by the Ain Soph.”

Next was a non-aroused Jupiter energy. It is happy, mild, not a boundary setter, but an affirmer. I felt myself bestowing a personal blessing on my experience as a whole; it was of the blue sphere based on the Kaballistic imprint. I did not feel uplifted by Jupiter, which surprised me at the time. I had expected to feel Jovial Green Dragon I've felt in my liver before, but did not. Silent mirth, happy in solitude, an inner chuckle is the kind of happiness if I had to personify the satisfaction. At this stage, J! began talking, and I had to interrupt my focus to pay attention to him, and when I focused again it was to do Mercury.

Mercury is the Magician archetype, by my reckoning: able to make connections before they are fully felt by communicating between disparate parts. I felt an orange energy down through my crown, the color I've seen in pictures of the planet's surface. The intellect. I felt more at peace with the Mercurial energy than I had during my first year at OU, because I am more fully developed and thinking is better complimented by emotional and social activity. Nonetheless, the 3 sisters project and the bioremediation I am thankful for, and I recall as I write this another experienced truth of appreciating this function earlier this year, which was a milestone I suppose- hopefully I wrote it down at the time and can transcribe it an put it on a timeline- spiraled on the wheel of the year?!!! See what I mean! While Jupiter's humor was slow and subtle, and Venus's was like a ink spreading blue dye from the chemistry lab spreading through a solute, Mercury I felt as the energy around my spinal column. THat seems to correspond with the central nervous system…

The steam got really intense after Mercury, and I realized that the Moon would be next, because there was just a full moon lunar eclipse on Saturday morning. It was so hot, my nostrils felt like they were burning, and so did my nipples.

I came outside and thought about the Moon- and suddenly it was connected to my sexuality! I did not continue the formula of inviting it in and then purging it, there was a truth happening in me of its own accord. In "The Mystical Kabbalah", Dion Fortune says something about how all the other energies are reposted in the Moon's, which brings it down to Malkuth, the Earth, the 4 directions that Amerindians use as a soul compass technology. I imagined different colored beams of light, the green, orange, blue and red that I had seen, entering into the Moon in a rainbow, that arced down into the sphere of my lower belly. Then yellow light appeared as the pre-eminent light, and the blue faded, and it was strengthened. The rainbow covenant was renewed, I realized: I do not need to hurt and strangle my body or emotions to grow and evolve them, and I vowed upon seeing the Rainbow that I was too beautiful to extinguish, ever.

I feel less certain of the chronology of the following events, but I will record them from memory as faithfully as possible, and perhaps return to offer elaborations and corrections later. Inside the tent for the third portal, the East, Rosco tells us that this is the place of beginnings, this is the direction which we evolutionarily are coming out of Dark Age in the heated South and getting more enlightened, so that space alien gods will return to conscious communication with our society and help us clean up the ecological messes we've made. I remember offering a homily to the Moon. I offered thanks to the Moon for her gifts of shaking and strengthening our imagination, so that we as earth poets could connect with the other energies too and figure out the work we need to do, and be the Gods who don't have to destroy everything to create anew! We remember, it is renewed, the Rainbow Covenant, I said. It was powerful, and I did not falter. A! offered a prayer to our DNA and ancestors and teachers before that; M! or Stephan-Eye offered something brief after. J! thanked us and said we should go into spontaneous singing. I began "Humble myself to the light of the Moon", but he overpowered me and the others with his voice, and asked us to "get low" as he dumped a ton of water on the rocks. I felt intensely angry, but then did not allow myself to retain the anger. This was a very important part of the process. I let anger pass through me, and out again like a barnacle goose’s acorn sinking through an uncovered well, and being carried out to sea on an underground river. Bending my forehead to the ground, the cord from base chakra to top chakra that my pal Farinacci suggested becoming aware of, became an upwards flowing motion. I could feel it move through me from base to top as I bent over and it flowed from I don't know where, it felt like, into the Earth, like I was a hose which somebody had dunked in water and then sucked on for some siphoning action. I was totally bent over my crossed legs. I stumbled out, my conscious mind a total annihilated blank.

J! and his interruption, what a coyote, setting me up to realize my higher need of allowing anger to pass through and back out again instead of into my sword arm.

After that third portal, I just lay in the grass. I could barely move. I was nauseous, feeling like the heat had done me in. I did facial massage but without the heat. A! came over and I took a hit of some smoke, which seemed super appropriate. I administered a resuscitating nose bridge rub. My fingers that meandered over to the left brow ridge, below my off-center third eye. I felt it quiver, and I blasted off!

This was the weirdest and most intense of the experience.

There was all this exchange between above and below energies, via the heart, and SOOO much imagery. I remember being reborn as a lux shen baby and being rocked by the virgin mother; I remember burning to a cinder and rising as a phoenix from heart to throat. I thought, "I should read Chuang Tze to see about his thinking on this. I remember INRI, strangely enough, and YHVH, and I felt the fire of creation sweep from letter to letter left to right. There were three consecutive serpents that took three paths from root to crown, each with fierce different face and temperament. One was definitely an asp or some venomous looking green snake with maroon banding, another was grayish. The first two I could feel as blazing verically, the green one kind of meandered. It got overwhelming after a while. I realized on the comedown, as others came out and started adjusting from their forth portal, that I loved this Gnosis and that I was salty to have to ever move again, because I could not express what I felt to the others and that living into it would be difficult to achieve and even more difficult to understand. Perhaps with further study, these super-dense experiences can reveal further meaning. That's a definite possibility! Anywho, when it got overwhelming, I said "These evolutions are what have happened to the World as a Whole, and I would be deluding myself if I was to view these events as my exclusive domain. The visions were of monumental, transpersonal transformation and I will learn and grow from integrating them into what I am, but on a human scale. I can’t get shredded by all this God energy."

I was rather discombobulated and couldn't communicate what happened to me to those around me, so much, but it was good. The next morning, this Monday morning, I cried after a belly rub, both for how intensely good it had been, and the great disconnect I felt between the mundane and the journey I had just come back from. I offered thanks, and remembered the Rainbow Covenant and the peaceable Martian were there supporting me.

On my way to 8 am Spanish class the morning after voyaging, I found my red bike, which had been stolen. Lavishing it with maintenance and riding it hard, I exercised the newly integrated pieces of my philosophy. I am feeling fucking amazed, enlivened and invigorated by it all.”

That bike will never have a rusty chain again. I am taking care of it from then on out, and moving straight from a stilled point, amidst the powerful fluctuations of the Lunar Flame, is what constitutes gaining control of your being. Here's to

__________________
This is what my old teacher C Duke said upon hearing my newly adopted title

"You are *not* a Zelator - you are always and only ever were *Ipsissimus*...
Enlightened and *Self-Initiated*

*Everything else is just someone else's hierarchy.*"

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Next I'll talk about the Solar achievement. After all this heavy duty focus on me, the next posts will be about girls and beer and la vida dulce.