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With a two-part lecture series on the left-hand path later this month at Treadwells Bookshop 25 July and 8 August, I thought I’d share some personal observations on my previous identification with the LHP.
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Some years ago, I was approached by representatives of a major marketing company who wanted to explore the possibilities of using direct magical techniques to promote a product. I cannot discuss this in more depth, as I signed a non-disclosure agreement. Suffice to say, I did not agree with what they wanted to do, and we parted ways on good terms. I did get some material benefit out of the affair. They rang my boss (I was working for a b2b media company at the time) and asked for a reference. My boss, alarmed at the idea that I was being head-hunted by another company, decided to reward me for my work with a present – a state-of-the-art (for 2000 anyway) laptop. I still have it.
Continue reading »In a recent essay, I posed the question – How do we learn to be magicians? Is it simply a matter of reading books, studying with a teacher, doing practices, and taking on particular beliefs and attitudes? My answer was to reflect on my early dive into the world of the occult in which I introduced the term reflexivity. In this post, I will discuss the concept of reflexivity and propose that it should be accepted as a core occult practice.
Continue reading »Words have Power.
Imagine a setting. You’re in a restaurant or a café perhaps, enjoying a quiet conversation with friends. Suddenly a stranger walks up to your table and without any opening or introduction, begins to offer a commentary on some conversational topic. You’d be slightly taken aback. Alarmed even. Who is this complete stranger who has suddenly, for no apparent reason, taken it upon themselves to intrude into a private conversation?
Continue reading »How do we learn to be magicians? Do we just pick up a book or two, do the exercises and rituals, and take on the beliefs and perspectives that ‘feel right’ to us? Maybe do an online course with a teacher whom we have come to respect? Go on social media and engage constructively (or not) with other practitioners. Join a small group or a large magical organization? It is not, I feel, a simple process. Well at least, it was not a simple process for me. I was not initiated by fairies at the bottom of the garden, as one of my friends says he was. I did not have a magical granny or the memory of a past life being a high magus in Atlantis. I did not receive messages from a spiritual master on the Inner Planes. I did not experience a sudden spiritual awakening or a summons by a goddess.
Continue reading »One day in 2020, I ambled into my study and turned on my computer, and … nothing. My heart skipped a beat. I felt a sense of dread steal over me. Checking the startup options, I saw that not only had the SSD drive on which the operating system lives failed but also one of the disks in my RAID array had gone too. It was a palpable shock. All that was on the computer – work in progress, layout jobs for clients, photos, games, videos, half-sorted digital libraries … gone. More than that, I was cut off from the wider world of social media and the internet, extended knowledge repositories, news, friends; and the full panoply of digital life in networked culture.
Continue reading »What does the Śrīcakra mean to me? What part does it play in my own practice? As you might know from reading my Unfoldings newsletter I have been devoting some time to discussing Kenneth Grant’s representation of Tantra. Grant has a great deal to say about the Śrīcakra, and going over Grant’s take on it, plus referring to various tantric scriptures, as well as what scholars have written, prompted this short post. In doing so, I want to get away from scripture or analysis.
Continue reading »In the previous post in this series, I outlined the representation of kleśās within the Pātañjalayogaśāstra – a.k.a the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (YS). For this post I want to discuss a more complex issue – are kleśās “tantric”? This is something I have pondered, on and off, for some years. As I explained in the first post, I was introduced to kleśā practice through initiation into AMOOKOS, and the kleśās were presented to me by my mentor – with the support of the AMOOKOS grade papers (published, in part, in the book Tantra Magick) – as a core component of daily practice. As I said, I spent a decade or so using the kleśā schema as a means of self-observation and analysis. This was very fruitful. Perhaps it should have been enough. Gradually though, it began to dawn on me that the perspective underlying the kleśā practice was very different from that of the tantras.
Continue reading »In the previous post in this series, I outlined how I began my practice with the five kleśas as presented in the AMOOKOS practice manual, Tantra Magick. Now I want to turn to an examination of how the kleśas are dealt with in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras (YS). Before doing so, however, I want to give a brief introduction to the philosophy that underpins the Yoga Sūtras.
Continue reading »Continue reading »“The five kleshas must not be regarded as petty foibles, weaknesses or minor failings or amusing defects which can be considered for a short moment and then dismissed and forgotten. They form the foundational obstruction in Twilight Yoga as in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.”
Dadaji The Exegetikos