Into Time and Space

After I finished my emptiness ritual and had cleansed myself of the paint, I moved right into the ritual to accept time as the new element. I put on the bracelet of elephant hair, and the elephant necklace and put before me the painting to elephant. I asked elephant if elephant would allow me to enter the gates of time and was told yes. Then I evoked Purson and Thiede as my guides through the silver web of time and space. I did an exercises of putting increments of time into each other until the increments become meaningless.

I opened the memory box, which is my gateway to the silver web and put both my hands on its sides. And I traveled along the silver web until I came to the center, where the Spider Goddess of Time awaited me. She held up the book of her mysteries and said, "It's good you have this back, now paint what I show you."

I pulled out my paintbrush and waters color and painted a web of time. Just one colors, lots of silver-gray...I asked her...was this really it? And she told me that my perceptions of time were too limited by human made standards of time. That what I painted wasn't even so much a symbol as a way of relating to time and space, a way of moving past the linear perceptions and measurements that mark time by human standards. She told me that this year would be a move away from the mystical path I've been on, back to more of a focus on magic, but also a focus on changing those limited perceptions on time...that all the material she'd put in my path the last couple of months was partial prep work for the workings ahead.

And with that, she stopped my hand, looked at my work and said, "Start with this and see what it teaches you."

Then I closed the gate to the silver web of time and gave my thanks to Thiede, Purson, and Elephant...and to her, the spider goddess of time. And so that's the beginning into the element of time.

Are you a Traditionalist?

A reader asked me yesterday, after I posted my review of Evola's book on Buddhism, if I agreed with Evola's  traditionalist views in other areas, because I liked Evola's work. When I posted the review to Amazon, I'd noticed traditionalism come up as a possible tag, first time I ever came across the word actually. Let me just say that assuming I'm anything based on what I read is at best an erroneous assumption. It's true I like Julius Evola's writing. And if we were to research Julius the person, we would find out he was a fascist and I guess a traditionalist as well (maybe they are even one and the same!). But I'm not interested in Evola's political beliefs and don't find them relevant to my practice. Nor, really, am I concerned with labeling his spiritual practices or my own as traditionalist.

In fact, I'm not really interesting in trying to label my own practices either. The most I've ever done is to label myself as an experimental magician, an even that label is one I rely on less these days. What's really important afterall is not the label, but rather what one is actually doing.

So for me, Evola's writing, which I like because he's a good scholar and offers some intriguing perspectives on what he writes about, whether it's Buddhism or Tantra, or Hermeticism, or an article on time magic, is important because I find it relevant to my spiritual practice. Frex, the book on Buddhism offered some useful insights into early Buddhist texts and practices, and proved helpful in my emptiness working.

But even though I like his works, it shouldn't be assumed that I'm a traditionalist or anything else that Evola was. I am, after all, not Julius Evola (last I checked). Nor because I've read Edward Hall and liked his work, should it be assumed I hold to his political beliefs or his approach to anthropology or anything else. Liking someone's writing doesn't mean you agree with all of it or that you hold the same beliefs as someone.

But really what I'm saying is this: Labels are at best an illusion crafted to provide us and others the security (a false one) of being able to say this person is this or that. But what if I'm not?

I read what I read because I find it important to cultivate an awareness of a wide variety of perspectives and beliefs so that I can see how those perspectives inform my spiritual and indeed, overall life. So am I a traditionalist? Likely not.

But I am me...and I do enjoy learning and applying what I learn toward living a better life. I hope you do as well.

Review of The Silent Language by Edward T. Hall

In this book, Hall explores the intricacies of time and space from a cultural studies perspective. Although this book is a bit dated, the information is still very relevant, and what Hell offers is an examination of how much our perception of time influences our cultural and everyday interactions. For example, learning just how tightly time is wound for Americans as opposed to other cultures is quite insightful to the workaholicism that pervades American culture. Hall touches on some aspects of space as well, though you'll find more of his thoughts on it, in the hidden dimension. What I most enjoyed about this book is an exploration of time from a social science perspective as opposed to a hard science perspective.  I definitely recommend it to anyone interested in understanding concepts of space and time.

5 out of 5 stars

Time Magic: Purson

When I got home on Sunday from Fall Eq, one of the first things I did was go back to my ritual room and get started on the next painting for the time magic ritual I'll be doing in October. This time, the painting was for Purson, one of the Goetic Daimons of Time, and one I've been working with closely for some time. Purson is one of two guides for time, in my paradigm. The horn he blows in a symbol of sound and its relationship to sound, in terms of tuning potentialities into actual realities. Purson, as a guide, provides safe passage on the silver web of time, and can act as an intermediary for the magician, when the magician wishes to work with the Spider Goddess of time. As an interesting aside, Purson stabilizes time, while the other guide stabilizes space. Below is the painting I created as a Seal for Purson.

Time Magic: Work with Elephant

I'm prepping to switch from the Element of Emptiness to the Element of Time. My work with the element of Time will likely be quite different from that of the previous workings. I'm working with a lot of entities, and already have been given a diagram of sorts that shows the positioning of each entity. Last night I did my first working, which was to Elephant as the gatekeeper of time. Elephant guards the gates of time, acting as a guardian for those who would work with time, but also as a guardian of time itself. I would consider him a tester of a person's understanding of time. His lesson is to teach those who would work with time about the integral role of space in defining our understanding of time, specifically in terms of distance and how we use spatial measurements to process the motion of time.

I'll be working with him for the rest of this week, as part of the prep work for switching over to Time in October. Below is the painting I created last night with his guidance. The background colors are purposely done somewhat faded, so that the symbol stands out further.

Space/Time Tarot/Deity experiments

I decided to do some space/time work with tarot cards after finishing A Brief hirstory of Time by Oryelle Defenstrate-Bascule. In his book he'd explain some of his own space/time tarot techniques and it reminded me of some of my experiments with space/time tarot, which I'd done a year or so back. As good as any reason to break out the cards and do some further experimentation as well as deal with a few gnawing situations in my life. As Oryelle points out and I have pointed out as well, tarot isn't just for divination. It's also for conjuration. A reading provides you more than a glimpse of the future...it also provides you an opportunity to manipulate the possibilities presented to you. I used the voyager deck to create a magical circle and an evocation triangle. The magical circle and triangle is based off the book Portable Tarot by Donald Tyson, but the technique described here is an extension of his concepts into my own style and experimentation of magic. Here's what it looks like (Note you can also click the link to see the full picture):

The aces are in the center. They form the elemental foundation. On top of them is the card, which represents my current self. My presence is the Hanged Man. The outer circle is the trumps cards used to create the magical circle or tarot temple or whatever else you want to call it.The row of cards above are trump influences I am relying on. All of them were appropriate as gateways and power providers.

The summoning Triangle is the Priestess, the Fool, and Space/Time. Normally the Hanged man would be part of the Triangle, but I replaced him with the Priestess card, thinking it appropriate, plus the Hanged man is the presence of me. The Master of Worlds is the Future self I picked for myself. I thought of going to the usual card, the Woman of Crystals aka the Gaurdian, but I realized that didn't feel right, so I randomly stirred the voyager cards until my hand came to that card, which said I am the future of you. I realize now that the Guardian card is no longer representative of me. She was the guardian of my lies, illusions, and delusions which Babalon stripped away from me this last year. The presence of the Hanged Man is that which stares into the emptiness of zero seeking answers while submitting to the suffering necessary for achieving those answers. That suffering, for me, is really the emptiness work and the work with my past, with the roots of all that has haunted me in this life. The Master of Worlds is also the Master of time, but to master anything, you have to submit to it first, surrender to the flow in order to understand the force and manifest a movement that goes in sync with others. The master has surrendered to the emptiness and so understood it. He is me after this year is finished, or at least a possible variant of me.

I did the activation of the circle as well as the invocation of the future self into my present self, asking him to guide my hands for the reading I was going to do. I evoked the spider goddess of time, Purson demon of time, and Thiede the Dehar of space/time. I also evoked Xah my Personal Daemon and fox spirit and guide. Each of these beings are essential to my mythology of time. I wanted their presence and guidance in the working I was doing, because I wasn't just doing a divinatory reading, but actually a conjuration across the silver web of time. Below is a picture of me meditating with the forces that I'm working with:

I felt my older self lay his hands into mine and I shuffled my Alchemy deck and created a reading specific to circumstances in my life, both present circumstances, but also seeking for the person(s) who are part of a very specific magical working in my life that is yet to come, which this emptiness working and the love working has been a prelude to. Below is the cards pulled for the alchemy deck (Note you can also click the link to see the entire picture):

You can see most of the cards, though one got caught in the glare of the light. The Three in One, in the center, are present situations in my life. The two cards above and below the three card spread are current potential factors I can use that also involve what it is I'm seeking for. The card to the left is the past, and aptly reflects who I was. The cards to the right is an action to take as well as the desired reality. This not justr a reading...it is actually a specific working, a conjuration of reality, which utilizes the principles of the cards to manifest specific goals. The last time I did this type of working, was for Leisa Refalo's Podcast on Tarot and the magical working I did has come to fruition and continued to manifest since then. I mention that because I want to emphasize the dynamic nature of this working. It isn't a divination...It it a conjuration of potential that is manifested into reality. It does provide necessary information for how the conjuration will manifest, while also aligning the realities into one. It's also a kind of retroactive magic, because I'm using my future self to guide my presence in manifesting this potential into specific reality.

After I did this reading, I then spent some time working with the spider goddess of time in particular. I asked her to show me how to weave webs of potential into reality. I put my hands together as if in prayer, but as I looked at my hands, I felt the Astral fingers of each hand go through the other hand, so that I held my physical fingers in prayer, but held my astral fingers in a kind of V and used both sets of hands to weave the silver strands of time into reality. She guided my weaving and as I looked into those hands, I began to see a flickering of images that represented different potential realities. I started weaving the images into the silver webs and then cast the webs into reality. The webs of time would take the images of the possible future and meld them into reality. Below is a picture of the prayer pose I was doing. Obviously you can't see the astral fingers, but it gives you an idea of what I was doing on a physical level:

When I finished with the meditation, I thinked each deity of time and then thanked my future self. I recorded the cards and the specifics of the reading in my personal journal and then undid the temple, releasing the silver webs into reality. I'll be experimenting with this technique in more depth and there will likely be an article about it in the future, but I also wanted to show a work in progress as it were as well as how I do some of my space/time magic work. This post will likely end up in my book on identity and magic, as a lot of my research and experimentation is involving a lot of space/time work. This is a small example of that work.

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Review of A Brief Hirstory of Time by Oryelle Defenstrate-Bascule

For any chronomancer out there, this book is a must read. Not only will it put you in touch with the Spider Goddess of Time, but it also demonstrates experimental magic at its finest. Oryelle presents some very intriguing concepts and ideas about time magic. I found it hard to put this book down as I was enthralled by his ideas, as well as noticing some intriguing synchronicities in our work (which isn't surprising as this seems to be common amongst Space/Time magicians), most notably the silver strands of time. Oyrelle artfully blends poetry and art into a discourse on space/time magic which is revolutionary for what it offers, namely a non-linear perspective on time as well as methods for practicing some potent space/time magic. I'll definitely be utilizing some of this techniques and experimenting with them, because I know the process described within the book works. I've already started working with the spider goddess of time and she is a very real presence. I highly recommend this book. You will get a lot out of it and also be supporting and artist and magician in his work.

5 out of 5 silver webs of time.

Meeting the Spider Goddess of Time

My grandmother died on Veteran's day. I never really knew her. I met her maybe half a dozen times in my life. But I did feel sad for my father, who even though prepared for it, is still sad. I don't attribute any special significance to her death in regards to emptiness itself, so much as I recognize that death is an ending, and emptiness is about endings and beginnings. She's left one form of life and rejoined the cycle of life. After I found out she died, I decided to try and use my new meditation to try and make one last connection out of respect for her presence in my life, and also a bit of sorrow for missed opportunities. I wanted to pay my respects to her in some form or manner that would let me connect with her, even though she is now gone from this plane of existence. I used my special meditation for emptiness, arms outstretched, one eye open, the other closed, my mind drifting across all time and space. The eye that is open is only partially open, with the eye-lid half closed, so that you only see partially out of one eyelid and there isn't much focusing. The focus of the eye shifts inward, so you're looking across time and space. I called the name of her once, out load, letting the vibrations carry out across the spiral rhythm of time, onto the web of the spider time goddess. I found her in memories, I found her ready to join the dead, and she asked, "Why have you come after me, my grandson?" And I said, "To help you on your way to the land of the dead, she who was and will be..." We walked, nothing said, just walking across the silken strands of time, visiting moments of intersection in my memory briefly and then coming to a river, my ancestors across the way waving to her. She turned to me and said, "This is goodbye". I said, "Goodbye my grandmother, goodbye she who was and will be..." We embraced one time, then she flowed on to the land of the dead, back into the cycle of life.

As I came back from the land of the dead, I met the spider goddess of time, weaving her web of wyrds and fate and destiny. She looked at me and said, "You are one of mine, even as you belong to the other time gods. The emptiness you seek is the doorway to our domain, to the infinity of time and space, all things and none. Use your guide and the infinity sign to keep finding us. In them is the eternal beat of the spiral rhythm of time, the silken vibrations of my web, the pulsing red star light of Thiede, Purson's promise of all secrets revealed and more. We named you ours early on, and we're coming to take our due. Seek us in the emptiness, seek us in the depths of all and none, the zero and one through which you've seen the crystalline perfection and the star eyed one who is you, as you are hir."

I bowed to her and thanked her, and she said, "Thank the one who departed. It's her gift to you." I thanked my departed grandmother for her gift of this journey that allowed me to meet the spider goddess of time.

Everything is perfect in the moment when you have no control over anything. When you surrender and let it all overwhelm you and take you somewhere no one else can go. Tonight, I surrendered to the current of time and let it sweep me somewhere I'd never gone...perfection. I lose myself in that current sometimes, whether in a meditation like tonight, or in the rapidly turning pages of a book, where I'm caught up in the creation of the time and space in the pages that turn and the words that burn into my mind a different world and place. My awareness of time slips out of linear and into a place where time is very circular, spiral, all over the place. Times' always been something very mutable and malleable. One moment shifts into another, but a moment can last for an infinity or it can be gone in the blink of an eye, which is one reason I'm fascinated with time as an expression of reality. The spider goddess of time, as grokked from Oryelle's writing and met tonight on my trance passage is enough another expression of temporal slippages. I've walked on her silver silken strands before, but this time I met her. I'm sure we will meet again.

An intriguing phenomenon I've noticed

I just finished reading The Apophenion by Peter Carroll and started a Brief Hirstory of time by Oryelle Defenestate-Bascule and I've noticed a really intriguing in both those books and Farber's latest book. It seems like all these authors have created specific entities that are engaged with, invoked, etc., by the very act of reading the book. It's as if the book acts as a gateway into the mind of a person and then uses that to create a connection to the entity which allows it to manifest. In fact, there's principles of memory which could be worked with in that way. If the entity imprints on the memory, then every time the entity is remembered or imagined it's invoked into the life of the person. I can see some roots of this in Burroughs work and Austin Osman spare's art concepts. With william S. Burroughs, you can feel the character's come alive, and I think his books were his way of invoking himself into the lives of other people, through his use of characterisation...as some of his characters were based off him. And of course a lot of written books inadvertently invoke entities, because the characters are so real to the people that they become a live for those people, but it's only with these books that I've noted an intentional effort toward creating an entity. I imagine too, that if you faithfully do the exercises that this strengthens the connection of the entity to you, as well as how it manifests in your life. It does make me wonder if I could create such an entity myself...Actually I think we do it all the time...but creating one where the book itself activated the entity is fascinating to me.

As is I can safely say that the goddess apophenia is now a presence in my life as a result of reading Carroll's work and I'm inclined to sustain that effort by working with her...it makes the book more efficacious when I read it next time. Although I've decided to already reattribute her as a time goddess, instead of how Carroll treats...which then makes me wonder if the book allows you to create your own variant of the entity, which could even work at cross purposes of the writer's intention.

Book Review: The Apohenion by Peter Carroll

I was really intrigued when Carroll released a new book on chaos magic. The Apophenion is the introduction to a goddess, more space/time speculatation, theory, and practice from Carroll, an exploration of the multi-mind and much more. It is a book worth picking up if you're into chaos magic or experimental magic, or if you're curious as to how someone who has training in math and science is applying that training to magic.

What I liked about the book was Carroll's succinct explanations of his theories about time magic and the multi-mind. I also liked his explanation of Apophenia and how one can work with her. I already consider her a deity of space/time workings from his description of her. I will note that the Apophenion is mainly a book of theory and that it assumes that readers already know a good deal about magic. Any practical applications of it, are left entirely in the hands of the readers to produce.

With this book, Carroll charts new path for chaos magic, while also updating readers on his own work. I highly recommend it as an inspiring and thought-provoking read.

5 out of 5 chaostars

Future me

So there's a site called Futureme.org where you can send an email to yourself in the future. I've been using it for the last couple years to occasionally emails to myself and predict or set the intent for what I want to manifest. The result's have been fairly accurate and this doesn't surprise me because I'm essentially telling myself what I plan to manifest. I keep the emails short and to the point. At most four sentences. I think if you can't conscisely state what you want, you probably don't know what you want. I don't know if I consider this a space/time magic experiment or not...I suppose it could be and it will be going into the book as an example of some of my work with my future selves. It's worth trying out anyway...

Some thoughts on time

After reading Evola's article on precognition and time in Introduction to Magic, and in particular two passages, I've been musing further about the illusory nature of time and how much a sense of time is derived moreso from routines than we might think. The passages in question is: "The overwhelming majority of people are so enslaved to habits, craving, instincts, and fixed reactions, they are such slaves to things and to their selves, that it would truly be surprising not to be able to forecast their future. Knowing the so-called 'character' of a person, we can already know in an approximate way what he or she will do in certain circumstances" (Evola and the Ur Group 2001, p. 310).

and

"Wherever the basic condition of 'desire' is overcome, and thereby the object is purified from an object of desire into an object of contemplation, the overcoming of the temporal condition ensues naturally. I am referring here to the liberation of the self and of the object and thus to the possibility of capturing in a synthetic way what ordinary consciousness would regard as events analytically arranged along a temporal series, as a mere sequence of 'facts' or events more or less endured" (Evola and the UR Group 2001, p. 313).

A lot of what Evola writes about in terms of habits, cravings, etc is is quite true. Contemporary studies in neuroscience show the people act more so on emotions and cravings and desires and then after that initial impulse end up rationalizing their choices. Given that the amount of neural connections that go from the emotional systems to the rational sections of the brain is substantially more than the connections going from the rational systems to the emotional systems, it's fair to say that the emotions have a significant impact on our choices (no matter how we might like to conceive of ourselves as rational thinkers). Add in the fact, that in sales it's recognized that you sell the feeling in order to hook a potential buyer, and you have people who do in fact plan on the future likelihood that a person will react in an expected manner.

A conversation with my neighbor tonight yielded another insight, which is that if a person feels really good about the lifestyle s/he has, s/he may be perfectly content with the predictability of hir routines. This then brings into question what the motivation for change needs to be to shake up that routine...point is though that time becomes more of a reality through the predictable routines we use to navigate life. In fact time can be conceived as a measurement of those routines. this is most noticeable in the eight hour workday, where time is used to measure how long a person has to stay at work. But it can also be seen in other activities...Calculating the commute for instance.

An astute reader will note that I mentioned time's nature is illusory, but might wonder if that's really the case, given what I just wrote above. But what I wrote above amply demonstrates the illusory nature of time in the sense that time is used as a predictor and measurement of activities...when they should occur, when they could occur, etc....We use time as a measurement to determine and predict when something happens, and create routines out of that prediction.

The second passage of Evola's is intriguing to me, mainly because I've experienced it...i.e. the alignment of events and occurrences that cause a situation to manifest favorably for me. And I think he hits on a key point, that the overcoming of desire greatly enhances the potential of the events aligning in a person's favor. The reason is because you're no longer engaged in specific routines that you believe will get you what you want. We use routines to provide us comfort as well as to fulfill desires, but those same routines are predictive of the actions we'll take, and can limit the possibilities/opportunities a person could manifest.

The choice to overcome the basic condition of desire is really the choice of being able to perceive the desired outcome in a dispassionate manner...to no longer want it, and thus to no longer need your fixed routines that you'd normally use to get it. Unsurprisingly the result of this is that a person is much more open to possibilities or opportunities that are unconventional, yet still lead to the same outcome. A personal example I'd use is my deliberate choice to not concern myself about the out come of my most recent job hunt. Instead of worrying about when I'd get a job, I focused instead on other matters that I cared about. I did of course still do some job hunting, but ultimately the job I ended up with came through a different venue than what I'd normally have found. Everything came together at at exactly the right time.

It occurs to me that linear time is really another means of measuring desire, measuring how much effort you will put into getting something...whereas non-linear time  is an acceptance that the desire isn't essential, and consequently this opens up new vectors which can bring that desire into fruition...the act of not wanting it causes it to occur. Sounds contradictory, but the more desire we emotionally feel, the more invested we are in attempting to obtain something, and as Evola notes and I have noted myself, both from personal experience and from reading a variety of texts on the subject, the feeling of desire can trap us into particular routines, while blinding us to different perspectives that may not be as based in desire (or linear time), but are based on being open to the random opportunities that cause reality to align and manifest what the person was seeking. It's exactly when you give up desire on an emotional level, that you open up to non-linear time and allow what you wanted to come to you through unconventional methods.

Paradox...

The nature of days

I feel like today is thursday, and then I stop and realize it's actually Wednesday, but that for me it is thursday, because this Friday I will be off. This got me thinking about the meanings we associate with days, and what those days mean to us. It seems to me that people have meanings associated with each day, particularly days in the work week. We know for instance that thursday means the work week is almost done. Just one more day and we're finished. We know that Friday is the end of the week, it feels shorter...and then Wednesday is probably the longest day, the hump day, the day where the end is at a distance.

And Saturday and sunday have their own meanings as well. Days of rest, days of joy, days to not do anything associated with work...well that is if you work at a standard job. And lets not forget that weekends for some people are different days then saturday and sunday. I imagine also days have different meanings to people who own businesses.

And then too when your schedule is changed somewhat, it changes the meaning of the day. Wednesday this week is Thursday for me. The progression of days seems to echo the progression of time and the meaning we associate with it...do days become identities, have identities? Is the character of a day defined by what people do in it? Does a day have a life of its own, a conception of itself?

Do those questions seem silly or academic? Depends on how alive you think reality is, I suppose...

An article on time travel

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580364,00.html This is an article from Time Magazine on time travel (The humor of this sentence does not escape me btw). It appears that there are sections of the brain that only come alive when we are doing nothing. These sections, known as the dark network, in the article allow us to remember the past or day dream about the future.

It's an intriguing idea, but it's mostly presented as an automatic function, something we do without really realizing it. The article isn't very clear on the neuroscience behind it, but that's hardly surprising, given that's its a popular magazine.

I have written, in Space/Time Magic about daydreaming the future, using day dreams to specifically created visualized futures and then bring thsoe futures into the present when you are snappedo ut of the day dream, but I seem some potential expansion on that, even though this article is rather vague, as well as some expansion on retroactive magic when it comes to changing the past via memory.