:: (Continued from part 1) ::
3) Clear out your altar.
In magic every piece of natural substance is a vessel of spiritual force. In a world that delivers almost any spiritual artefact, substance or rare ingredient right in front of our doorsteps 24/7 our altars and homes can easily turn into Egyptian tombs filled with all sorts of dwellings of power...
The difference though is that in Ancient Egypt every vessel was there for a reason, assigned to a specific deity, clearly confined in its dwelling and arranged in harmony with the objects around it. If you are skilled enough to achieve such a supreme level of inner consistency and spiritual harmony on your altar please disregard this tip. All others might want to consider to clear out their altars and homes of open and unguarded spirit vessels. Because if you don’t confine and assign them to specific beings they are an open invitation to whatever astral worms happen to crawl by looking for a place to feed of...
Suggestion: In order to simplify your magic every object on your altar needs to be an expression of clear and present intend. Check your own skill level and determine how many vessels of present living force you can hold in your mind at the same time? Then get rid of all others. Bin them or wrap them in pure silk and store them away until it’s time for them to be filled and harvested.
4) Allow time to work for you.
In magic time can be perceived as a force that constantly creates patterns. These patterns can either be left to organize themselves or they can be leveraged as boundaries to our magical work. Time patterns are essentially cyclical. They tend to be organized around a central pole or theme. The season of the year revolve around the sun, the signs of the zodiac and the phases of the moon revolve around the earth and even a song revolves around a central theme...
We can use these patterns of time to our advantage in magic. Our ancestors can teach us a lot about them... The first step, however, is to find out around which pole the patterns of your magical life revolve right now?
Consciously leveraging cyclical patterns of time on your journey can be hugely beneficial: Significant power will flow from attuning your body and mind to a specific rhythm of actions. Perform a small devotional rite, a gesture or exercise each morning at the same time, then close the circle by repeating it at night. When successful, expand the rhythm to embrace a whole week. Open the week with one exercise and close it again seven days later. Then go on to embrace a month, a season and finally a year or whole period of your life.
Suggestion: In order to simplify your magic start working actively with the patterns of time. Establishing a central theme or pole around which a period of time can revolve around will allow nature to actively support your workings. Living in tune with the tides of time is both an act of passive devotion as well as of active engagement. Thus attuning your magic to a rhythm of cyclical works can become a significant catalyst to your work.
5) Train your patience.
In magic we all remain students for a lifetime. That's why there is absolutely no need to rush through things. Remember the length of your journey as well as the fact that you encounter many experiences and rites only once on your path.
How often is it that only looking backwards we realize how significant certain moments in the past were for who we became since then? Taking the time to be present and to allow the moment to last until it is truly over seems to have become a rare skill among adepts - myself included. Still, there is an intimate relationship between us and every moment of magic we experience. Someone once said to me: Maybe we are afraid to stay in the present moment because it would be both risky and erotic? If we only allowed it to it would capture all our senses like a lover and start engaging with us like a living being...
One way of developing this crucial skill can be to keep a list of all the wonderful ideas, sparks and innovations about your magic to come. Yet not to allow them to distract yourself from the work you are already involved in. Some might capture such a list at the end of their magical diaries. Others might write each idea down, then put it in an envelope and send it to themselves in order to be stored away until the time is right.
Suggestion: in order to simplify your magic allow yourself to be patient with the work you are carrying out. In magic just in life things will go downhill once we try to speed up the harvest. Just look at all the chemical fertilizers that pollute our land... Considering the length of your lives journey the moments where it takes true powerful magic to be performed will be special and rare. Seed these moments with patience and care. Then wait for them to unfold and help the seedlings to turn into trees.
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Well, I thought about one more thing for this post. Yet, rather than another way to simplify magic it seems to be more of an underlying principle that holds true for all 5 steps above?
If I had to give it a name I'd call it: Safe energy. Avoid standbys. Actually it is just the same principle we are already being told over and over again by the green eco-movement: When leaving the house ensure the heater is off, the radio is out, the lights are switched off and - most important of all - all electronic devices with a standby button are fully unplugged.
Standby clearly is one of the most stupid ideas ever invented in technology - looking simple and clean on the surface yet swallowing huge amount of resources in the background. However, just as we often fail to recognize this when dealing with technical devices we often miss that the same principle doesn't get any better if we apply it to our everyday lives...
Once we have set a magical act into motion it deserves to be finished. At all costs. Every circle opened deserves to be closed. If we think we can put this process on standby we might be surprised to find that in magic things tend to take on a life of its own if left to themselves... In which case the line of a circle might become the beginning of a maze - or even worse - the strap around your neck.
May the serpent always bite its tail.
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