magicianjourney

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Module 2 Lesson 5 Part 1

This lesson is about teaching elemental patterns and maps as it relates to the land around you.  This is the first lesson related to “nature” magic.

The first part of this lesson has you do some investigation using divination and inner senses to determine the gender of the land you are working on as well as the direction each of the four elements is strongest on the land you are working.  Once you have identified that you make a graphical map that shows the elements, the directions, and your astrological signs and how it all relates.

When I did the work to determine the directions of the elements I found the following:

North -  Earth

South - Water

West - Nothing

East - Fire and Air

Earth seemed to be where it is in the traditional pattern.  Water being in the south was interesting because South is traditionally fire.  Water and fire cancel each other out so it leads me to believe that water/fire is well balanced on this land.  In the East I seemed to have both fire and air.  The combination of fire and air brings up images of firestorms or out of control fire.  The east is also the future, so maybe in the future the power of the land will waken and become very strong?

When I did my investigation through divination of what gender the land is I got the Hermit from the tarot cards.  This further leads me to believe that the power of the land is male but withdrawn at the moment.  So having Male/Fire/Air/East makes me think that in the future or as a potential the land power is male and very powerful and could get out of control.

However at the present I feel the land power is probably well balanced and not very active.  This probably means that working on this land at the moment won’t have much impact on my work and if I try to draw from the land it will probably not be very strong.

Since I live in the city and don’t have any outdoor private space I had to do the investigation on the land indoors which could have limited my ability to get a good reading of the land.  In the future when I move and more more natural space I would like to be able to come back to this lesson and do a reading on the new land outside.

The second part of this lesson is a ritual for communication with the land.

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For the module 2 lesson 4 symbol research I have chosen to look into the “Khanda” symbol.  I wanted to chose a symbol that looked interesting to me but also one from an area I know nearly nothing about.

This symbol is related to the Sikh religion in India and is actually a fairly recent form that didn’t come about until the first decade of the 20th century.

The symbol itself is made up of three different symbols.  First the double edged khanda sword in the center, then the “chakkar” or chakram in the middle, and finally the two single edged swords that are crossed at the bottom.  These represent the dual characteristics of “Miri-Piri” (material and spiritual), and indicate the integration of spiritual and temporal sovereignty together rather than treating them as separate things.  

This seems to indicate that the material and spiritual aspects of life should be lived equally.  To spend too much time on the spiritual or the material is unhealthy and creates an imbalance in life.  This follows the same lines of balance that Quareia teaches both in life and in the work that you do.  This is seen in the idea that ritual and inner work should be done equally; doing one more than the other creates an imbalance.

Some say that the symbol as a whole stands for infinity.  There are many infinity symbols in many religions.  It is said in yogic terms that the symbol represents a neutral mind and the ability to make non-reactive decisions.  The middle circular symbol reflects oneness and unity of mankind.  The two swords and their dualistic nature remind me of the yin and yang of Chinese philosophy.

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Lately I have been exhausted from work so I haven’t been practicing as much as I should but I’ve been working on memorizing and practicing parts of the Hexagram ritual and I have finally done this ritual in full.  From now on I will try to do this ritual monthly.

This lesson also has you sigilize this ritual and then go back and sigilize the rituals we’ve done so far.  I have taken a first stab at this and put the sigils in my records, but I would like to let them sit and then revisit these to work them some more and refine the shapes.  In the lesson you are supposed to use circles, dots, and lines and I find this restriction somewhat limiting in the shapes I can make so I will let what I’ve done sit and then revisit it soon.

The lesson also has you research religious symbols that have positive and negative aspects and then choose one to write about.  I will make another post about that.

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In keeping with recording anything strange that happens I should record a recent event that happened.

It was night time and very dark except for highway lights and I was driving in a light rain.  The road was wet and I was on the highway.  No other cars were around.

As I was driving I noticed two shining orbs far down the highway maybe half a mile away.  My initial thought was that there was an animal in the road, maybe a deer.  As I got closer the orbs didn’t move and suddenly I thought there was a silhouette on the road, at this point I’m starting to think it must be a deer so I start to slow down a little, I’m still maybe a quarter of a mile away at this point.  

Next the silhouette really starts to fill out and I’m convinced this can’t be a deer and must be some kind of creature.  At this point every hair in my body stands on end I get that feeling of absolute certainty there is some being on the road and it fills my whole body, all the while I’m still slowing down.

Then suddenly as quickly as it was there the silhouette disappears, the feeling disappears, and the orbs disappear.

Physically I think the road was wet and my headlights were probably shining just right to reflect the lights and cause shadows on the road.  But nothing can explain that extreme feeling I had that there was a presence on the road that night.

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Module 2 Lesson 4

This lesson is about doing the Full Hexagram Ritual.

The hexagram ritual is all about divinity (the hexagram represents divinity) and how it flows.  Whereas the pentagram ritual was all about man and how that power flows.

So far I have done the first half the ritual which involves opening the directions and then going around drawing parts of the pentagram and muttering some words.  Afterwards you are to sit down and meditate on what you did.

The first thing I noticed is how much more I seem to “connect” to this ritual versus the pentagram ritual.  So far I am able to easily remember the movements and the directions they go in as well as the words you need to say.  I think partly this is because the sayings are short and follow a pattern and they are associated with certain movements.  I think it’s easier for me to remember movements so by combining them I have an easier time remembering.  With the pentagram ritual I am still struggling to remember the large sections of text you have to recite so I still have to do that from paper.  I also feel like I can visualize the symbols drawn and patterns brightly in my vision.

The second thing I realized is that the symbols drawn and the directions/elements match classical alchemy symbols of the four elements.  Air/East/Upright triangle, Water/West/Inverted triangle, Earth/North/Inverted triangle, Fire/South/Upright triangle.  And by putting together the opposites you come up with a complete hexagram for each pair.  A nice side effect of this is that I was having trouble remembering these symbols for the elements but because of this ritual I don’t think I’ll have that issue anymore.

I’m not sure yet what the full hexagram you draw in the cross quarter between East and North is for, but I still have the second half of the ritual to learn.

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Module 2 Lesson 3

This lesson is about doing the Full Pentagram Ritual.

The lesson talks about giving and receiving related to the sword and the cup.  

First is a lesson about having to really give in life without any expectation of thanks or feeling good (because this is actually a receiving of thanks).  You are instructed to take a portion of your paycheck and give it to a homeless person and walk away before they can respond.  You are also supposed to gather some things and donate them.  It didn’t bother me at all to do the donation part, the part about giving a portion of my paycheck was uncomfortable but only because I have some financial goals I’m trying to achieve but I didn’t mind.

I have never been too attached to material things.  There are things I like to have from a utility perspective because they either make things easier or more comfortable, but if I had to get rid of them for some reason it wouldn’t bother me too much.

Next the lesson talks about receiving in a magical sense and talks about receiving unconditionally.

These two actions of receiving and giving are important because they go along with “power in” “power out” kind of like an electrical circuit.

I think the lesson focuses a bit on receiving/giving in a non emotional way to be more practical.  I think the idea is that when you’re working at higher levels with large amounts of power or working with other beings you need to do it in a practical non emotional way.  I feel like I already have a good head start with this because typically I’m good at looking at situations and dealing with them in a very logical non emotional way.  Sometimes this can be a bad thing because it can make me seem cold, but it can also be a good skill for getting the work done or doing what needs to be done.

The main point of this lesson is the Full Pentagram Ritual.  In this ritual you go around the directions with the help of inner contacts and you first give power in the East and then take it to the North to put into your past.  Then you receive power from the West and take it to the South for the future and put it into yourself.  After this there are some recitations to do about yourself and the powers.

I am currently practicing this ritual to get it down more strongly before moving on while also practicing the directional ritual and tarot spreads.

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Module 2 Lesson 2

This lesson is another Tarot lesson with a new layout.

This tarot layout is based on the Tree of Life from Qabalah and the structure of the cards is the same.  It is said that this layout is good for specific questions but weaker overall for general questions.  The practical work in this lesson is to practice the layout several times with questions about public figures, some situations, and then practice it regularly.

Note to self, I definitely need to practice Tarot more regularly and get more familiar with the cards.

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I tried to remember what I dreamed last night but it faded too quickly, I remember a lot of dreaming but I can’t remember any of it.  I had an image of a shape with the infinity symbol above it and it reminded me of the Rider Waite tarot card of The Magician.

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The only thing I can remember about my dreams last night are reading some words: “Defeat the skull.  Take the blood.  Don’t tell anyone.”  It was very strange.

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Module 2 Lesson 1

This module is all about Magical Patterns and Maps.  Lesson 1 is about the directions we have been working with and going more into detail.

I’ve been working with this lesson for over a week now as it has quite a few parts.  The lesson starts off talking about the directions and power and then the first exercise is a ritual of confirmation that gets things going with the journey of receiving the sword and the cup so I will be on the lookout if either of those show up in my life.

The next ritual I practiced was the first part of the Directional Ritual of Power which I practiced over the last week to memorize the pattern.  Then you are supposed to move on to the full ritual which is more complicated than the first part because it adds the layer of visualization and contact.

The ritual itself teaches you to take power from the East and then bridge it to the future in the South.  Then take power from the future and bridge it to past in the West, and then take that power and destroy it and then place the fragments into the North.

I have now practiced the full ritual once and will continue to practice once a week for a few weeks.  On my first run through of the ritual I noticed something new.  As I was going around opening the directional gates I noticed a strong pressure in ears like you get when the atmospheric pressure changes.  It seemed to last for the whole ritual and afterwards it seemed to go away.

Another thing I wanted to take note of was how tired and drained I felt most of this last week.  I mainly attributed it to work and mental exhaustion from that.  But on reflection, the lessons do mention that the work of bridging power can be exhausting.  A couple of times this week I doubled up the practice and did 2 a day and skipped a day.  So it’s quite possible that the extra exhaustion was from the magical work.  Bridging this energy from the past and future is supposed to build up inner muscle.

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In my dream last night I was in High School I think.  I was talking to a girl and then she sticks her finger in my ear and cleans it out.  After that we continued to meet and talk a few times after school before I woke up.  I don’t remember actually hearing anything though, it seemed that the dream was silent.

Maybe this was about the sense of hearing?  Maybe a sign that I will have a better inner sense of hearing or that I need to clear my ears out somehow?

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Strange dream from last night:  I felt like I was awake but I can’t be sure.  In the “dream” I was laying in bed and I had senses on my mind and suddenly smelled what I think was a very very strong musky cat smell like it was in my nose.  After about 2 or 3 breaths of this it startled me so much that I suddenly woke up and realized I wasn’t fully awake.  When I woke up I no longer smelled the smell and everything seemed normal.

P.S.  I should note that this might be the first time I ever remember smelling something in a dream or at least remembering it.

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My dream last night was of a woman receiving bones, maybe as a gift.  It made me think “Bonewoman”, but that’s all I can remember.

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Module 1 retrospective:

In module 1 I got a brief introduction to many different subjects including: Meditation, Ritual, Tarot, Vision, Inner Senses, Protection, Symbols, and Astrology.  As the course goes along it will cycle back around to all of these going in greater and greater depth and slowly building on the basic skills.

At this point I think my strong skills are vision and tarot.  I already have good practice at visualizing things from many years of reading and visualizing the scenes unfolding.  For tarot I can’t remember the cards at all and have to use a cheat sheet to remember meanings but the results of the spreads I have done seem to “work”.  For the most part even if a card doesn’t seem to fit if I think about it a little more then it makes sense.

My weak skills at this point I think are inner senses and astrology.  I’m not too worried about astrology, I have a basic working understanding and I don’t think I need to memorize all the different patterns.  However, I do want to memorize the symbols of the zodiac and the planets so that I am able to visualize those when necessary as part of ritual work.  As far as inner senses goes I’m not sure what I can do to strengthen those at this point.  I think that I definitely need to do more meditation and a more regular practice of meditation and maybe that will help.  I would also like to get some supplemental material on “improving psychic senses” and see if any of that is useful.

I feel like I have a good grasp on Module 1 and I know the things I need to continue working on daily/weekly and I can go ahead and start slowly working on Module 2.  Module 2 is all about patterns and will have a lot more work on ritual.  One of the first rituals in module 2 that I am excited about is one where you introduce yourself to the inner worlds as an apprentice.  I think in the next few modules I will begin to connect with power and start to feel and experience things beyond little prickles here and there.

At this point I have completed 1 out of 30 modules for the course.  At this time if I take my time and work hard on the material I think I can definitely see the course taking me 3 - 5 years to complete.  I am excited about what is to come.

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I was snoozing with my alarm to get up this morning and I remember a bit of my dream from last night (after having removed the invisibility talisman that blocked me from the magical world).

I was on a plane to Chicago and I was snoozing and kept waking up.  I was thinking it was taking an awfully long time to get there and then I realized that because of the fog and weather the plane was driving along the highway with other cars and other planes so it was taking a lot longer because we weren’t going on a straight path.  This seemed a little weird, but apparently not weird enough to wake me up.  

I also got up and sat next to a few other passengers.  They talked to me but I can’t remember what they said and it seemed to be mostly random gibberish.  I also remember taking note of the timezone change which made it seem like it was taking a lot longer.

At one point I remember waking up to my alarm in real life and I remember a flash of an older bald man with glasses staring at me.

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Module 1 Lesson 7 talisman results:

I completed the experiment with the talisman from Module 1 Lesson 7 for invisibility of the magical world and wanted to post my results.

I was anxious about what I would experience because as I said when I started the experiment I don’t feel like my psychic senses are very strong so I was curious what I would feel like after a week without them.  I took the talisman off today and threw it in a river.

As I took the talisman off I could feel a weight being lifted off (obviously from a psychological perspective this makes sense because of the physical weight of the necklace).  But it also felt like a blockage was cleared, or taking from an eastern cultural explanation it’s like my qi was not flowing and after taking it if everything flowed smoothly again.

As far as senses go, I can’t really say that after taking it off I could suddenly see auras or hear/smell/taste anything differently.  I think that probably makes sense, since my senses were not strong to begin with I wouldn’t really notice anything with or without it on.  While I didn’t feel much putting it on I definitely felt the weight being lifted off taking it off.

I think it would be fun to do this experiment at a later date when I’m further along the path and maybe have developed stronger senses.

This experiment marks the end of my time in Module 1 and I feel like I’m ready to move on to Module 2.  Before that I would like to do a post to reflect on what I learned in Module 1 and what the future holds.

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Module 1 Lesson 8

While I’m doing the talisman exercise from the last lesson where I created and am wearing a talisman that blocks all psychic/magical senses and spirits I’m not supposed to practice any active magic, so I went on to the next lesson which is mostly research about an introduction to Astrology.  I will be wearing the talisman for a week and return to magic practice next week.

The introduction to Astrology is interesting and vast.  I can definitely see how Astrology as a field can be a vast study that takes many years to fully become adept in.  This lesson is a brief introduction with some practical work in using internet tools to generate your natal chart so that you can start to analyze.  There are planets, houses, transits, etc. to consider and really all you need is a basic ability to know about the different symbols and have an idea of how to read a chart.

I used a couple of online tools to generate my natal chart and compare and then I went with astro-charts.com to generate a paid version which has a very nice large chart with all the symbols and a very in depth analysis of all the patterns.  As I was reading through the analysis I was surprised at home much I agreed with many of the statements.  There was only really one aspect that I disagreed with and that could have been because the planet is so close on the border of 2 houses.  Here are some of the statements that I felt were spot on:

“You have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. You’re always consuming something to keep abreast of current thought and developments in your field.“

“You may spend much of your time looking for authorities on the subject; looking for a guru who can you blow you away with their wisdom, kindness and guidance. You’re swept up by the love of a strong, clear direction.“

“You’re not interested in shallow work. Nor are you interested in sharing weekend golfing stories around the watercolor. You are here to transform lives.“

“You are a hard nosed worker, that shuns attentions.”

I am approaching Astrology with the same healthy skepticism as Tarot (being another divination technique), I am finding it as spot on as Tarot.  I think that the general horoscopes you see in the newspaper or daily on the internet have to be fairly generic because they’re not going on very much information about you but I feel that the natal chart is actually quite good and while some of the statements were fairly broad there were many that were fairly specific and spot on.  I was actually expecting maybe 50% of it to be way off base but I feel like only maybe 5% of the analysis was wrong or didn’t fit.

I also understand that your natal chart is sort of what you “start with” or what you have to “work with” and doesn’t at all represent the absolute truth, just like in Tarot a reading for the future is more of what will happen given the current circumstance and I feel like you can always affect and change your current fate.  So I see the natal chart as my natural talent that I have to work with.

The report from astro-charts.com has an analysis that is mostly mundane in meaning, more about the physical world.  So the lessons in Quareia have you look at the position of the planets in relation to your personal seal.  I find it interesting that most of the planets are clustered around the section of the seal for the Cup which has to do with “I receive”.  I’m interpreting that to mean that I am very receptive to all those powers.  And I notice that the planet closest to that position is Neptune which is usually associated with “inspiration”, “dreams”, “psychic receptivity”.  I am very excited about that and hope that means I have a lot of potential in the magical world.  The planet closest to the sword, which is “I give”, is Chrion which usually represents the “wounded healer” and our attempt to heal the wound.

For homework for myself from this lesson I have made my personal seal with the planets and I will start trying to memorize and visualize the symbols of the planets and the Zodiac signs.  I believe later in the course we will be working a bit more with planetary powers and this will be important.