Two Lessons in Life In my previous post I shared how I performed some magick at a young age. Clearly, however, it was not the result of a truly trained magician. Unknowingly, I happened to have followed a pattern that equated with the practice of magick. It was unintended, natural, and successful. The second attempt that I remember didn't happen for another ten years. During that decade I spent time going to school, playing baseball, goofing with kids on my block (I grew up on a street named "Stoner Avenue." No, really!). I did all of the things a normal guy kid did. By the time I was 16 there were two important things I hadn't experienced. Danielle I met her at a youth meeting at my

Topic suggested by Chirotus. Thank you! Most people don't completely remember their early childhood. Freud suggested this was the result of our embarrassment over ideas and actions of our early youth and called it "motivated forgetting." However, many people remember certain events from that period that had a strong effect on them. One that I remember was my first experience of magick. The Background When I was five years old I watched my father die of a heart attack. My mother couldn't deal with maintaining a house, raising me and my older brother, trying to find a job, and the loss of her husband. My brother and I were sent off to relatives while my mother received help dealing with

Magick is more than making changes outside of you, it is also making changes to yourself. If there is something you don't like about yourself, you can change it. Well, there's nothing new about that! There are numerous systems for personal growth, change, and empowerment, some more effective than others. To effectively use any of them, however, requires you to know more about who you really are. If you think you're cowardly when, in fact, you are actually brave, you might spend many days, months, or years trying to become brave when it's a quality you already have.* Surely this is one of the reasons the concept of "Know Thyself" is so important—you can't decide on your goals (where you

Kirk - "Is he dead?"  McCoy -"it's worse than that Jim, his brain's gone." The above dialog comes from the first episode of the third season of the original Star Trek. The episode was first shown in 1968, was the first episode in the "we'll put this show here to die" time slot of 10:00 p.m. on Fridays, and demonstrated the "quality" of their new, lower budget. It's generally considered one of the worst of all the original episodes. Two of the stars, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, have stated that they didn't like it. Dialog like the above is on par with the infamous "But one thing's sure. Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible" from 1959's Plan 9 from Outer