A Curriculum for Gaining Power: Cycle 2

 

 

In order to implement any sort of occult technology of power beyond the beginner level, you have to unfuck your mind. Judeo-Christian assumptions and logic have blended with political and economic systems, especially in the global west, to create masses of frustrated consumers locked in the invisible prison of conformist culture.  This is how your mind, your perspective of yourself in the world, and your perceptual field in general is fucked. It’s not a conspiracy theory because there is no conspiracy.  No one is controlling all of this, even if some groups can exert temporary control over parts of it.  Yet all who are immersed in the Judeo-Christian current are more or less controlled by it.  It is an emergent human phenomenon of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.  If you can read these words, that means it affects you.

Standing the place of the other, being spiritually othered, being inwardly alien, being different with the aim of becoming magically powerful means accepting the binaries of self vs. not-self, individual vs, group, self-determined social action vs. predetermined social action.  In this curriculum for gaining power, we strongly affirm the pain of deliberate self-creation at the expense of the comfort of creation by others.  “Unfucking your mind” means enacting this self-creation from the inside out, permanently altering your perceptions and therefore your values.

 

None of this is new.  The non-Christian Aquarian / new age countercurrent has espoused these ideas since well before Aleister Crowley received Liber AL vel Legis in 1904 (“[T]hou hast no right but to do thy will” (Liber AL I.42)). Still, I wonder whether you understand this in your bones. I address myself here as well as the several readers of this blog who expressed appreciation for Cycle 1 and the many who subscribe to it.  Nodding at these words is one thing, but grasping their implications is another.

 

I ask again, questioning myself as well as the hypothetical reader, do you understand this invisible prison at its deepest level? Because that would mean clearly seeing the hidden world around you in order to make its prison bars explicit for yourself. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, you’re not there yet. If you’re arguing, you’re not there yet.  I’m not even entirely “there” yet, since “there” presupposes a discrete end point to this effort.  I’ve said many times that the left hand path is not something we ever “get done.”  It’s a path of becoming, of constant striving.

 

The prison of Judeo-Christian thought never fully goes away.  Even when we think we’ve extricated ourselves from it, it’s there all around us in our family and friends, in our institutions, in the architecture of the world, creeping back into us from those things when we’re not paying attention.  And though there are many useful Judeo-Christian ideas and practices, metaphysical and otherwise, it remains at heart a slave religion of hypocritical self-deceit.  One is essentially encouraged to admit that one is powerless before Yahweh in order to passive-aggressively gain power through him.  Needless to say, this doesn’t work in real life, which is why Christianity, in particular, is also a lying death religion.

 

Cycle 2 of the curriculum for gaining power encourages you to reject this as deeply and as firmly as you can.  You will never reject it completely because it has been written into you and reinforced since your formative years.  But you can begin to take the power back and keep it for yourself.  You can stand in the place of the other and embrace antinomianism to the greatest extent you are able.

 

The theme of the previous cycle was “Unifications.”  The theme of this cycle is “Severance.”  In order for something to split apart, it has to first come together.  And by “something,” I mean your life.  You must now “split apart” in deliberate ways.  You must fracture the comfortable limitations imposed on your body and mind by others.  You must sever and jettison anything and anyone standing in the way of your self-initiation.  To say this is difficult is an understatement.  To say this is the most difficult step toward gaining power is a falsehood.  It gets much harder, but this is our work right now.

 

Goal: beginning the process of self-creation through radical severance.

 

Books and items to acquire (used along with the previous books and items from Cycle 1):

 

• MindStar, Michael Aquino
• Seven Faces of Darkness, Don Webb
• Freedom From Your Inner Critic: a Self-Therapy Approach, Jay Earley and Bonnie Weiss
• The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer
• The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey
• “Saturn” incense (Lucky Mojo makes a good self-combusting blend of this, but use your own creativity and possibly make your own). 
• Get some charcoal discs for clean incense burning and a bowl with sand or a small loose burner with a wire grating in it.
• A symbol of Saturn, Satan, Samael, Prometheus, Loki, or Set (find one that appeals to you—could be a statue, a symbol, a picture or anything else, as long as it is tangible, you can put it on the altar, and it clearly communicates the essence of the spiritual archetype in question).  This is in addition to the small pentagram from Cycle 1.
• A red pillar candle and a black pillar candle.
• Replenish any supplies consumed in the previous work.

 

Cycle 2 Length: 60 days.

 

Daily Practices (do as much of these as you can at any time convenient to you):

 

Body:

• Stretch: continue the routine from the previous cycle, which should now be relatively easy.  Add 12 rounds of Surya Namaskara (Prashantj Yoga has a clear, well-crafted instructional video).  After you get familiar with the asanas and the breathing, add the mantras.  Do it every morning, taking one day of rest when you start feeling exceptionally tired.  This, in itself, is a complete spiritual and physical practice. 
•  When you get comfortable with this, you may wish to also read Swami Satyananda Saraswati’s A Technique of Solar Vitalization (Yoga Publications Trust, 1983).  You may continue with your Five Tibetan practice or dispense with it as you wish.  It will be useful to continue Five Tibetans as a prelude to performing Surya Namaskara every day, but your core body-mind work is now focused on the latter, inherently more rigorous practice.
• 5x10 knuckle push-ups.
• 5 judo pushups (Scott Herman demonstrates this well).
• 5x10 sit-ups.
• Maintain 15 long jumps.
• Increase to 8 bear crawls.
• Maintain 100 basic sword cuts (and read the rest of Korean Sword Mastery, but do not implement any of the other techniques or practices yet).
• Learn to do a basic front kick (look at Hayabusa here).  Practice this kick at the end of this daily conditioning (not at the beginning).  Be able to do it fast and hard, but also practice doing it very slowly and holding your leg out at full front-kick extension for up to 2 minutes.
• This physical curriculum is not easy.  It’s more “HIIT” (High Intensity Interval Training) than anything else. But for the purposes of training body and mind more directly to become powerful, it is priceless and you don’t need to go to a gym or spend time at a dojo (both of which are also very good).  Remember to apply analgesic, take rests, and consult with a doctor if you have any questions about being able to do these things.  Regular massage is a very useful (though optional) addition to this.

 

Emotions:

• You have been practicing the discipline of not complaining.  You may wish to continue that, but you should now reflect on how your days have or have not improved as a result of that self-work.  What other realizations and tools have you acquired as a result of this?  What can you discard? 
•  You have also been “pivoting” and employing elements of New Thought as a way to improve your inner states.  Continue to experiment with things like Law of Attraction and positive thinking.  Follow this practice wherever it leads.  It will take you somewhere unique to who you are.  That is, incidentally, the ideal of this entire curriculum.
• In this cycle, you will now take your emotional work to a more involved level.  Read Freedom From Your Inner Critic, front to back, and journal about what you discover.  Apply this knowledge to your New Thought work and, in a broader sense, to this entire system of left-hand-path growth. 
•  Confronting your inner critic, if done correctly, will release an enormous amount of blocked psychological (and metaphysical) energy in you. It will bring you insights I cannot imagine from my point of view while writing this.  Remember, self-creation means self-motivation and self-direction.  As we progress, the practices in this curriculum will become increasingly loose and suggestive rather than proscriptive and deterministic.  You must become tolerant of the discomfort inherent in cutting your own path through life.  Only then will you reach your potential.  It cannot be handed to you by others.  You have to do the work unique to you.
• Go through The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook.  This may be very difficult.  The object is to forgive and love yourself.  The right hand path stresses self-abnegation, self-denial, and self-criticism.  The left hand path celebrates the self.  It encourages you to fully and completely experience every emotion that arises in you. 
•  At this point, you should read Anton LaVey’s aeon-defining chapter in The Satanic Bible, entitled, “Indulgence Instead of Abstinence,” arguably the most important part of this deeply misunderstood book.  Now that you have learned to see yourself clearly and act in the most positive light, confront the self-hatred taught to you in your childhood, and learn to love yourself (at least a little more), indulgence should take on a much deeper meaning with many strange and interesting implications.  Work them out.  Write about them in your journal.

 

Mind:

• Continue the Tarot contemplation, but adapt it to the “advanced” version in Modern Magick.  Record what you experience in great detail.  Try to answer this question: what is the nature of an astral experience?  Your answer to this should and will change over time.
• Write a letter to yourself in your journal about Svoboda’s themes in The Greatness of Saturn now that you’ve finished it.  Start to think about how left-hand path parables, archetypes, and riddles can inflict pain on the person trying to work them out.  Here is the only koan used in the Temple of Set: “The text of another is an affront to the Self.”  It twists back like an ouroboros.  Why?
• In MindStar, Dr. Aquino writes, “The phenomenon of individual consciousness is not  identifiable in a vacuum. For humans to recognize this facility, they must first become aware of an environment outside themselves, then realize, if initially only passively, that they are severally something distinct from it” (23).  Research the complete meaning of the ancient Egyptian word for “god,” neter (-u). The Egyptians regarded everything as a god. Aside from the god of consciousness (which the Temple of Set considers to be Set), what are the other neteru?  What are you in this context?
• Study and notate the frame rite on pages 50-53 of Seven Faces of Darkness.  Make sure you understand everything, every word, every name, every aspect.  Studying magical operations is an act of magic.  All magic begins by changing the magician.  Studying this will change you.  Be aware of that and journal about it as you work.
• Continue exploring Shen-Ku, The Essential Law of Attraction Collection, and Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path.  Some of what you read may modify how you do these practices.  That is good.

 

Spirit:

• Practice mindfulness meditation at your altar for five minutes daily.  Burn the Saturn incense.  Put the red pillar candle to the right and the black one to the left.  Make sure they are lit and the light falls on your symbol or statue of the left-hand-path deity.  It’s up to you to learn how to do this meditation.  There are many free resources online.
• Continue recording your dreams.  They are keys to your inner planes.  You will eventually start to notice dream imagery showing up in your advanced tarot contemplations.  Do not be unsettled by this. 
•  Continue casting sigils and working with Angels of Alchemy / Magickal Protection as desired.
• Now that you have learned the frame rite from Seven Faces of Darkness, first perform the self-initiation rite (“self-initiation” because this work is yours alone) and then perform the frame rite with one of the PGM spells from the book, pages 57-80.  Note everything down in your diary. 

Unlike with Cycle 1, the 60-day length for this is only a suggestion.  You can take longer, but don’t rush through it.  Cut ties with any person, place, practice, situation, or thing standing in the way of your self-empowerment.  This may be easy or it may be painful.  It may take some time.  Give yourself that time.

 

Cycle 3 notes will follow.

 

 

Silenciumetaurum

 

A Curriculum for Gaining Power: Cycle 1

 

Cycle 1 - Unifications 

Goal: unite body, emotions, mind, and spirit.

Books to acquire:

·       Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons in the High Magickal Arts, Donald Michael Kraig.

·       The Art of Shen Ku: The First Intergalactic Artform of the Entire Universe, Zeek.

·       Korean Sword Mastery, Jerry Laurita.

·       The Greatness of Saturn, Robert Svoboda.

·       The Essential Law of Attraction Collection, Esther and Jerry Hicks.

·       Angels of Alchemy and Magickal Protection, Damon Brand.

·       Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path, Don Webb.

Other items:

·       A journal with blank pages and a pen you like.

·       Black tea lights and incense. Burn on your altar daily.

·       Index cards.

·       Tarot deck (Rider-Waite or one inspired - 78 cards).

·       A bokken or a stick that resembles one.

·       Analgesic (Tiger Balm is good. So is White Flower Balm Oil and Wong To Yick Woodlock Medicated Oil, but Ben Gay or Icy Hot will do).

·       A small box for your items and books, which you can also use as an altar (get a black altar cloth for it or cut a black T-shirt for it).

·       A small bowl or metal can for burning slips of paper.

·       A small plate stand and a wooden or metal pentagram, which you will place on the plate stand point down (i.e. as an inverted star, representing you as a singularity in which all other elements and saltes find meaning).

·       A piece of dedicative jewelry. Can be a pendant or a ring or something else. The point is that you will wear it every day. Suggestions are: an ankh, an inverted pentagram, or if you’re feeling a bit radical, a “Baphomet,” a Sulphur / “Leviathan Cross,” or  the symbol of Saturn.

You cannot separate body, emotions, mind, and spirit. Each of these are ways of seeing the singularity that is you. For the purposes of the practice of gaining power, they are useful fictions. This map, however, is not the territory.

Read the tiny parables by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled, “Inferno, I, 32” and “On Exactitude in Science.”

Understanding this comes in waves or layers. You can grasp the idea at once (ideas are aligned with the element of air and, as such, move very quickly relative to other things—for example, the mind is often where a magical working first manifests). But you cannot know a thing just with the mind. And understanding with the body, emotions, and spirit often comes at different times.

Cycle 1 Length: 78 days.

Daily Practices (do as much of these as you can at any time convenient to you).

Body:

·       Stretch (Shen Ku: “A Traveler’s Guide to Therapeutic Stretching”).

·       Five Tibetan Rites (Modern Magick, many places on the internet).

·       3x10 knuckle push-ups.

·       3x50 sit-ups.

·       15 long jumps (land on the balls of your feet, do 3 jumps one way, turn around and do 3 jumps back).

·       Bear Crawls about 30 feet out and 30 feet back five times (look on the internet for this).

·       100 basic sword cuts (Korean Sword Mastery, pages 71-114).

·       Apply analgesic to sore muscles.

Emotions:

·       Develop emotional discipline: no complaining for this entire cycle. Whenever you catch yourself doing it, go do 10 knuckle push-ups. If you can’t embrace this, renew your Netflix subscription and quit this praxis.

·       Practice “pivoting”: when you experience something unpleasant or any kind of negative emotion, say, “I know what I don’t want. But what do I want instead?” (Essential Law of Attraction, “Part 1: Pivoting and the Book of Positive Aspects”)

Mind:

·       Tarot Contemplation Ritual (Modern Magick).

·       Read The Greatness of Saturn.

·       Read Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide from “Initiatory Magic” on page 25 to the end of the chapter on page 31.

Spirit:

·       Read Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide from “Metacommunication” on page 19 to the end of “Practical Sigil Construction” on page 23. Use the system to bring you more money. Record the operation in your journal (cf. Modern Magick, “The Ritual or Magickal Diary” and Uncle Setnakt, page 32, Method 1: “Keep a diary”). After you draw some money to yourself, do 4 more of these sigil workings for the following: sex, insight, spiritual communication, and domination of someone else. I leave it to you to interpret what the specific subject matter will be. My only requirement is that you have courage and accept all consequences without complaint.

·       Begin recording your dreams (Modern Magick, “Tips for Remembering Dreams”).

·       Learn Damon Brand’s “Sword Banishing Ritual” (Magickal Protection).  Do it daily.

·       Invoke the Shem Angel, Tzafuniel, with Damon Brand’s Angels of Alchemy method. Ask for endurance to complete this first cycle (only do this at the beginning of the cycle). Record this working like any other.

Anything someone does more than once begins to get hard. You will fail. You will slack off. You will feel very uncomfortable. You will question this. You will wonder whether you have to do this for 78 days. This is part of it. The first day of practice is relatively easy. The 50th day, less so. You can always quit and return to your confusion and self-loathing. This is a path of transcendence, which means you have to internalize that concept. You have to evolve, transcend, grow stronger. No one cares whether you do. But you must care deeply about this. You must be extremely serious and quiet about it.

Cycle 2 notes will follow shortly. Good luck.

 

Silenciumetaurum