I'd like to know what the biggest influences in your life have been. Specifically, what events and experiences had the most profound effect on your Self and guided you into a magickal relationship with your world?
For the sake of brevity, try to pick the top 3-5.
For me:
1) When I was about 4 years old my parents sold their home, bought a camper, and we departed on a 6 month camping trip. We went about halfway down the Baja peninsula, then back north through Oregon, Washington, and into Canada, then returning back south to settle in San Francisco. I have many memories of beautiful natural environments -enormous sand dunes rolling into the sea, vast lakes haunted by giant flocks of bats, deep, lush green forests for miles and miles and miles, and visits to native north american reservations with totem poles and tipis. This was the foundation for my ecology and relationship with Nature.
2)Ingesting LSD for the first time at 16. I was in a great setting with no responsibilities. I closed my eyes and before me were glorious jeweled vistas, geometries unfolding and evolving, I flew over unimagined lands and witnessed the joy of unfettered imagination. This was my first lesson that there was much more to the world than what I had been raised to believe.
3)Being driven home from a rave in San Francisco, coming down from an acid trip, I looked out the window of the car and suddenly realized beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Love permeated Everything. That it was always there but was simply hidden by the mind. This was the foundation for my optimism and the deep belief that Everything is Happening Just as it Should.
4)Pulling off the paved road and turning on to the playa of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada at 2 in the morning, seeing for the first time the playground of Burning Man. A city of art and light and community unfettered by commerce or consumerism, existing temporarily in spacetime for the sake of the joy of creation, only to fade back into the desert like a tibetan sand mandala blown away by a high lama. I learned here that there are far more freaks in the world than I ever could have imagined and that I belong amongst them and will always yearn for an idealized, hedonistic community of artists, pagans, and joyful thinkers.
5) Witnessing the deaths of my wife's Father (of ALS) and mother (of leukemia) in the past 2 years. The depth and profundity of watching another human being pass into death is beyond words and has shaken my world to the core. It has been the biggest challenge to my belief in light and love and purpose. This is the lesson that life continues forward in spite of the petty desires of the ego, that time is precious, and life is only one half of the coin so get used to the idea that you won't be here forever. |
- there's a few more autobiographical-magickal threads in there also)