Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Temple >

What advice would you give?

09:29 / 15.07.05

This is based on a pdf I read recently, what advice would you give to yourself if you could step into a time machine and go back in time to when you first started stepping into the occult world?

I could link to the pdf I know, but I haven't so there would be no 'I agree with......... no point in copying it'. I would like to hear your own views and it doesn't matter if you are twenty years or ten months down the line.

Only fair I start;
It's ok to laugh, I wish I had known this at the start when things go fanfasticly belly-up it's ok to laugh..clear the air and learn from that mistake and continue. And to maintain that sense of humour at all times

09:40 / 15.07.05

Start thinking for yourself, based on your experience, rather than your reading or preconceptions. Experiment and think about it, because there isn't a right way to perfect.

&

Any plans you lay, exhortations you make - if you don't act on them right then, you're probably bullshiting yourself. Just fucking get on with it.

10:29 / 15.07.05

I'll second that - don't over-estimate the importance of books and paths.

10:34 / 15.07.05

The buddha smiles for a reason ;-)

11:49 / 15.07.05

People involved with occultism and paganism are, by and large, a bunch of ridiculous, insufferable cunts.

Unconditional Love

12:16 / 15.07.05

kill yourself first, cuz beforehand you were just bullshitting. at least now you can tell your bullshit from your experiences.that doesnt mean blagging scamming and bullshitting are nessecarily bad things, no, there very useful skills.just reign in your tactical shit sprayer from completely covering your world in the stuff, but there again everything needs something to grow in.atleast you can tolerate the smell of your own shit. thats my analysis.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

13:32 / 15.07.05

Your books suck. Chuck that sanitised new-age crap in the bin where it belongs and go and read some Crowley or something.

Tryphena Absent

14:22 / 15.07.05

Don't try and find a good book on witchcraft, it's all complete shit and you'll be wasting your time.

14:39 / 15.07.05

Don't perform anything unless you're damn well prepared to have it work.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

21:21 / 15.07.05

You are not in control.

You are not in the driving seat. You are not running the show. You think you can decide the direction that your practice will take? You think you can pick and choose, adopt A (because it ties in with the way you want to see yourself and be seen, fits your pet fantasies, doesn't put you to any inconvenience) and reject B (because it scares you, or because it just doesn't go with your stuff)?

You've got another think coming. Sooner or later, you're going to get yanked away from whatever path you think you ought to want to be on and sent off in a completely different direction. Your whole way of looking at the world, everything you think you know, will be erased and overwritten--not just once, but many times. You will be snatched up by a tornado and dumped into fucking Oz and--here's the thing--you won't even want to go back because, hey, fuck Kansas. Then another tornado will come along and dump you somewhere even stranger and you'll be all "Well, fuck Oz." And with everything you learn or unlearn, you will feel smaller and more ignorant; with every step you take on the path, you will see the road grow ever longer before you.

You are not running the show. The show is running you. And if it isn't running you, if you're still pick-and-mixing like you're buying sweeties at Woolworth's, then you're not really working magic. You're having a tea-party in your room with your teddies and dolls.

You are not in control. But hey--fuck control.

15:45 / 19.07.05

Know Thyself - this first above everything.
Love Thyself - the hardest of tasks; from this love and compassion ripple outwards.
Trust Thyself - within you exists all possibility, knowledge, and divinity, if you learn to appreciate the magnitude of this mystery.

Growth is not possible without risk.
Take mushrooms when you're ready.
Everyone is a teacher.

All Acting Regiment

16:43 / 19.07.05

About those diagrams and names of demons and stuff. Can you tell me what it is actually useful for, right now? What can you actually acheive with it?

Right. Well then. Go and read around some more.

That's "read around" as in "go on Barbelith etc", as opposed to sitting in the library with the "A to Z Of The Occult" and wondering why the tracksuits are laughing at you.

18:57 / 19.07.05

People involved with occultism and paganism are, by and large, a bunch of ridiculous, insufferable cunts.
Gypsy Lantern stole my response.

My advice to my younger self? Don't be so cautious, throw yourself into it like a mothafucka.

10:33 / 20.07.05

..and read more occult books. Sorry all you peeps who said read less, there are loads of essential texts out there I wish I'd read earlier.

vanishinghitchhiker

02:23 / 21.07.05

This is an odd question for me, or perhaps just an odd moment for me to come across this question.

For me, right now, it would be more to the point to ask what advice my just-beginning self could give to the me that's now. (This is slightly off... It's not really the very-just-beginning self that could tell me things, so much as the practicing-for-maybe-two-years self).

That's not to say that I haven't learned a lot in the time since then. I think I probably have a broader idea now of what magic is to me and how to use it/how it affects me. On the other hand, I think I might have had a better idea then of where the underlying magic around me is. I have relearned/am relearning that, but I knew it then.

I'm just astounded lately when I read things from that time in my life, from my first couple of years with a real awareness of magic, rediscovering that I knew things then I'm only just relearning now, things I've forgotten to know for a while. And that me knew how to have patience with the learning, which is something else I'm having to find again. A lot of that likely has much to do with the fact that for a good three years (part of the time since then) I pushed magic out of my life good and hard, at least on the surface. Tried, anyway. Then again, that might've caused me to forget some things, but I think it's part of where the knowledge I have now (as said, the broader idea of what magic is) comes from.

Other people have said brilliant things about what they would tell their younger self, though, particularly those things (and there are many) that have to do with letting go.

As far as the books are concerned, silly as they may have been, I think it was good for me to read some of them first, try to learn from them, believe in them perhaps for a bit, so that later I could disregard most of that and follow myself in a different direction. Similar to what people say about learning to follow the rules before breaking them (please no one respond thinking I'm actually saying that those books present 'the rules,' I'm not I'm not, it's just a rather poor analogy).

--

04:50 / 21.07.05

Sigils aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Also, avoid buying photocopied occult books from an eBay scam artist named okra-z.

Boy in a Suitcase

15:05 / 21.07.05

Hah ha ha ha!!!

Nice one. Okra-Z. Fucker.

20:52 / 23.07.05

Keep USING those skills you've won!

And - write things down. You tend to forget details after a couple of decades.

20:15 / 24.07.05

Don't wish or cast spells for anything so stupid - and become aware that whatever influences that you can soak in will imprint you even down to the subconcious, remember that anything done on the magickal level will eventually bubble back to real time and will effect you. Magick seems the precursor to the Psychic Parapsychological Paradigm. There are pluses and downsides to every magickal system. Me personaly am going heavilly to the Psychic Paradigm and the Selves - Development Movements. I started off with Colour Magick, Taoist Sytems, Spare and Crowley and Burroughs. Sigils aint the whatever they deem themselves to appear as, but they are fast!!! Watch the Darkside it can bring you down - depends how afloat the abyss you want to position yourself with. Learn Linguistics and Semantics it will boost your intellectual side no doubt but also make you talk more clearer! Don't Scramble your brains surfing reality tunnels can become like getting your wellies stuck in the mud at a raining festival.

20:25 / 24.07.05

Oh by the way sex magick can detract from the mundane pleasures of yourself and others, sex easilly imprints easilly it can ruin your sex lives if you don't exercise caution. Divining Hate Runes whilst pleasuring yourself isn't exactly the thing you want - it can set you back years in re-search. I'd watch out for the Alphabet of Desire it can besot you - I have my own, which works (it's just a visual anchor to induce a resource state), but Peter Carroll's AOD with its Planetary Symbolism can bind you to strange resource states when reading the astrological section, so I'd un-bind that one because obsession can take over you. Look up Cyber Magick there are plenty of tools to use with computing and that and also hi-tech ways of attaining gnosis or relaxation devices and plenty of other systems apart from magick as well.

21:58 / 24.07.05

Kali is not where it's at. Leave that teen-angst-bodycount bullshit where it belongs.

One word. Sarasvati.

20:03 / 27.07.05

Fuck your moral code. Transgress and grow.

20:05 / 27.07.05

...and, after six months of the above, forge a moral code that is your own, not the shit you got taught at school, and stick by it.

Boy in a Suitcase

21:21 / 27.07.05

Fun fun fun fun fun! Have fun fun fun fun!

00:02 / 28.07.05

I'd like to think that my younger self would tell me to fuck off.