The Habits of the Magi

Those four principles are broken down into these simple ideologies or these simple phrases that you can easily remember:

The first one is that all things are at all times in relationship and in communication, whether locally or non-locally.

The second one is that the law of the Magi requires him to always and in all ways find a meaning that is empowering.

The third one is to love thy mystery more than thy history.

The final one is to seek surrender and not release.

To fully expand upon these phrases and ideologies would take quite a lot of information or quite a lot of episodes. I hope to bring some of those in the coming episodes to you, but for today’s episode, I’d like to focus on one, perhaps two of these, just to help you understand the relationship and how that core principle could be a soft discovery of where you may be stuck right now in your practice and how you can get to the next level.

Let’s get into that episode today and remember to live deliciously.

Living deliciously is something that I’ve consciously pursued now for the last few years and it really came to me as a result of a painful breakup. I recognized in a very close and intimate relationship when I finally found “the one,” which happened to be, you know, as that goes, I discovered that this was not the one. This was my Imago. This was my own psychological projection of various internal inadequacies or states or stages of the development of my archetypal models that I was projecting over another person and essentially unconsciously making this other individual responsible for states that existed within myself.

Now, yes, we can enter in our society today and say that, look, there’s a role of exchange that we go into. That’s part of the beauty of being in relationships: we can give to other people, and that’s great if we enter relationships from the dynamic where both parties are seeking to give. This is a very functional and healthy relationship. But when we’re unconsciously seeking, when we’re unconsciously desperate, we’re unconsciously projecting, having certain needs of ourselves trying to be met through the other person, this is when we are struggling. This is one of the core ideas that we need to come back to because it is an actual leak of our power. It’s a position at an unconscious level of something that is then hijacking or commandeering our behavior.

The reason for that is because, quite frankly, most of us don’t want to come across as needy, and we see that very bespoke in this world that we have today, where everyone’s trying to demonstrate how non-needy they are. Yet fundamentally, this is still part of human nature. We need to connect. These are actual fundamental human needs. Connection is a need. Being significant or feeling like we matter is a need. These aren’t things that are going to go away. These are simply just components of ourselves that we need to develop healthier vehicles in order to experience so that we can have more abundance of them because we’re not just meeting our needs selfishly, looking at that narrow-minded view, but in fact looking at the broader spectrum.

In fact, one of the great interpretations of the difference between the hero and the villain is that both have had pain, extreme pain. The difference is that one looks at that and says, “The world’s gonna pay. They’re not going to do this to me. I’m going to get them,” right? The other one goes, “The world did this to me. I’m not gonna let this happen to anyone else.” That’s one of the core fundamental differences. It’s also one of the fundamental differences in what we would define as being mature and immature in terms of how we experience our concepts of life. It’s this fundamental differentiation between associating to a limited self and associating to an unlimited or transcendent self, which is truly the essence of our spiritual practices.

How do we experience ourselves as the transcendent self? The problem is that we are fundamentally a transcendent self. We only hallucinate ourselves as this temporal self and as such get attached to that because it starts to meet a lot of our fundamental needs and that as such becomes an addictive pattern. The problem inside of this is that it creates a series of complexes to which we become unconscious because we want to keep an enlightened version of ourselves in our head. Everyone is secretly the hero of their own story or maybe sometimes they begrudgingly become the martyr of their own story, which at least was true for me, living as a martyr, recognizing how everyone else had this, but I had to carry the burden, I had to carry the cross.

This is something that we’re almost most promoted for in religious paradigms and programs, right? How humble we are through suffering, by this extreme point of suffering. This is a very perverse interpretation of some of the initial ideals. It is not that we are humbled by suffering; it is indeed true that suffering does humble us. But the fundamental purpose of these interpretations, we find in the practice of logotherapy, right, in the work of Viktor Frankl, he discovered that one of the core differences between people that were in the concentration camps during the Nazi run with the National Socialist run, so to speak, of Hitler, the difference between people that almost instantly gave up and became physically ill and died versus ones that actually seemed to become stronger was the difference in meaning, the difference in interpretation.

When somebody comes to you and they’re trying to give you all this empowering knowledge around suffering and pain, which I myself do, it is not to make pain noble, it’s not to glorify suffering and as such make it almost an addictive pattern. It is simply to recognize our capacity to find meaning within the shadows. In finding meaning within the shadows, within the pain, within the darkness of our lives, we are able to liberate ourselves from our enslavement to it. This is very edged into the left-hand path because we see as the shattered tree occurs of the clip-off that it still contains within itself an essential part of the body of God. That’s still within the demonic, which helps us to recognize meaning. Finding meaning inside of this demonic, this darkened, or this painful aspect of our nature or of our life becomes the very instrument of liberating that part.

The reason for this is because when we go through those experiences throughout our history, if you think through the timeline of your life from where you started to where you are today, every single stage in that journey has had various intense emotional events. The catch with various of these emotional events is they create anchors. Anchors are very simple to understand. It’s somebody that just hears a dog and then suddenly their body freezes, or you’re just driving down a road and you’re suddenly hearing a siren from a police car. Even if you did nothing wrong, your body still reacts in certain cases, and this is often because at some point, either in your event or in someone else’s event, they were emotionally impactful journeys and the brain anchored it.

This is very much what we do in occult practices when we look at symbols or sigils. We create a sigil that’s representative of certain states or desires or goals, and through conditioning, we anchor this into our nervous system or into our unconscious, and this thing formulates upon itself the behavioral patterns that then become expressed in the personality. As Joe Dispenza so rightly points out, that personality creates personal reality because your personality sits at the root of your life, right? It determines where you’re going to go, what you’re going to do.

Now, there is a far greater expanded model behind that, which is what the occult worldview is about, how that then entangles itself to all of reality and every other person, place, time, and thing and event that is out there, but that’s a little bit beyond the scope of our discussion today. If, however, that’s something you’re interested in exploring, I suggest looking at Dr. Joe’s work or my own work to help you dive deeper into that or just pick up a good book on neuroscience and explore that. I recommend deeply looking into the subject of neurotheology to help break some of those biases and start to understand the patterns happening within ourselves.

What we recognize by this pattern is as the timeline of the journey of the individual goes, we see very much the same depiction that we see in the tree of life. We become, we start off from this place of, shall we say, almost Ain Soph, this place of limitlessness, and from this place of limitlessness, we then begin to limit our potential through these emotionally intense defining moments of our life. These then eventually become the architecture, the governing principles of our personalities. They formulate our perceptual models of reality.

Physics will indicate to us that it’s the observer that turns the wave of infinite potential into the particle of limited manifest experience or reality. As such, as our perceptions of reality formulate throughout these various experiences, we thus produce reality. It becomes what we perceive the world to be at the level of our heart. These things then fundamentally build up to become the experience of who we are. We see this kind of journey of liberation oftentimes depicted as the journey of Inanna down into the underworld, or the same repeating of this mythology in the journey of Persephone also going down into the underworld to join with Hades. This is all a recognition of a journey down our timeline, down the inner world, that we may discover these various complexes, these governing powers of our personality, and thus our personal reality so that we can begin to liberate those experiences, untangle those electrically and emotionally charged events that have formulated who we are at this core level.

You see, this is one of the key essences of magical initiation. Magical or occult initiation is the systemic transmutation of the self-concept. The magician begins the journey and maybe sees themselves as a neophyte, then moves into the elemental grades where they start to, if the teacher is correct and intelligent or experienced enough in their guidance, connect with the archetypes of the king, of the sovereign, the magician, warrior, and lover. These four elemental manifestations in our psychology and how their impact is on the larger world, the greater world of ourselves. But throughout this progression, something very fundamental happens. The sense of self that gets lodged into these different places because it’s serving a purpose, it’s meeting some of these fundamental needs of the soul, of the spirit trying to express itself in reality, these get liberated piece by piece. We recover from this vast ocean of the unconscious ourselves. We begin a form of soul retrieval.

This is very much the essence behind the statement that I give: seek thy mystery more than thy history. Love thy mystery more than thy history. Because we are unconsciously governed by our history in most cases. We live with a certain set of ideas or events or experiences that happen in our life. We become intensely emotionally charged by this event, creating a neurological anchor in our brain. We repeat this over and over. How many times were you in an argument with somebody at work or someone in traffic or a lover or a spouse, and then for weeks you’re having that argument still in your head? The event’s passed, the situation’s over, but you’re still angry about it. You’re still emotionally feeling this event, right? You’re still living in the past. You’re still very much in love with your history. You’re loving your history more than you are your mystery. As such, you keep emitting that vibration.

All of magic, all of occultism, all of these things really boil down to a science of vibration, a musical cacophony of sound, but through the form of feeling is what we’re trying to emit. So if you’re stuck, if you’re caught up with a very limited range of emotional experiences and they’re dependent on what other people say, do, and behave, and how the economy and the world outside of you is functioning, that would make you in magical terms a slave. That means you are fundamentally more in love with your history than you are with your mystery. In other words, you are creating reality from the external references. You’re letting the events of your childhood and of your life and everything dictate who you are and as such determine what is and is not possible inside of your reality right now.

Now, this is not some holier-than-thou information. This is not some idea that says, oh, if you’re doing that, you’re bad. We all do this. This is the function of the human being. Events that we don’t take seriously, that have impacted us throughout our lives, the way our parents treated us or did not treat us, affected our attachment wounds within ourselves. It affected how we pause or fail the marshmallow test, if you will. Our capacity to deny pleasure short term for long-term pleasure is the statement behind the idea seek surrender, not release.

As we start to understand this first principle of love thy mystery more than thy history, it recognizes that the reason my desired goals are not coming into actualization is simply because I have more of an emotional tie to repeating my history, to being justified in my pain and my trauma, than I have in actually emotionally experiencing my reality. You can experiment with that quite simply. Go into meditation and meditate and experience only your desired goal, your desired dream reality, and notice how quickly your body tries to resist or come back out of it because your body is physically addicted to the past. That is the program that you’re repeating over and over. That’s the one that has the most emotionally intense charge. So when we say you love your history more than your mystery, we’re not talking about an intellectual choice, we’re talking about a biological choice. The process of love is the process of association. In other words, you are more associated or as such more identified with your past self than your potential self.

To love thy mystery more than thy history is to be more identified with thy potential self. This then gives us the premise of the idea of the marshmallow test. The tests or experiments done with kids, and no, they didn’t initially use marshmallows, but it’s how the article became popular, where the practice became popular, where they were looking at young boys and girls and they basically said to them, okay, here is, for example, a marshmallow. You can have this one right now, or you can have double that if you wait for an undefined time for this person who’s running the experiment to come back. There would usually be more than just one, but it would usually be some kind of variation of that, and it was an exploration of what was done. Would the child wait for the immediate pleasure? Would they go for the immediate pleasure, or would they go for the long-term pleasure, getting more as a result of it?

Find yourself in the society today. Look at the addiction that happens in your body from dopamine as a result of social media, the constant clicking and scrolling. All that stuff has been proven to weaken our concentration span. If anything, it promotes the ADHD of our culture at a super intense level because we’re being rewarded very quickly for short-term pleasure. So we no longer develop the will, the very fundamental tool of magic. Aleister Crowley was well noted for saying that the two most important instruments that the magician must cultivate are the will and the imagination. The will cannot be cultivated when we’re looking and chasing quick releases. This is known as addiction. To seek surrender over release means that we are no longer allowing ourselves to settle. It requires us to raise the standard by which we measure our life and our goals and our objectives. It’s when you start saying no to things more than you say yes to things. It is saying no to subpar relationships, subpar forms of income that are killing your soul as a result of it. But you need that. Now, I’m not saying that you just quit your job or you just step out of the relationship immediately. I am saying, however, that you need to recognize and start taking stock of the long-term pain and sometimes looking at the long-term investment.

One of the problems in our culture is that every social media marketer out there is trying to sell you this quick win lifestyle, this one little technique that’s going to make you a billionaire, and it feeds on that part of the psyche that wants to seek release. It’s the undisciplined animal self within our own nature. There’s a phrase that I’d like to say around this subject: a man who has not mastered the beast within will ultimately have that beast tamed by other men. If you are allowing this portion of yourself to go running amok, then that constantly brings you outside of presence. That constantly proves that you are being run or controlled by these unconscious forces of yourself. This is what magic is. The magician is one who has risen in the hierarchy by actually dealing with these complexes and components of themselves and as such can see them more evidently in others. Not everybody has pure intentions at heart, and if you don’t consciously cultivate mastery over this stuff, you become the slave of marketers. You become the slave of others who see the patterns you yourself have not seen.

This is why I love the old statement by Ramtha: “Make known what is unknown.” It’s one of our greatest purposes, or as Carl Jung would say, “Until we make the content of our unconscious conscious, it will rule our lives and we will call it destiny.” When you find yourself in a situation where the pressure or the frustration or the need to release is overcoming you, recognize that in this moment that is an addiction. That is something to which you have become a slave. The liberation of your slavery in your life on a global scale starts with the liberation of yourself at an emotional scale. It requires you to liberate yourself from the tyrant within and realize that the tyrant without is often times a projection of that one. I’m not saying that the world outside doesn’t have tyrants; it’s quite evident in our time that there are many. But the question is, why are they there in the first place?

I would usher the idea that sometimes many of our tyrants and the systems of control outside of us exist because we were happy to give up control. Like how Elliot points out in the classic TV series Mr. Robot, it’s not that we voted for the election poll, but that we voted for it with our time, with our energy. That is the problem or the poison inside of ourselves and our society. Change does not begin by us just making more content, even though that helps to bring about the message. Change comes by creating the transformation within ourselves. That’s the true difference between low magic and high magic. Low magic is the spell of influence that we cast upon the world very quickly to create moments, but that’s pretty much as good as a motivational talk that inspires you and gets you hyped for a bit until the old habits or unconscious patterns resurface. High magic means the fundamental transmutation of our experience of ourselves, the shifting of these behavior patterns, the transmutation of these archetypal relationships within ourselves so that we unlock within us the kingdom of heaven and the thrones and powers of hell, that we resolve within us that duality of good versus evil, of right versus wrong, which is the pain and pleasure mechanism that keeps us enslaved, that others can then utilize in order to influence and persuade us.

I’m not saying that influence and persuasion are bad because sometimes it is necessary to educate an uneducated mind to discover the infinite potential within themselves. This very show has influence; all content is influence. Saying good morning to somebody is an influence because it makes an assumption of the quality of the morning. You cannot eat food without manipulating your jaw, influencing your jaw. We cannot avoid our capacity for influence. Our butterfly effect is affecting what we can do. However, we can take responsibility for it, take ownership of it, and as such become conscious beings instead of unconscious beings. Then we begin to create change in our lives and in the world. We are not creating change by posting likes or necessarily even donating to causes, even though that does help, that does support those. But the true change that we seek in the world must come from within, and that is the initial purpose of magic.

Magic is not about what I can get. It’s not how many people approach it, like it’s the lotto. “I’m gonna throw a few words in there as the equivalent of a scratch ticket. Maybe I win, or maybe I don’t.” This is a very immature approach to magic, promoted by a culture that’s more interested in selling books and making money than doing actual fundamental inner work. I want to just leave you with these two principles today. We can talk about the other ones on a later occasion, but as you go into your life, as you progress throughout the day, as you unfold, ask yourself when you’re in reaction to a moment, when you’re stepping into a place, are you operating from your history or are you operating from your mystery?

As Jordan Peterson points out, the purpose of memory is not, in fact, to remember. The purpose of memory is to extract lessons that empower us for the future, that allow us to articulate a personality or vehicle that is better able to handle similar events as they come into our lives. The other component: seek surrender, not release. You wake up in the morning and you’re scrolling all the way through on that social media because you’re trying to affirm your old self, your old personality. You cannot create a new reality by constantly affirming that. It’s the definition of insanity, expecting something new by doing the exact same thing. You must love your mystery more than your history. You must fall in love daily with who you can be and what your life could be. You must program that as you wake up every morning early, starting your meditation with a clear vision of your life and forcing it to the point where that is more emotionally intoxicating than the reality you had. You must seek surrender, not release. When you begin this journey of transformation, it will be painful. You will go through what we call the morning of Isis, the time period where your cells and your body die from the old patterns and new ones are reborn. But if you keep knocking, the door will open. If you continue to impregnate consciousness with the reality that you desire, eventually the entire system will accept it and this will become your new identity. Once it becomes your new identity, your reticular formation in your brain will activate and find evidence of it in the world around you. This will support the inner state and the outer state. They will merge, and this will change at an electromagnetic level to bring about the shifts in your reality.

Seek the Kingdom of Heaven within first, and all else shall be added unto it, with words from the Gospel of Saint Thomas, the living sayings of Jesus. But if you’re still looking at occultism from this left versus right, this up versus down, then you are a slave of duality. You yourself are subject to the slave of God. I do recommend if you’re new to the channel and you’re new to some of these ideas, look at my mini master class. It’s one of the playlists. Go through that, familiarize yourself with those ideas, but think about their relevance in your current life. Many people explore magic not because it takes them within, but because it takes them without, because they suddenly get to live a fantasy life instead of becoming aware of the inner fantasy of active imagination and then working with that to make known what is unknown so that the true alchemy of the Magus can begin and we can restore the kingdom within ourselves, that we again become aligned to our authority.

I hope this has been insightful for you, and if you’ve enjoyed it and you’re new to the channel, please do like, subscribe, you know the jazz. If you’d like to work with me, I open up my Deamentorship training every few months for new students that I work with personally in a weekly intensive process. But whether you find yourself getting this work with me or you find that work with someone else, listening to more podcasts, doing your own research, exploring it, the greatest investment you’re ever going to make is in this work within yourself. Because the thing that sits at the center of your universe is you, and that, my friend, is God. It’s time to let that component of yourself work with you because you have the right to live deliciously. You do not have desires—Latin root of the word desires, of the father—you have information of the world that is possible for you to be living in life now, and it’s time to open your mind and your heart to that life because you’ve been configured with a certain set of capacities to bring it about. Magic is not what you do; it’s who you are.