The Doctrine of Death

I want to discuss the idea of Kali, and I want to discuss these ideas of time, space, and consciousness, as well as the death deities and the valuable lessons that we can take from them, especially as we overcome tragedy and loss and any setbacks that we may have had. How we literally have to sometimes give up the life we knew for the life we are meant to.

So, let me quickly read that quote directly so that I’m not paraphrasing:

“In every ancient tradition we have lost, it has been the gods and goddesses of death that have acted as guides to unlock the lost tradition, the keepers of its once forgotten gnosis. These same forces carry with them such powerful reminders, from Ereskigel to Santa Muerte. We must make friends of Death, and even allies, as Kali herself stands over Shiva’s dead body. We find the most essential lesson: death is timeless and essential in all creation, and in every second, its grip upon us becomes greater. But we can be victims of Lady Death, or we can be her priesthood. We can choose to offer nothing and slowly become dust with no real value more than what we were born with, or we can articulate time, using it as a language by which we cast our very spells. We can master it, pulling the essence out of every second and thus making minutes feel like delicious hours, as we savor instead of escape the powerful present moment, acting in each second from a place of pure purpose, manifesting the mystery inside of us instead of replicating the reality sold unto us. We can choose to be the instruments of death and kill off our limitations, our fears, our excuses, our procrastination, and insecurities masquerading as status and the judgment of others. Kill everything that is no longer relative to the gospel of your heart. We are indeed the witches, the troublemakers, the wild men and women in a world of rules. We are the free folk, but look into your heart and don’t just agree; admit to where you are not free yet, and invite death in until she rots those chains and you die to your false masters. Like Osiris, you are reborn a master of the dead instead of one haunted by the ghosts of their past, still chained to the mortal world. Give to Death what belongs to Death, and use the time She has granted you wisely in return.”

So, let’s talk about Death. If you look back over here, you’ll see the old classic statue of Kali over the body of Shiva. This was a very powerful insight and realization for me that I think is so deeply overlooked. There is a classic quote from Oppenheimer after the bomb, where he quoted the Bhagavad Gita and said, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” I love that quote so much that I have the original Sanskrit written on my body, but the translation there is a bit tricky. You see, it doesn’t necessarily say ‘death’; the more accurate translation would probably be ‘time’. Now, I become time, the destroyer of all things.

But time and death do share a very active relationship, one that we see very well depicted here in Kali. In fact, I think the symbolism of this is probably one of the most beautiful and important instructions upon the occult path. You see, a lot of people get caught up with this idea that, you know, time doesn’t exist, time isn’t real, and that we shouldn’t be slaves to it. That is an escapist’s mentality that very rarely achieves beauty. Kali is an essential component; there is an essential need for us to cut and kill Shiva. What do I mean by this? Shiva represents the destroyer; the destroyer of what? The destroyer of all things in terms of time, rules, space limitation, and every form of limitation is destroyed through the eye of Shiva.

It is the eternal eye of undoing, if you will, the obliteration of time and space. This is why we can correlate the third eye to the eye of Shiva because when we are seeing through the third eye, we have shut off those regions of the brain related or corresponding to time and space. However, those time and space components have a very important role to play at a certain period of time. If you are functioning purely in that state, you are going to struggle to relate to society in a way that truly brings value, because value needs to be quantized inside of our culture, inside of our society, for us to be able to apply a measurement to it, and that measurement then becomes a form of value.

But there’s more to this; there’s a powerful lesson inside this idea. It’s the concept that insight and wisdom are gained through meditation. It is practiced within time and space. There is a beautiful piece where Joe Dispenza talks about how we struggle when we place goals and we constantly force and practice to do it because we’re trying to do it in time and space. The problem here is that we’re kind of forcing ourselves. It’s going to take a very long time to do this impossible thing because we’re doing it from the bottom up. His advice is that we go into the quantum field, which means we go outside of time and space, we escape Kali and go like Shiva into the realm of pure consciousness, and there we give birth to this vision; we dream this vision into being. So that, out of the longing of a heart, one may give birth to Ganesha, who is then the destroyer or remover of obstacles. But even inside of that when pure consciousness returns, there is another ensuing death and rebirth process that still occurs.

It’s this endless cycle of birth, death, and unity; and rebirth, of birth, death, and unity. This constant repetition of initiation of a dream or a desire, the unification of the dream and the desire, and then the death of the dream and the desire, and the reshaping, re-manifesting, giving of new forms, new shapes, new bodies. This constant cycle is always happening and suffering; the definition I believe, from Nicole’s point of view, of suffering is any time we cling to a form that is meant to have passed. You know, as long as we are holding on and saying our manifestations of our true will is a result of what we had a partnership, a relationship, a business, an object, a body, ourselves, or another, a shape or form, a way of thinking, as long as we are maintaining an attachment to that, we are haunted by the ghosts of our past and suffer due to them.

Now, there is beauty in this, knowledge in this, and, while this is a bit of a tangent, I want you to know that I am going to come back to that point, but it serves to illustrate these elements in that knowledge. We recognize all the different death deities that have also been represented to us throughout different cultures. You know, Santa Muerte is probably one of the most famous, but we also have Irreschihal, Papa Bones, and Papa Legba in the Hoodoo tradition, who act as the gatekeeper and warden of the Underworld, respectively. Inside these, each represent access to the knowledge of these ancient traditions and the Necromancer’s philosophy, which is one in which we resurrect the dead to extract the information they have. Even in spiritualism the entire practice of spiritualism having one where we’re connecting with somebody who has passed over but the thing that is very important here to recognize is the why behind all of these things the why behind each of them is the extraction of the last nitsuzu the last forsaken light the last forgotten bit of meaning or beauty beauty oh that is the key beauty is the key it’s such an important key.

I remember going through the most tragic breakup of my life. A woman I gave my heart and soul to betrayed me in the most Judas Iscariot kind of way, and I suffered for an extensive period of time for this. The moment of realization was because all the memories were so incredibly beautiful and it was the tragedy of not having that until there was this moment that it dawned on me actually through working with the Goethic spirit Vapoola, the Duchess of Knowledge and Wisdom, and teachings in these ways. She also has great mastery of her psychiatry, so you know she was my psychiatrist working through that challenge, you know, at the last part of my healing stages, and she reminded me that the beauty that I missed was not the beauty of this person, but it was my beauty. That other person, that other individual, could not even perceive that beauty. They could not experience it at that level that I was experiencing it, or they’d still be there. Maybe I didn’t communicate it properly to them, but the point is it’s not me; they didn’t have that expanse, and they had their own journey to go through. I suffered because I lost my soul. I lost my beauty. My Tiferet was being projected inside of this other individual or attached to that person thinking they were my beauty. Thinking that past unless we do this, we think that pasting was my beauty. That thing was my beauty, my grace, my identity. My core identity was placed inside of that, and we learned from the death cards to go in and liberate the beauty, liberate it, recognizing that it wasn’t the institution, it wasn’t the individual, it wasn’t that people, those people, those places, those times, things, and the events.

Remember, these are the things that construct the ego. It constructs the false self, the one we experience ourselves as, and oftentimes become in reaction or, you know, momentarily in response to. However, response is oftentimes more a segment of the true self, the fundamental self. Now it was when I recognized this that I could liberate my beauty. It’s that when we recognized and said that, you know, it wasn’t the work, it wasn’t the environment, it wasn’t this thing, it was me, it was myself, and I am able to extract that. Then only can I complete the death and allow the rebirth to begin the writing, if you will, of the new narrative. That’s when I can extract myself and understand the lessons of death that after the winter has passed, spring comes again, and from spring, summer comes again. It’s the reminder that no matter what you have lost, no matter what tragedy you have been through, whether it’s been the loss of a financial stability or a loved one, maybe it is through betrayal, maybe it’s through death, there are so many ways. These are the inevitables of life, but we suffer as long as our sense of self, our sense of our true beauty, is embedded or dependent or attached to that.

And this, to me, fundamentally is why the Buddha preached the philosophy of non-attachment. He didn’t preach never loving but preached the philosophy of not becoming attached, not having your beauty defined by people, places, times, things, and events, but re-establishing a narrative inside of your heart that is the narrative of a shape-shifter, one that can transmute the inevitable death that will come consistently and is constantly coming. And as I point out from that quote, you know, since the moment you are born, death’s grip comes upon you. Whether we overcome death, you know, with all the new technologies and new insights that we have, whether we, you know, master it from a biological point of view or we achieve the singularity within, you know, our lifetime, these are probabilities, but these are not things to be distracted by. Because it’s the same way as somebody that takes on the philosophy of reincarnation, “Oh, I have, you know, if I don’t get it in this life, I’ll get it into the next life.” And it’s a very nonchalant, very hippy-fairy way to go about it, and sure, it may provide you with momentary peace, but at what cost? You see, these philosophies of distraction, because that’s what they really are, they interpret.

It’s not that they are not valuable, they’re not ideas, they’re not beautiful ideas, and they may be true or they may be false. The question is, does it lead you to results? The purpose of magic, fundamentally, is to actualize the inner, you know, the inner dream, to make known the unknown, as Ramtha says, it is to bring about those deep dreams, those deep dreams inside your heart, that dream home, that perfect business plan, that great idea of a social, you know, environment or relationship, that change you want to see in the world that’s so in your core, so in your purpose. Anything that distracts you from that, whether you’re like, “Oh, I don’t have enough knowledge, I got to keep learning, keep learning,” instead of actually just starting to do things. Sure, keep learning, but also do things that are leading you to that. Those are truly the most damaging philosophies in your life because they are putting you to sleep.

In Napoleon Hill’s Outwitting the Devil, the heart of the matter, the heart of the book boils down to this: people going to sleep, people becoming unconscious, people going, “Tomorrow, you know, it’s in God’s hands,” you know, “the universe will provide.” Key philosophies, but they take responsibility out of the hands of the magician. And I think this is probably the main reason why the left-hand path, and, you know, left-hand path, right-hand path arguments out of the way, let’s just say that the path that puts you at the center of the universe as the one responsible and capable of creating reality, the doctrine that says God is within you and it is you, meaning you’re not supposed to wait, you’re supposed to do, I think is the most essential doctrine of our day. And nowhere is this better depicted to me than in the depiction of Kali over the body of Shiva.

Because again, we have these infinite dreams. They just say we’re starting to liberate our beauty and we’re starting to see our beauty not in the past but in the future because that’s where we’re stuck, right? It’s in the past, the past relationships that where it was, that’s where it’s mean. You know, I wake up in the morning, I think about how good things used to be, or I’m daydreaming about how great things might be, you know, so I’m either fluctuating between past and future, where I’m projecting my beauty, in other words, where I am seeing my true self. My responsibility is to bring that home, to bring that into the now. Remember the big spiritual teachings is to live in the now, to become present, to make, to become conscious beings.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you sit like a monk the entire time of the day and go, “I’m so present, oh no, don’t distract me with the future, the past, I impress it.” This is not actually presence. This is just being mindless, and even though it has the benefit from a spiritual point of opening you up, if it’s you still need to combine those factors. You need to combine energy and consciousness. In other words, you need to still be purpose-driven, you need to be aligned to yourself. Presence is only of value when it’s in alignment with purpose. And that’s the important thing to recognize here because a lot of people confuse presence as a form of escapism. Instead of dealing with their problems, they’re being present, they’re being here.

No, presence means you’re being fully present, you’re trying to come into the root of the problem, you’re trying to extract the beauty behind the past and the future so you can bring those items together. This then helps us to achieve something else. When you go into pure Shiva, when you go into the realm of pure consciousness, okay, and you’re in your meditation, you’re in your creation, let’s just say you’re doing something like my Shiva Shakti balancing technique or the flute of Pan, you’ve achieved another state of consciousness and you’re creating reality, you’re producing the thing you want to, and you’re in pure Shiva. Now, you’re stimulating Shakti, you’re stimulating that emotional energy that then wires this together, and then you’re surrendering. Okay, so you’ve done the morning reality creation process, if you will, you’ve conceived the vision, you’ve invoked your emotional energy, and you’ve seen your beauty to it. It’s become the most delightful thing. You’re no longer stuck in the past. The most beautiful and the future is the most beautiful. You’re now in the present and you’re experiencing this potential reality, and now you surrender to it, you release it, which means your psychological needs are no longer codependent upon this outcome because you’ve experienced this as real to such an extent that your brain’s accepted the program. Now you’ve released it and it’s gone into the subconscious. Now what’s going to happen is yes, your magnetic field is going to change, you’re going to attract new opportunities, but we have this very the secret kind of way of looking at that like all of a sudden, “Oh wait, opportunities are going to show up, I’m just going to sit back and wait for them anytime now. Right now, my opportunity is going to walk through that door, you’re going to see, you’re going to see.” And people become these martyrs, you know, to their spirituality, and then there’s tons of intellectual philosophies out there that kind of justify that. But the problem is they get more and more disconnected from their reality, more and more disconnected from their Malkuth because they don’t want to be materialistic now, you know, they don’t want to, “Oh, you know, go put in the dirty work and stuff like that,” because here’s the things they go like, “It’s supposed to feel good.” And then they go, you know, “I have perfect body dream going to the gym, it doesn’t feel good, this probably isn’t right because, you know, the secret said I should do it feels good.” No, no, you should generate feel good. Spirit governs over the four elements, which means spirit rules over earth, air, fire, and water, which means you out of a place of purpose need to force that energy into fire by forcefully taking action. You need to force that spirit into air by physically doing the research and the study on developing a strategy and working on your belief systems till you generate water. In other words, until you start getting a feel for the created by motion. You don’t generate emotion by laying in bed just doing nothing. You generate emotion by doing things. Once you start doing things, you start changing the way you feel. You don’t feel like it when you start that workout, but once you start taking that micro action, eventually like, “Wow, I feel great.” You know, when I start doing, getting started is the most difficult part in the fight. Only when those are done, then does earth kick in, then does the biology start playing along, then does the body give up its resistance.

Up until that point, I’m still fighting through resistance, I’m still fighting through the natural inertia, the old things. And this again comes the teaching of death. Death is always there, death is taking a grip the whole time, and it’s saying, “Where’s mine? Give me the stuff that no longer needs to be here.” And this is when you do that, this is when you die. This is when you die to your past excuses. You know, Adam and Eve chilling out in the Bible just committed big sin, you know, which means they just ate from the forbidden fruit. They became aware of duality, they became conscious of their own drive for pain and pleasure, these twin forces within themselves. And now what happens as a result of it? They come up with excuses because there’s mixed meaning. I don’t know what’s going to happen if I do this. Is this going to give me pain? Is this going to lead me to my beauty or is this going to lead me to my suffering? You know, where is it going to lead me? So they don’t take any action, and as a result of non-action, they get judged and cast out. See, it becomes more difficult. The longer you take to do something, the longer you take to act, the further out of heaven you are cast, the further out of that state. But the fact of the matter is, then you have to toil, you have to put in the work. You know, you have to talk, you have to suffer in order to put in the work to get to where you want to go, to then again, like Lucifer who has fallen, now rise up again and go take heaven under new management and under new terms, you know, which is now the dream that you’re going for to put in.

I remember in the Dragon Rouge when I was in, when I performed one of my initiations and I was there over magic week and at the end of magic week, we were doing the necromantic chamber work and as I was laid down in the coffin, Thomas’s wife, Diana, said, who was doing the doing the ritual at the time, said the most beautiful phrase that always stuck with me and she said that “Give to death what belongs to death.” How much attachments, how much excuses, how much self-pity, how much “Oh, it’s unfair,” how much “Why do I have to do this,” how much “What about them?” Be honest. Do you have? Forget the intellectual rubbish for a moment. I don’t care how justified you and I may be. If it’s not giving us results, if it’s not leading us to what we’re trying to accomplish, it no longer needs to be here. Its time is spent. Give it to death. Give it to death. Give the parts of your personality, you know, however old you are, what aspects or traumas of your childhood are you still holding up, carrying with you? Give them to death because only when we give them to death, only when we allow ourselves to consciously kill these parts, to cut them off, like Kali stripping down on that, and not just going, “Oh, even, oh, it’s the dream.” What are the practical applications of the dream? What do I need a sever? What do I need a cut? You know, death goes into all the angles. It doesn’t leave one part open, you know, it looks at everything, it takes everything. Death is the ultimate lover because death won’t leave one part of you untouched, you know, at all, at the end of the day, except for the one part that’s just your soul, just your true beauty. That’s why that’s the one part you should be taking and you should be refactoring it into the new narrative of your dreams. But then you should learn from death that time is a limited resource and you must use and apply time as an expert. This is not just a philosophical thing. Martial arts, the success in martial arts is the mastery of motion inside of time. The person that has the most resource intelligent utilization of motion inside of time is the most effective martial artist. This is also true of an animator and a filmmaker and a musician. Music itself is only possible due to the mastery of time, the application of time. We’re understanding now in terms of social media marketing and influence in the modern day, even storytellers, that the pacing and timing of a story is essential because pacing, timing, all of this creates emotion, it creates, it puts things in motion, it creates things. Death is time and time has to cut out every unnecessary thing down to the fundamentals that are essential.

Now, you’re not going to be perfect when you start this because a lot of things inside of you still need to die: your resistance, your excuses, “I’d rather be doing that.” But take the lessons of death, admire and honor the death gods and the death goddesses, because you and I will inevitably meet them and we might as well meet them as friends saying, “We have spent time, we’ve spent you well, we have spent time wisely in accomplishing our purpose.” Because here’s the fact: every day you wake up, every second is taken from you, right? You don’t wake up today with more opportunities, you wake up today with less time. So my question to you is, what if today was your last day? What if death was not coming today for the memories that no longer serve you, but what if death is coming for you and it says to you, “What have you done with your life? What have you done with the dreams that I have instilled inside of you?” Every time you have lost something, every time you’ve been betrayed or hurt, and out of those rage and out of those sadness, none of those longings, I gave you a dream of a better world and a better life. What have you done with them? You’re going to let that die too? Because if you do, what did your life mean? What does your life mean? What legacy are you going to leave behind? Are you going to be satisfied with just a good job, pretty partner, you know, 2. whatever fam, you know, kids? I don’t think so. If you’re the rare, rare individual that has been willing to question and challenge the status quo and the common way of thinking, you are a very intelligent individual, or you would not even be considering a podcast or a show like this. You are somebody that has challenged intellectual thought to an extreme extent to get to a point of such original thinking that leads you down such an avenue. Will you ever actually be satisfied unless you have truly done everything possible, even if you fail, to bring about the beauty that is your soul, the purpose you are here to bring? Take these moments and make them mean something.

I’m Adam Nox and remember, take this life, drink in every second, and don’t just tell them how great you’re going to be, show them what you’re capable of. Because we are the witches, we are the troublemakers, we are the free folk, and we will not be taken without demonstrating an impossible tomorrow.

Now go and live deliciously.