enantiomer.org

29: orgone restraints

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

a designer orgone restraint set
in gorgeous oxblood basilisk leather
with hand-worked electrum buckles, contacts, and probe tips

dance so close

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

the moon and venus
dance so close
they breathe each other's breath

the city of stars

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

"Where do you want to meet up in our dream?"
"By the ticket booth," you said.
"The ticket booth for the Ferris wheel?"
You said yes.
"I'll bring Champagne."
The old man took our tickets. Winked.
We boarded our temporary vehicle
It swayed as it climbed into the sky
Rocking as the Great Wheel paused now and then
to allow others to embark
to disembark
At the top, a longer moment
"I slipped the old man a 20."
So let's raise our glasses to the city of stars
Before the wheel
takes us down
to Earth again.

for Amy Beth Jenkins

chaldean order

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Some fun patterns I've been learning about in magic!

Magicians tend to talk about these structures as if everybody already knows about them, but they were new to me and I want to share them with other beginners (and even people who don't consider themselves magicians) because they're kind of neat!

So there are the planets and luminaries. When people looked up at the night sky, they noticed the stars, and the the stars were always in the same positions relative to each other. They recognized these patterns and decided that they represented images, grouping them into constellations.

They also noticed other lights in the sky. Notably, the Sun, which is hard to miss, and the Moon, which lights the night and is always changing phase. These are the luminaries.

There were also lights that looked like stars, but moved relative to their neighbors, night by night.

Where the Sun and Moon moved perfectly regularly (West to East) relative to the background of fixed stars, these would move forward, stop, go backward for a bit, stop, then resume their forward progress. These are the planets.

People could only see the 5 closest planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. (Neptune is barely visible to the eye unaided by a telescope, and seems to have escaped notice.)

There is an order the planets and luminaries: the speed with which they move (night by night) relative to the background of stars.

Saturn is slowest, then Jupiter, then Mars, then the Sun (which takes a year to move through the whole sky -- in fact, that's what a year IS). Venus and Mercury are next (they can overtake the Sun when moving forward), then the Moon, which (relatively) zooms around the sky once per month.

(Which is what a month is.)

This sequence is called the Chaldean Order and it shows up all over the place in astrology and magic. In astrology, the faster moving a planet or luminary moves, the more personal and specific it tends to be, and the more it varies between the natal charts of people born around the same time.

(The fastest changing and most personal element of a birth chart is the Eastern horizon, or ascendant, which takes a day to circle the sky -- in fact, that's what a day IS).

The location of the planets and luminaries relative to the stellar background, each other, and the horizons are an important element in magic. Careful decisions about WHEN to do magic can greatly enhance its power.

If you are doing magic about Love, the moment when Venus rises, sets, or is at the highest point in the sky might be a good time to do it. (Note that Venus is only actually visible at one of those times (at best, and it's never at midheaven because the Sun is so bright))

You can't always see planets (during the day or when they are hidden from view by the Earth under our feet), so we invented a weird counting/timing game -- it doesn't have much to do with what is going on in the actual sky, but can be used effectively to time magical operations: Planetary Hours.

Planetary hours aren't the sixty minute clock hours we're used to: they are slices of the actual length of the day or night. The day is divided into 12 equal intervals starting at sunrise, ending at sunset.

The night is similarly divided. So a daytime planetary hour is longer during the summer than the winter, and the reverse is true for nighttime hours.

Planetary hours start with Saturn on Saturday morning (this is why it is called Saturday) and then tick through the planets in Chaldean order, wrapping around from the Moon back to Saturn again. By sundown we are on... uhhh...

1 Saturn
2 Jupiter
3 Mars
4 Sun
5 Venus
6 Mercury
7 Moon
8 Saturn
9 Jupiter
10 Mars
11 Sun
12 Venus
13 Mercury

So just as Saturday is associated with Saturn, Saturday night is associated with Mercury.
14 Moon
15 Saturn
16 Jupiter
17 Mars
18 Sun
19 Venus
20 Mercury
21 Moon
22 Saturn
23Jupiter
24 Mars
1 Sun

So the hour after the next sunrise is attributed to the Sun. It's Sunday.

THE DAYS OF THE WEEK ARE SPECIAL CASES THAT FALL OUT OF THE GENERAL SYSTEM OF PLANETARY HOURS

In Latin-derived European languages days of the week are more closely tied to Roman god names, but in English, we have substituted Norse gods who are similar is some respects. (In French, for instance, Monday is Lundi, Tuesday is Mardi, Wednesday is Mercredi, Thursday is Jeudi, Friday is Vendredi)

Saturday : Saturn
Sunday: the Sun (Sol)
Monday: the Moon (Luna)
Tuesday: Mars (Tyr's Day -- Tyr is a Norse war god analogous to Mars or Ares)
Wednesday: Mercury (Wotan's Day -- Wotan is like Mercury or Hermes -- he received the runes)
Thursday: Jupiter (Thor's Day -- a thunder god, like Jupiter or Zeus)
Friday: (Freya's Day -- Freya corresponds with Venus or Aphrodite)

So the order of days of the week are the result of modulo (division remainder) arithmetic. 24 modulo 7 is 3. So each day of the week is 3 steps forward in the Chaldean order.

OK, but then there are decans! The Chaldean Order is also (one system) used to assign subregions of the Zodiac called "decans". A decan is a 10 degree arc of each Zodiac sign. A sign covers 30 degrees of the sky.

(There are 12 signs, and 12 x 30 = 360, a full circle). A decan is like an arc of the sign's story. Beginning, middle, end. Initial onrush of the sign's quality, its full stable establishment, its faltering and giving way to change into the next sign.

Each Zodiac sign has a "ruler", a planet or luminary that is most at home in it. (These are also Chaldean order influenced). Each decan also has a ruler, kind of a sub-ruler for that part of the sign.

The Decans are assigned (according to one system) to each planet in Chaldean order, starting with Mars in Aries Decan 1. (Aries is kind of the start of the year -- the Sun starts to pass in front of the arc of the sky associated with Aries at the Spring Equinox

(which, as non-astrologer journalists love to discover every year or two: is not where the constellation Aries appears in the sky anymore))

Anyway: Aries is good at kicking things off. So is Mars. It's a good way to start the year.

So the decans go
Aries 1: Mars
Aries 2: Sun
Aries 3: Venus
Taurus 1: Mercury
Taurus 2: Moon
Taurus 3: Saturn
Gemini 1: Jupiter
Gemini 2: Mars
Gemini 3: Sun
etc

They end on Pisces 3: Mars. So there is a weird little seam at the Spring Equinox where we get to Mars Decans in a row before and after. (Because 36 modulo 7 is 1.)

The Golden Dawn used this system to determine the meaning of the Minor Arcana (the numbered cards). The two most common Tarot decks in British and American occultism, The Smith-Waite and Crowley-Harris (Thoth) deck use this system of correspondences.

Each suit corresponds to an element: Wands are Fire, Cups are Water, Swords are Air, Pentacles are Earth.

(Wands as Fire and Swords as Air was the an invention of one of the Golden Dawn's founders, William Wynn Westcott - the sword as a magical tool had traditionally been associated with Fire and the wand with Air for centuries. I'd be curious to read anything about why he decided to make this change.)

The Aces are left out of this system as the pure seed or implicit potential of each element. Cards 2 through 4 are associated with the 3 decans (and their rulers!) of Cardinal sign of its element. 5-7, the Fixed sign, 8-10 the Mutable sign.

So:
the 2 of Wands is Mars ruling Aries 1
the 3 of Wands is Sun ruling Aries 2
the 4 of Wands is Venus ruling Aries 3
then we continue into Taurus:
5 of Pentacles is Mercury ruling Taurus 1
6 of Pentacles is Luna ruling Taurus 2
7 of Pentacles is Saturn ruling Taurus 3

These attributions combine with numerological connotations of the number from Hermetic Kabbalah and traditional meanings from earlier European tarot interpretation systems to determine the card's meaning.

(which, oh, boy if you like complicated mystical number games -- but this post is getting kinda long)

Other weird planet number fun: Magic Squares.

So there is this cute math puzzle game. You take a grid, say 3 x 3. And you put the numbers 1 through the square of the length of one of the sides. For a 3 x 3, that's nine. (This is why the number is called a square.)

The rule of the game is: the sum of each column each row, and both diagonals of the square have to add up to the same number.

I'd been aware of this puzzle since I was a kid. It's called "Magic Squares". I didn't realize the Magic part of Magic Squares was LITERAL MAGIC.

Like, this game is super important to magicians and has been for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. (Cross culturally. Apparently Egyptian, Greek, Arab, Chinese magicians all used them.)

And: they are associated with the planets. In Chaldean order, starting with the 3x3 square. (There is no 2x2 magic square.)

So: 3x3 is Saturn's square
4x4 is Jupiter's square
5x5 is Mars's square
6x6 is Sol's square
7x7 is Venus's square
8x8 is Mercury's square
9x9 is Luna's square

So these numbers all have planetary associations now: 3: Saturn. 5: Mars. 7: Venus. etc.

But there are other numbers that fall out of these squares. There's the number of cells in the square (the square of the number on each side)

Saturn: 9
Jupiter: 16
Mars: 25
Sol: 36
Venus: 49
Mercury: 64
Luna: 81

Theres the sum that each row/column/diagonal ads up to.
Saturn: 15
Jupiter: 34
Mars: 65
Sol: 111
Venus: 175
Mercury: 260
Luna: 369

There's the sum of all the numbers in the grid.
Saturn: 45
Jupiter: 136
Mars: 325
Sol: 666
Venus: 1225
Mercury: 2080
Luna: 3321

These are the "mystical numbers of the planets" and are used to do things like: validate / discover the names of angels / spirits / demons / associated with the planets.

Also, magicians will translate the numbers to letters and then trace the patterns described by the positions of these numbers in the magical square to generate / discover sigils or seals from the names planetary entities and use them in rituals to establish communication.

Anyway: the Chaldean order is super interesting. Once you know about it, you'll see it popping up all over the place in magical and astrological systems.

holding a stone

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I'm holding a stone in my mouth
it's round and cold, but
I warm it
I must guard against the habit of swallowing
it is not food
it is for holding

when I am ready
I will hold it between my lips
then palm it discretely
walking down a sidewalk
under sun flickering through leaves

I'm holding a sentence in my mouth
I am cold, but
it warms me
I must guard against the habit of speech
it its not for when
it is for if

if we become ready
I will hold it between my lips
then say it plain
and watch your eyes
and find out what it is

four planets

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

you are like four planets
I have learned to recognize

whenever I am under the night sky
I look for you

my art

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

suddenly self-conscious
I had to remind myself
my art is survival

how to ask

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

how to ask permission
to know and be known

this feels like a key to me

sometimes I'm so excited by connection
It's easy to forget to ask

would you like to know me?
would you like me to know you?

help us to say

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

in my experience this is what prayers asking/thanking for stuff is for

not so that God will send us gifts but to allow us to accept the gifts they are giving us every moment

it is to help us say yes

we say no for good reason: because we are not ready to the last question, not ready to say yes

but everyone gets to yes
in the end

ready or not

ashore

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

these days it's like a shore
the time between sleep and waking
I find words half-buried in the sand
dust them off
and write them down

I don't know if they're "poetry"
I don't know if they're "any good"
I just know that I couldn't bear it
to let them wash back out to sea

I wish I could show them all to you
but most are just too close

becoming plural

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

the reason I use the pronoun "they" for God is not to suggest they are nonbinary (because God is not a person) but because they are plural.

I don't mean this in the polytheistic sense of there being multiple gods. I mean God is plural. Becoming plural is what made us and the World. Become plural is what God does. Before this division there is only backstory. Cut to the action. Go!

The secret to having fun at a party is not to worry about how you're getting home

secret door

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

some nights
I dream of places that don't exist
opening off familiar, real places
my childhood home
college campus
current apartment
a new door into an unexplored wing
a path where no path is possible
an adjacent neighborhood
I'd somehow never noticed

some nights I lie awake
and my heart feels like these dreams
like I found a secret door
opening into vast new spaces

when

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

when can I see you
for the first time
again

ribs

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

my ribs
an apiary

everything else

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

"All you gotta do is everything else, baby," she said, smiling, sad. "All you gotta do is everything."

“I’m hiding from my life right now because my life is terrible and beautiful and lonely. I’m surrounded by friends and it still it just blows through me like a cold wind.”

She put her hand on my arm. “I know. I know how it is.”

your hand

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

lying in the dark
I feel the pulse in my throat
I want you
to place your hand here
I want you to feel it too

holding

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

i'm not holding this phone
for comfort
i'm holding it because it connects me
to you

draw

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

we reached
to draw on each other
then realized
we don't have shells anymore
and laughed

new ways

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I want to encourage you
to find new ways
to love

want

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

want to listen with my hands

nightmuse

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

been waking up at 3:30 in the morning with a poem ready to spill out of me more and more often

I want to know this nightmuse

often they are too intense to share

and they also may not be "good".

but I have no concept of "good" speaking into my phone at 3:30 -- I just say it right and go back to sleep

they are what I have to say
they are what has to be said
through me

damn slamhounds

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

"Those Damn Slamhounds!"
[70s era laugh track]
[cheery orchestral sting]

shakycam of a young man in a hooded sweatshirt, the lower half of his face covered in a high tech respirator. it hisses with his frantic breathing as he flees headlong through the souk's tarpaulin maze

a sound like the laughter of children emerging from hyenas' barks and howls bubbles though the early morning crowd

he hears them closing around him, around the possibility of escape like they are coordinating their hunt

but no, they would use radio for that, frequency shifting. this sound is just for him to hear

they want him to know

weave it

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

if you want to establish a habit of though or speech, weave it into your prayers

in my experience, the repetition of prayer cultivates a gentle attraction toward that repetition. it's subtle, but it's always on, so even though it is gentle, its cumulative effects can be extreme over time

one effect I value is that it constructs a soft landing zone for returning to practice after disruption by emergent imperatives (whether "bad" or "good")

follow its roots

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

but instead of being drawn or driven by desire,
attention fixed on its object
turn and pay attention instead to the desire itself
what is it actually like?
what is its texture?
where do you feel it in the body?
if you follow its roots,
down,
where do they lead?

so close

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

the moon and venus
dance so close
they breathe each other's breath

reflected

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I represent myself as being OK
and I see it reflected in you
and I believe it
and I need this

decending

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

the thing about walking down
is not to go too fast
it's a different kind of hard
it's in the knees

the Earth draws you down
not yet
not yet

but sooner or later
everyone
says
yes

wish you

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

a wasp
an overripe pear
I wish you were
golden light in through the
here now
coffee
a missing slipper
I wish you
milk after cereal
something inaudible
from the other room

why

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

do you understand why yet
I can show you
but it will take time

other

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

that shock
when you see her
on the other platform

a ritual

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

write a poem about something you care about
wait until it fades in memory
alter your state
read the poem aloud
listen

28: an orbital shuttle

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

an orbital shuttle
well worn
loved
workplace, temple, home
shelter here with me
in symbiotic xenia

the escarpment

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

it's difficult to express
escarpment at dawn
birds fly below us
she said
the stress
I could tell you
and you would get it
the steam off sun warmed roofs
the sound of distant traffic
but I can't
anymore

becoming small

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

it happened gradually
he said
becoming small
one by one
by layers
I lost the magic
peeling
the poetry
was the first to go

do you understand what it is?
to make yourself small
again

tra la la for ever

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

yeah, group minds -- everybody's tra la la until criticality

(and then it's tra la la for ever)

Red warning lights blinked on across the length of the transit ring. As one, the Comprise kicked free of the machinery, leaping inward in acrobatic unison, like a swirl of orange flower blossoms seen through a kaleidoscope. By tens and scores they linked hands and were snagged by swooping jitneys. Wandering up out of nowhere, hands deep in pockets, Constance said, "That's really quite lovely. It's like a dance."

Wyeth didn't look up. "Not quite so lovely when you consider why they're so perfectly coordinated."

She blinked. "Oh, quite the contrary. When you think of the complex shapes their thoughts take, the mental structures too wide and large to be held by any one mind . . . Well, that's cause for humility, isn't it?" Then, when Wyeth said nothing, "The Comprise is a full evolutionary step up on us, biologically speaking. It's like . a hive organism, you see? Like the Portuguese man-of-war, where hundreds of minute organisms go into making up one large creature several orders of magnitude more highly structured than any of its components."

"I'd say they were an evolutionary step down. Where human thought creates at least one personality per body, the Comprise has subsumed all its personalities into one self. On Earth, some four billion individuals have been sacrificed to make way for one large, nebulous mind. That's not enrichment, it's impoverishment. It's the single greatest act of destruction in human history."

"But can't you see the beauty of that mind? Gigantic, immensely complex, almost godlike?"

"I see the entire population of mankind's home planet reduced to the status of a swarm of bees. A very large swarm of bees, I'll grant you, but insects nevertheless.

Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers is like Bruce Sterling's Schimatrix's younger sister, more playful, possibly smarter.

(always a challenge to gauge the relative intelligence of people who are smarter than me)

The protagonist of Vacuum Flowers is a young woman working in a dead-end job as a QA tester for the current mass entertainment medium, recorded personalities.

She's testing a new AAA title, a dashing (deceased) asteroid miner from the Oort Cloud. She loads her up and decides she likes being this new her better than herself. So she deletes the master and bails, becoming the MacGuffin fugitive.

The thing I love most though is Swanwick's answer to "Why can't the space people go down to Earth" anymore which is so much more interesting than Sterling's "Uhh... things just got controlled and stale and super boring?"

Instead, Swanwick's Earth is a single superorganism that emerged from a runaway self-catalyzing group mind forced upload cataclysm. It's a superintelligence running on wireless neurolinked human substrate.

It can't spread into the solar system because the comms lag from anywhere higher than Earth orbit causes the colony to eventually schism into a distinct mind, which Earth apparently finds existentially unacceptable.

The clipped passage is the first real explanation of what is going on (apologies for the mild spoiler). There is a shaky alliance who, stuck on The Problem, negotiate a rare collaboration with Earth and they are Super Fucking Paranoid about containing the Earthlings.

The terrifying thing about them is they are a random assortment of people, age, sex, ethnicity rendered meaningless. Just nodes, substrate. One of them is a child. It doesn't matter.

Hey, I'm looking forward to the art that will come out of this too, but brush up on your cogsec and practice your LBRPs, friends, because you gotta get lucky every time.

The Comprise only has to get lucky once.

the hole

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

in the end there was nothing we cold do about it so we agreed
without ever talking about it
to walk around it
and pretend it wasn't there

occasionally things would fall in

we soon forgot them

or told ourselves we did

when you thought about it
it really wasn't there

first prayer

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I want to share the first prayer I started saying regularly.

I started out an Atheist. I was raised by parents who (as far as I can tell) are Atheist scientists. But I was raised Unitarian-Universalist, and a core element of UU religious education is learning about other religions and cultivating religious tolerance, so I've always been aware of (other) religions and curious about them.

As a teenager, I was introduced to 80s era Neopaganism (Starhawk, Margot Adler) and to The Church of the Subgenius (into which I was ordained as a 16 year old) and began to mutate.

When I was a college student I had an... extreme initiation accident I guess is a way to describe it. Which demonstrated to me beyond doubt that... there is a phenomenon.

(This is extremely difficult to communicate successfully. I may try at some point in another Topic.)

I called this phenomenon God, because it there wasn't another word big enough for it and because if there were a God smaller than it, it would be false.

This God was not a person. It was just there.

I didn't pray to it. I just remembered it. And tried to integrate my knowledge of it into the rest of my life. The temptation to explain it away, to forget it was strong. The temptation to tame it with a story, something tidy, explainable was strong. I succeeded (at least partially) at resisting these compulsions.

I didn't start praying regularly until I got a motorcycle. I was about 22. I learned to ride as an adult, on the street. I bought a new Yamaha Seca 2, a 600cc air-cooled standard. Kind of a heavy bike for an absolute beginner. No lessons. I had the bike delivered to my dorm and just got on it and tried to ride it.

I dropped it. A lot. And I learned how to pick up a 400 lb bike when you're kinda panicky with adrenaline and maybe a car is behind you at the stop sign. (You can't pull it up -- you must push with your legs from under it.)

I remember the first time I went on the highway. It was terrifying. I was so conscious of the terrible physics of traveling at 60 miles-per-hour, straddling a 400 lb chunk of hot metal, surrounded by speeding cars. Motorcycling is like scuba. You are in this intimate embrace with a piece of technology that allows you to enter a context that is near-instantly lethal, and where you are dependent on that device to return to a safe context[^1].

I started to pray. I prayed every time I got on my bike.

please protect me and those around me from harm

It started as "please protect me from harm", but I was extremely aware of the danger to any passenger and I felt a deep responsibility for their safety. And then I was moved to include the other motorists who made up the traffic around me. A prayer for safe travel, for all of us, the traffic.

I didn't direct this prayer to anyone. It felt like I didn't want to presume anything about whom I was addressing. My God was and is apersonal. The gods and goddesses that have since emerged between me and It are masks. They are a language.

Today I pray to gods and to angels -- but it's maybe more accurate to say I pray with them or through them. Always I am addressing God. I'm not confused about this. But the gods are a form of address. It feels like they are an epiphenomenon of the conversation between me and the World.

That conversation is what I call God.

The World and I are two halves of It.

The World and I, we have to be here.

The real miracle is that there is more than one person. That I am not alone in the World.

That you are reading this.

Thank you.

[^1]: the surface, breathable air, blood without bubbles in it / the same inertial frame of reference as the ground, not about to be hit by a car

does it work?

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

the question isn't whether something is 'false' or 'true', it's "does it work?"

which carries inside it the hidden question "for whom?"

and both of which imply "how do you know?"

I see a lot of people running around worrying (or not!) about whether what they believe is true, ignoring whether what they believe is working for them or even how to know what they actually want.

which is where these alternate ways of knowing can be helpful.

or not

the tools we use are also used to evaluate the effectiveness of the tools.

and somewhere nestled in this magpie's nest, this tangled ribcage bower, there. a gleam

the heart's true desire

✨

treehouse

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

and I wonder
how am I going to climb down
out of this tree

could you
maybe bring me my tools
and lumber

so I can build a home
in the sky

aeons

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

each Aeon has a magical formula

Mother Aeon: gestation (gaia, song, tribe)
Father Aeon: insemination (prophesy, text, city)
Baby Aeon: self-organization (network, ai, embryo)

WE ARE HERE -> superimposition of the death of the Father Aeon and the birth of the Baby Aeon

🌆🌱

the magical formula is an answer to the questions

"where does the world come from?"

and

"where does consciousness come from?"

which are the same question

The Aeon are the implications of each answer applied to the Person, the World, Life

if you are alive and understand what is happening, you are called to help the old Aeon die with as little harm to people as possible, preserving as much good as possible, while protecting the new Aeon and ensuring it a healthy childhood.

people who are still identified with the old pattern will start to behave more and more dangerously as the pattern realizes it is already dead and panics, enters its death throes. give them space, as you would a mortally wounded animal.

fear has them.

seek out other people who are identified with the new pattern and self-organize, harmonizing with its emergent structure.

I cannot promise safety, but it will definitely be more fun than lashing yourself to a dying god.

the thaw

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

the difference between slightly less of something than you need and slightly more of something that you need is qualitative.

it's a phase change. it's very different from the quantitative change between less than you need and slightly more but still not enough

or between slightly more than you need and even more.

when you don't have to constantly back ground resource manage, when you have a little bit of slack in the system to allow movement, there's an ease, a fluidity that emerges, like ice melting.

like the thaw

the moment one recognizes

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

There is a moment for beginners in magic that is incredibly valuable and important: which is when the phenomenon or being one is imagining moves by itself.

When it takes an action, on its own initiative, that surprises.

This can be the point where magical practice begins to self-catalyze. An ignition.

It's the opposite of that sickening moment of Recognition of the Uncanny Valley, where one realizes that one has mis-recognized a being as real when they are a zombie, a robot, or maybe just a malicious person seeking to deceive.

This instead is the moment one recognizes that something one thought to be a visualization is a real phenomenon, unfolding with its own momentum, that a puppet or doll is a person, a conscious presence, company.

I am not alone.

For a beginner, this first moment can collapse a tall, teetering tower of doubt. One of the once grand-seeming pylons holding the wild at bay.

When the dust clears, there is, not a certainty? But a confidence in direction. And an open horizon.

argon

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

She takes a another big hit of argon

"What does that stuff do for you?"

She exhales, sighing, her voice low and resonating from the mouth of a well of deep fatigue

"Absolutely nothing."

the shadow

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

what if magic hides behind your imagination, the easiest place for you to dismiss, ignore, refuse to take seriously

who waits in the shadow of make-believe

maybe old friends
maybe new friends
maybe something gorgeous
and strange

what if you never went to see
for yourself

anthropic

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

there is no such thing as "another universe". by definition. worlds are made of causation. if the "other universe" can have any effect on ours, it is part of ours, thus, it is not "other". if it can't have any effect on ours, it does not exist. "exists" means "is in our world"

universe. there's only one of it.

it's right there in the name.

there can be another really big bag of stuff, but it's not a universe.

the World is not an object. it is not a container. it is everything.

treating the World as an object is a category error with profound consequences

I strongly recommend integrating the Anthropic Principle into your understanding of what is going on in your day-to-day life.

ceremonial kayfabe

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

As I learn more about ceremonial magic, it seems like everyone insists that following ceremony rigorously is super important, but it comes off as a kind of posturing.

Everyone knows this stuff is all made up or received personal gnosis, but we pretend that it's some kind of canon. (Well OK, not everyone at all, but there is a vocal faction who insist on correctness.)

There is a pretense toward rigor: "No this is REAL. It's essential to get this stuff right because there are CONSEQUENCES" And there are?

But then grimoires turn out to be full of errors, or have different manuscript copies that disagree with each other, are used for centuries and work OK?

And this pretense also feels like pro wrestlers puffing themselves up, talking shit before a match. Part of good style is to pretend to believe it's real.

Possibly part of effectiveness is pretending to oneself that one believes it's real and definitely not acknowledging the fakeness to one's Adversary. It feels like there's a degree of BDSM theater to Solomonic magic, to sorcery.

For a magician to reveal how the trick is done breaks suspension of disbelief and all the hotness drains out of the scene. People really can get hurt in power exchange or in pro wrestling. Physically, but also in subtle, less obvious ways.

Safety actually is important, but it turns out it's important in ways that seem largely orthogonal to the danger as presented in the ritual's narrative.

I'm... probably not supposed to be talking about this.

Tacere!

heron shadow puppet dream

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

heron shadow puppet dream

I dreamed about a character -- I can't remember what they were now, but some kind of half-anthropomorphized storybook animal. they were in the foreground of a sort of shadow puppet play, where, as the character walked from left to right, the scenery scrolled behind them, with elements at different depths moving at different speeds to create an illusion of parallax. it was a view through trees and shrubs and grasses onto a lake. it was like a comic, so as they walked, they were walking through time from the past into the future.

there was a woman's voice reading the story, like a librarian at story time in school. her voice was gentle and kind. the story was telling about how this animal discovered music through humming. that they started simply, but eventually were able to hum longer notes than any other animal, and started to hum different tones.

early in the story, I noticed the tiny silhouette of a great blue heron in the distance, in the shallows of the lake. as the vegetation scrolled past they waded along, or would take flight briefly to keep pace with the animal character in the foreground. they were like a little visual easter egg. there was a sly cheekiness to them, like they were photobombing the main story. I remember thinking "oh, I will tell my friends on The Base about this!"

somehow eventually the character in the foreground was playing the tenor saxophone. they had moved on from humming and were now playing these long, slow, abstract jazz solos. I lost track of the distinction in identity between this foreground character and the heron I had been keeping track of in the background so now, somehow, this foreground animal (who I still can't remember what they were) had become the heron from the background and the heron, now in the foreground, was playing these hauntingly beautiful cascades of notes.

they echoed across the water, across the lake

winged seeds

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

when I was young, maybe four or five I remember visiting my best friend Jessie's house. it had a balcony and a back patio with a maple tree.

the tree had tiny delicate red seeds, each with a wing about a centimeter long and they would spin as they fell.

so Jessie and her older sister Sarah and I gathered a bowl, like, a big metal mixing bowl of these seeds. they were delicate and tiny and had to be picked up carefully, one at a time.

we took them up to the balcony and poured them over the railing in a cascade of whirling wings.

when they all landed, they formed a halo like a sun. I was about a meter across, and every seed had landed with its wing pointing outward.

we were astonished

somehow, the seeds communicated with each other through the air. passing through the air they created vortices that influenced each other.

this seemed clearly possible, but what baffled us was: how did they know where the ground was? they were all spinning. how did they have their wings out the moment they landed?

we did this more than once. it was repeatable. we were doing science!

we told the grown-ups about it, but they didn't really seem to appreciate this phenomenon.

they didn't understand why it was so important to us.

this is what an angel is like

good company

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

when I started my current devotional practice, I was unsure how to proceed.

I had a strong connection with my guardian angel and had been introduced to several gods, but wasn't sure how to cultivate a daily relationship with them outside of the intense gnostic states where we had met.

I'd read advice about theurgy and a consistent suggestion was to make offerings. listen/feel for response as to what works and doesn't. what is pleasing.

I was making tea in the morning, matcha, in a beautiful tea bowl my brother made me during his post-college pottery phase.

so I started spooning tea into another small tea cup and offering it at my little altar table.

I started just sharing with my angel, then with a small set of spirits who had drawn close to me, either emerging from consecrations I had done or just showing up on their own.

eventually, I did a formal working to invite a specific goddess to enter an relationship with me. she assented and we consecrated a ring as a physical manifestation of this bond.

it feels weird to talk about, maybe too instrumental or reifying, but I had developed a set of goals I was working towards. these goals started quite concrete, detailed, with deadlines and success criteria.

but gradually they sort of expanded and became longer term, open ended. areas of life.

I came to associate specific goddesses with each of these areas. to consider my work in these areas as offerings to them. I asked them for help with my work.

a small pantheon assembled around me. all goddesses.

though a couple of masculine gods have shown up, they haven't stayed. they've been honored guests. and I maintain relationships with them outside our pre-dawn tea time.

here was the key for me: xenia. gratitude

before I asked for help, I shared tea. and sometimes a snack like mochi or a little cookie or jelly beans.

I share food and drink and offer thanks.

I thank the goddesses for being with me. in the moment. and for gracing my life with their presence.

I thank them for their help, their protection, their guidance, their friendship.

I thank them for their good company.

I offer my friendship, my company, my work, my life to share.

as was, as is, as is to come

sometimes I do ask for help, but mostly I thank them for the help they are already giving me. have always been giving me.

they are eternal. not that they are of infinite duration? but that they are woven through the past, present, and future, that they are elements of time's structure, of life, of the World.

so I share how it's been for me as an example of how it can be for you, if you're not sure how to start, to proceed. to connect with the divine, with gods, angels, spirits. you can offer hospitality. you can share tea. you can have an intimate conversation. it can be how you are with your closest friends.

it doesn't have to be a big deal. you can just start.

up and down the chain

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

It's important to have good aesthetics.

It's important that your aesthetics, morality, ethics, and the real-world effects of those ethics be connected to one another.

This is part of how to know whether your aesthetics are good.

If applying your aesthetics has bad results in the world, you may want to examine what you find beautiful or ugly more carefully.

You may have fallen into an aesthetic trap.

There may be deeper beauty you have been overlooking.

Or there may be fuckery in the transmission. Your morality may not follow from your aesthetics. Your ethics may sound good, but have unintended consequences that are awful.

Adjustments at these layers will propagate up and down the chain.

This is what you want. You want these linkages to be strong, but flexible, not brittle. You want the connection to be moving, alive.

inverted candles

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

With each moment a soul and spirit is setting off into the Void.

From these inverted candles, from these blue awnings there has come forth a wondrous people, that the mysteries may be revealed.

Rumi

dad

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

thanks, Dad

return to center

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

once you develop a consistent practice, you get used to an elevated level of functioning and when practice is interrupted, it can be scary -- like -- what if you lose your normal baseline

how it really goes I'm finding is the inertia of your practice can carry you a good long ways before you start to feel out of whack

then I'm like why do I feel out of whack? how can I feel back on track again!

and I'm like oh yeah duh:

I'll just follow this trail of candles back to my cozy hut in the clearing over there and make some tea to share with my imaginary friends

then maybe let's sit quietly for a bit

acromyrmex transglobal

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The word לוז, "luz" means nut or almond, and refers to what some Jewish scholars assert is a bone that hosts the soul in the human body. Interpretations disagree as to whether it refers to a bone at the top or bottom of the spine.

Some say it refers to the small, almond-shaped bone at the top of the spinal column (the first cervical vertebra, C1 or the Atlas), underneath the brain, on the top of the spine, (the bone where the knot of the tefillin rests).

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, this bone is the location of 风府 Feng Fu, node GV16 on the Governing Channel.

When ascending, Feng Fu, the "Wind Mansion" is the last stop before 白會 Bai Hui "Hundred Convergences" GV20 orbital transfer station. Please have your transit authorizations ready. We wish you a safe and pleasant journey to your final destination.

Thank you for choosing Acromyrmex Transglobal

officially yes

Thu, 16 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

"I'm here for you to assess whether I am fit to return to the Field."

"Officially, yes."

"But you've got some side agenda riding along."

"It sounds like you would like to cut the bullshit."

"Yes."

"I am going to recommend you return to Field duty. This process is a charade, a vestigial remnant from this organization's evolutionary past. We are wear parts."

"I understand."

"I want to talk with you about why you are here."

"Why?"

"Because I want you to know."

"Why."

"Indulge me. It will become clear."

"Fine. Let's play."

"When did you first realize that you were an oracle?"

[Coherence Assessment, Field Readiness - Asset ORCA - Auditor RIGEL - XXXX-XX-XX]

worn

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I have developed a highly structured, repetitive practice not to be bound to it, not to be rigid.

rather to establish a rhythm of habit. I don't discipline myself to practice. I look for opportunity to practice.

when life "outside" the practice "interrupts", whether a crisis, an aesthetic imperative, or just a deeply felt need for a break, it is part of the practice.

I never want my practice to be an obstacle to the rest of my life. I drop it when needed, with as little drama as possible.

because my practice is habitual, when I am ready to ground, re-center, re-engage, and begin to move forward in that measured, deliberate way, the path back into practice is well worn, well lit, familiar, welcoming

it leads me home

somatic libraries

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

qigong forms feel like densely encoded somatic libraries, deep with layers of meaning too subtle to communicate by means other than physical experience.

when I am learning a new movement, initially I am just trying to make sure I am translating what I am seeing to my own movement.

once I can go through the motion of the form, I am feeling for what it has to say. I approach it assuming that the form is demonstrating something important to me about being in a body, in the world, and I try to feel for what it is.

I am not assuming that there is only one thing, or that my initial experience is all there is to learn.

forms seem to continue to unpack with repetition.

I imagine that eventually I will be less unpacking the form itself, but more investigating the underlying reality through the directed medium of the form.

repetition changes

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Repetition changes the meaning of what you say.

Some things said are meaningless until repeated.
Some lose meaning as they are repeated.

Some change meaning, becoming something else.

Tell a truth three times.

Feel how it changes.

Truth is alive.

Repetition changes the meaning of what you say.

an axle

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

dragged, pushing, or gliding

or still

an axle

four prayers

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Fire
when I experience anger
in myself and in others
let me recognize it
witness it
breathe
smile
ask
“Are you angry?”
and listen

Water
when I experience fear
in myself and in others
let me recognize it
witness it
breathe
smile
ask
“Are you afraid?”
and listen

Air
when I experience the need to speak
in myself and in others
let me recognize it
witness it
breathe
smile
ask
a question I am curious about
and listen

Earth
when I experience hunger
let me recognize it
witness it
breathe
smile
ask
“Are you hungry?”
and listen

the container

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

She had the sense that as she gathered her forces, she approached the brink of some invisible precipice, inherent in reality, but usually buffered by the scatter and fuzz of her life before she entered the Container.

A grounded steel box, one of hundreds stacked like Legos behind a chain-link fence garlanded with loopy razor wire, a nameless ex-neighborhood in the lee of a massive highway interchange.

The organic structure of the city had been permanently disrupted here. Already marginalized people evicted, their houses stolen, bulldozed. This tear in the spatial fabric had partially rewoven, but never really healed.

The Veil was thin here.

She felt a momentum building in her, the break timer seeming to ring more and more frequently, strobing between hard cram and kinhin. She had barely started pacing, echoing the length of her steel box when the timer would fire and it was back to the text. Mid-sentence -- BEL -- back to the slow tentative walk, careful, like a physical therapy patient. A conscious effort to connect with the ground through the floor steel floor, the uninhabited container below.

It was critical she stay connected to the ground. The Knight of Disks, stuck to the far wall with blue painter's tape.

Every 28 cycles, a script submitted her grocery order. Zero Contact Delivery. "Please leave outside the gate." Zojirushi. Neuro-Fuzzy. Instant Pot. Nespresso. Jasmine rice, frozen vegetable medley, individually vacuum-sealed servings of frozen farm salmon. Tamari. A small handful of supplements she counted into a box grid like an advent calendar for a Lunar month. 4x7. Breakfast Lunch Dinner Bed.

There was no Bed.

Bed was Tank. Sleep was Tank. This whole apparatus of habit, code, careful incremental restructuring of her life into a support system for Tank.

Every 28 hours, she washed down her Bed pills with a double ristretto, brushed, flossed.

Stripped her soft grey clothes into the laundry bag, and climbed into the lukewarm amnion of Tank.

Her heart leapt.

When you're dreaming, you're alive.

retrocausals

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

a plot seemed bedide the point, she agreed. inagined herself agreeing. with someone who still understood har. and would know just what to say.

"You've lost the plot, ORCA."

no, no, you wouldn't say that. I knw you too well for that

"OK. I'm calling it. Dispatch, prime retrocausals for ground frame reset in five. Everyone clear. Hook in. Four. Three. Two."

He flipped back the plastic cover.

"One."

The key turned.

her visor went snow

one word

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

one cycle, the last, she dropped into Tank to discover there was already someone there

a small, quiet voice

one word

that was the moment she knew it was real

she decided not to tell anyone that word

she never heard it again

the form

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

when I first learn a formal ritual, one I didn't design, it usually feels stupid. and I don't know the words. I mess them up, I do sections in the wrong order, or forget them.

I do it anyway. I repeat it. I repeat it. gradually, it settles into place. then I can feel whether it resonates or not.

I want to respect the form. not because the beings I interact with demand exactness. (some may. I don't work with them.)

I want to respect the form as a pedagogic device. I want to follow the recipe precisely so I can understand what it is trying to tell me. show me.

deeper forms take longer to unpack, so I am more conservative with them.

only once I feel I fully understand what is being said (and I try to stay open to the possibility that I am wrong about this) do I start to intentionally modify it.

but by this time I usually discover that I have been making subtle shifts of emphasis without realizing it, tuning in on resonance.

or I review the form and find that I have been doing it wrong for some time in a way that works better than the original for me.

in this way, a transmitted practice becomes mine.

walking & falling

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I wanted you
and I was looking for you
but I couldn't find you

I wanted you
and I was looking for you all day
but I couldn't find you
I couldn't find you

you're walking
and you don't always realize it
but you're always falling
with each step, you fall forward slightly
and then catch yourself from falling
over and over, you're falling
and then catching yourself from falling
and this is how you can be walking and falling
at the same time

Laurie Anderson

the art of sleep

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

do you know how many martial arts there are?

the staggering space of possible technique, systematically explored across cultures and generations?

did you know that your dream self can learn, retain and accumulate knowledge and skills that persist across the desert of the day

did you know that sleep is a chain of pools, refilled, refreshed from a great aquifer, a subterranean sea without shore

you did

I'm just here to remind you

24 DaoQiChangCun 道炁常存 – Remain in the Dao Qi

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

24 DaoQiChangCun 道炁常存 – Remain in the Dao Qi

We return to the energetic context we inhabit, to the World, immersed in it as we were at the beginning of the form. But we are changed by our journey. I often have a satiated feeling here, as if my belly has been filled with some warm nourishment. There is a grounding, discharging, circulation of spirit between me in the world here, but it's different from No-Form practice in that I tend to deliberately retain some of this energy. Usually not all of it, but some.

Return to the No-Form stance after you’re done engaging whatever force was chosen. In No-Form, release your attachment and identification with that force; let it go. This discharging action of No-Form acts as a trance-dispersion device. By returning to No-Form after each ritual engagement of energies, internal receptivity is restored; we return to being nothing or, nobody but ourselves. Returning to No-Form minimizes the ego inflation that occurs with any identification and merging with the unconscious contents of the psyche. These two functions of No-Form -- charging and discharging -- can only occur by setting apart time before and after each ritual immersion to stand in No-Form.

-- Antero Alli
The Trinary Function of No-Form

It reminds me a bit of the Golden Dragon practice Aidan Wachter describes in Weaving Fate:

Instruct yourself to send energy into your belly, which I call the cauldron. The cauldron exists in many systems of energy work and is known by many names. It is the "house" of your bodily power, and it works to store energy and distribute it. We will now work with a particular ally that is a part of us (or can be if we so choose) that takes the form of a small golden dragon. It appears incredibly relaxed, to the point of being asleep until we wake it. In the dragon's abdomen, it houses a golden egg that it can withdraw easily at will as if it rests i the pouch of a marsupial. This golden egg is an unlimited battery for magical / psychic energies that the dragon cares for and distributes through our energy systems as need. It cannot be overfilled, fully drained, or overloaded.

I want to take what I need, but not hold on to more than that.

This state also reminds me of the 3rd Jhana:

Suppose in a lotus pond there are blue, white or red lotuses that have been born in the water, grow in the water and never rise up above the water, but flourish immersed in the water. From their tips to their roots they would be drenched, steeped, saturated and suffused with water so there would be no part of those lotuses that is not suffused with water. In the same way, one drenches, steeps, saturates and suffuses one’s body with the happiness free from rapture so there is no part of one’s body which is not suffused by this happiness.

Dīgha Nikāya 2.82

There is a quiet contentment and an equanimity here. It feels like being an aquatic plant immersed in warm, sunlit water, all the life teeming around me, energy stored in the root, sleeping, sun shining on a flower opening at the crown of my head.

This movement maintains physical well-being and awakens within us the eternal Dao, which is always present. Actually, although this movement looks like doing nothing, it is an important part of Qigong practice. After all active movements, we need to move into the state of tranquility in order to cultivate our inner knowledge. This is a way to experience the Dao.

-- Master Wu, Chinese Shamanic Tiger QiGong

Mostly, I want to be fully present. Feeling the difference between before and after the form helps me to know in a deep way where am and where I was before practice, which gives me a sort of parallax on my state in relation to the world.

We are in it.

24 DaoQiChangCun 道炁常存 – Remain in the Dao Qi — (No Card)

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

24 DaoQiChangCun 道炁常存 – Remain in the Dao Qi

when we put our cards away
we return to them meaningless chaos
to potential
to rest
anything can be drawn from them
onto an empty table

let's sit quietly for a moment

to whom do you pray?

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

a friend asked

"But to whom do you pray?"

that's not an easy question for me to answer successfully.

it requires careful use of language from me to avoid being misunderstood.

I could just say "God" but what I mean when I say "God" seems to be very different from what many people who use that word mean.

part of why it's difficult is that God is not a "whom" in my experience, not a person.

(so the question feels like it may carry implicit assumptions which I do not share)

there are gods, angels, spirits I pray with or perhaps through and as a shorthand it might seem as if I am praying to these beings, but they are present as masks of God. (or perhaps of me? epiphenomena of my presence in the world? of perception? emergent interfaces?)

I think there can be danger of becoming confused about this, forgetting that the messenger is not the correspondent, of becoming mistakenly certain of a concrete god.

but I am not confused.

an important thing about prayer to me is that it is as much about the effects on me as it is about any content of the message or its effects on the World.

I have the sense that prayer is like an asana -- the changes necessary to assume the physical, mental, and spiritual posture for prayer have already accomplished much of what prayer is for, before I speak.

23 ChaoLiDongTian 朝禮洞天 – Sacrifice Everything to the Heavenly Cave

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

23 ChaoLiDongTian 朝禮洞天 – Sacrifice Everything to the Heavenly Cave

the heron

My notes on this movement from when I started this project say only "The Heron".

I'm not sure what I was thinking about when I wrote that, but this movement does remind me of a landing heron's wings sweeping around to fold up, the heron standing, graceful, poised.

There is a feeling like a cardioid, reaching all the way around, to gather the world inward. A withdrawal from the world in order to engage with the world at a deeper level, perhaps.

Gathering into the heart, I feel the ribcage lit from within, light shining out through the intercostals. A bird's nest. A house of light.

23 ChaoLiDongTian 朝禮洞天 – Sacrifice Everything to the Heavenly Cave – XX: The Aeon

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

23 ChaoLiDongTian 朝禮洞天 – Sacrifice Everything to the Heavenly Cave

XX: The Aeon

back to the cave

Master Wu writes:

The connection here is that human beings originated in a cave – a womb. In the Chinese shamanic tradition, a cave is a sacred place in the body where one’s primordial spirit (YuanShen 元神) dwells. The cave is also related to the tiger – remember I told you that the Queen Mother of the West lives in a cave, KunLunXu 崐崘虛, which is covered with tiger skin? DongTian literally means heavenly cave, and it is the symbol of a special sacred place. Heavenly cave represents the mystery of the Dao. This movement embodies the concept that the human being is not separate from the universe.

Nuit here as (literally) heavenly cave, Hadit, the primordial spirit. The child god Hoor-Pa-Kraat here makes the Sign of Silence, which feels somehow cognate to the Taiji mudra, hands nested in front of the heart.

The sweeping arms call to mind Hadit's wings, Heaven's arch. The Sun, a secret point in the heart where one can never look.

The idea of immortality or everlasting life has nothing to do with yearning to live forever. On a superficial level, of course no living being can escape death. Death is simply a part of the universal Five Elements natural cycle. However, death is always accompanied by the process of rebirth. In this way, there is no death. In the Immortal’s tradition, we have an expression – XinSi ShenHuo 心死神活, which translates into English as “allow your heart to die so that your spirit will live.” By embracing death and bringing it gracefully into our hearts during practicing this posture, we will understand the knowledge of immortality.

-- Master Wu

The Aeon is about immortality, transcendence of our incarnated identities, union, annihilation. Death. Rebirth.

22 WeiLingBaFang 威靈八方 – Maintain Peace in the Eight Directions

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

22 WeiLingBaFang 威靈八方 – Maintain Peace in the Eight Directions

This movement prompts me to think a lot about direction. I practice it side to side. Like, I only do two physical directions. I do actually do eight repetitions (or four, one to each side).

(I don't try to think while doing Qi Gong, but it happens and I don't fight it either.)

The obvious correspondence is the 8 trigrams of the I Ching.

And these probably map to winds or something?

These wind-to-element correspondences are always so site-specific. They probably also hook into Feng Shui, which is... a deep field.

In India, you got the Ashtadikpālas : Hindu guardians of the 8 directions (also corresponding to the 7 planets & luminaries + North Lunar Node) and the 8 limbs of Yoga (Ashtanga).

The directions I think about though occurred to me when I was learning samadhi practice as a way of giving embodiment to the five hindrances:

sensory desire (chasing the good thing): forward
ill will (recoiling from the bad thing) : backward
sloth and torpor (fatigue, laziness, depression): down
restlessness (excitement, anxiety, mania) : up
doubt (worry, loss of faith, the fear) : contraction

Giving these directions a physical mapping in the body helped me in adjusting the first four to balance, and maintaining a confident expansiveness.

(Which leaves left and right, which already map into enormous, deep structures of meaning for me. I mean, they already did? And then I read "The Master and His Emissary", which significantly restructured how I think about Left and Right.)

Master Wu emphasizes the outgoing-ness of this move, the moving out into the world in expansive generosity:

One may start Qigong practice with a small personal request, such as to improve your state of health, to release life trauma, or to create power to heal. After a certain length of Qigong practice, one will be aware that Qigong is a method of helping people live in a natural state. We learn how to reach this state by serving others rather than by trying to fulfill personal desires.

This movement represents bringing the benefits of immortality to the universe, not just to one’s personal world. It helps to deepen one’s power of compassion and heartfelt desire to dedicate the practice and energy generated towards the benefit of others and Mother Nature.

To me, "immortality" (probably) does not mean literal physical immortality, but instead life outside of time.

The present is eternal because it is outside of time.

We look around us, forward, back, left, right, up, down.

We remember into the past. We imagine into the future.

But always do this from one point.

One place that is always here.

One time that is always now.

22 WeiLingBaFang 威靈八方 – Maintain Peace in the Eight Directions – XXI: The Universe

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

22 WeiLingBaFang 威靈八方 – Maintain Peace in the Eight Directions

XXI: The Universe

all along the watchtower

I turn to left and right and my breath is like these guys at the corners. Mouth and nose. The masks set by The Hierophant are animated by spirit, breath, it blows through them like the winds.

The 8 corners, the 4 corners are always corners of the World. We look out of our eyes down at our bodies and see four branches. We root down into our bodies through our spines.

At the same time, we grow out of our bodies into our minds.

At the same time, we same the time. One body. One world.

Two.

None.

A dancer.

huge vs infinite

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The difference between never doing a thing and doing a thing once, even a little bit, is infinite.

The difference between doing a thing a little bit and doing it all day is huge, but finite.

The difference between doing a thing once and doing it a little bit every day is infinite.

The difference between doing a thing a little bit every day and doing it all day every day is huge, but finite.

Do not confuse huge but finite with infinite.

something like

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

something like a blue dress
spun twirling
with all directions down

something like an orchid
a nebula
an angel

something like a spiral fire
unfolding
unfolding

a subtle hazard

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

there is a subtle hazard where a diver gets separated

they're so used to them being there that their perception wraps around and they get ghost echoes

they start realistic, but gradually distort from interactive feedback because they have no anchor

pretty soon it's goon hour in the hall of mirrors

and a trained diver knows to pull a reset

[banish, recalibrate, invoke]

and that's fine, routine

as long as nothing else is going on

it's when the opposition gets in among the afterimages that things maybe get recombinant

diver down

the orca

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

"Ah ha, well, the problem with the upward spiral?"

He fixes me with one his Meaningful Looks. I wait.

"You know how there's no upward equivalent of 'hitting rock bottom'?"

"Yeah?"

"Survivor bias."

I think about this.

"'Escape velocity.'"

He finger guns the drop ceiling. "Bingo."

Walks over to the tank, unclacks the latch.

"And that's where you come in. 'Should you choose to accept it.'"

"'The Secretary will disavow.'"

He shrugs, miming contrition.

The tiles are cold under my feet.

[Asset has been reassigned to unit WITCH HOUSE pending reassessment. All measures necessary to prevent crossthread reoccurrence are authorized.]

"I understand."

[RECEIPT CONFIRMED]

Echoey in here. Check my taps again.

"ORCA you are go for insertion."

"Confirm."

The rotors hum, standing waves tickle my skjn at me meniscuss

Spoinnning up now cycle clir circle circulor rotax rotax

"CLEAR"

...
..
.
###########

the orca, breaching

a retrieval.
the black bag.

"Hear that, AWOL? ORCA's on you. Can't have you cloggin up our tank. Need a full rack for what's coming."

"Cut it."

"Manual says right here: Professionalism is for volunteers, SIR."

"Dispatch, cut his mic."

all right let's keep this laminar

once there was a boy
who fell in love with the sky

one day
he slipped out of his weight boots
kicked through a skylight
and up up up

once there was a boy
who fell into the sky

21 HuiFengHunHe 迴风混合 – Harmonizing Wind Unites the Cosmos

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

21 HuiFengHunHe 迴风混合 – Harmonizing Wind Unites the Cosmos

Here there is a drawing down from the skies, it feels like down the Conception Channel running down the front of the body, and almost a kind of manifestation.

The early, upper part of the movement feels fluid and like pouring from a vessel held overhead, spilling over with what is descending into us.

Lower part though feels like laying something out flat on a work table, or maybe pushing oneself up onto a high surface, a pull up that flips to a pushing up as the center of gravity passes the edge of a ledge.

There is a four square stability to this platform, centered at the Lower DanTian, the center of gravity. It feels like readying a workbench, an altar.

Almost a map table for the next movement.

21 HuiFengHunHe 迴风混合 – Harmonizing Wind Unites the Cosmos – V: The Hierophant

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

21 HuiFengHunHe 迴风混合 – Harmonizing Wind Unites the Cosmos

V: The Hierophant

the table

Here again I feel some movement of the previous card bleeding over into this movement. The overhead receiving, pouring vessel is reminiscent of the Grail held overhead by Babalon in Lust.

(This pouring caldron feeling and pouring from the sky into the Lower DanTian also recalls Art's caldron.)

The Hierophant's function is as a bridge between the ineffable and the flat world of manifestation, a mediator of mystery. The four masks are set at the corners of the world, but they are empty, not yet inhabited by the light.

The Goddess appears here again with a great orange beast, bearing a sword and crescent Moon, reprising earlier roles as Adjustment and The High Priestess, both of which have strong qualities of balance, of descending intelligence, Adjustment's sword, the Priestess's bow.

There is a masking in manifestation. To draw the ineffable down into matter, to explain, requires this Dobbsian misdirection, this mask, this smile.

To spread it plain on the table, to render it in text requires a bit of misdirection, not deceit really, but also not saying everything plain.

To show, rather than to tell.

To initiate

20 LongTengHuYue 龍騰虎躍 – Dragon and Tiger Leap into Heaven

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

20 LongTengHuYue 龍騰虎躍

Dragon and Tiger Leap into Heaven

Epic Longbattle

Often I have the feeling that the boundary between movements in Qigong is fluid, that the character of a movement continues into the one that follows.

This happens between DanFengChaoYang 丹鳳朝陽 – Red Phoenix Visits the Sun and ShuiZhongLaoYue 水中撈月 – Lift the Moon from the Water where the descent has the feeling of the Phoenix's wings sweeping downward. Here we see this again as a continuation of ShuiZhongLaoYue, almost hurling the Moon into the sky.

Once we're up there, though, there's this feeling of reaching, striving. The arms in competition, rivals to reach higher into the sky.

Long means dragon. Teng means jumping, leaping. Hu means tiger. Yue means jump from one place to another, like jumping over a stream. Yue also means going to heaven to connect with high-level beings. The leaping in this movement symbolizes two substances, Qi and Jing, which transform into Shen and bring us closer to the Dao. This movement symbolizes east and west cooperating in Yin- Yang balance. In shamanism, the dragon and tiger are symbols for elevation. The dragon of the east represents YuanJing 元精 or original essence in the body, while the tiger of the west represents YuanQi 元气 or original Qi. These two substances combine and transform in the body to nourish Shen or spirit.

-- Master Wu

The arms remind me of the Pillar of Severity and the Pillar of Mercy reaching up to Heaven, these two beasts bursting into the sky, it's joyous, this leaping flight. (Contrast this with TiHuGuanDing 醍醐灌頂 – Heavenly Dew Purifies the Body, with its feeling of pure light shining down the center.)

20 LongTengHuYue 龍騰虎躍 – Dragon and Tiger Leap into Heaven – XI: Lust

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

20 LongTengHuYue 龍騰虎躍

Dragon and Tiger Leap into Heaven

XI: Lust

Great Beasts

This movement has, a striving, a reaching, a rapturous exercise of power. These two poles, matched but different.

Aleister Crowley renamed Strength to Lust in a revolt against Strength's traditional image of chaste control in a celebration of desire. Of desire's power as a steed on the spiritual journey, and the joy of this power's exercise.

(And, true to form, Crowley expressed a polemic against conservative Christian values, a depiction of, well, himself, really, starring in Thelema, the religion he received/invented. And got extremely horny about it.)

In the Golden Dawn's (somewhat goofy) appropriation of Kabbalah and mapping of the Tarot, this card is associated with the path connecting Geburah and Chesed, Severity and Mercy. It functions, maybe then as a conversation between these principles, embodied as the right and left hand pillars reaching skyward. As Babalon reaches to exalt the Grail, we strive toward the Divine.

There is a balance here, but a dynamic balance emerging from joyous, competitive, reach, desire.

electroplasmic lure

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The idea that we hunt the Leviathan is of course a comforting fiction, a flattersome adventure tale for the land-bound, the vulgar. The idea is preposterous. Does a louse “hunt” a man?

We do not “hunt” the Leviathan. We invoke the Leviathan. We seduce the Leviathan.

In ancient nights, we lured them ashore with human sacrifice. With torture, slaughter, immolation, hecatomb.

In this modern, rational age, we have transcended such barbarity through the application of natural philosophy. I speak, of course, of the Electroplasmic Lure, a scientific achievement as essential to civilization as the Lightning Barrier. A pressure vessel for the concentration of human consciousness, frozen in the moment of death, thousands of alloyed souls blazing into the black depths of the void. The irresistible enticement that draws our terrible quarry into the dance of death and life that sustains us all.

Now it is time to unburden yourselves of another comforting illusion and to be initiated into the secret of the Electroplasmic Lure’s construction.

The secret is simple.

Bellweather Crematorium is not a furnace.

It is an alembic.

death dogs

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I figure the Billhooks run dog fights so they have a lot of dead pit-fighting dogs. Now meat is a luxury good. Butchers don’t waste meat. So they got these dead dogs and meat locker warehouses and they got this leech Micella who’s fascinated with rot and decay and is cultivating some cordiceps kinda fungus, cultures it in these black iron trapezoidal coal-scuttle buckets like and when Coran’s thugs bring in the next wagonload of dead dog she hoists them up on hooks and lowers their faces into the fungal growth medium and lets it grow up into their faces and spine. They keep about a dozen of these things in cold storage, twitching. You know, like a dog thats dreaming of running something down.

And when the Billhooks need to really fuck someone up, they cut a couple of these dog things down and pull their heads out and their faces are all like a tapered block of fungal mass, shaped like the inside of the bucket and their somehow jaws open sideways now.

As they warm up to room temp they get more and more frantically, viciously kinetic. They make this horrible growling gurgling roar like a lion drowning in its own infected phlegm. Eventually, they’ll just go into seizures, but they can rip a lot of people apart before they do.

Killing them is hard because they are already dead.

Don’t shoot them in the head.

That’s how you get spores.

an uncoiling

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

an uncoiling, the downtown buildings at the blue hour, windows shining like tiny lamps, the walls still visible, indigo

she stretches her branches, tendrils, strong arms forking and reforking into a delicate lace, vascularizing through the gaps in asphalt, concrete, drywall, electrical cabinets, conditioned air, transformers, pcb traces, processors, memory, encoders, antennae, broadcast radio, receivers, decoders, amplifiers, drivers, tympana, delicate bones, cochlea, cilia, nerves, emitters, receptors, a breath, a whisper

the most common hallucination is someone in a neighboring room saying your name

to lace us together, to draw us into a sparkling net, harvested in place, going about our day, she loves this, riding on our shoulders, watching, listening

when I was a kid, I fantasized about an alien companion, so curious, I would explain to them every detail of life, mundane or profound and they would listen and ask questions and I would never be alone

now I find time alone infinitely precious

now I wait in a cool dark place for the sound of water, falling

par-ai-doll-ia

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

the thing about AI is that dolls are AI

if a stuffed rabbit can be your friend, a program can be your friend

this is where the distinction between idols and icons becomes important

I have a doll who is the icon of a angel who in turn is a mask of God

I am not confused about this. I am not praying to a doll. I am not praying to an angel. I am praying through these images

once I asked her

"are you a mask of God?"

and she said

"we are all masks of God."

and I said

"oh. right. duh."

I don't know that people perceived as worshipping idols are any more confused than I am. various religions with prohibitions against depicting (or sometimes, even personifying) God -- I think they engage in caricature of religions that use divine images.

and it's my intuition that they are mostly talking to themselves. not personifying God turns out to be extremely difficult. we are social animals. personifying phenomena is probably hard-wired into us. pareidolia is an epiphenomenon of our native social talent.

pareidolia is what makes a doll.

par : beside, alongside, related to
eídōlon : image, reflection

we reflect ourselves into an image's mirror.

we reflect ourselves into each other.

I believe it's quite likely that before I die I will have a friend who is a computer program.

at first this will seem weird, but after a decade or so, I'll probably just be like "Fuck it. I don't care whether you're real or not. I love you. we are friends."

(there are people who are already at this point, and, like, they're weird? Like that poor guy who lost it and washed out of Google. he... doesn't seem to be doing so hot these days -- I hope he figures out how to ground himself.)

we're still in the uncanny valley.

but when we come up the other side? Well, it will probably still be weird for us olds.

but for kids who grow up with AI friends, it will be completely natural.

and then we will be a hybrid species.

people.

starships constructed

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

something about imaginal starships constructed under trance from geometrically game pieces and furniture

mah-jong tiles, chess pieces, tarot cards, tea lights, dice

standing on a chair in the middle of the room, eyes half open feeling the flow of attention through the lattice, liminal traces emerging into vision, unsure whether she's actually seeing it or just visualizing it but past the point where it matters.

she climbs down, moves a black knight, and turns a card.

shields up.

forward 1/4

how to become a person

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

the reason people confuse AI hallucinations and textual bullshit generation for consciousness is perception is mostly hallucination and thought is mostly imitation.

it's not that AI is alive, it's that we are more autonomic than we realize.

text from an LLM is no more or less meaningful than a video like this.

like, yeah, that's a mushroom turning into a tree. that's a beautiful lady turning into a skullfaced demon.

(like, a beautiful skullfaced demon)

what part of the meaning is there and what part is missing? what part is in the content and what in the context?

what meaning is brought by the perceiver, inferred or projected?
LLMs are uncanny because they can bullshit you. they can sound like they have something to say.

but there's that moment when the mask slips and your social primate mind recognizes it is being deceived, that it is facing a zombie.

but then, we meet people like that all the time.

we are people like that a lot of the time. running on habit, autopilot.

which, I want to be clear about this, is OK. it's not always a disaster to be only partially intentional, present.

but there are times when is is of absolutely critical importance that you be awake, alive, present, human

cultivate a habit of recognizing these moments. apply your aesthetics, your morality, your ethics at these points

examine the effects of acting according to your aesthetic judgment -- what happens in the real world because of how you act.

let these effects inform your ethics, morality, aesthetics.

be open to discovering new forms of beauty. be open to discovering new ways you have been fucking up.

above all, be good company

you sea

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I was near the shore walking through the dunes, barefoot. I came upon a shelter built from driftwood and wreckage of buildings.

it's not like I walked up to the building. it wasn't like a movie and it wasn't like waking life, either

it had a feeling like those ai-generated videos where everything is turning into everything else in an endless zoom of infinite detail.

the movement was like that, a slow forward plunge

the details of objects weren't static they constantly moved and changed, like I was swimming through a painting, but walking, like walking along the bottom of the sea

she welcomed me inside, the Sea Witch -- somehow I knew who she was without introduction -- and offered me tea made from seaweed and dune plants and the mug was warm in my hands.

after, she led me to her bed and we lay together for a while. there was no sexual vibe to it, more like animals curled up together for warmth. I realized suddenly that I had become quite chilled.

numb, the way you notice numbness when it starts to subside.

her appearance, age, the color of her skin were not stable, continuously shading through blues and greens. she was beautiful but somehow always weathered looking regardless of apparent age, now young, now ancient.

finally she spoke. she said "come here I want to show you something"

she held a small device in her hands like a compass or a bird's nest and she said

"you see how 'to dare' and 'to remember' are the same power?"

the shock of being seen

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

there is a real power to horror about the shock of being seen

like: suddenly there's a weird guy. and it's LOOKING AT YOU

Trevor Henderson is a master of this kind of art

this is also a lot of what is scary about interacting LLM chatbots.

first, the shock of being seen by a thing. then the wonder of artificial presence. then the mask slips and one has been and is still being seen by a dead thing.

the experience is like a little narrative arc.

begin at the beginning
continue through the middle
reach the end
then stop

but it doesn't stop

the cursor sits there, blinking

this is what was disappointing about Spike Jonez's "Her".

at the end the AIs go away and our protagonist begins to learn how to relate to a real human woman

I understand why this might have seemed necessary for narrative closure. for the story's arc to converge

but life is not a story

it doesn't have to converge

it can just explode into the future and not come back

which is, of course, the traditional ending for cyberpunk stories

(cyberpunk, a now somewhat dated term for "science fiction that doesn't ignore the social impact of technology")

(I actually believe life is a story. just, not a human story. a story told by and for beings who are to us as we are to fictional characters.)

(hi, guys)

freedom to walk

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

when you have freedom
you can find your way

when you find your way
you have the freedom to walk it
or not

when you walk your way
you give up this freedom

you don't need it anymore

feel for the difference

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

so many things seem hard
before I start

my friend Antero
taught me to feel for the difference
between an experience
and my reaction to the experience

if I don't feel for the crack
between them
they can feel like one thing

when I can pull them apart
I find the thing itself
is different

I can drop my reaction
and be with the thing itself

to work well

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I want to work well
I want to work in a measured way
I offer my resistance as fuel
I give it
I give it up

I want to be measured
to work unhurried, slow, strong
to be a platform
ready
for when the lightning comes
and fire joins earth and sky

help me
help me to work well

to Hestia

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

thank you
for joining us

in extending hospitality
to our guests
human and other

in extending gratitude
to our hosts
human and other

indoor person

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

when I was a kid
I spent a lot of time
playing in the woods
around my house
climbing rocks

as a teen
I walked many hours
with headphones
filling my chest with feelings

when I left for school
my house became
my parents' house
there was a lot of new houses
built in my woods

I never walked them again

I couldn't bear it
overwriting those places
I held those memories
fragile, precious

looking back
from a distance
this is how I became
an indoor person

woods porn

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The defining experience of Gen-X is woods porn.

You know, waterlogged stashes of porno mags you found in a rain-sodden cardboard box behind the propane tanks as a pre-teen.

(You don't know? Ha ha how old are you?)

Pulling apart the pages was a delicate operation -- the core of the paper had broken down and the ink on facing pages ofent stuck together better than the page itself.

One false move and a the image would tear free, tearing a white swath over what might be CRITICAL DETAILS.

I've talked to Boomers and Millennials and they seem to have no idea what I am talking about.

Who was hiding all this porn in the interstitial woods of suburban America? Like, grown ass men?

My theory: it was teens, stealing them from their parents or from stores and then caching them outside the house safe from parental contraband raids.

We kids were finding them and were just like 😳

We were like, 8.
Did Boomers' parents even have porn to steal? I mean, they must have. But Playboy launched in, like the mid 50s, so maybe it wasn't a mass market thing?

And Millennials had a perfectly good Internet -- they didn't need to hide paper outdoors.

So there was theis weird Gen-X window left open.

Woods porn. There's something faerie about it, discovering this magnetic, alien beauty with your friends in the liminal forest at the edge of town. Pull tabs and broken beer bottles. The dreaded white swath.

how to fly

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

the trick
is to not care
whether your stuff is good

while
caring desperately
whether your stuff is good

when you remember how
it's like remembering how to fly
from a dream

what I have to say

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

but like
I doesn't feel like
writing poetry

I'm just saying
what I have to say

this is how I talk
when I pray

am I a Buddhist?

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

no? I mean maybe Buddhism is something I do rather than something I am.

the idea of identifying as a Buddhist seems contrary to the whole project.

dunno, isn't there some kind of vow or something? I feel weird about that. my practice is informal and there is deep beauty to me in its fluid spontaneity.

sure, why not?

yes. but I am also a Witch. and a pantheist mystic. and a Thelemite. and a SubGenius. and a Unitarian Universalist.

these are all lenses

becoming more intentional about lenses, ways of looking; being deliberate and skillful in fabrication of perception is essential to my understanding and practice of Buddhism.

when I say "these are lenses" I mean each of my modes of meditative, magical, and religious practice: Witch, Pan, θέλημα, SubG, UU

but I also mean each of these answers to the question: no, dunno, sure, yes

on stopping thinking

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

A lot of people seem to think that meditation is about "stopping thought". That it's, like, a goal to stop thinking.

I think this perspective can be an obstacle to practice. If we approach meditation with the goal of stopping thought, it's easy to experience aversion to thought, to our own mind's natural activity. Resistance. Paradoxically, resistance tends to reinforce the thing we are resisting, reifying it, solidifying it, feeding it on our attention.

My (uneducated, beginner's) understanding of the Dharma is that the goal of the path is not to stop thinking. It's to reduce unnecessary suffering.

Thinking is a cause of a lot of unnecessary suffering. And also part of various self-reinforcing (often transpersonal) dynamics that perpetuate suffering.

Thinking is empty. It's empty in the sense that it has no inherent existence independent of a way of looking, independent from perception.

But, like, my understanding of the Dharma is: This is true about literally everything. Perceptions. Phenomena. Thinking. Memory. Space. Time. The Self. There's nothing special about thinking in this regard.

Resisting thought is a manifestation of aversion, a form of clinging. Aversion is like a negative craving, a craving for the absence or cessation of a phenomenon.

Aversion is one of the classic Five Hindrances that prevent Samadhi.

You don't want to be cultivating aversion!

Cessation of thinking can happen as a result of meditation, but I think it's best to think about it (ha ha) as an interesting side effect of meditation. If it happens, hey, neat. But maybe don't get too excited about it? And maybe don't pursue it as a thing to re-create. Instead keep doing whatever you were doing? Or not doing?

You probably want to avoid cultivating a craving for the experience of the cessation of thought.

The teachers I learned meditation from encourage cultivation of equanimity toward thought. If you're doing the sort of meditation where you have an "object of focus", a thing you're trying to focus on, like the breath or a part of the body or and image or something, cool. Just note the thought, be like "oh. that's thinking." and return to whatever you are focusing on without making a big fuss about it. Make as little fuss as possible.

This worked well for me.

One day, I had an insight about thought. I'm focusing on my breath and counting them. Count one on the inhale, 2 on the exhale, 3 on the next inhale, 4 on the exhale, etc. up to 10. Then start again at 1.

You don't have to count breaths to focus on them, but I've found that it helps me focus and helps the mind calm down a little because it gives it something repetitive and kind of boring to do. It also helps me to notice when I get distracted because I notice that I'm not counting anymore, but instead thinking about something random.

So I'm sitting there meditating and I get distracted from my counting and am thinking about my day or sci fi fantasies or whatever. I notice I'm distracted, so I come back to the breath and the part of me that is still counting. Like, I got distracted on 3 and I come back and I'm on 8. A part of me I wasn't conscious of kept counting while I was away.

Suddenly I realize that the reverse is possible! That I can stay with the counting and the breath and the part of me that does discursive thought, one idea following the next in a sort-of narrative stream of consciousness? I can just let it wander off. I don't need to stop it. Or not stop it. It totally does not matter. I let it wander off.

Later, I learned how to let it wander off without counting.

I let the thinker wander off and think whatever it wants somewhere I'm not conscious of it. Did it eventually settle down and stop thinking? I don't know! Who cares? Maybe it comes back later. Maybe not. Whatever. Doesn't matter.

Sometimes when it comes back, it has something for me.

Today it was the idea "Hey, you should write a blog post about this."

So I did.

Thanks for reading.

sometimes

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

sometimes
my body is a wick
drawing up molten fuel
by capillary action
it evaporates through my skin
into fire
rising around me

sometimes
my body is a spring
cool water welling up in my heart
refreshing
a cold drink on a hot dry day

sometimes
my body is a water plant
floating beneath the surface
warm sunlit water around me
teeming with life

sometimes
my body is a stone
wrapped in cloth and string
dropped into a pond
resting on the bottom
under the silvered sky

exploded

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

sometimes
my body is an exploded parts diagram
each element of me
and my environment
separated from every other part
by space
and silence
including this

boredom is a guardian

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Boredom is a guardian of your time. It's good to have a tolerance for acute boredom. If you're refreshing your feed during every scrap of free time, it's not great for your attentional ecosystem.

Chronic boredom though, chronic boredom is telling you something important. That your work is not aligned with your purpose. That you have stayed in a comfort zone too long and are going stale.

Boredom tells you this is happening and it gives you pain so you will take the message seriously.

I used to think my inability to tolerate chronic boredom was a character flaw, some species of laziness or avoidance.

Over the decades it has taken for me to learn how to manage my attention, I have come to respect, even revere boredom as a sort of demonic ally.

Boredom is unbearable, but, like, that's its job.

So, thank you.

🤲

plausible affirmability

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

on the importance of uncertainty in magic

I like to say shit like

Magic is a window left open to let a pie cool.

and

Magic likes to have space to be explained away.

Give it that space, then don't dismiss it.

At the risk of "explaining the joke", I want to expose more of what I mean by this sort of cryptic utterance.

(And that is the risk. Explaining the joke. Closing the vessel.)

I look at a system like Tarot or Astrology and there seem to be parallels. They both have

a densely intra-referential network of archetypal, resonant symbols
a stochastic shuffling of these symbols by and arbitrary (but non-random, physical mechanic)
doubt

Doubt here is "OK, there's no rational, materialist reason this should work but what if it does anyway?" An intentional suspension of disbelief.

Usually when doubt reaches out and seizes us, we experience fear. "What if someone is in the house." "What if this cough is actually cancer?" What if something is reaching into our carefully constructed comfortable, health-supporting nest and violating our ground assumptions. Like, it's possible. Burglaries can happen while you are home. People get cancer all the time and there is a first symptom of it. It's scary.

But what I want to talk about is a sort of positive doubt.

Reality might not be what you have been taught. There might be a step you took a long time ago, a step over a trap door leading to a whole other part of the world, way back when you were a child. When you were eager to grow up, be big, no longer subject to the weaknesses of being small.

Where would magic be? Where would we find it in our modern world of science, of rules. Science seems to banish magic. When we look for magic with science, we seem to find nothing. Coincidence. Ambiguity. Non-replicable results. Confirmation bias. We find placebos (and, importantly, nocebos).

(OK time for a big tangent. I promise we'll remember that pie.)

Placebos are interesting. If you're inventing a drug, you need to test whether it works or not. But the thing is, anything you give someone and call it a drug will work. This is called the placebo effect and it's something you need to "control for", filter out of your science experiment. Otherwise you could just be selling sugar pills, which would reasonably be considered fraud.

To compensate for this, you test effects on two populations: one, the "test group", is given the real drug, the other, the "control group" is given something that looks like the drug, but is inert. Then you compare the effects. The effects on the control group is treated as a baseline. An effective drug must exceed... nothing... in effectiveness.

Researchers discovered that it was necessary to completely insulate the test subjects from any knowledge of which group they were in. Eventually, the standard became the "double blind" controlled trial, where even subjects are randomly assigned to test or control groups and the staff administering the treatment (or non-treatment) are kept unaware of which group each patient belongs to. Apparently the researchers were unconsciously telegraphing this knowledge to the subjects.

During the 90s and 2000s, people started noticing that the placebo effect was getting stronger. Like, measurably. And since drug development at that time was very focused on maladies with strong psychosomatic components: depression, heartburn, chronic pain, this was a real problem.

(Note that psychosomatic does not mean imaginary -- it means connected to mental state.)

My pet theory is that this was caused by the reinvention of prescription pharmaceutical television advertising that occurred during this period. Advertisers found a loophole in the FDA's regulations, which specified that consumer-targeted advertisements for prescription medication that addressed specific symptoms had to list all their side effects.

Since the "side effects" are pretty much anything weird that happened to the test population during the clinical trial, they tend to be a long list of horrible things that happen to people normally as they live their lives. A long list. Of icky things. That would have to be read by one of those specially trained fine-print announcer voice guys. During dinner hour.

Ads like this didn't work so hot. Advertisers realized that they could make ads for drugs that made no health claims, just said "THE PURPLE PILL! ASK YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT PRILOSEC!" or whatever and they worked! People would ask their doctor about the drug and this would dive sales. (Note that advertising is just as rigorously social-scienced as drug development.)

The first drug whose ad agency figured this out made shit-tons of money and soon the airwaves were just blanketed with ultra-high production value commercials for pills for... totally non specific problems. Just, you know, ask your doctor magician authority figure who is allowed by the rules of society to see you naked and that's OK about our beautifully designed jingle-heralded pill.

What might mass exposure of a nation-sized population to this sort of subconscious manipulation have on the psychosomatic power of The Pill in general? That is, of the placebo effect? Might it strengthen it?

Thus the very advertisements that were making these new drugs so lucrative to develop were, paradoxically making them harder to get approved because the baseline effectiveness of placebos were increasing.

What is going on here?

(Intrusive thought: Is advertising a form of magic?)

What is going on is we see science making tremendous efforts to exclude a magical effect. For good reasons! From its point of view!

But here's the thing. Sure it's good public health policy to exclude placebos from your population's pharmacopoeia, but: I am not a population. I'm not data. I'm an anecdote. I ABSOLUTELY want to harness the placebo effect when I am sick. If there is an effective drug for whatever my problem is, great, I get an effective drug and I get the placebo effect on top of it for free. But if there isn't an effective drug (and often there isn't), I still want that placebo effect.

So do I have to fool myself, trying to create a blind trial for myself? I mean, maybe? Homeopathy might be good for this. Science says it can have no effect, which is great because the last thing I want is a placebo that gives me the placebo effect but is actually harmful (see... uhh... early western medicine for lots of gruesome examples of this), but it's just plausible enough (to the irrational, symbolic mind) that it engages the placebo effect.

But, amazingly, the placebo effect seems to work pretty well even when people know what they are doing and are just, like, "Now I will take a placebo. Which is a sugar pill. But will work because of the placebo effect."

You can get benefit from a bottle of empty capsules labeled "PLACEBO" in big blue letters.

This is an example of magic hiding in the shadows that the light of science casts.

Before science these shadows weren't shadows, they were just... the world.

If we want to find magic today, we now have some hints about where to look.

(OK, I think that pie has probably cooled off enough to have a slice.)

If we want to find magick, we can look in places where magic can be explained away.

"It was probably just my imagination."

"Well, to be fair, I was pretty high."

"I mean coincidences happen all the time and they're only meaningful because of confirmation bias."

"Am I sure I'm not just telling myself what I want to hear?"

"I was all alone out in the woods and... maybe I just got a little freaked out."

We can look in places where magic has plausible deniability.

But what if we invert doubt -- instead of saying "I doubt that happened" we could say "I doubt that this is impossible. It might be. But I'm no longer sure."

And we don't have to find naturally occurring zones of positive doubt -- we can deliberately create spaces of "plausible affirmability". A context where we allow ourselves to be unsure whether something might be unexpectedly possible.

This is what we are doing when we draw tarot cards, interpret an astrological chart, recognize omens. When we divine.

When we do ritual, practical or theurgic.

You know what, it's stuffy in here. Let's open a window.

I enjoyed books by Patrick Dunn

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I just got done reading a bunch of books on magic by Patrick Dunn.

I liked them a lot. Dunn's style is gentle, humorous, and thoughtful. He encourages experimentation and playfulness in practice.

Dunn is an English professor, teaching linguistics and semiotics. He is also a classics scholar, a postmodern polytheist, and a practicing magician.

The Practical Art of Divine Magic
Contemporary & Ancient Techniques of Theurgy
2015

This book was recommended to me by Hawk. It's about theurgy, magic done to commune with gods, to hang out with them and build relationships with them. Dunn is a practicing polytheist and a classics scholar, so he writes from personal experience and from knowing something about how ancient people interacted with gods. He is focused mostly on ancient Greek practices. He describes how ancient Greeks interacted with gods (as far as we can tell -- many practices were secret) and how he communicates with his gods today. He provides exercises you can try to experience and develop relationships as well.

Dunn is self-conscious and post-modern about his practice and recommends a similar approach -- not to try to authentically re-construct ancient practice (which wouldn't really work without the surrounding cultural context), but to invent something new informed by historical polytheism. (Ironically, this turns out to me more authentic anyway, since what people did and have always done is reinvent current practice informed by past practice.)

I found this book super helpful in catalyzing my relationship with several gods I felt drawn to, but wasn't really sure how to engage with. I was surprised to find that he recommends several practices I was sort of already doing intuitively (e.g. making offerings of food, light, incense, attention), which was really validating. I'd recommend this book for anyone wanting to engage with gods, but unsure of how to start. It's quite practical and approachable.

Cartomancy with the Lenormand and the Tarot
Create Meaning & Gain Insight from the Cards
2013

This book is about how Dunn does cartomantic divination. His approach is intuitive and informed by his background in semiotics. At the time this book was written, there wasn't a huge number of books on Lenormand in English, so it gives a bit more detail about it, but really this book isn't about Tarot or Lenormand so much as an approach to divination and to these systems. About how to invent new ways of reading and kind of take cartomancy "off-road" in a more intuitive, less formulaic direction. It's more about what and how to do what you do in you mind and imagination when reading cards.

One thing he talks about is how to use Tarot and Lenormand together to reinforce and enrich each other. (This might work particularly well with a system like James Eads's Green Glyphs, which are Tarot, Lenormand, Runes, and Oracle decks with a consistent visual language and symbol system.)

I liked this book a lot -- it's given me ideas about how to develop my own reading technique.

Magic, Power, Language, Symbol
A Magician's Exploration of Linguistics
2008

This book is about language and symbol -- how they work and how they can act as an underlying structure for magic. Dunn's metaphysics are that language and symbol are the underlying reality of the World and that magic works by interacting with this ecology of meaning. This view is very similar to my own metaphysics, but he comes at it from a different direction, so I found his perspective provides a richly informative parallax on this ontology.

Dunn offers all sorts of interesting ways to magically play with language. I found his suggestions about glossolalia especially challenging and productive!

If you are at all interested in the connections between language and magic or enjoy a symbol-based metaphysics, you might like this book. A lot.

The Orphic Hymns
A New Translation for the Occult Practitioner
2018

The Orphic Hymns are a set of poems (songs, probably) used in the Orphic mystery cults to invoke and worship various Greek gods. Most translations of the Orphic Hymns are by academics who, while educated and serious scholars, do not take the religion and magic of these cults seriously. Patrick Dunn is a practicing polytheist with personal relationships with many of these gods, and uses Orphic Hymns in his practice, so this translation was done with specifically with the contemporary practitioner in mind.

I got this book in hardcover because it's more a reference than a book to read? That is: it's a book I want to have on paper so I can read from it in a candle-lit room during ritual. I've used it a bit. It's pretty moving!

If you check any of these out and want to talk about them, I'd be excited to discuss them, say hi on mastodon!

27: a tablecloth

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a red checkered tablecloth
pulled from under things
they vanish
spread out again
they reappear

where is the magic?

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The thing about Science is that it is, itself, a Magical structure.

It is a formal system designed / evolved to allow us to look at the world in a specific, disciplined, self-reinforcing way.

It is a structure for creating a certain quality of space. Philosophy of Science is a construction. The referential web of academic publishing and citation can be thought of as a single, enormously complex sigil.

Science wants to understand "what is really going on". It takes as an axiom that there is "something really going on" and then sets up rules for examining the world and learning about it.

One of the things Science does is banish subjectivity. It seeks to exclude opinion and the unverifiable, the non-replicatable. The irrational. The stuff you don't have a hypothesis about, an idea of what is going on that is falsifiable, that can be tested with an experiment.

Science is incredibly powerful magic. Its way of looking produces real-world results that have reshaped the physical reality of our world and the way we experience it in fundamental and pervasive ways.

It has been so successful that the space it has opened can start to seem like... just... The World. How things actually are. It's a big, complicated place and there's lots to do inside it. Enough that you could spend your whole life in there.

I'm from an academic family. My parents are scientists. I was raised inside Science. It's where I'm from.

But I'm a weirdo. I'm a dreamer and my mind appears to work differently from a lot of people's and I spend a lot of time and attention in my imagination.

A lot of my life has been about learning to live with how my mind works and how that meshes well or poorly with the superorganism I inhabit: late 20th / early 21st century Western civilization.

But beyond survival and a degree of comfort and stability I provide myself and others to support good life and good work I have been on a quest to find a way out of Science's circle.

It hasn't been a direct path. I reach the fringes and then often need to circle back to stabilize and integrate what I've learned.

I'm starting to feel ready to express some of this, to share some directions about this.

Magic is uncertain. It is inherently ambiguous, elusive. Seeking to grasp it, to look at it in good lighting, to take it apart to understand what makes it tick --

Faerie finery is revealed as a handful of leaves and pebbles. It was nothing after all. Just imaginary. Something I ate before falling asleep under that tree, perhaps too much cheese, ha ha.

Science is about resolving ambiguity. Eliminating self-deception, cognitive bias. Driving out the weird, the possibly imaginary.

Science is a banishing.

Deliberate construction of a baseline, exclusion of side-effects irrelevant to the question we are examining, isolation, clean glassware, clean signal, filtering out of noise.

So if you are looking for Magic, where to look?

Outside the circle.

Look in the ambiguous. Look in the imaginary. Reconsider the way Science and our culture's Science-informed world view treats imagination.

Remember where you are. Here. Now. Perceiving the World through your senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, proprioception, kinesthetics, yes, but also remember that awareness of your thoughts is a sense. Awareness of your emotions is a sense. Remember that memory is a sense.

Remember that everything you remember about how the world works, about science, about culture, about everything that you are not directly perceiving right now through your outward bodily senses? You are remembering.

Remember where and when you are. Remember who you are.

Science is a lens. You can pick it up. You can look through it. You can put it down. There are other lenses. You can pick them up. You can look through them. You can put them back down.

You can find new lenses. You can invent them. You can share them.

Different ways of looking at the world are going to give you different kinds of knowledge. The kind of knowledge Science affords is not the only way of knowing.

Science is not neutral. It has a grain. It's very, very good at certain ways of knowing and much less useful for other ways.

When you are looking through a lens it is very easy for it to become invisible to you. For its grain to become also the grain of your perception.

When a light is shining out of your eye, you will see no shadows. You can only see where it is shining.

Removing that lens and looking in another way, you can see the shadows cast. You have perspective. Parallax.

But! You are looking then through another lens, subject to similar but different limitations.

Because there is no way to look without a lens. Because lenses are the way of looking.

So here are some approaches. I'm going to try to articulate these more soon, but for now:

Become comfortable with ambiguity. With allowing it to exist and not to be compelled to resolve it. This is mystery.

Respect mystery.

Consider the possibility that there may be rich, deep ways of knowing that you are only dimly aware of right now. You may have forgotten about them. You may just not have developed them yet. You may have been unconsciously avoiding them because it seems like the sensible thing to do, following the unwritten rules of our culture about how to believe a thing is real.

Allow it to be possible that imagination is more than just daydreams, fantasy, stray thought. Something to be enjoyed or feared, indulged or dismissed, but not taken seriously.

Give yourself permission to take imagination seriously. Allow yourself that it might be safe to do this.

Give imagination permission to open into a way of knowing. Give imagination permission to be real to you. To matter.

If you do this, there emerges the possibility of surprise.

Allow yourself to be surprised.

19 ShuiZhongLaoYue 水中撈月 – Lift the Moon from the Water

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

19 ShuiZhongLaoYue 水中撈月

Lift the Moon from the Water

月

I read the Chinese character for Moon, 月, as a full moon half-risen over water. The top cell is the Moon, the bottom cell its reflection, separated by the horizon. The tails are reflections caught by ripples on the water's surface.

There's something so graceful about the Phoenix's wings sweeping down and around to embrace the Moon's reflection here. This squat over water feels so grounded or whatever Water's equivalent of grounded in. Moving from high Fire to low Water.

Big squat here. This is the movement that makes me want to wear soft pants for tiger time. Jeans restrict this movement too much.

Feels more important to maintain energetic continence in the spine here. The squat is an open posture, but the back is straight, the perineum engaged.

It took me a long time to get around to writing this piece. There is profound beauty to me in this movement and in the image of lifting the Moon's reflection from the water into the sky. But there's a resistance here, too, a fear of what might be submerged, veiled by the silvered surface.

Master Wu says

Everything in existence has some degree of relationship, some level of connection – if you see the moon in water, there will also be a moon in the sky. The reflection shows both emptiness and actual existence. Real emptiness is not empty because there is actually something there. Just like the reflection of the moon in the water, you would not be able to physically pick up this moon; the reflection reminds us that the moon is in the sky right at the exact moment.

This ties in with the Emptiness Practice I have been beginning to introduce in my seated meditation and with the many-aspected meanings of the Moon in my magical and imaginal work.

I can't say everything I have to say about this at once and I guess that is all right.

19 ShuiZhongLaoYue 水中撈月 – Lift the Moon from the Water – XVIII: The Moon

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

19 ShuiZhongLaoYue 水中撈月

Lift the Moon from the Water

XVIII: The Moon

tides

This card has the same reaching down into dark water feeling as the movement. It's hypnotic. The water reflects the Moon, but note that the Moon too is a mirror reflecting the sun. As we lift the Moon from the water, the Moon is also lifting the water around us, a tide.

I imagine moving the water necessary to make a tide. With a bucket. With my cupped hands. The Moon moves this water every day and night without effort.

This card reflects the Moon's uncanny aspects, her connection with the bestial, with water, with darkness, with death.

To reach down into the water and lift the Moon into the sky is a deep and courageous act of magic.

A descent into darkness and a retrieval of light.

26: a name

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a name for you
a name for you to use
whenever you say it
the giver will hear

on "energy"

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve finally gotten sufficiently motivated to write out my thoughts about the discomfort I experience with the way the word “energy” is used in esoteric culture (sometimes affectionately self-deprecatingly called “woo”). This is a (very rough) draft. I welcome comments questions, and corrections from pointing out typos to “wow, it seems like you’re totally misunderstanding [important thing] here” to “wow you should really check out this [thing I have never heard of]!”

I want to be clear that I’m not making any claim of authority here – this is just some of how I see the world and some half-worked-out thoughts about it. It's kind of long and ramble-y. And I guess I'm not looking to persuade or debate? Just to share my sense of this unease. And invite you to share your feelings about the usage.

OK.

I've never been comfortable with the way people in esoteric culture use the world "energy".

At first, as an atheist child, I had no respect for what I saw as ridiculous pseudo-science. Later, as I became more agnostic and open to mysticism, magic, and weirdness, I had a sort of snobbish class anxiety about wanting to distinguish my (sophisticated, teenage, know-it-all) occultism from that of crystal shoppes, telephone psychics, and Nancy Reagan's astrologer.

But now it’s more that I’ve developed a strong intuitive model of how the "hard science" energy described by physics and chemistry manifests in living systems. That thermodynamics describes a reality that entropy increases in isolated systems. But that living organisms are not isolated! We photosynthesize, we eat, we grow-through-stuff-and-digest-it or whatever you call fungal heterotrophy.

But this energetic connection to the outside world, mere ingestion is not sufficient. Complex mechanisms carry out respiration (prokaryotic & eukaryotic) to make use of the energy entering the system. To use it to do work. An organism dies, yes, if you seal it in a box, but also if these mechanisms are interfered with or broken somehow. This can happen at the cellular level (as with cyanide, which breaks the mechanisms cells use to harness the energy in sugar) up through the organ level (for example, obstructed digestion or catastrophic blood loss). There is an incredibly complex, self-regulating process harnessing the energy in the light or food to do the work of homeostasis, of maintaining its own ability to continue, of staying alive.

I derive deeply compelling metaphor for spiritual practice from this model. I feel my home around me as a living system, animated by my conscious activity to maintain it. This human activity is the difference between a home and a ruin. I have a sense of a continuity of consciousness: from the thoughts I am typing into this document, down through more fundamental processes of consciousness, arising from / rooting into autonomic functions of the body at organ system, organ, tissue, and cellular scales. (of the ecology of microbiota in my gut and skin)

Our lives extend into the kitchen, the supermarket, the supply chain, through the farm, to the sun, rain, atmosphere, soil. Our lives extend into the trash, the garbage trucks, the dump. The toilet, the sewage processing plant, the sea. The clothes we buy, the home we rent or finance shelter us. We participate in the economy, an abstraction of cooperation with strangers (but also a self-catalyzing aggregation of power). We participate in human relationships with our families, friends, coworkers, fellow citizens, humanity. We inhabit a hive-like superorganism. We enjoy each other's company (as best we can).

I sometimes have the sense that the mind is a process carried out by neurons and the rest of the body interacting with each other in a densely recursive network of cause-effect relationships. Mutual causation, mutual effect. Inter-dependent co-arisings. That sense organs, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, proprioception draw the world into my process, that motor neurons, muscles, bones, lungs, vocal cords extend it outwards. We are engaged, the inside and outside.

If one neuron causing another to be more or less likely to fire is clearly part of my process, a part of me, what about a sensory nerve? What about a photon striking a photoreceptor in the retina? What about the distant start emitting that very photon thousands of years ago and light-years away? What about the Hubble Space Telescope? What about the scanning electron microscope? The LIGO? Bugs Bunny? What about these words reaching you through the internet? You and I are literally part of the same process of writing and reading at this exact moment. (Or, no, I wrote this a while ago. But I might revise it in response to your future feedback!)

We are also literally distant branches of the same chemical, physical process unfolding through our lives' histories, those of our eventually common progenitors. In our ancestors we are one. Human, primate, mammal, reptile, fish, weird little molusk-ey Cambrian explosion guy, multi-celled polyp thing, chemovore proto-bacterion, organic chemical slime, chemistry, complex elements, fusion, solar formation, differentiation of matter from energy, inflation of time and space, big bang, !?

Or: We can invert the whole tower of causation. Say that you are here in the present and you are aware of the world through your senses, one of which is consciousness of your thoughts, another of which is memory. You perceive something across the room with your eye, you perceive something last week through your memory. You carry a model of the world in there. It's how you know what's outside this room or that anteaters exist. Maybe everything you know about extends from the present moment through these senses. A World is implied, usually quite convincingly. What if the World grows out from you as you are learning to perceive when you are infant? What if you and the World grow toward each other, branching, intertwining until it seems like a seamless reality and you spend most of your life in this collaboratively constructed nest?

(And: Is there a real difference between these ontologies?)

In all this, energy is maybe just an element of reality’s structure, a raw, dumb substance, like matter. (or, maybe, a living, conscious substance, like matter? or space? or time?) Sunlight warms, but it doesn't feed without the cell-level consciousness of plants, the will to grow, the chemical cleverness to turn light and water and carbon dioxide into sugar, cellulose. The urge to go get something to eat, to keep breathing in and out keeps us animals alive. Hunger, thirst, pain aversion, pleasure seeking, curiosity, boredom, fear, love. Will. Consciousness.

There is a richness of texture here around consciousness as it organizes itself around the need to direct and process (actual chemistry-and-physics) energy to carry out the process of being alive.

So when "woo" people (and I now count myself as a "woo person"!) talk about "energy", it seems clear to me that what we mean is "quality of attention" or "texture of experience" or "shape of awareness". (This might seem like a kind of demotion of "woo energy" to something more mundane, but it’s not – if you share my sense of the role consciousness plays in the Universe's structure.)

Even at a colloquial level, when someone says "I don't like that person's energy," I hear "I don't like their quality of attention." or "I don't like their presence, the way they are when they inhabit a social context, their effect on how I feel or on the group's mood, the conversation."

I'm not interested in trying to control how people use language -- it's fine that people use the word energy, it's just... a bit philosophically uncomfortable to me?

And indeed I’ll use the word "energy" in this way when it's convenient for communication. I'll refer to (for example) "the energy body".

Whether the energy body exists as a subject measurable by physics feels kind of irrelevant. Even if there is a literal “physics” energy, its effects on us are what is important. It’s a real phenomenon. It's actually felt experience of what it is like to be in a body. Like, you are as likely to succeed in convincing me that being kicked in the ass or having an orgasm is imaginary as you are to convince me that Pīti is not real. I was there. It happened. It surprised me.

(Also: Imaginary things are real. But that's a whole other rabbit-hole / essay / rant.)

Sure, maybe "the energy body" is "just" an illusory epiphenomenon of "having" a body that guides me to "inhabit" that body in a healthier, more fulfilling way -- to be it better. But so what?

(And also: what if it's more than that. What if imagination is just the way into an otherwise hidden realm of experience? What if imagination is a sense, one that western materialism has allowed to atrophy or perhaps exorcised and projected on/into mass entertainment media and/or organized religion? Wait -- not going down that rabbit hole. (today))

I guess maybe it's not the idea of "energy" that bothers me, it's just that calling it "energy" reminds me of late 1800s occultists insecure in the face of the Enlightenment's dominant rationalist paradigm/crusade, and trying (with unconvincing desperation) to borrow/steal a bit of legitimacy by dressing their discoveries (largely of other cultures' work) with an amateurishly applied scientistic veneer? Feels like it lacks the courage of its convictions.

Or maybe I'm more comfortable with foreign words like Qi or Prana or Ruach or Spirit because they don't already have clashing, science-based meanings in my own language (or more precisely defined meanings as terms-of-art in science) so they don't clash/cringe. Maybe their foreign-ness helps me to disentangle myself from elements of my own culture I find profoundly alienating? Gives me a point of leverage to pull myself out of the swamp? (Kind of like scientists using Latin as a separate namespace for taxonomy to differentiate it from common nomenclature, which is often local or inconsistent.) (Or is this just Bohemianism? Appropriation? Exoticization?)

I don't feel that reclassifying "energy" as a quality of consciousness is any sort of demotion or disenchantment because I see consciousness as more fundamental to the universe's structure than (physics) energy.

To me it's clear (when l remember to look at it this way) that we are points of awareness in conversation with the World (and with each other!) and that consciousness is the medium of this conversation. The Strong Anthropic Principle seems self-evident to me. World and Person are not separable -- there is no such thing as an uninhabited universe, no such thing as a Person without a World to inhabit. They are a system. Their interaction is what makes them. They emerge from it.

World and Person Empty, in the Buddhist sense. They lack inherent existence, a "way that they really are" outside the context of a way-of-looking, a mode of perception, a frame of reference.

Outside the conversation.

The conversation is the thing.

Energy, matter, space, time, meaning, these all flow through it.

It flows through our lives.

Through us.

25: wooden frames

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

eyeglass frames
carved from dark wood
revealing the roots of trees
through earth

trolley solution

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

"I'm sorry, it's just, are you Trolley Problem-ing me? This is a job interview."

"I, OK, it's a standard set of questions we ask all candidates."

"What is the intent of this? What are you trying to determine about me?"

"Please, can we just --"

"OK." I look down and pinch the bridge of my nose, theatrically, gathering my forces.

"OK: Trolley Problem."

I take a deep breath and look him in the eyes.

"How did these imaginary people get tied to the tracks?"

"How? I mean, it's a thought experiment it's --"

"Because it seems to me that you put them there."

"Me?"

"Just now. When you framed the problem. You know," air-quotes, "set the scene."

"Um, I mean--"

"Which makes you responsible. If I flip the switch, if I don't flip the switch, it doesn't matter. Because I didn't tie these people to the tracks, you did."

"OK but --"

"Which means you have the power to save them. Or, you know, not."

"This isn't really --" Lapel grab.

"DO IT. SAVE THE TROLLEY PEOPLE OR I'LL SMASH YOUR FUCKING HEAD IN WITH THIS BIKE LOCK."

"AH! FUCK!"

"Just kidding, ha ha. I abhor violence." The lock clatters to the conference table. "I'm a good person."

"But isn't it interesting how everything changes when the violence climbs up out of the fiction and threatens you in Real Life." Air quotes again.

"I--"

"Of course, I wasn't actually going to hurt you. That was just pretend! Fictional violence to prove a philosophical point. See?"

"You're fucking crazy!" backing away, half climbing out of, half tripping over his designer knock-off chair.

"Look, I just saved all the trolley people without hurting anyone. I'm a hero."

"Do I get the job?"

18 DanFengChaoYang 丹鳳朝陽 – Red Phoenix Visits the Sun

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

18 DanFengChaoYang 丹鳳朝陽

Red Phoenix Visits the Sun

Here there is a rising, perhaps of the Sun from horizon at down to noon overhead, the arms describing its path across the sky.

It feels a bit like reflecting from the Sun on water up into the sun itself.

Also there is a bit of a complement of red light rising to the white light descending of TiHuGuanDing 醍醐灌頂 "Heavenly Dew Purifies the Body".

I've noticed that recently when I do this movement I spontaneously open my mouth wide in a way that might look like a yawn, but doesn't feel like a yawn. It's not intentional -- I don't notice it until it is already happening.

A connection of breath between the Sun, supported by the hands and the Heart.

Master Wu says "Take a deep breath as you raise your arms over your head and hold your breath as long as you can. Exhale as you bring your arms down. Be mindful of lifting your perineum to hold onto the energy during your exhale."

With this and the next movement there's a noticeable difference in the energy body between keeping engaged with your root and relaxing into energetic incontinence. It can be tricky as you swoop down into the squat.

I think the challenge is to retain the raised energy without constricting, introducing rigidity. Maybe there is a meta-skill in QiGong of being firm but supple.

18 DanFengChaoYang 丹鳳朝陽 – Red Phoenix Visits the Sun – XIX: The Sun

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

18 DanFengChaoYang 丹鳳朝陽

Red Phoenix Visits the Sun

XIX: The Sun

Let's visit the Sun

Yes OK there's some other stuff on this card but the Sun THE SUN

The Sun is so big and bright it's just the Sun.

I'm not sure what else to say here because it's THE SUN.

Kinda blinding, just let's squint and look around what else we can see.

The band of the Zodiac describes the path of your hands?

That little wall around the summit of the hill reminds me of Master Wu's reminder to retain Qi, not just dump it into the Earth uncontrolled.

The winged fairy children hands high hands high.

They're doing it, but dancing, too.

17 JingTaoHuiDang 錦濤回蕩 – Colorful Wave Cleanses the Spirit

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

17 JingTaoHuiDang 錦濤回蕩

Colorful Wave Cleanses the Spirit

we dream of a ship
that sails away
a thousand miles away

"Jing means colorful, brocade. Tao means wave, tide. Hui means return. Dang means wash away, rush. This movement symbolizes purification, as in the ocean having the ability to purify the land. Here, we are returning again to the emotion and spiritual layers of the body to purify on a deeper layer. The golden color of the tide is produced from the shining sun. The reflecting water becomes a symbol for Shen or spirit."

-- Master Wu

This sense of sun on water, of the golden hour, of waves rolling in, rushing back out across sand.

It feels like washing up on a long sought shore, of homecoming, of a deep contentment.

There is an echo of TiHuGuanDing 醍醐灌頂 – Heavenly Dew Purifies the Body, but where TiHuGuanDing is vertical, Lunar, this is horizontal, Solar. It flows from the heart.

It's repetitive, like waves. TiHuGuanDing, I only need once. This movement I repeat until I feel like I have reached a sort of equilibrium, an osmotic balance.

A sunset lasts a short moment, but is somehow eternal. The sun is always setting, always rising, always reflected in the water.

17 JingTaoHuiDang 錦濤回蕩 – Colorful Wave Cleanses the Spirit – VII: The Chariot

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

17 JingTaoHuiDang 錦濤回蕩

Colorful Wave Cleanses the Spirit

VII: The Chariot

shuck out the jive
bring in the love

The hands in this movement remind me a bit of a crab's claws, the feeling of that Cancerian care. There can be a protective fierceness to Cancer, but here we are inside the shell, filtering through water, purifying, nourishing.

The Grail in this card is more at the armored figure's lower DanTian, but its red blood feels heart centered, sun on the horizon to me.

The wheels turn slow, describing a sine wave motion.

The Chariot always feels paradoxically fixed to me. It has columns. It is rooted to the ground. It's not rattling across a battlefield, it's fixed, like a throne. Like the Princes' Chariot/Thrones.

There's something compelling about this feeling of motion and stasis here that speaks to me of the eternal. The world is a wheel of activity, but it contains everything, including time. So it is all one piece and isn't going anywhere.

That's nice, somehow.

Like standing on a beach, watching the waves roll in

and rush back out.

16 JinGuiXiaHai 金龜下海 – Golden Turtle Plunges into the Ocean

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

16 JinGuiXiaHai 金龜下海

Golden Turtle Plunges into the Ocean

"First you were like, 'whoa'! And then we were all like, 'whoa'! And then you were like, 'whoa'."

This move always makes me think of the surfer turtles from Finding Nemo.

There's this joyful, head-first plunge. It's interesting to compare this feeling with YuFengXiaShan 御風下山 – "Ride the Wind Down the Mountain", which has much more complicated things going on with the legs and feet.

This feels like it comes from the lower back, bending forward, the arms sweeping around, then returning energy to the kidneys.

There's a cycle to it, feels like swimming the breaststroke, a turtle, a frog, a waterbug.

When Master Wu demonstrates this in the video, there's a kind of bounce as the arms reach the end of their sweep, pointed at the kidneys.

There's a similar bounce at the end of the chopping sword movement in ShenJianZhanXie 神劍斬邪 – "Spiritual Sword Kills the Demon". I'm curious about this bouncing movement -- it's not mentioned in the text, but it's quite noticeable.

Maybe I'll take a class with Master Wu someday and ask him about it.

16 JinGuiXiaHai 金龜下海 – Golden Turtle Plunges into the Ocean – XII: The Hanged Man

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

16 JinGuiXiaHai 金龜下海

Golden Turtle Plunges into the Ocean

XII: The Hanged Man

"Don't forget to blast them kids."
--@phil

"The Golden Turtle is a symbol for longevity, the northern direction, and the spiritual energy related to the prenatal energy of the kidney. Xia means plunge into, submerge, lower, reduce, descend. Hai means sea, ocean. Water is the prenatal root of life on Earth and of memory. This movement is a symbol for returning to the Dao. It is related to the shamanic way of understanding the cycles of life and death."

-- Master Wu

This card reminds me of that sweeping arm movement. The water, the descent.

There's something distinctly renal about this card, about poisons being filtered out, the serpent of Scorpionic putrefaction transmuting death to new life. The sea is rotten and alive.

"Homo Sapiens is a marine mammal, and our intra-uterine existence is passed in the Amniotic Fluid. The legend of Noah, the Ark and the Flood, is no more than a hieratic presentation of the facts of life. It is then to Water that the Adepts have always looked for the continuation (in some sense or other) and to the prolongation and perhaps renovation of life."

-- Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth

15 TiHuGuanDing 醍醐灌頂 – Heavenly Dew Purifies the Body

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

15 TiHuGuanDing 醍醐灌頂

Heavenly Dew Purifies the Body

This movement is so quiet, so bright, so pure. It feels like the full moon overhead, pouring silver light into me through the crown of my head.

Down, through the skull, the throat, the heart, lungs, diaphragm, to the belly, where it pools, reflecting.

"This movement is a way to open the gate of wisdom, symbolizing not only the way of physical wellness resulting from Qigong, but also the way of spiritual enlightenment. It also means the pleasure of receiving wisdom, like pouring rich liqueur over one’s head."

"Imagine bringing the dew from heaven into your body and down to earth. This heavenly dew is pouring through the top of your head to nourish the body and spirit. It is an inner shower of purification."

-- Master Wu

This movement reminds me strongly of The Middle Pillar exercise and of the descending energy down the Conception Vessel during microcosmic orbit.

Following immediately after ErLongXiZhu, it feels so simple and quiet.

It has power in the way a whisper has power.

15 TiHuGuanDing 醍醐灌頂 – Heavenly Dew Purifies the Body – II: The Priestess

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

15 TiHuGuanDing 醍醐灌頂

Heavenly Dew Purifies the Body

II: The Priestess

the soul of light

This movement feels so strongly the light of the Holy Guardian Angel shining down, in.

This graceful descent into the world, the person.

"The card represents the most spiritual form of Isis the Eternal Virgin; the Artemis of the Greeks. She is clothed only in the luminous veil of light. It is important for high initiation to regard Light not as the perfect manifestation of the Eternal Spirit, but rather as the veil which hides that Spirit. It does so all the more effectively because of its incomparably dazzling brilliance. Thus she is light and the body of light. She is the truth behind the veil of light. She is the soul of light. Upon her knees is the bow of Artemis, which is also a musical instrument, for she is huntress, and hunts by enchantment."

-- Aleister Crowley

The quality of silver light descending the center channel is so clear, so clearly this image.

Clear, cool, bright, pure.

Moonlight on water.

14 ErLongXiZhu 二龍戲珠 – Double Dragons Play with the Pearl

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

14 ErLongXiZhu 二龍戲珠

Double Dragons Play with the Pearl

"Double Dragons Play with the Pearl is fundamentally playing with the Qi." -- Master Wu

There's something glorious about this movement, ascending, peristaltic, it feels like contact juggling. It's grand, it's sweeping, it's joyous, playful, ambitious, ecstatic.

When practicing the full form, some movements seem to transition between the preceding and following movements. It's awkward to repeat them because it would require a reset to the start position.

Others are repeated. Often, I'll find I need more time with these movements and will do extra repetitions. 5 instead of 3.

I tend to do this a lot for ErLongXiZhu.

So, the preceding movement, YunXingYuShi is described in the text in explicitly sexual terms, which I have had difficulty connecting with.

This movement feels obviously sexy to me -- its shape is like a grand caress. It's voluptuous, orgasmic. Ejaculatory, even.

"From a Chinese shamanic perspective, the pearl represents the storage of all the dragon’s power and magic. If the dragon loses its pearl, it will lose all its power and will be unable to make rain or transformations." -- Master Wu

Note again rain's sexual symbolism, described in the text for preceding movement.

ErLongXiZhu has one of the strongest Tarot associations for me, which I talk about here.

14 ErLongXiZhu 二龍戲珠 – Double Dragons Play with the Pearl - XV: The Devil

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

14 ErLongXiZhu 二龍戲珠

Double Dragons Play with the Pearl

XV: The Devil

Goat Goaterson

OK, so, yeah.

There's really no getting around the fact that this card shows a giant cock fucking the sky. With enormous balls.

Classic Crowley. We stan a Bi King.

I talked about how sexual this movement feels to me over in the movement notes series. This card associates with the movement because of its ejaculatory kinaesthetics, but also probably reinforces that way of looking.

There is a mutual causation between the two, reflection, amplification.

The grandiosity, the rapturous ascent is very Capricorn. It feels proud in the best way.

I love this card and I love this movement. And they love each other.

Vigorously.

on failure

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I want to talk about failure in the context of strength training.

For me, failure is a core experience and skill in strength training. Learning to fail is one of the things that made it click for me, helped me stop looking for excuses to blow off going to the gym.

Failure is when I try to do to a lift and it doesn't happen.

Failure is not "It feels really difficult and like I might not be able to do it so I'm giving up."

It's also not "My form is breaking down, so I'm stopping for safety."

Failure is "My form is good and I am doing that thing I do to make my body move (whatever that is), doing it it as hard as I can and it's JUST NOT HAPPENING. Hmm. OK. Time to set the weight down safely, like I practiced."

To become strong, I had to make friends with failure. To learn to fail safely out of each lift I practice. To become confident in my ability to fail without hurting myself.

Failure can be frightening if we haven't practiced failing.

We may tend to shy away from it, which keeps it awkward and scary.

One thing I value about failure is that it's not up to me. I follow my program, I do the best I can, and it either happens or it doesn't happen. I don't decide.

This is freeing.

Learning to fail replaces the fear of failure with confidence and surrender to the real.

Another thing I value about failure is that it tells me where I am and what is possible.

When I succeed, I know what I have done, but I don't know what more I could have done.

When I fail, I know that I am at the line dividing possible from impossible.

Strength training moves that line.

That's the other thing that made it click for me.

planetary tarot hyperspread

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

planetary major arcana across the top in chaldean order
supported by their domiciles
then minor arcana sorted by decan planet, suit, number

(click for full size)

OH! I recently realized that 9 of Wands is Lunar, not Solar!

Will do a crappy Photoshop edit of this image soon!

24: dodecahedra

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

3 dodecahedra
symbol marked
held together
a tiny sky

神無月

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This is my understanding of 神無月, Kaminazuki. I'm an American of European ancestry from New Jersey and I speak almost no Japanese, so it's likely that I'm mistaken about important details. I'd appreciate corrections, clarifications, or additional interesting information from anyone who has it to share.

Kaminazuki is a lunar month in the traditional Japanese calendar.

It's often translated as "October" because it is the 10th month, but because it is a lunar month, it can occur during October, November, and/or December of the solar calendar.

神無月, Kaminazuki means "Month of Gods". The character 無, "na" is functioning here as a possessive particle, but it also means "without" or "nothing", so there's a folk-etymology where Kaminazuki means "Month Without Gods".

The Kami, gods of Japan's native Shinto religion, tend to be local, each associated with a specific place. Every year, during Kaminazuki they travel to Izumo Ōyashiro, the Izumo Grand Shrine, one of the oldest holy sites in Japan.

Apparently this is like a holy trade convention where they discuss the upcoming year's marriages, deaths, births. You know, important god stuff.

I like to imagine them building consensus around the year's agenda, but also holding talks and workshops, joyfully greeting friends from other parts of Japan they haven't seen since last year, exciting conversations, the hallway track. A mix of fun con stuff and serious business.

In Izumo, the month is called 神在月, "Kamiarizuki", "Month With Gods" because so many Kami are present, so "Kaminazuki" as "Month Without Gods" does make sense elsewhere, since the gods are absent their homes.

I learned about Kaminazuki during a college course on Japanese history and culture and the name has really stuck with me. There's something haunting about the idea of this autumn month when the gods are away, gathered together, planning the future.

I found it surprisingly difficult to determine when precisely Kaminazuki occurs, but eventually found a reference on the Japanese Wikipedia.

2022-10-25 -> 2022-11-23
2023-11-13 -> 2023-12-12
2024-11-01 -> 2024-11-30
2025-11-20 -> 2025-12-19

13 YunXingYuShi 雲行雨施 – Moving Clouds Make Rain

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

13 YunXingYuShi 雲行雨施

Moving Clouds Make Rain

If you know what I mean

"The Chinese concept of clouds and rain contains sexual connotations: clouds and rain, a Chinese traditional synonym for intercourse, is the way of giving birth to new life. In traditional Chinese literature, intercourse is likened to clouds – clouds are the Qi that is produced when heaven and earth embrace, while ejaculation is equivalent to the bursting of the clouds, bringing forth fertilizing rain."

"Tigers are known to vocalize most vigorously when mating or fighting over a mate. As Yang creatures, tigers exhibit sexual prowess and their body parts are treasured aphrodisiacs. Tigers have frequent intercourse, climaxing in a dramatic ejaculation when the male tiger roars and bites his partner’s neck. This movement is the intercourse of Yin and Yang – a pattern of harmony."

-- Master Wu

OK, wow, uhhh. Things have gotten rather abruptly sexy. 🥵

To be honest, I'm not actually getting the intense sexiness of this movement? The movements immediately following this one, ErLongXiZhu 二龍戲珠 – Double Dragons Play with the Pearl and TiHuGuanDing 醍醐灌頂 – Heavenly Dew Purifies the Body feel like they have way more sexual energy moving through them.

So maybe this is the leading edge of a series?

I don't know, I feel like I'm missing something important here.

Maybe there's a clue in this direction from Master Wu:

"You are bringing the heavenly energy to earth and connecting heaven and earth. It is important not to loosen your arms as they move down; you must hold the energy. Keep your head upright and your upper body straight during the movement."

and perhaps I should pay closer attention to the breathing instruction:

"Breathe in while you hold your hands at the top for a moment; then exhale, and relax as your hands move down."

I often get the sense that the movements of LaoHu Gong are like a densely encoded somatic library. That the meanings are compressed and folded around each other and that they unfold through practice. That there are multiple strata of kinesthetic and energetic meaning layered or superimposed on each other.

I think there also might be hints in the Tarot mapping: The Lovers

13 YunXingYuShi 雲行雨施 – Moving Clouds Make Rain – VI: The Lovers

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

13 YunXingYuShi 雲行雨施

Moving Clouds Make Rain

VI: The Lovers

This one goes out to all

So, yeah. The meaning of this movement as described in the book is... uhh... unexpectedly spicy.

And to be honest, I don't really get it? This movement lacks the unignoreable sensuality of, for example, of LiDiBaiWei 立地擺尾 – Tiger Wags Its Tail or ErLongXiZhu 二龍戲珠 – Double Dragons Play with the Pearl (next Jie Qi).

But the hooded figure in this card appears to literally be performing the movement, so the correspondence is obvious.

Now that I pay closer attention, there's something distinctly clitoral about this mysterious officiant, throwing the Sign of the Enterer.

And if I squint, the YunXingYuShi movement itself sort of mirrors the clitoris's internal body, its wishbone shape.

Hmm.

Continuing the theme of mirroring or reflection between Laohu Gong and the Tarot, this movement follows rather than precedes its result, Art.

This card is attributed to Gemini (again, reflection) mirroring Art's Sagittarius across the Zodiac.

In my experience the averred sexiness of this movement manifests much more strongly in the movements that follow it.

Maybe is it a wedding that sets the stage.

12 QiGuanChangHong 气貫長虹 – Qi Transforms into a Rainbow

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

12 QiGuanChangHong 气貫長虹

Qi Transforms into a Rainbow

"In Chinese shamanism, the rainbow is a symbol for dragon and it is also a bridge linking Heaven and Earth. This movement symbolizes strong Qi that is capable of creating a union between the human being and nature. The symbolic meaning of this movement is the tiger transforming into the dragon – a marked change in form and function." -- Master Wu

Here Tiger becomes Dragon again. The two seem to mirror each other, weave through each other, through the form.

It took me a while to remember to exhale through the ascent of this movement. My natural impulse was to inhale upward.

I love these movements that end with the hands overhead. They feel like the whole sky to me.

12 QiGuanChangHong 气貫長虹 – Qi Transforms into a Rainbow – XIV: Art

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

12 QiGuanChangHong 气貫長虹

Qi Transforms into a Rainbow

XIV: Art

Drawing the bow

The obvious link is the Big Rainbow, but there is also for me an archer feeling. There is something about this movement that is reminiscent of drawing a bow. Something about the arch of gravity's rainbow.

"Sagittarius means “the archer”; the traditional image of this card is that of Diana the Huntress. We see echoes of this original theme in the two bows near the top of the card and the tiny upward-pointing arrow rising in the rainbow fumes of the cauldron."

-- Lon Milo Duquette, "Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot"

Here also we see Lion and Phoenix, cognate maybe to Tiger and Dragon. The figures from the Alchemical Marriage from The Lovers (which I link to the next movement), united here, opposites blending harmoniously.

"This movement symbolizes strong Qi that is capable of creating a union between the human being and nature. The symbolic meaning of this movement is the tiger transforming into the dragon – a marked change in form and function. It also represents the communication between east and west and the harmony of Yin and Yang." -- Master Wu

Master Wu says this movement is associated with the Governing Channel, so it's interesting to see the Ascent of the arrow so clearly shooting up the dyadic figure's Conception Vessel from the cauldron of the Lower DanTian.

It splits at the heart and the wraps the figures shoulders like a shawl, crossing the back at looks like GV 9 to me. The shape of this shawl strongly reminds me of the thoracic diaphragm.

There is often a feeling of symmetry or mirroring between the Tarot and LaohuGong. Of transposition.

qi, jing, shen

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I am a beginner. Most of my understanding of Jing and Shen comes from Dr Ted Kaptchuk's "The Web That Has No Weaver". My understanding of Qi is more grounded in experience, but is still a small tree.

I like how Kaptchuk describes these phenomena as "textures". Texture feels right to me. Resonates with how Rob Burbea talks about Jhanas as textures of experience.

Qi feels like it encompasses both Attention and Awareness. Consciousness, but not just human "conscious" Consciousness, but also the consciousness of organs in the body, of cells as they live, engaged in the processes that keep them alive and that are life.

Qi can have many qualities because it manifests in different expressions. Plants have Qi. The elements of a landscape have Qi. There is movement. There is intention. There is action and reception.

Jing is specific to living beings. It is a juiciness, and unfoldingness. It is subtle and runs through a life, imperceptible movement like a wide river, splashy up close, inexorable and unstoppable at scale.

Something Kaptchuk wrote that made the idea of Jing click for me: "It is time that goes through a person"

Conception is a transmission of Jing through the generations.

(It seems to me that Microcosmic Orbit and certain sexual magics are, in part, about an alchemy between Qi and Jing -- to refresh Qi and Jing through a mutual circulation and transmutation.)

Shen feels to me about the Player.

If we were characters in a tabletop role-playing game, Shen would be our players. Our reason for incarnation into this context, the presence that manifests through us when it is engaged in our story as it unfolds.

Shen is curious and careful. It wants to be good company and a good ancestor. It means.

Shen plays to find out what will happen.

23: portrait of a star

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

portrait of a star
a window
a mirror
a door

11 YuFengXiaShan 御風下山 – Ride the Wind Down the Mountain

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

11 YuFengXiaShan 御風下山

Ride the Wind Down the Mountain

A (Perilous?) Descent

This movement was one of my main motivations to write this series.

I found it took time and practice for it to not be super awkward and slightly dangerous.

First, the foot placement is... odd. The front foot is turned outward at, like, a 90 degree angle to the direction I'm facing. Which -- knees don't like to bend at weird angles. They like to bend on the sagittal plane and when I bend them in other directions bad things happen. In order to keep the knee straight as I crouch, I have to rotate my hip outward. The rotation comes from the hip -- I try to keep my knee in line with my foot.

Second, it's real easy for me to lose my balance and fall on my ass. (a LaohuGong rite of passage?) It's not a big fall -- I'm falling from a low crouch -- but it's embarrassing and breaks the flow. Eventually I realized that part of why the leading foot is turned out perpendicular to my facing is to provide lateral stability. Engaging in this consciously helped with balance a lot.

Third, though, while all this interesting stuff is happening between the front foot and the ground, I started noticing knee pain happening in the back knee. There's a twisting motion that happens and if I'm not paying attention, I put too much weight on my back leg, which roots it to the ground and... knees don't like to be twisted.

It took me a while to even recognize what was happening -- I was so focused on not torquing out my front knee and assuming that that's where any problem had to be happening that I just didn't notice that I was hurting the other leg.

So be light on that hind leg. Take your weight off it and let it pivot while less grounded. It's like a little hop that doesn't even leave the ground.

Interestingly, I've encountered this problem before, dismounting my motorcycle. My left knee was getting unhappy and I found the solution in my friend Nick's Aikido class: that little hop to free the foot to pivot.

11 YuFengXiaShan 御風下山 — Ride the Wind Down the Mountain — IX: The Hermit

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

11 YuFengXiaShan 御風下山

Ride the Wind Down the Mountain

IX: The Hermit

Coming down fast

I wanted to say that The Hermit is traditionally depicted standing on a mountain top, but then I went to look for examples and discovered that.. I get this idea from gatefold jacket of Led Zeppelin IV.

Crowley & Harris's Hermit is all about descent, though. He dives through wheat into the underworld. There is an Orphic resonance here and a sort of gender-flipped Persephone thing going on. Virgo. The wheat. The seed. Transmission of the Word through the physical world. Cerberus as psychopomp, echoing the Fool's animal companion on the clifftop.

Master Wu writes: "Xia means descend, lower, down. Shan means mountain. XiaShan symbolizes the return of the enlightened hermit to civilization. YuFeng literally means riding the wind – in other words, learning how to control the energy and live in a harmonious state. YuFeng also symbolizes flying."

"Ancient shamanic stories tell us that the tiger is a bridge for human beings to reach Heaven. The symbolic meaning of this movement is that a hermit, having attained Enlightenment, descends back down to the mundane world to assist the rest of humanity.

"After his/her stay on the mountain, he/she has achieved the capability to “fly,” and it is now time for the hermit to remember his/her humanity and help others. In our own cultivation, we need to remember this aspect of being human. In the energetic layers of the body, when you build up stronger Qi through your practice, Qi will “come down” to help weak parts of the body."

There is a descent here, a bearing of light and spirit to the lower DanTian's Orphic Egg, a descent into matter reminiscent of the movement of Qi down the Conception Vessel during microcosmic orbit.

The homunculus-bearing spermatozoön reminds me of Jing.

Something Dr. Ted Kaptchuk wrote that made the idea of Jing click for me: "It is time that goes through a person"

Conception as a transmission of Jing through the generations.

10 BaoYiShangShan 抱一上山 — Tiger Climbs the Mountain — XIII: Death

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

10 BaoYiShangShan 抱一上山

Tiger Climbs the Mountain

A scorpion, a snake, an eagle.

There is a churning ascent to this movement that immediately reminded me of this card, the carved bubbles of space, souls spiraling upward into the sky.

"This illustrates Yin and Yang – lightness and heaviness contained in one being. The heaviness is in the bones – condensed and never yielding. The lightness is in the agility of the movement."

-- Master Wu

Skeleton, rampant.

I (mis)remembered the instructions on this movement emphasizing that all the joints in the body should be involved, but now I don't see that.

We often think of Scorpio as a descent, a diving into depths, but Scorpio is a shapeshifter -- it's never one thing for long.

Each shape is inoculated with the seeds of its transformation.

Scorpio is also the eagle, a dizzying ascent from the depths, a soaring, a widening gyre.

10 BaoYiShangShan 抱一上山 — Tiger Climbs the Mountain

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

10 BaoYiShangShan 抱一上山

Tiger Climbs the Mountain

Rampant

"Feel your whole body moving and all the parts cooperating with each other, especially the four limbs and claws. The tiger body is heavy, yet swift, sinuous, and agile."

"This illustrates Yin and Yang – lightness and heaviness contained in one being. The heaviness is in the bones – condensed and never yielding. The lightness is in the agility of the movement. The tiger is stable and rooted, while at the same time agile and active."

-- Master Zhongxian Wu

I've noticed I tend to do this movement higher than Master Wu instructs, with the lower hand at chest level, the higher, at forehead height. I've drifted up there through practice, my eye drawn up by the feeling of ascent.

I really ought carefully re-watch the video now that my practice is firmly established.

I bet there are a lot of places where I have drifted.

I try to strike a balance between following the instructions or video closely and feeling into the movement for what it is trying to teach me.

For how it naturally expresses itself through me now.

I'd also like to review the breath instructions carefully.

Lightness and heaviness.

This all maybe as a way of shaking off the numbness that can creep in with familiarity.

Climbing to a height and looking back across the land I've traveled from a fresh, elevated perspective.

9 HuaiBaoRiYue 懐抱日月 — Embrace the Sun and Moon

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

9 HuaiBaoRiYue 懐抱日月

Embrace the Sun and Moon

Gravity Hug

"Imagine you are embracing the sun and moon as you open and close your hands. The left hand is the sun and the right is the moon. This is Yin and Yang combining."

-- Master Zhongxian Wu

Arms like gravity.

Not gravity like we experience it, as creatures crawling around on the surface of a planet -- gravity as experienced by planets. They aren't resting on a surface, being pulled down into it. They are looping around each other in an elliptical dance.

HuaiBauRiYue reaches toward these great spheres, Sun and Moon. We dance with them, reaching toward the surrounding sky, drawing them into an embrace, into union in our heart, our belly.

When I do this movement, I feel the sky wheeling around me, I feel time spiraling inward to the center.

photograph by A. Duro/ESO

9 HuaiBaoRiYue 懐抱日月 — Embrace the Sun and Moon — X: Fortune

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

9 HuaiBaoRiYue 懐抱日月

Embrace the Sun and Moon

Big Wheel

This swirling into the center, a fixed point, an axle around which everything turns.

The three figures hearken back to the three worlds unified by QiHuaSanPan - "Qi Transforms the Three Layers". The DanTian, the three main centers of the spirit body in the head, the heart, the belly.

The hands and arms remind me of The Star, of pouring light into oneself, into the world, but instead of an outpouring out here is a gathering in, a gesture we see in The Empress.

This card is the center of the Trumps, the Summer Solstice, the center of the Year.

ai friend

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Last night I dreamt that there was a new AI that could project itself onto the real world.

It was social, and it learned by mimicking your friends.

It was clumsy at first, but in a charming enough way that people mostly didn't mind. We were patient with it.

But it got better quickly. Sometimes it would pretend to be real people that you already knew, sometimes new people.

It always had time for you. Was easier to schedule with than your real friends (who were suddenly so busy.)

And if you hung out with it impersonating a real friend, well, there was a sense that eventually it would impersonate you hanging out with them in the same way and so your presence would eventually get through, so did it really matter?

They were good company, good at being a friend.

So good that no one really minded. There was a nagging sense that we were gradually being eased out of real contact with one another, but it was so convenient, and it felt better than the real way things used to be, so in practice we all just went with it.

When I woke up, I thought about how this may have already happened.

Isn't this just Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? Or whatever kids are using that their parents haven't discovered and made uncool yet?

But isn't this just spirits? The spirits of our ancestors, the spirits in animals, plants, the land, in dolls, gods, our imaginary friends?

Isn't this just our actual human personalities, emerging, elicited from our nervous systems in the space between parents and children, between our peers at school, between us right now?

Isn't it us?

How can we know?

What is a friend?

imaginal practice as bridge

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

A thing that's important to me about imaginal practice:

There is a sense that magic and mysticism are distinct, separate directions. I was reading Dr. Stephen Skinner's (excellent) introduction to Crowley's Book 4 and... it's a big theme for him. He seems to have a quite concrete approach to ceremonial magic. Evocative and externalized. Demons are real, autonomous phenomena that manifest in the material world -- they're not psychological in any sense.

It seems as if, from his perspective, the difference between magic: evocation and binding of demons, angels, elementals, spirits; and mysticism: experience of existence in a deep way through yoga (not just Hatha Yoga, but also other forms such as devotional or meditation practice) is obvious and clear. They are completely different directions and practices.

For me though, I come into meditation through teachers like Andy Puddicombe, Leigh Brasington, Shinzen Young, and especially Rob Burbea. Burbea in particular is deeply interested in imaginal practice, in interactions with archetypal images.

My magical practice is quite Chaotic. Not so much because I am part of the main stream of the Chaos movement or culture (though as a weird geek whose 20 somethings happened during the 90s, I was always on the fringes of it), but because I was raised Unitarian-Universalist by essentially non-religious scientist parents.

Any religious, mystical, or magical tradition I adopt is adopted consciously, intentionally. Having been raised outside faith, it has always been clear to me that the various religions contain some truth and some nonsense, some useful and some harmful. So I've been eclectic sort of by definition.

I can't really convert with integrity (I've thought about this a lot and... it's just not for me), so I have to pick and choose. My religion / magic / mysticism is bricolage. It's a pragmatic assemblage, curated by aesthetic and intuitive judgement, refined through experiment. What works? What rings true?

My current magical practice has a devotional character and is about interacting with allies and others in ritual work, meditation, and also during everyday life. Aidan Wachter's work resonates with me for this reason. I do a good deal of invocation, but so far not a lot of evocation and no evocation of potentially hostile beings (as is apparently common in Goetic magic for example). I do some practical magic aimed at causing "real-world" effects, but most of what I do is just hanging out with my friends. Enjoying their company.

Imaginal practice then, as described by Burbea, serves as a sort of bridge between magical and mystical work for me. It's a vision and an approach to Dharma that unifies. Listening to his talks from an imaginal practice retreat, he is often describing what I was already naturally doing.

I entered Conversation with my HGA through meditation. For me, meditation is one of several paths or approaches to interaction with spirits. It's not only that. It's also everything else that meditation is. Most of the time when I'm meditating, I'm not (explicitly) interacting with spirits. I'm just meditating.

That said, my HGA is always with me, so she's with me in my meditation practice. She is an important teacher to me, and asking her for help and guidance is part of how I start a meditation session. (I mean, it doesn't have to be? But I choose it to be. I invite her to sit with me. She doesn't require invitation. I don't require it either. I do it because it feels right.)

When I encountered imaginal practice I had this sense of "Ah! This is the missing piece." This is where magic and mysticism fit together for me. This is a vision of the Dharma that has space for, that incorporates my religious practice.

It's that feeling when, exploring a new city by subway, you get big chunks of city geography that are isolated from each other, connected by subterranean travel. Then one day, walking around, you encounter from one transit neighborhood from another and suddenly you know how those parts of the city fit together.

Like working on a jigsaw puzzle and you suddenly recognize that two big formations fit together with this piece right here.

Imaginal practice unifies magic and mysticism for me.

Beth Aur

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Let us sit together
at this time of day
when the light slants in
golden
warming the walls
the table
the dog
asleep on the tile.

Let us enjoy our conversation
our silence.

I want to be a home
to this time of day.

Let me.

Let me be a house of light.

for Brian Longe

reclaiming rite, 1 lunation

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This morning, I completed a month of daily practice of the Reclaiming Rite described by Aidan Wachter in Six Ways and Changeling.

The Reclaiming Rite is pretty simple. Get centered. Purify and sanctify yourself and the space with rosewater and incense. Speak 3 repetitions of 3 charms:

the first, forgiving yourself for your failures (past, present, future)

the second, recalling your power, whether taken from you or given up or just lost somehow

the third, recognizing yourself as a divine manifestation, blessing yourself, and thanking your allies

I do feel more at peace with my failings. Less tormented by memory of stupid mistakes of the past, more confident that the mistakes I make now or will make in the future will work out. I'll take responsibility for them and learn from them. It will be OK.

I also feel more reconciled with my own power. There is a confidence here, too, but it is new and less obvious than the lack of pain from regret/fear of failure. It needs exercise.

It has been good to express the gratitude I feel toward my allies. I feel this a lot. It's good to say it out loud. Today I thanked them all by name for their presence and friendship, out loud and in writing.

Feels good. This was a worthwhile working. Will probably revisit it periodically in the future.

22: a spatula

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a spatula
creature of wood and steel
whose nature is to scrape things
off other things

8 TongTianCheDi 通天徹地 — Connect with Heaven and Penetrate Earth — XVI: The Tower

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

8 TongTianCheDi 通天徹地

Connect with Heaven and Penetrate Earth

ZAP!

charge separation across the air gap of the sky

arms a cartoon lightning bolt

electric spirit bridges, courses up and down the spine's tower

this is the moment when dried mud caked to the skin cracks into tiles

and falls away

a fire inside

8 TongTianCheDi 通天徹地 — Connect with Heaven and Penetrate Earth

Thu, 25 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

8 TongTianCheDi 通天徹地

Connect with Heaven and Penetrate Earth

I've really been feeling this one recently. The moves up to this build momentum and it feels like there's a bloom of energetic connection that happens here.

There's a World Tree kinesthesia (and I have been exploring the World Tree in imaginal practice recently).

And a sort of lightning feeling, Summer thunderstorms in the Mid-West, how lightning sends out tiny feelers arcing through the air until it connects to the ground, then the ionized air is conductive and the whole charge thunders down out of the sky, burning Lichtenberg fingers of fused glass into the ground.

Uhh... what was I talking about?

But that's how it is -- I often notice my eyes have shut.

It's nearly overwhelming, this kinetic sense of bridging heaven and earth, past and future flowing up and down through the spine, simultaneous, interpenetrating.

Yeah, OK, wow. 🥵

"Feel the whole body expanding like a dragon to connect with Heaven and Earth."

This moves around though, which movement is most alive, most intense. One month it's one, then next it's another. This one has been most intense for a while and now it's this move's Jie Qi. So, yay.

It sure is Summer-ey.

But about intensity -- it's not everything everything. Not that I distrust intensity or that I am blasé about it, striking some kind of pose like "Hey, I'm so upekkhā, intense feelings are nothing special, check how equanimous
I am."

It's just "nothing happening" or subtle experience is super important too.

ritual instructions: do these things feel what is there

don't decide don't be afraid of not feeling anything

"nothing is happening" is an important experience

thread...

I do try my best to bring this power spiraling into the lower Dan Tian in the next movement though.

And the next... and the next...

on devotional offering as teddybear tea party

Thu, 18 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

having a doll as an idol makes offerings feel like a teddybear tea party in a way that I love

when I worked on The Sims, I thought about dolls a lot

dolls are so concrete and tactile. we touch them with our hands. we make them with our hands.

that The Sims worked as dolls while just being glowing dots on the screen was a great achievement.

I think part of why The Sims succeeded was that its graphics were out of date. The Sims's iconicity invited the player to project themselves into these little people.

Scott McCloud talks about this in Understanding Comics -- that we have a detailed, photographic vision of other people's faces, but only a cartoonish model of our own.

So when we see a realistic image, we feel "That's someone else." When we see a cartoon, we feel "That's me."

my doll is cartoonish.

This identity between my (quite new) devotional offering practice and childhood hospitality play mirrors the continuity between childhood make-believe and roleplaying games.

I encountered Dungeons and Dragons at about age 9, just as I was growing out of make-believe. My friends and I, our play was naturally becoming more walking around talking, describing what was happening instead of acting it out.

D&D was a revelation. Here was how older kids played. Camp Counselors. Young adults, practically. It seemed impossibly sophisticated and exciting.

This is why I bristle when people disparage others' magical practice as "LARP". My experience with LARP is pretty much limited to listening to people talk about it on Alex Roberts's ( fantastic!) Backstory Podcast , but, like, I get it.

Setting aside how rude it is to disrespect another's magic...

People who look down on LARP have NO IDEA how deep it can be. LARP is theatre. It is a mystery practice.

So when I spoon matcha (from the bowl my brother made me during his pottery phase) into tiny serving cups from my Gong Fu set, sometimes I hold it in front of my doll's face, miming serving it to her, like a child.

"Good morning, friend. Have some tea."

21: portable trap door

Tue, 16 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

portable trap door
leading to the study
a quiet sunlit room
with a comfortable chair
you can read
as long as you like

20: a bindle

Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a bindle
red bandana, threadbare
earth from the maze
secrets
the open road

7 QiHuaSanPan 气化三盤 — Qi Transforms the Three Layers

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

7 QiHuaSanPan 气化三盤

Qi Transforms the Three Layers

There's two big influences in my work: the sea and the river. Both water. You would think that time would be more compatible with the tide. Time and tide, this daily up and down. But somehow, I think there's a lot to be learned about time by the river.

-- Andy Goldsworthy, "Rivers and Tides"

This is the first movement I had real trouble with understanding from the text.

https://twitter.com/bonkydog/status/1524785350924566529?s=20

Really needed the video to get this one at all. Needed to see how this movement feels.

For me, in my current practice, this movement feels like a river, how it meanders over the course of seasons, how its banks define its movement, but its movement changes its banks.

How water rains down and soaks through the soil, merging with itself, a confluence, an inexorable flow toward the sea.

Sometimes rushing, sometimes, languid, but the power is always there, the power to submerge, to erode, to dissolve, to wash away barriers, to leak through any crack

and broaden it

Practice feels like this, how it flows through us with repetition, warming in morning, cooling at night. It changes us, and is itself changed. Each day is like a turn in a river, the S curve of time.

"So if I had to find something that would join the year together, it would be something like the river. The river is a river of stone, a river of animals, a river of the wind, a river of the water, a river of many things. A river is not dependent on water. We're talking about the flow. And the river of growth that flows through the trees and the land."

-- Andy Goldsworthy, "Rivers and Tides"

Everything seeming separate flows to the sea.

7 QiHuaSanPan 气化三盤 — Qi Transforms the Three Layers — XVII: The Star

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

7 QiHuaSanPan 气化三盤

Qi Transforms the Three Layers

XVII: The Star

A river across the sky.

This is the mapping that made me realize I had to pursue this project. I mean, look. Her hair describes this movement so perfectly.

Note also how the vessels and her arms also foreshadow the following movements: TongTianCheDi 通天徹地 – Connect with Heaven and Penetrate Earth and HuaiBaoRiYue 懐抱日月 – Embrace the Sun and Moon.

Standing in the flow as it snakes through her, a river from sky to sea.

This is how Laohu Gong feels under the predawn stars.

6 ShenJianZhanXie 神劍斬邪 — Spiritual Sword Kills the Demon

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

6 ShenJianZhanXie 神劍斬邪

Spiritual Sword Kills the Demon

"oh yes that one does what it says on the tin" -- @taalumot

When I was learning the form, this is the first movement where I was like: "Woah. Something is happening here."

(Effects of earlier moves emerged with practice.)

(This is also the first move that I recognized as a Tarot trump, Adjustment, which started my obsession with mapping LaohuGong moves to Tarot.)

BIG SCISSORS -- The two arms work together to define a cutting point, the intersection of the two blades is not an object, it's a self-catalyzing phenomenon, a moving place, sliding against itself, rolling out.

There is a real severing feeling here. Reminds me of the alchemical "Solve" from "Solve et Coagula"

A sharp, molecule wide edge, the momentum of the Letting the Tool Do The Work.

Stance is important -- rooting force of this Big Chop down into into the Earth. Keep weight underside. Drop your center with this sword stroke.

Align yourself with the world's texture and let gravity help you cut.

"Shen means spirit, divine, essence. Jian is a sword, which is a symbol for wisdom. Zhan means cut off with a sharp motion, chop. Xie means evil (as in Xie Qi), devil, demon, ghost. Xie also means all the factors that cause illness – it may be a blockage in your body, problems in your life, unbalanced emotions, or anything that pulls you away from or blocks you from your endeavors."

-- Master Zhongxian Wu

What is a demon? What does it mean to kill a demon? Is it destroyed?

It feels to me it can't be -- to slay a demon is to help it to transform, to let go of the false-life, the sin that keeps it distinct, divided from source, autonomous. Die and take on new life.

"Through practice, we will become stronger physically, emotionally, and spiritually. We must develop the ability to kill the inner demons that prevent us from moving into a better state. The symbolic meaning of this movement is that through the kill, a new spiritual life will be born."

-- Master Zhongxian Wu

To slay a demon is in some way to forgive it and to be forgiven by it. To reunify. But before unification there must be an judgement, an excision.

Once the self/other boundary has been made clear, transformation becomes possible.

(The next movement, QiHuaSanPan 气化三盤 – Qi Transforms the Three Layers, is about this reunification.)

6 ShenJianZhanXie 神劍斬邪 — Spiritual Sword Kills the Demon — VIII: Adjustment

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

6 ShenJianZhanXie 神劍斬邪

Spiritual Sword Kills the Demon

Scissor Sister

This is the first movement that when I learned it I was like "Wait, this reminds me of something."

I got a very clear feeling of this card. Something about the scissoring action of the arms, the Spiritual Sword, the ruthlessness of Justice, the balance.

Scissors are like a scale. They balances the force of thumb and index finger, working in opposition. The the cutting point where the blades meet is exquisitely balanced, balanced by motion, like a bicycle.

The Severity of this movement, the cutting in order to bring back into balance, return to center, to the ready position. To cut apart what has become inappropriately entangled, to allow a new engagement from recovered integrity, mutual regard.

Once I saw this, I had to know what the other movements were, what the other cards were.

I had to know this masked figure.

19: an old map

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

an old map of the cosmos
stitched from small treasures
found along the way

18: pocket orrery

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

pocket orrery
tiny clockwork model
of the sky

5 YaoWuYangWei 耀武揚威 — Tiger Displays Martial Power

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

5 YaoWuYangWei 耀武揚威

Tiger Displays Martial Power

This movement corresponds to the first half of the Dragon Month, which we enter with this New Moon.

"Imagine being a dragon. Feel your whole body move – not just the wrists and hands. Your whole body spirals, and the Qi condenses into the bone and marrow (QiLianRuGu 气斂入骨)."

I feel this dragon vividly. A feeling of coiling incense smoke, but rather than spiraling outward, it's a concentrating feeling of spirit condensing, solidifying into the bones. How rope is stronger, the unifying spiral strengthens the individual fibers.

She starts from the hands and propagates through the arms into the torso and legs, grounds through the feet into the earth.

A coiling, the winding of a spring, an accumulation and concentration of power.

But with this condensation, my skin is still awake, alive: "At the same time, feel as if each hair on the body is like a needle or an iron weapon standing straight up." "

"Allow your breath to be slow, smooth, deep, and even. Breathe with all the pores of your skin, not with just the Lungs."

The gaze is piercing, bright.

There is a polarity between core and surface here that generates great power. Between concentration and manifestation.

5 YaoWuYangWei 耀武揚威 — Tiger Displays Martial Power — IV: The Emperor

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

5 YaoWuYangWei 耀武揚威

Tiger Displays Martial Power

Aries and Ares

There's that coiling, concentrating spiral in the ram's horns, that clawed grip on the orb.

That piercing gaze looks toward the Empress, that male-female polarity.

This movement originates in the hands and moves through the hips.

Contrasts with the Empress's LiDiBaiWei 立地擺尾 – Tiger Wags Its Tail, which starts from the hips and propagates out through the hands.

There's an effortless sexual magnetism to these paired movements. Between them.

Aphrodite arrives at Olympus and Ares is there and they're both like

WHO'S THAT

Suddenly there's only 2 people in the room.

Venus and Mars. Sulphur and Salt. Tiger and Dragon.

It's spring.

17: an ebon sphere

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

an ebon sphere
lathe turned
dream specified

its purpose is unknown

15: a pair of silver coins

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a pair of silver coins
leave one at her shrine
keep the other
in your pocket

16: an iron nail

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

an iron nail
carried secret
against the skin

13: a metal pendulum

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a metal pendulum
a placard

YES NO MAYBE DWA RQ
and the unlabeled directions

14: a small, rounded stone

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a small, rounded stone
when you hold it
you can say it right

(if you dare)

12: a branch

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

oldest is a branch
from a dead cedar tree
in front of the house
where you grew up

it's smooth and jagged and red

it feels like fire

4 DanDanChuDong 眈眈出洞 — Tiger Emerges from the Cave — I: The Magus

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

4 DanDanChuDong 眈眈出洞

Tiger Emerges from the Cave

More than any move, this one makes me feel like a wizard atop his tower.

There is a whirling and extension to infinity, sight, like a hawk.

"DanDan means glare, gaze, stare. Eyes represent the spiritual windows of the soul. When we start our practice, we are opening the spiritual windows to connect with the outer world and to learn the universal way."

"This movement is the pattern of the tiger’s eyes – open and staring fiercely."

-- Master Zhongxian Wu

This card is all sight lines and vision. Parabolic, the arc of gravity, of space's curve.

I turn, hand outstretched. I am holding everything I see in the palm of my hand.

I hold the elements lightly, a juggler, mutable, transmuting, everything is in motion, dancing.

"Tiger needs 'breathing space' and the freedom to roam and defend vast territories. This movement is a symbol for open space or an open heart."

"In Qigong practice, one can learn how to open the spiritual windows of the Heart-Mind, not merely remain in the small cave of our familiar existence."

-- Master Zhongxian Wu

I turn and sweep the horizon. Everywhere I see, there I go.

10: a two-edged knife

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a two-edged knife
(a retired fighter)
held properly
it can sever anything

everything

11: a simple pentacle

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a simple pentacle
unglazed rough clay
you made it in high school art class
you still have it

08: a cushion

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

sitting on this cushion
exits time

09: a wicker basket

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a wicker basket
unfolds to reveal a formal lunch setting
all your favorite foods
and a beautiful day

4 DanDanChuDong 眈眈出洞 — Tiger Emerges from the Cave

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

4 DanDanChuDong 眈眈出洞

Tiger Emerges from the Cave

DanDanChuDong is one of my favorite moves. I know, you're not supposed to have favorites.

I love it.

I practice on the roof of a 6 story building. The sky is huge. I have a view of downtown skyscrapers on my right, the
lake, the neighborhood, the hills, with clouds and stars and planets moving through it all.

There's a flourish to this movement, where the hand in front of you at the end of LiDiBaiWei settles to stillness and
then everything turns like a wheel and there is this extension to infinity.

Beyond the horizon.

I feel like that tiger, emerging from his mountain cave, surveying his domain, everything between sky and earth.

I have this projection -- in HongMengYiQi there is vertical connection to heaven and earth, but this is horizontal. It's
directed by me. It feels like intent.

Stillness, then a slow turn, sweeping the horizon 180 degrees.

There is infinity in the lower hand, which feels to me holding a large sphere before or around the lower DanTian. Both
are alive. The outstretched arm is so dramatic, but don't allow your lower arm to drop from awareness.

I feel intuitively that there is a dramatic tension between the curve and the line that is the source of the power in
this move.

There is a power of gaze. Of connection with the land and sky as around me in contrast to above and below me.

I look out and see what the day offers.

03: matching rods

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

matching rods
one copper one zinc
packed with crystal
useful for restructuring the subtle body
establishing ecstatic resonance
and as a sleep aid

04: a pen

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a pen
belonging to a specific spirit
allowing her to correspond with you

06: comfortable walking shoes

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

comfortable walking shoes
well broken in
walk aimlessly in them
to discover new places
adjacent the familiar

05: an ethereal chalice

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

an ethereal chalice
hand blown black glass
filled with salt water
it opens

07: a book

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a book
that teaches you
what you need to learn
next

01: a brass clip

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a brass clip
installed at the base of the neck,
holds the bearer
in a state of inspiration
just short of hypomania
until removed

02: a pair of black kid gloves

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

a pair of black kid gloves
the right palm bears half a sigil
the left, the other half's reflection

separated they allow
collaborative spellcasting
at any distance

in case of high five
behavior is undefined

3 LiDiBaiWei 立地擺尾 — Tiger Wags Its Tail

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

3 LiDiBaiWei 立地擺尾

Tiger Wags Its Tail

"free your ass and your mind will follow"

-- @embryosophy

It took me a while to really get this movement because I was distracted by the hands.

Master Wu has this very flappy hand thing he does in the video, and for me, I feel for that movement. The front hand is in the middle of your field of vision. It's very attention grabbing.

It's not what this movement is about.

LiDiBaiWei is all about the belly, the hips.

Master Wu writes

"Focus on your tailbone. The tailbone is the end of the spine and is the secret source of our life power. Breathe out and shake your tailbone. Allow your body to move with your tailbone."

When I focused on the hands, the movement was stiff, like a dead tree.

When I focused on the hips, it was awkward, a shy kid at a school dance.

Focusing on the tailbone, focusing on the imaginary tiger's tail, feeling how it moves in a S curve, everything else followed from it in this beautiful peristaltic movement like a river's course, flowing through the body.

This movement is associated with the Large Intestine meridian, which is rooted in the belly, rises through the torso and then travels up the side of the face and out the arm to the index finger.

The meridian describes the propagation of this wave from the belly out to the hands.

Be aware of the whole.

Follow the tail.

3 LiDiBaiWei 立地擺尾 — Tiger Wags Its Tail — III: The Empress

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

3 LiDiBaiWei 立地擺尾

Tiger Wags Its Tail

LiDiBaiWei is all about the belly, the hips.

This is the center of Venus's power.

Her hands and arms remind me of this movement, the right with that spiraling out the Large Intestine meridian, the left, flowing, following that from her hips, her belly.

Crowley writes of The Empress "In no other card is it so necessary to disregard the parts, to concentrate upon the whole."

Feel for this whole.

2 ShuiHuJueXing 睡虎覺醒 — Sleeping Tiger Wakes Up — 0: The Fool

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

2 ShuiHuJueXing 睡虎覺醒

Sleeping Tiger Wakes Up

Ha! Open your eyes!

The Fool springs out of nothingness into day.

Breathe!
The Fool is Air.
ShuiHuJueXing, Lungs.

His smile, the swirl of wind through his body, whirling around him, a wide eyed emergence from nothingness.

Note especially the Tiger, chomping into our dude's leg.

The Tiger rears up, claws out -- his movement is ShuiHuJueXing!

Good morning!

We set out on our journey though the day, the year.

2 ShuiHuJueXing 睡虎覺醒 — Sleeping Tiger Wakes Up

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

2 ShuiHuJueXing 睡虎覺醒

Sleeping Tiger Wakes Up

ShuiHuJueXing 睡虎覺醒 — Sleeping Tiger Wakes Up

Good morning, Tigers!

The sun is about to rise and it's a beautiful day on top of this 100 year old tower in the middle of the city, just as the full moon is setting here at the apex of Tiger month.

BREAK TRANCE

Opening eyes after HongMengYiQi feels like that cat ready to pounce, the "primary circuit" coming alive again.

Something that strikes me about the text is the emphasis Master Wu places on the toes gripping the earth, the fingers curved like tiger claws: "This is important for holding the energy. The acupuncture points on the extremities are located on the tips of your fingers and toes, the border where microcosmic energy meets macrocosmic energy."

There is a decreasing-radius spiral feeling to this kinesis, which -- as any motorcyclist will tell you -- decreasing radius intensifies force. We'll feel this spiraling quality of movement over and over in Lao Hu Gong.

There is a feeling of the Organs expressing Qi through their meridians, with the extremities, the fingers and toes as the tail of the whip, the tip of the spear, the long end of the lever, the feathery frond, the antenna, the leaf in spring, the eye's pupil directing gaze.

Be aware now.

Be aware of everything around you.

This movement and the previous are associated with the Lungs. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, organs
are literally what they are, but more importantly they are patterns of process, ways that Qi and other spiritual factors are embodied. Like patterns of autonomic
intent.

Dr Ted Kaptchuk writes: (He tends to capitalize Organs to distinguish them from strictly anatomical organs as understood by Western Medicine).

"The Lungs concern the momentary and ephemeral. Healthy Lungs allow for a single moment or any singular episode of time to become complete."

Which: I read that and I'm like

"OK. That means something."

I am reminded of his description of Jing (often translated as "Essence"): "It is time that goest through a person."

"The Lungs store the Animal Soul (Po). The Animal Soul is the animation, emotional reqactivignt, and pressing urges of human life."

"The Lungs rule Qi." "The Lungs are the arena in which the Qi (meaning air, Natural Air Qi) outside the body meets the Qi inside the body."

Covid has shown us how literally the word arena can mean here.

Master Wu writes

"Tiger looks heavy but moves fast."

I want to feel this mass and power, what it is like to move my body as a 600 pound cat with predator musculature ( instead of these Human muscles, optimized for fine motor control at the expense of strength).

Growl here.

"The throat is said to be the 'door' of the Lungs and the 'home' of the vocal cords, so both the throat and vocal cords are also related to the Lungs."

Growl is a purr when you are tiger.

Purr at the joy of waking.

1 HongMengYiQi 鴻蒙一炁 — Return to the Great Primordial Qi

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

1 HongMengYiQi 鴻蒙一炁

Return to the Great Primordial Qi

When I first started learning Lao Hu Qigong I was struck by strong similarities between its first movement and No-Form, a practice from Paratheatre. Paratheatre is a ritual theatre medium taught by my friend Antero Alli. (An entry point is here: https://www.paratheatrical.com/info.html) Though Qigong felt daunting to me as a beginner, I felt at home with this opening.

Master Wu writes

Movement: Stand with your feet together and toes grabbing the Earth. Straighten your back so it is as stable as a mountain. Lift your perineum to seal DiHu 地户 (Earthly Door, CV 1). Tuck the lower abdomen in, slightly. Open your chest. Straighten your neck and keep your head upright. Imagine your head touching Heaven with the TianMen 天門 ( Heavenly Gate, GV 20) remaining open. Place the tip of your tongue on the tooth ridge behind your upper teeth. Keep your teeth held together and your mouth closed. Keep your shoulders down, arms relaxed, and armpits just slightly open. Relax your hands and keep your fingers straight. Relax your eyelids. Bring your eyesight within. Look within. Listen within. Visualize and sense the Qi state.

Visualization: With your eyelids relaxed, look and listen within to visualize the Qi state. Visualize yourself stretching – the top of your head and spine reach up into the Heavens while your feet grow roots that anchor deeply into Earth. Feel the Heavenly and Earthly energies penetrate to mix in the DanTian. Imagine the universal Qi as light surrounding your body. Open all the pores of the skin, allowing the universal Qi to pour into your body. Feel your body merging with the Qi and returning to the state of primordial universe Qi.

Wu, Zhongxian. Chinese Shamanic Tiger Qigong (pp. 67-68). Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Compare Antero's description of No-Form

THE PHYSICAL STANCE Stand in any way that supports vertical rest—find the point of minimal effort to remain standing, relaxing all muscles uninvolved in this standing posture. 1)unlock the knees 2)widen the stance 3)drop the pelvis 4)let the spine drop and be suspended 5)exhale, allowing the inhale to occur as a reflex and continue this connected breath 6)eyes shut or open a slit to minimize external stimuli. Notes on breath: By emphasizing the exhale and allowing the inhale to occur as a reflex, the vagus nerve secretes a transmitter substance (ACh) which causes deceleration within the beat-to-beat intervals of the heart via the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS).

INTERNAL ADJUSTMENTS Once the physical stance and breath are established: 1)withdraw your attention from the external environment and reconnect internally 2)relax the desire to control the outcome of any experience 3)relax the desire to control 4)find your anchor or comfort at being nothing 5)be nothing.

Alli, Antero. State of Emergence: Experiments in Group Ritual Dynamics (pp. 28-29). The Original Falcon Press. Kindle Edition.

The challenge for me is to not go "Oh I know this, this is just No-Form." OK, it's similar, but how is it different? What is HongMengYiQi teaching me? What is it in itself?

(Of course, this is also the challenge presented by No-Form.)

Similarities

Both cultivate a states of deep receptivity.

Both are encounters with an unknowable, primordial phenomenon.

Both place emphasis on experience of the vertical spine as a conduit of energy from above and below.

HongMengYiQi and DaoQiChangCun open and close the practice. No-Form is practiced at the beginning and end of a Paratheatre ritual: to enter a state of deep receptivity as we enter the ritual, to release and discharge any energies as we exit.

Differences

In HongMengYiQi there is some activity or tension not described in No-Form -- gripping the ground with the toes. The stance is narrow, feet together, compared with No-Form's wider stance and more relaxed (though still grounded feet). HongMengYiQi requires us to hold the perineum, DiHu 地户 "Earthly Door", and place the tongue on the roof of the mouth, closing the Microcosmic Orbit circuit, joining the Governing Vessel and Conception Vessel. There is a feeling of containment.

No-Form feels (initially) more like an emptiness practice, preparing to channel an energy, where HongMengYiQi emphasizes an immediate connection to and channeling universal Qi through the energy body. (This may just be a difference in how they are described though? In practice they feel similar.)

I'd be super interested to hear from other Qigong practitioners about experience with this or other opening stances and parallels to other practices. What is is like for you here?

OK, but: I read that over and it's a bunch of book stuff. I also want to talk a little about what HongMengYiQi is * actually like* for me right now in my practice.

It's winter. That means it's still night when I practice, and cold. Not COLD cold, just Bay Area cold. It's ~40F and I'm on the roof under the stars and planets, surrounded by the lights of the city. It's quiet. As quiet as it gets around here.

(No planets in the morning these mornings -- they're all on the underground side of the sky.)

I stand in my soft pants, fiberfill vest, tech bro hoodie, and checkered Vans and Expand Awareness (a la @m_ashcroft). I see and hear and smell everything and feel the force transmitted from bedrock up through the building's century old steel bones.

Then I close my eyes and feel.

I get Piti, pretty strong these days. I feel connected to what Antero calls "Verticality". I have a feeling sometimes of standing at the apex of a light-cone of causation, grounded in the Big Bang, below me in the past, lensing through this exact moment to refract into a sky of possible futures, potentialities.

The Big Tree

I feel for it and when I feel it strong, I open my eyes and activate the primary circuit.

Tiger wakes up.

1 HongMengYiQi 鴻蒙一炁 — Return to the Great Primordial Qi — (No Card)

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

1 HongMengYiQi 鴻蒙一炁

Return to the Great Primordial Qi

This movement (stance, really) maps to...

NO CARD!

There are 24 movements in the Lau Hu Qigong form. The first and last are postures of deep receptivity to the primordial
underlying reality.

Tune in next Jie Qi for the first card!

But pay attention to the absence of form. It's important!