Remember Your Own Path

Am I just a puppet for the Higher-ups?

Hello, good people of the internet, and welcome to the Redux Series, which is a series that involves me going back to my old blog posts from the last 10 years of my Adventures In Woo Woo blog to see if I still align with them, or if I have anything to add or subtract from them. In the end, I'll collect it all together as a book.

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One thing I noticed about myself having re-read the post below from 2017 is that as someone who claims to be a magician I still don’t actually do much magick.

By this I mean Magick for stuff. Magick to improve my life situation and experience.

I’m not sure why this is the case, but I would suspect that some of it comes from my thinking that I shouldn’t be doing magick for just any old thing. No, instead I should save magick for the “big stuff” or the more important things – whatever they are. This sort of thinking implies that my magick is something finite and that it can be wasted on trivial matters. But is that the case? I doubt it.

Another reason is this old thought in the back of my mind that doing magick for my material betterment is somehow sinful, less spiritual, or, you know, the dreaded evil black magic!

This stems largely from my Irish Catholic upbringing and its focus on shame and guilt. But, my subsequent dive into wider spiritual teachings reinforced the notion that I should see the material world as something to be shunned, treated with disdain, and wanting any sort of materialistic improvement is a heresy.

Materialism, it is often said, is the opposite of spirituality. This is very black-and-white thinking, and it’s unhelpful.

A third reason is the idea that not getting what I want is actually better for me than getting what I want. A close relative of this is the sense that I am being protected from getting my desires because getting my desires would lead to disaster. It’s the curse of “be careful what you wish for”, where I have become terrified that if I get what I want, something bad will happen. And so If I perform magick—but it's unsuccessful—then it feels like the “higher-ups” have made a decision that I’m better off without it, or that it’s not for me.

And this leaves me with a despondent sense of “Why bother doing magick at all?”

If someone or something else gets to decide what’s right for me and what isn’t, then I don’t really have any magick ability or agency at all. If I am only able to do successful magick if my spirit allies (or God, or HGA, or whomever) decide that it's the best thing for me, then who is actually in control here? Who’s living this life?

If it's me, then I should get to decide what is best for me, no?

If I am doing Magick I'm not asking for advice, opinion, or to be protected from it. When I enchant for “the thing” and instead of getting “the thing” I get advice, then the advice it's unsolicited*.

I don't always want to be protected from making a bad decision. I want to have the agency to make my own decisions. Otherwise, I may as well only be reactive to life and live life passively. If the Higher-Ups are getting to decide what's best for me, then what's the point in me doing Magick (or anything) for what I want? If getting what I want or desire will make me wish I never got it then why do magick?

That said, I am aware of plenty of examples from my life where it was much better that I didn’t get what I thought I wanted, I’m not saying that isn’t the case. It's more the principle of the thing. It makes me feel passive and powerless to feel others are making decisions about my life for me, and that ultimately I have very little say in it all.

Is this my life or am I just a puppet for the higher ones? What’s the point of me having goals, dreams, wants, desires, ambitions etc if pursuing them is not what I should be doing?

The usual spiritual answer is usually to transcend your desires, overcome them, let them go, move past them, or something along those lines. But I have gotten very sick and tired of the spiritual cliché that the whole point of human existence is to escape from it, transcend it, or wake up to our true lives. That just seems utterly pointless to me.**

But there is a final reason why I often don’t do magick.

Deeply embedded within my being is a feeling that suffering is somehow spiritually advantageous. That all growth comes from hardship. That suffering is somehow more holy than thriving. That being happy is a sin and pain is a virtue.

And therefore, suffering should not only be tolerated, it should be welcomed – or even cultivated!

I think that I only ever feel it's OK to do magic for a better life is when my life gets really, really shit. At that point, it becomes about survival rather than material pleasure, or sense gratification, or whatever other words and terms I want to use for being happy.

And I mean, while I get that you learn from overcoming your troubles, the idea that it is more spiritual to have shit experiences is bullshit. The idea that you are more ascendant if you shun the material world is bullshit. I am not more holy just because I’m broke. Shame and guilt are not superior to joy. I’m not more spiritually evolved because I choose to always take the hard road. Being sad isn’t making me a saint.

And depriving myself isn’t getting me any closer to god.

So what’s my point here?

My point is that I should do more magick for material improvement.

It's also my intention.

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*But to note, if I do ask for advice from the allies, I will take it.
**But just because I don’t like the idea, doesn’t mean it's not the case.

Remember Your Own Path

20th July 2017

For about the last month or more, I have noticed that I haven’t actually done any magick at all.

I think this comes from being a bit burnt out with the whole constant trying to magick all the time. There was a point there where I wasn’t doing anything non-magick related – even my relaxation time was spent reading magick books. But also I feel it happened because I was spending too much time in other people’s outlooks, and not enough time following my own path. My meditation practice has also been terrible, often going days without doing it and then when I do I barely manage ten minutes.

My goal in magick has always been personal development – I want to become a better person – mundanely and spiritually. From my teenage years, when I first got into all things spiritual, my goal and drive was always to become a more complete person. There are definitely ideas mixed up in this about Ascended Masters, Karma, Reincarnation, Soul evolution and a host of other things that I reckon I have dropped intellectually, but are still there, buried in the darkness of the unconscious.

If pressed, I probably would say that the meaning of life is something related to developing, learning and becoming more evolved.

The problem with magick though, is that it frequently appears to be just about getting the “stuff” rather than becoming something greater.

Be the Energy, Don’t Just Borrow It

I have been doing lots of reading and studying Grimoire history and use, but it just wasn’t sitting too well with me. I felt that I should be into the topic, but I just wasn’t. Even the books I bought were a hard slog for me, as I just couldn’t get into them — so much so that I haven’t read or opened a book in about three weeks. Which is probably the longest time I have spent sans-book in at least ten years.

If it smells like burn out…

The Grimoire system seems, at least to my basic understanding of it, all about getting demons/spirits/whatever to do things for you. There is a huge emphasis on intercessory magick in occult circles these days, (possibly always) and it just doesn’t gel with me fully. I can obviously see the benefit of it, but it feels like ultimately it may just be a crutch.

For example, years ago when I first started doing webcomics I needed a website, and rather than hiring someone to make one for me, I spent some time learning how to do it for myself. Which has paid off much, much better in the long run. If I want to do something, I always try to learn how to do it myself rather than getting someone else to do it. I like learning things, and I like being able to do things for myself. I like working and creating on my own, I like being in control of all the things. And I like being able to get the stuff that is in my head onto the page without having to explain it to someone else.

And with the Grimoire stuff, or any intercessory magick, it just kinda feels like hiring a WordPress guy rather than learning how to use WordPress for yourself. So, while it may be cool to call up a treasure spirit and get him to hand over some goodies, I’d much prefer to learn how to make or find my own treasure.

Even when I use the Forty Servants, I don’t really ever use them in an intercessory way. I don’t ask them to do stuff for me, I ask them to show me how I can do these things, or gain their particular qualities for myself. Personally, I feel the main benefit of Invoking is that you can learn to become that energy/attribute/aspect for yourself.

With invoking (or modelling if you prefer the NLP lingo) you fit the god’s/spirit’s/demon’s/Servant’s energy on like a coat and see how it feels. You then walk out into the world exuding that energy and acting like you are that energy. If you just invoke you will always have to borrow that energy to use it, but once you know how it feels you can work on cultivating that energy within yourself until you come to the point where you can just switch it on or off—you have become that energy!

So, If you only ever ask spirits or whatever to do stuff for you, you never learn how to actually do that stuff for yourself or become an embodiment of that energy. Which seems like a waste, to me anyway.

Back to Basics

I recently mentioned on a podcast that the Law Of Attraction and related ideas (Vision Boards or Glamour Magick for example) were always more successful for me than say Sigils, but yet I don’t do any LoA stuff any more I mostly just do Sigils. Why is that? Doesn’t that seem dumb? I think it’s because LoA isn’t seen as being cool in Chaos Magick circles, it actually shunned and mostly laughed at, and I may have been paying too much attention to that. The calling card of Chaos Magick is “Do That Which Works” and I feel I may have been getting too concerned about the aesthetics.

The results are what matters, not the method.

I won’t stop using sigils completely, as they still give me about a 60% success rate — higher if I don’t care at all about the desired outcome, and a lot less if I really care about getting it, which is interesting, don’t you think? It would almost make you feel that my thoughts and emotions played the biggest part in it.

Basically, I have been paying too much attention to what other people experience Magick as, and not enough attention to my own views, beliefs, and experiences of Magick. It’s great to expand your knowledge and see what other people have to say – it’s great to learn new things, but it’s also highly important to then spend some time assessing the usefulness and effectiveness of what you have just learned. Does it actually apply to you or your life? Is it actually useful? Do you like it?

Which is why I have a new Ganesha altar in my office, why I am back listening to Stuart Wilde audios and why I am trying to someone take a mental break from all the outside things. I need to get back in sync with my own core energies for a while. I need to get back to walking and trusting in my own path. And byjaysus, I need to get back to a better meditation practice.

I need to get back to the things that work for me. Hanging out with other ideas, and world views is brilliant and should be encouraged, just as long as you don’t lose yourself in the process.

Facebook

In completely different news, recently over on Facebook the Gif version of The Forty Servants deck got marked as spam and was deleted. It has been shared more than a couple of hundred thousand times, and I had actually paid Facebook some money at one point to “boost it” (which was absolutely useless— in fact, it seemed to slow the post’s viral nature down considerably- don’t bother with boosting posts unless you want to spend a lot of money), so when I logged into to find it had been deleted it really irked me.

But I took a positive approach and made a new version – a better version – and posted it in its stead. All was well until Facebook then changed how it handles Gifs, now you have to click the link to get it to work, it no longer plays from within the actual Facebook post. But what are you gonna do? Facebook doesn’t owe me anything, and it certainly never said it would ever work the way I wanted it to.

But wait, there’s more… Then soon after I logged into my personal account and was told that it had also been reported as sending out spam. Facebook then made me delete some posts, and unlike some pages. The funny thing was that it didn’t seem to care which posts or which pages, it just wanted me to delete something. This was a pain and annoying, and would become even more of a pain a few days later when the same thing happened again!

Obviously, someone on my friend list was reporting me. Everything on my personal profile is set to “friends only” so in order to report my posts you’d have to be on my friend list.

I just don’t understand why people do that.

Well, I actually can get my head around it, but only by thinking that People = Shit, and I don’t want to have that outlook. I just don’t want to believe that, even if a lot of the time there is plenty of evidence that could confirm the truth of it. I guess people want their voice to be heard. So rather than just unfriending or unfollowing they feel they must make a point that “This upsets or annoys me – the authorities must be informed of my dissatisfaction posthaste!”.

What extra sucks about FB though is that I have previously reported actual undeniable porn profiles (with images of full penetration) and have got messages back saying that they found nothing wrong, and no rules were broken. But earlier this year they deleted an image of The Carnal on my profile. The total lack of consistency in how Facebook enforces its rules combined with the fact that you can never actually talk to an actual person about anything just is so frustrating. I suspect this is on purpose though.

It’s almost as if Facebook is set up to be as annoying and anti-user friendly as it possibly can be. The whole thing feels like a massive social experiment where we are the lab rats. It probably is, I don’t think they even try to hide that any more.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I am culling loads of people from my Friend list; a while back I just started saying YES to everyone who asked and that was probably a bad move. So if you get dumped and feel that was in error, please send me a message and we hook back up.

Until Next Time…

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You can read the rest of the Blog Redux Series here!

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And that's it for another AIWW Newsletter, I hope you got something from it. If you'd like to chat about it, you can leave a comment below, or come find me on Bluesky!

If you would like to support me in doing all the things I do, then feel free to join the PATREON, buy a FORTY SERVANTS deck, get me a book or something from my Amazon Wish List, or just send me some money via PAYPAL. It all really, really helps, and is very much appreciated.

So, until next time,
MAY YOUR BEST DAYS BE AHEAD!

Tommie

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My name is Tommie Kelly, and I’m an artist, musician, writer & chaos magician from Ireland. I’m probably best known for creating the magick and divination system, THE FORTY SERVANTS. These periodical newsletters are about my adventures in creativity, spirituality, and magick. Check out my website: Adventures In Woo Woo