Prior to the age of roughly 23 (2005), I was your run of the mill hard drinking, agnostic, literary misanthrope, whose youth is well documented in my autobiography in verse (link to All My Whores Are Madonnas, All My Madonnas are Whores). I was in my senior year of completing an undergraduate degree in psychology and fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and was already accepted to the Master of Fine Arts program in fiction at the same. I was well on my way to penning the literary creations you’ll find in the Books section of the main page.
Aside from mucking around with some friends in the joke Discordian Order of the Beak, which led to the fake band with real songs Giant Baby, I had little to no interest in any kind of spiritual practice. While I’d grown up loosely Catholic, neither I nor my parents were particularly religious, and I was fine with the brand of romantic agnosticism that accompanied my chosen course to study fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. I did have a mild interest in astrology and Tarot that I’d inherited from my mother, who gave me pop, New Age books on these subjects as a teenager, but even these were considered more or less fun affectations.
This changed one afternoon in my mid-twenties (roughly 2005) when I decided to get a Tarot reading at a local coffee shop. My motives were hardly spiritual ones: there was a cute girl with a Tarot spread in front of her, and I asked for a reading as an excuse to flirt. To my chagrin, her Tarot “guru” – an old, long bearded hippy man with a torn flannel shirt and jeans – poked his head in and said, “You want a reading, I’ll really give you a reading.”
Boy was he right.
The reading was uncanny – detailing that at the time I was having issues with the third woman I’d ever been with, and even catching that her Sun Sign was Aries. Most importantly, the reader said, “What would it mean to you if I told you God or the Universe or whatever you wanted to call it was telling you to wake up?”
I certainly had no idea. I can say that this all occurred at a very unhappy time of my life without going into further details here (if you want them, read my fiction and poetry, again, especially All My Whores Are Madonnas, and All My Madonnas Are Whores). That night, instead of my normal routine of feeling sorry for myself, I attempted to pray. The only one I could even remember was the Lord’s Prayer, so I said it multiple times, feeling my breath slow in a way that is now normal to me via the practice of meditation (and don’t worry – this is not where I launch into some diatribe about how Christianity or the Christian God is great, or even palatable, or launch into some narrative of religious conversion).
What happened next seems normal to me now, but was miraculous then: I saw in my mind’s eye a light, and the light came down and filled my whole body with a warm feeling of bliss. All I knew when it happened was that it felt amazing and that I wanted to do whatever it took to feel that feeling again.
As I’ve said, prior to this moment I was a total religious and spiritual skeptic (and I encourage you to be the same). To me, it didn’t seem important that it was the Lord’s Prayer I was saying, and I wasn’t even convinced that any kind of external force had anything to do with my experience. What did seem important was that the state of surrender I reached through saying the prayer had created space in my mind to allow the experience to occur. I reasoned that many religious and spiritual traditions were likely metaphors written by people that had experienced such things as I just had, and I wondered how many religious taboos were really just misread instruction for ways to experience what I just had more effectively. I recalled a similar “Zero Experience” when I was maybe nine years old, where I’d seen a void in my mind’s eye, and believed that the world I lived in wasn’t real, and this pulsing, benevolent vortex within was the only true reality. It was clear that some investigation had to be done, for surely someone else out there had experienced such things.
This led me to a fortunately brief superstitious phase where with my new Tarot reader friend’s help I read just about every book I could on mysticism, spirituality, or magick and suspended disbelief in any of the crazy things that they said. My Tarot friend was a hoarder and bibliophile, so he provided many of these to me on loan, and cheap New Age paperbacks ordered online provided the rest. As a writing major, I had a well developed critical eye for bullshit, and was used to reading large volumes of text quickly. At first, I learned towards things that had more Judeo-Christian symbolism “just in case” any of the dogma of my very loosely Catholic upbringing was real, but quickly abandoned this as I realized that what I was searching for was really more a matter of technique and process than theory or symbolism, and found much of what I was looking for in the writings of Aleister Crowley.
What techniques was I using when I started out? Meditation seemed to be at the center of all of it, so I first became proficient in this, setting a timer and quieting my mind until I could do so uninterrupted for 20 minutes. I also practiced many intro level techniques consistently mentioned in the magick books I read such as The Lesser Banishing Rituals of the Pentagram and Hexagram, and the Middle Pillar. Though I found them useful to develop my capacity for visualization in my mind’s eye and holding focus, they accomplished little else.
My first major results came when I was initiated into the Usui Reiki Ryoho tradition by my instructor Jeff Greenwald at a New Age shop in Pittsburgh. I’d met him through an online meetup I’d sent feelers out to, and heard back almost to the day I’d become proficient enough in mediation to do it for twenty minutes uninterrupted by thought. I liked him right away as he displayed skepticism, asking how I even knew he was a Reiki Master. Most importantly he demonstrated Reiki hands healing on me, and while it didn’t produce the same experience I’d originally had, it did do something more than what I’d accomplished thus far. As I initiated into the practice up to the teacher level and began using it and meditation daily, I soon found myself having more spiritual experiences of the variety I’d set out to repeat. To classify these new successes, I used the Spiritual Experiences of the various spheres of the Hermetic Kabbalah of The Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley, having now found for me a better “way in” to the inner world than magickal ritual.
The books that influenced me most when starting out were these: The One Year Manual by Israel Regardie, Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson, Modern Magick and Modern Sex Magick by Donald Michael Kraig, Simplified Magick and More Simplified Magick by Ted Andrews, Promethea by Alan Moore, and Hands of Light by Barbara Brennan. Years later (especially after joining OTO), I dove deeper into basically any works by Crowley I could get my hands on, and then saw him as one utilizing the same philosophy I present via different means.
I’ve always believed in the DIY punk rock sensibilities of learn three chords then use them to speak your truth. My three chords were a daily practice of meditation, Reiki, and journaling, then using the Spiritual Experiences of the Hermetic Kabballah to classify the results. After roughly eleven years of this (2017), I initiated into Crowley’s OTO and have now attained the rank of Perfect Initiate (which is as far as I intend to advance in the order).
The song that has come out of these simple chords of my now nearly twenty-year practice are my volumes of fiction and poetry and the system of occult philosophy presented in Templar of the Ruby Star, Diary of a Scarlet Woman and A Comedy and/or Tragedy of Pan: Commentary by Dr. Hunter Lumiere, and my intuitive bodywork courses and manuals. For me, the psychological catharsis that my practice has created is the only thing that has consistently increased my baseline of happiness without reliance on external sources such as drugs, romance, or things money can buy (though I’m still a big fan of all of the above). I present it to you not as a master, or a guru, or even as a person that has everything figured out, but as a human being that has found a way to suffer less that doesn’t cost much more than time. For as hard as time is to spare, I can say that mine used in writing and teaching this practice and philosophy is worth it if it does the same for you.
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