The Eighth Sermon to the Dead

It has now been over a year since we've been in our new home. I could not have done it without the people who helped us with our donations for the downpayment. Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts. I'm not going to acknowledge you all by name in public, but we will be having thank you notes coming out over the next few weeks. Thank you all. Owning a home comes with it's own challenges that you don't have when you rent. The appliances are yours. So are the gutters. The walls. The carpets. If something goes wrong, you have to handle it. You can't leave it to the landlord. Pests on the property are all yours too, from noxious weeds to vermin. I love that. It has it's own wonderousness, too. It has beauty, and the ability to change the land and the structure as you like (within limits). You don't have to ask anyone to paint, or to put in new flooring, or redo all the plants. It's all yours, with all the rights and attendant responsibilities. In my cas...

N. N. Taleb likes outliers and minorities. He wrote an interesting book called ' Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable ', which was a fascinating read that I highly recommend. Recently, I read an article by him called " The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority ". It's a fascinating study of the counterpoint to the majority rules rule, and shows how minority populations end up making decisions for the vast majority of the population, even changing the majority population's makeup.  Mr. Taleb gives the example of the Muslims and Christians, the examples of Rome and the Christians, the example of Kosher everything, the removal of peanuts from public life, and a current event in the general acceptance or rejection of GMO foods. I won't go into the details, the article is linked above, give it a look. But it does provide an interesting formula: The population which requires x, will inevitably overcome the population that can ...

Here in the west, it's quite dry. There are a lot of fires. The drought in California has been going on for some time, and even in rainy Oregon we've had unseasonably early dry weather and low snow pack. Most of Oregon's water needs are met by snow melt water, so having a low snow pack is not a good situation. I am a magician. I have had great success with individual and group workings combined with real world efforts to change my circumstances. However, I am a skeptic, and always approach new workings with a healthy dose of 'can this work?' Which brings us to Rain Magic. Meterology is a relatively new science.  People have been making observations of the weather since before there was writing, and we know Aristotle wrote on it in 350 BC.  However, most of the work before the 18th century was done via observation. As the scientific era dawned, new measuring tools brought that observation into the realm of measurable and predictable science. Certain things a...

Gnosticism has several different ways to approach our mythological figures. The Son of God can be approached as a preacher in Galilee, or a cosmic principle of The Word (Logos). Mary can be the mother of Jesus or the Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Sophia, or even an embodiment of the Divine Feminine Principle. What's interesting to me is that neither of these approaches is wrong, or even mutually exclusive. The personhood of Jesus makes him approachable, understandable, and valuable in a moment of crises. The transcendence of the Logos provides a way to work with timeless concepts, timeless forces, and to move beyond the crises into the realm of the eternal. Where many people fall down with teaching gnosticism, is they try to jump right to the concept. We place more emphasis on the concepts rather than the people. This works for a subset of people, people we gnostics can talk to on this conceptual level: Occultists, Freemasons, other Johannites, etc.  To the vast majority of h...

I've now officially met more neighbors in my country house than I ever did living in the city. There's the YardGuy* and his lovely wife, the Conversationalist. They live up the hill from us, and are delightful people. The Conversationalist gave Paddy a number of lovely plants, which are now merrily growing in our cottage garden. There's the Mule Guy. He is what we call around these parts, a character. He goes to the local fairs with his mules, and has a mustache that simply will not quit. He's got that way of speaking that is at once incredibly odd and endlessly fascinating.  There's a bit of curmudgeon in there as well. There's Elk Jewelry Girl and her German Beau. Interesting folks who are renting the property that simply has a great big garage/workshop on it, and living out of their RV. Yesterday, we met Terminal Preacher and her husband. She runs a home church for terminally ill people, and has cancer herself. We had a fascinating conversation, about t...

The fourth volume of Joseph Wolf's series on the Shem ha Mephoresh is now available on Amazon for kindle . This fourth volume goes past angel summoning 101, and into deeper contacts and ties with the entities in the Illuminated Circle. You'll read the results of Mr. Wolf's explorations here. This is the final volume of the series, completing the elemental correspondences of the zodiacal signs. The books will be updated with further explorations of the angels as they become available. We are also working on a print version for people who prefer text that is not electronic, so stay tuned! And don't forget to check out the other works in this series, here .

"Two fates bear me on to the day of death. If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy  My journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.  If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,  My pride, my glory dies...  True, but the life that's left me will be long,  The stroke of death will not come on me quickly."  - Achilles on his death in The Illiad, Book 9, 499-505 Some legends are told Some turn to dust or to gold But you will remember me Remember me for centuries - Fall Out Boy, "Centuries" I don't wanna die, I'm a God, Why can't I live on? -Iron Maiden, "Powerslave" The knowledge that one day we will die makes us crazy. Our whole species is insane. We are these wonderful special snowflakes. Each one different, each one unique, too weird to live, to rare to die. And yet, we will. And it makes us angry. Resigned. Hopeful. Insane. Fearful. Crazed. There is only one form o...

When embarking on a new endeavor, a good question to ask is "Is it sustainable?" For instance: A diet, or an exercise program. You may start out all enthusiastic, but can you sustain the effort and care needed to succeed? Raising animals: Can you sustain the expense or effort required to take care of the animals? Vet bills, feed costs, etc? Ideals: Can you sustain the effort to protect your ideals, even in the face of stiff opposition? This all bears on me. I'm currently looking at how we raise our animals, and it's not sustainable. We currently buy a lot of feed, and we're getting little return for it. Some eggs, some rabbit meat, but not nearly enough to justify the expense. It's not sustainable. So I'm exploring ways to make it more so. Diet and exercise are on my mind a lot. My health would improve greatly if I can drop 40 lbs. It's simply a matter of, what can I do that I can sustain to get that kind of weight loss, and keep it off? Id...

Change always comes with a cost. In our case, changing our residence comes with a disruption of the bills. The immediate needs came first, and now that the dust from the move is settling, some of the more recurring bills are coming to rest, as are some of the realities of owning your own home. For instance, we're woefully unprepared to deal with certain things. There's more work than we can do all at once, we had no garbage cans, or service, there's no power to the Barn and that project will take some time to get off the ground.  All the payment schedules are wonky, and the checking account is overdrawn. We're spending a lot more in gas as we move all the members of the household hither and yon, as we've moved some distance from our former base of operations.. All of the above is temporary flotsam and jetsam in the wake of the move. It will all settle down, in a month or two. The move was worth it, the transformation in our lives is immense. We simply have to navi...

This weekend was lovely. We spend a lot of time hanging out at home, letting the animals explore under supervision. The back pasture is rather steep, and forested, so it was with a bit of trepidation we let the horses graze up there. We need not have worried, as they had a wonderful time. The goats had a wonderful time in that pasture. I'm pretty sure they'll eat all the bushes, brambles, and grass down so we won't have any sort of fire hazard there.   The chickens also had a great time, wandering around the upper pasture and the our yard, eating bugs and generally having a good time. We have three sets of chicken, and two of them are out wandering around on their own. The layers are wandering in the upper pasture, and the 'blues' (blue orpingtons) are wondering in the lower pasture. Our Dark Cornish (velicoraptors) are not allowed to wander, as they're generally too slow moving and too sweet to not get hurt. As for the humans, we sat around some, ...

The move being over, we're now trying to figure out what to do with the space. One thing we've started on is a cottage garden. You can see the path we've started off to the right. The brick is from a Mother's Day present we gave Paddy back in 2011, a bunch of free brick we got with the idea of doing some project with it. We've moved the brick three times: Once from it's original location, then when we moved up to the Farm in Sherwood, and now to the new house. It's not getting moved again. So, we're using it for a path. We've got just enough to make a good sized path. We've got it all laid out, and now we'll put some sand in, and level it, and then place it level. Or something. So, the cottage garden is one thing Paddy is all about. Personally, I'm looking to make a few shrines. Several spirits and angels have helped us on our journey, and I think we're going to set up shrines to them. I have a few out of the way spots that I thin...

Currently I'm reading The Gnosis of the Light , translated by F. Lamplugh from the Coptic Codex Brucianus. It's also been called the Untitled Apocalypse. The edition I was reading had a wonderful Preface by R.A. Gilbert , where he talks about the idea that in order for the Divine Spark to be liberated, three things are needed: The Divine Spark within must be identified  There must be revealed but secret knowledge, gnosis and  There are specific practices that must be performed, known only to the Illuminated Gnostic The elitist ideas contained herein will be addressed later, but one of the things I like about the Gnosis of the Light is that it actually gives you most of the requirements for the third point. I haven't finished reading it yet, but in the first sections that I've read lay out a conceptual map for the specific practices. There are names of power. There are intoned vowels. There are literal maps of temples and names and images for the beings encount...

The mystic reaches within, out, above, and touches the divine. Returning to the world, we see that the mystic returns with a shining face and a joyous heart. This divine the mystic touches is scattered across the world, and the world does not see it. It underpins every action, every transaction, every happenstance is filled with divine light; light not visible to the non-mystic, as we see through our glass but darkly. But the mystic will perceive that light: in the birth of a child, the germinating of a plant, a simple meal of bread and water. No matter to the mystic that the birth of a child may be a torment for the mother, the germination of the plant destroys the seed, the making of bread kills the wheat and the yeast, the drinking of water condemns countless microbes to die. This too is a matter of joy: Life is a fabric, life is a weave, and all life supports life. The divine underpins all. The death, the destruction, the evils of the world brought about by the ignorance of h...

The title of this post comes from this article , where Mr. Samuels is discussing the literary merits of weird fiction, and why reducing it to social commentary or personal characterization has diminished the genre. The title got me to thinking about Gnosticism, however. The gnostic myth is a horrible story. The Demiurge is at worst evil, at best incompetent, and generally has it out for humanity. The Archons rule our lives with no regard to what we need, but are rather cosmic forces blindly going about their tasks with no regard for who is hurt or even how their tasks affect the rest of the cosmos. They care only for their spheres, and not the wider cosmos, and it's up to the incompetent or evil Demiurge to keep the whole thing running. It is the image of imperfection. And in the world, we see this born out: Life must consume life in order to survive. Our time is limited and we fritter it away on things which do not matter. Even death may not be a release, as our material fo...

We've been moving for about 3 days now, and I don't think we've made a dent yet. Nevertheless, the house feels like home. Soon, it will be Empyrean Acres, our farming home. Now I'm sitting in an arena, watching people learn now to ride and exercising their horses. Once we're done moving, I'm probably going to start taking lessons. I've never had a desire to ride horses before, however living with horse people makes it look appealing. I don't have any desire to do any competitions, but riding on a trail would be fun.

Yesterday was the last day of my חדל meditation sequence. I think it was a relative success, as I've remained sane and taken time out to rest, relax, fish, and do numerous other things. It was also the day I signed the loan papers for our new house. I've been rather excited about all of this. We were told by our landlord back in March that he wanted to move back in to his house, on May of this year. We asked him to hold off until June 15th, as we'd been house hunting, and needed 60 days to close. Yesterday, we signed loan papers. The sellers sign papers today, and on Friday we will be the new owners of our home. It's been quite a journey. We started with about $1000 in the bank, and through the blessings of The Most High and various other spiritual entities, the generosity of our friends, the hard work of Paddy and myself, and a couple of wonderful pieces of good fortune and magical finagling, we're at the end of that portion of the journey. Now, the next leg b...

It's been 10 days since my last post. I've been keeping up with the meditation. We celebrated the Eucharist on Sunday in our new space, which was wonderful. Saw some new faces. This move is kicking my butt. We sign papers on 5/22, and close 5/29. It can't happen fast enough. Our landlord is moving back into his house, so he's chomping at the bit to get back up there. It's causing stress and complications as he tries to move animals in before we've moved our animals out. Animals are always unpredictable: they have their own behaviors, diseases, and issues, and they rarely stay right where you put them. I just want to kick the dust from my feet and get to our own place. When I'm already stressed, complications cause me more stress. So rest, relaxation, etc are difficult to come by. Work is gearing up for our next phase of the project, the phase that starts letting the whole company in. I'm gearing up to help support the whole system once the contractor...

Today I've been thinking a lot about the Permaculture. It combines a lot of ideas that I am interested in: renewable energy, greywater and rainwater storage, soil regeneration and restoration, food forests, trees and garden design. Careful use of resources, respectful approach to life, and thoughtful planning. It provides for the needs of human beings, and other forms of life. Waste becomes resources, productivity increases, work is minimized, environment is restored. Holy cow is that a paradigm shift. I've been raised in a culture, a business culture, of resource extraction and efficiency. That science, rationality, and engineering will produce the best life humans can have. While that may be true, it seems mainstream science has actually stopped with principles developed during the industrial age. Efficiency, redesigned as the least amount of work, became the goal. Waste was discounted. Now, though, I've come to a new business, with a new understanding of waste. In ...

On Day 23, I did manage to meditate, but writing was not in the cards. This making myself stop and take time to relax is hard. 9 hour work days, child care, dinner prep, etc. make things tough. I have no idea how single parents do it. We've been without internet for 3 days now, which is a mixed blessing. I've done a bit more around the house, got some packing done which is good. I've been out walking twice this week, and the second time was easier and of longer duration than the first. Today, I may take the goats and sheep out for a walk as well.  We'll have to see what happens. The service provider will be up tomorrow morning to check the internet. It doesn't seem to be an issue on our end. We'll see. I've given up on reading the Hugo nominees. I'm not that interested. I may come back to them later, but right now there's just too many other things on the plate. Perhaps I should buy a supporting WorldCon membership, and get the voters packet, which...

Apparently, May 6th is International No Diet Day . Given my health issues to date, I think it's a load of crock. From Wikipedia: International No Diet Day  (INDD) is an annual celebration of body acceptance, including  fat acceptance  and body shape diversity. This day is also dedicated to promoting a healthy life style with a focus on  health at any size  and in raising awareness of the potential dangers of  dieting  and the unlikelihood of success The unlikelihood of success. Just what I needed to hear right now. Success is vitally (get it?) important to my life right now. I'm 42 years old, I'm overweight (40-80 lbs depending on which chart I look at), I have high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and the weight all rests around my middle, which studies say is a result of high cortisol levels (Stress). Does the weight cause the stress, or is the weight a result of stress? I'm sure there's a relationship there, and it may be becoming a self-reinf...