Thirty-three

As of this past Saturday, I'm now 33. I easily pass for 25. Yeah, good genes! I study and practice all sorts of weirdness and mystery. You see, wizardry (or whatever you want to call it) is my thing. So, as a birthday present to myself, I'm working on coming to terms with my experiences in that weirdness and mystery. I'm coming to terms with the fact that at this current moment, things are happening. What kind of things? Good things: career, profession, both esoteric and exoteric; maybe other more personal matters. I don't know. But it'll all take some time still. Nothing good happens overnight (except when it does). I did some insider trading: Did some personal readings on the lay of the land. I had some friends do the same for me. Put my ear to the floor, and listened for whispers in the chaotic din of the Universe (or whatever you want to call that); you know, like when the Beach Boys are playing outside your window in the middle of the night, or when people, whom you least expect these remarks from, mention things that are almost uncomfortably and very explicitly related to very specific things on your mind at the moment. All of these messages are lining up, piece by piece, with the events that are unfolding in real-time. Maybe I've pinged my future self and he sent me some good news. Maybe.

The point is that I've been fighting against just accepting this, not because it seems highly pre-deterministic to do so - I know that I can get off this train at any time (right?) - but because it's exciting, and scary all at the same time. And probably requires some amount of patience on my part. Rather than worry about the supposed insanity of my experiences, I'm just going to run with them all. I'm going to own this weirdness. There's the big things, but I'd even embrace the little things:

• Like those instances where I think "I certainly don't want to have that meeting today" only to find out an hour later that the meeting was canceled. Happened twice.
• Or Saturday afternoon when I went downstairs to the store to check my mail only to find The Sugarcubes' "Birthday" playing on the store TV? You see, that was clearly for me.
• The part where Warren Ellis posted a new SPEKTRMODULE podcast? Well, I'm just going to pretend that was for me..

But why accept all of these things, both the significant and the seemingly insignificant? Because this world's a rough place, but it can also be a fun place, and I want to live in it. And all the while this stuff percolating.. brewing, it's all an exercise in equanimity.

And that reminds me: the peculiarity about how things come together. Before the semester began, I had one of my friends read for me about the the lay of the land, and there was something about taking on new occult practices or something like that. It was pretty important thing to do, but the specifics as to what that practice would be wasn't in the cards. We threw some ideas around. I knew I was interested in acquiring the Supernatural Assistant, and we pretty much settled on that definitely being the task; however, I wasn't really sure how I was going to take that on and my final year of undergrad all at once.

I don't think that was the right practice. Don't get me wrong; I think it's something that I'm going to do, but not just yet. As the the semester began, this become much more apparent. What initially began as enrolling in a few classes because they fulfilled certain graduation requirements in both of my degree tracks, turned into something a bit more. For Psychology, I still needed one more lab, and so I enrolled in the Abnormal Psych lab. The lab was based off of Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction meditation techniques. For Religious Studies, I needed to take a seminar course, and the one offered was on Western Buddhism.

Geshe Thubten Soepa (with kitty!)

What resulted was much more than I had expected, and all for the best. I got a handle on my meditation practices again, which resulted in a lot more "chilling the fuck out" especially when things got heavy. My Western Buddhism seminar was a fruitful addition. A few of us formed a temporary sangha where we sat together and discussed all sort of ideas and tech outside of the classroom. In the classroom, I was introduced to numerous forms of Buddhism and practices that grew out of Tibet. The one that probably struck me the most was Dzogchen, and I think that's going to be something that I'll continue to explore from here on out.

I was also very fortunate enough to meet Geshe Thubten Soepa, spending a few day with him, chatting with him, and soaking in his teachings. His Holiness had the most profound effect on me, and it's the kind of the thing that rarely ever happens to me anymore. One of those things is working towards a vegetarian diet, which I'm mostly successful at, but meat still happens on occasion. The booze, on the other hand, stays. I remember him looking at me during one of the sessions, and he said (paraphrased), "Beware of demons in your dreams. They give you bad vision." A couple days beforehand, I had a dream or two that were really upsetting since they coincided with elements in my waking world, and I remember thinking that I wished I could just ask him about those dreams when I saw him. I wasn't ever going to bother him about those dreams. But he bothered. A while later, I had a couple more dreams involving those types of demons; this time, I called those bastards out.

That's been the ride so far to 33.

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Aleister Crowley
October 12, 1875 - December 1, 1947

As an amusing side note, Saturday was also the 65th Anniversary of Uncle Al's death: born on the scales of Libra, died on the planes of the Centaur. Probably one of the reasons why I like the bastard so much.

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P.S. I was going to write about tarot. Didn't happen. Doing that later.