I'm getting to a deeper part of karma now, the sort of things that are established very early on and built up over many small almost inconsequential events. After doing a hour or so chakra meditation to open up my chakras I started a mindfulness meditation and followed my thoughts as they arose. I hit on one that I noticed produced a particular feeling both physical and emotional. I'll not go into it because it contains the singular risk of turning this blog into mopey teenage poetry. After I studied the thought and the feeling for sometime and it was hard to absorb it has been with me for so long it connects to a lot of other things. It is taking a while to work though and even though the effects are not nearly as potent as my early karma it is more poignant and my mood suffered for a few days.

As I work though this bit of my karma I am very emotionally vulnerable and EVERY little thing is more bothersome or upsetting than before. Someone knocks in to my chair and I have to remind myself it was not purposeful. The normal dissociative behavior of people I work with and the disingenuous behavior of others hurts like a personal insult. Several days latter I have either gotten more sensitive generally or it is just because of the Karma, because even being around people who are angry feels like their emotions are washing over me. That cave in the mountains is looking better by the day.

For sometime now the karma I have been transmuting has hardly seemed worth the effort. At the start the karma I was dealing with was physically painful and represented episodes in my life that were traumatic and involved. Now the worst I get is the time I was awkward and brisk with an associate. I take this to mean that I am making progress. After transmuting bad karma am not effected by it, the circumstance that made it, or the memory of it. I am able to remember but the emotions of the event are gone, simple facts remain. I am changed by it though, the emotions are integrated into my being still there but insignificant on their own. However, it left me thinking about what happens after all my bad karma is transmuted. Karma is karma, good or bad it holds us down. What will I do when I get to good karma? The crap I deal with from bad karma I want to leave behind, but the good? A lovely kind old man just came up and handed me a gift card for giving him "a chuckle" about his fancy tea cup he brought to the cafe. The one woman I have ever felt enough about to have a two year long relationship with brings me happiness every time I think of her. Do I want to let them become simple facts?

I started transmuting karma because for fifteen years I was racking it up by the day until my life was too hard to live and anything became better than what it was. Now it is better, far better. I have little issue with transmuting good karma, I only worry about my memories, the things that I drive worth from, well they still be there? I don't know.

But the more I think about it, I become curious what I can do with these new integrated and transmuted chunks of karma. If they are sill part of me as I have been lead to behave surly the emotions can be summoned to match them as well. I have a feeling that is defeating the purpose of transmuting karma, but if it is attachment that spawns karma and attachment is merely the clinging to things, then the experiences unveiled so to speak should still resonate with me even though it has been made simple fact. In this way I hope to rid myself of karma while avoiding a bland internal life.

That to me is important for I view it as just another sort of attachment, this time not to things but to a condition of mind and spirit. I often hear how in taoist and buddhist practice, not thinking is a very important prerequisite to reunite with the Tao and Buddha respectively. That is all fine and good, but if you have to not think to find satisfaction and happiness then you are reliant on shutting out part of you. Instead of relying on attachment to make you happy you rely on non-attachment. I have heard arguments that say the satisfaction is better and more lasting then that of attachment, but that simply means you view the two in worldly terms of good and bad. I no longer find use in that. Perhaps it is simply the commentaries I am reading but there should be a way to uncouple value from experience, so that no Karma is accumulated and the quintessence of life is not lost.

There are of course other traditions that claim this- zen most notably- but they also require you to practice some technique to do so and therefore are relent on them. More often than not the technique is non-attachment and not thinking.

I was going to post this on my site blog but I decided against it. I already have too many essays sitting there; perhaps someone will find this worth reading. In any case this came about after I discussion in which the relative merits of strict adherence to a grimoire were debated. It got me thinking about lore and how much we have lost touch with that way of understanding magick. Everybody is a theorist who wants to find the most useful schema for approaching magick. This is part of a love letter to lore, but because it is very long letter, I will for now post only the critique of the theorist approach. If people find it worth reading the rest will follow.

Part 1

Lore, it is odd. Lore is knowledge and understanding. Lore is also acquired – not given – simply because understanding comes from effort expended in the pursuit of understanding. It is one thing to know that a stone has the power to stabilize emotions but another altogether to understand what that means. The limits and nature of its power are basic, uncomplicated, but the application of that power is requires more from us. To use a strained analogy: we all know fire is hot, but “hot” is limited description of its nature. Fire is not simply “hot”, it is a consumptive force which emits heat and light and which will transmit itself by heat- it expands and does so though what it touches. Understanding that it is not simply “hot” allows you to build steam engines. In the same way “hot” is inadequate and limiting description of fire, so too is it inadequate to say “it makes steam engines”, for it will also cook your food. If you say such and such ritual implement has such and such function you’re not adequately expressing its nature, only describing one fascist of its application. Assuming that something is as simple as it seems or that it falls into some generic category fails to do the object justice. It is also not lore.

Lore is active. Applying an understanding of what you see and know, but it is also the slow acquisition of understanding of the thing. Lore is gained, in my experience, by slow meditation on the observations of something; much time and effort to ferreting out each and every nuance of it. Metaphysically, there are very few things that are simply a thing.

An acquaintance with neo-plutonic thought and its rituals is helpful in acquiring lore. They spent much time and effort learning to navigate the High Plains of Thought where exist all such abstractions that people like to toss around without knowing exactly what they mean. We often use a kind of short hand to explain ourselves and the world and in that we do not err for it has its uses. But it also numbs us to seeing things in many ways. Those of us who use magick separate ourselves from others by virtue of our occult knowledge by which we discern the uses of stone and metal and plants. Is it therefore not so, that understanding of an object will gain us a further separation, this time from occultists who simply use pre-establish correspondence? I hold that it is so. A careful examination of the nature of an object will grant you much understanding. It is important to include people, also culture, in your meditations as people who make lore are as often as not affected by some confluence of their own philosophy and the role some object plays in it.

There is no need to “gather experimental data” as it were because you have the rich and long history of humanity which has done that for you. It is not as wise as it is often thought to mix and match parts of a ritual by random or some hypothesis. I do not like trial and error. It is an approach that eliminates possibilities rather than illuminating them. Try a talisman with this metal rather than the other and see what happens. If nothing happened – as is most often the case with that approach – you have only learned what it is not good for. Learning what it is good for requires you to think about the object. I do not hold that anything more is needed than the object itself and its history. No experiments or systems of classification other than your own. I do not suggest that you toss out your copy of Libber 777 or other such tables. I am merely suggesting that while saying that “gold is the metal of the sun” is convenient short hand, it is good to know what common properties lead people to associate the two. Meditation on gold is easy- get some gold examine its properties, read about how people viewed it, and the effect on those who hold it. Meditation on the sun though, is hard, so alien is it to us, but its effects are very observable and very well known. Pondering the effects and their meaning to those it affects is like pondering the effects of fire heating water.

On the point of Libber 777 and other charts, I would like to speak on how they are constructed because it illuminates my earlier points on philosophy and culture. Systems of herbal correspondence can be one of three general classification systems. The first is an astrological/elemental system where in the physical properties of the plant, part used, locations grown, time to seed, sent, and taste are all considered in classification. The second system is based on each plants effects on the body- most western apothecaries used this system to make medicine up until the mid 20 century. The last system classifies herbs according to long standing tradition. For example, some flowers where associated with temples of Greek and Roman gods seemingly for no other reason than they smelled good and the gods seemed to like them, thus did a god take a flower under their domain.

In the west the astrological element system is most used, but the east also has one. Instead of element they use yin and yang, with expressions in wood, metal, water, air, earth. That system is called Heavenly stems and earthly branches. It looks at parts of an herb or any object and based on many, many criteria places it in a Heavenly stem and earthly branch. What separates the Chinese system from others is that is subjects use metaphysical as well as physical properties to make a set of associations.

These are the classification systems people are most familiar with. Though they all look different and use different words, they all have one thing in common. That one thing is interpretation. A block of wood is just a block of wood, the metaphysics, energy composition, it’s all the same. The interpretation is all that changes. People will interpret by their worldview. I use worldview in a slightly technical way to mean a cohesive set of values, beliefs, and traditions (also the justifications) belonging to a culture by which members order their experience to give meaning. Slightly technical, it is also an accurate description of what people do naturally. They take what they have and use it to find meaning in what they experience. When the person has a sense of what lies below the skin, their experiences are more profound, and will require something extra than the every world view to make since of it. For that reason they establish systems for classifying the new experience – tables of correspondence. Though they are not the same as the old mundane worldview it is also not wholly different from it. After all the people who made the new system also lives the worldview of their culture. They will make assumptions and references which they will never notice because everyone – they are aware of – knows what they mean. For that reason the two are never completely separable.

Because people are not independent of their culture or worldviews it is also good to ponder about people, culture and life. They are both simple and complex, as is everything else. A person is a person, and life just is. But that person on the level of ideas, energetically, and spiritually, each is particular, useful in their own way. Life has many facets to it and it is much fun to ponder. It is also useful because an object, even one with great occult power, which is not used, is very hard to understand. People have been around a while now and been using things in every fashion conceivable and within every sort of world view for a very long time. What they have accumulated is lore. They do not call it “lore” but none the less it is an understanding of hard won knowledge.

Again I must stress that they are bound to their worldview and so will only describe an interpretation of the fundamental truth of the object. If you asked a mountain how to cleanse a crystal it would likely say you must bury it in the earth for ten days. We all know that there are other ways, but the mountain is limited by its view. Ask an enlightened being how to do it and it would likely give some gibberish about the nature of taint and its causes. No doubt it is true, but less useful than sticking it in the ground. Limitations are useful and so it is not a bad thing that culture decides the use of an object, but we should acknowledge that it is at least so. Adopt whatever system you like but understand where it came from.
You can of course make your own lore; or rather you can discover it. To say that you can “make” lore implies that you are responsible for the properties you seek to describe. This in turn suggests a psychological approach to magick which is counter to my experience. When some new facet of reality is discovered embodied in an object this is new lore. Lore that is interpreted according to some deep understanding is also new lore. Indeed, lore exists – or can exist – for any object, experience or phenomena. Even things that are very boring have a use.

Transmuting karma is distracting. It is also painful on an emotional and even physical level. When you’re working though a blockage it is the only thing that is on your mind. That makes every day activities quite troublesome. I've been a dattle brained idiot for weeks now. Every so often a rather forceful event occurs and I need to spend the next 20 minutes dealing with it. It is not terribly realistic to look for support and understanding in others either, they try to avoid karma and so will repress the emotional damage it has cased. They will tell you to either to “focus”, to “get your shit together”, which is far from helpful, or at best give a concerned nod and the insightful “that sucks”. Now I know why sages go off to the mountains for this sort of thing.

I have been working on the idea of a mixed alter for a goodly while and seem to have hit on something worth talking about. The Taoist Alter consists of two sub-alters. The central (internal alter), and the earth alter (external). On the back central alter there are statues of the four directional gods and I personal god. My idea was to substitute the personal god statue with a Yorishiro of white coral. Acting as a seat where the summoned god my sit fits the style of my magick better than the recommended picture of the first taoist of the celestial master cult- also I am not using the celestial master system so I feel no obligation to them.