Awake in the Starlight

You've probably all heard the saying "As above, so below; as below, so above." There are several variations of this saying. One of the more interesting ones for me is "As within, so without; as without, so within." This is true in multiple ways. If you want to get a sense of its meaning through experience, try the following exercise. De-clutter your room, and if possible, your house. Also, if you are able to, de-clutter your office and any other environment you are in for significant portions of your day. Then, practice thought-observation and compare how cluttered your mind is with how cluttered your mind used to be before you de-cluttered your environment. There's a good chance you'll find that when you spend lots of time in a cluttered environment, your mind will also be more cluttered; and, when you de-clutter your environment, your mind will become de-cluttered as well. When a society is possessed by a consumer culture, the society's group m...

We all know that the presence of arrogance in someone's personality is a glaring indication that said person is not very far along the magical path. The purpose of this post isn't to state that this is the case, but to shed some light on why this is the case. The simple reason is that how far along the magical path you are depends largely on how balanced you are, and arrogance is a major imbalance. There are other ways of looking at the issue though. Bardon tells us that four qualities are needed for success in magic - knowledge, courage, volition, and silence. He calls these the four pillars of Solomon's temple, which represents the fully developed and realized magician. Arrogance is a sign that a person lacks at least two of those qualities - knowledge and courage. An arrogant person does not know his shortcomings, flaws, vices, and negative traits. Furthermore, an arrogant person does not have the courage to analyze himself, because somewhere in the back of his mind ...