"Andin man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the mostcomplex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe."

-IsaacAsimov

"Themost merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of thehuman mind to correlate all its contents. Welive on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas ofinfinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."-H.P. Lovecraft

"Likemost living creatures, the pigeon quickly associates the pressing ofthe lever with the reward. But when a timer releases a seedautomatically every 20 seconds, the pigeon wonders, what did I do todeserve this? If it was flapping its wings at the time, it willcontinue to flap, convinced that its actions have the decisiveinfluence on what happens. We call this "pigeon superstition"."

-Nemo Nobody, portrayed by Jared Leto in the film Mr.Nobody.

This chapter isgoing to be the longest and probably most confusing part of themanuscript. It's taken me forty years to get a good understandingof magick, and I'm trying to impart it all to you over the courseof one normal-sized book. You don't necessarily need to understandeverything I'm about to get into in order to truly become a Wizard,but if you can hold out, it will only help. Then, in the nextchapter, we'll break into how to use magick to make money, and thenext chapter will move on to how to cast love spells.

You in? Good,because this chapter is going to bridge the gap between science andthe supernatural.

You'rethe Best... Aro-oooooound!

Inthe last chapter, we started with Star Trek, and this was by design.It may turn some people off,but Star Trek, despite how easy it is for shows like Futurama to makefun of it,is actually a very deep and powerfully meaningful show whichincorporates some occult philosophies and symbolism.Most importantly, however, is how it shows a group of peoplewho are, as best we can tell from what we're given to see of them,almost always at the very top of their game. It shows a society ofpeople who have gone through enough terrible situations on their ownplanets that they have decided to straighten their own mess outbefore carrying it with them out into the universe.

Ourdaily lives coincidentally don'ttake place on board intergalactic starships traveling across vastsolar systems in a matter of seconds. As such, we don't exactly needto always be at the top of our game in this daily struggle. If yourlife and the lives of hundreds of others aren't dependent on youpressing the exact right button at the exact right time while yousimultaneously trust hundreds of other people to be doing the sameelsewhere on the ship, it doesn't seem necessary to be perfect.

Butnow, think for a second about everyone you've ever respected. Thinkof the people they respect.In fact, you're reading this right now because you picked up a bookabout how to be a Wizard, so think of every magick-wielding characteryou've ever known of that has the respect of other people in theirworld.What is the one thing that defines all of them?

Thisoverwhelming respect of everyone around them comes partly due to thefact that, no matter how flawed they may be, they always do theirbest to project themselves as being at the top of their game. Byhaving at least the appearancethat they are in control of the universe, they actually dohave some level of control.

HowFluffy can you get?

There's a thingreferred to as "Fluffy Magick"in more modern pagan and witchcraft circles. This is colloquiallydefined as any special power little kids want to have because theysaw it in an anime or a comic book and thought it was cool.

There's a reasonpeople are so intrigued by this "fluffy" magick, which includesthings like throwing fireballs, flight, "glamours,"mind control, telekinesis, and invisibility.Sure, it's because many of us grew up with fictional stories ofcharacters who have all these abilities and more, and wield themskillfully and with great effect upon their foes, but the underlyingreason may be surprising despite its simplicity.

We're tired of beinggarbage, and of living in a world where garbage things happen to usall the time. Even when things aren't bad to such an extreme as beingtwenty seconds away from crashing your ship into a supernova at alltimes, people still treat us badly, call us names, have nicer thingsthan us and let us know it,and generally put us down without reason or sympathy. It's justpart of the world in which we live. Having such amazing abilitieswould certainly help give us an edge to make us better thaneveryone else.

Evenif we didn't have any real use for those powers,we would want to have them just because other people don't, and itwould make us better than everyone else.Not even using them, just havingthem would make usgreater than the rest of the world. Why?

Because they wouldmake us truly unique.

WhyMost People Will Never Obtain This Power

There's two goodreasons you not only don't have this power, but why you've neverheard of anyone who did, and why it's very likely that neither younor anyone else ever will. That reason, let me just assure youimmediately, is NOT that magick isn't real.

Far from it, infact...

The reasons are thatyou don't believe you can do it,and nobody else believes you can, either.

If we were to doaway with the idea that magick is completely unscientific andimpossible, what remains? If magick were real,what is the thing keeping people from obtaining it, or others comingto learn or even hear about it?

Everything.

I Am Jesus Christ

Iwas born in a small town outside a city where the rich and powerfulonce played, but which had allowed the trappings of a modern societyto come in and turn it into a commercial tourist trap. My father wasa carpenter, and my mother was a bit of a whore.When I was a small child, my parents brought me to a number ofdifferent churches from a number of different denominations, since myfather was a Catholic and my mother grew up Baptist and Lutheran.

In each case, I waskicked out of Sunday School for asking too many questions theteachers didn't want to answer, and when moved up to actual Sundayservice I would annoy the pastor by questioning his interpretation ofthe Bible whenever he stopped with a hypothetical question. I barelyremember this myself, but my parents were both proud and mortifiedenough to remember it for me for years.

I have always feltthat I was sensitive to the supernatural, as well.When I was seven, my brotherstarted me down a lifelong path of studying and practicing alternatetypes of spirituality, religion, philosophy, and thought. I spentyears of my life traveling the Americas learning what I could where Icould, and helping out where I found people who needed it.

I attended Baptistseminary, and although I was beloved by much of the faculty, staff,and student body, the administrators of the college hated me,challenged me at every corner, and conspired to get rid of me. Theysuspended me several times, but every time I came back, I had newfollowers from the secret whispers that had been spread about me.They couldn't stop me. Eventually, they had to expel me, destroy mywork, erase my credits, and exile me to Saint Louis where I becamehomeless.

After a "40 yearsin the wilderness" period where I even got married for a littlewhile and tried living a regular-old, boring-old life, I now live asthe Wandering Wizard Simon Kalimanus.

I'm sure you see thecomparisons there. I haven't died yet,but there have been a few miracles along the way.

Now, what in theworld do I mean by havingwritten this section? One can understand how this might seem a bitodd, given that most people who proclaim that they are Jesus Christturn out to be sociopathic lunatics and make groups of people drinkpoisoned Kool-Aid. However, unlike probably just about anyone elsewho has ever proclaimed to be Jesus Christ, it's my intention here totell you that you are also JesusChrist.

TheWord is God

This is where it maystart to get a bit difficult. I assure you, all the theological andscientific information I'm about to throw out is going to form thebasis for understanding how magick works and is real. It isn'tnecessary to understand it inorder to be able to use magick in the real world, but it is veryhelpful in understanding how it works, and how it even possibly canbe so.

Let's start byflipping what you already know. Genesis chapter 1 doesn't describe anall-powerful entity creating the universe... it's the story of a babyopening its eyes for the first time.

No, really. "AndGod separated the light from the darkness..." Picture a solid fieldof black, and suddenly a slash of light appears and gradually growsto fill your field of view.

Before we get there,let's scoot up a bit further into the Bible and take a look in JohnChapter 1, where it says "In the beginning was the Word, and theWord was with God, and the Word was God."

In Strong'sConcordance of the King James Bible, an interlinear lexicon of theBible involving numbers linkedto their Hebrew, Greek,and Aramaic original translations, there are three major definitionsof the word "Word" alone, with twelve sub-classifications,one of which is:

"InJohn, [the word] denotes the essential Word of God, Jesus Christ, thepersonal wisdom and power in union with God, his minister in creationand government of the universe, the cause[s] of all the world's lifeboth physical and ethical, which for the procurement of man'ssalvation put on human nature in the person of Jesus the Messiah, thesecond person in the Godhead, and shone forth conspicuously from Hiswords and deeds."

Thisseems like a whole lot of speculation and internal biases rather thana definition, and is putting a lot more on Jesus than I think heprobably wanted to have put on him.It's also putting Words in the mouth of the original author of thebook of John.

Theparticular meaning of the word Logos (λόγος)here was actuallycoinedby the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who used the term to refer tothe plan or reason guiding the "ever-changing universe" 600 yearsbefore Christ is said to have been born. When, in the Old Testament,Moses talks to the Burning Bush,it tells him to go to the people and tell them that I AM THAT I AMis the one that sent him. This is a reference to a Hebrew phraseאֶהְיֶהאֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה,which means "I am who I am." Clearly.

Notquite that clear, actually...

Inancient Hebrew, every word, even every letter position, hassignificant meaning, and when these words were aligned it actually isa powerful magical phrase which means something along the lines of "Iwill be what I will be," "I create what I create," "I am theone who Always Exists," or "I will cause to be what I will causeto be."

Jesusknew something about this, as manyBiblical scholars agree he traveled around the known world at thetime learning from philosophers and mystics of both Eastern andWestern traditions,and in his travels he learned the thing that brought him to the samestate of understanding as the Buddha, and many of the Hindu mystics,and Sufi masters, and shamans of old before him. This state is knownby Buddhists as "Nirvana," or enlightenment.

Regardlessof whether or not they were real living individuals, the Bibleexplains that Jesus and Moses, just like the Buddha and these manyothers all throughout history since the dawn of humankind, both hadtheir moments of realization that they were God.

Thedifference between Moses and Jesusis that, as he was going down the mountain after achieving thisrealization, Moses decided he couldn't tell everybody that they wereGod, because he felt he would lose control of them. According totheologians, he was afraid they would go insane and do whatever theywanted to. And he was right! When he got back down Mount Sinai, theywere all having a wild orgy around a golden calf.

Now,in most Sunday Schools, you'll be threatened with this storyand told that people are just terrible evil animals that willimmediately revert to being pieces of garbage on a whim withoutguidance and leadership. While this is kind of true... people do needgood guidance and leadership untilthey become who they were meant to become... there's a question herenobody ever asks...

Whobuilt the goldencalf?

Whoeverthat jerk was, he ripped off Moses' idea before he got a chance touse it!

Yousee, Moses knew the truth... He felt powerful as he descended themountain, like he could do anything he wanted. He had, after all,just come to realize he was God.By exploring the world and finding himself within it, he had come tounderstand that he wasn't just in it... he WAS it. He was everything,and everything was him. But, he was a leader. He had people under himwho had followed him out of Egypt,and he had seen how the people therehad been guided together by Pharaoh to become an overwhelminglypowerful force with the power to create whatever Pharaoh couldenvision.

Hedesperately wanted that power.

Thepower to rule menis what drove Pharaoh and his ancestors. Moses wanted it, and he didexactly what the "honeybees" we talked about previously warnedtheir fellow Egyptians and future people everywhere about. He knewthe people wouldn't believe that he was God...

...sohe made upa God to serve as a banner under which to gather them.

Jesusknew this,and wanted to tell people the opposite thing. He had faith in people,that they were inherently good and would do right, and that theywould be able to outnumber those who were not good if the need arose.Moses and whoever built that golden calf had the opposite idea, andthey turned out just like all those who had come before them allthroughout time.

Allthe way back to the first shamans that stopped using their influencein society to try to help others and give power to the powerless,they replaced these noble pursuits with psychological methods basedon using archetypal concepts found in the natural world that meantsomething to humankindin a way they could use to reprogram the populace and shoehornthemselves into power. People who have had this knowledge have triedhard to make sure other people never came to understand or find outthey were also Gods.

Thinkback on all of human history.

Itis littered with ideas being turned into banners under which to forcepeople to think and act a certain way, and wars and slavery andinquisitions and torture have always been the result.

Thisis exactly what Jesus was trying to fight against, and it isn't justthat one verse taken out of context,but in every red wordin the Bible. Nevertheless, they turned Jesus himself into a banner.Even if he was not a real person, it's extremely likely was anamalgamation of several itinerant Palestinian rabbis traveling aroundsharing an occult view of the Scriptures at the time. Such wanderingmystics were very common at the time, and there is more historicalevidence to show they existed. In this case, either Jesus was a realperson, a complete fabrication, or a character composited fromseveral real orfictional people.

IfJesus was in fact not the person he is made out to be by modernreligions, but rather a character designed for some purpose oranother, the purpose in question would seem to be so the dying RomanEmpire might have a means through the up-and-coming religion beingspread by thisrabbi,which wasbecoming very popular, to cling to the ideas and authority of theEmpire after its fall... and fill its coffers... and alas, what wehave in its place is today called the HolyRoman CatholicChurch.

TheWord that Jesus, should such a man have existed, was trying to spreadwas lost, hidden again in plain sight just like the forgottenstencils of honeybees in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and replacedwith a system which further enslaved everyone from that point onward.

TheKingdom of Heaven is Within You

Surely,you've heard this phrase associated with the Bible.It's found in Luke 17:20-21...

"Andwhen he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God shouldcome, he answered them and said 'The kingdom of god cometh not withobservation, neither shall they say Lo, here! Or Lo, there! Forbehold, the kingdom of God is within you."

Let'slook at the entire first section of John, chapter one,to understand this. It says:

"Inthe beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Wordwas God. All things were made by him, and without him was notanything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was thelight of men. And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darknesscomprehended it not."

-John1:1-5

Thispassage, when you look at it in the original Greek,says this:

"Inthe first order of thingswas the idea. Because of theseideas, the idea came to be aligned withGod,and the idea came to be God. This idea was in the first order ofthings with God."

Thenext word is very interesting... "Pan" means "All Things,"and in the Strong's description it says it includes not just allthings collectively, but individually. It's where we get words like"pantheon,""pantheism,"and "pansexual..."

It'salso the name of the Greek god of fertility and excess that appearedas goat manwho held constant drunken orgies.

"Allthings came into being because of that idea,and without it no one thing came into being that came into being. Inthis idea was a vital force, and in this vital force was a light forhumanity. And it shone on ignorance,and the ignorance couldn't grasp it."

Thisdefinitely sounds like quite an idea. An idea that could change theworld, in fact. Unfortunately, a lot of the world is pretty dark,and it doesn't get it today any better than it did when Jesussupposedly tried to spread it, just like many people before him hadtried and failed.

Andthat's where we find ourselves today.

OnSacred Geometry

Nowwe're going to start exploring how that "Word" or "idea"becomes Magick.

Theancient Greeks think they came up with a system of understandingphysical existence that actually existed long before them, butthrough the work of people like Pythagoras,they were able to rediscover a system that had been in use since wefirst started scratching images in the flickering lights of caves.

Thereare five primary shapes in the universe that we have come tounderstand in our three-dimensional experience. These correspond tothe dice shapes you might see in a standard game of Dungeons andDragons. These are known collectively as the Platonic Solids, thetetrahedron,the cube,the octohedron,the dodecahedron,and the icosahedron.The decahedronis not one of the solids, as there is a logarithmic increase in thenumber of sides.

Now,we're going to mention the Bible again for a second, going all theway to the very first lines.

"Inthe beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth waswithout form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God saidlet there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, thatit was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."

Let'slook at how that REALLY relates to the creation of theUniverse.

It'sThe Circle of Liiiife!

Whenwe look at the story told by sacred geometry, it paints a verysimilar picture. Visualize if you will an extensive, empty planewhere everything is darkness and nothingness forever in alldirections. When the first Consciousness awoke for the first time, asphere of light and influence radiated out from around it. Draw thisas a white circle in the darkness of the nothingness everywhere else.This circle represents everything that entity could see andexperience from where they were just floating there in the middle ofthe void, their personal sphere of influence and observation.

Oncethat first consciousness realized there was nothing much to see inthat little area of void, it began branching out. It moved to thefirst border of its area of influence and stopped to look around fromthis new vantage point.

Now,if we look at this "first consciousness" as a "first molecule,"we know the path this entity would have taken. It would have beenperfect, elegant, as one would expect God to be. It would have moveddirectly to the next point along the circle where its circumferencenext met the circumference of the other circle.

Fromhere, draw another circle at that junction, the same size as theother and with its center on this new point. Having completelyinvestigated these new surroundings, God moves to the next junction.It continues doing this until it has completed one fullcircumnavigation of its original area of influence, and thencontinues on exploring its borders in this way adinfinitum. However, for now we'reonly really concerned with this initial pattern. This honeycomb-likepattern is also seen, like the bee symbol, all throughout the ancientworld, going all the way back to cave art. It is this pattern andmany connected to itwhich make up the corpus of occult study known as Sacred Geometry.

Now,if you take this pattern, which was called the Seed of Life,and you draw a line between every single one of these conjunctionpoints, you have what is known as Metatron'sCube.

Thisassortment of lines, when completed, containsthree-dimensional renderings of allfive Platonic solids...

Goahead... look deep.

Thisrendering shows how the universe is, as modern scientists,mathematicians, psychologists, and some Enlightenment-eraphilosophers have said, a three-dimensional projection on what isactually a two-dimensional plane.

That'show the world works when you put yourself at the center of it. Inthis type of model for the universe, we build the entire universearound us, and everything is completely a product of you being THEGod creating it around you as you go. It exists solelybecauseyou opened your eyes and looked.This is called hardsolipsism,and it was Rene Descarte's pronouncement of CogitoErgo Sum,"I think, therefore I am," that best explains this idea,that you could just be a brain in a jar somewhere, the only thingthat exists, and definitely the only thing you can be sure actuallyis real and is capable of live, active thought processes. Most of thetime, when hard solipsism comes up in religious debate, the onlydebate is "Uhhh, well, that's hard solipsism, we can't really provethat," just because it's uncomfortable to think about.

Couldyou really just be a figment of somebody else's imagination? Iseveryone you know and love just a figment of yours? You'd never beable to tell for sure, because for all you can tell, you areactually nothing more than a mind experiencing the universe as youperceive it.

Let'slook at another theory for now, one that not many people often thinkabout because they encounter these negative stigmas and get turnedoff to looking any deeper.One that will come back full circle and answer this problem of hardsolipsism. And for that, let's move on to...

TheQuantum World!

Inquantum physicsthere is a well-known experiment known as the Double SlitExperiment.Here's how it works: If you were to fire paintballs wildly at a wallfor a long period of time, you would expect the wall to eventually bea big circular mass of paint, with the paint being a lot thicker inthe center and thinning out as it gets further outside the range ofwhere you were firing.

Puta barrier in front of the wall with a slit on it, and the wall behindit will now just have one solid strip of paint on it, with themajority of the paint being on the barrier.

Addtwo slits in this wall, and you would get that pattern of paint onthe barrier, but there would be two slit-shaped areas of paint on thetarget wall now instead of just the one.

Youwith me so far?

Basically,the two-slit experiment started with the same premise: fire electronsthrough a barrier with two slits on it, and the other side shouldshow the same pattern, because electrons are tiny quantum particles.However, when they tried the experiment, this is notthe result they received.

The"particles" that made it through the slits to the wall formed aninterference pattern,like a wave of water would have produced.

Thinkif you had the wall and the barrier half-submerged in water anddropped a drop of water on one side of the tank... the ripple wouldhit the two slits, and then break into multiple ripples on the otherside. The two ripples would then continue on the other side, butwould interfere with each other, and each of the strips formed on thewall would be from where one ripple met the edge of the next.

That'swhat happened.

"Hotdamn," said the scientists,"that's weird."

Whenthey tried to figure out how to proceed, they decided the electronsmust be interfering with each other before they got through theslits, ricocheting off each other and making a ripple on thisside ofthe slits. To figure out if this was true, they tried firing only oneelectron at a time.The interference pattern continued. The only possible solution atthis point was that theelectron was somehow interfering with itself.

Scientiststhought this was absolutely crazy-go-nuts at this point, so they setup their sensor devices and tried to measure the exact point at whichthe electron reached the barrier and caused the self-interference.What they found blew their minds.

Thepattern on the wall, when observed,became a regular two strips, as theyexpected was going to happen from the beginning. The very act ofobserving the experiment changed it to show what the scientists wereexpecting to see all along.

Thistakes place because of what's called the HeisenbergUncertainty Principle. In simple terms, the movement of any one thingis described as a vector with two components: speed and direction. Inthe case of quantum particles, trying to measure one distorts themeasurement for the other, so the more detailed you try to get yourreadings, the more distorted you make all the other readings you'retrying to get.

Butthat doesn't explain the sheer wildness of the Observer Effect.

Thisexperiment and some of the other ideas that have grown out of quantumphysics led to physicist Erwin Schrodingerto come up with his famous "Schrodinger'sCat" thought experiment. He started the experiment by suggestingyou take a cat and put it in a box along with a jar of a poison gas.This poison gas would be connected to a trigger that could go off atany time randomly.Schrodinger said that if you were to close this box, and you were nolonger able to confirm if the cat were alive or dead visually untilyou opened the box and found out for absolute certain, the cat wouldbe both alive and dead at the exactsame time. Once you open the box,you collapse the wave function (ie. break down the mechanism by whichthe interference pattern was seen on the wall in the two-slitexperiment by making a measurable observation) and the cat, at thatmoment, becomes either alive or dead, for real.

Untilthen, the cat is both alive, and dead, and every possible state inbetween.

"That,"Schrodinger said to his colleagues, "is why all y'all are insane."He came up with the experiment specificallyto show how crazyquantum mechanics is. AlbertEinstein himself called the idea of quantum entanglement"spooky action at a distance,"and said of quantum physics that he didn't believe Godplayed dice.

ManyWorlds, Many Universes

Wheneveryou see anyone try to dismiss this idea, they will tell you that youjust don't understand quantum physics and aren't thinking logically,but then will use phrases like "that's what I'm comfortablewith."

TheCopenhagenInterpretation of this phenomena explains that nothing actually hasany actual properties until you examine it on a quantum scale,and that the only way to truly determine something's properties is byusing a wave function.

There'smany more interpretationsof this,but there is one which, along with the Copenhagen,affirms what I've written here in regards to the reality of naturebeing at the heart of the individual observing it.It is called the Many Worlds Interpretation.

Accordingto the Copenhagen Interpretation, prior to the electron beingmeasured, it had no identifiable properties. Before it was measuredit was free to go through whichever slit it was going to gothrough. However, something much weirder happens with the Many WorldsInterpretation. According to it, immediately before reaching thewall, the electron suddenly creates a series of possible newuniverses in which the electron either interferes with itself,doesn't interfere with itself, or some superposition of everypossible state between the two.

Breathethat in for a second.

Somethinghappens. Or nothing happens. Or EVERYTHING happens...every single time anything happens.

Oncesomething happens,whatever it was that happened breaks off into its own distinctuniverse of new possibilities. Each possibility in that infiniterange of possibilities stems from the one electronat the momentthat it split. At that moment, it becomes a cloudof possible universes. An infinite number, in fact, as there were aninfinite number of possibilities to begin with and each one madetheir own branch of sub-possibilities.

ABig Change of Pace

Jesusused parablesin his teachingsto explain his ideas to people for a very good reason. By doing this,he was able to connect the stories he was telling to the people in alanguage that meant more to them. He speaks to people in terms theyunderstand, like fishing and farming and the types of people doingthe types of occupations and activities they might see on aday-to-day basis.

Thisis often the best way to talk to people when trying not just to teachthem something, but when trying to get them to realize it on theirown.This is something nobody can really teach you, but it's something youhave to come to pick up with experience. It's still one of the bestway to get people to understand you... by meeting them where they areand talking about it in terms they understand and can relate to.

WhenI talk about quantum mechanics, Richard Feynman and I would both tellyou we don't know a damn thing about what we're talking about. Meeven less so, since Feynman was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize,and my professional credits include hotel accountingand preaching. I have studied it on my own for about twenty years,reading from the likes of Feynman and the other pioneers of the work,and some more modern scholars like Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking,Roger Penrose, and many others, and so I have a bit more under mybelt than people who read a magazine article and then try to tell youquantum physics proves their spiritual beliefs, but I still will bethe first to tell you I'm not qualified to tell you a damn thingabout quantum mechanics.

Sothe question remains, why would I use the most difficult subject inthe world, one which I'm not even qualified to use, as an exampleparable here?

YouAre the God of Absolutely Nothing

Ifyou listen to a lot of debates between Deistsand atheists, you will often hear the argument come down to bothsides essentially saying "You don't know what you think you know.What I'm saying is correct, and what you're saying is wrong. You justaren't thinking outside your own little box." The atheists say theChristians are stopping at the Bible,and the Christians say the atheists are stopping at science.

Butthat's the Dunning-Kruger Effect we talked about earlier in action.It's a confirmation bias wherein people on both sides seek out onlyinformation to support what they already know, because they don'tthink there's anything else out there that's more useful than whatthey already are sure they know. It all boils down to both sides inany debate making no headway and moving on to a question and answertime during which audience members who already think one way oranother turn their own scathing comments into pseudo-questions sothey can take one final jab at their interlocutor of choice.

Itstill all just becomes two people squawking meaninglessly at eachother for an hour and a half, getting nowhere. Both of them aretrapped in bubbles that they have no intention of leaving.Both are subject to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Now,let's combine the idea of the Dunning-Kruger Effect with the circlesof influence from our chat about sacred geometry from earlier, whenGod was moving across the world creating new areas of influence toexplore and define. Take those circles of influence and turn theminto spheres,and you have arepresentationof every individual point of view. This bubble shows the sphere ofinfluence around each individual conscious mind, wherein theindividual is aware and can immediately perceive and interact withthings around them.

Youare an individual, conscious mind existing in a world where thereare, as we've discussed, an infinite number of other "bubbles"like this, and an infinite number of branching universes constantlybeing generated within those bubbles. As you discover the worldaround you, that area of influence grows and joins with the bubblesof other people,and your mind begins to form a more fully fleshed-out representationof everything elsethatisn't you.

Inthis way, all of reality is a great Venn diagram,with each conscious mind being like a circle on that diagram. What isconsidered "real" are the spots on the diagram where the mostnumber of circles overlap. Things we all agree on, like droppinga hammer on a planet with positive gravity resulting in it falling tothe ground.

Butthere are areas where the circles don't overlap.

Now,let's get back to why I used the most complicated subject possible asa parable to explain what I'm trying to say here. It's directlyconnected to the title of this section...

...rightnow, as it stands, if you are like the other almost 8 billion peopleon this planet, you are a God,but you are one of a bunch of people who are the Gods of AbsoluteDog Crap.

"Aww,geez," you may say,"I thought this book was trying to build me up into a Wizard, notknock me down!" Well, yeah, but you're missing the point. I can'tjust tell you that you are the very God mentioned in the Bible andother religious texts all throughout history, the one that made theHeavens and the Earth, and let you run with it. Believe me, I was theGod of Absolute Dog Crap once as well.

It'spart of the whole journey.

Afterthat little aside, let's finally get into the reason I used quantummechanics as a "simple" example. It was to show you two things:the first was to show you that the Universe actually functions in areally ridiculous way, and the second was to prove to you that youdon't actually know a bloody thing about it.Not even I know it, and I'm the one writing about it, but atleast I know enough about it to write about it.Most people will have never heard about a lot of this stuff beforepicking up this book.

Evenif you were a quantum physicist and knew enough about it to yell atme for being so inelegant in my treatment of it, I'm sure there are alot of things I could talk about that you have no clue about. Do youknow how to dance? Could you program a computer game from scratch?Have you cooked using traditional Indonesian spices? Have you evergone diving off the coast of Hawaii, or sailed under the Golden Gatebridge? Have you hunted ghosts in Virginia, aliens in Arizona, cultsin Rhode Island, and Werewolves in Louisiana?

Haveyou stood face to face with gods, demons, and angels?

Thereis so much stuff out there to see, and know, and do. There isa much bigger world than any of us can know, even those of us whoalready feel we've been around the block a few times. Even a quantumphysicist who has spent an entire lifetime studying the basicbuilding blocks of all reality still hasn't experienced even a verysmall fraction of everything there is to see. There are sunsets atevery possible place you could be standing anywhere on the planet,and a whole range of things to stand between us and those sunsets tobe illuminated by their golden-red glow. From every spot you could bestanding on the shore of any lake or ocean, the full moon casts asilvery path that leads to Avalon.

Youjust need to keep moving your circle of influence out a littlefarther, and then explore that circle as much as possible and keepmoving, finding new things to be amazed and enraptured by in thisstrange and wonderful universe in which we find ourselves.

Rightnow, think about your area of influence. How much of the world haveyou really seen? How many amazing facts about this place we live canyou think up that makes you gleam with hope and anticipation thatthere are so many more such facts, and sights, and experiences, to befound?Howmuch do you really know, and how much of what you think is trueactually is?

Canyou even really tell? Would you be able to, given what we'vementioned about the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

Doyou really deserve to be called God?

Well,yes, you do, regardless of whether you think you do or do not. EveryGod started somewhere.

TheHero's Journey

Sincewe first started telling stories as a species,we have told them according to certain structures that make it easierfor people to remember them and more closely identify with them. Fromthe very first time our species opened its eyes, we have seen thesame symbols repeated over and over again... the sun, the stars, thetrees, the water, the ground... we saw strong warriors and sneeringcowards, we've seen maidens, mothers, and old crones, we saw peoplewho tended to plants, animals, and people, and we saw people whobuilt things up and broke things down.

Allof that got really, really ingrained in us.

Semioticsis the study of signs and symbols and their use and interpretation.Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung came up with a list of twelvepersonality types which show not just the different types of people,but can be applied to different types of anything. When welook out into the world, we see these "types" in just abouteverything, as did our ancestors. These types are the Innocent, theSage, the Explorer, the Outlaw, the Magician, the Hero, the Lover,the Jester, the Everyman, the Caregiver, the Ruler, and the Creator.

Putthat on the backburner for now, because next we're moving on toJoseph Campbell.

JosephCampbell did something very similar, but, unlike Jung's individualpersonalities, Campbell showed the stages of the journey that eachhero in a story has to face on the path they take through their partof that story. Here I'll be going through all seventeen of the stepson this "Monomyth" he mentioned while incorporating a slightlymore modernized versionwhich uses only twelve steps, because I've found somewhere betweenthe two lies a path down which each of the Jungian personalityarchetypes comes to light.

Payattention, because these steps match the steps that lead from beingwho you are now to who you will become. The stages are as follows:

The Ordinary World and the Call to Adventure: In the mundane world, this is where the main character first gets the idea that they want to go on an adventure. The world has just been created, and God has opened his Eye for the first time. Every step of the journey from this point on is God moving around, making the world larger and the story more detailed. In this part of the story, nothing has changed from where it was in the time leading up to this story. At the moment, the hero is an Innocent, being happy (or at least unhappy but content with how things are, like Harry Potter living under the stairs) with life, the universe, and everything being exactly as it is and always has been. But the hero isn't the Hero yet, so...

Refusing the Call: ...because he is not yet where he wants or needs to be, the hero refuses the call outright. This is where Luke Skywalker sees the looming Empire, casting its shadow over everything he knows and loves, and decides to go to Toshi Station to pick up some power converters instead of doing something about it.

Meeting the Mentor / Supernatural Aid: This is where Luke Skywalker first meets Ben Kenobi, or where Hagrid comes for Harry Potter. It indicates the point at which the person's innocence has been lost to the knowledge that the world isn't quite how they thought it was... it's a lot bigger. They move on to become the Sage. Whereas before it was safety and security that was important to them, what becomes important now is gaining more knowledge about the world they didn't even realize existed so they can go be a part of it. Often, although it may not always be necessary, this step comes with a push from an outside source, like ol' Ben.

Crossing the First Threshold: This is the first time in the story where things get hairy. My screenwriting professor called it "the First Door of No Return," because it is the point in the story at which something happens that makes it impossible for the character to go back to the way things were without going all the way around. This is when Luke comes home to find his home and moisture farm burned to nothing, and Uncle Ben and Aunt Beru along with it.

Belly of the Whale : The hero has now moved on from the Innocent and the Sage and is now the Explorer, reaching out to find a solution to the problem that has found them on the road in the first place. They have begun to draw lines between the circles (like Metatron's Cube, as we were discussing it earlier) and make the world into something more physical and tangible on the way to reaching their goal. This is when Luke, Obi-Wan and the two droids are carried away from Tatooine in the Millennium Falcon, and have to climb into the guts of the ship to hide, inside the bigger fish of the Death Star. As the name of the step implies, it isn't always the most pleasant of trips, and it takes them through a hive of scum and villainy, past Imperial blasters, and out into the blackness of space with a pirate and his extremely large, humanoid dog.

Road of Trials: This is the path the hero takes through the world (or the universe, or a galaxy far, far away) that contains trial after trial that set the hero back three steps for every one they take forward. This is Luke and Han getting away from Tatooine only to be captured by the Death Star, saving Princess Leia only to get caught in the trash compactor, and escaping the Death Star only to lose Obi-Wan in his fateful duel with Darth Vader. It is, however, these trials that build the hero up to become what they are supposed to become. This indicates that the hero has moved from the Explorer to the Outlaw, the archetype that first wants to leave its mark on the world, to find liberation from the law and order of the world they knew before.

Meeting With the Goddess: This is where Luke meets Leia. You'll probably notice, especially if you aren't a man, that this section has been using masculine terminology, whereas I've been trying my darndest to be pretty pronoun-neutral thus far. There's a very good reason for that: the symbols have very deep meaning in the human subconscious, and the male and female aspects have very deep, intrinsic importance to our psyche. In most stories, this is the point where the main character meets his love interest, giving them a reason to push onward past all of the trials they have faced in their lives up to this point, and all the ones they know are bound to crop up eventually. However, this is, as we'll see in Chapter Five ("...of Love and Hatred"), not necessarily the way it should go. Success over his trials has shown the Hero that he has power over the world around him, and the Outlaw has now become the Magician. At this point in the story, the hero has found someone to give their life meaning and to give their struggles reason.

Temptation: This point of the story sees the character reaching the point that makes them most likely to give up. It's the lowest point in the story, equivalent to the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus wept tears of blood as he asked God to lift the burden of sacrificing himself for the sins of the world from his shoulders. This is the point at which things go so bad that the hero has never felt so low. It's the Second Door of No Return. In Star Wars, this is the point right after the escape from the Death Star when everyone is feeling the loss of Obi-Wan, who is at this point ostensibly the very last Jedi in the entire galaxy. There is officially no more magick left in the world.

Atonement With the Father: This is the point at which the hero meets whatever their major failing is head-on and defeats it. It's often associated with their father or ancestors or past and a failing within them that has carried on in a kind of "generational curse." In Luke's case, neither Luke nor the audience know that Darth Vader is his dad at this point, and so Luke considers Obi-Wan to be his dad. Obi-Wan wanted to free the galaxy from the tyranny of the Empire, and was killed, just like his aunt and uncle... Luke's major failing was always his fear: his fear of failure, his fear that things would never change and couldn't be made to change, and his fear that he wasn't powerful enough to make change happen.

Apotheosis : Luke sees his father figure die in front of him, and he has his time to grieve about it on the flight to Yavin, but the next time we see him he has finally donned the garb of the Hero at the briefing for the final assault on the Death Star. He has decided to stop sniveling and take over for Obi-Wan, overcoming both of their failures enough to become the Hero he was meant to be from the very beginning who will bring peace and freedom to the galaxy.

The Ultimate Boon: This is the completion of the quest. At this point in storytelling there is normally another Road of Trials as the hero and his allies rush to accomplish the task, but we always knew the Hero was going to make it since he was the Innocent. At this point in time, he becomes the Lover, the one who is loved not only his Goddess, but everyone, and he finally comes to love himself because he has seen his lofty goals, which at one point seemed so small and impossible, be torn wide open for the world to see.

Refusal to Return: This is the point of the story at which point everything is done. After the awards ceremony that finalized Luke's position as the Lover, the film just kind of ends with a token LucasFilm wipe. Sure, there are two more films in the original series , but for right now, we are stuck having to think Luke settles down with Leia and goes back to have a normal-seeming, regular ol' life. Maybe not as a moisture farmer, but even if it's as the King of the Universe, he's still just going to be sitting down doing nothing until the next time somebody tells a story about him. This is when, in the classic mythology, the Hero gets enchanted by the world of magic in which he's found himself and doesn't want to return, becoming the Joker.

The Magic Flight: This is the point where the Hero decides he can no longer stay in the world of wonders and must return to ordinary life, the Final Door of No Return. He must move on from being the Joker, who has cherished excess too long, and must now go back to being the Everyman and find a sense of belonging in the mundane world once more. In Harry Potter, this is when Hogwart's closes at the end of the semester and Harry must go back to living under the stairs.

Rescue From Without: This is a point which doesn't necessarily always exist in stories, but if the Hero has been injured or weakened by his ordeal, he may have to have some help getting through. You'll notice in terms of the three stages that served as the chrysalis for the Hero's Apotheosis, the Outlaw was when he cared more about himself and not being burdened by the rule of law, the Magician was when he was coming to grips with himself and the world around him, thus being neutral, and the Hero had him out to spare others from the very thing that changed him into the Hero in the first place. Because he learned to put the needs of others before his own, others now come to his aid when he is fallen. This is reminiscent in the scene in the first Spider-Man when Joey Diaz, and later many more New Yorkers, stand up to a villain more dangerous than they can handle to protect their fallen hero.

Crossing the Return Threshold: The Hero has come back to the world he originally found to be a place he wanted to leave, but after the journey sees it differently, and decides to spread the Boon they recovered to the rest of the world. At this point, they become the Caregiver, the more feminine and motherly aspect that sees the suffering of others, just like the Goddess did for them at a point roughly opposite this on the cycle, and want to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves by distributing the Boon. This is what happens in The Lord of the Rings, when the Hobbits Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return to the Shire to find it taken over by the evil Wizard Saruman, whom they then soundly trounce.

Master of Two Worlds: This is when the Hero moves from Caregiver to Ruler. He loses his soft, caring edge and becomes a masculine, fatherly power, more strict and iron-fisted than the feminine Caregiver. He sees the people he has cared for become dependent on the new order he has brought, and fervently and even brutally protects it. This is the basis for Conan the Cimmerian after Conan the Barbarian becomes the King of Aquilonia. It is this very point in the story all of life begins to cycle over and over again... the ones who sought freedom because they were fed up with law and order find when they become powerful that the weak ones below them need law and order, and then they supplant that old order with one of their own.

Freedom to Live: At this point, once a new order of law under the Hero begins, he moves on to the final stage of his journey: He becomes the Creator, the one who makes the world after his own image. Fortunately or unfortunately for everyone involved, the story begins again, and the cycle keeps going on and on forever.

Words FromChildhood

These stories havebeen told over and over again in many forms all throughout our longhuman history. Early on, we associated the shapes made by theconstellations with these symbols, and they've been staring at usnightly for time out of mind ever since then. They are now pushed sodeep, deep down in our psyche that we even dream in these symbols.Ever since our parents' parent' parent' parents were children, theyheard these ideas and had them pushed on them over and over for theirentire lives. You now exist in a world created by the lastgenerations, who existed in a world created by the generationsbefore, but no matter how far back you go, those symbols were there.Everything you know has been inundated on you not just from your ownchildhood, but on everyone from time immemorial as far back asconscious minds first looked up to the stars. If you look at everystory you can think of, it utilizes these symbols in very much thesame way, and follows this structure fairly closely.

Thesesymbols have just been twisted and turnedin the time since they were instituted until the present into theircurrent form, which is primarily controlled by whoever is at the headof the society using them. Often what happens is that a communitywill appropriate the symbols forced on it by the larger society andturn it into culture.Culture is that thing that anyone who grew up in anyfamilywill recognize keeps you from being able to understand that anythingelse in the world is good or worth looking further into.

From the very firsttime you open your eyes and begin to see the world around you, whatyou see may be dark and blurry, but as you grow and focus and reachout and see and touch things, you begin to solidify them. They beginto become more and more clear and real to you, and with them thewhole world begins to take shape. Out of the darkness of the void,our world appears. As most adults will attest, these younger yearscan't possibly mean that much to us, because that whole periodof our lives is usually just a mist of obscurity to all but thosewith photographic memories. We see only the symbols, but we don'tknow what anything is yet, so it doesn't really affect us.

As much as it couldif we had better understanding of things, that is.

It isn't until youstart learning wordsfor those symbols that you start cementing them into your head, andthe words come with a weight to them which may not beimmediately obvious. When you first learn the word for "mother,"if your mother was an awful, scary ogre, you may forever have thearchetype of the Caregiver be tainted, leaning more into the realm ofthe Ruler. If your father took off on you when you were young, youmay forever assign the Ruler archetype to something like the Outlawor the Joker. If he was a good father but was taken from you young,he could be the enigmatic Magician.

Your culture alsohas a very big part to play in how you recognize those symbols. Allthese ideas could then taint your entire view of any related symbols,such as "man," "woman," "child," "family," and"love,"potentially for the rest of your life.

Yourheroes at childhood play a part too. For me: Gandalf, Batman,Aragorn, Captains Picard and Kirk,Sherlock Holmes, Yoda and Qui-Gon Jinn,Fox Mulder, John Constantine, Optimus Prime, Gomez Addams, Kermit theFrog, The Doctor, Merlin, Professor X, Jesus, Simon Belmont, Robocop.Atreyu. Conan the Barbarian, Doc Brown, Holden Caulfield, AtticusFinch, Indiana Jones, Abraham van Helsing, Don Quixote, Aslan, HanSolo, Sam Spade... all of them contributed to who I am now.

Finally We GetTo... Just How The Heck Does Magic Work?

That'sthe question we've waded through three and a half-ish chaptersto get to. We've needed this build up for a reason, mind you...everything that came before this will mean something over the courseof the next few chapters, and all the little analogies and scientificexplanations and stories and ancient words of wisdom we've beendropping to this point will begin to take on meaning as they will beused pretty often from now on to explain a good amount of whatremains. You now have the basis you need to fully understand the restof what there is to say.

So now, we havefinally arrived at the question you've been waiting eagerly for me toanswer.

How, in the actualhell, does magick work?

Well, why haven'tyou been listening? I told you already! It was right there in thetitle of the chapter... "Of Mechanics and Psychology." Thefirst part was about Quantum Engineering,and now we're on to...

...

Let'stry to make this as basic as possible. Have you heard of the placeboeffect?There you go, that's magick.

There'seven an opposite, the Nocebo Effect,which establishes that negative effects can also be causedpsychologically, such as if you were told a placebo would also causeheadaches, and it did.

What,you thought there was more to it? Well, yeah, of course there is, orelse I wouldn't have had to write this entire book about it.But,it boils down to the very simple idea that whatyou believe completely is going to happen is going to happen, andwhat you believe completely is not going to happen is not going tohappen.

"Okay," you say,"now I know you're full of it, because I can test this outright now." You then close your eyes, imagine yourself atrillionaire, open your eyes again, and find yourself sitting in theexact same spot you found yourself sitting not very long ago, not onecent richer.

"Case closed,you're wrong. I guess I'm not God."

Well,you aren't all the way there yet. It's easy to understand the "God"part, and for some people it's even easy to accept it, but then whenthey try to apply it to their lives, they miss another, moreimportant word:

"Believe."

In the Biblical bookof Hebrews, chapter 11, it begins with the following definition forthe word faith:

"Nowfaith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of thingsnot seen."

This is commonlymisrepresented as an explicit missive to throw out one's ability tologically reason and just accept whatever dumb trash somebody mightsay in the name of God. That does not really catch the essence of themeaning, although this particular version of the meaning does lenditself well to utilization by less-than-honest religioneers who useit to manipulate peopleinto following what they say blindly and not asking any questionsabout it.

Because askingquestions means you're being influenced by the Devil.

Thedeeper, occult meaning here is quite different, although it stilldoes require bypassing the brain. This isn't as bad a thing, in thiscase, as it sounds. In the first instance, that being the use of theword "Faith" by religions, it's bad because it causes you to openyour mind to someone else to allow them to program it with whateverthey want, which mostusually is not going to be in your best interests.

However,in this second occult meaning of faith, which we will see in amoment, skirting logic becomes a good thing because it allows you toprogram YOURSELF withwhatever you want. Thisis the key component to magick that is overlooked very frequentlyeven by those who claim to be "occultists."Lots of people go online and look up a little ritual to do and callit magick. Let's examine such a ritual, taken from an onlinerepository of Wiccan spells:

"You'llneed:

Piece of rose quartz

Small silver bowl

Handful of pink or red rose petals

Thisritual is performed on the night of the new moon (which means therewill be no visible moon that night). Give the crystal a kiss, and setit in the bowl. Sprinkle the rose petals over it, and set it in awindow for 7 days.

Afterthe week is up, take the crystal and carry it with you to drawromance into your life. Leave the bowl of petals in the window untilthe next new moon."

Now,without trying to hurt anyone's feelings, how exactly is thissupposed to work? By what mechanism does kissing the stone actuallydraw in love?Why seven days, or the new moon,and why does this particular ritual not use candles, or knots, or anincantation, as many others do? Why are there so manydifferent methods and prescriptions for similar spells, and why dosome work or not work for certain people?

Regardlessof the nebulous reasons you may give to explain why you think thismagick works,there is no science that could be done to detect it. We have lookedfor the so-called "energy meridians" and "chakras" throughoutthe body, and have found absolutely no scientificevidencethat any of them exist in any recognizable form.

Themagick stillworks,though. Not everyone reading may agree, but there are those readingthis with a knowing smile right now who understand that magick worksbecause they've seen it happen before their very own eyes,and nobody can ever make them think otherwise. I'm the one writingthis, and I'm saying:

Themagick still works.

Justlike prayers still work.Just like a Mormon gets the burning in the bosom when they ask ifJoseph Smith is the true prophet of God.Just like alien abductees claim to have felt the teleporter-ray andthe anal probe.

"WeSee the World Not As It Is, But As We Are."

Inthis quote by 20th century philosopher Anais Nin, we seethe collection of everything we've talked about coming to take shape.Think about the double-slit experiment... when they tried to measurethe electrons, they saw what they expected to see. When they just letit happen without trying to measure it perfectly, they got a wholespectrum of possibilities.

Butwhen they looked, they saw what they expected to see.

Whenthe Christian looks, they see Jesus. When the Muslim looks, they seeAllah. When the Atheist looks, they see science. When a lunaticlooks, they may or may not see monkeys.

Whena Wizard looks, a Wizard sees the entire spectrum of possibility...

Thinkagain to the whole Venn Diagram of reality we were discussing. Everyconsciousness sees the world a certain way, and reality is where thecircles on the diagram overlap. But the other parts of the circlesall still exist on the diagram, and some of them overlap outside themain area of overlap.

Now,take these two concepts... the concept that you see what you expectto see, and that while reality is the largest overlapping section ofa Venn diagram there are always other smaller individual sectionsthat may or may not be overlaid with others' on that diagram thatstill exist... Now combine them with a third thing we talked about...

...MultiverseTheory.

Theancient Egyptians believedthat the center of the consciousness was the pineal gland, which isshaped very much like the All-Seeing Eye of Ra. It is seated deep inthe middle of the brain. Let's imagine for a second that one singlepoint, your particular pineal gland, were an electron, about to passthrough two slits. If people were there observing it, it may actexactly as they expect it to. If they thought you believed in God,they would expect that when it passes through the slit it would actas though it were being influenced by God or his word. If theythought you were a Buddhist, they may expect it to react as though itwere being influenced by the words of Buddha. However, if there areno other observers to put an expectation on it, that pinealgland-turned-electron is free to make a decision at that moment whichalters the entire direction of reality, creating the branchingpaths of a multiverse in which any infinite number of things arepossible.

Doyou see how all this has related to magick, and your ability toperform it?

So,this gets rid of the problem of hard solipsism... and objectiverealism... and presents a third option: metaphysicalomnipsychism.You aren't the only thing that exists, you are just the only thingthat you can be truly sure exists in your own local presentation ofthe universe. Others exist, in their own self-contained continuum ofreality, in which everything they see in that continuum appearsexactly how they expect to see it, just like everything inyours appears exactly how you expect to see it.

Itdoesn't get rid of the hardest of these questions posed so far... ifI'm the God of my own self-contained universe in an infinitemultiverse full of other such Gods making similar universe-alteringchoices, then why is it that I don't have a million dollars?

Weactually attack that specific problem in the next chapter, butfor now we need to focus on something much more important: Whycan't a God do anything it wants to?

YouLack Confidence

That'sthe reason. You may want something, and you may desiresomething, and you may even need something. You may longfor it, pine for it, hope for it... expect it, even... butnone of that actually makes it so.

Let'suse the example that theistsoften use when trying to prove to an atheist that even the atheisthas faith in some things..."You have faith in a chair that it's going to support you, don'tyou?"

Thatisn't an entirely honest argument. It doesn't compare to God, becauseyou can see the chair, and you can also judge its state andrelative ricketiness. On seeing a rickety chair, you immediately losefaith that the chair is going to be able to support you.

Yourconfidence is based on how rickety the chair looks.Your faith may be misplaced, because a rickety-looking chair may besurprisingly strong and be able to support your weight, while theperfectly-constructed Ikea chair might collapse under you right outof the box.

Similarly,your confidence that you can create a fireball out of your barehands, or turn invisible, or levitate, are nil, because you've neverdone those things before, you don't know of anyone in the real worldwho has, and you live in a world where you have at least the basicknowledge of logic and physics to understand that no one, includingyou, SHOULD be able to do those things under any givencircumstances.

Furthermore,your ability to get a new boyfriend/girlfriend, or a better job, orto get out of a toxic relationship, may be hindered because you neverhave achieved those things, you don't believe you could, and youdon't know of any circumstances in which you even could try.

That'swhy you're here, most likely, reading a book about how to become aWizard even if magick isn't real.

Please,keep in mind, this is only the first step of this journey. Magick isreal, let me assure you: I know for a fact that it is, or elseI wouldn't go through life calling myself a Wizard. But to getthere, you have to start with the null hypothesis... that magick isnot real.

Becauseit also is not.

What IsRitual?

Thefamous occultist Aleister Crowleydefined Magickas "The Science and Art of causing Change in conformity with Will."The idea being that any conscious mind can cause change simply bywillingitto be so. But what exactly is involved with willingsomethingto happen?

A lot of peoplemight be familiar with the famous scene in Quentin Tarantino's KillBill: Volume 1 in which Uma Thurman's "The Bride" uses herwillpower to wiggle her big toe simply by saying "Wiggle your bigtoe" over and over again.This is a perfect example of willpower. At the time I was revisingthe last chapter, I was having some arthritis problems in my ankleand actually accidentally dislocated the ankle while willing it tomove.

Willpower is theability of a person to will something to happen simply by talkingthemselves into believing it.

If you are God, butyou don't believe something is true, it won't be true. You can'tforce yourself to believe that you can levitate if you never haveever done so, don't know of anyone else who you can verify really cando so, and you live in a world where you are pretty damn surenobody can.

Unless of course youcan make yourself believe it...

This is where theritual comes in.

There are a lot ofdifferent types of rituals, in a lot of different cultures. Thechurch mass or service, the prayer at the Wailing Wall or the Dome ofthe Rock, the pagan circle and the Wiccan's candles and pentagrams,the psychic's cardsand crystal ball... even the roar and wave of the crowd at sportingevents and the jingles sung by different colorful brandrepresentatives... are all rituals designed to hypnotize you intobelieving something is true, or possible, or the best.

The Pharaohsunderstood mankind's ability to create whatever it believes in, andso generated their system of religionin order to Capitalizeon that power, attuning it to their own goals, immortalizingthemselves instead of those from whom the power came... the peoplewho worked hard every day of their lives to make it so.

Inthe same way, you have been hypnotized by all of life to believe thatcertain things are and are not absolutely true, and you havehypnotized yourself into believing those limitations are especiallytrueof you, even though often you can see other peoplesucceeding in them... just not you, for some reason.

The ritual is amethod of hypnotizing yourself to realize you're wrong, and toreprogram yourself to believe whatever you want to happen actuallycan, and will.

Inside theRitual

This is where we'regoing to see how a real occult ritual is devised and performed.Rather than pulling one off the internet, I'm going to come up withmy own to show you exactly how it works. For this example, we'll bedoing a money spell.

Ifyou are a non-believer, sit tight. This sectionmay seem to get really weird to you, but don't forget... I promisedyou would be able to read this book and by the end of it should beable to accept what you've read without having to alter yourworldview. That's still in effect, but... this section isgoingto get weird. I will be explaining in common mortal terms right afterI make you raise your eyebrows a bit.

We start off withone of the most useful things you can have: an idea. We decidewe need $100.00 by next Wednesday to enter our prized pig Carlo intothe state fair, so we begin to design a ritual to help draw thatmoney into our life. The next thing we need to grab are a book ofcorrespondences,whatever other resource books we may need,and a notebook, and we sit down ready to plan it out. In many cases,I'll go to my special, consecrated desk which I use solely for mymagickal workings.

Every little actionyou take, right down to where you plan the whole thing out, is animportant step in the process. The very word consecrated meansto be set aside for a particular use. So many things were holy,sacred, and consecrated in Biblical times because they understood thepowerful psychological effect of making something extra-speciallyimportant to you.Every thing you do, down to the smallest movement, should beseen as something sacred, special, and holy, because every tinyaction you take is part of what makes this self-hypnosis work.

We look through ourbook of correspondences, and we see in the "Prosperity" sectionthat jade is a stone related to money, green and gold are colors thatcorrespond to it, cinnamon and patchouli are corresponding herbs, andThursday during the full moon is the best time for such a spell.

I decide to do thisspell, then, at midnight on Thursday, which is great because itsomehow just happens to be the full moon.I write in my notebook a series of steps, starting with all thethings I need to gather and how I need to prepare the areabeforehand. This becomes a framework that I follow carefully as thenight progresses. Often, I write it transliterated in koine Greek, tofurther the intensity of the differentiation between real life andthe magickal world I'm about to enter.

Start with ashower,and change your clothes into something clean. If you have a specificoutfit you wear only for magickal workings, don it now,and even better if you have different colors for different occasions.Set up your altarwith a representation of Earth to the north (in this case, a jadepentacle),Air to the east (in this case, a patchouli incense stick), Fire tothe south (a green candle, which I've inscribed with the astrologicalsymbols for Jupiter and Venusand anointed with cinnamon oil), and water to the West (aspecially-sanctified goblet filled with pure water). A fifth object,indicating the spirit I want to work with, is set near at hand. Inthis case, we're going to be using Bune, a demon from The LesserKey of Solomon and Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.

To work with thisspirit, we are going to copy its sigil from the grimoirewe chose onto a piece of paper.Ordinarily, a Goetic spiritlike this requires a black mirror to work with,but I'm a Wizard, so I'm going to call him straight into the candleflamewhen the time comes.

When midnight falls,I ring a bell to start the process of traveling from our world to theWorld-Between, where Wizards and gods walk. I begin a pre-selectedmusic track of Native American Peyote songs, and begin to call out tothe corners.

Calling to thecorners is a method of coalescing all of the Universe into one smallunderstandable block of information, and is the first major step inthe hypnosis process. The ancient Greeks saw all of reality as beingmade up of four different basic types of matter... Earth, Air, Fire,and Water.The calling to the corners is meant to take the macrocosmand boil it down to the microcosm.It trains you to begin to see things on a large scale as beingintrinsically connected to things on a small scale, which is apowerful axiom known to practitioners of magick from many differenttraditions which we've already mentioned in this book: "As above,so below."

To connect andimplement the corners, you associate them with what somepractitioners call "The Watchtowers," or the four ElementalSpirits, or the four Holy Guardian Archangels... everyone sees themas and calls them something different. Personally, I call them theWatchtowers so I don't have to bother to make such a distinction. Ivisualize them as great towers way off in the distance, forming abarrier of protection and energy around me and my work.

"To the Watcherof the Watchtower of the North, Watcher of Earth, attend to me andground me with your strength and protective power as I begin thisworking. Grant me connection to all things now, and as Iprogress."

As I begin theritual, I hold up the pentacle and recite the words. I then kiss itas whisper a personal greeting and thanks to the Watcher. Next, Ilight the incense and spread it around the room as I recite theincantation.

"To the Watcherof the Watchtower of the East, Watcher of Air, attend to me and fillme with the knowledge of what I am doing and what I must do tocomplete this working. I ask of you to carry my pleas to theheavens."

I then light thecandle, holding it aloft as I speak.

"To the Watcherof the Watchtower of the South, Watcher of Fire, attend to me andgrant me the strength and vitality to progress in this working. Letthe passion burn within me like a fire to see my intention through."

Finally, I pour thewater from a clean source into my goblet. I lift it up and hold it tomy lips, preparing to drink as I speak.

"To the Watcherof the Watchtower of the West, Watcher of Water, attend me and flowthrough me as I work, granting me wisdom and empowering my energiesthrough your currents. Flow through all, now, and bind us alltogether in this working."

I then performwhat's called the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagramto cleanse my own energies and the energies around me. I have a wandwhich is made of ocotillo cactus skeleton and can hold a regularincense stick. As I perform the banishing, I use it to drawprotective pentacles in all four corners of the room. If I'm outside,I draw a protective circle on the ground around me.

Then comes the mostimportant part of the ritual, which is the summoning of whicheverspirit you have decided to work with. In this case, I've chosen Bune,and there are a number of different things you can find in thevarious grimoires which reference him which will assist you insummoning this particular spirit.

The fifth elementused by the Greeks was Aether, or Spirit. This is normally somerepresentation of the spirit, like its sigil, a candle, or a blackmirror. I place this in the middle of the other four.

Again, I'm a Wizard,not some conjurer of cheap tricks, so I do my magick however I pleaserather than following prescriptions in ancient spellbooks. Don't getme wrong... I had to follow a lot of prescriptions before I got tothis point, but once you become more attuned to this type of work andfind your confidence rising, it becomes less important to do so.

How That AllWorks

I pull out thedollar bill on which I'd written the sigil of Bune, and I begin anincantation to summon and control him.During the chant, I burn the bill, and I continue to intone his nameas I stare into the candle and urge him to come forth.

Normally, if I'vedone everything right and seriously up to this point, he'll appear.We'll have our dealing, I send him on his way to get my goalsaccomplished, I say farewell to each Watcher in turn, and then Iclose off the ritual.

But, by this point,you've already heard everything you need to know to understand whythis works, even if you haven't put it together yet, and that reasonhas absolutely nothing to do with any of the things I just said ordid to get to this point.

From the moment youdecide to do magick at all, your brain jumps the ship ofreality a little bit. In mentalism, a lot of the time the mentalistwill start with a variety of "rapport" techniques which includemimicking your movements slightly, holding their body in a certain"inviting" position, and asking you a "yes/no" question theyknow you might answer "yes" to. The reason they do this isbecause it's been psychologically proven that a person who says "Yes"to one thing is statistically more likely to say "yes" in thefuture.

If you can getyourself to start saying "yes, all this weird stuff I'm believingand doing is real and will actually have a real effect on the world,"then you have taken the first steps toward believing it really isreal, and this is the first step to getting magick to actually workfor you.

Symbology is thelanguage our subconscious minds use to make sense of the world. Ourbasic brains don't use words, as this is like a higher-levelprogramming language we installed on our operating systems later. Ourmonkey-mind doesn't have words, so it instead uses symbols.We start the ritual by taking symbols that indicate all of the statesof realityand putting them into a basic symbolic representative image (thepentacle, incense, candle, and cup) which we then have completecontrol over.

We're hypnotizingour subconscious mind into believing that we have complete controlover everything in the universe.

Next comes theprotection. When you're doing this, you're trying to do two things...make sure everything is perfect with the ritual (the outer world),and to make sure everything is perfect with you (the inner world).This drives away all of the negativity and doubt which may make yourworking fail, and also lets you act with a bit more confidencebecause it also programs your mind to feel safe while you're ploddingaround being, for all intents and purposes, a freaking weirdo.

The next step is tocall on the spirit you're trying to deal with. Each spirit in everysystem of belief has been broken down into basic archtypical symbolsas well,and this gives us kind of an intelligence other than ourselves thatwe can trust to get a thing done for us, because they specializein that one thing.

You approach thespirit in this case with a sacrifice, a small amount of money inexchange for a larger amount, a trusting "down payment" or aninvestment toward the desired future state. By doing this, you'resetting higher stakes which makes your mind more on alert becausethere is actually something being lost here.The world has been changed because of your spell already... you'vebecome one dollar poorer. This sets your mind to believe thatyou can, in fact, change physical reality with your spell.

Theentire thing, from start to finish, bends your mind toward creatingthat reality inwhich your will is made manifest. In the ordinary woo-woo terms thatso-called "spiritual gurus" use to try to make this sound morescientific than it really is, you need to alter your vibrations tomatch the vibrations in the universe we are trying to create. Whilethere is no reason nottobelieve this is the way it works,as they use all the science and ideas I've already mentioned to cometo this conclusion, there is no evidence in any way that has everbeen found by science to show that this really ishow it actually works.

You just have tobelieve it does.

One MoreScience-y Idea

There's one morescience idea I should probably mention to help put a nice little bowon all these things we've brought together here to explain howscience explains magick. This concept is called "Occam's Razor."The idea of Occam's Razor is to choose the simplest explanation bynot meaninglessly adding concepts to something in order to explainit. An example of this is the idea that God created the Universe. Ifyou don't know what created the universe,the answer to what created the Universe cannot be God, because thenit only puts another unknown quantity up in place of what was alreadyan unknown quantity.

God created theworld? Okay, fine. Where did God come from?

For an easierexample of this, if you are on the street in downtown New York Cityand hear hoofbeats, you could probably assume that it is a horse,more likely a police horse, as a wild or privately-owned horseprobably wouldn't be walking around downtown New York. You may alsoguess that this is a zebra, and could even justify it by sayingthe zebra could have escaped from the nearby Central Park Zoo.

However, if you wereapplying Occam's razor, you would likely go with the horse, as it hasthe most likely chance of being true by virtue of being thesimplest possible explanation. It could be a runaway zebra, butthe chances are considerably lower, almost infinitesimally so. Inorder to believe it was a zebra, you have to add in unnecessaryconcepts. It still may be a zebra, but what are the chances?

So, how are we goingto apply Occam's Razor to what we've been studying up till now aboutmagick?

Well,it's to back up what I believe is the singlemost important idea youshould take away from this book. People have believed in variousgods, spirits, and deities all throughout history, and have made uplists of their various characteristics and correspondences, and theprayers and rituals required to contact and commune with them.

How did they getthese lists? How did they work out exactly which combination of linesand actions and magick words would entice the spirits to do ourbidding? Clearly they wouldn't have given us this knowledgethemselves, so by what means do all of these magickal symbolsand actions work? By what agency do they take effect in the physicalworld? How have people been usingthese rituals for millennia, and why would they still be using themif they didn't work?

Occam's Razor wouldhave us answer that question in a very simple and sobering way. Thereare no angels, no demons, no gods. The lines and symbols and wordsreally do have no meaning, except in your mind. None of thesupernatural things we practice as a species actually aresupernatural to begin with.

They work because itis our minds working.

Defining"Spells"

As I've alluded to afew times already, there's a very important connection between magickand the concept of words and letters. A spellbook is also known as a"grimoire," or a "grammary," words create reality, and anindividual act of magick is called a "spell..." The word "spell"itself means to write out a word using its component letters, in muchthe same way that casting a spell is the act of performing smalleractions that lead up to a magickal effect.

Aswe also mentioned, when you have a certain preconceived understandingof a word, it changes how you perceive every instance of that word.If you hate your mom, whenever you experience a motherly figure, thechances are good that you will react negatively to them even if theyare perceived by others as good, just because of your preconceptions.They really may need to work hard to prove it to you before youaccept that they aren't like your own mother,in which case you will probably subconsciously assign them adifferent symbol.

The purpose of a"spell" is essentially to change your understanding of the"words" (ie. concepts) being used. If you are used to beingsomeone who does not have money, then the word money, on topof being defined as "the thing you use to purchase goods andservices," may also be defined as "that thing which you don'thave very much of," "that thing which seems to elude you," and"that thing which is supposed to make people happy, but I wouldn'tknow because I don't have it so I'm not happy." It then continuallystays that way, because you continually think about it that way.

The purpose of aspell is to redefine that concept in your head. The ritual opens youup to be in a receptive hypnotic state, and the spell is thesuggestion you put in your head once you are sufficiently suggestive.

How does this work,you may ask? We've tried to go as deep on some of these topics aspossible, and I keep on trying to point out "what is the mechanismby which that works" whenever we talk about supernatural topics. Sowhat is the mechanism by which this works? How do you hypnotizeyourself into believing something so strongly that it actually altersthe physical world around you?

Well, What IsIt?

I could start withanother scientific concept which will only make things even moredifficult, and we already spent the first part of this chapterhammering home a bunch of really esoteric scientific concepts.So, when I tell you there is a current widely-accepted theory that weconsciously hallucinate our reality, well... by now you shouldn't besurprised that the universe works that way, but please, go look it upyourself at your own leisure. I have enough to explain here!

I won't make thingsthat over-complicated... or that very simple... for you. If we weregoing to stop right there, on what's called Simulation Theory,magick would be a whole lot easier to explain, as long as I couldsuccessfully explain that already-super-difficult idea.Once you get that, it shouldn't be a stretch to believe you couldconsciously generate your own lived experience around you as you gothrough it.

But we aren't goingto take the easy route.

We've already used alot of ridiculously complicated and weird examples fromscience,but now we'll try to further explain how this works using onlyconcepts we've already discussed.

How does magick,or self-hypnotizing oneself, make a difference in the outside,physical world which we do not seem to have direct control over?

I'm glad you asked.Simulation theory, for starters.

The real power comesnot from changing not the world around you, but by changing you, andfrom this change on a smaller, personal scale comes a change on amuch larger one.

In The Secret,which espouses a much looser version of this idea designed tocapitalize on book and dream journal sales, the "magick" comesfrom believing not just that you are going to receive what you want,but that the Universe has already delivered and you are living withthose results. It suggests clipping pictures of the things you wantout of magazines and putting them up on a "Vision Board," thenlooking at them every day to enhance the feeling that you already aresurrounded by the things you want.

This is actually thekey to this technique, but like I mentioned, The Secret doesn'treally get it quite right. One could associate it with the Law ofAttraction, as they do... the idea that the desire of certain thingscauses your "vibrations" to actually repel them, but feeling asthough you already have them causes you to vibrate on the samefrequency, which will attract them to you.

But remember, I saidwe were going to make it so even someone who completelydisbelieves in magick can read and accept this book withouthaving to alter their own worldviews too terribly much, if at all. Noscience-accepting person with a sound and logical mind could acceptthat explanation, and no one really should. It would be easy if wecould stop here, but there's more to it.

So, let's do you onebetter...

The RealReason Magick Works

The real reason thistechnique works, not just of wanting a thing, or of pretendingthat you already have it, but of hypnotizing your mind into believingyou already have it, is this: when you believe you alreadyhave a thing, you act like you already have it. Subconsciously, youstart to put it out into the universethat you are the type of person who has what you want. Otherpeople see this, and you and them begin to act and react accordingly.

If you picture themultiverse theory as we described it before, as an innumerable seriesof variable events from the past uniting into one moment of decisionwhich creates an infinite number of possibilities and branches offinto a future based on whichever choice the focal entity makes, youcan begin to understand how many different inputs there are inlife. You like to hold a spoon the way you do because of a millionlittle things that happened to you in childhoodand throughout your life that led up to it.

Taking this in mind,imagine how many different inputs begin to be added when you startgetting the whole world around you involved. To use the more flowerylanguage of woo, you vibrate on a certain frequency, and if youvibrate strongly enough, you cause other things to begin to vibrateand match your resonant frequency, which acts as a magnet and drawsyour desire toward you.

Let's make this assimple as possible for those of you who are still nonbelieversand aren't liking that language.

The evangelistGeorge Müller founded and was the headmaster of the Ashley DownOrphanage in Bristol, England. In his biography, it tells the storyof how Müller would often run out of food for the orphans. He wouldneed ten pounds of rice, and he would pray, and God would deliverexactly ten pounds of rice. Likewise, I remember in highschool, I needed $1500 to get into seminary, and within a week ofdeciding on Atlantic Baptist Bible College, the money arrivedanonymously at my door, cementing to me the idea that this was theschool where God wanted me.

How does thiswork?

Well, the Christianis told to believe that the Lord not only will provide your needs,but already has provided them, so if you live life as if Godhas already provided, you shouldn't be surprised when the things youneed show up at your door.

Right?

Well, no. There's amuch simpler and more realistic explanation for this.

In both cases, myown and in the biography of George Müller, you have Christiansacting in life as though God had already provided. You have thembelieving so strongly that they go to church, and in front of theirChristian brothers will say "I am trusting that God has given us aten pound bag of rice," or "Pray for me, brethren, that God makesgood on his promise of $1500 for seminary."

Somebody at thechurch obviously sent the bags of rice to Ashley Down, and someseveral folks at my church raised money for me, then collected it allin one envelope and wrote "Anonymous" on it, which is one stepaway from just signing it "From God."

Does that explain iton a really basic level? You want something, and rather than livinglike you don't have it, which causes negativity in yourself andothers, you live with power, as though you're never in need. Someonewho is never in need can afford to be very generous with people, evenif it is with their actions and not their wallets, and so when needeventually does come,there are enough people around you who want to see you do well thatyou are taken care of in return.

On bigger things,well... let's say you want a new Lamborghini. You can't just willthat into existence, can you? But if you begin to act as you thinksomeone who already owns a Lambo might act, you will probablyfind yourself acting in a way conducive to actually making thathappen. Somebody with a nice car normally has one for two reasons.The first is that they are trust fund kids who don't deserve it, whogot the car because mommy and daddy bought it for them. This isnot the type of person you want to be, so don't act like that.The other type of person is someone who is smart about money, who isresponsible, who works hard to get the things they want, and whodeserves the things they get.

By "method acting"your way into the role of a person who has a nice car for goodreasons, you are hypnotizing yourself into acting like that person,into taking on their traits and attributes and quirks, and as you getmore into the head of such a person, understanding what makes themtick and applying it to your own life,you begin to become like them. The characteristics that led them toget a Lamborghini in the first place now become your characteristics,and lead you to getting what you want.

So, this is nowcompletely outside the realm of the supernatural, and anyonereading this could now very easily accept that you don't have to be adope to accept the reality of magick, no matter which theology ornon-theology you tend to accept.

You may say "butthat isn't how magick is supposed to work! I should just be able towave my magick wand and get a car!" To which I'll refer you toanother point most people who want things from magick tend to forget...In all great fantasy stories, the Wizard is not just some schlub whowaves a wand and get what he wants. Normally, they have studied foryears to get where they are, ordinarily becoming hermits and livingin some tower far away from everyone to gain the spiritual knowledgeand power to become what they have become and gain what they havegained.

You didn't thinkthere wouldn't be any work involved, did you? This is whymost of the spells you find online don't work for you... you aretrying to take shortcuts. You don't want to do the work required toget where you want to get, so you want to try saying a few magickwords and kissing a rose quartz in order to get what you wantinstead.

It isn't going todo anything if you haven't put in the work of becoming the personfor whom magick actually works. Now maybe it makes more senseas to why we were discussing the Hero's Journey alongside all thatcomplicated science stuff. In order to get what you want, there is ajourney involved, and until you undertake that journey to get tobecome a Wizard, a God of Everything, you are still just the God ofAbsolute Dog Crap.

There is still onebig problem most people have at this point. It's the final hurdle wehave to get over before magick can become real to us.

The Problem ofModern Life

The way we live inthe modern day society is something we will be getting to in the nextfew chapters. Regardless of what you may think, it is not agood thing, and you are much lesser for that. One area where it hasreally got you suppressed into a corner are centered around the ideasbeing presented in this book. Magick can't be real, they wantyou to believe, because they don't want you to have any power. Theless powerful you are, the more powerful the people who run thingscan be, and stay.

One of the ways youare kept weak is by giving you whatever you want as cheaply, quickly,and easily as you can possibly get it. Why does a singlerelatively small townneed four mattress stores visible from a single street corner?Do people really constantly need that many mattresses? You'd thinkeveryone who needs a mattress would pretty much already have one atthis point.

There is a fast foodrestaurant and a convenience store on every single block even insmall towns so you can have a burger and get gas without having todrive more than a minute away. You have devices in your home that doevery single conceivable task for you in seconds with as littleactual effort as possible. You buy things cheaply meant to use onceor for a short time and throw away and replace without a secondthought. With the single flip of a switch you can make your lightscome on, make your food get hot, make your drinks get cold, or sendyour poop rushing away somewhere you don't have to deal with it inthe flash of an eye.

We call this instantgratification, and it is the reason you can't succeed inachieving the things you want.

We live in a societywhere we can barely watch a video we are interested in if it's toomuch longer than five minutes, but all the best possible thingsrequire time. They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice toachieve mastery in a skill, but people try to do something once, findthey "can't" do it, and throw it down in disgust, neverattempting to pick it up again.

This is one reasonwhy a lot of people pick up magick, too. Young people are especiallyvery prone to this: other people make you feel weak and powerless,and you feel as though if you could just throw a fireball at theirfaces then you would feel better, and then nobody could stop youfrom throwing more fireballsat everybody who ever did you wrong. If only you could turninvisible, or teleport, or fly, you could get out of here. If onlyyou could turn into a bear, or a wolf, or a falcon, or a dragon, or afairy, or a vampire, or a kitsune,you would be better than who you are, better than who everyone thinksyou are or sees you as. You could be exactly the type of powerfulcreature you want to be, and you could get away, flying free into theheavens, whenever you want.

Weworked hard to get some level of respect with the nonbelievers in thehouse. Now, I'm going to blow all that cred on a single sentence...

...it is allpossible, and we will get there.

UniverseJumping

Ihave stopped several nuclear holocausts from taking place, and sohave a few of my apprentices.

Yes, nuclearholocausts. As in, the bombs were dropping, and the world was aboutto end.

Once again, let mereiterate that you cannot just trust me when I say thesethings, any more than you should trust Uri Gellar when he says he canbend a spoon with his mind. I could be lying,I could be mistaken,I could be mad,and my apprentices have a definite stock in making me look good andcorrect, so nothing I or they say here in regards to this can betaken seriously.

But, I'm asking youto try for a second.

The first time I didit, I was driving to Sedona with my wife. She was asleep in thepassenger seat, and I first heard a large plane fly overhead, thensaw it come into sight. It released something from its undercarriageand continued to fly off as the payload fell behind themountain-line. Suddenly, the sky turned white, brighter than anoverexposed photo, and a few seconds later there was a sound notunlike the THX sound effect at the beginning of certain movies.

I closed my eyes,and I said "Nope."

When I opened them,I was somewhere much further down the road (about twenty minutes orso, in fact), and the catastrophe had been averted.

This is somethingthat anyone could very easily pass off as a daydream, or an actualdream had while half asleep at the wheel. It could be a lie. We'vebeen through all this.

It has happenedseveral times since then, while I've been alone, with others, andwhile others have been alone without me. There are other situationstoo, such as stopping car accidents that had already happened fromhaving happened, and even bringing people who had died back to lifeby producing a universe in which they never actually died.

One could always saysomething along these lines: I saw a bird or plane or a shadow ofsomething higher up above the clouds. Upon seeing that, my mind,which has been programmed to believe nuclear war was going to happenany minute ever since I was a little kid,showed me what I expected to see. Upon "noping" out of thatsituation, all I really did was close my eyes and open them again ina world where nothing had happened, yes, but where nothing wasgoing to happen in the first place.

Every possibleuniverse already exists out there, somewhere. At the moment when youget into an accident, the universe where you didn't get into thataccident is also created. You can move your consciousness into thatuniverse simply by believing that's where you are, making yourconsciousness vibrateat the same frequency as the version of you in that universe untilyou come to consciously inhabit it.

This isa very dangerous idea, as we'll see several examples of in the nextfew sections. The first of many reasons universe-hoppingis not necessarily a good idea is because of what we call the MandelaEffect.

The MandelaEffect

The Mandela Effectis that thing you may have heard about involving the BerensteinBears. It actually gets its name from Nelson Mandela, who lots ofpeople remember having died in prison, but after 27 years, people'sminds were blown when he was releasedin 1990.

Lots of people whouniverse jump experience it in a similar way... there's some kind offlash of either bright white or piercing blackness, and a sound likea sonic boom or whoosh. Another thing they seems to have in common isthat Mandela Effects increase around them. They'll start noticingthings they knew for absolute certain to be quite different than theyremember, like thinking you knew someone's birthday and finding outyou were wrong even though you know you've been celebrating it onthat day every year for years.

This is probablybeginning to sound less and less convincing to the skeptics outthere. There's a good natural explanation for this, and it'svery simply that the memory is never a completely reliable thing, andcould be lying to every single one of us at any moment. People who"think" they are jumping into different universes are more proneto see differences, and so little places where they are absolutelysurethat they remember something gets made a bigger deal of because theyare expecting to see it.

After all, they arejumping into other universes, so why wouldn't there be other slight,meaningless differences?

This is proving ourmajor point here... People see what they expect to see, just like inthe observer effect with the Double-Slit Experiment.They jump into a new universe...

...but they expectit to be different for this very reason...

...and so it is.

Because the universethey jumped into is just as not-real as the one they came from. Onlytheir mind exists, and it created both of these worlds around itself,so what it expects to see there is what it sees.

No FluffyMagick, Please

As Imentioned,"fluffy"magick can be described as "cool magiceffects kids want to do because they saw it in a cartoon somewhereand feel weak and insecure and want a shortcut to power over othersto make them feel better about themselves." The reason people wantit so bad is right there in the description...

It's fluffy. It'snice. It makes them feel happy about themselves.

People often ask meto learn magick because they want to use it to have an eye or haircolor nobody else has, because deep down they feel they can't bebeautiful unless they are unique.They want to throw fireballsbecause they feel weak and want an advantage not just over the peoplewho hurt them, but over anybody who threatens to step out of linefrom what they like or to stop them from taking advantage of theirpower.

That isn't to sayfluffy magick doesn't work. You can do it, and I promise you Ihave done it, although for the very reason that I can't prove any ofit to you, I won't bother regaling you with my exploits until itbecomes important to the lesson at hand.

There are twomain reasons not to do fluffy magick, though, besides the factthat it makes you weak to seek out shortcuts through power. The firstis because if you want to throw fireballs, you can either spendeighty years gathering books of magick and poring over them inexperimentation until you find out how to make it work, or you couldjust put a bloody lighter up to a can of friggin' hairspray.

There is another,much less comedic reason why you should really abstain from fluffymagick, and it is this:

Do you remember theVenn Diagram analogy we used earlier?

Every individualcircle on that Venn Diagram is a separate universe, with a differentGod at the center of it. Whatever that God believes is what exists intheir universe. The universe we all share, the shared reality that wecan all see and agree upon, is the areas where the circles on thatVenn Diagram overlap.

If a person doesn'tbelieve something, truly, it doesn't exist in their world.

If nobody believesyou are a Wizard, they don't believe you have the power to make itrain.

So therefore, if youare standing outside and you make it rain, and everybody watched youtrying to make it rain, and they knew there was no chance of itraining, they would have to absolutely believe that you werereally a Wizard with supernatural abilities.

But they don'tbelieve it's possible, so it doesn't actually happen intheir universe.

None of them believeyou are a Wizard, so none of them even have the capacity toexperience the rain you have created, because it exists only in apart of your circle that doesn't overlap theirs. It doesn't exist intheir universe. It can't, because it means everything they know aboutreality is false.

But, let's rememberwhat we called "reality" again. It's the space between the emptyspaces on the Venn Diagram, where the most number of peopleexperiencing a situation collide.

Let me explain whatI mean by this with an analogy: If there is a man who believes it israining, he may be dancing around in it, his arms out, he may behumming Singing in the Rain, and if you tested his galvanicskin response it may actually even be the same as someone who isbeing hit by raindrops, even if it is not really raining.

To everyone else onthe street, that person is a lunatic.

Think about that fora second before we move on.

The Thing TheyDon't Teach You At Hogwart's......

There is one majorreason that people who try magick can't get it to work for them, andit's actually very closely related to the reason people try and failin religion: they just don't really ever believe in whatthey're doing. Sure, they can believe it, as in they can devote theirentire life to it, but if this is yielding them absolutely noresults, they are only hurting themselves if they continue to followit.

I went to acharismaticPentacostal church, having been invited and never being one to turndown such an invitation. I always want to see the different beliefsand traditions of different groups, and how they differ from place toplace. I'd been to other less-offensive charismatic churches, but IswearI very nearly burned that church down, because at the end I saw themtrying to "exorcise" a demon from an autistic child.

However, whilethere, I saw another clear object lesson in the making. During thesession where people go up to be "slain in the spirit",I saw most people just go up in a state of absolute bliss and passdirectly out with little to no resistance. This first example,showing the majority of people I saw at the church that day, is veryeasily explainable in the exact same way that people go to a comedyhypnosis show and can be made to bark like a dog or strut around likea chicken on command. These people just really want to beinvolved, so bad that they just kind of go along with it, andlater will generally claim to have just been going along with itbecause it felt right to, and everyone else was, and everyone aroundthem was expecting them to. The magic here is peer pressure.

There were two otherpeople at that church service, both of which had their own uniqueresponses.

One was a littlekid, a smart-looking lad of about 5 or 6. I saw him standing there,his hands in an over-exaggerated parrot of the way the adults hadthem. He was pumping them up and down mechanically while lookingaround at everyone else, a very confused look on his face. He lookedso upset as his friends got slain in the spirit one by one all aroundhim, but even when the preacher struck his forehead, he didn't move.Tears started welling in his eyes when the preacher stopped holdinghis hand on the boy's little forehead after a few tries and walkedaway.

Next, I saw an adultwho suffered from the same condition.He was a really big fat guy, the kind my dad used to say "Oh,that guy must be five, six hundred pounds, easy," about.There was one little teeny tiny old woman standing behind thismassive fella in this little church, ready to catch him. 4'5".Eighty pounds easy. He went up, clearly zealous with faith,but you could see etched into every line in his face that he hatedthe fact that if he allowed himself to be slain in the spirit, hewould absolutely destroy the poor woman behind him.

He walked away,unfulfilled by God simply because he weighed to much to be caught ifhe fell. And he knew the worst part of that was that he knew itwasn't God who had made that choice.

Both people, thelittle boy and the chubby young man, suffered opposite ends of thespectrum of the exact same condition, and it wasn't a lack of faith.Both of them expected something to happen. The little boydidn't realize the only way for it to happen was just to "let goand let God," as they say. He expected something to happen outsideof him, and so it never happened, because only he could make ithappen by allowing it to. The man's problem, although similar,sprung from a different angle of the same source...

He had been slain inthe spirit many times. For as pious as he was, he probably got slainin the spirit once a bloody week. Not this time, however, andhe looked just as hurt as the little boy, but not because God didn'tmanifest for him...

No, it was becausehe realized God only manifested because he wanted God to manifest,and he didn't want to crush this lady, so he just as easily chasedGod away from appearing for him instead. He realized in that momentthat he was the God who had been knocking him down all this time, andafterwards you could see the abject depression on his face.

. . .

...sooooo....

...if something thissimple can keep people from believing, or can cause them to clearlysee something that isn't there, then what's the secret to reallybelieving, and having true faith?

...It'sDrugs!

Well,not really, that's just a joke.The secret that they never teach you about magick in things likeHarry Potter or in most books about real-world magickal ideas isAltered States ofConsciousness.

AlteredStates of Consciousnesses refer to states of mind that are non-commonto ordinary existence, and this is part of the reason why it's soessential to magick to use consecrateditems, locations,garments, and accouterments,and to consecrate yourself by showering, shaving, and dressingspecially before a ritual. Everything you do to enhance your state ofmind into one altered tobe attuned to your intention helpsto hypnotize you into this belief. That's why the church servicementioned above, along with most church services, has driving andemotional music, people swaying and dancing and yelling "Hallelujah,Amen!" and raising and waving their hands... it's all part of thehypnotic techniques used.

The reason mostpeople who try magick can't get it to work for them and give up on itis because they just read off a spell, like the one I gave to findlove earlier, and either immediately suppose there is no way thiscould possibly work, or the reading and performance of the spellisn't sufficient to make them believe it ever will work, and so itnever does.

People haveexpectations of things, pre-established from cultural conditioningsuch as movies. For example, we've all seen movies where God or theangels descend upon man and are visible and glowing and magnificentand have booming, powerful voices and amazing powers that warpreality in ways that absolutely prove they are real. When we go tochurch actively trying to experience God and this type of a thingdoesn't happen, we lose faith that God is actually real and has anypower to manifest or do anything at all.

In this case, theyare like the little kid from the church.

In the same way,when they read off spells they looked up online or got out of a book,it doesn't mean as much to them as whoever originally wrote it andperformed it every day until it wound up working for them. Energydoesn't flow from their hands, magickal symbols don't float in theair around them, and strange, shadowy entities don't appear in thecorners of the room and beckon to them.

And so, they giveup. Or, they stick with it no matter how depressed they get that itnever seems to work, and it never does, and they waste their livesbelieving it for nothing.

However,think about a Christianwho believes in the God of the Bible. They may only get answers fromtheir prayers 50%of the time, but they believe God knows better than them and cananswer "no" or "wait" in their best interests. They seeterrible things happen in their lives, but they believe God isworking in mysterious ways to help move them in the direction hewants them. They see things happen others would consider absolutelymundane and assume they are miracles, made specifically for theirbenefit.

TheChristian isn't worshiping a real God... they are generatingtheir God into the worldaround them. In ancient Tibetan beliefs there is an entity called atulpa,which is created by the will of those who believe in them.A tulpa-type entity most people in the modern day recognize isSlender Man, who was created on the SomethingAwful.com forums andgiven power through the internet community until it wound up leadingto two young girls murdering a third in his name.

TheChristian God exists, not because he always has, but becauseChristians believe in him so much that he does.In order for something to be real, it has to be able to have ameasurable effect on the world. God clearly has a measurable effecton the world. You could argue it's the Christians that are having theeffect, but what is effecting the Christians to make them behave inthat way?

But God is only intheir minds, so it's still just the Christians, right?

Right?

No,yeah, absolutely correct. But here's the thing... it'sonly because allof them believe it. Theyare making up their own Venn Diagram where belief in their God isactually mainstream, and so it brings God into reality forthem. Maybe not forothers, but for them, God exists forreal in the physical world. Theysee evidence of it everywhere, even though nobody else can.

And then he effectsthe outside world through them because of it.

Christians,and others among the religious faithful, are creating their ownlittle pockets of sub-reality where their beliefs are prime, becausetheir beliefs are the only ones that exist on that alternate plane ofreality.This creates an environment conducive to belief, and other peoplemoving into this "pocket of belief" can actually more easily beswayed into belief. When you put the often-beautiful architecture,the swelling emotional music, the hordes of people weeping andpraying at the altar, and the motivational and even mystical wordsbeing uttered at cadence by the preacher, and you have a recipe toget everything "vibrating at the same frequency."

Thisis what we call "Altered States of Consciousness," which is theeasiest way to take yourself into what Castaneda called "non-ordinarystates of reality." Altered consciousness occurs when something haschanged the regular operation of the brain, and can be as simple as ahandshake induction.Setting the mood by altering the atmosphere of the "ritual" beingperformedhelps bend the mind into this state, as does the music, the loftywords of the preacher, the emotions being spewed out by everyone inthe room... everything leads into this experience of altering thebrain chemistry to be more open to suggestion.

Most of the time,when watching movies with wizards or when reading almost any booktalking about real magick, they always fail to note that, in order toreally get magick to work, you have to enter an altered state ofconsciousness. Otherwise, it's really hard to get your logical mindto believe something impossible is about to happen.

When I started withritual magick, I would fast for weeks, memorize huge incantations,meditate for days, and perform ceremonies that could take dozens ofhours. Everything needed to be right... I had to be in consecratedmagickal clothing, in a sacred ritual space, and nothing could be outof place.

Irarely even draw a circle anymore, but that's beside the point. I hadto do all of this atfirst, because my mind wasn't properly attuned yet. After all this,as any doctor could probably tell you, there's a good chance you'lldefinitely behallucinating strange monsters talking to you about supernaturalpowers, because your body will be shuttingdown and rebelling against you!

I'vealso spent some time in Louisiana learning from local Voudouhoungans, and studied the rituals of the native and aboriginal peoplefrom all over the world, and found that a common link in their magickseems to be an ecstaticcomponent. Ecstaticmagicis a type of magick where energies are built by dancing, singing,jerky movements, hyperventilation and holotropic breathworktechniques, and sometimes even causing pain to oneself. All of thisis done in a constant, vigorous manner to build up oxygen in thesystem and to alter their brain's chemical condition to one of ahigher state of mental receptivity.

These types ofrituals often conclude with someone getting "mounted," orpossessed by a spirit. On closer inspection, this whole thing is kindof like the hypnosis show, with the ecstatic component being all thebuild up chat from the hypnotist and the spirit entering the bodyakin to the audience volunteer strutting and clucking about like achicken.

When I first startedusing marijuana, I realized something interesting... in a few minutesafter getting high, I could easily recreate the emotional and mentalstate it took me all of that ritual work to do.

The Stoned ApeHypothesis

The Stoned ApeHypothesis is a very interesting idea that may lend a bit of credenceto the case I'm making here, as long as you remember it is ahypothesis and not an accepted theory. In the early 1990's,ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna proposed the answer to the question ofwhy human brain capacity suddenly doubled in size around 200,000years ago. His answer was not taken very seriously at first byscience, because it was that 200,000 years ago is about the time thathumans found our way to the Siberian Peninsula and first discoveredpsilocybinmushrooms. At this time, mankind also started painting visionary caveart and performing burial rituals on the dead. The answer seemedclear to McKenna, a well-known psychedelics advocate... people foundmagic mushrooms, took them, and expanded their minds.

In modern day,McKenna's idea has received a new champion in the form of leadingmycologistPaul Stamets. In his talk "Psilocybin Mushrooms and the Mycology ofConsciousness," he even posits, with some extraordinary evidence,that human consciousness is actually part of a greater fungalintelligence. All of this is beyond the scope or purpose of thisbook, and Stamets' ideas remains unproven, but this could be a verygood explanation for both that sudden expansion of humanconsciousness and the strange, consciousness-expanding effects oftaking psychedelic drugs.

Marijuana is notknown to be a psychedelic drug, although people do very infrequentlyreport hallucinations while on it. It is, however, what is referredto as a psychoactive drug. Use of the cannabis plant is knownto calm down the body while making the mind more active. This resultsin the "everything's better on weed" effect, where food, sex,movies, and whatever-have-you seem to be a lot more enjoyablewhen you're high.

The thing aboutpsychoactives is that they act in exactly the same way as dressing upin a special outfit, lighting a certain scent of incense, and staringinto a specific-colored candle. It makes you like things more becauseit is already acting on the things you like and ramping up yourmindset so you like them more. In the same way, it is taking all thelittle inputs you're plugging inand making your mind believe they are working better than theyshould be. It helps your mind to "vibrate"on the same frequency as the intention you're trying to produce,which gets everything going a lot quicker.

Now, pleaseunderstand, even though marijuana is legal now recreationally in manydifferent places, I'm not saying you definitely should use it if youwant to do magick. It isn't for everyone, and there are even claimsthat underage use of it could lead to developing schizophrenia.However, what I am saying is that drugs are very closely entwinedwith magick.

The first magiciansin history would have been tribal shamans, and the shaman werenormally those who knew which plants did what. A large number oftribal shamans use psilocybin mushrooms or ayahuasca, which itself isa brew the natives claim the spirits of the Amazon taught them how tomake. Carlos Castaneda, who wrote about his apprenticeship with theshaman Don Juan Matus, describes his interactions with the "allies,"spirits inhabiting peyote, jimson weed, and psilocybe mexicana. The Egyptian Ritual of the Living and the Dead involves use of themorning glory flower seed. Moses' burning bush was most likely anacacia tree, which is also a psychedelic ingredient in the incense inthe Tabernacle.

So, once again, I'mnot encouraging drug use here, but drugs have always been a veryintegral part of magick.

Let me take this onestep further, however. The mystic Baba Ram Dass, also known aspsychologist Richard Alpert, was a big proponent of psychedelics usein spirituality, and was very interested in the then-recentlydiscovered synthetic psychedelic known as Lysergic AcidDiethylamide.In his book Be Here Now, he recounts his trip to a monasteryin the mountains of Tibet where he encountered a guru he wanted toask about the drug.

He tried to give themonk a single tab of LSD, and the cheeky bugger instead swiped theentire blotter from his hands and devoured it. The entire strip ofacid had absolutely no effect on the old man, who claimed that hiscomplete control over his mind had made it so he was alwaystripping, and could turn it on and off at will.

I can tell you frompersonal experience, this is entirely possible. The moral is thatdrugs aren't necessary, and they really are just a shortcut. AnyWizard worth their salt doesn't use shortcuts, knowing full well thatdoing things the long, difficult, and right way is the bestway to make ourselves and the world around us better.

However, for thoseof you who may be doubting magick because you've tried it and gottenno results, keep this in mind. Drugs aren't necessary to magick, butaltering your consciousness is, and like I said earlier, whenI first got started I had to work day and night for weeks to getmagickal effects. You MUST bend your mind to accept what's happeningas real somehow, or else it won't work, and the more it doesn't worknow, the more you won't believe it will work later.

Drugs do that reallyquickly and easily.

SolveEt Coagula

We're drawing to aclose on this chapter.There are just a few more things to cover, but this has been adoozy.We started off with some extremely complicated science andpsychological concepts, and then we hopped directly into provingmagick was real and works in the real world while also trying toprove that all of this could possibly be true even if it weren'ttrue.

That's been rough.But it was all worth it, because now we have a framework ofunderstanding for the rest of the topics I'll be covering.

But first, before wemove on to the next chapter, let me try to instill one most importantidea in you, which we've covered a bit before already. Now that youhave the full foundation for an understanding of what we're on abouthere, let me reiterate it.

You can understandeverything I'm saying here. You can agree with it, even enjoy it, andwant to incorporate it into your daily life. The same could be trueof any book you may read about how to make your life better.

But until the momentcomes when you actually make the decision to do it, like the moment aChristian decides to accept Jesus, you just keep drifting throughlife saying things like "I'm a spiritual person," and "Ibelieve in magick!" and "I'm doing my best every day to becomethe best possible me," but if you look closely you'll find you areactually quite a bit more inactive than you thought you were.

The reason for thisis directly related to something we haven't discussed much in thisbook about magick, even though it's a key element in certain circles.We'll talk a bit more in-depth about it later, but Alchemy is thecornerstone of all magickal ideas and bears some mentioning.

One of the key ideasabout Alchemy can be rendered down to the phrase Solve et Coagula,which is Latin for "To Dissolveand Coagulate."This idea can then be stretched out and applied to just abouteverything else in life, right down to Sherlock Holmes' ability tobreak downa crime scene and then reconstructthe clues into an approximation of what really happened.

When we aren'ttrying to dissolve an element into its base constituents and thencoagulate it back into a different state of matter,the proper Alchemist is applying "Solve et Coagula" to his ownlife. Just like in their physical work, the beginning of thespiritual alchemical experiment involves getting to know the sampleelement,breaking it down into its base materials,keeping the constituents that will produce gold,and purging out the constituents that will lead to impurities in thefinal sample.

This is actually thetrue Magnum Opus, or Great Work, of the Alchemists. The lead and thegold were just stand-ins for the base version of yourself and theidealized version of yourself, and all the notes they kept abouttheir experiments were actually coded into the language of chemistryto analogize the changing of oneself from that base version into thatideal version.

True NameMagick

In the Earthseabooks by Ursula K. LeGuin, the magick system of the world includesTrue Name Magick, which claims specifically that knowing a thing'sTrue Name gives you power over it. A thing may have its given name,which is the name people call it, but everything has a special namein the original language of the dragons, and knowing that name givesyou power over the thing so much so that you can alter its physicalproperties with magick.

Even knowing aperson's given name gives you some degree of power over them. Youcould always walk into a crowded room and say "Hey you," but ifyou know a person's first and last name, you can walk into a room andcall that name out, and only the one person willrespond. While this is a basic example, it opens the door tounderstanding how knowing something's name gives you power over it.This in itself should reveal that names themselves, the things wecall things, are extremely powerful.

That's why, when Idecided to become a Wizard, it wasn't just me seeing The Lord of theRings and saying "Hey, you know what, I want to be like thatGandalf fella. I think I'll start incorporating some of the lessonsfrom his story into my life." I spent my life learning, studyingmagick, making sure it was really what I wanted to do and that therewas some merit to the decision, and preparing myself. When the timefinally came, and I felt ready to do it, I performed a ritual onWalpurgisnachtof 2016 to cement my position as a Wizard and declaring my new nameto be "Simon Kalimanus."

I recreated myselfthat day, killing off the "Lead" version of me and creating adefinite moment of beginning to the experiment that would lead to mebecoming gold.

The very mostimportant take away from this chapter is this...

You can take anyscience and statistics and use it to say any thing, to agree withyour preconceived religious or spiritual beliefs, and to create posthoc rationalizationsfor whatever your world view happens to be. I can talk about quantumphysics all day and it doesn't prove that magick is real no matterhow much I make it sound like the two things are connected. The thingthat proves magick is real is the fact that your brain is amazing,and capable of generating the entire universe around you.However, your mind will not do a single bloody thing if youdon't believe it will, and if you want to believe it will, you haveto do something to jump start it.

The Tale ofthe Mountain Climber

A young man decidedone day that he was going to climb the mountain near his home. He setout one morning and approached the foot of the mountain. Before toolong, he saw a traveler coming down the mountain.

"If I ask thistraveler about the path they took, I might have an easier time ofit."

So, he asked, andlearned all about the path they took, and what they saw at the top.They told him the path they took was over jagged rocks, and itsounded too strenuous to the young man, so he decided to wait a bitand ask another traveler. Eventually, he caught another person comingdown from the mountain, and asked them. This time, he learned of adifferent path, and heard all about what they saw at the top of themountain.

This next person'spath led them over a river, and the young man hated to swim. He satthere all morning trying to find about a different path, and heardtwenty different stories from twenty different travelers.

Finally, he decidedall the paths were too difficult, and he'd heard everything he neededto know about what awaited him at the top, so the young man went homewithout bothering to climb the mountain to see it for himself.

Likewise, you canread a bunch of books about spirituality, magick, andself-betterment, but until you decide to take the path for yourself,you have no frame of reference by which to know what anyone at thetop actually saw, and there are many more than just the twentyperspectives you heard about from others who have been there.

The path might bedifficult, but the difficulty is part of the process. You can'texpect someone to give you the magick secret that leads you to becomeeverything you want to be overnight. Anything worth doing is worthspending the time to actually do. Otherwise, why botherspending any time on it at all?

Just like abodybuilder has to tear muscle to build it, you may have to climbsome jagged rocks or forge a few rivers to get there, but everysingle step of the journey leads to getting to the destination, andeverything that happens along the way is only wisdom gained andlessons learned.

As they say, thejourney of a thousand miles begins with a single step...

...but if you nevertake the step, or any of the ones that come after it, you'll neverget to your destination.

TheRainbow Connection

byKermit the Frog

(witha little help from Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher)

"Whyare there so many songs about rainbows

Andwhat's on the other side?

Rainbowsare visions, but only illusions

Andrainbows have nothing to hide.

Sowe've been told and some choose to believe it,

butI know they're wrong wait and see;

Somedaywe'll find it, the Rainbow Connection

theLovers, the Dreamers, and me.

Whosaid that every wish would be heard and answered

whenwished on the morning star?

Somebodythought of that, and someone believed it,

andlook what it's done so far.

What'sso amazing that keeps us stargazing,

andwhat do we think we might see?

Somedaywe'll find it, the Rainbow Connection,

TheLovers, the Dreamers and me.

Allof us under its spell,

Weknow that it's probably magic.

Haveyou been half asleep, and have you heard voices?

I'veheard them calling my name.

Isthis the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?

Thevoice might be one and the same.

I'veheard it too many times to ignore it:

It'ssomething that I'm supposed to be.

Somedaywe'll find it, the Rainbow Connection

TheLovers, the Dreamers and me."