I’ve questioned a lot of my beliefs lately. I’m still questioning them, actually. I have a suspicion that I’m nowhere near done, but I wouldn’t make any conclusions that lead me to take action based on an emotionally reactive place about this. I mean –I feel tempted to. But I’m choosing to abstain because I’m curious about this place and I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m encountering resistance.

This place is fascinating. I can reveal that I’m not entirely trusting of myself, especially when encountering my own resistance. The fact that there is something that’s beyond my conscious control that wants to fuck with me is something that brings me to a place of utter awe, reverence and also total fear. It’s something that drives me to a point beyond belief.

Beyond belief, for me, is a place that’s at once disarming as it is empowering. It is by no means easy. By that, I mean that I find myself constantly wanting to put up arms, to go to war. To fight my own self for territory and permission, or rights, to be here.

If that sounds exhausting and terrifying, it’s because it is. It’s more frustrating than scary, actually. I’m actually quite good at handling fear. It’s the emotions that fear masquerades around that get me into more trouble. I get so caught up, or I have been known to, in emotional states of varying degrees of desperation that find me wishing I had known what I was getting myself into.

Of course…I did know. If I am honest with myself, I asked to be here. Yes, I actually wanted to be in this place and I even put out a call of desire, a prayer, if you will, to be in this exact place. Or to put it another way, I witched myself here.

Why witched myself here? Allow me to elaborate. “To witch” is a verb that describes the act of using one’s will to achieve means that appear quantum in nature, or magical. Thus, “to witch myself” would mean that I am casting a spell, if you will, upon the very nature of my reality. Thus, I am changed, and thus, my world changes.

The degree to which one is effective in magic has a lot to do with one’s level of influence upon their own internal psyche, or their shadow. It has to do with one’s relationship to their shadow, and how one integrates their own unconscious.

For me, these ideas have only begun to really reveal themselves in full spectrum. I would say that even this vision now is a platform to begin in, a template to work with and explore. I consider myself a skeptic because I believe that someone believes you more when they understand that you didn’t believe this yourself. It’s (hopefully) a foolproof way to act magically, because if you don’t believe yourself, anything can happen.

To put it another way, one way I like to describe it and I think works as a rather poetic definition is, “When you don’t know, anything is possible.”

I like to consider myself a romantic. I wasn’t for a long time, basically from the time I had my heart broken in adolescence to last year. Really. I held a lot of resentment about romance and relationships in general, because I colluded with myself on the belief that relationships lead inevitably to failure and pain. Which, it turns out, they might be, but that’s a level that only my brain can gauge and usually it doesn’t know what it’s talking about when it comes to matters of love. It seems to only make sense when I’m viewing things from the lens of heart — the center of all that matters. I seem to have a keener sense of perceiving and understanding when I’m seeing and thinking from my heart, rather than my brain.

This is my theory about the brain. There’s still some kinks to work out, but I think it’s going somewhere.

The brain is a quantum machine. The brain has many levels. It exists on a near infinite amount of dimensional frequencies, which it can access at any given moment given the spirit soul’s access to varying levels of consciousness. The extent to which one explores the spectrum of their consciousness is largely determined by the individual’s aptitude for real determination in the face of adversity, as well as one’s strength of desire, and level of acceptance in their personal so-called limitations, flaws and character defects.

I personally am striving to see beyond the image of these definitions, and see with clear perception what is actually going on in front of me (or around me or beside me or behind me, as the case may be.)

To be clear; this is not easy. It is by all means a challenging endeavor and I find myself struggling with something new daily. But this is the Great Work — it is the power of possibility that exists within the human heart. It is my destiny, because I have chosen it so. I believe in the power of renewing one’s self-vows. I have decided to commit myself afresh several times throughout my life to my personal growth and heart’s desire. I do this because the temptation to quit and become non-attendant to my life is quite great. Since I have planted seeds, I continue to water even if I find that the soil is hard to tend. Then I work the soil, and I pull out weeds, and I introduce nutrients to the plants. I must admit that I do, also, at times question the value of my toil. I ask myself, “Is this really worth it? Or should I just give up and go home?” Home probably means a stable point in my homeostasis, where I can flow along with the rest of the waves around me that point towards a certain idealized cultural meme, or several. It is a very easy trap for me to fall into!

I am finding, however, that my commitment to my self, sincere and determined, and tenacious as fuck, brings me through some of the hardest shit. And there’s something else, too. My pride. My pride serves me well, simply because it keeps me from giving up on what others would deem a lost cause because I’m not willing to say I was wrong. Surely, this can hurt me, and it has at times, but it’s also gotten me to some pretty amazing places that, even if I was wrong, I still got to go to these amazing places. Some of it is the oddest. I found myself feeling depressed and lonely surrounded by paradise on the coast of a tropical ocean. I felt too prideful to admit that I missed my family and just let myself mourn that. Experiencing my sadness became a kind of contest with myself. When I finally lost, or won, depending on how you look at it, I was feeling my sadness: raw, open, bare, naked.

It broke my heart. But that, I think, is the gift. I suppose that the breaking of my heart has been the sole thing that has kept me going all this time, because I have been confronted relentlessly with the fact that I am unbearably alive, and then finding myself having to live with it.

Having to live with a broken heart is probably one of the most common shared factors in the lives of the six or so billion people on this planet. And yet, most of us deal with it as if we were alone. As if we didn’t have so many fucking other people here sharing this shit with us. As if we weren’t allowed to feel.

What happens when we aren’t allowed to feel? Our heart rate goes into an unhealthy state of homeostasis, our habits become mechanical, and our main aim becomes to maintain the status quo, rather than to disrupt it or introduce anything new into the system. It becomes more about keeping the current program going than to alter the program, thereby changing every other aspect of the system itself.

We all know what that’s like. Nearly everyone has been there — when it becomes more important to maintain a thought than to see if it’s really true by dropping into our body and asking our heart if it’s true. Nearly everyone knows what it’s like to go numb in the middle of an important conversation, where we feel like our presence is sorely needed but we’re unwilling to stay checked in, or we find ourselves rapidly checking out, because the topic or the feeling of the conversation makes us too uncomfortable.

What if there was another way? Well, you’d probably tell me you already know: just be in your heart, but if it were that easy why would there be as much suffering in the world as there is? Why would we have this issue if it were as simple as just dropping down and making contact with that which always knows?

I perceive that there is a split in the psyche of humankind. It is a kind of wedge, hammered between on aspect of the self and another. Many experience it as a split between the child-self and the adult self. Others experience it as a split between mind and body. Still others experience it as a split between the feminine and masculine aspects of their consciousness. However one experiences it, we all have in some form or another, and it matters less how it’s categorized than the fact that it’s happening.

Why the split? Well…to be honest, we could go on and on about that. We could talk about the split between the sexual soul and the lofty spirit in the days of the institutional beginnings of Christianity, even going as far back as the beginning of patriarchal Judaism. We could discuss the parentage of spirituality, the maneuver of organizations that sought to capitalize on God, and we could discuss the public shaming and persecution of the sacred whore that marked the beginning of the separation between sexual and spiritual. We could go back to the introduction of the Church to peoples who had for centuries or longer maintained a pantheistic, multiple gods worldview and a magickal connection to the planet itself.

It would make less of a difference, though, than if we just went straight to the heart of the matter: What is your desire?

We have all left a portion of our desire somewhere deep in our past, or the basements of our subconscious, or in places that generally lead to all kinds of inconveniences when they actually come to us. We implant shame, or rather, we internalize it, for no child is born with shame. Shame is taught. It becomes our map, and it shows us what places are okay to go and what places are not okay to go. Anywhere marked with an “X” usually signifies taboo, and we are not to go in that place. Of course, the adventurous and probably sadistic of us are most likely to venture into those areas deemed off limits, and we find ourselves in all sorts of strange voyages and encounters.

Okay, I’ll speak for myself. I’m likely to travel into these places because I happen to be very adventurous but also highly sadistic and vicious. I happen to be a person who has a particularly dark side. I’ll not say I’m evil, because I happen to believe that evil is a product of one’s denial of their own internal shadow. When I project it out onto the world, I hurt people. When I recognize that the world is my mirror, and that I create what I see, it’s fucking awesome.

I have a ways to go in terms of acceptance of my own shadow. In fact, there are people who I’ve recently reached out to that I put my own truth on the line in a vulnerable act of self revelation who I haven’t heard back from and I’m pissed about it. I think, though, that we only can do this work if we have some stuff in us that’s undone, messy and not yet whole or fixed. Otherwise, if we did, we’d have a whole bunch of easy peasy pumpkin pie and that wouldn’t really be anything to work with, would it? It’s like taking clay and turning it into water. It would destroy the form.

In fact, I have tried to turn clay into water on more than one occasion in the past, because I thought I had to be light and loving and airy and pure. I tried to temper down my own darkness because I was unwilling to admit that I had a shadow — that there were things I didn’t know about myself, that I wasn’t the standard of perfection that’s dosed to us by our popular culture. What happened is that the whole thing I was working on, which was beautiful and well-formed, got literally watered down. I quit on myself because I wasn’t ready to be okay with all of me.

By embracing my shadow from the depths of integration, I find myself consenting to the power of magic in my life in the face of great risk and possibility. I find myself remembering the powerful and often forgotten adage of the art and science of alchemy: “The poison is the antidote.” If this may hurt me, I will find out after I’ve done it. I will either have learned something new or become someone new. Whether it’s the acquisition of knowledge or experience, either way, I have gained something invaluable.

I find it powerful to remind myself of these things, because I remember that our brains need powerful anchors to hold us as we form new bridges through insight and exploration. I say to myself, “It’s worth it. Hang on. Stay with it.” Whether I know this to be true or not, there is an incentive to stay because there is a sense of hope, or possibility. I have powerful allies in the arena of desire, both physical and non-physical. They help me to find my inner bearings, to locate the source of my power within and operate from that place, thus shifting my inner orientation to match the outer world that I desire. And from here, a ripple affect takes place. The outer world really does reflect my inner state, and resonance is found. The bought of synchronicity increases with frequency and level of manifestation, and I find myself feeling like there is invisible help all around me, and all I have to do is ask.

Here again, I will admit that I may find myself in doubt when faced with the power to cultivate all that I desire. I too am a skeptic. I find myself wanting to go into reasoning, and rational ways of explanation. All this really does is make my vibration more sluggish, because I am trying to explain something that really cannot be sufficiently explained. The very act of attempting to explain the unexplainable has the affect of muddling up the waters and turning them gray, thus effectively blocking the next wave of manifestation. It’s like when the party gets going, and someone predicts rain. Soon enough, the rain shows up and everyone leaves, wet and down-trodden.

I’m working on this. My next wave of big lesson transformation has a lot to do with faith. Cultivating faith is about learning to exist with uncertainty in a way that is if not friendly, then certainly un-hostile. It’s learning to be comfortable with discomfort. And that means, if a guy mutters, “There’s gonna be rain,” during my party, I’ll say, “That might be nice,” and if it does rain, I’ll enjoy getting wet and I’ll have fun in whatever shows up. If I’m the guy who yells rain, I’ll do what my friend Tom does when he has a story show up that might be hindering him from enjoying the miracle of the moment: “It’s going to rain. YES!”