"Steal This Book of Shadows" - Spellcasting #30

"Steal This Book of Shadows" ver 2.0
(What's Really Happening in the Mind of a Wizard)
An Occult Tutorial
by Azzerac
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Page #63
Spellcasting #30
Law #17
Self-Knowledge

(Brought To You By,...)

"Huw'Arghu'Yooo?" ~Arnold Schwarzenegger, "Conan the Barbarian"
(Translation: "Who are you?")

This is the page I've truly been dreading!
How can you give a "guideline", a concept so narrow, to address a potential so great? The very nature of the human Identity is art. It mixes it's paint from the ever-growing shades & hues of experience and, for weal or woe, paints these amalgams into it's very reality model. The model you carry that says "This Is The World" is carried into every conversation, determines every reaction, and shatters traumatically at every new drastically divergent experience, only to be repainted with the colors of this new experience: It is You.

...but is it all there is to you?

It's in the daily rituals, the weekly routines, and the weekend getaways. It's in the skills you wield, the faiths you hold as "truth", and the traumas that your third-grade teacher inflicted upon you, but is That "You"?

It's also in the holes in your experiences.
It's in the lessons you learned, be they true or false, the guidance you were given or lacked, and the limitations of your vocabulary which defines the boundaries of your world view. It's in the questions you never think to ask, and hardships you never challenge, with the battle-cry of Success: "Why Not?"!

...but all of this is the 'negative-space' of you.

The Self is that single point in the middle of this metaphoric panorama.

This panorama is what keeps you fenced in. It's the safety-net you've built around you. It keeps you from failing, by reproducing the same actions (no matter how stupid) because you know the outcome is survivable. It restrains your deeds to within your strengths (as you assess them), so that you won't risk injury or embarrassment. It's in every unattended impulse for change, audited by that internal police man saying, "That's just how it is, and how it's done".

This is the picture of "Self" that you show yourself.
The Picture you show the world.

"What's wrong with this picture? We're in it!" ~'Smat', The TTR Group

There are a great many things we succumb to, at the hands of our greatest tyrant: ourselves. These few concepts are but a few of the petty wraths we visit upon ourselves, and never ask their sources. "Why do I do this?", "Who 'says-so'?", and "Who made this rule?". We take a lot of things as carved-in-stone, and never apply the one inherent principle to self-knowledge, self-worth, and personal occult power:

authority!

Without knowing, first-hand, and with honest introspection, why you think & do what you do, you will never find the personal power within yourself, to make the changes, in your life that you want, let alone magically effect the world around you. Without finding yourself as the authority of your life, you will never have authority over anything else.*

It isn't easy, and it isn't instantaneous.
It Is Mandatory, if you are to be a Witch or Wizard, and not simply a "Dabbler".

The exercise for this installment is Three-Fold, but will last you for the rest of your life.

1) Every time you find yourself doing something 'automatically', stop (as the moment allows) and ask why you did that. Challenge your every reflex, preconception, and force-of-habit.

2) Explore them, and the memories of your life that led to them. If they don't fit with every way you see the world, change them, based upon reason & wisdom.

3) Be okay with yourself, through every change of perspective. (It's really easy to want to kick yourself for the memory of every enactment, in the past, of what you now see as foolish. Don't! Keep reminding yourself that you were doing the best with what you knew at the time. If this takes the form of a secondary voice of a "conscience", ask it why it didn't stop you, and tell it to butt-out! You need to be the authority in your life, and not some fragile vanity image you once held. This "voice" of regret is that vain self-image collapsing. Be okay with its' passing.)

*-The New-Wager community would have you think that 'annihilation-of-ego' leads to enlightenment. All it leads to is acquiescence. It makes you a non-person. In this instructors' opinion, it flies in the face of millions of years of evolution. This ideology won't and doesn't work, as long as even a single person asserts authority. There will always be at least one. That One will rule the rest. We are human, after all, aren't we?