Why aren't you studying witchcraft and the occult?
Dear Earnest Reader,
I don't know why more people don't study witchcraft and the occult, if only as a passing interest. I mean the world is very big, and it is full of many things you may never get to see unless you go looking. And I can't say for sure if YOU will find anything if you do. ( The odds, as they appear to me, are actually in favor of you finding quite a bit.) But it would seem to me that if somebody told me that there were very specific and well-tried methods of contacting the spirit world and using it to get what you want, whether it be money, power, wisdom or better health, I would at least give it a shot. Well, I am saying that. And I don't mind talking about it if you ask. And I don't mind being challenged about it either. You can ask me what you want and I will try to answer in a way that is illuminating. But when it comes down to it you will never know unless you go try it yourself.
Can you really say you know how the world works, or what is possible? What would it take to actually know? I want to learn everything I can, and see just how far the envelope "bends".
I once had a friend tell me he saw Peter J. Carroll, a famous occultist and author, who you should also check out, manipulate fire magically. I've never done it but I don't see why I should claim I know if its possible. Now maybe if I spent my whole life trying to find out how and exhausted every possibility then I could say that I'd never found the way. But that would be all I could say. There would still be an infinite universe out there that I had not yet explored. Also, something else may have changed with the world I HAD lived in, to make it possible.
Aleister Crowley, who you will hear a lot about if you spend some time studying the occult, once said that when men discover the secret of physical flight, they will laugh at how simple it is (Liber LI, The Lost Continent, III "Of the Aims....."). What you will also discover about Crowley if you study him long enough was that he was not an idiot. He was incredibly intelligent and worldly. And if you study him even longer and follow out with some of his methods you will discover that when it comes to magick and yoga he knows what he's talking about. So when he said that yes, men can fly, was he just pulling our leg? I don't know and neither do you.
A lot of occultists, both the experienced and inexperienced will act like they know all sorts of things. They will do this to your face and in the books you read by them. And more often than not one of the things they ACT like they know but really don't IS just how far the envelope bends. And how to bend it. Their dialogue will often have a curiousily smothering effect to your sense of imagination and feel like its forming lead boots around your feet. Don't listen to them. Your sense of anything being possible is one of your most powerful weapons in life as well as magick.
.....maybe you don't want to study any of these guys or their methods. Maybe you have your own ideas about what magick is supposed to be and how you want to do it. PLEASE, for the sake of us all, but especially for you, give those dreams a chance.
And, if you are a thelemite, what is another name for the Goddess?
Sincerely yours,
L.A.B. 0=0 A.'.A.'.
2nd degree O.T.O.