For those of you who have been following me on Instagram, it will come as no surprise that I'm digging into social and emotional labor tied to the expression of one's inner truth and how that's tied down and restrained by conditioning we receive as children and adults.

Our society has a tendency to try to homogenize all things for the sake of fitting in to the greater whole in a way that feels unified on the surface, often to the wholesale detriment of all of the uniqueness that makes us who and what we are.

Recognizing this, I feel a need to rewild myself, the world within, and the world without to get us back to the magick, to the glory, to the power and potency of circumstance.

When we're in that space where the choices are a) be like everyone else, or b) choose yourself, its important to be able to exist in a way that's healthy and additive for the whole while simultaneously being true to ourselves, and I would invite you to see what social conditioning you can lay down at the door.

There's bound to be quite a lot you're doing that makes you miserable and unhappy, all for the sake of others who are ALSO unhappy with the same systems, conditions and circumstances.

Food for thought. ;)
-Chris/SE

​Those of you who have been paying attention & following along with my work, I have seen me working with angels and other heavenly spirits quite frequently recently. Throughout the process, I’ve been challenged and some really unique ways and learned a lot. Spirits have a way of repeating some of the same lessons at us again, and again, and a variety of different ways until we hear them & understand exactly what they mean.

That can be kind of maddening at times, and yet it’s deeply important to the nature of the universe, and by extension, to sorcery and magick has practice.

You see, we are made of unsubtle matter. We are the fleshed out manifestation of billions of atoms, subatomic particles, energy currents & electromagnetic bonds. By our very nature (which is in itself no small miracle), we are the concreted essence of the Divine-made-Flesh and finding our way home to subtle divinity is something of a process, a chore & a challenging joy we must confront.

And as we seek & learn, we discover that our lives are infinitely complex. Something as “simple” as a heart muscle contains within it some 40,000 neurons (afferent neurons, motor (parasympathetic and sympathetic) neurons; and interconnecting local circuit neurons), and this base muscle matter functions as a kind of a little brain within our chests. How incredible is that?

… I bring this up with one intent: that is to get us thinking about just how complicated the things we take for granted really are. Everything from a garbage truck to a human body to the simplest of coffee beverages is the combination of intense design, detailed focus, and attention. Nothing is truly simple, save on the surface, and it behooves us to contemplate the complexity of Creation as we seek to work our magick upon it.

Even the smallest rituals go onto affect change upon tens of thousands of moving parts, I and we should take this into consideration each time we try to do something with sorcery. Don’t fall into the temptation of oversimplifying a thing out of impatience. Instead, take the time necessary to build healthy structures that can outlast & assist these complex mechanisms in their function. You will thank me, as your magickal work will become that much more powerful and successful.

Food for thought.
-Chris

​The four angels named above are the movers and shakers that revealed themselves to me on the day of Simchat Torah, the very same day that this awful war began anew. They came across as I was dancing with the scrolls and spending time with friends and family, trying to celebrate as we are commanded to at a time where my heart really didn't feel like singing or dancing.

...and its that energy that I carry into this space as I work with Melahel, Caliel, Rehael and Mebahiah. Its an act of rebellion against the horrors of war; its an act of vitriol-made-useful to work towards the healing and care of those who have been roughly-treated by circumstances outside of their control. Furthermore, this is an act of struggle-against-unfairness and a blatant call to arms for Spirit for those who need that energy and care.

These are the very four angels that I'll be conjuring in part of a group ritual I'm offering through Instagram, and I'll be working with them to create global change, using each participant as a linked-point in a network of magickal change. That feels right, that feels helpful, and furthermore it feels HOPEFUL. We need more of that in our world.

​-Chris/SE

​f our condition is a reflection of our conditioning, what we experience in the world and what we internalize OF the world is a reflection of that conditioning; thus, its important to be mindful of what we take onboard and what we project into the world around us.

Being mindful of what we take away from a given situation and circumstance dictates what we decide to come away with in the end. If we're uncautious and give too much power to other people, we take tools and resources away from ourselves. If we empower others as world-ending bringers-of-vitriol, we make them bigger and badder in our minds and remove our capacity for personal agency.

Thus, we must recognize what is and is not a reflection of our own conditioning to better understand our personal truths and how they make themselves manifest in the world. Sometimes an asshole is an asshole, and sometimes a bad day is JUST a bad day. If that assholish behavior we see from others becomes a widespread pattern, that's the point at which we need to start looking at how we're interacting with the world and take better stock of what we're bringing INTO that world around us.

Just something to consider while doing all of the interpersonal developmental work this year's astrology is inspiring us to do. ;)

Food for thought.
-Chris

​… every step you take with mindfulness changes that condition & all experiences related to it.

In the Buddhist world, we talk a lot about the concept of Dependent Origination, which can be summed up in short as the understanding that everything in life comes from something. Just as in Newton’s Second Law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, everything we experience in life is built upon the foundation of experience is leading up to each moment. Every victory, every defeat, every consequence leads you to where you are now. In the physical sense, your exercise, habits influence how well rested you are, how fit your body is, and how content you feel from moment to moment. Likewise, the same occurs in your mind.

Each experience, the way that these situations are parsed & the memories we choose to hold onto influence our every thought, action and response.

If our body is a series of muscles that can be well trained to withstand and endure physically taxing events, so too can our minds. Just as the body can learn how to do a push-up properly, we can train our consciousness to see things differently, and to experience the world differently by extension.

This is one of the inherent truths behind emotional, non-avoidance training, behind shadow work and trauma work & even behind spiritual training. Each of these experiences and the intentional development of awareness around them becomes a tool kit by which you change the way that you approach the world & thus modify how the world responds to you.

I sometimes see people communicate that they are somehow stuck in their ways as though there’s no way for them to change beyond their script, and yet it’s been my experience that this is untrue. We can absolutely learn to live more satisfying, complete, fulfilling lives!

If that was something offered to you, would you desire it? If that was offered to you, would you change your circumstances to change your fate?

I had some particularly intense emotional and spiritual experiences this past weekend, and it began to shift substantially my perspective yet again.

One of the realizations I’ve walked away from the weekend with is this understanding that so much of what we experience is a reflection of what we’ve been conditioned to believe. If we’ve been blessed to live a happy childhood with support and positive experiences of safety, we come to expect that in life, and if we’re lucky, we come into adulthood with better tools for handling hardship. If, however, we have come up in a difficult childhood, very often we come into the adult world with a certain industrious and self-reliance informed by trauma & the various rigors experienced before we were old enough to really handle or conceptualize those experiences.

Neither is superior, and while we might wish for one or the other (often with a great preference for a happier childhood, for instance) these are simply -different- experiences. Without prescribing moral or ethical values to those experiences, we can reflect upon them and come to better understand our current status quo within our minds & hearts, and that is the purpose of this discussion.

What we experience in childhood informs our perspectives in adulthood, and each prior set of life lessons forms a chain of consequences that are motivated by these bits of conditioning we’ve encountered along the way. We learn tools and coping strategies along the way that then influence how we look at every life experience we encounter has an adult, and those experiences can and do contribute to happy or miserable life individual journeys.

You are absolutely a reflection of the landscape of evolutions shown in the mirror of your past, and it’s from the space of understanding that we can begin to affect change in our future.

Blessings,
-Chris

​Earlier today, I spent some time working with a specific aspect of  Ha Shem to assist a client in moving beyond a circumstance in which he slipped & stumbled. He and I are working together with an aspect of the Divine to help him to step beyond momentary misunderstandings and miscommunications that he might be more successful with his wife, and in that moment of conjuration, I felt I understood something more.

So much of what we encounter when we work with the Divine is what we understand as Mercy, and its a different kind of Mercy than to which we are accustomed. 

When the Divine steps in, They (which I use carefully, as Ha-Shem is a plurality just as Elohim is) are an extension of what is effectively Right Action made manifest. They're each subsets of a more complicated series of cosmic motions that then culminate into the Expression of Purpose that magick is. Working with magickal current is a toolkit, and that Divinity can be enhanced or misplaced.

This can feel disastrous, it can feel right, it can feel like a mixed blessing, and so much of it comes down to how we take it. When we believe we're right and concrete in our ways, we often turn a blind eye to how else we might grow and evolve. We mistake our current placement for the Pinnacle, when in fact the Divine movers and shakers that allow us to locate and embrace such things require internal change as a catalyst for growth.

So I say to you: embrace change. Embrace shifting sands, as its the grit of those individual grains acting as an abrasive mechanism which defines and refines us into the shape we wish (and need) to become. It might not make much sense at all, at first, but it will in time. Such is the way of things.

Signed: a person constantly mystified by the Divine Creator and how these myriad manifestations make a mockery of what we've planned.

Remember, "Man plans, God laughs".

​… and the peculiarities of Dharma. 


Spirits are a wild bunch, and they often approach and teach in ways that we don’t expect.

Some years ago, I was attracted to Vajrayana Buddhism after growing up in Nichiren Buddhist circles & over time that attraction transformed into a passionate fervor for the development of the Self through the use of those tools for personal evolution. Along my journey, I met spirits who insisted that I would find my way back to my ancestral practices through a deep dive into the currents of both contemporary and pre-Buddhist Tibetan practices.

Naturally, I was skeptical, as my family hails from Japan on my mother’s side & the pre-Meiji Restoration era practices or my ancestors were all but obliterated within the changing tides of time. Old practices gateway to new ones as Western colonialist mindsets took hold and the ways of the Onmyoji, the Shinto & the Shingon again to largely fall out of favor.

When I began this process of intense spiritual practice, I had no idea just how intimately related these practices were to what we still see in Vajrayana schools today, and I was reasonably baffled at the thought that the practices of the Bonpo would have any kind of bearing on what had been lost to the sands of time within a vastly different social and economic structure of a completely different country…. Yet I was given every reason to trust my spirits, and they have a paid that trust in heaping bounties of growth and spiritual learning I thought utterly lost to the crushing weight of progress. 

Along the way, I (re)learned that Spirit owns these practices & that nothing is truly lost if the spiritual gatekeepers, guardians and teachers of those systems still exist. I’ve learned that those things are really only obscured by time and circumstance. 

With a careful hand and steady heart, one can piece together the practices of Old and find one’s way back to the path once hidden.

As luck and the steadfast guidance of Spirit would have it, I’ve found that my discarnate spirit teachers were truly and entirely correct - I *would* eventually find my way back to my Self & my Heritage as a mixed-race Japanese child of a once-outlawed dynasty of spiritual practitioners. That has been an incredible gift, and I’ve been shocked, amazed and deeply moved by just how right these spirits were. 

You see, Shingon Buddhism is functionally Japanese Vajrayana, and the spirits thereof have already been my constant companions on this journey. Practices that have taken 13 years to ripen have fit nicely within and sparked-alive ritual process kept in secret and the empowerments my family once held still hold trust today. These spirits my tribe was murdered for worshipping and working with still speak, and they still stand beside me despite the brutalities of the Western world. They speak, they listen, and they cause great change for me while endlessly fascinating me at just how much common ground exists.

The path may twist & wind, but for the brave souls who spend decades steeped in these mysteries, it always leads home. I was once beyond hope in considering that I might come to better understand my ancestors, who came before, and yet I feel perfectly at home through the teaching and guidance of Yamantaka, Tara-Ma, Sengdongma, Padmasambhava, Vajrakilaya,  Ksitigarbha & the endless host of Dakinis, Yidams, Dharmapala, and the assembled Dharmakaya. I have found exactly what I was promised, and I am humbled, delighted, scene and found. 

Once dispossessed, I have a spiritual home again, and it’s not just something that I created for myself. It was something that already existed that I needed to tap into, and now I do so as a child of my spiritual ancestry, who has spent years working with angels, demons, yakshas, astrological luminaries, land spirits and everything between. I have the opportunity to straddle and unite these disperate worlds in me, and I feel so, so blessed!

So please, do trust in Spirit. These paths might not make a lot of sense initially, but there’s a reason they exist, and there’s a reason that we are led back to them. I feel tremendous joy out of what once was a desperate sadness and feeling of oppressive isolation as a young child and adult. 

This path may twist and turn, and yet following it diligently, has proven again and again to be the strongest, most promising way forward.

As I go for refuge to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, I invite you to go to Spirit for refuge in your ancestral paths. Strike a light and say hello!

Be blessed. 
-Chris 

...have a surprising amount in common, I'm learning.

Lately, I've been on this journey of exploring the Bardo with help from Spirit. Its been an ADVENTURE! But, its also an adventure with details I can share.

I've noticed a thing and it fascinates me.

Buddhist tech has this thing called the Generation Stage of practice. When you're in it, the supplicant/monk/practitioner is supposed to visualize Deity and then fill that space in their mind in with details supporting Deity. In short, you make a shrine in your mind and fill it...

There's a parallel in Ceremonial Magick of all stripes, too:
We conjure and evoke a spirit into a space created for them, personifying their virtues and energies with the intent of allowing that spirit to appear in person and without delay.

The difference is that one is in the mind, the other is in the space in front of you....but is that actually a difference?

To my brain, it isn't, because my neurodivergent self can see the connection between those two points. What about you? Do you see this connection too?
-Chris