​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

...is hard work, but you don't have to do it alone.

One of the things you learn when you've been around trauma and traumagenesis for as long as I have is that these feelings are shared more often than they're not. Trauma comes in many forms and we're subjected to it every day between our home lives, work, school, socializing with others, and just dealing with the intense social dysfunction we're subjected to every day and every waking moment.

Seeing all this while actively in-recovery is HARD. Its hard not to feel isolated and alone, particularly if you've got the voices of your abusers in your head or you're forced to live through something that re-traumatizes you regularly. 

When and where that's the case, its not unusual to need help. That help can come from family, friends, trained therapists, trusted advisors, spiritual counselors, from our daily rituals, and from the mindsets we carry around inside.

As it turns out, one of the toughest things to dismantle is that internalized sense of shame that we often get beaten-down by. So if you're one of those persons who has been shamed into obeisance of structures and persons that seem to exist to harm you, try to see that shame as a tool for the victimizer.

DON'T LET THEM USE THAT TO CONTROL YOU. Take your power back and defeat your shame. Don't let it be the leash or lash by which nonconsensual power is reasserted!

​I've written and rewritten this post in my head some dozen times over the past several months, trying to figure out how to let my readers in and teach something useful without getting bogged down in trauma. Its going to be a tricky line to walk, but I think I've got this.

To talk about a topic that's deeply and immensely important to me, I first need to provide some context and background. Its a context I don't get into much, as both my magick and spiritual practice were forged in the fires of my personal hell.

I didn't have a happy childhood. Full stop.

Gang violence was prevalent, systemic abuse was rampant, and I did not have "safe spaces" around me. My grandmother really tried her best, but the people being cruel to me were also charged with my protection & did everything they could to make me viscerally afraid of the law as weapons and tools of that systemic injustice all around me. The youngest expression of self spent the late 80s and early 90s growing up as a kid of mixed heritage in a space that was fundamentally polarized by racial violence and hostility manifesting as gang violence and casual discrimination from within and without my peer group. I was called banana and gaijin by my cultural brethen and sistren, while simultaneously being looked down on by white folks. It was a weird space to be in, and safety came down to what I could make for myself in the moment.

Magick was raw, visceral, and guided by a spirit whose pact with me was as simple as the phrase "I can teach you how to make [the spirits and dangers] go away". This spirit introduced me to all manners of wonderous teachers along the way, allowing me to properly be a child of three worlds culturally, as well as bodily, emotionally, and intellectually.

With a white father and a mixed-heritage mother from Japan, that coupled with my horrifying experiences, having a loving spiritual parentage made me a child with backup. I had one person I could truly rely on within my family as a kid, and there was only so much she could do.

The rest came from Spirit, the lessons they teach and the way I've been learning and growing from my work with them these past nigh-on 34 years. I let you in and give you this context to paint a backdrop upon which these very practices I teach were developed.

Something you learn as a little kid with "irresponsible caretakers" is not to rely on authority figures. You learn that they're out for themselves. You learn that they only give a shit when you're creating a problem, so you learn to hide. You stop asking, you stop  presenting a target - why bother if they're going to hit or scream at you? You stop asking them entirely. 

...Instead, I turned to spirit. I largely pretended to follow their way of doing things while doing my own, convening Nichiren Buddhist Prayer, concepts that made sense from my father's Lutheran services & all that I learned from Spirit along the way. I turned away from the abject cruelty and despair existing in my personal life and sought more and more understandings of spirit without any real care for personal safety. By extension, spirits didn't feel intimidating. Sure, many of them were said to be angry, violent, loud, cantankerous, and mean-spirited, but how was that any different from what I was experiencing at home? Real talk, if you're used to being bullied all the damn time, grumpy spirits don't seem to be much of a threat. 

After a time, that mindset and approach of talking to every spirit I saw and connected with, I started to learn that what we knew of Spirit was completely freaking wrong. We (in the Pop Culture Collective sense) have long contended that spirits are just vendor windows for magickal acts that don't have feelings or desires or wants, but the opposite is true. Its only recently that we've begun to see more examples to the contrary, and some of these entities represented do indeed have enormous personalities! They can be a wealth of love and affection while being **super** spicy, and its that personality that gives us the ability to really get through to the heart of whatever it is that we're working through.

You see, I started to learn that these wrathful, angry, mean-looking, and even demonic spirits were not at all what we thought. They were rough around the edges, sure, but they had a depth of understanding and knowledge that far outscales our own. These spirits are FIERCELY protective, while being equally willing to point out our every fault FOR OUR BENEFIT. They speak truth not to hurt us, but to give us what we need to know so that we may be more successful.

In this, they can help those of us with traumatic experiences in our past a way to reexperience some of the intensity of the relationships we had with those who were super challenging for us, but they do it in a way that allows us to experience genuine love and care. They do it in a way that allows us to ask for help and properly receive it, and that can be super novel and scary at first. Especially when you're not used to it.

If you're on the fence about working with spirit, and fear is what's keeping you back, I recommend doing it. Those of us that need help can get it, and if you need help getting help, I can help! 

-Chris

//

I owe thanks...

To Many Faces, Kali, Mother Tara, Palden Lhamo, Simhamukha, Kurukulla, Ekajati, Sgrolma, my Dakini teachers, the Five Wisdom Kings, the Four Demon Princes, to Belial, to the Goetia and their retinues, to the ancestors who support me, and finally to others. I owe thanks to those who taught me as a child, to those who saw to my development as a teen, and to those guiding me as an adult. Y'all ensured that I made it through childhood when I didn't I'd make it to my 18th birthday. 

Moreover, you help me to help others now as I learn to mend ancient cycles of grief and guilt, shame and sorrow. Thank you!