Today’s card is the Prince of Cups. A face card again. I really need to start doing full spreads to give some context to these random people I’m drawing. I might consider doing a full spread each weekend. The prince looks like this:
“A young man whose characteristics are subtlety, secret violence, craft; an artist whose calm surface masks intense passion, caring, intensely for power and wisdom and ruthless in his own aims.”
Tomorrow’s card is the Princess of Cups.
“Represents the earthy part of water. A young woman, infinitely gracious, all sweetness, voluptuousness, gentleness, kindness, romantic and dreamy.”
Heh. Seems unlikely.
The first mind control exercise in Liber Null is to practice motionlessness. The goal is to find a comfortable position and hold it for at least fifteen minutes without moving the body at all. This does not include breath movements, obviously.
My first attempt took place on the sofa. I want to practice in a range of locations/positions, as I think true success would include being able to remain motionless in a range of positions/conditions. I laid on the sofa with the TV and music off. T had already gone to bed, so there were no other people around. The only sounds were the hum of the computer and cars driving by outside. The light was on–I was afraid of falling asleep with it off. I kept my eyes closed so that my eyes wouldn’t dry out, forcing me to blink.
I looked at the clock before laying down so that I could get a good idea of how long I went without moving. I settled in and the exercise was easy at first. After just a few moments, however, I began to notice small tensions and discomforts that became very unpleasant. Two of my fingers, for example, felt too close together. I actually felt angry when I suppressed my natural desire to move them. Suddenly all of my fingers felt tense, as if they needed to be flexed. Other parts of my body itched. I tried to think of a neutral body part to concentrate on to take my mind off my fingers. At first I selected my tongue, but when I focused in on it, it immediately felt filled with tension. I switched to my big toe, which made me want to bend it. I went on like this and finally twitched my tongue and then my fingers. I lasted between 4 and 5 minutes. I guess that’s a decent start. I think it will probably take several days of practice to extend my time significantly.
Now that we’ve warmed up a bit by creating a habit of recording dreams and pulling Tarot cards, it’s time to get down to business–to the meat of magick as it were. Because, after all, recording dreams isn’t magick. We’ve agreed to use Peter Carroll’s book Liber Null to begin as it outlines a concise process for developing mind control. We’ll be focusing on the first section titled Liber MMM. Part of the process is to make a record of all of our daily attempts, which will be recorded here.
In addition, now that we’ve had some practice with our dreams, we will be taking steps toward mastering the dreamworld by attempting to manifest a specific object in our dreams. Successes and failures will be recorded here as well. The ultimate goal of gaining mastery over the dreamworld is to practice lucid dreaming, contact entities, and achieve exteriorization, or out of body experiences. But we’ll start with manifesting an object.
I drew the Prince of Swords today:
“Represents the airy part of air. A young man, purely intellectual, full of ideas and designs, domineering, intensely clever but unstable of purpose, with an elusive and elastic mind supporting various contradictory opinions. He slays as fast as he creates.”
I don’t like the face cards–I never feel like I encounter these people. But again, maybe I’m lacking context in only drawing one card.
Well, I drew the Five of Swords Saturday morning and it didn’t really come to fruition. I had about an hour of ire at work–there was someone there I can’t stand to work with at all. She drives me crazy–out of my skull. But she was only there for an hour. So it wasn’t horrible, just annoying for a short spell.
Anyway, the card didn’t seem to hit the nail on the head the way it did the other two times I drew it. And no complaints here about that!
Today I drew the Three of Disks: Works. The book says:
“Business. Paid employment. Commercial transaction. Constructive building up. Increase of material things. Growth. Commencement of matters to be established later.”
Sounds promising.
I didn’t draw a card today. I laid around the entire day playing video games and watching TV. It’s been quite awhile since I did that and it was wonderful. Maybe I’ll draw a card and ask the deck what yesterday was like. Could be interesting.
For the third time since this experiment started, I’ve drawn the Five of Swords: Defeat. I feel like I know this card very well by now, and I’m sorry to say, the card has been accurate both times I’ve drawn it.
Here’s the meaning:
“Loss. Malice. Spite. Weakness. Slander. Failure. Anxiety. Poverty. Dishonor. Trouble. Grieving after pain. Ties. Separator of friends. A busybody, cruel yet cowardly, evil speaking.”
The unfortunate thing is, I can’t even say that the previous times I drew this card the results were a self-fulfilling prophecy because the “Defeat” was introduced by external sources. The first time was when my student the plagiarist send me a nasty email insisting that failing the course for plagiarism was unfair, and the second time I was affected by the dealings of two other people who are close to me. I guess we’ll be putting the card to the test today.
Divining is a mixed bag for me. In a lot of ways, I don’t want to know what’s coming. But, there is, I think, a certain amount of advantage to recognizing what may be coming my way. There are tons of ways to divine and people have been doing it for as long as they’ve been writing things down–perhaps longer. Divining often involves reading omens–entrails, runes, coins, tea leaves, and yes, cards. But divining can be done without omens as well–scrying is one technique that does not involve omens. Some perform divinations with the aid of mind-altering substances. Others simply meditate. To me, divination involves the two following processes:
1) Accessing information non-locally.
What this means (to me) is that if we consider time and space to be an interwoven fabric, then seeing the future means accessing a point in spacetime that we do not occupy. This is analogous to using the internet to download something. We log on and through the download, receive information stored at a different location in space–a server somewhere, or someone else’s computer. The difference here being that we are only transcending space by downloading our file. Divination requires us to log on and receive information from another place and another time. Here we need to expand our analogy and consider what it means to “log on” and what the mechanics might be for accessing points in spacetime.
Lets go back to the Internet for a moment. The Internet makes it easy to transcend space–there is physical infrastructure there that allows us access to computers in other places–a network. So my first question, or line of thought, involves the divination “network.” What is it, and how do we dial in? My speculation is that we have a permanent connection. People who exhibit psychic ability have a more conscious connection than those who do not. This would explain why someone like me, who has had only two psychic experiences in 32 years could access information from the network very rarely, while someone else might do so on a weekly basis. That brings us to our next process.
2) Interpretation
So, if we’re always connected, how do we access and make sense of the information we receive? Well, if we go back to the Internet for a moment we can draw another analogy. Information travels electronically through wires or as is more common now, information is transmitted through the air over a wireless network. The information is digitally encoded. We can’t digest the raw information when it’s encoded. We need our computers to do the job of translating that transmission into something we can read, watch, or listen to. I think something similar is occurring when one uses cards or tea leaves. We access the network and ask it to download data into our tea. Or our cards. Or our coins. Whatever happens to be handy. This is why divination systems, fairly universally, require meditation prior to reading. This is the process of recognizing our connection to the network (in our Internet analogy, consider this something as simple as sitting down at the computer), tuning our divining tools to the task at hand (telling our information where to download), and posing our question (telling the computer what file, or point in spacetime, we want to access).
The information downloads and we have to make sense of it. Cards provide a symbol system to help interpret the raw data. The same is true of the coins or yarrow stalks of the I Ching. In the case of scrying, where one gazes into a clear surface, images appear directly on the surface–some symbolic, some quite literal.
So this is where I’m at with divination. I may refine or edit. I may change my mind completely. I may can the whole thing and say it’s a load of horse shit. Stick around and find out.
