Teach

O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.

-       Sun Tzu

I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

In a fit of optimistic rebellion I decided to say fuck you to the corporate masters and find more ways of making my living than working for them. After a searching inventory of my skills and knowledge, magick came to the forefront. I don’t consider myself an expert. I know more than some but less than a lot of people I know. But I do have a perspective. With this in mind I headed down to my local occult store, Inner Path, and offered to fill a hole in their workshop curriculum. They had plenty of people teaching psychic development, massage, goddess(1) classes, but no one teaching magick. I didn’t know if this stemmed from a lack of interest or a lack of teachers. I’ve always been the guy to hang it out and see who nibbles, so I volunteered my services.

Then I waited, several weeks. I thought for sure they wanted nothing to do with me, afraid I’d scare off the folks doing angel readings. Surprise. This week they called me. They were excited. They wanted me to start right away. Shit.

So now I needed to actually figure out what to teach. And, what the fuck am I teaching anyway? I decided on ceremonial magick as the best description of what I do. It sounds better than Sun Tzu magick. No, I don’t make war with my magick(2), I do follow the philosophies in the Art of War. Sun Tzu said, “Can you imagine what I can do if I do all I can?” My perspective can be described as--bringing as much knowledge, and thus power, to magick as possible given the current state of being. This means using all the magical tools at your disposal(3) and constantly developing your ability to draw upon gnosis(4).

I guess that’s what I’ll do. Give them tools. So look here in the future for the notes from my workshop classes and see if they might be something that helps you.

(1)    How the hell do you teach “goddess”?

(2)    Not often, but I am participating in the current magical attack on News Corp. We’re hoping to push them over the edge.

(3)    That also implies using only the most effective ones.

(4)    As per the Peter J. Carroll definition, building altered states of consciousness.