Ogham Readings on Saturdays

Jun. 13th, 2025 11:26 pm
kimberlysteele: (Default)
[personal profile] kimberlysteele

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills.  Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):
 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices
 
I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via email -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline.  I cannot answer health questions.  If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break

My next planned break is from Saturday, June 21, 2025 - Friday, July 11, 2025.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.  

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal.  If you'd like to make a donation, I would be grateful if you did it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Frugal Friday

Jun. 13th, 2025 11:05 am
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
domeWelcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed.

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

With that said, have at it!  

Back from England

Jun. 12th, 2025 09:16 am
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
archetypal englandYes, I'm back home in East Providence, RI, now. As promised earlier, here are a few of the details. 

Travel is easier.  It's been eleven years since I last flew, and I was surprised by how little hassle I had getting to and from England. The security and customs process on either end of the flight is little more than theater these days; no doubt the fact that both countries have fairly porous borders takes a lot of the urgency away. The most unnerving discovery I made is that airport food has improved. I expected the usual vile slop, inflicted on travelers who had no other choice; getting a genuinely decent burger and good beer in Logan Airport left me wondering if I'd somehow slipped into an alternative timeline or something. 

London is London. I shouldn't like London. It's sprawling, crowded, raffish, and not especially clean, but for some reason I always feel comfortable there. I took several long walks through various London neighborhoods without any hassle at all. It's a polyglot jumble of people from all over the planet, as it's been for the last three centuries or so; if that distresses you, I don't recommend going there. To forestall one of the obvious questions, yes, there are a fair number of people in Muslim dress there, but no more than I remember from eleven years ago; for that matter, most of the big new religious buildings I saw there were Hindu temples, not mosques. 

the torGlastonbury is weird. This will doubtless explain why I like it so much. It hasn't changed appreciably since my two earlier visits; the used book stores are still packed with obscure occult tomes, and eccentrics parade down the streets, so I fit right in. The various ancient sites haven't gotten any younger, and of course neither have I -- I climbed the Tor in decent time, but had to stop and rest twice on the way up, which I hadn't needed the last two times.

A good time was had by most.  You can judge the character of London these days by the fact that of the three readers I met my first day in London, one is Mexican, one is Irish, and the third is a British descendant of Indians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. Inevitably, we ate Thai food for dinner. The next day I walked for a few miles to have lunch with an editor of the online magazine UnHerd, where some of my essays have been posted, and then took the Tube to meet one of my publishers in Clerkenwell. 

assembly roomsI had two book signings in London, one at Watkins Books on the 3rd and the other at Atlantis Bookshop on the 4th. Both were well attended. The second was enlivened by two people fainting -- they're both fine now. Then it was off to Glastonbury, carpooling through London traffic and then through green countryside and dubious roads into the west. Readers and friends started turning up almost immediately on my arrival. So did pints of Mena Dhu, a Cornish stout that makes Guinness seem just a little thin and pale. (You can literally eat the foam by the spoonful.) Friday we wandered through the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, visited the White Spring, and then climbed the Tor; Saturday and Sunday we met, around fifty of us, at the Glastonbury Assembly Rooms for a variety of talks, and then went to the George and Pilgrims, a fifteenth-century pub, to talk until closing time. I also did Essene Apprentice attunements for eight people, ordained two Gnostic priests, and consecrated a Gnostic bishop. (I'll give her a proper announcement sometime soon.) 

Monday the 9th I was back on the road, carpooling with more friends, and stayed the night with yet another reader and friend, an alternative-health practitioner who cheerfully calls himself "a back-street quack." To describe our conversations as strange would understate matters considerably; that is to say, I enjoyed myself immensely. Tuesday I squeezed in time for a video interview with UnHerd -- I'll post a link once it's available -- and then I was off to Heathrow and on my way home. 

The 11-year itch. It didn't occur to me until I got to Britain that I've gone there at 11-year intervals: my visits there have been in 2003, 2014, and 2025, always in June. I'd like to go back a little sooner than 2036, but partly that depends on the return of the arrangements that allowed freighters to take up to 12 passengers, which closed down during Covid -- I don't feel I can justify air travel more often than I have to, given the ecological impact. Nonetheless, it was quite something to celebrate my 63rd birthday in Glastonbury with a substantial gaggle of friends. I'd be remiss if I neglected thanks for Oliver Rathbone of Aeon Books for arranging and facilitating the London end of the adventure; Brigid Brennan for making all the arrangements for the Glastonbury end of things; and all the other participants who helped make this a memorable and pleasant experience. Thank you, one and all!

Questionable Ethics

Jun. 12th, 2025 08:15 am
methylethyl: (Default)
[personal profile] methylethyl
 Yesterday, I started getting calls for...  eh, let's call him Bradley. I don't actually want to destroy his life or anything. Anyway, phone going nuts, calls, texts, all from mortgage companies looking for... (not his real name) Bradley Spellman. Dozens of calls and texts. While I'm answering one, call waiting chimes in with another. 

This has happened before. Two or three years ago, same deal: Bradley Spellman, mortgage companies. Once...  maybe it was a mistake. Maybe he fat-fingered my number instead of his own on the loan application, because it's one digit off or something. Last time, I sighed and spent a week or two asking people to take me off their call list, until the calls stopped. Twice, though? 

In my defense, I was (I am) angry, and I want it to stop. But I do find myself, at this point, wondering where the line is between gentle deterrence and possibly-evil stalking. 

At first, I hung up on them, told them it was a wrong number. Asked them to remove me from their call list. This seemed inadequate. So I started talking to them. I used my super-nice sexy telephone voice. Yes I have one. It is super handy for navigating bureaucratic telephone jungles-- an activity I do not enjoy, but which I excel at. I did not lie to them. 

Me: Hello?
Caller: Is this Bradley Spellman? 
Me: Who's calling? 
Caller: XYZ Super Mortgage
Me: Oh! I'm not Bradley, but I've been trying to get in touch with him! I wonder if you can help me--  this is not his number, but do you have an address, or an email or something I might use to contact him?

The first two actually cared about their jobs and demurred. No, we can't give out information. Third try was the charm. I got a street address. 

It is way easier to extract personal information from strangers on the phone than I expected!

I looked up the street address on google maps. Bradley lives in the same neighborhood I grew up in. Just a few blocks from my parents. Wow that presents some tempting possibilities. 

Let's not do anything illegal though. And... what if he used a fake address as well as a fake phone number? 

That's easy enough to answer. I've been trying to buy a house (unsuccessfully) for like four years now. I have amassed some useful real-estate research tools. 40 seconds to find the owner of the property at that address...  and sure enough it is Bradley Spellman. And now I know that he took out a mortgage for $150k to buy that house in...  roughly the same timeframe as the last deluge of calls from sketchy mortgage companies. 

So I'm like 99% sure I've got the right guy, now. I look him up on Facebook. His FB page literally has a picture OF HIS HOUSE (which I crosschecked with the real estate site and google maps just to be sure) in the header.  Not the brightest bulb in the box. It also links to his business FB page. Where I collected the phone number for his company. 

I now have this guy's full name (first middle and last), his home address, his business info, the name of his spouse, I know when he bought his house and the amount of his mortgage, I know it was a VA loan so he's probably been in the military, I know his maiden name (yeah, he's married to a dude and changed his name. Does that make it a bachelor name?), I know his age (about a year older than me, so... not local or I'd know his name-- military would explain that), and I know that he's applied for a mortgage when he's already got a pretty hefty one. That's curious. There's no way he's going to refi now and get a better rate than 3 years ago, with a 30yr VA loan. Is he looking to buy a second house? Divorce in the works? Real estate investing? Fraud?  

I could have checked the local court records. But I didn't. 

So far, I've just got a stack of easily-accessible information. Possibly, it is an ethical gray area to ask phone reps for information they are not supposed to divulge. 

Here's where it gets a bit dicey though. I DMed him through his FB page (no, I do not use my realname on FB, nor do I friend anybody-- it's for accessing marketplace and stuff) like: Hi Bradley, please stop using my phone number to apply for loans.  I am getting a gazillion phone calls from mortgage companies now, this is the second time it's happened so I don't think it's an accident anymore, and maybe next time you need a dummy phone number just do a quick google search for "fake phone numbers to give to men you're not interested in" or just use a 555 number like in the movies or something. 

Probably still OK, but... I'm really really annoyed at this point. My phone is still ringing every ten minutes. This doesn't feel as cathartic as I'd hoped. I hop over to the public part of his page and leave a comment on the top post: Hey Bradley, stop using my phone number for loan applications. Why are you using a fake number to apply for loans, when you've already got a mortgage anyway? Is this some kind of fraud? 

And then, I copied down his work phone number. 

He blocked me on FB of course. Anyone would. 

But I still have his work number, and now, every time I answer a call for Bradley it goes like this: 

Caller: Is this Mrs. Spellman?
Me: Oh, are you looking for Bradley? 
Caller: Yes
Me: He's not here, let me give you his work number (reads off work number).
Caller: Thank you, have a nice day!
Me: You too!

There's a tally card on my desk. I've given ten callers his work number now. 

I didn't lie or tell anyone that I was Mrs. Spellman. But I did let them assume it. Arguably, I am being super helpful, assuming it was an honest mistake, and redirecting calls *he signed up for* to a number where he might be reachable. 

Arguably. 

Not honestly, though. I definitely want him to be as annoyed by the people calling *my number* (which he's so free about using) as I am. It's not exactly Christian charity. I'll probably be hashing this one out in confession next week. 

But the thing is, my phone is still ringing. I'm up to eleven tickmarks now. Nine of those have been in the last hour. I don't even get a tickmark for the three four calls that came in while I was typing this, that never connected to a rep. 

Sigh. 

Asking nicely went whizzing by yesterday. Where do we cross over from "make the point so it never happens again" to "triggering retaliation"?  Bradley doesn't know me. Did he accidentally fat-finger my phone number on a loan application twice, by accident?  Or is my phone number just his go-to "fake" number when he has to enter a number to complete the form, but doesn't want to get spammed by every mortgage lender in the universe? Maybe he's just dumb and it never occurred to him that the number he randomly made up, actually belonged to someone, and that he was signing that someone up for 50,000 spam phone calls and texts. Wherever the dividing line is between "make sure he gets the message that this is not OK" and "Revenge" I'm pretty sure we're past that. 

Should probably stop. 

But...   the phone is ringing again. Dang. 

EDIT: 

Perhaps eleven is enough to get the point across. I admit I'm still tempted to drop a friendly postcard just to let him know that I know where he lives. That would...   not be nice. I should resist that temptation. Dang. 

Possibly, for the next couple of weeks of frustrating phone calls...   this guy might have a better approach.  It's not their fault someone gave them my number, and I'm not the person they're trying to reach. This thing became unstoppable as soon as Bradley clicked "submit" on that application. There is nothing he can do about it now. It's out of his hands. I just need him to never do it again. So... what's the right response to the dozens of mortgage reps who are still going to call me? Perhaps, as the fellow in the link suggests, this is a God-sent opportunity to practice low-pressure social engagement and soft evangelism. How many people have we shared the Gospel with? Are we good at establishing a social rapport with strangers? How often do we share the love of God with people we just met? Do we need more practice at it? 

UPDATE: 

Well, it turns out evangelism *is* a better tactic. Particularly now that the damage is already done, and there's no way to avoid the next 100 unsolicited phone calls. The God Loves Telemarketers guy is right: it's good practice. The last lady even agreed to let me pray with her. And no joke-- I totally sincerely asked for God's blessing on her. So. 

Two weeks to go. Let's see if we can keep it up!

UPDATE: 

33 phone calls today, including a dozen where the autodial failed to connect to a representative. 

On the plus side, praying with total strangers is losing its weirdness. 

On the minus side, it's fairly exhausting. So far I've only gotten one hostile though. 

Right now: researching how to change my voicemail message to "Hi, I'm not Bradley and I don't know him: please take me off your call list", so I can just turn off my phone for a week. 

Y'All Need Discursive Meditation

Jun. 10th, 2025 11:42 am
kimberlysteele: (Default)
[personal profile] kimberlysteele

I am not all that bright. My creativity and uniqueness are something to behold, but when it comes to raw candlepower, I am a mid at best. I don’t always make smart decisions and that is why I have six cats. There is no reason any person of my lower middle class income level should have six cats. To my credit, only three of the six live inside my diminutive home (three are friendly ferals), however, their food and litter cost more than our human groceries per week. Their care and feeding take up a good thirty percent of any given day. Taking on six cats was not a smart or logical idea… yet here I am. There is meowing in the background as I write this.

I am in plentiful company: humans are not very smart. Our level of intelligence is somewhere between unicellular slime and demigod. The notion that we are the smartest beings in the solar system just because we walk on two feet and build a bunch of junk is laughable. For one, we’re not intelligent enough to do spacetime travel because we don’t have mental bodies sufficient to understand that space and time are illusions. We aren’t smart enough to cooperate on a consistent basis: our systems are fraught with waste, entropy, and unnecessary bloodshed. Our doctors are so stupid, they treat their human patients as if they were cars with interchangeable parts. Our men and women of god are usually hypocrites, hebephiles, and pedophiles. Our politicians and celebrities are slaves to a depraved System that vampirizes children and babies for profit.

Humans are not only stupid, we are extremely lazy. Entire civilizations have checked out where meaningfulness and earnestness are concerned. Their citizens have all but reneged on human decency and diligence and have instead fully embraced mindless egotism and zombified compliance. Going the saner path would require actual work they are not willing to do. We begin to see why the old holy books routinely featured an angry god who wiped the Earth clean with a flood and told a few survivors to start over.

As I mentioned in my previous essay about banishing rituals, I was atheist until about ten years go. Atheists like to think of themselves as super smart and I was no exception. The new atheist movement named themselves “brights” around 2003. Richard Dawkins, who is someone I consider to be more idiot than savant, attended the 2003 Brights movement conference. The Brights, also known as the Godless, proudly flaunted their atheism on the world stage for a hot minute. If you’re cringeing, well, I’m cringeing harder because I actually used to consider myself one of them! At any rate, Dawkins is neither the first nor will he be the last retard to declare his truth to be the only legitimate one.

In my own case, one of the only saving graces I have ever possessed is that I have always known I could be wrong, and that is why I am slightly smarter than “brights” such as Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, as well as any given monotheist theologian or imam. I don’t stake my entire self-worth on being right. I am also at peace with being retarded. I’m comfortable with it. To this day, Dawkins and Harris do not even know they are retarded and poor Hitchens died before he could figure it out.

So long and so very hard LOL

I’m sad I have to say this, but becoming less retarded is one of the key reasons we are incarnated here on Meatworld. Some lessons can only be learned the long and hard way. Some alchemical processes take so long that only a billion or more illusory spacetime years can get them done, for instance evolving the soul of an amoeba into a pianist.

Long ago, a bunch of medieval Catholics refined the concept and practice of discursive meditation. It is an understatement that discursive meditation is one of the great traditions the West has given to the world. Discursive meditation is a procedural method of deliberately limiting thought until the singular subject of that thought has been treated to a thorough amount of expounding, unpacking, and illumination. Benedict of Nursia is credited with putting discursive meditation on the map and making all the monks of his order do it on the regular, but I am confident discursive meditation was practiced throughout the medieval Christian world before he put his stamp on it. Medieval Europeans were a great deal more intelligent than the Progress narrative insinuates. Not only did medieval peasants have vibrant intellectual lives, they were far more connected to the rhythms of the land and the beauty of existence than we are. Proof of their superiority lies in the Gothic cathedrals they left behind. Our peoples will leave islands of ocean plastic waste the size of Alaska, spent uranium, and janky concrete.

The medieval peasant was smarter, braver, and more conversant with the Divine than you because the thought leaders of his time were immersed in discursive meditation even if he personally was not. Limits are power, whether we are talking about the walls and pipes of a hydroelectric dam or the exclusion of inferior ingredients in a treasured soup recipe. Via limits, discursive meditation improves lives. It improved mine and it can improve yours. If everyone on Substack took up discursive meditation for 10-20 minutes a day for a year, we would be looking at a burgeoning revolution in addiction recovery and dramatic collapses in mainstream media far more pronounced than what we are seeing now. Positive infection happens.

Voice in your head

It’s not that NPCs lack voices in their heads or internal dialogues. We all have voices and internal dialogues. Every person has a unique spiritual ecosystem just as he or she has gut flora. The ecosystem is a mishmash of different selves and outsiders. Beings such as the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), ghosts, egregores, fairies, demons, feeders, larvae, and a motley array of beings who pass through without interaction are par for the course. You are not alone and you have never been alone. You were conditioned into rootlessness after being born in a spiritual Dark Age of endemic metaphysical handicaps. You were shoehorned into dismissing the spiritual world, and if you were raised in monotheism, you likely had it worse because you were told most of the discernible spiritual world was evil and Satanic.

You are a blind leper in a vicious game of dodgeball, unaware that your nose and fingers have fallen off. You are dimly aware that you in constant pain and that something isn’t right. You need a banishing ritual or its traditional mass equivalent stat. You also need a way of preserving what is left of your own dwindling strength so you can stop wasting your magical energy, otherwise known as intention.

Most of us have problems with intention and again I am no exception. My Achilles’s heel is eclecticism, which is the urge to jam several lifetimes of accomplishment into a single human incarnation. Discursive meditation has been a godsend in discerning which activities I am best suited to spending my time on and which are better left behind. Limits are power.

Where does your mind go?

When I first started discursive meditation about ten years ago, I was still solidly atheist. That said, the skeptic in me had no problem with ten to twenty minutes a day of severely limited thought. My first meditations were deceptively simple. A pencil. A sandwich. The piano. The number five. My daily contemplations grew to include terms or phrases such as “cleanliness is next to godliness” and “middle age”. Only later did I build up the fortitude to tackle problematic subjects such as troubled relationships, my own shadow projection, and past lives. Once I had my sea legs, I was able to gain tremendous insight to most of my own problems. I became my own best shrink. I struck at the roots of my own stupidity, pride, and self-sabotage. There is nothing quite like isolating one’s own culpability in discursive meditation to put an end to one’s own bad behavior. Removing the bullcrap and sanctimony drives an iron pin through the heart of the pale, squirming grub of egotistical complacency. The phrase “everywhere you go, there you are” sums it up: instead of running away as most humans do from self-reflection, discursive meditation exposes you to your own inner workings. Confront the way you think; this is the key to much, to paraphrase Dion Fortune. As Apollo said, know thyself.

Stop waiting for the world to change and change yourself. Discursive meditation is a direct route to self-change. It is unfortunate that some who are reading this will find ways to dismiss what I have said here because I am a non-Christian occultist. Yes, I am both of those things, but I believe Jesus himself wants you to revive the tradition of discursive meditation. I believe He (or someone uncannily like him) popped into my ecosystem a couple of times and said “Hey you… tell them I said this!” He said that gratitude and generosity sublimate to the power of seven. He also said that discursive meditation, a.k.a. the old Catholic contemplation that made the West formidable and great, should be revived. In short, Jesus is no fan of whiners and whining. He would much prefer you use the ancient tradition of His church to clean up your own corner instead of crying about somebody else’s pigsty.

Make of that what you will… I could be wrong!

How to do a discursive meditation:

  1. Choose a subject in the form of a physical object, word, or phrase. Do not choose more than one subject. Limits are power. Christians can use a phrase from the Bible, and you’ll observe the Bible’s verses are conveniently partitioned and numbered for contemplation purposes.

  2. Get a notebook and pen and put it somewhere within reach.

  3. Sit in a straight-backed chair with your feet on the ground and take a few deep breaths. A little discomfort is OK as long as it is not extreme.

  4. Limit your thought to the subject alone. If you’re hungry, too freaking bad. If you’re thinking about a deadline or an annoying person, cancel those thoughts for ten minutes. Only think about the subject and all its aspects.

  5. Once you have thought about the subject, isolate three aspects of it that crossed your mind. For instance, if I meditate on a pencil, I can think about its etymology (pencil means “little tail”), where it was made (likely China), and my own preference for mechanical pencils. Write those observations down in your book.

  6. Quit after ten or twenty minutes. Don’t overdo discursive meditation. It’s actually heavier exercise than you would assume. Once you get good at it, you can go longer.

     

Ogham Readings on Saturdays

Jun. 7th, 2025 12:56 am
kimberlysteele: (Default)
[personal profile] kimberlysteele

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills.  Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):
 
-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading
-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices
 
I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via email -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline.  I cannot answer health questions.  If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break

My next planned break is from Saturday, June 21, 2025 - Friday, July 11, 2025.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.  

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal.  If you'd like to make a donation, I would be grateful if you did it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Y'All Need a Banishing Ritual

Jun. 2nd, 2025 11:08 pm
kimberlysteele: (Default)
[personal profile] kimberlysteele
When I began doing a daily banishing ritual almost ten years ago, I had a feeling I would one day preach the need for it in public. Well, here I am. Within that scant decade, I came up with my nascent concept of astral pyramids, which are imaginal structures that develop their own wills and velocities and that want to expand at the base. Now I find myself fulfilling that early prophecy — I am an unpaid advertiser for the banishing ritual’s astral pyramid. From the outside, I know now as I knew then that I appear as a strange and foreign land in my enthusiasm for an esoteric practice that involves ten minutes a day of standing around, drawing shapes in the air, and crooning the names of gods. Appearing to be a weirdo is a risk I am willing to take. I hope people start taking up various banishing rituals en masse, because much like the late Roman empire our era tends to rhyme with, the people are in a state of collective astral sepsis.

 

One of the troubles with being sensitive is that my consciousness acts like a superhauler net for passing dramas and emotional dirty laundry. I cannot read anyone’s mind, but I can sense where their minds wander with an uncanny accuracy. Most average people have a slew of dark, macabre thoughts they have never once brought to the surface and dealt with in the light of consciousness. Most normies are plagued with grotesque sex and violence fantasies which of course are worse if they watch porn. You don’t need to watch porn, however, to have a festering subconscious mess on your hands — some of the worst and most hideous fantasies I have perceived came from older suburban women who are nothing but kind, pleasant, and helpful in person.

If the nice suburban lady has a snuff film series perpetually running in her subconscious, you can bet anyone born in the porn and digital media saturated generations that came after her is not doing any better.

Where does it come from and why is it like this?

Not only are we not alone when we think we are alone, we are all under constant spiritual attack. We live in a spiritual Dark Age. Never has a group of civilizations been in more profound denial and ignorance of the unseen, non-obvious (occulted) world. To the average person in our day, magic has to be Harry Potter with his fire hoses of lightning shooting from his fingertips or it does not exist. If an animal or tree doesn’t start forming sentences in American English, we claim we cannot understand its language. We are so senseless and numb when it comes to the spirit world, we pave paradise to put up a parking lot. We call an office complex “church” and presume God will give us goodies if we show up there in our cars every Sunday.

Those who think a being powerful enough to have a great deal of authority over our lives and deaths is beyond being pissed off at us would be wrong. I think Jesus has become so frustrated with what has been done in his name that he has all but left the building. He is still around, but he makes himself scarcest around the very people who claim to know him best. Their massive egos don’t leave him sufficient breathing or speaking room. The thing invoked in megachurches is neither Jesus nor God, nor anything like him. Many Christian rituals summon an array of spirits, some of which are benevolent. From what I have sensed in Christian churches, all too many of the spirits are neutral or malevolent. In any given mainstream religious service, I have sensed an array of feeder spirits who eat loosh, elementals, fairies (fairies can be as predatory and malevolent as they come), bodhisattvas, and demons. Yes, you heard me correctly, demons.

Any ritual gathering of people in an unbanished, badly designed, and unholy space is going to attract its fair share of demons. Certain human activities generate potent astral and etheric energy dumps. Religious rituals are no exception. A large group of spiritual insensitives whose members believe God himself is reaching out and touching them are not totally wrong. For those willing to live Jesus’s word via selfless generosity and the Golden Rule, ritual is a pathway to connect to Jesus via their Holy Guardian Angels and higher selves. For the rest, ritual is a socially acceptable method of getting high.

When the Catholic church discarded its traditional mass for the “new” one, it opened the floodgates for sinister spirits to take the mantle once held by the Christian God. Long before Catholics abandoned their own genius, longstanding egregore, Protestants were making a demonic mockery of Jesus via Pentecostalism. Charlatans writhing on the ground and babbling like asylum patients in public while claiming the miraculous healing powers of Jesus gave rise to both Spiritualist seances where other charlatans allegedly channeled the dead and modern televangelist “healing” shows.

By the time I was born in 1973, there wasn’t a serious religious ritual to be found almost anywhere in the world, save a few enclaves where people had instinctively preserved the old ways. Add to this a bunch of zealots who claimed every ghost sighting or non-monotheist synchronicity was demonic and it is no wonder people like me started saying “my church is the great outdoors”. They traded a living spiritual ecosystem for a broken, muted liminal space that looked a great deal like a shopping mall.

Ritual in general is like bathing and serves a similar function on the astral plane. Old Catholic and Orthodox masses were and are full of banishing and cleansing elements such as images of God, singing, chanting, incense, and demon traps in the form of repeating symmetrical designs. Not only does the repetition of a traditional mass strengthen the inner self of the person lucky enough to participate in its pageantry, it simultaneously draws and builds the ancient power of millions who have performed the ritual over time. Time and space are irrelevant on the level of spirit because spirit is so large and time and space are small. There is nothing spirit cannot “see”. Those who choose to enact the ancient mass are like radios that decide to tune themselves to a holy bandwidth. Yes, they could choose to dial in static like everyone else, or they can narrow down their actions to specifically tune into the self-improvement God channel. Of course there are many God channels and many rituals that tune into them. One of these is the Sphere of Protection. Though there are other banishing rituals, the Sphere of Protection is the one I am the most familiar with. It is also considered easier and gentler than other banishing rituals for reasons I do not understand.

Decompression mode

Someday when this incarnation is over for the lot of us, I believe we will look upon this time as very compressed, dense, and pressurized as history goes. Many have tried to cram several lifetimes worth of experience into a single incarnation: multiple marriages, houses, great hoards of possessions, compulsive travel/perpetual tourism, children with multiple mates, and careers that make it clear that nobody can serve two masters. The Sphere of Protection (SoP) is a great separator, unsmooshing disparate intentions so they are no longer tangled and confused with one another. When I first started doing the SoP, I had the instinct as most do to attract monetary prosperity to myself without considering where the wealth was coming from. As years wore on, something happened where I was no longer willing to accept unearned wealth even in the realm of fantasy. What replaced the lust for unearned wealth was a feeling of true security and the notion that my will could sustain me in far worse circumstances. The result was a deep appreciation of the small and large luxuries I have as a lower middle class American and the steady diminishing of the Wendigo to accumulate more, more, MORE.

The balanced ecosystem of the SoP

The Sphere of Protection invoke an ecosystem via the imagination and a bit of dramatization, i.e. hand gestures and body movements. The way it works is via numbers and shapes. You do a series of turns, facing one direction and tracing a circle, facing another and tracing a triangle, and so on. This seems like a bunch of nothing until you actually do it every day for about six months. I went through the motions for a long time. If you’ve ever played a musical instrument, it is a great deal like musical practice. For the first six months to a year, you sound like ass and you are embarrassed every time you hear yourself. Give it enough time and dedication, however, and you sound pretty good.
The Sphere of Protection opens with a mini ritual of essentially drawing a cross in the air. In my own case, I sing the names of the gods I invoke. There are four of them all belonging to the same pantheon. After the cross, the “real” Sphere begins and it involves turning to the East, South, West, and North (clockwise) and invoking one god per corner. The East and West gods are masculine and the South and West are feminine. This can be changed around so the North and South are masculine and East and West are feminine. Monotheists can also adapt the entire invocation to their own, single god. Again, in my case, I sing the Divine names but you can also just speak them. It’s a very adaptable ritual.

The Sphere of Protection ends with drawing a circle for the spirit above and the spirit below and imagining another cross with two extensions going up and down much like a ship with a mast and an anchor. The Sphere is complete when you imagine all the invoked forces meeting and creating a protective ball around you that extends about four to ten feet around your general person. I am a visual learner, so that is why I have made
a video of the Sphere of Protection here.

The Sphere of Protection will not make you astrally bulletproof, but it will deflect a large amount of psychic static that would otherwise make itself into a nuisance. In my own case, I am a psychopomp, which is a fancy term for someone who talks to the dead and occasionally helps them cross over. The SoP has helped me filter genuine messages from deceased people who need my help and muted the voices of malicious impersonator spirits. I would highly advise that anyone who struggles with addictive behavior perform the SoP every day. Addictions are commonly the result of being fed upon by nefarious entities who get off on the energy of addictive behavior. In large part, the SoP is a big astral pyramid that is using me to perpetuate itself. I’m fine with that, and if you give it a try, I will try to help as much as I am able.

I have a detailed walkthrough of the SoP here. Good luck!

On Hiatus

May. 31st, 2025 10:54 am
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
glastonbury abbeyJust a reminder -- I don't expect to post here again until June 13. I'll put through comments when I have the chance, but there may be long delays. 

Those of you who are coming to the book signings in London or the talks in Glastonbury, I'll look forward to seeing you soon. Everyone else -- why, I'll be back in a couple of weeks. 
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