Religion is Bullshit

I've been trying to go to sleep but haven't really succeeded tonight. Instead my thoughts have strayed to my brother and trying to reconcile a civil relationship. I thought about the topic of religion, the reason why we fought in the first place. I was the instigator, as usual. I see ignorance and cannot leave it alone, thus becoming ignorant myself. The importance of what occurred to me is to let him know that his faith does not offend me, if it did what would that say about me? Should anything in the vast universe offend me? If it exists then it is as it should be, universal evolution doesn't depend on my petty egotistical desire to prove someone wrong. But if I'm to embrace the universe, how am I to explain unpleasant phenomenon? The most easily reviled matter that comes to mind is feces, we call tings we don't like shit. Its the final stage of matter after digestion, it can longer be absorbed by the body so as to provide any nourishment. What was once a desirable meal has had its essence digested and leaving a husk of shit behind. When babies need change or pets have accidents indoors the stench is unmistakable. So ponder on that for a moment, is there some use in its existence? Sure, nature is self sustaining, so it fertilizes soil, its great for potty humor and it gives us some wonderful descriptive terms to define things we hate, or just things in general. I can think of an allegory just like it.

Spiritual essence is digested by humanity in its mystical form through myths and dreams, leaving only the material remains adopted by religions in the form of dogmas (notice that they fixate on what people do with their bodies). Religious fundamentalism is humanity's metaphorical fecal matter, sure it stinks, but it exists for a reason. We see it in the world and strive to get rid of it's poison, we clean up its mess, we poke fun at it. Watch an extremist at a party tell people that they need to repent and find Jesus and you'll see them flee, just the same as if he took a dump on the carpet. Its quite funny actually, though sad in reality. Either way, it shouldn't personally offend anyone with genuine spiritual aspirations, its just bullshit. Looking at it this way, I don't know why I poked at this issue so much with my brother, I only made a messy situation smell even worse.

Demon Dream - Round 2

Today I took an afternoon nap while Irv and Lisa were out and Alden was at Kevin's. The dream begins in the house next door, same time and overcast weather as the actual day. The kitchen next door was empty, including the fridge we use for storage, in its place was the old round wooden table and two small chairs that used to belong to that kitchen. Lisa was sitting across from me facing the backdoor entrance into the kitchen, facing East. As we were talking I realized that this was a dream. I remembered that I had, in fact, taken a nap while she was out. I then lovingly reached out to her and tried to explain that I love her, but this is just a dream. I felt a surge upwards as my dream-body began to float away from her, even as I reached to touch her face.

Instead of awaking, the dream fades into another sequence in the same setting, though this time the table was set closer to the center of the room. Sitting at the North end of the table was Lisa again, though this time she was looking slightly downwards at the table, as though absent minded while muttering things to herself. I sat close to her at her right side, touched her arm leaning on the table and asked her what she was saying. She looked at me with malicious eyes that weren't her's at all and continued to mutter gibberish a little louder this. In my inexplicable dream-world understanding I knew it to be a demonic language, out of which I made out the words goetia and ritual or evocation. I was immediately reminded of a ritual I've been planning to do this month, though mundane life has made me forgetful. Today is March 16, 2010, for a while I had planned something for March 15th, even so, I had worked yesterday and upon coming home I was completely sidetracked by the day's activities. The period from march 11th to March 20th marks the calendar days attributed to Andromalius, a goetic spirit I've already employed in a relatively minor matter without any formal ritual. My suspicions that the earlier demonic dreams are connected with this spirit are all the stronger now, as they were in that dream-instant. I pulled away from touching not-Lisa and it vanished before my eyes, I was standing alone in the kitchen looking around, fully lucid. A defiant instinct in me drove to to call it “SHOW YOURSELF, DEMON!” Realizing that I was rashly calling it without any precaution, I closed my dream-eyes and forged a mental circle about me for protection. No circle was needed, it was gone and the scene needed to play out in my unconscious was over. I woke up groggy, just enough to realize real-from dream and went back to napping, vainly hoping to learn more.

Edit: Its important to note that at some point during this dream, I felt power all over my body, that feeling of enlightened rapture covering my sleeping body. Its like prolonged goosebumps, though that description alone doesn't do it justice. It flows from me like golden light radiating from the Sun. I don't remember the exact moment within the dream, I think I first sensed it when waking up from the first layer, but I'm not certain.

Old School Dream

Its hard to remember now how the dream actually started, it just faded into memory now. I remember arriving at my old high school in Long Island with a stack of three books I selected from mine and Lisa's library. I set them down in one corner of the art room and started planning another large painting commission. At that moment the pain of revisiting that place hit me all at once as I realized that Susan Hersh was no longer alive, a distant memory in my past. I thought of all the hassle of physically purchasing and assembling the same materials all over again on my own. The archival way of doing this only occurred to me just moments ago while awake. I was alone in the semi-dark room, with lights off and only the north light from the overcast day filtering into my surroundings enhancing the dream-like setting. Students started casually filing into the room, talking quietly amongst themselves pay no mind to me and my project. I remember a friend, Kerry as she looked in the past amongst them, I would identify Sean later. I was aware that I was older, as I am now, and slowly I began to see that the entire project was an unrealistic undertaking. I lived in NJ and had no place to stay, I was not about to even try my mother's house even if she took me in. I had 3 stacks of books because they were a way of bringing my home and my loved ones with me. The thought of Lisa made me want to drop everything and go home.

I looked at some of the student drawings and recognized poorly drawn versions of my own drawings from everyday life. Amongst them were a few drawings of Harmony, the black and white cat. I proceeded to interrupted their chatter about art and half-jokingly accuse them of stealing all my ideas, the room went silent and I walked away into the teacher's office next to the room. It occurred to me that I kept waiting to meet this other teacher that had replaced Sue there, but the teacher never arrived. It was like some unreal entity that everyone except myself knew, but never actually manifested itself in the dream. So there I was stuck in a teacher's role though it had nothing to do with what I was there for. At my best I observed student's behavior like a distant anthropologist, at my worse I felt the entire place was beneath me. When leaving I caught a conversation between Sean and a friend of his. It sounded like a critique of a art film his friend was working on about bi-sexual relationships, and I mused to myself on how progressive that was for a high school setting. That was the last passing observation as we all walked out of a school building that was by then structurally morphing into the school of my childhood in Brazil. The dream faded once again.

HGA

Why do I have this need for God? Why can't I exist like an animal, going day to day satisfied with my lot in life? Its like I drug, I always need a fix, never going long without one contemplation and aspiration for the Divine. The more I reach upwards, the farther the Star seems. I weep at the thought of my ego, my inadequacies, personal flaws and failures holding me back.

My Tarot Thesis

Truth veiled in Beauty

Lust

The thelemic doctrine on which this entire deck is based comes from Liber Al vel Legis known to most as the Book of the Law. In it we find this most liberating, yet spiritually binding decree.

Do what thy wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will.

“Do what thy wilt” applies to every inclination of your true being. You should always try to expand your horizons challenging what you think you like or dislike by trying new things. But if something doesn't resonate with you, you must be true to yourself. Struggling with sexual identity has been a long burden imposed on men and women of all ages by society's moral norms. Among them, young people are the most tormented as they're really trying to find and define their identity. Society doesn't help when it constantly tries to label and categorize people pigeonholing them in definitions such as gay, straight, bisexual, transgendered and such. You are not defined by any of these labels! Your sexual preference is simply an expression of your divine Will. Much like a genuine religious ritual, not a banal dwelling on the superficial act, but the meaning of the act to your libido, in other words - what gets you off. If you were to stop and reason through the exchange of saliva and other bodily fluids it seems gross to the mind, yet in the heat of passion we transcend these limitations of cold reason and don't question what turns us on. This sexual “turn on” switch is subjective and unique to every person, exactly like the experience of spiritual enlightenment (This is probably the best allegory to explain the enacting of True Will uninhibited by reason). It would be frustrating and counterproductive to be caught up in minutia, your sexual preference is the means to an end, you're not defined by the mean but the end - the climax that unites us all. Sex between two or more consenting individuals is the crux of freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

So if you're troubled by your culture's view of what you do in the bedroom, let's dispel these social pressures right now! To paraphrase Crowley, 'we are all one in essence and many in manifestation'. By observing the unique individual nature in each other, we're learning something new about the whole, the supreme nature of the universe. God - The Supreme Deity, Manifest Universe, learns about it's own nature through us, therefore homogeneity is the enemy of all nature. Succumbing to external pressure to normalize the individual to a common denominator is often a direct violation of one's True Will.

In the Book of the Law the feminine receptive principle manifested as Nuit describes that the “Word of sin is restriction” As Queen of Infinite Space she states:

“...I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me!” -Al 1:61

Hadit, the manifestation of the innermost God within all of us responds in part two.

“I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. The exposure of innocence is a lie. Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for this... I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy. If I lift up my head, I and my Nuit are one. If I droop down mine head, and shoot forth venom, then is rapture of the earth, and I and the earth are one.” -Al 2:22;26

The Lust card is a depiction of this sacred ritual that unifies all consciousness through the unique expression of the Self in its various forms, but always with the essence of the Yin and the Yang in ecstasy.

Sex is a powerful magick tool available to all of us. In a figurative sense we're all pubescent children playing with each other. It can be just casual fun or it can be our embodiment of the primordial creative forces of the universe. Either way the spiritual principle behind the depiction of male and female intercourse is NOT to be taken strictly as a literal heterosexual coupling. This divine state of ecstasy is always a result of intercourse between a projector and a recipient, men and women can play both roles. If it's two men, one is the recipient and he becomes the scarlet woman or a manifestation of Nuit, infinity beckoning to be filled. The projector becomes the beast, or Hadit, answering the call and filling infinite space. Its the same with two women or men/women role reversal. This principle can be extended to include poly-amorous sex where a group of projectors are worshiping the recipient who embodies the priestess of infinity. I know for sure, that its against my Will that anyone should ever use my artwork as a basis for discrimination against anyone else. The important point of all this is that Lust is universal, there is no discrimination, the whore Goddess depicted in this card is Babylon, the refuser of none.

Dream: Spirit Possession.

I don't feel like writing anything at all right now, but I have to put this down because its significant. The night before last I had a dream, the usual large dark haunted house that recurs often. I was sometimes alone, sometimes with Lisa and Irv somewhere near. The place was haunted by a presence, an intelligent spirit that danced just on the edge of my peripheral vision. This wasn't a shade or a print of someone stuck in time and space, this was a spirit presence. It would rattle and move things around the house and while the base instinct of fear came over me, I easily overcame it with my urge to investigate the unknown. But as soon as I reached it, it would drop its manifestation and move on someplace else in the house, never actually confronting me or revealing anything of its nature beyond pointless mischief. After many frustrating repetitions I was very aware of the fact that I was dreaming and decided to wake up. I would get up from the couch, the house would be supernaturally dark, a dream darkness that permeates everything, defying physics, though somehow leaving the environment just visible enough to see my way around. A dream in a dream, how frustrating... I then forced myself to wake up and every time I thought I succeeded I would roll off the futon mattress only to realize I was still dreaming. After several times I concentrated hard enough to at least move on to different dreams, as though dream scenarios were windows navigating on the edge of my lucid dream state. I was able to move on to darkness of sleep then another dream entirely about an scenario in which I had never met Lisa and was perpetually stuck on the fringes of the dating game while trying to make it as an artist.

I told Lisa about this dream, same night when she had a zombie dream. The very next night it came back much worse. In this dream I remember being in the house in dream darkness as I've described before. I was on the computer when a feeling of what felt like drunkenness came over me, I get up and see Alden up and staring at me silently. I try to say something to him and realize that conscious movement and speech is much harder than I've ever experienced in my most drunk and stoned state of mind. Alden was puttering around the house getting something to eat in the kitchen when I started to levitate uncontrollably. I remember bumping into his coffee and spilling it over the counter. I felt a the beginnings of supernatural connection to something powerful, tried to channel it to fly away but only bumped my head against a glass window, not being able to break free to the outside. I could see the dark overcast day outside, empty, filled with possibilities, but I couldn’t break free on my own. I once again tried to wake up and rolled off bed, ran upstairs to Lisa and Irv and told them about this horrible nightmare. Staring at their dumbfound faces I realized that I was still dreaming, no matter what I said, they couldn't understand what I was talking about. I would feel goosebumps and numbness all over my body, I could just about feel my laying body, but couldn't wake up.

I tried again and roll off bed once again. This time I was in a different house, it was the house I lived in with my family in 2000, though only part of it, as though it somehow fit in with my current home in a hybrid form. I walk into a small room where Lisa was sitting in, dressed in her pink nightgown sitting on a single bed. There was another single bed across from her with a TV tray between the two, where she was readying her tarot cards for a reading. I walk in, she greets me, and I proceed to desperately tell her about my experiences for the past few dream-hours. I knew it was another dream. She was listening attentively and nodding when I explained to her that she wasn't the real Lisa, only a dream version, that in reality she was much more, a Goddess by comparison to this limited fraction of a psyche standing before me. I loved her just the same, and held her hands. I could tell that dream Lisa understood the meaning of everything I said and was still ever a comforting presence even if only being my unconscious projection of her. We sat across from each other and just was she was starting to shuffle cards I felt the beginning sparks of holy rapture within me, the sense of levitation again and soon, the realization of my inability to transcend the room I was in. I immediately understood that this was a state of false enlightenment, a simulation induced by the spirit toying with me, an experience so incomplete that later I would actually feel sorry for the spirit's inability to understand what its really like. It was only able to reproduce the most superficial sensations of enlightened rapture in my nervous system. Only I can complete the circuit as a conduit of Divine Will, connecting the above to the below, so it was really limited if it had tried to really fool me. (The highest demons can ascend to in the Tree of Life is Daath, where the Arch-demon Choronzon resides. It is Knowledge, their false summit, whereas Understanding lies beyond it, in Binah, the Mother, womb which birthed the Universe. Only souls birthed as humans starting at Malkuth can cross the Abyss. In this journey, demon spirits under your Will are redeemed and given a chance to ascend to higher realms. As we get promoted, so do they, filling the cosmic vacancy we leave behind as we ascend.)

I once again struggle to get up and roll off bed, repeating this series of fake awakenings until I murmur something out loud and momentarially wake up for real, for a brief second. I made a conscious mental note of the whole thing and went right back to sleep, hoping for relief in dreamlesness or some other dream. Instead the cycle continued, I've never before in my dreams experience this kind of demonic possession. Finally in the last fake awakening I immediately fell limp to the ground, by now I I'm sick of it all. Not yet sure if this was dream or not I thought If only I could get upstairs I could get some help from Irv and Lisa, they're all I have when I'm in distress. So crawling on the floor near the foot of the stairs I yell “I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS!” and I roared so loud that if it was real someone in the house would wake up and help me, I was furious. With that I broke free and woke up again to the sound of my voice. This time I opened my eyes, wiped off some of the drowsiness and looked around the room. I could hear the spirit inside my head still whispering generally dickish musings, mostly unintelligible gibberish which I can't recall. I seriously thought about going upstairs and sleep on the side mattress next to Lisa, but I had work the next morning and didn't want to risk not getting up from the alarm clock in the living room. So I mentally told the spirit “Go to sleep or whatever the hell you do. Let me sleep, I have have work in the morning, this is not a good time for this.” I then promptly fell into a pleasant dreamless sleep.

I told Lisa about this dream and we speculated this being my depression or something. I've been working on compositions of the Holy Guarding Angel present symbolically in Hierophant and figuratively in the Art card. She suggested it could be a backlash from below. This merits a tarot reading.

Edit: What Lisa said wasn't just simply dismissive of me chalking it up to depression, it was much more complex. I just got tired of writing tonight, this was for a dream record only.