Ritual and Results

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And you believe that:

1) It's all the result of your actions.
2) That you are the prosecutor, judge, and jury for the world.
3) That these people somehow were guilty of a crime and deserved to be punished.
4) That you are the person to mete out that punishment.

#1 is a mere coincidence.

#2 through #4 indicate that you somehow feel such a sense of righteousness that you can decide the fate of others.

However: Assuming that there is anything to 'majik', not only have you violated some of the spiritual laws, but the Wiccan Rede, as well!

So the bottom line is that either your actions were mis-guided and produced no effect outside of wasting your time and effort, or you have done something very, very wrong, and the spiritual backlash will act to balance out the deed. In other words, you have either nothing to fear, or everything to lose.

Oh great that makes me feel heaps better

What goes around comes around and it comes around to me once

Im safe & ...

Reality is what you make

I'm not here to make people feel better; I'm here to tell the truth.


No, reality is what it is in spite of what you make of it, and not because of what you make of it.

Well, I believe reality is what you make and that is my REALITY

Then we all have you to blame for making AIDS, the Iraq war, and Britney Spears part of reality, because I would certainly have not included them!

I always used to read a lot, write, draw, daydream. The three times that I have lived in countryside as an adult; four years at uni on a campus in the hills, and twice, ( for 6 and 10 months), by the sea, I spent most of my time getting pissed and stoned, and studying, or reading, drawing, and getting stoned, when not at work, respectively. Did a bit of walking by the sea, but after an initial enthusiastic period walks became car drives to places where sat and got stoned.

I have almost always tended towards bookworm behaviour.


This is exactly what I have been thinking about the last couple of weeks, provoked by all the wiccan/pagan talk of connecting with nature, and troubled by the disappearance of sunshine/direct daylight from my life. Remembering when I have worked on organic farms, a few months here and there, when all I tended to want to do was "sit" in nature.

Nature simply doesn't mean very much useful to me. It is beautiful decor, but what exactly am I supposed to do with it? I appreciate the beauties of sea and mountains and trees and the fascinating world of insects in the grass. I can go into ecstacies over a scenery, stand and feel myself expanding in a glorious landscape, but what am I supposed to do with it after the first few hours of exposure to it? It has little or no function for me.

I was thinking that if I needed to grow food in it, hunt or fish in it, house myself warmly and safely in it, then it might be of abiding interest to me, because I would need to work it out, use it, find a good relationship with it, but the fact is that I don't. Some people do; they live on farms, in eco-villages etc, but if you don't it really is nothing but a particularly rich visual environment.

When I was homeless, and moneyless, and wandering france 18 years ago, sleeping rough in sleeping bags under bridges, amongst pine trees, stamping out flat places in the dark to lay down on, warily observing weather and the approach of people, listening to the sounds of animals close by at night, picking blackberries off hedges, and almost collapsing from thirst in the heat on an island where we couldn't find water for a whole day, watching insect life and clouds because we had almost nothing else to do, then it was important.

But most of the time I have no need to pay nature much attention. It is not important. What is important is avoiding cars on roads, comparing prices in supermarkets, etc etc etc, and nature is nothing but scenery. I can't interact with nature. What am I supposed to do with it if not hunting, gathering, sowing, weeding, reaping, harvesting, preserving and pickling, herding and breeding and milking animals, etc?

So I was looking for a way to pull me out into the daylight/sunshine again. And found it in the act of rolling cigarettes. Rolling meticulous cylinders of paper and leaf, lighting them up with fire. Breathing deliberately/consciously. It is an oddly natural thing to do compared to reading, or sitting in front of the computer.


But that is precisely why it is useful to me in this case. It makes me go out, ( get showered and dressed every day too). It gives me ( an) energy.

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Last edited by ouinon on 18 Jul 2008, 3:42 pm, edited 4 times in total.

There are different plain'z (levels) of reality and that of thinking.

NB: In fact the most meaningful part of nature to me, the most important bit of "nature", as far as I am concerned, is my body, ( and the sun, I have been realising again).

It is possible that I have developed as complex and meaning-rich a relationship with my body, and with what I eat for instance, as I would once have done with the whole of nature when living as a hunter-gatherer or early farmer. As fascinating and problematical as the rest of nature would have seemed to me as a hunter-gatherer.

I think I said it on another thread about "virtual bodies" , that nature has become like a kind of church, to worship in every sunday ( walk), or from time to time because think one should, but actually no longer something ( really) meaningful to most people.

So what are the rituals that "connect"/support life now? Surely not ones to do with animal reproduction and plant seed sowing cycles. Or?

Even the sun has lost its place, as more and more people spend more and more of their lives in artificially lighted environments, stay up long after sundown, etc. But I know that I miss it. I still remember how totally alien and odd it felt after 5 weeks living and sleeping outdoors to go inside a house and switch on electric lights.

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Last edited by ouinon on 18 Jul 2008, 4:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Can anyone think of any other rituals/ceremonies/rites they practise to make things happen? Preparations and "spells"?

I thought of another one which I had almost completely stopped doing until recently, ( after having been quite an "adept" at it aswell), and which once upon a time would have definitely been considered a charm/spell; writing lists of "Things to Do".

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>>>.So the bottom line is that either your actions were mis-guided and produced no effect outside of wasting your time and effort, or you have done something very, very wrong, and the spiritual backlash will act to balance out the deed. In other words, you have either nothing to fear, or everything to lose.

I actually went through that whole “initiation” for several months straight. It was a real hell because I felt so unconnected with society and all mainstream religions. But then I found these groups online of real magicans who really knew about magik, including curses and stuff. Basically, the people who know explain it like this. People usually get cursed for one of two reasons, either they are bad people, always doing bad things, so your curse, it just attracts more of the issues they already have, so they get justice meted out to them that way. Otherwise, they are really too nice of a person, always doing things for others and thinking about others and never about themselves, as a result of this they get used and abused, and sooner or later this manifests itself, either in health problems, or getting taken advantage of, or other ways. If your curse worked you really have nothing to be afraid of, now, if it “didn't” work, see thats when you have to worry, because you are sending all this negative energy out, but sooner or later, it is going to rebound on you because you are the weakest link, for example, the time I tried to curse my math teacher for failing me in class. I should have never done that. I wound up losing control of myself over it.

Was just thinking that some of the impression of power in rites and rituals may lie precisely in their apparent pointlessness ( to the "uninitiated") . After all if every action has some kind of effect on the web/weave of the universe then actions like lighting and burning candles or making and erasing circles, all the complex deliberate elements in ritual, "must" be having an effect somewhere. But where?

Anyone else engage in seemingly ineffectual/useless actions because of some effect you perceive them to have somewhere in your life?

Maybe so much action in modern life is useless/ineffectual compared to pagan times that we are actually swamped by unseen but powerful effects without realising?

PS: I take it that your post, Taimaat, was in reply to SIXLUCY rather than anything that I had said?

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In fact in that sense probably the majority of jobs are nothing but extremely complex rituals conducted in order to conjure up money.

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You got it in one!

There's something I heard about Andy Warhol, that made a deep impression on me but is ignored by the herd. Maybe true, maybe myth.

One day, in his early years of fame, he produce a 5$ bill and started talking about how pieces of paper are worthless, but because this piece of paper has the signature of the head of the federal reserve, it's worth 5$ and can be exchanged for materials worth far more than the value of the paper. Then he wrote his own signature on the 5$ bill and said that now it has his signature on it, it was a genuine Warhol work of art and was worth thousands of dollars!

Back to conjuring money through ritual jobs. It's not so much the money as all wealth is relative. It's not the absolute amount of money we earn (or blag because, lets face it, most of the big money careers don't earn anything) it's keeping ahead of everybody else that matters.
The main aim is the power of enforcing your imagined reality on as many others as possible.

Substitute something healthier instead of the cigarette and then use that as an excuse to go outside and enjoy the sunshine.

Suggest something else that has that power. Walking for exercise or to do little shopping errands didn't do it. I tried. Didn't keep it up/didn't even start.

A cigarette insists. Motivation in a little rolled cylinder of rice paper. Magic!

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