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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gordon White
Read between
December 20 - December 28, 2019
Graham Greene once wrote that all writers must have a splinter of ice in their hearts so that they can be involved in the world and also slightly removed, making observations. The hearts of modern magicians living through the Kali Yuga must contain glaciers.
Reality must be approached more from a pirate angle than a naval one.
Your goal is not to find a quiet, secure job somewhere near an affordable suburb, settle down and then wait for death. The economy that supported such unambitious goals is ending. The developed world is now in a state of permanent structural instability. Seeking after stability is a recipe for homelessness in your late middle age years. In today’s world, security only comes from embracing opportunity. And opportunity is not randomly distributed in either space or time. It must be pursued and seized.
Magic’s only other requirement is that you always put a question mark after the word “reality” and truly own the responsibility that comes with doing so.
the gap between never having performed a practical enchantment and performing your first practical enchantment is greater than the gap between that first enchantment and achieving the status of Magus.
To ignore half of them as irrelevant is to navigate with half a map, or even to divine with half a deck of tarot cards, as the macroeconomic forces will always tell you what will happen to the microeconomic forces in the coming months. Just look at how gas prices fluctuate.
Giving yourself a global perspective on humanomics is essential for the acquisition of wealth and meaning in your life. As the old gambling saying has it, if you can’t spot the sucker at the table, you are the sucker.
Until 1971, the value of the dollar was pegged to a fixed amount of precious metal just as it was at the beginning of fractional reserve banking. When the famous Voodooist Marie Laveau and her daughter were alive in the nineteenth century, a dollar was either made with a guaranteed amount of silver, or was convertible into a specified amount. This fixed the value of a dollar into something real. So if either Laveau senior or junior had used the customary folk magical practice of putting a dollar under a candle, she would have been growing wealth from a fixed amount. If you have tried this same
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Ten million jobs were lost and the banks received $11 trillion in bailouts. It is worth noting that the total mortgage debt of the United States at the time was approximately $9 trillion. It would have been cheaper for the taxpayer to pay off every single mortgage in the country and let the banks who placed dodgy bets fail. Go ahead and let that sink in.
The most important wealth creation step you can ever take is to come to grips with debasement and find ways to ameliorate it.
We live in a world where the number of inches in a foot and the distance each inch measures are constantly changing to suit the needs of the 0.01 percent. It thus falls to you and you alone to assess value, something you cannot do without an understanding of currency and money.
The way we view economics then, the way we measure and allocate value, is the very definition of bringing a knife to a gunfight. It is simply not up to the challenges or opportunities the twenty-first century presents. You alone have to meet those challenges and opportunities.
All these changes are going to elevate many people and are going to leave even more behind. And if you are expecting some form of policy change to save you, then you will be waiting a long time.
There is no avoiding the fact that we are now solely responsible for our own economic destiny. Taking the long view of history, we always were, but this has been obscured by the fact that for a brief thirty-year period after the war, our economic best interest was aligned with that of the state. Now it isn’t. Now we have to educate ourselves and become whole.
All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions … A simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram.
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate. nassim nicholas taleb
There may indeed be a resting worldview you prefer for the quieter moments in life or their most important milestones such as births, romance, and the deaths of loved ones and enemies. These maps may not be best suited for navigating the corporate sphere, especially now that it appears to have gone completely feral.
We have diluted what is probably our most powerful asset, magical thinking, by confusing it with the advertising slogans you heard during the television programmes of your childhood.
The probability that two events will both occur can never be greater than the probability that each event will occur individually.
Viewed from the perspective of pure theory, optionality allows you to benefit from the positive side of any uncertain situation without exposing you to any damage from the negative outcome of the same uncertainty.
Firstly, lean into optionality rather than charging off after lofty goals from a standing start. Take single steps rather than multiple steps to maximise your starting probability. At each step on the way to your goal, maximising optionality also maximises the probability of a preferred outcome for the next step. Make peace with the cognitive reality that you both probably do not really know what you want and definitely do not know the correct way to achieve it from the outset, so re-examine your options at each step and be open to the hitherto-unanticipated route.
In a 1901 letter to fellow Golden Dawn magician Florence Farr, the poet W. B. Yeats wrote “whatever we build in the imagination will accomplish itself in the circumstances of our lives.”
Which becomes especially true when you build one brick at a time. And while the bricks get smaller and smaller as you build, the next one—the cornerstone, if you will—is an absolute doozy.
Properly used, magic will destroy your life. This is a feature, not a bug.
Becoming invincible is the process of immunising yourself against the monoculture. Your world becomes permanently bigger … so big that the shrill howlings of marketers and politicians get so faint that you can barely hear them, let alone believe them.
It’s best to not sugarcoat this: the most effective route to becoming invincible is to take a high dose of psychedelics in a suitable ritual environment.
We think of marijuana or opium as “drugs” and leeks or carrots as “vegetables,” but the classical world saw them all as plants. Some you ate, some stopped stomach cramps, some relieved pain.
croupier
#NewWords
diktat.
#NewWords
Mastering Witchcraft.
#ToRead
“The Magic of Transgression”
For instance, it may be forbidden to eat the flesh of a certain animal because it is involved with a creation story. To temporarily break a taboo is to unleash tremendous power because the sorcerer steps outside the rules or conditions governing the proper function of reality.
In magic based on the violation of taboo, the individual sees himself placed in a new relationship with regard to nature: instead of suggesting to natural forces what he expects of them, by relying on imitative acts, he wrests from them the power to coerce them into yielding to his wishes.38
The Headless Rite
The Headless Rite
The Rite
apotropaic
What we might call “rural folk Catholicism” bears as much similarity to what happens before the throne of Saint Peter as the experience of flying on Air Force One has to you walking to your mailbox.
heuristic
#NewWord
The simplest way to begin with the spirits of the dead is to buy an Anima Sola/Lonely Soul statue or card, light a white candle before it and offer them spring water to quench their/his/her thirst.
The Scole Experiments
Look it up
Secondly, OBE/NDEs have occurred when patients have been inside MRI machines that can prove there was zero brain activity, so how could the brain be hallucinating?
Look into this
We still do not know how it is possible for people to experience an enhanced consciousness during a cardiac arrest, that is, during a period when the brain displays no measurable activity and all brain function, such as bodily and brain-stem reflexes and breathing, has ceased. Looking at the interaction between consciousness and the brain, we concluded that consciousness cannot be seen as the product of brain function. In fact, sometimes the opposite seems to apply: the mind influences brain function, both in the short and long term as a result of the empirically proven principle of
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Working with Hermanubis
Agathodaimon,
#OccultWords
Serapis
#OccultWords
Logos,
#OccultWords
Err on the side of caution with offerings for other spirits and leave them at crossroads, in graveyards, or other between-spaces not located on your property. Much as on the African plains or in the open ocean, there is something of a food chain when it comes to spirit offerings. The big ones eat first. Then the others do. You do not want to be feeding or attracting the others to your house.
Another Offering Rite
Shoot for luck, not power; shoot for tricks, not clout.
In general, oblique approaches recognise that complex objectives tend to be imprecisely defined and contain many components that are not necessarily or obviously compatible with each other, and that we learn about the nature of the objectives and the means of achieving them during a process of experiment and discovery. Oblique approaches often step backwards to move forwards.52
