Around my birthday, I had this dream, which I will copy here...

I dreamt that I was driving a car and my passenger was Aleister Crowley. He was somehow back from the dead and I was filling him in on everything that had happened since his passing in '47. I went to pull out of the cemetery where I'd picked him up, and realized there was no passenger-side tire and I was attempting to drive on 3 wheels.

I had done a lot of pondering what this meant, especially as it pertains to my life and path. Uncle Al has been a large influence on my cosmological thought, he and Jung holding the two main pillars. Today, I was meditating as I drove home and had this revelation.

I was driving Uncle Al in my car. I drive an Infiniti, whose symbol is a triangle in a circle. My goodness, it's sort of like my tattoo.

Also, the year, of my car? Oh, it's a '93, oh Holy Thelemic Number that you are!

Was Uncle Al trying to warn me about my car falling apart? Am I relying one-tire-too-many on Al? Is the status of my car a measuring stick for my path, somehow synchronistically connected? Am I reaching for straws here? Am I babbling incoherently? Am I eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

At least one of those questions are true, I am sure of it.

P.S. Here's an icon for my Thelemic friends :)

It's Christmas Eve, so of course I was thinking about the Myth of Oedipus. (No, there's really no connection. I was being contradictory.) I will summarize for those unfamiliar and those who want the full story can follow the link above.

Oedipus goes to the Oracle who says, "Dude, you're totally gonna kill your dad!" Naturally, Oedipus thinks this is pretty fucked up, so he runs away so he won't be anywhere near his dad. While traveling, he meets a stranger, gets into a fight and kills him. Then he goes and hooks up with dead-dude's wife. Eventually he discovers that the dude he killed was his dad and he's been fucking his mom. Oedipus then stabs out his own eyes in horror and banishes himself.

Now, Freud says that this myth means that all men want to kill their fathers and fuck their moms.

What the fuck is wrong with Freud?

Anywhere in the story does it seem like this is something that Oedipus is looking for? He didn't get up one morning and say, "Hey, I'll go see the Oracle and maybe that crazy witch will give me some good news! Like I get to stab my dad with my sword and my mom with my cock!"

Is it not much clearer as an allegory for the inescapable pull of one's destiny? Try as you might, you can't fool the Fates, you can't avoid your destiny. Fight all you want, but you get pulled along anyway, and because you fought all the way, you will find nothing but discontent where you may have found contentment instead. Does this not teach us to embrace our destiny, to follow our unique life's orbit? A Wise One in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series says that we must learn to ride fate. Wouldn't you rather be surfing atop the events of your life, rather than always being tossed about, churning in the undertow?

Perhaps Freud had a hot mom, a MILF if you will. And his father was a very strict and authoritarian Jew. Between Freud's everything=sex theorizing and his personal correspondence between with Carl Jung, it becomes clear that dear Sigmund was quite hung up on sex, even unwilling to discuss his own sex life in analysis. So it is not surprising that Freud would pull this most immoral and distressing interpretation out of a simple metaphor about fate. What strikes me as surprising is how wide-spread and accepted this interpretation is and how much psychological damage has been done to the personal unconscious and sexual identity and of the Western world because of it.

Happy Holidays!

The purpose of the Great Work is to follow your Path perfectly. In the movie K-PAX, Prot tells us that the Universe is continually, forever, expanding, then contracting upon itself. Every time it expands, we live the same life over again, making the same choices, the same mistakes. So we should get it right this time, because it's the only time we get. The theme is the same in Vonnegut's Timequake. In Good Omens, Adam says that maybe religions should stop telling us it all gets sorted out after we're dead so that maybe we'll start trying to sort it out when we're here.

So it's this I've been pondering all morning, my retrograde reflection. Yes, we may have life after life to get it right, but I've always felt that this is my one life and I have to get it right this time around. There are no second chances. This, I think, is why I have been so obsessive about doing what I feel I need to do and being very uncompromising in my life decisions, following the signs the Universe sends my way.

Prot tells us that our task is to be here and be prepared for anything that falls in our Path. He's right.

I just watched something like thirteen clips from the new Harry Potter movie. Seriously, there can't be much of it I haven't seen already. It's almost like the opposite from the books. Absolute and complete secrecy for the books, but the movie is right out in the open. As if the books are the original tale, the fuller, more secret version, the esoteric aspect, while the movies are the much simpler, out-in-the-open, mass-appeal version, the exoteric aspect.

Most religions have them. Judaism has Qabalah, Islam has Sufism, Atheism has the Magic Power of Chance, etc... The Egyptians had a two-sided religion, the esoteric version, known only by the priests, magicians and pharohs, and the exoteric version, which was spread to the masses. The main difference was that the esoterics knew what all the symbols really meant.

Jesus was a mystic. His friends called him Yeshua. His wife called him Honey.

Someone just parked in an illegal parking spot directly in front of me, a place I got a $25.00 parking ticket for parking in and then someone came out of the neighbors and began to load large amounts of luggage into his car. I think there was a bowling ball involved. Well, it was at least a bowling ball bag. Who knows what could have been inside it.

Einstein's brain? John Dillinger's penis? Seventy-four pairs of pink socks?

The world may never know.

My, my, how productive I've been! Laundry and dishes and oil change and hair cut for wee lad and cooking and car washing. Now I should just add sleep to my list of productions and maybe I'd get some of that too :P

I got the Book back from the Editor yesterday. There are no major changes to be made, and merely a few grammatical errors, and a propensity to use "seemingly" quite a bit. Some quotes from the review:

"...a fun and entertaining read, yet thought-provoking and surprisingly profound at the same time... very complex and well-developed characters. The book is very smartly written, full of nuances and witticisms. There is a wide spectrum of personalities, providing a something-for-everyone potential..."

Does anyone here know how to do margins with HTML? I would have liked to indent that last quote. Hmmm...

So now, the next step is to do the final edit and get it ready for publication. We should be sending it off toward the end of August, once Mercury goes direct again. Excitement, excitement!

I'll be working all weekend. Yip.

"I would say that there is no truth. There is only you and what you make the truth." ~ Bright Eyes

"People believe. It's what people do. They believe and the will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine and people believe; and it's that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen." ~ Neil Gaiman

Douglas Adams said that Man wanted to know purpose, so God left Man to figure that out. We make belief. The Universe doesn't mean anything until we create that meaning.

You feel like life has no meaning? Get out there and make some. Brew it, stew it, construct it, paint it, spell it, dance it, write it, cook it, eat it, shit it, fuck it.

It's your world. Populate it as you like.

Everything is under control.

Your control.

Do you think that an orbit exists as anything but an expression of the planet which follows it? Do you think your life exists as anything but an expression of you?

It's your life.

Wake up.

**EDIT**
Thanks wwonka666, for the indentation advice!

This struck me very hard this evening.

I got unstuck from space-time, but only in a sensory sort of way. Not really unstuck physically. Because I can't even imagine what that would be like. I've done it metaphysically, spiritually, and psychologically and a few other allys I might mention.

First, as I left work, staring across the street to the Marriott, the light drizzle dabbling at being rain, blackening the pavement, suddenly transported me to the lot of a Denny's restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I've never been to Florida, but who am I to argue with what my senses tell me?

That's a rhetorical question. That means you don't really have to answer it. But you can if you want to. This IS a free country, after all.

Ah, the sky. Yes, so after leaving Denny's in Florida, I entered my car and drove, and I became unstuck again. This time, I was traveling along an expressway with the purple sky over Tokyo. Everything was bathed in pinks and violets, deep and thick, substantial. Philip K. Dick said God delivered messages to him in a pink laser beam of phosphene. Now imagine most of the sky is filled with it. And it's tangible. Reach out and cut me a slice of neon cotton candy.

Then the sun burst across the horizon like a brimstone demon clawing its way out of hell, and I found myself on Venus at sunrise; the sun too big and too bright, burning away the toxins and impurities of the atmosphere. The sun continued upon its trajectory, the demon eradicating the Venusian meteorological effluence, leaving me with an ordinary Earthling-blue sky.

And I had this thought, how Earth is right in the middle between Mars and Venus, the mythological Man and Woman, the sun and the moon, the yin and the yang, and how everything on Earth, even languages can be broken down to masculine and feminine, binary code, zeros and ones, alpha and omega, cat and dog, Hodge and Podge, Starsky and Hutch. (Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stuck in the middle with you?)

On a more mundane note, I finished reading The Half-Blood Prince for a second time, and it's still good. I have a metaphorical shit-ton of theories about what’s going on and what’s going to happen. Only two more years to the exciting conclusion. Egads, what will I do?

I've read a few more Terry Pratchett novels. Has he written a book where Vetinari, the Patrician, is the main character? I love how his books overlap and center on different characters, and Vetinari is one of my enigmatic favorites.

I'm now reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a murder mystery where the dead one is the neighbor’s dog and the detective is a fifteen year-old autistic boy. It is amazing and I've only read thirty-eight pages.

This is more than long enough. Oops.

The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were a group of Chinese scholars and poets of the mid-3rd century AD who banded together to escape from the hypocrisy and danger of the official world to a life of drinking wine and writing verse in the country. Their retreat was typical of the Taoist-oriented ch'ing-t'an ("pure conversation") movement that advocated freedom of individual expression and hedonistic escape.

They play a large role in the Book, and my writing partner has a group on MySpace dedicated to their ideas. The group needed a new icon, and here's what I did.

"What might be hidden in the dark part of my mind? I thought then that I was dancing on the thinnest egde of my soul. Below me were vast spaces, totally unknown. Not psychiatry, not religion, not biology could penetrate that depth. None of them had any real idea of what lies within. They only knew what little it had chose to reveal of itself.
Were human beings what we seem to be? Or did we have another purpose in another world? perhaps our life here on Earth was a mere drift of shadow, incidental to our real truth. Maybe this was quite literally a stage, and we were blind actors." -Whitley Streiber, "Communion"

Alex Wrote:
Could you imagine the effect 6 billion Christs would have on the world?

I Wrote:
Yes I can and that sounds AMAZING! Six billion Saviors. No more searching for a Savior, we can all save ourselves. Physician, heal thyself! Oh my God, pardon the pun, that would be the best thing EVER! Imagine it! Every single person on the Planet connects up to God, realizes their inherent divinity and begins acting with wisdom, compassion and understanding, shining bright lights into this dark world!

That's so bad-ass.

So how do we get started?