The first time we met; both of us doing the same thing in a chaos magick guise; a chaos magick mentor who suggested Thelemic magick; from magickal power back to something more traditional; influences from Daniel Ingram and Aleister Crowley; different ways of describing what was unfolding for us; The Viking Youth Power Hour; paranormal experiences as the beginning of the awakening process; suspicion of the self and the spark of the divine; a pretence at a career in music; being groomed by Crowley from the age of nine; a silly fantasy novel comes to life; slumming in London; the attraction of practical magick; the chaos magick scene; the current aversion to magical group work; The Colours of Chaos (2008); disagreement in the context of friendship; objectionable opinions; all opinions are objectionable; all beliefs are imposters upon the Great Work (TGW); the false belief of TGW as the end of suffering; the false belief of insight as a reward for morality; what fulfils is nothing in this world; magicians are united by something outside the world; the weirdness of “objectionable views”; disagreement as an existential threat; the necessity of turning inwards; TGW involves concerning oneself only with oneself; the aversion to discussion of personal experience; discussion as an avoidance of truth; woke witches as a contemporary simulacrum of magick; gatekeeping; defending TGW is not TGW; how this played out in the organisation we were members of; the banality of the mainstream; how the occult scene is becoming occult from itself; self-doubt and disillusionment; focus and effort and the role of personality; our separation after The Baptist’s Head trilogy (2009-10); creating a unique expression of TGW; the delusion of “expressing” TGW; true nature is inherently moral; all tactics are the compensation for an absence that never was; evil versus the cultivation of good; regaining identity versus occupying it; humanity versus false identity and drama; the under-realisation of human potential; an invitation to teach; frustrating experiences of teaching meditation; syncretism and tradition; students looking for something behind the traditions; explorations in Anglicanism; training as a therapist and hiding occult trappings; Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli; how Jung hid his true insights behind psychology; the spirit of the depths versus the spirit of the times; The Red Book enabling talk of spirituality in psychological contexts; the ludicrous voice of the spirit of the times; fear of the wild; the lack of mystery and soul in psychology; the manualisation and automation of therapy; medicalisation and pathologisation of spiritual experience; increased incidence of spiritual experience, or like attracting like?; the Master of the Temple as cultivator of a garden; therapeutic approaches to disturbing spiritual experiences; normalisation; spiritual bypassing; conflict between therapeutic and spiritual ethical frameworks; how “do no harm” can do harm; healing is discovering how we were never sick; therapy as “to accompany”, “to go along with”; parallels with Dante; the roles of the teacher and the student; Virgil and Beatrice: Dante’s two guides; the mainstream view of the teacher as a conveyor of techniques; the further you go the harder it gets; the teacher as the divine self; Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion. Intro music by Alan Chapman. Outro music from loops by users mildperil, Tumbleweed, and VladEisch at looperman.com. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.