Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just before midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.1 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is the current edition of my sixth published book, Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings. These days books on investigating reports of monstrous entities are all over the place, but that wasn't the case in 2001, when this first saw print.  I happened to be doing a lot of investigation of certain entities in the Puget Sound area in the years just before then; I thought it would be interesting to get some of my experiences and ideas in print; the book was a pleasant project to write, and it sold like hotcakes -- and, er, I may have some very small share of responsibility for those books on sparkly vampires, because unless you happened to spend time in the stacks of old university libraries full of mostly forgotten anthropology publications, this was for some years the one place in print you could find out that there's a very lively werewolf tradition among the native peoples of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington -- you know, near Forks.   If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and here if you live elsewhere.

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I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed -- as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Two Techno-spiritual instances

[robertmathiesen]

Not quite half a century ago, way back in the days of T-boxes, terminals and VM370s running on mainframes, it used to be tricky to actually activate a T-box connecion between your terminal at home and the mainframe your VM370 was running on. The T-box light would blink and blink while there was a staticky electronic frisson ... and then the hum and light would stop, and you'd have to start the process over again, sometimes as many as 6 or 8 times, before you'd finally get a useable connection.

After I had gotten sufficiently annoyed by these electronic vagaries, I set out to find a way of securing a good connection on the first try. What I ended up with was the following method: as soon as the T-box started trying to make a connection, I'd focus every last bit of my awareness on holding the light and the hum in a sort of determined mental grasp to keep them from shutting off, until at last a connection took hold. Once I learned how to do this (whichb required shutting down my awareness of everything else in the universe around me while doing it), I could get a connection on the first try every time.

So yes, the sort of magic that is sometimes called "mind-over-matter" certainly worked on those long-ago electronics. What I did was just a minor example, in response to a minor annoyance. But there was definitely a certain amount of sentience and life in those T-boxes, enough life that you could seize and hold their wandering attention and get them to focus on what you wanted them to do.