Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is just a few minutes away, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, 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.  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.  And further:  I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

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. As I mentioned last week, once I found a publisher willing to bring out my fiction, a lot of it found its way into print in a hurry, so we're going to be in tentacle territory for a while now.  This was my fifty-second published book, and it's another tentacle novel, but it's not a part of the core Weird of Hali sequence. The Shoggoth Concerto came slithering up out of my subconscious while I was hoping to get the rest of the Weird published but things weren't looking especially promising; I thought that an independent novel set in the same fictional cosmos might be able to get a hearing at one of the big publishers...and then I started writing, and it turned into the oddest of my many odd books.

You know all those stories about someone who has brash new innovative ideas and gets bullied by the defenders of tradition?  This is a story about someone who wants to do something traditional and gets bullied by the avant-garde, which is of course much more common these days. It's also about love, memory, magic, and shoggoths, and to my taste, it's still the best of my novels. I did submit it to a big publisher; I actually got a personal response, which is rare, saying that it was too quiet and too weird -- those were the editor's exact words -- but that if I wanted to write something more publishable I could send it directly to her. I rolled my eyes and found someplace else to publish, as bending the knee to the shallow fashionable clichés of big-brand fantasy and SF is the last thing I wanted (or want) to do. If shoggoths or classical music appeal to you, you can buy a copy of The Shoggoth Concerto here if you're in the US and here if you're 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, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[jprussell]

Not JMG, but in case it helps, a few thoughts on what has seemed to help me some, though I'm not where I'd like to be.

I mitigated much of my teenage and 20s leanings towards slacking by having a pretty good relationship with my parents (so I actually cared that they wanted me to do well in school), and then by finding extrinsic-motivational systems aligned with stuff I actually cared about (I studied subjects I genuinely liked in college, and then I joined the Army for my own reasons). The plus side was that outwardly, I got stuff done and did well, the downside was that eventually I ran out of extrinsic-motivation frameworks I cared about enough.

So, occult work has been helping me learn discipline not because I'll get in trouble or get rewarded for being disciplined, but because I value the results myself. A few other thoughts that have helped/are helping along the way:

1) "The Divinity of Interest": I think this particular phrase came from Jordan Peterson, but basically, if you learn to pay attention to what you actually care about, what grabs your attention, what you do for its own sake, you can start to work with that. Maybe right now that's video games and booze and porn (or whatever else), but maybe scratch at what about those grabs you (besides the obvious, of course). Take video games. Maybe it's the achievement. Maybe it's strategy. Maybe it's competition, or challenge, or exploration. Whatever it is, see if you can find ways to get that that are closer to "productive" for values of productive you actually care about.

2) Small Wins: it can help to identify incremental steps that are more achievable, shoot for those, and celebrate when you get them. Start chaining them together, and you're getting somewhere. Take daily meditation. Maybe you'd like to get to doing it for 20-30 minutes every day, but if you're starting from zero, meditating for five minutes once a week is still doing better. The trick is not to get too comfortable with the incremental steps, but not beat yourself up for staying with them for as long as you need to. Easier said than done, I know.

3) Find a Community that Supports You: Different folks respond differently to peer expectations - for some, its' the make-or-break between success and failure, for others it's a non-factor. But for most folks, it's at least a little helpful for motivation, and if nothing else, it can be practically helpful. That's one thing I've found so helpful about these Magic Mondays - reading about what other folks are doing, asking questions, sharing milestones, and the like have certainly helped me stay on track, so maybe it could help you as well.

Whatever you end up doing, good luck, and hope some of this helps!
Jeff