Visiting my childhood home in Bellerose, Queens.

.@MitchHorowitz man it's SO good to see you on @Timothy_Schultz's channel on a topic that I especially & highly interested in ‼️

We spend too much time analyzing human behavior and minting new—and fleetingly satisfying (e.g., gaslighting)—terms to capture its maladies. Human nature is not complex. It is automatic—a far deeper crisis than what I am about to describe. The chief fissure of our conduct is: hostility. This brokenness—hostility—fuels everything we experience in physical and digital culture as sources of pain and suffering. In that vein, the problem of hostility is as rampant as it is simple. The solution, while challenging, is also simple. Refusing the world on its terms. In practice, that means sustaining participation and communication—doing whatever culture, commerce, and warranted relationship require—while limiting exposure to the world’s frivolity and superfluousness, by which I mean: blather, gossip, trash talk (as entertainment), and the sick joy experienced by humiliating, or witnessing the humiliation of, other people. What I prescribe will, at first, make your life harder: you will have less to talk about (which is good) and you will, at times, have no idea what others are talking about, most of which is worthless. Start in small ways. Larger means emerge from the small. mitchhorowitz.substack.com/p…

I challenge the notion that people do not know what they want—or, if they so name and attain it, it won't make them happy. My life is far happier at age sixty as a writer-speaker-public persona than it was at thirty. I am anxious but not ashamed. That is the difference. I write from experience. I do not consider my life exclusive. Whose life is? Hence, I reject the "know better" critique of other people's desires. mitchhorowitz.substack.com/p…

Check out @MitchHorowitz doing his wonderful commentary on The Proof Is Out There, S6, Ep21 on @HISTORY!

I have recently been documenting the history and survival of occultism from late antiquity to the modern age. Having explored the dawn, revival, and suppression of occult ideas, I am most lately considering the occult’s endurance: my previous article surveyed occultism’s migration as a thought movement to the American colonies—and I now look at how occultism resurfaced with intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic force during the Enlightenment. This piece is adapted and expanded from my 2023 historical study Modern Occultism. I write as a historian. But—for those interested in mind metaphysics, this article contains great hints in the direction of method and efficacy. -M- “. . . Understanding occult history requires accepting history as it really existed and not as I might want it to romantically exist. That said, nothing I write here is meant to suggest that novelty is wrong; nor that because an idea is old and familiar, it is necessarily true—or because an idea is novel or adapted, it is trifling. Historical faiths are combinative and syncretic. Religious practice emerges from diffuse sources and morphs across centuries and geography. Schisms occur. Meaning is found by reading new stories into an object or practice—or reviving a theme or idea that exists fragmentarily. New forms are not illegitimate. But it behooves thoughtful seekers to understand lineage and vintage . . .” “. . . Crowley’s later definition of ceremonial magick as Will projected was pioneered, in its revivalist sense, by Lévi. Lévi, in his way, also gave new voice to what Mesmer (or his descendants) reached for, as well as Schopenhauer’s description, and what the Romantics alluded to literarily. The exercise of causative, extraphysical thought force could be aroused through desire, want, need, focus, symbol—and sexuality. This, finally, was the ancient and elusive Philosopher’s Stone. This was the alchemical key. The Golden Bough. The Holy Grail. The Open Sesame. The sword in the stone. Aladdin’s lamp. The means of enacting the Great Work . . .” mitchhorowitz.substack.com/p…

Support @HRW bit.ly/2RHz3Ax

Check out @MitchHorowitz doing his fantastic commentary on The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd S3, EP20, Dances With Death on @HISTORY!

I’m not a Buddhist. I’m not a ceremonial magician, an alchemist, or an adherent of any particular religion or spiritual path. I’ve practiced within these systems, learned from them, and been changed by them…. but I no longer feel the need to live inside any of their boundaries, or under any of their labels. A path is a useful map because it gives you a direction when you don’t know where you’re going, but if you keep staring at the map forever, eventually the map becomes just another thing between you and the ground beneath your feet. At some point you stop needing maps. You stop asking which tradition is “right” and start paying attention to what is actually here In front of you. You eat when you’re hungry. You train. You work. You love people. You grow older. You meet whatever life puts in front of you as completely as you can. Buddhism, alchemy, magick, Zen - all of them point toward something beyond themselves. But eventually you have to stop following directions and just walk.

Whenever I write that the point of the path isn’t to spend your life chasing altered states or strange experiences, someone inevitably shows up to explain those things to me, as if I’ve never experienced any of it. What they don’t know is that I went through all of it. The visions. The altered states. The sense of ascending beyond ordinary consciousness. At one point I fully believed I was having conversations with God. I’m not dismissing these experiences because I’ve never had them….but I am saying they aren’t the end of the path. Eventually you have to come back down. Back into the body, into ordinary life, into relationships, work, aging, disappointment, washing dishes, and whatever else is directly in front of you. The question eventually is no longer “How high can I go?” , but “Can I bring what I learned all the way back down here?” Ascension can be part of the path, but it isn’t the completion of it. Ascension may show you something, but descent is where you learn how to live it.

Out now from @WeiserBooks

I highly recommend this book. And prefer having the print edition, but if Kindle is your thing now is the time to get it.

On $6.99 special @AmazonKindle amazon.com/Esoterika-Formula…

Does anybody have a link to Rajaji's book on Marcus Aurelius? Seen many references but not the book itself.

Damien stands upon Wisdom & Understanding. His statements on magick and spirituality are simply correct; direct; inarguable.

Writers: never fake it. If you're describing something or someone and find yourself using generalities, stock phrases, irreverent idiom, or fragments, you do not sufficiently know your subject. Ad Fontes: "to the sources."

A publisher once asked: “Who is the Neville Goddard that readers have not yet discovered?” I replied immediately: Prentice Mulford. mitchhorowitz.substack.com/p…

You can’t train the mind with the mind. The mind is the very thing that wanders, argues, fantasizes, worries, remembers, and constantly pulls us away from what is actually happening here and now. Trying to think your way into presence just creates another layer of thought. The body doesn’t have that problem. No matter where your mind goes, to something that happened twenty years ago or something you’re afraid might happen tomorrow, the body is always right here. It can’t breathe in yesterday. It can’t take a step in tomorrow. It only exists now. This is why physical practice can be such a powerful way of training attention. When you return to the breath, feel your feet against the ground, hold a posture, lift a weight, or swing a sword, you give the mind something real to return to. The body becomes your anchor. Every time attention wanders, you bring it back to what the body is doing right now. Do that often enough and presence stops being an idea that you understand and becomes something you experience first hand. You train the mind by teaching it to follow the body home.

Mark: Are there any spiritual forces that are wholly evil? Mitch: No, I don't believe so. You know, if you go back to the early Hebrews’ conception of Satan, who they called ha-sa-taan—the adversary or sometimes the prosecutor or the disruptor—that being served a definite purpose in life . . . Friction is the price of creativity. Without friction we wouldn't be worthy of the term human in all its splendor and ignobility. And if you dial back to the most ancient forms of worship and spirit contact, you find that the nonhuman intelligences are a hell of a lot like us. If one looks at the creation story of the Western world, for example, the Odyssey, biggest movie in the country right now, okay: How did the Trojan War start? Where did it come from? It is elusive but present in myth. Eris, the goddess of chaos, was not invited to a wedding banquet, and she was angry. So, she threw a golden apple called the Apple of Discord into the wedding banquet. And the apple had the words on it: “For the Fairest.” So, some of the female goddesses get into a fight over who is the fairest. And eventually, this leads to the events that erupt in the Trojan War. So, sexuality itself—we were talking about sex magick, sex transmutation—is at the heart of the Western story. It's at the heart of how we understand how we as a Western world got to be here. Now, Eris, the goddess of discord, she was hurt. She was jealous. She acted out in a way that we as humans recognize. I don't call her evil. I might say that the fight that ensued was foolish. And Mercury thought, “I'll fix this. I'll transport them to a faraway island where they can fight there and no one will get hurt.” Well, a lot of got people got fucking hurt, unfortunately. Plans go awry. There's foolishness. There's jealousy. There's betrayal. I wouldn't say that's evil. I would say it's projections of ourselves. piped.video/watch?v=tFmq1VH-…

Check out @MitchHorowitz doing his insightful commentary on The UnBelievable: Encounters with Dan Aykroyd season 1, episode 1-They Came From Above on @hulu !

Every time I post something, people rush to tell me whether they agree or disagree with it. They quote books, defend traditions, correct my terminology, explain what reality really is, or chatter away about why I don’t know what I’m talking about. However, agreement and disagreement are both just more noise in the head. The Way was never asking us to have the correct opinion about reality. It was asking us to experience reality before the mind starts talking about it. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel yourself breathing. Look at what is directly in front of you. Be here. You can argue about Buddhism, Zen, magick, enlightenment, consciousness, God, and the nature of reality until the day you die. None of it means you’ve taken a single step toward what those things were pointing toward. The finger is pointing at the moon. All that’s necessary is to stop arguing about the finger and look.