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.

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