David Shoemaker with The Occult Rejects

David Schoemaker on. But before we introduce him, I would like to introduce the other rejects and I got Judith the Loon with us. What is going on? Judith? How are you.

and spiritual development. Doctor Schumaker is the author of Living Thelema, The Winds of Wisdom and The Way of the Will, and he's also deeply involved in Tholemic training through the Temple of the Silver Star, with decades of experience working with students in both OTO and AA related practice. David Schumaker describes himself as a clinical psychologist in private practice

with specialization in Youngian and cognitive behavioral psychotherapy. On his official site, he also identifies himself as a chancellor in p prolocutor screwinglet up of the Temple of the Silver Star and notes he has been involved with the OTO as a student of an end as a student of AA since nineteen ninety three. Today we're going to get into Thelema Astramargentum's spiritual attainment, practical magic, and how psychology

and mysticism intersect in real practice. Doctor Schumacher, thank you very much for coming on the show and welcome to the Occult Rejects. Would you please let everybody know where they can find anything about you what you would like to plug rabbitas sure.

and Organizationally, you can find the organization's administer. The AA is at one Star Insight dot org and the Temple of the SilverStar is at T O T S S dot org.

So I'd always been interested in Carl Jung, and there was an influential professor in our department who was also interested in Young. So he and I started a book club basically to kind of let people who are interested get more content around Young. And we did that for a few years, and as I got my degree and

went out into practice, I focused on Young. But in the middle of grad schools that was starting up and I was I was getting more into Young, I realized I didn't I needed something in my personal life that was more numinous as Young might have said, that had a spiritual quality that had a mystery to it. And so I started doing some reading, you know, around the vaguely occult and pagan books that were available at the time this is pre Internet, of course, and read some

wicked pagan materials from Llewellen. But what really caught my eye within a few months of doing that, well in books, what really caught my eye within a few months of doing that was that in the back of those wicked pagan books were ads for things like The Golden Down by Regardi and The Middle Pillar by Regardy, and I thought, actually, that sounds was more like what I'm kind of looking for.

So I read those books, and the really pivotal moment was when I got The Middle Pillar by Regardi, where he explicitly links cabitalistic psychology with the work of Carl Jung and the work Foster Crowley, and that just sort of got my head spinning, and I knew it would be my life's work. I didn't know how it would be my life's work, but I knew it would be.

So that was nineteen ninety three. That's when I got initiated into Oto and into the They brought her tradition behind the AA and Temple the SilverStar, and so that was that's the origin story.

I was going somewhere else. I felt like I had found something that was already home to me in that way. That and probably too much reading Order of the Rings as a kid, that the Gandalf archetype I was ready to connect with. You know, kind of half joking on that, but yeah, that's my best answer for that. What can you say? It's an intuitive thing, that something calls to you.

the world. There's something unique about each person that explains what they do in this room, in this moment, as much as it explains what they do over the course of decades in their lives, and it's rooted in their

essence as an organism. Just like a tree does a certain thing, or an animal does a certain thing, or a river does a certain thing, each individual does a certain thing, and the task of each of us is to discover that true will, and once we have some conscious awareness of that, we strive to shape a life that will give us maximized opportunities to live that out without as much conflict with harmony and joy and passion.

And what we find is that when people connect with who and what they really are, that tends to go pretty well. You know. We find those who moved through life doors open rather than close. We find that we feel like we're swimming with the current instead of against it. And uh, much of my work, both in in psychology and and the organizations that I work with, has been to just find the best possible tools to unlock that true will awareness and people as efficiently as possible.

So that's the work I did and continue to do, you know, every day, striving to own that down. But basically, you know what I was describing what happened with reading Middle Pillar and Regardi in that moment, that was a lightning bolt of I'm here to do this, you know, not like I think it would be cool to do this, or I could get rich doing this or something like that. It's that this is my nature to do this in

this world. And the law part of it for me is it better be my law to do what I'm here to do, you know, otherwise I am going to be swimming upstream and I am going to be, you know, missing opportunities to two fully actualize myself in the world and to help people doing that and so on. So do what thou wilt for me is is do what you're here to do in every moment you can.

And of course that sort of misunderstanding has fueled a lot of the public misunderstanding of Croley the whole time since he's been alive. Even the tabloids in the nineteen twenties got on that high horse. So, oh, mistakes, I've lost the question. They so One mistake is misapprehending what do it though it means. Another is thinking that diving right into advanced practices is a quicker way to get

to the result they want. Because if you get the part of the basic training, which is you getting to know how to move energy, contain it within yourself, channel it where you want to manage your own physical and energetic self, you skip all that stuff. No matter what you try to do is not going to go as well,

and so what you end up doing. What those kind of people end up doing often is getting to advanced stuff, either getting confused or feeling screwed up by it because they didn't know themselves very well and didn't know their energetic system very well, and then having to say, I guess I better go back and learn the basics. I kind of liken it to deciding to be a poet without knowing the alphabet yet. Sure you can try, you know, but I think you know, you get the foundations first.

And that I say this not in a way that it is to be rigid with it, like experimentation is fine. You're always going to make mistakes, and we can always try stuff that we haven't tried yet, and figure out if we were ready. Maybe that's how we discover we weren't. But but in general, I think that's a pretty common, pretty common misapprehension that it'll be quicker if I head right to the sexy stuff, but then it ends up being actually slower because they have to circle back and

learn foundations. I guess in a similar vein, it's that sort of it's that old saying about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. But people get a little bit of meditative success or a little bit of ritual success, or sometimes have the psychedelic experience that convinces them they're at the end point to the beginning point, without the infrastructure of the non drug related you know, muscles that

are needed for doing good magic and mystical work. So it's kind of like early success bringing a false sense of attainment and mastery when really it's just like they've mastered step one of fifty, but since they haven't mastered more than step one, they don't know what step two mastery feels like. That's just a quick summary of you have a question, Yeah.

I always wonder about that, And then when I speak to other people who are Theelamites, who have never read any of the hermetic ord of the Golden Down, they think that it's just gibberish, and so, yeah, I've always wondered that, especially listening to your stuff.

his life. You know, he's teaching the Golden don LBRP in the nineteen forties, three years before he died. So I don't think it's necessaryarticularly for people to pursue Golden Down style magic in their personal practice or initiatory wise before doing Thelemac work. It's the question of what are they called to. The other thing that is really important here is they go together like there's it's not Golden

Down or the Lima. The Temple of the Silver Star, for example, which I administer, is very explicitly a Golden Down patterned order that incorporates the Lima as its basic operating principle. So it has woven with Thelema into all of not all, but many of the landmarks that we might expect from a Golden Down initiatory system, and I think strengthens both in the process. So I've answered your question and then some but hopefully that that's helpful.

like as a beginner thing. And I do think like just from my experience, you know, jumping for me meditation and getting that down was more important than jumping straight into ritual work.

the problem. The personality and all the things that it tries to do to protect itself, all of the expectations that get laid on us by family or society or eventually ourselves, those are the things that obscure the true will and the true kind of star at the center

of each person. So when I'm working with people in therapy, even though we may never say the words true will or the lima or anything remotely like that, what I have an awareness of in the room is sort of my meta model is that we're working on the personality. In one example, working on the personality in order to clear away those blockages that allow the real self to

shine through. And so often that might be what would look like a conventional therapy session around looking at what did your parents kind of want you to be and you didn't want to be, and so we end up talking about what was really under there, what was trying to get out, you know, what was what was the

impulse that maybe got stifled a little bit. That's just one specific kind of example, but it's that that's the more common situation where we're not really talking about it as a true will kind of process, but we're just

working on to a fly on the wall. Would appear kind of a common therapy session, but you know, more and more, because people know my work, they're coming to me as a therapist or a life coach because they're Theelamites or magicians or cult of some kind, and they want a therapist who has a similar language and understanding and worldview, much like a devoted Christian might seek out

a Christian counselor or something like that. So it's it's a smaller pool at this point, but increasingly it's it's the case that a lot of my therapy sessions might include more overt discussion of magical principles or I'm just trying to use the language that actually works and is alive for the person I'm working with. Does that get the question? Yeah? Very much great.

and that tends to work just fine. You know that the problem is for humans that we get in our own way with that, as I was kind of describing with the therapy examples. But I think that the macrocosmic expression of do what thou wilt is really just looking around and seeing that. Of course the universe is doing what it's supposed to do. It's it's evident that that's

the case because it is doing it. You know, things work a certain way, and that's not a different kind of law than what we can work with as an individual. It's simply we we determine what our role in that is when it's our microcosmic part in the greater work?

do it, and then there's those of us who maybe don't have that ability. So I just kind of would love to hear your take on those things.

initiation in a group. That said, some people will thrive more in a formal, structured setting that has kind of a not just a lineage, but also is what we might call a contacted order, that there are interplane contacts that actually, in my experience, quite literally move through the work we do and make it a specific kind of initiatory experience or its members. You're not going to possibly

get that without contact with that organization. That doesn't mean any given organization is the right one, you know, But for a specific person it might be the right one, and for another person it might be the absolute wrong one, and they need to do it themselves in order to get the maximum gains, or they need a different organization,

a different tradition, or whatever. So I think the efficacy of self initiation depends a lot on the specific person doing it and what they're what they're cut out for, what their prior experience is, what their innate skills are, or you know, what their innate blind spots are. The success of that kind of endeavor is really going to have a lot of those variables involved. But there may be other angles on this that you wanted to hear about. But that's that's my first thought.

full conscious awareness of true will. So there's no way to talk about this without being reductionistic or using terms that may predispose people to think of it in certain ways, like cosmic consciousness or whatever. But at some point, well, let me start over the central goal of all of

this training. In both AA Temple is Overstar and Croley's conception of what we're here to do on the planet, the central goal is to strip away those barriers to full conscious awareness of our divine self and of our true will. And that awareness, when it comes, typically eventually, pretty climactically, is very very often accompanied by the sense

of presence and connection to a being that is beyond ourselves. Now, there are may be some people who connect with this as actually, this is just a part of my brain, or this is just my higher self or whatever. I don't The good news is, once you get there, you don't need anyone to tell you what it is because

you're experiencing it. But the many many people you know experience this as a myself included, experience this as a as a as a tremendous overturning of the sense of who we are and who we have been in relation to this Holy Guardian Angel that we encounter. When this has occurred, our next task is to work even harder to build a life that honors the truth that we've discovered.

There So, in the AA system, the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel that's the term that Curley used for that breakthrough colog and conversation in the AA system that's attained at this the grade the Indus story grade of the fareth in the center of the tree. And then the work beyond that is, now, let's make a life that lets me live this out with as few obstacles as possible and with the greatest deficiency as possible,

and then we take it from there. So the HDA is the power slash entity slash aspect of the universe slash personal god whatever that enables all of this to happen. You could also think of it as like the I had a friend describe this this way to me, which is always stuck that the sun is shining, but there there's one ray that's aimed right at you, and that's the HDA, And so you find that and you tune into that like a radio finding that one station, and that opens up your path.

life to being a free lawyer for the poor. And so the idea is, you move past this point of initiation and figure out a way to implement the type of love that you felt well connecting to that different state of being.

to the world. And Carl Young's an interesting example. I don't know who here or watching has looked at his Red Book, but those were early, clearly mystical experiences for him that were followed by him building an entire career based on trying to make sense of those things and bringing those truths as best he could to his work in the world. So he never termed it a knowledge of conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. But that's what

that looks like. To me, and so we can probably find any number of examples like that.

as we can than the world itself. You know, we contribute to the world being a more harmonious place where there's less unnecessary conflict and people aren't as blinded by their their confusion about who they are and there and their projections of negativity, negativity to others, and just all the stuff that makes us take the easy way out and not grow ourselves. But when we each do that, yeah, I think that the world becomes the place that it

can be. Carl Young was asked to incessantly come back to Young but he was asked in an interview around the fifties or so if there was Cold War, right, so everything was scary. Nothing, it's not scary now, but it was scary then too, And he said he was asked, is there any hope for humanity? And his answer was if enough individuals do their inner work right right, And that's that's my operating principle every day of my life right.

to have holly wars and things. But it's the more we realize we're all aiming at the same thing, and you know what, if here's my idea, we get simultaneously get everyone in the world to have the awareness that what if the actuality is there's no choice but to all be worshiping the same God, and that's just the truth. And then anything anyone is doing is their best approximation of that no one instantly, no one is in disagreement

about about that. If everyone could just get that it's all stories about the one thing, and that we don't need to point fingers that who's doing it wrong?

something better is out there than just you know, because Theosophy tried this, and you know, Carley came out of the Theosophist movement, and you know, so many other things, and it gets blamed for everything because obviously this secretism is changing the way people think in a cohesive way instead of a you know, dualistic or multipolar way that a lot of people would prefer because they want to remain distinct. And I think that distinction really hasn't been

honored by American society in a lot of ways. Across the world. It's like everybody is now just individual, replaceable units, and we're seeing the rebellion to that right now.

not going away. So it's inevitable that we've got to make that all of that have some degree of transparency so that we can see the light that's behind it. So I whether someone works with a therapist to do that or just figures it out themselves, they've got to do that. Otherwise their magic is going to be their whole path is going to be skewed based on their blind spots, on their natural predispositions, on their underdeveloped areas

that aren't ever developed, you know. So that's one reason why systemization of the initiatory process is so helpful for a lot of people is that it it cultivates all the aspects of the self and helps to remove the blind spots. So for me, it just seemed inevitable that.

I mean, I was already studying psychologies, but but it's like having having arrived at the place where I was in the middle of starting a psychology career, but also having this huge nuclear blast of awareness about the lima and and the opportunities for self development there that it just for me personally just became an impossibility that they wouldn't be working together in my life.

a Merril my teacher and and and her eyes. She put in her training system from the very beginning that we, uh, we must be monitoring our psychological projections on a daily basis in order to learn about what our shadow projections are and what our projections are generally that that we bye by watching how we react to things, how we get emotional, how we overreact. You know, we can we can get the kind of self knowledge that's not available if we only look at like we're just navel gazing

about who am I and what do I like? And we don't look at the potential dark sides of that. In terms of these projections, we're missing a whole bunch of of work that can be so helpful and so in our system now, you know, as we teach it in Temple of Silver Star, we have people doing part of this part of their daily diary work. They monitor

psychological projections. They are therefore stripping away therefore and thereby stripping away those filters and the mud that's all over the lens, you know, to use that example again, that is blocking them from seeing their truth self more and more clearly. But the shadow work is really just one example of projection work in many ways, but more broadly out of work in terms of understanding of what is

it we're pushing out of awareness? Like if we live if we live in a box you know, called me, and we decide we're just going to live in this corner of it because we don't want to go in that part that makes us uncomfortable, then we're living in a tinier world. And so for fullness of self and life, we have to accept all of ourselves, even if our personality doesn't like it, So that's that's the bigger kind of picture of why do shadow work.

makes you feel that way. Right, So it's replacing embarrassment with a biological process.

we know it's stupid when we've done the work. Not that we'll be one hundred percent successful with that for sure, as my friends can attest.

if they want to go to therapy. You said it yourself earlier that the.

too burdensome for you to deal with. How would you recommend someone approach someone who a therapist that may or may not accept their way of belief system despite the fact that this is what they're trying to deal with at that.

language like that and would understand that. One of the reasons I'm here working on myself with you, therapist, is that I am on a self an initiatory path I and I am trying to, you know, take this to a more mystical place and so on. But even without that, and it's still going to be so valuable to have

someone sitting in the room with you. Again, even if they don't have any idea of an occult path being part of your life, it's going to be so useful to have another person sitting there reflecting with you on your strengths and weaknesses and growth patterns and blind spots

and shadows stuff and all of that. So I think the main thing in seeking out a therapist that would be compatible for an occultist is just to at least make sure that they're not that they're not going to have a worldview that is like antagonistic to alternative spirituality, so that if you if it just comes up casually that you know you're a pagan or a occultist or a gold Dominsian or whatever, that you know, they're not

going to think that is pathology. And fortunately, in today's world, I think most therapists had enough breadth of training and life experience to know that there's a lot of paths out there. But you know, if someone's advertising themselves explicitly as they are a therapist from a particular religion, and you think that's not a very good mesh with your spiritual beliefs, and maybe that person isn't the best choice

for this. But someone who says they are young in or transpersonal or humanistic or existential or you know, it's something that's got to built in the sort of openness to the breadth of life you know, I think is probably going to be a good choice. Kind of a long answer. I hope I hit on the basic question.

will is. So you, as we discussed earlier, take the next steps of making your life a place where that can happen. You keep doing that, you're very likely to be successful at it because by definition, it's what you're cut out to do. You've found your dream job, you know, except it's not just a job, that's your whole life. And if you keep doing that, you're likely to become

known for doing that. You're likely to be good enough at doing that thing that you will bring yourself to kind of the culmination of what you can be as a human in the normal sense. You'll be self actualized, to use a common term for that sort of thing. You've seen these people, they just seem to be so good at what they're doing. They're doing it out in the world, and they're known for it, and it seems like they were just born to do it. And at

that point, where do you go. If you're going to grow more, it can't just stay in the realm of I'm going to make me better and better. You know, I'll be bigger and bigger and greater and greater. And that becomes at a certain point self limiting and destructive, because the danger is that the ego takes over and is just so happy to be so good at all this that it wants to keep doing it and keep getting more and more famous for it and all that.

So at some point the only next step available is giving it up and letting go, being willing to let go of everything that you've developed, being willing to say what's more important is that this is helping the world, not that it feels good to me or that it's you know, so good for my life, you know. So this is where we go from a bit more of an individual centric self development model to let's bring it back to the world, like the monomouth return phase we

were talking about two. Now, let me dedicate my entire life to service to the universe, whatever that means. Okay, So the real crossing of the abyss is being able to fully develop oneself and then offer it all out to the universe and let go of the individual focus. So another angle on this is that there is a part of us that has always been living across the abyss. This is the abyss of personal versus trans personal or

individual versus collective consciousness. Okay, Uh, part of us that star at our center, you know, has always been there. The change is that our ego says, I now recognize consciously that the real list me is not the me I've thought of myself to be at all, you know, And I can give that up because that's like a

leaf blown in the wind compared to the collective. So the real kind of cosmic consciousness attainment at that level is is that kind of a shift that we we consciously and intently let go of individual centered consciousness and embrace the the all really or you know, the non dual consciousness at that level. So that's a lot, but it's uh, it's not something obviously that is a common

experience for many people. Although that's one of those danger zones where with the right psychedelics, sometimes people who have done two banishing rituals in their life decide they've crossed the Abyss and now have cosmic consciousness and are finished and all set. I couldn't resist that.

crawl out. So I would love to hear your take like.

It Clely describes this in various places, but it's everything becomes fragmented, and formula that have worked for you don't work, and nothing makes the sense it used to make, and each experience sort of is like a funhouse mirror of you know, So if you don't go into that consciously and with an awareness of what's happening, it just feels like you're going crazy. So Corronzon, I think, is a good like character that you know fits that kind of experience.

And then for context that Cronzen was shows up in Croley's series of visions called the Vision that the recorded and the vision of the voice for listeners.

can't allow to be in my world. Instead, you just embrace it along with everything else. Because it can't harm you if we're all one thing, you know, it's all one energy. But I imagine there may have been some of that kind of intent with with Crowley, that kind of I'm going to deal with whatever's here because the choice it's here, the choices. Am I admitting that or not? You know? Am I Am I pushing against what's real? Or Am I going to embrace what's real.

crazy and did return. And it's like if anyone were to see that from the outside, they'd be like, oh, somebody did that to you, and it's like, oh no, oh no, that was me.

like Crowley lived. This is one of the other probably a more misunderstanding more in the mainstream public, I would say about this when someone looks at Felima and says, wait, Crowley was the head of this religion and he did all these things, and he had weird sex and took drugs and was sometimes not nice to people and all that, So why would anyone be a part of this religion that assumes a worldview where religion over the founder of religion is a model for behavior. It's the system that

is the model for behavior, not the human Curly. And so here you get into trouble with what we might call croleanity, where where it's you know that the idea is clearly the human is there a model for behavior, which no one I know feels that way, but maybe some people on the fringes think of it that way, and people encountering fe Lima in the general public might be very confused about why anyone would be a part of a system that Curly created because undoubtedly, you know,

you sometimes made bad choices and treated people badly, and you know we've all got false.

hard these days. Do you know what I mean to be like, Oh, yeah, I'm a felamite. I'm like no, I'm like no, I don't know. I've read Cooley and I like his you know. Anyway, so that's kind of my own, Like I get really weirded out in those things, even though I'm like, yeah, definitely a fellamite, of course. Yeah, I do what thou wilt loves the law. Yeah.

do for me. Reading through seven seven seven, it seems like he's intensely self critical, almost as much as he is about other people, because he's trying to properly explore these things in a way that is very hard to define, right, I mean, we're dealing with subjective experiences that are almost impossible to nail down, and that's that's something a lot of people miss out on with the exploration.

and improved way to do this. So it cut out all the group ritual work except for a couple initial initiatory experiences and that are like in Temple, but other than that, it's a one to one teacher student training organization where the structure is always the same and the tasks are the same from grade to grade, but you're

given one teacher. Now a teacher might have many students, but each student only has one teacher, and the idea was, let's strip away the potential distraction of the social component.

That Crawley really had a bad taste in his mouth coming out of the Goldendon because of the way that group was administered specifically, and the AA began to publish a lot of the fundamental documents of the Limit tradition in the Equinox Journal that Corely edited for a number of years, and it has persisted in an unbroken line to today. There have been splinterings here and there, but it's never stopped, and we administer it today through the portal for my work with the AA is, as I said,

one Star insight dot org. So it's the one to one teaching structure temple. The Overstar, in contrast, is in service to AA, but has reincorporated a lot of the fundamentals and landmarks of the Golden Dawn Temple tradition of having group initiations and group ritual meetings that still have the component that what everyone goes home to do is their individual work in the structure in terms of assignments

and rituals and meditations and so on. So a lot of vibrant growth in both these organizations in the last fifteen years or so, and I think the flame is burning as bright as it ever was. There's far more people involved than ever were in Crowley's time.

chiefs of the temple and provide, providing guidance with, you know, testing on how a ritual's done, or reviewing a diary and kind of talking with the person about what that experience meant to them and how it fits into the personal,

mystical or magical work they're doing. And so you get eyes on your work by someone who has literally done the same work and been supervised by someone who made sure they were doing it the right way and so on, and so the opportunity for self delusion is much reduced where there's someone to catch it and say no, actually, that result you had is expected for stage one and not stage four. So you're really you know, keep working

on stage one. You'll get there. You know, the encouraging, but you keep people focused on the steps in front of them as stid of letting them get ahead of themselves. You are doing You're guiding a person through the work in a structured way, and so it's done in a stepwise fashion that has proven to be successful, has proven to set a good foundation for later work, and so in that way, it's it's one of the most efficient

ways that I know of to train people. And really presenting the systems of initiation is one way of understanding my own true will in this world. It's clearly something that I care deeply about. So I think I got your question there.

point at particular rituals that maybe miss misunderstood or mispracticed. Sometimes, you know, you know, Curley writes which is often with two or three levels of meaning, and there's what he's seen to be saying you're supposed to do, and then you realize from reading his commentary somewhere else that what he's really meaning is like that's just a metaphor for

what's going on inside with your visualization. Or he says, you know, to to to be doing something that sounds rather outlandish, but really it's a it's it's it's a metaphor for a certain state of consciousness you're supposed to hold during the the performance of the ritual. So a lot of stuff like that that is just people not reading deeply enough or taking it too literally or whatever.

So that's probably a better answer than trying to drill down on a particular ritual practice or something like that.

AA work. For Temple of the Service, Star initiation is by application and interview, so there's there's no pre study sort of in that approach.

and the AA. You're given a hefty pack of materials for reading and study and practice, and that will always include some writing and you know, a little bit more academic leaning kind of learning, but then daily personal, magical and mystical practices, and the psychological dimension is addressed through things like projection monitoring and other kinds of self awareness practices. So this is all done in the context of of the framework of a Golden Dawn type organization, but with

with the Law of Thelema as its core. Like the whole point of it is an unfolding awareness of true will for the initiative. So there is some overlap in terms of the style of practice from the AA and Temple the SilverStar. You know, between the two. As you can imagine, we're all kind of delmites doing Willy McGuirk. But those are some of the key differences, and you know, one person may be more suited for one and another

person for the other. We've got a number of people, of course, over the years who've done them simultaneously because they're different enough and have different kinds of benefits structure.

Does that make any sense to you?

of conversation of the HGA. One could do that in the Temple of the Silver Star and never join the AA at that point. You know, it's accurate to say that if one wanted to take it further, that would be in an AA structure, because from getting beyond knowledge of conversation into the next steps is really beyond the scope of what we could do with some sort of group training experience. I mean, think about what we've been talking about here in terms of the nature of the

ABYSS and all of that. How exactly would one, you know, do a group ritual and have someone else train you in that experience. It's entirely you're you're kind of on your own in the in the cosmos at that point. But getting up to knowledge and conversation you may need human teachers. And so both AA and Temple the Silver Star gets you to knowledge and conversation.

You know, it adds up to silver star. I do want to clarify that Temple of the Silver Star is a group that isn't a A, but you know acknowledges that that sort of silver star of the name is of course hinting at the fact that we're in service to AA. So I just I say that because I don't want confusion about the Temple of the SilverStar being AA.

You've already had a lot of supervised experience with ritual and diary keeping, and you got all that momentum, so you hit the ground running with AA as opposed to it being quite as much of a sink or swim thing. Yeah.

slightly different purposes. But you know, we're his vision of sort of like a new, aon new new the Limic world version of some of those traditional rituals, things like the Star Ruby and the Star Staff, Roley's penogram and hexagram versions. But that that's probably the clearest example of things that get confused. Yeah, a lot of the it's you can't really overstate how much of Crowley's basic magical education was entirely through the filter at the Golden Dawn work.

gram ritual doesn't really replace the function of the traditional ritual of the Hexagram in terms of being able to invoke or banish specific planets or zodiacal regions and things like that. So so what I felt, I and of course double the Silver Star. We have private different versions that accomplished the same thing. But what I did in Living Thalma was I wanted to talk about the x Gram Ritual. I didn't want to just represent an old, aon so to speak, version from Crowley's early days before

he really had time to think it through more. And so I tried to come up with like a Thlemic era version of the hex Grammatual that would let go of some of the vaguely Christianized symbolism that was left over in the Golden Dawn terms of the Dying God formula as we know it, that sort of christ formula, and make it more Selenic. So I changed some of

the terminology and intention behind the work there. But the other thing is when Crowley published the hex Gram Ritual, this is really nerdy, and I apologize, but for those doing a deep dive, the original publication of the hex Gram Ritual by Croley described how the hex Gram Ritual would have been done within the vault of the Golden Dawn, the second order vault, where the attributions to the quarters

are different. And so what I presented in leming Thalma was how someone approaching this work as an aspirant not in the presumably not in the in the in the golden non second order vault, would would do it with the elements in the quarters just the same as they are in the pentagram control. But that was another important part of the way I presented it. That's different from some other published sources.

pre crole version. But certainly there's there's a lot of debate. I'm I'm the last person who's gonna come in here and say there's one correct tarro or something like that. I think it's it's pretty evident from our discussion here that there's lots of ways to get effective work done, and arguing just delays our progress.

apparatus as well, which weaves it all together. It's probably not the best book for a beginner to pick up and say, let me get into Crowley, unless you're really going to start at the beginning and of the book and focus on some of those preliminary materials first. But I think that things like you didn't ask this question, but I think things like eight lectures on yoga, maybe Magic without Tears in terms of ely stuff that might

be more approachable for a beginner. And then you know, there is some good modern stuff out there, and obviously my books, but Alan Duquet does great tacts that are good for beginners too, and so we continue to grow.

I need to figure out what is going on with this because you get little little gems and stars as you're reading it, and then you can read it a year, five, ten, twenty years later you're like, now it's it's unfolding, like a hyper sigil or like a great diagram.

But the main thing is to just persist. You know, you're going to have dry times, you're going to have dark times, You're going to feel disillusioned and that's just going to happen no matter what path you're on, and know no matter how you're doing it, but don't give it up. Don't stop. Do the work even if you don't feel like it on certain days, and trust that at your core it's making a difference and keep persisting and aspiring.

doctor Heatherlin coming on. I've got all kind I got American Esoteric, we got all kinds of stuff going on. To go over to a YouTube Magas in the Media X Magas in the Media on Instagram. Thank you again, Thank you Brad.

the show. This is totally blowing my mind and it was really a selfish treat for myself to even have a conversation with you. But I do think you left the listeners with a lot of great information as well, so.