@PENamerica award-winning historian | author Modern Occultism, et al. | I play myself @Shudder's V/H/S/BEYOND | host @Discovery/@HBO's Alien Encounters | TRY
2/5 "those elements in the Hermetica that strike us as familiar (those that make us feel comfortably 'at home' in our own mental world, surrounded by concepts and ideas that we readily know and understand) are most likely to lead us astray." This is because material that may...
2/7 and material security, so that is an unarguable baseline. Beyond that, I venture that happiness is expressed selfhood. We seek the establishment of self in our work, art, relationships, households. The manner in which that selfhood is exercised or frustrated determines,...
2/8 But it did occur to me: aiming for greatness is no larger or smaller than aiming for ordinariness. Today I want you to aspire within, and by followup without, to utter excellence. Why couldn’t this be the greatest day of your life as measured by reversal of a depleting...
2/8 of the #30daymentalchallenge was a success! Mainly just made me aware of how shockingly often my mind defaults to seeing the negative sides of life… It's been so much more powerful than I could have imagined. I'm struck by the fact that, prior to the last few days, I let...
2/7 our wishes. We internalize values and decisions that belong to others. I have watched other people (and myself) get torn in two by divided fealties—or rather divisions between what they say they want and what they really want. For example: do you want people to relate to...
2/5 as Emerson noted, that what you wish for when you’re very young comes upon you in waves when you’re old—so be careful. Is that also true? I ask you today to peer into your earliest conscious memories, from ages three or four, and make that consideration. I think—barring...
2/5 for power is “concentration” and “drilling”—that is, focus on a single point and continual practice or effort in that direction. This is seen in nature: dispersal brings weakness and concentration brings force—it is the difference between water mist and a waterfall...
2/8 That’s the title of a hugely popular 1897 New Thought book that I am reintroducing. I love New Thought because I believe in its basic premise of mind causation. I have deep differences, however, with how most New Thought literature has approached suffering, hate, and...
2/7 antecedents (e.g., trauma, class, evolution). Ninety years of data from quantum theory—and rejected but no less evidentiary data from academic ESP research—have placed us before the question of mind as determinant. Quantum theory requires acknowledgement that perspective...
2/5 For the next 24 hours I will be working very hard with you to dedicate myself to our efforts. Let us all do this together. We benefit from hidden tendrils of cooperation. The second act of verification involves my revisitation of a conviction that breaks with most...
2/8 really doing it. Our minds and emotions—the amalgam of which I call our psyche—are enormously conditioned toward fear, hostility, and anger. These things are not *always* negative. Fear or even anger in the face of legitimate danger can be preserving. But as in the case...
2/7 available to “spiritual” people. Often this is nothing but internalized peer pressure, unverified ideas that are hallowed by repetition, and decisions made by others. The margin notes in our books are filled with such assumptions. Become aware of—and test—what truly works...
2/7 in the 1920s with his keynote: “Day by day in every way I am getting better and better.” Ever since seekers have debated how or whether affirmations work. I believe they do work—affirmations recondition the psyche in subtle ways. I have written elsewhere about the...
2/6 If you are following this challenge you likely feel unsettled with norms. For this reason holidays can seem perpetually unsettling. Holidays and family gatherings are often unsettling for sensitive people. You feel misunderstood by relatives and family members...
2/6 I do not exactly mean outer peer pressure, which I’ll address tomorrow, but rather the limitations that we internalize as a matter of rote and thus limit our senses, large and small, of solutions, possibilities, and avenues of expression. I do not suggest a...
2/4 we self-condition around these things plays a seismic role not only in self perception but in determining the very nature of experience. William James made the observation that act precedes and determines mood, not vice versa. In every possible instance, assume the gait
2/8 appearance. We are conditioned to use words and markers in place of experience. Today choose hard-won experience over concept. Trust your experience. When I was 12-years-old and riddled with anxieties (for which I was hospitalized) I thought to myself: “If I could just go...