kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with gratitude

Living provisionally is a form of procrastination. When we live provisionally, we put off making positive change in order to dwell in a state of helplessness where "nothing can be done". Though some of us are doomed to undergo the trials of Job, for most, it is nowhere near as dramatic as all that. Our circumstances may be far from ideal, but they are also probably far from catastrophic, and that means we have material from which we can create new and better patterns.

There are many sad human beings on TikTok. One especially morose individual I came across while scrolling was a young, attractive man. He lamented the workaday world and the pipeline of primary to graduate schooling that groomed him and other candidates to grease its wheels. He was crying. He longed to go outside and commune with the trees. He wanted to go back to the land. Most of all, he longed to go home to a paradise that only exists in his imagination. Like Peter Gibbons in the movie Office Space, ever since the day he started working, every day of his life has been worse than the one before it. The young man correctly perceived the office as an extension of school -- divorced from the seasons and rhythms of land, sea, moon, and sun. He had not chosen this fate directly and he had grown to hate it. He wept for lost time. He wept because he felt wasted and used. Mostly he wept because he saw no way forward that was not full of the same gray-beige flotsam of corporate garbage.

Unfortunately, I can easily see this man taking his own life, and that would be terrible because he has so much potential to make change for himself and to lead the way for others who feel the same about the corporate world. His comment section was full of agreement and copious blame of capitalism for creating the juggernaut that trapped him so well. The last time I checked, he was gaining a little traction singing original songs -- he has a lovely voice -- and there was a glimmer of hope that he could somehow monetize his talent.

It's never too early nor too late to go outside

The young man cried with longing for open sky and trees while he sat inside his apartment in the same business casual attire he wore to work. I hope I did not seem like a troll when I commented that he needed to go outside RIGHT NOW, sit with his back to a tree, and begin speaking to it as well as listening. What he failed to realize is that the outside world was waiting just beyond the door. You don't have to be a subsistence farmer or a native Sentinelese to walk outside, plonk yourself down under the nearest tree, and sit there until you feel something through the layers of industrialized-society numbness and psychic sludge heap you've been programmed to carry. Trees have been waiting for us humans to begin talking to them like we used to do, and they are only one class of beings in a nearly infinite crowd that awaits once we have reinvigorated our dormant. It is not complicated. All he needed to do was to take his ass out of the building, find a tree, look down to make sure he wasn't about to sit in a pile of dog turds, and sit for a few minutes.

Don't put off what you wish was perfect

How many times have you given up or not even tried because somebody already outdid you before you got started? That is the Faustian mentality at work: the demented idea that we must be the absolute best at any random hobby or activity or it is not worth doing. Perfectionism steals joy and prevents greatness. Besides, it is often those who laud themselves as the greatest ever who are the most mediocre. Consider the field of architecture: the supposed giants cannot produce a beautiful or durable building to save their lives. The biggest It Girls and It Boys in pop music don't write their own material, and when they do, it is laughably bad. The Metropolitan Museum of Art contains art that is nearly as bad as my dancing, without the sense of humor. As a piano teacher, I can assure you that there are many people who quit piano or do not take it up in the first place because they saw a video where a pressure-cooked Taiwanese six year old played a Bach invention at warp speed. The performance was not good -- mostly it was a testament to the wonders of a specific form of child abuse -- but they did not know that, and it black-pilled them into forgoing the smallest effort toward playing the piano.

The reason I have the best job in the world is because I instill a skill that does not just last a single lifetime. No, music education, when done correctly, is carried forever in the soul. Music is merely pattern recognition and assembly. It is also intense multitasking that acts as a form of prayer. I talk about this a spell in my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking. Practice music often enough and it helps you self-realize via the cultivation of differentiation, diligence, and humility. By doing this, it fulfills karmic debts. The work you put into practice which seems to have no "reason" or true goal may very well be a demonstration to the Divine that you are willing to put rubber to road when it comes to materially committing to an intention. Studying music is spiritual work because there is only one way to get to Carnegie Hall (or its equivalent in the far, far future) and that is practice. Music is a mental plane shortcut that takes extraordinary physical plane diligence to master. It is simple but not easy. All it takes to be a musician is a few minutes to hours of practice a day... every day... for the rest of your life.

Stop dieting!

Dieting is the method by which you are puppetiered by malevolent vampires who steal your money, energy, and life force in order to line their pockets. Nobody should be permitted to install an emotional middleman between you and the food you must eat in order to survive. The best advice on eating came from Apollo, who left an extremely tiny canon of advice in the form of words: "Know thyself," and "Everything in moderation". The second best advice ever given on eating came from Hippocrates: "Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food."

Dieting keeps you enthralled by a phantom future that never arrives. You, but thin, cute, adored, successful, and living the dream. If you are morbidly obese, it will be suggested that you have half to ¾ of your stomach either rerouted or amputated in a brutal procedure called gastric bypass. This procedure may partially deliver what it promises -- extreme weight loss -- but it means you will never again be able to eat normally. It will also not strike at the root of the problem, and that is the need to go without eating for longer periods and the need to stop using food like an illicit substance. The only kinds of dieting anyone should ever do are light fasting, going without solid food for a maximum of two days at a time (such as religious fasts), or eliminating foods that you suspect might be causing allergies or other health problems. In my own case, I went from ovo-lacto vegetarian to strict vegan in 2010, and my cystic acne, the bane of my existence since puberty, virtually disappeared overnight. In hindsight, I believe that my acne was caused mostly by dairy consumption and that not eating it lowered the inflammation factors that did what Retin-A could not. I wish I had eliminated dairy sooner, as it was not the only health problem that was ameliorated by quitting it.

Start small and where you are

Deworm your mind of perfectionism parasites. Comparison is the thief of joy and mojo. Copycatting can only get you so far anyway -- if you are truly original, you will end up going the last mile alone. It begins with intention, and intention is nothing without material follow-through. If you want to become a musician, pick up an instrument and practice, even if it is a two chord jam or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. If you want to own a restaurant someday, cook something with what few and inferior ingredients you have on hand, and it had better be good. If you want to be a mystic, pray, even though you are in a grotty public bathroom. If you want to get out of debt, make an economic sacrifice such as avoiding take out food for a time, and clean your toilet without fail every night. If you want a clean kitchen, do the dishes. Do not wait for anyone else to do them. If you hate the workaday world, start doing something else you love even though there is not a snowball's chance in hell of doing it full time . . . yet.

Use what you've got

Living provisionally convinces us that life can only be lived fully in a future scenario. Happiness will only be achieved if the circumstances are right and X fulfills Y. Nope. Get it done. If you truly hate the one you are with, leave. Better sooner than later. If you want the wall painted, do it. Forgiveness, not permission. If you have not used the item in a few years because you think you will refurbish it, sell it, mend it, or shrink into it, nope, you won't. Throw it or give it away now. Say "thank you for your gifts, and I'm sorry I could not do what I planned with you" and let it go. If you need time outdoors, don't wait until work gives you a paid vacation or until you can save up to go to a sandy beach in the tropics. Go outside on your lunch break and breathe the air, stare at the sky, and give thanks to the local ecosystem, no matter how urbanized or fractured.

Of course it comes down to gratitude

Once again, I will end this essay with a reminder that everything is alive, everything carries intention, and the fastest way of connecting with the world around you is to thank it. The reason why cleaning your toilet helps you to draw more wealth is because it is all connected. The grateful individual who literally cleans up his own crap every night says to the Divine "Here I am, humbly cleaning my toilet." People who clean their own toilets do not take nice things for granted. They generally also do not take helpful people for granted, and that humble, grateful energy attracts helpers of the noncorporeal and corporeal varieties like flies to . . . well . . . you know. The journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step. The symphony of 10,000 notes begins with one lousy pentachord. The journey to no longer working for the man begins with walking outside and sitting under a tree.

Hey everyone! I am taking a break for the week of October 24, so I will not be writing the usual weekly essay next week. I am also taking a two week break from Ogham. Thanks for your ongoing patronage of my essays and readings.

Consequences of the Craft

It serves me right to be the recipient of anyone's ill wishes because I used to wish ill upon others. Not only did I used to engage in the prideful sin of throwing curses, I was good at it. Of course I could be wrong, but I believe I was able to rain hell on people. My secret weapon was my perception of any given target's Achille's heel. In order to nail someone to the wall on the astral plane, you must be able exploit their primary weakness. In most cases, people wear their primary weakness upon their sleeve and do not even bother to try and hide it. If you can intuit someone's worst choices and tendencies when pressed, you can influence them to choose the worst of all options offered. If someone is a reckless idiot and an attention whore, you can push astral forces to make their stunts more dangerous. If someone is a bad driver with road rage, your ill-wishing will make them more likely to be stuck behind a slowpoke. They will be more likely to overreact and speed through a yellow-going-red light, potentially T-boning a car full of sixteen year olds. You can push a lazy hedonist towards more of the same, and lo and behold he will give himself cirrhosis of the liver from his hard drinking or his husband will leave him and he will be destitute. This is what may happen if you were as good at it as I am. If you're not good at it, and most people don't have the talent, you'll do the magical equivalent of pooping where you eat. All of the above results may happen to your enemy, but like a grenade, you'll detonate your own life, worsen your own weaknesses, and generally bring nearly immediate misfortune to you, your family, your pets, and your circle of friends. You will create an invisible miasma around yourself that others, despite the endemic condition of spiritual retardation, will sense and draw away from.

In the days before scientific rationalism when astrology and astronomy were one and Western doctors addressed the subtle and material bodies as one larger ecosystem, people were often labeled as witches and summarily tortured and/or executed. If you look in old books about superstitions, you will find a wealth of charms against the evil eye both in cultures around the world. Christianity has often been a religion of hysteria, and the persecution of so-called witches was often waged for faulty reasons such as grabbing the witch's resources. Nevertheless, sometimes it was a matter of punishing someone who was throwing his or her horrible energy around and making life hell for the locals. In spite of Christian ignorance, the masses used to have a higher overall sense of the spiritual ecosystem than they do now, hence their awareness of the evil eye and the use of magic to combat it.

Malefic Witchcraft: You're Soaking In It

Magic is the formation, process, and reverberation of intention. We all do it, and by "we", I don't just mean humans. Everything on this planet, including the forces we humans cannot perceive or see, possesses intention and in that way has its own life. The wind has intention to blow in a certain direction and it is countered by the intentions of objects standing in its way like trees and houses. The tree has intention to drink sunlight from above and water and nutrients below while exhaling oxygen. The human has intention to drive his car to work and the car has intention to be recognized for its labors as it hurls through space. Intentions cooperate, bump, and clash all the time. No intention exists in a vacuum and there is no being outside of a god who understands the multiple symphonies of intention going on at any given time in any given place. The world is no less magical than it ever was, it is that we humans, especially those of us in the industrialized West, have become utterly retarded when it comes to sensing, recognizing, and controlling intention.

Enter the people who think of themselves as clever: politicians. Politicians are clever because they force proxies to do harm on their behalf while walling themselves off in fortresses. They dwell in luxurious bubbles, which is the first clue they do not operate on behalf of the common man. The most powerful politicians are infamous for sending hitmen to literally kill their enemies. Most politicians would not be caught dead without a toothy grin on their faces. This is to hide the price of being a politician, which nowadays is to sell one's soul (not literally) and to claw one's way to the top of a pile of bloody and messy grifts. The politician wishes harm upon all while pretending to operate as a "public servant" LOL for personal gain and power. The average citizen has the urge to see the politician's head on a pike like the average Christian had the urge to see the local Karen put to death in 1600.

Magic has always been the weapon of otherwise powerless people. Hatred can be weaponized on the astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of images and imagination. Those who say the astral plane does not exist are morons who have yet to contemplate that an airplane does not just appear from nowhere: it was invented by men who put images in their mind of a flying machine and combined enough images on the astral plane to make a flying plane. Back in the day, women were far more powerless and were more often doing witchcraft. Intention is neither septic nor clean by default. It is what it is. The same sorts of images that make planes fly can load them with working bombs. The people who are good at malicious magic often feel disenfranchised and have a great deal of stored hatred.

I used to be amazing at weaponizing my hatred on the astral plane -- I was a prodigy and a natural. I had the aim, the power, and the temporary ability to dodge immediate consequences. Bad, bad things happened to people I did not like. I stopped and I am glad I did. There is an energetic state one has to occupy to be the equivalent of a torturer/assassin on the astral. It's not a happy place. It's also not a grateful place. There is little room for gratitude when you are constantly worried about your own Achille's heels and are constantly focused on the faults and vulnerabilities of others.

Another reason I stopped is that I got tired of worrying about causing collateral damage. Let's say I believed my enemy deserved his accident or his diagnosis. No matter who I was targeting, the ultimate result impacted his or her loved ones and dependents. When I was still fully atheist, I had the urge to curse someone and then realized she had lots of pets who depended upon her. She was a good pet parent and probably still is to this day. For once in my ridiculous life, I stayed my hand and just let her be, not for her sake, but for the welfare of her pets.

You're a Witch! She's a Witch!

Unless you are genuinely sweet to your core, you have likely aimed some of your own bad intentions at others and gotten results. This is a mere fact of life. Perhaps the intentions of others got in your way, perhaps you suffered immediate consequences, and perhaps you got away with it. The hard truth is that you have people aiming their bad intentions at you right now and you are likely suffering the consequences of the bad energy that made it through. I have been a writer for a long time and a jerk for even longer, and I reliably field would-be witches attempting to assault me on the astral with their malefic energy.

When you have malefic energy being thrown at you, you have choices. In the case of normies, they do not know bad energy is being thrown at them at all because they deny it exists, they deny it has power, and they deny the astral plane of images it comes from because they are too deliberately ignorant to attempt to research occulted knowledge. Let's call these people the ignosophers -- they love ignorance and we will leave them to it. They are dismissed because the grown ups are speaking now.

When you are an Evangelical normie, you believe that all bad energy thrown at you comes from Satan and that those throwing the energy are agents of the Dark Lord. You are wrong. The friction produced may be coming from within you and your own uncontemplated dissonance and misunderstanding. Some of it comes from the fractured spiritual ecosystem in which you dwell and some of it comes from other would-be witches trying to hex you. Because you produce malefic energy yourself, you will attract it on the plane of images as like attracts like. Your invocations of a deity you make pretenses of serving while acting in the opposite manner of what that deity stands for will likely invoke other things that are not Divine.

When I was an atheist witch with no banishing rituals in place, I believed that I was immune to the bad energy being thrown my way and exempt from consequences. I was wrong. The more I threw hatred in response to hatred, the more lathered-up and vulnerable I became on the astral plane. The astral plane is the same one we encounter in dreams. My dreams were full of drama, hags, and shadow men, the last two being parasitic entities who are attracted to malefic energy and feed off of drama. By reacting like a clueless idiot to various stimuli, I painted a kick-me sign on my butt on the astral plane and dragged my energy lower than it needed to be.

Most people are somewhere between atheist and Evangelical. I would call them the casually religious. When bad energy gets thrown at a casually religious person, she often does not know it explicitly. She senses it. She knows something is not right. Perhaps she knows who it is coming from and will react in her mind with hatred, wishing the person would just go away. This sort of impotent energy has almost no effect on anyone or anything except for her as it makes her sad. If she is a bit more towards the feisty end of the spectrum, she will wish harm on the person in her mind, seeing them step on a rake in her astral replay or hoping they'll get a good and hefty dose of what they are owed. This more focused energy will disrupt the hated person's life if she is a natural witch. If she is actually into ritual magic and does ritual magic against the nuisance person, she can deal out a great deal of harm because of the added power a physical ritual lends to the force of images. Those on the more religious end of casual cause harm by praying for others without their permission. Prayer is really, really gross when aimed at people who do not want or ask for your prayers. A prayer aimed at the unwilling is the equivalent of camping out on someone's lawn and pooping on it and then throwing that poop in their open window. No sane person makes that kind of effort, and to add insult to injury, the prayerful moron tries to invoke great power in order to throw crap.

In my own case, I have been public about having done the Sphere of Protection every day without fail for the last seven years. The Sphere of Protection is a banishing ritual that takes about 5-10 minutes and acts as an astral shower or bath. I also tend to bathe every day, so it's no surprise that I fell into the habit of the same sort of thing on the plane of images. The Sphere of Protection is great on its own for cleaning up one's astral plane existence, but when combined with the mental plane practice of discursive meditation and serial attempts to get the advice of the gods through regular divination (Ogham in my case) it lends a powerful set of shields when someone tries to hex me. I also pray to several gods and I never, ever pray on someone's behalf without their express permission. This is also protective.

She Hexed Herself LOL

When a would-be witch tried to hex me recently, a few of her blows landed on me despite my walls of astral, mental, and spiritual defense. I was able to figure out what she was up to via divination. It is highly unlikely she consciously knew what she was doing. As a result of her malefic energy, I had a couple of klutzy moments and a day that had every opportunity to turn septic had I let it. A loved one who does not have a banishing ritual suffered a minor flesh wound that needed a Band-Aid. In other words, it was a nothingburger that I easily handled. By throwing her crap around, I'll bet she had a string of terrible days. I'll guess she made herself sick or did the same to her loved ones, and overall ended up worsening her personal relationships and causing herself far more worry and anxiety than she was able to project onto me.

If you want to defend yourself against the bad energy of conscious or unconscious would-be witches, I suggest at the very least a daily routine of prayer to gods and discursive meditation. Obviously the Sphere of Protection or another banishing ritual such as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is advised as well. Once this routine is in place, it is fairly difficult for the average semi-skilled witch to get through. By being unlike the witch, I sent her energy glancing away from me and towards the Unmanifest that Dion Fortune talks about in the Cosmic Doctrine. I was unlike the witch because I refused to react to her with hatred. I don't hate the witch because I don't care about her. When I see her in my mind's eye on the astral plane, I see a sad, desperate, anxious person who doesn't deserve my contempt or my compassion either way. In her vain pride and self-importance, she sent blows that sailed past me. The banishing ritual I do ensured it along with my lack of interest in her and her life. Her problems arose when the energy blew towards the void and found their mark in entities that feed on human drama. We call these entities demons in our lack of understanding. By trying to hit me with her best shot, she painted an All You Can Eat sign on her house and opened the door to whatever nasty thing from the lower astral who wants to walk in. Demons cannot get in without an invitation.

The most repulsive and defensive part of my wall is my gratitude. Whenever I have anxiety or begin to covet a thing or situation someone else has, I play the Glad Game and imagine A. How my situation could be worse and B. Why I am lucky and grateful. Somewhere along the way in the last seven years of banishing rituals, discursive meditation, prayer, and divination for myself and others, I became a more grateful person. Gratitude is trust in the Divine. I trust the gods to provide for me and I am not worried or anxious like I was when I was actively hexing other people as a stupid atheist ignosopher. I am not at all afraid of death and I am certainly not afraid of some piddling little wannabe witch.

If you want to be treated more fairly and to be loved and adored, you must be the change you want to become in the world. You must be fair and you must emanate love and adoration, not just for other people but for places and things. I’m talking about gratitude.

We all love the grateful. Grateful people are thankful no matter what their circumstances. They take nothing for granted. You may be a jerk (here I am, the pot, calling out the kettle) but they are grateful for you. They uplift everyone and everything in their presence. Gratitude is powerful.

Think of the most grateful person you know. If you don’t know of anyone who emanates gratitude, consider the example of Jesus Christ. No matter what happened, Jesus was grateful to his father, God, for the opportunity to experience life. While on Earth, Jesus performed miracles that came from a well of power whose source was the connection forged with ultimate gratitude. Jesus knew himself to be poor but he preached gratitude nonetheless, because he was able to appreciate his circumstances and the lessons they offered while he was on Earth. Jesus had no fear of death despite the fact he was tortured to death. His gratitude overcame his fear.

We All Have to Start Somewhere

I’m not rich and my lifestyle is fairly modest. Nevertheless, I am nowhere near as poor as Jesus and chances are neither are you. We can either wallow in guilt and consider ourselves sinners, or we can appreciate our surroundings at every moment.

To appreciate is to raise in value. Value is not strictly material. A wise entity once threw me a bone. It said that genuine gratitude from the heart sublimates everything it touches by the power of seven. I have parsed this to mean that an act of genuine gratitude blesses the giver and the receiver across seven planes of existence. When a little boy gave his small portion of fish and bread to Jesus, via the power of his selflessness and Jesus’s gratitude the fishes and loaves were transformed into a hearty meal for five thousand people. The loaves and fishes example is an extreme one meant to illustrate a point. If you give everything you have out of the goodness of your heart, God will bless you and keep you no matter how bad things get. If you are compulsively generous, you will be rewarded with a kind of generosity to which no form of material wealth can compare.

Start where you are and thank the bed you slept in. If you have time or if there is not someone still sleeping, make the bed as you thank it. Making the bed is an act of appreciation and love. It restores the order of the bed and in effect “seals the deal” of the appreciation you express. A heartfelt thank you to the bed, whether or not you slept well, tells it that you don’t take it for granted that you have a soft, warm place to sleep at night. It vicariously thanks the place and time where you live for sheltering you, especially if bombs were not raining down or if natural disasters weren’t attempting to wipe your residence off the map.

The Dollar Tree Egg Roll

Another potent ritual is to thank the food you eat for its sustenance, even if it is a Dollar Tree egg roll that you cooked in the microwave for lack of a better alternative. Someone grew the cabbage, threw it into a dangerous machine for slicing, and oversaw the frying, cooling, and wrapping of the egg roll. To be grateful for the egg roll and all those who brought it to you is to accept both the benefits and drawbacks of our era. Convenience food is nice in some ways. Gratitude for it means amplifying the good aspects of the egg roll and shifting focus off the bad. Yes, the egg roll is not healthy. In an ideal world, I would be handcrafting my own egg rolls with cabbage, carrots, and onions grown in my garden. I do have the good fortune of owning a garden. I have yet to grow the vegetables and gather other ingredients to make egg rolls. Instead of focusing on the egg roll’s calorie count or its lack of nutrition, I consider how wonderful and tasty it is and how hard various forces worked to bring it to me. I could be yet another diet-obsessed drudge; those types are common enough. It’s easy to obsess about what I eat. I don’t. People love being obsessed with food because it spares them the hard work of confronting their real fears and drives in contemplation and discursive meditation. In a world teeming with toxic negativity and misery, gratitude serves to counterbalance certain forces that have gotten out of control. I cannot singlehandedly cure the collective astral plane of the nastiness it suffers right now; nobody can. There’s no way gratitude for a nuked Dollar Tree egg roll will save the world. I can, however, be grateful for small things and small acts of kindness and by that virtue ameliorate some of the black sludge of the modern collective consciousness. I can watch and observe as that gratitude bounces back at me through the planes by the power of seven or more.

Imagine being grateful to every object, person, or place that fills your life. Imagine being grateful to those you don’t like for teaching how not to be and what not to do. Imagine being grateful for your mistakes because they are a constant opportunity to learn, despite it often feeling like trial by fire. Gratitude is like a rose in the garden. If you tend to it and give it lots of care it will grow and flourish. If you are grateful to your bed every morning, you will sleep better at night. If you are grateful for the place you live, you won’t be consumed by the desire to fix every aspect of it or to run away. The consequence of gratitude is often more gratitude. If you are grateful to others, they stand a much better chance of changing into the kind of people who would earn that gratitude than if you took them for granted and got angry at them for their behavior. Gratitude builds the positive and to a degree ignores the negative.

Gratitude and the Spirit of Place

The first connection to the spirits of place happens via gratitude, not by “getting into the occult”, pulling out the Ouija board, or hosting a sleepover seance. Humans make a grave mistake when they presume that bad energy that flies in their direction is coming either from other human beings who happen to know magic or other human beings who happen to be dead. At any given moment, the subtle ecosystem around you is populated by a complex menagerie of unseen beings. Some of these beings are the spirits of the dead. Some are elementals, beings that make fire hot and whose energy is the reason snow becomes crystals. Some are the spirits of place, from huge land spirits that encompass entire provinces and give them their particular idiosyncrasies to a tiny spirit who occupies the stove in a rented apartment. Some are thought egregores you created yourself that develop lives of their own. Some are egregores created by groups of people, such as the spirit Carl Jung described and warned about in his prophetic essay Wotan. Some are larvae, the unseen equivalent of maggots. Larvae are found wherever there is sickness or death. Clairvoyants can actually see them; most of us can only sense them as an icky feeling. Some are angels and some are demons. There are some who are so beyond humans in their intelligence that they could destroy you and everything you know in a single thought, yet for some odd reason they don’t. Most of the subtle ecosystem cannot be explained at all, and it also doesn’t help that we humans cannot physically see it and that our scientists have forgotten what it is to try to understand it. Just know it is there and as humans, we are uniquely handicapped when it comes to perceiving it.

Ancient Mayans feared the age we are currently living through. It’s as if they knew how far the human race would fall from being in touch with its own spirituality. Though people of our era love to claim that humankind is at the most advanced state it has ever achieved and that the past was full of ignorant, god-bothering rubes, it is our time that is the true Dark Age. Like a person who gradually becomes blind over the span of several years, our entire race has gradually lost its connection to clear perception of the subtle worlds over many generations. The unseen world is in attack mode all the time now. I don't think it was always this way, but it is this way now. That is why it is unwise to counterhex people who you think or know are hexing you. In absence of a banishing ritual such as the Sphere of Protection or the etheric and astral shielding formed by sacred homemaking and a great prayer relationship with one or more gods, to counterhex is to paint a target on your own back. You end up calling out for the exact type of energy you are trying to repel, much like the dumb kid who took a couple of martial arts classes and makes the mistake of taking on the biggest bully in school.

The answer to the blindness of our age is to slowly re-sensitize ourselves via the appreciation of the good, and that means cultivating many gardens of gratitude.