Before major rituals, Tibetan Buddhists offer the gek-tor, or “obstacle torma.” Recently, however, my Lama has started calling this a “spirit torma,” a change with which I agree. Gekpa, or obstructing spirits, cause obstacles to people because of their own frustration. When we offer the torma, we ask them to leave and enjoy the offering […]
Everything is about models in dealing with psychic energy. We have no way to detect psi with instruments and no methods for quantifying it. It can be qualified, but it has a pernicious habit of defying those qualifications. Even the word “energy” is ambiguous. We conceive of it as an energy and in many ways […]
It’s surreal. Someone asked me, How do you become adept at sensing? I mean sensing/seeing entities around you. I can’t do it because my imagination is always playing tricks on me. Does it mean that I don’t fully achieve gnosis and should work harder on that? There is a time and place for objectivity and trying […]
When we perform magic, we’re ultimately trying to accomplish something. Doesn’t matter what that something is, we’re looking to achieve a result. Sometimes the result is something that could be normally achieved without magical intervention through some physical action we cannot or will not perform. Sometimes it’s something we absolutely cannot achieve through conventional means, and […]
Stripping down and homogenizing or syncretizing practices is certainly not new. The free exchange of cultural ideas, and the adaptation of those ideas into a pre-existing framework, is something humans have been doing from the beginning. We don’t like to abandon our own beliefs, practices, or magical frameworks – but we also don’t like to skip […]
The following is excerpted from a book I am working on on the subject of hauntings, ritual magic, and how the marriage of these things can shed light on a haunting and even make it useful. Ghosts are defined differently throughout the world. In a large part of the world, perhaps the larger part, they […]
A few years ago I was in college and asked to quickly perform a banishing ritual at a friend’s house. I had been out of “the business” for a while, exploring some other spiritual paths, and the last exorcisms I’d done had been using Christian priesthood authority. This obviously functions very differently than a generic […]
One of the more mainstream popular topics in magic, perhaps even one where it overlaps with the interests of the general public, is that of hauntings, ghosts, and so on. This seems to fall under the broad umbrella of the “paranormal” and so is approached somewhat differently than magical work or sorcery or conjuration or […]
When people first begin dabbling in the magical arts, it seems to me that the first thing anyone runs to is defensive spells, banishings, generally forceful, wrathful stuff. Regardless of what initial approach one takes, this always seems to be the first go-to. No matter what one’s approach, the first thing they learn tends to […]
Magical ritual comes in a wide variety of forms united in common purpose but generally differing in details. When we look at ritual, we can approach it from many directions, depending on our own predisposition, prior knowledge, and so on. For instance, on a practical, operational level we may focus on the details of the […]