SHALLOW (Random Thoughts)

Shallow people fall for surface, all the time.I hear a lot of "He's such an asshole sometimes but at least he's gorgeous!" or " I'd leave him if he wasn't so hot!" It seems good looks are prized above all else. In our society we tend to cater to, tolerate mistreatment from, diminish ourselves for, vie to associate and be seen with as well as struggle to conform to, what we have been told classifies as good looking. This is a sickness. We have been taught that good looks make you better than others. Which is scary. Scary and a lie.If your attractive that's awesome! But it doesn't make you more or less special than anybody else. Both the average looking and the good looking (by society's standards!) Have assholes. The asshole your kissing says a lot about you. (Here's a hint, you really shouldn't by kissing anybody's ass!)

VOWS OF MAGIC (How to get started on your own path to magical practice.)

Many close friends and acquaintances have asked me how they should begin to develop their psychic skills or how to develop magical skills. (I whole heartedly believe that both of them should be developed if your desire is to become a practitioner of magic.) My question is before you undertake this adventure in to the unknown, what is your motivation? Why do you want to be psychic? Why do you want to work magic? Is it a calling? Or is it to empower your ego? Is it the search for self-knowledge that compels you or is it the thirst for power, control over others and other dark intentions? I was born into all things psychic and magical and am a natural. I had a spiritual teacher that was not. He became a priest in the afro-Latin religion known as Santeria by paying High Priests of that religion to perform the ritual that made him a Santero (A Santero is a Priest of Santeria). He bought his way in to the world of magic. He had no reverence for the dead, the living, the ancestors and the Orixas. (Pronounced “Oh-ree-shaws”. They are the African Gods / Ancestors of the Yoruba African people who hid them within the Saints during the times of Slavery and coming to the “New World.) He was always seen as less because he was gay and wanted a means of counteracting the disdain, cruelty and violence he was always a victim to by becoming feared. His heart wasn’t pure. He entered the world of magic with fear, anger and hate. So the power that was given to him by his initiation was corrupted. Though I was a natural, he cunningly managed to convince me to allow him to initiate me and my family into the mysteries of Santeria.

As it turned out, he wanted me to be his servant. To bow to him in public and to worship him as an Orixa. He initiated many other people who had natural gifts so he could use them for his own personal agendas. He was creating an army. Long story short, I refused to bow. I refused to kill, I refused to work black magic on his behalf and I refused to be his student. I rebelled and we fought to a stalemate. His power and my mine equal only because I didn’t have to invoke the Orixas power. I had my own. Where he served the Orixas I worked with them. They are not my Gods but my family and ancestors. There are three initiations in Santeria. I was only given two. This was my indoctrination in to Santeria. I was told because I am gay, I would never be able to be a priest in that or any religion my heart feels an affinity with. I was told that I should not work with the Orixas of Santeria, The Loas of Voodoo, and the Nkisi of Palo Mayombe because my homosexuality would be considered an affront to them. This was a lie. A lie to keep the female and male energies within me that not only make me who I am but that also empowers me that much more than those who seek to control and deny the Ancestors contact with ALL of their children. Now I realize why my teacher paid for his initiation. 

So, I decided to flip the script and become witchdoctor or brujo I naturally was meant to be. I decided to let the Ancestors initiate me instead of a priest or high priest who was corrupted by greed and standard homophobia that all orthodox religions are ripe with. I would take from any and all paths in order to build my own. This works for me and I have been blessed and able to help many people, learn many lessons and live a magical adventure that has become my life. I have learned forgiveness though I admittedly am still learning this to this day.

I share this with you the reader because if you wish to embark on your own magical adventure, YOU become your teacher. Avoid hierarchies and grades and ranks. YOU be your OWN high Priest or priestess. Take responsibility for your spiritual path and indoctrination into the mysteries. It’s as simple as this:

1      1)  If you decide to work magic? Pick your own Pantheon. The Gods are symbols, Principles, emanations or personifications of creation and the creator. The Universe communicates with light, cause and effect and symbols. Choose to work with god forms that make you feel the most comfortable or which you have a kinship with. The Universe will communicate with you using them.   

         2) Meditate often. Keeping your mind clear is of the utmost importance. Meditation is not just a practice but a vehicle to other states of being and dimensions. It is a means of exercising you psychic abilities and gaining control over your own mind, spirit and life.

3        3) Be clear as to your intentions. Know yourself. Why you do things to others and to yourself as well as what you want form others and yourself.

4       4) Become familiar with your fears so they do not control you.

5       5) Know the god forms you invoke and those god forms that come to you.

6       6) Ask your guardians to guide, protect and teach you. Always.

7      7)  Learn the basics, the four elements, Candle magic, how to create spells and rituals, herbs and crystals. Create your own ceremonies and perform them regularly. I would start by researching the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

8     8)  Study one path at a time. As you get more proficient you will be able to see similarities in magical traditions and paths. Only then can you meld and combine them.

9       9) Remember to always let it happen as opposed to making things happen.

1     10) Get a tarot pack commit the definitions to memory and get started reading and writing down your readings. This will help you develop your psychic abilities.

1     11) Nurture a ravenous appetite for researching, studying and learning about the magical traditions, pantheons, languages, spells, incantations, sympathetic magic, rituals and psychic abilities. Be just as diligent in reading, writing in a journal which will become your spell book or Book of Shadows, as you should be in your faith. Faith and belief in yourself, your path, your idea in a creator (if you have one) and your intentions which should be for the benefit of yourself as much as for the world around you.

This is a good start. This way you become a solitary practitioner and you answer to no one but yourself and the forces you work with. Don’t just work magic. Become it.

PSYCHIC EXPERIEMENT 06/13/2014: Establishing telepathic link with the Ascended masters

I was bored today. So, I thought if the creator gave me the greatest tool, toy and sophisticated instrument like consciousness why not use it? I tried to telepathically scan the thoughts and thought forms of the ascended masters. Why the hell not? Even though they are millions of light years more evolved than me and they are even further away from me in terms of distance. It really shouldn’t matter right? If thought transcends time, space distance, matter, light, dark, death and life (at least in the way I understand it!) then I should be able to at very least grasp nits of visual, spiritual and psychic glimpses of what they know and experience. So I gave it a shot. I don’t know if I was successful but this is all I could get from my telepathic experiment trying to get into the mind of the Ascended Masters. Here it is:

Close your eyes. Imagine walking in a field of flowers. Beautiful flowers of different species and colors. Different forms and shapes. Some in bloom and others in the twilight of their all too short lives. They seem to be completely unaware of our presence not being able to see and communicate with us, only being able to interact with other flowers. We exist outside of their reality and awareness. Now imagine that every one of these flowers are alive. They communicate, reproduce, interact and exist in perfect harmony with their environment. Is their life less important than our own? Their life span is so short and the quality of life seems so alien to our own when we think of all of our accomplishments as a species, right? Is a species that is so short lived and that’s alive in a very different way than what we classify as “living” less Important than our own lives? Do their lives even matter in comparison to our own? Or, Can we learn from them. Can we study the nature of their nature to better understand ourselves? I think we can. Everything in creation was created to help everything in creation to further the evolution of, everything in creation. 

Now imagine our lives to be a literal “blink of an eye” to a higher life form.  To them, we are the flowers. For a being whose life span can be millions over millions of years, our life span is just as short as a flower or even shorter still. We cannot perceive them because higher life forms exist outside our ability comprehend, understand or to even be aware of them.  Time, space, distance, matter, light, dark, death and life move differently for them than for us and that itself, is the barrier we must overcome in order to engage them in any type of communication. 

Well…that’s all I could get before I got a headache so I will keep you posted as I continue my Inter-dimensional telepathic experiment.   

A PATH NOT AS BRIGHTLY LIT… ("La Santisima Muerte")

La Santisima Muerte translates to “Saint Death” or literally to “Most Holy Death”. She is portrayed as a female skeleton with a skull for a face and covered in a black robe similar to a Catholic female saint. How she grew in popularity in Mexico is as insidious as what many of her worshippers do to others in her name. Many have committed human sacrifice, crimes, murders, black magic most unimaginable and terrifying, and have made deals with her for wealth, power and greatness. She is the Dark Priestess of Mexico and she is gaining in strength in other countries as well. She is gaining in popularity because she caters to humanities carnal, material, and animal desires. However, she does this for a price. It baffles me that people will blindly follow a deity, entity or power without first understanding what exactly it is. She is in fact, not a Saint at all. She is not even death itself. She is an active Aztec god. 

The Aztec Gods Like many other ancient gods were vampiric in nature and fed off their servants and all who worshipped them. Human sacrifices were common in primordial Mexico much like in other places in the world. However what made the Aztec Gods different than those of other pantheons, is that they also fed psychically and emotionally off their servants and worshippers. The Aztec Gods could feed off the anger, rage, guilt, lust, sadness, pain, suffering, and misery of their believers. These Gods were Psychic and empathic feeders and not exclusively dependent on blood. Another less known but most sacred Goddess in the Aztec pantheon, Tlazolteotl was what is called a “sin-eater” and ate the sin of all who cut themselves before her effigy and rubbed their blood on her. It was said that she “ate the filth of man that his spirit would be clean. Many of such rituals and ceremonies existed in an attempt to propitiate these almost always hungry deities. (Now it must be said that NOT ALL of the Aztec Gods are dark. Some are beautiful and healing, ascended and transcendental protectors and teachers. Where there is darkness there will always be light!) 

In 1580 A.D. through 1640 A.D. when the Spanish was actively colonizing Mexico, The Spanish brought African Slaves to counter the rapid decline of the indigenous people who were dying off due to the sicknesses the Spanish brought, being worked to death as slaves themselves, being conquered, oppressed, subjugated by their conquerors religion and forced to abandon their own. As time went on the Africans revealed that they brought their gods with them from Africa because the Gods were in fact there Ancestors and that the Aztec Gods were the Ancestors to the Aztecs. The Africans taught them to hide their gods in the Catholic Saints they were being forced to honor. As the Africans interbred with the Aztecs and the indigenous peoples of Central and South America a hybrid religion was born. A religion fusing the gods of Africa, Meso-America, Caribbean, Central and South America. The energy in this religion is primal, raw, implacable, overpowering, rage, vengeance and brutal power forged by everything that was experienced by all those who were subjugated, enslaved, brutalized, victimized and tortured. This Hybrid religion has many different names by region and location but are similar in origin and hybrid make up. They are Santeria, Luccimi, Candomble, Palo Mayombe, Santuario, Quimbnda, Vodou, Obeah and Indigenous Shamanism working with the Ancestors and the dead. In this day and age these magical religions are still prevalent but still highly secret with regards to their practices, ceremonies, rituals and the extent of their reach and power. Unfortunately and like with all religious hierarchies,  corruption is rampant within its sacred mysteries. Not only can you purchase the power in this religion you can purchase entrance in to it and this naturally leads to the abuse of the powers and wisdom of the Ancestors by the greedy, disrespectful and unworthy. These are the very types of people that are spreading the worship of La Santisima Muerte to the ignorant, the desperate and the lost.

La Santisima Muerte is called in  ancient Aztec language of Nahuatl, “Coatlicue” which means “Skirt of snakes”. She is the devouring mother of the Aztec Gods and rules the powers of Life, Death and Rebirth. She is first in a cadre of primal Earth Goddesses. Were as the Aztec Gods one and all are vamipric in nature, it is only the older female dieties that possess Chthonian quality. Coatlicue is the darkness of the womb and the tomb. In Aztec Legend she was sweeping a temple when she saw a ball of beautiful feathers floating before her. She quickly grabbed it and placed it between her bosom and returned to sweeping as if nothing happened. Unbeknownst to her, she became pregnant and no longer found the ball of feathers between her bosom. Her children, embarrassed and enraged attempted to kill their mother for shaming them and their family however right before they killed her, Coatlicue gave birth to Huitzilopochtli who would become the God of War. A feathered god fully grown and armored, who killed all 400 hundred of her children who tried to kill her. He dismembered them flinging their heads up in to the sky where they became stars, so that she could look up and gaze at them when she missed them. Coatlicue or La Santisima Muerte as she is called now In Palo Mayombe, is a most powerful spirit. Spirit, not a GOD. Those who serve La Santisima Muerte are said to lead solitary, lonely lives. They cannot have friendships, relationships, connections with community and social lives because she is an extremely jealous Goddess. You are only to be with her. She who protects you, nurtures you, defends you, kills for you and allows you to live. She is splendid with the powers, gifts, wealth and health that she gives but the price you pay is that you become hers. Not her child, her possession. Her snack. She feeds on all that which is hers and all that she bestows? Is for a limited time only. She takes it back and when you have outlived your usefulness to her and have brought her more people to corrupt? You slowly decay away and perish by odd and unforeseen or criminal circumstances. She is being fed quite regularly now with all the Drug Cartel wars, mass murders, random killings, corruption, greed, hunger, poverty and the like. It’s a proverbial banquet for her and she is getting her fill. Also of import is that she is not only Vampiric and Chthonic but she is also one of the few dieties that is a symbol of a hell mouth. After all she is a Primordial Earth Goddess, attributes of life, death and rebirth, and a devouring mother of the womb and the tomb. 

The Aztec Goddess of creation for the Aztecs was and is “Tonacacihuatl”. It is believed that it is she that Appeared to a Humble Mexican Indian named Juan Diego who told the priest of the town and the villagers of this Brown skinned girl who later would reveal herself to be the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin of Guadalupe has more followers than Jesus and all of the Saints of Catholicism in Mexico. Because it is engrained since Aztec times that The Mother is the symbol of the divine sacred. La Santisima Muerte will and has capitalized on that and has used it to her advantage to her great success. The Followers of La Santisima Muerte have become a cult and slowly are becoming a fill blown religion or maybe better said “fringe religion”. Her power only held in check by The Virgin of Guadalupe or  Tonacacihuatl, the true Mother of the Mexican People. 

In Palo Mayombe there is another power that is stronger than La Santisima Muerte. Stronger than all the dark ancient or modern. They fear this spirit and obey his edicts with the fiercest loyalty. His Name in Palo Mayombe is “El Cristo Negro.” His name translates to “The Black Christ.” This Spirit is King of the Spirits of Palo Mayombe. All them must bow to him and him alone. To know him is to know his back story as well. He is Christ after the crucifixion who descended in to hell and freed the imprisoned, lost, incredulous, martyrs and saints from hell. The Christ that forced the powers and principalities of hell to bow before him as he freed the  imprisoned souls. This is the power of El Cristo Negro. However, He too  has a much older name and was known to the Aztecs. His was Known as “Tezcatlipoca” or the “Smoking Mirror” Tezcatlipoca was a feared God because he was a master of many powers, an ancient Aztec Polymath God who was the master of magic, night, war, Night winds, hurricanes, The North, Obsidian arrows, mirrors and stones, enmity, discord, rulership, divination, temptation, jaguars, sorcery, beauty, strife, Master of Machiavellian strategies (This is derived by another of his many nicknames or lesser names The “Enemy of both sides”), Sky and Earth. Tezcatlipoca Is wise and can outsmart and trick both the Gods and man and is known to be a trickster as well. Tezcatlipoca crossed swords, so to speak, with the Aztec God of civilization and light known as “Quetzalcoatl” The Feathered Serpent and won. As El Cristo Negro, Tezcatlipoca has unlimited power and is also being continuously fed in the most remotest of villages and regions in Latin America and has kept himself in large part hidden from public scrutiny. Anywhere El Cristo Negro is, La Santisima Muerte must bow. Where his power is, her power must yield. El Cristo Negro isn’t just the knowledge of good and evil, he is the wisdom and the power of both good and evil and the keeper of the deeper knowledge that Both Good and Evil evolve into each other becoming each other in a continuous cycle until creation transcends those paradigms for higher states of being and consciousness.      

Healing My Self-Image

I stare at my face sometimes. In the mirror or random pictures of myself. I have a hard time seeing the beauty that all people should see when they look at themselves. It’s sad but true. Deep down inside I do not feel beautiful. So, I am working on it. I stare at myself regularly and see the lines, the freckles, the birth marks and the color. I just caught myself saying “the" instead of “my”, so I apparently still have a lot of healing to do. I write this not for pity or for any affirmation from people, family or friends but to reach others who may be going through this very same life lesson of achieving self-love. As with everything that I write, I hope this helps people. I really do.

I try to look at myself every day to correct the disconnection, the dysfunction or dysmorphia or whatever the hell it is that I have been carrying for some time. And I think I am beginning to slowly see my beauty. What helps is seeing everything I have endured and survived in my life. I look exactly like I am supposed to look and I am built exactly like I am supposed to be built.  

I am and have always been Gay, Feminine, Strong, Mexican, African American, Intelligent, autodidactic, Spiritual and magical. This is what I have come to see in my face. If only my eyes could tell stories. In my childhood I was really sick with asthma and spent much of my childhood in bed, in the hospital within an oxygen bubble, the emergency room and seriously over medicated with Prednisone, Theodure, Benadryl to a point where I was in a dazed blur for much of my early life. I think this contributed to my poor self-image because I never was able to see myself clearly. I slowly began to think something was wrong with me because all the other kids I grew up with in school were adapting socially and I wasn’t. I also wasn’t quite accepted because I was either not black enough for the black kids or not Mexican for the Mexican kids all the while in an overpowering sea of white kids. I was and still am naturally flamboyant, effeminate, articulate, and sensitive so I couldn’t help but to stand out like a sore thumb. I’m healing my internal self-image. By letting go of what I think people expect from me and for my need to be accepted by people so I can better be able to accept myself. I never really had a chance to. I was always trying to be somebody I never really understood that I already was. I never truly embraced the fact that if I don’t accept myself I had no right to expect anybody else too.  If I didn’t, why should they? 

When you have a warped sense of self, you tend to attract emotionally broken people as mates that reflect what you feel about yourself. If you feel that your ugly or worth shit, you will always be attracted to or attract prospective mates that will reinforce those feelings. You will also find yourself in romantic situations where you seek out romantic situations that are destructive, abusive, toxic or all together non-existent and non-reciprocal. I have learned that the hard way. I am starting to believe that I am better than that. I whole heartedly believe that I am worthy of the same love I am capable of giving and I will never settle for anything less than that. Ever. 

As I look at my face now? I forgive myself for hanging on to what modern society depicts as beauty. I forgive myself for thinking I was not what beauty is. I forgive all the people that made me feel like I was ugly and worth shit. They only were allowed to hurt me by me, because I thought the same thing about myself deep inside. I forgive myself for thinking that I am ugly and comparing other people’s beauty to my own. I will never be a super model but they will also never be me. I am different, exotic, unique and that, right there, is three different forms of beautiful. I am beautiful. I think we all are. Not just physical appearances but also inside of our very souls is where true unending beauty slumbers waiting to be seen and touched by another’s beauty equally hidden. I see myself now. And…I can honestly say that I like what I see. Scratch that. I love what I see.