New Worlds of Body, Mind & Spirit Since 1901
I'd like to share what kindergarten and magick have in common—and why this is such good news. When it comes to drawing, I am not naturally skilled. I still remember my kindergarten days and my early experiments with art. We used bright tempera paints and brushes that would have been more appropriate for painting walls than attempting illustration on the sheets of grayish-white paper attached by bulldog clips to easels. My paintings generally consisted of a house made of a large rectangle, another rectangle for the door, squares for two windows, and a triangle for the roof. A rectangle served as a chimney and a spiral that looked like the chimney had swallowed a pig head-first, ...
The Gospel of St. Thomas is perhaps among the most beautiful and powerful of the Gnostic Scriptures that appear in the Nag Hammadi library. Its great power lies in the fact that it is not encumbered by the literary device of a story-line, but is simply composed of sayings, many of which are left in a quite raw and primitive form, as though simply recording what was said in the power of the moment. Thus, the verses of the Gospel of St. Thomas are left open to a wide range of interpretation, and in doing this the author invites us to entertain an internal dialogue with the Spirit to gain our own insight and understanding of the Gospel. This quality, in and of itself, makes this Gospel ...
Though I grew up in a modern household, my family belonged to the Orthodox branch of Judaism. We kept a kosher home, observed the major holidays, my sister and I went to Hebrew school—and yet, I never heard the word "Kabbalah." It was not until I became fascinated with the Tarot, and studied its esoteric history, that I even knew such a tradition existed. "Tradition" is certainly the right word, for that is what Kabbalah means, a mystical tradition passed down from teacher to student. Seemingly, in the 19th and early 20th centuries that oral passage had failed, become too magical for Jews who wished to embrace the modern world. But Kabbalah had not vanished, it had simply opened ...
Wars often bring about the greatest technical innovations and advances. Similarly, personal crisis and heartache can lead to the best spiritual discoveries. This was the case as I worked out the processes for my latest book, Magical Pathworking. Seven years ago my marriage was on the rocks, I was unhappy with my job, and the spiritual support of the group that I had been a member of for almost a decade was about to disappear in a puff of egos. I could not work out how I got to this position, let alone how to get out of it. As part of my occult work, I used imagination techniques called pathworking—journeys to imaginary places to meet with miscellaneous heavenly entities. These ...
