Topic suggested by Chirotus. Thank you! Most people don't completely remember their early childhood. Freud suggested this was the result of our embarrassment over ideas and actions of our early youth and called it "motivated forgetting." However, many people remember certain events from that period that had a strong effect on them. One that I remember was my first experience of magick. The Background When I was five years old I watched my father die of a heart attack. My mother couldn't deal with maintaining a house, raising me and my older brother, trying to find a job, and the loss of her husband. My brother and I were sent off to relatives while my mother received help dealing with

Magick is more than making changes outside of you, it is also making changes to yourself. If there is something you don't like about yourself, you can change it. Well, there's nothing new about that! There are numerous systems for personal growth, change, and empowerment, some more effective than others. To effectively use any of them, however, requires you to know more about who you really are. If you think you're cowardly when, in fact, you are actually brave, you might spend many days, months, or years trying to become brave when it's a quality you already have.* Surely this is one of the reasons the concept of "Know Thyself" is so important—you can't decide on your goals (where you

Kirk - "Is he dead?"  McCoy -"it's worse than that Jim, his brain's gone." The above dialog comes from the first episode of the third season of the original Star Trek. The episode was first shown in 1968, was the first episode in the "we'll put this show here to die" time slot of 10:00 p.m. on Fridays, and demonstrated the "quality" of their new, lower budget. It's generally considered one of the worst of all the original episodes. Two of the stars, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, have stated that they didn't like it. Dialog like the above is on par with the infamous "But one thing's sure. Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible" from 1959's Plan 9 from Outer

It was decades ago when I moved into one of the rooms of a two-bedroom apartment with Scott Cunningham (for more about what I learned about Scott over the following years, see my eBook, The Magical Life of Scott Cunningham, available through the Kindle Store [LINK], Kobo [LINK], Nook Bookstore [LINK], Sony [LINK], and iTunes [through the store in iTunes]). One night, Scott was out with some friends. I was at home, reading, when I heard pounding at the door. I went to the door and opened it. It was a friend of mine, a highly intuitive woman I'll call Linda (and no, that's not her real name). It was clear she was in a panic. She threw her arms around me, begging for help. Linda was one of