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Video Description
What is the quietest tool in a magician’s kit? Perhaps it is the notebook. In this video, Lyam Christopher makes the case that keeping a diary, what Wiccans call a Book of Shadows, is not an optional extra but one of the most important habits on the path. Ritual work is powerful, he explains, so powerful that it stirs the deeper parts of the mind awake. Daily banishing and the Middle Pillar do not always make life feel easier at first; they gently pry old baggage loose and ask you to look at it.
That is where the magic diary earns its keep. As old fears, dreams, and troublesome habits rise to the surface, writing gives them a name and a shape. He calls it the light version of evocation: instead of a dramatic ceremony in a circle, you can sit quietly and let a fear play out on the page. You might write a dialogue with a difficult habit or describe the dream sign that proves you were dreaming. By objectifying what usually hides inside you, you make peace with it before it has to crash into your outer life as a hardship.
The goal behind all of this is beautifully clear. Record your dreams, harvest your thoughts, and practice noticing the strange details that mark the edge between sleeping and waking. In time, the journal does not just track the drama; it shows you that you are not the drama. The image of Thomas Jefferson writing a dialogue between his head and his heart appears as a quiet example of reuniting mind and body. The final invitation is as old as the Buddha: wake up in the middle of the dream and stay awake. It sounds impossible, and that is exactly what makes it worth practicing.
Full Video Transcript
Alright, it’s time for another video, and hopefully the sound settings are better. I’m still learning how to work this contraption.
This time we are talking about the magical diary. As you all might know, anybody who practices magic, whether that be ceremonial magic or Wicca or folk witchcraft, people are always very often encouraged to keep a magical diary.
In the witchcraft traditions, it’s often called the Book of Shadows, which is a great name for it because that’s essentially what it is.
To keep a magical diary is to confront various phantasms from within the mind.
All right. So a magical diary is very often secured in a fancy form like this or like this, as in a book of shadows.
OK, I think the best thing to do is obtain a nice, high quality cover, the contents of which you can switch out with new pads of paper.
So you can always have this really cool cover for your magical journal, but then switch out the insides of it.
If you go to the bookstore, you can probably find a good cover with the insides that are replaceable.
I tend to just use a composition book.
I don’t really require a lot of trappings for my magic, but I think it’s a good idea to have a magical diary that has a cover at least that’s very significant to you.
that makes it ritually very valuable to you so why do we keep a magical diary okay so many many
of you might have noticed and you’ve come to this channel because you are maybe discouraged by
uh the amount of ceremonial magicians out there who are assholes why are they so hoity-toity
intellectual and dismissive and uh why do they cling to the scholarly authorities why do they
claim to have, why do they pretend to be of high rank, you know, things like this.
We’ve already talked about this earlier in a previous video, but the banishing work and the
middle pillar work and things like that, they tend to inflate the ego temporarily. It’s just
part of how they work. So if you’re wondering about this, you might want to check out the video
that’s called The True Nature of the LBRP, what it actually does, what does it do, okay? And watch
the video on the middle pillar so you get a better impression of what might be happening.
The performance of the daily banishings in magic and the middle pillar work are probably not
enough. You also need to spend some time processing the things that these rituals will stir up within
you. As I said in previous videos, your life tends to get tougher. It doesn’t necessarily
get better when you start doing the banishings. It can actually get tougher because the things
that you need to process karmically are now being prodded to manifest around you. Not necessarily
manifest materially, but they are being prodded to manifest, at least in your psyche, in your
dreams, in your thoughts, in your perceptions. And if you continue to ignore them, they will
also begin to manifest physically as hardships and trials that you have to endure and suffering
all right the interesting thing about dealing with karma is that the karma will begin to manifest
first within your mind within your dreams within your visions within your thoughts
before it necessarily manifests in physical reality around you that’s what seems to happen
If that’s the case, that means that you can head off your karma before it materializes physically.
So if you deal with any psychological issues you have before they manifest physically,
then you can keep them from messing up your physical life.
Okay, that’s the idea anyway.
Is there any guarantee that you can head them all off before they start affecting your physical existence?
No, of course not.
But, this is the real reason why people keep any diary at all.
They might not be aware of this, but they can head off the kinds of issues that they’re dealing with that are starting to manifest around them.
They can head these things off while they exist in the mind, before they manifest out in the outside world as physical hardships.
What this means is that, why do magical ritual at all?
You could just keep a diary.
and then start to deal with your issues and your baggage and your evolutionary trauma.
You could deal with all this stuff as it’s arising within your dreams,
within your daily thoughts and things like that.
Yes, that in itself is an act of magic.
What that means is you could dispense with all this phantasmagorical ritual
and building a temple room and making magical implements
and chanting conjurations and words of power and things like that you could
just keep a daily diary okay and you will make some progress spiritually that
way very likely okay however there are advantages to combining both a daily
ritual practice and a meditation let’s say and your magical diary those two
practices work really well together okay many writers of course keep a daily
diary and it’s pretty clear that it benefits them but it doesn’t necessarily
benefit them the way that an intensive spiritual practice would benefit them so
maybe keeping a magical diary is if you know how to do it you could that would
be enough for you to for your spiritual practice but in the meantime you are
training yourself through ritual through meditation and through the diary uh how to manage your
awareness and how to head off your karma before it materializes around you all right so uh people
who do magic and they don’t really keep an introspective diary or magical journal their
daily magical work is prodding all of their evolutionary baggage to manifest around them
in their theater of the imagination okay and uh since they are failing to deal with their various
their various psychological issues as those issues arise um it just simply leads to ego inflation
okay so um what i’m saying is that the ceremonial magicians around you who for some reason have
become assholes uh and are all about you know did you really have your five equals six grade
initiation oh is is that practice you’re doing really legitimate is it really like the way it
was done by the original golden dawn all these you know uh fussy clingy things that uh intellectuals
do uh when they really start to get uh you know sort of fanatical about their craft um all these
things are a result of the work and they can be dealt with if you know how to head them off okay
so to make it clear when you do the daily ritual work it’s going to prod the you know uglier parts
of your personality to come out so that you can confront them and make meaning from them
and resolve them in order to do that you need to keep a magical journal that’s one way of doing it
a magical journal so that you can objectify them and see them and make meaning out of them
talk about them talk to them have them talk back okay so we’re going to go into the advantages
of keeping the magical journal to my mind it’s essential if you’re on the hermetic path this is
an intellectual path of magic, okay? And so writing and reading and studying and drawing diagrams
and trying to make sense of the contents of your mind, these are things that are part of the
hermetic path. So if you’re going to embark on a hermetic path, you’re going to adopt the trappings
of a scholar pretty much a wizard a seer or a sage and so you’re gonna have
journals and bits of paper and books around you and diagrams and all kinds of
tricks that the magician uses to facilitate his own enlightenment process
so one of the advantages of keeping a magical journal is evocation and I like
to refer it i like to refer to it as the light version of evocation l-i-t-e like a light beer
version a light version of a beer okay so you have your hardcore evocation practice which involves
drawing magic circles and chanting words of power and doing incantations visualizations incense and
all the ritual trappings uh but you also outside of that maintain a daily ritual diary entry where
you talk about your experiences your thoughts your visions your dreams as they get prodded
to manifest things to you okay a ritual practice without keeping this diary is is a mistake because
these things that you are prodding with your daily ritual are going to be coming
out of your psyche and demanding that you notice them and make some kind of meaning from them
all right if you are not practicing this kind of self-observation and self-recording uh the stuff
that gets brought to the surface is simply going to become accretions in your personality it’s going
to make your life worse and worse um kind of make you it’s going to make you full of yourself
and you become that stereotypical ceremonial magician out there that nobody wants to talk to
and you’re all about the titles and the you know what grade are you in that kind of stuff okay
all right in the golden dawn there’s a famous saying called by names and images are all powers
awakened and reawakened the interesting thing is that there’s there are many things in the psyche
that your daily ritual practice the lbrp and the mental pillar let’s say those things are going to
prod things in your psyche to awaken and sort of come forth and bother you for a while okay
and as we talked about before every person is kind of seen as occupying a sphere of sensation
on some level somewhere our minds are are basically in a state of non-motion and all the
this motion that the physical body goes through traveling in your car going to work going on
vacation traveling in airplanes while wandering around the house these things
are happening in physical space but in our true nature the true nature of the
mind there isn’t any motion going on at all and so in one sense your psyche
could be seen just as a sphere of sensation and if the physical body is
walking through a landscape let’s say well then the physical sensation is just
sort of moving around you okay um i’m i’m bringing this up because it makes the the psyche of the
magician more like a theater of the imagination and so if you’re going to sit down to make a
journal entry of about the stuff that happened to you through the day uh you’re going to be
talking about oh these are the things that i experienced in my sphere of sensation in my
theater so in other words in my theater of the imagination today here’s what came up and here’s
what seems to be playing itself out okay it’s a strange way of um of talking about your life okay
the your life doesn’t actually exist it’s basically just a display within your theater
of imagination that arises plays out some kind of drama and it kind of does its little thing in
front of you to try to get you to make some kind of sense out of it okay that’s why you keep a
magical journal so that you can prod this drama to reveal things to you and then you can write
about it okay yeah and the ability to do that is extremely important if you have a particular
behavior that is now surfacing because you’ve been doing ritual and that behavior is troublesome like
it’s a bad habit the nice thing is you can notice it now and say oh i think i’ve always had this
habit i’m only just noticing it now okay let’s let’s give this habit a name let’s see what it’s
trying to accomplish let’s look at it let’s ask it what it’s trying to do and see if we can maybe
resolve it somehow so that it doesn’t bother me anymore okay and likewise all kinds of things that
arise all around you are now bothering you and then so that you can make sense of them and
redefine them so that they are no longer troublesome anymore okay so by names and
images are all powers awakened and reawakened by names and images are all powers dealt with
so when they arrive you can now give them names so that next time they crop up you will have a
name for them and recognize them oh there’s that annoying habit i have it’s there it is again what
was i going to do with that habit oh i was going to turn it into this habit and then give that new
habit and name. So the interesting thing that writing does for you, it allows you to label
things and to objectify them. I’m going to go back to this one, objectification. Okay.
It allows you to objectify things that you normally, normally about yourself that you cannot
see. So when themes are starting to materialize in your life, you can use various words, names
to label them so that you recognize them whenever they come up okay or if you have a particular
habit that’s bothering you or if you have um a deep instinct that is arising in some kind of
spirit form okay or like a spiritual or or an evolutionary fear that you have inherited like
fear of heights or something like that what image does it start to come forth as okay or what what
kind of nightmare are you having on a regular basis that indicates the presence of that fear
of that deep evolutionary fear and as you come up with names for these things you can then
deal with them you can even talk to them have them talk back and all on the pages of your
magical diary if you like okay and this requires some skill obviously um so as these things come
out some people refer to this as working through projections so your daily ritual practice is
prodding things within your mind and your psyche to materialize in some kind of form all around
you. They might materialize in the form of a difficult boss. They might materialize in the
form of your own troublesome habits or addictions that you now begin to notice. Whatever is
manifesting around you, whether it’s in your mind or in the apparent physical world, you now write
about that in your journal and make sense of it presumably if you make peace with it it’s going to
be less and less in your life it’s going to diminish and the various things that pester you
won’t be pestering you so much anymore working through projection okay and so that involves the
ability to objectify things that other you otherwise would not be able to see so many
people have beliefs or fears or secret desires that they’re not even aware of and those beliefs
and desires and fears tend to be running their life for them and as they get prodded to become
troublesome around you you can maybe notice them okay and in your magical journal give them names
and and try to figure out how they work or have conversations with them on the page right there
in there have make it write a little dialogue okay uh and the more you understand these things the
the more they will begin to feel understood and they will resolve and stop bothering you
okay they’ll become they’ll get on friendly terms with you okay and this was this is what it means
to have familiar spirits okay so if if a troublesome trend in your life is starting
to materialize around you okay um this is something in your psyche that is demanding
your attention it’s waving at you saying here i am make some meaning out of me okay uh what you’ll
find is that all of these various spiritual forces that materialize around you they like having
meaning made out of them okay now the interesting thing about magic is that you know many people who
are purists will say well that magic that magical system you’re using isn’t real it’s entirely
fictional it’s based on these bogus concepts and it’s really arbitrary what meanings we apply to
them blah blah blah blah right well what they’re missing out on is that the the psyche of each
person likes to be systematized and to some extent it likes to have interpretations drawn up over it
so if you have a system of magic like the golden dawn that you are using to apply to your life to
make meaning out of it your psyche tends to like that it likes being able to present things to you
and then you use some kind of philosophy or system or whatever to make sense out of them and give
them a purpose give them meaning help them play out their little dramas so you can understand
where they’re coming from okay uh so the whole idea of magic is that you are applying some kind
of mythological construct to your life not because that mythological construct is necessarily true
but because your psyche likes to have meaning made out of it okay and that’s so in other words
to do daily ritual every day that’s nice because you’re really plugging directly into a lot of
mythical powerhouses very various god forms various geometric shapes various symbols okay
and these powerful archetypal forces will stir things up in your life so that you can evolve
faster than the average person and then you sit down to write about them to make meaning out of
them okay so the the practice of a daily magical journal entry is essential it makes you it kind
of forces you to sit down and figure out okay what’s been stirred up inside me today what do
i need to make sense out of okay if you don’t do this all these disturbances get worse and worse
and they turn you they pretty much form layers within your personality and then you can become
increasingly ego-inflated because there’s so much stuff that is waiting for you to make sense out of
it we’re waiting for you to make meaning out of it i hope that makes sense now objectification
the things in your life in your psyche that you are now prodding to appear before you
they appear in various as various phenomena that are asking for you to objectify them
okay objectification is not necessarily a bad thing okay it’s something that you use to make
sense of your life in other words when some kind of overarching theme in your life begins to
manifest, it’s going to appear in various forms as metaphors, as symbols. It very often will
personify itself. It will appear as characters in your dreams or in your daydreams, okay?
Personification and anthropomorphism, that’s essentially the same thing.
These are all characterizations of deeper aspects of the psyche. Your psyche will body forth aspects
of itself to put itself on display before you and it likes when you sit down and contemplate what
what it displays to you okay and this is what we do when we keep a magical journal we sit down
think about the things that have been happening to us and then we write about them give names to
the various forces that are appearing okay um so we speculate as to where they might be coming from
how they arose we even talk about what they might truly want all right and of course these various
manifestations of the psyche indicate the presence of powerful archetypes that are present in your
life okay themes archetypes these things come forth as characterizations as personifications
as symbols and even metaphors even the various settings that you find yourself in in a daydream
are living beings that are trying to communicate with you and very often those settings will body
forth some kind of character dream character that will can even talk to you and that would be a
spirit another reason for keeping a magical journal if you are interested in astral projection
or lucid dreaming you can use your magical journal to identify dream signs all right
uh that’s really handy too um if you are interested in astral projection you probably
are moving throughout your daily work uh let’s say you’re going about your day and you’re paying
attention to all kinds of dream signs so occasionally you will look around you and
ask yourself am i dreaming because you’re trying to get in the habit of catching yourself
dreaming when you really are dreaming at night so if on a regular basis you do little reality
checks to see whether you’re dreaming okay um eventually that habit will take over while you
are sleeping at night while you’re dreaming and you’ll you’ll you’ll occasionally stop yourself
and check to see whether you’re dreaming uh that gives you the chance to wake up in the midst of
your dream and take control of it to some degree and then you can take off and fly and go exploring
and do really amazing things uh in the dream world okay and so uh one thing to do with the
journal is to sit down in the morning and write down the things that occurred in your dreams,
if you remember them, that were unusual enough where they should have clued you into the fact
that you’re dreaming. Something weird happens that can’t happen in the physical world,
that’s called a dream sign, okay? And interestingly enough, some of the most common dream signs
are the same types of things that we find in horror movies.
So, for instance, a vampire doesn’t cast a shadow,
doesn’t have a reflection in a mirror.
So if you’re in the dream world,
one of the ways to check whether you’re dreaming
is to see whether you have a shadow.
You can look down to, oh, am I casting a shadow?
Or you can look over into a nearby window
to see whether you have a reflection in the glass.
i have i have no shadow i have no reflection i must be dreaming these are dream signs okay and
when you wake up in the morning you want to take note of all the unusual things that happen during
the dream that should have um clued you into the fact that you’re dreaming and giving you the chance
to wake up in the midst of the dream and say hey wait a second i can go exploring the dream world
now okay so another that’s another reason for keeping a magical diary so that you can record
dream signs in it okay and as many of you know like in order to be able to wake up in the midst
of a dream to experience lucid dreaming it’s very good to keep a dream journal okay and i’m what i’m
proposing is that you don’t waste a lot of time writing down all the events that happened in your
dream one after another like a narrative just go through the dream and pluck out the dream signs
and write those down. The narrative stream of your dream is not nearly as important as the
things that you note that happen within it, especially the things that are sort of fantastical
that can clue you into the fact that you’re dreaming. Those are more important than the
events of the dream. That’s quite a pointer right there, by the way. We’re shifting from
writing down the narrative of the dream, which is a bunch of events, which can kind of get tedious
and boring you just want to try to capture the dream signs out of the dream okay and just capture
those in your journal then you’re done and eventually you get in the habit of looking for
dream signs everywhere and that’s include you become increasingly awake no matter where you are
not only do you experience lucid dreaming but you experience lucid waking and the whole process of
all this magic and spiritual practice is to simply be permanently awake no longer dreaming no matter
where you are whether you’re sleeping at night or not okay so you will wake up in the midst of
a dream and you’ll find out if you wake up in the midst of your life it’s like wow this is a dream
too keep in mind that um the buddha was simply awake that’s what the that’s what buddha means
the awakened one he said i’m not a god i’m just an ordinary man but i the only difference is that
i am now awake i’m awake to the fact that i am dreaming you on the other hand are still caught
up within the dream you think the dream is real all right yeah there’s a lot to be we’ll be talking
about astral projection and lucid dreaming more in depth soon another really good thing to do
with your magical journal uh is time travel you can go back in time and then re uh refictionalize
or mythologize the things that have happened, either in the dream or in the past, the things
that are coming up in your thoughts or your daydreams or in your reflections or in your
dreams at night. All these things can be manifestations of past trauma or past fears
or past desires that are bugging you. You know, there’s a reason you show up naked in the classroom
without your homework. That’s a certain anxiety that’s sort of haunting you that keeps following
you around saying, hey, you need to resolve this so that I don’t need to keep cropping up again
and again. Isn’t that interesting? So much anxiety these days and what it seems to result from is
from people who are running away from it. They’re just trying to suppress their anxiety or get away
from their anxiety or medicate themselves out of their anxiety which makes the anxiety worse and
worse and worse because all that’s really happening is the psyche is throwing things at you saying
please make sense of this so it stops happening and if you try to keep it from happening all that
stuff’s just going to build up and keep clamoring for your attention until you make meaning out of
it and help it dissolve resolve itself by itself and this is what the magical journal is really
good for okay you what you’ll find is it’s not really enough to sort of replay your day in your
mind in your head because it’s all sort of nebulous and and being able to sit down and
write about it really forces you to make words out of it and concepts out of it and you’ll find
the psyche likes to have labels applied to various aspects of it okay your ability to objectify the
psyche is really important okay now you can do that in an abusive way in a harmful way
but essentially what you’re learning is how to do it in a productive way so that you can process
through your karma and start to sidestep it you’re basically sifting your awareness
you’re trying to figure out where does the drama end and where does my pure awareness begin
because ultimately your pure awareness cannot be touched by any of the drama that is uh coming up
from your karma okay and so the more you observe this drama as it’s being prodded to manifest
around you and in front of you you begin to notice that oh i’m not the drama it just plays itself out
it does its thing and what you’re eventually learning to do is is end suffering so that the
drama continues okay there’s no escape from karma right uh the drama continues and you uh are now
disengaged from it there really isn’t any self left to be hurt by it okay so eventually the ego
will die that the um all that will be left is the persona and the persona when it’s free of ego
no longer suffers. Life is still challenging. It still throws things at you, but none of it
seems to be so personal anymore, okay? This is the ultimate goal of magic, just quite simply
enlightenment. And of course, the closer to enlightenment you get, the better of a
manifester you become, the better you get at magic. Another benefit of keeping a magical diary is that
you harvest your thoughts okay see when you are when you allow your fantasies and anxieties to
play themselves out and you review them and you review the things that you fear you review the
things that you desire you give names to them you make meaning and sense out of them you also
develop plans of action that you wouldn’t normally have done before okay and so your whole life sort
of gets reorganized around magic and everything starts to pretty much get in line with the process
of the psyche doing its dance in front of you so that you can regard it make meaning out of it
and help it play out its drama without any fuss yeah a lot of the fears we have can simply play
themselves out in the mind and they don’t need to manifest in some kind of horrible form in our
physical lives this is the secret of really being able to handle a magical journal you can let
things play themselves out in the pages of your journal before they need to manifest in physical
reality to beat you over the head conceivably if you have something terrible happening in your life
it’s it’s because you have been neglecting it in the psyche in that space uh where it
has manifested before and if it manifests in the psyche it’s basically saying to you you need to
make sense of me now before i appear in your physical circumstances around you and then it’s
going to get really tough okay so when things are happening in your mind it’s best to deal with them
before they manifest in your physical reality and the magical journal is a good way of doing that
and as you do that you’re going to harvest some thoughts you can come up with new ideas
you can uh come up with new plans of action which you would not normally get if you weren’t
living such a reflective lifestyle all right and if you go to the forbidden realms blog
um there is a an article there i think it’s called magical evocation and um it shows you how to uh
summon up demons okay so that you can make peace with them and you can do this in a ritualistic
sort of way and the really fun part about that um article is that towards the end it says magical
evocation the light version okay l-i-t-e the light version okay and that simply involves you uh
sitting down at your magical diary and instead of doing the ritual all dramatically with magic
circles and barbarous names of evocation and things like that um simply write about a magician
doing that and then confronting these various demons outside the circle okay you can also write
about it and you can process the things that are bothering you in the same way okay so it might be
enough for you to sit down sometimes and simply record an entire procedure a narrative of your
ritual process in your journal without actually doing it in your ritual space okay now ideally
you would do both okay so you would do things in a ritual practice and then as things get stirred
up in your life confront them also on the pages of your journal okay uh one of the things that
thomas jefferson did um is he kept a ritual well he kept a diary we don’t know whether he was
practicing magic or not but he uh he he also had dialogues with aspects of his psyche uh and so he
he occasionally had a dialogue between his heart and his head he was quite the intellectual
and he uh but he also um valued having a heart a romantic sort of center in his chest and and so
what you’ll notice he’ll just do like um a dialogue a play where his heart says something
blah blah blah blah and then his head some says something in response and his head and his heart
are talking back and forth uh and if you’re familiar if you’re really familiar with the
golden dawn stuff that essentially is a a linking up of the ruach to the nefesh so in other words
it’s the you know the consciousness of the brain uh rejoining the consciousness of the body uh and
as many of you might know people in the west tend to suffer a split between mind and body
which of course doesn’t exist where if you look for that split where would you find it
that’s if you try to find it somewhere it’s nowhere right and somehow we still tend to
regard this split between mind and body very interesting okay uh and of course in order to
dissolve this split between mind and body you can’t just try to um dissolve the split itself
you have to let that split do its thing have to let it play itself out so the mind is looking at
its physical circumstances and then making meaning out of them eventually it learns to
dissolve back into the body or the universe or whatever okay i’m hoping that’s clear
all right so that is the uh the importance of keeping a magical diary uh very profound really
If you just think of it in terms of trying to head things off that are troublesome before they manifest in your material circumstances around you.
They manifest in the mind and in the emotions first so that you can deal with them there as imaginal scenarios.
If you fail to deal with them there, then they will manifest in your physical circumstances and your life gets tougher.
okay aha so it’s almost like the the secret of a an untroubled existence you wonder why some
people suffer more than others do uh there are many reasons for that but one of them could
could be that they are failing to process their karma while it exists only in the mind and in
the imagination they are they run away from it inside their minds and so therefore that karma
has no choice but to manifest around them in their physical circumstances and then their life gets
tough yeah i guess this is one of one of the secrets of karma yoga all right i’m hoping that
makes sense and uh until next time
Source: Lyam Christopher