Askesis: Fourteen Disciplines of Illumined Living

Agathos Daimon (ancient Greek for "the Good Spirit") is the deity or protective spirit of good luck, fortune, health, and wisdom. He is also specifically known as a spirit of agriculture, vineyards, and the proper use of wine, deeply connected with Dionysus (the god of wine, rebirth, and ecstasy). 🙏

Mithraic deity Aion-Phanes represents a syncretic blending of two primordial deities in Orphic and Hellenistic mythology: Aion (god of unbounded time and eternity) and Phanes (god of creation, light, and new life). 🙏

Zurvan Akarana, the ancient Persian deity of infinite, limitless time. 🙏

It will be a while before I can publish, but my first book, “Zurvan, Aion, Agathos Daimon: A Theurgic Odyssey in Gnostic Time” is finally complete. A friend who owns my favorite pagan shop has said it’s the best occult writing he’s encountered, that I can take my pick of publishers.

Alchemize your trauma. You can transform it into beauty that raises up other struggling souls and makes the world a better place. You got this.

Dionysus is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience. - C.G. Jung

Nature shall be the visible spirit, and spirit, invisible nature. - Friedrich Schelling

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite. - Novalis

Everything breathes. The breath breathes, the heart pumps, the galaxies turn—it’s all in flow. Right Understanding says that there is a different dimension of reality that is not dependent on changing conditions. - Jack Kornfield

No matter how perfectly a spiritual principle you learn accords with Reality, until you search out and find its operation within the continuity of your own consciousness with primordial being, it’s not yet knowledge for you. It’s still only part of the map, while you want the actual territory.

Are you just an individual, or are your eyes just a few of the infinite number of apertures through which the One, Infinite Being is always peering out… at itself? You are eyes of the world; so is everyone else… you think there are other beings because you hide under a multitude of disguises.

In the late 1990’s I was initiated in Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s precepts called the “Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings,” by Order of Interbeing dharma teacher Jerry Braza. They can be practiced by anyone, and lead to real peace. 🙏 orderofinterbeing.org/for-the-aspi...

By contrast with the Wiccan Rede’s “An ye harm none, do what ye will," Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is often paired with “love is the law; love under will.” But considering the full implication of his two statements, they seem irreconcilable, mutually exclusive.

Know that however difficult experiences may be, they are part of the truth you seek. - Tarthang Tulku

Nice! 😊

My latest essay. qr.ae/pCftw7

All the misery the world contains comes from wanting pleasure for oneself. All the joy the world contains comes from wishing happiness for others. - Shantideva

The fake hermetic handbook that keeps conning beginners. farrellnick.substack.com/p/the-kybalion

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises from within us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. ~ William Wordsworth, from “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”.

All his goddesses were versions and virtues of the Great Mother, all his gods were aspects of the creating and destroying power, and all of these resolved into One: light, life, Love. - Orpheus: The Song of Life, Ann Wroe

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awaken from dreams. - Ralph Waldo Emerson Image: "Garden of Allah" by painter Maxfield Parrish

When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same... then you will enter the kingdom. - The Gospel of Thomas

Go sweep out the chamber of your heart, Make it ready to be the dwelling of the Beloved. When you depart love will enter; In you, void of yourself, God will display His beauty. - Mahmud Shabistari, 13th-century Sufi

If they ask you "What is the sign of your Father in you?" tell them "It is movement, and rest." - The Gospel According to Thomas (Saying 50)