Do you remember the first time you saw something that changed your life completely and immediately imprinted some new possibility for reality that you would never have otherwise considered?

The first time I can remember this happening, I was about 5 years old.  My father read a lot, a lot a lot, the house of my childhood had walls lined with shelves full of dusty books. The living room in particular had 2 large bookcases all full of various articles of classical literature and thought: works by Homer, Chaucer, Aristotle, Erasmus, Keirkegaard, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Huxley, etc.  All great magicians in their own right.  On the lower shelves were books with wonderful pictures of dinosaurs, sea monsters, aliens.  A small space on the bottom of the lefthand bookshelf held my father's small comic book collection.  His mother disposed of the collections of his youth (except for a few vital items) when he left for college.  Sometimes, very wisely, he would read to us from this small collection letting our eyes linger on the pictures while he did the voices for the each of the Avengers or for Spider-Man.  I remember having an affinity for "The Vision", but only vaguely.

No, what really stuck, and changed me, happened on one fateful day while I was home sick with strep throat, or walking pneumonia.  My father stayed home to take care of me and I asked him to read a comic to me, so I could follow along.  On this day he pulled three oversized comics off the shelf.  These 3 were reprints of Tales from the Crypt, the Vault of Horror, and the Haunt of Fear, respectively.  For the next couple of hours my father good lord, -choked- his way through every story, pausing after each to survey my wide-eyed, fearful, face to ask if I'd had enough.  "More" was my answer.  On this day I was reborn.  My brain permanently changed.  Bernie Wrightson, my new hero.

Art and magic have an inextricable link.  Change in accordance with personal will broadly defines the goal of magic.  What change?  Environmental changes, physical changes, internal changes, really any change as long as the will accomplishes it.  These changes come much easier when a practitioner learns to communicate with whatever they wish to change, by learning the language either through careful study or intuition.  Change occurs first in the mind, as an idea takes root and begins to prune away long-seated opposition with nimble and dextrous fingers.  As the process continues it works its way through the body, altering motor units to produce, ultimately, some manifestation, some pattern for others to follow.

You can never know what lies inside of another person beyond their anatomy.  The information they spit out through their various signals has a high degree of noise, as does a person's ability to receive it.  Through constant meditation and practice, people seem the same, oneness steps forward, the clay all mashed together, all brown and grey.  Then because sensitivity to certain things inside creates a type of knowledge through its experience,  this can apply itself meaningfully to others.  Thus begins compassion and empathy.  Learning the language of people.

I draw to communicate.  The tandem paradox of spoken words both abstracting and specifying renders them mostly meaningless.  In order to understand someone by speaking to them, so many words have to come out of both people, this vocal torrent constantly checking and editing itself on the fly to ensure the other party understands.  With a drawing or painting, the effect occurs almost immediately, and the viewer can linger in silence.  The imprint can happen immediately.  Art allows the inside to come out, so people have the opportunity to acknowledge internal processes, and sympathize, or empathize with them.  It causes long lasting or permanent change in others as well as in the creator AND it manifests some critical internal idea.

I started writing and drawing a comic in July after a lengthy daily practice and meditation with a singular goal in mind: to reconnect myself to my will (HGA).  What emerged was the germ of an idea I had carried with me from childhood to know, that has taken many shapes and had many false starts.  All signs said "THE TIME HAS ARRIVED".   The Crowelyan true will.  My will's flow interrupted by life, work, sloth, etc.  But I always come back to work on it.  Getting faster every time I sit down.  Working hard at communicating clearly.  Sometimes I have second thoughts.  The trickster universe throws so much in front of what I feel I need to accomplish.  Crowley would say that means I've found the right track.  Slowly but surely, all blame on my father for instilling me with a love of comic books as a child.

Memory Hopscotch

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, during a specific stage of death, the psychopomp attempts to soothe the horror of the listener's departing entity when they visually encounter wrathful figures  with 12 arms and 12 legs.  These wrathful figures, the listener is reminded, are actually a virtue contained in themselves, a clear light.  When I visualize these figures, I tend to relate them to the pathways of memory, winding, labyrinthine neural structures with arms that reach everywhere, irrevocably altering and effecting everything they contact.  Memory ultimately fuels personality by way of indicating which habits have favorable results (lead to the release of pleasant chemical combinations, or produce states where unpleasant chemical combinations are no longer released).  What we experience alters and changes our processes.  Particularly during moments in time where an individual has a high sensitivity to imprinting.  In fact, imprinting events tend to affect many classes of later formed habits and potential actions.

These synapses have a high vulnerability to alteration, but meaningfully and willfully altering them either takes some degree of fortunate or 'lucky' circumstance, or many years of regular and seemingly tedious practice.  A fortunate circumstance would possess a critical mass of factors that either directly relate to, or are highly symbolic of, the same number of factors in the original circumstances surrounding the initial imprint or memory.  Years of meditative practices, particularly those involving the objective observation of the process of mind and a heavy emphasis on visualization practices can bring mental pattering to a similar state.  The former has fewer components of deliberate mindfulness and therefore a higher potential for a non-favorable outcome in the untrained.  Quiet and deliberate practice in directing the mind leads to a more disciplined outcome in either case.

Theoretically, when, through many hours of mindful practice, these imprinting or habit-forming events that occurred on some date previous to the present can project lucidly and clearly into the infinite space behind the eyes, a very powerful sympathetic magic can occur.  During this state the practitioner can play act within their own memory and alter not only their reaction to the event, but also change the way they participated in the event.  If an invocation to imprint vulnerability, performed just previously to this strong visualization, showed measurable signs of success then the memory of this evoked event will permanently change to adhere to the freshly visualized alterations.  If the preceding invocation did not achieve success, and continues to fail, then the end of altering the imprint requires many more subsequent successful visualizations.

Perhaps my work with children combines easily with my own memories of youth, but those memories, long buried, have crawled and clawed their way to the surface and into my field of vision with a reliable frequency.  The one that showed up this week occurred in Kindergarten.  The current version of the memory involves a young girl, a nun named Sister Julia, and me.  When someone raised their hand in class and had difficulty spitting out a correct answer, this teacher would look around the room and say "Can anybody help him/her?" before calling on someone else who would then give the correct answer.  We were each individually engaged in a math assignment, something having to do with circling groups of numbers in a specific pattern.  A girl in class was having trouble and the teacher asked me to help her.  I have no memory of how this came about, only that she specifically emphasized my helping her.  I did what most humans at 5 years old, only possessing those two basic pieces of information, would do.  I gave her the correct answers.  Sister Julia came over while I was in the middle of giving the girl the last two correct answers.  I remember circling a 5 and a 9 in some versions of the movie, and a 5 and a 3 in others.  She was infuriated by what she saw, pulled me aside grabbed and gripped the tops of both ears between pointer finger and thumb.  Then she pulled up hard.

In some versions of the memory my feet leave the ground, in others they don't.  I buried this memory, but not in the conventional way.  After I was about 15 I experienced no discofort talking about it, but I refused to re-experience it or reframe it.  In this way I convinced myself that it had no effect on me.  This, such a great conceit.  It began to come up in my seated practice every once in a while in my mid twenties.  When I experience the internal movie now  I no longer experience the pain of the event  and I no longer feel shame afterwards, just the wind at the top of the icy mountain.

Although, the we cannot change the things that occurred in our histories, the past has an equal flexibility and plasticity to the present, particularly through the lens of consistent practice.