Affirmation Rituals

Affirmation rituals are multi-sensory trance states designed to build a bridge between your conscious and subconscious. Because your subconscious is the source of creativity and all inner secrets, learning how to negotiate a free exchange between your subconscious and conscious allows greater understanding of yourself and your creative talents.

An affirmation ritual begins by gathering components.

You will need sensory artifacts, items that represent each of the five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.

• Sight can include pictures or artwork or magic symbols or candles, etc;
• Sound most often involves music or some other type of auditory recording like rain, a rain forest, theta waves, white noise, etc;
• Touch is something you can feel like fabric, ice, a sharp tack, sand, glass, leather, etc;
• Smell might involve incense, food, perfume, gasoline, ganja, etc;
• Taste naturally food, gum, candy, etc.

These examples are just off the top of my head and you can naturally improvise.

A database of anchors can be easily created of important images that conjure positive feelings:

• Boardwalk fries drenched in vinegar
• The warm tingle of a good stretch
• A cold shot of rum stinging your throat

Objects and abstract ideas can also be captured by associated senses. One of my fondest writing experiments was to capture the senses of an addiction by describing an object:

• the cold sweating can, the crisp sound of the can opening, the carbonated fizzle, the chug, the sizzle in my throat

Don't know if I captured the addiction but I'm speeding through a tangent here, eh.

More specifically, though, the items that you choose aren’t meant to be chosen at random but rather deliberately collected as symbols, usually with a theme connected to a particular person, idea, revelation, trauma, etc, related to the goal of your ritual.

For example, with all of the troubles that I have with relationships, I might chose items representing a relationship with a particular person, for example:

• A picture of an ex-lover, a power symbol, a blue candle, and a red candle (sight)
• A CD of Pink Floyd songs representing our favorite band (sound)
• A shred of Cashmere fabric bought from a rag shop representing a sweater that I wore on a date that a boyfriend rubbed his nose in while we were making out in a department store (touch)
• Strawberry incense (smell)
• A chocolate covered strawberry representing something I ate with a boyfriend before kissing on a second date (taste)

Hopefully you can see how the above list can have so many substitutes.

After re-reading the final issue of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, I found a superbly perfect example:

Morpheus asks William Shakespeare what type of wine he would like to drink and Shakespeare responds,

When I was young, my first month in London, a gypsy-girl gave me wine to drink. It was tawny-colored, and sweet as honey, and after I had taken a sip, she kissed me, and no kiss has ever tasted so finer. Nor no wine neither.

This isn't even my memory and I am impressed and happy. Sensory blurbs like these can be created -- although the power of affirmation rituals comes more from the objects themselves. Then again, other magicians might argue that representations or simple images in one's head are just as good.

To continue, naturally you need other practical items like a CD player, matches or a lighter, and other stuff.

The purpose of these items is to create sensory stimulation that invokes a particular feeling or association.

Most people only engage one or two of their senses (usually sight and sound) and rarely engage in their other senses. Description using smell, taste, and touch are generally more creative because they are underused. The affirmation ritual engages multiple senses to activate unused section of the imagination for more vivid creativity.

To begin the actual ritual, go somewhere. I prefer somewhere in the middle of nature (like a field or a forest) or somewhere in a desolated part of a city. Night time is best.

I recommend that you record your experiments either on a tape player or some type of video camera.

Draw three circles. I recommend using some type of disposable substance like whipped cream in a can to draw your circles. It’s cheap, tasty, and biodegradable. Just make sure to test the can that it works. I once had a ritual where the whipped cream can was broken and I couldn’t draw my circles.

Or use simply chalk. Chaos magick is about using whatever works.

Each circle has its own name and purpose.

Circle 1: “behavior”

Circle 2: “intent”

Circle 3: “creative”

Gather your items in the Behavior Circle. Sit down. Activate your sensory items as necessary by lighting incense, turning on your music, lighting candles. Focus visually on your sight items. Inhale the smell. Listen to the sound. Feel your touch item. Taste your taste item.

Breathe deeply from the pit of your stomach until you feel yourself relax.

Gather your thoughts together and meditate on any of your negative behaviors. What are you doing that you want to change? Don’t think just pour out all of your undesirable behaviors one by one. Force yourself to spill your guts; dig deep and admit your darkest secrets (“Incest turns me on”) or admit to superficial problems (“I don’t brush my teeth three times a day”) until you are exhausted.

Or focus on one particular problem: you'll often find that one thing leads to another…

With each behavior problem, associate as many sensory details as you can associated with your behavior, even if they don’t make sense or may be a stretch. For example, anger can conjure images of the color red, screaming, a sharp knife – what is the smell of anger or the taste? Come up with as many associations as you can with each problem but focus on all the senses.

You are adding to your affirmation image database.

You will know when you are done with the Behavior Circle.

Move on to the Intent Circle.

Focus on the following question: why do you engage in these behaviors? What is your purpose, reason, or intent with these behaviors? Figure it out. Why are you angry? Why do you fall in love with anyone who shows you the littlest attention? Why can’t you engage in simply hygiene on a daily basis? Force yourself to come up with as many answers as possible. Ramble on saying whatever comes to your mind. Don’t stop talking. You’ll be surprised what comes out.

Talking to yourself and even better yet asking questions of yourself is a powerful yet simple way of getting answers.

You will know when you are done with the Intent Circle.

Move to the Creative Circle. In the Creative Circle, you propose alternate ways of fulfilling your intents. In the previous circles, you went through your negative behaviors and the reasons behind them: now your goal is to come up with alternate ways of fulfilling or managing or dealing with your problems and behaviors. If behavior is merely a way of handling a situation or a problem, that means behavior is a type of solution. Then why not come up with alternate solutions?

Every problem can have more than one solution; every behavior can have alternate behaviors. Why do you fall in love so easily? Are you lonely? Do you feel socially isolated or obligated to have a relationship to feel important? Has the importance of a successful relationship been over-impressed upon you? What else can you do to ease the loneliness? What other types of social obligations are there to take the place of your relationship problems? How can you socialize more? What other types of relationships can you form or negotiate? Do you get angry too easily? Anger is a response to a frustrating situation so what can you do instead of getting angry? How else can you react? How can you deal with your anger?

In the Creativity Circle, examine your problems, perhaps even returning to the Intent Circle if you get stuck, and come up with as many alternates to negative behaviors. In Freudian psychoanalysis, this technique is called sublimation, transferring your desires or behaviors from one object to another or from one behavior to another. Instead of getting angry or yelling at someone, twirl around in a circle like you were a top or start singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Instead of searching websites looking for a new significant (knowing full well that it'll end in ruins), practice drawing and creating your visual affirmations. Instead of contemplating suicide, practice shooting targets at a shooting range.

Hmmn, for some reason I'm thinking about Twister (the game).

Unconscious Competence

The majority of your skills and abilities are not conscious. You act at a subconscious level, having learned certain behaviors and abilities until they became automatic responses.

Consider for example, sports. Take any sport you enjoy and can do fairly well: tennis, football, basketball, ping pong, and break down the process involved in playing.

I’ll use the example of throwing a javelin. In order to throw a javelin, you have to hold your hand properly, hold the javelin level to the ground, run in a certain way, and step a certain way before throwing.

When you play, do you consciously think, hold my hand this way, stand that way, step one, step two? Probably not. You just play.

When I first started throwing the javelin or playing ping pong, I practiced each individual step and learned how to put the steps together. After enough practice, the motions became natural to where I didn’t have to think about them. I had mastered unconscious competence.

The way that NLP guru Tony Robbins explained unconscious competence was

You don’t have to know how the electrical wiring in a wall works in order to flick on a light switch.

You don’t have to know how to garden or harvest apple trees in order to pick the fruit.

What he means is not to think too much about the whys and hows of why and how things work, just to know that this is what you do.

That’s life. That’s magic. Don’t think about it. Just do it.

Of course at some level unconscious competence is a ridiculous notion because the more you know about gardening, the more you can improve upon your gardening techniques to improve the productivity of your garden. You need to know the proper weather and season or proper soil mixture. You need to know how to properly water a plant and how much sunlight it needs. Likewise, you need to know how to prune your plants and what fertilizer to add. The list can go on and on.

That’s a different metaphor that we’ll talk about later.

The main point of unconscious competence is to learn how to act not based upon consciously focusing through our intellect but working with subconscious power. Remember that the majority of who we are is subconscious and our behaviors and talents come from the subconscious. Consider the creativity of dreams or how many ideas come when you’re in a relaxed state. If you sit down and try to be creative, you won’t get anywhere.

Real magick works not by fighting with your subconscious or actively focusing on how much you want your life to change but by letting go and letting your subconscious do the work for you.

Here are some examples to practice with before you even get started with using magick:

Watch a clock – not a digital clock but one with a face. Watch the second hand tick for one minute. How long does that minute take? It’ll feel like forever. Now set up a timer for one minute and walk away. How much can you get accomplished before your time is up?

Boil a pot of water. Stand there and watch the pot boil. How long does the pot take? It’ll feel like forever. Now restart the boil and walk away.

Think about downloading a movie from some type of filesharing program. If you haven’t tried it yet, the process can take a considerable amount of time. If you sit there and watch it download, you’ll drive yourself bonkers. Set up the program, walk away, come back and check in a little while, and stop the program in a day or so when it’s done. (I set up my filesharing before I go to bed or before I go to work so when I wake up or come home, the majority of the work is done).

Part of the trick is managing your psychic work. If you sit and watch your life, it'll take forever, but if you walk away and never check up on things to make sure they are working properly, then your life will go astray. An unwatched pot can burn the house down. Downloading files might get stuck and stop downloading.

Ask the local library to order a book for you. Asking people to do other things may be the hardest part of unconscious competence because you are relying upon someone else to do something for you. Many managers make the fatal mistake of trying to do everything themselves because they don’t trust the ability of their employees. Doing everything yourself will kill you so you have to learn to delegate responsibly. Notice responsibly. The hardest part of delegating is wondering if people will come through or fail. If they come through, the end result is that everything gets done while you are doing other things. Imagine if you could make money this way, while sleeping or golfing? You can.

I'll admit that delegating responsibility has always been hard for me because of how many people have failed me. The key is learning what is reliable and what isn't. It's a lesson learned in time.

Demons are servants who haven't been whipped into shape. They want to be obedient but don't know how. They resist and sabotage until taught how to behave.

Unconscious competence begins with small practice steps establishing a routine and repeating information until it becomes subconscious.

Decide upon your overall goal.

Divide your goal into smaller steps. Start with the first step. Do it. Even if you totally suck or fail, just do it. Practice for maybe 20 minutes and then move on.

The next day, practice again. You need to practice at least every 24 hours. Keep practicing the first step until you feel you’ve got it. Start the next step and repeat your 20 minute practice every 24 hours.

(As a side note, you might be thinking, but don’t athletes practice for hours a day? Yes, but they practice different things. A full practice in baseball won’t focus on hitting the ball for two hours but hitting, throwing, etc)

You’ll find that once you’ve got it down pat, you will do it naturally. What’s most important about doing it naturally is to relax. In order to do it naturally, you can’t think about it. Do you think about walking? No, you just do it. If you think about it, you lose your instinct and automatic reflexes.

An example:

I bought Heelies, those fagly sneakers with roller skates on them. I figured it would be easy to use them because I have been roller skating since I was a child. Wrong.

My first time wearing my Heelies, I couldn’t skate more than a couple feet. I would lose balance and fall. I would drag my foot and not go anywhere. I couldn’t skate on them because I had to lift and balance my feet in a certain way or else fall or drag.

I spent the first 20 minutes in-between two cars trying to skate. I would take a step, lift my toes, skate a couple feet, stop, and then walk back to the starting line.

Once I learned how to balance myself, I left the cars and started skating for longer distances. This was difficult because I was so afraid of losing my balance that I would stop whenever I went too fast. I had to conquer my fear of falling. I took a walk around the block and took small skate steps as much as I could.

Once skating became more natural, I practiced skating downhill. It was difficult because I was focusing too much on balancing my heels and toes. I was dragging too much and would lose my balance too easily. I skated down as far as I could and then walked back up. Each time, I would consciously say, lift my left toe, balance my right toe. I repeatedly focused on getting the motions down. Skate down, walk up, skate down, walk up. After 20 minutes of repetition, I stopped thinking about the balance and started doing it.

My next goal was for longer distances.

The process of continuously developing and expanding one’s abilities to better standards is called stretching. What makes magick so difficult is that it often sets up unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic expectations occur when one sets out to do something that is beyond one’s abilities. Common examples include many weight loss programs. As long as you weight train three days a week, do cardiovascular exercise three days a week, and maintain a balanced diet without any fluctuation, you’re guaranteed to lose weight and build muscle. Got it. Now go try it. Good luck. See you later. Plans are only good on paper; the minute they are put into action, they fall apart.

Start with something you can do. Start with the most important component of your goals. For example, diet is more important than exercise, cardiovascular more important than weight training. Work on your diet first. Once you have your diet down pat, work on cardiovascular exercise. Once you have your cardio down, move to weight training. Once you’re able to bench press fifty pounds, go for sixty.

Stretching simple means upping the ante. Once you feel you have the hang of something, try to do something harder.

Imagine all of the things that you can’t do. Find something marginally beyond your ability. Try it out. Push yourself to go a little further in small steps.

If you walk a mile, walk another block or two.

You’d be surprised at what you are capable of.

A good example of stretching is in the movie Unbreakable where Bruce Willis’ character David Dunn is lifting weights. His son keeps putting on heavier weights without Dunn realizing it until he finds out that he is benching a ridiculous amount of weight.

But if you find that you cannot do something harder, fall back and do something easier until you are ready to proceed.

All too often the biggest limitations on our performance are ourselves (and often other people). Having worked with the disabled, I’ve seen mindless vegetables do relatively impossible tasks that others had written off as beyond their capability. This is known as the Pygmalion effect, whereby people perform up to the expectations that other’s place upon them.

Don’t concentrate on it. Just do it and practice it. The skills will come surprisingly. You’ll wake up and say, wow, I really did this. I’m doing it.

The Oral Biosurvival Circuit part 1

We were all once alien babies cryogenically preserved for future world domination in the mothership.

We were once embryos floating in the micro-oceans of our mother’s wombs.

Our first trauma was to be born into this brave new world of bright light, pain, and gravity.

We were all born malleable like amoebas.

What happened to us?

How did we get such ugly, dirty shapes?

The world leaves its first fingerimprints on us as soon as we are pressed to our mother’s teat.

We can call these fingerimprints pleasure and pain. We suckle and then are denied. We experience the pains of our body and the alleviation of these pains and discomforts. We have not yet learned adult concepts like restraint and moderation.

As we become aware of our bodies, we respond the most primally to satisfy these biological needs.

All objects are originally neutral with no good or evil value. We learn to catalog experiences as either pleasure or pain. This cataloging is necessary in order to efficiently process information. We are overwhelmed with so much that our brain cannot process the totality of reality without tricks. If we were to lose our cataloging tendencies, the results would be paranoia– the inability to associate objects with a value system. The mind then makes up its own value system and makes random and dangerous connections. Street signs follow you. The Bee Gees plot to kill you.

Salvador Dali refers to the opposite – the cleansing of these pre-packaged catalogs – as the paranoid critical method. He explained it as the “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” What the fuck, right?

But still, the artist attempts to clear the subconscious of preconceptions and then make new connections between objects, effectively blurring reality into a new synthesis.

One might argue though that we are in the beginnings of magick, making up our own reality.

We learn what is pleasing. We seek pleasure. We move towards what is safe.

We avoid pain. We learn what hurts us. We move away from what hurts us.

If we were Freud, we have entered the oral stage.

If we were Maslow, we have begun to experience the physiological level in the hierarchy of needs.

Excuse me, sir, but do you mind if I stick my Freud in your Maslow?

One can see the oral stage as simply a component in Maslow’s theory of basic needs.

What are these basic needs? Simply put: breath, eat, drink, fuck, sleep, shit, stay the same.

Let’s create in our minds our world of pleasure and pain based upon our body’s needs (or at least mine, for an example):

	Pleasure	Pain
Breath:	All I need to relax are three deep breaths from the pit of my stomach. I am calm again. I love to see my breath in the cold air. I love the smell of coldness like hot coals burning in a barbecue grill. I love the subtle smell of vanilla perfume or any perfume with a cookie or dessert scent. The act of smelling alone is erotic, tracing my nose across someone’s skin.	I cannot stand the smell of cigarettes or the subtle urine smell of an unclean bathroom. When I wash my white clothes, the smell of bleach is too much. Or when I hang around someone with subtle body odor, I linger at a distance. I worry about my own breath and always carry breath mints.
Eat:	I like variety and self-service (since customer service generally sucks). Buffets are my favorite. I particularly like Chinese buffets and CiCi’s pizza restaurant where they have smaller slices of pizza where you can sample a whole bunch of pizza recipes. I like to go to hibachi grills where they cook in front of me (but they have to entertain me as well). I also like Fuddruckers: a nice medium-well Chipotle BBQ, but I like the fries and dips the most. When I go, I get one of each dip – hot sauce, mayo, ketchup, steak sauce, BBQ sauce, and whatever – and dip my fries in each. I like shrimp and crab legs. I like eating sushi. I also like making ice cream cones with as many scoops as I can balance. For dessert, I love Applebees triple chocolate meltdown, and my all time favorite dessert is Death By Chocolate. I’d like to have a buffet of pie, with small slices: strawberry-rhubarb, cherry, hot apple, blueberry, coconut custard, lemon meringue. I also like lamb chops and steak with plenty of A1 sauce. I like hot wings and have a hot sauce collection. I like cheese whiz and always ask for Pepperidge farm meat and cheese baskets for Christmas: I love making cheese and meat crackers. I like cruising the miracle mile and going through the drive-throughs for a smorgasbord: $1 menu from BK and MickeyD’s, KFC, a couple Taco Bells. I’d prefer not to eat in a restaurant but take it someplace else.	I don’t like heavy foods, which includes mainly German and Polish food. I don’t eat much pasta although a good meat sauce will sway me for a day. The same goes for any type of heavy carbohydrate or starch like potatoes or macaroni and cheese. I hate sit down dinners mainly because of the uncomfortable silence that comes along with them. I don’t like salty foods or most fried foods (with the exception of KFC or French fries).
Drink:	I drink Mountain Dew like a fiend for the caffeine and prefer the Code Red for the color. I like fresh carbonation that rips out my throat. I’m not much of a drinker of alcohol but when I do, I would prefer to lay out a variety of shots in front of me, usually a Buttery Nipple, a Flaming Rockstar, and Rumplemintz. A simple Rum and Coke would be fine with me. I like cold water and that yellow colored Gatorade as refreshers and a V8 Splash as the occasional alternative. Although the taste is horrible, I like ginger beer, and root beer when I’m off my Mountain Dew addiction.	I can’t stand iced tea or anything diet or those fruity flavored water things. I don’t drink coffee. Neither do I drink beer that often or enjoy the flavor of many stiffer drinks. I drink too much Mountain Dew and sometimes during my hectic stressful schedules can down a 12 pack in a couple days.
Fuck:	Fucking for me needs to be spontaneous and I tend to get horny in public places like department stores because these are part of a casual routine. There’s nothing natural about “going back to my place.” It’s artificial. I’m not a spooner. I like to get entangled with my lover’s face to face, particularly in sitting positions like Kama’s Wheel. Sometimes I just want to be a piece of meat and lie there passively while getting fucked till I orgasm while other times I need to worship and explore my lover’s body while in deep conversation. I also like it under the sheets. My fetish areas are my breasts, stomach, and back.	I sometimes see sex as a chore where I have to please the other person and go through elaborate rituals or use kinky devices to make everything fresh. I get so caught up in pleasing the other person – what position would please him the most – that sex becomes all about the act and not the enjoyment. The intimacy is lost and I become consumed in the bodily response. I don’t know why I hate that, where I have to fuck with my mind and not my body or heart.
Sleep:	A good sleep doesn’t end when I awake but leaves me in a comfortable in-between, awake but my eyes still closed, my body relaxed and limp. I can just lie there. On the weekends or days off, I like to sleep past the time I’m supposed to get up, so if I normally head to work at 11 am, I like to sleep until 12. I don’t like to sleep alone. I like king sized beds where I can sprawl out in any which way. I like lying on the bed when I’m wet, freshly out of the shower or the rain. I can’t sleep with clothes on and usually have to wear just underwear, a camisole(e), and socks. No matter how warm it is, I need to wrap myself in at least two blankets. I use a fan and soft New Age music as white noise. I hug a giant body pillow.	I get insomnia a lot. I sleep during the day and can’t sleep at night (no thanks to all the caffeine I consume). I often wake up within an hour of falling asleep, often in a paranoid state looking for cameras. I once checked the smoke detector in my dorm room and recently a patch of light on the wall made me suspicious. I always wake up half an hour before my alarm goes off. Many times I wake up just to check the time.
Shit:	Wow, what a topic but okay, I enjoy the type of shit where I feel completely empty. You know, the type where you know you’re done because you get this feeling of being totally emptied. You are cleansed.	I was actually a very anal retentive child because I had bad constipation. I would hold it in for days; one time my mother yelled at me because I ruined a party. I had horrible gas pains from not taking a shit and had to go to the doctor. When I tried vegetarianism for the first time, I became extremely constipated. I felt like I had to shit but couldn’t. It took me about an hour to finally take a shit and it was such an ordeal that I felt like Jesus resurrected afterwards.
Stay the same:	I need change. I can’t hold on to a relationship for too long before I need someone new. I have trouble staying in the same place; I usually lose my job every couple years.	I didn’t want my mother to die. I didn’t want to move out of my parents’ house. I didn’t want to lose a couple of my boyfriends. I’ve had long conversations and perfect dates that I didn’t want to end.

These fragments of pleasure and pain shape the way in which we interact with the world. Positive interactions with our flesh mold us into a peaceful relationship with the environment. Negative interactions leave us hostile and full of hatred.

Does it all stem from the teat, as Freud would argue, our relationship with the (un)divine mother?

Although pleasure and pain are of the flesh, they have no human form, but we see them personified throughout mythology and psychology as sections of our whole. Joseph Campbell might call these personifications the Goddess and the Temptress. Neither mytheme represents pleasure or pain but both wrapped into ambiguous forms. The Goddess is a source of comfort and restriction, the Temptress a source of pleasure that fells us.

Jung might call this pleasure and pain the anima or animus, the opposite part of our soul, unconditional and perfect love, with which our soul can unite in the sacred marriage of syzygy, of hieros gamos.

But perhaps a better way to look at the needs of our body is through the acquisition of our boons.

As we grow older, the mother becomes lost to us and we are forced to transfer our attention from the original object of comfort (“the mother”) to a more suitable object (“baseball”) in a process called sublimation.

Our culture is filled with objects that are sublimated teats, any symbols that are round, domed, or spherical:

Would you prefer to look up at a flat white ceiling or stare up at a domed ceiling high above you, perhaps painted with fascinating artwork?

How often do you see pictures or paintings on the wall of flatlands, of deserts that stretch out for hundreds of miles? Or do you see instead images of mountains looming over their own reflections above a lake? Perhaps you’d like to go hiking in the mountains?

As a child, did you love those clowns that did balloon sculptures? Or water balloons? Maybe just blowing up balloons? Wouldn’t mad scientist experiments like these be awesome: Balloon Car, Balloon in a Bottle, and Balloon Rocket?

Can you balance a spoon on your nose or flip a spoon in the air into your hand from off the table or do the old spoon bending trick? Have you ever spoonfed a lover moist chocolate cake?

Have you ever gone to the grocery store and meandered in the produce section? Mm, nice oranges, melons, and grapefruit?

Do you like decorating Easter eggs? Do you amaze your friends with tricks involving eggs?

Do you like sports? Do you play baseball or basketball or volleyball, maybe even hockey or golf or tennis? Or do you like super balls and play with them all day, bouncing them while you walk? (I used to have a nice collection). Or do you juggle or play beer pong?

How many rings do you have on your finger? Why do we give rings as symbols of love?

Do you know all the names of the planets? Have you ever made a solar system out of Styrofoam balls? Do you look up at the moon or watch for UFOs?

These are all sublimations of the mother, unconsciously built into our software as we grow and grow. Have you consciously accepted these symbols and played with them?

In neurolinguistic programming, we sublimate more deliberately through a process called anchoring. The anchor itself is an object of sublimation that is linked to a desired emotional state through a process similar to classical condition (a la Pavlov’s dog).

Pavlov sounded a bell as his dog was given food. The dog salivated when it saw the food. Every time Pavlov served his dog its food, he rang a bell. Eventually, the dog would salivate when hearing the bell without the food. The bell represented food to the dog and triggered an emotional response as if the food were there.

The crisp clean sound of a can of Mountain Dew opening puts a smile on my face as does the sexual anticipation of a man who slowly pulls at the bottom of my shirt.

Pleasure and association can cause pleasure with just the association.

Think of something that gives you pleasure. It must be a real memory, not something that you’ve never experienced. Play that memory in your mind, imagine with every sense. The Mountain Dew is cold and sweaty in your hand, green and red like Christmas colors. You could make a tree from cans of Mountain Dew. The sound of the can opening is crisp and loud. The Mountain Dew singes your throat as your drink it. When was the last time you drank a cold, stinging can of Mountain Dew? Remember that specific time.

Some magicians believe that you need a token with you as a tangible anchor, perhaps a Mountain Dew T-shirt or just the logo in your iPod or a can of the tasty beverage itself. Other magicians believe that you can hold the symbol in your imagination, withdraw into that world to reenact the pleasure. Some believe anchors are permanent, others like myself believe that new anchors will always be needed as the pleasure of one burns itself out.

But what about the pain side?

In Freudian terms, dwelling too much on the pleasures of the oral stage leads us into oral fixation, a preoccupation with putting things in one’s mouth.

Do you smoke?

Do you drink too much alcohol?

Do you eat more than you should?

Do you bite your fingernails or chew on pens?

Maybe you like bubble gum and/or oral sex?

Failure to ascend beyond the needs of the body results in a childish and egocentric personality dependent upon others to provide safety.

We rely upon others to solve our problems because we see our problems as other people’s problems being forced upon us.

This is your problem, not mine. You fix it.

In times of trauma we inevitably and automatically revert (“regress”) back to infantile states of mind, back to the psychological teat.

Have you ever been paralyzed below the neck for six months?

Have you ever broken down into tears when reading an unexpected e-mail telling you that your best friend just died?

Have you ever fried your brain on too many sedatives?

Have you ever lost your job? Or a long term relationship that you thought would end in marriage (it only ended up ending instead)? Or moved 300 miles away and back again in the course of a couple years? Or worse, moved back in with your parents after being on your own for years?

In these times of anxiety we reach out for the teat again.

Boo-hoo, but these are times ripest for change.

We return to infancy when everything was possible, happy little amoebas again.

A person or even a culture under trauma has a choice of two directions to move in: Backwards towards pleasure and safety (the flight reflex) or forward to fight the danger and face the future.

Look for example at the conundrum of Victorian society: they obsessed over the dead with séances and re-established traditional social values to honor the Golden Age; all movements into the past. But they also developed science and futuristic visions of marvels to come that propelled them at the speed of the steam engine into the future.

Which way do we go?

Magick Moment?

Last year, I had a terrible break up.

His name was V__ and I loved him so much. I'll spare you the poetic maudlin descriptions of the passion between us and skip to the heartache.

He changed in less than half a week. We spent a Sunday taking pictures -- those "pictures of us" that every teenie bopper with a boyfriend has on her Facebook -- and I took one of them, with his permission, for my purse. On a Wednesday over a nice Italian dinner, I took some small items out of my purse and he saw the picture I had of him. He called me a stalker right in front of everyone in the restaurant and I was left there with a shock of feeling stupid on my face.

Some of you know my temper. I would have killed him right there but I needed the ride home and that only increased the tension. A fight broke out and to keep the story short, I simply cut off my ties with him. He tried to make peace but I simply told him, "I never want to see or talk to you again."

This was seven month ago, actually on my birthday.

Being born on the 23, I had a bad feeling that something was going to break down. There was a fight in the air. It was raining. I was stuck in a long boring training and my work performance evaluations had come back horribly against me.

I should've just stayed home but I wanted to be with him so much.

I've spent the past several months avoiding him. I was so afraid of what would have happened if I ran into him. I wanted to kill him; I had this anger of betrayal raging inside me that I couldn't calm down. Part of it was the fear that should I try to resolve a happy ending, he would make me regret it with his own simmering stubbornness. I just didn't know what I would do if I ever ran into him again.

It took me months to relax, to convince myself that any accidental meeting would occur.

A couple weeks occur I played Kevin bacon on Facebook. Y'know, how often you can start out with a friend and then just go from one profile to another and after a few profiles run into someone you know.

I ran into V__, more specifically into a backdoor that lead to one of his photo albums. A few months after we had broken up, he had uploaded "our" pictures to his Facebook.

Why? I thought. Or better yet, what the fuck? Why would he attack me so bizarrely and then hold on to the same pictures that destroyed our relationship?

And what would I say to him? I wanted the pictures gone but I had made it clear that I would never talk to him again and if I confronted him, he would ask me how I knew that he still had the pictures.

I kept my magickal diary up to date of the mundane events in my personal soap opera, and synchronicities started popping up.

His favorite snack was chocolate covered pretzels. While I was up in the Poconos, I kept passing a chocolate covered pretzel factory that just made me say, wtf?

A friend of mine with whom I hadn't spoken in several month contacted me and said, "hey, I was watching some of the new Knight Rider TV shows and did you know who was doing the voice?" Yes, by one of those odd coincidences, the voice of KITT has the same first name and same birthday (December 31 - notice the 23) as my former lover.

As the synchronicities poured in, I kept them all in my magic journal. The language was quit poetic.

He and I were going to run into each other again. It was an impossibility but I knew it was going to happen.

My schedule was off. I was just sitting around. I had to be at work but just didn't feel like going. I had time to kill and was hungry. I left my home later than usual.

I stopped by a Burger King. The service was slow with few people behind the counter. They gave me half my meal and I ate it while waiting. I went to threw the hamburger wrapper away when I turned towards the door.

HE walked in.

We stared at each other from across the restaurant with that what the fuck are you doing her look on both our faces.

He came over to me and we hugged, that lame hug like a dog shaking your hand.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

What a stupid question. Obviously I was getting a fucking hamburger, but I've asked that stupid question myself.

He stood back away from me, a good several feet so I couldn't even reach out and touch him. I thought back to my Speech class where I learned about proxemic communication and personal space.

We talked about or jobs. His dog had died. We talked about car accidents we had been in involving deer.

We were both shaking.

He looked awful. I thought, I can't believe I fucked this guy.

He said he was thinking about me recently. He had taken up to writing again and could have used my help but didn't have my number anymore. Bullshit, I thought, and I called him on it.

"Here, I got a new phone. I'll give you my number." I did but I doubt he'll ever call me.

The woman at the counter told me my meal was finally ready. I told her to wait. A few minutes into my conversation with V__ it felt like we had never fought until that uncomfortable silence came.

"I think that uncomfortable silence means our conversation is over" I said. I turned, paid for my meal (actually threw money at the woman at the counter and told her to keep it). I couldn't focus.

"I'll see you…?" he said.

"Probably never" and that was it.

I ran into a co-worker on my way out. I didn't process it but I e-mailed her later and asked if she knew V__. She did. Actually several of my new friends were friends of his by some odd coincidence.

Today he removed the pictures of us from his Facebook.

I don't know if this counts as a magickal record but for the second time my premonition was right. I had been focusing on this moment for months and it wasn't ever going to come. But it did. It shouldn't have. It was scary.