Anniversary

The 19th of September is the third anniversary of the day when I began making daily entries in my metaphysics log book. I am almost all the way through my third notebook. I use the spiral bound college rule 150 sheets 9.5 inch X 6 inch style. On the pages of these notebooks I record:

• every meditation
• every prayer
• every ceremony
• every reading in the topics of metaphysics
• every tarot card spread
• a small number of other occasional related items

Almost. I am not obsessive about it. It is probably closer to 90% of my relevant activity that actually ends up getting written down.

This was my the-third-time-is-a-charm try at maintaining a diary of this sort. The first time was shortly after I read Aleister Crowley's Book 4 in 1997 or so where he lays out his system of metaphysics and his slogan "the method of science and the subject of religion". His prescription was identical to those of my freshman chemistry and physics lab teachers who said "if it isn't written down, it didn't happen". If I recall I got about a week into this project back in 1997 before my attention span fizzled out.

Then, I tried again in around 2005. This time I did not get past two pages. I know this for a fact as in 2009 I started up again with the same notebook and tore out the first two sheets so that now it only has 148 sheets in it. Now I am on page 143 of the third notebook so in this time I have steadily filled up 441 pages in 1086 days or around 2 pages every 5 days with my records of meditations, prayers, &c.

One thing has been remarkably constant since even before 1997. My central meditation activity is autogenic training, which I first discovered in the Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook by Davis, Eshelman, and McKay (an earlier edition of this book.) It is gratifying to me to look at the Amazon page and see that it has now has 68 five-star reviews. Back in 1997 I had some stress related medical problems and I went to a physician who gave me a photocopy of their chapter 5 and a little hand held thermometer. He told me after a few weeks the temperature measured between my thumb and forefinger would increase a couple degrees and that is how I could be sure the method was working. I went home from the doctor and opened up my copy of Davis and Eshelman and Mckay's book and confirmed my suspicion that he was telling me something I already knew. I had already experimented with the exact prescribed autogenic training technique, among other things in that book. After my first session my fingertip temperature climbed three degrees which was way faster than a few weeks so I skipped going back to that doctor ever again, and have continued to use this method as one of my main meditations.

One thing has changed drastically since the early days of my metaphysics activities. My gateway was Crowley, who I discovered via Jimmy Page. When I was a teenager and a rock music fan my nearly favorite band was Led Zeppelin, just like almost everybody else I knew. One day I heard a fascinating bit of gossip from the fellow in my peer group who seemed to know the most rock arcana and this was that Led Zeppelin was in hiatus because Plant and Page were fighting over Page's occult occupations. Plant had been in a nasty car accident and his young son had died from some freak medical ailment and he thought that Page was bringing bad juju upon the band. I went to the library and looked through every Page mention I could find until I found an article in Rolling Stone that linked him up with the Crowley character who I had never heard of before.

The Crowley books had a big influence upon me. In looking back I think it was the almost endless esoteric data and the stimulus it had on my imagination. It has been a long time since I have taken Crowley seriously, but it did attract me to activity which has been fun and interesting and rewarding that I might not have otherwise found any interest in. A couple years ago I was meeting with an esoteric group near here and the leader asked me how I first became interested. I told her it started with Led Zeppelin and Aleister Crowley and when I first began I wanted to do things like shoot lightning bolts out of my fingertips but I have calmed down a lot since then. That was a bit of an exaggeration but they all seemed to enjoy hearing that.

Back to the notebooks. I have (so far) three years of records for my own method of science on the subject of religion. Much of it is useless. Some of it may be of great value. I haven't spent much time combing through it yet. One thing I did a few months ago was count every single tarot card I have ever drawn in a spread. The one trump I have drawn almost twice as much as any other is the Hierophant. I mentioned this once to a friend of mine and they replied, "of course you are going to draw the Hierophant more than any other."

That statement seemed to make a lot more sense to her than it does to me.