What we don't know is what amazes us. What intrigues us is that which we do not understand. The deepest good comes from the adoration of mystery, or the unknown; the love affair that each of us has with the mystical and the Other. In the same way, the deepest evil comes from the fear that we have, finding that we cannot control this deepest mystery. This comes from everywhere that we do not know.

    The word Occult means 'secret'. I have always thought that this was merely in reference to the hidden and reclusive nature of Magical Orders, but this could not be further from the truth. The divine Secret, the source of magic, is mystery itself. It is that which confounds us, that which we simply cannot understand that breeds the purest magic. And it is from here that my contempt for Gnostic magics are spawned. The gnostics seek to Know that which cannot be understood, that to which understanding is Anathema.

    God is not to be understood, no more than he reveals to us. It is normal and Good to hunger for more than we have seen- indeed, that is part of the nature of love! But when desire turns to greed, to lustful wanting, to an existential demand that degrades the purposes of the Triune nature, the Sacred need to Understand becomes not a vehicle to Being, but a plummeting free-fall into misdirection and decay.


I like pie.

I washed some windows today, and I am completely changed.

My Dad and I went to the trailer park here in town and just went around asking people if we could wash their windows. We didn't say we were from a church or any bullshit like that, we just asked them if we could wash their windows. Only one family agreed. They were sitting in their back yard in two lawn chairs and a wheel chair (not for medical reasons) reading Harry Potter to each other. I knew the daughter of the mother from high school. She had been in an accident recently and was in a halo at some hospital. She was also three and a half months pregnant, so if they ended up having to operate, she would lost the baby.
Some of their windows were missing because of a recent tornado. They had seven dogs in and out of the trailer. Piles of rotting fur, feces and feathers surrounded the place, giving it a smell that made me gag every time I risked breathing through my nose. They were outside because they couldn't afford to pay the power bill. And, to be frank, I wouldn't have gone in if I lived there either. The smell was just too horrible.
I saw some kids I knew coming out of a house with some drugs they had just bought. Meth, coke and weed are common in the trailer park.

Now I'm sitting in my own room on my queensized, pillowtop bed, looking at my 3 video game consoles, sipping some of the diet root beer of which we have plenty, thinking vaguely about what I'll have for lunch from my full refrigerator and typing on my two-thousand dollar computer which is hooked up to my three hundred dollar external hard drive, my three hundred dollar drawing tablet, and filled with software that I may never use and certainly don't need. I've always thought that Tesia was a wonderful person for wanting to sell all her furniture and live with the poor in India. I've always loved her for that part of her. But only now do I truly understand this self-disgust, this loathing of the beast of Want. I see it now. I am not ashamed of what I have- not at all! But I am ashamed of having wanted more.
We always have food, power water, everything we need. Once we went a day without power, and I thought it was the most horrible experience imaginable. We always have gas in our TWO cars. We always have the medicine we need. We can always go to a doctor if we need to. I go to a very nice University. Sure it's on loans mostly, but just the same, what more do I need? I need none of this. I could easily live on a book and twenty dollars for a week. I know this. If I had Tesia, I could live in a field with a tent.

The difference is the crushing depression. This place was not the abject avatar of the god of filth because these people were lazy. I talked with them. They are people. REAL people. They are not freeloaders, they are not charity cases, they are not hopeless. But they feel like they are, and have felt that way for years upon years.

My stomach just rumbled, and I know that at any moment I can go into the kitchen and make myself a wrap or a bowl of soup or anything else to delight the taste-buds. They can't.

I don't hate myself or my possessions, I hate myself for having wanted more in the past, and I hate the Beast of Want. I don't think I CAN hate people anymore... not after finishing Blue Like Jazz yesterday... If you haven't read it, READ IT. It will change everything.



May this stick to me and the rest of you for all of time and into eternity, and may you ever be unsatisfied with the Beast of Want,


Sean