Spiritual Self-Defense and Protection

Announcer: 00:27

Hello and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John

John Moore: 00:47

Hello, hello, hello. Hello, my friends, I'm back. And I'll say that I am recording this at an unusual time for me. I'm usually a morning person. And I usually do these things first thing in the morning. But I wanted to get one out and you know, it's it's almost seven o'clock at night where I am. past my bedtime. Just kidding. I'm not that much of an early bird. But today I'm going to talk to you about spiritual self defense and protection. What does that mean? Why do we care? Why should we be interested? What are some methods of protecting oneself spiritually? Excuse me? And what on earth or not on Earth? Do you want to protect yourself from I have, I'll say this. My background is my backgrounds a little strange. So I have a background as a shamanic healer and teacher to teach shamanism quite a bit teach other spiritual topics. And this is I taught a course in shamanic self defense, it went over really well was very popular with people, and they get a heck of a lot of people who contact me and go, How do I get rid of these entities that are attacking me or I'm under a curse or what have you. So we're going to talk a little bit about that today. And so my background not only as a shamanic healer, but I also taught martial arts for a couple of decades, including teaching self defense classes at places like Harvard Medical School, and a research a Primate Research Laboratory interesting place, and a, you know, Law Firm and I would do these private self defense classes and a shelter for pregnant teens. So all kinds of places I taught self defense, and then I went in and got a master's degree in information security and assurance. And so I learned a lot about things like hacking and protecting boundaries. And so combining my physical self defense, my technical self, defense or company defense, knowledge with my spiritual knowledge sort of puts me in a unique spot. And so I have a ton of books about a shelf of books basically on spiritual self defense. There's a lot of stuff that comes from witches wit or witchcraft or Wicca or you know, whatever. There's a ton of stuff that comes from there. Right I have a book called The witches shield by Christopher pen Zack and author I really like who is a witch and I have a book in front of me as we speak called hex twisting, counter magic spells. For the uninitiated, which I have not read that but or, you know, I've read parts of it. Interesting stuff, and I always like doing research and getting new techniques. So let's talk a little bit about what I mean by spiritual self defense and protection or spiritual hygiene is another term I like to use for this. And to get into this I want to talk a little bit about the Emerald Tablet, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. Thrice great Hermes, the Atlantean 12,000, supposedly 12,000 years ago, this guy carved out seven seven rubrics. So little paragraphs into a green stone and hid it away in Egypt. And the story was that it was discovered, eventually discovered by Alexander the Great who built a, basically a temple around it or a library around it and has been lost since then. But there are copies of this, we have copies of it in Arabic in Latin. And now of course, an English has been translated many times over. And it lays out the, in very succinct terms, some of the secrets of the universe secrets of reality, right, if you know how to read it, if you know, you understand the laws if you dive into them. But the first one, the first law, or kind of, I guess, it's maybe the second rubric, the first rubric just says, Hey, this is all true, I swear. But anyway, that the famous line and you might have heard this before, has sometimes been translated as, as above. So below, we're also translated as that which is above is like that, which is below. And what this can be taken to mean is that the physical world is a reflection of the spiritual world, and that the spiritual world is acts as a template for the physical world. And physical manifestation is a process of the Divinity, the one mind, the one thing coming down through all of these layers of creation, and finally winding up in physical reality. And so we can be assured that things that exist in the physical world also have a spiritual counterpart. And that includes things like threats, things like bad guys who want to do harm to us things like you know, disease, there's a spiritual component to disease, things like that, right? And so we want to be protected from those things. Now, I will say this, when somebody contacts me, regarding I've been cursed, or I have entities after me, or, or what have you. I don't just take them on face value. And it's not to disbelieve what they're experiencing, I believe that people who contact me are having real experiences. But very frequently, they are misinterpreting what happens and I will get into that a little bit. Most people these days are not under curses. Most people don't have possessing beings, but it can happen. And there are other things that can happen, that are problematic spiritually, that can affect us on the physical plane. runs of bad luck can often be attributed to spiritual causes. So what I want to do is outline a little bit of the way that I look at spiritual threats. What's a threat? What's a vulnerability, this comes from my background in risk analysis. A threat is something that can cause harm, can cause some conceivable harm, right. So if you're an insurance company, and somebody builds their house in a flood zone, they would have to take out maybe a separate flood policy. Because a flood is a type of threat to the structure, right? As a human being, there are all kinds of threats to your life. There are diseases, there are accidents, there's old age, there's, you know, that sort of thing. So these are things that can cause physical harm to you. Crime, traffic accidents, falling down in the shower accidents in the kitchen. These are things that can cause physical harm. And so spiritual threats include things like curses, painful magic, energy attacks, just picking up bad energy from the area, you're in crossing nature spirits doing something that you shouldn't do, violating the sanctity of a temple or space, all kinds of things, breaking oaths. There's a big one don't make odes to spirits that you don't fully 100% intend to keep. So excuse me. So that's what a threat is. So a vulnerability means an exposure to a threat. So, if I don't ever fly, I will probably not die in a plane crash. That being said, planes are safer than cars safer than bikes, accident wise fatality wise. So that's when we get into risk. Looking at risk, right? So we have threats, we have vulnerability, vulnerability are, you know, weaknesses? Or is one way to look at it, or exposure, exposure to threats? All right, if I am where I live in the state of Maine in the US, I am highly unlikely I am highly unlikely to be bitten by a poisonous snake because there aren't any that live here. It isn't to say somebody might not have a pet Cobra in their house that they shouldn't have. But, um, you know, there's very little vulnerability to that. If so, vulnerability can be contextual, as well. So let's talk about risk. Risk is a combination of the chances of an a, you know, something that is a threat, the chances of that occurring, and the amount of damage that it can cause. So sort of a multiplication, and there are, you know, there are risk tables that insurance companies use and risk analysis and that sort of thing, right. So, for example, getting bitten by a poisonous snake would cause a significant amount of damage, or could cause a significant amount of damage to me, including fatality. However, the chances of that happening where I live, are very, very close to zero. The chance of the chance of dying in a car accident, anywhere in the United States are fairly high. Okay, so that fatality could be considered like 100% loss, and the chances are pretty high. So should I be more scared of poisonous snakes? Not scared, but you know, not unintelligently fearful, but should I be more cautious of poisonous snakes or driving in my car? And the logical answer to that is driving in my car, right? So people think that, you know, spiritually, we can do a little bit of risk analysis in this can be hard, because if you're not some kind of practitioner, you don't know a lot of people in esoteric circles, that sort of thing. You might not know how common things are, right? So very powerful curses that can cause huge amounts of damage are very rare, extremely rare. But energy attacks that can make you physically sick, even if even when the Senator is not conscious about it, are much more common, and can cause physical illness. So when you look at that, you're like, Oh, well, I should protect myself energetically. Not very many people get possessed. And most people who think they're possessed are suffering from some form of mental illness. I will talk a little bit about that I will talk a little bit about you know, I have some experience dealing with people who contact me who are have a diagnosed mental illness. And this isn't to say they aren't deserving of help, or they aren't experiencing exactly what they think they're experiencing, you know, things that we consider delusions and hallucinations. My take on that is that they are they're experiencing spiritual phenomena there, they've, they're completely open, and they can't filter things out. And their brains perceive this as a threat. Like they're constantly under threat, and I really feel for people who have, you know, sort of paranoid schizophrenia. You know, I've had people contact me like, I'm under attack, I've been under attack my whole life, Gods and Goddesses are attacking me and I come from a long line of witches and I'm, you know, you know, been cursed by 13 generations of, and so, you know, when I hear that stuff, people contact me, I'll say, um, have you ever been diagnosed with a mental health condition? And invariably they'll say, Oh, yes, you know, schizophrenia or gets affective disorder or something along those lines are. And I've gone off my medication because I don't like the side effects. And that is a really unfortunate aspect to our medical based mental health system is that frequently, the medications that we use have really bad side effects. And so people decide to go off of their meds frequently and wind up sometimes in a worse position. You know, and I feel for those people, but, you know, my position is I won't, if somebody has a diagnosed condition of any kind, mental, physical, whatever, I won't work with them. If they're not seeing their doctor and they're not doing their treatment, they've gone off their meds, I'm, you know, probably not going to make things better. And there's a risk, I could make things worse. Even though I fully believe in shamanic healing, I think it is a good adjunct to Western medicine. And I don't want to ever do anything irresponsible or harmful to anyone. So you know, I've sent a few people away and say, you know, if you if I would be happy to see you, but I need a I need a note from your doctor saying that the your therapist saying that they don't think I'm going to do you harm. And that you are actively seeking treatment, and going in and participating in your treatment. And people rarely come back to me and I think that's unfortunate. Okay, so many people contact me who think they're being attacked by entities non stop or whatever, aren't, but some people are? And how do we determine that? Well, we use lots of spiritual means to determine that it's very difficult, very difficult to determine that without, you know, using physical means alone. And probably not possible. I don't know how to, I wouldn't know how to do it. So I will give you I'll give you an example from my own life and talk about, you know, some things that that happened. So years ago, I was in a relationship with somebody who is a practitioner of you, not just shamanism, but some other things as well. And we went through a kind of painful breakup was sort of dramatic and whatever. And, you know, this person was, was not well and sought a lot of revenge, I would say for, you know, being hurt about the breakup, and whatever else and did things like you know, tried to ruin my reputation amongst the community that I belong to, and that sort of thing. But a bunch of weird, kind of paranormal stuff started happening around me. And, you know, there were illnesses, there were things happening to electronic devices, there were, there was like a really weird run of bad luck there, you know, just a bunch of bunch of bunch of stuff. And I thought, I bet this person is cursing me. And I got some indications that that was occurring. And I didn't. And so here's a word of advice as well. Something you can do. If you feel like you're being cursed, you feel like you're under attack, actively. Seek out a professional and an even better if you get a second opinion. So I got a reading and I got a second reading from people who I didn't know but new, like new of new as very professionals, very highly respected. People very experienced, and who did different things than I did. Both of them independently confirmed that this was cursing going on. Both of them picked up on exactly who was doing it and exactly how I remember because one of the things this person did to me was throw garbage in around in my yard in my driveway by my car. And if I will, that's just odd, immature behavior and terrible and you know, whatever. And the first person I got a reading from said, they are cursing you and one of the ways they're doing this is by throwing something into your yard. And I was like, oh, and I hadn't said anything about this person other than I think it's possible. I'm being cursed and I'm trying to figure out why and who it is. And you know, definitely Got information. And then the second person I spoke to a few days later or whatever I said, you know, I think I think I may be cursed. And she's like, Yeah, absolutely yes, this is going on, I don't even need to read cards or whatever I can tell you this is going on. And this is and described the person and describe some things about the person. And so I got my confirmation. So if you think you're being cursed, or attacked, or whatever, and you don't know how to do your own divination, work, or determine if you're being cursed somehow, then seek out professional help seek out somebody who does curse unravelling, or hex twisting, or whatever you want to call it. So that's a little bit about risk and vulnerability, and threat and attack and damage and that sort of thing. So it's a way of thinking about stuff, right? I don't have to spend a lot of time learning to unravel curses, I'm not being cursed actively at this moment that I'm aware of. But I have protection in place just in case. It's sort of like you might live in a safe neighborhood, but it's still a good idea to lock your door. locking your door. Okay, so another aspect of risk management is how much does it cost to protect from a risk, right? So let's say that I'm afraid of I'm afraid of plane crashes, right. And so I don't want to fly, I don't want to fly anywhere. And I need to go, you know, I need to get 3000 miles away, I need to get across the country. Well, if I drive that, it's going to take days and days and days and days and days to get there, right. And so it's that is a costs, not necessarily monetary cost. For to overcome something that is low risk flying in a plane, it's very low risk activity. plane crashes are dramatic. And they're all over the news every time they happen. And so they stand out. But if you think about things from a logical perspective, so I don't personally know anybody who is casting voodoo curses at me. So I don't need to protect from those necessarily. But if I spent a little bit of time every day, sort of cleaning off my energy field and setting up shielding and stuff, if something were to happen, it's very, it's very low cost, it doesn't take a lot of time for me to put some effort into that. And it's sort of an all encompassing act where it sets up quite a lot of protection. So locking your doors is a good idea why it doesn't cost you anything to lock your door. It's called it takes less than a second to push a lock on a door twist a lock. And, you know, it provides you with a level of safety. Now, I have heard all kinds of junk advice about locking doors. People have told me Oh, if a burglar wants to get in, they will get in anyway. Sure. Absolutely. If somebody wants to break down your door, I don't care how much you've protected it they will find a way in. However, I do know that the vast majority of burglaries in the United States happen with Open Door happen through open doors and windows on the first floor of a building. They happen in the middle of the day. Why? Because people aren't usually home and burglars are lazy. If they weren't lazy, they would go out and get a job instead of stealing stuff from you. Right or they're trying to feed a drug habit or something. So locking your door is a good physical thing you can do that might prevent somebody from breaking into your house. I had somebody when when my kids were little they left the front door unlocked when we left and we usually go out through the side door so I didn't realize that the door was unlocked. And 10 minutes in we live like often the rural rural area hardly any crime 10 minutes after we drove away our alarm went off, somebody went through the door. You know they must have seen us driving off, waited 10 minutes to see if we come back and open the door. So we have you know we obviously have an alarm system and which was not very expensive and saved us money on our homeowners insurance and again, prevented somebody from getting into our house and stealing our stuff or causing damage or whatever they were there to do or potentially hurting somebody where right when we if we came home or something. So again, there's, you know, there's a word called cost benefits analysis. So costs can be the amount of time the amount of effort, the amount of money that you put into something. So in thinking about spiritual protection, I'll teach you a really quick, really quick exercise that I do when I'm walking in public. And I don't want to pick up everybody's bad vibes. You know, this is my sort of Walmart thing, if I have to walk through Walmart, I will use the I will say the phrase to myself shields up, which is a little bit of a trigger phrase for me, it also comes from Star Trek, shields up, and then I will push a blue bubble of energy out into place, it takes a second very little effort. And I feel like it really really protects me from bad emotional energy that is stuck in that space. Very low cost. Makes me feel better when I come out of Walmart and maybe protecting me from things like getting sick, or you know, picking up what we call in shamanism intrusions, which is energy that doesn't belong in your energy system. And so this shielding is a really, you know, it's a really good really low risk practice. Now, what if I learned some complicated 45 minute long banishing ritual, and I had to do it in my car, before I went into Walmart, and after I came out of Walmart, that doesn't sound like a very, that sounds like a very costly ritual. Sounds like something that's going that would take too much time to be worth my while, every time it probably keep me from keep me from going to Walmart ever. If I had to do that every time, that might not be a bad thing. I don't love. Sorry, if you like Walmart, I don't love going to Walmart. The energy there is is really can be really harsh. So think about stuff from that perspective. Like what can I do? So you might, you know, place protective measures we call Ward's wording is a thing in magic and in witchcraft and folk magic, you know, placing things like what's called a hamsa, which is an evil eye protection place those around your home. There are Fung Shui cures from Taoism that you could place to make the energy in your home harmonious. So there are things that you can do that you can place around that are low cost, low effort, that will provide you with a you know, energetic and spiritual protection in your space. So the next thing I want to talk about is called defense in depth, or another way of thinking about this is layered layers of protection. So, inside, you know, in your home, you have layers of you have layers of protection from the elements, right, you have an outer wall, even an inner wall, you have maybe double glazed windows, and then you might have a heating and cooling system. And you know, you have you have all of these layers that protect you from the elements from the outside and keep you comfortable and keep you private and all of those things. So there's a lot of protection that happens there. And the idea of defense in depth or layers of protection comes well, you know, I don't know where it originates, but when I think about it, I think about medieval castles in Europe, right? So if you're, you know, wanted to rule over some territory and protect yourself from invading forces. One of the best things you could do back in those days was to build a castle. And the first thing you thought about when you were going to put up a castle is where where am I going to put this castle? Right the environment itself is going to provide a layer of protection. If you have a castle and there's only one route into the castle, you build a castle on top of a hill as they often were. Over looking things in there's one road up. Very easy layer of protection there. There's only one way enemies could approach Okay, so the environment is one, the outer layer of protection for for castle. And then you would do, you know, you might dig a moat and fill it with water. We difficult, you know, to make it difficult for people to cross, it's another layer of protection then of course, castles have walls. And then inside those castles are, you know, soldiers probably with, you know, bows and arrows and other you know, implements of defense and offense inside the castle. And then that usually at the center, or you know, some really protected area of the castle, there was something called a keep. And the keep is a place that was extra fortified and sort of the last bastion of defense, if the enemy got past your walls, you could retreat to the keep, and hold them off even longer and hope that you know, hope that they either you know, ran out of supplies eventually or reinforcements arrived or whatever. Okay, so you had all of these layers of defense, defense in depth, right. So in your computer system, you know, you have the, you have the, you know, you might have network security, right, your router provides a layer of security over the network. And then your computer operating system itself, you know, provide some security and you hopefully have antivirus software that checks things and all of that. The last line of defense in any computer system is a human being. So you can definitely do things to mess up your computer, you can definitely let attackers in, you've probably heard of phishing attacks, where people send things over email, you know, they send malicious stuff over email and try to get you to open it or to click on a link that's malicious or something like that. There's something called Human Engineering and hacking where they they try to get you to give give up your passwords or that sort of thing. And so with a with a castle defense, right if you you know, if Bob was in charge of closing the drawbridge and he forgets it he was the last line of defense right? Or you have the guys with the swords inside the castle fighting off the enemy if they breach the walls. So it's spiritual defense you have you know, you you have helping spirits you have spirits that you might pray to or if you are shamanistic, you might journey to or call upon, you might have images of saints if you're religious, or pray to whatever the you know, God or God or crowds or gods and goddesses that you worship, you know, that's a high level defense against things spiritually, right. But there's also the environment, right, and I talked about walking through Walmart, you know, if I, if I keep my environment, spiritually clean and uplifting, and I don't wander into dark for, you know, into the middle of fairy rings and dark forests and, you know, do do silly things. That's another sort of layer of defense. Okay, then, you know, closer in, I might wear an amulet or talisman or have words around me. And then I might do rituals, I might learn vanishings I'll talk about what a banishing is in a moment, I might learn banishing rituals, I might do this energetic protection, that sort of thing. But I am my last line of defense. And again, if I, you know, run into problems, I might hire a professional to help me out. So this is what I sort of mean by defense in depth. And again, you're always sort of the last line of defense, the things that you do the things you choose to do your behaviors, how you take care of yourself, and your systems, your various systems, meaning your physical body, your energy body, your spiritual body, your soul, body, all of these things. You got to take care of them, right. So again, I might I gotta have the most secure household in the world. But if I stopped taking care of my hygiene, and I might get sick, right or if I eat a lot of bad food, I can weaken my body. And the other thing is, if my body is weak, you are also energetic. You can be energetically vulnerable. So spiritually, energetically, you can be violent villas while these systems interpenetrate interact and communicate with each other, and are dependent upon each other, particularly your energy and energy, body and physical body. They interface quite a bit. This is why things like acupuncture, Reiki and energy healing work. So you have to take care of yourself. Now there are a lot of spiritual systems out there and religions and other spiritual systems that talk about purity. And they will have you do things like bave, before a ritual, taking care to clean the physical body, but also cleaning the energy body. And I'll give you a hint, salt is a really powerful, energetic thing. So salt scrubs in a shower or bath are really great Epsom salts work because the crystals absorb the energy and then it washes down the drain. So really, really good thing to do. If you ever feel kind of gross, like you've picked up some bad energy, you know, get keep some keep some Epsom salts and some salt scrubs on hand. You can pick up that stuff at a grocery store for crying out loud, and very inexpensively keep those on hand the good, really good cures. So let's talk a little bit about rituals as well. There are different types of rituals that you can do if you feel energetically impure, or even if you're under some sort of attack. When I was being cursed, I did a lot of ritual work, which involved doing protective work around my home around myself or my loved ones working with my helping spirits. So it's, I want to go a little bit into what types of spiritual things are, quote unquote threats. I use that term not to make you feel scared or you know, whatever, but just because it's the word I know from from doing risk analysis and that kind of thing. And so let's talk a little bit about some of the different types of threats spiritually that are out there. So I talked about curses, already curses or any sort of painful magic, anything where somebody tries to take control over you or cause you harm physically, mentally, emotionally, cause you fear cause you depression, what have you, um, curses can, curses can cause a lot of, we'll call luck issues. So if somebody thinks they're cursed, I'll talk you know, talk it out with them first before I do the work to determine if they're cursed. Because sometimes I can just say, well, it doesn't sound doesn't sound like a curse to me, you would have more stuff going on. So you would you know, maybe have a run of bad luck, which might include bad health you know, Phantom Pains, things that can be diagnosed along with, you know, weird occurrences stuff showing up in your house is sometimes there are entities involved, sometimes not. Okay, so cursing is, you know, painful magic. And I actually lump some, like love spells and stuff into this where if somebody were to cast a love spell on you, to emotionally manipulate you to fall in love with them. That is, in my opinion, taking away your free will. Not something I recommend. If you and somebody have feelings for each other, and you do some magic, maybe together to intensify your passion, or you do magic work that is not targeted at a specific person, but say you want to manifest more love romantic love into your life. Great. I think that's totally fine. But don't do stuff that takes away people's free will. That is bad juju. It's bad karma. You know, it will cause you problems. And if somebody knows what they're doing, they can there. They can reverse spells, all kinds of counter magic, spell reversal and counter attacking and all of that sort of thing. Right. So so that's when they sort of sort of consider spells cursing painful magic ton of stuff out there. It's been done since the dawn of time, they will find lots of like Greek and Roman like led tablets with curses carved into them, you know naming specific people they'll like carve a curse and then throw it into a well you know not to mention the fact that you well with lead curse enough so all kinds of curses, there are shamans who throw curses and magical attacks at each other. So um you know, maybe I'll do a whole episode on cursing at some point but just far too complicated for me to get into too much detail here because I want to get into some other types of things. Then there are what we consider like energy attacks, spiritual energy attacks, so people are attacking your aura, your chakras, your energy system to cause a disruption usually in your health but also it can cause emotional dysregulation all kinds of stuff. The evil eye is one notorious type of energy attack with the evil eye is there are some people who are born with the ability to do the evil eye and maybe even unaware of it. But it's a magical attack that is usually cast through the gaze and there is intense negative emotion behind it and like a laser beam can burn a hole in your protective system. So imagine if I could you know point some sort of energy weapon at you and disrupt your immune system you might not immediately get sick but down the line you could get deathly ill right and that is a little bit with the with the ELI is like and the evil eye you know is known across many many many cultures by different names you know, malo Keo and in which means, you know, bad or evil I in Italian, but there are different words for it in different cultures, you see it, you know, you see protective charms against evil eye, in all kinds of cultures. So that is another, that's another type of threat unknown. Another type of threat is things that things that we do to ourselves. That because we don't really know what we're doing, so you could right now, at this moment, go on the internet and download instructions for evoking a demon in your living room. Or a gym or some, you know, opening a portal into a chaos dimension or whatever, with zero experience zero training. Now back in, you know, back in the days where these grim was, which are grimoires, or spell books or big books of magic, where they, when they were written, they were written by people who had been studying and practicing their entire life and probably apprenticed other under other people read tons of works. These books were incredibly rare, incredibly expensive, could not just be you couldn't just, you know, go walk down to the mall, which didn't exist at the time and go into the bookstore and say, Hey, give me a book to summon demons. Right? You had to be very wealthy, to own any books. It was. I remember reading something that went the time. John D, a very maybe famous guy, you may know him you may not know him, he was the court straw among many things. He was a court astrologer for Queen Elizabeth the first. He was a he knew he knew literally all the knowledge there was to know by mankind in Western Europe at that time, he had studied every subject. He had several 1000 books in his collection, which was many times more than the libraries of Cambridge and Oxford combined. Think about that. Books were incredibly rare, incredibly expensive, and often not written in a language that you understood like you would have to I mean, today, you know, John D, probably had five or six languages under his belt, at least, you know, English, Latin and Greek and then maybe several others. As people did with classical education, we had to be very wealthy to have that so not everybody could do this. You had to be educated. You had to go through training you had to go through years of purification. Today, just download a ritual and summon the demon in your living room. You know, or, you know, some powerful spirit or do Jinn magic or whatever. If you join a magical Lodge, for example, magical organization or magical Lodge, you would pass through many degrees of practice, and that would include practical, daily spiritual work. So I have encountered individuals may have talked about this in other podcasts as well. And I could see stuff buzzing about them, I could see beings that were, you know, they had picked up all kinds of hitchhikers from opening doors that they didn't know what to do with and didn't know how to close and didn't know how to protect themselves from the entity so we can be our own. We can be our own attackers if we're not careful. I see this very frequently with people who use a tremendous amount of psychedelics as a shortcut, to instead of doing shamanic or other spiritual work that just, you know, I remember somebody walking into a lecture I was giving, and they could see little beings buzzing around his head, like little airplanes flying around, flying around or you know, the, in the cartoons when somebody gets bonked on the head. And birds fly around them. It was it was like that. And this guy's eyes were like, glazed over and unfocused. And I talked to him. And he was incredibly nice guy. And I was talking about shamanism in this lecture. And he came up afterwards and I spoke with him. And he's like, Yeah, I guess I've done every thing under the sun. I've done ayahuasca, LSD, psilocybin peyote, he had a list, you know, and I could tell, I'm like, Well, you opened a lot of doors, right? He goes, Yeah, he goes, and once you buy the ticket, you're on the ride, there's no control over it. So you know, and I know of people who have been hospitalized from doing Ayahuasca I know if people have died from doing ayahuasca, things like that. I don't know why people think you can just experiment with this stuff, this very powerful plant medicine, you know, taken frequently out of context when you go. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with plant medicine. What I'm saying is when it's used recreationally abused, taken out of cultural context, or used by people without the requisite training and experience. It's incredibly dangerous, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Be careful with that stuff folks. Get with I don't know how you know, if somebody is legitimate or knows what they're doing. There have been people who like flown down to Peru to get with a shaman that they found online or whatever. Take an iOS can been sexually assaulted or robbed or killed or whatever, you know. So not to be into like, the scare tactics too much or whatever. But just be careful with that stuff. And be careful with magic build your build your way up, build your knowledge, build your experience, when you do magical training, the way that it's supposed to be done. And you're practicing say, you know, you join an organization like a Golden Dawn type organization or whatever, you're doing banishing rituals every day from day one. Every single day, a couple times a day, you're doing banishing rituals. So you like what happens is you develop spiritually you light up on the astral plane, and that can be attractive to spirits. And sometimes you don't want those spirits to be hanging around you. Right, like bothersome guests. You don't want people just walking into your house when you're taking a shower or, you know, whatever walking around in your skivvies likewise, you don't want spirits to just like come and take up residence or decide they want to, you know, drain your energy or cause you to have thoughts and that aren't yours or emotions and do things. So they start with banishing. And they start with rituals that build up the magical credence and there's great two, two authors that I like really like one named Rufus Opus. writes about ceremonial particularly planetary magic. Another name Jason Miller, who writes about sorcery, lots of different topics. I think they're loosely associated, they at least belong to the same or did belong to one same magical organization and they, you know, I've known them to talk about each other as well, I like both of both of these guys a lot. And they have both talked about the Roman goddess Metis and Metis being this, you know, beyond being a goddess, also being a mantle of magical authority that one can don. And that offers authority over spirits that you might be conjuring, but also protection and that sort of thing. And it takes some work. It takes initiation, it takes practice, it takes creating magical implements, there's a bunch of work that goes into this stuff. You know, there are there are a lot of books out there now who just like pick up and start doing spells and whatever in some of them are not very risky, right? You can pick up a book on candle magic and start doing, you know, candle spells. But if you started to do evocations and invocations, and you're calling calling in spirits and stuff, and you don't really know what you're doing, I think it can be risky. Nothing, absolutely nothing in this world, including doing nothing is risk free. Right, I talked about risk. Risk is the danger of a threat. Or the likelihood, I will say the likelihood of a threat coming to pass and causing damage, and the potential sort of multiplied by the potential damage that can be done. Right. So think about that, from a risk perspective, if I don't know what I'm doing, if I go and operate a chainsaw, and they don't know what I'm doing. That's a risky activity. Right? My ignorance is part of that risk. You know, chainsaws are risky enough. Obviously, people get hurt using chainsaws, all the time, right? chainsaws, if you don't know chainsaws can kick back into your face if you don't use them correctly. Or you can cut through a log and swing it into your leg or grab, you know, whatever people do with chainsaws. But your ignorance is adds to risk. You know, if you are brand new to esoteric practice, start with something safer shamanism. You know, the way that it's taught in core shamanism is, you know, is particularly safe. In my experience, you know, you're working, there are ways to determine that you're working with helping spirits that you should be working with and that sort of thing that are beneficial when you're working with compassionate spirits. I'm not proselytizing about shamanism. Shamanism has other things to it that make it challenging. It does stir things up in your shadow and force you to confront them. And if you're not ready for that, you are not ready for that. So you know, those are some of the various kinds of threats, there are other kinds of threats, things like thought forms, which are thoughts that are transmitted that sometimes land on us and get stuck. Right. So an example of this is if I, you know, growing up, and I wanted to learn to play the piano, and my parents constantly told me, nobody in this family is musical, you can't learn to play the piano, they might sort of transfer that thought to me, and I might never either take up the piano, or if I do, I might, might not be good at it. Right. And that thought is transferred in part verbally, but in part energetically as well. If you don't talk about thought forms very much. But it is it is a thing in the word meme, you know, has come to me in like funny pictures with text we share on the internet. But the word meme, actually, the original connotation of that was an idea of virus and idea that spreads like a virus. Right? And you can probably think of some, you know, some of these ideas that get that gets spread around. You know, things like I don't know, an urban legend, I guess might be a type of meme. Things that kind of take on a life of their own and spread like a virus from person to person to person. An interesting one an interesting phenomenon I've seen happen are these very expensive drink containers like when my my daughters were young, they had to have younger they had to have a Hydro Flask right? I'm just like, why would you want a $50 thermos, like, that's ridiculous had to have it, saved their money, pulled it, you know, got their birthday money together and all that and bought themselves these $50 thermoses they don't even use anymore now now. Now it's on to Stanley Stanley's like 100 year old company that made thermoses and somebody's like, oh, we can make this thing go viral. If we get the kids into these things. Now they're buying these $50, Stanley, because it's no longer the Hydroflask will it keep your drink colder? It will keep your water colder for 10 minutes longer or something? I don't know. I don't know. It's not what it's about. It's about the brand and what it represents in this idea and the trend, and everybody's got to have it. Right. It's like a virus that spreads around. So we want to be careful of those things, those ideas that can spread their thought forms. I'm not saying don't buy if you want to Stanley water bottle, that's fine. I'm not judging, or anything. It's just an interesting, it's just an interesting phenomenon to me that I don't I don't necessarily understand it. But that's okay. I don't, I don't have to understand the appeal for it to be appealing to other people are valid, and I'm not judging. I'm sure there's lots of things that are appealing to me that many other people don't understand as well. So with that, I will give you some things to think about. If you are going to be doing esoteric practice of any kind, particularly things that are like conjuring or ritual work or that sort of thing. It would behoove you to learn some vanishing, I won't tell you what time to learn, there are many types of vanishing you can learn. But there are lots of traditions about banishing, which is creating, you know, creating space around you that is essentially pure. It's purifying sanctifying space for doing ritual work and that sort of thing. banishing also, if you do it, right has the effect of changing your aura, making your aura more effective as a shield. So learn that learn some shielding. And if you're really really into it if you're really really want to learn some learn some basic protection and reversal magic. In fact, one of the authors I remember Jason Miller has a book called protection reversal magic that I think is really good. But there's lots of stuff out there you can learn. With that I will leave you for today. I hope this has been helpful. I will talk to you all very soon.

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