Topic: Magick & Spirituality

There are too many people in the New Age who are looking for easy solutions to difficult problems. The alternative community is so inundated with these “bliss ninnies,” as a friend of mine calls them, that they’ve become a caricature in the media, both in the movies and on television shows like ABC’s sitcom Dharma and Greg.

Back in June my friend Linda died. Neither of us would say that we were extremely close friends. I had never been in her home, nor she in mine, and we had never met after work for cocktails or a bite of cheesecake as friends sometimes do. But we were friends nonetheless.

When the Dalai Lama made an appearance on a recent Sunday afternoon in New York’s Central Park, a crowd of 40,000 people showed-up to hear him speak. Granted, that’s no big number for Central Park, which fairly regularly plays host for groups of over 100,000 for big name musical shows. But this was no entertainment event. There was no Streisand, Jagger or Garth Brooks to entice this crowd, only a simple man who lives in India and who probably would’ve never become known in this country if he had not been driven from his native Tibet by the Chinese back in 1959.

The other day I was talking with an associate about a mutual acquaintance. In the past, both of us had experienced difficulties with this person, although my associate had experienced much more grief from this man than me. My friend said, “I had a lot of trouble getting over the way I felt about him. It took a lot of work, but I finally learned to ‘love my enemy.’”

It’s one thing when a group embraces a concept like Satanism to propagate their rather unpleasant and tasteless ideas. But at least when an organization calls themselves “Satanist,” the general public has some idea of what they are about, as if there is some sort of truth in their advertising. They may try to dress-up their ideas to make them intellectually palatable, but we pretty much know that they align themselves with concepts that most people consider bad or evil, because that’s what Satanism means.

I just received a letter in the mail that proclaims that I am already a winner! My ship is practically in port and it’s all down hill from here! I don’t have to have the winning number or give a specific time for Dick Clark or Ed McMahon to stop by to drop off my check. All I have to do is sit back and let the good times roll.

Most people would like to know what the future holds in store for them. Since the dawn of time, soothsayers and seers have been developing systems to predict events that have not yet happened. For as long as there has been commerce, there have been “fortune tellers” who will predict the future for a fee. There are many reasons why people seek such advice. Some are interested in love and romance. Others want to know about their financial future. Still others want only to gain a deeper insight into their own inner processes.

Morgan, Doug, Nick and Mick are four local young men who are all in their twenties. Every week they get together at someone’s house and do Magick.

“Real Magick - with a ‘k,’” Doug says. “Not smoke and mirrors, like David Copperfield.”

September 11th has always been a special day for me because it’s my father’s birthday. If he was alive, he would have turned seventy on the day that four highjacked airliners wrecked havoc on New York City, Washington, D.C., and rural Pennsylvania. Because of this personal connection, I know some rather trivial things about this date. For example, I know that this year Christmas will fall on a Tuesday, because September 11th and Christmas Day always fall on the same day of the week.

A friend of mine recently joined a small healing group after becoming certified as a Reiki practitioner. The group meets monthly to do healing work on each other, and to do “absentee healing” for those who’ve requested it. Everyone in the group is certified in Reiki, which means that each person has at least learned the basics of hands-on metaphysical healing.