Today, Asteroth told me write about love.

I asked for more detail and she said ‘love as acceptance’. I didn’t need anymore words because the words themselves conveyed the entirety of the suggestion. This is a difficult concept to explain but it seemed as if the words themselves conveyed the feeling and understanding of love as acceptance. It’s as if the words are only a key to a packet of understanding which opens up and engulfs me.

What those words conveyed to me was along the lines that when we are told to ‘love one another’, we are told to accept one another for what we are and what we have the potential to be. It’s a surrendering of one’s own ego and viewpoint. A letting go of our own conditioning and biases allows us to see our fellow humans simply as they truly are. In itself, this is an act of magic since it involves first changing ourselves in order to see more clearly - to see the divine spark in each and every person.

I have been giving a good deal of thought recently to a variety of topics that came up during my 5-year SOL course. Reading through my own meditation notes, some things suddenly make more sense that they did before. It's prompted me to start out on a certain path with enthusiasm again.

One idea that struck me is that the Tree of Life gives you a great insight into reality. First, lets assume that Kether already exists - and let's discuss the tree in terms of developing an idea and turning it into reality. Kether is the source but as the tree unfolds down into Malkuth, things become more set, more constrained. Yes- the tree evokes an unknowable number of possibilities but how does it actually work?

I believe that we create our own reality and have written many articles on this site about that concept. Its the basis of Magick that we can and do create the world around us. But what if that were not true? Last night I had a dream in which I discovered that our lives were preordained. It was such an amazing dream that it prompted me to write this post....

Imagine that for each millisecond of time, our preordained life was captured. Our life comprised millions and millions of snapshots in time sequence a bit like a movie in which each frame is a still photograph but when run through a projector we get a concept of time and movement. Follow? Our life is already mapped out like a movie script and each millisecond of that script is there already waiting for us in sequence. Our consciousness then moves through the scenes reacting to events - to the script - so to speak. Instead of running the movie through a projector our consciousness is the projector. We don't have free will but we just react and learn. Learn and adapt to the journey created for us.

Having learned how to relax and found a suitable location where we will not be disturbed, the next phase in meditation is the actual meditation itself. In general, there are two or perhaps three methods of meditating;

• Focus on a word, phrase, image and drill down into it;
• Keep the mind blank and allow images to arise;
• Guided meditation – also know as ‘Pathworking’

Let’s look at each in turn.

Focused Meditation

Introduction
According to Wikipedia, Meditation can be defined as “a state of concentrated attention on some object of thought or awareness. It usually involves turning the attention inward to a single point of reference.”

For me, meditation involves reaching a state known as ‘mind awake, body asleep.’ Several techniques may then be used to actually meditate including constant thought and attention on an object, symbol or a statement or, my favored approach, emptying of the mind to simply let images arise that are noted and then dismissed. I will discuss these two approaches in more detail in a later continuation of this dissertation.

To meditate properly, that is, to reach the correct state of ‘body asleep, mind awake’ is in fact quite difficult and some students have immense problems getting there at all. The key however to reaching such a state is relaxation.

Relaxation