March Challenge
- We will begin this month by expanding on our mediation practice. Continuing our discipline of setting aside time, we will increase from 5-10 minutes per day to 10-15 minutes.
During this time, we will take a few minutes to simply relax and monitor our breathing and so on, but this month, after we do so, we will be performing some exercises to sharpen the mind for our next phase.Begin using the Wondrous Items discipline found in Vakandibok. If you do not own a copy, or cannot afford one, begin using what I call the Turning the Gears. I cannot remember where I first heard about this practice, but it is simple and effective. One starts out with a blackened mental image, just void, and places one gear, or cog into the void, and begins turning it. Next, they add another cog, which is turned by the first one. One proceeds in this fashion until they “lose the image,” either due to complexity or lack of focus, and starts over.These beginning practices and exercises are important, because we cannot begin the process of uncluttering/self surgery on our minds and inner universe until our tools are sharpened and oiled. Even if we are generally mentally active, but we are still relatively new to meditation and to “going within,” or just returning to it, we have to perform some exercise and get the blood flowing, so to speak. In a similar fashion, if I have been out of the gym for a while, I jumpstart my training by doing some full body workouts and hard cardio to get myself worked back up.If you are someone who has practiced meditation for a long period of time, simply use this time to return to the basics, and keep a “beginner’s mindset”- allow yourself to revisit the firststeps of the process from a different approach. You might learn something, or you might not, but certainly, any time spent sharpening the mental faculties is not wasted.
- Second, we will perform a financial assessment. Whether we like it or not, the blood that flows in the veins of Empire is green. In order to attain leverage in that world and be able to be effective there, as much as anywhere else, we have to learn to think of money as a tool, just like a wrench or hammer.It helps us get a job done, and do what we need to, in order to live the lives we want. I have met many intelligent and passionate people whose disdain for money or lack of ability to make it crippled their enjoyment, mobility, time, and freedom. Everyone has bills to pay, and goals to achieve that will require capital, unless they are an ascetic who lives in a cave or hut and survives only on what they can produce themselves- those individuals have my utmost respect, but they are probably not reading this article. For the rest of us, we must destroy our limiting views of money, and simply view it dispassionately as a means to an end, an energy supply that can be used in much the same way as electricity, to power the circuitry of our temporal (and sometimes spiritual) plans.For now, we will simply write down our total income for the month of March, and track each expenditure of money for the month (spending as we normally would), and WRITE EVERY SINGLE ONE DOWN. This is essential groundwork for what will come next, and just like everything we are doing this year, we will begin basically and work toward more complexity once we have shown we are capable of those basics.
- This month, we will again return to our Heroic Blueprint and work on both a positive and a negative. This is the last month we will mention this, as our blueprint should be in the forefront of our mind at all times- we will begin keeping a journal of our progress towards this archetype if we haven’t already done so, and we will write deeper and more experiential pieces regarding our perceptions of those positive and negative traits. We are looking this month to begin building an archetype in our minds that embodies our blueprint, a mythic character, like a god, that is us in potential- representative of ourselves as we Will ourselves to be, but not as we are now. As we improve, the concept of our archetype will deepen, and go beyond us, and create a constant struggle toward further emulation, which we call worship. This is the ritual aspect of the Werewolf method, a creation of a new god, one known only to ourselves, driving us onward as we give it depth, attribute it with deeper meaning, and realize our own mythology through the pursuit of this higher ideal.
92.
-P.W.