That One Is More Important: A look at buildings, history, and learning to ask the right questons

"That one is more important."

"Why do I know that?"

It is important to learn to observe.  And it is important to learn to listen.  Especially when it is ourself talking.  And it is important to learn to ask the right questions.  Buildings are important.  Locations are important.  Names are important.  History is important.  Learn to observe.  Learn to listen.  Learn to ask the right questions.

On Friday, I drove into Denver with the intent to go on a tour of the Governor's Residence.  They were doing tours through that day, from 10am-2pm each week day.  This was in  relation to the Christmas decorations that were done this year by the Colorado Interior Design Coalition.  It was supposed to be beautiful.

Governor's Residence at the Boettcher Mansion

The Governor's Residence is more properly called the Governor's Residence at the Boettcher Mansion.  Previously, it was referred to as the Governor's Mansion.  It was completed in 1908 by Walter Cheesman.  Cheesman was a druggist from Long Island originally and growing up in Chicago, working with his brother to provide the necessities in early Denver.  He made his fortune in real estate and built himself a mansion, which his widow sold to Claude Boettcher in 1923.  Boettcher came from a pioneering family who started with a hardware store selling to miners and built a fortune in many areas including sugar and cement.  The Boettcher Foundation donated the mansion as the residence for the governor in 1959.

I ran into slow traffic on my way from Longmont to Denver, and got there too late.  The tours were until 2pm, and I got to the closed gate at 2:10.  I only got to see it from the road, but it is a gorgeous building.  I walked around it and down the hill past the carriage house, then across Governor's Park below it.  I proceeded up the hill on the other side in the park, and say another mansion to the east of Boettcher Mansion.  My mind spoke, saying, "That one is more important."  I then asked the obvious next question, "Why do I know that?"  "Because it's higher" came the answer.  And I wondered why that was the reason.

High places have always been important.  As are low places.  Study many cultures and peoples in history, and this is quite evident.  There are different reasons for this, in regard to high places.  One is the military element.  A high place sees more of the surrounding area, so gives you more warning of an attack.  Build a tower or raised platform and it becomes more so.  A high place is also easier to defend.  Being above your enemy gives you the advantage, whether you are shooting (shooting arrows, throwing spears, later, shooting guns or cannons, are easier to kill with using gravity to draw them down from a height) or fighting with a melee weapon (you have an advantage swinging down, with gravity helping, over someone swinging up).  Second, there is a power and government element.  Being higher than someone by definition is superior, and this implies power over those below.  Whoever is on the hill above is easily seen as more powerful and more affluentual.  There is also a spiritual aspect, when dealing with sky gods or spirits, the high place is closest to them, just as when dealing with chthonic gods and spirits, the low place is closest, like caves and pits.

So, this second mansion is higher.  So what?  Does the idea above hold water?  Is this second mansion, which is not the Governor's, more important?  It is most definitely higher.  From the atrium of Boettcher Mansion, you can see Pike's Peak on a clear day, which is way south near Colorado Springs.  Boettcher Mansion has an amazing view.  But the balcony on the highest floor of the second mansion is a good fifty feet higher, and looks out above the roof of Boettcher Mansion.  In fact, before the much more recent apartment complexes around it were built, and before the sky scrapers in the Upper Downtown area were built, it would have been the highest point in Denver, with a view incorporating everything to the west of it all the way to the Frontrange, for an amazing panorama.  So it has the height, but was it really more important?  Is it now?

Grant-Humphreys Mansion

The second mansion is the Grant-Humphreys Mansion.  It was completed six years before the Boettcher Mansion, in 1902, for $35,000, which was a very large sum at the time.  The original building had 30 rooms and was much bigger than the Boettcher Mansion.  It was built by James Benton Grant.  Grant Street in downtown Denver is not named for the president as I presumed, but for this Grant.  Grant was a plantation owner in Alabama who was impoverished by the Civil War and decided to try to make it back in the mining industry.  He studied in Germany and moved to Leadville, Colorado where he made a fortune with a smelting company.  In 1917, his widow sold the mansion to Albert E. Humphreys.  Humphreys made a fortune three times, only sustaining it on the third.  One was in logging, then in mining, and finally in oil.  The mansion came under the stewardship of the Colorado Historical Society in 1976.

Now, as you can guess, smelting, in a time where mining was the biggest industry in the Frontrange, was a bit more important than, say, drugstores and hardware stores.  Likewise, an oil baron was a bit more influential than the owners of the Boettcher Mansion.  There's a reason the second mansion is larger, higher, and older than the first.

So, I observed.  I looked at two mansions and noted what I could with my senses.  I listened.  I listened to my internal voice, took note when I told myself the second mansion was more important.  And I asked the right questions.  I asked, and through those questions identified why it was so.

And named are important.  They leave legacies, and the places and streets and locations bearing the names lend clues to understanding the history, the impact, and the importance of those that bore the names.  The four names above, each to different degrees, were important in the Denver area and the history of the area.  One of the major roads in Denver was named for Grant, who served as Colorado's third governor, did much for Colorado's trade and commerce industries, and contributed to great extent to education in the state.  The neighbourhood to the east of Capital Hill, on which these two mansions are built, is named for Cheesman, including a park named for him, with many tales of being haunted and a colourful history.  Walter Cheesman has instrumental in developing Denver's water system, and was well known for using his money to help people.  The Boettcher Foundation has been responsible for aiding in many endeavors to improve Colorado, including building projects and educational scholarships.

FFF,
~Muninn's Kiss

Thirteen Points of Advice for Those Starting on the Path

The following are thirteen points of advice and guidance I'd give to anyone starting out of the path.  They aren't exclusive, there are other things to know.  And they aren't original, they are drawn from many sources.  And they are from my point of view, so should not be taken as gospel.  I hope they help some who read them.  Before getting into them, four books I'd recommend before most others, and I have a very long recommended reading list, are the following:

• Visual Magick by Jan Fries (Paperback, Kindle)
• Drawing Down the Spirits by Kenaz Filan and Raven Kaldera (Paperback, Kindle)
• Mysticism: Initiation and Dream by Andrew D. Chumbley (J.D. Holmes - US, Three Hands Press - UK)
• The Robert Cochrane Letters by Robert Cochrane and Evan John Jones (Out of print but available through Amazon)

And that being said, here are the thirteen points of advice that are my intention if sharing this:

1. Mutual respect is essential. Respect the spirits, and expect respect in return. If you don't receive it, they're out, burnt, or cut off.
2. All things have a spirit, and that spirit can be worked with and learned from. Some work with them as servants, or worship them and become servants. I prefer to work with them as partners. There is an authority in knowing you are equal with all things.
3. People (and spirits) see what they expect to see. Open your eyes, then open them again. Observe. Perceive. Understand.
4. What conceals also reveals. Look beneath the surface, both in of what your senses (physical or otherwise) tell you and what teachings, lore, and myth tell you. What they hide is as important as what they say.
5. Learn to ask the right questions. Asking the wrong question will send you in the wrong direction. There are no bad questions, but often looking at the question in the right way opens doors. And always ask the next question, don't let the answer be the end of the question.
6. When all else fails, cheat. Don't assume that the traditional way to do something, the way everyone does it, or the way you've always done it is the only approach. If it doesn't work, do something else.
7. Divide and conquer. If something is baffling or seems to be concealing something you can't quite grasp or see, break it down, look at each part of it separately, determine where something is missing, concealed, or not working, and focus there.
8. Only you are responsible for your actions and words, no one else, and you aren't responsible for anyone else's. Do what is necessary, but accept the responsibility for it. Own what you say and what you do, regardless of the consequences or what you think of them later. Don't pass blame, and don't take it on.
9. Learn from all things. All beings, objects, persons, spirits, circumstances, lore, teachings, regardless of the source or pain or issues, contain beauty, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, and can be learned from, if you ask the right questions, look beneath the surface, and separate what has value from what doesn't. There's a saying in Hawai'i that not all knowledge is found in one shed.
10. Be willing to consider any idea, no matter how different from your own. Examine it, understand it, but don't just accept it in you process. Hold on firmly to what you know, and only change it if there is good reason to do so.
11. Everybody lies, misrepresents, and hides things. This goes for spirits as well as living humans, and all things. Never assume you are being told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We all speak through our filters, understand based on our experiences, hide what we don't want seen, and mislead when it will gain us something. Make no assumptions about the truth of, completeness of, or accuracy of anything you are told. This goes for what you tell yourself as well. Look deeper, examine. Observe. Perceive. Understand.
12. What is yours, you need to hold, protect, defend. As Cochrane said, "What I have--I hold!" You are guardian and keeper of what is yours. Find what that is, and keep it against the storm.
13. What you put in, you get out. As we say in computers, garbage in, garbage out. Only you control what you get from the path. No effort, no result. No danger, no gain. Victor Anderson said anything worth doing is dangerous, and Cochrane said take all you are given, give all of yourself. Huna teaches that where your attention goes, the mana goes, and Taoist thought teaches similar, where the mind goes, the chi follows. Where you focus, that's where your energy is, what you think about and contemplate, that is where you will learn. It's all about you. You hold the reins. Make the most of it.

Hope these are helpful for some.

FFF,

~Muninn's Kiss

The Road to Tipherah: Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces

"The first step in finding beauty is to see it. There is beauty in all things." ~Grimr

Beauty is a hard thing to find, not because it's so rare, but because it's so common. It is everywhere, in all things, both in the wonderful and the horrible. It is everywhere, but we don't see it because it's everywhere, we are numbed to it, so therefore blind to it. A young child sees it everywhere. This is Innocence. But we lose our Innocence along the way, we cease to see beauty because we forget it's important. We see only ugliness, getting lost in the qlipoth, the empty shells of what we first knew.

At the core of the trunk of the Tree of Life stands Tipherah, Beauty, the balance of all things. Above it are the Three Minds. Da'ath, Knowing, spanning the Abyss, the Dark Bridge. Binah, Understanding, the Deep Sea. Chokmah, Wisdom, the Deep Well. Beyond is Kether, the Crown, the root of the Tree. To the right of Tipherah is Chesed, Mercy, Lovingkindness, complete openness, complete acceptance, unlimited expansion, unlimited loosing. To the left is Geburah, Judgement, Severality, complete closeness, complete denial, unlimited retreat, unlimited binding. Below are the Three Manifestations. Netzach, Victory, on the right, emotion and passion, conquest and force of arms. Victory by advancing. Hod, Glory, on the left, intellect and cunning, magic and planning. Victory by retreat, by holding back. Yesod, Foundation, in the middle, sex and subconsciousness, instinct and intuition, the foundation of Action. And below, Malkuth, Kingdom, Manifestation of Manifestation, the Three Manifestations becoming Action. The playground of the soul.

Beauty stands at the centre, if it is lost, the whole Tree is lost. This is the lose of Innocence, and results in separating us from the Root. We become a branch or a twig or a leaf, drying and dying without the sustenance that can come only from the Root. And, as the dying leaf, we see only darkness, only ugliness, only decay. We can't even see that even the darkness, the ugliness, and the decay contain beauty. For there is beauty, truly, in all things.

When people look at the Wasteland, they see only ugliness. Walk in the Sonora Desert that spans the United States and Mexico. People see the lack of water, the lack of shelter, the lack of life. They focus on what isn't there, on the negative. But walk in those sands and look carefully. See the form of the saguaro cacti, each stove pipe reaching to heaven like the trees of the Pacific North West. See the lizards and snakes, how they move, their skin protecting them from the environment around them. Watch the waves the wind creates in the sand, so much like the beaches of Florida that many find so beautiful. Look at the mesas rising in places, as majestic as the Rocky Mountains. The desert holds much beauty.

Walk in the High Plains of Wyoming. People see the cold and wind, the dryness and flatness, the barrenness, the remoteness. They see what's not there, not what is. They see the negative. Look closer. The plains roll, with valleys around rivers with trees, with wet spots and dry, thick vegetation and thin. Look at the old growth sagebrush, almost five feet tall, older than the oldest tree in the Pacific Northwest, ancient and strong, able to survive the freezing winter, the pounding heat of the summer, the persistent wind that scores the mountains and hills, but the sage still stands. Watch the hawk soaring on the wind, diving for a rabbit or rodent. Watch the pronghorn antelope run faster than most cars, bounding and tearing across the plains. The High Plains abound with life. And with beauty.

People will point to the worst of mankind, of the qlipoth and dying leaves, and say, no, here is a place there is no beauty. Take rape for instance they will say. There is nothing beautiful about rape. There is pain and suffering, hurt and no hope. But they're once again looking at the negative, to what is lacking. The human spirit is strong, and beauty can rise from that ugliness. As healing comes, the victim, though scarred, will move on. They will reclaim their body that was stolen. And they might be able to help with the healing of others. Yes, there is nothing beautiful about rape, but it only stays that way if beauty is not looked for. Even from the ugliest ugliness, beauty rises from the ashes like the phoenix.

The first step in finding beauty is not to look for it, it's to see it, because it's already there. We don't see beauty when we look at what's lacking, not what's there. Sorrow is only meaningful as a lack of joy. Fear is only meaningful as a lack of courage. Pain is only meaningful as a lack of comfort. Suffering is only meaningful as a lack of peace. Ugliness is only meaningful as a lack of beauty. But these things don't exist without their opposite, for it's not truly an opposite, it's two ends of the same thread. Sorrow and joy are not distinct, it's a matter of where you are on the thread. Every Yin contains Yang and can be further divided into Yin and Yang. Every Yang contains Yin and can be further divided into Yin and Yang. There is ugliness in beauty, but there is beauty in ugliness.

Finding beauty is the reclaiming of Innocence. And it is found purely by opening our eyes and seeing clearly the beauty that is before us, all around us, in everything. And with the return of Innocence, and the return of Beauty, Tipherah, the Tree of Life returns and we are connected once more to the Root, nourished by that Source from which all things spring, and to which all things return.

So look! Open your eyes! Let he who has eyes see, let he who has ears hear! The beauty is around you and in you. Look and see it!

FFF,
~Muninn's Kiss

*The subtitle comes from the album from Seether, released after the suicide of the lead singer's brother. Many of the songs are him working through that pain and sharing the good that could come out of it.

Observation and Calculation: Laziness and the passage of time

 There are certain feasts and festivals that are considered "movable" in Christianity.  Easter is the most well known by the general public outside the churches.  But Easter is only movable because of laziness and an insistence on defining lunar feasts based a solar calendar.  As we talked about around that time earlier this year, Easter started out as the Sunday after Passover.  Passover is fixed, but obviously to the Hebrew calendar, not the Julian or Gregorian.  Passover is *always* the week of the 15th through 22nd of Nissan, which is sundown on the third Friday of Nissan until sundown of the next Friday.  So Easter was always 24th of Nissan.  But non-Jewish Christians didn't observe the moon, so they had to ask a Jew when it would occur, and, as relations got more and more strained between the two religions, the Christians wanted to know it themselves.  So they figured out a calculation, so they wouldn't have to observe.  And they did it based on a solar date, the equinox, and even that was set on the calendar by then, not observed.

Both the Hebrew and the Islamic calendar are based on observation and lunar cycles, not calculation and solar cycles.  The Jewish months aren't set, nor are the Islamic.  The Romans said, this month is this long and this month is this long.  The lengths are arbritary, not based on anything in nature.  Hence Julius Caesar was able to steal a day from February and put it in the month he renamed after himself, and Augustus did likewise.  But the Jewish months are based on observation and not arbitrary.  When the moon disappears from the final crescent into the dark of the moon, the new month starts.  And the Islamic, when the moon reappears after the new moon, in the first crescent.  But this varies.  First of all, because the moon isn't tied to the solar days.  Some lunar months are 29 days and some 30 days, or some people say 28 or 31, it's hard since the new moon doesn't last only one day, just as the Solstice is hard because there are three days real close.  So the length of the months are different from each other and based on observation, not the same, and not arbitrary.  The length of each month are pretty close to the same each year, day wise, but this isn't guarantied.  Even if it drifts, the Hebrew and Islamic calendar will still be consistant, because the exact length of each month doesn't matter and won't mess up other calculations.

That's the thing, we're lazy, so we prefer calculation to observation.  That's why the standing stones were more accurate.  As I said, nature isn't orderly and consistent.  We like to make laws and rules to define nature, to show its order and show it as static, but they always fall short, because nature is chaotic and dynamic, always changing.  Just look at the length of a year.  We have a nice calculation of 365.2425 days, but this is an average.  Each year is different in length.  It's pretty obvious it would vary, if you think about gravity.  When Jupiter or Mars are closer, earth is pulled out further, and when Venus or Mercury are closer, it's pulled closer to the sun.  These four planets aren't on a cycle relating at all to any of ours.  Depending on the timing of this, if the earth stays out further more of the year, the year is longer, but if it spends more time closer, the year is shorter.  The same thing happens with the lunar cycles, hence to the tides, and so on.

And even the "Law" of Gravity doesn't give the whole picture.  Even Newton saw that Mercury osculated in a way the Law couldn't account for, be he couldn't find a solution and no one else could, so they just kind of ignored it until Einstein looked at it and started from scratch and came up with the Specific Theory of Relativity, which he later expanded.  The point is that *everything* effects everything else, so the universe and nature is far too complex to calculate.

So calculation will only give averages, not specifics.  To really know the cycles, it takes observation.  In Genesis, G-d says, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth."  They are signs.  A sign is meaningless if it isn't observed.  The seasons, the days, and the years, are seen watching these signs, not calculated with an easy formula.  If the earth took an extra day to make it around the sun, or the moon an extra day to make it around the earth, how many people would even notice?  And if we noticed, would it be when it happened, or afterwards when the calculations start failing?  Would we change the calendar, or just pretend it didn't happen?  And if we changed it, would we just change the calculation and hope it happened again the next year, or watch and wait and observe and see what happens?

Do we as a modern people notice the signs and omens around us every day?

FFF,
~Muninn's Kiss