Ipos: “I’m here. I find it ‘cute’ that you still call with the enns even though you know we’re here and listening.” (He was using one of my phrases on purpose)
Me: “I suppose it is cute, my Lord Ipos. Still works and it helps get me into focus a bit more. Doesn’t take much time.”
I: “It doesn’t. You think you’re calling to learn more about the intuitive things I can teach, but you’re going to get a crash course in several things. This will be more of a ‘Lessons of the Deck’ approach in your daily life through the week, so make note and copy it down to add here, please.”
(I nodded, he nodded, and left.).
Meditation:
I just called Ipos for the start of the week and have his sigil blazing over my third eye for intuition. This made me think of several of the Maoshan exercises where one of the hand gestures/forms is pointed towards the 3rd eye and another where tones are vibrated to stimulate it from within. I saw that I could place his sigil into that area inside, also, to further stimulate the effect. I also saw that with enough practice, this would become more and more permanent/sustained/powerful. He was pleased that I shared this and left again.
Dreamwork:
I had this dream where I was marrying the Queen, but I don’t know which Queen it was. I don’t know where it was. It was just some small town that I saw and everybody in the town knew it was going to happen. The kicker is that I was still married to my current wife and that was just being dissolved so I can marry this Queen and that was just it. Just seemed like it was a matter of fact. There wasn’t emotion either way on it. It was something that was just going to happen and I was almost a bystander in it the same as everybody else.
I would find myself going through these different houses and I was supposed to be doing preparations at these houses but I couldn’t see what preparations I was doing. I just knew at some point the preparation had happened. I would see this mess that got made from some preparation I didn’t see myself do and my thought was this is going to require some extra clean up from my current mother-in-law – which seems like a really messed up thing to think in a dream.
I even knew I was dreaming at the time, but I felt like I shouldn’t interfere with a dream itself and so I didn’t.
The dream lasted a very long time. I was even in the same room with my current wife and I was I was getting ready. She was helping me get ready. It was just a matter of fact that the marriage was going to get dissolved so that I can marry this queen whose face (or even anything about her) I never saw. Couldn’t tell you the first thing about her. The location reminded me a lot of England, but we all know from those monarchs that there’s a gender issue with this dream happening. I know it was not a real life sort of dream, but I don’t know why I had such a vivid dream like this from working with Ipos. Ipos was mum about it.
Freewrite:
There are A LOT of side avenues with this particular task. I’m going to touch on 3 of the parts – Confidence, Intuition, and Perspective. The three play into my practice and life heavily. Confidence was a rough one. I haven’t always had it. There are times when I’m still a bit “unsure” and this is a logical and healthy perspective to facing known “unknowns” and gaps in knowledge or foresight.
My Intuition came first and I can’t be sure whether it was born of necessity as I grew up or whether that just helped hone it to a degree. Most of my surrounding held uncertainty (abuse, hardship, instability) and this was the one tool I could use to face the hardships inside and outside the home/family. I learned to trust it quite a bit, while I also realized that I could cloud it by forcing my hopes and wants on it. Naturally, these intuitive experiences affected my perception and perspective.
Confidence didn’t really come until adulthood. I was finally out from under the abusive household and family I was born into. I completed Basic and Infantry School and had confidence in those areas, but not in other Life skills. That wouldn’t come until after Iraq, when I started College and worked through a good portion of it. Those types of experiences – ones not reliant on others, things they can’t take away – shifted my perspective and confidence incredibly and permanently.
Magically, I don’t think I had Confidence for several years. I was building on successfully establishing a professional life that was reliable and consistent. I didn’t use Magic or the Occult to get my positions outside of establishing goals, wanting to achieve them, and working towards that consistently. I think it would’ve affected my personal confidence if I had. I had to do it the old way, the hard way, or I wouldn’t believe I had earned it. That’s a ME thing, but that perspective is still there. Sometimes, intuition would play a part, but it was a small part, with nudges here or there to let me know I could follow this path or that.
Intuition is my biggest GOTO. I’ll send stuff out into the ALL, the Tao, and see what response I get back intuitively. Sometimes, this shifts my perspective when I see I need to (re)consider something. Sometimes I get an intuitive pull to act on something that may be counter to my typical work is something I’ve learned to listen to. I’m typically more confident when this happens, because it’s less likely that that is what I wanted to do. This can be not doing a ritual or delaying or not starting starting a campaign. I have the confidence in my abilities that I can do it and in my intuition that I need to delay or cancel the action.
Confidence with magic usually comes from actually doing magic and stepping outside one’s comfort zone. Sure, one can go from blessing a meal they are preparing to jumping head first into world events, but a gradual curve is largely smarter. Take up smaller parts of causes and be brutally realistic with the results. Too many magicians, even supposed “professionals”, take full credit and this hurts your inner confidence over time. How so? Because the real YOU knows you’re lying to yourself. You need to keep a sort of honest dialogue with that upper part of you, not the ego portion that wants to save the day and take all the credit. The weight of harder and harder things going the way you want is your indicator, not some freshman desire to be the prodigy.
Ipos indicated that this is enough, so I will call it here.
He chose Career and Confidence for the topics of the first Invocation/Evocation.
I: “You are concerned with not knowing enough for your current role to properly help your people. This is true, but only for the time being. You will soak up what you need. And I want you to use my sigil and draw it in the air to energize your (collective) workspace from time-to-time. This will help others also gain flashes of insight and boost productivity in a natural way, without the added stress of micro managing. That is all for today.”
I didn’t specialize in the areas I’m now managing people in and this has a tendency to cause me to worry a bit that I’m not doing enough for them (even though I am) and may not be understanding the problems correctly. I’m confident I’ll be okay in the long run, but he knows I’m not nearly as much at the moment. Largely only in this sector, though. Everything else is going really well.
(I was getting ready to look to see what is due for today when Ipos wanted to have a conversation first)
I: “You found success today.”
M: “Partial. It’s promising. I’m pleased it came our way.”
I: “Just happened to? You think about it all day long – how to move your team forward. You know that moving them forward will move you forward and put your vision for their paths in a trajectory you want to have happen, that you seek. This will continue to happen. Did you use magic?”
M: “Not intentionally. Intent on where I want things to go, putting energy into trying to find those things that will get us there. And a lot of worry and some self-doubt that I’ve run down everything I could.”
I: “(He nodded.) We’re done.”
M: “There are still things to do. Today’s work, the ritual.”
I: “You have done the day’s work and you simply need to add the elements to the given ritual above to make it whole. Kindly do so and I will look forward to working together again.”
M: “Thank you, Ipos.”
The Ritual:
He suggested drawing the sigil in a work area to energize and inspire those in that area, but I also saw a larger ritual in my head that can be done for larger areas. You can conceal that you are doing it by acting like you are drawing on a notepad or similar, if you don’t have a lot of privacy.
The essential acts are drawing the sigils in the four corners, which do not have to be the cardinal points. We aren’t trying to balance elements here, but define a boundary space. Chest level is fine. After this you will draw it in as close to the center space as possible or anywhere if you’re energetically inclined and can move it. The center will fill the space to the boundary points with the intent of that put into the drawing of it.
If you need the space recharged, then you can chant his enn like a mantra while focusing on the space or the points themselves. It doesn’t have to be loud or forceful.
Hail Ipos!
