The flower I've been thinking about has been showing up in my visions etc turns out to be Nymphaea Caerulea also known as the Blue Lotus or The Blue Lily of the Nile. There are a variety of reasons that this is mind blowing for me, only some of which are posted here.

"The Sun was "reborn" each day from a great Blue Lotus blossom in some myths." This is the exact imagery that was in my head, this sky blue paling into white flower blooming and unfolding into the sun in the sky. This has been the central image/metaphor of the last couple of months of my self work.

And this flower just happens to be psychoactive.

They are a nexus connecting to different spaces and joying the world of man with that of nature. To be under the bridge is to be outside the world and among the mechanisms that allow it to operate. It is a zone of multple flows, orthogonal at different layers.

The Lion's Gate Bridge in vancouver has struts the shape of inguz and the perfect shade of green, The shade of growing, the colour of an open heart chakra. The colours and shapes I tattooed on my solar plexus.

{Lion,Sun,Heart}+{Ing,Blooming,Green}

Well... today I realized I am approaching the lowest point in my life, while simultaneously finding the mojo again.

Mundanely I'm at the worst point I've been in since suicide was a serious consideration. IF I was the person I was then, I probably would have killed myself this week. Despite being in the EXACT situation I've dreaded for... well... a long time, I can't actually bring myself to feel bad. I think I bottom out at 60%

I also realized that I was plugged into the synchronous field again. It was subtle... faint and tenuous in a way it never was before but IT WAS THERE. I suspect it was so faint because I just haven't been paying it attention. Or that my frequency just hasn't been compatible.

Over the last few days I've been "walking the circuits" and "feeding the spirits." At some point I consciously realized (or decided) that's what I was doing. As such I've been noticing zones, components and um powers coming online again with the kind of flicker and hum of cold war era bunker systems booting up.

Part of this remembering/deciding is that I'm not going to worship the gods of damaged goods (at least for a while) but will instead invoke the angels of my better nature. First on the docket is (feel free to laugh, I don't mind) Sheriff Andy Taylor.

PS if anyone has questions about my highly personal terminology, I'd be happy to attempt explanation.

"Rather, we transfer our present state of mind onto the cards and then, by transferring it back, read the unconscious expectations that we initially projected onto them." (Akron, H.R. Giger Tarot, p 13)

I tend to simplify and synthesize the functional description of systems down to four elements. For me this has proven the simplest useful description of how things work. These elements are the same as the classical four elements: fire, water, air, earth and as the suits of playing cards: clubs, hearts, spads, and diamonds.

Over the years I've layered so many different systems and processes over the four elements have become a kind of metaparadigm for me. I connect the parts of an interaction system relating to desires and intention with fire, feeling and perceptions with water, objectivity and analysis with air, and finally, physical reality and action with earth.

Written for an audience slightly less knowledgeble than this one, I suppose.

The Psyche is the total field of psychic possibility. It is every mode of awareness, every thought, that we can experience. For every possiblity we can embody, the opposite is also part of the Psyche. Every time we say we are something or say we aren't something we are staking out a position in this field, an unbalanced position. The sum total of these positioning statements is the Ego. The opposite of these statements is the personal Shadow. Normally we perceive reality from this Ego position and this distorts our experience of reality and our responses to it.

The true center of the Psyche is called the Self. It's where you would be if you didn't stake out any positions of opposition. While the Psyche is both one thing and its opposite, the Self is neither. The true Self is No Self. With an undistorted experience of the world we can respond naturally. It is the wellspring of energy that the psyche runs on. The farther away from this point you are the more of your energy is bound up in complexes and conflicts.

The purpose of Individuation is to release the hold that the Ego position has on you, accept that the shadow is also you, and start living from the Self. To move from inbalance to balance. To perceive and act in congruence with ourselves.

I feel like I'm waking up after a long sleep.

I'd been slowly dropping away interests and activities that used to matter to me. "Magic(k)" and the "Occult" ceased to be meaningful to me and I sold off over 2/3rds of my Magic Library. I started becoming more and more reclusive. I started leaving my house less often. I reduced talking to people on line.

I found that my motivation to work on any of my projects had stalled. I stopped working on my book. Despite the fact that I hung my shingle to work with people as a Life Coach I didn't put any effort into promoting the business or getting clients.

I basically lost all motivation to do anything.

I can come up with a number of reasons, or more honestly triggers, for this shift. A romantic possibility that I was a little too invested in collapsed. I suspect this was the main factor. A magazine project I was working on was abandoned by my partners on it. My magic related friends rejected what I was currently interested as irrelevant to them. I no longer had any overlaps for conversation about that aspect of my existence. This was the point where I said if what I was interested in wasn't magic then I wasn't interested in magic. A global journey I'd been planning got cancelled by my travel buddy. My closer friends moved away or stopped talking to me. And so on.

Before this downward trend I had been existing in a kind of manic intensity where the possibilities presented by my life were breathtaking. New ideas and revelations were coming thick and fast. And the self-transformative process I was going through was marked and positive. The last things I was working on before the uh black period was integrating Jungian Archetypes and a kind of ideosyncratic Taoism.

I started coming up again perhaps 2 weeks ago. I started a new project, writing a science fiction novel. I started my drawing program again and I've gotten decent at what I set myself up to practice. Despite this shift in direction I didn't... notice it. I was still asleep.

I started reading a couple of crossover occult books again. Both were books that I picked up during the true beginning of the large cycle I've been in. The peak of intensity that set the vector I've been on for close to ten months now. Both were books that I hadn't done much more than skim.

The first book was Meta-Magick: the book of Atem by Phillip H. Farber. NLP and Memetics as Magick using group exercises. Unfortunately there is not much that I could get out of the book without some other people to do the exercises with so I put that book down again for now. Synchronistically, though it linked me with an NLP forum where I randomly encountered the author. So the book is serving a purpose for me. I have a forum for NLP kinds of discussion now.

The second book was Towards an Archeology of the Soul: a paratheatrical workbook by Antero Alli and Friends. It's a reworking of the ritual technology he developed in his book All Rites Reversed but stripped of the Leary/RAW hippie-ness and deepened with a dark Jungian frame. Exactly what I needed, a ritual technology for spiritual rather than sorcerous work using body and space with a Jungian self-alchemy flavour. I highly recommend.

I hadn't seriously read the book because in that peak I mentioned earlier I projected rather heavily on it. Mostly a dark/negative charge. Relating in part to that romantic investment I mentioned. So it wasn't until everything was as dark as the charge I'd put on that book that I could read that book. It wasn't until I'd given up.

So it was early last week that I read the section named "The Alchemical Nigredo" and recognized where I was living. The shock of that recognition woke me up. This blackness wasn't the end of my evolution and growth it was a distinct and necessary PART of that growth. And from my awakened perspective I could see how this black phase had already started ending itself.

The nigredo experience was not pleasant. I don't think it would have been as unpleasant if I'd known what it was as I went through it but then I'm not sure I could have gone through it if I'd kept that awareness. It's kind of amazing to me that I could forget and fall asleep like that given how important the nigredo concept has been to me in the past.

Also interesting to me is the synchronistic way I set up the books to trigger an escape route. The way I'm picking up exactly where I left off when I fell asleep... the way I couldn't access the message of the books until they were needed. The... artfulness of how I set that up without awareness of setting that up. Just beautiful.