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I had been practicing for four years before I ever thought about calling myself a "priest".
I had earned the title many times over, but someone else called me a Priest before I
would ever think about calling myself that.
7) An aversion to introspection.
A while ago, I did a series of articles on various things, one of which was "The Path of
the Magickian". It lays out the path a practitioner of magick treads in their journey. One
of the recurring themes of that article, and a critical component of anyone's spirituality,
was introspection.
Don't know what that is? Let me explain.
Introspection is "looking within". In an INspection, you look at things, adding "intro"
means within. So, you look within your mind, your soul, your body and find out what is
right, wrong, in need of correcting at a future time, and what can be put on hold
indefinitely. You look and find why you are pissed off when your sister takes the
attention at Christmas, you look and find out why you are tired at the end of the day, you
look and find out why that song on the radio made you cry. You find these things out so
you can apply them in your life. Want to be helpless every time "The Leader of the
Band" comes on the radio? Then find out why it makes you bawl your eyes out. I know
why it affects me, and how to keep it from affecting me to the point of having an
accident. But I would not have know that or how to "fix" it if I didn't go looking for the
cause and how to fix it.
Want to know why you don't have a lover in your life yet? Look at past relationships and
pay attention to what you were doing. Remember that when so-and-so grabbed the brush
out of your had that you flew into a rage is not enough, why did you fly into that rage? Is
it because they were rude, is it because you were not done yet, or was it because you
were afraid they would hit you with it like your mommy did? Are you insecure about
your looks and brushing your hair is a way to delay looking in the mirror and dealing
with how ugly you are? Or is it that he simply wanted to talk to you and you thought that
his doing that was incredibly rude? As GI Joe said at the end of every episode "Knowing
is half the battle".
Guess what.... When you know, you can say to your next lover, "Don't grab the brush out
of my hand, my mother used to do that just before she smacked me with it for being bad,
and it brings up a LOT of bad memories for me" or that you need to work on your temper
or your beauty self image issues. Thus, you can brake out of one cycle of behavior
through knowing WHY you reacted the way you did. Ninety percent of the time, without
breaking out of those cycles, you can't advance spiritually.
8) Not wanting to mess up.
This is probably the most insidious fluffy behavior there is, the desire not to screw up.
Conversely it's the easiest to correct.
You are asked to do something for your leader. Because you don't want to mess up and
you want to be looked upon as trustworthy and capable, you decide to do it and you jump
in with both feet. It does not matter that this is not something you are actually
knowledgeable in, and that you are incapable of doing this, you want to impress her and
your mates, so you do it. You do this without help, you mess up, mess up and mess up,
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