Cloud Cover: 70%

I am the heart, and Thou the Serpent. Wind thy coils closer about me. So that no light nor bliss may penetrate.

Obviously this verse is about the embrace of the coiled serpent. To prevent it from springing forth.

But is it not also a reference to Liber XXXI: III: 5? A statement on the effects of doing De Cultu on a daily basis. That as one does Resh four times a day, and the LBR thrice daily, The Mass of the Phoenix every night, at sunset, The Mass of the Holy Ghost and the Path Working at suitable times. Finally, spending time in each of the Eight Practices of Yoga, and pondering over the Five Points to meditate upon.

There are other meanings to this verse:

• The Aspirant is the female, waiting to be swept away by One's Holy Guardian Angel
• The sexual metaphor: [ It does describe an interesting sexual position, after all. ]
• The Serpent of Liber Arcanorum
• The Heart is one's spiritual center. The Serpent is the Kundalini. [ Similar, but not the same as I decribe as the result of practicing Du Cultu

They all are right. They all are wrong.

So you are wondering what this has to do with encryption. Nothing much, except that there are several levels upon which one can read, and under Liber LVX

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud Cover: 75%

Been neglecting my daily practice.

Still unemployed. Three interviews in three weeks. One call back from a company who had no idea what VOIP was. Job mandates a landline at home. That put an end to that job prospect.

Went to three street fairs/festivals, in the last three weeks. All were smaller than they were last year. All were much more "commercial" than in years past.

How "commercial"? Five years ago, the people running one of the events totally prohibited coke, pepsi, rc, etc. Sobe was the only soft drink allowed. This year, it was conspicious by its absence.

Whilst slightly more vendors were handing out free samples, nobody was giving away T Shirts this year. That did happen three or so years ago. Just before the dot com bust.

Kellogs was handing out free samples of a new breakfast cereal. Since I am on a medical diet that prohibits grains, I didn't try it out. The design on the front of the package implies strawberries are the major ingredient. Nice concept.

Another vendor was giving away samples of pomegranate juice. I have no idea who the vendor was. Their sample reminded me why I do not like processed juices. Juicing vegetables and fruit yourself makes a much better tasting beverage.

I was chided by my friends for eating so little. Some raw almonds, the freebie pomegranate juice, and two or three bananas during the afternoon, wandering through the fair. And some curly fries, which made me sick. [ Potatoes are prohibited on my diet. I had forgotten that, when I bought the fries.]

At one of the fairs, the only food that vendors had, that was acceptable for the diet I am on, was roasted asparagus. That vendor did not go to the other fairs.

At the fair I went to yesterday, I made a special effort to find something that I could eat. Skipping meat products --- I am a vegetarian -- left me with choices of roasted corn, which is a no no on the diet, curly fries, which is another no no, strawberry shortcake, which contains a plethora of items that are a no no, and candy floss, which is a distinct no no.

I'll go to the street fair during the summer solstice, and see if the food selection is any better.

There was a solar eclipse of the sun on 30 May. Which I slept through. I meant to watch it through one of the live cams.

It shouldn't have affected me, as I am far from the path of the eclipse. I have been somewhat more restless the last couple of days. Not sure whether or not that is due to the eclipse, or other factors.

I got an email today, stating that the moon had been sighted at 19.46H local time, in Tekoa . Which means that I have one reliable source for the start of a new lunar month. [ Last month they sent an email on the Sabbath, stating that the moon had not been sighted.]

It would have been more useful, had the Islamic list I am on, also sent an email stating either that the moon had, or had not been sighted. The solar eclipse does not count, in a new moon sighting.

The solstice is in three weeks. The middle of the season of growth. If I am working, I will make, a dedicate a new Oktogrammaton Board then.

An interesting thing about the YiJing and Tarot, is how differently they treat time. The YiJing has time either as a wheel, or a spiral. The Tarot has time as linear.

Despite their being more cards in a Tarot deck, than Gua in the YiJing, I see more granularity in the YiJing. Probably because I have spent much longer playing with the YiJing.

Neither system has anything like the Seth/Jane Robert's axiom: All Time is simultaneous.

Seth / Jane Roberts have an interesting spin on Reality. An individual constantly re-creates their own reality. I have come to the conclusion that that is correct. When I was last unemployed, I was hired, once I decided upon the company that I would work for. Two weeks later, I was attending their training session. The first one that they had had in two or three months, and two or so months before they planned to do so. This period of unemployment, all I have been able to come up with, is companies I do not want to work for, and positions that I do not want, on various grounds.

I will start doing Tarot Readings, and/or YiJing Consultations, to make ends meet.

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud Cover: 90%

I have been doing the daily readings outlined in Thelemic Tephilah since the end of The Three Holy Days of Thelema. Basically, it is a verse or two a day, for most of the year. It only covers Liber Cordis, Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli, and Liber Al vel Legis. During the Holy Season of Thelema roughly half the Class A texts are read.

This is the first time I have go through the Holy Books a verse at a time, one per day. And read it with no reference to surrounding verse. Each text stands on its own. It makes a big difference in what the verse seems to say.

Today, for example, the text is:

Intoxicate the inmost, O my lover, not the outermost!

Read in context of the other verses, it appears to refer to Pan, who partied the previous day, but did not get drunk. But in isolation, I get a complete different take on the verse.

The lover is one's Holy Guardian Angel. The inmost is one's spiritual development, whilst the outermost refers to one's mundane life. The idea is that one should be constantly at prayer like the Anonymous Pilgrim at prayer .

But a Thelemic one, not a Christian one.

Or maybe a Thelemic Hymn

Along with Liber Resh and LBR four times a day and the Gnostic Creed

Is doing them a verse at a time a bug, or a feature? The results are very mixed for me. Sometimes the specific verse seems to be applicable to me that very day, other times it is just a confusing welter of images. In the past, I've done a chapter at a time, and gotten a completely different feel for the text. Not as personally applicable, as a verse at a time, but also not as seemingly way off course, as a verse at a time can do.

And this makes me A Centre of Pestilence

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud cover: 95%

I just found out that there is one item that microsoft makes that I actually like. I did not know that they had it in them.

The item: A font: Lucinda Sans Unicode to be precise. I have it on my linux box, and thought that it was just one of those freebie fonts that everybody gives away.

I use it most of the time, because I like the typeface. And the fact that I can write in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew writing systems, without changing fonts. [ Granted, in OpenOffice there is a thing to tell OOo to switch to an Asian writing system..]

Between MS UI Gothic, Lucinda Sans Unicode and Enochian, my font requirements are pretty well covered. If I need others, Dante.de probably has them. They are not Unicode, though. :-(

I will not repeat my earlier Unicode rant. Though doing so would be in good /. tradition.

I did find the Code2000 font, which appears to be fairly complete. Have not yet installed it. Then there is also Ariel, which has 58K character, and is Unicode 4.0. Now can I find one font that covers the 128K characters of Unicode 4.

I was reading FAQ about Font's earlier today. It has not been updated since 14 August 1996. Matt dropped it, and nobody else has picked it up. That is a six year old FAQ, and the age shows. There is this one on UTF-8 which is more useful than Matts. Still didn't point me a comprehensive font, though. Czyborra.com is almost as comprehensive, and has allegedly Unicode 3.0 compliant fonts.

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud Cover: 90%

I just did a search on Google. I don't quite own Wind under Thy Wings, but this post on spamming is at the top of the list. True, there are only two sites indexed with that phrase.

If Google ever indexes this blog, I will own the phrase, as far as Google is concerned.

Cheery thought. Now to go write some more for my book.

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud Cover: 85%

Technology of the mind is what I am writing about. If that confuses you, this is /. --- subject icons do not have to agree with subject contents.

The Method of Science
The Aim of Religion

Motto of The Equinox

Success is thou Proof.
Liber Al Vel Legis

It is one thing to do a religious practice. It is another thing to actually believe it. Do you practice your religion, or do you merely believe in it?

Better still, does your religion discourage belief, in favor of practice? I suspect most people in the states have heard jokes about "Sunday Christians". Go to Church on Sunday Morning, and look impressive. Rest of the week one would wonder if they ever heard of religion, much less believed in one. [ That would make a good sermon.]

Ever noticed that Jews are either described as an observant Jew or just a Jew. OK, so Google did have the following " non - observant Jew " phrase.

From that, one can deduce that practice is equal to faith, for at least one religious group.

Now how about the practice, with neither the belief nor acceptance of that faith? Most religions would say that is being hypocritical. Thelema would have you do just that.

Do the spiritual practices, and keep your original beliefs.

Whilst I have hard time seeing a Christian studying her Bible, saying a prayer, and then doing the LBRP, this site seems to think the two can mix.

Do the appropriate rituals for a month, and see what spiritual changes one undergoes. That is all that Crowley asked people to do.

Do not believe me. Test it out for yourself.

Is one of his better quotes. Most Guru-types insist of blind faith. He detested blind faith. Indeed, an arguement can be made this his books were written to show those who have blind faith in him that they are idiots.

The technology: De Cultu is the daily practice. Thelemic Tephilah is the Bhakti.

Just follow those two things, and one is a practicing Thelemite. No belief required. More to the point, if one does De Cultu daily, one does more practical ritual work on a daily basis than most Thelemites do.

And no, one does not have to believe, much less accept Liber Al Vel Legis

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud Cover: 70%

Some years ago, I read the book Chasing Gods not our own. [ I do not remember who the author was.] It is the story of how Europeans systematically destroy African culture. A slightly more academic version of Something of Value by Robert Ruark.

But the two books are not the same. In one, civilization is removed, in the other civilization is replaced. In both, the traditional culture is discounted.

Hakim's lists it with an author of SME Bengu. Google only has 4 910 listings of the name Bengu As I recall, it was written by a Nigerian, which would more or less exclude this SME Bengu though my impression may be simply because Nigeria is a bleeding edge country falling into the clutches of Islam. Islam attacked Traditional African Culture from inland, and Christianity attacks it from the coast. Between the two, the traditional cultures are destroyed.

Amazon, as can be expected, does not list it.Or at least Amazon Light did not find it.

But I think of that title in a more personal way. What is the religious heritage of my great grandparents? What was the religion of my great-*-grandparents?

My Fathers's Mother traces a lineage back to Guy Fawkes Solid Roman Catholic from at least 1600. My Father's Father hit a rough spell between 1400 and 1850. From 1850 they were Roman Catholics. But they were expelled from Spain during the Fifteenth century. Probably political, but it need not have been. Christopher Columbus is probably the best known Spanish Jew. Leaving town just before the curfew set it.

My Mother's side of things is a little more stable. Solid Scottish. Clan Gunn Sept Jameson. Either wild picts, or tame norsemen. In either case, Druid or Asatru, then Roman Catholic, then Church of Scotland . Neither side wandered far from home --- the migration from the Orkney Islands was at the pleasure of the reigning monarchs.

OTOH, this quest for roots, and research family trees, can be viewed as just another aspect of racism.

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud Cover: 50%

It has been mentioned to me that one of the "problems" I have in interviews, is that i do not list all my job skills. That a good researcher, picking up my resume, will find education that I omit from the list, job skills I fail to mention, and outside activities that are not even hinted at.

[ Nothing bad. Things like the college courses in communication I took, or my certification as a missing person's investigator. Digging further back, they might discover I set a record selling speciality boxes one Christmas.]

Most of the stuff I omit is difficult to verify. More difficult than the things I do list.

[ Every company I have ever worked went out of business. My former managers have scattered to the far corners of the planet, never to be heard from again. The college I attended no longer exists. The high school I attended was history before I graduated from college. The secondary school I attended was shut down before I graduated from high school. The primary school I attended became a high school. The kindergarten I attended no longer exists.]

All that seems to be the practice of adhering to the Fourth Power of the Sphinx.

Wednesday, I had a job interview, in which they asked about non-computer job skills.

My instant response was:I can cut a stencil, run a Gestetner and a Roneo machine. Also cut plates for the Addressograph machine, frank them and get them mailed out ."

A blank stare was the response. The interviewer was vaugly familiar with cutting stencils, but had no idea why people ever did that. She did know what a franking machine was, but had never heard of Addressograph. As for the mail, that was Fedex or UPS.

Once upon a time, a hotel hired me, because I was the only candidate who knew how to run things manually. Maybe I should go back to hotel work.

Another quasi-rant.

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud Cover: 75%

Said the weather was improving.

Practicing ceremonial magick leads to Enlightenment, hence the use of that journal topic tag. To all those who object, it it really any worse than seeing duplicate, or triplicate, or even quadruplicate articles on /. ?

Anyway, I did Resh an hour or two late, because I was working on my book, and not paying attention to either the sun, or time. I can not even see the sun in my computer room. Book cases and / or computers cover the windows.

I don't need a reminder like this one for daily prayers, but More like this. except geared for when to do Resh , and orientated towards Boleskine, rather than for saying saying Salat, and orientated towards Mecca.

OTOH,this is the religion that celebrates Mass, A Holy Season, The Three Holy Days, Tephilah, Rembrances of Enochian Workings Past, and The Paris Working, but they best imitation of a Siddur or a Missal is Mickley which omits the liturgy, amongst other things.

Of course, with a calendar as complicated as they have, do they have time to do anything else, but determine how to correctly write the date?

Wind under Thy Wings

Cloud cover: 80%

Whee, did not realize is that low. Weather must be getting better.

I've been reading emails in various threads on Thelema. Did not realize that so few Thelemits knew the correct salutatation.

It is not as if it were something that was hard to find, like De Cultu. Liber Al vel Legis has been distributed on the internet since at least 1985, if not earlier. Dead tree versions ahve been in print since 1925, albeit sometimes, but not always, in pirated form.

XXXI:I:40 and XXXi:I:56 are fairly straightforward verse.

The Thelemic Salutation is: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
and Love is the law, love under will.

Anybody can read it at Liber Al Vel Legis

I:40: Who calls us Thelemites will do no wrong, if he look but close into the word. For there are therein Three Grades, the Hermit, and the Lover, and the man of Earth. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

and in

I,57: Invoke me under my stars! Love is the law, love under will. Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the law of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of God.
All these old letters of my Book are aright; but Tzaddi is not the Star. This also is my secret, my prophet shall reveal it to the wise.

Simple. Really simple.

So we get things like:

• Do what Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law,
• Do what thy Wilt
• Do what thou wilt
• Ninety-Three
• Love under Law
• 93/93
• 93

The last two are found in email. But the others are either used in email, or said verbally.

Why are these practioners of magick unable to say their own salutation correctly? Sloppiness, or are the Poesers?

The one thing they can not claim is that they are using a textual variation. This is not one of those passages where Crowley's handwriting is semi-illegible.

Likewise, they have obviously forgotten the Four powers of the Sphinx --- assuming that they knew them in the first place.

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud cover: 96%

I'm still thinking about that anonymous blog thing that was discussed on /. the other day.

I can see why somebody would want to use that service, but the other half of me is why bother, since the odds of anybody else reading the blog journal are slim, to non-existent.

There are a couple of people with high profiles in the blogworld, and then a couple of hundred thousand who are way below anybody's radar. Like anybody who uses /. as a blog. Might get noticed by one or two people on /., but nobody else.

Do a google search for the string "/." sometime. Nothing shows up. Low profile, bad algorithm, or something else? True, slashdot gets 2 930K listings.

K5, OTOH, gets 711K hits. Kuro5hin gets 405K.

People prefer the abbreviations, and google doesn't handle some abreviations well.

The point being somebody could put the entire life somewhere like /. journals, and nobody would ever find the page.

Do a google search for the string Wind under Thy Wings, and a whopping one site shows up. Their suggested Wind under The Wings has a total of 39 sites. IOW, it would be very easy for somebody to own either, or both of those expressions. But only if they are one of those high profile bloggers, that google hits on a daily basis.

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Cloud Cover: 93%

On my website is a partially hidden page Books and Crime. An indirect copy of an article that appeared in Creative Loafing / Atlanta sometime between 1989 and 1991. I just found a photocopy of the page with the two missing pieces.

The Crime: Shoplifting

Required Texts

• The Koran, by a bunch of people.
• The Old Testament, also by a bunch of people.
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevski

Banned Texts

• Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman

The Crime: Drunk and Disorderly

Required Texts

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee.
• Zelda by Nancy Mitford
• Mister GOd, This is Anna, by Mr Fynn.

Banned Texts

• Mr Boston's Deluxe Official Bartender's Guide
• Vintage, The Story of Wine
• The Collected Works of Charles Bukowski.

When I get my website reconfigured, I'll include all of them.

Oh, the author of the article was John D Thomas, and Rodger Brown. The title was Critical Choice: Novel Punishment # 1. I have no idea whether or not they did any sequels to that list.

The first paragraph describes why they wrote the story:

Last week, the Associated Press reported that Judge John E Rochester, of Montgomery, Alabama, ordered two men who pleaded guilty to drug charges to read five books and file reports on each one. This week we give a required reading list, as well as a "banned text list," for convicted criminals.

Pure plagarism on my part. But I doubt Creative Loafing will object to a ten plus year old story, that they did as a lark.

And yes, this is looking more like a blog than I had originally thought I would write.

Wind under Thy Wings

Cloud Cover: 95 percent

Still unemployed. Only thing that even resembled an interview this week was from an idiot who thinks I have a series 7 licence.He is an idiot. My resume says nothing about being a being a stockbroker, or working in the insurance field. Much less claim that I have any of the licences requried for that field.

Submitted between 20 and 30 resumes. One call back. I returned the phone, to get voicemail. I'll try them again tomorrow.

I'm not sure why I even bother submitting resumes anymore. The temp agencies I used to work through are not even looking at people that used to work for them. Addeco was impressed with my typing speed --- 67 wpm, and my scores on Word. B Everything they have requires somebody who has done one thing for the last umpteen years. My experience is too varied for them to place me.

Do I go pitch a product I do not believe in, using a method I find unethical, simply to get money to pay rent? Buddhism, oddly enough, with its concept of "Right Livelihood", does admit that it is better to earn a wage, even if doing the wrong thing, that to not be working. The idea is that by working, one can look after one's dependents. The other half of that is that is acceptable, only until one can change to a livelihood that does not harm others.

So can I justify doing the wrong thing, in the name of taking care of self and dependents? I am having a very hard time twisting that one thru. Not sure that I can.

This hasn't made me feel any better, but there is a place up the road that is apparantly hiring, that I have not applied to. Not Right Livelihood, but still. The guy who manages practices his beliefs. Which is one good thing.

Wind under Thy Wings

Why do companies Lie in their recruitment adds? At least half of the "customer service" positions on monster.com are really sales jobs. Three quarters, or more, of the "customer service" positions on HotJobs are for sales positions.

Why can't the companies just put that in the first line, and not wait till the job interview to say: "But this is a sales position."

Granted, I'm frustrated at only having one job interview in three months of unemployment. And that for a sales job I would have turned down, had I known they company was lying about the position they were offering.

Then there are companies like Live Ops that offer customer service/telemarketing positions from one's home. One needs to be able to make phone calls, whilst browsing the net. OK.

So why do they think I have to have microsoft's junk to fill out the application? Konqueror, Galeon & Mozilla took me to that stupid site, to download MIE 6.0. never mind that nothing from that stupid company works on a Linux platform.

I thought I could fill it out using Lynx, but lynx does not support Active Server pages. :-(

Can I just call LiveOps, another dead company that does not realize that there are better alternatives out there than the junk from taht company that has yet to release any software that is either bug free, or works according to their claimed specifications.

The Advertising Standards of South Africa has a nice thing to say about the lies about their junk. Though why I did not read that in my hometown newspaper is another question.

I just took another look at one of my search agents at Monster. Changed it to show results for the whole country. 34 listings for the last thirty days, in all of the united states. No wonder I think my speciality is out of date. Half of them don't even require my speciality. They throw it in becuase it is a buzz word that sounds impressive. May handle calls that require "skill x". Blah. Sounds like inbound, but I can be fairly confident that it is outbound.

Who wants to hire somebody who can read thirty languages fluently, and is working on Chinese and Japanese. I'm stuck on the Kanji. I can read HiraGana and KataKana fairly well. These books are pretty good. I just haven't spent the two hours a day on the kanji, to remember them. Somebody joked that I would not be staisfied until I had passed Chinese Proficiency Test and Japanese Language Proficiency Test and Korean Language Proficiency Test.

Think that waving those around would do any good? Not in that bastion of monolinguilism known as the united states. OTOH, I do think that Singapore has a great business climate --- especially for what I studied at college. There, those certifications would not mean much, but would ensure that I could communicate with most of the population. If only Sharia Law were not the foundation of their legal system.

Wind under thy Wings

Amber

Temperature: 28.6 degrees: Cloud cover 80%

I haven't been doing much.

Why write when there is nothing to write? I expect /. posts so many dup articles, simply because they feel a pathalogical need to look like they are providing news.

Browsing Wikipedia I found a couple of sites that had Chinese text on them. I could read them. So I looked at zh.wikipedia.org, and got Latin characters. It seems that only part of it uses Unicode. Why can't they all use Unicode?

The default language setting on my browser is UTF-16. Asia Yahoo notes in Afrikaans ( Or did I do that on Google? I havne't bothered to change that setting), the browser commands in Japanese, and the listing in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. All display perfectly well.

So why can't these other places at least use UTF-8, if not UTF-16?

At least I can write my book with Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, English, and Enochian text on the same page.

Wind under They Wings