Part of this process is it was me coming up with a method, the process trauma that I had without knowing about anything else that would help.
And so part of it is actually kind of revisiting your previous self at critical junctions where things went really fucking south.
And either like coming in when somebody should have stood up for you and you imagine yourself walking into that space and standing up for your previous self.
Or you know that if you'd gotten a particular kind of support, maybe it wouldn't have had as much downstream effects.
And so it's going back and really putting yourself in that space and your imagination and going, "Hey, that was fucked up, but we're okay."
And so you can let it go.
And I have all that shit here hanging on to you right now, because I know how to process it now, you know.
Welcome to the Re-Patterning Podcast, where we believe your mind-body system is your domain and that choosing the beliefs, habits, and patterns that best support you is your birthright.
I'm your host, Arden Lee, creator of the Re-Patterning Project, an eight-week course in learning to free yourself from the patterns of your past and program your mind for your dreams of the future.
Join me for these extraordinary conversations as we unpack the keys to creating our reality.
Welcome back to the Re-Patterning Podcast. I'm your host, Arden Lee, and I am so excited to welcome today's guest, Aidan Wachter.
Aidan is a practicing witch and animist, and also the author of three books, six ways, approaches and entries for practical magic, weaving fate, which I have my copy of right here.
Hi, Brazigels, changing the past and telling true lies and changeling a book of qualities.
I'm really excited to chat with Aidan today, because when I started reading some of his work, I recognized so much simpatico between Aidan's approach and the approach of the Re-Patterning Project, which is the eight-week course that I teach that inspires these conversations on this podcast.
By the way, if you're listening, chances are we are presently enrolling for the next session.
You can check us out more at thereepatoningproject.com or you can go on Instagram to @thereepatoningproject and you can find out the details of enrollment there.
And what I really, really love about Aidan's approach is that it feels to me like the very witchy sensory-based right-brained approach to the same truth that the Re-Patterning Project arrives at from a very analytical, logical, left-brained approach.
One of the reasons I'm so excited to have Aidan on today is that I want as many people to understand this sort of basic truth of reality and human nature and life and magic and agency as many people as possible to be able to access that deep spiritual wisdom.
So I really hope that today's conversation with Aidan might help some of the folks who may be resonate more with that more organic and right-brained approach to understand some of the things that I've been sharing on the show already.
So Aidan, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. I'm super excited to chat with you today.
It's excellent to chat with you. It's been a while since we have. So it's super nice.
It has. Aidan, you guys. Aidan has been a guest teacher in my advanced container. Twice. I was extremely honored to welcome him. And he's blown everyone's minds each time he comes in and chats with us. So I'm really excited to talk with him today too.
I definitely want to start off with the first book of yours that I personally read, which is weaving fate, hyper-sidials, changing the past and telling true lies. And I was reading in the beginning where you're talking about deconditioning and stripping away some of the beliefs that we get conditioned with over time or that there are moments in our past that form.
And I, yeah, I just want to start with that actually. Maybe can you tell people maybe about what your approach was or the approach that you guys others through in order to do that work.
Yeah. So I came to that. You've been around me. So you know, I'm going to background everything. Please do. I was thinking about this in relationship to this conversation because I know what you do. And I listen to the grant Morrison and Doug Rushkov.
Thanks to see how you're running things. They were both great. So thank you. I'm honored. Thank you.
How I got into magic was through punk rock. And I met these anarchists dudes who were a couple years older than me. And one of them was a magician. And they were all way more into kind of industrial music at that time. And this would have been 82.
And one of the guys, it may have been a more general discussion. But I remember one of those guys turned me on to this idea that he referred to as tape loops.
And the best way that for people now is before there was sampling and before there was digital sampling and all that stuff that we just take for granted now.
If you wanted to do that kind of thing in music, you would actually record a looped sound of something like an instrument or a vocal. And then you would play it on tape decks. And so this was what tape loops were. And that just stuck with me. And the more as I was kind of in the back burner until I got heavily into magic.
And then as I was doing that, I began seeing people who ostensibly knew what they were doing and had way more kind of book knowledge than I did. But I could watch them running these loops that were to me really counterproductive to the work of magic.
Oh boy, that is a whole mood.
Right, that you're like, oh, you're really stuck on it has to go exactly right or it has to go exactly this way. And so if you try to light a candle in a ritual and the light is not cooperating, you lose your shed.
And to me, that was crazy because it's like, it's got to, you've got to be way more resilient than that. Right. It's like, what if you never get it list? Does that mean you can't do magic to me? That's fucking absurd. Right.
Yeah. And then just consistently over time, I would have moments where I would be doing something and I would realize like, I don't know why I'm doing it except there's a little voice that's telling me like, you're doing it cause you're doing it cause, but that's part of the loop.
It's part of the program. And so you could kind of interrogate it for why and it would come up with all sorts of wise, but it was really clear that they were all empty.
Like the why I was really just because it's what we've done before. It's what we've been taught to do. And I could see this in most people that I knew in a very unquestioning way, particularly like teachers and parents and folks like that because I got into this stuff when I was quite young.
And so I began thinking about it then, but I don't think I really got a handle on it until I was reading. I think probably for the second time of the amber books by Roger Zalazni. Have you read those nine princes in amber?
I have not actually I've not even heard of those. That's the first it's nine princes through the courts of chaos are the good ones. And anyway, I was already practicing pretty heavily. I'd read it before I got serious, but I know at this point I've been practicing and was considering what I was doing.
I was practicing and was considering myself the chaos magician at that time. And the thing is really interesting in those books is there's reasons behind it, but some of the characters can basically walk between worlds.
And the way that they do it is they like get on a horse or they walk or they get in a car. And as they're traveling, they go, OK, but what if the ocean was not on my right. And they could have it shift the other side.
And they could do this and kind of move between kind of planes of existence to me. This was a great description of magic.
Like we begin to remove the things that aren't correct for us and replace them that think with things that are closer.
And eventually we end up in a completely different world and in a completely different life. So that's what was kind of the roots of all of that stuff for me.
I actually want to read just a couple paragraphs from weaving fate that really particularly moved me. Is that all right with you? Yeah, absolutely.
This is the stuff that when I read this, it just it really clicked for me so much. And I was like, you know how would they say like a lie like can manifest in a thousand different ways.
But the truth always has sort of the same ring to it. This is how I felt reading this part of your book. So I'm just going to share this with our audience.
If we can move and shift ourselves free of these lockdown and rigid belief structures, we can return to something like a native or intrinsic state.
This is a way of being that existed before the desires of others became our own before all of life was mediated and sold back to us from this intrinsic state.
And we can begin to live a life that fully suits us as we are today right now, not when we came up with when we were 16 and we were told we had to decide who and what we would be when we were all grown up if we were offered a say in it at all.
Making these shifts is to begin steering our faiths to become co-creators of our lives alongside the weavers.
And we wish to change the outcomes we experience to alter the trajectory of our lives. We are best served by changing it at the roots of the tree at first causes rather than attempting to conjure different fruit or ends directly.
We do this by addressing those causes which produce the effects already in play that we wish to modify.
And we want us to shift or transform them into powerful drivers that lead to more suitable outcomes or states of being by altering important points along the trajectory of our lives.
We can achieve different end states much of what we base our current experience on our memories of the past.
We recall what has happened before interpreted as good bad or neutral and we extrapolate from those memories to see where we are likely to end up next.
And we often dictate what we believe about ourselves and our situation which helps to form what we think of as our self identity from a sorceress perspective our identity controls not only our current position but our sense of what is possible.
And so our future outcomes as well.
I just got chills reading that again even though I've read it many times already.
And I've been a little bit about how you arrived at that conclusion of deconditioning for yourself.
So I came in to magic through the temple of psychic youth.
And the temple of psychic youth was started by Genesis, your age and Peter Christopherson as a project they did after throwing gristle broke up.
There was always this deconditioning element in there and I'd had the experience when I was so I found that when I was 15 or 16 and around the same time I also took part as the youngest person that had ever been allowed in to you and asked off shoot kind of encounter group weekend.
And he was also addressing this kind of stuff directly focused a bit more of course not on what I would be interested in but given who was kind of had the money to do this in general you know it was more business folks and kind of that usual thing that you get out of that stuff.
And what I figured out from watching that was I could like look at my parents and go okay and later in life asked them it's like how much of what you did did you decide on and they were like well all of it and you're like no no no no like how much did you actually sit and think and go I want to do this life like this.
And both of them were like never and I was like oh okay this is what's wrong with me right this is not fitting in because this is super critical to me like why would I want that and some of those things I did want and I still asked that like okay I want to be you know it was super nerd of virgin weird nerdy punk stoner kid way more interested in music and science fiction than anything else you know it all of that I just
like lead to sending me down that like why do you people want what they want and I believe it's almost entirely conditioning and essentially there's like a good form of
conditional conditioning and there's a bad form right and the good form is what we see in what most of the places we see it now or what we call indigenous cultures that have managed to hold on to it but the language that I prefer to use is like functional society.
And to me a functional society is one that everybody in it is functional and not productive that's different that's you know capitalism speak but that they're okay like they they know who they are they know where they are and within those kinds of cultures in in functional societies you have all of these stories that explain where you live what your interrelationships with the landscape are with the animal.
With the ecology and with the spirits with the dead with each other and what I could see and still see here is that we don't have any of us we have kind of everything is production aspiration and so everybody nobody and I think this is why people are so crazy not necessarily in a clinical sense but that too is because we're looking for ground that it doesn't exist within our culture.
And we know on that intrinsic level that you know we're reading about what that is and what it would feel like and so we have this huge amount of like loss and grief in no way to process it because it's never even addressed as being relevant or if it is it's in really shitty ways it's you know nationalism and stateism and corporatism are you pretty enough or you wealthy enough all these things that shouldn't matter but we have a totally different way of doing that.
But we have a totally dysfunctional society and so to me all that is is programming is a big part of the work of magic for me because I believe that magic is in a neat thing within us is getting rid of enough of that or at least getting to where you can see it and pick and choose that you can actually get to that state where you can do magic.
Because otherwise you're doing like the wrong things for the wrong reasons and this is I think the biggest issue that I see for folks that are kind of drawn to spiritual practices is often they're not given a real understanding of like what that would even before it's like super vague and if you could kind of go, hey maybe it's to get you operating outside of those programs or at least choosing them because some of them work.
Some of them are very good it's not necessarily you know it's arguable that some spiritual systems are seeking to get outside of all of that but I would argue that they have their own cultural conditioning within those systems because it still has to fit that model or they don't accept it you know.
And so to me that's kind of the most baseline piece of magic is like can you get control of yourself and control of your situation at least enough to know what you think about the situation you're in or real that's not mediated it wasn't fed to you.
Yeah I feel like it's a very difficult point to get across to a lot of contemporary occultists.
I just read actually just the other day Matt Orin shared a quote from Christopher Penn's act and I didn't prepare it some paraphrasing but essentially what that quote said was the external things that we can get through magic you know a new job a new lover like those are great and you know but really what I respect most deep down is people who do the spiritual work to change not their external circumstances but themselves to gain more confidence to gain.
You know as sort of spiritual grounding and sense of calm and and to be able if you like if you change yourself you're going to change the way that everything everything that you interact with and I believe that that really is what Re-Patterning is about you know and there's plenty of ways both mundane and magical to rewire the brain and change your own interstate of being which is you know primarily what I teach and I always tell people you know I really think.
I think that's the first seven years of your practice and make sure every sigil that you cast starts with the word I change yourself first and then you know after that point you know and i'm not saying don't open your roads to certain outcomes or whatever you know sure give yourself the you know the things that you want but.
Before you try and control anything else in your external reality and I find it so difficult to get that across to so many occultists who let's face it a lot of people in the occult world are more than a little bit unhinged and are stuck in these sort of power grabs I have magic i'm going to use it to control and dominate things and if you're trying to tell me to be a little goody to choose you's over here and just work on myself you know that's not interesting to me not only is it not interesting.
But I kind of think you're a was for you know not going out and grabbing that yeah how would you communicate what we're speaking about to that archetype of person because man I have tried.
So I have like a I tend to hit a problem in there anyway with folks that are wired that way because I'm a hardcore animist and so for me animism is not metaphorical at all.
I'm fully immersed in a world that I have very very regular spirit contacts and have for years they're verifiable in that what they suggest is not what I would tend to do a lot of the time without having some guidance and if I do that things work and then they often connect through other people to me like they will have other people tell me things because I'm not the most clairvoyant person so like I have a good friend that will appear.
I can call me up and go hey these people you work with they want this on the altar and like when I bring it to them it's really clear that's true and it's just like I'm not clear enough in that particular way that's not a skill I have to pick up on so those folks tend to have an issue with me anyway because they also tend to be very materialist even if they do on some level kind of buy in that there's something else going on they're viewing it in a materialist way I think.
But how I talk about it so by the time this comes out I'll have it I'll be running a course on kind of building a practice in the way that I suggest for people and the first document kind of talks about what we just said and how I kind of define it is a little PDF called playing records that's the first thing you get when you get in there and it's basically saying like okay what we tend to do is operate like a vinyl record or for modern people like a play.
Right. It's track one through 800 and you tend to hang out in maybe the top 30 and they kind of recursively feed into one another right if that's going on you don't know what you want.
You think you do but you know what you were programmed to want and that's the issue with that approach is it's like if you don't do that work you're trying to fill a void without knowing the shape of that void.
And without knowing the depth of that void and so that kind of self knowledge is hugely important in one of the great things about results magic is it's a really rough road but it's a great teacher of all the things that aren't satisfying.
And so for everybody that quits five years in or ten years in because they are still unsatisfied it's like I think they missed the turn off and the turn off is at some point is going like wait a second if I can manifest all this stuff and I'm still not happy what's up.
Yeah.
And it's like okay well you're manifesting something that isn't what the actual thing that you need is but you know it's a hard sell because people were way certain we're I think we getting trench about things that we feel certain about because we have like an emotional attachment to that you know it's like what we're talking about at the beginning like if
like I just would never create a ritual that's done outside that requires me starting a fire if that's the key point there do that inside right because it's like why are you going to set yourself up to fail.
There's a million ways you could do a ritual for the same thing there's no singular pass.
Yeah so I think it's interesting it's and I also think it's tough because it's there is a reality that we do need to have enough of the stuff that is socially and culturally required to get by but you have to also find a way to get some space from that if you possibly can.
So in those spaces you can go okay but what's what's real to me what do I really need here and I think a lot of people just never get there because they don't get the space.
And I also think people like now especially people don't get what practice is when it comes to spiritual stuff and that's the course that I'm teaching is is called building a practice because it's about that because it's this exact thing we're talking about it's like if you sit down and do a particular kind of energy working once.
You had an experience but it doesn't do anything 30 40 50 100 times down the road you changed your neurology that's what practice does it's and this is why you know people are super fascinated by spells and rituals and sigils and they aren't great at that thing they aren't the best tool to rewire what's going on up here and coming from kind of an animatism.
So I think from kind of an animatism perspective active for most of us that aren't super psychic by nature and a lot of us just don't get there until you do some of that rewiring you don't get contact with the other things and that's what's really useful to me so like I start everybody off making offerings to allies it's like we don't care that's number one.
You don't need to know who they are now you don't need to who they are ever it's like the assumption is if you're alive and you're you know older than nine you have them is this is not this is a sketchy planet for you know animals and so we just run on that is a given and start trying to build that relationship and that's kind of the first thing that I run you know and the funny thing about that is people will go well I'm an animatism and I'm like it doesn't matter.
This is a language a way you can view it is that this is a language that you are kind of deep mind you're kind of deep self understands it doesn't have anything to do with whether you believe it if you cut up a bowl of fruit and offer it to your allies with a candle every day that's doing stuff in here.
Even if you believe that all that's happening is just internal the results are interestingly similar you know.
I love what you also mention about how building a practice will change your neurology over time and that that for me has also been really huge especially in the last few years in my first several years of practicing magic so much of my focus was on Re-Patterning on changing my beliefs and I was maybe doing you know I would pull cards I would
be a little bit more divine and I would cast a spell maybe every couple months for something that I needed and I would get results from that often those spells as I said were on myself and in the last few years my circumstances changed in some ways in that I began really building things and there were also some situations in my life that required more regular and intensive magic that I was tackling and in doing this I ended up with a practice that you know I still
to this day maintain where I'm defining literally almost every day and I know there are some occultus out there who will be like oh that's too much divination but I'm in communication with my allies every and I'm I'm similar to you I'm not psychic clairvoyant so much but when I open up that space of divination they'll give me messages right away so as long as I'm sitting there at my table and got my cards and pendulum I'll get those messages as long as I open that door
and the difference over time in the communication the spirits that show up for me and in my ability I'm actually in many ways opening up my psychic development more than you know without even really trying a lot of traditional psychic development practices and you know and I do try and practice some of those but it's almost like the communication becomes so much clearer that I'm almost hearing what I what they say and then I just you know I just confirm it with my
pendulum to make sure it's actually what they mean and not just an intrusive thought so yeah I so recommend folks that just doing things regularly building that muscle a friend of mine on Twitter of these a converter via a sami used to say do something a hundred times and then just see what the difference is between your first and your hundred.
Yeah you know and that was one of the things that was really lucky on is there wasn't a lot of information out where I was I didn't know a lot of people who practiced and the first person that gave me a practice told me to do it twice a day for six months.
That's I think really reasonable and it's really tough for people to kind of wrap their heads around that like you want me to do this like 350 times before we move on to the next thing and it's like yeah like if I had control yes.
And I ended up doing variations of that for close to seven years and there's no way that that didn't radically change me you just can't it's like practicing guitar it's like you're going to be better if you put in that many hours you know it's just what happens and yeah for me it's interesting to it's like one of the things that you know I may
want to do it. So I don't have any fantastic so I don't have an internal screen I can't visualize anything so that's really tricky for a lot of the instructions for magic because a lot of its visual and it took me a really long time it took me up until maybe like 10 years ago before I realized that I was getting body stuff like I would tremble and shake and that was let me know that the allies were around.
And I wasn't until about three years ago now where I was like hey could we actually go really hard on this could you focus on making doing these body shakes and stuff and that's become like my pendulum now I don't use the pendulum anymore because I can just kind of sit down and talk to them and I will kind of like shake when they're now shaking is is yes and like more shaking is more yes and less shaking is like your warm but not right there and if you're still that's totally out.
That's totally off base and so I can have a conversation with them know that way that's very fast and this is not a thing that's taught in any books on magic that I know of which is too bad because we end up it kind of goes back to that conditioning thing because so much of what we get about magic is visual meaning that it's coming through visual media or visual descriptions and then the people that can visualize it's a really great tool for them so they lean really heavy on it.
And now I mean I think a fantasia was only really kind of recognize maybe 10 or 15 years ago like there's some of us that don't cannot do that and see you got to figure out how are they talking to you because they probably are and that's one of the things that I push people towards as well as like really open like what if you don't have to learn something new to do you have to notice what's already happening.
That's one of the biggest keys that I've found is really helpful for all of this stuff because people go like oh yeah I have like these wild dreams that come true but yeah I just can't visualize so I feel like I'm not getting anything done it's like go to the dreams.
Forget that thing you can't do the thing you can and then ask them when again it doesn't matter if you view that as I do is outside of spirits or if you view it as your own you know deep minor unconscious or whatever.
Just say hey this works for me can we lean into this or can you be way louder like this is one of the best things that I ever did was like yeah I was getting little hints at stuff and it was driving me batshit and then I actually did a really consistent thing that any time any of that would kick up I would be like louder I'm really dense like louder and it got so loud that I was like cool can we back that off now.
But now they get like subtle is not the way to go you know with me I love how transparent you are about a fantasia because I feel like in a lot of your books especially in changeling so changeling is another book of eight and two guys that I've read that is really really good and especially in changeling you offer so many options for people who might not be able to visualize and I'll say I am probably much more geared toward not quite clear audience and it's a bit like clear copy.
It's a bit like clear cognizance but it's like it's verbal I'll hear language not necessarily hearing noise or even hearing the voice but the words will suddenly form I have you know some visual sometimes especially the more I do the more it opens up but yeah I I think that would actually be a great question to lead into next is for listeners out there who do have a fantasia what are some of the other channels or avenues that you recommend trying out.
So just because it's been such a huge one for me try going into whatever you're doing.
Richely with no expectation but pay attention to what happens is like one of the ones that I got early on that I recognized is like if I kind of made contact to whatever you want to call it that were interacting with when we do magic.
There would be pressure changes in my ears like being in an airplane and that was one of the first things that I recognize like okay so somebody is something shifted in the room and lean into whatever those are realize that you can talk your way through every exercise that's ever been created and actually just speak out loud what you're doing so like if you're
going to go to draw a pentagram in blue fire in front of you with your finger with the wand state that that's what you're doing while you're doing it out loud like I'm drawing a pentagram of blue fire in front of me that's the same imaginative process as seeing it and the effect is the same and this is wild for a lot of people that are just like and then it doesn't work if you don't speak out loud or it doesn't work nearly as well.
That's a huge one. I also the thing that I tell people is like okay we have this general kind of belief that the people that can see everything all the time are super kind of blast and know what's up and what if just for you if that's a thing that you've played with and you've done and I suggest everybody see if they can get there because there's lots of good books out like Christopher Penn's that he mentioned earlier is intertemple of which craft has a lot of great exercises that will help you get there if you can do that thing.
But if you can't reframe that and go okay so why do I believe this person that basically like is hallucinating all the time is witnessing things that are real and not just making it up and maybe that's not a desirable thing maybe I would rather have it come in a different way and I stuff that I started doing a real long time ago probably within the first two years I started practicing since now 40 years of this is go to the altar and talk to you.
Whatever you think you're talking to whether that's yourself for your allies and tell them what you're trying to do not in a ritualized state but go and let your candles do whatever you do you some breath worker whatever and then just spill just start talking going like hey I would like to have better communication with land conscious or with the spirits or with the allies or what's the dad whoever that is that you're trying to get in connect with it would be really cool if we could figure out a way to do this.
And don't propose a pathway just put it like hand it to them and go like hey you guys this is the thing I want for me right now and keep asking and usually something kicks up but you don't have to ever see anything you don't have to ever hear anything a lot of people will develop.
I guess what is clear cognizance I have that in a weird form now where oh yeah this is the other piece that everybody thinks what's going to happen is going to happen in the ritual and I think that's just wrong like it's putting this really micro container on things that are usually really big so you do the ritual nothing happens awesome move on.
And if you keep doing that what tends to happen is is whatever way you're going to get information starts to open up because you are kind of derailing the process when you're like not getting what you think you should be getting so it's very frequently that I will ask at the altar and be like hey I would like this to be like this and I don't expect anything and a day two days two weeks a month later I know something that I didn't know and it's not because I read it.
And it's not because I've been thinking about it it's because whatever is this system that we call magic has gone okay here's your solution here's your answer to that thing that you ask and that's completely legit and you can test it right it's like I'm not protesting in the sense that a lot of people are like oh I'm going to do all these experiments to prove that magic works or doesn't but see what happens if you act on that stuff but going to it really lightly not like this is a
scientific experience but if they say oh yeah you should probably go to this place go you don't have to ask questions about it and see what happens and all this stuff opens up but it takes time and it takes relaxing more than it takes work and will is what I would say it takes practice and then relaxing.
You bring up a really great point about asking for the things that you want to happen and I know that for me I've also been able to improve my practice by casting on my own abilities like just yesterday which was a Monday I cast my regular lunar divination spell which I think I do like once a quarter now just for maintenance and it's for
your strong pendulum swings accurate card pulls on the first try and you know accurate correct interpretations and to open up my spirit perception and it has worked like you cast these over time and you keep building up and it will it will happen one way or another and I also love what you shared about
because I've had that experience to where you do the ritual and you're like well nothing nothing really happened I had that experience actually with an exercise that grant gave me once we were grant and I our
relationship is is built on the caballic tree of life and we were in the sphere of yes odd so grant assigns me meditate on the dark side of the moon like literally put on the pink Floyd album and meditate you know do like a lunar
meditation and sure enough I'm sitting there and I'm listening to the dark side of the moon sitting on my bed I've let some you know jasmine incense or whatever I'm like all right you know what's what's going on and nothing really happens I'm like well okay
and then before I fall asleep I find myself somehow navigating like for some reason I got I got the urge to look up gloss alalia on YouTube and I found this woman with a video and it's got like 50k views on another none of her other videos have a lot and she's kind of like she's
not looking out in a tent she does not look like the most mentally stable person she's like I've been crying all days are I look weird on video or whatever but you know here's the gloss alalia whatever and I just like look just and I followed her blog
just got like a blog so I click on it like I wonder when's the last time this person wrote something and I look and it's oh today's date while she updated today
another entry today's date and another entry today's date and another and there's like five or so I'm like wow this is this is every date has like and she starts narrating these sort of internal like voices she's hearing this she's hearing that and she's she's like and I have these forces that are operating in me that are telling me to stock this person and I know I have to not listen to those forces and I know that there's this over here telling me to do this and I told this person just block me because I'm not going to be able to control myself and the amazing thing
and was that this reading through this vlog and seeing these patterns and weirdly enough recognizing some of my own neuro divergence and like her anxious attachment her pattern recognition things like that and I was like wow
like this could have been me if I just like taken that wrong turn at alborkerkey kind of a thing and that was the beginning of my foundational knowledge that allowed me to later understand DID dissociative identity disorder
and it was nothing happened during the meditation but immediately afterward I found that yeah so I'm 100% on board with that that just from my mind to be in that story
it's super interesting because I think that a lot of people come to magic because they're aware that what we're told we should want and kind of the general experience of life is pretty hollow
but I don't know that a lot of magic is really kind of addressing this stuff it's why I've kind of been to the side of most things most of my life
I've connected with different groups briefly at different times but I've never been able to maintain it because I've always been very interested about not in the kind of conspiracy what's really going on thing but like
how do I need to be in the world so that I'm fully well regardless of what's being offered like what is that and magic is helped me get there more than anything else
but for me to let that happen I had to not care what other people said it was for and so like people are like what's your definition of magic it's like I don't really have one
I can make one up for you but it's not really about that you know and I think that if we look at stuff like DID and I've had when I was young like kind of 15 to 18 I had a couple of really severe drug experiences that had me in similar states
and they were really useful because they showed me where I could go and I had enough kind of consciousness even in the experience to be like wow this is really wild
like I'm really out of control here and this is available right this is a thing that can just happen and yes I did things that to make this happen and hopefully it will stop in a day
but other people that just happens and it gave me a lot of compassion for the folks that I knew that were having a much rougher ride you know
and so looking at kind of weaving fate weaving fate is really playing with this idea of yeah what's the core story that you're attached to or what is the core family stories or whatever
and are they working for you and not even from the point of view of then let's go and interrogate it's like not about the psychological approach it's like okay what would work what would a good life look like for you
and don't get weird about it don't get like crazy about it all has to be perfect or if I ask for the things I want my grandmother will die or whatever you know
there's all this anti-magic mythology even within folklore and magic and all of that is is I believe social control I think every bit of that is social control
and it's not to say that you can do some damage with magic because you can but you know what I tell folks that come into kind of my zone bring that up
it's like have you ever tried like walking outside like that's it's dangerous like it's way more dangerous than magic you know people are driving like Jesus you know
worry about that don't worry about if asking for what you you need is going to cause somebody else to have a really tragic and it's like it's not it the world's not built like that
yeah one of my one of my musical collaborators who is not a magical person but has I've done some magic for him he's seen some results from me it sort of expanded his mind
but he said to me like oh I don't I don't want to do magic because you know I I've seen the movies and it always like turns out bad I'm like okay well in that case I've seen movies too and I'm not getting in your car with you
because I've seen movies about cars they always crash well and that's also it's funny because it's like it's one of the things that I have that
for folks that don't know we've been fed is kind of a journal approach to hyper sigils which is something you've talked about with
grand we've got to talk about hyper sigils and so I kind of came up with this particular iteration because of though I didn't know about kind of
experience with them at the time I found that out much much later the people that I knew who are writing fiction as as that kept trying to write stuff that was exciting
and that's not good usually that's bad so you you write about you know tragedies and overcoming tragedies well then you're like asking for the tragedy to overcome right do you want that
and so the journaling thing is is usually a much easier way and so the black book is really this journal about allowing yourself to like
ritually fantasize about a perfect day a perfect future a perfect life yourself way less fucked up yourself way happier
and it's actually treating it as a magical act and as an enchantment and doing other stuff that helps that alone and it's weirdly effective it really is it's a I think it's a fascinating thing to have
have put out there because kind of a huge number of people have reached out like maybe a couple hundred people have reached out since we've
come out and said I read this book and basically thought this guy's like repackaging the secret and I put it away for like three years until things got really bad and then I actually did what you said and I did all three parts of it and holy
fuck and it's like yeah that is how it seems to be and that's a big part of I think your work too as far as I understand it which I think maybe tougher people to get
it's like it clicks when it clicks which is what you expect to happen and what you believe is possible either in the world or for yourself are like hard rails that keep you within that reality
and I'm not kind of going full on reality Transurfing stuff like I'm not talking about like we're going to somehow jump tracks into a different reality because most people I don't
think we'll ever do that I'm not saying it's impossible I don't know but I do know that if you actually believe that you're like doomed to repeat your parents life or the last 10 years of your own you probably
will yeah and so you better get on it and so weaving fate is really the book about my approach to getting control of that thing and going no we're not doing that that way we can see that
that's the trajectory and no you know and I think it's fun too it's a fun process which always good.
Oh absolutely and I have my black book sitting right there over there on the shelf and I will I will yeah I will also confirm does it works just you know do it do it and it works but I do want to come from another side of the coin though regarding you know because I have my band
and I write you know I use my music as a way of hyper sigilizing of transmuting reality and my feeling about writing about tragedy is it's really important to especially as an artist you really want to make sure that you don't
go into a loop where you are rewarded with audience attention for your pain and then so you seek more pain out but my feeling on this is there is enough pain in the world already I can take pain that is already out there and I can
transmute it and that's that's what I most hope to do and I think you know also my own neuro divergence my ADHD my dopamine deficiency I'm really into problem solving there's just you know that engages me and so
there are things that in my own life or in the lives of my loved ones that I've looked at you know looking at and I remember actually like when you were when you were in my advanced container like all got it was all you recommended feeding your demons that was it and that was I have to tell you by the way that was so that really help set me up with a practice that was really really helpful for that particular situation
and I've used a lot so I was you know just for for people who don't know because they weren't there when they were talking in that in that class I was basically you know I had a loved one make a cry for help to me and I was looking to sort of get them out of a really difficult cycle and situation that they were stuck in in which was kind of a really really stuck situation because coping coping mechanisms like denial and avoid is our coping mechanisms and often like we use those as a way of avoiding the pain because
it's actually too difficult to go into so you have to somehow create safety enough to even go there before you can you know and getting someone to even kind of show up for that can be very difficult that the trauma is that extreme so yeah I've and I've used my music in a lot of ways to right happy endings to existing tragedies because I'm like there's enough there's nothing the world already you know you might as well
I think that's really great use for it and that's kind of where I go even with black book stuff is it's like there's a lot of work in the corridor and in the black book that kind of addresses this which is it's like you and so for people what the part of this process is it's is it was me coming up with a method the process trauma that I had without other without knowing about anything else that would help and so part of it is actually kind of revisiting your preview
self at kind of critical junctures where things went really fucking south and either like coming in when somebody should have stood up for you and kind of you imagine yourself walking into that space and standing up for your previous self or if it's something that's
that makes sense you kind of have to figure out what makes sense for you maybe something bad happens to that person in which is you and you know that if you've gotten a particular kind of support maybe it wouldn't have had as much downstream of facts and so it's going back and really kind of putting yourself in that space and your imagination and going hey that was fucked up but we're okay and so you can let it go
and I would like some of that like let me have it and I have all that shit you're hanging on to right now because I know how to process it now you know and so I think that you can transmute so much stuff and that that's again I think we have like kind of a pretty big disservice has happened around magic being overly focused on either kind of kind of individual kind of solar I am the center of the universe magic
magic or kind of like really like almost clinical results magic instead of what I'm interested in which is like can I make everything work better like yes I don't I don't just want to go in and kind of put out fires or see if I can you know get the next five thousand dollars that I need because my car blew up can I make it so that this is never an issue again
or as close as I can get or when it kicks up I'm just cool with it like yeah shit happens let's fix it you know it magic is great for all this stuff it's just about changing what the target is and so I love what you what you shared about that to you because it's some point I stopped focusing the work outside and turned it on myself as you described and that's when everything started going way better you can
like okay this is a pretty good technology for getting stuff done in in the outer world but it's a fantastic technology for doing stuff on the inside.
I actually I want to talk about the corridor as well because the corridor exercise that was another thing that when I read it I was like that is almost again in the same way that like there is that same sort of tuning for true ring of like truth like it all feels you know very similar to one another
it was so almost functionally identical to pointing to my certification on the wall back here to my timeline therapy certification which is so fun that was like part of my neuro linguistic programming certification but I read the card I was like this is this again it's a more right brained you know more story based orientation to what I do in timeline therapy which is you know you go back to that moment that the pattern set that the trauma happened or whatever incident or event happened and you give yourself the support
you need and you you know walk yourself through that or you walk the client through that or what so I would love for you to share with our listeners a little bit about how to do the corridor exercise because I think it's so great that people can do that on their own as well.
So the corridor just happened it's something that happened one day I basically learned how to trans because I was an insomniac and I was like okay if I'm awake from three o'clock until I go to work every night or go to work in the morning.
I'm just going to do deeper relaxation because that way I will actually be functional right and from that process I learned how to trans in trans I remember it was one one night I don't remember when though and I was super relaxed and something some really fucked up event that it happened in my life popped into my head and I was like oh I wonder if I could go there and I was like
I was just walking down this thing for a long time it felt for like 10 minutes or something door after door and I was just waiting for the door that led to that event and I got a hit that like this one and I walked in and I like walked in as like the camera observer of the event
and watched that whole thing go down and kind of had my thoughts about it and then that kind of it kind of just stopped or faded out I don't remember exactly and I wonder if I can actually engage with that part of me which is really the memory of the event kind of the trauma memory of that event and so I left the room and came back in and stopped it and was like okay
you I want to talk to you that asshole is not involved and got this completely engaged much younger version of myself like what the fuck is going on and be going like
you and I were the same thing that guy's fucking unhinged you don't listen to fucking where he has to say and fuck him and you're awesome and I remember this ended up being a process where I began
going into that corridor and finding earlier moments that I didn't plan them it's like I would go in find the door and walk in and I would be like oh shit this is one of the things that like really stuck like I didn't know you know it's not like I went oh this event must have fucked me up that's not how it went I was very much running intuitively wow
and the biggest thing that I found was that that either like shutting down the other person involved if there was somebody else involved immediately or other was just like this is what you're looking for and you will find it but it's not right here
and so it's not a good place to look but you know I'm around I'm available and so there were several years where there was a lot of cord or work going on in my life
as like because it became that kind of thing where I had a sense that like my younger self was calling me now like it knew remember it it didn't grain down that this was reality and would call me we were usually outside somewhere and be like I don't know what to do about this
and that's when I realized that like oh there's some other with shit we could do here like do you want to know how to do magic
like I learned how to do magic but you could know now like you don't have to wait till you're your older like do you want to know how to do sigils
do you want to learn how to do some shit and I began teaching myself magic in that space
I think it was to me it's super useful work and I think it's the most beautiful work that I've done magically because it was just 100% like what's needed here
and it's very rare we actually get to do what's needed in a situation and so to me like discovering that I could actually go back and actually have real effects from that
because that's one of the things that's so weird about it that's hard for people to grasp is they go okay but how do you know that it worked
and in some cases what I discovered was like I wouldn't know what the effects of doing these corrections would be or teaching this person magic
but then like I would be in a situation where somebody would push all of my buttons that would just wreck me and nothing happened
and it's like oh okay that's all from these things that I've been changing it's fascinating work
and that's why I also said that I think weaving fade is is my best book practically I think it's the most useful book
but I think view it as fun like find the fun in the process and let it just play out because it's like it's fascinating what happens
and I yeah it's I've been saying for a couple years now that I'm functionally living a life that is like a it's like if we were to go into grant Morrison territory
if we're to go into like comic book territory you have like the story of this is the one life right
and then there's another one that's really close but better like I'm living a black book that I wrote years ago
and I can see it and it's not exactly the same so that's why I tell people like you don't have to be precise
this isn't a precision act it's like get all the feelings right
and I basically for about three years now have been operating within that and it's like okay this was all all all of that work in the corridor
and the black book and things just work now
the other really cool thing too and I think you mentioned this in weaving fate is that there were instances in which you went back and altered an event on your timeline
and the memories and other people's minds were altered in the same way I wanted to share with you because I'm having on the same season of this podcast
I've invited Mitch Harowitz on as well so I just read his book Daydream Believer and he talks about doing this
but at least something very similar and where he gave a speech a presentation that he didn't feel it was quite his best
so like I'm gonna go back I'm gonna choose something fairly low stakes I'm just gonna imagine that I gave a really great he said
as soon as he did that they posted the speech online people in the comments were like oh my god this was fascinating
he said if this was unprecedented the folks who hired him sent him flowers after words he said no one had ever done that after any of his other speeches
I just find that fascinating it's the weirdest thing because it's the weirdest thing because what happened with that was I had changed something that happened back
I think I was already out of high school because I left high school early but I was still living kind of in my neighborhood it was before I moved to the city
and some shit went down that I didn't feel good about and so I changed it and there were other people involved and so I co-ordered and changed it
and a friend of mine was performing in San Francisco I was living in New Mexico at that time and maybe Seattle I don't know, probably Seattle
and so I flew down and opened for him and I was at the bar and someone came up to me and started telling me like hey do you remember when this happened
and I got like the fucking the truth chills before they opened their mouth and I was like holy fuck and they fucking described something that I know is not what they experienced
but it is what I changed that in the quarter to be what that is I don't know it's fucking fascinating though it really is
well I want to bring on our producer Tomi to ask her question as well because I know we're getting around the hour
so Tomi take it away
yeah so Aidan I know that you also come from a chaos magic background and that like grant Morrison's work like for so many of us was one of your many gateways into this world
and I also know that that's not really a term you identify with anymore
and I was curious if you could tell us a bit about like what that moment was for you when like what the last straw was where you realized that like this
this was no longer a term you quite associated with or wanted to identify with with your practice
yeah that's a great question my best guess I like I know what what what my thinking was but I'm not sure exactly when it happened
is I think I just like hit a point where I'm like I don't actually think what's being described here is as close to what I think reality is
which is kind of this raw animist field and I could see that a lot of the ideas in chaos magic were initially useful for me but I diverged from them pretty rapidly
and particularly I got super massively turned off with kind of the shift into kind of humorously I didn't get into Morrison until much later
but kind of the shift into pop magic and discording is I'm kind of rolling into chaos magic and I had no use for it
because by that point I was already like oh this is way more serious than people think this magic thing
and I was only interested in it on that level I wasn't interested in the other stuff
and so to me it just became kind of it ceased to be accurate I hadn't really discovered the idea of animism yet
but there was a point where I'm like I'm not doing what people think I'm doing and so I'm going to stop using that word
and I began to find also that like every other label I've ever found I just found that it was more of a bind than it was
like a release from binds and I don't have any use for that
so like I don't really have a self definition for what I do other than animist at this point
I use them and I make them up like I think I've been using which thing in my bio for like a few years now and I like that
but they're also kind of short-lived because I don't really they're not mostly not accurate
whereas the animist piece that's accurate and one of the things that I say a lot now is that I used to be a magical practitioner
kind of working within an animist model and at some point that ceased to be a model for me
and now I'm an animist who teaches through magic more than I teach magic
I do, but my subtext is not that you get better at magic exactly
I want something for the world that's different than that
Interesting, yeah I've not heard many accounts of people that have stepped away from Chaos Magic yet
so I really appreciate you sharing that inside of like where it stopped mesh with your world view when you're view of magic
Yeah it actually kind of happened it happened even when I was still in the IOT a million years ago and then we formed the Z cluster after I left
me and my friend Merrick did and it was I would say that the big dividing line for me was I like lost kind of all kind of interest in the kind of like
we could do this with these pop culture figures and I'm like why the fuck would you do that when the reality is right there
like it's palpable these things are right there they're ready to go they are real why do you need to put a different face on it make yourself comfortable it didn't make sense to me
I'd rather be uncomfortable and be as close to the sources I can
I imagine that's something that a lot of people see is like a point of accessibility for it or like maybe it's just yeah the fun the pop magic of it all
beginning to put your favorite characters into these frameworks but yeah I feel like that yeah only works is like a first stepping stone and like it that be weirder for someone that's been in this for a while to then go like hey let's use this
the superhero or this pop star or the pop theme in one of the things that I've talked about in a lot of different places that this is related to is that I came to magic because I had experiences with spirits that were unquestionably that
and so I didn't come looking for spirit contact or proof of a spirit world I came to figure out how you fucking lived with one which was way different and it was one of the first divisions I kind of made was there are a lot of folks that were kind of like eyes it results magic are you willing to curse people all that I was like none of this is relevant it's like are you doing this because you know
are you doing this because you want to find out I knew I just didn't know how to manage it and so that was another big dividing line that's still probably my biggest dividing line is that's those are the two divisions was there's people who come to this stuff because they think there's something there that could help them and then there's the folks that come to it because they have to
you because it's already there for them and they have to come up with the tools to work with that appropriately or it's going to eat their lunch you know thank you that I think that gives me exactly what I was looking for thanks for the question it's a good one.
Well, thank you so much for joining us today and it is always such a pleasure to chat with you I know you and me are two of the folks who are in the magic scene who are the most vocal I think about hyper sigils you me and grant.
So I'm really a pleasure to have you on and to chat about this and by the way you guys if you want to check out more of Adon's work if you want to learn from him you can go and support him on patreon patreon.com/adonwalkter
and of course check out his three books weaving bait six ways and changeling and of course check out the Re-Patterning project and you can come support us on patreon to at patreon.com/therepatterningpodcast
and hopefully we will see you in the next episode thanks everyone for listening we'll see you next time.
Thank you for listening to the Re-Patterning podcast if you're curious about the repaterrning project the eight week course in mental mastery and creative freedom that inspires these conversations you can check out more details at the repaturningproject.com
You can download the self-study version of the course and get started today we also offer a four week course on narrative magic and archetype titled midst and magic changing your life through story also twice a year.
If you'd like to join our community the Re-Patterning parlor on discord you can sign up for five dollars a month at patreon.com/therepatterningpodcast
Thanks to everyone who makes the Re-Patterning podcast possible firstly our award-winning producer Tomi Trembath of the key master collective network of podcasts.
She also produces transcending comics vision in the void and giant sized violence.
Thanks also to animation studio mortis and madriacs who created the video for our introduction as well as to Andrew Means who composed and produced our theme music.
And also thanks to Al Alvarez who took the photos of yours truly that you see on the cover of each episode if you're watching the video version.
And finally thanks to you our listeners who give meaning to this work our greatest wishes that whatever you've heard today inspires you to live freely and begin creating your reality from the inside out.
Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you again soon.
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