Being Special: The Path to True Power
How the Powers of the New Age can Deliver us from Despair



Copyright © 2007 By Robin Artisson
All Rights Reserved.



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Being No One Special in a World Where No One Matters

For pretty much everyone, life bites, almost from the beginning. Screaming out of the bloody tunnel of the birth canal, you are squeezed into a hospital room or some such place. It's cold. It's full of strange beings and they do painful things like cut your umbilical cord off (or if you were fortunate enough to be born in the stone age or in modern day El Salvador, a midwife bites it off). In some barbaric places, a doctor even slices the foreskin off of newborn males, a disgusting and needless practice which is now thankfully being debunked and abandoned.

At any rate, your troubles don't end there. I think most of you here who aren't Paris Hilton know how hard life can be, even from those early days. And one day, one Fateful day, you have to realize the scariest thing of all- your suffering doesn't make you special. In fact, your suffering is the one thing that you can say that you have in common with the rest of your fellow man. Your suffering makes you a part of a very huge crowd of anonymous faces, all suffering, all hating it. They all have a sad story, many of which sound just like yours.

What's a growing individual to do? You gotta be someone, but you're an individual- just like everyone else. You gotta do something, but then, everyone else is doing things too, and with alarming regularity, many people do things better than you. You think you can sketch or paint well? Wait until you make it to university and see the real art nerds at the top of your class. You think you're a fast runner? You are destined to meet that spindly-legged kid competitor from out of state who leaves you in his dust.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Damned as an individual, and without the power to stop being an individual. Even death might not spare you from selfhood; if the Buddhists are right, you've been through this shit quite a few times before. Like most occidental people, you probably think "frack those weirdo eastern people who chant and meditate- I'm a proud westerner, a round-eye, a gaijin, a guy who likes his fish well cooked thankyouverymuch, and a rose of the west should never try to bloom like a lotus of the east".

So then you turn to your fellow westerners for their religious consolation and you are rewarded for your stupidity with Christianity. Not only does death not spare you from being an individual, Christianity is the biggest spiritual "one-upmanship" club ever invented. God expects you to not just do well, but to excel. You gotta work your arse off to be good, holy, wonderful, and to NOT do all the crappy things that define our existence as sinful jerkoffs. From top to bottom, it's all about who and what you are, and what you do, and what you fail to do. All over again.

So what's a person to do? Being born sucked; growing up was hard; if you don't excel you're a loser, and your attempts to excel will be met with limited success, considering how much more talent is in the world compared to your own.

God won't help, he's busy stoking a big eternal fire for losers just like you; Buddha's hardly any help, even if you can make it through miles of Sutras; atheists tend to be narcissistic jerks, agnostics simply refuse to answer your questions, and well, mom's wondering when you're going to get married and have some grandkids for her. Others will say it's "just a phase", and your last hope- your kindly shrink- will smile and hand you a big fat bottle of pills which will succeed in dulling any concern you might have for these things. On final analysis, you begin to fear that maybe drug-addicts had it right all along.

You have a ball of hot iron in your throat, and you can't swallow it. But you can't spit it out, either. Why would you? Suffering- even if you don't call it that- is all you've ever known. What would you be without your conflicts? Actually, don't kid yourself- you didn't just have that thought. No one ever makes it that far into realization, not in this dark age.

So strike that from the record. There is NO WAY of giving up conflicts; its unthinkable. You ARE the person who has to have a pill, has to have a fix, has to win, always loses, has to compete, alienates people, sucks up to people, wrecks cars, wrecks homes, builds up fortresses in your head, gets heartbroken, figures out the problems of the world, crusades, fights, loves, hates, but never wins. That's who people know you as- the crusader, the fighter, the loser, the freak, the lame, the partially admirable, the smart, the dumb, the good lover, the crappy pick-up lines guy, the couch potato, the health nut, the carnivore, the vegetarian, the evil, the compassionate, the forgiving, the selfish, the weird.

And for all that, you're still surrounded by tons of people who could _also_ be called all those things, and more.

Strange Gods Terrible and Unseen! You're a nobody!

Wait... you're somebody... but you're just so......... Average.

Let's face it. It would be better to be DEAD than Average.

The problem is huge. It's a disease. But you have a cure.



Being Special in a World Where Everyone is Special

The New Agers make it to your door first, beating the Mormons, the Jehova's Witnesses, and the asspounding Scientologists. And thank the Gods for our modern day! Along with frozen pizza and birth control, (the finest gifts of the modern day) our amazing infrastructure has made all the delivery trucks, superhighways, and sidewalks that you needed to hear the word of the New Age.

Not unlike pharmacy home-delivery, or that Mexican place up the street that delivers to your door as long as your order exceeds 15 dollars, what you need can make it to you, served up easy and nice. You can get Amazon.com to ship the answer, or you can just double-click on the Mozilla icon on your desktop.

And BOOM! There it is. Your answer. Our answer. THE answer- just what a painfully average world needs- instead of being that guy who works at Kinko's, and who has a crush on that girl who doesn't know you exist, you can be any of the following:


1. A Powerful Mage

An ideal choice for kids who did good at Math and who really actually thought that the Christian or Jewish God was "sort of cool"- or at least thought the idea of sword-wielding angels wiping out the enemies of God were cool. Most of you who will decide to walk the path of the Magus probably really loved the movie "The Prophecy", and probably thought that the movie Pi re-affirmed everything you had previously hoped and suspected.

The Ceremonial Magic pack and prop-set is available in most places now, and instead of dealing with that boring "God" from Aunt Macee's church, you get a "Cabbala" screen to lay over him and divide him into ten neat spheres of divine power, complete with whole armies of angels, elementals, and spirits, all ready for you to command with some vibratory formulas. Crowley can just back the frack off, because he was a drug addict anyway, and this is sooo much better. Considering it may be your "true will" to do, um, well, pretty much whatever you want, you might just do the drugs too, but only for the purposes of "scrying the aethyrs".

Either way, Dungeons and Dragons got it ALL wrong. You don't have to memorize spells everyday. You just have to memorize the LBRP and the Opening by Watchtower, and you're ready to rock. You aren't an average nobody. You are far beyond those pathetic mortals- you know the meanings of numbers, the symbolism of colors, the secret names of the Most High! You are a mage!


2. A Witch

You've had it. For FAR too long the local preachers and their joyless, judgmental asshole congregations have choked the life out of this world (and especially out of your small Arkansas town). And all those shiny, happy Christians made sure to have just enough shiny kids to grow up and become popular students at the local shake-and-bake High School that you attend, just north of O'Reilly's "Paradise Island" Mobile Home Park. Sure, it's all fun and games while they throw food at you in the cafeteria and make fun of you in the locker room. But thanks to the New Age, you will most certainly have the last laugh.

You're going to be a witch, and even though you won't really be worshipping this fake "Devil" everyone in your town is terrified of, THEY will think you are, and man, that gives you a power you never dreamed you'd have. Of COURSE the stupid church mistakened the ancient Horned God, with his fanged serpent, red-eyed hounds, and HUGE phallus for the devil- he's everything powerful and savage about humankind that we've neglected for too long.

But not you! Not anymore! And this deal keeps getting sweeter- The Horned God has a wife, and she is sexy. She's everything you ever could have wanted in a woman, and for that matter, in a mother, because she's the Mother of everyone and everything. We aren't talking some defeated woman, some desexualized chick that's prayed to in the Vatican or in weirdo Catholic homes across the world- we're talking big, perky breasts, long lucious hair, full-moon round ass, American thighs, total femme fatale, total power- she knows magic, and she and her Horned partner (unlike another God we know) actually answer prayers. You know they do- they've answered plenty. You've seen them in dreams. They guided you to a local shop where that pentagram pendant you've always wanted was RIGHT THERE, on sale!

Dancing naked in the woods, praying to the Horned God, waving a scary knife around, YOU have the power. You aren't average. You are a witch! Just like those girls on "The Craft"! Punk Rock!


3. A Psychic Vampire (or just a regular vampire, or a shape-shifter, or a monster, or a fallen angel, or you name it)

While the rest of these AVERAGE people with their jobs and daily commutes are dying slowly, one boring day at a time, and all these AVERAGE misguided new agers are hopping around and chanting and fooling themselves with their sad devotion to their ancient lost religions, none of them have any idea about the true secret history that is being written right before their unseeing eyes.

You have never in your life been like "everyone else". There was something diferent about you, and you knew it, even when your parents and guidance counselor told you to grow up. That boy you were after, the one that you finally got the courage to write that letter to in Algebra Class, he didn't understand the deadly secret you were trying to tell him.

You are a predator moving among the throngs of mankind. You take vital energy from people, sucking it up, even when you don't want to. One day you will know how to control your power, and maybe, just maybe, you'll find your way to others like you. Or perhaps the demons that always torment you will force you to hurt those you love most, and then abandon you to oblivion. The legends of the "vampire" were born in the reality of people like you- those who are different, who must feed on the vital energy of others. But when you gain control of this, you will be powerful. This is your blessing, your curse.

Or... maybe... you won't be a psychic life-energy vampire at all. Even though you don't remember it, you were once among the angels in high heaven, and you fell with Lucifer, on that terrible day of defeat. No wait... You were once at the side of the righteous angels, and you chose to pursue the fallen here, to the Earthplane, where you awoke with few memories of your former existence, and found that you could no longer see your wings... not all the time, anyway. If you visualize just right, you can see them. So can others like you. You are half-angel now, and you have a mission.

Wait, wait. Scratch all that. You are different. You've always known it- people always thought you were strange, somehow... more savage. You smell with great power, and have keen eyes. You are faster, stronger than others, and you want... blood. You want the hunt. Animals react well to you, or at least, some animals do. That's because you are part of them, and they of you. You are Otherkin. Part human, part beast, you feel the transformation coming. You are never at home in the human world, never at home in the animal world... you must walk between them.

No matter what you are, You aren't average. You are a Vampire/Psi-Vamp/Otherkin/Angel/Elf or whatever!


COMING SOON

4. A Powerful Earth Shaman

5. A Fairy (a supernatural creature, not an especially Effeminate gay man)

6. A Childe Ov Kaos/ Chaos Magician

7. A Feminist Womyn-Wiccan Ballbreaker

8. A Radical Fairy (An especially Effeminate Gay Man)