The Fourth Step on the Everyday Path to your Holy Guardian Angel, Realization is now online. In the stage of Realization we get down to the essentials: we are re-creating our lives. In the article I use the analogy of creating our own Golem from the clay of our everyday lives, i.e. the choices, decision and actions we take everyday. We are not what we feel or think or fear inside, but what we choose to do. The shape of our life, the shape of the Golem we are about to create is defined by our deeds mainly.

I originally called this phase 'Self-Service' - yet it quickly dawned on me how easy this could be misunderstood. Clearly I am not thinking of life as a long buffet table where we can serve ourselves as much and often as we would like. We all know that’s not the case - even though Magic has often been abused to try to accomplish this false ideal of greed... Instead I am thinking in this phase of the Everyday Path of 'service to our higher selves'. 

If someone observed us from the outside, though, what they saw could easily be perceived as Egotism at this stage: We are busy re-creating, re-balancing sometimes even re-inventing our lives. It's a lot of 'us' in there and sometimes little space for other people. From an inner perspective, however, it is really not about us in terms of our Ego and everyday cravings anymore. From an inner perspective it is about the contact, the voice and direction that is starting to come through us.

It is important to state that Self-Focus or Self-Service is a stage we pass through. It is very specific work we aim to accomplish during this stage of the Path. And once it is done, we can let go. A new framework is established, new tides of life have been established and things can come to life on their own now... This is the essential difference to normal states of self-centeredness: If we focus on ourselves because we strive to fulfill our everyday cravings, our substitute desires of consumption and greed - our journey will never end and we will easily get stuck in this phase. That is because our everyday cravings don’t aim anywhere except at their own fulfillment. 

In the Everyday Path I recommend to disarm and destroy the power of our everyday cravings by working on our fears during the phase of Darkness. Once we return from Darkness and start to work on rebuilding our lives as a Golem from everyday clay one of the main charges is to re-balance the basic needs that essentially will always remain with us as long as we are in a body made of flesh.

Now, here is a pretty simple model that I find helpful for this phase of essential re-creation:

It tries to answer the simple question: “Which basic needs does my Ego have?” or in other words “What do I need to really do to take care of myself?”. Borrowed from the Chinese five elements each corner of the pentagram represents one of the five essential needs human beings have. The trick, however, is that each of us needs a different balance, a different equilibrium between these five components in order to keep the optimum reservoir of resilience and life force constantly recharged.

What seems a fiddly question at first often takes the journey of a life-time to get it right. Just take a moment to consider this: When you perform magic which of the five basic needs of your Ego do you normally address? And what about the activities in your job? Now consider the corners that didn’t come up... How are these balanced out? Maybe that’s where you will bleed energy and lose resilience in life when things get tough?

Isn’t this wonderful? I am talking to you as a magician sharing a few of the lessons I have been taught on how to create knowledge and conversation with your Holy Guardian Angel. And here we are - thinking about how much good food, how much calmness or human encounters we actually need in our lives to truly feel recharged and alive?

Well, I guess that highlights the basic split of responsibilities between us and our Holy Guardian Angels: While our HGA can take care of the direction in our life-journey, the elements of our True Will and the destinations we will be encountering during our 70 odd years of life - it is our sole responsibility to get there in good shape. If we fail to take care of the Golem that will take us there - i.e. the physical body, the temporary mind and the ephemeral body of emotions - nobody will. 

At no point of our life’s journey will our HGA feed us, or manage our finances, or rest us, or give our bodies the exercise they deserve. It is us who need to build and maintain the Golem of our everyday lives. The spirit that brings it to life will only be given once this body is sufficiently prepared.