by Jason Miller
Key 20:
Trade In Goals for Trajectory
Last year, I did a consultation for a client who wanted to increase her income. Before the consultation, I asked her to tell me what she wanted. The goal she named was “to make $20,000 per month in 2016.” It fit the metrics of a good goal that I listed in Key 2. This would represent a significant uptick from her current income and was thus inspiring. It was not such an increase that it is unrealistic or unattainable given their business and what they brought in last year. It was not vague at all, and easily measurable. I am usually happy to get goals like this.
I had her re-frame her goal anyway.
I had been working with this person for a few years and decided that this goal was too static. In this case, January was already half over, and though her business has been steadily improving, she would not be likely, even with Sorcery, to hit the $20,000 mark that month, so she would be starting off the year already failing.
Let's imagine, though, that she did hit that goal in January. Does anyone really want to have the same goal 12 months later? What does that say about her business? It says that it has plateaued, that it is static and lost its momentum. This would be just as true for a relationship, for fame, or for spiritual growth as it is for business.
It was time for my friend to let go of goals and replace them with trajectory.
I told the client that making $240,000 that year was totally a great yearly goal, but that they should be sure to break it down so that they were hitting that $20,000-a-month mark in June or July rather than as a static sum. Aim for $15,000 in January, $16,000 in February, $17,000 in March, and so on. After the summer, they want to be making more than $20,000. In September, aim for $23,000. In December, aim for $24,000 or $25,000 for the month. This way, she hits the number she wants for the year and does not suffer from failing the first few months when an instant increase to $20,000 falls outside the spectrum of enchantablity. She had to tweak this strategy to accommodate her seasonal ups and downs, but eventually developed a great system.
The best part is that she set the trajectory for next year, which is the biggest benefit in this kind of thinking. She missed her yearly goal in 2016 by only $6,000, but was happy with the result anyway. The steady increase created a trajectory for where she wanted to head, and now she had a clearer vision of how she wanted 2017 to go.
When Goals No Longer Serve
At the beginning, there are always things to fix: the debt to pay down, the shitty job that is falling out from under you, maybe even a dangerous situation to escape from like an abusive partner, a court case, or someone threatening your safety.
Next come the things that are not emergencies but represent the basics of whatever you consider a happy life: a bachelor's or master's degree, a career you enjoy, a nice home in the country, an apartment in the city, a long-term partner, a kid or two. These milestones are important and are defined by static goals, a gold ring that you need to grab. They are the nouns in the sentences of life.
After you get these under wraps, what then? I suggest that it is time to stop focusing on the nouns of life and start thinking about the verbs. Think less about the next goal and more about the trajectory of your life.
This shifting in thinking solves two problems that I see when people get to this stage in their life: The first is that they find that having all the things they thought would make them whole and complete and happy do not in fact make them whole and complete and happy. The second is that, having attained a certain level of success, they feel like they are untouchable, and that things will stay this way forever—which of course they never do.
The Trajectory of Fulfillment
It's a funny thing. Happiness is often found in temporary things like a good shag, a night out with friends, or a particularly satisfying meal. This is why studies often show things like leather jackets and meaningless sex make people happier than having children. But is happiness the same as fulfillment? I don't think so. I think that though happiness can be found in these short-term pleasures, true joy comes from commitment and striving. Perfection is found in the go-getting rather than in just getting. It's a verb, not a noun.
Once you have that relationship in place, what then? Lots of married couples report that their partners stop striving to make their relationships better after marriage, as if that seal removes the need to think more about it. It doesn't though, which is why as soon as laws and societal norms allowed for divorce, people started divorcing in droves. If you set a trajectory for your partnership, you stop asking yourself whether you have it or not, and start asking about the strength of your partnership, the communication, the sex, and so on. Your marriage is not a static thing; it is in constant motion. Early in relationships, people often ask, “Where are we going with this?” but stop asking once the relationship becomes committed. If you think in terms of trajectory, that question never leaves your mind.
When I started working for myself, my big goal—the one that would define success for me—was to make $5,000 a month from my writing, teaching, and consulting. I actually had posted it to one of those “vision boards” and hung it in the office. The year that I finally had the bravery to quit my day job (which I would have been fired from soon anyway, because I spent more time writing blog posts and books than actually working), I hit that goal. If success was a goal, I grabbed it. The night that I filed the taxes for that year, I sat down with what I call my “board of directors,” the spirits and deities I work with for my business success. They told me this was just the tip of what was possible and that if I dedicated myself to serving my readers and my students, I should stop thinking about a final number to maintain for a happy life and start thinking about percentage increases over the previous year. I am happy to report that the advice of my spirits1 was wise indeed, and my set point has been moved again and again. Now, like the trajectory of a rocket, I have a plan for my continued rise, as well as slow descent for when I get very old. I will land when I'm dead.
Knowing that this journey doesn't end until I am dead is itself a source of joy. Sure, there are lots of goals to reach within that trajectory, but the outlook is very different than when my highest aspiration was to match what I was making at my day job. I now view this as a moving target.
Inescapable Impermenance
The other problem that trajectory thinking solves is thinking that once you are out of your time of difficulty and danger that you are somehow done. A few years ago, a good friend of mine, who is also a hell of a Magician, finally paid down all his debts and hit the six figure mark that he held in his mind as sort of the “end-all be-all” of financial success. He was so relieved that all this “was done.” I said, “Done?” He assured me that yes, done. He didn't have to “worry” about that part of his life anymore.
It's five years later, and sadly, he is no longer at six figures. One of the people in his department that he trained was able to do what he did for a lot less money. He was not done, and if you are still breathing, neither are you. Neither am I.
The one thing that remains constant in life is change. When looking back over life, we can take a solid assessment of our success and failures, but when people project ahead, they often have an amazing blindness to the possibility of things going south. It is particularly hard when you are at the top of your game to see the ground slipping away from under your feet. A great example of this is Blockbuster Video.
Netflix was founded in 1998 around the same time that Blockbuster Video's initial public offering on the market was valued at $4.8 billion. In 2000, Blockbuster declined several offers to purchase Netflix for just $50 million. They were not interested in this scrappy company because they had just dominated the entire video market and felt invincible. They continued to feel invincible as the industry that they let slipped out from under them. In August of 2010, the same month that they were de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange, Kevin Lewis, the company's digital strategy head, explained to Fast Company that “We're strate
gically better positioned than almost anybody out there. Never in my wildest dreams would I have aimed this high.”2 One month later, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy valued at just $14 million. The reason I am bringing this up is that Blockbuster was not thinking about an ever-moving, ever-shifting trajectory, but instead about static goals.
Life is a study in movement. Every person that has ever lived has died. Every company that was ever started will eventually close. Every empire that has ever risen will fall. Keep moving. Hold in your mind the one thing you can be sure of: If you are not growing, you are shrinking. There is no stasis.
Put more simply, don't sit on your ass when things are going well. Look at your trajectory and ask, “What's next?”
What Does Trajectory Thaumatury Look Like?
Bringing this back to the realm of practical Magic, what do spells for trajectory look like as opposed to spells for static goals?
The first element is that the spells are long term and the materia used is going to be based around something that you keep around, update, or change as your needs arise and move.
Full altars, of course, would be fantastic, if you have the space for them. It's great to keep a financial altar, a relationship altar, a security altar, and so on. You can burn candles for individual goals and obstacles on the bottom tier of the altar, while placing long-term items like statues and spirit fetishes on the upper tiers; that will keep everything tied to your overall trajectory. Unfortunately, we don't all have the space for multiple altars, and because life changes, we must never let our Magic be chained to such elaborate structures. Even I have space problems, and I do this for a living. When my twins passed their first birthday, I had to give up my room in favor of a smaller shrine in the garage until I could get a larger space. When I traveled for long periods of time, I had to do without altars entirely. Enjoy such elaborate set-ups while you can, but as one teacher once told me, “You should be able to continue your practice even if you found yourself in prison.”
Spirit bottles require less space than a full altar. Filled with herbs and items that relate to both the spirit and the trajectory of the facet of life that they are overseeing, these bottles can be kept on a shelf. Think in terms of a permanent, oversized mojo hand. Place a candle in the top of the bottle and speak to the spirit when it is lit. Perhaps leave an offering on a plate that the bottle sits on. Tell the spirit how it's going and ask for advice and assistance. If necessary, update the items in the bottle, giving the spirit tools to evolve along with your life.
My client who I spoke about at the beginning of this key uses a spirit bottle now to help chart her trajectory. She has grown as much as she can on her own and now has to hire assistants, so she added gravel root, High John, and special consecrated hooks to the bottle to help find the right person to help her. Another client had to move his home-based business to an office, and now has added dirt from the new office to his bottle.
Petitions are my primary way of managing my trajectory. I make quarterly petitions about what I would like to see, and every equinox and solstice, I make an offering of thanks, burn the petition, and replace it with a new one under my loadstone. Some petitions are yearly instead of quarterly and are updated on the feast day of the Saint that I am petitioning. I then anoint it with oil as I make the offerings and place it under the statue, or inside of it if it has a drawer in the base.
The Jupiterian Cashbox I wrote about in The Sorcerer's Secrets is another method of keeping financial trajectory, and since that book came out, hundreds of students have sent me pictures of their own boxes filled with dirt from the key spots in their life, loadstones to attract increasing wealth, and of course money that goes into the box for a week, then gets taken out and spent.
I have now taken this idea a step further and made a round base box in which to place papers for investments I have made. In the box are items related to Helios and, in each direction, is an image of one of his horses. The box is painted in gold leaf and I have asked Helios to keep my investments shining, to hold their worth overall, over time. I know that some will lose value, and at times they all will, but overall, I am trying to get a nine-percent annual return and doing well at it.
For other types of short-term investments, I have dedicated a statue of Baphomet and placed him over the petition. The choice of Baphomet is because of his arms: one points up and says “coagula,” and the other points down and says “solve.” This is a perfect metaphor for how this investment's trajectory is going to go, and I ask Baphomet to guide me and watch over these investments as they rise and fall, making sure that I pull out at an optimal time. It's still early in this experiment, but I am having fun with it.
Whatever tactics for trajectory you use, the key points are:
Open-ended rather than closed goals.
Thoughts expressed in terms of movement rather than stasis.
Recognition of the inevitability of change.
Even when you feel like you are at the top of your game and things have seemed to plateau into a nice rhythm for a few years, you are still in motion. Set your trajectory or it will be set for you.
Enlightenment as a Trajectory
This book is meant to be about practical Magic, but I hope you will indulge me on a bit of musing here on spiritual ascent and trajectory.
A lot of religions express their result in terms of hard goals. In Buddhism, for instance, enlightenment has very set definitions. Not all schools agree on what those definitions are, but the definitions within those schools are pretty set. In Christianity, there are characteristics of salvation as well as Gnosis. Most traditions have a goal that they have attempted to define as a final or ultimate state.
I have come to view spirituality as an open-ended trajectory. The goals within it are interesting signposts, but we may or may not wind up marching past those particular ones. For the most part, even if there is a final enlightenment or final Gnosis, we are so far from that, that we are better off just charting the next step of the journey and keeping the trajectory we want in mind. You can spend your time obsessing about whether the final enlightened state entails bliss and emptiness, or emptiness and clarity—or you can know that you are on a trajectory that improves clarity, kindness, power, and understanding, and worry about the next step in front of you.
Sadly, the history of religion is a study in people who argue and fight over what the final goal or ultimate nature of divinity is. There were once texts that were literally chained up in the bottom of the Potala Palace because they expressed a view of emptiness that the state disagreed with. Think about that: They chained up the texts.
During my many years communing with Hekate, I would press her for what the goal of all this Magic she was teaching me was. “To go beyond” was all she would say. Frustrated, I asked when it stops. When do we stop “going beyond”? When do we get to the destination?
The Goddess's reply was this: “I haven't yet. Why should you?”
The Take-Away
Harold has finally achieved a state of comfort. Money is good, love is good, and he wants it all to just stay like that. Our demon sadly cannot accommodate him. Change is the only constant in life.
No matter what you are attempting—weight loss, increase in clients, return on investments, or clarity of mind—remember to think in terms of trajectory and not static goals. Then, strategize accordingly. After you fix the things in your life that are broken and attain the basic milestones of a happy life, start thinking about trajectory rather than individual goals. Life is and always has been in motion. You need to think in verbs more than nouns.
Key 21:
Maintain Sovereignty
I think it's fair to say that many people consider Tibet a place that spent a lot of time and energy developing its spirituality and its Magic.
While some of this reputation is pure fiction, Dr. Strange, Dr. Doom, The Shadow, and Mandrake all got their powers there after all, it can be said that Magic was integrated into everyday life, from medicine to even
the government, and spirits are taken absolutely seriously.
While studying the fall of Tibet to the Chinese, I noted that a lot of the Oracles were telling the Dalai Lama to fight back. They recommended working with the CIA and foretold a glorious defeat of the Chinese. Obviously, this did not come to pass. When I asked my teachers why the Oracles were wrong, they shared a very old saying that I think is a good place to start our discussion of the 21st key:
“When people are desperate they petition the Gods. When the Gods get desperate, they lie.”
They are a lot like people in that respect. They tell the truth most of the time, but they can lie when they want and sometimes simply do not know. What better reason not to yield sovereignty over yourself?
You Are In Charge
Religion is very often in the business of blaming events on the will of the Gods. From the Plague of Thebes blamed on Ares, to televangelists claiming homosexuals caused Hurricane Katrina, and the governor of Tokyo blaming “national egotism” for the tsunami of 2011, there are always those who will blame events on the Gods and spirits. On the smaller scale of our personal lives, people do this as well. Just this week, one of my family members thanked God for steering Hurricane Irma west toward another city that, assumingly, God was less happy with.
If Magic and Sorcery is about anything, it is about taking charge of things ourselves and becoming an active participant in the play of providence. Rather than blaming the Gods for events, we attempt to get them to aid us. We are spirits, so we throw our own weight at the problem and ask the Gods for help. If we succeed, then we thank them. If we fail, then we don't.
