Esoteric Origin Story - Aaron David

I always enjoy hearing my favorite authors and bloggers and podcasters tell how they got into esotericism. Here's my story, given at a time when nobody really cares, given I'm an unknown blazing dark star:

Since I can remember I've had an interest in the mysterious - ghosts, UFOs, legends and lore. I ate it up with a spoon every chance I got. What I mean to describe though, is what pushed me into esoteric practice.

When I was very young, I read a book called The Beautiful Side of Evil by Johanna Michaelsen. This book blew my freaking mind. It had poltergeist activity, witches, gnomes, peyote, dracula, graveyards, theater demons, Mexican healers - man! - it was the most magical book I had ever read. About two-thirds in, Johanna finds Jesus and I got bored and never finished it. That book is probably what ignited my interest in hallucinogens. 

In the book, Johanna got involved with a Silva Mind Control group. What she described sounded cool as hell to me, and I began the practice, which essentially was counting down from 100 while visualizing the numbers and going down an elevator. Then you reached the bottom, and you had a room with filing cabinet, and eventually you brought up 2 guides from the elevator. Johanna got stuck there looking at 2 bloody werewolves, but that's another story.

Next comes a long interlude of marijuana, LSD and mushroom use, which propelled me into the inner-worlds, and isolated me from the outer world.

Sometime in high school I found this exact book - the Silva Mind Control Method - at my aunt's house. I was in a Tae Kwon Do class, and the visualizations really helped me with sparring. That counting down practice also really helped me to calm my mind for sleep. I've always had trouble getting to sleep.

Pretty much nightly for years and years, I counted down from 100. During the day, I would count down from 10 and try to reach the same meditative state.

The next thing that had quite the impact on me, was Carlos Castaneda. Those books blew my mind as well. I already had quite a bit of entheogenic experience - enough that I didn't care for any more. The Art of Dreaming really got me interested in lucid dreaming and astral travel and such - which I had been doing since childhood, haphazardly. 

So, coming up to just around 2 or 3 years ago, that was it. No Wicca, no Buddhism, no Yoga, never saw The Craft, never watched Buffy. Oh... There was Magic the Gathering, and I guess you could count Pentecostalism and a mystical experience with glossolalia, but that's another story. The next thing to happen was that I became friends with Rufus Opus on social media, and he emailed me his Neo-Platonic Basics. That was the major catalyst, along with my marriage having failed, my father's death, and 3 more failed relationships. It was like the shamanic dismemberment....