Today’s topic is about indoctrination and fear. And I’m going to get personal here. I’m more personal than I’ve been in any of my other podcasts, and I’m pretty sure some people won’t like it, but I think most of you will appreciate it. As some of you may know, I come from a pretty mixed background. My father’s side is Middle Eastern and mostly Jewish. And my mother’s side is Irish Catholic. My mom converted to Judaism before I was born mainly for the wedding because my father’s mother insisted upon it. So in that way, I was exposed to many different religious faiths, and living in Manhattan, you see it everywhere. We weren’t religious in any way, but we did the Hanukkah thing, the Passover thing, the Christmas thing, the Easter thing.
We did all that. And my birthday is right around the corner, in December, I was a spoiled kid, Christmas, Hanukkah and my birthday, not necessarily in that order. So it was a pretty open family, but there was an underlying feel of Judaism there. Things started to change for me when I was sent off to Israel when I was 13 years old; I was not a good kid. I was a pretty rowdy kid or rather disobedient, let’s put it that way. My parents sent me off there to live for a little bit, trying to get me back on track. So when I was 14, I had a spiritual experience that put me on the path that I’m on now. I’ve been in the occult for 31 years; you know how old I am now. But that’s okay. I tell people if they ask
I was exploring. I mean, exploring everything, absolutely everything. It was like a whole new world opened up for me. Fast forward two years, and I’m back again in the Middle East because, after 14, I came back here and then went back for vacation. I was about three weeks into the vacation, I was supposed to stay the whole summer until something odd happened. I started to play an experiment with a system that I created that fuse together Kabbalistic and ancient Egyptian symbols together. It was potent. I mean, insanely powerful and these entities that I worked with were always working for my betterment, but because I was young and naive, I didn’t see it like that. I became afraid of them.
It inspired fear in me when I started to have dreams. The first dream was of me looking at my father and someone in the dream is saying to me that he is going to die of a particular disease. When I wake up from that dream, I sort of brush it off a little bit. I mean, you know, I’ve had nightmares before, but then the next night, I had a second dream, and it was a dream within a dream. This time, it was my mom telling me, “your father is dying from this disease, and he only has two years to live.” So, now I’m panicked. Now I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what is going on here?’ I called my family here in New York, and I said, ‘look, I have to cut my stay short. I have to come back. I can’t. I cannot stay in Israel right now.’ And like I said, I was only three weeks into this vacation. My father relented, but he was pissed off because he said, ‘I paid for your entire summer, and now you’re coming here after three weeks because of a silly nightmare.’
The summer passed. During it, I was pretty much at home studying the occult and eating McDonald’s. I think I gained 20 pounds that summer. Then comes September of that year and its 10th-grade orientation. I go, and I come back home in the middle of the day, and all the lights in the apartment are on. Now that doesn’t sound too weird, but those who knew my father, knew that he was a little frugal, so he would never leave the lights on. My little Spidey senses kicked in, and I felt something was wrong.
I ran to my grandmother’s apartment, and I knocked on the door for five minutes. She finally opened, and we walked into the other room, and I sat down, and I asked her, ‘What’s going on? Where’s, where’s my father?’ And she said, ‘you need to speak to your mom.’ Now I’m starting to panic. Something is wrong. So I run to my mother’s apartment. My parents have been long, long divorced. She opens the door, and she has this sheepish smile on her face, and I’m thinking, ‘okay, all right, she’s smiling.’
My grandmother was a little bit dramatic, so I thought, ‘okay, this was this grandma being herself.’ So, we walk into the other room, I sit at the edge of the bed and all of a sudden I get Deja Vu. I’m like, wait a minute. I’ve been in this position, this situation before, and all of a sudden, and hair stands up right now just thinking about it. The dream comes true. She says to me, ‘do you remember those two dreams that you had?’ And I said,’ yes.’ And she says to me, ‘well, today your father went to the doctor, and he got his results, and as your dream said, he got this disease, and that disease was AIDS.’
Back then, it was a death sentence. And I, I didn’t know what to think. I mean, that’s what it said in the dream. But you know what? I was in my own world; I didn’t even know what AIDS was. And to show you how disconnected I was from that, I would go on the subway or the bus, and there would be ads that would say, get tested for HIV. And I read it as hives. I was like, why are people getting tested for hives? So that’s how disconnected I was, but yet the spirits told me precisely what he was going to die from and that he would die in two years.
That was crazy. And what happened at that point is my indoctrination kicked in. All of a sudden, I abandoned the occult completely and utterly. I burnt and got rid of first edition occult books. I can’t believe it. I still kick myself in the head over that now because you can’t find them anymore. And if you can, it’s like the 15th edition. And to see how powerful indoctrination is, I didn’t even need to be religious in my past to be indoctrinated. So, I felt guilty, and I jumped right into Judaism like really intensely because I thought that maybe my work in the occult caused this to my father. That’s how I felt. So I felt guilty, and I thought naively that if suddenly, I would change course that somehow through repentance and through going deep into Judaism that I could reverse the situation.
I was completely naive, but mostly in denial. As I got deeper into the religion, the sicker my father got, and the more miserable I became because it was spiritually empty. You know, I, I craved what the occult gave me and the connection that I had with the goddess ISIS, who was my mother Goddess at the time. Suffice it to say, my father died in 1992, and I was livid at God. I had so much anger that I tore and spat on Holy books. I mean, I was terrible, but one thing came quickly is I went back into the occult and back to embracing the goddess, but I was still scared. I was still scared and guilty. That may be, I brought that onto my father. And what’s so interesting, and I know some of you still do this, is when you do a ritual, but then before you go to bed, you say a little prayer to God just in case for insurance. That’s how it was back then for me. So, it was just a really tough time because the indoctrination kept on telling me, ‘it’s because of you. You brought this evil into the house.’
A year or so later, I stumbled upon Hinduism and Buddhism, and that caused me an inward reflection that I didn’t have before. I then realized it wasn’t me that brought this upon my father. It was him. It was his own choices that did that. It is the height of ego to think that our occult practice, our spirituality is at fault for these things, instead of understanding that people have their own choices and need to live with those consequences. Instead, we make it about us. We’re like, ‘well, I brought it into the house.’ No, that was their choice. My father lived his life the way that he did, sometimes quite recklessly. He brought it on himself. Anything bad that happened to him, he brought on himself. I had nothing to do with it.
But it took a long time for me to come to grips with that. And when you think about it, it was because of a big ego. People believe that egotism only runs one way, that it’s always people who are thumping on their chest. They say, “I’m the best, I’m everything.” But it goes the other way too. The other way is taking on the blame for everything. Saying, “Oh, it is my fault. I did this.” That’s egotism as well. Not many people think about that. But if you’re making it about you, even if it has nothing really to do with you, that’s an ego thing. So, all of this time, I feared. And in the end, it was not me. I needed to allow my father to have the right to make his own bed, so to speak. So really, the moral is don’t be afraid to practice your occult.
Keep doing it. You know, people have their own lives, they had it before you were born and they’re going to have it after you’re gone. That fear, even a slight bit of it, is indoctrination, and the only way to fight that is to realize it’s your choice and you can, you can fight it. It’s your path. Don’t make it about someone else. You may or may not be lucky enough to practice occult openly. I know some of you cannot. Don’t be a martyr. Nothing good comes from being a martyr because we need you alive. So that means you’re going to have to practice in your heart. And that’s okay. I know some of you do struggle with your interest in the occult and magic because a small part of you is afraid.
And I, and I know this because I get messages and when I read them, I see my early self. It’s understandable, and it will take a while to get rid of it. But keep at it and never forget you owe it to yourself and the world to follow your heart, to follow your spirit. Don’t abandon what your soul calls you to do like I did when my father got sick. If anything, staying true can only help you get through it. So, do you see how sinister indoctrination can be? I wasn’t even religious and yet I still felt I was doing something wrong.
So what you have to do is work through that uncertainty and the fear and know that no matter what, if you are a Wiccan, Luciferian, Satanist, New Age Witch, or what have you, stay true to yourself and as a community, we need to be supportive of one another. Don’t let our various factions become inquisitions. That defeats the whole point. Why run from an inquisition to cause another one? We need to be one community living the way our spirits want us to live. We didn’t like it when the Western religions told us we were wrong. We shouldn’t tell each other that we’re wrong. We don’t need to agree, but the moment one group becomes an inquisition, we have become like the religions we so desperately wanted to escape. So, stay strong. Stay true. Follow your occult path. My brothers and sisters don’t let fear and indoctrination cause you to waiver. Remember, it is just indoctrination and nothing more. These are ideas that were pumped into you from birth, work through it. You got this…So Mote It Be!
