I have spent years of my life and now months even more intensely reading books on ceremonial magic, occultism and mysticism and their methods, ethos, theory and techniques. I practiced as much as I could, ignoring the subject of initiations as it was more a factor of symbolism and cultism than something useful. I went from pseudosciences to science and from tantra to crowley sex magick even taoist ideas from chi to golden dawn and traditional Jewish kabbalism to hermetic Christian kabbalah and a traditional Indian chakra system (I tried hard to avoid theosophy, new age, ariosophy ideas and new thought but I ended up reading several authors and even evola) also religious mysticism (christians, sufi, etc) and academic shamanistic studies and even yogas. I feel somewhere between a functional magician in certain periods and an armchair magician in other periods but in the long run I got disappointed and failed to see anything magical like some sensationalist authors like crowley with the HGA (although I had a freaking panic attack with something that sounds alien or angelic to my experience) or bardon or others but still weird thing happened. although mysticism did give me pure psychosomatic-mystical experiences magic and rituals not so much alike. I recently started reading Prometheus rising sometimes i ask myself if its not a secret brainwash guide of the MK-U Glowies and RAW and Timothy know something and other books and ended up by fate reading about hypnosis. It feels so weird but many of the mystical techniques, theory and rituals I learned just clicked with hypnosis techniques so fucking fast, I dare say I went into a trance between mindfulness, focus and tranquility very quickly combining the techniques I learned with hypnosis and modern neuro-studies. >also And something that left me in shock, I was consulting history books about the origins of hypnosis and later syncronicity? of orthodox and heterodox masonic orders as well as their relationship to the magic lodges and... the influence of mesmer is very obvious. I begin to have the strange belief that the western esotericism was only in principle a kind of vitalism-mysticism-spiritism that began with hypnosis and theater like McDojos although I do not know if I could say the same of the PGM or other old grimories (except that the shamans and pagans who made ceremonial mix up of gods are not very different but in these books trance is a part of the threatise) It is as if everything makes sense now, a fucking occult key, I am perplexed.