5 - How To Concoct A New You - At Home In Your Spare Time

"We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams ..."

(Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy)

Everything that begins in your life should begin nicely clean and brand new to give you confidence that nothing is hanging on from old mistakes to drag you down. To start a new way of operating your life, to completely change yourself into what you want to be, you should start as though with a blank sheet of paper.

You will have to make an inventory of yourself and your life - everything you've accomplished, everything you own. You are what you own; you are what you have done. You must accept yourself on those terms. What you are today is a result of the things you have done or abstained from doing, which is sometimes more of an influence. As you take stock of yourself in following the "New You" blueprint, do not blame others for anything about yourself or your life that you do not like. It may sound tough, but you have to take all the blame yourself.

Every human being on earth has something about him that is unique; we all have something to offer the world that nobody else can offer, even if it's only a dimple. But because we are unique, only we ourselves can decide what we will do, and only we can figure out that list of personal aims called desire. First, you have to stop kidding yourself. How are you ever going to get happiness if you are not honest about what you really want?

What you want and the way you go about getting it is part of the uniqueness about you, and that holds true whether we're talking about a special sex technique that thrills you or a safe deposit vault full of diamonds. You are going to have to sum yourself up, take your own inventory of dreams and reality, and witchcraft insight will show you how. It is a very different plan from anything you have ever heard before, and, unlike most plans of self-improvement, it works. It works because it's honest. It stands up and faces reality.

For example, everybody has heard wise psychologists advise, "Relax - be yourself." That's the surest route to nowhere ever advocated. Don't relax! Do just the opposite, get yourself all keyed up. The keyed-up, emotionally turned-on you is the best you that the world will ever see. Relax? What for? Too many people are so relaxed they never accomplish what they want. They spend their lives wandering around in the psychological equivalent of hair curlers. Ugly!

Don't be afraid that you can't change. Not everybody can go out and change the world or influence their own environment just by wishing to, but you can certainly change your personal life. And perhaps when your life does change, you will have been an influence on your environment, because what you do will set forth chain reactions that affect everyone around you. It won't be your psychic energy alone that did it. You will be doing something concrete to make the other things happen. Witchcraft of this type is bound to improve what you are, and will also increase your confidence.

The thing to do is this: Write down one thing you want to accomplish. Read it every morning and every night, carry it around. You'll reach the point where you don't even have to look at the words. But you know that piece of paper is in your purse or your pocket and it's happening; eventually it slants everything you do towards the goal. You will make the right moves at the right time and never falter.

Accidents are rare, and practically every disaster that's ever occurred in your life, other than perhaps, getting hit by a tornado, might have been avoided. Almost anything could have been changed slightly, if way back in time you'd made the right move. One subtle difference along the way, and your whole destiny can be altered.

So many people create horrible relationships with the world, and yet they wonder, "How can this happen? I've been so good, I do all I can, yet this is what I get back." They get back exactly what they asked for, unconsciously. Somewhere along the line they developed a pattern of allowing certain things to take place, very minor things perhaps, that eventually built up to a big personal disaster. The thing to do is to correct that tendency from the start, so that if you're not successful next week, you're going to be successful by the end of six months or two years.

You must watch the whole picture and bide your time. There is power in not being rushed, which is not the same as being relaxed. If you are rushed, sometimes you can slip and be overwhelmed by the heat of your own desire. If you play it cool and wait, keyed up and ready, everything is going to fall into your lap.

The approach of writing down and establishing clear desires, then repeating things and carrying the same idea with you, gives you a direct course of action that you may not have had before. It eventually allows you to instinctively discard all the superficial things that are taking place; the unnecessary baggage is dropped and you move at a faster rate.

Your subconscious has taken in information from the time you first feel any sensation at all, and it is full of information as to how to operate. Your conscious mind probably has been distorted and trained by circumstances and people around you. The inner you knows everything. The average man or woman has a fantastic amount of information poured into him constantly every day, and it's there to be tapped. Witchcraft lets your subconscious figure out what's right for you in any situation. You may be consciously confused or distracted, but, like a computer, you have stored all the necessary facts to win what you desire. The little objects and chants help your conscious let go and not hold on so tightly to the reins.

Recognize that your conscious mind is a product of environment; your conscious mind has been conditions by father, mother, husband, children, the entire world. But everything you've read, everything you've seen, even strange and unconnected events have conditioned your subconscious mind. So it's brilliant compared to the outer self. Let it go free!

If you do, you should be able to reach the point where you're able to generate energy by subconscious mental process rather than hard concentration. With control, you should be able to turn on energy. Have you ever talked to someone on the phone who has the flu? They usually answer the phone with a dragging voice. Now that's not necessary, because it's not going to make them feel any better. You should never even pick up the phone without being turned on. Never do anything without turning on.

Turning on isn't going to make you die any sooner. In fact, it sustains life. All of these little things can add up to failure. The limp voice on the telephone. Shuffling across the floor with slippers flapping - that's just not necessary. You can walk just as quickly and firmly when you've got a fever. Too often people deliberately fail. They tend to do all they can to break their spirit, subdue their energy. It's this same energy you want and need to get you things. You've got to generate energy in order to get things going. You can take vitamins for the rest of your life, but unless your mental attitude is energetic, you're not going to get what you want. You've got to turn on.

There is no bible of witchcraft, and although there are many books on the market about the history of witchcraft and a few mysterious little things to do, the books are not truly dealing with witchcraft unless it is made clear that mental attitude is the driving force. Anything else is fake, and it's absolutely not witchcraft. So don't waste your time kissing frogs: They won't turn into Prince Charming. The real magic - helped by spells, chants and whatever - must come from within you. That's power enough. It can turn brain tissue into gold, positive gold !

Today, in spite of vast knowledge about what makes man tick and what makes man click, many people still want to think that something or somebody else is in control when it comes to their own life. They don't want to accept responsibility for the control of their own lives, their own miseries and disasters. They like to cry, "Somebody else did this." Or, "I would have been different, but my father was mean to me." So long as you persist in this attitude, you are never going to be different or achieve anything. Accept responsibility for everything you do and say. Don't lean on your environment and your inherited characteristics so heavily.

A witch can't poison her enemy's apple, and when he dies, shrug it off with, "It must have been something he ate." A witch who casts a seduction spell can't cry, "Rape." Some people prefer not to be in the driver's seat, because they may never get anywhere or achieve too much. If you want to achieve success, to hit great heights and fulfil all your desires, you've got to risk going down very low, with great despair, because once you recognize that you've done it, nobody else, it can hit you very hard.

If you can face that, with the help of witchcraft, then the whole world is yours. That's the decisive line. You accept complete control. It's a very heavy burden, but the rewards are fantastic, because all the gains are yours, too. Look around you at successful and unsuccessful people, the happy and the unhappy. One group expresses the thought that things could have been different, but ... The majority of people are very content to associate every bad thing that happens to them with an act of another individual or power. If they'd only realize what could be done with limited ability, provided one takes over completely!

There is not now and never has been any definitive textbook that all witches follow, yet real witches all do the same things. Real witches do the same things that real people do. Witchcraft just can't really be practised without the attitude of full control. Read again the spells that include chants that say, "I am the power," or "I am the cosmos, I am the wind."

From that point, we can move on. Remember what you want to do and what kind of props you will need for spells in order to sustain your faith in yourself. Make an outline, much as people make up a budget. Write out what you want to achieve in life, not specifically now, because it isn't a red hat or an alligator bag, it's the essence of the kind of a life that will enable you to have the specific things. Put down, too, what reactions you want from life. If you want energy, you can't just set up a programme by which you receive free 100 vitamin capsules every day. Instead, you set up the things that will give you energy. A loose circle, a wide frame, should be placed around your picture of happiness.

Say, for instance, that a person is bored, lonely and not rich. First of all he must give up all his old reasons for being this way. He must stop dwelling on what has created that condition, because that just adds power to the old condition. Then he must start creating an image of the way he wants to live and what he wants to happen. He must visualize this and picture it constantly.

Most people do this by occasional daydreams, but it isn't sustained. In order to sustain it while you're occupied doing other things, put it down in a form that you can associate with your desire. Make it concrete; put it in words. Just state the facts as briefly as possible. If you write it out in great detail, it is going to be too tedious, too difficult for you to keep concentrating on the whole thing. So state very clearly and in a few words: One, this is what I want, and two, this is what I want. Keep it in your desk drawer, and read it regularly.

Memorize it. Say it over and over. Keep the list in your purse, and every time you open your purse you will be reminded of it. Put it under your pillow, pull it out, and look at it. At all times fortify yourself with it, keeping it in the forefront of your mind.

Sit in a darkened room, with a candle lit, perhaps incense burning, and some music that you like - all the things that turn you on. When these things are going for you, creating this new experience, tell yourself, "Because every night at midnight I light this candle, I am going to get what I want, everything I want." You don't have to know anything, just be yourself. Because you light a candle, what you want on your list is going to come to you; tell yourself that aloud, repeatedly.

Light a candle: you can trust that because it is something outside of yourself, and it is easier to have confidence in things that are concrete. If you repeat the process regularly, you will advance to the point where a lighted match in a restaurant will reinforce you with all the power of the candlelight ceremony in your home. And pretty soon just visualizing the tiny tip of the candle flame in your mind will have you feeling that you are on the road to success.

Everybody has heard of single-minded people, strong-minded people, the one-track mind type, the kind of driving mentality that gets what it wants. This is the same kind of person you are teaching yourself to be. But this isn't something that happens overnight.

You have to give yourself at least the same length of time you'd give a particular facial cream before you can expect to see results. If you go on a diet, you can't expect results overnight, and witchcraft is something that's going to change your entire life, not just your weight. Crash diets seldom work and neither will crash witchcraft.

Another thing you've got to do is work over years and years of doing things the wrong way, if that's the way you used to do them. It's not necessary to spend the same number of years to start life anew, but it may take you at least a month or six weeks to change your pattern of doing things. But if you follow this practice every day, you will be completely transformed. Within a month you will see the first signs of something new happening.

Knowing that you have the knowledge within yourself to achieve any desire, and that by lighting the candle you'll trigger that knowledge, the more you can relax about it the more quickly you'll trigger that knowledge, the more quickly you'll move towards your goal.

These methods have proven very successful for witches in the past. If it is not difficult, it's a good idea to rhyme your major desire. Rhymes are used because there is an hypnotic effect to reading poetry. It flows; you get into the swing of it, and it's easy to remember. You want things to be smooth and flowing. You could either rhyme your own or find a piece of poetry that pleases you and adopt it, substituting your key desire words.

You should use the same rhyme over and over, writing it down: "I'm going to have a handsome son, a home and man when next year's done." This will have a subtle effect on your subconscious, so that you will begin to act in the way needed to set into motion events that will result in your obtaining your desires. The primary thing about happiness is that you can't kid yourself: If you do not know what you want, you will never get it.

A man called me on two-way radio recently to ask my advice about an upcoming business deal that he said was very important to him. I felt that his main problem was emotional, not business, so I said to him: "I don't think this business deal is your problem at all. I think you have a very deep emotional problem that is pressing on you right now, and that is worrying you a lot more than this business deal." He admitted it.

People always want to discuss their emotional problems, it seems, but find it hard to begin, or perhaps don't know how. One woman who called me during a radio show indicated she was primarily interested in her upcoming wedding. From, all the surface facts it would seem that she was extremely happy, a lucky bride-to-be who was about to start out on a happy new life. But suddenly I said to her, "You're not in love with this man at all, are you?"

I detected that although she seemed preoccupied with getting married, the partner was a secondary consideration. The girl confessed that she did not love him but could not tell me why she was marrying him. It wasn't for wealth, position or pregnancy, and I can't imagine why she was going ahead with it at all. Just because he asked her?

To know what you want, you have to learn to know yourself. Always study yourself and discover why you do things. Analyse everything. You say, "I did that because I wanted this to happen," always looking at yourself and the things you do and why you do them.

With my own intuition, psychic insight, and a few other things, I try to get people who call me on the two-way radio to look at themselves. They ask me for advice, or they ask me what to do, but I never give advice. I tell them that they are failing to explore their real needs. I say, "What you are really telling me is that you want to do this because you feel ..." They say, "Yes." They end up being very happy that someone clarified their thinking for them. They are people who have usually been living in a pattern of hiding from themselves.

People ask me if one can control or create the future. Yes! What you control is yourself. You can change or adapt to things and situations that will be happening.

One of the biggest problems in approaching a new way of life is that so many people look at the future blankly and either deceive themselves or have to admit that they are not sure what they really want. So if you have been unable to clearly plot your list, perhaps you need an inventory to lead you to the insight of what your future should have to make a happy you.

You must sit down and make a list of everything that applies to yourself, even very simple things, like, "I am five-foot-five, I have black hair, I have brown eyes." Put down every statistical fact that bears on your life, because these are what make you real to yourself, and this is the picture you must see clearly. Write down whatever you have done that is of any significance to what you are and the way you live. Even relatives might affect your life and people you react to.

You must even list all your possessions, a complete assessment of everything connected to you. Write it all out. It should be clearly and briefly stated, line by line, item by item, covering you from top to bottom, everything you consider a contributing element to your physical appearance or mental attitudes.

When you have written all these things out, draw a two-column checklist beside it. Examine each item on the list from the point of, "What, of all these things, do I consider important to myself?" The questions for a yes and no in each of the columns are, "What do I like? What is it that bugs me?"

It can't be a matter of what your mother thinks is important, or your teachers or the church or the lady next door. It must be your own secret and personal inventory. Which of these things really matter to you? Do you like it or not?

What you possess influences what you are to a great extent, and at this stage you cannot separate or omit any items or relationships from the chart. It all adds up to making you happy or unhappy.

You must be extremely selfish in deciding these desires. Selfishness is often frowned upon as being a poor trait, but it is not. Until you are selfish enough to make a strong individual out of yourself and your desires, you will not be a strong enough person to share yourself with others. Make yourself happy first and then, and only then, will you have happiness to spread around. Those people who sacrifice themselves do it because they get something fabulous out of it. But others will not extend sympathy or hold themselves accountable because you destroy yourself for them. Selfish people, openly selfish ones, are more likeable. You know where you stand. They don't fool around.

In facing the realities that make you what you are, which make your life what it is, you cannot blame an abusive husband or a misguided parent. You have contributed to these situations. You can remove yourself from them. No sick mother has ever prevented her daughter from marrying for forty-five years - unless the daughter wanted to avoid the perils of marriage. No mother has brought you up so badly that your life is ruined. No one mistake, or series of them, can have ruined your life. The mere fact that you are alive, that you can recognize the situation you are in and its need for improvement, makes you a part of what has happened.

This is not to say that because you are displeased with your married life that you must pack up and walk out on your mate and children - although sometimes this is the only answer to a hopeless situation. But sometimes the "old you" walking out and the "new you" walking in will be sufficient. A woman called me once and told me that, after thirty years of marriage, she was going to leave her husband. After thirty years of knowing a human being and reacting to him, she was willing to never see him again.

It was as though she had had absolutely no experiences with this individual that in any way were connected with her life. No memories. Even without considering sex or love, if you live next door to a guy for thirty years you establish some thing between you. She said she never liked him, she always had trouble with him. Well, an important part of her marriage seemed to be based on the fact that she was living with somebody she didn't like; she liked that, and if she left, she would miss hating him every day. Something in the relationship must have satisfied or pleased her in some way, or she wouldn't have stuck it out for thirty years.

People do not suffer. The first inclination is to protect ourselves and this we do. When there is suffering we get out; when we linger, it may mean that we like it.

Another woman was planning to leave her husband to start a new life. She told me that she felt nothing for him; that was why she was leaving. She feels nothing because he feels nothing; they live together feeling nothing, and when they split up they will go on feeling nothing: Divorce will not change the situation. She will still feel nothing because she is giving out nothing to react to, but is just waiting for somebody to make her react. Leaving him won't change her, or her life.

Too many people let themselves get caught in a sort of limbo-land, situations that do not demand too much from them and that pay meagre dividends of happiness. This "safe" spot may gradually destroy your life or just explode in your face. It is simpler, easier, and far more rewarding to make a commitment, declare what you want and go after it.

There is a tendency to seek out constant situations. But life is dynamic; it changes every day. If a constant situation to you means lack of motion, nothing happening, then you are playing dead. If you play dead, you can end up dead. It's a very tricky thing, because some people go into situations like marriage expecting that the other person is going to give their life meaning. They want to dedicate themselves to this other person, give themselves over to this other person and become part of their life. Such an attraction is doomed, for if an individual has nothing going for himself, the excitement of the alliance is missing from the start, and, if the other person fails to sustain the relationship, then there is no relationship, there is no life.

Have you ever heard someone say, "If he leaves me, I'll die"? Baloney! Nobody dies because some other person leaves. The other person doesn't matter; it is you that matters. When you DO die is when you stop doing what you do, what makes you what you are; that's why, if you live through another person only and have no life of your own, their departure is like killing you. But it's suicide, not murder.

Living your life is what you do, and nobody else can really do it for you. People often ask celebrities and famous successes if they have some outlet, a hobby, as a relief from their work, and most often the celebrity is surprised by the question, because his work is his life. If he does have a hobby, he pursues it with the same energy and zest as he does his chief occupation. The implication of such a question is that, for example, an actor or actress spends twelve hours a day working in front of cameras only biding their time until they can get home and do what they really want. The fact is, they spend their days being themselves, living their lives, and why would they want to change that when they went home? You never stop being you.

If you are waiting until you get off work to be yourself, you are wasting a major part of your life. If your work does not agree with you then you must change it, not change yourself. If you are waiting for something to happen, something to change before you start doing what you really want to do - later, always later - then you are wasting your life. So much of life is wasted waiting to live, to feel, to be alive, to love - and soon life is over and it is too late.

How many things happen to you when you're in an emotional slump? None. Things happen when you are turned on, active, dynamic. It is there, inside you. And starting to act creates more energy in you, charges you up.

You've got a wonderful mechanism for reacting, and you should enjoy using it, feeling everything you've got, while you've got it. If you wait for the next time around, you're placing an awful big bet on reincarnation.

When people say, "Relax and be yourself," that's not really yourself. Yourself is everything you've learned to do, to think, to cover up and hide. The you is a learned thing, something shaped. When you relax everything you've shaped, then there's no more you.

A witch wants great things to happen in her life, but she never thinks that they are going to be just handed to her. A witch wouldn't want them through another individual. That would be second-hand life. What you want should come to you as a result of your own energies and efforts, from something that comes out of yourself. You can't duplicate that sensation, because when you get something that way, you've done it all yourself. You take full credit.

Everybody has something to offer, the power to get what he wants. There is nothing that can beat what you are. The one thing that everybody else lacks is you, your life. You have that: You are the only one living your life. Every shape, every form has a chance to achieve some sort of joyful existence, and you are no exception.

Look around you; look at people. Appearance is not an important factor. There are fat, ugly people who have handsome mates attracted to them by something else inside them, some energy. It doesn't matter if you're tall, short, fat, skinny or bald; it is what you project, what you are offering that is important, not how you look. Of course, we try to make the best of our physical characteristics, but, bumpy nose, grey hair or whatever, let's face it, none of us are beautiful, at all stages of our lives. But what your personality projects is what you'll get back from the world. There are many pretty people who are extremely unhappy individuals.

On the other hand, there are diets, plastic surgeons, skin specialists, cosmetics and exercises, and other ways to go about being as attractive as possible if that's important to you. Study the people around you. Not the people of films, television and magazines who are superhuman and unreal. The people you must study are those you'll find by going out into the streets, into banks, post offices, anywhere where there are masses of people. Look at them. They are people who are married, or single, well-dressed, or not, well-proportioned, or not. Look at their faces, the way they carry themselves. If you lack confidence, such a study will reap huge benefits, because you'll realize that most of the people in the world are not very much to look at, even though most of them are making it, making steps towards happiness. What's holding you back?

Many people think that witchcraft will give them a quality of being mysterious. What has being mysterious to do with witchcraft? I've known a lot of dull and stupid women who were mysterious. They had no control and were accomplishing nothing. They were a mystery to themselves, and this is what they projected. A witch is neither overly mysterious nor overly open. You can have any kind of personality and practise witchcraft.

It doesn't mean that you should go around your neighbourhood broadcasting the fact that you have taken up witchcraft. Maybe it helps when you're trying to quit smoking, to tell everybody that you're quitting cigarettes. If letting people in on the secret that you're practising witchcraft is liable to put you in the position of being goaded, bugged and kidded by friends who do not believe, then why put yourself in line for this kind of bothersome torment at a time when you're beginning something new?

I wouldn't advise you to go out and say you're practising witchcraft, because most people, with all the old false conceptions of witchcraft, will think you are a nut. Once it's working for you, then go out and tell the world what you've done if you want to. But at the start, if a friend says, "What's come over you lately, you're a completely different person?" your reply should just be a noncommittal, "Oh, am I?" Friends all interject their reactions into something unusual, and most of the time the reactions are not really their own, but something handed down to them. They don't know what they're talking about. In situations like this, it's best to keep quiet until you've got the control you need. Then nobody will laugh. They'll copy you.

People who try to make themselves over completely sometimes get impatient. If you try a spell for six weeks and nothing happens, and if it's something that's new to you, then six weeks is not a terribly long time for you to get into shape, or reshape, as the case may be. It's a day-to-day way of thinking, an approach, a way of life that must be developed, and if it takes longer for some people than others, it does work. Look at it the way you look at anything else you get involved in: Women learn to put on makeup. The first time many come out looking freaky. Women don't learn the best way to do their hair overnight; it takes a while. Learning to make love, and all its variations and subtleties is something also that takes time. So what's the rush with witchcraft?

You are going to be reborn; you've got to make up your mind to it. You must start as an embryo in the world of witchcraft and expand in power from there. But once it happens, you grab hold of a whole new life, a more dynamic and happier one. That's worth working for.