Moonrise at 8:34 instead of sunrise at 6:40 because I was too lazy to get up. No need to beat up on myself. There were some beautiful insights in that time and space between five in the morning and now. There was a beautiful sunrise. These moments are how you realize where you are in this life experience.

Several teachers have stressed to me that each moment must be recognized and experienced. In each moment is where choice is made to create (magic), each moment is where can be emotion is used to calibrate the high or the low frequency. Each moment is the moment in which you are present. This is, indeed, one of the hardest, hardest, things to understand. But it is the key to most of what we do in and with these bodies, because recognizing the moment brings us back into the body. And if we can do that, we are truly conscious.

There was a time when I didn't understand any of this at all, it sounded like so much mystical stuff to me.

There is an exercise that I created to keep me in the present body/mind/spirit. It is actually something that Franz Barden endorses in his excellent excellent study of the principles of magic for the individual practitioner. Again, hard to get if you don't know it with your head. While not exactly a holy man, Barden was a healer. Barden spoke of love as the best vehicle by which magical transformation and creation can occur. This was a person who was tortured in the German camps for god's sake, so I expect that he knows what he is talking about. But of course it is not the "love" as we understand it in this world that he is speaking of. It is something more elemental, something akashic, to use his formula. I have not wrapped my head fully around this. But my practice is that when I see another human being - or any living energetic or conscious being - I offer blessing. It is the only exercise that keeps me present and keeps awareness to the fore. It can get tedious, and it can get automatic. But it is a constant way of creating something intentionally and offering it to the other being in a benevolent way. I do not do this solely out of a service to others. It is a service to self that benefits the other, and keeps me in real time and in the body. It is a constant exercise in creation that uses magic consciously. And it is difficult to maintain, but it gets easier. In time it will flow outward, without effort, from the Higher Self.