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Thank you for your kindness. :)
As I said earlier in this thread I am devoted to the gods of the ancient witch faith, known in Wicca as the Lord and the Lady (though Wicca is really just the tip of the iceberg). If you're interested in them, you can look them up, there's loads of information, but basically they're fertility gods: the archetypal or quintessential man, and the quintessential woman. But they can also be seen from a cosmic perspective as the embodiments of masculine and feminine energy in the universe - the Father and Mother of all living creatures, and even of the entire universe - I actually see connections between the Lord and Lady, and the Christ and Sophia of Gnostic Christianity. But anyway.
In the style of Austin Osman Spare, who pioneered the technique of creating an "alphabet of desire" - a set of symbols representing aspects of the world, from one's own unique perspective, to be used as a way to communicate with the unconscious mind and / or the spirit world - I created over time a set of symbols, for an entirely different reason (a script for an invented language of mine), but realized that they could be used to express abstract concepts, deep facets of reality, the way the Norse runes can, but then that's the way all alphabets of desire work - they're ways of categorizing reality. Each of my symbols (there's 24 of them, like the norse runes - weird coincidence) is associated with some combination of masculine, feminine, and neutral forces, and thus as a whole they express all the different interrelationships of the God and Goddess - all the different parts of reality.
So, some time ago, when this all started, I was contemplating these runes of mine and tried to find a way to create with them an affirmation or a spell to combat a major problem of mine - lack of motivation and willpower. I came up with a word which in my language (which you remember these runes are meant to write) means "I conquer / empower myself." I then, through meditations on this word and various intuitions, realized that I could achieve this goal of self-empowerment through self-discipline by devoting one day to every possible pair of runes - that's 576 days! Plus this would embed me deeply into a mystical system that I could use to communicate with reality and with my own mind on a deep, possibly magickal level. I gave myself two weeks to prepare, during which time I have been doing a lot of meditating and thinking. In a few days I will begin the work, and by the end I will have proven to myself that I am capable of doing something so big and difficult - and this belief in myself, I think, will cure my willpower problem, AND I will understand 576 individual facets of the universe and of the Lord and Lady's interrelationships in a way I never have before!
Wow, that's a lot of stuff to say, I hope it all made sense. :)
As for what I've learned yet... well, I've discovered loads of meanings hidden in my symbol system. It really is more a map of my own PERCEPTION of reality than of reality itself - but only through understanding my own mind can I figure out how to reshape myself in the image of my true, ideal, destined self. So an artificial runic system is the obvious method. I've also, during my meditations when I am in a deep trance, heard (in my mind) the voices of the Lord and Lady telling me things that I can do to improve myself, giving me advice, and I often see mental visions, like waking dreams, which involve these runes and depict symbolically meanings of them that I didn't know before.
I know none of this has ANYTHING to do with shamanism but I am a profoundly intellectual person, in terms of my spirituality. I have to have an intellectual, mental way of understanding and relating to spiritual reality - a map, if you will - so that I will, when the time comes, be able to understand the connections among things that would have confused me without that preparation. Honestly, it's sort of like reinventing the Kabbalah, only in my own image.
A simple example is that my rune "Dhet," representing a sound like the "th" in "father," symbolizes such disparate things as transformation, astral travel, song, mirrors, and prisms, linking all of those into one more abstract idea - thus, whenever I need to embody those ideas somehow, or interact with them, I can invoke that particular rune. It's like the way people say the Norse runes have spirits, souls of their own, they're sort of alive - I think it's becoming that way with my own, artificial (or is it perhaps channeled? I don't believe anything is invented, everything we create we are really discovering) system, the symbols are like visual names for spirits or primordial, sentient forces in reality that I could call upon and communicate with. So, like, in the presumably rather common instance of a "shaman" - or in my case, a witch - travelling into the spirit world via trance and song, or by staring into a mirror and moving through it in their spirit, that very event or action is EMBODIED or expressed in my rune "Dhet." They are one thing. To understand the latter enables one to enact the former. To commune with the spirit of the latter is to learn from it how to do the former.
Is that too complicated? I worry that I sound a bit confusing when I talk about this. Someone not familiar with the "alphabet of desire" method of doing things might find it confusing, I'm not sure. As you can probably see though I have a VERY eclectic method - I take any idea that inspires me and combine them all together, because if it inspires me, I assume that means it will be useful to me! If you have any questions, do ask them.
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