For some notes on the origin and meaning of Alban Elued, see this previous post.

Our family’s Alban Elued ritual is drawn directly from the pages of John Michael Greer’s Druidry Handbook. It is in no way supposed to be a reconstructed ritual, a reenactment of what ancient Druids performed 2000 years ago. Almost nothing is known about their rituals or holidays. Instead, this is a ritual of the Druid Revival tradition, which mixes elements of known Celtic mythology with Arthurian romances and 19th-century mysticism. The overall effect is eclectic and hermetic, infused throughout with nature symbolism. Read the rest of this entry »

As I noted in my previous post, believing in subjective reality as Steve Pavlina defines it requires struggling with some strange and thorny questions, including to what extent you can trust your own memory, how the “rules” of physical reality are learned, and whether you can use the Law of Attraction to generate other conscious beings with true free will. In this post, I’m going to lay out an alternative model that addresses these issues. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to take a couple of posts to talk about Steve Pavlina’s recent remarkable podcast on subjective reality. Steve tries to explain the Law of Attraction — that is, the observation that your reality strongly reflects your thoughts — by proposing that everything you observe is caused by your own consciousness. In fact, nothing exists outside of yourself. This is a pretty serious break from the belief systems of most folks, and I began to wonder if there were some other way to explain the Law of Attraction — to explain it in a fairly rigerous way, as he tries to do — without accepting the idea that all of reality is simply a reflection of your own personal consciousness. Subjective reality, in Steve’s terms, is consistent, makes few assumptions, and is impossible to refute — but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. There may be other ways to explain the Law consistently, and I want to explore one of them in this series. In this first post, I’ll talk about some of the stranger consequences of Steve’s conception. Read the rest of this entry »