There are times when reading ACIM that I feel a very powerful presence within me and everything makes sense.  Then there are other times when I can’t read it because I know it’s going to mess up my good mood.  There are certain things I enjoy about being an inverted misfit occultist.  I love having weird and ancient books to read that will lead me down arcane paths of knowledge.  I love piecing together the bits of occult history like a jigsaw puzzle.  I love looking for the occult imagery in popular films and tracing the shamanic significance of popular culture.  

For instance Angelina Jolie, the kalki-avatar of Hollywood, has a new movie coming out called "Salt".  Salt, of course is one of the principal elements of alchemy.  Will we find alchemical imagery in this film about shifting identities?  Who can know?  What an exciting drama!  I found both "Beowulf" and "Wanted" to have serious occult implications for the collective unconscious.  

I suspect Dakota Fanning will be some kind of new psychic "it girl" for the younger generation.  "Push" and "Twilight" are both loaded with transformational virtues.  If she keeps going with roles like that she may get "tagged" with that kind of aura.

In fact the entire "Twilight" phenomenon may be the concluding chapter in the vampirization of America that began with Anne Rice thirty years ago.  As far as I know, Lestat was the first popular vampire to listen to rock music and kill only bad guys — the first one who was actually a hero and not a villain.  Now that vampires are known to play baseball and shop at Abercrombie and Fitch it’s probably going to be considered politically incorrect to call them monsters.  

But to return to the subject of peace — I know that continuing to read ACIM will give these things a new and different significance.  It’s certainly my ego that loves all this knowledge.  Peace is something else.  Peace is a kind of connectedness and occultism is, almost by definition, a kind of separateness.  

Now certainly I personally couldn’t begin to accept the Course without a firm foundation in occultism and Jungian psychology.  It’s only because of all the weird things that I’ve experienced down other roads on this ego-journey that I can begin to accept this document as valid.  However the Holy Spirit is beyond the rational — in fact transforms the rational into the irrational in order to lead us to the super-rational — and therefore through this alchemical process of teaching peace, I can expect to find some sort of Temperance there.  

So I began this entry and, just like yesterday, I got lost in some thoughts and now I have to come back and fulfill my purpose.  Teach Peace!

Peace comes to me from knowing that our world is ordered by divine beings of infinite compassion who have been known in all cultures.  They are the Celestial Bureaucracy, The Secret Chiefs, the Mahatmas, the Aeons . . . that these popular books and films that reach us through the mass media are like shadows of some original dream — the collective unconscious — but that this dream is somehow ordered and that although some transformations may appear to be nonsensical or even horrifying at first they will ultimately bring us greater love.

Peace comes to me from knowing that even though I don’t have a clear answer about peace today, I believe this process will work and that I will probably get an answer later.