One of the most important things you can learn in life is how to be alone. Solitude is where you begin to discover who you actually are, separate from the opinions, expectations, and influences of everyone around you. Most people spend their lives absorbing the values and beliefs of the people they surround themselves with, never stopping long enough to ask what they genuinely want from life. Being alone gives you the opportunity to step outside the hive mind and find out. It also forces you to confront the parts of yourself that constant social stimulation allows you to avoid. There’s a reason monks, hermits, and contemplatives throughout history have placed so much importance on solitude. You cannot truly know yourself if you’re constantly being told who you should be. Solitude is also where mastery takes place. You can attend a martial arts class and learn a new technique, but the instructor can’t put the thousands of repetitions into your body that will eventually make the movement effortless. That work has to be done alone, without an audience or applause. The same is true of writing, painting, music, meditation, or anything else worth mastering. Every hour you spend seeking entertainment or social stimulation is an hour you cannot devote to cultivating yourself. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the company of others, but a life devoted to constant distraction will never produce the same results as one devoted to discipline and practice. Eventually, you have to decide whether you want to spend your life being entertained by what others have created, or developing the ability to create something extraordinary yourself.

I have absolutely no interest in magick, alchemy, esotericism, or any of the other things I’ve spent most of my life studying and practicing. I don’t care about rituals, initiations, secret teachings, spiritual hierarchies, or collecting mystical experiences. I spent decades immersed in these things, and I understand their value. But they were never meant to become permanent occupations or identities. They were tools intended to accomplish something. The problem is that people become so attached to the tools that they forget what they were trying to accomplish in the first place. They build an entire identity around being a magician, an alchemist, or an initiate, and then spend the rest of their lives defending and reinforcing that identity. The very thing that was supposed to free them from the ego becomes another way of keeping it alive. The purpose of the Great Work is not to become a better magician or a more accomplished alchemist. It is to become free. Free even from the need to practice magick or alchemy. At some point, you have to stop preparing to live life and actually live. It. I want to practice my sword, drink my tea, spend time with my wife, and give my complete attention to whatever I’m doing. I have no desire to escape the world, transcend the material plane, or become something other than what I am. I spent years trying to reach something beyond ordinary life, only to discover that ordinary life was what I’d been looking for all along. If your spiritual practice never allows you to put it down, you haven’t found freedom. You’ve just built yourself another prison.