If my work has been meaningful to you, Patreon is where I share the deepest part of it. It’s where I discuss things that don’t fit on social media, cover the principles of alchemy, Zen, and the Way of the Sword in greater depth, and offer practices designed to move these ideas out of the intellect and into lived experience. If you’re interested in genuine transformation, you can find me here: patreon.com/Damienechols?utm…

Most people go through their entire lives without ever asking themselves WHY they’re doing the things they’re doing. They follow routines, repeat habits, and live according to expectations handed down by their parents, society, or religion. They never stop and ask themselves what sort of human being they’re trying to become. When you don’t consciously establish an intention for your life, you don’t become free of direction. You simply allow your fears, desires, habits, and the expectations of others to determine that direction for you. You can spend forty years performing the same rituals, saying the same prayers, or practicing the same techniques without ever fundamentally changing. Repetition alone doesn’t produce transformation. Intention is the ingredient that turns repetition into refinement. When you establish a clear intention, your life begins to organize itself around that intention. You begin to recognize what deserves your time and attention, and what is just distracting you. My intention in sword training isn’t to become the greatest swordsman in the world. It’s to cultivate discipline, awareness, and presence through the act of training. That intention can be fulfilled every single day, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Even mistakes become opportunities for refinement. And the same principle applies to everything we do. Every action you take, every habit you repeat, and everything you give your attention to is shaping the person you’re becoming. We have to figure out whether we’re going to participate consciously in that process, or spend our entire lives being shaped by forces we’ve never bothered to examine.

One of the things I write about most often is the importance of dedicating yourself to something that allows you to refine yourself. For me, it’s martial arts and sword training. For someone else, it might be music, painting, or any number of other disciplines. Inevitably, someone will respond by saying there’s nothing we can do to become more than we already are. That there’s nothing to attain, nowhere to go, and no progress to be made. And I agree. At the deepest level of our being, there’s nothing missing. But recognizing that truth doesn’t automatically eliminate a lifetime of conditioning. You can experience the dissolution of the ego and still be impatient, undisciplined, selfish, or controlled by your fears and desires. Realization and integration are two very different things. This is why we need a discipline. We aren’t trying to become something greater than we already are - we’re trying to refine the habits and behaviors that prevent us from living in accordance with what we’ve realized. I can’t become patient simply by understanding patience. I have to practice it. I can’t think my way into becoming disciplined. I have to repeatedly do things that require discipline. The danger is allowing the ego to turn these accomplishments into another identity, another reason to feel superior to others. The purpose of the work isn’t to create a better ego, but to become less controlled by the one we already have. There’s nothing we need to become, but there may be a lifetime of things we need to unlearn. Enlightenment isn’t the end of the work. It’s the beginning of learning how to live.

One of the central mysteries of alchemy is the union of opposites. Sun and Moon. King and Queen. Heaven and earth. Spirit and matter. Alchemists call this the coniunctio, and consider it one of the most important aspects of the Great Work. But I think we often make this far more complicated than it needs to be. We assume that two separate things must somehow be brought together, when the real work is actually recognizing that the separation was never as absolute as we believed. The mind divides reality into categories: body and spirit, sacred and mundane, inner and outer. Then we spend years pursuing spiritual systems designed to reunite what our own minds have divided. But when we bring our attention completely into the present moment, these divisions begin to fall away. We stop thinking about life and begin directly experiencing it. This is why I place so much importance on embodied presence. The mind can wander endlessly through the past and future, but the body is always here. When I’m practicing with a sword, there comes a point where the distinction between myself and the movement disappears. There is no longer someone standing outside the experience, analyzing it. There is simply movement. This is what the alchemical marriage of Sun and Moon is pointing toward. Not escaping the physical world to reach some higher spiritual realm, but discovering that heaven and earth meet right here, in the life we’re already living. And that’s why the completion of the Great Work looks so ordinary. You still eat, sleep, wash dishes, and grow older. The difference is that you’re no longer standing apart from your own life. The Philosopher’s Stone doesn’t bring two separate worlds together. It reveals that there was only ever one to begin with.

One of the central mysteries of alchemy is the union of opposites. Sun and Moon. King and Queen. Heaven and earth. Spirit and matter. Alchemists call this the coniunctio, and consider it one of the most important aspects of the Great Work. But I think we often make this far more complicated than it needs to be. We assume that two separate things must somehow be brought together, when the real work is actually recognizing that the separation was never as absolute as we believed. The mind divides reality into categories: body and spirit, sacred and mundane, inner and outer. Then we spend years pursuing spiritual systems designed to reunite what our own minds have divided. But when we bring our attention completely into the present moment, these divisions begin to fall away. We stop thinking about life and begin directly experiencing it. This is why I place so much importance on embodied presence. The mind can wander endlessly through the past and future, but the body is always here. When I’m practicing with a sword, there comes a point where the distinction between myself and the movement disappears. There is no longer someone standing outside the experience, analyzing it. There is simply movement. This is what the alchemical marriage of Sun and Moon is pointing toward. Not escaping the physical world to reach some higher spiritual realm, but discovering that heaven and earth meet right here, in the life we’re already living. And that’s why the completion of the Great Work looks so ordinary. You still eat, sleep, wash dishes, and grow older. The difference is that you’re no longer standing apart from your own life. The Philosopher’s Stone doesn’t bring two separate worlds together. It reveals that there was only ever one to begin with.

The world is a god-making machine. We love to say that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but then we complain the moment life becomes difficult. A sword isn’t perfected by being carried around on a velvet pillow. It is put into the fire, hammered against an anvil, cooled, and then put into the fire again. We don’t become stronger by lifting weights that are easy to lift, either. Strength requires resistance. Life works the same way. The hardships we encounter aren’t automatically good, and suffering doesn’t automatically make us wiser. But every difficulty gives us raw material we can either use or waste. Buddhism calls the event itself the “first arrow”. The second arrow is everything we add to it: “This isn’t fair. Why me? Everyone else has it easier.” I had to learn this sitting on death row for a crime I didn’t commit. It wasn’t fair, but constantly telling myself that only created another prison inside the one I was already in. Eventually I had to stop asking, “Why is this happening to me?” and start asking, “What can I become through this?” You don’t have to be grateful for the fire. But you can be grateful that you learned how to walk through it. When the hammer falls, let it shape you.

Exactly!

One of the greatest misunderstandings in religion is the belief that stories about what happens after death are necessarily describing what happens when the physical body dies. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Greek myths of descent into the underworld, and even the biblical accounts of death and resurrection can all be understood as descriptions of internal processes that take place while we’re still alive. The descent into the underworld is the confrontation with everything we’ve buried within ourselves. The judgment of the dead is the moment we can no longer hide from the truth of what we are. The terrifying deities of the Tibetan tradition are manifestations of consciousness that must be recognized rather than feared. And the resurrection described in Christianity is the emergence of a new way of being after the identity we’ve spent our lives constructing begins to dissolve. The problem is that people have spent thousands of years turning descriptions of experiences into beliefs about places they’ll go after they die. They’ve mistaken maps of consciousness for maps of the afterlife. I’m not claiming to know entirely what happens after physical death. What I’m saying is that there’s a death you can experience long before your body dies, and until you’ve undergone it, you’re largely dependent on what other people tell you these stories mean. You can spend your entire life studying descriptions of resurrection without ever actually experiencing it. You can memorize every detail of the underworld without ever making the descent. At some point, you have to stop studying the map and actually make the journey. The kingdom of heaven isn’t necessarily somewhere you go when you die….it’s something you can discover while you’re still alive.

Hey, folks - I just left the Barnes & Noble in Kingston, New York, where I signed a few more copies of my latest book Alchemy of the Broken Blade, as well as Life After Death, High Magick, and Angels & Archangels. They have been incredibly kind and supportive to me, and were willing to do this because they know I don't really travel much anymore, so it greatly limits book signings. If you want a signed copy of any of these books, they will ship it directly to you. Their phone number is: (845)443-2033 Thank you guys so much for the love and support you've shown me through the years.

Living an enchanted life means different things at different stages of the path. At first, the world seems mundane….you go to school, get a job, make money, buy things, do what you’re “supposed” to do. Then something begins to feel hollow or missing, and we go looking for more. We discover magick, meditation, gods, angels, spirits, hidden worlds, and reality suddenly becomes mysterious again. But if we keep going, eventually we discover that the forces we were searching for outside ourselves were within us all along. After this, the division between the spiritual world and the ordinary world begins to collapse. Then enchantment takes on an entirely different meaning. You return to the same world you once wanted to escape, only now you realize it was never mundane. You wash the floor with the same attention you would give to cleaning the body of God. You prepare food as an offering. You listen to another person as if the creator of the universe were speaking to you. The later stages of the path aren’t about finding more extraordinary experiences. The culmination of the path is about becoming completely intimate with ordinary life. You leave this world searching for the enchanted one, only to eventually discover that the enchantment was here all along. You just couldn’t see it yet.

Some of humanity’s oldest myths contain the same warning: not to look back. Lot’s wife looks back at the world she was leaving and turns into a pillar of salt. Orpheus looks back for Eurydice before they have completely escaped the underworld and loses her. In Japanese mythology Izanagi looks back at Izanami in the land of the dead and discovers that the woman he remembers no longer exists. Different cultures, different stories, but all have the same message….that there are thresholds in life that can only be crossed by accepting that what was behind you is gone. This doesn’t mean we have to forget the past. But it does mean refusing to live there. The past can teach you, shape you, and become material for the Great Work, but it cannot be inhabited again. We become frozen when we keep trying to resurrect an old relationship, an old life, an old identity, or an old version of ourselves. Transformation requires something to die so that something else can be born. Sometimes the final test of an initiation is simply this: can you keep walking without turning around?

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.

We live in a world that seems determined to strip us of any sense of purpose. We’re encouraged to spend our lives chasing things we don’t need, seeking approval from people we don’t even know, and distracting ourselves from the emptiness that eventually comes from living without direction. However, purpose isn’t something the world can give you, which means it isn’t something the world can take away. It’s something you create through the way you choose to live. Every morning you wake up, you have another opportunity to decide what kind of person you’re going to become, what you’re going to devote your attention to, and what you’re willing to work toward. You don’t need some grand cosmic mission or a destiny written in the stars. Sometimes purpose is simply deciding that you’re going to become a little stronger, a little wiser, and a little more capable of bringing something good into the world than you were yesterday. The world may not care whether you grow or deteriorate, but you should. That decision alone can give meaning to an entire life. This is what my latest book, Alchemy of the Broken Blade, is about. amazon.com/Alchemy-Broken-Bl…

I recently did an interview with Newsweek, asking the president to reconsider Livestreaming the upcoming execution by firing squad. newsweek.com/freed-death-row…

In Western esotericism, there’s a concept known as the “Guardian of the Threshold.” It’s the counterpart to what ceremonial magicians call the “Holy Guardian Angel.” While the Holy Guardian Angel represents our highest potential, the Guardian of the Threshold represents everything within ourselves that prevents us from realizing that potential. It’s the selfishness, jealousy, dishonesty, insecurity, and need for approval that we spend our lives refusing to acknowledge. Most people begin a spiritual practice imagining they’ll become wiser, happier, or more enlightened. What they don’t anticipate is that genuine practice will first force them to confront everything they don’t like about themselves. We begin to recognize that our compassion sometimes comes from a desire to be admired, that our humility is sometimes disguised arrogance, and that even our spiritual practice can become another way of making ourselves feel superior to others. These things were always there…. practice just eventually makes them impossible to ignore. This is why the Guardian stands at the threshold. We cannot move beyond the limitations of the self while continuing to deny what that self actually contains. And the work isn’t to hate ourselves for what we discover, or to spend years wallowing in guilt. It’s to accept responsibility and begin changing how we live. If we discover that we’re selfish, we practice generosity. If we discover that we’re dishonest, we begin telling the truth. We cannot change what we refuse to acknowledge, and we cannot overcome our nature by pretending it doesn’t exist. The Guardian of the Threshold isn’t an enemy standing in our way. It’s function is to show us exactly what needs to be transformed. The Holy Guardian Angel shows us what we have the potential to become. The Guardian of the Threshold shows us what we actually are. And until we’re willing to see both, we’re not really doing the work.

I’ve noticed that people who express an intense hatred for the world are often expressing something much closer to home. What they really hate is their own life, their circumstances, or perhaps even themselves. But instead of examining the source of that suffering, they project it outward until the entire world becomes the enemy. They begin seeing everything through the lens of their own dissatisfaction. Every interaction becomes another reason to be angry. Every disappointment becomes further evidence that the world is a terrible place. Eventually, they become so accustomed to looking for things to despise that they can no longer recognize anything beautiful or worthwhile. And because they’re convinced the problem exists entirely outside themselves, they never consider that the one thing all these miserable experiences have in common is the person experiencing them. This is one of the reasons self-knowledge is so important. Until we begin examining our own minds, we have no idea how much of what we experience as reality is actually our own inner world being projected outward. A person who is constantly at war with themselves will eventually find themselves at war with everything around them. This doesn’t mean there aren’t genuinely terrible things happening in the world, or that anger is never justified. It means we have to learn to distinguish between what is actually happening and what we’re bringing to the experience. Otherwise, we can spend our entire lives trying to change a world that isn’t responsible for the suffering we’re carrying around inside ourselves. And no matter where we go, or how much our circumstances improve, we’ll continue finding reasons to be miserable. Because the one thing we can never escape is ourselves.

If you want to read the entire second article I wrote about the upcoming execution by firing squad, you can do so here: damienechols.substack.com/p/…

When I recently wrote about the possibility of a public execution being livestreamed, several people responded by telling me they’d been watching videos of beheadings, torture, and other atrocities since they were children, and that seeing another human being killed wouldn’t bother them in the slightest. They seemed to think this somehow proved me wrong when I said that witnessing such things changes us. But desensitization isn’t evidence that something has no effect on you. Desensitization IS an effect. If you’ve spent your entire life consuming images of human suffering, how could you possibly know what kind of person you might have become without them? How much compassion you might have developed? How much sensitivity you might have retained? And just because some adults have conditioned themselves to view human suffering as entertainment doesn’t mean children should be subjected to it. Once something like this is put on the internet, it becomes impossible to contain. It gets shared, turned into memes, and inevitably reaches people who never chose to see it. Everyone has heard the phrase “you are what you eat,” but very few people seem to understand that this applies just as much to the mind as it does to the body. Everything you repeatedly give your attention to becomes part of the material from which your inner world is constructed. If you spend years feeding your body garbage, your health will eventually reflect it. And if you spend years feeding your mind hatred, cruelty, violence, and human suffering, your inner world will eventually reflect that as well. You may not even recognize the changes, because they’ve happened so gradually. This is what we mean in alchemy when we say, “The laboratory doesn’t lie.” You can tell yourself that none of it affects you, but that doesn’t make it true. There’s a tremendous difference between having the strength to face human suffering and developing an appetite for watching it. One can deepen our humanity. The other can slowly destroy it.

I’ve had a lot of people asking me about the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, as well as the upcoming execution by firing squad that’s supposed to be livestreamed. Having spent nearly 20 years on death row, my thoughts and feelings about these things are so vast that I sometimes struggle to find a place to begin. I became close friends with a man who had committed murder. He was like a brother to me. I once watched him break down crying, trembling as he told me he wished he was as evil as the world believed him to be, because then he wouldn’t have to care about what he’d done. Fifteen years later, he was still having nightmares about it. I know in my soul that he would never hurt another person again. But I’ve also watched a man being stabbed to death in prison. I cried for days afterward, and something inside me was changed forever. I learned that some people are capable of extraordinary transformation, while others remain capable of terrible violence even behind prison walls. There are no simple answers here. No slogans or political arguments that can adequately address the complexity of human beings, guilt, punishment, and suffering. But there is one thing I want to say about the upcoming execution by firing squad. Don’t watch it. Whatever you believe about the death penalty, even if you think the person being executed deserves to die, don’t watch it. You cannot witness a human being being killed and simply walk away unchanged. What you see becomes part of you. It follows you into places you never expected it to reach. There are things I witnessed in prison that I would give anything to forget, things that still cast a shadow over my life decades later. There’s a difference between understanding that terrible things happen in the world and deliberately making yourself a spectator to them. I don’t have all the answers about justice, punishment, or forgiveness. But I do know that killing another human being should never become so ordinary that we turn it into something to watch from the comfort of our living rooms.