Listen, folks, gather ‘round.

I’m here to tell you a cold, hard, honest truth that some of you may be aware of but unsure of what it means or why it should mean anything at all to you.

Fact is, most of your organized religion has been buried under a mountain of politics since the inception of it.

Look, when it comes to structures of power, the only real interest is the consolidation of it and hoarding of it. Anything given to you…the power structure’s already figured out a way to get that leaked power back over to them.

Another Fact remains, every organization and entity will undergo a stress test eventually. The lockdowns/mandates were one of many (with probably more to come so, organizations, review what you did) and it left a great many of us with an unsettling question that every one of us needs to sit with and answer before moving on to anything else.

Whether the politics are ecumenical or secular, especially in recent years: When It Came To Matters of Your Soul, Where Did Your Religious Organization Stand?

If you found yourself and your soul expendable on the altar of their fears for survival, I have news for you.

They Forfeit Any Claim To The Well-Being of Your Soul, Going Forward.

You can forgive them for “going on what they had at the time.”

That is possible. I know that sounds strange until you realize that forgiveness means you’re moving past that action.

It’s like saying, “No, I understand. You were in fear for what you would need for survival. So was I. You’ve survived. Congratulations. Hopefully you will survive longer without me. Thank you.” and you just move on with your life without that organization in it any longer. Past this point, what they do, say or think is completely none of your concern.

You just move past it, but you are implying that you don’t have to be under the delusion that you can continue to trust them in trying times.

The lesson I took from all of this was not that institutions are evil. It was that there was a point of failure that was major, demonstrable, observable and documented and that every practitioner should be capable of standing on their own feet.

A church, a minister, a kindred, a teacher, an organization can all fail when the chips are down. The Satanic Panic taught me that much.

Books can be wrong, Ralph Blum taught me that.

Tradition, without examination, can stagnate and take you with it. Our purpose is to grow and the only way to do that is to sometimes acknowledge that some traditions don’t survive today.

If your entire spiritual life depends on any one of those things, then your foundation is fragile.

What I wanted was a foundation that could survive the failure of any single authority, including my own.

That is what this curriculum is designed to build.

That is why, this Saturday, I'll begin opening the bookshelves and showing you the structure behind this curriculum: why every title earned its place, how the tracks connect to one another, and how lesson plans are generated from the material itself.

It’s all for your benefit so you can then benefit others. It’s not about degrees or titles, it’s about building up who you are so that you can build something that lasts.

If that means actually building a registered church that you can then direct yourself, then, by all means, please be the organization that fills in the gaps. Remember, someone’s going to have to carry that thing you built forward.

That’s a nice segue because I had thought of a few things:

What if an organization or an individual uses the syllabus/curriculum to study something horrible? Or what happens if someone or a group does study something of which I don’t approve?

The answer to the second question was easy. I don’t have control over that and, it’s none of my damn business.

That being said, let’s honestly and genuinely take that first question. If someone does use this structure to promote a divisive, sectarian way of thinking, they’re using a cheap-ass bootleg of my system, not my system, itself.

What’s the difference? The Magnusson Standard. The first six rules that I created for this space (and all subsequent spaces moving forward) will apply to everything here. Plus, since this is open-source, all of the articles, rituals, etc. will be under a Creative Commons/Attribution license, which means you can take it and alter it but the Standard must apply and attribution made. Without those two things satisfied, it distances what I’ve actually built from the thing they did because, they’ll have to either apply the standard or admit it’s a cheap knock-off. Something along those lines.

Maybe your organization passed the test when the pressure came.

If that’s the case, good. Hold onto that because those things are rarer than many people realize.

But if they didn’t?

If the moment your convictions became inconvenient, you suddenly found yourself alone, if the institution protected itself before it protected the people it claimed to serve, if your concerns were dismissed, your questions were unwelcome, and your conscience became a problem to be managed, then stop asking whether they survived the stress test and ask whether or not they passed it when it came to you and your family.

Those are not the same question.

The purpose of this curriculum is not to destroy institutions, the purpose is to ensure that your spiritual life can survive their failure.

Because traditions, organizations and leaders can fail. Books can be wrong. Communities can lose their way, but your responsibility for your own soul never disappears.

So conduct the audit and be honest.

Follow the evidence wherever it leads.

And if the answer is that you need to rebuild from the ground up, then start building.

That’s exactly what we do here.

We're here to demonstrate that a practitioner who can stand on their own feet is harder to break when the chips are down.

In the end of things, you’ll look back while you’re in mid-build wondering why you didn’t start sooner.

If you already started, you’re starting today or you’ve committed to starting later, then you’ll be the one still standing when the stress tests hit. You’ll be the one in authority when the official fails. You’ll be the one to correct the book, test the tradition and show your work.

The best part of all of this is that you don’t have to build anything other than your mind, your library and your competence. You’re not here to perform. Just Demonstrate.

The type of power you get from that is one that you’ll probably never have to use, and that’s the point.

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