Hello and welcome to The Jeweled Lotus. By way of introduction, I'd like to tell you a little bit about myself and a little bit about my work.
I am 23 and currently reside in a small college town in the Midwest, where I am working on completing a degree in East Asian Studies. I'm an out gay male and a devout Zen Buddhist-- one of the reasons I decided to start this blog.
Though I'm fairly young, I've been working various aspects of the craft for 11 years. My initial introduction, as for so many of us, was to wicca; I left the religious aspect of that path due to my atheism*, but continued working the craft and developed my own religio-moral code as a pledged monk of the element of Life. Reading the theories of Chaos Magic confirmed a lot of my theories of magic, and encountering Buddhism put a lot of my religio-moral thoughts in an elegant framework. I maintain the devotion to Life within the frameworks of the Noble Eightfold Path, and practice ahimsa in my daily life (I am not perfect, however, and will admit to lapses involving ants and cockroaches). My magical workings tend to stem from my devotion as an monk of Life, and fits further into a framework that has been slowly revealed to me involving two partners (only one of whom I have found) as aspects of Creation and Destruction, where I fit in as Preservation.
I know that within the broad pagan community there has been a backlash against so-called "fluffy bunnies" who focus solely on all that is "good" and light. I am not one of those people. I acknowledge and appreciate the vital importance of destruction to the cycle of energy, it is just not my path (I leave that to my partner). While I have a moral code that I follow that involves strict nonviolence, I also acknowledge openly that my path is not the only one, or even the best one for most people. I cannot and will not ever condemn someone for violating my moral code: it's a path that I have chosen to follow, but most others have not. In a nutshell, I:
❁ Do not commit violence against any being
❁ Do not work malicious magic due to my belief that karma is a part of universal law
❁ Prefer the constant change of life to the stasis of death
❁ Condemn in others only actions which prevent an individual's choice.
Well, that's about the Movies in 15 Minutes version of everything relevant to this blog. I maintain a policy of truth; if you have questions about me or my path, I will answer them truthfully with as much detail as you'd like. (Due to the nature of the medium, some responses may be sent to you privately to maintain my privacy, and I may rarely refuse to answer some questions for safety, like "What is your address, phone number, and social security number?" XD)
Namaste,
~Lux 卍
*As a Buddhist, I believe in the existence of gods, I simply do not worship them. In a practical sense, I see the deity worship of most paths as a way to personify archetypes of the human experience for working; this is a view that stems primarily from chaos magic, a topic I will talk about further in a future post.
**Please don't bother to chide me for using a swastika. Its use in my religion as a symbol of peace predates a certain German political party by about two thousand years.
