THE TOOLS OF THE ALCHEMIST
Transmuting darkness into light, discovering more of ourselves, and uncovering the Truth.
 Good day, fellow Alchemists:
There is an old parabola that Alan Watts would often tell in his lectures. The story follows a rancher who recently hired a new farm hand to help him. The new employee was sent to do a variety of tasks, which he fulfilled quickly and without error. The farmer was delighted at how diligent his new helper was and tasked him with even more responsibility; to examine potatoes and decide which ones were to be sold and which to throw away. After only a short time of doing the job, the new employee yelled to his boss that he can no longer stand the work and that he wishes to resign. His boss, the farmer, was surprised by his attitude. He had him do all sorts of difficult jobs by himself and never once did his employee complain. The farmer asked his worker what had pushed him over the edge. He even offered him a raise and other such benefits. The worker then explained that he didn’t mind the back breaking work, but the constant decision making with the potatoes had driven him mad! It is believed Alchemist, that our will power is an exhaustible source. Everyday, we have a myriad of choices to make and each one can chip away at our strength to decide Some of us may find ourselves in internal stalemates on a regular basis. We may worry that we hadn’t taken every piece of information into account, but the truth is Alchemist, we never could! It all stems from a desire to control the outcome. This is why having trust in the Universe is so useful. If we allow the world around us to be shaped in whatever way fate has in store for us, much of our power can be returned to us. It is for this reason that every leader delegates authority to the people around them. By giving up control you will have the entire Universe working in your favor. All you must do is learn to let go. With love and sincerity, The Alchemy by LA Council  Grand rising, dear Alchemist:
Our body is a wondrous tool for exploring all that the third-dimension has to offer us. We travel with it and interact with one another through it, and when our time on this planet is over, we return our body to the earth. It is truly a beautiful relationship, yet we often neglect our bodies energetic needs. Alchemist, your mind and body crave unity with each other! These days, most of us spend our time sitting in front of a computer or phone while our bodies waste away. It is not simply a matter of exercising and eating properly, we are completely disconnected from our body and the sensations we feel. Our physicality is the tether that binds us to this reality. By not living through it and bringing it to our awareness through out the day, we become stuck in the world of the mind. This, of course, results in stress and a lack of overall health. We must remember Alchemist, that humans are three-fold beings: mental, physical, and spiritual. In order to achieve balance and growth, we must master all three of these facets in our lifetime. It is no wonder why yogis and sages incorporated different styles of moving mediation, instead of only sitting mediation. Styles of mediation like Yoga and Qi Gong were developed for bringing the mind back into the body, allowing us to guid our pure intentions through our energetic pathways, clearing them and returning the body to a natural state. An easy practice of bodily awareness that anyone can do is slow-motion movements. It can be any movement, walking, eating, cleaning; as long as you’re moving slow enough to focus on every subtle shift, your mind and body will become one. If that sounds too tedious, then just try standing in one location and focus on all the sensations you feel within your body. The mind and body work at an optimal level when they interact with each other. This union is an important key in maintaining a stable life. With love and sincerity, The Alchemy by LA Council  Good day, fellow Alchemists:
How aware are you of the experiences you manifest into reality? Can you see the nexuses between your thoughts and the world you live in? Perhaps you’ve already begun to trace the events in your life back to some unconscious beliefs you’ve held and are now growing past those limitations? Yet, some experiences tend to feel enigmatic. Whatever lesson you were meant to learn from them eludes you, and an exit towards a new reality is nowhere to be found. It might seem like a cop out for your own spiritual growth, but some experiences you have might actually not stem from your own manifestations. Alchemist, has it ever dawned on you that the people you are surrounded by play a large role in creating the world you live in? This is called co-creation, and it dictates how the world is shaped as a whole. We are all together manifesting new realities and coming into a kind of energetic contract with one another. You can think of it kind of like a form of collective validation. When the entire human race agrees that pigs cannot fly, then that reality is collectively manifested. This makes certain situations very difficult to change in our favor. While this may sound a little too deterministic, there are plenty of loopholes to take advantage of to get better manifestation outcomes. We can use the collective unconscious to manifest our desires more accurately by flowing with the strong current of beliefs that already exist. To be clear, you probably can’t make your pet pig fly like an eagle, but you can take positive perceptions that people have on any given situation and focus on it yourself. If you are going on vacation and are worried about your own safety while flying and traveling, simply tap into the collective unconscious that strongly believes that flying and traveling is safe and it will manifest smoothly within your reality. The same can be done with peoples perception of you. If you need to perform well at something, just unlock the collective belief that you are highly capable. By using the collective unconscious to our advantage we can freely take part in all the most positive beliefs held by those around us, rather than the negative ones. With love and sincerity, The Alchemy by LA Council  Grand rising, dear Alchemist:
It’s been a remarkable journey on this planet, hasn’t it? From the moment we are born into this world, we experience all manners of joy and fulfillment; from our first love to our first grandchild. Some of us are lucky enough to have traveled the world, pursuing our dreams, changing the world for the better, and even living long enough to watch new generations do the same. But occasionally, with the sweetness of life comes a bitter aftertaste. Almost all people experience trauma to varying degrees. It is part of the give and take of third-dimensional living. By having a body we are vulnerable to physical pain, and by having an ego we can be emotionally hurt as well. Anyone you meet can attest to the fact that reality can be both beautiful and cruel. That leaves us with a question: If given the opportunity, would we choose to come back to this plane of existence and live as a human once more? As we’ve discussed in previous transmissions, reincarnation is a phenomenon that exists in almost every religion and culture in one form or another. Many eastern traditions set their sights on an existence beyond the never-ending cycle of reincarnation and seek to free their soul from the pain of life. However, couldn’t we also accept that the pain we inevitably feel is worth the joyous experiences we create? It’s a difficult concept to wrap our heads around, especially when factoring in the mystery of what awaits us in the afterlife. When given the opportunity to reincarnate, we may feel as though our previous life had ended too quickly and that there are still many things we wish to experience. Contrary to that point, we may feel as though we’ve had our fill of human life and wish to move on towards our next adventure. Well Alchemist, considering that we are all here at this present moment, living as humans, we can be sure that if the option to reincarnate existed, we’ve already made our decision. With love and sincerity, The Alchemy by LA Council  Grand rising, dear Alchemist:
A fun part of playing the human game is having many desires you wish to fulfill. We live our lives in pursuit of these desires and some of us are lucky enough to have discovered the law of attraction, which enables us to bring our dreams into physicality. Through the process of manifesting, we slowly begin to see the world in a different light. What we once thought of as impossible starts to become an ordinary part of our reality. After having dealt with the internal deficiencies that once caused us to manifest an undesirable reality, we become masters of our own lives, capable of accomplishing just about anything. Once we successfully manifest all that we want, a question may arise: Why am I able to do this? What is the purpose behind conscious being's ability to create their own reality? It's a valid question that may not have an exact answer. In order to gain some perspective on this question, we must first recognize our own identity as creators. Some enlightened gurus have likened the human experience to a game of pretend. We are all pretending to be individual, tiny, ignorant humans when in reality, we are the Universe itself. The process of life can be thought of as a journey to rediscover our all-mighty nature. The law of attraction obviously plays an important role in this process. Once we begin to work reality in our favor, the truth that we are the invisible hand manipulating everything will become more apparent. This journey of self-realization is important for the spirit to evolve and gain greater levels of consciousness. It is within the realm of possibilities that once we complete this journey, we may start it all over again. This may seem unusual to most of us. After all, why go through the hardships of life over and over again? Alan Watts once spoke about reality and compared it to a lucid dream. He asked, what if you knew you were dreaming and then were able to dream of whatever you wanted? At first, you would experience every kind of joy imaginable. But how long would it take for those joys to cease being meaningful? Alan Watts argued that eventually, you would want to experience something you couldn't expect. Something surprising, mysterious, and maybe even a little scary at times. Ordinary human life can offer all of that and more. Of course, these are all just theories thought up by tiny, ignorant, and singular minded humans. The truth may be thousands of times more incredible and unexpected, which is also part of the fun of being human. With love and sincerity, The Alchemy by LA Counsel  Grand rising, dear Alchemist:
Are we alone in the Universe? That question seems to come up more often these days. Especially with the ongoing release of information from the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which is set to gradually declassify information on UFOs over the coming months; we may actually have conclusive answers within our lifetime about the existence of alien life. Of course, to some degree, we were all expecting aliens to exist in one form or another. There is even a theory as to why we have yet to make contact with them, known as the Fermi-paradox. The Fermi-paradox states that, given the expansiveness of the Universe, much more evidence of extra-terrestrials should exist. There are innumerable amounts of planets with the potential to produce life in our Universe. Some of these planets should have led to space-faring civilizations sprouting endlessly throughout our 15 billion-year-old Universe. So where are all the aliens hiding? The only explanation for this problem is the existence of great filters. Perhaps all intelligent civilizations destroy themselves at some point. Or maybe a single species has been dominating all others since the beginning of time. It could also be that the most unlikely scenario is actually true; that we are alone in the Universe or that intelligent life is incredibly rare. We are here today to discuss another possibility. That our perspective on how life and intelligence evolve together are far too narrow. Could it be that life exists in other dimensions that cannot be seen by lower-density beings such as ourselves? As we've discussed in previous transmissions, our perception is limited to a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic scale. Beings who vibrate at a frequency higher or lower than us will go unnoticed, regardless if they exist on other planets or in our living room. Some people claim to have had experiences with these beings during dreams or out of body experiences. Whether we refer to them as ghosts, aliens, angels, or even demons, it is entirely possible that we share space with a variety of different beings. It would be arrogant to assume that all life should look and behave as we do and function within the same realm of physics that we are subjected to. So when an etheric blob of psychic spores tries to contact you via telepathy, stay calm, and represent our species with grace. With love and sincerity, The Alchemy by LA Counsel  Grand rising, dear Alchemist:
The power of words is often overlooked in our society. Sure, we have sayings like: the pen is mightier than the sword, but it feels like something no one really takes the time to examine at an energetic level. It's not simply that words can help shape the world through their effect on those who hear them, but also how it changes the individual doing the speaking. The words themselves carry with them a code that reprograms reality at the most fundamental level. This phenomenon is most effective within the body, where the words reverberate through every cell as they are spoken. A common magical teaching is the phrase: abracadabra, which translates to I create as I speak. The ancients understood the power of words very well, which is why prayer and chanting are so prominent in all religions. Even modern science is starting to get a grasp on the idea of vibrations and how they travel through speech. Just look at the work done by Dr. Masaru Emoto on water molecules being frozen with different words labeled on them. The water that was labeled with an "I love you" froze into beautiful patterns, while the water labeled with insults froze in a chaotic manner. Considering the fact that our bodies are mostly water, we should really be watching what we say to ourselves. Imagine what happens after years of negative self-talk, how it can distort our bodies, and our reality in such a profound way. Now imagine what would happen after years of saying good things about ourselves. We are so wary of what we put into our body, yet we seem to have no problem echoing a negative mantra through our being on a daily basis. Just saying the words "I love you" to ourselves at the start of each day can heal our mind and body better than any medicine could. Remember Alchemist, your words are powerful, so utter them wisely. With love and sincerity, The Alchemy by LA Council  Grand rising, dear Alchemist:
Today we'll be exploring the idea of free will vs determinism. To begin, let's conduct a thought experiment: Imagine if you will, a supercomputer capable of analyzing every detail of reality, while also being able to quantify that information flawlessly in order to predict the future with perfect precision. This means that any action you consider taking, no matter how minor, has been calculated based on a previous set of circumstances that led you to take said actions. Would this prove that you have no free will? This is a simplified version of the dilemma that philosophers have been struggling with since time immemorial. Taking a position on either side can pose major ethical and spiritual problems. If all life is determined, then all of our actions both good and bad have always been out of our control. This leads us to question the point of our existence in the first place, not to mention having no way to justify our experiences. Knowing we have free will helps us be at ease with our place in the Universe. It allows us to feel as though we are not simply an embedded occurrence among all the randomness that goes on. Choosing this line of thinking, of course, means we must also take responsibility for our actions. It is entirely on us to wake up in the morning and go about our days knowing full well that we are the masters of our own lives. The prospect of free will has not yet been forsaken. Take the example we started with: If one were to see their own future, then all that would need to happen in order to deviate from it would be to simply change the course of events that lead to it. The ability to know one's future could, in fact, change it. This could mean that our example can hold no weight in actuality. Perhaps the only thing that is determined in our reality is that nothing actually is, and any sense of control we have might be a fleeting, third-dimensional illusion. Alchemist, in our journey through this life, we may have learned that it is best to let go of the need for certainty, and this past year has really hammered that point in. Discovering who is writing the never-ending scenes of life is not what's important. Our role in the play is what matters most, to make every moment memorable, and to watch the story unfold together. We are the actors, the writers, and the audience. Now, enjoy the show. With love and sincerity, The Alchemy by LA Council |