Modern Day Mystery Schools for Magical People (MDMSMP)

Tom And His Minions

“f**k, I’m nervous,” said Al, Theo’s wiley invisible fox daemon. A daemon is like a magical extension of a person’s spirit. Theo was the kind of guy to never get trapped or locked down… into anything…. He’d even turned down Interscope Records for a contract because he didn’t “want to sign his life away.” Foxes are cunning and sharp, calculated yet playful, totally cautious and caring, in short, absolutely adorable… and this pretty much fit the bill for Theo who was caring and quiet, yet skillful, and smart as a whip. Of course, the smaller mammals do have a pretty quick nervous system and this can cause hyperventilation, nausea, and perceived feelings of threats (given that just about everything in the forest is a good deal bigger than them)

“You’re always nervous, Al, why don’t you suck on a peppermint?” He threw a wrapped cherry bomb peppermint down to his foxie. “Om nom nommm,” said Al. “Real cute, just figure it out please,” said Theo. “I need this day to go well. Big test coming up.” 

Theo had enrolled in the nighttime segment of “Magical Romanticism: From Trust Building to Love Spells” course. Actually, there was a lot more to it than met the eye. There was a good deal of preparation he’d had to do to refine his skillsets in this arena so as to properly pass the course and the rigorous testing of the class. But no more had he had that thought than the teacher say roughly, “Close your books class. Pop test time,” to a crowd-full of boos and flustered feelings of overwhelm. Theo felt the heat in the class rise considerably as all of their stomach dropped, as though on a rollercoaster that would never end. Discomfort always feels that way, always, even though the Buddha reminds us that nothing in life is temporary… so we must cultivate gratitude for everything that we do have. 

“Bummer, man!” shouted Tom from the back. 

“Tom!” the teacher reciprocated. “Go to the headmaster’s office immediately and explain your attitude to him, then come back ready to take the test. You will not receive extra time after class; you will be docked anything you fail to complete and your time will begin when you promptly come back to class after getting it from the headmaster!”

“Awwww!” scowled Tom. “Getting it’?” he jeered conspicuously. “What is this, the 1300s? Gonna slap a ruler on my hands, teach? What are you, my nun?” His goons snickered appreciatively. “Ewan and Bud, you can go with him if you think that’s so funny. Have loads of fun and we’ll see you all when you return.” 

“Bullocks,” they replied, regretting their over-the-top sycophanting to Tom, a mere 1st year like they. “Should’ve stayed home sick today, reckon.” They trudged off demoralized to the headmaster’s office. Actually though, Ewan kind of liked opportunities to pick the brain of the headmaster. Arter was kind of interesting and had the mind of like, a really smart genie, crossed with a robot. Empathic yet so intelligent so as to be robotic, able to summon or repel at whim, able to float in midair and do complex mathematical or martial arts equations in his mind, able to materialize out of thin air and teleport without a kiosk, able to if you don’t see what that means, disappear and reassemble his atoms at will. At will alone! 

The headmaster’s door was open when they arrived. “Come in, come in,” he said absent-mindedly as though he were not at all surprised to see them. Well.. that was probably true. He wasn’t omniscient per se, but he was definitively … what’s the word… clairvoyant.”

They shuffled in the door, about to close it.

“No no, leave it open.” Arter spoke of course with a Japanese accent, but aside from that his English was absolutely impeccable, not strained at all, simply elegant and free-flowing, vivacious in his speech. Pristine understanding of the mechanism and with charismatic performative delivery and approach. 

The boys did as instructed. Arter was maybe the only person in the world they listened to with an open mind. It couldn’t be truly explained why… perhaps his sheer mastery of the world, coupled with a deep, profound tangible type of humility. 

“I sense that you boys have been sent here for an attitude adjustment. Let me just inquire of you first: What… what have you eaten today?” he asked clasping his hands on his massive mahogany desk. “What have you eaten?”

The boys looked at each other and worked the problem out in their minds. “Well, a sandwich at lunch… a smoothie for breakfast…”

“Great food combining,” agreed Arter. “Was the bread organic or GMO grain?”

“It was from Subway, sir.”

“So GMO, then.”

“No, I think it was called Pepperjack grilled Sourdough.” 

“Well that’s a little better… sourdough starter gives the good kind of yeast for a healthy intestinal tract for the flora and fauna.”

“For the flora and who?” asked Bud, who was promptly smacked in the head by Tom.

“Owwww….. That hurt!” he protested loudly. Tom rolled his eyes, ashamed to have such fragile minions.                                                                                                                                                                                          

“Why does our dietary history make any difference?” asked Tom professionally, clasping his hands on the table across from his headmaster. 

“It makes all the difference in the world,” explained this absolute sage of a man, who was able to levitate many miles and soar around the galaxy even without the teleportation kiosks that he’d made and imported through the far planet Demetrius from Spain (for technical tinkering) for our benefit. 

Changing what we allow from the world changes the mind, making us the masters solely responsible to reign over our inner selves. The cultivation of inward thought, thinking, and conductivity is greatly aided by what we choose to imbibe in this world, to experience what we have never before imagined, instead of repetitively or neurotically repeating what we’ve already experienced in these lifetimes. What we eat helps realign what we pay attention to, by giving us natural, organic energy from the Earth which is our greatest, most magical teacher alive. 

“With the mind, boys, you can only conceptualize whatever you have seen before. When you think of the word glory, what arises is only the most that you have ever beforehand experienced of that concept, all that you’ve experienced in this lifetime. When you upgrade and uplevel your body - your immune, nervous, digestive, respiratory system - through upgrading your habits and what you imbibe and put into the body, you will not find the need to aggressively provoke, to react, to nerve out and lash or act out upon the world in any way, the way you do, antagonizing things like a sadistic child poking bugs with a stick trying to exercise mastery over the world as a result of failing to master himself, his inner worlds. You will experience the true god-given glory of the world, of all the worlds, the top of the shelf, the highest of caliber, remnants of true mastery. Isn’t that what you want -- to learn of true mastery? To be a capable practicing magician?

The boys nodded somberly. They knew their provocations were made in an attempt to overcompensate for their base insecurities, but acting like the best is certainly different from being the best. Peacocking about and bullying people in the hallways certainly made a name for themselves, but no one could say that it was a particularly fine one at that. It was just… how they established a sense of beingness outside of the lonely existential bardos between classtime. The Headmaster could see through all of this… he’d been around the block himself for quite some time and had never not been a wizard of pure analytical, thought-provoking observation of the human experience, a small piecy portion of life which manifested all around him.

“I’m going to teach you something right now,” he said decidedly. “Put down your books, please. Remove your coats. Stand at attention. Let’s see it.”

The boys begrudgingly stood up, altered as they were from the pot they’d taken before class, from the packaged danishes they’d bought from the bazaar that morning, from the stale black coffee they’d made in their student apartment suites overlooking the zen gardens where they might have taken a walk, for a magic or writing stroll in the AM but who’d instead slept well past their alarms, missing half of their Conjuring class that very morning. All of this was inherently manifest and properly obvious to discern, from within their auras. 

“We call how you live, in life, at least up until this point, living on the defensive. You’re living like a reactionary, triggered by things rather than creating your way and opting to be appreciative in making the best of what comes, understanding that you’ve taken a pact and agreement to play along with life, in order to help create things to happen. 

“It’s time for you boys to learn how to create magic intentionally and live life on purpose. Here are three easels.” He reached behind his desk and brought out a few of his art equipment kits, “Each fastened to a palette of paints with a number of brushes, from calligraphy to fine stencil to thick and many-bristled, hairs drawn from the finest horse herders in the Himalayas. I want you to spend the next 20 minutes tracing and coloring in the image that appears to you on the translucent screen behind the pastel portrait-cut canvas. Just then some specialized technology of a screen began to glow bright behind the paper, revealing a different image per pupil that they were to draw. “Simply trace the lines over first using the stencil pens, then mix the colors as shown behind the paper, and fill them in appropriately, paying attention to shading, to texture, to highlighting, to color-variant fade-ins and outs. While you do this for…. Well, we said 20 minutes, but let’s make it closer to 45 - you’ll see, time will pass quite quickly once you enter a flow state - I will tend to some work with my colleagues out by the garden. He glared at the boys pointedly. They hadn’t done any of their gardening sadhna in quite some time and they knew it. They wondered if he’d telepathically communicated the sentiment/idea to them moments earlier. Anything was possible with Arther. He was the brilliant madman behind this whole enfranchised enterprise, if you could call it that, though it wasn’t for-profit of course. 

“Give you some time to clean up those messy auras of yours,” he explained. 

“Do we get coffee?” one of the boys jabbered out.

Headmaster spun around swiftly and laughed. “Coffee,” he said, “Is for the weak. Work on that attention span of yours! Time begins now. You’ll be graded accordingly, and it will go into your final GPA. Make the result, imitate the image you are shown. Time begins!” He exited the door and left the boys cowering in the room, fully prepared physically but totally inept on the mental level of things. These were not your ordinary artist types, and Arther knew this. He knew of their bullying on an institutional level, and the fact is, these hooligans were costing the school tens of thousands of dollars a year whilst degrading the morale of the rest of the class. If they didn’t integrate their focus soon and show some kind of holistic progress eventually, they’d have to be expelled. Anyone who failed out on their GPA was given a highly funded flight home in one of the private helicopters belonging to the school, in order to make a kind of point that they should not attempt to teleport back onto the premises. Upon expulsion, their sentences may be terminated and their records destroyed.

“I can’t believe you asked for coffee,” the other goon said, slapping Bud across the face. “That’s the opposite energy required for art,” he explained. Tom laughed (he found violence funny). “Art is a theta activity,” he agreed. “Not beta.”

The boys set to work, putting tongue in cheek and letting the state of their attention (degraded and derelict though it was) accrue value by the weight of their consistent efforts of awareness. Of course…. They did not do a very good job. 

When the Headmaster Arther returned from his teacher’s meeting in the gardens, his stomach dropped as he stared dumbfounded at the absolute sludge these pupils had turned up. 

‘I’ve never seen anything this bad,’ he thought to himself, struggling to find words to say. 

“I’m sorry, you’re all expelled. I can’t,” he said. “No pop test for you today, this is… this is sufficient. Suffice it to say, this is the most talentless piece of crap that I’ve ever set eyes upon. Who let you in here? Like, originally?” Though the Headmasters was speaking in convivial dialogue of the decade, his mind was also miles away creating schemes about the upcoming competitions, the political state of the world, the slowly expanding, shifting plates of the earth, and frankly… a mounting dis-ease in the realization that he didn’t have time for this level of nonsense in his life. 

“Sir….” the students said, looking down, cheeks flushed in shame. “You did. We received letters on our doorsteps same as every other student. Why… would you…”

“Why would I what? Forsake you? You forsake yourselves. Did you spend any real attention on these pieces? How could this,” he motioned to the original, glowing schematic screen placed delicately behind each of the canvases, “Turn into this?” with a sprawling hand gesture he motioned to each of the boy’s creations which were, frankly disturbed, if not just bad beyond belief. “Who hurt you?” he asked them pointedly, mentally all the while doing complex socioeconomic and politico-mathematical equations pertaining to his future subjects of study. “I just don’t know where I went wrong,” he explained his head now in his hands. 

“Please sir, it’s not your fault, we can do better,” said Bud rushing over and knocking into the headmaster, spilling his tea all over his blouse, earl grey swiftly creating bronzed blotches all over the headmaster’s sheer white button up. The only thing unmarred was the dark navy blue vest on top of the outfit; even the red tie had gotten soaked in the slander of the moment. 

“I’m sorry, I’m really not even certain why I didn’t do this earlier. You lot are expelled. Please leave my office this instant and… pack your things and…”

“Professor, please,” said Tom, the head of the rascals. “We can pose a counter proposition for you. If you give us one more chance, I scarce say we won’t disappoint. Whatever it takes. Just one more chance. Whatever it is. I’ll have these two shining your shoes twice a day if that’s what needs to happen. You’ve got to believe us, this is the only thing going right in our lives. Home just isn’t an option. You see, the reason we’re so mean is that we’re… well… poor. Before this we were only involved in a gang of petty thieves out on the outskirts of Manchestor. When we received the letters… your kind letters, sir,” he said bowing appropriately, “We were out of our heads with excitement. We thought, no, knew, that this was our way out of the grind, out of debasing ourselves regularly with petty antics on the streets. Although our heads were in the streets, our hearts were always up in the clouds… waiting on something more.” 

“Quite the speech you’ve got there,” grunted the headmaster, shaking his head woefully about their art pieces. 

“Unprepared, I beg you,” said Tom. 

“When you were out on the streets, stealing to get by, how often did you open your mouths to jeer at the passersby?” asked Arther. “When did you begin speaking frivilously, flapping your gums only to cause pain? Was it after I accepted you into my gorgeous institution of mystery schools? Why would you try to destroy something beautiful that I’ve built? You took your job on the streets more seriously than you’ve taken any of my classes, more serenely than the brazen nefariousness with which you’ve upset the psyche and morale of my students. I want to know why that is? Why are you continuously predisposed to destroy rather than to create?”

“Insecurities,” said Bud immediately. 

“Anger,” explained Ewan. 

“Um, Alpha complex,” said Tom. “But we promise it won’t happen again. We’ll be nice. Peaceful. Successful. We promise. Give us one more challenge to prove ourselves. Anything.”

Praise and flattery wouldn’t have worked on Arther because he’d transcended his own ego years ago and was no slave to sycophantry. But sincerity… that did go a good long ways in this old man’s heart of hearts. So he devised a plan quickly in that fast-processing noggin of his to give them another shot, so long as they proved themselves a good deal more competent than they’d let off. 

“I’ll tell you what,” he said slowly, with newfound resolution. “I will give you one more chance. But in the case you don’t succeed…” he drew a line across his throat. “I send a helicopter to transport you home on the dime. This is what I need you to do.” He cleared his throat and covered his mouth with his hand, whispering to them a procedure that hadn’t been used since at the dawn of the Magician’s Empire, an extremely risky one, and one that involved a great deal of political subterfuge. These goons would find a way to make themselves useful yet.