Hail thyself! You are a god! It’s tempting to rest on our laurels with respect to this mindset. We like to imagine that since we simply are born the way that we are, that the natural attributes of a Satanist come along with it. The truth is, as a Satanist we must constantly strive to nourish our roots or our blossoms will wither, and exercising our perspective is no exception. It’s a critically important skill that helps us out yes, in general, but also specifically towards warding off psychic vampires. Only when you lose your perspective of the forest through the trees can you fail to see the circles that these types of individuals wind around you.

That accident lives in my memory as if it happened just yesterday, but the thing that I remember the most was the shock I had over the first thing to run through my head. I was nineteen, I’d just gotten my license, and I’d rear-ended someone. They looked pretty pissed. I looked pretty pale. I knew what had happened: it was my fault. I’d gotten carried away, I’d been careless. I’d made some assumptions about the behavior of others, and my assumptions were faulty because I lacked experience in reading others on the road. There was nothing else to do now but call the police and bear the penalty for my poor judgement, but all the while I couldn’t shake that single thought in my head: “I wish I could get a re-do.” Oh, what I wouldn’t have given for that! My father was going to slaughter me. My freedom was about to be jailed. My record was tarnished, and never would I be able to go back in time and change what’d happened because that’s just not how life worked. It’s a curse of being young, but it’s a burden that lessens as time makes us stronger, and I’m lucky: I’ve learned a great deal over the years but in its place I’ve picked up a different sort of burden. Now? Now I suffer watching youth make the same dangerous decisions I did, and youth, exciting as it is, rarely allows someone to slow down, take a breath, and listen to the sage advice that’d make life a little easier.

Everyone has those days where your emotions want to run away with you for one reason or another. The religion I was raised in taught me a lot about how to suppress emotions but never really control them. My Satanism includes the responsibility of self, and that includes being able to be responsible with your emotions. I found my own thoughts written in the pages of the Satanic Bible when the founder described his opinion that letting emotions die in darkness only poisoned the body.
 
It's important to acknowledge and let yourself feel, whatever emotion it could be. Emotions are real, they're happening for a reason. Don't ever let someone tell you that your emotions are invalid...the cause may be, but your emotions are not.
 
Still, responsibility is a two sided coin. We are responsible for letting our emotions breathe, but we cannot allow them to run us. Our choices and decisions, our words and commitments must be our own. To this end, I thought I may share some tactics with you about how to handle those emotions without doing something such as: "Telling your problems to others who do not want to hear them." Let's begin.

There is something about Satanism, especially “traditional” atheistic Satanism codified by LaVey, that screams “narcissistic elitist egomaniac.” Of course, knowing we ‘LaVeyans’ as you do, you will know that this isn’t actually the case, but it does nevertheless dominate the opinion of society when we are center stage in its field of view. I struggle to pinpoint exactly where this comes from and in the end I find myself somewhat comfortable with the notion that it stems from all of the inspiration that Anton LaVey had from works such as “Anthem” and “Might is Right.” Dystopian struggle is a favored theme by many, and the idea of conquering the general glum and gloom of daily life to achieve what you want out of it is one of the things that we take pride in as Satanists. We spend our time in the pursuit of happiness, bettering ourselves, and enjoying this world in a deep capacity. Such being the case, it really doesn’t come to me by surprise then that there is something even more top secret in Satanic society, a stricter taboo of discussion than even SRA itself: Satanists with disabilities.