Metaphysical Organization

The more you become involved with your spiritual work the more you will find yourself with books, magazines, and articles, all haphazardly arranged here and there over your whole house. This can create quite a chaotic situation if you suddenly remember something you read, try to find it, and can't!

So, following are a few tips for organizing your metaphysical collection.

A. Magazines

There are a number of magazines that deal with the Medicine Path, Paganism and related subject areas. The available titles are constantly changing, of course. Some of the ones that have existed or do still exist include: Wildfire, Kindred Spirits, New Age Journal, Strange,Circle Network News, Fate, Fortean Times, Farout, UFO Universe, Sedona, Quest, Gnosis, New Moon Rising, Body-Mind-&-Spirit, Magical Blend, Shaman's Drum, and others.

To deal with these, you first should get magazine holders. Make sure you make a label for each one, and you can keep all your like magazines together.

Here is where computers can come in very handy. A database program is one you use to keep track of information. You can keep a metaphysics database, and store the name of any article you find interesting, the magazine issue and date, and the page number it is on. That can be a lot of work but in the long run in will pay off when you decided you need to find out what you have in your magazines about any particular topic.

You can do the same thing on file cards and avoid the use of a computer, if you so desire.

B. Newspaper articles: From time to time as you read the newspaper you will find an article of interest. My suggestion is to cut out the article, make sure you put the newspaper name and date on it somewhere, then store that article in a filing cabinet if possible. If you can't get a filing cabinet, you can always get boxes and label those for your articles.

C. There are a great many books that you can purchase that deal with the Medicine Path, Wicca, "New Age" topics and other related areas. Again, a good thing to do right from the beginning of your collection is to keep similar books together, and label your shelves with the general category of books. This makes things a whole lot easier when you start looking for something.

D. There are also many books in your local library that will cover various areas of your interests. Check the books out, go through them and put a marker of some kind wherever you find something of great interest to you and then xerox that material, making sure you write down on the back of the xerox the name of the book and/or magazine you got the item from and its date.

E. There will be also times when you are surfing the Internet and find various pieces of spiritual information that you wish to keep. Print those out and then file them carefully, adding them to the database of information you are building.

F. General tidbits of information: Sometimes you will find pieces of information you want, but not entire articles. Again, a computer or file cards can come in handy. Just copy the section you want and the name and date of the source, and file it away.

G. Videotapes: Again, you may decide to tape programs from television relating to your spiritual work. One excellent program I saw on television was Burning Times, about the witchcraft trials. There are many similar programs on TV. If you do tape something, however, make sure you record the name of the program on a file card or put the information into a database.

H. Computer programs: There are a growing (slowly growing, granted) number of computer programs dealing with various aspects of the type of spiritual system I follow. Two of these include one on Ghosts and one on The Unexplained. You may find others in your stores or on the Internet.

Now, why should you consider going to the trouble of doing all of the above? Basically because it is almost inevitable that there will come an occasion where you will need that information; you may be talking to someone and want to quote an article, you may even want to write a book like this one.

Having your material together and organized will make it infinitely easier when those kinds of situations arise.

Remember- you can be metaphysical and organized, both!