A Desert of Roses
An CIn Dnn f
PARA www
heptarchia c o u k
Pbh by h Lonon an Brghton, Unte Kngom . Informaton: wwwheptarcha.couk
Copyright © Alan Chapman & Duncan Barford 00 First ed ition Juy 0 0 Al rghts reserve. No part of ths pubcaton may be reprouce or trans mtte n any form or by any means, eectronc or mechanca, nclung pho tocopyng, recorng or by any nformaton retreval system wthout the pror wrtten permsson of the copyrght owner, ecept for bref quotatons n a re vew ISBN 978-0-9563321-2-7 Prnte an boun n Great Brtan.
There is nothing whatever in the S tone ut a hite Rose. A nd a voice comes there shall e no mo re red roses for she hath crushed all the lood of all things in to her cup Aleister Crow ley The Vision and the Voice (nd Aethyr)
Introduction
7
DUNCAN'S MAGICAL RECORD
Embracing the Shad ow
Salvia Divinorum So N ow I Know How Reality Works What LAM Did For Us Enlightenment
11
14
19
21
Confessions of a Hermit The Twittergatha
27 32
ALAN'S MAGICAL RECORD
The Encounter with Choronzon
The Scrying of Aethyr 20 (KHR) The Great Work Accom plished
39
44
.47
DISCOURSES
When Magic Turns Paranormal (Duncan Magick Works A Response (Duncan
92
Buddhism on the Tree of Life (Duncan Understanding Actual Freedom (Alan The Words of the Magi
Politics and the Occult (Duncan
9
The Tempe Wo rking Explained
89
Letter to a Dharma Teacher (Duncan
80
Ma gick and Enlightenment A Recap (Duncan
You Cant Be Serious (Duncan
76
The Cross Correspondences (Duncan Thank You, Dr. Gotama (Duncan
67
95 97
104 117 122 127
EPLOGUE
What is The Baptist's Head? NOTES
REFERENCES
NDEX
143
147
149
151
Introduction Intoducton
Done is wha has o be done ... Here i is, he hird and final volume in a rilogy ha began wih The Blood of the Saints (009a) and The Urn (009b), comprising he wriings of wo conemporary magicians as hey rediscover he rue meaning of he wesern magical radiion and hurl hemselves owards compleion of The Grea Work, also known as 'enlighenmen. As before, he maerial in his volume firs appeared on our websie The Baptist's Head, bu has been reedied, annoaed and referenced for his ediion. In my op inion, a prined boo k is less prone o desrucion han a websie, so I can sleep sounder in he knowledge h a he enirey of his m aerial is now avail able as a maerial objec, accessible o fuure generaions of ma gicians and seekers (should hey find any use in i). In comparison wih previous volumes his one is conspicu ously slimmer, bu in large par simply because i covers a smaller imeframe. When we publis hed The Urn boh Alan and I were far closer o compleing The Grea Work han eiher of us probably seriously believed, even hough wed been given clear enough indicaions from our communicaions wih he spiri Tempe, asral represenaive of The Grea Whie B roher hood. One o f he key aricles in his collecion is, indeed, o ur rero specive examinaion of Tempes prophecies. In he ligh of re cen evens hese make far more sense, alhough even now some of his more crypic references are sill unresolved. Bu also on offer, and likely o be he main focus of ineres for readers of he previous volumes, are he firshand accouns of our final enlighenmen. Our respecive claims o enlighenmen coninue o arac fury and derision from cerain quarers more recenly, no only from inside he magical communiy, bu also from praci ioners of easern radiions ha supposedly regard enlighen men as a realisable aim. There is evidenly sill enormous resisance on he magical, spiriual and counerculural scenes o he idea ha enlighenmen is somehing acual, pracical and aainable by ordinary human beings. This is cerainly due 7
A Desert of Roses to the wide prevalence of bad models and a poor general un derstanding of what enlightenment is. Once again, we extend a sincere invitation to everyone interested, to read our accounts and replicate our findings by making the experiment of actually trying out the practices described . In recent months weve been delighted to become involved in sustained communication with people from a wide range of spiritual traditions who are doing precisely that, and have also been overjoyed to observe them undergoing similar experi ences and enjoying the same results. This stuff works. This stuff is genuine. Its quite obvious to us that were doing nothing more than spreading ideas and methods that have been used reliably for millennia and are part of our birthright as human beings. Since our completion of The G reat Work, the flow of articles onto The Baptist's Head has slowed, and our intention is to wind up the project completely in due course. The final essay in this book is Alans summation of what The Baptist's Head was actu ally always about. Although both of us will always retain a spe cial bond with the western magical tradition, weve since embarked on a new project, Open Enlightenment which aims to speak to the reality and attainability of enlightenment across all spiritual traditions. I doubt that either of us will ever renounce our continued practise of ma gick. In many quarters of the western magical tra dition, magick itself is viewed as standing in opposition to or as an antidote against spirituality and religion. The one thing that The Baptist's Head demonstrated, however, was this m agick is a radical means by which we can bring the core truths of religion and spirituality to life. Duncan Ba rford July 2010 The Baptist's Head www.theaptistsheadco.uk Open Enlightenment www openenlightenment org
8
DUNCAN'S MAGICAL RECORD
Duncan 's Magical Record Em bracing the Shadow
8th Deceme 8 :am
The university is poorly organised . The a dministrators have not reaised they should have thrown me out last year when I failed to submit an American Literature assignment. I hate this course, yet I wont let go of the hope that some day they award me a Masters degree. Sitting in my room, I wonder if I should visit my tutor. He doesnt even know my name. Perhaps he coud suggest a way I can complete my degree. But I dont have the motivation to make up my mind. And then I hear a menacing sound behind me, and turn to find a spectre creeping up back, shaggy, de formed. Im terrified, but turn my mind into the experience. I know Im dreaming and surrender to the fear, realising that the ap parition is harmless. Sure enough, the contraction of fear re leases. I alow the monster to grab me and I embrace him. I kiss his face and the knot completey unties. Its like that mom ent in Poes Narrative of Ar thur Gordon Pym, when the narrator fals from a cliff into the waiting arms of Dirk Peters, his atavistic darkskinned comp anion. Im not sure if this is part of the dream or my waking commentary upon it. American Literature was part of my studies in the dream, which makes it doubly uncertain whether I am awake or dreaming. But now that Ive embraced my monster, the issues behind the confusion can surface. Angels, the ene elohim, gave us human anguage. Because we did not invent it, this means human language is predicated upon nonhuman assumptions. Ancient schoars of the great traditions have formaised these assumptions and the types of problem to w hich they give rise at the human evel. I realise that Im no student; Im a teacher Im eading a sem inar on methods of resoving problems in anguage. Im de scribing ines of thought which, although obscure and difficut, have been explored and proved true by generations of scholars. 11
A Desert of Roses The particular formalisation Im teaching addresses four or five problematic assumptions The standard resoution of one of these gives rise to an ugly verbform foy or feu or feo I pro pose to the seminar that a better solution would be elufeio (or perhaps elofeio It feels ike I am replacing words from the modern Latin anguages with terms from ancient Greek This is not more 'correct, but it is more elegant This is not original thought on my part, but it is a successfu attempt to reach for a more ae sthetic solution I do not d elude mysef that I am 'right, but neither can I deny my ability to hold my own in these matters and teach others this difficult material, formu lated long ago by great classical minds €A€po
After some searching I decided that elufeio or elofeio was ele phairo, which, with my nonexistent Greek, Id render as o This is an obscure term, used rarely, whose meaning is not entirey certain Elephas means 'ivory and is the root of our word 'eephant Elephairo means 'to deceive and appears most notably in The Odyssey Stranger, dreams verily are baffling and unclear of meaning, and in no wise do they find fufiment in al things for men For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fufilment But those that come forth through the gate of poished horn bring true issues to pass, when any morta sees them But in my case it was not from thence, methinks, that my strange dream came (The Odyssey XIX 560569) Virgi repeats this idea of twin gates of horn and ivory through which, respectively, true and false dreams pass (Aeneid VI 893898), but Homer was using the image in a punning sense that neither Engish nor Latin can capture the Greek for
12
Duncan 's Magical Record 'fulfil is similar o 'horn, and he Greek for 'deceive (elephairo) is similar o 'ivory (elephas) Wha can his be aken o me an in relaion o m y dream? Firs off, he confronaion wih he shadow seems o be he price of enry for wha is revealed in he second par. The dream does all i can o pass iself off as waking realiy raher han a dream-as if alering us o he fac ha somehing ou of he ordinary is happening. The way ha Greek (elephairo) is being used o replace and elucidae Lain words chimes eerily wih he way ha Hom ers unranslaable pun in Greek (elephairo / elephas, 'horn / 'fulfil) is wha underlies Virgils more lieral image of he gaes in La in. Bu, a he boom of i all-he dream says-is he fac ha language was given o us by nonhuman agencies, so we can expec answers o human quesions o be answered a he hu man level by language. Wha we do have, however, are he grea radiions, whose scholars successfully formalised he problems, recognising ha alhough hey c anno be res olved a he human level we can neverheless arrive a he wisdom ha he naure and origins of language are divine. The passage from Homer is spoken by Penelope. She is elling a sranger ha she dream her husband Odysseus came home from his wanderings, bu she reasons ha his dream came hrough he gae of ivory and is decepive. Lile does she know he sranger she is speaking o is Odysseus in disguise and he dream is rue. Therefore, i is no he dream ha is de cepive bu her percepion of he waking world . The passage from Virgil describes Aeneass reurn from he underworld, where he has had various visionary encouners. Virgil saes ha Aeneas reurns o he world of waking realiy hrough he gae of ivoryhe gae of decepion. There has been much debae on wha Virgil was geing a, bu Jorge Luis Borges offered an ineresing possibiliy Wha hen occurs is quie curious and has never been well explained, excep by one anonymous c om menaor who I believe offered he ruh. Aeneas re urns hrough he gae of ivory and no hrough he 13
A Desert of Roses gate of horn Why? The anonymous commentator tes us because we are not n reaty For Vrg, the rea word was possby the Patonc word, the word of the archetypes Aeneas passes through the gates of vory because he enters the word of dreamsthat s to say, what we ca wakng (Borges, 1985) In other words, to return to the wakng word requres pas sage through the gate of vory = 'decepton, elephairo because the wakng word s fasty tsef, the decepton of human per cepton Theres no souton to ths decepton at the eve of the de cepton tsef However, anguage-our understandng-s gven to us as a dvne facuty and by arrvng at an understandng of decepton, profoundy grasped n ts root sense (e as the Greek term, elephairo we can become aware that we apprehend everythng through 'the gate of vory The dream therefore offers a mode for a sorts of nterestng reatonshps between anguage, dreams, percepton and truth The prce of admsson s embracng the shadow and thereby coapsng the boundary between wakng and d reamng Salva Divinorum: So Now I Know How Realty Works
The ntenton was to use the powerfu entheogen salvia divinor um to gan a vson of the actvtes n the afterfe of Henry Sdgwck, Frederck Myers and Edmund Gurney There s more about them esew here n ths book, but for now I concentrate on the manfest detas of what resuted Sava s ega n ths country; I went and bought some tnc tured eaf for £10.50 from a newsagent Later, we found the same product £2 cheaper on an ndoor market sta Aan, aready a sava veteran, suggested that a 5x tncture (e fve tmes the strength of untreated sava) was penty strong enough, athough tnctures were avaabe n gradatons a the way up to x. The tempe was opened and banshed, and varous other 14
Duncan 's Magical Record workings performed before I took up p osition on a cushion and loaded my pipe with the tinctured leaves 'Are you sure you want to do this? Alan said 'You realise that it will seem as real as walking through the door into the next room? 'Yes, I said, cluelessly On Alans advice I took as big a hit from the pipe as I could manage Small hits bring on a mild, hallucinogenic effect; a big hit is required to flood the brain with salvinorin (the active in gredient) and propel the user across the threshold into an altered reality I took a puff, waited, and was about to take another but changed my mind Something was rushing up at me It was very familiar Ludicrously so An uncontrollable paralysis took hold of me and I let myself fall backwards onto the cushions placed behind in preparation I was laughing like a lunatic, harder and harder, as the situation became more and more ludicrously familiar I think I was unconscious for a short time, during which I was immersed in childhood impressions memories of atmo spheres, textures, and intimately ordinary objects such as sec tions of pavement, parts of lampposts and roadways, ornaments from my parents or my grandparents hous es Then I became aware o f the context of these impressions We w ere all of us in my granddads vegetable garden and each of us, it seemed, had a zipper than ran the length of our bodies and fastened us to reality It was not through choice that our zip pers were fastened, but by the action of other figures who walked between and came to us i n turn as we lay helpless and paralysed The y were p ulling shut the zips that bonded the two sides of realitymy body on one side, and everything else on the otherinto a seamless whole When this was done, I was again immersed in the atmosphere of childhood and aware of nothing else, because it was so full and satisfying Yet after a time I became aware of the figures and the zip pers again, and that my zipper-which had seem ed closed-was gaping open So the figures would come by once more and zip me up, and the process w ould repeat, over and over 15
A Desert of Roses The figures were few only two or three of them, definitely male. I could not see their faces clearly, but they were of a piece with my childhood recollections. They looked like posh, upper middleclass men of the early 970s; the sort of pater familias who regularly appeared on a contemporary TV quiz show called Ask The Family. The zippingup was for our entertainment that was self evident. It was like a fairground ride, exhilarating, and partly the reason I was laughing so hard . Especially enjoyable wa s the zipper closing along the length of my body. Reality, the sub stance I was zippered into, was a kind of vinyl with a plastic sheen. Its surface consisted of synaesthetic formations of child hood impressions, difficult to put into words, but one of them was that special feeling of standing in my parents yard at night, with the outdoor light switched on; another was the space at the top of some concrete steps along the route to my grandparents house; the polished tiles in the corner of my grandparents sittingroom where they kept a potted rubber plant; a warm orange light that was familiar, but which I couldnt placeperhaps from a forgotten lampshade; and a smudged confluence of colours that was instantly intimate, but which I recognised only afterwards as a tiny s ection of the print of a painting of some boats my parents had hung in the living room when I was a child . Some of these impressions, however, were false-although they might easily have been true, because they all had the same intimate feeling. For instance the recollection of a rocking horse on the polished tiles in my grandparents house. This looke d and felt like a memory, but afterwards I knew there had never been any su ch thing. I did not quite understand how I became repeatedly un zipped from reality; nor how I could know afterwards which memories had been false, when at the time they all felt true. Yet each time, after being zippered and lost in childhood, I would become aware that what I experienced was neither true nor real. E ach time I realised, it felt as jawdroppingly incredible as the last a Philip K. D ickian moment of terror, waking up to ex perience as a total fabrication. Ea ch time, I saw that what I pe r 6
Duncan 's Magical Record ceived w no real memories of childhood, but a synthetic fab ric pieced together from them, and I would realise it was the drug, salvia, that was putting me through this ordeal over and over It was like a betrayal or violation hid den forces, the face less men with their control over the zippers, were using my childhood stuff to trick me into believing in the reality of the fabric This was probably the point at which I started to sho ut 'Stop it Stop it and kicked against the floor, much to Alans alarm, and probably my neighbours als o I stretched out my arms and legs towards the men, to make it easier for them to zipper me, reasoning that this way the experience would be over more quickly It felt pleasant and unpleasant at the same time, very like when someone tickles you, but refuses to stop It was clear by this point that the process w as inescapable and I wou ld have to endure it until its end Throughout, the vision had a strong sense that I was being shown 'something behind the scenes The zippermen were an impersonal force, binding people to reality for our o wn safety and enjoyment Even after Id realised reality was a trick, it was nevertheless still clear that all of this was largely for the pur pos es of our entertainment The most unsettling realisation was still to come, however, and it was this there is no resting any where The memories werent real, but neither-I realised-was the realisation of this Each time through, the cycle exp ose d that the last time had not been the awakening it had seemed to be; and so, presumably, this time was no different Each time the cycle was merely manufacturing yet more synthetic material for the zippermen to fasten me into next time There was no way out, and no reference point anywhere on the inside that it made sense to regard as 'real Gradually, the childhood impressions faded and I was more aware of the room, and o f Alan, and of Alan talking to me But the effects werent over The cycle of buying into reality and then awakening from it was now being applied to my sensory perception I talked to Alan, but woul d be struck by how I d yet again bought into the stupid idea that this was truly what was 17
A Desert of Roses happening Even as normaliy began o reurn, i would feel shockingly unreal again, and he cycle would repea, bu more slowly and more shallowly each ime I was shaking unconrollably-no jus because I was cold 'You ve had a shock, Alan said I was n o unil he effec had worn off almos enirely ha I was capable of sanding In he background was a panicky feeling ha I had damaged my brain, or I would shorly go insane, bu I acknowledged ha his was merely a reacion o he drug and i would soon pass off A background sense of unrealiy lingered ino he nex day Cooking, eaing and lisening o he news on Ra dio Four helpe d ground me Wha I didn' expec was he impac of he experi ence on my mediaion, which seems o have moved up a level When I sa, I found I could easily find he sensaions from he vision of being 'zippered up and of being 'open The fasener was done up each ime I los myself in houghs, or idenified wih sensaions The ' open feeling, I realised, is he aiude ad oped when we pracice vipassana, cenred prayer, or whenev er we urn he mind o empiness The vision has enabled me o see clearly ha he feeling of 'familiariy or 'inimacy associaed in he mind wih any arising sensaion is indeed in a sense a conrick, or an ac on our par o buy ino an illusion Im sill invesigaing wheher 'realiy is formed exclusively of he feeling of familiariy Im no sure ye, bu wha I am sure of is ha boh he familiariy or inimacy (e he feeling of experience being 'mine) and realiy are hemselves sensaions arising in he mind, and are defin iely no-as we usually ake hem o be-independenly arising signs of an accurae percepion of he exernal world My experience of salvia l ed o unexpeced benefis, bu Im no suggesing is use leads o enlighenmen A search on You Tube for salvia urns up a subgenre in which people give he drug o heir friends and film he 'hilarious resuls One wo man was gripped wih error and on he verge of panic be cause, alhough she cou ld see and was alking o her friends, as she pu i: 'Youre no here This migh well happen, if you
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Duncan 's Magical Record dont have a context in which to integrate an experience of emptiness. Her friends, however, thought it was really funny. What LAM Dd Fo Us
Looking back through my magical d iary, I was surprised to dis cover the important role played by the extraterrestrial entity LAM in the foundation of The Baptist's Head and my embarka tion upon The Great Work. Remember LAM? The eggheaded alien, assumed by many to be the prototype of our modernday 'alien grey, inadvert ently summoned into our dimension by an illconsidered ma gical working of Aleister Crowley? The very same whom Alan argued (convincingly, I think) is only an inept invention of Ken neth Grant, spawned from his misinterpretation of an equally inept 'portrait by Crowley of the Chinese sage L aoTzu. A nest of synchronicites, with LAM at its centre, brought Alan and I into each others orbit. I was new to magic at the time, but had joined a group o f which Alan was also a member. I had been reading Promethea (2003) by Alan Moore and re member being struck by how Moore had rendered the tarot card 'The Judgment with the image of Harpocrates, 'the silent god, giving him the face of Harpo M arx. On the way to a meeting of our group I listened to a po dcast by The Viking Youth, which contained the first references Id heard to the supposed connection between space aliens, LAM and Crow leys Amalantrah Wo rking. A t the meeting, one of the rituals involved m aking contact with a 'machine intelligence from the future. During this I re ceived a vision of a alien ' grey, with its lips sealedhardly sur prising, perhaps, considering what Id been reading and listening to. I mentioned my vision to Alan, whom I hardly knew at the time. 'Have you done any work with LAM? he asked. 'Funny, I answered, 'I was listening to a podcast about him on the w ay here .. . Later that same meeting, Alan presented a ritual that in volved a petition to the Egyptian god Herupakhered. As the name suggests, this god was the forerunner of the Greek Har 19
A Desert of Roses pocrates and shares the same iconography: a finger against his lips in a gesture of sience Both gods are also strongly identi fied with Horus It seemed that LAM was caling me, so on M arch 5th, 006, I made contact with him for the first time, following the specific instructions provided by Grant Immediately I obtained some odd resuts: such as opening my eyes (as directed by the in structions), only to discover that temporarily I coud not see; and reaching up to touch my face, only to discover I appeared to have no head ! At the end of the working, I requested LAM to make a sign in the sky that contact had been estabished A couple of days ater, I found myself staring in wonder out of the office window with my colleagues, at a strange rainbow cooured ight in the d aytime sky With resuts ike these, no wonde r I went back for more ! The second working, March th, was less intense I began to realise how LAM is not a 'personaity but more 'the idea of an opera tion; that one must do certain things to obtain a resut Among other stuff, I was advised of the importance of the heart chakra and given a vision of 'black wine that I must drink in order to change mysef forever This ast theme reappeared in the third working, March th, as a 'black sea that I tried to enter, but caused a stir among the gods because 'I was not advanced enough I was advised to aquire an ankh, to meditate upon it and to wear it-which, ater, I did A boat came towards me in the vision, and this I took to mean that by working with the ankh I might cross the back sea The fourth working on the 5th include d a prophecy: the ar riva of a person 'Look out for them and listen to what they say, LAM was teling me I was then told explicity: 'Ask Fes toon At the time, this was Alans magica name (Hey, I mustnt laugh-in those days I was going by the monicker of 'Frater Vacuum) The vision then presented an image of Alan looking through a microscope It was this explicit instruction from LAM that led to Alan and I discussing the possibility of working together, making
0
Duncan 's Magical Record podcasts and setting up a websitelong before either of us har boured any explicit notion of 'The Great Work. Perhaps LAMs work was done at this point, because the fifth working (March 9th) was vaguer and inconclusive, and I began to wonder if he was actually having a po sitive effect. The sixth (March 6th) was vaguer still. I had a sense that messages were being passed to me, yet I was-again-'not ad vanced enough to decipher them. The seventh, and the last, on April 9th, was also unclear: 'a strong sense of silence about to be broken. Of a voice about to be heard .. . He expresses that which is on the bord erline of com munication. A nd: 'there is information in the air and in the sky . It is in a material that we hav e not managed to decode yet .. . The communication is all around us, but appears in a form so mundane or indistinguishable that we do not perceive it as a signal . That was the last I ever heard from LAM-and the last he ever heard from me. Looking back, however, it seems there are clear precedents in these workings of what would follow: the crucial alliance with Alan; the 'black sea, as an abyss that I would cross (into 'stream entry), but at the time was not suffi ciently advanced to comprehend; the silence and the over looked com munications, which now could perhaps be read a s a naive inklings of the notion of emptiness. Thanks, LAM, you helped me a lot. Not bad, considering your origins in the insane ravings of Kenneth Grant. It would seem that even the most contrived and ridiculous imaginings have something to offer if approached in the right way. Or per haps it was simply in his true identity as LaoTzu that LAM was guiding me. Enlightenm ent
On March 6th, 009, a Twitter mess age from Alan in India lit up my screen at work : It is nished This could mean only one thing: hed attained arahatship, that degree of understanding traditionally described as 'en lightenment .
A Desert of Roses Wonderfu news But now what? One of us getting en ightened meant The Baptist 's Head had fufied its aim So what woud foow? And strongest of a were the feeings about how this impacted upon me: envy, frustration, fear that I might nev er achieve the same eve of understanding Bodhi svaha! I tweeted back to Aan, at the same time resov ing to bring mysef to the same eve as s oon as p ossibe The Powers That Be
The ast coup e of fruitions in my med itation practice had been biggies Id sensed I was cose, and had even wondered wheth er I might get there before Aan (That woud have been sweet Im pretty sure I beat him to streamentry, by the way, but Ive been traiing ever since) It was time to obtain s ome heavyduty guidance so, that same afternoon, I it some incense of Ab ramein, banished the tempe, and invoked my Hoy Guardian Ange The presence of the ange came through very strong In an swer to my question 'How can I make the grade of arahat as quicky as possibe? it gave me three runes: TYR (reversed), BEORC and WUNJO WUNJO was easy enough to decipher It symboises joy In a its communications my ange has used it to represent fruition or enightenment The outcome seemed assured, then, but how to make it happen quickly TYR reversed, according to the book I consuted, symboised impatience and effort incorrecty appied I had stepped up my practice recenty in a bid to precipitate a fina breakthrough This was worrying; it was evidenty the wrong approach BE RC, however, was more positive: it represented a birth or coming into being 'Any scheme s in the works shoud be impe mented right away, the commentary advised m e I asked for a sign from my ange The sky outside the win dow, which had been empty, instanty fied with birds rahat Weekend
For the weekend of March 45th Id reserved a pace on two workshops with dharma teacher Christopher Titmuss who, I
Duncan 's Magical Record imagine, is no stranger to enlightenment Id also booked a two week residential retreat at the beginning of April at a B ud dhist centre These would form the elements of a new plan: I would ease up on my meditation practice and try to relax into enlight enment, rather than forcing it through; and I would try to use the retreat and the contact with Titmuss as c atalysts Yet even before d eciding this-in fact, right from the mo ment Id received Alans message, a softening in my practice had already begun to set in It had already begun to seem ab surd to attempt to 'pressure Emptiness into a conclusion But after only a couple of sittings, this softening itself also became prob lematic I was confident that I was wellestablished at the level of realisation immediately before enlightenment, known as 'third path or anagami. This stage is characterised by the appearance of Emptiness to the meditator over extende d periods, or 'in real time The apprehension of Emptiness, however, was limited to a particular point in my field of awareness, specifically associ ated with with my brow (ajna chakra Emptiness always gave a strong impression of being on one side, with me on the other side, set against it, although there was a paradoxical aw areness that both were actually on the sam e continuum, as if situated at different points along a mobius strip There had also been ex periencesusually at or approaching fruitionwhen me and Emptiness would flip places, sometimes with Emptiness seem ing 'over here and me on the 'other side From my reading and my contact with highlyrealised practitioners, Id been led to believe that enlightenment comes when 'me is completely identified with Emptiness, or-in other words-the process of identifying the self with sensations comes to an end through its having been seen for what it is So how was I to make that final jump from identifying with sensations to identifying with Emptiness? The softening tend ency had already led to my abandonment of formal vipassana practice It simply seemed more natural just to sit with Empti ness But what was I supposed to do with it? If I focused my awareness on Emptiness, it solidified into an object of concen tration, and I would find myself moving up and down through 3
A Desert of Roses the various concentration states, or jhanas, which was peasant enough but wasnt leading to any new insights. Yet if I left Emptiness alone and just sat, this seeme d to go nowhere either, except into increasingly more contentess states that at times seemed to slip into that amost utter cessation known as nerodhi samapatti When in doubt, ask someone whos been there and done it! The workshops with Christopher Titmuss synchronistic aly roled around. Titmuss doesnt teach meditation on these day schools; instead he taks, and encourages people to tak to each other. Probably hes earnt the hard way that peope dont ike to learn the hard way. Talking about psychoogica stuff is the only inroad to the dharma that many modern westerners are willing to folow. His themes for the weekend were: ' Doe s Any thing Realy Matter? and 'The Powerlessness of Now. Titmuss is a compassionate and lovely man who oozes reaisation from every pore. By the end of the weekend I was so cam and fo cused on the dharma that in itsef this seemed to have an effect. At the end of the first workshop, I ask ed if he would listen to a question about my practice. I briefly described where Id got to. Instead of the struggle Id had expaining mysef to teachers in the past, he seemed to know exactly what I was talking about and what I neede d. 'You dont need to practise anything, he said . 'Just attend to that which is not Emptiness. That was it. I was confident this advice woud prove correct. It was Saturday evening, and I sat two further sittings in which I put Titmusss advice into practice. I noticed no particulary unusual states during these, except the feeling that my practice was m oving forwards again. It fet 'right . The Eye in the Pyramid
A few days earlier, at the beginning of the week, Id had a vis ion during my morning sitting. First, Id seen an eye: unbink ing, persistent and staring. Then Id felt myself picked up and moved. My 'sou was being transported. It was taken to a pyr amid and ushered directly through the was into the innermost
4
Duncan 's Magical Record chamber. Radiant white light filled my being as I entered. In side, also bathed in white light, Alans soul was waiting. It was so cheesy it made me laugh, but there was no denying the unusual power of the vision. Success seemed assured, but theres no oracle Ive ever come across that seems able to put accurate timescales on its pr edictions. It might be as before I joined A lan in our gay Egyptian hidea way. The timescale that Destiny was working to turned out to be far different from anything Id expected. Comletely Unexected
On Monday 6th March I woke at .50am wondering if someone in the building had put their washing machine on maximum spin. There wa s a sensation of heat and a strong, fast vibration in my solar plexus. It was a moment before I grasped the cause of the feeling was internal. And then, a moment after wards, I noticed consciousness had changed in some strange way. There was a feeling of collapse and relaxation. A peculiar absence of striving. I waited for a few minutes. If this were a dream or trance, then it would pass. But although the vibrations faded, the alter ation in consciousness remained; in fact, it grew, and a sense of utter certainty established itself. I knew it was done. I got out of bed to meditate. Looking inward, I saw the con figuration of the mind had changed to a degree Id only experi enced before after gaining a new path. When I tried to resume the practice that Titmuss had given me-'attend to that which is not EmptinessI couldnt, because the practice had become re dundant. Emptiness was apparent, but it was no longer set against or beside anything. The structure of my mind had shif ted so that now, wherever I looked, everything was Emptiness. My personality being the thing it is, I was gripped with doubt, anxiety, fear. Was this what it seemed? Would it last? But the doubts, anxieties and fears were arising against the background of this new configuration, where there was no sense of a separate me set against anything. So although my
5
A Desert of Roses personality was doing the kind of thing it usually does, its products were seen through effortlessly as soon as they arose, or with the merest reflection Often, indeed, there are still things I experience that include a sense of 'me But under the new co nfiguration these have be come just thate they are experienced not a s 'me, but as sen sations giving rise to that The wh ole, entire field of aw areness is shotthrough with Emptiness, which seems the most salient aspect of the new understanding It is this that prevents 'me from setting itself up in opposition to anything, as it used to The old solid and separate 'me has been stifled at its very root, and seems unlikely to return This domination of the field of awareness by Emptiness is what is meant-I assume-by the saying 'Emptiness is F orm, which is the realisation upon which arahatship depends There is, then, a sense that all phenomena (including the sense of a perceiver) arise against a background of Emptiness It might be described as seeming as if phenomena were 'blocking the view of Emptiness; as if true seeing would occur if it werent for all these impressions of objects in the way From this perspective I understand the saying 'in the see ing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard, etc, which supposedly describes the momenttomoment consciousness of the arahat A few minutes after 4am I returned to bed and slept I dreamt that someone brought me a selection of nice PVC trousers to try on I chose my favourites, then stood and per formed the song 'Bombers by Tubeway Army I was aware that probably I looked absurd, but I enjoyed the song and the singing anyway Why hadn 't I done this sooner ? I wondered I woke again at 6am and everything was in the same new state I got up, meditated, and my observations were again the same The teaching and the workshops with Titmuss had created the space for the most unexpected thing to occur Id never ex pected it to come so soon, nor for it to be like this-which is a good indication that it really has occurred, because I still re member how third path (anagami was completely beyond my wildest expectations As this is too, with its bizarre mix of the 6
Duncan 's Magical Record ordinary and the strange. Of all the paths this one bears the strongest resemblance to no path at all. Nothing has ceased of its own accord. Rather, an under standing has been arrived at that enables a view through and beyond everything that continues to arise sam e as it ever was . I cant pretend the last week has been a blissful joyfest. There is a lot of integration to be done. My obsession with en lightenment is unfortunately still in place: I catch myself ob sessively scanning my inner processes for traces of unenlightened behaviour, checking I still 'have it, even though this makes no sense. The habits and obsessions are seen through as they arise, yet the tendencies that give rise to them are still fully active. My mind gives the impression of a fly w heel mechanism thats no longer need ed to carry the strain it used to, and now its spinning superfast, out of control, be cause theres nothing else for it to d o. On the two nights following awakening I was again dis turbed by vibrations and heat in the solar plexus. Each night was weaker than the last, and there has been no recurrence since. Ive also been bothered by headaches and migrainelike symptoms for a few days. These, too, seem to be passing. What remains at the moment are anxietydreams, which, Im hoping, are a means for all the obsessive tendencies and unhelpful im pulses that have grown up around my dogged pursuit of en lightenment over the years to blow off some steam and perhaps one day cease . In the meantime, I intend to get on with things, just as Ive always tried. Id be untruthful if I said theres absolutely no change to everyday awareness. This path seems to have a very subtle background sensation, like the mental equivalent of con stantly falling backwards. It reminds me of looking up into a colourless sky and watching snowflakes come tumbling down. Confessons of a Herm t
Two weeks in silence at Gaia House in Devon, working five hours a day, meditating like crazy for six, and still this 'fourth path thing, this socalled 'enlightenment, seems to be holding up. 27
A Desert of Roses Learning to Lea
Before the retreat I was tormented by doubt, yet d been able to see that my doubt was a reaction to the shift in relationship to emptiness, not an insight arising from it In 'The Tempe Work ing Part Three (Chapman & Barford 009b: 03f), the spirit Tempe, an astral representative of the A A , revealed to A lan and I information about our karmic habits That whole cycle of workings now appears to have been a set of prophecies dealing in part with the circumstances under which Alan and I attained fourth path In the third working, Tempe shows us that our karma is the issue immediately confronting us And in deedmy doubt was completely in keeping with my character; in other words, it was karmic In my case, at least, Tempe was warning that my karma had the potential to disrupt my attain ment and should be properly examined After a few days on the retreat of general sitting and build ing up tranquillity and concentration, I picked up an audio tape from the Gaia House library and discovered an interesting talk by Zen teacher Reb Anders on Watch your intentions, says Anderson, which are present in everything you do at virtually every waking moment Intention reveals your relationship to the universe It reveals your karma Like all things, however, intention is empty On searching for its essence it becomes unfindable, because it is neither in you, nor not in you To experience your intention in this wayAn derson says-is to know the budd ha mind, which abides neither in fixed intentions, nor in karma, but is described as always 'leaping I tried this 'leaping, but intentions continued to arise as usu al, so I backed off and simply watched them for a couple of days I allowed my attention to get sucked into their unpleas ant, fizzy energy A lot of my intentions were centred around having arguments with pe ople, proving them wrong, dram atiz ing confrontational scenes d never have the guts to stage in reality There was also an obsessive intention to get 'it sorted out now (whatever 'it was), and to solve for once and all this whole problem of intentions and karma The longer I noticed
Duncan 's Magical Record all this the more unpleasant it became, until suddenlyout of the blue-I noticed something: that although intentions can and do lead to other things, such as thoughts, actions, feelings and fantasies, the intentions in themselves do not Doh! For me, this was a big revelation An intention arises Later, it arises again And again Re markable, each time, its unaltered Other stuff might happen after the attention has arisen, but that other stuff is no longer the intention Intentions in themselves do nothing, and further more-guess what?-theyre no different from other mental con tents: they manifest as sensations, just like everything else Idiotic as it seemed, I was still harbouring an idea that karma is something special, the urging of some kind of fate or destiny In an interview with my teacher, she advised me to distinguish between karma and the results of karma My in sight enabled me to do this: the results of karma are the stuff that happens after the intention, but the karma itself has already manifested in the intention, which is the driving force of the result, yet is simply a sensation and as easy to see through as any other sensation Karma, therefore, is no big monster If your karma inclines you to doubt, the intention to doubt is not the doubt itself The habit of regarding intention as 'what hasnt manifested yet is very strong, but an intention has in fact always already mani fested-as an intention! It can therefore be exposed as empty, just like everything else Yetalso like everything elsesimply realising this didnt prevent my karma and intentions from con tinuing to arise just as they always ha d Now, I know what youre thinking: how could a selfpro claimed enlightened being be as dim as this? Well, just because I might have penetrated the veil of perception and realised my relationship with the Deathless beyond space and time (which I have) doesnt mean Ive cleared up all my inadequacies closer to home In fact, it was my continuing inadequacy that came to the fore as the karmic stuff slowly quietened down over the next couple of days Emptiness itself even dropped from view en 9
A Desert of Roses tirey. The more I me ditated, the more it seem ed to retreat away from me. But surprisingy, I didnt give a shit, because this en abed me to reaise another truth from another random teaching Id stumbed across in the ibrary (from Dzogchen): 'There is Emptiness and the knowing of Emptiness . In other words, its easy to get hung up on Emptiness to the degree that we reify it as the bea and enda of practice. But the truth is that there is no knowedge of the Absoute except through a reative, imited human consciousness. Like it or ump it, we view the Absoute through the spectaces of being human. So I sat and abi ded without Emptiness, absorbed in my own humanity, acknowedging its imitation, its reativity, its ignorance, and managing not to hate mysef for it in the sight est. Sometimes Emptiness was apparent, sometimes not. What was constanty apparent, however, was the reative nature of my cognitionand why shoud I expect it to be otherwise? This, I think, is what som e peope ca compassion From the Hea
Id considered my heart chakra opened, after performing a fortyday kundaini yoga kriya to achieve just that and having consequenty fet some stirrings in that region. But- Around the hafway mark of the retreat it began to fee as if there were a sixinch gash in the centre of my chest. Sometimes there was a hard stone inside it. Sometimes the fesh was ripped and bruised. It was unbearabe. On the teachers advice, I gave mysef permission to step back from examining it when it fet too much, but to expore it deepy when I was abe. 'Look at the feeings and ideas associ ated with it, she suggested, 'and see if theres a sense of what kinds of experiences woud hep with unbocking or pushing through the sensations you find. Inside the chesthoe I discovered guit, remorse, pus that nasty sticky feeing you get when you express yoursef to someone and it comes out a wrong or they misunderstand your intentions, and aso a curiousy specific feeing of being driven by intense ove to do something to the beoved person
30
Duncan 's Magical Record that was too rou gh, or too motivated by selfish needs M ost sur prising of all, however, was how obvious wh at was required to 'push through these emotionssimply: more of the same Yet more guilt, more remorse, more risking of the stickiness of mis communication, more situations calling for the management of dangerous love that might damage the beloved if unskilfully exercised Near the donations box at Gaia House was a quotation from the Buddha: 'If you knew as I know, it said, 'the pleasure in the act of giving, then you would share every meal This didnt sound like the Buddh a to me; that word pleasure seemed wrong But whilst meditating my mind would often wander back to the quotation The hole in my chest felt horriby vunerable, as if anyone could thrust inside and do me immense damage I realised that the fear of damage was connected with my lifelong habit of hold ing back from others Oh dear It was looking as if the meditation was dragging me toward a realisation of my lack of generosity This might break the habits of a lifetime But on the other hand, I was up for it! Why the fuck not? If it meant I could break a lifetime habit it would be great to feel those icky sensations in my heart centre pushing through the existing crap As ong as it was yoked to something worthwhile, why the fuck hold back from shitty situations? Shitty situations are just as impermanent and em pty and any other! As if to test my resolve, external circumstances intervened d exchanged smiles and glances with one of the female re treatants and a situation had begun to deveop-at east, it seeme d so to my mind To me, it looked a s if it was an issue for her too In a normal environment, an exchange of words wouldve made our intentions (or the lack of them) clear But silence is the rule at Gaia, and breaking another persons silence is a big deal I felt selfconscious when she was around Her body lan guage indicated she felt the same In retrospect its ridiculous, but in a retreat environment where there s nothing else to think about, stuff like this can become a major mindfuck
3
A Desert of Roses There were two days left Fine, I thought I dont want to make her uncomfortable, so Ill sp end the rest of the time med itating in my room But then I realised I was simply avoiding the awkwardness, whereas this situation could be grasped as an opportunity to confront some of those sticky feelings Id dis covered blocking my heart So I sat with my stupid selfcon sciousness, watching my absurd fantasies about this unfortunate woman arise and pass, examining in minute detail the sensations that well up from mi scommunication It felt like Id swallowed the entire writings of Marcel Proust I watched the baseless fantasies arise, saw their emptiness, and wondered at their karmic origin Yet it would be false to pretend that I wasnt at the same caught up and carried away by them I considered whether it would have been kinder to the per son concerned to have hidden in my room after all, rather than using her as an occasion for cold, dry vipassana Wasnt this in itself a defensive tactic? Yes, of course it was W elcome to the world of the relative! As Id begun to realise, the Absolute alone is perfect; only Emptiness is free from limitation Im not the Absolute, yet I can know it Through this knowledge, the extent to which I align my relative self to the Absolute is the extent to which I realise its nature And the way we realise the Absolute is to negate self, by which I mean not a conscious effort to reverse or modify our usual actions (which would only be a separate manifestation of self) but by seeingthrough intentions, and un binding the self from any fixed course o f action Its not easy, this stuff It troubled me not a little, that on the retreat Id concerned myself with the contents of experience al most as much as with its nature But it didnt feel like I was get ting sidetracked, because everywhere I turned I could find Emptiness, even when Emptiness had com pletely gone away This stuff is impo ssible to master Thats entirely the point The Twttergatha
Alan has laid claim to being the first person to announce his en lightenment using the socialnetworking service Twitter-in 3
Duncan 's Magical Record which case, perhaps I was the second What foows is a selection of tweets-short messa ges with a maximum ength of 40 charactersthat I sent during the days immediately leading up to and after my attainment of fourth path
REALITY )
IS
SRIEIG
@ t r a ve l i n g s a dh u a n n o u n c e me n t
of
i ght .
penet rate s
hi s
An
the
(M
[ Congratuating Aan on the en ghtenment ]
h e y y y yy y y ! B o d h i s v a h a ! White
ME !
AT
(Mar 6t h)
eye,
inn er
Way
st aring .
c h amb e r
Y i k e s ! N ot a t yp i c a s i t
of
My a
sou
pyramid .
(Mar 9th )
More exharatng than the eeng of yng in
a
dream
is
the
moment
of
b e f o re ha nd t h a t i t ' s p o s s i b e Very
quiet
Just
me
and
my
realisation
( Ma r 1 0 t h )
mate
Emp t i n e s s
(Mar 10th) I
j ust
tried
J eh ov ah ' s
p o i n t in g
W i t ne s s e s .
out
That
no-se f
was
to
stupid .
t he (Mar
0th) After Christ there wi be no more prophets, s ay th e J [ eh ovah ' s if
c o me dy
were
f u n ny a n y m o r e ? Mu s t
k e ep
Setting
W [ i t ne s s e s .
b a nn e d ,
a t t a ch me n t
nothing
woud
be
(Mar 11 th)
n ve s t g a t n g for
S o i ke
just
th e
sitting
(Mar 1 2th )
33
u n nv e s t g ab e . with
it
is
A Desert of Roses The
Witness
shocks
the
interna
i n t o e mb a r r a s s e d s i e n c e . Attending this
workshops
w e e k en d .
w i s h e d me
Happy
( Ma r 1 3 t h ) Christopher
T i t mu s s '
Titmuss
as
s o me bo d y
(Mar 1 3th)
W o ke a t 2 5 am had
by
commentator
s t o pp e d
W en t t o m ed i t a t e an d s aw i t
B ig
L ov e
to
e ve r y b o dy
(Mar
6th) Dreamt
I
put
B o mb e r s '
by
rea iz ed
I
on
PVC
T u b e wa y
shou d
trousers
A rm y .
h a ve
So
d on e
and
much
it
sang
u n
years
I
ago
(Mar 6th) L o o ki n g
at
it
it' s
sensations
s oaked
ook
od
as
a n y t i me s o o n
*st i *
with
me '
s
a
ied
Emp t i n e s s gong to
o
Doesn' t
spng back
(Mar 1 6th)
I c o u d t o u c h t h e g r o u n d a nd a s k E a r t h t o b e my
witnes s
T wi t t e r !
w h at
the
hey
I ' ve
got
(Mar 1 6th)
Intense night
But
chakra I
ne ve r
action
woke
b e i e v ed
in
me
again
chakras
they started going bananas on me .
eect on
e xp o s e s
unt i
(Mar 17 th)
F e a r s a nd d o ub t s a r i s i n g c o n s t a n t y . s ghtest
last
But the
they' e
emp t y .
(Mar 7th) H ab i t s
and
t e n d en c i e s
E mp t y
* v e r y * a c t i ve .
(Mar 1 8th )
Remember
the
Handbook
D e ce a s e d '
in
the
im
34
or
but
the
oh
so
Recenty
*Beeteu ice* ?
We
Duncan 's Magical Record how
a
about
Handboo
E n i g h t en e d ? o u rt p a t
Recent
s t e p a t t a t s mo s t
i e n o p a t h a t a l . has
e n i g h t e nm en t . is it?
the
(Mar 9th)
( a r a a t )
Meditation
or
(Mar 2 th ) nothing
But
tat s
to not
do
ver
with
hepu,
( Ma r 2 5 t )
Being enightened is it s
t e r r i b
e n g t en e d
i e being ga,
b ad
beng
man n e r s
to
out
i n t h at
or
one
another .
(Mar
26th) Anone
need
wood
car ring ? e
wt
is
eepng
that
it
is
is
not
e v id e n ce
arising
as
s e e ou , M ar a we
see
m ag i c . Asing
water
i .e.
: )
G od
others
a se -centre , reaction
it s
the
to
* ar ma * .
but te
Hah !
I
( M ar 3 s t ) ex t e n a ,
( N i s h ida K it a ro ) W h o Am I ?
about
( Ma r 3 0 t h )
o
a
centelessness
I
an
sence
denies
b e n e i t o o ur m i s t a e s D o u bt
or
(Mar 27t)
probem
experience
chopping,
t
s
m e e
( Ma r 3 s t )
I c a n t b e i e v e h o w I wa s
s a t i s i e d w i t h a ns w e r s t a t a i n i d e a s o r sensations .
( Ap r s t )
L oo i n g a t t e Ab s o ut e c o s e up . . . there
seems
t he re
to be
re a !
s o me
ind o
( Ap r 3 rd )
35
Who a . . .
*detai l *
in
A Desert of Roses E n i g h t e nme n t e n i g h t e n ed
is
so
that
i
much I
eren t
I d b e u c k in g d i s ap po i n t ed Somebody,
pease
not
i ke
te
enightened
;-)
me ,
being
(Apr 20th) h at s
t he
reatonship beteen Emptiness and Moraity (Apr 30th) H a ve
sitched
entirey
W o .
W a t c h n g my s e c o n c e n t r a t e s a s u p e r b
obj ect or ins ight . Buddhism
is
Everything
the
to
s a m a th a
( M ay 6 t h ) *opposite*
exists
practice
*except*
soipsism
o the
se
(Jun
4th) G od
do e s n t
I t d be
just
oo
another
part
o
s
most
reakng
Non-exstence thing
the
I
the
It
did,
universe amaing
(Jun 15th)
e ce p t i o n the
right !
ex i s t
o
imp r e s s i o n s .
reception
s o me t h i n g o t h e r
o
an
Nothing
impression
es e , there
but is
( Ju 7 t h )
Consciousness is u o stu pretending to b e t s b a c k g r o un d o r s o u r c e
B u t a e h av e
to
no n e
do
is
oo k
to
see
(Aug 27th)
36
that
o
it
is
ALAN'S MAGICAL RECORD
Alan 's Magical Record The Encounter with Choronzon
The following article because of its chronology m ore properly belongs in The Blood of the Saints Chapman Barford 2009a Its text re surfaced quite recently however and so it has been included here for completion's sake On the 5th November, 006, I scryed the 30th aethyr within the Enochian magica system, and within the vision that I re ceived the symboism seemed to imply that I had crossed the abyss. A lot of the symbo ism was Thelemic . It included visiting the City of Pyramids and being received within the Cup of Babylon, which al relates to the third sphere on the Tree of Life, or Binah, which is where the adept is received as a Master of the Tempe once he or she has crosse d the veil of the abyss. Three days ater I decided to confirm this with my Hoy Guardian Ange. I communicate with my Hoy Guardian Ange using an African divination system known as the Obi. It con sists of four cowrie shels fed with blood, which are then cast within a consecrated space, usualy deineated using a chain. There are five possible answers from throwing the Obi, some of them requiring a second throw. So athough not as rich assaythe Tarot or Yi King, you can get quite comp icated an swers to specific questions beyond simply 'yes and 'no . I asked m y angel if I had been accepted into the City of Pyr amids and my ange confirmed that indeed I had, but that I wasnt yet a Master of the Temple. In order to compete the crossing and obtain the grade fully, I would need to perform a specific ritua that I came to c al the Da ath Operation. The de scription in my diary read s: At the appointed time retire to temple before sunrise with the curtains open to allow sunlight in Burn storax Invoke Holy Guardian Angel Perform sex magick using a sigil to invoke Choronzon the denizen of the abyss into Da'ath Then travel to Da 'ath in my astral body to con ont Choronzon Perform the Star Ruby a Thelemic ver sion of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram I would then 39
A Desert of Roses ob tain the grade of the Master of the Temple by declaring my name as a Magister Templi and ending the ritual without banishing I was told I would receive the name in due course as well as the correct time to perform the oper ation as a specic date was no t given The thought of confronting Choronzon astrally, didnt fill me with too much confidence, considering the fact that I dont consider myself an expert at astral work. So I devised a practice routine, in which I would visit all the different spheres on the Tree of Life in order to exercise and thereby strengthen my as tral body, a bit like a boxer training before a prize fight. It must be pointed out that at the time my knowledge of Qaballah and the Tree of Life wa s not that great, and so I first began by learn ing all of the correspondences necessary to visit those spheres in the astral body, such as the appropriate incense to burn, col ours to visualise, names of God , and so on. At just over a week into this new p ractice regime, on th e th of Decemb er, I was sitting in my study writing at about three or four oclock in the afternoon, when I suddenly had a vision of myself performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Penta gram u sing a wand that I purchase d when I first began my ma gical career, but had never actually use d. I went upstairs to my temple room, dug out the wand from the back of a cupboard, and performed the banishing ritual to see what might happen. It was after I finished the ritual that I realised that if the vision had not included the wand, I would not have performed the ritual in the temple room. Feeling a little confused, I assumed that perhaps there was something that I needed to do specifically in the temple. I noticed that I had left my diary on the altar, which is something that I never usually do, so I thought perhaps I was supposed to write something. So I went to my diary and had a go at automatic writing. After about ten minutes, it was o bvious that I was writ ing absolute gibberishit was just absolute nonsense. So I ripped out the page and threw it away, feeling a bit miffed that I had ruined my diary. But then it dawned on m e that perhaps I wasnt supposed to write something; maybe my angel just 40
Alan 's Magical Record wanted to speak with me. So I took out my Obi to chat with him. Basically, he intimated that something bad was going to happen that evening. To hear my angel say this filled me with absolute dread, and at this point a lot of questions began to fill my head, such as would I be receiving some bad news regard ing a family member, or was there going to be a gas explosion downstairs, hence the command to go upstairs? My angel as sured me it was none of those things, and the bad news was that Choronzon had d ecided t o attack me that evening. I found this very surprising, the idea that Choronzon had preempted the plan of me going to him, and had decided that he was coming to get to me first. I asked for a time at which to expect the attack. The reply was 6 .30pm . At this point I took my old watch and placed it on the altar, so I could monitor the time. I asked what I could do to defend myself, and was told that I should perform the Daath Operation. I was quite con cerned by this as I still wasnt as good astrally as I would have liked to have been, having only been practising for a week, and I still hadnt learned all of the Greek necessary to perform the Star Ruby Banishing. So I asked for confirmation that Choronzons ETA was indeed 6.30pm, but this time received the reply that he would be arriving sometime that evening be fore 0pm . I then went through a lengthy process of corroborat ing every detail of the Operation previously given. This went on for some time, during which I went to the toilet a couple of times. Upon returning the second time, I was told I needed to make a fresh batch of Abramelin Incense, as well as receiving conflicting information on what exactly I was supposed to do next. It slowly dawned on me that perhaps I wasnt actually speaking to my angel any more, so I asked, 'Is this my Holy Guardian Angel?, to which the reply was, 'No. This begged the question: 'Is this Choronzon?, to which I received an em phatic 'Yes. I looked at my watch on the altar and saw that it was exactly 6.30pm. I was dumbfounded for a couple of seconds and sat there shaking like a leaf, before pulling myself together and de ciding I should just perform the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, 4
A Desert of Roses considering a of the instructions I had been given previousy were now out of the window I performed the rite and then sat in my meditation posture, eyes cosed, to see what might be go ing on And and behod, I was in Daath on the astra pane, and the vision was so strong it was as if Daath had com e to me rather than the other way round; there was no effort at a on my behaf I was stood on a rocky outcrop with a storm raging a around, at the end of which was Choronzon He ooked ike a naked human, except that parts of his body were sweing and fuctuating, making him appear as if he were a giant, gibbering human boi Am azingy, it poppe d into my head that I had read somew here how Choronzon c annot abide concentration and si ence, so I put my finger to my ips in the Sign of Harpocrates, and remained sient for awhie, as Cho ronzon continued swe ing and gibbering and pusating I then thought it woud be best for me to banish Daath, so I performed the Lesser Banish ing Ritua of the Pentagram in my astra body, and needess to say the anges appe ared without me nee ding to visuaise them, and as the ritua progressed the storm began to subside unti nothing of the vision remained Opening my eyes I performed another banishing, just for good measure, waved my wand menacingy at the Obi for a whie, andsti shaking with adrenainthought it woud be best if I retired downstairs to eat and watch so me teevision At this point, I need to expain the ayout of the house I w as iving in an od Victorian townhouse, with two rooms upstairs and two rooms downstairs that I used as a study and a iving room The kitchen was buit on as an extension to the iving room, with a bathroom added at a ater date So you had to go through the iving room to get to the kitchen, and you had to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom When I came downstairs, the ight in the iving room was on, but the ights in the kitchen and bathroom were off As I waked into the kitchen to get something to eat, I fipped the ight switch-and the ight bub bew Strangey, the iving room ights remained on, even though normay in the house a ight bub bowing woud cause a fuse to trip Just to be sure, I 4
Alan 's Magical Record went to check. Locating the fuse box, thankfully under the stairs, I discovered that indeed none of the fuses had tripped. So I went back to the doorway of the kitchen feeling confused. Despite my experience in working with spirits and demons, and confident I could look after myself magically, I still couldnt help feeling that in the faroff darkness of the bath room something unpleasant was lurking. After a couple of seconds, I pulled myself together and con fidently walked into the darkness, through the kitchen, to pull the cord and turn on the light in the bathroom. The light didnt come on . I ran back into the living room as fast as my little legs could carry me, only to notice for the first time that the clock on the microwave read 6pm . How coul d this be, when the ritual I per formed had began at 6.30pm ?! Now I was both scared and even more confused. There was nothing to do at this juncture but sit down and watch some reality TV. Later, when I coul d put it off no more, I du g out a torch and ventured into the bathroom, to find nothing hiding in there but my own confusion and paranoia. Thankfully, 6.30pm in real time came and went without incident. The next day was spent hunting for an additional fuse box that might explain the strange behaviour of the lights. Finding none, I eventually called in an electrician who couldnt find a cause for the malfunction either, other than a spurious 'melted wire in the ceiling of the living room that would require tear ing up the floor boards upstairs to run a new wire into the kit chen and bathroom. A couple of days later I got a second opinion from another electrician, who, after listening to my suggestion of another possible fuse box, glanced in the corner of the kitchen to spy a solitary fuse for the kitchen and bathroom lights, which up un til that point no one had ev er notice d. Two weeks and new fuse later, Choronzons reign of confu sion was finally over. It was the day after my confrontation with him that I gained the insight to se e the confusio n or futility
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A Desert of Roses in all thoughts oras Crowley described itto experience the world above the abyss. I think this whole episode is a wonderful illustration of the way in which spirits operate. Spirits are not simply beings that pop up during a ritual; their manifestation occurs on all levels of human experience, from the subjective to the objective, through mental, physical and social phenomena. As the embod iment of confusion, we can see that Choronzon not only mani fested as an astral vision, but also in my subjective mental state, in that I couldnt work out what time things were happening or the exact details of the ritual; in my emotional experience of fear and panic; and also physically, in the whole lighting fiasco. Immediately after the ritual, I had a lot of questions, such as how did Choronzon displace my angel to communicate through the Obi? And did Choronzon really preempt my de cision to go to him by pulling a fast one and surprising me? Looking back on it now, it seems naive to think there were two invisible spiritual beings wrestling for control of the cowrie shells. The encounter with Choronzon was a necessary part of my development, which is embodied within the HGA. So if we look at what actually happened, my HGA led me through an experience that is part of my magical development, and that ex perience was an encounter with confusion as embodied by Choronzon. If we look at what occurred in light of the above, its obvious that performing the Daath Operation was confus ing, and that what happened with the Obi in terms of Choronzon gaining control of it was confusing too In other words, these are manifestations of Choronzon, and the only correct way then to procee d in terms of finding an explanation for what happened is to utilise the only antidote to Choronzon, and that is Silence. The Scyng of Aethy (KHR)
The following is a record of the scrying of the twentieth Enochian Ae thyr KHR augmented by the ingestion ofketamine There is someone sat in a large room with wooden panelling and lots of red velvet. I think he may be a king. He is a chubby, 44
Alan 's Magical Record pale man, and he is dressed like a Bishop, hoding a crooked staff He is a saint I begin to trance out heavily 'Im trancing outa ot, Dunc Christ! The saint is aso a shepherd I see sheep Fuck me this trance is mental' I exclaim as the trance goes even deeper I explain to Duncan how it's somewhat similar to the big ball' I've encountered before where space and time seem to bend into a sphere It goes beyond the "big ball I am the "big ball Crikey! ' I can see space, but it is bent in a strange shape Christ! I can 't even describe what this ck me! Oh now I can see space has bent into a funny shape the universe hasWHOA !' The totality of the known universe has become a minute drop faing into an infinite se a This is truly the most awesome thing I have ever experienced Long deep b reaths follo w I can't describe how immense this is Duncan and how minu te I am Ohthis must be Nuit and Hadit This is easily the most men tal trance I've ever been in Christ ' I see the shepherd He seems very maeroffact Perhaps sanctimonious The big ball' phenomenon still arises but it has changed it no longer seems so immense A green pasture with sheep What looks like a Mexican farmer with a pitchfork is throwing bails of hay from a red truck This vision is replac ed by a strange abstract figure: a cone on its base with an eclipse or crescent moon on its p oint A seven or ninepointed star foats through space, with a styised graph ic representation of a tail I can see what looks like a triangular metal machine with three ights, one in each corner Each corner aso has a three pronged arm It probes me, before pulling a piece of fesh from my chest and eating it It leaves, taking the form of a metalic crab Im on the side of a giant robot It takes its gun and shoots I ook down to see a burning hole in my torso, which is of gigant ic propo rtions, floating in space 45
A Desert of Roses There is an hourgass Biss arises I see the drop again: I am the drop I am a drop of nothing, faing from nothing, into a vast sea of nothing Wow ! This is m en tal! I don I t think you appreciate the scale of this Dunc' [Laughter] My physica shape and the tempe itsef is inside the dro p It is bissfu I am the universe as a drop The infinite vastness of the universe has been reveaed to be the size of a minute drop in an incomprehensibe sea The scae is terrifying, but just ike the drop and the ocean, the fear is nothing too This fear must be related to the selcontraction ' The vision becomes an expansive, comfortabe trance I realise that the comfort is an illusion Then Whoooa ! Fuck me! I can't even begin to tell you what I can see now D un ! I'm surprised I can even talk at all Christ! What was that ? ! That doesn 't make sense The universe is insane! Christ! I'll try and explain what just happened when I'm not so o my face In fact I'm sort of struggling to remember already what just happened I can 't describe what happened Hmm ' The vision becomes harsh and utravioet Ive been here be fore It ooks ike a fim negative: the coours seem inverted The trance is back and white at the same time, but utravioet too There was some mad shit there too Dunc I don't even know if I can describe it It's such hard work ' The vision is of an utravioet andscape with couds as both the ground and sky, with ightning jumping between them In the space in the midde are a number of what ook ike back torpedoes, resting on their fins and aimed towards the sky One is much coser than the others, and out of its top is a pair of bony hands and a sku peering out It ooks ike death After trying to verbaise everything above, I open my eyes, but have to cose them again due to feeing so dizzy It takes a good hafhour before Im back to some sembance of norma ity Refecting on the events above, Im convinced that the vision of the torpedo foowed a fruition that occurred during the vis
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Alan 's Magical Record ion. All in all, this is the most mystical vision Ive ever had, and no doubt the ketamine facilitated this. The Geat Wok Accom plished
I arrived in India with great expectations. The Tempe Working had predictedamongst other thingsthat I would meet a member of the Great White Brotherhood somewhere around the Bay of Bengal, who would somehow take my magical de velopment in a new direction. In addition, the same man had appeared within an Enochian vision as a gnome, carrying a pineapple, who directed me down the throat of a dragon or beast. English Qaballah had revealed that the pineapple was a symbol for the Supreme Ritual, which led me to expect the Brother to teach me a new method of insight that might eventu ally lead me to attain the grade of Ipsissimus (or arahat, as it is known to the Buddhists). Shiva 18h Janua
My wife and I landed in Mumbai, which is without doubt the worst place Ive ever been in my life. Starving millions, abused and emaciated animals, rubbish everywhere, defecation in the streets, pollution equivalent to smoking two and a half packets of cigarettes a day, con men and women on every corner, countless beeping cars clogging the road s, and no mattresses or running water in our hostel. Im not going to mention the toilets. 2 1 s Janua
Decided to visit Elephanta Island just off the coast of Mumbai. The boat ride is only an hour or so, but looking back you cant see Mumbai due to the po llution. This part of the Arabian Sea is so polluted it can no longer support marine life. The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the island was a moored boat with AA painted on the side, the name of my 47
A Desert of Roses particular tradition The island is home to a number of 500 year old cavetemples, all dedicated to Shiva, with a huge and glorious threeheaded statue of Shiva as its centrepiece. Would Shiva be playing a role in my magical development? I certainly found the main te pe to be a very sacred place, especially around the central lingam. A few weeks before I set off travelling, I asked Tempe to cla rify a portion of the prophecy he had made about my travels. Tempe had said there was 'something nasty at the end of the tunnel, and this troubled me. Exactly what was this 'nasty thing? I received the image of an oriental dragon, and a man in black robes whose face was hidden in shadow Was this the Adversary, and a B lack Brother, respectively? After returning from Elephanta Island we caught a sleeper coach to Goa (we were ripped off for the tickets and we didnt get a wink of sleep during the fourteen hours due to the drivers insane driving). It occurred to me during this journey that perhaps the man in black robes was me My recent vision ary work with Enochian magick had presented my magical de velopment in terms of the dragonslayer myth Doesnt every hero become the monster he slays by virtue of acquiring its skin or pelt, such as Heracles and the lion? Is the monster not the source of the heros powe r? Was I to meet and slay the Adversary? nd Janua
Arrived in Anjuna, Goa A car drove past with ' AA p ainted on the side Took a shower and got electrocuted That night I had a very vivid and terrifying dream of small cobras trying to burrow under my skin, which I frantically tried to pull out. 3rd Janua Pondering the nights dream, I passed a statue of a cobra on a stall near the beach. What was the significance of the cobra? That evening we w atched the film Kill Bill at a bar Two per manently braindamaged ravers who had taken one too many pills sat behind us, occasionally shouting nonsense at the
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Alan 's Magical Record screen. At one point, one of these losers began to repeat a five pointed star (the symbol of my tradition), like some kind of de lirious human oracular machine 24th Janua
Saw AA on both a menu at a cafe, and on the grills above my apartment window . 25th Janua
A little investigation on the internet revealed that Shiva is one of three manifestations of Buddhi, the other two being Vishnu and Brahma In other words, Shiva is the embodiment of the Supreme Truth, or enlightenment As I passed a sculptors stall, I noticed a threeheaded statue similar to the one at Elephanta Island The reverse of the statue was a cobra The sculptor confirmed that indeed, Shiva some times appe ared as the King Cobra, the largest snake in India . Had my dream about resisting the cobras entering my body revealed a fear of enlightenment? Was the Adversary what my separate self perceived as death? Or better yet, was the Advers ary the embod iment of fear based on ignorance? (Isnt all fear based on ignorance?) 27th Janua
On this day I met Shiva on the beach, where he tried to sell me stickers of Ganesha and the rest of the family. Okay, not the a tua god, but an Indian bum who just happened to be named Shiva. After buying the stickers (I do love Ganesha), Shiva told us we should travel to Gujarat Not being people who ignore the advice of a god, we spent the next few hours revising our route. Now we w ould take in the south coast all the way up to Chennai, where we would catch a flight to the Andaman Is lands, before heading back to Kalcotta, then west to Bodhgaya, Varanasi, and eventually Gujurat. 0th Janua We left Goa and arrived in Panaji I had been slack on the ma gick front, so I decided to do a tarot reading It told me I had
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A Desert of Roses been slack on the magick front Here I began a daiy routine of core HGA practice and tarot, which I recorded in my magica diary 5th Fbrua
By now we were in Mysore It dawned on me that perhaps I should have panned our route to incude as many opportunit ies to meet enightened peope as possibe, instead of leaving it up to chance So I looked up Ramana Maharshis ashram in the Lonely Planet India guide It just so happened that his ashram was aready on our route In addition, the guide explained how Maharshis favourite mountain, Arunachala, was apparenty where Shiva first appeared as a faming lingam Who needs planning when youve got prophecy? 6th Fbrua
Arrived in the small m ountain town of O oty At night I dreamt of a guru, venerated by Hindus and Buddhists alike, who was actualy a demon His teachings were em pty proverbs Despite his incredibly violent and unpredict abe nature, I fet no fear and greeted him politely Surprisingy, he respond ed in kind 1 5th Fbrua
A fortnight had passed with many an adventure, but none of them m agica When we arrived in Verkala, I was beginning to despair at India Nothing was safe to eat, everyone was a liar and my wife and I were exhausted In our room I found a co py of Vivekanandas The Law of Suc cess, which can be summarised as : 'D ont think you can change the word, but aways serve others It seemed as if the ignorant view that life was something that happens to me, almost as if I were a victim, had crept back into my ife Was I losing faith? Should I ask the A A for a sign?
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Alan 's Magical Record The Gnome? 1 6th Fbu
We visited a restaurant overlooking a cliff near the beach, and sat at a table next to a man on his own Within seconds he was taking to us: He was Lance, a rich Canadian construction en trepreneur He had been in Verkala for five weeks, but was planning to visit the Andaman isands in the near future This set off alarmbels: was Lance the prophesie d gnome? My interpretation of the Tempe Working had led me to ex pect the gnome to own a boat, but Lance didnt like boats (he was fying to the Andaman Isands) let alone own one Tempe had also mentioned a tattoo, and although Lance had none, the first thing I heard him say was a comment concerning tattoos to a passerby Lance was aso interested in Bud dhism However, what caused me and my wife to look at each other wideeyed was when Lance said: 'You know the video to Pink Foyds Another Brick in the Wall where every now and then a gnome fals off the conveyor belt? Well, I asked my brother who they were, and he said they must be those pe ope that end up in jai I said N 0, theyre the entrepreneurs! If ever there was an indication that Lance was the gnome, surey this was it? He had actualy identified himsef as such! It ooked like the AA had given me my sign after the doubts of the night before Lance then suggested that when we visit the States we shoud drive up into C anada from Bou der It appeared as if we were being given new travel plans again, this time to ensure I wou d visit Vincent Horn We woud bump into Lance a few more times over the com ing week, but eventually we parted due to our different travel plans I was left puzzed as to what the apparenty missing de tails (such as 'the boat and 'the tattoo) coud mean in terms of Tempes prediction
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A Desert of Roses uroino 24th ebrua
We arrived in Puducherry to discover (to my surprise) that it was home to Sri Aurobindo and the Mothers ashram We in quired about staying at an ashram hostel, but the receptionist (I think she wa s French) was conceited, arrogant and unhepfu 25th ebrua
I visited the Aurobindo information centre to see if I could learn more about the guru Had he left any enlightened stu dents behind and, if so, could I meet them? The nice man be hind the desk informed me that Aurobindo left no ineage and that in order to get enlightened one need simpy read his writ ings I found this very lame, so I asked if there was anyone around who was actualy enlightened The man told me that 'things happen at the ashram, and he knew peope that these 'things had happened to It sounded l ike an injunction to me ! 26th ebrua Over the weeks I had been progressively ill with food poison ing and acute diarrhoea, and on this particular morning I was feeing very pissed off with the beeping of car horns, the mos quito bites and the constant smell of sewage Whist scowing and swearing to mysef as I waked down the street ('India is a dirty shit hole ful of ignorant superstitious people intent on ripping me off), I looked at an old Indian lady going about her business and su ddenly saw that even here, in this god forsaken country, the Absoute was here It was very quiet and serene at the Aurobindo ashram There were many devotees shuffling through the grounds, taking it in turns to pay their respects at the samadhi (the mausoleum) When it was my turn I copied the devotees and rested my head, with eyes cosed, on the stone samadhi At first, the samadhi felt as if it were physicay moving under me Then I saw a light, and the vision of an od Indian man with flowing white hair (cant say it realy ooked like Aurobindo though) I retired to a wal around the courtyard and meditated, feeling ful and
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Alan 's Magical Record at peace. Just as I had experienced it with Andrew Cohen, and then with Nuit during the Gnostic Mass, the Divine was defin itey coming from and ocated at a point in spacetime, in this case the samadhi. How the he did it do that? Two yeow fowers fe out of the sky and hit me as I sat there. Did these represent Aurobindo and the Mother? Looking around bemused, I saw that they had actuay faen from the centra tree of the ashram . I was struck by how so many from so far had traveed here in order to worship the idea of enightenment. It is often cited how in the West we have no ineages and our earning is book based, and yet here we had an Indian sage who activey pro moted this approach. I returned to the samadhi. I saw ight again, experienced REM, and then a vision of a triange, foowed by the aien egg from the fim Species. 28h Fbrua
I awoke at 3.30am in order to watch a bonfire being hed at Aurovie in honour of its inauguration. Returned after break fast feeing very inspired, so I booked an a ppointment to medit ate in the spectacuar Matrimandir. I had been reading Guenons Man and His Becoming around this time, particuary about the Hiranyagarbha or 'Word Egg that represents the possibiity of a ife, aso known as 'the subte manifestation. As I booked the appointment for the Mat rimandir, I discovered that it too represents the Word E gg. Woud I be reborn after entering it? 1s March
I visited the ashram again at 6.6pm, after a beer or two. I sti fet the peace and funess. Arriving back at the hote, I turned on the TV to find the fim Species just starting. Was the vision of the egg at the ashram inked to the Matrimandir? 2nd March
A certain sadness had begun to take hod; I was craving the peace of Truth. What was I doing chasing after it? But why was 53
A Desert of Roses I still not enlightened? I wondered if this was how disappoin ted Duncan felt during the loss of the transmission from Co hen I consulted the tarot as to what to do, and received The Magus. So I put together a little practice for an ashram visit Meditation in the ashram took the form of surrender to the samadhi/ Aurobindo /M other, and then I explore d how the emptiness actually manifests The Divine was simply not there, and yet still it radiated from the samad hi W as it a result of my subjective viewpoint of the samadhi? After all, at this stage in the process of enlightenment I could experience emptiness in any phenomena simply by reflecting upon it And yet the phe nomenon occurred in the ashram before Id even sat down to perform the injunction Could it simply be that ignorance still dom inates the Maguss p erception of an object without a willed investigation, and so those phenomenon that are 'closer to, or less ignorant of, the Truth app ear to ' give off emptiness or the Divine? Hence the appearance that emptiness is located in spacetime, when it is actually above and beyond all phenom ena, and so located everywhere and nowhere I had been having doubts abou t just how willing I was to au thentically surrender myself to the lying fantasist that was the Mother That night I dreamed of my stepmother standing in a field and holding a childs hand The child was Ramana Mahar shi She told me: 'Do not go looking for the Supreme Lord in the fields I concluded that my stepmother was the Mother (a mother who is not my mother), Maharshi was the supreme realisation, and that I had a false belief that my final realisation rested upon a sincere appro ach to the Mo ther; or, in other words, the Mo th er cannot stop me becoming enlightened Exactly what was I concerned about? 3rd Marc
The Matrimandir appointment was at 9am Its a fantastic building, and the central chamber reminded me of an Enochian vision, with the worlds largest manmade crystal set up in a very Enochian fashion (resting on foursided Aurobindo star, on a marble sign of the mother) 54
Alan 's Magical Record And the instructions for the 'concentration within the Mat rimandir? N o talking, cou ghing, resting heads against walls, or chanting. I pressed the guide for an actual instruction. He talked about two kinds of 'concentration that we could do: static (on a fixed idea, such as love) and dynamic (such as listening to a piece of music or exploring a theory). In other words, we were to have a good long think! I asked that if the crystal is the focus, are we supposed to think about what it rep resents? The answer: It was up to us! The guide told us that the Mother had seen Auroville in a number of visions, and that it was only a matter of time before the vision descended the various levels of manifestation and reached the material world. It occurred to me that this is the very meaning of the World Eg g. Apparently the Mother saw no money, no police, and a united human race. (Perhaps shed just had a vision of Burning Man) I am always surprised by the amount of peop le who are un able to sit still and silent for two minutes. Many were resting their heads against the walls. One m an looked as if he had been there for days: legs spread out, head back against a pillar, arms outstretched and facing upwards, as if begging for relief. The fat bastard was actually part of my group and had only been sat down for five minutes. Disappointingly, there were no immediate effects from the World Egg. Was the result still to come? runahala Ramana
We left the same day for the small, hardcore Hindu town of Tiruvannamalai, once home of Ramana Maharshi, and arrived at 7pm. I was excited to be there. Surely there would be an en lightened devotee of Ramana who might be able to 'finish me off, as it were, and end the process of enlightenment that had begun three years previously? After all, Maharshis technique goes straight for the centre point, the last barrier between the self and the Absolute . Next door to the hostel was the Manna caf, and on the no ticeboard were a number notices for instruction in self enquiry, 55
A Desert of Roses reiki, bamboo flute tuition, dance and other assorted New Age guff Amongst the adverts for spiritual instruction, one stood out with its claim that the teacher was spiritually awakened His name: Arunachala Ramana This just happened to be the same name as the hostel in which we were staying He is an American who claims to have become enlightened in 973 by seeing a picture of Ramana Maharshi in a bookshop His sat sang was invite only, so I took his number to give him a call In bed at about 0 pm, a subtle 'transmission effect, very similar to the Cohen event, began to occur Bliss, a feeling of coming home, and the realisation that Ive been enlightened be fore, were all in attendance Was this because I was near the mountain Arunachala, which Ramana claimed was his guru? Was it a result of the Matrimandir? Or was there an en lightened devotee in the building? 4th Mch
During the morning my wife and I saw a corpse in the street Later, I found out that the Maharshi ashram was actually a few hundred meters from where we were staying 'This may ex plain the vibes !, I thought Visiting the Maharshi ashram, we discovered something very different from the tranquility of Aurobindos ashram Ma harshi is venerated as a traditional Hindu saint, with the burn ing of copious amounts of incense, the singing of the Vedas, and the 'feeding of the samadhis (Ramanas, his mothers, his dogs, his cows, etc) with milk; self enquiry, along with any enlightened devotees or lineage, were completely absent This was very disappointing, especially as I experienced no vibes whatsoever What happened next was frankly bonkers and quite embar rassing To cut a long story short, we were talked into walking a part of the way up the mountain with no shoes (we had to take them off to visit the ashram) by a man who, it later tran spired, was p retending to be an official guide at the ashram H e took us to a secluded spot, jok ed that we should have sex, and disappeared We thought he was clearly insane, rested our sore feet for a minute, then began to leave As we did, the guide 56
Alan 's Magical Record came running out of the bushes, red faced and sweaty (he had obviously been m asturbating) as (it later transpired) two of his young friends turned up to 'join in He then did his best to con vince us to get drunk with him, as we hobbled back to the ashram I reported the man, and the manager of the ashram found it hilarious You coudnt make this shit up , but thats India for you We returned to the hal to meditate, but I was overwhelmed with disappointment This was certainly not the experience I was exp ecting at Ramana Maharshis ashram Later I caed the Arunachala Ramana ashram to book my self in for the satsang We w ere required to visit the day before the satsang to undergo an orientation and registration 5th March
I was determined that today was not going to be ike yesterday We decided to get some bananas to hand out to the poor and the stoner sadhus, and we planned to give away our cigarettes and our mo dest amount of cannabis too We bought some fowers for a puja to Ganesha at the main Hindu tempe If anyone can help, Ganesha can As we were buying some bananas, a sadhu approached me with a goden spear I sud denly remembered the weed in my pocket and gave it to him W ithout unwrapping the packet, he looked at me as if he aready knew what it was and thanked me sincerely The sadhu then handed me a lemon, saying it was 'very good He had obviously just lifted it from the bowl of em ons next to him on the fruit stand The tempe was magnificent and sprawling We visited the ingam that Maharshi visited as a child, and burned some in cense to Shiva A guide approached us outside in the courtyard We told him we had no money, but he could have some cigar ettes if he took us to Ganesha The guide led us to a large or ange statue of the elephantheaded god, and led a very minimalist puja We placed the flowers on the ground with two bananas and burned an incense stick I didnt fee as if I had connected with Ganesha properly, so as we parted company with the guide, I remembered the lemon, and went back to 57
A Desert of Roses Ganesha to make the offering Standing there in silence, I sud deny felt Ganeshas presence m anifest in the statue a nd a great love weled up inside me Om G anapati! We returned to the Maharshi ashram to meditate in the grand hal, where we bumped into the manager of the ashram who asked, rather sincerey, if we were okay today Om Ganapati! After the med itation, my w ife told me h ow she fet inspired, like she was ready to begin something new, perhaps a voc ation, which she ater investigated on the net Om Ganapati! Later that day it was time for 'orientation at Arunachala Ramanas AHAM ashram Lovey big grounds, very peacefu We went to the rooftop where we met Vivian, a longserving member of the organisation She told us a litte bit about AHAM, before our onetoone questions woud begin What folowed w as a good hour of conversation and debate She told me I was aready aw akened, just like everyone else So I asked her why AHAM existed She replied 'Why not? I aske d her if she co ud give me any pointers on teaching enight enment as I wished to set up a simiar organisation in the fu ture, to which she replied: 'The future doesnt exist, ony the present, so why does it matter? I asked her if she planned to wear clothes tomorrow or eat any food I put it to her that if I wanted to build a roof like the one above us, coud she not tel me how they had done it and what probems I might en counter? Why was it not the same with an organisation? On a different tac, I asked her if it was possibe for two fuly awakened peope to tak about how best to make a roof She repied d have to ask them She then tod me there have been no probems, there is nothing to relate Why coudnt she have just said that in the first place? She asked me what questions Id like to put to Arunachala I started with 'In your opinion, but she cut me off with, 'He doesnt have opinions He doesnt have a mind, or thoughts I coud hardly hide my increduity I suggested that maybe he has thoughts, but he is not attached to them She concedes that yes, he probably does have thoughts Phew !
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Alan 's Magical Record When I related my interest in maps, stages and recognisable features leading up to enlightenment-stating very clearly that I had experienced some of these stages prior to my know ledge of any maps or models, and that some people seem to get en lightened in very different ways-she dismissed the very idea and stated that they have nothing to do with 'that at AHA M. Vivian then talked about their eightday graduate program, where the student gets a buddy who has already graduated, in order to help them through. I asked her if a graduate is actually enlightened. Bizarrely, this completely threw her, and she even tually blurted out: 'Well I dont know!. I was convinced that Vivian was clearly not enlightened, even after thirty years of working in an organisation that sup posedly facilitates such a thing, nor was she even aware if the program had actually enlightened anyone. And yet she had the audacity to spout pseudoadvaita at me as if she actually knew what she was talking about. It was made clear that any questions ab out teaching enlight enment from a practical point of view, running an organisation or the process of enlightenment that Arunachala may have gone through prior to his enlightenment, would be answered with: 'But who is this "I that wants to know? . We finished off with a little pointing out exercise. Before coming, I had do ne a tarot reading on how best to proce ed with AHAM, and I had been told 'to be open. I think I was quite courteous and tolerant during the conversation, and I did bite my tongue a number of times. So I mustered up some interest and did my best to try out the exercise. I was told to think of a problem. I picked enlightenment. I was then instructed to write the various emotions and thoughts surrounding this problem as a web diagram, with 'I am in the middle. Surprisingly, fear came up as part of the problem. When I had finished, Vivian asked me to consider what all of these elements had in com mon. The answer, of course, was 'I am. Whenever I have a problem, I was told, I could perform this exercise to realise that I am none of these emotions and thoughts, only pure being, and that the negative emotions would then 'dis solve in awareness .
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A Desert of Roses Back in the town, my wife and I were stopped by a German woman because we were holding hands. Apparently this causes rape to occur in the town, as it frequently does on the mountain, especially to foreigners. I said a lot of things to this woman, and a lot of those things were swe ar words . We booked our flight to the Andaman islands that night. 6th Mrch
It was time for my satsang with Arunachala Ramana. On the way to the ashram, I actually felt ready to give the whole en lightenment thing up. I wa s sick of it! 'The Sanctuary, where the satsang would take place, was a nice room with two large pictures of Jesus and Ramana Mahar shi, comfy seats, and a large throne for Arunachala. There were about nine people already sat in silence, most of them meditat ing with their eyes closed, in a classical pose or holding a mudra. I had brought questions to ask Arunachala. Vivian an nounced there would be no note taking; we were beyond aca demic or intellectual learning now. I had a sense of excitement, anticipation. This was the first time I would be interacting with an enlightened person. How should I act? And what about the Supreme Realisation itself? I felt some fear at what the experience of that realisation might be like, and my heart raced. Going with the flow, I employed the 'I am technique from the day before, in order to calm down. Arunachala Ramana entered: a tall, bulky fat man with cropped white beard and hair. His shorts were humongous in order to cover his overhanging gut. He had two very bad tat toos, one on each forearm: an outline of the state of Texas, and a scroll saying 'Mother. It seemed like an effort for him to walk, but he looked nothing like his eighty years. His bulk explained the size of the chair. He sat and pulled up a foot rest, sighed a bit, and looked round the room. Suddenly my conceit around what it meant to be en lightened was apparent. I closed my eyes. I had held an unac knowledged conceit around process and practice too; they had 60
Alan 's Magical Record no bearing on enlightenment whatsoever How could they?! I was in a strong absorption state; but this too was obviously un related And finally: a stupendous fruition, with white light and a feeling of exp ansion And with this I acquire d know ledge of the Supreme Truth Even emptiness or the nondual had noth ing whatsoever to do with enlightenment! A vision appeared of Arunachala holding a scroll, that when unfurled had only two words written on it: 'I AM Vajras formed the ends of the scroll, and I heard the phrase: 'The Path and Purpos e are One I opened my eyes What had just happened? I wasnt com pletely sure, but the meditations, poses and mudras of the sangha were patently absurd Just exactly what did they think this behaviour would achieve? Why were they here looking to Arunachala for something he coul d not possibly give them? By the end of the preliminary hour of silence (90am), Ar unachala began the question and answer portion of the session Vivian must have provided the questions we told her we would ask Arunachala the day before, because he picked up a piece of paper and began with: 'So we have two questions from Alan and Ruth He started to read out the first question, when I interrupted him 'I no longer have any questions, I said Ar unachala asked me if I then understood what it means to be en lightened I replied 'Y es ! He then moved on to answer the next question It occurred to me that I had just awakened; and funnily enough, at the exact point when all the maps and models pre dicted I would I felt finished, complete, whole This was a knowledge, not a state or trance Most peculiarly, I saw that my future was not concerned with magick per se, or with any tradi tion for that matter My destiny lay not at the hands of the au thors of The B ook of the Law; the ultimate, absolute truth, and so myself, was beyond it all It would take me a week or so before my new vision woul d begin to take shape For the next hour, Arunachala held forth, without once re sorting to the pseudoadvaita crap Vivian had come out with However, he seemed to believe that the initial results of the self enquiry techniquemastered within eight daysis the same thing as awakening Perhaps this is because Arunachalajust 6
A Desert of Roses like Ramanawas already enlighened when he firs ried such a echnique, herefore eading him o concude ha i mus lead direcly o awakening for everyone. Ouside, during he informa 'felowship period, boh my sef and Ruh were disappoined in he fac ha no one spoke. They remained as if sil in he sasang: silen, some wih eyes closed, some even aughing o hemseves as if privy o some incredibe cosmic joke. I go he impression ha Vivian realy didn ike me, especially afer inerruping Arunachaa. Sady, no one even menioned he fac ha I had publicly announced I had jus become enlighened. Was his because hey simply as sumed I had jus undersood selfenquiry? Did hey beieve hemseves enlighened because hey had aken par in an eighday program? Or could hey no enerain he idea simpy because I was obviousy nohing like Arunachala, who a one poin even said ha he had no answers, and ha i was ony he being ha spoke hrough him ha did? I bough a DVD of he session jus o ge my enlighenmen on film, and noiced he large Ganesha saue in he garden. Ganesha was here a he beginning (my firs magica ac o kick sar he process) and a he end! Om Ganapai! On he way back o he hoe we agreed o discuss a a nearby caf wha had happened for boh of us and w ha we go ou of he experience. Ruh was o be he firs person I would el I was enlighened, and i seemed like such a ridiculous hing o say. However, Ruh suspeced wha had happened (which isn a surprise considering I announced i a he sa sang; wha is more of a surprise is ha no one else did) and old me ha she go very excied on he way o he caf. A his poin I fe very lucky indeed; no many peope woud ac so appropriaely (one ex of mine would have been absouey dis gused a such an announcemen). To have a parner who can undersand wha i means o be enighened and back you al he way is a blessing indeed . I now seemed obvious ha Arunachala Ramana was he prophesied hierophanic 'king or 'Caesar, wih a aoo, who woud provide he 'supreme riual. He had led me down he hroa of he adversaryhe 'somehing nasy a he end of he 6
Alan 's Magical Record tunneand I had 's ain the dragon And the whoe experience was to take me in a competey new direction However, the fact that I encountered the gnome symboism prior to this whoe experience suggested that mysef and Duncan had perhaps made the error of amagamating many of the predictions or symbos provided by Tempe into a descrip tion of just one event Future exp eriences, such as encountering the boat and the 'swaow symboism, woud corroborate this Latitude and Longitude
My first day as an awakened person asted thirtysix hours, be cause we traveed nonstop to the Andaman Isands: the very coordinates suppied by Tempe during the second workingI saw the trip as a wedeserved hoiday from the task of getting enightened, before my ifes rea work coud begin As we traveed, every now and again Ruth woud ask me if I fet the same I woud check and I aways did However, od habits die hard, and I found mysef trying to hod onto awaken ing (even thou gh it was way beyond such a notion) and fretting that it might go (again, which was impossibe) The conceited nature of these two actions were abundanty cear to me, but I cannot say I suffered from them A miion questions now sprang up to repace the hundreds I had before awakening, and I woud spend the coming days de veoping new ideas about enightenment, whist wresting with the od, useess habits and persp ectives base d on chasing it 1 6th March
I received news of Duncans enightenment, and I was sur prised at my own surprise that it woud occur just then However, after considering everything ese that had happened with The Baptist's Head it made perfect sense I coudnt wait for what we were going to do ne xt!
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DISCOURSES
Discourses When M agic uns Paanom a
This is a loose transcript based on my notes for the talk I gave at The Colours of Chaos.4 Some of the themes covered Ive previ ously addressed elsew here, from a sightly different ange. Two Tyes of agi
I woud ike to suggest that resuts from magical acts come in two flavours. Sometimes peope say to me: 'I got a spectacuar resut from some magic the other day. I wanted a new job, so I did a ritual. Then I ooked in the newspaper, saw some ads, sent off for an application form, had some interviews, and then I got a new job. My reaction: 'Oh . Thats really amazing. (No t.) But then a part of me thinks: Wel, its about the person s ex perience. They experienced the resut as amazing, so thats what happened for them. But then I see sense again, and I just cant hep concuding: 'N o. Thats not magic. Thats just getting your shit together and acting ike youve got half a brain. Its only the second favour of results that I woud bother to cal 'magic. This is the type that aso makes good stories. The first type doesnt, because they simply follow the rues of everyday cause and effect: you get a job by applying for one, whether youve done a ritual or not. Good stories are based on screwing about with events, or unexpected coincidences and significances. I did a working recently to get mysef abducted by aliens. (I wanted to see what al the fuss was about.) Various things happened, but it reached a climax when, a week after the working, a friend and I were treated to a procession of UFOs right outside my window. In fact, half of Sussex saw them; there was a wave of UFO sightings across the south of England that weekend, which was reported in the local press. Now that's wha t I ca magick! Okay, its not fair to compare an intent to get abducted by aliens with an intent to get a new job. Agreed. So, instead, lets compare the relationship between the intent and the resut in each case. 67
A Desert of Roses Regarding the aiens, Id expected the resut to be a vision, maybe, or a ucid dream. Instead, I saw three UFOs and haf the county got invoved in a UFO fap. (The fact that the 'UFOs were actuay Chinese anterns isnt reevant, because I dont beieve in feshandbood aiens anyway; but a UFO fap is a UFO fap.) Regarding our first case: I want a job, I do a ritua, writeoff for and get a job. The everyday aws of cause and effect are not being stretched . In the case of the aiens, the probabiities against the resut that manifested seem much higher. You get that wonderfu buzzthe thing that keeps a ot of us doing magic, I sus pect-that fees as if the whoe universe is being evered into pos ition, as a consequ ence of the working that weve d one. Actuay, it hasn't and ater on I suggest why not. The Paranormal
Question: Shoud any resut gained through magic be viewed as a p aranorma event? Does it depend on how you define 'paranorma? Perhaps youre expecting me to do that here, but Im not going to, be cause Im guessing were aready broady in agreement: tee pathy, precognition, psychokinesis, cairvoyance. What these boi down to, Id suggest, is a vioation or by passing of the aws of cause and effect that usuay obtain in our experience of mind, time, matter, and the mundane senses. Its not that I want to bigup these 'aws of cause and effect . A I mean by them is a set of assumptions by which we nor may make sense of the happenings in our d aiy ives . Paranorma phenomena, on the other hand, do not beong among these everyday happenings. For most peope, the paranorma arises spontaneousy, unexpectedy, and is gener ay unwanted. However, magicians are not 'most peope. Most magicians, Im guessing, have experienced the paranor ma. Some of them as the direct resut of magica workings; a though many, or perhaps most, as the unexpected sideeffects of magica workings. What sets magicians apart from 'most
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people with respect to the paranormal is this aspect We set out to something unusual happen M ost people d o not invite these sorts of things to happen to them So, theres a relationship between magic and the paranor mal, but its not as simple as saying that magic is the means by which the paranormal is caused For instance, there are other kinds of people besides magicians for whom the paranormal manifests through intention I want to examine one of these groups of people: they dont use ritual, instead they use They dont have ouija boards or go into trances, instead they have various bits of hardware andmost importantly They call them selves But just like magicians, sometimes they persuade the p aranormal to manifest in their laboratories Parasyhology
The history of parapsychology begins with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which was founded in Early paranormal research now reads to us like afterdinner parlour games Interesting, but anecdotal A shift occurs in the 930s, coming from Duke University in North Carolina, where JB Rhine for the first time concentrates exclusively on a approach toward the paranormal Whately Carington
I want to concentrate on a parapsychologist from the transition al period between the two approaches, by the name of Whately Carington An unsung hero Obscure Most likely to be men tioned in connection with the researcher Samuel Soal, the Brit ish equivalent of J B Rhine Soal set out to replicate Rhine between 936 and 94 He had 60 subjects More than ,000 trials After five years of results hed disco vered above chance It was Whately Carington who suggested to Soal that he re examine his results and look for ' displacement effects By this, Carington meant that although the subject might give an incor rect guess to the card they were supposed to be guessing, how 69
A Desert of Roses did their guess compare with the (also unseen) card that had been turned up in the previous trial, or the card that was about to be turned up in the next trial? When Soal did this, he discovered that two of his subjects had scored hits severa milions above chance-but on the tria before or after the one they were supposed to be guessing Soa was able to repicate these resuts in subsequent experiments. Hang on! If a subject is correcty guessing not the current card, but the one that comes after it, in the ture is this tee pathy or precognition? Carington had recognised the importance of displacement effects as a consequence of his own experiments, which were as folows: he colected a coupe hundred volunteers; gave them a pile of prepared questionnaires; every evening at the same time he opened a book in his study and made a drawing based on a random word; he left the drawing over his firepace, then he locked the room unti next morning These days wed cal it 'remote viewing Caringtons sub jects were invited to remoteview the drawings (they ived al over Britain) and record their impressions on the forms The results were assessed independently, and were found to indic ate scores significanty above chance After a whie, Carington decided to enclose a photograph of his study in with the forms He simply wanted to heighten his subjects sense of participation in the experiment He did not expect what happened subsequently: the number of hits jumped up dramaticaly The photograph was playing the part of what Carington woud ater cal a 'K object or 'K idea The 'K object increased the number of hitsCarington theorisedbecause it suppied a link between the subject and the drawing By showing them the study in which the drawing hung, it seemed to have the effect of putting the subject more fuy in mind of the target, the drawing
' Objets Caringtons view of the paranormal gets around the alternative view that the paranorma relies upon transfer of information, or 70
Discourses energy, or particles between people Or that it depends upon some kind of latent or exotic sensory ability Instead, he held the view that entities are linked and give rise to one another in a manner similar to how ideas are linked to one another in the mind. Carington looked to the classical philosophical notion of 'The Association of Ideas as the key to understanding paranor mal phenomena The 'K object works because it forges a link between between the subject and the drawing In magic, 'K objects are everywhere A ritual is a 'K object: the symbolic link between an intent and the magical result The ritual often involves further objects acting as 'K objects, usually in one of two flavours: (a) sympathetic magic ('like at tracts like; a symbolic representation, such as an effigy of the person who is the target of the ritual); or (b) associative magic ('the part is connected to the whole; such as hair, or blood of the target, or a possession of theirs) You dont need these things; often the ritual itself is enough of a 'K objectCarington didnt need the photo to score above chance But it helps! And Ive often heard magicians express the view that you cant beat a good magical link in order to really nail a result in sorcery Parasychologists ad agicias
Hang on The magician has ritual, the parapsychologist has their experiment, but it looks as if theyre both doing magic Both are expressions of intention, setting up an intentional situ ation in order to create a link to a desired outcome The paranormal is the violation of classical cause and effect So, it seems, is magic I f I command a goetic demon to bring me cas h and I discover a wad of twenties in the street the next day, this is not the usual relationship of cause and effect that obtains between myself and money But the laws of cause and effect are never violated to the ex tent that what happens ceases to have meaning (Is that pos sible?) As Carington suggests: the paranormal adheres to the laws of the mind ('The Association of Ideas) A demon is a 'K object; a concept to form a link between me and some cash This
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A Desert of Roses makes no sense in terms of classical physics But the idea of a demon fetching me some cash is perfectly comprehensible in terms of how our minds wo rk; whats not to understand? Carington was writing in the 930s and 940s, so didnt have the benefit of a later idea, which squarely addressed the notion of meaningful, noncausal correspondences between events: synchronicity Synhroniity
Carl Jung published his essay 'Synchronicity: An Acausal Con necting Principle in 95 Synchronicity is a very useful id ea for thinking about magic and the paranormal Without it, you tend to be left with many loose ends For instance, how do you tell the difference between telepathy and precognition? What seems to be telepathy may be someone remoteviewing the result of the trial in the fu ture-ie precognition clairvoyance Arthur Koestler, another key figure in parapsychology, was one of the first to suggest how synchronicity helps us out of these kinds of problems Koestler was interested in quantum physics as a model for the paranormal (Koestler, 974) Trouble was, each type of phenomena seemed to require a different quantumphysical mo del to exp lain it In the case o f psychokin esis, where everyday objects start rolling around, some kind of interface between the quantum and the level of classical physics would be required It cant be right to have different explanations for different bits of the paranormal when, as weve seen, those bits arent really distinct anyway Luckily, synchronicity does the job in one go Jung suggested there was a sep arate force at work in the uni verse apart from causality We dont have to look only for a causing b It might be, Jung suggests, that given a then b some times likes to happen with it ('L ikes to happen is probably the best our language can do to describe the synchronistic relation ship between things) Telepathy can be viewed not as a biophysical mechanism, but as a correspondence between my intuition and thoughts in 7
Discourses someone elses mind; precognition as the correspondence between my intuition and events in the world; even psychokin esis: a correspondence between my intention and the physical be haviour of an object. I concentrate. It moves. A cause? Or a correspondence? Lovely. But unfortunately acausal, meaningful correspond ences between mind and matter are very difficult to conceptual se. An example of synchronicity: the famous dream of the gold scarab. A patient of Jung is telling her dream of a gold scarab, w hen a golden beetle flies through the windo w. The scarab in the dream is matched with the scarab in real ity. The meaning of the scarab hieroglyph kfr (rebirth, renewal) is matched with the effect it has on the patient. Its this same idea we found in Carington: the idea that events give rise to one another not only through cause and ef fect, but also through the meaningful affinities they share, which Carington referred to as The A ssociation of Ideas. Events are related more in the way that ideas in the mind are related than the way that objects in classical physics are related to each other. Synchronicity: great idea. Unfortunately Jung doesnt always handle it particularly well. Acausality is not an easy concept to handle. Sometimes Jung seem s to suggest that synchronicity oc curs because of the activation of an archetype . In the case of his famous patient: the activation in her unconscious of the arche type of rebirth (the scarab) led to the synchronicity. But that has to be wrong, because in that case the archetype would have caused the synchronicity (no matter the exact mechanism), and causal is sup posedly the one thing that a synchronicity isnt. Be ware Jungians ! The practices of magic, psychotherapy, parapsychology can be said to 'cause synchronicity only in a very limited sense, in that they provide a context in which synchronicity is invited to arise. In the same way that going to school provides a context for learning; going to school doesnt cause learning to occur. We have to distinguish this 'context from what occurs with in each specific example of a synchronicity, or within each act 73
A D eser esertt of of Ros Roses es of magic Having a dream about a scarab cant be said to have caused a goden beete to fy into the room-thats a truy acaus a eventbut the practice of Jungian psychotherapy certainy did provide p rovide a context c ontext for this this to happen Syn Sy n hr hroniity oniity an a n agi
The most common outcome from magic is synchronicity pure and simpe Fairy commonly a synchronicity wil arise as an unexpected unexpec ted sideef side effec fect, t, aongside or instead o f the expected re s ut This Thi s is the type of thing thing which, when you firs firstt start magic, leaves you thinking 'Surey thats just a coincidence, which woud have happened anyway, even if I hadnt done a work ing After about a hundred of these, you might stop taking about 'coincidence and start to enjoy the feeling that your ma gic is able to ever the whole of reality into an atered shape al around you yo u But this this attitude attitude is just as dim d im because, once again, its causal. I reay reay dont d ont advise you y ou to go around believing that that you or your magic cause causess the the acausa acausa But rituas can in themseves cau se certain things things to happ en, and I think this may account for the 'lame type of magic I men tioned at the beginning Someone may perform a ritual, and the act may cause them to focus their efforts seriousy enough to actualy apply for a job, which they may not have done other wise-and, surprise, surp rise, they they get one Is this magic? Im stil loathe to admit it The ritual may be said to have caused a result, but it caused it in a way that (a) was definitey causal, abeit on a psychoogical leve; and (b) doesnt need any expanation outside of a bit of ego psycho logy The Transersonal Fator
Where a true synchronicity occurs the 'K object acts at a transpersona transperso na evel Al A l I intend intend by thi thiss is that theres no imme diate cause-physica or psychological-at the individual eve to account for the result In the case of Jungs patient, no amount of personal deveopment, visualisation, imagination, 74
Discourses going to the gym, reading books by Ken Wiber could 'cause a golden beetle to fly in through the window And yet a beete flew in What is this factor that somehow takes the K object onto a transperso tr anspersona na evel evel?? (Y ou re exp ecti ecting ng me to tell you, y ou, aren arent t you? y ou? ) Wel, its a mystery In magic, it has been caed 'True Wil (by Aeister Crowley) or 'Kia (by Austin Osman Spare) In Buddhism, 'buddha chitta In Daoism, its 'the Dao In Platon ism, 'the One In Jungian psychology, 'The Sef Sometimes it arises in magic, sometimes not If it coud be guaranteed, then it probably couldnt be said to be acausa, be cause in that case we would have found a means to 'make it happen Nevertheless, as on happen onee progresses p rogresses along the the magical m agical path its appearance becomes more common, com mon, and the experience of it it becomes more integrated into everyday life It even starts to have effects effects outside outsid e of inten intentional tional magical acts Ones w hole life begins to become synchronistic In Daoism there is the term 'wei wu wei-'doing without doing-which seems to be de scribing scrib ing this state state Two things about this transpersonal factor are cear: () its acausal; () any amount of wanting or wiling it to happen guarantees guarant ees that it wont Thi s is why the drea dreaded ded 'lust of result has such a deadening effect on magic Wanting something to happen fixes the 'K object on the individua, causa level, and you get no result, because all the 'K object does is put you in mind of how badly you want a resultor perhaps you get only an egocentric, egocentric, psychoogica p sychoogica result Conclusion
A re all magical magical results results paranormal paranormal ? No Some are psychoogical psychoogical What is the relationship between m agic and the parano rmal ? A t the risk of sounding sou nding cheesy, chee sy, realit re ality y is stranger than than our habitual habit ual ignorance alows us to p erceive The p aranormal arises out of the influenc influencee on our o ur d ail aily y lives of this this realm beyond our ignorance Magic is one means, among others, that enables us
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A D eser esertt of of Ros Roses es to shed our ignorance and experience the transpersonal reality that lies beyond it. I hope this has provided food for thought, and some struc tures for thinking around the relationship between the paranor mal and magic M agck Wo Work rks s A Response
'Waving our hands and declaring the self to be an illusion, writes Julian Vayne in Magick Works 'does not help us under stand the self (Vayne 00: 45) So Id better defend my hand waving and declarations unless I come to be regarded as a 'Bloodless Adept, which is Julians term for his interesting take on what constitutes constitutes a 'B lack Brother Suppo se just for for a moment m oment the Bud dha got it right and and there is no self Imagine it doesnt exist It is nothing An illusion. Does this mean we have to stop taking drugs and all find jobs as accountants? Course not! If there is no self then its true already, regardless of how things seem So the net impact on reality of our realising the truth of the proposition that there is no self would woul d be- However, Julian prefers to insist: 'in all cases there does seem see m to be a self (Vayne 00: 45) . Personally, that thats s not my ex perience perie nce The closer Ive lo oked the l ess lik likely ely it seems-which seems-which is a relief, because if I thought there ws a self then Id be ob liged to define it. Not that Julian doesnt shirk this task. He makes a d ecent stab at it, but his view relies in part on that in in teresting yet flaky book The Quantum Self (Zohar 990) and an insistence upon the supposed 'peculiar quantum properties of neural tissue tissue (Va (Vayne yne 00: 5) . If Julian asserts there is a self presumably its because his ex perience suggests so. Yet theres a problem with defining something at the heart of experience in terms of something that cannot be experienced directly at all-e quantum reality This reminds me of when I was on retreat and our teacher, Mr. Goenka, assured us that the tingling sensations we experienced whilst practising vipassana meditation were a manifestation of a quantumlevel phenomenon I was sceptical that my physical 76
Discourses sense organs, which are organised a he aomic level, could be capable of represening changes in he subaomic realm My scepicism was confirmed when I made an experimen: I dis covered ha he ingling stopped if I held my breah So eiher he ingling was an effec of oxygenaion, or I was owed a big fa Nobel Prize for discovering my breah was he bridge beween he aomic and subaomic realms Even goo d pracising Bud dhiss like Mr G oenka are no im mune from using quanum physics for alking bollocks To be fair, Julians model of he self ress on more han pop physics : W] ha are we lef wih? Wih a self ha comes ino being hrough ineracion, ha is rooed in he body bu also exiss as he conex of ineracions in a nonlocal field of consciousness The self is an ap paren propery of his nonlocal consciousness when i is 'conained wihin a specific idenifiable body I has an individual hisory bu is predicaed on is relaionship wih ohers (Vayne 00: 53) In shor: he sense of self arises only in he conex of an oh er ha gives i shape Wihou 'he oher, here is no self Per sonally, heres where Id call off he search alogeher, bu Julian seems o believe here is somehing salvageable from his 'self, despie he way he has exposed i o be compleely de penden on 'he oher His definiion, above, is an ineresing idea, buagainis somehing we could never experience Sure, you can have an idea of he self coming ino being hrough ineracions, bu I could never experience myself as ha, because he ineracions of which my self would consis depend upon an oher whose experience is no available o me This model canno herefore accoun for my sense of 'I am me The self is no defined by an idea, because we have los of ideas, bu we don misake all our ideas for he self By he same oken he self canno be a feeling eiher: examining he feelings ha consiue our sense of self we discover nohing special abou hem Wha makes a paricular feeling 'me or 77
A Desert of Roses 'mine? The answer seem s to be that it is this very process itsef by which we are constanty mistaking the other for 'me. In other words, the sef is a mistake. The menta equivalent of an optical iusion. (The Bud dhists ca it ignorance.) Magick Works is a wonderfu colection of lectures, rituals and personal experiences, with a particuar emphasis on the im portance of entheogens in magical exporation. Julians know ledge of entheogens and their uses is everywhere in evidence, and so too his eloquent sensitivity to the states of consciousness to which they provide access. Here, I think, lies the reason for his insistence on the notion of a self as a valid too in magicka work. Magick, for Julian, is 'the path of pleasure, freedom and power. The Black Brother, on the other hand, is someone who resists the process of enightenment, which entais a widening and dissoving of the ego into 'the other. There are many who woud agree with this, but Juian puts his own spin on the mode: Many 'Xepherites e. Back Brothers] dont smoke dope because drugs destabiize the boundaries of the ego. Ironicaly the most 'satanic of modern oc cultists may aso be some of the most sober! (Vayne 00: 4) The Back Brother, then, resists ecstasy and pu mps effort in to maintaining a rigid ego boundary. Julians view exposes ex celently the futile efforts of the Back Brother. Imagine, spending your days shoring up the everyday sense of self. They are probaby also part of the kiljoy establishment, set on deny ing the rest of us the freedom to use drugs. The reason for this deniaargues Julianis simpe: 'they fear ecstasy (Vayne 00: 46). Buthang on. Alcoho produces ecstasy, yet the estabish ment sanctions it, despite the casualties that pile up each week end. And what about television? Doesnt that produce a tranceike ecstasy too? And so too computer games and other consumer gadgetry. Plus shopping. Plus advertising. And lets 7
Discourses not forget everyones favourite: mindless repetitive work In fact, it soon becomes apparent that the establishment depends and thrives upon our elective use of ecstatic trancestates to fa cilitate its proces ses of prod uction and consumption The establishment doesnt fear ecstasy; it depends upon us being dependent upon ecstasy Although its possible to mount an argument that these trances are not freely chosen or in our interest, if the meaning of ecstasy is to 'get out of ourselves then thats obviously why we go shopping and watch The X Factor Now, if there were no self would ecstasy be possible? How could we 'get out of it if there were no 'it to get out of in the first place? This is the reason, I think, why Julian insists on a notion of self, because self is the other of ecstasy, and the ab sence of one a ppears to threaten the existence of both Julian describes the attainment of the grade of Ipsissimus as 'the peak experience of magick we might imagine it as a series of ecstatic mom ents (Vayne 00: 53) Enlightenment, however, is not a state-ecstatic or otherwise-but a form of understand ing So please dont mistake me for a Black Brother or killjoy Bloodless Adept! Entheogens are sweet; so is booze, The X Factor and barbecueflavoured Pringles But the states they evoke lead to s omething sweeter still, when apprehended as ex periences in the service of understanding If we want to get up the nose of the establishment, Im not sure how we should proceed The establishment is formed of mindless dependencies Its like a drugpusher or a junkie: what it cant use it most likely doesnt even perceive But if we can see through the illusion of self then we are forecosing on our dependency on sociallysanctioned ecstasies Provided we dont merely substitute these for nonsanctioned types, this means thepowersthatbe simply cant use us any more Yet most likely we simply drop out of sight, rather than attaining some kind of Che Guevara moment The assumption of a self can lead to the view that there are types of experience that bolster that self, in opposition to other experiences offering ecstasy From this position it may seem
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A Desert of Roses 'the path of pleasure, freedom and power lies in swapping the one set of experiences for the other. An alternative, however, lies in abandoning the notion of self. The Ipsissimus then takes on the significance not of someone who has found a way to 'get out of it permanently, but has instead reached the full understanding that theres nothing to get out of. The Cross Correspondences
The Cross Correspondences are often described as the best evidence ever produced for the survival of the personality after death. They are a voluminous collection of writings or 'scripts produced by a group of mediums between the years 903 and 93, purportedly representing communications from a group of dead people. Chief among them were three prominent and founder members of The Society for Psychical Research (SPR): Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney and Frede rick Myers. The SPR was founded in and marks the beginning of organised research into the paranormal. Back in the day, paranormal phenomena attracted the interest of the brightest minds. Presidents of the SPR included professors, members of The Royal Society and even a Nobe l laureate. Sidgwick, Gurney and Myers w ere themselves exceptional brightsparks and after they passed on, members of the SPR reasoned that if anyone could p roduce evidence o f survival then these three were prob ably better placed than anyone else-assuming, of course, they ha survived. And so, a series of sittings with a talented medi um was arranged, and-sure enough-communications from the three of them started to come through. However, these wer ent your standard 'Fred likes how youve decorated the kit chen type of communications. For starters, they arrived through a group of mediums, some of whom were aware of each other, but some of whom werent and-in addition-were wide ly separated from each other geographically. Whats more, some of these mediums contacted the SPR unprompted with messages from the dead individuals concerned, even though the project was a secret within the organisation. 0
Discourses The messages themselves contain floods of strange imagery and disjointed phrases, which were a puzze even to the medi ums who channeled them Yet when they were examined by interpreters app ointed by the SPR they were found to consist of alusions and quotations from an astounding range of classical and literary texts Some of the scripts ony yieded their ful meaning when read in conjunction with other scripts, which-it shoud be remembered-had been produced by different medi ums in different ocations with no knowledge of what their col eagues were producing The communicators from 'the other side had been formidably versed in the classics, to such an ex tent that the interpreters were still teasing out obscure mean ings years after the scripts been produced Many of the references that emerged had highly specific reevance to the ives of the individuas from whom they had supposedly ori ginated Star bedecked the headthe broidered robethe stars singing in their spheres You have made a mis take about the robe, but never mindI want a simple sentence known to you and you wil not write it The ove that waits beyond Death Say that-try again-she looked long, gazing, gaz ingpiercing the distance with eager eyes, that is better the pighted troth-roses for a maiden dead say that try again Gurneylet the penci move freeyHepthere is one who asks your heptry again (Roy, 00: 0) This is just a tiny sample Although the messages on the sur face seem vague, senseless, or at the very least widly indirect, this alusive and distributed form of communication had the advantage of validating itself against its supposed origins It couldnt all be due to the imagination of the mediums con cerned, but indeed appeared to be originating from several spe cific-abeit disembo died-personalities Yet if these texts are really the overpowering evidence for afterdeath surviva that some people claim, why hasnt every
A Desert of Roses one heard of them? There are various solid reasons why not Firstly, the scripts and their interpretation are complex: anyone who wants to form an opinion is going to have to take time out and study them and the context in which they were produced. (I certainly wouldnt relish writing up the topic for W ikipedia.) Secondly, although partial accounts of the scripts have ap peared in public (for instance Heywood 97: 757), for years the SPR kept researchers at a distance, because some of the ma terial was of a highly personal nature These days, however, everyone who might have been personally affected by the rev elation of this 'personal material has sadly passed on For the first time ever, the complete saga of the Cros s Correspondences has been told in The Eager Dead A Study in Haunting by Archie E Roy (00) and the full story is more bizarre than anyone could have imagined Archie Roy is a conservative soul His book is partly a eu logy of the Victorian era and its hard to criticize him for this, because back then it seems people really did know their place and behaved themselves, yet had big ideas and achieved great things, and-due to precisely this attitude-Britannia well and truly ruled the waves The original members of the SPR like wise were drawn from the ranks of the great and good among the British establishment But the image of gentlemen scientists fearlessly confronting the great question of existence breaks down decisively, in my opinion, once the communicators bey ond the grave started to reveal 'The Plan To describe 'The Plan demands a sketch of the relationships and personalities of some of the people involved Members of the illustrious Balfour family were active participants on the SPR scene Henry Sidgwick had married a sister of Arthur James Balfour, who himself subsequently became one of the sit ters, thus adding a British Prime Minister to the rollcall of lu minaries connected with the SPR, for he indeed fulfilled that office between 90 and 906. Arthur Balfour never married and was a very private individual (When you think of how Gordon Brown had to do the decent thing and got hitched as soon as it looked halflikely he might get the top job, you realise that Balfour wouldnt have stood a chance of election these
Discourses days ) H owever, he had fallen deeply in love during his young er days, with Mary Lyttleton, who died prem aturely of typhus F or the rest of his life h e remained faithful to the mem ory of Mary The entities sending their communications through the scripts implored that Arthur Balfour should sit with one of the mediums, a 'Mrs Willett, whose real name was Winnifred CoombeTennant, at the time a wellknown public figure in volved in various aspects of social reform, and a British deleg ate to the League of Nations At the time she safeguarded her credibility by keeping her mediumistic activities a closely guarded secret The scripts that resulted from this sitting and subsequent sessions convinced Arthur Balfour-because of their references to intensely private matters that no one living could have known aboutthat the communications were genuine, and were indeed originating from his lost love Mary who was waiting for him beyond the grave Mary afterwards became a regular member of the group of communicating entities Not content with reuniting divided lovers, the dead, it seemed, wanted to get even more 'handson Edmund Gurney declared his love for medium Winnifred CoombeTennant through the scripts, and slowly 'The Plan was revealed: that Winnifred should bear a child, whose paternity would be shared among the dead communicators, although chiefly by Gurney And this child would be no ordinary baby, but a mes siah who would lead humanity into a new golden age of peace A t the time, W innifred was locke d in a loveless marriage to an older man; happily, however, she discovered a mutual at traction to one of the sitters, Gerald Balfour, brother of Arthur Gerald was also m arriedbut no matter; the result of their liais on in 9 3 was a son, Henry Augustus C oom beTennant Henrys true paternity was also kept secret-although the undisguisable physical resemblance and some dropped hints enabled various people to work out that Gerald was really Henrys d ad Geralds wife eventually came to terms with what had happened; the reaction of Winnifreds husband, however, has gone unrecorded
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A Desert of Roses So, what of the new messiah, Henry CoombeTennant? I know what youre thinking: the fact hes not a ho usehold name doesnt bode well for the authenticity of 'The Plan Given his pedigree, its unsurprising that Henry turned out to be another brightspark He went to Eton, then up to Cam bridge, and from thence into the army He saw active service during the Second World War, was taken prisoner by the Ger mans, escaped, and parachuted back into active service again, this time as a secret operations agent in occupied France What Henry did after the war is not a matter of public record, be cause he worked for the British intelligence agencies, particu larly in the Mi ddle East By this stage of his life he was aware of the grand destiny that had supposedly been mapped out for him, yet the people close to 'The Plan began increasingly to despair of how he seemed less and less likely to realise it The final blow to their hopes came in 960, when Henry underwent a religious conversion, became a Roman Catholic, and entered a monastery Major Henry CoombeTennant became Dom Joseph CoombeTennant He died at the monastery in 99 The full story of the Cross Correspondences is indeed a very tangled weband this summ ary isnt the half of it! Archie Roy s book runs to almost six hundred pages and involves far more than the outline Ive presented here But lets break d own what weve got so far: . Members of the British establishment engage in commu nication with spirits . The spirits communicate in a specific kind of language, and assist in the decoding of the message as part of their com munications 3. The spirits issue prophecies and injunctions for the pur pos e of bringing about historical change 4. The communications culminate in an injunction to per form a sexual act that contravenes the moral codes of the era We can call this work 'psychical research if we like, but in 5, when John Dee and Edwa rd Kelley undertook something amazingly similar, it was regarded differently Unsatisfied with his progress in the fields of science and mathematics, Dee, a close advisor to Queen Elizabeth Iand 4
Discourses probaby a spy in her service-began seeking conac wih an gels and o his end enlised he services of Keley as his scryer or medium . The resus of heir work included books of proph ecy and magick dicaed in he angels own anguage, 'Enochi an. The angels aso insruced Dee and Keley o rave around Cenral Europe and reprimand is monarchs for heir ungodly ways. Incrediby, hey did so, and ye somehow avoided execu ion. The end of heir associaion came shory afer he spiris insruced hem o swap wives. Dee was horrified by he pro spec of his 'crossm aching, as he called i, bu was convinced i was he will of God, and so in May 57 i wen ahead. The radiional inerpreaion of he brea kdown in he m agica par nership of he wo men is he faiure and embarrassmen caused by he wifeswap, bu his is perhaps debaabe (Tyson 997: 3). A circumsance no ofen menioned is ha a son was born o Dees wife he foowing February (Wooey 00: 95) Dee never raises he quesion of he chids p aerniy in his diar ies, bu he mus have wondere d. And perhaps were lef wondering oo: wheher is inevi able ha anyone aemping susained work wih spiris, wheher in he name of 'science or 'psychical invesigaion, wil evenuay be aked ino commiing some kind of fainly absurd sexua faux pas. By he ime he paricipans find hem selves considering wheher hey should make a baby so he can become a messiah and save he world, or should swap wives in order o reaise he wil of Go d, perhaps hey also ne ed o admi hey abandoned scienific mehod a long way down he road behind hem . Wha heyre d oing is dubious science, bu possiby effecive magick. Sex magick, of course. Imagine if he spiris had asked Aeiser Crowey o perform a similar ac. He wouldn have baed an eyeid, because he advanage of Croweys approach is ceary visibe in his conex: by consciously freeing himself from he aboos of his cuure hrough sex ma gicka pracice (he was, afer a, a conemporary of he SPR researchers) Crowley sideseppe d he neuroic ormens of gui and d isgus ha Dee endured and he SPR siers aso had o conend wih. Crowley also forearmed himsef agains he embarrassmen, he disap 5
A Desert of Roses pointment and sense of anticlimax that possibly scuppered the DeeKelley working, and perhaps also spoiled the outcome of the SPR communicators plan Crowleys approach also im mures the magician against a further possibility: that the spirits are simply dicking the participants around Whether you under stand 'sp irits to refer to independent entities, or repres sed psy chological complexes, in the cases of both Dee and the SPR it looks susp iciously as if the spirits were pushing the sitters bey ond the limits of what was considered acceptable behaviour, just so they coul d roll about laughing Meric Casaubon (659) was among the first to express in writing the opinion that the spirits with whom Dee trafficked were devils, not angels Its difficult to decide whether the 'crossmatching was proffered to Dee as a practical joke, or an authentic tantric working that might have widened his spiritual consciousness However, the SPR communicators plan for making a baby that would save the world is certainly-Id sug gesttending toward a corrupted teaching The ide a that anoth er person can eradicate your suffering is naive (Too bad that a great deal of modern Christianity is based on precisely this in terpretation of the life of Christ) A teacher might be able to point the way, but-putting aside wishful thinking-each of us must do our own work to liberate ourselves Depending on someone else for this leads only to the dea dend of blind faith At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a strong messianic impulse at work in the culture Within the Theosoph ical movement this took the shape of the belief that the child Jiddhu Krishnamurti was destined to become the World Teach er In European society at large it might be argued that the ulti mate manifestation of this messianic current were the fascist dictatorships of the 930s That Krishnamurti eventually rejec ted his role as World Teacher, and spent the rest of his life teaching 'you must become liberated not because of me but in spite of me, suggests that this Theosophical messiah had a lot more spiritual weight behind him than the fascist ones The SPR communicators always claimed they were the sur viving personalities of Sidgwick, Myers and Gurney, but the sitters were never co mpletely able to eliminate the po ssibility of 6
Discourses what they called 'super ESP-the possibility that the commu nications came from a telepathic source that had access to the personalities and experiences of dead people, but was not those dead people itself In other words, could something have been pretending to be the people concerned? If the messianic nature of the teachings doled out by the spirits seems suspect, the question of the spirits identity is doubly so Here we arrive at the central paradox of trafficking with dead people To affirm their identities as the dead, the spirits had to demonstrate they possessed the more or less in tact personalities of the people in question Yet if those person alities were indeed still active, then in what sense could they be said to be 'de ad? It would be more accurate to describe them as merely ' disembodied But then if they were disembodied, why did they demonstrate such a concern with earthly, bodily is sues-the spirit of Gurney professing its love for the medium Winnifred, for instance; or Mary wanting to sort out hers and Arthurs relationship issues? The karma (in its proper sense) of all these dead people was still very much active Whats more, by engaging with it, the sitters were allowing that karma to con tinue to spin the wheel of suffering upon earth Our confidence in the dead is perhaps undermined even fur ther w hen we consider the following description by the spirit of Gurney of the state that he finds himself in: The nearest simile I can find to express the diffi culties of sending a messageis that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass-which blurs sight and deadens sound-dictating feebly-to a reluctant and very obtuse secretary A feeling of terrible impotence burdens me-I am so powerless to tell what means so much-I cannot get into com munication with those who would understand and believe me (Roy, 00: 7) He seems to be implying that hes still subject to perceptions of some kind (sight, sound), to desire, to a division of self and other If hes really dead, he d oesnt seem to have m ade a 7
A Desert of Roses good job of dying! Certainly, he doesnt strike me as a wise en tity whose advice Id be confident to trust; he simpy sounds like a man with 'issues . But what else could w e expect of a per sonaity that has survived death? Its just a personality, after a. And dont we have enough of those to contend with on this side of lifeour own personalities included ? Dee adopted a preferabe appro ach, electing to tak to spirits that had never been human. If their injunctions seemed bizarre at times, this was presumably because the sphere of earthy concerns was the ony domain in which they could make their extrahuman intentions inteligible to us. I began Roys book with anticipation, because Id read im pressive things about The Cross Correspondences, and I do be lieve they represent a magicka working on a comparable scale to the angeic workings of Dee and Kelley. But I never expected I would come away more suspicious of the SPR work as a con sequence. One of my suspicions is positive, howeverand that con cerns the assumption that the SPR working was a failure. When Henry entered the monastery, there was still some fororn hope that he might one day become Pope and change the word. H e didnt, of course. But, ike Jiddhu Krishnamurti, the Theosoph ists intended messiah, there is the possibiity that he attained persona liberation and in this sense transformed everything. Its too bad that Henrys upbringing and his work for the secret services instiled in him the habit of keeping silent about his persona experiences. However, among the effects eft at the monastery after his death, Roy recovered the script of a tak Henry once gave about his life. It contains the foowing reti cent yet suggestive passage: W]hen I was serving in Baghdad, I became in volved in a sequence of events and experiences w hose significance seemed to me to transcend their actual content. I dont want to be questioned about these events or experiences. It will be sufficient to say that there was a period of profound mental and physical suffering, during which ( if I may put it this
Discourses way) my own ego, which had for so long been the selfsufficient centre of my inner life, disintegrated . I have grown a new ego since, of course, though not a selfsufficient one, but at that time there was noth ing to hold me together. I was in pieces, and if the pieces were to be reassembled, a new principle of unity would have to be found. (Roy, 00: 53) If Henry during his time as a monk attained personal libera tion, it might be argue d that the SPR working was the most glit tering success imaginable. If so, then maybe the universe itself had the last laugh, for from the reanimated karma of undead spirits Henry had been born, and had bee n considered a failure by all concerned because he failed to live up to his promised destiny. Yet perhap s, in Henry, that undead karma at last found its ces sation, and he attained a for m of fulfilment that the dead souls who fathered him simply couldnt match. M agck and Enlghenm en A Recap
During the introduction to some dharma workshops I attended at the weekend, everyone was invited to say something about their practice and their connection with Buddhism. Explaining myself to a Buddhist group was an interesting exercise in mak ing clear the relationship between magick and dharma. The aim of the Western Magickal Tradition-I explained-is the same as that of Buddhism: enlightenment. The specific act of magick that fulfils this aim is known as The Great Work. The magician achieves The Great Work through the invocation of an entity known as The Holy Guardian Angel. The angel leads the magician across the Abyss, which is the gap between our ordinary perception and metaphysical exp erience. This culmin ates in the magicians first awakening, a temporary experience of enlightenment. By engaging in further work with the angel, eventually the magician achieves union with it-which is equi valent to 'full or 'final enlightenment. In Buddhist terms, the angel is a representation of Emptiness Angel and Emptiness are the same thing. Magick is the art of 9
A Desert of Roses experiencing Truth, so the Western magician uses the angel as a duaistic representation of nondual, unrepresentable Empti ness in order to bring about a direct experience of Emptiness through magica means. Because it employs magick, the West ern Tradition often proves the most direct and fastest route to the reaisation of enightenment, but it is not without certain risks to the ignorant and unwary. Where the Western Tradition has falen d own, however, is in the clarity of its teachings. The Buddhist teachings are more straightforward, whereas western occutism has been subject to vigorous suppression by exoteric reigion, and has aso been corrupted and misunderstood by its own supposed practition ers. The most common corruption of the Western Magica Tradi tion is the practitioners inability or refusal to use magick in the reaisation of The Great Work, but instead to limit its use to sor cery or 'low magic. The Buddhists texts on meditation accept the development of psychic powers or siddhis as a coroary to awakening, and incude simiar warnings on the dangers of mistaking these powers as an end in themselves or a sub stitute for enightenment. In the Western Tradition, however, competency in magick is an absoute prerequisite for The Great Work. The reason for this is simpe: to summon the angel, one must be famiiar with the technique of invocation to communicate with the ange, one must know how to work wi th spirits to make decisions about dir ections to be taken, divination is essential, etc. In short, The Great Work demands proficiency in al areas of magick. When propery understo od as a genuine tradition, the West ern Magical Tradition paces magick in the service of enighten ment. As the magician moves surely and swiftly towards the reaisation of the aim (which is inevitably successfu because it is the expression of a magical act) then his or her magical abilities are developed and perfected at the same time . It is for this reason that the Holy Gu ardian Ange is often de scribed as ' the future magica self. Union with the ange-let us rememberis the reaisation of Emptiness, and so magick
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Discourses placed at the service of enlightenment bootstraps the magician into awakening to his or her ultimate nature. Thank You, Dr. G otam a
I attended some dharma workshops at the weekend, and was surprised by the number of p sychotherapists that were present, most of whom came w ith the specific aim of applying Bud dhist ideas to their work. These days, you can train and qualify as a psychotherapist through various organisations that teach Bud dhistinspired therapy. Having had plenty of experience on both sides of the fence, this troubled me. The therapists I spoke with all seemed of the opinion that Buddhism and therapy share a common approach and aim. Yet none of them seemed interested in the idea that maybe the dharma probes into a deeper level of truth which therapy never goes near. One person I spoke with described how B ud dhist techniques can be us ed to help p atients realise that their thoughts and feel ings are simply thatthoughts and feelings, rather than 'the truth. This is fine and helpful, of course . Yet the aim o f dharma is not to 'accept our thoughts and feelings, but to wake up to the fact theres nothing there to own them. Of course, patients who present for therapy in most cases arent in a mental state that would benefit from confrontation with the truth of noself. But presumably the therapist is, so doesnt this oblige the therapist to explore the dharma more deeply? If you were ill and you consulted someone who gave you medicine for your complaint, but later you discovered that the person prescribing the medicine decided what to give you by asking their doctor-then, indeed, you might not care too much, as long as the illness went away, but if the therapists want to hand out Buddhist medicine surely they're obliged to under stand fully what theyre giving out? Otherwise, were left with a situation where peop le hop onto the dharma, and hop off before theyve gone anywhere-e as soon as theyre able to function within the 'normal parameters 9
A Desert of Roses of society The danger is that therapists will get into a habit of leaning on Buddhism, but never arrive at an understanding that it has something far deeper to offer ette to a Dhama eache
i Dea r B, People dont write letters on paper any more, so I hope this one isnt too much of a shock It was good to see you at ---- the other week, albeit from a distance I listened to a recording of one of your talks on awakening, and I hoped we might exchange som e views I enjoyed the talk Do you remember last year when I came to you in interview and said I believed I was an anagami? I thought about your re sponse a great deal afterwards, and took seriously your advice that below the type of emptiness Id experienced there was a deeper level where phenomena become unfindable I wondered if Id confused a type of emp tiness that is one of the three char acteristics of phenomena (perhaps 'emptiness in an adjectival sense) for 'emptiness proper, which I had not yet experienced I wondered if yo u were sugge sting that emptiness i s a comp lete cessation of experience, such as that supposed to occur in ner odhi samapatti. I kept an eye open for signs pointing in this dir ection, but I never found them In your talk, you spoke very pertinently on the popular con ceptions of the enlightened person'radiant, 'youthful, 'Asi an, etc-and you made reference to the 'ten fetters model as perhaps a better guide than these common notions However, Ive arrived at the view that the ten fetters model is perhaps just as distorted as the popular misconceptions For instance, the arahat is supposedly free of 'delusion What, all delusions? How could that possibly be true for a human being? The idea that someone becomes incapable of any particular action or emotion whilst that person retains a human form seems to me a poor basis for a model of awakening, because what could pre vent an arahat from exhibiting a certain action or emotion if he or she was moved to do so? 9
Discourses The arahat may have realised the deathess, but they have not become it. Even if we suppose they have somehow tran scended their humanity (which personaly I dont), why wou d this take the form of disabing certain actions and emotions? Suppose we grant that an arahat has total contro over his or her motivation (athough I suspect this isnt true either), it stil makes no sense to declare that a person could not under any cir cumstances do o r fee certain things. You mentioned in your talk that character and behaviour are not sufficient bases on which to make a judgement of a person s character, yet this is precisely what the ten fetters mode does. I think its a poor mode, produces confusion, and we shoud chuck it out! These are not entirely my own ideas. Ive been folowing cosey the work of Daniel Ingram (00), an American dharma teacher. Ingram throws out the ten fetters model and proposes instead a revised fourpath model. Im sure youl check it out if youre interested, but, in brief, Ingram regards the stages of awakening in terms of changes in the relationship between the practitioner and emptiness, rather thanas in the ten fetters modelthe practitioners progressive inabiity to act like a hu man being. In Ingrams mode, the stream enterer has merey glimpsed emptiness for the first time. The sakadagami has se en emptiness more than once. The anagami has begun to see emptiness on and off 'in rea time. The arahat, finay, has 'identified with emptiness and is in a fuid reationship with it pretty much full time. ('Identified is the wrong word, I know, but more con venient than ' deidentified with everything other than. ) One of the consequences of Ingrams view is a radica defa tion of attainments. Sure, you dont need robes and nice teeth to be an arahat, but neither are you free of delusion, nor do you act without making karma, etc. The popuar misconceptions of awakening are miseading, but theres a whoe lot of misin formation in the traditional teachings-or so Ingrams reasoning suggests (Ingram, 0 0) . Which brings me back to my failed search for 'emptiness proper after my retreat last year. I didnt find it because I was 93
A D eser esertt of of Ros Roses es aready in reationship with it. I was an anagami At east, ac cording to Ingram. According to the ten fetters mode I woud have had to be virtuay incapabe of being either nasty or stu pid, and so I was indee d wide o f the the mark Since ast year Ive und ergone another major major deveop deveopment ment in in my practice, which my most recent retreat was an opportunity to evauate. I see what you m ean now now by that 'deepe r eve eve . Its not that phenomena cease to arise-which is what I took you to meanbut as if consciousness penetrates to a ayer prior to those phenomena taking form. So, I see sensations prior to the mind appying (for exampe) the three types of vedana to them. Thee ve dana has ceased, Th cease d, in a sense, I suppose, but it seems more the case that the practitioner has seen far enough down the chain of dependentarising to view things from a pace that is prior. Nerodhi samapatti fees simiar: not the cessation of cogni tion, but penetration to a eve where (simpy) the basis of that which becomes co gni gnition tion doe s not not arise. Anyhowthe upshot of a of this is that it seems there are perhaps quite a few dharma teachers striving toward a mode of arahatship that they wi never attain because it isnt pos sibe,, but is a fiction created by co rrupted teachingsa common sibe probem in a the words great reigious traditions. If it is the reaisation of the deathess that the Buddha emphasised above a in the process of awakeningas you stated in your tak-then when this has been attained, and is avaiabe to awareness pretty pretty much a of the time, time, where ese i s there to go? Of course, its easy to imagine that feeing there is some where ese to go means that something must have been eft un done. But again, the absence of doubt or striving seems to me too much to expect of a human being, which, Im convinced, is what the arahat aways remains remains.. You know what ese this entais, dont you? Butif you havent aready done so-theres no need for you to touch the earth as witness to your attainment. Ive aready witnessed it for you! With very best wishes, and thanks for the hep and inspira tion youv youvee given me . Duncan 94
Discourses You Can't Be Serous!
Are Aan and mysef reay caiming o be enighened? Yes, we are. Are we serious? Compeey. Bu were aso up for answering queries and criicisms from anyone whos ineres ineresed ed enough o have any. In fac, Ive aken he ibery of answering a coupe ha no one has even pu o us ye. (Bu I be heyre hinkin hinking g hem.) Why do you claim to e enghtened when eveone know that' imoile?
The Buddha go shiry someimes when peope asked him his. He woud repy wih simies of bind men presuming o e sighed peope heres no such hing as coour. A decaraion ha enighenmen is impossibe from someone who hasn mad e he proper effors effors o see se e for hemseves carries no auhor iy, of course. cour se. Bu he genera quesion w heher enighen enighenmen men is possibe is compeey vaid and deserves a considered re sponse. Enighenmen enais an encouner wih somehing ha ies beyond experience: he Absoue. The assumpion ha enigh enmen is impossibe arises from he conradicion in he pro posiion po siion ha his unknowabe can be k nown, or ha ha which is no a par of experience can somehow b e sensed . I used o hod his view mysef, and no one was ever more asonished han me o discover ha he confronaion wih he Absoue simpy makes his everyday ogic of 'his or ha re dundan. If we wonder ha somehing ouside our experience can be avaiabe o our experience is because we have idenified a paricuar range of our awareness as 'us, as 'our experience. Ye, in reaiy, we are simpy no wha we appear o ourseves o be. When we ake he roube o ook, he sef canno be found in any sensaion, idea, feeing or hough, bu is somehing beyond a of hes e. The sef, herefore, is aready no any par of experience. The encouner wih he Absoue, hen, 95
A D eser esertt of of Ros Roses es doe s not bring us into contact with with anything anything alien to or in con co n tradiction with the true sef. Enightenment is the moment when we realise that this everyday logic of 'this or that, 'sef or other, does not apply to our true identity. Buddhism teaches that there are six realms of existence: hel reams, hungry ghosts, the animal kingdom, the human word, the ream of the warring gods, and the heavenly gods. But it states that to be born in the human word is the most fortunate of births, because only in the human world is there the possibi ity of enightenment. Clearly, there is something special about being human with with regard to the process of awakening. Ive started to wonder whether this special human attribute isnt something specificay to do with our cognition, something to do with how we can know and react to truth, because the at tainment of enightenment turns on realisation the truth we ar rive at through our understanding doesnt remain at the eve of ideas but enters into experience, into our existence. At the moment of realisation al of our efforts to get enightened are fi nalised into a new reationship with reality. We become the fruit of our efforts. If we understand magick as the art of experiencing truth, it might be said that human beings can become enightened be cause they have the ability ability to practise ma gick. Youe simly deluded yoursef by meditating too much!
This one, I imagine, is likely to be levelled at us by the green meme, postmodern crew. If you believe you're enlightened they might say, then that's how it will seem to you; it's true' from your perspective They might even add: And that's okay because there's nothing worse about that reality tunnel' than any other as long as it 's the one you you 've chosen chosen to go down down Unfortunately, the critic who assumes that being en lightened simpy entais believing yourself to be so is probaby going to be the least incined or able to grappe seriously with the practices that actually ead to enightenment, and thus un likely to gain a direct understanding for themselves that this is no how things stand.
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Discourses It took me three and a half years to arrive at that moment of awakening which occurred last month. Three and a half years spent meditating every day, or going off on retreats. During those sessions I looked closely at my momenttomoment ex perience and disciplined my mind away from fantasies, specu lation and idle philosophising to concentrate exclusively on what was there in front of me, in immediate awareness. And the rest of the time, when I wasnt sitting in meditation, I was trying to do exactly the sa me thing in my daily life. Does looking at whats right in front of you seem likely to lead to delusion? Does it seem likely that someone who has dedicated him or herself to this practice for a number of years and continues to do so will be more 'deluded than someone who, on the basis of no experience whatsoever (because, ac cording to him or her, there couldnt be any authoritative ex perience) has s imply assume d they know better? You decide! B uddhsm on he Tree of Life
Whats the one thing thats certain in life? D eath is And whats the cause of death, by which I mean whats re sponsible for the death of all living things in all cases? Why that would be birth And whats the cause of birth in all cases? Reproduction generation the fact that things come into being And what is the cause of coming into being? Something like lust'; our clinging onto life And what is the cause of this clinging? Craving after things in the world And what is the cause of the craving? The seeking of pleasure Feeling 97
A Desert of Roses
The eel of Life Bhavacakra The nidanas are situated in the outer rim of the wheel 9
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Of the feeling? Our sensory contact with things Of the sensory contact? Perception itsel And what is the cause of perception? That things are perceptibleie that they have a form we perceive or a name that enables us to think abou t them And what is the cause of things having a form or a name? It's the way we're hard-wired I suppose so 'd say the brain and body And what is the cause of the bod y? Well in terms of individual experience which I guess is what you mean the body arises as sensations within the mind The cause of the mind? Consciousness The cause of consciousness? Well there can't be consciousness on a personal level without some thing to be conscious o s o the cause of being conscious is the fact that s tu' arises for us to be conscious o The Buddhists call this stuff ormations ' And what is the caus e of formations? Formations arise because we fool ourselves we 're separate from the universe This allows stuff to appear as if it were really some thing out there' So I'd say that the cause of formations is fundamental ignor ance And what is the cause of ignorance? If I knew the cause of ignorance I wouldn't be ignorant! Ignorance is the nal answer om a human perspective It's as far as we can go
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A Desert of Roses The Nianas
This chain of cause and effect from which the cycle of birth and death arises is also known as the Buddhist theory of dependent origination The everyday world appears to us as a universe ful of things, but enquiring into its nature along the ines described above reveals that reality is not compo sed of solid objects at a, but is a constantly arising and selfrenewing process of becom ing. The universe is not a noun but something like a verb: rather than being themseves, things are always in the process of becoming other things. Nothing in the universe po ssesses the invulnerability to change required for it to truy be itself, but in stead reies on other things for its form, its apparent identity. When an enlightened person awakens, the lived experience of dependent origination is what it might be said he or she awakens to. Dependent origination is an essentia component of Buddhist thinking, athough not the most commonyknown teaching, because its quite technical. On The Wheel of Life, those paintings that show the L ord of Death in the centre holding the wheel of samsara (theyve got one in the toiet of my oca Bud dhist centre, see overleaf), twelve of the links in the chain of causes described above are portrayed in pictures around the wheels outer rim. They are known as the nidanas ('causes, foundations). In a lesserknown sutta, the Buddha described a further se quence of nidanas, which have not (as far as I know) been as signed a traditiona pictorial representation. These are the socaed transcendental nidanas They demonstrate that the pro cess of dependent origination is circular because theyre the converse of the standard nidanas, pointing not to the down ward path of birth, suffering and death, but to the upward path beyond suffering toward iberation. The Transenental Nianas
What do es birth ead to? Suffering and dissatisfaction
00
Discourses What does suffering lead to? Blind faith For mo st people that's what they put their trust infaith in something be tter or faith in it all being worthwhile What does faith lead to? Gladness Cheerfulness. What does gladness lead to? Getting happy-clappy Rap ture. Rapture leads to . . .? Getting blissed-out. Tranquility And Tranquility? True happiness. Where does happiness lead? To concentration The mind can focus at last because it's undistrac ted Where does concentration lead ? To insight oras it's also knownthe Knowledge and Vision of Things as They Really Are And where does the Knowledge and Vision of Things as They Really Are take us? To disenchantmen t because beyon d all that suffering and bliss at the end of the day stuff is jus t stuf in nit? An d disenchantment? To dispassion . To equanimi ty. We accept things for what they are. And equanimity? To liberation. The end of The Great Work And then? Arrival at the knowledge that the illusion has been seen through. Traditionally known as knowledge of destruction of the cankers'. 101
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Now, have you been keeping coun? Thas welve sandard nidanas and welve ranscendenal. Twenyfour in oal. Twenyfour? Why, has almos twenty-two a number dear o he hear of every wesern occulis! Twenywo leers in he Hebrew alphabe. Twenywo major arcana in he aro deck. Twenywo pahs beween he sephiroh on The Tr ee of Life. The idea of mapping he nidanas ono he pahs of he Tree of Life didn appeal o me simply because of a nearmiss nu merical correspondence. The Tree of Life depics he sages by which he Divine expresses iself hrough he meaphysical and e poral. The nidanas porray a Buddhis equivalen o his: how samsara is forged by he minds urning away from empi ness. The heory of dependen originaion argues ha realiy is more like a verb han a noun, in which case he nidanas are really only arbirary poins along he coninuum of dependen arising raher han acual 'hings. This allows us a bi of flexib iliy, I hink. If we wan o add or drop a nidana here or here, regard one as wo or vice versa for he purposes of our model hen his doesn necessarily do injury o he spiri of dependen originaion. 'Liberaion and 'knowledge of desrucion of he cankers I decided don si on he ree a all, bu are meaphysical evens 'above Keher. Given he close similariy beween 'gladness and 'rapure, I figured we could drop he former. 'Name and form, similarly, I hough migh be said o be embraced by he subsequen nidanas of 'mind and 'body, so 'name and form also go he chop. And would you credi i-has wenywo remaining! Does i work? Ill le he reader decide. Nidanas such as 'birh, 'formaions, 'consciousness and 'ignorance seemed o have places ready and waiing for hem. Ohers fied less inu iively, bu made complee sense afer a lile reflecion. Maybe a couple or so aren so clear. For go od measure, I also hrew ino he mix Daniel Ingrams suggesed correspondences beween he vipassana jhanas and 03
A Desert of Roses the sephiroth. He suggests some quite broad designations, which places 'the three characteristics around the level of Malkuth and Yesod; 'the arising and passing away is at Hod, Netzach and Tiphereth; 'the dark night gets underway at Ge burah and Chesed and draws to a close with Daath; 'equanim ity is at the level of Binah and Chokmah; 'path is Kether. A table of corresp ondences between the nidanas and the tar ot trumps is presented for consideration at the end of this art icle, using Crowleys designations of the paths and the tarot. (Ive opted for the traditional, nonThelemic names of the trumps.) Here, again, many of the correspondences are strik ingly obvious (eg. The Fool = 'ignorance); others more subtle but strongly relevant (e.g. The Tower = 'six senses); and others slightly puzzling (The Sun = 'sensory contact) . O f course, you cou ld map the nidanas to the tree in different waysperhaps better than the way Ive chosenbut the oppor tunity to map m ajor B uddhist concepts like 'ignorance, 'equan imity and 'suffering onto the key symbols of western esotericism seemed too goo d to pass by. The Te pe Workng Exp aned
On the 5th June, 009, we attempted contact with an astral representative of the Great White Brotherhood, the universal body of enlightened beings. We were successful. On two fur ther occasions the operation was repeated and we communic ated with the spirit known as 'Tem pe a total of three times . On each occasion Tempe made a number of predictions that seemed especially to concern what would occur on Alans im pending trip around the world. Over the course of these work ings, and almost in spite of our really stupid questions, it became obvious that Tempe only really cared about one thing: enlightenment. We produced a commentary on these three workings as we recorded them, and Alan wrote three speculative articles and an additional commentary. These formed a whole section of our previous book, The Urn (Chapman & Barford, 009b). At the current time (August, 009) the majority of Tempes predic 04
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A D eser esertt of of Ros Roses es tions have come to fruition but have thrown a competely dif ferent light on those yet to happen. Furthermore, the fulfiment of the the prophecies to dat datee has dem demonstrated onstrated jus justt how wrong our previous interpretations of Tempes predictions were, and just how much bullshit (read: 'insane occult conspiracy) we projec ted onto onto some of Tempe s answers. So, here is th e Tempe working explained, w it ith h the benefit benefit of more recent events. DUNC AN : Ive rea rea y y been looking forward to you writi writing ng this this up. The parts of the prophecies that directly concerned me Ive aready mentioned in passing esewhere, but most of what Tempe said seemed to be about you, so Im fascinated to hear how it has come tr true ue . Or not. So, come on then: what new light can you shed on the first wo working? rking? ALAN: Okay. Wel, then: Tempe first appeared to us hold ing a book and a crucifix. The book contained a tabe, six squares by six. The name of the book was Lemegeton. The num ber of the book was 6. The cross was 3 . DUNC AN: This puzzed us at the the time time .. . ALAN: But we worked out that 'book = 6 = 'camel, 'magus and 'Kamael 'Kamaele e . my magica name namee e me The cross = 3 = 'Tempe. So, I am the book and Tempe is the cross. The cross represents the concept of the messiah, which we come back to later. The numbers in the six by six tabe, remember, add up to 666. DUNCAN: Ive never mentioned it before, Aan, but I sup pose youve noticed you have the same initials as Aleister Crowley. I didnt like to draw attention to it, because I thought you might start to think you were the next messiah or something someth ing.. . ALAN: After this was the part about my meeting in the fo lowing March with a 'king or 'caesar, a member of The Great White Brotherhood. Tempe suggested he would wear some kind of snake adornment. He would be jovial, welcoming, dressed in white and have the number 60. We, on March 6th I met the Advaita Vedanta guru Arunachala Ramana during my travels in India. He was certainly enightened (and in this sense 06
Discourses a 'king or 'caesar and a par of he Grea Whie Broherhood) He ooked a bi ike Faher Chrismas ('jovia), had wo aoos (one of which was a scro, which was perhaps he 'wised snake) and, as a guru, was cerainy a 'hierophan ( = 60) DUNCAN: Tha is prey amazing, because I don hink eiher of us expeced your enighenmen o come so quicky When Tempe said ha you woud mee a guru, I assumed i was someone who woud simpy hep you aong-no he per son who wou d hep hep you y ou finish finish up A hierophan indeed indeed ! ALAN: Bu is a here in wha Tempe acuay said He aso gave he guru he number 6 = 'supreme riua Finishing up he process of enighenmen is he supreme riua, andas Tempe aso prediced-his has aken me in a compeey new direcion since hen, wih he sar of he Open Enlightenment (OE) projec DUNCAN: Okay, Im ooking a he ex, and a his poin Tempe goes ino a o of grim suff abou 'The Adversary, 'gi an squids an and d ' Back Brohers ALAN: Yes Is cear now ha The Adversary and 'NONE (which was he name Tempe gave i-hey, heres a big cue here in he name) are not iera eniies, bu are my visionary or asra encouners wih he embodimen of fear and herefore ignorance The Adversary is defeaed by each individua a he momen of enighenmen 'NONE is herefore he maser of hose peope who can ony view he word hrough he ens of fear and of hose who consciousy resis enighenmen, some imes i mes ca ed he Back Brohers DUNCAN: Youre no so ho now on he noion of an acua conspiracy? ALAN: No, because he descripion Tempe gave us of wha makes a Back B ack Broher indicaes ha ha he he Back Broher isn con con cerned wih keeping he word unenighened; raher, hes simpy sefobsessed The Back Broherhood is no acivey working o 'unenighen he word; i simpy wishes o pro moe is own debased and ignoran ineress Unforunaey, a misundersanding akes roo in our inerpreaion of Tempe a his poin in he ex Ahough Tempe seems o ak abou ier a Back Brohers, he is acuay using he Grea Whie Broher 07
A D eser esertt of of Ros Roses es hood and Back Brotherhood as symbos for enightenment and ignorance from this point onwards. For instance: when I asked him whether the batte woud be fought in peopes minds, he repied with a specific image of a singe maa bead turning into my hea d. Quite ceary, what he me ant was that the the batte batte is ac tuay going to take pace ony within my head. Tempe was, in effect, ony ever interested in taking about our (mine and yours) enightenment. A bit ater on he gives us an image of the 'aura of the White Brotherhood with too much 'back in it, and vice versa vers a . . . S o if the the White W hite Brotherhood is enightenment enightenment and the Back Brotherhood is ignorance, then Tempe is simpy giv ing us an accurate description of where we both were at the time in the process of enightenment: the penutimate stage of enightenment is precisey when emptiness arises and passes away in rea timei.e. enightenment and ignorance are mixed up. DUNCAN: I certainy remember the way Tempe seemed to be ducking various questions at this point, as if he deemed them the m no t worthy worthy of an answer. ALAN: Because they were the wrong questions. Remember the part where he s aid it wasnt abou t one of the side s winning, winning, but about them both operating in the correct way, because one of the sides was operating incorrecty incorrecty?? DUNCA DU NCA N: We never did get to to the bottom bottom of that. . . ALAN: AL AN: We, 'not operating operating correcty correcty simpy simp y means 'not en ightened yet. He was just teing us that we had some work eftt to do. ef d o. DUNCAN: The imagery turns a bit utopian and messianic after this point, as I reca: 'Sunrise over the earth. Intense ight over the whoe p anet. . . ALAN: Enightenment, again. Both in a persona sense and a goba sense, with regard to the aims of the OE project that was the resut of my enightenment. DUNCAN: And the cathedra, which refects in its architec ture the union of a the traditions . .. ALAN: Again, it represents both the persona experience of enightenment (because the event itsef is iteray the reaisa tion that enightenment is beyond a and any tradition), and the 0
Discourses vision of the goba progress of enlightenment that is the object of O E. DUNCAN: So if the cathedral is not strictly litera, does this mean (as we assumed) weve got to physically build it? And what about the 'three hares? Weve taken that as the logo for the OE project; are we stil okay to u se it? ALAN: The hares are fine, but its clear now that they too were a symbol that encompassed both my impending personal enightenment (the 'underword experience, or 'initiation which was part of Tempes origina message about the hare) plus the transpersona aspect of the OE project. DUNCAN: Peope weve spoken with so far have already raised the question whether Tempes cathedral might be a bit too-erm-'kitsch or 'retro to deserve to exist in reaity. ALAN: The whoe premise of OE rests on a recognition that enightenment is the root of a religion. For the genera public, this woud be a whoe new perspective on history. Its only with this perspective on the past that the 'cathedra of enight enment can be built. DU NCAN : So youre making me wonderyet againwheth er this thing needs literally to be buit, or whether Tempe was pointing to a new historical perspective rather than actual bricks and mortar ... ALAN: From the start, the idea that Tempe was predicting the actual building of a 'cathedra (or Open Enlightenment Centre as I prefer to call it) was irrelevant. I just wanted to buid it, and even more so now! It wi be an architectura rendering of the enlightenment experience. So who knows, maybe Temp e was aso predicting the litera building of the 'cathedra .. . DUNCAN: What about the stuff that comes after this in the text: 0, peak oil, global warming? ALAN: The stuff about solar flares and sunspots relates to an argument I d recenty had online with an idiotic V oudon priest, which boiled down to the issue of confusing the planes. Tempe was showing us here that confusing the planes may prove an obstacle to educating the public about the nature of enightenment. That other stuff you mention was, Im afraid, just a brief interude of pointess occult specuation. Tempes 09
A Desert of Roses symboism simpy points to sefcentred interests and ignorance as the source of the words probem s DUNCAN: Tempe is saying theres nothing specia about 0, then Its just the usua greed, ignorance and fear Busi ness as usua ALAN: But he tries to steer us back on course with the next part of the message : the 'poisone d fish from 'Yemen DUNCAN: I never knew Yemen had such a thriving fishing industry unti Tempe cued us in ALAN: We sussed at the time that 'fish = 4 = 'truth, 'word, and that the ichthys (Greek for 'fish) was a secret sym bo for Christ to the eary Christians He aso gave us the num ber 44 = 'prophet Remember how Tempe appeared at the beginning with a crucifix in his right hand? Furthermore, Ye men is not ony impo rtant bibicay, but has aso been ho me to numerous Jewish and Isamic messianic movements over the centuries Tempe is therefore pointing out here how enighten ment (the 'truth or 'word) has been firsty iconceived and then intentionay degenerated ('the poisoned fish) in regard to past, orthodox reigion The messianic movements of the past have faied He returns to this theme in the second working DUNCAN: So that just eaves the stuff about the moon, the aien tripods, and perhaps some form of faked aien invasion engineered by The Back Brotherhood ALAN: Whatever thats about, it obviousy hasnt happened yet, but we have a better grasp now on Tempes perspective He referred to 'heaing unar ight and gave us the number 34 = 'purpe, 'mother, 'beautifu, 'vision, 'fower Based on what has gone before, its ikey that Tempe is taking stricty in terms of enightenment Tempe is representing enightenment as a 'purpe ight The presence of a 'hare has been noted by numerous cutures in the markings on the moons surface The hare, of course, is the symbo for OE So perhaps 0 wi see an increase in pubic education regarding enightenment DUNCAN: Ive been reading about the importance of the coour purpe during the Byzantine Empire Byzantium was the pace where the Greek tradition survived in Europe from the fa of the Roman Empire right through to the midde ages Its 0
Discourses rulers wore purple robes that no one else was allowed to wear and there was also a cha mber made of purple stone in the Great Palace where the Empres s was taken to give birth The 'caesars of Byzantium therefore had a special word to describe them selves: porphyrogennetos, which means 'born in the purple So purple came to signify legitimacy and the continuation of the Greek tradition Interesting So much for the alien invasion, then? ALAN: My best, conservative guess at this time is that there will be public hysteria around aliens, no doubt tied in with the 0 myth, and a few ignorant individuals will make a lot of money off the back of it Thats probably all Tempe is saying DUNCAN: Which brings us finally to 'the gnome with the pineapple So, did you meet any fruitbearing dwarfs on your travels, or not? ALAN: Unsurprisingly, its not as simple as that In Verkala, in India, I met an entrepreneur who identified himself as a 'gnome (see above, p 5 ) But it wasnt until later, at the begin ning of March, that I met Arunachala Ramana and became en lightened (as Tempe predicted) The gnome was certainly someone I met on my travels, but perhaps the entrepreneur who identified himself as such was just a synchronicity, where as Arunachala was the 'actual gnome Or maybe Tempes pre dictions are a series of synchronicities that he has presented together, from which we have co ncluded he was describing one event when in fact he wasnt Theres more stuff in the second working that seems to su pport this idea DUN CAN: Nice Looking over the text of the second work ing, a lot of it is explicitly concerned with the difficulties of communicating with Tempe We certainly knew there was a problem, even if we werent aware at the time exactly what it was ALAN: Yes The vision began with the rune NIED, inverted, which indicates: 'setting off on the wrong path and that to con tinue in the same manner will result in failure Because of the pointless occult speculation wed forced Te mpe into during the last working, this second operation began with completely the wrong intent and ex pectations
A Desert of Roses DUNCAN: We jus kep a i, hough, unil he gave in and sared o alk wih us There were some ineresing resuls from he par where you asked him: 'Who is Alan? Who is Duncan? He saed ha you were 'a head on a plaer made of a founain of whie ligh (e The Bapiss Head) Me, I was: 'The wand The snake The eye in he pyramid In March his year, afer Id heard abou your enlighenmen, I received a sponaneous vision whils I was mediaing in which I saw a vas eye saring a me, and hen my soul was ransferred ino he inside of a pyramid where your soul was already waiing This was quie clearly a prophecy ha my enlighenmen would occur afer yours Ye again, Tempe is no predicing a specific even or giving an 'answer o quesions, bu hrowing ou a kind of synchronisic marker-e Im no 'he eye in he pyramid in any specific sense, bu his provision of his symbol loaded my subsequen vision of he ey e and he pyramid w ih a huge whack of synchronisic meaning ha i wouldn have had oherwise ALAN: I was obsessed wih finding ou wheher he specu laive aricles I wroe afer he firs working were correc or no His answers wih regard o wo of hem are noncommial, bu I hink his respon se of ' an energy biding is ime ha is no go ing in a paricular direcion wih respec o wha I wroe in 'Unreasonable Foresigh (Chapman & Barford, 009b: 80) is a polie way of saying is all fanasy He was elling us a faked alien invasion was no going o happen, and hen I insis on asking him how o prepare for i! A his poin he gave us he aro card, THE SUN, which indicaes we should enjoy life by concenraing on he posiive and looking for is realisaion I was his aemp o ge us back on rack, bu once again i proved fuile As we coninue o persis, he gives us he Greek leer Omega, which means 'las I hink now ha he was ry ing o ell us his nonsense mus come o an end! DUNCAN: Afer his he falls silen and I sar o sense expli cily ha he doesn w an o answer hese sors of quesions ALAN: Didn sop us, hough We ake his presenaion of he rune ANSUZ o me an he abiliy o sail hrough he coming
Discourses crisis. But this probably meant at the time 'will you please just let go of all that crap! DU NCAN : An d next theres s ome interesting stuff about the 'false m essiah, which was the meaning we took from the refer ences to the Yemen in the first working. Including that freaky bit when he gave me the number '555 at exactly the same mo ment as you were looking at the clock (which I couldnt see) and the time was '5:55 ALAN: Its not there in the original commentary, due to o ur confusion, but 555 is a number that represents me, as di scusse d in my magical record (Chapman & Barford 2009a: 83f). It all makes complete sense once you consider that I am the 'false messiah who 'is imprisoned at the moment-e. Im not en lightened. The false messiah is also described as 'a head on a stick, which I think demonstrates Tempes sense of humour. I ask him when I should set up a new magical order and he replies with an image of tunnels at the end of which is something nasty. As I discussed elsewhere, this simply means: 'When youre enlightened. DU NCAN : He combined that last image with a specific mes sage: 'Y ou are with someone. An o lder figure. Near w ater or on a boat. It is po sitive. 33 . ALAN: 33 = Indian, blessing. This is quite obviously the eighty yearold guru I met in India. DUNCAN: Which brings us to those freaky coordinates! '792. 83 or 830. ALAN: Tempes answer here is stunningly precise. On the day of my enlightenment, I travelled to the Andaman Islands, which match the first set of coordinates: 7N 92E . It wa s here that I formulated the idea of Open Enlightenment the new 'ma gical order. 8N 30E is the border of Egypt and Sudan, where I ended my around the world trip at Abu Simbel. This is without doubt the most mindblowingly accurate prediction Tempe has made, which he provid ed at a time when I was actu ally planning to travel the world in the opposite direction. DU NCAN : I went online and checked it out for myself, and I think it needs pointing out that the coordinates are not spot on. The first set, for instance, are actually somewhere at sea to 3
A Desert of Roses he norhwes of he Andaman Islands. Bu boh ses are obvi ousy in he righ area. I is quie mindboggling, especiay giv en ha neiher of us a he ime had any deailed undersanding of ongiude and aiude and-as you say-your ravel plans were compeely differen back hen. ALAN: When I asked him if here were anyhing else he gave me he word 'Caesar. Whils aending a beach pary in he Andaman Isands, I saw a man dressed as Julius Caesar. Tempe aso menioned 'a boa and 'swallows. In April, I vis ied Thailand and on a whiewaer rafing rip (which mos cerainly involved a boa) a man sruck up a sponaneous con versaion wih me abou swallows. These were separae evens from my meeing wih he guru. So, again, were lef wonder ing wheher Tempes predicions are jus synchroniciies, or wheher is beer o consider some of hem as referring o a number of evens bu rolled ino one answer. DUNCAN: In he nex par of he working we wase a o more ime on poinless quesions, bu as we urn o he heme of when were going o ge enighened he answers become more revealing again. ALAN: The meaning of he answer in my case is even now no enirely cear. He describes an unusua characer like 'he German characer Esze surmouned by a cross, which weve no been able o race. DU NC AN : I hink now ha his migh have been or lezh, a symbol for 'he voiced alveoar laeral fricaive, he guura L sound ha in Classica Arabic is represened by he leer Dad. Mos people pronounce his sound wih he ef side of he ongue. The Prophe Mohammed, repuedy, coud pronounce i on boh sides a once. This symbol migh herefore be aken o mean: 'somehing ha ony a prophe can do. Is no clear, is i? Wha Tempe said regarding my case, however, was a bi more obvious: 'A honey bee. A dar. A lance. Afer I heard of your enlighenmen, I conaced my Holy Guardian Ange and asked wha I needed o do in order o finish up he process. My HGA communicaes hrough he runes and he answer I re ceived was: TIR (invered), BEORC, WUNJO. In a his commu nicaions, my HGA has used WUNJO o represen 4
Discourses enlightenment BEORC resembles the letter 'B TIR is in the shape of an arrow Tempe, then, was looking forward to this message from my HGA, but the 'bee is actually a 'B, and the 'dart or 'lance isnt literal, but the symbolic representation of an arrow that is TIR Its that same mode of synchronicity rather than literal prediction ALAN: After this I asked him whether our wo rk was related to the prophecy of Crowleys successor given in The Book of the Law. Tempe replied with an image of plants and bulbs that flower and die with no trace, yet return the next year And then the image of a monk I think this makes it clear that our work is a different but successive e xpression of the tradition of magick We didnt grasp this at the time, though, and i t seems from this point as if Tempe has finally had enough and becomes frus trated with the method of communication DUNCAN: Our attempts at allowing him to possess us physically proved pretty lame, although some of the stuff he said when speaking through you seems clear enough ALAN: Yeah: 'The basis is to advance, not to stall and won der It is done Im gone Hes being pretty explicit We ve spent the most part of this second wo rking wasting his and our time w ith the pointless speculative occult fantasy DUNCAN: Luckily we got mostly back on track in the third working,which was my favourite This was the one in which Tempe presented us each with three images or aspects of ourselves Later, we carried out what we regarded at the time as an unrelated magical exercise with the tarot, to examine our karma It was only later we realised that Tempe had predicted exactly the cards that appeared in our tarot spreads So in his usual way, he had again underscored the significance of an ap parently unrelated event with a huge whack of synchronistic meanng ALAN: When I asked him if the six images hed given us were a symbol of our temple, he replied with the Greek letter Gamma and the Latin word 'Felix'. Gamma is the third letter of the Greek alphabet-he gave us three images each, remember Gamma is also used to denote a variable in mathematical equa tions Felix' means 'happy or ' lucky So what Tempe seems to 5
A Desert of Roses be saing is: 'here are three variables related to our happi ness In other words, hes making it clear from the outset that this is about our respective karma We didnt know it at the time, but he was sho wing us what wed have to deal with po st enlightenment DUNCAN: Its as if this time he was determined to keep us on track, and was making it ver clear from the outset that he was talking about us and our development But there was also that puzzling series of images where he showed us the Tao with the Yin and Yang curled together like foetuses, and the line formed where their bodies met forming the profile of an old man, the Hol Guardian Angel And then the rune PERDHRO ALAN: The rune is thought to represent mster or something hidden I think now that it was pointing to the dis cover of the hidden aspect of the self that is revealed during enlightenment A s for the rest of it, I can think of two interpret ations: firstl, that the Tao is the Absolute, expressed through the interpla of outh and age or the lifespan of the human be ing; or secondl, that the foetuses are the pas t or the beginning, the Tao is the present, and the HGA is the future or endpoint of human development Perhaps this is also a general schema representing the threepart depiction of our karma delivered both b Tempe and the tarot exercise DUNCAN: Thats quite nice That makes a lot more sense now ALAN: The most important aspect of the communication, however, is of course Tempes prediction of the bad time we would have after enlightenment, dealing with the habits, per spectives and behaviours based on the separate sense of self that had built up in us over a lifetime In other words, the wa that we would both be forced to deal with our unique karma DUNC AN: Yes In both our case s it was exactl as predicted both b Tempe and the tarot ALAN: With the separate selfsense gone and replaced b enlightenment, the conceit of karma becomes blindingl obvi ous; and et alongside that, for ever second of ever da, the newl enlightened human being must endure the seemingl 6
Discourses endess cycing of their frustrated and pointless beliefs and ac tions DU NCAN : For me, it was mo stly about doubt and my cling ing to the idea that I was still searching for something Even though it was evident to me that al of that was truly over, at the same time the habit of questioning and seeking continued to arise obsessivey At the time, I joked about how, if I werent enightened, then enlightenment woud be a pain in the arse But I think theres a lot of truth in that joke! Tempe s depiction of my karma certainy heped me understand and dea with what was happ ening ALAN: Given time, of course, this discomfort subsides, as enightenment sowy but surey has its effect on the personal ity, aowing old habits to die eventuay and new ones-based on whoenessto take their pace DUNCAN: The anaogy Id suggest is of a stick of incense: the exp erience of emptiness is the saltpetre that keeps the stick burning; enightenment is the fire; and karma is the stick of in cense itsef, that sowy gets reduced to ash Understandng Actua Freedom
In the Western tradition of enightenment, known as magick, there is a conceptua tool called the Great Chain of Being that can be used for ascertaining the nature or aims of a teaching or tradition The Great Chain of Being can be described as a series of leves of experience that constitute the totality of reaity This is a simpe version: physica, emotiona, mental, spiritual, non dua With each successive stage (or holon as W iber prefers to ca them, because they transcend but include the previous stage) there is a growth in awareness For instance, a beginner in med itation may at first become aware of the frantic activity of the mind for the first time, and with continued practice wi eventu ally begin to experience spiritua events Eventualy the growth in awareness will reach the nondual and enlightenment occurs
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A Desert of Roses This growh or imb up he sages, from he gross o he suble o he uncondiioned, is called initiation by magicians, as well as by many oher genuine enlighenmen radiions Bu no a eachings are really iniiaory; some eachings are presened by people who have no experience of rea iniiaion The symbos, erms and cuure of genuine radiions are ap propriaed by hese pseudoiniiaes for various pur poses-fame, delusions of grandeur, escapism, ec The New Age scene is a grea example of a pseud oiniiaory movemen Pseudoiniiaes are easily spoed because hey canno hep 'confusing he planes 'Confusing he planes simpy means confusing one leve of experience (say he mental) wih anoher (say he non-dual) When someone hinks an inelecual insigh is enighenmen, hen hey have confused he panes When someone hinks happiness is enlighenmen, hen hey have confused he emoional level wih he nondua level Im sure you can find many more exam pes Pseudoiniiaes are prone o confusing he planes, because having no experience of iniiaion hey use erms reserved for he spiriual and nondua levels o refer o heir own imied experience of phys ica, emoional and menal evens However, here is somehing a lo worse han he pseudo iniiae Is called a counter-initiate If genuine iniiaion is a growh upwards owards he higher leves, and pseudoiniiaion is no movemen a all (usualy saling a imaginaion or he menal level), hen counerinii aion is acualy a movemen downwards. Couneriniiaion firs denies he spiriual, hen he mena, hen he emoional, evenualy reaching us he physical aone Couneriniiaion is pure reducionism and is goal is uncon scious oblivion, wih he evenual denial of even he physica i sef Why woud anyone desire oblivion? Because i is he ima gined ulimae escape from fear Fear of he world, of oher peope, realiy, and deah Couneriniiaion is a parody of genuine iniiaion, and con fusion of he planes occurs for he couneriniiae as a complee reversal of he leves: he physical becomes he nondua Noe 8
Discourses how closely this resembles 'emptiness is form and other non dual teachings; but the difference here is that the countertradi tion is based on confusion, not clarity; separation, not whole ness. Certain members of the Dharma Overground-a website dedicated to honest, practical enlightenmenthave become proponents of a movement called Ac ual Freedom To cut a long story short, some of their comments have not been received well by some of their peers. Ive decided to examine Actual Freed om in the light of the model of initiation presented above . Where oes ctual Freeom fit?
From the Actual Freedom website Actual Freedom offers a third alternative to either re maining 'normal or transcending the normal by practising an awareness of an 'inner world to rise 'above it all Actual Freedom is an alternative that offers not only the elimination of the self, that lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning entity, but the elimination of the Self, that superior God like spiritual entity as well. Actua l Freedom is to be free to constantly delight in the physical universe, its immediacy, its in finitude and its purity. To be this sensate, sensual body w ith awareness freed of any psycho logical en tity whatsoever, enabling one to fully live this mo ment of being alive. At last to be a free autonomous human being, one emerges into this paradisical fairytale physical world where a veritable smorgas bord of sensual pleasures become apparent. With heightened senses one is able to see and experience the actual world as it is without the greycoloured glasses of 'normal reality or the rosecoloured glasses of the 'spiritual Then and only then one is able to realize ones destiny. Then one is able to be the universe experiencing itself as a sensate human · 22 b eng. 9
A Desert of Roses Aleady made you mind up? Thees a lot moe. Richad, the founde of this movement, actually states 'Eveybody has got it 80 wong. So instead of aiming upas in the usual spiitual quest-we need to tun aound and go in the othe diection: towads the physical. Actual Feedom actively denies the spiitual, while attibut ing the usual desciptions of the benefits of spiituality to the physical level of expeience alone. We ae told that a puely physical existence will bing feedom, peace, hamony, happi ness and compassion (although Richad pefes the tem 'ham lessness). These ae all things pomised by enlightenment, o ealisation of the nondual. Futhemoe, a mom ent of being awae of the physical alone is descibed as a PCE, o 'Pue Consciousness Expeience. So Richad is equ ating the physical with Consciou sness itself! This is anothe paody of nondual expeience. Hee Richad de scibes the ego and the soul : Given that the instinctual animal 'self in humans has mophed into a sophisticated and cunning psy chological and psychic identity that appeas to live within the flesh and blood body, it is obvious that the instinctual animal passions can only be eadic ated by eliminating both the psychological 'self and the instinctual ' self . The elimination of ones 'self needs to be totalboth 'who you think you ae as a social iden tity and 'who blind natue has pogammed you to instinctively feel you ae in spiitual tems, both the ' ego and the ' soul. The good news is that with the extinction of who you think and feel you ae what you ae will emegea flesh and blood human being, fee of malice and soow and fee of any metaphysical delusions whatsoeve. He equates the ego with the psychological self, but instead of the usual undestanding of the soul as a spiitual entity, he claims the soul is nothing but the 'instinctual self. Hee the 0
Discourses sou is reduced to the ower emotiona / higher physica eve of experience A gain, a compete reversa of the panes There are many more exampes to be found, but ets sip to the fina and u timate parody of enightenment itsef What c an we expect when the 'socia identity has been disempowered and w e are ' actuay free? One can apperceive prime characteristics that actua freedom factuay show s In psychiatric terms, for ex ampe, these are caed : 'd epersonaisation (sefessness the absence of an entity that is caed ego and Sou or sef and Sef 'aexithymia (the absence of the affective fac uty no emotions, pa ssions or caentures whatso ever 3. 'dereaisation (the condition of having ost ones grip on reaity the 'rea w ord is nowhere to be found 4. 'anhedonia (the inabiity to affectivey fee peasure no hormona secretions me ans hedonism is not possibe Depersonaisation is a psychotic parody of nosef Aexithy mia is a psychotic parody of equanimity Dereaisation is a psychotic parody of emptiness Anhedonia is a psychotic par ody of nonattachment This is as cose to iving obivion as one coud hope for: fee nothing, desire nothing, thin nothing, imagine nothing Suey says.
Actua Freedom is a countertradition Richard is a counterinitiate If you are a practitioner of Actua Freedom, you have been seduced by a parody, and your spiritua deveopment is iter ay heading in the wrong direction Psychosis is not enightenment
A Desert of Roses M advice (like ou need it): drop this now, and get back to the good stuff Theravada, Magick, Sufism, whatever; anthing but this craz shit! Politcs and the Occult
There are man beliefs but onl one realit Or at least, b claiming realit is singular I mean theres onl one venue that can pla host to our beliefs (B all means appl our beliefs to a personal or simulated realit, if ou like, but dont expect the rest of us to notice) Soour beliefs are applied to a d omain of experience that we can share (to a greater or lesser extent) or else o ur beliefs cannot be seen to have been applied at all This domain is the con sensus realit Politics can be viewed as a guardian at the threshold of con sensus realit Politics is a word to describe those processes b which we organise how beliefs are applied or held in abeance These processes are how consensual realit is made, and also determine to an extent the content and characteristics of that realit Given the close relationship between politics and belief, its not surprising that occultism has embroiled itself in politics since the beginningespeciall politics in its more radical or re volutionar forms, sometimes progressive, sometimes reaction ar Because the occultist doesnt limit his or her experience to the consensus realit, the notion of ' heaven on earth or ' en lightenment, if ou likeis not just an ideal but a viable pro pos ition Changing the consensus realit so that others can also find their wa to heaven on earth is often one of the main aims of occult po litics Man who stick to the consensus view regard politics as a kind of metabeliefthat is, as merel a belief itself concerning what other kinds of belief it is appropriate to hold The sup pose that engaging with politics determines our beliefs, which in turn shape our actions, and in this wa earth might be brought a step closer to heaven The occultist, on the other hand, doesnt make a hard and fast distinction between action
Discourses and blif Occultism rcogniss that adopting a blif is itslf an action that rshaps rality-unlss youd lik to insist that your mind isnt a part of rality, an absurd notion, which is nvrthlss a ky tnt of th consnsus viw For whovr raliss that not only ar action and blif indistinguishabl, but also rality and whatvr w suppos stands 'outsid or 'against it and sks to chang it, thn for that prson th work of building havn on arth is ovr Power Tri
Powr is not th dfinition of politics but mrly on of its f fcts Consnsus rality is th domain of xprincs that w can shar and agr upon, and powr is a word that dscribs th xtnt of th ability possssd by an individual or group to shap and dfin thos xprincs, rlativ to othr individu als or groups Bcaus th occultist rcogniss ralitis ovr and abov th consnsus, h or sh has a quit diffrnt rlationship to powr from a prson limitd by th consnsus viw Th occultist r cogniss that th masur of powr is always rlativ, and thrfor has a maning only in thos placs whr th stand ard of that masur is agrd upon (As somon onc put it: 'Rndr unto Casar that which is Casars Th occultist may indd sk to acquir and xrcis powr, in ordr to rshap th consnsus rality in a way that nabls othrs accss to th ralisation of havn on arth, but this ho nourabl intntion is no safguard against wrongdoing or harm Powr is th ability to shap th cons nsus, which invitably supprsss crtain in trsts whilst advancing othrs Powr will always hav th sam kinds of ffct on popls livs rgardlss of who wilds it History is largly th story of th group s or individuals who hav hld powr and what thy hav d on with it Convntion al history, thrfor, is oftn writtn in answr to th qustion: o? But this is a qustion of marginal importanc to occultists, who ask it only as a mans for xpo sing th illusion of idntity
3
A Desert of Roses Seret Histo
Gay Lachmans ecent book Politics and the Occult (2008) casts inteesting light on the elationship between occultism and politics ove the past fou centuies, but Lachman egads the poject of building heaven upon eath fom within the con sensus view-that is, as lagely a matte of belie The histoians assumption is that occult beliefs aise in eac tion to the politics of an ea and that thei aims go lagely un fulfilled. This pespective infoms the widely pevalent view within academia that occult and esoteic taditions can be un destood though histoical analysis. Yet a histoy of occultism told by occultists wo uld pesent a adically diffeent view. Thoughout the ages, es oteic goups have attempted diffe ent solutions to the question of the elationship between powe and the attainment of heaven on eath. Sadly, this is not a sol uble poblem because the goal of heaven on eath lies outside consensus eality, wheeas the sphee ove which powe can have an influence is entiely within it. Powe and politics ae theefoe incapable of deliveing the New Jeusalem . No doubt, theye impo tant tools fo changing consensus eality, but heaven on eath depends upon tan scending consensus eality, which would imply eithe a politics that contadicted its own pinciples o a powe that denied its own authoity, neithe of which seems vey viable in the con sensus eality. In the Seventeenth Centuy the answe posed by the Rosicucians was the setting up of a woldwide netwok of en lightened heales, dedicated to seeking wisdom in all the na tions of the wold and cuing the sick fo fee. But afte the publication of thei manifesto, with its invitation to anyone shaing these aims to join in, no futhe communications wee eve eceived, causing many to conclude that its membes wee nonexistent and the whole m ovement a hoa x. This view of Rosicucianism suppots the consensus view that belief is detemined by po litics but is insufficient in itself as a fom of action o pactice. On the contay, we should view Rosicucianism as having been extaodinaily successful, be 24
Discourses cause anyone seeking to become a Rosicrucian had no option other than to fill the gap opened by the nonexistence of the movement. In the 'hoax of Rosicrucianism was a direct lesson that building heaven on earth proceeds not from espousing be lief for its own sake, but on ly for the sake of simply getting on with the job. There is no separation between act and belief in Rosicrucianism; anyone seriou s in their belief in Ro sicrucianism was a Rosicrucian. Rosicrucianism was a successful political manifestation of occultism because it came so close to actually embodying the paradoxical form of powe r that is the closest in consensual real ity that something could come to transcending that reality. It should be noted, however, that at the time the evident 'nonex istence of the movement attracted much m ockery and d erision from mainstream culture. Outside the mainstream, meanwhile, Rosicrucianism has remained quietly influential even down to the present day. By the Eighteenth Century, various forms of Freemasonry had picked up the mantle from Rosicrucianism, yet the political organisation of these occult groups was in a sense almost a mir ror image of Rosicrucianism . Instead of 'nonexistent members, we encounter in Freemasonry and its offshoots an image of en lightened beings so mysterious yet so endowed with power that they have become virtually inaccessible to anyone except those with high, elite connections. Unlike the Rosicrucians, groups such as The Bavarian Illuminati werent ridiculed for not existing, but were feared for existing 'too muchas invis ible networks wield ing undue political influence. In the Nineteenth Century another shift becomes apparent in Theosophy. The largely inaccessible and semidivine 'Hidden Masters were still in evidence, pulling the strings of human destiny from their Himalayan hideaways, but (luckily for the rest of us) Madame Blavatsky presented herself as on hand to transmit their wisd om . The leading figures among the Traditionalist movement of the Twentieth Century, such Julius Evola and Ren Gunon, or ganised themselves as a kind of Protestant response to Theo sophys Catholicism, insisting that anyone could access the 5
A Desert of Roses Hidden Mases diecly fo hemselvesbecause Gunon, Evoa and company were hose mases! The Tadiionaiss pesened hemselves as an elie band of enlighened leades, inviing ohes o paicipae in hei mission of seeing he ig noan masses away fom he disase of mod eniy. Whos Nazi?
This as goup aises a cucial issue, of couse, because of he maked simiaiy in he way hey oganised hei aim of cea ing heaven on eah wih he way he fascis dicao ships of he ime wen abou oganising he consensus ealiy of Euope. Bu, as Ive agued, po liics concens he pocesses by whic h be lief is oganised i n he eaive dom ain of consensus ealiy and has no beaing on he ceaion of heaven upon eah, which concens he absoue. In my view, he Rosicucians ook a bee appo ach because i was fa moe suble, bu he eliism of he Tadiionaiss doe s no ue ou he aainmen of hei aim. Anyone in doub should ake a look a Evoas Introduction to Magic (00) , which sil sands as one of he cleaes, mos diec and cuualy di vese books of magical pacice eve wien. The pacices de scibed in ha volume ceainly wok, and mos pobably did wok fo hose ha folowed hem. You can call me a Nazi apologis if you likebu youd be wong. In fac, Im an apologis fo occultism, which was somehing ha Hie des pised, desp ie umous o he conay in he sensaionais lieaue abou he Nazis ha spung up afewads-much of which has now been debunked (Lachman 008: 95) . The disinguishing feaue of occulism wih espec o poli ics is is efusa o sepaae acion fom beief and is ecogni ion of a eaiy beyond he consensual. Fom his pespecive, using eiism as a ool o bing people close o he absolue doesn enail beief ha eliism in iself is good, and neihe does i hod eiism as a fina goa. I does imply, howeve, a willingness o use ha paicula oo and an assumpion of is usefulness. In hese especs he way ha he Tadiionaliss o ganised hei aims was seiou sly flawed. 6
Discourses Lachman mentons how n the hstory of the occult we re peatedy encounter 'good guys sayng bad thngs (Lachman 2008: xv) Havng noted n occultsm the ntentona mergng of belef and acton, and the observance of realtes beyond the consensual, we are n a poston to better understand why ths s the case Good guys said bad things because they sometimes used their bad beliefs to achieve their good aims How ths refects on the future of occultsm s, of course, df fcut to predct Many occult organsatons of the present day are modeled on those of the past, or represent amagamatons of older forms What seems a fresher departure, however, are those esoterc organsatons that have modeled themseves on modern corporatons-such as Ken Wlbers Integral Institute or Andrew Cohens Evolutionary En lightenment Perhaps ths s an attempt to shed from e sotercsm any aura of the esoterc altogether; to repackage the project of heaven on earth as an unthreatenng 'commodty that anyone can pur chase But as a tactc, t brngs occultsm dangerousy cose to the consensua realty that t must n fact transcend n order to realse tsef It wll be nterestng to see to what extent ths type of organsaton succeeds n ts ams, and what the consequences n the consensus reaty mght be Personally, my expectatons are not great The Words of the M agi
The following is an interview conducted by Cole Tucker originally posted on the website Plutonica.net on 18th September 2009 COL E: D d you formuate the Co re Practce technques mmed atey after attanng the Knowledge and Conversaton of the Holy Guardan Angel (K&C), or dd t folow your successfu crossng of the Abyss? ALAN: I attaned the K&C usng a freeform rtua tech nque, but I came to deveop a smpler method base d on Father Thomas Keatngs Centred Prayer as I perssted n nvokng the HGA through the years 27
A Desert of Roses COLE: The baebones Coe Pactice descibed in Aans es say beas a stong famiy esembance to vipassana meditation. Duncan has mentioned a ongstanding inteest in Buddhism. In you wok, each of you pay homage to Danie Ingam and his fantastic wok. At what point did you pick up the inks between wisdom taditions and decide to adopt vipassana into you egua pactice? ALAN: Ive neve adopted vipassana as pat of my egua pactice, athough it was duing my cossing of the abyss that I came to eaise the same pocess was descibed by the Theevada pogess of insight mode. Late, I discoveed the same pocess descibed in the Ten Zen OxHeding Pictues, the achemica pocess, and many othe taditions. DUNCAN: My chaos magica taining demanded egua meditation pactice, but Id faen out with Bud dhism ten yeas befoehand and had not pactised since then. I discoveed In gams wok on the Intenet and found it absoutey awesome. Suddeny so much dopped into pace that had been missing fom my engagement with Buddhism a decade eaie. Chaos magic had instied in me the eaization that you can 'ust do it, and the pactice of magic in genea had aid the gound wok fo undestanding how eaity is maeabe and constuc ted fom the mind. Ingams mastey of vipassana was daunting at fist, not east because of the intense sensations of envy it aouse d in me. But eveyone is cap at me ditation in the beginning. If you keep at it and do it popey you make po gess. The agest pat of my pactice has been staightup dy vipassana. It was Aan who took up Ingams wok and showed me the inks between it and the othe maps of enight enment, incuding the AA / Tee of Life mode. The eaiza tion that the aim of ma gic is the same as enightenment I owe to Aan. COLE: Like Cowey, you each evoked Choonzon duing the peiod of cossing the Abyss. Coud you touch on the natue of this entity? Do you think the taditiona Abamein wok of caing up the egions of He and binding them to the Geat Wok opeates in an anaogous manne? Any wods of advice o waning fo those wo king towads the K& C? 8
Discourses ALAN: Choronzon can be considered the embodiment of a particular stage within the process of enlightenment known as 'The Spiritual Crisis, the dukkha nanas (in Theravada Bud dhism), or 'The D ark Night (in Christian Mysticism) . Enga ging with the process of enlightenment on a magical basis en tails the manifestation of these stages as visions, synchronicities or-in this particular case-as an encounter with an entity. It is not necessary to engage with the process in strictly magical terms, and for the dry meditator he or she need not expect an encounter with Choronzon although they will most certainly experience the Spiritual Crisis. The Abramelin work of calling up the legions of Hell and binding them to the Great Work is something entirely different from the encounter with Choronzon. The binding of the demons can be considered pre paratory work in ensuring all aspects of the self are in line with the aim of the magician. Using such a model, this work would take place before reaching the stage of the Spiritual Crisis. Working with Abramelin demons, i n my o pinion, is neither ne cessary nor desirable in magically engaging with the process of enlightenment. If anything, they are nothing but a pain in the arse. My advice for people working towards the K&C is to in voke often, dont be scared, and persist. DUNCAN: You certainly do not need intentionally to evoke Choronzon if you are engaging with the process. He will come. I remember getting hung up on trying to force his appear ancebut this was a waste of time. Confusion, disgust with the process, and the certain realization that it is all completely pointless are among the most common and the most powerful manifestations that Choronzon can take. Be especially on your guard against these. COLE: Your records of attainment for the grades of Magister Templi and Magus are rich and wonderful. I find myself re turning to them regularly and find the cutting through the bull shit really refreshing. In the Church of Satan and Temple of Set, each Magus utters a Word which supports that of the current Aeon. I didnt find any mention in your own works regarding this issue, although Alan mentions it in one of his essays (Chap man & Barford, 009a: 3). Comments? 9
A Desert of Roses ALAN: I eceived a wod fom my HGA whist pefoming the coe pactice some time duing the stage of Magus. This wod led to my discovey of the English Qabaah. It encapsu lated my definition of magick and would late evea the func tion and meaning of The Baptist's Head It pefecty encapsulated the sphee into which I was cast out (see below, p. 40). Refe ence to this wod is found in my magical eco d. DUNC AN: My wod to o was eceived well into the gade of Magus, duing an intense deam in which a hoifying ceatue appeaed. I ecognised I was deaming, masteed the fea and embaced the monste. The deam then continued, and the wod was given. It is an achaic Geek wod that means 'to de ceive. It appeas in Home, whee it is used in a context that e veas its meaning as 'deception but in a sense vey cose to 'peception. It confimed fo me that the souce and the d estin ation of my deveopment lies in the Platonic tadition. An ac count of this is incuded in my magical ecod. (See above, pp. 4.) COLE: Onto the contovesy On Api 3d, 009, the fist post on you site Open Enlightenment went up. Coect me if mistaken, but this eflected each of you claiming to have expei enced the big one, fina enlightenment. To stat off, since this event happened afte you each completed the tasks of Magus, doe s this mak the enteing of the gade of Ipsiss imus? Consid eing the mythoogy of the gade in the context of you wit ings, it seems that maybe this is whee the Buddhist pactice of moality comes into play. If a task of the Ipsissimus is to get eveyone (each ock and gain of dust) into the boat of Enight enment, then the job is neve done and so no living peson can claim the gad e. Am I just talking out of my ass hee? ALAN: Im afaid so Yes, enlightenment pope is the at taining of the gade of Ipsissimus, and accounts of ou expei ence with enightenment can be found on The Baptists Head, as well as on Open Enlightenment. So yes, you can conside myself and Duncan Ipsissimi (not sue if that is the coect pu a). Im petty sue a lot of people will find such claims delu sional, insane, impossible o egotistical. I emphatically uge anyone eading this not to believe a single wod we say; al I 30
Discourses ask is that you give fair consieration to our reco rs of the the pro cess of enightenment, an repeat the practices we folowe to confirm our experiences for yourself, if you are intereste in en ightenment Contrary to more or less everything I bet youve hear on the subject, enlightenment is a very real, natural hu man eveopm ev eopment ent that is is not ep enent on race race,, sex, eucation, wealth, sexua preferences, culture or geographica ocation Enightenment is your birthright as a human being, an you ont have to engage with it on a solely magical basis, or even entert ent ertain ain the the pomp p omp ous soun souning ing titles titles weve inhe inherite rite from the 9th Century for the various stages of the process The Buhist practice of morality is one of the three trainings un ertaken by the Buhist at the very beginning of his or her practice; it cannot be separate from the other two, concentra tion an wisom The equivalent of an Ipsissimus in the Buhist moel is the arahat, but it woul make no sense for an arahat to begin morality training only after enlightenment Likewise, moraity for the Thelemite begins before enighten ment in its form as the expression of the True Wil The grae of Ipsissimus is not efine by Buhist moraity, nor is the task of the Ipsissimus to enlighten everyone an everything For a efinitio efin ition n of the the tasks of the the various graes of the the A A , please ple ase see 'One Star in Sight COLE: Duncan, I was hoping that we cou eve a bit into your magickal backgroun, establish the creentias as it were In your bio, you m enti ention on paranormal experiences as a teenager eaing to your first magical experiments Woul you care to expan on that? DUN CAN : They were nothing nothing too untypica untypica for anyone anyone who abbles in those areas Most of it resulte from making an playing with a Ouija boar when I was about thirteen We ha spiritss giving us mess spirit m essages, ages, objects moving aroun , some anom alous energ energetic etic phenomena The mo st important important aspect asp ect of this was that, in later ife, those experiences just kept coming back an wount wo unt eave me alone I was wa s trying to settle own into a 'norma life with a proper job an responsibilities, but how can you o that when youve youv e witness witnesse e for yourself you rself reality reality refusing refusing to behave in the way that were tol it ought to? Thats what fi 3
A D eser esertt of of Ros Roses es naly deemined deemined m e o ake up magick. ough o have done i much soone. COLE Once you ook up magick, did you m ove saigh saigh ino ino esulsoiened wok? How did you appoach he Goeia? Do you hi hink nk missing he lionhide lionhide be sp eled disas disase e,, somehin so mehing g moe bas basic ic like neglecing iangle/ iangle/ cicle, o jus d ivide ivided d Wil W il and po o concenaion? DUNCAN My fis sefconsciously magical wok was leaning how o scy. bough a picuefame, pained he glass black, and sa on Haloween nigh saing ino i by candleigh. had had visions of a woman des sed as a s a piesess and hen se off on ying o find ou who she was. (The goddess Ahena, i uned ou.) A he same ime ook up Goeia-jus becaus e hough ha was w ha magicians did . My fis Go ei eicc woking was in ode o aac some 'likeminded peope. Of couse, you don need o eso o Goeia fo somehing ike ha-i was a compeely supid and pooly houghhough inen . . . Bu inen B u a few days d ays af afe e he iual ( (he he demo d emo n manifesed as a waiing voice in he wall of my bedoom-which was pey feaky) was on an ineview panel o seec a new sof wae develope a he place whee woked. Afe he peson we chose had saed wok, boowed a CD fom him ha conained some sofwae-bu aso a o of piaed eBooks on magick. uned uned ou ha ha he peson had se eced was deep deepy y ino magick and he inoduced me o he Chaos Magic scene. m sil in conac conac wih wih him; hes aso he peson wh os had he mos mindbending esuls fom woking wih Goeia ha ve eve come acoss. Bu soon leaned fom fom expeience expeience ha Goe Goe ia is 'leaky magic (as anohe magica colleague biliany de scibed i). Afe he fis iual, a gloweing sense of booding evi lingeed in my home fo days. Sholy afe anohe iua, my gifiends hai caugh fie. On ha occasion, whils doing he evocaion, objecs inside he cicle saed oing acoss he capew cape which seemed se emed vey evid en enly ly a messa ge fom he de mon ha i could 'ge a me wheneve i liked. haven ouched Goeia since, ahough confess have since aken pa in goup Goeic wokings. The poblem wih Goeia is ha is simpy a shiy magical famewok. Why bohe woking wih 3
Discourses entities that want to fuck you up, when there are other entities that obviously have yo ur best interests interests closer clo ser to heart? COLE: Now, you have stated that Alans success with his HGA working led you to begin your own Did this decision come as his results were just so interesting or did you feel an existential existent ial hole in or revealed by y our practice? DUNCAN: Its difficult to remember now I dont think I sensed a lack in my practice at the the time, becaus becausee I doubt dou bt Id ad ad vanced far enough to be aware of such a thing I was already getting some interesting results in my own work, including in vocations of LAM (see above, p 9f) according to the instruc tions provided by the Typhonian OTO In one of these visions LAM explicitly told me to approach Alan for advice-so I did When I saw the amazing work he was doing and its results, I followed along (Thank you, LAM) The problem with a lot of magicians is that they have big egos and so are always having to convince themselves that they know the best way to do things But its so important to recognise people who know more than you do, listen to what they say, and test out their ideas for yourself It was obvious to me that Alan was onto someth som ething ing important important D aniel Ingram Ingram has said that the the reason he got enlightened was that he learnt how to follow instructions And hes he s another wise old ol d stick to whom Im very indebted COLE CO LE:: I thi think nk your you r account of attainin attaining g the K&C K& C i s fascinat fascinat ing,, and mirrors my own in ing in a way You had decid decided ed to memor mem or ize Liber Samekh and work it until you attained, then hit a home run on your first time working through it Both of our experi ences, along with Alans (and really, many suggestions that Crowley gives), contraindicate the position that attaining the K&C is something only for supermen Crowleys own experi ence and his need for multiple attempts adds to this expecta tion Did the mythology surrounding the K&C make it difficult for you to accept that the event had actually occurred? DUN CAN: I didnt use Liber Samekh, as such, s uch, it was the plain old Bornless Ritual And I confess to not having much know ledge at all at the time time of the traditional traditional procedu res ALAN: I just assumed that, magickwise, anything Crowley could coul d do I could do, because hes just a human human being 33
A Desert of Roses DUNCAN: Because we had both come up though a Chaos Magick backgound, you have the expectation that you can get esults staight away, egadless of the amount of fuss you make about it I think that in etospect this mus t have helped a lot, because I didnt have the assumption that what I was d oing had to be vitually impo ssible o take a lifetime COLE: I had the undestanding that afte the K&C, I would neve have any touble deciding what to eat fo beakfast, whethe the gil favoued me o not, and my entie caee path would be laid out befoe me What do you say to those indi viduals who would challenge you attainment of the K&C? The OTO is not exactly chuning out individuals who have attained the K&C This in an oganization dedicated to Cowleys wod and paxis Do you think this eflects on you claim, o the o ganization moe? ALAN: F ist of all, most people who have dealt with the top ic entetain a bad model of the K&C usually as a esult of a na ive view of how magical esults manifest Fo instance, if I believed that the K&C can only occu as a liteally physical manifestation of the HGA in a pu ff of smoke to ad dess m e in a boom ing biblical voice, possibly in Hebew, then I would say it is neaenough impossible fo anyone to gain the K&C I cant comment fo evey membe of the OTO, because I havent met them all, but its pobable that an oganisation 'dedicated to Cowleys wod will have bought into Cowleys histionics on the subect (and many OTO membes that I have met have done ust that) Sadly, its my expeience that most Thelemites have failed to acknowledge the wondeful contibutions of Chaos Magick, leaving them looking somewhat naive when it comes to pactical magick With bad expectations of both magical es ults and the K&C, its no wonde that not many Thelemites have even attempted the K& C, and those that have, have failed COLE: As you have developed though the stages of En lightenment, what changes in you Relative abilities have you noticed? I emembe the claim that magickal effectiveness gets about 0 times bette afte the K&C With you account of the Andew Cohen semina (Chapman & Bafod, 2009b: 5f), I cant help wondeing, do you have the ability of shaktiput 34
Discourses now? Does just beng n your presence accelerate others devel opment? DUNCAN: Magckal effectveness has mproved vastly, but I dont do a s much practcal sorcery as I used to Thngs seem to fall nto place more easly on the whole, and there hasnt been as much need The Absolute takes the place of all that ALAN: Workng wth the HGA s a magcal engagement wth the process of enlghtenment The bggest lesson for me n ganng the K&C was the revelaton that I am not the centre of the unverse It s not the magcan that ' do es the HGA but the HGA that 'doe s the magcan The ego tstcal whms of the ma gcan are set asde n favour of the wll of the unverse As such, the vew of a cau sal relatonshp between a magcan and hs magcal results becomes largely redundant What s nor mally called 'magcal results certanly ncrease, but t would be foolsh to consder these results as a product of some knd of newly acqured superpowers Regardng shaktput or the transmsson of enlghtenment from one person to another, my comments on the wll of the unverse apply here too It s not the case that a person who has experenced enlghtenment pos sesses ether enlghtenment or the magcal power to transmt ths experence Shaktput s smply a case of ntersubjectve en lghtenment between two or more ndvduals who are ready and able to experence enlghtenment Its not a queston of whether myself and Duncan can 'transmt enlghtenment to others, but whether or not a person s capable of experencng ntersubjectve enlghtenment DUNCAN: Certanly, no one has made any comments to me about any radance or auras manfestng from my drecton COLE: Followng your clam of experencng full enlghten ment, I notced qute a furore from the parts of the onlne Buddhst communty that I follow (presumably based upon ths) Dd the response from these communtes, supposedly ded cated to tradtons of realzaton, surprse you ? DUNCAN: Outsde of Dharma Overground, I dont tend to follow many Buddhst webstes, so the 'furore was lost on us The resstance of Buddhsts to what seems to me the whole pont of ther tradton never ceases to amaze I medtate at a 35
A Desert of Roses Buddhist Centre every week, and am constantly a witness to cases of people who have been 'meditating in this tradition for decades without even a w hiff of the first jhana. When I attempt to introduce even the mildest technical terms into discussions, these are shunned or denied . Ive not declared m y arahatship to people at the centre, but I suppose itll come out one day. I hope they wont throw me out. So, the short answer is: no, this reaction from selfprofessed Buddhists doesnt surprise us at all. But by no means all Buddhists share the same view, and were pr oud to be friends and allies with many of the ones who dont. COLE: It seems you continue to receive discouragement from what Ill refer to as the Enlightenment Community. In light of this, Id like to go back to your criticisms of Western oc cultism and Chaos Magick in particular. Do you cut any slack to a tradition which allows for individuals within it to attain without it when other groups who claim to support attainment suppress frank discussions about it and often seem to disbe lieve in the po ssibility of attainment? ALAN: The point of Chaos Magick is not enlightenment but the use of belief as a tool. Chaos Magick is therefore not an en lightenment tradition and so its lack of enlightened practition ers is not com parable to the failings of the enlightenment traditions of the east. It should be noted that Chaos Magick is flexible enough to recognise and accept enlightenment as a real, natural and attainable human experience, being a practice based tradition. The mainstream examples of Buddhism, yoga and other eastern traditions of enlightenment are, in contrast, examples of dogma. I have never come across an ineffective Sufi lineage. DUNCAN: We give Chaos Magick a hard time, but we know the chaos magicians can take it! So far, the chaos magi cians weve debated with have lived up to the motto of 'noth ing is true, everything is permitted, because theyve tolerated our criticisms and not thrown us off the scene. Ive never come across a more tolerant and intelligent group of people. But, as Ala n says, Cha os M agick is not an enlightenment tradition and its affiliation with the tenets of postmodernism has rendered it 36
Discourses narcissistic and egocentric in many respects. It doesnt admit the Absolute, and therefore it doesnt have the means to enter tain even the concept of enlightenmentat present. COLE: The two of you both support experiencing final en lightenment before focusing on engaging the relative. In partic ular, Im thinking of Buddhist paths of Morality and Concentration. The Book of the Law professes a very different un derstanding of Morality practice than Old Aeon traditions. Duncan, you mentioned having moved away from practising. Not to pick on you, but you described an ambivalence which continues, though you have experienced enlightenment. What are your thoughts on New Aeon Morality practice? Has the peergroup of Old Aeon practitioners perhaps facilitated this trend? I havent seen much explicitly addressing these issues on your sites. ALAN: I know your uestion is aimed at Duncan, but pre dictably I have something to say. As someone who is not a Buddhist, I do not ascribe to the 'three trainings, nor do I see morality as a set of rules to be followed. This does not mean that I promote the idea of getting enlightened first and dealing with life later. The morality of The Book of the Law is summed up nicely in a single sentence: 'Do what thou wilt. From the Thelemic viewpoint, morality is a uestion of acting in accord ance with your true nature. Yes, The Book of the Law attributes behaviour to the hermit in complete o ppo sition to the tradition al view of the ascetic, but this is merely a device to illustrate that enlightenment is not simply the pro vince of celibate troglo dytes. It should be remembered that Liber Legis is delivered from three distinct perspectives on the same subject; we shouldnt make the mistake of literalism (stamp down the wretched and the weak, etc.). 'Do what thou wilt is only real ised when we engage with the process of enlightenment, and so the magician begins to exercise Thelemic morality the minute he or she lets go of the reins and allows his or her true willwhich is indistinguishable from the will of the uni verse-to exercise itself unencum bered . Now, its not in Duncans nature to get shitfaced and act like a whore; it would just be silly to expect to find him in a purple bed covered in 37
A Desert of Roses ewes, wih a huge sash of spice in his cupboad. his is simpy no his 'wi. DUNC AN: Howeve, I do own a leopadskin bedspead .. . In fac, Aan and I ae boh siing on i igh now ... M y own views on moaiy ae ha i is som ehing o be nferred fom ac ions ahe han appled o hem. Once he ue naue of he e laionship wih he Absoue has been eaized, no ohe view seems enable because al he shoulds and 'oughs ha di vided he self fomey (o seemed o ae now seen fo wha hey ae: eacions and sensaions aising wihin he eaive. Afe enlighenmen, is less easy o misake hem fo ules o inuncions ha appea o poceed om he Absoue. Fo his eason i seems o me o do no ham landing enighenmen as soon as pos sibe, ohewise is m oe likely ha a model of mo aiy based on an idea of folowing ues (o, indeed, on beak ing hem wil pesis. his is no fee, because any mode ha bases isef on ues is by is naue cu off fom he Absolue and emeges fom a divided and false self. Od habis die had. Enlighenmen doesn desoy anyhing, so i doesn make habis go away, bu i does make i easie o see hem fo wha hey ae, and so ove ime hey become easie o deal wih. COLE: In he essay 'Magic wih a K (Chapman & Bafod, 009a: 7, Aan caims ha Seianism is a couneadiion and ha i affics wih eniies who pohibi he meaphysica pocess. Coec me if Im wong, bu I hink his comes fom he Seian seeking he goa of immoaiy fo wha hey efe o as he Isolae Ineligence of each individual. In Uncle Setnakt's Essental Gude to the Left Hand Path (999, Don Webb menions he Seians ques fo enighenmen. Sephen Fowes ad desses how Cowey could achieve enlighenmen and be a 'Lod of he LefHand Pah in his book of ha ile (Fowes, 997. If he emphasis on eaive immoaiy is indeed he is sue (and if I have misundesood please expain whee I wen wong, a wha poin is he qualiaive ine dawn beween feeding yousef and poviding fo ones genea needs and one siving fo immoaliy? I hink ha we agee ha ceain ansiional sucues of he elaive sef ae desoyed in he
38
Discourses Enightenment prcess, but deep structures f the relative self appear t remain-hw else culd we cntinue this discussin? ALAN: The prblem with Setianism, and the viewpint u give here, is th e ver essence f the cuntertraditin itself: the misunderstanding f enlightenment, r f ur essential nature The idea that the eg has t die, r is smehw destred r damaged b enlightenment, is a false belief; but nevertheess, it is a ver real fear We are brn believing we are a subject r separate self, and that we m ust d ie; the mtivatin f the Setian is based n a perfectl understandable reactin t this, resuting in ding everthing pssible t reenfrce the subject, such as investigating the naive hpe f phsical immrtalit But the truth is that we are nt subjects r separate, and ur essential nature was never brn nr can it die The direct, persna ex perience f this is enlightenment Man f ur actins, per spectives and behaviurs are based n the ignrance f ur nature, and th e futie wish fr immrtalit, fr a sef r subject that never existed anwa, necessaril drps with enighten ment This desnt mean that we are n nger human with everthing that entais; and far frm being a 'transcendence r 'escape frm being human, it is the realisatin f an abslute intimac with all experience: it is the acceptance f everthing and the avidance f nthing With enlightenment, fr the first time in ur ives, we can enj being human simpl fr its wn sake, just as it is As, cntrar t what man a suppsed 'left hand m agician wud have u believe, the difference between the Left Hand ath and the Right Hand ath is ne f methd, nt aim The bth faciitate enlightenment See Tantra fr a vaid exampe f the Left Hand ath COL E: As Magi, an essential part f u burns as dust in the Cit f the ramids, but what abut the sphere int which ur 'Star cast frth t give light t the earth? Cud u tel us mre abut ur sense f missin and plans fr the future? D each f u fee like u shine in the same areas, r d u have cmpimentar rles? Where d es this lea d t? DUNCAN: I had a dream abut an rganisatin called 'AY IN Waste Dispsal when I went n m first retreat The path A YIN n the Tree f Life shws that I was cas t ut int H d 39
A Desert of Roses Im an inteectua and iterary sou at heart Im good at tech nica crap, itte detais, and I want to write ots of books about interesting things My HGA informed me it is an aspect of the archange Gabrie, who is often associated with communica tion, heaing and the emotions In one of our Enochian visions (or maybe it was a persona HGA workingIm not sure) we were tod that our future magica destiny invoved Aan driv ing a tank, and mysef manning an ambuance that foowed in its wake M ake of that what you wi! ALA N We shoud be carefu not to take the Theemic mo de of the process of enightenment as a itera description of what is experienced It is metaphor (even though I have seen the various different stages occur during vision), and extremey hepfu and accurate at that But there is no burning of essentia parts! 'Casting out into a sphere is a metaph or for the individu a acting in his or her true nature as a resut of under going the process of enightenment The Tree of Life is a compete fiing system for any experience or phenomenon one might en counter, and this incudes the personaity Generay, my nature fits very nicey under the sphere Geburah, and once I had crossed the abyss, or enjoyed a peak experience of enighten ment, this is the sphere I was ' cast out into Im not afraid of confrontation that resuts from simpy teing the truth As such, I expect my future to incude a ot of abuse from peope who dont ike what I have to say Ive had it from occutists for saying magick, Crossing the Abyss and the Great Work are not the soe province of specia peope, and Im currenty under attack from Buddhists and the wider 'enightenment com munity for taking about enightenment as if it was an or dinary, natura experience avaiabe to everyone B ring it on!
40
EPILOGUE
Epilogue What s The B aptist' s Head?
Back in 005, three chaos magicians decided to start a podcast, in part inspired by those other podcasting chaos magicians, The Viking Youth A name was required, and coming across the automated prophetic magical head of St John the Baptist in Grant Morrisons Te Invisibles (Morrison 996: 0) r wondered if 'The Baptists Head might be appropriate, consid ering we wou ld be talking about m agical matters Duncan and Shawn liked the name, and so it stuck Five po dcasts in and Shawn had left, and Duncan and r had found ourselves embarking upon an unexpected and marvel lous magical journey The Baptists Head became a record of our progress in completing the Great Work of Magick, some times known as awakening, realisation, liberation or enlighten ment Just over one year had passed and we had achieved the first traditional big step in reaching our goal (called 'Crossing the Abyss in the Western tradition, or 'stream entry in Theravada Buddhism), we had generated enough material for our first book, and it was obvious that the final destination of the Baptists Head would be our respective awakenings Tradi tionally, there is one more big step before full liberation, and r entertained myself with the absurd notion that we might pro duce another two books, one for each successive year, with the next step and final awakening conveniently occurring within that time frame still cant believe that this is exactly what happened If you think that stretches credulity, consider the following: not only did bo th Duncan and r become enlightened within the same timeframe (we really do have a strange relationship), but our awakenings were predicted a year before during a magical operation undertaken on a whim to contact the Great White Brotherhood, or the One True B ody of Saints Early on in my magical progress, r had been identified as 'The Camel, which as far as r was aware simply indicated an animal in service to humanity, and the path of Gimel on the Tree of Life that leads to Keter the Crown (God) For me, it was also a symbol for Truth, the crux of my new definition of ma 43
A Desert of Roses gick (hence the tite of my itte book The Camel Rides Again [007], which reintroduced the concept of truth into magick after the extreme reativism of postmodern magick). 'Came aso payed upon Kamae, the name of my Hoy Guardian An ge (HGA), and KIMIL, my 'word (a persona magica formua traditionay reveaed during the process of awakening) that in cidentay ed to my deveopment of Engish Isopsephy and my adaptation of Centring Prayer for working with the HGA. Up unti my enightenment, my practice had been heaviy magica, as the above demonstrates. But with my fina awaken ing, and as predicted by the Great White Brotherhood, I dropped the trappings of tradition and became concerned with the phenomenon of enightenment as a human event, not a ma gica or reigious one . My priority became pre senting the unity of those traditions that a described the same natura, human experience of reaisation, and I began the Open Enightenment project. Subsequenty, whist traveing in America, I chanced upon a copy of The Sus by Idries Shah. Turning its pages, everything was sud deny brought fu circe [T]he Arab mystics, ancienty known as the Near Ones (muqarribun) . . . beieved that essentiay there was a unity among the inner teachings of a faiths. Like John the Baptist, they wore cames woo, and may have been known as Sufis (Peope of Wo o) ... (Shah, 9 7: 89) So I was a 'came indeed! Was the origina Baptist one as we? It is important to note that (according to Shah) the Sufi is not just an Isamic mystic (Shah even goes so far as to say that Sufism predates Isam), but a true Sufi is anyone who has reached enightenment, being beyond the confines of any one tradition or reigion. Shah had a ot more to revea regarding the Head of the Baptist
44
Epilogue
In Sufi terminology, ras elfahmat (head of know ledge) means the mentation of man after undergo ing refinementthe transmuted consciousness. (Shah, 97 : 254) As legend has it, the Knights Templar were accused of wor shipping a head, sometimes called a 'Baphomet or 'Bafomet. Could this be a corruption of ras elfahmat? Or perhaps buhimat (Arabic: abuhamat), the 'Father or 'chief seat of understand ing? Its worth noting that the Arabic root for 'knowledge or 'understanding is FHM, the same roo t for the word 'black: The Baphomet is none other than the symbol of the completed man. The black head, negro head or Turks head .. . is a crusader substitute w ord .. . for this kind of knowledge. (Shah, 97 : 255) The shield of Hugues de Payen, the cofounder of the Tem plars, carried three black human heads, and the 'wondrous head theme recurs throughout med ieval history . Pope Silvester II made a brazen head, and A lbertus M agnus spent thirty years making his m arvellous brass he ad. However: The artificial head is not made of brass. Artificial it is, in that it is the product of 'work [the Great Work] in the Sufic sense. Ultimately, of course, it is the head of the individual himself ... In Arabic, 'brass is spelled SuFR, connected with the concept of 'yellowness. The 'head of brass is a rhyming homonym for 'head of gold, which is spelled in exactly the same way. The Golden Head (saritilai) is a Sufi phrase used to refer to a person whose inner consciousness has been 'transmuted in to gold by means of Sufic study and activity ... The phrase, 'I am making a head, used by dervishes to indicate their Sufic dedication in cer 45
A Desert of Roses ain exercises, coul d very well have been used by Al berus Magnus or Pope Silveser, and ransmied in he ieral sense, believed o refer o some sor of arefac (Shah, 9 7 556) So, righ from he beginning, and oblivious o our ignoran minds, he Bapiss Head was lieraly a hidden Wesern sym bol for enighenmen, and our 'building of he sie wih de scripions of our magical explois and progress was none oher han he making of our own 'heads ! The fina synchroniciy here is he fac ha he magical or ganisaion ha inroduced me o Duncan, and hereby inad verenly ed o he Bapiss Head projec, has as is paron he 'spiri of he ife energy of our pane, depiced in a composie form of man mammal repile (someimes known as he Sab baic Goa) and caed Baphomet Im a a loss o describe exacly how a of his occurred, bu uimaey i doesn maer. Wha maers is: when are you go ing o make a B apiss He ad of your own?
46
Notes Notes
. Poe (838), chapter 4. . Feu: French: fire, ight; feo: Spanish: ugy, pain; foy: Scots: a farewe feast, drink, or gift, as at a wedding, from Od French voie from Latin via road. Light on an ugy road? A 'Road to Damascus experience? 3. Elephairo Ancient Greek, 'to deceive. E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (898). The significance of this word is discussed further in the main artice, beow. In Greek Qabaah eep enumerates to 5 30 + 5 + 500 + + 0 + 00 0 = = 'star = 'shaft, stem. 4. See artice 'The Cross Correspondences, p. 80f. 5. See Chapman & Barford (009a), p. 9f. 6. After doing some research Ive determined that the materia cause for this may have been the action of icecrystas in the at mosphere. . See artice 'The Twittergatha, p. 3f, for other tweets I wrote at and around this time. 8 . See Chapman & Barford (009a), p. 65 . 9. See Chapman & Barford (009b), p . 3f. 0 . Vincent Horn is the originator and host of the Buddhists Geeks website and po dcast. . See Chapman & Barford (009b), p. 333 . . See artice 'The Tempe Working Expained, p. 09f. 3 . See Chapman & Barford (009b), p. 90 . 4 . A conference hed at Conway Ha, London, on 6th September, 008. 5. See Chapman & Barford (009b), p. 8f. 6. See Chapman & Barford (009b), p. 380f. . See Carington (96) and Heywo od (9 8) for more on Caringtons research and its position in the history of parapsy choogy. 8 . See Mansfied (995) for an indepth investigation of syn chronicity and criticism of Jung. 9 . Known as 'The Upanisa Sutta or 'The Discourse on Sup porting Conditions. See Bhikkhu Bodhi (00). 0. S ee http:/ / tinyur.com/3yfnch (interactivebuddha .com) . 4
A Desert of Roses 2. See: http:/ / www. openenlightenment.org. 22. http:/ /tinyurl.com/ 2ffnypr (actualfreedom .com .au) . 2. http:/ /tinyurl.com/ 2cpyzv (actualfreedom .com .au) . 24. http://tinyurl.com/25q64dk (actualfreedom.com.au). 25. This text by Crowley and its significance was d iscusse d in Chapman & Barford (2009a: 20f). 26. These experiences are discussed in detail in Barford (200) . 27. At the time of writing (June, 20 0) The Viking You th seem to have fallen silent and havent produced a podcast in over a year. Their website: http: / / www.thefeedlot.org. 28. This was, of course, 'The Tempe Working . The working it self is documented in The Urn (Chapman & Barford, 2009b) and its results examined in the present volume, p. 04f. 29. Or 'English Qaballah . See Chapman & Barford (2009b), p . 25. 0. See http://www.openenlightenment.org.
48
Refereces References
Bafod, Duncan 00) Occult Expermets the Home Persoal Exploratos of Magck ad the Paraormal London Aeon Bodhi, Bhikkhu 00) 'Tanscendental dependent aising a tanslation and exposition of the U panisa Su tta http / / www accesstoinsightog/ lib / authos/ bodhi w h ee77html accessed June 00 ) Boges, Luis Boges 985) 'Nightmaes In Seve Nghts Tanslated by Eliot Weinbege New Yok N oton Bewe, E Cobham 898 ) Dctoary of Phrase ad Fable Caington, Whately 976) Thought Trasferece New Yok Ceative Age Pess Chapman, Alan 007) The Camel Rdes Aga A Prmer Ma gck Bighton He ptachia Chapman, Alan 008) Adva ced Magck for Begers London Aeon Chapman, Alan & Duncan Bafod 009a) The Blood of the Sats Bighton Heptachia Chapman, Alan & Duncan Bafod 009b) The Ur Bighton Heptachia Cowley, Aleiste 974) The Book of Thoth Yok Beach, ME Weise Evola,Julius, and the UR Goup 00 ) A Itroducto to Magc Rtuals ad Practcal Techques for the Magus Rocheste, VT Inne Taditions Flowes, Stephen E 997) Lords of the Left-Had Path Runa Raven Pess Heywood, Rosalind 978) The Sxth Sese Hamondswoth Penguin Ingam, Daniel 008) Masterg the Core Teachgs of the Buddha London Aeon Books Ingam, Daniel 0 0) 'An e ssay about aahats http / / www inteactivebuddhacom/ aahatsshtml accessed June, 00) 49
A Desert of Roses Koesle, Ahu (974) The Roots of Coincidence London: Pan Books Lachman, Gay (2008) Politics and the Occult The Left The Right and the Radically Unseen Wheaon, IL: Ques Books Mansfield, Vico (995) Synchronicity Science and SoulMaking Chicago & La Salle, IL: Open Cou Mooe, Alan & JH Williams (2003) Promethea Book 2 Tian Books Moison, Gan (996) The Invisibles Say You Want a Revolu tion New Yok: DC Comics Poe, Edga Allan (838) The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Powes, Tim, Gwen Lee & Dois Elaine Saue, eds (2006 ) What If Our World Is Their Heaven ? The inal Conversations of Philip K Dick London: Duckwoh Roy, Achie E (2008) The Eager Dead A Study in Haunting Bighon: Book Guild Publishing Shah, Idies (97) The Sus New Yok: Ancho Book s Tyson, Donald (997) Enochian Magic or B eginners Woodbuy MN : Llewellyn Vayne, Julian (2008) Magick Works Stories of Occultism in Theory and Practice Oxfod: Mandake Webb, Don (99 9) Uncle S etnakt 's Essen tial Guide to the Left Hand Path Runa Raven Pess Woolley, Benjamin (2002) The Queen's Conjuror The Life and Magic of Dr Dee London: Flamingo oha, Dana (990) The Quantum Sel New Yok: Quill/Willi am Moow
50
Index INDEX
Abramelin 1289 absolute, the 95f (see also: 'Emptiness). abyss, the 21, 89 Actua Freedom 11 7 Adversary, The 107 (see also: 'NONE). Aeneas 13 aethyr 39, 44f. Aexithymia 121 aliens 67-8, 111 anagami 23, 92. Andaman Isands 63, 113114. Anderson, Reb 28 anges 11. arahat 35, 93 Arunachaa Ramana 56f, 1067, 111. Ask The Family 16 Association of Ideas, The 71 Athena 132. Aurobindo 52. Auroville 55 automatic writing 40. Bafour, Arthur James 82f Bafour, Gerald 83f. Baphomet 145 Bavarian Iluminati, The 12 5. bene elohim 1 1 . Back Brotherhood 78f, 107f Bavatsky, Helena Petrovna 125. Book of the Law, The 137 Borges, Jorge Luis 13-14 Buddhism 91£, 97f, 131, 1356; Therevada 1 28; Zen 128 Byzantium 110-1 caesar 62. came 1434 Carington, Whatey 69f Casaubon, Meric 86 casting out 139-40 cathedral 1089. centred prayer 127.
chakra 23, 25, 30f, 34. chaos magick 128, 134, 1367. Choronzon 39f, 128-9 cobra 49. Cohen, Andrew 53, 127 compassion 30 confusing the panes 109 consciousness 36 CoombeTennant, Henry Augustus 83f CoombeTennant, Winnifred (Mrs. Willett) 83f. core practice 127-8 counterinitiation 1 18 . Cross Correspondences, The 80f Crowley 19, 44, 75, 85-6, 133, 134 Daoism 75 Dark Night, The 129. Dee, John 84f. Delusion 92, 96-7 demon 50, 712. depersonaisation 121. derealisation 121 Dharma Overground, The 119, 135. doubt 345. dragon 48, 63 ecstasy 78f. elephairo 12f Emptiness 23, 256, 289, 32, 54, 89 90, 121 (see aso 'The Absolute). enlightenment 78, 21£, 36, 60f, 95f, 135f, 144. Enochian 85 equanimity 121 ESP 87. Evola, Julius 125-6 '555 113. Fowers, Stephen 138. Freemasonry 125 fruition 46 Gaia House 27f Ganesha 57, 62. 151
A Desert of Roses gnome 51, 62 God 36 Goenk, SN 76-7 Goet 132 Grnt, Kenneth 19 Gret Chn of Beng 117 Gret Work, The 89f Grney, Edmnd 14, 8f Hrpocrtes 19 hed (of the bptst) 144£ Herces 48 Herpkhered 192 Hoy Grdn Ange, The 22, 39f, 89, 114-6, 14 Knowedge nd Co mmncton of 127f Hdden Msters 125 hstory 123f Homer 1213, 13 Horn, Vncent 51 Hors 2 Ind 47f, 113 Ingrm, Dne 93, 13, 128, 133 ntton 188 ntenton 28-9 Ipsssms 8, 131 Jehovhs Wtness 33 jhn 24 Jng, Cr Gstv 72f 'K object 7f krm 28f, 35, 87f, 115f Ketng, T homs 127 Kelley, Edwrd 84f ketmne 44f Knghts Tempr 145 Koestler, Arthr 72 Krshnmrt, Jddh 86, 88 Lchmn, Gry 124, 127 LAM 19f, 133 Lo-Tz 19, 21 LeftHnd Pth 1389 Lyttleton, Mry 83
mgck 9, 96 Mgns, Aberts 145-6 mgs 139; the word of 13 Mrx, Hrpo 19 M trmndr, The 5455 Moore, An 19 morlty 137-8 M orrson, G rnt 143 Mother, The 54 Myers, Frederck 14, 8f Nzsm 126 nerodh sm ptt 24, 94 ndn 97 Nshd Ktro 35 noself 121 NONE 17 (see lso 'The Adversry) Ob 39f Occltsm 1223 Odysses 13 Open Enghtenment 8, 13 OTO 134 oj 131 prnorm 1312 Pyen, Hghes de 145 Peneope 13 Poe, Edgr An 11 poltcs 122f Postmodernsm 96 power 123f prophet 114 psed ontton 118 ps 68f psychoss 121 psychotherpy 91£ Pre Conscosness Experence (PCE) 12 Qbllh (Engsh) 47 Rmn Mhrsh 5, 54, 55f relty 17, 122 remote vewng 7
5
Index Ren Gunon 125-6 Rhine, J B 69 Rosicrucianism 124£ Roy, Archie E 82 sakadagami 93 savia divinorum 14f samadhi 52 samatha 36 Satan, Church of 129 scarab 73 sef 76f, 95, 120 Set, Temple of 129 Setianism 1389 sex magick 85 Shah, Idries 144£ shaktiput 134-5 Shiva 48, 49 siddhi 90 Sidgwick, Henry 14, 80£ Sivester II (Pope) 1456 Soal, Samue 6970 Society for Psychica Research (SPR) 69, 80f soipsism 36 Spare, Austin Osman 75 Sufism 144£ swallow 114 synchronicity 72f, 112
UFO 67-8 universe 46 Vayne, Julian 76f vedana 94 Viking Youth, The 19, 143 Virgil 1213 Vivekananda 50 Webb, Don 138 wei wu wei 75 Whee of Life 98 White Brotherhood 107f Wilber, Ken 127 Word Egg 55 Xepherite 78 Yemen 110 YouTube 18 zipper £
tarot 49-50, 54, 103-5, 115 Tempe 7, 28, 104£ Thelema 131 Theosophy 86 Titmuss, Christopher 22f, 34 Traditionaism 126 trance 45 transcendental ni dana s 100£ transmission effect 56 (see aso: 'shaktiput) Tree of Life 97f Tubeway Army 26, 34 Tucker, Cole 127f Twitter 21, 32f
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