Wednesday, December 21, 2016

The Hermetic Lessons


I started the Hermetic Lessons blog to attempt to spread the material on the Metabolism of Time into the wider consciousness of the Western Mystery Tradition as well as providing opinions and insights on the practical application of magick in general.  Whilst being a published author gives legitimacy and to some extent a small (?) living (?) I don't need the money and I don't think small prints of books are the best way of disseminating ideas although I do think they can be beautiful objects.  One of the potential problems with ''authors'' and their effect on the community as I see it is the temptation to sit on ideas or research until they become books reducing the immediacy and potential range of their impact.  How many ideas died this way before they even became books?

Since I started the blogosphere has mainly died off (with some notable exceptions) in favour of magicians dicking about on facebook/tumblr or engaging in futile political rants because a) that is a damn sight easier than having to write a blogpost and b) it generates more social traffic these days.  I prefer blogging to such social media chit chat and posturing because of what it does to the relationship I have with my ideas.  I am sure there are still a few bloggers who can resonate with this. Anyway there has been a renewed interest in the blog over the last couple of months and partially I think it is to do with the lack of geunine content being produced elsewhere (again with notable exceptions).  I wish it wasn't this way but it kind of is. 

I made a post about Cellular Consciousness a few days ago which has a set of links that can guide you to what I think are the core discoveries of the Blogos and its these ideas that I am mainly trying to spread around so please help with that if you can.  I understand there is an intellectual gap when it comes to knowledge of the sciences in the occult community but have a go at wrapping your head around the ideas as they will enrich your perspective on your own innner being and how it relates to this model of consciousness.  For people who are struggling to make headway in the WMT at all or are realising that ''material'' desire fulfilment might not be the be all and end all of being involved in the mysteries I just want to give a few points of advice, I think these few things saved me a great deal of wasted time getting lost in the labyrinth.

1. Raja Yoga, Dzogchen or something similar - this should form part of your practice as early as possible.  The idea of restraining oneself from and observing other practises i.e. vegetarianism is perfect training for the will and the way in which the system then applies that will to more challenging states - asanas, pranayamas, pratayharas - finally culminating in an apprehension of the true nature of mind is vital for rapid progress.

2. Pulling  - When trying to affect the physical world around you (and I don't mean levitating stuff) direct your psychic influence through pulling rather than pushing.  Holding your fingers to your temple and attempting to push stuff about, as it is portrayed in many comic books and other fiction,  will not work at all because that is the wrong part of your brain - the frontal cortex is the seat of the will and is really good at stopping you doing things but not that useful for direct influence.  You need to use the back of your brain and the ''force'' (whatever it is) is directed into yourself (drawn in to the pineal and cerebellum) as opposed to pushed out (from the pineal).

3. Astral Body -  As discussed repeatedly throughout the Hermetic Lessons your true nature is mental, you inhabit a mental universe which is made of your sensations, perceptions, thoughts and concepts, which is in itself buried somewhere in the rest of your mind which may or not actually be in a physical body in a physical universe.  One of the easy mistakes to make when astrally projecting is that a lot of advice sites tell you to imagine your astral body rising out of your body and what this tends to do is shift your imaginary perspective to a third point where you are trying to see that body rise out of your physical body.  Lots of time can be wasted here.  Lie on your back and then pull yourself up on to the astral plane you are already in your astral body right now you don't need to imagine anything.

4. Jewish Kabbalah.  I was lucky in that I only poured a few years into the deeply flawed and logically inconsistent systems of so-called ''Hermetic Qabalah'' that the Western Mystery Tradition largely relies upon before a small band of plucky Kabbalistic mentors saved me from this massive (mostly) time waste.  It should be a no-brainer.   If you are going to study ''QBL'' then include a great deal of Jewish sources from the get go - I started with Kaplan, Idel, Scholem and Hallamish.  If you don't do this then you are perversely maintaining a kind of weird ignorance about one of the most important foundations of what you do and you need to have a good long conversation with yourself about why you are doing that.  Its bizarre and illogical so sort it out.

5. Purity.  I dimissed the notion of religious cleanliness, virginity, innoncence, etc in the WMT for a long time as unnecessary historical baggage but I see that a clear heart is fundamental to success in these endeavours and that I recieved this training from the East.  I am not talking here about Faustian pacts with spirits to get you all that bling and worldy adventure that you desire I am talking about accessing higher realms in astral form.  ''You'' are ''your'' own worst enemy when it comes to keeping ''you'' mired in 3d delusional reality and the egoic babble of anxiety, pride, malice etc will block all entry to higher worlds.  Bathing, wearing white, anything that establishes the ideas of cleanliness, openness and innoncence is practically beneficent but most importantly you have to quell that egoic noise as much as possible.  I can blame most of my failure on this and I am sure you can too.



Anyway a few things to think about and have a Merry Christmas everyone!  If you do pledge to write more in the New Year - stick to your promise this time, eh?  The next month should have given everyone who is anyone time to see the Arrival and we'll be continuing with why the two images above are closer than you think when it comes to ''exploring'' non-linear time and its relationship with language.



Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Time Travel - Fourteen Minotaurs


Not only have I imagined these games, I have also meditated on the house.  All parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is another place.  There is no one pool, manger or drinking trough; the mangers, drinking troughs and courtyard pools are fourteen (infinite) in number.  The house is the same size as the world; or rather it is the world.  However, by dint of exhausting the courtyards with pools and the dusty gray stone galleries I have reached the street and seen the Temple of the Axes and the Sea.  I did not understand this til a night vision revealed to me that the seas and temples are also fourteen (infinite) in number.  Everything is repeated many times, fourteen times, but two things in this world only seem to be repeated once: above, the intricate sun; below Asterion.  Perhaps I have created the stars and the sun and this enormous house, but I no longer remember.

The House of Asterion, Jorge Luis Borges

According to Raziel there are not an infinite variety of ''yourselves'' in different timelines only 14 variations. The vast majority of timelines and versions of you do not cohere and are effectively dead or non-existent - much like the vastness of space is mostly supervoid.  The 14 variations of you that survive have preexisting histories and you cannot change any of what happens to them - they are your 14 personal fates.  What you can do is, at certain moments in your life, use a branching moment to swap between them - like you can change tramlines but not drive the tram as you wish. Although people often think magick is about creating new realities from infinity it is really about changing tracks in a much smaller ''world''.

The 14 variations are based on the 7 planetary kingships and their 7 inverses:

  • Wisdom vs Idiocy (Saturn)
  • Wealth vs Poverty (Jupiter)
  • Fertility vs Infertility (Mars)
  • Health vs Illness (Sol)
  • Power vs Slavery (Venus)
  • Peace vs War (Mercury)
  • Beauty vs Ugliness (Luna)

They exist because they are woven out of the very fabric of story itself.*  What that means right now is that you are one of these archetypal 14 - the healthy one, the poor one, etc - and although we are all at any moment a ratio of all 14 principles, one will be king.  To some extent you are free to form an opinion on these worldly conditions - some find misery in riches, some find strength and art in the adversity of illness, etc.  The poor and sick have their adventures and their contributions to the story are as vital and valid as those of the rich and powerful.  Some choose the poor line for monkish reasons, others for revolutionary ones.  If you are unhappy with the story of your life you can change tracks to another one.

The lines are effectively woven out of a median self, an ''average'' version of you that does not exist in any of the 14 but only ''mathematically'' - for example the rich and poor versions will only be relative to this median self, for some it may be the difference between lower middle class and upper middle class or for some there may be a true rags to riches story and vice versa.

The lines are joined by robust branching moments and the way these moments manifest are significant events, which are preceded by synchronicities.  As you approach a significant event, and therefore a chance to change lines, you will notice an uptick in the number of synchronicities.  As you recede from the event this number will decrease - think the Doppler Effect but applied to timelines.**  The vast majority of yes/no decisions in any given moment aggregate towards the same robust branching moments.

FEED ANNUALLY WITH 7 YOUTHS AND 7 MAIDENS

In practising planetary magic what you are actually doing is noticing the moments to change planetary tracks and then steadying yourself on that track so you don't inadvertently swap back to another track.  For example, ''Jupiter magic'' will guide you to the wealth line and then more proactive Jupiter magic will maintain you on that track.  Although there are 14 versions of ''you'' and therefore ''you'' are still trapped by Fate, there are many different routes through them.

Although discussing Fate in this way and our very limited abilities to choose our own adventure may sound ''doomy'' in reality it is central to the way in which Zeus slays Cronus.  By embracing a ''4D'' block time perspective as opposed to a ''3D'' linear time perspective the God of Lightning (massless time travelling light) slays the God of Time (perishable ''linear'' matter).  If you are questioning what you should do next, or why you are here, what the planets are doing is realising the confounding infinity of the chaos of the universe (most of which is dead, uninhabitable or ''unrealisable'') into these 14 navigable beams which ''cohere'' because they are based on the fundamental principles of story and produce our archetypal selves.  If health is important to you then you contact Sol, if wisdom is important then Saturn, if beauty then Luna.

What will my redeemer be like?  I ask myself.  Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man?  Or will he be like me?

The House of Asterion, Jorge Luis Borges


*All of these stories also culminate in the invention of time travel which is why they cohere in the first place.
**This is important when navigating time via synchronicities.  If you are focused on the synchronicities themselves as opposed to their frequency or the significant event they are indicating you can miss opportunities to change lines.

Monday, December 5, 2016

Cellular Consciousness, the Metabolism of Time and the 231 Gates


Does a tree feel?  Does a river run?  Is a sunset sad?  Does an ocean smile?  I'm an intellectual mass of cells.  I am a clockwork of subatomic movements.  I am a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in miniature.

Fernando Pessoa, Disquiet

In order to understand the principles of the Metabolism of Time it is necessary to view the structure of your consciousness as a mirror image of the biological cells that make up your body.  The feeling of being in the body-self is the mental equivalent of the chromosomes, the feeling of the extent of your physical reach is the nuclear membrane (nucleus) within which the chromosomes are stored, the limits and contents of perception represent the limits and contents of the cell (the cytoplasm) and the cell membrane represents the boundary between the rest of your mind and the place wherein the bubble of perception is held.




The experience you are having right now in the room you are sitting is buried or nested somewhere in the rest of your mind - beyond the limits of your perception (wall or horizon) you will not find more of the physical world but the rest of your mental world.  Just like the nucleus interprets and processes the contents of the cytoplasm so you are interpreting and processing your immediate percieved environment.  The objects located in that percieved environment of the room also find their corollary in the cell - i.e. you have windows and doors like the cell membrane has gates and receptors, you have a heat and light source like the cell has its mitochondria. When you walk down the street, the appartments buildings rise up beside you like a wall of tissue along a capillary. The helixes are represented as personified hourglasses to show the link between time and the digestion of experience and the facial expressions show the transition between being a finite physical object in a 3d world to an infinite mental object in a 5d world - they show an evolution in the individual's relationship with their place in time and how in order to escape the cave you have to know it.*








When people first learn about the occult maxim of ''as above, so below'' they tend to come across this idea of a relationship between the structure of the solar system and the structure of the atom - likening the outer particles to the planets and the atomic nucleus to the Sun.  What makes the structures outlined in the Metabolism of Time more useful to us is that our cellular nature and our consciousness are way closer to home than distant nuclear fireballs or the quantum foam.  The alchemical possibilities are legion.


In order to realise a more detailed model than the outline above (and therefore one which is capable of greater specificity when it comes to application) you have to elaborate this simple view of cellular consciousness with even more parallels.  The links below are to some of the more important parts of the work on this site and it is worth refamiliarizing yourself with them before we move on.


These relationships between the cycle of cellular time and the cycle of consciousness are extremely important to us in our lives - we are very familiar with fatigue, with mania, with hunger, with lust - and these sensations are regulated by molecular clocks which are stored in our tissues and concentrated in the SCN (suprachiasmatic nuclei - a cluster of around 20000 cells situated by the pineal gland - the master clock), the liver and the genitalia.   Seeing the movements (internal and external) of your physical body as the movements of your chromosomes directly links them to the genetic dance of creation.


The 231 Gates represent all possible pairings between the 22 Hebrew Letters (code for Kabbalistic astrology i.e. principles of time) when placed in a circle (gilgalim - cycles) and it is said to oscillate back and forth generating fortune and ill-fortune - bliss and plague. Similarly the body reads its genetic information, pairing up amino acids into chains in order to create proteins to maintain the status quo against both harsh conditions and ''too much of a good thing''. A protein is released into the cellular environment from the chromosomes in the same way an action is released into the percieved environment from your physical body.  Conversely rather than being manufactured inside the cell nucleus, proteins can enter the cell from the blood through membranes in the same way an event enters your percieved environment from the bloodstream of time.  In other sections of the Hermetic Lessons we have detailed how to examine the event by its characteristics and therefore respond accordingly.

In Sefer Yetzirah the 12 zodiac signs are specifically related to the concepts of speech, thought, motion, sight, hearing, action, coition, smell, sleep, anger, taste, laughter - the essential modes of our physical body.  Similarly the 12 basic genetic rhythms cover the modes of the chromosomes as they work to maintain your life.  In Sefer Yetzirah, the 7 planets are related to the worldly conditons of wisdom, wealth, fertility, health, power, peace and beauty manifest in your percieved environment and in the Metabolism of Time we relate them to the 7 cellular organelles which makeup the structure and contents of the cytoplasm.  Finally our 3 elements of air, water and fire are related to the systems of oxygen, water and energy necessary to maintain your life.

I am handed faith like a sealed package on a strange looking plate and am expected to accept it without opening it.  I'm handed science like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank.  I am handed doubt like dust in a box - but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?
Fernando Pessoa, Disquiet


*Many years ago I performed a tarot experiment using a 22 card spread which represented these principles of cellular consciousness and used it to ''take photographs'' of my body.  Repeating this experiment daily I was surprised to watch events being digested by my body and cards of the same suit being broken down into smaller numbers in my lower body, or indeed built up into larger structures in the same way proteins are assembled.  You could watch a major arcana card move through your body in this way.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Raziel - Consciousness as Anti-Time II


How often in this age-old trajectory of the worlds, a stray comet must have brought an Earth to its end!  A catastrophe so utterly material will determine the fate of countless mental or spiritual projects.  Death, spies on us like a sister of the spirit, and Destiny... Death is our being subject to something outside us and we, at each moment of our lives, are but reflections and a consequence of what surrounds us.  Death lurks in our every living act.  Dead we're born, dead we live and already dead we enter death.  Composed of cells living off their disintegrations, we're made of Death.

Fernando Pessoa


Whilst it is nice to discuss things in general terms it is important to have a science that is capable of handling the details of fluctuation in the time/anti-time field that we experience as reality.  Time speeds up, slows down and events seemingly from the past are regurgitated into the future.  Some language and science to discuss this subject have been emerging from the dialogue with Raziel - closed time streams, pinch-points, robust branching moments, synch pings, non-realisable time, Year 0, etc - and eventually these ideas will coagulate and become one with the original channelled work on the Metabolism of Time.  These terms, drawn from the future, are part of a codex of concepts necessary for temporal navigation and freescaling.

But what can the original work (much of it detailed here in the Hermetic Lessons) tell us about where we are right now in the closed time stream?

THE METABOLISM OF TIME

From looking at the diagram of the Metabolism of Time, which details the processing of a single moment all the way up to how large groups differentiate in order to assist in the digestion of time, we would expect any period of looking towards the past - be it nostalgia, regret, grief  (2016's key themes) - to be characterised by the modes of Remembering, Forgetting and the Altered Past.  The elements of the endocrine system that relate to this are the kidneys, adrenal glands and genitalia - so cleaning the blood, fight/flight, fixed gender expression, stress control and reproduction.  The physiognomical archetypes that will rise to political dominance during these periods will be high testosterone, high adrenaline and high cortisol. Negative psychological traits that will emerge enmasse are vengefulness (adrenaline), emotional restraint/coldness/lack of compassion (cortisol) and deviancy/impulsiveness (testosterone) - the last one leading to a rise in violent crime. The world will turn against the ''individual expression'' that dominated the pancreatic period of the present-focused world (late 90s to mid teens, the Inner Mind in the diagram above) which also featured a lot of obesity, living in ''the moment'', and sugar rushes and ''return'' to a pre-egoic focus on uniformity, where fat will be heavily frowned upon, your food will be starchier/high fibre, and savings will be encouraged. In the entertainment industry we can expect a rejection of ''stars'' and a return to technical proficiency as the set of virtues required to be successful as opposed to a massive ego - the rise of the unknowns.

Hopefully the astute amongst you can understand why these elements of the biological organism (kidneys and genitals) can produce a kind of fascism.  Having been to the future there is a twist and the Wall won't be built the way you necessarily think it will.  The genuine fascist elements lie in the millenial generation of identity politikniks, vegans, Brand-esque communitarians, etc and finally emerge as eco-fascists supported by various global entities at the very latest in 2030 as opposed to the Brexiteers and Trumpeters who are all nearly dead anyway.   The eco-fascists' rise will be assisted by a series of environmental disasters mainly relating to food and water.  The de-growth world that follows will be fairly strictly regulated by international bodies and people, trained and monitored by social media, will police the norms and expectations. You will be going ''off the grid'' and living with solar powered hydroponic gardens in a grow your own food perma-culture hipster paradise but some of that energy will be siphoned off to continue to feed/fund Deep State technology.  Essentially you'll be expected to farm energy and pay your tithes. Ecological catastrophe will be used to justify the militarisation of the UN against this global emergency.   A Dharma 2.0 form of materialistic meditation spreads rapidly (there are already many many seeds of this in the yoga centres on every corner, in the corporate lectures on mindfulness, etc).

After a revolutionary phase in the initial period where the incumbent police state i.e. the one we see forming right now, executes some protesters in gory fashion, thus martyring them and forcing change (early 20's) this near future becomes extraordinarily boring although it is healthier than the current phase.  The deaths from ''climate change'' induced disaster (man-made for sure, but maybe again not in the way you think) will not be as severe as some speculate but they will be enough to galvanise and radicalise the population.  Your soy will be ethically sourced but you're not getting your hands on the cloned hearts. As far as we can tell there will be some major defection from within the Deep State towards the end of this period (late 30's), which unveils a lot of seriously advanced technology, but by then we will be getting close to Year 0 (late 40s?? - it becomes more difficult to see) when what is probably an AI will initiate the successful time travel experiment that creates the pinchpoint - a singularity type event - and floods our planet with time travellers from the future, bringing the museum/pocket dimension of ''inviolable fate'' to an end and releasing the few who can keep their wits about them into the genuinely free astral future. Fun huh?  This future is not for me although I will see a good chunk of it.  Afterwards I am heading back downstream to the 3rd  millenium B.C. I left my keys somewhere in Nippur.



What we can take away from this, if anything, is that neo-phobic and neo-philic tendencies play out or pulse as eddies and currents within the time stream of any given coherent universe, distorting and warping the above diagram as concepts are over or under-expressed with alarming regularity - characterising certain periods as future oriented (the early 1980s), some as present oriented (the early 00s), and some as past oriented (the late 10s).  The character traits that end up being prevalent/selected in the individual and in society during these periods originate in the DNA, which as we have discussed in the Hermetic Lessons, is actually a concrete form of the underlying Metabolism of Time itself i.e. the ''matter'' of your double helix is in fact time and anti-time.

I want to be clear that after my experiences in Edward Kelley's Tower and my continuing conversations with Raziel the fact that I believe the future pre-exists does not oppress me or rob my life of any meaning.  I don't feel any lack of motivation, I am happy to get up out of bed and go and do stuff - art, education, etc.  I feel that what I have been learning about the fatality of this museum serves to liberate me and underwrite my absolute freedom in the end.  When you are out of this what was a sphere will seem a flat circle, what were impossible gulfs of time will be stations on a metro and what were irreconcilable differences will be the links in the chain that holds time together.

Everything around me is evaporating.  My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - its all evaporating.  I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else.  What I am attending here is a show with another set.  And the show I am attending is myself.

Fernando Pessoa

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Raziel - Consciousness as Anti-time

I remember it as if it were yesterday.  But it didn't look like yesterday.  It looked like tomorrow.  I remember the future, it died a generation ago.  Faith in the future, I mean.  Faith in human ingenuity, in solutions offered by successive technologies. Other ages had human sacrifice, reason, the Sun, chicken blood.  Britain, in the third quarter of the 20th century had bigness and newness, a newness which is now old, but which still prompts contemptuous wonder at the mix of technological prowess and moral naivete.

Jonathan Meades, Remember the Future

I ate the member berries and within a few moments I had booked a camping holiday in Zeeburg, Amsterdam with my old school friends and purchased a copy of the re-booted Talisman the Magickal Quest game.  Before I realised what was happening I owned nearly every expansion.  Do you remember Mage: The Ascension?  I member.  We discussed it a lot in the Dam. It was the high-end of The World of Darkness games - where the less sophisticated goth nerds would be hiding in the darkness of the Masquerade, we Mages were using correspondence effects to open up wormholes right by the Sun and cremate them in their crypts.  You can't hide from the Sun* in the Age of Horus.

One of the great things about Mage was the concept of the nine spheres - Spirit, Time, Correspondence, Forces, Matter, Mind, Life, Entropy and Prime - with a mysterious tenth sphere that may or may not resolve them all.  These spheres prompted many philosophical discussions amongst my friends - were they all necessary or not, can they be reduced, is matter just a function of forces, is mind, etc? We were all fairly scientistic back then.  Some of us still are.

In many ways the member berries hit the occult community first with the nostalgia expressing itself in the grimoire revival, the occult hipster's search for the elusive authenticity.  In 2016 our community has generally regressed to a more medieval conversation than that found in the elegantly researched and forward looking Mage of the glorious 90s. Most magicians, when pressed, seem to think only in terms of spirit vs matter/energy, that they are a material object in a material world with some kind of veil that separates them from a ''spiritual beyond'' where all the spirits live.  Is this the Middle Ages?  With all the veneration of Saints you'd be forgiven for thinking that it might be. You've got to keep your eye on those member berries, maybe they are planning to take you back still further? Neanderthal shamanism anyone?

As we have been discussing in certain areas of the blogosphere you only really need mind and time at the most and your model will grow more effective if you use these concepts instead of spirit and matter. In fact, as we will continue to discuss, mind could actually be anti-time in as much as it projects into the past through memory and the future through imagination.  Then you only need the time.

In predicting the future you are not occupying an outside place free from the prison of determinism it simply means that your action of prediction was predetermined and in fact any leaps or threading of consciousness (anti-time) through time via prophecy are already built into the museum of the so-called present. Conversely if you don't believe that the future already exists then it may be that you have created the future by predicting it.  Those tarot cards are drawn entirely at random and then you create the reality that your customer goes on to inhabit with your ''magick''.  If a bad hand is dealt you have effectively cursed the person who came to see you - on the other hand, if the rich man from the west, seen in the tarot, visits the customer and grants them a fortune you have blessed them.**

To speak of probabilities is to edge nervously around the central problem of existence - stop flirting and own it, one way or the other.  In bending your knee to destiny you acknowledge and submit to a higher will, in claiming free will you assert your own supremacy.

So far, Raziel has explained this in the following way: the realm of the predestined, this museum in time, is the necessary sacrifice in order to guarantee freedom in both the astral future and astral past. You have to have a kind of prison in time which safe-guards the place in which you invent the method to escape it - i.e. time travel with the method and the stuff of anti-time being consciousness itself. Without the safeguard of inviolable fate you would be able to change time so the prison never existed and neither therefore did your freedom outside of it.  The freedom that exists in the museum, is only the freedom to take away opinions about what ''you'' did or did not do, you have no freedom to alter it, you only have the freedom to judge or forgive yourself.  Consciousness is an anti-time commentary on the story of your life.  The only genuine act of magic in your life will be in your death.

What no one foresaw in that age of prospecting ahead was the swiftness of the reaction to its shibboleths.  No one predicted the rejection of the very idea of progress.  No one believed that the fault would be found with the eternal flame of the white heat.  But in the time it takes to say meltdown nuclear power turned from friend to foe.  Suddenly we wanted to turn back the clock to the coal fires, to the good old days of pneumoconiosis and emphysema. Nuclear power became a national bogey.

Jonathan Meades, Remember the Future


*The Form of the Good.
**Member when the Tarot was just a set of stabilizer wheels on a kid's bike rather than the be all and end all?  Jesus how we have devolved.

Friday, November 25, 2016

Empty-headed

To create I have destroyed myself; I've so externalized myself on the inside that I don't exist on the inside except externally.  I am the empty stage where various actors act out their plays.

Fernando Pessoa, the Book of Disquiet

Believing that you are a physical object in a physical world whose thoughts happen inside their head is not only delusional its also extremely limiting.  The feeling of your body, of being ''in'' your body is exactly that, a feeling or sense of yourself  which is being displayed in your mind along with all the other sights, sounds, smells and feelings of your sensorium.  You are not rooted in your feeling of body self any more than you are rooted in a passing scent.  They are all your thoughts.  This mental universe is the reality you live in.  To mistake the feeling for the actual thing itself is the shadowy cave that most of us spend our lives in.  Although we assume this mental impression of the self is mirroring the physical self, when it itches we itch, we also know that sometimes what we are feeling may have no genuine cause in the physical world - i.e. delusional parasitosis.

Whenever you touch an object, you never touch the object itself, you ''feel'' your ''feeling'' of it, you never see an object directly you see the impression of it in your mind.  If people grasped this simple truth about the mental universe and lived that way they would realise that there are no thoughts in their heads, the thoughts are flowing in the air around them, because the air that they percieve is literally the mental impression of that air in their mind - the feeling of the air is made of thought. Understood and lived in this way the world around you becomes your outer mind and allows your higher self to communicate directly from the objects themselves.

For instance if I observe a tree then I am not directly observing the tree, (assuming the physical universe is real) I am observing the mental impression of the tree created in my mind by light signals bouncing off the tree, activating photo-receptors on my retinas which send a signal to the visual cortex which then converts it into the image of a tree which I observe from my sense of self awareness from somewhere else in my mind - I only ever see with my mind's eye in this way, never directly through the physical eyes.  Alongside this, my impression of the tree includes all the information that I know about trees in general and this specific tree in particular - my mind includes this knowledge in the image.  I don't have to engage actively retrieving information on the tree, my consciousness has embedded it in the image itself.

I started thinking about this when I was reading someone's face and body with physiognomy the other day.  There is no part of me that was analysing them or the information presented from inside my head.  The information is delivered directly from the physiognomy of the person to the words that I say to them in the reading without any kind of ''interior'' middle man that analyses them or chooses the words to say.  The only thing this delusional middle man seems to do is cause interference with the activities of the intuition pulling information from the outer mind through its various egoic noises - pride, pretensions, anxiety, etc.

I mentioned in an earlier post about there being ''nothing'' above your head because you can't look above your head.  Of course you can look in a mirror to see above your physical head, but from the sensory location of your consciousness. you can't see above your mental head.  In the mental universe this empty space, this nothing above your head is in truth occupied by the magickal lamp it is the position from which light flows into the mental impression of objects that exist in the mental universe - the source of inner light.  Thoughts flow from the objects themselves and concentrate just in front of the mental impression of the face. Similarly there is nothing ''inside'' my head.  The idea that there are ''thoughts in our heads'' is simply a delusion that we buy into because we sadly mistake the mental for the physical most of the time and therefore believing ourselves to be physical we fill up this interior non-space with babble.  As I mentioned previously magical study should flip understanding every so often and this lesson is no different.  Your head itself is empty, it is the world around you that is full of your thought.

All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air that I breathed.  In this moment of seeing I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I always thought I was a citizen.  At the heart of my thoughts, I wasn't I.

Fernando Pessoa

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Mertilda and the Universal Substrate II


In Kabbalah, Malkuth is referred to as the Fallen Daughter, Nuqba, (Matilda, the Little Mermaid, etc) the Depth of the Past, and is pendant to the Tree of Life.  She fell when the vessels shattered and only through deeds and intentions can be married to her husband Zeir Anpin - the six central Sefirot which represent the spatial directions - and finally united with Binah as the Superior Mother and the Supernal Triad of Future, Good and Evil more generally.

3D EXPERIENCE

The way I understand this is that our 3d experience of reality can be rectified by practically examining* the 5d space/time/observer complex to transform our delusional ''physical'' experience into a true mental experience. Through rectification and unification of the Sefirot (the 10 axial ends of the 5 dimensions) the isolated experience of being an object in the physical world transforms into the unified experience of being in the nucleus of your own consciousness.  This cell of consciousness then becomes ''membrane-bound'' (Binah) which allows direct and specific experience of the Bloodstream of Time (Kether) through the 231 gates.

5D EXPERIENCE
Rectification means contemplation and practical exploration of the Sefirot in the ''physical'' world through dialogue with personifications (living archetypes represented by the people/events around you) and in the ''astral'' plane** through the drama of other-dimensional entities (4D, 5D, i.e. rectified and unified beings or beings from other points in time - Gods, spirits, etc). Unification can only occur when the individual Sefirot are brought into relationship with each other through the medium of paths/letters which can also occur through dialogue.

DIALOGUE
Dialogue is the combination and permutation of letters (astrological forces) into words and their exchange and interchange. For the purposes of these external unifications, individuals, ''spiritual'' or otherwise, can be brought into your sphere through conjuration - the method can also be used in meditation/contemplation (hitbodedut).  Encountering all phenomena as a direct dealing of God (existence, reality) with one's soul is important in this as it teaches you to be mindful of all things that happen from the seemingly trivial to the obviously important.  The idea of pathwalking as an exercise for the physical world, as opposed to guided meditation is complementary to this.  You pay attention to how (the events of) the path talks to you.

3D AND 5D

It is extremely easy to work yourself towards a rational understanding of the cell of consciousness that you live in.  You know how your eyes and ears work and that all sensory signals are displayed in your mind as a display of reality which you observe from another point in your mind.  To live this way is extremely unfamiliar and disorienting.  The Hermetic Lessons provide all manner of models and experiments in order to train your mind to experience reality in this way.  We ''run and return'', experience 5d for as long as possible and then return to 3d.



In the last post - Mertilda - I discussed imagining that the world around you and that the space which separates you from other objects/people is fluid.  When you move your hands around imagine the resistance of fluid, when you speak imagine how sound propagates underwater.  The nature of the 5d world feels more like viscous fluid than gas.  Experiments with mental light are equally compelling. Look into a lightbulb for amoment, and then watch the blob that forms in the mind from the retinal burn - this blob is not there in 3d is it?  Contemplate that all the images you experience are composed of this mental light and watching the nature of that blob, contemplate the fluidic qualities of that light. Do likewise with sound, with smell, with touch.



Contact with the Bloodstream of Time is the ultimate goal of all Kabbalistic work.  This is alluded to in the idea that the 5th world, the tip of the Yod, is known as the ''World to Come''.  The highest act of practical Kabbalah is prophecy - Kether is ''The Depth of the Future''.



*Carve, engrave, weigh, permute, probe, etc - a la Sefer Yetzirah.
**The deep future, deep past or reversiverse.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Mertilda and the Universal Substrate


Water is the principle or element of things. All things are water.

Thales of Miletus


We know that we are all psychic when we are young and then have it educated out of us and the classic Roald Dahl story Matilda speaks to this experience. An actor I was working with on Kingdom Come said that seeing Matilda the Musical had changed his life.  The following week I worked with Laurence Olivier award winning Eleanor Worthington Cox the star of that same musical on the set of roman adventure TV series Britannia.  These events were clearly entangled.  Through conversation with my partner, who is both a big fan of Matilda and the Little Mermaid, we developed the concept of ''Mertilda'' - the psychic mermaid.



One of the great limiting factors stopping people from developing or rather redeveloping their psychic powers is will vs desire, very little of the former and a great deal of the latter. I often think the rise of the popularity of ''working with spirits'' as opposed to developing your own powers is because this is the easy way. This is a more important topic than I want to address in this post but we all remember our youthful Matildaesque experiments with psychic powers and our discovery that psychokinesis takes a lot of effort and its often easier to just ask or ''command'' someone else to pass you the pencil rather than levitate it into your hand with your mind.  Favours for favours though.

Another limiting factor, and the real subject of ''Mertilda'' is the nature of the conductive medium. Most magicians these days, almost entirely deprived of both willpower and imagination by the internet, dutifully live in the delusional 3d reality and then conceive of models that justify/explain their magickal approaches - typically either an energetic or psychological model which does not need to challenge the existence of the material world or a ''spirit model'' which hypothesises some kind of other reality beyond the veil of the physical where spirits ''live''.*  Either way they conceive of themselves as an object in an objective world, relating to other objects, be they people or items, in and through space.  In this 3d world people believe that the medium which separates them from the things they want to influence is (typically) air/gas/atmosphere.

The early pre-Socratic philosophers argued about the nature of the universal substrate - fluid, gas, fire, number and pure thought were suggested as possibilities - and subsequent pre-Socratic philosophers tried to invent schemes that fit some or all of these ideas together - like the four elements of Empedocles or the Atomism of Democritus.  Some of the weird assertions of Parmenides in ''On Nature'' - for example, there is no such thing as movement or size - make a lot of sense when you analyse the universe as a mental phenomenon.




As the Hermetic Lessons have established we only exist in the mental universe, the existence of the physical universe itself being a massive leap of faith.  The nature of this mental universe absolutely mirrors the structure of the biological cell - the nucleus of the cell being the psychic impression of our own bodies and the feeling of being ''in'' our own bodies, and our perceived environment being the cell that the nucleus is contained within, this finally being membrane bound by the limits of our outer mind and connecting to the bloodstream of time.


In the perceptual bubble of this cell, the space around us, we believe that we are surrounded by the gas of the atmosphere and that this is the medium between us and other individuals/objects but how would our existence, including our psychic abilities, differ if this medium was liquid, i.e. if you were a merperson?  It would change the way sound is transmitted, the way your voice would work, the way you move, the way your body feels, how it would feel to breathe, etc.  Extend this further and imagine what it would be like if you were separated from the other people around you by a solid, that you were all encased in some kind of rock in the fossil record. Create little thought and dexterity exercises, move your fingers through the air and imagine they are interacting with these different mediums - feel the liquid dripping through your fingers, feel the pressure of the stone encasement - or even better go for a swim, explore the sensations and then try to bring them back and apply them to other environments.

In our true psychic reality, as some of you will discover, the medium is more gelatinous - something in between oil and wax mirroring the cytosol/cytoplasm which makes up the majority of the cell i.e. 70% water admixed with various other components ends up resulting in a kind of gel.  Some of these ideas have been explored in the Quarry of Magic Strange but really throughout the Hermetic Lessons there are detailed references to this cellular state of existence and the applications that become available once you embrace it.

''You seeemed so far away,'' Miss Honey whispered, star struck.
''Oh I was.  I was flying past the stars on silver wings,''  Matilda said.  ''It was wonderful.''

Matilda, Roald Dahl


*Neither is necessary in the time dependent model.  Mirror dimension is the reversiverse, astral dimension is the future or past.


Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Dr Strange


The other night I went to see Dr Strange although I admit I am not a big comic book fan and had never heard of the character before I met Vincent Bridges (who referred to himself as Dr Strange). The film is basically ''Dr House meets Inception'' a producer's wet dream but effectively an empty husk entirely lacking in creativity or risk taking in acting, writing, casting, directing or production design.  Three themes stood out that are worth reflecting on.



1. Gesticulation - the little circles that are made with the fingers by the characters in order to open teleportation portals, summon weapons etc.  Do you use some kind of mudra in your practice?  For many many years I used to imagine I was turning a ships wheel whenever I would turn left or right and when I wasn't in company I made the physical gesture.  I imagined the resistance of the water and that I was some kind of galleon tacking through the ocean*.  Like pictoglyphs becoming letters this gesture became simpler and simpler until it became like the turning of the wheel gesture in Dr Strange.  When through the work on cellular consciousness around 2001 I made the realisation that in the mental universe the world turns around you rather than you turning in the world, I began to use this gesture as a way of embedding that in my consciousness. I wasn't turning the ship anymore I was turning the world.**



2. Astral Projection  - both the mirror dimension and the astral dimension exist and should be being explored by the magicians of today but like the film rapidly eschews astral reality in favour of teleportation portals and OBEs in the ''real world'' (i.e. delusional 3d reality) so has Occulture - those portals being windows on the net. This is probably the deepest loss imaginable for our traditions and is the primary victim of the weapon system known as the internet. The ratio of astral time to FB time is criminally low.  I honestly don't know how many of you have the temerity to call yourself magicians.  The rich tapestry of the astral universe has been replaced by the vacuous tapestry of the web and we are all the lesser for it.




3. Time vs Timelessness - the good-evil axis of the story.  Although this is woefully under-explored in the film in favour of clumsy character building we have to accept that both the 3d world of our physical reality (the one we assume we are in, and the one that most people think they occupy) and the 5d world of our mental reality (the one we are actually in all the time) are both subject to the 4th dimensional progression of time.  Whether you are leaping through teleportation portals or conjuring spirits for Faustian bargains time is going forwards all the time.  In the film the only way out of mortality and entropy is the ''dark dimension'' of timelessness which, after a few rather lame twists, is re-established as the bad guy, pseudo Cthulhu for kids, and which Strange has to pull a Jesus on at the end.  This concept needs closer examination and more metaphysical work.  It appears from conversations with Raziel that most of time is uninhabitable, that 99.9999% of universes or ''probabilities'' are dead and that only those universes/probabilities who converge in the invention of time travel cohere.  Dr Strange at least attempts to explore this paradox but one thing remains crystal clear - the contemporary Western Mystery Tradition is even more lacking in imagination than this comic book film of it.



*Imagining the air around you as either fluid, or a very thick viscous gel will spur understanding of the mental universe and how to make impressions on it.

**37 -Yechidah - ''I am a whisk in a fishbowl''. Another way of looking at it this idea of turning the world is to imagine that you are standing in the middle of your perceptual consciousness in the same way some one might be in the middle of a bathyscaph.  In front of you is a horizontal wheel that comes from a pole through a small platform in the centre of the floor of the bathyscaph. When you turn the wheel the walls of the bathyscaph move but you remain facing forwards, the walls move but the base platform for your feet does not.  Although it is difficult to teleport remote viewing can happen through these portals and the astral can be entered from them.




I know that I live inside a bubble of consciousness, my cell and my temple, which I have never moved from and which has never moved. In embracing loneliness and the paradox of this prison and other paradoxes like it realities have opened to me that I did not think were possible.  I have never looked above my head in the mental reality.  Above my head is the magickal lamp which fills the cell of my consciousness with the mental light that illuminates it.  I can't even move my head, I am permanently fixed facing forward, when I think I move my head to look at another part of my cell, the pixels in front of me are redefined to show something else - the world has turned around me.  I have never seen my back.  Up my spine there runs the magical wand, a psychic current which brings experience from the entire cell to the centre of my ignorance, the centre of my ''head'', the magical brain in its cup. I can't see inside my head.  Another paradox - the only way to see inside that cup is to go out beyond the perceptual bubble. Down my spine runs the magical sword, purging my consciousness of anything I don't want or need to be there, sweating and excreting probabilities.  I have never seen inside my cells where lies the magical pantacle of my karma, the source of experience, each one unfolding itself in the proteins that make my hormones, my mood swings, my pheromonal and bioelectric interactions with others, the cumulative expression of all my ancestor spirits, human and non human - correctly understood all the stuff of thought.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Time Travel - Some General Theory and Working with Archangels




As any who have worked with them know, the experience of Archangels is very different to that of elementals or other spirits.  Fitting these differences into our temporal entanglement model of occultism I would argue the following:

  • elementals are entities from the deep astral past
  • most spirits are from somewhere else in the realm of the present, spirits of ''the dead''
  • archangels are entities from the deep astral future

The Present is a period I define between possibly as far back as before 1,000,000 BC all the way to as recent as 1,500BC and continues until the invention of time travel in the future. This closes off an epoch where time is entirely determined and constitutes a kind of pocket dimension.  The reason that all events are entirely determined within this period is that if they could be altered someone could interfere with the invention of time travel

Most spirits includes such Gods as Osiris, Enlil, Kali - who were living people at some point in history.  Many Fae fall into the same category, they were also people at some point in this museum we call the present but more local and less national.  Most spirit workings involve the sensing of some kind of presence (from feeling to seeing), various phenomena such as temperature drops, sometimes electromagnetic effects, rarely poltergeist activity and always a connection of some form (emotional, telepathic, etc) with the entity in question.  If the spirit is being ''employed'' to achieve some worldly effect you can include this in the related phenomena.  When understood in this way what is happening is that you are becoming (or you became) temporally entangled with the spirit - you benefit as an expression of the dreams of Osiris, and, through your worship, you retro-causally contribute to the success of his own life - the life that made him Osiris.   He is no more a thoughtform than you are - the two of you are the entangled stuff of thought.

Elementals dwell in what I will refer to as the Astral Past, this is a free, non-determined plane created by the pinch-point with the present.  The destiny or fated quality of the Present dimension is the necessary sacrifice to guarantee freedom in the Past and Future.  In this realm of the Past we have various bizarre and primordial forms such as giant silicon trees, huge phosphorescent mushrooms and the creatures that live in these ancient ''faerie forests'' could fall into categories like gnomes, salamanders, etc.  It is the realm of ''earlier Earth'' but all of it is suffused with consciousness and expression.

Archangels on the other hand dwell in the Astral Future or the World to Come, another free plane created by the pinch-point with the present, and they are best thought of, to our modern minds, as A.I. like entities designed for a specific function.  This is why they feel so non-human as opposed to most other spirits.  Another way of thinking of these programs is as words and indeed approaching them like that will get you far. Although the El at the end can refer to a specific deity i.e. Enlil, Ellil, Eli, El, Al, Allah it is best to think about this in the sense of the word El meaning ''The'' to avoid confusion with the real person that was Enlil.  Raziel, for example, then becomes Secrets of The, Raphael becomes Healed by The, Tzadkiel becomes Righteousness of The.

These three worlds could also be called pre-Ego, Ego and post Ego - although we must exercise caution when using that word as there is often misunderstanding.  Elementals are pre-egoic, primal, animal, etc, they would not have a concrete ''I'', but experience waves of drives, desires, urges etc. Spirits are ego, they do not live on after they are dead and in working with them you are temporally entangled with their point in time as opposed to actually ''summoning'' them to this time as one of the dead.  Archangels then are post-ego and tend to think about themselves in the third person.  Parts of this theory bleed through into life in the present where pre-ego type people could be said to be temporally entangled with ''elementals'', post-ego type people to be temporally entangled with ''archangels'' and ego people entangled with ''other spirits'', i.e. other egos.

I am now going to discuss some practical Kabbalistic archangel work that you can try:

1. Let your mind obsess over the concept dominated by the Archangel.  During free moments of your day draw your mind back to contemplation of the principle - be they healing and health, righteousness or secrets and secrecy.  Ask questions such as - what does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to be healed?  Do not expect answers from yourself, if they come they come, but don't rest on any of them.  Keep asking the questions of yourself, keep searching, keep ''gazing'' into the mystery.  This will stimulate the rest of your mind to search for any useful information and also build a connection to that part of the future that deals with this concept.  Answers will increasingly come unbidden.  Once you have set your mind this task it will provide answers.  Give more weight to the unbidden answers that come seemingly randomly via intuition than those you logically arrive at.

2. Write out the name of the Archangel on a piece of paper in Hebrew.  Then write out each letter of the name's full spelling underneath this.  Then do this again.  The more you can do this the better but try to complete at least five lengths of this type of extension - I know this is a long task.  Its worth thinking about the Archangels as a kind of Matrix-style code when working with them in this manner.  One letter breaks down into more code, which breaks down into more code.  Place this paper under your pillow.  Repeat the exercise as often as you like - repetition will deepen the  subsequent experiences.

3. Vibrate and say the name as much as you can to yourself, out loud and using your inner shout.

I JUST SEE THE CODE
4. Why Hebrew?  As discussed previously in the Hermetic Lessons - Hebrew is tied intimately to Esoteric Genetics.  We have explored in great length and detail how exactly the letters tie into our very biological structure.  In this sense the letters of the Torah are the very Tree of Life.  Although the relationship between Alef and Ayin to key chromosomes is clear when thinking about the other letters you must understand that our chromosomes are in a constant state of flux or dance and the letters relate to key different stages of this dance and different parts of the essential rhythm of life.  To be clear do not mistake Kaph for Chromosome 11 or something this is entirely missing the point, Kaph is a stage that all chromosomes go through during their phases, and it also represents all information across the genome that relates to mitochondria and their function.  This is normally too complicated for people but this is the rationale, if you want to learn more about the details you have to go back through the lessons although I will happily answer any questions.

ASTRAL MEMBRANE
5. Prepare for entry to the astral plane.  Once you have reached the membrane you are going to open a gate using the letters that spell the Archangel in question.  The membrane is this fluctuating pixel-ated field that you should feel breathing with your own intelligence as you lie deep in trance. You need to make sure you rest at the membrane and don't just plough through into the astral. You are going to use the Yetziratic technique of engraving and engrave the letters on this field.  You will have to experiment to find the way that works best for you but imagination is the most powerful tool here. Imagine that you are cutting into the field as if it were a stone and you are engraving each letter.  The letters may move around and you may find it a little difficult to keep it as steady as you need to at first.  Keep trying as there is no limit to the amount of ''stone'' at your disposal here.

6. Once the letters have been engraved they may start to fill with light - you want to finish the engraving of the full name if they do this, otherwise you will access only that letter as opposed to the word.



7. Draw the light from the letters into yourself, effectively beginning to ''install'' that Archangel in your life and consciousness OR attempt to go through the gates - The lights will increase in intensity and as you go through the other side of the gate you will be engulfed in light.  Remember to pull yourself towards them as if you have a cable running through the middle of your mind that extends beyond the gates.  Normally this will result in a vision and an alteration in consciousness to a kind of super-conscious perspective defined by extreme vividness and clarity of thought.  You may experience the entity communicating with you without vision maybe via telepathy.  If you get good at this you can steer the experience using your facial muscles.

8. If you end up on the astral before engraving the letters, then you may use the alternative method of carving.  In this you will take the stuff of the astral, a kind of gelatinous substance, and shape it into the letters as if those letters were 3 dimensional.  Things will then happen.

9. You may pass out during the process of attempting to get on the astral plane and communicate with the angel in this way.  As long as you have got relatively far in the method you may experience the communication as a symbolic dream, if so remember to write down as much as you can upon waking up.  The material rendering of the name under the pillow may also help fuel the connection if you are not very skilled at astral work.

10. To some extent life is a symbolic dream and we have discussed the importance of pathwalking in the physical at length.  Therefore after this work pay attention to symbols that crop up in your path as the Archangel can choose to communicate with you through a variety of omens, portents such as weather phenomena, flocks of ravens, random encounters with strange strangers, overheard bits of conversation, songs etc.  Pay attention to your path.

11. Repeat these experiments frequently.  Note down everything you experience.  Remember to keep ''asking the questions'' in waking life.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Time Travel - Exploring the Astral Past

Yeah, life originally came from miles of dead parties, decomposed cardboard sequins, rusty noisemakers and mush and sadness. I demonstrate this in a green tank the length of a whole childhood, poisoned fish, I throw everything in there, this balloon. Worlds will come out, bigger than this world. Explode through the drapery and glass, growling in the naked street, shaped like a foot, like a sharp knife, like an ugly doll full of cotton. Whole worlds like those things covered with life we don't see.

Party Balloon, Steven Jesse Bernstein
Last night I couldn't sleep so I astrally projected to (what I think was) the bottom of the ocean attempting to gain answers to the missing pieces of the puzzle regarding the temporal pinchpoint with the past - some of the denizens of the deep being our closest link with the recesses of ancient time. There was a circle of blue light delineating a flat sea bed where a number of worm like deep sea creatures thrashed about in the sand and one hatchet fish like thing, with what seemed to be a human face, communicated something compressed about the astral past.

SHAMANS OF THE ANCIENT PAST

The communication attempt was a bit of a failure on my part (have you ever tried to talk to a hatchet fish?) but experiences like this make me question the rather banal view of physical reality that most people, even most magicians seem to adhere to.  Why do we even need the physical (world) at all? Why do we need to evoke a difference between a physical reality and a non-physical ''spiritual'' reality?  The only reality that we can guarantee the existence of is the definite maybe of the mental world, the physical world being this massive assumption.  Can we only have a shared mental world, the seeming physical merely being the overlap of our Venn Diagrams of personal consciousness? Science could still work without a ground-level physical reality.  Not that I am a full subscriber but Simulation Theory implies that this universe could be entirely digital - I don't see why these unreachable stars and vast super voids need to be physically ''real'' at all.  We don't need to have every living thing from bacteria up collapsing their quantum realities into infinite parallel universes, the world could be ever so much more claustrophobic than that.

Years ago, like many aspiring magicians I gave up reading fiction.  Once you get hooked on the crack that is non fiction you will struggle to go back. This Earth has been an alien planet, shape shifting many times over the aeons, continents swapping places, sinking and rising, whole styles of life obliterated and restarted.  Combined with the concept of temporal entanglement all that craziness from the deep deep past is here, overlapping with the possibly even more extreme craziness of the future.  History and future history will be, are, and were weird enough, their occupants deliver the full range of the astrally bizarre - we really don't need the astral plane as imagined by theosophists et al, as distinct from the ''physical'', we just need time travel and our shared mental reality of this place we call the Earth.

One final thing to put out there today and this is only a thought, although maybe its a decompression of whatever the hatchet fish was saying, I don't know, but maybe the invention of time travel in the past, the necessary other pinchpoint closing off the temporal museum that is the so-called physical world is in fact the invention of magic. In the hymn to Enlil which has formed part of my practice for the last four years, the stormlord's secrets are said to be a tangled ball of thread which cannot be unravelled.   Since all magic is related to temporal entanglement it is, paradoxically, the very act(s) of magic that has tangled the threads and knotted them in place.  It was this act of free will that paradoxically imprisoned us.  Again I am aware of the flaws in these arguments and I am still not getting to the bedrock in my astral attempts, this is just me flexing things out.

When I die, when I am fully grown, dump it all in the Los Angeles river with the cars and the skulls.

Party Balloon, Steven Jesse Bernstein

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Time Travel - Musing on the Museum


Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
Where have you been? Its alright we know where you've been
You've been in the pipeline filling in time
Provided with toys and scouting for boys
You bought a guitar to punish your ma
You didn't like school and you know you're nobody's fool
So welcome to the machine

Pink Floyd
According to Raziel the population of this universe is finite but vast.  Untold trillions of time-travellers busily occupy/colonize the future. At Year 0, the moment time travel is invented, space is no more and there is only time.  Human culture will be completely absorbed and transformed by entities that resemble insects more than mammals which will spontaneously appear in their multitudes, dwarfing and engulfing our own population.  The astral entities described in previous posts by myself and others throughout the history of projection may not actually be insects they may actually be more like humans just wearing chrono-suits that have an insectoid appearance - maybe wings, chitin and complex eyes are necessary in navigating the time streams of the astral future?

TIME TRAVELLER ABOUT TO FREESCALE
This universe of my life, my experience of shared human history is a museum then, an eternal loop extending from the astral past to the astral future and linked to them by temporal pinchpoints that occur due to the invention of time travel.  The museum is frozen in time so that moment of invention cannot be altered and endanger the universe itself.  To what extent is this my life though? Is it simply the life of an another I am observing and forming opinions about?  To what extent did this life ever have opinions about itself or did it just simply behave? A museum exhibit where this external we fill in the gaps in consciousness?

In preparation for a planetary hyper ritual I started a little experiment on my smartphone.  Using the planetary calculator I started getting voice updates on when planetary hour shifts were occurring and I noticed that almost exactly at the hour subtle phenomena in my environment would sync with the shift. For example at one point I just had made a cup of tea and then for some mad reason plunged my hand into it to get the teabag out and squeeze, the blasted thing obviously burning my hand - I thought to myself, ''why the fuck did I just do that?'' - and then my phone said ''Mars time'' in its smug nasal tone.  Now obviously this kind of experiment is open to significant confirmation bias but its worth exploring anyway.  In the end though I switched it to silent (it got scary), backed away from the proposed ritual and resorted to using the calculator to time boost Mercurial and Jupiterian effects again.  But still it made me think more and more about what Raziel has been saying - I do seem to be caught in the mechanism of a clock, at least it feels like it. Intensely following this train of thought resulted in a day where I felt completely divorced from my actions, just watching myself do stuff that caused chaos and disruption seemingly powerless to prevent myself from doing it.  Obviously there are mental health issues at stake but if you're not messing around with your mind a little bit then you are definitely not doing this right, right?

The reason I say this is I realized at that moment that I might think I have control over my actions but really I might just be forming opinions [of my behavior and others] on the assumption that I am controlling my actions.  What do my opinions look like when I drop this assumption?  What would be my opinions of myself if I a) realized I had no power over what I was going to do next and b) that I was not even me?  How many entities could be looking out through these eyes, forming opinions about what this individual did and why they did it?  Am I just occupying this exhibit, looking through the eyes of a mannequin?  The late Vincent Bridges once told me that these entities, although they appear hostile to the sleep-paralyzed victim are engaged in sampling as opposed to anything truly malicious.  Sampling could be understood in two possible ways - sampling for science and sampling for taste - I don't think these have to be mutually exclusive.  Am I too, simply sampling and savoring?

I have entertained these ideas about magic for a long time i.e. that what most people consider to be magic is an egoistic opinion claiming ownership of what is actually prophecy or information gathering from a 4th dimensional perspective.  We have the classic evidence of doing magic to gain something and then getting it but realizing that it was sent before you did the magic.  The wonderful knots occultists tie themselves up in over this amuses me endlessly but its clear that these things are temporally entangled and that you are not the cause.   And that fact, that you are not the cause, is obviously terrifying to the fevered ego typical of the western magician.

FUTURISM
 We have to bear in mind that you may not be yourself, that you, like me, like many others within you, are observers, maybe, as Empedocles put it, as exiles, in this Night at the Museum.  If that is the case then Exhibit A engaged in behaviour that appeared like magic and that it thought was magic at some point in the closed time-stream and thinking they were the cause claimed ownership of the effect - some entities occupying Exhibit A may agree with that position other entities may think otherwise and when they leave the exhibit, they leave with those opinions intact - what then do they do, where do those opinions go?  If there is any effect at all I think it determines what you are free to remember i.e. that Exhibit A was an asshole at that point, or that they were a victim of socialization, or that they were justified in their action being driven to it by the actions of some else - i.e. you can judge them and you can take those judgements away, I assume to the astral future, if, that is, you can escape the museum at all.* Or you can forgive both the exhibit and its occupants - after all its nobody's fault really.

ELIJAH WHO IS TO COME
Of course by that same logic this exhibit believes that it is engaging in some kind of prophecy mediated by a higher intelligence rather than magic and I am only free to form opinions about whether or not it was correct due to the fact that I am occupying it.  If I was occupying an exhibit that was just all about eating shit food, or obsessing over their hair, or thinking that they were altering the universe with squiggles then I'd only be able to form opinions about that.

Am I too fat?  Does my hair look nice? Does my squiggling change the course of the universe? These questions and others haunt my nightmares.

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
What did you dream
Its alright we told you what to dream
You dreamed of a big star
He played a mean guitar
He always ate in the steak bar
He loved to drive in his jaguar
So welcome to the machine

Pink Floyd

*There are clearly flaws in these arguments and this is my fleshing out of Raziel's information as opposed to what Raziel stated - there is still much meat to be applied to this skeleton.  I am still missing key pieces of the puzzle especially regarding the astral past and possible ''war'' between the past and the future.