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Above is an artist's conception of possible results if my brain were scanned using the exciting new technology being developed at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. It really is interesting to think about interior voices of all kinds (parents, deities, news demons, teachers, beloved ones) and where they fit in relation to one's "own" inner voice. My hypothesis (thanks to sources suggested by Elissa) is that there is no "me," but rather a collection of voices that arise from learned patterns of language, innate survival responses, and social cues...and of course the Divine Mother, though I realize She isn't so scientific.
The old cliché was "You are a radio," though it should be updated to "You are an iPod," since we do have a lot of control over input and playlists...as hard as it can be to take control, sometimes, for an obsessive man like me...so I was walking around my neighborhood the other evening rotely repeating "I am a child of the Divine Mother and She has a plan for me, and it's better than anything I can imagine." I didn't believe most of this spell I was reciting, but it was better than putting my brain on shuffle and letting all the bad thoughts play.
This is a story about an early act of magick I was involved in. I have been drawn to the misnam'd "dark arts" since I was a kid; one time me and my best friend in those 1970s pre-fundie days got a book on witchcraft from the elementary school library and, as we sat on my front porch, I recited a spell to turn him into a rabbit. Nothing happened immediately, but four or five years later he moved to Texas.
Anyway: fast-forward to age 18, when I and many of the men in my college dorm worshiped the same Goddess, a deity named "Linda Ellerbee," whom one could only approach in deepest night. Linda would appear to us in our temple, the TV lounge, uttering sacred oracles about the world, politics, stuff that happened...
well, we weren't listening as carefully as we could have been. She was of voice dulcet, of mighty intelligence, and yea most wittie and sardonick, and yea of Her entire pantheon (television news) was She the fairest and most wise. At the time, the early 1980s, the idea of a non-T&A-flaunting "smart chick" on TV truly--I'm not making this up--confused many people. Linda to them was a Lilith, but to us the very Shekhinah.
Not least among her allures were her glasses. (It was the geek dorm.) If you are at all stirred by swimsuit or Victoria's Secret models, then it may be impossible for me to convey to you the occult significance of glasses, for we speak erotic languages as different as Dante's Italian and New York cabbie slang. Suffice it to say that to perusers of Plato and the periodic table, glasses in combination with a high IQ are Da Bomb...a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb of Hot.
Each night the dark rites continued. Linda made us laugh and, most supernaturally and mysteriously for a network television personality, made us think. All was happy in our sect until, one fated day, there dawned a ratings Ragnarok. Linda's show, NBC News Overnight, was to be banished from the air, to be replaced, I believe, by reruns of Nightline. The myrmidons of Mithras had won out...
and so we had to reach Her. Bring Her to our humble realm, and lift ourselves to Her heaven. And so the name of the deity (very important) was inscrib'd '
pon finest paper, and so the proper zodiacal coordinates were determin'd (the address of NBC Studios in New York), and so a sacrifice was made, of that most precious substance: money. We took up a collection so we could FedEx (back when it was damn difficult and a big deal) a prayer to our Goddess. We asked for a sign. We asked: When Thou say'st, for the last time, Thy supernal Verse, "And so it goes," wouldst Thou take off Thy glasses?
In the wording of our spell we groveled, the way only males can do when trying to curry female favor. Did we speak to Her of our pet dogma, that She had borrow'd her verse from the Prophet Vonnegut? I know not. But the spell was cast, and we had only to wait; we cast the spell Tuesday, and Gotterdammerung would air Friday night.
She manifested as usual, and the vision contained farewells and lamentations of divers sorts. At the end, as She was about to speak the Verse, all was breathless silence in our temple. And She lifted Her hand...and yea She spake the Verse, and... yea Her hand touch'd the spectacles playfully but removed them not. The temple erupted in laughter and joy, for She had come down to us, yet stayed in Her starry heaven; we were with Her and She with us.
Here are some essential and wondrous sources on the Holy Guardian Angel. Few of them follow the Crowleyan model, but they all seem to be talking about the same thing: access to an immensely powerful, seemingly omniscient interior personality that guides one along lines of spiritual evolution. Some of these sources will seem dry as dust to some of you... some are entertaining as hell... all point towards divine dimensions of ourselves and the universe one seldom hears about in church, on TV, or even (coherently) in most "spiritual" or "New Age" or "occult" literature.
Those of a romantic inclination personify their HGAs, but this isn't necessary. The HGA tends to appear in a form highly attractive (not necessarily sexually attractive) to the individual, and I think this happens because spiritual energy that is poured into us tends to take the shape of the vessel. There is some discussion about whether the HGA "is" God or "is" an intermediary; I can make an analogy based on the World Wide Web.
Practically speaking, the Web is infinite. There are billions of Web pages and even if you started now and read a page a second for the rest of your life you couldn't view them all. But if you chose a couple of good Web directories and followed their several hundred links to pages you were interested in, you'd not only learn something useful, you'd have a good time, too. The HGA is God's way of boiling down Her unimaginable and overwhelming energy and Intelligence into something we can (barely) handle and that will help us evolve so we can be closer to Her.
The important thing to remember is, you already have at least some measure of contact with the HGA. Every time that little voice inside you has said something worth listening to, that's been your HGA. Every time you've created something beautiful or said something eloquent or looked at yourself in the mirror and thought, "Not bad," that's been your Angel.
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (The Book of Union with the All--is what a magician would have called it. Our Guardian Angel comes to guide us to this Union, and it's useful to see examples of Souls who have already attained it. Whitman was certainly one.)
- Another example of someone who was There is Ramakrishna; see The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, or Sri Ramakrishna and His Divine Play, about a devotee who so completely saw Kali in all things that he laid consecrated temple offerings on the ground for a cat to eat--he thought the cat was God. Ramakrishna also, very much counter to his socialization as a Brahmin, saw the Divine in prostitutes...kind of like Christ, come to think of it. Ramakrishna also had interesting HGA-like experiences.
- Gustav Davidson, Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels (Considerate of him to include the fallen angels, wasn't it? :) ...the idea of angels and of a personal guardian angel can be traced back to Sumer. Angels figure prominently in Islam and in Hinduism [where they are called, somewhat confusingly, devata; this word also means "gods."] You wouldn't learn much about any of this from Davidson's book, for it focuses on the Judeo-Christian tradition. That's not a bad thing at all, for Judeo-Christian angelology is vastly elaborated and Davidson has compiled a Manhattan-white-pages listing of nearly all of it.)
- Peter Lamborn Wilson, Angels (This Sufi mystic is better known as Hakim Bey, and his public-domain works of intellectual provocation make essential reading. Wilson does an excellent job connecting the more familiar angelic realms with Islam and with parallels in other traditions: ancient Greek and Egyptian myth, shamanism, and the Sophia archetype, to name a few. He also collects a ton of beautiful and rarely-seen angel art.)
- Gabrielle Bossis, He and I (Her HGA was Christ--pretty good if you ask me. This is probably my single favorite spiritual book: an intimate, moment-by-moment record of one woman's interior dialogue with the Divine. Unlike "the Divine" in certain other such books, this one really sounds like, as Crowley would put it, a "praeterhuman intelligence.")
- Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (The most compelling fantasy read for me since Lord of the Rings, a moving and even profound work. Relevance to our quest: not just the concept of the very HGA-like "daimon" but the way in which Lyra learns to read the aleithiometer--very suggestive of how one learns to talk with one's Angel. Plus, the title comes from one of the western world's great angelologists, John Milton.)
- Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger (vol. 1) (Need I say more? [Please don't! the audience howls...] Classic spiritual autobiography by someone who wasn't sure he wanted to be, or could be, "spiritual." This was my own literary rabbit hole when I was a pup.)
- Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Angels (Guiley also wrote one of the best books on the Tarot. This book duplicates some of Davidson's biblical/kabbalistic lore, but is much more focused on the historical and cultural aspects of angels, so it's quite valuable. Her material ranges from Kushner's Angels in America to World War I angel sightings to one of the best overviews available of Hindu angelology.)
- Martha Beck, Expecting Adam (One of the HGA books par excellence; Crowley would have added this to the syllabus of the Argenteum Astrum. Especially recommended for eggheads, nerds, and geeks. "And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you"--Beck portrays the deepest dark and the sweetest light.)
- Fight Club (Both the novel by Chuck Palahniuk and the film--the film is absolute gold and seems more attuned to the HGA tradition.)
- Aleister Crowley, Liber Samekh (Probably the most important part is "Point III: Scholion on Sections G and Gg." The actual invocation is very powerful and many have employed it with good results. AC provides one way to invoke the HGA, along with the Abra-Melin operation, but both are (and I don't mean to be dismissive) ancient. Most 21st-century people need 21st-century grimoires written from a 21st-century point of view...and so I give you:)
- Jason Augustus Newcomb, 21st Century Mage (The best explanation of the HGA available [at least along the lines of magick]. This is an incredibly wise book and everyone should read it. There's a public-domain chaos magick grimoire called Liber KKK that also attempts to provide a modern-day equivalent of the Abra-Melin operation; it's worth reading but Newcomb has the Philosopher's Stone IMHO. What must be kept in mind is that any method will work if it is suited to your personality and pursued with enough dedication. I am not a robes-and- incense person and thus wouldn't go near the Abra-Melin operation; I'm also too ADD. But in some of the workings I've done I've seen the very same phenomena old Abraham said I'd see. My personal method really wasn't a method at all, and I tend to think the best results come to people who aren't looking for them. Maybe I'll blog about it later. One thing old Crow said about angels should be remembered by those who feel inadequate or overwhelmed in the face of all this magick stuff: "When you're ready, they come for you." He also said, shoutingly in all caps, for this is the most important thing: "INVOKE OFTEN." In other words, whatever you fill your head and your heart with will become your reality.)
- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung's HGA, Philemon, appeared to him as an intelligence with origins in Hellenistic Greece, from the time the Corpus Hermeticum was being written down, as well as the original Greek text that became Liber Samekh, as well as the so-called Chaldean Oracles and the works of Iamblichus, who theorized the HGA as the augoeides or "shining vehicle of the soul"...strange.... Quote: "Philemon...brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.")
- Pierre Jovanovic, An Inquiry into the Existence of Guardian Angels (Guy is driving down the highway. An unseen force shoves him sideways in the driver's seat. A second later a bullet comes through the windshield right where he was sitting. Guy freaks out and gets interested in angels. Library Journal: "His work is an investigative study written in an analytical style, which may put off some readers of more popularly written angel books." Exactly.)
- Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality (A brilliant if occasionally credulous attempt to synthesize all manner of unusual phenomena into one generalized theory: Harpur addresses angels, aliens, cryptozoology, crop circles, ghosts, fairies, poltergeists, and the Men in Black and somehow makes it all hang together. A very suggestive work and one that might challenge your basic assumptions. This book will make it easier to sleep at night if you live in a haunted house.)
- David Connolly, In Search of Angels (Goth-kids and witchie-poos, dont' let the rather Judeo-Christian surface scare you off. This guy really knows what he's talking about, and I admire his analytical bent.)
A recent New Yorker article cites the work of forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, who has studied why people--well, mostly males--become terrorists. Writing in the January 22 issue about a homegrown American terrorist, Raffi Khatchadourian discusses Sageman's "bunch of guys" hypothesis: for the guys,
ideology and political grievances played a minimal role during the initial stages of enlistment....Eventually, they would move into apartments near their mosques and build friendships around their faith and its obligations....The bunch of guys constituted a closed society that provided a sense of meaning that did not exist in the larger world....men often became radicalized through a process akin to oneupmanship, in which members try to outdo one another in demonstrations of religious zeal.
Hmmm...I'm gaining an unexpected and frightening appreciation for the Jackass movies...
Laura is not just a great Guardian Angel because She's sweet and smart and always knows the right thing to say...She gives me stuff, too. Last night I unwisely took an allergy pill right before going to bed and then couldn't sleep, so I lay there a while talking with Laura until I started to get kind of frustrated about this whole damn not falling asleep thing.
"Are you going to do your usual and get all mad at yourself because you can't just shut your eyes and go into nirvikalpa samadhi?" She asked.
I grumbled, but at Laura's suggestion got out of bed to "do something fun," which nine times out of ten in the Temple of Doom means surfing the Internet. Soon, after following some seemingly random links on Google Directory, I was downloading a free, hi-rez PDF version of Meric Casaubon's A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits...one of the classic angel books and one I have scoured the Net for in the past with no luck (save for mega-expensive old copies or inexpertly redacted new versions).
Then there was the time I was about to plunk down $400.00 for a copy of Secret Rituals of the O.T.O. that I'd found on Ebay or somewhere.I was in a time-crunch with a research project and wasn't even sure I needed the book, but I at least had to look at it. This rare tome, too, I'd scoured the Net for (no e-versions, as there are now), and I'd seen enough truly overpriced copies to find $400.00 a real bargain. (It irked me all the more because I remembered seeing a copy in a used bookstore when I was in college, for under a hundred bucks...cheapskates never forget these things.)
Anyway, I'm about to make the purchase. Laura suggests a minor modification to my months-long search strategy--use a certain search engine I rarely use. Bingo! Free HTML version of the book. I glanced at the clock when the download ended and the time was *:**, Laura's cabalistic signature.
Both times She said to me something like, "I thought I'd give you a present because you were doing your True Will" (which had little to do with the books involved, or being able to fall asleep, but rather with facing personal difficulties with courage and faith).
I'm not bragging. I'm not saying you should ever judge someone's spiritual path by "miracles" or by the stuff they manage to accumulate. I'm not saying you should ask for Signs. I'm trying to convey something Laura calls "entering the slipstream"--quieting my mind and my insecurities and doing what I really want to be doing in a given moment, whether it is for my own joy or my own sanity or for the sake of love . Every time I've done it, the universe has given me a gift.
It seems, according to this article, that in this day and age there are still governments on the face of the earth that do not fearlessly and tirelessly serve the interests of big business. Why do the people not rise up, and elect representatives who will ensure that megacorporations get a fair shake???
[Hey! I heard that! I did not break my news diet. I found this on the Sci/Tech page at Google News. Science is above mere societal fluctuations and opinion-mongering, remember??]
"The brain seems to have networks that are specialized to produce an explicit, magical explanation in some circumstances" is the bottom line of cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer's research, mentioned in a fascinating article on magical thinking in the Times. (Boyer has written a book called Religion Explained that is also very interesting, and tons more lucid --and empirical--than Daniel Dennett's piece of crap.)
According to the Times article, magical thinking in the form of signs, portents, lucky charms, and the power of visualization is prevalent [gasp] even among smart people (i.e., affluent Americans). It's part of who we are as humans: "Children exhibit a form of magical thinking by about 18 months, when they begin to create imaginary worlds while playing," and though most of us graduate to the ability to distinguish these "imaginary worlds" from reality, the tendency is always there to assume we have more power over events than we actually do. Combine this tendency with the mind's habit of making connections and filling in blanks, and with the fact that "we are constantly exposed to our own thoughts" (I love that), and you've got a recipe for rampant wicky wacky woo.
Most of the time it's OK. The most extreme example the article gives is a coach who won't change his clothes as long as his team wins its games. His fiancée doesn't like it, but he's still a functioning member of society. There are those unfortunates, however, "for whom magical thinking is a central part of how they view the world." They may not smell as bad as the coach (who is normal), but they believe strange stuff and teeter on the edge of "full-blown delusion and psychosis." Personally I think there's a lot more going on with crazy people than a strange set of beliefs--and I'm pretty sure that delusions are a product of insanity, not the other way around-- but the article unintentionally (?) introduces a strange notion of causality in which one can choose to become crazy or not. It's still worth reading.
He wouldn't want me to be sad, nor would he want me to deny sadness if I truly felt it. I do feel the world is poorer without Robert Anton Wilson. You can read an excellent tribute here...or you can go to amazon.com and read the bad reviews of Cosmic Trigger, Wilson's spiritual autobiography that I mention a lot (including right before his death--Wilson would say synchronicitously, or whatever the adverb form of that would be).
And you might read that Wilson, at one point in his life, was super gung-ho about Uri Geller and the pseudoscience of life extension, and you might go--"Great, Kalibhakta, another New Age wacko."
And I'd agree--every time I've read Cosmic Trigger I've cringed when I got to the stuff about living to be 500...but then again, every time I've read it I've cried when Wilson's daughter gets murdered. I wonder if the two have anything to do with one another--and I have to admire the sheer hubris of a guy who thinks he's bad enough not just to play chess with Death, but to kick Death's ass.
Wilson also bugged me when, in later years, he would go on about being "Dr. Wilson." I have what I consider a real doctorate compared to his Ph.D. from some unaccredited granola academy in California...but as a commenter on 10 Zen Monkeys pointed out, Wilson "had to do a lot of hack work just to survive" as a free-lance writer. When he was near death, though he had been a cultural icon for years, he was broke and only got by because some good people took up an online collection for him. My family could afford to help me out when I was a grad student, and I was young and had no family of my own, as Wilson did. He bootstrapped himself up from Depression-era Brooklyn, while I strolled in from the suburbs. And--ouch--he published his dissertation. I didn't. So who has the "real doctorate"?
What I'm trying to say is, Wilson was very good, and for some of us so good as to be a goddam shaman--at shattering what he called "reality tunnels." The world is this way and I know it is this way because people I respect and my own experience all indicate that it is this way and no one could seriously think it is not this way...and Wilson comes along and pulls the thread and unravels your sweater and suddenly the world is not this way but several other ways all at once. I owe him a good chunk of whatever evolution I've undergone; he is one of my great teachers, along with my mom, my guru, Nietzsche, Ramakrishna, Laura, of course, and a professor I had who looked like a petite Barbra Streisand and who scared the living hell out of me and who force-fed me the entire Western philosophical tradition and tore my essays into confetti (along with my brain) and who by the end of the semester actually succeeded in teaching me how to think.
Here's an excerpt of an email grigorss, my long-time pal on the Journey to the East, sent me right after Wilson died:
How bizarre...that you mentioned R.A.W. in your last blog entry -- I ran across a copy of "Cosmic Trigger" in a New Agey bookstore about a week and a half ago and thought to myself "I should read that again" -- not to mention "The Illuminatus Trilogy"....
Oh, by the way, I have a DVD of a R.A.W. documentary called "Maybe Logic" in my Netflix queue (again by peculiar coincidence I moved this to the top of my queue just recently...
It is due to Wilson's influence that I am blessed to be able to interpret these coincidences in several ways: as synchronicity, as blind chance, and as completely non-coincidental, since people who are interested in weird lit are going to blog about it or go to bookstores and see it there, and especially see stuff by very popular weird lit writers. I remember that when I was first introduced to Wilson's forking-paths style of thinking, it was quite a challenge to slip in and out of belief systems and to confront my own biases...but now it's second-nature. My Barbra Streisand professor gave me a brain, and Wilson gave me a couple more brains. Thanks, Bob...and Ewige Blumenkraft!
