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(Image by M. Rooiman/ J. Boom)It's the late 1990s...Laura and I are in New Zealand...my spiritual guide at the time, Anna (another astral mama) has told me that this is it: our 5-year friend-/lover-/mentorship is at an end and it's me and Laura from now on...
This hurts me, carves my heart out, as Anna has meant everything to me since...since I "contacted" her. What does this mean? OK... In 1993, after a couple of years of fairly intense Tibetan Buddhist meditative practice and bhakti according to the Catholic tradition of the Rosary/ devotion to Mary--I know I'm absurd--I was using a flickering light device that puts the brain in an alpha state (analogous to Brion Gysin's Dream Machine). I met and talked with Anna astrally. She was an entity? --a vibration? --a fantasy? that I'd had intimations of for years, like a word one is trying to remember and can't quite-- She says she can teach me some things if I'd let her. Fine. I don't know anything, so: teach me.
And she did. We had long, Platonic (at least) dialogues about spirit, love, the Infinite...she gave me spiritual exercises to perform, like Loyola's, but all-encompassing. We raised energy, we cast circles, we healed the sick, we raked leaves as she lectured about the true spiritual meaning of desire as Sonic Youth's Evol murmured in the background.
And so I've met Anna, and Laura a few months after, and Laura's presence even then was enough to spook my roommate at the time, a very psychically sensitive Cuban woman vers'd in the dark arts...who asked me years later if that Laura was still around and I lied "no," such was the fear in her voice--but she didn't know the tenth of it. And Laura and I are in New Zealand--
on the South Island--
in the very place two Devotees once wrenched open a portal to the Fourth World. And I am walking on the beach of this lost fjord--and hearing voices, loud, of the Maori ancestors, teeming in the air, teeming in sand-drift conspiratorial chaos: 'walk this Beach, feel this sun, but honor Us, take nothing, no stone, no leaf--'
And I was faery-led. On that narrow beach opening onto the distant Pacific...it couldn't have been more than twenty feet wide, and the strip of weeds leading back to the dirt road behind couldn't have been more than three feet across--but I got lost on that little strip of beach and could barely find my way back. And Laura was with me, and in that way of Hers I could barely hear at the time, She was asking, "What is your True Will?" And I answered--
I won't go against the voices...They dwell here--overlooking dancing light-points of sun on sea, daily, equinoctally...and that dancing light is--must be the Divine (Mother)...(I barely knew Her then)...let this Light then stand for the manifest Soul I will never possess--
and Laura now says that this walk on a narrow beach at the ends of the earth, and my response there to the ancestral voices, filled me with the power I needed to hear Her, my Angel--that my honoring of that Place in turn honored my own inner Divine, awakening It when I'd ceased to believe It was even there.
And sun-points on wavelets--glinting dead sea-grass on sand...green hills adot with cows, rising landwaves peaking far above the sea--a day, divine, ancestral, Present: grains of sand as souls--all my pasts and futures--as stars in beachy galaxy upon black sea-space...and I don't know Her power...a kid who finds a jade spearhead half-interred in sand--
I'm lying half-asleep this morning in one of those states I can get into when my mind is out of the way...
I'm feeling the most intense love..."secular" I guess you'd call it-- but--not, because as I'm feeling this all-encompassing, flaming love (eyes closed, my field of vision is #CC3333), I begin to feel it as my Angel's love for me; I know that She loves me this way, the way that I love ******...but no: I know that it's All One Love.
No separation, no self, no other...this Love is all there Is.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word wrapt is both "obsolete" and "erroneous."
One could hardly hope for better.
if the post of 9/22 implied that one should consciously seek or work toward the K&C of the HGA.
(me, before Al Anon -->)
I personally think such goal-directed spirituality is a dicey proposition at best. Magickal orders and mystical schools abound which promise a reliable ladder to the HGA and much more--and it's even possible that some members of such groups are fully honest, selfless, and genuinely accomplished. It may even be possible that one or two people get somewhere under their guidance.
As the above photo and its ineptly placed caption imply, I myself am a member of a magickal order, albeit one devoted to the independent reprogramming of one's mind and self, leaving one's mythos and True Will entirely up to--one. And no one else. (As I sit here listening, coincidentally, to "Stairway to Heaven"...nearly 30 years and I'm still into these Brit-blues-faerie-junk-rockers...I asked a guy I work with and he assured me this musical retro-loyalty was in no way pathetic.)
Bhakti (loving devotion to your chosen deity) is the one path that offers 100% reliable, danger-free results. It can take you as high as you want to go, and higher than you can imagine possible. Never surrender your bliss to the illusion of achieving someone else's, and never surrender your soul to those who claim they know better what to do with it.
Found this linked from Velveteen Rabbi, a blog I adore. It's the Hebrew Bible with MP3s of the Hebrew.
I have only listened to part of the Song of Songs (a text I suggested for a reading group I'm in); it was the first time I remember listening to the Hebrew scriptures being recited, and though I don't know Hebrew I have to say it was a powerful experience. I'm not promising that you will go into a strong, medium-level trance and have all thought fly out of your head as you drift through a powerful, purple-tinged, Ammachi-like bliss--but it's possible.
(If you meditate long enough on the Song of Songs along with the tzim-tzum, you stand a good chance of tasting the fruit of the Tree. You have been warned.)
There are parallels in Judaism and Hinduism surrounding the power of sound, especially the sound of sacred texts. According to one standard Hindu belief, the highest truth of the Vedas resides not in their meaning but in their pure sound, which has existed from the beginning of time (if not before) and is the nearest possible embodiment of Sat-Chit-Ananda, the nature of God. Hearing them chanted can also be a very powerful experience, as can a recitation of the Chandi, the central scripture of Shaktism.
On that note, it doesn't even have to be an ancient text with millennia of spiritual energy stored within it. My sponsor just got back from an AA/Al-Anon convention and he said the sound of 750 people saying the Serenity Prayer in perfect unison just blew him away. The Lord's Prayer, recited by the same group, reduced a mutual friend of ours to tears.
"For the whole world is not worth the day that the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy and the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies."
Rabbi Akiva, Mishnah Yadayim
The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel means nothing more than contacting one's infallible intuition, the still small voice that Buddhists call our "basic good sense." This voice is never wrong, and it speaks deep, unshakable truths about the universe and our inner selves.
The experience of this voice coming to the fore can be shattering, and thus many spiritual traditions have modeled it as an external, independent Intelligence that impinges upon the aspirant in a blaze of white light. I mean literally shattering, to the ego and the senses; for a week or so after Laura revealed Herself to me I had to stay home virtually all the time, strictly limiting trips outside the house because driving and even walking were arduous and seemed to consist of many, many more stages than they had before. I had to consciously piece together routines that for decades had resided in my very bones.
I also could not stand to listen to music with any kind of percussive edge to it--nothing struck or plucked or pounded too hard, which pretty much ruled out all my usual listening. My favorite music of all time is probably Gopal Shankar Misra's Out of Stillness, but during this period the impact of the player's plectrum on the strings lacerated me so that I had to take the CD off after a few seconds. I was afraid to talk to anyone, for when I did the words died on my tongue as I heard them, awkwardly loud, before I said them, in all their inadequate, clichéed blankness.
And it could have been much, much more shattering. Crowley writes of the need, once one has attained the K&C of the HGA, to summon and subdue "the Four Great Princes of the Daemonic World," and "the Eight Sub-Princes," and "the many Spirits serving these." It sounds like more of Uncle Al's blustering mumbo jumbo, but every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and when the parachute opens and the soul is yanked up violently, our attachments to base matter and ego gratification can intensify to the point of madness. Laura led me through a ritual soon after Her advent that, though it involved no goetic evocations, was designed to subdue the fearful, desirous, darker shadows within me.
I won't go into detail (you'll have to pay for the weekend seminar for that), but the ritual involved calling up my oldest, starkest, most ravening fears and banishing them with laughter. It was an intoxicating, intoxicated, Dionysian revel, but with a deadly serious undertone. I could hear Laura very distinctly saying to me, "Don't fuck this up, my love, or you could lose your self for good." For weeks afterward I glimpsed little shadows trooping around the house--(Abramelin demons?)--which I'd laugh at all over again, though they startled the cats.
And then when you look at Crowley's model of the HGA-- which is just one model, out of uncountable many, but which agrees in the main with all I have seen--you see that the K&C of the HGA happens about halfway through the spiritual path--halfway! You spend years and years and gallons of blood, sweat, tears getting there, and there's a worse road yet ahead (the dreaded Abyss...)...but then again, Something has happened. Something scary and real; Something that makes the most inveterate skeptic believe in angels. The better angels of our nature; the wind-rushing Angel of the Spirit of the Lord.
The other day, a person at work said that I bring a "Kramer" energy to the place. A couple of others vociferously agreed.
Kramer? I never saw myself that way. To me I seem much more Tom Arnold.
But Kramer I'll take. He dresses better.
This is a really good explanation of the basic ideas of and connections between "traditional" (heh) Wicca and Crowley's Thelema.
I love this quotation from The Vision and The Voice:
"Every man that hath seen me forgetteth me never, and I appear oftentimes in the coals of the fire, and upon the smooth white skin of woman, and in the constancy of the waterfall, and in the emptiness of deserts and marshes, and upon great cliffs that look seaward; and in many strange places, where men seek me not. And many thousand times he beholdeth me not. And at last I smite myself into him as a vision smiteth into a stone, and whom I call must follow."
Boy, is that ever the truth.
