Occult Experiments in the Home

The Vision of PAZ (Aethyr 4)

January 30, 2012 by Duncan

There comes over me the ‘buzzing’ state that heralds an out-of-body experience, but although it fails to develop, neither does it fully recede. It settles into a pulsing rhythm, quite unpleasant, but I decide to put up with it. My body is guided to a specific place, as if I were floating feet-first. This state does not feel deep. I wait for it to stabilise. It seems as if the cat is scratching my bedroom door. I decide to abandon this working, because the cat is bound to distract me, but then I realise there’s no evidence the cat is really there. If I am experiencing sights and sounds, then these cannot be distractions from the state – they are the state. And so I ask for admittance to the aethyr. I ask three times, because each request seems to strengthen the state.

[I was staying at my mother's. She was able to confirm that the cat really had been scratching at my door.]

Killer Bob. A demonic spirit from the Black Lodge. (Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 7.)

There are two spirits who spout all kinds of sententious-sounding stuff. But it’s nonsense. They take the form of a small aluminium pan and a plastic food container – which betrays their nature. Then I see a procession of things, which I repeat verbally to ensure I will remember. Yet I have forgotten them all. They seemed meaningful. It is only in the next moment, when the vision feels as if it has changed into a different mode or was drawing to a close, that my memory of it properly begins.

[Was there really stuff that I have forgotten? Or was this the vision's way of saying, 'You have forgotten everything that came before because you changed to another mode'? In a vision there is no boundary between experience and symbols.]

I am in a small room with patterned wallpaper, bare except for a bed against one wall. In the same wall is a big window onto absolute blackness. In the forgotten part of the vision, I was in the same room, but it had no window. Now, I stare through the glass, and briefly see my reflection on its surface. My reflection is replaced by a manic, seething face with long hair and bushy eyebrows. The face seems about my age – perhaps a little younger – but strikes me as very different from my own.

[The room reminded me of the one Ken Wilber's reported during a near-death experience [1]; and of the climax to Sapphire and Steel, a supernatural sci-fi drama, in which the heroes were trapped for eternity in a very peculiar motorway café [2]. The face is very much like the psychopathic spirit ‘Bob’, who possesses Leland Palmer when he kills his daughter, Laura, in the TV series Twin Peaks. [3]]

Fiji Mermaid and 'baby' from Eraserhead.

Above: Fiji Mermaid. Below: Nightmarish 'baby' from the film Eraserhead (1977).

I turn around and behind me, on the bed, is a woman dressed in a blue-grey smock with a pointed witch’s hat. She seems frumpy and ill-at-ease in her body. I realise that the face in the window is not my reflection, but hers. I am between them, but I have no image. I have a strong feeling that this is a joke. Someone is making fun, at my expense.

Then I feel again that the vision is changing mode or about to end. I am suddenly alone, until my sister appears. ‘Well, that’s it, brother. Weird, wasn’t it?’ she says. As she sits on the foot of the bed she transforms into a small wizened creature. It’s about two feet tall, totally paralysed, with round, staring eyes, and matted hair that fans out around its head like seaweed.

[The creature reminds me of a Fiji Mermaid [4] and the baby-creature from the film Eraserhead (directed by David Lynch, 1977).]

As I stand, staring, it transmutes into an inanimate object: The Ace of Wands, as depicted in the 1JJ tarot deck. Then the vision falls apart.

Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David McCallum). Trapped for eternity in a kind of cosmic Scratchwood service station.

[The next day, I happened to read this: 'The garbha-grha, or womb-chamber, is the enclosed, windowless room where the deity is kept in a Hindu temple' [5]. This synchronicity perhaps offers a key to an interpretation of the vision. The room is the womb. Early experience is forgotten because there is no reflexivity or ‘window’. Self is an illusion created by the window, from a position between the body (the woman, ‘witch’) and spirit (the man, ‘Bob’). In the vision, this process is presented as something uncanny and potentially ‘evil’. The womb is an emptiness, a void, and yet it is the space in which everything arises. ‘Sister’ is the one (who is not ourselves), who is made, spliced together (like a Fiji mermaid) in the womb. Again, the symbolism turns the generation of life into something grotesque and frightening: the horrifying baby from Eraserhead. In the garbha-grha is the image of the deity; here, the womb-chamber contains the Ace of Wands, a very conspicuous phallic symbol. The vision seems to be showing that whether the womb is empty or filled (by the father’s phallus, or by the deity) we can never find or position ourselves within it. If it is filled then we are displaced; if it is empty then we are not there. Like Sapphire and Steel, we are always already floating in eternity, lost forever.]

Notes

The Ace of Wands from the Swiss 1JJ tarot deck. It's certainly got wood. What's with all that yellow shading?

[1] Wilber described it as: ‘[A] really strange room of blue and pink pastels.‘

[2] Sapphire and Steel was created by Peter J. Hammond and aired between 1979 and 1982 on the UK’s ITV network.

[3] Twin Peaks was created by David Lynch and Mark Frost. It first aired between 1990 and 1991 on the USA’s ABC network.

[4] An object presented as the mummified body of a mermaid, which was actually the remains of a monkey and a fish, spliced together. (See picture, above.)

[5] Sarah Caldwell, ‘Margins at the Center: Tracing Kali through Time, Space and Culture’, in: Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West, edited by Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. 265.

Posted in Astral | Tagged aethyr, lucid dream | 3 Comments »

Deconstructing the Male Orgasm

January 17, 2012 by Duncan

Ejaculation and orgasm are not the same thing.

To many men this may sound incomprehensible, but I’ve been amazed to discover that not only is it true, it’s also easier than I expected to separate them from each other.

For solid evidence that coming does not entail spurting, a little human anatomy comes to our aid: whereas ejaculation is a function of the sympathetic nervous system (which also manages the instinctive ‘fight-or-flight’ response), sexual arousal is a function of the parasympathetic system (the automatic stuff that happens when the body is at rest). A sexual act that includes ejaculation, therefore, is a combination of bodily responses activated by different physiological pathways. More than one thing is happening here, which means there’s scope for turning one of them off, or changing the relationship between them.

Daoism and Tantra are two esoteric traditions that offer views on why it’s a good idea to not spurt when you come. Both seem broadly in agreement that there are health benefits, and opportunities for enhancing sexual pleasure. Semen and sperm contain all sorts of beneficial substances, which are lost upon ejaculation and must then be produced by the body all over again. If, instead, the ejaculate is conserved, it is simply broken down and its virtues recycled. Ridding the body of semen is not the urgent prerequisite for health and sanity that it may seem.

Ejaculation consumes so much energy and blood-flow that it’s basically ‘game over’ for male sexual arousal once it has occurred. A man must take a period of recovery (which may be quite a while, unless you’re a pro porno actor or a Viagra fiend) before erection and inclination returns. Refraining from ejaculation, however, opens the door to the male multiple orgasm. Yes, there really is such a thing. Gentlemen, it really is possible to come over and over again, each time as satisfactorily as if you’d had a fulsome spurt. (Those of you out there who have already been practising this stuff – just when were you planning to clue the rest of us in?)

The ability to maintain sexual arousal through multiple orgasms, especially for those of us with female partners, provides more scope to harmonise with our partner. But never mind this personal, ‘relationship’ stuff. Each of us is our own best judge of the applicability of these techniques to our relationships. Overall, the principle of retaining semen means that sexual arousal is not killed off in a climax to the sexual act, yet most of us have been conditioned to regard the expulsion of sexual energy as precisely the aim of sex. This has certain psychological and spiritual side-effects, but the consequences of the opposite strategy – keeping the sexual energy in – seem far more benign. For instance: learning the art of taking pleasure from what is ordinarily experienced as tension has the potential to increase our capacity for love, tolerance and enjoyment, beginning in the sphere of sexual experience and expanding outward.

Some of this may seem familiar, because most men have developed techniques for delaying their ejaculation – such as thinking of their granny, or imagining their partner as Margaret Thatcher. Unless you’re a member of the Conservative Party, the psychological drawbacks of these tactics should be obvious. Yet once you’ve established to your own satisfaction that ejaculation plays only a minor role in the sensations we label ‘orgasm’, there seems little point in merely delaying it, when it could be eliminated altogether.

This is not the place to go into the details of the specific techniques that will enable you to come without spurting. There is plenty of material on the web. There are pitfalls, however, and it’s these I’m keen to share. First off, a lot of this material is devised and presented by women. I’m sure they have the best intentions, but they don’t have the body parts to describe accurately the kinds of sensations to look out for. Secondly, there are lots of scrawny, long-haired weirdy-beardies out there, who may indeed have a penis, but will promise to make you a Sex God only in return for lots of cash. Personally, I wouldn’t bother. Not when you can learn this stuff virtually for free. And it’s probably more helpful to forget the ‘Sex God’ bit. Like all esoteric practices, this stuff actually turns out to be about rediscovering what is already very ordinary and familiar.

A weirdy beardy.

Indeed, the main obstacle I found was my expectation that something unusual was supposed to happen. Most of the techniques involve stimulation up to the notorious ‘point of no return’ (PNR), the moment at which ejaculation becomes inevitable and involuntary. The trick is to cease or reduce stimulation before PNR and learn the knack of ‘relaxing down’, riding the familiar but dry orgasmic spasms that will develop in the genital area. (Please note that there’s more to it than I’ve stated here!) The texts describe the eventual results as ‘full-body orgasms’. From this, it’s tempting to conclude that something special is going to happen. But it’s not. It’s just an orgasm – same as usual (mostly) – except without the spurty bit. Yet if we’re conditioned to expect and aim for the spurt, then at first its absence feels a bit weak and incomplete. For a long time, I assumed I hadn’t got close enough to PNR, or I wasn’t correctly applying the technique, because nothing ‘different’ was happening. It really doesn’t need to. By trying to fly too close to PNR (or even trying to somehow get ‘beyond’ it, as I did a few times) all you end up with is a sticky patch and a sudden end to your practice session.

Basically, what we’re doing here is meditation. It’s just meditation, with sexual sensations as the object, rather than the breath or peace and loving-kindness. It’s vipassana with a hard-on. The best tactic is to observe the sensations without seeking to modify them, without looking for something that’s not already apparent. It’s helpful to notice how, when there is no ejaculation, although the continued arousal can feel irksome for a short while, a dry orgasm nevertheless yields an afterglow every bit as lovely and fuzzy as a spurty one.

As in more ordinary forms of meditation, you can’t really (in one sense) do anything ‘wrong’. It’s instructive to misjudge PNR and lapse into an unintended spurt, because this gives us the opportunity to compare the two types of orgasm. I was amazed to find myself disappointed at how the spurt killed my arousal, just as I’d felt disappointed at how arousal continued after a dry orgasm. Whew… It seems dissatisfaction is just everywhere! This also gave me the opportunity to observe how there really is no such thing as an ‘orgasm’ – it’s a dependently-arising amalgamation of sensations. We might assume that ejaculation is the ‘essence’ of male orgasm, but when we look at the experience directly, ejaculation is just a fairly mild, squirty feeling. There’s nothing more special about it than taking a piss. The really pleasurable components of the experience belong to other aspects entirely. When looked at, it’s difficult to localise these in either the body or the mind.

And yet, we must remember: we are but men. Evolution has hardwired us to ejaculate, and the man who seeks to side-step evolution can never quite relax and surrender to sexual pleasure in the way a woman might. But I’m not complaining. Only a few months ago, I’d have thought that multiple orgasms for men was probably a myth. Yet it remains inevitable that what was built to spurt is probably going to, occasionally. I’m interested to see how far this practice can be taken. There’s much debate over whether it’s healthier to ejaculate occasionally, or never. I imagine that if a partner is determined to part us from our semen, then she or he will probably succeed… And, of course, there’s a vast ethical dimension to these techniques, which I’ve not insulted my readers’ intelligence by even mentioning.

Ghost Hunting

December 19, 2011 by Duncan

We were near the end of our friendship, but I couldn’t see it. Zeff still seemed cool and dangerous to me, the way he rolled his ciggies, and how he drove that boxy automatic his uncle left him, with its disability badge still on the windscreen, which meant Zeff could park anywhere. We sometimes cruised around the city on errands, me in the passenger seat and him swinging around bends with that lazy driving of his. There would be music on the stereo. We used to like Michael Nyman’s soundtracks to Peter Greenaway’s films.

Zeff had a shock of blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles, and a smile that – depending on how you looked at it – was either cheeky or cruel. Girls threw themselves at him. On our course was a scarily beautiful girl with amazing wavy red curls all the way down to her waist. She lived off-campus by the sea, and Zeff once stayed the night. When I asked what she was like, Zeff said that whilst she’d gone to the loo he’d looked through her diary. It was full of notes on how to attract the right kind of men. ‘She keeps a great big vibrator by her bed,’ he smirked. ‘But I think she uses it a bit too much.’

It surprised me he’d even made the effort to drive and see her. Mostly, he liked to get drunk and stoned and sit talking bollocks at home. He was the only man I knew who faked his orgasms when he felt tired. At least, that’s what he told me, but he was lazy enough for me to believe it.

One weekend, I got off at a party with another girl from our course. We went outside for a snog. The taste and touch of a new person felt so good to me, but at the same time somehow painful. I’d never noticed this before. It felt as if this girl and I were splitting up, whereas in fact we never even got started.

Over her shoulder, I saw Zeff come out for a smoke. He watched us, then gave me a thumbs-up sign, then sat down heavily, swigging from a pint glass of red wine. I ignored him. He got so drunk that night, in the morning he seemed to remember nothing. I dropped a few remarks about the girl, but he just looked blank and talked about something else. I couldn’t tell if he really didn’t remember, or simply wasn’t interested in things that happened to me.

What I couldn’t do without were our talks. His room was over mine, and each night I’d go up and we’d talk and talk, usually with the television on. Beavis and Butthead were big around that time. We joked about how we were their philosophical equivalent.

Death was Zeff’s big preoccupation. He wanted to write his dissertation on it. He had books by Sartre, Heidegger and Freud. On top of his television stood a brass statue of Kali, whose lithe and dancing limbs dangled severed heads, and waved cruel-looking knives. I never quite worked out where Zeff thought he stood on death. I found a book of photos once by an Italian artist, who made portraits of dead people: the elderly and children; the chronically ill, and those who had been healthy right up to the end. He seemed to be saying that, even as corpses, we retain individuality. Many of those dead faces looked like they were faintly smiling at some private joke. Zeff flipped through the images cursorily – a bit tensely, I thought.

'Many of those dead faces looked like they were faintly smiling at some private joke.'

‘Well, they’re all peaceful and happy,’ he declared.

‘Of course they’re not,’ I said, taken aback. ‘They’re dead, Zeff. There’s nothing there that can feel peaceful or happy.’

Another time, our conversation turned onto how dying must feel.

‘Like nothing much,’ Zeff surmised. ‘Merely glimmers. Flashes of sensation as the brain shuts down.’

‘But those “glimmers” will be all of our experience,’ I said, ‘and if that is everything there is for us, then there can be no “merely” about it.’

I sat drinking wine and talking bollocks like this until I was tired. After midnight, Zeff would switch to whiskey and sit up for long after I’d gone to bed. Some mornings, I heard his television and knew he was still up from the night before. He usually surfaced after lunch, when I’d already been studying for a few hours. Sometimes, I would take a break from the books and journals. ‘It’s a day off, today,’ I would tell him.

‘No it’s not,’ he would snap. ‘It’s just another day. Just like any other.’

I don’t know how it came about. Maybe I was bored, because either I would be reading or else I would be talking bollocks with Zeff, and that was all it seemed I ever did.

‘I don’t need to read any books,’ Zeff once said. ‘I just talk to you about them.’

How my search for some variety turned into joining the Parapsychological Society, I’m not sure. It was close to Halloween, so I guess I just saw a poster for what they had planned: a night in some woods, investigating ghosts. In 1941 a German bomber had come down in some nearby woodland. Ever since, people had supposedly seen re-enactments of the plane’s last moments, plus a ghostly airman, wandering among the trees in Nazi uniform. This was long before the packaged ghost vigils that are popular today. I could think of no better way to spend Halloween than in those woods, hunting dead Nazis. And when I heard that the organisers needed volunteer drivers, suddenly Zeff was involved too.

‘Could you please slow down?’

'A ghostly airman, wandering among the trees in Nazi uniform.'

That was Liam, a weedy bloke in specs who nominally led the group. Also on the back seat was a chubby goth girl known as Raven. They weren’t holding hands and didn’t often look at each other. In fact, I’d never seen a couple like them. They seemed like strangers always accidentally too close.

Zeff thundered along way too fast down the winding roads. The three cars behind struggled to follow. He and I were postgrads, and I shared his delight in torturing the undergrads Liam and Raven. They blanched when he pulled out a bottle of Famous Grouse whiskey and swigged on it, yanking the wheel with his free hand.

After Liam shakily alighted and the others arrived, he marshalled us at a lay-by and we followed him into the trees, Zeff still pulling on his whiskey bottle. Pressing through the bracken, the wind sighed through the branches and the trees crowded in. I caught myself scanning the others for reassurance, but sensed them just as fruitlessly scanning me.

We split into two groups. Ours, led by Liam, patrolled the clearing made fifty years earlier when the plane came down. Raven guided the rest to a roadside spot where the airman had been sighted. Zeff passed me the bottle, and I was grateful for the warmth it imparted. By torchlight we trudged around the clearing.

‘You really feel you could bump into something weird here,’ I murmured.

‘Don’t worry. We won’t,’ said Zeff.

‘Be quiet, please,’ Liam chided, relishing his chance to turn the tables on Zeff.

But Zeff was right. Nothing happened for the whole hour, except we grew accustomed enough to our surroundings to start to feel bored. Yet when we reconnoitred at the lay-by with the other group, Raven was squatting by the verge, looking ill.

‘When she touched that tree stump,’ one of the guys in her group explained, ‘the negative energy nearly threw her across the road.’

Liam put his hand on the place indicated and confirmed he sensed something strange,

‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ he said, ‘if the pilot’s ghost often stands just here.’

I glanced at Zeff, and his glance in return assured me we were agreed on what we thought of this. With much stroking and soothing, Raven was coaxed by her friends back onto her feet. There was just enough moonlight to reveal the road winding down into a valley, then curving upwards past more woods in the distance. Someone shouted, and pointed at something odd, moving at speed through those distant trees. It was a vivid red light, which shot out a concentrated beam that revolved in all directions as it moved in and out of the trees. We could all see clearly that it was not at ground level, but hovering a short height above. My mind reeled in incomprehension as I watched. I’d come to investigate a ghost, but had found a UFO instead.

'A vivid red light that revolved in all directions as it moved in and out of the trees.'

One of the better-equipped guys aimed his flashlight at the object and signalled it with two quick blasts. In response, it instantly winked out and vanished.

Although this proved the thing was intelligent, suddenly it didn’t seem wise to have given away to it our position. As we stood, debating whether it was better to leave, or hike over to where the light had last been, we heard an engine roaring up the road.

A tall truck appeared, with an open rear, on which stood a man in camouflage gear, hands gripping a device on the cabin roof. Leaving us in no doubt as to what we’d seen, he flicked a switch and we were drenched in dazzling red light. The driver pulled over and killed the engine.

‘What are you lot doing out here?’ he growled, climbing from the cab.

‘We’re from the university, undertaking scientific investigation into sightings of a ghost,’ said Liam.

The driver looked at the other man and they smiled. The man in the back of the truck dimmed the light and jumped down.

‘There’s no ghosts out here,’ he said. ‘I’ve lived around here for years and I never heard of any.’

‘A German bomber crashed here in 1941,’ Liam explained.

‘Well I’ve never heard of it,’ the man insisted.

The residual red glow revealed a bulging tarpaulin in the back of the truck. Feathered carcasses protruded from underneath, and something big that might have been a dead deer.

‘You’re farmers?’ Liam asked.

The two men looked at each other again.

‘That’s right,’ said the driver.

‘We didn’t mean to trespass,’ Liam apologised.

‘Oh, we don’t mind,’ said the driver.

‘No,’ smiled the other man. ‘Make yourselves at home.’

Zeff broke away from the group to stand chatting with the men. In the meantime, Liam gathered us around him. ‘Each group will swap sites,’ he announced, glancing at the truck, ‘for one final patrol.’

I watched Zeff sharing his spliff and whiskey. The men laughed again and finally made off. The tail lights of their truck went back down the hill, and Zeff skulked in at the rear of the group. They must have had shotguns with them. Things could have turned out far worse.

By now it was past 2am. But the next hour was as dull as the first, as we tramped up and down the same stretch of road. At one point Liam froze, pointed, and made a performance of having seen a goggled figure near the tree stump where Raven had her dizzy fit. A few in the group began to nod and murmur that maybe they’d seen it too, but I wasn’t convinced. To judge from his complete disinterest, neither was Zeff.

‘Sorry,’ I whispered to him as we trudged again up the road. ‘I thought there would be more to it than this. You know, some kind of intellectual, scientific discussion.’

‘Not your fault they’re dicks,’ said Zeff.

‘We could have done something useful instead,’ I said.

‘You might have,’ Zeff replied.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I can’t be bothered working as hard as you do. I don’t even know why I’m doing our course.’

‘Because you turn in good work,’ I reminded him.

‘I get all my ideas from you.’ He flicked the remains of his roll-up. They traced a red arc into the damp grass. ‘Before you came along,’ he said, ‘I’d never met anyone more intelligent than me,’

He was angry, but I was puzzled. It’s clearer to me now what happened right then, but at the time I felt only that if we wasn’t blaming me for how badly the evening had turned out, then he was certainly blaming me for something.

After the two groups merged and we prepared to drive home, in the same instant all of us noticed peculiar sounds and movements. The sky was clear at that moment, the moon bright. On the opposite side of the road an empty field rose into a gentle hill, glowing blue-white. On its crest, something stirred. An undulating form that coalesced from mist, and rose into an approximately human shape. It turned its head to us. It had no features, and never ceased shifting and writhing as it gathered itself, beneath the brilliant moon.

‘Wooooo! Awoooooo!’

Even as my heart continued to hammer, I still remember how one thing seemed to transform into another: the ghost turned into a laughing heap of two men, flailing under a tarpaulin. It was the poachers, returned from over the field to give us a scare.

'"You’re farmers?" "That’s right," said the driver.'

‘Admit it,’ said Zeff to Liam, after the men had stopped laughing at us and walked away. ‘I talked to those guys earlier. There was never a ghost out here, was there?’

Liam looked at Raven, then around the group. ‘I was going to tell everyone,’ he said. ‘But –’ he raised his voice over the chorus of groans – ‘it was still a valid exercise. We needed to test how to coordinate a large group out in the field, before we undertook a real investigation.’

I never attended another of their meetings. Although we laughed on the way home, and often re-told this story between ourselves and friends, it marked the point after which things changed. Within a couple of months Zeff had given up the course and moved back with his parents. I stayed in touch, until it grew painfully obvious how it was always me who phoned. I heard through other friends that Zeff had later found a job and moved into his own place. Then, after a couple of years, I heard he’d married and set up a business selling designer shoes. It has been twenty years now since I saw him. I still think about what he’s doing, and still wonder how it took me so long to realise he never liked me as much as I liked him.

In the meantime, the internet has come along. Some nights I go on-line and try to find him. These days, everyone leaves some kind of trace on-line, but although he has an unusual surname Zeff seems to have left nothing. And this worries me, because Zeff was always so obsessed with the idea of death. A lot can happen in the space of twenty years, but so – of course – can absolutely nothing at all.

Posted in Consensus Reality | Tagged fiction, ghost hunting, paranormal investigation, short story | 3 Comments »

A Conversation Between Worlds?

December 5, 2011 by Duncan

Mark L. Cowden is the author of Spirit Voices: The First Live Conversation Between Worlds, a book that ought to be causing a stir on the paranormal scene.

Cowden specialises in audio technology, and in this capacity joined the Northern Ireland Paranormal Society (now renamed ‘PSI Ireland’). Members of the team, including Cowden, featured in a BBC television programme, Northern Ireland’s Greatest Haunts, which has so far completed two series.

Mark L. Cowden, 'Spirit Voices: The First Live Conversation Between Worlds' (Anomalist Books, 2011). Click image for more information.

In episode one of the second series, during the investigation of a supposedly haunted location, Cowden succeeds in using specially adapted equipment to record the ‘voice’ of a spirit replying to questions asked in a separate room by mediums Marion Goodfellow and Andy Matthews. When Goodfellow later hears Cowden’s recordings, which support the inaudible communications she claimed to be receiving, she breaks down in tears. ‘For the first time ever,’ explains Cowden, ‘other people could hear exactly what Marion heard when she was communicating with a spirit’ (p. 145). A clip of this incident, and the full episode of the show, are currently available on YouTube. Cowden describes how he was able to repeat this feat at a second location, later in the series.

However, the book is more than a description of a technological process. It is mainly the story of how Cowden awoke to his own psychic talents. ‘[T]he recorded evidence I was getting had little to do with the equipment,’ he writes. ‘I was getting results because I was evolving in the right direction with my own spirituality’ (p. 150-1). The right direction, according to Cowden, is to undertake paranormal investigation in aid of a greater good, which involves liberating earthbound spirits and awakening ordinary people to the reality of spirit.

Although in the television programme he is portrayed as a member of a sceptical paranormal team, in his book it is clear he has come to regard himself as a spiritual practitioner, like the mediums. The only difference is in his use of electronic equipment to augment his psychical abilities. Otherwise, Cowden is swinging a pendulum, sensing energies, and receiving communications from entities just like any common or garden psychic. ‘I was becoming more interested in just how my intentions and my own spirit related to the success of my recordings’ (p. 119), he writes.

But just as sceptical materialists harbour untested assumptions, mediums and psychics can also do the same. Medium Andy Matthews, listening to Cowden’s recordings on the television show, comments that they are a clear demonstration of ‘intelligent contact’. Yet we have to question this, I think, because Cowden’s remarkable work foregrounds the important question of what a record of the paranormal actually is.

Not all ‘records’ are analogues or pictures of what they represent – such as a hologram, for instance. A web page is another example (one that I understand better), which is also not an image so much as a series of instructions for constructing itself on a specific device. (Select ‘View Source’ from your browser’s menu to see exactly what I mean. A web page isn’t an image; it’s code.)

Mark Cowden demonstrates his recording set-up. (YouTube clip. Click image to view.)

What if a ghost or spirit were something similar? I think there might be good reason for supposing that it is. Cowden, however, contrasts the intelligent communications he captured with another type of recording, which he aligns with the famous ‘Stone Tape’ theory of hauntings: ‘The voices didn’t seem to be interacting,’ he remarks of these. ‘I had tapped in on conversations conducted hundreds of years previously’ (p. 142). Clearly, Stone Tape phenomena would be images of past events. But what if the ‘intelligence’ manifested in the other type of recordings is not originating from some supposed mind behind the voice, but from the execution of a set of ‘instructions’? If a ghost were a bundle of meanings and feelings triggered to run on contact with a human consciousness, this might create an impression of intelligence, but it would be artificial.

This has certainly been my experience, when working with spirits of the dead and other discarnate entities. In spirits of the dead we encounter a very limited constellation of emotions and motivations. A living person can be different things to different people at different times, whereas the dead are trapped within a specific story. This is not a person; neither, in my view, can it really be considered an ‘intelligence’, it is only the remains of one. An animal has a far greater range of responses and a more expansive personality that what we ascribe to a ghost. That’s probably why it seems an act of kindness to help a ghost ‘move on’. Becoming nothing restores a ghost to a nature that is paradoxically more human than the obsessive and static collection of attributes we ordinarily suppose a ghost to be.

The same is true of other kinds of spirits and of deities. We turn to them for the attributes they offer. We couldn’t work with Ganesha, for instance, if he had the ability to one day become more like Kali – as a human might do, either willingly or unwillingly. Working with gods and spirits produces change, but our consciousness is what executes those changes, not the gods and spirits themselves. Our consciousness can turn itself to anything because it isn’t, in itself, anything. Ganesha’s clearance of obstacles, Kali’s cleansing destruction, and uncle Albert’s inability to realise he died in 1941 are all nowhere without a human consciousness that turns itself towards them and manifests them.

And yet Cowden’s achievement was to record voices. So surely something is actually out there, operating of its own accord? Watching the television programme, it’s not that Cowden recorded the specific words that Goodfellow claimed to hear (does she even claim to hear ‘words’?) but he certainly obtained responses that followed the gist of the conversation Goodfellow claimed to have. Just as every different type of web browser interprets the instructions for building a web page broadly the same, yet with slight differences, so it seems that Cowden rendered not an exact image of what Goodfellow clairvoyantly received, but something that conveys its general sense.

The utterances captured didn’t sound to me what we might expect from a speaker of eighteenth century English – the period in which had lived the historical person identified by the mediums as the ghost. Likewise, in Cowden’s book, when he divines the name ‘Darren’ for the spirit of a mill worker (p. 37), you have to wonder how common that name would have been back in the day. (Cowden doesn’t consider this and I’m no expert, but my guess is ‘possibly not very’.) And when a female spirit is recorded saying, ‘It’s okay’ (p. 156), then that word dates her to possibly no earlier than 1790, but – again – no comment is made on this.

The 'Philip' Experiment. A still from a dramatised reconstruction. (YouTube clip. Click image to view.)

If we assume that ghosts are actual people from history on another plane of existence, then such assumptions must stand or fall on details such as these. However, if we accept that there’s no ghost without an interceding, interpreting human consciousness, then it doesn’t much matter. The ‘Philip’ experiment at Toronto University in 1972 demonstrated how human belief alone can produce a ghost with tangible physical effects, even though the historical back-story intentionally ascribed to it has no basis in historical fact. Cowden’s recordings can stand, not as the actual voice of a ghost, but as the manifestation of a ghost’s voice mediated by human consciousness.

Since my night alone in the company of one, I’m less inclined to view ghosts as evidence for survival of the personality post-mortem, but I’m more inclined to the view that working with spirits facilitates our own spiritual development. Beyond the grave, I think that non-existence awaits. Anything that endures on this side is karmic traces, the remnants of a personality. On the basis of my experience so far, I don’t believe there’s another world, but instead the lack of one, which – to the extent we can approach this through spiritual practices whilst still alive – suggests something far more amazing.

Posted in Astral, Consensus Reality | Tagged ghost, life after death, Mark L. Cowden, Northern Ireland's Greatest Haunts, spirit, spirit communication | 13 Comments »

The Visions of DEO, MAZ and LIT (Aethyrs 7 through 5)

November 27, 2011 by Duncan

The visions of the aethyrs are becoming subtler, harder to attain, and yet – surprisingly – more mundane and personal, as I approach the end of this five-year working. (Or has it been even longer?)

The Vision of DEO (Aethyr 7)

I’d not had a lucid dream in ages, so this working was an experiment: I opened the temple with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram; read the Enochian Call of the Aethyrs and opened Aethyr 7, reciting the names of the governors; and then, without banishing, I then went straight to bed. I had decided that whatever occurred between opening the aethyr and rising in the morning, I would accept as the vision of DEO.

Waiting to fall asleep, a spirit in the form of a young boy came and asked questions. ‘How do you open an Enochian aethyr?’ he kept pestering me. Earlier in the evening, whilst performing other operations, I had sensed a presence behind me, but it had not identified itself. I had banished afterwards, even though the working hadn’t required it. I wondered now if the young boy were that same spirit returning. There was something vexatious in his questions – because if he were a spirit of the aethyrs, why was he so interested in knowing how to open one? And besides, the spirits were there to answer my questions.

Eventually sleep came. The weather was breezy. Something, somewhere, made a slight, intermittent bumping sound that kept me partially awake throughout the night. Maybe this accounted for the paucity of dreams, yet it also provoked a consistent emotional state: not quite anxiety, but certainly a suspicious watchfulness that endured whilst the aethyr was open, and which I decided was one of its attributes.

At 4.19am I woke, got up, and sat in meditation until 5.10. I saw a headless being, composed of white, squirming limbs. Apart from the wind, the night was quiet, and I was reminded of my stint last year in the haunted prison cell. Fear took hold, several times. Watching the fear and its sources, at one point I entered a state where the presence of my mind was the cause of its fear. The mind was frightened just by the weird, ghostly fact of itself. My surprise that such a state could exist immediately put an end to it.

Usually, getting up to meditate and then going back to bed is my sure-fire method for obtaining a lucid dream. I lay on my back (another lucidity aid) but finally turned on my side and slept.

I was in my parents’ old house, sleeping in the room I’d had as a small child. Fra X was staying as a guest, asleep in a room upstairs (although, in actuality, there is no room above). Fra X liked listening to show tunes when he rose in the mornings, and it seemed I heard these, but soon the music stopped and Fra X had still not appeared.

[I hate show tunes. I were asked to nominate someone whose lifestyle was completely at odds with ordinary, family life, then I might nominate Fra X.]

It was still dark, and in the meantime I heard my father get up for work. As he moved about, making his breakfast to the news on the radio, it struck me how agile he sounded. ‘His hip must be better,’ I thought.

[The sounds of my father in the morning are memories from childhood. His bad hip is a reference to the present. By confusing the sequence of time, the past is enlisted to heal the present.]

Then I heard my mother get up and leave the house. I was curious and anxious where she might have gone. I found her at the bus station, waiting with a group of characters from my home town, looking the way they’d appeared in the 1970s. Sitting nearby was my grandmother with her next-door neighbour. This puzzled me, because I knew they were both dead. I missed an opportunity to become lucid at this point, yet they all looked so happy, chatting together whilst waiting, and having reassured myself my mother was okay I decided to leave them all to it. ‘You are all far too early in the morning for me!’ I laughed, and walked away.

A bus queue in Bedford, 1970. An image of the afterlife?

['Waiting for a bus' can feel like 'forever', and here is used to symbolise eternity. 'You are all too early' is a reversal of how the people waiting are actually 'late' – in the alternative sense of 'dead'. I am anxious for my mother because really I am afraid that she will die. I am able to reassure myself that it is not she who is dead but the others, and – anyway – they are all having a nice time, but evidently this is a fragile reassurance.]

Later, my sister came to visit. Fra X was still upstairs, but that was fine. If he ever got up and came down, it would be great to see him.

[Again, this rings false. If Fra X is the 'anti-family' then when he 'gets up', the family ceases to be.]

I had an electronic gadget that made quiet but distracting sounds – such as the noise of squelching food. I demonstrated it to my sister, at first without telling her. It drove her nuts. She couldn’t fathom where the noises were coming from. But when I showed her the device she found it very funny. She said it was exactly the kind of thing she supposed I would have.

[When we were kids, my sister was a noisy eater – which used to drive me nuts! The animosity of our childhood is forgotten here, the roles reversed, and the source of annoyance made into a toy, a novelty, that is a source of humour.]

Then there was a tiny, enclosed space, perhaps underground. As I was squeezing into this space, our long-dead family cat squeezed past me and ahead. My face was buried in the warmth of her fur, so what might have been a horribly claustrophobic episode was instead reassuring.

['Underground' suggests a grave. The family cat is buried in the garden. Regressive sexual imagery is combined with the deathly connotations. 'Cat' = 'pussy'. I'm pressing my face into the entrance of the womb! As a strategy for escaping death and separation, this is obviously rather flawed.]

The Vision of MAZ (Aethyr 6)

I am walking in a windy place with a childhood friend, thinking, ‘It would really impress him if I could fly.’ Realising that I am dreaming, I conclude: ‘Why not?’ And I do. But then I wonder, ‘Is there enough time to scry an aethyr?’

The state has become unstable, but I concentrate and it becomes more steady, and I state my intention: ‘I wish to enter MAZ, the sixth aethyr!’ Indeed, I state this so powerfully and clearly that I’m sure I’ve spoken it aloud in my sleep. The lucidity begins to fade again, but I reinvigorate it by spinning around and around.

I am on a mattress without blankets in a room that reminds me of my sister’s room in my parents’ old house, except it has an exceedingly high ceiling. My girlfriend is asleep next to me, and next to her is an identical aspect of herself, with a scarlet pentagram on her forehead at the third eye. She says something, which I do not remember and may not have been verbal anyway, but I recognise who she is: the part of my girlfriend that is childlike, mystical, and loving towards everyone.

[The amalgam of sister's room and partner suggests (again) the mystical sister, soror mystica, a personification of the male alchemist's 'female half' who assist in his quest. The pentagram is a symbol of earth and humanity. 'Scarlet' recalls the 'Scarlet Woman', the shakti, or tantric partner. The magickal practice of placing symbols on the forehead of the partner, charging them as sigils through orgasm during lovemaking, is also suggested here.]

'He meets his shakti Tuesdays, / Down the launderette. / They go behind the driers / And invoke Baphomet.'

At the foot of a mattress, high up against the wall on a ladder, a large naked man is fixing a red cube to the wall. ‘Who’s in charge?’ I call up to him. He laughs, but not derisively. ‘You’ll never see him around here,’ he says.

[Red cube: another symbol of earth and matter.]

There was a second part to this vision, which has faded from memory, in which it now seems that I did see and meet who was in charge. But whether there were images and I have lost them, and that’s why only the purport of it remains, I can no longer tell. Yet I know that the person in charge gave me something. Because he was angelic it was something very subtle and fine, so he showed me how to mix it with what is gross and disgusting, in order to make it usable in everyday experience.

[This suggests the magickal techniques of tantra and the Left Hand Path.]

Earlier I’d dreamt non-lucidly that Edgar Allan Poe decided to take his own life. He rode on his beloved horse to the edge of a cliff, then took out a handgun, intending to blow out his brains. It was the horse that swayed him. Poe couldn’t bear the thought that his horse might come to harm, and – realising a source of genuine love in his life – the urge to commit suicide faded. Instead he went home, and dined alone with gusto on a meal of roasted rats.

[Poe's lack of love contrasts with the compassionate nature of the mystical sister. The horse represents the bodily or animal nature of the rider. What we might have here is a view of the Right Hand Path from the perspective of the Left. Poe's 'spiritual practice' is to blow out his brains, rather than to use his connection with the 'horse'. The rat traditionally symbolises observation and intelligence – mental awareness, rather than bodily. In Poe's story 'The Pit and the Pendulum', the narrator is tortured by the Inquisition, but escapes after rats gnaw through the ropes that constrain him. The rat, in this instance, is perhaps a symbol of 'liberation by mental means'. Poe, of course, was an intensely cerebral character.]

'They swarmed upon me in ever-accumulating heaps...' Illustration for The Pit and the Pendulum by Byam Shaw, 1909.

And so the person in charge mixed the subtle thing he gave me with cooked, minced rats. And although Poe ate with relish what was actually disgusting, the mixture of the subtle thing and the rats was really quite palatable. Only when I thought of the ingredients did I feel disgust, but then only weakly, because it came from thinking and was not a bodily reaction.

[This suggests a way forward in my current practice.]

With this second scene, if there ever really was one, the vision ended.

The Vision of LIT (Aethyr 5)

I’m at a magickal moot. There’s a theatre performance, and also we’re all doing our rituals on the stage. There’s a large, dark guy who’s in an aggressive mood and keeps shoving me. I get angry and we start to fight, but we’ve only shoved each other a few times before the magickal brothers and sisters crowd in and calm us down.

[Are my magickal brethren really doing me a favour by preventing the fight between me and my shadow?]

It’s dawn and I want some breakfast, so I step outside and discover I’m in the main street of my home town. Mum and Dad aren’t far, but I doubt they’ll have the kind of breakfast I need. I could just buy a cup of tea, but realise I have no money. Then I remember there is both breakfast and tea back at the moot. It has begun to rain, so I decide to run back to where I came. A feeling of discontent arises at that thought and, noticing it, I also become aware that – anyway – I’m dreaming.

[The moot hasn't taken me far from home, but I seem to realise that it's still where I'm more likely to find appropriate 'food'.]

I look up at the sky and ask to enter LIT, the fifth aethyr. My words sound slurred, so I say it again. Beautiful coloured lights appear, swirling above me. When I look back to earth it’s as if my gaze drags the colours down – the lampposts and houses are festooned with bright decorations made of organic stuff, circular membranes of vivid colour. Everywhere I look more of the stuff appears, but I decide it’s all a bit ‘trippy’, so I head into the town centre to find something interesting.

Where the roads meet is a small café, which somehow I know offers divination. The sign above the window reads QUILITY FRINDS. The premises are very small: candlelit tables for two crammed closely together. At each table sits a woman, waiting for a customer. They are mostly quite short in stature, homely looking, with their hair tied up as if they really were workers in a café or bakery.

[QUILITY FRINDS ('QUALITY FRIENDS'?) = 75 = Five-Pointed Star.]

One of the women with her back to me turns around, sees me, and seems to take an instant dislike. ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to help you,’ she says. But on my left is a woman who looks more friendly. She’s inside a kiosk, and it takes her a while to squeeze out. Another woman occupies the chair where I am supposed to sit. She squeezes out also, to share the seat with the woman from the kiosk. As it turns out, the second woman does most of the talking. The woman from the kiosk merely nods and says a few words.

‘Can you give me some information about the fifth aethyr?’

Next time you're in a lucid dream, visit QUILITY FRINDS. (Hopefully, their cakes are better than their divination.)

‘Well, yes,’ the second woman says, ‘although there are certain things about it we’re not permitted to tell. And anything I do say, you mustn’t take as an official representation. There are lots of beings here, so it’s just my view.’

‘Okay, that’s fine. What can you tell me?’

‘Something’s going to happen, but I’m not allowed to reveal it. It’s not good and it’ll come about on November 16th.’

Of course, on hearing this, I was determined to squeeze more details out of her.

‘Is it to do with my family or with health issues?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’ She sighs, and seems to give in. ‘It’s a bit of a rip-off, really. You’ll buy something and it’ll turn out not to be worth it.’

‘But hang on,’ I realise, ‘where I’ve come from, it’s November 21st. The 16th has already passed.’

[I had got up to meditate shortly before going back to bed and obtaining the vision. I had noticed the date whilst setting the alarm for the end of the meditation.]

The two women stare at each other as if this were entirely unexpected. ‘Then you’ll be able to look back and work out what it is,’ the first woman responds.

This seems to have broken our concentration – theirs, and also mine, because at this point the vision breaks up and fades.

[Looking back to November 16th, I have so far found nothing to support or illuminate this retrospective 'prediction'.]

Posted in Astral | Tagged aethyr, dreaming, Enochian magick, lucid dream | 4 Comments »

Superego: Secular and Spiritual

November 21, 2011 by Duncan

Id, ego and superego: components of Sigmund Freud’s famous topography of the psyche, so well-known I won’t rehearse the basics, but will focus on perhaps the least-understood element: the superego.

Fundamentally, it allows us to view our ego as an object, from which it gains its traditional role as our ‘conscience’. The superego is the cartoon angel on our shoulder, opposing the cartoon devil (the id) that whispers in the other ear. Whereas the ego specialises in passing judgements of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ on perceptions, the superego judges the ego’s judgements. So watching television, by the ego, is judged better than cleaning the house; but to the superego, the ego’s decision to slob out is judged worse than snapping on the rubber gloves and blitzing grime.

Superego and id as angel and demon. Such a common and cheesy idea it's available as clipart.

In English and other languages, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have parallel sensory and moral meanings. What the ego likes or doesn’t determines good or bad in the sensory sense, but what the superego likes or doesn’t like about the ego’s decisions is morally good or bad. The ego might decide that as an alternative to vegetables, ice-cream is ‘good’; from which the superego concludes the ego is ‘bad’ for dodging its greens. What decides the sense of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in any instance depends on where the judgement comes from: ego or superego.

How the ego arrives at judgements is fairly clear: from weighing up how much pleasure something will deliver against how much hassle its enjoyment will case. (The id, of course, skips that last part.) But Freud broke radical new ground when he considered the criteria of the superego’s judgements, which he decided arose from the influence of our parents.

Firstly, in childhood, our ego contends with the demands of the id in opposition to what reality can actually provide. Later, it has to deal with another set of constraints, those that our elders place upon us: ‘Don’t do that, it’s dirty… Stay away, or you’ll hurt yourself.’ We realise from these how things not only appear good or bad to us, but we in turn appear good or bad (morally) to others. When we no longer need actual parents to deliver these injunctions, but start doing the job ourselves, then our superego has been installed, the consequence of which is a new capacity for guilt. Because just as from the ego arise feelings of disgust or repulsion in reaction to unpleasant perceptions, so from the superego arise guilt, shame and remorse, in reaction to unrighteous intentions from the ego.

At this point, we’re screwed. There’s now a parent in our head, and its punishment – that horrible feeling of guilt – is used to control us. But on the bright side, the capacity to feel shit when we act like one is the basis of civilisation. When people follow rules, rather than their desires, then pyramids and cities get built, the economy grows, and rockets fly to the moon. How fulfilling this actually feels is another question, of course. And meanwhile, those who missed out on the opportunity to grow a sense of guilt are destined for prison, or psychiatric medication, unless they find a way to turn their ruthlessness into a viable lifestyle. (Luckily, there are plenty of options.)

Freud portrayed the dynamics of the superego as the human condition in a nutshell: the source of that enduring disconnection, between doing what we ought and being happy. No other animal suffers like this. But whereas Freud professed he had no solution, the great spiritual teachers have claimed otherwise. Just as the superego leads into the midst of human suffering, so it can also facilitate escape.

Freud would have disagreed, of course. For him, the spiritual path was a delusion, caused by projecting the superego onto the external world. He was mostly correct. For confirmation, we have only to listen to the discourse of present-day orthodox religions, which all assume the following form: by agreeing with and following the rules supposedly laid down by Religious Figure X, I will attain Deferred Metaphysical Reward Y.

A problem with the superego is there’s nothing rational about it. The ego judges physiological responses to perception, which have a certain degree of commonality, but the criteria for superego judgement are passed down from parents, guardians and other figures of authority. Whether the rules bequeathed from them are actually sensible is beside the point: the superego will dish out just as much guilt for breaking a stupid rule as for a valid one. People in orthodox religion can end up believing some really stupid things, because – Freud argued – they are trying to recreate the origins of the non-rational superego by projecting it onto the external world. The rules that in childhood applied to ourselves are taken now to apply to everyone, which means the parent who originally delivered them must now stand outside the world altogether – becoming God, or the Religious Teacher who is more than human in some mysterious, supernatural way. ‘I must do what Daddy tells me,’ has now become: ‘Everyone must do what God says,’ even though His rules may not make sense or be much fun. But at least by following them we know we appear good in His eyes.

If you ever wanted to stroke a tiger in a pleasant, ethnically indeterminate setting, then you should check out the Deferred Metaphysical Reward offered by the Jehovah's Witnesses.

At first glance the ideal of orthodox religion is moral goodness, as dictated by the superego, but its ultimate aim of a Metaphysical Reward (heaven, nirvana, universal justice, etc.) betrays the workings of the ego. Moral goodness is merely used as a form of delayed gratification, rather than supplying an end that’s good in itself. Orthodox religion is not really union with God at all, but a ruse for circumventing Him to attain (albeit beyond our earthly lives) precisely those satisfactions we have been denied. Sucking up to authority in order to get around it, be it a parent, boss, warlord, politician, commissar or king, has proved itself a handy survival tactic for centuries. But survival concerns earthly, human life. It has nothing to do with the Divine.

Orthodox religion is really all about surviving death because that is what the superego is about. Freud supposed that a very specific insight creates the superego: that moment in which we realise that authority possesses powers that we lack, and is capable of depriving us even of that little we currently enjoy. This is what he named ‘the castration complex’. In Freud’s writing, it has a lot to do with angry dads threatening little boys with penis removal, but it’s likely that this was just the way the idea manifested in the childhood phantasies of the early twentieth century Viennese male bourgeoisie. Anyone in the presence of a toddler throwing a tantrum has probably sensed the immense traumatic impact upon a child of realising that the strength of their desire amounts to less than the strength of the external authorities that stand opposed to him or her. This realisation of our lack of potency, this ‘castration’, Freud viewed as the specific trigger for the superego, because if our toddler-self has no chance of overcoming Mum’s superior wisdom and strength, we can at least incorporate Mum’s harshness and wield it against ourselves in a way that makes us seem more like her, and hence less weak – plus it has the added advantage of earning us back Mum’s love. It’s the horrible guilt inflicted on us by the internal parent that finally picks us up from our tantrum on the supermarket floor, resentfully to re-take our external Mum’s hand.

On the one hand, the superego transmits civilisation and culture down the generations. On the other, it’s a prison of guilt and discontent. But it’s also the chink of light that leads us out of the human dilemma altogether, with that basic facility it offers of perceiving our own ego. The examined life (as opposed to the unexamined variety, which Socrates declared worthless) is brought to us courtesy of the superego.

The first step on the spiritual path is to look inward and be disgusted by what we find. Next, we take up practices to try and fix what we have seen, perhaps passed down by some spiritual teacher; and if we stay diligent at applying them, it’s only because we’re driven by the sense of moral badness that arises when we fail to do so. We probably hope, one day, for a pay-off in return for all this. Here, then, we arrive at exactly the same position as the practitioner of orthodox religion. But whereas the orthodox God-botherer remains in the grip of the ego, the yogi seeking authentic union will employ a unique trick. In Freudian terms, he or she embraces castration.

Freud's diagram for his structural topography of the soul - but embrace castration, and it all comes tumbling down.

Nothing impels the ego into reaction more than exposure of its lack of a foundation, or the prospect of its annihilation. The superego sprang out of the ego in the moment we realised our powerlessness, as a defence against this insight. Yet we can now use that same superego to catch our ego in its favourite pastime of making something out of nothing, of denying the liberating emptiness at the heart of all things. Catching out the ego in this way is precisely what all effective spiritual practices are designed to do.

The superego, which sprang from the ego’s fear, is the means by which we see through the ego’s habitual reaction. Instead of running from castration, the fundamental lack of substance to our self, we learn to look instead, directly in the face, at that from which our instincts for self-preservation have so far encouraged us to flee. Doing so, we glimpse at last the Nature we truly are. At which point, the whole Freudian edifice of superego, ego and id, falls delightfully apart.

Posted in Consensus Reality | Tagged castration complex, ego, religion, Sigmund Freud, spirituality, superego | 5 Comments »

A Defence of Synchronicity

November 14, 2011 by Duncan

Stephen Braude is a philosopher who was written extensively on the paranormal, ever since he witnessed close-up, whilst working on his PhD, a table levitating clean off the ground.

Braude’s books are dense and analytical, but he gives his ideas a more populist airing in The Gold Leaf Lady And Other Parapsychological Investigations (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), which I discovered recently, read with much enjoyment, and highly recommend.

Psychokinesis (PK) is the aspect of the paranormal that most floats Braude’s boat. The main refrain of The Gold Leaf Lady is that although the standard, statistics-based laboratory experiments for identifying paranormal phenomena are all well and good, a far more compelling type of evidence would be to see big-arse objects appearing or floating around the room – what researchers call ‘macro-PK’. This is what Braude sets out to reproduce. He argues passionately that it’s not impossible to produce good evidence where it is most likely to occur (i.e. in a non-laboratory context) yet with effective controls in place. The book is presented as a series of case histories, some intriguing, others patently bogus, through which Braude documents the dilemmas of encouraging phenomena whilst eliminating fraud and self-delusion.

The Gold Leaf Lady, by Stephen Braude.

Braude argues that a training in philosophy equips us with incisive tools for eliminating flim-flam. Surely, that’s often correct. But I parted company with him in the chapter that feeds synchronicity into the philosophical mill, and seems to grind it to smithereens.

Jung was clear that it’s not human beings who cause synchronicities, but some other agent. Yet if God or some other agent were responsible, Braude points out, surely Jung wouldn’t countenance this either, because it would mean that synchronicities were caused by something, rather than being acausal. However, the alternative, that synchronicity is a basic operation or principle of nature, doesn’t hold either, because if the meaningfulness of a synchronicity is not simply our interpretation of events, but those events are somehow actually linked independently of the way a human being would arrange them, then synchronicity would be acting on properties that events possess in themselves rather than those we ascribe to them. On the contrary, Braude argues, ‘things count as similar only within a shifting context of human action, needs and interests’ (p. 137). And even if synchronicity could link events, that would assume there were particles of history that it could act upon and which could be identified as discrete happenings. ‘[H]ow many events were there in World War Two?’ Braude asks pithily. ‘Nature does not parse herself’ (p. 140).

Archetypes were, of course, the means by which Jung attempted to ground his view of synchronicity as an acausal law of nature. No good, says Braude, because archetypes are accidental products of biological evolution and human conceptualisation. He gives the example of the ‘mother’ archetype which, although it may be universal, would certainly not have arisen except for the evolutionary accident of the human body being non-hermaphroditic, and of child-rearing being viewed as a female activity. Braude’s view of archetypes exposes them as very much effected by natural laws, rather than in the position themselves of natural laws. On the broader question of whether meaning is a self-subsistent ‘thing’ that has effects on other things, Braude tends instead to the view that meaningful connections between events require a perspective relative to which they become meaningful.

The only way – Braude suggests – that we can admit a role for synchronicity (other than writing off all synchronicities as merely chance) is to admit it is a principle which is causal in some way. Whereas the principles of physics have great generality and predictive power, synchronicities are specific and have no predictive use, so that role is unlikely to be as a law of nature. The perspective relative to which events linked by synchronicity become meaningful is a human perspective. On this basis, Braude goes on to outline his view that synchronicities are engineered by human agents, in some cases by creative interpretations of events, in others by perhaps unconscious but otherwise orthodox means, and – in a remaining few – perhaps by paranormal means, possibly by macro-PK exerting an influence on our own circumstances or on those of others.

Evidently, analytical philosophy is great for ripping apart Jung, but I think it may have led Braude to an unnecessarily limited conclusion.

First off, Braude’s description of the experience of synchronicity is very much ‘from the neck upwards’. Yes, it entails meaningful linkage of events, but we confront meaningful linkage of events many times during a single day, yet these are not the same kind of experiences as a synchronicity. ‘Meaningful coincidence’ doesn’t do it justice. The experience of a synchronicity is to feel the melting of a boundary between our internal thought processes and what we had hitherto perceived as reality. It is like finding ourselves at the exact centre of the cosmos, and seeing how everything else is being levered into place by a sentient, conscious universe.

It is possible to launch an argument against the contents of such an experience, and dismiss them on logical grounds, but this misses out on what makes synchronicity the phenomenon that it is. A synchronicity is not simply a meaningful link, but has a specific emotional and perceptual structure: it entails feeling and seeing our internal processes as indistinguishable from the outer world. Explain this away, if you must, but then you must acknowledge that you have also explained away whatever sets synchronicity apart from the usual meaningful linkage of events that forms the routine background of everyday cognition.

The Uroboros, a snake consuming its own tail. Symbol for the Unus Mundus.

Synchronicity, for Braude, is a human creation rather than a phenomenon of nature. Yet it’s so obvious that it feels churlish to point out that human creations are part of nature too. Our minds have evolved as all things have evolved, upon and out of the planet. The dichotomy between human cognition and the principles of physics, upon which Braude’s argument rests, from this perspective no longer looks so secure. Mental processes that appear ‘internal’ are necessarily also a part of the nature that appears ‘external’. So although we may not be able to identify properties of relationships or events as discrete entities in external nature, the fact that we can identify them internally means there’s still ‘natural’ material there.

There seems to me adequate grounds to argue that synchronicity may be a principle of nature after all. It is the principle that mind and nature are one and the same. If this were so, then it would be unique among principles in being something we could experience directly. Other physical principles, such as gravity or entropy, we can observe acting upon us, or upon other things. But the physical principle that mind and nature are one and the same would be a force in nature through which we could perceive our own consciousness. If we had the same relationship to gravity, it would be as if we ourselves were putting the stars and planets in motion. As things stand, our experience of the principle that mind and nature are joined is synchronicity. As a physical principle, synchronicity indeed lacks any ‘generality’ or ‘predictive power’, but this is because mind forms part of the condition through which it operates, much as time and space enable gravity to work. If our consciousness fell along with the apple dropping from the tree, then our assessment of its motion would always be ‘just here’ and ‘right now’. This is precisely the case in synchronicity. Because mind is implicated, it can manifest only as the experience that right here and right now the internal and the external are one and the same. But what this principle lacks in predictive utility is compensated by the directness of our relationship with it. This relationship is maybe what makes paranormal abilities possible.

Despite the holes in Jung’s argument, I think synchronicity as a law of nature still carries some weight. It’s been a while since I read Jung, and I’ve never found it the pleasure I always set out hoping it would be, but synchronicity for Jung was always a manifestation of the Unus Mundus – the underlying reality in which matter and mind are joined.

Returning to Braude, whereas he argues that PK may cause synchronicity, I favour the opposite view: that PK is an (acausal) manifestation of synchronicity. A PK event is a meaningful coincidence between a person’s will or intention, and the behaviour of physical objects. Yet more than this, for the person concerned, it is a direct experience and enactment of the principle that mind and nature are one and the same.

As a side note, one of Braude’s many interesting arguments in The Gold Leaf Lady is that people fear psi because, once it is accepted, then we must countenance a whole new world of possibly malign influences. For instance, if someone can move a matchstick a couple of millimetres by mental power alone, then it’s a small step towards assassinating another person by the same means, through constricting an artery perhaps.

Russian PK mistress, Nina Kulagina. It could be your internal organs that she's moving around with the power of her mind...

My own gut reaction is that it simply doesn’t work like this. The history of the paranormal is surprisingly light on casualties. Consider all the stone-throwing and fire-starting poltergeists on record: how easily they could have killed many, many people, had they wanted to or truly been able. But remarkably, there are very few cases on record of ghosts causing fatalities. Likewise, UFOs. Sure, there have been instances where UFO encounters appear to have caused deaths. But if we really are being visited by hostile forces from distant stars, we’re getting off remarkably lightly.

Indeed, if the paranormal is calling the shots, and it is PK that brings about synchronicity, then all manner of mayhem is possible. But if synchronicity is what facilitates the paranormal, then manifestations of the paranormal depend upon consciousness, which depends in turn upon life. In that case, killing people simply removes the conditions on which both synchronicity and manifestations of the paranormal depend. Someone strangled in their bed by a ghost, or killed by a psychic assassin, wouldn’t be in any position to facilitate the unity of nature and mind (their own or any one else’s). Maybe for this very reason, the attempt by one entity to kill another entity to which it is fundamentally joined is always doomed to fail…

It would be nice to think so, anyway.

Posted in Consensus Reality | Tagged Carl Jung, paranormal, psychokinesis, Stephen Braude, synchronicity, Unus Mundus | 6 Comments »

What Are ‘The Men In Black’?

October 24, 2011 by Duncan

Mainstream culture adopts esoteric ideas only in ways that reflect its assumptions. From the gnostic idea that reality is a prison constructed by a malevolent demiurge, for example, we get a film like The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999). The film falls short of its apparent gnosticism because, on closer inspection, reality and the matrix are pretty much identical. Neo, the hero, looks and acts pretty much like himself in both, illustrating how popular culture simply can’t do without the notion of a stable ego. Indeed, having discovered that he himself is happily a fixed feature of two realities, the matrix ultimately becomes a playground for Neo’s ego, the reason why the film degenerates into the usual chase and fight scenes.

The consensus view of reality inflicts similar damage upon paranormal themes. In the paranormal field, there is a threshold. Stepping over it, we leave behind the realm of the socially acceptable. Things get serious over there. This moment is dramatised in another Hollywood film, The Mothman Prophecies (Pellington, 2002). The hero John Klein receives a message that his dead wife will call. When the phone rings (even after he has disconnected the handset from the wall) he must decide whether to walk away and resume a rational, everyday life; or pick up the receiver, and allow himself to be drawn in by bizarre phenomena. Hollywood represents the first option as wiser.

Nick Redfern, 'The Real Men in Black'. Click for the official website.

In Nick Redfern’s recent book, The Real Men in Black (2011), I was intrigued by how there is a species of paranormal phenomena that specifically enacts this moment in the lives of its witnesses. According to the folklore that surrounds them, the Men in Black (MIB) visit, warn and sometimes threaten people who are digging around in paranormal topics. Most frequently, MIB arrive after sightings of UFOs, but Redfern’s book shows this isn’t always so: spotting the Loch Ness monster, searching for King Arthur’s burial site, or just general dabbling with ouija boards and the occult have proved sufficient cause for a MIB encounter in certain cases.

Redfern considers a range of possible explanations for the MIB: hallucinations and hoaxes; tulpas; the Trickster archetype; actual government agents and civilian imposters; time travellers; and demons. His conclusion is that MIB are a heterogeneous phenomenon, produced by possibly any combination of these.

At the end of the book, I felt that although Redfern’s conclusion holds good for the MIB’s means of manifestation, nevertheless there does seem to be a unifying reason for the phenomenon: the position of the witnesses on that threshold I mentioned, between consensus reality and – something else.

As I read through Redfern’s stories, I found myself in each case tending towards a probable cause: one sounded like a lucid dream; another sounded like paranoia; one seemed a hallucination or screen memory; yet another seemed most likely just some guy mucking around. Nevertheless, the significance of the incident in the witnesses’ lives was pretty uniform. It brought them to a turning-point, from which most fearfully turned away, whereas a few chose to forge ahead.

The MIB reminded me of an entity that appeared one day as I sat meditating. ‘Hello,’ it said. ‘I’m the root of your being. I’m here to tell you that you’ve reached as far as it’s possible to go, so there’s no need to continue. You can stop meditating now.’ Although I was suffering at the time, and the invitation to cease was attractive, nevertheless I pressed on.

My colleague Alan had a similar experience (whilst on a bus). He named what we’d experienced as ‘The Vision of the Double’ (Chapman & Barford 2009: 22-24), a last-ditch attempt of the ego to prevent its being seen through, by producing a replica of itself and then trying to persuade us that this replica is something ‘real’ or ‘other’.

This tactic accounts for some of the weirder aspects of the MIB, for instance: the way they often appear to struggle to maintain a human appearance. Some commentators have pointed out how MIB seem particularly prone to fail in this if the witness reacts to the encounter with strong emotions (other than fear) or humour, in response to which MIB will often seem to lose their authority, or will even sometimes flee the scene. Indeed, Gray Barker has suggested that a joke is the best defence of all against them (Redfern 2011: 178). We all know from experience how nothing overwhelms our ego more than strong feelings, or silences its demands more effectively than a sharp dose of humour. Under these conditions it’s difficult for our ego to maintain its semblance of integrity.

However, I don’t mean by this that MIB are a purely interior, psychological event, or even necessarily a hallucination. MIB are not purely psychological but also partly magickal, an aspect of the magickal process that guides us toward truth. If magick is the art of experiencing truth, then we can arrive at this on the back of anything: dreams, waking hallucinations, chance events, or even some random guy hoaxing us rotten with a cheap black suit and make-up. Any of these can lead us magickally to the experience of truth; not the truth of how the MIB happen to manifest, but the truth of what the encounter with them means.

‘The Vision of the Double’ is a perspective on an important turning-point, but with a negative slant. A more positive view is provided within the literature of western occultism, however, in the guise of ‘The Guardian of the Threshold’. According to Rudolf Steiner, this is an astral being who appears when our faculties of thinking, feeling and willing become detached from the personality – in other words, when we have reached the understanding that our thoughts, feelings and intentions are not the isolated private property of a metaphysical ego, but also themselves a part of reality, and as such fully amenable to our further exploration and development.

According to Steiner, the Guardian, in effect, is saying to us:

Hitherto … [karmic powers] were interwoven with thine own being; they were in thee and thou couldst not see them, even as thou canst not behold thine own brain with physical eyes. But now they become released from thee; they detach themselves from thy personality. They assume an independent form which thou canst see even as thou beholdest the stones and plants of the outer world. (Steiner 1947: chapter X)

Consider how a UFO encounter – or some other paranormal experience – might disrupt a person’s sense of reality sufficiently to cause them to investigate seriously, perhaps for the first time, the nature of their perception and of what, until then, they had considered ‘real’. The boundary between self and other can become tenuously thin at such times, resulting in all kinds of synchronicites or chains of paranormal happenings, of such intensity that the witness may question their sanity. It is often against such a background that MIB pay their visit and issue their warnings or threats.

Whereas ‘The Vision of the Double’ emphasises the ego’s attempt to deceive, ‘The Guardian of the Threshold’ stresses the possibility of re-owning the deception and moving past it. In Steiner’s paraphrase, again:

I am thine own creation. Formerly I drew my life from thine; but now thou hast awakened me to a separate existence so that I stand before thee as the visible gauge of thy future deeds – perhaps, too, as thy constant reproach. Thou hast formed me, but by so doing thou hast undertaken, as thy duty, to transform me. (Steiner 1947: chapter X)

In some of Redfern’s cases, ignoring MIB warnings appears to have led to mysterious ‘accidents’ and premature death. But where this occurs, of course, we do not have the witness’s own full account, but instead a narrative told by others, which is perhaps more prone to the effects of telling a good story. The occult scene is littered with psychological casualties. Probably no one is immune. But the individual must decide whether harm arises from venturing into the unknown, or from the tension caused when we try to keep one foot in what we refuse to regard as anything other than rock-solid reality.

There may be disparate causes of the manifestation of MIB, but the reason for their appearance has to be a unifying factor, present in each instance. It seems no accident that, although not exclusively, MIB appear mostly in connection with UFOs, because in ufology more than any other paranormal field (ghosts or psi, for example) its dominant theories lie within consensus views.

The idea of life on other planets is easier to swallow for most people than the notion of survival after death, and whereas no one suspects their government of capturing and dissecting poltergeists, people have far less problem supposing their government has done so with respect to UFOs. Of course, there are ufological researchers who take a far more sophisticated approach, but their theories are often too subtle for consensus tastes. Ufology, more than any paranormal field, has fallen to the stranglehold of a single theory (the extraterrestrial hypothesis) whose physical basis has marked it with a materialistic taint.

A curious drawing by Steiner (for stained glass) of 'The Double' as an inhuman serpent, with chakras.

The idea that MIB are agents from the government intent on silencing UFO witnesses is widely accepted – with good reason, because as Redfern shows, in some cases it is demonstrably true! Yet the fallout from the materialism of ufology is that even in cases where governmental agents are not involved, suchlike will nonetheless appear, whether in the form of dreams, hallucinations, misperceptions, or maybe even supernatural entities. They are the product of an imagination tainted by a materialist, consensus mindset; yet also, at the same time, they are an opportunity offered by that same imagination to transcend itself.

References

Alan Chapman & Duncan Barford (2009). The Blood of the Saints. Brighton: Heptarchia.

Mark Pellington (Director). (2002). The Mothman Prophecies [Motion picture]. United States: Lakeshore Entertainment.

Nick Redfern (2011). The Real Men in Black. Pompton Plains, NJ: The Career Press.

Rudolf Steiner (1947). Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Translated by George Metaxa. http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/English/AP1947/GA010_index.html

Andy & Lana Wachowski (Directors). (1999). The Matrix [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros.

Posted in Consensus Reality, Meditation | Tagged ego, Nick Redfern, paranormal, Rudolf Steiner, The Double, The Guardian of the Threshold, The Men in Black (MIB), ufology | 6 Comments »

The Erotic Source of Mysticism – and Other Postmodern Bollocks

October 11, 2011 by Duncan

I listened to a radio interview with magickian Alan Moore, and my heart sank when he said: ‘I have never in my life seen an objective truth’ [1]. And it sank further when I encountered similar sentiments in a book by the writer and professor of religious studies, Jeffrey Kripal.

I loved Kripal’s most recent book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred [2], which is an exploration of rhetorical strategies in the work of key writers on the paranormal. The book perhaps heralds a shift in the academic orthodoxy away from postmodernist theory towards subjective experience. Here’s what Kripal says on his website:

I think the ways… [paranormal] phenomena offend or subvert our usual dualistic epistemologies (subjective/objective, mind/matter, meaning/causality, and so on) represent one possible future of critical theory… I have come to see that the deep resonances, even identities, between eroticism and mysticism that I tracked in my early work are refigured in the deep resonances, even identities, between matter and mind that I am now tracking in the history and study of the paranormal… It’s all one reality, which is fundamentally nondual. [3]

In Authors of the Impossible Kripal shows how the great writers on the paranormal, although publicly they might pretend otherwise, were often writing from experience. They wrote because something incomprehensible had happened to them, and the ideas and strategies they developed for writing about it were not only a formulation for coming to terms with the incomprehensible, they were that coming to terms. Yet Kripal by a whisker (it seems to me) steps back from asserting that paranormal and spiritual experiences constitute any kind of objective truth. His interest is primarily hermeneutical; he examines the self-contained world of words and meanings created by his authors, with an intentional lack of concession toward any supposed referent of those words and meanings.

Maybe Kripal’s latest book is indeed a positive sign of change within academia, but his earlier work – the work he mentioned on the relationship between eroticism and mysticism – confronts us with some more nakedly postmodern assumptions. Perhaps he is in a process of wrestling free from these.

Books by Jeffrey Kripal. Click to preview his works on Google Books.

Evelyn Underhill, author of that hoary classic Mysticism (1911), is the subject of one of the chapters from Kripal’s earlier book, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism [4]. Kripal takes Underhill to task for her assertion that only mystics can write about mysticism; that only experience counts in this field; and that the experience of the mystic is direct, self-sufficient and universally recognisable.

Kripal chides:

In the end, what Underhill cannot see is that even the most orthodox of mystics are not reporting on some independent objective experience but interpreting a highly subjective state that may or may not be engaging a noumenal ground, and all this with categories that not only describe the experience after the fact but help shape and form and guide the event within the experience itself. Experience itself is interpretation. [5]

Kripal’s view is that because the language of mysticism is erotic (all that talk of ‘divine union’, ‘surrender to the Absolute’, etc.) then the basis of mysticism is the body. What the mystic writes is therefore an interpretive gloss upon a bodily, erotic experience.

Even though he appends a slightly mitigating footnote, I can’t let pass that ‘experience is interpretation.’ It’s a classic postmodernist tenet, but to hold this view surely perpetuates a sin of which postmodernists like to believe themselves innocent.

Some mystical experiences are not states, but are the understanding of what presents as an experience of no state at all. When I first stumbled into this realm what struck me most was the paradoxical, impossible form that the experience took. What rises during these moments is something experienced not as a thought, not as a feeling, nor as a concept, nor as a sensation. Except there it is all the same, leaving us bewilderedly wondering how we can possibly be experiencing such a thing.

This is my description of my mystical experience. If there’s not enough ‘erotic’ language in it, then let me oblige by saying how it totally fucked my mind!

‘Experience is interpretation’ allows for differing interpretations, but it doesn’t admit that experience itself might take on different forms, from person to person. Kripal’s view allows for differing views creating different experiences, but ultimately this suggests there is only one kind of experience – the kind that arises from holding a view. It’s the same old glaring flaw that haunts the whole postmodern enterprise: the assertion there is no absolute truth, asserted absolutely.

What the mystic describes is more postmodern than the postmodernist: it is the idea that the structure of experience itself varies from one person to the next. So, to someone like me, who has sat on a cushion meditating for hours on end, there can appear something that fits no mental or sensory categories. Because ‘zero’ assumes the same value on whatever scale we choose to measure it, by this means what is seen assumes objectivity. Whereas to someone like Alan Moore, who has perhaps devoted more of his time to developing his prodigious talents, the view is different: ‘I have never in my life seen an objective truth.’

Neurological imaging studies that show structural differences in the brains of long-term meditators (increased cortical thickness, for example [6]) perhaps argue for this possibility of variations in the structure of experience, beyond the far less radical differentiations between interpretations of an assumed single form of human experience. Mystics are therefore a group for whom experience itself – not just their interpretation of it – is different.

Spot the difference: a baseline brain, versus a meditator's brain.

Indeed, ‘experience is interpretation’ itself implies a particular structure of experience, for if experience is genuinely an interpretation then there is no ‘direct’ experience; instead, there is mediation, an interpretive activity, which renders the interpretation to or for something. The nature of experience, in this view, is divided between the interpretation, the interpretive activity, and that to which the interpretation appears to be an experience. ‘Experience is interpretation’ is actually not saying anything very new or clever at all, but merely consolidating what was already the consensus view, that experience is what assumes a particular form for a separate, individual self.

The postmodernist who holds these views has perhaps looked deeply enough to observe how what we call experience is made and not ‘given’. ‘I have never in my life seen an objective truth,’ they might conclude. Or they might decide to look even harder, because where can they situate for whose benefit it is supposed the interpretive activity takes place, if not within experience also? And if the self or ego is in our experience (for otherwise, how would we experience it?) then isn’t it too a product of the interpretive activity?

Once it becomes apparent that there is no one for whom the interpretation takes place, then it follows that what we call experience is not and never could be mediated by and for anything. Yet this is not the consensus view of experience at all, but something else. It is indeed the direct knowing of the mystic, where experience recognises self or ego as just another aspect of itself – self as just another content of experience, rather than something separate that apprehends or creates that content.

This is not a ‘state’. This is not even an experience. It is instead a restructuring of experience, wherein the illusion of an interpretative activity by or for someone has been seen through. Because the interpretive activity has now been seen for what it is, this is direct knowing, clear seeing. But until it is seen for oneself, it cannot be known. ‘Only mystics can write about mysticism,’ as Underhill said. This would be false if theirs were only an interpretation of experience, but instead it is an altogether different kind of experience.

Bernini’s St. Teresa, in the basilica of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Is that her 'mystical experience' face?

It might be said that, back in the day, mystics perhaps over-eulogised their experience. They used terms that were bodily and erotic in order to do so, but there’s no necessity to do that. It’s a vocabulary that is better than many others, but the aesthetic of mysticism is free to change. Mystics are human beings, and human beings love sex, so if sex flavours their expression more than – say – cybernetics, then no wonder. But that does not mean that mysticism arises from sex. What it might mean is that the first step in transcending the consensus view that ‘experience is interpretation’, which entails an isolated, separate self, is an inclination towards the erotic. But that’s not where mysticism ends. It aims instead toward a radical restructuring of experience, not simply a leaning toward certain kinds of experience.

The good news is that this restructuring is available to everyone who takes the trouble to cultivate it. To entirely misappropriate and misquote Karl Marx: ‘The postmodernists have only interpreted experience in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Hopefully Kripal is already onto this, and the rest of the academic establishment that he currently stands against will one day soon follow suit.

References

[1] ‘Expanding Mind’, Progressive Radio Network (14th July, 2011). Moore makes the comment at approximately 8’49″ into the recording.

[2] Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2010).

[3] From the FAQ section of Kripal’s website, hosted by Rice University, Texas.

[4] Jeffrey J. Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2001).

[5] Ibid., p. 66.

[6] Sara W. Lazar, et al., ‘Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness’, Neuroreport, 16 (17): 1893–1897 (2005 November 28).

Posted in Consensus Reality, Meditation | Tagged academia, Alan Moore, eroticism, Evelyn Underhill, Jeffrey Kripal, Meditation, mysticism, non-duality, postmodernism | 27 Comments »

The Vision of ZID (Aethyr 8)

September 26, 2011 by Duncan

I am in my parents’ garden when I realise that I am dreaming, so I call to the sky for admittance to the aethyr. The scene fades. I wake. But afterwards appears a vast and sunlit white building. As I watch, scratched into the concrete of its walls, writing appears: numbers, fractions, percentages – all seemingly being added together. It is a vastly long sum, tending towards a single, simple result.

Belshazzar falls victim to the Divine Tagger. (Rembrandt, c.1635.)

[This recalls 'The Writing on the Wall', Daniel 5: 1-31. In the Old Testament story, the writing is in Aramaic, mene, mene, tekel upharsin, which is sometimes translated as 'number, number, weight, division', curiously echoed here by the 'numbers, fractions and percentages'. Daniel interprets this as a forewarning of the demise of King Belshazzar. The last part of the vision, below, perhaps provides a clue as to whose demise is being foretold here. 'Sum' is also 'I am', in Latin. The God of Daniel was He who identified Himself to Moses as 'I am that I am', Exodus 3: 14.]

And then I am inside the building, which is an enormous office, filled with storage areas, equipment, desks and workstations, with all the usual internal systems of electrics, plumbing and air-conditioning that such buildings have. But I am looking down on this through a skylight, and it is apparent how without its skylight this building has no order or structure at all. It would be a meaningless jumble. For this is a new generation of vast buildings that are defined by their skylight. In the future, the skylight will always come first and the rest will follow.

A skylight, whereby into a building is admitted the Celestial.

[A building or house is a common symbol for the mind-body, but this is a mind-body defined by its 'skylight', a hole in its roof. This appears to be a symbol for the apprehension of emptiness; it is nothingness, a void, that lends this building its sense of structure. That more buildings like this one will appear in the future seems to suggest that more and more people will arrive at an apprehension of emptiness.]

Then I become aware that English is dying out, replaced by the language of invaders who will one day conquer and enslave the country. It will be such a long process that they have started now, before the invasion takes place. Once the replacement of English is complete, only then will the actual invasion come.

[The concern shifts from mind, perhaps, to speech. Indeed, in the next part of the vision, the focus shifts again to the appearance of the body and its deeds. So we are being led through the three vajras of Tibetan Buddhism: mind, speech and body. In terms of speech, the implication here seems to be that realisation (the 'invasion') comes about only after changes in speech have taken place – almost unconsciously, it seems. The imagery of invasion is curious, however. It does not seem beneficent.]

And now I am at a Halloween party and someone is dressed as the character Worf. Someone else is dressed as Gary Numan, and I think how it should have been me. Then I spot Larry Hagman, who played J.R. in Dallas. He winks at me, and this tells me he really is Hagman – not just someone in a J.R. Costume. I weigh up the idea of congratulating Hagman on his costume, pretending that I’m convinced it must be a costume because I know that Larry Hagman is dead. But really, I know full well he’s alive. This might be a good Halloween joke – yet, thinking it over, I conclude that it would be impolite, in slightly bad taste, and it might even frighten Hagman.

Where, but at the Halloween party we call 'the human personality' would you find these three oddballs together?

[The 'Halloween party' is the everyday psychological self, and the characters are traditional aspects of that self: Worf is the id or shadow; Numan is the ego ideal or ideal ego ('it should have been me'); and Hagman is the ego. But Hagman, as the ego, is in a peculiar dead-alive state. Many people might indeed be uncertain whether, in real life, Hagman is still above ground. (He is.) So is the 'ego' alive here, or not? Is it 'real' or just a costume? In fact, the ego is both real and alive. Yet although it's Halloween, and darkly humorous pranks are the sort of thing one does at this time of year, the decision taken is not to entertain the prospect of the ego's death, because the ego itself might get offended or frightened. As this advice appears to originate from 'outside' the personality, it might be worth following... But for the life of me, I can't think of a good reason why – it is a Halloween party, after all...]

Posted in Astral | Tagged aethyr, Enochian magick | 2 Comments »

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Occult Experiments in the Home

personal explorations of consciousness, reality and magick

The Vision of PAZ (Aethyr 4)

Notes

Deconstructing the Male Orgasm

Further Reading

Ghost Hunting

A Conversation Between Worlds?

The Visions of DEO, MAZ and LIT (Aethyrs 7 through 5)

The Vision of DEO (Aethyr 7)

The Vision of MAZ (Aethyr 6)

The Vision of LIT (Aethyr 5)

Superego: Secular and Spiritual

A Defence of Synchronicity

What Are ‘The Men In Black’?

References

The Erotic Source of Mysticism – and Other Postmodern Bollocks

References

The Vision of ZID (Aethyr 8)

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