A car park of grass.

Imagine that! A place where people could have been parking cars, but weren’t.

The tarmac had become suffused by moss, which made the ground feel underfoot like carpet. I fantasised about returning at night, to bed down in a sleeping bag by the wall. People would pass in the dark without knowing I was there. I hoped it might gently rain.

A Grassy Panopticon

My wandering led me to the wood above Bevendean, a district I’d never explored. Littering the wood were beer cans, crisp packets and used condoms – one of them tied and dangling from a twig, a disturbing shade of blue. I realised later it was the colour of band-aids traditionally used in hospitals and food preparation establishments. Pantone 2935. Personally, I wouldn’t willingly sheath myself in the hue of an occupational injury.

In the central space of Bevendean, houses on either side eye each other across an expanse of green. A pocket park on your doorstep might once have been delightful. But, despite the mild weekend weather, today it was deserted, for when there’s so much more electrical head space indoors, and a trip to the park entails merely driving the car onto grass, to play the sound system with the doors open, then who will be bothered to go to the effort of stepping outside, just for a bit of lawn?

Once a friendly, communal space, now the abandonment of the green conveyed an edginess and quiet paranoia.

A trail led onto the Downs, where a glare – unbearably bright – assailed me from the city below. It was hard to ascertain, but seemed a reflection from an array of solar panels on a terraced house.

If it provides water or electricity, why make it look like a chemical weapons dump?

I paused to inspect an installation on the apex of the hill. It might have been a nuclear bunker, a biological weapons research centre, or maybe just the entrance to an extraterrestrial base.

If anyone reads this who is connected with the place, a simple sign on the fence would be nice – unless you’re intentionally pitching for ‘sinister’.

The Persistence of Liminality

In my home town, Irthlingborough, I set out to explore the new housing estates which, over the years, have destroyed the place I remember from childhood: a small town, where everyone knew everyone else.

Not to be confused with Upper or Working Grass.

The last time I wandered onto one of these estates, erected on a former patch of wasteland that had offered a fantastic playground when I was a kid, I was lost a blind mesh of streets. This time, I couldn’t understand how that had happened. I had walked it all in minutes! A woman jogging thanked me, as I stepped aside to let her pass. It felt cosy and homely.

Finding a route back to the old town, I noticed a track leading into waste ground, well-worn enough to indicate that it certainly led somewhere. I followed, and discovered an ad hoc footbridge, leading onto one of the newer estates.

It was Saturday afternoon. There was not a soul in sight, apart from a couple of guys delivering leaflets for an Indian takeaway. As I wandered the maze, the only life-sign was a weedy dog, peering from a window. Although the pod people had taken this part of town, I was cheered by the indications that human beings were still forging walks through the wasteland, creating new liminal tracks between the authorised spaces.

Where the pod people perform circular dances in their cars.

Another recently forged trail led from this estate to the town’s bypass, which I followed back again, to explore the latest estate of all, this one so new it wasn’t even nearly finished. Passing a brand new house I’d assumed was empty, a small child burst from the door, dressed in a karate suit, and threw himself into a nearby 4×4.

As long as those vast dependencies are in place, upon which children’s karate classes and 4x4s rely, it seems the pod people will happily inhabit a building site.

Just before arriving home, I was caught in a vicious hailstorm and took shelter under a hedge.

Realms where the pod people live.

A Realm of High Verdure

Another day, and the final drift began as I descended Crow Hill into Irthlingborough, and wondered at the field near the bottom, on my right.

Behold, the distant light that beckons from another realm…

Other than grass, I’d never seen anything growing there. I’d never seen animals grazing. I didn’t know where it led, nor what lay over that teasing slope formed by its lush and spongy turf.

I leapt from the roadside and went to explore.

Over the hill was yet more grass, and more fields. In a muddy corner, hoof marks betrayed the none-too-recent presence of cattle. I was returning to my point of entry, disappointed, when something scarlet caught my gaze at the hill’s nadir, and I noticed, too, a tunnel, under the road, beneath where I’d jumped the fence.

The red thing was an empty and discarded school bag. The tunnel was a rank and dismal place, haunted by sinister, cavernous dripping sounds. I’d earmarked it already as an entrance to hell, until I saw light shining from the other side through leafs and twigs.

I climbed up onto the road, crossed, then squeezed over an old stone wall, through brambles down to the other side. And here I found it: a high fantastical world, wildly overgrown. Trees, bushes and plants were tangled in a crowded orgy. Birds tweeted madly, like tweeters on Twitter, and a wood pigeon, distressed by my gatecrashing, chittered in high dudgeon and hurtled off through the leafs.

A very English jungle.

There were precious few signs of intrusion – apart from the inevitable jetsam of bottles, cans and packets, fallen just inside, tossed by pod people from their cars. A branch lodged against the wall, easing the descent, suggested a weak incursion – by children, perhaps. Unfortunately, I was wearing my lovely faux leather jacket I’d bought the day before, in the pod person Mecca of Milton Keynes, and I was reluctant to test it against the thorns.

The land seemed boggy and uneven. No doubt, someday someone will work out how to build a housing estate there. Until then, it’s mine to explore, and if it’s a chaotic riot of growth in April, imagine how it’ll be when I return, wearing my old denims, in July or September…

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
– From Andrew Marvell, ‘The Garden’ (1681).

A realm of high verdure.

At Daffivisionomy we performed for the first time our ritual for opening hellmouths and encountered a psychotic spirit. At Chesney Peck we employed tarot and the magic 8 ball to make contact with a thieving gnome. Vomitory we used as an opportunity for some practical sorcery. Finally, we used a ghost box to chat in real time with spirits inside Yizmeduck.

Entrances to Hell - the movie. 11mins 44 secs. Click to view on YouTube.

Although I’ve logged their locations and characteristics, I’ve never set down in detail what I consider the nature and function of these entrances into hell. In my view, psychogeographical magick consists of a few basic techniques. Standing still is the simplest: you simply stand in a specific location, observe what happens, and interpret the experience as a message. Following is another: either you move from location to location following specific signs or cues from the environment, or else you choose locations or directions at random. (This is, in essence, the technique of ‘drift’ or ‘dérive‘, so commonly favoured by psychogeographers.) Finding is slightly different. You decide beforehand the outcome of the journey, and then look to experiences during the journey as the provision of that outcome. (My walks to discover the chakras of the city were an example of this.) The entrances to hell, however, represent a fourth category in the psychogeographical repertoire, which I describe as going behind. It differs fundamentally from the previous three by assuming a dimension of experience separate from the manifest environment.

With this type of magick, we’re not so much interpreting experience as a message or allegory, but the experience itself is perceived as originating directly from the allegorical realm. So whereas with the first three techniques we can observe, discover and track our quarry, by going behind what is manifestly real we interact with our object more directly, on its home ground.

Splitting the world into ‘the manifest’ and ‘the concealed’ is itself a fundamental magical technique, one so powerful that it’s not limited to magick. Realising that a ‘here’ originates from a ‘there’ releases the potential to change ‘here’ simply by interacting with or intervening in ‘there’. Science does this all the time, intervening in things we can’t perceive in order to change those we can. Similarly, but in a different sphere, therapists, politicians and teachers influence our unconscious processes, in order to modify conscious behaviour. The domain of magick, however, is neither physical nor social reality, but individual consciousness, which is why in magick this technique is worked entirely consciously instead, and limited within the minds of a specific person or group.

Entrances to hell are necessarily funny. This is because ‘funny’ arises from a split between what is actually said and what was meant, or between what really happens and what ought to have happened, and so on. All traffic with spirits is at least faintly ludicrous, because of the way that what’s ‘up there’ is necessarily forced to manifest through whatever happens to be available ‘down here’. For instance, when the angels made Dee and Kelley schlep around Europe for months on end, to reprimand its kings for their sins, and later instructed the pair to swap wives – this was at least as absurd and funny as it was dangerous and embarrassing. Similarly, when Crowley, possessed by Choronzon at Bou Sada, sneaked out from the protective triangle and leapt on Neuberg – that was bloody hilarious!

Bathos and magical manifestation tend to go together. If the results of magick aren’t faintly silly, it’s worth checking that they have been truly situated as coming from some place other, and aren’t merely the product of an over-valuation of what’s to hand. I remember looking at an altar, lovingly set up for a session of group magick, when a senior magician came in and remarked, ‘What a pile of tat!’ What magick infers or represents is important, not the forms through which it manifests. Mistake the forms for the meanings and you end up with the kind of superstitious fetishism that many mistake for magick.

Comedic techniques are frequently put to magical uses, something almost as frequently overlooked. A joke, for instance, has an enormous power to entirely transform our mood, or make someone look and feel ridiculous. And the use of laughter as a banishing ritual is endemic among chaos magicians. However, comedy comes in two flavours: ironic and humorous. The former turns the world dark; the latter floods it with light. Imagine that a condemned man is led to the chopping block. If he remarks to the executioner, ‘How lovely to meet you!’ then that would be irony. But if he paused to inspect the axe and ask, ‘Are you sure that thing’s safe?’ then that would be humour. In the former, the prisoner highlights how bad things are by pretending they’re good. In the latter, he draws attention to the manifestly bad (the axe), but pretends good might come of it. The ironic remark shames the executioner, whereas the humorous one releases and absolves him. Indeed, it releases and absolves everyone, including the prisoner.

In magick, irony manifests demons and humour draws down angels. Entrances to hell are portions of the city overlooked, ugly, decayed. By awarding them attention and deciding they are intentional, and that behind them lives an organising intelligence, this ironically exposes the chaos ‘here’, by supposing that ‘there’ the chaos is planned. The disadvantage of demons is that they mess things up; the advantage is that in places messed beyond repair, a demon has control. No doubt for this reason, we heard the entities of Yizmeduck describe themselves as ‘the rape of truth’ and admit that ‘we play violent’.

So to visit and open an entrance into hell is to negotiate with the messed-up city, with all that disgusts and alienates us from our environment. We may not like it, but these forces have power over what manifests – in certain locations, at least. The alternative view is that wastage occurs by accident, and there’s no intelligence behind decay, but surely it’s better to honour and negotiate with the city’s demons rather than to accept alienation as accidental and inevitable?

So much for demons and hellmouths. Where are the angels? The technique I’ve tried for finding these I call going beyond. It involves letting go of the manifest, or – at least – holding onto it so lightly that ‘there’ unavoidably bleeds through into ‘here’. There’s nothing new or original in this. By making the angels in his film Wings of Desire (1987) so concerned with mundane aspects of human experience, Wim Wenders similarly erased the split between the other world and this. So far (perhaps) I’ve found two angels in the city: one of air, and one of earth or fire. But this is a work in progress, because they seem far harder to locate…

P.S.

Oh, in case you’re wondering… Having opened one, to close an entrance to hell merely recite thrice backwards the traditional opening formula. So just say (three times): Sasaz atanatasan, sasaz, sasaz!

I was glad to see he’d put on a little weight since last summer, when he was looking far too skinny. I like the way he organises his life, always roaming around, completely outside the system, teaching and writing in his notebooks. (I’m not sure where he puts them once they’re full.) It’s a pretty insecure existence, however. We’ve discussed this, and I know it’s something he thinks about occasionally.

He told me about an idea he’d had to make a little cash, which he hoped to put away in case of emergencies. He’d noticed how popular tarot cards have become, and how useful they are for opening up insights into personal issues, or providing forecasts of possible events. But he’d also noticed how Buddhism has nothing equivalent.

Three of Bhikkhu Parasamgate's nidana cards in action.

This set him thinking. The reason that tarot is so effective, he decided, is because of how it maps the entire panoply of mundane experience. Everything is there in those 78 cards: the suits representing earth, water, air and fire; the minor arcana embodying the 10 sephiroth of the Tree of Life; and the major arcana corresponding to the 22 paths between between the sephiroth. Yet the main concern of Buddhism is with finding an exit from ordinary experience (or ‘suffering’, as the Buddha characterised it), rather than revelling in all its mundane glories.

Of course, for Buddhism to achieve that, it has to provide a full understanding of exactly what must be ‘escaped’. And this was what brought Bhikkhu Parasamgate, finally, to the nidanas – or ‘chains of causation’. These are the teachings within the Buddhist tradition that describe in greatest detail the ordinary, unenlightened world. So it was upon the nidanas that the bhikkhu built his new and uniquely Buddhist oracle. And the more he thought about it, the more amazingly suited to this purpose the nidanas seemed to be.

However, leading the sort of lifestyle that he does, his resources were limited. Luckily, he had a friend who could typeset the book he wrote. Although Bhikkhu Parasamgate is many things, he’s no draughtsman, and sadly he couldn’t find an artist with the time and interest to create original images for each nidana. He had to resort instead to trawling the internet for suitable pictures. Of course, he knew he couldn’t make money from these (that would be copyright theft) but he hoped that a professional publisher would take up the idea, run with it, and hire a suitable artist for the job.

Unfortunately, given the current state of publishing, no one was interested in taking on the substantial up-front cost of producing an original deck of 26 cards. Bhikkhu Parasamgate carried the nidana oracle in his bag, still hopeful, for three or four years, but last week he handed me a USB stick and explained he’d given up on making money from the idea, although he still thinks the nidana cards are too good an idea to waste. He has asked me to release both his book and the cards onto the internet, for free, with an assurance he hasn’t profited financially from anyone else’s work. He can’t remember now where he culled the images from. Hopefully, many of them are already in the public domain.

What the cards mean, how they’re used, and what divination has to do with Buddhism anyway, are questions the bhikkhu explores in his book, written in a style more wonderfully concise and engaging than anything I could manage. I hope readers of this website will find it as interesting as I did. It really does seem to offer a uniquely Buddhist system of divination.

The nidana cards are a nuanced and subtle oracle, nowhere near as ‘earthy’ as the tarot or the runes, and probably best applied to issues that are primarily psychological, or concerned with spiritual development. Even if you don’t use the cards, there’s plenty of interesting material in the book concerning Buddhism, meditation, enlightenment and divination. Spiritual geeks will probably enjoy the appendix, in which the bhikkhu shows how the nidanas can be mapped onto the tarot, the Tree of Life, and onto salient concepts from Integral theory. But if you decide you would like to use the cards, then you’ll need to make yourself a deck by hand, from the files supplied.

I never imagined this blog would turn all ‘arts and crafts’, but here are some instructions, based on how I made my own deck of cards:

1. Print out the cards at as high a quality as your printer allows onto separate sheets of thick photo paper. I used glossy, A6 sized sheets (148 x 105 mm; 5.8 x 4.1 in), which worked really well.
2. For the backing of the cards, print off a few sheets of the backing design onto A4 (or similar-sized) thick photo paper.
3. With scissors, trim the nidana cards fairly close to, but not exactly on, the edges indicated by the fine black line.
4. Using PVA glue, stick a group of cards face up onto a backing sheet. Make sure the backing sheet is oriented in the same direction for each group, otherwise it might be possible to guess the front of the card from its back!
5. Cover the glued sheets with a cloth, and press overnight under a pile of books (or other weighty object) to flatten and prevent curling whilst the glue dries.
6. Then, with a scalpel and ruler, cut out each card (now glued securely to its backing) along the fine black lines. Trim the rounded corners with sharp scissors.
7. You’ll need some sort of covering to protect your cards, because printer inks are very vulnerable to moisture. I used self-adhesive plastic to cover mine – which turned out okay, although it was tricky to avoid air-bubbles. Various kinds of spray-on varnish are available, which might produce a good effect, if you’ve a suitable space in which to apply them.

Bhikkhu Parasamgate sends his best wishes to readers of this website, hoping that you find the book and cards useful, and he wishes you the very best of luck with finding enlightenment in this lifetime. If you have any feedback on his work, let me know, and I’ll pass on your comments the next time he swings by.

In the Nevada desert, the Burning Man Festival imploded under the pressure of 2012. Everyone wanted to party at the end of the world. The utopian ethic of Burning Man was trampled, as entry prices and New Age mendacity ran riot, and hordes of the ticketless marched on the playa. In panic, the organisers cancelled. And thus the promised return of the serpent-bird-god Quetzalcoatl, into the body of his messiah (a New York journalist), was denied its scheduled venue. And if it took place elsewhere, then no one noticed.

Luckily I’d foreseen the burnout of the Burn and had switched focus, swapping my ticket (at cost price) for a trip to Bugarach in south-western France. New Agers had been collecting there, quietly, for several years, convinced that an alien base was hidden under its peculiar-looking mountain, whose occupants might be persuaded to airlift the crowd to safety, when the apocalypse hit on December 21st.

Bugarach Mountain, which some believe contains a hidden alien base and will be ground zero for the 2012 apocalypse.

A woman who runs a hardware store in Washington, channelling the spirit of a Lemurian warlord 35,000 years old, prophesied that Bugarach would be ground zero for a leap in human consciousness. But it wasn’t only the esoterics with their eyes on the mountain. The army was on alert to prevent a mass influx, and they pulled it off impressively. Two French squaddies marched me out of the station when I tried to board my train in Paris. Whatever transpired at Bugarach, it transpired within a rigid exclusion zone, and the world woke up pretty much unchanged on December 22nd.

Yet my trip to Paris wasn’t a complete waste. Sipping morosely at a coffee, I fell into conversation with a guy in Tibetan Buddhist robes. The cafés of Paris were swarming that week with unlikely characters. I assumed that this guy, European-looking, with a shaved head and little round specs, was dressed for Bugarach, but had been disappointed the same as me. It turned out, however, that despite coming originally from Bedford, he was the real deal. He’d left for Tibet a decade ago, to study in one of the few monasteries tolerated by the Chinese.

‘I’m travelling home, because now it’s all over for me,’ he said.

‘You think everything still might end?’

He looked surprised, and then: ‘God, no!’ he laughed. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘Sorry,’ I sighed. ‘You know, I’ve been so convinced that something was going to. If only because enough people believed.’ I flashed back again to that undignified scene of being marched off the platform. ‘I can’t shake the feeling there’s something I need to find. Wherever and whatever it is, it’s not here,’ I said.

The guy in the robes (oddly, I never caught his name) seemed to weigh me up, and then embarked on a very strange story. It was all the weirder for not including any elements of the stories I’d heard before. In it were no grey aliens, no Roswell, no US government cover-up, and no masonic plot. The Illuminati was not mentioned, nor the Knights Templar. The bloodline of Christ didn’t feature, nor – for that matter – Atlantis. But, unsurprisingly, given his costume, there was quite a lot about Tibetan Buddhism.

Whilst in his monastery, my monk from Bedford became embroiled in a controversy, which arose when the Dalai Lama (whom he’d met on several occasions; a very nice man, apparently) asked his followers to cease their homage to a spirit-deity named Dorje Shugden.

For four centuries this entity has been worshipped as a dharmapala, or ‘protector’ of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, but for reasons that the monk took great pains to explain, yet which still remain to me (I’m ashamed to admit) rather hazy, the Dalai Lama decided that Dorje Shugden was not all he’d been bigged up to be, and – indeed – was best left well alone. In short, the Dalai Lama had come to suspect that Dorje Shugden was not an enlightened being and, as such, might not be acting in the best interests of humanity. This presented something of a problem to my monk, because he’d inadvertently ensconced himself in a monastery strongly opposed to the Dalai Lama’s views and fervently dedicated to Shugden, whom its senior lamas regarded as both the ultimate protector of their faith and guarantor of its survival beyond the 21st century.

But there was much more. At the monastery was an old monk, who lived in a separate cell, excused from most of the daily duties. It was well-known that this old monk hadn’t long to live, as a result of a role he’d fulfilled unstintingly for many years, which was to become physically possessed by Dorje Shugden, and relay the spirit’s message to the faithful monks.

The possession rituals were onerous in the extreme. Once Shugden’s spirit had taken possession of the old man, in a ceremony before the entire monastery, it shook him from head to foot, made him scream at operatic volume, and flung him like a dishcloth around the ceremonial platform. Often, it took the poor old boy a fortnight to recover. But as the controversy with the Dalai Lama widened, the necessity to consult Dorje Shugden arose more frequently, until the medium had reached his limits.

On the day of the final ritual, the old monk could barely stand – until the spirit of Shugden sent him screaming and cavorting. It was too much. He died in his cell two days later, but peacefully and with a cheerful smile, because the spirit had known this was its last chance to manifest (until a new medium was found, which might take centuries) and to safeguard the tradition against the double threat of Chinese oppression and the Dalai Lama’s intransigence, it had conveyed a remarkable and very specific set of instructions to the assembly of awestruck monks. And my monk, of course, had been among them.

There is nothing in the world that conveys displeasure more vividly than the body-language of a Parisian café waiter. It was quite late, by this point. Our coffee cups were empty, and it was clear we would soon be required to leave. Luckily, the monk was able to finish his narrative before the management sent us packing.

What the spirit of Dorje Shugden revealed to the monks was that, although it was pretty much ‘game over’ for Tibetan Buddhism in Chinese-occupied Tibet, it was far from the end of the road for the tradition as a whole. But this was only on condition that three objects, which the spirit referred to as ‘jewels’ or ‘treasures’, were located and smuggled out to the West.

The Triratna. Symbol of the 'three treasures' in Buddhism: Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Traditionally, in Buddhism – the monk explained – the ‘three jewels’ are a metaphor, standing for the Buddha himself, his teachings, and the spiritual community that receives them. But the spirit of Shugden was quite explicit that his three treasures were actual, material objects, and through their physical ownership not only would the teachings be saved, but perpetuated throughout the entire world.

Unusually for prophecies of this type, Shugden’s message revealed not only their appearance, but also their exact whereabouts. This made infinitely more easy the business of finding and shipping them to the west, but by no means abolished all the hazards, and, although the efforts of the monastery eventually proved successful, from the monk’s grave expression during this part of his story, I divined that probably not a few of his brethren had come to harm.

‘So what were the objects, and where are they now?’ I asked, sensing he was reaching the end of his tale.

‘They’re safe,’ he smiled. ‘What they are is something that anyone can now discover for themselves.’

‘There’s no way I could travel to Tibet,’ I said, weighing his implicit challenge.

And then, through sheer force of disdain, the waiter had ejected us from the café. Outside on the pavement, the monk rummaged in the folds of his robes and handed me a small chunk of pinkish white crystal. ‘When you find the place, show them this,’ he instructed.

‘How will I find it?’ I asked, in rising desperation, as he turned to leave.

‘Firstly, learn to meditate, because you require discernment to recognise the treasures. Secondly, when the time is right, Dorje Shugden will show you the way.’

With a final wave, maroon robes and all, he vanished into the Parisian crowd and I was left staring at the lump of quartz, which was as angular, irregular and opaque as any other lump of quartz I’d ever seen.

Returning home, I signed up for a course in meditation. I never expected it would be so tedious. Each week, I sat in the meditation hall, counting my breaths, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did – except my legs and arse turned numb, and my mind wandered a lot: into why I’d believed the monk any more than I’d believed there were aliens under Bugarach, or that Quetzalcoatl had been due at Burning Man. Not, of course, that I’d believed those literally. I supposed the monk’s story now had a personal significance. Perhaps, in the past, my mistake had been to invest in other people’s stories. Now I’d found one of my own, which wasn’t featured in the pages of Fortean Times – but what to do with it? Sitting in a room, breathing with my eyes shut, didn’t seem to be leading anywhere.

After the tenth and final week, I expressed my frustration to the teacher – without telling the whole story, of course. He was on loan from a northern Buddhist centre, and his soothing Yorkshire accent had sometimes turned the meditation instructions into a kind of poetry. ‘To be honest,’ he told me, ‘I can only teach relaxation in a class like this. To go deeper, you need to go on retreat.’ He took me into the office and produced a brochure. ‘I recommend this place,’ he said, drawing his finger across a map. ‘Near the Welsh border.’

‘Thanks for your help.’

I realised that during the course I’d never caught his name.

‘George. George Sugden,’ he smiled, putting out his hand.

He must have wondered why my shake was so limp, and why my mouth was open in amazement. I felt in my pocket for the crystal, which I now carried most of the time.

‘Does this mean anything to you?’

‘Quartz, isn’t it?’ he said.

I saw him give me a look. Probably he thought I was some New Age nutter. And maybe he was right, because it was only an alignment of sounds: George Sugden versus Dorje Shugden. The monk had advised me, ‘Dorje Shugden will show the way’. He hadn’t. But a George Sugden had… Maybe… Was there really a connection between a Tibetan deity and this bloke from Yorkshire? It seemed unlikely… What the heck! I wanted to learn meditation anyway, and so there seemed no harm in booking into the place Sugden had shown me…

Dorje Shugden. 'Dharma protector' or 'worldly spirit'?

The first week was grim, and the second was worse. A bell woke us at 4 a.m. We meditated for ten hours per day, with short breaks for toilet and meals, until a final bell signalled sleep. The food appeared twice daily, in starvation-sized portions. No talking or eye contact was allowed. There was even an ‘exercise period’, supervised by burly members of staff, during which I stood at the wire fence and visualised my escape across the drizzly fields.

The meditation involved ‘looking at the nature of things’. A Pol Pot dead-ringer was our teacher, who informed us, with a steely grin, that when we looked closely at sensations, we would see them flickering in and out of existence, because they weren’t actually real in the way we thought. But nothing had ever felt more real than the unbearable pains in my back and legs from sitting all day, trying to convince myself sensations didn’t exist. Each night before bed, we were summoned before Pol Pot, who asked each of us in turn if we could see ‘it’ yet. He might as well have held up four fingers and asked if I could see five.

As each 4 a.m. bell roused us to a day slightly worse, yet largely identical to the one before, my fellow retreatants began to capitulate. A trickle at first, then a steady flow, conceded they could see what Pol Pot had said. I studied these turncoats avidly. True, they seemed to be sitting in less discomfort. And often their faces, like his, wore a silly grin. Something was going on.

I tried harder, reasoning this didn’t mean I was submitting to brainwashing; I could always try out ‘five fingers’, to see if it was any good, as long as I remembered there were really only four. But no matter how hard I tried, sensations remained the same. Pain was pain, and it hurt. It didn’t ‘flicker’ or go away. It was stupid to imagine otherwise.

But at the end of the retreat, the silly grins were in the majority. Only a few of us ‘four-fingered’ remained. On the morning of the last day, I felt proud about this. As evening loomed, my mood changed. Probably George Sugden had been a coincidence, and there was nothing to get, but if there was – then the trail was turning cold. Desperation, once again, pushed me to arrange an interview with the teacher. I wasn’t stupid enough to tell him everything – just the parts about seeking truth, meeting the monk, and him advising me to meditate – and I apologised for being such a bad and insolent student. The teacher’s English wasn’t great. I could see he wasn’t getting all of it. But when I took the crystal from my pocket, his grin fell away.

He eyed me coldly for a moment, then gestured for me to wait as he stepped outside. I stood alone in the poky office, reassuring myself that nothing bad could happen, and yet I was painfully conscious of those desolate miles of countryside around the retreat centre, and of how they’d confiscated everyone’s phones on the way in.

After a few minutes, a woman stepped into the office – which was a surprise, because the centre was sexually segregated: men in one half, women the other. I recognised the woman from glimpses during the previous fortnight. She was the teacher in charge of the female half.

‘You have something to show me?’

I held out the crystal to her unsmiling inspection.

‘From a Tibetan?’

Her accent was perfect, which was presumably why the teacher had sent her.

‘Well, he was from Bedford originally,’ I said.

She looked at me blankly, then motioned I should follow.

We left the office and passed along some dingy corridors, away from the public sections of the building, down into the basement.

‘The Tibetan described to you the three treasures?’ she said.

My heart raced. How could she have known about that? At last, I was getting behind the scenery.

‘Not in detail,’ I said. ‘But he mentioned they were hard to obtain.’

She nodded. ‘They are moved frequently, so that as few as possible know their whereabouts. Many people would take them from us.’

‘The Chinese Government?’

‘Certainly. And the Taliban. And the Americans. The Vatican.’ She smiled. ‘And probably the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

We arrived at a featureless door, which I would have assumed was a boiler-room or cupboard. She unlocked it with a single key, flicked on the light, and gestured for me to step in first.

Indeed, it was little bigger than a cupboard. No windows. Narrow. There was a faint and musty, chemical smell. The walls and floor were painted in shades of light brown. And it was empty, apart from three frames, hanging at eye-level on wire from three very ordinary-looking nails. In two of the frames, an object was fixed against white plaster.

‘Are they very valuable?’

‘Only to someone who has come seeking them. Otherwise – I’m sorry. And they have no special powers,’ she said, anticipating my next question.

The First Treasure. A piece of wood, once believed part of the True Cross.

The first frame contained a lump of burnt wood. The second, a scrap of parchment, with characters written in a foreign script, some of which had been scored over. And the third was empty.

‘They represent something? A truth or teaching?’ I felt my stomach sinking with disappointment.

‘No,’ she said, her voice taking on a more professional tone, as if she’d been over many times what she was about to say. ‘These objects represent nothing. What they are is not the truth, but actually the opposite. That’s why they’re so valuable.’

I nodded, but she continued as if I’d confessed I didn’t follow.

‘We are always in truth. Everything is perfection. Only, our perception is at fault. Many would think these words insane…’

‘There’s so much wrong in the world,’ I interrupted, ‘that it’s not difficult to see why.’

‘Look,’ she said, gesturing at the chunk of burnt wood in the first frame. ‘This object was taken from a laboratory in Russia. It was discovered in a medieval Christian reliquary, once believed to contain part of the cross on which Christ died. But when it was dated in the laboratory, it was discovered far older than a few hundred years old.’

‘You mean it’s authentic?’ I asked.

‘Certainly not. Something more amazing. Something disastrous. Testing suggests this material is older than the universe.’

‘Hah!’ I scoffed. ‘There were pieces of wood before the universe existed?’

I laughed, but her face remained serious.

‘You laugh because something that lasted forever must be wrong – and I agree. So then, why would we view the world as imperfect, just because what is good in it does not last? If there were anything that lasted always, good or bad, then it would be like this object: false. It cannot change. It is fixed forever. That is not how the world is, because that is hell. Instead, because nothing lasts, we are in bliss.’

Had she lured me here just to preach? It felt so. Yet, if it hadn’t been for the crystal, I wouldn’t be here at all. And how did she know the monk had talked about ‘three treasures’? Dorje Shugden was nagging at me, again. The Dalai Lama believed Shugden was a worldly, unenlightened spirit. Indeed, there was something oddly back-to-front about the teacher’s preaching, which I couldn’t put my finger on. Disastrous, was how she’d described that lump of wood. These objects represent nothing, she’d said.

The Second Treasure. Don't try too hard to read it - or you know what might happen!

‘What about this next one,’ I said, leaning in towards the second treasure. ‘Is this impossibly old too? It looks like Tibetan.’

‘Only a thousand years, or so. It has killed very many people,’ she sighed. ‘It would be mostly gibberish to a Tibetan speaker.’

‘Some kind of ancient edict, then?’

‘A poem,’ she said. ‘About an ornamental pot. There are rumours that Keats heard of this object, and partly based upon it his famous ode, “On a Grecian Urn”.’

‘No one ever died of Keats,’ I laughed.

‘Many have died from this poem,’ insisted the teacher. ‘It was composed by a monk – thankfully, in one of the remotest monasteries. He was dead in his cell, days after writing it. Whoever reads it is seized by a rapture so intense they can attend to nothing else. Even when force-fed, the human body is unadapted for such absorption. Every reader has been killed by its beauty, its sheer perfection.’

‘Presumably we’re okay because we don’t read Tibetan.’

‘Cutting up the manuscript without looking made it possible to translate the separated parts into other languages, then back again, losing some of the sense. But even that proved too close to the original. Not all, but numerous readers fell into the rapture from mentally piecing together the intended sense. So it is not the language that kills, but the meaning, which makes it even more dangerous. You see those characters that have been written over? This is the standardized, “safe” form. The original meaning can still be worked out, but it would take much effort. Sometimes, nearing the end of their life, a nun or monk will choose solitary confinement and undertake a reading of the poem. Many are successful and die in rapture.’

‘If it’s so dangerous, why not just destroy it?’

‘No.’ The teacher shook her head. ‘It’s still a treasure. It shows us that what is perfectly good is deadly, because if it fulfils us entirely, we will not progress beyond.’

‘Good things are just good, surely?’

‘Of course,’ she smiled. ‘Yet hell is where things are ultimately satisfying, because then there is nowhere else to go. That is death. The monk who wrote the poem stumbled by accident into hell, but his tragedy teaches how dissatisfaction is life. To suffer the lack of good things, when perceived accurately, is bliss.’

For all I knew, those scribbles were just a millennium-old monk’s laundry list, but her story was so peculiarly grim. She certainly had a unique way of selling her shtick.

‘You’ve got me hooked,’ I said.

‘The last treasure, I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘is very hard to explain.’

I examined the frame closely. Apart from an irregular dimpling in the plaster, there was nothing.

‘It’s empty,’ I said. ‘Is that what it’s meant to represent: the void?’

‘I already explained: the treasures don’t “represent”,’ she retorted, a little crossly. ‘Take out the crystal from your pocket.’

For a second I was puzzled, and then I realised the enormity of what she was suggesting. I held the lump of crystal towards the dimpled plaster, and looked at her. She nodded, indicating it was okay. The crystal fitted at once. The cavity in the plaster perfectly received its edges. I withdrew my hand and there it stayed, gleaming faintly pink against the white.

‘How did this happen?’ I gasped, shaking my head. ‘How did I come to be here, and how did you know?’

‘Not me. Not you,’ she replied. ‘This is the nature of the third treasure. It belongs.’

‘It belongs here?’

‘No. It was taken from a mosque. But don’t worry,’ she explained, reacting to my expression, ‘the imams didn’t even miss it. It was there because Islam was the last great world religion. But its significance had long ago been forgotten, except by a handful of sufis, who gladly gave us access. It’s auspicious that now we have it.’

‘And yet I got it from a Tibetan monk…’ I said.

‘Yes. And now it is in a UK meditation centre, run by the Burmese,’ the teacher smiled. ‘There are references in many scriptures to suggest this object has passed through the hands of every enlightened teacher, from Shakyamuni Buddha, to Moses, Plato, Lao Tzu, Christ, St. Paul and Mohammed – and many, many others besides.’

‘And me?’ I laughed.

‘And me, too,’ said the teacher. ‘Why not?’

My head reeled with the absurd grandiosity of it.

‘Everything is shaped by whatever caused it, and is always in a process of becoming something other,’ the teacher explained. ‘But the crystal has only and forever been itself. Wherever it is, it belongs. If it could be said to be in a process of anything, it would be always in the process of being at home.’

We both stared at the nondescript stone, returned to its place, resting innocuously in its frame.

‘Some regard it as a little piece of the Divine,’ she said. ‘It has no business in our world, perhaps, yet here it is. And maybe that’s the reason (although it doesn’t often happen at once) that each person who touches it comes to enlightenment.’ She turned and smiled at my bewildered expression. ‘Some say, that although in our age it appears as a crystal, it may have had various forms throughout history. In that case, we might better view it as a concept. We might call it the Grace of God.’

The Third Treasure. A crystal that always 'belongs'.

Her conviction was apparent, and yet I continued to have doubts.

Indeed, I doubted all the way through the next fortnight, through another tormenting retreat, which I sat immediately, without even bothering to return home. And I doubted all the way through the one I sat after that, and the next one too. Yet I couldn’t completely shake off the treasures, nor the teacher’s words, because of all those mad coincidences that brought me here, including Dorje Shugden: worldly spirit, dharma protector, or whatever he turned out to be. I was like a lit stick of incense. I burned and burned, smouldering right through experience, until a few more weeks of meditation passed, and finally there were neither doubts nor any remaining need to go on seeking. I was burned right through, right down to the base, and only a pile of sweet-smelling ashes remained.

The treasures were relocated from the centre. I hope that, just like me, others are drawn to them still and awaken from the experience. I imagine the treasures moving from place to place, keeping alive in many different forms the gift to the world from those monks in Tibet. As far as I know, the crystal relocated too. I would love to know who has it now, and hear the story of their awakening. Or perhaps, like the teacher suggested, it has since changed form. Right now it could be anything: a piece of glass; a coffee mug; an old picture, maybe. Perhaps even a web page.

In passing, the film refers to the current controversy (schism, some might say) within the Tibetan tradition regarding Dorje Shugden. This spirit is regarded as a dharma protector by a sizeable community within the tradition. These are spirits that guard Tibetan Buddhism, its practices and adherents. They are a species of ‘wrathful deities’, entities that take on a fierce and frightening manifestation in order to lead sentient beings to enlightenment. However, although all dharma protectors are wrathful deities, supposedly not all of them are of the same calibre. Some are ‘worldly spirits’ who protect the dharma only in a material sense (by manifesting wealth, for instance), acting because they are bound by an oath, rather than as an expression of their enlightened nature. A sizeable community within the Tibetan tradition regards Dorje Shugden as an enlightened being, whereas the rest – the Dalai Lama amongst them – views him as a ‘worldly spirit’.

The Oracle: Reflections on Self, a film by David Cherniak (2010). Click to view on YouTube (54 mins).

Like many religious disagreements, to an outsider it looks as if it’s really about organisational politics, rather than anything of doctrinal importance. It’s a widely repeated story that the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet in 1959 succeeded because of help received from an oracle possessed by Dorje Shugden. Even if this is the case, which seems quite possible, it does not contradict the view that Dorje Shugden is a worldly spirit, protecting the dharma by material means. Cherniak interviews the Dalai Lama in his film concerning the nature of oracles and their supposed accuracy, to which the Dalai Lama gives a strikingly pragmatic and open-minded response.

Intrigued by this, I decided to attempt possession by Dorje Shugden for myself, to see if I could determine one way or the other his nature. It had been quite a while since I had done any possession work, which is perhaps the most daunting tool in the magickian’s kitbag, but I was keen to see if I’d become any better at it.

There was a group of us. We had a photograph of Dorje Shugden, a singing bowl, some Tibetan cymbals, and – although it wasn’t made from a human thigh-bone – a short, didgeridoo-like trumpet, which certainly sounded the part. The company sat in a circle and I took up the centre. I issued them with a vajra, a symbol of spiritual power and enlightenment, which they could use as a blasting-rod if the spirit turned out to be ill-dignified or unruly. We used the classic Tibetan mantra OM HAH HUM to build up a trancey atmosphere.

A vajra. Mine is made of brass. Symbol of enlightenment and spiritual fortitude. The word means 'diamond' and 'thunderbolt' in Sanskrit.

Whilst the mantra and the musical instruments did their thing, I performed breath of fire, flexing my pelvic floor and abdominal muscles to build energy, and draw it up toward the higher chakras. I kept my eyes closed throughout until, suddenly, I felt something sweep up and over me, and I fell backwards. I could feel my spine and limbs going into spasm.

It was not that I became unaware of what was happening. Instead, I felt a definite urge to do certain things, make movements, utter sounds, but I could not identify these as coming clearly from myself. I could hear the questions asked by the group, but no words, symbols or meanings arose in me as a response. There were, however, clear and strong impulses to make twisting, spasmodic movements, grunting sounds and enraged cries. I felt a constant, pronounced sensation of fear. Afterwards, one of the participants remarked that it seemed as if the entity were used to persecution. It had acted fearful and enraged, as if it were expecting ill-treatment.

The results were disappointing in terms of communication, but it was certainly the most powerful possession I’d undergone. Afterwards, unexpectedly, I felt ill and shaken. I was nauseous and light-headed. It was a trial to get through the other rituals we’d planned for the evening. We banished thoroughly, of course, but I still felt fragile, as if whatever had taken control might suddenly decide to come back.

After I arrived home, I spent a disturbed night. The feeling persisted of something encroaching. I dreamt of walking into a dark room, which I had presumed was empty, but then there was a slight movement, and I realised someone was hiding. Terrified, I dashed outside, and then awoke. Towards morning, a bolt of orgasmic energy shot through my body and I cried out, suddenly wide awake.

Thankfully, the feeling of strangeness and vulnerability wore off gradually and by lunchtime the next day it was gone.

Icon of Dorje Shugden. (That little critter in the crook of his left arm is a mongoose, who spouts jewels.)

The mediums in Cherniak’s film uniformly claimed they had no memory whatsoever of their possession by spirits. Certainly, I could remember the gist of what had happened. But the impulses I’d had, I still didn’t recognise as my own. Perhaps when mediums say they have ‘no memory’, they might mean something similar: that what happened can be stated, but can’t be recognised as a part of the time-stream we call ‘ours’. In that sense, indeed I had no memory, because what I did in that time wasn’t ‘mine’, although I recall what those things were.

Other questions remain. Most of the participants concluded that the spirit was not Dorje Shugden but something else, given the lack of communication. Yet our magickal intent was to contact him and no other. Or if it was Dorje Shugden, then perhaps I wasn’t capable of channelling him fully, and what manifested was only an aspect.

At face value, it seems that Dorje Shugden is a wrathful deity, a dharma protector perhaps, but of a primitive type, who seems fearful of persecution and abuse. The problem is, to what extent is this ‘face value’ the whole picture?

Audio

Edited audio excerpts from the ritual. Three minutes of chanting, grunting and screaming. Voices have been distorted to preserve anonymity, although you can probably guess the one possessed.

A Response from Ona Kiser

Oh, Duncan, I’m tickled. A few comments from the perspective of Santeria, where possession is a common part of ritual work.

1) It is common for initial possessions by strong entities in less-experienced mediums (less-experienced with full possession, even if experienced with other forms of mediumship) to be harsh, abrupt, disorganized, etc. As the entity and medium work together over time, the medium is eventually more able to speak, move and engage with the ritual in a smooth way, and the entry and exit of the entity tend to be less agonistic. In fact, in Santeria mounted orishas do not speak until a specific ritual is done during possession. Other kinds of spirits do speak clearly, but rarely on initial visits unless the medium is very experienced with that kind of possession.

2) I have found in several cases of strong (invited) possession and in cases even of heavy trance or altered states, that simply invoking ones own HGA instantly clears everything, returning one to full normal consciousness. Try it next time, to add to the case studies we have on record!

3) Among Santeria/Spiritist mediums I know with years of experience with full possession, full possession can range from this sense of the body/mind being operated by the entity while one retains a faint awareness as if watching from far away but can do nothing… to complete loss of consciousness by the hosting medium. It’s not a better/worse scenario – it may vary due to the experience of the medium, the particular abilities of the medium, or the desires of the entity who is present.

4) I had one experience where in a group scenario we invoked a Pomba Gira, but were not holding a totally traditional ritual. I was intermittently possessed by her and got the distinct impression she was a bit freaked out at first by the strange setting. Like she didn’t quite know what to make of it. After dismissing the possession for a few minutes to regroup (see HGA above) I then sat down at the altar and talked to her, explaining more clearly our purpose and welcome. I then let her return and she was much more comfortable and enjoyed herself. Your mention of the fearful reaction of the spirit you called could include a bit of this disorientation, as it arrived in unfamiliar surroundings without the usual ritual things it was used to expecting.

In any case, wish I’d been there for the chuckle.

[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]]

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.

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.

Further Reading

The book widely acknowledged as the best and most helpful for learning the techniques mentioned, is: The Multi-Orgasmic Man by Mantak Chia and Douglas Abrams Arava (London: Thorsons, 1996).

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.

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.

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'.]