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The Effects on Lucid Dreaming of Alpha-GPC (Glycerophosphocholine)

In Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements (Lulu, 2006), Thomas Yuschak describes how a combination of galantamine and alpha-GPC (glycerophosphocholine) can help induce powerful lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences, and how other substances can be used to support this.

Unfortunately, galantamine is now available only by prescription (in the UK, at least), probably because it has been found effective in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, so my experiment was limited to alpha-GPC alone.

The following is a simplified description of how alpha-GPC effects dreaming. To anyone seeking more detail and ideas for further experiments, Yuschak’s book is likely to be of interest.

The technical part

Alpha-GPC crosses the blood-brain barrier and acts as an acetylcholine precursor. Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter that research has linked with the ability to think, learn and remember. It also plays a major role in the regulation of sleep: its levels gradually rise during the night, in tandem with decreasing levels of serotonin.

[(2S)-2,3-dihydroxypropyl] 2-trimethylazaniumylethyl phosphate

Chemical structure of alpha-GPC. (A source of Choline, which is supposedly good for you — in appropriate doses.)

Our sleep consists of alternating phases of deep, dreamless sleep, and of relatively lighter, dream-filled sleep – also known as ‘REM sleep’. As the night begins, the phases of dreamless sleep are longer at first and the phases of REM shorter. This relationship gradually reverses as morning approaches. REM sleep is therefore associated with lower levels of serotonin and higher levels of acetylcholine, whereas in deep, dreamless sleep the ratio is reversed.

I went to bed at 10.30pm and fell asleep as normal. Then, at 3.40am, as my acetylcholine levels were naturally beginning to rise and the phases of REM naturally growing longer, I took 600mg of alpha-GPC and returned to bed. I had some difficulty getting back to sleep, and after about 30 minutes I got up again for the toilet.

The fun begins

Some time later my landlord came in to say he was taking his niece out for the day. I heard him explain, ‘Duncan is testing the effect of supplements on dreams’. But then I remembered I was at my partner’s house – so the appearance of my landlord could only mean one thing…

‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ I exclaimed.

It was totally indistinguishable from being awake. It didn’t feel at all like I was dreaming; I only knew, logically, that this had to be the case. When I looked closely at articles in the room (some coloured chess pieces near the window, for example) I knew they didn’t exist in reality – and then I noticed how other items were in different places from where I knew they really were.

Still a little nervous that I might be making a huge mistake, I drew the curtains apart and forced myself through the glass. It gave way like jelly.

So now I was certain – and I recognised it had to be the drug, making the dream more vivid than usual. As I floated to the pavement, the dream showed no sign of breaking apart. The concrete under my feet was as solid as reality.

Beforehand (for reasons I won’t explore here) I’d set myself the task of visiting the gospel scene where Christ raises Lazarus. ‘Take me to Lazarus!’ I shouted at the sky, spreading my arms. Darkness rushed over me and I sank into the ground. But then, disappointingly, I awoke.

Back in again…

Hoping to regain the dream, I lay still with my eyes shut. But whilst awake, I was becoming conscious of the effects of the drug. The mind felt fluid, in a state of rapidly rolling forward. For a time, there was hypnagogic imagery of a printing press. Black characters on white scrolling past. The typography and arrangement of letters was gorgeous: isolated characters, sometimes in combinations, as if to draw attention to their beautiful shapes.

This gave way to some internal dialogue, which immediately detached itself and became an external character: a tall woman, hair in a black bob, wearing a floral-print dress. My reaction to this also split off and became a person. In an instant, there were four of them, distinct personalities, all gabbling away in conversation on the effects of the drug.

The next I remember, I was at my parents’ old house, helping my mother stack food in the cupboards, our long-dead cat weaving between our feet, looking as scraggy as she had during her final months. I was holding a sack, and when I bent to sniff inside, discovered it was full of huge cornflakes, each a couple of inches wide. Making sure Mum didn’t see, I let some drop near the cat, who wolfed them down gratefully.

I’m not sure I was always entirely lucid. It seemed that four or five times during the night, I realised I was fully conscious, threw myself out through the window, and tried to realise my Lazarus goal. But the drug wasn’t particularly improving my habitual shortcomings when it comes to lucid dreams: either I wasn’t quite lucid, or – when I was – it lasted only a short time. The drug was heightening the intensity and fluidity of my usual experience, but it wasn’t fixing its usual problems.

'Advanced Lucid Dreaming', by Thomas Yuschak.

Yuschak’s book is self-published, but available from usual outlets.

After a couple of failures, I gave myself a break and simply enjoyed the scene from the window. My partner lives on one of Brighton’s quirkier shopping streets. The architecture was now augmented, upwards and outwards, with hardly any sky or road between the facing buildings. Everywhere were ramshackle stalls and entrances, giving the place a third-world feel.

When I jumped down, someone told me that two Buddhist monks had come to work on a neighbouring stall. I grabbed some cartons of lychee juice – which seemed an appropriate gift. The two monks had shaved heads and dark-red robes. As we chatted, it became clear they were more concerned with the rules and culture of their tradition than in mastering meditation and gaining insights. Still, they were nice guys, and it was interesting to talk about their travels.

In fact, everyone, everything, seemed to want to talk. The mind itself was in a state where it felt far easier than usual to discourse at length, to spin out stuff in a swift and ceaseless stream. But it was a problem to make any of it stick. It seems I have forgotten a great deal. I had to make a conscious effort to rescue these fragments.

Deep stuff

Things other than dreams were occurring. Before bed, I’d read an email from a friend about working with spirits. She was wondering how supplication of spirits or gods relates to that deeper level of religious insight, in which we recognise all is well – right now – just the way it is. If the goddess Yemaya gives us something that isn’t this all-pervading sense of wellness, then what is Yemaya?

I didn’t have an answer until, between the dreams, one arrived. It said: ‘The question is wrong.

Yemaya

Icon of the goddess Yemaya. In Santeria, she is the mother of all living things.

‘Yemaya isn’t anything. This is the realisation that everything is well. But if we can’t help having to take something from her, then with the infinite compassion of nothingness, the goddess will give.’

I made another tilt at Lazarus. Transitions in lucid dreams between scenes and states are always tricky, and can often chuck you out into waking consciousness. Yuschak describes a technique he calls ‘seeding’ (p. 163). Whilst falling asleep, we drop into our mindstream conscious images which, if our timing is on, will grow into our desired scene as we slip into dreaming. The challenge is to do this lightly enough. If it’s too conscious, we won’t fall asleep. If it’s too lax, the images will grow in unintended directions.

Of course, I failed. Despite picturing myself outside the tomb, hoping Christ might show up once I’d dropped off, I was too loose. My images took on their own life and meandered far, far away. Somehow, I ended up sitting on the floor beside four people on a sofa, explaining what I was trying to do. A plump girl in glasses, with curly hair, seated closest to me, kept talking across everyone. Finally I realised it might be good to shut up and actually listen to her.

‘There was a phone call for you,’ she said.

‘Who was it?’

‘A beautiful voice. Can you imagine,’ she went on, ‘picking up the phone and hearing this most beautiful voice reciting the most beautiful passages?’

‘What were those passages?’ I asked.

‘Captain Pigeon.’

‘I’m sorry?’

She repeated the name.

‘I don’t know who Captain Pigeon is,’ I apologised. ‘We don’t have him where I come from.’

The people on the sofa stared in amazement and pity.

‘Of all the TV programmes,’ the girl explained, ‘Captain Pigeon is the only one with no death or violence.’

I smiled, because although I hadn’t made it to the tomb of Lazarus, this felt like some kind of sign. The pigeon or dove is an important Christian symbol for the Holy Spirit, for peace, and for John the Baptist. If I’d been awake, this might have been a synchronicity. But I wasn’t awake, so it was only a dream of one.

Piero della Francesca, 'The Baptism of Christ' (c. 1448-50).

Captain Pigeon, a.k.a ‘The Holy Spirit’ or ‘the dove from above’. (Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, c. 1448).

In a synchronicity, mind and reality come into alignment: a girl dreams of a golden scarab, and the next day a golden beetle flies through the window. I had wanted to see Christ raise Lazarus, but instead I’d had a phone call from Captain Pigeon. This might have been a synchronicity inside the dream, but – I realised – outside the dream it would not be meaningful at all.

‘Wow,’ I thought. ‘In here, I have absolutely no terms of reference.’

And then, bizarrely, the meaninglessness suddenly assumed an intense and paradoxical meaning. The non-synchronicity became one. Because Captain Pigeon, by drawing attention to his own senselessness, had transcended the dream. It felt like a message smuggled from another dimension.

Debrief

I woke at 7.04am, when the drug would have reached its peak and was starting to decline. I could tell I wouldn’t sleep again, so I took the opportunity to examine the remaining effects in a more conscious state.

Its basic quality was that state when we’re consumed by an activity and cannot let it go; the feeling of being interested in and happy to work away at something all night. The label on the jar promised ‘mental acuity’. I’m not sure I quite agree with that. It seems to provide momentum rather than focus.

I can also confirm Yuschak’s observation (p. 71) that dreams under the drug seem inclined to feature music. At one point, from no visible source, I heard a funky piece played on a harpsichord; and whilst sitting by the people on the sofa, I heard trashy, but oddly light, dubstep being played. Whenever the music played, it was loud, which created an odd effect: because it was not actually sound, but a mental image of sound, it was possible for it to play at an ear-splitting volume, yet I could still ‘hear’ perfectly well (at the same time) conversations and other events in the dream.

A jar of alpha-GPC.

Alpha-GPC is available from health shops. (Other brands are available.)

Reported side effects for alpha-GPC include insomnia and nausea. At 600mg I experienced none of the latter. The former was mitigated by ensuring five hours sleep before taking the drug. After this, indeed, my sleep felt rather light and brittle. After waking at 7am, I was fine at first, but 3-4 hours later started to feel tired. I also felt a little low and irritable as the effects wore off, but I’m a miserable git anyway, so this was nothing extraordinary.

I’ve seen numerous posts on forums from people who tried alpha-GPC without results. This is not surprising. It’s a diet supplement, not a psychedelic; it only enhances the conditions for lucidity and does not directly induce it. Combining psychological techniques with alpha-GPC makes it more likely to trigger lucidity, and it’s absolutely necessary to time the dosage correctly. A few hours of sleep should always be taken beforehand, not only to guarantee some rest, but also to ensure maximisation of effect during the later stages of the night (or early morning), when the REM phases are at their deepest and longest.

I shall definitely be using it again – sparingly, so as not to build tolerance. But I won’t be following the directions on the jar to use it as a dietary supplement and chug a couple every day. However, as I make my living mostly from writing code, it struck me that it might occasionally prove handy in this context.

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The Magickian versus the Paranormal Investigator

Suppose that a woman believes she is haunted. She has recently found a new partner, and he’s about to move in, but various odd experiences suggest the continued presence of an ex-partner, who tragically killed himself in the same house several years ago.

The woman calls a friend, a self-professed magickian, to help uncover what’s going on. The friend takes some photographs in the house, and on one of them an ‘orb’ appears, precisely in the spot the ex-partner’s head had lain on the day the woman found his body.

This is not a scientific, rational investigation. This case finds its resolution in a magickal ritual to lay the ex-partner’s spirit to rest. But was the house ever really ‘haunted’, and did it ever actually contain a ‘ghost’?

We might be able to decide, if anyone knew what a ‘ghost’ is, or what ‘haunted’ means. As things stand, ‘spirits of the dead’ is only a theory for the nature of ghosts – one that, so far, lacks any substantial evidence. But the ‘orb’ in the photograph – there’s now some good evidence as to the nature of those: they’re particles of dust or moisture, reflecting light from close to the sensor of a digital camera [1].

Rather than assuming the return of a dead person’s spirit, this case is more adequately explained by a misattribution of natural phenomena, perhaps motivated by the widow’s guilt over finding happiness with a new partner.

an orb

Imagine the hilarity, had this orb elected to manifest in a more meaningful position.

The mind (or brain) is hard-wired to find meaning where none exists. ‘Ghost’ and ‘haunted’ are two such meanings projected onto experiences that are actually nothing of the kind.

This sounds like a rational view, but it pretends to an authority it cannot support, because its assertion of non-meaning is also itself an instance of the mind manufacturing a meaning in order to explain something to itself – in this case, the nature of misperception.

Rationalism usually has nothing to do with transcendent realities, so it seems odd to appeal to a notion of meaninglessness beyond what any human being can experience, because although we can have the experience of ‘seeing a ghost’ (albeit mistaken), we can never have the experience of ‘not seeing a ghost’.

This is not to claim there is no misperception, or that any view or meaning is as valid as any other, but simply that mind is always meaningful, and so the battle for rationality is not on the side of meaning against non-meaning, but on the side of meanings that are faithful to perception against meanings derived from other mental faculties (such as thought, imagination or intuition).

Although a rational investigation of the case would have reasonably concluded there was no evidence for a ‘ghost’ or ‘haunting’, nevertheless ghost and haunting can remain meaningful terms for describing what happened – the kind of experience that the woman had. There’s no evidence for ‘ghosts’, but there is evidence for things that could give rise to the experience of one. Likewise, there is no evidence for consciousness, mind, or the self – although there are neurological correlates, which might or might not indicate something that gives rise to them – because these are terms for entities that by their nature fall outside of our perception [2]. Nevertheless, we would find it difficult to get along without those terms. They are three privileged ‘ghosts’, with whom we have become so familiar, it seems unlikely they shall ever be exorcised.

Turning now to the photograph of the ‘orb’ (that speck of dust), its appearance encapsulates the whole issue of using magick or ‘spiritual methods’ in approaching the allegedly paranormal.

another orb

If orbs were the manifestation of a spirit, I imagine this one saying: ‘WTF are you even *doing*?’

There are some evidence-based theories for how Ouija boards, mediums, EVP recorders, etc., obtain their supposed results. None of these theories has anything to do with post-mortem communication, but everything to do with autosuggestion, misperception and possible fraud. Even so, many have found that if we persist in the use of these methods, eventually they can yield a result that seems so mind-blowingly improbable we might be left wondering if they might work after all.

Our ‘orb’, albeit a humble dust mote, had the temerity to appear in a meaningful place. No matter its mundane origin, we can’t deny its random and yet exquisite sense of position. Likewise, during a Ouija session, when the board spells out information known only to the observer seated apart at a safe distance, who cares if the operators’ fingers are unconsciously driving the planchette? Results are results!

Or are they? This is the point at which we must evoke coincidence. Rightfully so, for if a means of manifestation is provided, then stuff can and – given enough opportunity, eventually – will appear. To manifest any concept expressible in English, all we have to do is provide 26 letters and some kind of randomised selection process. (If it’s non-random, then even better.) A human voice is but sound within a certain acoustic range: make that range available, provide some form of random sounds within it, and eventually a ‘voice’ shall speak.

This is the essence of magick: decide on a goal; provide some kind of format or means through which it can be said that the goal is met. Often, eventually, it shall then in some form come to pass. Not because the chosen technique or magick itself ‘works’, or has any effect (in the sense commonly understood) upon physical reality, but because it enables us to have an experience of its having done so [3]. Because human experience is inherently meaningful, this can have a shaping impact on our lives indistinguishable from a more conventionally direct experience.

Occasional ‘hits’ like these, in themselves, prove nothing. To achieve proof, a sub-branch of magick is used, known as ‘science’, which cleverly defines a goal and a means of manifestation that are both limited to perceptual phenomena, augmented by instrumentation where appropriate.

Because, through perception, we share the same physical reality, the ‘magick’ wrought by science is repeatable and objectively verifiable. It becomes possible to predict and to know the results of certain procedures, rather than simply to experience them as true.

The magickal or spiritual goal of creating meaningful experience is not ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’ (a common confusion, perhaps especially among those who seek it), but is instead the empowerment it can confer through meaning. Meaning is a source of motivation in life like nothing else.

For the woman in our example, the appearance of the ‘orb’ could provide confrontation with her grief, and perhaps the means of coming more fully to terms with it. But magick is always risky, especially for those with no support-structure or previous experience in occultism; it offers no guarantee that we will find it easy to cope with the powerful experiences it can throw in our direction.

For this reason, the role of the paranormal investigator is to stick with science, collecting evidence for rational causes (where this is to be found) and handing the meaningful or experiential dimension of the phenomena back to the experiencer. In most cases, this should help to safeguard from harm the person affected by the experience.

Notes

[1] ‘Orbs! At last some definitive evidence that they are not paranormal‘ (2010), by Steve Parsons.

yet another orb

Only some orbs are particles of dust or moisture. Others are projected directly from the ajna chakra of evil cats.

[2] ‘Self’ is that for which we suppose experience arises, so whatever falls within experience is not self. ‘Mind’ is supposedly what thinks and experiences, not necessarily those thoughts and experiences themselves. ‘Consciousness’, we assume, is what provides all the qualities and things of which we are aware – which makes it problematic to suppose that consciousness itself has qualities or is a thing.

[3] My personal view is that the paranormal is real, in the sense offered here: an effect upon physical reality that has no physical cause other than the intention of a person or discarnate entity. But apart from subjective experiences, I have no evidence for this, and no notion of what form the evidence could take. Until I do, I accept that this is merely my opinion.

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The Varieties of Religious Idiocy

Scientists can make discoveries, or they can fail to do so. The scientific method is what it is, and no one argues that the scientific method itself is what makes bad scientists. Yet in the case of religion, it’s very often argued that religion itself is what creates ignorance.

In practice, of course, it’s not a level playing-field. It’s accepted that to do good science you must be capable of a certain level of understanding, but the same is sadly not applied to religion. It is supposed that in the field of religion any idiot’s opinion is as valid as any other’s.

So let us reflect on religious idiocy…

In general, the biggest idiots of any persuasion tend to turn nasty over little things: a football team losing, or someone’s pint getting spilled. This reflects a primitive level of engagement with the world: namely, that certain things are ‘mine’ and these should be defended. Primitive it may be, but in primitive contexts it’s effective at safeguarding survival.

A priest blesses machine guns

Catholic priest blesses weapons for the military in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

It’s not difficult to imagine how geniuses of this calibre behave when they come into contact with religious traditions: they identify with one tradition above all others and defend it by any means against the rest. This is the root of tribal and sectarian conflict, which has nothing to do with the doctrinal contents of any religion, but everything to do with how frightened animals react when their identity feels threatened.

But it truly is stupid, because although it works fine as long as we’re kicking someone else around, eventually someone bigger comes along and kicks our arse. ‘Hang on a minute,’ someone will declare, ‘this isn’t much fun any more. Wouldn’t the world be better if someone put their foot down and exerted a little authority?’

And – lo! A slightly less moronic structure springs from the daftness of the first: the appeal to authority. When this makes contact with religious traditions, now we encounter the idea that holy books are ‘the Word of God’; that every sentence is a literal truth to be obeyed to the letter. So the Earth is only a few thousand years old, because that’s what the Bible says. Indeed, whatever old book we borrow our morality from, well, it has to be applicable to the present day – otherwise, that would just plunge us back into chaos, wouldn’t it?

Ultimately, this structure collapses also under the weight of its own crappy assumptions (for those brave enough to allow it). To illustrate, I had a conversation recently with someone in this mindset, who told me how his obedience to God was so absolute, he would willingly kill his kids if God told him to.

Rather than notifying social services, I convinced myself this probably wasn’t going to happen. It’s rarely fruitful to argue with those in this mindset, because the very purpose of it is to safeguard its own authority; the less it accommodates, the better (from its point of view). But if I’d wanted to argue, I would’ve reminded him of a recent tragedy, in which a guy drove his children into the woods and killed them. ‘So would you agree,’ I would’ve said, ‘that if this man told us God had commanded him to kill his kids, then he’d committed no crime?’

The ‘authority’ mindset fails because religious experience is subjective. If someone hears the voice of God, does that mean other people have to jump to attention? Religious experience is a shoddy, useless arbiter of human affairs. Any book can say what it likes, but if what it says is contradicted by our own experience, which should we stick with? If it’s authority you crave, then stick with the Book of Rules. But if it’s knowledge, you have to follow where experience leads, even though it can be difficult and scary.

Thus we arrive at the next structure of understanding, which is the point where scientific reason becomes possible, because here we accept direct experience as the only reliable guide.

When this mindset comes into contact with religion, often it turns away in disgust. There is a general falling-off of religious practice in cultures (like our own) where this view has become fairly dominant. But religion can survive contact with it. Meeting people who seem to inhabit this perspective, I sometimes get an odd feeling that in one sense they’re not really ‘religious’ at all.

Burning monk

A Buddhist monk burns himself to death in protest at the Vietnamese government.

Scripture, for them, tends to be a guide rather than the rule, interpreted according to individual conscience. The everyday experience of everyday people is important to those in this structure, which can call down upon them, from less sophisticated cohorts, accusations that rather than ministering to spiritual concerns they are dabbling in politics. In fact, they are simply remaining faithful to experience of the world as it is, to the here-and-now.

It’s striking how similar (in some senses) the discourse of liberal religion is to contemporary scepticism. Like liberal clerics, sceptics are often passionately and genuinely concerned with exposing and combating injustice, abuse, and shining light onto cruelties.

Blessings upon both their houses! But even this mindset crumbles, because if my experience is the arbiter of what is real for me, then the same is true for you, and for the next man, and for the next woman, and so on for everyone. Every view – it begins to seem – is as valid and equal as any other. Even science is just a ‘discourse’.

Oh dear. We seem to have fallen into what commonly passes for post-modernism!

When this mindset engages with religion, we get The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Believe in whatever you like, as long as it makes you happy and you gain from it what you intend. Some forms of New Age belief fall into this perspective (but only some, mind you), and certain branches of modern occultism. Also, quite a few of those who have consciously chosen a non-local religious tradition: western Buddhists, Kundalini yoginis, and suchlike. And why not? We’re all on the same journey, right? All following different paths toward our own equally valid notions of truth.

But, guess what? This viewpoint fails too – once it becomes apparent that although every person’s experience is indeed as valid as anyone else’s, this is only true in the experiential sense. In other words, our experience is of equal worth, but what about our understanding of that experience?

And so we end up right here, the place we’re looking from right now, which is the view that the understanding that informs our experience varies wildly from person to person. Some views are less stupid and intolerant than others. Hence the view that is most comprehensive (which here is also the criteria for ‘most true’) is the view that can include and yet discriminate between the widest range of other views.

When this mindset connects with religion, we arrive at the spiritual investigator, who engages with a number of traditions, or perhaps with a number of practices within a tradition. He or she arrives at the following observation, gained directly from his or her experience: that although some of these traditions and practices lead us to the same destination, many do not.

Dianetics – for instance – leads to a different set of experiences from those arrived at through Zen, which leads to something comparable with (say) Ramana Maharshi self-enquiry, but which is different again entirely from what a Jehovah’s Witness experiences when they succeed in luring you to your front-door.

To anyone acquainted with spiral dynamics or integral theory, I’ve not said here anything very original or new. I’ve simply tried emphasise how religion, like scientific method, is something people can fail to understand or apply. Science does not produce ignorance; our misunderstanding takes care of that. The function of science is always to produce knowledge.

The function of religion, on the other hand, is to produce direct experience of what has been variously called ‘the Absolute’, ‘Emptiness’, or (perhaps its most widely abused and misunderstood term) ‘God’. This is not conceptual knowledge of the kind that science reliably supplies, but where it is motivated by actual engagement with the nature of experience, neither is it a form of stupidity.

Flying Spaghetti Monster

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: a post-modern faith erected upon its own inherent absurdity.

Religion works, just as the scientific method works. But whereas people are more inclined to admit their ignorance in the face of science, unfortunately there are religious morons aplenty with utterly no clue, who still believe they’re qualified to tell you the Meaning of Life or what God thinks. They may indeed be stupid, but that doesn’t mean religion is.

All you need to do is ask them how they know. The answer that they give will probably point to which mindset they currently inhabit.

(If it’s the first or second, you may need to run away.)

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A Dialogue on Awakening with Mark Van Void

A couple of weeks ago I chatted with chaos magician Mark Van Void about the nature of awakening, what happens afterwards, and various other details. Mark brought some pre-prepared questions for our discussion, and generated some extra questions at random using a pictorial dice oracle he has been experimenting with recently. Unfortunately the recording wasn’t clear enough to make a podcast, but here’s an edited transcript.

MARK: Statement: ‘The joy you seek is you.’ Is that true for you, Duncan? Has that been internalized in some way?

DUNCAN: Yeah. That sounds very true to me. What about you? Is that true for you?

M: Yes and no. [Laughter.] The surface me: no, it’s not true for that. Because that’s what moves me to search for things that will bring happiness. But it’s true for the deeper I, because that doesn’t need anything, and it’s always free, always happy. So, yes, it’s true on a deeper level. But how can it be true on a superficial level, because then there wouldn’t be a seeker?

Mark Van Void

The shy and retiring Mark Van Void, standing with his back to the camera. In a wood.

D: I think the whole point of that statement is that it’s getting you to question that sense of ‘I’. I think that’s what it’s for. Because, of course, on the surface it’s apparent that this is not the case.

M: Yes, because without some degree of unhappiness and dissatisfaction there would be no seeking. And perhaps it’s pointing to the fact that all of that is unreal, and deep down that ‘you’ is the enlightenment, the awakening, all the joy you are after. And this is not different from you.

D: What I get, when I’m sitting there, seeing that, the bliss – it’s a sensation as if it just keeps giving and giving and giving… Do you get that at all?

M: Yes. It doesn’t seem to have a beginning or an end. It seems timeless. It seems prior to everything.

D: To be honest with you, though, the thing that gets on my tits is that it’s still just an experience, the bliss. Do you know what I mean?

M: Yes, I do. You are the witness of that.

D: But I think it goes beyond that, because even if the witness has dropped away too, there’s still the sense that this has to take the form of an experience. My hunch is that if there is some ‘enlightenment’ that comes after what most people call ‘the awakening experience’, then it’s got to have something to do with that, the way that all we have is the experience of things – even of emptiness, even of the clear light. It still has a form.

M: Okay. What about the kind of experience where, to describe it later on, really, is just to talk crap because, at the time of the experience, there was no ‘me’, there was no experiencer. To make a statement about it is not to describe it in any way, because even if it is verbally accurate, such as ‘emptiness’, ‘void’ or whatever, I am not there. It is a transcendental thing beyond experience.

D: What strikes me about those kind of experiences is that they don’t include this – you know, the sense of there being an I, of being here. And in that way, they’re incomplete – do you know what I mean? Everything should be included. Even the sense of sitting here and feeling crap. I don’t think there’s anything ultimate about the transcendental kinds of experiences, because they rule out the mundane.

M: I’m not sure what you mean.

D: I don’t think there’s anything wrong or less transcendent about my state of consciousness right now than any other state.

M: Yes. This is like the debate over whether liberation is right now, such as in the sound of us talking. Is that liberation? Is that what you mean?

D: Yes. My view is that it is.

M: It has to be doesn’t it? Do you mean that there’s a tendency to tag a beginning and an end onto some of these deeper experiences? But isn’t that just a concept of the experience, which is like a tarnish, really? It tries to put the experience into time, when this – which is happening right now – is beyond fucking time!

[Laughter.]

D: I also think that ‘bliss’ is a label. Because bliss is not bliss. It has to be!

M: It’s just a word, isn’t it?

D: Yes, because the bliss that you seek is there even when you’re not seeking bliss, and even when it’s not bliss that you are experiencing.

M: You mean in the sense that your attention can be elsewhere, but it’s still running, as if it’s an undercurrent?

D: Yes. I think this is one of the things that pops up in practice, in the later stages towards the awakening experience, where you get this weird sense that even though you’re not concentrating, you’re still with things, somehow.

M: Yes. Distraction is allowed. Distraction is allowed to be, as distraction.

D: I think that’s a big breakthrough, because when you begin you’re so hung up on staying with things – and then you discover that everything’s a lot more spacious, and your mind can wander, and you can watch it wandering, and it’s completely off the point, and you’re no longer meditating. You’re completely off on one. And yet you can still see all of that, arising and passing. I think the same applies to bliss.

M: It’s like a meta-position to meditate from. Do you have a spatial location for this, Duncan? Where is that viewed from? Behind the head or something?

[Laughter.]

D: No, you can’t locate it.

M: Okay. I’m just asking you. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. So it would be wrong to think you were looking from above or behind the head, or something?

D: I don’t think that does it justice, does it?

M: No. That would be to assert a ‘me’ doing something, wouldn’t it?

D: Yes.

M: Which is located here or there, or wherever… So, could you say that bliss is arising from a particular location?

D: No, but I’m thinking about chakras…

M: I’ve heard it said that bliss arises from the heart. Perhaps it arises from there and radiates out throughout the body. But then, what body? What fucking chakra?

[Laughter.]

D: To me it feels, when you’re in those states, that it’s like the chakra is receiving it. I know a lot of people say they get it in the heart chakra, and I do too, but most of the time it’s in the ‘third eye’ for me. That’s often where it feels strongest. Also – do you ever get it when it feels painful as well as blissful? It sometimes feels like there’s a hard pebble in the heart chakra, grinding around and around.

M: It can be emotion, which feels a little like pain, but not pain in some physical way. Is that what you mean – like a physical niggle?

D: It can feel like that, yes. But I don’t think that’s what it is.

M: The emotion is a reaction to it. The emotion is added to it. Often, we can be observing the emotion, which then transcends the emotion, and the emotion stops.

D: Yes. So I don’t think there’s a location for bliss, but it feels like bliss can be in the chakras. But when I look at it more closely, it seems to be like you say – it’s a reaction. The sensations are reactions to something. To nothing.

[Laughter.]

M: To nothing being everything… Perhaps wherever you focus your attention it can be.

D: But if you concentrate on your fingertip, does that have the same feeling? It doesn’t seem to. It seems to be certain parts of the body.

M: I see what you mean. Next question: Buddha said enlightenment is the end of suffering. Do you think there’s a misconception amongst seeker about this?

D: Yes, I think there’s a massive misconception about that, which is the idea that you’re never going to feel pain again or feel miserable again. After the awakening experience it’s a huge anticlimax to discover that things are still shitty.

M: That irritation can still arise?

D: Yes. [Laughter.] There’s still suffering, but the idea that there is someone to suffer is what changes. It just doesn’t seem as ‘personal’ as it used to. Do you know what I mean?

M: Yes. To the extent, though, that you can develop anger or irritation or any other delusion – if you like – isn’t that due to some sort of karma that remains, or our attention on the thought that gives it some energy?

D: I don’t think it works like that.

M: Isn’t our attention feeding that thought, making it into something bigger and bolder than what it actually is?

D: Well, ask yourself: what is it making more intense? What is there to be made more intense by the thought?

M: Well, more thoughts. Such as ‘this shouldn’t be happening,’ and other such stupid ideas.

[Laughter.]

D: This is the weird thing: suffering still arises, but – like I said – it’s not personal any more. It is seen straight away as being empty. But that doesn’t stop all the thinking and clinging – that still arises too, but that also is seen through as being empty. So I’m sitting there, unhappy about something, and the thoughts are arising, and I’m totally bound up in the thoughts arising – but the being bound up is seen through as well. I take what you mean about karma, but I don’t think karma takes us away from anything. It’s just karma. And karma is seen through as well. The feeling I had, after my awakening experience, was like a kind of cog wheel, all the suffering and thoughts arising, but spinning and spinning and spinning without gripping onto anything in the way that it used to. It doesn’t find any purchase. The process still goes on, and it gets quite mad and intense, but there’s nothing for it to lock into.

Karma

The cog of karma is always turning. What we mistake for ‘ego’ is just a part of the same system. But even after this is seen through, the cog of karma still turns.

M: Yes.

D: I think the karma is what is making that wheel spin. The karma is still there and the wheel is still spinning, but it can’t find purchase because you can see that everything that comes up is empty.

M: So it’s like a duck’s back that has been positioned vertically. [Laughter.] Whatever gets thrown up, can’t stick. It’s just going to run down and fall off.

D: Yes. And I think the karma is what is doing the throwing. That’s going to carry on. Over time, you’re going to gradually learn that there’s no point throwing that water, and it comes up less and less.

M: So the attention given to thought lessens too, in so much as you become a sort of ninja who can block those thoughts with quick reactions?

D: Yes, because you know they’re not really going to go anywhere. But those thoughts can’t really do anything. After the awakening experience, everything that arises can be seen through. So it really doesn’t matter what you think. It doesn’t matter how you react. Whatever that reaction is, it’s seen through.

M: Automatically?

D: The awakening experience is like a kind of understanding. That’s the nearest word I can think of to describe it. It’s not a state, or an idea. It’s like a kind of understanding that soaks into you, and you just know, see and experience it in that way. So you can think what you want. You know, what could you possibly think that could mess up your whole life? What could you think that could destroy the universe, or stop you from seeing things how they are? There isn’t anything.

M: I suppose not.

D: In some traditions you have the idea of ‘blasphemy’ – if you think certain thoughts or say certain things, then it somehow sticks in the universe and God can see it and will be offended. I think this is an equivalent. But there’s really nothing you can think, or any reaction you can have, that can ever really do that, because reality is just not like that at all – stuff does not stick around. It’s always arising and passing.

M: So the only clinging that occurs, occurs within the conditioning within delusion and – necessarily – isn’t real?

D: Yes. The karma is not in you having those thoughts. It’s seen through. It doesn’t stick anywhere.

M: And as a result of not reacting to these situations, then you won’t be committing any more karma.

D: Well, that’s not how I’ve experienced it, so far. I think you can react, and even the reaction can be seen through at the time. So someone might say something and you become annoyed. Even as the anger arises, even as you lash out at them, you can be seeing through that, seeing that it’s empty.

M: Can there be stages to that? You might have an angry outburst, and it’s only when you’ve said the last word of the sentence that you adopt this meta-position and think, ‘What the hell?’ and it’s like you’ve just watched someone else do something.

D: I think it’s at a much deeper level. You can see through your ‘letting go’, even. Imagine you’re angry, and you can see yourself being angry, but then you decide to let go. Even that is karmic and can be seen through.

M: So it’s a meta-position even of that?

D: I think it’s no position. It’s not having any position at all.

M: It’s like the internal weather is still there but your experience of it is different. Preference can still be there, and doing something that goes against it. You’re still going to try to choose situations that involve less suffering – unless we put ourselves deliberately in a place to test our realisation.

D: And I think that’s a good practice!

M: That’s it. If you can go into situations where previously you got annoyed and ended up ranting at someone, if you can go there and abide in a peaceful state, and walk around with a big smile, then there’s probably nothing left to learn, is there?

[Laughter.]

D: But, at the same time, you’re probably still getting pissed off. There’s probably still annoyance arising.

M: But it’s being seen through.

D: Yes. And if you keep putting yourself in those situations then, eventually, it probably won’t arise. But that’s probably nothing to do with enlightenment as such; it’s just habituation.

M: Karma is like habit too, isn’t it? Conditions that we’ve built up through belief.

D: I’m starting to find more useful now the idea of the Will of God. Not a particularly Buddhist concept, but the idea of surrender to the Will of God seems a better metaphor than this idea of trying to arrange things in a certain way. What grabs me about this idea is that God’s Will is always the way everything already is. You can’t go against it, because by definition this is already what it is, what’s happening right now.

M: I don’t know… The concept of God, for me, is too karmically polluted!

[Laughter.]

D: Try this one, then: enlightenment is not ours to fiddle with. Awakening is just awakening.

M: I can detach the word ‘God’ from personification, but sometimes I have trouble. [Laughter.] So, go on. Run it past me again.

D: Enlightenment is part of reality. So you don’t get to think, ‘Oh, I won’t react like this,’ or, ‘I won’t get irritated by that.’ That’s not what enlightenment can be, because that’s us trying to set things up in a particular way.

M: Trying to control things.

D: Enlightenment is just what is. It’s the fabric of reality.

M: Whatever is happening has already been deeply accepted with love, in a sense, because it’s happening.

D: Exactly. So who gives a fuck what you think or how you react – stuff like that. You can’t intervene at that level. Thank God!

[Laughter.]

M: There’s no one to react. There’s just this.

D: Which – from one way of looking at it – is the Will of God.

M: How about ‘Great Spirit’? I think I’ll go with that one. It’s more faceless.

D: Hasn’t got so big a beard.

M: It’s more comfortably vague. It can be called the Will of the Great Spirit, but it’s still witnessed by us, by ‘I’.

D: But that arises within it. That’s part of it. It’s not standing outside of it.

M: The Will of the Great Spirit, that’s arising within you, rather than you arising within it. You’re a witness of the Great Spirit too, no?

D: It doesn’t seem that way. I remember, I met an old teacher of mine from university and I was telling him about some of the stuff I’d got into. As I continued talking I could see his face taking on this expression of increasing horror, as I went on about Buddhism, magick and occultism. At the end he said, ‘That’s just complete solipsism. You’ve deluded yourself that you are the only being in the universe; that you are synonymous with the universe itself.’ Afterwards I was thinking about this, and I concluded that actually it’s the opposite: all this stuff we’re talking about right now, it’s not solipsism. It’s not like we’re trapped in our own heads. It’s not that we’re saying we’re the only beings in the universe. It’s like everything else exists, apart from us. That’s the way I tend to look at it.

M: That they’re all merely perspectives, and at different times some are more appropriate and useful than others.

D: Yes.

M: Solipsism is crap because it’s all about everything being one, and oneness, and that can have a loosening effect on our reality tunnel – if you want to call it that – which can be beneficial, but I prefer the term ‘non-dual’, meaning ‘not two’, and I think there is an important and subtle difference between the meaning of ‘one’ and ‘not two’.

D: Yes. And ‘not one’ either.

M: Yes. And neither ‘non-dual’ nor ‘one’. But both. Sometimes.

[Laughter.]

M: Next question: going through the meditation or awakening experience, we feel we have ‘okayness’ with whatever arises, but even when this is relatively stable, can there still be resistance to some or certain appearances?

D: Definitely. You can even have resistance to the ‘okayness’. Why shouldn’t you?

M: You’re free to adopt any position.

D: You can’t define enlightenment as belonging to any particular view or state.

M: Even okayness with whatever arises is a perspective. And there can be resistance to appearances, but that is merely a perspective also, one that automatically is seen through as empty.

D: Exactly. If things were ‘okay’ and ‘stable’, imagine how fucking bored you would get! [Laughter.] But then boredom would arise – and be instantly seen through.

M: You must get to a point where you can’t choose not to see through thoughts and experiences and so on.

D: I don’t think ‘seeing through’ is a voluntary process. That’s what I mean about enlightenment being a form of understanding.

M: An intuitive thing? Not conscious?

D: It’s like when you learn a sport or martial art. Once you’ve ‘got it’, you just do it automatically.

M: So there you go – there’s a limitation: you can’t not see through! You’re stuck being free from delusion.

D: Someone said to me once, ‘What if you get enlightened and you don’t like it?’ At the time, I thought this was the most stupid thing anyone could have said. But, after the awakening experience, I thought: ‘Actually, they’ve got a point.’ Because there is no going back.

M: No.

D: For a while, the effects of the awakening experience did feel unpleasant, in a way. The sense of self changes, and there is a sense that you’ve lost something.

M: What about loneliness? Does that come into it?

Wot, no permanent, separate self?

D: Initially, I think. What about you?

M: I’ve thought so, yeah. If that’s all there is, and there’s no one among all of these forms; if it’s just ‘you’ looking back from among all these forms, whether they’re people, or objects, or whatever, then I think there is a loneliness there. But not a sad loneliness, as such.

D: It’s weird how the awakening experience includes all this bliss, the end to suffering, and yet there’s unpleasantness and loneliness at the same time.

M: A sweet, beautiful sadness.

D: A boring bliss.

[Laughter.]

M: So, if you look at an object, then, do you get some sense of ‘you’ – in the deepest sense – that’s illuminating it from the inside, that’s making it be there, because it’s arising within you? In what way is it ‘other’ than you?

D: Again, this makes me think of what we were saying earlier, about how everything exists apart from the self. Pens, screens, microphones and vajras exist, but the only thing I can’t find is the thing that thinks it perceives them.

M: If the person is empty of independent existence, then the many people are empty of it too – there’s not just no ‘you’, there’s no ‘anyone’, either. And similarly, with objects.

D: Yes. But I don’t really experience it that way. Do you?

M: No. There’s an element of ‘otherness’ in objects and things, but it does sometimes look like a practical joke I’m playing on myself, by putting that ‘otherness’ there, by projecting that otherness.

D: ‘Otherness’ arises on the inside?

M: It can’t be ‘outside’, can it? ‘Inside’, ‘outside’ – again, it’s just duality. Just more perspectives on nothing.

D: Let’s roll those dice, then!

[Mark takes up his dice oracle, to generate some further questions. He lights some incense and rings a bell. Whilst reciting mantras, he throws the dice and pauses to interpret the result.]

M: Okay, this is roll number one. This is good! So: ‘When we investigate with the single-pointed arrow of our concentration, is there a need to be able to hold the object of emptiness whilst simultaneously inspecting it from many angles, like a nimble fish, in order to see it directly with our vajra-like mind of bliss?’ Here are the dice, so you can see where I got that from…

D: Let’s have a look… Wow! There’s a key, a torch, a learner-driver sign, a lightning-bolt, an eye and a fish. That is so cool! To answer the question – absolutely, and this practice still goes on. This question is more like an affirmation, I think. It becomes even more amazing after the awakening experience, because holding emptiness in attention deepens it, and deepens it. You can also see how concentration itself is empty – what is concentrating and what are you concentrating on?

M: Does there come a point, then, when the concentrating and the deep inspection of the object vanish, and something beyond the mind arises, like a revelatory experience?

D: Yes. That is the experience of meditating upon emptiness, as far as I’m aware.

M: So it’s like the mind and its object both vanish, revealing emptiness itself, seen directly?

D: Yes. This is just the practice. Your dice seem to have summed up precisely the practice. This is what all practices designed to bring about enlightenment will ultimately lead to, I think.

M: So concentration and the object are like the two pieces of wood that get rubbed together, and the fire gets going, and eventually the fire destroys the two pieces of wood used to start it?

D: Yes. You can now see, in real time, all the time, over and over again, how there’s nothing to concentrate on, there’s nothing to concentrate with, and there’s nothing called ‘concentration’ anyway.

M: Shall we try another one?

D: Yes, I’m impressed!

[Mark rings bell, recites mantras and launches the dice.]

M: ‘This vajra-like bliss from concentration, how essential is it to crossing the river of awakening and seeing the multi-levelled house of samsara as empty, to give happiness?’ [Laughter.] In other words, ‘How essential is bliss?’ Is it the discovery of this bliss that stops the appearance of the ordinary body-mind?

D: I don’t think bliss is something you have to cultivate in order to arrive at the awakening experience. I think for a lot of people it’s a hindrance. You come across a lot of people who are stuck in concentration practices and just sit focussing on their breath, totally off their tits in bliss, but never reach the point where they examine who is concentrating or what is being concentrated upon. Bliss is a result of seeing emptiness.

M: That’s interesting…

D: Not all bliss, of course… Hey, I love these dice. They’re more like affirmations than questions. Rhetorical questions.

M: Would you like to try out one last one?

D: Let’s.

[Mark rings bell, and does the mantra and dice thing again.]

M: Okay, ‘What does the awakening experience have to say to people who feel they are the victim of circumstance?’

D: Oh, that’s tricky. Isn’t that tricky?

M: It is, isn’t it? But that’s what has come up. What ability or what approach would help a person who feels themselves a victim of society or circumstance or something?

D: One approach to helping people like that is to teach them magick. It reaches out to people more than religious systems, because the first thing it gives you is a sense of empowerment. It can make you feel more empowered and, as you press further into it, then you start to ask deeper questions about, ‘Why do I want the stuff I’m asking for?’ ‘Who is doing this?’

M: Yes. Like you say, it correctly puts the person back in the position of choosing the experience rather than suffering the uncontrollable.

D: I can’t think of any religious system that does that for people. If you take up magick, you are the priest – and the congregation.

M: That’s quite a healthy way to think, really. Isn’t that how religions came about historically, by manipulation of the populace? They didn’t want local shamans popping up here and there to help people.

D: But past a certain point, all the intention to awaken people has gone. There’s no longer anything spiritual going on; it’s all about power. It’s just the attempt to control people through dogma.

M: I don’t think the Buddha had any intention for ‘Buddhist Centres’ or institutions built around what he had said, or whatever.

D: The Buddha’s problems started as soon as he began taking on students. Then he had to impose rules. And people began mistaking the rules for the practice. It seems inevitable, doesn’t it? Whereas the wonderful thing about magick is it teaches you there are no rules. You just make it all up. It doesn’t really matter what you make up, because it’s all going to be reality. You can’t get away from reality. Making stuff up just makes you look closer at what you suppose the difference between reality and unreality actually is. And then you’re confronted with the fact that it’s your mind, your beliefs that do that. And then – you’re on the path to enlightenment.

M: ‘With our thoughts we make the world.’ That’s from the Dhammapada. So with our thoughts we can make our own spiritual system! We can make it all up, if we like.

[Laughter.]

by

Where the Dead Live

Fast forward to the moment of your death: as the body fails, with a varying degree of rapidity, your perceptual and cognitive faculties shut down. Seeing stops. Then tasting, hearing, smelling and feeling. So too, thinking. In Buddhist traditions, supposedly hearing goes last. And at some point, presumably, consciousness.

But don’t worry too much about that last one – consciousness vanishes for a good part of every night. Sometimes, during the day as well. It comes and it goes and is no more ‘you’ than anything that arises within it. Even with consciousness completely gone, we wake up in the morning and recall stuff that seemed to have happened. Weird stuff, often. We call this stuff that happens to us in the absence of consciousness, dreaming.

Heraclitus said, ‘The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own’ (Fragment 89). Because dreams are so private and unique, we are – in a sense – closest to ourselves in the absence of consciousness. But what is this intensely personal stuff that continues to unfold in us, even in the absence of consciousness and volition? One word for it is karma.

The karmic traces are like photographs that we take of each experience. Any reaction of grasping or aversion to any experience… is like snapping a photo. In the darkroom of our sleep we develop the film. Which images are developed on a particular night will be determined by the secondary conditions recently encountered. Some images or traces are burned deeply into us by powerful reactions while others, resulting from superficial experiences, leave only a faint residue… We string them together like a film, as this is the way our psyches work to make meaning, resulting in a narrative constructed from conditioned tendencies and habitual identities: the dream. (Tenzin 1998: 32-3)

So claims Tibetan Buddhist dream yogi, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Before we write this off as exotic claptrap, consider the similar conclusions of a western dream yogi. Sigmund Freud preferred the term ‘unconscious wish’ (Freud 1976: 200-213 [Ch. III]) instead of ‘reaction of grasping or aversion’; Tenzin’s ‘secondary conditions recently encountered,’ Freud called ‘the day’s residues’ (Freud 1976: 247-76 [Ch. V (A)]); and ‘the way our psyches work to make meaning’ was precisely what Freud believed had been uncovered through his exploration of dreams, to which he dedicated the rest of his career. (He preferred to describe it as, ‘the dream-work’ [Freud 1976: 381-651 (Ch. VI)].)

The end of consciousness is not the end of karma. Indeed, in the absence of consciousness, karma thrives. But what about the end of life? ‘What dreams may come?’ Is death the end of karma too?

I’ve used my limited abilities as a lucid-dreaming yogi to interrogate angelic and demonic entities, and to scry the Enochian aethyrs. In December last year, my father unexpectedly and traumatically died. Since then, whilst grieving for him with other members of my family, cautiously and carefully I’ve tried to use dream yoga to explore his vicissitudes after death.

28th February. To see him was lovely. A vivid sense of his presence. He sat in the chair watching television. Yet as soon as interaction was attempted, things turned problematic. He stood against the wall, frozen and immobile. No response. His eyes opened and stared blankly, like they had in the intensive care unit.

6th March. I went into the kitchen and he was getting ready for work. He looked younger and healthy, but seemed stressed. ‘You’re looking well,’ I said to him. ‘You know that’s because you’re dead now, don’t you?’ He seemed bewildered and unsure. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I feel poorly. Every time I walk into a room, I –’ Unfortunately, just then the lucid state dissolved.

‘But these are just dreams,’ is the obvious criticism. They were lucid dreams, but other than that I do not disagree – except to point out that our experience of others is always of their behaviour: the way they look, speak and move; the choices and reactions they make. In an encounter with a dead person in a lucid dream, all of these present themselves to consciousness. Phenomenologically, there is no difference from an experience of the person in waking life.

Yet in these dreams, when the dead person is called upon to react to their current situation, the interaction breaks down, because what is missing is not karma, but life. As far as I’m aware, there is no scientifically feasible definition of life that doesn’t point instead at karma. So far, life has not been defined as what it ‘is’ or ‘has’, but only in terms of actions and behaviours – as karma, in other words.

DNA, certainly, is a substance that living things have, but that having is made possible only by a doing: the self-replicating and recombining action of the DNA molecule. It appears that life itself is not the being or having of something, but a continuous unfolding, somehow beyond these, to which being and having are responses, rather than the driving force.

The karma of the dead might persist in various forms, the strongest of which is probably memories and effects upon the living. But although the karmic simulacrum left by the dead is to all extents identical with what they were, in the experience of others, that Grace by which (when alive) they were able to change, develop and respond, has withdrawn.

25th March. I couldn’t find him, but then I went into a pub and saw him. He looked normal but, on inspection, was like a hollow, metal ornament. His eyes were closed and his face dead. Inside him was black ash and soot. Still in the lucid state, I began to meditate. This way I could find him, because he had abandoned the physical representation of himself. Where he was now, he was in a kind of focused repose. No thoughts. Very peaceful. He was collecting himself quietly, focussing in on himself, with no thoughts or perceptible changes.

The karma of the dead unfolds in the living. Their vicissitudes after death are dependent on us, because they are done with developing and unfolding. Grieving is no isolated event in an individual mind, it is the dreaming-out by the dead (through us) of their karmic remnants. Our mourning is the unfolding of love or antagonisms they left behind. The dead can suffer or cling to life, depending on their dreams, woven by our grief.

3rd April. He seemed neither dead nor alive, but I sensed I could force the issue, so I walked quickly up to him and spoke loudly into his ear, ‘Dad!’ ‘Eh?’ he mumbled. ‘Love you,’ I said. ‘Uv oo,’ he replied, then lapsed back into a stillness, from which I knew he would next time be even harder to rouse.

I found it both difficult and helpful to meet him in this series of dreams. It’s not a technique I’d recommend for anyone with complicated issues concerning the deceased. There are bereavement counsellors who can guide us more safely if this is the case. It was difficult because there he was, completely back again, even though I knew full well he had gone. It was helpful because it showed me directly, painfully, how all that remained of him was karma. What had allowed that karma to unfold had now disappeared, maybe back to where it came.

Dad and me

Dad and me in a slot-machine arcade (probably Blackpool). Late 1970s Polaroid.

This last encounter alerted me I was clinging on too tightly. As time passed, he was moving ever further away, becoming more difficult to find. Reaching out was pulling him back toward a state in which he no longer belonged. It also exposed how, really, we’d said to each other all that needed to be said. It was selfish to continue.

1st May. In the garden at night, I pointed out to him the Pleiades star-cluster. Then I realised I wasn’t looking properly: the whole sky was filled with stars like the Pleiades, packed and dense. Suddenly, he was gone. Vanished from sight, like a jump-cut in a film. Mum and I were in the garden, looking up at the stars and remembering him.

References

Freud, Sigmund (1976). The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Pelican.

Heraclitus (2012). Fragments. http://bit.ly/MToVOM (wikisource.org).

Tenzin, Wangyal Rinpoche (1998). The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Edited by Mark Dahlby. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications.

by

The Shin Splint Drifts

I had developed shin splints, and running was off the agenda. Never mind: walking was still available, so I wandered the city, and around the corner from home discovered a small, abandoned car park.

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.

by

Inside the Entrances to Hell

Last May, Alan Chapman and I visited four of Brighton & Hove’s seventy-two entrances into hell (as featured in previous articles on this site) to make a short film of our exploits.

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 - view on YouTube.

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!