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Those who have toyed and those who have more than toyed with the occult are drawn for many different reasons. Certainly the outcomes are uncertain until the moment of death when, we are told, all will be revealed for good and bad.
My own journey began aged 14 when a lucid dream developed into a life changing experience- an experience that left me with an unworldly craving. This hunger (for hunger it is) has remained the galvanizing force in my life to this day and has lead me through many adventures and learnings.
My first occult tamperings occurred within months of this experience and were undertaken with two school friends at my instigation. They took the form of a series of naïve and unprepossessing rituals and some surprisingly successful experiments with extrasensory perception. I was hooked! I went to the best of the local bookshops and looked for any title that would give the material I felt I needed. There was none! All I could find were the titillating mystery writings of authors like Erik Von Dannikan and Lyall Watson. With a small deposit from my pocket money I persuaded a very sheepish looking assistant to order a copy of Eliphas Levi's Transcendental Magic. For all the world she looked like she was going to be impaled Satan's trident there and then for subverting a minor!
Beyond the books I began reading I very soon realised that finding a mentor was essential and I was lucky to find the ashram or spiritual community of Dr Douglas Baker nestling unobtrusively very close to where I was living. Weekend jaunts at the ashram, seminars and helping out all fed the hunger, and provided wonderful elements to the occult jigsaw I was attempting to piece together but if our lives are complex the occult has a habit of adding an extra dimension.
Underneath the valuable learning and esoteric discipline, I found myself harbouring doubts that the ashram would take me where I wanted to go and being a young man in a hurry I struck out for more adventures, joining a witch coven and a western mysteries group to learn ritual magic. The more I did the more I came to recognise that my own views of life were conditioned by the Christian values which underpin even our avowedly materialistic culture and that weird figures like the magician Aleister Crowley (described by the English Press as the Wickedest Man in the World) point the way to values and experiences that cross the line between cultures. There was no choice for me but to get hands on with my own conditioning - the received and unquestioned views, values and expectations that are the sea that society drowns in. Around this time I read several essays by an Englishman (Dadaji 999) who had spent years as a wandering holyman in India. Behind the strange use of language and in a moment of insight I saw a man who had crossed the line between cultures and developed an expanded view of humanity. This view encompassed the essense of my esoteric hunger and in days Dadaji visited me in a dream that was to have far reaching effects.
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