What is the nature of reality?
What are life and death for?
Why is there evil?
Why am I here and what means these weird things?

Have you ever really sat down and asked yourself what you think about the Nature of Things? Have you tracked back in your memory to the days of your childhood and patiently examined how you came to think the way that you do? Did you ever feel that you were born with certain knowledge or opinions that have never left you or been modified by later experience? Here's a short list of questions which one should answer to themselves, even if only briefly, before continuing in earnest:

What did your parents tell you about the world, the universe, God?
How did you react to other people who believed differently than you?
How did others react to you?
Do you understand or have some feel for their motivations?
Did you decide that you knew "better" or knew more than your first instructors?
When did that happen and what was that like?
Did you ever think someone was lying to you to protect you from some difficult truth?
Have you radically changed your assumptions about the universe?
More than once?
Do the findings of modern science cause you problems with your cosmology? Or bring you joy and a sense of wonder?
Has your own experience caused you to doubt or confirm some part of your cosmology?
How much do you think any of this matters? Is it vital? Or merely amusing?

I will proceed to address these questions as best I can, showing how my cosmology has changed over time and illustrating some of the processes and deductions which led me to the (always uncertain) place where I've gotten my toe-hold purchase.

I was born a middle class, American, white child into a fairly liberal Protestant cosmology. As this child, I was taught that Jesus was very important (but never burdened with more than the most simplistic details of his life and mission), Right was opposite Wrong, Good was opposite Evil and that I would eventually die "quite a ways off in the future--so don't worry about it." By the time I was five, my cosmology had to change because I had actually encountered something that seemed evil, even if only a pale shadow of what evil visits the lives of others less fortunate than I.

I was three or perhaps four years of age and eating what was probably my first slice of watermelon on the front porch of my parent's home when it happened. Some older kids were riding their bicycles in the street in front of the suburban home and I went out to the curb to watch them. One seemed quite curious about my watermelon, and when I offered it up to his inspection, he threw it into the street. Whooping and hollering, they rode their bicycles over its splintered rind before raging off into the distance. This turn of events was made utterly frightening because I did not understand what their possible motivation could be for such an act. This was very unlike the gentle care-giving I'd received at the hands of my parents and siblings! I ran back into the house but do not recall whether or not I got my message across. I seem to remember yet another slice of watermelon, and one that did not taste so sweet. Humph! I may have mused. Now I have the matter of Evil to contend with..." This problem, of course, would occupy the next 40 or so years of my incarnation, but I'm getting ahead of myself. At this point, this tale serves only to show that one's cosmology has to be flexible, and from a very early age at that. First, let's look at some of those other big questions.

This part of my life (about 40 years of age) finds me a Qabalist of the Hermetic stripe (as opposed to the Traditional Hebrew or Modern Christian kind) with a strong neo-Platonic influence. I did not make it that way on purpose. In point of fact, I have long attempted to concoct a decent, workable cosmology that suited my needs and explained the seeming facts of the world and so, by the by, I cobbled together the things I felt to be true and relevant and then proceeded to hang my experiences upon that structure to see how well said structure bore up beneath the weight. Eventually I had knocked together a pretty good explanation for all the experiences, mundane and extraordinary, I had enjoyed. This was not an easy task, as I had a) seen more than one ghost, b) encountered "spirit lights" up close, c) experienced numerous occasions of various sorts of ESP, d) visited other realities with LSD and other psychedelic compounds, e) had a fairly thorough and deep spiritual reawakening, f) conversed with other orders of intelligence, seemingly both internal as well as external to my psyche, g) watched someone sink into schizophrenia, h) been knocked senseless by people paid by my taxes to protect me and, i) been in love--more than once. When all was said and done and I researched the various systems by which human experience are typically catalogued, I discovered myself to be a Qabalist. As a matter of record, the same set of parameters forced me to consider myself a Taoist not ten years previously, but that is not to be utterly unexpected. That being said, let me talk about the beginnings of things, at least in so far as they concern me.

My thought on all this is that we are God playing hide and seek with himself. Like so: In the beginning, before the development of matter, energy and the material universe, there was pure spirit and potentiality--some call it "The Void". For some reason, be it boredom or Inescapable Fate, this Void erupted into the physical universe and started on a zillion-year joy-ride in which all things can be experienced, quite possibly just for their own sakes. A blue-print of this design is recorded as the Qabalist's glyph called the "Tree of Life", but it is more accurate to say that this glyph is one of our ways of conceiving of this blue-print. In this universe, life eventually emerges, makes blueprints of itself so that it self-replicates and evolves, then stumbles toward more and more complex forms until these forms elevate themselves to a level of sentience. In such a universe, it is an axiom that consciousness precedes matter, manifestation. Even so, the matter still needs to become evolved enough to become a sufficient vehicle for self-realization.

I suspect it is at this point that an awareness of the primal spirit develops and beings become aware that they have a divine nature or that they are part of A Greater Thing. In the case of higher mammals, this is where philosophy sets in like a bad rash and they all start arguing about what reality is and isn't. Religion isn't far behind...

It never really had to be like that, at least not in my mind. I see it this way: we are One Spirit and a spirit that has decided to put on a material universe not unlike the clothes your body is wearing, or the flesh your "soul" is wearing. The process of becoming a matter and energy universe produces, as a direct result of its design, the idea of separation, individuation and so forth. It is as tho' God said "I need a heart torn by separation that I may fully declare the agony of my yearning" as some sage has suggested. And so we wind up thinking we are individuals.... Through successive incarnations, we draw further and further toward the source of our local branch of spirit, ultimately to be reabsorbed in it, either at the end of time when this universe is all played out and matter/energy come crashing back into a state of void (perhaps to start again, maybe with a different design or set of blue-prints?) or when learn to/wish to/need to. The chief problem with all this is that our view is so bloody limited it's impossible to tell what's really going on and it takes melting your brain with LSD, epileptic seizures, magick or near-death encounters to envision some bigger (yet still relatively small) part of it, and even then we still are forced to jam it through the filter of our minds, cultures and experiences.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... This new Universe separated into a lot of different things, clumps of matter, wads of energy, buckets of potential, thick spots of Spirit. I don't know if Spirit clumps up in proportion to the mass which expresses it, but this would be a damn handy hypothesis, would it not? I used to think this was an explanation of convenience, but I realize that if matter/energy is a mere draping for Spirit, why shouldn't it clump up together in spots? One might at least assume that it obeys laws of some sort... Galaxies are wadded up together in clumps and so are stars and planets with great spaces in between--why couldn't spirit do the same? Especially if matter/energy are merely material expressions of spirit and the laws which govern physical things are outward expressions of laws which govern spiritual matters, as is usually supposed.

I mentioned reincarnation. I believe in that, after a fashion. My belief arises from sifting through the evidence set forth by the traditions of the world's religions, great and small; the materials being constantly brought to light by the more daring, as well as competent, psychotherapists; the evidence of my own senses. While a popular belief in reincarnation would have us incarnating as discreet entities in this form or that, usually until we've reached some level of maturity after which we'd be allowed to move on, I'm not at all sure this need be the case. In such instances where living folks have been in contact with some discarnate entity, these entities often say that "there aren't as many souls as there are people in the world" and "there are many worlds but only a few souls" or simply "it's not at all like you think". They may be hinting that reincarnation is not a serial affair with one zillion souls popping into and out of existence on one zillion separate space/time tracks, but more like a great ocean of awareness surging through creation, popping up as this plant, that ecosystem, the other bacterium, planet or galaxy, simultaneously and across all "Time" (which probably doesn't even exist, right? Wasn't it Mark Twain who said: "Time is Natures way of making sure everything doesn't happen at once."? ). To my mind, this is probably closer to the heart of the matter. It probably matters not that the best I could ever understand about my true being is the track-record of this particular incarnation and it's vague relationship to those with which I interact daily.

A frank and thorough examination of the literature on reincarnation would not convert a dedicated skeptic, but might give him pause. At the very least, it seems that a) we do, in fact have something very like a "soul", b) it interacts in seemingly "non-usual" ways with others of it's ilk, c) it can function in some way outside the constraints of the living body and d) it has access to a large store of data in the form of "racial memory", or "akashic records", if you like. I have not yet validated my more empirical data with more subjective research, but will do so soon via the method of self-hypnosis using scripts written by an expert in the field.

And what of that hypnosis? For a long time, I reasoned that the techniques that comprise hypnosis do in fact access some part of the brain and elicit some response, but it is a difficult matter to show that they do in fact access anything other than a hyper-creative function of the brain and probably the same one responsible for our habit of creating myths, legends and symbolic stories. I have, after all, seen this feature at play in a variety of guises while experimenting with LSD. Your brain can tell you stories the origin of which you cannot comprehend! Humans are all about language.
Even so, I've collected up a sufficient quantity and quality of literature to convince me that there is, at the very least, an interaction occurring between us and other orders of being, possibly our being.

So if we reincarnate, what must be the nature of our soul? The Qabalistic traditions indicate that it is multi-form, proceeding from the most divine parts to the most gross. This suggests to me that it is like a tendril reaching out of a central mass, becoming successively more physical and less divine in form until it appears in the flesh-n-blood universe we inhabit. If God is the Painter, then our souls are the arm, hand and fingers; our bodies the paintbrush, our lives the expression of the paint upon the canvas of the universe. There is more in this analogy than first meets the eye, and I suspect those of an artistic bent will comprehend it more readily than most.

Within all this there seems to be a fair variety of "beings" that occupy our universe, some being more "advanced" than ourselves, others seeming "inferior". We are all indebted to the work of Wilson Van Dusen, a clinical psychiatrist who sought to dialogue with the hallucinations of his patients only to find that there appeared to be a whole plethora of "spirits", "demons" and "angels" that fairly reliably conformed to certain mystic texts ranging from the Vedas to Immanuel Swedenborg. The information yielded by his research caused him to discard much of the popular notions about mental illness in favor of a model which better fit the facts. His peers, of course, have ignored his work, by and large. In short, it appears that we are some relatively exalted creature, well away from some forms of intelligence, yet well beneath others. It also seems as if we are capable of passing from this form into a more exalted one by strength of our desire, our Will, our effort. In my cosmology, I can classify a number of beings into ranking categories:

God:

Divine ground, the One being in Whom all is Truth. Alpha et Omega, yet not Jesus Christ, Inc. God is hanging on the cross, but that cross is our flesh. He came to live in the flesh that we (seeming creatures of clay) may have eternal Life. God lives in Jesus. God lives in Paul. God lives in Hitler, Idi Amin, Bloody Queen Mary, Plato, Solon, Hassan i Sabbah, Jean d'arc, Plutarch, Katerine the Great, Ray Bradbury and Dr Suess. God suffers death and transfiguration that we all may live, eternally.

Egregores:

It follows that if our physical bodies can mold a lump of clay then our spiritual component can interact with the spiritual "world" around it as well, and this is where we find magick of the thaumaturgical kind. I suspect that we twiddle the stuff of Spirit all the time, by the way. By learning how to do it well, we can see more immediate results in the material world. By getting lots of people to twiddle it in the same way over a long time, we can create an intelligent, self-perpetuating pattern in it--we can call it a "god" or an "egregore". 25,000 years of eating fermented berries and getting blind drunk with your friends could produce an egregore like Dionysus and a mystery-cult could empower and sustain him for thousands of years more... Similarly, our inherent love of Justice and beneficent rulership can create Jove, and so on. 1 million people playing with the tools of modern mass communications can whip up an egregore called "Wicca" in about 50 years flat, and you can tune in to it and experience it in a way that will coincide with all that his been donated to it. That which we call "reality" is rather like a magnetic recording medium, capable of receiving and storing impressions which can play back upon our consciousness or even seemingly upon the fabric of a group's shared reality.

Picture Mary, mother of God, and the church fathers who used her to disguise Isis, Astarte, Demeter and the rest. Add 1500 years and you've got one big and complicated egregore that has a face and attitude utterly more complex and powerful than any Pope every envisioned. No wonder "miracles" crop up left and right--such a god-form would have to give off a bit of sparkle with all those people praying at it night and day--think about it!

Angels:

There are some fish in an aquarium in the adjoining room. I suspect they are dimly aware of me because I feed them and help clean their environment from time to time. I am a higher and more complex order of being than they and I probably understand their motives and behavior a lot better than they understand mine. We both live in the same universe. As far as they are concerned, I was put here to turn the Big Light on and off, to pour out manna in the form of fish-food and to take the dead from The World. I think the analogy should be clear by now.

Buddhas, Christs, Bodhisattvas:

All folks hold the divine. Some hold a great deal and are probably actually still incarnating "against the odds", providing a beacon for the rest of us yutzes, giving hope, inspiration and direction. Apparently, as one removes the dross matter from his soul through successive incarnations, one becomes capable of a great range of choices in their manifestation. Those that remain out of compassion for the less fortunate, and who provide them with wise counsel toward their ultimate success, are the "Bodhisattvas", the ma-hee-a-niveh-noh, the "spirit helpers".

Demons:

There are orders of intelligence in the universe that exhibit less complexity than our own, it's a fact. I suggest that "demons" are those which seem to exhibit less "spiritual coherence" than we and certainly less than angels. We are capable of having our bodies and our minds break down such that they can be utilized by lesser intelligences which clamor for self-expression, even if imperfect of form. This can be induced and it can be healed--the medium of the mind-body continuum is more plastic than it appears.

Us:

We are life in many forms. I usually think of "us" as "humans", but I feel it is much bigger. "Us" is all sentient life and I'm not at all sure that is restricted to animals, plants--even minerals. Truth be told, I believe that structures (matter and energy, that is) capture and express awareness, develop consciousness. In the long haul, our part in the universe is possibly as beyond us as the fish in my aquarium, but I suspect we have a few really good tools with which to examine our state--tools like Art and Magick.

But what of Truth? Should we be pragmatic, say "if it works, it's true"
and leave it at that? I submit that if it works, then there's some truth to it, probably (he said, warily). I've been asked that "When you have an experience...along [certain magickal] lines, how "true" is that experience? I can only state that it would be true for me and considered a particular, individual dealing by God with myself, even if I did sound a tad like a skeptic. In truth, I've had experiences I didn't understand because I didn't have a good enough light to shine on them or otherwise possess good enough tools by which to examine them. The Qabalah is a tool of some convenience which I can use to structure my thinking. But suppose that someone has an experience that is based on a world view that is different from or even opposed to that of Qabalah, how does that affect the "truth" of the Qabalah? To this I can only answer: If someone has an experience with a foreign car how does that affect the utility of the tools I find in the toolbox I open when I want to tune up the Ford?

This discussion more or less leads us into the so-called paranormal, for it is this collection of bugaboos and "damned things" which tend mightily to challenge any cosmology one can set up. What does it do to a person who has a very modern, technical and scientific cosmology to encounter an angel, a demon or a ghost? What does it do to an atheist to witness a manifestation of the Blessed Virgin Mary? If we are men and women of flexibility and open mind, we might seek to find some way to accommodate our experience within our world view--if we be cowards we shall quickly write it off to stress, indigestion, madness. Along these same lines, I've long wondered why supposedly rational people have examined, say, the ravings of isolated madmen (or primitive shamans, for that matter) found numerous and intricate similarities and yet write them off as random delusions produced by disordered minds. Saying a thing is "crazy" does not render it untrue at every level, merely pronounces it irrelevant to a particular world view.

A lot of things once, and still do, fall into this category. I speak here of ghosts, UFO's, bigfoot, spiritism, telepathy, psychokinesis and so on. I leave most cryptozoology out of this matter, as no one in their right mind will agree that we have catalogued all creatures great and small throughout the physical world--there are still quite a few mundane mysteries, I'm sure. No, here I would refer the reader to the works of both Albert Budden and Dr. Michael Persinger which go a long way towards explaining the nature of electromagnetism, an area which I regard as a scarcely-explored frontier.

Dr. Persinger is probably most famous for his invention of "the God machine", a football helmet fitted with electrodes operated by a signal generator/computer which bombards a subject's head with small amounts of electromagnetic radiation (EM) at certain intervals. Subjects of his experiments have been quoted as "seeing God" or having out of body experiences, occasionally experiences from the point of view of other people in other places and circumstances. His methods of statistical analysis have shown that bigfoot, ufo reports, sudden infant death syndrome and airplane crashes hold high correlation with electromagnetic activity either of the magnetosphere above the earth or of piezo-electric effects occurring deep with in it. He has begun to demonstrate that a disease called "electrosensitivity" seems to exist and may be as much a by-product of our technological age as black lung disease was of the industrial revolution.

Simply put, our brain communicates with itself partly by chemical methods and partly by methods electromagnetic. Everyone has heard of the French doctors who stimulated memories, smells and visions in patients' brains by means of electrical probing--this is very old news. What we have learned lately is that big, dirty EM fields are bad for you and may permanently change the way your brain communicates with itself, or the way your perceptions come across. The so-called "repeaters" (multiple UFO "kidnapees") are usually shown to be overly sensitive to electrical stimulation of the brain and it is known that exposure to strong fields can produce this condition (called ES). This brings us to the work of Albert Budden, who has made a number of comparison studies of famous UFO cases and looked at them carefully in the light of magnetic anomally, finding incredible correspondences.

The clincher for me was the 1990 case investigated by Budden, France and Potter where a person long-suffering from ES beheld an anomalous light, a severe distortion of realty that seems to cross over into a disassociative state and an encounter with an odd humanoid. It appears that a subterranean geophysical event had occurred which provoked a pulse of EM field activity in an area (doubtless generated by piezo-electric effect resulting from immense pressures placed upon a substratum of quartz crystal) and two unfortunate people were caught up in it. A luminous object was seen (quite likely not a hallucination. Piezo-electric effects can include the formation of luminescent balls) which seemed to interact with the subjects. A humanoid figure chased them through a landscape that later turned out to not exist as such. The clincher was the fresh banana left on the dashboard of their car, which, upon their return, they discovered had been cooked to a brown goo, as if exposed to severe microwave emissions, also known to accompany these geological disturbances.

I am not suggesting that all such encounters are explained away by such methods, but I am suggesting that there is a medium of subtle communication within one's mind and even between the minds of others which is influenced by manipulations of the EM spectrum and that much of what is reported in magickal literature is somehow involved in just the area. It is a logical next step for scientists to study the electromagnetic behavior of the brains of people who deliberately and with time-honored techniques of Magick engage in seeming communication with "angels", "demons" and discarnate entities.

More interesting yet is the field of ghost research which is consistently showing phenomena of that particular ilk as having a profound effect in the EM spectrum, if not originating there altogether. The real bugaboo of this field is that there is a large body of photographic "evidence" that has been accumulated showing a plethora of effects ranging from glowing orbs, unexplained vortexes which are solid enough to actually cast shadows and swirling mists. This is not something happening utterly in the theater of the mind, but is something substantial enough to be captured on both film, video and digital cameras. But then, it's not as if vortexial magnetic fields are not known to twist light just a tad.

On a web site dedicated to the study of this collection of phenomena, I have offered a brief proposal which relies upon my qabalistic understanding of the nature of the soul but which does not stray into EM territory:

"...Let me say that insisting that the soul is energy is a very arbitrary thing not well supported by the evidence and just as prejudicial as saying that it is matter, or even that it doesn't exist at all. Looking at this phenomenologically, the soul could very well be information--a much more abstract thing, and we are in fact experiencing only manner in which the information is made manifest. The music he hear is not the vibration of air as such, merely information thus conveyed.

"For a good study on this subject from an occultist's point of view, you might also like to stop thinking of the soul being a singular thing possessed by a single body. Even some Catholic dogma liked to split this one force up into two bodies, soul and spirit. Both Eastern Yogic studies as well as modern Qabalistic interpretations in this matter will quickly lead you to an idea that there are a certain discrete number of souls, four in the case of the area in which I study.

"Consider the immortal parts of man to be a sort of continuum in which we tend to experience several gradients. The part closest to the physical reality is said to die after the body, eventually dissolving into the general spirit-stuff that surrounds it. At the other end of this continuum, the soul is utterly indistinguishable from "God", Divine Ground or the infinite oversoul (whichever you like). In between are a few mediating portions that steer the particular incarnation along it's path according to their individual wills or characters.

"At death, the matter-bound lowest part stays with the body or, in some cases of violent and confusing death, functions independently after a fashion. In and of itself, it is only a rudimentary animal-intelligence, but the soul just "above" it in this chain is not disconnecting as is proper and instead pours a lot of energy downward into this lower soul, causing it to make the various ripples in reality that constitute our experience of it. Some suggest that our experiences with "guardian angels" and whatnot are, in fact, a conscious awareness of these more exalted portions of the soul..."

While this does not directly address the EM aspects of this matter, it is easy to see that the subtle body has some very definite interaction with the EM spectrum and this has been demonstrated in a variety of ways over recent years. In fact,. I should go so far as to say that I believe the very nature of Reality, the matrix of Light, Energy and Matter of which we are a part, is capable of receiving and transmitting information via the agency of electromagnetism and the human nervous system. Not unlike a tape recorder's magnetic head storing analog magnetic information, our subtle bodies, our emotions and thoughts write on the fabric of reality itself for greater or lesser periods of time and in greater and lesser amounts of coherence. I find little wonder in contemplating how people who die peacefully in their sleep rarely haunt folks, while those who met with tragic, emotive or violent deaths tend to leave a ghostly imprint. But what is this subtle body, really? How and why does it interact with electromagnetic forces?

Mark Balfour has an excellent book called The Sign of the Serpent in which he brings to light much of the little-known EM research in the health field. Mr Balfour is not as objective as we would perhaps like him to be, but his book opens out onto some very interesting vistas indeed by highlighting what scientific evidences and proofs do exist of the various electromagnetic features of our lives. This is definitely a subject for a larger work, and one upon which I am currently working, rest assured. Let's look at the theory of the subtle body as expressed both by science and by esoteric literature, past an present.

Mr Balfour and I both agree that The Vedas, probably the oldest body of knowledge on earth capable of translation, contain a great deal of information upon medical matters and the nature of the subtle portions of the soul. The ideas that probably had their start there, or in a previously-flourishing technical civilization, have spread far and wide and are even gaining a certain amount of acceptance in modern medical circles owing to the manner in which the ideas consistently perform in controlled settings. Acupuncture is probably a good example of this. The acupuncture points represent areas of interaction with the non-physical, "subtle" body, only approximately cognate with the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, and not always with any known physical nerve-channels, as is often supposed by the layman. I am quite certain that it has been presented to the West in a way that the West will find acceptable, but one must remember that it is based almost totally on assertions that cannot be demonstrated, i.e. that we have a subtle body of some sort that interacts with our (eminently more detectable) physical body.

In brief, it is posited that there exists one or more subtle bodies made of some substance that lies aside from or within the physical dimensions, seeming quite a bit like the layers of an onion. It is commonly expressed that the most subtle of these bodies is closest to the Divine and that the least subtle of them is closest to the physical. Sound familiar? The Eastern doctrine of subtle bodies seems quite parallel to the Hebrew doctrine of the multi-part soul--the Yechidah-Chiah, Neschemah, Ruach and Nephesh. I do not doubt that the ideas came from similar sources, long ago, and suffered various corruptions over the years.

The principal difference lies in the fact that the Eastern systems delineate a number of energetic "gathering points", known as Chakras, which bridge the subtle bodies and allow some sort of energetic exchange between them, while the idea seems to be mostly imported into the western occult sphere fairly recently. There are a number of techniques both East and West to arouse and manipulate these centers and a growing body of comparative literature that suggests that they have some real and important manifestation.

Jon Anderson, the singer for the band Yes, has said of the matter:

"Music has this amazing deep-rooted knowledge of God. We constantly hear music, and it constantly affects us in so many, so many different ways. I think it has something to do with the harmonics. I believe it probably has a lot to do with the harmonic construction of the Chakra energies that surround the human body. It's the human field of vibrational knowledge. I don't want to get too deep into this, [in this interview] but I just feel that that is what music does for you. It's a therapy."

We do not think he is too far from the mark, either. Among the other sciences which seem to support the theories of subtle bodies and chakras, we find a little-known study where the remarks of voluntary LSD users were compared in a double-blind study with the remarks of those who have undergone ancient techniques of chakra vivification, mostly through the school of Kundalini Yoga. Their startling similarity is enough to cause this researcher to state quite flatly that a) there is more to our existence than our physical body and b) we can tamper with it via manipulations of EM fields, chemistry and even mental discipline alone.

As a sideline to the paranormal, we find an interesting body of literature arising out of what I regard as one of the most important discoveries (or rediscoveries) of our century: the indole ring compounds--LSD25, Mescaline, Psylocybin, psilocyn, DMT and DET. Having experimented quite a bit with these compounds in my youth (an early part of my ongoing quest for meaning, really) I feel both qualified and obliged to offer observations. Like Ghosts, UFO's and visions of the Blessed Virgin, the very existence of psychedelics begs interesting questions. I will use the name "psychedlics" for this class of compounds with good reason, for I believe that this is quite possibly the best description of what they are and what they do. Truly "mind-manifesting", they show the mind unto the mind allowing the mind to have an experience of itself in a unique way. I find it even more interesting to note that this class of compounds has been shown not to cause these mental and physical events directly, but to trigger a chemical reaction of which we are innately capable and can achieve by other means, apparently.

Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception theorized that the brain possesses a "cerebral reducing valve" that functions to screen out impertinent data and such a device has indeed been found, a resident of the hypothalmus. It is a matter of fact that our eyes record impressions that our brains do not allow us to "see", our ears things that we normally do not hear, other senses operating similarly. One can easily imagine how chaotic our lives would be if suddenly we could detect changes in air temperature with our eyes (as snakes can) or receive EM information (as many other animals are known to)! Of course, I'm not suggesting that a person with a head full of acid is perceiving the world around them in it's truest light, but I will state that he or she is receiving (and perhaps even transmitting?) information from non-usual sources, without and within. As an example of an inner transmission of interesting character, I'd point the reader to a now out-of-print books by Masters and Houston called Varieties of Psychedelic Experience which contained one case study of a poorly educated and not terribly articulate laborer who described a complex mental adventure wherein he participated in a Dionysian rite of passage the details of which he could almost certainly not have known. The literature actually abounds with accounts of stories the drugged mind has made available to the possessor of that mind and they are frequently of a mythopoaeic character. Not only that, but many of the stories differ very little from person to person, often lacking any of the real cultural veneer one would expect to find.

There are several stories my drug-addled mind has told me on several occasions which I have heard time and again from numerous individuals accessing these tales via madness, extreme exhaustion, methamphetamine abuse, religious ecstasy or exposure to psychedelics--these are the stories regarding the creation of our species and the end of the world. The first story indicates that man came from the stars--a theory gaining some ground amongst scientists who study comet debris and who think that life may have been seeded here in such a fashion. The psychedelic version of this story usually has elements less scientific and random, however, and features intelligent beings (typically angels or space travelers) involved, usually in a relationship similar to that of a gardener to her garden. Since it has been shown that the mind is functioning in a state of awareness that utilizes complex symbolism in novel ways, we can dare to assume that a greater truth may lie beyond this common collection of images.

The same is true of the story I call "The End of the World" The main features of the story involve some god or goddess destroying the world either a) because that's their job or b) Man is very wicked and ought to be erased. This is a surprisingly common feature of many religions and certainly a motif of our times as we head across the year 2000 mark. The ancient Greeks believed in various ages of Man, terminated by various conflagrations over ethical judgements--a belief they probably picked up from the East where the yugas described similar cycles. This has always made me wonder: Why would such a collection of events be so important as to not only come down through history through mundane means, but be actually inscribed in our common psyche, the collective unconscious? Could it be that events like this actually happened? We've geological evidence of great deluges that no doubt gave rise to the stories of Noah (and others--I can think of three more from non-Semitic sources), but what about tales of the sun stopping in the sky? Of the seasons changing and of "war in the heavens"? Enter Velikovsky.

I admit it--I like Velikovsky. Unlike the above diatribes, I actually believe in Velikovsky. I say "believe" because it is a matter I take on faith simply because it seems to be so right. I also believe that science will someday show that he wasn't completely wrong. Unfortunately, his knowledge of certain sciences was weak enough to make him appear a great fool. A modern and skeptical inquirer into his theories would easily have to throw away 2/3rds of his arguments but might still be overwhelmed by the rest. And, my osmology just wouldn't be complete without his contributions.

In brief, Mr Velikovsky posits that the earth had a series of near collisions with another heavenly body which has been recorded in folklore and geological records alike. In the first area, he cites Greek Myth, the Bible, Hawaiian tales of a god who lassoed the sun to arrest it's course, and so on. He bolsters this with records showing a very different ordering of the cosmos dating to a time more than 5000 years ago and even a remark from an ancient Chinese document recording the fact that magi had to be sent out into the world to find out where the new directions lay, that having changed somewhat suddenly and violently. In the manner of the geological evidence, he points to the deposits of whale and dolphin bones found atop the tallest mountains of South America, the ice-age mammals found in the Russian, temperate-zone plants still digesting in their stomachs and the persistent geological anomalies which defy explanation under gradualist theories but which make grand sense within catastrophic frameworks. Having sifted the evidence out of sheer fascination with the subject, I'll tell the tale as well as I can in a brief space:

Our solar system has captured many comets, of which Halley's and Hale-Bopp are probably the most widely known. Early in the development of our stellar neighborhood, our sun captured or formed a big one which settled into an odd orbit of greater and lesser epicycles which brought it uncomfortably close to our world from time to time. There is some indication that there is a lesser cycle, probably just long enough for primitive man to forget about it (a few generations) and there was a greater cycle. I suppose the lesser cycle is of import mainly to the ancient students of the sky while the greater cycle represented a time when the epicycles carried the body close enough to the orbit of our world to have a measurable and profound impact upon it. The length of this cycle could span hundreds, perhaps a thousand years. Eventually, such an object interacting directly with the gravitational forces present in our solar system would either break up, utilize a gravity-well effect and fly out of the sun's grasp altogether or else settle into a stable orbit.

It is my position that some combination of the above did indeed happen and that the retrograde revolution of the planet Venus, the presence of the asteroid belt and the discovery of Martian rocks upon the surface of our world are remnants of the final solution to the problem of this imbalance of planetary masses. I was most impressed recently by the discovery of magnetic pole reversals, the acceptance of the "comet theory" of dinosaur extinction and the now-accepted science of tectonic plate movement for these all are a step closer to vindicating Velikovsky's name. From a not-too-unrelated quarter, that of the search for Atlantis, comes a very interesting bit of discovery demonstrating that there actually is a pattern to both the evidences offered by folklore and of the fossil record. In the latter case, it is shown that the extant anomalous fossil record is located in a clearly belt about the earth, and one which would result of a sufficient force caused a realignment of the axis of our word by a certain number of degrees. In the former case, the cultures most affected by this change more faithfully record the nature of it such that one can draw a fair conclusion that the Earth (or, much more likely, the crust of the earth moving on it's fluid bed of magma) did in fact change orientation of it's axis.

But this is an essay about cosmology isn't it? More specifically a magickal cosmology, eh? This matter is relevant, if not vital to just that, for the occult literature of our own time and some of that of the ancient past is utterly rife with references to vanished civilizations, great conflagrations, etc. I believe that a great number of humans would have been wiped out in such a cataclysm, and small numbers in less affected areas would have escaped while still others would have survived to repopulate the areas in which they ultimately landed. The stories of Mu and Atlantis, despite centuries of accretion are probably more or less true, survivors of their strange shores washing up in places as far apart as the coast of California and the Indian subcontinent. In the latter case we have a great deal of evidence ranging from sudden and unpredictable language shifts to irregular technological changes in a concentrated area. I believe that a land mass or number of them occupied by a relatively advanced culture sank beneath the sea, sparing only handfuls of survivors who later landed on the shores of either less technically developed lands or perhaps in nations only slightly more fortunate in the catastrophe. This influx of foreign intelligensia brought a great deal of odd information with it, ranging from metallurgic and agricultural techniques to advanced ideas about psychology or religion. The fellow known to history as Hermes Trismegistrus may well have his origin here and so do the pre-vedic historical texts only now being translated fully. It's no surprise that they contain some pretty fantastic accounts of flying machines and death-rays as well as a load of medical data which describes...well, chakras and manifestations of the subtle body. I believe that magick may well be the science of a former age, encoded in religious and ascetic practices such as yoga. But what is Magick? Or Yoga?

Much the same thing, it would seem. Yoga (literally "yoke" or "union") is an Eastern collection of mental and physical techniques aimed at attaining union with the Godhead and may also include the attainment of certain supernatural powers. On the other hand, magick is an Western collection of mental and physical techniques aimed at attaining union with the Godhead and may also include the attainment of certain supernatural powers. Magick is the yoga of the West, whose growth was stunted by the emergence of the powerful political structures surrounding the Church of Rome. Conversely, the various yogas were welcomed into the religious and social structures of the East and have more or less been allowed to run their courses.

While I haven't concluded my research into this area yet. I believe that the yogic information living in the East found it's way into the West via the Middle East by the usual trade and migration routes, and later by means of the returning warriors of the crusades. It seems that the mystic literature of the first few centuries of Christianity favored a variety of initiatory techniques which have come across to us by only the most circuitous of routes.

All of this probably begs the question: why am I not a Christian? Mostly because orthodox Christianity doesn't ask enough difficult questions and tends to ignore the facts which cannot neatly fit into it's cosmological reference (something it shares with "Science"). When it was mathematically proven that the earth revolves around the sun, the Jews of Europe were heard to exclaim: "wonderful are the mysteries of Almighty God!" while the other church flatly stated "no, it does not." What can one make of an institution that has no respect for the truth? I feel that there was once a good collection of life-affirming, gnosis-producing techniques buried in the early traditions of the Christian church, but that it has not survived the ages of politics, greed and corruption that have characterized it's most public institutions. Not unlike the way the Masons say "The Word was lost" so do I believe that the Word was lost from much of orthodox Christianity, leaving it a strictly political and social vehicle mostly incapable of directing a person adequately toward a true understanding of himself in the cosmos.

Beyond this, it seems that (if my recent researches are anything like accurate) the organized "Pauline" church has even spent considerable resources attempting to snuff out the original cult of Jesus, his word and Art, even his living descendants. In this light, the central claim of Rosicrucians and other Christian esoteric cults being descended from the gnostic (and magickal) traditions of the Original Jesus Thing make a certain sense.

Despite all this, some Christians do find God, many (but not all) of them remaining Christians. I have met such recently-enlightened people and I could tell the "Spirit was upon them" and they are every bit as confused as anyone else would be in similar circumstances. They will often break from their church group for a while because they feel a stronger presence of God without it. Soon enough though, they talk themselves out of the true depth of their experience and begin to drape orthodoxy upon their experience in an effort to help it make sense. If a presence is felt, it is assumed to be that of Jesus or of Mary and it should come as no surprise that such a presence might not behave as if it were just such a person. In worst-case scenarios, the person carries with them the experience of bliss and of tangible union with the divine and enshrines it in his life, even while hawking the orthodox creed (whichever one that might be) in an effort to convince himself that his experience meant something else.

I actually had the following conversation with one such individual:

HIM: "Have you heard about Jesus?"

ME: "Of course I've heard about Jesus, why?"

HIM: "If you have accepted Jesus into your heart as your personal savior ye shall have eternal life in Heaven. All your sins will be forgiven."

ME: "And if I don't? In Hell, right?"

HIM: "Yes."

ME: "Brother, let us reason together. We're all sinners, right?"

HIM: "Yes. We are born in Sin, because of the Original sin of Eve."

ME: "I'll accept that for the moment on face value. Everybody sins, I don't expect to stop doing foolish and hurtful things to others altogether for the rest of my life and not many people can honestly say that. What if you're a little kid who steals a candy bar from a store or something? Stealing's definitely a sin. If he dies right then, does God consign him to Hell?"

HIM: "The Bible says no, for he hasn't reached an age of accountability."

ME: "Granted. I suppose the same is true for the mentally ill or the retarded or others who are constitutionally unable to tell right from wrong."

HIM: "God is, if anything, fair and merciful. I suppose He would not hold such folks accountable...but only He knows who is truly accountable and who is not."

ME: "Agreed. I was not trying to tempt you to judge the souls of others or second guess how God might do the same. That is the sin of Pride in it's most virulent form. Suppose though, that we had another sort of situation where a person was unaware that God had offered to atone for that person's sin through the medium of Jesus, the Christ. Say he'd never heard of Jesus..."

HIM: "I think everybody's heard of Jesus . . . "

ME: "I do not. There are places still on this earth like parts of China and the Amazon rain forest where people can live, sin and die without ever hearing of the Lord. What does God do with their souls?"

HIM: "Um....I don't know....but it would follow that he could not be held fully responsible . . ."

ME: "Why would God offer us salvation and then not allow some of us to even know that the opportunity existed?"

HIM: "Huh? I . . . uh--"

ME: "What you have told me today is that if I had never heard of Jesus Christ, I would automatically go to Heaven, yet now that I have, I might go to Hell. It seems that the thing to do is to tell no one of Jesus, so that we would all possess the required innocence to enter Heaven."

HIM: "Oh, man!"

ME: "Hey, I'm not saying you're full of shit or anything, but think about it. It doesn't make a lot of sense . . ."

I almost had him . . . he became angry and said I was in league with the devil. This scenario doesn't often play itself out exactly this way because the beliefs of some churches are more patently absurd than others. The bottom line is this: Jesus and Jesus' immediate followers worshipped and gave honor to God, not to Jesus or his memory--all that came later. In this light, no church truly of Christ would worship Christ in any way. It is the same story as is told of the Buddha where the Enlightened One pointed to the moon and everyone bowed to praise his finger. I wish more people could truly see that.

Modern Churches do have one lasting and important function that lies beyond the (mostly failed) transmission of gnosis, and that is the workaday matter of moral lessons. I've not found the morals and dogma of most churches to my liking, they frequently being quite arbitrary or even behind the times. Dr. Leary once gave an exposition in which he announced that "The 3 worst things facing Catholics today is AIDS, overpopulation and abortion. The Pope tells them not to use birth control, right? Not very pragmatic, is it?" Morals evolve. They have to, just like our notion of evil must evolve over our lives. In the days when economic stability was seriously threatened by "alternative family-forms", ours today is bolstered more by embracing and exploiting social diversity. When we learned how to reliably avoid reproducing ourselves in the face of dwindling resources, it doesn't seem very pragmatic to make it a sin, does it? Sometimes (as in this case here) an invention or discovery will remove the harmful consequences of something once considered a sin, even turn it into a sort of virtue. Can't the morality evolve just a bit more quickly, please? The pace of civilization doesn't appear to be slowing down...

While not a complete moral code, here's the notions that seem most right to me:

Don't interfere with the way other people are maturing--
help them know who they are, to whatever degree you are mutually capable of discerning.

Remember that we are a valuable life form, but we are probably not superior to other life forms.

All beings, human and nonhuman, have the same inherent
worth. In the words of Aldo Leopold, each of us is "to be a plain
member and citizen of nature"

Our role is to understand and work with the rest of nature, not to
conquer her. Our role is to participate in Creation in our own unique way, given to us as our individual destinies by the All.

Something is right when it tends to maintain life-support and wrong when it tends otherwise; we are hard-wired to live, not surrender to death when the going gets weird.

The same is true of life generally on this planet in the years ahead. Something is right when it tends to maintain life-support systems and wrong when it tends otherwise; The bottom line is that the earth is the bottom line and if we don't figure out how to stop shitting in the same place we sleep, we will surrender what dominance we do have over to some species that can manage that particular trick.

Our primary purposes should be to share the earth's finite resources,
care for other people and other species, and interfere with nonhuman
species only to satisfy vital needs -- not frivolous wants. Success is
based on the degree to which we achieve these goals.

Resources are limited and must not be wasted -- there is a lot, but
there is not always more.

To prevent excessive deaths of people and other species, people must
prevent excessive births.

All people are entitled to a fair share of the world's resources as long
as they are assuming their responsibility for sustaining the earth, (but then, I am a dreamer, eh?"

All people must be held responsible for their own pollution and
environmental degradation. These are crimes of reckless endangerment, often on a staggering scale.

No individual, corporation, or nation has a right to an ever-increasing
share of the earth's finite resources. As Mahatma Gandhi said, "The
earth provides enough to satisfy every person's need but not every
person's greed."

We can never completely "do our own thing." Everything we do has
present and future effects on other people and other species. Most of
these effects are unpredictable. We dance in lockstep with all of
Creation.

It is wrong to treat people and other living things primarily as factors
of production, whose value is expressed only in economic terms. As
Aldo Leopold said, "We abuse land because we regard it as a
commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to
which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Economics is not everything.

Premature extinction of any wild species, or the elimination or
degradation of their habitats, by human activities is wrong. Biodiversity
= survival.

Everything we will ever have ultimately comes from the sun and
the earth; the earth can get along without us, but we can't get along
without the earth; an exhausted planet is an exhausted economy.

Don't do anything that depletes the physical, chemical, and biological
capital of the earth; the earth deficit is the ultimate deficit and one which
we are incapable of correcting. I do not think we will leave this cradle anytime soon.

When we alter nature to meet what we consider to be basic or
non-basic needs, we should choose the method that does the least
possible harm to other living things. In minimizing harm, it is, in
general, worse to harm a species than a an individual organism, and
still worse to harm a biotic community. Failure to choose the lesser of
evils in a situation compounds the evil done.

We must leave the earth in as good a shape as we found it, if not
better. I'm not holding my breath, either--but it could happen.

In protecting and sustaining nature, whether it be an ecosystem
or another being, go further than the law requires.

To love, cherish, celebrate and understand life and yourself you
must take time to experience and sense the air, water, soil, trees,
animals, bacteria, and other parts and rhythms of our current environment
directly, not just indirectly in books, TV images, and the World Wide
Web. There's some stuff you can't learn in a book and you owe it to
yourself to learn everything you can about everything that interests you.
It is wrong to waste your life as if asleep, if you can conceive of any
alternative.

There is no Devil, as such. Man is perfectly capable of horrendous and truly disgusting feats, but also capable of knowing God. Realize that you are responsible for your own actions and the sooner you get it right, the sooner you can get done with your homework and go out and play.

Lastly, loving is your Art and your job. Do whatever it takes to learn to do it well and with a style that expresses who you are and who you will be, living like it matters, while we all struggle to put the First Man on Earth.

Our Fair City,
13 OCT 1999