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anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


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Thursday 29 December 2016

Primordial Being

Part One

"I'm just going up into the loft before breakfast" I announced assertively to the long-suffering lady who has chosen to live with me over the years. She looked up from the bits of mango she was in the process of cutting up, a barely-concealed quizzical look on her face. "I'm looking for something connected with Buddhism" I volunteered not altogether helpfully. She shook her head slowly, before returning to the fruit.

Single-minded passion. Focussed enthusiasm. The King of Wands in person. Some people might call it obsession, but I know better. Whatever. It was this energy that drove me to get out the ladder and crawl around amongst the bags and boxes (mainly my wife's, in my defence) before breakfast time."It's not there" I pronounced, as I retreated, dusted myself down and sat down to yogurt and fruit.

A few days later, a thought appeared. The garage! Rusty lock is prised open, wobbly black door swings creakily wide, and I enter. Barring the way is the never-used bicycle. Having negotiated its immensity, I look at the array of boxes, containers, and cartons stacked up before me. That large one's full of decorating and repairing materials that I hope won't be needed before I die. The enormous green plastic thing from Poundstretcher is chockerblock with photos and miscellaneous other stuff of my wife's from the time she lived in France twenty-five years ago. Ah, that's the one. The damp, musty box with the dodgy bottom contains file upon file of notes on lectures, seminars, and study groups on Buddhism. Plus a few books from the era: Protestant Buddhism. Ah yes. The Duties of Brotherhood in Islam. Hmmmm. Everything except what I am looking for. As the box is put back in its rightful spot, the bottom falls out, and years of lectures go tumbling over the floor. "I must get one of those nice new boxes I saw in the loft to replace it" I muse as I slowly close the garage door again.

Dorje Chang. The first time I made a personal connection with any Buddha-type figure was with Dorje Chang. I had a poster, black and white, of a beautiful Dorje Chang while I was still living in Oxford, well before I got 'properly involved in proper Buddhism'. Where it came from I cannot recall, in the same way that I cannot remember why it is not to be found in the loft or the garage - I suppose it was yet one more unwitting victim of my occasional fits of renunciation, always a cause of eventual regret.

I surmise that my meeting with Dorje Chang was not an 'accident'. The encounter was a receptacle of meaning which, even today, continues to unravel. Dorje Chang (or Vajradhara in Sanskrit) is the Primordial Buddha, or Adi Buddha. He embodies the naked essence of reality (naked literally in his equivalent in other systems of Tibetan Buddhism, Samantabhadra). Various types of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism enumerate three 'bodies', kayas, of Buddha. The first, which manifests through the form of Dorje Chang, is the Dharmakaya, the pure unified experienced essence of reality. Then there is the Sambhogakaya, the archetypal manifestation. Then there is Nirmanakaya, reality manifested on the plane of flesh-and-blood: Buddhamind Jimmy Smith queuing up at checkout in the supermarket in Huddersfield.

It has always made me laugh. Dharmakaya, the scholars and Madhyamika purists tell us, is beyond description, representation. Cue cosmic, abstract, 'wow'. Yet the meditators, the imagination-saturated artists, can't resist. So there is Dorje Chang, there is Samantabhadra, embodied manifestations in their indescribable magnificence. And they appear either alone or, quite frequently, in yab-yum, ie with female consort in full sexual embrace.

So why did I feel the sudden urge to look for Dorje Chang in the attic and the garage? And, for that matter, what on earth is he doing turning up here at all? The answer, in brief, is that Dorje Chang seems the closest that the Buddhist traditions have come up with to what I was trying to get at in my most recent post: the sense of the God that is not at all like the counterfeit God who appears in the mainstream God-based religions. The source of all emanation, the ground of being. Dorje Chang bridges the gap. Maybe.

Part Two

Like a number of other Buddha archetypes, Dorje Chang manifests wielding a vajra (dorje in Tibetan) and a bell. These are his implements of magical transformation, his spiritual/existential weapons, even. What is special about Dorje Chang is the way he holds them. The bell (his love, compassion, the water element, chalices in Tarot), and the vajra (wisdom, seeing through and into, air, the sword of the Tarot) are held at total ease and in complete equipoise across his heart. There is no fluff around the edges, no qualifying, no theorising the likes of 'you develop the wisdom and the emotions come along for the ride later'. Nope. In Dorje Chang the two rest together, in total harmony. They are, in truth, part and parcel of one and the same experience. Twin aspects which manifest simultaneously, undifferentiated. It's a bit like a balloon bursting. You may experience it as a sudden, loud noise, or as a piece of rubbery stuff suddenly shrinking. Either way, it's the same thing, experienced differently yet simultaneously.

At the same time, they are the primal differentiation, the first splitting, of the undivided primordial wisdom as it breaks up en route to eventual everyday humdrum experience. Bell and vajra; heart and
mind; feeling and mentation; action and reflection; love and seeing. The basic oppositional moment. In tarot it's the twos. The aces manifest the primordial beingness of Dorje Chang; if they turn up, there's not a lot you can do with them. But one step 'down' you have the twos. basic polarity. Most of us fail to live in Dorje Chang world very much, so the essential opposition of the twos, of the bell and vajra, is where our work begins to effectively take place.

Vajra without a bell is a bit useless; likewise, bell sans vajra. I wrote enough about mind with a deficit of heart back in August and September, in my own 'liberation is no liberation' series. But heart without mind is pretty useless too. Dangerous, even. Bell needs vajra. The problem with stand-alone feelings is that they are extremely vulnerable to dirty influences. The person based on emotion is easily manipulated; easy prey for those who would prey. Appeal to their feelings and you've got them! This, sadly, is what I appear to see all around me: well-meaning, good-hearted people who are continually being 'had' by dint of their bells without vajras. Blind - blinded by feelings - and constantly and relentlessly taken in by tales, often tall. Stories in the mainstream media, for example. People's feelings perverted into weird confections through appeals to their sense of Justice, maybe (Crowley wisely replaced 'Justice' card in the Thoth Tarot with 'Adjustment'), or Equality (what does that mean, precisely?).

Vajra does not suggest forming opinions, however intelligent or articulate they might appear to be. Most 'thinking' is just this: points of view based upon frequently unconscious feelings. The people who are 'had' the worst are just these, the articulate, typically 'well-educated' ones, who pride themselves in their clarity of thought. I know, because many of my acquaintances fall into this camp. Vajra denotes more - far, far more - than this. It is original thought, an emanation from the primordial, deceived and deluded by nothing and nobody. It is looking at the warped, distorted mirrors held up to us by religion, politics, culture, science, history, and the rest, chucking the vajra at them full-force, and watching them shatter into a million splintered pieces. More disturbing, world-and-ego destroying, than any revelations of 'inner realities' is the realisation that the world-as-presented is a fiction, a made-up story, in good part specifically designed to deceive.

To realise that you've been led up the garden path by the school, the BBC, the newspapers, the stupid bishops, silly Brian Cox and the rest - that's really uncomfortable. No wonder few people still go there. It's part of the esoteric aspect of vajra work. And at a moment like this the vajra needs to be passed on from peaceful Dorje Chang to a raging wrathful deity. Maybe Vajrapani himself, Wielder of the Vajra. I occasionally get it as I'm lying in bed early in the morning. A fury begins to rise up from near the solar plexus centre. It's a total rage, destructive and indestructible, a power that's unshakeable. Its aim: to burn up and smash through all the crap, the nonsense, the lies told my myself and by others. After a while it dies down. But I remember.          

Images:  Dorje Chang (Keith Dowman)

              Two of Swords from Wild Unknown Tarot

              Vajrapani              

    

Thursday 15 December 2016

Supreme Being

Part One


Maybe. Maybe. Just maybe. Maybe...... maybe I've been wrong all these years. That is to say, for most of my life. Worse yet: maybe I've been had. Duped. Deceived. Well and truly. Hook, line, and sinker. You see, maybe there is a God after all. It's just that the real God has nothing - and I mean literally nothing - to do with the God popularly believed in and paraded in the Abrahamic religions of our mainstream cultures.

When I was a wee boy, I was quite a fan of baby Jesus. This, at least, is what I'm told by my sister. Say a bad word about the baby Jesus and you'd get your knuckles religiously rapped. I must have been seven or eight when I started to seriously dismiss the entire thing as nonsense. You don't require overmuch intelligence to work it all out. There were all these stories about Jesus, Moses, prophets, disciples, and the like, dished out as truth but with no reason to believe them. Nobody bothered to explain to me why I should give any more credence to these often bizarre and unpleasant Bible narratives than I should 'Noddy and Big Ears' or 'Thomas the Tank Engine' (both of which were peopled by far more likeable characters than those who turned up in the 'Good Book'). The Bible was this foreboding piece of reading that was invariably bound in sombre black, and you just had to believe it as true. Most strange.

Similarly, this God of the Christian religion. I saw no evidence. Nothing in my feelings or instincts resonated with the notions presented to me by believers. There was, instead, an instinctive turning-away: it did not feel right or true or healthy. This God was a twisted fantasy, nothing more. People who based their life around this make-believe character had to be a bit deficient.

Aged ten I won the Scripture Prize at school. This was more a reflection of the other kids' total lack of application in class than anything to do with me. The short walk onto the school stage to receive my prize - a Bible, of course - was one of the most uncomfortable experiences in the life of the young me. "You've made a horrible mistake. You've got the wrong man. You don't understand." The protests resounded through my mind.

Life as presented appeared to offer a simple choice: Christianity or the rest. This 'the rest' consisted largely of variations on a theme of secular humanism, scientific materialism, atheism, rational agnosticism, and similar. I think you get the picture. I didn't fit into this group very well, either. Despite my outright rejection of Christianity, I felt no kinship with the flat, restrictive, claustrophobic premises of this lot, who left no room for acknowledging the centrality of fantasy, imagination, crazy wisdom: the sort of stuff that's always turning up on Pale Green Vortex.

Years later, I fell in with Buddhism. And Buddhism kind-of took its place quite neatly in this category of 'the rest'. Firstly, it boasted no can't-see-him-anywhere God. Then it didn't require faith in a whole load of beliefs and stories which generally seemed twisted and unhealthy - not the sort of stuff you want to follow in the first place. Finally, Buddhism appeared to be practical and pragmatic. It had a range of practices that you could actually follow, in a suck-it-and-see way. If it works, do it; if it doesn't, move on. Meditation, in particular, stood out as a technique for knowing oneself. I took to it; it seemed to work. Buddhism as working with direct experience seemed brilliant. As the years passed, I came to see that it wasn't quite that simple. But still....

Part Two

Around five years or so ago, I began to more consciously and systematically undertake a process akin to what the alchemists of old might have called 'purifying the vessel'. This involves removing, dismantling, chucking out, those contents of ones consciousness, as Jung would put it, which are preventing the pure open space of awareness from manifesting. 'Adventitious defilements' is one term that appears somewhere in Buddhism which relates to this phenomenon. A catalogue of attitudes which are generally considered necessary for successful functioning as a human being were investigated and experimented with; some, as a result, were consigned to the dustbin and kicked out. I was forced to face head-on the anxiety which, as an undercurrent, has been my constant companion over the decades. I looked deep into its nature, its inappropriateness, its falseness, and more-or-less eliminated its obscuring activity, on one level at least (I see that it lurks still, but as a totally existential entity).

As a result of these and other endeavours, the space began to clear. There was less separate 'me', distinct from the ebbs and flows, the comings and goings, the unique magic of the sensate moment, than there once was. And, as this space began to clear, two new elements unexpectedly made their presence known.

Firstly, I found a channel of communication opening up with 'Something Else'. At first it was a bit of a secret between 'me' and 'it', almost like a clandestine love affair. What this 'Something Else', this 'Other' is precisely, I have been in no hurry to attempt to define. Higher Self? Holy Guardian Angel? Sophia, Shekinah, Universal Mind? Whatever. An intermittent two-way communication started up, with 'Something' that is both rigorously personal to me and completely impersonal. And before any Bible people get too excited about a Christian awakening on Pale Green Vortex, this 'Something Else' seems to be female, or at least to have a focal feminine component.

The other 'emergence' was the existence of intent in the universe. Through a variety of events involving especially synchronicities I found it increasingly difficult to escape from the sense, the feeling, that there is intent in the universe. Through the various experiences of non-duality and similar that I had had over the decades, intent - purpose - had never come into it. Clear your personal space enough, however, and the universe begins to take interest - as in the previous paragraph, an interest simultaneously highly personal and impersonal - and begins to present signs, challenges, nice experiences and nasty experiences, all with the aim of showing the way, helping you along. The universe wants us to 'grow'. The universe wants everything to grow. The universe needs everything to grow in order to achieve its own fulfilment.

This all sits rather uncomfortably with both sides of the dichotomy that I grew up with: Bible and the Christian God on the one hand, and the rest, including no-god Buddhism, on the other. I am in no mood to attempt a neat reconciliation these days. There are actually aspects of Buddhism which resonate with the experiences I have described -  the notion of Universal Bodhicitta is one such - but it seems to me that these have become increasingly marginalised. Western practice of Buddhism has veered in the direction of rationalistic, mental sides to its multifaceted jewel. All too often, Buddhism in modern times is the refuge for those who identify with thought, the rational; in Jung's typology, introverted thinking types. Not the kind to take easily to the notion that the universe possesses purpose.

No. I am left with the feeling - the horrible feeling - that I've been had. For most of my life I've been victim of a false dichotomy. Maybe those crazy Gnostics were right after all. The Christian God, they claimed, is a false god. He is the demiurge, an impostor, a demented lower-level being who is bent on deception. He turns up boasting that he is the god, the only god, the creator of all. The tragedy is that huge portions of humanity fall for his lies. I, too, have been 'had' by the demiurge, in that I have believed that 'God' as presented by him is the true and only notion of God. Like any reasonable person, I have rejected the claims of the demiurge, while failing to see through to the roots of the deception. The demiurge is the pretender par excellence.

Part Three

'Counterfeit mimickry' - pretending to be something, while really being something else, the opposite, even -, which is what we could call the antics of the demiurge, is not a one-off. It remains a prime tactic in tricking humanity today, leading it astray from its natural way, its 'god-given' sacred path. You take humanity's innate sense of the spiritual - its most valuable asset, if you will - and then you twist it to your own devious ends.

Take, for example, that intuition of one-ness, of the interconnectedness of all life, which finds an echo, however far or faint, in the lives of many, if not all, people. This gets twisted into the modern ideology of multiculturalism, espoused by many dcent, well-intentioned folk nowadays. But they've been had. Oneness is not in the least the same as sameness, which is the hallmark of multiculturalism as presented. It seeks to create uniformity, mediocrity, one-size-fits-all. This is a programme relentlessly pushed by organs of control such as the BBC. Its result is a dead and deadening cultural globalism, brought into being by the artificial removal of distinction - which, paradoxically (or not), is the basis for true 'spiritual growth'.

It's a similar story with ardent forms of feminism, along with the war against gender distinction. These zealous efforts to erode and nullify difference, undertaken in the guise of 'fighting against sexism', have similar aims. Once more, many well-meaning people subscribe to these agendas, but they have been duped. What superficially appears to promote freedom is actually an Orwellian move beyond the wildest dreams of Big Brother in 1984.

This is an exercise in social manipulation built upon a dark distortion, in this case a bastardisation, of what Jungians call 'wholeness'. It is the union of opposites, the divine hermaphrodite and the royal marriage as represented in alchemy, or the yab-yum in tantra. This wondrous flower of the sacred life is corrupted into a monster. The result is a society of men unable to comment that a woman is looking nice today, for fear of ending up with a criminal record. Can a society get more sick than that?

There are other examples, but they can stay in the box for now. This hijacking of our deep-down spiritual sense is one of the darkest aspects of modern culture and politics. The cult of political correctness, in particular, is riddled with this pernicious, soul-destroying virus. It befalls us to, at the very least, look out for it, see it when at work, and free ourselves individually from its toxic influence. It's out to destroy the world of spirit, the spirit of the world.


Images:

Top:       Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer, Altona, 1785 ('Wisdom is the female emanation of God')

Below:   The Temptation of St. Hilarion by D.L.Papety. Scratch beneath the surface, and you find that present-day efforts to eradicate gender distinction are nothing but a continuation for secular times of the Christian 'horror of the temptations of the flesh' crusade. That same visceral unease (dis-ease) with difference and the reactions it evokes. Both are life denying. Both attempt to repress Eros and the sensual.  
                

Monday 5 December 2016

Brexit: Six of Cups

The Six of Cups - or Chalices, as I prefer to call them (Chalices, after all, come in sacred gold or silver, vessels of vision, soaked in legend and exoticism - Grail and Parzifal. Cups, on the other hand, are what you use for hot chocolate before going to bed). The Six of Chalices should be such a lovely card. Six, the number of harmony, the different elements mingling in perfect concord. And the Chalice is associated with the Water Element: flow, feeling, emotion, a certain kind of intuition, a worthy receptacle for the feminine aspect to existence. What felicity!

In the Thoth Tarot, the Six of Cups is simply called 'Pleasure'. In the Waite-Smith, two young children are depicted in a spacious garden. The larger child is handing a cup filled with flowers to the smaller. Around them are five more flower-laden cups. The card is often read as being related to nostalgia, pleasant memories of the  past, a fond looking back on things that have vanished. We have to go to some of the dark Tarot decks to shake us out of this illusion of a flowery Garden of Eden, a horticultural Paradise on Earth,

A deeper consideration will reveal that the Six of Cups is inviting us to look closely at the whole matter of how we relate to the past; to our past. There is indeed in this card nostalgia. Nostalgia.
There are those who will claim that a positive nostalgia does not exist. Severing all attachment to, and identity with, our 'personal past' is a necessary prerequisite for spiritual freedom. In Castaneda, the notion takes the form of 'erasing personal history'. Even granted the possibility of a positive nostalgia, still dwelling overmuch on the past brings its perils. Yearning, hopeless longing, the inability to let go of what what has been and is no more; the refusal to release, to merge with the one and only reality, that of the present moment. Repeating the past over and over again, without regard for the current situation. Finally getting caught in a nightmare version of Nietsche's eternal recurrence.

In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the darker waters of the Six of Chalices unexpectedly began to flow, and with some force. I have found it difficult to comprehend what I have seen with my own two eyes during my brief forays into the twisted world of 'mainstream media'. It is indeed eternal recurrence gone horribly wrong. Like a bad smell from a too-long stagnant sewer. Or like slimy maggots crawling out of the furniture in that room in the East Wing that nobody visits these days. Like ghosts, nay ghouls of the worst kind; or, more accurately, vampires, irresistibly drawn out by a stench that they recognise only too well.

What are the phantoms that I witnessed, almost incredulously, in this spectral resurrection? There was Blair. There was Major. Miliband. Clegg. Out of the dark, dank, vapid air of the past did they make their unwelcome reappearance. Nobody prayed for their presence, or even invited them to raise their fatigued heads, but there they were, unmistakeable. It was as if an alarm bell had been rung, warning of the end of the world as we know it, and indeed how it should be, and they were powerless to resist. They responded, just as skeletal automatons would be expected to respond.

Why the opinions of the Blair should be given any more credence nowadays than those of Kirsty on the Tesco check-out in Paisley I have no idea. It seems that we are witness to the emergence out of their burrows of a tiny group of beings who are not able to live with the possibility that it's time to go join their local pub tiddleywinks team (not dominoes, since it reminds them of what they dreamed of seeing in the Middle East, and they start cheating); or do 'Strictly Come Dancing' or the jungle programme.

While Miliband at least had the decency to stop short of calling for another referendum, because the first one provided the wrong result, Blair and Major have been open and cavalier in their snubbing of the democracy that we are supposed to inhabit and adhere to. What did Major talk about? The tyranny of the majority? Am I hearing right?Dodgy stuff. While readers of Pale Green Vortex will be aware that we take western democracy with a pinch of salt, regarding it largely as a charade, another kind of opium for the masses, a veil over the deeper, not very democratic at all, realities of parapolitics etc, still..... You don't sign up for a democracy with your own sub-clause '.... when it suits me'.

In this parade of dishonour, I have to single out Blair as prime Lord of Darkness. Many years ago, I was well and truly had by Blair myself. I was among the multitude who shed a tear, quite literally, when he first came to power, and was on television walking around smiling, shaking the hands of well-wishers. Hope had arrived in the form of the Blair. The wicked witch was gone, her second-rate successors dead and buried as well. Bring in a new era.

Six years later, I was sitting in a restaurant in Notting Hill Gate, London, eating pizza with a friend (come on out, you know who you are....!). Halfway through the meal, my friend leaned over his Quattro Formaggi, looked me straight in the eye, and in a conspiratorial tone of voice asked me the question:"Are you against the invasion of Iraq?" I looked around nervously, checked that nobody was within earshot, before quietly intoning my reply:"Not as much as some people." We polished off our pizza quickly, wiped the cheese off our false moustaches, then shuffled uneasily out into the night.

Those were the days when I still believed what the mainstream television and newspapers had to say; I had no reason to do otherwise. I worked on the same basis as most people: the mainstream media report the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and leave the individual to form their own opinion. Rather than the process that I now see only too often: the mainstream media present certain events, facts, quasi-facts, fabrications and selected information, all of which serve to form your opinion for you.

So I was well and truly had by Blair (B-liar) and his not-so merry band of men from the shadows: Mandelson, Campbell et al. It's part of life's learning curve, should one wish to take up the challenge. Most hilarious of all today, is how this theme has started to go around: how we are living in a new world, where truth is no longer the yardstick. Surely this is another tactic of mind-subversion by the evermore desperate cool, trendy, liberal, all-embracing people (who are actually very nasty and intolerant of others when crunch comes to crunch), whose ascendence has been threatened by Brexit and the Trump. When was this Golden Era, when Truth was so valued above all else. Was it the time of the Blairs, Milibands, Cleggs, Majors???? Give us a break. The credibility-ometer has just exploded.

   
Images: Six of Chalices:
              Waite-Smith (top)
              Royo Dark Tarot (centre)
              Dark Fairytale Tarot (below)

Monday 28 November 2016

Images of Tarot (Part Two)

When I first came across the Tarot, around forty years ago, readily-accessed information about it was very limited. And the only deck that the majority of people were aware of was the Waite-Smith. Today, things have changed remarkably; and, I venture, for the better. The wealth of info, the abundance of different decks, is amazing. I'm just going to write a few words here about my own impressions of a little that is available today.

First up, we've got the 'historical Tarot decks'. These date back mainly to the 18th and 19th centuries, and issue primarily from France eg the Marseilles decks, or Italy eg the Ancient Italian deck. Like the Waite-Smith Tarot, some of the symbolism and aesthetic has Christian connections. Unlike our 'classic Tarot', however, these are unsullied by the puritan/protestant influence. They come without the censor of richness and abundance getting out his chopping knife first. The figures are gaily
depicted, richly adorned, in colours that sometimes remind more of Veronese than of the gaunt, measured aesthetic of northern Europe. In truth, they seem to partake of the same spirit as that of the Italian Renaissance, the Greco-classical spirit mixed with that of Christianity. Give me the Ancient Italian over the Waite-Smith any day. The main drawback - and it is, for me, a critical one - with these older decks is that the 'pip' cards, ie those minor ones with numbers, are not fully illustrated, but simply come with stylised wands, cups, etc. This does mean that imagination has very little to work with, and interpretation of these minor arcana cards is very limited.

Next comes what is, apparently, the second most popular Tarot after the Waite-Smith. It makes its entrance 100% untainted by Christian undertones, overtones, or anything else. This is hardly surprising since it is the brainchild of Aleister Crowley, brought into full physical manifestation thanks to the fantastic artwork and infinite patience of Lady Frieda Harris. This is the Thoth Tarot. Compared to the Waite-Smith and historical Tarots it is more abstract, more trippy, speaking more of internal realities than beings and happenings in the outer world. In my opinion, its logic is easier to follow, in the sense of being a comprehensive and comprehensible projection of the emanation aspects of the Kabbala. Crowley was openly scornful of the endeavours of A.E. Waite, and got very irritated with his 'there is a special mystery hidden here, which I know about but which I am not at liberty to share with you' habit. Either tell us what you know or shut up, complained Crowley. Otherwise it's just an insidious game of pseudo-mystical one-upmanship. "Here is your criticism, Arthur, straight from the shoulder. Any man that knows Truth and conceals it is a traitor to humanity; any man that doesn't know, and tries to conceal his ignorance by pretending to be a guardian of a secret, is a charlatan. Which is it?" (Crowley, Equinox, vol 1).

I, too, find this aspect of Waite's Tarot annoying, so am with Crowley on this one. The Great Beast made fun of Waite viciously, even publishing an obituary of the fellow while he was still alive. It was entitled 'Dead Waite'. I find this episode both very naughty and completely hilarious. I like the Thoth Tarot. It works well for me, and I find it relatively simple to use. It's one of my two main Tarot decks.

Then there's the rest. Loads of them. Hundreds, literally.

Things have changed remarkably over the forty years since I first became a long-haired, commune-dwelling, reader of Tarot. And, I would say, these changes have been, in general, for the better. The variety of Tarot decks available today is amazing. Some are profound, others frivolous. Some are dark, mysterious, scary even; others come full of light, smiley maybe, at worst sanitised. Anybody with an interest in Tarot nowadays can simply have a good look around ('Aeclectic Tarot' is an online resource with a broad overview) and find what appeals; what speaks to you, that is the most important thing. And only you can know.

Most  of the more worthwhile modern Tarots are based loosely on the root systems of the Waite-Smith or Crowley's Thoth. Some, I feel, have actually outstripped their original inspirations. And this is no great surprise. A lot has happened since Arthur Waite and Pamela Colman Smith were beavering away on their landmark Tarot a century ago. We've had Jung, archetypes, the collective unconscious; synchronicity, transpersonal psychology, psychedelic gnosis; Tantra, Tibetan Buddhism, the release from prison of Eros, Dionysus, sensuality, the recognition of Shadow as a force within and without. Despite the mess of the political world, of the ongoing project of mind control, we're not in such a bad place after all.

To be effective, Tarot requires a blend of intellect/knowledge and intuition to be brought to bear; the masculine and feminine principles working in harmony. A basic grounding in meanings, patterns, and systems is needed, really. At the same time, some of the more modern decks major on intuition: no confidence in your intuition and you will end up bewildered, probably throwing the cards in the bin. In a world still dominated by linear, mechanical notions of reality, this primacy of intuition as a tool for understanding, of making sense, has to be agood thing.

For myself, I have a special liking for some of the darker, fantasy, gothic even, decks. They seem to speak more directly to the archetypal, mythical aspects of being than do more naturalistic decks, or the cardboard cut-outs of Waite-Smith. They do not play safe, but venture towards the periphery of the psyche, where we may feel perturbed by its inhabitants, denizens of the night, teetering on the threshold. Shadow, eros, darkness, are encountered, viewed as portals to the sacred, even. This is a more total language of reality than that spoken by some other 'nice', 'safe' Tarots. That's me. Anybody properly interested in Tarot should follow their own bliss - or, rather, their own nose, their intuition, to discover where the treasure lies for them. Uniquely.

Images:  Top: King of Wands(Clubs) from Ancient Tarot of Lombardy
              Centre: King of Wands from Deviant Moon Tarot
              Bottom: Grumpy ol' King of Wands from Waite-Smith Tarot


Monday 21 November 2016

Images of Tarot (Part One)

An archetype is an archetype is an archetype. By the time it reaches the realm of planetary human life, however, it's a bit beaten up and bashed around. Or it may find its entrance forbidden altogether by the authors of fabricated reality, thus gaining access only through secret subterranean tunnels of its own construction.

The prime agents of this bullying, bruising, and archetype distortion are culture and religion. These, the founding blocks of 'human civilisation', have their own prior, often unspoken agendas, which encourage and promote certain attitudes and energies, ignore others, and demonise others still. Archetypal life is forced into the synthetic straijackets of officially-sanctioned morality, goals and value systems, incapable of giving free rein to its pure energetic spontaneity.

Even such a clearly archetypal system as Tarot is subject to the twistings and distortions of culture and religion; of 'the age', 'the time'.

Take the Waite-Smith Tarot, the classic Tarot deck; far and away the most popular deck, and often the only one that people know of. It was earlier this year that I purchased a copy of 'Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot'. I'm a real sucker for books with the words 'secret' and 'mystery' in the title: I have an entire bookshelf of such tomes in the living room. At the same time, I find it hilarious: it's not much of a 'secret' if the whole world can read about it with a couple of clicks on Amazon!

Be that as it may. In 'Secrets.......', writers Tali Goodwin and Marcus Katz, two people with lots of experience with Tarot, teach us many things. Description and discussion of the meanings of all 78 cards as interpreted in the Waite-Smith system. Biographical info on Waite and the hitherto under-recognised Pamela Colman Smith. Information on how to read the cards. Most interesting to me, and new at the time, details of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and how Tarot connects up with this system.

This is all good stuff. 'Secrets......' is a substantial, weighty tome, with enough material to keep you going for quite a while. But there's the culture, the religion......

A.E.Waite is the chief mystical intellect and intuitive, providing authoritative inspiration for the deck. It is Pamela Colman Smith who gives the ideas of Waite physical form; she is the artist. The illustrations in the Waite-Smith Tarot are clear, crisp, precise in outline, providing a host of symbolic meanings in the details for those in the know. Endless heady esoteric entertainment for the curious.Waite was a mystic, but a mystic with a Catholic foundation. And it shows. A good deal of symbolic detail comes down from orthodox Christianity, some from more esoteric Christianity, while the entire deck is subtly pervaded with the perfume of the religion. As an illustration, I have included pictures here of the Judgement card, sometimes wisely called 'Aeon' instead. It is the card of renewal, of the phoenix, of the arrival in ones life of the magnificent 'Other', even. The top one (above) is the Waite-Smith depiction. Below there are two more modern manifestations of 'Judgement'. Words from me are superfluous: I leave the reader to make their own judgement.

And the culture, the culture. The Waite-Smith Tarot was given birth a little over a century ago, shortly before the First World War. I get the shivers every time I think about the cultural-religio norms of the first half of the twentieth century. What an era of dead and deadly conventionality, of repression of the life force; what a time at odds with nature and natural instinct, at odds with the body. Shadow, to use a term from Jung, was denied both personally and collectively, to such an extent that it had no choice but to be projected outwards in the form of two awful world wars. My early childhood was spent in the late 1950s, and it quickly became clear to me: a main aim in life was to escape the horror of that unspoken air of repression which pervaded....... everything.

As time goes by, I find myself having increasing respect for those who dared to champion the body, sexuality, the senses in that dark age for the natural world. Nowadays, it's not such a big deal (among some people, at any rate), but then.......  I think of D.H. Lawrence, as prime example, a man with many flaws and who made many errors in his life, from what I can see. But a man who had the courage to go against the flow, come what may, and proclaim the resurrection of the flesh, the divinity of life within a body.

Above all, in the Waite-Smith Tarot, there is the 'high seriousness' of so many of the cards. The figures are sometimes referred to as resembling cartoon cut-outs, but above all they convey the feeling that life, especially spiritual life, is something extremely serious. Take a look, especially, at the Court Cards (King, Queen etc). They are a dour, crusty-looking bunch. Not a lot of laughs to be had on the way to enlightenment, that's for sure.

The cards of the Waite-Smith Tarot reflect too much of the era for me. Apollo has won out over Dionysus; Logos reigns supreme, while Eros has gone missing. Which has suited down to the ground the following generations of 'alternative' people in northern Europe and the USA, where the protestant, puritan heritage has continued to infect the mindscape. We can be 'progressive', 'alternative' without coming out of the comfort zone provided by mentality, rationality, the clarity of Apollo.

With the Waite-Smith Tarot, we can be clear, we can be clever, spotting and interpreting the mystical symbols half-hidden here, there, and everywhere. For me, at least, my 'wholeness' is left hungry, wanting, if I contemplate this version of Tarot alone. This 'number one Tarot' is not the one for me.

To be continued.

Images:  Judgement from Waite-Smith Tarot
              Judgement from Archeon Tarot
              Judgement from Wild Unknown Tarot


Monday 14 November 2016

And That Is The End Of The News.....

Part One

The moment 'news' becomes a commodity, to be sold on the open market. The moment it becomes subject to the vagaries of profit and loss, to the need to expand circulation in the interests of making money. The moment it then becomes vulnerable to fashioning, shaping, twisting, exaggerating, manipulating, falsifying in order to further the interests of some party or another. From that moment on it ceases to be the least bit trustworthy.

For the first time since I was born, I sense that the mainstream media is really struggling. And since, as a result of the process outlined above, it is primarily the mouthpiece of the Global Cabal, that network of ne'er-do-wells is likewise finding things more difficult than it imagined.

'Global Cabal' is the term I'm using today; there are many others available (some unprintable....). By 'Global Cabal' I mean a certain network of beings - politicians, bankers, other financiers, media moguls, miscellaneous other statesmen and women, members of 'think tanks' and other self-appointed organisations like Bilderberger, Tavistock etc, top level military, transnational organisations such as the EU and the UN. They all share in common the belief that they know best, and take upon themselves the job of telling the rest of the world how to run its affairs. This wish - this need - to impact upon peoples' behaviour progressively trickles down into more and more minute details of our lives: what we can say, think, feel. What jokes we can tell, what we are allowed to discuss, which subjects are acceptable and which form 'hate crimes'. In other words, they are the sponsors of the Thought Police of the modern day and age. All in our own best interests, don't forget.

But they haven't been having things their way. You see, more and more people have stopped listening. They aren't taking notice of the attempted manipulation by terror, fear and hatred that has been the stock-in-trade for the Cabal and its media henchmen over recent decades.

First up, there was Brexit. The majority of mainstream media in Britain was against Brexit. Viciously.
Notions of independence and sovereignty are anathema to the Cabal, which campaigned ceaselessly against Brexit. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, issued warning after dire warning. Leave the EU and we'd all be living in cardboard boxes within weeks. Just like the global warming alarmists, who predicted a bunch of catastrophes that should be upon us by now. But, miracle of miracles, loads of people didn't read the script.

Second, there's Trump. The vast majority of the mainstream media in Britain was completely against Trump, and launched a concerted attack on the fellow. The notion that anybody could even consider voting for such a buffoon was clearly beyond their comprehension. But people did. Quite a lot of people, in fact.

The morning after the US election, I didn't even bother checking the 'news' first thing, so certain was I that the Clinton was going to win. When I eventually had a look at the BBC, I was shocked, surprised. I confess that a sigh of relief passed through my being. What was most amusing was seeing the folk on the BBC trying to report the thing. It's like they were confused, not knowing how to behave or react. This wasn't in the script. This wasn't supposed to happen. Not at all.

For the Global Cabal, Hillary was pretty much the perfect candidate. A fully-fledged member herself, but, it became increasingly apparent, without strongly-held personal opinions on all sorts of stuff. In other words, an ideal vessel through which to channel the aims and objects of the Cabal. Trump, on the other hand, speaks his mind, even if it's not always pretty. He's been in a tight enough corner himself to have been forced to do a bit of homework on the machinations of the Cabal. He won't kowtow so much to the manipulations of political correctness. Not the kind of guy the Cabal wants at all.

I'm not saying that Brexit is a 'good thing'. I'm not saying that Trump is a 'good man' or will be a 'good president'. What I am saying concerns the spirit of plenty of people. The wet dream of the Cabal is that people simply give up the will to live, roll over meekly and do whatever they are told. Their dream is the collective nightmare. Phoney, purposely-created wars, political correctness; cataclysmic, fear-engendering global warming; encouragment to take offence and play the victim: all designed to knock the spirit, the emotional stuffing, out of people. So that the mass of humanity on Planet Earth will finally quietly submit. A few years ago I would have surmised that the scheme was working. Now, a goodly number of folk have woken up to at least one level of the 'matrix from hell'. This cannot but be a good thing.

Part Two

Now, I don't want anybody to cry too much, but this has created a bit of a personal problem. While most of my relatively newfound inspirations, contacts, and buddies will be roughly sympathetic to what I have been writing about, many of my older friends, going back to the 1970s, generally see things differently. What's more, some assume that I will see things in that different way too. They will bewail the demise of Hillary, tear out their hair at the idiocy of so much of the populace in voting for Brexit.

I think these friends haven't cottoned on. Having grown up in a time when the 'left' was closer to the alternative, they haven't realised that things are different now. That what was once 'alternative' has been effectively hijacked, and is now the orthodoxy. The Establishment used to strut around in pin-striped trousers and black hats, but no more. Nowadays it turns up in open-collar shirts and trimmed beards if it's male, or smart-casual, vaguely attractive but within clearly-defined parameters, if it's female. In its upper echelons at any rate, the Global Cabal has no political allegiance. It is shamelessly opportunistic and omnivorous. It will use whatever seems to work for furthering its interests, carrying out its nefarious projects. In the 1950s it was Tory stockbrokers; today it's blokes with 'Friends of the Earth' stickers in the car. The Global Cabal is truly amoral, truly opportunistic. Many people I know don't seem to get that. They can only translate my viewpoint into 'Ian has turned into a rabid narrow-minded fascist pig'. Which only goes to show how much they have been 'had' by Cabal-think.

I have in front of me the Thursday 10th November edition of 'i' newspaper. I have a copy because a neighbour of ours occasionally drops yesterday's edition through the letterbox, in order to keep my wife in touch with what's happening in the world (true story). Contributors to 'i' are, in the main, precisely the kind of people who consider themselves caring, tolerant, and all the other nice virtues. But in reality they can turn nasty easily, and are actually at the beck and call of global totalitarianism. They really don't like the outspoken, thinking-for-himself, take no prisoners and no sacred cows, style of the Trump. The paper is jammed full of vile, noxious, effluent which is really propaganda for the Global Cabal. About how the world is going to go up in flames due to global warming with Trump as president; what a disaster it is that Trump might actually get on with Putin (that's another System psy-op: Putin. He gets most of the bad press that he does simply because he doesn't play the game of one-world global elitism the way he's supposed to); how horrified Cher, Madonna, and Lily Allen are at the election result; racism, sexism, and all the other unmentionable things that are going to go through the roof now that Trump is at the helm. Most serious of all, 'Sturgeon raises fears over racist Trump'. Yes, Nicola, the world is hanging on your every word. Thanks for putting us all right on that one.

What a nasty fantasy world the mainstream has created. It now firmly believes in its own self-manifested nightmares, taking them as real. Less so do more and more 'ordinary' people. Bring on the end of the media mainstream. For me, it can't come a moment too soon.

Images: Top - Mark Carney. Be afraid. Be very afraid. And keep on being afraid. Carney is surely a pupil of the Lord Mandelson School of Dark Arts.
              Below - Tower, from Visconti-Sforza Tarot. A Tower may be collapsing, but what will appear in its place?

      

Wednesday 9 November 2016

Tarot in a Joined-Up World

The strange goings-on at the opera outlined in my previous post were presaged by the Tarot. A week before Cosi fan Tutte I had done a reading on Full Moon day, for the waning moon phase to come (ie the following two weeks). Now, sometimes Tarot readings can make some kind of immediate sense, either logically (heaven forbid) or intuitively. At other times they appear as gobbledegook, incoherent collections of cards with no apparent connection to the world of everyday events at all. These are the ones to really look out for: more often than not, the meanings unfold themselves over the following period of time,......... Look back from a vantage point yet to be reached, and all will be revealed. Such was the reading on the full moon of Sunday October 16th 2016.

The reading came overflowing with the feeling and watery world of the suit of cups or chalices. This
in itself is very unusual in Tarot readings that I do. Entering the world of emotion. As 'overall intent' for the forthcoming period came up Seven of Chalices. This is about the area of appearance, illusion. The 'classic' Waite - Smith Tarot shows a conjuror-type guy standing in front of seven cups brimming with phantasmagoria. The Dark Tarot shows a young girl, a newly-wed bride. Her face is painted in youthful pensiveness, disconcerted yet knowing. 'In the realm of imagination....., the bride has learnt the language of death' we are told. There she is, just before or after the day she's been told is the happiest of her life, and she has been confronted with Death. In short, the card is an invitation to investigate the entire world of appearance, maya, reality and unreality. And, it being a chalice card, especially on the level of feeling. What precisely is going on when we 'feel'? Precisely the question I was compelled by circumstance to look straight in the eye halfway through Act One of Cosi fan Tutte.

'What to Release'? - waning moon phase is the time for banishing, releasing, throwing out: Five of Chalices. There is a loss, though something remains. In the Dark Tarot, a young woman of elegance reclines. She has claws for fingernails, and a raven looks on. 'Fingers that do not feel sensations. The fire has gone out, but the raven has not forgotten beauty.' There I am, unable to feel, back at the opera.....

So what's with the Tarot for me? I am certainly not an 'expert'; my knowledge, ability, experience are all very modest. The popular conception of Tarot concerns prediction, particularly, it seems, with regard to career and romance. However, I'm not looking for a job or a girlfriend, so that's not it. More fascinating is the way that the structure of Tarot reflects something of that of the universe. The twenty-two Trumps, major arcana, are really like archetypes, and can be read as such. From Jungians to Michael Tsarion, people will read them as illustrating the journey of the Soul from the beginning to the end of the path, the spiritual path, of life. The minor arcana, on the other hand, the four suits of wands/clubs, chalices/cups, swords, and pentacles/disks, are more descriptions of process. Precisely, they can be mapped onto the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah, and communicate the different phases of coming into being of phenomena, from the initial spark in the Aces, to final fixing, total stabilisation, in the Tens. It's a form of emanation theory, of describing how things come to be. As such, I have been fascinated, my life enriched, by this aspect of Tarot. But still that's not the clincher......    

Though a wealth of material about Tarot has been produced by Jungian types since the great man's passing, he was more of an I Ching man himself, In the 'Appendix' section of 'Memories, Dreams, and Reflections' he says the following: "I would sit for hours beneath the hundred-year-old pear tree , the I Ching beside me, practicing the technique by referring the resultant oracles to one another in an interplay of questions and answers. All sorts of undeniably remarkable results emerged - meaningful connections with my own thought processes which I could not explain to myself." During this period, Jung often threw the I Ching as part of his therapy with patients.

Jung puts pretty well what my own attitude to Tarot is. What he says about the I Ching is relevant to my experience with Tarot: "Time and again I encountered amazing coincidences which seemed to suggest the idea of an acausal parallelism (a synchronicity, as I later called it)."

This is what Tarot is first and foremost to me. An exercise - experiment if you like - in synchronicity. Or, to use less fancy words: in the joined-up nature of everything. The universe as a magical kaleidoscope rather than as a cosmic pinball machine. It is a way out, to haul yourself out of a purely linear experience of reality - an experience that is partial - and into a more whole, true breathing-in and breathing-out of the totality of life. By setting up conditions where acausal connections, to use Jung's expression, are more likely to arise, you seem to ramp up synchronicity in everyday experience. This is purely logical: use it or lose it, as the saying goes.

To move consciousness beyond exclusively linear time-and-space awareness. This seems part of moving out of 'petty self', into Big Self, Higher Self, the Divine Presence, that Something Bigger with an overarching organising principle, that magnificent multidimensional polyverse, of which we are simultaneously an infinitessimally tiny part and absolutely everything. The error of perception generated by those following Jung was that synchronicity is an occasional event, normally spectacular and soaked in mystery and significance. Whereas the trick is to realise that it is there all the time, and to experience it as such.

More and more people seem to have cottoned on to this of late - at least this is what my reading and personal contacts suggest - and this has to be a good thing. Maybe a shift in general consciousness is actually happening, at least among those who are making the effort to become multidimensionally aware.

Images:  Seven of Cups or Chalices:
             
              Waite - Smith Tarot (top)
              Mystic Dreamer Tarot (bottom)



        



Thursday 3 November 2016

A Visit to the Opera


I'm not what you might call an opera buff. From the entire repertoire there are maybe half a dozen operas that I would conceivably go out of my way to see. Among that select few is 'Cosi Fan Tutte' by Mozart. Though not the composer's most celebrated opera it is, in my view, the one that will most consistently blow you away with its melodic and beautiful music. So when the chance appeared to see it only a half hour's walk from the house, it was an opportunity too good to pass up.

To get things straight. It wasn't the opera directly on stage that my wife and I attended. It was film of the opera, broadcast live throughout the world onto the big screen. This, apparently, is the thing nowadays. Neither was it the actual live performance we saw. It was an 'encore' shown four days after the live event at the Royal Opera House in London. That's what happens when you live in the Highlands of Scotland.

There is indeed a lot to be said for this 'live opera at the cinema' concept. Singers and scenes are seen close up and from a wide variety of angles, giving a more expressive and comprehensive view than is possible if you are attending the live event. There are subtitles, so those whose Italian is rusty (me) or non-existent (my wife) can follow the story easily enough.

We settled into our seats. No popcorn. Down go the lights, and a long but interesting intro ensues. Then the opera. The overture. Rich, clear, sumptuous. I feel nothing in response. Soon the main characters are on stage, and the story begins. It contains many of the silly cliches typical of opera: disguise, mistaken identity, and the rest. Nevertheless, the plot is not completely stupid, involving as it does the claims of two husbands-to-be that their soon-to-be wives are unconditionally faithful, impervious to temptation. A wager is made: will they remain faithful for twenty- four hours while all manner of delight is regaled before them?

The singing is marvellous, the staging magnificent, the music perfect. Yet still I feel nothing. I am not engaged. In fact I feel as if I am witnessing aliens acting out a narrative from a different galaxy. It is all very disconcerting. Betrayal, everlasting love, trickery and deception are the name of the game in 'Cosi Fan Tutte'. You see, these are, I eventually realise, all feelings of people who have a 'self'. Twenty minutes in, I realise this is the crux. I am relating from a position of a person who is no longer a person: who has no self.

By now I am feeling very confused and quite physically ill. My stomach has constricted into a tight ball, a tangled knot, and is giving me considerable pain. This isn't what I signed up for at all. However, instead of feeling a deep calm and tranquility as a result of having left all these self-based feelings behind, I am stricken with a grave sense of wrongness. What have I done to myself? Or, indeed, allowed to pan out, since the practice of no-self is a piece of piss that happens automatically once you are in the habit?

Beginning to realise what has happened, I make an effort to come down into my body, into my feelings, come to my senses. Fortunately, I have not turned into a hard-core no-self robot, and after the interval healthier service is resumed. As we walk home beside the river, I recount my experience to my wife; I think she gets it.

The following day I feel anger and shame. Anger at what I have done to myself. And shame? Well, this is not a familiar feeling these days. It's not a 'nice' feeling at all, is it? But a keen sense of shame at having somehow let myself down. Strayed unconsciously off-track. Once upon a time, in my days of organised Buddhism, these feelings might have been put down to 'resistance' to the process of spiritual growth going on. Or maybe as a reaction from those aspects of myself that aren't into personal development. Nowadays, I think I can distinguish between 'resistance' and 'wrongness'. In fact, they are worlds apart.

It's there in the article by 'John Smith' that I referenced back in September. I just hadn't realised how viscerally true, how central to experience, what he was communicating is. Practice of 'no self' only works properly if your 'reality map' is what he terms 4D (three dimensions of space, plus time) ie the normal, everyday, 'linear' reality we inhabit. If your reality map encompasses multidimensionality in some form or another, then no-self just ain't particularly relevant, or isn't going to work. Go to the opera with a background in the multidimensional nature of the polyverse after a hearty breakfast of no-self, and you end up with stomach cramps and indigestion. Existentially confused.

My afternoon at the opera was in-your-face evidence that John Smith wasn't just writing a theoretical treatise. It's real - dead real, directly felt, and dead serious. Your reality map goes a long way to determining what works or doesn't work in your 'spiritual practice' -  or in your life generally, I suppose. I hadn't really got that berfore.

Those emotions which, in my state of no-self I failed to properly experience, are not, as flatland no-selfies may claim, hindrances, or mere by-products of a faulty perception. No. They are part and parcel of the form and structure of universal existence as it manifests in all its glorious, imperfect, uniqueness in, and through - me. Our feelings and emotions are not just consequences, results, or side effects. All aspects of our being have meaning, purpose, their role to play in the divine unfoldment. Even self-based feelings can be echoes of spirit, of the infinite. Or gateways into communion with the source of creation. This is what my reality map is telling me at the moment.

Whatever the interpretation - and I may be wrong in my unfolding analysis - the entire episode shook me up emotionally. I felt psychically contaminated, poisoned; or as if I had been subjected to some kind of psychic vampirism. A couple of days after the trip to the opera, I contracted a head cold. This then morphed into a migraine - the first of any note for quite a long while - and the past few days have been spent in a strange, dreary hybrid of the two. Which is the main reason it's taken so long to write this little piece!

So I am sorry for having got sidetracked into the arid wastelands of a no-self that does not embrace the magnificent multidimensionality of existence - at least not explicitly. That sees voidness, emptiness, without granting equal weight to the infinite meaning-saturated movements that take place within that empty space. If anybody thinks I've got it all wrong, let me know. In the meantime, it's bye-bye no-self, and back on the rollercoaster of authentic felt experience in all its weird and wonderful forms.

Here's that link again:

www.energygrid.com/spirit/2015/04ap-dimensionalperspectives.html


                 

Monday 24 October 2016

In Praise of Woo

You may or may not know what 'woo' is (or woo-woo to fervent enthusiasts or detractors). Rather than attempt a formal definition, I shall present examples of some phenomena that may be considered to be woo. Telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, teleportation. Earth energies, Earth mysteries, ley lines, dragon lines, crop circles. Astrology, tarot, I ching, numerology, any form of divination. Feng Shui. Channelling, inner heat, walking on fire, rapid walking, astral realms, astral travel, astral anything, auras. Energetic healing, homeopathy, healing with fire, stones, soul retrieval, shamanic travel. Synchronicity, UFOs, gnomes, elves, dwarves, chakras. I think you get the picture.....

Should you wish to find out more about things woo, the place not to go is Wikipedia. Wicked Pedia is fine for important things like the population of Huddersfield, who won Wimbledon in 1958, or the birthday of Igor Stravinsky. But for stuff like woo, Wickedness Pedia is useless. You see, Wickerman Pedia has been got at. It's been distorted, rearranged. It ain't what it appears to be.

The most notorious instance of this concerns Rupert Sheldrake. To my knowledge, Rupert is a proper scientist. He does experiments, writes them up, considers the results, that sort of thing. His fatal error, however, is to extend his experimenting activities into the arena of woo. Telepathy, for example. And he has his theory of morphic resonance, which some people just don't like.

Recent years have seen a veritable hoo-hah about the Wikipedia entry on Rupert Sheldrake, which has been radically altered. It is worth checking out Sheldrake's own website on the nefarious activities of Guerilla Skeptics (Rational Wiki, one of the least rational things to grace the planet, naturally denies the existence of such a group at all). This is essentially a small group of ideological skeptics, who have taken on as their holy mission to the world to put it to rights on anything that may emit the faintest whiff of woo. Have a look at other Wikipedia entries on woo - homeopathy, for example, which can only get a soft-core woo rating, really. Of course, if you are a member of the Church of One-Eyed Scientific Materialism yourself, you will quietly murmur approval at the triumph of righteousness over the dark hand of woo.


For some reason, the prophets of 'rational humanism' (read 'irrational humanism') and 'scientific materialism' (read 'one-eyed scientific reductionism') have something serious against woo. It seems that they feel the need to attack tirelessly. Maybe they feel under threat; for sure they feel under threat.

Until recent times, the bastions of irrational humanism were upheld in the public eye by two figures familiar through the mainstream media.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, the Great God of One-Eyed Scientific Materialism sent as his emissary, his earthly representative, one Richard Dawkins. For many years, alongside his fellow henchman the archangel David Attenborough, he efficiently spread the word. Even the messengers of God are not forever, though. Not even, I bet my boots, Food-and-Mating Attenborough. Additionally Dawkins, in latter times. has developed the unsettling habit of speaking his own mind, which is not always spiffingly correct politically. It became clear a few years back that the time had arrived for the Second Coming. And thus came to pass....

Brian Cox - sorry, Professor Brian Cox - is our modern-day Christ figure, sent to put us right on how everything works. With his boyish looks, big shiny white teeth, and perpetual ever-so-slightly superior smile, he is indeed a guru for modern times. I mention his physical appearance not to have a go at him, but because it is such an integral part of his message. Cool, modern, smiley-smiley, maybe with a touch of the puer eternus. Truly a prophet for the modern era.

Cox truly has something about woo. It's a word that is embedded in his vocabulary, always uttered in a barely-concealed hiss between smiling yet strangely clenched teeth. The word is immediately registered by the listener's mind as a put-down. Something is 'woo' therefore it is automatically and
necessarily stupid, superstitious, non-existent, the fantasy of a sick mind. "That's woo" -job done.

It behoves one to ponder why this wholesale and automatic despising of everything woo. It is not very rational at all. It comes down, in the only conclusion I can reach, to a matter of ideology. Despite their facade of freedom of thought, liberalism, and the rest, the Dawkins and Coxes are rigid ideologists. In their own ways they are no more flexible than the Jehovahs Witnesses who knock on the door when you are in the middle of breakfast, or the Muslim fundamentalists. They come to preach scientific materialism, and the supposed benefits of the feeling of wonder in the face of an essentially mechanical, robotic, meaningless world. This is what is preached ad nauseam through much of the mainstream, particularly the BBC.

Woo is attacked so vigorously because it doesn't fit into this paradigm of mechanical meaninglessness. It is not easily measured: homeopathy can't work because the substances are diluted to an extent that cannot be measured, we are told. 'I measure, therefore I am' is the variation on Descartes. Instead of stopping to think the unthinkable - that maybe the instruments aren't capable of measuring everything that's going on, and that we haven't attained the apex of understanding - it is current hubris that wins the day. This cannot happen because I don't understand how it can happen. Or: I can't measure this, therefore it cannot exist. There are assumptions embedded in this attitude. Huge assumptions.

We can't take the views of these people too seriously. Small minds, tiny vision. Yet they are vicious, relentless in their attacks, tanks fuelled by ideology. They are out to twist your mind. If we want to get a bit conspiratorial, we can say that liberal humanism and scientific materialism are attempts to 'contain' the human mind. To disempower the remarkable human spirit in its magnificent flight. To cut us off from, to hide, those elements to reality that offer us the chance for insight, gnosis, call it what you will. Those aspects to life, and to each and every human life, that cannot be controlled, that are all of ours to explore, interact with, engage in divine rapture. Scientific materialism, like all organised religion, aims to control the masses, keep them in order. When Christianity no longer did the job, it was time to roll out another dogma, propounded by the dark agents of one-eyed science.

So, bring on the woo. I'm not saying that all of it is 'real', 'exists', or anything like that. There's plenty that I just don't know enough about to be able to say. Yet some of the contents of the basket of woo I have experienced personally, and have subjected those experiences to questioning and a degree of rigorous examination. Which is the most we can do, really.

Images: Top: Rainbow Chakras. OK, but why do we always have to sit in lotus position for the chakras to appear?

              Centre: Steady on there, Carl.

              Bottom: Ah, yes.....

And today's quiz: One of the three images is not at all woo. Not in the slightest. Guess which one.

      



Tuesday 11 October 2016

Meeting on the Ridge


It's April 9th, 2011. A Saturday. 11.45am.  The sun, when it deigns to shine, does so with strength and ferocity in the Highland spring. I am soon warm as I ascend the zigzags rising from the floor of Glen Shiel, away from the weekend trippers and motorbikes and towards the stark clarity of that springtime sky.

The path which steadily climbs up onto the spur is a grand piece of architecture, almost a thing of beauty. Not one to normally wax lyrical about things Victorian, I nevertheless concede that these old stalkers' paths are works made with pride, sensitivity, and out of a certain love of the environment through which they pass. What contrast they make with the modern estate tracks, blasted through glens and up hillsides by bulldozers, great mechanical scars cutting deeply through the silence. Creations of a mentality that knows not beauty, sensitivity, love.

I reach the top of the spur and behold the climb ahead of me. The broad grass-and-bog ridge leads onwards and upwards, to give onto steeper rock which rises up to eventually reach the first peak on the ridge proper.

Today is a big one. Having got myself to the first summit, I shall head westwards along the ridge to two more peaks, then more-or-less retrace my steps to catch the evening bus home. By then, I anticipate, I will be tired.  

Walking along the spur, I become aware of another person ahead of me. Their pinpoint becomes steadily bigger: they are progressing slowly. Eventually this pinprick, which has expanded into a sizeable inkblot by now, stops altogether. What is clearly a tea-and-relaxation break on the part of the slow-mo ahead is my opportunity. I step up my pace with the clear intention of overtaking and continuing to the top of the ridge unimpeded.

Approaching this figure sitting upon the meagre bog-and-grass that ekes out its existence at this altitude, I see that it is a man. Quite a senior one, in fact. He is enjoying refreshment from his thermos, clearly enjoying the warm sunshine of spring. I bid a cheery 'hello' with an energetic wave of my hand, but it's no good. I am not adept at passing by people on the mountains who would like a brief dialogue about the weather, the hill, and the rest. I have been well and truly waylaid.

My newfound friend must be, I guess, around eighty years old. His gear is straight out of the 1950s; in particular, he is using as an aid to walking an alpenstock. I have never seen an implement such as this close at hand; it is something which I thought was only used long ago, for early ascents in the Alps. It sports a long, straight, wooden handle. I have never set eyes upon such a magnificent yet simultaneously unwieldy and impractical walking aid in all my life.

"May I accompany you up the hill?" he asks. It's got to be a rhetorical question, hasn't it? It's not exactly easy to say "No, look. You're really slow, and I've got some extremely important walking to do today." It's not easy, for me at any rate.

We begin to snail pace our way up the narrowing ridge. My companion is, to borrow an unfashionable word from a fellow blog-writer, cultivated. He has this air about him, and an accent that marks him out as hailing from well-heeled Surrey. "I live in Middlesborough" he exclaims, almost causing me to tumble into the coire below. He tells me his name, which I have forgotten. He also confirms his age as eighty. And, lowering his voice conspiratorially, as if to tell me a great secret, he proffers a deep confession: "I am staying at the Kintail Lodge Hotel. Splashing out a bit." For a moment his eighty years are stripped away, and he appears beside me as a rather naughty little boy up to no good.

We amble on slowly, gradually gaining height. At one point the ridge narrows, and the path climbs a small rocky turret, requiring the use of hands for its ascent. My Teeside companion finds this tricky. His legs aren't up to it and give way, leaving him dangling. I am alarmed, and rush to help him up the mini 'bad step'.

We finally reach the top of the mountain, a Munro no less, and sit beside the cairn for another break and to soak up the view of ridge and sky. I cast my eye in the direction of the peaks to the west. "This is enough for me" my companion states definitively. "I'll stay for a while, then head back to the hotel for early dinner."

I stride off into the afternoon sun, leaving this man to feast his eyes on the landscapes before retracing his steps downwards. I look back one more time, apprehensive about his descent: will he negotiate the rocky step without tumbling head first and smashing his skull open on a protruding piece of rock? Several hours later, as I descend a parallel ridge, I see no sign of a crumpled body beneath the bad step, so assume that he made it OK. And I complete the day in reflective mode.

There, at 650 metres above sea level, somewhat below a rocky step on a northern spur of Maol Chinn-Dearg, I had the privilege to encounter a rather remarkable human being. I partook of his company, but then sped off along the ridge, intent on my own very important programme for the day. Was this an opportunity missed? A deeper, richer communication spurned for the sake of my own mad goals and agendas? My not fully appreciating the wonder before my very eyes, intent instead on finding it somewhere else - in this case, along the ridge? The answer to all of these is simultaneously 'yes' and 'no'. Did I miss out? Yes. Would I do the same, should the situation arise again? Most probably 'yes'.

The one thing I do know is that, should I reach such an age, it would be marvellous to be able to do as this man from Middlesborough. Know my limits, know my ever-dwindling physical abilities; realise without regret that those epic multi-peak marathons of yore are no longer. Yet to hone what I know I am still capable of, to still breathe in magnificence from expeditions which appear more modest, yet with age and the waning of physical ability take on proportions of enormous magnitude.

Photos: On the South Glen Shiel Ridge                  

Wednesday 28 September 2016

A Cairngorm September





Contrary to vicious rumour, the sun does sometimes shine in the Highlands of Scotland. Here are a few pics from a couple of vaguely energetic forays into the Cairngorms this September.

It's taken me a long time to attune to the Cairngorms. It probably needed a couple of wild camps right in the Cairngorm heartland for me to appreciate the unique nature of the landscape. It's not like the west coast of Scotland, where the peaks are spikier, the ridges narrower. The Cairngorm is predominantly high, rolling, upland plateaux, cut into deeply by a number of coires and through-passes. The atmosphere is specific to the area, the wildlife a bit different. To complain because it's not like the spiky Cuillin of Skye is like moaning about parsnips because they don't taste like brussels sprouts.

I've come to feel increasing affection for the Cairngorm hills, just down the road from me, really.



Friday 16 September 2016

Love (series end....)

Love. It's a word we shied away from in my Buddhist days. And with good reason. Its imprecision may be unprecedented in the English language. Unconditional Bodhisattva love, Kuan Yin, Mother Teresa, empathy, sympathy, neurotic attachment, cupidity, Eros, pity, friendliness, compassion, crush, infatuation, Platonic stuff, Aphrodite, ecstasy and related empathogens, longings, yearnings, anima; the feelings some people have for pets, mum and dad, boyfriend or girlfriend, God, Guru, nature, wild places, dolphins, daffodils, dinosaurs, doughnuts, computers and computer games, Justin Bieber, the girl you see on the bus every morning. All and more are implicated by the vague and vast word 'Love'. No wonder we sometimes feel confused.

Yet, beneath the panoply of forms, 'love' suggests that basic movement towards. Together. That
movement in the universe to unity, union. Connection. It's a big word.

Love strikes me as being a basic part of the fabric of the universe. From its pure source in non-locality, it cascades down. First as a primal energy that moves between and connects two points: primordial polarity, dualism. Then down, through healthy fellow-feelings between people, through ever-more twisted and distorted forms, until eventually hitting rock-bottom in television soap operas and supermarket checkout magazines.

My own experience of love has been unexceptional; paltry, even. Sure, my sometimes cheery smile and playful banter have lightened up people's day; I have been useful, helpful, accommodating; have experienced the bitter pangs of loss on the deaths of my parents. I am averse to conflict and confrontation, and what has sometimes appeared as sympathy and understanding may have been, at times at least, a mask for not wanting to create a hoo-hah. I have, generally, speaking, hung the banner of love from outside the comfort of my own tower.

Maybe more, but twice have I undeniably participated in a different order of love. The first occasion was over twenty years ago. I was living in a room of a friend's flat in the Waterloo area of London. In common with many inner city quarters, the area boasted a veritable honeypot of humanity. Despite being located proximate to the Old Vic Theatre, the estate where we lived was roamed by all manner of ne'er-do-wells, don't-do-wells, can't-do-wells, and won't-do-wells.

It was a Saturday morning. I was sitting at my little table ready to eat breakfast. The top floor flat overlooked a busy main road with a tiny park and bus stop adjacent. Suddenly I was alerted to one almighty din of a noise, the sound of shouting and screaming, coming from outside. A man and woman were standing at the bus stop with a collection of carrier bags, and yelling their heads off at one another. A really loud, high-pitched, vicious bout of trading lethal insults had started up.

Then something unusual happened. Instead of the habitual frustration and irritation, or the pity directed towards myself, as I needed a nice quiet breakfast after a stressful week of teaching work; instead of the 'bloody hell, not another bunch of alcoholics'; or even the attempted understanding of, sympathy towards, two people down on their luck. Instead of all this, something else manifested. I can only term it 'love'. A pure energy, yellow in colour should I need to pin it down. Free of all judgement, and free of mentalities that we often associate with 'love', such as acceptance and forgiveness. None of these got a look in. It was something else. It nearly put me off my cornflakes.

The second incident is from more recent times: March 26th, 2010, to be precise. I had been going through one of my more wretched periods of 'What am I doing with my life? Am I doing the right things? Am I doing enough of the right things?' These periods, mercifully, seem no longer to occur: maybe I am simply 'on track' now. In an attempt to possibly clarify matters, I enlisted the help of a 'sacred teacher plant', a certain spiny being from way up in the Andes of Peru. Many hours after ingesting the noxious-tasting brew, I was no closer to any revelation about the current state of my life. I decided to call upon yet further help (isn't it great to have friends?) in the shape of two 'spirit guides'.

The previous year I had attended a course in Switzerland run by Ralph Metzner, on the theme of 'Alchemical Divination'. Of course, learning to contact and work with spirit guides is precisely the kind of thing that happens on courses such as this (without the aid of teacher plants, I should add for clarity's sake). I invoked the male spirit guide. He tried, I felt, to make a point to me, but I couldn't catch it. He began to get frustrated with me, and started shouting and ranting; I had to let him go. Then I called up the female spirit helper, and something unexpected happened. I was bathed in a warm yet strong yellow light, and a feeling not unlike that which manifested at breakfast time in Waterloo.

Again, words like 'forgiveness' and 'acceptance' don't capture the tone of what was communicated. It was more like an 'Everything is fine because everything is just as it is and it is impossible for anything to be any different. Whatever you do, even the mistakes and the messes, is just fine. It is impossible for it to be any other way. Stop worrying and get on with your life.' But it was communicated, not through the medium of mind, so much as bodily and through the heart. Then the spirit guide disappeared and I collapsed onto the bed in wonder. I gained considerable personal confidence from that evening encounter, going about my life with fewer doubts and anxieties littering my way.

After looking up the date of this experience while writing this piece, that strange yet familiar voice, the one which makes connections where other voices don't, suggested I checked something out. Sure enough, the day after this meeting with the spirit guide was the day when I posted my first piece on Pale Green Vortex. Meaningless coincidence, I'm sure.

So, love. Feeling. An indispensible ingredient. I suspect I have received at least as much as I have given, but love is not really amenable to quantifying in that way.

And there comes to an end this little series. It has assumed a life of its own as I have written, and all sort of stuff has emerged that I did not imagine would when I first started. That, I suppose, is part of the magic of the creative process.                  

Image: The magnificent Luis Royo, as used in his Dark Tarot, Six of Pentacles