Apologies for overdoing this ole wizard crush. I am not clingy and weird, except on Facebook. In real life, I am too busy for crazy.

The second post has just come after me, because it is important to read the Cabala, but it also important to chew the cud about it.

By all means, please acquire a copy of John Michael Greer’s book Paths of Wisdom, available at a bookseller near you, or on Amazon. I used the first edition, but two more are out, and are, no doubt, very fine. I don’t know the first thing about them, having spun the Fate in Edition One and not looked back. Enough.

In the last post, the Ones Who Know would recognize that JMG arranged to put people into THE GAME using the old work, which is to say, ingenuously, the Masons’ Cabala, for the Golden Dawn has a great pile of Egyptian gods, astral travel, Enochian Angels, several methods of divinations, not to mention exciting and inspiring initiation rites, and other things that take you INTO the magic if you are in a lodge or working group, which are psychically volatile — not necessarily in a bad way — but do tend to splinter and with some acrimony, for it is how the original Golden Dawn functioned, and these patterns seem to be “the ghost in the machine.” But it does work, so it tends to attract new people, and I perceive a current of agape, spiritual love, relative to those in other subsets, even some in different spheres.

It is not unfair that I am a leftover. In the 1990s, I was involved in the lodge work of the B.O.T.A., and happened to overhear what may have been an “Atta Boy” from the brethren toward a sister, that there was a particular Masonic lodge in Seattle that only admitted 100 men at any time, and that this gent in my lodge had just gotten admitted, and reported that John Michael Greer was in it. It was a super COWED magic working group and full of old men who, no doubt, had the old ceremonial magic, THE GAME, that kept an eye on everything in Seattle. That, of course, in addition to all of the other smallish working and study groups in magic that did and do function, though at the time it was part of what everyone did, since their relatives and ancestors were all in the lodges, mine own included, and not just males. It is very weird about me and this. What is reincarnation anyway? I do think there were a lot of Masons doing stuff, including tricks, which actually worked and didn’t crazy you out. But that is IMHO. One shouldn’t be over-focused on the flashy people — it is often the plain ones who get the job done.

This may have been an urban myth about the occult community of Seattle in that era. It may just have been “the scene” and the various magical groups that rose and fell during that era, and I was in a couple of them. I am too stodgy for those places, so I will just go home and get to bed at a decent hour for a school night.

The Spirit whispered even then that this was a magic of men, and I could not be completely capacitated. It always falls apart. In the early aughties, Mr. Greer advocated the Lucky Mojo and hoodoo as an important Art, and there I went, and still, quietly, do quite a bit of it. Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.

I have to turn to the great female ceremonial magicians, Dion Fortune and Ann Davies, with a side of others, published and famous often, for role models, but the best magicians are often slogging it out in the lodges, doing the work and not being overwrought about it. So let’s have some of that.

JMG’s Cabalistic Golden Dawn is an arid and unfaithful business without the mindscape of Dion Fortune. Please read all of her work if you want to have a magical universe about this. In many ways, this work is a method of jailbreaking Dion Fortune. The Mystical Qabalah, which I read once a year, is a theology in a spell, a rubric in a poem, a bardic incantation, a world of Rosicrucian mind, that points most effectively to her fiction. We her readers long for the good ole days when the Work resulted in that kind of magical universe, and lots of smart clothes in London, when it has been reborn before our very eyes as the new stuff, which I think is kinda sorta a Buddhist/African Traditional Religion lucid dreaming mindscape involving necromancy, laboratory-synthesized drugs (that were never abundant enough for most people in the past), sexual magic (that used to cause undue pregnancy and still causes that and undue venereal disease), pop culture focused on binge watching Netflix instead of binge watching Mass, and a smattering of meditation, with almost no occult training outside of itself. THE ONE TRUE CHURCH ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH, as the MAR-MONS would call it.

These new people, possessed of an extremely powerful magic that is quite beautiful and sweeping everything, don’t involve themselves in regular magic — the substrate worlds — and often end up performing the work as instructed and cannot stand up to the structure and end up paying for the work with deprivation magic — often practiced vampirically on others! — compromising health, money, relationships, and everything taken down quite too far.

There are ways to produce magical energy without losing something.

So we strive to TEACH so that we may help people get better at magic. They/we should have FREEDOM and not SLAVERY. And we are involved with THEM if we do anything but live alone on a deserted island.

That is my position, and probably what JMG intended to begin with, for what author at Llewellyn has not SIGNED THOSE GOVERNMENT PAPERS?

So, go out and get the book on Kindle if you want to follow along! And let’s take a gander at the next section.

If the existence of an Ultimate Reality is to be taken into account at all, we need to have some way to think about it, however inadequate. Just as language must be stretched to its limits to deal with experience beyond the physical, the language of symbols must be stretched to its own, much broader, limits if it is to deal with the Reality which is beyond all experience whatever.

In seeking a way to tackle this problem, the creators of the Cabala — like mystics everywhere — turned to paradox as the only useable tool. At the outermost edge of its symbolism, then, the Cabala provides three paradoxical images for the Existence beyond all existence. They are called the Three Veils of the Unmanifest, to remind us that as symbols they necessarily conceal what they seek to express.

There are three Veils of the Unmanifest, represented in the human body as three energy layers above the top of the head.

The first one is called Ain, which means, Without.

Now let’s imagine that we are in a world where a lot of super sonic cults are ranging about with a bunch of actual necromantic electric magic taking everyone in. They approach and try to put a bunch of electromagnetism on your head. This could be the year 1400, or it could be the year Today, for the Cabala was exactly that in its true heyday!

TIN FOIL HAT ALERT.

This could just be your iPhone, which does that very thing!

You focus on it, and learn its Path.

This thing used to be called two hours a day of Church, and it worked.

Do you want this Path?

We have these exercises in the Cabala which enable you to jailbreak Church. You can say, at the level of the Unmanifest called Ain, or Not, Yes or No? Don’t turn that thing on if you don’t want it, and turn it on if you do. It should be your choice.

The second level is called the Ain Soph, which means, No Limit. As we are passing between our own personal human consciousness to the telepathic interface with groups, civilizations of the dead, the fundamental MIND world of nature, and our own deep beings, we have choices in the energy. The second switch is the one called Limitless, Opening to what the personal would call Infinite and what the cultic magic might call AN INTERVIEW. JMG expresses it thus,

Everything we know, however large or small, is finite. The sands on the beach or the falling raindrops may be beyond our ability to count, but a little logic shows that however large their numbers might turn out to be, the count will eventually reach an end. No matter how large a finite number we may choose, it falls short of infinity by an infinite amount, and the Cabalists of old saw in this absolute distinction a metaphor for the difference between the universe we experience and the ultimate Reality. Here the symbol is a Vastness like that of interstellar space, and the Veil lies in thinking this implies that the Ultimate is like the things we know, only bigger.

If you read the Dalai Lama and his admirers on neurotheology, you will find that experienced meditators — the enlightened — have been put into MRI machines while meditating in these ways, and their brain patterns on the physical level were very odd. Not just sleeping, but certain parts of the brain damped down while others overactive. One part of the brain that was damped down was the part that controls the capacity to perceive opposites. Hot/cold, good/bad, high/low — all of these toggle switches went down and all was an neurological unity.

My own experience of doing the theurgic ritual work of the companion volume Circles of Power is that, in meditating beyond the Veil into the Supernals, when one loses the inbuilt toggle switch, the capacity for normal ethical thought goes down.

I call it, SHALL I SIT ON THE CAT?

You catch your cat sitting in your favorite chair for the seven thousandth time. He knows he should not be there. The right and honorable thing to do is to recognize that he is limited, being a cat, and to shoo him out. It is, in fact, part of the ritual of your relationship. One of the reasons he sits there is to enjoy your scent and the normal sense of his owner, his person, the one he lives with in affection. He gets shooed out. He shakes himself off. Then he leaps onto your lap as the two of you sit in that chair that is, reasonably, both of yours.

But here you are, beyond the Abyss, your brain is damped down, and you see no reason to endure this crapped-out mess, so you sit on the cat, teaching him a lesson, and breaking his ribs in the process, because he is not expecting anything but normal human functionality from you.

In fact, as you stand there in a godlike neurology, it is clear that, with vast eons of MIND in your grasp, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever if this cat ends its earthly existence beneath your butt. In fact, as an IMMORTAL GOD, albeit a budding one, it is your responsibility and Divine Right to learn what you need to about the great polarities around you, and it may be one of your Lessons to take this life that is in your hands and is of no real consequence.

The thing about males is, when left to their druthers, they cause all things to be THE STOCK MARKET, which bubbles up and up until it crashes and down it goes, the mere whisp of Reality in the world’s money, yet is said to possess Animal Spirits. Groups of the Cabala — and THE GAME, which is the New Cabala — being largely male constructs, do tend to behave like that, and in the Animal Spirits of the cults, which usually revolve around the workplace, there is the outrageous DARE of the Big People to Go For It!

We must imagine that more than one person has sat on the cat, causing this situation, and now we are All Dirty. It is what is.

That is how it is beyond the Abyss if you have not slowly and carefully evolved up from Malkuth, treading the path of the Serpent of Wisdom, and obeying the ANGELS as they tell you how to fix your life — and your magic — all the way up the Tree, until you can command the powers of the Supernal Triad in righteousness.

I will not say that I have entirely prevailed. There is this thing called the “Peter Principle,” which dictates that we each rise to the level of our own mediocrity — then come down a peg. And that is exactly where the Adepti of the Golden Dawn find ourselves, while the Thelemites are MIRED IN TELEVISION SIGNS after all that Greek. (Thelema is clearly the “Ambassador Lodge” around here and clearly has to bear more of the weight of THE GAME for local Hermetics, perhaps for the entire West Coast.)

And so we come to the sense of Limit or No Limit, because you do need to pull your brain back into normal functionality, look at your furry friend who is engaged in the normal game of your relationship, purring contentedly in your seat, knowing he is in trouble, and push him off, for he is not supposed to be there.

The third of the Veils is named AIN SOPH AUR, which means Infinite Light. One of the oldest and most universal of all symbolisms describes the world of ordinary experience as darkness and the spiritual realms which underlie it as light. Like the mental image of the cup, the image of spiritual light is based on experience as darkness and the spiritual realms which underlie it as light. Like the mental image of the cup, the image of spiritual light is based on experience: the energies of certain states of mystical awareness are very commonly perceived by human beings in the form of physical light. It’s for this reason that terms like illumination and enlightenment are used to talk about spiritual experiences. In Cabalistic thought, the experience of inner light is a signpost pointing toward the attainment of the higher realms, and — as these realms offer a less constricted way of approaching the hidden Reality — light has been used to symbolize that Reality as well. Here the symbol is, of course, Radiance, and the Veil lies in mistaking that Radiance for the unknowable Existence it signifies.

My own direct perception if this is that my eyes could be closed, but there is a light resembling a flash of lightning inside my head, and inside of that light, are ideas, commands, information, knowledge structures. The theory of the Hundredth Monkey, which is reasonable, holds that ideas are spread by some kind of mental transmission that could be called telepathic. When enough people have an idea, it spreads like magic to other places, even in species that are not human! Hence the term, Hundredth Monkey.

This is what seems to happen when the Inner Light appears. There are people in the light and they have ideas. Vast realms of knowledge can be accessed in the Light. We can learn and operate more quickly and with greater capacity — if the Light is proper. In the great areas of creativity, people hanging around together naturally made everything superb. The Inner Light can intensify and extend this. Hence the hunt for genius. However, the ideas may not be in my best interest, however, especially if bad people have gotten into the Cloud, but it is impressive that I am perceiving them as an inner light.

It is also, and fundamentally, that the magic was done with different techniques. Trust us, they implore. It’s not that complicated! My response is, You have no idea how to DRIVE THIS CAR, because every time they get the upper hand, it is a wreck! Furthermore, in the Golden Dawn, I seek to learn that I may serve. A great part of the responsibility in the functionality of lodges and our magic is 1) continuing to do it; and 2) teaching people how to do it. There is no physical plane lodge here, but we are able to teach in the WATER setting, discharging the responsibility to serve the magic. It may seem expensive to those who would like the energy in their work, but that is the price of our capacities, which are sober and not involved in physical (or even mental) sexuality, and therefore of considerable goodness in polite society. A BUSINESS SETTING.

Newbies can do crappy things when instructed by the hundred monkeys, especially when the hooligans gang up and put on a big Jesus mask. As I recall, “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21).

This is why we have to start our journey of enlightenment with secure footing at the bottom and work up, painstakingly and gradually. There will be false steps and mistakes, and as we rise in power and capacity, there are trials at every step of the way! No one is perfect, and the Cabalists are not going to explode on the scene and be absolutely right, especially if we are solitary workers. At the same time, solitary workers, such as are guided and assisted by Paths of Wisdom and Circles of Power, are able to take a step back and say, THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES.

We need to fix the new magic. It is fantastic and wonderful, and it is in, but it is not foolproof.

NOTES

Who Shot Who on the Embarcadero?

The Hundredth Monkey Effect