lapis occultus

the most advanced techniques in several esoteric disciplines involve neither folk magic nor intellectual exercises*. instead, they are focused on working with the energy body through the most immediately available interface, the physical form, that is, the body and its immediate environment. through balancing certain energies, specific fields are created &/or enhanced. by this means, one is capable of attaining anything from physiological effects (rapid healing, an enhanced metabolism and immune system, increased productivity etc.) to more abstract goals (such as finding it easy to obtain objects or life circumstances that one desires). specific examples of such techniques might be alchemy (both 'internal' and 'external') and other kinds of ecstatic ritual.

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*: this is not to belittle these practices which have their importance in/& their place, but rather to place them into a larger context; magic may work for everybody, but that is more a problem than one might think - the whole trick is to know when to expend energy & when simply waiting for things to work themselves out will save one a mountain of repercussions, & no amount of reading or mere reflection can resolve this dilemma.

clear

echo "Knowledge is Power"

The lead of Galen taken from the land has already begun to break apart. The fires of hell reneged on their pledge and turned on their master, the pipes that conduct the waters have been transmuted to electrical copper.

Locked symbols conduct for powerful estuaries. Urgrund.

the emphasis, then, is on an embodied practice rather than mere theory. however, this is not simply practice for its own sake. the objective here is twofold: first, to gain experience with the manipulation of certain subtle energies either through a mediating substance or even directly; and second, to obtain a link to what has been given various names including inspiration, insight, conversation with ones holy guardian angel, &c.

Underground the boiling toil biols into viols over the future. Poured from the heavens as We GoDS see fit. The ciphers are ours to decipher and retrofract into the present - ThE Prescience of Future Knowledge. Born a dark sign in a dark worlds light to inform the Worthy of the cOMing Flight. We who flee back to knowledge of GoDs Surfeit will revel once again in the aeternity of balanced light and deaf death black unpierced by a point of green. But WE know that the GREEN iS ThE blaCk Whole.

Unto ours is given a needed drink. lead is ours to keep as ours, ours to turn to Gold globules of the hidden Earth. Let them not eat, who do not seek gold. For ever a dreadful yeast poisoning our unsullied source. We know one HalF of the Force, and all of hating the farce. We are the undefatigable hierophants, who see our own reflection as gold in the heart of the leaden world of the unliving.

some have theorized that the philosopher's stone is a mere metaphor, a term used to describe an intangible experience. this is surely a lazy reading which ignores the strange precision & the extent of the sophistication of alchemical terminology. what is more likely is that the stone is indeed a substance, but perhaps not what one normally imagines when they have matter in mind.

there is more to matter than walls and ceilings. from the perspective of quantum physics, its even possible to think of light itself as a subtle kind of matter on the boundary between substance and energy. if we look at things from this angle, the stone can be thought of as a certain energetic configuration of fine matter (or, what is perhaps the same thing on another level, energies) that may only exist in potential in the preinitiate & that would require refinement, accumulation, controlled combination, and so forth. thus is alchemy understood to be an advanced psychophysical technology rather than being concerned exclusively with either materials or with psychological experience*.

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*: there are many different paths one might take towards this realization, from the Chinese school of Neidan to the works of Bertiaux (in particular, the lesson papers of the monastery of the seven rays) and Kenneth Grant.

The untruth of MANs meanings are unveiled to those worth to seek through the dross that is the human race. sOME WILL B e tUrned into lesser metals for our cause, our life - that refuses to die when surrounded by dEAth. We Learn while other's play useless games designed to steal their time, and we all know time is money - so get that GolD in your soul or DO AS YOUR TOLD. Wirklichkeit uber alles fur alle zeit, fur die UltraMenshenheit. Wan wir komst auf ein verstandlichkeit und dan wir will die UmWelt haben. Alle zeit mein ziegfrauen und heilMenschen... alle zeit. Wie nicht haben ein zymbol oder dann #!. Sha-bang!

repetition

However many times I try, I die. However many lives I live, they fly in to the abyss only to be catapulted back through the eye of the storm into the flashing light. Torn asunder by the thundering, smoldering, coal-black clouds, my voice is lost in the din. Recast then in a common form, attuned to a common existence - molded like red clay, a sounding vessel resonating with the void, the humming line between is and isn't. Between the maybes and the knowns and the unknowns, all along transmuting each of the three. An eye, an oval, an egg; a scroll marked by owls and scrawled by knaves.

the great work is not an end-point but a process, although it is common in the beginning stages to assume the former case. in fact its nature resembles the maintenance of a dynamic system within a certain range of values.

cycles, repetitions. easy enough to miss - one has to be looking. this is what Castaneda calls stalking. one looks out for the most subtle of changes in ones environment. truly an endless task, as the more attention one pays to one's reality, the stranger & less commonplace it will seem, until one suddenly finds oneself wondering how they could ever have mistaken this magical place for an ordinary world. but back to our cycles.

some have hypothesized that consciousness itself is a fluctuation, a binary alternation, a flickering, a flashing light¹. so perhaps its not so surprising that life itself also seems to move through cycles, expanding, contracting, succeeding, failing, & so forth.

isn't it unfortunate that everybody tends to move through these cycles? not particularly, as this is the way of nature. everything that lives moves cyclically through its existence. people are in fact at an advantage here, as they can realize this fact & work toward making the most of it. but this isn't simply a matter of contemplation (though that's a good start) or a matter of pointless superficial changes. what is required is a radical deconstruction of one's every action to determine what one can do without, energetically more than on a mere material level. although on the surface this might seem like another expression of some ascetic ideal, what is intended is perhaps the use of similar methods, but towards almost the exact opposite objective. one needs to develop the ability to avoid pointless wastes of energy and time that serve no purpose other than as trivial distractions, & to then redirect this energy to whatever one has decided are worthwhile pursuits. the point is that the effort saved through this process can provide a boost that can then be used to enter a whole new world of cycles. a magician is nothing other than a person who has attained a certain experiential understanding of these energetic facts, & can effectively use them to alter their own, or another person's perception. 

& yet, even in this new existence, this new reality, there will eventually arise an inevitable death (at least if this is understood in its technically accurate form of a radical change to one's state of being). why does one have to 'die'? Castaneda speaks of an assemblage point², which is a way to denote a particular trajectory of perception of the world. from this perspective, success is simply the fixation of the assemblage point in a position that one, or one's society, might consider successful. one might imagine this to be a final objective, at least until it is attained. at that point it slowly loses interest until one finds oneself almost bored with their own success.

from this perspective, it is irrelevant whether one is successful at any given thing or not - or, as Sartre says in Being and Nothingness, "it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations." The ultimate point is not to become fixated on any one point of perception, but to become flexible, able to take on whatever appearance or traits are necessary in any given situation. to experience everything that it is possible to experience. only from such a perspective is one capable of forming a comprehensive understanding of the world, & this is the position of a true initiate.

1: it could even be that consciousness is a kind of flow, that moves through but does not belong to anyone in particular. in this case, the self is simply a surface, or the 'set' through which this force acts; anything else is but an illusion caused by the fact that habits, including mental habits (or 'memories') persist.

2: In Castaneda's esoteric anatomy, a person is energetically experienced (but not, as some have erroneously judged, visually apprehended) as a spheroid of glowing energy. the 'subjective' experience of a person's perception of the world depends on where on this shape the assemblage point is located.

transcision

The father is the sun and
the mother is the moon.
The things they move together -
Makes the waters move.

The moving waters start to swim
And make the metals mingle;
Make the mix that's all life's flow,
And then begin to tinkle.

The tinkling's sound does all rebound
And make the colors bleed.
The bleeding's fade does all arrange
And make the mind aflame.
The fire flies in face of time,
And all but wick remains.

  

(& as I cut through or as it cuts through me I see)

day is calculation. separation
the night is intuition vision
& dusk is a doorway not from or to but through

a person is as a machine
energy the fuel, habits feelings thoughts the parts
& I am everything. or I'm nothing

geometries of initiation

prelude (on sacrificing oneself to oneself)

hints & stirrings is how it begins, voices whispered through the wind. that much was expected, the magician preparing, practicing daily. then it expands, like being swept up into a tornado. looking back, the magician is incapable of pointing to when, how or where this'd happened. all of a sudden. lost in a reality that intersected with this at an incomprehensible angle; or not so much an 'angle' as a half-remembered dream. even now, immersed within the experience. there are two of them, the one who slays & the one who weeps, mutters helpless. (& yet the magician is neither...)projections. the magician has mastered the art of sending forth credible projections. the Master is perhaps a projection & nothing more; a gateway, an opening for a force of the sort that finds names as amusing as they are irrelevant. & yet. the magician has never been so alive as she has been since her death. since she stopped moving in a straight line, started going round in circles. ever since the echoing instant within which she embodied these strange geometries of initiation

...

crossroads

The experience is plain and simple and can be described to a certain extent, yet it is often spoken of using metaphors and obscure language. As if the experience were not already obscure enough, in that people rarely have it. They often say, "be in the moment". Well- if a person is ever "in the moment" enough, they might stop giving that advice so freely, because when a person is fully in the moment they arrive at the crossroads. We have the perception of time that we have because we lag behind the center of the moment. There is even evidence that light creates "cools" into the elements and systems that comprise our reality because light itself is slowed in a way through it's immersion in what some are calling the "zero point field". The reason why we human beings lag behind time to such an extent is because of our thought processes and our use of language as we think. Our thought processes create the sense of linear time because they create a lag. When a person is fully aware, is fully in the moment, thinking ceases, and then time literally ceases to exist. The world around a person stops moving and becomes like a still, rather than a moving image.  If one looses his or her focus and regains it, or starts to panic, time can rewind and replay itself within one's subjective awareness. This applies to sound and other senses as well as vision. At the same instant that one's environment becomes a still image, the future and the past begin to flow into the present- into the center.  One can remember, in that state, as far into the future as into the past- which is, in that state, not particularly far. It is like two rivers flowing together into the center. How is this possible- when we know that different people's activities fit together, and that there is a kind of linear time? One can speculate that, because on some level we are made of pure light (and if at the speed of light time stops for the subject) then that might be the solution to this question- as other people seem to imply- for instance Castaneda.  If one then enters into this center- into the crossroads, then the world undergoes "Inversion"- that is, the outside becomes the inside, and the inside becomes the outside.  One is then aware of one's inner-world with the same intensity as is normally focused onto the exterior world. The outer world is experienced as well, but as something internal.

electromagnetic initiation mandala, earth chakra

it is possible to understand the energy body from a physical perspective. however, this would have almost nothing in common with the materialist-empiricism of today. after all, the body is not simply a mechanical machine, but also an electrical one - charged signals govern everything from thought to muscle movement. thus, instead of a superficial understanding of the body as a simple mechanism, we would now need to account for all of its interconnections to (pretty much) everything else (or, more particularly- those things which are possessed of an electromagnetic component. this would include stars, planets and perhaps even other 'bodies' which are by some rather difficult to discern: we might hypothesize the existence of entities which exist solely on the e.-m. level, without a body as it is usually experienced. might this be the basis on which to ground a scientific theory of spirits? it is left up to the interested reader to pursue this further...). thus can we compose an endless web of associations and correlations which would have almost nothing in common with classical mechanical conceptions.

...

It is at this point that one can ascend the "world-tree", which is described in various ways in a great deal of literature from modern accounts of shamans, to Hermetic teachings. The elements may be experienced as one ascends through the "wheels", or chakras. This experience of the elements is a very powerful one- quite a bit more powerful than ordinary awareness. One has an experience of the classical elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire that is so intense that the 'Moods' of these elements are as powerful as say, all of the emotions that one has ever experienced packed into these particular 'Moods'. The elements are experienced as having many gradations within each of them- this we might call the "Moods of the elements". These moods are very distinct and particular, and progress in a predetermined way- like the slow ticking of a clock is the regularity of the changes within each element. Each change can seem to last practically an eternity and yet is a regular "Ticking" behind the changes. In this phase, people who are dead may be encountered by the individual. They are encountered as images of themselves who are known by their elemental signature- a kind of a code- having to do with which moods of which elements comprised the sum of their personalities- not their inherent selves, but their personalities. Living people can also be contacted in this way. One can then see through the eyes of a person with whom one is familiar, and one can rifle through their memories, etc.

 

 electromagnetic initiation mandala, water chakra

we have wavelengths. some move fast, others move more slowly. the basic structure of one's frequency is reflected in their body, and even more in their behavior. within these general parameters, one's frequency falls within a particular range determined by their mood and emotional state. we can picture 'hot' emotions (anger, acute fear, etc.) as having a shorter wavelength, and a higher frequency than a calm or 'at rest' position. except that in doing this we are not simply using our imagination: there is a scientific schema which does just this, using brainwave frequencies as a means of reference. one can be said to empathize with another if they are, as it were, 'on the same wavelength'. but, there is no a priori reason for restricting this 'other' to a person (vide supra, re. all the different kinds of bodies that possess electromagnetic signatures).

...

After ascending through the elements, one reaches the fifth element, the vanguard- the point at which one is actively participating in the creation at the very edge of reality. One then, at some point after a seeming eternity, returns to one's baseline state through a process that seems to be very similar to the experience that one has when one enters the world- that is, as a biological entity. However, at least at first, on returning, one will be in what is called the mystical state, at least to the point that within one's environment, there is no subject/object distinction, though the "observer consciousness" can still be active. Most commonly, one's self includes everything within the limits of perception. One is then only a part of Oneself. 

 

 electromagnetic initiation mandala, air chakra

regarding seasonal shifts, & their effects on behavior. these latter tend to vary from the physiological to much more subtle internal psychic modifications. the magician uses these to their benefit, adjusting with the movements of the seasons, effectively dancing with them. on a scientific level, we can almost certainly hypothesize explanations for this. perhaps its electromagnetic shifts, slowly altering the balance of sensitive brain chemicals. in fact, there's a scientific article on evidence of solar geomagnetic seasonal control of the topside ionosphere (which a simple web search might uncover) and another on Diurnal, seasonal and inter-annual variations in the Schumann resonance parameters (also publicly available online) to list just two examples. if its been conclusively determined that drugs (& even certain foods) alter (balances of) particular brain chemicals, would it be such a stretch to postulate an electromagnetic system that interconnects the planet with its inhabitants? (such would be a solid scientific basis for the so-called gaia hypothesis of Lovelock et al.) & why stop there. perhaps this is exactly the kind of scientific grounding that astrology supposedly lacks. after all, where there's gravity, there's magnetism.

...

There are a few things that should be mentioned in connection to this phenomenon. For one thing, it is a relatively common experience for shamans who use psychoactive sacraments. Also- it seems to be what Castaneda called "stopping the world".  When one approaches this "place", if one is around other people, their movements become jerky, and the whole thing has a rather low-tech quality as if a film maker didn't have access to very high quality editing equipment. Castaneda very accurately describes this aspect and notes that there is something fundamentally disturbing about the nature of this jerky quality of time. One wonders why he would be so vague about other aspects of this experience. Another thing about it is that as one approaches it, one loses the ability to think in words. If someone is talking to you, you will lose the ability to understand what they are saying. One can use this aspect of it to bring another person into this experience by what we might term the technique of "Prattling and Mumbling". Begin to speak very distinctly while sort of prattling on and on.  Then gradually slow your speech and make it increasingly indecipherable while not letting on with your body language that anything has changed, all the while  concentrating your power into yourself so as to create a kind of a gravity that would pull the other person into the same state as that which you are entering.

You will lose the ability to talk to yourself about what you are experiencing, and this by itself can be disturbing. But, this can allow a lot of power to flow into a person, and from a subjective point of view, the surrounding world can seem very chaotic, like the powerful emotions and perceptions that one might experience when laying closely next to a rail of train tracks while a train is passing. There are reliable keys to deliver this experience which we will leave it to the reader to discover. Anyone who has these "keys" can experience this if the amount of the keys is sufficient. The person, knowing what has here been written and having the keys can experience what we have described. Read it and think on it while the keys turn the locks. The reader should however be warned that this is an experience of what lies beyond death. Only those who truly desire to die in life and live again in a much changed state should consider this. One will not be better at one's job by doing this.  One will have a lot to think about- for the rest of one's life- though it gets easier with practice.  At first it lays heavy on the self and impels one by great Need to learn about what has happened to him or her.  This can be a distraction from any pragmatic goals one might have. So heed this warning because it is not for affect, nor is it an understatement. 

 

 electromagnetic initiation mandala, fire chakra

the most effective (perhaps the only) initiations are self-initiations. from another perspective, one might say with equal justification that the circumstances that lead one to initiation are like a force of nature that grabs hold of whom it will, without any volition on the part of the 'victim'. more interestingly, it might be both of these simultaneously, and it might well be that even this is irrelevant. what matters is what lies beyond this point, when one inevitably begins the study of these deep structures, these subtle

Vodou dreamachine schematics

i: axisward

thesis

Does reality have a center? If so, it is not somewhere 'out there' but within, subjective rather than objective. The world is like an onion - if I modify my behavior, I can access another level & thus inevitably become a different person: it is not the essential fact that one acts uncharacteristically when out of their element - it is rather that the easiest means to almost limitless change is to alter one's habits & thus, in time, to enter a novel environment. 

antithesis

The first spirit to be called in Vodou ritual is invariably Legba, who is charged with opening the gate to the spirit world, or not opening it as the spirit decides. Legba is in this sense the central spirit in Vodou, & is even called the poteau-mitan or center pole.

...

ii: encountering the ally

synthesis

a dream of young Petro Legba, showing me a golden spiral of all these versions of myself encased in bronze; they were laughing, crying, laying down asleep, etc in permanent stasis. We were underground and the clouds and sky were moving above this opening in the grass. His skin was in perfect molding, as if covered in oil, eyes fierce like Erzulie Yeux Rouge.

self-portrait as Legba Petro

an encounter with the wise old man archetype, right out of Jung, though you might just as well say it was Papa Legba. he had a sort of machine in his hand, a translucent sphere with similar spheres concentric within it. & he wasn't talking, but somehow communicating the idea that 'its all circles', or perhaps 'it goes all the way down'.

...

iii: postscript - a dream within a dream, shaped like a machine

Is the world a machine, do we live in a clockwork universe? This position is often contrasted with that of life as a dream, but is it possible for both positions to be true simultaneously? One can see each perspective as the endpoint of a series which also traverse questions of whether spirits are independent entities or aspects of oneself, & whether laws, such as those of physics, can predict human behavior. Perhaps an example can illustrate this further: Lord Kelvin is reported to have said, at the end of the 19th century(!) that "[t]here is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement". This unverified quote is often referenced to point to our ever-evolving knowledge of the world. Except there are two ways to interpret the statement. We have to keep in mind that Kelvin was working from within a Newtonian understanding of physics (i.e. classical mechanics) - Einstein's theories on relativity (with their electromagnetic, as opposed to a particle-based, understanding of beings) weren't published until early in the following century. So while Newtonian physics may well have been at its completion at this point, a whole new way of approaching the discipline was yet to begin.

It is most likely that our original question simply doesn't have an answer because it is badly formed. Thus while we can say on a conceptual level that 'all is one', experience is perhaps by definition of difference & variety. Even if there are experiences of a unitary world, these tend to be exceptional rather than being the norm. Likewise, while we can ultimately say that spirits are aspects of oneself (in the sense that they are primordial archetypes residing in some collective consciousness & which often appear to assist, to guide people), when one actually has an experience of interaction with these entities, just as when one interacts with another person, the emphasis tends to be on just how different from us they are.

Each position is true to an extent, or more accurately within specific situations. Existence itself can be understood as a dream that one, or rather the whole world, is having, but this does not in itself prevent an active engagement in the logic of the dream. This happens to include certain processes that can be calculated with a clockwork precision. The art is to know when to behave based on which of the respective understandings, a skill that can only come through a process grounded in direct gnosis.

notes: for an esoteric bushido

bushido /ˈbuʃiˌdɔ/  (trans. 'way of the warrior')  
unwritten code of the Japanese feudal warrior class, the samurai

 -

"For the magician, every day is a battle to hold back the powers of evil"

 - Michael Bertiaux, VGW

The magician-as-warrior can be found throughout history & in diverse areas between which there is often no possibility of a historical influence. Examples can be sought in ancient warrior societies which were simultaneously initiatory magical groups from the Vedic cults of Indra/Mitra-Varuna, Mazdaism, to Nordic Odianism. The Templars could perhaps be listed here as well &, through their influence, various contemporary groups. The idea has also appeared in fiction, for instance in Grant Morrison's Invisibles. 

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"The greatest enemy will hide in the last place you would ever look"

-Julius Caesar 75 BC

Thus begins Guy Ritchie's most underrated (& perhaps not coincidentally, his most profound) film, Revolver. While there are many reasons a student of esotericism would benefit from watching it (consider it a companion piece to this text), what we will focus on is the understanding of the 'enemy' that the film explores at length. Who is this despicable, evil enemy? Where can one find them & how is one to proceed once they do? The film's interpretation of this quote is that the most formidable opponent one will ever encounter is none other than oneself.

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"Use your perceived enemy to destroy your real enemy"

 - from Revolver   

Evil is nothing other than that which obstructs our path (either individually or collectively) to being all that we can be. Carlos Castaneda, writing in The Fire from Within, outlines the idea of petty tyrants. From one perspective, they are people who seem to have an unjustified power over the magician, but from another, they are (for the most part unconsciously) trying to help one to go beyond oneself. This is simply a different angle on Jung's understanding of the shadow as a canvas upon which people project their own shortcomings, except there's nothing simple about the consequences of this energetic maneuver. From the dominant sociocultural perspective, the 'enemy' might be symbolized by the feminine (as well as racial & other kinds of others), death & the unconscious world of dream. As for the view that if certain others are eliminated, suppressed, silenced, then one will be truly free: in following this to its inexorable conclusion, one will secure a slavery to their own fears & delusions. By shutting out or by labeling the other as 'evil', we just end up where we are now - in a world full of utterly meaningless hatreds.

The magician in working with left-hand-path techniques actively seeks to forge links to the shadow world & thus to problematize the distinction between waking life and dreaming, even death. The long-term objective is to integrate both light & dark, to weave a tantrik synthesis therefrom. If initiation never ends, & initiation implies ordeal in the form 'if you want to attain to x, you must do y', then the occultist is certainly a kind of warrior. We each have a path we're on, & 'enemies' are but people who are advancing us along our path by pointing out flaws in our existential position. We will not be so naive as to say that all is well with the world & conflict can be invariably avoided when it is quite possible that the opposite is true. Still, we can minimize unwanted & unnecessary frictions, thus saving energy for essential causes. One must chose one's battles. In fact the more one does so, the more one comes to feel energetic lines connecting them to their objective, with the supposed 'enemy' standing right in the middle, ready to test the initiate. In this case one can do nothing other than to adopt the attitude of a warrior & to fearlessly go forward into the unknown.

 -

dedicated to the people, the spirit(s), the land of Japan

Reality as music

or, what if the gods are a frequency? 

In vodou, some guedes are legbas, & some legbas are guedes, but not all legbas (or guedes) are guedes (or legbas). Dig? This can seem counterintuitive if we perceive them as discrete entities but it makes a lot more sense if they're particular energetic frequencies between which there is some overlap. Hindus hold that creation manifested as a vibration, the ubiquitous AUM, and even the neoplatonic conception of emanations can be visualized as ripples from some center. Nor is this some mystical fluff that one can repeat to hypnotize oneself after a long day at the office. Quantum mechanics, perhaps the very foundation of hard science, admits that particles can be measured, and thus actually behave in terms of either waves or particles. The question, then, is why does our experience exclude waves, rhythm, frequency in favor of solidity, mass, quantity?

Remedios Varo, The flutist (1955)

The short answer is that we perceive discrete entities out of sheer habit. Still, it is possible to attune (pun intended) to this perspective; indeed, it is one of the main objectives of esotericism. One can make a list of techniques demonstrating this, & to pick examples representative in their diversity we might cite whirling dervishes, invocations of gods, vodou drumming. Fair enough, but why bother? What are the benefits of using these techniques, of  accessing these levels of awareness? We might respond by quoting Nietzsche, who writes that "without music, life would be a mistake". Or we can attempt to sway others by pointing out that there are particular interests who stand to benefit from utilizing piles of resources standing in reserve, and that what is to their good is not necessarily to everyone else's. Ultimately, though, one who has experienced being in the flow arrives at the understanding that this work, or play, is its very own reward.

remembering Kenneth Grant

featuring Michael Bertiaux on La Prise-des-Yeaux, Carlos Castaneda on seeing & a special guest appearance by William Blake

Grant's work is everything that esotericism is at its best - bold, creative, almost athletically eclectic, & lacking the all-too-common narcotic qualities of much else in the field. Many of his detractors, taking a cue from the notorious Crowley quip (specifically: "you cannot be content with the simplicity of reality or fact; you have to go off into a pipedream", from a correspondence) see Grant as a fantasist. Never mind that this may have been based on a single incident, or that the man, or beast, was sometimes condescending even to his closest associates. Against this misconception there is Grant's own position, first articulated in The Magical Revival & expanded upon throughout the Typhonian trilogies, that the gnosis is, at least in its original, undistorted form, physical. About as down-to-earth as you can get, that.

William Blake, Hecate (1795)

William Blake asserts that "if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is - infinite", Michael Bertiaux outlines the faculty known as la prise-des-yeaux & Carlos Castaneda's descriptions of seeing are a central theme in his books. There are many stimulating similarities between these concepts which we will leave it to the reader to uncover. Suffice it to say here that they all point to a deep, immediate grasp of an intense, somehow more real reality only glimpsed rarely & fleetingly but which, with initiation, can become continuous. Making use of Grant's dictum as outlined above, one can form an assemblage linking Blake's recommendation concerning the cleansing of the doors of perception, through physiological cleansing procedures (something along the lines of the yama and niyama of Patanjali's yoga sutras, which were intended more as technical recommendations than moral injunctions) to the objective of la prise-des-yeux, or of seeing for what it is the inexhaustible, luminescent wonder of the world.