Wednesday, December 21, 2016

The Hermetic Lessons


I started the Hermetic Lessons blog to attempt to spread the material on the Metabolism of Time into the wider consciousness of the Western Mystery Tradition as well as providing opinions and insights on the practical application of magick in general.  Whilst being a published author gives legitimacy and to some extent a small (?) living (?) I don't need the money and I don't think small prints of books are the best way of disseminating ideas although I do think they can be beautiful objects.  One of the potential problems with ''authors'' and their effect on the community as I see it is the temptation to sit on ideas or research until they become books reducing the immediacy and potential range of their impact.  How many ideas died this way before they even became books?

Since I started the blogosphere has mainly died off (with some notable exceptions) in favour of magicians dicking about on facebook/tumblr or engaging in futile political rants because a) that is a damn sight easier than having to write a blogpost and b) it generates more social traffic these days.  I prefer blogging to such social media chit chat and posturing because of what it does to the relationship I have with my ideas.  I am sure there are still a few bloggers who can resonate with this. Anyway there has been a renewed interest in the blog over the last couple of months and partially I think it is to do with the lack of geunine content being produced elsewhere (again with notable exceptions).  I wish it wasn't this way but it kind of is. 

I made a post about Cellular Consciousness a few days ago which has a set of links that can guide you to what I think are the core discoveries of the Blogos and its these ideas that I am mainly trying to spread around so please help with that if you can.  I understand there is an intellectual gap when it comes to knowledge of the sciences in the occult community but have a go at wrapping your head around the ideas as they will enrich your perspective on your own innner being and how it relates to this model of consciousness.  For people who are struggling to make headway in the WMT at all or are realising that ''material'' desire fulfilment might not be the be all and end all of being involved in the mysteries I just want to give a few points of advice, I think these few things saved me a great deal of wasted time getting lost in the labyrinth.

1. Raja Yoga, Dzogchen or something similar - this should form part of your practice as early as possible.  The idea of restraining oneself from and observing other practises i.e. vegetarianism is perfect training for the will and the way in which the system then applies that will to more challenging states - asanas, pranayamas, pratayharas - finally culminating in an apprehension of the true nature of mind is vital for rapid progress.

2. Pulling  - When trying to affect the physical world around you (and I don't mean levitating stuff) direct your psychic influence through pulling rather than pushing.  Holding your fingers to your temple and attempting to push stuff about, as it is portrayed in many comic books and other fiction,  will not work at all because that is the wrong part of your brain - the frontal cortex is the seat of the will and is really good at stopping you doing things but not that useful for direct influence.  You need to use the back of your brain and the ''force'' (whatever it is) is directed into yourself (drawn in to the pineal and cerebellum) as opposed to pushed out (from the pineal).

3. Astral Body -  As discussed repeatedly throughout the Hermetic Lessons your true nature is mental, you inhabit a mental universe which is made of your sensations, perceptions, thoughts and concepts, which is in itself buried somewhere in the rest of your mind which may or not actually be in a physical body in a physical universe.  One of the easy mistakes to make when astrally projecting is that a lot of advice sites tell you to imagine your astral body rising out of your body and what this tends to do is shift your imaginary perspective to a third point where you are trying to see that body rise out of your physical body.  Lots of time can be wasted here.  Lie on your back and then pull yourself up on to the astral plane you are already in your astral body right now you don't need to imagine anything.

4. Jewish Kabbalah.  I was lucky in that I only poured a few years into the deeply flawed and logically inconsistent systems of so-called ''Hermetic Qabalah'' that the Western Mystery Tradition largely relies upon before a small band of plucky Kabbalistic mentors saved me from this massive (mostly) time waste.  It should be a no-brainer.   If you are going to study ''QBL'' then include a great deal of Jewish sources from the get go - I started with Kaplan, Idel, Scholem and Hallamish.  If you don't do this then you are perversely maintaining a kind of weird ignorance about one of the most important foundations of what you do and you need to have a good long conversation with yourself about why you are doing that.  Its bizarre and illogical so sort it out.

5. Purity.  I dimissed the notion of religious cleanliness, virginity, innoncence, etc in the WMT for a long time as unnecessary historical baggage but I see that a clear heart is fundamental to success in these endeavours and that I recieved this training from the East.  I am not talking here about Faustian pacts with spirits to get you all that bling and worldy adventure that you desire I am talking about accessing higher realms in astral form.  ''You'' are ''your'' own worst enemy when it comes to keeping ''you'' mired in 3d delusional reality and the egoic babble of anxiety, pride, malice etc will block all entry to higher worlds.  Bathing, wearing white, anything that establishes the ideas of cleanliness, openness and innoncence is practically beneficent but most importantly you have to quell that egoic noise as much as possible.  I can blame most of my failure on this and I am sure you can too.



Anyway a few things to think about and have a Merry Christmas everyone!  If you do pledge to write more in the New Year - stick to your promise this time, eh?  The next month should have given everyone who is anyone time to see the Arrival and we'll be continuing with why the two images above are closer than you think when it comes to ''exploring'' non-linear time and its relationship with language.



Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Time Travel - Fourteen Minotaurs


Not only have I imagined these games, I have also meditated on the house.  All parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is another place.  There is no one pool, manger or drinking trough; the mangers, drinking troughs and courtyard pools are fourteen (infinite) in number.  The house is the same size as the world; or rather it is the world.  However, by dint of exhausting the courtyards with pools and the dusty gray stone galleries I have reached the street and seen the Temple of the Axes and the Sea.  I did not understand this til a night vision revealed to me that the seas and temples are also fourteen (infinite) in number.  Everything is repeated many times, fourteen times, but two things in this world only seem to be repeated once: above, the intricate sun; below Asterion.  Perhaps I have created the stars and the sun and this enormous house, but I no longer remember.

The House of Asterion, Jorge Luis Borges

According to Raziel there are not an infinite variety of ''yourselves'' in different timelines only 14 variations. The vast majority of timelines and versions of you do not cohere and are effectively dead or non-existent - much like the vastness of space is mostly supervoid.  The 14 variations of you that survive have preexisting histories and you cannot change any of what happens to them - they are your 14 personal fates.  What you can do is, at certain moments in your life, use a branching moment to swap between them - like you can change tramlines but not drive the tram as you wish. Although people often think magick is about creating new realities from infinity it is really about changing tracks in a much smaller ''world''.

The 14 variations are based on the 7 planetary kingships and their 7 inverses:

  • Wisdom vs Idiocy (Saturn)
  • Wealth vs Poverty (Jupiter)
  • Fertility vs Infertility (Mars)
  • Health vs Illness (Sol)
  • Power vs Slavery (Venus)
  • Peace vs War (Mercury)
  • Beauty vs Ugliness (Luna)

They exist because they are woven out of the very fabric of story itself.*  What that means right now is that you are one of these archetypal 14 - the healthy one, the poor one, etc - and although we are all at any moment a ratio of all 14 principles, one will be king.  To some extent you are free to form an opinion on these worldly conditions - some find misery in riches, some find strength and art in the adversity of illness, etc.  The poor and sick have their adventures and their contributions to the story are as vital and valid as those of the rich and powerful.  Some choose the poor line for monkish reasons, others for revolutionary ones.  If you are unhappy with the story of your life you can change tracks to another one.

The lines are effectively woven out of a median self, an ''average'' version of you that does not exist in any of the 14 but only ''mathematically'' - for example the rich and poor versions will only be relative to this median self, for some it may be the difference between lower middle class and upper middle class or for some there may be a true rags to riches story and vice versa.

The lines are joined by robust branching moments and the way these moments manifest are significant events, which are preceded by synchronicities.  As you approach a significant event, and therefore a chance to change lines, you will notice an uptick in the number of synchronicities.  As you recede from the event this number will decrease - think the Doppler Effect but applied to timelines.**  The vast majority of yes/no decisions in any given moment aggregate towards the same robust branching moments.

FEED ANNUALLY WITH 7 YOUTHS AND 7 MAIDENS

In practising planetary magic what you are actually doing is noticing the moments to change planetary tracks and then steadying yourself on that track so you don't inadvertently swap back to another track.  For example, ''Jupiter magic'' will guide you to the wealth line and then more proactive Jupiter magic will maintain you on that track.  Although there are 14 versions of ''you'' and therefore ''you'' are still trapped by Fate, there are many different routes through them.

Although discussing Fate in this way and our very limited abilities to choose our own adventure may sound ''doomy'' in reality it is central to the way in which Zeus slays Cronus.  By embracing a ''4D'' block time perspective as opposed to a ''3D'' linear time perspective the God of Lightning (massless time travelling light) slays the God of Time (perishable ''linear'' matter).  If you are questioning what you should do next, or why you are here, what the planets are doing is realising the confounding infinity of the chaos of the universe (most of which is dead, uninhabitable or ''unrealisable'') into these 14 navigable beams which ''cohere'' because they are based on the fundamental principles of story and produce our archetypal selves.  If health is important to you then you contact Sol, if wisdom is important then Saturn, if beauty then Luna.

What will my redeemer be like?  I ask myself.  Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man?  Or will he be like me?

The House of Asterion, Jorge Luis Borges


*All of these stories also culminate in the invention of time travel which is why they cohere in the first place.
**This is important when navigating time via synchronicities.  If you are focused on the synchronicities themselves as opposed to their frequency or the significant event they are indicating you can miss opportunities to change lines.

Monday, December 5, 2016

Cellular Consciousness, the Metabolism of Time and the 231 Gates


Does a tree feel?  Does a river run?  Is a sunset sad?  Does an ocean smile?  I'm an intellectual mass of cells.  I am a clockwork of subatomic movements.  I am a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in miniature.

Fernando Pessoa, Disquiet

In order to understand the principles of the Metabolism of Time it is necessary to view the structure of your consciousness as a mirror image of the biological cells that make up your body.  The feeling of being in the body-self is the mental equivalent of the chromosomes, the feeling of the extent of your physical reach is the nuclear membrane (nucleus) within which the chromosomes are stored, the limits and contents of perception represent the limits and contents of the cell (the cytoplasm) and the cell membrane represents the boundary between the rest of your mind and the place wherein the bubble of perception is held.




The experience you are having right now in the room you are sitting is buried or nested somewhere in the rest of your mind - beyond the limits of your perception (wall or horizon) you will not find more of the physical world but the rest of your mental world.  Just like the nucleus interprets and processes the contents of the cytoplasm so you are interpreting and processing your immediate percieved environment.  The objects located in that percieved environment of the room also find their corollary in the cell - i.e. you have windows and doors like the cell membrane has gates and receptors, you have a heat and light source like the cell has its mitochondria. When you walk down the street, the appartments buildings rise up beside you like a wall of tissue along a capillary. The helixes are represented as personified hourglasses to show the link between time and the digestion of experience and the facial expressions show the transition between being a finite physical object in a 3d world to an infinite mental object in a 5d world - they show an evolution in the individual's relationship with their place in time and how in order to escape the cave you have to know it.*








When people first learn about the occult maxim of ''as above, so below'' they tend to come across this idea of a relationship between the structure of the solar system and the structure of the atom - likening the outer particles to the planets and the atomic nucleus to the Sun.  What makes the structures outlined in the Metabolism of Time more useful to us is that our cellular nature and our consciousness are way closer to home than distant nuclear fireballs or the quantum foam.  The alchemical possibilities are legion.


In order to realise a more detailed model than the outline above (and therefore one which is capable of greater specificity when it comes to application) you have to elaborate this simple view of cellular consciousness with even more parallels.  The links below are to some of the more important parts of the work on this site and it is worth refamiliarizing yourself with them before we move on.


These relationships between the cycle of cellular time and the cycle of consciousness are extremely important to us in our lives - we are very familiar with fatigue, with mania, with hunger, with lust - and these sensations are regulated by molecular clocks which are stored in our tissues and concentrated in the SCN (suprachiasmatic nuclei - a cluster of around 20000 cells situated by the pineal gland - the master clock), the liver and the genitalia.   Seeing the movements (internal and external) of your physical body as the movements of your chromosomes directly links them to the genetic dance of creation.


The 231 Gates represent all possible pairings between the 22 Hebrew Letters (code for Kabbalistic astrology i.e. principles of time) when placed in a circle (gilgalim - cycles) and it is said to oscillate back and forth generating fortune and ill-fortune - bliss and plague. Similarly the body reads its genetic information, pairing up amino acids into chains in order to create proteins to maintain the status quo against both harsh conditions and ''too much of a good thing''. A protein is released into the cellular environment from the chromosomes in the same way an action is released into the percieved environment from your physical body.  Conversely rather than being manufactured inside the cell nucleus, proteins can enter the cell from the blood through membranes in the same way an event enters your percieved environment from the bloodstream of time.  In other sections of the Hermetic Lessons we have detailed how to examine the event by its characteristics and therefore respond accordingly.

In Sefer Yetzirah the 12 zodiac signs are specifically related to the concepts of speech, thought, motion, sight, hearing, action, coition, smell, sleep, anger, taste, laughter - the essential modes of our physical body.  Similarly the 12 basic genetic rhythms cover the modes of the chromosomes as they work to maintain your life.  In Sefer Yetzirah, the 7 planets are related to the worldly conditons of wisdom, wealth, fertility, health, power, peace and beauty manifest in your percieved environment and in the Metabolism of Time we relate them to the 7 cellular organelles which makeup the structure and contents of the cytoplasm.  Finally our 3 elements of air, water and fire are related to the systems of oxygen, water and energy necessary to maintain your life.

I am handed faith like a sealed package on a strange looking plate and am expected to accept it without opening it.  I'm handed science like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank.  I am handed doubt like dust in a box - but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?
Fernando Pessoa, Disquiet


*Many years ago I performed a tarot experiment using a 22 card spread which represented these principles of cellular consciousness and used it to ''take photographs'' of my body.  Repeating this experiment daily I was surprised to watch events being digested by my body and cards of the same suit being broken down into smaller numbers in my lower body, or indeed built up into larger structures in the same way proteins are assembled.  You could watch a major arcana card move through your body in this way.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Raziel - Consciousness as Anti-Time II


How often in this age-old trajectory of the worlds, a stray comet must have brought an Earth to its end!  A catastrophe so utterly material will determine the fate of countless mental or spiritual projects.  Death, spies on us like a sister of the spirit, and Destiny... Death is our being subject to something outside us and we, at each moment of our lives, are but reflections and a consequence of what surrounds us.  Death lurks in our every living act.  Dead we're born, dead we live and already dead we enter death.  Composed of cells living off their disintegrations, we're made of Death.

Fernando Pessoa


Whilst it is nice to discuss things in general terms it is important to have a science that is capable of handling the details of fluctuation in the time/anti-time field that we experience as reality.  Time speeds up, slows down and events seemingly from the past are regurgitated into the future.  Some language and science to discuss this subject have been emerging from the dialogue with Raziel - closed time streams, pinch-points, robust branching moments, synch pings, non-realisable time, Year 0, etc - and eventually these ideas will coagulate and become one with the original channelled work on the Metabolism of Time.  These terms, drawn from the future, are part of a codex of concepts necessary for temporal navigation and freescaling.

But what can the original work (much of it detailed here in the Hermetic Lessons) tell us about where we are right now in the closed time stream?

THE METABOLISM OF TIME

From looking at the diagram of the Metabolism of Time, which details the processing of a single moment all the way up to how large groups differentiate in order to assist in the digestion of time, we would expect any period of looking towards the past - be it nostalgia, regret, grief  (2016's key themes) - to be characterised by the modes of Remembering, Forgetting and the Altered Past.  The elements of the endocrine system that relate to this are the kidneys, adrenal glands and genitalia - so cleaning the blood, fight/flight, fixed gender expression, stress control and reproduction.  The physiognomical archetypes that will rise to political dominance during these periods will be high testosterone, high adrenaline and high cortisol. Negative psychological traits that will emerge enmasse are vengefulness (adrenaline), emotional restraint/coldness/lack of compassion (cortisol) and deviancy/impulsiveness (testosterone) - the last one leading to a rise in violent crime. The world will turn against the ''individual expression'' that dominated the pancreatic period of the present-focused world (late 90s to mid teens, the Inner Mind in the diagram above) which also featured a lot of obesity, living in ''the moment'', and sugar rushes and ''return'' to a pre-egoic focus on uniformity, where fat will be heavily frowned upon, your food will be starchier/high fibre, and savings will be encouraged. In the entertainment industry we can expect a rejection of ''stars'' and a return to technical proficiency as the set of virtues required to be successful as opposed to a massive ego - the rise of the unknowns.

Hopefully the astute amongst you can understand why these elements of the biological organism (kidneys and genitals) can produce a kind of fascism.  Having been to the future there is a twist and the Wall won't be built the way you necessarily think it will.  The genuine fascist elements lie in the millenial generation of identity politikniks, vegans, Brand-esque communitarians, etc and finally emerge as eco-fascists supported by various global entities at the very latest in 2030 as opposed to the Brexiteers and Trumpeters who are all nearly dead anyway.   The eco-fascists' rise will be assisted by a series of environmental disasters mainly relating to food and water.  The de-growth world that follows will be fairly strictly regulated by international bodies and people, trained and monitored by social media, will police the norms and expectations. You will be going ''off the grid'' and living with solar powered hydroponic gardens in a grow your own food perma-culture hipster paradise but some of that energy will be siphoned off to continue to feed/fund Deep State technology.  Essentially you'll be expected to farm energy and pay your tithes. Ecological catastrophe will be used to justify the militarisation of the UN against this global emergency.   A Dharma 2.0 form of materialistic meditation spreads rapidly (there are already many many seeds of this in the yoga centres on every corner, in the corporate lectures on mindfulness, etc).

After a revolutionary phase in the initial period where the incumbent police state i.e. the one we see forming right now, executes some protesters in gory fashion, thus martyring them and forcing change (early 20's) this near future becomes extraordinarily boring although it is healthier than the current phase.  The deaths from ''climate change'' induced disaster (man-made for sure, but maybe again not in the way you think) will not be as severe as some speculate but they will be enough to galvanise and radicalise the population.  Your soy will be ethically sourced but you're not getting your hands on the cloned hearts. As far as we can tell there will be some major defection from within the Deep State towards the end of this period (late 30's), which unveils a lot of seriously advanced technology, but by then we will be getting close to Year 0 (late 40s?? - it becomes more difficult to see) when what is probably an AI will initiate the successful time travel experiment that creates the pinchpoint - a singularity type event - and floods our planet with time travellers from the future, bringing the museum/pocket dimension of ''inviolable fate'' to an end and releasing the few who can keep their wits about them into the genuinely free astral future. Fun huh?  This future is not for me although I will see a good chunk of it.  Afterwards I am heading back downstream to the 3rd  millenium B.C. I left my keys somewhere in Nippur.



What we can take away from this, if anything, is that neo-phobic and neo-philic tendencies play out or pulse as eddies and currents within the time stream of any given coherent universe, distorting and warping the above diagram as concepts are over or under-expressed with alarming regularity - characterising certain periods as future oriented (the early 1980s), some as present oriented (the early 00s), and some as past oriented (the late 10s).  The character traits that end up being prevalent/selected in the individual and in society during these periods originate in the DNA, which as we have discussed in the Hermetic Lessons, is actually a concrete form of the underlying Metabolism of Time itself i.e. the ''matter'' of your double helix is in fact time and anti-time.

I want to be clear that after my experiences in Edward Kelley's Tower and my continuing conversations with Raziel the fact that I believe the future pre-exists does not oppress me or rob my life of any meaning.  I don't feel any lack of motivation, I am happy to get up out of bed and go and do stuff - art, education, etc.  I feel that what I have been learning about the fatality of this museum serves to liberate me and underwrite my absolute freedom in the end.  When you are out of this what was a sphere will seem a flat circle, what were impossible gulfs of time will be stations on a metro and what were irreconcilable differences will be the links in the chain that holds time together.

Everything around me is evaporating.  My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - its all evaporating.  I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else.  What I am attending here is a show with another set.  And the show I am attending is myself.

Fernando Pessoa