Occult Experiments in the Home – Personal Explorations of Magick and the Paranormal_nodrm

**** ****** **Created Created by ebook eboo k converter - www.e ww w.ebook-conver book-converter.com* ter.com*** **** *** *

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

**** ****** **Created Created by ebook eboo k converter - www.e ww w.ebook-conver book-converter.com* ter.com*** **** *** *

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

**** ****** **Created Created by ebook eboo k converter - www.e ww w.ebook-conver book-converter.com* ter.com*** **** *** *

First published in 2010 by Aeon Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT Copyright Copyright © 2010 by Dun Duncan can Barford Bar ford The right of Duncan Barford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,  photocopyin  photocopying, g, recording recor ding,, or otherw otherwise, ise, without without the the prior writt wri tten en permissi permission on of the the  publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-1-90465-836-8 Typeset by Vikatan Publishing Solutions (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed Printed in i n Great Britain www.aeonbooks.co.uk 

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

**** ****** **Created Created by ebook eboo k converter - www.e ww w.ebook-conver book-converter.com* ter.com*** **** *** *

Dedicated Dedic ated to Alan Chapman. Chapman. Two mages with a lot of welly,  But which one’s Dee and which one’s o ne’s Kelley? Kell ey?

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 NTRODUCTION 

If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or  laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere. (Charles Fort, 1997: chapter 1).

The book you are holding is rooted in personal experiences. Indeed, the first essay in the collection aims to show how scientific explanation of subjective paranormal experience will often miss the point and end up destroying what it set out to define. But if science destroys the paranormal, should we not wonder whether the  paranormal was really there in the first place? This is a noble and rational point of view. However, to adopt it assumes that the faeries at the bottom of our garden possess (or ought to) some quantifiable attribute that we can seize hold of (or not) and thus state definitively whether the faeries are there. The view put forward in this book is that faeries are far subtler and cleverer. In most instances, a paranormal event cannot be cleanly separated from its effects on the witness, or from his or her beliefs. The “event” may indeed be disproved (or at least shown to be not what it appeared), yet the effects will continue to reverberate within the witness’s life, and the beliefs or misconceptions that  predisposed him or her to the experience may also persist. Put more simply: it is theories that are proved or disproved, whereas experiences themselves are simply what they are. There is no “seems” in an experience, paranormal or otherwise. I can only experience seeing a ghost; I can’t experience “seeming” to see one.  None of this is new—of course—and philosophers have investigated these issues more rigorously than will be my aim1, but what I hope is original about this  book (its unique selling point, if you like) is its use of the tradition of magick  to inform the exploration of the paranormal. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

I’ve followed the convention of appending a “k” to the word in order to distinguish this philosophical tradition (which, in the West, can be traced back to the ideas of the Ancient Greeks—see Goodrick-Clarke [2008]) from stage magic and from  popular notions of impossible super powers.  No doubt my disparagement of “science” at the beginning has halved my  prospective audience, and now the mention of magick has probably halved it again.  Never mind. This is only due to the common misperception of magick as “trickery”, “superstition”, or “devil worship”. As I aim to show, magick is a more insightful and useful tool than is commonly supposed. The discipline of magick is alive and well in the 21st century and there are more magicians active in the community than many readers might suppose. Contemporary magick is the discipline of using belief to investigate or construct realities; or, as one recent expert in the field has put it: “Magick is the art of  experiencing truth” (Chapman, 2007, 14). If science destroys the paranormal, then magick—on the other hand—is a tool for creating it. In the essays that follow I will discuss instances in which consciously  practised techniques give rise to paranormal experiences. I will also discuss instances in which unconscious practice of magick may have produced the same result. Using magick as a tool for exploring the paranormal may sound at first like adding silt to already muddied waters, or shovelling gullibility onto a waiting pile of  credulity. But mag-ick, it should be remembered, entails conscious use of belief. For  instance, in the second essay I describe how the magical technique of “remote viewing” was used to retrieve information about the scene of a possible haunting. To gain the information it was necessary to go through the motions of believing that remote viewing actually works. Yet to make use of that information and to assume that the information gained is real are two different things. The discipline of magick enables us to separate and distinguish between them. In short, it is a consideration of the meaning of a paranormal experience that often casts more significant light on what happened than attempting to decide simply whether an experience was real, because (from the subjective perspective, at least) “real” has very little meaning. The essays that follow were not written to a rigid plan, but following Fort’s suggestion at the head of this introduction they represent five arbitrary starting-points around the circumference of a single circle. The first essay discusses some first-hand experiences of the paranormal from my early life; the second explores in depth the experience of a close friend, who even now (several years later) is still affected by the events described; the third examines the ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

relationship between space, time, and consciousness; the topic of the fourth is religion and spiritual experience; and the final essay explores naturally-arising altered states of  consciousness, such as lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, and astral projection. Fort’s “circle”, his “underlying oneness of all things”, seems centred about the nature of consciousness itself. This was what I discovered beneath the experiences and ideas presented in the book. It returns in each essay, again and again. When we supplement our investigations with the tools offered by magick, what we find in the paranormal is not something “out there” but equally “in here”—or   perhaps more accurately, something that is at once in both and neither. I’ll let the essays speak for themselves and will end here by hoping that the reader finds in this book something I’ve certainly discovered to be true: that  paranormal experiences do not happen only to special people and on rare occasions. To experience the paranormal we need only turn our attention to the nature of  consciousness itself.  Duncan Barford   January 2010 http://oeith.co.uk 

 Note 1.

 Phenomenology  and Pragmatism  are two schools of philosophy that can come to the aid of a magician when he or she is called upon to defend their world-view.

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

CHAPTER ONE  My sister wore our granddad’s ghost

W

e were travelling home by train, some friends and I, when—without knowing it—I started work on this book: I asked each of them to tell me the strangest thing they’d ever experienced.

We had not got far when the stranger in the seat opposite interrupted. “You’re talking about the paranormal,” he said, “and it’s doing my head in.”

He was swigging a can of beer but seemed good-humoured. And he had a point: for a public place our conversation was rather odd. “I’m not fascinated by that stuff,” the man said, raising his voice over my friend’s story about the night her mother sighted a ghostly figure in the garden. “In fact, I think you’re talking garbage.” “Well, I respect your opinion,” I said. Some of the other passengers were pricking up their ears. “Anyway,” the man said, settling into a more conversational tone, “paranormal stuff happens to people who look into things more deeply than others. Let’s say my pen started to roll over the carpet: I would think nothing of it. But because you  are into  paranormal things, anything that happens to you out of the ordinary, you’d think: ‘Oh  My God!’   Whereas I just think: ‘Well, that pen rolled over.’ To you it means something. To me it doesn’t.” “So doesn’t it boil down to whatever is in your head is real?” I said. It was naughty of me, but without telling him I’d pressed the button on my digital recorder. (Hence the striking realism of this dialogue, as you’ve probably already remarked.) Something unusual was taking place: a conversation with a stranger, plus a ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

crowd of other passengers listening in while pretending not to do so. (A couple of them later overcame their politeness and started to chip in their comments.) “I pray that the stuff you’re talking about is true,” the man with the beer can said. “But I won’t believe it until it happens. I really pray for myself and my two kids that it is true, but I don’t believe there’s anything after death. It’s a horrible belief and I don’t want to be like that. At least you’ve got something to hope for.” “Your point of view is a strong reason to make the most of life,” I said, glossing over the fact that by not believing in something he was not actually ruling out its existence. “I don’t see why you’re put on this earth for 60 years to work away and graft,” continued the man, “and then die for nothing. I graft bloody hard and don’t particularly enjoy it. If there was something afterwards, that would be great. But if there is someone above looking after you, then I don’t understand why you have to work. My experience of life is I have to work for 60 hours a week to pay my mortgage. If there’s something afterwards, why should I do that?” What if he ran into a ghost later that night, I wondered; or if he got off the train and was abducted by aliens. (Or, at least—if he had some kind of experience that he understood in that way.) Taking him at his word, this would be all he needed to quit his  job and stop paying the mortgage. I imagined him joining his local Spiritualist church and channelling the wisdom of the Ascended Masters, or putting on a sky-blue shell suit and joining the alien contactee lecture circuit. Isn’t this precisely the fascination of the paranormal for all of us: proof   that everything we know is wrong, and the liberating realization that there’s no point in  playing any longer the tiring game of normality? “I’ve heard that it never happens to people who don’t believe,” the man said. “I had a granddad who died 20 years ago. He was one of the greatest. I used to go around his house all the time from when I was eight. If you were to tell me he would come and stand by my bed tonight, well—at first I would shit myself. But I would long   to see that.” He paused at this point and looked surprised. “Freaky, actually, because I’ve just realized that today is his birthday.” “You think that’s coincidence?” I smiled at him. “How do you know this conversation isn’t his way of letting you know that he’s in touch?” For a moment there was a look on his face that made me wonder if I’d gone too ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

far. But luckily for me he seemed to decide to take it in the way I’d intended. “Oh, don’t give me that! Don’t tell me he’s talking to me through you! Anyway, what experiences have you had?” “Well, years ago,” I said, happy to shift the focus, “I used a Ouija board to call up a spirit and …” “Whoa! Wait a minute. You don’t just go and do something strange like that. I would never   use the Ouija board. If something happened, I would shit my pants. You  just don’t do that.” “You do when you’re 13.” “What do you mean, you ‘called up a spirit’? You can’t just say: ‘Hello, spirit, here we are!’ There you go already, you see; I don’t  believe you. You cannot just say: ‘Spirit, here we are, please move the glass!’ ” Yes you can, I thought. Really, you can. But if you do, don’t count on paying the mortgage again. What I hadn’t confessed to him were my credentials: I’m a magician. Not the sort that does card tricks and saws women in half—they are “illusionists”, by the way. No, I mean the “occult” kind. You’ve heard of Aleister Crowley, probably? Well, that sort of thing. (Please don’t mention Harry Potter .) Much of the news these days is generated by secular rationalists on one hand squaring up against religious fundamentalists on the other. Or vice versa. You do not hear much about the third path, far less travelled, which treads a course between. Some regard it as the sanest alternative, although the majority—certainly those on the two extremes—view it as even more despicable than their opposite. This third path is magick, the occult. You won’t hear it discussed in the mainstream media, which is a shame  because, unlike how they would have you believe, magick is not all about worshipping Satan, dancing naked in the woods and curdling your neighbour’s semi-skimmed. Magicians might  do these things, but they do much else besides. The life experiences that forced me off the straight-and-narrow track of secular  rationality into the path of the oncoming juggernaut that was magick are the reason why this book is different from your standard “strange-but-true” pot-boiler. It was some close shaves with the paranormal that proved to me forever how reality has nothing in common with what we like to call “everyday life”. We say goodbye to our beer-drinking friend on the train at this point. We are done with him. We will leave him to his decision to believe only in what happens, ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

while he makes well and truly sure that certain things never ever will. I’m going to wax autobiographical. By the time I’d reached my thirties (I’m older than I sound) I’d settled into a steady job, working with computers, making money and feeling like a grown-up at last. Yet the more “successful” in conventional terms I became—in other words, the more stuff I owned and the more people who looked up to me—the less happy I felt. I couldn’t have said why I was unhappy. I had money and a lovely girlfriend. We went shopping every weekend and flew off on holidays. I was healthy and liked the gym. But I was also often stressed and miserable, even though my job was not  particularly demanding. I was also drinking quite a bit; a nightcap every evening, and sometimes the pile of bottles in the recycling bin was a little embarrassing. I remember the day I announced to my girlfriend I was going to explore magick. “Because I know the world just isn’t like this,” I said, gesturing at all the stuff and gadgets I’d accumulated in my home. “You’re not going to go weird, are you?” she said. How I’d come to the conclusion that what people call “reality” is actually a pack  of lies dated back to puberty when (as I’d revealed to the man on the train) I began meddling with the Ouija board. For those who have never used one, the Ouija board is sold as a sort of novelty or toy. It is an oblong piece of pasteboard with letters of the alphabet printed upon it, the numerals zero to nine, and the words yes, no and good-bye. With the board comes a  piece of heart-shaped plastic mounted on three legs, which has a transparent circle in its centre. This is called the “planchette”. The board has to be operated by a group of   people. (I’ve never got it to work on my own, although some people have claimed successful solo use.) The planchette is placed on the board and each person puts a finger on it. Questions are addressed to the board, and—here’s the strange part—it’s often found that the planchette, in response, moves —apparently of its own accord. A letter or number becomes visible through the transparent circle in the planchette, which, followed by subsequent characters, spells out a message. Many have supposed that the Ouija board is a means of talking with spirits. The board was invented in the United States during the mid-1800s when the Spiritualist craze was at its peak. It was patented in 1891 by Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard, but in 1901 production was taken over by William Fuld, whose name these days is that most closely associated with the “Ouija” trademark. The precise origin of  the board’s peculiar name is lost in legend, but one of the nicest stories is that the ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Ouija board itself dictated the name to Kennard. It was 1981 when I first used the principles of Ouija to make contact with a spirit. I remember the song Ghost Town by The Specials was playing on the TV as I sat nervously at my parents’ dining table with some friends. Today, I have a classic 1970s version of the board, produced by Parker Brothers, which a fellow magician bought through eBay and permanently loaned to me (I suspect because he’s too scared to keep it in his own house.) I did not have a proper board back then, so instead we cut out squares of paper and wrote on the letters with felt-tipped pens. For a planchette we had an upturned jar that had once contained pickled cockles. It worked just as well and scared me just as badly as any commercially-produced board. I was never certain who was pushing the jar, but definitely someone was. I never   believed it moved “of its own accord”, or that it wouldn’t stop the moment we took our  fingers away. The rational explanation for how Ouija works, routinely repeated by debunkers, is “the ideomotor effect”.1 This is the psychological principle, established  by controlled experiments, that muscular movements can occur independently of our  conscious awareness or intention. In other words, one or more members of the group  push the planchette but do not know they are doing it. Looking back, if we were truly talking with disembodied spirits, they were extremely patient and uncommonly interested in the affairs of 13-year-olds. The events that we asked the spirits to predict—who would marry whom; who would take whom to the next school disco, etc.—consistently failed to come true, with no exceptions, consolidating my impression that it was merely mortal hands at work. There was one entity who showed up whenever we used the board, supposedly my mother’s long-dead great uncle, named “Jack”. He insisted on communicating even though in life he had been illiterate and apparently had not learnt much since he had died, to judge from the meaningless jumble of letters he served up. Sometimes he hinted that more literate spirits were queuing up behind him, but he never let them take a turn. Despite explaining the Ouija board to myself as an instance of “the ideomotor  effect”, it still gave me sleepless nights. Maybe I was dimly aware of the fine line  between explanation and “explaining away”. Okay, maybe it was our muscles moving the planchette without us being aware, but then who  was instructing our muscles to move? Evidently, no one that we or the scientists who had made the experiments could locate or put a name to. Which was more bizarre: Uncle Jack steering the cockle jar, or  this unnameable “other” working us like meat puppets without our permission? My friends and I soon upped the ante. We ditched the Ouija and asked the spirits ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

to signal their presence through direct physical manifestation. At first, the results were disappointing, until one day my sister came in from school looking scared and  beckoned me away from our parents. “Touch the air around my hand,” she said. I reached out and my fingers encountered something peculiar. The space around her arm was “alive”. It felt vibrant, like static electricity. It gave me that tingling sensation you feel on the surface of a television screen, or on a rubber balloon after  rubbing it against nylon clothes. But, more than that, it was warm. The sweat glands on my hand prickled in response to its heat. “Hot, isn’t it?” said my sister. I nodded. But even as she had spoken, the sensation passed, as if my hand had  pierced a delicate membrane and destroyed it. I groped in the air around her arm, but couldn’t find it again. “It’s granddad,” she whispered. During their lunchbreak at school, she and her friends had each summoned a dead relative. Each girl’s dear-departed had manifested as a kind of thermal bangle, which had lasted—on and off—for the remainder of the afternoon. This was the first time I felt that unique rush, which I always get from bumping up against the paranormal. Many experiences expose us to the otherworldly: drugs, illusions created by various forms of entertainment, but the “feeling” of the paranormal (for me, at least) is quite distinct, composed of amazement yet also of a creeping sense of danger, because what is happening is supposed to be outside the everyday world, and yet it’s here. And it’s real . When you reach out to occult forces and receive a response, not only does it feel “super-real”, there is also an experience of sentience. To say it feels like you’ve touched something “alive” is the wrong word, but thereis a sensation that it   is certainly out there, and it knows you are here. It  is talking to you and sees you where you are. A month after my sister came home wearing granddad, I was idly rolling a couple of dice across the lounge carpet, when I wondered if they might also be used for  spirit communication. I stared hard at the little plastic cubes and mentally commanded them: Dice, I  request that you move if the next throw is a double six.  Nothing happened, of course, but I rolled them anyway. The score was reassuringly random. Once they had come to rest I repeated my command and rolled ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

them again. I don’t know how long I sat there. I simply decided I wouldn’t budge until I had a result. I’d got it into my head that the dice must   perform because I wasn’t going anywhere until they had. After I’d repeated the sequence so many times that I wasn’t thinking anything any more, suddenly I sat bolt upright. The dice had been lying on the carpet where they fell, close to each other, but had then “jumped” apart. You might argue—like the man on the train—that they simply hadn’t finished rolling yet. But it was not that. I’d allowed a good few seconds  between each roll whilst I mentally repeated my “command”. It was a movement of a couple of centimetres; exactly the kind of movement you would expect to see if two magnets had been placed side by side with their like-poles facing, so that each repulsed the other.  Nervously I picked them up and rolled again. They felt quite normal as I set them loose. Was it imagination, or did they seem to tumble more slowly than gravity ought to have allowed? But beyond doubt was the result: double six. So there it was. The most astounding, most mind-blowing paranormal experience I’ve ever had in my life: two plastic dice rolled on a carpet. There were no witnesses and it happened only once. Despite my best efforts, the dice never repeated their feat. Moving dice that predict their own score? Dead relatives returning as thermal  bracelets? Twenty years later when I decided to take up magick it was these experiences that had bubbled up into my mind. How—I reasoned—could I possibly sign away my days to a job, family life, the government, and all the other institutions that decide for us what existence is and how it should be lived, when— obviously —the reality they decree is nothing like the full story? I once talked over my dice experience with a rational friend. The only way she could fit it into her world-view was to suggest it must’ve been a “false memory”. I’ve thought long and hard about this. Of course, it’s a possibility. If she’s right then I’ve thrown away my career and filled my head with trash because of something that never happened. But the more I thought, the more I realized that the difference  between a memory and an actual event isn’t the issue, because even if it hadn’t  happened the way I remembered, nevertheless I’d lived my life since that moment exactly as if it had . That day shook my beliefs to their roots, influencing what I thought, the books I read, the life-decisions I made. So what was the difference between an accurate memory of what happened and a false one? In terms of how I’d lived my life, it had indeed been “true”. And even if I decided now that it had been “false”, the only way to do that was to make a conscious choice it had been so, and change my  behaviour once again from that point onwards. In both cases the “truth” or “falsity” of  ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

the memory boiled down ultimately to the way I chose to live my life. Truth, in the abstract, has a very minor influence on human life. That is why we should pay far less heed to both the scientific rationalists and the religious fundamentalists than they demand. For instance, it is most likely “true” that the world’s supply of oil is running out, but it is not “true” for the majority of us until we discover  we cannot buy petrol any more. At this point we might decide to change our habits. The kind of truth that has an actual impact on human beings always arises from experience. But imagine if you had the power to decide what you experienced as the truth. If  you made  a particular idea or experience true, then you could change yourself by it, and also—in effect— change the world. The reason why some people live more ecologically than others is because they experience as true the unsustainability of our  current lifestyle. They experience that truth not in some abstract concept, but in their  daily lives. Some people have developed more advanced techniques for achieving this kind of thing. They are the people we call “magicians”. They create truth from their  experiences, rather than clinging to ideas or beliefs laid down by others. This is what sets them apart from both scientists and religious fundamentalists. Susan Blackmore, a former parapsychologist (i.e. someone who scientifically studies the paranormal), wrote a memoir that takes up this very theme, but from the opposite direction. She began her intellectual career with a passionate interest in the  paranormal, yet her attempt to explore it on a scientific footing led her to disillusionment and a more orthodox scientific outlook: I was interpreting the “realness” and vividness of my own experiences as meaning that they were “paranormal” or “occult”. It is an easily made and common mistake, and it took me many years to see it for what it was (1996: 19).

What happened here was that science supplied Susan Black-more with an experience of the falsity of her experiences! Before she began looking for “proof” of her  experiences, she seems to have had a talent for reading tarot cards, and she once underwent a spontaneous out-of-body experience that lasted for three hours, during which she was able to describe bizarre visions on the astral plane verbally to her  friends, who were seated next to the body she had “vacated”. These anecdotes make me wonder whether her fascination with science perhaps hampered an innate psychic gift, or was her way of defending herself against it. Blackmore assumed her perception was mistaken. Putting her tarot readings through statistical tests, to determine if they were any more accurate than chance, all ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

she encountered was the frustration of a repeated failure to design an experiment that could conclusively rule out fraud, bias and statistical artefacts. Ultimately she was forced to conclude it was impossible to determine what she was supposed to be measuring in the first place! And indeed it is. Because a good tarot reading—or any kind of fortune-telling—  always boils down to a purely subjective experience of the relationship between the reader and the questioner. When I get out my tarot cards, people often challenge me that the meanings of the cards are so vague and general they could be applied to anyone at any point in their  lives. “Wow!” I exclaim. How much wisdom must be packed into those cards, if  they’re so universally applicable? Arguing that the tarot means anything to anyone is tantamount to admitting that it works, if what we mean by “works” is that the cards  provide an experience of truth. Anyone who attempts to “verify” the paranormal according to science is missing the point, because the paranormal overturns the dualisms on which science depends, such as the distinction between observer and experience, or between subjectivity and reality. Take telepathy, for instance: if I can read your thoughts, then how are they “yours”? If the phenomenon we seek to prove actually exists, then a person’s thoughts can no longer be confined only to one person’s experience, so something is already in  play that the assumptions of our experiment cannot take into account.2 Could a statistical study ever prove that telepathy occurs? It might be regarded as suggestive, but if one form of the paranormal is entertained then there is immediately no reason to exclude any of the others; and in that case who is to say my apparent “telepathy” is not precognition —peering into the future to gain knowledge of the answers the test subject will give? By enticing us to prove the unprovable, the paranormal makes fools of us all. When I was a student I lived for a year in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. I turned out to be the unhappiest year of my life. I shared a basement flat in Clarendon Square with a girlfriend and another  woman. Firstly, relations with our housemate broke down and then my girlfriend and I  proceeded to tear each other apart. The flat was big and seemed luxurious when we first viewed it, but once we moved in it proved damp, dark, and cold. The couple who lived upstairs could often be heard screaming and throwing things at each other. “You’ve got a little palace here,” our landlord used to insist in a thick Brummy ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

accent, when he came around to read the electricity meter. Towards the end of the tenancy he once turned up so drunk he could not read the dials. “Let’s just call it a fiver,” he slurred. Concerned that he would regret his largesse in the morning, we suggested he came back another time. That was the last we ever saw him. When we rang the university at the end of the year to enquire why we hadn’t been asked to pay more bills and why our deposits hadn’t been returned, we were told our landlord had  been found floating face-down in the river. The verdict was suicide. That flat had a cursed and malevolent air. Years later, I discovered that Aleister  Crowley had been born and grew up a couple of doors down. I doubt he was responsible for the misery that seemed to hang over the area, but I understood from where he might have acquired his urge to travel. Another peculiarity were the huge spiders, which we never saw alive. They turned up dead on the carpets in the mornings, scrunched into agonized balls. The paranormal proclivities of the place became more overt towards the end of  our stay, as second-year examinations loomed into view. One night, I was woken by a  peculiar sensation. My bed was being shaken. I lay still, wondering if it was an earthquake and waited to see when it would stop. After a minute (when it had not) I got up sleepily and went to my girlfriend’s room. “My bed keeps shaking,” I explained. A few weeks later an old school friend came to stay for the weekend. We had not seen each other in a while. We went drinking and caught up on events in each other’s lives. During the course of the evening, he announced that he was gay. That night, after he had gone and I was asleep, the bed started shaking again. Due to the alcohol, this time I simply couldn’t be bothered to get up. Thankfully, in the morning it had stopped. I sometimes suspect that most tales of the paranormal fall into a category like this one, where the usual categories of “subjective” and “objective” blur together in our experience. Imminent exams and my friend’s sexual revelations: these were disturbing circumstances, possibly the root of both experiences. It certainly felt to me as if the bed were being shaken, yet—on that first occasion—it stopped as soon as I got out. Maybe our old friend the “ideomotor effect” was at work again. Quite possibly, my own body provided the physical force for the shaking, yet once again it was that unknown “other” who provided the will and inspiration for the usual inscrutable reasons. Psychology can take us a certain distance towards what these events might ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

signify. If I’d omitted my description of the circumstances that led up to the shaking bed (“weird flat”, “unhappy days”, “exams”, “sexual revelations”) it would have been completely inexplicable; not substantial enough even to form a story worth telling. As it stands, there is a possible “motive” here for the shaking: my unconscious emotional response to an upsetting environment. Yet why it took the form of a vibrating bed, and what was achieved or expressed by this, remains obscure. Another personal experience is perhaps more illuminating in this respect. It took   place between the moving dice and the shaking bed, on the eve of an A level examination when I was about 18 years old. I was nervous and unable to sleep, which served to make me even more anxious about my probable performance in the exam. To make matters worse, the family cat had managed to escape from downstairs, where she was usually confined at night, and had come into my room. I heard her paws on the carpet as she crossed to my record player, and then (as was her habit) she began sharpening her claws on the back of the wooden speakers. I suffered the noise for a while, but when there was no sign she was going to stop I got up and turned on the light. Immediately, the scratching stopped. I bent down to pick her up from behind the speaker. Only—there was no cat. When I checked later, she had been downstairs all along. But something   had made a sound like an animal with paws across the carpet. Something  had scratched and bumped behind the speaker. Indeed, my sister in the next room had also heard the noise. I checked thoroughly all around, but found no explanation. Psychoanalysis provides us with a useful notion: the “ symptom”. Certain cases of mental illness arise, psychoanalysis declares, because in the unconscious lies an urge that is in conflict with social mores, or with the interests of the sufferer’s conscious personality. This urge is repressed by the conscious mind but it remains active in the unconscious and may lead to the formation of a symptom. For instance, imagine that someone did not want to sit an exam, even though it was vital to his future. In a case like this a symptom might be formed: the urge to flunk  the exam would not be allowed direct expression, but by manifesting instead as some kind of illness it might be able to make itself heard. If the symptom were severe enough to prevent the sufferer from sitting the exam, then it might even realize its full and secret intention, albeit by a roundabout route. Some of the girls in my sixth form sat their A level exams with their arms in ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 bandages. One of them had woken in bed and discovered she had scraped the skin off  her arms while she was asleep. After she had shown her injuries to her friends, a couple of them woke the next morning and discovered they had done the same. The anxiety of these girls had taken on quite a direct manifestation. Perhaps my anxiety was also making itself felt. Luckily for me, it hitched a ride not upon a  bandwagon of self-harm, but upon the idea of a ghostly cat. Our cat was a playful, mischievous creature. She sat and lazed on pieces of   paper even as I was trying to write on them. To her my pen was a toy. She had a  personality that ideally suited her to become the kind of double-edged symbol (“domestic pet”—”untamed”) that psychoanalysts since Freud have uncovered at the root of many a symptom. Perhaps my anxiety that night manifested itself in the form of  an unruly moggy. We can call those noises I heard an “hallucination” if it makes us feel  better. In magick, however, there is a concept closely allied to the psychoanalytic idea of the symptom, but it demands a radically different mind-set. It is called a demon. Aleister Crowley wrote: “The spirits of the Goetia [i.e. demons] are portions of  the human brain” (1995: 17). Contemporary magicians, such as Lon Milo DuQuette and Christopher S. Hyatt, often make even more explicit the links between psychotherapy and demonology: Psychology … deals with people’s fears and doubts. Psychologists label many of these fears as  pathology. P sychologists have carefully followed in the footsteps of the P riest, who in his non-scientific  but simple way labelled these things as evil or demonic possession. The average clinical psychologist is no more scientific than the priest  (2000: 11).

Despite its technical-sounding terminology, psychoanalysis is widely disparaged as “pseudo-scientific” by the more sci-entistic branches of psychology. Part of the reason is perhaps that the aims of magick and of psychotherapy are strikingly similar: both seek to help the individual gain control over and make sense of his or her experience. The magician seals himself inside a magic circle, recites incantations, evokes demons and makes a pact with them, harnessing their power to his will. The psychoanalyst’s approach is not so very different: her “demons” are the patient’s symptoms; her “magic circle” is the formal relationship with the patient, governed by the rules that regulate the practice of psychotherapy. Foremost among these rules are those that discourage therapists from sexual relations with their patients. Because of its powerful sensations and emotions, its intense effect on consciousness, sex has long been used by magicians as a tool for  injecting energy into or “raising power” for any kind of endeavour. The way that ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 psychotherapy also seeks to maximize erotic tension within the therapeutic relationship, by ensuring that it remains unconsummated, is a technique that might have  been lifted straight out of a book of spells. Louis Culling, in his occult classic Sex  Magick , writes at length on what he calls “Dianism”: the magical use of a sexual experience in which climax is intentionally avoided (1992: 21–49). In one particular  type of magical working, climax is postponed in order to maximize ecstasy, so that the magician’s partner can assume the elevated form of the “Holy Guardian Angel” or  “ideal self”. In therapy, similarly, because there is no possibility of consummating the relationship, every little word, gesture, and interpersonal incident becomes highly charged, filled with significance, and in this way the patient’s fantasies are stoked until they blaze. The equivalent of the magician’s “incantations” is the conversation between the analyst and patient, which draws the patient’s unconscious to the surface. The “evocation of the demon” and the “bargain” made with it occur as the analyst encourages her patient to re-enact within the consulting room his habitual ways of  relating, with the aim of replacing unhelpful behaviours with more effective patterns of  action. Ramsey Dukes has written on how we can work creatively with our “personal demons”. He advocates a technique that he calls “consciousness sharing”. If we project our human moods and motives onto external objects, abstractions or situations—for  instance, onto malfunctioning computers, the stock market or “my inability to find a decent job”—then we will have “reaped a whole universe of meaning and metameaning” (2005: 28). In other words, by treating external phenomena as real and alive we heighten our  awareness of them and most likely increase the respect and intelligence in our manner  of dealing with them. This is where we arrive at the advantage of dealing with “demons” rather than “symptoms”. For all its lowliness, we respect the power of a demon; we recognize that if we could harness that power for other ends then it would  be to our advantage. However, we are also wary of becoming too friendly with something that will damage us if not properly controlled. If we choose to regard the demon merely as a metaphor for our personal psychological hang-ups, the dynamics of  the relationship remain fuzzy. But what   made the scratching noise behind the speakers? What   moved the dice and shook the bed? Another advantage of a “demon” is that we are not committed to internalizing the experience, the way that psychotherapy invariably does. The difference between magick and therapy is that, for mag-ick, truth lies in experience, whereas therapy is concerned with questions of “meaning” and “interpretation”. The ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

therapist traces the meaning of symptoms back to the unconscious, over and over again. In other words, issues on the surface are exposed as being the product of issues hidden at a lower level. It is all “about” issues. Magick, on the other hand, enables us to experience issues directly as something else—as a “demon”, an “angel”; as something other .3 A paranormal experience might be regarded as an instance in which personal experience becomes so intense, or so different or alienated from ordinary consciousness, that what we regard as “internal” spills into the “external” world. If  this sounds far-fetched, a friend once told me about an acid-trip in the woods with friends, during which the trees rewarded them with ready-made staffs that dropped from the branches into their hands. When the drug wore off, they were still holding them. The inner experience and the external world had become inextricably interwoven under the intense experience of the drug. All cases of synchronicity  (a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung to describe “meaningful coincidences”) possess this quality of a blurred boundary  between the mind and external reality. It prompted Jung to invent another special term,  psychoid ,4 to describe this level at which the mental and the physical coincide. Magick  appeals to this level and aims to immerse our experience within it. Psychology shuns it with horror, associating it with hallucinations and psychosis. Of course, there is always the possibility of natural explanations for seemingly  paranormal events, and these should not be discarded where they can be determined. When trying to establish the truth of an experience it must be admitted that there are always other possibilities. Maybe it was indeed the family cat that made those scratching noises behind the speakers after all. She never did enjoy being shut inside at night. Perhaps, in her frustration, she had astrally projected herself upstairs.  Notes 1.

  The term was coined (1852) by English physiologist and naturalist William Benjamin Carpenter. 2.

 I recently read about an investigation into telepathy where one of the experimenters noticed a charming correlation: that positive results were recorded only on those days when birdsong was audible inside the laboratory (Foxx, 2006. See sleeve notes: “Thought Experiment”). 3.

  The philosopher Ken Wilber uses the terms “translation” and “transformation” to discuss this difference (1996: 46ff). As is well known, to change yourself through ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

therapy takes years. This is because (in Wilber’s terms) therapy merely “translates” our issues between unconscious and conscious; Wilber’s model suggests that this “translation” is simply movement of issues within the same level of personal development. Magick, on the other hand, encourages “transformation” by presenting us with our experience as something other . Magick can provide a much faster track for  self-development, although it is probably fair to admit that the effects may be more volatile. 4.

 “[W]e do not know whether that we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the  border we distinguish from the physical as psychic …. They may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience” (Jung, 1936).

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

CHAPTER TWO A nice place to meet dead people

F

or reasons that will become obvious I’ve disguised names, dates and locations in the story that follows. It was told to me by a close friend, whom I’ll call  Karen. The narrative is based mostly on notes she made in her journal at the

time.

It was a Sunday evening in early autumn, 2006. Karen remembers it was a warm day and that she was on her way to the building where she used a shared computer to  pick up her emails. She was working on a particular project and expecting an important email that she would have to act upon as soon as it arrived. She did not relish the thought of this, and had put off checking her email for as long as she could, but now she accepted it was time to get stuck into what needed to be done. Karen lives in Brighton. This much I haven’t disguised. She was crossing the road, near St Peter’s church, whose grubby white edifice dominates the flat area in the city centre known as Grand Parade, a few hundred metres from the seafront. She looked up and saw a friend of hers—we’ll call him Dave —who skidded to a halt on his bike. “We both said ‘hi’,” remembers Karen, “and he looked pleased to see me. We stood and talked about things that were happening to us just then, which is how I know it must’ve been that time of year. I mentioned that I’d taken up kundalini yoga and talked about the business project I was working on. He mentioned he was into seakayaking. He told me this was great in the summer, because he’d bought a summer  wetsuit, but he was scared of the winter because he didn’t think he could afford a winter one.” Karen and Dave talked for about 20 minutes until Karen felt the unwelcome pull of that important email. She glanced up and down the street, wondering if there might ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

**** ****** **Created Created by ebook eboo k converter - www.e ww w.ebook-conver book-converter.com* ter.com*** **** *** *

 be a café open at a t this time time on a Sunday Sunday,, but she couldn’t couldn’t think think of any. any. Aft A fter er they they had talked for another ten minutes she bowed to the inevitable: “I’ve got to go.” Looking back, she remembered how disappointed Dave looked when she said these words. He had been cycling towards the sea but she had not asked where he was going. After they parted, she remembered thinking it was odd how Dave hadn’t commented on her new hairstyle; she had drastically shortened her hair after wearing it long for years. All her friends had commented on how different she looked but Dave did not seem to have noticed. Also, in the months that followed, his slightly extreme use of the word scared  word scared  to  to describe how he felt about the onset of winter lingered in her  memory. But at the time, she simply continued on her way and picked up her emails. It was in February the following year that things took a strange turn. Karen, having stopped off again to read her emails, was reminded of her last meeting with Dave. “I just thought to myself: ‘Well, it’s probably time I saw Dave again.’” It was not unusual for months to pass without them seeing each other. They had met as co-members of an organization that ran various projects. They had both worked on one particular project that supplied a community service to city residents. Both of  them had enjoyed the activity it involved them in, and were disappointed when the  project’  projec t’ss fundin funding g was cut and and it was wound wound up. Karen was still a mem member ber of the the parent organization, in a different capacity, but Dave had moved on. Although they enjoyed each other’s company and were always pleased to see each other, their infrequent meetings generally happened by accident. Karen had a tough winter. A close business associate died unexpectedly before Christmas and the loss hit her hard. There was also a spate of deaths among people associated with the organization where she had worked with Dave. An acquaintance called Graham had killed himself, and a female colleague, Kerry, had died of a heart attack. Karen dropped into the organization and was talking with her colleagues about the people who had died, when another colleague, Jo, said: “Oh, and Dave Jones has killed himself.” Karen did not place the name at first, partly because she was not sure of Dave’s surname, but also she was not sure how Jo could have known Dave, because they had not worked on the same projects. But then Jo mentioned how “Dave Jones” was always on his bike and interested in sea-kayaking. Karen remembered there had been two men named “Dave” on the community project, but she was suddenly extremely worried worr ied about ab out her friend. friend. The next week she took along a photograph of Dave. As Karen herself related: Jo said: “No, that’s not him,” but I discovered later she thought I was pointing at someone else in the

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

**** ****** **Created Created by ebook eboo k converter - www.e ww w.ebook-conver book-converter.com* ter.com*** **** *** *

 picture.  picture. E ven so, itit continu continued ed to worry me, me, so I doub doublle-checked with with Jo J o and then then she reali re alized zed her mistake mistake and said: “Oh, it might   be him.” Susan—another worker—was there and she knew Dave well. She looked at the picture and said: “I think it might be.” She suggested I talk to Beth, someone who worked closely with Dave. So I went to Judy, who’s a manager, and asked if it was possible to get in touch with Beth. The next week I took my photograph to Beth. She said: “That’s definitely him.”

Karen was suddenly confronted by the brutal fact that another of her friends had died. Everyone who had heard about Dave’s death had mentioned, so far, that he’d killed himself by an overdose. But how could she be absolutely sure he had died? “Beth had access to Dave’s records,” explained Karen. “She couldn’t tell me any details but she mentioned that he died in Janua in January ry 2006 . ‘That can’t be right,’ I said, because I saw him in October 2006 .” .” Karen and Beth decided that the “01” of January in the date of Dave’s death on his record must have been a mistake for “10” October. However, Karen’s investigation did not end here. Although she and Dave had not been very close, Karen was distressed to discover he had ended his own life. Part of her felt guilty that she’d not been a better friend. It was unlikely, but she could not help wondering that if she’d made more effort perhaps he would have opened up and talked about whatever was on his mind. In any case, she wanted to find out if there was a memorial memorial where she could visit vi sit to pay her respects. respec ts. Confidentiality rules kept getting in the way. First, she went to the remaining administrators of the community project. Officially, they declined to tell her anything,  but unoff unofficia icially lly they they conf c onfirmed irmed that that a “Dave Jon Jo nes” had worked on the the project projec t at the the same time she had and that he had died. She also wrote a letter to the only remaining manager of the project at the time she and Dave worked there, but received no reply. Karen rang Beth again and discovered that in the meantime Beth had made contact with Dave’s doctor. Once more, the strange piece of information resurfaced that Dave had died in Janua in January ry 2006 , nine months before  before  Karen had met him on that Sunday evening. Again, she wondered whether he’d really died at all. Karen was having sessions with a psychotherapist at this time, for issues related to post-traumatic stress. She explained the situation to her therapist, who advised her to visit the register office at Brighton town hall. By now it was March 2007. Karen visited the register office towards the end of the month and when she came away there was wa s no esca e scaping ping that that something something strange strange had happened. Dave’s date of death was officially registered as 28th January, 2006. When Karen explained to the receptionist that she had seen and spoken with Dave in October  ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

**** ****** **Created Created by ebook eboo k converter - www.e ww w.ebook-conver book-converter.com* ter.com*** **** *** *

of that same year, the receptionist looked doubtful and explained that the date of death is verified by two people: firstly by a doctor, who writes out the death certificate; and secondly by another witness, who formally registers the death. Because of the circumstances surrounding Dave’s death, the second witness was the city coroner. If  the date were wrong then two professionals had both made a very unusual mistake. “The same day, I talked again with my therapist,” said Karen. “We went over the conversation I’d had with Dave. My therapist commented on how it had no fantastic content. There were no fantasy themes in it. It was simply a conversation; not the kind you’d make up as a memory to someone who had died, and it was consistent with events at the time I remembered it to have taken place. “My therapist told me that she had done some research and had uncovered other  cases in which people had seen people who had died, with no pathological indications.” It seemed Karen had joined the ranks of these sane, waking people who (unwittingly in Karen’s case) had met and spoken with the dead. But Karen did not leave it here, either. She was determined to prove to herself beyond doubt that Dave had   died. She phoned the cemetery where Dave’s funeral had been held and was advised that the date of the funeral had been 11th February, 2006. Officially, the cemetery was not supposed to release any details, but the person on the phone kindly informed Karen of the name of the street where Dave had been living, and this matched what Dave had told her in their previous conversations. “It felt like it wasn’t real,” Karen said, when I asked how the experience had affected her. “You can’t see dead people. It’s a fact that, socially, you don’t see people once they’re dead. In other cultures it might be acceptable, but not here.” Karen’s realization that beyond our culture there might lie a means of dealing differently with what had happened pointed a way towards her personal reconciliation with these events. But before we get to that part, our story takes an even murkier turn. My curiosity had been aroused by the area of the city in which the encounter had taken place. As soon as Karen mentioned where she had spoken with Dave, it hardly seemed surprising … In his book Daimonic book Daimonic Reality Realit y (2003), Patrick Harpur adopts a holistic approach to the paranormal. Ghosts, UFOs, crop circles, fairies, even pumas sighted in the British countryside, he argues, can all be approached as facets of a single phenomenon that is neither real nor unreal, but which presents itself in various forms on the  borderline  borderl ine between both. These “daimons” “daimons” and the the “daimon “ daimonic ic reality reali ty”” they inhabit inhabit are ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

**** ****** **Created Created by ebook eboo k converter - www.e ww w.ebook-conver book-converter.com* ter.com*** **** *** *

a permanent feature of human experience, Harpur suggests. Their existence will never   be objectively objectivel y proved, pr oved, for as one type type of manifestation anifestation becomes extinct extinct (“fairies ( “fairies”” or  “ghostly giant dogs”, for instance, which are now rarely seen) newer forms emerge (“alien abductions” and “the Beast of Bodmin”) suggesting that human beings and  planet Earth Earth herself are never without without them them in some some form or another. another. As well w ell as occupying occupying a conceptual conceptual borderline borderl ine between subjective subjective and a nd objective, Harpur’s daimons like to appear at locations that have a similar ambience: Daimons notoriously favour boundaries—what the anthropologist Victor Turner called liminal (“threshold”) zones. These may be within us (between sleeping and waking, consciousness and the unconscious) or outside us—crossroads, bridges, shores. They may be at certain times, between day and night, at the witching hour, at the turn of the year. Caravan sites or trailer parks often become especially haunted … perhaps because they are liminally situated between town and country, habitat and wilderness. At any rate, everyone knows a place of enchantment … Here, the laws of time and space, matter and causality seem attenuated; and we glimpse for an instant an unseen order of things (2003: 49).

Karen had met Dave as summer turned to autumn, as the afternoon became the evening  —and on a Sunday Sunday evening, evening, at exactly exactly that that tim timee of the the week w eek Douglas Douglas Adams described descri bed as “the long dark teatime of the soul” (1982: 4). It was at a spot in the city beyond the northernmost tip of a grassed area, known as Victoria Gardens. The “southern” and “northern” sections of Victoria Gardens are not much to look at these days. Hemmed in by the busy roads of Grand Parade and Gloucester Place, they are little more than grassy traffic islands. Looking back through my journal, I see it was September 2006—a few weeks before Karen’s encounter—  that that my my attention attention had been bee n drawn draw n to the the very ve ry same area. ar ea. There had been concern in the local press over the high number of deaths in the  bus lanes that that run throug through h th this part of the the city ci ty:: three deaths deaths and more more than 20 injuries in in only seven years. The road layout is quite complex, yet the circumstances made me wonder if something unusual were not at work. Many of the victims were long-time residents who knew the area well, but for some reason, in broad daylight, they were stepping in front of buses, mostly double-deckers: It happened on a pedestrian crossing and our information is that she crossed against the green man light and the bus had priority at the time ( Argus ( Argus,, 1st September, 2004). Family and friends cannot understand how a man who was so meticulous about safety was involved in an accident … Witnesses said he walked in front of a No 2 bus … against a red pedestrian signal ( Argus,  Argus , 22nd November, 2004). The driver pulled away on a green light just as the woman stepped onto the road ( Argus ( Argus,, 30th January, 2006). [A witness] said: “She stepped out right into the path of a single-decker bus coming from her right. The driver did not have time to react at all” ( Argus ( Argus,, 1st March, 2006).

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

It is believed [she] may have walked out in front of the bus as it turned … ( Argus, 8th August, 2006).

I decided to do some magical work that might help prevent further deaths, but first it had to be determined whether there was anything at work that called for magick, or  whether it was simply up to the council to make the road layout clearer. I gathered together a group of magicians to undertake an exercise. We would launch our astral bodies into the area and investigate on the astral plane to see what was amiss. We had derived our method of working from two sources: one modern and one a little more traditional. The modern source was “remote viewing”, a technique developed from research by the American physicist Hal Puthoff. During a remote viewing session, a subject—generally a person with established psychic ability—is assigned a “target” (an object, person, or location) from which he or she retrieves valid information by extra-sensory means. Remote viewing has attracted much interest and controversy since its development in the 1970s, due to the amazingly high success rates claimed by  participants and the fact that its development was funded by the CIA over a number of  years. Since then, claims of its reliability have become submerged beneath a mass of  conjecture and counter-interpretations.1 In any kind of psychic work, establishing a link  with the target of investigation is regarded as helpful. The participants were shown a map of the area and press cuttings of the accidents. Beforehand, I walked through the area at midday with an audio recorder so that each participant could also listen to sounds from the site. They were then invited to lie down, the lights were turned low, and some incense was lit. Our more traditional source for this working was Aleister Crowley’s instructions on astral travel: Let [the student] imagine his own figure … standing near to and in front of him … Let him then transfer  the seat of his consciousness to that imagined figure … Let him then cause that imagined figure to rise in the air to a great height above the earth … (2006: 185).

The participants were guided through Crowley’s visualization and then a six-digit set of “co-ordinates” was barked at them, with the instruction: “Go for it!” The co-ordinates were another idea borrowed from remote viewing. Researchers discovered that results improved if participants were presented with the concept   of an exact location, even though the numbers bore no actual relation to any ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

geographical area (Schnabel, 1997: 363, 377). As might be expected from an activity such as this, the experiences reported by the participants were wildly at variance with one another and not a little bizarre. One  person saw a man without a head wearing a suit; someone else saw a white slug-like creature under the ground that refused to cooperate; another saw black-skinned people under the road who stared at him menacingly. However, there were interesting common themes: some described vortices or whirlpools of energy that were putting pedestrians into a dangerous trance. Most remarked on some kind of subterranean entity or energy. The area looks like a part of any city centre, urbanized and busy with traffic. But when I visited it again and peered more closely, the more incongruous its balding  patches of greenery began to seem. Maybe a little renovation was all that was needed to create a different impression, but Victoria Gardens was starting to look less like a  park and more like a wasteland. If there were any truth in Harpur’s idea that the supernatural favours liminal spaces, it was becoming less remarkable that Dave had chosen to talk with Karen here, nine months after he had died. The history of the area turned up further information. “It is undoubtedly because of the swampy nature of the land,” wrote one historian of Brighton, “that [the area] was never built upon, and remained broad open spaces throughout the centuries, so that we now possess the mile-long chain of green gardens and lawns running … to the sea” (Musgrave, 1981: 21). Settlement at Brighton dates back to before the Norman invasion in 1066. Yet in 1780, this area was still wild and leafy enough to inspire the Duke of Cumberland to turn out a stag upon it—although the huntsmen were disappointed by the quality of the chase (Musgrave, 1981: 79). It was not until the end of the 1820s that the whole area had been drained, landscaped, and enclosed into gardens and recreational areas (Berry, 2005: 32). The swampiness of the land was caused by the Welles-bourne, sometimes referred to as Brighton’s “lost river” (Carder, 1990: entry 201). This is an intermittent stream that once ran above ground, directly through the area. Remnants of it still flow,  but—as my remote-viewing colleagues seemed to have intuited—these days it follows a subterranean course. The main body of the Wellesbourne ran along (now beneath) what later became London Road. It was joined by another stream that followed what is now Lewes Road. The two streams still flow into each other beneath the surface of the street, only yards from where Karen spoke with Dave. Various commentators in the fields of parapsychology and “earth mysteries” 2 have noted a correspondence between sightings of ghosts and the nearby presence of  ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

underground water. Tom Graves, building on the work of T. C. Lethbridge, has  proposed a unique theory of apparitions based on this. Using a dowsing rod, Lethbridge claimed he could detect various kinds of “concentrations in the earth’s field”, which he classified according to the type of spirit that traditionally might have  been supposed to inhabit the kind of landscape where the field was detected: “‘naiad’ for waterfalls, springs and streams, ‘dryad’ for trees and woods in general, ‘oread’ in mountains and deserts, and ‘nereid’ in or by the sea” (1986: Chapter 6). Graves notes that (apart from oreads, whose existence he doubts) all these spirits depend upon the  presence of underground water. Victoria Gardens, a grassy area with trees, close to the sea  and with an underground stream, would provide a possible habitat for all three types of spirit. Water, suggests Graves, has unusual and so-far inexplicable properties. 3 The atoms in a water molecule, he argues, do not form a straight line but, typically, a shallow angle of around 140°. This angle, however, is highly susceptible to change—  not merely by physical forces, but also by means that appear decidedly magical. He refers to an instance in which a blessing spoken over a sample of water apparently changed its molecular angle by 20° (1986: Chapter 8). A recent resurgence of these ideas can be found in the work of Masaru Emoto (2005), whose photographs supposedly demonstrate a physical effect upon the molecular structure of ice by speaking certain words over it, or exposing samples to  people experiencing particular feelings, or playing different types of music nearby. However, Emoto has received widespread criticism for his lack of scientific controls and it might be best to approach his work as “photography” rather than science. Yet whether or not water is susceptible to human feelings, there is evidently a tendency for   people to believe it might be so. Even before its inclusion among the classical elements of Aristotle, water had long been associated with emotionality, intuition, changeability, and vitality.4 In the case of apparitions, Graves regards water as the equivalent of “a  photosensitive emulsion” (1986: Chapter 6). In water that flows freely, any stored image would immediately lose its coherence, but water locked within the soil might fulfil its function differently. At a suitable location, an emotional experience may  become imprinted upon the environment. The experience may then be retrieved by another person at the site in a future time. Graves constructs an analogy between this model and the technique used for producing a hologram. He suggests his theory might account for the “multi-dimensional” qualities of a haunting, which may include experiences of sounds, feelings, memories, and solid-looking imagery, rather than simply a two-dimensional form. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

My research into the geography of the area had revealed that the location satisfied a number of these criteria. The accidents in the bus lanes also took on a different meaning in the light of Graves’s suggestion that “hauntings” can be dangerous: [T]hey wait around like tape-recordings of very loud noises, to be set off by a trip-wire or a hidden beam; and they’re dangerous for the same reason and in the same way, in that they take you by surprise  because you’re not ready for them, not aware of them … A moment’s anger in one year by one person, it seems, can cause a car crash in another for another (1986: Chapter 6).

The visions of the participants in the remote viewing exercise, of vortices of energy and underground entities seemed enticingly significant. But in one clear respect, it was obvious I was pressing Graves’s ideas into a service that they could not fulfil, because Karen’s encounter with Dave was not  the “replay” of a past experience. The hologram analogy is appealing, but it does not really hold. For instance, if  “standing water” provides the photographic plate then what provides the “laser beam” essential for rendering a holographic image? Prod the analogy a little and it becomes apparent that that is all it is—an intriguing metaphor. But if the “hologram” is a metaphor, maybe the process Graves tried to describe is simply a metaphor too? I mean this notion of the standing water bending its molecular structure in sympathy with a human experience nearby. Indeed, when he came to consider cases of indoor hauntings, with no convenient water source, Graves was obliged to stretch his theory. He suggested that “quartz or quartz-like crystals in  building-stones” provided an alternative medium to water. Yet water and “quartz-like crystals” are obviously two quite different materials with contrasting physical  properties. If water and quartz can both be claimed to store human experiences, then this must be because of some property they share. Physically, this property is not obvious. But what does forge a strong link   between them is a series of metaphorical   connections. Crystals, like water, are clear,  perspicacious, and bright; a sequence of metaphorical attributes also commonly assigned to consciousness. In magick and shamanism the link between quartz and consciousness has a long history. Initiatory traditions among Australian aboriginal tribes often include the insertion of quartz crystals into the body to facilitate “the transformation of  consciousness from physical to psychic levels” (Lawlor, 1991: 324–325). Quartz is accorded similar correspondences among shamanic traditions in South America and South-East Asia (Eliade, 1989: 50, 52, 350). Perhaps, then, what Graves is searching for, in the costume of Western empirical ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

science, is simply the principle of linkage itself   between inner experience (consciousness) and the external world. Someone with whom I discussed Karen’s story raised an interesting point. Imagine (he said) if we had access to CCTV footage of the area. (Given the extensive coverage of CCTV in our cities, it is quite probable there was a camera overlooking the area at the time.) What would the camera have captured as Karen stood talking with Dave? Would we expect to see a woman chatting to a spookily indistinct figure; or a woman talking and gesticulating all by herself; or—more prosaically—just Karen walking past, without stopping, on her way to pick up her email? There is almost no chance of gaining access to the footage. (Imagine the response once we’d explained the reason!) But of the three possibilities above, it’s the last that seems to me most likely: just Karen walking by. I think that the appearance of a dead man in the street would put too much strain on the usual habits of physical reality to prove feasible. Karen’s encounter is therefore unlikely to have taken place in physical reality. But perhaps it occurred in another   place, in Harpur’s “daimonic reality”, or the realm that Jung referred to as “psychical reality”: It may well be a prejudice to restrict the psyche to being “inside the body”. In so far as the psyche has a non-spatial aspect, there may be a psyche “outside-the-body”, a region so utterly different from “my”  psychic sphere that one has to get out of oneself … to get there (Jung, cited in Harpur, 2003: 33).

Once again, we find ourselves wondering whether a paranormal experience is a “getting out of oneself” of precisely the type that Jung describes: a merging of the inner  and outer worlds (which, at root, are revealed as joined) so that one becomes indistinguishable from the other. Jung is not the only psychologist to have harboured this idea that mind can be “out there”. It may surprise some readers, but towards the end of his life Sigmund Freud arrived at a similar view. It is more widely known that Freud took a longstanding interest in telepathy and even wrote some papers that tentatively assumed its existence (Freud, 1933). However, among notes discovered after his death are these enigmatic sentences, which perhaps indicate that Freud would have taken these ideas further: Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is possible. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it (Freud, 1938: 299).

Freud does not seem to be implying here that mind and material reality are necessarily ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 joined , but he does suggest that they have significant properties in common. As we cannot directly see our own eyes, so our mind cannot directly know itself, and among those self-characteristics it may not be able to recognize are the qualities it shares with the outside world: in this instance, extension in space. If the mind has spatial attributes (as Freud suggested), or if mind and material reality are joined (as Jung insisted), then we no longer need “water” or “quartz” as a material, causative agent in hauntings. We no longer need “holograms” as a metaphor  to hang a theory upon, because if a haunting is the linkage between an experience and a  place, and if mind is spatial or joined with space, then a causative model is unnecessary. A haunting is simply mind manifesting in a particular location. It has often been remarked how our metaphors for the mind are shaped by whatever technology happens to be predominant at the time of writing. At the turn of  the 20th century, the mind was like a camera; subsequently it has been compared to a telephone exchange, a computer, a hologram. These days, ideas from quantum physics  provide our comparison of choice. Perhaps it is simply better to assume that the mind is like a metaphor . As in a metaphor, so in the mind concepts are brought into unity and similarity. Like an outrageous conceit   (the literary term for a metaphor that joins together wildly diverse ideas), the human mind is the mysterious link between spirit and matter, the cosmic and the mundane. Mind is like a metaphor; the only metaphor in the whole of  creation that may, in fact, prove literal. From this angle, the presence of underground water where Karen met Dave need not be regarded as a cause of anything, but as a synchronicity —Jung’s famous “acausal connecting principle”. What the underground water supplied was not a physical medium, but a material embodiment of how deeply Karen’s encounter permeated into her soul. The water did not cause; it meant . It meant “depth”, “feeling”, and “life”. Its  presence indicated that here was an experience so deep that it passed from being experienced as “psyche-in-here” to “psyche-out-there” and entered Karen’s awareness as if from the outside world. We have arrived back at Harpur’s definition of liminal zones: those crossroads, wastelands and transitional spaces that the paranormal seems to favour. It favours them  because they are a synchronistic component of the experience, a correlate of the  blurring between psychical and physical reality. Jung relates a famous story of how a patient was telling her dream of a golden scarab. There was a tapping at the window, which Jung opened. He caught a beetle as ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

it flew into the room: “the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our  latitudes” (1952: §843). He went on to suggest that our understanding of a synchronistic happening can be assisted if we approach it as a dream rather than a “real” event (1952: §845). If we turn to the reports of our remote viewers, we already have the equivalent “dreams” to hand: a headless man; people under the ground; subterranean currents and energies. The imagery recalls the River Styx from Greek mythology, the boundary  between earth and the underworld. If Karen had told us she’d dreamt  of meeting a dead friend in such a place, Jung might have amplified the contents of her dream by drawing comparisons with myths of heroes descending into Hades to encounter and assist their  dead companions. Sometimes, in these myths, the hero does not even realize that the friend has died until meeting them there. (The sad encounter of Odysseus and Elpenor  in Book 11 of The Odyssey is a prime example.) But as things turned out, it seems that Karen passed on the opportunity to dream and instead had the experience for real. During their posthumous conversation Karen mentioned to Dave that she had taken up kundalini yoga. This is a form of yoga now commonly taught throughout the Western world, yet it differs from what most people recognize as “yoga” because of its inclusion of visualizations, mantras, and meditative exercises among the sequences of   bodily movement. Indeed, the stated aim of kundalini yoga is to awaken the energy of the “kundalini serpent”, which lies dormant, coiled three and a half times about the base of the spine. Sets of exercises (called “kriyas”) encourage the serpent to rise, stimulating seven successive “chakras” (or ”energy centres”) on her way to the highest chakra, which is located just above the crown of the head.5 However one chooses to regard this explanation, it’s fair to say that kundalini yoga places a unique emphasis on emotional well-being and spiritual development, as well as bodily flexibility. Another activity that Karen had recently taken up, but which she neglected to mention to Dave, was the practice of magick . From what I could gather, she had bought some books on the subject and in a low-key style had started to explore the effect of various rituals, invocations of gods and goddesses, and mystical systems such as tarot cards and the Kabbalah.6 Some might say that Karen had set herself up for the strange experience she subsequently underwent. But as seems clear from her reaction and her rational investigation of the events, she certainly was not inviting it. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

At the time that she was confronting the fact of Dave’s death, she had recently completed the performance of a kundalini yoga kriya for healing, which she performed each consecutive morning for 100 days. This is a method recommended by kundalini teachers when a practitioner wants to work on a particular bodily or spiritual issue. One hundred days is an impressive period of time to sustain such an exercise, and implies a significant degree of willpower on Karen’s part. Regarding Kabbalah, she was experimenting with visualization exercises. These were based upon “The Tree of Life”, which is a diagrammatic schema of the whole of  creation. It represents how Creation manifests from the Godhead (at the “top” of the tree) and then overspills into ten successive “vessels” (or “sephi-roth”), each increasingly more material and removed from Divinity. At the very base of the tree is the sephiroth known as “Malkuth”, which corresponds to the earthly, sensate world. The exercises that Karen followed enabled her to “visit” within her imagination a chosen sephira.7  The means by which this was achieved were extremely simple:  burning a candle of a particular colour, some chanting, and the visualization of a “guardian spirit” who would allow admittance. Then, sitting in meditation, whatever  images or sensations happened to arise were to be taken as constituting the visit to that sphere.8 After Karen discovered that Dave had died, for a time she felt disoriented: I started to write down events, in order to stop myself getting confused. I might have been a bit scared at first, but even if he had come back from the dead, it wasn’t in his nature to be scary. I think I would’ve  been more upset if he’d died and I’d never seen him again. A week or two afterwards, I was thinking that if I’m alive and Dave is so-called “dead” then there’s nothing to worry about. The scariest bit was that he had died ; it was grief more than fear. If it had been revealed that he was dead the very next day after I’d seen him, then that might’ve been a much bigger leap.

Without any conscious planning on her part, her yoga and magical practices spontaneously began to change: I had been paying visits to Malkuth for nearly a year. I’d also been doing kundalini meditations. I did a kundalini meditation for the heart, and tagged on a bit at the end—visiting Yesod [the sephira immediately “above” Malkuth], because I knew Yesod was all about emotions. Kundalini meditation is great, but you either get an immediate result or you don’t; there’s no space in it for questioning or investigating your  experience, which is why I tagged on the visit to Yesod. I did this consecutively on three days. On the fourth day I asked if there was something I could do for Dave, although I wondered if I was being arrogant, but I wondered if it would help me too. So I went in and spoke to the guardian, and he said: “Come into Yesod for 40 days. You’ve already done three of them.” This was the first time I’d received a message from an entity telling me to do something in a way that contradicted my conscious intentions,  because I was going to start the 40 days forwards from that point, but I was told very clearly not to do this. “Don’t over-egg the pudding,” was the response. So I did the heart meditation and then I went to Yesod.

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Some might argue that dabbling in forces you don’t understand or that are beyond your  control will inevitably land you in trouble. Such people might regard Dave’s visitation as demonic in character and in some sense Karen’s fault. But if magick got her into trouble, it also proved the means by which she laid her friend to rest. When an entity you assumed was imaginary starts telling you to do things you did not intend or had not thought of, it is obvious that you are beginning to connect with something outside the usual boundaries of the self. This could only be read as a signal of a marked increase in Karen’s magical abilities. She went on to describe to me how the guardian of Yesod subsequently informed her she must protect herself magically and even gave her instructions on how to do this. If the location in the physical world where she had encountered Dave, with its liminal characteristics and underground stream, were a symbolic equivalent of the River Styx, then her magical practice was the symbolic process by which she escorted him across the river’s boundary and into the realm of the dead. I still have a problem working out what is “real” in these visions, or what is made up from my imagination. By “real” I suppose I mean something from outside, coming in and working on my imagination. I also felt a presence sometimes. I don’t know if it was Dave or not, but it felt like someone was there, behind my shoulder on the left side. And then, sometime around day 36 or 37 of the total 40, I seemed to jump out of  my third eye [i.e. the spot on the forehead between and slightly above both eyes] into some clouds. I knew it was my mind making up this imagery. I saw these corny images of land, the mountains and then the sea, and then I felt I was carrying something on my back, through the water. I wondered if this was Dave. Then the vision ended. The next day, I reached up my arms and could hardly move. I had an excruciating backache in a place I never would have normally. It felt exactly like I’d carried a huge weight on my back, as if I’d been using muscles I wouldn’t normally use. After this, I never felt Dave’s  presence again. The last couple of meditations passed without incident. T he 40 days just ended. The back   pain eased away in a day or so, after I did some yoga stretches. But it was so painful, I’d never felt anything like that in my back before.

It was not as if Karen’s grief vanished overnight; she found herself still working through a process of mourning but, as she puts it, those 40 days “were like my memorial to him.” A paranormal experience gives the impression of something “uncontained”: the normal boundaries of everyday life are eroded so that thoughts leak into reality, or  dead men walk on the streets. Magick itself depends on techniques that artificially encourage this disintegration of limits: entering trances and altered states, or deciding to enter into communication with visualized entities that one would ordinarily presume to be imaginary. Yet, as Karen’s story illustrates, approaching the paranormal in this way, using magick to speak with the paranormal on its own terms, can allow the opening of a channel of negotiation. Instead of pushing the strange experience out of her  mind, or being badly traumatized or confused by it, Karen used the magick she had at ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

hand to contain the incident and bring it to a resolution. The way she reacted recalls the function of shamans in traditional cultures around the globe, where it is the shaman’s role to mediate between the spirits of the dead and the living. In contrast to the relatively recent techniques developed within the Spiritualist movement, such as Ouija boards and seances, the shamanic approach is far  more ‘hands on’. Often, to negotiate with the dead, the shaman must travel to their  world, undergoing some form of ordeal to make the transition. Karen’s 40 days of  kundalini yoga, and her consultation with a spirit in order to determine a method for  helping her friend, seem more in line with this tradition than the relatively passive and verbal behaviours of psychics and spiritualists. In his book Up From Eden  (2004), the philosopher Ken Wilber presents a survey of the spiritual development of humanity since our earliest origins. He offers a model in which spiritual practices can be ranked and compared with one another, and in the process makes the following interesting remark: The shaman was not the first great mystic sage … he was simply the first master of kundalini/hatha yoga (2004: 87).

For Wilber, kundalini yoga and shamanic practices sit side-by-side on a shared level of spiritual development. Wilber ‘s intention is not to cast aspersions on any particular  traditions or practices, but to show which are effective on particular levels, the highest of all being the attainment of enlightenment. The level on which kundalini yoga and shamanic practices operate is referred to  by Wilber as “the psychic”. Here, consciousness makes its first foray beyond the material and the rational into the transcendent. At this level of the mind we encounter   phenomena such as out-of-body experiences, auras, telepathy, precognition, and so on. It is also the level where that which Wilber calls “true magic” (1996: 77) is situated: [C]onsciousness, by further differentiating itself from the mind and body, is able in some ways to transcend   the normal capacities of the gross bodymind and therefore operate  upon the world and the organism in ways that appear, to the ordinary mind, to be quite fantastic and far-fetched. For my own  part, I find them a natural extension of the transcendent function of consciousness (1996: 78).

Repeatedly, in Karen’s story, we have encountered notions of boundaries being crossed, of liminal zones, of conceptual spaces in which the line between psyche and reality is dissolved. Wilber’s model draws our attention to the ultimate transition, which seems to have occurred within Karen herself, who, by taking up magical  practice and using it spontaneously as a means of dealing with the strange events she experienced, was at the same time transporting herself onto a new level of  consciousness. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 Notes 1.

 A good introduction to the subject is Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers: The Secret   History of America’s Psychic Spies (1997). 2.

  “Earth mysteries” is a term applied to a diverse, “fringe” area of study that encompasses a wide range of scientific and pseudo-scientific themes. Examples include: “ley lines”, ancient monuments, ancient astronomy, dowsing, folklore, shamanism, “earth lights”, crop circles, etc. It is often regarded with extreme scepticism by mainstream science, although scientific work has been conducted within some of these areas. 3.

 He is not alone in pointing this out. See also, for instance, Lyall Watson (1974: 45–  48). 4.

 See, for instance, Tom Chetwynd’s A Dictionary of Symbols (1986: 422–424). The entry for “Water” includes references to Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythology. 5.

 A clear and useful introduction to kundalini yoga, containing many useful kriyas, is: Open Your Heart With Kundalini Yoga (Siri Datta, 2003). 6.

  Kabbalah (or Qabala, Cabbala, etc., there are many varying spellings) is a name applied to a body of texts and ideas inherited from the Jewish mystical tradition. The way in which some of these ideas have been appropriated by Western magick is regarded by many as a divergence from their original significance within Judaic  belief. 7.

Sephira is the singular of sephiroth.

8.

 The book she was using is widely available in the “Mind, Body and Spirit” section of many bookshops: Simplified Qabala Magic (Ted Andrews, 2004).

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

CHAPTER THREE  I’m the urban shaman

S

 pace and time. Have you ever stopped to wonder what theyare? Have you ever   peered deeply into your experience and considered what they are like?

They lend a fundamental structure to our experience, but in trying to grasp what time and space are we can easily overlook the equally interesting question of what use is being made of them. Where space and time connect with human consciousness there arise the notions of place  and occasion. And what constitutes the content of our lives more than these? Our lives are a procession of places and occasions. As soon as we turn our attention to how experience takes this form, we start to realize how our lives are chopped up into  places and occasions of different types, within which different rules of behaviour are applied. It seems too obvious to be worth pointing out how we are expected to behave differently when driving on the motorway from how we behave when walking on a  pavement. It even seems absurd to argue that the contrast between our behaviour in a school (say) and in a supermarket has any real significance. Surely, we simply have to educate our children and buy our food, so why wonder that society sets aside places and occasions for this? Yet, if we trouble ourselves to think about it, the institutions of  our culture have no other means of manifestation than the way they dictate our usage of  time and space. To question or challenge this usage is a powerful technique for  changing both culture and our experience of reality. In a developed society, space and time are divided into a wide variety of places and occasions that may be bought, sold and traded. This constitutes the basis on which our social and economic relationships are built. The purchase and sale of places and occasions is made possible by abstracting our experience and then treating those ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

abstractions as commodities. For example, we have invented dedicated occasions and  places for eating, sleeping, shopping, being entertained, relaxing, and exercising. It hardly occurs to us that not one of these activities requires any kind of formal institution to make it happen. In fact, we do not need to devote space and time to any experience, because space and time are forms taken by  experience, not a necessary condition for having it. Developed societies convey an impression that experiences could not occur if we did not have restaurants, cinemas, televisions, gyms, and yoga classes to create them. But, in truth, it is purely our will that brings these activities into  being. Membership of the most exclusive gym does not guarantee fitness; and the most complicated meal cooked by the most famous chef does not compare with the crudest food, if accompanied by our resolution to enjoy it to its fullest. The privatization of space and time has become almost total. Home is a name for  a space purchased or leased from an institution, or from another person who probably does not live there. Work  is time sold to an employer or customer. Holiday is a bought escape from both work and home, but rarely from this ceaseless commerce of place and occasion. If we list the places and occasions we pass through in the course of a day and the economic relationships underpinning them, we see how little control we have over the settings of our daily experience. Nothing is more fundamentally ours than experience, yet culture is everywhere engaged in a process of abstracting and dividing our time and space (which is the closest that it can currently get to our experience itself), and then selling it back to us as commodities it fools us into believing we don’t already own. The physical world is no longer considered big enough to satisfy the appetite of  this process. The internet seems as if it were purposely invented to supply a new, fresh level of abstraction. But even so, archaic traces remain of a different attitude. This is vividly evoked in the discoveries of Paul Devereux, an archaeologist who has studied ancient sites  belonging to a category he calls “shamanic landscapes”. Whether constructed from rows of standing stones, as on Dartmoor in England, or simply by removing topsoil, as near Nazca in Peru, mysterious lines have been left upon the earth by cultures of different epochs around the globe. The function of these lines and tracks, Devereux shows, was not the demarcation of territory, nor even an aid to transport. For instance, the so-called “ceremonial roads” built around Chaco Canyon in New Mexico were constructed by a people that had neither horses nor the wheel (1993: 24). Yet the prevalence of these trackways or lines suggests that some kind of  universal human need must have been their motive. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Devereux bases his theory of what this was partly upon folklore and myths, which reflect a widespread belief that spirits travel in straight lines. In Western Europe, straight tracks known as doodwegen  (Dutch for “death  paths”) or Geisterwege  (German for “ghost paths”) connect cemeteries to other  landmarks. These appear to be a medieval continuation of much older beliefs that the spirits of the dead can be marshalled along straight lines. In Britain, so-called “ley lines” appear to have a similar origin (Devereux, 1993: 27–28). However, in the Americas it was the spirits of the living that were more at issue. Petroglyphs (images carved into rocks) have been discovered at sacred sites in the Americas that appear to depict the soul leaving the body of the tribal shaman (Devereux, 2009). Devereux argues that these images are the earliest depiction of the motivation behind lines on the landscape: the out-of-body experience (OOBE). Shamanic cultures devised a variety of practices giving rise to states of trance that liberate the soul of the shaman from the body, setting it free to travel the spirit world. These practices involve psychoactive plants, or self-generated ecstasies caused  by over-breathing, over-exercising, flashing sunlight into the eyes from a knife-blade, and so on. In each case the aim is the same: to experience the spirit world. And in each case the experience assumes a common form: the soul rises above or flies outside the  body. There are competing theories as to what causes an OOBE. The assumption that i is the “soul” flying out of the body is perhaps the least psychologically sophisticated,  but it has the advantage of fitting the manifest appearance. Whether these episodes were shamanically induced, or caused by other types of trance, or even perhaps by disease, when people told stories about their experiences these accounts might well have bolstered the idea that the spirit was separable from the body and capable of  unconstrained flight—in other words, of travelling unhindered in a straight line. Ancient peoples clearly believed in the reality of spirit flight, and that belief has left its imprint as straight line and effigy markings on what can only be called shamanic landscapes. These lines varied from culture to culture and age to age in their form and meaning, but their underlying source was the common canvas of the human mind in metachoric trance conditions (Devereux, 1993: 35).

The impulse to use the landscape, our environment, our space as a means to access the dimension of spirit seems a world away from where we find ourselves today. In modern times the environment is demarcated by lines so that it can be “commodified”. It fills us with wonder to think of ancient landscape markings, such as the famous Nazca lines in Peru, that reveal their meaning only when seen from the air, and yet they were made at a time when no human eyes had access to this viewpoint. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Received wisdom suggests that these works were intended to be seen only by God, or (in shamanic cultures) by the soul of the shaman after he or she had left their   body. Sometimes, during an OOBE, the “traveller” may indeed be confronted with impressions that closely resemble the actual, physical world, but just as often the traveller encounters an unfamiliar environment or one that contains odd and dreamlike “discrepancies”.1  Yet imagine for a moment that we knew  there was (say) a giant hummingbird carved into the top of the hill outside our village, visible only from above. Would we not now be more inclined  to see it during our OOBE? In fact, would the case that an OOBE is the only possible occasion on which we had a hope of seeing it not dispose us to experiencing OOBEs more often? I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to draw on Devereux’s findings and suppose the motivation behind these landscape markings might have been to cause the type of  experiences required to view them. I’d even suggest the markings probably succeeded in giving OOBEs to many people who would never otherwise have had them and would not have seen the hummingbird had they not known it was etched in reality onto the hill. We might argue that these people had not therefore had a “genuine” OOBE at all, but had simply dreamt   about a hummingbird, yet this would not necessarily be what the experience meant to the dreamer. Etching a design onto a hill may have been a means of focusing the dreams of a people around a specific image, in which case a dream concerning that image would have been a significant spiritual experience. Once again, it is difficult to imagine our own society investing so much time and energy into a project for enriching the nation’s dreams, yet it is not correct to claim we are no longer interested at all in projecting the contents of our minds onto physical space. Rather, what seems to have changed is what finds expression. We have shifted from the meaningful and qualitative towards the utilitarian and quantitative. The land is required to sustain a far larger population these days, so this might seem a necessary development, but did we really have to deny our imagination access to external space to quite the current extent? Art is still allowed some restricted access, in officially sanctioned locations, but the shamanic landscapes were not art. They were not aimed at an audience but were instead utilities, facilitating environments, where people came specifically to interact with and have direct experience of the divine. The impulse to project qualitative ideas onto space has not died. In certain contexts it is still thriving, but not without injury from the cultural shift that drove the imagination from external space into the private consciousness of the individual. In the ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

eyes of our culture, soul and spirit are concepts too divisive and primitive to be allowed officially sanctioned external space, although occasionally they are given a suitably indirect artistic or religious expression.2  Our modern-day version of the shaman is usually an artist, but occultists and magicians also play a lower-profile role. The shamanic world-view seems to have survived by renaming itself   psychogeography,  a non-specific label for what has become partly an artistic and literary genre, partly an amorphous set of political and philosophical concepts. Psychogeographers are not often concerned with writing physical representations of experience onto the landscape, but with investing their external environment with meaning. This is often abstract and usually personal, but it is undoubtedly qualitative rather than quantitative. Because this goes against dominant trends, the psychogeographer is often forced into confrontation with the values of the age, unlike the tribal shaman, who occupied a more esteemed position. Frequently,  psy-chogeographical practice involves changes made only to the psychogeographer’s  perception of his or her surroundings, so that the effects are apparent only to the  practitioner. This perhaps explains why psychogeography has become mainly a literary movement. Most of the developed world lives in cities, so it is the urban environment in which the psychogeographer usually works. Modern town planning strategies and the urban redevelop-ments that followed in their wake have spurred the growth of   psychogeographical practice. A well-known instance was the redevelopment of Paris in the 1860s that swept away the clutter and chaos of unregulated streets in favour of  wide, radiating boulevards (Coverley, 2006: 57f). These could be more easily policed and were utilized more easily by government forces against would-be revolutionaries. At the same time, covered glass arcades were introduced into urban areas, encouraging the bourgeoisie to flaunt their wealth in public and stimulate economic growth. This gave rise to the figure of the wandering urban stroller, the so-called  flâneur , a 19th century prototype of the psychogeographer first described by Baudelaire in an essay of  1863. By the 1920s, the covered arcades were themselves vanishing under new waves of redevelopment, prompting the social critic Walter Benjamin to begin collecting material for his The Arcades Project , a seminal psychogeographical text. This work  had a major influence upon Guy Debord, founder of Situationism and inventor of the term “psychogeography”. The psychogeographical impulse to rescue meaning and quality from external space receives a fresh stimulus from each new wave of commodification. Usually this has taken the form of an artistic or political response but, as we have noted, the aim of  the shamanic landscape was not art. It performed a function, and the community relied ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

upon it and the skill of their shamans to execute that function. The shamanic landscape was, to the modern mind, something more akin to a church than an art installation, but it was the church of a religion that did not seek merely belief. Instead it offered everyone a role in its ceremonies. The shamanic landscape facilitated a magical act that enabled people to experience a truth. Whether that truth concerned communication with gods or other  entities, or released the soul to explore other worlds, the shamanic landscape was the means to make that actually happen for the persons concerned. Art, in contrast, is expressive rather than functional. It sets up a hypothetical arena through the medium of  symbols or ideas into which an audience enters, but from which the audience is free to disengage. The magical act, in contrast, collapses the distinction between symbols and reality. Its truth is not hypothetical or symbolic but self-evident, because it is conveyed through immediate experience. There are no spectators to a magical act; everyone  participates. Where magick fails the result is art; the “suspension of disbelief” that occurs in art is a weak echo of the magical experience of truth. Magick stands in a similar relation to politics as it does to art. Magick is functional rather than hypothetical, an end rather than the advocation of any particular  means. Marx’s famous thesis that the point of philosophy is not to interpret the world  but to change it has been used to highlight a supposed affinity between magick and Marxism. But unlike left-wing politics magick does not operate through conflict or  opposition. It can manifest truth from reality whenever and howsoever it wishes. In our  earlier example, we considered how the magical act of etching a hummingbird onto a hill might stimulate an experience of flying outside the body for the persons concerned. Magic does not “struggle” with anything because it is not fussy about how it changes the world; the means is not important to the end. Magic does not “do” dialectics,  because it is concerned with experiences, not ideas. There are magicians who portray themselves as politically radical and view the use of magick as a subversive act, but this is to mistake the aim of their magick for the nature of magick itself. Mainstream society constantly employs magical techniques to evoke into reality fantastical entities such as consumer goods, celebrities, and other commodities that are as intangible as they are expensive. It is not simply the fact that a magician uses magick that makes him or her subversive. Just as shifts in culture have forced psychogeography to operate in the realm of  symbols rather than the physical environment, so too its practice has been diluted. It has lost sight of the original affinity of its core ideas with magick and has yoked itself  onto art and politics. But even so, work in this field3  continues to demonstrate that unorthodox explorations of place and occasion, even in an abstract form, retain a ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 power to transform deeply our perception of reality. I decided to explore what could be gained from mixing pyschogeographical techniques with contemporary magick. Like many others in 2008, I found myself  wondering where the meltdown of capitalism that we were living through might lead, so I decided to examine the city where I lived for signs to instruct me. A standard psychogeographical technique is “drift walking”, which involves taking an unplanned stroll with no fixed destination and simply paying attention to whatever experiences arise. I decided I would depart from this slightly. In the interests of keeping fit and maybe generating some kind of semi-shamanic trance through exertion, I decided to run instead. So I put on my shorts and running shoes, stuffed a digital camera and voice recorder into my pocket, and took to the streets of Brighton and Hove. First, I went to the crossroads nearest my home and made an offering to the spirits for help with my quest. Then I set off in the direction it seemed was indicated. During the run I encountered images, signs, and situations, and had several conversations with people, all of which I interpreted as direct answers to the question I had posed: Where is the current world crisis taking us?  I was obeying Aleister  Crowley’s injunction, that the magician must interpret everything that happens as a direct message to his soul from God (1989: Chapter 81). It is this attitude that can lift  psycho-geographical work out of art and into magick. In art, it is not God but the artist who is the source of the message. In magick, that message is not merely entertained as an interpretative possibility but accepted as the truth.  Not far from the crossroads I noticed a fat spider hanging in its web, an obvious analogy for the current financial system. Indeed, the next day I found myself reading an article arguing that the nationalization of financial institutions around the world had amounted to a covert centralization of the international banking system. A short distance further on, the letters “NOX” caught my eye on a car  registration plate. Nox is the Roman goddess of night. To the Greeks she was Nyx, an obscure figure (appropriately) but a force of such extreme power and beauty that Zeus himself was terrified by her. The financial crisis, I had therefore discovered, was unleashing forces that had thoroughly rattled the usual authorities, but which were ambiguous and not necessarily detrimental. It went against my pessimistic habits, but the further I ran the less negative the signals I encountered. I passed a building called “The Church of the Good Shepherd” and then noticed an unusual sign on the gate of a private house that read simply: “A ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Vision of Hope”. No matter how hard I looked, the signs seemed positive. By now I was in an affluent part of the city I’d never visited before. The symbols along the route had indicated that in the short term there would be an increased centralization among world governments followed by a chaotic period which, although unpleasant, might prove transformative. Now I was being shown that a close eye had to  be kept on the rich, who would manifest the greatest signs of stress. The trend would continue for them to hide behind security barricades and retreat into enclaves, in order  to protect their diminishing wealth. My shamanic jog reached its climax in Hove Park, where I found myself lost in a Cretan maze. Literally! Or should that be symbolically? Because this was a magical act, the distinction had vanished. The maze was a work of public art: concrete lines set on a grassy slope in a pattern combined from a traditional Cretan labyrinth and a human thumbprint. “Walking the maze,” read a plaque nearby, “is traditionally linked to contemplation and renewal.”4 So I walked the maze, and I saw how the financial system, in its present form, had indeed become a labyrinth in which we have imprisoned ourselves. Of anyone who obeyed the advice on the plaque and took a contemplative walk about the maze it might be said: “He applies his mind to unknown arts and changes the laws of nature.” This was how the Roman poet Ovid described Daedalus,5 the genius who invented the first labyrinth, but who was intelligent enough to strap on wings after he had finished  building and avoid becoming a prisoner of his own creation by flying free. Presumably he flew upwards, like a spirit, in a clear straight line. This was in contrast to our   present day financiers, who had lacked the sense to avoid falling victim to their own system, and had trashed the world economy as a result. In the coming times, I had learned, we must all emulate the example of Daedalus to avoid the fate of the rich, whose burdensome possessions lead only to self-imposed imprisonment inside a “gated community”. My discovery of the Cretan maze, which I’d somehow never noticed before, despite living in the city for nearly 20 years, convinced me that I’d found my answer. The work was done. I turned and began the long jog home, with the voice of the city echoing in my ears.  Notes 1.

 We shall examine why this is so in the final chapter but consider for now the bizarre imagery that surfaced during the remote viewing exercise presented in the previous ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

essay (p. 29). 2.

  Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, a 20 m tall sculpture of a winged figure situated in Gateshead, is a recent and significant example. 3.

 Examples include writers such as J. G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair and Peter Akroyd, an film-maker Patrick Keillor. 4.

 Fingermaze (Chris Drury, 2006).

5.

 Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII: 188.

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

CHAPTER FOUR The absolute truth

T

o observe paranormal events in their more vivid forms,” suggests Michael Murphy, “we must do so when and where they happen.”

Sounds obvious, but easier said than done.

“In studies of hypnosis,” Murphy continues, “biofeedback, meditation, and mental training in sport, experimental procedures can weaken results by their   preoccupation with devices meant to enhance scientific precision” (1992: 17). In other  words, fields of activity in which the paranormal is likely to appear are also those on which the clammy hand of science has its most deadening effect. Sceptics frequently argue the converse of this: that pseudo-scientific disciplines  produce “anomalies” only because they do not admit scientific rigour. But let us examine Murphy’s list in more detail: hypnosis, biofeedback , meditation  and sports training . These share a concern with how the mind and body are connected; the relationship between self and other, observer and observed. Experimental science tends to take this boundary for granted. It would have to trash all its conclusions if, for  instance, it were discovered that the experimenter influenced the results, whether  consciously or not. Yet this kind of influence is the specific goal of the disciplines on Murphy’s list; they all work to affect and change that boundary in various ways. If our aim is to study paranormal events “where they happen”, then one answer  to that question of “where” is on the boundary between self and other. The same place that experimental science is so ill-equipped to occupy. Quantum mechanics is a branch of science notably exempt from this. Quantum  physicists have their own conceptual tools and theories for dealing with the exotic  behaviour of the subatomic world, but it is widely accepted that the laws of the ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

subatomic do not apply at the level of the everyday sensory world, which is where the  paranormal arises. Many have looked to quantum physics for an explanation of psychic  phenomena, but the assumption that macroscopic strangeness has its roots in microscopic physics has not yet been proved. If it had, it would be a major   breakthrough, and would have been used to solve questions of far greater concern than telepathy and poltergeists. Those disciplines (“pseudo-sciences”, if you like) that make their home in the liminal but macroscopic gap between observer and observed have also evolved their  own tools and technologies. Magick is one of these disciplines. It does not feature on Murphy’s list, but its aim—like the others—is to change the individual’s experience or  exert “mind over matter”. Unlikely as it seems, religion  also belongs on that list. If  religion tends to be overlooked as an effective technology for changing experience this is because it is so widespread and commonly practised that most of us tend not to pay it much attention. Religion is a contentious topic in our age as we witness fundamentalists vying for power not only in the Islamic world, but also wielding increasing dominance in the United States. Agnostic secularism has been reluctant to challenge religious faith headon, but an atheist rearguard has made its presence felt and is refreshingly fearless and scornful in its tone. Heralded “The New Atheists”, these commentators have sprung from a range of philosophical and political backgrounds, as might be expected of a group united only by a common lack of belief.1Generally, however, they are materialist, rationalist, and sceptical in their approach. At their head is Richard Dawkins, the renowned evolutionary scientist and Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. There are few people qualified to argue on equal terms with Dawkins over the subject of evolution, but that has not deterred Creationists and proponents of “intelligent design” from queuing up to try their luck. Likewise, judging from his book The God Delusion  (2007), Dawkins himself is oddly confident of his own qualifications to argue against religion. Where direct spiritual experience is concerned, Dawkins regards it as a case of  “there but for the grace of God go I”. He tells the story of a young boy lying in the grass, examining plants and insects, when suddenly: “the micro-forest of the turf  seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it” (2007: 31). It was not Dawkins who experienced this moment of spiritual awakening (of  course), but someone who later became a loved and respected chaplain at Dawkins’s school. “Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

the other is not an easy question to answer” (2007: 32). Dawkins is either shy of sharing his experiences, or he has experienced very little. He treats us to only a couple of personal anecdotes. As a child he woke one night and heard the eerie sound of an invisible person praying. On another occasion he saw an evil face staring from a window. Both times the budding scientist stood his ground and investigated. He discovered the “sound of praying” was actually a draught through the keyhole, and the frightening face was simply an optical illusion: That is really all that needs to be said about personal “experiences” of gods or other religious phenomena. If you’ve had such an experience, you may well find yourself believing firmly that it was real. But don’t expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings (2007: 117).

There is much to be said for ruling out the mundane before resorting to the paranormal,  but would things have been different if he had had an experience of the kind that offered no opportunity for physical investigation? Earlier, 2  I described how objects rolled around of their own accord after I’d messed with the Ouija board as a teenager. There was no room for degrees of misperception in this experience: either the objects moved or they did not. If they did not, then my sanity is in question; if they did, then reality misbehaved. Either way, the explanation is something more interesting than a draught through a keyhole. The characteristics of Dawkins’s atheism are not unique but bear comparison with Sigmund Freud, who was one of the most popular and influential critics of  religion in the previous century. Although Dawkins offers intriguing suggestions, he shies away from stating specifically what kind of a delusion he considers religion to  be, and from where it may have arisen. Freud was more forthright: he regarded religion as a crutch for feelings of existential helplessness: “I cannot think of any need in childhood,” he wrote, “as strong as a father’s protection” (1930: 260). The idea of  God, in Freud’s view, arises from projecting a reassuring fantasy of “the father” onto the external world. Most educated people in the Western democracies would probably position themselves alongside Dawkins or Freud, yet at the time Freud first published his views a friend and correspondent, Romain Rolland3, challenged him that the basis of religion is not a fantasy but stems from a fairly commonplace experience: [A] feeling which he [Rolland] would like to call a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic”…. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion (Freud, 1930: 251–  252).

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Freud’s response to this idea was dismissive: “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself” (1930: 252). Dawkins’s comments on his chaplain’s “oceanic” experience among the grass-stems is an echo of Freud’s puzzlement. As might be expected of a  psychologist, Freud is more sensitive to his own mental processes: feelings, he observes, are vague and tricky things. If we can ever hope to understand this “oceanic” sensation properly, Freud declares that we must translate it into an idea. The “idea” that Freud arrived at was this: “oceanic” feelings and mystical experiences occur when we regress to primitive states of mind that belong to infancy, when the ego is not adequately separated from the world but both are merged together  in a sensation of “oneness”. Freud turned down his friend Rolland’s suggestion that yoga and breathing exercises would provide an actual means for Freud to experience these states for  himself—if he took the trouble to practise them. “Most unusual experiments” was Freud’s disdainful reaction (1930: 260). He proceeded to quote some lines from Schiller’s poem The Diver : “Let him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate light!”4 Freud was saying he’d rather not venture “down there” into the murky depths of  mysticism, feelings, and yoga classes. Perhaps Dawkins does not have the type of friends that Freud had, who might  pester him about yoga classes and the idea he ought to experience for himself the type of experience his chaplain underwent. Finding a yoga teacher was a much bigger deal in the early 20th century, so perhaps we can afford Freud a little leeway. Dawkins, however, has far less of an excuse for passing on the type of spiritual practices that Rolland recommended. The philosopher Ken Wilber, in his attempt to define the common ground  between science and spirituality, has pointed out that science rests upon injunctions as much as it relies upon evidence (1998). In other words, science is not merely about observing data, but also about the methods necessary for acquiring that data. When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter with his newly-invented telescope, religious leaders of the day denied that such celestial bodies could exist, yet they refused the offer to take a look for themselves through the telescope, on the basis that the device was “blasphemous” and perverted true perception. Dawkins quotes Bertrand Russell against the religious fundamentalists: “Many  people would sooner die than think. In fact they do” (2007: 345). Many rationalists, however, are equally averse to feeling and experiencing. I doubt that Dawkins’s resistance would extend to martyrdom, but I can almost hear his argument against taking up a spiritual practice: it would “delude” him. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

As Ken Wilber suggests, personal experience is not beyond the boundaries of  scientific investigation, if a hypothesis that requires a certain experience also includes a specific injunction that can be followed to replicate that experience: i.e. “To see the moons of Jupiter, look through the telescope.” It is too late for Freud, but if Dawkins wants to qualify himself in the field of  spirituality and support his opinions, he must expose himself to the data. I’d suggest an hour of vipassana meditation every day, for a duration of two years. This ought to yield some relevant experiences, provided he does it properly. And if he or any like-minded critics refuse, how is this any different from the clerics of Galileo’s day, who turned down the telescope with cries of “blasphemy”? By refusing to accept the injunction and experience the data, how are they qualified to comment on the findings of those that have  had the experience? Freud and Dawkins expose themselves to allegations of  irrationality, because they have refuted data without observing it for themselves. Freud claimed that the “oceanic” experience must be converted into an idea to make sense. But for those that have taken the trouble to replicate the experience, it is clear that any “idea” abstracted from it detracts from the actual data. The truth does not always lie in ideas or hypotheses derived from the data, but sometimes in the experience of the data itself. “But—hang on,” comes the response, “I cannot find this experience in myself. It simply isn’t there. So much for your notion of ‘subjective’ truth, then! What use is a truth that isn’t self-evident to everyone?” Professor (I reply), it’s up to you to have the experience! Until you do, how are you qualified to tell us that “actually” an experience means this, or “really” it means that? Go and do some yoga, meditate, and come back when you understand what you’re talking about, then we can debate on what you’ve found. One hour of daily meditation for two years is far less effort than it took for  Dawkins to qualify himself in biology, so there shall be no griping over demands on time. And there should be no cheating either: no connecting oneself to an ECG to monitor what’s “really” happening in the brain; or getting someone else to meditate and measuring their brain activity instead. I demand subjective experience! Returning to Freud, I looked up and read the whole of the poem by Schiller that he quoted in defence against trying some meditation. It is about a king who hurls a  precious goblet into the sea and challenges a youth to retrieve it. The youth is sucked down by vast currents but finds the goblet by sheer luck and then, equally by chance, he is spat back up by the tide just before nasty Lovecraftian sea creatures drag him under. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Freud bravely faced all the sex, death, and emotionality his patients could throw at him, yet a friend’s suggestion he might try yoga prompted him to allude to these images of abject terror. Evidently, he identified with the fate of the diver, who is seen no more after the king hurls the goblet a second time and promises the hand of his daughter in return for a repeat performance. With his theory of the unconscious, Freud dived into the depths and brought up as much as he could handle. The goblet of mysticism that Rolland tossed as a second challenge he allowed to sink forever into ignorance. Yet in Dawkins’s writing we encounter a concern with mul-ticulturalism and sexism that suggests—in contrast to Freud— he is at least partially open to models of  truth that deviate from the empirical and evidential. He makes frequent references to the “raising of consciousness” achieved by theorists of race and gender-relations. Indeed, he expresses the desire to do some consciousness-raising of his own, urging us to correct anyone who makes reference to a “Jewish child” or a “Muslim child”, rather  than “a child of Jewish or Muslim parents” (2007: 379–383). With this “consciousness-raising” Dawkins is not seeking to persuade us with evidence that religion cannot be transmitted genetically from parents to children (an absurd idea, of course). Instead, he is urging us to change language and reinforce a  socially constructed  truth. He will not go so far as to submit his own scientific discourse to scrutiny, however. He does not commit himself to a particular theory of religion, but he offers up a number of ideas on how evolution by natural selection might have allowed religion to arise and proliferate, and even discusses the adaptive benefits it may  provide. Possibilities include the way that the survival benefit of attributing intention and design to natural circumstances (e.g. seeing a tiger and assuming, without any supporting evidence, that it wants to eat you) often outweighs the intellectual inconvenience of being wrong (2007: 211–212); and how, when someone “falls in love” with God, we may be witnessing a misfiring of those selection pressures that favour monogamous sexual behaviour toward other humans (2007: 214f). Whatever his specific arguments, Dawkins makes his general stance clear: religion is “a by-product for something else” (2007: 200). He will not dignify religion with any accomplishments in its own right. But surely it is possible to explain science too as a consequence of evolutionary  processes, as ‘a by-product for something else’? From an evolutionary perspective, what else can it be? Ultimately, despite Darwin whipping out the carpet from under  them, both religion and science are still with us, doing what they always did, with no ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

signs of vanishing in a puff of deconstructive smoke. So why does Dawkins assume the same evolutionary argument “kills” one of them (religion), but “strengthens” the other  (science)? This is an interpretative ruse no different from the kind he attributes to religious apologists. He asserts it is inadequate to argue that religious scripture is “symbolic” rather than intended to be taken literally, because there are no objective criteria by which to distinguish the parts that are literal from the parts that require interpretation (2007: 269). But likewise, if you are going to apply evolutionary science to the history of ideas, you cannot assume that certain ideas are in need of explanation (religion) whereas others (evolutionary science) are transparent and not subject to the very same explanations. But we must not be smug either and assume that we are now in the clear, just  because we have so convincingly trashed Dawkins and Freud. Earlier, I suggested that religion has a place among those disciplines concerned with the interface between mind and body, subject and object. We need to consider this in more detail. A general claim of mystical and religious traditions is that human beings are deluded. God, the truth, is available, but human nature separates us from Him, Her, It. The truth is waiting for us to experience it, but this will not occur without action on our   part, whether this takes the form of surrender to the will of God, accepting Jesus as a  personal saviour, or sitting on a cushion and meditating. What precisely is  this hidden truth? People have labelled it in many ways: Heaven, paradise, enlightenment, gnosis, satori. Some of these terms come from orthodox religions, but unfortunately it is the case that most people who profess them have not actually experienced them. These experiences are not easy to gain or  understand (you supposedly have to be dead before you can experience some of them!)  but, at the same time, religious organizations must justify their existence to ordinary  people in the material world. The usual result of this tension is that the core of truth any single religion may have contained becomes corrupted over time into a mere idea. For  instance, instead of transcending everyday consciousness by dissolving the ego into  boundless compassion, many people interpret Christianity as meaning we should simply “agree” with what Jesus said, in order to win entry to a place called Heaven that we will discover after we are dead. Fortunately, all the major religions have their mystical or esoteric branches: Islam has Sufism; Judaism has Kabbalah; Christianity has Gnosticism. In the West, orthodox religions have often persecuted mystics and occultists (and will probably continue to do so, wherever they are given the chance) because of the mystic’s ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

insistence that each person must experience truth for him or herself, regardless of what any religious authority has to say about it. Jared Diamond suggests that a key function of religion is the promulgation of  repressive power structures: [A] way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy [i.e. a power structure that serves the interests of its rulers] … The chief claimed to serve the people by interceding for them with the gods and reciting the ritual formulas required to obtain rain, good harvests, and success in fishing (1998: 277–278).

Orthodox religions of the West have indeed tended to ossify according to this pattern. Whatever spiritual truths may have inspired their origin, over time these have become obscured beneath the weight of an institution that ultimately serves its own material ends, albeit with the tacit approval of followers. But the situation has sometimes developed differently, as is seen more clearly in the case of Eastern religions. Karen Armstrong describes how the Buddha abandoned his regal life and took to the road as an ascetic, yet he was regarded because of this not as a drop-out but as a hero: “People regarded the ascetics as pioneers: they were exploring the realms of the spirit to bring succour to suffering men and women” (2000: 9). Thanks to this cultural tradition, acolytes of Eastern religions can still sustain themselves on alms to this day. In contrast, those brave monks who attempted to transplant Buddhist traditions directly from Thailand to their monastery in Chithurst, West Sussex, usually went hungry after doing their rounds of the rural villages with their begging bowls (Ward, 1990: 111). The pendulum can swing either way; it is not a case of “East is better than West”. Both the corruption of religious institutions and popular support for them arise when the majority of the people look to others to deliver spiritual enlightenment rather  than seeking it for themselves. All institutions are self-serving to a degree. It is only by happy historical accidents that Buddhism wears the essential truth of all the great traditions a little closer to its surface than some of the others. Certainly, this is what I’ve found most attractive about it, and Aleister Crowley reassures me I’m not alone: The only one who explains his system thoroughly is Buddha, and Buddha is the only one that is not dogmatic … Our best document will therefore be the system of Buddha … (1980: 10).

It might surprise those who have not taken the trouble to read him that Crowley has  positive things to say about Buddhism—indeed, about other religious traditions as well. Religion and occultism are commonly regarded as hating each other at least as ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 bitterly as religion and science. However, the deepest and darkest secret of occultism is this: its power comes not from denying or subverting religion, but on stealing the  best bits from it and practising them properly. Buddha, Moses, Christ, St Paul, Mohammed: what made them the monumental figures they became? This is the rhetorical question with which Crowley opens Book   Four , his introductory text on yoga and magick. What these prophets share is a peculiar  gap in their biography; nothing may be known of them for a few years, or they retreat “into the desert”, or they suddenly give an account of some event curiously outside of  time when they were “caught up into Heaven” or “visited by an angel”. All except for  Buddha, of course, who instead tells us in unsparing detail precisely what he has been up to: he had been meditating . In fact, he meditated so much he grasped the truth about reality and dedicated the rest of his life to teaching us all about it. Crowley suggests that all the great religious figures (himself included, naturally) did as the Buddha did: they went away; they meditated; and they came back changed into the spiritual giants it was their destiny to become. Many people know of meditation as a relaxation exercise. Many people know of  yoga as a physical workout to keep the limbs supple. What most people do not know,  but what Crowley emphasizes, is the transformational power of these practices. In fact,  perhaps this is recognized now even less than in Crowley’s day. Because so many  people attend meditation or yoga classes we assume we must already know what these disciplines are for. I first became interested in Buddhist meditation during the early 90s. I attended a group that practised in the Mahayana tradition. Their main exercises were anapana  sutti, a meditation that involves focusing the attention on sensations experienced while  breathing; and metta bhavana,  a visualization for generating compassion towards others. I enjoyed these classes and was soon meditating twice a day, for a total of an hour or so. I found myself becoming more relaxed, calm, and aware in my everyday life. But after a few months things changed—and not for the better. When I sat to meditate I was distracted by unpleasant thoughts. Instead of calm, my body was full of  aches and pains. Each time I practised everything felt “nasty” in a subtle, indescribable way. Nothing I did seemed to help. I talked to the teachers: “Keep your attention focused on the breath and it will pass,” they told me. Sometimes they would recommend an exercise to calm the mind, if my thoughts were over-active, or to enliven myself if I was torpid and depressed. But none of it worked and the feelings grew worse. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

I noticed that most of the teachers were ex-Catholics. This, and their inability to help, convinced me that I didn’t fit in with this group. No, I decided, religion—not even atheistic Buddhism—obviously doesn’t work for me; I’m simply not the religious type. So I stopped going to meetings and eventually I stopped meditating altogether. That happened during my early twenties and the decade that followed was the worst of my life. That vague “nasty feeling” seemed to hang around for years, not lifting even after I’d given up meditation. It did not go away properly until ten years had passed and I took up meditation again. This time I’d joined a magical organization whose syllabus for novices included daily meditation practice. I gritted my teeth and  braced myself, anticipating that it would be grim, and at first my expectations were confirmed. But eventually the nastiness lifted. The reason things improved was that I’d done something that probably came so naturally to Crowley he does not even bother to mention it in Book Four : I simply kept going . The secret of meditation is to keep doing it. That’s all. No matter if “nothing is happening”, or it is boring, or painful, or unbearable—you just keep doing it. “Better  not to start. Once started, better to finish.” This old Zen saying is true. Regular  meditation kick-starts a process which has an unpleasant as well as a pleasant aspect. The contrast between them is particularly marked soon after beginning, but if you roll up the mat and walk away as soon as it gets tough, the unpleasantness can stick with you. It can stick around for the rest of your life. (I’ve seen this happen to people.) Sometimes the only cure is to jump back aboard. Strong and consistent effort will eventually yield a result. Crowley describes it as follows: [L]et it suffice to say that this consciousness of the Ego and the non-Ego, the seer and the thing seen, the knower and the thing known, is blotted out … There is usually an intense light, an intense sound, and a feeling of such overwhelming bliss that the resources of language have been exhausted again and again in the attempt to describe it … It is an absolute knock-out blow to the mind. It is so vivid and tremendous that those who experience it are in the gravest danger of losing all sense of proportion (1980: 13).

The meditator who gets this far suddenly understands the language of mysticism in a way that the likes of Freud and Dawkins never will. “Aha, yes,” you say to yourself, “‘God’, ‘angels’, ‘being taken up into Heaven’, I see now what all that old stuff  means.” But as we try to put the experience into more sensible contemporary language, even as we try to figure out to our own satisfaction what the experience “is”, we start to realise how we’re constricted by the limits of our personal understanding and our  cultural context. As Ken Wilber puts it: “If we … pat ourselves on the back, let it still ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 be with humility: whatever stage we might be at, there are always higher stages; and somewhere, someplace … someone is writing a text that is over our heads” (2006: 92–  93). Crowley’s “blotting out of the difference between knower and known” is merely the type of description that would be expected from someone who lived in a rationalist age and whose explicit aim was: “the method of science, the aim of religion”. 5 The first part of Crowley’s Book Four  is one of the most succinct, practical, and inspiring texts on meditation I’ve found. It surprises me every time I re-read it. But this is not to claim that Crowley’s descriptions of meditation are true and the terminology of “God” and “angels” used by Jesus, St Paul, Mohammed, and Joan of Arc is misconception. The advantage of language like Crowley’s is that it does not generate the same kind of misunderstandings in those who have not had the experience for  themselves, or who are locked in a more dogmatic culture. Where the language of gods and angels can breed religious fundamentalism, the attendant danger of Crowley’s language is psychologism: it may foster the belief (in those quarters where it is not met with outright ridicule) that the “blotting out of the knower and the known” is a  pathological process, a symptom of mental illness. Does everyone  who attains this stage of realization emerge with the religious zeal of a Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed? Thankfully, Crowley muses, no: [T]he majority of people who claim to have “seen God”, and who no doubt did “see God” just as much as those whom we have quoted, did nothing else … Perhaps … “great” men are the failures of humanity;  perhaps it would be better to say nothing … (1980: 14–15).

Crowley, of course, is not the most impartial authority on this. He himself chose the  path of prophethood. But the following comes from a lesser-known figure, Joel S. Goldsmith, another self-styled mystic and the practitioner of a Christian form of  meditation6: In my own experience, eight months of from five to ten meditations a day were necessary, before I received the very first “click” or sense of the Presence within—eight months of meditating day and night. Furthermore, I had no knowledge that such a thing as making contact with God was possible, or that it would accomplish anything once it was achieved. There was, however, deep within me, an unwavering conviction that it was possible to touch something greater than myself, to merge with a higher power.  Nobody whom I knew had gone that way before me; nobody had prepared the ground for me. There was only that inner conviction that if I could touch God, at the center of my being, It would take hold of my life, my work, my practice, and my patients. By the end of eight months, I was able to achieve one second of  realization … It was another week before the next second of realization came and many days before the third one. A whole week intervened before the fourth moment of realization was achieved; then, it happened twice in one day … It was probably three years before I learned that if I got up at four o’clock, sometime between then and eight in the morning, I would feel that “click” or awareness that God is on the field. Some days the “click” came within five minutes and some days it took the whole four hours, but never after that did I leave for my office until the Presence had been realized (1974: 169–170).

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

This illustrates, I hope, that expressing these kinds of experience as “God”, or taking a religious sense of mission from them, is a choice determined largely by personality. Yet at the same time a deeper pattern informs these experiences, which seems to be more uniform: the diligent application of a contemplative technique leads to a realization of something unsuspected and inexpressible in the nature of reality. Continued practice leads to repetition and refinement of the experience, as the  boundary between other and self becomes progressively more permeable. It is not uncommon for orthodox Christians to shake a forbidding finger at meditation and yoga. The reasoning behind this is self-preservational: if “the experience of God” were accepted as something everyone could obtain, the Church would not seem so necessary. This is why the emphasis within orthodox religion tends to be on faith rather than experience. The faithful accept the existence of God purely on the basis of belief, and are actively dissuaded from taking up practices that would otherwise afford them direct experience of the object of that belief. Likewise, magick  and the paranormal are declared off-limits (“evil”), despite the awkward fact that religious scripture consists to a large degree of saints and prophets displaying all kinds of paranormal powers. Spiritual and paranormal experiences go hand-in-hand. A person who practises meditation diligently will eventually experience something they might feel inclined to call “God”. As a result of their practice, it is also likely that he or she will encounter  other paranormal experiences too. The classic Buddhist texts on meditation are very matter-of-fact on this issue. Both the Visuddhimagga  (“The Path of Purification”) and the Vimuttimagga  (“The Path of Freedom”) contain chapters on “supernormal powers” with explicit instructions on how to cultivate them. These include “Knowledge of Others’ Thoughts”, “Recollection of Past Lives”, and “Divine Sight”.7  But I confess to disappointment on reading these. The instructions perhaps make more sense if you are a Buddhist monk, but they give the same impression as old grimoires or alchemical  books, which often intentionally demanded rare ingredients or impossible feats in order to deter the ignorant or the uncommitted. It’s my impression that the meditator is  being intentionally overloaded with onerous instructions in these texts. If someone took  them at face value and seriously dedicated themselves to fulfilling them, telepathy and  past-life recall would be the least of their achievements! Daniel Ingram, a present-day master of meditation, provides a stripped-down and far more accessible version of the magical methods described in these and other  Buddhist texts. His approach is a kind of “chaos-magical” equivalent to classical ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Buddhist magic.8  Yet although Buddhism does not go as far as decrying paranormal experiences as the work of Satan, nevertheless the “supernormal powers” (or siddhis) are traditionally regarded as a distraction from the main aim of Buddhist practice: enlightenment. Ingram echoes these reservations, yet readily accepts that the powers can be cultivated through meditation, and also lists some of the spiritual benefits from doing so. His pragmatic attitude is summed up by the following passage: Whether or not these [powers] are “real” is a question that I am happy to avoid, though these experiences can be so extremely vivid that they can seem more “real” than the “real world”.  Much more interesting  than the question of what is real is the question of what is causal, i.e. what leads to what. For  example, we might decide that our dreams are not “real”, but we must admit that there are real world consequences of having dreams. All this can be a slippery business, and the “psychic powers” generally don’t turn out to be quite what they seem. As one of my friends once said, “Yeah, I can fly, but just not in this realm!” (2008: 173).

For most people, it is more likely that paranormal experiences will arise spontaneously from their meditation practice, rather than from an intentionally directed technique. One evening in February 2007, I was meditating when I distinctly heard a woman’s voice saying: I’m done! I’m done! It was so clear it startled me and broke my concentration. My immediate thought was that someone had died. I mentioned this to no one, because my girlfriend’s mother was seriously ill at the time, but I noted it in my diary. The next day at work it was announced that a senior member of staff had died the  previous evening. Well, that must have been it , I thought, even though this person was male and was alive at the time I heard the voice. In the days that followed my girlfriend’s mother made a good recovery so I thought no more about the experience. Around this time a letter arrived at the building where I lived, addressed to Mrs G. No one of that name lived in the building and the letter lay uncollected. There was no return address, so after a few days I opened it, in order to return it to the sender. Mrs G., it emerged, was the sister of Ms M., an elderly woman who lived in the flat  below mine. It was a letter of condolence. It was only by this accidental route that I discovered Ms M., my neighbour, had died. I’ll probably never know the exact date and time at which Ms M. passed away in hospital, but the date on the letter suggested it would have been on or close to the day I heard the voice. Ms M.’s bedroom was directly below the room in which I was meditating. Many long-term meditators will have stories like this, which invites us to ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

examine in more detail the connection between contemplative practice and the  paranormal. Why would the simple act of regular concentration lead to instances of  telepathy, precognition, and hearing dead people? An interesting perspective is supplied by Arthur Koestler in The Roots of  Coincidence (1972). Koestler begins with a survey of experiments in parapsychology, which attracted far more optimism in the 1970s than is currently the case. He turns to theoretical physics for an explanation of the strange phenomena that parapsychology has unearthed, but concludes there is no evidence that the behaviour of microscopic entities can exert analogous effects at the level of the everyday world. Even if it did, Koestler is discomfited by how different forms of paranormal experience would then require different physical theories. For example, quantum-level “psitrons” might explain ESP, but some kind of macroscopic physical field would be needed to account for psychokinetic phenomena—i.e. for poltergeist activity or other instances of realworld objects moving around without apparent physical cause (1974: 80–81). Koestler turns instead to synchronicity  as a possible means of grouping all  paranormal phenomena under a single theory. Synchronicity is the assumption of a noncausal force at work in the universe, so that events are connected not only through cause and effect but also through their meaningful affinity with one another. All the phenomena we term “paranormal” can be regarded as instances of  synchronicity because they consist of events that exhibit affinity regardless of their  intrinsic nature or their separation across time and space. For instance, a premonition can be viewed as a synchronistic correspondence between a person’s intuition and an external outcome. Telepathy is a correspondence between one person’s perception and thought-processes in another person’s mind. Indeed, even psychokinesis can be viewed as a non-physical correspondence between a person’s intention and the behaviour of an external object. The almost surreal research into ESP by René Peoch took this to a whole new level. The results of his work with animals and computers suggested that the mind of a chicken can influence the movements of a robot to a statistically significant degree—even when the movements of the robot had been pre-programmed in advance (Fenwick & Fenwick, 1998: 228). This would appear to indicate that ESP has no physical or causal foundation whatsoever, and does not even require a human subject. But let us leave aside psychokinetic chickens for the moment, because in a sense the most stunning species of paranormal phenomena is indeed the synchronicity  pure and simple, those startling “ coincidences” we sometimes encounter. For instance, a woman of my acquaintance needed to contact a long-lost friend. Being a practising magician, she decided to compile a six-digit telephone number from cards pulled at random from a tarot deck. She then dialled the number—and found herself talking to the ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

friend’s next-door neighbour! To the persons concerned, events like this create an impression that the whole universe  has been cleverly levered into position, as if to ensure the affinity takes place. But as a matter of fact, it has not. If it had, then the event would have been caused   —presumably by whatever provided the leverage. The sensation that the universe has been manipulated is simply an “effect” (damn —you see what I mean?) of  our causal habits of thinking, which are deeply ingrained and almost impossible to  break. Synchronicity was, of course, a term invented by C. G. Jung, and we have already examined its application in other contexts. 9 Yet despite invoking it, Koestler is no fan of Jung’s idea. In particular he baulks at Jung’s assertion that a synchronicity is mobilized when a psychological archetype becomes active in the mind of the person who experiences it. Koestler argues that Jung has therefore posited a cause  (i.e. the archetype) for his supposedly “acausal” force: “It is painful to watch how a great mind, trying to disentangle himself from the causal chains of materialistic science, gets entangled in its own verbiage” (1974: 98). Jung and his followers do themselves no favours in the way they express these difficult ideas10, but Jung was primarily a psychotherapist rather than a physicist, and so we shouldn’t complain too much if his usage of his own ideas is geared specifically towards that field. Victor Mansfield, however, makes the case that Jung was more scrupulous in his thinking than Koestler suggests. Mansfield argues that all paranormal phenomena can indeed be regarded as acausal, but we should reserve the term synchronicity (as Jung himself clearly intended) for instances of acausal phenomena that are meaningful  (1995: 28f.). For instance, thinking about someone who chooses that same moment to  phone is an example of an acausal event, but it is too trivial to be considered a synchronic-ity. In contrast, Jung’s famous story of the “scarab beetle”11 was a synchronicity, because the scarab is a symbol of rebirth and it caused a psychological revolution in the life of the previously hyper-rational woman to whom it appeared (1983: 340). Koestler proposed an alternative concept to Jung’s “syn-chronicity”. If Jung’s ideas are geared towards psychotherapy then Koestler’s idea—the holon —has a more general, biological cast: “‘holons’ … are Janus-faced entities which display both the independent properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts” (1974: 112). Every entity in the universe, suggests Koestler, is a holon. It comprises certain  parts, yet itself forms a part of a greater whole. For example, the human body consists ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

of organs working together to sustain the identity of the body, while the body functions as part of a wider organization, a particular society. Each holon demonstrates on the one hand a self-assertive  tendency to retain its own identity, but on the other an integrative  tendency to function as a part of the greater whole. In human beings this integrative tendency manifests in what Koestler labels “the self-transcending emotions”: … devotion, empathy, identification, hypnotic rapport. Going one step further, we may include into this category the trance-states of mystics and mediums, the effects of certain psychotropic drugs, and emotions which accompany spontaneous paranormal experiences (1974: 119).

The “acausal” forces of the Jungians and theoretical physicists, Koestler suggests, can more usefully be viewed as this “integrative tendency” in action, an innate inclination of all entities to combine into ever-higher wholes. The integrative urge can bring about a “confluential event” without any physical means (1974: 122). Presumably this is so  because, as the experience of synchronicity suggests, the integrative tendency is a feature of the universe that operates throughout physical reality. Wherever it occurs and we are able to perceive it, we are likely to describe the result as “paranormal”. Koestler was no stranger to mystical experiences. Paul Devereux notes a classic “oceanic experience” that Koestler underwent at the age of 14 (2005: 32). Whether we accept that Koestler’s theory of holons illuminates the basis of mystical experience, or  regard it simply as autobiography projected onto the history of ideas, perhaps depends in part on our preference for taking a causal or an acausal view. In ordinary waking consciousness, perception appears split between subject (perceiver) and object (perceived). Considered as a holon, everyday consciousness is an instance of the self-assertive  tendency, because it strives to maintain the sense of   permanent, separate identity. In meditation, however, the opposite tendency comes into  play. God, samadhi, satori, gnosis: these are some of the labels used to describe the shift in experience onto “higher” levels of awareness as the boundary between self and object is transcended. This takeover of everyday consciousness by the integrative tendency  (as Koestler’s theory describes it) is the moment at which the paranormal may come calling. Seen from this perspective, it seems less surprising if meditation—  which is the intentional  exercise of the integrative tendency—should occasionally lead to paranormal experiences. The aim of meditative practice is not paranormal experiences but enlightenment . Most authorities on meditation advise against cultivating paranormal experiences  because: “One risks becoming sidetracked by them into the exercise of personal  power, which strengthens the ego—the small self that stands between us and progress ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

on the meditative path” (Fontana, 1992: 168). Considered in terms of Koestler’s complementary processes, we can now appreciate in a new way how the paranormal might tempt us to slide from “integration” into “self-assertion”. Yet enlightenment seems to many people a notion equally as baroque and bizarre as psychic powers. “I pictured three options,” a young American Buddhist wrote recently, about his search for a guru, “a gorgeous female kung fu master … who would teach me to do one-finger handstands; an old Japanese master who would hit me with a stick and demand, ‘Jaimal!— where is your mind?’, or a Tibetan lama who could fly” (Yogis, 2008: 61). The ironical assumption here is that “enlightenment” has to be something that is apparent to the naked eye in some extraordinary form. A friend and I, both of us seasoned meditators, were excited to learn that a famous guru was coming to London to give a talk. What interested us was not the advertised content of the lecture but reports we had read about this person’s special talent for transmitting his enlightenment to people with whom he came into contact. We did not exactly expect him to levitate, but we did wonder if we might experience some kind of “weird vibe”. The event was well-attended but we found seats fairly near the front, supporting our plan to get as close as possible and soak up any enlightenment rays he happened to  be giving out. Of course, we were only half-serious; and any genuine awe would have  been swept away in any case by our first impressions of the guru as he came on stage: a short bloke, with a mullet haircut and a bushy moustache. However, what happened afterwards certainly wiped the grins off our faces. We should have realized something was afoot from the number of synchronicities that converged on the event: firstly, we discovered the venue was just around the corner  from a pub in which we had once had a significant conversation; secondly, the number   printed on my friend’s entrance ticket was personally relevant to him; and thirdly, he was amazed to discover that one of the organizers of the event was a colleague from the same office where he worked. During the journey home, he sent me a text reporting that “something unusual” was happening. I assumed he was joking, but over the next couple of days this was followed by a number of emails, indicating that he believed he was now “enlightened”. He asked me if I was absolutely sure that I wasn’t enlightened too. At the time, well … I felt positive, happy and upbeat, but there was nothing  particularly “enlightened” about me. The next day I woke up with a migraine. It improved enough for me to go to work, but on my way home I felt light-headed, as if a trace of it remained. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

It was when I sat to meditate later that I couldn’t deny it any longer. Something had happened. The more I tried to meditate, the more my mind refused to go anywhere. Slowly it dawned on me why I was having trouble: whatever I was setting out to achieve by meditation, I was already in that place. Meditation had become pointless. Wow, I thought. It’s true. I’m enlightened! Let me state this up-front: it lasted for about a week. I wasn’t really (yet) enlightened. At the time, though, I really believed I was. But so what? It did not prompt me to start preaching in the town centre on Saturdays. I did not start a cult. Yet the most amazing thing had happened to my mind: everything felt the same, except for the availability of something impossible. It was hard to say much about it, except that it could not possibly be, and I did not understand how I could be aware of it. Whatever it was, it could not be seen, heard, or sensed. Neither could it be thought. It was not an image, idea, or a deduction. Yet there it was in my awareness, blaring away on its own unique channel, which was neither sensory nor mental. If I was busy with things, it would be in the background and faint. But when I was quiet, it came on strong. When I meditated it went berserk . Meditation was like sitting face-to-face with God. It blared at me with its incredible impossibility, beaming at me from somewhere outside the universe. It verged sometimes on being almost  painful. One feature of it that particularly surprised me was that it had little to do with any heightened awareness of being alive or of the reality of existence. It was independent of any existential issues. Instead, it was like a little patch of objectivity or  “not me”, which had somehow lodged itself in my subjective awareness. The perfection of it was engrossing. Imagine if, each time you wanted something, you discovered there was a little piece of whatever it was already inside you. It was as if I now had the outside world on my inside. There was nothing I couldn’t cope with or  face up to. Even the thought of dying had begun to seem quite exciting. Sadly, it was my reaction as it started to fade away after a few days that proved it was not enlightenment: I was horrified and utterly devastated. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be “ordinary”, but was brutally reminded as it passed away. Meditation  became the usual effort and daily life resumed its usual cast: me “in here” and everything else “outside”. My friend underwent the same process of withdrawal a day or so after me, which made it slightly easier to bear. If I hadn’t known better, maybe I’d have devoted myself to the guru we went to see. I might have joined his organization and handed over my income to him (as he ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

often demands of his students, if the articles that have been written about him are true). But what would be the point of relying on another person for my spiritual state of mind, whether he was enlightened or not? That did not look to me like “the path of  liberation”. Granted, being in his presence truly seemed to have had an effect, but it evidently was not an ability he could direct or control, and I doubted he would have affected me at all if I were not already an experienced meditator. Daniel Ingram defines “full enlightenment” as follows: The arahat [i.e. a fully enlightened person] has attained to the complete and utter elimination of the illusions of permanence, satisfactoriness, and duality (separate self), and now perceives reality nondualistically. They know the joy and clarity of freedom, as well as the fullness of their humanity (2008: 364).

As Ingram suggests—and I had to learn the hard way—enlightenment is not an ability, a characteristic, or a quality that a person can be said to “have”. This would imply it were a “thing”, something that was “not me”, whereas to see it as such would be to maintain the split between subject and object on which our everyday consciousness rests. But that was indeed how I had regarded the brief taste of non-dualistic  perception that was granted to me (through some strange and synchronistic act of grace that I still don’t understand), and was why I reacted so badly when it ended. Since then, the same experience has come back and passed away numerous times. It no longer feels like such a big deal because it has helped me understand that although it is certainly a reality, enlightenment has nothing to do with flying Tibetan lamas or levitating buddhas with telepathic powers. It is something even more amazing than these: a fundamental revolution in the relationship between human consciousness and perception that destroys forever the illusion of a self isolated from the universe. The teachings and technologies needed to realize this directly for ourselves are easily available to everyone, provided we look in the correct places and practise them in the right way. Paranormal experiences, amazing as they are, are actually a gateway to something even more incredible.  Notes 1.

  Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are th main figures associated with this movement. 2.

 See p. 8–9.

3.

 Romain Rolland (1866–1944) was a French writer and winner of the Nobel Prize

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

for Literature in 1915. He was strongly influenced by the Vedanta branch of Hindu  philosophy, and was an associate and friend of Mahondas Ghandi. 4.

  A different translation, by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (Schiller 1864: 21–28), is freely available on-line. 5.

  The motto of the A?A? or Argenteum Astrum  (“Silver Star”), a magical order  created by Crowley in 1907. 6.

  Goldsmith’s practice sounds very much like a contemporary form of Christian meditation called “Centering Prayer”. However, this is only my surmise from the author’s passing references. The key modern proponent of Centering Prayer is Father  Thomas Keating (1997). Some Christian practitioners avoid labelling what they do as “meditation” because of its association with Eastern traditions. Anyone who has  practised both is likely to report that Centering Prayer is a form of vipassana (“insight”) meditation. Prayer itself is  meditation, when performed as a means of  surrendering self to the other. The common idea of prayer as “asking God for stuff” is a sad corruption of this and leads, if anywhere, only to ego-inflation. 7.

 See Buddhagosa (1997: chapters XII–XIII); Upatissa (1995: chapter IX).

8.

  In an internet podcast, Ingram described some of the startling results and experiences he had gained from this technique. See: http://tinyurl.com/ms6wgp. 9.

  See p. 31, where the role of water in hauntings is explored as “symbolic” or  “synchronistic” rather than “causal”. 10.

  Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest collaborators, writes on the one hand that “Jung even explicitly warned against taking the archetypes (of the collective unconscious) or psi-powers to be the causal agency of synchronistic events” (quoted in Mansfield, 1995: 25), yet on the other hand she writes, without any qualification, “Wherever Dr. Jung observed such meaningful coincidences, it seemed (as the individual’s dreams revealed) that there was an archetype activated in the unconscious of the individual concerned” (Jung et al., 1964: 226). 11.

 See p. 37.

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

CHAPTER FIVE  Dream yourself awake

T

he term “lucid dreaming” was coined in 1913 by a Dutch psychiatrist and writer, Frederik van Eeden. It refers to the type of dream in which the dreamer  is aware—even as the dream unfolds—that he or she is dreaming.

Many of us will have experienced spontaneous lucid dreams. Often these take the form of nightmares in which we recognize something horrible is about to happen and we wake ourselves up. In other words, we become aware we are having a dream while we dream it. However, there are techniques that can be practised to produce lucidity when we want it. These techniques also provide an ability to change the contents of our dreams. The appeal of lucid dreaming to occultists is probably self-evident. Awakening inside a dream supplies access to a different plane of existence, one in which we are liberated from the usual constraints of the physical body. “In these lucid dreams,” Eeden wrote, “the re-integration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper  remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition” (1913: 152). He was suggesting that a lucid dream is extremely close in quality to our experience of  waking reality, but with a crucial difference: the object   of our experience. In the case of waking, the object of experience is physical reality. In the case of the lucid dream, the object is our own imaginary inner world. Van Eeden may have been the first to use the term “lucid dreaming” but he was not the first practitioner. St Augustine relates an account of a lucid dream that dates to 415 AD (LaBerge, 1986: 21), and detailed techniques for inducing lucidity have been a  part of the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism for many hundreds of years (Wangyal, 1998).1 ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

However, the claim that we can “wake up inside a dream” has been met with suspicion from more recent currents within Western thought. Freud’s theories on the nature of dreaming have proved extremely influential. In his view, the source of dreams is the unconscious mind and the instinctual drives that emanate from it (1900). Only after a long process of analysis, Freud argued, can a dream be shown to have any meaning or any relationship to waking consciousness at all. Without analysis, the meaning of dreams is hidden from consciousness. So rather than “experiences” in their  own right, Freud tended to view dreams as puzzles that could be resolved only by the waking mind. His assumption was that dreams belong to the unconscious mind, waking experience belongs to the conscious mind, and never the twain shall meet. In an influential book on dreams published during the 1950s, this type of  argument was extended even further. Norman Malcolm wrote sceptically about lucid dreamers, those deluded souls who: often report that while they were having a certain dream they “realised” they were dreaming, and they do not mean that this realisation was itself a part of their dream: rather they wish to distinguish between the dream and the judgement or realisation that it was a dream. (1964: 42)

Malcolm suggests that a lucid dream is not a particular type of experience we have had, but is simply a linguistic failure to distinguish correctly between waking up in a dream and dreaming that we are awake . The first would imply a unique mental state;  but the second is simply a normal dream except with a specific content. He argued that lucid dreaming does not exist; a so-called “lucid dream” is simply a dreamer’s failure to conceptualize correctly that they dreamt about waking up inside a dream. So much of the confusion that surrounds the theory and practice of lucid dreaming centres on this basic issue: is a lucid dream different from a non-lucid dream  because it is a different kind of experience (i.e. a unique mental state), or only because it has a certain type of content? And how would we ever be able to tell the difference? A 19th century master of lucid dreaming, Hervey de Saint-Denys, believed he had proof that lucid dreams were a distinct state of mind. One night, he became selfaware in his dream and found that he was standing beside a lilac bush: [T]he question was whether this [lilac bush] … was a stereotyped vision, the unalterable reproduction of a memory-image imprinted in the fibres of my brain, as the materialists would have asserted. In this case my imagination and will would be powerless to modify it. Whilst considering these questions I broke the  branch and tore off the head of lilac flowers bit by bit … (1867: 56).

 No doubt, Saint-Denys had proved the materialists wrong—but not in the way he supposed. He had indeed shown how a lucid dream creatively throws up modified scenes and objects in response to the changing awareness of the dreamer, but he had ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

not “destroyed” the image of the lilac bush. In fact, he had only created a new image of  himself destroying it! Although we may be habitually drawn to do so, we must not assume that “objects” in the internal world of our dreams are like those in the waking world. Logic is the application of the laws of everyday physical reality to the world of the mind, but in the mind and in dreams all kinds of contradictions are conceivable and permissible. When we sleep, our connection to the world created by the physical senses is severed, and so too is our reliance on logic. It has no relevance any longer because, as the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted: “For those who are awake there is a single, common universe, whereas in sleep each person turns away into his own,  private universe” (1987: 89). Every supposed “object” we appear to perceive in our  dream, or think about, or manipulate, evaporates into nothingness the moment we awake. Consequently, in our dreams the difference between an “object” and our mind is far more uncertain than appears the case in the waking world, and so too is the difference between “self” and “other”. What Saint-Denys overlooked as he pulled apart the lilac bush was that if the bush was a perfectly formed mental image, then so too was the image of himself destroying it. He was free to act as he pleased within his dream, but only because the presentation of himself within it was also an image; this “self” was not set apart from or against what it appeared he was acting upon. The whole dream, including the sense of himself inside it, was one seamless image. Jean-Paul Sartre summed up this difference between the inner world of images and the waking world when he wrote: An image can only enter into consciousness if it is itself a synthesis, not an element. There are not, and never could be, images in  consciousness. Rather, an image is a certain type of consciousness. An image is an act, not something. An image is a consciousness of  something (1962: 146).

Waking perception, in contrast, does not appear to us like this. An image may be a willed act, but a perception is different: it is a response to something that truly exists “out there”, in reality. Confusion between perceptions and images often arises when we try to compare or think about them because most of our mental images are sensory. Commonly, our mental images are based on visual   perceptions, although most of us have no trouble forming mental images of sounds, smells, tastes and feelings as well. Abstract mental imagery is also common. More rarely, there is also cross-modal sensory imagery, which may involve “seeing sounds” or “feeling smells”, etc.2 Because most mental imagery is of things perceived, people may confuse their  images with the perceptions on which they are based. For instance, it is quite common to hear people debate whether they dream in colour or black and white.3 Never mind ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

the answer: the question arises from a misunderstanding of the difference between  perception and imagery. When we dream our eyes are closed; nothing is being seen. Colour is a property of seeing, not of thoughts or images. We may dream that a rose is red, but this does not mean that the image has anything red in or about it, any more than the word “red” needs to be written in coloured ink in order for it to have its meaning. So although there is nothing to prevent anyone from dreaming about things having or not having certain colours (or—indeed—even dreaming that they do dream in colour, or in  black and white) to insist that colour or monochrome is a property of mental imagery is like asking someone what musical instrument they can hear their thoughts being played on. I once mentioned a dream to someone in which I’d built a wickerwork structure across my front door before answering the doorbell to him. After I’d told him the dream, he asked: “But if you couldn’t see me, how did you know I was outside?” “Because I dreamt  you were!” I said. 4 Along similar lines, Sartre (1950) presents an interesting thought-experiment. Picture your best friend (Sartre suggested) and standing next to him or her an identical double who resembles your friend in every way. Now, if you were confronted with this scene in waking perception, you would not stand a chance of telling them apart. But a mental image is an act  of the one who imagines, so confusion never arises. Why am I making a big deal over this difference between imagery and  perceptions? Well, if we apply to dreams the same criteria that we apply to waking  perception, we will miss out on the unique subtleties that the dream-experience  presents. For instance, in a dream a person may have a certain appearance yet be experienced by us as someone else altogether—or, sometimes, even as a combination of several people impossibly rolled into one; or a word or a situation may be imbued with a power or sense of truth lacking completely from that word or situation if we were awake. If, after waking up, we decide: “Well, really I must have met Tom, Dick  and Harry in the dream, even though I only remember seeing Tom”, then our  expectations of the waking world have distorted the experience that we actually had. 5 Unfortunately, a great deal of scientific research into dreaming does precisely this—it applies the criteria of waking perception to imagery. Consequently, its conclusions might apply to waking perception but probably tell us little about dreams. For example, Stephen LaBerge (1986), a leading authority on lucid dreaming, conducted an experiment to investigate the problem of duration in dreams. We have  probably all experienced having a dream that felt as if it lasted for an extended period  but, on waking, we discovered that only seconds had passed. This raises the question ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

of how long it takes to dream about x in comparison to the duration of x in the waking world. LaBerge used a team of experienced lucid dreamers who made a signal by moving their eyes when they had become conscious inside their dream. (LaBerge had already established that eye movements behind closed eyelids could be used as signals  between the lucid dreamer and the waking world, without the dreamer waking up.) It had been agreed in advance that the dreamers would count from one to ten after their  first signal, and then make a second signal to indicate when the counting was finished. LaBerge recorded an average of 13 seconds between the first signal and the second—  exactly the same figure he arrived at by asking his dreamers to perform the same task  whilst awake. These results suggested it takes the same amount of time to dream of  something as it does for that thing to take place in the waking world. But once we consider this experiment more closely, does it really tell us anything about dreams? The subjects had been asked to count from one to ten: this is an action, a task . Any action takes a certain amount of time to complete, but the duration tells us little about the processes involved in the task. For instance, suppose we asked some people (whilst awake) to add up a list of figures. Would the time taken enable us to deduce an average “rate of thinking”? Would we suppose this “rate of thinking” holds good for  every thought-process undertaken by that person? I don’t think we would, because it is clear that this approach does not really get to grips with the nature of thinking. And neither did LaBerge’s experiment get to grips with dreaming, because the dreamers were not asked to have a dream, they were asked to count to ten. Would we assume that counting to ten whilst awake reveals something deeply significant about waking consciousness? Not really. “Doing x”, “thinking of x” and “dreaming of x” are three different activities; we cannot suppose that simply  because they share x  as their common content we have somehow factored out x and gain access to the pure process of “being conscious”, “thinking”, or “dreaming”. It is not clear that LaBerge’s dreamers were not simply performing the task demanded of  them irrespective of their waking or sleeping state. “Growing an extra head” might have been a better task to have set them, because it could only belong to the dream state. If tasks can depend upon certain states of mind, then maybe adding up figures or  counting from one to ten can only be accomplished by someone who is awake. If you have ever tried to add numbers or read a newspaper in a dream, you will know what I mean—it feels “wrong” and impossibly difficult. Indeed, the identical result of 13 seconds arrived at by LaBerge might suggest that this is the case. 6 ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

The moral of this tale is that if you approach dreams with the expectations of  waking reality then that is all you will get. For practitioners of Tibetan dream yoga, however, this is certainly not the aim. Generations of Buddhist monks have not been set the difficult task of learning to lucid dream simply so they could hold onto waking consciousness throughout the night, but for a radically different reason instead: to arrive at a first-hand understanding of the illusory nature of reality itself. In a normal dream we accept as real anything that arises, no matter how absurd it appears afterwards. When we become lucid in our dream, however, we are in effect waking up to the artificial, illusory nature of the “reality” that surrounds us in that dream. The ultimate aim of the dream yogi is to carry this powerful practice into his or  her waking hours and recognize the artificial nature of waking perceptions as well as dream images. If we assign “reality” only to our waking perceptions, and consider our dreams only by comparing them to this “reality”, then “waking reality” will become the standard by which we approach our dreams. But if, on the other hand, we respect the unique properties of the dream state and allow these to subvert our waking expectations, then we can approach the experience of dreaming on its own terms. Although I’ve had some success at inducing lucid dreams, for many years after  my first experiences I remained sceptical whether it could truly be regarded as “being conscious while dreaming”. My reason was the nagging sense of falseness  that tormented me like a hangover each time after awaking. It seemed   I had become aware and woken up inside my dream, and this had indeed been accompanied by vivid imagery that was certainly unlike non-lucid dreams. But the trouble was that having woken up to myself inside the dream, I would then always start to do or say or think  things that I simply wouldn’t have if I’d been awake. Many investigators of lucid dreams have commented on the phenomenon of  “false lucidity”. Sometimes it may seem to us that we have become lucid in a dream, whereas we realize afterwards we were only non-lucidly dreaming that this was the case. False lucidity is like a type of dream that many of us have experienced: when we dream that we have woken up and gone to work, but in reality we are still asleep and in bed. Often we have this type of dream when we do not want to get up and wish to remain sleeping. Dreaming that we have gone to work seems designed to fool our  workaholic tendencies into some extra sleep. Similarly, false lucidity often arises when we are trying too hard to attain the lucid state, as if part of the mind were fobbing off the part that is striving with a fake version of what it was striving for. An obsessive seeking after sexual adventures was the main reason why I doubted ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

my lucid dreams were what they seemed. As soon as I became self-aware, I would immediately set about engineering sexual situations—yet I knew I wouldn’t behave like this if I were truly awake. There were many aspects of the lucid state I longed to explore, yet despite my best efforts I’d always get side-tracked into sex. 7 I could see no other explanation except I wasn’t actually conscious at all. All lucidity, I concluded, must be false lucidity because that simply wasn’t “me” in the dream. As I remarked previously: how can we ever tell the difference between being awake in our dream, or just dreaming that this is the case? It took a long time to find a solution. Until I found it I was, in effect, turning Descartes’ famous pronouncement “I think therefore I am” onto its head: That’s not me, therefore I’m not conscious.  Yet if  consciousness is not precisely that which by definition is what it seems, then what the hell is it? Immersing myself more deeply in occultism—specifically, in the practice of  meditation—revealed the blindingly easy answer, which also forced me to start meeting my experience on its own terms. Simply: the dream self and the waking self  are not the same. It is so obvious that it is easy to overlook the fundamental truth this contains. Usually, we regard the self as whatever it is that stays consistent as our awareness changes from state to state. For instance: this morning I was unhappy because I had a toothache, but this afternoon I’m feeling great again because I’ve seen the dentist. Ordinarily we suppose it is the same thing in us that experiences the pain and then the relief. We don’t posit a “pain self” and a “relief self” that separately come to the fore, so why should we suppose there is a dream self that comes to the fore in sleep and a waking self that takes over in the morning? In that case, like Jekyll and Hyde, they might have conflicting agendas and go about satisfying them in wildly different ways. Dr Jekyll might be interested in the philosophical aspects of lucid dreams, whereas Mr  Hyde would probably use them only to get laid. The practice of insight meditation (vipassana, in Pali) showed me it was not the lucid dream that was false but my understanding of the waking state. My error lay in the widespread tendency to suppose that we have a self and it is conscious of whatever  experience we are having. Vipassana,  however, teaches techniques for looking very closely at our experience of reality whilst it happens, moment to moment. It may take a while to get the hang of it, but—once you have—something peculiar about everyday experience is then realized: the self is an experience that arises within consciousness, not the other way around. Quite simply: there is no basis for assuming a self that somehow sits outside experience, taking it all in. How could there be? How could we even know we had a self if that were so? Think about it! It’s such a stupid mistake it ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 beggars belief how we go on making it, every instant of our lives. Yet we do. But by  practisi ng vipassana  we can begin to let go of this delusion. Indeed, life gets remarkably better if we do so. Eventually, we might even follow in the footsteps of the Buddha and shake ourselves free of the illusion of self for good. 8 But to return to lucid dreaming: it seemed I was conscious in my dream, but it also seemed I behaved differently in my dream from how I would when I was awake. Yet now I’d found a view from which I could accept this was simply as it appeared: the dream-self and the waking-self were different   — or rather, as the practice of  vipassana had shown me, there was actually no justification for any kind of “self” at all; there were simply different sets of experiences, depending on whether I was asleep or awake. Neither Dr Jekyll nor Mr Hyde was my “true self”, because my true self was the realization I had no self at all. So far, then, we’ve held up lucid dreaming as a category of experience that is interesting because it sheds light on experience as a whole: waking consciousness  presents us with perceptions, whereas in dreams we find ourselves immersed in a world of images and these possess radically different properties. However, when we dream, the mind makes a “reality” out of these images, just as it does from perceptions when we are awake. It is the dominance of the image over the dreaming consciousness that gives the dream-state its characteristics, which appear strange when compared to the waking state. Yet as we’ve seen, it is not only “reality” that is thrown into question by the transition between waking and dreaming consciousness, but also the nature of self. Meditation practice leads to the realization there is no such thing. Self is itself an experience rather than the transcendental source of experience. If self is an experience then it is subject to radical shifts, just as our experience is subject to wild alterations as we move between different states of consciousness. If the waking state is dominated  by perceptions and the dream-state by images, then as we move from waking consciousness into sleep we also make a transition from an experience of self based upon perception to a self that is based upon images. This crucial difference enables us to begin to understand the relationship between lucid dreaming and some closely-allied states of consciousness: out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) and astral projection. Some books on these subjects tend to gloss over the distinction between these states and suggest that they are all at root the same thing. John Magnus, for instance, defines astral projection very broadly as the ability to project our awareness in a way that enables us to bring our thoughts to life and experience them as we do the physical world (2005: 3–5). His book is entitled Astral Projection  yet it includes many experiences similar to those we would expect to read in books on lucid dreams. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

In my opinion, the distinction between these states is quite clear and needs to be firmly grasped in order to avoid confusion. A lucid dream is a dream in which we are conscious that what we are experiencing is a dream. Usually, lucid dreams are far more vivid than their non-lucid counterparts. However, the degree and quality of consciousness may vary from lucid dream to lucid dream and our mental abilities within them may sometimes appear  constrained in ways that seem unusual when compared with being awake. Here is an example from my dream journal:  A beautifu l view through big windows. The sk y is full of dark clouds, but the sun is slanting  underneath and the landscape is brightly lit. Open fields. Fires are burning here and there. I  resolve to go outside. I open the window and climb onto the radiator in front of the window, then onto the sill, then I discover an outer window that I must open. All this seems vivid but is extremely difficult to achieve. I have to concentrate very hard on opening the outer window, on trying not to  fall, an d on trying to maintain the lucidity on which I k now all this depends. But the lucidity starts to fade and despite all my efforts I am suddenly awake in bed again.

In waking life there would be perceptions of physical objects that had to be negotiated. In a dream, however, the feeling that something is difficult can manifest nonspecifically. In the waking world there would be a specific combination of windows, locks, and objects that it would be possible to overcome. But in the environment of the dream-world the general idea of “difficulty” can appear as a non-specific thing. This is due to the way that in dreams the environment is composed of mental images. An out-of-body experience (OOBE) is indeed similar to a lucid dream, but it has one clear and distinct difference: during an OOBE we are aware of our sleeping,  physical body but at the same time—alongside this—of impressions arising from a “dream body” or “astral body” that seems to occupy a different spatial location from the physical body. Paradoxically, during an OOBE we are aware of inhabiting two “bodies” at once. OOBEs and lucid dreams may both arise spontaneously or they may be induced at will. I propose that the term astral projection (AP) should be reserved for a willed  OOBE. An OOBE can be said to be “willed” in two senses: firstly, the dreamer ha decided to have an OOBE at a particular moment; or, secondly, the dreamer has decided to have an OOBE at a particular moment and also wills their “astral body” to travel to a particular location or scene.  Now, it is quite possible for someone to have a lucid dream that   he or she is astrally projecting, just as it’s possible to have a non-lucid dream about lucidly dreaming. My suspicion is that many accounts of so-called astral projections or  OOBEs are in fact lucid dreams (or maybe even non-lucid dreams)about   having these ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

experiences. Each time I’ve experienced an OOBE it has begun with an unpleasant an intense “buzzing” sensation that sweeps over the body. This sensation is the  classic sign of the onset of an OOBE. It feels horrible, as if the fillings in my teeth were abou to be shaken loose, but I’ve discovered that if I accept the sensations for what they are, they eventually pass. Many times I’ve flinched away from this feeling or become excited at the prospect of an OOBE, only to discover that my reaction prevents the OOBE from developing.9  Only after the buzzing sensation has been successfully endured and has passed is it possible to “leave the body”. Sometimes this has to be willed, other times the “separation” happens naturally: Something started to happen. A buzzing sensation started. It was unpleasant but I was excited  because I recognised it as the beginning of an OOBE. I let the fear and excitement wash over me; it became “integrated” and then passed. I sensed I could “roll out” of my body although it was difficult. I could move my astral left arm so I rolled all of me to the left. I could feel the quilt and  my girlfriend’s sleeping body under it as I crawled out of bed over her … She kept fidgeting and  each time the movement brought my awareness back to my physical body, asleep in the bed, which  I was also aware of and could f eel. I concentrated my way through this, at f irst, but she continued  to move. It was too much and I was annoyed. Awareness of the astral body gradually faded as awareness of the physical body grew too strong.

I’ve put certain expressions such as “leave the body” and “separation” into inverted commas because if we were awake and we suddenly started to see the world from a location different from that inhabited by our body, then we might indeed be justified in assuming something had separated from us and travelled to a different place. But  because we are dealing with mental imagery and not perceptions, we are not justified in assuming any such thing. There is nothing to prevent us at any time from forming images of places that are remote from where we are, whereas forming perceptions of  remote locations demands the physical relocation of our sense organs. As has been mentioned, paradoxically an OOBE includes a full awareness of the physical body and its activity. In every OOBE I’ve had, as well as being aware of impressions received  by my “astral body” as it wanders about the room, at the same time I’ve had a peculiar  dual awareness of the sensations received by my physical body as it lay in bed: I can feel the position of my body and the quilt covering it; I can hear my regular, slow  breathing; I can even see the darkness behind my closed eyelids. Too much awareness of the physical body endangers the OOBE, as the example above illustrates. It is as i awareness of impressions from the astral body demands a certain level of  concentration or detachment from the sensations of the physical body. Often, the environment we encounter during an OOBE closely resembles the waking world. Sometimes, however, it does not, especially if we succeed in moving ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

the astral body from its immediate starting location and exploring beyond the bedroom. It is important not to get too hung up on this and fall into the mistake of regarding the  perceptual accuracy of the experience as part of the criteria for an OOBE. The buzzing sensation and the impression of inhabiting two locations at once are the sine qua non of an OOBE. To add to this a rule that the environment encountered should conform with the actual physical environment would be to confuse characteristics of the state with what is merely its content. As I hope I’ve established by now, to insist that an OOBE is only an OOBE if it meets the criteria of waking perception leads t contradiction and confusion. Certainly, all these states—lucid dreaming, OOBEs and astral projection—are alike in that they arise upon the cessation of waking perception and the crossing of the  boundary into sleep. OOBEs and astral projection, however, are characterized by a greater sense of self-awareness than a lucid dream. In a lucid dream we are aware of  ourselves inhabiting a different kind of reality, but during an OOBE or astral projection we are also acutely sensible of inhabiting a different kind body, or possessing a consciousness that seems to have “detached” from the body altogether. It is as if these states of consciousness form a hierarchy according to the degree to which consciousness has become focused upon itself. This is why I think it is useful to distinguish clearly between them, because each demands a higher level of spiritual sophistication than the previous in order to access it reliably and navigate within it. In the waking state, consciousness is focused predominantly upon perceptions arising from the physical world through the sense organs. In a normal dream the focus is upon internal mental imagery. But in a lucid dream, there is an additional degree of  self-reflective awareness that enables us to be aware of what we are experiencing in its true nature as  a dream-image. In OOBEs and astral projection this is taken ye another step forward, with the focus turning inwards once more upon the kind of  “body” or “‘self” that appears to be doing the experiencing. In an OOBE we acquire an astral body. In astral projection, in addition to this, we have the willpower to direct the astral body to wherever we please. It seems to me likely that experience of these states is what has led mystics,  philosophers and even the prophets of world religions to posit notions such as “the soul”, “ghosts”, apparitions of living people, etc. I’d be wary of deducing the objective existence of any such entities from these states of consciousness. The tendency to invent from our sensations and experiences a “self” that appears to have some kind of  objective existence extends into these states too—as I was forced to realize when confronted by the dubious sexual behaviour of my “dream self”. The way I acted in my lucid dreams wasn’t “me”, so I concluded it must be a “dream-me”. Later it became ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

clear that the foundation for imputing a self to any state of consciousness is equally illfounded. However, the temptation to do so may be greater in certain states than in others. Confrontation with an experience of a “dream-me” or “astral body” understandably leads us to wonder whether this entity might be somehow “truer” or  more essential than the sense of self we experience during our waking hours. The imputation of a self or essence to these exotic states of consciousness becomes especially tempting when we consider how the “astral body” seems to exist independently of the physical body, perhaps offering the possibility of personal immortality. When exploring these states it is helpful to maintain a perspective rooted in actual experience rather than wishful thinking. Based on the replicated findings of  countless practitioners through the centuries, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition again offers some useful pointers. Mastery of dream yoga, according to this tradition, leads to yet another level of dream experience, beyond even astral projection. In this state consciousness is more refined and even more intensely focused upon itself. This is known as “clear light dreaming”, which “indicates a state free from dream, thought and image … in which the dreamer remains in the nature of mind” (Wangyal, 1998: 63). Clear light dreaming is the apex of dream yoga, generally considered attainable at will by only the most advanced and enlightened practitioners.10  In this state consciousness is so purely focused upon itself that there is nothing else, nothing arising “in” consciousness: no perception, no image, not even a sense of self or object. There is only the unimpeded light of consciousness itself, out of which all experience takes its form. And although those who abide in or have touched this state have indeed reported realizations of “immortality” at this level of awareness, they have also emphasized it is a transpersonal   layer of being. Consciousness may indeed be infinite and eternal at this level, but if anything endures forever it is Consciousness (capital “C”) and not “my” consciousness, or “yours” or even “ours”. Having drawn a rough sketch-map of these states of consciousness, I’m concerned not to give the impression that things are as simple out there on the astral  plane as it might now seem. Although dreams, lucid dreams, OOBEs, astral projection, and clear light dreaming appear to form a neat hierarchy in terms of the degree to which consciousness is the object of itself in each, I’ve stumbled across other states that throw this model into question—and I’m sure others will have done so too. “Sleep paralysis” is one of these and is exceedingly common. Typically, sleep  paralysis occurs between sleeping and waking. The mind partially emerges from the dreaming state, but the body is still incapable of movement, no matter how much we attempt to struggle. Most often, the inability to move is accompanied by a sense of a ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

menacing presence, sometimes manifesting as a terrifying creature sitting on or  applying force to the chest, or to some other part of the body, resulting in a constriction of the breath. Evidently, experiences of this type belong to the spectrum of dream-states: the creature sitting on our chest is not a part of perceptual waking reality, but obviously a manifestation presented to the mind as an image. The dreamer is conscious, so this state is not a non-lucid dream. The dreamer possesses a perceptual sense of the  physical, sleeping body (albeit paralysed), which therefore rules out a lucid dream. Yet it cannot be considered an OOBE or astral projection, because the sense of an astral body and the willpower to move even the physical body are both notably absent. Where, on the spectrum of dream states, does sleep paralysis belong? Is it  perhaps a type of OOBE that has failed to get off the ground, placing it below an OOBE and above a lucid dream? Whenever I’ve had the misfortune to find myself i this state, I’ve noticed that my thought processes are remarkably sharp and quite undreamlike. Considering also how this state tends to arise during the transition between sleeping and waking, my hunch is that it’s more correct to situate sleep paralysis on the  boundary between waking and non-lucid dreams rather than anywhere “higher”. The main point to draw from this, I think, is not to do with how these states should be categorized, but how there are states of consciousness that do not obviously fit into any simple model. And there are more of them out there, at the fringes of consciousness, states so ill-formed and bizarre it is no wonder no one has bothered yet to put a label on them. For instance, more than once I’ve experienced the following:  A rippled pattern appears. It doesn’t move. I interpret it as wallpaper on a wall or ceiling. I am aware of my physical body, but cannot roll out of it into an OOBE, despite trying. This is not sleep  para lysis either, beca use there is no sense of foreboding or presence. Nothing further happens, other than this static pattern in front of my eyes, so it is not really like a dream at all. There is  simply consciousness, and the sense of being awak e in some place that is j ust as real but far more limited than the wak ing world.

“False” lucidity was discussed above as a case in which the dreamer has a non-lucid dream about lucid-dreaming. However, on another occasion I stumbled across an odd variation on this:  I dreamt that I had an expert in lucid dreaming watching over me, check ing my progress. I had  that “light”, “fragile” feeling that precedes a lucid dream; I even felt myself on the verge of the “buzzing” sensation that preced es an OOBE; but I was not aware that I was actually asleep whilst I  was dreaming all this! It felt so much like waking consciousness I simply assumed I was still awake all along!

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

In other words, instead of becoming conscious and entering a lucid dream by realizing I was dreaming, I was already lucidly dreaming yet failed to recognize this as such  because it felt so much like being awake. Now, perhaps this was indeed simply an unusually elaborate instance of false lucidity, but it certainly seemed otherwise after I awoke. And where would we place this experience upon our continuum of dream states? A lucid dream in which we were not   aware that we were lucidly dreaming would be a contradiction in terms! Although there is an observable progression between the states in the extent to which consciousness is aware of itself, evidently there are other states that are unique enough to deserve a label to themselves, yet in respect of which it is much harder to decide whether they manifest consciousness “more” or “less” than other states. This suggests that consciousness is probably not the only factor enabling the transition from one state to another. For instance, the transition from waking to sleep involves a switch from perception to imagery as the dominant sensory modality; and in the case of OOBE and astral projection it is the manifestation of willpower that allows us to suppose a change of state has occurred. It seems, then, that the overall change in consciousness is itself connected in some way with the action or inaction of a whole set of mental faculties. These include (but may not be limited to) the following: thought, imagery, perception, and will. In waking life, these are all active and the waking mind is able to distinguish each from the other. As soon as we approach the boundary of sleep, however, it seems as if they become selectively enabled or disabled depending on our state. In sleep  paralysis, for instance, thought and imagery are active, but perception and will are disabled. In an OOBE, thought, imagery and perception (of the sleeping physical body) are all active, yet many people in this state report odd problems when it comes to doing what they want to do. Sometimes movement in certain directions is inexplicably  blocked, or simple physical gestures are impossible, whereas others remain easy. It seems that the will is only partially active in this state. (Hence my suggestion that we reserve the term “astral projection” for OOBEs that manifest the activity of will to a much fuller degree.) Alongside this selective enabling and disabling of mental faculties there is yet another factor, which is exposed to view when we investigate the nature of the faculties that become “activated” as we move into a particular state:  In the dream I visualised a sigil. I was surprised to discover I was capable of visualisation. I had  expected that—as in a non-lucid dream—anything imagined would arise in the external  environment, as in a non-lucid dream when we read a book, say, or watch television, and the story or f ilm suddenly becomes the d ream itself. But it didn’t. S omehow it had its own “mind-space” that 

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

it could occupy. However, the visualisation was “abstract”, not vivid like a mental image when awake. It seemed more like a word or an abstract idea than an image.

In waking consciousness there is diversity among the elements of experience; we have  perceptions, thoughts, and images. But in dreams our waking senses are suspended and the contents of consciousness become images, begging the question how  in an imaginary world (i.e. a world constituted purely of images) would it be possible to “imagine” something? My experience suggests that in a sense it isn’t   possible, but what seems to be happening is that faculties which are available during sleep step into the role of those that are no longer available. As we have seen repeatedly, imagery takes on the role of   perception in all the dream states. In a lucid dream, then, it seems as if thought   takes on the role of imagery. This is why a lucid dream provides an extra mind-space in which we can reflect and hypothesize, in contrast to a non-lucid dream; but this also explains why, when we investigate the nature of this faculty within the dream itself, it  possesses a peculiar “dry”, “abstract”, “non-sensory” quality that the imagination does not possess when we are awake. On an internet forum, I read with interest the startled observations of an experienced meditator who had succeeded in settling down to meditate whilst inside a lucid dream. As he turned his mind to look deeply into his state of consciousness, he was surprised to note the complete absence of anything resembling will . In his waking meditation he was used to noticing the subtle mental sensations of his will going about its business. In the lucid dream, however, these were entirely absent. Will makes a partial return in OOBEs, and a fuller return in astral projection, but is it the case that some other faculty might be filling in for it? I can’t lay claim to having had the experience that would qualify me to answer, but I believe the solution might lie in the shift in the sense of self that occurs between lucid dreaming and an OOBE. In a lucid dream we often have vivid physical sensations, but these are taken to a whole new level in an OOBE. It is not simply that our “perception” seems more real; in an OOBE the heightened background sense of “being in a body” vastly increases our  sense of being aware. I would hazard a guess that it is the return of the awareness of   physical sensations  (i.e. perception) that is the basis of this; the paradoxical awareness of the physical body in an OOBE alongside whatever is happening to the dreaming part. It seems that perception is somehow implicated in forming the basis of  a sense of will   that begins to emerge in the move from lucid dreaming toward OOBE and astral projection. This kind of observation is very difficult to make. Part of the reason is that it ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

requires dedication and practice to learn how to distinguish between the different elements of mental life through introspection, and intense self-discipline to turn the mind to this type of investigation when in the lucid dreaming state. Another part of the reason is that few people are looking or have ever looked at their experiences in the dream-states in this way. Currently, most investigators are drawn to neurological imaging as the basis of research, even though this kind of work presents deep problems when we come to ask questions of what it feels like to be in these states. And the final  part of the problem is our natural bias towards waking life as the baseline against which we measure all types of experience. It simply appears counter-intuitive to the majority of people to suppose that what assumes the role of perception in a dream is not  perception, or what assumes the role of imagination is not  imagination. Old-fashioned, systematic introspection into our own experience can still shed new light on the structural features of these states, and—in particular—the role they  play in mystical experience. There is much work remaining to flesh out the model of  the dream-states that I’ve proposed. I suspect this work has already been done on a  personal level by those enlightened souls who have mastered dream yoga, or have found other ways to peer deeply into the nature of human perception and consciousness. But the ways in which they have presented their findings may have  proved idiosyncratic and off-putting to many people. Two mystical geniuses of the early 20th century, Rudolf Steiner and G. I. Gurdjieff, exemplify this. Both wrote of human spiritual development as a process that involves an acquisition of an extra “body” in addition to the ordinary physical one: [M]ankind is the only creature that can grow a soul … Thus, we human beings have a purpose, and that  purpose is to grow (or, as Gurdjieff prefers to call it, to “coat”) within us a “higher-being-body”, by us called soul (Ginsburg, 2005: 9). This work [i.e. the constant endeavour for the mastery of the ego] leads on to ever higher levels of human nature. Through it man evolves new members of his being, which lie—as yet unmanifest—behind what is manifest in him (Steiner, 2005: 53).

At first glance such ideas are senseless until, perhaps, we compare them with the  progression of the dream states from non-lucidity to astral projection, because these states—when regarded as a continuum—do indeed seem to chart a process that results ultimately in the establishment of an “astral body” possessing its own full set of  faculties including consciousness, perception, imagination, and will. These faculties appear to have been salvaged from the scrapheap of waking consciousness that is left  behind when we cross the threshold of sleep. For instance, when we dream, our new “body” acquires “perception”, which it constructs from the waking faculty of  imagination (mental imagery). When we lucid-dream, it also acquires a form of  ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

“imagination”, constructed from the waking faculty of thought. As we pass into an OOBE, our new body gains the beginnings of a “will” of its own, which it seems to have re-purposed from the waking faculty of perception. The common understanding of “a body” is as a kind of vehicle or wrapper for  our consciousness or sense of self. Obviously, this is not the sense of “body” that applies here, which would lead us into all kinds of dualist philosophical problems if  we adopted it. This “astral body” is best regarded not as some kind of spirit-double  but—just like the physical body—as a holistic collection of capacities. The capacities of the physical body are shaped by evolution and environmental factors, and are synonymous with its form—for example, respiration, reproduction, movement, and everything else a physical body does. The capacities of the astral body, on the other hand, are shaped by the platform of raw materials that the physical body  provides it with, but also—as Steiner and Gurdjieff both insisted—by the conscious exercise of certain spiritual practices. In other words, if we do not give it a proper  workout, by performing spiritual practices such as yoga, meditation, etc., then our  astral body will not grow. The “body” model at first seems eccentric but it has definite advantages. A body can be viewed as a collection of functions sufficient to sustain its integrity upon the level of existence on which it functions. However, a body can extend its range of  functions onto other planes, by refining and extending its capacities. For instance, human beings are adapted by evolution to survival on land, but through prosthetic technology the exploration of the oceans and outer space has become possible to a degree. Dream yoga, meditation, and other spiritual disciplines are an equivalent of  scuba gear in the development of our consciousness. They help extend our awareness  beyond the everyday sense of self into which our waking experience and our   presuppositions condition us. But just as we would not expect to develop an exceptional physical body without putting in some work, the same applies to the astral  body. The dream states appear to form a continuum organized according to the extent to which consciousness is capable of taking itself as an object, but progression through this continuum in a neat sequence is not inevitable; we have to make it happen. As in  physical training, spiritual development has its equivalents of laziness, rigidity, and obesity. We can get stuck by falling into old habits and prejudices, or identifying the self with sensations. The body model explains why the dream states are not available to all of us, all of the time. It also helps account for those odd states we noted, that do not seem to fit in clearly with the others or lead anywhere interesting: they are not “bad” or “wrong”, they are a consequence of how the dream states involve interactions ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 between a range of faculties, so some of the combinations thrown up are quite likely to appear random or bizarre. The most important lesson that engagement with the dream states teaches us, however, is not concerned with the nature of any particular state, but with the subtle developments undergone by consciousness as it passes from one state to the next.  Notes 1.

  Earlier, we considered Paul Devereux’s claim that ancient rock-drawings depict similar experiences among our ancient ancestors. See p. 48. 2.

  This is a perceptual phenomenon known as synaesthesia, sometimes regarded by neurological investigators as pathological. For an overview see Cytowic (1994). 3.

 However, since black and white televisions are now all but obsolete, I’ve noticed that people discuss this less than they used to—which is in itself suggestive. 4.

 I’d expected him to know better. He was my psychoanalyst.

5.

  In psychoanalysis this misapplication of the laws of waking logic to dreamexperience is termed “secondary revision” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1994: 412) and is regarded as a defence against revealing the true meaning of the dream to the analyst. 6.

 On the question of duration in dreams, I’d point out that we have no conscious sense that enables us to register accurately the passing of time, and that the ability of human  beings to gauge duration is notoriously unreliable. Our relationship to time is extremely vulnerable to subjective distortions, yet what from the side of perception we would describe as “subjective distortion” might actually indicate a positive ability of the mind to form qualitative images of time. It should not surprise us too much if  these images of time also make an appearance in dreams, where—because there is no  perceptual input to undermine them— they are taken at face value. In short: if we dream of something that includes an idea of it taking a very long time, then it is experienced as such. 7.

 I don’t seem to be alone in this. John Magnus, for instance, discusses in detail his own struggle with lucid sex addiction (2005: 202f.). 8.

  This is known as enlightenment , of course, and forms the main topic of our   preceding essay. It should be emphasized that the Buddhists do not have a monopoly on enlightenment. Most of the world’s great religions have techniques similar to vipassana that realize the same aim. ******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

9.

 However, it is sometimes still possible to attain a lucid dream if we screw up at this  point. 10.

 Of course, any old klutz might stumble across this or any other of the dream-states  by luck or accident at some point in their lives, but the conclusions they draw from it will be crude or inaccurate if they are unable to view the experience in its correct context.

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

 EFERENCES 

Adams, D. (1982). Life, The Universe and Everything. London: Pan Macmillan. Andrews, T. (2004). Simplified Qabala Magic. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn. rgus, The (2004–6). [Local newspaper for Brighton & Hove.] Brighton: Newsquest Media Group. Armstrong, K. (2000). Buddha. London: Orion. Berry, S. (2005). Georgian Brighton. Chichester: Phillimore. Blackmore, S. (1996). In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Para-psychologist. New York: Prometheus. Buddhaghosa, B. (1997). Visuddhimagga (‘The P ath of Purification’). B. Nanamoli (Trans.). Singapore: Singapore Buddhist Meditation Centre. Carder, T. (1990). The Encyclopaedia of Brighton. Lewes: East Sussex County Libraries. Carpenter, W.B. (1852). On the influence of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement, independently of volition. In: Royal Institution of Great Britain (Proceedings), 12 March (pp. 147–153). Chapman, A. (2007). The Camel Rides Again: A Primer in Magick . Brighton: Heptarchia. Chetwynd, T. (1886). A Dictionary of Symbols. London: Paladin. Coverley, M. (2006). Psychogeography . Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Crowley, A. (1980). Book Four. York Beach, ME: Weiser. Crowley, A. (1989). The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. London: Arkana. Crowley, A. (2006). Liber O Vel Manus et Sagittae (section V). In: J. Wasserman (Ed.),  Aleister Crowley and the  Practice of the Magical  Diary. San Francisco: Weiser. Crowley, A. (Ed.) (1995). The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon The King  (Clavicula Salomonis Regis). S. Lidell & M. Mathers (Trans.). Boston, MA: Red Wheel/Wesier. Culling, L.T. (1992). Sex Magick. St Paul, MN: Llewellyn. Cytowic, R.E. (1994). The Man Who Tasted Shapes. London: Abacus. Datta, S. (2003). Open Your Hea rt With Kundalini Yoga. London: Thorsons. Dawkins, R. (2007). The God Delusion. London: Black Swan. Devereux, P. (1993). Acculturated topographical effects of shamanic trance consciousness in archaic and medieval sacred landscapes. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 7 (1): 23–37. Devereux, P. (2005). Koestler’s legacy.  Fortean Times, 201: 32–39. Devereux, P. (2009). Shamanic landscapes. [Public lecture at The October Gallery, London.] 24 February. Diamond, J. (1998). Guns, Germs and Steel. London: Vintage. Dukes, R. (2005). Uncle Ramsey’s Little Book of Demons. London: Aeon. DuQuette, L.M., & Hyatt, C.S. (2000). Aleister Crowley’s Illustrated Goetia. [Second edition.] Tempe, AZ: New Falcon. Eeden, F. van (1913). A study of dreams. In: C.T. Tart (Ed.),  Altered States of Consciousness. [Second edition.]  New York: Doubleday, 1972.

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******

******Created by ebook converter - www.ebook-converter.com******

Eliade, M. (1989). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. London: Arkana. Emoto, M. (2005). The Hidden Messages in Water. New York: Pocket. Fenwick, P., & E. (1998). The Hidden Door. London: Headline. Fontana, D. (1992). The Meditator’s Handbook . Longmead, Dorset: Element. Fort, C. (1997). Lo! London: John Brown. Foxx, J. (2006). Tiny Colour Movies [CD]. Metamatic Records. Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. S.E., 4, 5.. London: Hogarth, 1968. Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and Its Discontents. The Pelican Freud Library vol. 1 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Freud, S. (1933). Dreams and occultism. New Introd uctory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Freud, S. (1938). Findings, ideas, problems. S.E., 23. London: Hogarth, 1961. Ginsburg, S.B. (2005). Gurdjieff Unveiled . No location given: Lighthouse Workbooks. Goldsmith, J.S. (1974). The difficulties of meditation. In: What is Meditation? J. White (Ed.). Garden City, NY: Anchor. Goodrick-Clarke, N. (2008). The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graves, T. (1986). Needles of Stone Revisited. Glastonbury: Gothic Image. Harpur, P. (2003). Daimonic Rea lity: A Field Guide to the Otherworld. Ravensdale, WA: Pine Winds. Heraclitus (1987). Fragments. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ingram, D. (2008). Mastering the Core Teachings of the Bud dha . London: Aeon. Jung, C.G. (1936). Tavistock Lectures. On the Theory and Practice of Analytical Psychology. C.W., 18 : W. McGuire et al. (Eds.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. Jung, C.G. (1952). Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle. C.W., 8. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. Jung, C.G. (1955–6). Mysterium Coniunctionis. C.W., 14. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Jung, C.G. (1983). Jung: Selected Writings. Introduced by Anthony Storr. London: Fontana. Jung, C.G., von Frankz, M.-L., Henderson, J.L., Jacobi, J., & Jaffé, A. (1964).  Man and His Symbols. London: Picador, 1978. Keating, T., & Reininger, G. (Eds.) (1997). Centering Prayer in Daily Life and Ministry. London: Continuum. Koestler, A. (1974). The Roots of Coincidence. London: Picador. LaBerge, S. (1986). Lucid Dreaming. New York: Ballantine. Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.B. (1988). The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Lawlor, R. (1991). Voices of the First Day: Awaken ing in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Rochester, VT: Inner  Traditions International. Magnus, J. (2005). Astral Proj ection and the Nature o f Reality: Exploring the Out-of-Body State. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads. Malcolm, N. (1964). Dreaming. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mansfield, V. (1995) Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making . Chicago: Open Court. Murphy, M. (1992). The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature.  New York: Tarcher/Penguin. Musgrave, C. (1981). Life in Brighton. Rochester: Rochester P ress. Saint-Denys, H. de (1867). Dreams and How to Guide Them. N. Fry (Trans.), M. Schatzman (Ed.). London: Duckworth, 1982. Sartre, J.-P. (1950). The Psychology of Imagination. London: Rider. Sartre, J.-P. (1962). Imagination: A Psycho logical Critique.  F. Williams (Trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: The University

******ebook converter DEMO - www.ebook-converter.com*******