New Thelema Books and Pynchon

The Angel & the Abyss

by J. Daniel Gunther

This consists of books II and III of the trilogy The Inward Journey.  The first book, Initiation in the Aeon of the Child, came out in 2009.

The Angel & the Abyss immediately grabbed and held my attention from the very first sentence:  "One of the primary goals of the Neophyte of the A.'. A.'. consists in a resurrection from a Death which the world calls Life."  I remember first hearing this idea from E.J.  Gold shortly after moving to California.  The subject and importance of Death in post-Crowley Thelemic literature seems to have been largely overlooked.  Gunther remedies this and then some in the book's first chapter, The Self-Slain.  I thought I knew most of the references to Death in AC's writings and it's relevance on the path of Initiation, but I was wrong.  The first chapter reveals much more than I knew existed and backs it up with a coherent, well-referenced  narrative that inspires and feeds work along these lines, the lines of  using Death as an extremely effective method of initiation.

Gunther appears an extremely knowledgeable scholar in a multiplicity of traditions in the areas of religion, mythology, psychology and philosophy as well as being a foremost Thelemic authority.  He's adept at pulling out obscure references making cogent points that explicate Thelemic theory and practice.  This gives a lot of backbone and strongly establishes the high probability that Thelema presents a new formulation of an ancient tradition.  Gunther's scholarly discourse always engaged me, it never got dry or boring due to the sense conveyed that he lived it, he speaks with the authority of experience.  Not that I always agree, but his thinking always appears original, stimulating and creative.  If anything can make Crowley and Thelema academically respectable it would likely be this trilogy.  Many of the quotes from ancient writings are reproduced in their original languages in the footnotes which include Coptic, Greek, Latin, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and Sanskrit.  Some might find this pedantic, but I suspect future researchers will delight with the depth and broad scope this brings.

The content of The Angel & the Abyss resembles what the radical post-structuralist philosophers Deleuze and Guttari call a rhizome.  A rhizome is a metaphor borrowed from botany where it describes an underground mass of roots that  mostly grow roots laterally though they can still grow shoots upwards.  In D & G's model, rhizomes represent an aggregate of multiplicities that communicate laterally to other multiplicities.  In other words, there appears no set program or specific goal apart from the broad framework labelled the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  Since this will manifest uniquely different for everyone there endeavors to be a realization of multiplicities both in the sense of many individuals and of the multiplicities of experience in any one individual.  The KCHGA seems more of a dynamic endless becoming than a static being which agrees with the rhizome view.  As mentioned, this book transmits a multiplicity of information: historical footnotes, obscure religious rituals, archetypes, Egyptology, tarot, interesting cross-references in Thelemic writings to name a few.  All of the diagrams included look great communicating useful nonverbal data.

A more comprehensive review of this book is HERE

Gunther not only supplies a strong foundational background and context for Thelema, he not only brings to light much that seemed obscure in Crowley's writings, but he also expands upon Thelema proving that it exists as a living dynamic school open to new creative insight. 

Homemade Magick

The Musings & Mischief of a Do-It-Yourself Magus

by Lon Milo Duquette

This book nicely complements the previous one as it seems as practical, straight-forward and down to earth as the other is theoretical and esoteric.  Duquette shows you how to get  down to business from right where you are sitting now.  Though ostensibly a beginner's guide to practicing magick, and it is an excellent one at that, I find that Homemade Magick can be read on more than one level of interpretation.  To my eye it offers useful information to the experienced practitioner as well as the beginner.  It's always useful to review the basics, but there also appears multiplicities of meaning that transmits advanced knowlege on deeper levels.  Something gets invoked here that goes beyond an experienced Magician instructing students.  Perhaps this is the mischief part?  For instance, the first real page of content starts with a quote:

Intent is the mechanics through which spirit

transforms itself into material reality

Deepak Chopra

This has a footnote which reads:

1. Deepak Chopra, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004) p. 115

Below Chopra's quote is a photo of a collage of inspirational words and phrases with the caption:

"Constances "dream board" placed squarely over the washing machine.

To me this page looks like a deceptively simple yet powerfully effective opening dedication which underscores the homemade aesthetic of the whole book.  Strong magick.

The first sentence of the Prologue and the book reads:

Like my father and brother before me, I was born in Southern California and journeyed to rural Nebraska to find a bride.

As seems obvious already, Duquette is extremely generous with inviting us readers into his life, his family and home revealing many practical details of functioning as a magician in contemporary society.  The book is engaging, easy to read yet has a lot of depth.  It could have easily been subtitled Autobiography of a DIY Magus.  I particularly liked the section on Magical Weapons.  It sparked some new insights.

A more detailed review lives HERE

I recommend Homemade Magick unreservedly.  There appears a lot more to it that will eventually meet the eye.

Progradior & THE BEAST and The Magical Record of Frater Progradior

 both by Keith Richmond

These have both been out since 2004, but are now out of print and often expensive on the used market.  I was fortunate to find these recently at a decent price.  Frater Progradior is Frank Bennett, an Englishman who relocated to Australia spearheading magick and esoteric practice into that continent first with Theosophy then with Thelema.  He spent time with Crowley at the Abbey in Cefalu.  His record of that time reveals what it was like to live and work there, a valuable addition to other accounts by different residents and visitors.  Bennett is the person whom Crowley was discussing the HGA with relative to the subconscious mind when something Crowley said triggered a profound epiphany in him that lasted a few days at its peak intensity.  Crowley then suggested that he go on a magical retirement to consolidate the experience.  It encouraged Crowley to work diligently and furiously at completing Liber Samekh which was his adaptation and expansion of the Bornless Ritual for the purpose of attaining the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  Crowley did finish it in time for Progradior's retirement and dedicated it to him.

Frater Progradior could safely be called one of Crowley's senior students.  Richmond does an excellent job creating a vivid portrait of him without a whole lot to go by.  Much of his personal archives were destroyed by a crazed son who objected to and completely misunderstood his lifestyle.  I find these kinds of accounts helpful for getting a sense of the atmosphere of the Hermetic mileau back in that day; useful history.  Richmond includes a copy of Liber Samekh in The Magical Record.  That kindled my interest in that ritual which I'd never really explored before.  I found a good synergy with reading Liber Samekh while listening to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme.  His Cosmic Music also works well.  They seem like twin recordings.  The bass line for A Love Supreme sounds very similar to the bass pattern in Lord, Help Me To Be from Cosmic Music.

Another REVIEW

Mason & Dixon

 by Thomas Pynchon

This is by no means a review.  Mason & Dixon is included here because it appears a powerful magickal text worthy of serious study and application.  Yes, the book certainly seems multi-level, a rhizome of multiplicities, and I'm only focusing on one, rather extensive, strata of the assemblage, but this strata, the layer of magick,  seems rarely touched upon by Pynchon exegesists though it appears blatantly obvious to me; also blatantly obvious that TP writes with as much hierophantic authority as the other authors mentioned here.  If you like first rate literature, superb dry humor, whimsy, history, political opinions, puzzle solving and much else thrown in with subtle and wise magick instruction then you might, as I do, find Mason & Dixon in your library alongside other classics on the subject.

One review I read closed the piece with the statement: "Simplicity and clarity, I presume, would bore him..." implying that Pynchon never writes simply and clearly,  Au contraire, I must respond.  If one recognizes that the strata of magick exists in full force inside this tome then some statements do appear blatantly obvious as when magick first gets explicitly introduced ( it appears implicit from the get go) on p. 67:

Mason makes quick Head-Turns, to the Left and Right, and lowers his Voice.  Whilst you've been out rollicking with your Malays and Pygmies, ... what have you heard of the various sorts of Magick, that they are said to possess?"

This paragraph reflects the range of esoteric communication and reference from the explicit question at the end to the qabalaisticly significant correspondences at the beginning.  This same range even turns up on the front cover with an explicit image in the center and two word fragments above and below that carry qabalistic relevance related to the central sign.  

 

If the image portrayed by the stylized ampersand still mystifies you can always turn to the top of p.261 for a straightforward explanation of the cover.  

The writing style of novel ostensibly reflects the style of the period it writes about.  In that time, mid 18th Century, it seemed common for all nouns to get capitalized.  Pynchon doesn't do this to them all, but it does afford him license to capitalize much more than normal thus allowing much freedom to place emphasis on different things.  Some reviewers find this an annoying kind of affectation while the alert qabalist correctly recognizes this as another method of communication.  He also apparently uses common spelling and vernacular of the period allowing him to get away with things like adding a "k" to magic.

Notariqon is a branch of Qabala that derives messages from acronyms.  Pynchon seems to make capitalization choices along these lines frequently.  For instance, in the paragraph mentioned above from p.261 that explicitly describes the front cover, one sentence begins: " Even Quakers are out in the Street, ..."  When you add the caps, E+Q+S you get 165 which has one meaning in Crowley's dictionary ( 777 and other Qabalistic Writings) of "to make them know," exactly what this paragraph accomplishes with the front cover.

Three years ago I wrote a blog on Gematria that concluded with a look at the significance of the number 68 in Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy.  I also mentioned that Robert Anton Wilson used the SC notariqon prominently in his fiction oeuvre - Schrodinger's Cat, Sigismundo Celine, Celine's System.  SC = 68.  Both Eric Wagner and RAW had the impression that Pynchon read at least some of Wilson's Historical Illuminatus books before writing Mason & Dixon.  I don't doubt this as I've seen clear references to Wilson in other Pynchon books.  The Historical Illuminatus trilogy also transmits qabala and the strata of magick both explicitly and obliquely.  I mention this now because Mason & Dixon shows the SC combination to what can only get called an excessive degree.

In that blog I wrote:

The most simple interpretation:

68 = 6 and 8

6 = Tiphareth, 8 = Hod, the Sephiroth which relates to communication or transmission. Therefore 68 could mean the communication/transmission of Tiphareth.

68 also relates to the realization Crowley made in  The Paris Working about the identity of Christ and Mercury.  In the Book of Lies chapter 68 he associates this with Manna, divine food.  Within the first sentence of M & D Pynchon takes us into "the great Kitchen"  and describes the tantalizing food cooking there.  In certain Sufi schools the kitchen is considered the heart of the community.

Not that there don't exist other interpretations for the prevalence of the SC combo.  Like any qabalistic motif, it appears a rhizome i.e. multiplicities sending out roots of significance to other multiplicities.  It might be beneficial to study the tarot cards associated with S & C, Art and the Chariot in the Thoth deck, and note how they synergestically relate and create.

On p. 479 a clear description of Gematria is given, a glance at the inner workings of the magick strata in this novel.

The overarching story of two surveyors/astronomers, Mason and Dixon, exploring and scientifically  mapping out unknown territory metaphorically resonates with the practice of Magick.  The archetype of twins turns up prominently.  Mason and Dixon are twins in their vocation.  The context of the novel is that their story is being told by Reverend Cherrycoke to a family gathering.  Two of the children are twins named Pitt and Pliny so that either one could be the Elder or the Younger, in imitation of historical figures, and because no one knows who was born first.  "Twins" is the last word on the first page.  In the Thelemic pantheon, Horus, the guiding force of this aga, is said to be a twin god comprised of an active aspect, Ra Hoor Kuit, and a passive or silent aspect, Hoor Pa Kraat.

By their names, Mason and Dixon suggest a male/female, yin/yang type of binary unit.
Ma-son = yin, Dix-son = yang through common slang.  Charles Mason does appear the more introverted and reserved of the two while Jeremiah Dixon seems far more outgoing.  He likes to party and chase women.  The famous line they charted, the Mason/Dixon line was commissioned to draw a border between the then Provinces of Pennsylvania and Maryland.  The names of those territories also suggest a male/female binary unit by the same logic, in this case one that gets separated and divided.  This seems a very apt metaphor for the internal process of an Aspirant making their way through the desert of the Abyss.

Another yin/yang binary unit presents itself in the first page as he describes a piece of furniture:

"... excepting a sinister and wonderful Card Table which exhibits the cheaper sinusoidal Grain known in  the Trade as Wand'ring Heart, causing an illusion of Depth into which for years children have gazed as into the illustrated Page of Books..."

Wand'ring - wand = yang, ring = yin.

I am just scratching the surface, but I think you get the drift.  A thick volume of commentary could easily be written on the strata of Alchemy and Magick that exists in the Pynchon novels Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and Bleeding Edge which all connect with each other on that level.

The ending looks very nice and continues the theme of exploration:

"We can get jobs said William, "save enough to go out where you were," said Doc.
"The Stars are so close you won't need a Telescope."
"The Fish jump into your Arms.  The Indians know Magick."
"We'll go there.  We'll live there."
"We'll fish there.  And you too."

Prosperity Path Metaprogramming Orbs

I've mentioned these before, now it's time for an update.  Prosperity Path orbs are computer video game-like environments created by E.J. Gold and his team of designers.  They were made and play back on the G.O.D.D.(Gamemaker Of Diabolical Distinction) engine. 

For me, these runs through alternate cyberspace worlds represent the leading edge of bardo/magick/consciousness technology.  There are currently over a hundred orbs with a variety of intentions anywhere from simply feeling better to promoting world peace or helping someone transition into the afterlife; learn how to fly or astral project.  They don't take a lot of time either.  It's unusual to do a run for more than 10 minutes though a few of them can go awhile.  Several orbs take 2 - 3 minutes or less.

What follows are rough notes I've made from recent research.  I've been working with these daily for about 2 and 1/2 years.

It helps to adopt the viewpoint that these worlds have their own reality as valid and  meaningful as anything else.  You, the player, are out of body, but your avatar is your body in that world so try to experience the cyberworld as your avatar does and realize that what happens to your avatar happens to you.  Enter that virtual reality.  A page called How to Run a Prosperity Path Level  expands on this.

These orbs can be studied like Tarot cards.  Some people have written detailed books on the symbolism in the Tarot even going so far as to examine details of the card with a magnifying glass.  The P.P. orbs can yield much information when observed with the same attention to detail.  Sometimes the orbs read like a 3D Tarot card.  

The first important action at the beginning is to name the player who will run the orb.  It can be yourself or someone else.  It's common to run levels for other people. It sends them good wishes at the subatomic quantum level.

The Buddha Is in the Park

I was setting up to mix a project when the tragic news arrived of a death in the band.  I had my laptop with me and immediately ran the Clear Light orb for him.  Observing the graphics, the assistant engineer remarked, " Cool, a spiritual video game."

Buddha, in classic repose, turns up again and again in these game modules.  It helps to have some familiarity with the symbols encountered.   Anyone who has studied Buddhism of any kind or just read about it will be reminded of something when seeing these images.  Strong mood of Buddhaspace whatever that means to you.  My Buddhism got recently recharged reading Kerouac:

As thinking nothing of herself, a mother's love unfolds and cherishes her only son, so now through the world let they compassion move, and cover everyone.

Even robbers will permeate with stream of loving thought unfailing; and forth from them proceeding, enfold and permeate the whole wide world with constant thoughts of loving-kindness, ample, expanding, full of divine approval, joyously free from enmity, free from all suspicious fear.  Yea, verily, thus my disciples, thus must you school yourselves.

 - Jack Kerouac, Wake Up  - A Life of the Buddha

Kerouac's ecstatic description of Buddhism in general (not only the quote above) resembles Crowley's theurgic magick in some ways.

The Buddha is in the park in the Peace orb.  Actually there are 11 Buddhas in 4 different park areas.  

You start out facing a large, broad and deep park environment, very green and woody, lots of trees and foliage, that has 6 Buddhas, 3 on each side, just before the entrance to the light wash corridor on the other side.  On the right is the entrance to a park with two fountains spraying water in front of three Buddhas.  To the left is another park housing a single large Buddha with white light water falls on either side.  All the spaces have audio clues, you hear the water flowing out of the fountains and waterfalls along with the sound of  the outdoors.  Behind you is a fourth park area with a large Buddha statue set in the middle of a pond.  In the far corners on either side are floating bezels with images worth checking out.  Shining emptiness of pure femininity.  

I began running this level for the Gaza strip last summer after hearing about too many horrific acts of war happening there.  They finally figured out a lasting ceasefire about a week to ten days after running Peace every day.  It's a coincidence to be sure, but I'll take it.  I felt a strong connection with both Israel and Palestine from working and making friends with people who lived there only a few months before the unrest.  You can run orbs for places that cover large populations as well as running them for individuals or yourself.

Prosperity Path Magick

In all of the Cleansing orbs and in some of the Specialty levels you'll see a rotating CUBE on a pedestal that when you tag it says

 "Your matrix attunement was successful, COUPLING FACTOR is in." 

A tuning into the nonlocal circuit where communication occurs instantly and magick takes place, perhaps the subatomic world of quantum physics.  Technically coupling factor means:

Depending on the distance between the transmit and receive coils, only a fraction of the magnetic flux generated by the transmitter coil penetrates the receiver coil and contributes to the power transmission. The more flux reaches the receiver, the better the coils are coupled. The grade of coupling is expressed by the coupling factor k

 - http://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/technology/coupling-factor.html

'Coupling factor is in' means the connection exists between the player and something beyond the player (the matrix) that allows change to occur according to will.  Coupling factor also relates to the esoteric idea that one requires a mediator of some kind to experience absolute reality.  In qabalistic terms this mediator exists in the domain of Tiphareth, the central sephira on the Tree of Life.  Cubes have 6 sides and the key number for Tiphareth is 6.  The cubes in these orbs have 9 circular ports on  4 sides, not the top or bottom, making a total of 36 rotating ports.  36 = 6 x 6 and herein lies another clue.  A coupla sixes.  Also, Buddha is a character from Tiphareth so all the Buddhas encountered could be seen as coupling factors or mediators.

At the bottom of the screen in every game are two rows of attributes that increase or decrease as you go through.  Qualities such as: Protect, Healing, Shakti, Clarity, Endurance, Karma, etc. etc.  These will vary from level to level.  As a whole it's called a Heads Up Display ( HUD) which is "any transparent display that presents data without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints"  Many of the levels have a point that triggers a full HUD i.e. all attributes automatically set to maximum.

Above the entrance to the final wind-up in the Clear Light orb is a sign that says: "Have You Spent Your Life Wisely?"  I can't see how this question wouldn't arise in anyone's life at some point especially as one gets older.  Wisely adds to 121. 121 = 11 x 11.  11 is the general number of magick, energy tending to change.

The Black and White Cats

In many of the orbs, at the end of the run, you see a target image like a Buddha, a Lady in White, or a large Crystal that represents the finish.  On either side of this final image, posted like sentries, is a black and a white cat.  In other orbs, the remedy orbs for instance, the cats are stationed in front of the woman who tells you that you're out of body and to choose an astral body.  The cats also turn up on pedestals in one of the chambers on the run.  I associate these cats with the black and white sphinx's that pull the Chariot in the Golden Dawn Tarot.  The way I see it, these sphinxes or cats signify the animal component of the body/mind complex that when harnessed and going in the same direction provides the power or motive force to drive the Chariot.  Crowley modifies the card to include four sphinx to represent the 4 lower centrums, the physical, emotional, intellectual and the social.  It never hurts to read up on the Chariot card in Crowley's Book of Thoth for major info on the Work.  He called the Chariot the formula of the aeon of Horus, in other words, a guiding set of instructions for enabling the fruits of this age, Life, Love, Liberty and Light.  The path of the Chariot connects Geburah with Binah, Horus with the Mother, the sephira of force and fire with the one of Universal Emptiness.  The black and white cats that you have to run past to get to the end or the ones in front of the Astral Body Guide all seem to indicate that it's necessary to go through and past the animal nature to get to the higher levels; no other way to do it.

Color Radiation

Gold once remarked offhand that the colors found in these levels have a significant effect.  One of the coolest orbs, in the sense of cooling down, is called Panic.  This level invokes for me the element Water more than any other even though you see lots of water in many orbs.  I suspect the particular shade of blue used has something to do with that along with the solo flute music that plays.  I also like taking a dip in the huge fountain at one end. 

Many of the Cleansing and Specialty orbs end with a run down a light wash corridor.  I call it a light wash because the first time I saw it was in a level called Karma Wash.  The light corridor is set up like a car wash where you proceed through rows of different colored, bright intense lights.  It even has a car wash soundscape.  It can be interesting to stop at the end of the light corridor, don't go into the very last chamber where the run ends, but hold the space bar and go through the light corridor in reverse.  When you move forward through it again it seem  that much more intense.  There's a very intense light tunnel of a different kind about 1/3rd as long in the Conflict orb.  A large sign that says LIFT marks the entrance.  Going back and forth through it a few times can be effective.

Immerse yourself in the light from yours and the avatar's points of view.  One of my favorite orbs is Six Worlds which not only gives the feeling of flying, but also provides an experiential education into the Six Worlds of current Bardo research.  It seems this education primarily comes from the different, piercingly intense colors of each world.  Before "beaming up" you get stopped and asked by descending female Guides several times if you're ready.  If you are then you get sent to a vortex that beams you up to sky level, and voilà, you're flying.  The "tab" button keeps you airborn, the "caps lock" will let you descend.  On either side will be three large Palaces of different colors representing the Six Worlds.  You enter each Palace and tag a spinning disc to gain access to that world.  The worlds from the lowest up:

Brute - a gray/blue castle with multicolored lights, lots of white mixed with red, green and yellow in a way that looks superficial.

Purgatory - intensely green

Hungry Ghost - mostly red with a bit of yellow coming in through the windows, reminds a bit of Halloween

Human - bright, intense and rich yellow.

Hell - a gray castle with mostly white light light in the interior, but with smatterings of other colors mixed in.

Sun Absolute - deep rich dazzling blue.

New ways of showing old models; entering the Color Scheme of each  World gives an experiential feel that sinks in deeper than only reading about it.

 Stress Relief  is another favorite orb that I run regularly.  It has a Chamber of Thoughts where you get to shoot down all your thoughts which appear as floating crystals of different colors.  There's a Chamber of the Stars, a dark expansive space with celestial lights and patterns floating about.  Every morning in the dead of the night I walk about a quarter mile through the Sierra Nevada wilderness to go to a floatation tank room.  The  Chamber of the Stars has a very similar mood.

To be continued ...

You can download Prosperity Path Orbs HERE.  They are $.99 each and run best on a PC.

Making Life Brighter Interview

On Dec. 8, 2014 the internet radio show Making Life Brighter broadcast an interview with Yours Truly by host Winifred Adams.  The show transmits on the Health and Wellness Channel of the Voice America Talk Radio Network.  Healing and Consciousness are the threads that connect the weekly shows.

 Winifred Adams, apart from being an excellent interviewer, is an experienced healer in a variety of ways. Her email signature sums it up:

Medical Intuitive | Radio Show Host | Professional Wellness Speaker | Official Guide To John of God | Herbologist/Iridologist | 

"Successfully helping people heal from the inside out for 20 years!" 

The interview is HERE:  It's an hour program.  On the right of this page under Episode Directory are the archives of all the previous and subsequent shows.  Lots of interesting guests of different kinds worth checking out.  

Subjects of the interview include the recent Exploring the Hidden Music show and its centerpiece Heartbeat, a short history of my humble roots in sound, influences, memorable moments, setting up the space for a session, the power of music, changes in technology, in the music industry and more.

I know Winifred as an excellent singer and songwriter.  We were introduced when John Wooler flew me down to LA to record her and the musicians he'd assembled to back her up.  We talk a little bit about that session in the interview.  I wrote a blog about it almost exactly 4 years ago called Who Will Shall Attain from a Crowley poem that closes it which reminded me of Winifred and also served as my New Year's greeting that year ... or any other year including this one for that matter.

Finding the Hidden Music

O Silver trumpets be you lifted up

And cry to the great race that is yet to come.

Long-throated swans upon the waves of time

Sing loudly far beyond the wall of the world

That race may hear our music and awake. 

  - William Butler Yeats

Clockwise from left to right: Lynn Mabry, Dave Revels, Sheila E., Ryan Edwards, Sunny Hitt, Trilok Gurtu, Bill Laswell, Christopher Janney.  The heartbeat machine is between Sunny and Bill.  Photo by Yoko Yamabe

Immediately upon finishing the Exploring the Hidden Music show at the Gramercy Theater Tuesday night, Philipo turned to me and asked, "SO WHAT EXACTLY IS THE HIDDEN MUSIC ?!?!  Philipo, who hasn't emailed me yet with his last name, works as Trilok Gurtu's drum technician and sound engineer.  He had seen a run through of the show in various stages of development 4 times in the last 3 days including tonight's performance.  He asked the question several times and seemed quite serious, even a little distressed to the point where I felt compelled to respond even though I didn't have an adequate answer for him.  I told him to read the last blog, various people had told me it was a good description, but I knew it doesn't really say what the hidden music is.  I also told him that I didn't know, and said there was an English word people use to label the indescribable - "ineffable."  The hidden music seems ineffable, I told him.  Then I mentioned that "ineffable" is also used by people who don't know what they're talking about.  They use it to get by, to give an answer when no easy answer can be given.

So this blog is partly to give Philipo another set of choices to get an answer or direction from.  To eff the ineffable.  I realized what the hidden music meant for me flying 30,000 + feet over Middle America watching a documentary on the artist Ralph Steadman who is most well known for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson.

The hidden music requires tuning in to it.  First you have to know it's there.  The hidden music is demonstrable to serious listeners.  Anyone who has listened extensively to music recordings will likely tell you that some music they heard for the first time did absolutely nothing for them.  It might have sounded like noise or just flat and uninteresting.  Later it can happen that the same recording will be heard and appreciated as a great piece of music.  It's the same exact recording in both instances, but the musicality of it was hidden the first time or first several times until finally heard.  The recording didn't change, but obviously the consciousness of the listener did to reveal the previously hidden music.

The hidden music extends far beyond organized sound structures though music can be the basis to see it in other spectrums such as light and motion as amply demonstrated at the Hidden Music performance by the use of a video synthesizer, a state-of-the art light show, and modern dance.  Music provides the fulcrum for the visuals and dance to take off.

Buddhists call experiencing hidden music satori. John Cage's piece 4'33' reigns as the number one all time hit on the Hidden Music charts.  If you find the music hidden in that it then becomes much easier to experience it everywhere else.  Hidden music might be why our G star planet ended up at the exact sweet spot to support life.  An inch or two different in either direction and it might not have worked as far as human life is concerned.

That kind of critical balance seemed to also be in effect as one explored the hidden music with the Janney/Laswell production.  This exploration began for me the minute I touched down in New York from the taxi ride in to the movie star Rolls limo out, and included all the rehearsals where it naturally and intuitively assembled and took shape,  directed primarily by Janney,  Laswell and Gurtu.

November 23, 2014.

The first rehearsal I attended was at the Alvin Ailey Dance Studio on 55th Street just off of 9th Ave.  The building holds a large dance school and repertory company.  It was clean and new with the mood of a comfortable monastery for the art of modern dance.  Our rehearsal studio was 5B, on the fifth floor, a large, empty, rectangular space with two of the walls completely full length windows and a third, length-wise wall, all mirrors.  The view out the windows showed the city of New York pulsing below, people and cars ever moving through the arteries of the street.  The room had five white circular pillars on the walls running the length, 3 on the window side, 2 on the mirror side.  In front of the two pillars nearest the door, Trilok Gurtu and Bill Laswell set up their respective stations.  D.J. Logic set up his turntables and mixer on a table behind them visually forming a triad.  Flanked on either side of Bill and Trilok was keyboard player Ed Grenga on Bill's side with reed player Peter Apfelbaum by Trilok.  Janney set up his heartbeat machine a little forward from Peter.  It seemed obvious right away, just by how they looked physically in the room, that Bill and Trilok would form the musical pillars of the show.

The idea is for continuous music, Janney told them at one point.  Transitions were worked out so that each piece flowed into the next for a continuous bed of sound.

Sunny Hitt arrived; strong, ethereal, butterfly presence, and began warming up at the quiet end of the space.  Later, Janney attached the medical contact mics and velcroed a small wireless transmitter pack to her back.  The mic signal is received by a medical monitor which has an audio out that feeds a custom designed step-down transformer and eq.  From there it goes into a dbx noise gate which feeds a Crown amp and two banks of what looked like 6 or 8" speakers.  We only had two mics feeding a 4 channel mixer going into the room PA, so one mic went on the heartbeat while the other picked up Trilok's tablas.  Sunny danced to the sound and rhythm of her heartbeat while Janney worked on the form of the piece with the musicians and singers.  I was in a chair by the heartbeat machine.  This was the one time I really got to see her dance, a highlight for me.  Every other time I would be preoccupied with mixing the sound.  She also had much more space to move around in.  Several times it looked like she fully became the heart, expressing its life through a human body.  That looked like hidden music.

The rehearsal went well and ended exactly on time at 6pm.  Trilok, Janney and Bill were going out to eat and Bill invited me to join them.  The four of us left the building together.  Shortly before this trip I had been turned on to a Hemp Root Salve by Rockhouse Remedies for topical and deep tissue healing that I really liked and made great small gifts.  I had intended to give one to each of these three principles in appreciation for my involvement and now was the perfect opportunity.  Janney would only accept his if I had one for Trilok which, of course, I did.  Trilok said it was just what he needed.  What drummer doesn't get sore muscles?  I waited to give Bill his until after dinner where Yoko joined us as I had one for her too..  I didn't consider until later the possible quantum connectivity and morphic resonance field made by the five of us having the same remedy, a remedy also made with hidden music in its ingredients.

Back in room 1508 at the Four Points Sheraton on West 25th Street I open a window allowing in an ocean of musical street noise to wash through the room filling it with random sound that always seems a musical work in progress searching for harmonic order and structure, fractal fossil compositions emerging for a moment from the soup then merging back in to the hum and roar.  All distinction awash in the sea, a general blended cacophony that harbors no threat, but holds no hope of redemption.  Just a timeless moment suspended in the animation of the  neurons vibrating raw diamond sound in the eternity of the present.  Depth sirens stretch out echoing off the corridors of concrete and steel buildings.  Car engine symphonies ebb and flow, peak and valley, whirling eddies of sound always changing in unpredictable pitch, dynamics and timbre with strange harmonics and dissonant polytonals.  The sound of the Shekinah sighing at night, hidden beauty in her randomity, always an uncertainty.  A gong has struck and reverberated in the chord of New York.  Horns play with various sustain, 1/16th note, 1/8th note, 1/4 note, 1/2 note even a full measure in whatever time signature the astrological night registers in. 

November 24th, 2014

9 am load-in at the Gramercy Theater.  We have a good sound crew to work with, Ryan and Anastasia, FOH and monitors respectively.  I am reunited with Anne Militello, the LD from Tom Wait's Mule Variations tour where I mixed FOH.  The sound system is decent, 6 folded horn enclosures loaded with 18s for the low end.  I had to back them down a bit. The PA is controlled by a Soundcraft vi1 digital mixer, touch screen control.  The digital lighting mixer brought in appears even more elaborate and side by side it looks like the bridge of a Starship.  The stage set-up waits while a massive video screen for Janney's video synthesizer gets installed followed by Anne's lighting towers.  I ducked out for a half hour and walked down to the massive Barnes and Noble in Union Square and picked up Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut.

From the bridge we see Philipo, myself, Lighting Guy whose name I will get, and Anne Militello'  Photo by Yoko Yamabe.

I hadn't read Slaughterhouse 5 since the age of 15 or 16.  E.J. Gold mentioned it recently a couple of times and I only vaguely remembered it.  Its two main themes are: 1. Becoming unstuck in time. 2. Death.  Every paragraph tells a self-contained story and exists as an individual unit, its own abstract prose poem of sorts. The book is all these paragraphs strung together.   Every time he writes something about death it's followed by the phrase, "So it goes."  Every single time.  They get quite frequent as the book progresses.  The other phrase he uses, "And so on," gets less frequent as the book progresses.  They are magick formulae.  "So it goes" relates to the experience consciousness goes through when the body dies.  In the Bardo, the between-lives state, the experience appears one of "here to go."  Consciousness speeds up ... a lot, giving an apparency of extreme motion.

Audio starts setting up around 1:30.  I run a DI (direct injection) box for the Heartbeat machine and Sunny gets set with the mics.  At first it sounds great, but then something causes a voltage spike that blows up the line.  We change the DI and cables and it's steady.  Every once in awhile there's a hint of a crackle, some kind of static interference, but it's very slight and infrequent.  Both Janney and I hear it and deem it acceptable.  The next morning the noise is much worse, loud and constant.  Another cable is changed and it's fixed.  Always resistance when something positive tries to manifest.  There was another phenomena with the Heartbeat machine which is that sometimes it would go from the regular heartbeat pulse to a louder, chaotic low frequency rumble when one of the body mics lost contact.  It would also self-correct out of the rumble and back to the steady pulse.  Trying to broadcast the human heart is a delicate matter on any level.  We had a backup loop in case something went wrong during the show, but didn't have to use it.

We only had time this day to get a line check in, but it gave me a good idea of how the room would sound.  Philipo checked Trilok's drums and James played Bill's bass.  It was a complicated set up, but was coming together.  I felt good about where we were at.  Soundcheck was scheduled to begin at 9:30 tomorrow morning.

No art is possible without a dance with death. 

 - Céline, as quoted in Slaughterhouse Five

November 25th, 2014

Soundcheck begins with Philipo setting Trilok's monitors.  Philipo's assistance proved invaluable for Trilok's idiosyncratic drum kit ( 3 bass drums, two played with sticks, tablas, djembe, water percussion along with the more conventional snare drum, ride cymbal, hi hat and rack tom.)  He also does tabla bols, vocalizations into a wireless mic that imitates tabla rhythms.  Philipo rode shotgun with me at the FOH mix position during the show keeping his eyes glued to Trilok letting me know when he was about to play tablas or the water percussion so I could open those mics.  In all my years of live mixing Philipo is the only one who has ever been able to assist in that way without being a serious annoyance.  I was grateful for his help.

Soundcheck was followed by a run through of the show.  There would be another full dress rehearsal from 3:30 to 5:30 pm. Janney's main audio instruction to me , "Oz, there is loud and there is too loud..."  The dot dot dot was the unspoken "we don't want it too loud."  It was already my intention not to mix it loud like a rock concert, but more as the theater piece it was.  We were both on the same page in that regard. The Gramercy theater is on the small side, holds approximately 500 capacity, but is long and narrow with a high ceiling and tiered seating making it sound cavernous when empty.

Hidden music can also turn up as a friendly guide, an angel to take care of potential difficulties.  They seem to either show up serendipitously or you're on your own.  My difficulty was that I couldn't eat the food catered in.  Libby Mislan, one of Janney's extended family of helpers, saw what was going on and immediately took care of the problem for the duration of the project.  I work best when my biological machine is properly fed, and thanks to Libby I was able to get to the level of functioning called for by the invocation.  Later, she mentioned that her day job was teaching creative writing to teenagers.

Dinner was served after the dress rehearsal in the lounge downstairs which was acting as the production office/backstage area.  I found myself talking with Zoe Rappaport who was working on a project about the heart and art for her MFA degree.  It is partly inspired by her father who died from a heart condition when she was very young.  We exchanged the circumstances behind each of our father's deaths, both from heart disease; definitely not your average preshow backstage banter.  Janney's father had also succumbed to a heart condition.  His death had served as a strong inspiration for the creation of the Heartbeat piece.

After eating I had about 90 minutes so I headed down 23rd Street for the 5 block walk back to the hotel.  The street was buzzing with energy.  This was the evening that the Grand Jury announced their decision not to indite in the Ferguson, Missouri case.  Lots of cops on the street and sidewalks, but things seemed relaxed.  I only saw one protester with a Stop Police Brutality sign on her way somewhere.  Later I heard on the news that the New York protests began a little east of the theater on 23rd Street and proceeded to block traffic on the FDR.  At the hotel I had just enough time to get myself ready.

The event began outside the theater with a small version of Christopher Janney's Sonic Forest set up in front of the doors. These are a series of eight foot aluminum columns outfitted with speakers and lights triggered by sensors.  A precursor of sound  and vision environments yet to come.  I could easily imagine a sign over the door reading:

"MAGIC THEATER

ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY"

An ambient drone programmed in quad called Cybermonks greeted the audience filing in to the theater.  Cyber derives from an ancient Greek word meaning "self-directed."  White noise transient swooshing sounds panned across the speakers suggesting movement into a space and environment far outside the ordinary.  To dance with death is to die to the ordinary self with its egoistic worries and concerns.  The drone subtly and gently guided the passengers (ie the audience) into a new space.  It evoked a safe and upbeat feeling of exploration, a solid, foundational diving board to launch into the Unknown. 

The drone segued seamlessly into the first piece called Enter the Now.  The horns and Trilok picked up the ambient thread and moved it forward.  Bill began playing subtle lead phrases setting an invocational direction and was soon joined by DJ Logic with soft delayed scratch textures on the turntable.  It built from there.  Everything was musically incredible, everyone locking into the collective groove seamlessly and as if they always played together.  Apfelbaum and Bernstein, horn players I've had the pleasure to mix several times, sounded the best I've ever heard them especially after the ambient section; open and more  experimentally taking chances.  Throughout the concert Bill played at a level I've never heard before, best ever, for me.  Truly amazing ...there is a multi-track recording by Mark Wong, you will have to hear it to believe it.  And, of course, Trilok carried and rhythmically drove the whole thing with absolute finesse and world music taste.  Logic fit in like silk; like an extra-dimensional space visitor bringing new information and sonic corridors.  Without stopping they transitioned to the 2nd piece, Violin Violence that featured a Miles-like head theme played by the horns and joined by keyboardist Ed Grenga.  Sheila E. also joined at this point slowly sliding into Trilok's beat.  Sheila definitely carries her own weight in rhythmic gravitas in a completely different way, but very complementary to Gurtu's style.  Absolutely a highlight seeing them both up there on risers being the rhythmic rudders of the ship, playing with time in a variety of subtle ways.  Even more so when they soloed to start up the post-Hearbeat encore.  Truly a highlight of anyone's musical experience.  At one point she was on the kit, a little later he was playing one of her congas.  I don't think you ever see musicians connect that fast that often.  I believe they met for the first time that day or the day before and now they were creating a new definition of a drum solo.  You have never heard anything like it.  This production brought out the best in everyone... beyond limits.

Violin Violence also dramatically upped the visual aspect of the show when Christopher Janney started playing his video synthesizer projecting images onto a huge hi-tech light wall that served as the stage's backdrop.  I used to watch a TV show growing up called Time Tunnel in which the main characters would jump into this tunnel of swirling light and end up at a different point in time.  Janney's video synthesis screen had a similar effect when I looked at it.  Rapidly changing, mutating, images geometrical, abstract and representational creating a sense of motion and tunneling into different dimensions.  Always in flux, a visual stream of consciousness riffing off the music.  I could only watch 20% of the time, if that, having a show to mix and all, but I did notice one moment of incredible synchronicity between the video and music when the band as whole made a dramatic change into a slower tempo at the same moment that  a dramatic environmental image, the collapsing of a mountain and forest into the water is what I remember, lit the video screen.  I also remember a whole series of images of eyes of all kinds morphing and fluxing in and out of perceptible existence.  Janney achieved the same goal with the video art that Alejandro Jodorowsky had set for Dune, to create the psychedelic experience without having to take the drug. 

Heartbeat started with the audio dropping to the sound of Sunny Hitt's amplified heart thumping through the hall.  She was all in red, projecting form, posture and motion well, a somatic language which told a story of the heart.  Sunny is a good storyteller.  Janney read an anatomical description of the heart that had an eerie resonance set against the sound of the pumping heart. Bill began with high harmonic noises that you'd never expect from a bass while Trilok played ambiently through the water percussion mics.  The second movement of Heartbeat featured a collage of vocalizing and counting starting with a whisper and gradually crescendoing.  The vocals were led by Dave Revels and Lynn Mabry, he sang with the Persuasions, she sang with Sly Stone, two of the finest singers I've ever worked with and sounding as sweet as ever tonight.  Sheila E. joined them on vocals and the three part harmonies they gave had a surrealistically perfect Motown sound.  I had never heard it live that good before.  Janney and Ryan Edwards also were singing and counting, nicely fleshing out the vocal ensemble.

Heartbeat made the implicit explicit.  Normally you don't hear and aren't aware of the sound the heart makes pumping life sustaining blood and oxygen to the brain and nervous system.  Even less do we consider the musicality of that sound.  The hidden music of the heart always playing in our body.

As above, so below,  a primary axiom of magic attributed to the quasi-mythical Egyptian teacher Hermes Trismegistus means that you can make a model of something in the microcosm that has sympathetic resonance with the macrocosm.  In the microcosm of the Gramercy Theater, Sunny Hitt's heartbeat pumped life into the music of that chamber, it was the driving force.  By the principle of As below, so above the same would have occurred in the macrocosm.  The planet survived another night without going up in flames.  Despite high emotions, all the protests of the Ferguson verdict throughout the country stayed peaceful. 

Heartbeat concluded the first part of the show.  Everyone stepped out and took a bow.  The audience gave them a standing ovation.  Emotions ran high here too, but of a far different, transcendental nature.  Next up was DJ Adam Gibbons and his world music dance beats.  People began dancing.  The lighting crew had a blast letting loose with their rig following the DJs beat.

The end finale stayed at the plateau reached by Heartbeat and went up from there.  I already mentioned the percussion solo that reintroduced the live musicians.  That was followed by Bill soloing on his fretless bass while Janney projected a kaleidoscope of Laswell images as if to portray the multidimensional aspects of Being.  Everyone else joined in, horns, singers, keys, Logic, Ryan Edwards now on djembe, everyone listening to each other, sounding cohesive and exuberant with life.  They found the hidden music.

Exploring the Hidden Music - Christopher Janney / Bill Laswell

This looks to be another one of those incredible artistic events that I've been waiting all my life to do.  I highly recommend anyone in the New York area interested in plunging in to an immersive artistic experience to attend.   It's a multi-media performance where every element - the music, the visual and the dance will be of peak artistic expression.  In other words, all participants are extremely talented at what they do and this is a highly interesting, unique combination; a group synergy producing a harmonic order/chaos of light, sound and motion.  Art as negentropy.

Exploring the Hidden Music is the vision of Christopher Janney, an architect of sound, space and light ranging from airport installations to private homes, realized in collaboration with Bill Laswell, an architect/constructor of musical voyages and dimensions of equal depth. Choreography is by Sara Rudner of the Twyla Tharp lineage.  I know a little of Twyla Tharp's work from The Catherine Wheel soundtrack she comissioned  the Talking Heads to do for her.

Heartbeat, one of the central pieces of the show, is the one I'm most looking forward to seeing at the moment.  In it, a dancer, Sunny Hitt in this performance, is wired with wireless contact mics that pick up and transduce the sound of her heartbeat into an electrical signal that's then amplified and fed into the Front of House Soundcraft mixer for broadcast throughout the theater.  Live musicians start to play with her but no one plays on the beat of her heart, the driving force. 

 I'm not making any of this up, by the way, this will actually happen in a few days at 8pm November 25th at The Gramercy Theater, 127 E 23rd St, New York, New York 10010.
Tickets available HERE. The link takes you to the janneysound website which has much more biographical info on Janney.

 Heartbeat as appears one of those serendipitous timing things for me as it perfectly matches the tenor of my recent blog series, To Exercise Will which has Sufi heart opening practices as a main theme.  Christopher Janney's name appears as sheer coincidence.  As I'm writing this I get a vector diagram of the Heartbeat segment from Janney.  He has the most detailed stage plots I've ever seen, works of art in themselves reminding me of blueprints for a battleship or spaceship.

I've been interested in architecture and music for a long time, since reading Robert Fripp's groundbreaking article on the subject in Musician magazine back in the early 80s.  In it he talked about the dimensionality of the sound field: height = frequency response, width = panoramic potentiometer  (ie the pan pot on a mixer) and depth = the dynamic range.  Plotting sound through this dimensional grid reveals that music has geometry.  Not long after, I became very interested in Buckminster Fullers energetic geometry called Synergetics that went beyond Euclidean geometry so I started to apply Fuller's approach to mixing music. I also included a fourth dimension, time = rhythm. 

Another nail in the cross between music and architecture was driven in when reading Gurdjieff describe how architecture alters consciousness in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson.  He said that whenever you go into a building your consciousness will change to some degree due to the architecture of the space just entered.  This in part explains what they went for with the great Cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dame.  To create a divine, heavenly, enlightened state of being just by walking through the door.  If music has geometry and architecture it can induce similar exalted moods just by listening, walking through that door into the sound describing and defining the space.

I remember once as a studio assistant labelling an SSL mix with the tag "sonic architecture" and seeing Bill take notice of it.  It was then that I thought I might have a future doing interesting things in this business.  Now, here we are. 

When walking into the Gramercy Theater next Tuesday night you will immediately begin exploring the hidden music either consciously or subconsciously as pentatonic music will be playing out of the PA speakers and two additional speaker stacks provided by Bose in the back of the theater to create a surround sound experience.

Details on the musicians and dancers follow, copied from their Facebook page:

Architect/composer Christopher Janney and legendary producer/musician Bill Laswell join as they "explore the hidden music" - found in spaces, the human body and in the meeting of artistic minds. 

This performance includes a new version of Janney’s “HeartBeat” with percussion, electronics and voice accompaniment. "Heartbeat" is a dance/music/cardiology mash-up and was made world-famous when toured internationally by M. Baryshnikov in the 1990's. 

Janney's “Visual Music Project” will also be presented which utilizes his custom "visual synthesizer" exploring his synaesthetic tendencies. 

Both pieces feature world-class musicians including Trilok Gurtu (John McLaughlin, Joe Zawinul), Dave Revels (The Persuasions) Sheila E (Solo, Ringo Starr, Santana) and Lynn Mabry (Sly Stone, David Byrne/Talking Talking Heads (official), Bette Midler). 

Choreography by Sara Rudner (Twyla Tharpe). 
Additional Artists include Ed Grenga, Sunny Hitt, Ryan Edwards,, DJ LOGIC just added!!!. 

All this together with one of Janney’s interactive sound/light installations at the door and a new interactive light work “Touch my Light” over DJ Adam Gibbons (Uhuru Afrika) set with live drumming, the result should be a wild ride where, as Bill is known to quote Burroughs, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

Creativity - To Exercise Will Part 3

Success is thy proof

-Liber Al  3:42

To recap:

1. Like the physical and intellectual centrums, the emotional centrum can be educated, exercised and developed far beyond it's common undeveloped and not understood use.

2. Different models and metaphors are employed to communicate about the higher emotional body: Tiphareth in the Qabala, Circuit 6 in Leary's language, the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (KCHGA) in Crowley's system, Gurdjieff's Higher Emotional centrum or real "I", Jung's individuation etc. Robert Anton Wilson calls it the HEAD revolution in The Illuminati Papers.

3. The heart has its own intelligence that has a connection with intuition.  Intuition can also be exercised and developed far beyond ordinary incapacity to the point where it can be relied upon and trusted most of the time.

4.  Qabala acts as a higher-order language of imagery which both exercises intuition and establishes a common language for the Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel.  In other words, qabala helps us to learn to communicate with the subconscious, our deep selves, that huge hidden part of ourselves that remains almost completely unknown until we start diving in.  According to Carl Jung, the unconscious mind communicates to the conscious mind through symbols.  Qabala is a language of symbols therefore ideal for linking the subconscious and conscious minds.  By giving it a language, the subconscious (your HGA)  will talk to you.  Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) expressed it well when he said: Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.

That certain point = KCHGA.

Qabala utilizes a model called the Tree of Life,  a metaphor for everything in life being connected.  Everyone who so chooses makes their own individual Tree of Life based on the traditional form and correspondences combined with associations from personal experience.  These personal associations often derive from cultural artifacts - books, music, films etc.  Qabala has been called a filing cabinet of sorts.  Users create their own lexicon.  You basically get your subconscious to talk to you in different ways - through the environment, coicidences and synchronicities, dreams, self observation etc.   Everyone has a unique subconscious mind though they all seem to connect to what Jung labelled the Collective Unconscious.

5. To activate circuit 6 on a consistent basis requires Will, the Will for higher consciousness (True Will) as opposed to the ordinary will of the lower circuits to stick to their agendas known as the will of the machine.  Concentrated attention helps develop and focus Will.  Both Will and Attention can be exercised and made strong.

6.  Through the method of alchemy a permanent  higher emotional body can get crystallized.  The full lotus blossom of the open heart, a living fountain of waters, gets accessed at will.  Love under will suggests that the blood of the higher body (baraka) can be intentionally focused and placed.  Healers do this.

7.  The possibility of permanently activating C6 is available to anyone sufficiently motivated.  Every man and every woman is a star.  This is for anyone who wants to wash their own selves i.e. program and metaprogram their brains and nervous systems anyway they like.

RAW calls C6 the metaprogramming circuit borrowing the term from John Lilly's Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer.  Metaprogramming refers to programming the programming, your basic Operating System to continue the computer metaphor.  RAW stresses the importance of C6 when he writes:

Remember: the nervous system is what pre-scientific primates call the "self" or the "soul."  The "self" at the moment depends on which circuit is activated.  The "soul" or metaprogrammer decides which circuit or "self" to be at each time-juncture.  Do you want to choose your own "self" or do you want your "soul" on ice?
 - Illuminati Papers, p. 41

8.  We will call the four lower centrums - the physical, emotional, intellectual, and their aggregate, the social personality - the human circuits. The higher, mostly undeveloped aspects of those centrums - the somatic, the electric/metaprogramming, the genetic, and the atomic/quantum/ non-local circuits - the Being.  Being = non-human.  Another way to distinguish these two aspects of Spaceship WoMan - Human = animal, Being = spirit.  Raising consciousness = the movement of consciousness away from the animal and toward the Being or spirit.  Being seems more like "becoming," but we optimistically stake our territory in the higher dimensions 'as if" we've established permanent residence there.

9. Obstacles arise largely due to the fact the animal doesn't want the Being to grow too much as it feels threatened.  When Being dominates, the animal disappears, it's no longer in charge.  This dichotomy between spirit and animal is addressed in Crowley's Book of the Law (Liber Al):

Is a God to live in a dog?
No! but the highest are of us

It goes on to describe the qualities of "us":

Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, 
force and fire are of us

II:19 and II:20

In the Tiphareth chapter from Illuminatus!  Shea and/or Wilson mentions a "dogfight" a couple of times (p.344) which suggests puns on the dog/god dichotomy and the struggle to permanently set up camp in Tiphareth.  The third chapter of Liber Al starts out giving strategies for this battle.

Energy and rareified awareness - the waking state - come and and go.  Negative emotions can deplete energy.  However, efforts and the experience made to activate the heart always accrue.  Progress occurs nonlinearly in a spiral fashion.   One reason to keep a lab journal of experiments or a diary is to chart one's progress.  It can be helpful later looking back on it to see how far one has gone.  Progress can seem slow or miniscule when measured day by day.  Looking back on journal entries makes it easier to gauge how far one has gone.

A short interlude on the word "God:"

The magick used to activate C6 is predominantly theurgic as opposed to thaumaturgic.  Thaumaturgic magick concerns itself with changing the environment in some way, casting spells, creating love potions etc. or sometimes doing useful things to aid your theurgic arts.   Theurgic magick concerns itself with raising consciousness though its etymology suggests it as magick involved with contacting/invoking a god of one kind or another.  Many otherwise intelligent people get downright suspicious when they hear the word "god" by automatically associating it with organized religion.  Many of us are still deprogramming ourselves from these associations fostered upon us in our formative years.  I suggest that "god" can  be used like a mathematical coefficient, a symbolic representation of a specific functional use.  No one argues whether a mathematical coefficient is real or not.  It's an abstraction that works.  In this way one can remain a committed atheist or agnostic and still take advantage of the god idea to expand awareness and pull oneself up.  Crowley wrote a poem to demonstrate this which I unfortunately don't recall the title to (maybe someone else can?)  In it he eloquently praises the gods of various religions, adores and worships them profusely then ends the poem with the punchline, "Thank God I'm an atheist."

Excellent, scientifically-minded ways to use the god concept turn up in John Lilly's book Simulations of God where he approaches it as a form of self-observation, defining god as whatever you invest the most energy in, what you consider the Highest based on actions rather than a professed ideology or belief.   For instance, someone may nominally declare themselves a Christian or Buddhist yet spend the majority of their time and energy in pursuit of making money.  Their real god, what they really worship is money.  For some it's power, status, drugs, sports, music, health, sex, etc. etc. Lilly goes into much more detail in the book with different god simulation scenarios.

In The Illuminati Papers, a collection or writings mostly from the mid to late '70s, Wilson presents several utopian-like scenarios that he predicted would occur before the end of the millenium.  The predictions appear rational, based on science ( he cites all his references) and observations of prevailing trends.  So what happened?  Perhaps the human species as a whole has defense mechanisms blocking the transition from mechanical living to a conscious life of being?  In the Forewords to Cosmic Trigger I Timothy Leary writes:

It has been axiomatic since Haeckel that ontology recapitulates phylogeny - that the individual in Hir development repeats, step-by-step, the evolution of the species.

The Illuminati Papers is highly recommend in connection with this series of blog posts particularly the essays A Few of the Things I Know about Her and From: The Order of the Illuminati, Sirius Section To: Galactic Central.  The latter gives an elegant presentation of Leary's 8  circuit model of the human nervous system through the game of chess. A later essay, The Goddess of Ezra Pound seems related or one influence on A Few of the Things I Know about Her.  Pound's occult credentials get examined there.  Elsewhere, a review of Beethoven rates as a top piece of music writing found anywhere. RAW begins this book with the headline: "Join the HEAD Revolution." 


10.  This method is eclectic.  We use what works and discard what doesn't the criteria being what will help fulfill our aims.  Once more from the Illuminati Papers (p.67):

The point of systems like Tantra, Crowleyanity, and Leary's Neurologic is to detach from all maps - which gives you the freedom to use any map where it works and drop it where it doesn't work.

This applies to all the systems and models given in these blog posts.  

11.  The open heart, the KCHGA, contact with Being, making the subconscious conscious,individuation etc. = synonymous terms that may reveal one's purpose in life, what's been called True Will.

That seems another of the multitudinous ways to get the higher circuits revved up - find out what you really like to do and do that, align yourself with what you want to use this lifetime for. Developing a passion for something will naturally activate the feeling centrum.  A standard joke in the recording studio is to tell the artist after a take, "One more time please, ... with feeling."

Finding something creative you like to do appears one key for discovering True Will.  Creativity, in every aspect, opens the heart.  When engrossed in the process of creation, artists always seem to use the emotional centrum more than usual.  A search for creative ways of doing things in any art, discipline, or task = a search to open new chambers in C6.  Those new chambers/spaces in C6 can get communicated through art, music, literature, theater, film, poetry etc. Thus artists seeking to take their creative endeavors as far out as possible essentially serve the shamanic function of going into deep extra-dimensions (XD) and bringing something back to communicate the experience to the rest of the world.

This isn't anything new.  Frater Progradior, Frank Bennett, one of Crowley's more successful students gave a lecture in 1917 that included the topic The Perpetual Creativeness of Spirit. ( thanks to Progradior and the Beast by Keith Richmond.)

It appears that artists of various kinds respond the most to Crowley's magick especially musicians from Jimmy Page to Jay Z, Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Lennon and McCartney, Richards and Jagger etc. etc. etc. it's a long list.  Creativity and magick go hand in hand.  Magick teaches one how to invoke, how to draw down energies, information, gnosis from above thereby supplying a constant source for creativity if one has an outlet for it, a way to translate it into art of one kind or another.  Basically, creativity = magick.  Creativity naturally activates and uses the higher circuits. 

Magick works best when approached as an art.  Whether practiced alone or with a group it usually involves theater (inner or external) and poetry of some kind.  Some rituals, such as the Star Ruby, the Thelemic banishing ritual of the pentagram, and Liber Resh, the adoration of the Sun, can get run through thousands of times, but will stay fresh and alive with a creative attitude.   In this way, magick can be practiced under any circumstance from the cramped quarters of a transcontinental jet to driving in your car; in the middle of a crowded restaurant or watching TV.  It can be used extemporaneously anywhere anytime.

Gurdjieff said that we need many different alarm clocks to wake up due to the fact that what works one time won't necessarily work again next time.  The shock value won't be the same.  Esoteric schools disseminate many kinds of tools, games and techniques for exercising attention and waking up.   A creative approach from the student will best design an individual program with those resources to suit one's needs.

One reason a varied, eclectic approach is advised stems from the observation that the machine can get bored easily.  Learning a variety of practices gives the alchemist/shaman a bag of tricks to resort to in different situations.  Never underestimate the power of humor to relieve boredom, dispel despair, worry or other various ills of a recalcitrant human machine not the least of which includes taking oneself too seriously.. 

Last installment, to continue this recap, The Book of Lies by Crowley was described as an alchemical masterpiece.  In an earlier blog post I recounted the story of how this book apparently contains a great secret in either chapters 36 or 69 depending on whom you choose to believe.  Common wisdom ( if there is such a beast) holds that it has something to do with sex.  In the book Pearls of Wisdom, James A. Eshelman makes a cogent argument that "the sexual interpretation is not the perspective from which this ritual (ch. 36 = The Star Sapphire) was first written."  What then, could the secret be if not sex?  I don't know, however, we do know that each chapter has numerical significance.  36 = two sixes multiplied by each other.  69 looks like two sixes in a reciprocal relationship with each other.  The principle of synergy tells us that whenever two systems effectively combine the overall effect of their union contains more than the sum of the individual parts. 

Here we see John Cleese in a sketch that illustrates a not uncommon issue on the magickal path.

 To understand what I'm getting at, it's necessary to have a feeling for the four elements of the ancients: Air, Water, Fire and Earth.   Getting to know these elements, not meant literally, but rather as representations of different types of energy, seems fundamental to the practice of magick.  A primary source of my elemental education came from doing the exercises in Franz Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics.  These elements manifest symbolically for practitioners as magical weapons - The Sword or Dagger for Air, the Cup for Water, the Wand for Fire and the Pantacle for Earth.  Part 1 of Crowley's Magick Liber ABA, after the yoga section has essays on each of the weapons which are valuable for learning about the elements.  Homemade Magick: The Musings and Mischief of a Do-It-Yourself Magus by Lon Milo Duquette is another excellent source.  He also has many creative solutions for practical problems that can arise in the course of ritual workings in everyday life.  Practicing the Golden Dawn style of Enochian invocations makes another excellent method for getting to know your elements.  The Enochian World of Aleister Crowley by Crowley, Duquette and Hyatt serves as an easy how-to manual for that kind of work.

Symbols of the four elements get called upon every time the practitioner performs a Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram or one of its variants like the Star Ruby.  This ritual is to a ceremonial magician what practicing paradiddles is to a drummer, rudiments so basic and fundamental that benefit from constant daily practice until its burned into your soul, or more technically, your body of habits.  Your body of habits takes over when your mind gets blown, reflexive responses to the environment when you have no time to think.

We can imagine John Cleese as a magician with a slight imbalance on the Fire side of things.  Equilibrium of the elements appears necessary for effective magick.  All four elements are there - we see a pitcher and a glass of Water on his desk (the altar), there's Air around him as he sits on Earth (the telephone could represent the KCHGA) while at the end of the video we see what happens with the Fire he has conjured.  Air and Earth appear in abundance, but there's far too little Water to balance the Fire.  When Water and Fire are in ideal proportion it produces "steam' a special kind of Air that can produce much motive force.  The dictionary defines steam as: "the vapor into which water is converted when heated, forming a white mist of minute water droplets in the air."  When you heat up water you get steam.  When you heat up something flammable in a closed container you run the risk of explosion.

Successfully crystallizing C6 seems more a matter of dropping whatever impedes this circuit flow rather than trying to create something not already there.  Being resides with us whether we know it or not.  By relinquishing the sleep of the machine we open up to the awareness of Being however tentative at first.  From Wilhelm Reich's perspective, muscular armor and/or character armor blocks full emotional expression and reception.  This armor apparently gets set in place through past traumas.  I remember years ago when trying to figure out exactly where the hell to begin with the exercises in Gurdjieff's catechism seeing him write that a good place to start work is to lay down and deeply relax the body without falling asleep.  Deep relaxation - letting go.  I learned various magick ritual practices from instructional cassette tapes Israel Regardie of Golden Dawn texts.  He had one called The Practice of the Presence of God that consisted entirely of a guided visualization to deeply relax one body part at a time then fill it with light.

The whole business of the Holy Guardian Angel, started with a medieval grimoire called The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage translated in modern times by MacGregor Mathers.  Mathers was an early teacher of Crowley and one of the founders of the Golden Dawn.  The ritual to attain the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel consisted of a 6 month retreat of purification, cleansing and prayer getting more intensive as the retreat progressed. It seems mostly a matter of clearing out what's in the way to allow the light of the Angel to shine through.

Crowley designed a ritual called Liber Samekh for a more concise but no less involved method to invoke the Angel.  He based it on an ancient ritual picked up by the Golden Dawn known as The Bornless Ritual.  It's divided into sections based on the four elements and the fifth element of Spirit.  It might be that this intends to unify the constituent parts of our human nature toward the common aim of invoking the Higher Self.  We require all the centrums aligned and going in the same direction for this to work.

The element of Fire corresponds with C1, the physical centrum, the will of the body to activate C6.  The Water element corresponds to C2, the feeling centrum, the will of the emotions to go beyond.  The Air element represents the intellectual centrum, the will of thought to go higher.  These three types of machine will are effective when  they are quiet, when they are silent, when their centrums rest in quiesence, not acting out.  When the consciousness of C6 pilots the machine, the body disappears from our awareness, the fight or flight reflex gets bypassed; no disturbing emotions ruffle our inner life, the territorial imperative gets bypassed;  the thinking, head brain chatter vanishes replaced by complete presence in the moment and the task at hand.  The Earth element corresponds with C4 a composite and mix  of the first three circuits that makes up our social personality.  Leary and RAW put sexual behavior in C4, but I disagree.  It seems to me that the sexual force comprises a special area of C1, the body. The fifth element, Spirit represents C5, the transitional circuit where the beginnings of learning to alter our realities for fun and profit takes place.  Gurdjieff called this the magnetic centrum for the ease of attraction to either the higher or the lower depending upon whichever holds sway.

Crowley wrote an extensive commentary to this ritual within which he acknowledges the creative function.  Referring to the line 1 of section G, The Attainment that says:

 I am He!  the Bornless Spirit!  having sight in the feet: Strong, and the Immortal Fire!  he says, "The Immortal Fire" is the creative Self; impersonal energy cannot perish, no matter what form it assumes.  Combustion is Love." 

Regarding line 6 of the same section, I am He, whose mouth ever flameth! he writes:

The Adept realizes every breath, every Word of his Angel as charged with creative fire.  Tiphareth is the Sun, and the Angel is the spiritual Sun of the Soul of the adept.  

This tells something about both creativity as well as the nature of fire.

I present this information not because I proselytize the performance of this ritual, although it couldn't hurt, but rather to extrapolate strategies for our invasion of the Higher Dimensions whether through a magick ritual or some other kind of creative endeavor.  The permanent crystallization of C6, the attainment of the KCHGA, seems a gradual process that can include a variety of practices and techniques ranging from something as simple as learning to play the guitar ( if so inclined) to walking across China with a young wife and infant while using concentrated attention to visualize an astral temple for practice of the Bornless Ritual as Crowley did.  

The interference of the lower circuits is known as "dirt" in esoteric circles.  This point shows itself in chapter 57 of The Book of Lies:

Dirt is matter in the wrong place
Thought is mind in the wrong place
Matter is mind so thought is dirt.

Crowley then proceeds to devise a magick formula from the word PLACE to clarify where he's coming from with this statement.  So much of the work to live with a functional C6 consists of cleaning up the anomalies of the lower circuits - distracting thoughts often taking the form of imaginary arguments or debates, strong negative emotions that take over our mood, bad physical habits that take our energy, etc.  While we can chalk much of it up to our own psychology and past traumas, this can get cleaned up relatively quickly.  However, much dirt accrues through contact and contamination with the environment we operate in.  Just as we bathe everyday to clean our physical bodies from the natural dirt of life, we can also a maintain cleaning regimen for our spiritual lives.  It doesn't need to be complicated, sometimes we can clean both our physical and spiritual selves at the same time with the creative use of  attention.

Some people accumulate more dirt from the environment than others depending upon their job description and so may require strong cleaning solutions.  For instance, a coal miner, or someone who works in law enforcement in a big city will inevitably have more to clean due to occupational hazard.  A concept called Uncus focarius - a fire shovel can come in handy.  You whip up a lot of fire and direct that toward psychic cleaning.  Too much fire can interfere, but can be tempered with water returning to the idea of steam  as an effective locomotive engine.  Cleaning this way is called a steambath.  Some people find various Psalms effective for this kind of operation.  An excellent practice can be found in  The Greater Key of Solomon under the title Concerning The Baths, and How They Are To Be Arranged.  This can be creatively modified according to circumstance.

Listening to music seems a good way to experience the effect of the elements.  Of course, this will be subjective, but just to give some idea:  AC/DC is my hard rock go-to when looking for some blazing fire particularly the Mutt Lange produced Back in Black and Highway to Hell albums.  He really got the sound right on these ones.  I didn't like AC/DC in their 80's heyday until a bar band called Blade Runner  I was mixing played Highway to Hell and the room just exploded, you could feel this tremendous energy afterwards.  Some punk rock has the same effect - London Calling by the Clash and Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols come to mind. Caution is always advised when playing with fire of any kind.  Most Rolling Stones live albums and some of their classic studio records, when Jimmy Miller was at the helm, also boosts fiery energy for me.  Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles seems a watery song as does Led Zeppelin's Down by the Seaside.  A few albums by Miles Davis also have a significant watery component such as Sketches of Spain, Kinda Blue and In A Silent Way.  Bitches Brew adds more fire to the mix.  African kora music can sound liquidy like cascading waterfalls.  African drumming can be both earthy and fiery.  African dancers can tell or show you how this music transports them far beyond the ordinary.  The most elementally balanced piece of music I know about remains Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  Feel free to share any other obvious examples in the comments.  Of course, I am barely touching upon the subject.

I'll finish this rather hotch potch post with a Crowley quote from the commentary on Liber Samekh which emphasizes the importance of activating C6.  I've paraphrased a little to remove the male gender bias language:

This then is the true aim of the Adept in this whole operation, to assimilate themself to their Angel by continual conscious communion.  For their Angel is an intelligible Image of their own True Will, to do which is the whole of the Law of their Being.

Also the Angel appeareth in Tiphareth, which is the heart of the Ruach, and thus the Center of Gravity of the Mind.  It is also directly inspired from Kether, the Ultimate Self, through the Path of "The High Priestess," or initiated intuition.  Hence the Angel is in truth the logos or articulate expression of the whole Being of the Adept, so that as she increases in the perfect understanding of Her Name, she approaches the solution of the ultimate problem: Who she herself truly is.