Conversing with the Angel

It is spoken of the Sephiroth, and the Paths, of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.
—"Liber O", Aleister Crowley

We left off with 3 suggestions for initiating conversation with Higher Intelligence - The Holy Guardian Angel: puns, coincidences, and qabala.  All these we measure against a growing intuitive voice.  We balance interpretations from research and experiments with skepticism and discernment.

Puns open minds to multiple levels of meaning, different ways of seeing things.

Coincidences tend to make me pay attention to what's going on around me more, to become more receptive to the environment.  They are like a bell that gets rung or a light that sparks up the attention.  They wake you up a little bit more.

Synchronicities sometimes indicate a confirmation for a particular course of action that has been taken.  They communicate other valuable information as well.   Strong synchronicities can feel like direct transmissions from the School.

For example:  Bob Dylan released a special collector's edition of his then new album, Love and Theft, on 9/11/01 that included an alternate version of The Times They Are A'Changing.  The times certainly did change that day.  Other lyrics from Love and Theft prophetically describe the events of that day as well.  Even the common name for the World Trade Center attacks, 9/11, communicates vital information directly and succinctly with a very basic pun that everyone knows.

Synchronicities appear to result from the non-local quantum circuit and also seems to play games with time.  By that I mean that the acasual synchronized occurrence of two events may result from quantum processes manifesting into the human material world.

I suggest that this aggregate of extraordinary communication and guidance we choose to call the Holy Guardian Angel operates on this non-local quantum circuit and so could influence coincidences in the manner of John Lilly's Earth Coincidance Control Office (ECCO)

People who experiment with the higher brain circuits tend to attract more synchronicities.  Synchronicities serve as one method of conversing with the Angel.
Incorporating Qabala into your worldview will increase and broaden the understanding of this kind of phenomena.  Qabala also tends to increase the occurrence of synchs.  It tunes you in to Higher Intelligence.

Qabala gives a clear picture of the nature of the Holy Guardian Angel.  Just knowing that the full realization of the HGA occurs in Tiphareth, the Grand Central Station on the Tree of Life, reveals much more than words ever can after one gets to know this sephiroth.

Qabala means "to receive."   Everyone receives different things.  Everyone will have a different Tree of Life though there will likely be some common basis especially if one learns the Table of Correspondences in the book 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley.  This still reigns as the definitive qabalistic dictionary, in my opinion.  Just owning a copy of this book will get the qabalistic wings a growin'.  It even works through osmosis.

You build your own lexicon of images, your own map of symbols, your own numerological meanings, etc.  This lexicon seems to continuously evolve and get more refined mirroring an increased and more nuanced conversation with the Angel.

A major doorway into qabala opened for me the first time I read Cosmic Trigger, The Final Secret of the Illuminatti by Robert Anton Wilson.  You'll find numerous examples there of Wilson assembling a qabalistic lexicon leading to the reception of new information.

From Cosmic Trigger, the number 23 became an early building block in this reporter's lexicon.  Synchronicities with 23 appeared quite frequent for awhile.  A number of readers of this 23 Conspiracy have had similar experiences. It's as if the Angel finally found a way to communicate and wants to make sure to let itself be known.  Here's a related post: Bond 23.

The opposite of a rigid skeptic is a true believer.  I've observed people who believe in  the 23 Conspiracy finding 23s in everything.  There seems a significant difference from taking a quiet, receptive attitude to whatever random signals may communicate from the environment to projecting beliefs on the environment and finding confirmation there because you're looking for it.  No doubt there will be instances of uncertainty as to whether it's a genuine communication, a product of the imagination, or some mixture of both.  There exist ways to verify or refute your interpretations, but it's always a good idea to keep some measure of uncertainty in place remembering that you might be wrong.  However you don't want this uncertainty to paralyze your progress or contribute to complacency.  It's been said that every perception seems a gamble.  Caveat emptor - let the buyer beware - the Great Work appears a gamble.

Regarding certainty, Crowley wrote in Chapter 45 Chinese Music from The Book of Lies:

The more necessary anything appears to my mind,
the more certain it is that I only assert a limitation.

Wars, and fighting in general seem to partly result from the combatants being absolutely certain of their positions.  The occludedness of blind belief in anything, even atheism, gets poetically described by Crowley in the same chapter:

“I slept with Faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; 
I drank and danced all night with Doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.”

The Book of Lies, along with 777 became another major building block in my lexicon. Each of these one page Zen koan-like chapters bears some correspondence to its chapter number. For instance, 48 in my lexicon sometimes indicates (when this interpretation applies) working hard and making what the 4th Way calls super efforts because of how it reads in that chapter.

You don't have to base your lexicon of imagery on the Tree of Life or on Crowley's materials mentioned but if you do, then you'll be tapping into the same language that sometimes informs the writings of James Joyce (especially his experimental classics, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake), Robert Anton Wilson ( all his fiction, some of his non-fiction), Thomas Pynchon, and E.J. Gold among others.  Those are some of the writers I know who use qabalah deliberately.

One premise of occult functionality known to shamans, artists, musicians, magicians and mystics  throughout the ages holds that Higher Intelligence can get channeled through any willing receptacle. It can land anywhere.   The ancient Greeks spoke of connecting with their muse, that designation for personified (or godified) inspiration that's also the root for the word music.

Working off this premise, it then becomes possible to discover qabalistically encoded information in any form of communication.

Another example: In 1984, 3 days after moving in to the Sivananda Yoga Center in New York, I came home from school, flopped down on my bed and randomly opened a book of Allen Ginsberg's poetry to the line, O I am happy, O Swami Sivananda, a smile.
I'd never heard of Swami Sivananda until I started taking yoga classes and found this coincidence surprising.  The phrase, a smile, carries a certain significance in my qabalistic lexicon due to Timothy Leary's SMI2LE formula which has found some degree of exegesis in the Oz Mix archives if you wish to dig back there.

I wondered at the time if this synchronicity might be some kind of extraordinary communication.  I took it as a confirmation that moving to the Yoga Center indicated a good decision for my course, that it aligned to my largely unknown True Will.  This confirmation got verified from the useful experiments that subsequently occurred in that place of residence.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating of it.  In the Book of the Law it says, Success is thy proof.

The Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers has a wealth of qabalistic and magical information.   Much of it is advanced, there are multiple levels and degrees of difficulty, but some of it appears quite obvious.  For instance, the name of the socialite Mrs. Whitehead.  White = Kether, Head = Sun = Tiphareth.  The path that connects Tiphareth with Kether, called gimel (camel) goes across the terrain known as the Abyss (symbolized as a desert) and thus becomes one representation of the second spiritual landmark in Crowley's school, the Crossing of the Abyss.  One one level, Animal Crackers tells metaphorical tales and allegories related to this adventure through the Abyss.  In other contexts, Crossing the Abyss is known as navigating the bardo, and may be related to entering Chapel Perilous.  And that's just one interpretation of Whitehead.

Marx Brothers films, in general, are an integral part of my qabalistic lexicon.  The constant use of puns, linguistic acrobats, and the unexpected seems to open the mind up to new information.  Their humor seems like nutrition for the magician's developing awareness.  They, and/or their writers appear to have a direct connection with the 93 Current much of the time.

The 93 Current is another designation for Crowley's esoteric work, what I'm calling a new paradigm.  93 because Thelema = Will = 93 in Greek qabalah and Love = Agape = 93 also in Greek qabalah therefore 93 is a good number to symbolize love under will.

If old films aren't your bag there are plenty of excellent newer ones containing the wisdom of the arts using the language of qabalah to communicate.  Some examples: The Matrix series, American Beauty ( both the film AND the Grateful Dead album), The Fifth Element, The Adventures of Buckeroo Banzai, Big Trouble in Little China, The Meaning of Life, Beetlejuice, Rustler's Rhapsody, to name just a few.  Learning qabalah, learning to speak with the Angel, can be quite fun when combined with a good movie.

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Pattern recognition plays an important role in deciphering communications from Higher Intelligence.  This involves paying attention to the environment more carefully, noting any numbers, colors, phrases that recur more than usual or coincide in unexpected ways.  Maybe you read something that coincidentally relates to some life activity.

Recognizing patterns makes one very good reason for keeping a magical diary.  There are other good reasons too which we'll look at another time.

Developing competence in a good oracular system like the Tarot or the I Ching can make a bridge to the non-local quantum circuit home of the Holy Guardian Angel and thus establish another method for conversation.  This will be the subject of the next post.