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First published in 2010 by

Aeon Books Ltd

118 Finchley Road

London NW3 5HT

Copyright © 2010 by Duncan Barford

The right of Duncan Barford to be identified as the author of this work has been

asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act

1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the

publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-1-90465-836-8

Typeset by Vikatan Publishing Solutions (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed in Great Britain

www.aeonbooks.co.uk



http://www.aeonbooks.co.uk/

http://www.aeonbooks.co.uk/



Dedicated to Alan Chapman.

Two mages with a lot of welly,

But which one’s Dee and which one’s Kelley?





NTRODUCTION

If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or

laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning

anywhere.

(Charles Fort, 1997: chapter 1).

The book you are holding is rooted in personal experiences. Indeed, the first essay in

the collection aims to show how scientific explanation of subjective paranormal

experience will often miss the point and end up destroying what it set out to define.

But if science destroys the paranormal, should we not wonder whether the

paranormal was really there in the first place?

This is a noble and rational point of view. However, to adopt it assumes that the

faeries at the bottom of our garden possess (or ought to) some quantifiable attribute that

we can seize hold of (or not) and thus state definitively whether the faeries are there.The view put forward in this book is that faeries are far subtler and cleverer.

In most instances, a paranormal event cannot be cleanly separated from its

effects on the witness, or from his or her beliefs. The “event” may indeed be disproved

(or at least shown to be not what it appeared), yet the effects will continue to

reverberate within the witness’s life, and the beliefs or misconceptions that

predisposed him or her to the experience may also persist. Put more simply: it is

theories that are proved or disproved, whereas experiences themselves are simply

what they are. There is no “seems” in an experience, paranormal or otherwise. I canonly experience seeing a ghost; I can’t experience “seeming” to see one.

None of this is new—of course—and philosophers have investigated these

issues more rigorously than will be my aim1, but what I hope is original about this

book (its unique selling point, if you like) is its use of the tradition of magick to inform

the exploration of the paranormal.





I’ve followed the convention of appending a “k” to the word in order to

distinguish this philosophical tradition (which, in the West, can be traced back to the

ideas of the Ancient Greeks—see Goodrick-Clarke [2008]) from stage magic and from

popular notions of impossible super powers.

No doubt my disparagement of “science” at the beginning has halved my

prospective audience, and now the mention of magick has probably halved it again. Never mind. This is only due to the common misperception of magick as “trickery”,

“superstition”, or “devil worship”.

As I aim to show, magick is a more insightful and useful tool than is commonly

supposed. The discipline of magick is alive and well in the 21st century and there are

more magicians active in the community than many readers might suppose.

Contemporary magick is the discipline of using belief to investigate or construct

realities; or, as one recent expert in the field has put it: “Magick is the art of

experiencing truth” (Chapman, 2007, 14).

If science destroys the paranormal, then magick—on the other hand—is a tool

for creating it. In the essays that follow I will discuss instances in which consciously

practised techniques give rise to paranormal experiences. I will also discuss instances

in which unconscious practice of magick may have produced the same result.

Using magick as a tool for exploring the paranormal may sound at first like

adding silt to already muddied waters, or shovelling gullibility onto a waiting pile of

credulity. But mag-ick, it should be remembered, entails conscious use of belief. For

instance, in the second essay I describe how the magical technique of “remote

viewing” was used to retrieve information about the scene of a possible haunting. To

gain the information it was necessary to go through the motions of believing that remote

viewing actually works. Yet to make use of that information and to assume that the

information gained is real are two different things. The discipline of magick enables us

to separate and distinguish between them. In short, it is a consideration of the meaning

of a paranormal experience that often casts more significant light on what happened

than attempting to decide simply whether an experience was real, because (from the

subjective perspective, at least) “real” has very little meaning.

The essays that follow were not written to a rigid plan, but following Fort’s

suggestion at the head of this introduction they represent five arbitrary starting-points

around the circumference of a single circle.

The first essay discusses some first-hand experiences of the paranormal from my

early life; the second explores in depth the experience of a close friend, who even now

(several years later) is still affected by the events described; the third examines the





relationship between space, time, and consciousness; the topic of the fourth is religion

and spiritual experience; and the final essay explores naturally-arising altered states of

consciousness, such as lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, and astral projection.

Fort’s “circle”, his “underlying oneness of all things”, seems centred about the

nature of consciousness itself. This was what I discovered beneath the experiences and

ideas presented in the book. It returns in each essay, again and again.

When we supplement our investigations with the tools offered by magick, what

we find in the paranormal is not something “out there” but equally “in here”—or

perhaps more accurately, something that is at once in both and neither.

I’ll let the essays speak for themselves and will end here by hoping that the

reader finds in this book something I’ve certainly discovered to be true: that

paranormal experiences do not happen only to special people and on rare occasions.

To experience the paranormal we need only turn our attention to the nature of

consciousness itself.

Duncan Barford

January 2010

http://oeith.co.uk

Note

1. Phenomenology and Pragmatism are two schools of philosophy that can come to

the aid of a magician when he or she is called upon to defend their world-view.



http://http//oeith.co.uk



W

CHAPTER ONE

My sister wore our granddad’s ghost

e were travelling home by train, some friends and I, when—without

knowing it—I started work on this book: I asked each of them to tell me thestrangest thing they’d ever experienced.

We had not got far when the stranger in the seat opposite interrupted.

“You’re talking about the paranormal,” he said, “and it’s doing my head in.”

He was swigging a can of beer but seemed good-humoured. And he had a point:

for a public place our conversation was rather odd.

“I’m not fascinated by that stuff,” the man said, raising his voice over my

friend’s story about the night her mother sighted a ghostly figure in the garden. “In fact,I think you’re talking garbage.”

“Well, I respect your opinion,” I said.

Some of the other passengers were pricking up their ears.

“Anyway,” the man said, settling into a more conversational tone, “paranormal

stuff happens to people who look into things more deeply than others. Let’s say my pen

started to roll over the carpet: I would think nothing of it. But because you are into

paranormal things, anything that happens to you out of the ordinary, you’d think: ‘Oh My God!’ Whereas I just think: ‘Well, that pen rolled over.’ To you it means

something. To me it doesn’t.”

“So doesn’t it boil down to whatever is in your head is real?” I said.

It was naughty of me, but without telling him I’d pressed the button on my digital

recorder. (Hence the striking realism of this dialogue, as you’ve probably already

remarked.) Something unusual was taking place: a conversation with a stranger, plus a





crowd of other passengers listening in while pretending not to do so. (A couple of them

later overcame their politeness and started to chip in their comments.)

“I pray that the stuff you’re talking about is true,” the man with the beer can said.

“But I won’t believe it until it happens. I really pray for myself and my two kids that it

is true, but I don’t believe there’s anything after death. It’s a horrible belief and I don’t

want to be like that. At least you’ve got something to hope for.”

“Your point of view is a strong reason to make the most of life,” I said, glossing

over the fact that by not believing in something he was not actually ruling out its

existence.

“I don’t see why you’re put on this earth for 60 years to work away and graft,”

continued the man, “and then die for nothing. I graft bloody hard and don’t particularly

enjoy it. If there was something afterwards, that would be great. But if there is someone

above looking after you, then I don’t understand why you have to work. My experience

of life is I have to work for 60 hours a week to pay my mortgage. If there’s something

afterwards, why should I do that?”

What if he ran into a ghost later that night, I wondered; or if he got off the train

and was abducted by aliens. (Or, at least—if he had some kind of experience that he

understood in that way.) Taking him at his word, this would be all he needed to quit his

job and stop paying the mortgage. I imagined him joining his local Spiritualist church

and channelling the wisdom of the Ascended Masters, or putting on a sky-blue shell

suit and joining the alien contactee lecture circuit.

Isn’t this precisely the fascination of the paranormal for all of us: proof that

everything we know is wrong, and the liberating realization that there’s no point in

playing any longer the tiring game of normality?

“I’ve heard that it never happens to people who don’t believe,” the man said. “I

had a granddad who died 20 years ago. He was one of the greatest. I used to go around

his house all the time from when I was eight. If you were to tell me he would come and

stand by my bed tonight, well—at first I would shit myself. But I would long to see

that.”He paused at this point and looked surprised.

“Freaky, actually, because I’ve just realized that today is his birthday.”

“You think that’s coincidence?” I smiled at him. “How do you know this

conversation isn’t his way of letting you know that he’s in touch?”

For a moment there was a look on his face that made me wonder if I’d gone too





far. But luckily for me he seemed to decide to take it in the way I’d intended.

“Oh, don’t give me that! Don’t tell me he’s talking to me through you! Anyway,

what experiences have you had?”

“Well, years ago,” I said, happy to shift the focus, “I used a Ouija board to call

up a spirit and …”

“Whoa! Wait a minute. You don’t just go and do something strange like that. I

would never use the Ouija board. If something happened, I would shit my pants. You

just don’t do that.”

“You do when you’re 13.”

“What do you mean, you ‘called up a spirit’? You can’t just say: ‘Hello, spirit,

here we are!’ There you go already, you see; I don’t believe you. You cannot just say:

‘Spirit, here we are, please move the glass!’ ”

Yes you can, I thought. Really, you can. But if you do, don’t count on paying the

mortgage again.

What I hadn’t confessed to him were my credentials: I’m a magician. Not the sort

that does card tricks and saws women in half—they are “illusionists”, by the way. No,

I mean the “occult” kind. You’ve heard of Aleister Crowley, probably? Well, that sort

of thing. (Please don’t mention Harry Potter .)

Much of the news these days is generated by secular rationalists on one hand

squaring up against religious fundamentalists on the other. Or vice versa. You do nothear much about the third path, far less travelled, which treads a course between. Some

regard it as the sanest alternative, although the majority—certainly those on the two

extremes—view it as even more despicable than their opposite. This third path is mag-

ick, the occult. You won’t hear it discussed in the mainstream media, which is a shame

because, unlike how they would have you believe, magick is not all about worshipping

Satan, dancing naked in the woods and curdling your neighbour’s semi-skimmed.

Magicians might do these things, but they do much else besides.

The life experiences that forced me off the straight-and-narrow track of secular rationality into the path of the oncoming juggernaut that was magick are the reason why

this book is different from your standard “strange-but-true” pot-boiler. It was some

close shaves with the paranormal that proved to me forever how reality has nothing in

common with what we like to call “everyday life”.

We say goodbye to our beer-drinking friend on the train at this point. We are

done with him. We will leave him to his decision to believe only in what happens,





while he makes well and truly sure that certain things never ever will.

I’m going to wax autobiographical.

By the time I’d reached my thirties (I’m older than I sound) I’d settled into a

steady job, working with computers, making money and feeling like a grown-up at last.

Yet the more “successful” in conventional terms I became—in other words, the more

stuff I owned and the more people who looked up to me—the less happy I felt.

I couldn’t have said why I was unhappy. I had money and a lovely girlfriend. We

went shopping every weekend and flew off on holidays. I was healthy and liked the

gym. But I was also often stressed and miserable, even though my job was not

particularly demanding. I was also drinking quite a bit; a nightcap every evening, and

sometimes the pile of bottles in the recycling bin was a little embarrassing.

I remember the day I announced to my girlfriend I was going to explore magick.

“Because I know the world just isn’t like this,” I said, gesturing at all the stuff andgadgets I’d accumulated in my home.

“You’re not going to go weird, are you?” she said.

How I’d come to the conclusion that what people call “reality” is actually a pack

of lies dated back to puberty when (as I’d revealed to the man on the train) I began

meddling with the Ouija board.

For those who have never used one, the Ouija board is sold as a sort of novelty

or toy. It is an oblong piece of pasteboard with letters of the alphabet printed upon it,the numerals zero to nine, and the words yes, no and good-bye. With the board comes a

piece of heart-shaped plastic mounted on three legs, which has a transparent circle in

its centre. This is called the “planchette”. The board has to be operated by a group of

people. (I’ve never got it to work on my own, although some people have claimed

successful solo use.) The planchette is placed on the board and each person puts a

finger on it. Questions are addressed to the board, and—here’s the strange part—it’s

often found that the planchette, in response, moves —apparently of its own accord. A

letter or number becomes visible through the transparent circle in the planchette,

which, followed by subsequent characters, spells out a message. Many have supposedthat the Ouija board is a means of talking with spirits.

The board was invented in the United States during the mid-1800s when the

Spiritualist craze was at its peak. It was patented in 1891 by Elijah Bond and Charles

Kennard, but in 1901 production was taken over by William Fuld, whose name these

days is that most closely associated with the “Ouija” trademark. The precise origin of

the board’s peculiar name is lost in legend, but one of the nicest stories is that the





Ouija board itself dictated the name to Kennard.

It was 1981 when I first used the principles of Ouija to make contact with a

spirit. I remember the song Ghost Town by The Specials was playing on the TV as I sat

nervously at my parents’ dining table with some friends. Today, I have a classic 1970s

version of the board, produced by Parker Brothers, which a fellow magician bought

through eBay and permanently loaned to me (I suspect because he’s too scared to keepit in his own house.) I did not have a proper board back then, so instead we cut out

squares of paper and wrote on the letters with felt-tipped pens. For a planchette we

had an upturned jar that had once contained pickled cockles. It worked just as well and

scared me just as badly as any commercially-produced board.

I was never certain who was pushing the jar, but definitely someone was. I never

believed it moved “of its own accord”, or that it wouldn’t stop the moment we took our

fingers away. The rational explanation for how Ouija works, routinely repeated by

debunkers, is “the ideomotor effect”.1 This is the psychological principle, established by controlled experiments, that muscular movements can occur independently of our

conscious awareness or intention. In other words, one or more members of the group

push the planchette but do not know they are doing it.

Looking back, if we were truly talking with disembodied spirits, they were

extremely patient and uncommonly interested in the affairs of 13-year-olds. The events

that we asked the spirits to predict—who would marry whom; who would take whom

to the next school disco, etc.—consistently failed to come true, with no exceptions,

consolidating my impression that it was merely mortal hands at work.

There was one entity who showed up whenever we used the board, supposedly

my mother’s long-dead great uncle, named “Jack”. He insisted on communicating even

though in life he had been illiterate and apparently had not learnt much since he had

died, to judge from the meaningless jumble of letters he served up. Sometimes he

hinted that more literate spirits were queuing up behind him, but he never let them take

a turn.

Despite explaining the Ouija board to myself as an instance of “the ideomotor

effect”, it still gave me sleepless nights. Maybe I was dimly aware of the fine line

between explanation and “explaining away”. Okay, maybe it was our muscles moving

the planchette without us being aware, but then who was instructing our muscles to

move? Evidently, no one that we or the scientists who had made the experiments could

locate or put a name to. Which was more bizarre: Uncle Jack steering the cockle jar, or

this unnameable “other” working us like meat puppets without our permission?

My friends and I soon upped the ante. We ditched the Ouija and asked the spirits





to signal their presence through direct physical manifestation. At first, the results were

disappointing, until one day my sister came in from school looking scared and

beckoned me away from our parents.

“Touch the air around my hand,” she said.

I reached out and my fingers encountered something peculiar. The space around

her arm was “alive”. It felt vibrant, like static electricity. It gave me that tingling

sensation you feel on the surface of a television screen, or on a rubber balloon after

rubbing it against nylon clothes. But, more than that, it was warm. The sweat glands on

my hand prickled in response to its heat.

“Hot, isn’t it?” said my sister.

I nodded. But even as she had spoken, the sensation passed, as if my hand had

pierced a delicate membrane and destroyed it. I groped in the air around her arm, but

couldn’t find it again.

“It’s granddad,” she whispered.

During their lunchbreak at school, she and her friends had each summoned a

dead relative. Each girl’s dear-departed had manifested as a kind of thermal bangle,

which had lasted—on and off—for the remainder of the afternoon.

This was the first time I felt that unique rush, which I always get from bumping

up against the paranormal. Many experiences expose us to the otherworldly: drugs,

illusions created by various forms of entertainment, but the “feeling” of the paranormal(for me, at least) is quite distinct, composed of amazement yet also of a creeping sense

of danger, because what is happening is supposed to be outside the everyday world,

and yet it’s here. And it’s real .

When you reach out to occult forces and receive a response, not only does it feel

“super-real”, there is also an experience of sentience. To say it feels like you’ve

touched something “alive” is the wrong word, but thereis a sensation that it is certainly

out there, and it knows you are here. It is talking to you and sees you where you are.

A month after my sister came home wearing granddad, I was idly rolling acouple of dice across the lounge carpet, when I wondered if they might also be used for

spirit communication.

I stared hard at the little plastic cubes and mentally commanded them: Dice, I

request that you move if the next throw is a double six.

Nothing happened, of course, but I rolled them anyway. The score was

reassuringly random. Once they had come to rest I repeated my command and rolled





them again. I don’t know how long I sat there. I simply decided I wouldn’t budge until I

had a result. I’d got it into my head that the dice must perform because I wasn’t going

anywhere until they had. After I’d repeated the sequence so many times that I wasn’t

thinking anything any more, suddenly I sat bolt upright.

The dice had been lying on the carpet where they fell, close to each other, but

had then “jumped” apart. You might argue—like the man on the train—that they simplyhadn’t finished rolling yet. But it was not that. I’d allowed a good few seconds

between each roll whilst I mentally repeated my “command”. It was a movement of a

couple of centimetres; exactly the kind of movement you would expect to see if two

magnets had been placed side by side with their like-poles facing, so that each

repulsed the other.

Nervously I picked them up and rolled again. They felt quite normal as I set them

loose. Was it imagination, or did they seem to tumble more slowly than gravity ought to

have allowed? But beyond doubt was the result: double six.

So there it was. The most astounding, most mind-blowing paranormal experience

I’ve ever had in my life: two plastic dice rolled on a carpet. There were no witnesses

and it happened only once. Despite my best efforts, the dice never repeated their feat.

Moving dice that predict their own score? Dead relatives returning as thermal

bracelets? Twenty years later when I decided to take up magick it was these

experiences that had bubbled up into my mind. How—I reasoned—could I possibly

sign away my days to a job, family life, the government, and all the other institutions

that decide for us what existence is and how it should be lived, when— obviously —the

reality they decree is nothing like the full story?

I once talked over my dice experience with a rational friend. The only way she

could fit it into her world-view was to suggest it must’ve been a “false memory”.

I’ve thought long and hard about this. Of course, it’s a possibility. If she’s right

then I’ve thrown away my career and filled my head with trash because of something

that never happened. But the more I thought, the more I realized that the difference

between a memory and an actual event isn’t the issue, because even if it hadn’t happened the way I remembered, nevertheless I’d lived my life since that moment

exactly as if it had . That day shook my beliefs to their roots, influencing what I thought,

the books I read, the life-decisions I made. So what was the difference between an

accurate memory of what happened and a false one? In terms of how I’d lived my life,

it had indeed been “true”. And even if I decided now that it had been “false”, the only

way to do that was to make a conscious choice it had been so, and change my

behaviour once again from that point onwards. In both cases the “truth” or “falsity” of





the memory boiled down ultimately to the way I chose to live my life.

Truth, in the abstract, has a very minor influence on human life. That is why we

should pay far less heed to both the scientific rationalists and the religious

fundamentalists than they demand. For instance, it is most likely “true” that the world’s

supply of oil is running out, but it is not “true” for the majority of us until we discover

we cannot buy petrol any more. At this point we might decide to change our habits. Thekind of truth that has an actual impact on human beings always arises from experience.

But imagine if you had the power to decide what you experienced as the truth. If

you made a particular idea or experience true, then you could change yourself by it,

and also—in effect— change the world. The reason why some people live more

ecologically than others is because they experience as true the unsustainability of our

current lifestyle. They experience that truth not in some abstract concept, but in their

daily lives.

Some people have developed more advanced techniques for achieving this kind

of thing. They are the people we call “magicians”. They create truth from their

experiences, rather than clinging to ideas or beliefs laid down by others. This is what

sets them apart from both scientists and religious fundamentalists.

Susan Blackmore, a former parapsychologist (i.e. someone who scientifically

studies the paranormal), wrote a memoir that takes up this very theme, but from the

opposite direction. She began her intellectual career with a passionate interest in the

paranormal, yet her attempt to explore it on a scientific footing led her to

disillusionment and a more orthodox scientific outlook:

I was interpreting the “realness” and vividness of my own experiences as meaning that they were

“paranormal” or “occult”. It is an easily made and common mistake, and it took me many years to see it

for what it was (1996: 19).

What happened here was that science supplied Susan Black-more with an experience

of the falsity of her experiences! Before she began looking for “proof” of her

experiences, she seems to have had a talent for reading tarot cards, and she once

underwent a spontaneous out-of-body experience that lasted for three hours, duringwhich she was able to describe bizarre visions on the astral plane verbally to her

friends, who were seated next to the body she had “vacated”. These anecdotes make

me wonder whether her fascination with science perhaps hampered an innate psychic

gift, or was her way of defending herself against it.

Blackmore assumed her perception was mistaken. Putting her tarot readings

through statistical tests, to determine if they were any more accurate than chance, all





she encountered was the frustration of a repeated failure to design an experiment that

could conclusively rule out fraud, bias and statistical artefacts. Ultimately she was

forced to conclude it was impossible to determine what she was supposed to be

measuring in the first place!

And indeed it is. Because a good tarot reading—or any kind of fortune-telling—

always boils down to a purely subjective experience of the relationship between thereader and the questioner.

When I get out my tarot cards, people often challenge me that the meanings of the

cards are so vague and general they could be applied to anyone at any point in their

lives. “Wow!” I exclaim. How much wisdom must be packed into those cards, if

they’re so universally applicable? Arguing that the tarot means anything to anyone is

tantamount to admitting that it works, if what we mean by “works” is that the cards

provide an experience of truth.

Anyone who attempts to “verify” the paranormal according to science is missing

the point, because the paranormal overturns the dualisms on which science depends,

such as the distinction between observer and experience, or between subjectivity and

reality. Take telepathy, for instance: if I can read your thoughts, then how are they

“yours”? If the phenomenon we seek to prove actually exists, then a person’s thoughts

can no longer be confined only to one person’s experience, so something is already in

play that the assumptions of our experiment cannot take into account.2

Could a statistical study ever prove that telepathy occurs? It might be regarded

as suggestive, but if one form of the paranormal is entertained then there is immediately

no reason to exclude any of the others; and in that case who is to say my apparent

“telepathy” is not precognition —peering into the future to gain knowledge of the

answers the test subject will give?

By enticing us to prove the unprovable, the paranormal makes fools of us all.

When I was a student I lived for a year in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. I

turned out to be the unhappiest year of my life.

I shared a basement flat in Clarendon Square with a girlfriend and another woman. Firstly, relations with our housemate broke down and then my girlfriend and I

proceeded to tear each other apart.

The flat was big and seemed luxurious when we first viewed it, but once we

moved in it proved damp, dark, and cold. The couple who lived upstairs could often be

heard screaming and throwing things at each other.

“You’ve got a little palace here,” our landlord used to insist in a thick Brummy





accent, when he came around to read the electricity meter. Towards the end of the

tenancy he once turned up so drunk he could not read the dials. “Let’s just call it a

fiver,” he slurred. Concerned that he would regret his largesse in the morning, we

suggested he came back another time. That was the last we ever saw him. When we

rang the university at the end of the year to enquire why we hadn’t been asked to pay

more bills and why our deposits hadn’t been returned, we were told our landlord had been found floating face-down in the river. The verdict was suicide.

That flat had a cursed and malevolent air. Years later, I discovered that Aleister

Crowley had been born and grew up a couple of doors down. I doubt he was

responsible for the misery that seemed to hang over the area, but I understood from

where he might have acquired his urge to travel.

Another peculiarity were the huge spiders, which we never saw alive. They

turned up dead on the carpets in the mornings, scrunched into agonized balls.

The paranormal proclivities of the place became more overt towards the end of

our stay, as second-year examinations loomed into view. One night, I was woken by a

peculiar sensation. My bed was being shaken. I lay still, wondering if it was an

earthquake and waited to see when it would stop. After a minute (when it had not) I got

up sleepily and went to my girlfriend’s room.

“My bed keeps shaking,” I explained.

A few weeks later an old school friend came to stay for the weekend. We had

not seen each other in a while. We went drinking and caught up on events in eachother’s lives. During the course of the evening, he announced that he was gay.

That night, after he had gone and I was asleep, the bed started shaking again. Due

to the alcohol, this time I simply couldn’t be bothered to get up. Thankfully, in the

morning it had stopped.

I sometimes suspect that most tales of the paranormal fall into a category like

this one, where the usual categories of “subjective” and “objective” blur together in

our experience. Imminent exams and my friend’s sexual revelations: these were

disturbing circumstances, possibly the root of both experiences. It certainly felt to meas if the bed were being shaken, yet—on that first occasion—it stopped as soon as I got

out. Maybe our old friend the “ideomotor effect” was at work again. Quite possibly,

my own body provided the physical force for the shaking, yet once again it was that

unknown “other” who provided the will and inspiration for the usual inscrutable

reasons.

Psychology can take us a certain distance towards what these events might





signify. If I’d omitted my description of the circumstances that led up to the shaking bed

(“weird flat”, “unhappy days”, “exams”, “sexual revelations”) it would have been

completely inexplicable; not substantial enough even to form a story worth telling. As

it stands, there is a possible “motive” here for the shaking: my unconscious emotional

response to an upsetting environment. Yet why it took the form of a vibrating bed, and

what was achieved or expressed by this, remains obscure.Another personal experience is perhaps more illuminating in this respect. It took

place between the moving dice and the shaking bed, on the eve of an A level

examination when I was about 18 years old.

I was nervous and unable to sleep, which served to make me even more anxious

about my probable performance in the exam. To make matters worse, the family cat had

managed to escape from downstairs, where she was usually confined at night, and had

come into my room. I heard her paws on the carpet as she crossed to my record player,

and then (as was her habit) she began sharpening her claws on the back of the woodenspeakers. I suffered the noise for a while, but when there was no sign she was going to

stop I got up and turned on the light. Immediately, the scratching stopped. I bent down

to pick her up from behind the speaker.

Only—there was no cat.

When I checked later, she had been downstairs all along.

But something had made a sound like an animal with paws across the carpet.

Something had scratched and bumped behind the speaker. Indeed, my sister in the nextroom had also heard the noise. I checked thoroughly all around, but found no

explanation.

Psychoanalysis provides us with a useful notion: the “ symptom”. Certain cases

of mental illness arise, psychoanalysis declares, because in the unconscious lies an

urge that is in conflict with social mores, or with the interests of the sufferer’s

conscious personality. This urge is repressed by the conscious mind but it remains

active in the unconscious and may lead to the formation of a symptom.

For instance, imagine that someone did not want to sit an exam, even though itwas vital to his future. In a case like this a symptom might be formed: the urge to flunk

the exam would not be allowed direct expression, but by manifesting instead as some

kind of illness it might be able to make itself heard. If the symptom were severe enough

to prevent the sufferer from sitting the exam, then it might even realize its full and

secret intention, albeit by a roundabout route.

Some of the girls in my sixth form sat their A level exams with their arms in





bandages. One of them had woken in bed and discovered she had scraped the skin off

her arms while she was asleep. After she had shown her injuries to her friends, a

couple of them woke the next morning and discovered they had done the same.

The anxiety of these girls had taken on quite a direct manifestation. Perhaps my

anxiety was also making itself felt. Luckily for me, it hitched a ride not upon a

bandwagon of self-harm, but upon the idea of a ghostly cat.

Our cat was a playful, mischievous creature. She sat and lazed on pieces of

paper even as I was trying to write on them. To her my pen was a toy. She had a

personality that ideally suited her to become the kind of double-edged symbol

(“domestic pet”—”untamed”) that psychoanalysts since Freud have uncovered at the

root of many a symptom. Perhaps my anxiety that night manifested itself in the form of

an unruly moggy. We can call those noises I heard an “hallucination” if it makes us feel

better.

In magick, however, there is a concept closely allied to the psychoanalytic idea

of the symptom, but it demands a radically different mind-set. It is called a demon.

Aleister Crowley wrote: “The spirits of theGoetia [i.e. demons] are portions of

the human brain” (1995: 17). Contemporary magicians, such as Lon Milo DuQuette and

Christopher S. Hyatt, often make even more explicit the links between psychotherapy

and demonology:

Psychology … deals with people’s fears and doubts. Psychologists label many of these fears as

pathology. Psychologists have carefully followed in the footsteps of the Priest, who in his non-scientific

but simple way labelled these things as evil or demonic possession. The average clinical psychologist isno more scientific than the priest (2000: 11).

Despite its technical-sounding terminology, psychoanalysis is widely disparaged as

“pseudo-scientific” by the more sci-entistic branches of psychology. Part of the reason

is perhaps that the aims of magick and of psychotherapy are strikingly similar: both

seek to help the individual gain control over and make sense of his or her experience.

The magician seals himself inside a magic circle, recites incantations, evokes demons

and makes a pact with them, harnessing their power to his will. The psychoanalyst’s

approach is not so very different: her “demons” are the patient’s symptoms; her “magic

circle” is the formal relationship with the patient, governed by the rules that regulate

the practice of psychotherapy.

Foremost among these rules are those that discourage therapists from sexual

relations with their patients. Because of its powerful sensations and emotions, its

intense effect on consciousness, sex has long been used by magicians as a tool for

injecting energy into or “raising power” for any kind of endeavour. The way that





psychotherapy also seeks to maximize erotic tension within the therapeutic

relationship, by ensuring that it remains unconsummated, is a technique that might have

been lifted straight out of a book of spells. Louis Culling, in his occult classic Sex

Magick , writes at length on what he calls “Dianism”: the magical use of a sexual

experience in which climax is intentionally avoided (1992: 21–49). In one particular

type of magical working, climax is postponed in order to maximize ecstasy, so that themagician’s partner can assume the elevated form of the “Holy Guardian Angel” or

“ideal self”. In therapy, similarly, because there is no possibility of consummating the

relationship, every little word, gesture, and interpersonal incident becomes highly

charged, filled with significance, and in this way the patient’s fantasies are stoked until

they blaze.

The equivalent of the magician’s “incantations” is the conversation between the

analyst and patient, which draws the patient’s unconscious to the surface. The

“evocation of the demon” and the “bargain” made with it occur as the analystencourages her patient to re-enact within the consulting room his habitual ways of

relating, with the aim of replacing unhelpful behaviours with more effective patterns of

action.

Ramsey Dukes has written on how we can work creatively with our “personal

demons”. He advocates a technique that he calls “consciousness sharing”. If we project

our human moods and motives onto external objects, abstractions or situations—for

instance, onto malfunctioning computers, the stock market or “my inability to find a

decent job”—then we will have “reaped a whole universe of meaning and meta-meaning” (2005: 28).

In other words, by treating external phenomena as real and alive we heighten our

awareness of them and most likely increase the respect and intelligence in our manner

of dealing with them. This is where we arrive at the advantage of dealing with

“demons” rather than “symptoms”. For all its lowliness, we respect the power of a

demon; we recognize that if we could harness that power for other ends then it would

be to our advantage. However, we are also wary of becoming too friendly with

something that will damage us if not properly controlled. If we choose to regard the

demon merely as a metaphor for our personal psychological hang-ups, the dynamics of

the relationship remain fuzzy.

But what made the scratching noise behind the speakers? What moved the dice

and shook the bed? Another advantage of a “demon” is that we are not committed to

internalizing the experience, the way that psychotherapy invariably does. The

difference between magick and therapy is that, for mag-ick, truth lies in experience,

whereas therapy is concerned with questions of “meaning” and “interpretation”. The





therapist traces the meaning of symptoms back to the unconscious, over and over again.

In other words, issues on the surface are exposed as being the product of issues hidden

at a lower level. It is all “about” issues. Magick, on the other hand, enables us to

experience issues directly as something else—as a “demon”, an “angel”; as something

other .3

A paranormal experience might be regarded as an instance in which personalexperience becomes so intense, or so different or alienated from ordinary

consciousness, that what we regard as “internal” spills into the “external” world. If

this sounds far-fetched, a friend once told me about an acid-trip in the woods with

friends, during which the trees rewarded them with ready-made staffs that dropped

from the branches into their hands. When the drug wore off, they were still holding

them. The inner experience and the external world had become inextricably interwoven

under the intense experience of the drug.

All cases of synchronicity (a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung todescribe “meaningful coincidences”) possess this quality of a blurred boundary

between the mind and external reality. It prompted Jung to invent another special term,

psychoid ,4 to describe this level at which the mental and the physical coincide. Magick

appeals to this level and aims to immerse our experience within it. Psychology shuns it

with horror, associating it with hallucinations and psychosis.

Of course, there is always the possibility of natural explanations for seemingly

paranormal events, and these should not be discarded where they can be determined.

When trying to establish the truth of an experience it must be admitted that there arealways other possibilities. Maybe it was indeed the family cat that made those

scratching noises behind the speakers after all. She never did enjoy being shut inside at

night. Perhaps, in her frustration, she had astrally projected herself upstairs.

Notes

1. The term was coined (1852) by English physiologist and naturalist William

Benjamin Carpenter.2. I recently read about an investigation into telepathy where one of the experimenters

noticed a charming correlation: that positive results were recorded only on those days

when birdsong was audible inside the laboratory (Foxx, 2006. See sleeve notes:

“Thought Experiment”).

3. The philosopher Ken Wilber uses the terms “translation” and “transformation” to

discuss this difference (1996: 46ff). As is well known, to change yourself through





therapy takes years. This is because (in Wilber’s terms) therapy merely “translates”

our issues between unconscious and conscious; Wilber’s model suggests that this

“translation” is simply movement of issues within the same level of personal

development. Magick, on the other hand, encourages “transformation” by presenting us

with our experience as something other . Magick can provide a much faster track for

self-development, although it is probably fair to admit that the effects may be morevolatile.

4. “[W]e do not know whether that we on the empirical plane regard as physical may

not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the

border we distinguish from the physical as psychic …. They may be identical

somewhere beyond our present experience” (Jung, 1936).





F

CHAPTER TWO

A nice place to meet dead people

or reasons that will become obvious I’ve disguised names, dates and locations

in the story that follows. It was told to me by a close friend, whom I’ll call Karen. The narrative is based mostly on notes she made in her journal at the

time.

It was a Sunday evening in early autumn, 2006. Karen remembers it was a warm

day and that she was on her way to the building where she used a shared computer to

pick up her emails. She was working on a particular project and expecting an important

email that she would have to act upon as soon as it arrived. She did not relish the

thought of this, and had put off checking her email for as long as she could, but now she

accepted it was time to get stuck into what needed to be done.

Karen lives in Brighton. This much I haven’t disguised. She was crossing the

road, near St Peter’s church, whose grubby white edifice dominates the flat area in the

city centre known as Grand Parade, a few hundred metres from the seafront. She

looked up and saw a friend of hers—we’ll call him Dave —who skidded to a halt on

his bike.

“We both said ‘hi’,” remembers Karen, “and he looked pleased to see me. We

stood and talked about things that were happening to us just then, which is how I know

it must’ve been that time of year. I mentioned that I’d taken up kundalini yoga and

talked about the business project I was working on. He mentioned he was into sea-

kayaking. He told me this was great in the summer, because he’d bought a summer

wetsuit, but he was scared of the winter because he didn’t think he could afford a

winter one.”

Karen and Dave talked for about 20 minutes until Karen felt the unwelcome pull

of that important email. She glanced up and down the street, wondering if there might





be a café open at this time on a Sunday, but she couldn’t think of any. After they had

talked for another ten minutes she bowed to the inevitable: “I’ve got to go.”

Looking back, she remembered how disappointed Dave looked when she said

these words. He had been cycling towards the sea but she had not asked where he was

going. After they parted, she remembered thinking it was odd how Dave hadn’t

commented on her new hairstyle; she had drastically shortened her hair after wearing itlong for years. All her friends had commented on how different she looked but Dave

did not seem to have noticed. Also, in the months that followed, his slightly extreme

use of the word scared to describe how he felt about the onset of winter lingered in her

memory. But at the time, she simply continued on her way and picked up her emails.

It was in February the following year that things took a strange turn. Karen,

having stopped off again to read her emails, was reminded of her last meeting with

Dave. “I just thought to myself: ‘Well, it’s probably time I saw Dave again.’”

It was not unusual for months to pass without them seeing each other. They had

met as co-members of an organization that ran various projects. They had both worked

on one particular project that supplied a community service to city residents. Both of

them had enjoyed the activity it involved them in, and were disappointed when the

project’s funding was cut and it was wound up. Karen was still a member of the parent

organization, in a different capacity, but Dave had moved on. Although they enjoyed

each other’s company and were always pleased to see each other, their infrequent

meetings generally happened by accident.

Karen had a tough winter. A close business associate died unexpectedly before

Christmas and the loss hit her hard. There was also a spate of deaths among people

associated with the organization where she had worked with Dave. An acquaintance

called Graham had killed himself, and a female colleague, Kerry, had died of a heart

attack. Karen dropped into the organization and was talking with her colleagues about

the people who had died, when another colleague, Jo, said: “Oh, and Dave Jones has

killed himself.”

Karen did not place the name at first, partly because she was not sure of Dave’s

surname, but also she was not sure how Jo could have known Dave, because they had

not worked on the same projects. But then Jo mentioned how “Dave Jones” was

always on his bike and interested in sea-kayaking. Karen remembered there had been

two men named “Dave” on the community project, but she was suddenly extremely

worried about her friend.

The next week she took along a photograph of Dave. As Karen herself related:

Jo said: “No, that’s not him,” but I discovered later she thought I was pointing at someone else in the





picture. Even so, it continued to worry me, so I double-checked with Jo and then she realized her mistake

and said: “Oh, it might be him.” Susan—another worker—was there and she knew Dave well. She

looked at the picture and said: “I think it might be.” She suggested I talk to Beth, someone who worked

closely with Dave. So I went to Judy, who’s a manager, and asked if it was possible to get in touch with

Beth. The next week I took my photograph to Beth. She said: “That’s definitely him.”

Karen was suddenly confronted by the brutal fact that another of her friends had died.Everyone who had heard about Dave’s death had mentioned, so far, that he’d killed

himself by an overdose. But how could she be absolutely sure he had died?

“Beth had access to Dave’s records,” explained Karen. “She couldn’t tell me

any details but she mentioned that he died in January 2006 . ‘That can’t be right,’ I

said, because I saw him in October 2006 .”

Karen and Beth decided that the “01” of January in the date of Dave’s death on

his record must have been a mistake for “10” October.

However, Karen’s investigation did not end here. Although she and Dave had

not been very close, Karen was distressed to discover he had ended his own life. Part

of her felt guilty that she’d not been a better friend. It was unlikely, but she could not

help wondering that if she’d made more effort perhaps he would have opened up and

talked about whatever was on his mind. In any case, she wanted to find out if there was

a memorial where she could visit to pay her respects.

Confidentiality rules kept getting in the way. First, she went to the remaining

administrators of the community project. Officially, they declined to tell her anything,

but unofficially they confirmed that a “Dave Jones” had worked on the project at the

same time she had and that he had died. She also wrote a letter to the only remaining

manager of the project at the time she and Dave worked there, but received no reply.

Karen rang Beth again and discovered that in the meantime Beth had made

contact with Dave’s doctor. Once more, the strange piece of information resurfaced

that Dave had died in January 2006 , nine months before Karen had met him on that

Sunday evening. Again, she wondered whether he’d really died at all.

Karen was having sessions with a psychotherapist at this time, for issues relatedto post-traumatic stress. She explained the situation to her therapist, who advised her to

visit the register office at Brighton town hall. By now it was March 2007. Karen

visited the register office towards the end of the month and when she came away there

was no escaping that something strange had happened.

Dave’s date of death was officially registered as 28th January, 2006. When

Karen explained to the receptionist that she had seen and spoken with Dave in October





of that same year, the receptionist looked doubtful and explained that the date of death

is verified by two people: firstly by a doctor, who writes out the death certificate; and

secondly by another witness, who formally registers the death. Because of the

circumstances surrounding Dave’s death, the second witness was the city coroner. If

the date were wrong then two professionals had both made a very unusual mistake.

“The same day, I talked again with my therapist,” said Karen. “We went over theconversation I’d had with Dave. My therapist commented on how it had no fantastic

content. There were no fantasy themes in it. It was simply a conversation; not the kind

you’d make up as a memory to someone who had died, and it was consistent with

events at the time I remembered it to have taken place.

“My therapist told me that she had done some research and had uncovered other

cases in which people had seen people who had died, with no pathological

indications.”

It seemed Karen had joined the ranks of these sane, waking people who

(unwittingly in Karen’s case) had met and spoken with the dead. But Karen did not

leave it here, either. She was determined to prove to herself beyond doubt that Dave

had died. She phoned the cemetery where Dave’s funeral had been held and was

advised that the date of the funeral had been 11th February, 2006. Officially, the

cemetery was not supposed to release any details, but the person on the phone kindly

informed Karen of the name of the street where Dave had been living, and this matched

what Dave had told her in their previous conversations.

“It felt like it wasn’t real,” Karen said, when I asked how the experience had

affected her. “You can’t see dead people. It’s a fact that, socially, you don’t see people

once they’re dead. In other cultures it might be acceptable, but not here.”

Karen’s realization that beyond our culture there might lie a means of dealing

differently with what had happened pointed a way towards her personal reconciliation

with these events. But before we get to that part, our story takes an even murkier turn.

My curiosity had been aroused by the area of the city in which the encounter had

taken place. As soon as Karen mentioned where she had spoken with Dave, it hardlyseemed surprising …

In his book Daimonic Reality (2003), Patrick Harpur adopts a holistic approach

to the paranormal. Ghosts, UFOs, crop circles, fairies, even pumas sighted in the

British countryside, he argues, can all be approached as facets of a single phenomenon

that is neither real nor unreal, but which presents itself in various forms on the

borderline between both. These “daimons” and the “daimonic reality” they inhabit are





a permanent feature of human experience, Harpur suggests. Their existence will never

be objectively proved, for as one type of manifestation becomes extinct (“fairies” or

“ghostly giant dogs”, for instance, which are now rarely seen) newer forms emerge

(“alien abductions” and “the Beast of Bodmin”) suggesting that human beings and

planet Earth herself are never without them in some form or another.

As well as occupying a conceptual borderline between subjective and objective,Harpur’s daimons like to appear at locations that have a similar ambience:

Daimons notoriously favour boundaries—what the anthropologist Victor Turner called liminal

(“threshold”) zones. These may be within us (between sleeping and waking, consciousness and the

unconscious) or outside us—crossroads, bridges, shores. They may be at certain times, between day and

night, at the witching hour, at the turn of the year. Caravan sites or trailer parks often become especially

haunted … perhaps because they are liminally situated between town and country, habitat and wilderness.

At any rate, everyone knows a place of enchantment … Here, the laws of time and space, matter and

causality seem attenuated; and we glimpse for an instant an unseen order of things (2003: 49).

Karen had met Dave as summer turned to autumn, as the afternoon became the evening

—and on a Sunday evening, at exactly that time of the week Douglas Adams described

as “the long dark teatime of the soul” (1982: 4).

It was at a spot in the city beyond the northernmost tip of a grassed area, known

as Victoria Gardens. The “southern” and “northern” sections of Victoria Gardens are

not much to look at these days. Hemmed in by the busy roads of Grand Parade and

Gloucester Place, they are little more than grassy traffic islands. Looking back through

my journal, I see it was September 2006—a few weeks before Karen’s encounter—

that my attention had been drawn to the very same area.

There had been concern in the local press over the high number of deaths in the

bus lanes that run through this part of the city: three deaths and more than 20 injuries in

only seven years. The road layout is quite complex, yet the circumstances made me

wonder if something unusual were not at work. Many of the victims were long-time

residents who knew the area well, but for some reason, in broad daylight, they were

stepping in front of buses, mostly double-deckers:

It happened on a pedestrian crossing and our information is that she crossed against the green man light

and the bus had priority at the time ( Argus, 1st September, 2004).

Family and friends cannot understand how a man who was so meticulous about safety was involved

in an accident … Witnesses said he walked in front of a No 2 bus … against a red pedestrian signal

( Argus, 22nd November, 2004).

The driver pulled away on a green light just as the woman stepped onto the road ( Argus, 30th

January, 2006).

[A witness] said: “She stepped out right into the path of a single-decker bus coming from her right.

The driver did not have time to react at all” ( Argus, 1st March, 2006).





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

2006).

I decided to do some magical work that might help prevent further deaths, but first it

had to be determined whether there was anything at work that called for magick, or

whether it was simply up to the council to make the road layout clearer.

I gathered together a group of magicians to undertake an exercise. We would

launch our astral bodies into the area and investigate on the astral plane to see what

was amiss.

We had derived our method of working from two sources: one modern and one a

little more traditional. The modern source was “remote viewing”, a technique

developed from research by the American physicist Hal Puthoff. During a remote

viewing session, a subject—generally a person with established psychic ability—is

assigned a “target” (an object, person, or location) from which he or she retrievesvalid information by extra-sensory means.

Remote viewing has attracted much interest and controversy since its

development in the 1970s, due to the amazingly high success rates claimed by

participants and the fact that its development was funded by the CIA over a number of

years. Since then, claims of its reliability have become submerged beneath a mass of

conjecture and counter-interpretations.1

In any kind of psychic work, establishing a link with the target of investigation is

regarded as helpful. The participants were shown a map of the area and press cuttingsof the accidents. Beforehand, I walked through the area at midday with an audio

recorder so that each participant could also listen to sounds from the site. They were

then invited to lie down, the lights were turned low, and some incense was lit.

Our more traditional source for this working was Aleister Crowley’s

instructions on astral travel:

Let [the student] imagine his own figure … standing near to and in front of him … Let him then transfer

the seat of his consciousness to that imagined figure … Let him then cause that imagined figure to rise in

the air to a great height above the earth … (2006: 185).

The participants were guided through Crowley’s visualization and then a six-digit set

of “co-ordinates” was barked at them, with the instruction: “Go for it!”

The co-ordinates were another idea borrowed from remote viewing.

Researchers discovered that results improved if participants were presented with the

concept of an exact location, even though the numbers bore no actual relation to any





geographical area (Schnabel, 1997: 363, 377).

As might be expected from an activity such as this, the experiences reported by

the participants were wildly at variance with one another and not a little bizarre. One

person saw a man without a head wearing a suit; someone else saw a white slug-like

creature under the ground that refused to cooperate; another saw black-skinned people

under the road who stared at him menacingly. However, there were interesting commonthemes: some described vortices or whirlpools of energy that were putting pedestrians

into a dangerous trance. Most remarked on some kind of subterranean entity or energy.

The area looks like a part of any city centre, urbanized and busy with traffic. But

when I visited it again and peered more closely, the more incongruous its balding

patches of greenery began to seem. Maybe a little renovation was all that was needed

to create a different impression, but Victoria Gardens was starting to look less like a

park and more like a wasteland. If there were any truth in Harpur’s idea that the

supernatural favours liminal spaces, it was becoming less remarkable that Dave hadchosen to talk with Karen here, nine months after he had died.

The history of the area turned up further information. “It is undoubtedly because

of the swampy nature of the land,” wrote one historian of Brighton, “that [the area] was

never built upon, and remained broad open spaces throughout the centuries, so that we

now possess the mile-long chain of green gardens and lawns running … to the sea”

(Musgrave, 1981: 21).

Settlement at Brighton dates back to before the Norman invasion in 1066. Yet in

1780, this area was still wild and leafy enough to inspire the Duke of Cumberland to

turn out a stag upon it—although the huntsmen were disappointed by the quality of the

chase (Musgrave, 1981: 79). It was not until the end of the 1820s that the whole area

had been drained, landscaped, and enclosed into gardens and recreational areas

(Berry, 2005: 32).

The swampiness of the land was caused by the Welles-bourne, sometimes

referred to as Brighton’s “lost river” (Carder, 1990: entry 201). This is an intermittent

stream that once ran above ground, directly through the area. Remnants of it still flow,

but—as my remote-viewing colleagues seemed to have intuited—these days it follows

a subterranean course. The main body of the Wellesbourne ran along (now beneath)

what later became London Road. It was joined by another stream that followed what is

now Lewes Road. The two streams still flow into each other beneath the surface of the

street, only yards from where Karen spoke with Dave.

Various commentators in the fields of parapsychology and “earth mysteries”2

have noted a correspondence between sightings of ghosts and the nearby presence of





underground water. Tom Graves, building on the work of T. C. Lethbridge, has

proposed a unique theory of apparitions based on this. Using a dowsing rod,

Lethbridge claimed he could detect various kinds of “concentrations in the earth’s

field”, which he classified according to the type of spirit that traditionally might have

been supposed to inhabit the kind of landscape where the field was detected: “‘naiad’

for waterfalls, springs and streams, ‘dryad’ for trees and woods in general, ‘oread’ inmountains and deserts, and ‘nereid’ in or by the sea” (1986: Chapter 6). Graves notes

that (apart from oreads, whose existence he doubts) all these spirits depend upon the

presence of underground water.

Victoria Gardens, a grassy area with trees, close to the sea and with an

underground stream, would provide a possible habitat for all three types of spirit.

Water, suggests Graves, has unusual and so-far inexplicable properties.3 The

atoms in a water molecule, he argues, do not form a straight line but, typically, a

shallow angle of around 140°. This angle, however, is highly susceptible to change— not merely by physical forces, but also by means that appear decidedly magical. He

refers to an instance in which a blessing spoken over a sample of water apparently

changed its molecular angle by 20° (1986: Chapter 8).

A recent resurgence of these ideas can be found in the work of Masaru Emoto

(2005), whose photographs supposedly demonstrate a physical effect upon the

molecular structure of ice by speaking certain words over it, or exposing samples to

people experiencing particular feelings, or playing different types of music nearby.

However, Emoto has received widespread criticism for his lack of scientific controlsand it might be best to approach his work as “photography” rather than science. Yet

whether or not water is susceptible to human feelings, there is evidently a tendency for

people to believe it might be so. Even before its inclusion among the classical

elements of Aristotle, water had long been associated with emotionality, intuition,

changeability, and vitality.4

In the case of apparitions, Graves regards water as the equivalent of “a

photosensitive emulsion” (1986: Chapter 6). In water that flows freely, any stored

image would immediately lose its coherence, but water locked within the soil mightfulfil its function differently. At a suitable location, an emotional experience may

become imprinted upon the environment. The experience may then be retrieved by

another person at the site in a future time. Graves constructs an analogy between this

model and the technique used for producing a hologram. He suggests his theory might

account for the “multi-dimensional” qualities of a haunting, which may include

experiences of sounds, feelings, memories, and solid-looking imagery, rather than

simply a two-dimensional form.





My research into the geography of the area had revealed that the location

satisfied a number of these criteria. The accidents in the bus lanes also took on a

different meaning in the light of Graves’s suggestion that “hauntings” can be dangerous:

[T]hey wait around like tape-recordings of very loud noises, to be set off by a trip-wire or a hidden beam;

and they’re dangerous for the same reason and in the same way, in that they take you by surprise

because you’re not ready for them, not aware of them … A moment’s anger in one year by one person, itseems, can cause a car crash in another for another (1986: Chapter 6).

The visions of the participants in the remote viewing exercise, of vortices of energy

and underground entities seemed enticingly significant. But in one clear respect, it was

obvious I was pressing Graves’s ideas into a service that they could not fulfil, because

Karen’s encounter with Dave was not the “replay” of a past experience.

The hologram analogy is appealing, but it does not really hold. For instance, if

“standing water” provides the photographic plate then what provides the “laser beam”essential for rendering a holographic image? Prod the analogy a little and it becomes

apparent that that is all it is—an intriguing metaphor.

But if the “hologram” is a metaphor, maybe the process Graves tried to describe

is simply a metaphor too? I mean this notion of the standing water bending its

molecular structure in sympathy with a human experience nearby. Indeed, when he

came to consider cases of indoor hauntings, with no convenient water source, Graves

was obliged to stretch his theory. He suggested that “quartz or quartz-like crystals in

building-stones” provided an alternative medium to water. Yet water and “quartz-likecrystals” are obviously two quite different materials with contrasting physical

properties. If water and quartz can both be claimed to store human experiences, then

this must be because of some property they share.

Physically, this property is not obvious. But what does forge a strong link

between them is a series of metaphorical connections. Crystals, like water, are clear,

perspicacious, and bright; a sequence of metaphorical attributes also commonly

assigned to consciousness.

In magick and shamanism the link between quartz and consciousness has a longhistory. Initiatory traditions among Australian aboriginal tribes often include the

insertion of quartz crystals into the body to facilitate “the transformation of

consciousness from physical to psychic levels” (Lawlor, 1991: 324–325). Quartz is

accorded similar correspondences among shamanic traditions in South America and

South-East Asia (Eliade, 1989: 50, 52, 350).

Perhaps, then, what Graves is searching for, in the costume of Western empirical





science, is simply the principle of linkage itself between inner experience

(consciousness) and the external world.

Someone with whom I discussed Karen’s story raised an interesting point.

Imagine (he said) if we had access to CCTV footage of the area. (Given the extensive

coverage of CCTV in our cities, it is quite probable there was a camera overlooking

the area at the time.) What would the camera have captured as Karen stood talking withDave? Would we expect to see a woman chatting to a spookily indistinct figure; or a

woman talking and gesticulating all by herself; or—more prosaically—just Karen

walking past, without stopping, on her way to pick up her email?

There is almost no chance of gaining access to the footage. (Imagine the response

once we’d explained the reason!) But of the three possibilities above, it’s the last that

seems to me most likely: just Karen walking by.

I think that the appearance of a dead man in the street would put too much strain

on the usual habits of physical reality to prove feasible. Karen’s encounter is therefore

unlikely to have taken place in physical reality. But perhaps it occurred in another

place, in Harpur’s “daimonic reality”, or the realm that Jung referred to as “psychical

reality”:

It may well be a prejudice to restrict the psyche to being “inside the body”. In so far as the psyche has a

non-spatial aspect, there may be a psyche “outside-the-body”, a region so utterly different from “my”

psychic sphere that one has to get out of oneself … to get there (Jung, cited in Harpur, 2003: 33).

Once again, we find ourselves wondering whether a paranormal experience is a“getting out of oneself” of precisely the type that Jung describes: a merging of the inner

and outer worlds (which, at root, are revealed as joined) so that one becomes

indistinguishable from the other.

Jung is not the only psychologist to have harboured this idea that mind can be

“out there”. It may surprise some readers, but towards the end of his life Sigmund

Freud arrived at a similar view. It is more widely known that Freud took a long-

standing interest in telepathy and even wrote some papers that tentatively assumed its

existence (Freud, 1933). However, among notes discovered after his death are theseenigmatic sentences, which perhaps indicate that Freud would have taken these ideas

further:

Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is possible.

Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing

about it (Freud, 1938: 299).

Freud does not seem to be implying here that mind and material reality are necessarily





joined , but he does suggest that they have significant properties in common. As we

cannot directly see our own eyes, so our mind cannot directly know itself, and among

those self-characteristics it may not be able to recognize are the qualities it shares with

the outside world: in this instance, extension in space.

If the mind has spatial attributes (as Freud suggested), or if mind and material

reality are joined (as Jung insisted), then we no longer need “water” or “quartz” as amaterial, causative agent in hauntings. We no longer need “holograms” as a metaphor

to hang a theory upon, because if a haunting is the linkage between an experience and a

place, and if mind is spatial or joined with space, then a causative model is

unnecessary. A haunting is simply mind manifesting in a particular location.

It has often been remarked how our metaphors for the mind are shaped by

whatever technology happens to be predominant at the time of writing. At the turn of

the 20th century, the mind was like a camera; subsequently it has been compared to a

telephone exchange, a computer, a hologram. These days, ideas from quantum physics provide our comparison of choice.

Perhaps it is simply better to assume that the mind is like a metaphor .

As in a metaphor, so in the mind concepts are brought into unity and similarity.

Like an outrageous conceit (the literary term for a metaphor that joins together wildly

diverse ideas), the human mind is the mysterious link between spirit and matter, the

cosmic and the mundane. Mind is like a metaphor; the only metaphor in the whole of

creation that may, in fact, prove literal.

From this angle, the presence of underground water where Karen met Dave need

not be regarded as a cause of anything, but as a synchronicity —Jung’s famous “acausal

connecting principle”. What the underground water supplied was not a physical

medium, but a material embodiment of how deeply Karen’s encounter permeated into

her soul. The water did not cause; it meant . It meant “depth”, “feeling”, and “life”. Its

presence indicated that here was an experience so deep that it passed from being

experienced as “psyche-in-here” to “psyche-out-there” and entered Karen’s awareness

as if from the outside world.

We have arrived back at Harpur’s definition of liminal zones: those crossroads,

wastelands and transitional spaces that the paranormal seems to favour. It favours them

because they are a synchronistic component of the experience, a correlate of the

blurring between psychical and physical reality.

Jung relates a famous story of how a patient was telling her dream of a golden

scarab. There was a tapping at the window, which Jung opened. He caught a beetle as





it flew into the room: “the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our

latitudes” (1952: §843). He went on to suggest that our understanding of a

synchronistic happening can be assisted if we approach it as a dream rather than a

“real” event (1952: §845).

If we turn to the reports of our remote viewers, we already have the equivalent

“dreams” to hand: a headless man; people under the ground; subterranean currents andenergies. The imagery recalls the River Styx from Greek mythology, the boundary

between earth and the underworld. If Karen had told us she’d dreamt of meeting a dead

friend in such a place, Jung might have amplified the contents of her dream by drawing

comparisons with myths of heroes descending into Hades to encounter and assist their

dead companions. Sometimes, in these myths, the hero does not even realize that the

friend has died until meeting them there. (The sad encounter of Odysseus and Elpenor

in Book 11 of The Odyssey is a prime example.) But as things turned out, it seems that

Karen passed on the opportunity to dream and instead had the experience for real.During their posthumous conversation Karen mentioned to Dave that she had

taken up kundalini yoga. This is a form of yoga now commonly taught throughout the

Western world, yet it differs from what most people recognize as “yoga” because of its

inclusion of visualizations, mantras, and meditative exercises among the sequences of

bodily movement.

Indeed, the stated aim of kundalini yoga is to awaken the energy of the “kundalini

serpent”, which lies dormant, coiled three and a half times about the base of the spine.

Sets of exercises (called “kriyas”) encourage the serpent to rise, stimulating sevensuccessive “chakras” (or ”energy centres”) on her way to the highest chakra, which is

located just above the crown of the head.5

However one chooses to regard this explanation, it’s fair to say that kundalini

yoga places a unique emphasis on emotional well-being and spiritual development, as

well as bodily flexibility.

Another activity that Karen had recently taken up, but which she neglected to

mention to Dave, was the practice of magick .

From what I could gather, she had bought some books on the subject and in a

low-key style had started to explore the effect of various rituals, invocations of gods

and goddesses, and mystical systems such as tarot cards and the Kabbalah.6

Some might say that Karen had set herself up for the strange experience she

subsequently underwent. But as seems clear from her reaction and her rational

investigation of the events, she certainly was not inviting it.





At the time that she was confronting the fact of Dave’s death, she had recently

completed the performance of a kundalini yoga kriya for healing, which she performed

each consecutive morning for 100 days. This is a method recommended by kundalini

teachers when a practitioner wants to work on a particular bodily or spiritual issue.

One hundred days is an impressive period of time to sustain such an exercise, and

implies a significant degree of willpower on Karen’s part.Regarding Kabbalah, she was experimenting with visualization exercises. These

were based upon “The Tree of Life”, which is a diagrammatic schema of the whole of

creation. It represents how Creation manifests from the Godhead (at the “top” of the

tree) and then overspills into ten successive “vessels” (or “sephi-roth”), each

increasingly more material and removed from Divinity. At the very base of the tree is

the sephiroth known as “Malkuth”, which corresponds to the earthly, sensate world.

The exercises that Karen followed enabled her to “visit” within her imagination

a chosen sephira.7 The means by which this was achieved were extremely simple: burning a candle of a particular colour, some chanting, and the visualization of a

“guardian spirit” who would allow admittance. Then, sitting in meditation, whatever

images or sensations happened to arise were to be taken as constituting the visit to that

sphere.8

After Karen discovered that Dave had died, for a time she felt disoriented:

I started to write down events, in order to stop myself getting confused. I might have been a bit scared at

first, but even if he had come back from the dead, it wasn’t in his nature to be scary. I think I would’ve

been more upset if he’d died and I’d never seen him again. A week or two afterwards, I was thinking thatif I’m alive and Dave is so-called “dead” then there’s nothing to worry about. The scariest bit was that he

had died ; it was grief more than fear. If it had been revealed that he was dead the very next day after I’d

seen him, then that might’ve been a much bigger leap.

Without any conscious planning on her part, her yoga and magical practices

spontaneously began to change:

I had been paying visits to Malkuth for nearly a year. I’d also been doing kundalini meditations. I did a

kundalini meditation for the heart, and tagged on a bit at the end—visiting Yesod [the sephira immediately

“above” Malkuth], because I knew Yesod was all about emotions. Kundalini meditation is great, but you

either get an immediate result or you don’t; there’s no space in it for questioning or investigating your experience, which is why I tagged on the visit to Yesod. I did this consecutively on three days. On the

fourth day I asked if there was something I could do for Dave, although I wondered if I was being

arrogant, but I wondered if it would help me too. So I went in and spoke to the guardian, and he said:

“Come into Yesod for 40 days. You’ve already done three of them.” This was the first time I’d received

a message from an entity telling me to do something in a way that contradicted my conscious intentions,

because I was going to start the 40 days forwards from that point, but I was told very clearly not to do

this. “Don’t over-egg the pudding,” was the response. So I did the heart meditation and then I went to

Yesod.





Some might argue that dabbling in forces you don’t understand or that are beyond your

control will inevitably land you in trouble. Such people might regard Dave’s visitation

as demonic in character and in some sense Karen’s fault. But if magick got her into

trouble, it also proved the means by which she laid her friend to rest.

When an entity you assumed was imaginary starts telling you to do things you did

not intend or had not thought of, it is obvious that you are beginning to connect withsomething outside the usual boundaries of the self. This could only be read as a signal

of a marked increase in Karen’s magical abilities. She went on to describe to me how

the guardian of Yesod subsequently informed her she must protect herself magically

and even gave her instructions on how to do this.

If the location in the physical world where she had encountered Dave, with its

liminal characteristics and underground stream, were a symbolic equivalent of the

River Styx, then her magical practice was the symbolic process by which she escorted

him across the river’s boundary and into the realm of the dead.I still have a problem working out what is “real” in these visions, or what is made up from my imagination.

By “real” I suppose I mean something from outside, coming in and working on my imagination. I also felt

a presence sometimes. I don’t know if it was Dave or not, but it felt like someone was there, behind my

shoulder on the left side. And then, sometime around day 36 or 37 of the total 40, I seemed to jump out of

my third eye [i.e. the spot on the forehead between and slightly above both eyes] into some clouds. I

knew it was my mind making up this imagery. I saw these corny images of land, the mountains and then

the sea, and then I felt I was carrying something on my back, through the water. I wondered if this was

Dave. Then the vision ended. The next day, I reached up my arms and could hardly move. I had an

excruciating backache in a place I never would have normally. It felt exactly like I’d carried a huge

weight on my back, as if I’d been using muscles I wouldn’t normally use. After this, I never felt Dave’s

presence again. The last couple of meditations passed without incident. The 40 days just ended. The back

pain eased away in a day or so, after I did some yoga stretches. But it was so painful, I’d never felt

anything like that in my back before.

It was not as if Karen’s grief vanished overnight; she found herself still working

through a process of mourning but, as she puts it, those 40 days “were like my

memorial to him.”

A paranormal experience gives the impression of something “uncontained”: the

normal boundaries of everyday life are eroded so that thoughts leak into reality, or dead men walk on the streets. Magick itself depends on techniques that artificially

encourage this disintegration of limits: entering trances and altered states, or deciding

to enter into communication with visualized entities that one would ordinarily presume

to be imaginary. Yet, as Karen’s story illustrates, approaching the paranormal in this

way, using magick to speak with the paranormal on its own terms, can allow the

opening of a channel of negotiation. Instead of pushing the strange experience out of her

mind, or being badly traumatized or confused by it, Karen used the magick she had at





hand to contain the incident and bring it to a resolution.

The way she reacted recalls the function of shamans in traditional cultures

around the globe, where it is the shaman’s role to mediate between the spirits of the

dead and the living. In contrast to the relatively recent techniques developed within the

Spiritualist movement, such as Ouija boards and seances, the shamanic approach is far

more ‘hands on’. Often, to negotiate with the dead, the shaman must travel to their world, undergoing some form of ordeal to make the transition. Karen’s 40 days of

kundalini yoga, and her consultation with a spirit in order to determine a method for

helping her friend, seem more in line with this tradition than the relatively passive and

verbal behaviours of psychics and spiritualists.

In his book Up From Eden (2004), the philosopher Ken Wilber presents a

survey of the spiritual development of humanity since our earliest origins. He offers a

model in which spiritual practices can be ranked and compared with one another, and

in the process makes the following interesting remark:The shaman was not the first great mystic sage … he was simply the first master of kundalini/hatha yoga

(2004: 87).

For Wilber, kundalini yoga and shamanic practices sit side-by-side on a shared level

of spiritual development. Wilber ‘s intention is not to cast aspersions on any particular

traditions or practices, but to show which are effective on particular levels, the highest

of all being the attainment of enlightenment.

The level on which kundalini yoga and shamanic practices operate is referred to by Wilber as “the psychic”. Here, consciousness makes its first foray beyond the

material and the rational into the transcendent. At this level of the mind we encounter

phenomena such as out-of-body experiences, auras, telepathy, precognition, and so on.

It is also the level where that which Wilber calls “true magic” (1996: 77) is situated:

[C]onsciousness, by further differentiating itself from the mind and body, is able in some ways to

transcend the normal capacities of the gross bodymind and therefore operate upon the world and the

organism in ways that appear, to the ordinary mind, to be quite fantastic and far-fetched. For my own

part, I find them a natural extension of the transcendent function of consciousness (1996: 78).

Repeatedly, in Karen’s story, we have encountered notions of boundaries being

crossed, of liminal zones, of conceptual spaces in which the line between psyche and

reality is dissolved. Wilber’s model draws our attention to the ultimate transition,

which seems to have occurred within Karen herself, who, by taking up magical

practice and using it spontaneously as a means of dealing with the strange events she

experienced, was at the same time transporting herself onto a new level of

consciousness.





Notes

1. A good introduction to the subject is Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers: The Secret

History of America’s Psychic Spies (1997).

2. “Earth mysteries” is a term applied to a diverse, “fringe” area of study that

encompasses a wide range of scientific and pseudo-scientific themes. Examples

include: “ley lines”, ancient monuments, ancient astronomy, dowsing, folklore,

shamanism, “earth lights”, crop circles, etc. It is often regarded with extreme

scepticism by mainstream science, although scientific work has been conducted within

some of these areas.

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

48).

4. See, for instance, Tom Chetwynd’s A Dictionary of Symbols (1986: 422–424). The

entry for “Water” includes references to Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythology.

5. A clear and useful introduction to kundalini yoga, containing many useful kriyas, is:

Open Your Heart With Kundalini Yoga (Siri Datta, 2003).

6. Kabbalah (or Qabala, Cabbala, etc., there are many varying spellings) is a name

applied to a body of texts and ideas inherited from the Jewish mystical tradition. The

way in which some of these ideas have been appropriated by Western magick is

regarded by many as a divergence from their original significance within Judaic

belief.

7. Sephira is the singular of sephiroth.

8. The book she was using is widely available in the “Mind, Body and Spirit” section

of many bookshops: Simplified Qabala Magic (Ted Andrews, 2004).





S

CHAPTER THREE

I’m the urban shaman

pace and time. Have you ever stopped to wonder what theyare? Have you ever

peered deeply into your experience and considered what they are like?

They lend a fundamental structure to our experience, but in trying to grasp what

time and space are we can easily overlook the equally interesting question of what use

is being made of them.

Where space and time connect with human consciousness there arise the notions

of place and occasion. And what constitutes the content of our lives more than these?

Our lives are a procession of places and occasions. As soon as we turn our attention to

how experience takes this form, we start to realize how our lives are chopped up into

places and occasions of different types, within which different rules of behaviour are

applied.

It seems too obvious to be worth pointing out how we are expected to behave

differently when driving on the motorway from how we behave when walking on a

pavement. It even seems absurd to argue that the contrast between our behaviour in a

school (say) and in a supermarket has any real significance. Surely, we simply have to

educate our children and buy our food, so why wonder that society sets aside places

and occasions for this? Yet, if we trouble ourselves to think about it, the institutions of

our culture have no other means of manifestation than the way they dictate our usage of

time and space. To question or challenge this usage is a powerful technique for

changing both culture and our experience of reality.

In a developed society, space and time are divided into a wide variety of places

and occasions that may be bought, sold and traded. This constitutes the basis on which

our social and economic relationships are built. The purchase and sale of places and

occasions is made possible by abstracting our experience and then treating those





abstractions as commodities. For example, we have invented dedicated occasions and

places for eating, sleeping, shopping, being entertained, relaxing, and exercising. It

hardly occurs to us that not one of these activities requires any kind of formal

institution to make it happen. In fact, we do not need to devote space and time to any

experience, because space and time are forms taken by experience, not a necessary

condition for having it. Developed societies convey an impression that experiencescould not occur if we did not have restaurants, cinemas, televisions, gyms, and yoga

classes to create them. But, in truth, it is purely our will that brings these activities into

being. Membership of the most exclusive gym does not guarantee fitness; and the most

complicated meal cooked by the most famous chef does not compare with the crudest

food, if accompanied by our resolution to enjoy it to its fullest.

The privatization of space and time has become almost total. Home is a name for

a space purchased or leased from an institution, or from another person who probably

does not live there. Work is time sold to an employer or customer. Holiday is a boughtescape from both work and home, but rarely from this ceaseless commerce of place

and occasion. If we list the places and occasions we pass through in the course of a

day and the economic relationships underpinning them, we see how little control we

have over the settings of our daily experience. Nothing is more fundamentally ours than

experience, yet culture is everywhere engaged in a process of abstracting and dividing

our time and space (which is the closest that it can currently get to our experience

itself), and then selling it back to us as commodities it fools us into believing we don’t

already own.

The physical world is no longer considered big enough to satisfy the appetite of

this process. The internet seems as if it were purposely invented to supply a new, fresh

level of abstraction.

But even so, archaic traces remain of a different attitude. This is vividly evoked

in the discoveries of Paul Devereux, an archaeologist who has studied ancient sites

belonging to a category he calls “shamanic landscapes”.

Whether constructed from rows of standing stones, as on Dartmoor in England,

or simply by removing topsoil, as near Nazca in Peru, mysterious lines have been leftupon the earth by cultures of different epochs around the globe. The function of these

lines and tracks, Devereux shows, was not the demarcation of territory, nor even an aid

to transport. For instance, the so-called “ceremonial roads” built around Chaco Canyon

in New Mexico were constructed by a people that had neither horses nor the wheel

(1993: 24). Yet the prevalence of these trackways or lines suggests that some kind of

universal human need must have been their motive.





Devereux bases his theory of what this was partly upon folklore and myths,

which reflect a widespread belief that spirits travel in straight lines.

In Western Europe, straight tracks known as doodwegen (Dutch for “death

paths”) or Geisterwege (German for “ghost paths”) connect cemeteries to other

landmarks. These appear to be a medieval continuation of much older beliefs that the

spirits of the dead can be marshalled along straight lines. In Britain, so-called “leylines” appear to have a similar origin (Devereux, 1993: 27–28). However, in the

Americas it was the spirits of the living that were more at issue. Petroglyphs (images

carved into rocks) have been discovered at sacred sites in the Americas that appear to

depict the soul leaving the body of the tribal shaman (Devereux, 2009). Devereux

argues that these images are the earliest depiction of the motivation behind lines on the

landscape: the out-of-body experience (OOBE).

Shamanic cultures devised a variety of practices giving rise to states of trance

that liberate the soul of the shaman from the body, setting it free to travel the spiritworld. These practices involve psychoactive plants, or self-generated ecstasies caused

by over-breathing, over-exercising, flashing sunlight into the eyes from a knife-blade,

and so on. In each case the aim is the same: to experience the spirit world. And in each

case the experience assumes a common form: the soul rises above or flies outside the

body.

There are competing theories as to what causes an OOBE. The assumption that i

is the “soul” flying out of the body is perhaps the least psychologically sophisticated,

but it has the advantage of fitting the manifest appearance. Whether these episodeswere shamanically induced, or caused by other types of trance, or even perhaps by

disease, when people told stories about their experiences these accounts might well

have bolstered the idea that the spirit was separable from the body and capable of

unconstrained flight—in other words, of travelling unhindered in a straight line.

Ancient peoples clearly believed in the reality of spirit flight, and that belief has left its imprint as straight

line and effigy markings on what can only be called shamanic landscapes. These lines varied from culture

to culture and age to age in their form and meaning, but their underlying source was the common canvas

of the human mind in metachoric trance conditions (Devereux, 1993: 35).

The impulse to use the landscape, our environment, our space as a means to access the

dimension of spirit seems a world away from where we find ourselves today.

In modern times the environment is demarcated by lines so that it can be

“commodified”. It fills us with wonder to think of ancient landscape markings, such as

the famous Nazca lines in Peru, that reveal their meaning only when seen from the air,

and yet they were made at a time when no human eyes had access to this viewpoint.





Received wisdom suggests that these works were intended to be seen only by

God, or (in shamanic cultures) by the soul of the shaman after he or she had left their

body.

Sometimes, during an OOBE, the “traveller” may indeed be confronted with

impressions that closely resemble the actual, physical world, but just as often the

traveller encounters an unfamiliar environment or one that contains odd and dreamlike“discrepancies”.1 Yet imagine for a moment that we knew there was (say) a giant

hummingbird carved into the top of the hill outside our village, visible only from

above. Would we not now be more inclined to see it during our OOBE? In fact, would

the case that an OOBE is the only possible occasion on which we had a hope of seeing

it not dispose us to experiencing OOBEs more often?

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to draw on Devereux’s findings and suppose the

motivation behind these landscape markings might have been to cause the type of

experiences required to view them. I’d even suggest the markings probably succeededin giving OOBEs to many people who would never otherwise have had them and

would not have seen the hummingbird had they not known it was etched in reality onto

the hill. We might argue that these people had not therefore had a “genuine” OOBE at

all, but had simply dreamt about a hummingbird, yet this would not necessarily be

what the experience meant to the dreamer. Etching a design onto a hill may have been a

means of focusing the dreams of a people around a specific image, in which case a

dream concerning that image would have been a significant spiritual experience.

Once again, it is difficult to imagine our own society investing so much time andenergy into a project for enriching the nation’s dreams, yet it is not correct to claim we

are no longer interested at all in projecting the contents of our minds onto physical

space. Rather, what seems to have changed is what finds expression. We have shifted

from the meaningful and qualitative towards the utilitarian and quantitative. The land is

required to sustain a far larger population these days, so this might seem a necessary

development, but did we really have to deny our imagination access to external space

to quite the current extent?

Art is still allowed some restricted access, in officially sanctioned locations, butthe shamanic landscapes were not art. They were not aimed at an audience but were

instead utilities, facilitating environments, where people came specifically to interact

with and have direct experience of the divine.

The impulse to project qualitative ideas onto space has not died. In certain

contexts it is still thriving, but not without injury from the cultural shift that drove the

imagination from external space into the private consciousness of the individual. In the





eyes of our culture, soul and spirit are concepts too divisive and primitive to be

allowed officially sanctioned external space, although occasionally they are given a

suitably indirect artistic or religious expression.2 Our modern-day version of the

shaman is usually an artist, but occultists and magicians also play a lower-profile role.

The shamanic world-view seems to have survived by renaming itself

psychogeography, a non-specific label for what has become partly an artistic andliterary genre, partly an amorphous set of political and philosophical concepts.

Psychogeographers are not often concerned with writing physical

representations of experience onto the landscape, but with investing their external

environment with meaning. This is often abstract and usually personal, but it is

undoubtedly qualitative rather than quantitative. Because this goes against dominant

trends, the psychogeographer is often forced into confrontation with the values of the

age, unlike the tribal shaman, who occupied a more esteemed position. Frequently,

psy-chogeographical practice involves changes made only to the psychogeographer’s perception of his or her surroundings, so that the effects are apparent only to the

practitioner. This perhaps explains why psychogeography has become mainly a literary

movement.

Most of the developed world lives in cities, so it is the urban environment in

which the psychogeographer usually works. Modern town planning strategies and the

urban redevelop-ments that followed in their wake have spurred the growth of

psychogeographical practice. A well-known instance was the redevelopment of Paris

in the 1860s that swept away the clutter and chaos of unregulated streets in favour of wide, radiating boulevards (Coverley, 2006: 57f). These could be more easily policed

and were utilized more easily by government forces against would-be revolutionaries.

At the same time, covered glass arcades were introduced into urban areas, encouraging

the bourgeoisie to flaunt their wealth in public and stimulate economic growth. This

gave rise to the figure of the wandering urban stroller, the so-called flâneur , a 19th

century prototype of the psychogeographer first described by Baudelaire in an essay of

1863. By the 1920s, the covered arcades were themselves vanishing under new waves

of redevelopment, prompting the social critic Walter Benjamin to begin collecting

material for his The Arcades Project , a seminal psychogeographical text. This work had a major influence upon Guy Debord, founder of Situationism and inventor of the

term “psychogeography”.

The psychogeographical impulse to rescue meaning and quality from external

space receives a fresh stimulus from each new wave of commodification. Usually this

has taken the form of an artistic or political response but, as we have noted, the aim of

the shamanic landscape was not art. It performed a function, and the community relied





upon it and the skill of their shamans to execute that function. The shamanic landscape

was, to the modern mind, something more akin to a church than an art installation, but it

was the church of a religion that did not seek merely belief. Instead it offered everyone

a role in its ceremonies.

The shamanic landscape facilitated a magical act that enabled people to

experience a truth. Whether that truth concerned communication with gods or other entities, or released the soul to explore other worlds, the shamanic landscape was the

means to make that actually happen for the persons concerned. Art, in contrast, is

expressive rather than functional. It sets up a hypothetical arena through the medium of

symbols or ideas into which an audience enters, but from which the audience is free to

disengage. The magical act, in contrast, collapses the distinction between symbols and

reality. Its truth is not hypothetical or symbolic but self-evident, because it is conveyed

through immediate experience. There are no spectators to a magical act; everyone

participates. Where magick fails the result is art; the “suspension of disbelief” thatoccurs in art is a weak echo of the magical experience of truth.

Magick stands in a similar relation to politics as it does to art. Magick is

functional rather than hypothetical, an end rather than the advocation of any particular

means. Marx’s famous thesis that the point of philosophy is not to interpret the world

but to change it has been used to highlight a supposed affinity between magick and

Marxism. But unlike left-wing politics magick does not operate through conflict or

opposition. It can manifest truth from reality whenever and howsoever it wishes. In our

earlier example, we considered how the magical act of etching a hummingbird onto ahill might stimulate an experience of flying outside the body for the persons concerned.

Magic does not “struggle” with anything because it is not fussy about how it changes

the world; the means is not important to the end. Magic does not “do” dialectics,

because it is concerned with experiences, not ideas. There are magicians who portray

themselves as politically radical and view the use of magick as a subversive act, but

this is to mistake the aim of their magick for the nature of magick itself. Mainstream

society constantly employs magical techniques to evoke into reality fantastical entities

such as consumer goods, celebrities, and other commodities that are as intangible as

they are expensive. It is not simply the fact that a magician uses magick that makes himor her subversive.

Just as shifts in culture have forced psychogeography to operate in the realm of

symbols rather than the physical environment, so too its practice has been diluted. It

has lost sight of the original affinity of its core ideas with magick and has yoked itself

onto art and politics. But even so, work in this field3 continues to demonstrate that

unorthodox explorations of place and occasion, even in an abstract form, retain a





power to transform deeply our perception of reality.

I decided to explore what could be gained from mixing pyschogeographical

techniques with contemporary magick. Like many others in 2008, I found myself

wondering where the meltdown of capitalism that we were living through might lead,

so I decided to examine the city where I lived for signs to instruct me.

A standard psychogeographical technique is “drift walking”, which involves

taking an unplanned stroll with no fixed destination and simply paying attention to

whatever experiences arise. I decided I would depart from this slightly. In the interests

of keeping fit and maybe generating some kind of semi-shamanic trance through

exertion, I decided to run instead. So I put on my shorts and running shoes, stuffed a

digital camera and voice recorder into my pocket, and took to the streets of Brighton

and Hove.

First, I went to the crossroads nearest my home and made an offering to the

spirits for help with my quest. Then I set off in the direction it seemed was indicated.

During the run I encountered images, signs, and situations, and had several

conversations with people, all of which I interpreted as direct answers to the question I

had posed: Where is the current world crisis taking us? I was obeying Aleister

Crowley’s injunction, that the magician must interpret everything that happens as a

direct message to his soul from God (1989: Chapter 81). It is this attitude that can lift

psycho-geographical work out of art and into magick. In art, it is not God but the artist

who is the source of the message. In magick, that message is not merely entertained as

an interpretative possibility but accepted as the truth.

Not far from the crossroads I noticed a fat spider hanging in its web, an obvious

analogy for the current financial system. Indeed, the next day I found myself reading an

article arguing that the nationalization of financial institutions around the world had

amounted to a covert centralization of the international banking system.

A short distance further on, the letters “NOX” caught my eye on a car

registration plate. Nox is the Roman goddess of night. To the Greeks she was Nyx, an

obscure figure (appropriately) but a force of such extreme power and beauty that Zeushimself was terrified by her. The financial crisis, I had therefore discovered, was

unleashing forces that had thoroughly rattled the usual authorities, but which were

ambiguous and not necessarily detrimental.

It went against my pessimistic habits, but the further I ran the less negative the

signals I encountered. I passed a building called “The Church of the Good Shepherd”

and then noticed an unusual sign on the gate of a private house that read simply: “A





Vision of Hope”. No matter how hard I looked, the signs seemed positive.

By now I was in an affluent part of the city I’d never visited before. The symbols

along the route had indicated that in the short term there would be an increased

centralization among world governments followed by a chaotic period which, although

unpleasant, might prove transformative. Now I was being shown that a close eye had to

be kept on the rich, who would manifest the greatest signs of stress. The trend wouldcontinue for them to hide behind security barricades and retreat into enclaves, in order

to protect their diminishing wealth.

My shamanic jog reached its climax in Hove Park, where I found myself lost in a

Cretan maze. Literally! Or should that be symbolically? Because this was a magical

act, the distinction had vanished. The maze was a work of public art: concrete lines set

on a grassy slope in a pattern combined from a traditional Cretan labyrinth and a human

thumbprint. “Walking the maze,” read a plaque nearby, “is traditionally linked to

contemplation and renewal.”4

So I walked the maze, and I saw how the financial system, in its present form,

had indeed become a labyrinth in which we have imprisoned ourselves. Of anyone

who obeyed the advice on the plaque and took a contemplative walk about the maze it

might be said: “He applies his mind to unknown arts and changes the laws of nature.”

This was how the Roman poet Ovid described Daedalus,5 the genius who invented the

first labyrinth, but who was intelligent enough to strap on wings after he had finished

building and avoid becoming a prisoner of his own creation by flying free. Presumably

he flew upwards, like a spirit, in a clear straight line. This was in contrast to our present day financiers, who had lacked the sense to avoid falling victim to their own

system, and had trashed the world economy as a result.

In the coming times, I had learned, we must all emulate the example of Daedalus

to avoid the fate of the rich, whose burdensome possessions lead only to self-imposed

imprisonment inside a “gated community”.

My discovery of the Cretan maze, which I’d somehow never noticed before,

despite living in the city for nearly 20 years, convinced me that I’d found my answer.

The work was done. I turned and began the long jog home, with the voice of the city

echoing in my ears.

Notes

1. We shall examine why this is so in the final chapter but consider for now the bizarre

imagery that surfaced during the remote viewing exercise presented in the previous





essay (p. 29).

2. Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, a 20 m tall sculpture of a winged figure

situated in Gateshead, is a recent and significant example.

3. Examples include writers such as J. G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair and Peter Akroyd, an

film-maker Patrick Keillor.4. Fingermaze (Chris Drury, 2006).

5. Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII: 188.





T

CHAPTER FOUR

The absolute truth

o observe paranormal events in their more vivid forms,” suggests Michael

Murphy, “we must do so when and where they happen.”

Sounds obvious, but easier said than done.

“In studies of hypnosis,” Murphy continues, “biofeedback, meditation, and

mental training in sport, experimental procedures can weaken results by their

preoccupation with devices meant to enhance scientific precision” (1992: 17). In other

words, fields of activity in which the paranormal is likely to appear are also those on

which the clammy hand of science has its most deadening effect.

Sceptics frequently argue the converse of this: that pseudo-scientific disciplines produce “anomalies” only because they do not admit scientific rigour. But let us

examine Murphy’s list in more detail: hypnosis, biofeedback , meditation and sports

training . These share a concern with how the mind and body are connected; the

relationship between self and other, observer and observed. Experimental science

tends to take this boundary for granted. It would have to trash all its conclusions if, for

instance, it were discovered that the experimenter influenced the results, whether

consciously or not. Yet this kind of influence is the specific goal of the disciplines on

Murphy’s list; they all work to affect and change that boundary in various ways.

If our aim is to study paranormal events “where they happen”, then one answer

to that question of “where” is on the boundary between self and other. The same place

that experimental science is so ill-equipped to occupy.

Quantum mechanics is a branch of science notably exempt from this. Quantum

physicists have their own conceptual tools and theories for dealing with the exotic

behaviour of the subatomic world, but it is widely accepted that the laws of the





subatomic do not apply at the level of the everyday sensory world, which is where the

paranormal arises. Many have looked to quantum physics for an explanation of psychic

phenomena, but the assumption that macroscopic strangeness has its roots in

microscopic physics has not yet been proved. If it had, it would be a major

breakthrough, and would have been used to solve questions of far greater concern than

telepathy and poltergeists.Those disciplines (“pseudo-sciences”, if you like) that make their home in the

liminal but macroscopic gap between observer and observed have also evolved their

own tools and technologies. Magick is one of these disciplines. It does not feature on

Murphy’s list, but its aim—like the others—is to change the individual’s experience or

exert “mind over matter”. Unlikely as it seems, religion also belongs on that list. If

religion tends to be overlooked as an effective technology for changing experience this

is because it is so widespread and commonly practised that most of us tend not to pay

it much attention.Religion is a contentious topic in our age as we witness fundamentalists vying

for power not only in the Islamic world, but also wielding increasing dominance in the

United States. Agnostic secularism has been reluctant to challenge religious faith head-

on, but an atheist rearguard has made its presence felt and is refreshingly fearless and

scornful in its tone. Heralded “The New Atheists”, these commentators have sprung

from a range of philosophical and political backgrounds, as might be expected of a

group united only by a common lack of belief.1Generally, however, they are

materialist, rationalist, and sceptical in their approach.At their head is Richard Dawkins, the renowned evolutionary scientist and

Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. There are few people qualified to

argue on equal terms with Dawkins over the subject of evolution, but that has not

deterred Creationists and proponents of “intelligent design” from queuing up to try

their luck. Likewise, judging from his book The God Delusion (2007), Dawkins

himself is oddly confident of his own qualifications to argue against religion.

Where direct spiritual experience is concerned, Dawkins regards it as a case of

“there but for the grace of God go I”. He tells the story of a young boy lying in thegrass, examining plants and insects, when suddenly: “the micro-forest of the turf

seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy

contemplating it” (2007: 31).

It was not Dawkins who experienced this moment of spiritual awakening (of

course), but someone who later became a loved and respected chaplain at Dawkins’s

school. “Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in





the other is not an easy question to answer” (2007: 32).

Dawkins is either shy of sharing his experiences, or he has experienced very

little. He treats us to only a couple of personal anecdotes. As a child he woke one night

and heard the eerie sound of an invisible person praying. On another occasion he saw

an evil face staring from a window. Both times the budding scientist stood his ground

and investigated. He discovered the “sound of praying” was actually a draught throughthe keyhole, and the frightening face was simply an optical illusion:

That is really all that needs to be said about personal “experiences” of gods or other religious phenomena.

If you’ve had such an experience, you may well find yourself believing firmly that it was real. But don’t

expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have the slightest familiarity with the brain

and its powerful workings (2007: 117).

There is much to be said for ruling out the mundane before resorting to the paranormal,

but would things have been different if he had had an experience of the kind that

offered no opportunity for physical investigation? Earlier,2 I described how objectsrolled around of their own accord after I’d messed with the Ouija board as a teenager.

There was no room for degrees of misperception in this experience: either the objects

moved or they did not. If they did not, then my sanity is in question; if they did, then

reality misbehaved. Either way, the explanation is something more interesting than a

draught through a keyhole.

The characteristics of Dawkins’s atheism are not unique but bear comparison

with Sigmund Freud, who was one of the most popular and influential critics of

religion in the previous century. Although Dawkins offers intriguing suggestions, heshies away from stating specifically what kind of a delusion he considers religion to

be, and from where it may have arisen. Freud was more forthright: he regarded religion

as a crutch for feelings of existential helplessness: “I cannot think of any need in

childhood,” he wrote, “as strong as a father’s protection” (1930: 260). The idea of

God, in Freud’s view, arises from projecting a reassuring fantasy of “the father” onto

the external world.

Most educated people in the Western democracies would probably position

themselves alongside Dawkins or Freud, yet at the time Freud first published his viewsa friend and correspondent, Romain Rolland3, challenged him that the basis of religion

is not a fantasy but stems from a fairly commonplace experience:

[A] feeling which he [Rolland] would like to call a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling as of something

limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic”…. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the

ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion (Freud, 1930: 251–

252).





Freud’s response to this idea was dismissive: “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling

in myself” (1930: 252). Dawkins’s comments on his chaplain’s “oceanic” experience

among the grass-stems is an echo of Freud’s puzzlement. As might be expected of a

psychologist, Freud is more sensitive to his own mental processes: feelings, he

observes, are vague and tricky things. If we can ever hope to understand this “oceanic”

sensation properly, Freud declares that we must translate it into an idea.The “idea” that Freud arrived at was this: “oceanic” feelings and mystical

experiences occur when we regress to primitive states of mind that belong to infancy,

when the ego is not adequately separated from the world but both are merged together

in a sensation of “oneness”.

Freud turned down his friend Rolland’s suggestion that yoga and breathing

exercises would provide an actual means for Freud to experience these states for

himself—if he took the trouble to practise them. “Most unusual experiments” was

Freud’s disdainful reaction (1930: 260). He proceeded to quote some lines fromSchiller’s poem The Diver : “Let him rejoice who breathes up here in the roseate

light!”4 Freud was saying he’d rather not venture “down there” into the murky depths of

mysticism, feelings, and yoga classes.

Perhaps Dawkins does not have the type of friends that Freud had, who might

pester him about yoga classes and the idea he ought to experience for himself the type

of experience his chaplain underwent. Finding a yoga teacher was a much bigger deal

in the early 20th century, so perhaps we can afford Freud a little leeway. Dawkins,

however, has far less of an excuse for passing on the type of spiritual practices thatRolland recommended.

The philosopher Ken Wilber, in his attempt to define the common ground

between science and spirituality, has pointed out that science rests upon injunctions as

much as it relies upon evidence (1998). In other words, science is not merely about

observing data, but also about the methods necessary for acquiring that data.

When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter with his newly-invented

telescope, religious leaders of the day denied that such celestial bodies could exist, yet

they refused the offer to take a look for themselves through the telescope, on the basis

that the device was “blasphemous” and perverted true perception.

Dawkins quotes Bertrand Russell against the religious fundamentalists: “Many

people would sooner die than think. In fact they do” (2007: 345). Many rationalists,

however, are equally averse to feeling and experiencing. I doubt that Dawkins’s

resistance would extend to martyrdom, but I can almost hear his argument against

taking up a spiritual practice: it would “delude” him.





As Ken Wilber suggests, personal experience is not beyond the boundaries of

scientific investigation, if a hypothesis that requires a certain experience also includes

a specific injunction that can be followed to replicate that experience: i.e. “To see the

moons of Jupiter, look through the telescope.”

It is too late for Freud, but if Dawkins wants to qualify himself in the field of

spirituality and support his opinions, he must expose himself to the data. I’d suggest anhour of vipassana meditation every day, for a duration of two years. This ought to yield

some relevant experiences, provided he does it properly. And if he or any like-minded

critics refuse, how is this any different from the clerics of Galileo’s day, who turned

down the telescope with cries of “blasphemy”? By refusing to accept the injunction and

experience the data, how are they qualified to comment on the findings of those that

have had the experience? Freud and Dawkins expose themselves to allegations of

irrationality, because they have refuted data without observing it for themselves.

Freud claimed that the “oceanic” experience must be converted into an idea tomake sense. But for those that have taken the trouble to replicate the experience, it is

clear that any “idea” abstracted from it detracts from the actual data. The truth does not

always lie in ideas or hypotheses derived from the data, but sometimes in the

experience of the data itself.

“But—hang on,” comes the response, “I cannot find this experience in myself. It

simply isn’t there. So much for your notion of ‘subjective’ truth, then! What use is a

truth that isn’t self-evident to everyone?”

Professor (I reply), it’s up to you to have the experience! Until you do, how are

you qualified to tell us that “actually” an experience means this, or “really” it means

that? Go and do some yoga, meditate, and come back when you understand what you’re

talking about, then we can debate on what you’ve found.

One hour of daily meditation for two years is far less effort than it took for

Dawkins to qualify himself in biology, so there shall be no griping over demands on

time. And there should be no cheating either: no connecting oneself to an ECG to

monitor what’s “really” happening in the brain; or getting someone else to meditate and

measuring their brain activity instead. I demand subjective experience!

Returning to Freud, I looked up and read the whole of the poem by Schiller that

he quoted in defence against trying some meditation. It is about a king who hurls a

precious goblet into the sea and challenges a youth to retrieve it. The youth is sucked

down by vast currents but finds the goblet by sheer luck and then, equally by chance, he

is spat back up by the tide just before nasty Lovecraftian sea creatures drag him under.





Freud bravely faced all the sex, death, and emotionality his patients could throw

at him, yet a friend’s suggestion he might try yoga prompted him to allude to these

images of abject terror. Evidently, he identified with the fate of the diver, who is seen

no more after the king hurls the goblet a second time and promises the hand of his

daughter in return for a repeat performance.

With his theory of the unconscious, Freud dived into the depths and brought up asmuch as he could handle. The goblet of mysticism that Rolland tossed as a second

challenge he allowed to sink forever into ignorance.

Yet in Dawkins’s writing we encounter a concern with mul-ticulturalism and

sexism that suggests—in contrast to Freud— he is at least partially open to models of

truth that deviate from the empirical and evidential. He makes frequent references to

the “raising of consciousness” achieved by theorists of race and gender-relations.

Indeed, he expresses the desire to do some consciousness-raising of his own, urging us

to correct anyone who makes reference to a “Jewish child” or a “Muslim child”, rather than “a child of Jewish or Muslim parents” (2007: 379–383).

With this “consciousness-raising” Dawkins is not seeking to persuade us with

evidence that religion cannot be transmitted genetically from parents to children (an

absurd idea, of course). Instead, he is urging us to change language and reinforce a

socially constructed truth.

He will not go so far as to submit his own scientific discourse to scrutiny,

however. He does not commit himself to a particular theory of religion, but he offers

up a number of ideas on how evolution by natural selection might have allowed

religion to arise and proliferate, and even discusses the adaptive benefits it may

provide. Possibilities include the way that the survival benefit of attributing intention

and design to natural circumstances (e.g. seeing a tiger and assuming, without any

supporting evidence, that it wants to eat you) often outweighs the intellectual

inconvenience of being wrong (2007: 211–212); and how, when someone “falls in

love” with God, we may be witnessing a misfiring of those selection pressures that

favour monogamous sexual behaviour toward other humans (2007: 214f). Whatever his

specific arguments, Dawkins makes his general stance clear: religion is “a by-productfor something else” (2007: 200). He will not dignify religion with any

accomplishments in its own right.

But surely it is possible to explain science too as a consequence of evolutionary

processes, as ‘a by-product for something else’? From an evolutionary perspective,

what else can it be? Ultimately, despite Darwin whipping out the carpet from under

them, both religion and science are still with us, doing what they always did, with no





signs of vanishing in a puff of deconstructive smoke. So why does Dawkins assume the

same evolutionary argument “kills” one of them (religion), but “strengthens” the other

(science)?

This is an interpretative ruse no different from the kind he attributes to religious

apologists. He asserts it is inadequate to argue that religious scripture is “symbolic”

rather than intended to be taken literally, because there are no objective criteria bywhich to distinguish the parts that are literal from the parts that require interpretation

(2007: 269). But likewise, if you are going to apply evolutionary science to the history

of ideas, you cannot assume that certain ideas are in need of explanation (religion)

whereas others (evolutionary science) are transparent and not subject to the very same

explanations.

But we must not be smug either and assume that we are now in the clear, just

because we have so convincingly trashed Dawkins and Freud. Earlier, I suggested that

religion has a place among those disciplines concerned with the interface betweenmind and body, subject and object. We need to consider this in more detail.

A general claim of mystical and religious traditions is that human beings are

deluded. God, the truth, is available, but human nature separates us from Him, Her, It.

The truth is waiting for us to experience it, but this will not occur without action on our

part, whether this takes the form of surrender to the will of God, accepting Jesus as a

personal saviour, or sitting on a cushion and meditating.

What precisely is this hidden truth? People have labelled it in many ways:

Heaven, paradise, enlightenment, gnosis, satori. Some of these terms come from

orthodox religions, but unfortunately it is the case that most people who profess them

have not actually experienced them. These experiences are not easy to gain or

understand (you supposedly have to be dead before you can experience some of them!)

but, at the same time, religious organizations must justify their existence to ordinary

people in the material world. The usual result of this tension is that the core of truth any

single religion may have contained becomes corrupted over time into a mere idea. For

instance, instead of transcending everyday consciousness by dissolving the ego into

boundless compassion, many people interpret Christianity as meaning we shouldsimply “agree” with what Jesus said, in order to win entry to a place called Heaven

that we will discover after we are dead.

Fortunately, all the major religions have their mystical or esoteric branches:

Islam has Sufism; Judaism has Kabbalah; Christianity has Gnosticism. In the West,

orthodox religions have often persecuted mystics and occultists (and will probably

continue to do so, wherever they are given the chance) because of the mystic’s





insistence that each person must experience truth for him or herself, regardless of what

any religious authority has to say about it.

Jared Diamond suggests that a key function of religion is the promulgation of

repressive power structures:

[A] way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy

[i.e. a power structure that serves the interests of its rulers] … The chief claimed to serve the people byinterceding for them with the gods and reciting the ritual formulas required to obtain rain, good harvests,

and success in fishing (1998: 277–278).

Orthodox religions of the West have indeed tended to ossify according to this pattern.

Whatever spiritual truths may have inspired their origin, over time these have become

obscured beneath the weight of an institution that ultimately serves its own material

ends, albeit with the tacit approval of followers.

But the situation has sometimes developed differently, as is seen more clearly inthe case of Eastern religions. Karen Armstrong describes how the Buddha abandoned

his regal life and took to the road as an ascetic, yet he was regarded because of this not

as a drop-out but as a hero: “People regarded the ascetics as pioneers: they were

exploring the realms of the spirit to bring succour to suffering men and women” (2000:

9).

Thanks to this cultural tradition, acolytes of Eastern religions can still sustain

themselves on alms to this day. In contrast, those brave monks who attempted to

transplant Buddhist traditions directly from Thailand to their monastery in Chithurst,

West Sussex, usually went hungry after doing their rounds of the rural villages with

their begging bowls (Ward, 1990: 111).

The pendulum can swing either way; it is not a case of “East is better than

West”. Both the corruption of religious institutions and popular support for them arise

when the majority of the people look to others to deliver spiritual enlightenment rather

than seeking it for themselves. All institutions are self-serving to a degree. It is only by

happy historical accidents that Buddhism wears the essential truth of all the great

traditions a little closer to its surface than some of the others. Certainly, this is what

I’ve found most attractive about it, and Aleister Crowley reassures me I’m not alone:

The only one who explains his system thoroughly is Buddha, and Buddha is the only one that is not

dogmatic … Our best document will therefore be the system of Buddha … (1980: 10).

It might surprise those who have not taken the trouble to read him that Crowley has

positive things to say about Buddhism—indeed, about other religious traditions as

well. Religion and occultism are commonly regarded as hating each other at least as





bitterly as religion and science. However, the deepest and darkest secret of occultism

is this: its power comes not from denying or subverting religion, but on stealing the

best bits from it and practising them properly.

Buddha, Moses, Christ, St Paul, Mohammed: what made them the monumental

figures they became? This is the rhetorical question with which Crowley opens Book

Four , his introductory text on yoga and magick. What these prophets share is a peculiar gap in their biography; nothing may be known of them for a few years, or they retreat

“into the desert”, or they suddenly give an account of some event curiously outside of

time when they were “caught up into Heaven” or “visited by an angel”. All except for

Buddha, of course, who instead tells us in unsparing detail precisely what he has been

up to: he had been meditating . In fact, he meditated so much he grasped the truth about

reality and dedicated the rest of his life to teaching us all about it.

Crowley suggests that all the great religious figures (himself included, naturally)

did as the Buddha did: they went away; they meditated; and they came back changedinto the spiritual giants it was their destiny to become.

Many people know of meditation as a relaxation exercise. Many people know of

yoga as a physical workout to keep the limbs supple. What most people do not know,

but what Crowley emphasizes, is the transformational power of these practices. In fact,

perhaps this is recognized now even less than in Crowley’s day. Because so many

people attend meditation or yoga classes we assume we must already know what these

disciplines are for.

I first became interested in Buddhist meditation during the early 90s. I attended a

group that practised in the Mahayana tradition. Their main exercises were anapana

sutti, a meditation that involves focusing the attention on sensations experienced while

breathing; and metta bhavana, a visualization for generating compassion towards

others. I enjoyed these classes and was soon meditating twice a day, for a total of an

hour or so. I found myself becoming more relaxed, calm, and aware in my everyday

life.

But after a few months things changed—and not for the better. When I sat to

meditate I was distracted by unpleasant thoughts. Instead of calm, my body was full of

aches and pains. Each time I practised everything felt “nasty” in a subtle, indescribable

way. Nothing I did seemed to help. I talked to the teachers: “Keep your attention

focused on the breath and it will pass,” they told me. Sometimes they would

recommend an exercise to calm the mind, if my thoughts were over-active, or to

enliven myself if I was torpid and depressed. But none of it worked and the feelings

grew worse.





I noticed that most of the teachers were ex-Catholics. This, and their inability to

help, convinced me that I didn’t fit in with this group. No, I decided, religion—not

even atheistic Buddhism—obviously doesn’t work for me; I’m simply not the religious

type. So I stopped going to meetings and eventually I stopped meditating altogether.

That happened during my early twenties and the decade that followed was the

worst of my life. That vague “nasty feeling” seemed to hang around for years, notlifting even after I’d given up meditation. It did not go away properly until ten years

had passed and I took up meditation again. This time I’d joined a magical organization

whose syllabus for novices included daily meditation practice. I gritted my teeth and

braced myself, anticipating that it would be grim, and at first my expectations were

confirmed.

But eventually the nastiness lifted. The reason things improved was that I’d done

something that probably came so naturally to Crowley he does not even bother to

mention it in Book Four : I simply kept going .

The secret of meditation is to keep doing it. That’s all. No matter if “nothing is

happening”, or it is boring, or painful, or unbearable—you just keep doing it. “Better

not to start. Once started, better to finish.” This old Zen saying is true. Regular

meditation kick-starts a process which has an unpleasant as well as a pleasant aspect.

The contrast between them is particularly marked soon after beginning, but if you roll

up the mat and walk away as soon as it gets tough, the unpleasantness can stick with

you. It can stick around for the rest of your life. (I’ve seen this happen to people.)

Sometimes the only cure is to jump back aboard.

Strong and consistent effort will eventually yield a result. Crowley describes it

as follows:

[L]et it suffice to say that this consciousness of the Ego and the non-Ego, the seer and the thing seen, the

knower and the thing known, is blotted out … There is usually an intense light, an intense sound, and a

feeling of such overwhelming bliss that the resources of language have been exhausted again and again in

the attempt to describe it … It is an absolute knock-out blow to the mind. It is so vivid and tremendous

that those who experience it are in the gravest danger of losing all sense of proportion (1980: 13).

The meditator who gets this far suddenly understands the language of mysticism in away that the likes of Freud and Dawkins never will. “Aha, yes,” you say to yourself,

“‘God’, ‘angels’, ‘being taken up into Heaven’, I see now what all that old stuff

means.” But as we try to put the experience into more sensible contemporary language,

even as we try to figure out to our own satisfaction what the experience “is”, we start

to realise how we’re constricted by the limits of our personal understanding and our

cultural context. As Ken Wilber puts it: “If we … pat ourselves on the back, let it still





be with humility: whatever stage we might be at, there are always higher stages; and

somewhere, someplace … someone is writing a text that is over our heads” (2006: 92–

93). Crowley’s “blotting out of the difference between knower and known” is merely

the type of description that would be expected from someone who lived in a rationalist

age and whose explicit aim was: “the method of science, the aim of religion”.5

The first part of Crowley’s Book Four is one of the most succinct, practical, andinspiring texts on meditation I’ve found. It surprises me every time I re-read it. But this

is not to claim that Crowley’s descriptions of meditation are true and the terminology

of “God” and “angels” used by Jesus, St Paul, Mohammed, and Joan of Arc is

misconception. The advantage of language like Crowley’s is that it does not generate

the same kind of misunderstandings in those who have not had the experience for

themselves, or who are locked in a more dogmatic culture. Where the language of gods

and angels can breed religious fundamentalism, the attendant danger of Crowley’s

language is psychologism: it may foster the belief (in those quarters where it is not metwith outright ridicule) that the “blotting out of the knower and the known” is a

pathological process, a symptom of mental illness.

Does everyone who attains this stage of realization emerge with the religious

zeal of a Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed? Thankfully, Crowley muses, no:

[T]he majority of people who claim to have “seen God”, and who no doubt did “see God” just as much as

those whom we have quoted, did nothing else … Perhaps … “great” men are the failures of humanity;

perhaps it would be better to say nothing … (1980: 14–15).

Crowley, of course, is not the most impartial authority on this. He himself chose the

path of prophethood. But the following comes from a lesser-known figure, Joel S.

Goldsmith, another self-styled mystic and the practitioner of a Christian form of

meditation6:

In my own experience, eight months of from five to ten meditations a day were necessary, before I

received the very first “click” or sense of the Presence within—eight months of meditating day and night.

Furthermore, I had no knowledge that such a thing as making contact with God was possible, or that it

would accomplish anything once it was achieved. There was, however, deep within me, an unwavering

conviction that it was possible to touch something greater than myself, to merge with a higher power.

Nobody whom I knew had gone that way before me; nobody had prepared the ground for me. There wasonly that inner conviction that if I could touch God, at the center of my being, It would take hold of my life,

my work, my practice, and my patients. By the end of eight months, I was able to achieve one second of

realization … It was another week before the next second of realization came and many days before the

third one. A whole week intervened before the fourth moment of realization was achieved; then, it

happened twice in one day … It was probably three years before I learned that if I got up at four o’clock,

sometime between then and eight in the morning, I would feel that “click” or awareness that God is on the

field. Some days the “click” came within five minutes and some days it took the whole four hours, but

never after that did I leave for my office until the Presence had been realized (1974: 169–170).





This illustrates, I hope, that expressing these kinds of experience as “God”, or taking a

religious sense of mission from them, is a choice determined largely by personality.

Yet at the same time a deeper pattern informs these experiences, which seems to be

more uniform: the diligent application of a contemplative technique leads to a

realization of something unsuspected and inexpressible in the nature of reality.

Continued practice leads to repetition and refinement of the experience, as the boundary between other and self becomes progressively more permeable.

It is not uncommon for orthodox Christians to shake a forbidding finger at

meditation and yoga. The reasoning behind this is self-preservational: if “the

experience of God” were accepted as something everyone could obtain, the Church

would not seem so necessary. This is why the emphasis within orthodox religion tends

to be on faith rather than experience. The faithful accept the existence of God purely on

the basis of belief, and are actively dissuaded from taking up practices that would

otherwise afford them direct experience of the object of that belief. Likewise, magick and the paranormal are declared off-limits (“evil”), despite the awkward fact that

religious scripture consists to a large degree of saints and prophets displaying all kinds

of paranormal powers.

Spiritual and paranormal experiences go hand-in-hand. A person who practises

meditation diligently will eventually experience something they might feel inclined to

call “God”. As a result of their practice, it is also likely that he or she will encounter

other paranormal experiences too.

The classic Buddhist texts on meditation are very matter-of-fact on this issue.Both the Visuddhimagga (“The Path of Purification”) and the Vimuttimagga (“The

Path of Freedom”) contain chapters on “supernormal powers” with explicit

instructions on how to cultivate them. These include “Knowledge of Others’

Thoughts”, “Recollection of Past Lives”, and “Divine Sight”.7 But I confess to

disappointment on reading these. The instructions perhaps make more sense if you are

a Buddhist monk, but they give the same impression as old grimoires or alchemical

books, which often intentionally demanded rare ingredients or impossible feats in

order to deter the ignorant or the uncommitted. It’s my impression that the meditator is being intentionally overloaded with onerous instructions in these texts. If someone took

them at face value and seriously dedicated themselves to fulfilling them, telepathy and

past-life recall would be the least of their achievements!

Daniel Ingram, a present-day master of meditation, provides a stripped-down

and far more accessible version of the magical methods described in these and other

Buddhist texts. His approach is a kind of “chaos-magical” equivalent to classical





Buddhist magic.8 Yet although Buddhism does not go as far as decrying paranormal

experiences as the work of Satan, nevertheless the “supernormal powers” (or siddhis)

are traditionally regarded as a distraction from the main aim of Buddhist practice:

enlightenment. Ingram echoes these reservations, yet readily accepts that the powers

can be cultivated through meditation, and also lists some of the spiritual benefits from

doing so. His pragmatic attitude is summed up by the following passage:Whether or not these [powers] are “real” is a question that I am happy to avoid, though these experiences

can be so extremely vivid that they can seem more “real” than the “real world”. Much more interesting

than the question of what is real is the question of what is causal, i.e. what leads to what. For

example, we might decide that our dreams are not “real”, but we must admit that there are real world

consequences of having dreams. All this can be a slippery business, and the “psychic powers” generally

don’t turn out to be quite what they seem. As one of my friends once said, “Yeah, I can fly, but just not in

this realm!” (2008: 173).

For most people, it is more likely that paranormal experiences will arise

spontaneously from their meditation practice, rather than from an intentionally directedtechnique.

One evening in February 2007, I was meditating when I distinctly heard a

woman’s voice saying: I’m done! I’m done! It was so clear it startled me and broke my

concentration. My immediate thought was that someone had died. I mentioned this to no

one, because my girlfriend’s mother was seriously ill at the time, but I noted it in my

diary.

The next day at work it was announced that a senior member of staff had died the

previous evening. Well, that must have been it , I thought, even though this person was

male and was alive at the time I heard the voice. In the days that followed my

girlfriend’s mother made a good recovery so I thought no more about the experience.

Around this time a letter arrived at the building where I lived, addressed to Mrs

G. No one of that name lived in the building and the letter lay uncollected. There was

no return address, so after a few days I opened it, in order to return it to the sender.

Mrs G., it emerged, was the sister of Ms M., an elderly woman who lived in the flat

below mine. It was a letter of condolence.

It was only by this accidental route that I discovered Ms M., my neighbour, had

died. I’ll probably never know the exact date and time at which Ms M. passed away in

hospital, but the date on the letter suggested it would have been on or close to the day I

heard the voice.

Ms M.’s bedroom was directly below the room in which I was meditating.

Many long-term meditators will have stories like this, which invites us to





examine in more detail the connection between contemplative practice and the

paranormal. Why would the simple act of regular concentration lead to instances of

telepathy, precognition, and hearing dead people?

An interesting perspective is supplied by Arthur Koestler in The Roots of

Coincidence (1972). Koestler begins with a survey of experiments in parapsychology,

which attracted far more optimism in the 1970s than is currently the case. He turns totheoretical physics for an explanation of the strange phenomena that parapsychology

has unearthed, but concludes there is no evidence that the behaviour of microscopic

entities can exert analogous effects at the level of the everyday world. Even if it did,

Koestler is discomfited by how different forms of paranormal experience would then

require different physical theories. For example, quantum-level “psitrons” might

explain ESP, but some kind of macroscopic physical field would be needed to account

for psychokinetic phenomena—i.e. for poltergeist activity or other instances of real-

world objects moving around without apparent physical cause (1974: 80–81).Koestler turns instead to synchronicity as a possible means of grouping all

paranormal phenomena under a single theory. Synchronicity is the assumption of a non-

causal force at work in the universe, so that events are connected not only through

cause and effect but also through their meaningful affinity with one another.

All the phenomena we term “paranormal” can be regarded as instances of

synchronicity because they consist of events that exhibit affinity regardless of their

intrinsic nature or their separation across time and space. For instance, a premonition

can be viewed as a synchronistic correspondence between a person’s intuition and anexternal outcome. Telepathy is a correspondence between one person’s perception and

thought-processes in another person’s mind. Indeed, even psychokinesis can be viewed

as a non-physical correspondence between a person’s intention and the behaviour of an

external object. The almost surreal research into ESP by René Peoch took this to a

whole new level. The results of his work with animals and computers suggested that

the mind of a chicken can influence the movements of a robot to a statistically

significant degree—even when the movements of the robot had been pre-programmed

in advance (Fenwick & Fenwick, 1998: 228). This would appear to indicate that ESP

has no physical or causal foundation whatsoever, and does not even require a human

subject. But let us leave aside psychokinetic chickens for the moment, because in a

sense the most stunning species of paranormal phenomena is indeed the synchronicity

pure and simple, those startling “ coincidences” we sometimes encounter. For instance,

a woman of my acquaintance needed to contact a long-lost friend. Being a practising

magician, she decided to compile a six-digit telephone number from cards pulled at

random from a tarot deck. She then dialled the number—and found herself talking to the





friend’s next-door neighbour! To the persons concerned, events like this create an

impression that the whole universe has been cleverly levered into position, as if to

ensure the affinity takes place.

But as a matter of fact, it has not. If it had, then the event would have been

caused —presumably by whatever provided the leverage. The sensation that the

universe has been manipulated is simply an “effect” (damn —you see what I mean?) of our causal habits of thinking, which are deeply ingrained and almost impossible to

break.

Synchronicity was, of course, a term invented by C. G. Jung, and we have

already examined its application in other contexts.9 Yet despite invoking it, Koestler is

no fan of Jung’s idea. In particular he baulks at Jung’s assertion that a synchronicity is

mobilized when a psychological archetype becomes active in the mind of the person

who experiences it. Koestler argues that Jung has therefore posited a cause (i.e. the

archetype) for his supposedly “acausal” force: “It is painful to watch how a greatmind, trying to disentangle himself from the causal chains of materialistic science, gets

entangled in its own verbiage” (1974: 98).

Jung and his followers do themselves no favours in the way they express these

difficult ideas10, but Jung was primarily a psychotherapist rather than a physicist, and

so we shouldn’t complain too much if his usage of his own ideas is geared specifically

towards that field.

Victor Mansfield, however, makes the case that Jung was more scrupulous in histhinking than Koestler suggests. Mansfield argues that all paranormal phenomena can

indeed be regarded as acausal, but we should reserve the term synchronicity (as Jung

himself clearly intended) for instances of acausal phenomena that are meaningful

(1995: 28f.). For instance, thinking about someone who chooses that same moment to

phone is an example of an acausal event, but it is too trivial to be considered a

synchronic-ity. In contrast, Jung’s famous story of the “scarab beetle”11 was a

synchronicity, because the scarab is a symbol of rebirth and it caused a psychological

revolution in the life of the previously hyper-rational woman to whom it appeared

(1983: 340).

Koestler proposed an alternative concept to Jung’s “syn-chronicity”. If Jung’s

ideas are geared towards psychotherapy then Koestler’s idea—the holon —has a more

general, biological cast: “‘holons’ … are Janus-faced entities which display both the

independent properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts” (1974: 112).

Every entity in the universe, suggests Koestler, is a holon. It comprises certain

parts, yet itself forms a part of a greater whole. For example, the human body consists





of organs working together to sustain the identity of the body, while the body functions

as part of a wider organization, a particular society. Each holon demonstrates on the

one hand a self-assertive tendency to retain its own identity, but on the other an

integrative tendency to function as a part of the greater whole. In human beings this

integrative tendency manifests in what Koestler labels “the self-transcending

emotions”:… devotion, empathy, identification, hypnotic rapport. Going one step further, we may include into this

category the trance-states of mystics and mediums, the effects of certain psychotropic drugs, and

emotions which accompany spontaneous paranormal experiences (1974: 119).

The “acausal” forces of the Jungians and theoretical physicists, Koestler suggests, can

more usefully be viewed as this “integrative tendency” in action, an innate inclination

of all entities to combine into ever-higher wholes. The integrative urge can bring about

a “confluential event” without any physical means (1974: 122). Presumably this is so

because, as the experience of synchronicity suggests, the integrative tendency is afeature of the universe that operates throughout physical reality. Wherever it occurs and

we are able to perceive it, we are likely to describe the result as “paranormal”.

Koestler was no stranger to mystical experiences. Paul Devereux notes a classic

“oceanic experience” that Koestler underwent at the age of 14 (2005: 32). Whether we

accept that Koestler’s theory of holons illuminates the basis of mystical experience, or

regard it simply as autobiography projected onto the history of ideas, perhaps depends

in part on our preference for taking a causal or an acausal view.

In ordinary waking consciousness, perception appears split between subject

(perceiver) and object (perceived). Considered as a holon, everyday consciousness is

an instance of the self-assertive tendency, because it strives to maintain the sense of

permanent, separate identity. In meditation, however, the opposite tendency comes into

play. God, samadhi, satori, gnosis: these are some of the labels used to describe the

shift in experience onto “higher” levels of awareness as the boundary between self and

object is transcended. This takeover of everyday consciousness by the integrative

tendency (as Koestler’s theory describes it) is the moment at which the paranormal

may come calling. Seen from this perspective, it seems less surprising if meditation— which is the intentional exercise of the integrative tendency—should occasionally lead

to paranormal experiences.

The aim of meditative practice is not paranormal experiences but enlightenment .

Most authorities on meditation advise against cultivating paranormal experiences

because: “One risks becoming sidetracked by them into the exercise of personal

power, which strengthens the ego—the small self that stands between us and progress





on the meditative path” (Fontana, 1992: 168). Considered in terms of Koestler’s

complementary processes, we can now appreciate in a new way how the paranormal

might tempt us to slide from “integration” into “self-assertion”.

Yet enlightenment seems to many people a notion equally as baroque and bizarre

as psychic powers. “I pictured three options,” a young American Buddhist wrote

recently, about his search for a guru, “a gorgeous female kung fu master … who wouldteach me to do one-finger handstands; an old Japanese master who would hit me with a

stick and demand, ‘Jaimal!— where is your mind?’, or a Tibetan lama who could fly”

(Yogis, 2008: 61). The ironical assumption here is that “enlightenment” has to be

something that is apparent to the naked eye in some extraordinary form.

A friend and I, both of us seasoned meditators, were excited to learn that a

famous guru was coming to London to give a talk. What interested us was not the

advertised content of the lecture but reports we had read about this person’s special

talent for transmitting his enlightenment to people with whom he came into contact. Wedid not exactly expect him to levitate, but we did wonder if we might experience some

kind of “weird vibe”.

The event was well-attended but we found seats fairly near the front, supporting

our plan to get as close as possible and soak up any enlightenment rays he happened to

be giving out. Of course, we were only half-serious; and any genuine awe would have

been swept away in any case by our first impressions of the guru as he came on stage: a

short bloke, with a mullet haircut and a bushy moustache.

However, what happened afterwards certainly wiped the grins off our faces. We

should have realized something was afoot from the number of synchronicities that

converged on the event: firstly, we discovered the venue was just around the corner

from a pub in which we had once had a significant conversation; secondly, the number

printed on my friend’s entrance ticket was personally relevant to him; and thirdly, he

was amazed to discover that one of the organizers of the event was a colleague from

the same office where he worked.

During the journey home, he sent me a text reporting that “something unusual”

was happening. I assumed he was joking, but over the next couple of days this was

followed by a number of emails, indicating that he believed he was now “enlightened”.

He asked me if I was absolutely sure that I wasn’t enlightened too.

At the time, well … I felt positive, happy and upbeat, but there was nothing

particularly “enlightened” about me. The next day I woke up with a migraine. It

improved enough for me to go to work, but on my way home I felt light-headed, as if a

trace of it remained.





It was when I sat to meditate later that I couldn’t deny it any longer. Something

had happened. The more I tried to meditate, the more my mind refused to go anywhere.

Slowly it dawned on me why I was having trouble: whatever I was setting out to

achieve by meditation, I was already in that place. Meditation had become pointless.

Wow, I thought. It’s true. I’m enlightened!

Let me state this up-front: it lasted for about a week.

I wasn’t really (yet) enlightened. At the time, though, I really believed I was. But

so what? It did not prompt me to start preaching in the town centre on Saturdays. I did

not start a cult. Yet the most amazing thing had happened to my mind: everything felt the

same, except for the availability of something impossible.

It was hard to say much about it, except that it could not possibly be, and I did

not understand how I could be aware of it. Whatever it was, it could not be seen,

heard, or sensed. Neither could it be thought. It was not an image, idea, or a deduction.Yet there it was in my awareness, blaring away on its own unique channel, which was

neither sensory nor mental.

If I was busy with things, it would be in the background and faint. But when I

was quiet, it came on strong. When I meditated it went berserk . Meditation was like

sitting face-to-face with God. It blared at me with its incredible impossibility, beaming

at me from somewhere outside the universe. It verged sometimes on being almost

painful. One feature of it that particularly surprised me was that it had little to do with

any heightened awareness of being alive or of the reality of existence. It wasindependent of any existential issues. Instead, it was like a little patch of objectivity or

“not me”, which had somehow lodged itself in my subjective awareness.

The perfection of it was engrossing. Imagine if, each time you wanted something,

you discovered there was a little piece of whatever it was already inside you. It was as

if I now had the outside world on my inside. There was nothing I couldn’t cope with or

face up to. Even the thought of dying had begun to seem quite exciting.

Sadly, it was my reaction as it started to fade away after a few days that proved

it was not enlightenment: I was horrified and utterly devastated. I’d forgotten what itfelt like to be “ordinary”, but was brutally reminded as it passed away. Meditation

became the usual effort and daily life resumed its usual cast: me “in here” and

everything else “outside”. My friend underwent the same process of withdrawal a day

or so after me, which made it slightly easier to bear.

If I hadn’t known better, maybe I’d have devoted myself to the guru we went to

see. I might have joined his organization and handed over my income to him (as he





often demands of his students, if the articles that have been written about him are true).

But what would be the point of relying on another person for my spiritual state of mind,

whether he was enlightened or not? That did not look to me like “the path of

liberation”. Granted, being in his presence truly seemed to have had an effect, but it

evidently was not an ability he could direct or control, and I doubted he would have

affected me at all if I were not already an experienced meditator.Daniel Ingram defines “full enlightenment” as follows:

The arahat [i.e. a fully enlightened person] has attained to the complete and utter elimination of the

illusions of permanence, satisfactoriness, and duality (separate self), and now perceives reality non-

dualistically. They know the joy and clarity of freedom, as well as the fullness of their humanity (2008:

364).

As Ingram suggests—and I had to learn the hard way—enlightenment is not an ability, a

characteristic, or a quality that a person can be said to “have”. This would imply it

were a “thing”, something that was “not me”, whereas to see it as such would be tomaintain the split between subject and object on which our everyday consciousness

rests. But that was indeed how I had regarded the brief taste of non-dualistic

perception that was granted to me (through some strange and synchronistic act of grace

that I still don’t understand), and was why I reacted so badly when it ended.

Since then, the same experience has come back and passed away numerous

times. It no longer feels like such a big deal because it has helped me understand that

although it is certainly a reality, enlightenment has nothing to do with flying Tibetan

lamas or levitating buddhas with telepathic powers. It is something even more amazingthan these: a fundamental revolution in the relationship between human consciousness

and perception that destroys forever the illusion of a self isolated from the universe.

The teachings and technologies needed to realize this directly for ourselves are

easily available to everyone, provided we look in the correct places and practise them

in the right way. Paranormal experiences, amazing as they are, are actually a gateway

to something even more incredible.

Notes

1. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are th

main figures associated with this movement.

2. See p. 8–9.

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





for Literature in 1915. He was strongly influenced by the Vedanta branch of Hindu

philosophy, and was an associate and friend of Mahondas Ghandi.

4. A different translation, by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (Schiller 1864: 21–28), is

freely available on-line.

5.

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

6. Goldsmith’s practice sounds very much like a contemporary form of Christian

meditation called “Centering Prayer”. However, this is only my surmise from the

author’s passing references. The key modern proponent of Centering Prayer is Father

Thomas Keating (1997). Some Christian practitioners avoid labelling what they do as

“meditation” because of its association with Eastern traditions. Anyone who has

practised both is likely to report that Centering Prayer is a form ofvipassana

(“insight”) meditation. Prayer itself is meditation, when performed as a means of surrendering self to the other. The common idea of prayer as “asking God for stuff” is

a sad corruption of this and leads, if anywhere, only to ego-inflation.

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

8. In an internet podcast, Ingram described some of the startling results and

experiences he had gained from this technique. See: http://tinyurl.com/ms6wgp.

9. See p. 31, where the role of water in hauntings is explored as “symbolic” or

“synchronistic” rather than “causal”.10. Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest collaborators, writes on the one

hand that “Jung even explicitly warned against taking the archetypes (of the collective

unconscious) or psi-powers to be the causal agency of synchronistic events” (quoted

in Mansfield, 1995: 25), yet on the other hand she writes, without any qualification,

“Wherever Dr. Jung observed such meaningful coincidences, it seemed (as the

individual’s dreams revealed) that there was an archetype activated in the

unconscious of the individual concerned” (Jung et al., 1964: 226).

11. See p. 37.



http://http//tinyurl.com/ms6wgp



T

CHAPTER FIVE

Dream yourself awake

he term “lucid dreaming” was coined in 1913 by a Dutch psychiatrist and

writer, Frederik van Eeden. It refers to the type of dream in which the dreamer is aware—even as the dream unfolds—that he or she is dreaming.

Many of us will have experienced spontaneous lucid dreams. Often these take

the form of nightmares in which we recognize something horrible is about to happen

and we wake ourselves up. In other words, we become aware we are having a dream

while we dream it. However, there are techniques that can be practised to produce

lucidity when we want it. These techniques also provide an ability to change the

contents of our dreams.

The appeal of lucid dreaming to occultists is probably self-evident. Awakening

inside a dream supplies access to a different plane of existence, one in which we are

liberated from the usual constraints of the physical body. “In these lucid dreams,”

Eeden wrote, “the re-integration of the psychic functions is so complete that the sleeper

remembers day-life and his own condition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is

able to direct his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition” (1913: 152).

He was suggesting that a lucid dream is extremely close in quality to our experience of

waking reality, but with a crucial difference: the object of our experience. In the case

of waking, the object of experience is physical reality. In the case of the lucid dream,the object is our own imaginary inner world.

Van Eeden may have been the first to use the term “lucid dreaming” but he was

not the first practitioner. St Augustine relates an account of a lucid dream that dates to

415 AD (LaBerge, 1986: 21), and detailed techniques for inducing lucidity have been a

part of the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism for many hundreds of years (Wangyal,

1998).1





However, the claim that we can “wake up inside a dream” has been met with

suspicion from more recent currents within Western thought. Freud’s theories on the

nature of dreaming have proved extremely influential. In his view, the source of dreams

is the unconscious mind and the instinctual drives that emanate from it (1900). Only

after a long process of analysis, Freud argued, can a dream be shown to have any

meaning or any relationship to waking consciousness at all. Without analysis, themeaning of dreams is hidden from consciousness. So rather than “experiences” in their

own right, Freud tended to view dreams as puzzles that could be resolved only by the

waking mind. His assumption was that dreams belong to the unconscious mind, waking

experience belongs to the conscious mind, and never the twain shall meet.

In an influential book on dreams published during the 1950s, this type of

argument was extended even further. Norman Malcolm wrote sceptically about lucid

dreamers, those deluded souls who:

often report that while they were having a certain dream they “realised” they were dreaming, and they donot mean that this realisation was itself a part of their dream: rather they wish to distinguish between the

dream and the judgement or realisation that it was a dream. (1964: 42)

Malcolm suggests that a lucid dream is not a particular type of experience we have

had, but is simply a linguistic failure to distinguish correctly between waking up in a

dream and dreaming that we are awake . The first would imply a unique mental state;

but the second is simply a normal dream except with a specific content. He argued that

lucid dreaming does not exist; a so-called “lucid dream” is simply a dreamer’s failure

to conceptualize correctly that they dreamt about waking up inside a dream.

So much of the confusion that surrounds the theory and practice of lucid

dreaming centres on this basic issue: is a lucid dream different from a non-lucid dream

because it is a different kind of experience (i.e. a unique mental state), or only because

it has a certain type of content? And how would we ever be able to tell the difference?

A 19th century master of lucid dreaming, Hervey de Saint-Denys, believed he

had proof that lucid dreams were a distinct state of mind. One night, he became self-

aware in his dream and found that he was standing beside a lilac bush:

[T]he question was whether this [lilac bush] … was a stereotyped vision, the unalterable reproduction of a

memory-image imprinted in the fibres of my brain, as the materialists would have asserted. In this case

my imagination and will would be powerless to modify it. Whilst considering these questions I broke the

branch and tore off the head of lilac flowers bit by bit … (1867: 56).

No doubt, Saint-Denys had proved the materialists wrong—but not in the way he

supposed. He had indeed shown how a lucid dream creatively throws up modified

scenes and objects in response to the changing awareness of the dreamer, but he had





not “destroyed” the image of the lilac bush. In fact, he had only created a new image of

himself destroying it!

Although we may be habitually drawn to do so, we must not assume that

“objects” in the internal world of our dreams are like those in the waking world. Logic

is the application of the laws of everyday physical reality to the world of the mind, but

in the mind and in dreams all kinds of contradictions are conceivable and permissible.When we sleep, our connection to the world created by the physical senses is severed,

and so too is our reliance on logic. It has no relevance any longer because, as the

Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted: “For those who are awake there is a

single, common universe, whereas in sleep each person turns away into his own,

private universe” (1987: 89). Every supposed “object” we appear to perceive in our

dream, or think about, or manipulate, evaporates into nothingness the moment we

awake. Consequently, in our dreams the difference between an “object” and our mind

is far more uncertain than appears the case in the waking world, and so too is thedifference between “self” and “other”. What Saint-Denys overlooked as he pulled

apart the lilac bush was that if the bush was a perfectly formed mental image, then so

too was the image of himself destroying it. He was free to act as he pleased within his

dream, but only because the presentation of himself within it was also an image; this

“self” was not set apart from or against what it appeared he was acting upon. The

whole dream, including the sense of himself inside it, was one seamless image.

Jean-Paul Sartre summed up this difference between the inner world of images

and the waking world when he wrote:An image can only enter into consciousness if it is itself a synthesis, not an element. There are not, and

never could be, images in consciousness. Rather, an image is a certain type of consciousness. An

image is an act, not something. An image is a consciousness of something (1962: 146).

Waking perception, in contrast, does not appear to us like this. An image may be a

willed act, but a perception is different: it is a response to something that truly exists

“out there”, in reality. Confusion between perceptions and images often arises when

we try to compare or think about them because most of our mental images are sensory.

Commonly, our mental images are based on visual perceptions, although most of ushave no trouble forming mental images of sounds, smells, tastes and feelings as well.

Abstract mental imagery is also common. More rarely, there is also cross-modal

sensory imagery, which may involve “seeing sounds” or “feeling smells”, etc.2

Because most mental imagery is of things perceived, people may confuse their

images with the perceptions on which they are based. For instance, it is quite common

to hear people debate whether they dream in colour or black and white.3 Never mind





the answer: the question arises from a misunderstanding of the difference between

perception and imagery. When we dream our eyes are closed; nothing is being seen.

Colour is a property of seeing, not of thoughts or images. We may dream that a rose is

red, but this does not mean that the image has anything red in or about it, any more than

the word “red” needs to be written in coloured ink in order for it to have its meaning.

So although there is nothing to prevent anyone from dreaming about things having or nothaving certain colours (or—indeed—even dreaming that they do dream in colour, or in

black and white) to insist that colour or monochrome is a property of mental imagery is

like asking someone what musical instrument they can hear their thoughts being played

on.

I once mentioned a dream to someone in which I’d built a wickerwork structure

across my front door before answering the doorbell to him. After I’d told him the

dream, he asked: “But if you couldn’t see me, how did you know I was outside?”

“Because I dreamt you were!” I said.4

Along similar lines, Sartre (1950) presents an interesting thought-experiment.

Picture your best friend (Sartre suggested) and standing next to him or her an identical

double who resembles your friend in every way. Now, if you were confronted with this

scene in waking perception, you would not stand a chance of telling them apart. But a

mental image is an act of the one who imagines, so confusion never arises.

Why am I making a big deal over this difference between imagery and

perceptions? Well, if we apply to dreams the same criteria that we apply to waking

perception, we will miss out on the unique subtleties that the dream-experience

presents. For instance, in a dream a person may have a certain appearance yet be

experienced by us as someone else altogether—or, sometimes, even as a combination

of several people impossibly rolled into one; or a word or a situation may be imbued

with a power or sense of truth lacking completely from that word or situation if we

were awake. If, after waking up, we decide: “Well, really I must have met Tom, Dick

and Harry in the dream, even though I only remember seeing Tom”, then our

expectations of the waking world have distorted the experience that we actually had.5

Unfortunately, a great deal of scientific research into dreaming does precisely

this—it applies the criteria of waking perception to imagery. Consequently, its

conclusions might apply to waking perception but probably tell us little about dreams.

For example, Stephen LaBerge (1986), a leading authority on lucid dreaming,

conducted an experiment to investigate the problem of duration in dreams. We have

probably all experienced having a dream that felt as if it lasted for an extended period

but, on waking, we discovered that only seconds had passed. This raises the question





of how long it takes to dream about x in comparison to the duration of x in the waking

world.

LaBerge used a team of experienced lucid dreamers who made a signal by

moving their eyes when they had become conscious inside their dream. (LaBerge had

already established that eye movements behind closed eyelids could be used as signals

between the lucid dreamer and the waking world, without the dreamer waking up.) Ithad been agreed in advance that the dreamers would count from one to ten after their

first signal, and then make a second signal to indicate when the counting was finished.

LaBerge recorded an average of 13 seconds between the first signal and the second—

exactly the same figure he arrived at by asking his dreamers to perform the same task

whilst awake. These results suggested it takes the same amount of time to dream of

something as it does for that thing to take place in the waking world.

But once we consider this experiment more closely, does it really tell us

anything about dreams?

The subjects had been asked to count from one to ten: this is an action, a task .

Any action takes a certain amount of time to complete, but the duration tells us little

about the processes involved in the task. For instance, suppose we asked some people

(whilst awake) to add up a list of figures. Would the time taken enable us to deduce an

average “rate of thinking”? Would we suppose this “rate of thinking” holds good for

every thought-process undertaken by that person?

I don’t think we would, because it is clear that this approach does not really get

to grips with the nature of thinking. And neither did LaBerge’s experiment get to grips

with dreaming, because the dreamers were not asked to have a dream, they were asked

to count to ten. Would we assume that counting to ten whilst awake reveals something

deeply significant about waking consciousness? Not really. “Doing x”, “thinking of x”

and “dreaming of x” are three different activities; we cannot suppose that simply

because they share x as their common content we have somehow factored out x and

gain access to the pure process of “being conscious”, “thinking”, or “dreaming”. It is

not clear that LaBerge’s dreamers were not simply performing the task demanded of

them irrespective of their waking or sleeping state. “Growing an extra head” mighthave been a better task to have set them, because it could only belong to the dream

state. If tasks can depend upon certain states of mind, then maybe adding up figures or

counting from one to ten can only be accomplished by someone who is awake. If you

have ever tried to add numbers or read a newspaper in a dream, you will know what I

mean—it feels “wrong” and impossibly difficult. Indeed, the identical result of 13

seconds arrived at by LaBerge might suggest that this is the case.6





The moral of this tale is that if you approach dreams with the expectations of

waking reality then that is all you will get. For practitioners of Tibetan dream yoga,

however, this is certainly not the aim. Generations of Buddhist monks have not been set

the difficult task of learning to lucid dream simply so they could hold onto waking

consciousness throughout the night, but for a radically different reason instead: to

arrive at a first-hand understanding of the illusory nature of reality itself.In a normal dream we accept as real anything that arises, no matter how absurd it

appears afterwards. When we become lucid in our dream, however, we are in effect

waking up to the artificial, illusory nature of the “reality” that surrounds us in that

dream. The ultimate aim of the dream yogi is to carry this powerful practice into his or

her waking hours and recognize the artificial nature of waking perceptions as well as

dream images.

If we assign “reality” only to our waking perceptions, and consider our dreams

only by comparing them to this “reality”, then “waking reality” will become thestandard by which we approach our dreams. But if, on the other hand, we respect the

unique properties of the dream state and allow these to subvert our waking

expectations, then we can approach the experience of dreaming on its own terms.

Although I’ve had some success at inducing lucid dreams, for many years after

my first experiences I remained sceptical whether it could truly be regarded as “being

conscious while dreaming”. My reason was the nagging sense of falseness that

tormented me like a hangover each time after awaking. It seemed I had become aware

and woken up inside my dream, and this had indeed been accompanied by vividimagery that was certainly unlike non-lucid dreams. But the trouble was that having

woken up to myself inside the dream, I would then always start to do or say or think

things that I simply wouldn’t have if I’d been awake.

Many investigators of lucid dreams have commented on the phenomenon of

“false lucidity”. Sometimes it may seem to us that we have become lucid in a dream,

whereas we realize afterwards we were only non-lucidly dreaming that this was the

case. False lucidity is like a type of dream that many of us have experienced: when we

dream that we have woken up and gone to work, but in reality we are still asleep andin bed. Often we have this type of dream when we do not want to get up and wish to

remain sleeping. Dreaming that we have gone to work seems designed to fool our

workaholic tendencies into some extra sleep. Similarly, false lucidity often arises

when we are trying too hard to attain the lucid state, as if part of the mind were fobbing

off the part that is striving with a fake version of what it was striving for.

An obsessive seeking after sexual adventures was the main reason why I doubted





my lucid dreams were what they seemed. As soon as I became self-aware, I would

immediately set about engineering sexual situations—yet I knew I wouldn’t behave like

this if I were truly awake. There were many aspects of the lucid state I longed to

explore, yet despite my best efforts I’d always get side-tracked into sex.7 I could see

no other explanation except I wasn’t actually conscious at all. All lucidity, I concluded,

must be false lucidity because that simply wasn’t “me” in the dream.As I remarked previously: how can we ever tell the difference between being

awake in our dream, or just dreaming that this is the case? It took a long time to find a

solution. Until I found it I was, in effect, turning Descartes’ famous pronouncement “I

think therefore I am” onto its head: That’s not me, therefore I’m not conscious. Yet if

consciousness is not precisely that which by definition is what it seems, then what the

hell is it?

Immersing myself more deeply in occultism—specifically, in the practice of

meditation—revealed the blindingly easy answer, which also forced me to startmeeting my experience on its own terms. Simply: the dream self and the waking self

are not the same.

It is so obvious that it is easy to overlook the fundamental truth this contains.

Usually, we regard the self as whatever it is that stays consistent as our awareness

changes from state to state. For instance: this morning I was unhappy because I had a

toothache, but this afternoon I’m feeling great again because I’ve seen the dentist.

Ordinarily we suppose it is the same thing in us that experiences the pain and then the

relief. We don’t posit a “pain self” and a “relief self” that separately come to the fore,so why should we suppose there is a dream self that comes to the fore in sleep and a

waking self that takes over in the morning? In that case, like Jekyll and Hyde, they

might have conflicting agendas and go about satisfying them in wildly different ways.

Dr Jekyll might be interested in the philosophical aspects of lucid dreams, whereas Mr

Hyde would probably use them only to get laid.

The practice of insight meditation (vipassana, in Pali) showed me it was not the

lucid dream that was false but my understanding of the waking state. My error lay in the

widespread tendency to suppose that we have a self and it is conscious of whatever experience we are having. Vipassana, however, teaches techniques for looking very

closely at our experience of reality whilst it happens, moment to moment. It may take a

while to get the hang of it, but—once you have—something peculiar about everyday

experience is then realized: the self is an experience that arises within consciousness,

not the other way around. Quite simply: there is no basis for assuming a self that

somehow sits outside experience, taking it all in. How could there be? How could we

even know we had a self if that were so? Think about it! It’s such a stupid mistake it





beggars belief how we go on making it, every instant of our lives. Yet we do. But by

practising vipassana we can begin to let go of this delusion. Indeed, life gets

remarkably better if we do so. Eventually, we might even follow in the footsteps of the

Buddha and shake ourselves free of the illusion of self for good.8

But to return to lucid dreaming: it seemed I was conscious in my dream, but it

also seemed I behaved differently in my dream from how I would when I was awake.Yet now I’d found a view from which I could accept this was simply as it appeared:

the dream-self and the waking-self were different — or rather, as the practice of

vipassana had shown me, there was actually no justification for any kind of “self” at

all; there were simply different sets of experiences, depending on whether I was asleep

or awake. Neither Dr Jekyll nor Mr Hyde was my “true self”, because my true self was

the realization I had no self at all.

So far, then, we’ve held up lucid dreaming as a category of experience that is

interesting because it sheds light on experience as a whole: waking consciousness presents us with perceptions, whereas in dreams we find ourselves immersed in a

world of images and these possess radically different properties. However, when we

dream, the mind makes a “reality” out of these images, just as it does from perceptions

when we are awake. It is the dominance of the image over the dreaming consciousness

that gives the dream-state its characteristics, which appear strange when compared to

the waking state.

Yet as we’ve seen, it is not only “reality” that is thrown into question by the

transition between waking and dreaming consciousness, but also the nature of self.Meditation practice leads to the realization there is no such thing. Self is itself an

experience rather than the transcendental source of experience. If self is an experience

then it is subject to radical shifts, just as our experience is subject to wild alterations

as we move between different states of consciousness. If the waking state is dominated

by perceptions and the dream-state by images, then as we move from waking

consciousness into sleep we also make a transition from an experience of self based

upon perception to a self that is based upon images. This crucial difference enables us

to begin to understand the relationship between lucid dreaming and some closely-alliedstates of consciousness: out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) and astral projection.

Some books on these subjects tend to gloss over the distinction between these

states and suggest that they are all at root the same thing. John Magnus, for instance,

defines astral projection very broadly as the ability to project our awareness in a way

that enables us to bring our thoughts to life and experience them as we do the physical

world (2005: 3–5). His book is entitled Astral Projection yet it includes many

experiences similar to those we would expect to read in books on lucid dreams.





In my opinion, the distinction between these states is quite clear and needs to be

firmly grasped in order to avoid confusion.

A lucid dream is a dream in which we are conscious that what we are

experiencing is a dream. Usually, lucid dreams are far more vivid than their non-lucid

counterparts. However, the degree and quality of consciousness may vary from lucid

dream to lucid dream and our mental abilities within them may sometimes appear constrained in ways that seem unusual when compared with being awake. Here is an

example from my dream journal:

A beautiful view through big windows. The sky is full of dark clouds, but the sun is slanting

underneath and the landscape is brightly lit. Open fields. Fires are burning here and there. I

resolve to go outside. I open the window and climb onto the radiator in front of the window, then

onto the sill, then I discover an outer window that I must open. All this seems vivid but is extremely

difficult to achieve. I have to concentrate very hard on opening the outer window, on trying not to

fall, and on trying to maintain the lucidity on which I know all this depends. But the lucidity starts

to fade and despite all my efforts I am suddenly awake in bed again.

In waking life there would be perceptions of physical objects that had to be negotiated.

In a dream, however, the feeling that something is difficult can manifest non-

specifically. In the waking world there would be a specific combination of windows,

locks, and objects that it would be possible to overcome. But in the environment of the

dream-world the general idea of “difficulty” can appear as a non-specific thing. This is

due to the way that in dreams the environment is composed of mental images.

An out-of-body experience (OOBE) is indeed similar to a lucid dream, but it has

one clear and distinct difference: during an OOBE we are aware of our sleeping,

physical body but at the same time—alongside this—of impressions arising from a

“dream body” or “astral body” that seems to occupy a different spatial location from

the physical body. Paradoxically, during an OOBE we are aware of inhabiting two

“bodies” at once.

OOBEs and lucid dreams may both arise spontaneously or they may be induced

at will. I propose that the term astral projection (AP) should be reserved for awilled

OOBE. An OOBE can be said to be “willed” in two senses: firstly, the dreamer ha

decided to have an OOBE at a particular moment; or, secondly, the dreamer has

decided to have an OOBE at a particular moment and also wills their “astral body” to

travel to a particular location or scene.

Now, it is quite possible for someone to have a lucid dream that he or she is

astrally projecting, just as it’s possible to have a non-lucid dream about lucidly

dreaming. My suspicion is that many accounts of so-called astral projections or

OOBEs are in fact lucid dreams (or maybe even non-lucid dreams)about having these





experiences.

Each time I’ve experienced an OOBE it has begun with an unpleasant an

intense “buzzing” sensation that sweeps over the body. This sensation is the classic

sign of the onset of an OOBE. It feels horrible, as if the fillings in my teeth were abou

to be shaken loose, but I’ve discovered that if I accept the sensations for what they are,

they eventually pass. Many times I’ve flinched away from this feeling or becomeexcited at the prospect of an OOBE, only to discover that my reaction prevents the

OOBE from developing.9 Only after the buzzing sensation has been successfully

endured and has passed is it possible to “leave the body”. Sometimes this has to be

willed, other times the “separation” happens naturally:

Something started to happen. A buzzing sensation started. It was unpleasant but I was excited

because I recognised it as the beginning of an OOBE. I let the fear and excitement wash over me;

it became “integrated” and then passed. I sensed I could “roll out” of my body although it was

difficult. I could move my astral left arm so I rolled all of me to the left. I could feel the quilt and

my girlfriend’s sleeping body under it as I crawled out of bed over her … She kept fidgeting and each time the movement brought my awareness back to my physical body, asleep in the bed, which

I was also aware of and could f eel. I concentrated my way through this, at f irst, but she continued

to move. It was too much and I was annoyed. Awareness of the astral body gradually faded as

awareness of the physical body grew too strong.

I’ve put certain expressions such as “leave the body” and “separation” into inverted

commas because if we were awake and we suddenly started to see the world from a

location different from that inhabited by our body, then we might indeed be justified in

assuming something had separated from us and travelled to a different place. But

because we are dealing with mental imagery and not perceptions, we are not justified

in assuming any such thing. There is nothing to prevent us at any time from forming

images of places that are remote from where we are, whereas forming perceptions of

remote locations demands the physical relocation of our sense organs. As has been

mentioned, paradoxically an OOBE includes a full awareness of the physical body and

its activity. In every OOBE I’ve had, as well as being aware of impressions received

by my “astral body” as it wanders about the room, at the same time I’ve had a peculiar

dual awareness of the sensations received by my physical body as it lay in bed: I can

feel the position of my body and the quilt covering it; I can hear my regular, slow breathing; I can even see the darkness behind my closed eyelids. Too much awareness

of the physical body endangers the OOBE, as the example above illustrates. It is as i

awareness of impressions from the astral body demands a certain level of

concentration or detachment from the sensations of the physical body.

Often, the environment we encounter during an OOBE closely resembles the

waking world. Sometimes, however, it does not, especially if we succeed in moving





the astral body from its immediate starting location and exploring beyond the bedroom.

It is important not to get too hung up on this and fall into the mistake of regarding the

perceptual accuracy of the experience as part of the criteria for an OOBE. The buzzing

sensation and the impression of inhabiting two locations at once are the sine qua non

of an OOBE. To add to this a rule that the environment encountered should conform

with the actual physical environment would be to confuse characteristics of the statewith what is merely its content. As I hope I’ve established by now, to insist that an

OOBE is only an OOBE if it meets the criteria of waking perception leads t

contradiction and confusion.

Certainly, all these states—lucid dreaming, OOBEs and astral projection—are

alike in that they arise upon the cessation of waking perception and the crossing of the

boundary into sleep. OOBEs and astral projection, however, are characterized by a

greater sense of self-awareness than a lucid dream. In a lucid dream we are aware of

ourselves inhabiting a different kind of reality, but during an OOBE or astral projectionwe are also acutely sensible of inhabiting a different kind body, or possessing a

consciousness that seems to have “detached” from the body altogether.

It is as if these states of consciousness form a hierarchy according to the degree

to which consciousness has become focused upon itself. This is why I think it is useful

to distinguish clearly between them, because each demands a higher level of spiritual

sophistication than the previous in order to access it reliably and navigate within it.

In the waking state, consciousness is focused predominantly upon perceptions

arising from the physical world through the sense organs. In a normal dream the focusis upon internal mental imagery. But in a lucid dream, there is an additional degree of

self-reflective awareness that enables us to be aware of what we are experiencing in

its true nature as a dream-image. In OOBEs and astral projection this is taken ye

another step forward, with the focus turning inwards once more upon the kind of

“body” or “‘self” that appears to be doing the experiencing. In an OOBE we acquire an

astral body. In astral projection, in addition to this, we have the willpower to direct the

astral body to wherever we please.

It seems to me likely that experience of these states is what has led mystics, philosophers and even the prophets of world religions to posit notions such as “the

soul”, “ghosts”, apparitions of living people, etc. I’d be wary of deducing the objective

existence of any such entities from these states of consciousness. The tendency to

invent from our sensations and experiences a “self” that appears to have some kind of

objective existence extends into these states too—as I was forced to realize when

confronted by the dubious sexual behaviour of my “dream self”. The way I acted in my

lucid dreams wasn’t “me”, so I concluded it must be a “dream-me”. Later it became





clear that the foundation for imputing a self to any state of consciousness is equally ill-

founded. However, the temptation to do so may be greater in certain states than in

others. Confrontation with an experience of a “dream-me” or “astral body”

understandably leads us to wonder whether this entity might be somehow “truer” or

more essential than the sense of self we experience during our waking hours. The

imputation of a self or essence to these exotic states of consciousness becomesespecially tempting when we consider how the “astral body” seems to exist

independently of the physical body, perhaps offering the possibility of personal

immortality.

When exploring these states it is helpful to maintain a perspective rooted in

actual experience rather than wishful thinking. Based on the replicated findings of

countless practitioners through the centuries, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition again offers

some useful pointers. Mastery of dream yoga, according to this tradition, leads to yet

another level of dream experience, beyond even astral projection. In this stateconsciousness is more refined and even more intensely focused upon itself. This is

known as “clear light dreaming”, which “indicates a state free from dream, thought and

image … in which the dreamer remains in the nature of mind” (Wangyal, 1998: 63).

Clear light dreaming is the apex of dream yoga, generally considered attainable

at will by only the most advanced and enlightened practitioners.10 In this state

consciousness is so purely focused upon itself that there is nothing else, nothing arising

“in” consciousness: no perception, no image, not even a sense of self or object. There

is only the unimpeded light of consciousness itself, out of which all experience takesits form. And although those who abide in or have touched this state have indeed

reported realizations of “immortality” at this level of awareness, they have also

emphasized it is a transpersonal layer of being. Consciousness may indeed be infinite

and eternal at this level, but if anything endures forever it is Consciousness (capital

“C”) and not “my” consciousness, or “yours” or even “ours”.

Having drawn a rough sketch-map of these states of consciousness, I’m

concerned not to give the impression that things are as simple out there on the astral

plane as it might now seem. Although dreams, lucid dreams, OOBEs, astral projection,and clear light dreaming appear to form a neat hierarchy in terms of the degree to

which consciousness is the object of itself in each, I’ve stumbled across other states

that throw this model into question—and I’m sure others will have done so too.

“Sleep paralysis” is one of these and is exceedingly common. Typically, sleep

paralysis occurs between sleeping and waking. The mind partially emerges from the

dreaming state, but the body is still incapable of movement, no matter how much we

attempt to struggle. Most often, the inability to move is accompanied by a sense of a





menacing presence, sometimes manifesting as a terrifying creature sitting on or

applying force to the chest, or to some other part of the body, resulting in a constriction

of the breath.

Evidently, experiences of this type belong to the spectrum of dream-states: the

creature sitting on our chest is not a part of perceptual waking reality, but obviously a

manifestation presented to the mind as an image. The dreamer is conscious, so thisstate is not a non-lucid dream. The dreamer possesses a perceptual sense of the

physical, sleeping body (albeit paralysed), which therefore rules out a lucid dream.

Yet it cannot be considered an OOBE or astral projection, because the sense of an

astral body and the willpower to move even the physical body are both notably absent.

Where, on the spectrum of dream states, does sleep paralysis belong? Is it

perhaps a type of OOBE that has failed to get off the ground, placing it below an

OOBE and above a lucid dream? Whenever I’ve had the misfortune to find myself i

this state, I’ve noticed that my thought processes are remarkably sharp and quite un-dreamlike. Considering also how this state tends to arise during the transition between

sleeping and waking, my hunch is that it’s more correct to situate sleep paralysis on the

boundary between waking and non-lucid dreams rather than anywhere “higher”. The

main point to draw from this, I think, is not to do with how these states should be

categorized, but how there are states of consciousness that do not obviously fit into any

simple model.

And there are more of them out there, at the fringes of consciousness, states so

ill-formed and bizarre it is no wonder no one has bothered yet to put a label on them.For instance, more than once I’ve experienced the following:

A rippled pattern appears. It doesn’t move. I interpret it as wallpaper on a wall or ceiling. I am

aware of my physical body, but cannot roll out of it into an OOBE, despite trying. This is not sleep

paralysis either, because there is no sense of foreboding or presence. Nothing further happens,

other than this static pattern in front of my eyes, so it is not really like a dream at all. There is

simply consciousness, and the sense of being awak e in some place that is just as real but far more

limited than the wak ing world.

“False” lucidity was discussed above as a case in which the dreamer has a non-lucid

dream about lucid-dreaming. However, on another occasion I stumbled across an odd

variation on this:

I dreamt that I had an expert in lucid dreaming watching over me, checking my progress. I had

that “light”, “fragile” feeling that precedes a lucid dream; I even felt myself on the verge of the

“buzzing” sensation that precedes an OOBE; but I was not aware that I was actually asleep whilst I

was dreaming all this! It felt so much like waking consciousness I simply assumed I was still awake

all along!





In other words, instead of becoming conscious and entering a lucid dream by realizing

I was dreaming, I was already lucidly dreaming yet failed to recognize this as such

because it felt so much like being awake. Now, perhaps this was indeed simply an

unusually elaborate instance of false lucidity, but it certainly seemed otherwise after I

awoke. And where would we place this experience upon our continuum of dream

states? A lucid dream in which we were not aware that we were lucidly dreamingwould be a contradiction in terms!

Although there is an observable progression between the states in the extent to

which consciousness is aware of itself, evidently there are other states that are unique

enough to deserve a label to themselves, yet in respect of which it is much harder to

decide whether they manifest consciousness “more” or “less” than other states.

This suggests that consciousness is probably not the only factor enabling the

transition from one state to another. For instance, the transition from waking to sleep

involves a switch from perception to imagery as the dominant sensory modality; and inthe case of OOBE and astral projection it is the manifestation of willpower that allows

us to suppose a change of state has occurred.

It seems, then, that the overall change in consciousness is itself connected in

some way with the action or inaction of a whole set of mental faculties. These include

(but may not be limited to) the following: thought, imagery, perception, and will.

In waking life, these are all active and the waking mind is able to distinguish

each from the other. As soon as we approach the boundary of sleep, however, it seems

as if they become selectively enabled or disabled depending on our state. In sleep

paralysis, for instance, thought and imagery are active, but perception and will are

disabled. In an OOBE, thought, imagery and perception (of the sleeping physical body)

are all active, yet many people in this state report odd problems when it comes to

doing what they want to do. Sometimes movement in certain directions is inexplicably

blocked, or simple physical gestures are impossible, whereas others remain easy. It

seems that the will is only partially active in this state. (Hence my suggestion that we

reserve the term “astral projection” for OOBEs that manifest the activity of will to a

much fuller degree.)

Alongside this selective enabling and disabling of mental faculties there is yet

another factor, which is exposed to view when we investigate the nature of the

faculties that become “activated” as we move into a particular state:

In the dream I visualised a sigil. I was surprised to discover I was capable of visualisation. I had

expected that—as in a non-lucid dream—anything imagined would arise in the external

environment, as in a non-lucid dream when we read a book, say, or watch television, and the story

or f ilm suddenly becomes the dream itself. But it didn’t. Somehow it had its own “mind-space” that





it could occupy. However, the visualisation was “abstract”, not vivid like a mental image when

awake. It seemed more like a word or an abstract idea than an image.

In waking consciousness there is diversity among the elements of experience; we have

perceptions, thoughts, and images. But in dreams our waking senses are suspended and

the contents of consciousness become images, begging the question how in an

imaginary world (i.e. a world constituted purely of images) would it be possible to

“imagine” something?

My experience suggests that in a sense it isn’t possible, but what seems to be

happening is that faculties which are available during sleep step into the role of those

that are no longer available. As we have seen repeatedly, imagery takes on the role of

perception in all the dream states. In a lucid dream, then, it seems as if thought takes

on the role of imagery. This is why a lucid dream provides an extra mind-space in

which we can reflect and hypothesize, in contrast to a non-lucid dream; but this also

explains why, when we investigate the nature of this faculty within the dream itself, it

possesses a peculiar “dry”, “abstract”, “non-sensory” quality that the imagination does

not possess when we are awake.

On an internet forum, I read with interest the startled observations of an

experienced meditator who had succeeded in settling down to meditate whilst inside a

lucid dream. As he turned his mind to look deeply into his state of consciousness, he

was surprised to note the complete absence of anything resembling will . In his waking

meditation he was used to noticing the subtle mental sensations of his will going about

its business. In the lucid dream, however, these were entirely absent.

Will makes a partial return in OOBEs, and a fuller return in astral projection, but

is it the case that some other faculty might be filling in for it? I can’t lay claim to having

had the experience that would qualify me to answer, but I believe the solution might lie

in the shift in the sense of self that occurs between lucid dreaming and an OOBE. In a

lucid dream we often have vivid physical sensations, but these are taken to a whole

new level in an OOBE. It is not simply that our “perception” seems more real; in an

OOBE the heightened background sense of “being in a body” vastly increases our

sense of being aware. I would hazard a guess that it is the return of the awareness of

physical sensations (i.e. perception) that is the basis of this; the paradoxical

awareness of the physical body in an OOBE alongside whatever is happening to the

dreaming part. It seems that perception is somehow implicated in forming the basis of

a sense of will that begins to emerge in the move from lucid dreaming toward OOBE

and astral projection.

This kind of observation is very difficult to make. Part of the reason is that it





requires dedication and practice to learn how to distinguish between the different

elements of mental life through introspection, and intense self-discipline to turn the

mind to this type of investigation when in the lucid dreaming state. Another part of the

reason is that few people are looking or have ever looked at their experiences in the

dream-states in this way. Currently, most investigators are drawn to neurological

imaging as the basis of research, even though this kind of work presents deep problemswhen we come to ask questions of what it feels like to be in these states. And the final

part of the problem is our natural bias towards waking life as the baseline against

which we measure all types of experience. It simply appears counter-intuitive to the

majority of people to suppose that what assumes the role of perception in a dream is

not perception, or what assumes the role of imagination is not imagination.

Old-fashioned, systematic introspection into our own experience can still shed

new light on the structural features of these states, and—in particular—the role they

play in mystical experience. There is much work remaining to flesh out the model of the dream-states that I’ve proposed. I suspect this work has already been done on a

personal level by those enlightened souls who have mastered dream yoga, or have

found other ways to peer deeply into the nature of human perception and

consciousness. But the ways in which they have presented their findings may have

proved idiosyncratic and off-putting to many people.

Two mystical geniuses of the early 20th century, Rudolf Steiner and G. I.

Gurdjieff, exemplify this. Both wrote of human spiritual development as a process that

involves an acquisition of an extra “body” in addition to the ordinary physical one:[M]ankind is the only creature that can grow a soul … Thus, we human beings have a purpose, and that

purpose is to grow (or, as Gurdjieff prefers to call it, to “coat”) within us a “higher-being-body”, by us

called soul (Ginsburg, 2005: 9).

This work [i.e. the constant endeavour for the mastery of the ego] leads on to ever higher levels of human

nature. Through it man evolves new members of his being, which lie—as yet unmanifest—behind what is

manifest in him (Steiner, 2005: 53).

At first glance such ideas are senseless until, perhaps, we compare them with the

progression of the dream states from non-lucidity to astral projection, because these

states—when regarded as a continuum—do indeed seem to chart a process that results

ultimately in the establishment of an “astral body” possessing its own full set of

faculties including consciousness, perception, imagination, and will. These faculties

appear to have been salvaged from the scrapheap of waking consciousness that is left

behind when we cross the threshold of sleep. For instance, when we dream, our new

“body” acquires “perception”, which it constructs from the waking faculty of

imagination (mental imagery). When we lucid-dream, it also acquires a form of





“imagination”, constructed from the waking faculty of thought. As we pass into an

OOBE, our new body gains the beginnings of a “will” of its own, which it seems to

have re-purposed from the waking faculty of perception.

The common understanding of “a body” is as a kind of vehicle or wrapper for

our consciousness or sense of self. Obviously, this is not the sense of “body” that

applies here, which would lead us into all kinds of dualist philosophical problems if we adopted it. This “astral body” is best regarded not as some kind of spirit-double

but—just like the physical body—as a holistic collection of capacities.

The capacities of the physical body are shaped by evolution and environmental

factors, and are synonymous with its form—for example, respiration, reproduction,

movement, and everything else a physical body does. The capacities of the astral body,

on the other hand, are shaped by the platform of raw materials that the physical body

provides it with, but also—as Steiner and Gurdjieff both insisted—by the conscious

exercise of certain spiritual practices. In other words, if we do not give it a proper workout, by performing spiritual practices such as yoga, meditation, etc., then our

astral body will not grow.

The “body” model at first seems eccentric but it has definite advantages. A body

can be viewed as a collection of functions sufficient to sustain its integrity upon the

level of existence on which it functions. However, a body can extend its range of

functions onto other planes, by refining and extending its capacities. For instance,

human beings are adapted by evolution to survival on land, but through prosthetic

technology the exploration of the oceans and outer space has become possible to adegree.

Dream yoga, meditation, and other spiritual disciplines are an equivalent of

scuba gear in the development of our consciousness. They help extend our awareness

beyond the everyday sense of self into which our waking experience and our

presuppositions condition us. But just as we would not expect to develop an

exceptional physical body without putting in some work, the same applies to the astral

body. The dream states appear to form a continuum organized according to the extent to

which consciousness is capable of taking itself as an object, but progression throughthis continuum in a neat sequence is not inevitable; we have to make it happen. As in

physical training, spiritual development has its equivalents of laziness, rigidity, and

obesity. We can get stuck by falling into old habits and prejudices, or identifying the

self with sensations. The body model explains why the dream states are not available

to all of us, all of the time. It also helps account for those odd states we noted, that do

not seem to fit in clearly with the others or lead anywhere interesting: they are not

“bad” or “wrong”, they are a consequence of how the dream states involve interactions





between a range of faculties, so some of the combinations thrown up are quite likely to

appear random or bizarre.

The most important lesson that engagement with the dream states teaches us,

however, is not concerned with the nature of any particular state, but with the subtle

developments undergone by consciousness as it passes from one state to the next.

Notes

1. Earlier, we considered Paul Devereux’s claim that ancient rock-drawings depict

similar experiences among our ancient ancestors. See p. 48.

2. This is a perceptual phenomenon known as synaesthesia, sometimes regarded by

neurological investigators as pathological. For an overview see Cytowic (1994).

3.

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

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

5. In psychoanalysis this misapplication of the laws of waking logic to dream-

experience is termed “secondary revision” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1994: 412) and is

regarded as a defence against revealing the true meaning of the dream to the analyst.

6. On the question of duration in dreams, I’d point out that we have no conscious sense

that enables us to register accurately the passing of time, and that the ability of human beings to gauge duration is notoriously unreliable. Our relationship to time is

extremely vulnerable to subjective distortions, yet what from the side of perception

we would describe as “subjective distortion” might actually indicate a positive ability

of the mind to form qualitative images of time. It should not surprise us too much if

these images of time also make an appearance in dreams, where—because there is no

perceptual input to undermine them— they are taken at face value. In short: if we

dream of something that includes an idea of it taking a very long time, then it is

experienced as such.

7. I don’t seem to be alone in this. John Magnus, for instance, discusses in detail his

own struggle with lucid sex addiction (2005: 202f.).

8. This is known as enlightenment , of course, and forms the main topic of our

preceding essay. It should be emphasized that the Buddhists do not have a monopoly

on enlightenment. Most of the world’s great religions have techniques similar to

vipassana that realize the same aim.





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

point.

10. Of course, any old klutz might stumble across this or any other of the dream-states

by luck or accident at some point in their lives, but the conclusions they draw from it

will be crude or inaccurate if they are unable to view the experience in its correct

context.





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