I arrive in that “there” which of course, is “not-there” and feel as if I had never left and that the very idea of “I” (as so used here) is laughable.  Later, I am reminded of the phrase “being-consciousness-bliss” and try to recall which tradition it comes from.  But while “there” I am conscious of a bliss that is serene rather than effervescent, an understanding of pure being that is uninterrupted by the various activities of incarnation: the births, the deaths, the sufferings, the joys, the ambitions, the fulfillment, the frustrations, the disappointments.  I feel omniscient and omnipresent and yet tucked quite comfortably in a tiny corner.  I know that the multiverse of created worlds and beings continues to thrive in its constant change, but I do not wish to join the energetic dance of activity.  I am humming along quite nicely on my own thank you!  A more cosmic version of the afternoon nap, one might smile.

And yet I know I am inextricably intertwined with with every other focus of consciousness, either resident or visiting this “there” that is “not-there”.  I know I am complete, that no further achievement in the adventures of incarnation will make me any better, that no practice will make me any more selfless, as there is no self to improve; that no service to others will make me any more worthy, for I am not in any way worthless to begin with, and there are, ultimately, no real others to serve.  The preceeding definitions are all inventions of religions, elaborate rules which enslave the timid and ignorant and justify the existence of those who craft them.

As the hungry have to forage and hunt to survive, so the sinner has to surrender strive to become perfected.  These may be the rules of the plane we inhabit, but they are useless in the light we come from.  “There”, there are no needs or efforts required.  We are beings radiating our beingness.  Though our beingness blooms more with added life experiences it is still, in essence, our being.  A rose is a rose is a rose: blooming is what it does.

Planets, civilizations, prophets and deities: all fall away as unnecessary “there”, for we have no need of their guidance or restrictions.  They are forms we enter, from time to time, to exercise the vanity of ambition and aspiration.  We may fail, we may succeed, we may flounder.  Yet none of that matters ultimately.  All of it is only information resulting from an adventure, information that can be usefully applied in further adventures.

The hunter blending with his prey in the bloody death struggle, the mother dying in the act of giving birth, the peasant merging with soil and seed to facilitate harvest, the noble exercising authority to restrain and reward:  eventually all become stars in the infinite firmament.  As Aiwass said in 1904, through Mr. Crowley, “Every man and woman is a star”.  Endless evolution through the worlds of form imply that outcome. Rock, river, plant, tree; fish, fowl, animal wild and domesticated, human. fairy and angel:  all are stops along the way, all are vehicles for spirit projected.  And where once doubt might reign regarding the numbers, modern astronomy seems to indicate that equation is not so far off the mark.  Billions of stars are out there, all madly racing away from us, apparently.

When I returned from meditation, I yawned and stretched.  My joints were stiff and I was beginning to feel hungry.  Our world, one of many, had resumed its customary role.  I grinned in my gratitude, ready to desire, consume and be of service, for I know that the paradoxes of this apparent journey can, ultimately, only be surrendered to and embraced.  Fighting them on the grounds of injured rationality gets you nowhere.  As Woody Allen once wrote, “Eternal nothingness is just fine as long as you are dressed for it”.

Two employees are sent off in a company car in search of the man who made the discovery.  As they drive one observes, looking out at the busy night streets in what might be termed an access of pity, the crowds of innocents who have no clue what is about to befall them and society. This immediately reminded me of a similar expression in the film “A Few Good Men”, from some years back, where military man Jack Nicholson, under extreme pressure, famously yells “Son, you can’t stand the truth!”

What have these cinematic moments, of access to hidden information, have to do with esoteric studies and spiritual growth?  How do these cults of the classified resemble the arc of the seeker’s path?  Well, it has been my observation, over the decades of my inner journey, including writing, facilitating and teaching, that groups who define themselves as spiritual, from small conclaves of house bound students to large ashrams of disciples and everything in between, repeatedly make the classic mistake of looking down at the ignorant others who make up the rest of society.  If only they knew what we know can blossom from a silent thought to an overpowering mantra.

Whether that knowledge concerns the illusory nature of the personality, the transitory nature of the body or tribe or civilization, the psychic abilities known as siddhis,  the purity of vision which seems to come with an excess of meditation and lack of daily labour,  the knowing that worshiped deities and revered prophets are but way stations on the way to enlightenment, or that respected religious and political structures are secretly debased by greed, lust and power hunger, the knowledge, despite being what we think of as “real” can be debilitating to the soul seeking true inner growth.

While those pursuing  paths of light can, and do, help balance the planet’s share of darkness, they are no more special than the miscreants, children and little criminals they pity or despise.  One chooses a path of light because one knows, at that stage, there is no other choice.  One has exhausted all the options of pleasure and self-fulfillment, usually through many lifetimes, and one knows one can only continue to progress by submitting to one or other form of conscious service to others.

Those others are not lesser.  They are equals, despite their apparent ignorance of inner truths.  Even the devotees of religions, despite their enslavement to dogmas and restricted world views, are deserving of respectful empathy.  As are the fans of major league sports, who seem, in my experience, to come in for much derision amongst those who are skipping gleefully along the path.  Certainly those who are budding into individuation are the most inclined to see the shadows of their former adhering selves in the mass of wild enthusiasms unleashed at such events.

While I would not point the finger at self-initiated seekers any more than any other self-appointed elite or sub-culture, whether they be political, cultural or religious in nature, I believe it is always worth recalling, as we move inwards and upwards on the spiral of growth, that greater understanding should always be accompanied by deeper humility.  There is always more to know and do and be, and we may only access that ‘more’ in a state of deflation rather than one of inflation.

Whereas the effects of psychedelics such as psilocybin (mushrooms) and LSD tend toward the radical alteration of the experiencer’s perceptual fields (visual, aural, tactile) and provide an understanding of the parameters of this world being almost completely determined by the individual’s perceptual mechanisms and how those mechanisms can be so easily adjusted from whatever was supposed to be the norm, plant entheogens like DMT can take the experiencer to a completely other location in the space-time continuum.  These would seem to include deep space, far beyond the atmosphere of Gaia, and varied locations in the non-physical realms, some of which are recognizable to psychic projectors and out of body travelers, and some not.

I was struck, somewhat amusedly, by one woman who stated that after finding herself in deep space during her experience, had, that afternoon, to help conduct a grade one field trip.  This reminded me of my many experiences of consciousness projection, either during meditation or released by sleep, when the wonders of multidimensionality and ever unfolding creation, are quickly replaced by either dazed stumbling towards the bathroom or sudden and irreversible engagement with mechanical and electrical equipment or strangely awkward encounters with one’s fellow citizens

Almost all communities on the planes of form, physical and non-physical, have been created before we arrive there, sometimes centuries or millennia before.  Not that ‘before’ has much traction in the non-physical.  Certainly it is possible for a group of like minded iconoclasts, dissatisfied with what’s already on offer at their arrival, to create small new communities on one of the planes, but mostly folks can find an approximation of their desires already existent somewhere on the astral.  There are Buddhist communities, Baptist communities, gay villages and artists colonies, to name but a few.  But on the astral it is somewhat easier to notice how communities depend on the continuous thoughts of their inhabitants to sustain their reality.  They were formed by earlier applied thought patterns of deceased humans and need to be sustained by the continuance of the pattern.  Like physical plane communities decayed from lack of care, they will decay through lack of loving thought, although the inhabitants, ignorant of their local reality, will often not recognize the need.

Compared to the clownish, elfin beings of the DMT trance, whose forms and locations in the continuum seem malleable in the extreme, so malleable they can, and do, disappear in a flash, leaving behind their information overload to be diced and chewed on by the dazed experiencer, talking to the human dead is almost dull by comparison, but ultimately no different.  Not really. Of course there are wildly intelligent human dead and appallingly ignorant human dead. One can easily be persuaded that one is communicating with one’s assumptions, projections and expectations.  Some try to escape this by accumulating ‘evidence’.  Piling up verifiable facts seems to work for them, but for many it is the suspension of disbelief for the duration of the movie that is the key.  As John Keats wrote, “the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination.”

In reality, at least in terms of our cycle of rebirths, incarnation is the original suspension of disbelief.  After contractural negotiations with our guides and other karmically relevant parties, we agree to enter a movie and play a part, a part that has no actual script but is improvised according to the needs of the moment.  From spirit it all looks spectacularly unreal, the suffering gruesome, the dramas daft with ego drives unchecked, so we suspend our disbelief for the duration.  It is a movie with an ending and we know that before beginning.  We know that the chances are high that we will act as foolishly as those we observed from spirit, but we need to walk a mile in their shoes.

If, as a psychic projector, one chooses the realm of the non-human to explore, there is much to experience.  The spirits of nature can and will respond to curiosity appropriately expressed, some through language, some through feeling, some through what I can only call energy.  Devas and angels are also available to those who would challenge their assumed unworthiness.  The book Portals and Corridors by Monica Sue-Whitney and Gary Whitney indicates the large number of non-physical sentient beings of fluid form and indefinable nature there are to be encountered, should one have the nerve.

Once out of the One, the Godhead, the radiant void, there are innumerable beings of sentience and intelligence moving along their evolutionary paths of learning and expression.  You don’t have to communicate with them.  Your incarnation will continue and perhaps flourish in their absence.  Progress can still be made in the comfort zone of your village.  The community that shares your belief system will provide plenty of experiences for what I have already called your ‘educative completion’.  Yet moving away from the physical vehicle and exploring the antipodes of consciousness will prepare you for even greater adventures once the responsibilities of family and state are rendered.  There are many dimensions that our consciousness is connected to, each one of which holds mysteries and enigmas to be unraveled and absorbed, not the least of which is the discovery that consciousness itself is the vibrational medium out of which those dimensions are created and sustained.

Guess what, …the beings, the dead or not-so-dead, the communities, the landscapes or lack of them, the planets, the spirit planes, angels, powers and principalities, …it’s all  made from the same stuff.

It removes ‘god’ from the notion of a discrete being, a figurehead to worship, an entity to fear or a deity to placate, the kind of category cultures we call ancient seem to have devised for ‘him’.  My own spiritual journey had deposited me into an understanding of the manifest universe as a series of fluid states of consciousness, each of which came ready made with landscapes, communities and belief systems, all of which we cycled through on our passage to completion.  And the area in which divinity seemed to manifest most completely was that sea of light, that radiant void in which everything existed in potential but had no detectable shape or mass.

Whilst in that area, sometimes in meditation and sometimes while obe, one recognized that ‘omniscience’ and ‘omnipresence’ were available in direct proportion to one’s willingness to release the identity of a separate ego and limited brain.  One seemed to know what god knew, one seemed to understand why existence was exciting and yet futile, why cultures were created only to be destroyed, why the immense complexities of planetary and galactic formation were mere child’s play, and why the joys and sufferings of beings in bodies were ultimately of no significance.  And then, when the energy for such exploration waned, often in a matter of what might be termed ‘seconds’, and one’s vibration slipped to that of thought and then emotion and then the weighty body dragged down by gravity, one’s experience of the ‘godhead’ became a memory, savoured and then doubted by the ego with a brain.

I ponder these issues regularly.  Often they are brought to mind by books of a literary nature, where creative artists muse on their relationship, or lack of it, to ‘god’.  Often they are rebelling against some dogmatic god of organized religion, and on occasion the god of political ideology (cf Arthur Koestler’s The God That Failed on communism).  Certainly we are currently experiencing the collapse of faith in the god of free market capitalism.  Artists, I have found, retain a great deal of pride in their ability to have rejected the god of organized religion and proudly set sail on the seas of agnosticism and atheism, believing that intelligent men of moral stature can create and sustain democratic and just societies.  And as a citizen of one such society I can only applaud and praise such continued efforts.  We know very well that that eternal vigilance is the price we must pay for fair and just societies, and that even that focus will not prevent the continued depredations of corrupt elites and their intelligence agency enforcement arms.

With such creative types, and scientists often fall into this category, the god of religion is regularly replaced by the god of creativity and much is sacrificed on the altar of the novel, opera, ballet, art exhibit and experiment.  As a functioning artist myself I am thrilled by the ongoing creation of great works in all genres, but the belief systems which seem to sustain the artists involved strike me as at best a knee-jerk reaction to the cultural dominance of religion, a superficial homage of post-war existentialism, and a heedless plunging into the self-indulgent pleasures of bohemianism.  And mostly it seems to result in a fog of alcoholic and drug addicted despair, however well phrased or etched.

‘God’ does not live or die on the basis of human suffering and stupidity, whether modern or ancient, but the dependence on, faith in, or rejection of, deities composed of fear and desire, must be overcome so that the inner journey to the god consciousness can begin or resume.  That it is a journey well worth undertaking I can personally attest, although when ‘I’ feel myself there the whole notion of ‘I’ and ‘thou’ is laughably absurd.  That comfort zone of personal identity has had its boundaries erased by experience quite beyond the abilities of words.

One is energized, elated and ultimately dumbfounded.  The most that can be said, despite falling quite quite short, is that the god consciousness is ‘all that is’ harmoniously vibrating together, and the ‘you’ which has joined is an indistinguishable cell of that enormous structure, a cell that is so busy ‘being’ it no longer has the need to ask why or why not.  At least, not until later when the bliss becomes, through shrinkage, a mere blip of memory.

In the Grecian mystery schools, as recalled in clairvoyant perception by Charles Leadbeater, the Lesser Mysteries taught, through the medium of theatrical representation, the results, upon the astral plane, of certain lifestyles and habits forged here on earth.  Others researchers, knowing of the repeated mentions of a libation called Kykeon provided to the participants, suspect it contained some type of ergot or psychedelic mushroom to liberate their imaginations and etheric vision so they might at least glimpse the spirit beings and angels mixing in with the human performers.  Although the details of the Lesser Mysteries were forbidden to outsiders, knowledge of one’s attendance at the performances was not, so mentions in various writings of the time give us a fair idea of how many thousands might have attended over the decades, not to mention the seemingly unassailable fact that the Eleusian Mysteries, perhaps the best attended, continued for nigh on a thousand years.

Of the Greater Mysteries, less is known but much can be surmised, despite Leadbeater’s reluctance to say much more than knowledge of the mental plane was given to those deemed ready for such training.  Before I pass on to the modern day, It should be noted that mystery schools, although rigorously suppressed for centuries, never entirely disappeared.  Basically they went underground until it was safe to resurface, the 16th century Rosicrucian Manifestos being the first public wave of the flag.  The determined aspirant could always find the path, as the tales of pilgrims seeking alchemists and kabbalists attest.

The teaching of the Lesser Mysteries is unapologetically out in the open today, with so many thousands of psychics and mediums communicating with the deceased that almost everyone, even the skeptics, know the basic truths.  That there’s many kinds of afterlives and as many types of people to populate them.  That every religion and ethnicity is there, somewhere.  That some are less well adjusted than others.  That many are rueful and remorseful.  That most are reunited with their loved ones and pets.  That there is plenty to do and learn, and that it is a whole lot of fun.  And although millions of religionists will publicly aver that only their brand of believer is guaranteed a spot on the right hand of the righteous, I suspect their doubts are much stronger that they would ever admit, for education and travel have undermined their willful ignorance.  And the ancient principle of karma is so widely bandied about these days, it flutters about on the wings of gossip like some giddy butterfly.  As we joke, they used to hang you for having this much fun.

As a teacher and facilitator I convey the teachings of the Lesser Mysteries on a regular basis.  For clients I explain how the afterlife actually works, its procedures and mechanisms, its landscapes, societies and shifting populations.  I telepath to their dearly departed and their pets, returning information along that rainbow bridge of love.  I engage ghosts on their own turf and encourage their imminent relocation.  I confront mischievous and harassing entities, sometimes like a street corner tough, and demand that they quit their low down ways and leave their unconscious hosts alone to pursue their life paths.  I facilitate the accession of past lives which allows the clients to broaden and deepen their understanding of the who behind who they are.  They come to know that many actors take a part in their play through time and that each contribution, however praiseworthy or disreputable by conventional standards, is a step towards completion.

And while that completion of the incarnational cycle is the immediate goal we’re all striving for, it is far from the whole picture.  The Greater Mysteries revolve around our multidimensional nature, one aspect of which is our source in formless divinity.  At that level we can best be described as omnipresent, omniscient clouds of light which gather themselves for the experience of limitation in whatever corner of the universe offers useful parameters for the next stage of our self-exploration.  Ultimately we are not human, nor are we non-human.  We are not aliens, or helpless spawns of the Annunaki, as some would have it.  We are not any form we find ourselves in.  We are always passing through, picking up tips and tricks of the trade along the way.  We are no more limited than light itself.  It would not be a stretch,  at least as far as this upstart nobody is concerned, to say we are nothing going nowhere, for between our adventures in form and space, where we act and react and retain the resulting data, we resume our focus in that ocean of light that some call the radiant void, where being has no beginning, no purpose, no events and no end.

Or course all this is forgotten as we birth ourselves into humanity, picking families and nations in which to practice.  Practice what?  Whatever is left on our ‘to do’ list for life on earth.  We slowly become our issues and challenges, – the ambitious lawyer, the controlling mother, the testosterone crazy, the spoiled princess, the crusty old codger, – our identification so overwhelming that we cannot believe we are anything but.  But we are:  we are astral humans when asleep, flying about the neighbourhood, and then the planet, and then the almost endless planes of spirit.  We are shape-shifters there, or at least can be, if we give up our attachment to being vibrant and youthfully attractive.  We are orbs when we wish; we can, as I have discovered when obe, divide up quite easily into three or four and harry each other playfully like butterflies.  We can, as one of the ‘dead’, move from our human communities in the paradise worlds, where all is love and joy and pleasure, ascend in vibration and become formless, amazing our friends still in form.

There are many accounts, in the afterlife literature, of recent arrivals in spirit, still stunned at the miraculous beauty of their new life and lovely youthful bodies, being told that really we do not need bodies at all, and that those who have migrated to higher planes do not feel the need for them.  There are also many references to several aspects of the same soul existing on the various planes of spirit.  These aspects, which seem to include an angelic being that some call your ‘solar angel’, are created by the Monad (higher self) at the moment of ‘your’ inception, when the idea for your physical birth becomes a done deal.  These aspects seem completely free to operate as they wish, and when “I” have met them they seem mighty amused at my surprise.  On occasion they are mirror images of “Gordon” but mostly they appear as some enigmatically charming other.

Whereas religions would have us redeemed by god’s love from our sinful state and transformed into discrete beings of transcendent stature, the Greater Mysteries reveal that ultimately we are not anything that can be successfully categorized or described.  The limitless consciousness of which we are a part, a fully independent and functioning part, is the very fabric from which all manifestation is produced.  How the unmanifest becomes the manifest, emerging and disappearing every micro-second, continues to be not only an endless enigma but also the very core of our being/non-being.  We are living exemplars of the Greater Mysteries, and as such are the very essence of what we are trying to uncover.

And when we recover our eternal identities as nothing going nowhere, it can come as a bit of a shock, first of all to us, as we used to define ourselves, and then to others, who, despite efforts at conscious expansion, are still running on the old assumptions of personalities-to-be-perfected.  So be careful who you tell.  Being nothing going nowhere isn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea.  You may never eat lunch in that town again.

Later, around 1998, I discovered my own involvement in such activity and placed my reminiscences into Eternal Life And How To Enjoy It.  Long before that book was published in 2004, I came across Bruce Moen’s first two books, where he detailed his participation in earthquake retrievals.  Further activities of mine were included in my second book, More Adventures In Eternity, and more recently this blog has recounted my experiences at the recent mass shootings in Norway.

Having just discovered some forgotten disaster retrieval notes from 2008, notes which convey the moment to moment experience rather well, I shall copy and paste them here:

Burma and China:  May2008

 First night of Burmese cyclone, felt call when obe and answered it.  Not any kind of noise but a knowing. Move instantly as sphere/beam of light to source of “call”.  Thinking is not involved; direct perception and immediate action are the modes in use.  Arrived without quite knowing where I was and received instructions.  Was one of many spheres of light “listening”.  Found myself quickly down there floating around waterlogged and mostly destroyed tropical landscape.

From my “vibrational level”  I retune into the frequency of the new ghosts that are now floating aimlessly above their discarded bodies and quickly become a authoritative male figure from their culture who directs them to follow his instructions.  With only a minimum of background explanation.  Most know they are dead but are stunned by the sudden violence of their passing and the confusion of not knowing which family members are “here” or back “there”.

I shepherd various groupings “up” a couple of levels to the refugee style camps that always seem to be ready for such mass evacuations.  Huts and tents and groups around fires are set on a lush looking plateau on the edge of a forest beneath some impressive mountains.  Efficient and friendly organizer types come  to relieve me of my loads and I quickly disappear back to earth.  This process goes on all night, just like all the other disaster scenarios I’ve “worked”; been at this long enough now I’m left on my own to do as best I can within the chaos of the situation.  Of course there are the usual heart rending scenes of grieving parents who cannot link up with children and won’t follow me as requested.  I leave them for later; there’s too much to do right now.  It’s more important to get as many souls away from their dead bodies and tormented psyches, and avoid the mass hysteria that can easily result if enough unrelieved craziness is allowed to gather in one place for too long.  Frenzied stampedes only make matters worse, even a this level.

Find myself swimming underwater to look for souls still attached to their drowned forms, some of which feel trapped under twisted vegetation and huge trees. Sudden death and over-identification with the body can trap souls for quite some “earth time”.  There are various psychic tricks to shock such spirits out of their hypnotized ignorance, but they are not resorted to until several nights later when the main clearing up operations are over.

Many hundreds of earth based helpers are coordinated during these nights when they are physically sleeping.  Permanent astral dwellers seem to always know when disasters are about to strike and have the necessary situational props ready.  Almost as if it were a movie and the sets are wheeled out of some giant warehouse just in time.

The emotional and psychic chaos of these scenarios are shouldered by the helpers from both sides of the veil, and many of us awaken later with various combinations of sluggishness and  gloominess to cope with.  There are what I can only call multi-coloured showers of light that one can be immersed in on the astral plane that relieve one’s spirit of all this stress and the treatment works so well others  who normally have vivid dream recall, awaken to a blank slate which truly puzzles them.

We’re still working the Burmese situation when the China earthquake occurs.  Much the same mass evacuation scenario recurs, with many of us wondering just how much more we can take.  Though the physical strain of the firefighter, say, is absent, the psychic strain of dealing with so many crisis maddened souls can and does take its toll.  Not that we have much time to talk things over, but one picks up the vibe telepathically, believe it or not.

One makes the sacrifice because one has earlier made the commitment.  If one wishes to be let off the hook for a night or two, there always seems to be plenty of others to take up any slack.  As I have been Chinese a few times in the distant past, I manage to remodel myself with barely a thought.  With this situation we are dealing more with bodies trapped under collapsed buildings and the souls within them believing they are their bodies, which of course they are not.  We do our best to convince them to separate and move on.  Split families around collapsed schools bring many a headache.  Many of the dead children opt to stick around and commune with the grieving.  From our viewpoint not the best choice, but we must cede to their exercise of free will.

These soul rescue efforts continue: May21st

If any of you feel a resonance here,  a sense of ‘I know what this is about’ or ‘This doesn’t seem strange to me’, then I would suggest that you are yourself participating in such obe activities, but not yet recalling them consciously.  This is not uncommon.  Many of you are unconscious students of spiritual expansion, choosing that form to keep your daily life settled and acceptable to the consensus reality.  Not everyone cares to stand up and be counted.  Some of us have careers and families who could not accept such radical departures from the perceived norm.

So if you get a sense that such a silent dilemma is yours be assured that we who consciously participate and go out of our way to “kiss and tell”, do not, in any way, hold it against you.  The ascension energies which propel this and other projection activities wafts your boat across the lake whether your sails are unfurled or not. And for those of you who are intrigued but shy, I would suggest putting out your willingness to be trained as an offering to the universe every night before going to sleep.  The message will be received and acted upon.

But when we touch soul and embrace the spirit within we can begin to feel inner directed.  We can know the plan behind the outer confusion.  We can sense direction and purpose, even in the break downs and false starts.  We can begin to grapple with the notion that we are telling ourselves a story, a story to keep us entertained while we are educated.  A story steeped in mysterious turns and twists, a story with so many plots and counter-plots it might almost seem plotless. A story draped in sadness and disappointments that magically morph into resolution and chirpy ease.  A story with seemingly insurmountable challenges that suddenly capsize into carefree oceans.  Stories where you find yourself standing at the edge of a mountain only to chop it down with the edge of your hand.  Stories in which failure and success are assessed by us, both by the hour here on earth, and later in the heaven of our choice.

Was joy our playmate, sadness our ally?  Did envy trump compassion, or vice-versa?  Did we allow desire to stimulate growth, or ambition to stifle empathy?  Did fear embalm us, anger inflame?  Did we reach out to embrace, reach in to understand?  Did we wallow in addiction in the pursuit of pleasure?  Did we cripple  ourselves with wounds so that we could not walk?  Did we suppress emotion to deify the intellect?  Did we repeatedly dumb down to disappear from public view?  Did we champion the ego and construct mirrors for its cravings?  Did we inflate our personality and obscure our soul?

Such are the issues we weigh and resolve in the life that is after.  The life that comes before the telling of the next story.  The life that is in itself another story, another chapter in the ultimate narrative.

There are many ways our society reinforces our illusory fears of mortality.  It happens so often, mainly in the media, that we barely notice.  Is it because the media industries, newspapers, magazines, radio and television, tend to attract and produce that seen-it-all, prove-it-to-me cynicism?  I think so.  I suspect that it is the drive to career success, with its concomitant shaftings of perceived competitors, and the necessary armoring of the sensitive psyche which drastically reduces one’s compassion and idealism as it installs the warrior mode program for professional achievement.  While warriors fight each other for the prize of preeminence on the pyramids of power they are also fighting their fear of mortality.  This secondary struggle is buried beneath the first, where it usually remains undiscovered and unchallenged.

All organized religions, in their utterances, will emphasize the eternal life which lies beyond death, although there is very often the implication that it is only true believers of their persuasion who have rights to the prize.  So although it seems that only Spiritualism which attests to an afterlife for all, regardless of race, creed or status,  I cannot ignore the positive effects that religious utterances concerning eternity can have on despairing materialist societies.  They are, at least, a reminder.

It remains the media, with its birth in newspapers centuries ago, which repeats the mantras of mortality, as indicated above.  Watch for examples every day, for they subtly reinforce your doubts and fears, making your journey towards the light of understanding more uphill than it really has to be.  You have plenty of your own issues, you don’t need those of the journalist, newscaster and witty pundit as well.

Let the wisecracking dead bury the dead.

Furthering our growth in consciousness, regardless of our level of advancement, will always be a wondrous and light filled experience, but “excitement”, being a vibration closely associated with the astral body, is a temporary and fluctuating emotional state, and for the purposes of spiritual development, not entirely reliable.  In this state we are like children running around at a party, squealing with delight.  Our joy in our new found abilities is infectious but needs to be monitored by adults lest we trip and injure ourselves.

That adult can be a teacher/facilitator, especially in the early ‘student’ days of our unfolding, but later it needs to be internalized, merged with the detached observer and formed into a calm, objective referee who monitors all inner activity and sees where the psyche is headed in its sudden and often unpredictable spurts of growth.  And as those spurts are most often felt in the astral body, our focus of emotions and desires, where external stimuli evoke strong reactions which can easily overwhelm the impressionable student, it is a wise move to refocus one’s inner work onto the mental body, where the subtlety and speed of thought precludes, more or less, the almost Dionysian dangers of excitement.

As “The Tibetan”, through Alice Bailey, puts it:  “This perfect poise is arrived at by ruling out the pulls, the urges, impulses and attractions of the astral or emotional nature, and also by the practice of what I earlier mentioned: Divine Indifference.”  He also suggests “Serenity signifies that deep calm, devoid of emotional disturbance, which distinguishes the disciple who is focused in a ‘mind held steady in the light’, despite a surface life which may be in a state of violent flux”  I trust these references point an appropriate finger.

Seeing a nature spirit, contacting the dead, healing the distant sick, embracing the angelic dimension, allowing telepathy to manifest, all of these are signposts on the way, not destinations to be celebrated.  The excitements of minor achievements, traditionally considered “mere siddhis”, distractions on the way to full enlightenment, where the perceiver blends with the perceived and the Many is exposed as the One, and the whole notion of effort and expansion fall by the wayside as baggage now useless, are best experienced as intriguing ripples in the tides of thought.

Aligning one’s will with the angels, though an achievement in our world of ego enthralled materialism, is nothing new.  The Brotherhood of Men and Angels, as Geoffrey Hodson so aptly termed it way back in the 1930′s, although much subverted by organized religions, has been a given of esoteric teachings for millennia, so whether you succeed in mastering John Dee’s 16th century angelic language, or just sit in your garden and smile inwardly with open-hearted love, you are, in fact, participating in an ancient ritual, once closely guarded and now an open book, blending your egocentric human energy with that of your personal angelic counterpart, sometimes called your solar deva (angel).

As one modern exponent, Vee Van Dam, expresses it, in The Psychic Explorer, “An individual human soul is created at the moment of individualisation, and behind this process is the Solar Deva, – a being who is already very advanced, having evolved in other times and places (planets and solar systems)”.  He describes a merging thusly:  “I felt my Solar Deva come up behind me, and she enveloped me with fluttering, soft yet powerful energies, which made me think instantly of wings  -energy wings! She then entered into my body, and then fused with it until we were One in consciousness – one being, standing in one place, yet on various levels simultaneously, her golden and silver light radiating around us.”

Such an exercise, while revelatory to some, is being initiated and practiced the world over in many guises, and I suspect, in perhaps a decade, will be almost commonplace.  While resisting the tired ‘been there done that’ reaction, I would suggest that such interactions be conducted in the mental body at the very least, and the buddhic body if you can manage it.  Entering into such a divine bargain in one ‘s astral body could be disastrous at worst and enervating at the very least.  The new age/esoteric/pagan/magick communities are awash in psychic wrecks who have indeed, “reached for the secret too soon”/blown their circuits/flown too close to the sun.

I strongly suggest you save your excitement for other, more earthly pleasures.

Committed religionists will defer to the ‘God working in mysterious ways’ option, ways we poor humans cannot hope to understand.  They will quote from their ancient sacred books and pray.  They will tell you that submission to the will of god is what saves the suffering human from despair and meaninglessness.  Of course, agnostics and atheists will use the same argument to indicate the actual source of that suffering.  That peace of mind can be gained from such submission is obvious from the number of calm and settled believers in our midst. And again, there are great numbers of humanists who achieve much the same through accepting the severe limitation their concept of one-life-then-obliteration.  The religionists distance themselves from divinity and consider any approach to be not only impossible, due to our inherent unworthiness, but also quite heretical.  The humanists, of course, find this pointless, as there is no divinity to approach.

The religionists say, “I aim to be a decent, god-fearing human being”.  The humanists say “I aim to be a decent, ethical citizen.”  What does the newager/mystic/gnostic say?   “I aim to explore the mystery of incarnation?”

After many years of seeking, finding, and seeking again, “Gordon” has come to the conclusion, perhaps partial, that the meaning of life, at least on this planet, is to gain as many types of experience as is possible in the varied societies and epochs of our evolution, and seed that experience as sub-conscious wisdom in the psyche, to be employed in assessing and completing the ever more complex challenges of incarnation.  Concepts, emotional states, thought patterns, belief systems: all are incorporated in the gradual accumulation of experience data.  And when those data banks are full, incarnation is no longer necessary, unless one chooses the bodhisattva option of aiding others to move toward  their eventual enlightenment.

Does knowing the meaning of life enhance one’s experience of it?  It would seem so, though the gradual unfoldment of understanding which occurs to the seeker and disciple, adding stone by stone to the castle of wisdom until the mason is satisfied that The Work is complete, is so infinitesimally slow that the shifting balance between ignorance and knowing, suffering and bliss, can be tough to assess at any one point.  Some would say that being unable to distinguish between suffering and bliss is enlightenment.  One arrives at a plateau of understanding, feels remarkably wise, and then notices the steep climb ahead.  Sometimes one feels that serenity has been installed as a safety measure.

I have noticed that many who might wonder and ponder about the meaning of life, shy away from the actual understanding as I have portrayed.  Surely it cannot be that simple?  After all this sweating and slogging uphill, you tell us this?  Where is the reward for all our effort?  They do not wish the mystery to be solved, they do not wish the maze explained.  They love the mystery because it’s a mystery, and they have become comfortable being on the outside, peering delightedly in.  They do not realize, and I cannot seem to satisfactorily explain, that peering delightedly out can be just as much fun, if not more.