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The Annunciation, August Pichon |
Once, when I lived in the desert,
a blinding light illuminated the terrain. I felt a sudden heightening of
consciousness, a sense of eternity, a hint that something might exist
beyond physical existence, but then the light vanished, and the
desert seemed even more desolate and barren. I closed my eyes,
emptied my mind of all thought, and waited. To my great surprise, I
saw a gray figure-eight on its side floating above my head. When I
opened my eyes, it disappeared. The next day, I tried again: I closed
my eyes and dropped into the void. Suddenly, after a long time—how
long I'm not sure because I had entered a timeless state—I
envisioned a golden, equal-armed cross with an angel at each end.
So each day I would close my eyes
and drop into the void. Sometimes I would envision a symbol,
sometimes I wouldn't. One day the intense light returned, again
exalting my consciousness, and once again, the light vanished. When I
was meditating, I saw a gigantic tree in the distance and moved
toward it, and I could see the symbols that I had envisioned in the
tree. Suddenly a great light illuminated branches that seemed like paths, and I understood
the connections between the symbols.
In most ways, I'm average or
below. I'm not handsome or buff. I don't wow people with my
personality. I don't have great leadership skills. I'm not good at
math or at fixing things. I don't even have a decent job. I usually just barely get by, so I was surprised when for a six-month
period, I experienced a series of spiritual visions during
meditation, especially since before then I had never even
considered myself a spiritual person. I consulted a few religious
leaders and psychics but never heard a satisfactory answer about why
I was having the visions. When I described my vision of a
thousand-petaled lotus to a psychic, she exclaimed, “Why, that
means you're enlightened!” I didn't, however, feel enlightened,
just perplexed.
When I was growing up, I
occasionally experienced unexpected moments of exaltation. Once, when
I was four, I felt total bliss for about half an hour while in the
foothills near LA. My grandfather and I were ambling up a hill, the
dry grass golden in the setting sun. I remember he abruptly turned
around and took me by the hand. As we headed back to the picnic area,
I suddenly felt ecstatic as we sauntered down the hill. My soul was
ballooning with joy because I felt in contact with some great, unseen
force that was part of the earth and the trees and the grass. When we
reached the picnic area, I knew with absolute certainty, as if I
possessed some sacred inner knowledge, that each moment is perfect,
no matter how bad things might seem. I wanted to present the good
news to my parents and grandparents, but I couldn't find the right
words. When we got in the car and headed home, to my great
disappointment the feeling subsided as if I had lost contact with an
incredible force that might have continued to fill me indefinitely
with inexplicable joy.
Once, when I was a teenager, I
attended a concert at a church. The musicians presented a message
about Jesus Christ, and their songs about love and brotherhood moved
me to the point of tears. I felt joyful the entire evening, but the
next day, the world around me seemed stale, and I couldn't find any
examples of Christian love or brotherhood anywhere. Often,
in my teens, when I experienced stories of Christian love, I felt
deeply moved, but the same lack of any further illumination left me
stranded in a desert. Over the years, in the struggle to survive, I
simply forgot any altruistic sympathies or quickenings of
consciousness.
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| San Joaquin River Gorge |
And I grew deeply cynical. The
sense of absolute certainty about the perfection of each moment that
I experienced when I was four has occasionally struck me as utterly
absurd though I continued to remember how some force elevated my soul
and filled me with great peace. As an adult one day I unexpectedly
experienced the same feeling in the foothills near Fresno, and I have
continued to head out to the mountains every chance I get. No matter
how bad my circumstances, while in nature I have often experienced
the same kind of joy that I experienced as a child, a connection with
some overarching force of deep peace and harmony. Only after I
started meditating and envisioning spiritual symbols did I realize
that the force goes by different names, World Soul, Holy Spirit,
Goddess, and that one aim of occult spirituality is to contact this
great force and experience its powerful influence—and through its
influence other great forces that in Christianity go by the name of
the Son and Father of the trinity.
Recently I experienced an epiphany
about why, during my six-month period of meditation, I had a vision
of a golden, equal-armed cross. In the vision, the golden cross
floated in a deep, blue sky, and at each end of the cross an angel
hovered, each angel in a colored robe, one yellow, one red, one blue
and one white. This was the second in a series of visions of
archetypal symbols, all of which, I eventually discovered, are
associated with the Tree of Life, the great composite symbol of the
mystical Qabalah. As I mentioned, the visions came as a total
surprise: Before I began meditating at the age of forty-two, I was
oblivious to spiritual symbolism in general, so the full meaning of
the symbols has often taken me years to understand.
According to Dion Fortune, the
brilliant 20th Century Qabalist, in the bible, which she
claims is essentially a Qabalistic book, the different god-names in
Hebrew refer to different states of being. The Father, for instance,
refers to Kether, the Crown of creation, the first state of being
emanated from the unmanifest; the Son refers to Tiphareth, the Christ
center below Kether on the middle pillar of the Tree; the Holy Ghost
(or Spirit) refers to Yesod, the Foundation, on the middle pillar
below Tiphareth . Under Yesod is Malkuth, the Kingdom, where the
energies of the Tree manifest (Mystical Qabalah 179). Kether is a
state of pure spiritual energy, Tiphareth a point of transition or
transmutation between the planes of form and formlessness, and Yesod
a subtle plane of form directly “above” the physical plane.
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| Queen of Pentacles |
These two key points have profound
implications for Christianity and society as a whole. One of the
goals of personal mysticism is communication with the Holy Guardian
Angel, or higher self, the Individuality that develops through an
evolution (also known as the soul), which is connected to the divine
core of being and transcends space and time. The mystic, as Fortune
points out, begins in the humble manger, not on the Mount, so the
first communications from the higher self come through Yesod, the
state of being associated with the Holy Ghost and the feminine
principle of creation, in visions of archetypal symbols and voices.
The Tree of Life itself, which is a symbol system that represents the
unseen forces in the collective consciousness of humanity, comes from Yesod, the subtle realm of form.
Tiphareth, the Christ
center, is the sphere of the Sun, of blinding illumination, where
form dissolves in light. Only after shaking free from the physical
plane and making initial contact with Yesod, first experiencing
spiritual principle through visions of symbols, can the mind begin to
make sense of illuminations from the higher planes. The mind slowly
builds, piece by piece, a temple of symbols representing spiritual
principle, which makes comprehensible the experiences of illumination
and exaltation that swing the mind beyond Yesod into the blinding
sphere of the Son,Tiphareth, the center of cosmic equilibrium,
harmonizing love and spiritual inebriation.
According to Dion Fortune,
Illumination consists in the
introduction of the mind to a higher mode of consciousness than that
which is built up out of sensory experience....Unless, however the
new mode of consciousness is connected up with the old and translated
into terms of finite thought, it remains as a flash of light so
brilliant that it blinds. We do not see by means of the ray of light
that shines upon us, but by means of the amount of that ray which is
reflected from objects of our own dimension upon which it lights.
Unless there are ideas in our minds which are illuminated by this
higher mode of consciousness, our minds are merely overwhelmed, and
the darkness is more intense to our eyes after that blinding
experience of a high mode of consciousness than it was before. In
fact, we do not so much change gear as throw the engine of our mind
out of gear altogether. This, for the most part, is what so-called
illumination amounts to. There is enough of a flash to convince us of
the reality of superphysical existence, but not enough to teach us
anything of its nature. (180)
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| Tree of Life |
Before I knew the Tree of Life
even existed, I had during meditation envisioned many of its symbols.
Eventually I realized that these symbols have enabled me to translate
spiritual principle into “terms of finite thought” so that
illumination would not merely blind me. The symbols revealed not only
spiritual principle but, in one instance at least, the basic
structure of practical magic that connects the practitioner with
powerful unseen forces, such as the Holy Ghost and the Son of the
trinity as well as Gods and Goddesses and Saviors created by the
human mind to represent unseen forces throughout the ages.
Contemplation of the paths of the Tarot on the Tree of Life and of
the symbolic representations of the Gods, I discovered, is another effective way of
translating spiritual experience into comprehensible ideas.
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| Path 20, Virgo |
As Fortune points out, through the
type of consciousness associated with Yesod, “mystical experience
gradually builds up a body of images and ideas that are lit up and
made visible when illuminations take place” (180). In order to
build this temple of images, symbols, and ideas illuminated by higher
modes of consciousness, the mind must be open to spiritual
influences, which requires a passivity and a receptiveness of the
mind associated with the feminine Holy Ghost and Yesod, the sphere of
psychism and the etheric double. One must go deep into the
subconscious mind, below worries and desires and fears and
frustrations, to experience these astral treasures with the psychic senses. Spiritual development, instead of just being a series of
magnesium flashes of illumination and exaltation, is a gradual
expansion of the mind, a process that is aided by the symbol system on the Tree of
Life, a gift from the Holy Ghost in the sphere of Yesod.
Before I began having visions, I
was a materialist, believing that only the physical universe exists.
To understand my visions, however, I was forced to reexamine my life
and expand my idea of the cosmos. I had also experienced accurate
premonitions and intuitions which revealed that some part of my
consciousness transcends my brain and physical senses, but I had
simply forgotten or dismissed them—until I had the visions. When I
began piecing the moments of illumination together, I discovered that
it is helpful to think of the cosmos as consisting of many types of
energy in one vast fabric, from the finest spiritual vibrations to
the grossest physical matter, and that as an extension of the cosmos,
my being also contains those energies, hence the paranormal
experiences of nonlocal consciousness that have occasionally
surprised me over the years. At the “higher” end of the pole in the cosmos, the
energies are formless, evolving into planes of form, the physical
universe being the plane of densest matter. We experience
“nonphysical” or subtle planes of form in the imagination when we
dream at night or daydream or have visions of symbols. When we simply
know something through intuition, consciousness is operating
on a higher, formless plane, rising from Tiphareth, the sphere of the
Son, toward Kether, the sphere of the Father.
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| Path 14, Venus |
Immersing myself in nature, the
realm of the Goddess, is one way that I began to open myself to the
Holy Spirit and the illuminations of higher consciousness, at first
unknowingly, then intentionally. The beta mode of consciousness, the
dominant mental state in this highly competitive society, allows
intense focus on the external world but blocks access to unseen
spiritual influences, which is why for me at least there will always
tend to be a basic conflict between the driving forces of capitalism
and and the subtle forces of the spiritual world, why, in fact, I
lived so long in a desert. The affairs of business channel the mind
away from spiritual frequencies. In a predominantly masculine,
patriarchal, capitalistic culture, a barrier remains: Attaining an understanding of Christ consciousness requires receptiveness and a fair amount of
passivity, both qualities associated with the feminine.
Dion Fortune states that a
religion without the Goddess is halfway to atheism: In the Qabalah,
the masculine and the feminine as well as the physical and the
spiritual are polarities that allow the One to manifest as the Many.
To vilify, exploit, or misuse the physical or the feminine is to
blaspheme the Source of all creation. By demonizing feminine,
passive, receptive states of the mind, patriarchal religions and
societies block access to the Holy Ghost, thereby effectively
establishing a barrier to understanding the other forces of the trinity. One can
experience the illuminations of the Son, the Christ force, but cannot
fully understand them without experiencing the feminine state of the
Holy Ghost in Yesod—and, let us remember, the Son shows us the
Father. Perhaps that is why so many Christians love the Virgin Mary
and Saint Francis of Assisi, the great soul who loved all creatures,
who empathized so much with the Christ and the suffering of humanity
that he experienced the stigmata.
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| Baby Blue Eyes, San Joaquin River Gorge |
One of the places where I have
often experienced the Holy Spirit is the San Joaquin River Gorge, an
ecosystem that might soon be utterly destroyed by a dam at Temperance
Flat. In an example of an economic development described by Naomi Klein as “disaster capitalism,” which results in a redistribution of
wealth from the public sphere into private hands, farmers in the San
Joaquin Valley are using the drought as a way to “take” public
lands for private benefit even though a large percentage of the water
created by a new reservoir would go to water-guzzling crops such as
almonds and grapes in a semi-arid region (the biggest crop in the San
Joaquin Valley is almonds, and each almond takes over a gallon of
water to produce), as well as to commodity crops and fodder crops
that have no business being grown in a desert. Ensconced private
interests hope that a dam will save the economy because those with wealth,
land, and the means of production will be able to
continue business as usual. If the dam is approved, the private
interests who benefit will not be required to replace unique public
land with another public park or to compensate the public in any
meaningful way for the loss of land, nor will those private interests
be forced to modify their unsustainable practices.
The bottom line of capitalism
prevails. Based on my experience in the political realm, I've
discovered that the public's opportunity to connect with the
spiritual forces within nature is rarely, if ever (I am tempted to
say “never”), a concern to those with power and money or to the
politicians they influence. Approval of the dam would simply be one
more example of how capitalism can block connection between
the average person and the Holy Spirit, and by extension with the Son
and the Father, revealing a basic conflict between Christianity and
capitalism.
To say that in patriarchal
societies the feminine gets a bad rap is understating the case. The
feminine brings forth physical life, and since whatever is born must
die, the feminine also ushers in the King of Terrors. Physical life
is corruptible, always subject to the vagaries of time and the
infirmities of sickness and old age. But to the Qabalist, “the
natural is but the dense aspect of the spiritual”(194), the outer
robe of concealment that covers the inner robe of glory. All life,
including plants and insects and reptiles and animals, is spirit
manifested in matter. Everything dies but rises through regeneration.
Spiritual beings exist everywhere around us in physical forms that
sometimes ravish us, sometimes please us, sometimes repulse us,
sometimes terrify us. The false dichotomy that presents physical
energy as impure and spiritual energy as pure suggests that at the
heart of patriarchy is the fear of the subtle emotional, sexual,
psychic and spiritual power of women, a fear that has manifested
throughout the centuries as witch hunts and as an emotional
disconnect from the Holy Ghost.
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| Ace of Cups, Water |
In the Tarot, the equal-armed
cross, which “is called by initiates the Cross of Nature, and
represents power in equilibrium” (197), is included in cards that
represent aspects of the Holy Spirit: Judgement, the Ace of Cups, and
The Priestess. In the Tarot, color has great symbolic significance.
In the Ace of Cups the cross is black, in Judgement red, in The
Priestess white. In the symbol system of the Tree of Life, the black
equal-armed cross is associated with Malkuth, the Kingdom, or
physical universe; the red in Judgement symbolizes compassion, which
is linked through the Archangel Gabriel to Yesod, the etheric plane;
the white in The Priestess is associated with the spiritual laws of
the supernal spheres above the abyss. The gold equal-armed cross,
which appeared in my vision but does not appear in the Tarot, is
symbolically associated with Tiphareth, since gold, representing the
incorruptibility of the spirit, is the color assigned to the
Christ-center. In my vision, the golden equal-armed cross links the
Son with the Holy Spirit.
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| Path 31, Fire |
In the Tarot card Judgement, the
Archangel Gabriel, who is associated with Yesod and the Holy Ghost,
blows a trumpet to awaken souls in their tombs, and the souls arise
in gray, etheric bodies. These souls heed the trumpet call with
psychic senses, not physical senses, and rise in exaltation. As in
the other two Tarot cards representing Archangels, Temperance and The
Lovers, on one level the Archangel represents a higher mode of
consciousness linked with the daimon, or higher self. In Judgement,
the Archangel Gabriel also suggests the individual's first encounter
with the Holy Ghost and the superphysical nature of the psyche, which
leads to a reassessment of the nature of existence.
In the symbol of Venus, the circle
on top of an equal-armed cross reveals the perfection of the spirit
above the elements in equilibrium. In the Ace of Cups, on the other
hand, the equal-armed cross within the circle is being carried by the
dove into the cup of manifestation: The Holy Spirit brings the black,
equal-armed cross within a pure, white circle to the realms of form
where the spiritual and the physical coalesce. In this way also, the
Holy Spirit brings the conception of the higher self to the planes of form,
resulting in expanding knowledge about higher modes of consciousness and the integration of the psyche.
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| Path 13, The Moon |
In the Tarot card The Priestess,
the soul is confronted by the feminine principle on a higher arc, on a
path across the Abyss between the planes of form and the supernal
planes of formlessness. Here the equal-armed cross is white, in
opposition to the cross of Malkuth, the Kingdom, suggesting a spiritual logic very different from the ways of the physical world,
which suggests that the logic resulting in harmony within higher
modes of consciousness is also very different from the logic of brain
consciousness and the lower personality. The higher self can bring the soul into
balance in a way that the lower personality doesn't expect or understand at first. As in Tarot card The Lovers, for instance, the masculine
aspect of the psyche looks to the receptive feminine aspect in order
to know the higher self, which is very different from the belief
systems of societies with long, embedded attitudes of patriarchy.
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| Path18, Gemini |
Several times recently during
invoking rituals, I have experienced a vision of the jewel in the
lotus, which represents the spiritual energy of the Father in the crown
chakra, coming down the planes through my primary chakras to the
earth. The vision emphasizes for me that one of the most important
spiritual practices of our time brings spiritual energy into the mind
and manifests it in the world here and now. My visions of the jewel in the lotus coming down the planes is part of a long process that began with my long-ago vision of the golden, equal-armed cross, which is related to the Holy Ghost
and the elements in equilibrium, and I am living proof that, with an
openness to the feminine aspects of the psyche and the cosmos, and
with a little knowledge and effort, the average person can bring
powerfully transformative spiritual energies into all levels of his or her sphere
of influence.
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