ETERNALICIOUS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

© Shivanath, 2005



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. That means you are able to do things like reproduce it unchanged for personal purposes.

DETONATING THE MIND BOMB

Punk Rock Vedanta

We've also talked about escapes from verbal reality: sigils, drugs, thoughtlessness at orgasm, all of that stuff. How magic often happens in wordless states.

Well, fuck it, it's time to pony up boys and girls: kill the killer. Destroy your minds.

You want out of the verbal trap? Take a shotgun and blow your mind away. And I don't mean for an hour, or a weekend, I mean permanently. Plot your escape from Verbal Reality and run, flee, into the mystical silence that produces stillness and the practice of the presence of god.

Yes, dears, we're going to talk about meditation, the ultimate act of rebellion against society, "the system" and all of those other illusory things.

Meditation is not just social action: meditation is revolution. To become free - by any means necessary!

This is not some crummy "meditate so you'll be nicer to people" post. This isn't "meditate so you'll be calmer" post. This is "meditate so you can escape verbal confinement and roam free in the universe." Meditation as revolutionary politics, as anarchy, as Will and Life and Freedom. You know that your mind is a cage: that other people wrote the language you think in, that your conceptual frameworks were molded first by your parents, then by your schools, then by Aleister Crowley, Bill Burroughs and Swami Shivananada. Everything in words is garbage, ever more confining and sophisticated traps to keep you in the realm of experience to which words can meaningfully refer.

Understand? Even the people who seek to set you free in words are liars and thieves, polluting the human race's cognitive sphere yet further. All I can do with this trap is to clearly label it: "this is a trap because it adds words to your world."

If language is a virus from outer space, it's time you cured yourself. Destroy all thought.

This is not meaningless radical bullshit. Or, if it is, it's at least real meaningless radical bullshit. About 12 years ago I broke out of the mental trap, cut through the skein of thoughts and escaped into internal silence - a persistent state in which, if I am not actively thinking about something, there is only a silent light inside of my head, or an occasional AUM.

I credit that experience with saving my life: without the constant grinding down of language, the chatter, the psychic radio, the roaring evil nonsense which passes for our consciousness most of the time, it is possible to see things differently: life is beautiful, people are by-and-large kind, and most suffering is brief or something people can accommodate to. To recharge, one simply sits along and plays with the experience of being alive, makes some tea, has a snack, goes for a walk, plays with a puppy. Without a mind there to spoil every experience with it's constant stream of definition, doubt, negativity, appreciation, discussion - without the constant jump into meta-psychosis where every experience is rendered meaningless by being assigned an arbitrary "meaning" - why then, life is profoundly good. All of it.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Your mind has most likely trapped you, unless you're one of the free, and magic is not going to save you. At least, not the kind of magic you're most likely doing right now.

Setting Goals: Will and Purpose in Meditation

Real meditation is about liberation. First target: the tyrant of inner interruption. Let me make this clear: inside of you, there is a "seer" - something, which is at the moment implicitly "you" receives or has your experiences. You prick your finger with a pin, this "you" is what is aware that there is a feeling of pain. However, this "you" does not really have any idea of what it is, because it has been surrounded by a constant chaos for years.

You want an analogy? Imagine growing up for your whole life in a room with blaring disco music, bright flashing lights, and food which is randomly flavored with curry spices, tabasco sauce and cloves. Imagine growing up in that room from the moment of birth, never knowing stillness, quiet or nature.

That's what it's like to be your soul, born into a body in the culture of language, and worse, the culture of constant interruption and entertainment. There is no space to breathe, to be, unless you still (or kill) the mind that is the Psychic DJ, spinning records of self-deprication, alienation, and analysis. This is key: because that damn disco track has been playing since you were aware of being you, you think it is you. That's "introjection" in gestalt terms - confusing parts of the environment with parts of yourSELF because they are constant, and you are also constant. Imagine a world in which every person slaps themselves in the face, hard, mid way through every word of every sentence. Imagine the level of discourse, of understanding, in such a world.

That, my friends, is the world of the untamed mind, and unless you are liberated from it, this will sound insane.

Stop, right now. Do you have clear, unbroken awareness of what it is within you which receives all of your experiences: the five senses, the mind, the energy body, the chakras - what it is that turns all of that stuff into a sense of self, a sense of being? Can you look at the YOU within all of these things? Can you put your attention squarely on the Seer inside? The odds are not.

If not, and you want to fix it, here's how.

Sit. Dark, quiet room, or better, a sensory deprivation tank. You'll see a marked drop-off in sensory phenomena. Sitting still (try yoga as a preparation) is even better. Just sit. Now begin to catalog EVERYTHING in your awareness.

My right leg hurts. I'm thinking about my girlfriend.

I'm wondering what this exercise will produce.

What does he mean by "trap"?

There doesn't seem to be anything happening.

I hope my roomies don't come back yet.

This doesn't seem very much like a disco, or constantly slapping myself.

What you are seeing is the torrent of distractions which hides your true nature from you, and makes you a slave to what distracts you. This constant stream of stuff is NOT YOU any more than your hair is you. If you cut your hair, or dye it purple, something about you changes, but you are still you. So it is with the mind: if you shave it off to two millimeters long, people will see something has changed, but you will still be you. But rather than staring at the world through a tangle of foot-long fringe caked in mud and shit, you'll see the world clearly. You can cut your hair. You can change it's style, and remain you. Remember that in this next bit.

In the same way that your visual field becomes quiet when you close your eyes in a darkened room, you can cause your mind to become quiet. Combining lowered sensory inputs with lowered mind inputs can provide an environment suitable for coming to understand the basis of identity and perception, in the process becoming free.

But first, let's kill the mind, shall we? Tame the lion, bring the beast under control, sit firmly on the dragon seat.

Stopping the Mind

What if the voices in your head - not the spirit guides, but the ones you think of as "you" - simply stopped talking?

Think about that for a second (paradox noted). No internal dialog. No stream of critique. Nothing. You close your eyes, you put your fingers in your ears, and suddenly there's nothing. Stillness, darkness, silence, light. Resting serene within yourself, with no distractions. No sense of the passage of time, just pure being.

The only thing between this and you is your goddamned mind.

Now, do you want to talk about freedom and liberation by killing it?

(rolls up sleeves)

Ok, let's talk tactics.

This mind thing, it's just a bad habit?

Yes.

Try an experiment: poke yourself with something like a pencil, sharp enough to hurt, but not draw blood. Feel the sensation, then take a short break and think about how it felt, get some details.

Now try the same thing again, but in response to the pain, mentally (inwardly) chant "ow ow ow ow ow ow ow" or some other verbalization of pain. "OW OW OW OW OW."

Most likely you'll notice that the sensation of pain is less bad when your mind is filled with a symbol for the pain: by removing experience to the symbolic level, the intensity of the actual negative experience is reduced. That's the aetiology of the "mind syndrome." We form a layer between us and our experiences, negative first, but later all of them, and we call that defensive mechanism "the mind" and identify with it so completely that we mistake it for us. The noisy room with the flashing disco lights? We built it to get away from the negative experiences of childhood, of being a baby, of not having control, of being slaves to the whims of our parents, however well intentioned.

The mind forms as a defensive layer against real experience.

OK? Now let's try an orgasm. Watch it really closely: odds are that as you come, you'll enter an entirely non-verbal space for a short time. Nitrous oxide can do much the same thing.

That's non-verbal experience. Now, imagine being in that state - the no-internal-chatter experience of life - all of the time, without that goofy grin and the thrashing about, or the anesthetic effect on the brain. Note that you are still you at the point of orgasm, or on nitrous. There's continuity of identity, "little death" or not.

Meditation is a way of permanently delivering yourself into this wordless state of being.

So, what's the fastest way of getting past a defense mechanism? Some people will try, endlessly, to pick the locks - dismantle it a layer at a time, understand it, etc. Workable, but slow.

Why not just do what you're afraid of, realize it's not so bad, and then allow the defensive mechanism to fall off like a scab or a suit you no longer wear? A lusty virgin plays all kinds of games, dancing on the threshold of experience, and perhaps if the programming is bad enough (think: catholic school girls) becomes partly defined by defensive mechanisms built around not getting what you actually want out of life. It's a lot like that too: once you're having sex, you wonder what on earth you were waiting for, or at least many people do. Even if the first experience ain't great, crossing the abyss is useful in it's own right.

"The Mind" exists to attenuate our experience of being alive. Getting rid of "The Mind" is done fastest by allowing ourselves to acclimatize to having full-strength experiences, removing the fear which produces "The Mind."

Lose the mind, become more alive. Become more alive, lose the mind.

As a magician, this is the angle to work.

Slip into the gap between thoughts.

As a last aside, before we discuss practical technique, let's just note that between these words, there is a space. If you read them aloud, there is a gap between words. You could make a silent track, a 4'33" by taking an audio recording of speech and recording all the silence between the words. That's true for your mind too: there's an implicit gap between the words in the stream of thought. The normal experience is that the words are "figure" and the silence is "ground" - if this position is inverted, so that you are aware of silence as the primary experience, and words as the secondary experience, you're already most of the way there, even if there's still a lot of verbal junk.

The Three Point Exploding Head Technique

The first is Mantra meditation: you can read a book about this, but in a nutshell, pick a word (like "calm") and say it over and over again in your mind, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and phenomena. You'll find that things keep pulling you off course, so you're like "calm calm calm calm calm where's my cat? is that it throwing up? calm calm" and so on. This practice does two things:

It builds the "muscle" of returning your awareness to the place you want it: the mantra. It builds the awareness of how your awareness is not under your control: you feel the pull towards distractions. You get to know it.

The second technique is described in "Meditation, Tantra and Magic." You just sit. With your thoughts. With your emotions. It's like mantra meditation without the mantra. Just sit and have awareness of what is going on.

A typical interplay between these two techniques is thus:

"badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom SNAKE SNAKE SNAKE"

(see http://www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/ )

"I keep having these thoughts, and they're all in the emotional register of anxiety. I think I'd better take a look at that!"

[long period of sitting with pure awareness of the anxiety]

[insight: perhaps this isn't so important after all? - remember things like holotropic breathing can help trigger these insights too, indeed, that's why they exist - you can do this quiet awareness thing while doing techniques like that and it works really well]

"badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger"

This approach - switching periodically to directly face obstacles to your mind's annihilation - appears to work much better and faster than straight mantra meditation in terms of really getting to the core of the issue. It won't make you placid and peaceful as quickly, but it'll expose you to what the hell is really going on inside of you a hell of a lot faster. Try at least fifteen solid minutes of mantras before switching over and doing just-sitting. Then try flipping back and forth. Eventually, just drop the mantras completely. It's tough going if you're doing it right!

The third technique is sensory focus: sitting, or doing an activity, and treating your entire sensory field as a single unit. See, hear, feel, smell, taste, feel your muscles and skeleton, the pressure of the seat, all of it. A simple way to get started it to sit, and try and broaden your visual focus so you are aware of your entire visual field as a single piece, at once. Like having all peripheral vision, without the focal point darting from object to object. This kind of sensory broadening can be carried right across the senses too: first the whole visual field, then visual and audio as a single system, then take in the body too. But start with your strongest sense, either sight or sound for most people, usually sight. Or try and feel your whole body at once. Get away from the discrete and into the continuous.

These three approaches, taken together and practiced in cycles can rapidly result in access to breaks from the stream of thought, resulting in periods of internal silence, free from the yattering of the mind.

The big breakthrough: when your sense of identity shifts from the stream of words ("I am my thoughts") to the internal perceiver, the silent indweller ("I hear my thoughts sometimes").

Let me know if you get there :-)

Postscript

BEYOND DUALITY

Tantra, Equanimity and the Stability of Mind

Meditation: Why?

Before meditating, one should know exactly why one is sitting.

This seems like a simple requirement, but it is not. Are you sitting to stop suffering? That implies a belief that suffering can cease! That's a major claim and may align one with a religious tradition like Buddhism or Hinduism. How do we verify if those claims about the cessation of suffering are true? Is faith in other people's results appropriate? How do we know?

To generalize, are you sitting with the expectation of a result or benefit of some kind? If so, be explicit about why you think that meditation can produce that result. Similarly, if you are sitting to learn something about yourself, or your mind, or the world, know exactly why you think meditation can teach you that particular thing.

Knowing why you are sitting is the first step to dismantling the mental framework we build around the spiritual experiences we have. It clears the way to experiencing meditation directly, without constantly being focussed on a perceived goal.

Meditation: How?

There are many forms of meditation - nearly as many as there are forms of physical exercise. Different forms appear to produce startlingly different results in the early stages, and claims that they all wind up in the same place have to be verified personally or taken on faith.

Furthermore, it is very difficult (or perhaps impossible!) to tell what a silent, non-moving person is doing with their mind. Although people may describe the experience they are having, and the technique they are using, exactly the same way, how can we know for sure that they are actually doing exactly the same thing?

As an example, take "mantra" meditation: repeating a phrase over and over and over again in your mind, and returning to the phrase whenever you are distracted by a thought. Two people might do this exercise, one hearing the mantra in their own voice, the other hearing it in the booming voice of a cosmic being thundering the mantra into their ears! Will these two meditations have the same effect? How can we know? What about more subtle differences: hearing the mantra as if in the center of your skull and in your own voice, versus hearing it as if you were speaking very quietly? How can we know for sure that these differences are significant or not?

The technique we will be using is called "Nath Sitting." This name is arbitrary: the technique exists in many cultures and under many names. I have seen an exact description of this technique called "contemplation" by Christian mystics, but other Christian mystics use the word "contemplation" to mean an entirely different process: comparison of meditation techniques in language is difficult.

Nath sitting is done as so: one sits in a comfortable enough position, preferably with the spine reasonably straight, and attempts to have a relaxed awareness of all of the contents of the mind and sense organs simultaneously.

Now, here are the two distinctions from just sitting in an arm chair vegging out.

1. One does not think about anything if possible. If you notice you are thinking, try and return to a relaxed awareness: watching your self thinking is relaxed awareness. So is watching yourself not think. Trying to think about something is not relaxed awareness. If you are thinking, let it happen, but try and observe with relaxed awareness. If you are feeling, let it happen, do not interfere, and observe your feelings with relaxed awareness. Don't try to stop thinking or feeling: that effort is not relaxed awareness. Just sit.

2. One does not process sensory stimuli if possible. If there are background noises do not go off on mental riffs about them and their meanings. Just let there be noises. Try not to fall into studying individual sensations as objects of meditation, simply let the whole sensorium wash over your mind.

Compared to other meditation techniques, this approach may seem to be only very slightly different from simply sitting there. This is because in the Nath philosophy, enlightened awareness is only very slightly different from just sitting there, if there is any difference at all. A very gentle tool is used to investigate a very subtle, or perhaps nonexistent, distinction between the two states of "enlightened" and "unenlightened" awareness. A few minutes of this technique will have some effect but things really begin to get started after a few months of a solid hour or two a day. This may seem like a large investment of time compared to the more frequently recommended fifteen minutes morning and evening, and it is.

Meditation: What?

So what, exactly, is sitting there not doing anything other than having relaxed awareness of your senses, mind and body going to achieve? What is the point of such an exercise, and why will it (eventually, perhaps) improve the quality of our lives?

The answer is that it is nearly impossible to do the exercise as described.

Achieving a simple, relaxed awareness of all of our senses and our minds turns out to be very hard. Usually the first realization is that our "minds" are in fact dominated by a constant stream of thoughts forming an "internal dialog" or "stream of consciousness." Not everybody has this constant internal radio station of mental static, but most people do.

Another dominant phenomena is repressed emotions: we're on the go all the time, then we simply stop and find ourselves weeping as the sadness or pain we are staying busy to avoid come crashing home.

Just sitting doing nothing is actually a fairly active process because it gives time and space for lots of mental phenomena which are usually dammed up behind activities like work and recreation time to come to the foreground. Old flashes of memory, distracting thoughts we never normally have time to be distracted by, wild speculations... All of this stuff comes up, and simply clearing the backlog of "deferred maintenance" on the mind can take literally months of steady meditation. Nothing happens other than watching a stream of mental junk.

Eventually, the stream clears, and we begin to enter the territory.

Meditation: The Territory

The territory is where meditation begins to teach us things we did not already know about ourselves and the universe. There are some basic truths ("sitting being with myself is hard and upsetting sometimes") which which come almost universally, and quickly. However, "The Territory" is defined by four experiences.

1. Internal Silence

The "gap between thoughts" - the tiny moment of silence between the end of one mental word and the beginning of the next one - begins to be regularly glimpsed, or even enjoyed. Inner silence becomes a phenomena that one can produce at will with a little effort, or even an effortless state of mind and being.

2. Energy Awareness

Meditation brings to awareness input from senses other than the regular five or six, and you begin to sense your aura, the aura of other people around you, your chakras or energy flows, blockages in the energy flow in your own body or similar phenomena.

3. Spiritual Communication

Deep insights seemingly from beyond the human plane enter your awareness and begin to change your life. Perhaps you even see mental pictures of beings trying to communicate with you.

4. Emotional Catharsis

You notice patterns of feeling and thought which are usually hidden to you, such as repressed grief around the death of a parent or frustration with a career you thought was satisfying. You feel compelled to change.

Note that all of these phenomena are fairly common aspects of daily life which are simply magnified by putting awareness on them for long periods of time. Nothing new is being produced, but existing truths are being made more visible by holding relaxed awareness. Most or all of these things are experienced occasionally in flashes by many people: a premonition about the future, or a brief glimpse of halos of energy around trees... a moment of rapture at orgasm when the mind is stilled... meditation simply takes these phenomena and brings them closer to our daily awareness by a gradual process.

The Aura

The human aura is a fairly widely accepted piece of energy anatomy: a series of roughly spherical shells which surround the human body, each composed of more and more subtle matter, or substances like "prana" or "chi." The objective existence of the aura appears hard to prove at this time, but enough people have the experience of one (going back thousands of years) that it seems reasonable to use the term without further justification.

It is my experience that meditation changes our relationship with the aura. Long spiritual practice of any kind tends to build an awareness of the aura, and a rapid integration of the body and the energy field, resulting in increased physical capabilities, better health, and many other side benefits. For whatever reason, constant mental noise seems to interfere greatly with the perception of the aura and integration of the aura and the physical body, and meditation cures that problems. Many people, particularly those with strong hatha yoga practices, are only a small step from a high level awareness of the integrated mind/energy/body and often sitting meditation is the missing next step to that state.

Both the "Golden Dawn" (a victorian occult society) and the ancients who worshiped Mithras identified the zodiacal wheel strongly with the human aura. Not all schools of thought agree with this mapping, but I do. In the old images of Mithras, a muscular god is seen emerging from a "cosmic egg" which is inscribed with the symbols of the zodiac.

In high energy environments, such as a retreat setting, a magical circle, or a gathering of adepts, the level of the aura which corresponds to the zodiac can be seen and felt. It serves as a receptor for planetary influences (and therefore is the real basis for astrology) and also governs the expression of a lot of "fate" or "karma."

I cannot speak much more for this experience and its uses at this time, but drawing a zodiacal circle around you while you meditate, facing towards the position of your natal sun (i.e. your sun sign, but please be more precise if you can) can be a smooth and rapid method of extending your awareness in radical new directions.

The Fullness (and Emptiness) of Being

The human condition in its full reality is neither complex nor simple. Saints and sages from many traditions proclaim "you are god" or "you are pure awareness" in many different variations. Meditation is one key to beginning to tread the path to the discovery that in your current life this is already true. Discovering the reality of your aura is important because it breaks the cultural belief system which is so prevalent in the west: that you are your body, that the mind is a product of the brain, and that death is as permanent for the self as it is for the body. Furthermore, the aura corresponds closely to the "soul" and (in my experience) contains much of the "shadow" - those parts of us which are potential, but not manifest. If we are male, our aura will tend to be female and vise versa. Similarly, if we are young or old, the aura or soul contains the potential for the traits we had in youth, or will in old age. It is the well from which we draw our beings.

Tantra provides a set of approaches to integrating the new phenomena that meditation reveals rapidly and easily relative to meditation alone. The creation of circumstances and contexts which facilitate insight and integration is the core of tantra. We are already our aura, our chakras, our souls, but we realize it not. We are narrowed and limited to a certain set of frequencies and experiences, and tantra provides tools to reverse this. The awareness created by Nath Sitting or other forms of meditation can be brought into ritual circumstances to quickly ripen understanding of what already is. This is the process of magic or ritual: creating circumstances which quickly allow initiation and insight into the real condition of our being! The stable mind, relatively deconditioned by sitting practice, can quickly see, understand and assimilate new phenomena which are made visible by unusual circumstances like visits to a shrine, a puja celebration and other places where energy is focussed on enlightenment. This dynamic, meditative awareness brought to ritual activities like worship of murtis or sacred dance produces rapid transformation. All of this is tantra.

Furthermore, the stable mind, trained not to flinch or distract itself, begins to see the roots of being-ness: what it is to be alive, what it is to be an individual, what in the self is eternal, and what is passing. All of this is eternally present, but our focus is narrowed to obscure it, creating the limited sense of self we so typically experience. Samarasa ("equanimity") is the quality of self which comes from the realization of what the self is, and is not.

At the start, we asked questions about "why meditate" - and this is basically why. Meditation reveals our life as it is by reducing the distractions and changing how we process sensory data. It gives glimpses, and perhaps full visions, of the Self, the Divine Indweller, and the Soul. All of these are notional phenomena unless and until one experiences one, after which they become as obvious: always was there, always will be. All of that is here already, and meditation is how we learn to recognize it. No more, no less. You stare at being with an open mind until you realize what you are seeing.

The final wall - the "fourth wall" if you like - is between us and other people. We live our entire lives behind the screen which separates self from other, and it, too, is illusion. We are all one, all co-create each other through a continuous dance of perception, of karma, of gain and loss. Meditation reveals the dance of interbeing in a new light, one which reveals the entire play as a grand pleasure, an adventure, a game fit for god itself. I myself struggle to hold that view, having stabilized many of the earlier ones through my own practice, but I know that continued practice will make it possible.

Meditation is observation of what is. What is is only god. Meditation is observation of god being god. All perception has that quality, but meditation is special in it's intention: to see what is true, beneath the great divine drama, and eventually to live as a conscious participant in creation, right along side all the other god. To enjoy the bliss of the creation as the creator entering into his and her own works. Some call it living from the divine source: I call it truth and wisdom.

I don't know why things are as they are. I do know that we suffer and die only in some part, and in other parts of our being we are eternally free, joyful, hopeful and optimistic. Meditation is one way to bring the wholeness of your soul to your attention and to experience that joy and bliss.

But don't take my word for it, or anybody else's. If you believe other people's assumptions it is hard to discover your own inner spiritual authority, your own kernel-of-truth bullshit detector, your own will in the world. I've painted a picture based on my own experience, written words to try and communicate how I think the meditative experience works but only the part which you verify for yourself is reality. All else is hearsay.

Study your own experience and be your own authority. Nothing is real beyond your own experience.

SHIVANATH'S NICKEL GUIDE TO TANTRA

In which Shivanath takes a quick stroll through the understructures of Tantra with particular focus on stripping away the delusions which have built up around tantra and sex, orientalism, and Buddhism.

I'm a Nath. I'd been a practicing tantric sorcerer for about ten years before I became one, and I can't say that it changed very much in my outlook, but that's my lineage.

Almost all of the available material on Tantra is bunk. Most of the translations were done by non-sorcerers who were incapable of picking apart metaphor from literal description, were not deeply enough versed in Indian psychological and magical models, and were influenced by the early translations which miscast the entire field of study.

First, let's deal with the basics.

Tantra in Cultural Context

Tantra is a branch of Hinduism. Tantric Buddhism is more or less Hinduism with a gloss of Buddhism added. Vajrayana Buddhism is a grossly sexist form of Tantra which really doesn't seem to offer female adepts any social roles, and is nearly entirely staffed by male teachers, which should make you suspicious right there.

Tantra therefore operates in the general framework of esoteric hinduism: reincarnation, karma, the notion of the individual soul seeking a better relationship with the soul of the universe, chakras, energy bodies, gurus and the rest of the system. Tantra is "antinomian" - believing that there are no laws. However it is not undisciplined, and any tantric adept with addictions, or who can be controlled by other people, is not an adept. The discipline is self imposed, but it is ruthless and absolute.

A Brief Overview on the Practical Business of Tantra

Tantra can be divided into technique, philosophy, practice and action. Much of the technique is standard magical stuff found anywhere: banishings, invocations etc. I've found it works a little better to use Indian-style banishings etc. in a tantric context than, say, the LBRP, but the difference is fairly small most of the time. YMMV.

Philosophy is very simple in essence: whatever "enlightenment" is, it is visible right here and right now if you're willing to look there. It can't come and go - it must already be here. Now, how to notice it? This philosophy winds up in some strange practices: doing things which are supposed to be distracting or grounding, and not being distracted or grounded. Sex, eating meat, getting drunk, working a day job, having low or high social status etc. Implicit within this is the idea of reaching enlightenment while still having active karma. This is an explosive idea: normally enlightenment is said to be reached by exhausting one's karma. Finish the game, get to zero credit, zero debit and walk off the board into Samadhi.

Tantra suggests that one can be enlightened while still having karma - still having a social role, obligations, even desires. It simply requires one to be master of that karma - able to destroy it at will, able to control it's expressions. One must still master karma, but does not have to annihilate it to do so. In this respect, tantra is about taming and domesticating the experience of the universe, rather than destroying it. The steps are still the steps of Yoga, but the goals are a little different at an aesthetic and therefore technical level. This philosophy is often paraphrased as "learning to enjoy the created universe in the same way which god enjoys it" and I don't know of a better expression of the heart of the matter than that.

Practice is simple. Start with meditation. Learn how to "surf" the emotions - to feel the discomfort and emotional pressure which meditation brings up, but rather than hiding out in the white light and the roaring stillness, camp out in your anger and your pleasure and your pain. You sit, you feel rage at your parents, you sit with it. You don't judge it, you don't try and get away from it, you don't try and mask it. You don't ask it to leave. You just be there with whatever it is. You do this for everything: bliss and horror. If you're not feeling the horror, you've either cleared all your repressed emotions, or you haven't hit them yet.

It's in there, trust me.

Meditation is Goalless. NO ALTERED STATES!!!

One simply sits and watches. Once the mind is solidly established in that practice and has stopped trying to censor things at a gross level, so you can watch, say, a curious thought about incest or rape or theft or murder and not really be upset to see that your karma includes such ideas, then you can begin to take it out into the world. You can begin to hold the same kind of awareness of "stuff just is what it is" while performing activities.

Action taken from this perspective - of just being what you are - can be insanely and destructively dangerous. Here's why. Most people are a finely counterbalanced network of drives and repressions. Dismantling the repressions without dismantling the drives can easily produce monsters. Here's the key: the fundamental drives are not bad. Sex, food, good work, nice friends and so on - all that stuff is great. But the drives get twisted: your parents say "sex is evil" so you wind up with a block, and behind the block builds anger.

Vent the anger at it's target: your parents and their beliefs about sexuality and you're golden. Vent it at your spouse or your sex partner, and you're an asshole. The skill and grace of tantric practice is knowing how clean you are accurately - what you can express purely, as-it-is, and what you're still tied up in self destructive knots about. There are arts to this too: what to vent, what to burn, what to contain for future expression. You learn to "smell" material which is ready to blow, and to find safe ways of doing it.

Without that skill and discretion, tantra of any significant depth is a cheap and easy way to destroy your life.

I believe, although I have no first hand evidence to support this, that once there is essentially nothing left which has not been opened up in this way, one enters a "superconducting" state - zero internal resistance - at which point one simply exists and acts.

Sounds a bit like Zen, doesn't it?

Shortcuts

Tantra includes a set of practices which help people get to a frictionless state. Being pure divine consciousness in the bodies of hairless apes, we have a lot of issues related to the ape body. Apes are afraid of death, obsessed with sex and status, terrified of losing and so on. Full library of monkey problems!

The consciousness learns to flinch away from the ape. "No, I'm PURE MIND!" Tantra therefore gets people back into the habit of just being what they are - divine consciousness incarnate as an ape - this involves cutting through culture. One cannot understand what a thing is, if one already knows what it is. Sex, for example. What is it really?

Strip away the cultural context of sex. Put some apes in a room, and give them license to do what they please. Retain the awareness which was built through the meditation - see the desires as they are, not as you would like them to be. Fairly soon, inspite of all the fun and games, it becomes apparent that the SEX thing is actually fairly simple: it's about reproduction, tribal bonding, power, and buried deep within, there's a spirit of companionship, of god-as-ape taking pleasure in the simple joy of fucking.

Strip off the culture and there's something rather touching underneath.

Cut a little deeper, and the reproductive aspect comes into focus: sex contains the antidote to death! Reproduction for the body is a shot at immortality! This is the beginning of unmaking the distinction between the goals of the body, and the goals of the soul - if the body understands that it, too, is pure consciousness".

Again, I haven't gone far in that direction. But Goraknath - codifier of Hatha Yoga, inventer of Laya Yoga and Kundalini Yoga we're told - is said to be physically immortal and living in a cave somewhere in India.

There are a lot of short cuts. Most of them boil down to "if you're obsessed with something, why not put it in a lab context, study the hell out of it, and then figure out what it really is and why you want it." Most desires drop away when examined that way. Disassemble a complex aggregate desire which has been hard to satisfy into the three or four primal desires which compose it. Satisfy or release each individually. The few which do not go are typically very worthy and easy to satisfy.

It's the process which produces the apparent madness, the antinomian indulgence in the depths of human nature, the eating of feces and liking it. All of that stuff is just ways of seeing forbidden desires in a ritual context which allows them to be denuded of the glitter of being forbidden.

Nothing is forbidden. Do you really want to fuck a nun in the ass while a cardinal watches? Or did you just want to reclaim your sexuality and experience it on your own terms, not the terms of the Catholic Church? Ok, very good, now go back to your house, buy the wife some long-stemmed red roses, and have a good night. That's the real spirit of the thing right there: most of the basic material is very clean and very loving. It's the repression that produces the anomalies and the fearsome perversions.

Bliss

One side effect of all of this is bliss. It usually starts around the process of realizing that one is both male and female, and that the two can be unified in a variety of fun and interesting ways, but it can start around food, or love, or a bunch of other ways. It's basically a realization that you can be blissful regardless of what you are doing or feeling. It's pretty cool but not that informative.

I wouldn't give it up for the world, mind you.

It's a great gift. Afterwards, everything is sort of pleasant, even the stuff which really sucks. However, it's easy to mistake this feeling of well being, which is still rooted in the physical body, with the BLISS OF CONSCIOUSNESS which is a much deeper thing. Or is it?

There's only one way to find out. Spending a lot of time in bliss. Poking around at it, turning it one way and the other, trying to see what it is and where it comes from.

To study bliss by being blissful is a high tantra. One comes around again to eating, drinking, sleeping, fucking, and all the other arts and parts of life, but enjoys them so much more because the seeds of suffering are largely toasted and sterile and discarded. If you don't make yourself suffer, it's remarkable how little suffering there is in the world around you.

It's not a perfect world. But the world is much, much closer to perfect than the crappy self image - self myth - we start out with. Perhaps it is a perfect world... and a little more bliss... will show me how to see that...

It's important to remember that you can still fry at every stage. Bliss is wonderful - but if you're an asshole - it can collapse. You can blow it by creating hatred in your own being. You can blow it by lusting and hurting people who are drawn to your balance. You can do all kinds of stuff which creates bad ripples in the force which kick you out of paradise.

Just don't! Basic goodness, basic goodness. All of that Vajrayana mayhem? Advanced practitioners. Stabilize the bliss and study it and, if you find that to maintain it, you have to bend the rules of the world a little, please do it with grace and love. That's the tantric way.

Blood sacrifice, death cults, etc

If death disturbs your consciousness, if you shy away from it, buy a rabbit and a book on skinning rabbits. Kill it, skin it, cook it, eat it, wear it. If that wasn't enough, do it again.

Do it too often, one day you'll be the rabbit, seeing the experience from the inside.

Better to pray to Kali and ask her, if you dare, to help you with your problems around death, ask to be allowed to live happily and well, because your meditation is teaching you all you need to know at a fast enough rate.

Right? Do you see the model? The universe brings whatever you need to learn from, or you reach out for it yourself. The more you learn in meditation, the less in manifestation. It's critically important to understand why all of the darkness and death worship and orgies and the like exist: rapid ways of puncturing the garbage bags of the unconscious, spreading the junk all over the floor, picking out the useful stuff, and burning the rest to nothingness.

Why Bother?

The core of tantra is the theological understanding that the universe was created by intelligent entities which want us to have fun in it. All the conditioning and the karma and all the rest of that stuff can be let go of, just as you can allow your mother to tidy your room, if you don't care about the lego models on the floor.

Your life is nothing but a hill of little yellow plastic bricks that you dance around as if it was the Goddess.

If you're willing to let Her sweep it away, and put herself in the center, she will. It may still look like yellow plastic bricks to everybody else, but you'll know. Oh yes, my precious you'll know.

UNDERSTANDING MAGIC

On the Magic of the Modern Naths

What's In A Name?

Magic is a bad word. Nearly everything associated with the word "magic" leads to misunderstandings of the subject: parlor tricks, guys in funny robes muttering in strange languages, Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. All these things are instances of magic, but magic is a great country. To understand magic by these fragments is like understanding France through pastries and the Eiffel tower.

Partly to cut through this baggage, I will be using the term "sorcery" frequently, mostly to refer to "getting something done by non-ordinary means." You can read it all as "magic" if you like.

The Social Construction of Words

A dog is only called a dog because we all agree that it is a dog, and that it is called that.

In some cultures, a lot of the things we call dogs - Paris Hilton's carpet slipper, for example - might not be recognized as such. In other cultures our definition of dogs as pets rather than food animals would be similarly puzzling. Both the boundaries of the object, and the definition of that object are both socially constructed. We say "this is a dog" but they say "no, dogs are larger and brown and aggressive." We see the carpet slipper and the feral hound as two examples of one species, and they see two entirely different animals. Who's right? We might argue that it's Canis lupus familiaris but we're appealing to Science, which also has some socially constructed aspects. Those words mean only what other people from our social group construe them to mean, regardless of the objectivity of the phenomena to which the words refer. There is no way out of this maze: even if phenomena are objective (which they are not!) words are completely relative.

"When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." (H. Dumpty)

There's a need for this kind of pop-pomo linguistics because without it, magic will revert to being defined by a series of examples, which one person can define one way ("that's magic") and another defines another way ("that's just a coincidence"). While (nearly) all magic is subject to attack-by-denial-of-agency in this way, a properly constructed definition of magic is proof against this predation by petty tinkerers.

What is Magic?

Magic is whatever everybody involved in the conversation agrees magic is.

Now, this is a remarkably obvious and unhelpful definition in all cases except the practical one: this definition works. If I perform some act, and I say "I did this by Sorcery" and you say "No, that's just Chance!" then we are in two different universes of meaning: in my universe, there is pattern and causality, and in yours, only lowly chaos, unordered events open to any interpretation. This argument will not be resolved without new evidence!

I'd like to point that out again: the assignment of causality between two events, like "smallpox is caused by an organism" versus "smallpox is caused by invisible hobgoblins" is purely a personal choice and only rarely in magical practice is there enough available evidence to be completely sure.

If we all agree "smallpox will not touch us if we get rid of all the hobgoblins" and then we get rid of them, and nobody gets sick, this is the best case of practical magic: we make a plan, we act on the plan, the plan works, and we assign our success to magic. "We" is the social group which performed or knew about the magical act. We is the tribe, and almost all magic is performed relative to a tribe. If the tribe rules "magic" then it is magic. If not, it's just coincidence.

This is the big key to understanding the fuss-and-nonsense about "magic" - each different tribe has a local definition, ranging from the Western Rationalist perspective ("stuff and nonsense, except for Science") through to, say, African Shamanism ("that car goes fast because of the strong spirits!"). When these local, tribal definitions are not in harmony you get "reality wars" - places where conversation and narrative communication break down because of clashing definitions of words and cause-and-effect relationships. It is hard to talk coherently with a person who has a different model of cause-and-effect to your own: their narratives make no sense at all!

This is the first good diagnostic for detecting sorcery: localized breakdowns in cause-and-effect relationships which make communication and storytelling with people outside the tribe difficult. This indicates that something transpired which is only "real" inside the tribal group: local reality has diverged far enough from cultural norms to be called magical reality.

Baby Steps in Sorcery

To a baby, the entire world seems very god-filled and mysterious and beautiful and terrible. Enormous beings of unlimited power are responsible for every part of your survival and experience: your parents are god and goddess, lords of creation, makers of you. This is the universal imprint to which magic returns again and again and again: children playing in a reality they do not understand, overseen by enormous forces they do not control which they hope and pray are benevolent. To be a magician is to stay a child, living in the unknown, learning more each day about a universe it seems like you will never understand. The cheese of Televised Consensus Reality is Swiss, shot full of holes: the New Age, the Snake Handlers, the Scientologists, the Hindu and Buddhist nations, Islam, Fundamentalist Christianity. Everybody who appeals to a higher power, to a notion of reality above and beyond the level of Fox News is a magician of one sort or another with an alternative model of reality, and access to alternative models of cause-and-effect.

"This Happened Because Baby Jesus Is Angry With Your Sorry Ass" is a magical narrative, ascientific, heinously heretical, arbitrary and childish. This is magical thinking in the raw: vile blasphemies against common sense and good reason in the name of a god who would almost certainly disavow all interest in the situation.

That quality: "this makes no fucking sense and is completely wrong by all reasonable reference points" is a second good diagnostic for detecting sorcery. Anybody who lives in a world like that, even for a short while, is a magician of some kind, hacking cause-and-effect if only in their own minds. Magic is about redefining reality around your goals, your desires, your needs, your dreams, your ideas.

Sorcery is about getting your way in the world.

"I did it MY way" is the cry of the solitary magician. "WE do it OUR way" is the cry of the magical tribe.

My house. My rules. Be the parent of your own magical self!

Brass Tacks: Bell, Book and Candle

Much of the stuff of sorcery is siddhis - minor powers which are developed by spiritual practice and meditation. If you can see auras and feel other people's chakras, you can sometimes detect when someone is lying, or foretell short term events, or get little visits from spirit guides (your own and other's). You can communicate with astral beings by telepathy and ask for favors, sometimes push luck and happenstance by will alone and so on. Humans all have all kinds of capabilities, and mostly spend their lives with almost all of their capabilities fully absorbed in the material game we all play. When you begin to break away from that game, powers of various kinds just come. The New Age scene is full of people with minor capabilities which would be totally unremarkable in any shamanic culture, but stick out like sore thumbs here.

None of that shit really matters. You can develop it all in a few years of hard work if you want it, and it'll probably just come to anybody who's serious about living their life.

No. Real magic starts when you get ready to slide sideways in reality, crossing over from one form of existence to another. When you are ready to allow your core definitions of reality be redefined according to your own will and the will of god, you're ready to be a real magician, a sorcerer.

The magic circle, that most potent archetype, is completely real. It represents the personal reality of the sorcerer, the human aura's projective surface on which reality-as-we-know-it is shone. The Magic Circle is Plato's Cave, and we, that chained-down god, amused into captivity by the show on TV in our open-doored prison cell.

Sorcery is the remote control on reality, the game controller on life. Punch in the cheat codes and the game changes. But at every step, you find yourself surrounded by peers, others playing the same game as you, like-meeting-like on the open field.

On Angels, Demons and Other Beings

From time immemorial magicians have conjured demons: creatures of darkness, evil, hatred, below-bestial lust, delighting in the murder of hope. Why?

Similarly, consorting with Angels and Gods is an ancient sport among mages. Why?

None of these creatures is different in basic structure from you or I at an essential level: each is a created entity, just like a horse or a dog or a person. They may reside primarily in the same place you go when you have a dream, a vision or a nightmare, but rest-assured that you are as unreal to them as they are to you: one can approach the reality of nearly any being if one has the skill and agility. If you have a recurring dream of kissing an angel or being groped by a demon, night after night after night, that it is only a dream matters little: it is "real enough" to transform your life.

Whether seen with the mind's eye, in dreams, in visions, in dark glass mirrors, or as apparitions it matters no more than talking to a person face to face, by email, phone, fax or postal mail: communication with real entities occurs. They are as real to you as you are to them, and you can usually decide how "real" you want to make those kinds of phenomena. If you can experience telepathic connections with other human beings, why not non-human beings, creatures from other planes and so on?

Obviously, care and discretion must be exercised. You don't want, by and large, to hang out with crack dealing gun toting hoodlums to whom you are a wallet on legs - but if you want to buy crack, that's where you go. You're sick, you see a doctor. You're soul sick? Go see an angel, by whatever means necessary.

The Hack

The reality you are in is already magical reality to beings other than you: your talents, your mind, your body - those things are magical. It is your familiarity, your accumulated habituation to being your self which produces the illusion of the mundane world you live in. Because the inside of your aura has the same basic properties every day, you assume that this is the "real world" and because the surrounding culture tells you the "real world" is non-magical, you believe them.

However, the upper chakras or sephirot (energy centers) control the parts of the psychic body which shape the aura and the reality projected within it. As one gains conscious control of those energy centers, it becomes possible (nay, easy) to simply decide that reality will change it's flow, events will happen themselves into a different pattern, and it will soon seem normal too.

This interim phase: the gap between the decision, and that new reality becoming normalized, is magic. It's the shifting, the crossing, that is magical. When you die, it's possible "you" will incarnate on a different plane of existence: perhaps a world where you (and everybody else) can fly, or manifest food from thin air. Those worlds exist, or at least are written about very often. Somewhere within your soul there is the ability to exist and manifest in a world that works in such magical ways.

Sorcery, in essence, is finding out how your soul could operate in such a world, and then opening a bubble of that reality in your present environment, so that you can start exercising those unusual-for-this-place capabilities.

This is The Hack: to use the full powers of your awakened, expanded soul in a way which revolves around opening bubbles of alternate reality around yourself and perhaps your magical tribe: giving reality permission to soften, be changed, and harden again. To shift local reality in the direction in which your desires are possible, then to experience them. Note that order: first move reality such that it is possible, or inevitable... then experience it. Manifesting things directly in the mundane reality is possible, but very, very hard...

If you stay in that place of new potentials indefinitely, however, it is no longer magical. It's just normal again: a higher level normal. It's the shifting which is magical - the understanding that local reality is defined by consensus, and can be affected profoundly by your own intentions and the intentions of those people around you.

As you shift your sense of reality, you will tend to attract and be attracted to people and places with compatible realities: what starts as an individual decision about the nature of reality rapidly takes on the appearance of a "hard reality" as you find yourself surrounded by others with those beliefs. This is "planar travel" - moving between different tribes with different normative realities, or being drawn across the globe to places that are resonant with the reality you want to feel. Not everybody exists in the same world and although we do seem to share the same physical space, countless billions of people will simply never meet.

Secrecy, Boundaries and Magical Orders

The separation between one consensus reality and another is maintained on many planes of existence simultaneously. The "causal" level is most notable: cause-and-effect explanations do not travel well between realities. One group will say "it was the holy spirit that brought us together" while another will say "well, it was just one of those parties." It might be the same phenomena, but the local conventions and names and narrative styles form a divisive "hull" on that world-view. The linguistic level is an easy way to see boundaries between realities. There are also often energy membranes that reflect the emotional and psychic levels of those same divisions.

Secrecy is another powerful way of partitioning reality: "To Know, To Will, To Dare and To Keep Silent" goes the old magician's saying. Silence has many purposes, but one of the primary ones is to partition the local reality of the magician fiercely: if one simply never speaks of magic, then essentially one's magical tribe is a tribe of one. This approach gave people a great sense of power and importance but at some cost in sanity and balance: it matters little how much you can bend and warp reality in the privacy of your own temple. It's taking your show out on the road that counts.

A "magical order" or a society of magicians is typically defined by a large body of shared secrets that construe the "hull" - the boundary - of the Order. Within that hull reality often has radically different properties - when all present are members, and the door is locked, consensus reality can be drawn far, far back without seeming ill effects. Anybody involved in such a group should realize, however, that the fluidity of reality is a product of the agreement of all present that it should be so, and the relative rigidity of reality outside of the temples of the order likewise: we are all god, and all of equal "power."

This is key: even the most pig headed being is also god. Their wishes for reality have equal weight to yours, from the god's eye perspective. All divine children are loved and respected equally by their cosmic parents, perhaps with some exceptions for the exceptionally ill-behaved. Just because you get to fly around on the astral plane or make bubble worlds where nearly all the confining laws are gone, don't start thinking of yourself as qualitatively better than other people. You are not. They have collectively willed the mundane world into existence for reasons we may not even be able to guess at, and we exist within or alongside that creation.

Only a fool would think that we are lords and masters, and they are slaves and servants.

Of Technique and Purpose

The odds are very strong that you incarnated in this life for a definite reason. The most fundamental reason to do magic is to attain the goals and objectives that drew you to incarnate in the first place.

The shock of incarnation is huge: the pain of birth, the limitation of infancy, the stress of childhood disappointment, the drag of age, gravity, the passage of time. The upside of incarnation is pretty fantastic too, but using magic to cushion the shocks of the world is no bad thing in the general case. If you came to be an artist, a performer and a healer, keeping yourself in tip-top shape by living in a reality in which your body is almost always fabulously well is no bad thing unless there are specific reasons not to do it. Magic to that effect might be symbolized as a high energy yoga practice, a special diet, an amulet, a practice like herbal baths, or just an attitude towards your body. The creation is of a field of intention, and beyond that, a field of definition. That is magical in and of itself.

Tactical magic tends to be a bit more concrete, rather like the difference between interior decor and jewelry. A small local magical act to fix a specific problem is only a focus, a concentration, of a more general understanding of reality: a tiny body decoration rather than an ambient environment. If you need NOT to get another parking ticket until the next grant check appears, a little shamanic work to get that end is only an aspect of a more general "everything here is going well" field.

But the techniques, whatever they might be, really are just that: they're triggers, ways of harnessing the innate power of an individual human being's manifestation engine, incarnation engine, life engine. Ways of tapping into what we all do all the time unconsciously to co-create the world we live in. There are some exceptions: invocations in angelic languages, for example, tend to work not so much because the magician thinks they will, but because angels hear their names, read intentions and can choose to respond... one of the few cases in which magic is rather more objective than subjective.

Magic is nothing less than the creation of reality at will. We are all doing it all the time, but the reality we choose to create most of the time is defined to be concordant with the ambient reality of the planet, the nation and the social group we are in. Taking responsibility for tuning your own reality for the effect and lifestyle you choose is a big step but that's really all there is to magic. True magic, or sorcery, is in realizing that we have this capability, that we use it all the time to create the "normal" world, and that we can optionally become conscious and capable of action on those levels of reality, redefining our world at will and pleasure.

This is my understanding of the Nath Way, the Nath Sampradaya. It is a society of beings who, understanding that they are in some sense god, and fully vested members of the cosmic family, choose to live as they will, using intention, will, ritual, magic, and every other aspect of life as means to the end: enjoying the universe that god created with us.

ENTERING BLISS

Through Integrating Male and Female

It was, bluntly, driving me nuts. So I'd read my Jung, and had some tantric technique, and I'd studied psychotherapy as both art and science, so I figured that I'd just, well, manifest whatever I was looking for from these girls internally within myself. I figured it couldn't just be sex, or I'd be drawn towards people who I was more likely to get laid by - it had to be something fundamental in their energy that I was looking to use to fill some kind of lack.

Alchemy, right? Solve et Coagula. But I needed something to solve. So I went looking for the aspect of myself which was those women: some facet which was wild and unbridled and sexual and indecisive and neurotic and insane and open and friendly and welcoming. But mainly hot. And I discovered that I did have that aspect of me, very strongly: it was who I had been often in past lives as a woman.

I was attempting to have sex with myself.

So I did: I started to become that aspect of me, in private, in my meditations. Tried to remember what it had been like, to feel that energy in myself. With some practice, it became possible to have both that energy, that wild-female-power and my own somewhat repressed but strong male energy in my body at the same time.

It took a while, about a year and a half, but using this system in my masturbatory fantasies eventually balanced the two energies. I became equally comfortable with either set as "me" but remained as myself in daily life. Then one day, I began to realize that I could produce an essentially sexual bliss at will simply by allowing energy transfer to occur between the two.

I didn't have to be masturbating, or doing the visualizations. It just was there, any time I wanted it, as much as I would allow! That changed things!

Wow! That Changed Things!

I could not just feel like a hot girl when I wanted to, but actually feel like I was both having sex with a hot girl, and feel like I was a hot girl having sex. Sexual bliss on a plate. To be honest I was pretty careful not to do too much of the infinite-orgasms thing: I was more-or-less certain that there would be side effects, I just didn't know them at the time. I experimented some, but chose not to experience that as my default state of consciousness.

Instead, I merged them, this male and female, into an old, settled, married couple: removed the tension of separation and the bliss of union and allowed a basically independent state to emerge, one where I no longer needed anybody else's sexual energy as an input to my own, as is so often the motivation for sex, not just the pleasure, but a direct energetic rebalancing - young men and women, so strong on one side or the other of the force, need it to remain psychologically balanced - not just for pleasure, but to balance the kundalini. So I kinda took myself out of the game. Girls were still interesting as people, as friends, but I didn't really need sex any more. I still had relationships, still had sex and enjoyed it a lot, but my tolerance for BS had dropped way down because I was no longer psychically dependent on external sources of feminine energy.

Then I noticed I could catalyze the state in other people, and this made them a lot more fun to sleep with, because, well... if I went into the internal bliss, and they did the same thing, then you had these two bliss being bodies... well...

It Was A Good Thing.

However, without really heavy prior practices, people didn't seem to be able to hold it, so that again was a relatively short lived experimental phase. These days I tend to keep the energy down to the point where I feel a little better than I would without it running, and don't get entangled in relationships I don't want to, am not "thunderstruck by these tissues" and am comfortable and happy. I just don't really have the context to really let loose and I'm not sure that anybody really does: the celibate, or householder path really does seem to be more common than wild tantric orgies and with good reason. It's a lot easier to arrange.

I don't know why it's so hard. It's a shame.

One thing I have noticed, over the years, is that there's a lot of moral responsibility in being sexually integrated. The ego still has desires which it projects or which really are inherently in other people ("really" in ego speak, as it were.) Perhaps I botched the integration and it should have taken care of a lot more of my emotional needs, or perhaps those required other integrations which I'm still working out, who knows? But being able to generate internal sexual rapture, or manifest very strong, but internally balanced male or female energy at will, can make one a hell of a manipulator.

If I walk around with the rapture even slightly on, girls take notice in a way which is both appealing and frightening. Appealing because, well, it's nice to be noticed, to be wanted. As a guy, being able to draw looks from stunning women was a massive ego boost. Frightening because from my perspective, they're moths drawn to a flame which will certainly not help them much, and quite possibly do them some harm. They're certainly not going to do the integration practices, and contact with integrated energy is at that point basically heroin. Da Free John style addictive sexuality heroin, possibly. Here, honey, get a lot of my bliss field!!! Now drop 'em.

I just never go there. Not even once, thank god.

I think I'd be opening up a lot of temptation for very little reward: there's an ego need = residual self esteem issues from my teenage years, but no actual sexual need. I'd be using sex with out-of-my-class women to salve a twenty year old wound. Not healing, but only damaging excess would lie in that direction. Be aware that the internal sexual integration doesn't automatically free one from all forms of sexual conditioning and that those other forms can still be woefully dangerous!

STAYING HIGH

On the Longevity of Psychedelic Consciousness

College works because it's a relatively value-free space: four years, external sources of money, little decision making beyond which courses you do, and massive, huge, incredible social license.

Plus the school administration giving your life a basic shape and purpose.

With all that stuff as energy inputs lots of people are capable of being wonderful. Then they get out into the real world and fall back on the coping skills and patterns of their parents, and the wonderful game falls apart. People gradually go offline without some form of strong spiritual practice, be it meditation or psychedelics.

But psychedelics cause damage. Not much damage, not significant, but over years unless people know how to stay psychically healthy they begin to pick up more and more scars and bruises. Burned in bits of trip memory, or wounds that got opened up and never quite closed, stuff like that. It's hard to stay fully healthy as a long term user of psychedelics, and most of the brightest, shiniest people seem to trip only rarely past about thirty, with certain incredibly obvious and powerful exceptions.

"Getting the magic back" requires raising energy. Spiritual energy, you know... juice. The kind of openness to god, to each-other's hearts etc. which is easy, oh-so-easy as youngsters, but is so much more difficult and complex when relationships begin to presage babies, and mortgages make more sense than renting. How do you love everybody when you've got this kid who's so much more important to you than the rest of the world combined, really, when it comes right down to it?

I'm not saying that it can't be done, but I am saying that the main obstacles are spiritual, not material or even emotional. Extraordinary power and circumstances need to combine to keep that kind of openness to the world going in large communities which aren't made up entirely of mid-20s or younger folks.

The actual dynamics I've had described to me in some detail by 60s veterans of the consciousness movement.

They basically suggested to me that there's a curve: time on one axis, state of awareness on the other.

In the early stages, the drugs rapidly lift you to a plateaux. People can stay there with occasional psychedelic refreshers for about five years, maybe six or even ten in some cases.

After that period people begin to Come Down. Usually the process is extremely painful as the personality re-hardens, the drugs no longer provide any "lift". You still get high, but there's no spiritual opening, no sense of being liberated. Afterwards you're the same person you were before and the walls begin to close in. The personality stops changing much under psychedelic influences. The growth stops.

At that point, a lot of people slide over on to heroin or, these days, ketamine. The anesthetics kill the spiritual pain caused by both the re-hardening of the personality and the spiritual damage - bruises and little cuts - that psychedelics cause. I want to stress that spiritual damage from psychedelics is not minor in some cases - people can really break their "legs" - but that severe injuries on the spiritual level are the exception and not the rule. You can go hiking drunk a lot of times before you slip and shatter your leg, and so it is with spiritual work and tripping.

But still, the damage accumulates a little at a time, and most people have no tools to heal the myriad little rents and gaps that open in the subtle bodies as one zooms around.

The other part of that curve, the one which leads to a better life, is to smoothly transition on to a real spiritual practice before the end of the plateaux. Meditation, yoga, psychotherapy of a depth and power not commonly found, martial arts like Aikido or Tai Chi Chuan, even Christianity in it's more esoteric and applied forms will all work. The form is unimportant as long as it solidified one's awareness of the "energy body" or "aura" - that is to say, the thing most commonly written about as the "human soul."

Psychedelics extend the "plastic" phase of adolescence. They allow people to keep "growing" at an accelerated pace well into their middle years, and beyond. But there are prices to be paid for that plasticity: a certain lostness in the face of the conventional world, a mystification and distance from mainstream society. People of all spiritual traditions often feel like adults in a world run by children with enormous material power, playing obsessive games with money and power.

Real spirituality provides tools to keep that growth going long, long into one's old age. The "Old Boy" (Lao Tzu can apparently be translated so) archetype, of the sage with the eyes of a child, represents what comes after the temporary softening-and-hardening propagated by psychedelics: the enlightenment of being as fluid as water or as hard as stone as the situation demands, or as your own pleasure chooses.

This isn't to speak against psychedelics or their place in our culture, nor to indicate that psychedelic shamanism is not a fully developed spiritual path. But if we would stop going down there to talk to those guys about the drugs, they might be willing to spend the time telling us about the rest of their spiritual lives, which I imagine clearly are a lot more complex, complete and compelling than most of the western Ayahuasceros realize. Given the choice I think we may be having the wrong conversation with those chaps.

So back to Psychedelic Community. Groups of rapidly developing souls - people in deep flux - are often incredibly warm, open, supportive and loving. People going through changes together are like that, almost regardless of the context. Childhood, university, a workshop setting, a trip, Burning Man. Growth and lovingness and openness go together. The ossification of the 9-to-5 world kills people.

All spiritual communities have a hellish melodrama side, just like college. People play out their heightened emotions, have sexual feelings more deeply and outside of conventional roles, push forward deeper into their potential and are filled with a sense of possibility, of excitement, of "anything could happen!" It is the "Fountain of Youth" - to live continually in the zone of life where being is becoming.

To seek to do this is to seek to be forever young, forever rich, filled with spirit. To be a fountain of possibility and life into the world around. To seek to share that experience in a group, to joyously voyage through life as a tribe of happy heathens filled with the joy of being alive is the highest hope most people can conceive of. Pure heaven and hell on the path beyond paths.

What I'm saying here is that "psychedelic" is a form of spiritual. This "psychedelic" community of which you speak is spiritual community. Expect all the trauma, chaos and mayhem that comes with that. Talk to some veterans.

Does this make sense? It's not an unheard of thesis - that psychedelic practice is spiritual practice. But extended into community, it's clear that we haven't thought this through much as a culture.

Similarly I've watched a few people over the years start spiritual exploration by psychedelic means, not transition on to less stressful ways of staying high, and slowly harden into shells of themselves.

It's about the ugliest thing I've ever seen: people who've had recurrent brushes with the light fall into darkness with great struggle.

Think it through. There's a lot more to winning this game than the right people, the right place, and the right circumstances. There's an entire historical library of other people facing the same challenges, proposing their own plans, ways and solutions. People have been trying to get high and stay high forever. Community is part of the puzzle but there's a whole other leg: sustainable routes to higher consciousness.

I speak from experience. I spent a good chunk of my early 20s as a serious student of shamanism in it's most direct and applied forms. I went there - deep into the hinterlands of consciousness - over and over again by a variety of means. But I also had a solid meditation practice predating my shamanic experiences by a number of years and as time passed and that practice matured, I slowly and smoothly transitioned from being primarily a shaman to primarily a yogi. The chaos and melodrama are not all that different, the constant change and opening and growth open out into life in a similar form, perhaps more slowly and manageably but not always.

The people with practices, whatever they are, do better in the long term than the people without them. Building "psychedelic" community without having some kind of transition plan to help people survive the end of their psychedelic careers is asking to have a refuge for aging heroin addicts. On the Height, which was as much of a spiritual as a psychedelic scene, by the early seventies heroin had killed most of the brightest stars. The most beautiful and conscious faded away the fastest as the scene fell apart, largely (according to my contacts) because people were so burned out and damaged and didn't know how make it work without damaging themselves further. People had burned their resources.

To live well requires a plan. The drugs may carry you now, and may be an occasional option always, but there has to be something else to eat. Soma is part of a pattern, part of a way of life, and the rest of the picture has to be there for people to survive.

A community has to face these issues. To understand the natural life-span of a psychedelic is only five to ten years, at which point they become a burn out or a spiritual practitioner of some other kind. It's a harsh truth but it's the biggest obstacle to these kinds of endeavors - how do you make a good, grounded life with a group of people who's basic approaches to being alive are only good for a handful of years?

Think about it. Then start your Yoga, or your Tai Chi, or your Meditation, or your Prayer.

UNDERSTANDING MONOTHEISM

A Holy Tragedy in Four Parts

A "Brief" History of Angelic Contact with Humanity

Our Friends From Other Planes

Not a god damned thing in this essay is going to make sense if you can't work with the possibility that angels, demons and many other creatures from other planes of reality are as real as you or I.

If you have a hard time with this, let me throw some evidence in your general direction:

What the hell was Mahatma Gandhi? What in heaven's name was Adolph Hitler? David Bowie?

However you think of these creatures, I'm going to simply assume that they are the human versions of much larger, weirder and more powerful beings. You can think of them as "incarnations" of these entities, or projections into three dimensional space and one dimensional time, or in any other way you choose. The important point is this: David Bowie is Not Like Most Of Us.

Neither was Leonardo. Or Einstein. Or Fuller. Or, for that matter, the unknown person who invented fractional reserve banking .

Our world is disproportionately influenced by unusual beings who have enormous impact on history and culture. Some of these people appear to be much like ordinary folks. Others display incredibly unusual characteristics throughout their lives and continue to display them in new forms as time passes, displaying new traits over their evolution.

My assertion is that this is seen when a very large being simply continues to rotate more and more of its potential self into three dimensional reality, resulting in a continually shifting profile relative to ordinary humanity. Once upon a time, Gandhi was an uppity Indian lawyer in South Africa who's sense of justice - or perhaps human pride - was injured by Apartheid. Twenty years later, he's the incarnation of Vishnu, preserver of the universal values. Similarly, Adolph Hitler was an artist, and a common soldier in the first world war. My assertion is that neither of these beings was ever ordinary: at one point perhaps a small part of them which could pass for ordinary was projected into this world, but as time passed they took on more and more of their true form.

The gradual revelation of the extraordinary within the mundane will be a theme of this essay. I'll show that as individuals display these shifted attributes over time, as more and more of their potential is rotated into view, so it goes for cultures, races, and the human race as a whole.

History is a gradual unfolding, like a long version of the individual transitions I have noted above, for an entire world. Change is sometimes caused by realities from outside of our normal range pushing into our world!

Since Abraham was told to walk up a hill with a son and sacrifice him to God , angels or other beings from other planes of experience have been trying to boss Humanity around. A good deal of this is because those beings want to change the nature of this reality in ways which allows them to manifest on this plane.

A simple example: many Nazis were demons. Hell-beings who broke through into this reality, and created and exported Hell On Earth: the death camps.

This is an obvious truth. You have to be short a nose to miss the stench of hell pouring off Belsen or not to see the Hell in the images of half-starved Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists, Freemasons and so on in their striped uniforms, waiting for death at best. This is and was hell, and to think of it as anything less than a metaphysical event is a simple mistake of perception, a blindness induced by putting too much faith in a rationality which does not even BEGIN to attempt to explain WHY things like this have happened.

Because Science makes no claim to explain phenomena like Hitler or Gandhi, we should leave it out of this conversation entirely. Science has no theory on Hitler other than "we have no way to discuss these phenomena therefore we will ascribe them to random chance or human nature and leave it at that." Real Science is agnostic in the face of phenomena which cannot be objectively examined, not atheistic. Real science can say "I don't know" rather than being compelled by insecurity to say "That does not exist!".

If Science fails to provide an explanation for why things happen, it is OK to consider another, larger, older world view: Religion.

Angels Angels Angels!

Now let us turn our attention Angels .

Angels are light beings. You can think of them as souls without bodies , but this is a small mistake. Rather, the soul is a body, and they are divine consciousness cloaked only in the soul-body and not the human-flesh (in most cases!). To be an angel is to be a soul-being - the implications of this are a closeness to god, a certain ethereality, and familiarity with a different set of "laws of physics." The soul-planes are different from the matter-planes in some regards. A good analogy is the difference between your hand and your voice. In most cases, your hand cannot pass through other hands, but it can make firm, solid contact. Your voice, on the other hand, can pass through other voices, and a hand knows no equivalent to soaring harmony, to the blissful interbeing of a thousand voices raised together. Yes, a thousand hands can cooperate, but they cannot blend.

In the angelic world, most of the phenomena of life are lived at levels of energy where most phenomena have the properties of the voice rather than the hand: both-and thinking, non-duality and fusion of individuality into highly organized and complex aggregate consciousness. To angels, most human consciousness is too individuated and solitary to imagine tolerating. To an angel, the idea of not being merged in harmonious union seems like intolerable pain. To us it would be like being detached from the rest of the human race, all loved ones, and locked in a tank with food and water but no human contact or light. That is how encasement in flesh appears from the uneducated angelic perspective.

Furthermore, human life itself seems dull, boring and obnoxiously awful. The Symphony of Angelic Life - and I use that term precisely - is just that: a melodic blending of many different "species" into a unified whole which so greatly exceeds the capabilities and beauty of any one individual as to render individuality almost moot. In comparison, the human world seems filled with people banging sticks together or rocks against trees and imagining it sublime, each beating out their own rhythm, alone.

No wonder they look down on us and treat us like animals, eh?

And this, my friends, begins the history: Angels appearing to humans, scaring the shit out of them, and telling them what to do.

The Sumerians have pictures of angels : fierce strong men with pointy beards and giant lions with wings. I don't know very much about the mechanics of those early contacts : my understanding really starts with the Jews, thousands of years later.

Abraham, a smart human, hears God. God makes sure that Abraham is taking him seriously by marching him up a mountain to sacrifice (kill) his son. God stops Abraham right before he strikes ("No, no, only kidding. Now, sit down and let's talk, huh?").

Put that in perspective. Imagine a bunch of spooks - CIA, perhaps - who want to make sure that their agent will do as they are told under pressure. Suppose they do this by asking their victim to kill somebody close to them, and give them a gun filled with blanks... This is how we monkeys got started with those Angels. The basic deal has always been Obey, and it is the same to this day.

The Angels believe themselves to be permanently attuned to God, to the Divine Will, and perhaps they are not much wrong. Certainly, the soul-consciousness has much more access to divine inspiration, understanding from the god's eye perspective and many other highly important faculties, and yet it is still a body, still a shell over pure divinity, still capable of erring, making mistakes, defecting.

Angels can fuck up, and when they do, they do not believe that they have erred. This is important.

The (misguided) Angelic Plan to Reform Humanity

The material world was not created by Angels. It was created by God, or by the Earth itself as an incarnated divine being of some kind or other. When the angels discovered this place, and discovered the incarnated god-essences within it, they came to think of it as a problem, as some kind of hell. Pre-intellectual (perhaps - see "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes ) "human beings" roamed around the surface of the world, causing each other enormous grief and pain, and the Angels decided that it was their Divine Mission that Something Be Done.

Yes, in the Books, the Angels are ordered by God. In our version of events, however, they simply interpret what they see as a message from God that they are supposed to do something. We have all had experiences we might interpret as communication: you find a twenty dollar bill on the ground, and thirty feet further down the street you find a poor woman with hungry children begging for a twenty dollar bill to feed her babies. A coincidence like that seems to have a Hand behind it. The "coincidence" of being an Angelic race which lives in paradise and bliss, and then finding a race of suffering primates at the bottom of the gravity well, primates which could be like-unto-Angels, like-unto-God... how could one pass this up? Would it not be obvious that one was supposed to Do Something?

And so it started - the Angelic Plan to Reform Humanity.

There was just one problem: Humanity didn't need to be reformed. It just needed time. From this misunderstanding comes the majority of the darkness, pain and suffering in the world. A natural process has been rushed by a race of beings unfamiliar with the mechanisms and nature of the material plane, and how it interacts with divine consciousness in its many manifestations and forms. This error, through millennia of trial, error and communication is close to being resolved, but until there is peace between all "religions" there are still Angelic or other off-plane beings who don't quite get it.

This other perspective is the Hindu perspective, although it is much larger and more general than that, including Buddhism and some other traditions. From this Hindu viewpoint, the primates, the pre-intellectual humans were like children. Given a couple of thousand of years , they would gradually, gradually stabilize more and more of their potential consciousness, build culture, discover agriculture and the rest of it. It would be a slow process unfolding over time and, as conditions improved, beings would become more and more conscious. The souls already exist, but more and more of them manifests as the available vehicles improve and local conditions get easier.

And then, of course, it would all fall apart again as the time for "spiritual winter" - the next dark age - came around .

In any case, these unmanifested potentials lie hidden in other planes of experience: where is the rest of David Bowie? Where was the rest of Gandhi while he was being offended in South Africa in his earlier years? These beings, in their power, seem in some way ageless and timeless because the part of themselves which contains their extraordinary potentials is ageless and timeless, existing in planes of awareness where time is not as it is here. The Hindu perspective on early human evolution is that it was simply going to take time before the bodies and culture were sophisticated enough to make fully incarnating beings worthwhile, and that it was simply a waiting game which the Angels rushed into, mistaking it for a crisis.

After all, what is development, change and growth? How does a baby become a child, and an adolescent become an adult? How does one become wise?

Some of it is experiences, but there is also an element of the soul being continuously downloaded into the body, revealing more and more of its true nature as time passes.

It just takes time. But when the early Angels misunderstood the situation on earth as Intolerable Incarceration of Divine Sparks in Evil Flesh and, well...

BOOM. The plan to Rescue Humanity from Itself is made, and the trouble starts. It is not that the pain and suffering was not real, not that the pain and suffering is not still real but the approach that the early Angelic interventions took was brutal, surgical and effective. The basic attempt was a triage of human suffering through forced development.

I don't know if they gave us Farming or if somebody else did, or if it was simply time for humans to Farm. I don't know about stone tools either, or fire. But I do know that Writing, and Law , and above all Monotheism - the Great Invisible God Who Will Smite Your Misdeeds - all of these were imposed from above in an attempt reduce the suffering of Humanity by making Men more like Angels and less like Apes, which is what they were, are, and will continue to be. In the name of trying to liberate us from suffering, they also attempted to liberate us from our own animal natures!

An intelligent ape, an ape of great beauty and intellect, is not an Angel. This seed, this desire to make Human Life into Angelic Life, to merge the human race with the angelic race, creating a sort of Heaven On Earth is the driving force of Human/Angelic interactions from the beginning. It started as a rescue mission ("Make these divine beings in meat bodies as happy as we are in our bare-souls-alone!") and gradually became a much more sophisticated program of blending, exchange and assimilation as the notion that there was something to learn and experience down here took hold.

So, with some of the interplanar frame in place, let us sketch out the history very briefly indeed.

The Five Waves of Angelic Intervention in Human Affairs

The intervention comes in waves, each wave spearheaded by a Book, and a Law. The "causal" plane, the plane of language, is where a lot of the Angelic races exist: their bodies are verbal, audible, driven by truth and beauty and harmony. A Book is much closer to that reality than a stone idol and so it is through Books that humans are attuned to the Angelic world's intentions: obeying the rules in a book makes a human being resonant with the angelic world in some way which is hard to describe, but is a little like men-and-angels singing together, but only in the plane of concepts and deeds. If you structure your personal reality and morality around a book that some being gives you, then that being is likely going to find your ways of doing things easy to deal with and accept. Harmony might well result, and Harmony has always been the name of the Angelic game. Obedience to the Book, whatever it might be, helps create and maintain harmony between men and Angels.

Sumeria

The Jews

This is where monotheism, the worship of The Old Bastard In The Sky, really begins to get ground into the human soul.

Christianity

Islam

Now, before you get all het up here, what this obedience produces is indeed beauty, closeness to the Angels and their world, and great peace. Except at the edges, where it results in terrorism and holy war. Zealots and fundamentalists have causing trouble since they rejected Christ, if not before, and continue in the present form of people like Osama bin Laden. These people are so sure of the old truth that they can't accept new truths which can only be seen because the previous truth built a road for the new truth to march down. One level of truth succeeds another. This hindering of progress through bondage to old truth is a factor which turns out to sabotage the Angelic Plan over and over again throughout history and likely reflects a fundamental problem adapting to the fixity of human experience.

The Enlightenment

Let's deal with Democracy first. Democracy in the greek form appears to have been a practical agreement between men about how they would govern themselves. Universalist Democracy is a religion - "secularism" some call it - which asserts a basic theory of human rights and global equalities. It goes far beyond simple governance and comes bundled with concepts of fairness, individual liberty and freedom. This trend is given different names at different times - say "women's suffrage" or "the civil rights movement" - depending on which facet is being examined, but overall it represents a great thrust towards a leveling out of human power inequalities in favor of liberal ideals.

Self-determination within a harmonious whole is the goal state of this trend in human history, and this can clearly be imagined to be the default state of the Angels. When the mechanical and mathematical aspect of voting goes away, and people simply decide what to do based on not hurting other people's feelings, it's plausible to imagine the human race will indeed have become quite Angelic!

Harmony is the key to the Angelic world. It's all about harmony, preservation of harmony, and awful contingency management when that harmony breaks down into, say, Holy Wars.

Now, Science. Science as we know it really becomes alive with the birth into this reality of the Calculus. I will side with Newton and say it is his work, although Leibniz clearly could have done the job himself had Newton not got to most of it first. In either case, both men were mystics of the highest order. Newton was a magician, likely a Mason, an Alchemist and in every way devoted for the search for mystical truth . Liebniz is said to have studied the Kabbalah in great depth, and wanted the Calculus as a mathematical expression of the "Hierarchy of Monads" - a way of modeling the interlocking levels of creation so that one could backtrack from physical phenomena to understand the mind of god.

This is worth focussing on for a moment. Liebniz's idea, if I understand it correctly, was that the phenomena (let us say a ball falling) is the Event. The derivative of the Event is in some way the "next level up" - the derivative of a falling ball's motion is a constant, "g" - the rate at which the ball accelerates towards earth.

Leibniz's goal was to formulate a mathematics which would one to climb back up, level after level, to understand the constants behind all phenomena, the causes, the monad of monads . If this mysterious parabola is rooted in "g", then what of the motion of the oceans or the body? Could one not discover deeper and deeper truths by calculating higher and higher derivatives of more and more complex phenomena? This mystical ideas was key to his development of the Calculus: to derive the First Cause, to mathematically understand the Mind of God and the Origin of Being.

The effect that science has had on humanity cannot be overstated: it shattered the limits of the human condition in a way that nothing since Fire and Farming had. Suddenly humans can discover how the world works in objective ways, with an analytical leverage unknown and undreamt before hand. The notion of "reading the book of nature" was close, indeed, to knowing the mind of god. Engines, mass production, medicines, flight... all opened up by the ability of people to perform mathematics and repeatable experiments, to build instruments to amplify and extend their senses. Science made men as Gods in more ways than we can account, and continues to do so right into Transhumanism.

This jump of human affairs - Science, and Universalist Democracy - together mark the beginning of the transformation of the Human World of antiquity into something quite different: Modernity.

I will note that the Greeks are, in many ways, Modern. The notion of Greece as a seed from which the Modern world grew is attractive and worthy of future investigation.

What is the Messiah?

Proceed Directly To The End Of History

Now that we have some outline of the general schema of Angelic intervention in Human affairs, and a vague notion of what an Angel is and their relationship to us, let us discuss the goals in more concrete terms: What is the Messiah, the Second Coming, the "total goal"? Where exactly do these guys want to take us?

Exactly what is "promised" to the Human Race in the event of the Messianic Age beginning varies from time to time, from prophecy to prophecy. The broad themes are the same in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The main features are: rule by a Messiah, or by the Messianic consciousness. Physical immortality and freedom from all disease. Peace. Justice. Freedom. All Good Things.

In short, the fulfillment of every human dream. Heaven, quite literally heaven, on Earth.

And at least according to John, we're going to have to go through hell to get there.

Let's look at the general schema of history from the Monotheistic perspective.

The Earth & Human Beings are Created. There's some kind of "Fall" in which Human Beings become Bad. Ordinary Life as we know it is Bad Life because of this Fall. If you do what the Angelic Books say, your life will improve (a bit) and after you die, something wonderful will happen. Eventually it will all be fixed and life will be better than it was before th