A couple of weeks ago, the Diva and I found, and walked, the labyrinth pictured below. It’s at Land’s End, and has a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s one of at least four in San Francisco—there are two at Grace Cathedral, and one at the California Pacific Medical Center; as it happens, I’ve walked them all. The Land’s End labyrinth is easily the most vulnerable of the four, made simply of rocks and gravel found nearby and raked and set into the labyrinth outlines—in fact, it’s been destroyed by cretins, and remade, at least once. It’s beautifully sited on a promontory, with a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. Though it must have taken substantial effort to make, and appears timeless, in fact it was laid out in 2004 by one man, Eduardo Aguilera.

The Land’s End labyrinth depends for its survival on the kindness of strangers, and as the Diva and I negotiated its twisty inevitability we both, without discussion or premeditation, found ourselves tidying and rectifying the pattern by nudging stray rocks back into place. It felt like instinct.

I was reminded of the medicine wheels that appear in (presumably) sacred sites across vast swathes of North America. They are referred to as ‘Indian’ or ‘Native American’ but in fact they are far older than any extant culture and archaeologists tell us that they have existed for several millennia, serving—and being served by—several of the cultures that washed across their range like oceans receding and swelling. Think about that. Medicine wheels—which, like the Land’s End labyrinth are simple patterns of rock laid on the ground—have proven more durable than several civilizations, while also depending on civilizations for their creation, maintenance, and renewal; is it not flabbergasting? Our own civilization protects them carefully, with fences and guards, preserving them for… what?

placing our feet with Jain-like care

Of course, much the same can be said of cities, languages, religions, and other human constructs that outlive humans, and nations, and yet depend on humans for continued existence. It’s as if we are parasitized by patterns of varying complexity who make use of our bodies and minds as a means of life. Think of a medicine wheel filmed from above, its 1,000s of years of existence compressed into a movie of, say, an hour’s duration; it alone would persist while forests shimmered in its margins, while humans, like flickering brown worms, swarmed about and kept it repaired, occasionally adding or deleting pieces of the pattern according to some unguessable logic. I think it would look much like a cell under a microscope, or like a city seen from a satellite. It would be a living, lordly thing, and we its vassals.

The Diva and I walked the labyrinth with something like trepidation, eyes cast down, placing our feet with Jain-like care. I can’t tell you the unknowable vastness of her thoughts, but I know that I was contemplating the labyrinth as a metaphor. Because they are twisty and surprising and yet, in retrospect, inevitable, labyrinths are unavoidable metaphors for relationships, careers, and life itself. And so the walking of a labyrinth should be conducted reverentially, for our passage through it is like our passage through this life. Missteps are likely to find some expression in our circumstances.

I know whereof I speak. For once I walked another labyrinth, with another girl, and though we arrived at its center without mishap she made a fetish of being unrestrained by convention and walked straight out, across the lines, without a backward glance. I felt it like a blow to my heart, and followed her with dread. And in fact that was our last good day together—everything went bad after that, and we both crossed lines that I, at least, came to regret.

These patterns we walk, and live within, and build and maintain and renew; we make them and then they shape us. So much of what we do is set in stone, long before our individual selves exist. So much of what we do is inevitable, but only in retrospect—in the moment of walking, the best we can do is note the lines as best we can and walk with care. And should we choose to flout a line, as sometimes we must, we should do so consciously and face the consequences with open eyes.

Follow this BS on Twitter.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

That our conscious minds bob about on vast unconscious capacity is both scientifically accepted and intuitively obvious. A widely cited—but probably apocryphal—figure holds that we use less than ten percent of our mental abilities for conscious thought; in fact, the relationship between conscious and unconscious mental capacities is too complex and variable to assess meaningfully with a tool so blunt as a ratio. But it is clear that we have a lot more going on ‘under the hood’ than we generally acknowledge. Consider, for example, an act as simple as a free throw. Factors like gravity, wind, distance, grip, and strength are assessed and synthesized instantly, and a 22-ounce ball is tossed 15 feet and landed in a 18-inch hoop, and some humans can perform this computation constantly and near perfectly. Obviously there is no conscious calculating going on—somehow, an ungoverned savant side of ourselves does all the work, with little useful assistance from ‘us.’

Similarly, some conductor continually orchestrates hormones, enzymes, cells, glands, organs, and the islets of Langerhans to keep most of us in mostly good health most of the time and again, our attempts to consciously assist this process are clumsy and often counterproductive. There is some vast computational agency working always on our behalf—residing, apparently, somewhere inside us—and it jealously excludes consciousness from its realm.

Conversely, the relationship between consciousness and the things outside our head seems relatively straightforward; we collect data with our senses in order to appraise the world around us. But a little thought shows that this relationship, too, is unequal. For example, we see a very small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, hear very little of the range of vibratory frequencies, taste and smell relatively few chemicals and, generally, get by with a picture of the world based on a tiny percentage of the available data. Even in the range of data we are able to apprehend, we fail to consciously observe almost everything. The all-that-is presents several oceans-worth of data, and we sup with a teaspoon. It is as if, in Huxley’s phrase, consciousness works as a “reducing valve” that actively filters out information, so that the world we experience is a product of the data selected for consideration.

I contend that the reducing valve works both ways, that the relationship of consciousness to both outer and inner worlds is one of filtering and exclusion, and that the existence of a conscious mind probably depends on filtering and exclusion.

If this is the case, there is the interesting possibility that the fast and vastly powerful computing savant we house is constantly working with unknowably gigungous amounts of external data, and presumably knows far more about the world than we can consciously access. Reality, in this view, is a choice, not an inevitability. Our conscious and unconscious selection of the data we engage with creates the world we experience.

But let’s drop the faux-scholarship for a bit and consider, instead, a peculiar being that I, and at least some others, work with in order to ease our way through challenging traffic. I refer, of course, to the magickal entity Goflowolfog.

Goflowolfog: traffic management for (some of) the masses

Goflowolfog, according to that useful grimoire known as ‘the internet’, was created during a magickal workshop that took place in London, conducted by noted chaos magickian Phil Hine. He has a describable appearance, a sigil, preferred modes of action, etc. I have found no details concerning the exact method of his creation—magickal types tend to be secretive about such things—but I assume he was created and ‘charged’ in some suitably outré manner. Interestingly, and unusually, he was intentionally created for use by anyone who cares to call on him. His purpose can be derived from his name, which is a forced palindrome of ‘Go Flow’—Goflowolfog lives to keep the traffic flowing.

Goflowolfog is one of those irritating phenomena that produces little in the way of scientifically verifiable evidence forcing one to fall back, instead, on anecdote and direct experience. In my own case, I find that invoking Goflowolfog—just say his name in an invoking manner—yields fast results and that I am often efficiently extricated from seemingly stopped traffic. On the other hand, he isn’t very good at finding parking spaces (try Ganesh for this purpose). As a way of giving back, I like to donate pennies to those little change trays you sometimes see next to cash registers, and I make a point of using those pennies, if available. I reason that Goflowolfog is, presumably, pleased by improved flow of all kinds.

This is nutty of course, but as a gedankenexperiment let’s consider the possibility of an intangible, traffic-manipulating entity in the light of my hypothesis, that is, that our super-potent mental capacities are constantly assessing vast amounts of data beyond our ken. If it’s really true, then we might very well have extensive unconscious knowledge of traffic conditions outside our conscious sensory range. We might have unconscious knowledge—due, say, to the particular play of light on the underside of clouds—of an unobstructed side street. Further, we might also unconsciously possess at least the capacity to affect external matters profoundly; it’s possible, for example, that we can regulate the pace and direction of our driving in ways that subtly cue and control other drivers. It is possible, in other words, that the same subconscious abilities that instantaneously coordinate sports miracles and bodily functions can also be marshaled to direct ourselves and others in ways that reduce the traffic we encounter.

So how does Goflowolg figure into my wacky theory? I posit that ritual, visualization, spell work, affirmation, prayer, and the like are all methods for manipulating symbol, and that symbol is the ‘language’ of the unconscious! So Goflowolfog emerges as a symbolic system well-adapted for communicating my traffic desires to the super-potent unconscious. His dramatic origin, and my conscious investment in the spooky technology that produced him, facilitate conscious direction of abilities that are usually inaccessible to intentional direction.

Viewed this way, my invocation of Goflowolfog is very like the prayer of the faithful, the visualization of those devoted to The Secret, the spell work of Wiccans, and countless other systems, past and present, that promise some uncanny effect in the all-that-is.

Finally, there is a possible weird effect of Goflowolfog knowledge that may cast light on the birth and death of religions. Consider: when almost no one knows about Goflowolfog, it is probably harder to benefit from his powers. One person in a traffic jam, cuing and signaling, will have very little to work with when it comes to easing traffic. On the other hand, if everyone is busily invoking the entity, then their efforts will cancel each other out and nothing will change. Somewhere between the two extremes is a sweet spot, where the devotees of Goflowolfog unknowingly work with each other to ease their individual routes through traffic.

Might not religions have a similar arc? They are born weak, build power as they add followers and thereby generate miracles and then, as they become consensus reality, the dramatic powers they once commanded are vitiated.

So please, will just a few of you, not too many, begin to call on Goflowolfog? It will make my subjective experience of traffic so much nicer.

Follow this BS on Twitter.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

Remember, Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Even on the increasingly rare occasions that Timothy Leary’s LSD-popularizing antics are really discussed, the man known then as Richard Alpert appears as little more than a sidekick—Robin, to Leary’s Dark Knight—and his book, Be Here Now, a mere punch line to a forgotten 60s joke. But in the decades since, with Leary’s needle stuck at ‘groovy’ right up until his relatively early death, Alpert’s fully disclosed spiritual struggles, his open record of extreme growth and change, and of course his transformation into America’s own guru, Ram Dass, have left him, perhaps, the greater figure. By any reckoning, he is a scarred and worthy chronicler of a numinous time, and an interesting living experiment that still unfolds.

I had the good fortune to be handed Be Here Now in the midst of one of my very first acid trips, when I was still convinced that there was meaning beneath all the fireworks. I puzzled over it quite happily for hours, imprinted on it, and it has affected my subsequent spiritual life as surely as childhood religious instruction; and like childhood religious instruction, the influence has not always been positive and shaped me by my resistance at least as much as by my acquiescence. For example I, for far too many years, accorded Hindu-flavored spirituality far more respect than I now feel it deserves.

It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets

Be Here Now is actually three books in one. The introduction is Alpert’s tale of the years with Leary, his travels in India, and the encounters with the fabulous guru, Neem Karoli Baba, that remade Alpert as Ram Dass. It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets. The middle, longest, section is a hand lettered and illuminated attempt to convey, experientially, certain verities of the psychedelic experience. It is strange, strangely powerful, and I am not able to capture it in a net of mere words—take strong hallucinogens (or, if you prefer, entheogens) and read it for yourself. And finally, the book concludes with an adequate primer of the aforementioned Hindu-flavored spirituality—meditation, yoga, veganism, etc.—the efficacy of which is demonstrated by the easy competence with which India governs herself and cares for her people. Am I too cynical? Very well, paw through this section yourself and carry away the bits you find shiny… that’s certainly what I did, and I can’t say I regret it.

Separately, none of these parts is indispensable, but like the disparate, ridiculous books of the Bible (have you ever read the Book of Jonah?) when gathered together (along with an excellent bibliography) they amount to scripture. And, like scripture, they can remake your world to the extent you let them.

Alpert/Dass is, it must be said, a substantial spiritual fuck up, but I will always love him for this book, and for the way he once compared the way he figuratively fell on his face over and over to a man making his way to a holy city by means of continual prostrations—it was too apt a description of my own life to ever forget.

Promethea, by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is a literary titan whose medium happens to be comic books: deal with it. The fact is, Moore is positively Joycean in the way he packs layers of meaning into words and, unlike Joyce—or Pynchon, or Wallace—he has the whole playground of image to play with as well.

The substantial success Moore attained with his scripts for Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta, and other titles—and the substantial disappointments he suffered as those graphic masterpieces were translated to the screen—both allowed him and drove him to focus on more insular, idiosyncratic work… one can almost hear him muttering, ‘make a movie of this you effing bastards,’ as he completed his pornographic masterwork Lost Girls, or the swirl of Cabala, sex magick, metaphysics, and superhero mythology comprising the work I extol here, Promethea.

Available in five volumes that collect the original comics, the spine of Promethea is conventional for the costumed vigilante genre: a young lady, Sophia Bangs (pay attention to those names, reader) finds herself blessed/cursed with the ability to transform herself into the curvaceous superheroine Promethea, who is able to fly, shoot beams of force from her caduceus, and so forth. In coming to terms with her new powers, she meets and beats assorted villains, and ushers in the end of the world.

Wait; what was that last part? End of the world? It’s hardly a spoiler to tell you so—from early on in Book One it’s clear that Promethea’s world faces the end of history.

But not by nuclear annihilation, as in Watchmen, but by Armageddon, Kali Yuga, Ragnarök, or some other name drawn from the end time theologies so often found in human spiritual systems. In her quest to understand her role as Destroyer, Sophie/Promethea thoroughly explores the Western esoteric tradition.

In his personal life, Moore is an accomplished ceremonial magickian and here, like Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials, he uses an exciting, bawdy, page-turning tale to sugarcoat serious philosophical instruction. The attentive reader will come away from Promethea with a useful grounding in tarot, cabala and the tree of life, Crowleyan ritual, and will even get an intriguing and accurate glimpse of Goetic demonology.

More importantly, by reading this book and letting it’s glorious graphics seduce you, you will imbibe a certain mindset and realize at gut level that what we are pleased to call reality is merely an insubstantial scrim imperfectly concealing the actual nature of existence. And as Sophie—and her entire world—are forced to acknowledge, confronting an unveiled all-that-is is both terrifying… and thrilling.

Travels, by Michael Crichton

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but the fact is, I like Michael Crichton’s novels and have read most of them. And of course, I’m not alone in that—Crichton’s books have sold 150 million copies worldwide. But relatively few have read Travels, which makes sense because it’s pretty much the opposite of a ‘Crichton book’. It’s short not long, it’s a memoir not thriller fiction, and it’s written in a graceful, unaffected voice, not the thudding, heart-pounding! thriller prose that Crichton mastered long before writers like Dan Brown or David Baldacci began to hammer readers over the head with it. I think he missed his audience with this one; Travels is not for the average thriller reader.

As you might guess from the title, Crichton is here writing a travel memoir but, crucially, he includes inner journeys as well. Beginning with his experiences as a 6’9” medical student who put himself through medical school writing potboilers—and the The Andromeda Strain—and continuing with multiple world trips, and his experiences meditating, directing movies, learning to see auras, tripping intensely, bending spoons, diving with sharks, etc. etc. His clear exposition of the events experienced and of his own mental state while they unfolded is what makes Travels remarkable. Also, his motivation for writing Travels is unimpeachable; he certainly didn’t need the money, and must have known that this book wouldn’t make him much anyway. Nor would it exactly burnish his reputation… the questing, skeptical-but-believing Michael Crichton on display in Travels is not the Michael Crichton he would want Hollywood agents to negotiate with.

So ultimately, Travels is immensely credible. Crichton tells me that he learned to bend spoons one evening, and I believe him. He tells me that a weekend workshop gave him the gift of seeing auras, and I start looking for such a workshop to attend myself…

And thus is reality undermined.

His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman

Just to get it out of the way, yes, these are Young Adult novels. And they’re based on Milton’s Paradise Lost… or so I’m told. But so what?—we must take wisdom where we find it, and in the three books of His Dark Materials—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass—Pullman is not only wise, but brave, taking on, as he does, conventional religious thinking in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Most reviews of His Dark Materials focus on daemons, the animal-guised, familiar-like soul analogues that Pullman brilliantly fishes up from exceedingly deep archetypal waters and, yes, daemons are cool but for my money even more attention should be paid to his frankly anti-church agenda; read at the cusp of adolescence, these books will effectively immunize against excessive religiosity. I read them when I was struggling with my own religious addictions—I’m a recovering fundamentalist—and they were the kick in the ass I needed to actually change.

None of this would matter if Pullman was preachy or didactic, but fortunately—and unlike myself—he is neither. Instead, he couches his serious life lessons in a compulsively readable coming-of-age tale, set against a backdrop of witches, armored bears, dirigibles, and passages between worlds. As you are pulled from page to page, you will also be reordering your views on spiritual expression… so read with care.

My Life With the Spirits, by Lon Milo Duquette

Though I have cast spells, performed sex magick rituals, and worshipped my patron goddess Ostara under a full moon at Summer Solstice, the fact is I am a dilettante, not a practicing magickian. But even an armchair magickian must read astonishing quantities of written material, for surely it is the wordiest of hobbies, with tome after tome devoted to the arcana of divination, cabala, Crowleyan ritual, chaos magick, Enochian scrying, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And in all this vast, mostly fascinating, swamp of literature there is one writer, Lon Milo Duquette, who stands apart because he sees himself with without illusion, and because he writes with exceptional clarity, self-deprecation, and humor.

His Chicken Qabalah is a useful and lucid explication of how and why a non-Jew might explore Cabala for spiritual purposes, Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium is a perfectly acceptable primer for those interested in Western ceremonial magick, and should you decide to flirt with high strangeness and engage the Beast directly, you can have no better Virgil than Duquette in his books, Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema, and Aleister Crowley’s Illustrated Goetia: Sexual Evocation.

But before you read any of these (and even if you have no intention to read these, or any, books on magick) read My Life With The Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician. Like three other books on this list, it is a memoir of alternative spirituality. Conventionally autobiographical, My Life With The Spirits follows Duquette from early childhood through delightfully rock-and-roll-and-magick infused hippie years, and into an adulthood as a sober and respected bishop of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Like all my favorite people, Duquette has a zest for direct experience and he exuberantly dives into yoga, communal life, magickal ritual, and whatever else captures his interest. And he writes up his experiences with the brio and humility that I associate with truth telling. His tales of Goetic evocation, for example, are masterpieces of immersion journalism: accurate, frightening, and funny.

Duquette’s writings undermine my grasp on conventional reality because they have the ring of truth. Based on my own (relatively trivial) magickal experimentation and his clear reporting, I am forced to accept that demons (and angels) are real and can act on our plane, that Enochian calls effectively summon visions of another world, and that a dead kitten can, under the influence of the right prana master, be restored to life.

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Duquette’s oeuvre is his attitude of, if you will, ‘dogmatic agnosticism’. He doesn’t insist that you believe him, doesn’t attempt to convert, and freely concedes that everything unusual that he experiences may well be ‘all in his head’. “But,” he continues (a little dogmatically), “you have no idea how big your head is!”

Living With Joy, by Sanaya Roman

I didn’t set out to become a fan of channeled material, and I can’t tell you how I came across Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation, but in the six or so years that have passed since I abandoned fundamentalist Christianity no genre of literature has affected me more profoundly. Seth, I confess, is too intellectual for me, but Abraham and sometimes Kryon move me profoundly. And though he has a relatively small following—bad PR?—the entity who styles himself Oren, channeled by Sanaya Roman, has gradually and completely upended my world view, and Living with Joy is my bedside scripture.

There may be more to this world view than I am able to express, or I may be distorting it—I’ve been forced to admit in recent years that I am able to grasp only a small fraction of the data presented to me—but here is some of what I have gleaned:

• The all-that-is actively engages with individuals, reshaping itself to conform to an individual’s basic beliefs and expectations about reality. The all-that-is is like a nervous new lover, eager to conform to the beloved’s illusions.

• Our basic beliefs and expectations about reality are entirely within our control. Which is to say, the suite of beliefs we use to order and understand the all-that-is are choices, not understandings or deductions or inevitabilities. Likewise, we are free to expect whatever we like. Note: this is not to say that we control the all-that-is. It is more as if the all-that-is is an agreeable maestro, presenting itself in a way that is consonant with the observer’s disposition. But even so, certain verities persist, which is why day-to-day reality does not shift instantly to accommodate our fancies, as in a lucid dream.

• This being the case, it makes sense to deliberately choose our beliefs and shape our expectations so that we gradually create the most enjoyable life possible. We can also, incidentally, change our pasts by deliberately reinterpreting our memories.

• There are myriad techniques that accomplish this restructuring: prayer, spells, visualizations, drugs, ritual, are just a few effective examples. Different entities tend to focus on different techniques.

• You can start now.

By dipping into Living with Joy regularly, my thinking has gradually taken on this world view. I now pay attention to the tenor of my thoughts, state my goals in positive language, assume responsibility for my circumstances, etc., etc. And consequently, reality is now different for me. Delightful synchronicities abound, I live in freedom, experience joy, and no longer feel that I am a victim in a hostile environment. My fundamental belief about the way the world works is that the all-that-is is a wish granting machine, and that it dances with me every day.

Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson

I didn’t realize until compiling this list that I have read a lot of spiritual memoirs, and have been largely remade in their image. None have affected me more profoundly than Robert Anton Wilson’s (PBUH) Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati, the essential first volume of his three volume autobiography.

For me it has always been books, not teachers, that appeared when I was ready, and Cosmic Trigger showed up when I first decided in my heart—where it mattered—that I could no longer abide the fundamentalist Christian cult I had faithfully espoused for the first 17 years of my adult life. I knew others who had left what I was then pleased to call, “The Truth.” Some were always sad or bitter, some fairly groveled in their efforts to reinstate themselves, some gave themselves over to unattractive dissipation, and at least one—a smart fellow, like me—was dead of suicide. I didn’t know of any, at the time, who had made a success of their heresy and infidelity, none who had attained the happy, creative heathenism that I so craved.

Cosmic Trigger broke me open like a thunderbolt, like the divine bolt of lightning that is seen in the tarot’s Tower card, redefining an individual existence. It was Wilson’s contention that we all live in “reality tunnels,” self-manufactured existences made up of our beliefs, hopes, and fears about the way things ‘really’ are. Had he said only this, it would have been enough, for just the phrase and his explication gave me a way to understand and work with the morbid eschatology I had lived within for so long.

But Wilson went further, describing his experiments with “rapid brain change.” In his efforts to overcome a “normal” Catholic upbringing (and parenthetically, I have always found it fascinating that so many interesting writers have Catholic school in their past—might the need to assert themselves early against an ancient propaganda set them on the road to literature?) Wilson deliberately made use of the brutal shocks to consciousness available via psychedelic drugs, taboo violation, ceremonial (especially Crowleyan) magick, the books of James Joyce, Sufi exercises, and the like. And by writing constantly and surrounding himself with a good wife and good friends, he managed to integrate the inrush of change that resulted and ended up—at least by his own estimation—a happier and saner man.

I copied him. I ingested LSD and psilocybin and salvia divinorum and lots of pot, I donned ceremonial garb and performed pagan rites, and I attended Sufi dances. And I found my own way, as well; since the cult to which I had formerly been faithful especially reviled tobacco and tarot, I bought myself some fine cigars and learned to smoke them while laying out a Celtic cross, and since I had so repetitiously heard that the Boss of all-that-is hates extramarital sex I made sure to have some ASAP. And I’ve done other things, too, meditations and visualizations, group sex and odd sex, sought out strange places and strange companions, and through it all I wrote constantly and surrounded myself with good friends… the wives came and went. And of course I had the guidance of Wilson himself, via his many books, and I have to say that at the end of it all I am—by my own estimation—a happier and saner man.

Cosmic Trigger is, of course, more than an extreme self help program. Wilson’s thoughts on personas, for example, are revelatory and his insights into the writer’s life remain a guide for me. Most of all, he tells his tales of an interesting life and philosophy in the whiskey-warmed, unpretentious voice of an ideal barstool companion.

Buy it, read it, live it. You have nothing to lose but all your illusions.

Follow this BS on Twitter.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

when it comes to world cataclysm I say, ‘put up or shut up’

I am not a particularly old man, but even so I’ve already lived through more than one doomsday scenario. I can remember, for example, ducking under my kindergarten desk in drills intended to preserve me during nuclear attack and I witnessed the rise of sunscreen thanks to the thinning of the ozone layer and water has always been scarce and various toxic wastes and carcinogens have poisoned my environment and somehow I avoided ebola and tuberculosis and cholera and let’s not forget the 17 years I spent as a fundamentalist Christian, absolutely convinced that a wrathful God was poised to unleash Armageddon and reader, I promise you, I worried about all these things intensely and discussed them earnestly in coffee shops and classrooms and read the books and watched the PBS specials and frankly, I’m done: when it comes to world cataclysm I say, ‘put up or shut up’. So near as I can tell, the world has always been going to hell in a hand basket, and yet it never gets there, quite.

And we are not the first generation to cope with such a proliferation of threats, either. 14th century Europe quailed under the onslaught of what they took to be worldwide plague, the world’s various holy books betray an unhealthy fascination with divine mass murder and various native peoples in all times and places have interpreted omens in the most dire possible manner. It’s almost as if humans have a genetic propensity to believe the worst possible future scenario and this even makes evolutionary sense; after all, paranoia is a useful survival skill.

The fashionable world ending scenario nowadays is of course global warming, unless you prefer agricultural collapse due to honeybee decline or biological collapse due to extinction of keystone species. And yet, here I am: though the planet appears to be in its death throes, again, I continue to exist in reasonable comfort, as do most of my acquaintances, and I have every expectation of living out a typical human life span. As a sage of my acquaintance sometimes asks, “Why is the view out my front window less meaningful than the view on TV?”

I’m not suggesting that everything is rosy, that humans around the world aren’t dealing with serious difficulties, and I’m certainly not suggesting that your particular crusade, whatever it is, isn’t right and holy and urgent or that I won’t contribute to your fundraiser, whatever it happens to be this week. But I am suggesting that humans in general, and you and me in particular, are predisposed to fear apocalypse, to assume that our world is about to collapse. And when selecting our paranoid obsessions, it may be a good idea to keep this in mind.

Follow this BS on Twitter.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

When my sentences grow long and baroquely complex you can be sure I have nothing to say

Oh, we all have theories—evolution, Eden, alien spores—and we argue about them vigorously and endlessly, but what we never acknowledge is that none of us know. The creation was not televised and fossil evidence will never be conclusive. So far as we know we are alone in all the cosmos, the only self-aware tool users who have ever been, and we have not one shred of admissible evidence explaining how we got this way, or what it all means, or if it means anything at all, at all. As a species we are orphans, left to raise ourselves and with no monogrammed swaddling blanket to look to for a clue.

And you know what? It matters. For just as an orphan will spin fantasies about his noble unknown lineage, or fear that he is of low caste, mongrel birth, so we naked apes imagine we are Sons of God or consign ourselves to being freaks of chemical chance, with no guarantee that the flame lit by chance will not flicker and die.

When my sentences grow long and baroquely complex you can be sure I have nothing, really, to say and am hoping to drown you in syllables. So let me, for once, be brief and clear: I don’t know where we come from either. But I am deeply certain that the tale of our beginning is stranger and more beautiful than anything we have yet conceived.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

Do I banish? Do I invoke? Do I evoke spirits? Yes

For those who don’t recognize the name, Lon Milo Duquette is among the most visible and eminent modern ceremonial magicians. He’s an authority on Aleister Crowley and his magical systems, a high ranking member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and a prolific and exceptionally talented author who has published some of the very best and most accessible modern expositions of ancient magical systems such as Enochian and Goetic magick. His writing is marked by grace, humility, and humor, and authority based on extensive research and experience. That he is a member of the Illuminati seems obvious, though he has yet to admit as much in public.

The interview below contains a scoop—the subject and proposed name of Lon’s next book. Enjoy.

• What’s a typical day like for one of the world’s most visible magicians? Do you have a daily magickal practice?

Since I left my 9 to 5 job to become a full-time Lon back in 2003 there hasn’t been a typical day. One thing hasn’t changed, however, and that’s my daily preoccupation with affecting the magical miracle of keeping a roof over our heads and the medical insurance paid.

I travel a lot giving workshops, lectures all over the country and world. I am probably most magically disciplined when I’m on the road. I take full meditative advantage of the hours of unbroken silence as I stand in airport security lines and sit quietly at the gate area. My hotel room becomes my hermit’s cell, where the meager equipment necessary to maintain my life and comfort is neatly bundled into one bag.

Do I banish? Do I invoke? Do I evoke spirits? Yes. Even on the road I do these things, But after decades of performing pentagram and hexagram rituals, Star Rubies, Star Sapphires, etc. my personal banishings, invocations, and evocations have taken on extremely personal dimensions and might not (indeed, SHOULD not) be recognizable or understood by others.

At home a typical day starts between 3:00 and 3:30 AM. Before I get out of bed I do a general ‘getting-off-on-the-right-foot-personal banishing/invocation’ that would take me all day to describe …so I won’t. I then grab a cold bottle of mineral water from the refrigerator and shut myself in my office and start writing. I’m usually working on the next book, but I also have two or three other smaller projects –usually introductions or forewords to other people’s books, or lecture/workshop material that need attention. I’ll work on two or three chapters at the same time. I’ve found that when I get burned out on one train of thought I need only change the subject to feel completely refreshed and energized.

I try to write until around 8:00 AM. By then Constance has been up for awhile and brings me a cup of tea. I continue pecking on the book, but I also start checking my email and getting myself enmeshed in the objective reality of the day. I’ll take a walk around the neighborhood or the nearby parks before coming home to breakfast on the backyard patio. Constance has our tiny backyard garden teeming with flowers (and a few squash, green beans and tomatoes). The roses are insane! So are the humming birds.

We say ‘will’ (a Thelemic affirmation) before all our meals. We also try to recite ‘Resh’ in the morning, noon, sunset, and before retiring.

I stay in the office for most of the day. I get some serious work done, but I have to confess I spend far too much time farting around with my email….LIKE I’M DOING NOW! and working on scheduling my talks, etc. I have my guitar on a stand right behind my chair and I play it to unwind. I probably now play my guitar 2-3 hours a day… more when I have a gig that evening.

I try to catch a nap in the afternoon. Then I get up and take another walk before dinner (or, on nights I have a singing gig, a little snack). I try to get to bed around 11:00PM. Then the whole thing starts over again. Aren’t you sorry you asked?

• Is it reasonable to consider magick done to elevate or refine the self as being different from magick done to ‘get things’—that is, to get a better job, or a place to live, or a creative opportunity? If so, how do you strike a balance between the two?

“Elevating and refining the self” is the reason you do magick “to get things done”.

• Should have asked this first, probably, but: do you prefer ‘magick’ or ‘magic’?

I don’t care anymore. I use “Magick” when the audience as an understanding and appreciation of term, and “Magic” when the audience is so green that the “k” would be just one more bit of confusion, i.e., I title one book “The Magick of Aleister Crowley” and other, “The Key to Solomon’s Key – Secrets of Magic and Masonry”. I don’t however use the word “Magickal.” I don’t know why. It just bugs me.

• In My Life With The Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician you discuss delightful adventures with the Goetia and with Enochian magick; what have been your ongoing experiences with these branches of magick?

Glad you asked! I’ll write a lot more on both those subjects in my new book (should be out in 2010). It’s called (if the publisher allows) “Low Magick”. Until then, I’ll have to ask you to wait.

• How important a figure has Aleister Crowley been in your life?

Very important.

• I noticed you were on the faculty of Maybe Logic Academy: what do you teach, and were you close to Robert Anton Wilson?

I knew Bob, but I can’t honestly say we were real close. Our lodge presented him with our ‘annual’ Illuminati Award. Every year for a few years running the organizers of Pantheacon booked us to share the same hotel room. That was a kick.

So far I’ve taught four classes at Maybe Logic Academy – two each of “Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot” and “Initiation – The Western Magical Tradition”. I’m about to give new class on “Enochian Vision Magick.” Stay tuned!

• If an intelligent young person, interested in magick, asked you for three books to read, what would you suggest?

I have to be shameless and suggest three pairs of books:

Crowley’s Magick: Book 4, Liber Aba and my The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema.

Crowley’s The Book of Thoth and my Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot.

[Belief Systems & Other BS note: You'll also want the Aleister Crowley Thoth Tarot Deck discussed in the above two volumes]

Crowley’s The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis Regis) and my The Key to Solomon’s Key: Secrets of Magic and Masonry.

• Thank you very much.

You’re welcome.

Did you like this interview? You’ll love my books!

I have mildly precognitive dreams. When I record my dreams for a few weeks, and review them, I find slight but definite foreshadowings of real life events. This capacity of mine does not extend, yet, to reliable stock predictions but it is entertaining and a reminder that we humans mingle with eternity on a nightly basis, whether we remember it or not.

Let me share three such dreams, in descending order of probability:

it’s as if I somehow contain a larger, smarter mind than the one I use daily

First, I recently dreamed that I would be meeting with a restaurant owner and that he would be giving me advice. And in fact, the following day, this event did take place. Now, this dream is not mysterious—the fact is, I knew about the meeting, but it had slipped my mind. It would be fatuous of me to claim psychic abilities for what is plainly a case of the subconscious merely reminding me of a previously scheduled event. On the other hand, it does demonstrate that information is processed below the level of conscious thought.

Second, I once dreamed of escape through a long, wet, exceedingly narrow tunnel. The next night, impulsively, I decided to watch The Shawshank Redemption, a movie I hadn’t seen before and didn’t know much about. But the climactic scene was familiar; Andy Dufresne’s escape through a narrow, watery sewer exactly replicated the scene from my dream. Now this, I aver, begins to resemble a genuinely psychic event. I hadn’t seen the movie and had not, at the time of the dream, even decided to watch it. But perhaps I read a review or overheard conversations about the movie. So it’s possible that, here again, I subconsciously processed information not available to me consciously; it’s even possible that my subconscious engineered the event by prompting me to rent the movie, close the loop begun with the dream, and thus have the rather thrilling experience of foreseeing the future. But if so, how fascinating; it’s as if I somehow contain a larger, smarter mind than the one I use daily, a mind that organizes more information than I am able to, a mind that, apparently, has its own agenda.

My final example is somewhat disturbing, at least to me. I was scheduled to visit a company in Michigan as part of a due diligence team. In a dream—or nightmare, really—a few days before the trip, I saw myself and others at the company standing around in shock, contemplating a horrific disaster unfolding on television. The sense of dread was so palpable that I considered canceling the trip. But in the end I didn’t let a mere psychic event outweigh corporate need, and so I visited the company on September 11th, 2001, and stood around with others, watching on TV as hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Center.

Now this seems impossibly strange. And yet… there were people who knew 9/11 was coming: the hijackers and their handlers, at minimum, and in the shadowy world of government, perhaps there were yet more. Is it possible that my subconscious sifted vast amounts of subtle evidence, made a prediction, and passed it to consciousness via my dream? I don’t honestly know. And here’s another thing I don’t know: what would be the difference between that and genuine precognition?

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

a gift for sarcasm is also essential

A few years ago, at a land surveyors convention banquet, I stuck up my hand and volunteered to be hypnotized on stage. I didn’t think I would actually succumb to the hypnotist’s suggestions, and in fact I was proof against her skills and ended up leaving the stage ignominiously; what I was really after was the experience of being embarrassed in front of my peers and in that I was not disappointed. Being on stage and then being asked to leave raised my heart rate, shortened my breath, and made me blush. Frankly, the sensation was exquisite, almost sexual.

At the time, I was trying to quit being a fundamentalist Christian and one of the biggest obstacles was admitting to colleagues that I had been in a really stupid religion. Owning up to my idiocy was so mortifying that I considered staying faithful simply to avoid all the awkwardness. But that would never do, so I began deliberately seeking out public ridicule in hopes that I might inoculate myself against a debilitating fear of embarrassment. And it worked pretty well, leading to the formation of what I like to call ‘Stocking’s Law’, to wit, “A willingness to be embarrassed is one prerequisite of an interesting life.”

It’s certainly not the only prerequisite—a gift for sarcasm is also essential—but it’s one that’s often overlooked. In my own case, the stupid things I do are the main subject of my writing, so that whenever I sit down to a blank page I expect to squirm a little. And I know a piece is at least potentially good if I am hesitant to release it, if I am a little afraid that this time I have gone too far. But I find, almost invariably, that the writing I anguish over the most is the writing that connects best with readers. I suppose we all do stupid things.

So excessive fear of embarrassment would keep me from doing good work, but that’s true for everyone. Good work requires willingness to fail, and failure is embarrassing.

And what about love? Most of the really awkward, demeaning, humiliating moments of my life have come at the hands of some female I’ve just expressed a particular admiration for, but I hope to Goddess I keep trying. Even friendships are fraught with potential mortification; it seems that acquiring friends and lovers requires a willingness to be rejected, and rejection sucks… but it doesn’t suck quite as much as loneliness.

When writing these radio essays, I try not to have any particular axe to grind, preferring instead to drone on about axe grinding in general. But Stocking’s Law is something I’m willing to insist on: a willingness to be embarrassed is one prerequisite of an interesting life. So if things have been a little boring for you recently, or for most of your life, why not do what I always do? Go somewhere public and do something stupid.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

We performed pagan rites involving sex and magick under her serene gaze

My first pagan altar was a simple bedside affair, presided over by the postcard of a somewhat generic goddess whom I took to be Ostara. I was nearly 40, deliberately learning a new skill after 17 years of Christian fundamentalism, and it struck me that altars had relatively few necessary/sufficient components, to wit:

1) An image of the Divine—you can’t practice idolatry without an idol.
2) A defined area, over which the image presides.
3) Some tokens of the things or changes desired.
4) Offerings to the Divine.

The actual subject of veneration is your choice and there are few rules. Basically, find a pantheon that appeals to you. It might be as elaborate and time-honored as the Hindu cosmology, or as up to date and ephemeral as the Power Puff girls. Just make sure the being chosen speaks to you in some way, or at least gives you a little frisson of naughtiness.

Images and idols aren’t mysterious: they’re among the earliest artifacts of humankind, and have an honorable place in our cultural evolution. Again (and always), you make the rules; if you’re a Star Wars fan, for example, you might like to bow to a bust of Darth Vader—kinky! The idol’s form is not too important—sculpture, painting, photos, clay figures, etc. all seem to ‘work’—though of course it is hard to resist the idea that fancier, more elaborate images invoke the god more effectively. And so, idols have been the focus of considerable skill and capital over the years, from gilt messiahs to 100-foot Buddhas.

My Altar to Ganesha

Likewise, your defined area can certainly be an entire building, or a dedicated room, but it is more likely to be a shelf or window ledge or some other little niche and this is fine. When it comes to idols, ‘don’t spoil the darlings’ I always say. But it is important that the area be circumscribed in space and consigned to the god. You don’t want to be setting coffee down in the god’s precinct, and here’s why: what you are creating is sacred space, a sort of threshold between this plane and the Immateria, and such a space cannot exist unless it is defined and contained; otherwise, material reality might be corrupted… and there are rules against that. And since the definition or boundary of the space is important, it follows that emphasizing the boundary will enhance the positive results you are seeking. So be clear, at least in your mind. The altar should be this shelf or this tabletop or, perhaps, the area surrounded by this chalk line or piece of string. In the terminology of Hakim Bey, definer of temporary autonomous zones (TAZs), you are creating a ‘zone’, an area that is ‘autonomous’ in that ordinary rules don’t apply. The effect is real, so have fun—and be alert.

Never forget that the altar is all about you. An altar (or entire religion, for that matter) that exists solely to placate some ineffable being without addressing the desires of his, her, or its supplicants is not only sad, but perverse—gods and goddesses exist to serve Man, and not vice-versa. So place, on your altar, tokens of your desire. For example, if you would like a new car of a particular model to come into your life, you might find the the same model ‘matchbox’ car to use as a token, or if you desire a nicer home you could place a Monopoly house. In my case, since the end of my time as a believer corresponded roughly with the end of my first marriage, I was after a new relationship. So I found a postcard—hey, they’re cheap—of a couple kissing exuberantly at an outdoor café. The picture captured the essence of the strong, happy love I was looking for, and several weeks after placing it I met the Farm Girl, who eventually became my second wife. Not only was she an exuberant kisser, not only did she slightly resemble the woman depicted, but she had one more interesting characteristic related to the postcard…

Some weeks after meeting the Farm Girl, I took a closer look at the postcard as I removed it from the altar (it had served its purpose) and noticed, for the first time, that there was a dog in the picture, under the café table, on a leash being held by the woman; it seemed like more than coincidence that the Farm Girl was a dog owner. So can you blame me if I now scrutinize my tokens a little more carefully? Because honestly?—the dog was a pain in the ass.

And of course you must please the god or goddess with offerings because otherwise, what’s in it for them? But don’t go overboard; we are talking, after all, about divine beings… surely they can provide for themselves adequately. It really is the thought that counts here… so put some thought into it. Don’t, for example, offer alcohol to Ganesha: he prefers candy. For Ostara, since she is associated with Spring—the word ‘Easter’ is derived from her name—flowers always seemed appropriate, and once I planted a tree and left the receipt for the tree on her altar. In effect you are bribing the incorporeal intelligence of your choice, but since the bribe is symbolic the absolute value of the bribe is unimportant. What matters is the appropriateness of the offering, its taste and style—as one classic manual of idolatry says, “Whatever has a defect, you shall not offer, for it will not be accepted for you.” – Leviticus 22:20.

In short—and as in so many things, damn it—you have to care; in all their guises, gods are said to read hearts and if your offering is halfhearted you can expect far less than half effort from the Divine.

Letting Go and Moving On
During our brief time together, the Farm Girl and I elevated our worship of Ostara considerably. The farm we bought together was named for Her, we publicly venerated Her at the large solstice parties we threw, and Her altar expanded from the simple bedside affair to a dedicated table presided over by an exquisite and eerily lovely print of the Goddess that occasionally winked at me. We performed pagan rites involving sex and magick under her serene gaze, enjoying ourselves tremendously and, not incidentally, experiencing staggering rushes of synchronistic blessings on our affairs. And this is all as it should be: if your circumstances improve, and if you feel your god has had a hand in the improvement, it only makes sense that the god’s circumstances and rites should also improve.

Still, when my marriage to the Farm Girl collapsed I was happy enough to divorce Ostara as well; the two seemed a set. I drifted godless for a while, making my way in the world with no patron whatsoever, until a series of chance encounters led me to Ganesha, the god of obstacles both removed and imposed. His cheerful, elephantine countenance, His placid potbelly, and the elaborate symbology available to His worshippers make for quite a change from Ostara, PBUH. The essentials, however, are the same. For an idol I have a small sculpted head brought to me from Lhasa by an adventurous friend. His altar space is a former phone nook in the entryway of my apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. The tokens of desire I place are idiosyncratic, but meaningful to me and, apparently, to Him. I offer candies purchased for the purpose from an Indian grocer in my neighborhood. I was advised on this matter by the Indian family who operates my parking garage: the Ganesh altar they keep is considerably more ornate than my own, but they encourage my efforts and are genial fellow devotees. They have given me, for example, the correct incense to burn before the Great Lord.

I pray to the idol, and occasionally prostrate my self before it—it’s kind of fun, and I enjoy the act’s vaguely sexual undercurrents. And yes, Ganesha has been effective in my life. Under His auspices my business improved, travel opportunities came into my life, He oversaw my move to San Francisco, provided transient but satisfying romantic encounters and, when the time came for me to meet the Diva, PBUH, dispelled seemingly insurmountable obstacles to our courtship with a single, trumpeting blast from His mighty trunk. He is, in other words, the Shit.

How Serious Am I?
So how serious am I about all this? Quite serious, in that I do believe my heathen idolatry is at least partially responsible for various and sundry good things in my life, and serious in that I do feel that prayers and requests made to Ostara and Ganesha have been ‘answered’. But when it comes to my explanation for the tangible effects observed, the mechanism that explains the power I am tapping into… maybe not so serious.

Consider this possible continuum of faith: on one end, the ‘low faith’ end, we posit that the practice of idolatry is merely a technology that tames the unconscious, a trick that focuses latent intellectual powers on issues that bedevil us. On the ‘high faith’ end of the continuum we posit that the gods and goddesses, in all their divine glory, actually exist on some plane, actually monitor the few or many altars devoted to them, and decide, based on the quality of devotion, who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, who gets gifts and who gets lice. In this view, it’s all up to the incorporeal intelligence being supplicated, and we are servant to their awful whim.

The low faith end, it should be noted, is not especially controversial. That focusing techniques like visualization, goal setting, and affirmation are effective is believed by much of humanity, and there is ample scientific and anecdotal evidence to support the idea. Basically, the prayers and ritual of idolatry are viewed as another method of harnessing the variety of mental processes that are not under conscious control. The high faith end, I suppose, is a little controversial… except that billions of humans have believed some version of it for thousands of years.

When asked where my beliefs fall on this continuum, I used to hedge a bit and natter on about an intermediate view involving Jungian archetypes, mass thought forms, genetic memory, belief systems, synchronicities, and on and on, ad nauseum. But more recently I’ve realized that the continuum is not a line, it’s a circle, and the two extremes I propose are not opposites… they’re identical.

In other words if, as Alan Moore says, “The one place gods undoubtedly exist is in human minds,” then it’s possible that all our sacrifice and devotion, all our prayer and ritual, all our religion, are but ways to tame the gods between our ears, the vast unconscious forces that shape and sustain us and upon which we are borne as fleas are borne on elephants.

In other other words, those of ceremonial magician Lon Milo Duquette, ‘Yes, it is all in your head… but you have no idea how big your head is!’

Follow this BS on Twitter.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

Really, a hoax is a gift, and we should be thankful

I was quite taken in by a 1985 Sports Illustrated profile of Sidd Finch, a remarkable rookie pitcher picked up by the Mets. Sidd was a student of yoga and had spent time in Tibet, where he learned mystic arts that enabled him to pitch a 168 mph fast ball. For a few hours I lived in a more wonderful world, a world in which the delicate balances that make baseball such an exquisite game were about to be forever upended. But then I thought about it a little more, noticed the date of the issue, and realized I’d fallen prey to a hoax. April Fools, Angus.

When I was in high school, I was something of a patriot. I saluted the flag with zeal, applied to the Coast Guard Academy and here’s the weird part, I even felt a certain automatic respect for the President, congressmen, and other politicians. But as I got older I began to think about it, and eventually smelled a hoax… and never again have I labored under the tedious delusion that my government is inherently less odious than other governments in other times or places. Similarly, for longer than I care to admit, I vigorously maintained the curious belief that God himself had been captured with a net of doctrine, and that I and a few others were the ones who had sprung the trap, and as practical jokes go, that was harsh.

To be fooled, and to then realize one has been fooled, is a powerful and valuable experience, and one that we cannot choose for ourselves, for if we know we’re being fooled… then we’re not being fooled. Really, a hoax is a gift, and we should be thankful. To be fooled is to know in one’s gut that at least some of our beliefs are probably wrong, and to see through a hoax is some kind of enlightenment. For there are two parties to every hoax, and the biggest hoax of all is the illusion that we are separate from the divine.

To be fooled is not the same thing as being a fool, not quite. We can be deceived in this life, and do silly things in service of deception, and there’s still a way to keep our pride. All we have to do is keep asking, keep seeking, keep testing, and the day comes when we realize we’ve been had. And that’s when we teeter on the edge of being a fool, for now we have a choice. We can either laugh at ourselves, and the hoax we’ve fallen for, and maybe learn a little more about the Author of all hoaxes… or we can turn back, reenter delusion, and be a fool indeed.

So my challenge—and yours too, obviously—is to keep figuring out what it is I’m falling for now. Maybe, for example, the man on the TV is lying to me, or maybe my happiness is less dependent on the economy than I think. The fact is, I don’t know which of my beliefs are actually hoaxes, I just know that at least some of them definitely are.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!