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INTRODUCTION I / II / III / IV / V

Instead of imagining a Father, why not a Mother of all energies ?
Why assume there was a beginning and should be an end to the world ? Why not think it as always existing ?
If we assume a Beginning, what's 'before' it ? A god playing solitaire ? If you think in Kantian terms, it's impossible to talk about things this way, as demonstrated in the Critique of Pure Reason.
So, as Wittgenstein said in his 7th proposition, 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'.
A Big Bang is only a modern version of Creationism. So just let go, sit and meditate on the Void which is Full of Potential. From this Void springs the ten thousand things, including Beings which are much more powerful than Man, and which we call Gods.

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If you ever met God one day and challenged him to explain himself, perhaps he'd say... "I'm actually Good and Bad, I'm Christ and the Devil, I'm asleep and I'm awake, I love to let chance creep in but then, when I see it's getting out of hand I somehow intervene to keep the game going... I love to create and that's why sometimes I love and sometimes I'm jealous of creative people, because they discovered my secret... that Everyone is a God, that I only got here before you in this particular Solar System, and that above me and older than me are other more powerful Gods, and so on upwards endlessly. That life is a fractal phenomenon. And that sometimes I'm really really bored..."

And he would finish whispering to you : "Did you know that there's actually no Creation ? Everything has been going on since we gods can remember... we tried asking our elder brothers and they asked their elders and we never got to an original first creator... it's very bizarre... Some of our younger gods felt anxiety over this, but eventually they just let go of it..."

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Tattoos, or the body inscription mystique. Some very traditional Occult Orders inscribe (with kohl or henna) the reclined and nude astral traveller's physical body with the relevant planetary sigils, plus the sigils of the angels, spirits and daemons during the scrying ritual, as an officiant calmly recites the 'story' of that particular Path (in this case, one of the 32 Qabalistic Paths of Wisdom, which are comprised by the ten Sephiroth and the 22 paths between them).

In this sense a tattoo is a talisman and an amulet. It is an invocation of sorts. The only criticism one could do from this standpoint on modern tattooing is that the majority of people who choose old magical symbols (be they Chinese, Celtic, or other) are not actually aware of the energies they are connecting with... this could be hazardous !

Besides that, what Esoteric Initiations actually do is imprinting astral tattoos on the aspirant's Astral Body. These are as indelible as physical tattoos, perhaps even more so as they go beyond physical death and help the initiate in the between-worlds state (between lives).. 

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A Closing and an Opening. The conclusion, the higher octave of all the preceding aphorisms in this site lies in the Power of Now. This site opened with a dream, and in a certain sense closes or supersedes itself in the Power of Now, in the most complete Presence. For years the quest looked for a key, and this key, as is the case with all Occult keys, was right under our nose. With the opening of the Portal it is now possible to continue the Path. Eckhart Tolle synthesizes and opens for our times the open and hidden teachings of various Traditions : Sufism, Zen, Gurdjieff, Meister Eckhart's mystical teachings, and other Arcane traditions. Through his spontaneous Enlightenment when he was 29 years old, he showed even more effectively than Krishnamurti that Enlightenment does not require body rites and postures, that it is something intrinsically free. For those who are prepared, Tolle has brought the Portal that takes us to the deepening of and in Being.

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We have many rebirths during our life, in order to get closer to our goal which is greater spiritual awareness. All else is unimportant. The transmission of spiritual energy changes our lives, ignites our own inner selves and effectuates transmutations - from lead to gold, progressively, metaphorically. It is a generally slow and sometimes awfully quick process, eneven, non-continuous, by discrete jumps. Sometimes years of stagnation, then in a very short time an incredible opening of paths, followed by a partial closing of the doors as if to give only a taste of what awareness could be. Life seems to be a laboratory, an experiment in awareness.

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The invisible world, that is, the divinities and enlightened souls, seem to incite us from the beyond to enter this state of Presence. Curious, as we imagine (always the imagination..) that the beyond would somehow be like a continuation of our chronological, horizontal time. But this incitement to Presence seems to say the opposite to us, that this blessed Eternity where these divinities and souls reside is in a Present verticality. As if a dimension that crossed and surpassed us, as a plane that would cut our time plane and would not be in any way a continuation of it. This Kingdom of God - always present, here and now. One only needs to enter it. The Immanence of the mystical experience. God here, the divine here. This awakening, how pleasurable it is, strangely alive and energetic, nourishing. One feels one's body literally feeding on this energy, eating it.

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There is nothing besides Aleph, the Burning Bush, burning eternal Now. Basking at the Sun of Being. The continuous begetting of the Son by the Godhead. Eucharist. Welcome to Reality.

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As to ask help from Astral Masters, what could these masters do but exactly what we do here, that is to strive to be more present, to deepen oneself more and more in Presence wherever one is ? What would they do that we don't already strive to do ? This vertical path crosses all Worlds, and seems to be universal. The only thing we could ask them would be for their physical and spiritual protection so that we could accomplish this work in peace and security. No one will do this work for us. So, even if the Buddha himself appears to us perhaps we need not kill him as some traditions preach, but gently dismiss him, cum granum salis.

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It does not make the least difference. To know the details of our Destiny, to know what the stars or Gods have in store for us, does not make the least difference on the Vertical Path of Presence. They are as ripples on the surface of a deep lake, the lake of Being or Presence. Our lives may be completely foreordained, their encounters, their happiness and sorrows, their desillusionments - and indeed that seems to be the case by the evidence given by the age-old practice of clairvoyance. If such be the case or not - it does not make the least difference. The difference in magnitude between what happens or will happen on this surface is incommensurable with the Lake's deepness, as is incommensurable the former's bidimensionality compared with the broad tridimensionality of the latter.

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There is something quite real regarding Light as a way to the Divine, and poetic allusions to 'the Light of God' are wrongly taken as simple metaphors. Echoes of this are found in Sohravardi, as Corbin showed. And Goethe, who wrote a treatise on Light, had that famous last wish as he was dying : 'More Light !' Light seems to physically feed us at spiritual levels.

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Q : Which is the best religion ?
A : Perhaps Spirituality without Religion could be a best form of it... Conscience without Mind. So that we needn't have our ego identities based on that. And just be it.

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Q : What is Truth ?
A : Truth has nothing to do with statements about it, it's silent and Obscure and yet the Mother of all myriad things. What Heidegger named Being. What Lao Tse referred to in the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching :

The tao that can be described
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be spoken
is not the eternal Name.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of creation.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.
By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Yet mystery and reality
emerge from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness born from darkness.
The beginning of all understanding.

(J. H. McDonald translation)

Searching for Truth is about moments of awareness, like looking on a moonless and silent night sky.

René Daumal, an early Surrealist who was a pupil of Gurdjieff in Paris and Fontainebleau, wrote an interesting novel called 'The Mount Analogue'. It's about friends who decide on an expedition to find and climb this mythical mountain.

As they climb they collect pebbles which are symbols of these moments of true awareness.

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Q : Should we use more of our brain capacity ?
A : In fact we use too much of our brains already. Enlightenment means going beyond neuronal synapses and brain in general, beyond thought... Perhaps enlightened people seldom talk because their minds are empty and they have nothing to say...

Without opening your door,
you can know the whole world.
Without looking out your window,
you can understand the way of the Tao.

The more knowledge you seek,
the less you will understand.

The Master understands without leaving,
sees clearly without looking,
accomplishes much without doing anything.

(Tao Te Ching, 47, J. H. McDonald translation)

There is the leisurely one,
Walking the Tao, beyond philosophy,
Not avoiding fantasy, not seeking truth.
The real nature of ignorance is the Buddha-nature itself.

(Sho Do Ka, 1-2, R. Aitken translation)

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Why bother about reincarnations ? You see, we're reincarnating every second... every moment is a reincarnation.

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What do you want when you decide to meditate ? Meditation can have many possible goals, or put another way : we can say that there are many types of meditation... to suit all tastes...

Schopenhauer had this wonderful insight when he saw Buddhism as a will-do-die, as a desperate (in his opinion) answer to nature's will-to-live. Freud will rework all of this in his own way...

Then you can also have Nietzschean Occultists such as Crowley, who decide not on a final dissolution of the ego but rather on its divinization (going along with Renaissance guys such as Ficino, Pico, Bruno). And so here we have spiritual and magickal practices aligned with the realization of Life as Will-to-Power.

All of this has been synthesized by Hermetic Qabalists (mind you, not Jewish but Hermetic) as the difference between a) the Mystical Way of the Dove or Arrow - upwards in a straight line from Malkuth to Kether passing by Daath and making a dissolution choice there, and b) the Magickal Way of the Serpent, slowly passing upwards through all the Sephiroth, making a self-divinizing choice at Daath and finally attaining Kether...

Daoist cultivation seems to be akin to the Way of the Serpent, while Buddhist Meditation and Non-dualist mystical practices in general seem to be akin to the Way of the Dove/Arrow...

So Crowley was right after all as concerns the Adept of the Serpent Way when he proclaimed that “Every man and woman is a Star”… for indeed this divinization implies bigger and bigger material structures in the end, and it was not by chance that the ancient Greeks ascribed the stars and constellations to late extraordinary men or heroes… some even whisper that our present Sun was once a man…

Note : some people ask why do authors make a difference between Jewish and Hermetic Qabalistic traditions. Isn’t the Qabalah necessarily a strictly Jewish thing ? Actually, no. Let me give a brief historical explanation : from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance onwards you had quite a few curious European Christian scholars studying under the Rabbis. They translated some key texts into Latin (Knorr von Rosenroth) and often re-invented the Qabalah to suit their particular religious convictions (Reuchlin)... Pico della Mirandola, a pupil of Ficino, blended the Hebrew (and by this time Latin) Qabalah with the Hermetic and Neoplatonic magickal considerations of his teacher. The 17th century German Rosicrucians inherited this mixed Qabalah, and in their turn 18th, 19th and even 20th century Occultists inherited this same brand from the R+C... That's the lineage that is nowadays called 'Hermetic Qabalah', to distinguish it from the purely Rabbinical one.

As to the purists, it may well be said that the mythical Abraham (who brought the Qabalah from the East - presumably the Sepher Yetzirah, according to C. Suarès) was not a Jew. And as even Scholem and Moshe Idel point out, the Jewish Qabalah itself was an amalgam of Neoplatonist, Gnostic and Hellenistic teachings mixed with proper Jewish traditions…

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Q : Are Guardian Angels part of our psyche or are they separate spiritual entities ?
A : Actually there is this constant overlapping of realities... we could say the whole Universe, seen and unseen, is our Psyche... so Gods and Angels are part of us and vice-versa, all the time... there isn't in fact any inside/outside... which makes synchronicities and omens such a natural phenomenon...

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New
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted”. This simple phrase, credited by William S. Burroughs to Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain and chief of the Assassins (a designation that originates from their use of hashish), wonderfully synthesizes the ultimate truth cognized at the end of numberless Initiations : keeping the outer shell of his social, cultural and legal personality, the Void created inside the Initiate is a Void swarming with possibilities, a truly Daoist Void where Worlds are continuously generated and destroyed.

This phrase resonates deeply on many levels : on the metaphysical, ontological, ontic, ethical, moral, existential, real and imaginary, conscious and unconscious, coloured and black and white levels... And when this transmutation is accomplished true Freedom and its delight begins.

So many veils did the Initiate lift, only to see his own nudity. Magnum Opus. In this Inner Body of Glory, Light and Shadow fuse and Life finally begins, exuberant.

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New
I wish I had more to say - as the years go by, I have less and less... only my daily practice remains, an encounter with Is-ness, deeper and deeper... Looking at my books, painstakingly collected throughout the years, I feel I could throw my whole library out... an interesting feeling. I suppose it’s a good thing, after all.

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New
The shaming kiss. In the Templar Trial official documents, which at the end sent them all to the stake, was the statement that affirmed that one of their inner Initiations consisted of kisssing the anus of a goat which they named the Baphomet. To the Inquisitors, this goat stood for the Devil himself...

It is quite difficult to inquire on facts that took place so long ago, however it is interesting to note that this "goat" (an animal famous for its promiscuity or sexual energy) is represented by the Arcanum XV of the Tarot. It corresponds to the Seagoat of the sign of Capricorn, whose regent is Saturn (which is identified with the heaviest of the 7 Alchemical metals, Lead).

In the distribution of the 7 Alchemical metals to the 7 Chakras of the Subtle Body, Saturn/Lead corresponds to the Base Chakra (Muladhara), where the Serpent lies asleep.

This kiss is at the same time an Ophidian reverence and a Serpentine propitiation... It renders concrete the Aspirant's vow to attain Gnosis, Enlightenment, to attain the Awakening and Ascension of this Energy. Strangely, we are taken to the doctrines and practices of Ancient India... We'll never know for sure in how many veiled ways this knowledge tried to reach the West throughout the centuries - through heretical, Occult and symbolical trappings...

Note : one arrives at these same conclusions through the Occult attributions of the Arcana (Qabalistic, Alchemical and Planetary attributions) and by the careful study of these aspects in the Tree of Life and Cube of Space diagrams. As this is not the proper setting for its exposition, I'll content myself to suggest its study and to point out the Occult relationship that exists between Arcanum XV and Arcanum XXI.

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New
Pragmatic intuition. Perhaps there comes a time in the Path when one moves beyond Truth - perhaps it is only a phase, though, and one gets back to 'caring about Truth' again in the end. But at this juncture, one just keeps polishing the tile - through Method and Practice.

Perhaps it is a 'postmodern' phase in the Path. As 'all is discourse', all speech or 'Truths' become redundant... just Action and its tangible results remain – results obtained through Method and Practice. It could be called pragmatic intuition, or even spiritual pragmatism.

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