Book of Lives
I saw and heard my Holy Guardian Angel in a deeply affecting vision more than fifty years ago. Llee Heflin had a similar vision four years earlier in 1968. James Beck wrote down his vision of Aiwass in chapter 5, verse 12 of 1976’s the Book of Codes.
One vision, about two years before the vision of my Angel, I call the Book of Lives vision.
Book of Lives
I saw a large book before me. Its spine was wider than the height of its cover. Seemingly millions of pages were bound in that book; each page was gossamer thin; each page represented an entire lifetime in the world. The book was open to my lifetime.
There were wormholes or channels of awareness running through from page to page, future and past. I could feel snippets of perception and emotion cascading down these channels — like reflections in parallel mirrors — as the same moments of contact are experienced in different lifetimes.
– Book of Lives vision, Nemo Pandragon, 1970.
My girlfriend suggested that I was perceiving a different dimension of time, a dimension at right angles to regular clock time. We experience this “other” dimension of time only in the most intimate present, for that is where it coincides with our experience of reality.
In one way or another, every practice relevant to discovering and connecting with the level of our own being labelled “Holy Guardian Angel” brings us into the present.
What I portray as a third Cartesian dimension of time for the sake of illustration in the graphic, physicists describe as a second dimension of time, an axis measured on a scale of imaginary numbers. The imaginary number i = or i 2 = −1.
The Science News 15 December 2021 article, titled Quantum physics requires imaginary numbers to explain reality, reviews two experiments demonstrating that complex numbers — a combination of real and imaginary numbers — are needed to explain the experimenters’ empirical results.
Initiation means The Journey Inwards: nothing is changed or can be changed; but all is trulier understood with every step. The Magus of the Gods, with His one Word that seems to overturn the chariot of Mankind in ruin, does not in fact destroy or even alter anything; He simply furnishes a new mode of applying the existing Energy to established Forms.
– Aleister Crowley, Little Essays Toward Truth: Mastery, 1938
This is the same Journey Inwards as taken by meditators. A major component of Thelemic practice is sitting meditation, specifically Dharana, encapsulated in the term Asana.
Ritual is meditation in motion. By asserting a circle and sequentially addressing the four cardinal directions, times of day, and seasons through the symbolism of the four cardinal signs of the zodiac — Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn — one creates a psychological vortex. With practice, the circle produces a temple within which one may reach higher (more intimate) states of consciousness.
Magick — the use of sex for worship, and the recycling of hormone-laden secretions — amplifies the neuroplastic effects of Asana and Ritual. These three practices, working together, are the means of journeying inwards.
We begin by intentionally directing our orgasms to a symbol of the sky-goddess Nuit. This simple act causes a shift in our perspective, a shift that shakes the foundations of our enculturated world-view.
Science is not as important as the other three elements of ARMS (Asana, Ritual, Magick, and Science). Critical thinking, however is vitally important. Tarot, with its Tree of Life core, provides a map of consciousness and a language to describe different levels of awareness; it is the language of Liber 440. Knowledge of the carbon cycle and the biochemistry of metabolism detail how every thought ultimately comes from sunlight. A basic understanding of neurology and psychology is also useful.
An initiation is an insight which opens a new level of consciousness to waking awareness. The new perspective is accommodated by the ordeal consequent to the initiation. Without the ordeal, the insight is soon forgotten or becomes a mere eidolon.
At first, not knowing how to respond in the new world revealed by the insight, we make a mess of things and slide into the trough of the initiation-ordeal cycle. To rectify the mess we made, we must take up ARMS (Asana, Ritual, Magick, and Science).
With practice we become adept. The skills, developed while living in the new world unveiled by the insight, eventually become second nature.
Having climbed back up to the peak of the initiation-ordeal cycle, it begins again with the next step on the ladder of initiation.
77,3:16. Book of Oz,
chapter 3: verse 16
Is there no end to the falling and climbing? This is the secret of Sisyphus, that angelic beast. That the climbing and falling is ever a joyous task, that this life and death is truly an unearned reward.
Though the level of adeptship achieved by previous incarnations is passed to subsequent incarnations of the Angel as potential consciousness, each new incarnation must experience the initiatory cycles for themself. Initiation-ordeal cycles progressively link the mind-body complex to the Holy Guardian Angel.
220,2:9. Book of the Law,
chapter 2: verse 9
Remember all ye that existence is pure joy;
that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they
pass & are done; but there is that which
remains.
“That which remains” is the adeptship which is passed along to subsequent incarnations of the Angel as potential consciousness.