Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
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 [in the graphic] as a third Cartesian dimension of time for the sake of illustration, 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 and Wiccan ritualists. A major component of Thelemic practice is meditation, specifically Dharana, sitting meditation encapsulated for my purposes 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 an astral 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.
220,1:61. Book of the Law,
chapter 1: verse 61
… For one kiss
wilt thou then be willing to give all;
but whoso gives one particle of dust
shall lose all in that hour.
Science is almost as important as the other three elements of ARMS (Asana, Ritual, Magick, and Science). Critical thinking 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 neurobiology 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 soon becomes a vague memory. The ordeal instantiates the initiation in the mind-body complex of the incarnation.
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.
Aleister Crowley discussed this cycle in his remarks regarding the formula of I.A.O.
But before entering into the details of “I.A.O.” as a magick formula it should be remarked that it is essentially the formula of Yoga or meditation; in fact, of elementary mysticism in all its branches.
In beginning a meditation practice, there is always a quiet pleasure, a gentle natural growth; one takes a lively interest in the work; it seems easy; one is quite pleased to have started. This stage represents Isis. Sooner or later it is succeeded by depression—the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work. The simplest and easiest acts become almost impossible to perform. Such impotence fills the mind with apprehension and despair. The intensity of this loathing can hardly be understood by any person who has not experienced it. This is the period of Apophis.
It is followed by the arising not of Isis, but of Osiris. The ancient condition is not restored, but a new and superior condition is created, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death.
– Magick in Theory and Practice, chapter 5, The Formula of I.A.O.
Aiwass gives a global overview of the cycles of initiation and ordeal in his sequel to the Book of the Law.
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.
