Audio - Left & Right Hand Paths

The Left & The Right Hand Paths, 30th October 2022

Summary: The Mountain & The Forest

In the first talk I talked about how the prayer is a way of traveling up the mountain and unbinding practice as a way of traveling down.

So faith is how we go up the mountain. Knowledge is how we come down and travel back into the forest. So that's the mountain and the forest, and that's how we should think about how - practically speaking - the prayer and the unbinding practice are related to each other and why they go together.

And we can see there's the completing of a circle. That's the circle of creation. The esoteric aspect to that is the single most important principle for your orientation when it comes to Magia and why the teaching is called Magia in the first place. And that's the idea that we're bringing something from the world of spirit into this world and allowing it to act in terms of its own nature without interfering with it in any way. Such as changing, adapting, interfering with, interpreting, injecting beliefs into or manipulating, what it is that we have appropriately been assigned to bring into the world at that time.

This is the oldest understanding of magic. The further back in time you go, the older the traditions are that talk about magicians being the people who conjure creation itself, without which there wouldn't be any creation, there wouldn't be a world.

Principally, you find that kind of talk in shamanic traditions. Shaman is a very limiting term because it really refers to one specific group of people with a certain kind of magical practitioner in part of Siberia. But the general thrust is correct. It's like the older traditions with the older magicians who actually served a function in community.

There's another version of understanding this duty that we find in the Bible or with the Babylonians, which is the principle of the Watchers. So when you hear people like Peter Kingsley talk about the Watchers being present at the beginning or the end of a civilisation to witness or to watch, the thing to keep in mind is not that it's a passive appreciation of what's happening that's required. Rather it's the bringing of that divine nature that I just talked about from the world of the Spirit, that completes the circle of creation in that particular instance for that particular thing or aspect of creation. So in terms of that example, that would be a particular kind of civilisation.

Don't worry if the esoteric aspects don't make that much sense. The most important thing is that you understand practically what it is that you need to do, and the esoteric stuff will come later (if that's the case).

Summary: Leviathan & Behemoth

In the second talk, I talked about the magical record and why it's the most important tool that we have. And although it may look like a practical log that we use to adjust and understand our unbinding practice, it is in fact the very beginnings, a seed if you like, of our conscious participation in a process that's quite profound and describes incarnation itself.

I think the instructions for the record are pretty straightforward, but what it represents as a magical object is the magical memory. It represents memory. Memory being the only addition that can be made to a nature that has no beginning and no end. So you might say the gift of time to eternity is the addition of memory, such that there's a nature that can't be changed that through time is possible to reap a harvest.

I made comments in the last talk about how when someone dies, you get to see everything that they meant to you in your life in a way that's not possible whilst they're alive. And a similar thing occurs for yourself in terms of your own life. Love returns back to the other world that is cultivated through the memory that we've talked about. And the sufferings and the pain and all of that stuff that doesn't go away whilst we're here passes and is done. We see this in binding practice. If we do a binding practice and we trace back a drama or a shadow to the past, to an event that involved not just the drawing of the false conclusion that we're interested in when it comes to the binding, but can include even being on the wrong end of someone's malevolent intention.

When you finish a binding practice and the shadow goes home, we end up in a position of recognising responsibility - what we say yes to and what we say no to - but it doesn't pretend that the other elements in the experience don't matter - it doesn't explain them away - but it does leave them where they are. It leaves them exactly where they are. So if I asked you to find where that past event actually is, you'll come up with an answer, won't you? And that answer is exactly what happens to all of the pain in the suffering.

The harvest, the agricultural analogy, the headless magician - at Gobekli Tepi, there are depictions of magicians with no head, with a missing head. You also find it in biblical literature: the head of prophecy was cut off with John the Baptist. The Baptist's Head.

The corrollary of that is the making of a head, right? Or the making of a brass head, which is something that you find in Sufism. You find it in some interpretations of the legends of the Knights Templar, and what they worshiped. Because some people say that Baphomet really was a brass head.

But the head of prophecy, what that actually means is a head of wheat. You grow and cultivate something, and then when it's ready for the harvest, it gets chopped off. We talk about fruit, but it's the same idea, right? Whenever you see any references to a headless god, headless magician, that kind of a thing, or a head on its own that's been severed from a body, that's what it's referencing.

Now, we've got the human life - when a person dies, you can say that there's a harvest. Our intention with our practice is to make conscious the process of incarnation that everyone's engaged in. But we make it conscious in a way. And the diary being one way of doing that, is to accelerate that process. So we attempt to die whilst we're still alive. Again it's the same symbolism: the fruit, the head of wheat. 

So the magical record is a conscious way for us to participate in this process - the most important process - which is this accruing of memory, such that there can be harvest in a place that doesn't have seasons, let's put it that way.

An appropriate symbol to understand this process and what we're engaged in, which is a nice way of summing up the teaching of the Casting of Shadows in the Magia book, is the Leviathan or the Oroboros, which is a serpent eating its own tail.

The casting of shadows: a brief recap. We are gods standing in the fire of eternity casting shadows of ourselves into time, and then taking those shadows to be ourselves. That's what a human being is, and therefore, a mixture of two worlds, right?

This world won't exist if we didn't bring that life here from that other world. Again, that's referencing back to the idea of the magician conjuring the world, keeping it together. That's what it means to bind it together, to hold it together. A god incarnates, it's like a circle, we complete that circle of creation. In one aspect, that's the human life. For us, we want to accelerate that and do it quicker, because we want to die whilst we're alive.

That circle holds the world together. It's like the world's soul. The Oroboros is often depicted as that which holds the cosmos together. You can look at it in Christian terms and talk about Christ and Antichrist, but the best way of thinking about it is that it's opposites. And that as a result of two opposites coming together, there's a nature that turns about on itself and doesn't require or depend upon anything else to be the way that it is.

The Oroboros is like an iron ring. It's like a depiction of what a god is. It's who we are and what we're doing. We go, we are the gods that go and we travel. Which means all the things that we accrue in our memory are things that essentially can in no way harm our actual fundamental nature, right? Our nature is actually indestructible, and therefore existence is an adventure. One thing that's afforded by that viewpoint is the recognition of dignity being the appropriate virtue when it comes to thinking about yourself and other people and the choices that they make, the responsibility that they have. So that's Leviathan, the Oroboros.

There's more there with the symbolism: Christ is the perfect serpent that eats the smaller serpents. With Moses, with the brazen serpent and his staff with the smaller serpents, the bigger serpent eats the smaller serpents. Because that's what's required, isn't it?

The perfect serpent is a dragon. The dragon is Leviathan. Leviathan is the Oroboros that binds the world together.

Now, Leviathan and Behemoth being more esoteric, right? These two creatures feature in the Bible, in prophecy. At the end of the world, Leviathan will form a shelter, the place we inhabit. Behemoth will provide nourishment for all the creatures, all the things. I could say more about this being really a representation of divine justice and divine mercy, or you can think about it as the two worlds. The two worlds: divine justice is what we are doing when we consciously participate in this process. We say yes, we do a practice, we have a diary or a record. We do unbinding, we do binding, we do magical stuff, right? There are seasons, there's fruit. There's the binding of shadows, there's the traveling through the darkness. There are the stages. This is all in the light, so to speak, and that's what divine justice is. It's appreciating the consequence of the choices that we've made and the fact that we can't escape those consequences. Divine justice, right? Responsibility.

Mercy is the other world. Mercy is what we find in the underworld, the world of the damned. Those souls that can't say yes anymore, they've made all the wrong choices. No fruit is coming from that crop, so to speak. It's been a wasted harvest. Wasted season, nothing's coming, right? There is no self-help program for the damned. They're not going to say yes, it's game over. Human beings don't want anything to do with them.

If someone was being harsh, they would say, 'They've made their choices. Who cares about them? Throw them away, throw them in the fire.' So on and so forth. But at the bottom, where the damned are, where humans won't go, that's where we find divine mercy. Divine mercy says, even though justice says that this is evil, divine mercy says we'll still recognize 
that even that can be redeemed.

And what I mean by that is not redeemed in the sense of saved in the divine justice sense. I mean it in this sense: if you have a field and you sow your seed and you have a nice hardest, and you do everything well, and you pay attention, and everything grows, and you get everything that you wanted, and it's like your birthday and it's harvest time. And you have your nice food. It goes into winter and the ground is fallow again. It returns back to how it was last winter, empty. Barren, nothing will grow.

However, if you sow your seed, but you don't take care of it, or you intentionally do things wrong, out of spite or resentment, who knows? You're negligent. You don't get a harvest. Or maybe there's disease that wipes it all out. Either way, you end up where you were at the beginning again, in exactly the same way as the successful harvest.

Except the only difference is there's no harvest. There's no harvest, there's no memory. A wasted opportunity, a wasted journey.

Now divine mercy says even at the end there, everything returns back to where it started. And everything that happened is lost: all of that resentment, all of that anger, all of that malevolence. All of that confusion, all of that hurt. All of that's just lost. That isn't the harvest. So that's just gone. That's left where it is. It's gone. But an opportunity was wasted. So divine mercy means that even then at the end there's liberation, but what's come of it? So you could say it's a tragedy for sure.

If we were to make it into a creature, we would get something that might be a hippopotamus. But it's Behemoth, who sustains and feeds all the creatures, gives of itself unconditionally, sustains everything. 

The Fate of the Damned

Are the damned seen as sustenance?

No. This is another way of putting it, what I've just talked about:

If you take yourself merely to be this, when you die, you're dead.

If you die whilst you're still alive, you don't die.

See, because here's the question that comes up when we talk about the damned. Do they get away with it? 'Oh, they have the same thing that we have in the end. What's the point of that then?' But that's not what any of this means.

The tragedy is the annihilation at the end. It just leads to annihilation, there is no continuity with that. But that which is always the case, is that which is always the case. And there's no waste there, so to speak. 

There's no harvest. And it's a tragedy, but it's not the end of creation, right?

So you can think about this in terms of a human life. People have opportunities, a number of opportunities. They're not infinite, because your life isn't infinite. So certain things are possible and maybe the god that's incarnated throws away that lifetime. Or maybe there's a continuity in terms of working through particular false understandings that we have of our own nature in a sequential incarnation as a result of choices made in this one. 

The Left & The Right Hand Paths

In this talk, I would like to talk about the left and the right hand paths.

In magical tradition, east and west, and as a result of the cross pollination between the two, there are these ideas of the left hand path and the right hand path.

And practitioners fall into one of these two camps. They're either pursuing the left hand path or they're pursuing the right hand path. Now, there are a lot of opinions about what these paths are, what the differences are, what the similarities are. Some people argue that these ideas were really just made up by Helena Blavatsky and have no basis in tradition at all.

However, one of the things I would say about someone like Helena Blavatsky is that it's pretty obvious that some of the terms that she uses are made up, right? Some of the things that she talks about are made up. She misuses sanskrit right? Claims certain words mean things that they don't mean. And you can see she uses butchered concepts from other traditions. You might argue that maybe she doesn't understand the original concept, right? One of those examples, by the way, is the 'tulpa'. Have people heard of the tulpa? Tulpa is supposed to be a 'thought form'. You can create tulpas or thought forms.

What that is, is a misunderstanding of the word 'tulku'? Tulku is a reincarnated Tibetan lama. Not the animal, the Buddhist master. A tulku. So this word became a tulpa. And now in Western esotericism, there's this  idea of the 'thought form', and that in Tibetan Buddhism they create 'thought forms' and this other stuff. Doesn't exist in those traditions, but it doesn't matter. The point I was going to get to is this.

The Scholar's Error

If we go on purely rational, scholarly grounds for understanding a teaching and the activity of that teaching in the world, we can make a great mistake. We can see this in action when the Egyptian mysteries were translated into Hellenic culture. And certain words were translated in a way that we would say are academically unsound.

And we might even laugh at the stupidity of the people doing the translation. 'Look how they get it wrong. Look how they misunderstood. Look at their ignorance.' However, there can be something else that's going on.

We think of it this way cause this is how we think about things. And we can't imagine anything outside of this. But it's not an exercise in academic translation, right? In the accuracy of translation, in terms of a noun in one language being as close as possible to a noun in another. What's really being translated is a principle. A principle that can have many facets. And a facet of one particular principle might be best transmitted through - what we would call - a mistranslation of a word in one language, that describes a different facet of that same principle. Into a word that describes the other facet of this same principle in the other language.

I'll give you another example. If you read Crowley's Book of the Law: Egyptian scholarship was at a certain point that we have progressed from since then. So there are names for gods in there that are now considered inaccurate. You might even argue then they're kind of pseudo-Egyptian English gods, something like that, right?

Does that mean that they should be thrown away? No. What it means is that the truth that's pointed to through what we might call an inaccurate or an ignorant use of language - the living truth - is still there. It's conveyed with that meaning at that time in that way. And we would make a mistake if we dismiss it out of hand, or look down our noses at the work that they did. 

Conventional Occult Understanding of the Paths

So what's the conventional understanding of these two paths?

Here's one conventional understanding that we find in an organisation such as the Temple of Set. The left hand path is where you use magical methods or spiritual methods, usually considered taboo by the culture that you're in - so things like sex, drugs, intoxication, even committing crimes, things that you're not supposed to do - and you use those acts of transgression as a means to fortify the idea you have of yourself. To discover and fortify the nature of the self.

And that's in contradistinction to the right hand path. The right hand path is those fuddy-duddy, dusty, old, uptight religious practices that we find in monasticism, that kind of a thing. So the right hand path would be renunciation, it would be meditation, it would be going and practicing in a cave on retreat, turning away from world - and this is the conventional understanding, by the way. We'll get to the truth in a moment. The idea there is you're going to be annihilated in God. You're going to go and get annihilated in God.

So one path, you do all the naughty things, and it's to develop and grow yourself. The other path is to do all the really boring, uptight stuff and to be annihilated in God. So that's the corny understanding and there are organisations and people who think this is a real thing.

Eastern Traditional Understanding of the Paths

Let's look at eastern traditions. Now I'm going to generalize, so please forgive me for that. But generally speaking, the left hand path and the right hand path, if we find it in a tradition - so I can give a concrete example in the Tibetan lineages, Buddhist practices where they have tantra, often considered a left hand path practice - the trajectory goes like this.

You learn all of the stuff on the right hand path. So you have to learn how to meditate. You have to master the concentration iand absorption states or samadhi. You have to go through all of that before you are ready to do tantra or the left hand path. That means using those things usually forbidden to attain enlightenment - so if you're going to practice things like sacred forms of sexuality, that kind of a thing or intoxication. This alchemical idea of transmutation, taking something forbidden, or delusional  and turning it the right way up, making gold out of it or taking a poison and making it into a medicine. That's usually an analogy that's used, right? So that comes last and it's extraordinarily difficult to do. That's in those traditions.

Now, of course, in the west we have parodies of this. People just get drunk and have sex and pretend they're doing something spiritual. You're going to be doing it anyway, aren't you? And then if the idea is that it's to reinforce the self, it's business as usual, isn't it? I don't see any spiritual discipline there.

The Paths only exist at a point in development

In terms of Crowley's understanding of the left hand and the right hand path, and let's just say also the understanding that we have within Magia, right? Because they're actually the same thing, the left hand path and the right hand path are the same path up to a certain point.

For Crowley in his system, he had the idea of achieving union with the holy guardian angel. We would say an awakening, right? I was going to say through the beloved practice, but all three practices are three facets of the same thing, the same process, to achieve awakening.

So there are various different practices and disciplines that you can follow and up to a certain point you can pick and choose what it is that you want to do. So maybe you use sex magic, maybe you do meditation, maybe you do yoga, maybe you do fasting. Maybe you take mescaline, right? You can do all these different practices.

And it only really matters in terms of the two paths when you get to the point where there's the crisis of the angel, followed by the crisis of the abyss. Now we would say that's the crisis of the God and then the God ess, right? So awakening, but then the idea of the underworld, right?

Or divine justice. And then divine mercy.

Just to make that a bit more real. You know in your practice sometimes you can go through the steps and the stages and you can apply yourself and you can have a good understanding and you've read the literature and it makes sense and you're having growth and it feels wonderful, right? And there's progress and you can look in your magical record and you can see things happening and it all makes sense.

And then for some reason you have practices where you can't concentrate. The words don't really make sense. You don't even really like them. You can't make sense of any of the ideas in the book. You feel disgusted and confusion. Nothing works. There's nothing that you can do, right? That's divine justice followed by divine mercy, because there is no strategy that you can employ to help yourself when you're in that state. And that's because in some sense, at some scale, you are completing a circle.

So you're in the underworld, right? And the only thing that gets you through that is divine mercy. Divine mercy will be the liberation from that at some point. So you can have your wonderful awakening, but then following it is an even deeper, darker shadow. It's even more challenging, right?

At a certain point, you'll be faced with a fork in the road, and the left and the right hand path now means something. This is the choice. The right hand path is to continue the process to travel through, to keep going. The left hand path is where you decide you're not going to go any further. You've gone as far as you need to go, and you're not going to go any further because what lies ahead is annihilation. What lies ahead is disintegration and you're not into that. So you turn your back on it.

The left hand path for Crowley and for us is where we would say we would find what some of the traditionalists called a counter-initiate, or what Crowley called a Black Brother from his scrying of the Enochian aethyrs.

Vision: Cloaked Human Beings

And there's some interesting imagery that he saw when he did these workings with the Enochian angels. He saw lots of people with black cloaks over their heads and they were just walking around, bumping into each other and wailing and having a terrible time. And it's comical because all they have to do is just lift the sheet off their heads. But this is one vision that he had. For those people familiar with the Presocratics or rather the ancestors at the beginning of western civilisation, Parmenides and Empedocles and so on, that image might remind you of some of the images that they've used. Which is not a coincidence, which we'll get to in a minute.

So the left hand path is that decision: actually, I'm not going to go any further. And actually I'm going to hold on to what appears to still be here, fortifying the self. There's the idea that this is a valid alternative to the other path. And who's to say which one you should choose?

The False Existential Drama of the Left Hand Path

But here's the thing, what if the idea of annihilation and disintegration is a falsehood? What if it's not real? What if it's a shadow of what comes next? What if the shadow is the opposite image of the true nature of what's casting the shadow? 

In Magia we have this understanding of existential shadows. In the process of completing the circle, by necessity we will first encounter shadows from our past, which we cast as our incarnation deepened, and they're like miniature versions of a larger shadow or a larger drama. And once we travel through those - let's say personal or familial problems, let's put it that way - in your practice, eventually you get to the big shadow that comes prior to the awakening, of which the little shadows are like the children. They're the children of that parent shadow.

So there's always a multiplicity of smaller shadows that go back into our past that we see transmitted to us through the family or the culture. And they're different ways of expressing in smaller form as a multiplicity this larger shadow. And the difference is, this larger shadow is a shadow cast from the future. So instead of being cast from the past, like familial shadows, these are cast from the future.

And instead of finding a false transmission in the future, which is what we find in the past, we actually find a true transmission. And its nature is the opposite of what the shadow would lead you to believe.

So in all the traditions we hear talk of the fear of God, self annihilation, disintegration, being torn apart, the end of your world, et cetera.

However, what would be the opposite of self annihilation?

The image of the death of a human being is a lower order expression of annihilation of the self. There's the death of a person, but self annihilation is the annihilation of the self, the fundamental part of you, which is not merely the death of a human being. When you face self annihilation, it's very different from the idea that we have of death. Death is like a reflection or a playing out of that drama. But it's based on this higher drama, this idea of self annihilation, nonexistence, we might put it that way.  

Now, the opposite of nothingness - absolute non-being - the opposite of that is being, isn't it? The opposite of a slow dissent where you're torn apart piece by piece, a slow and painful process of suffering and sadness until you disappear, the opposite of that is a growth in eternal life. Can we put it that way?

And we're back to the Oroboros, aren't we? A continuous growth in eternal life. And what is that growth? That's the accrual of the memory. The magical memory. That's the opposite. That's what we get to.

Now, this is neither fortifying the idea of the self as a human person, it's not that. But it's also not self annihilation, is it? Both of those are appearances. And this isn't an appearance, this is something else at this stage. 

Okay, so what does that mean? How many paths are there really then? 

The Left Hand Path is choosing disintegration

This left hand path is a great example for you to ponder if you've ever been struggling with that idea of the mystery of magical reality and what it means.

One way of putting that is that you get exactly what you ask for, informed by your understanding of yourself. So if you've made a case of mistaken identity, you mistakenly believe you're going to get something from its opposite, and then you pursue this opposite. And wonder why you're not getting it. That's the source of suffering. 

If you believe that you're going to be disintegrated and you say I'm not going to go any further, then what are you going to experience? You inhabit this damned drama of disintegration, and it's a long process of being disintegrated. At the end, when finally there's liberation, you see that was never the case in the first place. That's likely at the end of that person's life, not whilst they're alive.

So if you believe yourself to be fending off disintegration, you get more of that, and that's a terrible way to live, to spend the rest of your incarnation. 

And that's the left hand path. Now is it an actual path?

No, it's not a path is it? There's only one path. And it'd be wrong to say that's the right hand path. Because there is no left and right hand path. There's just one path. 

The One Path is accommodating opposites

Now in terms of methodology, that then becomes a technical question, right? So why would you break taboos versus practice renunciation?

You can think of the whole process, the path that you're walking along, as one of accommodating these opposites, of balance, of achieving a total expression of your qualities and capacities. Most people start off lopsided or they have certain qualities that are developed and certain qualities that are undeveloped.

So the idea is, if you are lazy and indulgent and hedonistic, then the thing that you should do is practice renunciation. You've mastered laziness and hedonism, right? So you want discipline and renunciation. That's the direction you should go in.

On the contrary, let's say your sexually uptight. What you should do is go in the opposite direction, have some sexual adventures, right? And vice versa. So it depends on where you find yourself.

In terms of Magia, which I think is a slightly more sophisticated approach, we can see the accommodation of the opposites in our practice. So when we look at shadows, we accommodate the opposites, and those shadows are particular to ourselves in terms of our own nature already. So it's being able to address what I've been talking about from the inside out. Such that we end up expressing our nature in a balanced and fruitful fashion as a result of merely correcting our false understandings that we have of ourselves. Or another way of putting it, by reclaiming the magical power that we gave away as our incarnation deepened, and we took on these false beliefs. And as per the traditional way, we begin with renunciation. That's why it's there in the magical order.

So just to sum up, there's one path. What we want to do is accommodate the opposites. 

Trauma for your own good

There is a parody of this entire process - and you could say it's a parody of the left hand path - and it's about transgression. This all stems from the idea of breaking social taboos, but we don't really have social taboos anymore, do we?

Getting drunk isn't a social taboo.  Being promiscuous? Marriage means little as an institution in the west. So you'd have to ask from a spiritual perspective, if you were following the left-hand path that I've been describing, exactly how are you transgressing? You're just doing what you'd be doing anyway,

But it gets worse than that, because there's a way of describing this as 'to be disturbed or traumatised for your own good' - and that's malevolent by the way. You can't say yes to being disturbed, otherwise you wouldn't be disturbed. You can't say yes to trauma, otherwise it wouldn't be trauma. If there's an experience that you might have that could be traumatic, if you've actually said yes to it and you are prepared for it, then it's not traumatic in the way it is for others.

So what I'm saying there is you might have this idea that if you take a heroic dose of entheogens that's a valid path or something like that. That is you flirting with trauma. The parody is in there, which is the destroying of boundaries for your own good.

When it comes to practices like that - and there are other practices that don't involve drugs by the way, but stuff where there's this idea of transgression or pushing boundaries - you should look out for yourself, right? And don't walk into things naively, right? And if you see that dynamic and you're unsure, just don't do it.

I would never say to people 'don't explore', but there are people that will lead you in a certain direction and that could lead to your destruction, right? In whatever way you want to describe that. 

I've known quite a few people who start off with occultism or Western stuff and they stay there for a little bit and then they've moved on. And I know lots of Buddhist teachers who are like that, they start off there and then they move on. And most of the people they know who get involved in Western occultism, in any serious sense, they end up a mess. Their lives end up a mess. It's not good. And I've had more than one person say to me, they're surprised that I'm not a mess, given that I'm still in that tradition.

But as you can see, what I'm talking about is a lineage or a tradition that recognises these elements that I've been talking about. 

Sex and drugs are not inherently transgressive

Is transgression the only reason to use drugs, sex, et cetera, in your magical path?

No, and that's a great question. Cultures that use drugs, they use the drugs as a form of worship to interact with spirits. They don't use them for therapy. They don't call them molecules. They don't reduce them down to their molecular essence and then concentrate them and then make them a hundred times more powerful. And then make the trip as efficient as possible.

They don't do the drugs to transgress. On the contrary, they use those drugs to affirm the boundaries of their culture. They affirm the boundaries of their culture, the structure, what's at the center, their understanding of cosmology, how a human being is at the center of it, and our relationship with the spirits. 

Same with sex. Sex can be used to reinforce devotion. And in fact, that's what marriage is, isn't it? That's what the institution is supposed to be. A symbolic or a lower order reflection of this idea of conscious devotion like devotion in your practice, such that there's a space where stuff can come along, but there's a fruit that's possible that would not be possible otherwise.

So there's a mystery. Marriage was traditionally described even by Christians as a mystery. There's a mystery involved, and then of course there's the marriage to Christ, from a Christian angle.

Drugs, sex aren't by themselves transgressive, but you could say that there's a way of using them that could be transgressive, or a way of using them that would be the opposite of that.

Finding the Paths in Yourself

So the left and right hand paths: this dichotomy, you'll find it in yourself. And I think the best example is when it comes to thinking about awakening. Now, there are other examples that could take the place of awakening, but awakening's going to be the most frequent one that you'll encounter, right? And the pattern repeats itself at each stage, and you learn the lesson every time, over and over. It just happens to everyone all the time in every way. Prophecy is another example of this.

But anyway. Let's say you really want to wake up: 'I've been doing this practice now for a long time. I seem to have got good at it. I've been through a bad period. Now I'm back to it again, I recognise that.  I've had some mystical experiences, that kind of a thing. But when's it going to happen for me? What can I do? Maybe if I read some more books, maybe if I change my diet. Maybe if I do the practices from more than one tradition - because who knows which one will be the one that will work - I'll do this Magia stuff, but maybe I'll just keep this other practice in my back pocket, just in case. Because who knows?'

Now that drama, the stress of it, right? The burden of it, it can get to be a a real contraction, that weighs you down.

The origin or the presumption that informs that whole drama is that you will be the source of it. That you are going to do it. You have the capacity to do it. You are the one that's going to do it. You've got this far, you just need to do a little bit more, right? Just do the right strategy in the right way at the right time.

Now, categorically, I want to make this as clear as possible, right? You are never going to do it. You will never ever, in any way, shape or form, ever get yourself to wake up. It will not happen. You will not do it.

There is no arranging of appearances such that reality will spring forth. There is nothing you will do. Just give up now. Even trying to give up, you still think you are going to do it, 'Oh I'm the one who's going to give up then. I'll give up. All I have to do is surrender? I'll be the one who surrenders then, I'll just do it. How do I do it? Which part of me is tense, that I can just relax it and then that will be me letting go?'

Yeah, that's still you thinking you're going to do it. Now, you can't help that being there. Why? Because it's a shadow of something in the future, right? And you are in that drama. So you should expect to catch yourself in that drama.

And it's an infuriating place to be. But you recognize what it is. We even have a practice in Magia, which is binding, which can make sense of that shadow in such a way that it makes it easier to travel through it. So it's not the presence of the shadow that's the problem, or the catching of yourself playing out the damned drama that's the problem. So you don't have to flagellate yourself over the idea of being egotistical that you're going to do it or whatever. You're just going to find yourself playing that out.

But with the practice, we correct ourselves, we reorient ourselves. So instead of following the direction of the drama, we follow the golden thread in the opposite direction into the House of God.

So we're going to travel through it, so that's fine. We'll just travel through it. It's fine for it to be there, but we're going to travel through it.

That aspect that I've been talking about, the presumption that you are going to do it, that's the left hand path.

Choosing the Left Hand Path

The frustration is that you want to approach the awakening, but what happens when you get closer to the awakening and you realise, 'Hang on a moment, I'm actually scared of it. I'm actually scared of this impending moment. Will it feel like dying? What will it feel like? Will the universe disappear into a dot? Will I become infinitely large and infinitely small at the same time? Will it feel like being squished?' Will you be overwhelmed by an impersonal force so it's like going mad and you're not you anymore? Or will there be nothingness?

All these are different versions of the same thing. If you think that there's going to be nothing, that's like a diminishment until you disappear. If you think you're going to be overwhelmed, and go mad, that's another way of saying everything. You become subsumed within an everything and you're not you anymore. You're lost in it. And then of course there's something. If you think of something, that's another way of saying what you're approaching, and this is why the drama's problematic and it's a challenge, is that you are separate from it. You don't have the same nature as it. For something to overwhelm me, you have to have a separate nature from it to be lost in it. Otherwise you'd be that which is doing the overwhelming, which doesn't make sense, does it? You can't be overwhelmed if you are the thing doing the overwhelming, doesn't make any sense. 

So you think you're going to be everything. You think you're going to be nothing, or you think you're something. These three are all the same thing.

The fear! Now, maybe at that point you decide, I'm not going to go any further. That choice, that would be really choosing the left hand path. 

So just to make this clear, if you find yourself in the drama and you find it frustrating, that's fine. That doesn't mean you've chosen the left hand path. If you find fear about what comes next and you think, 'Maybe I'll just endure the fear or the terror and maybe it'll go away. Or maybe if I try and concentrate really hard, I'll break through the whole thing and then I'll have an awakening.' All of that is still not choosing the left hand path.

The left hand path is when you say, 'I'm not going any further, I'm having nothing to do with it.'

The right hand path is you just carrying on. You just do the practice. 'Oh, look, a terrible shadow,' and then you have your realisation and you're like, 'Wow. Realisation - it's got absolutely nothing to do with anything that I thought might be related to it in any way!'

And there's something funny about that, and it's a bit like those guys with the blankets over their heads who lift the sheets off or the covers and they're like, 'Oh, why was I walking around bumping into everyone, wailing and screaming about the darkness, when it was just a cover on my head?'

It's as ridiculous as that. So there's always humor involved. It's very humorous waking up.

Two Practical Pointers

Two practical things to keep in mind: if you ever encounter a shadow in your practice, one thing is if this is the opposite image of what's coming next, then what's coming next must be pretty sweet. Must be pretty good. And so the worse the drama is, the worse the existential shadow is, the better the realisation's going to be. That's just a little fudge to keep in mind. 

And then the second thing is: the first thing that we teach in Magia, the silent knowing. You have all these appearances that say no, and something inside that says yes. So often when we get into that drama, into a damned drama such as that and we can't see outside of it, the only thing we have is faith, this thread that we're following. And there's a horizon and we can't see over it - that fudge that I just gave you might say it's brilliant, it's great over that horizon, it's actually fantastic. But you don't know it yet. You might understand it, but you don't know it. So all you have is faith to go on.

Just as you were at the beginning, it's the same, except the appearances have changed a bit. So if your orientation is correct, you can have fear, you can have confusion. You can have doubt. You can have sadness. You can have all these different things or you can have joy and happiness and bliss and peace and so on.

It doesn't matter. The orientation is we're going to travel through all of it. That's the one path that exists. So the presence of things doesn't mean you've chosen the left hand path. The choice that you make, whether you continue or not, do you believe the appearance? Or do you believe the silent knowing?

Which one do you follow? 

The Black Brother

Whenever I talk about the black brothers, people suddenly start thinking, 'Hang on. Am I one of those? Am I going to cut off the universe from my own being and then slowly go mad over time?'

By the way, one variation of this is you might think - and it can manifest in this way - is 'Oh, actually I'm going to change everything about the teaching. I'm going to change the words. I'm going to change the practices. I'm going to do it this way instead of that way. I'm going to do it the way that I prefer it. In fact, I think I have a superior version and I've been led to it by the divine. Actually, there's something wrong with the prior version. This is where they were getting it wrong. In fact, I think the teacher's mad. I think they're crazy. And I think that this is a better version, right?' It can manifest in that way.

The right hand path - ends up looking like this, doesn't it? - it looks ultra-conservative. It's like, this is the practice, this is the way that you do it. Renunciation might be involved. The rules apply to everyone equally, including the teacher, because the content, if the teaching is true, didn't come from the teacher and it applies to them as much as it applies to everyone else.

Often the choice that's made by the person that poisons the tree, if we could put it that way, or becomes a counter initiate, which means moving in the opposite direction and telling other people to go in the opposite direction, can involve this manifestation of saying the tradition itself needs to go, or even a complete rewriting of it.

The humour of awakening

'It's such a strange thing to decipher, the understanding of always already the case, of taking off the cover over our heads and finding our prior delusion humorous.'

Yes. Here's a classic. You go walking down the street and you see a snake in the road and you're terrified, but you have to get past the snake to get home. So you start sneaking very carefully to the side of the road and you don't want to draw any attention to yourself. You get sweaty palms and your heart's beating fast. And then you're thinking, 'Maybe I shouldn't go through with this at all. Maybe I won't be able to get past the snake without it biting me.' But you inch your way forwards along the wall hoping it won't see you. And then all of a sudden you notice that it's not a snake at all. It's a rope.

Now the fact that it was a rope was always already the case. That's funny, isn't it? That you thought you were in terrible danger. You had sweaty palms and your heart was beating fast, right? But it's just a rope. It was always a rope. That is the quality of the humor.

Ego vs False Belief

'I've had that worry when dealing with parts of my ego that I'm prone to cling to.'

I really want to emphasize this, because you see this in so much of spiritual literature where people talk about the ego and they talk about the ego being a problem.

And hand in hand with that seems to be this idea of realising no self or the Self with a capital s. And I would say that you don't have to worry about your ego. It's not a thing that you need to concern yourself with if our understanding of what's meant by ego is our problematic behaviors that come from our understanding of ourself.

If you look at what a human being is made up of, we would say it's an amalgamation of roles, right? That mutually support each other. And all of our detrimental behavior comes out of that.

It all comes out of that, a misunderstanding of our own nature. If we're going to be allowing those parts of ourselves to go home - completing circles, which is generative and creative, and the reason why we've come here - where is this thing called the ego that we need to do something about?

Let's say you are greedy. Why would someone be that way? Now, someone might say, 'Oh, it's their ego.' In the teaching, the reason they're that way is because at some point in the past, they had a false transmission about what it means to be generous. About what it means to be rich, about what it means to be wealthy. Wealth, generosity: these are the same thing. And what it means to be abundant.

What would be a way of becoming abundant? By keeping everything for yourself. You can see that's an opposite image. Now I'm using a very simple generalised example. But it conveys the principle, doesn't it? So again, where's the ego that we need to find and admonish? All we need to do is correct the misunderstanding that we made in the past.

That's why in the teaching we don't talk about ego. We don't talk about no self. We do have the mystery of divine self. But you'll notice with the mystery of divine self, there are four steps. There is that which is not self or other. There's that which is self with a capital S, right? There's one found through the other and something beyond both. And that's the mystery of divine self. Something beyond both.

So we don't have to tie ourselves in knots talking about no self, which people translate as nothingness. Then we're back to the delusion of self annihilation.

Practical Summary

Self annihilation is a myth. It's a delusion that you will encounter and be challenged by.

There's only one path, but you can make a choice and pretend there's another one.

If you do that because you wish to wrestle with disintegration, then you get what you ask for. You'll get to wrestle with disintegration. That's the left hand path.

Okay? So that's all the practical side of it. 

The Esoteric Understanding of the Paths

The esoteric side:

Two and a half thousand years ago, Parmenides returns from the underworld after visiting the goddess, whose name we shall not mention, and he delivered a poem. And a key part of the teaching brought back in the poem is this idea of paths. 

Does anyone know how many paths the goddess describes in Parmenides' poem?

Three paths. There's the path of non being. What she says about non being, the first path, is that non being doesn't exist. So there's nothing to say about it. That path is illusory.

So then we're at a fork in the road, there's the right hand path and the left hand path.

The left hand path is the path where non being and being are mixed up together. So this is where humans think some things exist and some things don't exist. This is where human beings think they exist for a while and then they won't exist. Or things exist for a while and then they don't exist. Or things don't exist, then they exist, then they stop existing.

Nothing, then you're something, part of everything, that returns to nothing.

Nothing, something and everything. Back to that again. That's this left hand path. That's like someone who thinks, 'Wow, I've gone so far spiritually speaking, right? And I exist. But over the horizon is nothingness. Nonexistence, right? So I'm not going to go any further.' They're walking down a path of being and non being mixed together. That's the left hand path.

Now, the right hand path is the path that travels through all that is. It'll take you all the way to the center where the two worlds meet and everything has its origin, in Tartarus.

Vision: Human beings going round in circles

Now, this is what the goddess says. She says, all human beings are actually stood on this path, and they think they're at a fork in the roads, and they think they can travel this left hand path, this mixture of existence and nonexistence. Non being and being.

But really, they're not going anywhere. They're just going round and round in circles on the one path, right? They're just going round and round in circles, and they've actually not really made a choice. They're just asleep, completely and absolutely asleep, going round and round in circles like a group of people with blankets on their heads, right? Going round and round in circles, bumping into each other and never going anywhere, never going anywhere. 

Vision: Humans bumping into things

Empedocles describes human beings in a similar fashion, bumping into each other. It's like we are deaf, we are dumb, at the mercy of the strongest impression of the moment. 

So human beings are actually on this path, right? This left hand path. Now, the difference between someone we might say who's taken the left hand path, spiritually speaking, a counter initiate, and other human beings, we might say, they've at least consciously decided not to go any further, right? They've made some progress and consciously decided not to go any further, there is a difference there.

But in terms of how far they've really traveled, they've gone no further than anyone else. Despite their awakenings, they've gone no further than anyone else. They're still just going round in circles, bumping into each other like everyone else. 

The Paths as Original Instructions

What this means is that at the beginning of Western civilisation, logic was given as a divine gift, which was presented in terms of these paths, this understanding of paths and the crossroads.

And it was given at the beginning of our culture, and there was a description of people and what they're actually doing. They think that they've made a choice, but they haven't, and they're just stuck on the path and they are not going anywhere.

That was the first instance of logic, right? To show there's no such thing as non being, that there's only being, and then there's this false path of mixing the two together, and that's us humans going round and round in circles thinking they've chosen a direction.

The divine law was given, logic was given, as a spiritual exercise, something for you to understand divine law and how to participate in it. And we need to make a choice and walk down the path. That's what we need to do. That's why the gift was given in the first place.

The extent to which people are still just walking around in circles thinking they've taken this left hand path consciously or otherwise - we'll say mostly otherwise - is the extent to which we've completely ignored what we were given two and a half thousand years ago. And have continued to ignore for that entire period of time such that we're in the same place as we were at the very beginning.

The Path Taken

The problem is that we aren't quite exactly the same as we were at the beginning, because you can see in our culture that we have consciously decided to turn our backs on the divine or on the spiritual or on God, right? That's a conscious cultural development that happened, beginning something like 300 years ago,such that our culture is consciously pointed in the opposite direction.

Everything has a material basis, doesn't it? And anything that's of any value comes from us. We are the ones that are going to do it. We are the ones who have been doing it. We are the pinnacle of evolution. Everything has led to us from other humans doing it. They were the source of stuff and it's led to us, right? And we are doing more of the stuff than anyone's ever done. And we will do more stuff in the future. It's all coming from us. Because otherwise there wouldn't be anything, would there? And it's 180 degrees in the opposite direction to every tradition, including our own, that's come before.

So we are actually like the counter initiate, culturally speaking. We live in a counter initiatory culture. The disintegrating culture, it's another valid way of describing it. We've gone so far, we said we're not going any further, because maybe we'd have to give something up. And we are not going to give that up. And so deluded by our own false light, because that's what we need to fill up the space, slowly we're disintegrating, being torn apart. We asked for it. So that's what we've got.

And like I said at the beginning of this talk where I talked about harvest, what it means is there were opportunities, a certain harvest was possible, and we made other choices culturally speaking. So certain fruits or crops that could have been possible, peculiar to this part of the garden, haven't been cultivated and there'll be no harvest of that. 

But divine mercy means that the soil is still there for something else to grow. So we might say it's a tragedy, but in the end, divine mercy, the goddess, means that there'll still be continuity.

Meanwhile, the culture or civilisation is going through that process of disintegration and it will do everything it can to hold on. Which is another way of saying it will accelerate its destruction.