Audio - Leviathan & Behemoth

Leviathan & Behemoth - 23rd October, 2022

For this talk, I thought I would enlarge our view of the magical record. Now talk of a magical record can sound like accounting. The magical record can sound like the most tedious magical tool or magical weapon that we can think of. It's not as exciting as a wand, or even a dagger, is it? It doesn't seem as colorful or as captivating as your tarot deck.

However, as with all things Magia related, our first step is always practical.

Magical Record as corrective

We think of it as something that's going to help us with our unbinding practice. We look at the steps that we go through, we record them in each entry, we can see where we need to adjust things. So if you're practicing at the wrong time, you can address that. And you can see that in the record. 

And I don't know if people have encountered this yet with their magical record - and it can be something that can take some time to observe - but often with the magical record, you can miss a practice, return to the record and discover that you haven't missed one practice, you've actually missed something like three. It can be a way of indicating the extent to which we're incapable of appreciating the true nature of our failures when it comes to practice.

So often the magical record is described as a goad, something that will goad you to further practice.

Magical Record as memory

Now, of course, there's also the issue of when stupendous and magical things occur. So it could be a dream, it could be a vision, it could be a mystical experience, could be a visitation from some kind of entity, it could be some interesting magical working that you've done. And a record of that is invaluable, especially when the content of what you've encountered only makes sense years later. And that's always the case if it was a magical working of any value. And then you'd be surprised by going back to the record to discover that you remember it in a totally different way. And often there are details that are extraordinarily important that you don't remember at all.

There's a depth to the practical side of the magical record. 

Magical Record as gold

I have a friend who says to me that the only thing he has that's of any value whatsoever is a box filled with his magical journals from over the years. It's the most precious thing that he owns. So he's been doing that, let's say for 20 years or something like that.

And I feel the same way when it comes to my magical records. I didn't at the time when I began keeping a magical record, something like 20 years ago.  It is something that you appreciate over time and it can take a while to get there.

Magical Record as career

Given that it's quite easy to overestimate the practice that you've actually put in - you can have breaks that are of longer duration than you might appreciate - and given that you can misremember events including forgetting important details, that are of spiritual or magical significance, the essential value of the magical record is the extraction of your entire magical career, or spiritual career, from the text.

If it's recorded, if it's something that's been put into words, which can be the beginning of a more conscious participation in the fruit of your practice - so we have variations of this in terms of formal practice when we think about shadow binding and cosmological binding. But really they're just ways of recording something in a complete sense, rather than just some haphazard scribbles that you might have ordinarily, if you didn't have such a practice - so you can extract your understanding of who and what you are in a conscious way from the record.

Our understanding of ourselves and the quality of our realisation, what we're doing and where we're going, all falls back on this memory that's contained in the record, that comes out of the magical record.

Question about writing

Can you also say something about the significance of using ink and paper as opposed to electronic notes, for example?

The key thing I would say about that is there's a big difference between typing and writing with a pen. If you make a mistake writing with a pen, it costs you something. And you can only do it a certain number of times before the paper's not usable anymore.

So with long hand writing, you will tend to reflect on what it is that you're going to write before you put that ink on the paper more than how you would typing. You can type and make as many mistakes as you like, can't you?

Magical Record as object

You also end up with an object. It's it's an actual object. A magical object that actually means something. And that exists independent of yourself.

You can keep notes on your computer, but that's not an object, you've not created one. Especially when it comes to books, there is a capacity for the object to have a being or to function as an incarnatory vehicle in a way that digital notes on a computer can't do.

Here's something to consider: the book Magia is merely a particular iteration of my magical record. That's what that is.

How do you go from notes about how your unbinding practice is going, to producing a book of that nature? Well, the notes that you're making are the first step, the bottom of a tree, that looks practical, it's just for you. Doesn't seem to say anything profound, but what it's putting into words is the process that's described in this book. It's what this book actually is.

Magical Record as intimacy

So we extract our understanding of who and what we are from the text, from what we've managed to point into words, what we've encountered.

There's also an intimacy in terms of the journal isn't there? Where there's only you and the journal that knows what has happened. So you do your practice, you go to your journal, and you make an entry and you think, 'What am I going to write in this journal now?' It's only there for an audience of one. That's you. So, honesty, self-honesty, you have to be honest with yourself.

You're describing something that by definition is self-motivated. In deciding what to write in there, there is a degree of self-sufficiency isn't there? And maybe what you record, the way that you describe what you've experienced, you might feel that the words are actually inadequate. They don't quite get right what it is that you're trying to describe, but it's the best that you can do at that moment. There's a negotiation with the ability to express yourself precisely and your inability to do that at this time.

So there's an intimacy or the secret of your practice - and the growth that's occurring and you're reflecting on it - that's just between you and the magical record. So there's an extraordinary intimacy there.

Misleading Public Records

You can have an experience and put it into words. When you come back after a certain period of time, and then you read what you put into words, it can sound way different from what you actually experienced. I think this is the case with most of the mystical literature. You read stuff about people's awakenings and the impression that you take away from what's described can seem radically different from what your modest mystical experience has been. It can seem very different.

And sometimes people use big flowery language. Sometimes - and you can see this also in the literature - some people describe their experiences and over time the experiences become more and more elaborate every time they revisit them and describe them in successive books.

Magical Record as leading edge

One other thing to keep in mind as well, which can be astonishing, is that the leading edge of your practice always seems way more profound than what has happened in the past. But when you go back to the past in your magical record and you read what was happening at that time, it's just the same!

It's just the same. It's just the same level of crazy things happening. It's just the same. And you're like, I don't really remember it in that way, but here it is, you can see what was going on: visions, synchronicities, mind blowing stuff.

Without a Magical Record

Anyway, there's that process with the magical record that I've just described. This turning back, this reviewing, this cultivation, this turning over and this growth that happens. And the magical record is an essential part of that. If you take the record out, then that isn't what's happening.

You might think, 'I could just go through this process without making a record of it.' You could, except you're going to misremember what happened. Some details you'll totally forget about. You'll be more mired in your own capacity for self-delusion.

That means what actually happened and the qualities of those things remain dormant. Possibilities disappear as a result of that. So there's still a trajectory that happens. You can still go through that process of growth, but it's impoverished. It also means that the quality of your future development may be less than what it would be.

Sometimes you hear of people who have some kind of major awakening or something like that, and it takes 20 years before the next one.  20 years. Through the sheer force of just seeing moment to moment, eventually you will get there. But should it take 20 years? Not because the aim is to do it more quickly, but because the aim is to participate in something that you're doing in a more full way. So you bring out better details. Isn't that the aim of the game? Isn't that what we're aiming for?

Magical Record as binding

There's a continuum in terms of formal practice, from an entry that you've made to a full blown cosmological binding, which looks like a cosmology that you end up drawing, but that it's essentially the same thing. You're putting what's occurring into words. And the first thing is always going to be practical, but then it becomes esoteric.

It even does that with cosmological binding. It's just more sophisticated than a unbinding entry. You describe an event that happened in time, that's the practical part. It turns into a cosmology. That's the esoteric part. Happening outside of time. And then you can bring it back down into an event to understand what the event was. Completing that circle again.

So we've got circles in circles. An unfolding conscious participation by putting something into words, in this case, the written word. And were it not for the recording, something would be lost. Something would be lost. 

Magical Record as primary tool

So I think it's possible to make the argument that the magical record is the most important magical tool that there is. Not just because it's something you can refer to, but because it's an artifact of that entire conscious process that wouldn't exist otherwise. 

The Oroboros

The esoteric element to understanding this is the reason why the Oroboros - which is the serpent eating its own tail - is the appropriate symbol for understanding this process that you're engaged in. It's the reason why that symbol represents the magical order, which is a more formal way of putting the mastery of Magia practices into action.

If we begin with the understanding that we are Gods standing in the fire of eternity, casting our shadows into time, taking ourselves to be those shadows, to make an ideal mistake such that we can cultivate what can't be cultivated...

Memory as harvest

...it makes a harvest possible. That wouldn't be possible otherwise. And the change that occurs is merely the memory of what one has been through.

That's the addition. So one's nature remains the same: still, silent, no beginning, no end, doesn't require or depend upon anything else to be the way that it is. And yet a change is possible in a place where change can't happen simply through that memory, the acquisition of that memory.

Incarnation

We incarnate and we go through this process where there's an accumulation of memory, and we return to who and what we were beforehand. We wake up in the bed we were always in, where we are right now. We are liberated from the suffering of existence when that happens.

Every single person, when they die, they're liberated. They're liberated from what they've just been through. The experience that they've just been through adds to the understanding of that God through the memory of it. 

Judgement

When we die, we will be judged. But we judge ourselves. It's the self that does the judging. There's no hiding. There's no hiding from the actual nature of what's just occurred with death.

If you've lost someone close to you in your life - if you pay attention - you can see that what happens is, when someone dies, what's revealed is everything that they meant to you. And nothing's hidden anymore. It's why it's often the case that when there's loss, there's often regret. And the regret is because what needed to be said, wasn't said. Or the full depth of what the person meant to you wasn't expressed at the time. But there's an element here where that's actually not possible.

It's not possible whilst they're alive to fully appreciate the full depth of what they meant to you, because that fruit - if we can put it that way - or that total harvest of what they've just been through - and then what's happened as a result of that - can only be seen then.

Now it's possible for you to appreciate that as a human being, if that happens with a loss of someone else. But it's also what will happen when you die. There'll be an appreciation of everything that you meant to yourself. And there's no hiding the nature of what it is that's occurred. That's like extracting your understanding of who and what you are - and the depth of it and the quality of it - from a record. 

Some of these things that I've just said are true for everyone, for all human beings. It doesn't mean though once you're dead, that you won't be then addressing that judgment, which leads to further dreams.

For us going through this process consciously, there are degrees of what's possible that's not possible for people that don't do this consciously. And that's the virtue of doing it consciously. 

Magical Record as conscious incarnation

The magical record is like a lower order symbolic expression of everything that I've just talked about. If our understanding of who and what we are in a narrow, magical sense is extracted from our magical record, you can see that's analogous to our understanding of who and what we are in eternity, in relationship to our human experience.

And you can always look at your magical record and you can ask the question, 'What's the quality of this record? Did I put it into words correctly? Did I spend the necessary time to describe it accurately? Or did I just dash it off and not really think about it? Did I fully understand what it is that happened to me on this day?' I'm referencing there something like cosmological binding practice or shadow binding as a way of exploring something like that in its totality.

You can ask those questions and they're good questions to ask, and those questions are always something that you can personally address, aren't they? Sometimes you do a bad job, sometimes you do a good job, but you can endeavor to at least aim at the good job, can't you? 

Oroboros as symbol of the new aeon

Last time I talked about the name we have for God. The name we have for God is Aion. And I've encouraged you to try to understand the nature of Aion, first of all, primarily through direct experience. But second of all, from the text itself, from reading the Magia text and how it relates to Aion.

So there's a line in the Aion prophecy where I ask the question of Aion, 'Why do you appear as Aion at this time?' And the answer is, 'We turn slowly and we burn.' We. So it's this understanding of the divine, how there can be one god, one divine self, and yet a manyness or a plurality. And that's another way of saying, 'What's the relationship between the divine and the created?' Something like that.

And if there was no relationship, you end up with creation being pointless or even just a big mistake that should never have happened. And it just needs escaping! But then that raises questions about the nature of God. God would be imperfect, deluded, stupid, pathological. These are all things you might say about it.

But with this understanding of God being one and therefore many - like stars in the night sky - there is nothing that we encounter that is not a demonstration of the nature of that divinity. So there's an intimate connection between creation and the divine.

That's another way of saying an extraordinary promise that is made to every single human being in terms of who and what they actually are.

The prayer begins with the line, 'This is the new offering of a new aeon.' I already mentioned how there are different levels that you can cut this up to understand it.

But I talked about Aquarius. I talked about how, for us at this time, the most important thing is understanding the nature of the divine and therefore the nature of creation and our place in it. And realising that nature, that's the most important thing. That's the opportunity put before us, to do this at this time. And it has particular qualities, described in a astrological fashion. 

Speaking at the right time

So if you speak at the wrong time, you give form to the wrong thing.

When Magia came along, I spoke at a very particular time. It wouldn't have been possible to speak in that way at any other time. Funnily enough, same thing happened in Berlin.

There's talk in the book about certain gates being opened and certain gates remaining closed. Beacuse the time isn't right yet.

Preceding the aeon of Aquarius was the aeon of Pisces. And Christ is the central figure for that 2000 year span.

Oroboros as Christ

One of our ancestors in the lineage, Carl Jung, described the Oroboros as one way of understanding Christ. 

This theme runs throughout the Bible. You see it with Moses and it appears in some other places as well. But there's the motif of the serpent, the understanding of the nature of the serpent. You can have a serpent and it can bite you and it can kill you and it can be deadly. So you might say it's evil or something like that.

But then there is the serpent that consumes the small serpents, consumes the bad serpents. There's a serpent that comes down the tree, tempts Adam and Eve in the garden and it leads to the fall of man.

Christ on the cross is the serpent returning back up the tree. It's why often in iconography you see Christ - at least in orthodox iconography - you can see Christ painted like a zigzag, and that's a snake going up a tree.

So the snake came down and it's gone back up again.

You have the serpent that eats the smaller snakes that are poisonous. Moses has a staff that turns into a snake. And this is in response to these other snakes in the story. 

The serpent that eats the other serpents. I won't go off on too much of a tangent, but it can be related to the constellation of Draco, which means it's a dragon. So the serpent that eats the other serpents is a dragon. You could say Christ is like a dragon, but this symbol of the Oroboros, that's like a very large serpent eating its own tail.

It's a dragon eating its own tail...

Leviathan & Behemoth

...or in the Bible there's the idea of Leviathan, Leviathan and Behemoth. Leviathan and Behemoth are two gargantuan creatures described in the Old Testament and also in the New, Ezekiel and The Book of Revelation.

Leviathan is described as something like a giant sea creature. A dinosaur with flippers, that's Leviathan. Behemoth on the other hand, some people think the description is that of a hippopotamus, but it's a big creature with its own description in the Bible. It's a big beast.

And at the end of time, at the end of creation, Leviathan will be used to form a shelter for all of the saved people who've been redeemed and so on. Behemoth will provide food for the saved and for all the creatures.

Leviathan is this Oroboros eating its own tail. A dragon that's eating its own tail.

Christ & Antichrist

What does it mean that it's eating its own tail? Back to Jung: the Oroboros represents Christ. You have Christ meeting the antichrist, it's Christ consuming the anti-Christ, the two opposites contained in the Christian story. So the two fish, you have one pulling in one direction and one pulling in another one.

From the beginning of Christianity, it's eventually going to move to its opposite, we'll move from Christianity to Antichristianity. I think it's pretty obvious that's been the case. So you have the completion of the aeon of Pisces.

Now, what was accomplished on the cross was accomplished. It's done. The extent to which a person abides by that is a personal issue. The extent to which a culture abides by that is an individual cultural issue. Here I'm referencing ideas like the fate and destiny of a culture, and how that's analogous to the fate and destiny of an individual.

Accomplishment vs Uptake

I'll just say a little bit more about that to make this clear. Because I think sometimes people can get confused about this.

A teacher can come along, present a teaching, and give practices and so on. And what we tend to do is we look at a teacher, we look at the students that they had and how successful they were, and then we can rate them.

How good were they as a teacher then? How many awakened students did they have? How much of a movement did they create? How did they reshape the world? You know, what's the quantity? Quantity.

Now it's absolutely possible that you could have the greatest teacher of all time come along, and literally no one listens to them at all in any way. Maybe they have one student and that person disappears. Something like that. And you might say, 'Ah, that teacher was a failure, didn't do much.'

You see this with the prophets in the Bible. They say all kinds of stuff. No one really listens. So have they failed? Did they fail? A teacher - in the way that I'm talking about it - can't fail. There is no failure in that regard.

And when I say failure, I don't mean personal failings. 20th Century spirituality in the West has been a car crash, an absolute disaster.

When I'm talking about the success or failure of a teacher, it's did they fail or succeed to bring what they were supposed to bring and do the job that they were supposed to do?

So there's a phrase in the book, which is - I'm going to paraphrase it - 'what's possible depends upon the nature of the soil that the teacher walks on.' What are the conditions that are encountered? But tied in with that is the idea that there are the students that come along, they can say yes or no. The people that come along can say yes or no. People can follow the silent knowing but at some point say, 'No, I'm not going to go any further. This is as far as it goes!' For whatever reason. And who's to say that there isn't a profound mystery involved in that?

But, we could look at Christianity and we could say, 'That was an abject failure.' And we can look at the reasons for that. And we can talk about what happened with Christ and the Christians before the fourth Century. We can see how it was turned upside down and the wrong way around.

But nevertheless, what was accomplished was accomplished. 

And there are inevitable consequences to that, that can't be avoided. It's like, here's an opportunity. What's said? Well, here's the outcome now. Certain things are possible at certain times. So we're back to that idea of seasons, gates that can be opened at the right time and those of which must remain closed.

Now, Christ and Antichrist: that story's over. They're together. The two opposites are contained in something, and now we've moved on to something that's beyond both of those.

The Oroboros is now a symbol that's appropriate for understanding what it is that it is possible for us to do. The stage that we've reached. Bringing the opposites together, completing the circle of creation. 

Leviathan as holding the World together

Leviathan was a big sea creature, but it was also understood to - and you see this in lots of cosmologies, ancient cosmologies that are drawn. You see the Oroboros going around the outside of creation - and that's because Leviathan is also understood to be 'That which binds the world's soul', that holds it all together.

If you remember what I said last time, that's what we are doing when we do our practice. We are completing these circles. They're like miniature versions of what we are doing in terms of our human life. We've entered into human life, and we're going to complete a circle and return again.

And there will be a harvest or an accumulation based on the fact that there's the completing of that circle. Simply from the fact of the journey itself - of just going, what it means to go.

So the Leviathan, we could think of that as the same thing as the perfect serpent, which is the same thing as the dragon, which is the same thing as that which holds together creation, binds it together. 

Magia as original Christianity

The teaching in Magia is like the original Christianity before the fourth Century. That's what Christ came to show us. To tell us who and what we are, what our nature is.

If he's the Son of God and then we are the Children of God, we're exactly the same, aren't we? And then if you are a child of a parent, you have exactly the same nature as the parent. You're just growing into that capacity, aren't you?

To consciously participate in the process of death - which is another way of thinking about what crucifixion is, what Christ did on the cross - it's the same thing as lying down to die whilst you're still alive. An analogy to Christ on the cross is the cocoon and then the butterfly that emerges from the cocoon. And we do that in this life.

There's nothing in Magia that isn't also in the earliest forms of Christianity or in the earliest forms of the Jewish teaching with the prophets. The issue however, is the fact of Christ being crucified being taken as the point. And this is to make a mistake. So there is no crucifixion in Magia.

There is the Oroboros though, the circle. What was accomplished, was accomplished.

The Task of Aquarius

And now the question is, are we going to realise who and what we are at this time?

The promised destiny of human beings is the realisation of the fact that we hold creation together like the world's soul. And we do that by completing a circle and it involves the accommodation of the opposites in a whole.

This is why Leviathan - the Oroboros - is the symbol of the Order. It's the symbol of what it is that we're doing. You could say it's like the symbol of the magical record, because the magical record is like a representation of what's contained in that symbol. 

Practice as Christian Deification

It may be surprising to learn that before the fourth Century in Christianity, every single Christian understood this to be the aim of Christianity, and that was deification. Deification: you were supposed to become as God. That was the aim. That was the point. There was no other reason for it than to become deified.

In the culture, at the time, this wasn't a foreign idea. All the heroes were people who became deified. You were supposed to go through a process and become deified. This was the aim of things. So Jesus wasn't that much of an anomaly as a Mediterranean God. Deification is the idea that we're all children of God, therefore we're going to realise that nature, and Christ is the same except he's a teacher. It's very straightforward. It's very obvious.

But in the fourth century, what happened was, in the East, deification became qualified. You still find it in some of those traditions, they will talk about deification, but it's qualified. So you can become like God. And that's kind of the aim. You won't be like Jesus, though. Christ is exceptional. So there's a ceiling that you can't go beyond. Even though they talk about deification, it's not full blown deification.

And of course in the West, that idea completely disappeared, so that there's an esoteric void at the center of the Church. 

Turning of the Age & The God That Goes

So the beginning and the end of Christianity: that's happened. Or that age of Pisces: that's happened. Now we've entered this phase. The appropriate symbol is not the cross now, but the Oroboros. That's what we're making conscious.

Maybe that's another way of putting it: What was accomplished? Something was made conscious that wasn't made conscious before. Something like consciously and intentionally walking into death knowing that that's what you're doing. You're doing it on purpose because you have a nature that is divine.

Now that traveling, there are parallels in other traditions. There is the sandal strap, which is the ankh from Egypt. It means to go, the gods that go. Teh ankh incidentally is a cross with a circle on the top.

Everyone's heard of the Dao or The Way, haven't they? The Way, the point is the going, to go.

Again, it's all describing the same thing. God's standing in the fire of eternity. And what we do is we go, we are like stars that have their own orbits and we move in our orbit. By doing that, we bind the world together, creation together. And a small example of this, of making this process conscious, is what the magical record is. 

Question about judgement

In regards to being judged by our divine self after death, does this implicate a moral question? How should you practically deal with that? Personally, I felt some existential dread when you said it, maybe as a hangover from a simplified idea of heaven and hell or growing up in the opposite as an atheist. And I guess I'm wondering what to do about that. 

I know at the moment it's a culturally prevalent idea that there won't be any consequences. Fortunately, that's not the case.

Judgment means an appreciation of the nature of things - as it actually is - with nothing hidden. That might be a good way of putting it. As opposed to thinking of someone weighing you up and then deciding whether you'd be punished or rewarded.

If everything is revealed in it's totality and you get to see what it is, there is no hiding from what it is or what the consequences are. It just merely is what it is. There is no elaborate sophisticated moral system for me to describe because it really is that simple.

There is a nature that is morally good. Absolutely. In-and-of itself. You are radically, perfectly good in yourself, who and what you are. But it's a seed and it's something that you can follow or you can do something else, which usually means believing appearances or voices that tell you that seed should be ignored.

And there's a simple thing that you can do. You can see what happens when you follow it, and you can see what happens when you don't. Simple as that.

And then imagine that that's a very narrow view of things. You get to see a little bit, it's narrow and it's small. But at death, what happens is you get to see the entire picture, everything you've done, what the actual consequences were and what it led to, and how that unfolded.

There's a judgment. There's an appreciation of the details and the consequences of that.

Question about Oroboros as Christ & Antichrist

I feel like I understand Christ as Oroboros, but I don't totally get Christ and Antichrist as Oroboros too.

For Jung, his description was the head is Christ and the tail is Antichrist: two extremes. And you bring these two extremes together. And so Christ is consuming the Antichrist. You might say that's a nice description of what the accomplishment is.

We would think of it in Magia terms as we encounter a shadow, and we travel through it to find the light and it gets turned the right way up. You could think of that as a process of consumption, or if we thought about it in alchemical terms, transmutation. We get some chaos and make it into order. Or we get some base material, turn it into gold.

You incarnate and you come up against situations that are the wrong way around. They need turning the right way up. And if you successfully do that and turn these things the right way up, the thing that comes down the pipeline is bigger. And then you turn that the right way up and then what's next is bigger still.

And sometimes those bigger things are things that were laid down in the past. And you are going to turn it the right way up now it's possible for you to do that.

You could say that's the reason why we came here in the first place. We're supposed to encounter something the wrong way around and then turn it the right way up.

If we think about it in terms of love, it's like we've traveled to that which is the least lovable - not to put it in negative terms - but the damned. Something that's damned and we are saying, 'Is this worth redeeming, even this?

Then you can say, 'How can it be redeemed?' But that's the nature of the divine. It can just turn it the right way up. But not because it's the nature of the damned that can do that. But because it's the nature of what's divine.

And that's what we bring here and that's what we do. We turn it the right way up. And that's a choice. We get to consciously participate to the degree and extent to which we're capable of doing so, or wish to do so.

The World Soul

What is the world's soul and why or in what way does it need holding together? 

In the last talk I talked about how there's this very old idea of the magician being someone who conjures creation into being. But it's these two worlds, there needs to be a connection between them. One found through the other. There needs to be a connection between the divine and the damned. So that something else emerges, and that's creation.

So in one respect, we are the World's Soul. We bind it together, we bind creation together. If this circle isn't completed, if one isn't found in the other, then there is no creation. It falls apart and deteriorates and then it's gone.

Question about Oroboros eating its tail

It's consuming itself, but the consuming of itself means it sustains itself.

It's a way of saying it has a nature that is unconditional. Doesn't require or depend upon anything other than itself to be the way that it is. The Greeks called that Ousia - often translated as essence or being - but it's a nature that turns about on itself.

Incarnation as Shadow Binding

Is death like a binding on a more macro scale, bringing the shadow of that incarnation home after seeing the entire picture of what it is? 

Yes. When we do a binding, we are doing a lower order version of that.  Shadows are to us what we are to our soul or what we are to God. Being here is like being invited into the House of God where we have a room.

The Goddess as World Soul

Is the world soul also the Goddess of this world? 

When we look at cosmology in that way, the divine feminine, Sofia or wisdom - and wisdom is also mercy, they're the same thing - but the divine feminine or the Goddess, she's in the underworld. That's an older way of putting it. And this is the underworld. So she's in hell with the damned.

Another way of putting it from the Zohar: when the fall happened, that part of God stayed with the fallen part. Depending on how far back you go, she's God's bride. She's with the fallen, with the damned.

The fallen or the damned are also her offspring. So you've got Sophia and then you've got the Demiurge, which is her offspring. And she's trapped here with him and won't turn her back on him even though he's mad.

So we can consciously decide to take part in this process symbolised by the Oroboros. Completing this circle of creation - the gods that go - that holds the world together and it makes creation possible. The prime magical tool representing that being the magical record.

Behemoth

The counterpart to Leviathan is Behemoth.

At the end of time, the end of creation, when everything's judged, out of Leviathan will be made a shelter, and Behemoth will provide food. Behemoth is understood to be a peaceful creature, a giant peaceful creature.

This idea of a circle that's completed that we consciously participate in, this idea of growth and cultivation, saying yes, appreciating differences and adjusting ourselves accordingly, that is a symbol of divine judgment.

What you do has consequence. So what is the fruit from your action? And it doesn't matter whether you like it or not, an action leads to a fruit, so what is that? You appreciate it. This is what divine judgment means. You're making that judgment and that appreciation following the silent knowing.

But what about those people who are lost souls? They've made choices in such a way that over a certain period of time, certain opportunities come along and they're missed. Other opportunities come along that lead in a different direction. They take them and they do that enough times that it gets to the point where they can't tell up from down anymore. The light that they had inside them has been covered over, they can't tell up from down then. That's a lost soul. That's someone that's damned in a more explicit sense. The people that we lock up, because we don't know what to do with them.

Those people aren't going to do a practice. They're not signing up for any self-help program. They're not going on a retreat. They're not going to read a book to try to better themselves. There is no cultivation to speak of.

So what about them? Well, divine judgment isn't going to help.

Judgement & Mercy

Divine judgment would say that's gone, that's not happening. But Divine Mercy says, 'No, even the damned have a place.' They're not going to be thrown away.

Again, that's why the Goddess is at the bottom of the Underworld. She goes there, where no one will go. She's with those souls that no one else wants to be with.

When we do a practice, we go through our steps, and those steps can represent delusion and awakening, one found through the other, and something that's beyond both of them.

Or when we do a binding practice, we go through similar steps. We describe an appearance. It can even appear positive, but we describe an appearance, then we spell out the actual malevolence behind it, so we get a real name. And along the way we try to either actively or passively do something about the problem or the damned drama that we're in. But by just spelling it out and then naming it for what it actually is, seeing the whole picture, we are then free of it.

So with unbinding, we will be free from our delusion and our awakenings, that's where that leads. With our binding practice, we'll be free from our familial, cultural, or existential dramas.

But the freedom, the resolution doesn't happen because we manipulate what we're dealing with. What leads us out, where we end up, is with wisdom. That means mercy. It's a mercy that we are able to go beyond our dramas because in the dramas, the damned dramas, there's nothing we can do, we can't see outside of them. And we're damned if we do, and we're damned if we don't. That's it.

So how do you get out of it? What do you do? Now we always find ourselves trying to do something about the situation we find ourselves in, and our practice is for us to stop doing that for a second, and let's just actually see what we are looking at here. We spell it out. And then when we come to wisdom, we come to see, 'Oh, I was never in that drama in the way I thought I was.' Which is what an awakening is. That's wisdom. That's mercy. That's divine mercy.

If we spell the whole thing out, we would find divine judgment and divine mercy, a relationship between them, one found in the other, and something that's beyond both.

Leviathan & Behemoth

With these symbols, Leviathan and Behemoth, they can sum up this understanding of what it is that we're doing.

We can have the divine justice symbolised by the Oroboros, the god that goes - masculine, judgment. Divine judgment is like providing a shelter. That's another way of saying creating an external extension of ourselves that we can inhabit, a result of our actions. And of course the Oroboros is what binds the world soul together. So it's already like a shelter that we're inside of. 

But then we have the other side, the opposite, divine mercy, and that's represented by Behemoth - feeds all the animals, big and small. It is peaceful, sustains everyone and everything. That's another way of thinking about what mercy is. 

And these two together, mercy and judgment, divine mercy and divine judgment, these two coming together, it's another way of understanding, what creation is.

Blindness & Forgetting

What stops us from seeing how things are in the way that we can when we die?

There's a number of different analogies we can use, but let's say we just use the awakening one. What stops you from seeing things in their totality when you're dreaming - in terms of what they really are, in terms of your human life?

We could think of contraction into a more limited, one-dimensional role in a drama as something purely detrimental. But it does something, doesn't it? It affords an opportunity that you wouldn't have otherwise if you just know what the case is. And this is the principle idea in terms of what the change is that's made possible as a result of incarnating.

Why would it be the case that we forget who and what we are? What's the virtue of doing that? It makes something possible that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

Choosing an Unbinding Practice

You can do whatever practice you want on each day.

Maybe you want to do one specific practice for an entire week and then change to another one.

Maybe you want to assign some kind of random mechanism. For example, let's say you roll a die. One to two is fire, three to four is underworld, five to six is beloved. You could randomise it like that.

Or maybe you could do it on how you feel. But if you do it on how you feel, you have two options. Maybe you do the practice you're most attracted to. Maybe you do the practice you are least attracted to or even repulsed by.

However, the one thing I would say is never change your mind mid-practice. The reason for that is that once you've started to practice, if it's not going well - and maybe you reflect on the esoteric origin to help you orient yourself with this, so it makes more sense - but maybe it's not going that well and you think, 'Ah, I picked the wrong one. Maybe I should do a different one.' And then you flip to the other one. And then maybe you start doing that and you think, 'Oh, maybe I shouldn't have given up on the first one. This actually isn't going that well either.' Or maybe it's going a bit better, and you think, 'But maybe I gave up too soon and something good would've happened with the other one.' And so you flip back to the other one, and then you think, 'Maybe both of these are wrong. I'll go and do the other one.'

You end up flip-flopping around, wasting time. But what you're really doing is - and this is the most important part - is that you're indulging a drama around your practice. Your preoccupation with the quality of your practice being a certain way. And that's what you're indulging or you're in danger of indulging if you keep flip-flopping through the practices.

So my recommendation is once you've decided you're going to do something, you do it regardless of what you experience.

Minutiae of Practical Questions

Self-sufficiency, in terms of the magical record: you're deciding what you're going to write in the magical record and how you're going to write it and how well you did. And that's a little mixture of divine judgment and divine mercy, that negotiation between the two. You have to decide how you respond to those details because no one else is there with you. It's an audience of one. So you have to navigate what you're encountering. You have to be honest with yourself. You have to be self-sufficient. That means honoring what you believe to be the correct thing to do. We have to begin with that.

Now, questions like, 'How many candles can you use? Do you have to use the same candle? If there's two of you at the same time doing a practice together, can you use one candle or do you need two candles? Or could both of you light the candle at the same time? Or can one of you just light it for the both of you?' These questions are things for you to negotiate yourself.

Self-sufficiency, self-reliance. With these things you already know what the answer is, or what really matters. Does it matter if there's two candles or one candle? What is it that matters?

Caring for the dead

Could you talk about caring for the dead?

This happens to a lot of teachers and a lot of people that go through this process, but a lot of people don't talk about it. 

I'll start with this though, to get the context correct. In the first talk, I described the word Magia as an old word for an old understanding of what it is that we are doing when we're doing our practice. We're allowing something, we're bringing something here from another world, so that it can act, this nature can be expressed in this world and it does what it does. And then it moves on and something else comes through. And our job, our one job is to not mess it up, not to interfere, not to change it, not to alter it, not to have our preferences. Ultimately to follow it, even if it looks like it's asking us to jump off a cliff, and you couldn't possibly conceive how the outcome could be good in any way whatsoever. But it always leads you to what's miraculous.

That's the one job. This circle that I've been talking about, the Oroboros. This is what that is. That's how the circle's completed. That's what we're doing when we do our practice.

And I talked about the Watchers, didn't I? And I talked about how this activity is what takes care of the world, takes care of cultures. Whether that's the planting of them, whether that's the ongoing maintenance of them, whether it's taking care of them when they've come to an end. And everything else that might be associated with what that divine action does.

And therefore, it's neither active nor passive. They're the wrong ways of thinking about it. And it's not merely that lying down to die, that's you doing nothing. That's you turning inward and ignoring the rest of the world. That's not what's happening.

It's very simple, but it's the right way of appreciating the right context for approaching what I'm going to talk about now: helping the dead when people have died.

I've said some stuff about death, and you might think, 'What would lead me to those conclusions?'

It actually started with the death of my father in 2007. 

This was in meditation, in my practice, I came to see my father still trapped where he died. Now upon observing him in this condition, a process took place that was like the sped up conclusion of his life, let's put it that way. And then he was liberated from where he was trapped, from where he'd got stuck. Now, I didn't do anything. I didn't wave a magic wand. I didn't say any words. I didn't do a dance. I didn't invoke any gods, didn't do anything. It was like the act of observing did something.

Now that was just a bizarre experience at the time. It's a thing that happened. I've recorded it, you know, but what is it? I don't know. It did seem like I liberated him though, like he was stuck somewhere and then I helped him in some way. 

Later, I saw him in a dream, and he was in a place where he could experience anything that he wanted to experience. Whatever you thought was the case. But he was dead. And he let me know that, and that he missed his wife.

You find this in all cultures: you can meet the dead in dreams. It's why it's probably a bad idea to practice lucid dreaming in such a manner that you go off on adventures. Sooner or later you'll encounter some beings that will try to get inside you. They'll jump inside you and try and come with you. Why? Because they're trying to be alive again. They're trying to come back into this world, a very unpleasant thing. Especially if you have no idea about magic, and you don't know what to do.

So you can encounter the dead in dreams. As your degree of realisation deepens, you get to see more to this world than what we normally see, where things occur in terms of souls. Students, often on retreats, they'll have an awakening and it'll make it possible for them to encounter people who've died, such that something can take place that needs to take place between those two people. Happens all the time.

A student who died in certain circumstances came to me one day and needed help. Now, I helped that individual go - I'm just going to say these phrases. I'm not going to explain them - I helped him go as far as he could go, but then he got stuck and wouldn't go any further. And he got stuck because he became infatuated with where he was at and the nature of it. He became infatuated with it.

And it was the exact same characteristics that he had as a human being, which you might say was a failing or something like that. Like an immature infatuation with certain things. It was the same quality, same characteristic that stopped him and he wouldn't go any further. Now, again, I didn't wave a magic wand, didn't do a dance, didn't invoke gods or anything. You could say it just happened, something like that, but consciously. This kind of thing, helping the dead, happens all the time. It happens to a lot of people and it happens in a way appropriate to the degree to which they're able to be conscious of that happening.

I've seen it happen many times with students. It usually starts with dreams because that's the most available means for it to take place for that person at that point. But further on it need not be in dreams, it could be more conscious.

Of course you can find references from other teachers in the body of literature that we have from different traditions, where some people do talk about this stuff, but it tends not to be talked about in the West, especially by people who are into non-duality. They won't talk about it. All the crazy miraculous things that happen they don't talk about. Because it has to be whitewashed and just made about some kind of neutral conscious field or something like that. 

Guides for the Dead

But anyway, yes, helping the dead. Again, there's a description of this in Magia talking about the man of alabaster. As men and women of alabaster, to the extent that we're capable of doing that, one of our functions is that we are a guide for the dead.

Now you can look at that in one way, which is as a guide for someone who's literally just died, physically died. You can look at it that way. The other way of thinking about that is for people who have died whilst they're still alive. Dead before they're dead. That's awakening and you're a guide for those people. Really, the dynamics are pretty much the same. So you should expect that as an integral part of it.

And it is a mistake to try to consciously, intentionally do this. It's a mistake and it's a parody of the real thing to intentionally try to do this, to control it. Because if we're honest with ourselves - it comes back to self-judgement - the reason we would intentionally want to do it is because we want to say, 'Look how wonderful I am, I help dead people.'

But like all of these things - and again, this is why the orientation is very important - it's not you doing it. It's this nature, the divine gets to exercise itself and do what it does. These are comments that have the same nature when it comes to things like transmission. It's the same principle. You're allowing something to act, so it can act on other people. The first move we always want to make is we want to be the person who's doing that, we want to be the person who owns it. We want to be the person who's the origin of it. And it's like, 'Can I intentionally do that to people?' It's the first thing, it's the first move. Now it's fine. It's supposed to be there, it's at the bottom of the tree, but we're just not going to stay there.

And eventually you feel the same way about all of these things. Eventually you just won't think about them at all. You don't think about transmission, you don't think about helping the dead because it just does itself.

Consequence of infatuation

Is it bad if a dead person becomes infatuated with something? Does it create a problem or will it end as infatuations tend to and they'll move on?

It will determine the nature of what happens next to them. Because obviously they're taking that to be themselves and therefore they will play that out to discover who and what they really are by traveling through it.

One way of putting this is to say that will now inform his next incarnation.

The Advocate

Because we all miss the mark - because that's what sin means, to miss the mark -  we make mistakes, we don't do the right thing. Divine judgment, if everything's revealed, would mean you are damned. You're done, game over. You should be annihilated. What do we need you for?

Divine Mercy says, 'No. Hang on a minute. Even this is worth saving. This is worth redeeming.' So what happens is an advocate appears and steps forward at the time of judgment - an advocate that is perfect, and without blemish - and says, 'I will be judged in this person's place', so the person can continue on.

Another way of putting this, for us to understand it in Magia terms, is that the reason we go beyond our damned dramas, our damned identities that we take ourselves to be - because just based on those alone, that has to go, that's no good. It's thrown out - the reason we get to go beyond that is because what's represented by this advocate is the same thing as our actual fundamental nature.

The extent to which we realise that as our nature is the extent to which there's a blank record. You are no longer subject to the injustice of that drama. And therefore the consequences of it. 

So that's the advocate. That's the idea of what Christ would be. Or really it's what a teacher should be: an advocate. The teaching should be an expression of that.

We have our dramas that we're in, and what we do with the practice is we say, 'I'm not going to indulge this right now. It can be there and it's fine. With the practice I'm just going to see what the whole thing is.' And you discover that you travel through it, and that you were never subject to it in the first place, in the way that you thought you were. Because there's this nature,  like the advocate, that's pure.

And so with Magia and with teachers, they do something that's the opposite of what you might do in therapy or something like that, or with what our culture does.

The Accuser

And this is an important principle: If I indulge your drama - if you bring me drama and I indulge the drama, I reinforce the drama as being true, I tend to it like you're sick and that this is going to be the way that you cure yourself - I'm doing the opposite. I'm not advocating for you. I'm now playing the role of the accuser, taking the accusation - which is one way of thinking about what the damned drama is - as being real.

The teacher or the advocate should be someone who can walk through hell, sometimes heaven, with a student and that's how they learn to walk through it and do the same thing. So you become an advocate. That's that's the role that you should be playing. 

You can talk about comfort and consolation and stuff like this, or compassion, but there are wrong ways of talking about that. If I comfort you because of how you feel or something like that, I'm indulging the drama, I'd be indulging it. In fact, I know that this is beneath you. This drama is beneath you. And I'll walk with you through it so that you can see that that's the case.

Again, it circles back round to the thing we started off with when I talked about these qualities of self-reliance, self-sufficiency, honesty. A willingness to look, just to look and see what things are.

And a dignity comes out of it. A dignity. The dignity is the dignity of someone who's divine. It would be inappropriate and beneath you for me to believe that you are sick in the way that you think you are. 

The Ancestral Garden & comparing traditions

Sometimes when we reorient ourselves, the question we had disappears. 

Now in its largest appreciation, the ancestral garden is creation itself. But let's just think about it in terms of lineages and teachings. So there's one garden and all of these plants and trees grow in it, and they produce fruit. So they're all related to each other and they're all in the same garden. And they all do the same thing universally speaking, but they have their particulars and it's in the appreciation of the particulars that we are most interested.

Through your Magia practice, you'll be able to look at all those traditions and you can appreciate how far they've grown, what qualities they present, what's been cultivated and what hasn't been cultivated, et cetera. So you can do that with Buddhism, you can look at Thelema in the same way, all these different traditions.

And so as a result of this, what you end up with is not so much an identity, as someone belonging to a certain tradition. What instead you end up with - you can still have your preferences and opinions and so on - but what you end up with is something in addition to that, which is the capacity of taste. So you can have preference and then there's the taste or the discernment.

That doesn't leave you nowhere, like perennialists with no home, something like that. It doesn't do that. You get to appreciate the details of where you are, the part of the garden where you are. You get to appreciate those details, but it doesn't become a question of picking and choosing between traditions. 

With that orientation, the question then becomes something like, 'How are they the same and how are they different?' It's true, this lineage is a continuation of something that came before. But if you took at it just based on appearances, you won't mistake it for Thelema or Buddhism for that matter. Appreciating what was cultivated then and what's been cultivated now is a big part of it, and appreciating those differences is part of the enjoyment. That's what we're looking for. 

Let seeing guide Binding Practice

In the past when doing bindings, my emotional state seems to get worse and either I abandon it before it's fully finished, or I push through and find that there's no satisfactory conclusion.

So push through is being active, right? Or they just get worse and you give up, that's like being passive. Active and passive. They'll be two sides of the drama that you're looking at.

Basically the antidote to this is merely mastering the practice, learning to do the practice. That's it. The thing that you'll be learning at this stage is what it means to be looking to see, and what it means to be doing something else.

We can call that taste or discernment. And so you know when the seeing is guiding the practice versus when something else is doing it.

The problem is at the beginning you learn these steps and you're beholden to the steps, aren't you? Because you're learning a practice.

And it is absolutely the case when you're doing it, it's like poking something with a stick and it brings up these emotions. So if you're abandoning it, because the emotions get too strong, it means you are yet to learn how you travel through that. And that's basically what the practice is.

So that that will come with time, with learning it. It might be better to wait until you can do it with someone.

Now the thing about binding practice in the book, it looks like there are scant instructions, right? Except, if we don't add anything, everything that needs to be known is actually there in the instructions. And I did it in that way on purpose.

I've come to the conclusion that the best way of teaching binding is in person. It's better for us to do it in person. 

Beyond Awakening & Delusion

Last time we covered the basics of mastering unbinding practice, and how we might go about addressing practical concerns and then appreciating the esoteric origin of the quality of the practice. 

Just a brief recap. 

You want to practice not immediately after eating a heavy meal. You want to practice when you've had enough sleep or when you're not going to fall asleep - so like in the middle of the day. You want to make sure you can do it somewhere you're not going to be disturbed.

If you find that you are sleepy, you can focus your energy in such a fashion that you exercise your willpower a little bit more. So you bring a quality of attention to the practice. Sometimes that can help to cut through sleepiness. 

If there's restlessness, usually that arises as a result of some degree of success with the practice, beginner's success or otherwise. And there can be this impatience to get to the fruit, to move through the steps and get to the fruit. If that happens, simply pick one step in the practice and enjoy doing that for something like five or ten minutes just on its own to appreciate the flavor, and then you can go back into moving through the steps.

So those practical concerns aside, there's then the question of the esoteric origin of the quality of the practice. And that can be extraordinary, effortless success. Where you effortlessly move through the steps sometimes just by inclining your intention and you go straight to the fruit. Or conversely, sometimes you find it difficult to concentrate, it gets very dry. Maybe there are energetics involved, pleasant or unpleasant. Maybe there's a challenging drama that arises, existential in nature, and so on and so forth.

If the practical concerns are something that you can adjust conditionally, the esoteric quality is something you merely have to appreciate. The practical stuff is like a movement in space. Because it's something you can actually do. The esoteric quality is something like a matter of time. It's a question of time.

So I encourage you to think about your magical record as a journal where you record the growth that's occurring in your garden. Sometimes you have small trees that grow fast and produce fruit. Sometimes there are bigger trees and it's not their season yet.

What you can expect in your unbinding practice should you have addressed the practical concerns - and then you have your appreciation in terms of the esoteric origin of the quality of the practice - you should expect your preferences to be revealed, to be laid bare. There will be some things you prefer in terms of the instructions. Some things that you perhaps are even repelled by. Sometimes they're easy to engage with, sometimes you wish they were other than they were.

There will be confusion, there will be understanding, there will be appreciating the depth of one's delusion and maybe even challenging dramatic material that involves things like fear, that kind of a thing.

And there will also be wisdom, you know, and awakening and that kind of stuff. So we should expect all of this stuff to come along. 

But with the orientation of the practice, it's always the case that we are aiming above whatever it is that's come along, not just with our delusions, but also with our awakenings. We always have this orientation where we avoid wrestling with the darkness, and we also avoid trying to hold on to the light. And that's how we keep our eyes aimed at an horizon that we can't see over.

So we start in silence, we move through speech - which is another way of saying form or creation or something like that - and we return to it again, and so there's a circle that we complete.