Posts Tagged ‘Crowley’

After I broke up with E. things were somehow seriously going downhill in terms of being isolated. I just didn’t find anyone there interesting, they were all moralistic, political sort of people whom I felt little connection to. The only exception was Paultje. He was a thin, weird looking fellow who was also into Castaneda. One time he ate about 50 mushrooms when he was depressed and he had been having these ‘after flashes’ ever since. Sometimes I would walk with him through the city and he would suddenly stop and just stare confused at his own reflection in a shopping window. Otherwise he was a pretty decent guy though and he got me into On-U-sound music of which he was a fervent collector. I remember one time we went on holiday to Schiermonnikoog together. We stayed at some farm and most of the time we were busy practicing the right way of walking, meditation, etc. He freaked out one time because he got attacked by an owl while he was practicing. There was also another guy there who was into magick he was all the time talking about dream manipulation. Decent fellow, but at night I scared him by moving my sexual energy around the room and in some way I was able to make the girls in the room moan. I was pretty deep into the mind at that time. I remember I could make people say stuff, for example. I would sit at a table and I noticed that one could simply ‘steer’ a conversation by planting thoughts into someone else’s head. That might sound far fetched to some people, but in fact its a rather common phenomenon if anything. People do that sort of stuff all the time. The big error is that they assume that anything they ‘hear’ in their own heads are their own thoughts. The reality is pretty different. Its more like we live in this thought field that interconnects and thoughts are being exchanged all the time. As such ‘clairvoyance’ in the sense of thought reading is a very common phenomenon, all it actually requires is the talent of differentiating between your own thoughts and those of others and some concentration ability to listen well. The majority of fortune tellers consist of people who will simply tell you what you want to hear. Then there are some who have actually developed this differentiation ability and can actually repond to stuff from your head, but it doesn’t mean much that they can do so. Real oracling abilities requires much more than this and those sort of people are quite rare.

Two weeks after I returned from Arnhem some guy walked into my room. He was a croatian guy and Paul told him I had Crowley books. He told me he was a member of OTO and if I was interested in joining it. I said I didn’t know. He did a Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram in my room to show me how its done. It was pretty impressive. It felt like he was controlling invisible winds that were blowing through my room. I was kind of baffled by the whole phenomenon of this guy appearing like this and I never considered the option of ritualistic magick. He asked me to perform a LBRP too but I declined, it felt too weird to do anything like that with him watching. Two weeks later he send me a Liber Al vel Legis in the post, a Croatian-English version. I read it but I didn’t like that book very much. Parts of it were interesting, parts of it irritating. I had the biggest problem with part 2. Chunks of it sounded like social Darwinism and I seriously dislike that sort of philosophies. I was wrong interpreting them that way, but at that time, being 19, I was young and I had some naive hopes for my fellow humans.

Everything now posed a big dilemma: would I join an organization I knew little about? I felt things were connected, the appearance of the Castaneda guy from Aachen, the appearance of the OTO guy in my room. On the other hand I never liked organizations much and I didn’t particularly like that book he had send me. So there was a serious dilemma. Two dreams I had made the situation even worse. In the first dream my future self came to meet me. He had a copy of Liber Al vel legis in his hand and he told me the book was ‘okay’. That’s exactly what the message was. When I woke up I thought about it and thought this must mean I should join. So I got in touch and arranged for a meeting in Germany. At that time there was no Dutch branch, if I am correct I was the first Dutch person to join it.

However, there followed a second dream. In that dream I was in an underground cave complex. There was a room in the middle of the complex where an alien lived, in a room full of manuscripts and books. Whenever I would enter that room he would turn at me an look at me with his completely black eyes. Every time he did that I would feel a boost of terrible fright, since the intelligence that radiated from him was so otherworldlish, so hostile, so alien that it scared the creeps out of me. I ran away every time only to find that I got back to that same underground room.

After some loops I managed to find a way out. I was in a mountain landscape. A voice from the air told me I had to push this giant rock into the abyss. Below the mountain my friends were standing. I did what the voice asked and killed all of them with the rock. Then hundreds of ladders came out of the sky and I started to climb one of them. After climbing for a while I came unto a room in the sky. The room was filled with a blue light. There were entities inside that greeted me and it felt like finally I was coming home. I felt a great peace being there. Then, all of a sudden, the thought came to my mind: I had forgotten to close the door! I saw in a flash that the creature from the cave had followed me up the ladder. That thought was so scary I woke up, bathing in my own sweat. That dream was the most strong and real feeling dream I ever had. It was a prophetic dream, which are quite rare. I was completely at loss as to how to interpret it. What the fuck did this mean? I had no fucking clue. It undid the certainty I gained from the future self dream but I decided to go on with the initiation thing anyway in the hope for some answers. I got an invitation for Minerval initiation from Allala Oasis, they were located next to the Muzel between Koblenz and Triest. I went there by train. A woman named Beatrix told me by letter that she would pick me up from the railway station. The station was rather empty, they lived in this miniature town, but somehow Beatrix managed to miss me and I sneaked up on her when she was about to get into her car disappointed that I didn’t show up. We got into the car and drove to their house.

As I’ve written before my interest in the occult started when I was about 14 and my prime interests was science fiction, fantasy, advanced physics and the occult. Summarized: anything that was filled with the promise of the fantastic. I read a few hundred science fiction and fantasy books, a few dozen occult and physics works. Not of the more speculative kind like ‘godel escher bach’ but genuine works of Einstein, Bohr and others. I think part of my motivation for that was to irritate my dad, because he was a physics teacher but his knowledge was limited to simple newton mechanics. I was proud I knew more than him about the subject at the age of 13 and kept bothering him with discussions he didn’t give a shit about.

At the age of 16 I bought some Crowley books, the first book I bought of him was ‘The book of Lies’ which is a collection of cryptical, kabbalistic writings ordered by numbers. The book starts with the observation that all thoughts, even this one, are lies because they are pictures of reality, subtracts rather than the real thing. That book rather fascinated me. It is not exactly an easy work but on the whole probably one of Crowley’s better attempts. What’s interesting about it is that he attempts to express truths as compact and abstract as possible without any rational makeup.

At 17 I began reading Carlos Casteneda. His works had an even deeper effect on me. Crowley was sort of interesting but I always felt he was somehow seriously lacking direction and oversight, partly because he had to build a system from scratch and partly because he had this rather irritating Libra personality which tends to wander off in any direction without much spine to see something through. Its beyond me how the guy could write such insane volumes of mediocre poetry without even once questioning his sources, methodologies or even the intent to ‘become the greatest poet in the world’ – I have noticed this allergy to criticism in many Libra people: they are in fact severely upset by even the most minute sort of critique. I find that mode of existence mindbogglingly dull but maybe its some sort of natural phase in natures grand cycle.

The yaqui system seemed far more subtle and advanced to me and I was completely fascinated by these works. I read all the casteneda books, 7 of them in that time, in a few months. Here I saw a vision of a reality completely different than the one we are brought up to believe in and it was a reality with a working system and sound philosophies behind it. I started to practice some of the techniques described in the books. The first one was the ‘right way of walking’.

By that time I had moved to a squatted school. I had a classroom as a room. It was a giant room and at first I was at loss as to what I should do with it. The previous guy had build a little room inside the classroom with foam bricks. I decided to make a forest in the room with that little room as some sort of oasis in the back. I carried shit loads of yellow sand upstairs in buckets and covered the whole floor with it. Then, it was just after Christmas time, I started collecting the Christmas trees people had put as garbage next to the street. At the end there it was: I had a forest of Christmas trees in my room and an shiny oasis in the back! It was magnificent. It was great to live in a room in the middle of the forest. Some people also thought it was way cool and some others thought I was seriously bonkers. The school was right in front of the Evoluon so when I looked outside of the window there was this giant UFO in front of it. My parents came to visit for the 2nd time since I had moved out but the forest was way to weird for them they thought I was even more nuts than they did already and moved in and out like they’d have seen the devil in person. Well I didn’t care. I had a great time in my forest. E. and me used to walk naked through it and she looked like an elf already. The room also had the only access to the roof and we used to sleep there in summer under the stars.

The school consisted of two buildings. Ours was the home of the group that came from the willemstraat squat. By now we were sort of a family, living together for 15 months and we were more creative sort of folks. The folks in the other building were more political. They used to have these board meetings that bore the shit out of me so I never went. At some point later a building came free in the tonglresestraat and 3 people would be able to move there. It was a real cool place and they offered me a room but at this time I was tired of moving and I told paul he could have my room so all the guys moved leaving me behind alone. This was the starting signal of a somewhat more darker time for me.

Another event that happened to me between the age of 16 and 17 years old that had great impact on me: two public speeches I held at school. At Dutch schools, at least at that time, everyone was obliged to hold at least one speech in front of the class about a self chosen subject. Usually these speeches were 10 minutes long and a lot of students were sort of nervous about doing that.

My teachers name was Hans van Es and he was a soft, friendly and sympathetic sort of character. His subject was Dutch language. He had given me good grades and compliments about my writing abilities before so we generally seemed to like each other. Since I could chose my own subject I somehow got the idea into my head to try change everyones world view in my speaking time. I was somehow expecting that was possible. I got in front of class and spoke for 45 minutes about quantum physics, universe, shoestring theory, all sorts of other stuff relating to how weird a place the universe really is. I was totally emerged in the job and wasn’t even using any material as far as I can recall. The knowledge I had stowed within through years of reading and thinking simply poured out of me like I was exploding. After 45 minutes, which I had hardly noticed had passed, students literally rushed out of class. The teacher was rather impressed, though, and gave me an A but all I cared about was the effect my lesson had had on my fellow students. To my great disappointment none of them had even understood a single thing I had been saying. I questioned a good sample and most of them were simply unable to even tell me what I had been talking about that hour. I was severely disappointed by that awkward laziness and inability to understand the simplest things. I felt really pissed off.

So, one year later I had to do another one of those speeches and I thought like: fuck it, no concessions this time. I have to try something different. I asked Hans van Es if I could again take the whole hour and this time have a classroom I could prepare for the occasion. Hans gave his permission.

I asked some guys from the squat I was living in to come be surreal figurants. They were wearing weird masks and robes. I emptied the classroom so everyone had to sit on the floor. I darkened the windows with garbage bags. I had weird music playing and two tv’s with strange art videos a friend had made. I put one of the guys in masque in front of the door and burned heavy incense. I had a bunch of texts printed out from Crowleys Book of Lies. The class came in, bewildered, and all sat down on the floor. The only thing I remember about the 45 minutes that followed is that I went completely bonkers. I screamed, I danced, I read texts, I raved like a lunatic. All my energy was coming out. It was incredibly trippy. The entire hour is some sort of black hole in my mind. After I felt finished I sat myself down in front of the class and said ‘game over’. Right at that moment an alarm clock went off I had set before, really loud, and the students and teacher who were already freaked out jumped up.

It was one of the best things I did in those years. It gave me great mental independance. It was a performance I did for myself rather than for them, and that absence of concessions was superb. However, one blind guy who was in my class was completely fascinated by the whole thing and he thanked me repeatedly. Some girl who was there and was from our squat told me that a lot of the people the entire hour had been staring obsessively at the television in front of them. Fear of the unknown, it is an interesting thing to defeat.

Some years later I one time returned to that school and saw Hans. I asked him if he remembered that performance. He said he was still having nightmares about it. What really blasted my mind however was that someone had painted a portrait of Crowley and hung it close to the classroom i had done that performance in. I pointed it out to Hans and he gave a real troublesome look.

I recently called Joshua Ray Stephens book ‘The Moth or the Flame’ a ‘magical’ book. In a mail he asked me if I meant what I was saying, but of course I didn’t define what I meant with ‘magical’. Perhaps I should say ‘magickal’ as some people do, to differentiate from the Disney sort of magic, but I have always found that a somewhat daft way of differentiating. It was started once by Aleister Crowley, I think, a man who was as irritating as he was interesting. When I was a teenager, around 15 or so, I read all books i could get my hands on about the occult. For years and years I exclusively read books about occultism, science fiction and higher physics. At some point I finished most books and kind of distilled what I found interesting: on the ‘occult’ subject those were Crowley, Gurdjieff and Casteneda.

Now, of course that was a teenage fascination. Obsession, even, and I threw away almost all my occult books when I moved to Turkey because I could hardly bear reading them later on anyway. I had long since moved on to philosophy and poetry, and most occult works are simply not well crafted enough to keep my interest. Nonetheless these three people did play a role in the formation of my world-view, and many years of practicing their techniques taught me that the mind can be mastered in ways not taught in conventional sciences. I have practiced a range of techniques for more than 15 years, including asana yoga, hatha yoga, ceremonial magic, astral work, kabbalah, kundalini, castanedian techniques and so on. But ‘occult literature’ never interested me after I passed my 21st birthday. Whatever good these techniques are, the instruction manuals will always be just that, instruction manuals. And instruction manuals ain’t literature.

So, what the ‘mob’ defines as ‘magical books’ ain’t magical books for me. I really detest most ‘occult art’ and ‘magical books’ and for a good reason: good art is always magical, so whomever calls a work ‘magical poetry’ is somewhat insane or doesn’t know what poetry is. Yet, the same isn’t true about books. One simply can’t say that ‘all books are magical’ – that’d be a nonsensical statement.

A truly magical book is a rare phenomenon. It’s the synergy that does the trick: the design, the words, the shape, the colors, the intent put in it. A magical book is a very concentrated expression of someones essence. I feel that Joshua created something like that with ‘The Moth or The Flame’ – it’s a very special work that is very carefully crafted. Maybe we should rather call it a ‘grimoire’, I have always liked that word much better.

I keep practicing my skills and techniques, I spend about one to two hours a day on them. It’s greatly efficient since these skills allow me to completely renew or change my own energy levels. This is an extremely useful skill to have: recently I have been almost in a permanent state of being mind-blown by just about everything that surrounds me. But when I want to read magical books I have no use of ‘occult literature’ and neither do I have any desire for ‘occultists’, frankly: they are a rather irritating and small minded crowd. They are simply unwilling to question their own premises, which is the first requirement of any sort of progress. Besides, all occult forums I have occasionally visited banned me usually within a few days time, which I take as as good a sign of enlightenment as anything else.