Magnum Opus

“On an evening before Easter I was sitting at my table and after I had communed with my Creator, as I was ac¬customed to do, in humble prayer and meditation on Meditation many great mysteries which the Father of the Light in his majesty had shown me abundantly, I desired to prepare, together with my beloved Paschal Lamb, a pure, unleav¬ened wafer in my heart.” - Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosycross.




Fulcanelli said that “Alchemical Wedding” can be regarded as a valid alchemical text.

Easter is a good time to begin the Great Work. Furthermore it should be begun somewhere between April and May or Taurus and Gemini. There’s a widely used technological process performed between Taurus and Gemini upon the Black Virgin.




This process resembles burning the green candles.
“Another detail useful to the hermeticist is that in die ceremonial prescribed for the processions of the black Virgins only green-coloured candles were burnt.” © Fulcanelli

Oh, and it stinks.

Maybe it’s a key, at least one of them.

Well, I’m not an alchemist and I don’t plan to be one :)

Understanding

We are all different. Everybody sees and acknowledges each other's differences but you can't tell a book by its cover. The more differences between us, the less we understand each other. Misunderstanding leads to troubles. Most of troubles we solve in two ways: peace or war; and both need understanding. You need to understand one whom you want to be your friend and you need to understand one whom you want to defeat.

Understanding is not a simple task; it’s used to think that one can’t know the inside of a man's mind. And the problem here is the difference between us. But the problem can be overcome. Difference means separation, which is right in everyday life, but just there. There’re parts of us we all share. I don’t talk about something transpersonal like egregores now but I talk about parts of psychology we all share. Some of them can be used for telepathy but it’s not simple. There’re techniques much simpler, one of them is approximation. The idea here is changing the point of view similar to one of the man you want to understand while watching the interesting subject.

Close your eyes. You must see now something like gray screen. Now imagine the person you want to understand; the image comes from some point around you, find this point (well, you can train on other objects or people :) ) and move to it. You should notice now some change in your feelings, your perception changes to one like of the man you want to understand. If it didn’t happen you did something wrong. Now, from within this point try to look at the “gray screen” and recall the subject you want to understand. See the difference in perception?

That’s it.

Elements 3

There are five elements: Ether, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. Only four of them are present in any real object of this world. Only three of them are present in the Tree of Life.



Why. Elements are types or ways of existence and existence is a process so the best way to explain the elements is to explain how they appear in process.
Any process needs some kind of substance for its appearance: it can be medium, space.. whatever – base. And then it goes through 5 states.

1. Concept – Ether
2. Future – Air
3. Present – Fire
4. Past – Water
5. Base for next – Earth

So why it’s five and four and three. Tree of Life is the simple case. I wrote already that Major Arcana (in its human representation, and the Tree of Life is of the same kind) are the most abstract level of our mind activity. This way Ether = Concept is the idea and Earth = perceptible part of the World; and the Tree of Life represents realization of the idea in this World. What’s left is Air, Fire, and Water. When Air is represented by Arcana 1, 5, 6, 10, 11, 14, 18, 19; Water – 2, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21; Fire – 3, 4, 9, 16, 17, 22.

Material world is more tricky case. I showed previously how to use Ether in work with material objects but even so there’s no Ether in matter. The trick is there’re no objects in this world but instead there’s process of “rendering” of realized concepts into objects. I’ll show how it works.

Everyone of us is a product of our mind in some way. So there’s a process of constant creating of human being or whatever you call it (with 5 elements) and there’s a result of this process viewable in any moment as a body or something like that (with 4 elements). Now how it works together. Cycle of elements appears for us in form of tattvas – kind of time division of a human life. There’re five tattvas:

1. Akasha tattva – Ether
2. Vayu tattva – Air
3. Agni tattva – Fire
4. Apas tattva – Water
5. Pritivi tattva – Earth

Every tattva lasts for 24 minutes (sometimes when you work with karma or solve some psychological problem the cycle may change, like jumping to different tattva, but it returns to 24 min. * 5 instantly). This way when you go through Akasha you’re in Ether, but there’s no Ether for your body. Hence, you don’t disappear for 24 minutes every 2 hours. What really happens during Akasha tattva, you go through the time of physical uncertainty. Only physical. It doesn’t really affect you since the mind or psyche (or whatever you call it) is the determinant, but this phenomenon can be easily observed.

Take the pendulum, wait for Akasha tattva, and try to find what is the year of your birth using this scale.



Something goes wrong doesn’t it? :) It’s not only pendulum. Any physical device will produce wrong results during the Akasha tattva. But if you use “mind only” techniques you will never meet problems of this kind.

So there’re only four elements in physical world. But the Ether is still present – it defines the equilibrium or relations for the other four. Frankly, it’s a bit more complex – everyone of the elements defines relations of the other four in any object but Ether does it in most usable (for humans at least) way.

That’s how it works.

Total recall (past lives memories)

In 1944 Carl Jung completed one of his greatest books “Psychology and Alchemy”. I love Jung and I really appreciate his works, he was a great scientist. But despite this book is one of his best, it was great mistake. Mistake people made before Jung and after Jung. Psychology can’t explain magic because no system can be explained or described by its part.

The core difference between scientific and magical approaches to psychology is that science sees psychology as a static “black box” with slightly changeable parameters when from magic point of view it’s a constantly developing system of related identities growing from life to life.

We live our lives one by one and in every incarnation we create identities. Once we die it becomes part of our unconsciousness for the next lives. Usually we don’t remember our previous lives and this is crucial to diversifying our experience. But one day everyone reaches the point when using previous experience makes more sense than collecting the new one. Some people just start to remember something, some others must use some techniques to do this. There’re many techniques in this case and they’re all different, from training ability to remember to reincarnating previous identities. We all different so there’s no one best technique for everyone. I’ll describe one that should work for most of people who reached the “point of recalling”.

This is not simple. This is not really hard but not simple.

The main idea of this technique is that we need our experience for further development. Another idea is that there’s some part of us that never dies.

First part is the underlying technique – identification. We see, hear, feel… the outer world from some point inside the head. It’s not “where I am” but it’s “where I watch from”. This point is moveable. The easiest trick is to move it along your body. It usually stops in chakras and changes your perception accordingly (btw it’s a good practice to look at different things from different chakras – sometimes it enables to overcome the stereotypical understanding). Next step is to move this point out of body. Try to move it to some object like table or tree, if you do it right you should feel what it feels that moment – this is identification.

Second part is to find the part of us that never dies. Well, this is a part that develops through all our lives. So it would be good idea to look for something developing. Try to recall all the cases of your life when you learned something. Not these gray annoying days in the school but something that made you feel you really advanced. All these memories have something in common, some special feeling of advancing, of growth – this is what you need, catch this feeling. Now there’s some point where this feeling comes from, you must find it. If you never tried to catch your feeling this way try to use Osho’s technique “Look into your headache” from “The Orange Book”, it should work. The point is something like 8 – 10 inches before your forehead and 2 inches above your eyes.

Now identify yourself with this point. There must be some hardly describable feeling when you do this – this is a new connection built between parts of your… psyche. And now try to recall some of your childish dreams, if you did everything right, it must look more like memories now. If it doesn’t – start from the beginning and don’t forget that not everyone can do it, so if you constantly fail you maybe do not need it or you need some other technique.

Ancient Greeks believed that when we die we drink water from river Letha to forget our lives, and before we come into the world we drink it again to forget our post mortal existence.


But there was another river in realm of Hades – Mnemosine that returned memory. And there was goddess with same name that personalized memory and identity.

So if you succeeded, you can talk now to this part of yours and it will tell you about your past lives and show it. And this in turn will help you to develop the new identity, because identity is what really disables recalling memories from the past lives and if you rebuild it to enable you to recall your memories you just stop dying, because death is forgetting.

Power

I wrote already about shoulder devil. Now it’s about shoulder angel.
Just like death it’s a part of our energy but not the real angel. But it can act like one. It can give good advices because it knows everything about our abilities.
It’s called Power and it can be found on right behind the back.



I don’t know whether don Juan knew something about it – his understanding of power was different. I think the idea of the “death on the left” was taken from some ancient system and adopted for the Toltec needs while rejecting the rest of ideas.

Power is an ability to do something. Everyone can do something, those who cannot just do not live. So this is a point of entrance of all our energy (yes I know about Sushumna, Ida and Pingala and I know about Qi energy cycling, this is just another view). What’s interesting here is that any initiation you get connects to this point as an external source of energy or power and if it limits you someway it’s done here too.

Just like Death your Power can be reached through its graphical representation. But even so your Power can tell you many interesting and useful things about your abilities it makes sense to look at it before talking – sometimes it’s not the worst thing to know what is the source of your power and what are its limitations before using it or listening to its advices. So this one enables you to see your Power from aside.