Thoughts from Fr. 722

I am travelling again. It’s a funny experience so far. The things that seem “right” remain very difficult. In fact, in some cases I don’t quite know how to do them. But I’m seeing the internal changes and their fruits. The travel itself is much easier now than it was then. Here’s a little something to chew on:

[1] Years ago, I set out to do The Great Work -- and I discovered I must travel. Recently, I set out to travel -- and I discovered I must do The Great Work.

performed chant for 27th aethyr (ZAA). the vision got off to a rocky start. i saw a huge male figure with a bulldog head sitting on a throne of sorts, but i could tell i wasn’t really dialed in yet. it was a fleeting vision which left. a strange outline of a cone then extended from him into the sky. i tried to follow this abstract wireframe cone type shape, as it led to a much more expansive, very large sense of space, but it wasn’t right either. instead, i decided to become less active in the vision and all visuals died down. instead i heard a male voice speaking from the void. i forget the exact content of what he said, but the basic thrust was that he told me pretty plainly about how this place was ZAA and here’s how you get in. he took me to gates that were like the gates of heaven and opened them (the voice was always disembodied, it just guided the vision in this way). inside was a creepy run-down swampy forest. i asked why it was like this and he told me something like “the minds of humans make things as they will” — in other words, “dude, your brain is just full of junk.” i walked in this place for a like 5 seconds and started slipping into the swampy bog water. so i let myself slip under the water and it was really cloudy and muddy. i swam in this place a little, but could tell it wasn’t really going anywhere. i vibrated ZAA a couple times, though, and a golden door of sorts started to appear under the water, which cleared up with each vibration of ZAA. eventually this cleared to a point where i was looking at the golden door (actually a woden church door now, similar to ones i’d seen in spain) and it was just a few meters in front of the “gates of heaven” type doors opened by the voice before.

so i opened that door and walked into the chapel. it was small and i heard singing of male voices. there were maybe 50 seats with an aisle between them leading up to a long table on a raised stage. but the whole thing was really vague. some combination of vibrating ZAA and relaking into the vision again (i think i’d become more active again — oops!) made a large eye of horus appear on the wall. and below it was set, behind the table. he was cutting into something, and when i walked up and looked, it was a man. the man was alive and having parts cut out of him as he lay on the table in front of the congregation. he looked uncomfortable, but not tortured. i asked him his name, and he said kristios (spelling is guesswork on my part -- but it sounds like some greek variant of christos). i talked to set for a while as he cut. at one point, set told me that i was free to pass through this realm as i pleased, because i was frater ___. he also told me that he wasn’t really the real set, he was just kind of in set costume. i asked his real name, but he was reluctant and i didn’t push him. he seemed to think that this whole place wasn’t particularly important to me for some reason. a bit after that, i saw set grow and turn into a truly huge figure bearing down on me with bolts of energy. there were also little critters, like weird dust bunny demons, which swarmed me, but basically i had erected a shield over myself and nothing was penetrating. it was like being in a glass house during a storm. it calmed down before long (i might have blasted the dust bunnies away) and set told me that it was very wise of me not to be afraid of him. i relaxed more and he was favorably impressed.

then the scene changed. i was on the roof of a castle and it was raining. set turned into a statue on the castle roof with me, completely inert. on one side, i was shown the town below and it was a smoldering wreck. it had been obliterated. i was shown the town that could be seen from the other side of the castle and it was also a smoldering wreck. i tried to let the vision speak for itself and unfold without my interference. i saw that the center tower on the castle roof had a name inscribed: JIRISTI.

And the Enochian odyssey continues with aethyr 28, a super weird and confusing experience. I got a sense in this aethyr about how I was going to have to change my approach next time around. This mostly boils down to having my mind open a bit wider while journeying, and being a bit less focused on my own participation -- “going with the flow”, as the hip young kids say. Anyway, here’s aethyr 28, for anyone interested: performed chant for 28th aethyr (BAG). what a strange one this was. it began with a sense of a cloudy whirling vortex in space. after a time, an altar appeared, looking very catholic to my eyes, with gold and red and white being the main colors. beams of golden sunlight pierced down to the vortex. i believe there was a chant here of sorts, and after a time, i began to see the figure of a robed angel. the angel again had only blackness under its hood, there was no discernible face or hands. we stayed for a time at the altar, and then she began to walk off. for a time, she was walking in autumn leaves, wearing ordinary clothing, with a headscarf like a babushka lady, still blackness where a face would be. this scene seemed to lead nowhere, though, and eventually it returned to the altar.

the sequence is a little hazy [i did record this time, but need to go over the recording and do some processing to be able to understand it], but in essence, the vision threatened to break up on several occasions. at one point, i strengthened it by vibrating BAG. the angel was speaking to me in a language i didn’t understand, and it took a while to be able to get it to speak any english with me at all. the chorus behind the altar at some point triumphantly sang something like, “THIS IS BAG! THIS IS BAG!”, etc. the angel told me her name was AZIEL (probably AZ-EL, actually, as in the god of the beginning and end [in the english alphabet]), which definitely made me think instantly that my imagination was somehow failing me and churning out dull drivel that’s a little too predictable. but anyway, we chatted, just me and her in a blank setting, for a while, and basically she told me it was at an end. she thanked me for coming around and said that there was really nothing for me in this place and that i could move on. i said ok. my mind was feeling tired, like it was time for the vision to end. it felt so brief, i was quite surprised. so i waited for the vision to end, but it wasn’t coming to a natural end. instead, i started hearing more singing. the singing never ended. the sequence in all this is still a little hazy for me, but in essence, i began to see the void again, and then a red dragon appeared and ferociously attacked me! this is where things get… uhh… weird.

so, i defended myself with this dragon and didn’t particularly feel like fighting it, so i was parrying a lot and it got to the point where i decided to dance. i began playing a tito puente song, and we started salsa dancing. me and the red dragon. then the dragon was feeling pretty good, i guess, so i hopped on its back and it started flying me around. it headed toward a scene i couldn’t really make out at first, and over time it made its way down to a really majestic mountain scene. then it flew me down into a large body of water, and we plunged way down. i forget if anything significant happened there. eventually we came back up and i found myself standing in front of the dragon and aziel. they were both bowing to me and basically acknowledging that i had done a good job. i also did abhaya mudra and they followed suit (i tried this a couple more times in the vision, but the drive toward some kind of combat kept them from responding for long). it felt again like the vision was coming to an end. but it just didn’t. i even made the effort of taking the entire vision and turning into a pellet like in RII, but i tried to think of what to do with the pellet this time and it was obviously a dead end. somewhere in here, i discovered the dragon’s name was adriax.

the dragon lunged at me again, and i got out a wooden stick this time and casually sparred with it, until i got the stick in its mouth, hoisted it up, so that the dragon was balancing on its mouth with the stick pointed up in the air, and spun it around on the ground like a top. aziel entered the scene and the dragon began playing a nice latin salsa number i’d never heard on a piano. yeah, the dragon played salsa music on the piano. and aziel and i began to dance together. it was fun and seemed right, and eventually it came to a natural end. i wound up standing in front of aziel and adriax in a blank setting again. i asked to see aziel’s face, and she showed me. it was the face of a young blonde blue-eyed woman, only the face was rotting in a disturbing manner. i speculated that might be why she kept it hidden - so as to avoid the sense of her appearance being disturbing. she put her head back behind her hood, and several snakes came out (i believe it was 5), all attached to her third eye, trying to bite me. i didn’t let them and they eventually calmed down. and we were seriously just standing there again, like it was supposed to be over, but it wasn’t.

after a time, i asked her what i had to do, and she told me i had to fight the dragon. so hey, when in rome, right? i immediately got to work on that dragon and before long, i had punched clean through its head, chopped it into a jillion tiny pieces, thrown its corpse on the earth, thrown napalm onto it, and set it on fire. after that, aziel and i were standing together again. she suddenly became really huge, i mean like skyscraper-height, and was looking down on me in a very intimidating manner. i was keenly aware at that moment that i was dealing with something very large and powerful, but i made sure that i stayed chill and was not intimidated much. she spoke to me in a large and forceful way, looking down on me, saying something like, “you are frater ____, you have done what needed to be done.” over and over. i had a sense during this that my mind and imagination were being expanded a little to accommodate future interactions. finally, mercifully, some short time after this, we agreed that it was time for the vision to end and it actually did, collapsing back into a tiny crack.

More of this Enochian Aethyrs scrying business. I had a kind of hypothesis today about the Aethyrs as an initiation system. The idea is that what the Aethyrs actually do is promote a person’s innate sense of “specialness”, increasing it, pandering to it, and ultimately exalting it enough to break on through. It’s a very tentative idea, but it seems to fit the data of accounts I’ve read. Anyway, here’s my venture into Aethyr 29. Lots of similar themes and landscapes so far. Must mean my imagination is a wasteland: performed the chant for 29th aethyr (RII). this time i was quite well prepared in terms of comfort, but it took a little while for anything to happen. i sat looking at a blank screen for maybe a minute or so. then i began to get a sense of a kind of fire, a fire with a lot of pale shades to it, it reminded me of fire and biogel almost. but it represented a kind of astral-only fire, i guess you might say… anyway, this idea of this unusual fire spread out and soon it engulfed the entire universe. i was in a scene that reminded me very much of last night’s journey, in the last section in space. it felt bounded, but representing the infinite expanse… in any case, it was all on fire with this unusual kind of fire. all of space — the stars, the planets, and all the space in between. it was all ablaze! and out of the fire came an angel. the figure was a little uncertain at first, but soon it defined itself. it was a woman whose main defining feature in my mind was this electric blaze that could be seen through her irises only. we locked eyes very quickly, and as i stared into her eyes, i was drawn into the large expansive space inside her irises.

soon, i was at a highly realistic european villa of sorts. the whole appearance was very conventional looking. it was peaceful in its way, though i was a bit unnerved by the complete change in tone and content. i was in a very well-kept yard, i guess you could say. it had white walls in a style that reminded me of italy or spain. i walked up a ramp to a small arch that led to a well-tended landscape with a fountain, and i walked up to the fountain. when i looked into it to see my reflection, it was a skull. i was reflected back as a skeleton in the water of the well. for some reason, i decided to dive down into the well. once i was under water, my whole body was a skeleton. i was swimming deeper down, into the dark, and i saw a small kind of pearl of light at the very bottom. it wasn’t an especially bright light, but anyway, i went to pick it up. it was semi-attached to the bottom, like it was on a string, only it seemed like it was biologically attached somehow. anyway, i picked it up and decided to swim back to the surface. i heard singing and saw an expanse with ghosts all around me. i was informed that i was in the realm of the dead. actually, this was put in a much more eloquent way. i really need to start recording these as i do them.

anyway, i got to the top of the well gain and came out flesh and blood and was met by the angel from before. i forget the exact segue, but i believe she became very intimidating and started setting fire to everything again. i had a sense that she was trying to kick me out of the aethyr, and i said in a very stern and stubborn vaice, “I’M NOT GOING ANYWHERE!”. this phrase immediately made the whole thing collapse into a little pellet on the ground. there was a white lion in front of me, and everything else had gone black. the lion became aggressive. it lunged to bite me and i had to really struggle to keep it at bay. the lion’s force was stronger than some angels i’ve run into… anyway, after a period of struggling with this lion and not really getting anywhere, i eventually took the “hey, i’m not here to fight you” approach instead. we were both actually still at odds with each other in an almost palpable way, but the struggle calmed down a little even if we weren’t actually OK with each other still. i had the idea to feed the lion the pellet that contained the earlier portion of the vision, and the lion ate it as a tasty snack and genuinely calmed down after that.

after that, the scene changed again. there were two angels with prominent crosses on their clothes, and they began blowing triumphantly into brass horns. there was singing again, and between the angels, on a platform much like the one in the previous vision, i saw the angel again, and her head was bowed so that she was not looking at me with those powerful eyes of hers. the lion also appeared next to her, and it also had its head bowed. this scene continued for some time. i heard a long and distinct monologue at some point that seemed to be from the angel, but i have forgotten its exact contents. i was referred to by one of my magical names in it.

Well, I guess I’m one of those dorks scrying Enochian Aethyrs now. I did this one solo. Kinda wished I’d had something for voice recording at the time, would’ve loved to keep at least some fragments of the choral works I was treated to. Ahh, well. Next time. I also lost some stuff to poor memory while typing.

Anyway, here’s my record:

performed the chant for the 30th aethyr (TEX). i went to lie down in my bean bag, but it was too noisy. i lay on the floor, but the traffic sounds were too noisy, so i quickly put in earplugs. i had a sense of a very bright sun and sky scene, framed by a vaguely golden shape that made it look like something on a stage. and there was an entity moving in the foreground, so close that i only saw small portions of it  it was a little like having someone walk right up directly in front of a camera. at length, the vision stabilized properly. i saw the figure in full at some point, and it had a pendant in the middle of its chest that was billowing out a kind of purple smoke. and eventually this smoke overtook the whole vision and everything in the vision was inside of this smoke. it was a way of clearing the screen and transitioning to a new space. it segued into a scene of two female angels, both on white horses. they began singing a rousing acapella chorus in a language i didn’t understand. in time, the entity that had been so close in the foreground showed up between them, on a white platform with a few stairs leading up to it. i had seen his complete figure before at some point in the vision, but now he was staying put. he was in brown-ish robes. his face and hands were simply blackness in the hood and sleeves. i had a closer look at his pendant at some point, but the vision was not completely clear. at one point, it looked like a metallic figure of an asymmetrical 6-pointed star, with a design i hadn’t seen before. all the while, the chorus continued.

at some point, i asked him his name. he told me it was alcrefax, and he pulled back his hood and i saw underneath his robes the figure of a man who looked charred and withered, a bit like a preserved mummy. he had rings with colorful jewels on his fingers. i forget exactly what i asked him, but i think i asked him to show me what this place was really about. he took me through a door then into a place that felt like an attic full of initiatory props and tools. we sat in this attic for a while, and the chorus continued, but it incorporated his name in its words. the chorus seemed to be singing about him. anyway, after a little bit of time was spent in this attic type space, i said that this all still felt like props, and i wanted to see what was real in this place. he laughed and together we made a portal to a new realm.

the new realm was a bright scene on the grass on the banks of a beautiful clear stream. when we went there, the chorus changed to one female voice singing the same song. Alcrefax began to turn into a radiant young man, and he looked very happy. we sat for a time on the banks of that river, listening to the girl singing about him. i don’t remember the transition, but at some point, we moved into space, looking down at the earth. he became a grey alien, and for a brief period of time, i morphed into a grey alien also, and we held hands and laughed and looked down at the earth.

there was another transition that i don’t quite remember, but at some point alcrefax left, and i returned back to regular human form. a door opened in the middle of space, and from it, a very good natured female grey alien in a suit that was not all red, but had some noticeable red features, came walking down a staircase to me. the sound of the chorus was again singing in full numbers, and this time, it was actually the stars that were doing the singing. unlike alcrefax, she spoke to me in a very natural, friendly, congenial way. i asked her what this place was about, and she said in effect that it was about having a complete view of all space. i don’t remember the exact content of our conversation. i asked her her name, and she said it was almira. she told me that she was like the creator of this realm, she was its master (mistress?). but she was quite clear that she was only the ruler of this particular realm (aethyr, presumably), and i had a clear sense of the boundaries around her domain. she told me that alcrefax was the gatekeeper for this place, and that he didn’t like a lot of people; he didn’t always let them in. i had a distinct sense of having met the people of these two roles: gatekeeper and supreme ruler.

Today I went into a monastery in Madrid that had a statue of good ole dead ole Jesus lying down. Something about this statue left an impression on me, unlike most of the others, and I found myself asking if he had to die. Actually, before long, I was asking an astral impression of the statue this question over and over. It took him a while to respond, but when he did, it became clear that this was not quite the right question. Of course he had to die, duh. He told me over the course of conversation that he did not come back to life in his body, but rather that he impressed himself on the collective astral plane (collective unconscious) strongly through his death. And with this idea, a picture began to unfold in my mind of Jesus as metaphor for a particular alchemical process, in which the practitioner squeezes out every little ounce of alchemical mercury and sulphur from the physical body, in order to become alive outside of the body, leaving the salt behind entirely. This process is one of accumulation and then extraction, and the extraction simply happens to leave the body dead. The whole business of Jesus’s torture and execution is actually an allegory for the agonising process of extraction.

I remember hearing once from an accomplished alchemist that each alchemical stone is actually a Christ.

In any case, I am reminded of this image from the Book of Lambspring.