Methods in Teaching: Since I think of myself as a student, I feel free to share my experiences with others. I hope to learn something from others in the process and feel a part of a larger community. There are, however, a number of questions which are raised when we discuss teaching methods in the context of esoteric traditions. For example, how much of a spiritual or magical tradition is to be kept secret, how much is to be divulged through a formal or informal training system, and how much can be offered freely without restraints of any kind?
Let me be specific. If I write a book on one of the eight undines Bardon mentions who is named Istiphul, am I not revealing too much? Have I inadvertently opened the gates to the astral domain for those who are unworthy? Do I not jeopardize these marvelous beings by enabling their realms to become contaminated by individuals who are manipulative and greedy? Or, more important, am I not taking away from others the opportunity to experience Istiphul for themselves without being fed prepackaged and digested material?
Speaking from experience, it appears no matter how much others read my writings about elemental beings their experience will always remain individual and unique. These beings are full of wonder and boundless in inspiration. There is nothing I or anyone else can write or reveal which can reduce or substitute for a direct encounter with an elemental such as Istiphul.
From my perspective, the human race is just at the beginning of exploring the spiritual universe. We only have a few pages of the prelude to the books of wisdom and the operating manuals of creation. Is it possible to abuse the power we acquire? Yes, this will always be a possibility. Is it possible to somehow interfere with an undine's beauty and love? Yes it is just as it is possible to interfere with the purity and nurturing power of the seas. But we do so at our own peril risking self-destruction if we proceed motivated by selfishness and greed. Yet I would not write as I do unless I had a backup plan and overall agenda which justifies my actions and puts safeguards into effect.
I have lived for forty years in a world where the deployment of power was biased on a balance of nuclear terror. Even the most conscientious of politicians considered it a necessary evil and refused to think anything more about it. The human species has placed not national boundaries but its own existence and the biosphere at risk by proceeding in this manner. It is natural under these conditions (when I was growing up) to ask for a wisdom and a love of sufficient magnitude and quality that they can contain all power within themselves--that they can guide the human race into future centuries with a degree harmony and also the ability to take responsibility for our own self-destructive tendencies.
If there are new powers in the world and new challenges, then we also need new teaching methods and opportunities for learning to cope with our real life situations. Let me cut to the bottom line. What I have learned most from teachers in many traditions is not their esoteric information nor their process of initiation nor mysterious and wondrous magical secrets which they have shared in one way or another. What I treasure most in teachers is their enthusiasm toward their subject matter. When they have had this enthusiasm and invited me to discover my own enthusiasm as an equal--this is when I learned something valuable.
Teachers such as this are willing in any moment to communicate to you the essence of all their teachings. It is a heart to heart transmission. If you can get this, then they know that all knowledge, wisdom, technique, and method will fall into place. Everything else is at best secondary. Everything else is empty and worthless without the heart.
This idea of transmission does not put the student in a subsidiary and passive relationship to the teacher. For me, a good teacher realizes that inspiration is beyond all knowledge and the wisdom of all traditions. Inspiration is wonder, awe, love, and appreciation. For this reason, a teacher will regard the light burning in a student's heart not as a dimmer flame than what is in his or her own heart or a cloning of his or her own power.
The student's experience is always new. It is full of incomprehensible possibilities and experiences which the teacher may never in this life time have the resources to fathom. From my point of view, the only way to tell a teacher in any group of people is by observing the individual who is learning the most. That is the one with the most open and receptive heart. Let us consider further these issues of knowledge and initiation, of enthusiasm and the heart. In terms of methods and exercises for self-mastery, I can summarize my 23 years of experience with the Franz Bardon system in nine paragraphs. To me, this is what Bardon has a student practice in his three books:
1. You make your mind completely empty of thoughts so it is reflective like a mirror, receptive like the ocean, empty like a void, open like the sky, intense like air the moment before lightning strikes, serene like moonlight, fragile and responsive to suggestion like a dream, and solid and enduring like a mountain.
2. Next, with this empty mind, you focus your attention on something--a problem, your life path, an elemental being, a spirit, or a project you wish to accomplish. You add to this a little technique. Techniques are endless in variety. You can visualize a picture, a sigil, an image or symbol of God/Goddess; you can meditate on a prayer or a chant; you can use incense, music, or a tone; you can do a pathworking, mental wandering, construct a magical circle or perform a ritual, gaze upon a crystal ball, speak a word of power, etc. etc. Technique, methods, and procedures are employed to receive and amplify impressions.
3. And finally, through direct experience and careful study and analysis, you interpret your impressions. You translate them into words and call it telepathy, into visual images and call it clairvoyance, into sensations and feelings and call it clairsentience, into all three while connecting to a spirit and call it an evocation, into new information and call it knowledge, into a spiritual realization and call it wisdom, into light and freedom and call it enlightenment, etc. Impressions received from outside yourself can also over time become internalized so you embody their qualities and energy.
4. This same procedure can also be expressed in a more active manner typical of magick. All methods and techniques for changing oneself or the world boil down into a simple formula: you concentrate on what is desired as if it is real right now in this moment. You add an appropriate kind of energy to your picture, feeling, thought, etc. so it has some power independent of your mind and thoughts and can move with enthusiasm toward the objective on any or all planes. And you also take into consideration and comprehend from within every force, situation, resistance, and obstacle which blocks your vision from becoming reality. This last element insures that your course of action is forged from wisdom and results in harmony--that you can proceed without inference or resistance from the energies or environments your desire encounters on the four planes.
5. For example, in chapter three of Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics, you practice imagining the elements of fire, water, air, or earth around yourself as if you are immersed within a boundless sphere of a single element. Take the earth element. What is it to imagine you have within and around yourself a vast expanse of the earth element? This is the same as learning to think, feel, and perceive as a gnome.
6. Your mind attunes to that one element learning to amplify, condense, and transform it. After this training, it is not so difficult then to form connections and interact in a creative manner with gnomes. If you spent time concentrating on minerals, precious stones, trees, mountains, and so forth you would be undergoing the training of a gnome magician. And so it is with fire, water, and air.
7. You can also use colors instead of the elements. If you imagine yourself within a boundless expanse of emerald green light, then you are learning to think, feel, and perceive as a spirit of Libra or Taurus in the earthzone or a spirit from the sphere of Venus. The colors, then, can be used for probing the qualities, powers, and consciousness of the beings within the spheres regardless of whether you make connections to them or not..
8. In the end, when you can concentrate effectively, your thought is like electricity and magnetism. Everything else is attracted to and becomes aligned with it. The four planes cooperate with it. It is like akasha--obstacles dissolve in its presence. It is like a mating of Saturn and Uranus--something completely new and without precedent is introduced into the world and yet it feels so natural it seems like it is what was meant to be all along.
9. When I consider the entire spectrum of methods in Bardon's three books with over five hundred different spirits and 26 cosmic letters, this summary is what I come back to in order to understand what I am doing. Self-transformation, self-mastery, and integration--aligning oneself with the forces, the laws, and the harmony of the universe--are at the heart of the process from beginning to end.
Does Bardon communicate enthusiasm and a willingness to regard the student as an equal? Does he transmit the essence of his teachings to his students with the intent of empowering them to acquire their own experience guided by their own sense of wonder? For me he does this.
He introduces methods for training the mind, soul, and body. He gives sigils and descriptions of elemental beings and spirits. The sigils and elements are keys opening the gates to elemental and spiritual domains. He teaches evocation but evocation is optional. You can also interact with spiritual beings through mental wandering--meeting them in their own domains--or you can seek spiritual wisdom through practicing the cosmic language. Freedom and self-initiation are the nature of his system.
Bardon's system provides for nearly every conceivable kind of assistance. There are spirits who specialize in protection, magical perception, wisdom, enlightenment, love, power, relationships, peacemaking, business, advertising, technology, science, industry, history, justice, music, art, poetry, healing, alchemy, sex, birth, death, the bardo, reincarnation, religion and ritual, any and all of the four plane, and the spheres of the solar system, etc. It is up to the student to discover and to make connections to these spirits according to his own needs and maturity.
The question still remains about how to teach magick to others within the context of a large and mature esoteric system. The trick is to share and inspire without spoon feeding others or demeaning and minimizing their own, unique discovery process. To this end, I will review some examples of educational situations in which I learned the most.
Naturally, everyone will have their set of core experiences which guide and motivate them. There is no need for consensus on this matter. Yet we are perfectly free to listen to and learn from each other. I will state, however, form the beginning that I am an Aquarian and my approach emphasizes freedom, discovery, and cosmic wisdom over tradition, structure, and authority.
Technically speaking, I do not see a conflict between tradition and innovation. Recall that in some circles Aquarius is co-ruled by both Saturn and Uranus. Aquarius finds a way of honoring and working with the past while fulfilling its own obligation to make all things new.
When I was in eleventh grade in high school, I was bored to death in algebra class. The American system of math education and United States' students are nearly the worst in the world. Other nations have the teacher present a problem and leave the students to first work out individually, in groups, or as a class the solutions. The students then share and teach each other what they have discovered. The teacher steps in at the end with suggestions for how to improve upon the student's work offering them feedback on their problem solving process.
In the United States, the method is to teach the rules and concepts of math and then have the students apply this rote knowledge to solving the problems which fall within these categories. As a consequence, the students do not learn initiative or self-reliance. They are not challenged and ambiguity is not permitted.
It was my good fortune in eleventh grade algebra to be thrown out of the class along with another student. Both of us kept pointing out to the teacher that there were more effective ways for solving the problems than what he was presenting. The two of us were permitted, however, to spend our hour of class time in a tiny little math library with wall to wall books on mathematical theory covering a wide range of topics. The two of us spent our time rambling through these books challenging each other to solve the most interesting problems we could find. I learned a lot because our enthusiasm was like an explosion. We never considered what we were doing as involving work, discipline, or effort.
The result for me due to an enlightened department chairwoman was that I was permitted to skip a year of math and go directly into the advanced placement calculus class. But there I again ran into the American system of education. The teacher taught explanations and occasionally gave problems a little more challenging than what had been explained. Many of the students in the class considered themselves superior to other students and slightly elitist. Many did not feel I should have been among them even though I was in the top percentage of the class. Nonetheless, I learned that you can educate yourself on a topic if you are well-motivated, challenged, and in an interesting environment.
Another example. I had the opportunity to race sailboats during the summer in high school. I learned from many different teachers who took a lot of time and effort to drill me on basic techniques. One day during the world championships in the Lightning class, I had an opportunity to see the world champion perform. With eighty boats at the starting line, the water was crowded and maneuvering restricted. But he cleared a space and then gained enough momentum that after the starting gun he sailed out ahead and then crossed in front of the entire fleet.
It was clear that he was master of his competition and had good technique. But what I learned was different. From the way he sailed his boat, I had my first clear vision of a man who had learned to join the boat, the water, the wind, the sails, and his crew into one energy system. He sailed his boat from a state of trance as if nothing else existed. He was a fierce competitor but also a mystic--the elements of nature fell into harmony around him as he moved among them. I do not think he could explain or teach what he was doing but in seeing it I received that flame of inspiration--that there is a way of being within nature that neither competition nor aggression can ever capture.
In college, I learned the most from a drama teacher. For class credit, she let me produce and direct several dramas (Samuel Beckett) without ever giving me directions or even feedback. She did not give me materials, a stage, or even other actors.
Some of us converted the basement of a house into a stage and gave our performances at night to other students invited by word of mouth. It was a very small auditorium. The experience was a magical enchantment as good drama should be--drama like the spoken word of a bard can take you into another world and another plane of existence where you encounter the mystery within and of your self. The power in this teacher was in her ability to nurture. She could give others a new world to enter without restricting them with her judgments or imposing upon them standards from outside. Inspiration like fire is contagious if given the fuel of freedom and ignited by enthusiasm.
Over the years I have also studied with many esoteric, oral traditions. Any good esoteric tradition will outline a cosmology--a summary of the active energies shaping the universe. And then it will ask the student or initiate to seek to discover, encounter, embody, and harmonize those energies within himself.
However, in a number of monasteries where I studied, the insecurity of the students was so severe they would attach themselves to and demand conformity from others with nearly hysterical anxiety. Like a group of chimpanzees or baboons, they engaged in intense hazing and power struggles in an attempt to form a hierarchy among themselves. Though they were there to transform themselves from within, they were addicted to an external order and could not survive without it.
Needless to say, I did not learn much in these monasteries in spite of the massive amount of occult information and rituals they begrudgingly would teach from time to time. The masters hoarded their wisdom as something they would teach and pass on only to the most loyal who spent a life time serving their interests. But I did learn a lot from one Zen priest, a kind of master of akasha. He transmitted his enthusiasm and his wisdom without ever once speaking one word of Buddhist doctrine to me. From sitting and eating with him, I learned what it is to have a heart that is always open.
When it comes to seminars and retreats, I love situations where there is structure and the constant presence of a teacher. But the teacher is a facilitator whose primary mode of interaction is to set up conditions under which the students engage each other. The teacher adapts his knowledge and experience to this group of students in this moment of time. Everything is open to modification without compromising the flame of inspiration.
In summary, speaking for myself, information, knowledge, esoteric/occult/magical techniques and rituals are pretty much irrelevant to the process of initiation. There are those who will say, "We will only give our higher teachings to those who have proven themselves to be worthy by meeting our standards and qualifying by proceeding step by step through the stages of our system." These procedures will put you in touch with the wisdom of the past to the extent they actually reflect the past. The problem is that the ancient teachers were innovators breaking the rules of their day when they founded their traditions.
For me, secrecy is like someone guarding a few feet of sand on a beach stretching out into water a foot deep and advertising, "We can give you a taste and feeling for the sea." Yes, they can do that and some do it extremely well. But what I am after are sailors who are adventurers and who are prepared to sail a sea which has no shores, a sea whose winds are ecstasy, whose waves are bliss, and whose depths contain the dreams and visions of eternity. This is what I believe is the scope of Bardon's training system. It emphasizes discovery and direct, personal experience, an absence of secrets, and an endless process of transformation.
The reason for this is that clear, open, well-formulated, and truthful communication is a divine virtue. This principle is written into the stars, into the constellation of Gemini, and it is an aspect of Divine Providence. It requires an open and inspired heart and there is no limit set on the range or power of its influence. As I often repeat, the light of our sun and its song of inspiration shine to the ends of the universe--every single day and every single moment its heart is outpouring love. May we all attain to such illumination.