A Few Questions and Answers

I have had a few requests to post some of the answers I have given in response to the questions I receive through email. Below are the questions I address in this essay.

Question. Is there a simple way to learn magick without having to do all the occult exercises?

Question. How is it that you interact with spirits without using a sigil, wand, triangle, and so forth? And what would you recommend regarding working with earthzone spirits as compared to elementals?

Question. Can you relate how your model of magick compares to other Hermetic schools such as the Golden Dawn, Crowley, etc. And where do Isis, Horus, Thoth, etc. fit in as compared to the earthzone spirits?

Question. Can you discuss the differences between the mystic and the magician?

Question. Can you talk more about the electric and magnetic fluids and how you work with them? Also, you have so much confidence in the hope of this world. How have you come to this?

Question. At times I lack faith in magick. I seem to need some kind of proof to believe it is real. On some days, I am completely sure that everything is possible and on other days my faith is wavering. Can you talk to me about your experiences with faith?

Question. I have completed the required work in Initiation into Hermetics and have moved on to evoking spirits. I have found it easy to evoke and work with elemental beings as well as higher spirits. I can contact them with ease and they are pleased to assist me. However, lately I seem to have lost my motivation altogether. I am no longer interested in magick and the natural, spontaneous and joyful contact I have had with other people is no longer present. I seem to have lost my reason for living.

In your essay on The Earthzone as a Spiritual University, you state, “Still, there is a great price to be paid by those who engage, as I have, in studying at this Divine University. You have to confront the darkness in yourself as part of your entrance exam. This is where the otherwise really brilliant and talented students will fail. They cannot pass through the emptiness, the void and the abysses that exist within the human heart. And opening the gates to the Earthzone so universal and cosmic wisdom might be freely shared on earth is not the work of one individual but of an entire community of magicians who serve not themselves but Divine Providence.”

Can you suggest what might be the reason for these changes in my life and tell me more about confronting one’s inner darkness?

Questions and Answers

Question. Is there a simple way to learn magick without having to do all the occult exercises?

Answer. Yes. You take three minutes to three hours each day of your life. With this time, you imagine you are different things. The order does not really matter. What matters is that in the beginning you follow your interests and then branch out into every conceivable image.

Imagine you are other people--all kinds of people. Think of people you know, people from history, people from the future, and various ethnic and religious groups. Imagine you are every kind of animal and things from nature--trees, bugs, mountains, stones, minerals, seas, clouds, planets, stars, and so forth. Later on, imagine too that you are different spirits.

As you do this exercise, notice carefully the effect of the imagery on your mind, feelings, and body. Notice how each of your five senses is shaped and extended by the exercise. At some point in your practice, you should be able to notice that if you imagine you are a seal or another person, you can get impressions that are not a function of your imagination. Holding the image of something in your mind without distraction, you form a psychic connection. This link can be extended and developed. It turns into telepathy, clairvoyance, and clairsentience.

This exercise is part of the study of omnipresence. Under the law of love, you are free to join with anything in the universe. This is no limit on or exception to this rule. You open your mind and heart and become one with anything and everything that exists. This is a basic exercise if not the basic exercise in magick as I understand it. It is worth learning and practicing for a life time.

Answer. I work with spirits, both elementals and higher spirits, pretty much in the same way I interact psychically with other human beings. I can feel another individual's aura. I have practiced sending and receiving thoughts with others. And I have worked for many years sharing meditations with other individuals in which we generate various energies and then talk about how those energies appear to us as symbols, experiences, feelings, etc. I do these things with other individuals who are often thousands of miles away.

And so when I think about working with elementals or spirits, for myself anyway, it is exactly like working with human beings. I exchange thoughts, feelings, energies, meditations, and so forth just as I would with people I know. The difference is that I concentrate much more deeply with the spirits. I take a lot more time to focus on the impressions and thoughts and energies I am sending to them or receiving from them.

But I can not really say that any spirit has been more difficult or hard to contact or work with successfully than specific individuals I have sought to communicate and work with over the years in our physical world. Actually, I find the human beings more difficult to work with. The spirits, even the negative ones, are much more accessible and reasonable than some of the human beings I know. That is my experience.

I think if you develop some of the psychic abilities Bardon wants people to develop in his first book, then spirit evocation is a lot like talking to a friend or making an acquaintance. And with friends and new acquaintances it helps to be open, friendly, alert, and communicate your self with clarity and determination. This is the way the universe works for me.

In practice, I held back for about three years before contacting spirits or elementals because I wanted to study their auras which I did reviewing probably around seventy different spirits before I tried to interact directly. I was cautious in that regard. It helps to be very clear about your personal boundaries so you can always distinguish what is yourself, your own energy, thoughts, feelings, and life force and what is the spirit's energy, thoughts, feeling, and life force. Otherwise you get stories about the magician's apprentice as in the book, The Wizard of Earthsea, where the student is playing ego games kind of like those Japanese workers in a nuclear reactor who carried plutonium around in buckets and then wonder why there is an explosion. Magick is as simple as a prayer to God and as complicated as building and running a nuclear reactor on an attack submarine. It combines devotion, knowledge, and experience.

In other words, you have to take your own measure, listen to your own conscience, and above all love what you are doing so that you master it over the years.

For myself, I had to discover that working with physical implements like mirrors and wands was inappropriate in spite of the training manual that spells out in great detail how to work with these things. We all have our own karma and you have to be sensitive again to what works for you individually.

Of course, the elemental beings are closer to the physical world than are the spirits of the earthzone but the positive spirits of the earthzone are much more positive and helpful than are elemental beings who look at everything in terms of the power of their element. The reason Bardon demands students work first with the elemental beings is that in the long run magick isn't much good unless you have those basic elemental building blocks mastered so that the higher energies can be grounded in our world. But Bardon also suggests at the end of his first book that students contact their own guardian angel. But guardian angels are also spirits so you have to be careful that the elements don't become seriously disturbed when you connect to a spirit who influences you directly moving through the elemental planes to some extent in order to interact with you.

On the other hand, some of the earthzone spirits may be so familiar to you due to past life or present life activities that all you need to do is something as simple as a prayer, a direct request, and then watch carefully to notice if there are any changes that occur over the next few weeks or months due to that request. And with prayer, you can pray over and over until you get what you want. A magician's prayer is more like a skilled negotiation between businessmen about how to exchange goods or complete a transaction. It is not so much a function of devotion as it is of knowing the operating procedures for how things manifest.

Answer. I have read a number of books by authors related to the Golden Dawn and other Western hermetic traditions--Regardie, Dion Fortune, Gareth Knight, etc. I enjoyed reading Crowley's autobiography 28 years ago. I have not participated in Western hermetic orders so I can not speak from personal experience in regard to their training systems. I have never been personally attracted to their training systems. Early on, however, I fell in love with the Kabbalah before I ran into Bardon’s books. I then often would sit out in the desert for five or six hours at a time visualizing and meditating on the various sephiroth.

I tend to be rather independent and find authority, organizational hierarchy, secret oaths, etc. of any kind rather constraining. Further, like some other individuals, I am limited in that I am unable to use physical aids to magical practice such as crystal balls, magic mirrors, wands, robes, etc. My nervous system is too sensitive and such things interfere with my health. This by itself would tend to exclude me from participating in an occult lodge.

In general, the Kabbalah is usually a common element in these different training systems. There is of course an emphasis on training the individual to focus and to concentrate. There is some controversy regarding Bardon's books, as to whether he got some of the material from other teachers and there are a number of questions about the specific forms of the names for many of the spirits.

The spirits of the sphere of Mercury as Bardon presents them are very traditional. These are in other historical texts. My personal opinion is that most if not all of the specific exercises in Initiation into Hermetics are found in various places elsewhere. But the overall presentation I find unique. Even among high Buddhist practitioners, there is no equivalent of such wide range, depth, and balance that Bardon emphasizes.

I sometimes point out that in the first few chapters of Initiation into Hermetics that Bardon suggests that the student develop the mental emptiness of mind of a Zen master, the capacity to visualize scenes and comprehend character and action of a Steven Spielberg, the chi or ki of a Tai Chi Chuan or Aikido master, and the psychological understanding of someone with several Ph.D's in psychology. This is asking a lot but I think it fits in with the universality of the system he has laid out.

The Western hermetic tradition in many ways emphasizes that you as a magician belong to a lodge or a magical order. You train within and work with the knowledge of the group and its tradition. The spiritual world is something you gain access to through ritual.

Bardon quite clearly emphasizes that the magician train to heighten his abilities as a human being and that he also learn to move among spirits as one of them and as an equal. There are countless ways of interacting with spirits and Bardon gives a great many references that suggest these various ways.

Furthermore, there is no human tradition that limits or defines your authority in the Bardon system. Your university is Divine Providence. The one requirement for admission is that you confront the darkness within yourself and that you learn to develop your five senses so you can perceive and be active on the inner planes. Whether you use ritual or not, the choice of method belongs to you as an individual. The locus of power is in the individual and not in the tradition. In my experience, many individuals find Bardon's emphasis on doing it all yourself as something cold and even hostile.

Bardon was somewhat similar to Rudolf Steiner. Steiner, however, chose not to speak or teach much about methods of practice. What Steiner did emphasize is community. He developed many art forms and educational procedures such as founding the Waldorf Schools around the world. Bardon, by contrast, did not start a community as far as I can tell. But he laid the foundation for a universal training system that seeks to fully reveal what has been kept secret in other ages.

It does not emphasize what you believe. You can belong to any religion and still practice Bardon's methods since they are neutral as far as content of belief. Bardon likes to speak of God more in terms of an impersonal Divine Providence rather than a personal God. He does this apparently because the impersonal aspect of God is something you can be trained to work with in a systematic manner. Many individuals who work exclusively with a personal God, I notice, do not train for the encounter. They are content with believing, with faith, and with worship. They do not approach the spiritual world the way a physicist would approach the study of nature or an engineer would approach the problem of building a bridge across a river.

My approach over the years has been that of spiritual anthropologist. I have tried to seek out the oldest esoteric oral traditions I could find. I studied with a Taoist master who was the head of a 1,200 year old monastery in China. I studied with a Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist lama who is from a 900 year old sect of Buddhism with an unbroken lineage. I studied the Hopi Indian culture that dates back 900 years as the oldest continually occupied settlement in the U.S. I have enjoyed meeting a number of Hindu masters and so forth.

So when I started working with Bardon I noticed right away his sense of quality and his astonishing willingness to empower the individual rather than continue a tradition or religion. My piece on the archangel Gabriel I wrote while meditating with a Sufi woman who had been initiated by her masters into archangel evocation. But when I try to compare Bardon in terms of his overall system to other systems, I find there is something odd going on. Bardon certainly stands within the Western Hermetic tradition. But in my opinion Bardon is teaching a system of training that belongs to several hundred years in mankind's future. Some people say that Newton put the human race a hundred years ahead by presenting an integrated and comprehensive system of physics. I feel that Bardon is doing the same thing with magical training.

In a nutshell, Bardon's model of training is to say here are the requirements that enable you to be a fully empowered spiritual being--moving freely through the entire universe as a spirit--and who is also active within the sphere of history.

In regard to god and goddess figures, Osiris, Isis, Horus could be considered to be the gods/goddesses of the Egyptian religion. I would assume these are analogous to Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu in Hinduism, to Zeus, Apollo, etc. in Greece, to Odin and the deities of Norse mythology. Shiva, for example, has a great many practices in India associated with him. Vishnu has entire epics such as the Mahabarata in which Krishna is Vishnu's avatar.

Some of these deities are religious figures and some are part of highly evolved esoteric systems of training and initiation. I am not qualified to speak about the way in which these gods represent various powers and abilities and the way in which an initiate in the right system might go about working with or evoking them. There is often great power associated with various deities if only because they have been the object of many rituals and magical forms of concentration extending over thousands of years.

I do not recall off hand Bardon mentioning much about the gods in various religions. In the later chapters of Initiation into Hermetics, Bardon does make it an exercise to interact in a number of ways with your own personal concept and image of God. From time to time over the years, I will encounter a traditional deity of some kind or another. Because I was working with the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids that uses Celtic mythology for spiritual exploration, I spontaneously ran into such figures as Agnus Og. The equivalent of the Hindu goddess Dawn I have run into a number of times.

What I can say from my point of view is that all of these deities have a certain power and presence that you can encounter first hand. This is most easily done for me by entering into a waking dream state of mind and then attuning my mind to that specific god form. I am not particularly interested in questions concerning the metaphysical or ontological status of these beings.

I am a little like Buddha and also Socrates in this regard--whether these beings exist or not is not really interesting to me. I am content to approach them the way a good mythologist such as Carl Jung would by considering them at least to be representatives of universal or global archetypes. Whether you believe in them or not, the archetype carries with it its own power. Nevertheless, even when you consciously think to yourself that your encounter represents a psychological rather than a religious experience, the experience can still be overwhelming and astonishing.

I am currently writing an essay on my experience with the God Presence in terms of the ten sephiroth of the Kabbalah that is posted on my web site. It is a continuation of my essay on my web site on, "God Presence and Hermetic Tradition," under Basic Training. This is a little closer to my own religious background and I feel very comfortable with this approach.

Question. Can you discuss the differences between the mystic and the magician?

Answer. For me, all magick is about concentration. You want something and, if you are trained sufficiently, you concentrate on it until it is materialized in accordance with your desires. You can throw in a spirit or two, a Kabbalistic letter, a word of power, a ritual, whatever, but it is your concentration--your ability to focus your five senses and gather energy in accordance with the laws of the universe--that produces the result. That is what magick is for me.

Mysticism, though having a bad connotation because mystics tend to be so passive, has another altogether different application in my experience. It is again about concentration, but in this case you concentrate in order to receive with your senses rather than project something you wish to be. Part of being receptive is knowing how to become one with something--an ideal, an idea, a spirit, a human being, God, Goddess, etc.

For me, the connection between the magick and mysticism is that when you are good at becoming one with something you are in fact mastering the art of omnipresence. When you are one with something you also have power over it. Mystics won't tell you this and magicians rarely love enough with all their heart, soul, and mind to comprehend this level of power. To love, to become one, is to have absolute power. There is no question in my mind about this.

This power, however, is not manipulative, greedy, or controlling. It is creative the way two individuals in love who unite as one become creative in body, soul, and spirit. Past, present, and future are captured and united in this act. Space and time circle around such love. Power, knowledge, faith and conviction--these are the servants of this love.

I base my comments on my experiences with women (and also with spirits). When I am really one with a woman, at least on a psychic level so that I have united with her soul and astral body, her mind and life history, her spirit and guardian angel, there is a fabulous level of power that naturally accompanies this action. A high level of concentration, like a deep effortless trance is present, but it is still almost completely passive or receptive in that I am simply attuning myself to her--creating a space in which we are one.

But at this point, it is also nearly effortless to focus on something we wish to accomplish. When you are one with another person on all levels, it is very similar to being able to become one with anything else in the universe as well. (The spirits of the sphere of Venus testify to and teach this). As I have mentioned, under the law of love, you can become one with anything in the universe to fulfill a purpose. I use this principle often in accordance with the work I wish to accomplish.

The Great Yang is like magick in a way--it is symbolized for me by the light of all the visible stars in the universe and the other 9/10s of light radiation in the universe which is in the invisible spectrum and not seen by the eye. These forms of light are active and penetrate everywhere.

The Great Yin, however, is more like mysticism. It is symbolized for me by the emptiness of space that contains all the stars and radiation, planets and galaxies. It is open, utterly receptive, and encompassing, containing everything within itself. The Great Yin is absolutely terrifying to most people including women even though they are closer to it by nature. It is the great mother, like Prajnaparamita, whom the Buddhists tend to ignore and have no serious tantra for because she is so feminine. Matter, space, and time define each other. They, like the great masculine and feminine creative powers of Divine Providence, can not be separated. They interpenetrate, define, and are one with each other.

The magician, quite naturally, whether male or female, will seek to master and know as a friend and lover both the Great Yang and the Great Yin. The mystic, who puts aside his or her infatuation with the denial of self and the overcoming of ego, will notice that in becoming one and attaining total and complete rapport with the butterfly, the whale, the cloud, the volcano, the atmosphere, other human beings, stars, galaxies, spirits of any and every kind, has the ability to also love, that is, to care for creation as it exists.

To care, to love in this sense, is also to oversee, to guide, to inspire, to assist in whatever way possible the fulfillment of all paths of life and evolutions. For me, to love is to unite magick and mysticism, projection and receptivity, and masculine and feminine. When I concentrate, I am constantly moving back and forth between these two and also uniting them.

Question. Can you talk more about the electric and magnetic fluids and how you work with them? Also, you have so much confidence in the hope of this world. How have you come to this?

Answer. I think there are probably a whole lot of ways to work with the fluids. Bardon gives a basic method based upon some of the exercises he has given his students. Bardon is especially interested in having the student become completely familiar with both fluids so that his body adapts to the high levels of concentration he wants the student to have.

I think my first experience with the electric fluid came by practicing with the cosmic letter S on the mental plane. I got an immediately strong sense of electricity.

Now that I am familiar with what Bardon is after, I can pretty much just concentrate and I can get electrical fluid. It is also easy for me to just imagine an electrical storm between my two hands and I get the same stuff. Or, it is especially easy when working with Itumo, the salamander, or Istiphul the undine, to get electrical fluids since they both are fantastic at evoking them. Istiphul gets a human magician to experience electricity because she is so good at evoking the opposite magnetic fluid in herself and then setting up a polarity with the male magician.

Occasionally, I will create an electro magnetic volt as a way of getting a more dense manifestation of a spirit or to further some magical end.

The electrical and magnetic fluids I often write about in various essays. There are all sorts of qualities that can be found within them and by working with and becoming familiar with these qualities it is also possible to develop a natural feel for how to accumulate more of the quantity of fluid.

The electric often relates to faith, conviction, command, power, authority, dominance, direction, force to overcome obstacles, explosive power, the ability to connect to anything, the ability to set things in motion, and the ability to originate new things out of nowhere, out of nothing. The Great Yang creates new things out of nothing without need or reliance on anything else. It creates its own universe of meaning and purpose.

The magnetic fluid is not less powerful. In a way, the magnetic is perhaps more powerful. But the powers of the magnetic have been largely hidden from Western civilization. The pure magnetic fluid is open, empty or void of all identity, cold, receptive, and containing.

The more familiar aspects of the magnetic fluid are related to water--feminine nurturing power, affection, empathy, love, kindness, happiness, contentment, receptivity, and many aspects of healing and bonding. The more familiar aspects of the electric fluid relate again to faith and conviction, charisma, dynamic will, leadership, command, etc. The feminine magnetic fluid is a great and necessary compliment to the masculine electric fluid which is more actively involved in initiating acts of creation.

I think it is fairly easy to study the personal qualities of the magnetic and electrical fluids by imagining you are people who possess these fluids on a high level. Of course, again, there is a quantitative aspect and a qualitative aspect to the fluids. Some individuals possess great leadership abilities and charisma, but they do not have any noble causes they are pursuing. And some individuals have the highest purposes they seek to fulfill but they lack any significant amount of the electrical fluid so that nothing gets accomplish.

Yet the electric and magnetic fluids are still just energies. Each individual will find their own best way of discovering the sensations and ways to experience and then master these energies. The kind of magnetism in a magnet or electricity in a light bulb does not easily translate into something that is usable by a magician or something that can alter personal characteristics. It takes a slight modification of these energies in nature to make them usable and friendly so that they can be drawn upon for healing or to accomplish magical or personal objectives. Nonetheless, meditating on the electricity in lightning or a thunderstorm or on the magnetic bond in water or in a strong magnet is a way of beginning to develop a feeling for these things.

Anamil is a spirit in the earthzone, along with many other spirits, who specializes in the electric and magnetic fluids. It is possible to contact these spirits or use their sigils and so forth to also develop a feeling and understanding for these fluids as well as the appropriate elemental beings.

I think my sense of hope for the world that you mention comes from working with both fluids in combination. I mention in my essay on the Emnasut, the first solar spirit of the sun sphere, that when you tune into a spirit like this you notice that all suffering, loss, and emptiness as well are overcome completely when, like the solar spirits, you can join directly to the Creator. In such as state of union, you can recreate anything you want. The ecstasy displaces everything else or at least puts it into perspective from the point of view of Divine Providence. This is my experience.

But in more prosaic terms, I recommended to an individual who was very depressed one time that he work and learn to focus a little more on his personal opposite which for him was beautiful women. Women contain the magnetic fluid far more strongly than do men and to proceed on a spiritual path without really comprehending the primal and vital life force as it expresses itself through the feminine magnetic fluid is a great mistake.

Attractive women (and I am speaking of women with powers of attraction and not just physical beauty) possess a magnetic energy which produces states of well-being, acceptance, love, letting go, happiness, vivaciousness, contentment, peace, tranquility, serenity, etc. This type of thing varies of course from woman to woman but I think when you combine that basic vital energy with the masculine sense of taking charge and proceeding toward a goal you get power like nothing else in the universe--the power to accomplish your destiny whatever it is that you envision or dream.

A lot of people think they can get along nicely proceeding on their own or without the opposite gender. In my opinion, an individual gets better results by comprehending and fully appreciating your own opposite without of course comprising your identity in the process.

Answer. Regarding faith, I would like to point out that in Christianity for example, even in the writings of John, Peter, and so forth, there is this near hysterical fear of competition from other religions and those who have heretical beliefs. Therefore, the good church fathers invented the word “orthodox.” For example, they made the doctrine of the death and resurrection of Christ a crucial test of the legitimacy of one's beliefs. Although this is a great way to start a religion, it is a really bad idea when it comes to getting to know God better.

In this case, belief takes the place of faith. You do not need to have faith in God but only believe what the church tells you to believe. Faith for a magician is altogether separate from the issue of belief. You do not believe in magick. That is like the idea of believing in astrophysics when astrophysicists can not yet tell us where 95 per cent of the physical matter in the universe is yet. This total lack of knowledge does not interfere with research because science is committed to finding things out through experimental procedure. Belief does not, at least on the surface, play a role other than affirming that it is worth proceeding with an experimental procedure.

Faith on the other hand, like the cosmic letters K, S, and SH, is something that can be produced at will. If you are sensitive to energy and can work with color and elemental sensations, you can learn to increase your faith to fantastic levels for short periods of time. If you succeed with this kind of experiment, then you can gain first hand and direct experience with faith in both it qualitative and quantitative aspects.

This kind of faith is interested in manifesting things, getting something done, accomplishing an objective or mission. It is absolutely not about belief. You do not have to believe in prayer for a prayer to work . You can just try it as an experiment. But when you know with great certainty and conviction that what you want to accomplish is of great importance and that it is worth doing and that you are the one to do it, if you pray then or make a spiritual request, you tend to get much better results because you are willing to be the vehicle of manifesting what you desire. Taking responsibility for what you want done is rather important to spirits on the inner planes. Energy is important to magicians and to spirits and they do not waste it by giving it to those who are unsure of themselves or who lack commitment.

What is more important for me in terms of magick is not whether it is real. It is not about how you do it to produce effects which demonstrate to yourself that it is worth working on or that you can be successful if you practice it for years. What is more important for me is having a sense of wonder, beauty, awe, gratefulness for being alive, and love. For those who lack these things, I would suggest that they avoid practicing magick.

In this regard, I am like the author in the ancient Greek poem who says, “For those who lack wonder, may they never cross my threshold.” And as a matter of fact, there are so many other interesting things to do in life and so many other ways to be successful, satisfied, fulfilled, happy, and content, magick is hardly worth the bother if these are the things you are after.

But if you already feel in your heart that there is something very deep and wonderful about being alive, then magick may be one way of developing and refining your sense of wonder and love. Put simply, the highest magick is love. You do not need any master or occult lodge to pray to God and ask Him to give you some sort of indication as to what your path in life should be. You do not even need to believe in God to make this request. Some things may be attempted as a way of showing or demonstrating “good faith.”

The spiritual world is constantly being telling me to upgrade my level of power but that is because power is not a temptation for me. It is just a means to an end. As I have mentioned, power and faith are the humble servants of love. Never mistake or place the servants above or in place of the Creator who creates out of the ecstasy within love.

For me, having doubts about the reality of magick is a waste of time and the wrong line of questioning. Have wonder about the mystery of love and gratefulness for the awesome opportunity to be alive and to serve utilizing the creative powers of God which are all around us in lightning, wind, mountains, stars, oceans, etc. Everything in the universe vibrates within us and can be studied, felt, understood, and developed as an energy we can direct with our will.

It might help if I am more specific about my own experiences. I come from a background in which everyone is involved with either science, business, or industry. It is an almost completely materialistic culture that I was born into. However, I possess an insatiable sense of curiosity. And so I simply went around observing and studying individuals who had rich living mythological traditions and who were a part of unbroken lineages in which magick was practiced for thousands of years.

Working with these and other individuals, I began to develop psychic abilities. I discovered I could interact with and sometimes influence others in very dramatic ways that could not and can not be accounted for in terms of modern science. In this way, I made my own personal transition into a magical universe.

I consider the human race to be very young and innocent when it comes to the reality and applications of spiritual power. I am grateful that the current world does not know beans about magical power given how much human beings love to abuse any kind of power they can get their hands on.

I think Christianity offers a very serious test to all would be magicians. Historical Christianity has insisted that the spiritual world is much too dangerous for human beings to explore. It should be avoided at all costs since the temptations it presents and the dark forces it contains are too much for frail and weak human beings to handle.

In effect, Christianity has invented the idea of having doubts about faith because it has so actively destroyed any genuine spiritual knowledge of any kind. If someone could show you in a few hours how to experience ecstasy through meditation or show you the psychic powers you possess or show you how to meet angels in your dreams, then faith would not be an issue. You could explore the spiritual world directly through your own experience rather than having someone tell you about God and miracles and then leaving you without the means to encounter these things first hand. If you can learn to enter God’s Presence directly, then believing in God (or in the power to create--which is what magick is all about) is no longer an issue. These gates to the inner planes have been closed by the efforts of the church for two thousand years.

All the same, this has not been without advantages. The test of Christianity is simple: you should not explore the spiritual worlds unless you are completely certain about your ability to be pure and unless your faith in God is absolute; your purpose must be clear and you must know how to transform yourself. Otherwise, the power to create like unto God--even if only in small ways--may easily turn into an abuse of power and lead to an entanglement with darkness and negativity.

This is a good test and a lot of occultists and magicians ignore it.

Question. I have completed the required work in Initiation into Hermetics and I have moved on to evoking spirits. I have found it easy to evoke and work with elemental beings as well as higher spirits. I can contact them with ease and they are pleased to assist me. However, lately I seem to have lost my motivation. I am no longer interested in magick and the spontaneous and joyful contact I have had with other people is no longer present. I seem to have lost my reason for living.

In your essay on The Earthzone as a Spiritual University, you state, “Still, there is a great price to be paid by those who engage, as I have, in studying at this Divine University. You have to confront the darkness in yourself as part of your entrance exam. This is where the otherwise really brilliant and talented students will fail. They cannot pass through the emptiness, the void and the abysses which exist within the human heart. And opening the gates to the Earthzone so universal and cosmic wisdom might be freely shared on earth is not the work of one individual but of an entire community of magicians who serve not themselves but Divine Providence.”

Can you suggest what might be the reason for these changes in my life and tell me more about confronting one’s inner darkness?

Answer. To answer one of your questions: to open the gates to the earthzone is not the work of one magician but of a community of magicians. What I mean is that for me opening the gates to the earthzone is establishing here on earth the universal wisdom, power, and magick of the earthzone so that it is stable and permanent. You can go to the library and find information on the structure of the DNA molecule, the origin of the universe in its first few microseconds, the nature of atomic fusion, and so forth. This kind of information has taken us a while to develop but now it is available. In a similar way, in the near future an individual could also find books on and read something on just about any earthzone spirit. Anyone with the interest would then be able to pursue this kind of spiritual work without undo difficulty.

In other words, you have cosmic wisdom grounded here on earth and influencing every aspect of society through the great number and creative actions of a community of individuals working with high magick. One individual of course is free to investigate and write or do whatever he or she wants with the earthzone. But it takes lots of such individuals to make this wisdom a stable and valuable part of our world so that its presence is exerted in art, medicine, politics, education, psychology, economics, history, science, etc.

I took a class recently in figure drawing. The teacher was very good at art and teaching but he has no concept of magical art. The Western tradition of art he has practiced is very brilliant in some ways and very stupid in others. It is conscious of its brilliance but ignorant of its weaknesses. It is unaware of many areas that it has yet to develop. And it has lost much of its sense of primal wonder and awe at the mystery of life.

And yet, the price to be paid in contacting the earthzone and working with it extensively is that you are in effect working a lot with akasha. And akasha, with more ability than any woman, gets inside of you and searches for and brings your weaknesses to the surface so that you must deal with them. And this it does because it requires great balance and it teaches as one of its final ends perfect enlightenment and the ability to create like unto God. And so naturally, for such powers and illumination, you have to, on your own initiative, confront the darkness within yourself. That is, take responsibility for designing your own training and education system that takes into account your own weaknesses.

One of the wonderful mysteries of our solar system is that the great spirit that overshadows everything in this solar system inspires by getting an individual to take a great interest in what is the opposite of himself and the thing he is least interested in. In other words, again, there is a great balance and it is the opposites that enable our awareness to reach a higher level of wisdom. By understanding the part each thing plays in life, we come to understand the beauty and love that stands behind creation.

In a nutshell, you have to pay a lot of attention to your own subconscious. You have to know the child in yourself, your family history, and how to be totally ordinary--to enjoy each moment as it comes and for what it contains. You have to notice every desire you have and study those desires as if they have been given you by some great master of wisdom who offers you an even quicker route to illumination by paying attention to how your desires are satisfied.

If someone moves too quickly toward enlightenment or magical power, they may lose their capacity to communicate all that they have learned. To communicate, you need to be deeply involved with others and others need to feel that you are like them and share in their limitations and their lives. From my point of view, when I examine the spirits of the earthzone, I notice that each has found its own inner source of inspiration. Every one of these spirits feels joined from within directly to Divine Providence. The spirits of the sun are slightly different. They feel joined within directly to the Creator. They are a little more wild and tend to make up their own rules because creators are that way--they envision things no one else sees and then work to bring them into being.

So, in response to your situation where there is an acute loss of motivation and familiar joys and satisfaction are diminished, I would suggest that you make inspiration an important part of your overall training program. I have a few essays on inspiration under Seeking Transcendence in my basic training, chapter 2, on my web site.

I also have an essay under Basic Training on the Shadow in Psychology and in Magick. Bardon definitely does not take this approach, but then again he did not read as much psychology as I have and psychology was not as developed in the 50's and as familiar as it is now. The shadow is the subconscious desires that consciousness tends to overlook as it moves towards its goals of being productive and accomplishing things. The shadow, then, appears to undermine our goals, for example, by causing a loss of motivation, depression, getting us obsessed, or getting us distracted, or presenting us with deep animosities toward someone or something.

The shadow, however, is also something very wonderful because it is a guide and life long friend. As I mentioned earlier, one of the highest inspirations is to get us interested with our opposite and what we are least interested in. The shadow in part serves this purpose as well. I tell my kids stuff like, have a non-productive activity in your life so that you will always know how to disengage from what you are doing and relax. Like hobbies, art, and so forth. Things that are fun to do.

When I write poetry, it is always the child in me that is present to some extent. The child lives in a world that is undefined and full of wonder. I like that a lot. I see the universe, both physical and spiritual, as largely unexplored. I have what I feel are some very advanced skills in the use of power. But power mostly means nothing to the child who cares only for love and joy. I see love as the original power and something that outranks all others powers put together. To love is to feel a part of others and ultimately to feel one with the entire universe.

I practice that a lot--imagining I am other people. I search their souls for what would bring them happiness and fulfill their lives. This is not a magical assignment given to me. I have some intense work that is magical in nature that is kind of like a mission a I have. But this stuff about wondering what makes others tick and what would fulfill their lives is more my shadow speaking to me saying, "If you do not feel closer to others and share in their lives, then everything else you do is worthless."

I enjoy working with power. It is something I am good at. But it is this little stuff--touching another so I know I am sharing myself and sharing affection--this is what makes me feel most alive, not my magical training though the magick is sometimes necessary for touching another with love.

I am suggesting it is a great idea to take long vacations from magick, especially after you get good at it as you have done. I say this over and over in my writings, but let me say it again. In this age of the world, spiritual and magical training require that you do what feels right for you individually. You can't really follow a system of discipline unless you customize it and turn it into a path of life that makes you feel more satisfied and alive. The personality--what you individually like and dislike--is one of the basic fundamental elements of magical training in our age. If you do what you really like, without being distracted by what is important and otherworldly, you are then like anyone and everyone else--a normal human being. It is very easy when great powers and visions come to us to allow that kind of stuff to define our identity. From my point of view, that is a great mistake. It sacrifices being alive and awake in the present moment for something that shall appear or that has appeared in the past or the future.

The point where I separate paths from gurus and occult lodges is that I don't feel that participation in any kind of magical or spiritual training should make an individual feel special or place him or herself somehow above others or feel more important than other people. You can accomplish divine missions and do miracles with magick, but it should never be allowed to go to your head. The bottom line for me is that life is incredibly beautiful. I am in love with the universe and magick is one of her names. But this magick is based on love, the ability to feel a part of anything, anyone, and everything. I study magick the way a lover loves his beloved. When I love a woman, I seek to make it an expression of art--to turn the relationship into something beautiful which generally is very difficult for me to do though I am making progress.

I would suggest you work a little more with drawing or photography, but I say that perhaps because I am doing stuff like that. If you can easily visualize images of people in a great many ways then it becomes almost automatic to be able to see spirits. Spirits are just energy usually formless in nature and their appearance is therefore a symbolic expression that your brain utilizes to give them form though that in no way makes the appearance arbitrary.

I often mention to male magicians that their opposite is the estrogen in young women--the champagne, bubbly quality of laughter, springtime, Beltane, fun, and spontaneous, sensual joy. Serious, male magicians tend to lose these qualities and suffer terribly because of it. A friend pointed out that in Steiner's work that humor is one of the essential mysteries. There is a spirit in the earthzone who teaches humor and laughter. It is a way of seeing yourself from a distance and yet with great hope and nurturing love.

You might work more with the air element, that is, counterbalance the heaviness by lightening up. Find a few sylphs who are playful. I think one of my great life achievements is learning how to be playful with women. I have been so incredibly serious and focused on my quests that I have had much to catch up on.

If you work with magick and the earthzone, it is almost essential to have a purpose for doing so, something that is of benefit to humanity. Otherwise, as I mention, it is incredibly disorienting to view life from a perspective of millions of years and try to locate your self as an individual within that time frame. One of my karmic limitations or means of working through this is that when I do magick I try to write about it as soon as possible and share it, usually through my web site or in my books. That means that I am never operating alone. I am operating as a member of a community that shares with others and with whom others like your self share in return.

You might read some of my stories under What's New on my web site. I have one on Komio and another on A'ia. And another I just put up on Lugnas. They are all fictional and from a book I am writing called, Mystical Fables. But they explore through art some of the problems in balancing spirit and personality that a magician, who is also a human being, has to face when it comes to finding himself within a vast, uncharted universe of magick.