| In April of 1904, through the efforts of
the notorious Aleister Crowley, the Book of the Law came into manifestation.
This book predicted the birth of a child who would represent the spirit
of the Aeon. Simultaneous with the forth bringing of Liber XXXI,
Salvador Dali was born. Coincidence? We think not.
Dali's art was to capture the
images of concrete irrationality using the mind as a soft
psychedelic camera. In his book The 50 Secrets of Magic
Craftsmanship, Dali describes several techniques for breaking
through the rational perception (what we call the awareness
coma) in order to access the obsessing symbolic images of the
Freudian sub-conscious. Few would attempt to gainsay that Dali was a
wizard and quite a successful one.
The connection between Dali and
Crowley's work in the pyramid of Cheops in 1904 and its immediate
product is not subject to rigorous proofs and not popularly considered
but the connections between Aleister Crowley's work and the work of Kenneth
Grant, Austin Spare, and Kenneth Anger is certainly well established.
Both Kenneth Grant and Austin Spare have articulated and published methods of
dream control and Kenneth Anger's best films are clearly stated evocations
of higher dimensional awareness.
As exemplary let's look at a procedure
for working with sigils in an operation aimed at reifying the inherent
dream described by Kenneth Grant. To make a long story short an image is
discovered repeated in margin doodles, automatic drawing, or other
mindless scribbling. This image is distilled and refined and is drawn somewhere on the
shakti, the tantric sexual partner, where it can be observed during the
ensuing magical operation. The intentional observation of this sigil as
the mind enters orgasm opens doorways for its integration into the
conscious mind and allows
that mind to come into a closer resonance with the content symbolized
through the sigil. This intentional bridging assists in the attainment of reification
or realization of the incarnating impulse or inherent dream.
There is another approach reflected in
Austin Spare's writings. What Austin
Spare called the precarious funambulatory way we have
adopted to an exercise which develops an awareness into the area of
pre-sleep hypnagogic hallucinations. Lay down, relax, and detach the mind from the eyes and move it slightly up and back; just enough to distinguish from the
eye's energy. From there imagine doing a slow back-flip through the
top center of the head and down to the base of the skull. Along the way from the eyes
to the base of the skull, called the well of
dreams, one progressively withdraws attention from the
senses and awakening from the awareness coma one enters into the dream state. The
practice here is
to intentionally move carefully in order to be able to stop, return, and
repeat; much like in tantra practice. One could imagine it as
similar to the art of reeling in a fish which is bigger than the
fishing line's rated strength. |
