wasn’t an outcome foreseen by the book I was using as my guide. I took it seriously. There had been no umbilical cord! I had gone exploring on the cliffs of the infinite without being safely attached to base camp. If I had ventured any further I might never have been able to get back.
From then on I stayed put in my sleep. The dream of knowledge seemed to be an unreliable contraption, as much an ejector seat as a gateway to mystical experience. Soon I stopped having the dreams of knowledge, as if I had closed the door on them myself. I was missing an important clue. What I was being offered was something subtler than an escape from this uncoöperative body.
The dream of knowledge, the dream in which you know you’re dreaming, is a microcosm or a metaphor. If it’s possible to be dreaming but also to know it, then it is possible in ‘waking life’ to be aware of life’s illusory nature. The technical term for illusion being Maya. The guru, the adept, the – as he’s called – jñani dreams as much as anyone else, but he (or she, though really neither he nor she, since gender is only another of Maya’s little notions) always knows he’s dreaming. He’s awake in his sleep, and in his waking hours he sees through the illusions of life.
I had much more joy from the other book, The Tarot by Mouni Sadhu. The book’s subtitle was ‘A Contemporary Course of the Quintessence of Hermetic Occultism’, which was a mystical thunderbolt in itself. I also loved the epigraph, frustratingly unassigned to a source: Peu de science éloigne de Dieu / Beaucoup de science y ramène . A little know ledge estranges one from God – great knowledge brings one back into the fold. The moment I read it I recognised this as my own motto. Since then I’ve seen it ascribed to both Pasteur and Francis Bacon.
My mind salivated when it read the description of the Tarot on thefirst page of the Introduction as ‘a truly philosophical machine’. I read the book all the way to the end, not wanting to admit to myself that I was completely baffled and bogged down. Privilege Teth: the Adept is in command of the universal therapeutics. This means, that he possesses the art of the absolute criticism (in the mental plane), the art of disinvultuation in the astral, and the use of medical magnetism on the physical plane. 500-odd pages in that vein. It certainly wasn’t plane sailing, on any plane I knew.
Even so I was bewitched, partly by the author’s name, and would say it over and over again under my breath. Mouni Sadhu Mouni Sadhu . It became a sort of mantra, but it worked the wrong way round, stirring up my thoughts instead of dissipating them. I’m rather embarrassed by the book now, but at the time it nourished me with dark hints and cryptic formulas. I had to crawl through a thicket of obscurities before I could emerge from the gloom and see daylight for the first time.
Gardening for Adventure was partly responsible. Thanks to R. H. Menage I now saw the vegetable kingdom as a place of instructive freakishness, paradox and transgression. His book was a sort of botanical Apocrypha, even a Kabbala. Plants set traps to hunt meat, they fanned themselves when they got hot ( Desmodium ), they brewed deep inside their own tissues the liquors of enlightenment ( Lophophora wil lamsii ). It turned out that nature didn’t bother much with the Laws of Nature, as we so confidently formulated them on her behalf. And that was the part of nature I felt part of, mercury-nature, pumice-nature, platypus-nature, where a metal could be a liquid, a stone could float and a mammal lay eggs.
Milk running down abdominal grooves
Of course I was romanticising my own status dreadfully. The apparent exotica belong to exactly the same order of things as iron-nature, limestone-nature, cow-nature. There’s nothing wildly abnormal about mercury or pumice or platypus, they just don’t seem to fit the standard categories, lazy preconceptions. There’s mercury in
From then on I stayed put in my sleep. The dream of knowledge seemed to be an unreliable contraption, as much an ejector seat as a gateway to mystical experience. Soon I stopped having the dreams of knowledge, as if I had closed the door on them myself. I was missing an important clue. What I was being offered was something subtler than an escape from this uncoöperative body.
The dream of knowledge, the dream in which you know you’re dreaming, is a microcosm or a metaphor. If it’s possible to be dreaming but also to know it, then it is possible in ‘waking life’ to be aware of life’s illusory nature. The technical term for illusion being Maya. The guru, the adept, the – as he’s called – jñani dreams as much as anyone else, but he (or she, though really neither he nor she, since gender is only another of Maya’s little notions) always knows he’s dreaming. He’s awake in his sleep, and in his waking hours he sees through the illusions of life.
I had much more joy from the other book, The Tarot by Mouni Sadhu. The book’s subtitle was ‘A Contemporary Course of the Quintessence of Hermetic Occultism’, which was a mystical thunderbolt in itself. I also loved the epigraph, frustratingly unassigned to a source: Peu de science éloigne de Dieu / Beaucoup de science y ramène . A little know ledge estranges one from God – great knowledge brings one back into the fold. The moment I read it I recognised this as my own motto. Since then I’ve seen it ascribed to both Pasteur and Francis Bacon.
My mind salivated when it read the description of the Tarot on thefirst page of the Introduction as ‘a truly philosophical machine’. I read the book all the way to the end, not wanting to admit to myself that I was completely baffled and bogged down. Privilege Teth: the Adept is in command of the universal therapeutics. This means, that he possesses the art of the absolute criticism (in the mental plane), the art of disinvultuation in the astral, and the use of medical magnetism on the physical plane. 500-odd pages in that vein. It certainly wasn’t plane sailing, on any plane I knew.
Even so I was bewitched, partly by the author’s name, and would say it over and over again under my breath. Mouni Sadhu Mouni Sadhu . It became a sort of mantra, but it worked the wrong way round, stirring up my thoughts instead of dissipating them. I’m rather embarrassed by the book now, but at the time it nourished me with dark hints and cryptic formulas. I had to crawl through a thicket of obscurities before I could emerge from the gloom and see daylight for the first time.
Gardening for Adventure was partly responsible. Thanks to R. H. Menage I now saw the vegetable kingdom as a place of instructive freakishness, paradox and transgression. His book was a sort of botanical Apocrypha, even a Kabbala. Plants set traps to hunt meat, they fanned themselves when they got hot ( Desmodium ), they brewed deep inside their own tissues the liquors of enlightenment ( Lophophora wil lamsii ). It turned out that nature didn’t bother much with the Laws of Nature, as we so confidently formulated them on her behalf. And that was the part of nature I felt part of, mercury-nature, pumice-nature, platypus-nature, where a metal could be a liquid, a stone could float and a mammal lay eggs.
Milk running down abdominal grooves
Of course I was romanticising my own status dreadfully. The apparent exotica belong to exactly the same order of things as iron-nature, limestone-nature, cow-nature. There’s nothing wildly abnormal about mercury or pumice or platypus, they just don’t seem to fit the standard categories, lazy preconceptions. There’s mercury in
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