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CHAPTER FOUR

Notes towards a better understanding of my diary

A Thelemite's approach to a Judeo-Christian retirement

One big attraction of the Abramelin operation is that the book allows one to adapt the practice according to one's own religious beliefs—Christian, Jewish or pagan. And when it comes to prayer the text advises: “let each one speak his own language”, followed by some very sensible advice about not reading from a rigid script but rather praying from one's heart with conscious intention.

That looks pretty simple until one gets down to detail. There are plenty of instructions along the lines: “place yourself upon your knees before the altar”. These present some difficulty for Thelemites, who are exhorted never to bend their knees in supplication!

A more profound difficulty for me was that my religious inclinations at the time did not embrace any personal deity—I was closest to Taoism and a sense of a universal “way” that directed the course of nature. So, however freely I was permitted to adapt my prayers to my “God”, I was effectively praying towards nothingness. For some people that might present an insurmountable difficulty.

About a year later, however, I was writing the first chapter of Thundersqueak in which Lemuel Johnstone says: “what some people call hypocrisy, I call freedom of spirit”. The decision I finally made was not an easy one; I wrestled with it for weeks, but eventually decided to perform the operation in the thoroughly magical spirit of acting “as if”—as described by Austin Spare—or what is popularly advocated as “fake it till you make it”.

It will help you to understand what is happening on the following pages if you bear that in mind. During my oration, and at times through the day, I was adopting the attitude of one who believed in a personal God and prayed earnestly and with the greatest sincerity from that perspective. As you will see, that imagined deity did take on certain characteristics and behaviour during the course of six months, even if it did not take on visible manifestation.

The meditations

It was one thing to ritually throw myself into a state of theistic “energised enthusiasm” two or three times a day for the duration of an oration, but it was quite another thing to orient my whole life in that direction for six months. I also needed to adapt the operation to accommodate my True Will as best I could.

My inclination at the time was towards a sort of quietist Taoism that saw everything in terms of flowing states along the lines of yin and yang, with the paradoxical feature that each of these opposing qualities contained the seed of the other, and that kept them locked in the eternal dance of existence. My intention was to extend my “religious” Abramelin practice along the lines of Taoist meditation, circulating the light within the framework of the body, and so on. I took The Secret of the Golden Flower as my guide, together with books on Taoist meditation by John Blofield and others.

I think there are far more practical instructions available nowadays, but what was available at the time were mostly translations using teasingly far-eastern terminology that gave my western mind nothing very solid to chew on. Therefore, I was strongly influenced by the clear and sternly ascetic instructions provided by Crowley in his Eight Lectures on Yoga—summarised by Regardie (or someone) as: “Sit down. Shut up. Get out.”

Typically, I would sit in meditation, and control my breathing while circulating from the base chakra up the spine and down the front of my body, in a pretty standard fashion. I could not physically sustain a cross-legged posture, so I adopted the thunderbolt kneeling position. This lead to screaming pain in my legs as I arose after what was often an hour and a half of stillness three times a day. (Amazingly, I did get used to the pain, but it left me with varicose veins.) On the days when I write that the meditation was “good” or “successful”, it typically means that I reached and sustained a sense of utter stillness, mental silence, and often a feeling of being detached from my body as if floating far above it.

Strictly speaking, that state of still detachment was all that I should have aspired to, and any more complex or interesting phenomena should have been dismissed as mere distractions along the way. But I was not that accomplished. Instead I was often aware of things happening and “energy” shifts taking place inside me that seemed impossible to express in words. For these my guide was certain texts of western alchemy, especially those such as The Book of Lambspring that had illustrations that spoke to me.

I cannot explain all of this in a short introduction, but I will give one simple example. At the beginning of The Book of Lambspring there is a figure with the heading: “BE WARNED AND UNDERSTAND TRULY THAT TWO FISHES ARE SWIMMING IN OUR SEA”. Under the picture it says: “The Sea is the Body, the two Fishes are Soul and Spirit”.

It goes on to say paradoxical things about the two fishes being only one and yet two, and gives advice to cook all three together. What was the relevance of this?

As I sat circulating my breath in my body, at times I became aware of a duality within me that might be called yin and yang, or soul and spirit, and that there was value in simply holding awareness of these two, gently “cooking” them in the body rather than trying hard to analyse or differentiate further. And so on, with other alchemical images and books: I was reaching a state where words failed, but I could still find meaning and some measure of guidance in images such as these. At one point late in the operation, I describe God splitting into two: a very vivid experience at the time, but hard to communicate in words.

Resorting to alchemical terminology means that my original hand-written diary included a number of traditional alchemical symbols for the elements, planets and qualities, and in this edition I have replaced these symbols with their written names—not so mystical looking, but easier to typeset!

I cannot say whether these explanations will convey much to the reader—they do not always mean much to me now forty years later—but at least this explanation might give the reader some idea of what was happening to me. If it does, then it will add value to what might otherwise be a boring description of one man's struggle with everyday routine.

Watching the watcher

One other expression that turns up from time to time is “watch the watcher”. I thought I got this idea from reading The Kybalion, but do not see it there. It is said somewhere that Hermetic teaching tells us to “Watch the watcher. Judge the judge. Examine the examiner.” I have often found this principle very helpful when meditating.

When I first tried to meditate in my earlier years the usual thing happened: I tried to quieten my mind but soon found it was buzzing with ideas and that I simply had no success in controlling this fountain of thought. It was Gerald Yorke who taught me that the trick was not to try to block thoughts, but simply to observe them arising in a detached manner. When you do that the stream does start to dry up.

“Watch the watcher” suggests something similar. When you sit in meditation you become aware of all that is going on inside you—it is apparently uncontrollable. But then you ask yourself how is it possible to be aware of all this? How can one single consciousness be simultaneously busy and aware that it is busy? Then you realise that there is another “higher” part of you that is watching this flow. Thus you discover “two fish in the sea”: a consciousness and a watcher or over-seer.

How do you become aware of this “higher” part and the division between the two? It is because there is an even higher part of you that is watching and observing that there are these two parts within you…And so the meditation can lead one gently up a ladder of awareness to ever purer, simpler forms of consciousness.

This is what I am referring to when I use terms like “watching the watcher”.

To sum up: even when there is very little to report in my diary, I was throughout most days attempting to cultivate an ongoing state of detached awareness. This state came to a sharper focus during my twice or thrice daily orations and, not having an adequate language to describe the effects, I could sometimes only refer to them in this semi-alchemical language.

“Obsessions incarnating”

I was undecided whether it was better to edit out some passages where I use my diary as a sort of therapy exorcism—because these were too personal to be of interest to the reader—or whether I should leave them in, simply as examples of how psychological issues come up during the months of preparation. I asked the advice of my editor, and decided to leave them in, here are some explanations of the background to the most obvious obsessions.

Snobbery

Reading this diary again after forty years, I was at first puzzled by the early references to my “snobbery”. What was that about? Snobbery is not something that I identify with, but when I thought back to that time it came back to me.

This was the 1970s when the hippy era I had grown up in was evolving towards the decay that was Thatcherism. In the 60s and early 70s there was a rebellion against “the system” that most people were trapped in, and a move for some to “drop out”. Although I was not a dedicated drop-out, I had difficulty finding work that really suited me, and had extended periods “on the dole”, claiming state unemployment payments. At those times, I met many people who were no longer contributing to society in the accepted economic sense but were, in my opinion, contributing a lot in other ways. These included people following a mystical path; or those spending time in groups discussing society's norms and considering alternatives (a sort of informal version of academia that sometimes developed into “free schooling”). And there were those who, being free of nine-to-five work restrictions, were able to be more active and valuable citizens at a local level. There are examples of this in my diary, when I was at home all day instead of using the village as a dormitory between days working in London: I was able to offer coffee and conversation to an elderly and recently widowed neighbour—one example of how I became a better citizen, more engaged in our neighbourhood.

When the media began to push the Thatcherite division of society into “decent hard-working citizens” versus “layabout drop-out scroungers”, I was angry. I would never claim that no-one has ever dropped out simply to become a parasite, but I rebelled against the prejudice that being out of work labelled one as a worthless human being. I felt a temptation to go around telling everyone that, yes, I had dropped out of regular employment, but that I was doing it for superior spiritual reasons, etc., etc., and this was not to be confused with good-for-nothing parasitism.

This was, of course, just the sort of subtle temptation that one can meet as one begins such an operation—a desire to boast and draw attention just when one ought to be retiring and becoming invisible. It emerged initially in a form that I labelled “snobbery” and, although I resisted it during the operation, it returned in a purer form afterwards and had to be more properly dealt with, as I will explain in the postscript.

Lust

This was a much more lovable demon—it was, after all, the 1970s when fewer lovers would be taken as a sign of weakness rather than restraint. I was relieved that Abramelin only demanded absolute celibacy for the last two months, and I think I managed that, even if I could not control my dreams.

The resulting sex dreams were wonderful, and a real insight into the succubi torments experienced by mediaeval monks. At first I saw them as a bonus rather than a distraction, but when my dream lovers began to suggest that there was really no need to rise and meditate at sunrise—and far better to linger in bed and enjoy more sex—then I realised what was going on!

What about the general mystic's requirement not to indulge in sinful behaviour? Well, from a 1970s perspective sex was anything but sinful, it was a celebration of life, a near religious act and, if we had once been exhorted to pray continuously, then surely it was only the limits of bodily existence that prevented us from fucking continuously? I had no problem with the occasional sexual adventure during the first four months.

Physical deterioration

Re-reading my concerns about weight loss was much more of a shock to me, because this was, and still remains in a lesser degree, a very deeply ingrained concern.

I can now trace it back to the classic astrological observation that Sun in Aries and an excess of the fire element in the chart tends to accompany a split between body and spirit, and illusions about one's appearance that may be similar to the delusions driving anorexia and other eating disorders. In my case I have always seen myself as much smaller and frailer than others’ image of me.

For those who spend a lot of time trying to reduce weight, this might seem a positive blessing. But I was born in 1945 and so have very early memories of news about what was discovered in post-war Germany with horrific images of skeletal corpses and survivors from Nazi death camps. I cannot describe what that meant, I was too young to process the information, but it left me with a very profound sense of evil. When, many years later, I went with a friend to visit her mother in hospital and saw how terminal cancer can reduce a healthy body to a gaunt and tremulous skeleton, I felt utter physical revulsion and a rebellion of my spirit against the flesh and its privations. Most people would be moved to compassion, and I was too, but my compassion was overwhelmed by a panicky desire to run away and never visit again.

That was all past and forgotten when I started the operation. But early on I was reading about certain Christian mystics and a description of “God's athletes” whose bodies were reduced to skeletons by their spiritual discipline and devotion to the spiritual path, and I felt a similar surge of horror. Of course, I would never allow that to happen…but the idea must have remained in my unconscious mind until later when I began to notice myself growing thinner with all the fasting and a vegetarian diet. Around that time, I joined a local gym and an instructor showed me weight-training exercises that would soon restore my losses, but a few weeks later I discovered that I was losing weight even faster and I felt an irrational panic that was very hard to shake off.

As demons go, this one was relatively harmless, and yet it was extremely persistent. Whereas the worst of my demons were manifested and tamed during the seven years following the operation, this one persisted into my early seventies and still surprises me at times. It has taken me many years to grasp the fact that I am actually much taller than my in-laws: when I visualise them I still see myself looking straight into their eyes, as if they were just as tall as I am. And I have at last grasped the fact that the reason that I need to push the car seat right back before driving is because I am actually a large person, and not simply because I have a funny driving position.

“Mother's boy” lament

On 30 August 1977, I filled pages of diary with an absolutely classic and embarrassing lament about the way that girls favour “bad boys” over “goody goodies”. On an immediate level, it was probably a backlash from a spiritual path that was requiring celibacy in an era when such abstinence was seen more as a failure than a victory, but it also had deeper personal roots.

In the postscript pages I discuss the way that Sun in Aries, versus Capricorn rising, created a demonic split between my wild and potentially dangerous martial nature and a more cautious and conscientious capricornian self, and how I tended to identify with the latter and project out the former onto other people. This was another of many demons that I began to meet and came to terms with in the years that followed my Abramelin operation.