The Three Worlds
The realms of Angelic beings, the surface world, and the faery realm loosely define our concept of overworld, surface world, and the underworld. But we should not think of the over world as 'up'. That is only in relation to our own position on the planetary surface.
The overworld is stellar consciousness; it is the sun and stars around us, all around us. The Angelic consciousness is the consciousness of the stars. It is the consciousness of the substance that allows us to manifest into life. Angels are the filters through which non-substance becomes substance. They are the threshold of existence. They do not give marriage counseling or tend your cabbages for you.
The underworld is the planet beneath our feet, hence the term underworld. Again, it is named purely in relation to our feet on the planetary surface. The beings of the underworld, the faeries, are closer to our form of being, and in some cases are earlier forms of our being. Thus they are easier in many ways to communicate with.
Also within the underworld are the Titans who are the Angelic consciousness of the planet. To us, the Titans are deep within the center of the earth and are part of the underworld. But in truth, they are of the same consciousness as the overworld, the Angelic consciousness of the planets and stars all around us. But because we are a part of the planetary life, we think of them as underworld.
The Angelic consciousness of the Titans also acts as a threshold for Divinity to manifest itself. They enable the power of Divine consciousness to express itself in a form that can interact with planetary life.
The surface world, the skin of the planet also has its own collection of beings. This type of consciousness is the closest to humanity and is involved more with the mystical expressions of human consciousness as it reaches towards Divinity. The inner beings of the surface world, at their deepest expression, act as a threshold for civilizations, sacred cities, Deities and religions. They are involved in the tides of human consciousness. They are formed by various relationships with and between the four elements.
Vision and Use of the Imagination
Using visionary techniques can be a fascinating voyage of inner discovery that can have wonderful ripples through your life for years to come. Sometimes, a visionary experience can defy all known sense until many years later, when you are on a plane, or writing poetry or peeling potatoes, and the true experience emerges within you in a form that you can comprehend—an “Ah-ha!” moment.
There are three broadly defined stages within visionary work. The first stage is that of the visual scenario. You see landscapes, interact with identifiable beings and generally work within a visual pattern that your imagination can comprehend. It is not so much that these landscapes exist, but that the images act as an interface to allow your brain to understand the powers and worlds that you are experiencing.
The second stage is looser. You may still 'see' visually but it tends to be more fleeting. At this stage the body tends to interact with the power rather than solely the imagination. Hence the very vivid physical sensations that sometimes accompany visualization. As power interacts and passes through you, so your body responds by strange feelings, sensations etc.
The final stage is the deepest. You pass beyond the reach of the imagination, and beyond the body. The soul itself opens out and interacts at this deep profound level. The sensation of no time, no space, no movement is truly experienced at this stage. It is as though the soul touches the edge of its eternal impersonal existence, free of pattern and expression. The visualizer often feels a passing into a place of nothing. This brings a power and peace that holds its own unique sensation.
There is no hierarchy through these stages: it is not a matter of who is advanced and who is not. Both novice and experienced will experience all these stages in a random way. It is what is appropriate at that time for that person; that is all.
Discovering and working with the imagination is the most powerful training you can ever hope to achieve in respect of your spiritual life. Clues to this training are scattered among the many sacred texts around the world. Sacred texts are stuffed with spiritual visions that are maps or guidelines to inner workings.
For example, in the Christian religion, the Bible is full of powerful visions that are not just personal to the prophet who experienced them—some are true interfaces with the spiritual world. The Bible was meant to be a collection of poetry, history, visions, stories and life structures. It was not meant to be a literal word of God. That concept is purely modern.
Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist texts; all full of wondrous visions that guide you closer to yourself and to the Divine flame within you. For that is where paradise is. That is where the eternal Divinity without form is. God burns deep within you—the flame at the edge of the void. And using the word 'God' means Divinity without form, without gender.
As you draw closer to the deep mystery within, so the visions become less concrete, and more formless. Just as the closer to Divinity you draw, so the less formal, gendered and culturally shaped that Divinity becomes.
I feel that visions are very meaningful for this time, particularly in our culture of externalization. All our imagination is ‘out there” as in TV, video, film, computer etc. There is little internalization of the imagination. We are also living in an age where the imagination is seen as something trivial.
The imagination is our most precious tool. It is a mode of transportation; it is our most powerful access to the inner worlds. The early Christian fathers knew this and therefore steered people away from it. Some of the visions I use are old traditional visions, but when they are used they are timeless. I feel, in this time of change, that visions are a vital tool for all spiritual/mystical practitioners regardless of their tradition. And of course, many traditions and religions have many powerful mystical visions.
To perform an exteriorized ceremony is just that—a performance. It require speech, physical movement, the allocation of officers or workers, magical implements and tools, altars, candles, statues and the like. More often than not, externalized ceremonies are scripted, organized and set in their fashion. They are aimed at a specific intent which is often but not always conditional and they are sometimes performed to set patterns of time such as the equinox, solstice and so forth.
Ceremony is a bridge between the inner expression of power and the exterior molding of that power. In times past, ceremony was a marriage between power raised through deep inner work and a matrix created by ceremony, through which that power could pass.
Certain set movements, words and implements were used both to create and to work through an established pattern. Certain details of ceremony were passed from generation to generation, but the ability to raise the inner power was never taught externally. It was up to the student to rediscover that method through years of rigorous and disciplined training.
No real inner technique was taught. It had to unfold within the consciousness of the practitioner through guided work. All that was passed from teacher to pupil was outer ceremony, the classical disciplines (art, sciences, philosophy, language) and the power of resonance.
So for years, the student would partake of the ceremonies, experience inner contacts and grow in their wisdom. As the power began to move through them, they would make many discoveries of their own. The methods of teaching magic were to reveal one step that potentially revealed a further hundred.
With the rise in popularity of psychology, people began to move away from methods of moving power from A to B, towards techniques designed to make a person feel better, to heal them or mark passage. That was not the original intent of ceremony, however that may appear on the surface.
Modern thinkers smile sweetly at the people of past times who seemingly performed a spring ceremony to help the crops grow. " It gave them a sense of control to combat the feeling of being at the mercy of nature." This sort of comment is often heard or printed: and it is spoken from a place of ignorance.
The interaction with the land and the elements is just one facet of ceremony that has all but been lost in the western world. It was a type of ceremony that had direct interaction with the powers that manifest through the elements and the land on which the ritualists lived. It was often part of the religious expression of the time and was a way for the humans to interact directly with Divine power as that power filtered through the land and the seasons.
In today’s world the same rules apply. If you want to learn ceremonies and do them properly, learn the outer forms from a practitioner. But the inner powers for that ceremony you will have to learn for yourself by interacting with inner contacts and charting your own passage of discovery in the inner worlds through vision work and dreams.
The more you work with visions, the more you will move through your imagination to the depths of the inner realms until you are so disciplined that you can focus an inner intent and there you will be.
Gender and Power
When it comes to the use of inner energy and its manipulation, it is easier for women to hold power and find visions. This is nothing to do with sexuality, or the inner person. It is purely how the physical body filters power. Women are designed to carry being into substance from un-being. Women are also designed to accommodate larger amounts of power (holding two beings in one space during pregnancy for example). Women have a higher power to create and destroy, to curse and bless, and their capacity to work in a more formless way is better than men. They also have a higher tolerance for attack. (an inner version of a higher pain threshold)
Men have more ability to form patterns, which is crucial in magic (hence more powerful male magicians than females) and to hold power within patterns. They are better at working with polarized power rather than formless power. They are sustainers rather than creators or destroyers. This is mirrored in the powers of the Deities.
Of course, within this there are always the awkward ones who do not fit the norm…. that is what makes life interesting. Men are also useless at finding things, such as clean socks and the salt container that is right in front of them.
I think our challenge of this age is to move beyond the polarities, move away from being bound by substance. That does not mean withdraw. Rather it is to learn to use substance rather than being ruled by it. In this time of change we can choose to either be bound, anchored and ruled by polarity, or we can choose to move beyond the restrictions by stepping sideways…. out of substance and therefore neutral. So then you are back to visions, and working unconditionally.
I use the title Inner Convocation, because that is what it is…it is a place of consciousness in the inner realms where people, mediators of all worlds, times and traditions come together. There are many versions of it around the world and it is not a new concept. It is a communal gathering place for consciousness that comes together around a flame: the fire of Divinity at the edge of the void.
It is also a place where working unconditionally is a must. If you do anything for a reason, you create a polarity, a good and bad, and therefore you have to take responsibility for your creation. It is something that has come purely from you and is now let loose on the world. So if, for example, you go into the Inner Convocation and into a temple to work with the inner contacts to create world peace, you will have to bear the responsibility of everything that comes from that. It may not be a time for peace. We as humans have no concept of the long-term implications of power.
To work unconditionally is to go into the Inner Convocation and the temples, and open a doorway for what ever is necessary to come through for a situation. That way, you are using the unique ability of humans to mediate power from one world to another without interfering in the natural order of what is needful.
I did not use something like “old ways” because visionary work is timeless.
Time is not an ultimate truth, nor is it linear, that idea is bound merely by the physical substance and gravity. So the idea of old and new, before and after, fall away where there is no substance to hang that concept on.
In Wicca, and most pagan traditions, there are physical rituals, use of objects, use of nature etc, and such methods of working are therefore bound by time. So of course it would make sense to talk of something as an ‘old way’ if it comes from a time past. But visionary work does not use substance and is therefore not bound by time. It all makes sense after a few pints of Guinness.
I think the difficulty most people would find when they try to access the Inner Convocation for the first time without a guide would be inner self-discipline. It is certainly not dangerous, just difficult. The Inner Convocation is a place where everything comes together out of time, therefore you can access virtually anywhere via the Convocation. Ultimately you access yourself and that is where the inner focus really needs to come in.
It is easy to become swept away by the power of this place because of its simplicity. There is no dressing up, no egos, no pretensions, no hierarchies, because all of these things are directly related to substance and life. Being a high priestess 5 degrees to the left with a name that means grandmother in some obscure language that you don’t speak will cut no ice in this place. You eventually meet yourself without your worldly dressing, and that can be very shocking. It is a place where you access the inner powers of the elements before they exteriorize. It is the threshold of being.
Because there are no grand visuals in the vision, it is easy to dismiss it. And yet, to me, it is the most powerful place humans can access. Inner focus helps you to build the pathway to this place and inner discipline teaches you how to use this place responsibly.
If someone is trying to build a relationship with this place without help, I would suggest accessing it daily and allowing the vision to build slowly over the weeks. Then the practitioner should start to explore the four thresholds of the directions, where the inner elements manifest into the outside worlds. This is also known as the Four Inner Temples.
About Angels
Angels. I do not use that term lightly. Many people understand the use of the term ‘angelic’ to be something of belief relating to the Christian/ Judaic / Islamic stream of consciousness. That belief stems from the inability to understand such a realm of consciousness as the angelic realm.
Such realms are not the products of those religions. Rather, the religious context is merely a language or mode of behavior that allows interaction between the Angelic realm and Humanity. Other world zones/ cultures/religions have their own language and mode of communion for such interaction.
Angelic beings are powers that enable us to be in substance and form. They are filters that we pass through on our journey of life and death. They are the consciousness of the stars and the planets. They uphold the web of existence, the pattern of the universe. They also uphold the patterns of our souls. Such concepts can be studied through the Kabbalah.
When we work as individuals with angelic consciousness, we are actually working with a fragment of a fragment of a fragment of an 'angel.' They are hive beings of such colossal consciousness that we could not even begin to perceive their true power. Hence when a person is meditating or using visionary techniques to commune with such a consciousness, we often can only see a foot, or a hand or an eye. That is because our feeble brains cannot even begin to build an imaginative picture of a being with such breadth of power.
The angelic being that works with an individual human is a fragment of angelic consciousness. We visually perceive this fragment as a smaller, more human sized being detaching from a bigger hive. And yet that fragment is still gigantic in its strength and power compared to humans. But despite that immense power, different beings need each other in a form of alliance.
Angels are specifically focused beings, like the point of a needle. As such, they cannot perceive anything other than what they are tuned to. For us, as humans, that can be very dangerous. So for example in healing, the healers body becomes a doorway through which the angel can work: we filter the power and direct it in a productive way. The angel can use our minds to understand the processes that are needful for the healing.
In such work, the deepest imbalance is dealt with first: the energy matrix or web that allows the soul to flow into physical being. That inner matrix is the first threshold of life between being and unbeing. Then comes the second threshold; the inner body. A phantom copy of the outer form that houses and modifies the power of being as it flows through into the body. It also decides the outer form that the soul will take, what body they will have.
It is at this level that you can often perceive ‘inner’ genetic inheritances. The outer body is the product of genetic lines. (Where as the soul may follow a completely different line) That outer body is a physical manifestation of an inner genetic pattern.
For that inner genetic pattern to express itself in a live being, it must have a matrix of energy that will express itself through the genetic body, thus giving it the capability to carry a soul. The matrix (sometimes called a landscape) or web pattern is the doorway that the soul, so Divine flame can pass through into substance.
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