Some Various Notes on the Process of Initiation
by One who is called Ben
 

"Initiation, the raising of a person's awareness to a higher level, is not accomplished by putting ideas into a person's mind. Rather, it is accomplished by changing the foundational structure of the mind in such a way that it becomes capable of sensing events on additional levels or with greater scope, capable of organizing those sensations and experiences in new ways, and of re-organizing their past experience and thought-patterns to conform to the expanded view. This is done by introducing new energies from higher levels into the matrix of the person's being, those energies forcing a re-structuring so that they can be contained. It is only after such a change has been brought about that new ideas from the beings can have any significance, as seeds for the process of organizing and re-organizing the content of the mind."

On the Nature of "Channeling"

I knew "trance psychic" Paul Solomon, whose -- I'm not sure what to call them, "cooperative spirits"? -- claimed that they were the same ones that had spoken through Cayce. I had a co-op job in college transcribing the tapes of his trance sessions.

Paul's spirits showed the same mix of right-on information and apparent fantasy that Cayce's did. In some instances they were able to provide information that led to the diagnosis or cure of serious illnesses -- sometimes by means that made no sense at all, but which performed exactly as predicted when they were tried. And they had an uncanny ability to get into the heads of querents and speak to their real questions instead their spoken questions. But they also spouted the same Atlantean and "End Times" stuff that Cayce did.

I had a "reading" by Paul as part of my pay, and a couple of things these spirits mentioned to me (unasked, and deliberately without emphasis) seem to bear directly on the question of why a being with such access to information should also spout garbage.

The first thing they said was that they were forbidden from interfering in any way with an individual's "karma" or "life tasks", the things the person was supposed to accomplish during a particular life. If the person were supposed to work out a particular problem on his own, they could not provide any information that would influence the decisions he would make with respect to that problem. Nor could they provide him with "advance notice" of any problem he was supposed to encounter without preparation. So much of the garbage that comes out of such readings might be a slick way of distracting the person's attention from things they couldn't say.

The second thing they said was that they could only speak to a person within the limits of his current world-view; if the person was convinced that something was true, they would generally not attempt to contradict it, but instead would play along with it. So if someone believed in Atlantis or in a coming Armageddon, and asked questions based on that belief, they would couch their answer in terms that fit with that belief.

For example, at the time (early 1970's) there was a vogue for talking about forthcoming "earth changes" presaging the apocalypse. He was frequently asked about the nature of these changes, and (in one instance I recall) predicted that there would be massive flooding in the midwest for three years in the mid-1990's, and alternating flooding and destructive fires in the American southwest during the same period. The information seems accurate in retrospect, but since the person believed these events were indications of the End of the World, they went along with that belief in the way they phrased their answers. In another case where the person didn't believe in the apocalypse, they gave essentially the same information, but without the biblical overlay.

Interestingly, the advice they gave in such instances was usually pretty good, if you made the assumption that the events in question would come to pass and that the querent would be directly affected by them. E.g., someone came to Paul convinced that there were going to be famines in a few years, and asking what they should do to prepare. Their advice: he should learn to grow his own food and build a secure storage place for it. They never said he needed to do this, just that he could prepare for such an eventuality.


On the Nature of Initiation

As a person whose magickal training has come entirely from "non-incarnate" beings of one sort or another, I've had substantially more interaction with them than most people, even within the magickal community. One thing that has become glaringly obvious to me is that the verbal content of our contacts, the intellectually-apprehensible ideas and words, has in many cases been entirely unimportant to the beings with whom I was working. That content was intended to hold my attention on maintaining the contact, and at the same time, to distract my attention from the levels where they were doing the actual training work.

As human beings-in-the-world, we tend to focus on verbalizations, "facts", and meanings, regarding these as the most important parts of any communication. This is natural enough, since it is how we have to deal with each other and with the manifest world. But to a being observing us from a higher level, those things aren't real. Or, if not exactly unreal, are no more than transitory events of no lasting import, occurring within the structures with which they are concerned.

What these beings are concerned with are those structures which are the basis for our ability to have experiences. That is to say, where our attention is focused on the content of the mind, their purpose has to do with the underlying functionality that allows that content to exist, and determines the forms it can take. Communication, from their point of view, consists primarily in an exchange of energies between themselves and those root structures of our being; the verbal side is secondary.

Initiation, the raising of a person's awareness to a higher level, is not accomplished by putting ideas into a person's mind. Rather, it is accomplished by changing the foundational structure of the mind in such a way that it becomes capable of sensing events on additional levels or with greater scope, capable of organizing those sensations and experiences in new ways, and of re-organizing their past experience and thought-patterns to conform to the expanded view. This is done by introducing new energies from higher levels into the matrix of the person's being, those energies forcing a re-structuring so that they can be contained. It is only after such a change has been brought about that new ideas from the beings can have any significance, as seeds for the process of organizing and re-organizing the content of the mind.

In order to accomplish this goal, it isn't necessary for a magickal being to give someone verbalizations that have any relation to the "real" world. They need only to motivate the person to keep maintaining the "connection" between them, and to open himself to them in such a way that they can perform the manipulations needed to induce the change.

The verbal content of the communication would be focused towards these ends. It would need to be:

• sufficiently interesting to keep the person coming back.

• sufficiently complex or full of possibilities to keep his consciousness distracted from the activity being performed by the spirits, which would come into the person's awareness in the form of minor distortions of perception and odd swings of mood and affect.

• sufficiently "inspiring" to keep the person desirous of contact with higher levels of being. It doesn't matter if the image of the divine that is presented has any relation to the world as the beings perceive it, so long as that image can serve as a channel between the subject and the higher levels.

This last point is particularly important. Those magickal "helpers" I have dealt with (who say they are not unusual as such beings go) are restricted by certain ethical considerations. They cannot work to initiate a person unless that person demonstrates a desire for it, at whatever level he is capable of understanding the process. It is not unethical to offer him a vision of the divine that attracts him, and so gain his acquiescence. Along with the vision, they also give the person a bit of divine energy, a taste of what he can gain; and this energy is given to the person freely and unconditionally. They "pay" the person in advance for the opportunity to help him.

In this view, complaints about the absurd nature of most "channeling" and visions [or the bizarre and foolish delinquency of so-called "space aliens" ramming probes up people's behinds, all the while excusing such ludicrous behavior by lecturing them on the importance of "living green." -B:.B:.] take on the aspect of somebody complaining about being given a bit of ambrosia, just because it came wrapped in a cheesy package.

Once a person becomes fully and formally dedicated to the path of initiation, things become a bit easier. The magickal beings don't have to dangle a carrot in front of his eyes at every moment. His "oath of the Path" establishes a permanent thread of contact between the person and the divine, and also serves as a blanket permission for the magickal beings in his "inner Lodge" to do whatever is necessary to increase that contact. (However, they still are restrained by the rule of non-interference with the person's "true will".) So the bullshit factor can drop significantly, and they can spend the time gained on other beneficial activities.

So from all this you can see that grandiose stories, tall tales, and other nonsense from magickal sources aren't necessarily evidence of malevolent intent. It is simply that what the author thinks is important about such contacts is largely irrelevant to what is actually going on.

And not to blow my own horn, but simply as fact: I am evidence that sometimes those "grandiose" promises are fulfilled. I was promised at the beginning of my work that I would become a Magister Templi within 30 years; it only took 22 years. I was taken from being a wretched and ignorant fool to being (while still a bit of a fool) someone for whom transcendental awareness is a continual, joyous, and undeniable reality. And every prediction or prophecy that my magickal partners made (save one) has been fulfilled ten times over, usually in ways that were inconceivable to me at the time the predictions were made. Absolutely everything I ever wanted from them I have received, and more.

Aside from this, and speaking as a magician in the Western traditions, I'd have to say that if anyone's "shamanic" approach is only putting him into contact with beings who feed on his energy, then he'd better consider finding a new way of working. Or at least start looking for a different sort of magickal being to deal with. Every magickal ceremony (or every series of such to a particular purpose) ought to end up with the magician receiving as much or more back from his work as he put into it in the first place. And the beings worth knowing always end up giving more than they take.


On the Nature of Memetic Reprogramming

Let's start with an extremely simplified example to illustrate this. Say you've got a little computer that does certain things when it gets a signal. Whoever programmed this computer put in instructions for what to do when it gets the signals "01", "10", and "11". It is capable of also receiving the signal "00", but has no programmed instructions for that case. So what happens when it receives a "00" signal? It either ignores it, or treats it as one of the signals for which it does have instructions. As far as its internal activity goes, the signal "00" simply doesn't exist.

On a vastly larger scale, this is what the Ruach is doing. It only processes information for which it has a hard-wired program, or for which it can create new programs by adapting and combining older programs. Any information for which it can't make an interpreting algorithm simply doesn't exist, as far as it is concerned.

Most of the Ruach's processing programs are software, and some of them are capable of modification in such a way as to handle the usually-excluded data that makes up the transcendental experience. The problem is that nearly all its programming derives (sometimes through many levels) from adaptations of the basic "hard-wired" instructions for processing and responding to raw data from the physical senses. That's why the sephira Yesod, where this processing takes place, is called "The Foundation" of the Tree of Life.

So the entire structure of our minds, from our basic emotions up to the most inclusive "intuitive" level, has a built-in bias towards seeing and processing data in sensory-like ways, and an equally complete inability to see or process information that can't be fit into that schema or its more abstract analogues.

Now as I said in another message, nearly all of the path of initiation is a process of expanding the number of levels at which we can perceive consciously and integrating each new level into what came before. When this process is done for a given level, its functioning becomes relatively automatic, and falls below the threshold of awareness. Throughout most of the process the expansion and integration are fairly well-balanced, so that new levels open up at about the same speed with which we integrate the old ones. The progress is incremental, allowing gradual adaptation of old programs to new uses.

Regards,

Ben

(from Noton's Imperium Website)
 

[Note: any apparent bumpiness in the flow of this missive is the fault not of the author but of ourselves alone. In our feeble attempt to present a robust enough sampling of the absolutely marvelous buffet of ontological perspectives offered freely by our dear Brother Benjamin -- who clearly resideth beyond the word and the fool -- we fear we may've done little more than muddy the waters with our somewhat stuttery and inept presentation. Alas, we meant well. -B:.B:.]

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