Book Talk, TIGM/es 01

Post 1 in a series related to Edwin Steinbrecher's book "The Inner Guide Meditation."

I may ramble about related stuff or other thoughts through this. But I'm going to walk through my current re-reading of the book (last time was about 15 years ago) and thoughts I have. This stuff is key to the inner work I do -- though in my opinion, the inner work has no real limits and the book of course does -- and key to others understanding more of the down to earth structure of this kind of work, and maybe more of the ideas that it rides in on. Not all of which may be accurate, of course. I don't think anybody has all the final answers.

Re-reading is a dilemma of sorts, though not as much as some books can be. It's like this: on one hand, he is brilliant, and insightful, and has documented important stuff, and is worth quoting and modeling. On the other hand, perhaps because we are not the same person, I don't agree with him on every point.

Most the areas where I start differing, are when I sense that he has a paradigm, or that he created one while thinking he was 'objective' because multiple people were involved in the shared experience-set he used to map out 'what happened, when, where, etc.'. My remote viewing and hypnosis background both lean heavily on the idea that we influence others when we work with them; and that expectations can and will do so; and there is even some evidence scientifically that whomever is in charge of, or considered the expert for, a given group-effort, will have an undue influence on the 'spontaneous experience' that others have--yes, even if those others don't know their views.

You only have to see how a tasker's intent affects double-blind viewing to understand that these things happen without regard to whether other people know about something; energetic connection apparently exists below that. He on the other hand, seems oblivious to this point. So if he is the central person with a given belief, and others intentionally working with his ideas to report back to him for the sake of his work and writing the book, have experiences falling into his existing belief or his own prior experience, he considers this proof that "that's the way it must be for everybody," because he considers the two experiences to be unrelated and therefore objective. I don't.

Steinbrecher was also a serious astrologer, which seems to have given him the tendency to think that there is a map and the options and details and what they mean are the same for everybody, even though 'which' of those details are called varies based on the person. I respect astrology, thanks to a friend I respect very much who has been seriously involved with it for many decades. And I think it is great used in conjunction with shamanic archetype work. And maybe Edwin is right about some of the ways he applies it (eg he insists that what your guide looks like, depends on a specific thing in astrology). But I don't think any 'framework', including that one, should be used to seal the record on what is allowed to 'be' or 'be valid', and in places it seems like that's in danger of happening.

So when I see stuff that I doubt, or feel I've experienced differently, I'll be talking about it.

But it should be stated here in this intro post that I think Steinbrecher did fabulous work with all this, very important work that lets ordinary western folk take a combination of ancient shamanism, jungian psychology, and work it into something anybody can use to directly affect change in themselves and their reality -- the definition of 'magick'.

Israel Regardie wrote of this book:

This book will go down in occult history as one of the most significant contributions to meditation in modern times.

Regardie was probably the most knowledgeable occultist of his era or close enough, and I have respect for his opinion.

Also, he has been in a few of my "deep dreams", the sort that seem more like 'spiritual experiences' than 'dreams' if you know what I mean. So I am biased in his favor for that. I think I only recorded one with him in it, and I couldn't find a date on the doc that google desktop found this in, but here's an example:

The Dream of Israel's Portrait of Alistor
and our Entwining "Tripod of Consciousness"

I was minding my own business. I haven't been even remotely involved with anything related to official magick in some time, I mean as far as reading, talking, studying, practicing goes. So dreaming about it was out of the blue.

Last night I found myself face to face -- close up -- with this painting: a portrait of Crowley.

Not so much that it looked like he ever did; tough to explain.

It was truly amazingly done, it managed to convey a huge amount of emotion and information and depth. Done in thick paints like the days of old, it had real texture as well as visuals. Yet it was dominantly in these odd greens and angles that gave it this rather Saturn-like, weird feeling, a bit of cold, impersonal and unearthly feeling as one of the many overtones.

I turned to Israel (Regardie, who created it) and I said, "Israel, it's beautiful. You've captured so much of his energy it's like the portrait is alive. You always did have such a gift for empathic insight, and this is real art. And yet, I think the greens are partly your own interpretation of him; I would have used less of those, and a bit more deep blues."

And he admitted that was likely the case, and then he reached out for me and we became like long ribbons, or maybe snakes or strings, and we wound around each other like a candy cane all the way out to the ends. It felt so strange, it was amazing! It was like I could feel my (astral?) body just thinning out and wrapping around his in a vortex-like spiral. He was a tremendously warm soul, and he gave me this feeling of real "maturity" is the only word I can put to it; I relaxed into him with a mix of gratitude and sensuousness and decided it had been too long and I'd really missed him.

Later in the dream, after Israel and I had been winding around each other, always going upward, having a tremendously good time (strangely close; not really sexual, I mean we didn't have normal bodies, but so intensely intimate it defies words) Alistor showed up to take a look at the portrait and comment on it.

I had missed him and reached out to him, and he took my hand and somehow was connected to Israel as well when he did. He didn't seem surprised that Israel and I were old friends any more than that he and I seemed to be, and he swirled in with us, and we contemplated the portrait as a "joined tripod unit of consciousness" for a bit.

Then Alistor pulled back so he was an individual and said "Yes, Israel, right about the blues. I see more of them in me than you do, but it's always been that way." And Israel and I directed our long swirled-entwined strings of bodies over closer to the portrait and looked at it again for awhile.

I decided that he is far more understanding of Crowley now than he had been when he was alive; or rather, that he now has fewer personal issues in the way of expressing his insight.

I woke up feeling like I had partly merged with Israel and was now not entirely the same person I had been before I went to sleep.

As trivia, I once had a remote viewing session that has a vague resemblance to one point in this. I was using Win Winger's "Image-Streaming" technique as an experiment on a couple targets.

IS is very good for warmup/state of mind. Horrible for viewing as, like archetype work, it's imaginally-based. RV is greatly harmed by too much of that energy. In fact one reason RV is such a nebulous skill is because like many things, it uses the imagination (and memory) as "the tool for delivery of information", but you want the absolute minimum of imagination (and memory) to be active, ironically. Yet you can't suppress it all or you'd have nothing.

On one side you have memory, and the more you know or even suspect about a target (no matter how subtly), the more memory comes into play, feeding your subtle data based on both static memory and the projections one's analytical mind -- even at the below-conscious level -- create based on that. On the other side you have imagination, and the less you know about a target, the more any data you do get (even if 100% accurate and psychically-derived), because it has absolutely no model, framework, scale, perspective, for the brain to hang something on, the more imagination affects it.

These two polarities of imagination and memory + extrapolation are constantly functioning (as they are meant to do in normal life) through the RV session. The problem is that while these are necessary to functional human life, more than the absolute minimum (it appears) is terrible for RV. One has to hold a state of mind that is kind of 'in the middle' between those points, 'open' and allowing the tools to provide or translate info based on your intended target (for which you have only a random number), yet not going in either direction, and attempting to learn to recognize when you have, when the subtle data is your own translation or assumption, or when it's symbolic etc.

Anyway, in the IS-based RV session, I was sitting back in a recliner, eyes closed, using a tape recorder for data. I suddenly found myself standing right up next to a painting, far too close, and it took me a moment to realize it was a painting because it seemed real for a moment first. The painting was life-sized and had such thick paint it gave a 3D effect. (I had a friend tell me fine old art is like that. But I have only seen prints. I'm sorry I'm uneducated about art. Never lived near a museum or visited, to see 'real' classic art.)

In the painting was a full size skeleton, with one arm up holding something that flashed through rifle/sword/scythe (scythe like the archetypal 'death' carries), and the skull tilted back with the mouth open I felt screaming though in silence. It was shocking, like some archetype work done in a deeply altered state, and I was reacting and literally falling back to escape it so close as I realized it was a painting and got farther away from it, then feeling I was standing on the carpeted, railed balcony of a 2nd story, inside a house or something, looking at it on the wall.

Then I found myself just outside something like a hospital, 'sensed' and only seen in translation like an energy (like an X-ray visual almost, but 3D and subtler), and people were going up the elevator inside it, but many just continued, as if for them the elevator went upward indefinitely.

That was not much data and heavily symbolic, obviously. The target turned out to be the setup for a (in)famous civil war battle. And although it is normal to get data that is key to the existence of a given target (e.g., if the target is welding a WWII airplane, you're likely to get some war data and airplane data before your mind 'settles in' to the focus of some guy up against a metal wall with a welding iron, assuming it ever does), this didn't have enough data to get around to that, so was not any success as a session.

That kind of session in some (not many but some) contexts still might have potential value, but it is neither specific nor accurate about 'the focus'. One of the differences between RV and 'traditional' psi is the very specific targeting (ask a specific question/directive), the specific focus on, to the degree possible, only data which answers that intent (as opposed to 'anything which might be accurate about anything related to this'), and of course that RV is supposed to be done in a double-blind protocol (where neither the viewer, nor anybody with any form of physical proximity to them, knows the nature or detail of the 'intended data' they are to acquire. And in a perfect world, knows nothing about the target 'context' either, but in the real world, sometimes they do). Anyway it was a failure as a session but was still interesting as an experience.

The incredible painting reminds me of that dream. I don't remember the dates but I'm pretty sure the dream came first.

Anyway on my next post I'm going to start at the beginning, and when I run into something I'll be quoting some stuff and writing about it. This is in part my attempt to give more credit to ES and pay more attention to his book than I ever did in the first place. And in my part my attempt to really 'think through' what it is I allegedly believe--and why--and how those paradigms might be, even now, pre-shaping my experiences without my being aware of it.

PS The funny thing about that tripod-of-consciousness dream is that I had completely forgotten about this until writing this. I recently had a super-'lite' version of that... nothing as intense as the dream. And my ex had once told me of this powerful dream he'd had about being three-in-one. But I'd forgotten this one until now. Funny it would come up right after talking about that.

PJ