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Starting a Circle

The important thing is to do it; don't wait for someone else to do it. You don't need a building, use your home. You don't need a minister or a guru or anyone else with special training. Chances are that would just impede your development.

Keep in mind the long range goal of spiritual evolution and the short range goal of finding the roots of your being in the collective unconscious, and the intermediate goal of opening the doors of spiritual perception and powers. All three goals require you, personally, to do something. Listening to someone else talk will not directly help you. Prayer (a form of begging for favors from some supposed exterior being) is at best an inferior way of communicating with higher centers. Piety, asceticism, penitence, giving money to churches....none of these things help directly. What you need are spiritual exercises. Here's a possible schedule for an intensive circle. Spread it out, change it, in short, adapt it.

1. Monday night. Golden Flower meditation. Circulation and fixation of the Light. Opening the heavenly heart, HSP. Telepathy. Levitations, OOBEs.
2. Tuesday night. Mandala making and mandala meditation.
3. Wednesday night. Group or individual hypnotic regression to memories of former lifetimes.
4. Thursday night. Occult sciences workshop. I Ching, Tarot, Keplerian astrology, Cheiromancy.
5. Friday. Acupuncture massage workshop. Detect and restore normal pranic flow without needles.
6. Saturday night. Inner Sanctum. Guided trips by LSD or witch's cradle for the daring and trustworthy.
7. Sunday night. Reading and discussion. Lectures or demonstrations by visiting spiritual scientists or wizards. Dream interpretation.
8. At least four times a year you should have festivals out of doors in a secluded spot. Use any symbolic focus you wish, but seasonal festivals of the moon at times of full or new moon, preferably at night on a hilltop are very good.

A smallish group that can fit into one person's house will be more adventurous. Large groups will get diverted with building programs, choirs, and all the other folderol.

You've probably heard all sorts of hysterical warning from traditional religionists about the dangers of occultism. There is a mild danger from certain types of occultism which cultivate mediumistic trance states or hallucinatory visions. Not that everyone should avoid such things. But they are only for special people with special training. Much better to cultivate forms of spiritual perception which supplement rather than replace normal modes of thinking and perceiving. The resulting phenomena is much more subtle, but also safer. The spiritualist route can aggravate mental illness in those susceptible, though this is not offered as a criticism, so do your own thing.

You've probably also heard that it is necessary to have a guru. That is perfectly true in primitive and backward societies, where novices are apt to be unread and naive. Gurus are no longer necessary for Aquarian age people, providing they are reasonably familiar with the primary material of empirical religion (except for the optional final step of magickal initiation).

The first step for Westerners is to re-open their channels to inner space. A good way to begin is by mastering the Tarot and the I Ching. This will teach you to think intuitively and symbolically. That, in turn will enable you to make meaningful mandalas. No one can tell you in detail how to make a mandala, or make one for you. Every mandala is different. If it is a genuine mandala, it will be a symbol of your self, and a key to the heavenly heart (yellow castle, primal spirit, two-petalled lotus). Thus, mandala meditation can be the first step (or one of them) in Golden Flower meditation, since entering the heavenly heart is a preliminary to most other things.

The hypnotic recall of former lifetimes is an easy exercise that everyone can do, even before they've made any progress in other areas. Yogis don't think much of hypnosis because it does not lead onward to other things as does meditation. Perfectly true, but it is easier, it destroys the fear of death that Westerners of materialistic background may have, and it can lead to valuable scientific data. Incidentally, it requires no special talents to be a hypnotist, or to be a hypnotic subject. If you can put yourself into the hypnagogic state while someone is talking to you, you can be hypnotized. Most people can do it, if hypnosis is properly explained to them, if they feel in comfortable surroundings with people they like and trust.

The healing workshop on Friday nights is a way you can make empirical religion practical very quickly. That's important for Westerners. Charts and galvanic skin response meters can be used to find acupuncture points and pulses. That can be a test of your developing HSP senses, especially the dermo-optic HSP in the fingertips.

If you have someone with a known problem, and your acupuncture book tells you which points to use, and you can find the points, then you are ready to try to restore the normal pranic flow without needles. Remember that acupuncture is not a substitute for traditional medicine, especially when it comes to diagnosis, but merely a religious practice that can be used in addition with no possibility of harm.

To restore normal pranic flow, make your arms a circuit, with one finger on the acupuncture point to be 'needled' and another on a point of opposite polarity. Remember the Golden Flower maxim that release is in the eyes. Visualize a positive flow coming from you right eye down your right arm into your index finger, into the acupuncture point back up the left arm into the left eye and closing the circuit in the heavenly heart (two petalled lotus between the eyes). If that doesn't help, reverse the polarity. Breathe slowly and regularly and visualize the energy going through the circuit you've created. It will help.

When it comes to inner sanctum activities, you will have to make up your own mind about indulging in illegal activities in a time of tyranny. Remember that in guiding a trip you do not deny bad situations, you work through them, suggesting a different way of looking at whatever is being experienced. Obviously only stable and courageous and well-informed individuals should receive the LSD sacrament. You may prefer to create a witch's cradle, which is essentially a sensor deprivation and disorientation device to accomplish the same thing. Or you may prefer to stick to more cautious activities.

The hardest thing for uptight, intellectual Westerners to do is a proper religious festival, with a sacred, meaningful feel. You should do whatever is meaningful for you. The celebrants of wicca seek to call up tulpas within a magic mandala drawing. The Tibetans do much the same thing. It also would be useful to use the festival as a way of tuning into the thoughts of nature, of trees and moon and earth, and to try to develop HSP awareness of change states affecting all of nature, and to become aware of the dragon currents in the Earth, just as you strive to 'see' the pranic currents in acupuncture. But festivals serve many functions, including developing a deeper symbolic-intuitive understanding of the great archetypes of the unconscious such as the High Priestess.

Just as no one can design a mandala for you, so no one can design a festival for your circle. If it is to be magickal and sacred and symbolically and psychically efficacious, then you must develop it intuitively yourself, borrowing and adapting other's ideas to be sure. The summer festival might be a festival of pentacles, and you might try to improve the group's 'luck' at material/scientific/power problems. The Fall festival might be a festival of swords, and you could try to aid and sacramentalize life's transitions. Magic athames and phorbas might be consecrated. The Winter festival could be a festival of cups, and you could practice scrying (the same thing as crystal-ball gazing in a cup of still water), a way of looking into the still, inner heart of all. The Spring festival would then be a festival of wands, a time for increasing the life, vitality, creativity and fecundity of the group, and of nature in general.

All magick works by symbolic transformation of the inner man. It is also possible to affect others by the use of psychic powers, but that is not the main function of magick, and would be done perhaps only in self-defense of the circle.

The symbolic elements in a festival are dance, rhythmic music, masks, psycho-drama, and the visual props and the setting. The dances can be mandala dances or dervish dances and should be practiced by the participants. Drums can be used to beat out the appropriate trigram or hexagram change-patter from the I Ching, while gongs and bamboo flutes tuned to the appropriate sephiroth and geometric ratios can harmonically symbolize the appropriate themes. The members of the circle will have to make the instruments, learn to play them, and compose the music. Festival music will probably tend at first to be simple and hypnotic. Here as elsewhere, the thing is to do it yourself, and use your intuition. The psycho-drama of each festival should be roughly the same; the symbolic path of the great way through the entire major arcana. The details of it would never be the same twice.

Part of every festival could be silent communing with a wild place of nature, perhaps a high place, and a power point in the dragon current, if you are able to find it and use it.

Group hypnotic recall of former lifetimes can be a valuable occasional experience. The hypnotic state is merely a directed form of the hypnagogic state which everyone enters at least once every 24 hours. To go to sleep, you put yourself in the hypnagogic state, from which you drift off naturally to sleep, or to hypnosis, if the hypnagogic state is directed. You cannot actually turn off the sense or the body; what you do is let it drift. You no longer give any motor commands to the body. The body continues to move, however, making its own automatic adjustments. But the conscious mind simply relinquishes interest or control. Providing there are no urgent stimuli, you drift off to sleep, without noticing it. Likewise, if you stop talking to a person in hypnosis, they will also drift off into normal sleep.

The hypnagogic state is not a state of unconsciousness, despite the fact that you may not be able to remember anything from it when you wake up. Likewise with hypnosis. Images drift like clouds across the mind in the hypnagogic state, but one pays no attention to them.

Since everyone knows how to enter the hypnagogic state, anyone can be hypnotized, naturally, the subject has to be completely relaxed and completely trusting of the hypnotist. People in hypnosis do not feel strange or different. You feel exactly as you do in the hypnagogic state. The fact that you may be able to accomplish strange and miraculous things in the hypnagogic or hypnotic state does not seem strange or miraculous while in the state, any more than the illogical things that happen in dreams seem strange or miraculous while one is having them. If you and the hypnotist expect to be able to remember former lifetimes, then you will.

A medium trance is used for regression, and you get there by stages. The hypnagogic state is entered by relaxing all over, and following the hypnotist's suggestions of sleeping, or sinking, of letting things go, of becoming passive. The suggestion that the subject is going to sleep is just a reminder to put himself in the hypnagogic state. The subject can begin with eyes closed if that is comfortable. If it is not, he can stare at a candle flame during the preliminaries, until the eyes flutter, and then the hypnotist's suggestion that he close his eyes will be effective. Usually, the next stage is to imagine the hands are light and floating upward and then heavy and sinking downward, as the hypnotist directs. The trick here is not to be skeptical, and to let yourself imagine things just as the hypnotist directs. Will them to float and will the to sink, by feeling them to be light or heavy.

The second stage is usually to imagine some scene, such as being on a boat on a lake and visualizing all the people around. Thirdly, the hypnotist may try some test for the medium trance. For instance, ordinary non-mathematical people can be induced to forget a number. The hypnotist suggest that the number will disappear, will go over the hills, and the subject will not be able to think it. Then if asked to count, the subject will skip over the number, and not be able to use it in arithmetic.

Any sort of successful hypnotic accomplishment will lead one deeper into the trance. For instance, on can go directly to regression after stage two, and begin with things the subjects are sure to be able to remember, such as what they had for breakfast, then, what they did yesterday, then, last week, then a year ago, then, when they were in school, then when they were five and so forth. In each case, a particular concrete scene should be imagined. If they can image their fifth birthday, then they can probably also image their first birthday. If the subject can do that, you know that regression further is possible.

Let subjects continue to sail backwards in time, a year, two years, five years, continuing until they find some image. Usually subjects will float in darkness or 'nowhere' for a time, but will eventually come to some image. This may be a symbol, such as a symbol of the planetary sojourns and interim experiences (which one cannot usually remember at first, even under hypnosis). The first literal image the subject hits will be a scene from the former lifetime. Most people go back a hundred years, some go back only ten, some three hundred, and I had one subject who had to go over a thousand years to find an image. Sometimes images will be frozen, like still pictures, or only partially visible. Sometimes one sees with a kind of tunnel vision in hypnosis. Often, the subject will not really believe he has been in hypnosis the first time, because he imagines he will feel different and strange. However, such is not the case, no matter how deeply one goes into trance.

Memories fade as one goes further into the past. It is easier to remember scenes and emotions than names or facts. Historical verification of the existence of a particular former personality is a difficult and time-consuming art, requiring the services of a genealogist.

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