When I was young I had a dream that I was flying around collecting gold diamonds on the moon. I woke up and immediately began searching my room frantically for the bag I’d been collecting them in all night, but eventually disappointment set in and I accepted that they were mine only in the dream. My dreams have always been of importance to me but my interest has ebbed, flowed, and outright changed over the years.
I remember a few other childhood dreams, but for the most part I lost focus on them as the physical world gained an ever increasing grasp on my awareness.
On that first tour overseas, we had an NBC sergeant (nuclear biological & chemical[1]) with us who we’ll just call AB. He was a bit of an odd duck, but loyal and kind and just an all around good person. Long story short, Sgt AB told me many stories about growing up as he did, and ultimately it led to his telling me about astral projection, the crystal castle, guardian energies and all kinds of stuff I never expected I’d be learning in the army. I had experienced psilocybin once before going into the service, and maybe that helped prime my mind for it, or maybe I just wanted to experience something outside of my current circumstances, but for whatever reason I was open to the idea that there could be something to what he was telling me.
I began the practice of imagining it every night when I’d lay down. I tried a few things, but gave up trying before the tour was over.
After the second tour, I got out and went nuts liked I mentioned in The Rucker I think. Let’s dovetail into that part actually next.
I always liked drinking, and probably always had an addictive personality if that’s really a thing. But by the end of my second tour I felt disillusioned. I was filled with anger towards a system I felt had not been honest with us, and for having gone along with it all I had lots of self hate and other issues - and to top it off, now I didn’t like being home in America as much as I liked sleeping in the dirt. I coped with alcohol for the few months it took for me to ETS out of the army. Then I moved to Lawrence, Kansas and went to the University of Kansas, for my art degree.
I stayed steady with the drinking, but added in lots of weed to keep my mind limber. I tried lots of other drugs, some for longer stints than others, but I was fortunate that I always managed to leave things alone when I could see that I was losing control of myself in the grander sense.
These are a few works contemporary to this time period. I had to face and embrace a lot of darkness to find the light.
The last of all things I tried, and I think there’s a reason for it, was the hallucinogenic phase. I had several experiences with a few types of hallucinogens that I guess just loosened my attachment to the frameworks of reality as I “knew” it. I don’t know, and it’s definitely not the point as I’m not advocating drug use as a spiritual tool, I just also can’t say it doesn’t have its place. The reason I think hallucinogens were my last stop as I said above, was that hallucinogenic experiences have been linked in recent studies to breaking of PTSD and addiction cycles, and in my personal experience that has been the case. These experiences, I do think helped crack open my mind; they trained me to become familiar and comfortable with the sense of reality fracturing and crumbling out from under me. They helped loosen my commitment to preconceived cognitive conditions. They taught me to face cognitive dissonance without letting panic take over.
Anyway, flash forward to that degree in electrical engineering. I worked full time and went to school on my lunch breaks or at night. I made up work hours until late most nights, woo woo woo did that whole thing. An associates degree took me like eight years, and that was including the transfer credits from my time at KU. I couldn’t have done it any other way, institutional academia just is not my scene; so I stuck with small doses over a long period, I learned some stuff, and ultimately I was happy to put academia behind me. As much as it wasn’t my cup of tea, it did do one good thing for me; it got me used to demanding more from my brain.
A few months after I finished, my mind felt unhappy about staying idle. I had that dream again - remember that one where I flew around collecting gold diamonds in outer space?
While I did stop tracking what books I was reading, I maintained a list for quite a while.
I began reading. For a while there I’d sometimes be reading two or three books in a month. AB’s words came back to me and I read about astral projection. I practiced all I could do and read as much as I could stand to read about astral projection. I read about and practiced self-hypnosis. I thought, if the subconscious mind is more powerful for manifestation and all this, I should lucid dream so I can operate consciously within the subconscious and choose to raise my vibration and eject in to the astral! …but it seemed as though the universe didn’t want me to escape my body. Maybe my energies weren’t evolved enough to handle the trip? Perhaps my karma was shitty and my chakras weren’t aligned? If that was the case it would certainly mean the containment of my Kundalini energy! Hahaha! Whatever the reason, lucid dreaming was not looking like a viable option. I would continue trying over the years, but at the time of writing, I’ve had only a few lucid dreams - and when I do, I can’t resist the urge to fly.
When I couldn’t lucid dream, I sought to become more aware of my day to day life; I hoped in this way I could bring the habit of awareness into my dream life. In this way, the desire for astral projection had brought me to the desire to lucid dream, and the desire to dream lead me to mindfulness, which lead me to buddhism, which I followed backwards to find Krishna and Arjuna’s discourse on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the Gita…It had long since become clear that my new path was going to lead me through texts of myriad backgrounds and content.
I read the original books of chaos and some more that came after. I studied the works of the Theosophical Society, particularly C.W. Leadbeater and H.P. Blavatsky. I read about the pagan ways and learned a little Nordic lore. I spent some considerable time studying the ways and histories of the Red Road. I just couldn’t get enough, and reading about spirituality appealed to me so much more than just trying to be spiritual. In that regard, for all my reading, I had learned nothing.
I had a revival of interest in dreaming after I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Tao and zen literature spoke deeply to the silence within me. There were times when I felt betrayed by Nietzsche’s brutality, but in those same moments I had to admit I could not find fault with his words so much as I found that I wanted to do so. Perhaps I was still holding onto beliefs, now facing the exciting buzz of cognitive dissonance. As with all these works, further open I cracked.
Hours, I spent listening to Eckhart Tolle, Mooji Baba, Sadhguru, Osho, Alan Watts and others still. In the beginning I was writing a list of the books I needed to read, then dating them when I’d finished.
Every time I read something new it became my new reality. It wasn’t until I’d been doing this for two years that I saw the real value of this exercise. The greatest treasure to gain from traversing wildly between ideologies is not what you pick up, but learning how to put things down. Yes, you pick up valuable pieces from each of them, but putting down an ideology that you’ve allowed to fuse with your core being, can be difficult. Once you learn how to change belief systems like clothes, you are free to abandon them all together, or pick and choose as you see fit.
Somewhere in all this, I decided there was no more reading to be done. The mission was no long to project, nor to lucid dream. My meditation practice had become strong (it isn’t so much so lately though if I’m being honest). The interest in astral projection had guided me to another path, the quest for my true self. The quest to end suffering (turns out it looks like it ends when you accept that it is inevitable…so as far as I’ve been able to determine, it ends when you accept that it is unending - if you can get on board with that…so, it doesn’t end, it just stops bothering you).
For me this has come by opening my awareness. I can be aware of my own suffering, as well as the rest of the world around me, all at once. This, without attachment to outcome, is the closest I could come to describing the sense right now. I think that belief is the death of knowledge, that nothing is real, and that everything is possible…but if I wrote this next week who knows what I’d say.
I still study these works and hold them against my reality, I still do sigil work and other fun forms of manifestation and divination like Law of Attraction, numerology, rune stones and others. The magick community is a place to discuss the magick of spirituality in any form it takes, whether it’s Tarot cards or the Gospel of Thomas, or anything else. What’s magic to you?
[1]The NBC guy is the guy put in charge of maintaining safety equipment for such attacks and for keeping us trained on how to use them. We were not equipped to employ NBC agents.