“Induced Coincidence”

 

 

An episode reported by Gareth Knight, former student of Dion Fortune and leading figure in the Society of the Inner Light. It involves an exchange between an inner guide identified as David Carstairs (first contacted by DF in 1922) and Soror A., a student of Gareth Knight, in 1996.

In a communication in March 1996, Carstairs explains the mechanism by which a 1920s postcard of Ypres fell into the hands of Soror A unexpectedly when she was working on psychic history related to the battle of the Somme in the Great War. The postcard subsequently provided a strong “talismanic link powerfully charged with a sense of [the Master’s] presence’. It was later used in ritual. Carstairs explained that synchronicities are useful for “concentrating the mind”. 

The postcard incident was not the effect of direct control of the physical from the Inner planes. Rather, it was a case of the merging of consciousness in mutual concentration setting up a “kind of energized imprint which straddles the planes”. This generates “a kind of cosmic magnet” drawing in relevant forces, some of which can precipitate synchronicities or “induced coincidences”.. 

The process is not guaranteed to work every time. Carstairs likened it sending a message in a bottle and hoping that it will somehow reach its destination. He suggested it was possible that the card had been wending its way to the student ever since it was first purchased. Through a series of mailings and hand-to-hand transactions, the destiny of both card and final recipient were influenced retrospectively by the Master. 

Time on the Inner planes is not to be linear, the time constraints we experience in the tick-tock world make such an incident look anomalous when in deeper reality it is not. We might see manipulation of the past but the past is not past in the greater perspective. .

 

-     Source: Gareth Knight in Don Fortune and Gareth Knight, An Introduction to Ritual Magic (Loughborough: Thoth, 1997), p. 116

Where Shamans Use Paintings As Prostheses of Gods

"Korean shamans, called mansin, hang bright portraits of the gods they serve over the altars in their personal shrines. These paintings become sites of daily devotion as gods, operating through the portraits, send the mansin inspiration in order to divine, exorcise, heal, and open their clients’ paths to good fortune....

"The paintings must accurately represent the gods who are claiming a particular initiate. Unless they are appropriately portrayed, they will not 'come in', inhabit the shine, and provide a steady flow of inspiration for the mansin’s work...When ordering a painting, the initiate must properly identify the signifying characteristics of the deity she has seen in a dream or vision and have them replicated in the painted image she commissions for her shrine....

"The eyes meet the viewer’s gaze with a bold and penetrating stare, which some find unnerving. A mansin manifesting an imperious god might similarly lock eyes with a client, claiming an unsettling engagement in a place where socially appropriate eye contact is usually oblique...

"Both paintings and mansin bodies may be considered prostheses of otherwise invisible gods whose favor may vary over time."

Source: Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, and Yul Soo Yoon, "God Pictures in Action: Korean Shaman Paintings and the Work They Do" in Ars Orientalis vol. 50 (2020) pp. 157-176.

Illustration: Tiger gods in Museum of Shamanism, Seoul

Eldorado Kite

 

The great bird lifts from my hand

drawn to the sun

on your breath.

I tug on the string,

trying to drag it down,

forgetting what you taught me:

the falcon longs for the wrist of the King.

 

This strange wind is too strong for me.

I am rising with the bird

above all that is fenced in,

urgent to cut the cord.

My tame self panics.

It wants to hide among limits and shadows

where air does not move like this,

in animate waves of intent.

 

Something falls like a worn-out coat

and your breath blows me as a sail

across oceans of sky

to my home in your heart

where falcon and falconer are one.

- This poem, written for a dying friend in Eldorado, New Mexico, is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robnert Moss. Publsihedn byExcelsuo Editions/State University of New York Press.

A Neuroscientist Praises the Double

 

French neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz is worth reading on the theme of the double and its role in the origin and functioning of consciousness. He bows to the literature of the doppelganger, while acknowledging that neurobiology offers no adequate theory. Our ability to project a double, he says, is central to our ability to plan and the way we dream:

"I see in our ability to construct a virtual body, a double of ourselves the basis for our capacity to deliberate, that is to create virtual scenarios that involve first us, then perhaps others. This mechanism is probably at the root of our ability to change our point of view, to look at the world and especially ourselves from a variety of perspectives. …

"We have two bodies, the physical body and the virtual body. The virtual body ...is the one we perceive when dreaming. It, too, has a phenomenal reality.

"The duality is part of the foundation of consciousness. I think that consciousness appeared in humans at the same time as the two bodies. Consciousness is the act of the 'second me' watching the first one."

- Alain Berthoz. Emotion and reason: the cognitive science of decision making. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006 pp.207-8

Drawing: "Autoscopy" by Robert Moss

On Swan Wings

 

The swan is a symbol of the soul in Indian literature, and a ride for Brahma the creator. In dreams, we read in the Upanishads, the soul flies back and forth from the nest of the body like a "lone swan". Paramahamsa, "Supreme Swan", is a title given to enlightened spiritual teachers. 

The swan features in moving scenes of soul remembering - recollecting other lives and connections with other members of our soul family. When they come at the right time, such memories return (says the poet Kalidasa) like flights of migrating swans. 

There is a beautiful encounter in the Bhagavata Purana between a king who has been reborn as a woman and a friend from his previous life. The friend says, "Don't you remember your old friend? You and I, my dear, were two swans who lived together in the lake of the mind, until you left me to wander on earth. I created the illusion that made you think you were a man or a woman. Our true nature is as two swans."

Photo by Romy Needham

The Cave of the Dreaming God

 

A stranger gave us directions

at the mouth of the subway.

My friend and I heard him

but we had trouble with his accent

and disagreed about what he said.

The guitar man busking quarters heard

but claimed he had been there already.

Everyone else was on cellphones

or lost in headphone land.

 

"Get down, go down, find the Gatekeeper

who will ask you for the correct time.

There's only one right answer,

here or anywhere. Don't screw this up.

Then go west of certainty, north of comfort.

Take passage over the Jell-O sea.

Study, talk politely to demons.

and you may know the dreams of Time."

 

So we went down the tunnel and told the ticket man

who bared his teeth, "The only time is now."

He growled, but let us into ferry-land

where we took the Western Line

and sailed off the maps to the slow motion sea

that moves like tree sap dreaming of amber.

 

We came at last to the island where Chronos

lies bound in sleep. It took us only thirty years

of constant study and conversation with spirits

- but noone is counting here - to win entry

to the Cave of the Dreaming God.

 

In the slipstream of Time that is no time

possible histories flicker off and on;

ifs and might-have beens and might-bes,

memories of the future, roads not taken

in one world but followed somewhere else.

 

We learned not to look too long

at what we prefer not to see -

goosestepping Nazis in London,

plump Protestant ayatollahs ruling Hollywood,

Earth infested by bog-men and hungry ghosts

or ruled by insectoid dynasties from a hungry star.

To look here is to pluck from the quantum soup

a strand that becomes a species thought

and may become an event track in the serial world.

 

"Jus' like pickin a guitar" said the busker

when we came up from the underground.

So we'll keep the Cave of the Dreaming God

well-hidden, like a fleck of pyrite in a drop of amber

on the fob of a dead poet’s pocket watch.

- Robert Moss

 

An 18th century rabbi describes the night wanderings of the dream soul

 

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, playwright, Kabbalist and frequent astral traveler (1707-1746), also known as Ramchal, gives one of the clearest expositions in Western tradition on dreaming as soul experience. In his book Derech Hashem (The Way of God) he explains that "when we sleep, most of what happens is that our bodies rest and our brains are given the chance to sort out the thoughts of our day. However, something else occurs at the same time. The higher parts of our souls become slightly detached from our bodies. (This is why our first prayer upon awakening in the morning is thanking God for returning our souls to us (modeh ani).
    "Only the lowest part of our souls – the 'animal soul' all living creatures possess – stays with us overnight.) Once our souls depart our bodies, they are able to roam the spiritual planes of existence where they are most at home. While there, they may interact with other spiritual entities, such as angels, and may hear (or overhear) some of what the future holds in store for man." [Derech Hashem 3.1.6]
     While anthropologists following the “Swedish school” of Ernst Arbman have tracked the wanderings of the free soul, Luzzatto spoke of the freed soul, relased from the body and the lower self. In his conception in dreams "the portions of the soul from ruach (Spirit) and above them rise and sever themselves from the body. Only one portion, the nefesh, remains with the lower [animal] soul." The freed portions of the soul can then move about in the spiritual realm wherever they are allowed. They can interact and associate with such spiritual beings as the angels who oversee natural phenomena, some angels associated with prophecy, and shedim [demons].  
    While the anthropologists have been happy to use the word “image” (in the sense of the Greek eidolon rather than a representation) as a synonym for free soul, for the rabbi, the image is what the human imagination creates in an effort to bring down soul experiences on a higher level into the memory and understanding of the lower self.  What is learned by the higher soul descends to the animal soul through the imagination, which may confuse the content. So any dream apart from some special forms of prophecy is likely to contain “worthless information” as well as precious gifts.
    Once our souls depart our bodies, they are able to roam the spiritual planes of existence where they are most at home. While there, they may interact with other spiritual entities, such as angels, and may hear (or overhear) some of what the future holds in store for man. The message may be actual prophecy, or simply an omen – depending upon the level of being which communicates with the soul. That information might in turn trickle down into our consciousness and work their way into our dreams.

Luzzatto was variously celebrated as the leader of a kabbalistic-messianic confraternity in Padua, condemned as a deviant threat by rabbis in Venice and central and eastern Europe, and accepted by Portuguese Jews when he moved to Amsterdam, where they had found sanctuary. He faced recurring perseciution by conservative rabbis who arranged the destructionof his papers and forebade him to practice kabbalah. 
    Controversy started swirling around him early when, at age twenty – beardless and unmarried -  he claimed to have visions of a magid. The magid  or “speaker” is a spitritual teacher who may be an angel, a prophet or a divinely inspired individual, living or deceased. Luzzatto had no doubt he was in  contact with the angelic realms. These visions encouraged messianic aspirations and fed the idea that Luzzatto and his close associate Moshe Valle might be reincarnations of great figures from Jewish history. They formed a Holy Society of young enthusaists at the University pf Padua to discuss these revelations. This bred suspicion that they were reviving the kind of messianic movement that had roiled Jewish communities across Europe in the previous century under the leadership of Shabat Zvi, a self-proclaimed messiah who utmately betrayed his followers by converting to Islam under threat from the Ottoman Sultan.
    Moshe Valle’s mystical diary, discovered by Isaiah Tishby in the vaults of the British Museum, was recorded in the margins of his Bible commentaries. Entries often started with recorded dreams.

 

See Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, The Way of God trans. and ed. Aryeh Kaplan. Jerusalem and New York: Feldheim Publishers. Sixth edition, 1998. 

Illustration: Text-generated picture by RM with AI of the beardless 20-year-old Luzzatto having a vision of a magid in the Jewish ghetto of Padua.