Azurite Call

I had a crystal and showed many how to see in it and an even larger number to see visions according to the method of my Order.

-  Yeats, Memoirs 

My favorite dead poet showed me around a magic cottage he said was on the fourth level of the astral plane. He let me handle an azurite crystal and recommended that I should use one for scrying in the spirit vision as he and his Mystery associates did. Back in the ordinary world, I could not find an azurite crystal that matched his, though I can create one in meditation and use it as a spyglass, a laser pointer, or a transporter. I was inspired to return to the primal art of divination by rock reading and to embark on new expeditions to worlds we can find inside a stone. Here is a little more of the story, playing across many years.

Twenty years ago, in the Library of the House of Time, a place in the Real World beyond consensual hallucination, a dead poet called me to climb a steep spiral staircase I had not noticed before. When I reached the top, he transported both of us to a different locale: a pleasant country cottage. Flower beds bordered the path. From the window of his study, I could look out over changing landscapes, including the Byzantium and Renaissance Italy of his poems. He showed me secret journals and held up a marvelous deep blue crystal.
   “The azurite crystal,” he specified. He urged me to use it to open the third eye fully and see what I most needed to see. I had the impression that the crystal is not only a spyglass but a transporter. It can carry the user – if he is prepared and ready – as far as the Blue Star.
    Yeats explained that his magic cottage is on the fourth level of the astral plane. That did not sound high enough, in terms of the Theosophers' atlases of astral and causal planes. But it is the poet's place and I must assume that he knows his own address.
    After this encounter, I wanted an azurite spyglass. A gemmologist friend doused some of my blue fire by telling me that it is almost impossibe to find an azurite crystal as large as the one in Yeats's fist. I settled for a chunk of azurite stone, the size of a shooter marble but rough. The stone was held precious by both Egypt and Ireland; the Egyptians crushed it to make the blue pigment with which they colored the skin of gods and kings; the scribes who made the Book of Kells used powdered azurite to paint capital letters. This is the blue of deities and of royalty.
    If I unfocus my eyes and look at it close up, my blue stone becomes a mountain range, with a glacier or cool river of lighter blue falling down its slopes and a great open-mouthed fish in its waters. There is something of the lemniscate, the infinity sign, in the general shape. As I let my imagination loose as a leopard in this world, I see intricate knotty designs, pictographs, giant faces. A great beast with open jaws, a low brow, a great sloping muzzle. It could be a bear, or a boar, but when I see it in profile, it looks most like a lion
    I am shocked to find a face within the face. This is definitely human, and it is the face of a king. Strong and stern face, long-nosed, piercing dark eyes, slightly slanting, a short beard. Above his head, crenellations that suggest a crown. Is he the master of the Beast, or does the Beast have his head?
    I turn the stone and it shows me a second face, that might be at home on Easter Island. Another turn reveals a bird-woman, with heron legs and a beak.
    I contemplate the Beast who holds the head of a king as Yama holds the Wheel of Life on the walls of Buddhist temples. My mind turns, like the wheel, to another life and another journey.
    Before Yeats called to me from the turning stair, I made an expedition to a site in the Real World we call the Cave of the Ancestors. I found the opening I needed behind the hard spray of a waterfall. I searched rock paintings for messages. I was called by the glow of light from a standing stone to brave a mess of black adders. The stone became translucent, showing me the figure of a man who was desperate for help. Bearded and crowned, torn and bleeding, he was ready to destroy himself if his appeal to another time and another world went unheard. Something gave me the courage to drop my body and track him through the electric blue light inside the stone into his broken kingdom, to do battle with a dark power.
    Now I am holding another world between my thumb and forefinger. There are endless worlds, as Vasistha taught Rama. Any number may be found inside a stone. 

Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss

Your departure lounge for adventures in lucid dreaming

Your departure lounge for adventures in lucid dreaming is open to you anytime you are ready. It is is the twilight zone, the half-dream state on the cusp between waking and sleep, and between sleep and waking the French used to call dorveille. Frazzled by the pressures of everyday life, many of us tear through this zone without pausing to notice the magic that is there.
   Active dreamers tend to spend a lot of time in the twilight zone, even whole nights. In everyday life, the easiest way to embark on conscious dream journeys is to practice maintaining full awareness as dream images rise and fall during twilight states. The twilight zone offers optimum conditions to develop your ability to make intentional journeys beyond the physical body to learn the nature and conditions of other orders of reality.
    As you spend more time in the twilight zone, you will discover a notable increase in both your creativity and your psychic awareness. Going with the flow of spontaneous imagery in the twilight zone puts you into the stream of the creative process. It puts you in league with your creative source, mediated by mentors who appear to you in the half-dream state, or coming through cool and clear as a mountain spring. It is no accident that highly creative people — from Einstein to the romance writer and the powerboat designer I met on plane trips — are very much at home in the twilight zone.

     In the language of the sleep scientists, the twilight zone is the realm of hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences. Hypnagogic literally means “leading toward sleep”; hypnopompic means “leading away from sleep.” But these terms do not take us to the heart of the matter. You may enter the twilight zone before and after sleep, but you may also enter it wide awake, with no intention of sleeping. It is not the relationship to sleep that defines the twilight zone; it is its character as a border county. It is the junction between sleep and waking, certainly. But more than this, as Mary Watkins writes beautifully in Waking Dreams, it is “the plane of coexistence of the two worlds.” 

     In this borderland, you will find the gates to other worlds opening smoothly and fluidly — if you let them and are prepared for what may follow. When I allow myself to drift through this frontier region with no fixed agenda, I have the sense of leaning through a window or a doorway in space. Sometimes this feels like hanging out of the open hatch of an airplane. I have come to recognize this as the opening of a dreamgate. Depending on circumstances and intention, I can step forward into the next dimension or haul myself back into physical focus.

     From this departure lobby, the great explorers of the imaginal realm have used many gates and flight paths. This is why the twilight state has such vital significance in dream yoga, in shamanic training, in the Western Mystery traditions, in the “science of mirrors” of the medieval Persian philosophers, and in other schools of active spirituality.

     According to Tantric teachings, it is by learning to prolong this “intermediate state” and to operate with full awareness within it that you achieve dream mastery and, beyond this, the highest level of consciousness attainable for an embodied human. The Spandakarika of Vasagupta, which dates from the tenth century, recommends the use of breathing exercises to focus and maintain awareness as you move from waking into the twilight state. The dreamer is urged to place himself “at the junction between inhaled and exhaled breaths, at the very point where he enters into contact with energy in the pure state.” This is the entry into conscious dreaming, whose gifts (according to Tantric text) could be immense: “The Lord of necessity grants him during dreams the ends he pursues, providing that he is profoundly contemplative and places himself at the junction between waking and sleeping.”

    The aim of the practice is to achieve continuity of consciousness through sleeping, waking, and the intermediate state. When this is attained, the practitioner has ascended to the mystical Fourth State — the turiya of the Upanishads. This is the highly evolved consciousness of a person who has awakened to the reality of the Self; it now infuses his awareness at all times.

     As you become more practiced in maintaining full consciousness at the junction between sleeping and waking, you may find yourself moving beyond the flow of images to a perception of the source of those images — the dream matrix — and the stuff of which they are formed. Here is an excerpt from my journals, describing an experience of entering the dream matrix:

Into the Astral Sea

I am floating in a twilight state, shortly before dawn.

    I watch a parade of faces.

    I step forward, leaving my physical body on the bed. I have the impression of immensely tall doors. Beyond them, shining through the gape, is deep blue-green light. I move towards it.

    I find myself in the astral sea. It has substance, but this substance is lighter than foam rubber and endlessly malleable. I see temples and palaces rise and dissolve back into the matrix.

    I seek clearer understanding. I am told by a higher intelligence that I am in the “high subplanes of the astral.” The inhabitants of these realms can create their environments by thought and are aware of this ability. But they still work with the inheritance of earthly lives and memories of form.

    I slip into a more vivid scene of construction. I am amazed by the detail of this work. Is it due to the limited understanding of the astral builders — or will it give greater substance and beauty to the finished structure — or is it simply part of their pleasure?

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: "Pegasus" by Odilon Redon (1900)

What part of you is the dreamer?

Edgar Cayce suggested distinguishing dreams that reflect the needs or wishes of the body, the mind and the spirit. 

     The great medieval Persian mystic Shahabuddin Suhrawardi was one of those who knew about this through direct experience.  From his visionary journeys in the alam al-mithal, or Imaginal Realm, he brought us geographies of many cities invisible to ordinary eyes and to dreamers operating only from lower centers of the self. Suhrawardi wrote, for example, of an "earth of visions" named Hurqalya. It is an interworld, located between the sensory world and an angelic realm beyond terrestrial forms.
     Hurqalya is roofed with shining convexities, plane within plane, like crystals that interpenetrate and turn into each other. It contains the Hall of the Masters, where beings who transcend human geometries consent to project themselves into shimmering stability of form to communicate with those who succeed in ascending to their level.
     Dreaming will get you on your way to such places of initiation, rapture and transformation. But you need to start by paying attention to who is at the controls when you embark on your dream flights.
     Suhrawardi  distinguished three distinct levels of dreaming. The importance and reliability of what is experienced in dreaming depends on what part of you gets you there..

    In clear dreams or “free revelation” [kashf] your soul [ruh] goes traveling beyond the body, or you receive a visitation. Your soul travels make take you to other realities, or into the future, “With the eye of the free soul, by the imagination, a person contemplates in dreams the state of things which is yet in the hidden.” In this condition, the dreamer can have accurate foreknowledge of future events, and true clairvoyance.
    “After separation from the body, the soul knows even of the small things heard and seen of this world.” In clear dreams, the dreamer becomes a time traveler or remote viewer. This is a practice that can be developed in waking states of altered consciousness, or mukashafa. Suhrawardi calls in evidence episodes from the early history of Islam to support this discussion. Thus the Prophet scouted out the progress of a caravan en route to Mecca through mukashafa. The Caliph Umar, from afar, scouted an ambush that had been laid for his general Sariya and sent his general a telepathic warning that was received.

      Suhrawardi's second category of dreams includes "symbolic dreams" and “fancied revelations” . Now its is the lower self, nafs, rather than the soul, ruh, that is in charge of what is seen and experienced. vision is cloaked by the “fancy garments” of appetite and desire. Landscapes traveled in such dreams are “the stages of lust.” Interpretation is required to separate a message from the fancy dress.

     The third and lowest category of dream experience in Suhrawardi's hierarchy is "pure fancy”. You have fallen so deep into appetency that “sensual thoughts” rule your dream body and you have zero chance of getting out of the slums and fleshpots of the lower astral. You are “veiled from considering the hidden world.”

Suhrawardi's master work was his immense Philosophy of Illumination. It's a difficult read in translation (I have tried both English and French versions) and is still most accessible through the books of Henry Corbin, the great French scholar of mystical Islam. Suhrawardi is known as Shaikh al-Ishraq, the Master of Illumination. He melded ancient Persian, Hermetic and Platonic traditions together with mystical Islam and encouraged his students to follow a path of direct experience of the sacred. He is also known as Shaikh al-Maqtul "the Murdered Master", because in 1191 he was executed on charges of heresy by the judicial killers of Sharia Islam, who feared this wise and peaceful man over the youthful heir to the Caliphate.

Source: I have based this simplified account on Suhrawardi's teachings about dreams on a useful early translation of some of his writings: H. Wilberforce Clarke (trans) Shahabuddin Suhrawardi, A Dervish Textbook ('Awariful-Ma'arif).

Image: The Mi'rāj (ascent of the Prophet) ascribed to Sultan Muhammad, c.1540. Watercolor and ink. In British Library.

The nearness of the Moon

Just now I received a beautiful dream report from one of our teachers of Active Dreaming. She dreamed that the moon was coming close to the earth and we all could fly easily to it. There was a disabled boy in a wheelchair, and for him the Moon got so close to the earth it touched the land and the boy could roll right out to the surface of the Moon from a special hilltop. The dreamer received the wonderful feeling that anyone who is suffering can find a place of respite and magic in the realm of the Moon. After reading this account, I returned to a leisurely morning spent going over old journals. This is always a rich and absorbing exercise. I turned the page in a 2003 journal and found the drawing I have posted above. The accompanying brief dream report reads as follows:

The Nearness of the Moon
I become vividly aware that Luna is very close. It is easy to take people there for fun and adventure, and for instruction in schools that operate on this plane.

I think now of Jung's wildly - and wisely - shamanic understanding of a woman patient who said she went to live on the Moon after suffering incest and abuse as a teen.To the amazement and derision of his colleagues, Jung insisted that she really was living on the Moon. When the young Marie Louise von Franz heard Jung say this in a lecture, she confronted him. He couldn’t be serious, surely. He was. Marie-Louise suggested to Jung that what he meant to say that the patient's situation was “as if” she lived on the Moon. Jung replied, “No, not ‘as if’. She did live on the Moon.” Von Franz thought at the time that he must be crazy. [1] Later she came to understand that Jung recognized that we when we suffer intolerable conditions in this world, part of us may part company with us in order to survive - and why not in the astral realm of Luna, which ancient and indigenous peoples recognize to be thickly settled by spirits who take a close interest in human affairs?

1. Von Franz tells the story of The Woman Who Lived on the Moon in Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales (Toronto: Inner City Books, 2002) 6. She talks about the same episode in the documentary film The Wisdom of the Dream.

Drawing by RM. July 21, 2003.

Meeting Yeats in the magic cottage

Yeats in the Magic Cottage, R.M. oil crayons

I have enjoyed a lifelong relationship with my favorite dead poet, William Butler Yeats. I have always loved his poetry and have been able – since elementary school – to recite long passages from memory. I have had dreams and visions of Yeats and his circle for as long as I can remember. He was not only a marvellous poet; he was a Western magus, one of the leading figures in the Order of the Golden Dawn.

         Since I was a boy, Yeats has appeared in my dreams at night as well as my daydreams and willed journeys in consciousness. In dreams, I sometimes seem to be living in his era; at other times I seem to meet him in a separate reality. When drumming for groups, I have had had strong impressions of Yeats conducting experiments in "mutual visioning" in his own time, and have felt communication between us.
         I dreamed I received a message from Yeats inviting me to visit him at home. I was not sure where ‘home’ for Yeats might now be, but it did not appear to be in Ireland. In a subsequent vision, in the hypnagogic zone, I found myself floating above my body, up through the ceiling, and then through some kind of mesh that looked like an intricately woven fabric or netting. I was drawn up as if a traction beam had been turned on. I was under no compulsion, but I let myself rise on the intention of the one who was calling me. I had no doubt who that was. His lines were running through my head:

I shall arise and go there, and go to Innisfree…

Oh, yes, the early poem that has been quoted so often that Yeats himself got bored and irritated by it, vastly preferring the maturity and complexities of his later work. But its rhythms helped me travel, helped me swim through the subtle air. 

       I passed through many landscapes, perhaps whole worlds. They were separated by dividing partitions that were sometimes like cloud-banks, sometimes like membranes that stretched to let me through, and sometimes like woven fabric or netting. I came at last to what appeared to be a pleasant country cottage on a winding path. The flower beds were bright with colour. It seemed to me that, as I glanced around, the colours at the edge of my peripheral vision would change. Behind the cottage was a gentle river, and on the banks of the river, spires and towers that might have been those of Oxford. I began to drift along the path beside the river and saw another town beyond the first, this one quite certainly Italian; the architecture was that of the Quattrocento Florence or the Urbino that Yeats had loved and sometimes threatened to make his sanctuary from the critics and civil unrest in Ireland.

      I was thrilled that scenes the poet’s words had often conjured in my mind in lesser, drifting states of reverie were now so vividly and palpably available to explore. I hurried toward a palazzo worthy of a Medici that looked as if it has been constructed that day.

      But again there was that tug of another’s intention, and I allowed it to pull me back to the cottage. Did the cottage really have a thatched roof before, or was that detail changed while I was looking elsewhere?

      Through the door, long a hall, and there was Yeats, sitting at a broad table covered with books and papers. Through the leaded glass window at his left hand I saw the cities along the river; they changed from one to another at the blink of an eye. I was excited to see that Yeats was continuing to study and to write. I wondered whether it hampered or helped his craft that his new work would not be published on earth. He was patient with me, letting me gradually awaken to the understanding that, from his new perspective, the most important from of publication might be to inspire others, to operate as one of those ‘teachers of the thirteenth cone’ he wrote about in A Vision.

     He showed me a large blue crystal lying on his desk. He was most insistent that I should use this blue stone for creative inspiration and to open and focus the third eye of vision. This blue crystal was a place in which to see, and a connection between the two of us.

     He gave me some personal guidance and an update on certain psychic crosscurrents involving individuals and group that had been caught up in psychic battles in the past, in the time of the great rift within the Order of the Golden Dawn and in the darker times of the struggle between British magicians and the Nazi occultists. I asked Yeats where exactly we were.

     He told me very precisely: “We are on the fourth level of the astral plane”. It seemed this was a neighbourhood essentially reserved for people of creative genius, for writers and artists and musicians.

     I felt immensely privileged to have been given this tour of Yeats’s environment. It was not clear to me whether he lived in the cottage alone; I was not shown the private rooms. I did feel quite certain that this Yeats was embarked on a vast new project, though its exact nature was not yet made clear to me.