"The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental."
The Kybalion (1908)
A dream on a friend's couch
At eighteen I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, with very little money, a few books and a head full of Crowley, and for a while I slept on the couch of a friend. The city was only a few hours south of Saint Anthony by road, and for a young man raised in a small farming town it was a different world, with its bookstores, its parks and its people from every kind of background.
One late morning, as I lay resting on that couch, a vision appeared to me in a dream with very great clarity. I saw a book that I knew I needed to find. I saw its cover, the exact place where it sat on the shelf and the face of the young woman tending the counter of a bookstore, and I knew the store at once as the Golden Braid, just around the corner from the apartment where I was staying. The dream was vivid and unshakable.
Eleven dollars
I woke filled with a force beyond rational explanation, shot up and went straight to the shop, trusting the vision entirely. I had eleven dollars to my name, and on the short walk over I prayed that it would be enough to buy the book I was sure would be waiting for me.
I stepped into the store and walked without hesitation to the shelf exactly as I had seen it in my dream, and there it was, Summum: Sealed Except to the Open Mind. The price was eleven dollars. I carried it to the counter, and the young woman behind it was the woman I had seen in the dream. When I told her about the dream she smiled and waved off the tax, and I walked out of the Golden Braid with the book under my arm and no money left at all.
Something larger than my own planning was at work that morning. From then on I followed a clear dream with action.
Summum and the living mind
Summum: Sealed Except to the Open Mind was written by Summum Bonum Amen Ra, the founder of Summum, a group that began in Salt Lake City in 1975. Summum taught that its philosophy had been given to its founder by advanced beings he called the Summa Individuals, and it presented the book as the teaching that had once stood behind the mysteries of ancient Egypt.
The book opens with what it calls the Grand Principle of Creation, "Nothing and Possibility come in and out of bond infinite times in a finite moment." From that principle it sets out seven principles of its own, Psychokinesis, Correspondence, Vibration, Opposition, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender, beginning with the teaching that SUMMUM is MIND and that the universe is a mental creation. The whole of nature, in this picture, is the thinking of one infinite mind, and every stone, river, animal and person stands inside that thinking.
That picture of a universe that is mind all the way through, alive and aware in every part of nature, was a revelation to me. I came to speak of it as an Infinite Living Mind permeating all of nature, and today I know it as our Divine Infinite Being. The book taught that the creation itself is conscious, and that the same mind that moves through the stars moves through a blade of grass and through me.
The book also set its teaching beside the sciences, weaving quantum mechanics and string theory into its spiritual axioms, and it was the first spiritual book I had met that did so. The idea of a living, intelligent universe became the principle that linked the many mystical and philosophical systems I went on to study, Hermetic, shamanic, Hindu and Kabbalistic.
The Kybalion and my first discipline
Summum had grown out of an older book, The Kybalion, and it sent me straight to it. Summum regarded The Kybalion as incomplete and had rewritten its teaching, keeping its seven principles in the same order under some new names, with Mentalism become Psychokinesis and Polarity become Opposition, and with the Grand Principle set over all of them. I read the two books side by side and followed every change.
The Kybalion was published in Chicago in 1908 under the name "Three Initiates" and is usually attributed to William Walker Atkinson. It presents itself as the Hermetic teaching of ancient Egypt and Greece, handed down from Hermes Trismegistus and gathered into seven principles: Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender. The first of them gives the whole book in one line, "The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental." The All is the Substantial Reality behind the universe of time, space and change, and it cannot be known in itself. The whole universe of stars, matter, life and thought exists within the mind of the All as a creation exists in the mind of the one who imagines it.
The book's Principle of Cause and Effect reads, "Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law."
The Kybalion became one of the most influential works of my entire early spiritual life, and much of my first disciplined meditation drew on its principles. Until then my practice had been reading, the Tarot and my first experiments with ritual. I would take one principle, sit with it in the quiet and hold it in my mind, and when the mind wandered I brought it back to the words, as many times as it took.
I learned each principle in the words of the book itself. The principle of Vibration reads, "Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates." The principle of Rhythm reads, "Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates." I read these lines so many times that I came to know them by heart, and I could call up any one of them through the day and hold it in my mind on a bus, at work or walking down the street.
On the first days I could keep a principle in mind for only a few breaths. With practice I could keep it for many minutes.
The principle of Correspondence went deepest, "As above, so below; as below, so above." It teaches that the order of the heavens and the order of a human life are one order seen at two scales, and that what is learned in one can be read in the other. It is the old Hermetic teaching of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the teaching the Emerald Tablet of Hermes gave to the alchemists of the Middle Ages in its famous line that what is below is like what is above, and I have worked with it ever since. Today I teach that each of us is a microcosm within the macrocosmic order of the Cosmos, a small cosmos in the image of the great one.
Rhythm and Polarity became my companions in daily life. When things went badly, and in those years with no money they often did, I reminded myself that every swing of the pendulum has its return, and that the opposite of a hard state already lives inside it as its other pole. The book's Principle of Polarity says it in full: "Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled." These two principles were my first practice of changing my state by changing where I held my mind.
The book calls that practice Mental Transmutation, and it gives a whole chapter to it. The old alchemists, it says, spoke of turning lead into gold, but the true Hermetic art is the changing of mental states, forms and conditions, one into another, by the trained will. A state of fear can be met by polarizing the mind toward its opposite pole of courage, and a state of gloom by holding the mind on the pole of cheer, until the swing of the pendulum carries it over. I practiced this in the moods of my own days.
The book applies its Principle of Vibration to the mind itself. "Every thought, emotion or mental state has its corresponding rate and mode of vibration," it says, and "by an effort of the will" these states "may be reproduced, just as a musical tone may be reproduced by causing an instrument to vibrate at a certain rate." I loved that image of a state of soul as a tone that can be sounded again. The book's promise of "perfect control" over the mind belongs to the New Thought of its day, and we leave it there, but the image of a mood or a state as a note on an instrument has stayed in our teaching as the image of attunement.
The Principle of Gender teaches that everything has its masculine and its feminine principle, on every plane, and the book is careful to separate this mental gender from physical sex. The masculine principle is the will, the attention and the effort held, and the feminine is the receptive depth that brings forth image and revelation, both present in every human being of either sex. Our School takes its name for mental gender from this teaching.
Its chapter on cause and effect gave me a picture of the wise that I have kept: "The wise ones serve on the higher, but rule on the lower. They obey the laws coming from above them, but on their own plane, and those below them they rule and give orders." The little book has stayed in my teaching ever since, and it stands in our Central Doctrine as the witness of modern Hermeticism.
William Walker Atkinson
Atkinson stayed with me too. He was an American lawyer and writer, born in 1862, who became one of the leading voices of the New Thought movement in Chicago, with its teaching that the mind shapes the life, and he died in 1932. A few years after I first read The Kybalion, during my months at the massage college, I discovered to my great surprise that the same man had written widely on Eastern mysticism and yogic philosophy, under the name Yogi Ramacharaka.
Under that name he wrote books on Hatha Yoga and on the breath, the Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy, and A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga, monthly lessons on the training of the mind and the will. Over the decade that followed I read every available text by him, the New Thought books, the yogic books and the rest. His Raja Yoga lessons are among the sources our School draws on today, and he is one of the Western teachers I still name when I speak of where our School comes from.
The other books on the shelf
While I was absorbing Summum I gathered other works that expanded my sense of spiritual possibility. I read them in the same years, often several at once.
Liber Aleph by Aleister Crowley is subtitled The Book of Wisdom or Folly. It is a book of short letters of counsel that Crowley wrote around 1918 to his magical son, Charles Stansfeld Jones, and it was published only in 1962, long after Crowley's death. It gave me a gentler and more intimate Crowley than the one I had met in the Confessions, a teacher writing a page or two at a time to one student on the will, on love, on the training of the mind and on the conduct of a magical life.
David St. Clair's Instant ESP I worked through as a practical manual. It treats the psychic faculty as something a person can train, with exercises for intuition and for paying attention to the hunches most people dismiss, and I did the exercises as the book set them out, one after another.
Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner was my first real look at a nature-centered practice that one person could keep alone. Cunningham set out the turning Wheel of the Year with its eight seasonal festivals, the rites of the full moon, the casting of a circle, the tools and the simple altar, and he wrote for the practitioner who had no coven and no teacher.
At eighteen, at an airport, devotees of the Hare Krishna movement handed me their literature. It was my first meeting with the Vaiṣṇava texts, the scriptures of the devotees of Viṣṇu and of Kṛṣṇa, and soon after I bought a copy of the Bhagavad Gītā. The devotees belonged to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, founded in New York in 1966 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, and in those years they were a familiar sight in airports and on city streets in their saffron and white robes, chanting the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra and handing their books to anyone who would stop. I stopped, and I took the books home and read them. The Gītā is a dialogue of seven hundred verses within the great Indian epic, the Mahābhārata, spoken on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra between the warrior prince Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa, who serves as his charioteer and reveals himself as God.
Arjuna sees his teachers and kinsmen in the opposing army, lays down his bow and will not fight. Kṛṣṇa answers him that the soul is never born and never dies, that a person has a right to the work set before him but never to its fruits, and that action done as an offering binds no one. He teaches him the yoga of action done without attachment to its fruits, the yoga of knowledge and the yoga of devotion, and in the eleventh chapter he shows Arjuna his universal form, the whole of creation present in one body. I read it slowly and returned to it often.
Osho at the Pyramid
I first learned of Osho at Summum, where they were studying him at the time. Osho was an Indian teacher, born Chandra Mohan Jain in 1931, a former professor of philosophy who drew seekers from all over the world. Nearly all of his many books are his spoken discourses, transcribed and edited, on meditation, on love, on the mystics of every tradition and on the great scriptures of the East and the West. He spoke on the hundred and twelve meditations of the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, on Tilopa's song of Mahāmudrā, on Chuang Tzu, on the Gospel of Thomas, on Kabir and on the Zen masters, and in each of them he turned the old text toward the person sitting in front of him.
I went on to read almost all of his work. My practice of meditation was greatly influenced by his writings. On the front cover of one of the first of his books I bought were the words "Meditation is an Explosion and a Discovery", and I remember them perfectly to this day. That line is what really got me interested in meditation.
From then on I meditated as much as I possibly could every day. When I was able I went out into the woods and up mountainsides just for the experience of meditating there, sitting among the trees or on a ledge with the valley below. I also practiced many of his meditations over the years.
One saying of his I often think about during meditation and theurgy, that man has no center separate from the whole. If Osho had a time machine, he could have gone back and given Plato that beautifully simple answer, though Osho, admittedly, was not much of a Plato admirer in his lifetime. Meditation has been a fast companion to my theurgy ever since, and it is one of the reasons I became so interested in Raja Kundalini.
Robert Anton Wilson and the Khabs
For one particular period in my early twenties I read all of Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson was an American writer, born in 1932, who wrote novels and books of nonfiction on Crowley, on the psychology of Timothy Leary, on quantum physics, on secret societies and on what he called reality tunnels, the private maps of the world that each person mistakes for the world itself. His books moved freely between the occult, psychology and physics, often in the same chapter. He took from Alfred Korzybski the rule that the map is not the territory, and from Leary a model of the mind as a series of circuits switched on one after another. He also asked his readers to try on one belief system after another as an experiment, to see how each one changed the world they lived in.
In his writings I first met a verse from Crowley's Book of the Law, "The Khabs is in the Khu, not the Khu in the Khabs." The two words are Egyptian. The khabs is the star, and the khu is the shining body of the spirit, and the verse insists on the order, the star held within its shining vehicle and not the vehicle within the star.
I did not understand it, and I could not let it go. The verse has stayed with me ever since, and in our Central Doctrine I gave it my own reading.
Initiation, Sue and the lawns
I went to the Pyramid, progressed through all of Summum's required programs and was formally initiated into the order, and I attended every event I could. This was my first true exposure to the mysteries of transmutation and to the talismanic power of concentrated thought, the teaching that a mind held steadily on an intention can change the matter it is held over, and that a properly charged object carries that intention after the meditation is done.
During this time I formed a close relationship with Sue, the principal teacher who guided my initiation. She took me through the programs to the initiation itself.
I had no money to give back, so I gave what I had, which was work. Out of gratitude I worked on the Pyramid grounds, mowing the lawns, raking leaves and doing whatever needed doing. The work also gave me precious time with the other instructors, between chores and after them.
Through these years I learned the true discipline of directed thought, the ability to connect consciously with the mind of nature and the importance of meditation as the gateway to changing oneself. From eighteen to twenty-two I spent every hour I could at the Summum Pyramid. It permanently changed the depth and the focus of my spiritual life. I still keep in touch with members of the Summum community today, and I count those friendships as living links in my path.
The Pyramid and the Nectar
Summum had built a two-story pyramid in 1979, right in the center of Salt Lake City, in the shape that Egypt made sacred, oriented to true north and raised on the proportions of sacred geometry. It was an architectural symbol of cosmic resonance, and the grounds I tended lay all around it.
Inside the Pyramid stood a massive wine vat. The adepts of the order would meditate around it for days and sometimes for weeks, infusing the fermenting wine with precise vibratory states of mind and setting them into it through sustained ritual focus. These wines were the Nectar Publications, each one charged with the meditations that had been held over it. When a bottle was opened, sugar crystals shaped like tiny pyramids lay under the cork, an astonishing signature of the energy at work in the wine.
A single sip of the Nectar could launch the mind into an altered state. The effect was comparable to microdosing psychoactive mushrooms, yet cleaner, and it carried a powerful symbolic charge into the meditation that followed. My mind went quiet and open at the same moment, and I went deeper and further in meditation than I could reach without it.
I took the Nectar in that temple among adepts who had spent weeks holding the states it carried, and I received those states in my own mind. The Nectar taught me directly that a held state of mind can be placed in matter and received by another person who takes that matter in. Summum organized its whole practice around holding such states for long periods, and I tasted the result of that holding for myself.
Divination as a whole
In those years my interest broadened from the Tarot to divination as a whole. I studied dozens of systems, including the I Ching, rune stones, geomancy and other oracular methods, always looking for the common language beneath their surfaces.
The I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, is one of the oldest books of divination in the world, its core going back to the Zhou dynasty three thousand years ago, with the commentaries called the Ten Wings added by the Confucian scholars after it. It gave me its sixty-four hexagrams, each a figure of six lines, broken or unbroken, with its name, its judgment and its texts for the lines that are changing. A question is asked, three coins are thrown six times, and the figure is built from the bottom line upward, and where lines are changing a second hexagram grows out of the first and shows where the situation is moving.
The runes gave me the old Germanic alphabet, the twenty-four letters of the Elder Futhark in their three families of eight, each letter a name, a sound and a power, such as Fehu for cattle and wealth and Sowilo for the sun. In the Norse poem Hávamál the god Odin hangs nine nights on the world tree, wounded by his own spear, given to himself, and at the end of the ninth night he looks down and takes up the runes. The letters came to their users as a gift won by sacrifice, and each one was a power as well as a sound. I cast them and drew them from a bag, and I learned to read them as I read the cards, one at a time and then together as a picture.
Geomancy came into Europe from the Arabic world in the twelfth century, where it was called ʿilm al-raml, the science of the sand, as its diviners struck their marks in sand or earth. It gave me sixteen figures made from those marks, each built from four lines of single and double points, with its planet and its sign. The diviner makes four rows of marks at random while holding the question, counts them off into the four Mothers, and from them draws the Daughters, the Nieces, the two Witnesses and the Judge, so that the whole answer is generated from that first moment of making the marks. Israel Regardie set out the art in his own short guide to geomantic divination. Runes and I Ching coins are in my temple to this day.
Since those formative years I have labored diligently to master the art and practice of the Tarot and also the philosophy of divination in its most universal form, how it appears across cultures, what place it has held in history and how it serves as a means of contact with the great archetypal forces that shape our lives.