The only way out is in.
Cosmic Delusion, Fantasies about an Afterlife, Rewards beyond the Present Must Be Avoided for Those Seeking Enlightenment
One reality under many veils
People who see my temple for the first time often want one word for what I am. They see Kālī on the altar, Hermes and Apollo on the shrine, a deck of cards in a box beside the wand, and they hear Hebrew Names sounded in the rite. My personal practice as a theurgist centers on a syncretism of the Neoplatonic, Chaldean, Greek, Taoist, Hebrew, Christian, Roman, Jungian and Hindu mysteries, joined with astrology, the Tarot and the personification of the spirits of nature. Written out in one line it sounds like a great deal to carry. In practice it is simple, and The Divine Arcana Tarot shows the whole of it in one deck, with each of these streams given its card and its place.
Our School gives very straightforward instruction for working with all of it through theurgic and tantric ritual praxis. A student does not need to hold the whole list in mind to do the work.
I have always been highly syncretistic by temperament, in the sense of the perennialism of Iamblichus, the One showing itself under a multitude of veils. We are a school and a mystery tradition, and we study and honor the traditions without joining any one of them. Our central model rests on the earliest doctrines of transcendence in the mystery traditions of Iamblichean Platonism, the mysticism of Thomasine Christianity, the teachings of Krishna consciousness and the way of nature found in the Tao Te Ching. A student who comes to us as a Catholic, a Hindu, a Thelemite or a Latter-day Saint keeps what they came with, and nobody is asked to give up a god.
The name I use for this outlook is polytheistic monism. I acknowledge the gods in all their many forms, and all at once I recognize the one reality at the center of them, our Divine Infinite Being, the Absolute. I find meaningful expressions of it in all of the world's spiritual and religious narratives. Alfred North Whitehead, the American mathematician and philosopher, called his philosophy of organism pluralistic and built it around the one and the many held together in a living process. The physicist Jay Lakhani, who headed the Hindu Academy in London, taught a Hinduism of religious pluralism and of the meeting of science and spirituality. As a philosophical frame the outlook belongs to the Perennial Philosophy, and our Central Doctrine gives it in full.
I read the symbolic religions of history as tokens and garments. The names, myths and images under which a god was shown were given by human beings, knowingly or not, in answer to forces that can only be described. Reading them this way lets me love a people's gods without needing the whole of their theology. James Hillman gave me a psychology that is itself polytheistic, with the gods as the archetypes of experience. We join no polemic against the gods of any people, and we hold that all the gods are good and the causes of good.
The quarrel between religions comes from what I call the false identity of ownership. We are right and you are wrong, or we are right and so are you but not completely like us, or you are so wrong that only the gates of hell await you. All of these are human miscalculations about the Absolute Spirit as it shows itself across cultures and over time. Ownership is a political ideology, and it runs counter to the freedom between the infinite nature itself and the individual. A Catholic deep in prayer speaking to Christ is plugged into the very same truth as the Hindu deep in trance, singing the name of Kṛṣṇa and dancing in the streets of Kolkata. When you build the filter that ignores grand proclamations of ownership and looks only for the gems of eternal knowledge between human errors, all peoples can be seen worshipping the same infinite equally.
My practice is distinctly polytheistic. In my rites I often connect with the Supreme Ultimate Reality, the Absolute as our Divine Infinite Being or the Supreme Self, and I also give long and sustained devotion to particular gods. I strongly recommend this to students.
Inside the rite
In the rite there is a place where the theurgist invokes the highest form they serve. I myself often use that place to invoke Christ as a solar deity, or Hadit and Nuit from the Thelemic current. As I am of a highly syncretistic nature I could go either way, and I have often worked with Hadit and Nuit. I prefer the Hebrew Names for their sonorous effect and for their ties to deep Kabbalistic references, but the choice is up to the individual practitioner, and our books leave it open.
I honor Thelema as the herald of the age, and I have learned much from it, while our School keeps its own identity and gives its own answer to the age. I consider myself a Thelemite, though I seldom use the word and press it on no one. I take the Law of Thelema to be a true statement of the work, and I leave behind what I find irrational in Crowley and in the orders that carry his name (One Architecture, §13.2). I hold that The Book of the Law had at least part of its script divinely received. Crowley, with the science of his day, did not interpret all of it correctly, as the knowledge to do so did not yet exist, and a verse that says more than its scribe understood is to me a sign of reception.
I have a deep love for the spiritual and transcendent artwork, rituals and archetypes of the eternal spirit found in both the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches.
Father, Kṛṣṇa and the Mother
The presence I simply call "Father" is with me every day. I meditate upon it as the singular center of all things, the One, the Unity, the creative seed of the Cosmos. At times this presence still resonates with the Father of my Christian heritage. At other times, and more often now, I experience it as Kṛṣṇa, whose mystery I have joined with my devotion to the great goddess Kālī.
With the deepest reverence, I and our School address the totality of existence as our Divine Infinite Being, or, as the Chaldean Oracles express it, the Divine Parent, embracing both the male and the female principles. At its highest level the conception we hold is one of absolute, co-equal male and female, god and goddess, in perfect unity. One of the central teachings of our School is to awaken to this eternal balance of the divine polarities. In my personal practice I work frequently with feminine and goddess energies, especially through ritual.
In the personal form of this union, the pairing of Kālī and Kṛṣṇa as the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine, Kālī sits enthroned on my altar and Kṛṣṇa stands on my shrine, and the Mother and the Father stand together at the center of my daily prayer.
Out of long practice I have always warned my students that this polarity is mental, and that it must never be confused with physical sex. In an age which argues fiercely over gender and identity, a confusion between the two, once allowed to stand, especially when working within visionary and divinatory experience, is a confusion from which the work does not recover. One theurgist reads "masculine" as "male" and supposes that the knower belongs to men and that women must borrow it. Another reads "feminine" as "female" and supposes that receptivity belongs to women and that men may do without it. Both cut themselves off from half of their own instrument, as the man who will not surrender cannot receive the god, and the woman who has been told that will is not hers cannot hold the god once received.
I have also watched a question at close quarters among devotees of many traditions over many years. It is the challenge of fully accepting the grace of an all-loving, all-caring deity alongside a disciplined, progressive spiritual liberation. Devotion can offer what I have called a "golden excuse", a way to take life at leisure, to focus on the pleasure of devotion, the loving service to God and the comfort of God's grace, with much less responsibility for one's own actions. We celebrate right alongside the devotees, and we take our liberation, our transcendent duty and our spiritual discipline more seriously.
Heaven here
The Upaniṣads gave me a teaching I come back to often. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad teaches that the Self is grasped within the self by those who practice truthfulness and austerity, that the yogin beholds the reality of Brahman by the reality of the self as by a lamp, and that the Lord, subtler than the subtle and greater than the great, is seated in the heart. I have long gathered these verses into a single teaching of my own. When one finds tranquility in the self by the grace of the divine and, through meditation, sees the self in the heart, one then sees oneself as the Self, eternal, our Divine Infinite Being.
From that comes our teaching that heaven is here, realized in a transformed life. Against the idea of a reward to be collected later, for which this life is only the price, I wrote the essay my students know as Cosmic Delusion, Fantasies about an Afterlife, Rewards beyond the Present Must Be Avoided for Those Seeking Enlightenment. In it I put the matter in a saying our School has made its own, that the only way out is in.
A handful of other sayings go with me into every class. The shortest is that life is relational, and that this relationship, in its essence, is absolute Unity. Another is that your consciousness is the apex of the singularity expressing itself in the form of you. I teach that karma is the subtle current of cause and effect, the returns of past actions that come back to us as opportunities for reconciliation and integration, and that dharma is the heroic engagement with those opportunities. Karma sets the stage, and dharma directs the performance.
For reading a chart I give my students a rule from my essay Ritual Theurgy and Astrology for the Serious Aspirant. The birth chart is a ritual syllabus, with every square a signal of what must be purified, every trine an invitation to what may be invoked and every opposition a polarity to be ritually harmonized.
The moral teaching of our School is my own, thought through over many years. I hold its positions on beauty, on relationship and family, on identity and on the equity of men and women. What I want for every student is an ethic open to all and free of prejudice, respecting truth wherever it is found and making room for everyone. At the same time I want it disciplined and focused on the strengths of a theurgic life, so that each student grows in virtue and truly thrives, and every one of its positions rests on the one ground, our Divine Infinite Being.
The living world and the river
The Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World, reaches me today through my dreams, my visions and my experiences of the living Earth, and my essay Our Earth Is Alive, Imbued with Consciousness grew out of that experience.
To honor that connection I make it a personal practice, at least once a week during the warm months, to meditate along the Snake River, which winds through the valley where I live in eastern Idaho. The river is a place of great spiritual potency for me, a living center of power that nourishes my practice and my heart. I often sit directly in its waters, up to my chest, giving myself to the current while I contemplate Gaia, Śakti and the living divinity that animates this river valley.
On several full and new moons each year I have entered the river, alone and in the company of fellow seekers, to perform rites of drawing down the moon. The Greek writers told of the women of Thessaly who drew the moon down from the sky. My practice has long been to "bring the moon into the light of day", carrying into waking life the receptivity the full moon makes easy. In our teaching the Moon returns the Sun's light as a clear surface on which the Sun is shown whole.
Lineage as a living current
When people ask about lineage, they usually mean teachers, orders or initiations passed carefully through time. I value all of those, and I have received some of them. Lineage at its deepest is also a living current of wisdom that reshapes and deepens itself through every sincere seeker who carries it forward, and the current I serve has several sources.
The roots of my own lineage reach into Iamblichean Platonism, with its vision of theurgy and the ascent of the soul through direct engagement with the divine. The teaching that human beings can commune with the gods through purified practice and prayer is the foundation of most of my ritual work. Iamblichus is the teacher I have taken most personally, and beside him stand Plotinus and Proclus and the modern scholarship of Gregory Shaw. In the Western current my line runs through Israel Regardie and, through him, the papers of the Golden Dawn. When I name the protagonists of the modern mystery traditions behind our related practices, I name Eliphas Lévi, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Helena Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, William Walker Atkinson and Israel Regardie in the West, and A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, Osho Rajneesh, Ramakrishna and Shambhavi Chopra in the East.
My path also runs through Vedānta, from Sri Ramakrishna through Swami Vivekananda and his call to awaken the divine within, and through the Śākta and Śaiva teaching I met in India. Beside these stands the modern meeting of science and psyche in Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. Their work gave me tools to join the mystery of spirit with the knowledge of the mind, and to see the unconscious and its relation to the sacred in a language my engineering mind could accept.
Today these currents find their expression in the School of Our Divine Infinite Being, which gathers Iamblichean Platonism, the Vedāntic realization of the divine Self and the insights of Pauli and Jung, together with the contributions of Timothy Desmond. It is my privilege to dedicate my life to their practice and to uphold their truth in the work I do for the School, as a student of these mysteries and a witness to what they do in a life.
A word about my friends
Some of my closest friends practice goetia. Our School neither condones nor engages in any form of sorcery or goetia, and that position departs from theirs. I am deeply concerned whenever I see them practicing it, as I have found it ineffective, and I have watched it lead to damaging relationships with the true agency of the daemonic world. The goetic magician learns to meet that order as a field of threats to be warded off and of servants to be commanded, and every time the relation is practiced in that form it grows stronger in that form. My concern for my friends weighs as much with me as the ruling itself, and they remain my friends.
I love the Glitch Bottle podcast. Alexander Eth has done a lot for the occult community on his platform, giving hours of attention to texts, histories and practitioners that would otherwise reach very few people, and we are truly grateful for that work. An idea has also been popularized on his show that I find simply incompatible with Iamblichean theurgy, and I answered it in the Central Doctrine.
I deeply value the company of my Thelemic friends. I find their insights enlightening and their conversations highly enjoyable, and yet I do not count myself among Crowley's "paranoid sheep". I hold a deep appreciation for Crowley for many reasons, and I still read The Book of the Law with my own eyes and discuss its contents freely, in spite of the warning in its comment that those who do so are to be shunned by all as centers of pestilence.
The temple and the shrine
My temple today is a room set aside for the work. Many orders prescribe precise directions for the setting of the altar, and over the years I have often worked to mirror their designs in my own practice. Their arrangements are fine, and their symbolism is well considered. What I have come to hold as my altar is simpler and far more intimate.
On a cloth inscribed with the zodiac and the planetary spheres stands a statue of Kālī, enthroned at its center, for on my primary altar Kālī reigns supreme. Beside her are the Tarot deck I most often use, kept within a sacred box, and the wand, dagger, cup and pentacle, the four instruments of art. Alongside them lie stones and tokens that shift as my workings change.
Apart from the working altar I keep a shrine within the ritual space. Upon it stand statues of Kṛṣṇa, Hermes, Aphrodite, Śiva, Isis, Themis and Hecate. At its center rests a constellation of large stones, quartz crystals, tiger's eye and other charged minerals, with statues of Apollo and the Pythia given prominence as a dedication to the ancient oracle of Delphi. Around them are arranged runes, I Ching coins and other relics of divination from the oracular traditions.
Over the years I have tried many designs for the circle, from chalk and paint to cloth and stone, each reflecting the phase of work I was in. Some years ago I came upon a perfectly round red carpet at a time when I was immersed in the operations of Mars, and its form and color matched the martial current I was working under with uncanny precision. What began as a symbolic resonance became a permanent fixture of my temple. A circle, once chosen and charged, acquires memory, and this one has remained the foundation on which my rites are performed. A carpet at the center is not traditional, but it is a good deal easier on the bones, as I use the same space for yoga and meditation.
I keep two robes for my work, each very dear to me. The first is black, with the zodiac across the back, a reminder of the lunar and starry heavens and of the Ātman at the heart of the solar path. It hangs always within the ritual space, taking in the atmosphere of consecration and waiting for me when I step into the temple. The second is blood-red, marked with the image of a dragon and reserved for the operations of the divine intelligence of Mars. I obtained it in that same season of deep work with Mars, and it has since become bound to that current.
To the best of my ability I practice the central rituals of our School every day. In service to our students I often perform them live on camera, and those who follow our programs join me at the same hour and in the same intention. They see how the rites can be part of daily life, and I perform the same rite alone in my temple on the days the camera is off.
An ordinary day
Each day, without exception, I read for at least an hour. Throughout each week I follow podcasts, lectures and YouTube channels on occultism, Platonism, psychology, holistic health and the frontier sciences that explore the nature of consciousness and reality.
The rest of the day belongs largely to my company, and the breaks I take from it each month, sometimes several days at a time, go to deep study, ritual work and the School.
I also love the history of the sciences that touch our art. Kepler is one of my own heroes, as he found the laws of the planets' motion and also cast horoscopes and wrote on the influence of the sky.
The library
I live with few possessions, and the one great exception is books.
Today my library holds over 1,600 volumes, many of them rare or out of print, preserving writings that might otherwise be lost. I keep it for the benefit of our community. I regularly host researchers and sincere seekers who want to use it in person, and an online catalog is being prepared so that students can see what the collection holds.
For those willing to make the trip to my home, we do our best to include a visit to Yellowstone National Park, a hundred miles north of where I live, to see the power of nature in its geysers, steam vents and hot springs.
Food and fasting
While I hold no rigid opinions about what others should eat, I keep a clean vegetarian diet, a commitment tied to the overwhelming experience I had with the goddess Kālī in India. As part of my discipline I generally eat only once a day, and I fast during every full and new moon. Diet holds real importance for me, and it is a principle I emphasize in the grades of our School, where the care of the body, sleep, the table, training and the fast before major operations are taught before the first rite.
There are many valid and healthy ways to manage one's diet, and over the years I have explored and succeeded with many different programs. Whether you prefer a meat-based diet, follow keto or enjoy starch-rich foods, the essential point is that diet must be treated as a discipline and a sacrament. If it is neglected, the consequences for both body and spirit can be severe. There are many good resources available today to help anyone on this path, and whatever approach you choose, keep your commitment to health and harmony steady.
Fasting has one effect that matters a great deal to me. As one who regularly fasts, I have found that it sharpens my dream recall and makes the imagery of the night more luminous, as the soul, less burdened by digestion, becomes more transparent to the visions sent in sleep.
The guitar
I have long kept a healthy habit of playing the guitar, and it has carried me through thirteen different bands over the course of my life. For a while music held a serious, almost professional place in my life. Today it is a faithful companion to my personal exploration of the universal laws of experience. Music belongs to my devotion to Śiva, Dionysus and Apollo, and alongside theurgy it has been one of the strongest expressions of my art.
As a musician I understand musical explanations of resonance personally, and I still prefer that our books keep to the language of resonance and leave musical terms aside, so that the teaching stays tight.
The guitar is also one of my favorite examples of a measured intention. I want to practice the guitar, and that is a measurement. There is the guitar, there is my skill and there are my reasons for doing it, and every one of the three can be seen, set against the others and changed.
Being a father
I want to be a better father. I used that sentence in the Central Doctrine as a teaching example. The sentence holds a form and gives a life nothing to do until it is measured. I have to ask how I want to be better and by what standard, when I will act on it and where the time comes from in a week that is already full. I have to ask which child needs what kind of attention, how each of them is answering the plan I have made and how many hours a week I should give. Every one of these questions asks for a measurement, and the wish becomes a way of living when the ratios are fixed and kept.
I bring the gods into it as well. The father who wants to be better invokes Mercury, and with Mercury the question widens from how I spend time with my children to what that time does for their speech, their reasoning and their ability to think clearly. My son likes to study space, so the Mercurial question becomes how far his knowledge can be raised and how the plan can follow his growing aptitude. With Venus the same hours move toward presence, affection, interaction and bonding.
Little Suns at home
Little Suns is a teaching guide of thirty-minute lessons in the teaching of our School, and my wife Lannah and I teach it to our four young children at home. The guide carries no grade and no title. The adult path, with its reading, its grades and its work with the sky, belongs to adults who choose it.
The lessons begin with the One and its Name, the circle and the center, and the Mandala as the shape of the One and the shape of each child. They go on to the size of the Cosmos, the living Earth with Gaia as the patron of the course, the Mother and Father of All, each child as a little Sun with a little world around it, and the meaning of the shapes in the sky. When we reach the birth charts we have four children and four skies at our table, and each child learns their own Sun, Moon, rising sign and Midheaven as clues and never as labels. Later lessons give them Beauty, Justice and Truth as the three highest lights of the Good, lived every day, and the one light that shines through the many windows of the world's traditions.
In the unit called the Seven Rooms the quiet "I" visits each room of the body's house, one for each color of the rainbow, and comes home to the feet. That is the child's first form of Raja yoga, and the adult practice is for each of them to choose when grown. The stillness at the end of each lesson starts at a minute in the first weeks and grows to about four minutes by the last, so that the children learn to sit quietly a little longer each month.
I want them to know the river too. For a family in eastern Idaho the Snake River runs west and north into the Columbia, which reaches the Pacific Ocean, and our children learn that the water they see from the bank goes all the way to the sea. I want them to have the teaching on karma and dharma I give my adult students, in a child's words, so that each of them learns that what they do grows and that their part in the world is theirs to play.
Each lesson closes with a short stillness and a circle in which the children say the key idea of the lesson together, and the year ends with each child's own Sky Book and the Festival of Little Suns.