OCCULT EXPERIMENTS

IN THE HOME

OCCULT EXPERIMENTS

IN THE HOME

Personal explorations

of magick and the paranormal

Duncan Barford

First published in 2010 by
Aeon Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT

The right of Duncan Barford to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright
Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-1-90465-836-8

Typeset by Vikatan Publishing Solutions (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed in Great Britain

www.aeonbooks.co.uk

Dedicated to Alan Chapman.

Two mages with a lot of welly,

But which one’s Dee and which one’s Kelley?

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE
My sister wore our granddad’s ghost

CHAPTER TWO
A nice place to meet dead people

CHAPTER THREE
I’m the urban shaman

CHAPTER FOUR
The absolute truth

CHAPTER FIVE
Dream yourself awake

REFERENCES 113

INDEX

119

vii

INTRODUCTION

If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter
where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and
demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a
circle, beginning anywhere.

(Charles Fort, 1997: chapter 1).

The book you are holding is rooted in personal experiences.
Indeed, the first essay in the collection aims to show how scien-
tific explanation of subjective paranormal experience will often
miss the point and end up destroying what it set out to define.

But if science destroys the paranormal, should we not won-

der whether the paranormal was really there in the first place?

This is a noble and rational point of view. However, to adopt

it assumes that the faeries at the bottom of our garden possess
(or ought to) some quantifiable attribute that we can seize hold
of (or not) and thus state definitively whether the faeries are
there.

The view put forward in this book is that faeries are far sub-

tler and cleverer.

In most instances, a paranormal event cannot be cleanly

separated from its effects on the witness, or from his or her
beliefs. The “event” may indeed be disproved (or at least
shown to be not what it appeared), yet the effects will continue

I N T R O D U C T I O N

to reverberate within the witness’s life, and the beliefs or
misconceptions that predisposed him or her to the experience
may also persist. Put more simply: it is theories that are proved
or disproved, whereas experiences themselves are simply what
they are. There is no “seems” in an experience, paranormal or
otherwise. I can only experience seeing a ghost; I can’t experi-
ence “seeming” to see one.

None of this is new—of course—and philosophers have

investigated these issues more rigorously than will be my aim

but what I hope is original about this book (its unique selling
point, if you like) is its use of the tradition of magick to inform
the exploration of the paranormal.

I’ve followed the convention of appending a “k” to the word

in order to distinguish this philosophical tradition (which,
in the West, can be traced back to the ideas of the Ancient
Greeks—see Goodrick-Clarke [2008]) from stage magic and
from popular notions of impossible super powers.

No doubt my disparagement of “science” at the beginning

has halved my prospective audience, and now the mention of
magick has probably halved it again. Never mind. This is only
due to the common misperception of magick as “trickery”,
“superstition”, or “devil worship”.

As I aim to show, magick is a more insightful and useful

tool than is commonly supposed. The discipline of magick is
alive and well in the 21st century and there are more magicians
active in the community than many readers might suppose.
Contemporary magick is the discipline of using belief to inves-
tigate or construct realities; or, as one recent expert in the field
has put it: “Magick is the art of experiencing truth” (Chapman,
2007, 14).

Phenomenology and Pragmatism are two schools of philosophy that can

come to the aid of a magician when he or she is called upon to defend their
world-view.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

If science destroys the paranormal, then magick—on the

other hand—is a tool for creating it. In the essays that follow
I will discuss instances in which consciously practised tech-
niques give rise to paranormal experiences. I will also discuss
instances in which unconscious practice of magick may have
produced the same result.

Using magick as a tool for exploring the paranormal may

sound at first like adding silt to already muddied waters, or
shovelling gullibility onto a waiting pile of credulity. But mag-
ick, it should be remembered, entails conscious use of belief.
For instance, in the second essay I describe how the magical
technique of “remote viewing” was used to retrieve informa-
tion about the scene of a possible haunting. To gain the infor-
mation it was necessary to go through the motions of believing
that remote viewing actually works. Yet to make use of that
information and to assume that the information gained is real
are two different things. The discipline of magick enables us to
separate and distinguish between them. In short, it is a consid-
eration of the meaning of a paranormal experience that often
casts more significant light on what happened than attempt-
ing to decide simply whether an experience was real, because
(from the subjective perspective, at least) “real” has very little
meaning.

The essays that follow were not written to a rigid plan, but

following Fort’s suggestion at the head of this introduction
they represent five arbitrary starting-points around the circum-
ference of a single circle.

The first essay discusses some first-hand experiences of the

paranormal from my early life; the second explores in depth
the experience of a close friend, who even now (several years
later) is still affected by the events described; the third exam-
ines the relationship between space, time, and consciousness;
the topic of the fourth is religion and spiritual experience;
and the final essay explores naturally-arising altered states of

xii

I N T R O D U C T I O N

consciousness, such as lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences,
and astral projection.

Fort’s “circle”, his “underlying oneness of all things”, seems

centred about the nature of consciousness itself. This was what
I discovered beneath the experiences and ideas presented in
the book. It returns in each essay, again and again.

When we supplement our investigations with the tools

offered by magick, what we find in the paranormal is not
something “out there” but equally “in here”—or perhaps more
accurately, something that is at once in both and neither.

I’ll let the essays speak for themselves and will end here

by hoping that the reader finds in this book something I’ve
certainly discovered to be true: that paranormal experiences
do not happen only to special people and on rare occasions. To
experience the paranormal we need only turn our attention to
the nature of consciousness itself.

Duncan Barford

January 2010

http://oeith.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

My sister wore our granddad’s ghost

e were travelling home by train, some friends and I,
when—without knowing it—I started work on this
book: I asked each of them to tell me the strangest

thing they’d ever experienced.

We had not got far when the stranger in the seat opposite

interrupted.

“You’re talking about the paranormal,” he said, “and it’s

doing my head in.”

He was swigging a can of beer but seemed good-humoured.

And he had a point: for a public place our conversation was
rather odd.

“I’m not fascinated by that stuff,” the man said, raising his

voice over my friend’s story about the night her mother sighted
a ghostly figure in the garden. “In fact, I think you’re talking
garbage.”

“Well, I respect your opinion,” I said.
Some of the other passengers were pricking up their ears.
“Anyway,” the man said, settling into a more conversational

tone, “paranormal stuff happens to people who look into things
more deeply than others. Let’s say my pen started to roll over

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

the carpet: I would think nothing of it. But because you are
into paranormal things, anything that happens to you out of
the ordinary, you’d think: ‘Oh My God!’ Whereas I just think:
‘Well, that pen rolled over.’ To you it means something. To me
it doesn’t.”

“So doesn’t it boil down to whatever is in your head is real?”

I said.

It was naughty of me, but without telling him I’d pressed

the button on my digital recorder. (Hence the striking real-
ism of this dialogue, as you’ve probably already remarked.)
Something unusual was taking place: a conversation with a
stranger, plus a crowd of other passengers listening in while
pretending not to do so. (A couple of them later overcame their
politeness and started to chip in their comments.)

“I pray that the stuff you’re talking about is true,” the man

with the beer can said. “But I won’t believe it until it happens.
I really pray for myself and my two kids that it is true, but I
don’t believe there’s anything after death. It’s a horrible belief
and I don’t want to be like that. At least you’ve got something
to hope for.”

“Your point of view is a strong reason to make the most

of life,” I said, glossing over the fact that by not believing in
something he was not actually ruling out its existence.

“I don’t see why you’re put on this earth for 60 years to work

away and graft,” continued the man, “and then die for noth-
ing. I graft bloody hard and don’t particularly enjoy it. If there
was something afterwards, that would be great. But if there
is someone above looking after you, then I don’t understand
why you have to work. My experience of life is I have to work
for 60 hours a week to pay my mortgage. If there’s something
afterwards, why should I do that?”

What if he ran into a ghost later that night, I wondered;

or if he got off the train and was abducted by aliens. (Or, at
least—if he had some kind of experience that he understood in
that way.) Taking him at his word, this would be all he needed

M Y S I S T E R W O R E O U R G R A N D DA D ’ S G H O S T

to quit his job and stop paying the mortgage. I imagined him
joining his local Spiritualist church and channelling the wis-
dom of the Ascended Masters, or putting on a sky-blue shell
suit and joining the alien contactee lecture circuit.

Isn’t this precisely the fascination of the paranormal for all of

us: proof that everything we know is wrong, and the liberating
realization that there’s no point in playing any longer the tiring
game of normality?

“I’ve heard that it never happens to people who don’t

believe,” the man said. “I had a granddad who died 20 years
ago. He was one of the greatest. I used to go around his house all
the time from when I was eight. If you were to tell me he would
come and stand by my bed tonight, well—at first I would shit
myself. But I would long to see that.”

He paused at this point and looked surprised.
“Freaky, actually, because I’ve just realized that today is his

birthday.”

“You think that’s coincidence?” I smiled at him. “How do

you know this conversation isn’t his way of letting you know
that he’s in touch?”

For a moment there was a look on his face that made me

wonder if I’d gone too far. But luckily for me he seemed to
decide to take it in the way I’d intended.

“Oh, don’t give me that! Don’t tell me he’s talking to me

through you! Anyway, what experiences have you had?”

“Well, years ago,” I said, happy to shift the focus, “I used a

Ouija board to call up a spirit and …”

“Whoa! Wait a minute. You don’t just go and do something

strange like that. I would never use the Ouija board. If something
happened, I would shit my pants. You just don’t do that.”

“You do when you’re 13.”
“What do you mean, you ‘called up a spirit’? You can’t just

say: ‘Hello, spirit, here we are!’ There you go already, you see;
I don’t believe you. You cannot just say: ‘Spirit, here we are, please
move the glass!’”

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

Yes you can, I thought. Really, you can. But if you do, don’t

count on paying the mortgage again.

What I hadn’t confessed to him were my credentials: I’m a

magician. Not the sort that does card tricks and saws women
in half—they are “illusionists”, by the way. No, I mean the
“occult” kind. You’ve heard of Aleister Crowley, probably?
Well, that sort of thing. (Please don’t mention Harry Potter.)

Much of the news these days is generated by

secular

rationalists on one hand squaring up against religious funda-
mentalists on the other. Or vice versa. You do not hear much
about the third path, far less travelled, which treads a course
between. Some regard it as the sanest alternative, although the
majority—certainly those on the two extremes—view it as even
more despicable than their opposite. This third path is mag-
ick, the occult. You won’t hear it discussed in the mainstream
media, which is a shame because, unlike how they would
have you believe, magick is not all about worshipping Satan,
dancing naked in the woods and curdling your neighbour’s
semi-skimmed. Magicians might do these things, but they do
much else besides.

The life experiences that forced me off the straight-and-

narrow track of secular rationality into the path of the oncom-
ing juggernaut that was magick are the reason why this book
is different from your standard “strange-but-true” pot-boiler. It
was some close shaves with the paranormal that proved to me
forever how reality has nothing in common with what we like
to call “everyday life”.

We say goodbye to our beer-drinking friend on the train

at this point. We are done with him. We will leave him to his
decision to believe only in what happens, while he makes well
and truly sure that certain things never ever will.

I’m going to wax autobiographical.
By the time I’d reached my thirties (I’m older than I sound)

I’d settled into a steady job, working with computers, making
money and feeling like a grown-up at last. Yet the more

M Y S I S T E R W O R E O U R G R A N D DA D ’ S G H O S T

“ successful” in conventional terms I became—in other words,
the more stuff I owned and the more people who looked up to
me—the less happy I felt.

I couldn’t have said why I was unhappy. I had money and a

lovely girlfriend. We went shopping every weekend and flew
off on holidays. I was healthy and liked the gym. But I was
also often stressed and miserable, even though my job was
not particularly demanding. I was also drinking quite a bit; a
nightcap every evening, and sometimes the pile of bottles in
the recycling bin was a little embarrassing.

I remember the day I announced to my girlfriend I was

going to explore magick. “Because I know the world just
isn’t like this,” I said, gesturing at all the stuff and gadgets I’d
accumulated in my home.

“You’re not going to go weird, are you?” she said.
How I’d come to the conclusion that what people call

“reality” is actually a pack of lies dated back to puberty when
(as I’d revealed to the man on the train) I began meddling with
the Ouija board.

For those who have never used one, the Ouija board is sold

as a sort of novelty or toy. It is an oblong piece of pasteboard
with letters of the alphabet printed upon it, the numerals zero to
nine, and the words yes, no and good-bye. With the board comes a
piece of heart-shaped plastic mounted on three legs, which has
a transparent circle in its centre. This is called the “planchette”.
The board has to be operated by a group of people. (I’ve never
got it to work on my own, although some people have claimed
successful solo use.) The planchette is placed on the board and
each person puts a finger on it. Questions are addressed to the
board, and—here’s the strange part—it’s often found that the
planchette, in response, moves—apparently of its own accord.
A letter or number becomes visible through the transparent
circle in the planchette, which, followed by subsequent charac-
ters, spells out a message. Many have supposed that the Ouija
board is a means of talking with spirits.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

The board was invented in the United States during the

mid-1800s when the Spiritualist craze was at its peak. It was
patented in 1891 by Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard, but in
1901 production was taken over by William Fuld, whose name
these days is that most closely associated with the “Ouija”
trademark. The precise origin of the board’s peculiar name
is lost in legend, but one of the nicest stories is that the Ouija
board itself dictated the name to Kennard.

It was 1981 when I first used the principles of Ouija to make

contact with a spirit. I remember the song Ghost Town by The
Specials was playing on the TV as I sat nervously at my parents’
dining table with some friends. Today, I have a classic 1970s ver-
sion of the board, produced by Parker Brothers, which a fellow
magician bought through eBay and permanently loaned to me
(I suspect because he’s too scared to keep it in his own house.)
I did not have a proper board back then, so instead we cut out
squares of paper and wrote on the letters with felt-tipped pens.
For a planchette we had an upturned jar that had once con-
tained pickled cockles. It worked just as well and scared me
just as badly as any commercially-produced board.

I was never certain who was pushing the jar, but definitely

someone was. I never believed it moved “of its own accord”, or
that it wouldn’t stop the moment we took our fingers away. The
rational explanation for how Ouija works, routinely repeated by
debunkers, is “the ideomotor effect”.

This is the psychological

principle, established by controlled experiments, that muscular
movements can occur independently of our conscious aware-
ness or intention. In other words, one or more members of the
group push the planchette but do not know they are doing it.

Looking back, if we were truly talking with disembodied

spirits, they were extremely patient and uncommonly inter-
ested in the affairs of 13-year-olds. The events that we asked

The term was coined (1852) by English physiologist and naturalist William

Benjamin Carpenter.

M Y S I S T E R W O R E O U R G R A N D DA D ’ S G H O S T

the spirits to predict—who would marry whom; who would
take whom to the next school disco, etc.—consistently failed to
come true, with no exceptions, consolidating my impression
that it was merely mortal hands at work.

There was one entity who showed up whenever we used

the board, supposedly my mother’s long-dead great uncle,
named “Jack”. He insisted on communicating even though in
life he had been illiterate and apparently had not learnt much
since he had died, to judge from the meaningless jumble of
letters he served up. Sometimes he hinted that more literate
spirits were queuing up behind him, but he never let them take
a turn.

Despite explaining the Ouija board to myself as an instance

of “the ideomotor effect”, it still gave me sleepless nights.
Maybe I was dimly aware of the fine line between explanation
and “explaining away”. Okay, maybe it was our muscles mov-
ing the planchette without us being aware, but then who was
instructing our muscles to move? Evidently, no one that we or
the scientists who had made the experiments could locate or
put a name to. Which was more bizarre: Uncle Jack steering
the cockle jar, or this unnameable “other” working us like meat
puppets without our permission?

My friends and I soon upped the ante. We ditched the Ouija

and asked the spirits to signal their presence through direct
physical manifestation. At first, the results were disappointing,
until one day my sister came in from school looking scared and
beckoned me away from our parents.

“Touch the air around my hand,” she said.
I reached out and my fingers encountered something pecu-

liar. The space around her arm was “alive”. It felt vibrant, like
static electricity. It gave me that tingling sensation you feel on
the surface of a television screen, or on a rubber balloon after
rubbing it against nylon clothes. But, more than that, it was
warm. The sweat glands on my hand prickled in response to
its heat.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

“Hot, isn’t it?” said my sister.
I nodded. But even as she had spoken, the sensation passed,

as if my hand had pierced a delicate membrane and destroyed it.
I groped in the air around her arm, but couldn’t find it again.

“It’s granddad,” she whispered.
During their lunchbreak at school, she and her friends had

each summoned a dead relative. Each girl’s dear-departed had
manifested as a kind of thermal bangle, which had lasted—on
and off—for the remainder of the afternoon.

This was the first time I felt that unique rush, which I

always get from bumping up against the paranormal. Many
experiences expose us to the otherworldly: drugs, illusions
created by various forms of entertainment, but the “feeling”
of the paranormal (for me, at least) is quite distinct, composed
of amazement yet also of a creeping sense of danger, because
what is happening is supposed to be outside the everyday
world, and yet it’s here. And it’s real.

When you reach out to occult forces and receive a response,

not only does it feel “super-real”, there is also an experience of
sentience. To say it feels like you’ve touched something “alive”
is the wrong word, but thereis a sensation that it is certainly out
there, and it knows you are here. It is talking to you and sees
you where you are.

A month after my sister came home wearing granddad, I was

idly rolling a couple of dice across the lounge carpet, when I
wondered if they might also be used for spirit communication.

I stared hard at the little plastic cubes and mentally com-

manded them: Dice, I request that you move if the next throw is a
double six.

Nothing happened, of course, but I rolled them anyway. The

score was reassuringly random. Once they had come to rest I
repeated my command and rolled them again. I don’t know
how long I sat there. I simply decided I wouldn’t budge until
I had a result. I’d got it into my head that the dice must per-
form because I wasn’t going anywhere until they had. After

M Y S I S T E R W O R E O U R G R A N D DA D ’ S G H O S T

I’d repeated the sequence so many times that I wasn’t thinking
anything any more, suddenly I sat bolt upright.

The dice had been lying on the carpet where they fell, close to

each other, but had then “jumped” apart. You might argue—like
the man on the train—that they simply hadn’t finished rolling
yet. But it was not that. I’d allowed a good few seconds between
each roll whilst I mentally repeated my “command”. It was a
movement of a couple of centimetres; exactly the kind of move-
ment you would expect to see if two magnets had been placed
side by side with their like-poles facing, so that each repulsed
the other.

Nervously I picked them up and rolled again. They felt quite

normal as I set them loose. Was it imagination, or did they seem
to tumble more slowly than gravity ought to have allowed? But
beyond doubt was the result: double six.

So there it was. The most astounding, most mind-blowing

paranormal experience I’ve ever had in my life: two plastic dice
rolled on a carpet. There were no witnesses and it happened
only once. Despite my best efforts, the dice never repeated
their feat.

Moving dice that predict their own score? Dead relatives

returning as thermal bracelets? Twenty years later when I
decided to take up magick it was these experiences that had
bubbled up into my mind. How—I reasoned—could I possibly
sign away my days to a job, family life, the government, and
all the other institutions that decide for us what existence is
and how it should be lived, when—obviously—the reality they
decree is nothing like the full story?

I once talked over my dice experience with a rational friend.

The only way she could fit it into her world-view was to suggest
it must’ve been a “false memory”.

I’ve thought long and hard about this. Of course, it’s a

possibility. If she’s right then I’ve thrown away my career and
filled my head with trash because of something that never
happened. But the more I thought, the more I realized that

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

the difference between a memory and an actual event isn’t the
issue, because even if it hadn’t happened the way I remem-
bered, nevertheless I’d lived my life since that moment exactly
as if it had. That day shook my beliefs to their roots, influencing
what I thought, the books I read, the life-decisions I made. So
what was the difference between an accurate memory of what
happened and a false one? In terms of how I’d lived my life, it
had indeed been “true”. And even if I decided now that it had
been “false”, the only way to do that was to make a conscious
choice it had been so, and change my behaviour once again
from that point onwards. In both cases the “truth” or “falsity”
of the memory boiled down ultimately to the way I chose to
live my life.

Truth, in the abstract, has a very minor influence on human

life. That is why we should pay far less heed to both the sci-
entific rationalists and the religious fundamentalists than they
demand. For instance, it is most likely “true” that the world’s
supply of oil is running out, but it is not “true” for the majority
of us until we discover we cannot buy petrol any more. At this
point we might decide to change our habits. The kind of truth
that has an actual impact on human beings always arises from
experience.

But imagine if you had the power to decide what you expe-

rienced as the truth. If you made a particular idea or experience
true, then you could change yourself by it, and also—in effect—
change the world. The reason why some people live more
ecologically than others is because they experience as true the
unsustainability of our current lifestyle. They experience that
truth not in some abstract concept, but in their daily lives.

Some people have developed more advanced techniques

for achieving this kind of thing. They are the people we call
“magicians”. They create truth from their experiences, rather
than clinging to ideas or beliefs laid down by others. This
is what sets them apart from both scientists and religious
fundamentalists.

M Y S I S T E R W O R E O U R G R A N D DA D ’ S G H O S T

Susan Blackmore, a former parapsychologist (i.e. someone

who scientifically studies the paranormal), wrote a memoir that
takes up this very theme, but from the opposite direction. She
began her intellectual career with a passionate interest in the
paranormal, yet her attempt to explore it on a scientific footing
led her to disillusionment and a more orthodox

scientific

outlook:

I was interpreting the “realness” and vividness of my own
experiences as meaning that they were “paranormal” or
“occult”. It is an easily made and common mistake, and it
took me many years to see it for what it was (1996: 19).

What happened here was that science supplied Susan Black-
more with an experience of the falsity of her experiences!
Before she began looking for “proof” of her experiences, she
seems to have had a talent for reading tarot cards, and she once
underwent a spontaneous out-of-body experience that lasted
for three hours, during which she was able to describe bizarre
visions on the astral plane verbally to her friends, who were
seated next to the body she had “vacated”. These anecdotes
make me wonder whether her fascination with science perhaps
hampered an innate psychic gift, or was her way of defending
herself against it.

Blackmore assumed her perception was mistaken. Putting

her tarot readings through statistical tests, to determine if they
were any more accurate than chance, all she encountered was
the frustration of a repeated failure to design an experiment that
could conclusively rule out fraud, bias and statistical artefacts.
Ultimately she was forced to conclude it was impossible to deter-
mine what she was supposed to be measuring in the first place!

And indeed it is. Because a good tarot reading—or any

kind of fortune-telling—always boils down to a purely subjec-
tive experience of the relationship between the reader and the
questioner.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

When I get out my tarot cards, people often challenge me

that the meanings of the cards are so vague and general they
could be applied to anyone at any point in their lives. “Wow!” I
exclaim. How much wisdom must be packed into those cards,
if they’re so universally applicable? Arguing that the tarot
means anything to anyone is tantamount to admitting that it
works, if what we mean by “works” is that the cards provide
an experience of truth.

Anyone who attempts to “verify” the paranormal according

to science is missing the point, because the paranormal overturns
the dualisms on which science depends, such as the distinction
between observer and experience, or between subjectivity and
reality. Take telepathy, for instance: if I can read your thoughts,
then how are they “yours”? If the phenomenon we seek to
prove actually exists, then a person’s thoughts can no longer
be confined only to one person’s experience, so something is
already in play that the assumptions of our experiment cannot
take into account.

Could a statistical study ever prove that telepathy occurs?

It might be regarded as suggestive, but if one form of the
paranormal is entertained then there is immediately no rea-
son to exclude any of the others; and in that case who is to
say my apparent “telepathy” is not precognition—peering into
the future to gain knowledge of the answers the test subject
will give?

By enticing us to prove the unprovable, the paranormal

makes fools of us all.

When I was a student I lived for a year in Leamington

Spa, Warwickshire. It turned out to be the unhappiest year of
my life.

I recently read about an investigation into telepathy where one of the experi-

menters noticed a charming correlation: that positive results were recorded
only on those days when birdsong was audible inside the laboratory (Foxx,
2006. See sleeve notes: “Thought Experiment”).

M Y S I S T E R W O R E O U R G R A N D DA D ’ S G H O S T

I shared a basement flat in Clarendon Square with a girlfriend

and another woman. Firstly, relations with our housemate
broke down and then my girlfriend and I proceeded to tear
each other apart.

The flat was big and seemed luxurious when we first viewed

it, but once we moved in it proved damp, dark, and cold. The
couple who lived upstairs could often be heard screaming and
throwing things at each other.

“You’ve got a little palace here,” our landlord used to insist

in a thick Brummy accent, when he came around to read the
electricity meter. Towards the end of the tenancy he once turned
up so drunk he could not read the dials. “Let’s just call it a
fiver,” he slurred. Concerned that he would regret his largesse
in the morning, we suggested he came back another time. That
was the last we ever saw him. When we rang the university
at the end of the year to enquire why we hadn’t been asked to
pay more bills and why our deposits hadn’t been returned, we
were told our landlord had been found floating face-down in
the river. The verdict was suicide.

That flat had a cursed and malevolent air. Years later, I

discovered that Aleister Crowley had been born and grew up a
couple of doors down. I doubt he was responsible for the mis-
ery that seemed to hang over the area, but I understood from
where he might have acquired his urge to travel.

Another peculiarity were the huge spiders, which we never

saw alive. They turned up dead on the carpets in the mornings,
scrunched into agonized balls.

The paranormal proclivities of the place became more overt

towards the end of our stay, as second-year

examinations

loomed into view. One night, I was woken by a peculiar
sensation. My bed was being shaken. I lay still, wondering if it
was an earthquake and waited to see when it would stop. After
a minute (when it had not) I got up sleepily and went to my
girlfriend’s room.

“My bed keeps shaking,” I explained.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

A few weeks later an old school friend came to stay for the

weekend. We had not seen each other in a while. We went
drinking and caught up on events in each other’s lives. During
the course of the evening, he announced that he was gay.

That night, after he had gone and I was asleep, the bed

started shaking again. Due to the alcohol, this time I simply
couldn’t be bothered to get up. Thankfully, in the morning it
had stopped.

I sometimes suspect that most tales of the paranormal fall

into a category like this one, where the usual categories of
“subjective” and “objective” blur together in our experience.
Imminent exams and my friend’s sexual revelations: these were
disturbing circumstances, possibly the root of both experiences.
It certainly felt to me as if the bed were being shaken, yet—on
that first occasion—it stopped as soon as I got out. Maybe our
old friend the “ideomotor effect” was at work again. Quite pos-
sibly, my own body provided the physical force for the shak-
ing, yet once again it was that unknown “other” who provided
the will and inspiration for the usual inscrutable reasons.

Psychology can take us a certain distance towards what

these events might signify. If I’d omitted my description of
the circumstances that led up to the shaking bed (“weird flat”,
“unhappy days”, “exams”, “sexual revelations”) it would have
been completely inexplicable; not substantial enough even
to form a story worth telling. As it stands, there is a possible
“motive” here for the shaking: my unconscious emotional
response to an upsetting environment. Yet why it took the form
of a vibrating bed, and what was achieved or expressed by this,
remains obscure.

Another personal experience is perhaps more illuminating

in this respect. It took place between the moving dice and the
shaking bed, on the eve of an A level examination when I was
about 18 years old.

I was nervous and unable to sleep, which served to make

me even more anxious about my probable performance in the

M Y S I S T E R W O R E O U R G R A N D DA D ’ S G H O S T

exam. To make matters worse, the family cat had managed to
escape from downstairs, where she was usually confined at
night, and had come into my room. I heard her paws on the
carpet as she crossed to my record player, and then (as was
her habit) she began sharpening her claws on the back of the
wooden speakers. I suffered the noise for a while, but when
there was no sign she was going to stop I got up and turned on
the light. Immediately, the scratching stopped. I bent down to
pick her up from behind the speaker.

Only—there was no cat.
When I checked later, she had been downstairs all along.
But something had made a sound like an animal with paws

across the carpet. Something had scratched and bumped behind
the speaker. Indeed, my sister in the next room had also heard
the noise. I checked thoroughly all around, but found no
explanation.

Psychoanalysis provides us with a useful notion: the

“ symptom”. Certain cases of mental illness arise, psychoanalysis
declares, because in the unconscious lies an urge that is in con-
flict with social mores, or with the interests of the sufferer’s
conscious personality. This urge is repressed by the conscious
mind but it remains active in the unconscious and may lead to
the formation of a symptom.

For instance, imagine that someone did not want to sit an

exam, even though it was vital to his future. In a case like this a
symptom might be formed: the urge to flunk the exam would
not be allowed direct expression, but by manifesting instead
as some kind of illness it might be able to make itself heard. If
the symptom were severe enough to prevent the sufferer from
sitting the exam, then it might even realize its full and secret
intention, albeit by a roundabout route.

Some of the girls in my sixth form sat their A level exams

with their arms in bandages. One of them had woken in bed
and discovered she had scraped the skin off her arms while
she was asleep. After she had shown her injuries to her friends,

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

a couple of them woke the next morning and discovered they
had done the same.

The anxiety of these girls had taken on quite a direct mani-

festation. Perhaps my anxiety was also making itself felt. Luck-
ily for me, it hitched a ride not upon a bandwagon of self-harm,
but upon the idea of a ghostly cat.

Our cat was a playful, mischievous creature. She sat and

lazed on pieces of paper even as I was trying to write on
them. To her my pen was a toy. She had a personality that ide-
ally suited her to become the kind of double-edged symbol
(“domestic pet”—“untamed”) that psychoanalysts since Freud
have uncovered at the root of many a symptom. Perhaps my
anxiety that night manifested itself in the form of an unruly
moggy. We can call those noises I heard an “hallucination” if it
makes us feel better.

In magick, however, there is a concept closely allied to the

psychoanalytic idea of the symptom, but it demands a radi-
cally different mind-set. It is called a demon.

Aleister Crowley wrote: “The spirits of the Goetia [i.e.

demons] are portions of the human brain” (1995: 17). Contem-
porary magicians, such as Lon Milo DuQuette and Christopher
S. Hyatt, often make even more explicit the links between psy-
chotherapy and demonology:

Psychology … deals with people’s fears and doubts.
Psychologists label many of these fears as pathology. Psy-
chologists have carefully followed in the footsteps of the
Priest, who in his non-scientific but simple way labelled
these things as evil or demonic possession. The average clin-
ical psychologist is no more scientific than the priest (2000: 11).

Despite its technical-sounding terminology, psychoanalysis
is widely disparaged as “pseudo-scientific” by the more sci-
entistic branches of psychology. Part of the reason is perhaps

M Y S I S T E R W O R E O U R G R A N D DA D ’ S G H O S T

that the aims of magick and of psychotherapy are strikingly
similar: both seek to help the individual gain control over and
make sense of his or her experience. The magician seals him-
self inside a magic circle, recites incantations, evokes demons
and makes a pact with them, harnessing their power to his
will. The psychoanalyst’s approach is not so very different: her
“demons” are the patient’s symptoms; her “magic circle” is the
formal relationship with the patient, governed by the rules that
regulate the practice of psychotherapy.

Foremost among these rules are those that discourage

therapists from sexual relations with their patients. Because
of its powerful sensations and emotions, its intense effect on
consciousness, sex has long been used by magicians as a tool
for injecting energy into or “raising power” for any kind of
endeavour. The way that psychotherapy also seeks to maxi-
mize erotic tension within the therapeutic relationship, by
ensuring that it remains unconsummated, is a technique that
might have been lifted straight out of a book of spells. Louis
Culling, in his occult classic Sex Magick, writes at length on
what he calls “Dianism”: the magical use of a sexual experi-
ence in which climax is intentionally avoided (1992: 21–49).
In one particular type of magical working, climax is postponed
in order to maximize ecstasy, so that the magician’s partner
can assume the elevated form of the “Holy Guardian Angel”
or “ideal self”. In therapy, similarly, because there is no pos-
sibility of consummating the relationship, every little word,
gesture, and interpersonal incident becomes highly charged,
filled with significance, and in this way the patient’s fantasies
are stoked until they blaze.

The equivalent of the magician’s “incantations” is the

conversation between the analyst and patient, which draws
the patient’s unconscious to the surface. The “evocation of
the demon” and the “bargain” made with it occur as the ana-
lyst encourages her patient to re-enact within the consulting

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

room his habitual ways of relating, with the aim of replacing
unhelpful behaviours with more effective patterns of action.

Ramsey Dukes has written on how we can work creatively

with our “personal demons”. He advocates a technique that
he calls “consciousness sharing”. If we project our human
moods and motives onto external objects, abstractions or
situations—for instance, onto malfunctioning computers,
the stock market or “my inability to find a decent job”—then
we will have “reaped a whole universe of meaning and
meta-meaning” (2005: 28).

In other words, by treating external phenomena as real

and alive we heighten our awareness of them and most likely
increase the respect and intelligence in our manner of dealing
with them. This is where we arrive at the advantage of deal-
ing with “demons” rather than “symptoms”. For all its lowli-
ness, we respect the power of a demon; we recognize that if we
could harness that power for other ends then it would be to our
advantage. However, we are also wary of becoming too friendly
with something that will damage us if not properly controlled.
If we choose to regard the demon merely as a metaphor for
our

personal psychological hang-ups, the dynamics of the

relationship remain fuzzy.

But what made the scratching noise behind the speakers?

What moved the dice and shook the bed? Another advantage
of a “demon” is that we are not committed to internalizing
the experience, the way that psychotherapy invariably does.
The difference between magick and therapy is that, for mag-
ick, truth lies in experience, whereas therapy is concerned
with questions of “meaning” and “interpretation”. The thera-
pist traces the meaning of symptoms back to the unconscious,
over and over again. In other words, issues on the surface are
exposed as being the product of issues hidden at a lower level.
It is all “about” issues. Magick, on the other hand, enables us to

M Y S I S T E R W O R E O U R G R A N D DA D ’ S G H O S T

experience issues directly as something else—as a “demon”, an
“angel”; as something other.

A paranormal experience might be regarded as an instance

in which personal experience becomes so intense, or so differ-
ent or alienated from ordinary consciousness, that what we
regard as “internal” spills into the “external” world. If this
sounds far-fetched, a friend once told me about an acid-trip
in the woods with friends, during which the trees rewarded
them with ready-made staffs that dropped from the branches
into their hands. When the drug wore off, they were still hold-
ing them. The inner experience and the external world had
become inextricably interwoven under the intense experience
of the drug.

All cases of synchronicity (a term coined by the psychologist

Carl Jung to describe “meaningful coincidences”) possess this
quality of a blurred boundary between the mind and exter-
nal reality. It prompted Jung to invent another special term,
psychoid,

to describe this level at which the mental and the

physical coincide. Magick appeals to this level and aims to
immerse our experience within it. Psychology shuns it with
horror, associating it with hallucinations and psychosis.

The philosopher Ken Wilber uses the terms “translation” and “transforma-

tion” to discuss this difference (1996: 46ff). As is well known, to change your-
self through therapy takes years. This is because (in Wilber’s terms) therapy
merely “translates” our issues between unconscious and conscious; Wilber’s
model suggests that this “translation” is simply movement of issues within the
same level of personal development. Magick, on the other hand, encourages
“transformation” by presenting us with our experience as something other.
Magick can provide a much faster track for self-development, although it is
probably fair to admit that the effects may be more volatile.

“[W]e do not know whether that we on the empirical plane regard as physical

may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on
this side of the border we distinguish from the physical as psychic… They may
be identical somewhere beyond our present experience” (Jung, 1936).

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

Of course, there is always the possibility of natural

explanations for seemingly paranormal events, and these
should not be discarded where they can be determined. When
trying to establish the truth of an experience it must be admit-
ted that there are always other possibilities. Maybe it was
indeed the family cat that made those scratching noises behind
the speakers after all. She never did enjoy being shut inside
at night. Perhaps, in her frustration, she had astrally projected
herself upstairs.

CHAPTER TWO

A nice place to meet dead people

or reasons that will become obvious I’ve disguised
names, dates and locations in the story that follows. It
was told to me by a close friend, whom I’ll call Karen.

The narrative is based mostly on notes she made in her journal
at the time.

It was a Sunday evening in early autumn, 2006. Karen

remembers it was a warm day and that she was on her way to
the building where she used a shared computer to pick up her
emails. She was working on a particular project and expecting
an important email that she would have to act upon as soon as
it arrived. She did not relish the thought of this, and had put
off checking her email for as long as she could, but now she
accepted it was time to get stuck into what needed to be done.

Karen lives in Brighton. This much I haven’t disguised. She

was crossing the road, near St Peter’s church, whose grubby
white edifice dominates the flat area in the city centre known
as Grand Parade, a few hundred metres from the seafront. She
looked up and saw a friend of hers—we’ll call him Dave—who
skidded to a halt on his bike.

“We both said ‘hi’,” remembers Karen, “and he looked

pleased to see me. We stood and talked about things that were

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

happening to us just then, which is how I know it must’ve been
that time of year. I mentioned that I’d taken up kundalini yoga
and talked about the business project I was working on. He
mentioned he was into sea-kayaking. He told me this was great
in the summer, because he’d bought a summer wetsuit, but
he was scared of the winter because he didn’t think he could
afford a winter one.”

Karen and Dave talked for about 20 minutes until Karen felt

the unwelcome pull of that important email. She glanced up
and down the street, wondering if there might be a café open at
this time on a Sunday, but she couldn’t think of any. After they
had talked for another ten minutes she bowed to the inevitable:
“I’ve got to go.”

Looking back, she remembered how disappointed Dave

looked when she said these words. He had been cycling towards
the sea but she had not asked where he was going. After they
parted, she remembered thinking it was odd how Dave hadn’t
commented on her new hairstyle; she had drastically shortened
her hair after wearing it long for years. All her friends had com-
mented on how different she looked but Dave did not seem
to have noticed. Also, in the months that followed, his slightly
extreme use of the word scared to describe how he felt about
the onset of winter lingered in her memory. But at the time, she
simply continued on her way and picked up her emails.

It was in February the following year that things took a

strange turn. Karen, having stopped off again to read her emails,
was reminded of her last meeting with Dave. “I just thought to
myself: ‘Well, it’s probably time I saw Dave again.’”

It was not unusual for months to pass without them seeing

each other. They had met as co-members of an organization that
ran various projects. They had both worked on one particular
project that supplied a community service to city residents.
Both of them had enjoyed the activity it involved them in,
and were disappointed when the project’s funding was cut
and it was wound up. Karen was still a member of the parent

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

organization, in a different capacity, but Dave had moved on.
Although they enjoyed each other’s company and were always
pleased to see each other, their infrequent meetings generally
happened by accident.

Karen had a tough winter. A close business associate died

unexpectedly before Christmas and the loss hit her hard. There
was also a spate of deaths among people associated with the
organization where she had worked with Dave. An acquaint-
ance called Graham had killed himself, and a female colleague,
Kerry, had died of a heart attack. Karen dropped into the organ-
ization and was talking with her colleagues about the people
who had died, when another colleague, Jo, said: “Oh, and Dave
Jones has killed himself.”

Karen did not place the name at first, partly because she

was not sure of Dave’s surname, but also she was not sure how
Jo could have known Dave, because they had not worked on
the same projects. But then Jo mentioned how “Dave Jones”
was always on his bike and interested in sea-kayaking. Karen
remembered there had been two men named “Dave” on the
community project, but she was suddenly extremely worried
about her friend.

The next week she took along a photograph of Dave. As

Karen herself related:

Jo said: “No, that’s not him,” but I discovered later she
thought I was pointing at someone else in the picture.
Even so, it continued to worry me, so I double-checked
with Jo and then she realized her mistake and said: “Oh,
it might be him.” Susan—another worker—was there and
she knew Dave well. She looked at the picture and said:
“I think it might be.” She suggested I talk to Beth, some-
one who worked closely with Dave. So I went to Judy,
who’s a manager, and asked if it was possible to get in
touch with Beth. The next week I took my photograph to
Beth. She said: “That’s definitely him.”

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

Karen was suddenly confronted by the brutal fact that another
of her friends had died. Everyone who had heard about Dave’s
death had mentioned, so far, that he’d killed himself by an
overdose. But how could she be absolutely sure he had died?

“Beth had access to Dave’s records,” explained Karen. “She

couldn’t tell me any details but she mentioned that he died in
January 2006. ‘That can’t be right,’ I said, because I saw him in
October 2006.”

Karen and Beth decided that the “01” of January in the date

of Dave’s death on his record must have been a mistake for
“10” October.

However, Karen’s investigation did not end here. Although

she and Dave had not been very close, Karen was distressed to
discover he had ended his own life. Part of her felt guilty that
she’d not been a better friend. It was unlikely, but she could
not help wondering that if she’d made more effort perhaps he
would have opened up and talked about whatever was on his
mind. In any case, she wanted to find out if there was a memo-
rial where she could visit to pay her respects.

Confidentiality rules kept getting in the way. First, she went

to the remaining administrators of the community project.
Officially, they declined to tell her anything, but unofficially
they confirmed that a “Dave Jones” had worked on the project
at the same time she had and that he had died. She also wrote
a letter to the only remaining manager of the project at the time
she and Dave worked there, but received no reply.

Karen rang Beth again and discovered that in the meantime

Beth had made contact with Dave’s doctor. Once more, the
strange piece of information resurfaced that Dave had died in
January 2006, nine months before Karen had met him on that
Sunday evening. Again, she wondered whether he’d really
died at all.

Karen was having sessions with a psychotherapist at this

time, for issues related to post-traumatic stress. She explained
the situation to her therapist, who advised her to visit the

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

register office at Brighton town hall. By now it was March 2007.
Karen visited the register office towards the end of the month
and when she came away there was no escaping that something
strange had happened.

Dave’s date of death was officially registered as 28th

January, 2006. When Karen explained to the receptionist that
she had seen and spoken with Dave in October of that same
year, the receptionist looked doubtful and explained that the
date of death is verified by two people: firstly by a doctor,
who writes out the death certificate; and secondly by another
witness, who formally registers the death. Because of the cir-
cumstances surrounding Dave’s death, the second witness was
the city coroner. If the date were wrong then two professionals
had both made a very unusual mistake.

“The same day, I talked again with my therapist,” said

Karen. “We went over the conversation I’d had with Dave. My
therapist commented on how it had no fantastic content. There
were no fantasy themes in it. It was simply a conversation; not
the kind you’d make up as a memory to someone who had
died, and it was consistent with events at the time I remem-
bered it to have taken place.

“My therapist told me that she had done some research and

had uncovered other cases in which people had seen people
who had died, with no pathological indications.”

It seemed Karen had joined the ranks of these sane, waking

people who (unwittingly in Karen’s case) had met and spoken
with the dead. But Karen did not leave it here, either. She was
determined to prove to herself beyond doubt that Dave had
died. She phoned the cemetery where Dave’s funeral had been
held and was advised that the date of the funeral had been
11th February, 2006. Officially, the cemetery was not supposed
to release any details, but the person on the phone kindly
informed Karen of the name of the street where Dave had been
living, and this matched what Dave had told her in their previ-
ous conversations.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

“It felt like it wasn’t real,” Karen said, when I asked how the

experience had affected her. “You can’t see dead people. It’s a
fact that, socially, you don’t see people once they’re dead. In
other cultures it might be acceptable, but not here.”

Karen’s realization that beyond our culture there might lie a

means of dealing differently with what had happened pointed a
way towards her personal reconciliation with these events. But
before we get to that part, our story takes an even murkier turn.

My curiosity had been aroused by the area of the city in

which the encounter had taken place. As soon as Karen men-
tioned where she had spoken with Dave, it hardly seemed
surprising …

In his book Daimonic Reality (2003), Patrick Harpur adopts

a holistic approach to the paranormal. Ghosts, UFOs, crop cir-
cles, fairies, even pumas sighted in the British countryside, he
argues, can all be approached as facets of a single phenomenon
that is neither real nor unreal, but which presents itself in vari-
ous forms on the borderline between both. These “daimons”
and the “daimonic reality” they inhabit are a permanent fea-
ture of human experience, Harpur suggests. Their existence
will never be objectively proved, for as one type of manifes-
tation becomes extinct (“fairies” or “ghostly giant dogs”, for
instance, which are now rarely seen) newer forms emerge
(“alien abductions” and “the Beast of Bodmin”) suggesting
that human beings and planet Earth herself are never without
them in some form or another.

As well as occupying a conceptual borderline between sub-

jective and objective, Harpur’s daimons like to appear at loca-
tions that have a similar ambience:

Daimons notoriously favour boundaries—what the
anthropologist Victor Turner called liminal (“threshold”)
zones. These may be within us (between sleeping and
waking, consciousness and the unconscious) or outside
us—crossroads, bridges, shores. They may be at certain

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

times, between day and night, at the witching hour, at
the turn of the year. Caravan sites or trailer parks often
become especially haunted … perhaps because they are
liminally situated between town and country, habitat
and wilderness. At any rate, everyone knows a place of
enchantment … Here, the laws of time and space, mat-
ter and causality seem attenuated; and we glimpse for an
instant an unseen order of things (2003: 49).

Karen had met Dave as summer turned to autumn, as the
afternoon became the evening—and on a Sunday evening, at
exactly that time of the week Douglas Adams described as “the
long dark teatime of the soul” (1982: 4).

It was at a spot in the city beyond the northernmost tip of

a grassed area, known as Victoria Gardens. The “southern”
and “northern” sections of Victoria Gardens are not much to
look at these days. Hemmed in by the busy roads of Grand
Parade and Gloucester Place, they are little more than grassy
traffic islands. Looking back through my journal, I see it was
September 2006—a few weeks before Karen’s encounter—that
my attention had been drawn to the very same area.

There had been concern in the local press over the high

number of deaths in the bus lanes that run through this part of
the city: three deaths and more than 20 injuries in only seven
years. The road layout is quite complex, yet the circumstances
made me wonder if something unusual were not at work.
Many of the victims were long-time residents who knew the
area well, but for some reason, in broad daylight, they were
stepping in front of buses, mostly double-deckers:

It happened on a pedestrian crossing and our information
is that she crossed against the green man light and the bus
had priority at the time (

Argus

, 1st September, 2004).

Family and friends cannot understand how a man

who was so meticulous about safety was involved in

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

an accident … Witnesses said he walked in front of a
No 2 bus … against a red pedestrian signal (

Argus

, 22nd

November, 2004).

The driver pulled away on a green light just as the

woman stepped onto the road (

Argus

, 30th January, 2006).

[A witness] said: “She stepped out right into the path of

a single-decker bus coming from her right. The driver did
not have time to react at all” (

Argus

, 1st March, 2006).

It is believed [she] may have walked out in front of the

bus as it turned … (

Argus

, 8th August, 2006).

I decided to do some magical work that might help prevent
further deaths, but first it had to be determined whether there
was anything at work that called for magick, or whether it was
simply up to the council to make the road layout clearer.

I gathered together a group of magicians to undertake an

exercise. We would launch our astral bodies into the area and
investigate on the astral plane to see what was amiss.

We had derived our method of working from two sources: one

modern and one a little more traditional. The modern source was
“remote viewing”, a technique developed from research by the
American physicist Hal Puthoff. During a remote viewing session,
a subject—generally a person with established psychic ability—is
assigned a “target” (an object, person, or location) from which he
or she retrieves valid information by extra-sensory means.

Remote viewing has attracted much interest and controversy

since its development in the 1970s, due to the amazingly high
success rates claimed by participants and the fact that its devel-
opment was funded by the CIA over a number of years. Since
then, claims of its reliability have become submerged beneath
a mass of conjecture and counter-interpretations.

A good introduction to the subject is Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers: The Secret

History of America’s Psychic Spies (1997).

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

In any kind of psychic work, establishing a link with the

target of investigation is regarded as helpful. The participants
were shown a map of the area and press cuttings of the acci-
dents. Beforehand, I walked through the area at midday with
an audio recorder so that each participant could also listen to
sounds from the site. They were then invited to lie down, the
lights were turned low, and some incense was lit.

Our more traditional source for this working was Aleister

Crowley’s instructions on astral travel:

Let [the student] imagine his own figure … standing near
to and in front of him … Let him then transfer the seat
of his consciousness to that imagined figure … Let him
then cause that imagined figure to rise in the air to a great
height above the earth … (2006: 185).

The participants were guided through Crowley’s visualization
and then a six-digit set of “co-ordinates” was barked at them,
with the instruction: “Go for it!”

The co-ordinates were another idea borrowed from remote

viewing. Researchers discovered that results improved if par-
ticipants were presented with the concept of an exact location,
even though the numbers bore no actual relation to any geo-
graphical area (Schnabel, 1997: 363, 377).

As might be expected from an activity such as this, the expe-

riences reported by the participants were wildly at variance
with one another and not a little bizarre. One person saw a
man without a head wearing a suit; someone else saw a white
slug-like creature under the ground that refused to cooperate;
another saw black-skinned people under the road who stared
at him menacingly. However, there were interesting com-
mon themes: some described vortices or whirlpools of energy
that were putting pedestrians into a dangerous trance. Most
remarked on some kind of subterranean entity or energy.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

The area looks like a part of any city centre, urbanized and

busy with traffic. But when I visited it again and peered more
closely, the more incongruous its balding patches of green-
ery began to seem. Maybe a little renovation was all that was
needed to create a different impression, but Victoria Gardens
was starting to look less like a park and more like a wasteland.
If there were any truth in Harpur’s idea that the supernatural
favours liminal spaces, it was becoming less remarkable that
Dave had chosen to talk with Karen here, nine months after he
had died.

The history of the area turned up further information. “It is

undoubtedly because of the swampy nature of the land,” wrote
one historian of Brighton, “that [the area] was never built upon,
and remained broad open spaces throughout the centuries, so
that we now possess the mile-long chain of green gardens and
lawns running … to the sea” (Musgrave, 1981: 21).

Settlement at Brighton dates back to before the Norman

invasion in 1066. Yet in 1780, this area was still wild and leafy
enough to inspire the Duke of Cumberland to turn out a stag
upon it—although the huntsmen were disappointed by the
quality of the chase (Musgrave, 1981: 79). It was not until the
end of the 1820s that the whole area had been drained, land-
scaped, and enclosed into gardens and recreational areas
(Berry, 2005: 32).

The swampiness of the land was caused by the Welles-

bourne, sometimes referred to as Brighton’s “lost river”
(Carder, 1990: entry 201). This is an intermittent stream that
once ran above ground, directly through the area. Remnants of
it still flow, but—as my remote-viewing colleagues seemed to
have intuited—these days it follows a subterranean course. The
main body of the Wellesbourne ran along (now beneath) what
later became London Road. It was joined by another stream
that followed what is now Lewes Road. The two streams still
flow into each other beneath the surface of the street, only yards
from where Karen spoke with Dave.

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

Various commentators in the fields of parapsychology and

“earth mysteries”

have noted a correspondence between sight-

ings of ghosts and the nearby presence of underground water.
Tom Graves, building on the work of T. C. Lethbridge, has
proposed a unique theory of apparitions based on this. Using
a dowsing rod, Lethbridge claimed he could detect various
kinds of “concentrations in the earth’s field”, which he clas-
sified according to the type of spirit that traditionally might
have been supposed to inhabit the kind of landscape where the
field was detected: “‘naiad’ for waterfalls, springs and streams,
‘dryad’ for trees and woods in general, ‘oread’ in mountains and
deserts, and ‘nereid’ in or by the sea” (1986: Chapter 6). Graves
notes that (apart from oreads, whose existence he doubts) all
these spirits depend upon the presence of underground water.

Victoria Gardens, a grassy area with trees, close to the sea and

with an underground stream, would provide a possible habitat
for all three types of spirit.

Water, suggests Graves, has unusual and so-far inexplicable

properties.

The atoms in a water molecule, he argues, do

not form a straight line but, typically, a shallow angle of
around 140°. This angle, however, is highly susceptible to
change—not merely by physical forces, but also by means that
appear decidedly magical. He refers to an instance in which a
blessing spoken over a sample of water apparently changed its
molecular angle by 20° (1986: Chapter 8).

A recent resurgence of these ideas can be found in the work

of Masaru Emoto (2005), whose photographs supposedly

“Earth mysteries” is a term applied to a diverse, “fringe” area of study that

encompasses a wide range of scientific and pseudo-scientific themes. Examples
include: “ley lines”, ancient monuments, ancient astronomy, dowsing, folklore,
shamanism, “earth lights”, crop circles, etc. It is often regarded with extreme
scepticism by mainstream science, although scientific work has been conducted
within some of these areas.

He is not alone in pointing this out. See also, for instance, Lyall Watson

(1974: 45–48).

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

demonstrate a physical effect upon the molecular structure of
ice by speaking certain words over it, or exposing samples to
people experiencing particular feelings, or playing different
types of music nearby. However, Emoto has received wide-
spread criticism for his lack of scientific controls and it might
be best to approach his work as “photography” rather than sci-
ence. Yet whether or not water is susceptible to human feelings,
there is evidently a tendency for people to believe it might be
so. Even before its inclusion among the classical elements of
Aristotle, water had long been associated with emotionality,
intuition, changeability, and vitality.

In the case of apparitions, Graves regards water as the

equivalent of “a photosensitive emulsion” (1986: Chapter 6). In
water that flows freely, any stored image would immediately
lose its coherence, but water locked within the soil might fulfil
its function differently. At a suitable location, an emotional
experience may become imprinted upon the environment. The
experience may then be retrieved by another person at the site
in a future time. Graves constructs an analogy between this
model and the technique used for producing a hologram. He
suggests his theory might account for the “multi-dimensional”
qualities of a haunting, which may include experiences of
sounds, feelings, memories, and solid-looking imagery, rather
than simply a two-dimensional form.

My research into the geography of the area had revealed that

the location satisfied a number of these criteria. The accidents
in the bus lanes also took on a different meaning in the light of
Graves’s suggestion that “hauntings” can be dangerous:

[T]hey wait around like tape-recordings of very loud
noises, to be set off by a trip-wire or a hidden beam; and

See, for instance, Tom Chetwynd’s A Dictionary of Symbols (1986: 422–424).

The entry for “Water” includes references to Egyptian and Mesopotamian
mythology.

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

they’re dangerous for the same reason and in the same
way, in that they take you by surprise because you’re not
ready for them, not aware of them … A moment’s anger
in one year by one person, it seems, can cause a car crash
in another for another (1986: Chapter 6).

The visions of the participants in the remote viewing exercise,
of vortices of energy and underground entities seemed entic-
ingly significant. But in one clear respect, it was obvious I was
pressing Graves’s ideas into a service that they could not fulfil,
because Karen’s encounter with Dave was not the “replay” of
a past experience.

The hologram analogy is appealing, but it does not really

hold. For instance, if “standing water” provides the photo-
graphic plate then what provides the “laser beam” essential
for rendering a holographic image? Prod the analogy a little
and it becomes apparent that that is all it is—an intriguing
metaphor.

But if the “hologram” is a metaphor, maybe the process

Graves tried to describe is simply a metaphor too? I mean this
notion of the standing water bending its molecular structure
in sympathy with a human experience nearby. Indeed, when
he came to consider cases of indoor hauntings, with no
convenient water source, Graves was obliged to stretch his
theory. He suggested that “quartz or quartz-like crystals in
building-stones” provided an alternative medium to water.
Yet water and “quartz-like crystals” are obviously two quite

different

materials with contrasting physical properties. If

water and quartz can both be claimed to store human experi-
ences, then this must be because of some property they share.

Physically, this property is not obvious. But what does

forge a strong link between them is a series of metaphorical
connections. Crystals, like water, are clear, perspicacious, and
bright; a sequence of metaphorical attributes also commonly
assigned to consciousness.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

In magick and shamanism the link between quartz and

consciousness has a long history. Initiatory traditions among
Australian aboriginal tribes often include the insertion of
quartz crystals into the body to facilitate “the transformation of
consciousness from physical to psychic levels” (Lawlor, 1991:
324–325). Quartz is accorded similar correspondences among
shamanic traditions in South America and South-East Asia
(Eliade, 1989: 50, 52, 350).

Perhaps, then, what Graves is searching for, in the costume

of Western empirical science, is simply the principle of linkage
itself between inner experience (consciousness) and the exter-
nal world.

Someone with whom I discussed Karen’s story raised an

interesting point. Imagine (he said) if we had access to CCTV
footage of the area. (Given the extensive coverage of CCTV in
our cities, it is quite probable there was a camera overlook-
ing the area at the time.) What would the camera have cap-
tured as Karen stood talking with Dave? Would we expect
to see a woman chatting to a spookily indistinct figure; or a
woman

talking and gesticulating all by herself; or—more

prosaically—just Karen walking past, without stopping, on her
way to pick up her email?

There is almost no chance of gaining access to the footage.

(Imagine the response once we’d explained the reason!) But of
the three possibilities above, it’s the last that seems to me most
likely: just Karen walking by.

I think that the appearance of a dead man in the street would

put too much strain on the usual habits of physical reality
to prove feasible. Karen’s encounter is therefore unlikely to
have taken place in physical reality. But perhaps it occurred in
another place, in Harpur’s “daimonic reality”, or the realm that
Jung referred to as “psychical reality”:

It may well be a prejudice to restrict the psyche to being
“inside the body”. In so far as the psyche has a non-spatial

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

aspect, there may be a psyche “outside-the-body”, a
region so utterly different from “my” psychic sphere that
one has to get out of oneself … to get there (Jung, cited in
Harpur, 2003: 33).

Once again, we find ourselves wondering whether a paranor-
mal experience is a “getting out of oneself” of precisely the type
that Jung describes: a merging of the inner and outer worlds
(which, at root, are revealed as joined) so that one becomes
indistinguishable from the other.

Jung is not the only psychologist to have harboured this idea

that mind can be “out there”. It may surprise some readers, but
towards the end of his life Sigmund Freud arrived at a similar
view. It is more widely known that Freud took a long- standing
interest in telepathy and even wrote some papers that tenta-
tively assumed its existence (Freud, 1933). However, among
notes discovered after his death are these enigmatic sentences,
which perhaps indicate that Freud would have taken these
ideas further:

Space may be the projection of the extension of the

psychical apparatus. No other derivation is possible.
Instead of Kant’s

a priori

determinants of our psychical

apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it
(Freud, 1938: 299).

Freud does not seem to be implying here that mind and
material reality are necessarily joined, but he does suggest that
they have significant properties in common. As we cannot
directly see our own eyes, so our mind cannot directly know
itself, and among those self-characteristics it may not be able to
recognize are the qualities it shares with the outside world: in
this instance, extension in space.

If the mind has spatial attributes (as Freud suggested), or

if mind and material reality are joined (as Jung insisted), then

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

we no longer need “water” or “quartz” as a material, causa-
tive agent in hauntings. We no longer need “holograms” as
a metaphor to hang a theory upon, because if a haunting is
the linkage between an experience and a place, and if mind is
spatial or joined with space, then a causative model is unnec-
essary. A haunting is simply mind manifesting in a particular
location.

It has often been remarked how our metaphors for the mind

are shaped by whatever technology happens to be predominant
at the time of writing. At the turn of the 20th century, the mind
was like a camera; subsequently it has been compared to a tel-
ephone exchange, a computer, a hologram. These days, ideas
from quantum physics provide our comparison of choice.

Perhaps it is simply better to assume that the mind is like

a metaphor.

As in a metaphor, so in the mind concepts are brought into

unity and similarity. Like an outrageous conceit (the literary
term for a metaphor that joins together wildly diverse ideas),
the human mind is the mysterious link between spirit and
matter, the cosmic and the mundane. Mind is like a metaphor;
the only metaphor in the whole of creation that may, in fact,
prove literal.

From this angle, the presence of underground water where

Karen met Dave need not be regarded as a cause of anything,
but as a synchronicity—Jung’s famous “acausal connecting
principle”. What the underground water supplied was not a
physical medium, but a material embodiment of how deeply
Karen’s encounter permeated into her soul. The water did
not cause; it meant. It meant “depth”, “feeling”, and “life”. Its
presence indicated that here was an experience so deep that it
passed from being experienced as “psyche-in-here” to “psyche-
out-there” and entered Karen’s awareness as if from the out-
side world.

We have arrived back at Harpur’s definition of liminal zones:

those crossroads, wastelands and transitional spaces that the

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

paranormal seems to favour. It favours them because they are
a synchronistic component of the experience, a correlate of
the blurring between psychical and physical reality.

Jung relates a famous story of how a patient was telling her

dream of a golden scarab. There was a tapping at the window,
which Jung opened. He caught a beetle as it flew into the room:
“the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our
latitudes” (1952: §843). He went on to suggest that our under-
standing of a synchronistic happening can be assisted if we
approach it as a dream rather than a “real” event (1952: §845).

If we turn to the reports of our remote viewers, we already

have the equivalent “dreams” to hand: a headless man; people
under the ground; subterranean currents and energies. The
imagery recalls the River Styx from Greek mythology, the
boundary between earth and the underworld. If Karen had
told us she’d dreamt of meeting a dead friend in such a place,
Jung might have amplified the contents of her dream by draw-
ing comparisons with myths of heroes descending into Hades
to encounter and assist their dead companions. Sometimes, in
these myths, the hero does not even realize that the friend has
died until meeting them there. (The sad encounter of Odysseus
and Elpenor in Book 11 of The Odyssey is a prime example.)
But as things turned out, it seems that Karen passed on the
opportunity to dream and instead had the experience for real.

During their posthumous conversation Karen mentioned to

Dave that she had taken up kundalini yoga. This is a form of
yoga now commonly taught throughout the Western world, yet
it differs from what most people recognize as “yoga” because
of its inclusion of visualizations, mantras, and meditative exer-
cises among the sequences of bodily movement.

Indeed, the stated aim of kundalini yoga is to awaken the

energy of the “kundalini serpent”, which lies dormant, coiled
three and a half times about the base of the spine. Sets of exer-
cises (called “kriyas”) encourage the serpent to rise, stimulating
seven successive “chakras” (or ”energy centres”) on her way to

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

the highest chakra, which is located just above the crown of the
head.

However one chooses to regard this explanation, it’s

fair to say that kundalini yoga places a unique emphasis on
emotional well-being and spiritual development, as well as
bodily flexibility.

Another activity that Karen had recently taken up, but which

she neglected to mention to Dave, was the practice of magick.

From what I could gather, she had bought some books on

the subject and in a low-key style had started to explore the
effect of various rituals, invocations of gods and goddesses,
and mystical systems such as tarot cards and the Kabbalah.

Some might say that Karen had set herself up for the strange

experience she subsequently underwent. But as seems clear
from her reaction and her rational investigation of the events,
she certainly was not inviting it.

At the time that she was confronting the fact of Dave’s death,

she had recently completed the performance of a kundalini
yoga kriya for healing, which she performed each consecu-
tive morning for 100 days. This is a method recommended
by kundalini teachers when a practitioner wants to work on
a particular bodily or spiritual issue. One hundred days is
an impressive period of time to sustain such an exercise, and
implies a significant degree of willpower on Karen’s part.

Regarding Kabbalah, she was experimenting with visualiza-

tion exercises. These were based upon “The Tree of Life”, which
is a diagrammatic schema of the whole of creation. It represents

A clear and useful introduction to kundalini yoga, containing many useful

kriyas, is: Open Your Heart With Kundalini Yoga (Siri Datta, 2003).

Kabbalah (or Qabala, Cabbala, etc., there are many varying spellings) is a

name applied to a body of texts and ideas inherited from the Jewish mysti-
cal tradition. The way in which some of these ideas have been appropriated
by Western magick is regarded by many as a divergence from their original
significance within Judaic belief.

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

how Creation manifests from the Godhead (at the “top” of the
tree) and then overspills into ten successive “vessels” (or “sephi-
roth”), each increasingly more material and removed from
Divinity. At the very base of the tree is the sephiroth known as
“Malkuth”, which corresponds to the earthly, sensate world.

The exercises that Karen followed enabled her to “visit”

within her imagination a chosen sephira.

The means by which

this was achieved were extremely simple: burning a candle of
a particular colour, some chanting, and the visualization of a
“guardian spirit” who would allow admittance. Then, sitting
in meditation, whatever images or sensations happened to
arise were to be taken as constituting the visit to that sphere.

After Karen discovered that Dave had died, for a time she

felt disoriented:

I started to write down events, in order to stop myself get-
ting confused. I might have been a bit scared at first, but even
if he had come back from the dead, it wasn’t in his nature
to be scary. I think I would’ve been more upset if he’d died
and I’d never seen him again. A week or two afterwards,
I was thinking that if I’m alive and Dave is so-called “dead”
then there’s nothing to worry about. The scariest bit was
that he had died; it was grief more than fear. If it had been
revealed that he was dead the very next day after I’d seen
him, then that might’ve been a much bigger leap.

Without any conscious planning on her part, her yoga and
magical practices spontaneously began to change:

I had been paying visits to Malkuth for nearly a year. I’d
also been doing kundalini meditations. I did a kundalini

Sephira is the singular of sephiroth.

The book she was using is widely available in the “Mind, Body and Spirit”

section of many bookshops: Simplified Qabala Magic (Ted Andrews, 2004).

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

meditation for the heart, and tagged on a bit at the
end—visiting Yesod [the sephira immediately “above”
Malkuth], because I knew Yesod was all about emotions.
Kundalini meditation is great, but you either get an imme-
diate result or you don’t; there’s no space in it for question-
ing or investigating your experience, which is why I tagged
on the visit to Yesod. I did this consecutively on three days.
On the fourth day I asked if there was something I could
do for Dave, although I wondered if I was being arrogant,
but I wondered if it would help me too. So I went in and
spoke to the guardian, and he said: “Come into Yesod for
40 days. You’ve already done three of them.” This was the
first time I’d received a message from an entity telling me
to do something in a way that contradicted my conscious
intentions, because I was going to start the 40 days for-
wards from that point, but I was told very clearly not to do
this. “Don’t over-egg the pudding,” was the response. So I
did the heart meditation and then I went to Yesod.

Some might argue that dabbling in forces you don’t under-
stand or that are beyond your control will inevitably land
you in trouble. Such people might regard Dave’s visitation as
demonic in character and in some sense Karen’s fault. But if
magick got her into trouble, it also proved the means by which
she laid her friend to rest.

When an entity you assumed was imaginary starts telling

you to do things you did not intend or had not thought of, it is
obvious that you are beginning to connect with something out-
side the usual boundaries of the self. This could only be read as
a signal of a marked increase in Karen’s magical abilities. She
went on to describe to me how the guardian of Yesod subse-
quently informed her she must protect herself magically and
even gave her instructions on how to do this.

If the location in the physical world where she had encoun-

tered Dave, with its liminal characteristics and underground

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

stream, were a symbolic equivalent of the River Styx, then her
magical practice was the symbolic process by which she escorted
him across the river’s boundary and into the realm of the dead.

I still have a problem working out what is “real” in these
visions, or what is made up from my imagination. By
“real” I suppose I mean something from outside, coming
in and working on my imagination. I also felt a presence
sometimes. I don’t know if it was Dave or not, but it felt
like someone was there, behind my shoulder on the left
side. And then, sometime around day 36 or 37 of the total
40, I seemed to jump out of my third eye [i.e. the spot
on the forehead between and slightly above both eyes]
into some clouds. I knew it was my mind making up this
imagery. I saw these corny images of land, the mountains
and then the sea, and then I felt I was carrying something
on my back, through the water. I wondered if this was
Dave. Then the vision ended. The next day, I reached up
my arms and could hardly move. I had an excruciating
backache in a place I never would have normally. It felt
exactly like I’d carried a huge weight on my back, as if I’d
been using muscles I wouldn’t normally use. After this, I
never felt Dave’s presence again. The last couple of medi-
tations passed without incident. The 40 days just ended.
The back pain eased away in a day or so, after I did some
yoga stretches. But it was so painful, I’d never felt any-
thing like that in my back before.

It was not as if Karen’s grief vanished overnight; she found
herself still working through a process of mourning but, as she
puts it, those 40 days “were like my memorial to him.”

A paranormal experience gives the impression of something

“uncontained”: the normal boundaries of everyday life are
eroded so that thoughts leak into reality, or dead men walk on
the streets. Magick itself depends on techniques that artificially

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

encourage this disintegration of limits: entering trances and
altered states, or deciding to enter into communication with
visualized entities that one would ordinarily presume to be
imaginary. Yet, as Karen’s story illustrates, approaching the
paranormal in this way, using magick to speak with the par-
anormal on its own terms, can allow the opening of a channel
of negotiation. Instead of pushing the strange experience out of
her mind, or being badly traumatized or confused by it, Karen
used the magick she had at hand to contain the incident and
bring it to a resolution.

The way she reacted recalls the function of shamans in

traditional cultures around the globe, where it is the shaman’s
role to mediate between the spirits of the dead and the living.
In contrast to the relatively recent techniques developed
within the Spiritualist movement, such as Ouija boards and
seances, the shamanic approach is far more ‘hands on’. Often,
to negotiate with the dead, the shaman must travel to their
world, undergoing some form of ordeal to make the transition.
Karen’s 40 days of kundalini yoga, and her consultation with
a spirit in order to determine a method for helping her friend,
seem more in line with this tradition than the relatively passive
and verbal behaviours of psychics and spiritualists.

In his book Up From Eden (2004), the philosopher Ken Wilber

presents a survey of the spiritual development of humanity
since our earliest origins. He offers a model in which spiritual
practices can be ranked and compared with one another, and in
the process makes the following interesting remark:

The shaman was not the first great mystic sage … he
was simply the first master of kundalini/hatha yoga
(2004: 87).

For Wilber, kundalini yoga and shamanic practices sit
side-by-side on a shared level of spiritual development. Wilber’s
intention is not to cast aspersions on any particular traditions or

A N I C E P L AC E TO M E E T D E A D P E O P L E

practices, but to show which are effective on particular levels,
the highest of all being the attainment of enlightenment.

The level on which kundalini yoga and shamanic practices

operate is referred to by Wilber as “the psychic”. Here, con-
sciousness makes its first foray beyond the material and the
rational into the transcendent. At this level of the mind we
encounter phenomena such as out-of-body experiences, auras,
telepathy, precognition, and so on. It is also the level where that
which Wilber calls “true magic” (1996: 77) is situated:

[C]onsciousness, by further differentiating itself from the
mind and body, is able in some ways to

transcend

the nor-

mal capacities of the gross bodymind and therefore

oper-

ate

upon the world and the organism in ways that appear,

to the ordinary mind, to be quite fantastic and far-fetched.
For my own part, I find them a natural extension of the
transcendent function of consciousness (1996: 78).

Repeatedly, in Karen’s story, we have encountered notions
of boundaries being crossed, of liminal zones, of conceptual
spaces in which the line between psyche and reality is dis-
solved. Wilber’s model draws our attention to the ultimate
transition, which seems to have occurred within Karen herself,
who, by taking up magical practice and using it spontaneously
as a means of dealing with the strange events she experienced,
was at the same time transporting herself onto a new level of
consciousness.

CHAPTER THREE

I’m the urban shaman

pace and time. Have you ever stopped to wonder
what they are? Have you ever peered deeply into your
experience and considered what they are like?

They lend a fundamental structure to our experience, but in

trying to grasp what time and space are we can easily overlook
the equally interesting question of what use is being made of
them.

Where space and time connect with human consciousness

there arise the notions of place and occasion. And what
constitutes the content of our lives more than these? Our lives
are a procession of places and occasions. As soon as we turn
our attention to how experience takes this form, we start to
realize how our lives are chopped up into places and occa-
sions of different types, within which different rules of behav-
iour are applied.

It seems too obvious to be worth pointing out how we are

expected to behave differently when driving on the motorway
from how we behave when walking on a pavement. It even
seems absurd to argue that the contrast between our behaviour
in a school (say) and in a supermarket has any real significance.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

Surely, we simply have to educate our children and buy our food,
so why wonder that society sets aside places and occasions for
this? Yet, if we trouble ourselves to think about it, the institu-
tions of our culture have no other means of manifestation than
the way they dictate our usage of time and space. To question
or challenge this usage is a powerful technique for changing
both culture and our experience of reality.

In a developed society, space and time are divided into a

wide variety of places and occasions that may be bought, sold
and traded. This constitutes the basis on which our social and
economic relationships are built. The purchase and sale of
places and occasions is made possible by abstracting our expe-
rience and then treating those abstractions as commodities. For
example, we have invented dedicated occasions and places for
eating, sleeping, shopping, being entertained, relaxing, and
exercising. It hardly occurs to us that not one of these activities
requires any kind of formal institution to make it happen. In
fact, we do not need to devote space and time to any experi-
ence, because space and time are forms taken by experience, not
a necessary condition for having it. Developed societies convey
an impression that experiences could not occur if we did not
have restaurants, cinemas, televisions, gyms, and yoga classes
to create them. But, in truth, it is purely our will that brings
these activities into being. Membership of the most exclusive
gym does not guarantee fitness; and the most complicated
meal cooked by the most famous chef does not compare with
the crudest food, if accompanied by our resolution to enjoy it
to its fullest.

The privatization of space and time has become almost total.

Home is a name for a space purchased or leased from an institu-
tion, or from another person who probably does not live there.
Work is time sold to an employer or customer. Holiday is a bought
escape from both work and home, but rarely from this ceaseless
commerce of place and occasion. If we list the places and occa-
sions we pass through in the course of a day and the economic

I ’ M T H E U R BA N S H A M A N

relationships underpinning them, we see how little

control

we have over the settings of our daily experience. Nothing
is more fundamentally ours than experience, yet culture is
everywhere engaged in a process of abstracting and dividing
our time and space (which is the closest that it can currently get
to our experience itself), and then selling it back to us as com-
modities it fools us into believing we don’t already own.

The physical world is no longer considered big enough

to satisfy the appetite of this process. The internet seems as
if it were purposely invented to supply a new, fresh level of
abstraction.

But even so, archaic traces remain of a different attitude.

This is vividly evoked in the discoveries of Paul Devereux,
an archaeologist who has studied ancient sites belonging to a
category he calls “shamanic landscapes”.

Whether constructed from rows of standing stones, as on

Dartmoor in England, or simply by removing topsoil, as near
Nazca in Peru, mysterious lines have been left upon the earth
by cultures of different epochs around the globe. The function
of these lines and tracks, Devereux shows, was not the demar-
cation of territory, nor even an aid to transport. For instance,
the so-called “ceremonial roads” built around Chaco Canyon
in New Mexico were constructed by a people that had neither
horses nor the wheel (1993: 24). Yet the prevalence of these
trackways or lines suggests that some kind of universal human
need must have been their motive.

Devereux bases his theory of what this was partly upon

folklore and myths, which reflect a widespread belief that
spirits travel in straight lines.

In Western Europe, straight tracks known as doodwegen

(Dutch for “death paths”) or Geisterwege (German for “ghost
paths”) connect cemeteries to other landmarks. These appear
to be a medieval continuation of much older beliefs that the
spirits of the dead can be marshalled along straight lines. In
Britain, so-called “ley lines” appear to have a similar origin

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

(Devereux, 1993: 27–28). However, in the Americas it was
the spirits of the living that were more at issue. Petroglyphs
(images carved into rocks) have been discovered at sacred
sites in the Americas that appear to depict the soul leaving the
body of the tribal shaman (Devereux, 2009). Devereux argues
that these images are the earliest depiction of the motivation
behind lines on the landscape: the out-of-body experience
(OOBE).

Shamanic cultures devised a variety of practices giving rise

to states of trance that liberate the soul of the shaman from the
body, setting it free to travel the spirit world. These practices
involve psychoactive plants, or self-generated ecstasies caused
by over-breathing, over-exercising, flashing sunlight into the eyes
from a knife-blade, and so on. In each case the aim is the same:
to experience the spirit world. And in each case the experience
assumes a common form: the soul rises above or flies outside
the body.

There are competing theories as to what causes an OOBE.

The assumption that it is the “soul” flying out of the body is
perhaps the least psychologically sophisticated, but it has the
advantage of fitting the manifest appearance. Whether these
episodes were shamanically induced, or caused by other types
of trance, or even perhaps by disease, when people told stories
about their experiences these accounts might well have bol-
stered the idea that the spirit was separable from the body and
capable of unconstrained flight—in other words, of travelling
unhindered in a straight line.

Ancient peoples clearly believed in the reality of spirit
flight, and that belief has left its imprint as straight line
and effigy markings on what can only be called shamanic
landscapes. These lines varied from culture to culture and
age to age in their form and meaning, but their underlying
source was the common canvas of the human mind in
metachoric trance conditions (Devereux, 1993: 35).

I ’ M T H E U R BA N S H A M A N

The impulse to use the landscape, our environment, our space
as a means to access the dimension of spirit seems a world
away from where we find ourselves today.

In modern times the environment is demarcated by lines so

that it can be “commodified”. It fills us with wonder to think
of ancient landscape markings, such as the famous Nazca lines
in Peru, that reveal their meaning only when seen from the air,
and yet they were made at a time when no human eyes had
access to this viewpoint.

Received wisdom suggests that these works were intended

to be seen only by God, or (in shamanic cultures) by the soul of
the shaman after he or she had left their body.

Sometimes, during an OOBE, the “traveller” may indeed be

confronted with impressions that closely resemble the actual,
physical world, but just as often the traveller encounters an
unfamiliar environment or one that contains odd and dream-
like “discrepancies”.

Yet imagine for a moment that we knew

there was (say) a giant hummingbird carved into the top of
the hill outside our village, visible only from above. Would we
not now be more inclined to see it during our OOBE? In fact,
would the case that an OOBE is the only possible occasion on
which we had a hope of seeing it not dispose us to experienc-
ing OOBEs more often?

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to draw on Devereux’s

findings and suppose the motivation behind these landscape
markings might have been to cause the type of experiences
required to view them. I’d even suggest the markings prob-
ably succeeded in giving OOBEs to many people who would
never otherwise have had them and would not have seen the
hummingbird had they not known it was etched in reality onto
the hill. We might argue that these people had not therefore

We shall examine why this is so in the final chapter but consider for now the

bizarre imagery that surfaced during the remote viewing exercise presented
in the previous essay (p. 29).

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

had a “genuine” OOBE at all, but had simply dreamt about a
hummingbird, yet this would not necessarily be what the expe-
rience meant to the dreamer. Etching a design onto a hill may
have been a means of focusing the dreams of a people around
a specific image, in which case a dream concerning that image
would have been a significant spiritual experience.

Once again, it is difficult to imagine our own society invest-

ing so much time and energy into a project for enriching the
nation’s dreams, yet it is not correct to claim we are no longer
interested at all in projecting the contents of our minds onto
physical space. Rather, what seems to have changed is what
finds expression. We have shifted from the meaningful and
qualitative towards the utilitarian and quantitative. The land
is required to sustain a far larger population these days, so this
might seem a necessary development, but did we really have
to deny our imagination access to external space to quite the
current extent?

Art is still allowed some restricted access, in officially sanc-

tioned locations, but the shamanic landscapes were not art.
They were not aimed at an audience but were instead utilities,
facilitating environments, where people came specifically to
interact with and have direct experience of the divine.

The impulse to project qualitative ideas onto space has

not died. In certain contexts it is still thriving, but not with-
out injury from the cultural shift that drove the imagination
from external space into the private consciousness of the indi-
vidual. In the eyes of our culture, soul and spirit are concepts
too divisive and primitive to be allowed officially sanctioned
external space, although occasionally they are given a suitably
indirect artistic or religious expression.

Our modern-day ver-

sion of the shaman is usually an artist, but occultists and magi-
cians also play a lower-profile role. The shamanic world-view

Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, a 20 m tall sculpture of a winged figure

situated in Gateshead, is a recent and significant example.

I ’ M T H E U R BA N S H A M A N

seems to have survived by renaming itself psychogeography, a
non-specific label for what has become partly an artistic and
literary genre, partly an amorphous set of political and philo-
sophical concepts.

Psychogeographers are not often concerned with writing

physical representations of experience onto the landscape, but
with investing their external environment with meaning. This
is often abstract and usually personal, but it is undoubtedly
qualitative rather than quantitative. Because this goes against
dominant trends, the psychogeographer is often forced into
confrontation with the values of the age, unlike the tribal sha-
man, who occupied a more esteemed position. Frequently, psy-
chogeographical practice involves changes made only to the
psychogeographer’s perception of his or her surroundings,
so that the effects are apparent only to the practitioner. This
perhaps explains why psychogeography has become mainly a
literary movement.

Most of the developed world lives in cities, so it is the urban

environment in which the psychogeographer usually works.
Modern town planning strategies and the urban redevelop-
ments that followed in their wake have spurred the growth of
psychogeographical practice. A well-known instance was the
redevelopment of Paris in the 1860s that swept away the clutter
and chaos of unregulated streets in favour of wide, radiating
boulevards (Coverley, 2006: 57f). These could be more easily
policed and were utilized more easily by government forces
against would-be revolutionaries. At the same time, covered
glass arcades were introduced into urban areas, encouraging
the bourgeoisie to flaunt their wealth in public and stimulate
economic growth. This gave rise to the figure of the wandering
urban stroller, the so-called flâneur, a 19th century prototype
of the psychogeographer first described by Baudelaire in an
essay of 1863. By the 1920s, the covered arcades were them-
selves vanishing under new waves of redevelopment, prompt-
ing the social critic Walter Benjamin to begin collecting material

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

for his The Arcades Project, a seminal psychogeographical text.
This work had a major influence upon Guy Debord, founder of
Situationism and inventor of the term “psychogeography”.

The psychogeographical impulse to rescue meaning and

quality from external space receives a fresh stimulus from
each new wave of commodification. Usually this has taken the
form of an artistic or political response but, as we have noted,
the aim of the shamanic landscape was not art. It performed
a function, and the community relied upon it and the skill of
their shamans to execute that function. The shamanic landscape
was, to the modern mind, something more akin to a church
than an art installation, but it was the church of a religion that
did not seek merely belief. Instead it offered everyone a role in
its ceremonies.

The shamanic landscape facilitated a magical act that ena-

bled people to experience a truth. Whether that truth con-
cerned communication with gods or other entities, or released
the soul to explore other worlds, the shamanic landscape was
the means to make that actually happen for the persons con-
cerned. Art, in contrast, is expressive rather than functional. It
sets up a hypothetical arena through the medium of symbols
or ideas into which an audience enters, but from which the
audience is free to disengage. The magical act, in contrast, col-
lapses the distinction between symbols and reality. Its truth is
not hypothetical or symbolic but self-evident, because it is con-
veyed through immediate experience. There are no spectators
to a magical act; everyone participates. Where magick fails the
result is art; the “suspension of disbelief” that occurs in art is a
weak echo of the magical experience of truth.

Magick stands in a similar relation to politics as it does to art.

Magick is functional rather than hypothetical, an end rather than
the advocation of any particular means. Marx’s famous thesis
that the point of philosophy is not to interpret the world but to
change it has been used to highlight a supposed affinity between
magick and Marxism. But unlike left-wing politics magick does

I ’ M T H E U R BA N S H A M A N

not operate through conflict or opposition. It can manifest truth
from reality whenever and howsoever it wishes. In our ear-
lier example, we considered how the magical act of etching a
hummingbird onto a hill might stimulate an experience of fly-
ing outside the body for the persons concerned. Magic does not
“struggle” with anything because it is not fussy about how it
changes the world; the means is not important to the end. Magic
does not “do” dialectics, because it is concerned with experiences,
not ideas. There are magicians who portray themselves as politi-
cally radical and view the use of magick as a subversive act, but
this is to mistake the aim of their magick for the nature of magick
itself. Mainstream society constantly employs magical tech-
niques to evoke into reality fantastical entities such as consumer
goods, celebrities, and other commodities that are as intangible
as they are expensive. It is not simply the fact that a magician
uses magick that makes him or her subversive.

Just as shifts in culture have forced psychogeography to

operate in the realm of symbols rather than the physical envi-
ronment, so too its practice has been diluted. It has lost sight
of the original affinity of its core ideas with magick and has
yoked itself onto art and politics. But even so, work in this
field

continues to demonstrate that unorthodox explorations

of place and occasion, even in an abstract form, retain a power
to transform deeply our perception of reality.

I decided to explore what could be gained from mixing

pyschogeographical techniques with contemporary magick.
Like many others in 2008, I found myself wondering where
the meltdown of capitalism that we were living through might
lead, so I decided to examine the city where I lived for signs to
instruct me.

A standard psychogeographical technique is “drift walk-

ing”, which involves taking an unplanned stroll with no

Examples include writers such as J. G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair and Peter Akroyd,

and film-maker Patrick Keillor.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

fixed destination and simply paying attention to whatever
experiences arise. I decided I would depart from this slightly.
In the interests of keeping fit and maybe generating some kind
of semi-shamanic trance through exertion, I decided to run
instead. So I put on my shorts and running shoes, stuffed a
digital camera and voice recorder into my pocket, and took to
the streets of Brighton and Hove.

First, I went to the crossroads nearest my home and made an

offering to the spirits for help with my quest. Then I set off in
the direction it seemed was indicated.

During the run I encountered images, signs, and situations,

and had several conversations with people, all of which
I interpreted as direct answers to the question I had posed:
Where is the current world crisis taking us? I was obeying
Aleister Crowley’s injunction, that the magician must interpret
everything that happens as a direct message to his soul from
God (1989: Chapter 81). It is this attitude that can lift psycho-
geographical work out of art and into magick. In art, it is not
God but the artist who is the source of the message. In magick,
that message is not merely entertained as an interpretative
possibility but accepted as the truth.

Not far from the crossroads I noticed a fat spider hanging in

its web, an obvious analogy for the current financial system.
Indeed, the next day I found myself reading an article arguing
that the nationalization of financial institutions around
the world had amounted to a covert centralization of the
international banking system.

A short distance further on, the letters “NOX” caught my

eye on a car registration plate. Nox is the Roman goddess of
night. To the Greeks she was Nyx, an obscure figure (appropri-
ately) but a force of such extreme power and beauty that Zeus
himself was terrified by her. The financial crisis, I had therefore
discovered, was unleashing forces that had thoroughly rattled
the usual authorities, but which were ambiguous and not nec-
essarily detrimental.

I ’ M T H E U R BA N S H A M A N

It went against my pessimistic habits, but the further I ran

the less negative the signals I encountered. I passed a building
called “The Church of the Good Shepherd” and then noticed
an unusual sign on the gate of a private house that read simply:
“A Vision of Hope”. No matter how hard I looked, the signs
seemed positive.

By now I was in an affluent part of the city I’d never visited

before. The symbols along the route had indicated that in the
short term there would be an increased centralization among
world governments followed by a chaotic period which,
although unpleasant, might prove transformative. Now I was
being shown that a close eye had to be kept on the rich, who
would manifest the greatest signs of stress. The trend would
continue for them to hide behind security barricades and retreat
into enclaves, in order to protect their diminishing wealth.

My shamanic jog reached its climax in Hove Park, where

I found myself lost in a Cretan maze. Literally! Or should that
be symbolically? Because this was a magical act, the distinction
had vanished. The maze was a work of public art: concrete
lines set on a grassy slope in a pattern combined from a tra-
ditional Cretan labyrinth and a human thumbprint. “Walking
the maze,” read a plaque nearby, “is traditionally linked to
contemplation and renewal.”

So I walked the maze, and I saw how the financial system, in its

present form, had indeed become a labyrinth in which we have
imprisoned ourselves. Of anyone who obeyed the advice on the
plaque and took a contemplative walk about the maze it might
be said: “He applies his mind to unknown arts and changes the
laws of nature.” This was how the Roman poet Ovid described
Daedalus,

the genius who invented the first labyrinth, but who

was intelligent enough to strap on wings after he had finished
building and avoid becoming a prisoner of his own creation by

Fingermaze (Chris Drury, 2006).

Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII: 188.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

flying free. Presumably he flew upwards, like a spirit, in a clear
straight line. This was in contrast to our present day financiers,
who had lacked the sense to avoid falling victim to their own
system, and had trashed the world economy as a result.

In the coming times, I had learned, we must all emulate the

example of Daedalus to avoid the fate of the rich, whose bur-
densome possessions lead only to self-imposed imprisonment
inside a “gated community”.

My discovery of the Cretan maze, which I’d somehow never

noticed before, despite living in the city for nearly 20 years,
convinced me that I’d found my answer. The work was done.
I turned and began the long jog home, with the voice of the city
echoing in my ears.

CHAPTER FOUR

The absolute truth

o observe paranormal events in their more vivid forms,”
suggests Michael Murphy, “we must do so when and
where they happen.”

Sounds obvious, but easier said than done.
“In studies of hypnosis,” Murphy continues, “biofeedback,

meditation, and mental training in sport, experimental proce-
dures can weaken results by their preoccupation with devices
meant to enhance scientific precision” (1992: 17). In other
words, fields of activity in which the paranormal is likely to
appear are also those on which the clammy hand of science has
its most deadening effect.

Sceptics frequently argue the converse of this: that pseudo-

scientific disciplines produce “anomalies” only because they do
not admit scientific rigour. But let us examine Murphy’s list in
more detail: hypnosis, biofeedback, meditation and sports training.
These share a concern with how the mind and body are con-
nected; the relationship between self and other, observer and
observed. Experimental science tends to take this boundary for
granted. It would have to trash all its conclusions if, for instance,
it were discovered that the experimenter influenced the results,

“

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

whether consciously or not. Yet this kind of influence is the
specific goal of the disciplines on Murphy’s list; they all work to
affect and change that boundary in various ways.

If our aim is to study paranormal events “where they

happen”, then one answer to that question of “where” is on
the boundary between self and other. The same place that
experimental science is so ill-equipped to occupy.

Quantum mechanics is a branch of science notably exempt

from this. Quantum physicists have their own conceptual
tools and theories for dealing with the exotic behaviour of the
subatomic world, but it is widely accepted that the laws of the
subatomic do not apply at the level of the everyday sensory
world, which is where the paranormal arises. Many have looked
to quantum physics for an explanation of psychic phenomena,
but the assumption that macroscopic strangeness has its roots in
microscopic physics has not yet been proved. If it had, it would
be a major breakthrough, and would have been used to solve
questions of far greater concern than telepathy and poltergeists.

Those disciplines (“pseudo-sciences”, if you like) that

make their home in the liminal but macroscopic gap between
observer and observed have also evolved their own tools and
technologies. Magick is one of these disciplines. It does not
feature on Murphy’s list, but its aim—like the others—is to
change the individual’s experience or exert “mind over matter”.
Unlikely as it seems, religion also belongs on that list. If religion
tends to be overlooked as an effective technology for changing
experience this is because it is so widespread and commonly
practised that most of us tend not to pay it much attention.

Religion is a contentious topic in our age as we witness fun-

damentalists vying for power not only in the Islamic world,
but also wielding increasing dominance in the United States.
Agnostic secularism has been reluctant to challenge religious
faith head-on, but an atheist rearguard has made its presence
felt and is refreshingly fearless and scornful in its tone. Heralded
“The New Atheists”, these commentators have sprung from a

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

range of philosophical and political backgrounds, as might be
expected of a group united only by a common lack of belief.

Generally, however, they are materialist, rationalist, and scepti-
cal in their approach.

At their head is Richard Dawkins, the renowned evolution-

ary scientist and Professor for the Public Understanding of
Science. There are few people qualified to argue on equal terms
with Dawkins over the subject of evolution, but that has not
deterred Creationists and proponents of “intelligent design”
from queuing up to try their luck. Likewise, judging from his
book The God Delusion (2007), Dawkins himself is oddly confi-
dent of his own qualifications to argue against religion.

Where direct spiritual experience is concerned, Dawkins

regards it as a case of “there but for the grace of God go I”.
He tells the story of a young boy lying in the grass, examining
plants and insects, when suddenly: “the micro-forest of the turf
seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with
the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it” (2007: 31).

It was not Dawkins who experienced this moment of spiritual

awakening (of course), but someone who later became a loved
and respected chaplain at Dawkins’s school. “Why the same
emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me
in the other is not an easy question to answer” (2007: 32).

Dawkins is either shy of sharing his experiences, or he has

experienced very little. He treats us to only a couple of per-
sonal anecdotes. As a child he woke one night and heard the
eerie sound of an invisible person praying. On another occasion
he saw an evil face staring from a window. Both times the bud-
ding scientist stood his ground and investigated. He discovered
the “sound of praying” was actually a draught through the key-
hole, and the frightening face was simply an optical illusion:

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are

the main figures associated with this movement.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

That is really all that needs to be said about personal
“experiences” of gods or other religious phenomena.
If you’ve had such an experience, you may well find
yourself believing firmly that it was real. But don’t expect
the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have
the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful
workings (2007: 117).

There is much to be said for ruling out the mundane before
resorting to the paranormal, but would things have been

different if he had had an experience of the kind that
offered no opportunity for physical investigation? Earlier,

I described how objects rolled around of their own accord after
I’d messed with the Ouija board as a teenager. There was no
room for degrees of misperception in this experience: either the
objects moved or they did not. If they did not, then my sanity
is in question; if they did, then reality misbehaved. Either way,
the explanation is something more interesting than a draught
through a keyhole.

The characteristics of Dawkins’s atheism are not unique but

bear comparison with Sigmund Freud, who was one of the most
popular and influential critics of religion in the previous century.
Although Dawkins offers intriguing suggestions, he shies away
from stating specifically what kind of a delusion he considers
religion to be, and from where it may have arisen. Freud was
more forthright: he regarded religion as a crutch for feelings of
existential helplessness: “I cannot think of any need in child-
hood,” he wrote, “as strong as a father’s protection” (1930: 260).
The idea of God, in Freud’s view, arises from projecting a reas-
suring fantasy of “the father” onto the external world.

Most educated people in the Western democracies would

probably position themselves alongside Dawkins or Freud,

See p. 8–9.

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

yet at the time Freud first published his views a friend and
correspondent, Romain Rolland

, challenged him that the basis

of religion is not a fantasy but stems from a fairly commonplace
experience:

[A] feeling which he [Rolland] would like to call a
sensation of “eternity”, a feeling as of something limitless,
unbounded—as it were, “oceanic”… One may, he thinks,
rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic
feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every
illusion (Freud, 1930: 251–252).

Freud’s response to this idea was dismissive: “I cannot dis-
cover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself” (1930: 252). Dawkins’s
comments on his chaplain’s “oceanic” experience among the
grass-stems is an echo of Freud’s puzzlement. As might be
expected of a psychologist, Freud is more sensitive to his own
mental processes: feelings, he observes, are vague and tricky
things. If we can ever hope to understand this “oceanic” sen-
sation properly, Freud declares that we must translate it into
an idea.

The “idea” that Freud arrived at was this: “oceanic” feelings

and mystical experiences occur when we regress to primitive
states of mind that belong to infancy, when the ego is not ade-
quately separated from the world but both are merged together
in a sensation of “oneness”.

Freud turned down his friend Rolland’s suggestion that

yoga and breathing exercises would provide an actual means
for Freud to experience these states for himself—if he took the
trouble to practise them. “Most unusual experiments” was
Freud’s disdainful reaction (1930: 260). He proceeded to quote

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) was a French writer and winner of the Nobel

Prize for Literature in 1915. He was strongly influenced by the Vedanta branch
of Hindu philosophy, and was an associate and friend of Mahondas Ghandi.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

some lines from Schiller’s poem The Diver: “Let him rejoice
who breathes up here in the roseate light!”

Freud was saying

he’d rather not venture “down there” into the murky depths of
mysticism, feelings, and yoga classes.

Perhaps Dawkins does not have the type of friends that

Freud had, who might pester him about yoga classes and
the idea he ought to experience for himself the type of expe-
rience his chaplain underwent. Finding a yoga teacher was a
much bigger deal in the early 20th century, so perhaps we can
afford Freud a little leeway. Dawkins, however, has far less of
an excuse for passing on the type of spiritual practices that
Rolland recommended.

The philosopher Ken Wilber, in his attempt to define the

common ground between science and spirituality, has pointed
out that science rests upon injunctions as much as it relies upon
evidence (1998). In other words, science is not merely about
observing data, but also about the methods necessary for
acquiring that data.

When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter with his

newly-invented telescope, religious leaders of the day denied
that such celestial bodies could exist, yet they refused the offer
to take a look for themselves through the telescope, on the
basis that the device was “blasphemous” and perverted true
perception.

Dawkins quotes Bertrand Russell against the religious

fundamentalists: “Many people would sooner die than think.
In fact they do” (2007: 345). Many rationalists, however,
are equally averse to feeling and experiencing. I doubt that
Dawkins’s resistance would extend to martyrdom, but I can
almost hear his argument against taking up a spiritual practice:
it would “delude” him.

A different translation, by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (Schiller 1864: 21–28), is

freely available on-line.

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

As Ken Wilber suggests, personal experience is not beyond

the boundaries of scientific investigation, if a hypothesis that
requires a certain experience also includes a specific injunction
that can be followed to replicate that experience: i.e. “To see the
moons of Jupiter, look through the telescope.”

It is too late for Freud, but if Dawkins wants to qualify him-

self in the field of spirituality and support his opinions, he must
expose himself to the data. I’d suggest an hour of vipassana
meditation every day, for a duration of two years. This ought to
yield some relevant experiences, provided he does it properly.
And if he or any like-minded critics refuse, how is this any dif-
ferent from the clerics of Galileo’s day, who turned down the
telescope with cries of “blasphemy”? By refusing to accept the
injunction and experience the data, how are they qualified to
comment on the findings of those that have had the experience?
Freud and Dawkins expose themselves to

allegations of

irrationality, because they have refuted data without observing
it for themselves.

Freud claimed that the “oceanic” experience must be

converted into an idea to make sense. But for those that have
taken the trouble to replicate the experience, it is clear that any
“idea” abstracted from it detracts from the actual data. The
truth does not always lie in ideas or hypotheses derived from
the data, but sometimes in the experience of the data itself.

“But—hang on,” comes the response, “I cannot find this

experience in myself. It simply isn’t there. So much for your
notion of ‘subjective’ truth, then! What use is a truth that isn’t
self-evident to everyone?”

Professor (I reply), it’s up to you to have the experience! Until

you do, how are you qualified to tell us that “actually” an experi-
ence means this, or “really” it means that? Go and do some yoga,
meditate, and come back when you understand what you’re
talking about, then we can debate on what you’ve found.

One hour of daily meditation for two years is far less effort

than it took for Dawkins to qualify himself in biology, so there

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

shall be no griping over demands on time. And there should be
no cheating either: no connecting oneself to an ECG to moni-
tor what’s “really” happening in the brain; or getting someone
else to meditate and measuring their brain activity instead.
I demand subjective experience!

Returning to Freud, I looked up and read the whole of the

poem by Schiller that he quoted in defence against trying some
meditation. It is about a king who hurls a precious goblet
into the sea and challenges a youth to retrieve it. The youth
is sucked down by vast currents but finds the goblet by sheer
luck and then, equally by chance, he is spat back up by the tide
just before nasty Lovecraftian sea creatures drag him under.

Freud bravely faced all the sex, death, and emotionality his

patients could throw at him, yet a friend’s suggestion he might
try yoga prompted him to allude to these images of abject
terror. Evidently, he identified with the fate of the diver, who
is seen no more after the king hurls the goblet a second time
and promises the hand of his daughter in return for a repeat
performance.

With his theory of the unconscious, Freud dived into the

depths and brought up as much as he could handle. The goblet
of mysticism that Rolland tossed as a second challenge he
allowed to sink forever into ignorance.

Yet in Dawkins’s writing we encounter a concern with mul-

ticulturalism and sexism that suggests—in contrast to Freud—
he is at least partially open to models of truth that deviate from
the empirical and evidential. He makes frequent references to
the “raising of consciousness” achieved by theorists of race
and gender-relations. Indeed, he expresses the desire to do
some consciousness-raising of his own, urging us to correct
anyone who makes reference to a “Jewish child” or a “Muslim
child”, rather than “a child of Jewish or Muslim parents” (2007:
379–383).

With this “consciousness-raising” Dawkins is not seeking to

persuade us with evidence that religion cannot be transmitted

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

genetically from parents to children (an absurd idea, of course).
Instead, he is urging us to change language and reinforce a
socially constructed truth.

He will not go so far as to submit his own scientific dis-

course to scrutiny, however. He does not commit himself to a
particular theory of religion, but he offers up a number of ideas
on how evolution by natural selection might have allowed reli-
gion to arise and proliferate, and even discusses the adaptive
benefits it may provide. Possibilities include the way that the
survival benefit of attributing intention and design to natural
circumstances (e.g. seeing a tiger and assuming, without any
supporting evidence, that it wants to eat you) often outweighs
the intellectual inconvenience of being wrong (2007: 211–212);
and how, when someone “falls in love” with God, we may
be witnessing a misfiring of those selection pressures that
favour monogamous sexual behaviour toward other humans
(2007: 214f). Whatever his specific arguments, Dawkins makes
his general stance clear: religion is “a by-product for something
else” (2007: 200). He will not dignify religion with any accom-
plishments in its own right.

But surely it is possible to explain science too as a

consequence of evolutionary processes, as ‘a by-product for
something else’? From an evolutionary perspective, what else
can it be? Ultimately, despite Darwin whipping out the carpet
from under them, both religion and science are still with us,
doing what they always did, with no signs of vanishing in a
puff of deconstructive smoke. So why does Dawkins assume
the same evolutionary argument “kills” one of them (religion),
but “strengthens” the other (science)?

This is an interpretative ruse no different from the kind he

attributes to religious apologists. He asserts it is inadequate
to argue that religious scripture is “symbolic” rather than
intended to be taken literally, because there are no objec-
tive criteria by which to distinguish the parts that are literal
from the parts that require interpretation (2007: 269). But

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

likewise, if you are going to apply evolutionary science to
the history of ideas, you cannot assume that certain ideas are
in need of explanation (religion) whereas others (evolution-
ary science) are transparent and not subject to the very same
explanations.

But we must not be smug either and assume that we are

now in the clear, just because we have so convincingly trashed
Dawkins and Freud. Earlier, I suggested that religion has a
place among those disciplines concerned with the interface
between mind and body, subject and object. We need to con-
sider this in more detail.

A general claim of mystical and religious traditions is that

human beings are deluded. God, the truth, is available, but
human nature separates us from Him, Her, It. The truth is wait-
ing for us to experience it, but this will not occur without action
on our part, whether this takes the form of surrender to the will
of God, accepting Jesus as a personal saviour, or sitting on a
cushion and meditating.

What precisely is this hidden truth? People have labelled

it in many ways: Heaven, paradise, enlightenment, gnosis,
satori. Some of these terms come from orthodox religions,
but unfortunately it is the case that most people who profess
them have not actually experienced them. These experiences
are not easy to gain or understand (you supposedly have
to be dead before you can experience some of them!) but,
at the same time, religious organizations must justify their
existence to ordinary people in the material world. The usual
result of this tension is that the core of truth any single reli-
gion may have contained becomes corrupted over time into
a mere idea. For instance, instead of transcending everyday
consciousness by dissolving the ego into boundless com-
passion, many people interpret Christianity as meaning we
should simply “agree” with what Jesus said, in order to win
entry to a place called Heaven that we will discover after we
are dead.

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

Fortunately, all the major religions have their mystical or

esoteric branches: Islam has Sufism; Judaism has Kabbalah;
Christianity has Gnosticism. In the West, orthodox religions
have often persecuted mystics and occultists (and will prob-
ably continue to do so, wherever they are given the chance)
because of the mystic’s insistence that each person must expe-
rience truth for him or herself, regardless of what any religious
authority has to say about it.

Jared Diamond suggests that a key function of religion is the

promulgation of repressive power structures:

[A] way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct
an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy [i.e. a power
structure that serves the interests of its rulers] … The chief
claimed to serve the people by interceding for them with
the gods and reciting the ritual formulas required to obtain
rain, good harvests, and success in fishing (1998: 277–278).

Orthodox religions of the West have indeed tended to ossify
according to this pattern. Whatever spiritual truths may
have inspired their origin, over time these have become
obscured beneath the weight of an institution that ultimately
serves its own material ends, albeit with the tacit approval of
followers.

But the situation has sometimes developed differ-

ently, as is seen more clearly in the case of Eastern religions.
Karen Armstrong describes how the Buddha abandoned his
regal life and took to the road as an ascetic, yet he was regarded
because of this not as a drop-out but as a hero: “People regarded
the ascetics as pioneers: they were exploring the realms of the
spirit to bring succour to suffering men and women” (2000: 9).

Thanks to this cultural tradition, acolytes of Eastern reli-

gions can still sustain themselves on alms to this day. In
contrast, those brave monks who attempted to transplant
Buddhist traditions directly from Thailand to their monastery

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

in Chithurst, West Sussex, usually went hungry after doing
their rounds of the rural villages with their begging bowls
(Ward, 1990: 111).

The pendulum can swing either way; it is not a case of

“East is better than West”. Both the corruption of religious

institutions and popular support for them arise when the
majority of the people look to others to deliver spiritual enlight-
enment rather than seeking it for themselves. All institutions
are self-serving to a degree. It is only by happy historical acci-
dents that Buddhism wears the essential truth of all the great
traditions a little closer to its surface than some of the others.
Certainly, this is what I’ve found most attractive about it, and
Aleister Crowley reassures me I’m not alone:

The only one who explains his system thoroughly
is Buddha, and Buddha is the only one that is not
dogmatic … Our best document will therefore be the sys-
tem of Buddha … (1980: 10).

It might surprise those who have not taken the trouble to
read him that Crowley has positive things to say about
Buddhism—indeed, about other religious traditions as well.
Religion and occultism are commonly regarded as hating each
other at least as bitterly as religion and science. However, the
deepest and darkest secret of occultism is this: its power comes
not from denying or subverting religion, but on stealing the
best bits from it and practising them properly.

Buddha, Moses, Christ, St Paul, Mohammed: what made

them the monumental figures they became? This is the rhetorical
question with which Crowley opens Book Four, his introductory
text on yoga and magick. What these prophets share is a peculiar
gap in their biography; nothing may be known of them for a few
years, or they retreat “into the desert”, or they suddenly give an
account of some event curiously outside of time when they were
“caught up into Heaven” or “visited by an angel”. All except

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

for Buddha, of course, who instead tells us in unsparing detail
precisely what he has been up to: he had been meditating. In fact,
he meditated so much he grasped the truth about reality and
dedicated the rest of his life to teaching us all about it.

Crowley suggests that all the great religious figures (himself

included, naturally) did as the Buddha did: they went away;
they meditated; and they came back changed into the spiritual
giants it was their destiny to become.

Many people know of meditation as a relaxation exercise.

Many people know of yoga as a physical workout to keep
the limbs supple. What most people do not know, but what
Crowley emphasizes, is the transformational power of these
practices. In fact, perhaps this is recognized now even less than
in Crowley’s day. Because so many people attend meditation
or yoga classes we assume we must already know what these
disciplines are for.

I first became interested in Buddhist meditation during the

early 90s. I attended a group that practised in the Mahayana
tradition. Their main exercises were anapana sutti, a meditation
that involves focusing the attention on sensations experienced
while breathing; and metta bhavana, a visualization for generating
compassion towards others. I enjoyed these classes and was
soon meditating twice a day, for a total of an hour or so. I found
myself becoming more relaxed, calm, and aware in my every-
day life.

But after a few months things changed—and not for the

better. When I sat to meditate I was distracted by unpleas-
ant thoughts. Instead of calm, my body was full of aches and
pains. Each time I practised everything felt “nasty” in a subtle,
indescribable way. Nothing I did seemed to help. I talked to
the teachers: “Keep your attention focused on the breath and
it will pass,” they told me. Sometimes they would recommend
an exercise to calm the mind, if my thoughts were over-active,
or to enliven myself if I was torpid and depressed. But none of
it worked and the feelings grew worse.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

I noticed that most of the teachers were ex-Catholics. This,

and their inability to help, convinced me that I didn’t fit in
with this group. No, I decided, religion—not even atheistic
Buddhism—obviously doesn’t work for me; I’m simply not the
religious type. So I stopped going to meetings and eventually
I stopped meditating altogether.

That happened during my early twenties and the decade

that followed was the worst of my life. That vague “nasty feel-
ing” seemed to hang around for years, not lifting even after I’d
given up meditation. It did not go away properly until ten years
had passed and I took up meditation again. This time I’d joined
a magical organization whose syllabus for novices included
daily meditation practice. I gritted my teeth and braced myself,
anticipating that it would be grim, and at first my expectations
were confirmed.

But eventually the nastiness lifted. The reason things

improved was that I’d done something that probably came so
naturally to Crowley he does not even bother to mention it in
Book Four: I simply kept going.

The secret of meditation is to keep doing it. That’s all. No

matter if “nothing is happening”, or it is boring, or painful, or
unbearable—you just keep doing it. “Better not to start. Once
started, better to finish.” This old Zen saying is true. Regular
meditation kick-starts a process which has an unpleasant as
well as a pleasant aspect. The contrast between them is par-
ticularly marked soon after beginning, but if you roll up the
mat and walk away as soon as it gets tough, the unpleasant-
ness can stick with you. It can stick around for the rest of your
life. (I’ve seen this happen to people.) Sometimes the only cure
is to jump back aboard.

Strong and consistent effort will eventually yield a result.

Crowley describes it as follows:

[L]et it suffice to say that this consciousness of the Ego
and the non-Ego, the seer and the thing seen, the knower

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

and the thing known, is blotted out … There is usually
an intense light, an intense sound, and a feeling of such
overwhelming bliss that the resources of language have
been exhausted again and again in the attempt to describe
it … It is an absolute knock-out blow to the mind. It is so
vivid and tremendous that those who experience it are
in the gravest danger of losing all sense of proportion
(1980: 13).

The meditator who gets this far suddenly understands the lan-
guage of mysticism in a way that the likes of Freud and Dawkins
never will. “Aha, yes,” you say to yourself, “‘God’, ‘angels’,
‘being taken up into Heaven’, I see now what all that old stuff
means.” But as we try to put the experience into more sensible
contemporary language, even as we try to figure out to our own
satisfaction what the experience “is”, we start to realise how
we’re constricted by the limits of our personal understanding
and our cultural context. As Ken Wilber puts it: “If we … pat
ourselves on the back, let it still be with humility: whatever stage
we might be at, there are always higher stages; and somewhere,
someplace … someone is writing a text that is over our heads”
(2006: 92–93). Crowley’s “blotting out of the difference between
knower and known” is merely the type of description that
would be expected from someone who lived in a rationalist age
and whose explicit aim was: “the method of science, the aim of
religion”.

The first part of Crowley’s Book Four is one of the most

succinct, practical, and inspiring texts on meditation I’ve
found. It surprises me every time I re-read it. But this is not
to claim that Crowley’s descriptions of meditation are true
and the terminology of “God” and “angels” used by Jesus,

The motto of the A

∴A∴ or Argenteum Astrum (“Silver Star”), a magical order

created by Crowley in 1907.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

St Paul, Mohammed, and Joan of Arc is a misconception. The
advantage of language like Crowley’s is that it does not gen-
erate the same kind of misunderstandings in those who have
not had the experience for themselves, or who are locked in a
more dogmatic culture. Where the language of gods and angels
can breed religious fundamentalism, the attendant danger of
Crowley’s language is psychologism: it may foster the belief (in
those quarters where it is not met with outright ridicule) that
the “blotting out of the knower and the known” is a pathologi-
cal process, a symptom of mental illness.

Does everyone who attains this stage of realization emerge

with the religious zeal of a Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed?
Thankfully, Crowley muses, no:

[T]he majority of people who claim to have “seen God”,
and who no doubt did “see God” just as much as those
whom we have quoted, did nothing else … Perhaps …
“great” men are the failures of humanity; perhaps it would
be better to say nothing … (1980: 14–15).

Crowley, of course, is not the most impartial authority on this.
He himself chose the path of prophethood. But the following
comes from a lesser-known figure, Joel S. Goldsmith, another
self-styled mystic and the practitioner of a Christian form of
meditation

Goldsmith’s practice sounds very much like a contemporary form of Chris-

tian meditation called “Centering Prayer”. However, this is only my surmise
from the author’s passing references. The key modern proponent of Centering
Prayer is Father Thomas Keating (1997). Some Christian practitioners avoid
labelling what they do as “meditation” because of its association with Eastern
traditions. Anyone who has practised both is likely to report that Centering
Prayer is a form of vipassana (“insight”) meditation. Prayer itself is meditation,
when performed as a means of surrendering self to the other. The common
idea of prayer as “asking God for stuff” is a sad corruption of this and leads, if
anywhere, only to ego-inflation.

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

In my own experience, eight months of from five to ten
meditations a day were necessary, before I received the
very first “click” or sense of the Presence within—eight
months of meditating day and night. Furthermore, I had
no knowledge that such a thing as making contact with
God was possible, or that it would accomplish anything
once it was achieved. There was, however, deep within
me, an unwavering conviction that it was possible to
touch something greater than myself, to merge with
a higher power. Nobody whom I knew had gone that
way before me; nobody had prepared the ground for
me. There was only that inner conviction that if I could
touch God, at the center of my being, It would take hold
of my life, my work, my practice, and my patients. By
the end of eight months, I was able to achieve one sec-
ond of realization … It was another week before the
next second of realization came and many days before
the third one. A whole week intervened before the
fourth moment of realization was achieved; then, it hap-
pened twice in one day … It was probably three years
before I learned that if I got up at four o’clock, some-
time between then and eight in the morning, I would
feel that “click” or awareness that God is on the field.
Some days the “click” came within five minutes and
some days it took the whole four hours, but never after
that did I leave for my office until the Presence had been
realized (1974: 169–170).

This illustrates, I hope, that expressing these kinds of experience
as “God”, or taking a religious sense of mission from them,
is a choice determined largely by personality. Yet at the same
time a deeper pattern informs these experiences, which seems
to be more uniform: the diligent application of a contemplative
technique leads to a realization of something unsuspected
and inexpressible in the nature of reality. Continued practice

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

leads to repetition and refinement of the experience, as
the boundary between other and self becomes progressively
more permeable.

It is not uncommon for orthodox Christians to shake a for-

bidding finger at meditation and yoga. The reasoning behind
this is self-preservational: if “the experience of God” were
accepted as something everyone could obtain, the Church
would not seem so necessary. This is why the emphasis within
orthodox religion tends to be on faith rather than experience.
The faithful accept the existence of God purely on the basis of
belief, and are actively dissuaded from taking up practices that
would otherwise afford them direct experience of the object of
that belief. Likewise, magick and the paranormal are declared
off-limits (“evil”), despite the awkward fact that religious scrip-
ture consists to a large degree of saints and prophets displaying
all kinds of paranormal powers.

Spiritual and paranormal experiences go hand-in-hand.

A person who practises meditation diligently will eventually
experience something they might feel inclined to call “God”.
As a result of their practice, it is also likely that he or she will
encounter other paranormal experiences too.

The classic Buddhist texts on meditation are very matter-

of-fact on this issue. Both the Visuddhimagga (“The Path of
Purification”) and the Vimuttimagga (“The Path of Freedom”)
contain chapters on “supernormal powers” with explicit
instructions on how to cultivate them. These include “Knowl-
edge of Others’ Thoughts”, “Recollection of Past Lives”, and
“Divine Sight”.

But I confess to disappointment on read-

ing these. The instructions perhaps make more sense if you
are a Buddhist monk, but they give the same impression as
old grimoires or alchemical books, which often intentionally
demanded rare ingredients or impossible feats in order to

See Buddhagosa (1997: chapters XII–XIII); Upatissa (1995: chapter IX).

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

deter the ignorant or the uncommitted. It’s my impression
that the meditator is being intentionally overloaded with
onerous instructions in these texts. If someone took them at
face value and seriously dedicated themselves to fulfilling
them, telepathy and past-life recall would be the least of their
achievements!

Daniel Ingram, a present-day master of meditation, pro-

vides a stripped-down and far more accessible version of the
magical methods described in these and other Buddhist texts.
His approach is a kind of “chaos-magical” equivalent to classi-
cal Buddhist magic.

Yet although Buddhism does not go as far

as decrying paranormal experiences as the work of Satan, nev-
ertheless the “supernormal powers” (or siddhis) are tradition-
ally regarded as a distraction from the main aim of Buddhist
practice: enlightenment. Ingram echoes these reservations,
yet readily accepts that the powers can be cultivated through
meditation, and also lists some of the spiritual benefits from
doing so. His pragmatic attitude is summed up by the follow-
ing passage:

Whether or not these [powers] are “real” is a question that
I am happy to avoid, though these experiences can be so
extremely vivid that they can seem more “real” than the
“real world”. Much more interesting than the question of what
is real is the question of what is causal, i.e. what leads to what.
For example, we might decide that our dreams are not
“real”, but we must admit that there are real world conse-
quences of having dreams. All this can be a slippery busi-
ness, and the “psychic powers” generally don’t turn out to
be quite what they seem. As one of my friends once said,
“Yeah, I can fly, but just not in this realm!” (2008: 173).

In an internet podcast, Ingram described some of the startling results and

experiences he had gained from this technique. See: http://tinyurl.com/ms6wgp.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

For most people, it is more likely that paranormal experiences
will arise spontaneously from their meditation practice, rather
than from an intentionally directed technique.

One evening in February 2007, I was meditating when

I distinctly heard a woman’s voice saying: I’m done! I’m done!
It was so clear it startled me and broke my concentration. My
immediate thought was that someone had died. I mentioned
this to no one, because my girlfriend’s mother was seriously ill
at the time, but I noted it in my diary.

The next day at work it was announced that a senior mem-

ber of staff had died the previous evening. Well, that must have
been it, I thought, even though this person was male and was
alive at the time I heard the voice. In the days that followed my
girlfriend’s mother made a good recovery so I thought no more
about the experience.

Around this time a letter arrived at the building where

I lived, addressed to Mrs G. No one of that name lived in the
building and the letter lay uncollected. There was no return
address, so after a few days I opened it, in order to return it
to the sender. Mrs G., it emerged, was the sister of Ms M., an
elderly woman who lived in the flat below mine. It was a letter
of condolence.

It was only by this accidental route that I discovered Ms M.,

my neighbour, had died. I’ll probably never know the exact
date and time at which Ms M. passed away in hospital, but the
date on the letter suggested it would have been on or close to
the day I heard the voice.

Ms M.’s bedroom was directly below the room in which

I was meditating.

Many long-term meditators will have stories like this, which

invites us to examine in more detail the connection between
contemplative practice and the paranormal. Why would the
simple act of regular concentration lead to instances of telepa-
thy, precognition, and hearing dead people?

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

An interesting perspective is supplied by Arthur Koestler in

The Roots of Coincidence (1972). Koestler begins with a survey
of experiments in parapsychology, which attracted far more
optimism in the 1970s than is currently the case. He turns to
theoretical physics for an explanation of the strange phenom-
ena that parapsychology has unearthed, but concludes there
is no evidence that the behaviour of microscopic entities can
exert analogous effects at the level of the everyday world. Even
if it did, Koestler is discomfited by how different forms of par-
anormal experience would then require different physical theo-
ries. For example, quantum-level “psitrons” might explain ESP,
but some kind of macroscopic physical field would be needed
to account for psychokinetic phenomena—i.e. for poltergeist
activity or other instances of real-world objects moving around
without apparent physical cause (1974: 80–81).

Koestler turns instead to synchronicity as a possible means

of grouping all paranormal phenomena under a single theory.
Synchronicity is the assumption of a non-causal force at work
in the universe, so that events are connected not only through
cause and effect but also through their meaningful affinity with
one another.

All the phenomena we term “paranormal” can be regarded

as instances of synchronicity because they consist of events that
exhibit affinity regardless of their intrinsic nature or their sepa-
ration across time and space. For instance, a premonition can be
viewed as a synchronistic correspondence between a person’s
intuition and an external outcome. Telepathy is a correspond-
ence between one person’s perception and thought-processes
in another person’s mind. Indeed, even psychokinesis can be
viewed as a non-physical correspondence between a person’s
intention and the behaviour of an external object. The almost
surreal research into ESP by René Peoch took this to a whole
new level. The results of his work with animals and comput-
ers suggested that the mind of a chicken can influence the

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

movements of a robot to a statistically significant degree—even
when the movements of the robot had been pre-programmed
in advance (Fenwick & Fenwick, 1998: 228). This would appear
to indicate that ESP has no physical or causal foundation what-
soever, and does not even require a human subject. But let us
leave aside psychokinetic chickens for the moment, because in
a sense the most stunning species of paranormal phenomena
is indeed the synchronicity pure and simple, those startling
“ coincidences” we sometimes encounter. For instance, a woman
of my acquaintance needed to contact a long-lost friend. Being
a practising magician, she decided to compile a six-digit tel-
ephone number from cards pulled at random from a tarot deck.
She then dialled the number—and found herself talking to the
friend’s next-door neighbour! To the persons concerned, events
like this create an impression that the whole universe has been
cleverly levered into position, as if to ensure the affinity takes
place.

But as a matter of fact, it has not. If it had, then the event

would have been caused—presumably by whatever provided
the leverage. The sensation that the universe has been manipu-
lated is simply an “effect” (damn—you see what I mean?) of
our causal habits of thinking, which are deeply ingrained and
almost impossible to break.

Synchronicity was, of course, a term invented by C. G. Jung,

and we have already examined its application in other con-
texts.

Yet despite invoking it, Koestler is no fan of Jung’s idea.

In particular he baulks at Jung’s assertion that a synchronicity
is mobilized when a psychological archetype becomes active
in the mind of the person who experiences it. Koestler argues
that Jung has therefore posited a cause (i.e. the archetype) for
his supposedly “acausal” force: “It is painful to watch how

See p. 31, where the role of water in hauntings is explored as “symbolic” or

“synchronistic” rather than “causal”.

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

a great mind, trying to disentangle himself from the causal
chains of materialistic science, gets entangled in its own
verbiage” (1974: 98).

Jung and his followers do themselves no favours in the way

they express these difficult ideas

, but Jung was primarily a

psychotherapist rather than a physicist, and so we shouldn’t
complain too much if his usage of his own ideas is geared
specifically towards that field.

Victor Mansfield, however, makes the case that Jung was more

scrupulous in his thinking than Koestler suggests. Mansfield
argues that all paranormal phenomena can indeed be regarded
as acausal, but we should reserve the term synchronicity (as Jung
himself clearly intended) for instances of acausal phenomena that
are meaningful (1995: 28f.). For instance, thinking about someone
who chooses that same moment to phone is an example of an
acausal event, but it is too trivial to be considered a synchronic-
ity. In contrast, Jung’s famous story of the “scarab beetle”

was

a synchronicity, because the scarab is a symbol of rebirth and it
caused a psychological revolution in the life of the previously
hyper-rational woman to whom it appeared (1983: 340).

Koestler proposed an alternative concept to Jung’s “syn-

chronicity”. If Jung’s ideas are geared towards psychotherapy
then Koestler’s idea—the holon—has a more general, biological
cast: “‘holons’ … are Janus-faced entities which display both
the independent properties of wholes and the dependent prop-
erties of parts” (1974: 112).

Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest collaborators, writes on the

one hand that “Jung even explicitly warned against taking the archetypes (of
the collective unconscious) or psi-powers to be the causal agency of synchronis-
tic events” (quoted in Mansfield, 1995: 25), yet on the other hand she writes,
without any qualification, “Wherever Dr. Jung observed such meaningful
coincidences, it seemed (as the individual’s dreams revealed) that there was
an archetype activated in the unconscious of the individual concerned” (Jung
et al., 1964: 226).

See p. 37.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

Every entity in the universe, suggests Koestler, is a holon.

It comprises certain parts, yet itself forms a part of a greater
whole. For example, the human body consists of organs work-
ing together to sustain the identity of the body, while the body
functions as part of a wider organization, a particular society.
Each holon demonstrates on the one hand a self-assertive ten-
dency to retain its own identity, but on the other an integrative
tendency to function as a part of the greater whole. In human
beings this integrative tendency manifests in what Koestler
labels “the self-transcending emotions”:

… devotion, empathy, identification, hypnotic rapport.
Going one step further, we may include into this cat-
egory the trance-states of mystics and mediums, the
effects of certain psychotropic drugs, and emotions
which accompany spontaneous paranormal experiences
(1974: 119).

The “acausal” forces of the Jungians and theoretical physicists,
Koestler suggests, can more usefully be viewed as this
“integrative tendency” in action, an innate inclination of all
entities to combine into ever-higher wholes. The integrative
urge can bring about a “confluential event” without any phys-
ical means (1974: 122). Presumably this is so because, as the
experience of synchronicity suggests, the integrative tendency
is a feature of the universe that operates throughout physical
reality. Wherever it occurs and we are able to perceive it, we are
likely to describe the result as “paranormal”.

Koestler was no stranger to mystical experiences. Paul

Devereux notes a classic “oceanic experience” that Koestler
underwent at the age of 14 (2005: 32). Whether we accept that
Koestler’s theory of holons illuminates the basis of mystical
experience, or regard it simply as autobiography projected
onto the history of ideas, perhaps depends in part on our pref-
erence for taking a causal or an acausal view.

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

In ordinary waking consciousness, perception appears

split between subject (perceiver) and object (perceived). Con-
sidered as a holon, everyday consciousness is an instance of
the self-assertive tendency, because it strives to maintain the
sense of permanent, separate identity. In meditation, however,
the opposite tendency comes into play. God, samadhi, satori,
gnosis: these are some of the labels used to describe the shift in
experience onto “higher” levels of awareness as the boundary
between self and object is transcended. This takeover of eve-
ryday consciousness by the integrative tendency (as Koestler’s
theory describes it) is the moment at which the paranormal
may come calling. Seen from this perspective, it seems less sur-
prising if meditation—which is the intentional exercise of the
integrative tendency—should occasionally lead to paranormal
experiences.

The aim of meditative practice is not paranormal

experiences but enlightenment. Most authorities on meditation
advise against cultivating paranormal experiences because:
“One risks becoming sidetracked by them into the exercise
of personal power, which strengthens the ego—the small self
that stands between us and progress on the meditative path”
(Fontana, 1992: 168). Considered in terms of Koestler’s comple-
mentary processes, we can now appreciate in a new way how
the paranormal might tempt us to slide from “integration” into
“self-assertion”.

Yet enlightenment seems to many people a notion equally

as baroque and bizarre as psychic powers. “I pictured three
options,” a young American Buddhist wrote recently, about his
search for a guru, “a gorgeous female kung fu master … who
would teach me to do one-finger handstands; an old Japanese
master who would hit me with a stick and demand, ‘Jaimal!—
where is your mind?’, or a Tibetan lama who could fly” (Yogis,
2008: 61). The ironical assumption here is that “enlightenment”
has to be something that is apparent to the naked eye in some
extraordinary form.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

A friend and I, both of us seasoned meditators, were excited

to learn that a famous guru was coming to London to give a
talk. What interested us was not the advertised content of the
lecture but reports we had read about this person’s special tal-
ent for transmitting his enlightenment to people with whom
he came into contact. We did not exactly expect him to levi-
tate, but we did wonder if we might experience some kind of
“weird vibe”.

The event was well-attended but we found seats fairly near

the front, supporting our plan to get as close as possible and
soak up any enlightenment rays he happened to be giving out.
Of course, we were only half-serious; and any genuine awe
would have been swept away in any case by our first impres-
sions of the guru as he came on stage: a short bloke, with a
mullet haircut and a bushy moustache.

However, what happened afterwards certainly wiped the

grins off our faces. We should have realized something was
afoot from the number of synchronicities that converged on
the event: firstly, we discovered the venue was just around
the corner from a pub in which we had once had a significant
conversation; secondly, the number printed on my friend’s
entrance ticket was personally relevant to him; and thirdly, he
was amazed to discover that one of the organizers of the event
was a colleague from the same office where he worked.

During the journey home, he sent me a text reporting that

“something unusual” was happening. I assumed he was jok-
ing, but over the next couple of days this was followed by a
number of emails, indicating that he believed he was now
“enlightened”. He asked me if I was absolutely sure that
I wasn’t enlightened too.

At the time, well … I felt positive, happy and upbeat, but

there was nothing particularly “enlightened” about me. The
next day I woke up with a migraine. It improved enough for
me to go to work, but on my way home I felt light-headed, as if
a trace of it remained.

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

It was when I sat to meditate later that I couldn’t deny it any

longer. Something had happened. The more I tried to meditate,
the more my mind refused to go anywhere. Slowly it dawned
on me why I was having trouble: whatever I was setting out to
achieve by meditation, I was already in that place. Meditation
had become pointless.

Wow, I thought. It’s true. I’m enlightened!
Let me state this up-front: it lasted for about a week.
I wasn’t really (yet) enlightened. At the time, though, I really

believed I was. But so what? It did not prompt me to start preach-
ing in the town centre on Saturdays. I did not start a cult. Yet the
most amazing thing had happened to my mind: everything felt
the same, except for the availability of something impossible.

It was hard to say much about it, except that it could not

possibly be, and I did not understand how I could be aware
of it. Whatever it was, it could not be seen, heard, or sensed.
Neither could it be thought. It was not an image, idea, or a
deduction. Yet there it was in my awareness, blaring away
on its own unique channel, which was neither sensory nor
mental.

If I was busy with things, it would be in the background

and faint. But when I was quiet, it came on strong. When
I meditated it went berserk. Meditation was like sitting face-to-
face with God. It blared at me with its incredible impossibil-
ity, beaming at me from somewhere outside the universe. It
verged sometimes on being almost painful. One feature of it
that particularly surprised me was that it had little to do with
any heightened awareness of being alive or of the reality of
existence. It was independent of any existential issues. Instead,
it was like a little patch of objectivity or “not me”, which had
somehow lodged itself in my subjective awareness.

The perfection of it was engrossing. Imagine if, each time

you wanted something, you discovered there was a little piece
of whatever it was already inside you. It was as if I now had
the outside world on my inside. There was nothing I couldn’t

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

cope with or face up to. Even the thought of dying had begun
to seem quite exciting.

Sadly, it was my reaction as it started to fade away after a

few days that proved it was not enlightenment: I was horri-
fied and utterly devastated. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be
“ordinary”, but was brutally reminded as it passed away. Med-
itation became the usual effort and daily life resumed its usual
cast: me “in here” and everything else “outside”. My friend
underwent the same process of withdrawal a day or so after
me, which made it slightly easier to bear.

If I hadn’t known better, maybe I’d have devoted myself to

the guru we went to see. I might have joined his organization
and handed over my income to him (as he often demands of
his students, if the articles that have been written about him are
true). But what would be the point of relying on another per-
son for my spiritual state of mind, whether he was enlightened
or not? That did not look to me like “the path of liberation”.
Granted, being in his presence truly seemed to have had an
effect, but it evidently was not an ability he could direct or con-
trol, and I doubted he would have affected me at all if I were
not already an experienced meditator.

Daniel Ingram defines “full enlightenment” as follows:

The arahat [i.e. a fully enlightened person] has attained
to the complete and utter elimination of the illusions of
permanence, satisfactoriness, and duality (separate self),
and now perceives reality non-dualistically. They know
the joy and clarity of freedom, as well as the fullness of
their humanity (2008: 364).

As Ingram suggests—and I had to learn the hard way—enlight-
enment is not an ability, a characteristic, or a quality that a per-
son can be said to “have”. This would imply it were a “thing”,
something that was “not me”, whereas to see it as such would

T H E A B S O L U T E T R U T H

be to maintain the split between subject and object on which
our everyday consciousness rests. But that was indeed how
I had regarded the brief taste of non-dualistic perception that
was granted to me (through some strange and synchronistic act
of grace that I still don’t understand), and was why I reacted so
badly when it ended.

Since then, the same experience has come back and passed

away numerous times. It no longer feels like such a big deal
because it has helped me understand that although it is cer-
tainly a reality, enlightenment has nothing to do with flying
Tibetan lamas or levitating buddhas with telepathic powers.
It is something even more amazing than these: a fundamental
revolution in the relationship between human consciousness
and perception that destroys forever the illusion of a self iso-
lated from the universe.

The teachings and technologies needed to realize this directly

for ourselves are easily available to everyone, provided we
look in the correct places and practise them in the right way.
Paranormal experiences, amazing as they are, are actually a
gateway to something even more incredible.

CHAPTER FIVE

Dream yourself awake

he term “lucid dreaming” was coined in 1913 by a Dutch
psychiatrist and writer, Frederik van Eeden. It refers to
the type of dream in which the dreamer is aware—even

as the dream unfolds—that he or she is dreaming.

Many of us will have experienced spontaneous lucid

dreams. Often these take the form of nightmares in which we
recognize something horrible is about to happen and we wake
ourselves up. In other words, we become aware we are having
a dream while we dream it. However, there are techniques that
can be practised to produce lucidity when we want it. These
techniques also provide an ability to change the contents of our
dreams.

The appeal of lucid dreaming to occultists is probably self-

evident. Awakening inside a dream supplies access to a differ-
ent plane of existence, one in which we are liberated from the
usual constraints of the physical body. “In these lucid dreams,”
Eeden wrote, “the re-integration of the psychic functions is so
complete that the sleeper remembers day-life and his own con-
dition, reaches a state of perfect awareness, and is able to direct
his attention, and to attempt different acts of free volition”

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

(1913: 152). He was suggesting that a lucid dream is extremely
close in quality to our experience of waking reality, but with
a crucial difference: the object of our experience. In the case of
waking, the object of experience is physical reality. In the case of
the lucid dream, the object is our own imaginary inner world.

Van Eeden may have been the first to use the term “lucid

dreaming” but he was not the first practitioner. St Augus-
tine relates an account of a lucid dream that dates to 415 AD
(LaBerge, 1986: 21), and detailed techniques for inducing lucid-
ity have been a part of the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism for
many hundreds of years (Wangyal, 1998).

However, the claim that we can “wake up inside a dream”

has been met with suspicion from more recent currents within
Western thought. Freud’s theories on the nature of dreaming
have proved extremely influential. In his view, the source of
dreams is the unconscious mind and the instinctual drives that
emanate from it (1900). Only after a long process of analysis,
Freud argued, can a dream be shown to have any meaning or
any relationship to waking consciousness at all. Without analy-
sis, the meaning of dreams is hidden from consciousness. So
rather than “experiences” in their own right, Freud tended
to view dreams as puzzles that could be resolved only by the
waking mind. His assumption was that dreams belong to the
unconscious mind, waking experience belongs to the conscious
mind, and never the twain shall meet.

In an influential book on dreams published during the

1950s, this type of argument was extended even further. Nor-
man Malcolm wrote sceptically about lucid dreamers, those
deluded souls who:

often report that while they were having a certain dream
they “realised” they were dreaming, and they do not

Earlier, we considered Paul Devereux’s claim that ancient rock-drawings

depict similar experiences among our ancient ancestors. See p. 48.

D R E A M YO U R S E L F AWA K E

mean that this realisation was itself a part of their dream:
rather they wish to distinguish between the dream and the
judgement or realisation that it was a dream. (1964: 42)

Malcolm suggests that a lucid dream is not a particular type
of experience we have had, but is simply a linguistic failure to
distinguish correctly between waking up in a dream and dreaming
that we are awake. The first would imply a unique mental state; but
the second is simply a normal dream except with a specific content.
He argued that lucid dreaming does not exist; a so-called “lucid
dream” is simply a dreamer’s failure to conceptualize correctly
that they dreamt about waking up inside a dream.

So much of the confusion that surrounds the theory and

practice of lucid dreaming centres on this basic issue: is a lucid
dream different from a non-lucid dream because it is a different
kind of experience (i.e. a unique mental state), or only because
it has a certain type of content? And how would we ever be
able to tell the difference?

A 19th century master of lucid dreaming, Hervey de

Saint-Denys, believed he had proof that lucid dreams were a
distinct state of mind. One night, he became self-aware in his
dream and found that he was standing beside a lilac bush:

[T]he question was whether this [lilac bush] … was a
stereotyped vision, the unalterable reproduction of a
memory-image imprinted in the fibres of my brain, as the
materialists would have asserted. In this case my imagi-
nation and will would be powerless to modify it. Whilst
considering these questions I broke the branch and tore
off the head of lilac flowers bit by bit … (1867: 56).

No doubt, Saint-Denys had proved the materialists wrong—but
not in the way he supposed. He had indeed shown how a lucid
dream creatively throws up modified scenes and objects in
response to the changing awareness of the dreamer, but he had

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

not “destroyed” the image of the lilac bush. In fact, he had only
created a new image of himself destroying it!

Although we may be habitually drawn to do so, we must

not assume that “objects” in the internal world of our dreams
are like those in the waking world. Logic is the application of
the laws of everyday physical reality to the world of the mind,
but in the mind and in dreams all kinds of contradictions are
conceivable and permissible. When we sleep, our connection
to the world created by the physical senses is severed, and
so too is our reliance on logic. It has no relevance any longer
because, as the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted:
“For those who are awake there is a single, common universe,
whereas in sleep each person turns away into his own, private
universe” (1987: 89). Every supposed “object” we appear to
perceive in our dream, or think about, or manipulate, evapo-
rates into nothingness the moment we awake. Consequently, in
our dreams the difference between an “object” and our mind is
far more uncertain than appears the case in the waking world,
and so too is the difference between “self” and “other”. What
Saint-Denys overlooked as he pulled apart the lilac bush was
that if the bush was a perfectly formed mental image, then so
too was the image of himself destroying it. He was free to act
as he pleased within his dream, but only because the presenta-
tion of himself within it was also an image; this “self” was not
set apart from or against what it appeared he was acting upon.
The whole dream, including the sense of himself inside it, was
one seamless image.

Jean-Paul Sartre summed up this difference between the

inner world of images and the waking world when he wrote:

An image can only enter into consciousness if it is itself a
synthesis, not an element. There are not, and never could
be, images in consciousness. Rather, an image is a certain
type of consciousness. An image is an act, not something.
An image is a consciousness of something (1962: 146).

D R E A M YO U R S E L F AWA K E

Waking perception, in contrast, does not appear to us like this.
An image may be a willed act, but a perception is different: it is
a response to something that truly exists “out there”, in reality.
Confusion between perceptions and images often arises when
we try to compare or think about them because most of our
mental images are sensory. Commonly, our mental images are
based on visual perceptions, although most of us have no trou-
ble forming mental images of sounds, smells, tastes and feel-
ings as well. Abstract mental imagery is also common. More
rarely, there is also cross-modal sensory imagery, which may
involve “seeing sounds” or “feeling smells”, etc.

Because most mental imagery is of things perceived, peo-

ple may confuse their images with the perceptions on which
they are based. For instance, it is quite common to hear peo-
ple debate whether they dream in colour or black and white.

Never mind the answer: the question arises from a misunder-
standing of the difference between perception and imagery.
When we dream our eyes are closed; nothing is being seen.
Colour is a property of seeing, not of thoughts or images. We
may dream that a rose is red, but this does not mean that the
image has anything red in or about it, any more than the word
“red” needs to be written in coloured ink in order for it to have
its meaning. So although there is nothing to prevent anyone
from dreaming about things having or not having certain col-
ours (or—indeed—even dreaming that they do dream in colour,
or in black and white) to insist that colour or monochrome is a
property of mental imagery is like asking someone what musi-
cal instrument they can hear their thoughts being played on.

I once mentioned a dream to someone in which I’d built a

wickerwork structure across my front door before answering

This is a perceptual phenomenon known as synaesthesia, sometimes regarded by

neurological investigators as pathological. For an overview see Cytowic (1994).

However, since black and white televisions are now all but obsolete, I’ve

noticed that people discuss this less than they used to—which is in itself
suggestive.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

the doorbell to him. After I’d told him the dream, he asked: “But
if you couldn’t see me, how did you know I was outside?”

“Because I dreamt you were!” I said.

Along similar lines, Sartre (1950) presents an interesting

thought-experiment. Picture your best friend (Sartre sug-
gested) and standing next to him or her an identical double
who resembles your friend in every way. Now, if you were
confronted with this scene in waking perception, you would
not stand a chance of telling them apart. But a mental image is
an act of the one who imagines, so confusion never arises.

Why am I making a big deal over this difference between

imagery and perceptions? Well, if we apply to dreams the same
criteria that we apply to waking perception, we will miss out
on the unique subtleties that the dream-experience presents.
For instance, in a dream a person may have a certain appear-
ance yet be experienced by us as someone else altogether—or,
sometimes, even as a combination of several people impossi-
bly rolled into one; or a word or a situation may be imbued
with a power or sense of truth lacking completely from that
word or situation if we were awake. If, after waking up, we
decide: “Well, really I must have met Tom, Dick and Harry in
the dream, even though I only remember seeing Tom”, then
our expectations of the waking world have distorted the expe-
rience that we actually had.

Unfortunately, a great deal of scientific research into dream-

ing does precisely this—it applies the criteria of waking per-
ception to imagery. Consequently, its conclusions might apply
to waking perception but probably tell us little about dreams.

For example, Stephen LaBerge (1986), a leading authority

on lucid dreaming, conducted an experiment to investigate the

I’d expected him to know better. He was my psychoanalyst.

In psychoanalysis this misapplication of the laws of waking logic to

dream-experience is termed “secondary revision” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1994:
412) and is regarded as a defence against revealing the true meaning of the
dream to the analyst.

D R E A M YO U R S E L F AWA K E

problem of duration in dreams. We have probably all experi-
enced having a dream that felt as if it lasted for an extended
period but, on waking, we discovered that only seconds had
passed. This raises the question of how long it takes to dream
about x in comparison to the duration of x in the waking
world.

LaBerge used a team of experienced lucid dreamers who

made a signal by moving their eyes when they had become
conscious inside their dream. (LaBerge had already established
that eye movements behind closed eyelids could be used as sig-
nals between the lucid dreamer and the waking world, without
the dreamer waking up.) It had been agreed in advance that the
dreamers would count from one to ten after their first signal,
and then make a second signal to indicate when the counting
was finished. LaBerge recorded an average of 13 seconds
between the first signal and the second—exactly the same fig-
ure he arrived at by asking his dreamers to perform the same
task whilst awake. These results suggested it takes the same
amount of time to dream of something as it does for that thing
to take place in the waking world.

But once we consider this experiment more closely, does it

really tell us anything about dreams?

The subjects had been asked to count from one to ten: this

is an action, a task. Any action takes a certain amount of time
to complete, but the duration tells us little about the processes
involved in the task. For instance, suppose we asked some
people (whilst awake) to add up a list of figures. Would the
time taken enable us to deduce an average “rate of thinking”?
Would we suppose this “rate of thinking” holds good for every
thought-process undertaken by that person?

I don’t think we would, because it is clear that this approach

does not really get to grips with the nature of thinking. And
neither did LaBerge’s experiment get to grips with dreaming,
because the dreamers were not asked to have a dream, they
were asked to count to ten. Would we assume that counting to

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

ten whilst awake reveals something deeply significant about
waking consciousness? Not really. “Doing x”, “thinking of x”
and “dreaming of x” are three different activities; we cannot
suppose that simply because they share x as their common con-
tent we have somehow factored out x and gain access to the
pure process of “being conscious”, “thinking”, or “dreaming”.
It is not clear that LaBerge’s dreamers were not simply perform-
ing the task demanded of them irrespective of their waking or
sleeping state. “Growing an extra head” might have been a bet-
ter task to have set them, because it could only belong to the
dream state. If tasks can depend upon certain states of mind,
then maybe adding up figures or counting from one to ten can
only be accomplished by someone who is awake. If you have
ever tried to add numbers or read a newspaper in a dream,
you will know what I mean—it feels “wrong” and impossibly
difficult. Indeed, the identical result of 13 seconds arrived at by
LaBerge might suggest that this is the case.

The moral of this tale is that if you approach dreams with

the expectations of waking reality then that is all you will get.
For practitioners of Tibetan dream yoga, however, this is cer-
tainly not the aim. Generations of Buddhist monks have not
been set the difficult task of learning to lucid dream simply
so they could hold onto waking consciousness throughout
the night, but for a radically different reason instead: to arrive
at a first-hand understanding of the illusory nature of reality
itself.

On the question of duration in dreams, I’d point out that we have no conscious

sense that enables us to register accurately the passing of time, and that the ability
of human beings to gauge duration is notoriously unreliable. Our relationship
to time is extremely vulnerable to subjective distortions, yet what from the
side of perception we would describe as “subjective distortion” might actually
indicate a positive ability of the mind to form qualitative images of time. It should
not surprise us too much if these images of time also make an appearance in
dreams, where—because there is no perceptual input to undermine them—
they are taken at face value. In short: if we dream of something that includes an
idea of it taking a very long time, then it is experienced as such.

D R E A M YO U R S E L F AWA K E

In a normal dream we accept as real anything that arises, no

matter how absurd it appears afterwards. When we become
lucid in our dream, however, we are in effect waking up to the
artificial, illusory nature of the “reality” that surrounds us in
that dream. The ultimate aim of the dream yogi is to carry this
powerful practice into his or her waking hours and recognize the
artificial nature of waking perceptions as well as dream images.

If we assign “reality” only to our waking perceptions, and

consider our dreams only by comparing them to this “reality”,
then “waking reality” will become the standard by which we
approach our dreams. But if, on the other hand, we respect the
unique properties of the dream state and allow these to subvert
our waking expectations, then we can approach the experience
of dreaming on its own terms.

Although I’ve had some success at inducing lucid dreams,

for many years after my first experiences I remained scepti-
cal whether it could truly be regarded as “being conscious
while dreaming”. My reason was the nagging sense of falseness
that tormented me like a hangover each time after awaking.
It seemed I had become aware and woken up inside my dream,
and this had indeed been accompanied by vivid imagery that
was certainly unlike non-lucid dreams. But the trouble was
that having woken up to myself inside the dream, I would then
always start to do or say or think things that I simply wouldn’t
have if I’d been awake.

Many investigators of lucid dreams have commented on

the phenomenon of “false lucidity”. Sometimes it may seem to
us that we have become lucid in a dream, whereas we realize
afterwards we were only non-lucidly dreaming that this was
the case. False lucidity is like a type of dream that many of us
have experienced: when we dream that we have woken up and
gone to work, but in reality we are still asleep and in bed. Often
we have this type of dream when we do not want to get up and
wish to remain sleeping. Dreaming that we have gone to work
seems designed to fool our workaholic tendencies into some

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

extra sleep. Similarly, false lucidity often arises when we are
trying too hard to attain the lucid state, as if part of the mind
were fobbing off the part that is striving with a fake version of
what it was striving for.

An obsessive seeking after sexual adventures was the main

reason why I doubted my lucid dreams were what they seemed.
As soon as I became self-aware, I would immediately set about
engineering sexual situations—yet I knew I wouldn’t behave
like this if I were truly awake. There were many aspects of the
lucid state I longed to explore, yet despite my best efforts I’d
always get side-tracked into sex.

I could see no other expla-

nation except I wasn’t actually conscious at all. All lucidity, I
concluded, must be false lucidity because that simply wasn’t
“me” in the dream.

As I remarked previously: how can we ever tell the differ-

ence between being awake in our dream, or just dreaming that
this is the case? It took a long time to find a solution. Until I
found it I was, in effect, turning Descartes’ famous pronounce-
ment “I think therefore I am” onto its head: That’s not me, there-
fore I’m not conscious. Yet if consciousness is not precisely that
which by definition is what it seems, then what the hell is it?

Immersing myself more deeply in occultism—specifically,

in the practice of meditation—revealed the blindingly easy
answer, which also forced me to start meeting my experience
on its own terms. Simply: the dream self and the waking self are
not the same.

It is so obvious that it is easy to overlook the fundamental

truth this contains. Usually, we regard the self as whatever it
is that stays consistent as our awareness changes from state to
state. For instance: this morning I was unhappy because I had
a toothache, but this afternoon I’m feeling great again because
I’ve seen the dentist. Ordinarily we suppose it is the same thing

I don’t seem to be alone in this. John Magnus, for instance, discusses in detail

his own struggle with lucid sex addiction (2005: 202f.).

D R E A M YO U R S E L F AWA K E

in us that experiences the pain and then the relief. We don’t
posit a “pain self” and a “relief self” that separately come to
the fore, so why should we suppose there is a dream self that
comes to the fore in sleep and a waking self that takes over in
the morning? In that case, like Jekyll and Hyde, they might have
conflicting agendas and go about satisfying them in wildly dif-
ferent ways. Dr Jekyll might be interested in the philosophical
aspects of lucid dreams, whereas Mr Hyde would probably use
them only to get laid.

The practice of insight meditation (vipassana, in Pali) showed

me it was not the lucid dream that was false but my under-
standing of the waking state. My error lay in the widespread
tendency to suppose that we have a self and it is conscious of
whatever experience we are having. Vipassana, however, teaches
techniques for looking very closely at our experience of reality
whilst it happens, moment to moment. It may take a while to
get the hang of it, but—once you have—something peculiar
about everyday experience is then realized: the self is an expe-
rience that arises within consciousness, not the other way around.
Quite simply: there is no basis for assuming a self that some-
how sits outside experience, taking it all in. How could there
be? How could we even know we had a self if that were so?
Think about it! It’s such a stupid mistake it beggars belief how
we go on making it, every instant of our lives. Yet we do. But
by practising vipassana we can begin to let go of this delusion.
Indeed, life gets remarkably better if we do so. Eventually, we
might even follow in the footsteps of the Buddha and shake
ourselves free of the illusion of self for good.

But to return to lucid dreaming: it seemed I was conscious

in my dream, but it also seemed I behaved differently in my

This is known as enlightenment, of course, and forms the main topic of our

preceding essay. It should be emphasized that the Buddhists do not have a
monopoly on enlightenment. Most of the world’s great religions have tech-
niques similar to vipassana that realize the same aim.

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

dream from how I would when I was awake. Yet now I’d
found a view from which I could accept this was simply as it
appeared: the dream-self and the waking-self were different—
or rather, as the practice of vipassana had shown me, there was
actually no justification for any kind of “self” at all; there were
simply different sets of experiences, depending on whether I
was asleep or awake. Neither Dr Jekyll nor Mr Hyde was my
“true self”, because my true self was the realization I had no
self at all.

So far, then, we’ve held up lucid dreaming as a category of

experience that is interesting because it sheds light on experi-
ence as a whole: waking consciousness presents us with per-
ceptions, whereas in dreams we find ourselves immersed in a
world of images and these possess radically different proper-
ties. However, when we dream, the mind makes a “reality” out
of these images, just as it does from perceptions when we are
awake. It is the dominance of the image over the dreaming con-
sciousness that gives the dream-state its characteristics, which
appear strange when compared to the waking state.

Yet as we’ve seen, it is not only “reality” that is thrown into

question by the transition between waking and dreaming con-
sciousness, but also the nature of self. Meditation practice leads
to the realization there is no such thing. Self is itself an experi-
ence rather than the transcendental source of experience. If self
is an experience then it is subject to radical shifts, just as our
experience is subject to wild alterations as we move between
different states of consciousness. If the waking state is domi-
nated by perceptions and the dream-state by images, then as
we move from waking consciousness into sleep we also make
a transition from an experience of self based upon perception
to a self that is based upon images. This crucial difference ena-
bles us to begin to understand the relationship between lucid
dreaming and some closely-allied states of consciousness:
out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) and astral projection.

D R E A M YO U R S E L F AWA K E

Some books on these subjects tend to gloss over the distinc-

tion between these states and suggest that they are all at root
the same thing. John Magnus, for instance, defines astral pro-
jection very broadly as the ability to project our awareness in
a way that enables us to bring our thoughts to life and experi-
ence them as we do the physical world (2005: 3–5). His book
is entitled Astral Projection yet it includes many experiences
similar to those we would expect to read in books on lucid
dreams.

In my opinion, the distinction between these states is quite clear

and needs to be firmly grasped in order to avoid confusion.

A lucid dream is a dream in which we are conscious that

what we are experiencing is a dream. Usually, lucid dreams
are far more vivid than their non-lucid counterparts. However,
the degree and quality of consciousness may vary from lucid
dream to lucid dream and our mental abilities within them
may sometimes appear constrained in ways that seem unusual
when compared with being awake. Here is an example from
my dream journal:

A beautiful view through big windows. The sky is full of dark
clouds, but the sun is slanting underneath and the landscape
is brightly lit. Open fields. Fires are burning here and there.
I resolve to go outside. I open the window and climb onto the
radiator in front of the window, then onto the sill, then I discover
an outer window that I must open. All this seems vivid but is
extremely difficult to achieve. I have to concentrate very hard
on opening the outer window, on trying not to fall, and on try-
ing to maintain the lucidity on which I know all this depends.
But the lucidity starts to fade and despite all my efforts I am
suddenly awake in bed again.

In waking life there would be perceptions of physical objects
that had to be negotiated. In a dream, however, the feeling

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that something is difficult can manifest non-specifically. In the
waking world there would be a specific combination of win-
dows, locks, and objects that it would be possible to overcome.
But in the environment of the dream-world the general idea of
“difficulty” can appear as a non-specific thing. This is due to
the way that in dreams the environment is composed of mental
images.

An out-of-body experience (OOBE) is indeed similar to a

lucid dream, but it has one clear and distinct difference: during
an OOBE we are aware of our sleeping, physical body but at
the same time—alongside this—of impressions arising from a
“dream body” or “astral body” that seems to occupy a different
spatial location from the physical body. Paradoxically, during
an OOBE we are aware of inhabiting two “bodies” at once.

OOBEs and lucid dreams may both arise spontaneously or

they may be induced at will. I propose that the term astral pro-
jection (AP) should be reserved for a willed OOBE. An OOBE
can be said to be “willed” in two senses: firstly, the dreamer
has decided to have an OOBE at a particular moment; or, sec-
ondly, the dreamer has decided to have an OOBE at a partic-
ular moment and also wills their “astral body” to travel to a
particular location or scene.

Now, it is quite possible for someone to have a lucid dream

that he or she is astrally projecting, just as it’s possible to have a
non-lucid dream about lucidly dreaming. My suspicion is that
many accounts of so-called astral projections or OOBEs are in
fact lucid dreams (or maybe even non-lucid dreams) about hav-
ing these experiences.

Each time I’ve experienced an OOBE it has begun with

an unpleasant and intense “buzzing” sensation that sweeps
over the body. This sensation is the classic sign of the onset of
an OOBE. It feels horrible, as if the fillings in my teeth were
about to be shaken loose, but I’ve discovered that if I accept
the sensations for what they are, they eventually pass. Many
times I’ve flinched away from this feeling or become excited

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at the prospect of an OOBE, only to discover that my reaction
prevents the OOBE from developing.

Only after the buzzing

sensation has been successfully endured and has passed is it
possible to “leave the body”. Sometimes this has to be willed,
other times the “separation” happens naturally:

Something started to happen. A buzzing sensation started. It
was unpleasant but I was excited because I recognised it as the
beginning of an OOBE. I let the fear and excitement wash over
me; it became “integrated” and then passed. I sensed I could
“roll out” of my body although it was difficult. I could move my
astral left arm so I rolled all of me to the left. I could feel the quilt
and my girlfriend’s sleeping body under it as I crawled out of
bed over her … She kept fidgeting and each time the movement
brought my awareness back to my physical body, asleep in the
bed, which I was also aware of and could feel. I concentrated my
way through this, at first, but she continued to move. It was too
much and I was annoyed. Awareness of the astral body gradu-
ally faded as awareness of the physical body grew too strong.

I’ve put certain expressions such as “leave the body” and “sepa-
ration” into inverted commas because if we were awake and we
suddenly started to see the world from a location different from
that inhabited by our body, then we might indeed be justified
in assuming something had separated from us and travelled
to a different place. But because we are dealing with mental
imagery and not perceptions, we are not justified in assum-
ing any such thing. There is nothing to prevent us at any time
from forming images of places that are remote from where we
are, whereas forming perceptions of remote locations demands
the physical relocation of our sense organs. As has been men-
tioned, paradoxically an OOBE includes a full awareness of the

However, it is sometimes still possible to attain a lucid dream if we screw up

at this point.

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physical body and its activity. In every OOBE I’ve had, as well
as being aware of impressions received by my “astral body” as
it wanders about the room, at the same time I’ve had a peculiar
dual awareness of the sensations received by my physical body
as it lay in bed: I can feel the position of my body and the quilt
covering it; I can hear my regular, slow breathing; I can even
see the darkness behind my closed eyelids. Too much aware-
ness of the physical body endangers the OOBE, as the example
above illustrates. It is as if awareness of impressions from the
astral body demands a certain level of concentration or detach-
ment from the sensations of the physical body.

Often, the environment we encounter during an OOBE

closely resembles the waking world. Sometimes, however, it
does not, especially if we succeed in moving the astral body
from its immediate starting location and exploring beyond the
bedroom. It is important not to get too hung up on this and
fall into the mistake of regarding the perceptual accuracy of
the experience as part of the criteria for an OOBE. The buzz-
ing sensation and the impression of inhabiting two locations
at once are the sine qua non of an OOBE. To add to this a rule
that the environment encountered should conform with the
actual physical environment would be to confuse characteris-
tics of the state with what is merely its content. As I hope I’ve
established by now, to insist that an OOBE is only an OOBE if
it meets the criteria of waking perception leads to contradiction
and confusion.

Certainly, all these states—lucid dreaming, OOBEs and

astral projection—are alike in that they arise upon the cessation
of waking perception and the crossing of the boundary into
sleep. OOBEs and astral projection, however, are characterized
by a greater sense of self-awareness than a lucid dream. In a
lucid dream we are aware of ourselves inhabiting a different
kind of reality, but during an OOBE or astral projection we
are also acutely sensible of inhabiting a different kind body,

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or possessing a consciousness that seems to have “detached”
from the body altogether.

It is as if these states of consciousness form a hierarchy

according to the degree to which consciousness has become
focused upon itself. This is why I think it is useful to distinguish
clearly between them, because each demands a higher level of
spiritual sophistication than the previous in order to access it
reliably and navigate within it.

In the waking state, consciousness is focused predominantly

upon perceptions arising from the physical world through the
sense organs. In a normal dream the focus is upon internal
mental imagery. But in a lucid dream, there is an additional
degree of self-reflective awareness that enables us to be aware
of what we are experiencing in its true nature as a dream-
image. In OOBEs and astral projection this is taken yet another
step forward, with the focus turning inwards once more upon
the kind of “body” or “‘self” that appears to be doing the expe-
riencing. In an OOBE we acquire an astral body. In astral pro-
jection, in addition to this, we have the willpower to direct the
astral body to wherever we please.

It seems to me likely that experience of these states is what

has led mystics, philosophers and even the prophets of world
religions to posit notions such as “the soul”, “ghosts”, appari-
tions of living people, etc. I’d be wary of deducing the objective
existence of any such entities from these states of conscious-
ness. The tendency to invent from our sensations and expe-
riences a “self” that appears to have some kind of objective
existence extends into these states too—as I was forced to
realize when confronted by the dubious sexual behaviour of
my “dream self”. The way I acted in my lucid dreams wasn’t
“me”, so I concluded it must be a “dream-me”. Later it became
clear that the foundation for imputing a self to any state of
consciousness is equally ill-founded. However, the tempta-
tion to do so may be greater in certain states than in others.

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Confrontation with an experience of a “dream-me” or “astral
body” understandably leads us to wonder whether this entity
might be somehow “truer” or more essential than the sense of
self we experience during our waking hours. The imputation of
a self or essence to these exotic states of consciousness becomes
especially tempting when we consider how the “astral body”
seems to exist independently of the physical body, perhaps
offering the possibility of personal immortality.

When exploring these states it is helpful to maintain a

perspective rooted in actual experience rather than wishful
thinking. Based on the replicated findings of countless practition-
ers through the centuries, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition again
offers some useful pointers. Mastery of dream yoga, according
to this tradition, leads to yet another level of dream experience,
beyond even astral projection. In this state consciousness is
more refined and even more intensely focused upon itself. This
is known as “clear light dreaming”, which “indicates a state
free from dream, thought and image … in which the dreamer
remains in the nature of mind” (Wangyal, 1998: 63).

Clear light dreaming is the apex of dream yoga, generally

considered attainable at will by only the most advanced and
enlightened practitioners.

In this state consciousness is so purely

focused upon itself that there is nothing else, nothing arising “in”
consciousness: no perception, no image, not even a sense of self or
object. There is only the unimpeded light of consciousness itself,
out of which all experience takes its form. And although those
who abide in or have touched this state have indeed reported
realizations of “immortality” at this level of awareness, they have
also emphasized it is a transpersonal layer of being. Consciousness
may indeed be infinite and eternal at this level, but if anything

Of course, any old klutz might stumble across this or any other of the

dream-states by luck or accident at some point in their lives, but the conclu-
sions they draw from it will be crude or inaccurate if they are unable to view
the experience in its correct context.

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105

endures forever it is Consciousness (capital “C”) and not “my”
consciousness, or “yours” or even “ours”.

Having drawn a rough sketch-map of these states of

consciousness, I’m concerned not to give the impression that
things are as simple out there on the astral plane as it might now
seem. Although dreams, lucid dreams, OOBEs, astral projection,
and clear light dreaming appear to form a neat hierarchy in
terms of the degree to which consciousness is the object of itself
in each, I’ve stumbled across other states that throw this model
into question—and I’m sure others will have done so too.

“Sleep paralysis” is one of these and is exceedingly common.

Typically, sleep paralysis occurs between sleeping and waking.
The mind partially emerges from the dreaming state, but the
body is still incapable of movement, no matter how much we
attempt to struggle. Most often, the inability to move is accom-
panied by a sense of a menacing presence, sometimes manifest-
ing as a terrifying creature sitting on or applying force to the
chest, or to some other part of the body, resulting in a constric-
tion of the breath.

Evidently, experiences of this type belong to the spectrum of

dream-states: the creature sitting on our chest is not a part of per-
ceptual waking reality, but obviously a manifestation presented
to the mind as an image. The dreamer is conscious, so this state is
not a non-lucid dream. The dreamer possesses a perceptual sense
of the physical, sleeping body (albeit paralysed), which therefore
rules out a lucid dream. Yet it cannot be considered an OOBE or
astral projection, because the sense of an astral body and the will-
power to move even the physical body are both notably absent.

Where, on the spectrum of dream states, does sleep paralysis

belong? Is it perhaps a type of OOBE that has failed to get off the
ground, placing it below an OOBE and above a lucid dream?
Whenever I’ve had the misfortune to find myself in this state,
I’ve noticed that my thought processes are remarkably sharp
and quite un-dreamlike. Considering also how this state tends
to arise during the transition between sleeping and waking, my

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hunch is that it’s more correct to situate sleep paralysis on the
boundary between waking and non-lucid dreams rather than
anywhere “higher”. The main point to draw from this, I think,
is not to do with how these states should be categorized, but
how there are states of consciousness that do not obviously fit
into any simple model.

And there are more of them out there, at the fringes of

consciousness, states so ill-formed and bizarre it is no wonder
no one has bothered yet to put a label on them. For instance,
more than once I’ve experienced the following:

A rippled pattern appears. It doesn’t move. I interpret it as
wallpaper on a wall or ceiling. I am aware of my physical body,
but cannot roll out of it into an OOBE, despite trying. This is
not sleep paralysis either, because there is no sense of foreboding
or presence. Nothing further happens, other than this static
pattern in front of my eyes, so it is not really like a dream at
all. There is simply consciousness, and the sense of being awake
in some place that is just as real but far more limited than the
waking world.

“False” lucidity was discussed above as a case in which the
dreamer has a non-lucid dream about lucid-dreaming. However,
on another occasion I stumbled across an odd variation on this:

I dreamt that I had an expert in lucid dreaming watching over
me, checking my progress. I had that “light”, “fragile” feeling
that precedes a lucid dream; I even felt myself on the verge of
the “buzzing” sensation that precedes an OOBE; but I was not
aware that I was actually asleep whilst I was dreaming all this!
It felt so much like waking consciousness I simply assumed
I was still awake all along!

In other words, instead of becoming conscious and entering a
lucid dream by realizing I was dreaming, I was already lucidly

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107

dreaming yet failed to recognize this as such because it felt so
much like being awake. Now, perhaps this was indeed simply
an unusually elaborate instance of false lucidity, but it certainly
seemed otherwise after I awoke. And where would we place
this experience upon our continuum of dream states? A lucid
dream in which we were not aware that we were lucidly
dreaming would be a contradiction in terms!

Although there is an observable progression between the

states in the extent to which consciousness is aware of itself,
evidently there are other states that are unique enough to
deserve a label to themselves, yet in respect of which it is much
harder to decide whether they manifest consciousness “more”
or “less” than other states.

This suggests that consciousness is probably not the only factor

enabling the transition from one state to another. For instance, the
transition from waking to sleep involves a switch from perception
to imagery as the dominant sensory modality; and in the case of
OOBE and astral projection it is the manifestation of willpower
that allows us to suppose a change of state has occurred.

It seems, then, that the overall change in consciousness is

itself connected in some way with the action or inaction of a
whole set of mental faculties. These include (but may not be lim-
ited to) the following: thought, imagery, perception, and will.

In waking life, these are all active and the waking mind is

able to distinguish each from the other. As soon as we approach
the boundary of sleep, however, it seems as if they become
selectively enabled or disabled depending on our state. In sleep
paralysis, for instance, thought and imagery are active, but per-
ception and will are disabled. In an OOBE, thought, imagery
and perception (of the sleeping physical body) are all active, yet
many people in this state report odd problems when it comes
to doing what they want to do. Sometimes movement in certain
directions is inexplicably blocked, or simple physical gestures
are impossible, whereas others remain easy. It seems that the
will is only partially active in this state. (Hence my suggestion

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that we reserve the term “astral projection” for OOBEs that
manifest the activity of will to a much fuller degree.)

Alongside this selective enabling and disabling of mental

faculties there is yet another factor, which is exposed to view
when we investigate the nature of the faculties that become
“activated” as we move into a particular state:

In the dream I visualised a sigil. I was surprised to discover I
was capable of visualisation. I had expected that—as in a non-
lucid dream—anything imagined would arise in the external
environment, as in a non-lucid dream when we read a book,
say, or watch television, and the story or film suddenly becomes
the dream itself. But it didn’t. Somehow it had its own “mind-
space” that it could occupy. However, the visualisation was
“abstract”, not vivid like a mental image when awake. It seemed
more like a word or an abstract idea than an image.

In waking consciousness there is diversity among the elements
of experience; we have perceptions, thoughts, and images. But
in dreams our waking senses are suspended and the contents
of consciousness become images, begging the question how in
an imaginary world (i.e. a world constituted purely of images)
would it be possible to “imagine” something?

My experience suggests that in a sense it isn’t possible, but

what seems to be happening is that faculties which are avail-
able during sleep step into the role of those that are no longer
available. As we have seen repeatedly, imagery takes on the
role of perception in all the dream states. In a lucid dream, then,
it seems as if thought takes on the role of imagery. This is why
a lucid dream provides an extra mind-space in which we can
reflect and hypothesize, in contrast to a non-lucid dream; but
this also explains why, when we investigate the nature of this
faculty within the dream itself, it possesses a peculiar “dry”,
“abstract”, “non-sensory” quality that the imagination does
not possess when we are awake.

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On an internet forum, I read with interest the startled

observations of an experienced meditator who had succeeded
in settling down to meditate whilst inside a lucid dream. As he
turned his mind to look deeply into his state of consciousness,
he was surprised to note the complete absence of anything
resembling will. In his waking meditation he was used to notic-
ing the subtle mental sensations of his will going about its busi-
ness. In the lucid dream, however, these were entirely absent.

Will makes a partial return in OOBEs, and a fuller return

in astral projection, but is it the case that some other faculty
might be filling in for it? I can’t lay claim to having had the
experience that would qualify me to answer, but I believe the
solution might lie in the shift in the sense of self that occurs
between lucid dreaming and an OOBE. In a lucid dream we
often have vivid physical sensations, but these are taken to a
whole new level in an OOBE. It is not simply that our “per-
ception” seems more real; in an OOBE the heightened back-
ground sense of “being in a body” vastly increases our sense of
being aware. I would hazard a guess that it is the return of the
awareness of physical sensations (i.e. perception) that is the basis
of this; the paradoxical awareness of the physical body in an
OOBE alongside whatever is happening to the dreaming part.
It seems that perception is somehow implicated in forming the
basis of a sense of will that begins to emerge in the move from
lucid dreaming toward OOBE and astral projection.

This kind of observation is very difficult to make. Part of the

reason is that it requires dedication and practice to learn how
to distinguish between the different elements of mental life
through introspection, and intense self-discipline to turn the
mind to this type of investigation when in the lucid dreaming
state. Another part of the reason is that few people are looking
or have ever looked at their experiences in the dream-states
in this way. Currently, most investigators are drawn to neu-
rological imaging as the basis of research, even though this
kind of work presents deep problems when we come to ask

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questions of what it feels like to be in these states. And the final
part of the problem is our natural bias towards waking life as
the baseline against which we measure all types of experience.
It simply appears counter-intuitive to the majority of people to
suppose that what assumes the role of perception in a dream is
not perception, or what assumes the role of imagination is not
imagination.

Old-fashioned, systematic introspection into our own

experience can still shed new light on the structural features of
these states, and—in particular—the role they play in mystical
experience. There is much work remaining to flesh out the model
of the dream-states that I’ve proposed. I suspect this work has
already been done on a personal level by those enlightened souls
who have mastered dream yoga, or have found other ways to
peer deeply into the nature of human perception and conscious-
ness. But the ways in which they have presented their findings
may have proved idiosyncratic and off-putting to many people.

Two mystical geniuses of the early 20th century, Rudolf

Steiner and G. I. Gurdjieff, exemplify this. Both wrote of human
spiritual development as a process that involves an acquisition
of an extra “body” in addition to the ordinary physical one:

[M]ankind is the only creature that can grow a soul … Thus,
we human beings have a purpose, and that purpose is to
grow (or, as Gurdjieff prefers to call it, to “coat”) within us a
“higher-being-body”, by us called soul (Ginsburg, 2005: 9).

This work [i.e. the constant endeavour for the mastery of
the ego] leads on to ever higher levels of human nature.
Through it man evolves new members of his being, which
lie—as yet unmanifest—behind what is manifest in him
(Steiner, 2005: 53).

At first glance such ideas are senseless until, perhaps, we
compare them with the progression of the dream states from

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111

non-lucidity to astral projection, because these states—when
regarded as a continuum—do indeed seem to chart a process
that results ultimately in the establishment of an “astral body”
possessing its own full set of faculties including conscious-
ness, perception, imagination, and will. These faculties appear
to have been salvaged from the scrapheap of waking con-
sciousness that is left behind when we cross the threshold of
sleep. For instance, when we dream, our new “body” acquires
“perception”, which it constructs from the waking faculty of
imagination (mental imagery). When we lucid-dream, it also
acquires a form of “imagination”, constructed from the waking
faculty of thought. As we pass into an OOBE, our new body
gains the beginnings of a “will” of its own, which it seems to
have re-purposed from the waking faculty of perception.

The common understanding of “a body” is as a kind of vehi-

cle or wrapper for our consciousness or sense of self. Obviously,
this is not the sense of “body” that applies here, which would
lead us into all kinds of dualist philosophical problems if we
adopted it. This “astral body” is best regarded not as some kind
of spirit-double but—just like the physical body—as a holistic
collection of capacities.

The capacities of the physical body are shaped by evolu-

tion and environmental factors, and are synonymous with its
form—for example, respiration, reproduction, movement, and
everything else a physical body does. The capacities of the astral
body, on the other hand, are shaped by the platform of raw
materials that the physical body provides it with, but also—as
Steiner and Gurdjieff both insisted—by the conscious exercise
of certain spiritual practices. In other words, if we do not give
it a proper workout, by performing spiritual practices such as
yoga, meditation, etc., then our astral body will not grow.

The “body” model at first seems eccentric but it has definite

advantages. A body can be viewed as a collection of functions
sufficient to sustain its integrity upon the level of existence
on which it functions. However, a body can extend its range

112

O C C U LT E X P E R I M E N T S I N T H E H O M E

of functions onto other planes, by refining and extending its
capacities. For instance, human beings are adapted by evolu-
tion to survival on land, but through prosthetic technology the
exploration of the oceans and outer space has become possible
to a degree.

Dream yoga, meditation, and other spiritual disciplines

are an equivalent of scuba gear in the development of our
consciousness. They help extend our awareness beyond the
everyday sense of self into which our waking experience
and our presuppositions condition us. But just as we would
not expect to develop an exceptional physical body without
putting in some work, the same applies to the astral body. The
dream states appear to form a continuum organized according
to the extent to which consciousness is capable of taking itself
as an object, but progression through this continuum in a neat
sequence is not inevitable; we have to make it happen. As in
physical training, spiritual development has its equivalents of
laziness, rigidity, and obesity. We can get stuck by falling into
old habits and prejudices, or identifying the self with sensa-
tions. The body model explains why the dream states are not
available to all of us, all of the time. It also helps account for
those odd states we noted, that do not seem to fit in clearly
with the others or lead anywhere interesting: they are not “bad”
or “wrong”, they are a consequence of how the dream states
involve interactions between a range of faculties, so some of
the combinations thrown up are quite likely to appear random
or bizarre.

The most important lesson that engagement with the dream

states teaches us, however, is not concerned with the nature of
any particular state, but with the subtle developments under-
gone by consciousness as it passes from one state to the next.

113

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119

INDEX

acid trip 19
Akroyd, Peter 53n
angels 71
Armstrong, Karen 67
art 50, 52
astral projection 100, 102–3, 108
Augustine, St. 88

Ballard, J.G. 53n
Baudelaire, Charles 51
Benjamin, Walter 51
Blackmore, Susan 11ff
body 111–2
Bond, Elijah 6
Buddhism 67f; supernormal

powers (siddhis) and 74–6;
Tibetan dream yoga 94–5,
104–5

Carpenter, William Benjamin 6
centering prayer 72n
clear light dreaming 104–5
consciousness 104–5, 112
Crowley, Aleister 13, 16, 29, 54,

68–9, 70–2

Culling, Louis 17

daimon 26 (see also demon)
Darwin, Charles 65
Dawkins, Richard 59ff
Debord, Guy 52
Decartes, René 96
Dedalus 55–6
demon 17–8 (see also daimon)
Dennett, Daniel 59n
Devereux, Paul 47ff, 80, 88n
Diamond, Jared 67

120

I N D E X

drift walking 53ff
Dukes, Ramsey 18
DuQuette, Lon Milo 16
Drury, Chris 55n

earth mysteries 31n
Eeden, Frederik van 87–8
ego 81
Elpenor 37
Emoto, Masaru 31–32
enlightenment 81ff, 97, 97n
ESP 77, 78

faith 74
fi nancial crisis of 2008, 53ff
Fort, Charles ix
Franz, Marie-Louise von 79n
Freud, Sigmund 35, 60ff, 88
Fuld, William 6

Galileo 62
Gnosticism 67
God 39, 54, 66, 71, 73–4, 81, 83
Goldsmith, Joel S. 72–3
Gormley, Antony 50n
Graves, Tom 31ff
Gurdjieff, G.I. 110, 111

Harpur, Patrick 26ff, 30, 34, 36
Harris, Sam 59n
Heraclitus 90
Hitchens, Christopher 59n
hologram 33
holon 79ff
Hyatt, Christopher S. 16

ideomotor effect 6, 14
image 90ff

imagination 108, 111
Ingram, Daniel 75, 75n, 84

Jung, Carl Gustav 19, 34–6,

78ff; ‘golden scarab’ anecdote
37, 79

Kabbalah 38, 38n, 67
Keating, Thomas 72n
Keillor, Patrick 53n
Kennard, Charles 6
Koestler, Arthur 77ff
kundalini yoga 37–8, 38n

LaBerge, Stephen 92–4
Lethbridge, T.C. 31
lucid dream 87ff
lucid dreaming 99–100, 103
lucidity, false 95–6, 106–7

magick x, 4, 38, 41–2, 52–3, 58
Magnus, John 96n, 99
Malcolm, Norman 88–9
Malkuth 39
Mansfi eld, Victor 79
Marx, Karl 52
maze 55–6
meditation 69ff, 74, 83, 97
memory 10
metaphor 36
mind 35–6
Murphy, Michael 57–8

New Atheists, The 58–9
Nox 54

oceanic feeling 61, 63
Odysseus 37

I N D E X

121

Ouija 3, 5ff, 60
out-of-body experience (OOBE)

48–50, 100–3

Ovid 55

paranormal 8, 12, 41, 74ff, 77
Peoch, René 77–8
perception 91ff, 101, 111
politics 52–3
prayer 72n
precognition 12, 76, 77
psychoanalysis 15, 16–18, 92n
psychogeography 51ff
psychoid 19
psychokinesis 77
psychologism 72
Puthoff, Hal 28

quantum physics 58, 77
quartz 33–4

reality 95, 98
religion 58ff, 66ff
remote viewing 28ff
Rolland, Romain 61, 61n, 64
Russell, Bertrand 62

Saint-Denys, Hervey de 89–90
Sartre, Jean-Paul 90, 92
Schiller, J.C.F. von 62, 64
Schnabel, Jim 28n

secondary revision 92n
self 96–8, 101
sex magick 17
shamanic landscapes 47ff
shamanism 34, 42–3, 48ff
Sinclair, Iain 53n
Situationism 52
sleep paralysis 105–6
space 35, 45ff
Steiner, Rudolf 110, 111
Styx 37, 41
Sufi sm 67
synaesthesia 91n
synchronicity 19, 36, 78ff

tarot 11–12, 78
telepathy 12, 76, 77
thinking 93–4
time 45ff; dreams and 93–94, 94n
truth 10

water, unusual

properties of 31

Watson, Lyall 31n
Wilber, Ken 19n, 42–3, 62–3, 71
will 107, 109, 111

Yesod 40
yoga 69

Zeus 54

Document Outline

COVER
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE My sister wore our granddad’s ghost
CHAPTER TWO A nice place to meet dead people
CHAPTER THREE I’m the urban shaman
CHAPTER FOUR The absolute truth
CHAPTER FIVE Dream yourself awake
REFERENCES
INDEX

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