Speaking the language of The Phenomena Part 1
A confusing treatise on the nature of time and the beings that exist outside of it
I’ve been trying to write this article for over a year. Since writing that series about Hellier and how HP Lovecraft might be the missing link in the mystery I’ve been trying to get the idea written down here but I can’t seem to do it in a manner that’s concise. I get ten thousand words down on the page only to realize that I still haven’t even scratched the surface of the topic. What this tells me is that I’m actually writing a book and not an article but since I struggle to do even that I need to face facts that I’m just an essay guy and will likely never have the discipline to express myself in the long-form.
The urge to come back to this topic hit me while listening to a recent episode of Nonsense Bazaar about The Monroe Institute.
At around the 1:20:00 mark they play a recording of one of Monroe’s subjects who channels a being that starts blabbing about the lost continent of Lemuria. Sequoyah rattles off some ideas that nudged me to take another look at this idea that I have about the how and why of symbols and the way that The Phenomena talks to us because let’s be honest, there are no lost continents. There’s no Lemuria, no Atlantis, no Hyperborea. These are notions that have been around for centuries but like a lot of lofty philosophical ideas they represent a broader concept that the lay-people have twisted into a belief of concrete, literal reality. Mankind is constantly looking backward. It’s always longing for some lost golden era. Life is hard. Everything seems like it’s always coming apart at the seams. If only we could return to the good times, right? Sequoyah notes in the podcast that whatever is speaking through Lianna, the subject in the recording, it could be using Lemuria to express a concept rather than the physical notion of a massive body of land that was driven beneath the waves somewhere in mankind’s distant past. Why Lemuria, though? This is the thought that got the wheels turning for me.
Lemuria is nonsense to me but not to Lianna. What that meaning is I can’t say but in this example it really doesn’t matter. It’s simply important that it holds meaning to her. When Lianna opened herself up to channel this being she volunteered to become a user interface for the being that speaks through her. This is the case with anyone that channels a higher consciousness, from Lianna to Haitian Manbo to Aleister Crowley. You become a vehicle for another mind to ride around in. For the brief time that it occupies a human body it experiences the world through the senses of the person it’s riding but also has access to its memories and understanding. The higher beings above cannot speak directly to the lower beings below for reasons that I’ll explain in the coming paragraphs but in the moment it’s enough to know that in order to address us directly, it needs to use a mind and a body that is anchored to our four dimensions and in this case, Lianna is that mind and body. When it speaks through Lianna it is expressing an idea that originates in its consciousness but it needs to use words, concepts, and ideas that originate in Lianna’s mind. So when it says Lemuria it’s not trying to tell us that there’s a sunken continent out there at the bottom of the Pacific between India and Africa. It’s expressing an idea of its own and the closest approximation to that idea, through its user interface, Lianna, is the concept of Lemuria, whatever that may be. If the same being were to communicate the same concept through me, it would choose a different word that, by my own memories and understanding expressed the same concept. The same would be true for you. Language is slippery like that.
Ideas are abstract. They exist in a hazy layer of conscious thought in our minds but require language to mean anything even to ourselves. We can speak to one another with only mild barriers between us like a difference in spoken language or an inability to clearly articulate the idea with our own language to people who also speak it. But these barriers are far more easily overcome than trying to reach up to a higher consciousness which experiences the universe in ways that are fundamentally alien to us. The flow of consciousness seems to be a one way street, as well. We can communicate upwards, as I’ll explain, but we cannot adapt our consciousness to them and speak through them in the same way that they speak through us.
The Tree of Life as an onion-layered metaphor
To express this idea, take the Tree of Life. In Lon Milo Duquette’s user-friendly manual of Qabalah, The Chicken Qabalah, he explains that The Tree is the machinery of manifestation that God uses to bring something to life so that it may be experienced. At the highest levels of divinity, God is unable to directly experience its will. It passes that will down through the circuitry of The Tree, where it evolves from a hazy idea in Kether to a concrete thing in Malkuth, to be experienced by its agents in spacetime, us. Because we are it — as above, so below — we experience the will of God and as God’s surrogates, it experiences its will through us. This is the downward motion of The Tree.
If we step backward through the spheres of emanation, however, we can come to understand the nature of the consciousnesses that exist in those spheres.
The 4th Dimension
Welcome to concrete spacetime! Some call it Hell. I call it home. This is far as you can get from God and as a result of this, this sphere is considered fallen or evil. But honestly, I don’t think that it’s all that bad. For all its fallenness, this is where God’s will ends up and The Kingdom is full of far more beautiful things than terrible.
This is where you were born, where you live, and where you will die. If you do your homework and pursue the Great Work you can escape this sphere and move up the tree to higher and higher levels of consciousness until you eventually break through and rejoin the divine unity. In a way, you exist in every sphere that I’m going to define here but this is the only one that you are consciously aware of; here’s why: Malkuth is defined by four dimensions, the three Cartesian dimensions of space (X, Y, and Z axes) and a dimension of time, which measures changes in those positions.
Time flows in one direction in this sphere. It only moves forward and you will only ever directly experience this moment. You can’t speed up time and move forward more quickly and you can’t return to a moment that you’ve already experienced. All you have is right now.
The most important quality of this dimension to bear in mind for this article is that like all things here, our communication is also locked into serialized time-space. Speaking and writing takes up space and costs us time. The vibrations of sound move through space and reverberate off surfaces like your eardrum. Written words occupy space on a page or screen. It costs you time to read/hear and understand that communication. Seconds pass as you read this paragraph. It has a beginning and an end which can be measured in a handful of ways.
The 5th Dimension
Above us is an abstraction of the Fifth Dimension. It is a dimension in which space-time exists not as a serialized experience but as a singular point which surrounds and contains the 4th dimension. Everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen exists simultaneously here as a singular point of existence. And just as consciousness exists here, riding around in these meaty space suits, consciousness exists there in a form so alien to us that we can’t even speculate on the form that it takes there. We have taken to referring to them broadly as spirits. These are beings that are unmoored from the shackles of spacetime. They exist everywhere at all times.
In this 4th dimension of ours, time is the unchanging, immovable constant but we have direct control over everything else. Just like here, they have an unchanging, immovable constant which operates at a higher level, that being probability, and like us, they have control over everything else in the sphere. This implies that time is not the pair of handcuffs that it is to us. In an article from last year, I took a Randonaut journey in search of the Muslim wise man, al-Khidr.
In this article, I imply that the search was a sort of invocation of this spirit and him being a bit of a trickster, he arranged the events of the future in order to manipulate a certain outcome for me down here in the fourth dimension. Because al-Khidr exists in a place where time is a variable, he could reach down to me, glitch the communication between the Randonautica app and the Google Maps API, and lead me to a humorous outcome that let me know that he was listening. In that article he reached down into this dimension, through the vehicle of my consciousness and directed me to three symbols that I would recognize as representative of al-Khidr, a green egg, a boat, and a green fish. Going back to the top of the article where I’m rattling on about Lemuria and The Monroe Institute, I should remind you of Lianna’s story that used Lemuria as a stand-in for a symbol that was meaningful to her. Some higher consciousness was speaking to her in symbolic language that she understood by way of Lemuria. If she explained that symbolism to us as it applied to her, it would make perfect sense, but we don’t have those details. If I were to have simply told you that al-Khidr gestured to me through an egg, a boat, and a fish, you’d think I was fucking crazy. But by explaining those symbols and their significance to me, it sounds perfectly rational to someone willing to accept them as they are.
God, I hope this is making sense.
Let’s talk about sigils!
You can understand these words as they come to form ideas as long as you speak English. You and I have no problem communicating, though some details might get lost in translation between my mind and mouth or my hands as I type this. You have the sort of consciousness that moves through time linearly. It can receive this serialized information and translate it, accordingly. But how do you communicate to an order of being that is experiencing all of time and space as one thing simultaneously? These words are meaningless to it. They are a serial blip in their singularity. Diametrically, how does a being that exists in that sort of paradigm talk to us? It expresses ideas in a singular instance that we miss if we’re not paying attention. It’s like a cosmic conversation using semaphore. The answer is symbols!
As magicians, symbols are our primary trick of the trade. We use them so often but never stop to think about why we use them. It just is what it is and if you want to do magic stuff, you have to get comfortable with symbolism. If you want to perform an evocation of Paimon you have to wear a lamen bearing his sigil and also place the sigil in your triangle of art. But why?
The obvious answer is that it’s like writing your friend’s name on a flag and then waving it until they notice you. But what does Paimon’s sigil represent? Why wouldn’t it grab Aim’s attention of Astaroth’s? The easy answer is that that is his sigil and not theirs but to put a finer point on it, the sigil appears as a crown and Paimon is a king. Paimon’s appearance is that of a man wearing a crown, riding a camel that is also wearing a crown. He’s also preceded by a parade of men playing trumpets and smashing cymbals. The four points of the crown give the appearance of four men in a procession, moving left to right. The symbolism is layered. The circle and the letters are pure ornamentation making it easier for us to know his name but the sigil in the middle is the part that matters. Perform the evocation correctly and he’ll come running. It’s a sort of two-way messaging system that lets him know that we would like to speak to him and gives him license to occupy this space by way of your own consciousness. The experience is extremely subjective this way and is one of the reasons that I don’t get particularly wound up about Unverified Personal Gnosis because by this standard, all gnosis is Unverified Personal Gnosis and if your experience with a particular grimoire matches that of other magicians it’s because you read their notes and journals and set your expectations accordingly.
But let’s say that you don’t have a particular spirit in mind and want to get loose with it and impose your will on the universe in a more freestyle way. The flow of higher consciousness to lower consciousness is almost always a one-way street where they can easily reach down to us and influence people, places, and things in the present or the future for us to perceive and understand but we can hack that line and send information up the pipe if we do it right. The way that we do this is by taking a thought, desire, concept, whatever, and encoding it into a symbol that occupies a single place in spacetime. This message ceases to be a serialized string of 4-d information and occupies a single point in spacetime, easily seen by higher consciousnesses for whom human language is meaningless. It is a single symbol which represents a complex idea.
Of all the magicians out there making their way through symbolism, Austin Spare seems to be the only of them who thought to deconstruct the entire notion of symbols in order to understand their function. He took a higher order of communication, broke it down, learned how it worked and reverse engineered a system for manifesting an outcome that chaos magicians use as their primary tool. There’s a lot more to it than simply expressing an idea through a symbol, but that’s the essence of it. It’s the essence of art, in general. Ideas expressed through abstraction still manage to penetrate our consciousness whether we know it or not.
This is the how and the why of symbols. It’s why a spirit can never just come right out and say what it means. It can only deliver its message to you in abstract methods and it’s up to you to figure it out. Aleister Crowley was only technically delivered The Book of the Law in English. Aiwass spoke to him through the language of his own consciousness but the meaning of The Law is still thickly veiled behind a dense curtain of symbolism for us to meditate on and explore. Terry Wriste spoke to the Newkirks in Hellier in the same way. Whatever is speaking through the medium of Terry can only deliver the medium of the UFOnaut cipher. The higher up The Tree we go, the less definite things become until we reach the top and cease to be, entirely.
There’s still a couple of loose ends to be tied up, which I will do in the concluding article, Speaking the language of The Phenomena Part 2.
Well done! Looking forward to part 2!