(1) The Riddle of Death or Does Life Have a Meaning?

When you come here you are given a body. Well by the same token that body is taken away when you leave here. Now this is not something that is stressed in our culture. We are told in effect - it isn't said explicitly but it's implied in the teaching in all the schools - that you are your molecules and your brain is your mind. You're like a bubble - at death it bursts and that's the end of you, so you might as well drink pepsi-cola while you're here. What a way to go! We're actually the first large society that has grown up not believing the most vital part of ourselves survives the death of the physical body. Suppose now the brain is like a television receiver and we're receiving things through it. Well then, if something happens to the receiver your image is going to get blurred. But it won't hurt the program. Anyone with a good set can still receive it, as you could if you got a new television set. So the real you (the operator who is using the neurons in the brain to come through) is like a television program and the body is like a set that receives it. Then you can easily explain why very intelligent people would deteriorate with slight brain damage - with slight strokes and so on they can become vegetables. The person becomes a vegetable because their message can't get through - they have a bad receiver.

We are not our physical bodies. It is as if a hypnotist hooked up someone to a remote control robot and said, you are this robot, and the person believed it under hypnosis. If the person could move the robot around and walk it at will, they would finally believe they were the robot. Well, when you believe you are your body you are in the same condition. We are using the body and it's a marvelous instrument, but it's not the be all and end all.

(2) The Exploration of Consciousness

A tree, a table, a cloud, a stone - all are resolved in twentieth century science into one similarly constituted thing: whirling particle waves obeying the laws of quantum physics. That is, all the objects we can observe are three-dimensional images formed of standing and moving waves by electromagnetic and nuclear processes. All the objects of our world are 3-D images formed thus electromagnetically - super-hologram images if you will. solid, neuro wired holograms - a world of simulacra. Thus what appears to our senses as a table or a vase, say, is - we are now told - actually a configuration of minute whirling particle waves, all these components constantly involved in complicated patterns of motion vying in velocity with the speed of light. That, we are told, is the reality of the table and the vase - as well as of the leaf and the sunset. It is as if we were told while witnessing a cinema of some beautiful building that the projection machinery

and lights were the ultimate reality of what is being depicted on the screen. It is merely a series of coloured dyes on some plastic film being projected at sixty-four frames a second by a thus-and-so specified apparatus and that is all. So we are told. Yet here we demur, saying, But that is not all at all; for that scene existed somewhere or exists somewhere, and the projection apparatus is, if anything, the more illusory of the two - certainly not the ultimate reality of what is being depicted on the screen. It is thus obvious that whatever physical science tells us is simply about the substances of the images and not about the substance of whatever realities to which those images refer. It would be as futile to expect that science could tell us the significance of the world - the point of it, its so what - as to expect that the cinema projectionist or television engineer could tell us about the meaning of a scene projected on the screen simply by virtue of being a projectionist or an engineer. Thus the facts of science (insofar as they are not theories to be changed tomorrow) are correct but any claim to reveal final reality or significance is not warranted. Physical science has revealed the imagistic modus operandi but not ultimate reality - much less meaning on the point of life itself. Once we begin to be aware of the fact that our hologram type of matter is not the last word in substance, we cannot accept that the projection mechanism for such superholograms is ultimate reality. We can then begin to understand that the admittedly highly intelligent and complex manner of referring to this reality by means of moving particles and their standing wave patterns is simply the means appropriate to our kind of body - and understand that such means do not exhaust reality at all. Men change their cars yet are not educated to realize that they could acquire a much better model body, with notable improvements in the reproductive and digestive systems.

(3) (3) The Evolutionary Way Forward or the Lion Path

So how can we find the way to regenerate ourselves, to grow beyond the relatively limited capacities of our current molecular bodies and states of awareness? Musaios discovered that the religious teachings of the Ancient Egyptians preserved records of such a process, and that the embalming procedure performed on dead bodies was the corruption of a half-remembered and initiatory way of regeneration undertaken by still living people. He deduced these teachings must have been called the Path of the Lion, or the Lion Path, because the type of couch a mummy was laid upon in its tomb was frequently that of a lion and moreover, on a fragment of painted limestone bas relief at Dahshur, the fourth dynasty king, s-Nofrw, whose name meant (He Who) Causes Beautiful Things is shown receiving the breath of immortal life from the Goddess in lioness form.

The regenerative process has strong affinities with the metamorphosis that transforms

the limited, crawling caterpillar (its larval form) into the winged imago - the butterfly that emerges from its pupal case and flies aloft into the sky. For this reason the higher human entity - that which survives bodily death just as the butterfly survives the caterpillar's disappearance - was symbolized as a butterfly in cultures worldwide. Ancient Eyyptian teachings used the same metaphor: the bandaged mummy was like the silk-enswathed larva, with the folded wings depicted on sarcophagus or coffin lids indicating the folded wing-forms embossed on every lepidoptera pupa or chrysalis case. The outer cocoon was symbolized by the Mes-Khent or birth-tent of skin placed around the mummy or in the funeral chamber - the very word for which actually meant the birth chamber in the Ancient Egyptian language.

Just like the caterpillars, we humans have a regenerative gland associated within the vicinity of the thalamus - a group of as yet by-and-large unknown cells that can in turn be stimulated into activity when the hypothalamus is resonantly and appropriately stimulated. The key to this resonant stimulation is timing, the waves of time itself. This was known to the initiates of Ancient Egypt. Coffin Texts 467 and 468 read: 'Sothis (the Great Goddess presiding over the regenerative process) speaks to me in her own good time' and 'I embrace Sothis in her hours.'

Musaios had long known the importance of time as a resonant power of causality and developed the concept of time-surfing: learning to ride the waves to time to accelerate evolution. The forces of time, which ultimately cause all physical events in our cosmos, operate like a great computer. Just as a computer has a screen through which its activities can be monitored, so the night skies hold the keys to reading the great computer: the movements of planetary and stellar bodies are like the needle on an ammeter, indicating the flow of an otherwise invisible current of power. And in the last two decades of the twentieth century there was a special configuration of several important celestial phenomena, heralding a unique evolutionary opportunity on our planet. In 1978 the planet Pluto crossed within the orbit of Neptune (something no other planet can ever do) and remained there through 1999. As Neptune was further from the Earth than Pluto, its power for universal compassion enlarged and directed Pluto's tremendous power for regenerative transformation unleashed in those years. This plutonic power was at its height because Pluto was from 1984-95 in its own zodiacal sector of Scorpio - the sector classically allocated to death and transfiguration. These two cosmic events also achieved a rare and precise synchrony with the periastron Sirius A and B in April 1994. The brightest star in the heavens, Sirius A, was identified with the Great Goddess Sothis in Ancient Egyptian religion, and her dense, dark companion star (invisible to the naked eye) was also known to them as Horus.

Sirius-Hieroglyphe

As the deities who presided over and protected the initiate in the regenerative process, the enhancement of their mutual power through their hieros gamos (sacred marriage) at this watershed in human evolution was crucial. The synchronicity of these three cosmic phenomena occurs only once every ninety thousand years, showing the stunning rarity of this evolutionary opportunity.

(4) (4) Connecting with the Earth's Lion Path Cycle

The Lion Path Cycle for the whole planet began with its first timed-release of evolutionary energies when the Sun conjoined Pluto in Scorpio in October 1984. Thereafter this worldwide cycle, the Earth Cycle, proceeded for some years with successive releases of energy about every four months. These energy releases are the Lion Path sessions; they were interspersed with intervals during which the power of that session could be effectively assimilated in the lives of those on the Path. (People interested in the timetable of these sessions should read pages 106-25 of the fifth edition of The Lion Path.)

The vital thing to realize about this regenerative process is that it was and is freely available to anyone on this planet who desires it, that is to say, to anyone of basically good will and heart. If your main focus in life has been to become more loving, and to learn how to manifest that love by helping others in increasingly wise ways, then the Lion Path Cycle energies have been providing you with opportunities to rapidly evolve in that direction. In general we humans are not aware of the trans-human or superconscious part of the psyche which is hidden far beyond the threshold of our consciousness and is mistakenly called the unconscious. Actually it is our own more conscious mind since the conscious mind is ordinarily unaware of it. Included in this vast and more aware part of ourselves that we don't ordinarily know is our own metamorphic power. And it is through the power of the superconscious mind that these regenerative energies have been infused into our lives and destinies.

Quantum physics has revealed the existence of phonon, quanta or bundles of longitudinal wave energy that can be thought of as ultimate sound. They can travel not only through air, but through water, rock and even the physical vacuum, aether - a nonmolecular form of substance and the ultimate transmitter of sound. These ultimate sounds, far above the range of human hearing, have in successively released power waves penetrated the superconscious minds of all basically benign beings on the planet. Musaios was intuitively tuning into the unseen rescuing force of the Earth's Lion Path when he wrote the poem,

The ageless melody, unheard, heals,The healing vision, unseen, leads,The true leaders, unknown, rescue

He also knew that there are remarkable natural frequencies which permeate consciousness in such a way as to stimulate and activate the potential seeds of higher transformation within us. These frequencies arouse sympathetic responses that reach into the realm of the superconscious mind and stimulate the production of neuropeptides, those powerful hormones that are the bridge between mind and matter, being open on one side to states of the psyche, and on the other side to the subtle bio-electronic signals and interplay that govern all psycho-physiological processes.

The special frequencies of the Earth's Lion Path sessions, which have been reaching us at levels beyond the range of our hearing or of our conscious awareness, resonate powerfully to certain frequencies that are within hearing range. Listening to these audible frequencies helps make a stronger link to the metamorphic energies of the Earth's Path. They were put together in specially designed sequences and intervals by Musaios and are available in the audio-cassettes The Lords of Shambhala and The Pleromic Journey. The point about these cassettes is that the audible frequencies help you shift beyond the often frenetic turmoil of the conscious mind and to get into a deeper, more harmonious state where the powers of the Path can be accessed more easily.

(5) (5) How the Lion Path continues in the 21st Century

As we mentioned before, the Lion Path is essentially the way to evolve beyond our rela-tively limited molecular bodies and states of consciousness. Just as the larval caterpillar goes through the metamorphic process by which it becomes its imago form, the butterfly, so the sessions of the Lion Path transform our larval-like powers into those of much greater or imago-like capabilities. Musaios referred to these imago powers as

pleromic powers, using the old Gnostic word for something that has been developed to its full and divine potential.

Magic Square as a Talismanic Diagram of the Connection Between Hypernumbers and the Pleromic Powers

The Earth's Lion Path sessions began in the mid-1980s with the manifestation of the seven basic larval powers in the order: Venus, Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury and Jupiter. During subsequent sessions in the years through 1998 these powers gradually metamorphosed and transformed into their pleromic forms, the initial manifestation of these powers occurring between January and August 1999. That was the end of the first phase of the Earth's Lion Path. The second phase - that of gradual maturation of the pleromic powers during annual Cycles of Initiation - then began. These ancient Cycles, rediscovered by Musaios in 1998, are related to the four ancient Celtic festivals of Samhain (Halloween), Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh. However, the four sessions of each Cycle did not take place on exactly the same date each year as they were dependent upon the phases of the Moon. Thus true Samhain was not November 1st but the time of the new moon in the sign of Scorpio. The second session (true Imbolc) began not on February 1st but with the new moon in Aquarius. The third session, Beltane, was not May 1st, but began with the full moon when the Sun was in Taurus, and the fourth session, Lughnasadh, was not August 1st, but started at the full moon with the Sun in Leo. Then the next Cycle of Initiation would begin at the following Samhain. The final goal of the Lion Path is to awaken the key seventh pleromic power, Mercury, which grants access to and control of a higher body made of a nonmolecular substance. Such a body is as far beyond our current molecular bodies and their limited capabilities as the butterfly is beyond the caterpillar. However, before that could be achieved, the other six pleromic powers (Saturn, Moon, Venus, Sun, Mars and Jupiter) had to be fully awakened in their preliminary pleromic forms - levels of power that can be activated from within our molecular bodies on earth. This is what happened during the second phase of the Lion Path. There were four Cycles of Initiation, beginning in November 1998 and ending

on November 4, 2002. (Those who want further description of the seven pleromic powers - their nature, functions and capabilities - are referred to the heading Pleroma in the glossary on this web site.)Those who wish to know more about the Cycles of Initiation should read chapter one of Access: The Lion Path for the 21st Century. It is sufficient to say here that the first Cycle (1998-1999) activated the six pleromic powers as powers of will or desire to achieve. The second Cycle (1999-2000) activated them with respect to compassion and feeling - what is often called the heart. The third Cycle (2000-2001) activated those powers as wisdom or knowledge. The fourth Cycle (2001-2002) brought together all the effects of the prior three cycles, harmonizing the powers so that each true Lion Path candidate could balance the inner faculties of love, will and wisdom. It is essential in any evolving person that these qualities are as harmonious and even as possible - too much will and/or love leads to unwise actions, too much wisdom without love to meaningless curiosity and/or unloving behavior. Now we are in the third and final phase of the Path: when Pleromic Mercury (a power that belongs to the higher non-molecular body only) awakens and enhances the other six pleromic powers in turn. They are then awakened on a higher and non-molecular level of functioning. This finally completes the formation of one's higher non-molecular body.

(6) (6) Where the Lion Path is Taking Us

There is a vast realm of existence beyond our human societies on earth: a reality of higher-than-human communities already existing in higher dimensional worlds. These beings are of a more mysterious and advanced evolutionary level than our own, and are endowed with capabilities vastly surpassing ours. The worlds they inhabit are based upon a symbiotic rather than a predatory ecology - on a quite different and more advanced kind of nature than could exist here on earth: a nature lifted up out of the agonizing trap of predation.

The great question animating all the life forms in a symbiotic ecology is not the struggle for survival and Who eats whom? but How does one express love and wisdom in action? These are the qualities of Heart, Head and Hand, all acting in Harmony. The Lion Path is the map and living road from here to there, providing the answer to this vital question. It is a journey to a transformed environment and an ecological community surpassing the farthest reaches of our present senses and imagination. All beings on earth who have made a lasting connection with the energies of the first 45 sessions of the Lion Path now have a living map within themselves - one that bestows a vital ongoing connection with every type of world within our cosmos, and is accessible within the deepest reaches of the superconscious mind.

(7) (7) Types of Worlds and the Proportion of Predation to Symbiosis within them

What we mean by a type of world is a life-bearing planet where certain characteristics are very strongly marked within all the inhabitants. Our own planet, Earth, is to the type that resonates most powerfully to the power of Pluto: the power of metamorphosis or transformation, the deployment of which can either raise one to superb spiritual heights, or if misused, plunge one into the depths of psychosis and degeneration. It is clear from the history of our planet that most of its political leaders have chosen the latter course. The political history of our earth has been an almost unbroken chain of needless cruelty: mass murder legitimized as war, sabotage, treachery and deception. Likewise the ecological history of our world has been predominantly that of human abuse and plunder of the natural environment to the detriment of all other species - a process exacerbated since the industrial revolution by the twin evils of overpopulation and the inevitably indiscriminate and widespread use of technology this generates. The plutonic nature of our world is further underlined by the choice of our scientists to revive the lethal element plutonium (which had long since been naturally purged from our planet) and its horrific fire of atomic fission

. Our planet earth is thus a plutonic type of world (type 10). All life-bearing planets of plutonic type, as well as those worlds belonging to the nine previous types (Venus through Neptune) lie within the outermost sector or the seventh level of the great Tree of Life. Though all beings draw their life force from the invisible and unmanifestable roots at the heart of the Tree - these roots being what we might call our Ultimate Energy Source or the Source of All Life - there are seven different levels of distance from that Energy Source. What this means in practical terms is that beings on the first level of the Tree can access its full powers to manifest limitless love, joy and life, whereas beings like ourselves, who exist within the seventh level of the Tree, cannot draw on the full power of the Source, and are subject to suffering, disease, aging and death. This is reflected in our planetary ecology: the degree of predation (the terror of who eats whom to maintain the chain of ecological balance) is greatest and that of symbiosis (mutually supportive feedbacks, such as trees giving out the oxygen we breathe, and we in return breathing out the carbon dioxide they need) is at the minimal level necessity to maintain the biosphere. We thus live in conditions of continual war between beauty and horror in our environment, an outer war that is reflected in us all by our constant struggle between harmonious states of consciousness such as love and joy, and the turbulent inner states of lovelessness that manifest as paranoia and psychosis.

Yet worlds such as our earth have had a long history as schools in which the karmic

limitations and difficulties of life have prevented the great majority of their inhabitants from degenerating into worse loveless states of consciousness. Nor are the peoples of these worlds bound inevitably to the seventh level. Some have already gone on to a better, because more loving, joyous and life-affirming, sector of the cosmos. The next higher or sixth level of the Tree of Life contains a great variety of world types. These range all the way from the lower end of its spectrum, worlds of type 11 (the Pan type) - which have greater degrees of symbiosis than our earth and whose inhabitants are constructive, peaceful and trustworthy - to worlds of type 32, almost completely symbiotic worlds with just residual traces of predation. The proportion of predation to symbiosis progressively decreases on the sixth level, so the higher the type of world, the greater the amount of biological friends rather than enemies. Hence life-threatening diseases and their pathogens also decrease steadily, enabling the inhabitants of such worlds to enjoy far longer and happier lives than we can on earth, with greatly prolonged periods of youth and vigour.

There are five still higher levels of the Tree of Life. At the fifth level and above all planetary environments are completely symbiotic which means that aging and disease completely disappear. The beings living on this and higher levels of the Tree have progressively greater degrees of evolution and power. And the beings dwelling on the first level of the Tree are divine in comparison to us. They have constant access to its roots - the Source of all Life - and are greatest in power, love and wisdom. Their realm is one of eternal life beyond the need for manifestation in molecular form. Their 'bodies', like wondrous waves of light, are not limited to one set form but can take any lovely shape or quality they desire at will, and their eternity is not one of static unchangeability but states of bliss, constant evolution and ever-increasing fulfillment.

The path from our plutonic world to this supreme state of being involves a gradual ascent over some lifetimes through progressively higher types of world. To begin this journey one must first learn how to jump bardos, which means leaving behind our earth's bardo and traveling to the bardo of a higher (i.e. wiser and more symbiotic) world. A bardo is an inter-incarnational or intermediate realm (each life-bearing planet has one) where the soul dwells after the dissolution or death of its molecular body and before entry into another body through rebirth. For those who have not begun the metamorphic process of the Lion Path the experiences of the bardo are dreamlike, with the dreams being either lovely or nightmarish, depending on the degree to which those qualities had been developed during their last lifespan.

But when people walk the Lion Path they are able to do more than dream true in the

bardo: they can learn to move from one bardo to that of another, higher world, from which incarnation on this type of world will ensue. This occurs in the final stage of one's Lion Path learning experience upon earth. The Cycles of Initiation promote the growth of the first six pleromic powers within an initiate to the point where, once they have become powerful enough, the seventh power (pleromic Mercury) spontaneously arises. This power is at first simply conscious awareness of the link between one's physical body here on earth and one's pleromic-energy body now fully-formed in the bardo. One can then make powerful shamanic journeys and connections with teachers from other worlds who will help one learn how to control and use this pleromic-energy body to its full potential. As these skills are acquired one learns how to prepare oneself for the next incarnational experience and how to jump bardos. And the wisdom one learns during this life will not be lost, as rebirth on another world does not destroy or weaken the link between the pleromic-energy body and the new molecular body.

(8) (8) The Universal Lion Path and the Winding-up of our Cosmos

Our Earth's planetary Lion Path cycle (which is taking place simultaneously on all other life-bearing worlds of the plutonic type) is actually one session or phase of a much greater Cycle: that of the Cosmic Lion Path - an Emergency Rescue Plan designed to release all beings out of the suffering and mortality of predatory worlds and to restore them to the bliss and divine-like capabilities that are their true heritage. One may ask, why the need for this accelerated plan? The Tree of Life has existed in its present form for eons, allowing many beings to gradually ascend the ladder of evolution into more symbiotic regions of the cosmos. Yet it was long foreseen that greedy and psychotic human leaders on all Pluto-type worlds would eventually set into motion powerful geocidal forces, destroying the ecological foundations of life in their worlds through technology and pollution. It was also foreseen that this would involve horrifying violence and suffering on an unprecedental scale for humans and other life forms alike.

Therefore the rescue of plutonic worlds like earth does not simply mean activating the planetary Lion Path and teaching all successful candidates how to leave their home planets by travelling to higher bardos. It also involves setting up especially powerful centres of therapy to deal with beings either too criminally destructive or too traumatized to be able to immediately incarnate in higher types of worlds. Those who are interested in further details of the unfolding cosmic Lion Path should read The Shamanic Lion Path (available through House of Horus). The next few years will be a crucial learning time, and people of good heart will find increasing opportunities both to enhance their wisdom and to learn how to protect themselves and others. As the times get more desperate and dangerous, so greater forces of higher-than-human protection

will become more accessible to us. It is however the heart that must ultimately guide as Musaios wrote in the following litany:

Set not the heart on anything, Let not the subject rule the king. Set not the heart on anything, But let the heart grow, laugh and sing. Love, not learning, finds the way, Opens the eyes to the doors of the day, Uncovers the wonders of undreamed sights And leads the way to the wisdom heights. (9) Awakening to the Shamanic Reality in Your Life

The following text is taken from a lecture given by Musaios in 1999 at the School of Consciousness and Transformation of the California Institute of Integral Studies, and begins with some remarks he was addressing to Dean Janis Phelps:

You mentioned my coming from Canada. I came across the border and the American customs officer said, "I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that the computer selected you for a special check. The good news is that it won't take very long." I didn't know how good that was. Anyway I went in there. There were two customs officers there, an older one and a younger one. They wanted to know where you're going and why you're going, whether you have any bombs and stuff like that! So I said, "Well, I've been invited to talk down there." And then he got interested (the older one) and he said, "What's the subject?" and he didn't say it as if he was interrogating me any more. It became part of a conversation. Well, I thought, how am I going to explain shamanism to the customs? I thought a moment and said, "Well, it's trying to take the grind out of your daily routine. " Then I saw a black smudge on the other guy's finger, so I said, "Goodness! What did you do to your finger? Did you crush it?" He said, "No, I just got that grease from inspecting too many semis." So we left on good terms. That happens when you can in effect make the situation change from a negative and adversarial one into a positive one. In short, that's practising shamanism. So actually what I said I was going to do up here was also done for him there.

Now, let's see. We have so much to do and we have about two hours. I thought it was better to do it in the morning. You see between about 2 and 4 in the afternoon (with daylight savings time it's between 3 and 5) there's always an enervating l ull and it's good if you can try not to schedule classes then, unless it would be difficult to do that.

It's a low energy time in any case.

First some hints about what shamanic reality really is. I should say where I'm coming from as far as shamanism is concerned. The other religions - and the more institutional-ized they are the more this happens - they deal in words, not in what you can do. A striking example of this is found the early history of "civilized" - or should we say syphilized - Hawaii. There were the Kahunas - you know that term? - the Kahunas were the shamans of Hawaii, and they were approached by the missionaries, quite zealous missionaries, trying to convert them to Christianity. And the missionaries had already done a very good job so far: they had translated the Judeo-Christian Bible into Hawaiian. The Kahunas were presented with it to study it, and they said, "Let us look it over for the next two weeks and we'll come back." But when they came back they brought with them their worst possible cases of illness and disease. The missionaries in some consternation then asked, "Why this company of sick people?" "Well," the Kahunas said, "we read your holy book and your Teacher (Jesus of Nazareth) said, "If ye follow what I say ye will not only be able to do what I have done, but greater things. " You've had two thousand years to practice and you must be terrific by now. So we brought our worst cases for you to heal them." Indignantly the missionaries replied, "Well, we don't deal in that. We deal in words, teaching." So the Kahunas said, "Well, that's just talk. Then you can't really do anything like your Teacher did?" And they said, "No, that is not our business, " where-upon the Kahunas replied, "Well, we consider that hypocrisy." And then the missionaries proceeded to pass laws against being a Kahuna, making it illegal since the Kahunas' attitude would block them."

But that tells a lot. These people were shamans, and shamanism is a religion made operative, no longer a theory. You do things. And like any power, the surgeon's scalpel in the hands of a murderer will kill while in the hands of a surgeon it heals. It's not the scalpel's fault. It's the intent of the consciousness that's using the instrumentality. So like any other, the shamanic power can be also used to do obstructive things in the wrong hands. But the great majority of shamanic practice is very benign. And if we wonder about the dark side, the black side, look at any other religion: Christian church leaders dragged people through the Inquisition - burning people with the dishonest excuse that it would be sinful to draw blood. Hence you could burn heretics (read "those who disagree with you) to death and that was fine. But every institutionalized religion has its dark side. Even in Tibet, a king there who wanted to go back to pre-buddhistic shamanism was killed by fanatic Buddhists. It was one of the few times when Buddhist missionizing became violently aggressive, mostly contenting itself with denigrating its predecessors or rivals.

Now let us get back to shamanism after those introductory words about it. Desire is very important and you don't stifle or repress it, and you certainly can't kill it - it's too strong, any kind of desire, not at all necessarily sexual: the desire can be towards anything. What you rather have to do is redirect it towards your highest vision. Since you can't kill it or lock it up, you have to work with it, not against it. Thus you re-direct it. You make your desire an essential part of the vision quest.

You've heard of the vision quest? The Plains Indians came up with that last phrase which is apt: it's your highest vision. And last but not least, you don't scatter it too much by desiring one thing today, another tomorrow, and yet another the next day. A lot of people do that because the force of desire to manifest what is desired always works. What you do if you scatter it is that you get a little result here and a little result there and a little result over there, and they don't add up to a hill of beans. But if you focus it, then something happens that is noticeable, that you can really see. So you have to learn how to focus it, not scatter it. Scattering it is like promiscuity on any level. Thus one can prove on a quite objective non-ethical basis that promiscuity does not work. If it's too promiscuous, it's too scattered to be effective. More technically put, whatever is scattered increases its entropy in terms of the quantity of energy dissipated and so made inaccessible for further use. It's not accessible any more. So promiscuity always ends up in non-attainment, dis-satisfaction, and with no long term happiness.

But how to get enough judgment? How are you going to get the judgment to know what is right and good for you? Well that takes time, and hence a certain amount of trial and error, mistakes and false starts are inescapable. But don't just keep on making the same mistakes over and over and certainly don't end up hitting your head against a wall to feel how good the liniment is. All that is counterproductive. So learn to aim right and to focus your wealth of desire.

Now while on these hints, learn also to know that what things seem is not necessarily what they are and I have something there to illustrate that. Now this will be a little excursion. It's not just into mathematics, it's just into common sense really, and it's within the scope of all of us whether we've been trained in mathematics or not.

We all know that 6 x 2 is the same as 2 x 6. We've been taught this. Also, 3 x 4 is the same as 4 x 3, right? Well it's not right in certain branches of recondite mathematics which I won't bore you with. You might say, that's impossible to understand. Yet, in order to get something left over that would work with reality, quantum physics had to

admit such pairs of numbers that multiply differently when the factors are reversed.

But to get back to very simple arithmetic, I needed a lot of cans of cat food. I tried "Fancy Feast" - I have two wild cats who like it - but the tins didn't work for my demon-stration here: they wouldn't stack stably. But my good friend Rocky Beeman has a cat who lives on "Gourmet" cat food and that worked! The cat incidentally has been satis-fied - these are all empties. Now here's twelve in the form of 2 x 6 stacked tins. When you say two times six, it means "twice six" or six taken two times. That is what 2 x 6 means. Now imagine that twelve people are fleeing from an enemy and they come up to a river with just one boat on the bank, but it could take six of them at a time. There are twelve people so they'd have to take only two trips to get them all safely across the river. Some of them on their second trip might get caught if their pursuers moved very fast, but most certainly would make it. Now let's take 6 x 2. This is two taken six times and the boat can take only two at a time so it would have to take six trips and somebody's bound to get caught. The other boat was able to do it in two trips and avoided that danger.

So 6 x 2 is not the same as 2 x 6 - not when you're fleeing, not when you're in danger. And it's the same with 4 x 3 and 3 x 4. You can do that too. Three times four is four taken three times and you have transported all the refugees in one less trip than four times three. Three taken four times is more dangerous by one more trip, thus giving the pursuers an extra chance. So by little cat food cans you can show in a very simple way that things aren't necessarily what they seem at first glance, and that x x y need not at all be the same as y x x under all circumstances.

What we're dealing with here really is all these things are situations, and practical shamanic applications always boil down to some kind of relationship magic: how to make a relationship with a higher power; how to reinforce a positive relationship between two sentient beings; how to diminish a hostile relationship, and so on.

Such relationship magic is very important. Now I'll go on to what may seem like a more abstract level but which really isn't. I don't care for abstraction. Abstraction is a sub-stitute for clear thinking because the Latin root ab-stract means to draw something away from something else. The root tract is "to drag or draw" and ab means "away from". So you're drawing away things out of what you're considering in order to simplify, to make it easier to understand. In other words, abstraction is a cop-out from the complexity of reality. So abstraction isn't at all the great profound thing it's cracked up to be, and too many word-mongers and too many of the wrong type of academic

approaches stress ab-straction as something desirable as an end in itself. Actually it's more like strychnine - a little bit is all right for the heart but a lot will kill you. The worth of abstraction depends on what and how much we take away. We have to be as careful as with strychnine.

Now I want to go to where I was promising to go to: game theory and a theorem in it which occurred to me some time ago. It actually was when Norbert Wiener and I were lecturing in Naples together. He asked me, I remember, over a glass of wine in Ravello, "Do you think I should have written the book Cybernetics?" I said, "Why, what makes you say that?" "Well," he said, "it could be so misused." I replied, "All technology has been misused - that's its history, and it's also well used. If someone else had written it they might not have put in the ethical caveats you did." He seemed be to satisfied with that - he was a very conscientious scientist - more than those who advocate things like cluster bombs and radioactive, uranium-tipped bullets and anti-tank shells.

The theorem of game theory that I thought of at that time was, if you, if you have two adversaries or opponents or simply competitors of equal intelligence and equal force, the one who is least ethical will win because his strategy is least constrained. If they agree on something, the least ethical can break his word and do something different and win by that dishonesty. If they agree to abide by certain rules, he can break them without warning. So that theorem is true with a big unless - a very interesting unless. Unless there is a force, a power inaccessible to the unjust.

If you access that power which is inaccessible to intended abuse, then you're never there when the blow falls, which is of course the best way - that's the ideal defense in karate too. Just don't be there and manipulate in such a way that when the opponent is off-balance the attack comes. Don't be there when the blow falls. The shamanic power inaccessible to the unjust helps you to do that.

Now we're getting into what I call time-surfing. Time is like a big ocean. It goes in waves. Even a fisherman knows he can't successfully leave harbor except on the right tide. Now the word "tide" is the same as "time"; "Whitsuntide", "Eastertide" for example. So tide and time are the same and both wait for no man. This is an instance showing that the ancient poet-bards really made language. Grammarians didn't make language. Poets did. Grammarians are sort of like vultures who come and pick the corpses of what's already dead. Living language was made by poets, and they realized that times and tides were similar. They realized that time had waves in it like the sea. Hence, ideally, no experiment is repeatable because the time isn't the same. We often hear talk about

being in the right place at the right time. But the right time is more important than the right place, or it wouldn't be the right time. Time is funny, funny-strange rather than funny ha-ha.

Consider a point in space. Well we're in 3 dimensions, right? You can check that by looking up in the corner of a room and seeing there are three mutually perpendicular lines that meet. That shows you are in a three-dimensional world. If you were in four dimen-sions and you looked up into the corner there'd be four mutually perpendicular lines meeting at the corner of a four-dimensional room. We can't even conceive that. But we do know we're in 3D. So a point can contain a multiplicity of lines - you can imagine those three lines shrinking to a point of space. A space point is a wonderful thing; it has many mysteries which we won't go in today.

But consider a point of time. We will do the same thing that we did with space - we took a line and kept shrinking it. Now we take an interval and keep shrinking it. It gets shorter and shorter and shorter - until we get to what we call a moment, the Now. But the minute you say "now" it's gone and there's another now. Yet each moment of time (any moment) holds the whole universe in it as far out as the farthest nebula. So one point of time can hold all of space for any number of dimensions. It doesn't matter what dimension you are in, one moment could still hold it all. Thus time is infinitely more powerful than space.

Now you can see this in practical life. Real estate is expensive, yes, but there are many executives that have three or four homes, big estates - that's space. They have all the space they want but how much time do they have? Most of them have little time for themselves at all. They are running around from this moment to that - they cannot afford to have free time. So time is much more expensive to get into your life than space, and you'll find that out as you grow. Because as you grow up and you ineluctably enter society's web, you'll find that just operating the housekeeping of your life takes up a lot of time and you have hardly any left for thinking, fore real reflection, for inner growth.

And especially in our civilization � We promised everybody - well not we, but somebody did. Whoever started the whole thing with machines, they promised they were going to give us a lot more time. But no, machines ended up by and large like whips driving us to go as fast as the machine went. So we have less time with more machines, actually much less.The way to get around that apparent paradox is to say, well, okay, since I have no time that I can really call my own, or very l ittle of it, I'll use all

the time

Now consider "to enchant". Well the word gives it away: singing (canto in Italian). So to enchant is to sing something in or out of existence and that was also called weaving a spell. Incantation is actually an "en-singing" - the "en" or "in" means to use singing to do something with. The poets knew it instinctively.

We go on, then, to invocation. Well, the voc (e.g. "vocal") means the voice, hence sing-ing. Then you might say, what is the relationship between that and a cow, that word in religare, the Italian for "to re-tie" - to tie back to what you've lost hold of. Thus religion is recovering, like what Plato called remembering; and remembering is a kind of resurrection because dismembering is cutting into pieces. Remembering is putting back together, so it's the same thing as religare, religion.

You see how much we can learn from word roots. I think it's the next project I really want to work on because language is so close to us all, and this is not taught in the schools. The English language is marvellous because it has Celtic roots, and it has Greek and Latin roots; even some Arabic and Persian ones like "checkmate", meaning the Shah (or king) is dead. So English is an ideal starting point to teach how language really is poetry. And that's what it is in any language - evocation to call forth meaning.

Even in the Bible, in the translation of the first chapter, there's fiat lux - and I remember the probably apocryphal story of Henry Ford going to the Pope and saying he didn't like the phrase fiat lux because there was a "Fiat" in it! So, both in the Christian gospel of John and the Jewish book of Genesis, in the beginning was the creative word, and that's the stuff of shamanic invocation, and the effective basis of any religion is shamanism in some form.

Shamanism is operative religion. That's what it is. It's the kind of religion that says, No, we don't just deal in words. We don't endlessly argue. We heal, we do things. We may things happen better and more efficiently than ordinary human capacity could. Humans need to be taught. If they think they don't need to be taught, they cause a lot of damage. But the way there're taught is not by authoritarian figures that arise among themselves saying, "Do this, do that." We have enough of that from the history of governments and institutionalized religions. Human beings are really taught by contact-ing the access within. It's like we're all rooted in a tremendous tree (one of the prime symbols of shamanism is the Great Tree). And to get anywhere on the tree you don't jump out of the life-force of the tree by a mere external jump from one branch to

another. No, you go down into the root. And when you go down into the root you can come up anywhere else you want, riding on the living sap or life fluid. There's always a pathway from the root to any part of the tree.

For this reason I wanted you to seeing this drawing - a very ancient Siberian shamanic concept of the Tree. [Now holds up picture of the Tree of Life of the Selkup, a North Siberian people, shown on the cover of this book.] This is the lunar side and this is the solar side. Now the Sun is female and the Moon is male, contrary to the Latin languages that went the other way. In German it's still "die Sonne" and "der Mond". For instance, in the oldest Selkup shamanism the Moon is male and the Sun female. But the old Sun goddess is almost wiped out because Christianity came in with a Big Father god and then the Selkup shamans, for instance, thgouth they had to compete and made their Sky Father Num more powerful than their original Great Goddess, Ilynta Koto which can be rendered as "Great Living Granny". Her two related male powers (Num and Kyzy) were fighting with each other like Horus and Set in Ancient Egypt. One (Kyzy) was doing destructive and destabilizing things and one (Num) was doing beneficent and stabilizing things: like two forces of nature (cf. katabolism and anabolism) that should be kept in balance. They were in metal armour and fought so fiercely that the heat of their anger caused their armour to melt, thus welding them together. Living Granny then went out with a big hammer. She banged on them and separated them and then commanded, "You stay here and you stay there and you each do your thing." And so that's what happened and the world has been like that ever since, with Kyzy and Num in place.

Looking at the drawing again on the front cover, there's six on the lunar side (a crescent half-circle) and seven on the solar side (a whole circle). Now that's very interesting because in the "Pleromic Practice" of the shamanic Lion Path the seventh power graces and fulfills all the previous six and gives them new life. The six take up 180 degrees in the Selkup drawing - but the seven use up a full 360 degrees, thus the seventh power is shown to have added an entire half circle - as much as all six powers taken together.

Then they show eight male and eight female reindeer - a solar double pair on one side and a lunar double pair on the other. The old Selkup shamans also taught that there is a great horse power and that the reindeer powers come from that divine horse. Such an idea also pervades tantric shamanism in pre-Vedic times. The Sanskrit word aurva means the great submarine fire, symbolized by a horse storming out of the sea like Neptune's horses. Aurva became the later Hindu god Hayagriva ("horse-neck") who was then inherited by northern Buddhism. This symbol denotes the submarine fire below the bottom of the sea: the vulcanic understructure of the whole earth that breaks forth

in volcanoes, is the power of the cosmic horse, the eight-legged Sleipnir of the old Norsemen. And if that colossal power ever got loose and out of bounds, well then time as we know approaches an end.

[Now holding up an Indo-Tibetan shamanic picture of Eight Divine Horsemen around a central figure] Here the central figure has a little animal coming out of a pouch on his left arm. It's a mongoose. Interestingly enough that animal was also sacred in a ncient Egypt because it fought poisonous snakes. The name of the mongoose is very revealing though Egyptologists don't mention it much. It is Khatri or Destroyer (of the enemies of Light). There was a kind of Egyptian shaman-priest who wore leopard skins denoting their animal ally, though the shamanic base of Egyptian religion has never been done justice to as yet.

The Selkup shamanic drawing is old and probably no longer painted, much less ceremonially performed, because under Stalinism all shamans were deliberately wiped out in much the same way the American, Australian and Canadian governments tried to wipe out their indigenous peoples. Deliberately the native languages were suppressed and/or made "illegal", and the shamans were of course the upholders of the language and culture: they knew all the old myths, history and magical songs. In Siberia most of them were imprisoned or killed. It was really genocide because when you take away a people's language and culture you're killing their soul. And this is what happened, as it did when missionaries invaded Mexico, South America, California and Hawaii.

Always the bunch of humans with the better technology culturally (and physically!) obliterated those with less technology. In sum, it's very questionable how much actual good technology did. In fact, today what with the enormous increase of pollutants in air, earth, water and foodstuffs, you could have a license plate reading "Technology is bad for your health", and you'd be right. The hole in the ozone layer, for instance, has not been caused by ladies' hairspray, as it has been put out by the controlling media. It was caused principally by the washing of military planes with solvents containing the ozone destroying compounds. And those contracts to supply the solvents are very lucrative, and they're not being stopped even now.

There was a very interesting poet - returning to the poet as shaman. You all probably know the name of Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke well before his passing wrote four short, wonderful lines that he wished engraved on his eventual headstone. Here is my own translation, which includes all the subtle nuances in the original such as the play on words between "Lider" (eyelids) and "Lieder" (songs):

Oh rose - pure contradiction,joyous desiring, here is no one's sleepeven under so many petalled eyelids The central empty place of hidden song.

Then Rilke sums up how we each then will feel:

Wholly clean and planless - freed from the future, I have climbed the knotted funeral tangles of departed pain.

T.S. Elliott was another shamanic poet, who, about a generation later phrases the same victory this way in the last of his Four Quartets:

The end is where we started from [and reached] through the unknown, now remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning A condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything) �

And all shall be well All manner of things shall be well When the tongues of flames are infolded Into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one.

It's almost alchemical here, almost the depiction of an alchemical transformation. We haven't got time to go into that but it's fascinating. Rilke also realized, as every shaman does, that everything is alive.

I brought this up once at a conference in Locarno. We were talking about electrons. Heinz von Foerster was there, Ross Ashby, and Warren McCulloch, who started out as a student of divinity and then renounced theology for medicine, and medicine for artificial intelligence. In opposition to what I felt to be blind-alley thinking, I asked, "If a Martian

or an extra-galactic observer came down in a big city, say New York, with an underground, and he saw all these people going into little holes at a certain time and then coming out at other times, couldn't he make statistical laws about the movements of these people? But there would always be exceptions, wouldn't there? All agreed there could be.) Like somebody forgetting his wallet or going back to finish an argument with his wife. Well, I asked, why do you draw an arbitrary line and say, beyond the virus, it's a crystal, it's dead. The electrons are dead but we are alive. Why couldn't they all be alive? Why can't electrons be very primitive animals like amoebas, or even more primitive than the amoeba?"

Why not indeed! Well, the group couldn't answer those questions, but of course it was too horrifying a heresy for them to entertain. They didn't realize that once you draw the line and say, "This is living, this is dead", you have created the tremendous and actually irremovable logical onus of showing how one became the other. That could never be done because you can't get something out of nothing.

This reminds me of the story of the old woman. There was this young man who met a wise woman and asked her, "What holds the earth up?" And she said, "A rock." Then he asked, "What supports the rock?" And she replied, "Another rock." Then he said, "But what holds that up?" At that point she looked at him rather severely, saying "Young man, it's rocks all the way down!" And that's the way it is with the so-called physical world: It's life all the way down. It behooves us to realize that wonderful truth."

And Rilke did realize this. He wrote, "And now it's time for the gods to step out into the manifest and throw down every confining wall of my house, making a new wind and new fields to breathe in" (Neues Atemfeld is his beautifully condensed expression). Rilke continues:

Oh ye gods hidden in all things [the life in all things - the sentience], now arise ye in gladness, adding restoring being to our life now made full.Let it be the morning of your dawning, ye who alone are at the origin. Then the world will arise again and a new beginning light shine through the broken places of our former failures.

That was a truly shamanic vision!

We are living in an interesting time now, the time Rilke predicted. The cycles are shifting into high gear and there are four stages. It's much like the installation of a new program in a computer where you have to put in one disk and they then say, now insert disk number two. Well the first of these installation "disks" comes on July 28th and the second on August 4th, very close to it. The next on September 16th to 19th and then the last of the disks on November 7, 1999. That completes the installation of a totally new program in time in "the Great Computer in the Sky".

Some of these dates have to do with and were preserved in the old Celtic festivals like Beltane on May 1st, and Lughnasadh on August 1st, which is interestingly the Swiss national day and Switzerland was an old Celtic stronghold. As for the other two ancient Celtic festivals, Samhain (pronounced "Shahwain") is celebrated now on October 31st and November 1st (Hallowe'en and All Saints Day) and Imbolc, which was sacred to the great goddess Freya, was held on February 1st, but with Christian influence it degenerated into Candlemas.

But actually the real timing was lost through Christianization: it was easier to make the old sacred times the first of all these months, and it also obliterated the pre-Christian use of solar and lunar timing. Beltane was actually at the first full Moon after the Sun entered Taurus. We have a remaining vestige of that in calculating the date of Easter from the first full Moon after the Spring Equinox. And so this ancient shamanic time is celebrated in Buddhism as the Wesak festival, Buddhism having inherited many of the shamanic practices of central Asia and India.

Wesak is celebrated also in Thailand where they have an older form of Buddhism than in Tibet. Most Tibetologists and students in the West who have absorbed mostly the self-styled "Mahayana" (or greater vehicle) Buddhism call the Thai form "Hinayana" or "lesser vehicle", a term of opprobrium. But when you go to Thailand they don't call their Buddhism "Hinayana", but rather Theravadin, or "the path of the Elders". Even there the substrate is shamanic, as shown by the amulets he wore on a belt about his waist, shown to me by the high abbot of the largest Buddhist temple in Thailand in 1992. Anyway, the so-called birthday of the Buddha, the enlightened former Prince Siddhartha, celebrates the full Moon in Taurus, the same day as the even more ancient Beltane.

Thus Lughnasadh was anciently held at the time of the first full Moon after the Sun entered Leo. That's the July 28th [1999] date I already gave you. Continuing, Samhain is the first new Moon with Sun in Scorpio and that's now our All Saints Day, November 1st. It's when the gates are open to other worlds beyond the molecular, and we can go back and forth between worlds. Good things can come in that way as well as angry ghosts and demonic entities, for the gates between worlds are open. Finally, Imbolc is now on February 1st or, originally, the Sun and Moon's entry into Aquarius. It's almost the hardest one to understand. It's when the whole life-wave gathers in its force again and begins to renew itself.

Coming back to the present, time is going faster for all of us at the end of this millen-nium. Let me illustrate that a little more clearly. I brought along a "flying saucer" - it's a little big for a saucer but it will give you an idea. [Takes out a bowl and spins it on its edge. The spinning bowl goes faster and faster, then it comes to a sudden stop and rests again on its base.] That's what's happening to time now. The pace is getting faster and faster; the inherent time waves are increasing in frequency.

Now you noticed at the very end, this process is accompanied by a very small amount of friction - it's rolling friction which is much less than dragging friction. Gravity is pulling it down more and more. Its starting position was slightly inclined toward the table, so gravity is going to keep pulling it down. The bowl, however, had been given a twist, so it's going to keep spinning too, and there finally comes a time when the force that propels it is less than the rolling friction, and then gravitation brings it to that abrupt stop as you heard and saw. It doesn't go on to infinity at all. That will mean a whole new kind of time will be launched and that's what's happening. Our solar system will be all ready for that after November 7 t his year [1999].

It's interesting how human time agrees with this, because this special Samhain is based on calculations that go back some ninety thousand years even, and it's strange that our current Gregorian calendar agrees with this rarity in indicating the start of not only a new century but a new millennium.

Well, 1999 is the last bloody year of a very bloody century too. Innocent people were being killed in Serbia for what bad Serbians did and with (which was not well publicized) uranium-tipped bullets and shells because the U.S. department of defense sold that bill of goods to NATO in order to use a lot of what is mis-called "depleted" uranium. Radio-actively it's not depleted at all. It's depleted in a technical sense only: Uranium-238 ore holds an isotope of U-235 used to make plutonium. Well, when they extract all the U-

234, they call it "depleted uranium", but it's still pure uranium 238 and it's highly radio-active. Moreover uranium is a hard metal and heavier than lead. Lead has 82 protons in its atom while uranium as 92, hence is heavier and can go right through a tank. But when uranium hits another metal it bursts into flame and then it turns into uranium oxide as a fine powder that is then carried into the air by the prevailing wind currents. Highly radioactive, it also never goes away: its half-life is 4 ½ billion years! Thus using such shells is nuclear war and that has not been brought to the attention of the American people or the public in general - it's something that corporate mouthpieces like CNN wouldn't tell you but it's there. Some people know about it, however, and want to launch a protest march on the Pentagon on June 5th. Using uranium was a stupid thing to do, even for NATO leaders' own children who would be affected by the increased radio-activity. Really destructive�

Well, the old Persians had a very interesting idea that evil finally becomes stupid. That's a Zarathustrian proverb. Okay, if you want to know more about the whys and wherefores of who all these things began and developed, there are two books out there to read. One's an ancient legend. It's probably the oldest story in the world from very ancient sources - that's why there's no author's name on it. The other is about the whole shamanic reality. The first is called A Saga of Error and Glory, the second, The Lion Path.

Now let us consider some ordinarily inaccessible directions through space. If you have a room, with a two-dimensional being in this room (we'll put a skirt on it and call it she), and you took her out and put her here, she would say, "There's an infinity of directions in my world. In which of those directions did you take me out?" And you'd say, "In a direction perpendicular to all of them" and she'd say, "Impossible." Yet we know, living in a 3D world, that it's possible. In three dimensions you have "more room" than in two, that is to say, more kinds of room.

We're now in this conference room all enclosed - we think. But if we moved along in a 4D direction we wouldn't go through the floor, through any of the four walls or the ceiling, but we'd get out. You'd say impossible, just like the 2D being did. So there's another way to go which we can't see. There's always an invisible direction which we can't see.

[Question from the audience]: "Is that what's going to happen when time comes to a stop?"

Something may well come to us through one of these unsealed directions at a critical time juncture. We think we're all sealed off, but in full reality we're not. In fact you could do heart surgery on someone in three dimensions, do things on the heart without breaking the skin. So that gives you some thought about higher healing of our three-dimensional bodies without invasive methods - that is therapy indeed. This is not something imaginary. This is physically possible with a higher concept of physics. There is physics we do not know of by a long shot.

Continuing our talk of dimensions, does anyone know how many dimes can go around one? [Answer from audience: "Six".] Yes, that's in 2D. Does anyone know how many spheres, say ping-pong balls, can go around one in our space of three dimensions? [No answer.] Well, you can first get six around one and then you can get three on top and another three below. So that's twelve around one in 3D.

So we see there's more room in three than in two dimensions, and in 4D still more. In four-dimensional space 24 spheres can go around one centre sphere. This is where mathematics becomes like a bat. A bat can fly through a dark room of piano wires and not hit them. So there's the bat kind of mind, and also the use of the mind as the eagle kind - the eagle can see a mouse from two miles away. But the bat mind works by an invisible sonar, by leaps of intuition in the dark. That's what the poets do: they go in the dark of an as yet unknown reality but they never hit "a piano wire". So you can figure out with the bat type of approach what happens but you don't know how. You can land right but you don't know how you got there. So we can know, without being able to visualize it, that 40 spheres can fit around one in five dimensions, 72 in six, 126 in seven dimensions and 240 in eight.

But after eight [dimensions] something happens and it's not so comfortable or easy. So 8-dimensional space is some kind of organically unifed cosmic whole that comes together in unrepeatable fashion. And, as I said, the number 240 was treated as a sacred number on the walls of the Ancient Egyptian temple of Edfu, with Thoth, the god of wisdom, holding it in his hand. So the old priesthood seem to have known something from ancient civilizations - who knows the paths deep wisdom took?

There are legends among the Berbers of North Africa, and I got this from the letters of a British journalist, William Reginald Stewart, who was in Africa in the 1920s when it was really open and native traditions were still flourishing. He fell in love with a Berber priestess. She had been widowed from a war and had a little daughter about twelve years old. She was training Stewart and would take him around and show him what

reality really could be. His letters about this priestess were sent to his friend, Max Freedom Long, who wrote about the Kahunas of Hawaii, but he never published the letters about the Berber priestess/shamaness. I got to know him and he said they were in his garage. I went all the way out from one coast to another to find them and I foolishly gave them back to him who didn't care about them. The originals of those letters are now gone and I just have horrible xerox copies. But anyway, she took Stewart to a valley and butter-flies would all flock silently about her at her call. Finally, she was killed by a stray bullet in a tribal war just before she was about to really initiate him - the women were the guardians of spiritual secrets in old Berber culture.

She told him it all went back to ancient Egypt where they used to have a Goddess religion and there is considerable proof of that in the hieroglyphic record. After all, you see, it is always the woman who actually brings forth something. A man couldn't give birth to anything. So when the ancient peoples thought of creative origins it was, logically, in female terms. A man could be a fructifying impulse, a starting point that would make the process go, but he couldn't give birth. And that explains a lot. It wasn't just feminism at all, there was a deep biological foundation for naming Goddess rather God as the fundamental creatrix.

And in the same way when we grow and transform and become pregnant with our best selves - there's kind of a higher pregnancy and we have to wait for its term. I knew a mystic, very close to me, who vowed not to eat until he could function in a higher world. He contacted a feminine Presence in one of his entranced states and he was surrounded by flowing garments of very beautiful colours all about him. And She said to him, "My dear one, if you were born now you would have no eyes." And so he got the point: it's like pregnancy, you push it too fast and you could be malformed. You have to be very careful. So that gives one the patience (and a woman has more patience than a man) to realize that yes, it take time, I must wait for my own higher pregnancy to be achieved.

To go back to the 240 now, in the ancient Egyptian number system "five" was a star. It's the centre of the magic square and it meant a new dawning (Duat) and "100" in hieroglyphs is a spiral like on a strand of a spiral nebula. Two hundred is the whole two stranded nebula. So the number 240 can be written as eight five-pointed stars around a spiral nebula.

There's a time-honoured gift in Mongolia: you give eight horses and a white camel, and this is the old magic square again, with every diagonal, column and row adding to 15 (see The Lion Path: The Big Picture, page 60). As we have seen, it also links with 240, the

sacred number on the walls of the temple of Edfu held by Thoth, the god of wisdom.

There is a mostly unrealized logical principle of great service to clear and fundamental thinking, namely Yes is older than No - because something must be affirmed before it can be denied. So to annul always parasitizes on to create, and to destroy must come after something is built. There is one important biological application of these important priorities: Every parasite has an earlier, non-parasitic life-form.

The most deadly viruses are the retro RNA viruses - the one-strand viruses that can infiltrate the DNA. Now a parasite is always a later form-the tapeworm came later than its benign flatworm ancestor. We thus can ask, what is the benign origin of the RNA-virus (because every parasite is younger than its original non-parasitic form)?

Let me make a generalization at this point. No is younger than Yes in general. Yes is older than No because something has to be affirmed first before it can be denied. So life and affirmation are older than death and destruction. That means that the forces that are benign are more powerful than the forces that would destroy, and that's a great consolation, and it's built right into the scheme of things. If you have any doubts, yes, the contest may be close, but it's okay in the outcome.

If yes is older than no and we have a "no"-type thing, a totally parasitic virus, what is the benign origin of it? Because all parasites have non-parasitic origins. Well, the benign origin is a plasma because the viruses are not normally in a string. They're closed in a loop, and they can unclose and can loop again. And the retro viruses can introduce them-selves into the DNA of somebody and stay there, and then be passed along to the next generation because they're in the DNA, and when it reproduces, it reproduces the virus. Very clever. So it's the first subversion, the virus, the first Trojan Horse subversion. The interesting thing is that the benign origin is the way life-forms proceed. And parasitism is always a later choice.

Let us not also forget custom-built mutations. You can have whatever you want. If there is a repeat interaction with the environment that arouses the being's desire, "Oh I like that" or "I want to protect myself against that"; and if that's repeated enough, things are changed for the offspring. And then the changed RNA writes itself into their DNA and you've got a new mutation - but custom-built, not random, and hence effective, non-teratological and non-lethal. That is the actual way of evolutionary change proceeding, and then natural selection has something transformational to select from.

Darwin himself realized that natural selection alone could do nothing. If wouldn't be enough because all natural selection says is everything is preserved as long as it's passed on in reproductive age. But natural selection by itself wouldn't give anything to choose from - it would all miraculously have to be there: the bacteria who could withstand antibiotics would have to always be there. Nonsense. They, the bacteria, make those who can withstand. They adapt. They change their DNA, and they change it intelligently because intelligence goes all the way down. Natural selection unaided by custom-built mutation is simply the bare statement that heredity exists, and that is by no means enough to furnish the variety of species.

Another common fallacy, particularly among the computer and artificial intelligence people, though it is also prevalent amongst True Believer Darwinians, is, if you show them a nail or a carpet tack and ask, "Is this purposive or is it random?" They at once answer, "Oh no, that was purposely formed: that's for a carpet. " Yet a leaf is infinitely more complicated than the tack. In other words, anything humans make is purposive, but anything humans didn't make is "random." Now isn't such a really ignorant put-down, aside from its lamentable logic, terribly xenophobic?! -- it's against all the other life forms. In other words, it's bunkum.

Now we have this wonderful [mathematical] series 1 + 2 = 3; 2 + 3 = 5; 3 + 5 = 8, and it goes right on. If you take those ratios: 8/5, 13/8, etc., they all approach but never quite reach one half of the sum of unity and the square root of 5. Moreover, the ratios of successive terms will never reach it because it's all infinity. Thus we are able to write what happens at infinity even though we never get there. That's interesting. That's why mathematics is such an important adjunct to clear thinking in religion and philosophy.

I once was talking to a theologian and he said, "God is infinity." Well, I asked, which one? You see there are myriads of infinities, some so close to each other as to be separated only by 0.577215! Thus we can calculate the distance that two infinities are from each other, even though both are infinite.

You can even have an infinity that is infinitely bigger than another - so the second one is like zero to the first. There's all kinds of zeros and infinities, and schools should teach this. It is not hard to understand, though it may be unfamiliar. You see, a lot of things that seem difficult simply go against the conditioning that we've already had. So you say, oh that's brilliant because you find it unexpected. It may just be that someone has dropped the customary blinders and sees what is actually there for the first time.

And that brings us to logic. Imagine there are two logicians: A and B - B for better logician. So B says to A, "Would you admit that a conclusion is implicit in the premises?" A says, "Of course, that's the definition of a conclusion. B then says, "Would you also admit that the logical process, the apparatus of getting to the conclusion, is to make explicit what was implied in the premises?" A says "Yes, naturally." "So," continues B, "in other words logic is there for those who are too stupid to see what was there in the first place."

"My goodness," A says, "now I have no subject left." "Oh yes," says B, "you have everything left" "And," poor A asks, what is that" "Well it's the art of choosing the right premises."

B was talking about having the insight to choose the assumptions that really get somewhere. Well so much for logic. It's a servant, not a master. And so a good shaman treats it. That's about it. Are there any questions?

Question: Just a technical question? I saw this book The Lion Path by Musaios. Who wrote this book?

Answer: Someone I know.

Question: That's you?

Answer: Well, I don't know about that. I was having a tea party at a Zen group and they were kind of snobbish, and they said, "Oh who is your master?" "My Self," I said, "but I spell it in two words." And then they asked, "What is your favourite haiku?" I said, "I'll tell you the one I really like best: Samsara is nirvana. " I could have put it in a much blunter way: Those who can see star dust in dog dung have achieved enlightenment, as a saying of the secret Diamond Vehicle or Vajrayana goes.

Question: I wanted to ask about the dates that you gave. What significance do they have for us this coming year, those dates?

Answer: Let's say this much. You'll find out more about it in The Lion Path. Those dates (July 28th, August 4th, September 16th to 19th and November 7th) are like installation for manual override. For instance, suppose you had an automatic program on a plane. If you don't have manual override you're in real trouble. A lot of the mistakes they made were with too much automatization. Then even in an emergency you can't go back to

manual. If the computer goes crazy through a defective program you're at the mercy of it.

And let me say at this point what a computer is. A computer is a recorder of a process of thought. It's nothing more than that. And that's why computers don't think in any sense other than implementing pre-recorded thought. Now a big argument rages about artificial intelligence - they'll argue about it from now to doomsday because they haven't defined it. Each side means something different by intelligence.

Now if one means by intelligence, behaviour that seems intelligent, and is intelligent as far as it goes, then a computer of course is intelligent because it's the recorder of a thought process, and that record is called a program so that the logical thinking can be applied to new data. But if you mean by intelligence someone who can really create a whole new idea and a new concept like the mathematical genius Riemann or the musical genius Mozart - ah, the computer isn't that at all and is quite unintelligent, though because of it's systematic precision and data storing capacity, it can reveal implications that its programmers missed. That is the advantage of deploying a thoroughly systematic thought recorder that can play the thought back while operating new data. The computer, in short, is essentially a recording device for a precise process of thought.

Thus you will always need manual override because the person who thought this all out, whose mind the program reflects, may not have seen all the possibilities. In that sense the program is no better than the programmer who made it, and that also applies to so-called learning programs. You always go back to the limitations of the human being whose thought the computer is re-implementing.

Moreover, you also have another theorem that comes into play here: nothing that is a construct of something else can be wiser than the entity that constructed it. The theorem is true by definition because a construct is after all just that. The computer can go faster and remember better than us. But that's not relevant to the point here. The steam shovel is also much stronger than we, but we don't feel demeaned by that. The computer can indeed magnify our performance in the mechanical functions of the brain: like memory, or collation or rule application. These are routine mechanical things and it's good to be relieved of them. That's why human beings dried up on repetitive jobs when they were employed to do things like this -- -at should be machine stuff, and that's where the computer can be a great blessing. But it's not primarily being used that way.

Unfortunately the computer is being used to control people through being able easily to manipulate great masses of data, and it's very bad for education because you're putting an artificial screen between the child and the sensorily experienced world. You're not allowing the child to see nature itself, which is much more profound than any human thinking about it or model of it. When you use computers predominantly in education, you're putting someone's idea in there and they're looking at that idea. That's fine as an adjunct, but it shouldn't be the basis. Nature and sensory experience will always have vaster potentials than any idea of any human.

Oh, I got off the subject, didn't I? A little bit, but not too much because it is related. The dates I mentioned before are the installation stages of "manual override" so to speak, but it's not actually going to be human-manual. The powers that run the universe (we certainly should know by now that we do not!) couldn't interfere before by the fundamental law of equal justice. Because if you interfered in a situation where, say, a baby would die in a Chicago fire in a horrible death and the mother says, " Why didn't God save my baby?" Or centuries before, a young woman cries, "Why were the Roman soldiers allowed to come into our homes and rape and pillage?" The way the pre-override law went (and it would still exist up to the July 28th date I gave you) was that if higher powers intervened in one case, by their own justice, they would have had to intervene in all cases, for one needless suffering is not less important than another. And then the whole schoolhouse of Earth would be brought to a stop in short order.

And what would that do, you might say. What would be so bad about that? Well, that would hinder a lot of people from fulfilling their development. So a big, difficult choice had to be made. For perhaps even some souls would be wiped out - the whole individuality wiped out permanently. And so they had to consider it along the lines of, There's temporary suffering, which will come to an end, or there's eternal wipe-out; and decide, well, temporary suffering is better than eternal annihilation."

So you couldn't interfere in one case without interfering in all, and that would bring up this other problem. So nothing was done to interfere in the Great Computer in the Sky that keeps track of all events and their interactive consequences. All this goes a long way to answering why the good powers didn't do something about the horrors that have been continual throughout history. And that is why it's been allowed.

And now, what will happen? Something new: manual override. Then interference can be selective. Why is that? Because the school is coming to an end, because the very school building of Earth is threatened. The earth is being polluted and the biosphere ravaged.

There's a lot of eco-crime going on, both corporate and military, which makes it more and more difficult for people to lead normal lives: they're being intruded upon by high-tech war horrors, by food and money crises, by all kinds of things, and a constant whining and buzzing of advertising. Buy this! Do this! Get this! Buy, buy, consume, consume - because you need a consumer basis to run this whole shebang. And the bottom line is: How much money is there to be made and the devil take the hindmost! This is not just true of the United States, it's true everywhere. So manual override means that selective interference can happen, and that means selective obstruction and selective help. There's not much more to say at this time. That's about it.

Question: I have a question regarding your analogy of the computer to a recorder. I once read that Mozart wrote about his own symphonies and he said he was just a recorder, and they just came along and that he didn't actually do anything creative. He was just copying them down.

Answer: Right, but you have one nuance wrong. He didn't say he didn't do anything creative. What he did say is that his ordinary self didn't do the creation. You have to distinguish between the two selves here - his ordinary self and a much more advanced self. Jacob Boehme said the same thing when he said, "My pen couldn't go as fast as the thoughts rushing into my mind." But that's when you contact your own higher self - it's not another being. So there's really no contradiction here because that's what creativity is: it's contacting the higher reaches of your own potential.

Question: So maybe some people are born with more contact to it?

Answer: Yes, with more access. A hundred percent right. But anybody can practice it and improve. Let's see what time it is � it's almost time for your post-hypnotic digestion [it was lunch time]! I didn't want to keep you for more than two hours. Whenever I talk to people like this I'm getting things that I never thought of before too, so we all have a lot to think about.

Question: Just one thing. I wonder, when one uses the term, something is a sham, does that come from shamanism?

Answer: No, that comes from shame and shambles. Shamanism comes from a Turco-Mongolian root actually. The Tungus word shaman means "one who knows". Literally a gnostic: someone having experiential wisdom. Thus the word means just what it is, contacting a supra-human power, and it isn't related to English word roots at all.

Question: The selective interference that can happen. Can that come from our higher selves?

Answer: I don't know how it'll come, although it will involve more than us. It could be geological: the path of tornados has changed, the path of hurricanes, the sea level has changed. There's all kinds of strange things going on geologically; the submarine fires are getting restive. So the whole paths of powers are changing and we don't know why.

But scientists, even establishment scientists, are saying less and less that we have conquered nature because they're beginning to see how wrong that sounds. When a tornado becomes a huge vacuum cleaner, lifts up a semi and deposits it half a mile away, they couldn't do anything like it. In fact, they can't even build a pyramid. And archaeologists, who haven't studied engineering, keep saying, "Oh yes, you could by large groups and ramps." No way, if you go there and see those stones brought up that height. And we can't do that, even on our modern buildings. We don't know what they did�

Well, if there are no more questions, that about wraps up shop for now. (9) (10) Four Ancient Sacred Festivals Relevant Today

Four ancient Celtic festivals still popularly celebrated are Halloween (the old Celtic name being Samhain) on October 31st, Candlemass (Imbolc) on February 2nd, May Day (Beltane) on May 1st and Lammastide (the old Lughnasadh) on August 1st. These, however, are only solidified approximations and corruptions of the real times of these ancient festivals.

Their actual timing shifts slightly every year. True Samhain is the time of the new Moon (the conjunction of Sun and Moon) in Scorpio: a fitting beginning for the Celtic New Year in our Pluto-type world, as Pluto is the ruler of the sign of Scorpio. It is the time when the doors between the seen and unseen worlds open.

True Imbolc is the new Moon in Aquarius and is connected to the power of Goddess to nurture and sustain us at times of crisis, and to extend her protective power over all beings in the life- wave so that they might survive very destructive changes. The Sun and Moon are joined in the sign of Aquarius, symbolizing the ability to change the status-quo, and denoting the power of Goddess ( Uranus) to free from fate (Saturn). Interestingly, the Huachipayri people of the Amazon still speak of the legend of a great

tree which sprang forth from the loins of a woman of great purity in ancient times when the world was in terrible danger from drought and fire. All the ani-mals and human beings were able to climb into the branches of this tree (called the Huanaymey Tree) and save themselves from destruction.

The third festival of the yearly Cycle is Beltane, which is also the blossoming or fulfillment of Samhain. True Beltane is at the time of the Sun in Taurus and the full Moon in Scorpio, denoting the effulgent re-greening of the world in spring. The full Moon in the sign of sexual energy (Scorpio) releases a fresh injection of fertile power into the world to continue the incarnational cycle of nature. As the Sun in Taurus is ruled by the cosmic power Pan, the life force itself, and the Moon is in Scorpio, ruled by Pluto, the power of death or transformation, Beltane is the time when the forces of life and death achieve a new balance with each other - one that lasts through the next Beltane.

The fourth and final festival of this Cycle is true Lughnasadh, when the Moon is full in Aquarius and the Sun is in the zodical sign that it rules: Leo. It is the blossoming or fulfillment of Imbolc, signifying the radiance of a light streaming from higher worlds onto the community of earth's beings.

These are the four ancient festivals. Even today, true Imbolc is celebrated by the Chinese - it is the beginning of their New Year, and true Beltane is celebrated by Buddhists as Wesak - the moment at which the Buddha attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree.

However, we are now at the end of a much greater cycle of time on our planet, and a shift in the intensity and purpose of these festivals began on November 18, 1998, the day of the new Moon in Scorpio that year. That Samhain, the power of the element of water was released to play its full role in the ending of a long cycle. The Gates between the worlds of the living and the dead (more accurately, molecularly-embodied beings and dwellers in the bardo) remain open for a night at the time of Samhain. But from this date onwards, those gates were kept open indefinitely, allowing much greater ability for sensitive people on earth to change and heal their emotions. How does this work? Well, when the gates are open between earth and its bardo, people have the ability to go into anti-time. That's when time goes backwards, so that the future is like the past and the past like the future. The future becomes as if it were the past, which means that things that are normally just potentials within you become achievements. So you can have the things you desire much more quickly. Also the past becomes like the future. The past is the consequences of what you have done, even in the long-forgotten past and the

psycho-logical habits and tendencies that resulted from those past deeds. Going into anti-time allows you to dissolve those feelings of guilt and remorse because it makes the past like the future - in other words, it's as if those things have not yet happened.

Then on February 15, 1999, with the new Moon in Aquarius (Imbolc), the element of air was released to play its part in this new supra-transformative cycle. Since the very basis of life on our planet is now threatened by ecological crises and the mismanagement of human leaders, Goddess, in her role as sustainer and protectress of the life-wave, began a process that would lead to the redirection of all earth's creatures to a new home. The whole life-wave, in procession, began to move in consciousness towards those gates between worlds that were opened at Samhain.

The third wave of power involved the release of the element earth in Beltane: the full Moon of April 30, 1999. Now the forces of fertility were diverted to a higher end. In the context of the spiritual path, the element of earth is the solidification and manifestation of the nonmolecular substance from which the higher body is composed. At that Beltane, the procession of beings in the life-wave which assembled at Imbolc came to the roots of the great shamanic tree (Yggdrasil in the Norse tradition) to drink from the well of Mimir - that of transincarnational memory. This involved, rather than a mere replenishing of the power to provide molecular bodies for others, the transfer of that harnessed power to a process of accelerated spiritual regeneration.

The fourth wave of power - that of fire - was released at the Lughnasadh, the full Moon of July 28, 1999. The role of fire in this transformation is to bring down the spiritual light of a higher dimension onto the earth. It activated the beginning of a great purgation or final burning of the dross that holds back human beings and others from their heritage and true natures.

The Celtic word "Lughnasadh" is connected to the word root "retinue" or "assembly". So it means the assembly of Lugh (the god of light), i.e. a retinue of beings of light. Lughnasadh is also the time of the sacred marriage (hiero gamos) of God and Goddess, mirrored in each person by the partnership of their personal Sun and Moon.

This is reflected in the sky at the times of the full Moon, when the Sun and Moon are partners in opposing or complementary zodiacal signs. The most powerful full Moon in this respect is that of true Lughnasadh, when the Sun is in Leo, the sign that it rules.

Lughnasadh has survived (though its real timing is not generally known) as the folk

festival of Lammastide, when hitherto private pastures in villages were thrown open and made part of the common grazing lands. This is a dim echo on the material plane of the secret meaning of this festival: the opening of the gates to hitherto inaccessible places, and coming into the presence of a retinue of beings of light: higher beings. It is the internal spiritual marriage - the harmonious partnership between the Sun and Moon powers within each one of us - that allows us access to these hitherto inaccessible realms.

These waves of power were released to help all beings evolving on the earth's Lion Path, and to prevent the soul devastation that would have occurred if the reign of evil had been totally unrestricted, as it was in the past history of our world. At the Samhain festival of November 7, 1999 "manual override of the cosmic forces" (selective inference in the destinies of individual beings) was in full force on our planet.

(10) (11) The Names of the Ancient Celtic Festivals and their Meanings

Samhain (pronounced "Shahwain") is the old Celtic festival anciently celebrated at the new Moon in Scorpio and later, under Christian influence, called "All Saints Day" and celebrated on November 1st. Yet the old ways were not totally submerged, as is shown in the persistence of Hallowe'en on the night of October 31st, which is still celebrated from Europe to North America. Samhain is now called "All Hallows Tide" and "Hallowe'en". Though commonly thought to be a contraction for "All Hallows' Eve" the last part of the word "Hallowe'en" is actually a phonetic rendition of the Celtic word uine, meaning "time" or "opportunity" i.e. an opportune or auspicious moment.

An alternate name for Samhain, also embodying the word for "time" or "tide" in old Irish, is Samhuin (Shaween), a feminine noun which is also the name of the goddess of Summer's End or the beginning of the cold season. This ancient feast day was also called la Shawna, "the day of Shaween", or the day of Summer's End. The Irish la is "day" and samhna is the genetic of samhain. Similarly, our All Hallows Eve was oidce Samhna or "night of Shawain".

Interestingly, the root of oidce, "night", is oid, meaning "music" (and/or song): night was anciently a time of music and enchantment. The root samb in Samhuin or Samhain holds more secrets, since it denotes a heavy beam that was put across a gate to secure and lock it. Hence it really meant the sense of ease and tranquillity that comes from security. By the same token samhain can also mean pleasure or delight. In a shamanic context, there is no greater pleasure than going through an interdimensional Gate to a higher type of world, knowing the door is secured behind one so that one's entry into a more

joyful reality is assured.

It is no wonder that Samhain begins the cycle of the year and holds the key to the other three festivals. These four great sacred times were preserved by the Celts but reach back into primordial eras of which no written record survives. They live still in the memories of us all, in the deepest layers of the trans-incarnational record within us. An interesting illustration of this fact is in a poem written by Ourania in 1985 while she was still in Cambridge, England. She then entitled it "Windswept Summer's Day", but in the light of insights gained on the Path she would now call it "The Day of Shaween - Summer's End":

When I survey the richness of the landOn a storm-tossed summer's day My eye weeps with the wind Breathes with the storm as it weaves me into the dance of air laughing across the fields.

These winds do pass, and so once more the land exhales its wealth of perfume and flowers with a gentle sigh, languidly stretching into the warmth of a summer's day. And yet I see a few leaves falling � Already autumn soughs deep and beckons Summer's End.

The next sacred festival is Imbolc - a later variant of the earlier Imbolg - and originally celebrated at the new Moon in Aquarius, but later Christianized into Candlemass on February 1st. The old Celtic name means "in my (im) womb (bolg)" and is spoken with regard to all creatures by the Great Goddess of All Life, the Norse Freya and the Celtic Anna whose name, latinized, became Dea Anna or Diana. Her worship re-surfaced in the wicca religion so well delineated in her studies of it by the egyptologist/ethnographer Dr. Margaret Murray.

Then came Beltane, still celebrated in corrupted form as May Day on the first of May. Anciently it was at the first full Moon with the Sun in the sign of Taurus. The older name was Bealteine or Bel-tene, "Lord of the (Life-)Fire", teine or tene meaning "fire" and

Be(a)l, "Lord". The name of the old Gaulish deity Bel(enos) is retained in the name Sauvabelin, (the forest of Belinos) in the ancient Celtic homeland of what is now the canton of Vaud in Switzerland.

Finally came Lughnasadh, celebrated at the first full Moon with the Sun in Leo, and later corrupted into "Lammas" on August 1st. The old Irish word lamh, meaning "skillful (weapon-launching) hand" is the root of lam in Lammastide. So the name Lughnasadh is connected to the old Celtic deity Lugh, who had a divinely magical spear.

(11) (12) Why the Sun is Feminine and the Moon Masculine

In many religions there are male sun gods, but they actually appeared quite late on the scene, when male priesthoods became dominant over the older priestesshoods of the Sun Goddess. They tried to downgrade the power of the feminine by assigning it to the Moon of lesser light, claiming the power and brightness of the Sun for themselves. That is why later Sanskrit-related languages (e.g. Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Portuguese), assign a masculine gender to the Sun and a feminine to the Moon. Whereas in older languages of the same Indo-European family (e.g. Sanskrit, German and old Goidelic) the Moon is masculine and the Sun feminine. Similarly, in the very ancient, pre-Babylonian Sumerian tongue, the word for moon is explicitly masculine, as it is in Arabic, in which the word for "sun" is feminine.

Thus, underneath the surface of later male-dominant cults, there is a worldwide wealth of evidence of a much older and puissant Sun Goddess, as well as of a Moon God. The Tuvan shamans agree, as witness the following two excerpts from the rich manuscript collection of Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, the shaman scholar of Tuva, who single-handedly revived shamanism there after it had almost been persecuted to death in the Stalinist era. The excerpts were related respectively by Kertek Okaan and Mongush Senden in 1990 and recorded by Kenin-Lopsan:

My Mother the Sun

This story is from ancient times. The Sun is my Mother, one says � If there is no sun, then there will be nothing on earth [and] if there is no mother, there will be no children � As the sun and mother have the same duties, they began calling the Sun "My Mother".

Father Moon

There is reason why Tuvans of ancient times used to call the moon Father � The sun is called Mother because as soon as dawn breaks the sun rises in the east, and likewise a Tuvan mother is always the mistress of her yurt for she takes care of the children. The moon is called Father because a father is always away and does not stay long in the yurt. Likewise, the moon does not appear in the sky every day too: it either appears or disappears.

The Sun resembles the Ovum, the Moon resembles the Sperm. Modern observations support assigning the Sun to the feminine and the Moon to the masculine. Under the microscope the non-mobile ovum (propelled through the fallopian tubes but not by its own motion) looks like a sun with its many rays of living protoplasm emanating from its spherical surface. The motile sperm reflects the swift motion of the Moon as it propels itself in successive crescent-shaped waves. Also, under the micro-scope, the ovum appears more red and the sperm more white, confirming the old tradi-tions of tantric Hinduism as these are the two colours of the solar Kali and the lunar Shiva. They are also the colours of their pair of yogic channels pingala and ida, not to mention the pair of red and white tinctures in the central doctrine of the transformation of the soul in alchemy.

Affirming the assignation of the Moon to the male, it is the impregnation cycle in the human female which is controlled by the Moon, the directing of impregnation being a male function. That not obvious but straightforward relation of the male lunar power with the female menstrual cycle often led to the understandable error of taking the Moon to be female. That error is further pointed up by the fact that in cultures like those of the Buriats of Western Mongolia, the Greenlanders, Maori and Nigerians, it is believed that the Moon could impregnate women. Thus women of the Greenlanders had the custom that they would not sleep outside under the moonlight unless they had rubbed spittle on their bellies beforehand to prevent the Moon's impregnation. The Maori held that the Moon was the true and permanent husband of all women, more important than the mortal spouse.

The Moon is the initiating or fertilizing power of impregnation. It thus directs the tides of women's menstrual or monthly (the latin mens means "month") cycle because the lunar force determines the peaks of fertility - the crests of most likely impregnation and the troughs of its least likelihood. Thus the lunar power of impregnation orbits around the solar egg. These ancient truths reappeared in the age of chivalry, when the entire adventurous journeying of a knight revolved around his fealty to his lady.

Sacred Caves and Mirrors in Sun-Goddess Religions

Features that occur over and over again in the context of sun-goddess religions are sacred caves where the sun hides and is rejuvenated, often by a divine mirror power. Mirrors as ritual objects, sometimes in the form of bowls that were filled with water, have been found in ancient Sun-Goddess sites in Britain and Ireland, Egypt, Korea and Siberia. They were associated with shamanic or theurgic religion and hence also with the healing arts. Why was this so?

A clue lies in the legend of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess of Shinto, the oldest religion of Japan. When outraged by the attacks and insults of Her evil brother Susano-o, She retreated into a cave, taking with Her the source of light for the whole world, whereupon it turned into a place of darkness. The smith-goddess and shamaness, Ishikoredome, then fashioned a mirror in which Amaterasu's refulgent beauty could be fully beheld. This magical mirror reflecting Her glory encouraged Amaterasu to emerge from her cave and restore light to the world.

The ostensible reason given in the legend for the Sun Goddess coming forth is that She was attracted by the beauteous image in the mirror, which seems trivial. The shamanic reality runs deeper. All shamanic journeys beyond this world depend on the powers of the inner sun and moon in the shaman (the two caduceal strands of the self) being brought together, forming the basis of a higher non-molecular body. Thus the magical mirror is clearly a ritual and symbolic representation of the full Moon, when the Sun's radiance fully illuminates it and the two are joined harmoniously in a divine marriage or hieros gamos. Thus when Amaterasu's mirror, symbol of the Lunar-Self strand reunited with the Solar Strand, is shown to Her, She emerges from the cave of darkness and heals the world.

The power of reflection is linked with an interdimensional transfer and journey. We have pointed out elsewhere that reflection in a mirror embodies not simply a 180-degree rotation through three-dimensional space, but actually goes through a four-dimensional space and back into our 3D-space. This fact has not even been noticed in some mathematical treatises because they were simply concerned with the end result in our three-dimensional space, the reflected image that we see, and so overlooked the subtle interdimensional process causing that image.

All this suggests that the ancient bowls associated with Sun-Goddess sites (e.g. Newgrange near Loughcrew, Ireland) were filled with water, and then, like mirrors, used to symbolize the Moon's power to reflect the solar effulgence. However, lunar mirrors

were not only reflectors, since they could also re-direct and focus rays from the solar source. Re-directing and focusing power are male functions, explaining further why in the most ancient traditions the Sun was female and the Moon male.

The Sun as the Right Eye and the Moon as the Left

Also in widespread traditions the sun was believed to be a wondrous bright eye, and many people with bad eyesight were cured at certain sacred solar healing wells. In astral lore, the right eye is assigned to the sun and the left to the moon. At this point one cannot help recalling one of the chief tenets of sacred doctrine in Ancient Egypt: the wounded or left eye of Horus had to be healed and restored so that the egg of the higher body could function and hatch it.

Note that because the nerve paths cross as they pass through the cervical region, the left or heart side of the body corresponds to the right or solar eye, and to the right brain; while the right side of the body corresponds to the left eye and to the left hemisphere of the brain. So the left hand and right eye go together, as do the right hand and the left or lunar eye. According to the most ancient teaching, the Sun pertains to the left (heart) or female side of the body, and the Moon to the right, male and physically stronger side. Thus the sun rules the left side of the body and the moon the right side.

This is confirmed in one of the oldest shamanic ceremonies of the Na-khi people of Western China. There in the ritual of Wua-bpa T'su (from the book Dzu Wua-bpo), as the ancient Na-khi cosmology is recounted, two lines specifically say:

When the Sun came forth on the left, it was hot.On the right, when the Moon rose, it was bright.

Reconnecting the Inner Sun and the Moon

It is by following the shamanic path that we can bring the sun and moon within us back into partnership and harmony. Then the light of the sun or higher self can pour down into us and illuminate all our actions even whilst we remain in molecular bodies. There is still more to be said here. Since it is the function of the lunar strand of the self to seek out and rejoin the solar strand, even if the other strand be in a higher dimension not subject to mortality, it is hence necessary for the male or lunar strand to be able to

move interdimensionally and so be able to join in the vibrant unity of the now reconstituted higher self. Some years ago a poem came to me (Musaios) that I did not fully understand but which is germane now. I called it The Song of One to One. It is the wedding song of the two interwoven strands of the self:

You are in the root of me I am in the root of you You are in the blossoming of me I am in the blossoming of you The you that is in me The I that is in you That you That I is the sacred one Our Ever-Living Heart that gave and gives and ever gives us Life. For the you that is in me is the I that is in you - Twin flowers, each the other's root

(12) (13) The Universal Tree and the Shamanic Journey

One of the most penetrating shamanic cosmologies is that of the Selkup or forest people in Siberia somewhat north of Tomsk, and one of its primal concepts is that of the Great Tree of All Life shown on the cover of this book. The side governed by the half-circle depicting the lunar crescent is the Lunar Root and Branch. It is on the left as one views the Tree, and to the right if one stands in it. The Solar Branch and Root (on the heart- or left-side of the Tree if one stands in it) is ruled by the full circle symbolic of the solar disk. The differentiated life-forces of the two sides join in the central trunk, and specifically at the growing point of the topmost spire. That central union expresses the nature of the dynamically complete self.

But the Tree is also the entire life scheme that runs throughout and joins all living things, and there is nothing that on some level is not alive. The shaman/ess can thus ride the life currents of the Tree to reach the life centre of any creature. The life currents of the Great Tree are likened to a magical steed on which the shaman/ess is borne throughout the seen and unseen cosmos.

Let us step back a moment to compare these ideas with the old Nordic shamanic teaching of the cosmic ash tree Yggdrasil, so deeply connected to Odin, the Norse shamanic deity par excellence. It has three great roots. The first reaches down to the realm of departed souls in Nifheim, "the beclouded place" (see also Bardo in Glossary). This is the Lunar Root, on your left hand as you view the Selkup drawing, but on your right if you become one with and enter the Tree.

The second or central Root stretches down to what in the Norse tradition is the three sister-Weirds: Urd (necessity, past); Verdandi (the German werdend = becoming, i.e, the present) and Skuld (fate, future).

The third, the Solar Root, is on the right as you behold it but on the left when you enter the Tree. It reaches deep into the Well of Mimir that dispenses all-encompassing memory and wisdom. To drink of this unforgettable water Odin hung on the tree nine nights: "An offering to Odin, of myself to my Self", he sang. Here Odin (still meaning the first, the number 1, in Russian) is the primal shaman. Thus recalling what you were (and really are), you can act differently in the present and so change and re-shape the still malleable future. This is what Odin taught.

All shamanic experience means entering the Tree and thus reaching any desired entity throughout the entire life wave, whether presently in molecular incarnation or not. This means "riding" the Tree, and that Odin did by means of his eight-legged magical horse. Indeed, in the same nordic version of this universal shamanic mythos the name of the Tree is Yggdrasil, which is literally "Odin's Horse"; and the name of the horse is Sleipnir ("slippery one"), the current Norwegian cognate of sleip being slip, the word for the slippery liquid film on fishes. The Sleipnir is the living sap that courses through the Tree of all Life. The eight legs, head, and tail constitute a paradigm expressing the whole Tree with head (crown) and branches (forelegs) at one end, and the equally branching root system at the other end are the wind-blown tail and hind legs. The "wind" here is the living force of the whole life breath.

The initiated shaman/ess must learn how to ride this wonderful horse (that appeared later in corrupted form as the medieval witch's broomstick, the broom being the tail) on which she rode through skies of Odin's Wild Hunt. Through the horse/tree, one first descends into the roots and then up through particular and myriad pathways to even the tiniest branch and leaf where the being needing help is livingly attached to the Tree. After accomplishing the theurgic work one returns - through the Tree again - to where one was at the journey's start, now also its end, thus making the circle complete.

The way you enter the Tree and "ride" through it is not found in three-dimensional space, but in a higher dimensional direction as noted in the little anecdote in Part I. Imagine a two-dimensional being: one able to move only in two dimensions. For instance, on the surface of a vast sheet of paper only two mutually perpendicular lines can be drawn through any given point on that surface. Imagine, then, on that sheet that two-dimensional being now enclosed by a circular "wall" around her, and that you lifted her and placed her back again on the sheet but outside the wall. She could then well ask, but how did you transport me here? For you did not pass through the wall and hence did not take me out along any of the infinity of directions that radiated outward from me to the surrounding circular wall!

Your reply would be simple, but almost incomprehensible to her as you say: "No, you are quite right. I did not use any one of that infinity of paths, for that would have meant injuring you by collision with the inside of the wall as you tried to pass beyond it to outside of it as you are now. So all I did was to direct you along a higher dimensional direction (that is, in three-dimensional space, which to her would be "higher") which is perpendicular to all those countless directions. Thus none of them was used because you took an extra-dimensional leap out of and back into your world. Our 2D lady, being a trained mathematician in her world, would understand what you said in principle, would know it was provably correct, and yet would not be able to imagine or visualize it in the least.

So is it with our world and getting into the Tree by a path that is not any of the infinity of directions possible in three-dimensional space. Traveling such distances is perfectly possible, and if you fall back through such a distance into your molecular body, you will feel a shock similar to what your body would feel through a fall through a distance here. There are ways you can learn how to quiet your consciousness, your spinning mind-wheel of associations, memories and sensory inputs - a skill sometimes called knowing how to meditate, although no word does justice to what actually occurs (see Section 26 for some details). Those of you who have tried them would know that the Lion Path cassettes are an easy way to get to be able to do that. You will then also realize that if, say, you were suddenly shaken out of your altered and quieted state by some sudden shock, "falling" back into the molecular body would be experienced very similarly to a sharp short fall in our ordinary three-dimensional world. This is also an experiential way to know that we really move in some sense when we enter, travel in, and return from the Tree in shamanic work. There is of course no need to visualize all this. The metaphor will translate itself into its own reality. An easy time to prepare to take such journeys is

on any Wednesday after August 4, 1999, or on one of the dates of "manual override" already given. Shamanic journeying is often felt to be so much like flying that its prime symbol is a strong bird as, for instance, the eagle among the Selkup and the Falcon (and kite) among the shamanic priest (esses) in Ancient Egypt. Here is the experiential origin of creatures like Pegasus, the winged horse, or the Taoist tales of being carried on the winds of a magical crane in flight or on the back of the mighty Simurgh of the lore of the Magi, shamans of old Iran - recalling the flying Dragon ("loong") of ancient China.

The link between the Tree of All Life and the human psyche is made clear in one of the ancient pre-Buddhist shamanic teachings that are preserved, often uniquely, in Buddhist texts. For instance, in the Uighur (an old Turco-Mongolian tongue) manuscript version of the Bardo T'hos-grol, which concerns the technique and vicissitudes of dying. Folios 20 verso to 21 recto of the Uighur text testify to a clearly shamanic tradition: "Some pundits express the view that the tamir-network taken all together looks like the sacred larch tree �" Tamir is the Uighur cognate of the Sanskrit nadi (Tibetan rTsa) that denotes one of the channels or helically formed tubules of the supraphysical wave-guiding energy that underlies all the biochemical/molecular energetics, transformations and operations of an organism, and which is amply developed in the human body, keeping in pace with a complex neuronal network.

The Lam-rim of Tsong-khapa, drawing on rNying-ma teachings, also echoes the ancient shamanic image of the inner network of branching channels as a microcosmic counterpart of the macrocosmic sacred larch tree. He reiterates the connection between the Great Tree's three main roots (left or solar, and right or lunar) with the three great chakras or radiative centres of supra-physiology: the heart, throat and crown centres. These chakras correspond to the threefold forms of the higher or diamond body (vajrakaya): the dharmakaya or body of fundamental reality, the nirmanakaya or shape-shifting body that can conform to any appropriate appearance, and the sambhogakaya or body of lasting joy.

The three roots of the Tree also respectively correspond with the principal nadis that were mentioned before. But the closely shamanically linked Tibetan tradition preserved the right assignments better than the erroneous (reversed) associations of the red pingala or lalana with the right side and the white ida or rasana with the left. The Tibetan tradition, going back to earlier Sanskrit yoga texts, correctly assigns rKyang-ma the red (solar) channel to the left side of the body, and ro-ma the white (lunar) channel to the right side. There is no ambiguity with the central channel: dBuma in Tibetan, and sushumna or avadhuti in Sanskrit.

Thus the Tree is vast in meaning. As that expert and too little known calligrapher, poetess, and exquisite translator of Chinese poetry, Helen Burwell Chapin, so perceptively wrote in her Round of the Year :

"The roots of the Tree of Life extend beyond time." (13) (14) Riding the Tree of Life in the Shamanic Journey

All shamanic experience means entering the Tree and thus reaching any desired entity throughout the entire life wave, whether such entity is presently in molecular incarnation or not. This means "riding" the Tree, and that Odin did by means of his eight-legged magical horse. Indeed, in the same Nordic version of this universal shamanic mythos the name of the Tree is Yggdrasil, which is literally "Odin's Horse", and the name of the horse is Sleipnir ("slippery one"). The current Norwegian cognate of sleip is slip, the word for the slippery liquid film on fishes. Thus Sleipnir is the living sap that courses through the Tree of All Life. Its eight legs, head and tail constitute a paradigm expressing the whole Tree with head (crown) and branches (forelegs) at one end, and the equally branching root system at the other end being the wind-blown tail and hind legs. The "wind" here is the living force of the whole life breath.

The initiated shaman/ess must learn how to ride this wonderful horse that appeared later in corrupted form as the medieval witch's broomstick (the broom being the tail) on which she rode through the skies as part of Odin's wild hunt. To go through the horse/tree, one first descends into the roots and then up through particular and myriad pathways to even the tiniest branch and leaf where the being needing help is livingly attached to the Tree. After accomplishing the theurgic work one returns - through the tree again - to where one was at the journey's start, that is now also its end, thus making the circle complete.

The way you enter the Tree and "ride" through it is not found in three-dimensional space, but in a higher dimensional direction as noted in the little anecdote in Part One. Imagine a two-dimensional being: one able to move only in two dimensions. For instance, on the surface of a vast sheet of paper only two mutually perpendicular lines can be drawn through any given point on that surface. Imagine then, on that sheet, that this two-dimensional being is now enclosed by a circular "wall" around her and that you lifted her and placed her back again on the sheet but outside the wall. She could then well ask, but how did you transport me here? For you did not pass through the wall and hence did not take me out along any of the infinity of directions that radiated outward

from me to the surrounding circular wall.

Your reply would be simple, but almost incomprehensible to her as you say: "No, you are quite right. I did not use any one of that infinity of paths, for that would have meant injuring you by collision with the inside of the wall as you tried to pass it to outside of it as you are now. So all I did was to direct you along a higher dimensional direction (that is, in three-dimensional space, which to her would be "higher") which is perpendicular to all those countless directions. Thus none of them was used because you took an extra-dimensional leap out of and back into your world. Our 2D lady, being a trained mathematician in her world, would understand what you said in principle, would know it was provably correct, and yet would not be able to imagine or visualize it in the least.

So it is in our world, and we can get into the Tree by a path that is not any of the infinity of directions possible in three-dimensional space. Traveling such distances is perfectly possible, and, if you fall back through such a distance into your molecular body, you will feel a shock similar to what your body would feel in a fall through a distance here. There are ways you can learn how to quiet your consciousness, your spinning mind-wheel of associations, memories and sensory inputs - a skill sometimes called knowing how to meditate, although no word does justice to what actually occurs. Those of you who have tried them would know that the Lion Path cassettes are an easy way to get to be able to do that. You will then also realize that if, say, you were suddenly shaken out of your altered and quieted state by some sudden shock, "falling" back into the molecular body would be experienced very similarly to a sharp short fall in our ordinary three-dimensional world.

This is an experiential way to know that we really move in some sense when we enter, travel in, and return from the Tree in shamanic work. There is of course no need to visualize all this. The metaphor will translate itself into its own reality. Shamanic journeying is often felt to be so much like flying that its prime symbol is a strong bird as, for instance, the eagle among the Selkup and the falcon (and kite) among the shamanic priest(esses) in Ancient Egypt. Here is the experiential origin of creatures like Pegasus, the winged horse, or the Taoist tales of being carried on the wings of a magical crane in flight or on the back of the mighty Simurgh of the lore of the Magi, shamans of old Iran - recalling the flying Dragon ("loong") of ancient China.

Learning how "to fly" is an essential shamanic preparation. One of the nearest "modern" teachings to what we are discussing is the revelation of reiki, the neo-shamanic way of healing that arose in early 20th century Japan and has now spread to the West through

the good work of people like Diane Stein, who writes authentically about it. The first two degrees of reiki initiation relate to the healing part of shamanism, while the third degree, that of raku, relates to the shamanic journey.

Reiki is simply one of the most clear-cut demonstrations that shamanism is alive and well today. And why should it not be, for it is embedded in the reality of things, of ourselves, and of the world, both as we know it - and as we do not yet know it. The Lion Path is one of the most natural and least encumbered ways to enter, attain and manifest shamanic reality. But that reality is universal and ancient - more ancient than even words, which in turn are older than any man-made object. Language far antedates archaeology. But the magical speech is another story � The Path, suffice it to say, will teach you if it allows you to walk upon it.

(15) Society, Politics and the Lion Path

Undertaking the Lion Path would be hindered, even thwarted, by devoting one's time to well-meaning group protest or "social reform", let alone treading the tainted labyrinths of ordinary politics. None of these methods can lead to incorruptible and lasting social change as they all avoid the root problem of humanity: our current psychological/spiritual condition. That root problem requires individual search and self-discipline for the answer. The solutions that can transform our society are not found in institutions or groups as such. They can be found only through concerted yet individual efforts that eventually form a harmonious network of consciousness and motive.

Some of the pitfalls in political enterprise were noted in the introduction to the English translation of Jules Verne's City in the Sahara by I.O. Evans. (It was published by Ace Books in 1960 as Book Two of The Barsac Mission - La Mission Barsac.)

"In my introduction to Book One, I put forward a possible reason why so remarkable a work [was] not hitherto translated into English. The continuation of the narrative [in Book Two] suggests another reason, that the notion of a super-scientific community ruled by criminals seemed beyond the bounds of possibility. [Yet now] we have seen such communities - not mere cities but nations - compared to which the City in the Sahara seems almost tame.

"Here Verne's prophetic gifts misled him only by falling short of the mark. Yet the story remains an example of the symbolism which he could use so effectively. His Blackland typifies much in our civilization, its triumphs of technology and its material advances compared with its backwardness - indeed with its retrogression in moral and spiritual development, the threat implicit in its very nature that the misuse of its mighty powers will end in its own destruction."

Bravo, Evans! That the political quest for fame, admiration and power is not only bitter but fruitless was first clearly enunciated by Leonardo da Vinci in his private journals preserved in the Codice Altantico:

"I would not live on other men's breath [and] they who themselves go about adorned in the labours of others will not permit me my own."

The full import of these words, however, was not really clearly explained until some five centuries later by one of the finest though little known sociological and psychological minds of our times, John Iggulden. In his book Breakthrough (Chapman & Hall, London, 1960) he succinctly voiced the basic outlook of the relatively few among humans who seek control over others and play the deadly political game of greed and power through technology and science:

"Our whole beliefs and the glorious future of our Great Democracies depend upon this point - that we believe Man must return to the oneness of the primeval ooze. In the clash of philosophies in which we are engaged we must first strike at this primeval myth that human beings have souls. For the one who does not care what happens to the body is forever beyond our reach."

Iggulden's own spokesman, Martin Green, comments:

"Yes, you have done much. You have coupled fear and terror into a philosophy, and out of that you have spawned a dogma, and this dogma you have grafted on to half the world."

Not only that, but such people have made the same mistake over and over again.

"Who better qualified than the historian to look forward into Time and to unravel, if he can, the tangled moving of future events? At his fingertips he has the knowledge of what men have done in the past, he has discerned patterns and systems in the workings of time which has passed, and this knowledge he can apply if he will to the time which is yet to come. Men change, nations rise and fall; power groups lock horns in titanic struggle; and still motives remain unchanged. New figures have filled the sinister vacancies with fearful regularity. It's a long unbroken story of the same wanting to terrorize and be terrorized in this ancient tradition of death and slavery."

Green then sums up the refutation of such foul means and motives in his final conversation

with the character of a prominent journalist, Andrew Forbes. Forbes:

"If you wanted them you could have everything that most men have only in their wildest daydreams - fame and honour, and a position in the world which would let you play a vital role in affairs. When such men see someone who could so easily have then turn his back on them it worries them."

Green:

"Surely it will do no harm to have people worried about that? I would like to think that it might lead some of them to start keeping a sharp eye on the men who do achieve fame, honour and power. For if these men have won these things because they want them, and not indirectly through what they have done, then they are dangerous men. The vanity of such men has always been a curse to the world.

"I can look at both sides of this coin. I've had the opposite of fame and honour, and lack of any position or influence to help me to do things that needed to be done. From down there, where you get a worm's eye view, below everything, I had my chance to examine fame and honour and saw them for what they are.

"How poor a man must be inside himself if only the applause of other people can convince him that he exists! [Shades of Leonardo!]

"This desire for fame and honour is nothing more than that - a need to have other men agree that you have been stronger, luckier, braver or wiser than most. This tells all that needs to be known about the inner uncertainty of the one who hungers for fame. Have you ever wondered whether fame can possibly change one's own knowledge of oneself? Isn't this what counts? What we gain from being tested by experience?

"I am the same man when I look at myself as I was ten, fifteen years ago; older, of course, more experienced in some parts of life, and now I look with some distaste on some of the actions which events seemed to force on me; but still seeming the same man to myself."

"How could this be changed if I dragged myself as far as I could into the limelight and swallowed thirstily all the praise and admiration I could engineer for myself. The man with that thirst will never see it quenched! If I had the need to believe what other people said about me, then I should have believed what was said about me ten years ago, and if I had believed that then, I would have been crushed into despair about myself. I was angry then, and nearly soured, I admit that, but perhaps this is where I learned my distrust of fame. It seems fortunate for me

that I had it this way around. It is more usual to have fame before disgrace, for no one is more easily thrown into contempt and disgrace than the man who has let himself become enslaved to admiration.

"This is the condition on which fame is issued - that it can be taken away. Does this seem heresy to you, as a dispenser of fame? No matter, it is an answer to your mystery."

Forbes:

"But it is not an answer that many would understand."

The positive aspect of this brilliantly realistic summation was given in the nineteenth century by that obscure genius James Pierpont Greaves, who wrote in his posthumously published letters (London, 1845):

"All that we are asking for society, as society, we must ask for man, and far more. Suppose all given to society that we ask for, all going on as progressed, yet man would not be satisfied � Man wants what society did not deprive him of, and more far. Man did not lose a system, nor any systematic advantages, he lost a nature. Man's misery arises from a defective relationship with Spirit [and] we sadly mislead when we offer him success and not the nature he needs. Before society can be reorganized, it is necessary to reorganize the elements with which it is composed. Now men, women and children are these elements � Love will realize man as the moral harmony, provided he seeks to be associated with it.

"Each individual must for herself and himself seek this reconciler. This is not a social or societarian measure, it is of the will of each. There is no mode of social union that can be a substitute for this individual union."

This is also the central message of the Lion(ess) Path - path of heroines and heros. There is an added and also practical point that within our molecular mortal bodies, in the secret storehouses of vast numbers of unused brain cells and DNA genetic components, lies the key that we can turn so as to initiate this process of re-relating to and entering a higher order of gestation. Our present body is a seed meant to germinate into something more miraculous than itself. Whether it does or not is our choice and within our power.

About the same time as James Pierpont Greaves, and a whole century before John Iggulden's deep discussion of our soi-disant democracies, the keen observer and traveler William Burckhardt Baker wrote in his Cilicia and its Governors (London, 1853, p. 107):

"By this constant change of oppressors the people are always falling into fresh hungry hands which must be satisfied, lodged and maintained. The whole energy of their Councils is directed to the support of their members at the expense of the people. A useless, unprincipled oligarchy is ruinous to the Country and to the Treasury. Individual despotism is always to be deplored; but an oppressive oligarchy is the perfection of tyranny."

The peoples of the democracies of our times are living under such oppression, with self-preservation measures built into the laws enacted by the party clique in control. Even with elections or revolutions these cliques change only in name, not in psychological type or character. The bottom line here is that mankind or humanity as a whole is very malle-able and can be molded to react any way its currently controlling leaders direct - whether they be the leaders of an upcoming revolution or those of a long-term unchanged rule.

Why humanity doesn't learn becomes, then, a consequence of its leadership not learning. That in turn results from the very nature of the political power struggle: to gain power in any of the prevailing systems of societal power structure, one has to successively make compromises that more and more impair integrity. Then, when one has gained a position of power, one must impair integrity still further by inevitably ordering or condoning a ruthless, unjust or cruel act. This is a self-reinforcing process that ensures the continuance of unethical behaviour at the top, and the course of human history exhibits this pheno-menon clearly and unequivocably. Thus the only true advances in humanity occur in those individuals who are able to throw off the paralyzing conditioning emanating from a corrupted apex of governmental control.

The unworthy leadership at that apex will eventually be rendered ineffective by higher than human powers and thus in effect they would be impeached by a higher congress. Since November 7, 1999 (the installation of manual override - selective interference with evil without bringing the entire biosphere to a halt), the fate of the earth has been in the hands of its planetary guardians who are well beyond our human level of evolution.

What lies beyond our Predatory Ecology?

Just as our political institutions in reality operate from the principle of "might makes right", so the ecology of our world reflects this in its de facto bullying of the weaker by the stronger, and is based upon the fundamental question, "Who eats whom?" Yet there are deeply symbiotic pockets of existence even within this predatory ecological system, for life is older and stronger than death, just as Yes is older than No, as was shown in Part One.

Twentieth century human technology and overpopulation have exacerbated this predation into one overwhelming struggle between humans and all other life forms. Human beings, under the sway of irresponsible oligarchies, have become like cancer cells that end up in a suicidal

destruction of the body of their host, mother earth. But nature has always been not only one step, but an endless series of steps beyond man. The remedy for our damaged ecology is no longer in human hands, and that will become more and more evident.

Terrestrial predation is unarguably cruel: all animals must eat other things to stay alive themselves, and there are exceptions to even the plant world's general beneficence, such as strangler trees and parasitic and insect-eating plants. In most cases the victimized life- form is eaten alive - the worst form of sadism the Marquis himself could dream up in his journey to sodom.

Such a system is inevitably destined to self-destruct, with the human takeover of the planet spearheading and accelerating that fate. In thus acting as agents of dissolution of the present natural world, human leaders and their biophobic technology fit well into a much larger plan for eliminating not only predatory ecology but its very basis, the molecular state of matter as we know it. Human anti-ecological activities are being used to promote a transition to a non-molecular substantial state wherein energy and substance are so closely connected that one is scarcely distinguishable from the other. What is implied here is that there are worlds of life-forms beyond our ken, beyond our quinto-sensory reach, to which all beings of innate nobility and beneficence will be ineluctably led. What we have called the Lion Path is simply the way of that leading. It is interesting to note in this regard that the present condition of our rare, life-bearing planet may be considered like that of a great egg. An egg is not a womb and cannot of itself eliminate the growing tide of pollution and poison within it as the embryo approaches completion. The very enzymes that promote embryonic growth also create the poisons, that, in turn, trigger off other enzymes to produce the pecking or biting reaction that finally frees the hatching creature. Largely due to humanity's massive ecological misconduct, the poisons today are building up rapidly within the great Egg of Earth and they will inevitably lead to the hatching of that egg into something else. How all other life-forms, as well as our own, take place in this process, is the unfolding of the Lion Path.

The Higher Ecology

There is another cruelty inherent in predatory ecological systems: "lower" forms of life being held in bondage and prevented from evolving further because they are essentially needed in the life-support systems of more "highly" evolved forms. Examples are legion: beneficial bacteria in the intestinal tracts of insects, mammals and humans, the specialized protozoa in animal circulatory and nervous systems - leucoytes, erythrocytes, neurons

But in the higher ecology, predation is replaced by symbiosis, in which different life-forms help each other to survive, much as most plants emit oxygen and need carbon dioxide - a little glimpse in our world of what it is like in higher worlds. Also, in those worlds it is not the more lowly beings who are enslaved to higher ones, but rather it is higher beings who with their energies sustain the lower ones. A hint of this liberating principle is given in the book Pr-m-hrw or The Coming Forth into Day of the Ancient Egyptians. Its chapters tell us that each member (limb) of the higher body "is a god", i.e. is endowed with the power of a higher being. The Way

Out of Our Ecological Predicament

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) and Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) both saw the cruel predicament of all life-forms caught in a basically predatory ecology, even though they both lived well before the twentieth century when ecological issues began to surface.

Our predatory ecology, certainly not within the capacity of any human to devise - is hence directly traceable to a fallible god, a concept thus shown to be as demonstrably realistic as fallible popes and fallible governments. As an old and wise Chinese proverb says, "Even the gods and the immortals may make mistakes."

Jacob Boehme speaks repeatedly of a primordial loss of balance, a falling "out of the temperament" as he would say. And Emily Brontë in her remarkable French essay, Le Palais de la Mort (The Palace of Death), reaffirms that a profound "intemperance" or lack of balance lies at the root of all the ills of mortal embodiment in our molecular universe. Those insights came very independently about two hundred and forty years apart: Boehme's illumination, leading to the writing of his Aurora, occurred in 1600 and Brontë wrote her inspired piece in 1842.

Both saw that the current sad state of things was essentially temporary. He spoke of the great healing and restorative power of the Divine [pleromic] Mercury, which would reinstate joy and song in every heart. She saw this world as a larval caterpillar, and the world's transformative heritage as a resplendent winged imago. She writes (our translation):

"As the ugly caterpilar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so is this globe the embryo of a renewed heaven and earth whose least beauty infinitely exceeds mortal imagination."

And Boehme very specifically writes of this same Pleromic Process within the individual in his Signatura Rerum, chapter 10:

"All the seven forms of Nature [the pleromic powers] must be purely precipitated if the universal shall be revealed; and each form carries its own process to be brought out of the wrath into the clear light of the glorified body. There several seeds within you must all unite into one love-will."

This process, he further explains, is consummated in the power of the Pleromic or Divine Mercury [the final stage of the Lion Path]:

"Even thus it is in the philosophic work, when the Mercury shut up in death receives into itself the baptism of love. Then all the seven forms can manifest themselves through this love � Now the love-will is set in opposition to the poisonful Mercury [of the unawakened mind]: If you will

make heaven out of earth, then give the earth heaven's food, that the will of the wrathful, poisonous Mercury may give itself over to the will of the Heavenly [Pleromic] Mercury."

What are the Evolutionary Stakes?

"The people living on this planet have to break with the narrow concept of human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something that needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World." [from A Basic Call to Consciousness, the Iroquois address to the world in 1977 at the United Nations Conference on Indigenous Peoples]

Those who are usually miscalled "the lower mammals" are actually beings who, on the average, are more love-oriented than the human species, which, as a whole, has been too preoccupied with mind- and power-games to give love a high enough priority. Thankfully many individual exceptions exist.

What will generally happen, therefore, as the Earth's Lion Path proceeds, is that most "lower" mammals will increasingly respond to their superconscious minds, until finally these higher minds - endowed with far more intelligence and deeper reasoning than ordinary conscious minds, trapped into omissive logic - will irradiate these beings with luminous and far-reaching insight. That same consummation awaits the plants, who on the whole tend to be even more benign than animals. And remember, for those humans who follow a correspondingly beautiful path [learning to balance their knowledge and power with their love], an appropriately more beautiful evolutionary form and consciousness is waiting.

If we are to evolve on the Lion Path we must learn that the feelings and rights to exist of other species cannot always be subordinated to our own. Such attitudes have simply endangered the fragile, intricately balanced web of life on our planet - a web upon which we too depend for our physical existence. Voltaire, in his eighteenth century Philosophic Dictionary, wrote of these attitudes:

"How absurd, how platitudinous, to say that beasts are machines, devoid of knowledge and feeling.

"Is it because I speak to you that you decide I have feeling, memory, ideas? Well, suppose I don't speak to you; let us say you see me enter my house with a distressed air, look uneasily for a paper, open the bureau in which I remember putting it, find it and read it with delight. You then deduce that I have experienced feelings of distress and pleasure, that I have memory and knowledge."

"Now extend the same view to a dog who has lost his master, who has looked for him all over

with piteous cries, who enters the house agitated and restless, who goes upstairs and down, from room to room, and at last finds the master he loves in the study, and shows his joy by the gentleness of his cries, by his leaps and his caresses. Barbarians then seize such a dog, who surpasses man in capacity for friendship. They strap him to a table and discover in him the same organs of feeling that are in themselves. Answer me mechanist-vivisectionist, has nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal in order that he should not feel? Has he nerves in order to be unmoved? Do not suppose such a pointless contradiction.

"Limits of the human mind - they are everywhere, poor doctor. Do you want to know why your arm and your foot obey your will? Do you seek to know how thoughts forms itself in your puny understanding, or how an infant does so in the womb of a woman? I could provide you with a folio of questions to which you could reply with only four words: I have no idea."

After Voltaire's rare common sense, when we look around and see what technology has done to the planet, we can scarcely avoid adding Mark Twain's assessment in his Letters to the Earth that "an oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has". Supercilious minds have repeatedly tried to denigrate these two thinkers by calling them mere satirists, feeling uncomfortable that both of them were realists of clearest insight who simply used pungent humour and acute observation instead of academic jargon. Twain also wrote in the same Letters to the Earth: "Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them! He is the only animal that loves his neighbour as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven. He was at it in the time of the Caesars, he was at it in Mohammed's time, he was at it at the time of the Inquisition, he has been at it ever since he saw the light - he will be at it somewhere else tomorrow. I consider that the strongest count against his intelligence is the fact that with that record back of him he blandly sets himself up as the head animal of the lot."

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It is interesting that, of all the religions, it is the currently nonpolitically dominant ones that allow for the spirituality and higher development of non-human species. The Native American nations speak reverently of the Wolf People, the Otter People, the Badger People, the Coyote People, the Bird People and so on. The old pre-Christian tales of the European tradition speak of helpful trees, birds, animals and even rocks. In short, it is the shamanistic religions above all who allow for the spirituality of other than human life (all shamans and shamanesses have animal allies). The great religions of Ancient Egypt (in which animals and birds portrayed divine attributes), and Persia, were not unaware of their ties with all other life. Even current Hinduism regards the cow, the

hanuman-monkey, the garuda-bird and the king cobra as holy creatures.

In its inclusion of all nature, the old Mazdean religion, especially in its pre-Zoroastrian roots, is notable, for the Magi taught that all life, and not only the human, had a higher destiny. This was a basic Mazdean tenet, extending not only to animals but plants as well. Indeed, at the end of "the time of long domination of evil," all the life of the earth is due to be transfigured. Zamyat, the feminine higher being in charge of our planet, is actually a form of the Divine Mother, Spenta Armaiti, who also appears as Arshtat and Ardvi-Sura-Anahita (High-Sovereign-Immaculate-One). It is She who nurtures and dispenses the living fire of immortality, the glorious xvarnah (pronounced "khvarnah").

She provides all the life-forms of earth with transfigured, higher bodies of luminous, nonmolecular substance-energy as recounted in the ancient stanzas of the 11th and 19th Yasht. She is also called Savagaetha: She-Who-bears-the-Heaven-of-Light. And in Yasna XXX, verse 9, one finds the resplendent vow and prayer:

"O grant that we be among those chosen to bring about the Transformation of the Earth, for there do our thoughts tend."

The later Pahlavi sacred scripture, the Den-kart, which preserves many ancient and even pre-Zoroastrian teachings, tells us (book 9, chapter 28) that in its final metamorphosis our transfigured earth will be transported to a higher starry sphere by the power of the ever-living fire, the Xvarnah, "that glory which can never be seized by force" as the ancient Gathas tell.

So we see that the evolutionary stakes are high indeed and that the human species is not necessarily the sole prize winner, let alone the evolutionary favourite. We as humans need to cultivate a more admirable humility in our spirituality, as well as a more realistic appraisal of our place in the overall scheme of things. All this the shaman's Lion(ess) Path can teach us if we will.