The I Ching Astral Doorways I
I mentioned above that at the start of my magical career my development was split into two apparently distinct directions – Pete Carroll’s chaos magic, and a more traditional, psychism-based thread that aimed at full initiation, at some degree of awakening. This latter thread continued the rather mystical development I’d started in some of the better of my teenage acid trips.
These two threads did not need to be as separate as that – the sceptical, meta-view pragmatism of chaos magic could be applied with tremendous success to mysticism, just as it had been applied to magic. This did eventually happen, and partly by my own efforts in writing Chaotopia! many years later, and the work of Julian Vayne, Nikki Wyrd, Alan Chapman and others who brought a healthy scepticism to mystical matters but did not throw out the baby of luminous vision with the bathwater of religious ideology. This took years; the original, 1978 chaos magic was very much a product of Pete Carroll’s own view of magic, which is strongly anti-awakening.
So while I was taking active part in chaos workings out in East Morton (see the last two episodes), I was also working with another group, who were less impressed with the chaos magic approach, because of this lack of mystical perspective. This group included friends whom I’d first met through the early LUUOS, and the work we did was inspired by the Phoenix Light Lodge, which was run by Mike and Marian, whose working at my Leeds squat I described above.
A theme which ran through much of this work was astral doorways, especially involving the I Ching* hexagrams. The experiences we had would stimulate a rich dream life. In turn, this dreamscape was dotted with conflict. Some of these astral battles were inherited from Mike’s previous work with a very dangerous and unbalanced wizard called Ian, but most of them were magical dramatizations of personal issues.
I wrote things like:
SAT 4TH JULY 1981: Did we really see a hexagram on a flag in the park today? Certainly the bottom half – the Abyss Trigrams…!
We mixed the I Ching into aura work:
SUN 5TH JULY: Pranayama, LF WITH TRIGRAMS:
Very balanced sensations. Brought fountain up thro central Trigrams.
At some stage we decided to ‘gate’ all the hexagrams, in the usual order, and write a book about it. To unify the style of the visions, we made an intention to channel some kind of garden for each of the hexagrams, as a locale for the vision. The book never happened. Here is an example:
TUES 6TH OCT 1981: CHING GATE 2: K’UN, THE RECEPTIVE
Into temple without delay, and then rapidly through gate. Stepped onto a lawn of succulent dark green creepers with violet flowers. Guide was a woman, medium height, with a strong high-cheekboned face, clear steady grey eyes, black hair swept back from her face, robed in bright yellow with yellow sash. She welcomed me, showing a gold ring with a large bright emerald, to the garden, which was a terrace, ending at the downhill side with a white marble balustrade, each column finished with stylized lions’ heads. On the other side of the valley are rolling hills, shadowed depths of green, and in the distance mountain peaks with winter sunlight reflecting from their snowy caps.
There are no paths in this garden, but a set of steps at each end of the balustrade, edged with rambling roses. The lady walks down the farther one, and I the near one, down to the next level of the garden, where we sit on a bench of granite beneath an ancient elm whose gnarled and black roots reach up to the seat and beneath it. ‘See’ she says ‘how different he is from you, yet you both exist in this immense earth’. The sun seems still in the sky; it is late afternoon and winter, but not cold. The sky is the blue nearest white, pure crystal radiance, and my heart is at rest in this timeless garden. ‘Now let us see motion’ she says, and a swallow wheels against a backdrop of eternal now. Once again the garden is a node of stillness.
We return to the temple door. She gives me a word, not, I think, her name: ‘Shua’; a feather falls to the ground as I re-enter the Temple. I am reminded of Lorca’s lines: ‘ There is a bitter root/ and the world has a thousand terraces’.
*We used the Wilhelm translation, mostly, the one with Carl Jung’s intro in the front. The name was spelled I Ching, rather than the Legge version’s Yi Khing.
Dave Lee is the author of several books, including Chaotopia, Bright From the Well and Life Force: Sensed Energy in Breathwork, Psychedelia and Chaos Magick. Visit his website and sign up for his newsletter.