Empire of Mind: Mitch Horowitz Speaking on Mind Metaphysics at the Omega Institute

[00:00:02]Good evening everyone.

[00:00:04]>> Thank you so much for being here. I'm Mitch Horowitz and I know that you have all had busy days with workshops and movements and other activities and taking time out from a very packed schedule. I I very much appreciate you being here tonight. I I see a lot of familiar faces from the staff hour the other day and of course the wonderful participants and co-seekers that have joined me this week in our mind magic workshop and I hope in our time together tonight to give you a taste of what we have been working on this week in our mind magic seminar and circle and I hope also give you some very practical ideas that may play a part in your own search and efforts.

[00:01:02]I am a historian of alternative spirituality, esoteric traditions, occult traditions, new age. And I refer to myself as a believing historian because I am a participant in the movements that I document and write about. I write about alternative spiritual movements and the search both from the perspective of history which was the subject of my staff time talk yesterday and from the perspective of practicality which is probably going to dominate a bit more of our time together this evening.

[00:01:49]Most historians of spirituality and religion of whatever type are actually believing historians. Most of the books that are produced in our society about religious traditions, whether ancient or modern, whether mainstream or alternative, whether the lives of saints or practitioners are in fact written by people in very many cases who emerge from the congregations that they're writing about. But uh historians who are shackled by h some of the conventions of mainstream letters and academia are loathed to acknowledge their outlook as believing historians for concern that that will somehow lend some air of subjectivity or compromise to their scholarly efforts. And I feel in many ways it's quite the opposite. I think being part of a spiritual movement that one is attempting to document helps the individual stand at the center of that movement and better understand the values that emanate from it and the ways in which those values are marked by success, struggle and sometimes failure and participating in spiritual work also provides both the individual seeker and the person who tries to document it with the one tool that we really possess on the path which is verification. I believe very very strongly in the individual experience of the seeker and it is important to me in my own search to to find something to get somewhere and that is my wish for each one of you in this room tonight and everyone who has been working with me this week on the question of mind metaphysics, mind causation. Do thoughts make things happen? Do thoughts concretize reality? I am certain that within this complex world of ours and within the complex lives that we lead, that contention is true. I have felt that very deeply in my own search. And I've come to feel at this point in my my own path as a seeker, I've come to feel that methods that are marked by real simplicity can be among the most powerful reaching us. As a child, I grew up in a traditional Jewish household in the great burrow of Queens in New York.

[00:04:49]And I had an Orthodox bar mitzvah and I was very acclimated to a thickly lurggical experience, a mystical experience, but an experience that rested upon centuries and centuries of tradition in matters of prayer, uh, ceremony, the abiding of seasonal holidays, rights, and ritual. And then as I got older and entered my 30s and started to grow more deeply interested in traditions of ceremonial magic and esoterica at the same time working as historian to document some of these movements.

[00:05:38]I came to feel almost like a thirsty person has a wish for water. I came to feel a deep deep thirst for methods of real simplicity. And I came to feel very strongly that the contention that thoughts are causitive is not only true but may in fact be the turnkey behind all of our spiritual methods and practices. In particular, it seems to me at this juncture on the path that a passionately felt, well-defined wish is a thing of enormous power. And that locating a sense of one's individual wish may be the most uniquely important step that the individual can take in discovering a sense of personal agency and power in life. And when I say power, I don't mean force. I don't mean telling other people what to do or enforcing my perspective or my point of view. I mean the ability for self-expression, the agentic ability to see through one's wish to express and create in the world in whatever form and in whatever way and amid a world of complex and sometimes counterveailing forces.

[00:07:23]I came into the certainty of some aspect of the mind's causitive properties many years ago when I was involved in what I suppose you could say was a a very deeply serious, rigorous, intellectually committed uh circle of seekers who were dedicated to the ideas of the Greek Armenian spiritual philosopher GI Gerjief. And within that work, there are a lot of really arduous physical demands. You are placed into situations that are unfamiliar. You might be woken at an unusual time to perform an unconventional or unpredictable task.

[00:08:18]And when you're placed in situations of that nature, you learn a lot about the fiber and power of your own being. And it dispels fantasies about self very quickly.

[00:08:34]>> Terms like enlightened and realized and awake go out the window very, very quickly. When you're cleaning a latrine at 4:00 a.m., you learn something about how powerful you are. And the answer comes back, not very. Not very. We're we're we're too often tested in environments of convenience, places where we're on familiar ground and footing, and we're allowed to feel like wise owls or progressing seekers.

[00:09:09]And when that familiarity is stripped away from a person, the experience can be and ought to be very jarring.

[00:09:19]One day, uh, I was given a peculiar task by a teacher of mine, a man I love deeply, who's now dead. Uh, we were planning a winter camping trip in the woods uh, near the New York Pennsylvania border. And for those of you who have ever gone winter camping in the Northeast, you're aware that even under the best of circumstances, it can be quite arduous. Um, once upon a time, I was planning a winter camping trip and I asked a close friend of mine to come and he adamantly refused. And I said, "Why?"

[00:09:54]And he said, "Because the best you can possibly hope for is to have a terrible time."

[00:10:00]There is truth to this. Um the way that uh this particular uh week of work functioned is that men were staying in a cold water cabin and the women uh in the group were staying in tents outside uh on the tundra. And my teacher said to me with a little bit of a gleam in his eye, a little bit of humor, but also with deadly seriousness that he wanted me to find a chamber pots that the women could use in their tents so that if they needed to relieve themselves during the night, they wouldn't have to go out into the icy woods, but could use something within the tent. This was many years ago, long before the age of digital commerce. And he instructed me that he I was specifically to procure as these chamber pots pink heart-shaped buckets.

[00:11:05]And there there this this task was given to me with deadly seriousness. And he said, um, if you if you can't find pink heart-shaped buckets, then you can substitute in, if you really try and you can't procure this, you can substitute in pink buckets of a regular spherical shape. And if you absolutely find that you've come up lost after your very best efforts, you can then uh revert to red buckets of a spherical shape. Now again uh this was many years ago and it was before the advent of digital commerce.

[00:11:51]So I couldn't just go calling on Bezos and say you know have this here in 22 hours. I was in Manhattan and I began to do a search for pink heart-shaped buckets. And I searched at hardware stores, contractor stores, Bed Bath and Beyond, HomeGoods stores, anything that you could imagine, calling place after place after place and getting absolutely nowhere. eventually expanding my search uh to the outer burrows, to Queens, uh to Brooklyn, and again going down the checklist of all the places that you might expect to contact. And I just kept coming up blank, blank, blank. So then I decided that I would look for regular pink buckets of a spherical shape. And I made the same revenue of phone calls.

[00:12:45]Hardware stores, contractor stores, maintenance stores, homegoods, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. So at this juncture, I thought, well, all right.

[00:12:56]I've now earned my right to just get the regular red plastic spherical buckets.

[00:13:01]And I I really felt that this was not too complicated a task. Uh it was hardly asking too much to find red plastic buckets in New York City. And oddly enough, for the strangest of reasons, I couldn't come up with that either. And I really looked and I really tried hard.

[00:13:22]It was very very important to me not to disappoint my teacher and not to try my very best uh at at succeeding in this task even in a stepped down version of it. And after a really long and arduous effort, um, I felt that I had failed. And I went out, uh, on a little errand in the neighborhood. I visited one of these nothing little grocery stores near my apartment at that time on the east side of Manhattan, the kind of place you just run out to to pick up eggs or milk or something like that. And I was standing outside the store and I had with me my primitive old cell phone, the kind that you didn't get text on or anything like that. It was just like a real old-fashioned little thing. And I was going to call my teacher and report to him that I really tried. I made my very best effort to find the pink heart-shaped buckets, then the pink spherical buckets, then the red spherical buckets, and I failed. I failed.

[00:14:34]Um, and something told me, "Not just yet. Not just yet." And so I I entered this little grocery store and I walked to the back where the cold foods are to pick up some eggs and milk.

[00:14:49]And as I got there, standing right there in front of me was a gleaming pile of pink heart-shaped buckets. pink heart-shaped buckets in this little nothing grocery store.

[00:15:05]>> And I I I grabbed a stock boy and I said to him, "Um, I'm not seeing things."

[00:15:12]Correct. Those are the pink those are pink heart-shaped buckets. And he regarded me a little strangely and said, "Yeah, that's right." And they they just came in today.

[00:15:20]>> Wow.

[00:15:22]>> Yeah.

[00:15:23]>> Wow.

[00:15:24]>> And I was just overcome. I was just overcome. And I realized at that juncture that there is an intimate relationship between thought and the concretization of our reality. A natural law in order to be a law must be consistent. And yet consistency can get disrupted by surrounding conditions. Gravity is a consistent law, but you'll experience it differently based on mass.

[00:15:58]You feel it differently on Earth than you would on the moon.

[00:16:02]Water is always H2O, but it can be a liquid uh or a solid or a gaseous vapor based upon surrounding temperature.

[00:16:13]All kinds of natural laws in life are based on surrounding conditions. That being the case, I felt indelibly persuaded that there is a law of thought causation.

[00:16:28]>> And this really began to inform the nature of my work and my search. And when I wrote my first book, Cult America in 2009, which is a history of supernatural religious movements here in the US, the thing that I started to notice was that every movement from Christian science to ceremonial magic, from the work of secret initiatory organizations up through Edgar Casey, up through various expressions of channeling and parasychology and psychical abilities and all the different beautiful, beautiful intentional communities set around spiritual ideas across the United States, some of which we spoke about yesterday. And we stand on the very foundation of the the beginnings of that communal spiritual culture here in the United States at Omega. Omega has has lineage and and and tendrils that go to some of those very early experiments.

[00:17:39]The the that they were all united by one core idea which was the search for a bridge between the psychical and the external. The search for a bridge between thought and concretization.

[00:17:58]And I came to feel that although all of uh our alternative spiritual experiments have different aesthetics, different background claims, all kinds of different purposes and orientations.

[00:18:15]Some oriented in monotheistic tradition, some oriented toward polytheistic tradition, all with with their own aims and wishes and needs. Every one of them rested on this premise that thoughts are causitive.

[00:18:34]And this began to ignite my own search.

[00:18:40]And I said earlier that I think nothing is more powerful in your individual life as a seeker than arriving at the nature of a single passionately felt wish.

[00:18:58]and seen in a certain sense. The premise that I'm describing to you is so exquisitely simple and accessible and available. It's it's yours. It's yours.

[00:19:14]And yet so many forces in life strip from us the capacity to arrive at a wish that is uniquely one's own. We are so sused in my estimation with peer pressure and conformity and the vocabulary of decisions that are made by other people that we sometimes refer to as traditions but are really less traditions than they are customs and in some cases less customs than they are habits.

[00:20:01]habits of thought that get reinforced as truth by dent of familiarity.

[00:20:08]>> And I said that verification is really the one tool that the seeker possesses on the path. And I really mean this in the deepest sense. I feel that it belongs to you as a seeker and it belongs to seekers in every generation to verify ideas for yourself by lived experience.

[00:20:35]>> We in the alternative spiritual cultures face a particular challenge. No sooner do we flee orthodoxies sometimes from the traditions that we knew as children that we recreate orthodoxies within our own environments. If we human beings are good at one thing, it is creating rules and then enforcing those same rules. But to what end? To what end? other than just telling one another what to do which seems to be a unique human passion.

[00:21:12]And um the fact is we as a seeking community and this is true of of people who might be part of what could be considered more traditional or mainstream expressions. people who are part of what might be considered more esoteric or alternative expressions.

[00:21:35]We read translations of translations of translations of wisdom literature very often uh unable to read them in the original languages in which they were written and very often we don't even possess the originals themselves. This is the case for example with hermetic literature which is a particular source of of study and of personal importance to me. Hermeticism is a philosophy that emerged from the late stages of ancient Egyptian civilization. Uh after Cleopatra came uh to power in the decades immediately preceding the birth of Christ, she reignited the mystery traditions in ancient Egypt.

[00:22:35]She was part of a Greekeaking ruling class that had been left in place by the invading armies of Alexander the Great about three and a half centuries earlier.

[00:22:48]Some of the rulers who emerged from Alexander's armies known as Talmies instead of pharaohs. Talammy was a title for a general uh really stood aloof from the Egyptian population. But Cleopatra was by and large deeply loved by the Egyptian population uh because she was dedicated to the revival of the ancient mystery traditions, the temple orders, the magnificent statuary, the symbolism, the proliferation of rights and rituals and ceremonies that had ignited the magic ical empire for millennia. And one of the projects on which Cleopatra embarked uh was directing Greek speaking and Greek writing scribes who were part of the administrative class to write down facets of ancient Egyptian thought. And years later this literature became known as hermeticism or the hermetic literature. It was signed by the mysterious appellation of Hermes Trismagist or thrice greatest Hermes, a term of honor that Greeks applied to ancient Egypt's god of writing and wisdom, Thoth, who they saw as three times as great as their own god of writing and intellect, Hermes, or later Mercury. At the heart of the hermetic effort to write down in an expository language that we westerners can understand to write down the fragments and threads of ancient Egyptian traditions in this twilight of ancient Egyptians the ancient Egypt's life Egypt by this juncture was already a protectorate of of Rome and it was really in the final generations of its expression as the ancient culture that had endured for millennia. A key idea that appears in the hermetic literature and I ask you to listen to this very very carefully is that all of creation everything that is emanates from the thought forms of a great infinite overmind known in Greek as noose. This was sometimes translated as light and this was sometimes translated as great mind or great intellect. And the whole schema of the hermetic literature, which is to say the schema of esoteric Egyptian philosophy that was captured just in threads in the hermetic writings is that this great infinite mind creates by projecting thought through concentric circles of reality. And we human beings dwell as thought figments within one of those concentric circles of reality. And the key dictim that you'll find running throughout the hermetic literature stated in its most pristine form in a manuscript called the Emerald Tablet is the principle as above so below. It was Sir Isaac Newton who actually rendered the first English translation of the Emerald Tablet which previously existed at least as it reached us in Arabic and Latin. Newton translated the opening lines, true without falsehood, certain and most true. That which is above is as that which is below. And I think you can hear an echo of that in our own western scripture sometimes rendered as God created man in his own image. So it stands to reason that if one takes that seriously that as we were beings created by mind or by psyche which I see as a compact of thought and emotion.

[00:27:32]So must we create. So are we able to create through the concretizing effects of our own psyches. And I would go so far as to say that the task of creation is the very thing that makes us complete as human beings.

[00:27:57]I feel very certain that aosity aposity of self-expression and creativity lie at the heart of a great deal of the lowgrade depression and anxiety and onwei and addiction that traverses across our culture.

[00:28:22]am I think people who feel that constant gnawing sense of unhappiness, dissatisfaction, not being themselves, falling asleep at night with the television flickering and the chips on their chest and so on are suffering from an absence of purpose that can be defined as expression as creativity. broadly defined of course because that's going to be different for every individual. As above so below that's the hermetic principle.

[00:29:02]That law of correspondences is the hermetic principle. It is I believe the closest that we as a human community possess to a kind of universal law. You know I want to share an interesting story. Um for many many years I worked in spiritual publishing.

[00:29:22]I dedicated about 27 years to it. And one of the books I was proudest to publish maybe some of you have heard of.

[00:29:30]It's a book called Meditations on the Tarot by Anonymous. I don't feel I'm betraying any confidences by telling you that um anonymous was a a conservative Catholic theologian named Valentine Tombberg.

[00:29:48]And Tomberg wrote in this book that as he saw it, speaking as a Catholic traditionalist, there was no contradiction between this hermetic law of correspondences and the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

[00:30:06]And it's so funny how these revolutionary expressions, they just hide in plain sight. It's almost as if our culture is incapable of absorbing them of taking them in. Um the afterward to this book which appeared for the very first time in the addition that I was privileged to publish uh was by a conservative cardinal named Hans von Balthazar who was appointed by Pope John Paul II. And you can find authentic images online which have been verified of the two volume French edition of meditations on the tarot sitting on the desk of Pope John Paul II.

[00:30:54]>> Why do people go chasing after fantasy when reality is so fascinating?

[00:31:00]>> I I I have to explain to podcast hosts and so on. Guys, you don't need to make anything up. I can assure you the real thing is wilder than anything in your imagination.

[00:31:13]And yet somehow we as a culture are just resistant to ideas that seem to contradict our most conventional points of view. I will always love meditations on the the tarot. You may even find a copy in the bookstore or here on campus because it is this beautiful, very thick and very detailed interpretation of the tarot deck as a mystical allegory of hermetic development. And this volume seated on the desk of a man who was considered to be a a conservative 20th century pope written by a conservative Catholic theologian who wrote it under the title anonymous maintained that there was no fissure between hermeticism, this ancient philosophy of Egypt in its final expression and Catholicism itself.

[00:32:18]>> I I have to say the following and and this is something that we must be very careful of uh within our culture.

[00:32:30]We don't actually possess any of the originals uh of the heratic literature from Alexandria which would have been written in Greek.

[00:32:42]We don't even possess copies of the original scrolls which were produced in Byzantine Greek and were rediscovered during the Renaissance in 1462.

[00:32:56]It's just part of the messiness of history that things are overlooked, lost, destroyed in wars, robbed, buried, vanished, burned, and we suffer a disadvantage because we read translations of translations of translations.

[00:33:20]And the simple fact is that as our great literature passes through different hands across centuries, inevitably translators are going to insert some of their own prejudices, predilictions, points of view, religious attitudes.

[00:33:38]So it's very very difficult to talk in terms of the real McCoy in ter uh uh with regard to hermeticism. I am an enormous admirer of and have written a lot on a modern book of hermetic philosophy called the Cabalon which some of you may have heard of that was produced in 1908 and this elicits hows of protest from my high tone friends who insist that's fraudulent hermeticism that's airsat hermeticism that's phony hermeticism to which my response says, "Uh, fellas, learn your history because we are at a very disadvantageous place with regard to what you may think is real hermeticism, but is a copy of a copy of a copy and has been translated and passed through different hands in such a way that you're looking at a modern document." I happen to think just as a side note that the Cabalan, this this 1908 occult novelty is just filled with extraordinary and beautiful and valid insights based upon hermetic themes. Uh my mentor when I was younger, he's now dead, is the religious philosopher Jacob Needleman, who some of you uh may know.

[00:35:05]And I remember once upon a time I was saying to Jerry as friends knew him that it seemed to me that um I must have been in a little bit of a high tone mood myself that day. It seemed to me that the Cabalan was nothing but early 20th century new thought dressed up in Egyptian costume. And Jerry got a little gleam in his eye and he said to me, "There are some good ideas in that little book." And it returned me to it.

[00:35:39]And one summer I read that little book five times in a row. And as my own immersion in hermetic literature deepened and deepened and deepened, so did my appreciation for that little book because I came to realize although certain parts of it are very clearly modern and it must be said certain parts of it are inescapably theatrical and and and the author William Walker Atkinson, a beautiful, highly energetic new thought author and publisher, added a a a a large serving of pageantry to the book. The book also displays some really beautiful thematic understandings of hermetic spiritual psychology. I I stand by it to this very day. I stand by it because none of us are in a position to say I know exactly what the real McCoy is. The real McCoy can be very elusive.

[00:36:39]Which is why as much as we have to do our best, and I certainly try to do my best to search through ancient fragments of literature, sometimes struggling with languages over which I have very uh little and scant command.

[00:36:59]There is absolutely no substitute if you're on the path for individual verification.

[00:37:07]And you will find if you read a good translation of the hermetic literature and I'm going to name two really good ones. One is from 1990 by Brian Copenhaver and one is from 2000 by a team led by a man named Clement Salomon.

[00:37:26]They're both wonderful. The most mystical tracks in them are tracks one and 11. They're very short, but if you don't want to read the whole thing or if you don't feel it's just part of your your search at this time, take a look at tracks one and and 11 and you'll see something remarkable. And it is it is an accurate translation in so far as the best material that's reached us. You'll see references to a wish. A wish. And with the wish was the world born. and with the wish was the thing itself born into creation. There is a a frequent reference in those books to our equivalent of a wish. Which brings me back to my earlier point, a true wish, it seems to me, is something that owns you more than than you own it. Is something that you want to express. so fully and deeply in life that you couldn't get rid of it if you wanted to.

[00:38:36]I've had episodes in my own life, not infrequently, where a hallowed wish that I've held has come to cause me pain. I've come to feel this is impossible. This is too far out. This is making me unhappy. I'm done. I'm done. I'm getting rid of this wish. I'm gonna throw it out to sea. And then sometimes in less than 24 hours, frequently in less than 24 hours, the wish just comes roaring back in >> because it possesses us, not us it.

[00:39:19]And I encourage people to consider a wish as the real turnkey of our psychical capacities for actualizing experience, for actualizing reality.

[00:39:40]And to think very carefully and in a very very sincere and deeply felt and unmbarrassed manner about your own wish. And my suggestion to you is don't tell anyone what you're doing. It's yours. It's your hallowed self. You don't have to tell your shrink. You don't have to tell your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your spouse because you needn't put yourself in a position where someone else is going to take it away from you or is going to judge you or is going to say, "Well, what about or something like that." You're not owned by that process.

[00:40:30]And I ask you as you're formulating your wish to avoid all convention, throw out everything that you think you knew or that you think you understood because all of us have a habit of talking to ourselves even within from the experience of internalized peer pressure. Internalized peer pressure is overwhelming and we very quickly hear ourselves even internally using language that sounds like it belongs to some sort of a spiritual business plan or something like that. There aren't vocabulary words that you have to box check.

[00:41:18]Don't trouble yourself for the time being with the practicality of your wish or with the how, why or the wherefore.

[00:41:27]Just focus yourself on what the thing is. Krishna Murdy used to say when people ask how, what that really means is they don't want to do it. And there's a wonderful book called think on these things which collects some dialogues that Krishna Murdy had with Indian teenagers in 1966.

[00:41:53]And these kids were terrific because they really challenged him and there was a a a kid at one point who raised his hand and said, you know, you're telling us we need to be independent. You're telling us we need to live from our our true selves. But uh other people have expectations on us and blah blah blah bun. And of course this is India 1966 uh a a society where a young person uh really felt and still feels the the pressures of uh certain aspects of the castbased system. So when these kids spoke in terms of the pressures of conformity uh they were speaking from a place uh that that in which that was a really very heavy very dense and serious concern and so one kid said to Krishna Mie how can we do this thing that you're asking of us and Krishna Mie said sir listen to me very carefully I like the fact that he addressed The kids says, "Sir," he said, "if you were walking down a road and you saw a cobra on the road in front of you, you wouldn't say, "How do I get away from this cobra?" You'd know full well how to get away from that cobra, and you would ensure that you did. He said, "That's why asking how can reflect an internalized unwillingness to face truth." Now we are not adolescent kids growing up in India in 1966.

[00:43:31]We face what we might consider a less conformist environment. And there is truth to that. But all of our subcultures, as I was alluding earlier, including our alternative subcultures, reinvent orthodoxies very quickly, reinvent vocabulary words, reinvent concepts that are supposed to sound holy and wonderful and are really just decisions that have been made by someone else. I am asking you to give yourself a break just for the time being from the how and from the practicality and from the perceived judgments of other people and they're always there and just allow yourself within within the exquisite privacy of your own psyche. It may be the one remaining place in this hyperconnected society in which we actually have privacy.

[00:44:29]and ask yourself, what is my wish? What is my wish?

[00:44:35]Boil it down to a very, very simple statement. Write it down. Write it down.

[00:44:42]If you're like me, I suggest you write it down on a little card. Wrap that card in clear packing tape, one of my favorite projects, and carry it around with you in your pocket. and carry it with you like you are protecting a lit candle in a rainstorm.

[00:45:01]Treat it with exquisite care. Treat it privately. My suggestion is a true wish will always feel a little bit embarrassing.

[00:45:13]A true wish is something that you can and ought to keep private. A true wish is something that you couldn't dispense with even if you wanted to because it will follow you. It possesses you, not you. It um within the uh schema of the thought causation culture. Uh the the the person who has been the single greatest source of inspiration to me is a figure some of you know named Neville Goddard. I'm a great lover of Neville's work and I'm assuming that some of you in this room are on familiar terms with Neville's work. Neville was a British Barbadian mystic who was born in 1905 on the island of Barbados. came to New York City to study theater at age 17 and embarked on a remarkable career as an unclassifiable spiritual teacher who had one essential message which is that >> your your your imagination is essentially that which is referred to as God in Old and New Testament and that references to God in Old and New Testament are symbolical representations of your own imagination and that everything that you experience are your own emotionalized thought pictures pushed out into the world. And he meant that in the most literal in the most literal sense in so far as if you follow Neville's philosophy to its ultimate conclusion it would have to be said that there's no Mitch standing here that these are your words that these are your ideas I'm just a thought figment eminent from you as we are all thought figments emanent from noose the infinite mind and that I am simply a vehicle that you have selected at this point to hear these ideas. And Neville's thesis, which he stated over and over in in books and lectures until his death in 1972, sounded new and fresh every time he said it. Even though the basic idea that I've laid out for you more or less is the philosophy that he promulgated for decades and decades, Neville uh I came to feel many many years ago and I feel all the more today is the most beautiful mystical analog to quantum mechanics and quantum theory. Neville said something in 1948 in Los Angeles that was so precient of where uh quantum theory uh was to go about 10 years later. He said scientists will one day discover why there exists a serial universe but until then your job is to use that serial universe. It was close to 10 years later that the physicist Hugh Everett III popularized what became known as the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics or the multiverse interpretation of quantum physics. I will not go into all the technical details now. That's part of what we've been doing in our um mind magic workshop. But the basic notion is that because on a particle level reality is localized by perception, reality existing in a state of superp position or a wave is localized only by measurement of an observer. This reverberates as all natural laws must throughout all of the circles of creation including our macroabove ground world which consists of infinite layers of coexistent events all playing out simultaneously at the same time. like the layers that you might see in a boulder made up of uh sediment, glacial sediment that eventually solidified into one solid seeming object, but is made up of a vast number of layers that express the final hole. My contention, and I'm really speaking of this in great shortorthhand because we just have a limited time together tonight, is that through our psychical focus, through our perception, through our measurement, and what else are the natural senses but measurement, sight, touch, taste. We're measuring things.

[00:50:26]Through our measurement, we are selecting which branch of the infinite multiverse we are experiencing as concrete linear reality instant by instant by instant. If you were to uh ask yourself right now, where did I grow up? What were my parents' names? What did they do for work? You'd have immediate answers that would seem entirely real. and they are real. But it's possible according to the multiverse theory of physics and and and particle physics which reverberates through our above ground world that feels so solid and real. It is quite possible that at every instant you are reexperiencing a different strand of the multiverse through perception which localizes. As above, so below. So does it localize in the particle lab. So does it localize in the seemingly concrete linear reality that we experience every instant of our lives. But it's not ultimately real.

[00:51:40]We've known since Einstein, at least if I'm speaking in modern terms, that linear time is an illusion. Linear time bends. It bends in conditions of extreme gravity like a black hole. It bends in conditions of extreme velocity at or near light speed. This is the truth. And you look this up and you hold me to this and you tell me if I'm exaggerating.

[00:52:04]Astronauts in our own era, even though they're moving nowhere near the velocity of light speed, experience minute but measurable reductions in the aging process. That is timebending.

[00:52:21]It feels so real and it feels so actual.

[00:52:25]We also live in an era and I'm only going to reference this very briefly.

[00:52:29]We've talked about this at some length in our workshop. Um there exists within quantum physics the phenomenon of retrocausality.

[00:52:38]Particles that are mathematically shown to actually move backwards in time. One of which is called the posetron.

[00:52:46]And this is Elizabeth that's is is dealing with the mind inequality of this. We've been over this. Um and um very recently in a paper published uh in 2011 by a brilliant Cornell clinical psychologist named Daryl Bem. Bem demonstrated the effects of cognitive retrocausality in which thoughts that you have and actions that you take in the so-called future impact your experience in the so-called present an actual reaching backwards effect. Ben's findings have been rendered confirmatory in a metaanalysis, dig this, consisting of 90 different experiments in 33 different labs in 14 different nations. We don't even have that kind of data on aspirin.

[00:53:44]You're not going to learn this if you look on Wikipedia.

[00:53:47]Wikipedia can't contain this. Wikipedia will run monosourced articles telling you that this is pockmarked with errors.

[00:53:55]Wikipedia is wrong.

[00:53:58]I have gone through this data with great great care and I am speaking in shortorthhand but I am telling you the truth and you can read about it in my books and articles where I source these things with exquisite care and I ask you look at my sources hold me to it. If I am exaggerating, call me out.

[00:54:22]My email is on my website. I don't like gatekeeping. I take it very seriously that you should be able to reach people.

[00:54:29]Write to me and say, "Hey, you exaggerated that." You know, look, hold me to it. Um, so we're living in an extraordinary time. And this is why um terms like manifestation, the law of attraction, they're all good for me. But I use the term selection. And I use the term selection because I think that through perceptual measurement, through the conviction of the psyche, we are constantly localizing or actualizing different realities from within this sphere of the multiverse. And this brings us full circle to hermeticism, a late ancient Egyptian philosophy that saw the individual as eminent from an infinite positive mind that dictated a law of correspondences. As above, so below. And that left humanity with the indelible suggestion that as we were created by emanation of thought, so must we create by emanation of thought.

[00:55:41]Um, I want to give you uh to wrap up a four-step program of experimentation with these ideas. I take verification very seriously. We're here for um practical insights. And so I leave you with what I hope will prove a practical insight. It's a four-step formula. I've used it myself. I stake my existence on it.

[00:56:09]One, self honesty about your wish.

[00:56:12]really devising your wish in a way that is exquisitly private, free from embarrassment, uh, conformity, orthodoxy, not feeling bound by language that belongs to someone else, but a language and a wish that is indelibly your own.

[00:56:38]Two, flexibility with respect to arrival.

[00:56:44]Arrival will usually reach you through channels that are either very familiar, so much so that you're apt to overlook something, or through channels that are greatly unusual and that may challenge you by going outside of your mind's eye images of what you're all about. Once Jacob Needleman said to me, "What do you do when someone offers you a gift?" And brilliant student that I was, I stared at him blankly and he said, "You accept it. You accept it." We throw away extraordinary gifts all the time because we don't like the packaging. We don't like the manner in which they arrive.

[00:57:24]They violate our mind's eye perception of how something is supposed to be. Keep this in mind. There's a great deal of ancient wisdom literature, parables, fairy tales, biblical stories in which deities or spiritual messengers or kings and queens are disguised as wandering strangers, as vagabons. And people who show these beings, these strangers, hospitality and take them in are often rewarded with extraordinary gifts. the thing that you're looking for can reach you as that wandering stranger. Who wants this? I don't understand this.

[00:58:05]This doesn't look like the thing that I I pictured. Be exquisitely flexible.

[00:58:12]Number three, we could do a whole evening on this alone. Tireless perseverance, unflinching perseverance.

[00:58:20]Perseverance is a metaphysical law. I won't go into the whole background of it now, but I consider unflinching perseverance our single best guarantee, not our only, but our single best guarantee of actualizing the wished for thing. That can take any number of forms, but perseverance is deliverance.

[00:58:44]And four, finally, if and when you experience setbacks and there will be setbacks on the path because we experience a complexity of laws and forces and there are counterveiling measures that go on in this life.

[00:59:01]There's a lot of things occurring within the concentric circles of the multiverse. An infinitude of things occurring within those concentric circles. And there are going to be times and places and experiences of setback.

[00:59:17]Don't lose your wish. Don't drop your wish. Try to understand setback as a go.

[00:59:24]A go to something higher. We are tested constantly by setback. And it's vitally important and you will find this in martial arts. You will find this in cobalistic traditions that heartache and setback are a constant source of self-refinement.

[00:59:48]It's difficult and I have experienced the heartaches. I have experienced splendid heights and I have experienced the the the most depressing depths of feeling like it's not coming to me. I don't think this is real. Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. Stand it for just 24 hours more. Stand it for just 24 hours more because there's an extraordinary cyclical quality to life. It's lawful.

[01:00:22]It's lawful. There's a pendulus swing to life. In the Vic traditions, it's called karma. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it's called compensation. I speak frequently of reciprocity.

[01:00:36]Payment is lawful. We do have to pay for things in life. We have benefited from things that other people have paid for.

[01:00:46]This room is filled with things from the carpeting to the electronics into which tremendous labor has gone and we benefit from it. We do have to pay for that. So again, exquisite selfhonesty in formulating your wish. great flexibility in the arrival of your wish, a tireless perseverance in your efforts, both psychical and um your labors, and finally understanding setback as a goat to something better. A true positive mental attitude is not seeing life through some kind of rosy myopia, but a true positive mental attitude is evaluating events based on their capacity for self-development.

[01:01:38]And it is my deepest wish that everyone in this room finds something coming out of this week. Whatever you're participating in, whatever the nature of your efforts and your experiments this week, my deepest deepest wish is that you find something and as a community we all find something together. And I thank you so much. Thank you.

[01:02:10]Thank you. Um, it's not too late, so we have a little time for Q&A and exchange.

[01:02:16]If anybody had anything on their mind, I'm I'm happy to hear about it.

[01:02:24]>> Yes, please. Oh, >> you had your hand up, then we'll get to you.

[01:02:29]I've been thinking a lot about the concept of motivation inspiration and how a lot of times I'm motivated because other people's expectations.

[01:02:40]>> Yeah.

[01:02:46]>> Well, it's an interesting question. Um, inspiration is certainly extremely important and I think it can come to us through the the honesty of one's wish and inspiration itself can be a tough taskmaster. Um, we always think of inspiration as being something that's going to place wind at our back and that that feels great. But inspiration can also be very challenging. Um, as my wife Jacqueline Castell, who's seated up front, has made the observation that there's an intimate relationship between pain and excellence. I think that's something that every artist can relate to. Um, inspiration, I feel that it's important, but I feel that we should also be willing to welcome it like a mysterious stranger. It might come in ways that we don't always count on. I'll share something very intimate with you.

[01:03:46]Not because I feel like being self-disclosing in some morbid way, but because we are having an exchange. We are seekers and I feel there's a place for for frankness. Um, you know, I've written many books and I've gotten many fancy by lines and I'm proud of a lot of what I've done, but I I had a realization one night and I shared this with an artist I I admire just because we were having a frank conversation and I felt like sharing it. I'll share it with you. Um 90% of what I write uh I do to prove that I'm not stupid. You know, that's just a a a trauma or call it whatever you wish that I carry with me.

[01:04:27]Is that inspiration? Yes, it's inspiration. It's produced a lot of beautiful work, a lot of work that I'm very proud of. But if I could uh I don't know, self-actualize myself out of that pain, I might not be anywhere near as productive as I actually am. So inspiration can be a tough taskmaster um but a fruitful one.

[01:04:49]>> Oh let me get to the gentleman behind you then I'll come back. Yes sir.

[01:04:53]>> If uh thinking precedes doing is that basically what you're talking about and vice versa.

[01:05:00]>> Well it's an interesting question. Does thinking precede doing? I think the ancestor of every action is a thought.

[01:05:08]At the same time, it's tough to understand life sometimes as strictly linear. It's hard to understand where something is coming from if we really start to get into the questions of the flexibility of linear mind. There's a wonderful seeker in our mind magic group who um is Cynthia here? Yeah. Well, she was describing um having a a a broken ankle and essentially using the powers of psyche to uh heal that broken ankle when she was faced with a really tough course of treatment. And I said to her, "When you were doing these exercises, how did you deal with fear? How did you deal with anxiety?" And she said, "I I just felt sure that it was going to be okay." And I thought to myself and shared with her the possibility that maybe that was retrocausal. I haven't said much about retrocausality, but I feel it's really valid. It may be that the confidence that she felt um was an impact from the so-called future uh influencing or projecting itself into the so-called present. So there are these cause and effect relationships but they can be they can be very wild and loose.

[01:06:25]>> Yes, please.

[01:06:26]Uh do you believe uh that there's signs or um things that um can appear when a wish is coming to f to fruition or do you think that everything is kind of internal and self-expressed?

[01:06:42]>> Oh, I think there are real signs. Yeah.

[01:06:45]Um David Lynch used to say that you know you're on the right path when you get green lights. He would say just keep watching for those green lights. And um we might call them coincidences or synchronicities. He called them green lights. But absolutely, absolutely. I I think I think they're to be watched for and watched very carefully for.

[01:07:05]>> Yeah.

[01:07:07]>> Yes.

[01:07:08]>> Um this week a teacher that is also here is also teaching from the heratic principles. And my understanding of what she's teaching about what I'll just call manifesting >> is that thoughts are basically electricity >> and that the heart is magnetic. So you need both the thought as the electrical spark and the heart to draw it to you.

[01:07:33]>> So you're talking about using um perseverance and um and I can't remember um what the other of your four words.

[01:07:43]Sorry I don't have a notepad today but I just was wondering what your response to that would be. So for her like that kind of my understanding of her teaching was you know it's the thought and then it has to come through the heart. So has to be deeply felt because it's it's all through the heart that the magnet is pulling it in that the source is whatever.

[01:08:04]>> I I I agree entirely. I mean I tend to be very nichian in my orientation. If I could, I'd, you know, have marching music playing, but she and I are saying the same thing. And the reason why I'm very careful to use the term psyche is because I see psyche as a compact of thought and emotion. And emotion of course can run a great gamut. There's all kinds of emotions that could be of the heart. Uh sometimes blissful, sometimes painful, all uh subject, I believe, to transmutation. uh as the kind of heart force that I think she's talking about. Um I think I think it's essentially the same.

[01:08:45]>> Yeah.

[01:08:48]>> Yes.

[01:08:48]>> Just curious. I came across a book years ago attributed to her mistress just the divine high manner.

[01:08:54]>> Oh yeah.

[01:08:54]>> And I never fully understood the word and just wondered if you might shed a brief light.

[01:09:00]>> Yeah. Um it's fascinating. That's the first book of the so-called corpus hermeticum which were originally 14 trackcts that were rediscovered during the during the Renaissance and translated from Greek into Latin. And pyander is one of these words uh for which we don't have an exact translation. Sometimes it's rendered poandre but it's thought to be shepherd of men. Shepherd of men. And um in in the hermetica you'll find that uh Hermes Tris Majistus this kind of deific man god is sometimes having conversations with noose uh infinite mind and um in that book there is a hermetic pilgrim who's awakened from a dream and there's this force that's speaking to him and the force is uh is presumably Hermes Tris mag majestus the the shepherd of men uh which is what the term Highlander is is often thought to mean >> there was no one >> well um it's an honorific title best we can understand that that Greek Egyptian scribes appended to their own work uh they may have felt that they were genuinely speaking to and communicating from the figure of Hermes Tris Majestice who was thought to be this soul guide or or divine shepherd heard um a kind of deific man god again.

[01:10:31]Anybody else? Yes.

[01:10:33]>> I'm curious. You mentioned that something about concentric circles and you talked about seekers group but you're talking about an individual wish.

[01:10:43]I'm just wondering because we're not in your workshop, what's the power of the seeker circle in in the collective the way >> Oh, well, we we come together in exchange and we share ideas just like we're doing tonight. And I think through our shared energy and effort just like marathon runners, uh we we positively um contribute to one another's stamina and abilities. I think the group is is the uniquely important vehicle of our time. I remember once I had asked Jacob Needleman, I said to him, you know, it seems to me like we don't live in an age of great teachers anymore. Where are the Madame Levaskis and the Rudolph Steiners and the Geres? And he said, well, today we have the group. And I I think the group is is the primary vehicle of exchange for us today.

[01:11:35]>> Anybody else?

[01:11:37]>> Yes. Hey Um I I've seen a lot of books written lately that come out and they're largely AI or you know there's a lot of just everything coming out right now. So I'm curious what's the next big topic that you're looking to think or write about?

[01:11:55]Like what's your next big project you're going to work on?

[01:11:58]>> Oh well thank you. I appreciate that. Um I am working on a book next called the yoga of money about the the principles of of uh ethical treatment of money. And I think there's a intimate relationship not only between money and the path but I would say money and the path are really one and the same because money is the primary instrument of the human relationship that most of us experience most frequently all the time. Um members of my group uh made the suggestion this morning that I write a book on the convergence of all the different occult philosophies of the world which I really like. So, I'll let my publisher uh stew on that on on Monday. So, maybe maybe we'll see. Thank you for asking. Let's take one last one if anybody has.

[01:12:49]>> Yes, please.

[01:12:50]>> I love the way you say uh don't think about the how, >> you know. Um like just this a stupid example. I have a friend trying to sell a house. She's going, "Oh, and I have to I have to." I just said, "Why don't you just think about what you want and why you want it and leave it there?"

[01:13:08]>> Yeah.

[01:13:09]>> And let the how take care of itself.

[01:13:12]>> Yeah. So, I loved that you um you were talking about that. And what we're seeking, what I'm seeking is always seeking me. And I I love the way you were saying it follows you.

[01:13:23]>> Yes.

[01:13:23]>> Yes. Just really love that.

[01:13:25]>> I I appreciate that greatly. It's so difficult for any of us to fully cultivate or choose the conditions under which things reach us. Um, usually things reach us. Nature likes to travel in the most efficient directions possible. And so, usually things will reach us through established channels.

[01:13:49]But established channels can also be extremely unfamiliar. They can disrupt my sense of the kinds of things that I do, the kinds of people that I hang out with, the kinds of solutions or treatments that I consider suited to my existence. So, um I I always suggest to watch very very carefully because those unbidden strangers um those messengers disguised um can be exactly what we're seeking and they're seeking us.

[01:14:27]Well, thank you all very very much.

[01:14:28]Pleasure to exchange with you. Thank you.