Thirteen years ago this summer, a series of wildly improbable coincidences led to the creation of the Fifth Way as a physical entity. I could no more have stopped, or even, looking back, have shaped it, than a king can command the tide. Force of nature, perhaps… but certainly, something extraordinary…
Take for instance the fact that a raggedy ass old hippie, myself, would be asked to speak and give a workshop on the Kabbalah in an up-scale newage conference center in a town 60 miles from where I lived. But it was 1988, the year after the newage emerged into mass consciousness, and anyone with any kind of a reputation for occult expertise was in demand. I had acquired my cache for the paranormal from a mutual friend who worked part time at the center. The more she raved about our conversations and hypnosis work together, the more the director of the center was convinced that I should come over and give a talk about something.
Today, I can’t remember how we settled on the Kabbalah. It certainly wasn’t my first choice of a topic. But somehow, since it was an area in which I had some knowledge, I agreed to give it a shot. What I really wanted to talk about was the geometry of consciousness, a subject that had been working its way to the surface through a series of extraordinary events. It all started with a strange test pattern-like drawing that I did in February 1987. This was very unlike my usual fluid surreal images, being very starkly geometric. I called it Iduna’s Apple.
The day after Easter, 1987, I was in a graveyard in High Point NC meditating on the universe as a cow, the vast and ultimate ground of being in more western terms. I had attained a very high degree of realization of this perception, when something shifted me to an even higher level. There I encountered something. Here’s how I described it about eight hours after the experience: “I have no hope of conveying the immensity of the insight, I blank out on the foreground if I focus elsewhere. But it is all there, like some multi-density hyper-reality, an irreality made of truth…”
Much later, deep into the second wave of Fifth Way and just before our first big undertaking, the Zodical Earth Temple, I circulated a version of the following to the group (certain names and details have been taken out for reasons of privacy):
Statement to the evolving Fifth Way Group, January 17th, 1991
“I am the One who knows the way in and the way out.”
“This … introduces a Fifth Way — The Way of the Five Bodies, as it was in Egypt, but also new knowledge, blended with the old — to open the Fifth Way.”
“This … serves the purposes of Sekhmet and of humans…”
“All of time is to me nothing more than the flick of a cat’s whisker. But NOW is the time for THIS work.”
“On the night called Sekhmet, all humans will dream the same dream. And what do you think they are going to open their eyes to?”
“The cat has been let out of the bag!”
The Goddess Sekhmet
One late fall evening in 1987, I sat in the rocker by the fire at the farm, holding Deva, the E-T cat, in my lap and told someone that if I ever starting teaching the serious stuff like I had talked about at the Harmonic Convergence in August, I would call it the Fifth Way. I reasoned if Mr. G constituted the fourth way, then it would only follow that the next step would be the Fifth Way. But the Fifth Way would be magical in nature, using symbols and rituals to key into… and then of course I spaced out, trying to think of a better word for what I wanted other than psycho/physics. The name stuck in my mind. The joke seemed appropriate–sort of a backhanded tribute, even in a compensatory fantasy.
Things came and went after that. Things like some “channeled” material, a few pages of technical notes on the pyramid and the secret to working with earth energies, specific designs for a well we were instructed to build and other things, like a brief overview of galactic history. Things like that… Deva disappeared in April, in the midst of the biggest UFO flap yet. The cat came back in May, pregnant. In June the well went up precisely on time for the solstice that became, for me, a kaleidoscope of geometry and higher math, like some of those eldritch formulae hinted at in Lovecraft, except that I understood it perfectly. The strange signs and portents in the skies increased. Psyche and symbol on a day to day level.
In July, the cat had kittens. In August, I met with the people who would become the original Fifth Way Bunch, the astral rangers, the Inner5 Space Cowpokes, etc… Yippee-ti-yi-yaa!
The “big guys,” the light beings, had told me: prepare to teach this stuff. I had just spent eight years getting away from it and at the same time, delving very deeply into its essence. The challenge intrigued me. I guess the big guys knew that.
I never made any bones about the fact that all of this was very experimental. I had no doubt–still don’t–that I knew what I’m doing. I just doubted that the first group was clear as to what the deal was really about.Let me be perfectly clear. I am not perfect. I just know and have experienced more. I’ve spent over twenty years of work, research and practical experience just to get to the point where I understand this much: I know very, very little.
But, and let me stress this but, I do know enough to be of service to the higher powers, the big guys. I’m not exactly sure why they would think I can do this stuff, but so far, they have been right on it. As I got deeper into our work together, I began to rely on the aid and support of the big guys. They are still calling the shots.
In the beginning, I didn’t really stress this aspect of The Fifth Way work. I mentioned it. Danced around it, etc. but very little has happened that they haven’t commented on before hand.
And who are they?
On March 23, 1987, I had a good three hours of the ole LIGHT. An afternoon spent in satori in the High Point (I get it, HIGH point, heh heh) cemetery under a crepe myrtle, plugged into the source of all, and I Do mean ALL. At that point, I experienced an awareness of the higher beings that I had felt or suspected were there since childhood. I communicated with them, through out time, so that there many moments of time and almost was time and never will be time where we are discussing situations that are occurring at the present in that frame, but have an ambiguous relation to my conscious frame. In that more than infinite time/space, I was shown the pattern of the probabilities for the future of our world. I was shown where and how, by exercising our free will, we could adapt the changing temporal structure of the new age to the requirements of the Higher Evolution of mankind. The will, though, must be trained and harnesses. And it must, above all, be firmly directed by love.
Higher Evolution? Well, yes, of-course, that is the whole point, isn’t it? If we don’t evolve, we die. It’s just that simple.
Out of the LIGHT, sweet voices, in kindly tones, told of the Path of Permanence in the midst of Impermanence, of the diamond reality at the core of the clouds of irreality, of mind as the same ground under all standings. It wasn’t until I talked with the near death survivor, Tom Sawyer, that I really understood what this meant.
We live in an information rich sea of light, in which the entire experience of the universe is an infinite story, and fret over the possibility of personal extinction, about death, personal, as a species, as a planet, whatever. Is there really a spirit that animates the matter that collects and organizes the structure of the “soul” toward ever higher levels of “awareness”, oneness, the substance of we-feeling, etc.?
The voices whispered, yes. Listen to us. We come in the name of this vast organizing principle. Follow the resonance of what we are saying and you will always know that we have spoken truly.
Let me put it in very simple terms. The “keys” or code image I was given are these:
– A beam/ a brain wave/ a spark.
– Expanding light fields/ infinite.
– Loops of space/ time in which.
– Places repeat/ but time are out of synch/ lag/ synch.
– The resolution of the current situation collapses many of the probable timelines running in many directions across multiple event horizons…
– Every sentient creature has free will.
– Light is a quality of mind.
– Change the mind to perceive more light and you will therefore change the quality of mind.
– Free will is exercised though the expanding awareness of light as an expression of the wholeness of the universe.
– We are all One.
– Out of that One, we have agreed to be Many, so that they One may experience the All.
– We are pieces of the Universal Hologram, our centers and meridians reflect the earthly grids, as the earthly does the stellar and the solar. As we open our centers we open ourselves into inner/outer space/time.
– As we regain our balance and awareness, we assume certain responsibilities.
– Heal the sick, comfort the depressed, be long suffering to the poor in spirit of all kinds.
– Teach others what we have learned, so that they can be stabilized and begin to stabilize others.
– Be happy, all the time, not just when circumstances make it easy to be happy.
– Invoke often, and that means do it everyday and write it down.
– And constantly give thanks to the universe for the opportunity to be in this place at this time with this level of awareness.
– Never step on someone’s understanding of the light, no matter how meagre it may be.
– Weigh all voices of all the prophets with the same scale. Treat none with contempt.
– Check your data, no matter what the source.
– Focus on the highest quality of light that you are aware of, at all times.
– And never give in to petty spitefulness.
There was a lot more, but you get the drift.
It was all interrelated, everything! All of human history appears to be a reaction to contact with a vast active living intelligence system that lives at the same time within our bodies and in some transcendent realm of pure awareness. UFO’s, NDE’s, elves, faeries, gods, kundalini, interstellar communication, the gamma flash of physical transubstantiation, all of this explainable within the metaphor they presented and continue to present and will at some future time present. Time, in these matters, is very slippery.
But NOW is the time for this work.
They have told me that it is necessary to our survival to have a fairly large group of trained adepts. Frankly, there is nothing more important than accomplishing the work. I’ve been shown the results of not accomplishing the plan and they are not pretty. Too much, way too much, is riding on the successful outcome of this “rescue mission” for us to sit idly, knowing what we know, and what we know how to do.
I’ve let my hair down and I have been direct because it is time for directness. It is also time to get it together or let it go. Magick is a science as well as an Art. It must be taught so that both hemispheres, both brains are engaged. Fifth Way has tried to fulfil the requirement of balance.
On the morning after the Night called Sekhmet, what are you going to open your eyes to?
Even now, more than a decade later, I would have a hard time saying it any better.
And so, thirteen years ago I got up to talk about the Kabbalah as a new kind of geometry of consciousness. As I said, I did know something on the subject, so the lecture went quite well. The practical work went less well. However…
There were four folks who resonated to what I was trying to show them. Not that they got it right on the spot, but they had talent, were well read in the subject and had been little corrupted by exposure to other magical groups. Frankly, they seemed like the perfect test subjects for my emerging theories on magick, geometry and consciousness.
And when I put it to them, they were game. They wanted to learn and were willingly to improvise a little along the way. The great experiment got underway…
Working every week, and sometimes several times a week, it was soon apparent that the basic concept of the Five Bodies and how they interacted was the core of a very powerful way of looking at what we had been calling “magick.” Which brings us to the goddess Sekhmet…
Remember Deva? Well, when she returned, pregnant, I had a dream visitation from a lion-headed goddess, whose name I discovered was Sekhmet. Later, as the pyramid went on-line, I had a flash of inspiration. I saw the Hathor behind the veil in the GD Hall of the Neophytes as Sekhmet when the veil is lifted. Hot on the heels of that came another flash: the secret name of Nuit in Crowley’s Book of the Law was also Sekhmet.
Well, frankly, that didn’t mean much at the moment. The Fifth Way in its early form used the basic concept of five bodies mainly as the five L’s of the pentagram and the five elemental centres on the tree of life. It was lacking any further depth until the September of 1988 when a copy of Robert Masters The Goddess Sekhmet literally fell into my lap. Suddenly, many things made much, much more sense. Magick, it seemed, actually had a psycho-physiological structure.