Monday, February 2, 2015

Raziel - Ba, Ruach, Sleep Paralysis




LEICESTER, 2002

My first experience of sleep paralysis was at the beginning of my systematic magickal work with Archangels and the Sefer Yetzirah when I lived in a haunted old terrace house in Leicester dating back to 1910.  The place had the classic features of haunting; a sensed presence, sudden drops in temperature, dampness.  The majority of the sleep paralysis here did not have the standard feature of a holographic rendition of the room and mostly I was confined to what felt like a coffin in the abyss.  It was incredibly terrifying and I remember calling to Isis and Mary to help me escape.


VINOHRADY, PRAGUE, 2007

During my first year living in Vinohrady, Prague, I experienced sleep paralysis, on and off, for about three months.  These experiences were mostly horrible and nearly all involved being in a photocopy of the room I was in, occupied by some kind of hostile presence while my body felt like it was being electrocuted or having a stroke.  I remember that once I managed to crawl, using one half of my body, to the door of my bedroom and found it locked. I couldn't recall locking the door and began to exert more force on it until I finally realised it was being held shut from the other side. Using all of my partially paralysed strength I managed to wrench it open and on the other side not my lounge, but the mind-boggling expanses of the astral plane - a blue-red landscape of valleys and mountains, replete with astral beings.  These experiences certainly contributed to my later experiments with the ''cellular membrane''.


EDWARD KELLEY'S TOWER, MALASTRANA,
PRAGUE 2013-2014


The sleep paralysis experiences that occurred whilst living in the Tower were some of the most terrifying experiences in my life and they were closely coupled with what felt like possession.  The hours between 11 and 3 were the most dangerous and for the first part of my stay there I simply did not sleep (or attempt to) during this time.  When I did, sleep paralysis would occur but with a strange jutting forward of my lower jaw accompanied with an evil smirk.  As my face changed I felt very foreign thoughts. This was my first experience with an attempted possession by the spooks in the Tower (never exactly sure which of the Edwards it was, Kelley or Dyer).  Later on, I struggled to stay awake to get through the ''bad hours'' but ended up passing out once and then instantly sprang back to wakefulness and on to my feet with two beings fleeing from me in different directions.  I stumbled out of the appartment and on to the balcony, collapsing with very little idea of who I was.  It was the severity of this experience that led me to ask Vincent Bridges for some kind of protection - I was given ''an Enochian lamp'' which made the Tower habitable up until the disaster of the Summer months.  During the last experiences of sleep paralysis there I felt like I was in some kind of MRI scan where the paralysis was passing down the body from the head.

ZIZKOV, PRAGUE, 2015

Distinguishing between two types of astral plane exploration - one through a window, portal, where pretty much you can see but cannot touch and the other where you literally step on to it.    For the most part my experiences have been of the former.  Of the times I have experienced the latter the most powerful experience was when I used a mesh of Hebrew letters over my astral vision to effectively ''permeate'' the membrane; I stepped through into Renaissance Prague and went to the Tower on the Old Town side of Charles Bridge.

Recently intense theatrical ritual for part of my Jupiter work left me absolutely exhausted and during the early morning I was so tired that I could easily ignore the roll-over signal and experience some fairly calm but intense attacks of sleep paralysis.  When I say calm I mean I managed to remain fairly tranquil throughout the experience - the presence of Raziel as opposed to a (percieved) hostile entity certainly made that easier.

BA
During these experiences Raziel taught me about the ''Ba'' body, conterminous it seems with the Hebrew Ruach.  I have mentioned previously how Raziel has instructed me in the use of facial muscles and apertures for the purpose of astral movement and creation*  but during these recent experiences I felt much more of the literal escape from the physical body as opposed to just using a window.  I was moving around my (holographic) room in the Ba body and Raziel instructed me that any ''apperture'' in the room could be used to exit it (i.e. pass the cellular membrane) like my experience back in Vinohrady.  I attempted to go into the computer monitor in the room next door and was advised that this would take me into ''the internet'' and that that wasn't a good idea (the computer actually started melting to prevent me).  I also discovered that it is possible to use the time-phone in this manner although I didn't go there.  Finally I ended up making a mistake and ending up in the body of a pig**.

In hindsight it makes me recall Milton, a non-player character I invented for Mage,the World of Darkness role-playing game.  He lived in an old Victorian house where all the doors from the main hall were actually fixed portals to various different times.  It seems one way to include these revelations of Raziel would be to build strange attractors (shrines, altars, statues) etc in the ''astral temple'' which would serve as fixed portals to the realms/times they represent***.

For more ideas on how to experience sleep paralysis and then begin ''lucid dreaming'' see Lucidology on youtube




*Carve, engrave, quarry, etc.
**I got out.
***The Time Phone is a big part of this operation.  Ultimately it seems to be (used as) a portal to the ''primum mobile'' or the wormhole/black hole at the centre of the Milky Way but we also know it can be set to different times.  More on this in another post.

1 comment:

  1. In an odd way -- although you've paid for it dearly with terrifying experiences -- you are actually somewhat blessed with whatever idiosyncrasies make you prone to sleep paralysis, and blessed to have had the pressures that triggered it. Through the unique constitution of your nature and the unique situations your destiny has led you into, you have received initiations into astral experiences that some people have to wait a much longer time for than you. I don't get sleep paralysis, but some of my practices have caused spontaneous projections in my sleep and periodic lucid dreams.

    The story of your crawl across the floor and struggling against the door being held shut by "something" strikes me as a classic "watcher at the threshold" experience. You were being tested to see if you were worthy of the insight you were on the edge of gaining.

    The distinction you make between the two types of astral experience are useful, but mostly for the understanding that doors and portals ("thresholds") are powerful tools that seem to connect to an ancient -- the most ancient -- functions of human consciousness. I can see it in Platonic terms: doors and portals existed in the world of ideals long before we human being began making imperfect images of The Portal in our physical world.

    Regarding the Ba: whenever I take the time to read about the Egyptian taxonomy of the subtle body, I get this uneasy feeling that we only think we know what the Egyptians meant by the words Ba, Ka, Akh, etc. I've taken the attitude that the non-physical world is a spectrum that can be divided in different ways. You can get the Egytians' five bodies, or the Hindu Yogis' five koshi's, or the Qabbalists' four worlds, or seven chakras, or whatever. On the other hand, instructions from Ratziel are different than reading in a book.

    Perhaps the day will come when the difference will be significant to me, but for now, all I care is that I am aware when my consciousness is non-physical and when I am living through the five senses.

    I plan to write a post on my blog based on the medieval concept of the aevum; a realm midway between the eternal world of God and the temporal world of the physical universe. When you are not in the body, you are in the aevum. You are not in the eternal world where there is no time or space, but that world has a very different relationship to time and space than the physical world.



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