My Beginnings
I was born in 1955 in a small, very traditional Welsh village in a family environment that was both rich and very difficult. I was born with an innate sensitivity to inner experience and I remember a sense of the aliveness of the world and of a deep stillness that would enfold me and would convey a sense of all time and space being present just here and now. Within this stillness there would be experiences of beings who seemed concerned about me and the direction of my life. I had no way of contexting this experience as I was brought up in an orthodox Christian household that had no sense of inner experience. The Christian traditions of my childhood were very much concerned with the sense of sin and evil and the wish to eradicate or drive out anyone or anything that exhibited these qualities.
I was fortunate when I was 15 to come across the tradition of the Qabalah which we might describe as the inner tradition of both Judaism and Christianity. This takes a different view to orthodoxy and points our attention to the other tree found in the centre of the garden—the Tree of Life. This tradition appears in Europe in the twelfth century CE and gives us a way of working with self and world so that what is perceived as evil or wrong, instead of being driven away or slain, is brought into the heart and there undergoes an alchemical transformation in which the disturbed feelings, thoughts, and beliefs undergo a process of death and resurrection which, instead of dividing the energies of life, unites and magnifies them. The Qabalah is a practice of prayer, contemplation, and way of life that has its heart in this way of being and is organized around this image of the Tree of Life, simultaneously the image of the true human being and the universe in which we find ourselves. One of its central practices is the alchemical practice of bringing all that is lost and disturbed back into the heart and returning it into what might be called the great bundle of the living.
I have worked with this tradition for nearly fifty years. It has demanded that I be continually attentive to the ways in which I either act in the service of light or become an obstacle to it. It has asked me to take seriously the reality of the inner worlds and subtle beings and the ways in which the outer and inner worlds affect each other. I have stood in old churches that have become dormant or despoiled; in older sacred sites that have somehow become detached from their original purpose; on old battlefields; in the back streets and alleys of Jerusalem and the Drakensberg mountains of South Africa. I have also worked with it in the middle of cities, on trains and buses, in council estates and cottages, in gatherings of powerful people, in great cities and with powerless and despairing people in small towns. In all these places and occasions, the choice has been whether to find a way to affirm unity and the mystery of the indivisible nature of love and will, or to divide will and refuse love; to align with the tselem, the true human image, or to set up an idol in its place.
I was taught this art by two remarkable people, Walter Ernest Butler and Tom Oloman, both, in my view, tsaddikim or adept qabalists in their capacity to enhance life and transform disturbance.
Walter Ernest Butler (1898-1978) was taught the Qabalah by Dion Fortune, and was part of the Society of the Inner Light that she founded. He was also a priest of the Liberal Catholic Church. I encountered him in 1973 when I joined the Helios Course on the Practical Qabalah. His training was focused on the development of the will and imagination while retaining the capacity to be grounded and embodied. A particular feature of his work was the development of the image or tselem of the true human being; this he called “the magical personality” and he worked with it so as to enable a sense of ourselves as centres of light and life through which the practice of effective prayer and blessing manifested. This work involves descent into and emergence from what he described as “the inner sea at the foundation of our psyche.” In the act of dissolving into the inner waters he would be receptive to the deep prompting of his own soul and inner guidance, letting go of his customary self-image and, as he emerged, would take whatever form was needed to meet the conditions of the moment. He continues to be one of my major influences and as I write this, what I most remember is his clarity, kindness, and no-nonsense simplicity—no frills or elaboration.
I worked with Ernest Butler for only a short time, but I went on to work with his disciple Tom Oloman (1914-1995) for over twenty years. His work too was centred in a practice of blessing and prayer and, like Ernest, he used a process of dissolving and arising, but his approach was less precise and more mystical than Ernest’s. Like Ernest he followed the same process of aligning with light and embracing disturbance. Tom had great clarity and stillness, a similar sense of ground and embodiment to Ernest, and a capacity to go beyond form to identify the heart of whatever he was confronted by.
For both of these teachers working with disturbance and evil was an everyday matter; the quiet rebalancing of the universe.
Tom had an abstract, zen-like approach to this work based upon the unity of light and silence, seeing himself as a contemplative monk in a white habit whose task it was to bring the deep, silent music of heaven into the cacophony of the disturbance. He aligned with the sense of the divine as the Christ, which he would symbolise by the image of an equal-armed cross of gold with a red rose blooming at its centre; experiencing the balance and radiance of the golden cross and the fragrance and beauty of the flowering red rose. This he linked with the healing and harmonising quality of the Name YHShVH, יהשוהּ, which is called in Qabalah the Healing Name. He would bring the sense of discordance and lack of balance into relationship with the harmony of the Name and would simply sit with the disturbance until the inner cacophony subsided, leaving behind a stillness that would hover in the air like the fragrance of the rose.
Over many years I have learned the theory and practice of this tradition and have taught it both in the UK, Israel and South Africa. I recently wrote a book about it and remembered one of my early experiences.
Some thirty-five years ago my wife and I visited a small church in the depths of the English countryside. It was a sunny day; the village was a classic English village with a duckpond—a haven of peace and tranquillity—and an eleventh-century Norman church that looked beautiful in the afternoon sun.
We anticipated a pleasant visit, looking at stained glass windows, tombs, and learning a little about the history of the church. When we entered, we found what we would have expected to find: a plain, well-proportioned country church, but the psychic atmosphere hit us between the eyes. There was a sense of coldness, airlessness, and what I can only describe as fouled air. I recall stumbling in shock and surprise. I was near to the baptismal font, so I reached out in order to stabilise myself. As I did so I was suddenly aware of the presence of a medieval priest. holding me up and overshadowing me. I was given a strong impression that this place had been desecrated and rather than a place of peace was now a fountain of despair and anti-life. I found myself repeating the Healing Name, and as I did so, it was as if a fountain of pure water burst out of the font and flowed through the church.
My wife stood with me and repeated the Name with me. I don’t know how long we stood there, as I was not in an ordinary state of mind, but gradually the sense of oppression lessened. However, rather than the experience fading away it intensified; it was as if the priest stepped more deeply into me, and I leaned back into him and into the Name. I found myself walking up the nave to a twelfth century tomb in the north chancel and, as I did so, there was a sense of another presence as if rising out of the tomb. There was a different quality in the church now, an active will which engaged with and resisted the will that was coming through me. I found myself laying hands upon the tomb in a gesture of contact and blessing even though what was coming from the tomb was what I can only describe as pure antagonism.
Again, I do not know how long I stood there; it was like standing in the epicentre of a great storm as the light and presence of the Healing Name, coming from the priest and what seemed to be a great line of figures behind him, moved through me to be met by a dark shape of resistance. Gradually the resistance seemed to fade and, for a moment, I caught a glimpse of a human being. Something gave way and the figure and I came together, were embraced by the light, and it was as if he passed through me into the light. In the aftermath I was exhausted, although at peace, and certainly the church was an easier place to be in. The experience, although challenging and tiring was, in a strange way, a profound demonstration of the nature of love and embracing even that which rejects love.
Other later examples would be:
In my wanderings around Jerusalem I would sometimes be aware of the history of that place or might be aware of presences or feelings particular to that place that need attention. On one occasion I was near an old church in the Greek Orthodox quarter and was suddenly aware of the crusades, a graphic experience of slaughter and feelings of pain and rage that seemed to repeat itself on a loop. My response was to align myself with the Name YHShVH יהשּׁוהּ, to repeat the Name and to bring the pain and rage and images into the presence of the Name within my heart.
On another occasion I was in the Armenian cathedral and was aware of many Armenian dead, and of grieving, which linked me to the sense of Armenian genocide in the early twentieth century. Again, I aligned with the Name and brought the sense of grief and lostness into the Name within my heart.
In these meetings, there is an immediacy as we are physically present to whatever is manifesting, and in that immediacy we find ourselves responding to the perceived need. This is normally an essentialised practice in which we relate to the root of our own spirituality and bring that into relationship with whatever is manifesting.
In all these cases the work that is carried out is a collaboration between myself and inner colleagues whose work it is to help the lost and imprisoned. In the experience of the country church I was overshadowed by an inner-place helper who assisted me, first of all, to work with the corrupted energy atmosphere of the church itself, and then to engage with the lost soul that was the source of the disturbance. This involved the capacity to link with the light and with the pain, rage, and fear of the lost one, and to hold the link long enough for something new to happen.
This tradition has and continues to be at the heart of my life as practitioner and teacher. The practice of a tradition for a considerable time, however, means that the work becomes simpler and more essentialised and of course as my life has evolved I have investigated other traditions and disciplines.
My outer work began as a young man when I became first a psychologist and then worked with the Probation Service working with very disturbed people, some of whom had done terrible things and often as children had themselves been treated in awful and horrible ways. This outer day-to-day experience paralleled the inner practices I was learning.
Later I trained as a psychotherapist in a school that taught body-centred psychotherapy informed by Buddhist psychology and I learned the practice of paying sustained attention to the body and the sense of the body as the container of awareness. Gradually I came to feel that our societal sense of disconnection from and objectifying of the body was a major problem and that embodiment needed to be at the heart of spiritual practice. In particular I had learned from the psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin about the centrality of the felt sense in healing. The practice of a Tibetan buddhist discipline called Kum Nye, which involves deeply sensing into the body and working with very slow movements, also fed into my understanding of the importance of embodied experience. This understanding of incarnation is referred to in the Qabalah but as my explorations continued I became aware that it was and is much more central than I had understood.
Encountering David Spangler and IS
About 13 years ago I was taking part in an online course given by Catherine MacCoun called The Gospel Initiation and one of the people present offering her support was David Spangler. I was not very familiar with David’s work though I was aware that he was one of the key group that created Findhorn. I enjoyed the course but I was very struck both by what David said and perhaps more so by his approach and tone. I understood that he taught Incarnational Spirituality—a phrase that spoke to me and drew me to find out more about David and his work.
Shortly afterwards I took one of Lorian’s courses and was bowled over by the quality and direction of Incarnational Spirituality. The sense of IS as a contemporary Mystery School based around the principles of the incarnation of the spirit and being connected to engagement with Gaia and the problems of our time spoke deeply to me. David’s approach drew on his own inner experience and his engagement with science.
David’s approach and his use of what he called “exercises”—which I experienced not so much as things we do but as gestures of awareness—took me right into the heart of my experience of life and spirituality. As part of this new and developing inquiry, I took part in Lorian’s Ordination process which took the ancient archetype of the priest and interpreted in a new way for a new age. Many of the themes were familiar to me but were addressed in a much more essentialised way with freshness and with the felt sense and felt embodied experience right at their heart. One important theme that I was familiar with from my earlier experience was working with the Sidhe so as to enable a deeper sense of the human archetype to manifest, and another was working as an esoteric priest. The practice of Grail Space became fundamental to this work and this remains at the heart of my inner work.
Over the last year a new aspect of this work has been catching my attention. This recent focus began with the appearance of a new subtle companion who presented himself as an archaeologist and said he could be called Archie and that his work was to renew and restore old archetypes much as archaeologists do. He also said he was a Michaeline, a colleague of the Archangel Michael and that his task was to help me work with Intention and Imagination in the service of love.
He went on to say that love is not an emotion; rather it is the primary power of metaphysical gravity which shapes space/time, and in its expression as light it makes possible wave and particle reality. Intent and imagination are the servants of love and light as they enable incarnation: intent providing a spine or vector within which the shaping of love can operate and the imagination providing a matrix for the expression of the manifestation of light. In each moment we draw on these fundamental forces meeting the universe and co-creating its appearance.
Archie then drew my attention to a principle, described by the poet and writer Charles Williams, as “co-inherence,” saying that this principle—deeply related to holopoiesis, the principle of holistic emergence—describes the mirroring of the universe in which the all and the small meet in creative conversation. This is the basis of Grail Space and of life itself at the sub-atomic level, at the cellular and organ level, and at the macro level of planets and stars. As we creatively co-inhere, so all is in balance; as that balance is disturbed, so things start to go wrong—from cancer to social unrest to climate change etc.
The beginning point is found in the manifestation of love and light which reflect into intent and imagination, which in turn create incarnate forms and shapes of what Sheldrake calls morphic resonance and what Plato would have called the Forms or matrices that create the local conditions of the universe. These reflections of the Generative Source are themselves generative and acquire particular expressions of love and intent and, most importantly, history and memory.
Memory places a new layer of shaping which makes the expression of light easier if it runs in familiar grooves. This runs the risk, however, of these matrices becoming distorted or only partly expressed. Most of the god images have this problem—rather than being a direct reflection of the Generative Source applied to local conditions, there is a tribal element that attaches itself. For example, the root idea behind Islam for example is the direct encounter with the Generative Source and through surrendering to that source being a messenger of its light and love. This then gets translated into the worship of the messenger and his cultural form. This is true of Jesus and also the Buddha and many others.
Archie’s work therefore has been to realign these archetypes by engaging with them through intent and imagination so that the original vector is found and that distorted imaginal forms are dissolved and through an act of creative imagination new more aligned forms created which enable new possibilities to come into being.
The imagination is a much misunderstood faculty and Archie presented it as a fundamental aspect of our incarnation; it is linked to the capacity to make connections and relationship and the capacity to envisage those links enabling new fields of possibility—in effect, it is generative and a reflection of the Generative Source.
Working with Presence
If we consider for a moment the IS Presence exercise, it asks us to align with our personal sovereignty, with our Soul, with our Gaian identity and our Human identity. This is a profoundly visionary act and the incarnate sense of presence that arises from this is the growing tip of a new gesture of being-in-relation with self and world. From that gesture new actions and experiences arise and hence a new world—a new age—comes into being.
This practice begins by inviting our sense of uprightness and capacity to hold and opens into awareness of inner and outer senses, creating an anchoring field which becomes the container for the presence of our soul, the presence of Gaia and the sense of the archetypal human. Here we create a star of incarnation, a co-inherent radiant presence of life which generates new possibilities.
The anchoring of the imagination within the senses creates a presence that operates like a strange attractor holding together the opposites of solidity and fluidity, newness and future, this world and many worlds. There is an expansion both of our capacity to align to the generative mystery at the centre of all things and embrace the thousand things; we come to experience their fundamental union.
From this sense of union, we can consider the nature of nested experience and the idea of the fractal in which the scale or dimension can differ wildly yet there is a perfect replication of symmetry of pattern without distortion. We see this in the development of the body from the single cell but it is true also of inner development—the incarnation of the soul as it enfolds itself into the incarnate world and then unfolds into expression and participation is both particular to our own sense of identity and bearing also the more universal imprints of the Human, of the Gaian, and the Sacred.
The felt sense of dynamic presence expressing itself is the tip of an iceberg of nested or fractal patterns of intention to be and participate. As we move outwards in response to the intention of incarnation, the ability of the body to map and include (which is a reflection of the incarnational impulse) comes into play and there is a meeting between our vector and the vectors of the manifest and subtle worlds that are closest to us. In that meeting, a conjoined field is formed which is in itself a creative beginning, a star of life, just as a metaphorical fertilised egg creates new being with a new DNA configuration formed from the intertwining of the incarnational fields.
This is the basis of an organic praxis of magic—not as something I do or as just as a practice of healing and blessing, but more profoundly it’s the basis for the intertwining of multiple fields and the fractal expression of our incarnation and the incarnation of the universe.
For example, as I hold my tea cup in my hands, I allow myself to become present and enter the felt sense of Ian holding the cup. I invite the cup to be present with me and there is a moment of meeting and vibration which includes the sense of “this is my cup which I like. I am aware of the history of the cup and the potter who made it,” etc. Then I start to feel its cupness, the sense of clay and fired earth that is its substance; I feel its energetic form as well as its solidity; I feel its vibratory nature, meeting it as both particle and wave.
At the same time, I sense it responding to me and I have a sense of my cupness in response. As this becomes more vivid, I have a wider and deeper sense of myself and the cup as aspects of both Gaia and the Sacred, and as this happens there is an intensity of life and presence that appears. This becomes a bit overwhelming and has to scale itself down and as it does so it becomes a wave of expression moving in all directions.
At the heart of this expression is a non-sentimental love and care that is both the root of the experience and its currency, a mutual mirroring that enables a star of blessing to appear.
As the experience dissipates the intensity goes away but I and the cup are changed subtly. This practice of incarnation can involve the deep, mid-, and surface subtle—I'm not sure it matters where you begin as the fractal nature of the enfolded possibilities brings all of the wavelengths into activity, though we may not be aware of the full spectrum at any one time.
This repeated practice of conscious incarnation creates a field of presence and solidity in which we become more visible and accessible to subtle beings of different kinds. This visibility and accessibility of course heightens the necessity for energy hygiene but also heightens the capacity for cooperative action between ourselves and subtle beings. This can and does involve teachers and helpers but also involves the direct sense of Gaia and of the Generative Mystery which certainly can't be handled by the surface aspects of me but can be met 'Eye to Eye' by the aspects of my deeper soul that fractally correspond to them.
Central to this work is what we might call the image of the Ideal Human in dialogue with the image of the Ideal Earth and the development of a new etheric body of both humanity and Gaia, which in turn is linked to a deeper understanding of the imagination.
Archie went on to describe a way in which the presence exercise applied in a more concentrated sense to our body and energetic field can help in this emergence:
1. Establish the spine of intent—the vector of deepening incarnation and open into the field of the senses, inviting the creative imagination to function so that we enter into creative communion.
2. Pay attention to our body as an expression of Gaia contemplating the ecology of the body, immersing ourselves in the presence of Gaia as expressed through our body’s life.
3. Turn attention to the energetic life of Gaia that is all around us, noticing the green-gold life of Gaia mixing with us in a constant interchange and flow, and open to the deeper emergence of that life.
4. Sense our being as Human and embrace the catalytic, bridging, synthesising capacity of the human archetype and feeling, and open to a new expression of this deep form,
5. Turn to our sense of personal life, our thoughts and feelings in response to this emergence
6. Open to the Soul’s intent and invite its presence.
7. Invite in the quality of fiery hope and the coming together of the Generative Star formed by this conjunction.
It is this fiery Star that is at the heart of the Michaeline endeavour, for as we bring this into being, we strengthen our sense of presence and our involvement in the unfolding conversation. As I have pursued this process, Archie has encouraged me to think of myself as a Michaeline in order to include a sense of the Archangel within the work. I have reason to believe that Archie might be a projection of Michael scaled down so that I can come into conversation.
Becoming a Michaeline
One image he has asked me to contemplate is the Chapter House of Wells Cathedral as an inner temple. This is an octagonal space with a central pillar.
In inner vision, it presents as an interlocking shape of light and within the spine or central pillar is the altar, which is a unworked block of black, white, rainbow-shot granite stone rising up from the centre of earth where we find the green star of Gaia. Upon the altar is a blue sapphire chalice, and standing upright in the chalice and going through the chalice into the stone is a sword of gold. The floor is of a shining marble so that this above-ground shape is reflected in it, the whole forming a faceted sphere of constantly moving waves of light and sound which is the activity of the archangel. The felt sense of this place is of entering into a field of alignment where we are embraced by the divine life and presence and become spiritually oxygenated and are taken into the heart of the archangel. At other times when the archangelic presence is more muted, there is a gathering of presences.
A key element of this work has been the notion of priesthood and Michael as the archetypal priest; in Welsh, the word for priest is Offeiriad—the one who makes the offering. Now this refers to the Christian Mass, which is seen as the recapitulation of the offering that Jesus makes of himself upon the cross for the healing of all and the mass being both a remembrance and a re-enactment of that act, which is in itself a reflection of the primal offering made by the Generative Source in creating the universe and entering into it.
In Christian mysticism, this is called “The Lamb slain at the Foundation of the World” and holds the intention of moving from simplicity to complexity, from aloneness to unity/multiplicity. In re-enacting this the priest or offeiriad stands in the position of Christ the mediator and presence of blessing.
In the IS presence exercise, in creating Grail Space we are taking a stance of offering, becoming in that moment an anchor point and generative point which enhances the expression of life.
This stance brings into being a new etheric body and enables us to operate within the new etheric conditions of Gaia. One aspect of Michael’s work is to help us make this step and having made it we then function as an anchor point or tuning fork that sends out a call or invitation for others to join in this new wave form that arises.
We enter then into a new form of perception in which the direct and ordinary sense of other is joined to what we might call their immortal root. This act of united imaginative perception summons into being newness, vision, new combinations of thought, feeling, and substance that deepens the capacity of love to operate within our locality. The revelation of quantum physics about the observer effect which causes the waveform of probability to collapse into actuality is at the centre of this art. We can summon visions of heaven and hell and this is both the glory and terror of being a human being; but if we cooperate with the presence of light and love that is the Generative Mystery, then what moves through us is the capacity to see, to be grateful and to praise.
Then we act as and are a Michaeline. IS has brought me to this ongoing contemplation and I will be forever grateful to David and Lorian for helping me to a deeper understanding of the world and my own self than I would have dreamed possible and which includes my understanding and practice of the Qabalah but takes it into a new dimension
For me IS and my practice of the Qabalah go hand in hand—they are both spiritual dialects that I am comfortable in and in some ways are interchangeable for me. When I take my stance as the Living Tree I am also performing the IS standing exercise. The prayer of the heart and the contemplation of YHShVhיהשוהּ is deeply connected to the practice of Grail Space and the Touch of Love. I could go on as the parallels are numerous. The Qabalah roots me in the spiritual tradition I spring from and its history whilst IS takes me into the emergent frontier—perhaps a suitable image for an American system of spirituality.
When I completed my ordination process with Lorian we gathered together in a ritual which called on us to ordain each other. This meant that David blessed the first person and ordained them as priest and they then as a Lorian priest blessed the next one and so on. I was not able to be physically present but due to the magic of techno-elementals and through the good offices of Maryn, David’s daughter, I was virtually present in that I effectively sat in her laptop and she carried me around.
The moment of ordination required me to come up to the altar where James Tousignant was standing as priest so Maryn duly carried me up and put me on the altar facing James. This meant that he and everybody else was in Seattle while I was in Glastonbury UK. At the moment of ordination it was as if the ancient energies of Glastonbury and the traditions of the Qabalah came together with the energies of IS in a deep fusion. It was very emotional and brought me to tears and it is this fusion that I now work with as a servant of the Healing Name, a Lorian Priest and perhaps even as a Michaeline.
