Using a rosary or prayer beads for meditation practice

 Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

There are innumerable methods of meditation out there, my current daily method is probably as simple as it has ever been, I pretty much just sit and watch the breath for a set period of time a couple of times a day. But anyone who has practiced any sort of meditation or yoga for a while will know that the mind is a tricky beast that really needs training. While actual mental silence is impossible without being dead, we can however use various methods to lower the volume, and one method is mantra yoga. Any one of thousands of mantras could be used, each to their own, and this method is discussed in Crowley's writings and is an accepted part of Raja yoga.

However, what is not talked about is the use of a rosary or beads to aid this. To remedy this I would like to talk a little about the use of counting beads in spiritual traditions, and how these might be adapted to a more or less Thelemic practice.

The first picture (on the left) is a Buddhist set of prayer beads, usually called a Mala, or Nenju in Japanese. This particular set belong to the Soto sect of Japanese Zen Buddhism. There are many different types which vary by sect, as well as formal, informal, and made from a range of materials. Also, unlike the Catholic rosary, the method of usage is much more general, and varies not only from sect to sect, but even from temple to temple.

As non-Buddhists and non-Catholics we can still use these tools, although I imagine the Buddhist Mala would be more generally useful and free of unwanted theological connotations, and therefore much more useful as an aid to mantra yoga.

Many will recognise the rosary (on the right) as being Christian in origin; Roman Catholic to be precise. The Catholics have a very precise and detailed approach to saying the rosary, and it is essentially a method of meditation on the mysteries of Christ via five decades of ten prayers. The order is to recite the Nicene creed holding the crucifix, then at single beads the lords prayer, and grouped beads a hail Mary, and a Salve Regina is recited when one gets to the medal. 

Mantras should be simple, repetitive, and easy to memorise. In this way they differ from prayers which generally convey devotion, although these too can be used. I would like to suggest some ideas for mantras within a Thelemic context.

We could easily recite the following: 

A ka dua

Tuf ur biu

bi a’a chefu

Dudu nur af 

an nuteru.

Unity uttermost showed! 

 I adore the might of Thy breath, 

Supreme and terrible God, 

 Who makest the gods and death 

To tremble before Thee - 

 I, I adore thee!

Either in the original or in English, at each bead. The Gayatri mantra would also be a good option given its universal nature: 

Om bhūr bhuvah svah

tat savitur varenyam

bhargo devasya dhīmahi

dhiyo yo nah pracodayāt.

This is traditionally recited 108 times (one for each bead), which is handy if we are using a Buddhist Mala. Being an invocation of the Solar principle this is particularly suitable for a Thelemic context. My personal favourite is from the heart sutra:

Gyate gyate 

paragyate,

parasamgyate

bodhi svaha!

We could use this while in sitting meditation, although personally I like to separate mantra practice from sitting practice, and tend to go out for a walk reciting a mantra. Of course, a set of beads is not essential for this, but it does help to focus the mind. Specifically, when meditation is performed incorrectly we can get the idea that we need to lose awareness of the body. I feel that this is not helpful and more likely to lead to a wafty, unfocussed mindset at odds with what we want to develop. Having a set of beads to count requires the use of the hands and a connection between the mind and the body, bringing increased focus on the here and now. We can see if the mind is wandering because our mind and fingers go out of sink and we lose track of where we were in the mantra. Another useful point is that during meditation we can find ourselves unintentionally clock watching, wondering if our time is up yet, and growing impatient as a result. If instead of clock watching, we find out how many times we need to recite a mantra for a given amount of time, we can use the beads to help with this. Some people just recite their mantra 108 times, once for each bead, so that when they get to the large mother bead they know their session is finished. Again there are no rules, each should find his or her own way.

As with anything, the objective of the practice should be considered, and the beads, like the mantra itself, are really only a means to an end, and that end is greater integration of mind and body, and greater integration of the practitioner with the world around them. If the use of a mantra or a set of beads helps, then it it can't be a bad thing.

Love is the law, love under will.

Do I believe in god(s), angels, spirits, demons and the rest?

 Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

This is a question that I have asked myself a few times over the years, and which I think is probably pertinent given my involvement with mystical and magical systems in general. It is not easy to answer definitively, so I will try to clarify it as much as I can.

Firstly, definitions are important. If a person asks me, yes or no, whether I believe in God, then to avoid complications I would probably reply, yes. However, this needs some qualification. What does 'God' mean, and what do I mean by believe. God to me is not some beard in the sky, a sort of discorporate father figure that I can ask favours of and beg forgiveness of sins. If praying worked, the world would be a very different place, so we can be quite certain that God doesn't answer prayers, at least in the sense that is commonly understood and taught in Sunday school. No. To me, God is the ground of being, the fundamental suchness of the universe, the basic energy of life itself. Liber legis calls it Hadit, and this describes it pretty well, but essentially God is unknowable. God is the silence between notes, the space between words, the eternal and imminent moment between one breath and the next. God doesn't answer prayers because God is prayer, and the person praying. Gods answer to prayers is in the prayer itself.

But a separate being that makes for holiness? I see no reason to even consider that possibility. The God of the ancient Hebrews, Yahweh, I regard as a form of local deity, elevated to master of the universe status by his worshippers, but essentially a Semitic tribal totem no different from Baal, Astaroth, or any of the other dozens of tribal totems running around the middle-east at that time and mentioned in the Old Testament as rival deities.

So, why even call it God? Cultural conditioning I suppose. In the right company using that designation is natural enough and people understand what is meant. But there is room for confusion, and of course those who reject the term might not like it, but that's not my problem. Besides, in the introductory lection we are advised about this in no uncertain terms, so it should, we would hope, be second nature to an initiate: 

"Should therefore the candidate hear the name of any God, let him not rashly assume that it refers to any known God, save only the God known to himself. Or should the ritual speak in terms (however vague) which seem to imply Egyptian, Taoist, Buddhist, Indian, Persian, Greek, Judaic, Christian, or Moslem philosophy, let him reflect that this is a defect of language; the literary limitation and not the spiritual prejudice of the man P."

As for gods, demons, spirits, angels and the rest. I have had my fair share of dealings with gods over the years, but it was always with constructs of the mind, overlays onto reality, images deliberately given to forces, real or imaginary, but with no sense of a separate identity. The same goes for demons, angels and spirits to varying degrees. So no, I don't believe that they have any objective reality. They are however useful ways of interfacing with reality at different levels. For example my work with Liber Astarte was with the goddess Persephone. This was a rather interesting time in which I was able to see things from the perspective of cyclic birth and death, using the early agricultural symbolism and highlighting mans reliance as a species on the annual rhythms of the world, and the sense that we come out of the world, not into it. I have also had experiences that I might describe as demonic, soul sucking things that can attach themselves to a person in the lower astral. Whether these are just negative thought forms, symptoms of a diseased mind, or literal astral scavengers and bottom feeders. They frequently took on the form of walking corpses, thin, hungry things, or occasionally black angry things, aggressive and threatening, thereby matching traditional descriptions of such things. 

The last time I saw one of these was on the night I arrived at my regiment when I was serving in the army. Nobody had told them I was coming, so I arrived at the guard room and was redirected to the barracks where I was given a place to sleep in a spare room. I deployed my roll mat and sleeping bag on the floor and that night settled in to sleep. In the early hours of the morning I awoke to see a black silhouette in the doorway in a threatening posture. It practically buzzed with aggression and I knew it to be non-human right away. I had to meet the regimental sergeant major in the morning and was annoyed at being awoken, I sat up and said, "F off, I'm trying to sleep", and promptly lay back down. I've not seen anything of the sort since. 

What was this? I have no idea. However I've not seen much since that time, nothing uninvited in any case. I have had shells of dead things hanging around, more so when I was in my teens and early twenties, when I was living a lot more fast and loose and really not taking care of myself. More recently, a friend who died about 6 years ago used to visit from time to time, a silent presence in the corner of my mental vision, occasionally coming into my dreams. Oddly he became more and more inhuman as time went by, and more like a hungry thing and less like the friend I knew, until I took him to a nearby temple, he's not been around since. In any case, that was not my friend, just a thought form gradually falling apart over time. While I treated it as if it were a spirit, or a husk of the person I knew, I have no real reason to suppose it was anything other than my memory of my friend, a way of coming to terms with his death, but I will never know for certain.

As for the Angel, and angels in general? That's a subject in itself, which I think I have already covered. I will say that early in my A.'.A.'. career he took the form of a Sumerian God, sometimes the peacock angel of the Yezidi, and an ancient Hebrew spirit of the wilderness, but as I went on these names and forms were gradually cast aside, images of images, not things to be attached to, but useful at certain points in my training. At this moment, I would say that the 'Angel', is another stand in term, much like God, for that about which nothing can be said. These previous images can be called angels in the technical sense, i.e. messengers, ways of making the connection. But the connection made, they are no longer necessary and so I rarely employ them. I will go so far as to say that I was instructed by the Angel itself not to rely on these images and forms. 

So in the final analysis, I suppose I an a positive agnostic in the matter of belief. I have no idea if any of these things are real, and reason says there is little to suggest that they are anything other than projections of the mind. Yet somehow treating them as if they are objectively what they present themselves to be seems to work. Or, as I think it was Robert Anton Wilson who responded, when asked if he thought these things were real: They're real enough.  

Love is the law, love under will.

No path, Nowhere to go.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

 My approach to the path has always come back to seeing reality as it is, rather than as I'd like to see it. Even though at times I have fallen into habits of acquiring badges, mottos, ranks, as well as theories practices and dogmas, eventually each of these falls away under the ruthless scrutiny of the quest for authenticity in practice. What is left is something that I can't even put a name to, at least not one which will stick as definitive. My understanding is that the main thing standing in my way is myself, my preconceptions, hopes, wishes, fears, desires, even the desire for enlightenment becomes something I carry around like a burden, so anything except that 'something', which is ever present yet somehow hidden, ends up being put aside in the end. The path is like the eye of a needle, and even a tiny knot in the yarn makes passing it through the eye impossible.

 Even the path itself can become a sort of attachment. The idea that there is a path to begin with is the same. Is it a path, or am I just a ghost wandering in the mist? In one sense, religion, spirituality, the path, and the rest, ar all just empty words and rituals. And yet they point towards something else, something deeper, and this I have come to appreciate is an understanding of life that goes beyond these things yet at the same time accepts them as expressions of it, itself being inexpressible in its 'is-ness'.

Many years ago, I had a sort of vision, which I perhaps didn't realise the import of until more recently. In the vision I saw a black ocean, and on it flowers eternally blooming and fading away. With this image came the words, "void flowers". I think I can appreciate this vision now. The sea is that nothingness which is itself an infinite fullness, because though itself unformed, gives birth to all things eternally. Like flowers arising on the surface of the ocean only to sink back down again in endless succession. This image is similar to the Egyptian symbolism of the lotus flower, whos roots are in the black mud of creation, and whos flowers briefly bloom on the surface only to sink back down when their time is over.

While I can see that this is the truth of it, according to the limitations of my perception at any rate, I am still far from realising it in daily life, in my person. The vision is not fully digested so to speak, there are still dregs, knots in the thread, ideas, hopes, fears, and the rest, which I cling to even though I know they are passing away. Holding on to the flowers as if they had any permanence, as if we could preserve even one is the predicament we find ourselves in. If that flower be ones life, career, loved ones, even our sense of self, individuality, a soul, religion, God and the rest. All of these things are flowers on the ocean, they bloom in their time and pass away. 

As a person who has spent a lot of time working on magick and spiritual practice this pulls the rug out from under me somewhat. All the grades, titles, practices, even the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, itself the "image of an image", though important in their own place, are shown to be means to this end, not things to hold on to or to place great importance in. You don't wear skis to cross rocks, or climbing boots to swim in the sea. In the same way, magickal practices are useful in their own place. Qaballah can help order the mind, Goetia or the Abramelin can help bring certain things out or in to the sphere of the magician, yet a magician is only a worker of illusion, that is to say, he operates in the realm of form and concept, of means to ends, and on the lowest levels practical magick to improve ones lot in life. Yet while this remains the focus of practice it is a hinderance to a deeper view which can only really be arrived at when these things are put in their place and understood clearly. Not to refute them in a spasm of world denial, each level of existence has it's proper attributes, only to observe them in this universal perspective, as things that are part of the round of life and death, not things that can be held on to.

By practicing letting go, acquiescing to life as it is without trying to dress it up, or force it into any particular mold, it becomes possible to detach the attention from self, from the impermanent flowers that arise and sink back into the ocean, we become not victims of life, our lives a brief flowering in the sunlight, but willing participants in the dance, the eternal ebb and flow of existence. This can enliven whatever practice or observances we adhere to, because they then become expressions of this voidness, part of the dance and flow, we practice magickal ritual, or meditation, or even drinking tea or quietly sitting, and this is an expression of this eternal flowing and ebbing of the ocean of existence, we become one with it. This it not something to fear or lament over, not is it something to celebrate, it just is, and we can either work with it, or fight against it, and the person who strives against the momentum of the whole universe wastes his strength, even this effort is only a void flower.

Love is the law, love under will.