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Unfolding
the Rose
ILLUMINATION AND
WESTERN EsoTERICISM
The Institute for Hern1etic Studies "Study Guides Se­
ries" provides high quality, acaden1ically sound, and use­
ful inforn1ation for students of traditional and n1odern
Western esotericisn1. Designed to be concise, accurate,
and practical, IHS publications address historical as
well as conten1porary issues in the study and practice of
alchen1y, qabala, astrology, Hern1eticisn1, Rosicrucian­
isn1, Freen1asonry, Martinisn1, Gnosticisn1, and a variety
of psycho-spiritual disciplines.

Since its founding in 1998 the Institute for Hern1etic

Studies has been one of the leading resources for the
study and practice of Western esotericisn1. For n1ore
inforn1ation contact: Institute for Hern1etic Studies,
P.O. Box 4513, Wyoming, Pennsyl vania 18644-04513,
or visit: www.hern1eticinstitute.org

Unfolding the Rose - Illumination and Western Esotericism is a

complete overview ef the various paths �f Western esotericism and
how they relate to and build upon each other. This book is truly,
foundational and will provide a solid and invaluable friend and
guide for anyone seeking to understand the laby_ rinth ef Western
spiritual practices while journeying on the Path cf! Return.

. : ..
90000 >
�Ii Io
Ivi
THE INSTITUTE FOR HERMETIC STUDIES
STUDY GUIDE ::2::
~~~
UNFOLDING

ROSE
THE

Illumination e3 Western Esotericism

00

A Transcription of Lectures Given by

MARK STAVISH, M.A.
IHS FOUNDER & DIRECTOR OF STUDIES
 Unfolding the Rose:
Illumination f3 Western Esotericism

IHS Study Guide Series

Volume :l:'.:

Copyright © 2017 Mark Stavish

Transcription & editing by

~ Michael Mazock ~
Typeset with supplemental editing by
~ Alfred DeStefano III ~
The sigil of Poiel at the front of this book was created by
~ Fr. John Kadai ~

Email: [email protected]
Website: www.hermeticinstitute.org
Also by Mark Stavish:

• The Liturgy of Hermes: In Praise of the Lord of Light (IHS

Ritual Series, Volume I)
• Meditations €3 Rituals (IHS Ritual Series, Volume II)

• Light on the Path: A Study Guide for Qabala, Alchemy e3

Astrology (IHS Study Guides, Volume I)

• The Inner Way: The Power of Prayer and Belief in Spiritual

Practice (IHS Study Guides, Volume II)
• Child of the Sun: Psychic e3 Physical Rejuvenation in
Alchemy and Qabala (IHS Study Guides, Volume III)
• Words of My Teachers: A Companion to the IHS Audio
Programs (IHS Study Guides, Volume IV)
• The IHS Monograph Series (Numbers 1 through 9)
• The Path of Alchemy: Energetic Healing and the World of
Natural Magic (Available in Polish and Russian)
• Kabbalah for Health and Wellness (Available in Portuguese
and Russian)
• Freemasonry: Rituals, Symbols and History of the Secret
Society (Available in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Es­
tonian)
• Between the Gates: Lucid Dreaming, Astral Projection, and
the Body of Light in Western Esotericism (Available in
Portuguese, Russian, and French)

Continued on the following page...

With contributions by Mark Stavish:

• The Philosopher 's Stone: Spiritual Alchemy, Psychology,

and Ritual Magic by Israel Regardie
Edited and Annotated by Chic and Sandra Cicero
Chapter Twelve: "Introduction to Alchemy-A Golden
Dawn Perspective" (2nd edition, 2013)

• Howlings from the Pit: A Practical Handbook of Medieval

Magic, Goetia fj Theurgy by Dr. Joseph C. Lisiewski
Edited with Commentary by Mark Stavish (2011)
• The Key to Solomon's Key: Is This the Lost Symbol of
Masonry? by Lon Milo DuQuette with Introduction by
James Wasserman
Afterword by Mark Stavish (2010)
• Israel Regardie and the Philosopher 's Stone: The Alchemical
Arts Brought Down to Earth by Dr. Joseph C. Lisiewski
Introduction by Mark Stavish (2009)
• The Red Church or The Art of Pennsylvania German
Braucherei by C.R. Bilardi
Introduction by Mark Stavish (2009)
• Llewellyn's 2008 Magical Almanac
"Plants, Planets, and How to Make A Better Potion" (2007)

• Llewellyn's 2008 Herbal Almanac

"Paracelsus, Plants, and the Doctrine of Signatures" (2007)
• Forbidden Religion: Suppressed Heresies of the West edited
by Douglas Kenyon
Chapter 28: "The Alchemist's Resurrection: Did the Ancient
Arts of Transmutation Die with the Middle Ages, or Do
They Still Survive in Different Disguises?" (2006)
Contents

Page
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . xi
Opening Remarks . . . . . . . 1
Frater Albertus and Alchemy 2
Multiple Esotericisms 3
Hidden Teachings . . 7
Your Mission in Life 10
Karma and Trust . . 13
Illumination . . . . . 17
Hermetic Renunciation . 21
Rosicrucianism . . . . . 22
Cosmology: Alchemy, Magic, and Astrology 28
The Arbatel . . . . . . . 33
Creative Visualization . 35
St. Martin and Boehme 37
The Cornerstones . 39
Nothingness . . . . . . . 52
My True Self . . . . . . 55
Denial and the Kali Yuga 58
Immortality . . . . . . . . 60
Meditation, Sleep, and Death 64
Creatures of Air . . . . . 66
Grandmothers and Magic 71
Light, Life, and Love 73
Lucid Dreaming . . . . . . 75
Hermes and Sophia . . . . 76
The Middle Pillar and the Secret Fire 80
The Body of Light . . . . . . . . . . . 84
False God . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Elus Cohen Equinox Practice 91
Commentary on Ritual . . . . 94
Imagination is the Supreme Power 99
A Simple Practice . . . . . . . . . 101
Basic Alchemy: Some Questions & Answers . 104
Plant Stones and Hans Nintzel . 109
The Sum of Their Lives . . . . . 114
Force Fields and Alchemy . . . . 118
The Cloister and Regeneration . 128
Character and Success . . . . . . 135
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
~~~
Thank you to our sponsors and volunteers for making this
book possible:

MICHAEL & PATRICIA APPLEGATE

KEITH DEV ITO
MARC DICAPRIO
LAURIE MILLER
BRIAN OSBORNE
JERRY REIDY
DAWN VALDEZ

And special recognition to MICHAEL MAZOCK for tran­

scribing the recordings of the original seminar. This was a
heroic task that others had backed away from, but which he
conquered with the skill of an adept. Thank you.
Finally, to my family for joining me on this journey.
 Introduction

Bringing Unfolding the Rose: Illumination & Western Es­

otericism into publication has been a long and interesting
journey. The material which follows was presented at the
request of several esoteric groups with which I have had pre­
vious affiliation, as well as current contact. These day-long
teaching sessions were first held in Allston, Massachusetts, in
the greater Boston area, June of 2011, at Johannes Kelpius
Lodge, of the Rosicrucian Order (AMORC), an organization
in which I was raised from my youth, and in which I had
official membership and duties for over fifteen years. The
members of Johannes Kelpius Lodge-named in honor of
that great seventeenth-century German mystic of the Wis­
sahickon River, in what is now Philadelphia-have been good
friends of mine for over twenty-five years. As such, it was
without hesitation that I agreed to speak before them once
again, on matters so dear to our hearts. The meeting was
well attended, and while I spoke about the past, present, and
future of esotericism, my wife Andrea and our two young sons
Luke and Nathaniel found themselves navigating Boston's
tourist sites in the middle of the Boston Marathon. As with
all events of deep importance, we enjoyed a fantastic collation
in one of Boston's finer restaurants at the conclusion of the

xi
xii MARK STAVISH

teachings.
The second session was given the following weekend in
Juno, New York (just south of Plattsburg) at the invitation
of Dr. Brian Osborne, DOM, and a group of students familiar
with Oriental and Occidental occultism, as well as traditional
and modern shamanism, who desired to build themselves
a deeper foundation in the mysteries. The material which
follows is a nearly word-for-word transcription of the audio
recordings from this event. Minor changes have been made
for clarity.
You will find within this book a complete synopsis of
the theoretical and operative methods of most schools of
Western esotericism, thereby making it truly invaluable for
your path. What makes this book important are both its
contents and the aftereffects of the seminar. Recording the
seminar was almost an afterthought, done so that we could
provide the program for those who were unable to attend.
Then, for the next several years, a series of audio programs
were held on various esoteric topics and practical occultism,
each being recorded and made available to a wider audience
in CD format.
These seminars were in part sponsored by a patron who
wishes to remain anonymous, and were it not for his generosity
they could not have been held. On August 12, 2015, Fr. Alex
Berry, S.I. (Church of St. Cyprian the Mage of Antioch)
began the task of loading what is now over forty hours of
audio and video programs onto The Institute for Hermetic
Studies Channel on YouTube. In doing so, all of the seminars
hosted by the Institute for Hermetic Studies are available to
anyone who can access the Internet. In addition, all of the
Study Guides, along with additional material, were published
in a single book: Words of My Teachers: A Companion to the
!HS Audio Programs (IRS Study Guides, Vol. N). This book
was in part supported by a successful fundraising campaign,
but the lion's share of the credit of labor belongs to the editor
of the various IHS publications: Alfred DeStefano ill.
. INTRODUCTION xiii

The tremendous amount of work undertaken by Alfred

during this time was phenomenal. A host of obstacles had
to be overcome-so many that at some point we began to
wonder if there was not an invisible hand at work. However,
we-or rather he-overcame, and the massive text of nearly
600 pages was published in late May 2016. I point this out
because everyone who has benefited from these programs
since we began them in June 2011 hears my voice, but it is
the combined sacrifice-and I do not use this word lightly-of
our patrons, Alfred DeStefano III, and Alex Berry, that have
made all of this possible. It is true that many hands lighten
the load, and this load of spreading the Light of esoteric
Wisdom was made lighter for me by the strong hands that
answered the call when I asked for help. Their place at the
table of heroes has been guaranteed.
Please pay careful attention as you read this book. Hear
my voice guide you along the Path of Illumination, as both
your "friend and guide" as well as fellow traveler. Within
these pages is an introduction to some of the most profound
and previously secret methods in the history of ideas. Cherish
them, take them within, and nourish them with practice. Let
them make your life to be the Golden Cross upon which the
Mystic Rose unfolds.
Wishing you the best during your journey on the Path of
Return,

Mark Stavish, M.A.

Director of Studies
Institute for Hermetic Studies

Wyoming, Pennsylvania
27 January 2017
 I
\. ____ --------- --------' %!11.l.1'UIU.

~ Opening Remarks ~
What we're going to talk about today is the difference between
classical and modern methods of teaching spirituality. Here's
the reality: if you want to have the experiences of classical
Kabbalists or alchemists or yogis, then you have to practice
in the same way they did. That doesn't always mean you
have to be in a cave, but it certainly does help to a degree.
It doesn't mean you have to be putting horse dung around
your retorts, but it does help that you get an understanding
of some of the experiences that they went through in their
laborious undertakings.
In some ways we are really blessed by the wealth of infor­
mation that we have and the ability to get so much relatively
easily and quickly. But it is also a deceptive wealth. It makes
us think that the whole Path is easy. Just because we got
to the threshold pretty quickly doesn't mean that we can
get across it or make much progress. I'm going to help you

1
2 MARK STAVISH

think about some of those things and also look at different

systems and what makes them of value. To examine what is it
that constitutes an actual working esoteric practice or system.
What we're going to do in the first part of the morning is go
over some of the generalities of Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and
alchemy, and their world views. We'll talk about that and I'll
draw some stuff on paper here and you are going to copy it
down, just like it was way back when in the "good old days."

~ Frater Albertus and Alchemy~

Everyone likes to say: "Oh, I wish I had gone to study with

Frater Albertus!" Well, no you don't. No you don't! You drew
everything by hand then. There was never any such thing
as a handout. I've seen people's notebooks from that period.
There was a purpose to doing it that way. It was so you
learned it and you only learned it by studying it. And you
only studied it by engaging your senses. T hat's all of them,
not just the sixth one we call the mind but the other five.
You engaged them. And that's a ritual because a ritual takes
the abstract symbolism and choreographs it into a kind of
mini-play and therefore we absorb that through the senses. So
our senses are very important to us. They are our gateways
to consciousness.
Then what we'll do after lunch, we'll go over different
aspects of lucid dreaming, astral projection, and the body­
mind. I know that's what you are really here for. But I've
got to give you some background as to why that's important.
If I just give you the technical how-to and you don't have
the theoretical, we have violated the first rule of alchemy. So
we've got to go according to the rules. Yes, there are rules.
Heaven forbid we should say that. We can't just make it up as
we go along and then expect to get to where we want to go. So
that's why we have systems, more or less. Then I have some
gifts for you that I will give you at the end of the day. And
I'll do it according to Classical style. And then tomorrow we
. MULTIPLE ESOTERICISMS 3

will go over some basic alchemical work, some basic spagyrics.

It's probably not going to be as hands-on as we'd like it to
be, but at least you'll get to see some stuff getting done and
you'll also get to take some spagyric products home with you.
So that's good. That is the overview. That is where you are
going.
Let us really realize why we are here. We are here to pursue
Wisdom. Wisdom is both not only Sophia, the Goddess of
Wisdom, but also our Hermes, Thoth, Tehuti, Thoth-Hermes
the Egyptian, God of Wisdom, God of Magic, God of the
Spoken and Written ·word. We see reference to him in what
is the foundational text of Western Esotericism. There are
many "western esotericisms." Let's be clear on that. It's a
plural, not a singular.

~ Multiple Esotericisms ~
Has anyone ever read Antoine Faivre, a professor at the
Sorbonne up until not too long ago? He was founder of the
Chair of Esoteric Studies. As he politely reminded me on
several occasions: esotericisms. The Corpus Hermeticum, or
"Body of Hermes," is a body of texts that is the foundation
of Western esotericism, or Hermeticism. Hermeticism is the
bulk of what we consider Western esoteric practice. There
are other aspects to it, too, where they bleed or overlap into
one another but not always completely. We like to think of
these things as existing in very discrete components and they
don't. It is like overlapping rings. You have a discrete center
to each ring, but then on the edges things blend. That's really
how everything moves ahead; that's how everything happens.
Things blend at some point. Something new comes up. It
may live. It may die. It may create a distinct order, a distinct
society, a distinct culture, or a distinct esoteric perspective
and then it may go away. Other times it will be a gateway,
kind of a mouth that absorbs other things into it. If that
absorption is good, we have something that is very synthetic,
4 MARK STAVISH

very complete. It has a certain homogeneous appearance to

it, even though we know that other things are brought in.
It's digestive, if you will.
Very often we look at people who are going to different
movements here, movements there, and they don't know what
to practice. How often have you found that? You go to this
seminar or that seminar but what do I do now? I've got my
eight-sided mirror in the right place in my house. I've got my
Indian Buddha in the corner. I've got my eagle feather. I've
got my Fair Trade incense. But other than being confused
and guilty, I simply don't know what to do!
That's really what the morning is going to talk about,
because if I don't give you the morning you don't understand
what works, or how and why it works. With anything tradi­
tional we have to look to what is our archetype or idea of
Wisdom. And of course, this is Thoth. This is Hermes. It
can mean Mercury, but usually Thoth-Hermes. They blend
together at different points. We look and we say the prayer.
The prayer is always just an invocation meaning we are call­
ing on something out there to come and be present with us.
But it's also an aspiration. It is something within us that we
aspire to bring forth. It's always one and the same because
this idea of inner and outer is an illusion. It is an illusion in
the sense that it is a perception; it is not an actuality. I think
that's important. I don't like the word illusion because it
makes it sound like it's not real, but it is very much real. It's
just not permanent. Just as at one point this building did not
exist, this building is not a permanent structure ( although
the Department of Taxation thinks otherwise!). The fact is
there was a time when it was not here. There was a time
when it was not in this state. There is a time in the future
when it will not be in this state and at some point in the
distant future, hopefully when all of us are long-gone, it will
simply vanish as well.
So that's what we mean by an illusion: that it is not
permanent, it has no intrinsic, inherent, or definitive reality
. MULTIPLE ESOTERJCISMS 5

that is unchanging. So we have to aspire to understand what

that means and it is good if we have an image. And the image
that we have is of the scribe, Thoth the Scribe. This is a good
one to use. There is also at this point, in the early fourth
century, they were using images of just a general philosopher,
if you will, in his red and grey robes. But if you uphold that
in your mind and visualize it and think of that as real, as
permanent-that is, in the sense that it is here right now
with you, it has always been with you-then our prayers and
aspirations are to bring that out from inside you. Hear with
me and even say the words within your mind. This is from
Book One of the Hermetica:

Holy is God the Father of All, who is before the

first beginning;
Holy is God, whose purpose is accomplished by
his several powers;
Holy is God, who wills to be known, and is known
by them that are his own.
Holy art Thou, who by thy Word created all that
is;
Holy art Thou, whose brightness nature has not
darkened;
Holy art Thou, of whom all nature is an image.
Holy art Thou, who are stronger than all domi­
nation...
Accept pure offerings of speech from a soul and
heart uplifted to thee,
Thou of whom no words can tell, no tongue can
speak, only silence can declare.
I pray that I may never fall away from that knowl­
edge of thee which matches with our being.
Grant Thou my prayer.
And put power into me, that so having obtained
this gift, I may enlighten those of my race who
are in ignorance, my brothers and thy sons.
6 MARK STAVISH

Wherefore I believe and bear witness that I have

entered into Life and Light...

They are wonderful prayers and when you look at them

and you listen to them you can hear that they are aspira­
tions and declarations, that the prayer is a declaration of a
cosmology. It is a statement of reality, a perception of the
world, the Universe.
You hear the same thing when they said to Jesus: "Teach
us how to pray." Of course, we have what then became known
as the Lord's Prayer. It was not meant to be simply a rote
repetition but a kind of model, because He said: "When you
pray, pray this way."

Our Father who art in heaven - A statement of fact.

Hallowed be Thy name - "Name"-this notion of verb or
word, something which creates-holy is thy word, thy
name, a title in a sense.
Thy kingdom come - What is a kingdom but a place of
absolute rulership or power?

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven - Earth, what

is that? That is right here. Now, what is heaven? Well,
heaven to the Ancients meant several things. One is
that it meant the celestial realm that is above the
earth, meaning the stars, the planets, and all that, but
also, what else do we see in the New Testament? "The
Kingdom of Heaven is within." Heaven is within you.
Give us this day our daily bread - So God is not just con­
cerned with abstractions but some real practical reali­
ties.
And forgive us our trespasses - Now it says forgive us our
trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against
us. That's an interesting statement because it really
. HIDDEN TEACHIKGS 7

says "treat us as we have treated others." The notion of

karma-cause and effect. We'll get more of that later.

The word is "lead us not into temptation, but deliver

us from evil." When I was a child, my great-uncle Edward
Tischler used to say that what is really meant is "strengthen
us against temptation"; that is, lead us, show us-let me
know what to avoid. Temptation would be those things that
would weaken us or take us from our Path.

Deliver us from evil - Of course, it's saying here that the

world isn't always a fun place. In the Catholic version it
stops there. In the Protestant version, it says: For thine
is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen. They add that last part.

So it's a statement again of faith, it's an aspiration. It's

something that everyone should spend some time contemplat­
ing, looking at, but also looking at all prayers or aspirations
in this manner. What are they saying about the Universe and
your place in it, your relationship to everyone and everything
else? This is ultimately what every prayer and ritual does: it
describes, defines, and affirms our place in the cosmos.

~ Hidden Teachings ~
One of the most interesting things about the early Hermetic
period is-as John Anthony West pointed out to me over
dinner several months ago [2012]-he said that one of the
most fascinating things about Egypt is that Egyptian culture
starts out at a high point and goes down from there. You
can see it in the art. It starts and just kind of decays in
this progression-or regression-of Egyptian culture into the
Greco-Roman period. The Hermetic texts that we think have
come out of the Greco-Roman period were at the period when
E gyptian culture was at its lowest. It really is an attempt
to keep alive the survival of the earlier Egyptian mystery
8 MARK STAVISH

cults. For the longest time it was believed that there was no
real relationship between these small texts that we have-the
Corpus Hermeticum-and the Egyptian mystery cults. But
that has been pretty well disproven academically ( sometime
in the 1990s). This is not just a late-nineteenth century
occultist's hope or dream, but it was a reality. There was
a connection between them. So what's interesting is that
because it was written at a time when the empire was in
decay, you see an interesting statement. And the statement
is this:

Wise words, although written by my decaying hand,

remain imperishable through time, imbued with the
medicine of immortality by the All-Master. Be unseen
and undiscovered by all those who will come and go,
wandering the wastelands of life. Be hidden until an
older heaven births human beings who are worthy of
your wisdom. And having sounded this prayer over
the works of his hands, Hermes was received into the
sanctuary of eternity.
These were the last words of Hermes the Thrice-Great.
So you see, even within the Hermetic tradition, this notion
of hiding the teachings, or the teachings are hidden. And
they are not hidden necessarily because they want to be, but
because they have to be. They are hidden because of the
situation of the time. Remember, everyone knew where the
Egyptian temples were. You could go up and knock on the
door and if you got lucky you'd get in and maybe spend the
next 25 or 30 years of your life there. If not, maybe you'd
get to clean the stables. But anyhow, people knew where the
mystery temples were. But at this point, when these texts
were written, that was no longer the case.
This idea of hidden treasures is quite interesting and
you see it very well described within the Masonic traditions,
particularly those of York Rite. York Rite means those degrees
that have to do with the Temple of Solomon and culminate
. HIDDEN TEACHINGS 9

in the Knights Templar. The rituals, which are fantastically

enacted, have to do with hidden treasures in and around
the Temple of Solomon. Of course this has given birth to a
host of ideas about that treasure being an actual physical
treasure, and I'm sure some of it is, although I think that
was probably found for the most part and carried away in
one or more conquests. But this notion of always seeking for
what is hidden, seeking for something hidden, is a constant
theme across the board in most Western esoteric practices.
You see it on the Grail Quest or the Philosopher's Stone.
Now we have an overview of the Path that is important
to know-you always need to have an overview: where are
we now and where are we going. As Napoleon said: "I don't
feel at home until I've seen a map of the place." And really,
neither should you. That way you don't wander. Always ask
someone: "What is this Path? What do we call it? What is the
name of it?" The actual name for Buddhism can be translated
into Awakening, the Path of Awakening, of becoming awake,
which is a common theme within the West, to be awake. If
you talk to any of the Tibetan lamas, the words that they use
to describe what they do is "inner transformation," which is
a lot more active. The idea of awakening is very nice, because
someone else can awaken you but someone else cannot "inner
transform" you. What we call it is the Great Work. Not the
Big Easy! It's not easy. I like this description:

The Great Work is, above all things, the creation of

man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire
conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially
the perfect emancipation of his will, assuring full
power over the Universal Magical Agent [that is,
the astral powers or energies, even the mind]. This
Agent, disguised by the ancient philosophers under
the name of the First Matter, determines the forms
of modifiable substance, and we can really arrive
by means of it at metallic transportation and the
10 MARK STAVISH

Universal Medicine.

This is not a hypothesis. It is a scientific fact already

established and rigorously demonstrable according to Eliphas
Levi in his work Transcendental Magic.

The destiny of man, as we have said, is to make or

create himself. He is, and will be, the sum of his
works both through time and eternity. All men are
called into the lists, but the number of the elect­
that is, of those who succeed-is invariably small.
In other words, the men who are desirous to attain
are numbered by multitudes but the chosen are few.
Men who are masters of themselves become easily the
masters of others; but it is possible for them to hinder
one another if they disregard the laws of discipline and
of the universal hierarchy. Life is a warfare in which
we must give proofs if we would advance; power does
not surrender of itself; it must be seized. Initiation
by contest and ordeal is therefore indispensable for
the attainment of the practical science of mysticism.
The essential law of Nature-that of initiation by
effort and by voluntary and toilsome progress has
been fatally misconstrued.

~ Your Mission in Life ~

What Levi is saying here has many levels of meaning, but
the main idea is that this is your purpose. It is not about:
"What is my mission in life?" You don't have any. You are not
a secret agent waiting to go to the drop box to find the little
card from God that says: "Your job is..."
So that's the point: you don't have a mission. There is
nothing you are supposed to do. This idea of "what am I
supposed to do?"-shoulds, woulds, and oughts-is probably
one of the things that holds more people back from doing
. YOUR MISSION IN LIFE 11

anything worthwhile than anything else. It's essentially guilt:

"What should I do? What ought I do?"
Your job is simple. You're to make who you are. Not
even "discover," because that implies there is something to
discover. You are to make yourself. That is your sole function.
You are what you have made to this point. Those of you
who are obsessed with past lives and reincarnation, please
forget about it. You are the best you have ever been right
now. You may have smelled better in the past. You may
have been prettier in the past. I can guarantee you may have
been richer or poorer in the past. You've probably been a
lot dumber, too. And you've probably had a lot more dirt
under your fingernails. But you have never been better. You
are the best, right now, that you have ever been. Your job
is to understand and express your true faculties or potential.
It's really no different from anyone else's. You just express it
somewhat differently. Your Path is to fully actualize your full
potential, the emancipation of your will. Will is your ability
to choose, decide, and act. An unwavering will is probably
one of the hardest things to accomplish, and yet one of the
easiest. That's a great irony, isn't it? Especially if you get
into a staring contest with your dog at break. But what does
it really mean, to will? It means to choose.
Now you've made a choice. You've made a choice to come
here. For a lot of you that was a really easy choice; but
for some of you, that was a more difficult one. You had to
schedule some things. And for some of you, you really weren't
sure. You made a last-minute decision.
Now, if I give you the option of choosing vanilla or choco­
late, most of you will say, "Vanilla or chocolate what?" Is it
hard? When I say "Hiiagen-Dazs Double Dutch Chocolate"
it becomes easier. Sometimes more details make it easier to
choose. But the fact is, when you've made the choice, it's
often a done deal. I know when I'm going to get coffee it's a
done deal. I have habituated myself. I'm going to get cream
and sugar and that's going to be pretty much it. And I want a
12 MARK STAVISH

stronger roast. Now, one could say that's a function of habit,

which in some ways it is, but at the same time it's very easy
because that's what I want and I know it.
Sometimes you walk into a store to get something and you
just look at something, whatever it is, whether it's a dress,
whether it's a book-I don't know, it's just something-and
you see it and you think "I want that," and you know it. You
know what this is because you actually do want it, you have
experienced it. This is exactly what you were looking for to
fulfill some function or purpose. It's not just because you saw
it on As Seen on TV, but it really fulfills a purpose for you.
That's willpower. You've made a choice.
We think of will as throwing your shoulder to the grind­
stone and grunting and puffing away. That's not will. That's
work. That's too much. It's easy to stay focused for me when
I've habituated myself to cream and sugar. It's harder to stay
focused when you have to make the decision: "Sheesh, I've
really got to move some scheduling around to get here; is
it really worth it?" Or sometimes you're in the process of
making something, doing something, whatever it happens to
be, and suddenly you run into the obstacles, right? "I didn't
really want to do this-this is tough!" Well you can if you
stay focused on the end goal. So when I was driving up here
with two kids in the back of my car, I was happy. I don't
focus on the fact that: "Oh man-another three hours to go."
I just focus on the end goal: "He's got some good red wine up
there for me and a Wii for my kids to play in the basement."
It helps if we have a clear focus of what we're after. It's
really easy because you stay focused on the goal. Always on
the goal, and in spirituality the goal is what? Our becoming,
our self actualization, our self realization, our unfoldment.
Whatever you want to call it.
So as long as you're constantly focusing on that end state,
two interesting things are happening. One is that it's keeping
you focused on the end state, but it's also making it happen
right now. Because things only happen in the Now. We can
. KARMA AND TRUST 13

think about the past and we can think about the future. We
can fantasize and dream about it, but we're always right
here in the present, in the sense that we live in the present.
Whether our mind is here or not, well that's another story,
but the only thing we actually have is what's going on at the
moment. The Great Work makes us utilize that realization
of the imminent present moment so that we can become
the "Sons of our Deeds." That means we are the sons of our
actions. We are our own children. We create ourselves. We
are self-creating beings. While we have help from others and
from each other in terms of mothers and fathers and friends,
it's our choices and our actions that create who we are. And
what do we call that? Karma. And what does karma mean?
Here's the quiz:

~ Karma and Trust ~

I used to teach two university level classes, Public Speaking
and Composition, where I would say: "Clear writing, clear
speaking, and clear thinking are all the same function. You're
just doing it differently. One you do on paper, one you do
with your voice, and one you do in your head. If you can do
one, you can do the others." Karma-this is the only Sanskrit
word you will ever need to know, and I wrote it on the board­
cause and effect. That doesn't mean anything else. There are
no moral implications. There are no ethical implications. It's
not about good or bad. Karma has nothing to do with good
or bad. It has only to do with cause and effect: if I do this,
then this will happen. You need to really understand that.
All of our ethical notions are human constructs. They keep
society moving forward.
If you look at the Ten Commandments, three of them
are about your relationship to divinity and seven of them
are about your relationship to other people. The seven about
other people basically mean: don't take other people's stuff!
Think about it. That was the culture in that time and place.
14 MARK STAVISH

Someone actually had to write this in stone! "Don't do this

to other people because if you do bad things happen!" For
most of us "good things are what I like" and "bad things
are what I don't like" and if I do this, probably something I
don't like is going to happen.
This is critical, because societies are built on trust. Ev­
erything we do is built on trust. We may call it faith or
confidence, but it all comes down to trust. You trust Brian
[our sponsor] in what he says and that is why you are here.
You trust me in what you have read and in what I say; that
is why you will practice it faithfully and will therefore derive
results from it. In fact, there was a time, not too long ago,
when almost everything we did was based on trust. Farm
villages and the whole entire economic system around them
was one of trust. Oh sure, they kept detailed ledger books,
but there wasn't a lot of currency in circulation. There wasn't
a lot of coin. People fundamentally traded goods and services,
kept ledger books about values, and at the end of the year
would go to the local bank and reconcile that because cash
on hand was impossible. All things trust. Now of course it
was easy then because people weren't going to hop into a car
and move away. All of their collateral was probably within
visual distance. But it's again-trust.
There was a husband and wife team of anthropologists
who did a study. They wanted to see why some places were
wealthier than others. So they went to a village in Southern
Italy. The villages in these places are strange if you haven't
seen them or been to them. They're not like what we think
of, which is usually central and northern Italy. No one re­
ally wants to travel much south of Rome for a variety of
reasons and it has to do with trust. There, in this village in
Southern Italy, no one really trusts anyone and they hadn't
trusted anyone for a long time. So the village was terribly
poor. Because how can you create wealth if you're not going
to trust someone? You can't! Same thing with communal
situations that were developed in this country say from the
. KARMA AND TRUST 15

late-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Many of them

were incredibly prosperous in Pennsylvania and upstate New
York, in the mid-west in Ohio, Indiana. Some of those were
very prosperous because everything was about trust. People
pulled their weight for whatever it was, whatever that meant.
It is the same here-trust.
So when we're dealing with karma we're dealing only
with cause and effect. If we want certain effects, what do
we have to do? We have to create the causes. If the effect is
enlightenment or illumination, what do we need to do? Create
the causes that will be beneficial to illumination, which is
simply another word for deep personal insight about myself,
others, or a particular situation. Moral teachings, ethical
teachings, are fundamentally a foundation to help us get
there. I know people don't like to hear this-this is horrible.
It's Sunday School stuff. What does this have to do with
the Great Mysteries? Can't I do whatever I want? Well, you
can-whatever you want. But you've got to be responsible
for it.
Cause and effect is not "determined" in the sense that
some arbitrary being defines it any more than it is something
arbitrary, but if I take a stone and I throw it into a puddle
then I get ripples. Everything we do is a ripple. So the effects
represent many things. One is that it's fairly complex. Our
intention has a great deal to do with it on one level and that's
where it can become very difficult to understand why some
people do what they do. But on the basic day-to-day level,
our fundamental interaction with other human beings, it's
about simply being pleasant and nice to them and looking
after their best interests as you would your own. Now, how
do you know what their best interests are? That's where you
have to get some wisdom. We can do the right things for all
the wrong reasons. We see that often every day. So that's
where the wisdom part comes in. I once had a Tibetan Lama
say to me, "Americans have a great deal of compassion but
very little wisdom." It's easy to talk about compassion and
16 MARK STAVISH

get other people to spend other people's money on programs

to make you feel compassionate. It's another thing to actually
see: what are the effects of what I do, of my actions? If I do
this, what will the effect be? And then what will the effect of
that be? And what will the effect of that be? It's like a game
of chess. You have to think three, four, five moves ahead.
That's why chess is such a difficult game, because people
aren't used to thinking in terms of cause and effect. Chess is
a perfect game of cause and effect. Can you think four moves
ahead? Maybe not in chess, but how about in your life?
Now in some relationships you know exactly what's going
to happen if you do something! Oh, you know, because you've
seen it so many times! Unfortunately, those are the relation­
ships you need to walk away from, rather than the ones you
keep. Some of you are saying: "But I don't want it to be so
complex. I don't want to have to think about it!" But some­
times you have to. But other times it's just saying to really
be genuinely sincere in your best aspirations for yourself and
for others and treating them as you would yourself. That's
why Jesus said: "Moses gave you Ten Commandments, after
that came Kosher Law with 613 commandments, but look,
I give you two: 'love the Lord your God with all your heart
and all your soul' and 'love your neighbor as yourself.' "
And what if you hate yourself? Well, then you have a
problem and you need to address that, because you can't hate
yourself and make progress on the Path. It can be a beginning
point of not liking who you are and what you do, and not
liking the fruits of the actions that you have accumulated,
but at some point then you have to realize that that is not a
permanent state.
So, you treat others as you want to be treated. If you
want to be treated nicely, you have to treat others nicely. If
you want to be treated with trust, you treat others with trust.
The teaching was a fundamental introduction to the Law
of Karma on a very basic scale. As compared to the more
elaborate Laws of Karma, totally cause and effect if you like.
. ILLUMINATION 17

I don't like using the words "cause and effect," as they've just
been mutated through creating this vast hierarchy of "do's
and don'ts" and all that stuff. It's very difficult. In fact I had
one fellow say to me... the story goes something like this:

The Buddha says: "We have to send the Chinese

some wisdom; we have to send them some light."
So he said to Manjushri: "You have to go to China
and help these people" (Manjushri is the God of
Wisdom, that's why I'm bringing it up),"you have
to go and help these folks." Manjushri goes there
and says it's impossible. So the Buddha says: "Go
back and do it again." So he comes back and says:
"They just didn't get it." So the Buddha says:
"This is what you need to do." So he goes back a
third time and he introduces them to Jeng shui:
"If you put this here, good things happen. If you
put this here bad things happen." So he taught
them Jeng shui as a fundamental introduction to
the Law of Cause and Effect.

Everything gets concrete over time. So your destiny is

to make yourself into the image that you want to be made
into. If that is a Divine image, then that's what you do. If
that's something else, that's your choice. But you must do
it through your own work and effort. There is no welfare
spirituality. There is no free ride. You must do it in and of
yourself of your own effort, your own work. It is overcoming
obstacles because obstacles are fundamentally our weaknesses,
our ignorance, those things which we prefer not to deal with.
That is why it is hard.

~ Illumination ~
Where are we going? We're going to illumination, and illu­
mination or enlightenment is simply that; it is light. It is
18 MARK STAVISH

light without a shadow, because it is the light that exists

beyond duality. And this is literal and figurative. It is a unity
or a harmony that-regardless of events that unfold around
oneself-it is an objective view of the subjective nature of
existence, and thereby universal or cosmic. Illumination is
by no means distant, but it is immediate. It is never realized
in the past or the future because it is always in the present.
Illumination is just that. It is always present. It is light. There
is no shadow to it. Shadow is duality. Illumination is beyond
that. Illumination gives us insight into duality but it gives
us a pure view of it. You see, our view of duality is: I like/I
don't like-this is good/this is bad-I'm happy/I'm sad; I
regret the past/I fear the future ...
Illumination has none of that. It can perceive duality.
It can see it, but it doesn't dwell in it, because it sees the
big picture. It experiences the big picture. It's all-inclusive.
Therefore it understands cause and effect. You experience
illuminations all the time. You just don't recognize them,
because you're waiting for some big light to go on inside your
head. You're waiting for some great conversion experience like
Saul on the road to Damascus. You're waiting to be struck
down from your horse and go blind for three days.
So that's the problem. You're missing what is right in
front of you. And that's the nature of our obscure, ignorant
experience of life. We're ignorant because we're missing what
is exactly right in front of us. So how do we get there? The
long way or the short way? The choice is yours. In different
systems you see different statements about it: If you undertake
this path, perfect enlightenment can be achieved in this many
lifetimes. And you know, when you think about a lifetime, at
one point it seems such a long time, but at another point it
seems terribly short. And then when you start adding those
up, it doesn't seem that far off. So if someone says to you,
you can achieve perfect enlightenment in 10-12 lifetimes, it
sounds so far off but look at your own life, how far you are.
The reality is-and welcome to the unpleasant part of the
. ILLUMINATION 19

program-most of you are halfway dead. And that's part of

the reality that we will be talking about later on, about why
we do any of this at all. The short way is usually such things
as alchemy, particularly mineral or metallic alchemy. And of
course it is dangerous. It is expensive. Did I mention that it
is dangerous?
For those of you familiar with Tibetan practices, the
Vajrayana is considered the short way, the Lightning Path.
It is filled with many potential problems that most people
don't really grasp when they undertake the practices. In the
West, that would be certain forms of ceremonial magic. I
think the Golden Dawn probably best embodies some of that
because the Golden Dawn is not really a magical system
(in the classical Western sense) as much as it is a magical­
mystical system, more in the theurgic sense. The things that
are within the Golden Dawn the classical magician would
never recognize. They wouldn't even know what they are,
such things as Assumption of the God Form, the Body of
Light, the Middle Pillar exercise, the psychic centers. These
things were not known to these people in the same way we
think of and practice them. Many did not have any knowledge
of them. So when you see occasional vague references to them
in classical literature, they are just that, they're vague. So
the Golden Dawn is an example of a modern-modern being
late-nineteenth century-attempt to formulate a Lightning
Path. Of course we saw that thing exploded within twelve
years of its creation. It has never really solidified itself since.
We'll talk about some of the reasons why later on.
The long Path would be paths of general mysticism but,
let me tell you, the Path of Devotion is considered the quickest
path. I know most magicians hate that because they've settled
for a cerebral Path-they want to think that it's all about
their little wands and painted swords-but the Devotional
Path is the quickest, particularly if you have a deity that
represents an archetype for you that you really have an affinity
to. Any path undertaken without a devotional aspect is going
20 MARK STAVISH

to be sterile and dry. Inevitably it will lead to a dead end,

which I think is one of the major problems of the Golden
Dawn both past and present. It opens with devotions to
Ma'at, or the Goddess of Justice and Truth. But you never
see that really going anywhere. Of course Ma'at, or truth,
is perfect balance or harmony, a wonderful goddess to work
with. All gods and goddesses are the same, more or less, in
the sense that all goddesses are just reflections of a single
principle and all gods are reflections of a single principle.
We undertake the long way or the short way, knowing
the risks involved on each Path and the requirements of it.
And why do we do it? Why do we undertake this path? Well,
because initiation is to relieve us of the fear of death. This is
something I'm sure most of you really have not gotten good
teachings on. You will die, as I've said. You must accept this,
embrace this immediately to make any work on your journey
worthwhile because without it you are simply wasting your
time.
You may do all the creative visualizations you want to
get a new car, to get a new boyfriend or a new girlfriend, or
to heal some illness, and this is admirable, but mostly all of
your efforts are focused on such temporal (that is, dualistic)
notions, things which are clearly of a very limited nature.
That is not to say they are bad. They are necessary. We need
places to live. We need our cars to get there. We need money
to put gas in the tank. We want to have a nice room like
this to sit in. We're grateful for it. Here we say thank you
very much to Brian for making this available to us, for even
conceiving of it in the first place. Conceiving first in the mind
and then to undertake the actions to make it possible so that
we can all come here together as a group to help each other
on our journey.
All of these things are very, very important; however, they
must be focused towards the final destination of our most
perfect inner illumination. We must dedicate all our energies
to that, and all our temporal things can be dedicated to that,
. HERMETIC RENUNCIATION 21

too. All of our work can be done for that.

It does not mean that you spend your days in some healing
profession with sandalwood, incense burning, and candles
saying: "Oh, why can't I get Third Party reimbursement? It
would be so much easier if you just saw how good I was." No,
anything you do is a possible way of earning enlightenment
to yourself and to others. Anything that you do; I don't care
what profession it is, even some of the more questionable
ones oddly have that opportunity for folks I've known on the
Path. You have to recognize it. When you recognize that,
by recognizing that your actions here have effects, how can
I manage those effects so that they are in everyone's best
interest? Best interest means not just the temporary relieving
of their suffering and pain and their ignorance, but their
ultimate awakening, their ultimate illumination. Just as well
as what is best for me.

~ Hermetic Renunciation ~
There is kind of a Hermetic renunciation wherein we reject
the material world as the ultimate source of our being. We
accept it as the reality that we live in and the vehicle for our
growth. Therefore, what we reject is not the world but false
notions and ignorant clinging and attachments to it and what
it offers us. This is very important. Within Hermeticism we do
not reject the physical world. Certain aspects of Gnosticism
do and certain aspects of Gnosticism and Hermeticism do
not. We do not reject the material world. W hat we reject
is false notions and clinging to it as an ultimate source of
happiness or as the only thing that matters. We recognize
that material life is the basis for our experience and therefore
the basis for our ultimate awakening.
22 MARK STAVISH

~ Rosicrucianism ~
What do we need for the journey? We need ethics and moral­
ity in addition to the Sunday School teaching which I have
painfully reminded you of. I will go over the Six Laws of
the Fraternity. These are from Michael Maiers's Laws of
the Fraternity of the Rosie Crosse, Rosicrucianism, or the
expression of the Hermetic current in Europe (central Eu­
rope in particular) in the early seventeenth century. The six
rules are described as having come from CRC, or Christian
Rosenkreutz, to his followers. Maier comments on them (he
was physician to Rudolph II, the Holy Roman emperor):
Something may be said concerning their number of 6,
which hath very much of perfection in it; so that the society
by an abundance of laws is not in confusion, nor yet by paucity
and fewness tied up from all liberty.
1. First is that none of them (meaning none of the Fra­
ternity) should profess any other thing than to cure
the sick and do that freely. This was very important,
because at the time medical attention was very poor at
best and even the physicians were not often well-trained
or well-educated. So if you actually knew how to help
people, to relieve their suffering, you were obliged to do
so, just as we are today. Sickness is not just physical,
but it's mental and emotional as well. The commentary
that you are receiving is an oral tradition. It is not
written and occasionally you will get bits and pieces of
it. This is why this is a traditional teaching.
2. That they should not constrain to wear any distinctive
dress but follow the custom of the country. It's very
nice that many people walk around trying to show you
how enlightened they are, particularly by their dress
or garb, but all that it does often is make them stand
out more than anything else. Some of it can be quite
entertaining.
. ROSICRUCIANISM 23

One place I worked at was a school for what we politely call

Adjudicated Youth. It was an old Roman Catholic institution­
a very nice facility. They had, still have, relics in the altars.
I had a nice office with a painting on the wall. It was
by one of the Pre-Raphaelites. You've seen it. It's a woman
dressed in red standing on a black and white checkerboard
floor looking through a crystal ball. My boss used to ask me
why I had that and I'd say, "My job is looking into a crystal
ball for you." He kind of knew something wasn't quite right
but he didn't care. Until the Bishop called him once...but
that was another story.
So this one fellow-I was working a little bit later than
normal-one guy comes in from second shift. Generally I
didn't meet these folks because I wasn't there. He had a
tattoo on his arm. I looked at the tattoo and it was the
Talisman of Jupiter from the Key of Solomon. I said: "Nice
tattoo." We got to talking. The guy doesn't know anything
but let's see what else he's got. After all, it was a nice tattoo,
he probably had something else. So he lifts up his shirt and
he's got the whole Tree of Life tattooed down the front and
on the back, all the detail. Kind of like that character from
the last Dan Brown novel-he was just waiting for the last
place on the shaved top of his head to put something on.
But it wasn't doing anything for him! He'd spent a lot of
money on ink but it wasn't doing anything for him. So while
standing out can make us feel good about ourselves, feeling
good, being good, and doing good can be three very separate
things. We have created a society that really encourages
feeling good. Feeling good under the false notion that simply
feeling good is actually doing good (for others as well) too.
We were having breakfast earlier this morning. Brian's
wife was telling me about an experience she had in which
she got some soup. The soup was in a Styrofoam cup. One
of her co-workers began to give her a hard time because she
was so environmentally insensitive. We see that in a lot of
people who are wonderfully progressive. They're so good at
24 MARK STAVISH

pointing out other people's faults and how you fail to live
up to their expectations of all the "right" things you should
do. What it does is that it negates; it's a way of negating
anything good that a person has done that you don't know
about because they're not wearing it on their sleeve. They
don't have the right bumper stickers on the back of their van
or car to let you know how good they are as a person. But
being good, doing good, and feeling good aren't always the
same thing-we have to make it so that they are. It doesn't
mean we need to tell the world about it. That's what that
is about. "Do not wear any distinctive dress." Follow the
customs of your country. When in Rome, do as the Romans
do.
3. But every year, on the day of C, they should meet
at the Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum or write the
cause of their absence. I'm not really sure what the
"day of C" is. Different authors have different notions.
Is it the 100th day of the year? Is it Christmas? Is it
a particularly odd medieval Christian holiday that is
now fallen into disuse? And what is the Collegium ad
Spiritum Sanctum: the College of the Holy Spirit? It's
not a physical place. The College of the Holy Spirit is
a state of consciousness, a state of mind, a gathering
of people of the same state of consciousness-for us,
Tiphareth.
There are other definitions of what a college is, but it's
a place where people come together to learn. It is what the
Masons referred to as the "Household of the Faithful." If you
were members of a Lodge you might be called a Brother or a
Sister, or a Frater or a Soror. It's the same thing-because
I know you're familiar with this, I'll make references to it­
in the Vajrayana. You have your Vajrayana brothers and
sisters, those people you are taking teachings and vows with,
particularly empowerments with. The same thing when you've
had particular initiations with people in Western esotericism:
. ROSICRUCIANISM 25

those are your brothers and sisters. You've had this particular
unique experience with them and your obligation is to-what?
Help and support one another in that Path.
The point is that these people would meet together in a
state of mind, just as we must come together to meet in a
state of mind. We come together here to meet in a proper
state of mind to learn and to support one another in that
learning of a particular path and function.

4. Everyone should look for some worthy person of either

sex who after his decease might succeed him. You see,
it's not all about you, contrary to what modern media
might want you to know. You have to take someone or
find someone whom you can teach what you've learned
so that this does not die with you. That's what tradi­
tions are all about. That's what lineages are all about.
That you pass on what you've learned to the future.

The reason is very simple. As one fellow said to me:

"Tradition is the gift I give to myself in the future so that
we don't have to reinvent the wheel." As one lama said to
me: "I play leapfrog with my teacher until both of us reach
enlightenment. He is born, he teaches me, he dies. I am alive,
he is born, I teach him, I die. And it goes on and on and on
until we both reach enlightenment."
Much of what I tell you is only possible because of what
I was taught. It was not read from a book. I did not get it
from a correspondence course. Much of what was taught to
me was by my great uncle, which was taught to him by his
father, which was taught to him by others from the lands of
Eastern Europe where this originated. Tradition is the thing
that we give to ourselves and to others.

5. The word RC (meaning "R. C.") should be their mark,

seal and character. You will see some examples of that
later. "RC" generally means "Rosre Crucis," Rosy Cross,
because the cross is the symbol of our work, our effort,
26 MARK STAVISH

and our struggle. The unfolding of the rose is the symbol

of our illumination and it is a red rose. It is a Tudor
Rose which is a typical five-petaled rose, classically
given.
6. And that the fraternity should conceal itself every hun­
dred years. That's interesting because this talks about
the notion of cycles that we will talk about later. Right
now we live in an abundance cycle when all these teach­
ings are available, and yet there was a time when they
were not. And there's a time in the future when they
will not be available again.

Now, there are Eleven Rules:

1.
Love God above all else.
2.
Use your time to develop your soul-your consciousness.
3.
Be unselfish.
4.
Be sober, humble, active, and silent.
5.
Learn the origin of the metals in you.
6.
Beware of charlatans and liars.
7.
Constantly revere the highest good.
8.
Learn the theory before you attempt the practice.
9.
Practice charity toward all beings-all beings. That
means the animals. That means the people. That means
dead people. That means invisible beings you are trying
to supplicate or commune with. That may even mean a
few invisible beings who are harmful and an obstacle to
your Path. You need to find how you can be charitable
towards them, too.
10. Read the ancient books of wisdom
11. Strive to understand their meaning. Don't just read
them, try to understand them.

Then there were 16 secret signs:

1. A member of the Order is patient.

. ROSICRUCIANISM 27

2. He is compassionate.
3. He is incapable of envy.
4. He is not a bragger.
5. He is not proud.
6. He is not debauched.
7. He is not greedy.
8. He is not easily roused to anger.
9. He thinks no evil of others.
10. He loves righteousness.
11. He loves truth.
12. He knows how to remain silent.
13. He believes what he has learned. That is: have faith in
what you've learned, what you've experienced.
14. His hope does not fail-meaning that he is eternally
confident. Hope does not fail. You've got the goal and
you're moving towards it.
15. He does not falter during suffering. How often do you
see people with the greatest aspirations? They exclaim,
"The universe is your catalog. You just poke it and get
what you want!" Then when reality hits all that positive
thinking goes out of the window pretty quick. Reality
can be tough.
16. He will always be a member of the Brotherhood-mean­
ing a fraternity.

And if you look, these are all very similar-although this

was written during the early seventeenth century-this is all
very similar to the descriptions of the vows of a bodhisattva.
And bodhisattva means-what? Awakened heart, courageous
heart. The heart is the focal point in what we call enlight­
enment, hence the symbol of the Rosy Cross; the heart and
roses are always on the left. Their sum is-what? Six plus
eleven plus sixteen. What's the sum? Thirty-three. And what
do we get when we do it by numerological reduction? Six.
And what does "six" correspond to on the Tree of Life? The
Sun.
28 MARK STAVISH

Why do we travel? Because we have to. We do this because

we have to. No one makes us. It's just some perverse inner
impulse that obsessively drives us forward. W hat vehicle do
we use? This is from an Egyptian manuscript. It's from the
God Khephera, the God of Immortality, which is a scarab
beetle:

I became the Creator of what came into being. I came

into being in the form of Khephera coming into being
in primeval times. I became the Creator of what came
into being.

That is to say, I produced myself from primeval matter

which I made. Again, we are self-created beings. "I produced
myself from the primeval matter."

~ Cosmology: Alchemy, Magic, and Astrology ~

This is where we get into interesting points, because we have
two views of the cosmos: one which would be theistic or
deistic and the other which is atheistic, but metaphysically
atheistic, not materialistic. Now, the vehicles that we have
before us we think of as:

1. General mysticism, which involves contemplation and

deals with the relationship between consciousness and
the divine;
2. Alchemy, which deals with the relationship between
consciousness and matter;
3. Kabbalah, which deals with the relationship between
consciousness and symbols; and
4. Astrology, which deals with the relationship of conscious­
ness and cycles.

In the end we're always dealing with a triangle of energy,

matter, and consciousness. We're always looking at how these
interrelate.
 COSMOLOGY: ALCHEMY, MAGIC, AND ASTROLOGY 29

Now with alchemy we can call them mercury, salt, and

sulfur. We can refer to them as spirit, matter, and mind.
We can do spirit, body, and soul; or as classical mysticism
gnosis, logos, and nous. Nous is mind, but it's a mind that
is all-encompassing. It is an intuitive awareness of things. It
is a direct perception. And from that one derives gnosis, or
knowledge or wisdom. Logos is Word, but it also means a
kind of body, because it's the Word that becomes flesh. "In
the beginning was the Word," the first line in the Gospel
of John. The Gospel of John is one of the four gospels, not
synoptic like the first three. Does anyone know what that
means? The first three gospels pretty much line up. You can
take them and they talk about the same stuff, more or less in
the same order, with the Gospel of Mark being the shortest
of all the gospels. The Gospel of John is very different in
its structure. In my undergraduate days I spent an entire
semester just going over the first few verses of the Gospel of
John.
I have some things here about magic that's of importance
to us because rituals can be very simple or very complex,
depending on the practice you're doing. If you're doing high
ceremonial magic, such as the Golden Dawn style, you know
that this is very complex. If you're doing work with the
grimoires, you know that it can be very simple at times but
kind of difficult in terms of fulfilling their requirements of the
work.
If you're doing folk magic-particularly with brauche,
which was common among the Pennsylvania Germans which
I am familiar with-this is a folk system, or systems, because
it's a variety of different ways of doing things that is rooted in
medieval and Renaissance German magical practices known
technically as "Germanic Hermeticism," which includes the
works of Paracelsus, and Agrippa, and Trithemius. Agrippa
I'm sure most of you know, but also sometimes the writings
of Boehme-and Swedenborg also, later on-being included.
Now according to Agrippa-Cornelius Agrippa, that is-
30 MARK STAVISH

Agrippa affirms that sacred ceremonies and the rites sur­

rounding them have such virtue or power, that even if they
are not understood by the operator, they are effective. And
this is the fundamental practice of what we call folk magic
or superstition: that even if something is not understood, if
you believe enough in it, it can have some effect. Of course
the more you know about it, in theory, the better off you'll
be. You don't want to do things out of ignorance. Agrippa
later goes on to state that firm, constant faith works wonders
even in the course of a failed operation, whereas mistrust and
hesitation in the soul of the worker, who holds himself aloof
from all excess, lead to dissipated efforts and ruin. As Jesus
said: "If you have the faith of a mustard seed you can say
to this mountain, 'Go down into the ocean,' and it will go
down." So it takes faith or confidence, a firm conviction, to
achieve anything in this world or in any other.
It's no different in your work. Most of you have undertaken
something you've applied to a program or a school. When
you get in your car every day you have to have faith that the
engine is going to turn over until that occasion happens when
it doesn't. But then you have faith in your cell phone that
the auto club will come and tow you to the Happy Land of
the mechanic. And then you hope and fear that the mechanic
will be someone you know and will not charge you three
times the amount it will cost to fix you as a stranded traveler.
Our attitude imbues everything that we do; we just don't
often recognize it. So faith and confidence in your actions,
particularly in any actions with others, is critical to the
outcome.
Most of you have played sports at some time. Remember
we tell our children: when you get hit by the ball, what do
you do? You get back in there. Don't let that fear grab you.
Get back on that horse, you ride it. Go to it. So it's the same
with anything. You start a business. You have to have faith in
your ability to start, run, and succeed in the business. Many
people have faith in their ability to start it, but not to run
. COSMOLOGY: ALCHEMY, MAGIC, AND ASTROLOGY 31

it, or to succeed in it. The point is you have to have firm

conviction in the end goal, the end result and its achievability.
This is an interesting statement: "W hereas mistrust and
hesitation in the soul of the worker (we know what that is),
who holds himself aloof from all excess (I like that, because
we see people in that elevated state)..." I like in the Book of
Revelation, Jesus says: "I wish they were hot or cold, but if
you are lukewarm I spit you out." And the reason is simple:
because lukewarm water doesn't make good tea. And, as
Goethe says in Faust, even the Devil doesn't respect a lazy
man. That's why you got to call on the Devil three times, or
say your prayers three times.
The point is that you have to have effort in what you
do. And effort takes focus. And that takes, in our minds,
emotions. Emotions are the energies that make it work. This
thing in part is working right now not because of the dry
intellectual stuff I'm telling you but because of the emotions.
You're happy; you're being entertained; you're laughing at
my silly jokes. We both educate you and entertain you at the
same time. At the very least you'll have a good time. You
may even practice something. That would be wonderful. But
it's the emotions that tie us all together and make this a
memorable and good experience, a successful experience. It's
the emotions that will make your work a strong conviction,
a strong feeling that makes your occult work of any kind
successful.
Magical ceremonies may be regarded as a sort of gymnastic
exercise of will power. For that reason, all the great teachers of
the world have recommended them as proper and efficacious.
The more one does, the more one can do in the future. Those
who watch, those who fast, those who pray, those who refrain
from pleasure, those who place body at the command of mind
can bring all the powers of nature into subjection to their
purpose. Essentially, nature doesn't respect laziness. You
know that when you push yourself, you're able to do more...
in anything. This is simple. This is not rocket science. We are
32 MARK STAVISH

told, "As above, so below." We like to think that somehow

the inner world is easier than the outer world. It obeys the
same laws. In fact, it's the outer world that obeys the laws
of the inner world. We have to in fact reverse our notion of
things, because the world that you live in is an effect, not a
cause. You keep treating it like it's a cause. You must look at
the outer world as an effect and that your mind is the cause.
And not so much the trees out there, but your world, the
world you live in, the world and the bed that you get up in
every day, the doors you walk through. That's an effect, an
effect created by your cause. That's what esotericism, all this
practical occultism, is all about. That's it, but what are the
requirements? Many of the magical texts assume the magical
requirements; they assume you are knowledgeable.
Daniel and I were talking earlier about how he's doing
work with the Hebrew letters, and because of his knowledge
of Hebrew it has a whole different meaning to him. That's a
certain cultural thing. Magical texts you read were written
in a culture for a time and a place that no longer exists. I
have to re-educate you about Sunday School stuff just so you
can begin to look at the most fundamental and basic things.
That's okay. That's my job. I'm okay with it. I don't like
it. But that's a certain reality you have to grasp. You don't
even know that's a reality. I have to inform you of it. There
are little things you don't know that you need to know that
the average ten- or twelve-year-old child in the Renaissance
took for granted.
One of the greatest problems a lot of folks coming here
from other places ... They always like to rush, and I go back
because I run into them so much and spend so much time
with them off and on. These people want to run off and
study inner fire and yoga and stuff like this. These guys come
over here from Nepal or Bhutan or maybe there are some of
the older ones who fled Tibet during the Chinese invasion.
They say: "The things that our children understand we have
to teach you." Now, they didn't say it that way; they are
. THE ARBATEL 33

more polite. But that's the way it is. The things our children
understand, we have to teach you. Then they tell you it will
take you twenty years before they'll teach you something. You
walk out the door because you don't want to spend twenty
years.
Now, fortunately, I can teach you things and it will take
you seven or ten years, so it won't take you twenty. But you
have to re-learn a lot of stuff you forgot, or at least begin
to look at it in a new perspective, particularly if you want
a lot of this medieval magic. I know you like Joe Lisiewski.
Everyone likes Joe. I like Joe, too. But again, it's a notion
of what do you bring to the table? What is the package of
experience you bring? And that's a cultural one as well. So
when you're saying these names, these divine names, you have
to have a sense of what they mean. It's much more helpful.
But it's also what are understood to be the requirements;
there are moral and ethical ones. Some of the grimoires don't
mention them at all; some of them do.

~ The Arbatel ~
Now, the Arbatel does mention some rules. Here are several.
The second requirement is that a person should descend
into himself to carefully examine what parts are mortal and
immortal. It assumes you are already undertaking a mystical
path before you try to undertake a magical one. You have
undertaken inner reflection about yourself before you try to
move things around in the world.
Do you see the importance with that? If you don't clean
the house before you start moving, what happens? All the
dust bunnies come out. Not only the little dust bunnies under
your bed. There are flying dust dragons in the air. Then the
asthma attack starts. Then your eyes are watering. What
started out as an easy and simple project of moving the
couch becomes a disaster. You must descend within yourself
first. You must undertake a mystical path first before you
34 MARK STAVISH

undertake an occult one, as you must look within before you

try to change things without.
Thirdly, in contemplating his immortal soul-that is,
consciousness-learn to worship, love, and fear (fear means to
respect) the eternal God. Contemplation of his (that is, the
magician's) mortality should lead him to do what he knows
will please God in the benefit of his neighbor.
The seventh requirement, which here we seek: you have
to look at your life. You will stand before judgment, whether
it be Ma'at, or whether it be St. Peter, or whether it be the
Crocodile God, or whatever it's going to be, you're going to
have to look into the mirror of your actions and account for
what you've done. You'll look in the mirror and account for
what you've done when you're dead because there's no hiding
from it then. You have to make sure that you understand
cause and effect, karma, before you start trying to move stuff
around in the outer world through some old grimoire, or
whatever practice you're doing. Importantly, know what will
please God and what benefit your neighbor. This isn't just
about you.
The seventh requirement-and this is very different, be­
cause I know all of you have a lot of experience and a lot of
contemporary spirituality ( which is essentially narcissism in a
nice package). There is a very limited form of enlightenment
that it can get you. It has a definite end point. The seventh
requirement for the aspiring magus is the highest degree of
justice; namely, he should support nothing which is wicked,
unfair, or unjust, or even entertain such thoughts, and thus
he will be divinely protected from all evil.
You don't even entertain the thought. You don't have
anything to worry about, do you? Because like is only known
by like.
Much is achieved by our mind through faith, which
is a firm belief, a fixed intention, and a complete
absorption of the operator or recipient, and it assists
in every matter and lends strength to every deed we
. CREATIVE VISUALIZATION 35

wish to do, so that what may be called an image is

formed inside us of the power to be assimilated and
the thing to be performed in us or by us.
Therefore in every work and application we must
employ a strong desire, must stretch our imagination,
and must have the most sanguine hope and firmest
faith, for this contributes very much to success. 1

~ Creative Visualization ~
To give a simple example, when you're trying to visualize the
car that you want: "Ah, geesh, I want a car, ahh man, let's
see, do I want a BMW? Oh yeah I do, but can I afford the
repairs on it? Ah, geesh, I think I'm not going to get a BMW.
I'm going to go with a Saturn. Oh, no, they're out of business.
I can get it used, but the used car market is so expensive.
And Saturn parts may be expensive, too. I'm feeling guilty
about not being green enough. I want a hybrid. But hybrids
are so outrageously expensive. I can't really afford one. Ah,
jeez, maybe I'll just get an old Chevy down the street..." How
many of you have not gone through that process? You're dead
before you even began. And you know it, right? You throw
up your hands in despair and walk away. And it doesn't just
happen to be with our magical operations, but it can be with
your professional ones as well.
The firm image. It doesn't take much creative vision on my
part to remember what-I'll call her-"Jane" in the third row
of my eighth-grade algebra class looked like. I can visualize
her quite clearly and easily. I also know as well what my firm
and fixed intentions were ... (Might still be, but I didn't go to
the reunion, so I don't know!)
You know what I'm talking about here, don't you? You
know what I mean in the broader picture of things? That if
you really want to do or achieve something, you don't have
1
H. C. Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Book r, Chapter LXVI.
36 MARK STAVISH

to work at it. That is, work on the image. I tell people, when
I wanted to write a book, I didn't visualize a stack of papers.
What I visualized is very simple. ·when I say, "visualized", it
was more of a feeling than anything. Because I didn't know
what the cover would look like. But I knew what the weight
would be like. I know what the feeling of holding a book is
like and what my name looks like. So the idea of saying "I
wrote this" or "this is mine" was very easily fixed. I didn't
have to worry about the details. I didn't have to worry about
the cover, or the publisher, or any of that stuff. I went to the
end goal. And that was very easily achieved. That image very
easily brought itself to me. So pay attention to the images
that first arise. Pay close attention to them.
In fact, probably the best advice I'm going to give you
right now-or anyone ever has given you-is that when you
sit to meditate, pay close attention to the images that im­
mediately arise, the thoughts and the ideas. Now, you may
write them down, you may follow them for a little while, you
may ignore them, but pay attention to them, because those
are the things that are closest right behind your threshold
of consciousness and are important to you. You may not like
them; you may not want them to be important to you. They
may be something that's very good for you that you have
been thinking about for a long time. But they are important,
so pay attention to those images. It's nothing like the stuff
that first happens when you say, "Now I lay me down to sleep."
You lie down, you're relaxed, and then stuff comes up. What
is it? It's usually stuff that's annoying to you-anxieties,
fears, all this kind of crap. That's good. Pay attention to
it. Don't ignore it. You've got to learn to deal with it. You
have to find either an emotional way to deal with it-that
is, at first in the attitude of "this too shall pass"-or I have
no control over that and therefore I don't worry about it,
or I have control over it and this is what I will do and take
responsibility for it. It's one or the other, but it's "act."
People talk about self-mastery and mastery of life and they
. ST. MARTIN AND BOEHME 37

act as if somehow this means being some puppet master on

the creative forces of the universe. It doesn't. What it means
is acting and taking responsibility for things. In the occult
sense, you act from the perspective of the mind first. You act
from the perspective of a broader unity first. You just don't
do things impulsively. You bring yourself into a harmonious
state we call "cosmic consciousness" or "illumination" or
"oneness." You try to bring yourself into a more harmonious
state and then act from there, from that center point. But
you still must act. In Kabbalah we are in Assiah, the world
of action. It's action is what brings karma (cause and effect)
into fruition or completion.

~St.Martin and Boehme~

Louis Claude de Saint-Martin was a student of Martinez

de Pasqually, the great Portuguese occultist of the mid­
eighteenth century. Martinez de Pasqually was a man of
many titles, many spellings of his name, dubious Masonic
charter, and a man who had the most profound influence
on the French occult world. He established the Order of the
Elect Priests of the Universe of the "Elus Cohens." This was
a quasi-Masonic body that involved very exquisite ceremonial
rites often lasting six to eight hours. They are incredibly long.
His student, Saint-Martin, decided at some point he didn't
want to do this anymore, even though he was successful at
it. His statement was: "Is all of this necessary to know God?"
He also learned German so he could translate Boehme out of
German into French.
Boehme was quite popular at the time. Boehme and
Swedenborg, Emanuel Swedenborg, these are two Northern
European "theosophers." That is, they had philosophical
speculations on the cosmos, the universe, from somewhat of
an occult perspective. Their writings were brought over to this
country very early into Pennsylvania. They also influenced the
more occult Masonic orders of the period. Saint-Martin said-
38 MARK STAVISH

also he managed to be one of the few nobility who survived

the Revolution unscathed-he said: "To attain complete and
holy initiation, there is no mystery other than to plunge
deeper and deeper into the depths of our being, and not let
go until we have managed to extract from it the living and
vital root." Gnothi seauton: know thyself. That is forever
inscribed on the portals of the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
We all want to take this journey, but how do we know?
Who has gone there before us? That is where we need to
talk about the role of the teacher, the teachings, and the
community on the path. According to Dante, initiation puts
us on the straight path. There is a Masonic saying that
says the object of the quest is the way of the quest. It's not
something that you attain; it's something that you do. You
see this in Vajrayana. The path, the seed, and the fruit are
one.
We have three cornerstones to the Tradition. These are
the teacher, the teachings, and the student or students. Some
traditions only get passed down one or two students at a
time. They have very thin threads. We see this reflected
again in the structure of Masonic Lodges. We see reference
in Hermeticism to what is known as ''adoption." It's known
as Hermetic adoption; it's the technical phrase. We see this
in some of the writings, particularly Elias Ashmole. Elias
Ashmole is responsible, in part, for the survival of the writings
of Dr. John Dee. Dee was the Queen's eyes, 007, her spy; he
knew Michael Maier. They were both in Prague at the same
time doing alchemy. Ashmole's diaries refer to his Masonic
initiation. They refer to his other things, but then there's
a single note that makes reference to his adoption. That
alone tells us what his relationship was to the man who
adopted him. Because why would a man adopt another grown
man? He was his student. This was his adoption. For this to
work, a teacher must have a knowledge of the teachings, a
demonstrated practice, and the ability to transmit both the
academic and practical aspects clearly and concisely.
. THE CORNERSTONES 39

~ The Cornerstones ~
The Teachings. They must have a valid source, proven
effectiveness, and intact written and/ or verbal trans­
missions.
The Companions, that is, the Students. They are often
known by the technical phrase, "the Companions." Oth­
ers can be Fratres or Sorores, brothers and sisters, those
who have gone before us, who go with us, and will come
after us on the journey. You are all companions to one
another. You are all helping one another on the work.
Companions are the living link in the chain because
without them there are no future masters. And without
future teachers, there's no oral tradition. And when
there's just the written tradition, the system is dead.
It can be revived. It is possible because initiation takes
place on two levels. One is horizontal, which is histori­
cal, which is lineage-to-lineage, person-to-person, and
the other is vertical, a descent, an awakening.

Theoretically, whenever you undertake an initiation (in a

temple or for some particular reason) ideally both should be
there. Then you have the awakening. Even if you don't get
the big "Aha!"-the lightning flash-don't worry, the seed is
there and the seed can be nurtured.
That's what we're talking about: how to nurture the seed.
Learning how to cooperate with one another is part of being
an adult. We tell children to play nice. How often in these
esoteric and so-called spiritual groups do we not see the most
loathsome behavior human beings can muster, all signing the
email with "Blessed Be" or "Bright Blessings" after they've
said the most scathing and horrific things? It is just the way
things are. You distance yourself from people who are like
that because you cannot help them and they are doing no
help to you. But you have to also, at the same time, realize
you cannot isolate yourself completely. That is, the Hermetic
40 MARK STAVISH

isolation is a temporary thing. You're always in the world.

You cannot separate from it. That is how we learn how to
be imperturbable in the midst of life. Because if you're not
imperturbable in the midst of life, when someone in your
Lodge is saying you're doing something you don't particularly
like, you're not exactly going to be in the state of mind to
deal with what's coming up in your magical invocation.
The three essentials are faith, hope, and charity.

FAITH. Faith is confidence in the instructions you're

receiving, the teacher who's providing it, and
the source of the tradition from which it has
come. If you have faith in the teachings but you don't
have any faith in me, then it undermines your ability
to practice. If you have faith in me but you don't have
faith in what I'm telling you, then there's nothing for
you to practice. Whether the teaching comes from an
inner revelation, or from a written tradition, or from
an oral lineage one thousand years old is irrelevant if
you don:t have faith and believe that it can help you.
You need faith in all three.

HOPE. Hope is optimism or a positive outlook on

the future, both in the spiritual sense and in
the teachings. In the mundane sense, in the physical
world where your illumination expresses itself, they say
it takes place in the mind, but the mind is right here,
in physical life. You have to have hope that no matter
what is in front of you, you can deal with it.

I often give an example of this. We are fortunate enough

to live in a very wealthy age in which most of us do not
know true suffering. We know suffering-not getting what we
want-but our suffering is nominal compared to what goes
on in other times and places. We are told that through the
power of the mind we can do anything. Yes, you can. But
. THE CORNERSTONES 41

sometimes that "anything" does not manifest in the exact

way we like it to, does it?
Careful what you ask for, you will get it.
I'm reminded of the fellow that I worked for when I was
a child. I worked "under the table" ( off the books) at a local
grocery store, as did my brother. The fellow we worked for
had the good fortune of being born in the southeastern-most
reaches of Slovakia in 1913. At the age of twenty-five, he
found himself drafted into the Czech army to spend some
time in the wonderful rolling hills of Bohemia Moravia where
the Sudeten Deutsch lived. He happened to spend three years
there until the Third Reich decided... Well, the French and
the British and the Italians decided that they could decide
Czechoslovakia's fate. Hopefully you know this: the Third
Reich annexed Bohemia and Moravia in 1938. What wasn't
known, what most people don't know, was that everybody
got a little piece of the pie. Czechoslovakia had only been
formed as a nation in 1919 at the Treaty of Versailles. There
were Poles living in Slovakia so the Poles got a piece of it.
That didn't last too long as Poland was invaded in September
1939. The Hungarians also got a little piece of the action,
too.
Now our boss is a young man, he goes back home, after
serving three years in the military, and he's told-not only is
his family dead-but he's told he's going to serve three more
years in the army. His response was,: "I just did three years!"
And the Hungarians said: "But not in our army."
Now the only good news for him was that he could read
and write Hungarian. As you may have probably guessed,
most Hungarians at that time, outside of major cities, were
not very literate. He had the bad fortune of being, like so
many young men, placed in the infantry, and the good fortune
of being made a company clerk because he could write reports.
Somehow this managed to keep him alive for a period of time,
even though he ended up-as he said: "I marched 1,500 miles
into Russia and I marched 1,500 miles out."
42 MARK STAVISH

Nine out of ten men who marched 1,500 miles into Russia
never left. He managed to get out. In the meantime he said:
"Things aren't going too well here. I think it's good to learn
Russian." He did a stint in hard labor, too, along the way,
along with some anti-partisan work at night. On the way out
of Russia they said, "we have to shoot all of our Jews in the
morning," and gave him a chance to escape. They liked him.
He wrote up some more reports for them, leaving the dates
blank so they could file them. That was telling him tonight
is the night to go across no man's land. Because normally
when they sent him out, they sent him out to drag in the
dead horses, which was dinner.
He gets over to the Russians. The Russians at this time
were taking any prisoners of war that they had liberated­
meaning Russians who had surrendered to the advancing
Axis forces-treating them as traitors and strapping them to
the fronts of their tanks in chains so they could catch bullets.
At that time, the Russians would send up the first line of
troops with guns. They would get cut down. Then the second
line would not have rifles and they would pick them up from
the dead. Then the third line would repeat this process. And
they would repeat this process until they finally overwhelmed
what was left of the German lines, or the Hungarians, or
the Romanians, or whomever they were fighting. You have
to understand this because what happens is, he gets to the
Russians, he speaks Russian, and they make him a supply
sergeant. Is not the hand of God over this fellow in a strange
and perverse way?
I just say this to you because, clearly, he survived and
came to the United States, made a life for himself, a good life,
a successful one, and eventually with his wife (who was in
Birkenau for eighteen months; that was the women's wing of
Auschwitz), went over to Israel. The fact is they had children
and a good life. Based on what they had earlier, I don't know
how much "visualizing yourself in Tahiti" would have worked.
It takes a strong and powerful confidence and faith that you
. THE CORNERSTONES 43

can and will survive the situation.

You understand what I'm talking about here? Sometimes
that's what it comes down to. I say this because he was
devoutly religious. That's hope. Sometimes that's what hope
comes down to. Not about hoping for the new car. It's good
to have it. I like it. But we have to look at the life situation
we're in. If he was spinning his visualizations hoping for a
new Rolls-Royce, I don't think that would... who knows? It
might have worked out for him. It might have. Hope is a firm
confidence that you can deal with what life has in front of
you and that you will be successful.
That's faith and hope. Hope is positive outlook on the
future and charity is generosity. Generosity is very impor­
tant because generosity means we are without fear. We have
compassion. This is the sphere of Chesed. This is where we
give. We give without concern of loss. You can't give and be
concerned with loss. You can't be charitable and...well, you
have to be wise in your charity. You don't want to be foolish,
but you give.
Of these three essentials, faith has distractions, distrac­
tions that keep us from expressing it. We call these the
demons of the path. And the demons, the obstacles to
faith, are distraction, laziness, and criticism.

Distraction. Distraction is everything that keeps us from

practicing right now, putting it off until tomorrow,
putting it off until later. Do it right now. Three sec­
onds ...a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Three or four minutes of meditation now is worth an
hour later that never happens. It's worth more than
that. Three or four minutes now. Right now. Negative
emotions, stinking thinking, all that kind of dualism,
anything that gets you away from the work.

Laziness. That's procrastination. Do it right now. Procras­

tination is basically self-dissolution.
44 MARK STAVISH

Criticism. This is being overly analytical. We're not asking

you to be stupid. You cannot be stupid and be wise at
the same time. What you have to do is realize when
the time of thinking has stopped and the time of acting
or the time of simply acceptance has begun.

This is just the way it is. We can theorize about the way
things should or ought to be, but they're not. This is what's in
front of us; let's move forward. It's very easy to get distracted
with criticisms. Whenever you're saying: "I'm amazed, look
at that; by God, he picks his nose; oh, belly button lint; look
at those shoes." All that kind of stuff that goes on. You do
it to yourself. You do it to your friends. You do it to your
neighbors. You do it to your teachers. You do it so you don't
have to listen to them. You do it to all sorts of things. Just
stop it. And the way to stop it is this: when you go down a
bad path with your thinking, ask yourself, "To what end am
I doing this? Who does this help? Who does this harm? And
what will be the results of this thinking?" That's all you got
to do. What good does this serve? And you'll realize: time
to stop. And then you'll start thinking about something that
will be worthwhile. That's where prayers or affirmations or
mantras come in handy. Because as soon as you realize your
mind is going in the direction that's not healthy, you bring it
back to what is healthy. It's very simple.
Hope is expressed in the three forms of optimism,
positive indifference, equanimity, a joyful practice
that is free of the curse of lust for results. Demonic
obstacles are pessimism, attraction and revulsion, and
seeking of signs.

Pessimism. Pessimism is just thinking, negative thinking.

It can often be cloaked under the veils of rationalism
or realism. Of course, realism doesn't sell; doesn't sell
in our mind and it doesn't sell in the world. At a point,
it's a non-starter. You still have to act. And you don't
act from the point of "oh, geez, I have to do this." You
. THE CORNERSTOl\'"ES 45

act from the point of emotion. You need something to

move you forward.

Attraction. Attraction or revulsion is simply duality in

practice. That's the thing that keeps you trapped in
suffering. Reduce the power of attraction on you and
then you don't get anything added to your list of dis­
tractions.

Seeking of signs. This is a kind of spiritual materialism

where you simply are obsessed with psychic phenomena,
paranormal things, past-life regressions, approval from
others about your work. People are always talking about
the experiences they've had. They can be useful at times
for circulation and to help you, but to become overly
concerned about them is just to get trapped in the
delusional fantasies of your own mind. This can also
apply to degree-collecting in esoteric and occult orders.
Don't be seeking signs.

CHARITY. Charity or mercy expresses itself in the

forms of giving wealth, wisdom, and life itself.
Demonic obstacles are selfishness, fear of loss,
and the curse of perfectionism.

Selfishness. Selfishness is the path of only helping myself. I

care only about myself and what I am going to get. I
may care a little bit about others close to me, because
what affects them can impact on me.
Fear of loss. Fear of loss is being obsessed with limitations.
It's failure to see the fundamental nature of your being
as all-inclusive and encompassing. In the end you're
going to die and you're going to lose everything anyhow,
so plan accordingly. I think one fellow said it quite well,
Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma order in exile,
said never miss the opportunity to do a good deed,
46 MARK STAVISH

no matter how small, because that all adds up. You

habituate yourself in small doses to goodness, the good
actions, and to thinking and helping others. "Dear God.
Please let me win the Mega Ball. If you give me the
lottery I'll do such good with it, I promise." You don't
win, because you're a liar. You're lying to yourself
and you're lying to the Cosmos. The Cosmos at least
is smart enough to know you're a liar. You're dumb
enough to actually believe the crap you tell yourself. I
can tell who would do good with the lottery right now
by passing a hat around and seeing who puts money in
it and who doesn't. I can tell right now how much you
would do with the lottery based upon what you give
right now to charity. It doesn't have to always be to the
Children's Hospital, but either to your local library or
to anything. I can tell. I can tell from your tax returns.
You have to be honest with yourself. Take advantage
of the opportunities you have right now to do good, no
matter what they are.

The curse of perfectionism. This is the desire to act only

when the proper conditions are in place. As such, actions
are never undertaken. It's got to be perfect. Sometimes
you just got to kill your inner Virgo. You really have
to tack that one down. Because what will happen is
while I want my accountant, my airline mechanic, my
surgeon, and other things like that to be at their anal­
retentive best, in certain things it no longer helps but
hinders, because you freeze yourself up from acting.
You're thinking that if I get all the right conditions in
place, like a series of dominoes, everything will happen
mechanically just the way it should, without my inner
impulse or my inner act. That's what happens with that.
And the curse of perfectionism is just that. You fail to
look at the importance of everything. You're looking
only at the importance of one thing and you're stuck
. THE CORNERSTONES 47

in duality. You have to look at the good of everything.

It may not be the great bunnies, and puppies, and
sunshine that we'd like it to be, but we have to look
at what is good at that moment that we can extract
from it. That's the alchemical essence. We take poisons
and extract something good from them. That's what
we do from life. You extract from toxic situations and
emotions the energies that move you forward on the
path. Those of you who've done some evocation know
that you essentially have to extract from that very toxic
environment something useful to move you forward.
In the end this tells us that what we can ask are five
questions, that we can ask about anything:
1. What is the purpose of teachings?
2. What is the source of those teachings?
3. What is the path involved from beginning to end?
4. What can I expect from the work, that is, what will
the results be?
(a) There is a difference between saying "what will
this do for me" rather than lusting for it. If you go
to college and get a degree, it's fair to ask: "Well,
what will this degree do for me?" Take a medicine
and you ask the doctor or your healthcare provider:
"I'm glad to take this tea that tastes like gym socks,
but what's it going to do for me?"
5. And how's the path compared to other methods?
(a) All paths aren't the same. They don't all lead to
the same goal. How does this compare? What is
expected of me? We can talk about alchemy, but
really you need a lab to do it in. It's not all just
abstract meditations.
48 MARK STAVISH

Then we have three vows on the path. This is

about poverty, obedience, and chastity.

1. Poverty is essentially discrimination. You have to dis­

criminate between what is important, what is needed
and what is not, what is essential and what is non­
essential.

2. Obedience is your teacher, is your friend and guide.

Your friend and guide will assist you, but you have to
respect their experience and assistance, and subjugate
your own views and adopt new ways of thinking and
practicing so you can get a benefit from it. Otherwise,
you're not walking the path. What too many are looking
for is someone to pat them on the head and tell them
what they are already doing is all right and now they
can give it a new name and can sell it or talk about it.
You have to follow the directions you're given.

3. Chastity is purity. While this often refers to sexual

purity, it means an inner purity in terms of removing
those attractions and defilements that keep us from di­
rectly experiencing illumination. You have to constantly
recognize those things that are getting in the way and
remove them.

All of these paths have what we call outer, inner,

initiatic, and supreme levels.

1. Outer is often in the form of the church teachings

which you have forgotten, which have to do more with
a collective moral training.

2. Inner practices have to do somewhat with a spiritual

experience, such as actualizing it through prayer. Many
people go to church and do good things, but they don't
really pray much or think much about the rituals. "Inner"
is where you take that on a deeper level, where you
. THE CORNERSTONES 49

take that inwardly and you actually want to realize

the meanings within the framework of the Church or
religious organization.

3. Initiatic is where you actually have a deeper resonance

to these teachings that actually goes into the point of
what inspires the organization or organized movement,
where you begin to transcend it but you still use the
form and structure and symbols as a mechanism for that.
Initiatic structure is where personal and individualized
awakening begins to take place, but it's still reflected
in a form or structure.

4. And then there's what we call a Supreme level, or

Direct Realization, a direct level. This is where you
have a direct knowing of all these things. This is the
ultimate goal. This takes place only within the confines
of your own mind, in your own direct experience. It is
the final leg of the journey.

There are different types of seekers on the path:

1. Those who will do the minimum amount of work and

need teaching that applies to that level.

2. Then there are those who are somewhat competent.

They're somewhat motivated but they need help; they
need push; they need framework. Not unlike many of
us.

3. And then there are the superiors, those who really can
take something and run with it, and stay focused, and
extract all the essence from it. You see some of those
as well. Most of us probably have our moments of great
peak activity and then we fall into slovenliness and then
we get back in the middle again. Again, stay where you
can; stay as best you can on the path.
50 MARK STAVISH

Where is the kingdom of heaven? It is within us. These

powers that we have, as we develop we will expand our powers
of awakening, our powers of awareness, because as we get rid
of the obscuration and the veils, the "alchemical scoria," as
it's called, as we work away or peel back the sheathes of the
Qliphoth that obstruct us from having a direct knowledge
between the inner and outer worlds-these are demons, if you
will. As you practice you will begin to have four capacities
that will develop within:

1. Exorcism. One is what we call-these are not clear

names, these are names that I've had to create in order
to describe these activities-one we would say is exor­
cism. That's clearing away obstacles to return to our
normal state within duality. We're here in the world,
but we're beginning to clear away obstacles. This is
where Jesus casts out demons and does healing. You
can't actualize yourself on the path when you have
these obstacles. We have to get rid of them. You can't
go running if you have a busted foot. You have to heal
it. It's very hard to get progress on the path if you're
always burdened by the worries of bills, or personal
problems, or other people's problems. You have to learn
to exorcise or get these things out of your sphere so
that they no longer impact you. They may still be there
to some degree, but we learn to get rid of them in terms
of their impact on us. We see that in the gospel. I use
"E's" for all these.

2. Enchanting. I like to think of the meaning of words

such as "enchanting." I like the word "enchanting" be­
cause the word "chant" actually means to verbalize or
vocalize psychic power. That's where words or chants
come in. That's why the power of the word is so im­
portant. That's to bring conditions in to influence or
control. Once you've weakened or removed these oppos­
ing conditions, to bring ones under your direction that
. THE CORNERSTONES 51

you want, to create desirable conditions in your life, you

can achieve the work you want. That can be as simple
as cleaning up clutter. Getting rid of the old books that
you have that you haven't looked at in years and they
don't do you any good. A lot of things. Creating new
conditions so you can have new effects. We get rid of
conditions we don't want; we create new conditions for
the thing we do want. It's very simple. That we see by
Jesus turns water into wine. He was asked to do that.
He didn't do it because he wanted to do it. His mother
came to him and said we ran out of wine, can you make
some?
3. Expansion. The next is expansion. Once you've cre­
ated the state, you expand. You expand on the resources
you have. Jesus demonstrates this by multiplying bread
and fishes. People don't grasp this. This was not an act
of charity. He said go into a town and preach the gospel.
If they don't take it, then leave. He didn't say beat
them over the head with it. He said leave. Okay-leave.
What he did with the loaves and fishes, he said the
poor will always be with you. He wasn't writing out
checks every month on the public toll. What he did
was he knew that these people had followed him all day
long to hear teachings, and that they needed food and
water and bread to continue to maintain their health
and strength to continue to receive teachings. They
were doing something positive and active with their life.
They were there to improve their life. And he in turn
supported that, not just with words, but with physical
results. And there's the transmutation: why he did this
alchemical act. This wasn't what we think as an act of
charity.
4. Eradication. This is where you eliminate any of the
seeds that are residual within yourself to your illumi­
nation. This is demonstrated in the gospel by Jesus
52 MARK STAVISH

chasing the money changers out of the temple. You just

get rid of that. Now remember that set up a cause for
the effect which would be the arrest and the crucifixion,
which was essential to his resurrection, which in the
Christian context gives us the Body of Light.

~ Nothingness ~
If you notice almost all of the things Jesus is attributed with
were done by various characters in the Old Testament (as the
Christians refer to it), which is often not understood, it's not
seen. But they were done, in different points. Particularly we
have the visions of Ezekiel. We have these transformations into
Metatron, angelic being. And we have Enoch's transformation
into Metatron, into the Archangel. This is a point that is
missed on a lot of people: an angelic transformation that
sees the face of God. It's basically saying one-on-one there.
There's no difference really. He's the individual who now can
take the absolute and transmit it to the rest of us. The rest
can't hear it. It's crushing. But here is someone who can hear
that and transmit it to others.
One of the problems with Kabbalah is that Kether is
overrated. What happens is you see in a lot of the teachings
the Limitless Light, the Ain Soph Aur, gets minimized, and
that's really the void. Because with the Ain Soph Aur we move
from a kind of a theism, to a deism, now to a metaphysical
atheism with the void.
That's something that they don't want to touch. The
revealed religions don't want to touch that because what is
it that gives the revelation? You see if the revelation comes
from within, and that within is the enlightened mind of
the person giving the revelation, then that raises too many
questions. Whereas if it's the voice of God, The God, giving
The Revelation at this place and time in history, then we have
authority. Then you have authority for it, and the authority
is unquestionable because it's God.
. NOTHINGNESS 53

But how do you know? It is because we're telling you it is.

I don't mean to go down that road. I'm just telling you that
even with the metaphysical schools there are questions you'll
have to ask within yourself. I tend towards metaphysical
atheism. I'm fine with there not being a Sky Daddy. I'm
okay with it, which means I'm also fine with there being one,
because even if I could know or did know, I can't prove it to
you.
That's why we have to be careful of the questions we ask,
because sometimes we can go down lines of questioning that
really don't help us. Unfortunately, Kabbalah spends a lot
of time with questions that don't necessarily help us. I've
tried to streamline that when I wrote Kabbalah for Health
and Wellness. What is it that can really help us here? The
Practical Kabbalah of the folk traditions was about "what
does this do for me right now?" Those visions are nice, but
I can get this by licking a toad or eating the mushrooms
out back! What does this do for me? Hopefully you practice.
How can you tell if you're really getting anywhere when you
practice? It's very simple: if your practice is joyful. You want
to practice. You want to do this. If you have appreciation
for it, that is, you're grateful for the time, not only for the
teaching, but the time and opportunity to do it, and you're
selfless, meaning you're helping others on their path, and
you're helping others in general, then you're making progress.
This is from the Corpus Hermeticum (Book 11):

For working by Himself [that is, Deity, God] He is

always in His work, for He is what He creates. If
He were separate from it, all would collapse, and all
would by necessity perish, because life would be no
more. Since everything is alive and life is one, God is
also one. If again everything is alive, both in heaven
and in earth, and there is one life for all which comes
into existence through God, God is also that life. All
then is made by God and life is the union of Nous
54 MARK STAVISH

[direct, perceptive mind] and soul [or consciousness].

Death is not the destruction of what has been put
together but the dissolution of the union.

Eternity is the image of God ( eternity is our past, present,

and future; eternity is our ever-present now; eternity is a very
difficult concept to really wrap your minds around because
it's not moving); the cosmos, of eternity; the sun, of the
cosmos; and man, of the sun. So we go from eternity to
the sun, which is our solar system, the world as we would
understand it, the cosmos as the ancients would work on. We
are a reflection of the sun, just as you see on the Tree of Life
when you go from Kether, down to Tiphareth, down to us
down here. Well, you have Yesod. Here we are, boom, boom,
boom. Each is a reflection of that which is above it. People
call transformation death because the body is dissolved. But
in fact, life withdraws into the unmanifest. That is, the life is
no longer attracted to the body but the polarity is reversed
and is now attracted away, at least temporarily.
The cosmos assumes all forms. It does not hold constant
the forms that are within it, but changes them within itself.
Do not be amazed if there is a bodiless form, for it is like
the form of a word. In paintings, mountain peaks appear to
stand out sharply, but they are in reality smooth and flat.
All is within God. Within God everything lies in bodiless
imagination. Think of Him who contains it all. There is
nothing to limit the incorporeal. There is nothing quicker or
more powerful. It is absolutely without limit, the quickest
and most powerful.
This is the Ain Soph, the emptiness, the void. This is the
Buddhist concept of emptiness. It's not that it's empty of
anything. It contains everything and therefore all potential
exists within it. That is God. All potential exists within it
and all that is, is within that void. We exist within it. You
concentrate on this speck, this dot right here, and you will
understand the nature of creation. And that is true. That
. MY TRUE SELF 55

isn't just some abstract thing I'm saying to you. Because

everything is right at this moment any- and everything else.
So the void is essential because without it we would be fixed
and concrete and transmutation would not be possible. So
everything is constantly changing. W hat we do is with our
minds we direct that change to some degree ( more or less)
consciously.
I like the idea of this image, because at the caverns we
were at yesterday, there's a point where you could look down
at the water, which is maybe a foot-and-a-half or three feet
deep, and because of the angle the rocks reflected across made
it look as if it were a twenty-foot drop. And this is life. That's
what's going on all the time. We are looking at reflections
of things and thinking that they are solid and corporeal but
they are not. Yes, they are temporarily solid. They're just
not permanently. They have not always existed and will not
always exist. They are subject to the laws of change, what we
would call motion. We direct that change or motion through
cause and effect, the law of karma. We do that through occult
operations where the magical rituals are alchemical.

~ My True Self ~
Consider this yourself: command your soul to go any­
where and it will be there quicker than your command.
Bid it to go to the ocean and again it is there at once,
not that it has gone from place to place but that it
is already there. Order it to fly up to heaven and
it will need no wings, nor will anything impede it,
neither the fire of the sun, nor the ether, nor the
whirlwind, nor the other heavenly bodies, but cutting
through them all it will soar up to the last body. And
if you wish to break through all this and to contem­
plate what is beyond (if there is anything beyond the
56 MARK STAVISH

cosmos), it is within your power. 2

So within your mind, because your mind is a reflection

of all this, you have the capacity to do all these things.
Spirituality is the understanding of your mind.

See what power you have and what speed! You can
do all these things and yet God cannot? Reflect on
God in this way as having all within Himself as ideas:
the cosmos, Himself, the whole. If you do not make
yourself equal to God you cannot understand Him.
Like is understood by like. Grow to immeasurable size.
Be free from every body, transcend all time. Become
eternity and thus you will understand God. Suppose
nothing to be impossible for yourself. Consider your­
self immortal and able to understand everything: all
arts, sciences, and the nature of every living creature.
Become higher than all heights and lower than all
depths. Sense as one within yourself the entire cre­
ation: fire, water, the dry, and the moist. Conceive
yourself to be in all places at the same time: in the
earth, the sea, in heaven; that you are not yet born,
that you are within the womb, that you are young,
old, dead; that you are beyond death.
Conceive all things at once: times, places, actions,
qualities, and quantities; then you can understand
God. But if you lock up your soul in your body, abase
it and say: "I understand nothing; I can do nothing; I
am afraid of the sea; I cannot reach heaven; I do not
know who I was nor who I shall be..." What have you
to do with God? For you cannot conceive anything
beautiful or good while you are attached to the body
and are evil. For the greatest evil is to ignore what
belongs to God. To be able to know and to will and
to hope is the straight and easy way appropriate to
each that will lead to the supreme good.
2
Corpus Hermeticum, Book Eleven.
. MY TRUE SELF 57

When you take this road, this Good will meet you
everywhere and you will experience it everywhere,
even where and when you do not expect it. When
awake, asleep, in a ship, on the road, by day or night,
and when speaking or silent, for there is nothing
which it is not. Now do you say that God is invisible?
Be careful, for who is more manifest than He? He has
made all things for this reason: that through them
you should see Him. This is the goodness [ agathon] of
God. This is His excellence: that He is made manifest
through all.3

Though you cannot see what is bodiless, nous ( direct

perception) is seen in the act of contemplation. God is in the
act of creation. Nous is seen in the act of contemplation, God
in the act of creation. Write that down.

These things have been made clear to you, Hermes,

thus far. Reflect on all other things in the same way
within yourself and you will not be led astray.4

You may find other definitions for some of these terms.

They don't have single definitions. It's like there are ten
different interpretations of some of these Sanskrit words.
The greatest disease of the soul is denial of God. Next is
belief in appearances. And accompanying these are all evils
and nothing good. The denial of...when we say God, it's not
necessarily a deistic or theistic approach but the denial of
anything beyond the physical world, in appearances. When
you believe, it's natural, cause and effect. If there's nothing
more than this world, then what's in front of me is the most
important thing there is.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
58 MARK STAVISH

~ Denial and the Kali Yuga ~

When you look at the twentieth century, communism is the
greatest evil that befell the world. It killed more people than
any other system of government, yet many people who think
of themselves as spiritual like to ignore it. I think eighty
million people killed is the low number. That doesn't include
the hundreds of millions that were in giant prison camps.
I remember many people talking about the Soviet Union
as the moral equivalent to the West in the late '70s and
the '80s. The idea was that the KGB wanted to create a
kind of moral equivalency between the United States and the
Soviet Union. I saw that in the media and I saw that from
my political science professors and Berkeley graduates. For
me, Eastern Europe was a prison camp. Those guns were
pointing inward. Yes, there are problems with the American
Empire. I understand that. But I'd rather live in this empire
than that one. So did most people. That's why they try to
get here legally or illegally.
I see many Western Buddhists just refuse to accept the
violence of communism. Mao said to the young Dalai Lama:
"Religion is poison." The fundamental nature of communism
is what one French writer referred to as the last religion of
the Kali Yuga, because it's the ultimate dropping down. He
had strong criticisms of the revealed religions of Judaism and
Christianity and Islam. But the last new one is communism,
because it denied anything beyond materiality and believed
that we could scientifically improve everyone and everything
through our own actions. At that point, since there's noth­
ing to account to or for except the system or the machine,
everything is possible, and everything is justified. That's the
problem when you get into those totalitarian systems. You see
problems with totalitarian systems that are religious-based.
At least they have an internal mechanism that can destroy
them. But when you get into the materialistic ones, the only
thing that destroys it is its own inertia, which is what hap-
. DENIAL AND THE KALI YUGA 59

pened with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed

because of its own inertia. We had the good fortune to have
a President over here and a President over there who were
able to manage the Soviet Union's deconstruction instead of
allowing it to be a catastrophe.
So that's the problem when you deny spirituality, whether
it be metaphysical atheism or deism, karma or Final Judg­
ment, or any of that stuff. When you remove spirituality
from the picture, all bets are off. That's why we see in many
-isms-let's face it, is the world that much better because
we don't have prayer in public schools? Now you may not
like them there, but is it really that much better? Is it worth
saying we have to take the Ten Commandments off the court­
house? I'm putting this in practical terms for you. They say:
"Don't steal, don't kill, don't murder, don't take other peo­
ple's things, don't commit adultery." I wish the judges in my
courthouse paid more attention to it. I don't say that jokingly.
If you knew the horror of corruption that took place when
the three sitting judges were removed from the county court­
house... That goes deep. That's the top. That goes through
our entire legal system. That goes back to trust. If I can't
trust the legal system, on that level, things get shaky. Why
would judges do that? Because they don't believe they are
going to have to account for what they do. Any evil becomes
possible when there's no sense of accountability.
So I try to keep this as practical for you, and in some ways
that means poking you in the belly a bit about some of your
cherished beliefs. I don't mean to do that too hard, but you
have to step back. That's the reflection part. Where I have
been looking at things ... yeah, I get part of it, but it's like a
funhouse mirror reflection. I want to see the real reflection;
I don't want to see the funhouse one. So you really have to
deconstruct every one of your beliefs. And I mean that, every
one of them. You have to walk away from everything that
you believe. And then you say: "What do I do with this? And
why, why do I do this?" Because you may do it just because
60 MARK STAVISH

it fits the bumper sticker. You don't really do any good and
you don't really feel good, but you got the bumper sticker.
You got the card for the right membership.
You need to be a walking question mark with yourself.
Because this goes back to something else which is interesting:
nous, direct perception, is the soul of God. You see, that's
not my limited idea of my "self," but that's my ability to
see directly things as they are, and it rules over all. Nothing
is impossible for it. "Neither to raise a human soul above
destiny, nor if the soul has been negligent as happens to
subject it to destiny." When I am able to perceive things as
they are, not as I would like them to be, not as I have been
told, but as they are. Then everything becomes possible to
me, because I am working with the palette in front of me.
How many of you do any reconstruction work? How many
of you have done renovations on your house? That's like a
do-it-yourself divorce kit, isn't it? A couple of the older houses
around my place, the joke is when they are opening up the
wall how many bottles they find in there. Because you have
this idea in your mind of how things are, and if you tear open
the wall then there's what things really are.

~ Immortality ~
According to the traditions of the classical worldview, every­
one dies but not everyone is immortal. Your rebirth is not
guaranteed, nor is your salvation guaranteed. Everything is
up to you. You may live in alternate realms or dimensions.
You call these the different spheres, the different heavens. You
may come back, and the Egyptians-particularly the Temple
of Set-spent a great deal of time on physical immortality,
as well as on the Body of Light.
We know very little about it but we do know a little bit.
Because if you were Pharaoh, you were God Incarnate. You
had your own deity that you worshipped. And you were a deity
that was worshipped. Why would you want to reincarnate?
. IMMORTALITY 61

And for a lot of the folks who-the same thing if you were a
middle-level bureaucrat. You had a good place compared to
the rest. Why would you want to risk coming back? So almost
all their practices were designed to maintain immortality in
another world.
What did that mean? That meant primarily maintaining
their individualized consciousness, maintaining the conscious­
ness of who they were at that time, and taking it with them.
I'd say even more concrete than a lot of the Taoist experi­
ences. Interestingly, if you're not that concerned about your
position in life, your occupation, it's actually easier to do it.
But if you're trying to maintain all this stuff, it's better to
actually not be too concerned with that-just focus on the
mind. You'll see later on why that matters. The Egyptians
were coming from a society that was moving downward and
they knew it. Even though we see it as moving upward, they
have a period of history that goes back 40,000 years whereas
we can only validate maybe 3,500 or 4,000 of them. We say
the rest is myth, myth in the sense it's made up, it's wishful
thinking. But they are quite detailed about it. The teachings
became hidden according to the various vast cycles.
The capacity of individuals to learn varies from person to
person. Not everyone has the same capacity. Alternate realms
and true immortality involve formation of the "glorious body"
that you hear about in the gnostic and in the Christian
teachings of the Body of Light. This is where we see different
folks ascending in a chariot seeing views of heaven, ascending
bodily. Bodily ascension to heaven! Who does that? Jesus is
said to have done it. Mary included. Enoch is the best known.
This is a transmutation, because their thought, word, and
deed are not separate. They are not incongruent. There is
no body. There's just thought, word, and deed. They are all
expressions or one and the same.
Mind manifests through thought, word, and deed. You
make the confession of having sinned. "I have sinned in
thought, word, and deed." I have made an error. I have
62 MARK STAVISH

missed the point. That comes from Christianity through

Judaism which gets it from the Babylonian captivity, even
the exact ordering of the words. "I don't understand. I've
made a mistake. I have erred."
Sin has two things. We think of sin as the term "to miss
the mark," in archery, but also there's a meaning in terms of
religious sin, which is a profound taboo. But whatever it is,
it's saying: "Look, I've done this first in my thoughts. I've
misunderstood things or I've made this conscious decision
to do this. I've done it in my speech and I've done it in my
actions." But only when the three are harmonious are things
okay. When our thought, word, and deed are congruent, then
everything works.
The Body of Light, (or the Diamond Body) is indestruc­
tible. It's indestructible because it's thought, and thought is
indestructible. Your words are the medium that expresses
your thoughts. And at the same time they are the vehicle of
the body. That is, you use your vocal chords to say things. It
has a certain effect on the body. Emotions arise from them.
Emotions arise before them. There's a tangible impact that
they have. We say good words to someone and they feel good.
We say harsh words and they may feel badly. So words are
very powerful expressions of our thought. Hence, the impor­
tance of mantras and chanting and vocalizations and divine
names.
In Kabbalah, the spheres are not independent entities.
The divine names and the spheres are one and the same. The
divine names when said give rise to the sphere. We think of
them as very compartmentalized. When the divine name is
properly said, it gives rise to it. The thing is always there. It
reveals it or whatever you want to call it. It's not as though
they exist separately.
It's the same with us. Our body responds to our thoughts.
So if our words affect our body and are an expression of our
thought, and our body responds to our thoughts, then when
we bring them closer and closer to harmony, then things are
. IMMORTALITY 63

just better for us and around us. But if you think: "I can't
do this, I can't do that, wait a minute, that doesn't affect
me. I'm over here. That's not me." Or you say one thing and
do another and mean a third. That's a lie to yourself and to
the others involved.
When we're honest with ourselves, when we have that con­
gruity, then things move more easily for you, more smoothly.
Then there are particular practices, because the mind is the
only thing that's immortal. So the mind utilizes expressions of
the words and uses expressions of bodily actions. This in turn
will have an effect on the body, particularly on the nervous
system, which makes it more sensitive. The nervous system
is designed to keep energy in check. What our activities do is
they reverse that so that it allows more energy to flow. If the
whole energy of the nervous system were available to you at
once, you probably would explode. So what spiritual systems
do is slowly acclimate you so you can use more and more of
your inherent bodily energy.
We're getting rid of the obscurations, getting rid of the
blocks. When you're congruent on it and you're thinking of
yourself as higher than this, lower than this, all things at
once-if you want it, it's possible, it's within you. You have
to develop. But what does this mean? It means getting rid
of all the things you do not need.
As we said earlier at the break: classically there's the
notion that everyone dies, but not everyone gets reborn. The
question then is what happens to those people who don't
achieve some form of immortality or those who don't go back
into reincarnation? The answer is very simple. The notion is
they get reabsorbed back into some sort of massive cosmic
mass. There are also other ideas about it, but the question
people often ask is: "What is this notion of rebirth and why
is it so difficult?"
64 MARK STAVISH

~ Meditation, Sleep, and Death ~

The reason we meditate is to learn to control and understand
our mind. Spirituality is understanding our own mind. The
Corpus Hermeticum, this book, is a very small book which I
tell students to write out by hand so they can absorb it within
themselves. I've done the same with the Sepher Yetzirah.
When you write it out by hand, you acquire an understanding
of the text in the same manner our predecessors did that
you don't get simply by reading it or simply by copying it or
printing off an electronic file. You can do that to study a text,
but at some point you have to write things down. You have
to write them out. What we see is not necessarily stated in
there but in general fashion. The question is: "What happens
when we die?" As I stated, the process between meditation,
sleep, and death is the same.
The same thing is stated quite clearly in the Tibetan
teachings on death, which from what I understand are some
kind of Mongolian import, but also Chinese notions. The
point is, when we are in our body, we have something to
relate to. So when you have a dream and something happens
in your mind that terrifies you and you take it for real, what
do you do? Wake up. What happens when you don't have a
way to wake up now? Because when you're dead, there's no
body to escape back into. You are within the domain of your
mind. So unless you can begin to recognize what is real or
what is a projection of your own mind from what isn't when
you're alive, how are you going to do it when you're dead? So
what happens then is the emotional currents that overwhelm
you at the time of death, at the time of transition, these
become your dominant force and they'll withdraw you into a
new body because you want the comforts of a prison house to
keep out these thoughts and ideas from arising within your
psyche, these external forces that you feel you need to escape
from.
That's why we need to master our own mind. What hap-
. MEDITATION, SLEEP, A.'l"D DEATH 65

pens is you say: "How can I do this?" The answer is there

are different practices for different levels of individuals. But
one of the easiest ones is to simply act.
This is why I go back to having a firm commitment to the
teachings, and the teacher, and the lineage or the traditions,
to focus your consciousness on some kind of divine image.
In the Egyptian temples, they painted wonderful images for
the soul to follow. These are directions for the dead. They
weren't for the living. These were directions for the dead. Go
here. Go left to the cypress tree, go to the spring. Don't drink
it.
Well, you're not going to have directions on where to go
because most likely nobody's going to be sitting over you
reading from the Book of the Dead. If you're lucky, you might
have someone saying prayers for you. They need to know
which ones. So you're kind of on your own. That's why it's
important that you come together as a group, as a community
of supporters of one another so you can help one another­
and not just through life, but the time of your passing as
well. That's the most important time. That's the summation
of everything that you've done.
I want to put this in its proper context for you. As those
images arise, if you focus on a saint or holy being, someone you
really feel a devotion to, that's helpful. If you have someone
in life you really feel this way towards, that's all the much
better. But either way you need to keep your mind on that
so that all the things that arise around you can be done away
with, can be ignored. There are other things, too, but this is
the easiest and most fundamental.
As I say, my grandmother insisted on two things: one
is that she would die quietly in her sleep and the other is
that she would be reborn as a concert pianist. I don't know
if she did the second, but I know she did the first. I know
when she did the first. I can still see her because I looked
at her as I was leaving. I was going away for a conference
that weekend. I went over to see her and say goodbye, and I
66 MARK STAVISH

knew that this was the last time I would see her alive. I came
back Sunday and she was gone. That's just the way it goes.
But it's kind of different, because when I was growing up,
my great uncle would tell stories-he knew his brother-in-law
was dead because he saw him standing on the steps, with no
shoes. I guess they really didn't bury them with shoes then;
I don't know if they still do. The apparition was wearing the
brown suit that he was buried in. This was one of those things.
Of course, he had a lot of experiences, as did his mother,
profound psychic experiences. But this was taken as everyday
occurrence. These were just understood and accepted.
We make a great deal out of psychic phenomena because
we think of them as so unnatural, irregular. It's almost as
though we want to talk about them as something special,
whereas in other places where these kinds of practices were
well known, it was just taken as common everyday experience.

~ Creatures of Air~

It's like all these stories they have on cable TV, like Ghost
Hunters: they are exciting nonsense. If there are any ghosts,
they treat them poorly. These investigators need a lecture
on proper relationships to dead beings, on etiquette! In the
text you see-particularly in the Corpus H ermeticum-the
souls or the bodies of consciousness are composed of sheathes
of air. The air is one of the four elements. I'm not going to
be going over too much detail of this. I was told at break
that almost all of you have read my books, and I can see
from signing them that you have. Therefore I will not go into
detail on things which you have ready access to in the books.
Of course many of you, I understand, have done a great deal
of practice with the material in those books-which is very,
very nice and I am very pleased. Feel free to send me letters
about some of your experiences. I may not be able to respond
to them. What I'll do is maybe say something to Brian about
what I get, and any suggestions that come to mind.
. CREATURES OF AIR 67

The elements are four different expressions of energy that

we're used to. There's a fifth we call cether. The modern
schools have adopted the word akasha. Akasha doesn't mean
spirit; it means space, as in "spaciousness," but also stellar
space, vacuousness. So rether which is all-encompassing en­
ergy, prima materia from which all things can arise from,
manifests in four principal forms: fire, air, water, and earth.
These can often be set in different orders. Sometimes it's air,
fire, water, earth, depending on what we read. This has to
do with relationships. We'll talk about that tomorrow some­
what in alchemy. But the air is what is important because in
classical Egyptian symbolism it unites heaven and earth. Air
is life. When we hold our breath we get warm: the inner fire
is increased.
Some of the kabbalistic breathing practices possibly come
from Asia by way of the Middle East, or they may simply
have been discovered on their own. However, I don't find
the classical kabbalistic breathing exercises very useful. They
almost put one in a state of hyperventilation, and are very
stressful on the body. But any breathing practice where
there's a long slow inhalation and exhalation, holding to a
rhythmic breathing, that practice builds up energy in the
body. It also purifies the body as the heat burns off the dross.
What is that dross? The dross on a physical level is
the obscurations of the nervous system. On the emotional
level, it's whatever emotions arise from it. For the mind it is
whatever thoughts arise. Remember, pay attention to your
thoughts that come up during meditation. That's what you
need to really work with. That's the obstacle in your way.
People say, "Oh, I want to feel peaceful and happy." To achieve
that you have to deal with what's there in front of you. The
same thing when you're doing this breathing. There are lots
of tensions to be released by the body and those tensions are
knots of energy we need to release. When you release this
energy you have it available for other things. Some people
get so used to walking around with that tension they don't
68 MARK STAVISH

even notice it. You can see it in their phy siology.

Air is the breath of life. Air is life. According to the
Old Testament and Count Dracula, life is in the blood. You
see it in the blood. Now blood has a particular meaning in
the evolutionary sense in alchemy and kabbalah, as well as
other schools, but it's often not talked about because it's not
something they like to deal with openly. It is considered very,
very secret lest it be abused. Air unites the microcosm and
the macrocosm. It's me with the broader universe out there.
And as long as I'm breathing, I'm in here.
Air is the substance from which the body of the soul is
manufactured, both visible and tangible. This is the psychic
body, the astral body, the thin layers which we possess in
both density and power. The body of air, and these air
bodies, you hear them referred to as "spirits of air." It's
because they are ethereal. They can move about in space.
They don't have limitations by matter. But like air, like a
tornado, it has a definite location. A tornado is spinning.
It has a definite center. But at the same time it is part of
the broader landscape. It's connected. So when you think
of air in that way, that's what air does for us too. That's
why when you look at spirits of air-which are often called
"demon spirits" of the air-demons are chaotic forces. They
don't have a high degree of organization. Not unlike a good
half-mile wide hurricane or a tornado tearing up your town.
There's some center point, but there's a lot of stuff moving
around there. It's not a nice still calm breeze. A breeze, you
can feel when it hits you, and then it goes. Air is life, air
is organizational power. Air is what unites the universe and
the individual, the inner and the outer, the material and the
immaterial. Air is the finest of matter.
When we look at air and water (that's what we will
see tomorrow, in alchemy) creates what we call "alchemical
mercury" and what is Jeng shui. What do these words mean?
Wind/water,; the energies of life. Because you want to say:
"Is the wind good here?" You don't want stagnant wind. How
. CREATURES OF AIR 69

is the water? Is the water moving? Because what do you get

if you get a puddle? Mosquitoes. What do you get when you
get mosquitoes? You get diseases and death. So you want
to make sure the air is good. It's nice in movement at the
right pace, not too strong, not too weak. You want to make
sure the water is moving just right. Yes, it will have its ups
and downs, but most of the time you want it to be nice
and manageable. Just like those little electronic springs you
have in your office. The winds also are the forces of winds of
fortune, the winds of change. That's why in the East they are
referred to as "karmic winds," or habituated psychic patterns.
How can we imprint the wind? We imprint the wind with
our sound, with our word, with our vocalization. In the East
they imprint it with prayer flags. But in the West they do
that too.
In the sixth century it was very common for people to
write in Latin ( or whatever their native language was that
they could write) or they copied it from a book because
they weren't literate, so they copied it from a text, prayers
of strips of linen, and they tied them to trees. This was in
Europe. They didn't have a name. They didn't call it "prayer
flags" that we know of. They just did it. There were a lot
of things that we did but which didn't have a name. Then,
later on, when we'd forget them, we'd have to give them a
label. Otherwise, it's not authentic enough. It doesn't have
the right label. So we just called them "prayer banners" or
"prayer strips" or "prayer cloths." It was very nice, and the
idea is as they blow, the prayers blow on the wind and that
carries them and that's a blessing.
It's the same thing as the notion-how many of you work
with charging water, energized water? And they talk about
putting little stones in it. In classical German magic-you
can read about it in the eighteenth, nineteenth century-their
experiences with it. They would take a phrase or a prayer
within the Bible and they would write it in ink and they'd put
it in the water and it would come off in the water because it
70 MARK STAVISH

wasn't written with a Sharpie. It's just ink. And then they'd
drink the water. Now sometimes they'd use pencil. I know my
great-grandfather would just use pencil. Sometimes he'd make
them eat it too. The point is where you see this: you see this
in the Revelation of John where it talks about they've eaten
the scroll. You're literally consuming "the Word" or cosmic
pattern. So these things, strangely, are both metaphorical
and literal, which is what ritual is all about. It's making the
metaphor literal, but at the same time taking the literal and
making it metaphorical.
These forces, these forces of wind, are very difficult at
times to manage. So, many systems avoid it. That's why many
people work with alchemy, which is a fire path, a mineral-fire
path; or work with Kabbalah, which is considered a symbol­
ical water path. But working on the inner energies of the
body without knowledge of what you're doing is problematic.
Usually you can get away with some basic stuff-such as ba­
sic fundamental breathing, basic relaxation without concern.
All basic stuff is really very, very good; it should not take
you over to the edge. Where people screw up is when they
become unhappy with their basic practice and think they
have to do something more complex-and they break what
isn't broken. There's a lot of simple fundamental practices
that are often tremendously underrated. In terms of working
with the energies of the body, Brian can help you with that.
We'll talk a little about the Middle Pillar Exercise at some
point in regard to that, too.
Because of this, we have to look at what we're doing here
and how these spiritual practices relate to the different levels
of practice in the world. On the outer level we're dealing with
other people and community. You may go to church because
you don't know what you're doing and you want someone who
can give you basic instruction. You may go because you're a
child and you have to, or you're an adult, but you're not really
that interested, it is out of habit like so many people across
the globe. This isn't your thing, but you're going through the
. GRANDMOTHERS AND MAGIC 71

motions and you're getting some good grounding. Basically

you're being a decent human being.

~ Grandmothers and Magic ~

The next level, you're taking it seriously and you're develop­
ing a prayer practice. All of you probably had grandmothers
like this. We joke about them because everyone's got a grand­
mother out there who can do a prayer for you and get you
out of jail. It's fabulous. I have friends in different esoteric
groups who swap stories about their grandmothers. They all
had someone who could do something. In this corner pizza
shop I go to there's this picture of Padre Pio in the back room
and all the Italian ladies would be sitting back there making
pasta. The guy who runs it told me, "My grandmother, she's
like ninety-five. She must be doing something right. She still
has people coming over asking for the blessed oil. They swear
she's done this or that for them."
And it's true because of the faith. They have a sheer
devotion that it's going to work. W hat we do is we tend
to complicate the matter. If you have a profound devotion,
particularly an affinity to a saint or some kind of holy figure
or deity, this will go a long, long way helping you in all your
work.
From there you go on to the next level, which is to under­
stand your experiences and working with them initiatically.
At some point, initiation is something you no longer experi­
ence in the outer sense, or even in the inner sense, but simply
that you now must take responsibility for yourself as a human
being. This is what we would say is the "ultimate" level of
practice. You are confident in who you are. You understand
your relationship to others. You may not be perfect. You
may not have achieved this great perfect type--like tenth
level Ipsissimus on the Tree of Life--but you are on your
way to moving quickly on your journey and you know that
ultimately everything lies within you, within your own mind.
72 MARK STAVISH

And it is within your own mind that you will have to deal
with everything at the time of your death. So if you're used
to doing that now while you meditate and when you sleep...
I have some quotes in here from Joscelyn Godwin, [The
Golden Thread:] The Ageless Wisdom, regarding immortality
and the Chaldean Oracles from Giuliani, the author of "The
Oracles from Ancient Rome." I encourage you to read God­
win's book if you haven't. He politely mentions me in the
back. . . The Golden Thread. Godwin quotes Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky:

The permanent preservation or personal identity be­

yond death is a very rare achievement accomplished
only by those who wrest the secrets of nature and
control their own super-material development. It is
accomplished only by adepts and sorcerers, the one
class having acquired the supreme secret knowledge
by holy methods with benevolent motives, the other
having acquired it by unholy methods and baser mo­
tives.

Essentially, keep your motives pure in the sense that

they're not selfish; and let's say "selfish" is relative------you
always benefit from what you do. You cannot not benefit
from it. But if benefiting yourself first is the intention, or the
only intention, that's what we would consider base. Having
reckless disregard for others is what we would consider evil. So
if you undertake your practice with the intention of benefiting
others and yourself, that's the motive you want to have. You're
going to help others. I know I will benefit in the process. I'm
okay with that. You're going to do this and you set up in
that state.
I like this one: "The ignorant are deprived of immortality."
You can't be ignorant and be immortal. You have to take the
path of wisdom.
. LIGHT, LIFE, AND LOVE 73

~ Light, Life, and Love ~

Now, because the Father of all is constituted out of Light and
Life, the truth is Light and Life is God. And if you realize
yourself as being from Light and Life, and that you have been
out of them, you return to Light. Now all of the visualizations
that you are taught to do in my books and others, what do
they involve? Visualizing light. When you have light and heat,
you have life. That's why alchemy and Kabbalah deal with
the energies of fire, and often use air in breathing practices
as the conduit, along with visualization.
God is endowed beyond all men with these two immortal
gifts: nous and speech, both as much valued as immortality.
Man has the spoken word. If he uses these gifts rightfully he'll
be no different from the immortals. And upon departing from
the body he will be guided by both to the realm of the gods
and the blessed ones. Knowledge of direct perception, the
power of speech, or proper prayer and invocation, and through
these you will be guided to the blessed realms, because upon
death when you're saying your prayers, what do we say?
"Think of a place and you are there," it says in the Corpus
Hermeticum: think of a place and you are there. So as you're
saying your prayers, your mind is being directed to that place.
As you're leaving your body, you will go towards that place.
And upon death, that's what keeps you focused on that place,
that state. We say a "place," but it's a state. Of course you
go to the realm of the gods and the heroes. Death and rebirth
is a common initiatic practice. For those of you who have the
opportunity, initiation is critical to our psychic maturation
or experience of our natural self. What initiation tries to do
is put us in a state where we are receptive to our own self. At
least that is what it should be doing. I'm sure there are a few
out there that are different. It's designed to make us aware
of what we already possess. Meditation is critical because
it takes the seeds of initiation and matures them. That's
why initiations are symbolic, so that you get the essence and
74 MARK STAVISH

you chew on it, that seed, you chew it, water it, focus on it,
develop it.
Direct experience, or illumination as a result of medi­
tation, is critical to becoming the psychic self. That is, to
experience our mind, free from self-imposed limitations, in
its natural state. W hen you have an insight, nothing else
is there. It's direct. It's like if you have some knowledge of
a foreign language, when you're speaking in that language,
you're not looking the words up in a dictionary. It's a direct
communication because it's part of you.
This leads us to the importance of the day school and
the night school. The night school is what we refer to as the
lucid dreaming practices. Day school is meditation. During
the sixteenth century, there is what was referred to as the
"School of the Night." This was met at the home of John Dee in
Mortlake. School of the Night was a gathering of powerful and
intelligent individuals within the court of Queen Elizabeth.
We're not exactly sure what they did, but there is a connection
there-and of course John Dee was an astrologer, magician,
probably the most brilliant man in Europe at that time. When
Fleming used that code number "007," he knew that was a
signature of John Dee on his letters to the Queen. Ian Fleming
was involved in the Black Operations against the Nazis during
the second World War, which involved the creation of phony
Nostradamus prophecies and horoscopes. Sybil Leek, who
wrote Diary of a Witch, was quite famous in the late '60s
and early '70s. She was involved with him (Fleming) in these
intelligence operations. She used to come down my way in
the mid '70s to visit a local "Harry Potter/Doogie Howser
boy does good": Dr. Frederick Santee. Someone can go to
YouTube and look that up from the episode about him on
Animal Planet.
The practice of the day's meditation is reminding yourself
about the changing nature of the world we live in so that
your mind does not take it as fixed and permanent, but as
malleable. The practice of the day is various meditations
. LUCID DREAMING 75

and visualizations or any work you do that has to do with

helping to reunite you in that work. The practice of the night
is dream work. That's lucid dreaming. How many of you
are experienced with lucid dreaming? I figured almost all of
you. Good. So you know exactly what I mean. That state
of knowing that you're dreaming. What you want to do is
induce it regularly, because that means there's a transition
between the inner and the outer, between the objective and
the subjective. Then what you want to do is to push that
even farther, not just to the point where you say "I know
that I'm dreaming," but where you can begin to control the
dream. You can change and manipulate the effects within
it. Remember, the dream exists in your own mind. So you
begin to control the effects within your own mind. When you
do that, you then can also move on to, of course, all sorts of
wonderful things.
We see this talked about in different scriptures where
you can go visit people; you can have experiences with the
living, with the dead; you can create more than one body
for yourself. You see in the New Testament at the end Jesus
appearing in many places simultaneously. We see that in
Oriental teachings as well where the Bodhisattva's ability
to multiply in various bodies is unlimited. We see this in
certain teachings too where some saints are seen to be the
size of a dime when they are thousands of miles away. Padre
Pio, for example. There are many stories about him where
he had been seen. Some people said they saw him at the
same time on the same day, but he was sitting out in his
garden. That being said, we have substantial references to
these possibilities. What we have to do is actualize them
through our practice.

~ Lucid Dreaming ~
The best time to work with dream practices is when you are
preparing for sleep. When you are lying in bed, focus your
76 MARK STAVISH

attention on your throat. When I originally was taught this,

it was at the back of the neck, more towards the medulla
oblongata. I found that that worked, because that affects the
nervous system, particularly visual and auditory receptors.
But it was a little tricky, and then later I got different in­
struction. They said: "Well, that's fine but move it to the
throat." Now in Kabbalah, what they say is at the throat, a
location associated with Daath or Knowledge. The color you
get in typical Kabbalah is not very good. You want to use
the color red because it's an energizing color and it's vital.
Here's something I cannot stress enough. When you sit
for meditation, when you sit for any of this work, you have
to think of the body as no longer being a physical thing,
but as being an energetic hollow vibrant thing. You have to
realign your orientation towards your body so you imagine
it as light. It can be crystal clear, but it has to be brilliant
and it has to be insubstantial, meaning that it's not like
something you could put your finger on. You could maybe
put your finger through it. It occupies space. It has a sense
of presence, but it has no density. You really have to work on
that every time you sit. You have to start with that in some
fashion. Because of that hollowness, that spaciousness, you
create within yourself, that's what allows you to be receptive
to energies and experiences.

~ Hermes and Sophia ~

I'm going to give you some teachings on the Middle Pillar that
I didn't write down in the book. They are almost identical
to what you get in some of the Tibetan Tummo practices.
Practice it. That's the thing. Practice it. That's the real
thanks. Get attainment from it. Achieve it. That will be the
real thanks. And then once you have had experience, good
experience, and you're comfortable within your own realm of
experience, then pass it on to others. Support each other.
Now back to dream work: as you focus on your throat
. HERMES AND SOPHIA 77

with a vibrant red, it should be about the size of a marble,

but luminous and light. You can even feel around it an area
of heat, like when you get near a light bulb. The light bulb
is here, but you can feel the heat out here. You can feel the
heat, but rest within it. At first you're always looking at it
from the outside, but then rest within it. Then make your
prayer. Say your prayer, "Tonight I will dream. As I dream,
I will be aware that I am dreaming; and I will control and
direct my dreams. As I control and direct my dreams, I will
become aware of the nature of my own mind, the nature of
reality." Repeat that over and over again as you fall asleep.
The other way is to have an image of a divine figure. Thoth
is good. Hermes is good. Sophia is very good. I encourage you
to get a good image of Sophia. She's always clothed in red,
because that's the energy of life. You visualize her in front of
you, and then moving towards you and resting in you. Some
say the image rests in your heart, others in the throat. I think
it's best if you start moving into the throat and then into the
heart later, or go from the heart to the throat, but pick one,
see how it goes, and then go back and forth, but eventually
you'll want to have it rest in the heart. Start with the throat
because that connects the body, speech and mind. There is a
great deal of energy wrapped up in our words. That's why
we're using this in our prayer. Verbalize your prayers when
you say them. Don't just say them in your head, but actually
speak them. Then you'll notice you actually speak them with
confidence. Again the prayer, "Tonight I will dream. And as
I dream, I will become aware that I am dreaming. And as I
become aware I am dreaming, I will control and direct my
dreams. I will direct my dreams and become aware of the
ultimate nature of my own reality, of my own being, of my
own mind." Say it and mean it. Say it out loud and mean it.
Then hold onto it and go asleep.
As you do this practice, pay attention. What will hap­
pen is, you may decide you want to spice things up a bit,
because being the-they call it a monkey in the East, but in
78 MARK STAVISH

alchemical drawings it's a rabbit-a rabbit bouncing around

from one thing to another... You say to yourself, I want some
excitement. Well, we all do. That's the nature of the mind.
So you can later do the same thing with different planetary
symbols. You can do one starting with Saturn and work your
way down to the Moon, a week on each one. Or you can cycle
through using the planetary symbol of the day. This is just
basic training anyway at this point. It doesn't matter which
way you start.
Eventually you get to the point where you're just doing
the planetary symbol of the day. You can practice working
with a kind of bluish-black color that we use for space or
you can stay with brilliant red. It doesn't really matter to
me. I just point this out because you may find a different
experience resonating more than another. You may need more
of the energy of that red experience or you may need more of
the spaciousness that blue-black brings, because red is fire of
course. Fire is the energy of initiation. Write that one down:
fire is the energy of initiation. You may need more of that.
But you may also be more comfortable with that spaciousness
of the bluish-black. You're getting into the "big boy/big girl"
territory where you have to start to realize that you have to
make some decisions based on your experience and stick with
that rather than having a cookie-cutter pattern laid out for
you.
Keep careful attention of your dreams because you will
find that your dreams are most potent in and around the full
moon. Keep dream journals so you take advantage of it. This
stuff at some point isn't terribly complex. It just requires
constant vigilance. Because your unfoldment now no longer
has anything to do with what I tell you...your unfoldment is
completely in your own hands.
There's a practice for tuning yourself with Hermes (Thoth):
The Liturgy of Hermes. I won't call it an "initiation," but
it's a practice, a forty-two-day practice dealing with Thoth.
If you get the opportunity at some point, it's good to do
. HERMES AND SOPHIA 79

it. Brian can hold your hand through it next year. It's very
good because it will show you what happens in these kinds
of practices. Traditional practices. We don't always have the
advantage of doing a closed retreat, but we can still do a
retreat for 40, 50, 60, 90 days within our own daily life by
simply getting up every day and doing it. You'll find that
practices like this are great because you start out full of
enthusiasm and things are going great and then they just get
wretchedly boring at some point.
Everyone seems to follow the same cycle. It's so pre­
dictable. And then-ham/ When you get it, you get it. It's
with you forever now. Those kinds of practices where you
stick with something over a period of time, that really means
you're serious about it-the same thing, over and over again,
every day. You ask: "Why am I doing this to myself? Ok, I
started it, I'll finish it. Well, that attitude sucks. I'm going
to try to get a little happy about this." All this is part of
the reflection of the obstacles within yourself to your own
growth. You persevere. Some of these things that you push
beyond what we consider the normal limit-that's how we
talk about the alchemical month, forty/forty-two days. It's
not thirty. It's like certain thresholds. And it always happens
not exactly at the end of the threshold, but near it. So when
you're just about to give up and you push, that's when it
falls into place.
I knew a fellow-he was Indian, great stories he would
tell. He was profoundly psychic and very successful. People
used to wait until he'd come back to India to visit so that he
could arrange their marriages. Kind of tough, too, because
you couldn't really surprise him with anything. But he'd say:
"You just practice, practice, practice. When the apple is ready,
it falls."
I knew a guy in a lodge down around the Allentown area,
an esoteric lodge I used to go to on occasion, very successful
fellow, and he said he practiced ten years before he had a
real psychic experience-what we would call one-but he'd
80 MARK STAVISH

just diligently do everything. I think he might have had more

than that because with some of his experiences during the
war he should have been dead too many times. But he'd say
to his jeep driver just "Stop" and there would be an explosion
but they were still alive. If they hadn't stopped in that spot
they would have been killed. So I think that kind of counted
as a psychic experience. But what he meant is what we often
think of, the kind of "flash bang"...something you could say,
"Oh, that was a psychic experience."

~ The Middle Pillar and the Secret Fire ~

You have to work on increasing the energy levels of the body
to accommodate this phenomena. You are all familiar with
the Middle Pillar and everyone has read Kabbalah for Health
and Wellness and that is good. My comments on the Middle
Pillar in that book should be taken as religious doctrine. And
I do not say that lightly. There is a lot of blood, sweat and
tears that went into writing that from a lot of people who
over the decades have told me about their experiences with
the Middle Pillar: good, bad, or indifferent. Some of it has to
do with simple things like how do you visualize the spheres.
Regardie is talking about trying to visualize them the size
of a dinner plate. It's not working. You'll get a buzz, but
you'll have to visualize them small, because in your actual
body, that focal point is actually small. Now it may have a
radius that you experience the size of a dinner plate, but its
actual point is maybe the size of a marble or your thumb.
They often give natural measurements like your thumb. The
channels are often said to be bigger. The main channel is said
to be no thicker than your finger or an arrow.
The Middle Pillar is the pillar of consciousness. That's
the one you do a lot of this ascending and descending. That
pillar is your central channel. You know how in yoga you have
three channels. The Middle Pillar is the central one. That's
your consciousness. So practice moving up and down that
. THE MIDDLE PILLAR AND THE SECRET FIRE 81

from bottom to top as much as possible, in the center of it.

Not looking at it, but in it. Each one of the points along the
way is one of the psychic centers. You can visualize that as a
platform like a rose or a lotus, whatever you're comfortable
with. But it's a focal point. It's really a small focal point of
which the nerve endings come out. Those nerve endings are
what are referred to as the petals.
Most of you are familiar with classical Indian yoga where
each of the letters in Sanskrit refers to a petal on one of the
chakras. Thus when you're chanting in Sanskrit, the theory
is that you're playing the chakras as if it were a piano. So
the number of nerve endings on each of these psychic centers
corresponds to different perspectives, but essentially that
same notion.
In the West, we don't have that kind of a detailed psychic
anatomy. There are some things in German and Dutch, but
they have not been translated to my knowledge. That's why
most of what we work with is ritualistic, contemplative, or
alchemical. So when these guys are developing the Middle
Pillar Exercise a century ago, they are really flying by the
seat of their pants. People could get certain results, but most
of those guys blew their corks, too. That's why I tell you to
pay close attention to what I write in them.
The other thing is that the energy you move through-we
call it "fire," but we use fire as a visualization. It's not really
fire, but heat and cosmic fire. It's cosmic mind. It's a purifying
fire. It's all-consuming. Do it evenly. Your emotions should
never be rushed. Your breathing should never be forced. You
never should feel your breathing move up to your chest. Your
breathing should be slow and steady when you're moving it
through.
W hen you're falling asleep, when you're walking during
the day, when you're sitting here listening to me, another
thing you can do is imagine yourself as if you're in the central
pillar, and that the central pillar is very small. Now suddenly
it's growing, growing, growing. It's now the size of your magic
82 MARK STAVISH

circle around you. Because your magic circle is the central

pillar. So you must move your central pillar psychically out
from the limitations of being this big to the size of your circle.
If you do the central pillar properly, the side channels will
flow into it. I remember after I had written that, I was talking
with one Lama about it and I said: "You guys focus only on
the channels, not on the chakras as much. If you focus only
on the middle channel, the idea here is if it's clear, it acts
as a chimney and you get that chimney effect where energy
from the side flows into it. Up it goes." So this is the same
thing we're talking about. Focus most of your attention on
the central pillar. Don't worry too much about the side ones,
because if you clarify that one, the side pillars will collapse
into it, for lack of a better term. They'll collapse, they'll flow,
whatever you want to call it, into it. But you can work on
those side channels until you're literally blue in the face. It's
not going to do anything in terms of getting you stabilized.
That's not to ignore them, but you don't have to pay as much
attention to them, particularly for what we are talking about
here. When you do the full circulations of the light, I just
visualize them superficially. The important part here is to
move the energy throughout the body. You visualize the body
as being more or less hollow so that the energy flows through
you. At some point you can get it to where you start actually
pushing it into the different areas of the physical body, but
still you have to visualize that almost as a porous sponge so
that you are able to move it through. But, again, you want
to move it up and down, circulate it, bring it up, and sit in
it.
The main thing is going to be in that central column.
That's the foundation for all of this. You can think about
that during the day. When you're falling asleep, you can
visualize your central channel. You can visualize yourself
sitting in it or going to different levels, whatever you want.
But you have to have an understanding of what each level
is, too. You have to really read what's written, meditate on
. THE MIDDLE PILLAR A::--JD THE SECRET FIRE 83

that, and pull that into yourself. You can even make that the
aspiration of your prayer: that you will better understand
whatever level it is that you seek. Only work in the beginning
on the nature of the practice, but then you can bring questions
into the practice. There's no actual location for the channels.
When you talk with people, some say it's in the front of the
body; it's in the back of the body close to the spine; it's
in the center of the body. In our practice, for the sake of
convenience, we do it in the center of the body. I had some
old-school Lamas tell me: "You can do it in the center. You
can do it in the back of the spine. It's not real anyway." We
do it in the center, the core of the body. I think in Qigong
they have three pillars in the body. If you're used to doing
the Qigong practice, get details from Brian, but I'd say the
central column would probably work best for this.
There are overlaps, so take advantage of it. But some
people would take the Middle Pillar and try to shift it, do the
middle pillars in the front and back. In theory that's possible,
but what you start doing is you become distracted. Know
what you're doing, why you're doing it, and what you can
expect from it. With that is the statement that when you get
a practice, regardless of what it is, you can ask some questions
about it in relation to other practices. But I may give you a
kabbalistic practice which has a completely different set of
divine names from what you're familiar. It's not a question
of is one right or wrong. They're not; they're different. The
divine names that my great-uncle would have used on the Tree
are a little different from what you would have gotten from
the Golden Dawn. Some of the things that my grandmother
would have written down as prayers in bad Hebrew are a lot
different from what most people ever saw. You don't even
recognize it. You don't even know where it came from. But
it worked for her. It worked for a lot of people.
In fact, in Pennsylvania you used to have to take a test
in Harrisburg to be a licensed Braucher, basically a licensed
shaman. No one has ever been able to get me a copy of the
84 MARK STAVISH

test. They haven't seen one since the '20s, but they did exist.
Occasionally, in some of the antique shops, you come across
some of the licenses. Friends of mine have come across a lot
of brauche and pow-wow material down there: the wands,
the canes. You don't quite know until you look at them up
close. There are going to be certain engravings. The natural
implements are very simple. If you didn't know what you
were looking at, you would ignore it. But if you knew what it
was, it would get picked up really quick. In fact there was one
stone-it was called a "seer stone"-in Susquehanna County,
I think, that went for I think $250,000. It was very, very rare.
The joke is a rich Mormon probably bought it.
The main thing is going to be in that central column,
the foundation for all of this, and you can think about that
during the day. When you're falling asleep, you can visualize
your central channel. You can visualize yourself sitting in
it or going to different levels, whatever you want. But you
have to have an understanding of what each level is, too. You
have to read what's written, meditate on that, and pull that
into yourself. You can even make that the aspiration of your
prayer: that you will better understand whatever level it is
that you seek. Only work in the beginning on the nature
of the practice, but then you can bring questions into the
practice.

~ The Body of Light ~

The Body of Light practice is detailed in the book Between
the Gates: Lucid Dreaming, Astral Projection, and the Body
of Light. 5 There are several ways you can do it, and the more
you can imagine your physical body as being energetic nature
the easier it becomes. That's the ultimate experience you're
trying to realize anyhow. Its ultimate nature is energy so
that's what you're working on realizing.
5
By Mark Stavish (Red Wheel/Weiser, 2008).
. THE BODY OF LIGHT 85

Go over the details in the book Between the Gates so you

can get good at this practice-your future life depends on it.
Many people attempt astral projection but do not succeed
because they are too involved in using a method. The very
thing you need to do is to let go. The problem is when we
let go we tend to fall asleep. That's why having the mind
focused allows us to be relaxed. Now you understand the
point of meditation. It allows us to be at that point where
we can go with the flow. When we first get some success in
out-of-body projection it feel like: I'm going to die. This is
really scary when you're leaving. Guess what, that's because
you are! It's scary stuff. You have to get used to the idea
of not just being a physical body. The other part is when
you do the visualization here, you're getting used to moving
energy and the location of consciousness out of our body.
This is a very tricky practice. You sit in your chair and you
visualize yourself as a kind of radiant glowing form, distinct,
very distinct, not covered in some kind of haze, but that your
body is glowing. It is light. It is form. It is a definite structure.
But it possesses a dual nature. There's a matter that you
recognize, a density, and an energy as well. You want to take
that energy and you want to solve et coagula. You want to
separate the energy out and then bring it back in. This is
why this is a very tricky practice. Where you separate out
from represents different levels of consciousness. That's why
when you die they talk about different psychic centers of the
soul.
Ancient Egyptians placed all these talismans over the
body as guardians for protection so they could guide the
whole process. They don't want to return necessarily into it.
Maybe at night they might want to go out and come back.
But they want a connection like an anchor, not necessarily
always a return. As long as they are anchored to the body
they have a sense of individuality, a unique ego personality.
When that is severed, the unique ego personality disintegrates.
If you have read any of the Bardo teachings, they tell you that
86 MARK STAVISH

the ego disintegrates with that separation. So what they are

trying to do is to keep everything intact just enough so they
can keep their persona. Jean Dubuis called this "avoiding the
Second Death."
Here what you are doing is you're sitting in your area of
work. A good incense is necessary, such as sweet frankincense.
A little bit of myrrh, some rose, sandalwood is good. Anything
pleasant; nothing sharp or biting. You visualize the energy
leaving your solar plexus. Not the navel, but right above it.
At the same time, you can move down, you can get the same
effect down at the navel or slightly below it. The Egyptians
placed the focal point of all magical power in the stomach.
You're going to get a lot of kick out of the navel, if you go
from there.
I say start out slow, start out a little higher up at the solar
plexus. You visualize a cord going out from you to maybe six
or seven feet in front of you. You feel that the cord feels very
fibrous. You want to make it loose. The cord must be loose.
It must be thin, not breakable but translucent, flexible. It's
very important that it's translucent and flexible. At no time
should it be rigid or stiff. In fact not in any of the psychic
channels you ever visualize in any practice should it be rigid
or stiff, but they should be translucent and flexible. And
clear.
From that form a simulacrum of yourself through visu­
alizing. It's glowing and it's bright and it's right there. Its
eyes are closed. It can be in a robe. It can be in your favorite
hockey uniform from high school. It can be whatever you
want, even in your "birthday suit." It doesn't matter. You
visualize it standing in front of you with its eyes closed. Then,
in your mind, your mind travels through that cord into it
and arises within it as if you're looking at a mask. But you
don't open the eyes yet. You just feel the reality of that form
that you have created. The hands, the shoulders, the feet in
contact with the ground. Then you come out of it, go back
into your body, and you reduce that form down to the point
. THE BODY OF LIGHT 87

you pull that cord back in. It's like deflating a balloon. You
make sure it's nice and closed.
This is tricky stuff. This form must be brilliant at all times.
It must be luminous at all times. When after a few weeks
you finally do decide to open the eyes, you must look around
and not move and slowly in time begin to move. Then you
walk around your circle. You move around. You walk around
your chair. You try to look at different things to develop
the senses, listening, hearing, feeling of the body. What will
happen during this time is you will find that spontaneous
astral projection will begin to occur. You will leave your
body spontaneously, probably asleep while you are dreaming.
Lucid dreaming will pick up. This doesn't go in a straight line,
by the way. This has peaks and valleys. It's a roller coaster
ride. Just keep at it. At some point you can pull this energy
body back in. Then when you put it back out, you can begin
shaping it into god forms. Or you can begin scribing upon
it different Hebrew letters and that will be a roller coaster
ride, too. You do this over and over and over again for maybe
several weeks or months.
At some point this little form that you are making, you're
going to notice it doesn't want to follow your directions.
When this happens-listen closely-you do not treat it as
an individualized entity; you do not talk to it as a child;
you do not treat it as if it were a separate thing from you,
because it is a part of your unconscious that is trying to
disengage and separate. If it were to disengage and separate
what would happen is you will be calling Brian up to do
some vague version of a soul retrieval. You don't really lose
anything. What would happen is a part of your psyche be­
comes disproportionate to the rest. Its going to be something
that's always pathological. It will take on a semi-objective
existence. Because, remember, we can project multiple enti­
ties of ourselves. We think of ourselves as fixed and singular,
but we are not. You can project five or six images of yourself
across five or six different locations. You just don't think of
88 MARK STAVISH

yourself as being able to; but remember what I read earlier

from the Corpus Hermeticum, where anything is possible. So
what happens is this is a projection of a part of yourself that
can take on its own awareness or seeming self-awareness. It's
always something that's a real freak show. You've all read
stories of the Golem and Frankenstein. This is essentially it.

~ False God~

The old texts talk about how we worship a false god-Yahweh

is a false god-that we are obsessed with what's really the
demiurge, the god of the cosmos, rather than the All-Being.
What happens is at this phase of your practice you're replicat­
ing the stories you hear of "The Fall," how the Creator loses
control of his creation. Essentially, you're experiencing that
process in your world instead of on the cosmic scale. That's
why the old stories were about what they call reintegration;
the works of de Pasqually were about the reintegration of
beings. This is intensely difficult and dense reading. Essen­
tially it talks about the Fall from Paradise, from the Golden
Age, from unity into duality. That fall is described as Adam
falling into pieces. The original Adam is not a fall from omni­
science to limitedness, but it's a complete fall to pieces. We
are all individual cells of the great Adam, the great Being.
Our thing is to reintegrate with the whole. In a sense, that's
a replication of the Osiris myth.
We have our personality, but we don't let it get in the way.
We know that our personality is what we make it. It doesn't
require approval from others. I'm alright with who I am. If
someone says something nice to you, like it, but you don't
let it go to your head. If someone says something bad to you,
it's really about being an adult. It's either: "thank you very
much" or "I'm sorry you feel that way." It might be right,
it might be wrong. I don't know. It's taking away a more
relaxing view of yourself, not taking yourself so seriously. The
problem with "political correctness" is that it kills humor.
. FALSE GOD 89

What it means is that they take themselves so seriously that

it kills flexibility. That's death to spirituality. You have to
really get relaxed about how important you take yourself and
find equilibrium. There is: self-respect, self-cherishing as they
call it, self-love, or self-pity. The problem with us is that we
either love ourselves too much or we pity ourselves too much.
The fact is we don't have to do either. Stop loving yourself
so much-"I need my special day"-or self-pity-"Oh, my
life's so hard." You're here. You have some time off. It's great
weather. You have a refrigerator that works. In the end it's
all a matter of perspective, finding that equilibrium within
yourself.
This is important in this practice of the Body of Light
because now, if you're half out of your body or you're com­
pletely out of it, and suddenly you don't feel in control of your
thought form any more than you do an anchor that doesn't
pull you back. When you're dead you have to realize that
that's your thought, your projection. What we do is we create
this Body of Light when you do Assumption of the Godform
to give you a strong focal point for when you are dead. This
is so you have a sense of self that is somehow focalized to
understand some of the experiences that you are having and
then manage them in some way. What happens now is all of
these things that we consider angelic or good things within
us, and all of these things we consider demonic or evil within
us, as our psychic centers fire off, all that energy is released.
The Chinese used to say there are seventy-two psychic
powers that you had to develop in your mind and in your
dreams before you could develop them in the outer world. I
find that interesting that there are seventy-two seals. I have
little doubt that the seventy-two seals of the Goetia refer to
the seventy-two demonic forces that go off when we die that
are located mostly in the brain and the seventy-two angelic
ones are mostly in the heart.
I'm not saying that there aren't other objective realities
out there too, because I will tell you right now: as above, so
90 MARK STAVISH

below. But those demonic forces, if you experience them in a

more objective environment, you have to begin to understand
what your real relationship to them is. You're in charge here.
It's very true what they say: they don't come as one. Because
they are a chaotic force. They don't come singular. When
Jesus cast them out, they said, "Our name is Legion."
Even if you don't understand what this chaotic force is
and your relationship to it, even in encounters in your dreams,
hell realms are real. Jakob Boehme said, "Heaven and Hell are
within us." All the great ones said that, too. But within us we
investigate our way into what we would call a "more objective"
subjective domain. An objective domain is a consensus reality,
for lack of a better term, where we're all pretty much on the
same vibration. So you can be happy individually or you can
be happy in a group. You can suffer individually or you can
suffer in a group.
That's why one of the best practices that we have is in the
Institute for Hermetic Studies Monograph Wisdom's Bliss, on
inviting the guests. That helps you open up to the different
realities that are potential out there, but also beginning to
invite them into your life. People often get freaky when I
say, "Invite demonic forces into your life." But what is it that
these evil things want? What is it that you can do to make
them happy? If you want to make blood sacrifices, that will
make them very happy. But there are other things you can
do, too. You can make offerings to these things, what we call
obstructors, to get out of your way. Not to shoo them out of
your way through force, but to find out what is their need.
They're nasty because they're not happy. If they get happy,
then they won't be nasty anymore. And if I make it happy,
maybe it will help me in my path, because it is me. It is a
part of me.
 ELUS COHEN EQUINOX PRACTICE 91

~ Elus Cohen Equinox Practice ~

Some of you are familiar with an experience that came from
the Elus Cohen: operation of twenty-one days, ritual cloth, a
triangle. That's the circle, that's how big it is, about three
feet in diameter. When I was first taught evocation, I was
taught to do it in a circle this big, which is very small really.
What this does is this compresses your psychic body in a very
dense place. Using a candle, unless it's a votive, is a little
tricky. When you would stand by it you'd have to shave the
hair off your ankles because it would get singed. You normally
would hold a single candle. Some will do a candle, beeswax,
and an almond wand. I say just do the single beeswax candle.
And you could do this on each equinox twenty-one days, or
at least two equinoxes per year. You have the recitation. You
put the letter in the triangle and follow the instructions in
the book Between the Gates. As you're going to sleep, as you
focus on your throat, repeat that process with the letter.
I had a student who was hell-bent on doing evocation. He
just wanted to do one. Then his first year of training was
coming to an end. I set it up that way so after the first year
I could say: "You've done this. You're fine. If you want to go
another year we can talk about what you want to do." The
second year is usually different for each person. Some want
to do more Kabbalah. One fellow wanted to do Chaldean
Oracles. Some people want to do psychic manipulation. So
we have to figure out what fits, or if I have to send them
somewhere else. He just wanted to do evocation. His wife was
on the phone, too. It was a conference call. She was a student
as well. I just said: "You're an adult. Do what you want. If
you want to do it, go ahead. You don't need my approval or
permission."
He suddenly realized it was now all back on his lap. He
said: "What if this doesn't quite go right?"
I said: "Well, I don't know what to tell you. Don't call
me. I'm too far away to do anything and at that rate, you
92 MARK STAVISH

probably couldn't afford me to come down to do anything

anyhow."
Then he realized, when he heard it in those terms, that
not only is there a price to pay metaphorically, but that there
would be one literally.I wasn't going to come down after
telling you not to do something.I'll still help you, butI'm
not going to clean up your mess. People make mistakes. But
he had asked for advice andI gave him whatI considered my
best advice after thirty years of experience. At that point,
he still wanted to go ahead. There was a sufficient sound of
silence at the other end of the phone. Particularly his wife
realizedI was serious; we're not playing a game here. There
are more important things to do with your time than wasting
it on that.It wasn't like he had a good purpose for it. He just
wanted to do it to do it. He wanted to do it for some kind of
badge of honor. He was looking to accomplish something-I
don't know what. People lie to me a lot about this. First they
lie to themselves. People think they can come and ask me
this stuff, thatI can't discover the hidden motive.I think
I know what his hidden motive was and it's always money.
It's just a matter of what form. That's whatI'm thinking is
going on there. That's okay, but if you're going to do that
then you have to be full into it. Not lukewarm.It's like a
paratrooper. They'll jump out of the airplane. The chute may
or may not open. As it opens,I may get my head blown off
beforeI reach the ground. Worse yet,I may get other parts
blown off and survive the fall.I may hit the ground intact
and wander into horrible things that may happen to me. Or
all of that may be bypassed and whatever reasonI want to
be a paratrooper is realized in my mind.
Too many people come into magic or occultism to ac­
complish things they're too afraid to do in real life. They're
looking for a shortcut. That's whyI say it's the Great Work.
I see it all the time.It's okay.I don't think anyone comes to
the Path for good reasons.I'm convinced of that. As long as
you stick to it, keep moving forward and drop some of that
. ELUS COHEN EQUINOX PRACTICE 93

luggage.
The Body of Light is very tricky. You have to do it and
you have to do it right. After a year of it, you can decide
how much farther you want to take it or what directions you
want to take it in. But as you reintegrate and formalize that
notion of your physical body as being energetic, and that
you're projecting yourself from it and bringing it back in, at
some point you begin to realize that there's no difference
between the energetic body and the physical body, that they
are in fact one and the same. The actualization of that is
the ultimate actualization of the Body of Light, the rainbow
body, the adamantine body, Metatron. You look at it and it's
there and yet it's not there. It's not dense; it's not material.
You can touch it, you can feel it, and yet it is light. It does
whatever it wants. It goes anywhere it wants. Even the body
is not real. It's a projection of the mind. It's an energetic
component. The physical body is not just dense matter. It has
flesh and blood but behind that is an energetic matrix that
you can access and actualize. You can work with that. There
aren't two bodies. They are one. That's why you can include
the actualization of the Body of Light, the indestructible
body, in your prayer aspirations.
In Tibetan Buddhism, most people in the West are fa­
miliar with the Gelug tradition which is a very long path,
very detailed, and less so the Nyingma tradition, which is the
original school. In their prayers, these statements of the pro­
gression of the path, and this full actualization are repeated
over and over again, and the full complete accomplishments­
psychic abilities-that go with them. Instead of just stopping,
you pray not just for enlightenment but for the full realization
of the Rainbow Body, because that's the next step. It's not
just for the realizations of the mind, but for the body and
mind all together.
The Body of Light is like getting into a new car for the
first time. You want to get into this new car early and often
because when you actually have to drive it on the highway,
94 MARK STAVISH

which is when you die, you want to make sure that you're
familiar with where the ignition and everything is, where the
insurance package is going to be when you crash.

~ Commentary on Ritual ~
I promised yesterday as you left that I would explain to
some degree some of the symbolism of the ritual that you
experienced yesterday. I will do so without over-analyzing
it, nor with explaining it fully, but just enough to get you
going in the direction where you can understand the unique
peculiarities of how things are. Normally such rituals are done
singularly; that is, one-on-one as we initiate it. Sometimes in
small groups of three or four, but not often.
I'm sure many of you had experiences of some kind of
initiation or blessing, they are more or less the same word.
That's what initiation is. It's an impulse or start of something
new. It's a blessing. A way of giving or transferring not only
a little jolt of energy to someone, like a battery, but also to
help attune their mind to a particular direction. Because all
of this is about the mind, the direction the mind is going in.
When you come, when you look at me or whomever you
are receiving a blessing from, you have to look at them as
someone capable of doing that, as being able to help you
in some way. If you are receiving a blessing from someone
you don't think can help you, then it's nice but it doesn't
help you. It's pretty straightforward. If you are open to the
possibility, even if your faith is not firm or unshakeable, but
if at least you're open to the possibility that it can help you,
then you will receive some benefit from it.
Some of you may have felt a little concern. "What's go­
ing on? I didn't sign up for this." That's okay. That's fine,
because there arises within you certain thoughts and ideas
to contemplate. Why do you feel that way? Why are you
concerned? You're among friends. Why would you feel threat­
ened or endangered? Can you feel threatened? Nothing can
. COMMENTARY ON RJTUAL 95

make you feel threatened unless you let it. Nothing can harm
you unless you let it. If you don't want a blessing-a gift is
only a gift if you accept it. If you don't want it, don't accept
it. Even if it's given to you, you get to drop it or give it away.
So if you don't want what was given to you, simply give
the stones away or throw them away and burn the little bag
and string and say: "Let this blessing go to someone else
who wants it or will enjoy it." You don't have to take it.
But if you do, that's fine. W hat we did is you came before
me. You kneeled, which is a sign of humility meaning you're
getting out of your own way. We held hands which is a sign
of our union; we are one at that point. Yet we are not fully
one. It's kind of like that Hebrew letter Aleph. It's one but
it's two. There's a sense of transference, of unity, of coming
together. Then I blew upon your forehead. We said the winds,
the winds of life, the energies of change. I blew upon your
forehead because that is what we would define as the crown
or the highest point of the human being, the cleansing of the
central channels of the middle pillar, just as you would if you
inhaled. We did it three times. I'll leave you to figure that
out. It was done in the sign of the cross as the traditional
way in which it is done. And what do we say about the cross?
We have the symbolism of two forms of initiation. I pulled
you close. I whispered something in your ear. I gave you
something. I held your hand tight. I took some oil-rose oil
because that's what we had. Normally, it would just be olive
oil. I made the sign of the cross on your forehead again. Oil
is the symbol of fire, an anointing, a blessing. But it's also a
sealing. So we bring you. You come before. We remove the
obstacles. We give you something. We expand it. We seal it.
And we send you on your way.
The whole thing that we talked about was enacted right
here before you, right with you. You were a part of it. So
that's something to think about. When you take the number
three, we can look at it in different ways. In the Christian
context, which much of this tradition is, you can see it as the
96 MARK STAVISH

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which would be an outer way

of looking at it.
In a slightly more inner way, we could look at it as our
inner awakening to our own inner energies, but with help, with
assistance, our desire to understand what is this great creative
power in us, this great cosmic energy. As we talked about
earlier from the Corpus Hermeticum, Man is an expression of
the Sun, which is an expression of the Cosmos. The Cosmos
is an expression of the great creative force.
In an initiatic way, we could look at it in terms of different
levels of being, of Yesod, Tiphareth, and Kether.
In an ultimate sense, we could look at it as our pure
expression of thought, word, and deed, pure expression of our
consciousness. All in a single place, all in a single body, right
here, unified-because what is the cross? It is everything
brought together at this point, right here. Of course the point
is where illumination takes place.
Those are just some of the things you can think about so
you can understand some of the symbolism involved, because
when you go to an event and you have an experience like that,
you need to understand that at some point, either before you
have it or afterward, what the different symbols mean. I give
this to you afterward, because I didn't want to cloud your
possible own insights. I told you I'd explain everything in the
morning. There it is so it's no longer abstract. You carry it
with you always, long after I'm gone.
In the beginning, there is only unity. That unity kind of
wobbles a little, if you will, and there's a sense of duality, but
it's not right there yet. Then we move into the beginnings
of what we call duality. That's what we call the descent of
the tree. Kether, Chokmah, Binah, down to Malkuth. Or if
you look at the more Hermetic and Gnostic diagrams, the
different JEons and spheres, the Eighth Level and that kind
of thing, the underlying basis of everything is unified. When
we say unifying, we mean changing, not fixed, but always
able to turn into something else. Because it's not fixed; it's
. COMMENTARY ON RJTUAL 97

like the Ain Soph Aur, Limitless Light. It has no limit. It's
everywhere, but nowhere in particular. At that level there is
just the Light, and it's limitless. There's no boundary to it.
These are mental ideas. They are very difficult concepts
to grasp. Within the framework of that vast void, from this,
as Boehme called it, comes creation. Creation arises within it.
This is what we understand as duality. These are the Seven
Days of Creation, the Seven Levels of the Path down the Tree.
These are, in a sense, perceptions rather than actualities, that
is, something that is concrete. Right now, there is a perception
of distance between you and me that we can measure. But
there is no distance, because otherwise my thoughts would
not be able to blend into your thoughts; your thoughts would
not be able to blend with my thoughts. If the distance were
true and real, then that would not be possible. So there really
is no gap or void. That's why we said to you yesterday, when
you sit down to meditate you have to be able to think: yes,
you have your body; think of your underlying essence of it as
an energetic body. Think of that then as the fulcrum of who
you really are, not just the underlying essence, but that that
really is your body. The body is really radiant light. You just
don't see it. But because you don't see something, or don't
experience it in consciousness, doesn't mean it's not there.
So that's the thing the underlying essence is. Maybe we'll
do a little practice before we get into the laboratory to help
synthesize a lot of these ideas.
Regarding the question about angels: angels have a body,
but not a body as we understand it. They exist on a higher
level of duality. They're still in duality, but their sphere of
influence is considerable. But there's still a sense of duality.
They just can easily overcome it because their sphere of
influence is so broad. It's like us. What we do is we exist in
duality. We occasionally overcome it and we have a sense of
harmony or unity. Duality in many ways is just getting rid
of your sense of limitation. In that earlier discussion of the
Corpus Hermeticum, of what I read to you, think of yourself
98 MARK STAVISH

as higher than all heights, lower than all depths, and do

this all at once. Maybe you can't do it all at once, but you
can do bits and pieces of it and add to it. That stretches
your conceptualization of Self. It stretches your idea of who
and what you are to a bigger and broader notion. It's like
comparing the influence of your city councilman to that of
the governor. The governor has wide influence, but he's still
in duality.
There are two techniques for remembering your lucid
dreams: the first is when you're going to sleep, make a firm
statement that you will dream, you will know that you're
dreaming, and you will remember your dream. You could also
say you will control your dream.
The second technique is when you're waking up, wake up
slowly. This is very important: to wake up slowly. The same
thing when you're getting out of meditation, to get up slowly.
You don't want to just jump right off your chair. The same
thing when you're getting up out of sleep. You don't want
to just jump out of bed. You want to wait there, lie there
for a few seconds. Go over the dream several times in your
head if you need to. If you wake up in the middle of the night
and say, "I just had a great dream," go over it in your head
several times before you go back to sleep. You can write it
down if you want. But I stopped doing that. I make a firm
effort that I will remember it when I wake up. "You have
to remember this." But you can get up and write it down if
you need to. Don't try a tape recorder because that will just
sound like dinosaurs speaking in the morning anyway.
So, you formulate a firm conviction that you will dream,
that you will know that you're dreaming, and that you will
be able to direct the dream. You need to push it to that next
level: that you can direct it. "Directing it" means being able
to ask questions, being able to think. Thinking in dreams
is very problematic, trying to do things like reading, doing
simple math.
Most people have lucid dreams around two to three in the
. IMAGINATION IS THE SUPREME POWER 99

morning. You're designed to be asleep at that time. That's

why working third shift is problematic for people's health.
Second shift can be a little tricky, but at least you hopefully
can get in bed before midnight. You're supposed to be asleep
then.
You can dream in cycles where you dream for a few hours,
you wake up, and you dream for a few more hours before
you wake up. There are different practices you're supposed
to do during those break periods, but that's not what we're
concerned with.

~ Imagination is the Supreme Power~

To sum things up into the most distilled essence. I like to

quote Levi. He says:

Imagination is everything. In its own order it is

supreme. Facts, principles, and theories are barren
until they are vivified by the power of intelligence.
Magical arts have esoteric powers and are spiritually
illuminating only on the purified plane of intense and
supreme imagination. The true plane of magic is the
psychic and the translucent. Your imagination is the
supreme creative power within you, your ability to
create and vivify to powerful emotion images, ideas,
and seeds.

That is your supreme creative power. But with that you

need, as we say, the "Great Secret." This was a series of
articles written in the '30s that my great-uncle was somewhat
fond of, written by a fellow who was over in India for a period
of time. I'll read to you a paragraph:

I will now give to you the greatest Hindu suggestion I

have ever given in public. When you take a suggestion
from a teacher, healer, master, preacher, or a dose of
medicine from a medico, having been suggested by
100 MARK STAVISH

any of them that you would get such and such results,
seize that thought and concentrate your mind on that
thought, embrace that thought and hold it until it
makes you happy and adorns you with a uniform of
purity that meets the approval of the Guardian Angel
who watches over and guides your first steps. When
that is done, it is that which takes place when you
are healed.

This statement, word for word, has been testified by more

than a million souls in the last hundred years. To summarize
it into an even shorter phrase: "Have confidence and you will
have conquered. Dare to do and you will have the power to
do." When you look at the relationship between the relative
and the absolute, it is by man's domination of the finite
that he attains infinite mastership. By our understanding
of our relationship with the microcosm, we understand our
relationship with the macrocosm. It is through understanding
life, not running from it, that we understand ourselves. By
solving problems in day-to-day life, we understand our real,
inner spiritual or mental, psychic self.
In a closing statement, let me quote for you from the
Corpus Hermeticum:

I was overwhelmed with gratitude to the All-Father

who graced me with the Supreme Vision. In awe and
reverence I prayed. "Please never let me fall away
from this Knowledge of your Being, so that I may
enlighten those who are in darkness." Then, with his
power in me, I began to speak. The aloof laughed at
my words, but others knelt at my feet. I told them to
stand and receive the seeds of wisdom, which I will
sow in you with these teachings. So, listen, men of
clay. If you do not pay attention to my words, they
will fly past you, and wing their way back to the
source from which they come.
. A SIMPLE PRACTICE 101

~ A Simple Practice ~
Now I will give you probably one of the easiest, simplest
meditations, one that you're probably already familiar with.
It is the closest and purest thing I know to a perfect practice.
Just sit, close your eyes, and relax. Brian, I am sure, has
gone over this with you elsewhere. It's not new to you. Just
breathe deep and relax at your own pace.
Now imagine that your body is not solid and fixed, not
concrete, but is changing because it is energy. It is light. If
you like, you can imagine the Tree of Life within you, if you're
comfortable with that. Make it simple. Just light. No colors
needed. Or you can just think of the Middle Pillar. Or you can
just think of yourself as being hollow, with much spaciousness
inside you, much light. All is brilliant light. Remember the
words of the prayers we have read. We seek illumination, a
perfect expression of illumination, our natural state of mind
or being. With that, we seek out others, to reach out to
them. Everything is changing. Your body is changing. That's
what makes healing possible. You can change it into anything
you wish, for it contains all. It is the microcosm and the
macrocosm. Perfectly functioning.
Focus your attention in the area where your heart would
be. See a brilliant light. It can be white. It can be red. It
can be blue. Blue is a nice one because blue is spacious like
the sky. Blue is all-compassionate. Chesed or Mercy on the
Tree of Life. The great sapphire field of the Kabbalah. The
field is light, truly light. It is luminous. Reach out. It radiates
through a strong center point. It radiates great light through
you.
Now call out with your prayers, your highest aspirations.
Call out to the holy ones who have gone before, to the saints,
the masters, the great lineages of Hermeticism, of alchemy,
Kabbalah, Greek mysticism, from all the enlightened beings
everywhere. All times and places: past, present, and future are
here with you now. And that they pour their blessing down
102 MARK STAVISH

upon you, that you may pour it forth upon others. Visualize
them, imagine them as brilliant points of light coming from
the farthest reaches and the closest, from all areas of the
cosmos, pouring forth into this room, and into you, through
you. Know that they bring the most common thing, which is
joy, great love, and compassion for everyone and everything.
With that, a great wisdom. Wisdom of knowing how to act
and when and why so that it is in the best interests of all
beings.
Even if you are not aware of the details, you know and
feel confidence within you that this is the best thing to do at
this time. You're confident of the impulse. It may be a grand
thing; it may be a small thing. But it brings harmony and
happiness to the lives of those whom you have contact with,
to the lives of those whom you do not know, and to your own
life. That happiness may be temporal, in passing, like handing
a child a piece of candy. Or it may be vast like giving someone
a teacher who helps them on the path. When they are happy,
they can move forward on their journey. Feel the suffering
of others. As you inhale, see it come to you. See it inhale
through you. See it strike your heart and dissolve instantly,
for it has no concrete existence. It is merely an attitude, a
perception. Feel the ignorance and the suffering of others.
Let it come to you and it dissolves instantly. It shatters; it
melts; it disappears as it reaches the luminous warm light of
your heart. As you exhale, see a brilliant white going out to
them. This can be the great white light, the white tincture
of all-feeling of alchemy, the elixir of the gods, the Soma of
India and Tibet, whatever you want it to be. Or it can be
the blue light itself, the radiant mercy of Chesed, compassion.
See it radiate back out touching all beings everywhere. See it
first to those in this room. You inhale, taking their suffering
upon you. It dissolves instantly in a flash. You exhale. You
give them joy, peace, and happiness, whatever it is that they
need. You wish them happiness and whatever it is that they
need. You see this reach out to your family, your friends,
. A SIMPLE PRACTICE 103

those around you, your co-workers, even those with whom

you have troubles. You wish them the best. You wish them
great happiness. Strangers you pass on the street, the guy
who works in the gas station, the girl who gives you coffee in
the morning. All of these people, all of these strangers that
you see daily.
Reach out to all beings on the face of the earth. If they
need food and water, you wish it for them. If they need
clothing, you wish it for them. You pull within yourself the
vast dark clouds of pain and suffering and they dissolve
instantly in a flash. Now you wish the same for animals
because you know they suffer tremendously. They live in
great fear. You wish only the best for them. For those who
will be your food, you wish only the best for them. For those
that live in the wild or in pounds, you wish only the best for
them. For those that are maltreated, you wish only the best
for them, that they may have handlers and people who help
them.
Now you reach into the invisible realm and you wish
compassion upon all of those who are deceased who are
wandering and suffering, all of the ghosts who wander across
the earth in the invisible realms. You wish them light that
they may find their way. You reach up into the realms of
the deceased, into the realms of the angels and the demigods
who still exist on the vast plane of duality. You wish that
they may be happy, that they may find perfect contentment.
You feel their suffering come to you and yet you dispel it
instantly and wish them joy. You reach down into the hell
realms, land of the demons of the abyss. You know they are
suffering with great heat and great cold, great anger. You pull
it towards yourself and it dispels instantly. You send back
light and compassion and joy. You reach into the highest of
the gods. Notice that they are fast and powerful. They live
for eons near immortality, but are not yet perfect, not yet
fully illumined. You wish the best for them as well, that they
may be quick on their path.
104 MARK STAVISH

As you inhale now, you see all this ignorance coming to

you, assaulting you like a great demonic army, yet you sit
serenely in great rays of light. Your body no longer exists.
You simply are a point of light sending out whatever is needed
to anyone: wisdom, compassion, food. See the food, the drink,
books for learning, nice houses, jobs, money. The things they
need for daily life and for happiness. Maybe even odd things
like phones and computers, or papers and pencils. Anything
that they may need, that may help them be happy and moving
forward on their journey, on their path to illumination. See
this coming up for you like a great cornucopia. Now just sit
and rest. Breathe and allow this light to pour forth through
you and rest in the center point of your body. Now give
thanks to all of the masters who have heard your prayers and
have come to assist you. Give thanks to all of those whom
you have been able to help and they in turn have been able
to help you. W ish that any benefit from your prayers and
meditations may go forth eternally in the vast Ain Soph Aur,
the great emptiness, the great abyss, the void, and bring forth
eternally helping everyone, everywhere, achieve illumination.
Breathe deep.

~ Basic Alchemy: Some Questions & Answers ~

Paracelsus said, "We only transmute without that which we
have first transmuted within."
We're going to do a quick overview of some basic alchemy
before we work on some stuff from the lab. Have any of you
made tinctures? Have you distilled them? Or have you just
filtered them and used them? Have you done any work with
calcining the ash? How did that go for you?

RESPONSE: Actually very well. I've been doing it as you've

described in your book. I've never quite gotten it hot enough
to hit the white, but pretty light grey.
 BASIC ALCHEMY: SOME QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 105

And sometimes that's all you can get. By the way, the
secret's in the salt. So the more time you spend getting that
salt white, the better off you'll be. Jean Dubuis used to say
at the entrance to the lab of every alchemist you have to put
the word "Patience." We don't want to rush it. You often
hear what happens when you're doing this stuff when you
push it near the end, that's when the opportunity to really
ruin everything occurs. Because you want to push it, to hurry
it up. You want to get that last distillate over. And that's
when you run the risk of burning everything. So you really
have to be patient.
The easiest tincture of course to make is simply that.
What differs between it and what you get from the shelf is
that you go to the store and you get, we'll say Nature's Way,
or whatever the brand is, and they take a nice fresh herb most
likely. They may use dry, but probably fresh. If not, they let
it sit in some alcohol for a while, and probably not that long,
and then they drain it off, filter it, put it in a bottle, and
then they give it to you. This is nice. In fact, you can make
a tincture in about two hours. If you have fresh herb-we're
going to show you some differences-fresh herb on a hot
plate, you can see... You can hold that up and those-I use
lemon balm-that lemon balm will go from green leaf to a
yellow-green to almost a white. You'll get yellow-green in a
few hours. So you can make a tincture very quickly if you
need to. But it will go white probably by the end of the day.
What we're doing is we don't need to let it sit for the ten
to fourteen days. What we do, though, we do because tradi­
tionally that's how it was done. They put them in thermal
hot plates. They put them in cow dung. They put them near
a stove or a fireplace, someplace where it's warm to keep the
circulation going. But at the same time we also let it sit for
a while, because the belief is that would allow the herb as it
sits to evaporate as the alcohol goes off and comes back down
to attract more of the particular astral or planetary energy
that it is aligned with, because all of alchemy deals with the
106 MARK STAVISH

doctrine of correspondences. It all is based on that. That's

also called the Golden Chain of Homer in some texts. Several
people interpret the Golden Chain of Homer in different ways.
One is not better than the other. They are just different and
we have to use the right interpretation for the work. Most
often we see the Golden C hain of Homer in relation to the
levels of density. I have a picture here you might look at, but
it's not going to be of great insight. It's just something in a
text that you would read.

QUESTION: Would you let it sit for forty-two days?

I let them sit, yes. I just put them away. If I have to do

something in a rush, I know that I can, but I prefer to let it
sit.

QUESTION: When you're rushing do you have to do a lot

of prayer over it?

Well, rushing actually I do less prayer. I'd walk away. I

would just let it do its thing, knowing this is fine.
I had a lemon balm tincture, good stuff, usually people
take a few drops, but alchemists are crazy guys. You tell
them to take ten drops. You ask them how many they took
and they tell you twenty. A friend of mine asked me-this
is going back a while-he asked me to do a presentation in
Philadelphia. One of his co-workers was there. I gave her a
jar of lemon balm tincture and I told her what to do with it.
Finish it off, basically. Finish distilling it. I said if you take it,
only take ten drops at a time. I think she took a shot glass of
it. I called her half a year or a year later and she's over the
hill. Normally that doesn't happen, but too much of a good
thing makes you nuts.
When you follow the directions you follow them carefully
because tinctures are designed-particularly what we call
. BASIC ALCHEMY: SOME QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 107

"Ens," and I have some here for you, lemon balm Ens-the
tincture is designed to help purify your psychic channels.
They don't do it permanently. A permanent purification of
the channels requires a metallic tincture, usually antimony,
a fixed or unfixed tincture of antimony. I have directions
on my website on how to make that. I would suggest that
you look at those. I am not quite confident in some of the
readings I have seen published on how to make them. I know
for a fact that one of the authors who asked me to write a
brief foreword for his book many years ago-his first book I
thought was good, so I wrote the foreword. The second book
that came out later I know for a fact that the information in
there is radically incomplete, because all of the information
on the Flamel path-while a citation was given in the back
as having been translated by my friend, Patrice Maleze, who
did translate it, but I can tell you that those were notes
from a seminar. They are not the complete instructions. The
instructions are in a book, by someone who claims to be the
heir of Albertus. The writing claims that the instructions are
complete, but they are not. Therefore I doubt much of the
other work in his book as well. The first book, again, I liked.
I do not know what happened and never asked.

QUESTION: The tincture that is on your website...

There are fixed and unfixed tinctures of antimony. We're

not going to talk about them. I'm letting you know that is
the gateway to other mineral work and that that will provide
a profound and powerful healing tincture, but it is dangerous.
You have to get the antimony. Antimony is highly toxic. You
have to purify it with other things that are very toxic. And
then you have to purify it again. So it's a very dangerous
and difficult work. But you can do it. Brian has enough
lab equipment. He and I haven't talked much about it, but
it's something that I know he has enough here to do it. It
108 11ARK STAVISH

doesn't require a lot of equipment. It just requires a profound

attention to detail. Often those tinctures are-you do not
take the tincture directly but you're taking an alcohol-based
homeopathic dilution of it. W hen you get these things you
realize that this is an alcohol-based homeopathic dilution of
this nature. This stuff is strong.

QUESTION: Can you give some kind of a marker as to

when it would be safer for somebody going from plant alchemy
tinctures to antimony?

That's a matter of your own level of skill and equipment,

how comfortable you are dealing with that sort of stuff. We
say the toxic energies are more powerful. It is the same thing
in Vajrayana. You deal with the toxic emotions because they
are more powerful. You purify them first. It is the same thing
when dealing with antimony. The toxic stuff is strongest, but
you have to be very confident. People say it's natural, it can't
hurt you, and I looked at the one girl in the health food store
and I said, "Mercury is natural and it will give you a one-way
trip to the astral realm." That's why I don't really deal with
that too much; but I know that you can, just to set that up
for you, people want to jump into the mineral work and there
are things you can do. Fixed tinctures of antimony are one of
them. It's very powerful, very strong, and it's fairly easy in
the broader scheme of things to do. Then there's the other
work, which would be working with the Flamel path, as in
Nicholas Flamel.
Flamel was in the fourteenth century. You can look at
that in the back of my book. But before you get to the back,
you get to the front. The front deals with plant work. People
do plant work for three, five, seven years before they do
mineral work. Or they just do it forever because plant work
is inexhaustible. I'm telling you that right now. There is so
much you can do with it. I have barely scratched the surface
. PLANT STONES AND HANS NINTZEL 109

on that. It is inexhaustible. There are people who specialize in

sub-areas because there is so much cool stuff you can do with
it. That's really the point I want to say to you now. Making
spagyric tinctures takes more patience than it does work. You
have to really stay with stuff. Work meaning there's hard
effort. The effort is in the self, sticking with this calcining
and this leaching the ashes, going back and forth, making
sure you get the good herbs. It's not the same as tending the
fires. It's not the same work. Israel Regardie damaged his
lungs, and he was very skilled. He was very talented in the
work. But it's not like that work. It's much easier.
The good news is you can work with your friends and
family. You can make strong healing tinctures. Will the effect
be as strong? No, it won't be. But you can bring a powerful,
powerful even quality to it. Trust me on this. I've got some
tincture in there for you. You will see for yourself. This is
very good and if you just make seven planetary tinctures,
work with those. Work with making good salts. Work with
making stones.

~ Plant Stones and Hans Nintzel ~

There are two kinds of stones. I've seen the small pebbles. I
call this the German school. They are a hard little pebble.
Then I've seen what I call the French school, which is more
like a paste, like fruit roll-ups.
I remember taking a sliver of that one night when I was
staying with Hans Nintzel. Hans was a great guy. We owe a
lot to him for making available the alchemical name scripts
in English we have now. He went to great length, at great
expense, at great personal effort to collect these manuscripts,
have them translated, and then typeset. They were later called
"RAMS," the Rare Alchemical Manuscript Series. People are
offering them now for free, which is a great disservice, or they
sell pirated editions. You can get them on CD. Some of them
are pirated. Some of them are legitimate. I'm not sure who
110 MARK STAVISH

has the legitimate edition. I really don't.

Whenever anything involves mercury, you get lots of liars
and thieves involved. That's no different in esotericism. A
friend of mine told me that he personally brokered the sale of
these manuscripts to AMORC, the Rosicrucian Order in San
Jose, in the '90s. Later on I saw them showing up elsewhere,
too. People publish them without really caring who might
own the rights to it. It's a small market so it's not like there's
a lot of money involved, but that's also the point. There's
a certain dishonesty in what's going on. I don't know who
owns them any more so I can't tell you, but I do know that
we owe a debt of gratitude to Hans that we can never really
repay. So we hope that in his next life he gets a big push for
his journey because of what he's done in this one.
That said, I'm sure I'm not giving you too good a view
of alchemists early in the game. You've got to beware. The
plant work of making tinctures, that makes a spagyric or
alchemical tincture as we call it compared with one off the
shelf, is that a spagyric one has the salts put back in. That's
why we purify it. You purify the salt. You add the body back
to the soul and the mind, or the energy of the mind. That's
what we mean when we refer to it as the sulfur, salt, and
mercury. This is the body. This is the life energy or force.
This is what we would call the unique consciousness. In the
plant, this is very simple. This is the body of the plant. This is
mercury, and these are the essential oils that make it unique.
That's the sulfur. So when you're getting the essential oil,
you're getting the sulfur. When you're getting a tincture with
alcohol, you're getting these. What we do is we add this back
in.
Sometimes when you see a tincture you see little stuff
floating in it. That's a salt. I have some stuff out there we'll
show you where the salt has precipitated out of the tincture
and is sitting at the bottom of the bottle. What we're going
to do is pour it out. We're going to filter it. We're going to
take that stuff and we're going to calcine it. What's really
. PLANT STONES AND HANS NINTZEL 111

sweet is that's not the actual body of the plant. The actual
body of the plant has already been taken care of. This was
additional fine particulate that was existing in the tincture.
It's easier to calcine and it's easier to manipulate. The flip
side of that is it's easier to lose because-as some of you have
experienced when you calcine something, when you put a
match to it, a lot of times, especially with a fresh tincture,
like if you take lemon balm and throw it in alcohol, take that
alcohol and pour it off, and then you take that tincture, that
fresh plant while it's still soaked in alcohol-it explodes. It
just really pops. So you have to have it in a large enough
container or it's going to blow little stuff out. Often the finest
ash of course is the lightest, so it goes up. So you have to
have a way to hold down, or some people will take a very fine
galvanized metal screen. Clean it really well. They will hold
that over it so it doesn't fly through the screen. It's kind of
like fine cigarette ash. But remember, it's getting pushed up
by the heat currents.
You want to catch that stuff. You don't want to lose it.
We can have some of that because it's already sitting in the
tincture waiting to be ignited. We're not going to get much
either now, because when we burn something we get smoke.
Smoke is basically the water that's going off. We are mainly
water so there is not a lot of us left to get ground up after we
get cremated. The same thing with this stuff. I know people
who go out and they'll take more dry herb and they'll just
burn the herb right there to get more body if they don't have
enough salt. I know people who go out and they'll buy pure
essential oil if they don't have enough sulfur. I'm telling you
this because there are ways to augment the work. Now the
quality is very different. If you can get a really pure essential
oil, and you can get really fine salts, and you've worked at it,
you can get a really nice stone.
There's a fellow in Montreal, Steve Kalec, who has an
alchemy forum, Alchemistica, that's a forum. He makes this
wonderful rosemary tincture. Rosemary is just great for ev-
112 MARK STAVISH

erything that has to do with breathing, circulation, and the

brain because it really opens all the circulatory pathways of
the body. And it's just great because this stuff is like you
take a drop and say, "Wow, that's great, Steve!" And he's
such a great guy. All that solar element he brings right to
it because he's such a warm and compassionate person. He
brings all of that to it. That's all imbued in it. That's part
of the process. It's like Mom's cooking made with love. It's
the same thing here. It's like, how much essential oil do you
have to add to this? And he'd say sometimes it's a lot more
than you would expect.
So this work can be a little demanding on your time and
sometimes more on the resources than you would expect. I
mean not painful. It's not huge, but it's like, "Geez, I got to
get more of this, more of that." But you're not thinking about
the money. You're not thinking about the twenty, thirty, forty
extra. You're thinking about what? The benefit you get from
the work. It's just part of what goes.
You'll see alchemists together and they'll talk about stuff
and you'll never hear them complain much about the price.
Often it's: "I got something really great at LabX" or "What
I got on eBay." But you never really hear them talk about
anything else. Sometimes with antimony they'll complain
because that can run a few hundred bucks for a few pounds.
And that's all very recent. But they just do it, because they
know they don't need much. Sometimes they'll buy it in bulk
and they will share with one another. They'll pitch in. That's
why you have to have friends. It's always easier in a group.
When you pool your resources, it's easier for you guys to say:
"You know what? We're going to get two kilos of antimony and
it's going to cost us x amount, but we're only going to need
maybe half a kilo each." My point is that's the advantage
of the group, to help and support one another. And it's not
always the easy support of the hand around the shoulder and
the pat on the back saying: "You go to it, Tiger! Everything's
all right." It's the real support of stepping up and saying:
. PLANT STONES AND HANS NINTZEL 113

"How can we solve this problem, and have it benefit some of

us or all of us?"
I just want to reinforce that that's very healthy and a
very beneficial thing to do. I'm not going to discuss the Kali
Yuga, but one of the problems we have with contemporary
spiritual groups is there isn't really a lot of support there,
and I think you all know this. We're not going to kick that
dead horse. But when you have meaningful support, it's good
to appreciate it and continue that moving forward.

QUESTION: Do you make your own alcohol?

I get 20/20 and distill it off, because it's 20% volume

alcohol. You want the most alcohol you can get. I'm trying to
buy some local Dago Red. But sometimes the older guys will
make good stuff. You don't want to distill it all. But get some
of the local stuff. I know that's inevitably going to happen
with me. It's a matter of just when. I won't be making wine,
per se, for drinking, so I don't at that point get sidetracked.
You use a red wine for this. You use red because red, of
course, is the symbol of the sun and also the blood. That's
why you see this as part of the holy feasts. Even into India and
Tibet they use a lot of red wine, because in the higher tantric
feast (in the lower tantric feast, there they don't use any
alcohol-or what are considered impure things) we see the
rite of the bread and the wine going back to Melchizedek, the
righteous king in Jewish scriptures, and then moving forward
through them. But it's a kind of rite you see across many
places and times to central Asia and on down, and of course
through Europe as well. It represents giving, sacrifice and
giving, but also communing and coming together, forming a
community to the path of enlightenment.
And with that is life. And those products that are used
are the symbols and essence of life themselves. Bread is life.
Salt is for purification. Wine of course is one of the gifts of
114 MARK STAVISH

rejoicing after a day's labor. They are gifts of the gods. In the
early times, in the Greek rites, kind of a holy drunkenness
was encouraged, where the rites of Bacchus... now those rites
of inebriation, I've said be careful there. You don't want to
have too much fun.
One of the problems with alcohol is that it drives-and
the Chinese say the same thing-it drives the energy deeper.
And it does it in spagyrics and in our work, too. That's why
when you drink, you should drink only when you're already
in a good mood, not to get into one. And you should not
drink to excess, nor should you ever drink when you're in a
foul or miserable mood. It makes it worse. Oddly, we see a lot
of-and I'll just point this out to you-one of these things
about alchemy is that you see certain alchemists drank very
heavily. Paracelsus was one of them. He was a wretchedly
foul fellow at times, but at the same time he represented
the climate he lived in. He was just too brilliant for most
of the people around him. They didn't understand what he
circulated. Then when he cured elephantiasis they ran him
out of town. That's the kind of environment he lived in. But
people who knew him and people who could stand being next
to him long enough-which were few-would say he was one
of the most generous people. They said he would regularly give
his coats to beggars. He would be drunk all night and then
suddenly wake up his assistant, and his assistant would have
to start writing down what he said was the most profound
and in some ways disturbing insights that he'd ever heard.
That man was Paracelsus.

~ The Sum of Their Lives~

We often don't understand men and women like Paracelsus,

and we really can't in some ways, and it is best not to try.
You don't try to understand them. You look at them for the
sum of their lives. Because if you look at what you think is
their personality, you will be wrong and you will miss what
. THE SUM OF THEIR LIVES 115

is right in front of you.

This is not to say that the teacher is not the embodiment
of the teachings or that you can let someone do the most
wretched behavior and sit in front of you and be a hypocrite.
What I'm saying is there are some people, and you may in
your life meet one or two of them, who do things you don't
really understand. I think one of the great embodiments of
this was the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa. He was one
of the first teachers to come to the West. He was probably the
embodiment of this. He had an automobile accident which
radically changed his personality. Yet, at the same time,
people who knew him said he would do the strangest things.
And then at the final moment they might get a clue as to why.
It was not some perverse hypocrisy. You cannot understand
their level of reasoning. They have a knowledge of cause and
effect that you don't. They have a wisdom that allows them to
perceive like the chessboard, three, four, or five moves down
the line, when you're just trying to figure out whether you
should move a pawn or not. Those are rare folks. Hopefully
you may meet them or at least one of them.
My point is when you read the literature and you read
the biography of these people, you come across a lot of things
like this. Paracelsus was brilliant. He said there are at least
six or seven ways to make the Philosopher's Stone. He gives
many, many ways of working with alchemical plants. The
thing is, when you read the stuff that he's talking about,
most of the work is not really alchemical as it is preparatory
to alchemical, because you're preparing things that we can
buy readily.
So when I do work, I'll just distill my own alcohol off
red wine. But I keep that aside, my own stuff, for something
special, because that takes a lot of work. What I often use is
just regular grain alcohol, at least in the beginning. Now in the
beginning, start using grain alcohol so you get work in. There
are some alchemists-and Albertus is one of them, Dubuis
liked it too, we don't talk about it too much because you want
116 MARK STAVISH

to give people one thing and move them in a direction, you

don't want to give them options-but brandy was considered
an exceptional thing, too. I ended up getting some to work
with after I drank half of it. It was wintertime, 40% alcohol.
Now I know why they call it firewater. For your sake, go with
two things: grain alcohol and distilling red wine. If I pick
up a bottle of good wine and it's 7.5% alcohol by volume,
that means if I have "this much," I'm only going to get "this
much" alcohol. That's a lot of work; so if I get some good
hooch, 20/20, 20% alcohol by volume, that means a fifth of
it is going to come over into my glass. Occasionally you can
come across, very occasionally, 195 and sometimes 200 proof.
I have a site, a group in Washington that I work with,
that will distill pure alcohol alchemically from grapes. It's
expensive, but it's well worth it. The one in Washington
State. They'll send it to you. It fits in like a 4 1/2 gallon-it's
got to be under 5 gallons-a 4 1/2 gallon container. They'll
send smaller ones, too. They do it by quart, by gallon. I will
send it out to you. It's called Alchemical Solutions. They're
wonderful.
The thing is, alchemical means they've distilled it seven
times for purity.

QUESTION: So if you are given access to homemade wine

of a variety, you would only use something that was 100%
made of grape?

Red grape, and if possible, the least additional stuff the

better. Now there's a way to ferment, to self-ferment, a
spagyric product. There's a way to do that when you take
a plant and you put it in water. It creates its own alcohol.
There's a way to do that, but we're not going to talk about
that. I have the information. I'll send it on to you if you want.
My point is that a simple way is you take red grapes, red
wine.
. THE SUM OF THEIR LIVES 117

You distill off the alcohol. You purify it by doing it seven

times. These are known as the "eagles." This is the flight of
the eagle. Seven times. You'll know when it's done. Trust
me. Then you will take that and you will take your plant
ground up very finely if it's powder, preferably if it's fresh. I
try to avoid any metallic contact with my plants. I like to use
ceramic, glass, or even sharp plastic. You don't get an edge
when you have to cut something. I understand the Chinese
do it the same way. No metal, because the idea is that the
metal draws, so you don't want to draw off the energy. This
is just something I did always. I came across that later. You
grind it to a fine powder. By the time it's dry, though, you
can also throw it in a coffee grinder at that point. By that
point it's dry. It's when it's fresh that it matters the most.
That's what I found. By the time you've dried it, it's not
that big of a deal. But for myself personally, when it's fresh,
that's when it seems to matter, because it's still alive. It's
still very, very much alive.
So if you want to make a tincture of lemon balm-and
we'll say for your sake lemon balm's under the domain of
Jupiter-you'll go out some Thursday morning a little before
sunrise. You'll cut the plant and grind it up, you put it in
your Mason jar, and you pour the alcohol in just like it's
shown in the book. You put your plant in and you fill it
up about halfway with alcohol. Throw Saran Wrap on the
top. Slap the lid back down. Screw it down tight. Wrap the
aluminum foil so no light gets to it.
Stick it behind your refrigerator. We deal with natural
temperatures, about the temperature of a hen hatching its
egg. About 80 degrees. You put the Saran Wrap because the
alcohol is going to degrade the top. So you put that on there
so it doesn't and you seal it tight. You can put a light bulb
in there with 10 watts. I think it will push the temperature
to about 110, like a hen hatching its eggs. So it's no big deal.
Any in that range. That sand bath is a great idea. Because
the difference in temperature we think as a lot, but for what
118 MARK STAVISH

you're doing it's not going to really mean any difference on

your time. It's a nice smooth easy way. I mean I'll probably
go get some of that. Usually what we do to make a sand bath,
you have to get an electrical cord. You have to strip the end.
You have to make it yourself.
Forget that. You just have to get one of these already
made. Remember: safety first in all this. I mean that rule,
safety first. Take your time. Patience. Lemon balm is what we
start with because it's Jupiter and it has a generous health
benefit.
Let me say just one thing and then we'll go for break. So
that is your tincture. If you have good high-grade chemical
filters, fine. If not, use your coffee filter. Some people I know
filter with gauze and high-grade cotton because they lose less
tincture. At least, they tell me they lose a lot of issue. Of
course you can squeeze the cotton. I can't squeeze my coffee
filter on my own. Keep everything clean. Put them in a nice
clean fresh jar. And then we take the salt outside. We ignite
it while it's still hot. We stir it and start the long slow process
of turning that to ash. And it is a long slow one. W hat I
like to do is make enough tincture initially because you will
consume a lot of it when you're making the stone, a lot more
than you think. I like to make enough where I can take some
off and take it during the process.
You can take a tincture straight out of the bottle right
there, but ideally you will now take this tincture and of course
distill it seven times.

~ Force Fields and Alchemy ~

I was talking with a friend of mine, Russell House, who
noticed when they were doing some work on the Flamel path
that they had created an area or a force field that was about
maybe 100 feet or more in a circle around the furnace. That
was very interesting. An author who has written a book on
alchemy mentions this as a fact, although not really quite
. FORCE FIELDS AND ALCHEMY 119

mentioning the fact that this was never mentioned before

in print until he wrote about it in an article. I say that
because you have to watch who you read. So that force field
is a definite thing and it does affect the area you're in. You
interact with it; that's clear.
One of the more humorous aspects of this is when a friend
of mine, the same one who was doing some Flamel work at his
house... There was another fellow there. There are different
ingredients you add to this in the process. He's out there
with the heavy leather apron on, big welding gloves. He's got
torches under this thing to keep the antimony melting. He
said: "I've got a splitting headache." I said: "Did you add the
iron yet?" He said: "Oh, I forgot that."
So, it's kind of a joke, but you get this weird interaction
between the operator, the operation, and the environment. I
was on the other furnace. I was probably 50 yards away. But
that's the way it is.
My same friend had been doing a distillation much bigger
than that. He decided to walk away. He sat outside on a
bench next to his lab. He was smoking a cigarette. He was
waiting, waiting, waiting. He was thinking. His mind was
drifting. He sees this little flower there. This is going to take
a while so he's sitting there thinking about stuff. He looks
at the flower and he says: "What element would that need
to perk that flower up? Let's try Earth." So he starts trying
Earth thoughts and it's not doing any good. So he's thinking
Water thoughts. That's not doing much good either. This is
taking time now. Then he gets to Air. That's better. Then
he does Fire. And there's an explosion in the lab.
We jokingly say you're not an alchemist until you've had
an explosion. But that's usually something you want to try to
avoid. A lot of people have experiences where they happened
to be there right at the right time. So you want safety all the
time. You want to avoid that. For psychological purposes I
consider the small pops as explosions, therefore I am duly
"disastered" and all things will be smooth from here-on out.
120 MARK STAVISH

When you do your distillation, be aware that your attitude

is very important, but you don't want to have too strong
of an attitude-meaning you don't want to be projecting
something too specific. You want to have a general idea of,
say, what the Jupiter qualities are, but you don't want to
be so narrow as to eliminate all of them, or any of them.
So ideas of health, stability, wisdom, compassion, joy, and
expansiveness you would have in a general sense. Just allow
the process to pull out of you more than you are putting into
it. You want it to uncover what is there, rather than you
being so focused on what you want.
Of course you could decide for experimental purposes: "I'm
going to make a tincture of horse tail which is for Saturn and
I'm going to do it specifically for reinforcing and strengthening
bone structure." You could do that. But you know in your
mind that that's the purpose of the tincture. When we're
talking about these general tinctures, it's more open. You
have to open yourself. Remember unfoldment. Allow things
to move out rather than you always being in control. Because
that's part of the problem. You want to just be relaxed.
You want to have that "not too loose/not too tight" state
where you are meditated by the process, rather than doing the
meditating. You're relaxed and receptive, but not asleep.
The notion is that there are several points you should
always think of before you do the process:

1. Know what the process is step by step. Know the theory

before you do it, before you practice it.

2. Go through that practice step by step in your head.

That can be everything, if you're new to it, from con­
necting the glassware to each step, to the final thing,
the final distillate, the final act of creating the stone or
the tincture that you're after.

3. Know what the final outcome is. You have to know what
the final goal is, because that's what you're working
. FORCE FIELDS AND ALCHEMY 121

for.
4. Visualize this process again completely and perfectly,
step by step: what you're doing, why you're doing it,
and the outcome you're expecting.

It's like anything else you do, like baseball. You go up

there with your bat to hit the ball as hard as you can to
get it out of the park so you can run the bases and win the
game. And your team goes on to the championship, whatever.
You're not just doing it to swing the bat.
The same thing here: you go through that whole process.
Of course always make sure that you begin and you end with
your prayers, whatever they happen to be. There are many
alchemical prayers out there. You can make ones up yourself
that include the full understanding of your purpose. Or you
could get nice ones from the Hymns of Orpheus. They're nice
Renaissance prayers used in a lot of magical invocations. Use
these.
The whole function is very simple: to clarify in your mind
the entire creative process that you are replicating, taking
part in, within your mind and initiating the process to its
completion. Don't start any experiment that you're not going
to finish; if you are going to finish it, you do it regardless of
the cost.
So start small, build your confidence. Understand how
accidents occur and don't occur, how success occurs. Keep
careful notes of your dates and times. Always label stuff as
they are all going to look the same after a while. So clear
labels, clear notes.
Sometimes you'll have people ask me: "Is there a difference
between spagyrics and alchemy?" Purists will say yes. Or
purists will say: "This is not even spagyrics because you have
to have the plant fermented in its own alcohol for it to be a
pure spagyric product." Okay. That's fine.
Others will say: "Spagyrics is not alchemy because it is
not mineral." Okay. Because there are ways to do a spagyric
122 MARK STAVISH

tincture that don't involve a lot of personal engagement in

the process. What you're doing is invoking the laws of natural
magic, as we call it. It's more of a kind of chemical form of
astrological magic rather than what we would call alchemy.
That's fine. I'm assuming you're going to be part of that
process. Don't worry about it.
Some time ago I made a tincture. While I was calcining
the salt, I was looking at it under a magnifying glass. I
noticed that I was getting some color changes in the salt.
These weren't typical ones. You're going to find it can be
hard-going to the pure white. I know people who said only
once or twice in their life have they seen white salt actually
get pushed to a red stage. That's once or twice in their life.
Ideally that's what it should do. I say that ideally. It's not
going to happen.
I looked at my salt and I saw these green and blue and
aqua-green colors in it. I took a sample of it and sent it off to
get analyzed by a friend of mine. He wrote back and told me
the chemical description of what was in there. I asked what's
going to give us those colors? He said there's no reason for it
to be those colors; you have a genuine transmutation because
there's no chemical reason for those colors to be there.
That doesn't mean every time you have some change in
the lab it's alchemical, because most people don't have enough
science background to know the difference. So don't worry
about that. Just keep your head about you. Do the work,
take the results, and don't pretend to know what happened.
But if you do have access to someone with a good science
background and some good testing equipment, take advantage
of it and get your samples tested every now and again. Any
questions on anything so far?

QUESTION: I was just going to ask you to address a little

bit more the "why you 're doing it" aspect. Can you go into
it maybe just a little more in-depth to the physical, mental,
spiritual effects of the process in imbibing the materials?
. FORCE FIELDS AND ALCHEMY 123

It helps to clear away the psychic channels and obscura­

tions. In doing that, there are physical side effects of greater
health and well being. If that has any meaning for you, then
you do it. If it doesn't have any meaning, then you don't. But
you need health and you need longevity in order to complete
the path. This helps to speed it up.
The path is terribly long. We're not going to tell you how
long because it's too discouraging. You can probably do it in
this lifetime, or maybe six or twelve. That's considered fast,
instead of untold eons of mindless wandering.
It's a path of fire. Fire is essential for initiatic work. That's
why you want to have works of fire. This is a fire path. There
are other fire paths, too. When they work, I get hit by a
two-by-four! You may do the same practice five, six times.
You may get some results, big ones, little ones, many that
feel like nothing. When you get a big one it feels like getting
hit by a board because it moves everything out of the way
all at once.
That's why you need to have people around when you do a
lot of this stuff, so you can talk to them. Particularly someone
who has done it before. What is a teacher? Someone who has
done it before. They may not have all of the answers. They
might not be perfect in it because they are still doing work
themselves. At least if they have done the practice several
times before, for several years, they have enough experience
to hold your hand along the way. Remember, if you're ready
for Yoda, then Yoda would be here. You have to look at what
are your expectations and what are you ready for. You're
ready for whatever you got. Just move on from there.
First you cling to the outer religion as your salvation
against the evils of the world. Then you cling to some inner
devotions to help you understand what's going on. Then you
move on to some kind of initiatic journey in a secret society
or a method of that manner. Then at some point you have
to be an adult, stand on your own two feet, and rely on
124 MARK STAVISH

yourself. It's like the mystery of the Sphinx, the stages of

growth. Alchemy was considered the pinnacle of the sciences.
It was not something you jumped into. You usually had quite
a long time of experience, some fundamental astrology and
Kabbalah before you went into it. Being it's the Kali Yuga,
people want to start at the top and then realize it's a long
way down.
When you start this kind of path, you have to realize that
it draws a lot out of you quickly. That's what you're after;
that's what you want.

QUESTION: With the acorns, when making a tincture of

horsetail, you would break it down, you would mash it, so you
don't break those down and mash them first?

No, because that's the way I was taught.

COMMENT: It's kind of hard to break them down without

metal or stone. If you like to do the others, you 're taking a
mortar and pestle and you 're pounding it. It would take a
bigger mortar and pestle ...

What we do is patience-small amounts, slowly. The

amount of tincture that we have in there is very rare.
There's a story behind this. Jean Dubuis, who is well
known for his alchemical experiences and others, at one point
was approached by some folks banging on his door at night.
They had in their hands large amounts of mistletoe. They
said the Archdruid of Gaul ( of France) is sick. Years ago we
knew how to make a tincture from mistletoe that would cure
all illnesses. We have forgotten this and we would like you to
make something so that he can be better.
Dubuis looked at the mistletoe and said this is very hard
to find because it was mistletoe from an oak tree. He knew
. FORCE FIELDS AND ALCHEMY 125

that only a few families had this kind of thing available on

their estate.
Dubuis found that it was very difficult and gummed up
his extractors. Of course by the time they got to Dubuis, the
Archdruid was very ill and he couldn't get to it in time. But
Dubuis stayed with it and he figured something out. He said:
"Oh! What is mistletoe? Mistletoe is a parasite. It draws the
energies of the oak to it."
Some of you may know that folks have used mistletoe,
which is toxic, in fighting cancer. Suzanne Somers, that was
her big thing. She extolled the virtues of mistletoe tinctures
in fighting cancer. She used German tinctures. I don't know
if it was apple trees.
But Jean, because the oak was so important in alchemical
symbolism, said: "Let us try acorns." Because the seed holds
all the energy of the tree: from the little acorn the mighty oak
will grow. Applying his wonderfully brilliant Jesuit-trained
mind to the problem, he quickly came to an engineer's solu­
tion. Hence the acorn tincture was reborn.
The acorn tincture had existed for a while. In the eigh­
teenth century, there was a guy who existed only on acorns.
Acorn bread, acorn soup, whatever. He was one of some al­
chemists, I think, from the Ephrata commune. The tincture
was used and found to have essentially the same properties
as the mistletoe because the mistletoe was extracting what
was parasitical to the oak.
It's more from what we call natural magic, natural alchemy.
It uses time and patience on your side rather than you. I
talked about the difference between you projecting too much
into the work. Allow the work to affect you and pull out of
you rather than you coming in saying: "I'm going to make
this tincture for blah, blah, blah." You can make one for very
specific purposes if you want. You say: "I've got to make a
tincture and it's to work with bone structure." Sure. But gen­
erally we don't do that. We make a tincture that is broader
in its influence so that we can feel the process within us.
126 MARK STAVISH

You take your acorns. You pick them when they're ready
to fall. You put a tarp down. You collect them. You clean
them. Take the caps off. Wipe them dry. Pop them in a nice
big wide-mouthed jar. Pour in your alcohol. Wrap it tight
and let it sit.
You may find after six months-or a year may be useful­
but I generally say let it go about at least eighteen months.
Make enough where you can draw some off and let the rest
sit. As you saw, these are some of my last batches that I give
to you.
When I gave this to someone, they came to me and said:
"I've got a patient. They are very sick. Do I have anything
that could help them? They have Hepatitis C."
I said: "I don't really know. I'll give you something. You
tell me."
I saw them maybe a few months later. He said that there
was no sign of it ( the illness). There ended up a couple of
other people coming to me for it for the same reason. I guess
they were in the same support group. That would be the only
link.
I gave it to one fellow who said to me: "I just want to see
my fiftieth wedding anniversary." When I gave it to him he
was in the hospital. The doctor said: "Maybe two weeks." A
few days later I saw him where he lived and he was yelling
down the hall at me. In fact his wife stopped giving it to him
because he was getting too horny. I'll save this for another
time. That's it. That's it. That's your tincture. Hopefully
you'll have good experiences with it. Hopefully it will help
you with someone you know.

QUESTION: What kind of oak tree?

I'll take what I can get.

QUESTION: It doesn't matter, white, red?

. FORCE FIELDS AND ALCHEMY 127

I go for the red. That's because that's what's around. I

just take what I can get.

QUESTION: Mark, this is all done under the ausp ice...the

thought that the plant is some kind of higher vibration?

No. Plants have an energy that we're going to extract.

We help them; they help us.
We tell you these stories to encourage you so that you'll
undertake the work and have some of your own. W ith that
said, this is a simple product, a simple tincture. Some of the
ones that you're asking to make are more complex than this,
although not by much.
Moving on to stones or some mineral work, another tinc­
ture that we have for you-and I don't know if we have
enough, but we'll try-is an Ens, an Ens of Melissa. An
Ens is a particular product, very high in fire, designed for
initiatic purposes. There are many ways to make it. This is
the simplest way to make it. You can make it according to
Paracelsus, which is not that complex, but the effects are
much more potent. W ith that said, I encourage you to try
those as well. You have to deal with a very caustic solution in
the making of it, but Brian can walk you through the simple
safety procedures of: "Fluids separate; you only want the one
on the top." You've got to be careful.

COMMENT: That's where a separation ball comes in handy,

draining off the caustic part that settles. So that drains off
and you 're only left with...and then slow and steady you 're
taking it off the top. It's like you're skimming oil, but you
don't want to get any of that bottom to drain off until some
of the good stuff drains off too.
128 MARK STAVISH

I use a Pipetman. Very narrow because you think there's

not much on the surface, but there's a lot. I use a very
narrow graduated cylinder. What looks like nothing on the
top suddenly becomes "this much" fluid! It's using your head.
I have a narrow surface; I want to condense that. They're just
little tricks that you learn if you don't want to go through
expensive equipment.
You'll see it because this stuff has a color. It will float in
there. You'll know if you pollute it. It's not a question. You
know it. It's like your turkey baster. You squeeze a little bit
out and you get rid of it. I tell people to take a big glass of
water and then just take a small drop of it and put it on
their tongue just to see how bad it is. Then drink the water
fast because it's so bad. You never want any of this. I don't
encourage this. I say that jokingly. I did this to see how bad
it was. I took a big glass of water... and one drop. That stuff
is horrible. It burns.
The way Paracelsus suggests making that is just a little
more complex-not much more complex. It's not rocket sci­
ence. But there's just a little more to it in the method he
gives than what is generally given.

~ The Cloister and Regeneration ~

The residents at the Ephrata Cloister purportedly give a
description of a process that is identical. That's a regenerative
process that they undertook. But it's physically demanding
and damaging. I know people who started and stopped. You
can lose your hair, teeth. You're better off making a good
strong tincture of horsetail.
What we do is we'll take this, once it stops burning, we'll
take a mortar and pestle and crush it down. Now we put it
back in, calcine it a few more times. Each time it reduces down
until it won't reduce down any farther with that. Alcohol
burns at pretty low temperature. The other advantage of that
is it doesn't leave any residue. What's left is only what is the
. THE CLOISTER AND REGENERATION 129

plant material. Once we crush that down and put it back in,
you get kind of a fine black powder.
Hopefully, you'll start to see edges. You'll see the edges
of grey or white. You'll want it at least a grey, or ideally it
would be white, the lighter the color. The grey would be a
Chokmah kind of salt. The white would be a Kether, actually.
Then we'd pour a little alcohol on it, mix it up, burn it again.
If you've done it a few times-sometimes I'd go through that
process half a dozen times until I think it's spent, as far as I
can get it with that type of heat. Then you have to calcine it
some more.
Normally, I cheat at that point. If it's something that
takes a long time to cook down to a white stage and I really
need it to be a white stage, then I take the residue that I
have from the mortar and pestle; I put it in a crucible and I
cook it in a jeweler's kiln, because a jeweler's kiln can get up
to 3,000 degrees. I'll let that cook. I'll put it on a timer and
I'll let that cook eight hours, ten hours, something like that.
It shuts itself off so I can go to bed.
The other way we're going to show you is to set up a
regular tripod. You use a regular crucible. Put the ash in
there. Then you take a plumber's torch or something. Butane
is going to be hotter than this, but you don't want it to have
direct contact. You want a crucible with a cover because you
don't want to lose the ash. At that point when it gets to
the white stage, it gets so light it literally will float in the
air, so any little breeze... Obviously, outside is a little better,
because if something does go wrong you have less to deal
with. Inside, if things go wrong, now you're trying to put
stuff out.
I like cat litter because it's absorbent. I keep a lot of
bags around. Or you can use sand to smother any kind of
fire quickly. Fire extinguishers are always good. All of those
things are good. Safety first. It doesn't take a lot. If you blow
something up, you're done. I couldn't retrieve anything from
that. Even if I could, I wouldn't use it for a couple of years.
130 MARK STAVISH

Hopefully, you haven't spent a long time on it. That's why

we do it in small batches, because you're not losing all of it.
You have some in reserve.
Once you get it down to a white, you put it back in the
tincture. You shake it up and you continue to cook it. You
may cook it another forty days, or ten days, whatever. It
will take out the salts that can be dissolved from the ash.
The pure salts will go back in the tincture. Your menstruum
will actually dissolve those salts. Extract that part back into
the liquid. Now we have just the most purified salts back
in a liquid form, like the plants would do. They drop the
minerals from the ground. They're in a liquid form at that
point. That's how they utilize them. We want the same thing
without the gross matter of whatever the carrier is. So we
cook it off, cook off the gross salts, the material form, and
get just the essence. That gets reabsorbed. Then you get to
the next stage.
He's bringing the stuff he's straining off from the Ens.
There's a little bit of filtered material at the bottom. Strain
that off. At the end you'll see there's like a silt on the bottom
of the jar. Then you filter that off. Just pour the stuff off.
Save the liquid off to the side. Whatever there is going to
be is so fine you're not going to notice it anyway. Then you
calcine that down, the silt. Now you have the most rarefied
salts. You take those salts and add them back in.
Then you're good to go. Once the salt is that rarefied,
it will dissolve into the liquid material. The combination
of alcohol and water together... Remember, the alcohol and
water is really important. If you take these or any plant
material and stick it in 190 proof alcohol, you'll come back
a year later and it will be just as clear as when you put
it in there. It will not extract that. It preserves it. It's like
putting something in formaldehyde. It doesn't break it down.
It actually preserves it. For me, the thing I've always used is
50/50. Fifty percent spring water, fifty percent 100% alcohol.
That's what I like. Chemically I can tell you that the alcohol
. THE CLOISTER AND REGENERATION 131

will extract the alkaloids. The water will extract the phenyls
and the saponins, all of those things which are water-soluble,
not alcohol-soluble.
So if you're only using alcohol, you're only going to get the
alkaloids. You're not going to get part of it. That's a big deal,
because a lot of the healing aspect is that combination of the
two. Plants have an extremely sophisticated buffer system if
you take it as a full thing. That's why pharmaceuticals.. .it
drives them crazy, because it's such a complex organism
they can't make sense of it. They can't duplicate it. It's too
complex a structure. If the water is spring water, it's living
water so you're good to go. Remember, you're going to distill
it off, so don't worry about the water. I could draw it from a
stream. I'm not drinking that; I'm cooking it down.
First of all, anything in the alcohol is going to kill it.
And then I'm going to distill that off anyway several times
so it's really purified. But you want living water. Everyone
knows the difference between well water and spring water.
Spring water comes to the surface by itself. It wants to be
on the surface. It comes up from the ground by itself. It's
not something you're drawing from the ground. Spring water
comes by itself. It's here for you to use so we call it "living
water." It wants to come from the deep part of the earth to
the surface on its own. There's a lot of stuff there even to
think about. I find that it makes a much better tincture.
What we have is some other ash that is going to go easier
for you. We're going to get that in a crucible. Probably we
can do that inside because it's a very small amount. Leave
that here. Leave it covered. Let it go. You've seen the process.
Let a little air get in there.
As I was told by one alchemist, the amount of mercury
and acetone that they needed in order to get the red salts for
the red stone-that you would get in granular amounts-was
so huge that you were looking at about a quarter of a million
dollars doing it that way.
A friend of mine told me that one day Albertus was
132 MARK STAVISH

visiting. He's the only one that I knew of who went through
the PRS classes twice, seven years each. Albertus was visiting.
He walked over to something he had been working on, that
had been calcining for about two weeks. He still wasn't getting
colors. This is odd. Albertus just walked over and grabbed it,
pulled the lid off, and said your heat is too low. He could see
color coming off, which goes back to something I said earlier.
With alchemy it's a peculiar thing. You want to look at
where the information is coming from. You want to look at
who the teachers are. You want to look at the lineage. You
want to make sure there's a proven pathway here of effective­
ness. At the same time, anyone who is teaching ultimately
has to stand on their own experience, just as you will have
to. While not degrading what they've come from, they will
appreciate it more than you can imagine, because they know
that is what has helped them. So you have to be careful of
those who like to stand on the shoulders of others; they tend
to inherit their mantles, particularly when there's none to
inherit. So in alchemy, it's: "What is it that works here?" So
if someone is telling you that they made this tincture and
can do this, then great. It's easy enough to test. If someone
is telling you that they can make the Philosopher's Stone,
that's good; then let's see that, too.
I have a funny slide that I show of an alchemist having a
fire in his lab. It's an old wood frame. And I say: "You don't
want this to be you." Everyone laughs. But you don't. It's
inherently dangerous, so we tell you that.

COMMENT: What we would normally do with that is we

would put that in the kiln. A kiln not for pots but a small
one, big enough to hold whatever crucible you think you 're
going to need for future use. They weren't huge. The biggest
one might be like this size, maybe a quart of material, which
would be a lot. They never fill it up. Basically like a quart
flowerpot.
. THE CLOISTER AND REGENERATION 133

If you can find a dentist kiln from the 1930s or 1940s,

then that is what you want. Dentists would make their own
porcelain dentures. That's what I was told a lot of guys back
then would get. They would get these dentist kilns. I saw
one at the Moravian Tile Works. You can just do a search
on that, "dentist kilns from the '30s & '40s." They're energy
hogs, too. You might have this huge apparatus, but the idea
is to compress this heat into a small area. The thing you have
to watch is one of the reasons they work. What you don't
want to do is you don't want to turn this into a glass. You
don't want to fuse this. You just have to be careful.
Okay. As you can see, that's all black in there. You're
just going to keep working on that crap, scraping it down,
grinding it down. You're going to lose stuff along the way.
That's just the reality of it. You end up with very little salt
for all your effort. But that's where the good stuff is. So you
often end up with very little. Scrape that all off. That is part
of the long, drawn-out process.
Wait until it's cool before you handle it. Even with the
heavy gloves, it's hot. You're not going to be able to hold it
for very long. And it's an odd shape. It will slip right out of
your hands. You have to wait until it's cool so you can get
a grip on it. Once it's cool enough, and you can test it... As
long as the cover is on, you're not losing anything, so I give
mine a long time to settle. When I can get closer and closer
and I don't feel any heat at all when my hand is pretty close
to it, I'll give it a quick touch to see. But usually I'll let it
sit half an hour to let all the heat dissipate off it so I can
handle it. Even if it's really warm and you're holding it in
your hand, you want to really be able to hold it because you
don't want it to break and smash and your product is gone
now. You're going to use something to scrape it out. I use
a wooden knife or something like that. You can make them
yourself or find them at a store-made of bamboo and things
like that that actually has kind of an edge to them. If you
really chop you're going to cut your finger. You're going to
134 MARK STAVISH

scrape that out and grind it down again. Make sure that it's
good and then put it back in. Calcine it. Each time it's going
to reduce more and more. Then you'll get that white powder
that is what you're looking for, that white ash.
This is really something that we need a weekend for to
walk you through the whole process, but we just wanted to
show you some things so that those of you who have done
it could begin to relate not only to the simplicity of it, but
to how the problem-solving mechanisms go. Also to give you
some of the product that you can take home with you to
encourage you in your work and answer your questions.
It's really not something you can do in a few hours, al­
though I used to do it as a show-and-tell thing in about two,
sometimes three. It's more where you sit and watch and go
through things.
This distillation setup, if you can get one for one hundred
dollars, it's worth it. It's worth the expense of getting that
and then getting a hot plate. If you can't get that kind of hot
plate initially-and try to get a smaller flask on the bottom­
use a coffee hot plate and a sand bath. You can experiment.
I've done it with larger hot plates. I've seen them out there.
I've also used the old electric ovens, the circle wire end. But
the problem there is you have to wait until the heat fully
forms on the metal. The unfinished terra cotta may have a
tendency to crack; then you end up with sand. This is all
problem solving. There's no fire hazard. You're better doing
that and having no fire hazard-SAFETY FIRST. Always
go with electric. You have the directions in the book on how
to do a simple distillation train setup with tubing. It's just
exactly what you'd think except everything's rubber tubing
through ice. You can do it in a pinch, but glassware is the
best setup to do.

COMMENT: The round bottom is another reason it's good

to use the sand to hold it because it makes a mold.
. CHARACTER AND SUCCESS 135

Those of you who make tinctures, think about the dis­

tillation process. You need to make at least some of your
own wine, alcohol, at least once. You need to work on the
distillation of wine and you need to work on calcining. It
would be unrealistic for us to go any further in the work than
that. W ith this practical teaching, you have received some
things to help and you just have to go and do it.

~ Character and Success ~

Plato used to say that character is a function of habit. You
become what you do. If you want to become something, you
have to practice it. Practice means enough, where it's no
longer something you think about, but something you do
unconsciously. We call it a habit. It's what you are. A friend
of mine likes to say: "Liars can always be counted on to do
one thing: lie." So when we catch our folks in situations we
say we get to know what they really are. There's a book that
Brian gave to me last night from his Taoist teacher that is
quite interesting, because it talks about what you do when
someone takes a servant and how they treat them. Essentially
it's nine tests and each test gets to see what the person's
character is like. So you get to know whether you can trust
them. Someone says: "No one plans to fail. They just fail to
plan." That's the same in alchemy. It's the same in life. It's
just the reality that you have to accept.
That is the reality. A lot of people just go through life
without any real direction whatsoever, just vagaries. So the
more concrete you are, the better off you're going to be in
some ways, because at least you'll have a definite touchstone
of the goal you want to achieve. That's why I talk to you
about alchemy having those five phases, of being very concrete
in them. Know what it is this thing will do. Visualize the
process in detail to make sure you've covered all your bases,
just like going on a trip.
So success is a habit and character is a habit. We become
136 MARK STAVISH

what we do. Character is what you carry over with you when
you're dead. It's full revelation of your inner self, your values.
Nowhere to hide, you just are what you are, and of course
karma is nothing more than habit. We talk about the winds of
karma. We can moralize all we want, but it is cause and effect.
Cause and effect done over and over again becomes habit.
People talk about their negative karma. They never talk
about their positive karma, but their positive karma is their
positive habits and attributes that they have to recognize.
This is good. This is helpful. I need to do more of this, which
we summed up for you in a simple statement. Never miss an
opportunity to do a good deed.
The negative things often are habits that they just don't
want to break. You can call them addictions if you want.
That's what an addiction is; it's a habit. A habit that be­
comes deeply ingrained. So ingrained that we could even say
it becomes "somatized," so that when the body no longer
performs the habit, it still has fantastic physiological side
effects. Addiction is a habit that is destructive to you because
it may make you temporarily feel good.
So habits are what we are. If we form good habits-healthy
habits learned early last a lifetime-then things go much
easier for us. People came up with these pithy little sayings
because they are true.
You know a teacher by their students. If you want to
know what a teacher is like, watch his students. It's like Jesus
said: "By their fruits you will know them." I don't mean to
be hard, but we have to look at reality. That's truth. If your
practice or system is so great, why are you so miserable? I
didn't ask you why you are rich or poor. Or why you didn't
exactly have the dream job or publish a novel yet. I didn't
ask you that. I asked you why you were miserable. Because
success can be measured in various ways, fundamentally in
one's happiness. I know people who have been very poor and
have been miserable. I know people who have been very rich
and have been miserable. I know people who have been both
. CHARACTER AND SUCCESS 137

and have been very happy.

If we judge success by happiness, then that's the only
thing we can control. We control it through our mind. "I
choose to be happy." I can do something about this or I can't .
If I can, then I do it; if I can't, then no use worrying about
it. I have to say, people are burdened by tremendous worries.
You just have to stop. It doesn't do you any good. Yes, you
look and you plan, but no use worrying because in the end
we're all dead. So deal with what you can control within the
domain of its relative importance.
So that's really all I have to say to you. I hope this weekend
was useful to you. I thank all of you for coming out. I really
do appreciate it.
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Mark Stavish (Pennsylvania) is a respected authority in
the study and practice of Western spiritual traditions. He
is the author of The Path of Alchemy, Kabbalah for Health
8 Wellness, and Between the Gates: Lucid Dreaming, Astral
Projection, and the Body of Light in Western Esotericism;
both volumes of the IHS Ritual Series, The Liturgy of Hermes
and Meditations 8 Rituals; as well as the IHS Monograph
Series and the IHS Study Guides, Light on the Path, The
Inner Way, Child of the Sun, and Words of My Teachers. His
works have been translated into nine languages worldwide.
He is founder of both the non-profit Institute for Hermetic
Studies (Wyoming, Pennsylvania), where he is Director of
Studies, and the Louis Claude de St. Martin Fund, a non­
profit fund dedicated to the study and practice of esotericism.