THE FREE GNOSTIC SOCIETY

 

Old gate columns, overgrown and forgotten... but powerful still.

GATES AND GNOSIS [30.05.2015]

Suggested listening while reading: 
OBERON Age of the Moon.

Someone once said: The world is a world of secrets. 

For those of you who follow my ramblings, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I would be deeply fascinated by the concept of gates: passages that lead us across thresholds, figuratively and symbolically. If you read the Norse Sagas, you will find the stories imbued with the concept of making passage from some starting point to the place where destiny reveals itself.

In Japanese tradition, the Torii (gate) is very important. And there are certain behaviors that are deemed appropriate when passing through them. Death itself is a passage, the most mysterious one for sure, and proper conduct is advised in works like the Bardo Thodol, more popularly known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Death itself can also symbolize the great veil that cloaks the path.

When we become aware of the gates that surround us, the act of consciously passing through them can be a life changing experience. For each passage, we “shed our old skin” to be reborn, dressed in new garments. But sometimes (often!) life throws us off. We experience a fall - a descent into existential and spiritual darkness. There is always a path out of such places, but our ability to climb back up, depends on our level of awareness:

Excavation site of Ishtar Gate in the 1930s.

“I have fallen so many times
Too many to remember
To the point of breaking
But I pledge my life
I pledge myself
To the rising Sun”

(Oberon – Dream Awakening)

This is why I like to use the image of the Magician in my work, because to me it is the type that confronts the darkness that surrounds him, and in the transformational process of confrontation – generates a fire that burns away the layers of darkness (ignorance, misery, hopelessness) to reveal the inner Sun.

From "The Holy Mountain" by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

From "The Holy Mountain" by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

One of the songs from Dream Awakening where this whole feeling of "Gates and Gnosis" is deeply present is Age of the Moon, the song itself being a passage through several musical scenes before culminating at the simplest, purest point of exit.

"It's in my bones
The summer's fading light
A horizon that weeps
Nature's God's spell falls to earth
He watches through veils
The Magician's Holy Silence"


From the movie Ip Man. Pictured is Ip Man's son, Ip Chun, playing his father's teacher.

From the movie Ip Man. Pictured is Ip Man's son, Ip Chun, playing his father's teacher.

EVERYTHING HAS A PRICE! [05.04.2015]

We live in a world where we seem to be getting into the habit of wanting stuff for free.
But by nature’s law, everything has a price.

If you get something (you think is) for free, it means that someone already paid for it; energetically, monetarily or otherwise, so in fact, it isn’t truly free.

But most importantly, it is only when you are willing to pay the price that you can truly retain it: A teaching received from a teacher who got it from his teacher who got it from his teacher etc.  

A teacher’s knowledge is first paid for by giving some kind of compensation to his teacher. Then, as his master before him, he must continue to pay by spending years refining what he has received. Only after a long time practicing, will the student start to see the seed he received begin to blossom and reveal the light of truth within.

By keeping the teaching alive, the student – now a maybe him/herself a master – continues to pay for what the previous masters received by maintaiing the teaching, eventually working to pass it on to the next generation.

If you want something for nothing, you will not be able to participate in the glorious stream of pure knowledge passed down from the most ancient times. The House of Man will fall, fragmented and hollow, as the river of knowledge (it's life blood) will stop flowing through it. You will not be able to live in alignment with your purpose or burn with the flame of will.

So in this Season of Becoming, find a master, follow his or her teaching – or find something in yourself that you love and want (ref. what Joseph Campbell says about Bliss) to express with all of your being –  pay happily with your effort and dedication, your life and the world will be a better place for it.

Happy Easter/Ostara everyone!


Arnold Böcklin: The Sacred Wood. Used as cover for the reissue of the MYSTERIES album, released on Prophecy Productions, September 2014.

Arnold Böcklin: The Sacred Wood. Used as cover for the reissue of the MYSTERIES album, released on Prophecy Productions, September 2014.

ALL HAIL THE SEASON OF (RE)BIRTH... [30.03.2015]

Spring has always been the most important time for me, creatively and spiritually. The seasons of the Sun's rebirth. A time to be both humble and bold, and to let oneself be open to the magic that flows forth from that crack between the worlds that opens at this special time, hailed in art, myth and magic throughout the millennia. I've written several songs to Spring, two of them can be heard here. They are both from my album, Mysteries.  

Dreams of the Sun, from Anthem, is a meditation on the spiritual essence of the Sun. 

The ancient of days, by the masterful William Blake whose words I used for the song, To Spring. An image appropriate for the season, when the sun returns to impregnate the earth with the seed of life.

Haven’t you noticed, my friends, when you are close to nature and work out hard, when you experience a piece of music that commands you to move, when you are touched by something powerful; that it makes you feel the vast expanse of the consciousness you are a part of, beckon? That your body pulsates with energy and that the culmination of that dance that illuminates your being leaves you centered, happy and that your awareness has expanded greatly? 

As spring is dawning, let’s turn our lives into a true living ritual of birth and expansion. Let’s all take our part of that spiritual responsibility to knock back the astral darkness that threatens to choke out this world. Let’s make the world vibrate with songs, movement, dance, art, brother- and sisterhood, power and illumination!

It is truly the season for transformation! If there is ever a time to catch a gleam of why we are here and for what purpose, the time is NOW!

Happy spring, my friends!
ABRACADABRA!


ON VISIONARY GEOGRAPHY [March 2015]

"The French scholar Henry Corbin of the Sorbonne spoke about Visionary Geography, a fantastic concept, where in the case of a mountain, for instance, when you perceive it with not only your eyes, but also your imagination, you see its’ true nature. You see it both as a topographical object as well as a spiritual being, and in this way – in my opinion – you can see the true nature of something. If I think about you as a biological entity, it doesn’t tell me anything beyond what you are as a colony of cells, bacteria, atoms and so on. But when I see you through the eye of the imagination, I see a cosmic being, which in the language of myth would have his feet rooted deep in the heart of the earth, and the soul connected with the very source of the cosmic mind itself. If we see each other like this, we see how valuable life is and what potential we have." 

-  excerpt from a recent interview in Obskure Magazine.


sunsetsintosunrises.jpg

SOUL [March 2015]

Soul is quality

Not quantity

Free will is not about chosing

left or right

It is about chosing creation

or destruction

with all of ones being

- Bard Oberon, 2006


WHAT THE F...?, December 2014

What to do?

Sometimes what you think you want to do is really hard to do. Yet other things that you didn’t think you’d see yourself doing is really easy, and makes you feel really great! Some wise dude once said that your true calling is found at the point where your passion and the needs of society intersect. That makes more sense than any other ultra-deep-super-mystical-haiku-shit I’ve ever heard.

Eureka?


NATURAL MAGIC, October 2014

I am walking through a forest. I caress the grey rock as twilight lowers its mysterious veil upon the world. I haven’t been here for almost a year. As we (M., J. and myself) walk deeper into the bluish haze of this perfect autumn evening, it’s as if I can hear the timeless sigh of the trees. I’m home. We follow the sweet smell of smoke as we close in on a family sitting around a fire. We exchange a few glances. We move on. 

holymountain

 

For weeks I have struggled with the experience of Dream Awakening. First to record a «proper» album. Then to promote. To put myself out there and pretend that I need to live up to some kind of standard of perfection. Out *here* that whole music business game is meaningless. The music emanating from *this* place hits us as if it was carried on a river gushing out from the deep places of the world. And it’s such a pure experience, because there’s no way of capturing it except for feeling it here and now, like it would have been for the scalds and sages of medieval times (truly off the grid). Ecstasy. Then gone, forever, never to be shared outside that singular, finite experience. 

We begin talking about natural magic. We agree that there is a way of living that reintegrates aspects of our being that we have forgotten, or that have become displaced in our world as we’ve adapted to an environment of mechanical priorities. The French historian/philosopher Henry Corbin wrote about visionary geography, a concept worth looking into as a way of experiencing nature. You can view the natural world solely as physical phenomena or as multidimensional manifestations of magical principle (reality). If you see a rock merely as it appears to your physical senses, you limit your experience. 

As the path winds down amongst the spruce and the birch with only the sound of our steps breaking the silence, I start noticing the branches. They are like clusters of veins, connecting to the air – as if it is a kind of connective tissue that binds together all living things in the world. I am silenced. I touch the moss covering the old tree trunks. Age. Gradually we are broken by Master Time, but I understand that this process must be understood in the context of, and in the magical light of what I have just experienced. Although rare, time is not like money, it’s not running out. We shouldn’t hoard it. We’ll only get bitter. 

Natural magic is a way of remembering with dignity the lessons taught to us by the silence of the trees. Those looming giants of the ages. We can only truly save the world if we as a civilization can decide to forget our silly quarrels and powertrips and seek the silence of the forests and mountains. 

The magician’s holy silence…