Asperger's Syndrome and The Third Eye

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I put it on my to-read shelf. Thanks!

I grew up with Norman Vincent Peale, although I find most of his works and ideas to be somewhat untenable in retrospect.

But the phrase could have started somewhere like this:

"Inwardly and outwardley, do try to kill everything that comes in your way. If
the Buddha be in your way, kill the Buddha. If the Patriarchs be in your
way, kill the Patriarchs. If the Arahats be in your way, kill them. If your
father and mother be in the way, kill them too....That is the only path to
your liberation, your freedom."

(Hu Shi: "Chan Buddhism in China: It's History and Method." Attributed to
Yixuan (died 866).

All this talk about Alan Watts set me checking my small library to find only one book by Alan (????): "This Is It.". I quite enjoyed it.

Some others: "The Third Eye" by T. Lobsang Rampa. Not what I was expecting.

"Zen Without Zen Masters" by Camden Benares. People's Zen.

"Zen Teachings of Instantaneous Awakening" by Ch'an Master Hui Hai. A different
translation of this is available for free online.

I remember that years ago, Jane Robert's books 'The Nature of Personal Reality,' Adventures in Consciousness,' and 'The Nature of the Psyche' really widened my comprehension of just how much of the 'reality' we experience is not real at all, in the sense that we believe it to be. Normally I would be highly skeptical of information purported to be transmitted through any sort of 'spirit guide' or higher angel, but the concepts outlined in great detail by the 'Seth' entity she was channeling were so complex and explained so much, so rationally, I still don't believe she was coming up with it on her own. In any case, that and Fritjof Capra's 'The Tao of Physics,' all mesh quite neatly within the matrix of the Kabbalistic Tree.

Last year I read Peter Tompkins' 'The Secret Life of Nature,' and while I found some of his ideas to be a bit dotty and far fetched (he seems to have believed the Arthur Conan Doyle fairy photographs were authentic), he did recount an incident in which a pair of Theosophists near the turn of the last century, had used Indian Yogic techniques to focus consciousness to the sub-microscopic level and even made drawings of living entities they encountered which match modern diagrams of the most basic elements of modern particle physics - quarks, gluons, leptons, etc. Tompkins also makes correspondences between quanta, String Theory and the Tree of Life.

He also recounts experiences with the shamanic hallucinogen ayahuasca, and shortly after his book, I came across Dr Rick Strassman's book 'DMT: The Spirit Molecule,' about his clinical experiments with the hormone DMT, the psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca, which Strassman believes is released by the brain at death, to facilitate consciousness' exit from the physical shell. The experiences of his test subjects make for fascinating reading and having some personal experience with psilocybin, it makes me very intrigued, to say the least. I personally view this material world as a complex multi-player RPG - when our character "dies," we wake up back in the world of pure spirit consciousness, where we've actually been all along, rather like The Matrix, without the nefarious robots. But I digress...

I have both the Tao of Physics and The Spirit Molecule on my shelf, I have read the latter and not the former as of yet.

The Tao of Physics was a real eye-opener, if I remember correctly. Think I still have a copy.

Moving toward outer influence creating inner understanding, my more recent books of interest have been (in no particular order):

"blink" by Malcolm Gladwell

"Multimind" by Robert Ornstein

"Rewire Your Brain for Love" by Marsha Lucas, PhD (Don't let the title fool you) and

"Conscious and Unconscious Programs in the Brain" (Psychobiology of Human Behavior) by Benjamin Kissin, M.D.

For me these texts help me/us understand how my/our brain uses outside influences to operate and how I/we can better control the workings of my/our mind(s). (Clumsy, what?)

One thing I'm crossing my fingers on - Mark Stavish is having a two day seminar in several months covering a combination of Dutch-Pennsylvanian folk magic and some degree of theurgy and evocation. I'm hoping my work life will pan out enough in that time that I can go.

As far as people who really set a high bar professionally with respect to their work in the mystical and magical paths he's gotten to be one of my favorite authors and speakers on the topic. His Youtube channel is really a treasure-trove of wisdom.

Haven't seen this post until now. They are indeed forces that are ascribed as the laws of physics. Collectively, the weak and strong nuclear force, as well as gravity and the electromagnetic are called the 'four fundamental forces.' Remember, AspE, this is the kind of work I once did for a living. Not anymore.

So I looked up Stavish in Amazon and looked at the most miserable reviews of the first book listed (concerning alchemy) and found people complaining about his procedures, knowledge, background, etc., none of which I expected. These were people who intended to follow arcane recipes and instructions for some predetermined outcome (which did not occur).

Previously I considered changing things to gold was only an ancient dream (my entirety of alchemy knowledge). If it wouldn't be too disruptive to ask: What am I missing?

Tried to watch some YouTube but floundered. Is there a clearly stated book for beginners that provides some real results (as opposed to just "I felt better") without having to invest heavily in expensive materials (I already own a nice Coors mortar and pestle).

Or is this a life long quest better left for younger people?

It's a particularly brutal task for me to take you from 0 to 60 mph on that, particularly because - at least so far I find this with most people - the more things I tell someone that they haven't heard before the more everything I say will sound like a cloud of new age pseudohistory, so if I give you to little it sounds like an evasion and if I told you everything I could it would sound too different to be true.

I'd really recommend just reading the Wikipedia entry on alchemy first, just to get the philosophic background, before checking back in with much of anything else I say here.

If I were to give you any sort of basic tenet to start with - consider that Neoplatonism and Hermeticism are tantamount to the west's version of Hinduism and very closely mimicked the yogas (look at the last page of 'Do you believe in God' and see what I said before quoting myself - I responded to a bit about four elements, ethers, and alchemy where I explained this pretty well). When the Catholic church and later various protestants cracked down on everything that wasn't on their line of thought these streams of spiritual philosophy had to veil themselves. Alchemy was one such hideout (as was the ideologies and knowledge of the Lombard builders of Europe). For a long time Hermes Trismegistus, a name that apparently a lot of people aren't familiar with these days, was considered a contemporary of Moses of a long time - also Egypt was seen as the hotbed of a particularly advanced ancient knowledge. Consequently when Cosimo de Medici found the Corpus Hermeticum and other Hermetic texts in east Mediterranean monestaries it lit a fire across Europe in terms of inquiry. It was in the Renaissance where the ideas of alchemy, kabbalah, astrology, theurgy, and angelic/demonic invocation and evocation came to be so intertwined.

I wouldn't take it much past that. Really it would be way easier to explain the theories of Hermetic Qabalah and ceremonial magic in a context that an agnostic or atheist could understand than it is to explain alchemy. I'd say that most people actually in using the word alchemy these days are speaking of spiritual alchemy, ie. where one uses the alchemical symbolism as a set of tools for internal refinement and spiritual growth. Apparently there's backwash both ways, physical ingredients can be used for props to leverage internal change, ie. we start getting really abstract and cerebral quick - that and to tell you the truth I really don't know for sure what I have to say on whether physical alchemy, plant or mineral, is necessarily real. Apparently a lot of very sober and studious people would claim so, while that's persuasive on one level it has no relationship whatsoever to such a thing finding its way into a peer-reviewed journal and being tested and replicated. Then again, if there is so much internal that goes into it, the same results by a completely uninterested party might be impossible by that very virtue.


You'd be considerably better off browsing his lectures in general (Institute of Hermetic Studies) on Youtube and seeing what he has to say in general. The Spiritus lecture series is great, so his Hermes series. All of these really are taken from recent seminars. As far as I know he's been studying Rosicrucian, Martinist, and Freemasonic philosophy since the 80's, started publishing lesson plan in the mid to late 90's (primarily a counselor by vocation), and his Youtube channel is only something that came up in the last year or so.

The problem with me trying to give you more detail than this - the kind of esotericism you're asking about, and the varieties that he teaches and lectures on, is such a broad field and one where unfortunately most people don't even have a basic grasp on what the words magic, mysticm, alchemy, etc. mean in their usage here. If you have some familiarity with the Hermetic Golden Dawn and what Israel Regardie was writing about you have at least something of a starting point. Even there unfortunately most people don't have the foggiest.

Perhaps a good way to recap all of that as well - the core of the alchemical culture was about studying Greek and Egyptian metapysics more than trying to fudge the periodic table. People who tried turning physical lead into gold took the surface parlance too literally. You also had a lot of protoscientists in this manner who combined what would become modern chemistry with a lot of piety. All of this was happening concurrently under the same banner.

Thanks very much for this beginning information. This all sounds interesting enough that I'll wander down this path for awhile. Hope you don't mind if I come back to ask questions.

This looks like fun learning.

At a minimum it's a lot of sociology and culture that people just aren't particularly aware of.

I mean a great example of this:

Sunday - sun, Monday - moon, Tuesday - Mars, Wednesday - Mercury, Thursday - Jupiter, Friday - Venus, Saturday - Saturn. The seven planets, seven 'Elohim', applied to seven days of the week. That might sound campy, Sunday and Saturday are kind of obvious in English, the weekdays are a bit easier if you think of what they are in Spanish - ie. Lunes, Martes, Miercoles, Jueves, and Viernes.

If one puts the names for the days of the week in a circle and traces out the Ptolemaic geocentric/astrological order of decent (ie. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon) or vice a versa from either end they get a heptagram.

A lot of this goes to show just how much such people really were shakers and movers in the creation of our culture - from the days of the week to the layouts of cities like Washington DC, San Francisco, Paris, London, even the Vacan, as you had people all over the place from divine-rite monarchs and popes to continental and American Freemasons trying their hand at 'as above so below' in street patterns as a form of blessing.

Mabel's Books Recovered From Barn Loft

Suspected to belong to Mabel's collection: 3 books

Colin Wilson
The Occult

Harry Allen Overstreet
The Mature Mind

George Ferguson
Signs and Symbols in Christian Art


Ex Libris Mabel Bessemer: 33 books

Alice Bailey
A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
Esoteric Healing


Reuben Swinburne Clymer
The Philosophy of Fire
The Rosicrucians,: their teachings

L. Taylor Hansen
He Walked the Americas

Rosetta E. Clarkson
Herbs- Their Culture and Uses

James Churchward
Cosmic Forces of Mu
The Sacred Symbols of Mu
The Children of Mu
The Lost Continent of Mu

Wm R Fix
Star Maps
Pyramid Odyssey

The World Publishing Company
The Lost Books of the Bible



Lord Clancarty Brinsley Le Poer Trench
Men Among Mankind

A. Powell Davies
The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls


yigael yadin
The Message of the Scrolls

J.R. Brown
The Dead Sea Scrolls

Michel Peisel
The Lost World of Quintana Roo

Ignatius Donnelly
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World: Atlantean Megalithic Civilization


Albert Pike
Morals And Dogma Of The Ancient And Accepted Scottish Rite Of Freemasonry Prepared For The Supreme Council Of The Thirty-Third Degree, For The Southern Jurisdiction Of The United States


The New English Bible: With the Apocrypha (Oxford Study Edition)

A. R Fausset
Fausset's Bible Dictionary

Howell S. Vincent
Lighted Passage

R. A. Schwaller De Lubicz
The Temple in Man; The Secrets of Ancient Egypt

Harold T. Watkins
Mysteries of Ancient South America

Franklin Folsom
America's Ancient Treasures

Milton R. Hunter
Great Civilizations and the Book of Mormon; Archaeology and the Book of Mormon vol. III

George Lamsa
The Holy Bible from Ancient Eastern Manuscripts

Walter A Fairservis, Jr
Ancient Kingdoms of the Nile

Hans Fluck
Medicinal Plants

Rodolfo Benavides
Dramatic Prophecies of the Great Pyramid

Barry Fell
America B.C.

L. Taylor Hansen
The Ancient Atlantic

Most of the books have marginal notes. However, this one is possibly signed and dedicated by the author!?