Piercing the Veil of an AA Awakening

Christ is in our midst! He is and ever shall be!

“Then Jesus said to them again, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who ever came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly’” (John 10:7-10).

Ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ θύρα. 

Ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ θύρα.

There is no other door to abundant life, no door that is and leads to Truth, no other door that brings us out of the illusion.

Though, there are many robbers and thieves along the way, especially in spiritual circles, and just as many false shepherds, “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks? You eat the fat and clothe yourselves with the wool; you slaughter the fatlings, but you do not feed the flock. The weak you have not strengthened, nor have you healed those who were sick, nor bound up the broken, nor brought back what was driven away, nor sought what was lost; but with force and cruelty you have ruled them. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd; and they became food for all the beasts of the field when they were scattered. My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and on every high hill; yes, My flock was scattered over the whole face of the earth, and no one was seeking or searching for them” (Ezekiel 34:2-6).

Yes, there are many false prophets, shepherds, and wolves in sheep’s clothing on the spiritual journey, but no come to us worse than λογίσμοι (logismoi), or tempting and assaultive thoughts. These guardians of our threshold come to us when we take steps toward God, revealed in greater and greater luminosity as we ourselves are revealed by the Light of Christ growing from within and guiding from without.

There is no entering the door without κάθαρσις and wrestling with our passions that come to us in the form of λογίσμοι, calling to us to interact with them and feed them until they feed on us. Grown in the darkness, communed with in the recesses of our minds, they become stronger, taking possession of the νοῦς, disconnecting our hearts from God, scattering our minds like lost sheep and pulling us into the realm of the dead. Νῆψις is our tool to guard against the robbers and thieves that would come into our sheepfold and make off with a part of us. These thoughts are products of the leviathan. 

“Indeed, any hope of overcoming him is false;
Shall one not be overwhelmed at the sight of him?

“Who can open the doors of his face,
With his terrible teeth all around?
His sneezings flash forth light,
And his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.
Out of his mouth go burning lights;
Sparks of fire shoot out.
Smoke goes out of his nostrils,
As from a boiling pot and burning rushes.
His breath kindles coals,
And a flame goes out of his mouth.

He is king over all the children of pride” (Job 41:9/14-21/34).

The leviathan is, in essence, the entity from which the energies of the devil and Satan proceed from, the leviathan can be understood as a mirror image of the Trinity as an evil incarnate, a corrupt and bankrupt godhead. If we need to appreciate the mystery of God to relate to one another in a more perfect fashion than that acknowledgement can help us ascertain the malevolent forces, powers, principalities, and “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2).

Satanic symbolism is illustrated by Divine realities flipped on their head: the inverted pentagram, the goat substituting the lamb, the heptagram, the inverted cross (ironically originally the Petrine Cross), and the Black Mass among others. Evil cannot create; evil can contort and corrupt what has already been created. One symbol that the leviathan has come to represent is the ouroboros, which has its origin in many different cultures that helped facilitate its ongoing use in the world of Gnosticism, alchemy, and ceremonial magick. 

I’ve heard a ceremonial magician discuss, at length, this creature’s connection to a magician’s aspiration to unite with Divinity; the leviathan is what the practitioner is trying to break through in the process of ascension to attain to the Firmament. The leviathan, for whatever reason, tries malevolently to hinder the magician’s progress.

The leviathan is universal, found in many ancient mystery schools and myths, such as Egyptian, Nordic, Vedic, or Gnostic. The prevalence of such symbolism leads to the valid conjecture that, no matter what culture one finds themselves in, there is a spiritual battle being waged, expressed as diversely as the cosmos. The fault of modern, Western Christianity is devaluing this central theme of spiritual warfare inherent to such a struggle by marrying its thought with philosophical abstraction and, by consequence, a spiritual worldview so bereft of meaning and removed from experiential reality to appear like atheism. 

The rejection of spirit in modern Christian thought is a slippery slope into existential nihilism, where there is no good or evil; there is no right or wrong; there is no objective truth. This Western Christian model has no reality, but I digress. The point being one must understand the reality of the battlefield if they wish to engage in battle, if the former is denied then the latter is senseless.   

And there really is a war going on. Whether one believes or does not believe; if your truth posits there is no spiritual battle, then your truth is subjective and invalid. 

You watch someone lose their soul to methamphetamine and try to see it any other way. 

Experientially, ceremonial magick has the right idea in terms of cosmology. There is a God that is ineffable by nature and there are creatures that are trying to keep us away from Him. There is a θεάνθρωπος Who showed us the Way and due to the Gnostic influence on ceremonial magick, there is debate about what that Way exactly is or how it works. Ceremonial magicians want to transcend the material spheres of reality and come into communion with God. They understand that material objectivity can only go so far and that this life is only a shadow of what is true existence. To that, I have no rebuttal, but I am not sure they have the right way “out.” They might have it, but I do not think they do—Christ is the only Way to the Father, becoming like Christ is attaining the peace of the kingdom in the here and now. 

The idea behind Christian mysticism is redeeming the world through our personal redemption whereas magick would offer that this world is an illusion, what is called māyā in Hinduism, the entanglement in the purely physical and material reality that our consciousness mistakes for objective truth. Māyā, conceptually, is a veiling of the true self, that to pierce this veil and see through it one achieves moksha: the liberation of the self from the wheel of samsara. 

The Gnostics take this illusion to the nth degree believing in an evil, creator deity known as Yaldabaoth who has fashioned the world out of ignorance, keeping us trapped here in an illusory, prison planet where the divinity within our being is siphoned by Archonic forces, working for Yaldabaoth, to keep us ignorant of our true selves. The true self in Hinduism is the Ātman while the true self in Gnosticism is much the same: attaining to the state of the cosmic principle that is unchanging, permanent, and the highest reality, Brahman.

In any case, even if the leviathan were an ignorant entity like Yaldabaoth, neither one are the Creator God, however the leviathan is tasked with keeping us trapped here in the world of the material, it does keep us traversing the wheel of samsara, it does produce an illusion that the material world is all there is to know or experience.

The wheel of samsara pertains to the endless cycle of death and rebirth through millennia while Christian thought posits that there is only one life we live, and in this life we need to attend to our salvation. So, piercing the veil of māyā in this life means escaping the illusions of the physical world, acknowledging the temporal nature of things on earth, the fleeting passions, the temptations of the devil, and our entanglement in them due to our fallen nature.

The leviathan is keeping us trapped in this fallen, ignorant state; it is ensaring us in death like an angler fish luring unsuspecting fish to be guided into its jaws in the darkness of the deep, “And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works” (2 Corinthians 11:14-15). The doors of his face and his terrible teeth: illusory promises and false prophets; thieves and robbers.  

Ceremonial magick is concerned with crystallizing the aura—that is the reason for Golden Dawn-type rituals, so that upon death the magician, who has crystallized their aura enough moves through the astral, ethereal, and mental planes of reality without losing their essence, without forgetting their Ātman; without losing their sense of self to the leviathan and being spit back out here through the process of reincarnation. 

It was reading “Meditations on the Tarot” that made me see this is not the way we need to escape the leviathan and death, because it changed how I understood ceremonial magick and its, fatal, pitfalls: 

“Now, birth, awakening and recall, on the one hand, and death, falling asleep and forgetting, on the other hand, constitute, so to say, the two ‘pillar-forces’ of reality. They manifest in remembering and forgetting […] They are the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in every domain–mental, psychic, and physical.

“The Gospel maxim, ‘Let what you say simply be ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil’ (Matthew v, 37) reveals its significance in this context. The ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ – this is the essential of reality, i.e. the truth, pure and simple, whilst the ‘surplus’ comes from evil, i.e. it belongs to the sphere of the serpent […]

“Here is the secret: the serpent offers and promises such a crystallisation, according to the principle of enfoldment, that the human being will resist death and become, so to say, ‘death-proof’, immune to death. This crystallisation is effected through friction, i.e. by the electrical energy which is produced by the struggle between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in man. 

“Without doubt you know, dear Unknown Friend, that there are schools–occult or other–which teach and practice crystallisation and that there are other schools which teach and practice radiation, i.e. complete de-crystallisation of the human being and his transformation into a ‘sun’, into a centre of radiation. ‘Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’ (Matthew xiii, 43) – this is the practical aim of ‘schools of radiation’, to which that of Christian Hermeticism belongs” (Meditations on the Tarot 354). 

Crystallization is becoming stuck, trapping ourselves just the same as the leviathan would have us be, which reminds me of something a friend once told me during a particularly bad spiritual attack, the evil one is lazy. The devil would rather toss out a bunch of different temptations and enfolding thoughts, thoughts that make us regress and go inside ourselves, than it would ever want to spend time trapping us in a well-crafted Rube Goldberg contraption. Addiction is brilliant in its simplicity, anyway. The devil is lazy and we’re good enough at his job to do it for him, and that goes the same for magicians—maybe doubly so. 

The serpent tricked Adam and Eve into becoming crystallized, which is death. Traditionally, the serpent has been said to be a demon while other traditions say the serpent is the devil. Now, whether it be it the devil or a demon, both are stuck in a crystallized fashion with no hope of deliverance from Hades. Fallen angels cannot regain access to grace and they are trying to get us to crystallize without hope for salvation, too. 

Misery loves company.