After practicing Zen meditation and following the Middle Path to the best of my ability for over twenty years, circumstances prompted me to consider whether I'd misunderstood something basic about those old beliefs. I began to wonder whether the path of enlightenment was actually inclusive of something more than peaceful sitting and moral behaviour. Practices like the ones taught in Franz Bardon's detailed book of mystical instruction, Initiation into Hermetics, showed me there was another aspect to the old teachings. A number of paths were actually taught, and the Middle Path was only the most popular and least dangerous. It gets there, but it gets there slowly, over a period of several lifetimes.

Possibly it's true that the other path really is separate, and the Middle Path doesn't include these other things at all, but it may also be true that everyone on the Middle Path eventually finds the Dragon Path, or the Warrior's road, depending on how you confront and experience these ancient truths. Many old cultures approach them with similar yet independent systems, and religious belief has been slathered over them like a cheap watercolor printed on a masterful oil painting. Dig below the surface of the old traditions and you find the same things.

Whatever actually is true, I've been on the Dragon Path for a number of years now and find it both exciting and rewarding, yielding the experiences I thought must be beyond my ability in the decades I practiced in the other fashion, laying the groundwork for these things that followed. I can't help recommending it to other people, even though these old methods are punctuated regularly with warnings about what can go wrong and how foolish undertaking these practices are if you don't have a qualified master to help you. Many mystical traditions believed that help was always available, no matter what your circumstances. All the curious followers of the Dragon needed to do was accept it and move forward. Books were respected as a way of accessing the knowledge of the past masters, though books were not seen as intellectual studies. Books were lessons. Books were things you did, not things you read.

Follow up:

So I recommend Initiation into Hermetics by Franz Bardon for sound reasons, to people who are equally drawn to knowing and experiencing things beyond the usual boundaries of human life.

A few days ago I spent some hours in yoginidra, a mental state which supposedly allows the body to rest while the mind remains awake. This is supposed to be a great thing, since the intellect can continue work on important projects while the body recovers energy. I may not be very good at this, but I've never found the experience truly restful physically. At best it's the bare minimum of physical rest and it does get me through the next day, but I always feel like crap afterwards even though I'm not especially sleepy. As an answer to ordinary life's problems it sucks pretty badly. It does give me a chance to practice some of the meditations I've learned which I'd otherwise not have time to do. I suppose that's my important work, since part of my trouble in this mental open space is that I don't really have anything important on my schedule and in yoginidra I spend most of my time wishing I could just get past it and really sleep.

On the other hand, yoginidra provides a great environment for experiencing unusual things, and a few days ago when I devoted a few moments of my time to the preparatory steps I had the chance to do some of them again. The steps I took were magical visualizations and movements of mental attention, the things I learned from Bardon's writings and from other strange sources over the years since my vision quest. As always when I did these things I expected nothing major would happen, but as it usually does in spite of my low expectations, something major did. To me it's pretty normal, but when I first experienced something like this it was the greatest thing ever and I felt very special. The old path is like that, you learn wonderful things and they become normal.

What happened is hard to describe, since it involved being out of body observing myself sleeping next to Alice and wondering whether I should lay back down there and try to sleep or do something else. I decided to do something else, some of the energy breathing that occasionally gets powerful results. When I looked around for another place to lie down I found an old bench of mine against the wall, something I used for chopping in other days and which sold at auction after I moved on from that. The bench appeared to be in a different place, possibly now a decoration in someone's hotel or a country bed and breakfast inn.

When I walked over to it the view of it was obscured by the mirror Alice keeps against the wall, leaning there in case someday we do figure out a way to hang it properly. It's large and long and the sort of thing ballet students and martial artists use to observe their posture or forms as they train. I was reminded that in this other state of being, the magical one Bardon wrote about, mirrors are something else. Mirrors are more than reflections of this world and become entryways to others. So in spite of being a little skeptical I laid down through the mirror onto the bench and began to do my meditations.

The experience itself was ecstatic and powerful and I really can't say much more about it because there's nothing in normal experience that serves as a basis of comparison. If you wonder why yogis and masters don't care to use mind-altering drugs, this is why. Chemicals get in the way of something that's a far greater experience. That's one example of conduct that seems highly moral but actually represents something not founded on moral concerns. So I guess I'll just stop here, except to say that if you've ever wondered whether there's anything more to life than just what you see and touch and sense -- yeah. There is.

For more reviews of the important stepping stone books of the Path, see my Smoke blog here at SkinWalker Files, where I've begun a series of posts about banned knowledge and where to find it. Very often these old tomes are available for free online, but owning a physical copy helps a lot if you want to take the old advice and spend time with the rocks and the trees.