Beyond the Occult (65 page)
Equally extraordinary was an incident concerning the American satellite Skylab.
On the day Skylab was due to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere Daskalos decided to go and
take a look at it.
In the presence of Markides and Iacovos he went into a trance, and when he returned said he had been trying to push Skylab into the southern hemisphere, where there was more sea for it to fall into.
(At this point the Americans had lost control over it.) He did this by creating a moonlike disc in his mind and bouncing it off Skylab.
The next time he went into a trance Daskalos declared that he had encountered intelligent beings in three flying saucers who were trying to divert Skylab by their own methods.
‘These entities are really advanced.
They live in the higher noetic world and have no form.’
He went into another trance and when he emerged from this claimed that he and the flying saucer entities had changed the trajectory of Skylab.
Daskalos explained that these ‘superintelligences’ are the guardians of the planet earth and that ‘they truly love us’.
In the event Skylab, which was expected to fall in the northern hemisphere, re-entered in the southern hemisphere; parts fell into the Indian Ocean and parts on Australia.
Obviously the individual reader must make up his own mind how far he can credit Daskalos’s claims.
It seems clear that Markides ended by accepting most of them: for example he had no doubt that when Daskalos claimed to be wrestling with Skylab
something
important and interesting had really occurred.
Yet the most important parts of
The Magus of Strovolos
are not the stories of healing or exorcism but the exposition of cosmology and ‘psychological teaching’.
This, for example, might have been said by Gurdjieff or by some Zen master:
Let me ask you a question.
How many things do you concentrate on with full awareness during your everyday life?
Very few.
When you train yourself to concentrate you will become aware of much more in your life.
At first you devote a quarter of an hour every day.
During that time you may take a walk and will fully notice everything around you.
Nothing should escape your attention, nothing.
You may feel tired at first because you are not accustomed to paying attention to everything around you,
the ant walking, the flowers, the sounds, the voices.
You perceive everything, you feel everything.
When you start this exercise you learn that during that quarter of an hour you live much more fully, much more intensely, than at any other period of the day.
You will discover that what is considered ordinarily as the awaking state is in reality a form of semihypnosis … .
Daskalos claims that his ‘teaching’ is not his own but comes to him from an entity called Father Yohannan — the biblical St John.
It is Yohannan who takes over at the meeting of the ‘Circle of the Research of Truth’, delivers the lectures and answers the questions.
And what Yohannan says is remarkably consistent with what has been said by other mystics and psychics.
For example:
Can one communicate with a flower or a plant?
Ordinary people, no matter how much they may love plants and flowers, cannot consciously communicate with them.
They appear as objects to them, outside themselves.
A poet may be inspired by the beauty of a flower, but can he incorporate into his consciousness the semi-consciousness of the flower?
In the psychic world it is very different.
When you advance you will be able to communicate with all forms of life.
All things are alive and have their own language, vibrations and luminosity that you can feel in your psychic body.
This is a restatement of Eileen Garrett’s comments on communication with nature.
Other remarks of Daskalos throw light on the process of psychometry: ‘Within the psychic world there is no separation between us and an object outside us.
When we co-ordinate ourselves and focus on something we are simultaneously one with that object.
We are within it and around it.’
We may recall that when Maria de Zierold held an object and focused on it she became identified with the object so that if it was pricked with a pin she felt the prick, and if it was
moistened with alcohol she could taste the alcohol.
As Anne Bancroft looked at the branch of rhododendron she felt ‘a sense of communication with it, as though it and I had become one’.
Again and again it becomes clear that there is no basic distinction between the experience of the psychic and the experience of the mystic.
Again, students of Western occultism will be struck by the remarkable similarity between the basic ideas of Daskalos and those of Rudolf Steiner.
This is obviously not because Daskalos has derived ideas from Steiner, for it is quite plain throughout the book that everything he says is the result of direct experience.
It seems to be because there is a very close correspondence between Steiner’s experience of the ‘spirit world’ and Daskalos’s.
Steiner, for example, is unique among Western mystics in insisting that the ‘spiritual world’ is man’s
inner
world.
Daskalos (or Yohannan) is on record as making the strange statement, ‘When we leave our bodies, either through death or exomatosis, we actually enter within ourselves.’
And a chapter dealing with the passage from death to rebirth might be inserted into one of Steiner’s books without anyone noticing the difference.
According to Daskalos death is the separation of the physical body and the ‘etheric double’ (or ‘aura’).
The aura takes about forty days to dissolve away.
At the moment of death there is an enormous sense of freedom and serenity.
Then the individual enters the ‘psychonoetic world, carrying with him his virtues and vices.
In the psychic realms, feelings acquire far greater intensity, because they are no longer diluted by our physical bodies, so those who are subject to powerful negative feelings — like envy, rage, lust — will suffer from them with agonising intensity.’
These are in effect the sufferings of Hell — or rather of purgatory, for Daskalos denies the existence of Hell or retributory punishment.
The purpose of these sufferings is ‘so that we may find out who we really are’.
In the psychonoetic world the individual lives at once on the psychic plane and in his own subjective world.
Even on earth human beings live inside their own heads as much as in
the real world.
On the psychic plane they can virtually ignore objective reality.
So although, according to Daskalos, the psychic plane has trees, mountains, oceans and rivers (he says that our ‘real world’ is only a reflection of this psychic realm), ‘most persons who live there perceive it through the elementals they themselves create.’
Daskalos instances a gambler who died of tuberculosis and who has created with others an environment like that he knew on earth: dirty windows and tables and the same fights and quarrels.
Iacovos’s dead grandfather still looks after an orchard, sells the fruit and worries about the rainfall.
Sooner or later such people will realize that they could be doing far more interesting things, and move on to higher psychic planes.
And finally the ‘masters of Karma’ will order the individual to return to earth to learn more lessons.
Markides asked why all this was necessary: the reply was, ‘to realize, perhaps, who one is and to acquire self-consciousness.’
All this is so like Steiner that there is virtually no difference.
Steiner says that the aura takes three days to dissolve; Daskalos says forty.
Steiner says that the spirit and the astral body enter the lower psychic worlds, and that the astral body dissolves when it is purged by its own suffering: Daskalos says only that an ‘individual’ enters the lower psychic worlds after death.
But these differences — if they are differences — are trivial in comparison to the basic agreements.
It may also be noted that Daskalos, like Steiner, attaches immense importance to the figure of Christ in universal history and even, like Steiner, speaks of archangelic hierarchies, including that of Michael and Gabriel.
(According to Steiner, Gabriel was the
Zeitgeist
of the previous Rosicrucian epoch, which ended in 1879, and Michael is the guiding spirit of our own epoch.) Daskalos also insists on the reality of the Akashic Records or Universal Memory.
He makes the interesting statement that,
… whatever exists, existed and will exist is imprinted in this pan-universal supercomputer.
Furthermore, a single atom contains within it all the knowledge of the cosmos.
It
is, therefore, possible by concentrating on a single atom, to acquire information of something or some event that took place in the distant past.
It is done by entering into the Akashic Records just as a scholar enters into a library to investigate a particular issue.
Daskalos, like Steiner, claimed to be able to see a person’s past incarnations simply by using his capacity for psychic vision.
There is also basic agreement on the question of the ‘planes of existence’.
According to Daskalos man lives simultaneously on three planes: the material, the psychic and the noetic.
All three are material universes, but at different levels of vibrations.
(Lethbridge reached very similar conclusions with the use of the pendulum.) Our physical world of space and time is the lowest level.
Next comes the psychic or four-dimensional world: ‘Space here is neutralized and the individual can move over vast distances instantly.’
(It is presumably in this dimension that the ‘projection of the double’ can take place.) Finally, in the noetic or fifth dimension, laws of space and time are transcended so that the individual can travel across time as well as space.
Every individual has a ‘corresponding body’ for these three worlds, and all three bodies make up the total personality.
(The noetic body is divided into the higher and lower body, so the whole arrangement sounds oddly like the Huna conception of the three selves).
There is nothing in the material universe that does not have its psychic and noetic counterpart (another notion that Lethbridge derived from his study of the pendulum).
The earth too is a living being — nothing is actually ‘dead’.
But the noetic counterparts in the mineral and animal kingdom do not form bodies that can function independently of the material form: only man has this power.
(Daskalos, like Steiner, denies that animals have ‘souls’, or individual egos.) Man’s individual ego, or soul, is independent of his physical, psychic or noetic bodies, all of which can die: the soul is eternal.
So again Daskalos’s account of man corresponds closely with that of Steiner.
In fact one of the most fascinating things about Markides’s account of Daskalos is that it so often reminds us of other exponents of ‘the occult tradition’.
When he speaks of the tides of vital energy that sustain the universe we are reminded of Mesmer and Reich.
When he says that water is the dominant element on the psychic planes and that humidity is helpful to exomatosis we are reminded of Lethbridge.
When he speaks of withdrawal into ‘inward’ states we are reminded of Eileen Garrett and Rudolf Steiner.
When he speaks of the earth as a living being we are reminded of Rolling Thunder.
When he compares everyday consciousness to a state of hypnosis we are reminded of Gurdjieff.
Anyone who has even a nodding acquaintance with the ‘occult tradition’, from Hermes Trismegistos to Steiner and Ouspensky, can recognize that Daskalos is a living part of it.
In a sense nothing he says is original.
In another sense it is all original, for he is obviously speaking from direct personal knowledge and creating his own syntheses.
Daskalos, like Rolling Thunder, is one of those human beings who live with perfect comfort on the borderland between two worlds, the visible and the invisible.
He seems to have been born with the capacity to experience the invisible.
Others, like Eileen Garrett and Rosalind Heywood, had some difficulty in coming to terms with it but finally learned to accept the situation.
Still others, like Albert Tucker, prefer to live this side of the borderland.
But no one could accuse any of them of being ‘sick sensitives’, people with one foot already in the ‘next world’.
They are all quite obviously normal and sane human beings — if anything rather more balanced than the rest of us.
The main difference is that they are aware when the ‘invisible’ impinges on the visible, while the rest of us remain oblivious to it.
There can hardly be any doubt which has the wider and therefore the more rational view of life.
*
Afterlife
, p.
141, quoted from Myers’
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
.