FALCON BOOKS INTERVIEWS
EXPLORING ENLIGHTENED LIVING
THROUGH HERMETIC MEDITATION
AND BEYOND
With Dr. Jonn Mumford
Illustration 1: Dr. Jonn Mumford with Swami Satyananda Saraswati 1973, Bihar School of Yoga, Bihar State, Monghyr, India.
Falcon Books is presenting a series of interviews with seasoned Hermetic practitioners to offer not only their wisdom, knowledge and understanding, and an insight into their own journey, but also to offer inspiration to those on this path. The focus of these discussions are guided towards the spiritual seeker.
This interview is of great interest, as we continually faced with the challenge of discerning the difference from the inner reality and imagined within our magical training. Dr Mumford offers us a unique perspective on this subject, having both studied within the Western and Eastern traditions and in his understanding of the aspects of training
Presenting today an interview with Dr. Jonn Mumford who is a renowned and prolific author and is a direct disciple of Yogamaharishi Dr. Swami Gitananda Giri GuruMaharaj (South India). He was initiated by Swami Satyananda Saraswati into Sannyasa as Swami Anandakapila Saraswati at the Bihar School of Yoga, Bihar, India in 1973. He renounced that title in 2014. Dr. Mumford is known and respected around the world for his knowledge, scholarship, dynamic teaching style and extensive practical experience in Kriya Yoga, Jyotish and Tantra.
His renowned 1975 book Sexual Occultism (later revised and issued as Ecstasy Through Tantra) was among the very first books to introduce Westerners to traditional, left-hand Tantra from the perspective of an initiate. This book and Dr. Mumford’s public teaching at Llewellyn Publications’ 1976 Gnosticon conference inspired an entire generation of Western Tantra teachers.
Jonn wrote his first book Psychosomatic Yoga, in 1961 while completing an intensive period of yogic study in India. His current books include the bestselling Ecstasy Through Tantra (1988), A Chakra and Kundalini Workbook (1994), Magical Tattwa Cards (1997), Mind Magic Kit (1998), Death: Beginning or End? (1999) and Karma Manual (1999) from Llewellyn Publications; they have been translated into many languages and are available world-wide.
His diverse background includes training in chiropractic and psychology, many years of practice as an osteopathic physician, advanced training in a wide range of Eastern disciplines, and many years of teaching in Australia, India and the United States. This depth and breadth of experience makes Dr. Mumford uniquely qualified to communicate the secrets of Tantra to the Western world. He currently resides in Sydney, Australia.
A cordial welcome to Dr. Jonn Mumford from Falcon Books Publishing. Great to have you here and thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.
Dr. Jonn Mumford: My childhood was spent under the shadow of World War 11 and yet as an adult I could never have dreamed the state of the present world. Understandably a pall of depression, anxiety and confusion has fallen everywhere upon the inhabitants of the earth — which we have been treating as a garbage dump for humans personal convenience.
The last few years I have been attempting to bring certain aspects of Neuroscience together with the practices involving deep meditation because many aspects dovetail.
We are each of us engaged in a battle within, for our sanity, while attempting to do something about the chaos we are immersed in.
I have been fighting all my life to maintain some degree of sanity in my own life and I can assure you this battle can be won with many slips along the way. My first Guru gave me my life and I owe him to save it and share what has been hard learned over a lifetime.
The path is truly a “razors edge” but it can be done with persistence and discipline- difficult during these times—our worst enemy is our own MIND—not the outside world.
The enemy is within—endless dour, uninvited mind chatter, and yet if you can get past it, realizing these are but the mutterings of parts of your fragmented self, something beyond the world, beyond our fears lies deep within—even past the dreamless sleep state!”
1. Falcon Books: Would you be able to share with us a precis of your journey and what lead you on the path that you have taken?
Dr. Jonn Mumford: I want to express my gratitude for extending the opportunity for this interview and although I most definitely am not an expert on Franz Bardon I have admired his work for years and can recognize the unique and legitimate basis of his work—the man was a genius and his legacy is a treasure.
Your generous comments about my background are quite sufficient.
2. Falcon Books: How have you been able to bring together the principals of Western and Eastern esoteric approaches of inner alchemy. Did you find you were able to harmonise the two effectively?
Dr. Jonn Mumford: I did not find this difficult as the Indian tradition has a rich heritage of both literal alchemy (working particularly with metals and herbs to eliminate the toxic qualities inherent in some substance and bring out the healing properties) as well as the alchemical aspect of working with the subtle energies attached to humans to bring about transcendental states.
Thus many correspondences and similarities existed in both Eastern and Western Traditions.
3. Falcon Books: Yoga has become a fashionable pastime of today. How has the practice of yoga changed since you began your journey and do you feel its goals of the practice have also changed or have they remained the same?
Dr. Jonn Mumford: I began serious study of yoga in the early 1950’s when Yogananda’s work was being established in America and a few authentic books started to appear on the market.
Aside from Yogananda’s burgeoning influence with S.R.F. the first more accurate translations of Sanskrit texts begin to appear and records of direct experience, e.g. spectacularly Dr. Theos Bernard’s “Hatha Yoga”—an ultimate description of personal training undergone in North Indian and was written in the 1930’s. (his Ph.D. thesis from Columbia University was based on his book “Hatha Yoga”).
This man is largely forgotten in today’s Western Yoga scene and if you would like to understand why I have such esteem for him read his biography. His early death in 1947 represents, in my opinion, the loss of one of the greatest Indologists America ever produced.
Indeed you are correct in your comment “Yoga has become a fashionable pastime of today” compared to when I started and it also has become a Billion dollar major commercial Industry.
American’s are like the Romans of yore—great assimilators of anything useful from other cultures and extremely creative and ingenious, at molding these acquisitions into a form that can be assimilated by the population in bite sized bits, and may be commercialized as a “product” selling “Passion, Power, and Profit” or alternately packaged as “Peace, Purpose, and Prosperity (for all)”: thus Yoga has turned into a “Brand” with unbeatable selling power that can be labelled according to the target market.
The word “Yoga” has been misunderstood, abused and distorted by all Western Cultures and I am particularly offended when I hear Anglo-Saxon teachers addressing classes as “welcome Yogis and Yoginis”—my first Guru, Dr. Swami Gitananda, would never call himself a “Yogi”—the real implication is beyond what most of us have reached as we are all students and practitioners—not fully enlightened beings! The correct word for a student is “Chela.”
That being said I must say that America has some very good Yoga teachers, who have learned in India and also have a prerequisite knowledge of Sanskrit—often to Ph.D. level.
Finally when Yoga is absorbed by other cultures it is inevitable that dilutions and distortions occur as the teachings are trimmed and altered by those teaching, and the prevailing culture and politics of the country.. Sometimes these changes are for the better and other times they are tragic in the superficiality.
Yoga in India itself has changed, often not for the better, as the ubiquitous culture from the West, of monetary materialism infects the country, so you again have the best and the worst manifesting.
4. Falcon Books: You have written in extensively about Kundalini and the chakras, these subjects have become popularised within the new age movement. Within your book The chakra and Kundalini workbook, to quote the definition of a chakra:
‘“Chakra: “Wheel, disc, whirlpool.” The term is applied to the basic seven psychic centers outlined in Yoga and Tantra. Chakra implies a vortex, and thus “,? may define a psychic center as a “whirling vortex of psychic energy at the conjunction points of the mind and the body.” I must emphasize that just as the ” Cartesian division of “Mind” and “Body” is arbitrary, so a “chakra” may well be an imaginary, albeit useful, artifact for purposes of attention-fixing. I perceive a chakra as outside the space-time continuum and equivalent to the Euclidean “Point”-i.e., without magnitude, possessed of location but not dimension.”‘
Could a chakra be understood not to be located in a physical space i.e., astral, mental, physical but somewhere beyond this, but its effects are felt within all of these planes. Or is the chakra more of a paradigm, a point of focus to manifest and create from?
Please could elucidate more on this.
Dr. Jonn Mumford: Yes—It should be noted—particularly in America—that the correct pronunciation is CH(as in Church)AKRA and never SHAKRA.
Think of it as a point to focus without the attribute of DIMENSION! I consider Astral and mental planes as transcending the physical and time limitations we normally experience and therefore they exist on extra-dimensional planes.
I prefer to start from the premise that human beings have huge illusions about the chakras and better to consider that you are not born with chakras but only nascent points for placing “intentional attention” exist on the physical body.
These points have location but not discernable dimension however you may be able to grow your chakras into full blossom by concentration accompanied by intention over a period of time. This, by-the-way, is the classical definition in Euclidean Geometry of a “point”.
Euclid’s book Elements begins with defining what previously was undefined: “a point is that which has no part” and “a line is a length without breadth.” This is quite startling when you consider the implications over two thousand years age (c. 300 bce).
We start with Chakra Dharana, commonly gazing upon two dimensional colored geometrical shapes each representing a materialized Chakra until an afterimage is produced.
These images are designed so that each one is the complementary color of the color most commonly associated with the chakra so the result is when you close your eyes you see in the inner world the color attributed in India as the most characteristic of the chakra.
I also would like to establish that I am not a “theorist”—I am a “Technician”—I understand the basic theory of metaphysics however I am interested in “Experience over understanding” and what “works”
So I would like to tackle the seeming paradox of my statement that we are born with only the “Seed” of Chakras” which have “Location” but not dimension in this plane of existence. Successful attempt with the following experiment will assist answering many of the questions raised and which will be addressed as we go along. You will have to fit the pieces together for yourself.
A: IMAGINATION EXPERIMENT
Consider the shape below:
-
Gaze softly at the shape for a minute while deciding is it 2 dimension drawing in “reality” of a two dimension shape or a two dimension representation of a three dimension object i.e. a prism?
-
Close your eyes and imagine you are gazing through your forehead into an infinite black space. This is not an after-image exercise so any after-image appearing let it fade before starting.
-
Construct the diagram as a three dimension object exercising your imagination, perhaps ten inches outside from your forehead and imagine the same dark orange color. Just continue looking through your closed eyelids and forehead and draw the square with a triangle on top and imagine you are coloring it is with the brown read
-
It is suspended in black velvety space and slowly rotate it while observing carefully. Set about to determine the Number of Edges, Corners, Faces?
Manipulate it in this psychic space rotating it from left to right and also vertically as needed. Each time you have arrived at a conclusion open your eyes and write in the appropriate space the Number you think you have counted, reclose your eyes and continue.
When you have finished consider this: Your imagination has lifted you into what I term the “5th Dimension” where MAGIC first occurs and if it is strong enough it reverberates down into the three dimensional world of time and space. REALIZE as long as you hold the Cube in this inner dimension it actually does not exist in the 3 dimensional world and the only thing it has in common with the so called REAL world is the seed of time contracted to “NOW” which is the only thing you have in any dimension that is “REAL”.
5. Falcon Books: As practitioners of these meditative sciences, often it is left to us to experience and discern what is truly real in our practice from that which is illusion. How do we clearly discern and define ‘experiences’ such as Kundalini awakening since they are subjective. What are the traditional signs and how do we truly know that these are occurring?
Dr. Jonn Mumford: A good place to begin is to point out that there are also objective signs i.e. quite discernible evidence to the examiner or objective observer.
These include Expressions and gestures of ecstasy, spontaneous poetry, increased creativity particularly in music, singing, visual arts, and superior writing skills- seemingly arising from nowhere but now here for all to witness.
Also you may get Aesthetic awe, triggered by sudden awareness of a “world in a grain of Sand”, overwhelming compassion upon realizing the truth of Christ’s statement “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” resulting in uncontrollable weeping.
Exaggerated facial expressions, pupil dilation and gesticulation, signifying amazement and wonder as the individual’s perception of reality changes radically as do their feelings.
Spontaneous movements, swaying, shaking, trembling episodes and blacking underneath the big toes.The problem arises that some of these signs (medically observable) and Symptoms (subjectively reported) also can mimic Psychosis, and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.
The great Indian saint, Ramakrishna, expressed the Kundalini manifestation and significance of the Kundalini paradox very well:
“Men and women are beautiful masks. Behind them all is the
same Divine Power who rises up gently through the six subtle
centers of this human body, giving each person a unique
flavor and intensity, unveiling through each living being
a unique degree of Divine Manifestation.”
– Gadadhar Chattopadhyay [Ramakrishna Paramhamsa] (1836-1886)
The question you ask is actually very sophisticated. Let us pause and take a deep breath: In the seventies so many people had experiences of real or false “Kundalini arousal” episodes that the concept of “Spiritual Emergency Centers” arouse where people could seek assistance and be helped through the discomfort.
One of the best Resources is Dr. Lee Sannella M.D. Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence? privately published in 1976. Now available on Amazon and I would add his good friend, Itzhak Bentov’s book, Stalking the Wild Pendulum is essential reading—giving the best physiological explanation of Kundalini I have encountered.
I have had the pleasure of meeting and spending some time with Dr. Sannella when I was touring in the states. He took me on some of his rounds and he is not only a board certified Psychiatrist but also an Ophthalmologist and was doing research on glaucoma and assessing stress as a factor. You can discover more about this remarkable man on this youtube link. I concur with his viewpoint.
A couple of more comments to round this out and I will leave you to fit the pieces together as you desire.
So called “Kundalini” is often smooth depending on the individual circumstances.
The reason why this drug is very famous in so many people is due to the component that is sildenafil citrate which assists within saving erections in a man as well as another component that is dapoxetine which facilitates in infuriating levitra online india the cause for untimely ejaculation and in addition to it; it is quite supportive in circumstances that are linked with fewer or complimentary. Its main function in men is used to achieve and maintain powerful erection in cialis online discount bed. Where to appalachianmagazine.com acquisition de viagra buy Kamagra? You can easily place your order online. So don’t waste any more time and start to work cialis tadalafil 20mg faster than Kamagra tablets would.
The difficulty starts with the semantics: Here we have an opportunity to really trip over ourselves: “truly know” is a phrase that might easily be interpreted as a tautology.
Another way of looking at this question is to consider if something is “Really true” how can you ascertain it is “really” and is that concept different than “truly” or do they mean the same thing- in which case how do you “know” and can you “prove it” and to whom is that “proof” acceptable? Richard Dawkins for instance?
So we have to start with a fairly solid base-line. The most satisfactory definition of “reality” that works for all is “reality is agreement”. A few hundred years ago the earth was flat by agreement, now it is round and the evidence is sufficiently convincing so few disagree.
This definition is merely pragmatically useful so inhabiting a body you learn it is unwise to jump off a skyscraper or walk in front of a bus.
However the theoretically base of this rule is flawed because everything reduces to atoms, (which are like planets orbiting in a solar system), and the composition of atoms mean that the atom is mostly empty space.
Therefore it follows solids, including bodies, are made of atoms and therefore, as entities, we are mostly empty space, which does not help when a bus runs over you and reduces your body to a mess of blood and broken bones!
I know we are wading through heaps of words and I am telling you things you already know, as a preamble to the original question, which you may have understandably forgotten—I almost have and blame the editor for asking such a pivotal and astute question!
Now if you have bravely continued this far I would love to answer the question very simply and hope you would buy it. The short answer is “YOU CAN’T!”
However this will simply not do and, yes, I do have an answer which many of you already realize and that is to readjust your thinking and not confuse existence in three dimensions of space and one of time as the only possibility. The universe has multiple dimensions and there are many ways of considering this concept that lead to explanations for extra-normal occurrence’s and development of apparent supernormal abilities.
There are complex and simple examples of this both within and without us.
The answer, is this: As long as we are inhabiting Bodies occupying three dimensions of “space” and one of “Time” and believe the brain secretes the consciousness the way the gallbladder secretes gall the simple answer is YOU CAN NOT DIFFERENTIATE WHAT IS REAL OR TRUE
However once we realize we are a multidimensional being, possessed of subtle vehicles beyond the physical body, things begin to change. We alter our perspective and become open to the possibility of extending beyond the physical. The key is INTENSITY of your experience when you transcend space and time. Such experiences often completely transform people for the better. AND THE HANDIEST TOOL AVAILABLE FOR THE MAGICIAN IS IMAGINATION WHICH, WHEN CULTIVATED, TRANSCENDS TIME AND SPACE AS WE KNOW IT:
Stubborn incidents that have persisted over centuries are now being carefully gathered from people experiencing such phenomenon as clairvoyance, telepathy, past lives recall, Near Death Experiences (NDE) telekinesis, and are now the subject of Scientific consideration and experiment, in spite of the Skeptics.
The work of Rupert Sheldrake and his theory of Morphic Resonance, the American “Institute of Noetic Sciences” research, and the ground breaking cataloguing and verification of Past Life Recall that has accumulated over the last thirty years at the University of Virginia Medical Department, are just a few examples, easily verified by googling.
Hopefully you are beginning to see a different perspective on sorting out “Really True.”
6. Falcon Books: Could you please define what tattvas are for those who may not know and the importance in using them to develop one’s magical practice?
Dr Jonn Mumford: Some twenty-five hundred years ago an Indian philosopher called Kapila formalized a doctrine (Samkhya School) explaining the origins of the universe. His concepts were based on the “five Elements” eg. Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether beloved of the Greek philosophers.
Below is a chart comparing the Western Symbols currently used and the contemporary Indian symbols commonly used as well as the order of elements
Tattva means, in Sanskrit, “thatness, primary substance, the essence, principle” and upon the fundamentals of the Five Elements he was able to elicit combinations of the five elements into a total of twenty-five tattwas.
The back story of how Magical Tattwas was produced is not well known.
In 1995, in collaboration with my good friend, mentor, and publisher, Carl Llewellyn Weschcke, I began working on a book updating the original scrying cards based on the Tattwas as used by the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” founded 1887.
Carl had the copyright to addendums, provided by Israel Regardie, from the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn”. These “addendums” were written instructions given to the members. From three of these manuscripts we were able to construct the system they used for clairvoyance, utilizing the tattwa cards as known at that time.
Carl designed the cards and searched with the fervor of his genius, to find a printer that could create brilliant iridescent colors that mimicked an effect more often attributed to fluorescence, luminescence and phosphorene displays, startling effects never before used in printing.
He found a printer willing to try and the first attempt was a failure as the complex inks required bled into each other on the cardboard. They called in an inorganic Chemist to solve the problem and the results were stunning!
Carl Llewellyn Weschcke (1930-2015), an author in his own right, was a master of ritual Magic and knew well the power of Imagination to release creative forces resulting in the observable crystallization, materialization, and actualization of desire through intention. He was also a friend, patron and mentor to me, and the owner and chairman of Llewellyn Worldwide, the world’s oldest and largest metaphysical publisher. He has given me a great deal and my life would be less if he had not been such a pivotal part. The “Magical Tattwa” set could not have been manifested without our mutual collaboration.
Meantime the book I was writing was designed to update with everything I had learned from Ananda Ashram in South India and Bihar school of Yoga in the North so we could produce a system update for the 20th and 21st century.
I introduced into the manuscript a collection of original exercises never released before, using my knowledge of psychobiology combined with my Indian training regarding the “Swara” or psychic flows.
In 1996 I typed up the manuscript, sitting in Carl’s Minnesota Library, to produce the “Magical Tattwas” which was published in 1997 with a set of twenty-five beautiful cards suitable for meditation, scrying and divination.
Below you can see examples of the incredible fluorescent color designs used—the cards glowed with power!
The single card is an example of an Akasha (Ether) one of five cards from which the example combinations were created. Thus a total of twenty- five cards.
GAZE SOFTLY AT THIS FOR A MINUTE
I also developed a “Magical Tattwas” course to accompany the book and cards.
Now for the bad news – a little rain must fall in every life!
In 2007 AMERICA suffered the subprime recession which lasted up to 2009 and simultaneously publishers were placed under tremendous pressure from internet companies wanting to make inexpensive deals with publishers for digital copyrights. “Magical Tattwas” went out of print, the original printer for the cards went bankrupt, and the ink formula was lost and Llewellyn Publisher decided the cost of hiring another chemist and printer to republish the cards was not viable.
Thus I got my copyright back and it is now revised, expanded and available by digital download to students who have graduated from the part I and part II Om Kara Kriya ® course and wish to do the “Magical Tattwas” course which is also available by digital download.
We have managed to get our cards printed in Czechoslovakia and stock them at our New York Headquarters. They are not as good as our original cards but they are more than adequate and we sell them independently of the courses for around $10.00 plus postage.
(Anyone interested can email Mark Michaels at Mark A. Michaels <mark@tantrapm.com> Give him your snail mail address and he will then PayPal invoice you including shipping or make other payment arrangements).
Amazon and specialty book sellers have 2nd hand copies of “Magical Tattwas” available averaging $200.00 up to $400.00 as collectors’ items.
Should you purchase this rarity please double check it includes the full original deck.
The original information about the cards and “Magical Tattwas” is still on the Llewellyn site in an article written by my good friend the late Donald Michael Kraig (1951-2014) who was a personal friend of mine for some twenty-five years and is sadly missed. This article contains some very shrewd comments and your perspective will be broadened reading it.
7. Falcon Books: When working with methods such as scrying the Tattvas, how does one develop clarity to discern from that which is imagination?
Dr. Jonn Mumford: The clarity, with practice will develop so you notice concrete results or obtain knowledge that proves accurate as in “remote viewing”.
Imagination is not just important—It is everything
8. Falcon Books: Within your work with Kriya yoga you attribute each chakra to a deity, I wonder if you would be able to explain a bit more about this practice and how it assists in the evolution of the person’s development. Could this be classed as a form of invocation?
Dr. Jonn Mumford: I do not attribute the deities, these are the traditional Tantric deities attributed to the Chakras.
Both invocation (the act or an instance of invoking, especially an appeal to a higher power for assistance) and evocation (the act of bringing or recalling a feeling, memory, or image to the conscious mind) are involved.
The question we really want to know is: do the deities actually manifest or appear when invoked and/or evoked? The answer is YES! However not quite the way we may think?
Hinduism is often called a polytheistic religion—this is incorrect because there are levels of understanding in all religions and at the highest level Hinduism is monotheistic. This follows the pedagogical rule of each to his own level of understanding.
BRAHMĀ is the personification of the creative stream of consciousness of “no thing” from which everything emerges. The Sanskrit “Brahmā” (also transliterated “Brahman”) translates, roughly, as cosmic intelligence, ultimate reality, “according to Vedanta Brahmā is the cause of all visible existence, from which all manifest things are produced and into which they are absorbed”(extracted from “Sanskrit Glossary” Yoga Publications Trust, Munger Bihar, by Swami Yogakanti Saraswati).
Suppose you want to accuse the Catholic Church of being “polytheistic” on the grounds that the holy trinity represents three different entities much the way the Greeks on Mount Olympus had multiple God/desses !
A smart priest will make short shrift of that attempt, and in front of the congregation. He holds up a folded sheet and displays the first fold “The Son”, the second fold is opened, “The Father” and finally the last, “The Holy Spirit” and, with a flourish, reveals the entire sheet, triumphantly saying “ALL ONE”!
So let us stick with the Holy Roman Church and I will prepare us for the answer. Some thirty years or so ago, the Pope and his Cardinals decided the Church needed some reformation as the congregations began to shrink in many parts of the world.
Much deliberation, among the committee, lead, in their collective wisdom, to the conclusion that what needed to be reformed was eliminating chanting the “Mass” in Latin and translating it into the local languages of each congregation. They did! What a disaster— things have just gone downhill ever since and I believe the present Pope, a remarkable man, will have his work cut out for him to make real “reformations”.
What happened is the Church—as an entity, immediately lost the powerful psychic stream of nearly two thousand years of hundreds of thousands of worshipers hearing the Mass celebrated in Latin, by countless priests.
The Western tradition has given us a word that perfectly encapsulates this phenomenon and the essence is to understand that deities are archetypes in the collective unconscious of humanity that grow with a power of their own as they are brought into consciousness.
Deities are metaphors for the different expressions of universal forces and are empowered by humans repeatable affirming their existence until they take on a life of their own.
The word is EGREGORE!
“Egregore (also egregor) is an occult concept representing a “thought form” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. The symbiotic relationship between an egregore and its group has been compared to the more recent, non-occult concepts of the corporation (as a legal entity) and the meme.”
So the answer is that each time a ritual to a deity is performed that deity is reformed on the astral plane and the more and longer the ritual is carried on the more the entity is a source of power to be tapped and the worshipper or ritualist is more easily to ride on that energy and see, from his own archetypal storehouse, a manifestation of that entity.
Perhaps a simpler way to view the paradox is that deities just represent a variety of ways universal energy may be utilized the way electricity may light a bed lamp or drive the pumps in a hydro-electric damn project.
Note well that the variation in the above Yantra (more properly “mandala”) is a Tantric depiction of mūlādhāra and substitutes Lord Ganesha (the remover of obstacles) for Brahmā as the main Shakta deity for worship or puja and as a matter of interest in the Tantric tradition Divine Mother in her fierce form as Kālī resides in Anahata, the Heart Chakra.
So taking Ganesha, as an example, as he is the ultimate “enabler” we might ask does Ganesha hang around in some Hindu etheric heaven waiting to be called up to some stupid human, who by his own fault has gotten into a mess (we humans are really good at that)?
No- Ganesha has a day job as secretary to Lord Shani (Saturn) who is the Cosmic Accountant and Karmic tax collector. Hindu’s are generally scared witless of Shani—the scientologists may have been able to blackmail the IRS, but by holy Shiva nobody gets around Shani!
However Ganesha has probably been worshipped for over two thousand years and by 300 C.E. had ascended to the position of the major god Hindus made pujas to; imploring help or relief.
His location in mūlādhāra indicates his mastery of the creative forces from the arcane to the mundane and that is what you draw into with successful ritual to him—the energy of millions of Hindus who focused upon him for probably over two millennia.
9. Falcon Books: What practice would you recommend the practitioner of magic best to develop their imagination?
The easiest place to begin the cultivation of imagination is by using the eyes and associated visual processing. The largest area of the brain is occupied by the visual processing area at the back of the skull (occipital lobe). The human been primarily is a visual orientated being just the way a dog is primarily living in a world dominated by olfactory stimulation and secondly auditory acuteness with vision as a poor 3rd. The dog’s world is beyond our comprehension.
I teach a series of exercises starting with 2 dimension evoking of after-images moving onto multiple variations of closed eye exercises turning into 3-dimensional objects as well as various applications of learning reverse and manipulate optical illusions.
At an advanced level we integrate special yoga eye fixations known as Mudras to alter brain wave function and start integrating auditory functions and tactile sensations into the training. This process takes about one and a half years and continues in through various postgraduate courses.
The human being not only believes what they see but without realizing it they see what they believe
The interesting aspect is that when you are exercising your will in that inner 5th dimensions your imagination may be brought to the level that you are in complete control of what you elect to create, see, smell, feel and hear in a way that it is not possible in an outer world of three dimensions of space and one of time.
To find out more about Dr. Jonn Mumford and to find out the courses he provides please visit his Website and view link.