Islam is a major world religion belonging to the Semitic family – that is to say, it shares with the Jewish and Christian religions the Hebrew Bible as a source document. It was promulgated by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the 7th century CE. The Arabic term Islam literally means “surrender”.

Plato, through his character Socrates, uses the cave analogy to show that what we believe to be reality is simply a reflection of another, genuinely real world that exists beyond our normal senses. This higher perceptual world, which I call the Pleroma, is denied to most of us, as the British poet William Blake wrote, in an attempt to explain his

Darkness certainly seems to facilitate the opening of the mind to the Pleroma,

Zero point energy is a consequence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This states that if we know the position of a subatomic particle, we cannot know its speed; and if we know its speed, we cannot know its position. If a particle were at rest, we would know both. However, such particles can never be at rest, not even at absolute zero, the

The Secret Commonwealth This will be a review of the Egregorials that seem to share consensual reality with us and are identified as being fairies, elves, goblins and numerous entities that have historically been identified under the collective term “elemental spirits”. The Occult This term relates to Egregorials that are evoked through magic (or

Our everyday world, which I have termed the Kenoma, is closely linked with the shamanic Middle World. This is where the shaman usually functions. In effect, this is Kant’s noumenal universe, as discussed on page 38. It is important to realize that this realm is a non-ordinary counterpart of the Kenoma, a more malleable version of ordinary reality –

The word “psychedelic” is taken from the Greek words psychē (“soul”) and dēloun (“to make visible”, “to reveal”).

So what is the true nature of these entities? Do they have actual reality outside the mind of the observer or is there something far more complex taking place? You will recall that Aleister Crowley, in his book Magick in Theory and Practice, suggested that whether the entities were objectively real or not was “immaterial”: what was important, he

The oldest written records we have date back to around 4000 BCE and were found in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. The civilization that reached this level of sophistication had as its capital the city of Sumer (the biblical Shinar). According to modern research, the Sumerians were additionally responsible for the