Bøker av Oliver St. John

We here follow up points of special interest on Gnostic and other texts, including the remarkable Thunder Perfect Mind. Yoga and a science of the mind is implicit in all of them. Our interest is in metaphysical and universal symbolism; we are not overly concerned with factual references, names, dates and places. The surviving fragments of these ancient texts, as with the Yoga-Sutras, have their true origins in times that were already ancient when the Christian Gospels were being composed. The evidence for a yoga practice and science of the mind in those texts will become clear from studying this book. The second part of the book comprises a careful, practical study of the Yoga-Sutras attributed to Patanjali and Vyasa. There is no simplification or dilution of the yoga method; yet that method is clearly explained. The goal of yoga remains the same: union with God, immortality and even final liberation for those rare individuals that will renounce the world.

Here is an introduction to the Qabalah inclusive of the Hebraic tradition, as well as the modern Hermetic tradition with its systems of correspondences. It features a new commentary on the Thirty-two paths of Wisdom from the most important Qabalistic source work, The Sepher Yetzirah or Book of Formation. 'The Paths of Evil' concerns the Qliphoth of the first ten paths and those corresponding to the Zodiac. The last section, 'The Tunnels of Set', is a critical reappraisal of Kenneth Grant's Nightside of Eden Part Two, revealing how Aleister Crowley and then Grant and others worked to invert symbolism, effectively removing completely all spiritual possibilities for those that would follow them. By placing this in the context of the neo-spiritualist and postmodern occult movement it is shown how the decline and intellectual collapse of civilisation towards the final dissolution of our world is being supernaturally accelerated.

This book includes five chapters on the Holy Guardian Angel and five chapters on various aspects of yoga, including Raja Yoga and Kundalini Yoga. Here we pass beyond the syncretism of occultism to the synthesis of the metaphysical gnosis, which is necessarily the view from the 'centre'. All true initiatic paths lead to the same goal and only differ from the point of view of the outsider. The outward differences of paths owe merely to cultural or other modifications, as necessary, and none of that is of any consequence to initiation at all. We must deal with the conditions of the world that we now find ourselves in. This book is not a comment on social conditions or the more or less extraordinary phenomena that is all part of the 'signs of the times', however. Our purpose is to set forth in the clearest possible terms the ways now open to us given the circumstances of our times.

The voices of the Egyptian neteru are as loud and clear today as they were in ancient history for those who are still able to hear them amidst the noise and tumult of a civilisation that has lost all heart. Thelema and the (Egyptian) Book of the Law are here placed in the context of a metaphysical perspective. Some of the book is thus an advanced commentary on the Thelemic source work, which will be of interest to those not wholly beguiled by the obfuscations of Crowley and those who follow him. The book addresses the difficulty of initiation in the twenty-first century-for the Way has not changed but the conditions we work under certainly have. Laws, news, facts and even history are updated, deleted, replaced and rewritten on a daily basis. So-called alternative movements, some of which even claim to be 'spiritual', only serve to reinforce profane, anti-spiritual notions. There is a need to pass on the real knowledge to those few that are willing and able to receive it.