Experience of the subtle realms

John Heron

“One of the most exciting and thought-provoking books I have read for quite some time.” Stephen Hodge

This e-book, published here January 2003, is my 1994 revised edition of Confessions of a Janus-brain the first edition of which was published by the Endymion Press, London, 1987. It is about first-person inquiry – my personal experience.

For a co-operative inquiry approach, see Part 2 of Sacred Sciencepublished by PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye, 1998. 

Click on either a chapter heading or a subheading of interest to you.

Foreword

1.  Heron’s beard

1. The other world

2. Belief and ambiguity        

3. Heron’s beard and Occam’s razor

4.  A simple canon of inquiry

2. Passive hierarchies of the second kind

1. Critical decision episodes

2.  Taking it down

3.  Over the shoulder

4.  A wider scheme of things

5. Dimly felt presences

6. Invisible healing episodes

7. From a long way away

8. Ritual hierarchies

9. Two world politics

10. Other world science

3. Visits to the other world

1.  Going out

2. Travelling to

3. Subtle domains

4. Between the worlds

5.  A lucid dream

6. A double identity?

7.  Near death experience

8. Returning

9. The subtle matrix and the subtle body

10. Towards a science of consciousness

4. Openings between the worlds

1.  The horizon

2. Between sleeping and waking

3. The sun

4. Any single star

5. Special locations

6. Openings in groups

7. Between the breaths

8. Breathing in

9. At the edge of the visual field

5. Transfigurations

1.  Dissolution into the subtle

2. Suspension and emergence

3. Facial transfigurations

4. Windows in the eyes

5. The transfiguration of retinal lights

6. Misperception as clairvoyance

7. Systematically ambiguous percepts

8. The conceptual transfiguration of perception

9.  Transfigurations of personal appearance

10. Presence and double incarnation

11.  Auditory transfigurations

12. Vocal and musical transfigurations

6. Paradoxes of the arbitrary

1.  A Tantric window

2. Synchronicity

3. Divination procedures

4. After dinner divination

5. Oracles and the logic of ambiguity

6. The guru game

7. New symbols for old

8. Categorial addiction

9. The paradox retained

7. The doctrine of powers

1. Cat power

2. Mouse power

3. Angles as powers

4. Lines as powers of vision

5. Lines as powers between the worlds

6.  Powers and the person

7.  Eidolon encounter

8. Subtle matrix meditation

9. Running in two worlds at once

10. Being your own ally

11.  Subtle knack

12.  Elements as powers

13. Matrix space

14. More on the concept of an ally

8. Intimacy in two worlds

1. Basic encounter

2. Intimacy needs

3. Mutual gazing

4. Mutual touching

5. Spacing out and visions through the skin

6. Sexual ecstasy and continuous creation

7. The energy orgasm

8. The manifold of intimate transactions

9. The shekinah

9. Charismatic training

1.  Entering the levity line

2. Entering the subtle body: bearing

3. Following the subtle body

4. Expanding into matrix space

5.  The eight corners

6.  The parasol

7.  The matrix of the immediate other

8. Relative position

9. Further afield

10. Exploring subtle power lines

11. Entering the gaze-light

12. Projecting subtle touch

13. Subtle gesture

14. Pulsing in two worlds

15. Tacit invocations

16. Explicit invocations

17. Speaking out of matrix time

18. Expanding into matrix time

19.  Speaking and making space

20.  Direction, content and manner of speech

21. The use of intermental fields

22. Putting it all together

10. Manifold spaces

1.  Non-Euclidean geometry

2. Projective geometry as the source of metric geometries

3. Matrix within matrix

4. The fourth dimension

5. Modes of spatial experience

6. The fifth and sixth dimensions

7.  Dimensional clusters

11. Extraordinary times

1. Can the future shape the present?

2. Recording the future

3. The spawning womb

4. Primal events

5. Physical time, matrix time and transcendental time

6. Destiny and pre-destination

7.  Responsibility and freedom

8.  Transcendental time

9. The four causes

12. Speculative metaphysics

1. The manifest and the unmanifest

2. Eros, Cosmos and Logos

3. Autonomy, parity and hierarchy

4. The up-hierarchy of Eros

5. The down-hierarchy of Logos

6. Cosmos: the dove-tailing of Eros and Logos

7.  The illusions of Eros and of Logos

8.  The multiple Cosmos

9. The divine name

13. Into the future

1. Cultural forms, hierarchies of the second kind and archetypal power

2. Politics, inquiry and art

3.  A self-generating culture

4.  Rituals

5.  Social practices

6.  The genesis and development of cultural forms

14. Postscript – refraction between the worlds

1.  Physical refraction

2.  False elevation from below

3. False reduction from below

4.  False elevation from above

5.  False reduction from above

6.  Fourfold distortion

7.  Obliquity of vision

8.  Illuminative diffusion