Guru Viking Podcast
Ep265: Occult Experiments - Duncan Barford
In this episode I am joined by Duncan Barford, occult practitioner, counsellor, and author of ‘Occult Experiments in the Home’.
Duncan discusses his own journey into the occult including reality-bending experiments with Chaos Magick, invocation of his holy guardian angel, identifying and relating to entities, and meeting his long-time collaborator, the magician and spiritual teacher Alan Chapman.
Duncan recalls his first encounter with Daniel Ingram’s “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha”. He explains how he combined Daniel’s approach with Western occult methods and rituals to attain arhatship for himself.
Duncan declared his enlightenment on the internet and began teaching awakening in a short-lived venture called “Open Enlightenment”. Duncan reflects on the strongly negative reactions that both his declaration and teaching project received.
Duncan also comments on demonic affliction, both his own experiences as well as those of recent podcast guest Mattias Daly, the influence of social class and geographic location, navigating kundalini crisis, the intersection of mysticism and magick.
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Video version: https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep265-occult-experiments-duncan-barford
Also available on Youtube, iTunes, & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast’.
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Topics include:
00:00 - Intro 01:19 - Occult experiments in the home 02:38 - Duncan comments on Mattias Daly’s demonic affliction 04:34 - Demonic or kundalini awakening? 06:27 - - Duncan’s own kundalini crisis 08:44 - Seeking guidance from Tara Springett 11:39 - Identifying entities 14:19 - Duncan’s specialism in counselling those having unusual occult experiences 17:05 - Finding the best paradigm 19:38 - Does Duncan prescribe magickal practice? 21:50 - Spirituality vs everyday life 24:42 - Meeting Alan Chapman and sustained interest in the occult 26:59 - Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel 27:57 - Encountering Daniel Ingram and bringing awakening back to magick 30:31 - Duncan’s childhood interest in the supernatural and strange 33:13 - Gothic horror and psychoanalysis 33:52 - Beginning to explore magickal practice 35:03 - Moving from intellect to feeling and emotion 36:32 - Abandoning a PhD, meditation frustration, and life crisis 44:12 - Encountering Chaos Magick and leaning to bend reality 46:26 - Envy of Daniel Ingram and reception in the Chaos Magick community 49:40 - Are mysticism and spirituality compatible with magick? 51:09 - Using magick to induce mystical experiences 52:44 - Declaring arhatship and attaining the four paths 57:45 - Powerful experience with Andrew Cohen 01:01:43 - Advice from Christopher Titmuss 01:03:50 - Dreaming of Gary Numan 01:05:25 - Is arhatship the end of enlightenment? 01:07:09 - Duncan asks Steve’s opinion 01:09:07 - Did Duncan and Alan keep pace in their awakening path? 01:10:03 - The 3 doors and awakening with visions 01:13:39 - Fire kasina retreat with Daniel Ingram 01:16:26 - Why did Duncan declare arhatship? 01:17:59 - Ego inflation through magickal practice 01:19:08 - Negative responses to declaration of enlightenment 01:19:54 - Failure of Open Enlightenment and the compulsion to share one’s awakening 01:24:49 - Is UK conducive to spiritual and magickal work? 01:27:27 - Reflections on being working class 01:28:33 - Travellers vs locals 01:29:15 - Comments on the spectrum of entities 01:31:09 - Discount code for the Baptist Head Compendium …
To find our more about Duncan Barford, visit:
- https://www.duncanbarford.uk/
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For more interviews, videos, and more visit:
- https://www.guruviking.com
Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James
- Duration:
- 1h 32m
- Broadcast on:
- 02 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
In this episode, I am joined by Duncan Barford, occult practitioner, counselor, and author of Occult Experiments in the Home. Duncan discusses his own journey into the occult, including reality-bending experiments with Chaos Magic, invocation of his holy guardian angel, identifying and relating to entities, and meeting his longtime collaborator, magician and spiritual teacher, Alan Chapman. Duncan recalls his first encounter with Daniel Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. He explains how he combined Daniel's approach with Western occult methods and rituals to attain our hat-ship for himself. Duncan declared his enlightenment on the internet and began teaching awakening in a short-lived venture called Open Enlightenment. Duncan reflects on the strongly negative reactions that both his declaration and teaching project received. Duncan also comments on demonic affliction, both his own experiences, as well as those of recent podcast guest Mathias Daley, the influence of social class and geographic location, navigating Kundalini crisis, and the intersection of mysticism and magic. So without further ado, Duncan Barford. Duncan Barford, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me. I'm so delighted to be talking with you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. And I was telling you before that I dug out my old copy of your book Occult Experiments in the Home, which when I checked my Amazon purchase list, I bought in 2016. And so when I was merely 14 years old, I wish, no, I wish, I wish, and I still have my markings in there. So it was great when I was able to go through it in preparation for this interview and follow my own trail of breadcrumbs through your book. So it's quite fun to talk with you. Yeah, well, we were quite an old book now, isn't it? 2010, that came out. Right. And I'd like to talk a bit about actually what's in that book, as well as what's in your latest publication in collaboration with Alan Chapman, The Baptist Heads Compendium. Wow. A compilation of three volume set of magical and awakening journals and reflections and essays from yourself and your collaborator, frequent collaborator, Alan Chapman. So I'd like to dive into a bit of that later. But before we do, we were mentioning before we began recording, the recent Mattias daily interview, you'd said that you saw that and found it quite striking. And Mattias daily is an American man, translator of classical Chinese text, especially related to Taoism. Very interesting guy, interviewed him three or four times. And one of those interviews, he described about a year-long period in New Zealand of what perhaps we could technically call a sort of demonic affliction, as he reports it, not a full possession, where he was totally taken over and acting against his will, but a sort of growing affliction. And he went through, I think, no less than five separate exorcisms. He had a sort of Taoist-y kind of exorcism, he had a Catholic exorcism, he had a Tibetan Geshe attempt what passes for an exorcism. He had a spiritualist sort of exorcism, and then eventually he was successfully exercised by a Maori Tohunga, a medicine woman who came out of her taboo, in order to the Behespa dream, in order to perform that ritual for him. And he goes into a great deal of detail about how that came on, that experience, and what it was like for him, and I think very brave of him to do so. Absolutely. And you remarked that you've had similar experiences, but you see them differently from a different vantage point. I'm very curious to hear you talk a bit about that. Yeah, of course. I mean, I was absolutely fascinated by what he was describing, because he did describe it in real detail. And I think, possibly as well, the things he said, they're likely to be helpful to a lot of people, because these sorts of experiences aren't unheard of. But what I was struck by, did actually make me wonder, was having had a similar experience. Now, mine came about, this was in 2017, and it was after the ingestion of a certain substance, shall we say, at a magical gathering of a particular magical group that I was at. But what resonated with me in what he was describing was, he talked about how it was physical contact that seemed to really trigger these symptoms, you know, talking about spasms, about kind of speaking in tongues, hissing, making mooders and gestures. And as this substance took hold of me, I found myself, you know, doing that going into that place, making these movements, making these sounds that were not under voluntary control. But as we were talking earlier, before we started recording, the paradigm that I viewed this under, you know, rather than some sort of demonic possession, was Kundalini awakening. And I think this brings up an interesting point. You know, I think questions of paradigms and ontology are really important and significant. When we think about entities and different types of entities, and what the nature of those might be, so I found lots of kind of chakra sensations going on during my experience. In particular, spadistana, that chakra was really, really active. It was like a huge kind of swirling whirlpool of sensation that was kind of sweeping through my body. And I had my friend Paul with me at the time, who's, well, he's got lots of strings to his bows, but he's also an energy worker, and he was helping me through this experience. And one of the things that resonated with me, that Mattious talks about in physical touch, triggering the symptoms, Paul was working on my energetic body at the time. He wasn't actually in physical contact with me, but he was sort of doing whatever he does to kind of try to channel the energy and mitigate it. And that was triggering the symptoms. So even contact with the subtle body seemed to be creating an effect. Well, eventually, along with the substance, the symptoms of this subsided, and I managed to recover over the next couple of days. But when I went back to my everyday life, a week or so later, I was horrified to discover the symptoms returning, even though there's obviously no trace of this substance in my system anymore. I was still getting the spasms, the hissing, talking in tongues, and I think Mattious did a really good job of describing how it is possible to suppress it, but at the same time, it is very compelling. Like he was talking about how he could stop it if he wanted to, and I found that I could. But I could also open myself up to it, and it would run its course. So, I mean, at the time, I was thinking, you know, I'm losing my mind. You know, I've damaged myself. I'm never going to recover from this. I'm not going to be able to function. But what helped was turning to a teacher called Tara Springer, who I know has also been a guest on this very podcast more than once. And I didn't know anything about her at the time, but I found one of her ebooks downloaded that. And the guidance she gave in that, which is geared towards Kundalini awakening, you know, was really helpful, and I was able to resolve it. It was interesting listening to the podcast and hearing Mattious put it in the frame of, you know, some sort of demonic intrusion. You know, it did sort of set me wondering, you know, could that have been what it was? Is there something that I haven't addressed, you know, that might still be there in some way, because I didn't approach it in that paradigm at the time? But I don't know. I mean, it did very much seem to resolve, you know, following the sorts of advice that Tara Springer gives in her book, which was around surrendering to a manifestation of the divine. In my case, it was Harley, who's a goddess of presence that, you know, I was interested in and that I'd worked with in the past and seemed closest to what Tara was talking about in her book. And that led to a really dramatic experience where suddenly I was the whole thing turned around. So going from a kind of uncontrollable, demonic feeling, overwhelming sort of experience, it suddenly flipped around into an experience, a union with the divine extreme bliss. And over the days that followed, I found that I had the opposite problem, like being at work, I was working as a computer programmer at the time, and being absolutely blissed out of my mind. I'm having to sit there and type code all the time whilst feeling these sorts of almost unbearably ecstatic feelings of a union with the divine. And of course, over time, that sort of faded away. And the whole experience receded into the past. But it's interesting. I mean, I'm not saying that, you know, a Kundalini awakening is necessarily the right frame to put on those sorts of experiences, you know, any more than the frames of reference that Matias used to get him through whatever it was that he was working for him. Matias reported a growing sense of otherness, of an entity. At first, he was experiencing spontaneous movements, and that was interpreted for him as a sort of unkinking of his channels, who's working heavily in the qigong and so on. Over time, he came to experience a sense of an entity circling him, breaking through the defenses that the geshai had erected around him and a ritual and so on. I'm recounting now Matias' perspective on it. Did you have a sense in that instance? And of course, I know many other instances you have had this sense. But in this particular instance, did you have a sense of other of an entity? Yeah, I think possibly my experience was perhaps too short for that because it was, you know, it came to a resolution in, you know, about a couple of weeks. And I think in this case, there is a sense of a relationship there, isn't there? In what you're talking about. And I think then, you know, maybe there is the opportunity to think about it in terms of some sort of entity. I mean, my experience over the years has been when people wonder whether they might be having some sort of contact with an entity, demon, elemental angel. It's always the nature of the relationship that reveals what it is that we're in relationship with. You know, I think in the everyday sensory world, there's a sense that the nature of a thing is revealed by its appearance, you know, how it presents to the senses. But of course, in this realm, you know, we don't have that. But what we do have is a sense of a relationship. And I think the key feature of anything demonic is that it will, it will demand something of us. You know, and it did sound like that. That was what Mathias was up against, you know, something wanting to break through, to invade. And if Mathias had come to you in your capacity as a counselor, and I understand in your counseling practice, your therapy practice, you have something of a specialty in people going through all kinds of experiences like that, not always as extreme as that, because of your writing and your podcasts and what you've put out, you're known for it. And from what I understand, you have something of a specialty in that area. If someone like Mathias, hypothetically, was to come to you, perhaps people have come to you like that, what would you say to them? How would you work with them within the paradigm that you operate? Yeah. I mean, that was, that was never something I intended to do, strange. It's, it's just sort of ended up that way. When I started doing my podcast, a cult experiments in the home, what I was really setting out to do was just to talk about all my experiences, you know, to just get, get everything out there so that, you know, people could listen to it and use it and, and hopefully find it helpful. But it did feed into my counseling practice, you know, in a way, I never intended. So now, you know, as you were saying, I do tend to work with people who might have had anomalous experiences or might have a magical practice or, or some sort of religious or spiritual crisis. What I found important over the years is to keep all paradigms open, you know, as many as you possibly can. So, and not close any of them down, you know, so keeping open the possibility of some sort of psychological disturbance, you know, or like we were thinking earlier, you know, some sort of Kundalini awakening possibly, you know, alongside the idea that this might be some sort of entity or some sort of relationship with an entity manifesting in some way. Because in that sort of work, it's, it's what's helpful to the client that's always important. And there might be a particular paradigm that suits them, you know, more than it suits me. And if it suits them, then it's going to be the most helpful thing. So always, always, I try to keep everything open as open as it possibly can be. Would you conduct a sort of assessment to try to hone in on what's the best paradigm or to try to say someone comes, she says, I think I'm having a, I'm having some sort of demonic haunting or something like that. What would you do to eliminate psychological causes or different sorts of causes? What would you do there? Yeah. Well, I think finding the best paradigm, you know, is the work. Some people might be more comfortable with the idea that what they're experiencing is some sort of psychological difficulty. So, you know, then then we would engage with it on those terms. I mean, it's always the client's experience that's the most important thing. If it feels to them like it's some sort of entity that they're confronting, then that's, you know, that's the paradigm that will take it along because that's their experience. So, you know, I wouldn't, wouldn't rule anything out, you know, through some sort of assessment. And I'm a counselor, you know, I'm a, I'm a psychodynamic counselor, you know, so, you know, I don't diagnose, you know, I'm not qualified to diagnose, you know, that's what, that's what the psychologist and the psychiatrist do. What I do is listen and encourage people to talk and to explore their experience. You know, we do that together. And I'm led by what the client is telling me by what they're experiencing. So, if someone were expressing the sense that they're under attack by some sort of entity, you know, we would explore that. What sort of entity? What sort of relationship is this? You know, what is, what is the nature of it? What, what might help? You know, how could that relationship be adjusted in some way? And might you, given your extensive background in the occult, might you suggest, I mean, that some sort of means of improving the situation, if you'll excuse the pun, there are, there's a legion ways, different systems to propitiate or expel or reconcile, however it might be. Would you perhaps guide or prescribe practices or explorations drawing on your own bank of experience in the occult? Probably as a rule, no, I wouldn't. I would, if the client had a magical practice, you know, it wasn't a cultist, you know, had something that they wanted to try. But it's not something that I would suggest because, you know, I can't guarantee that it's free from harm, you know, I never, I never suggest to, to people that they should practice magic or, or do spells, unless that's something that they're already doing. And in fact, I wouldn't even suggest to somebody, you know, that they take up meditation, because, you know, it's, it's not free of risk. But, but if these are things that, that people are already doing, then, you know, of course, they're things that's already a part of that client's world. So, you know, we would, we would talk about them. But, you know, ordinarily I'd be exploring the sorts of things that counselors normally explore in the absence of that, you know, the more everyday kinds of techniques that people might use or, you know, different perspectives, they might be able to, to find, to, to be able to kind of cope with whatever it is that they're experiencing. Must be a difficult, balanced strike. I would imagine, and perhaps it's just my imagination, that given your output writing and podcast and so on, that some people would come to you explicitly for that magical expertise, or perhaps even that expertise in awakening. They resonate with the way you describe the awakening process, and are seeking tuition or guidance in those fields. And that's perhaps a slightly different context to a psychedelic counselor. It sounds like to me anyway, from what you're saying. So, do you, how do you, is it my imagination that sometimes people seek you out for that? And if they do, how do you balance that with the counseling? Yeah. Well, they do. And like I mentioned, if people are already meditating or practicing magic, then that's something they can discuss, you know, and talk about openly and probably have conversations that would be difficult to have, you know, in other parts of their lives. But I've noticed a curious thing, which is that people who might come, you know, with an intention perhaps to talk about magic or spiritual experiences, a lot of the time it does end up talking about everyday stuff and the sorts of issues and problems that very many people take to counseling, you know, who don't necessarily have any magical or spiritual experience is a strange thing. Again, not something that I expected, but of course, you know, everyday life and spirituality, you know, they're not, they're not unconnected, are they? We might think that, you know, our difficulties are to do with our spirituality, but, you know, everybody's everybody's a human being. And, you know, a lot of the problems that people face in life, you know, are pretty common, pretty run in the mail. You know, it's been a real, real surprise to me. But it does seem difficult to always be focused on the spiritual side of life, you know, the mundane. The mundane is always a part of what we are, you know, and it plays a bigger part, I think, than we might estimate. In your life, and I'd like to ask you about your life, actually, you've had phases of focus on, as you say, the spiritual side, whether it's magic or awakening, or both. And you've also had periods where that has been less the focus, actually. However, it does seem that you have sustained a fairly concentrated interest in the occult and in awakening that's perhaps slightly above average, even for those who have some sort of attraction to those, both of those fields. Or, yeah, why do you think that that is? I don't know, it's difficult to say. It seems to have been something that me and Alan, you know, my colleague Alan Chapman, something that we seem to have been destined to do. The two of us met through both being members of a magical organisation, the illuminants of the Naturos, which is a chaos magic organisation. And right from the get-go, you know, we just seemed to hit it off and there was a sense that we were going to do something. And what we ended up doing was putting back into chaos magic, what originally chaos magic seemed to have been set up to keep out, which was the spirituality, the stuff around enlightenment, awakening, mystical states. Chaos magic is a very focused school of magic, you know, really focused upon practical results. But we started on some magical work that very quickly showed us that that's not something that you can you can eliminate from magic. What happened was we both had the same mentor in the organisation and this person gave Alan the task of invoking his holy guardian angel. And I think the intention was that Alan would do this in some sort of chaos, magical style. As soon as I got wind of what he was doing, I immediately got interested and started to do the work myself. And to begin with, that was what we did. You know, we used the techniques of chaos magic to get in touch with this entity, the holy guardian angel using sigil magic, lucid dreaming, you know, acts of sorcery, divination. But it led very quickly into experiences of states of mind that pointed towards something absolute. And it was around this time while we were doing that work that I came in contact with the work of Daniel Ingram. You know, and here's this, here's this guy Daniel Ingram, you know, saying that he's enlightened and he tells you what that is. And he also tells you what you need to do in order to have these experiences. And we started, we started, you know, following his instructions and starting to experience those states, you know, it seemed to seem to be real, it seemed to work. And what we started to notice was a strange lining up of details in what Daniel was describing, and what someone say like Alice de Crowley describes about the holy guardian angel. So Daniel talks about the stages of insight, you know, how initially everything goes really well. And then there's this breakthrough moment, the arising and passing where everything gets a bit wacky and strange. But then after that, you plunge into the dark night, fear, misery, disgust, a desire for deliverance, you know, suffering, the dukananas, all of that. And Crowley in his book, the bersamech, where he talks about the process of invoking the holy guardian angel, he talks about, you know, an initial phase where you're getting in touch with the angel and there's bliss and wonder. But then the angel retreats across the abyss, we were abandoned, we deserted, and we have to travel across the abyss in order to reunite with the angel. And it was like, well, it's the same thing, it's the same pattern, these things line up. So I think for me and Alan, from the beginning, awakening and enlightenment, you know, was always part of what we understood by, by magic, where it was supposed to go, where it was supposed to lead us. I mean, it's there in Crowley, you know, so with over the chaos magicians, really wanted to turn their back on all that stuff and just use magic to get real practical, reliable results from doing sorcery, we always had a sense that that's only part of the story. And what magic really is, is an engagement with the nature of our being, with the question of why we want all that stuff that we're doing sorcery for in the first place. Well, I would like to return to just that point and your both of your stamina, remarkable stamina, for experiences documenting those, and also this orientation towards awakening. But perhaps we could go back in time. You're written in occult experiments in the home that you had life experiences that forced me off the straight and narrow track of secular rationality into the path of the young coming juggernaut that was magic. And later you say it was close shaves with the paranormal that proved to me forever how reality has nothing in common with what we like to call everyday life. So I wonder if you might go back to your early life. I'm curious actually about your childhood and the context of your upbringing. I understand that 1981 experiment with a Ouija board was a real turning point you often cite. But I'm curious even before that what was your childhood like in the context of your upbringing? What was Duncan like as a boy? I remember from an early age being interested in strange things. I remember when I was about seven or eight, the teacher did this lesson where we were allowed to choose a subject that we would go away and research. We would just go and read books in the library and we would write about it. But we could choose any topic that we wanted to. I chose ghosts. And that was considered quite unusual. So I was seven or eight years old. I've always been fascinated by ghosts and the gothic and the spooky and the weird. And I think that was the path that led me towards, you know, what I later on became interested in. I mean at university there was a course that I did called Melodrama and the gothic, you know, where we were reading Dracula and Frankenstein and ghost stories and watching horror films, Psycho and all sorts of black and white 1950s Melodrama. I absolutely loved it. And this was also the place where I encountered Freud and psychoanalysis for the first time and couldn't believe how powerful those were as tools for understanding, you know, perhaps what the gothic was about. And it's been said that Dracula is regarded as the last great Gothic novel, you know, the tradition sort of faded off around that time. You know, Dracula came out in 1897. And that's the time when Freud is first starting to get psychoanalysis off the ground in Vienna. And it's been said, you know, that the gothic turned into psychoanalysis, you know, psychoanalysis was the extension of the of the gothic. All of the things I do, you know, seem to seem to join up. It was those experiences with the Ouija board when I was about 14, you know, like you were saying, they were their experiences of things moving around by themselves to lepathy, all sorts of stuff that I couldn't explain. And those experiences never really went away. And I went after university, I got a job, got a serious relationship settled down. But there's always something nagging at the back of my mind that reality is not really like this, that there's more to it. And I started to get into magic as a means of perhaps being able to recreate intentionally those experiences that I'd had with the Ouija board. And it took a while. And maybe it wasn't quite in the way that I expected. But that did actually prove to be the case, you know, magic was a means by which I could get into those realms, but with the Ouija board sort of happened spontaneously. I'm curious which magical practices and techniques you you began to experiment with. And I'm also a little bit curious about any kind of on-ramp because from what I understand, you've usually been quite a practiceer, yoga, meditation, magic, putting a lot of hours in, relatively speaking, and that sort of intensity. I wonder if that's something you've built during your magical practice, or if it was an intensity that you had with you already. And if so, what was it directed to before you took up magic? Certainly back then, today, less so, much less so, I think. But back then, when me and Alice were working together, I was, I did pretty much nothing else. You know, just really intensely practicing all the time that I could. I mean, with the Holy Guardian Angel work, you know, the part of that work is to always be be thinking, remembering the angel, dedicating whatever you do, whatever your experience to it. You know, I was reciting mantras as I'm sort of at work or walking around town, reciting them inwardly, you know, really, really intensely. I think, you know, I've always been very academic. Academic work always came very easily to me, and I enjoyed studying. I would study a lot. I studied a lot at university, probably to the detriment of my social life, to be honest. When I was at university as an undergraduate, I didn't socialize much. I didn't really know how to, you know, how to quite sort of sheltered, protected upbringing. So there's always, I think, been a sense of, you know, an interior world with me that I feel comfortable in and that I can withdraw into. So I think that's where the energy always used to go. And that's changed down the years. And I think things have changed as a result of the work that I've done. I think that I used to be a very much more intellectual person than I am now. Emotion and feeling has been something that's come to predominate over time when I was at university. And when I did my masters in psychoanalytic studies, I was really interested in psychoanalysis and therapy, but I never seriously thought that I would be able to be a therapist, because I think there was a fantasy there that it would be too overwhelming, you know, being confronted with people's feelings and their issues were just overwhelming, destroying me. So the work I've done, the practices I've pursued, you know, what's happened over time is that's changed in a quite different person now to what I was back then. I mean, I remember sitting and meditating for the very first time, sitting down, you know, for half an hour to meditate. And I remember the thing that struck me was I realized that my mind was somebody. And it feels very strange to look back on that, because I don't quite know what I thought before that point. But I think I had some sort of conception that the mind was some sort of mechanism for working things out. But I remember the early experiences as I started to meditate were there was a sense of presence connected with it, but it had a sense of being to it. And I think we do all of us, you know, over the course of our lives really change, you know, our reality really, really changes in deep structural ways. I think that first sit that I did, you know, was was the start of, you know, a long journey, and there's been very many shifts in consciousness since then, you know, and probably, probably more to come, I hope. So I wonder if you might trace a little bit the beginning of that magical journey in some more detail. What practices were you doing? Which presumably books did you encounter? And initially, of course, you're reaching for that, you've described, you're reaching for that more. There's going to be more to life, this other aspect somehow. I'm curious how that motivation developed as you began to, you know, as you say, contact these things. Yeah, I think probably stages of life had something to do with it. I found my 20s extremely difficult. So I went to university. I was the first person in my family ever to go to university, you know, come from a very working class background. So off I went, and it was a real culture shock, you know, like meeting middle class people for the first time. And, you know, people, upper class people as well, and trying to navigate my way around that. And people from different cultures, you know, and all over the world. And got through that, got my degree. But then what? What was I supposed to do then? Here I am with this degree in English and American literature. Now what? I mean, my parents didn't know, you know, they couldn't offer me any advice. Nobody in my family could, you know, what, what do you do? And so I think I drifted and really struggled with a sense of identity. I tried to continue with academia. I did a masters. And then I started a PhD. But it slowly dawned on me with the PhD, but that people doing PhDs are there because they can afford to be there. There wasn't any sort of academic excellence involved as far as I could see, you know, up to that point, it had been about passing exams, which I was very good at. And then you got the reward of the qualification. So I think I was quite lost at that point. And this was when I encountered Buddhism for the first time and was going down to my local Buddhist center, friends of the Western Buddhist order and engaging with that and getting deep into meditation for the first time, but starting to get frustrated because I started to suspect I was experiencing what gets described in the book as Jana States. But when I went to the teacher, the teacher would never, never say that it was or it wasn't. They'd just sort of smile enigmaticly and say that they weren't going to say. And then after that, I started to feel really awful every time I meditated, full of frustration and despair. And the teachers would just say, you know, don't worry about it. Just keep going. Just keep going. And it got so awful that I couldn't. So everything was falling apart. I remember I was unemployed for a big part of my 20s. Didn't have any sense of what I wanted to do or what I could do. The Buddhism thing hadn't worked out. And eventually I started to pull myself up and get pieces of meaningful work and get back on my feet and finally got a proper job where I was working for the local authority and the education department and got a girlfriend. And then we were going out at weekends and spending money and going to restaurants and stuff like that. So I was finally getting to the place where I thought I was supposed to be. But it just wasn't enough. And that was when those Ouija board experiences started coming back. I knew there was more and then chaos magic arrived in my life. And it was the works of Peter Carroll that I first seriously engaged with, you know, doing the the Libre MM in his book, Libre Nal and Psychonaut. It filled me with horror that I would have to meditate every day in order to fulfill the practices specified there thinking, Oh, no, please don't send me, send me back to that place. But this time, it was, it was different because doing the magical practices, I could see that it was possible to kind of bend reality in interesting ways. You could cast a sigil with an intention and you would get a result. And that would often appear in strange or interesting ways, probably not in ways that you would expect. And something clicked with meditation at that point, which was to do with the fact that reality is malleable. So when I was sitting to meditate, there was more a sense of an active participation in it, rather than a confrontation with something immovable, difficult to put into words, but something had shifted. And then of course, I came across Daniel Ingram's work. And finally, finally, somebody was saying to me that when meditation gets difficult, that is actually a sign of progress. You know, that's what I've been missing that first time around. If only, if only the Friends of the West and Buddhist or put it in those terms, you know, and made me feel that by things getting difficult, I was actually getting somewhere, then, you know, maybe things would have, would have been different. How did you come across Daniel's work? And I suppose this would have been the time of message boards and internet subcultures, right? Yeah, you're a mark, actually, and I think it's an occult experiment. And you were in this phase, you were just discussing this sort of thing was really a subculture. And it wasn't mainstream. It wasn't widely known. And that adds a certain, well, perhaps you'll say what it adds, but I would imagine it adds, I can remember, actually, it adds a certain kind of their pros and cons to that. Yeah. So was it through that internet subculture network that you encountered this pragmatic Dharma, Daniel Ingram, this sort of thing? Yeah, it was. I was following this guy's blog, a guy called Zach, who had a blog called Alchemically Brain Damaged, which I think is still out there. It's incredible stuff at that time. And he just one day posted that he'd found this PDF online by this guy saying that he was online. And I downloaded it, looked at it, read it. And I think my first reaction was absolute crushing envy. You know, that there was this guy who could do these things with his mind that he was describing, you know, it just sounded incredible, impossible. How on earth was he capable of this? That's just crippled, crippled with envy. It's like, this isn't fair. But, you know, all negative emotions, we can flip them around, I think. And the wonderful thing about envy is it does at least indicate to us what's important to us. You know, when we know what's important to us, then there's a chance that we might be able to obtain some of it for ourselves. And like I was saying earlier, the thing about Daniel's work is he tells you what it is he's talking about and he gives you a method that you can follow and you can see whether he's right or not. And I mean, like he was saying about subcultures, you know, I mean, me and Alan started sharing this around. And I think Daniel's work was far more eagerly accepted in the chaos magic community than it was in, you know, in various Dharma communities, you know, because chaos magicians didn't have a problem at all with somebody making on the surface of outrageous veins, you know, as long as you get even method that you could follow and you could test it for yourself. And, you know, a lot of people got into Daniel's work on the chaos magic scene. And I suspect, you know, that he still has a big following, you know, in that, in that kind of community, you know, which is, which is far less critical of him than, than some of the Buddhist, Buddhist responses that I've seen. That's interesting. Did, do you think that changed the chaos magic community's orientation? You've talked about your own Alan, your own orientation towards enlightenment and the spiritual as you put it, which was a little bit at odds with the chaos magic emphasis at the time that you were, you're discussing. But subsequent to Daniel's work, you're saying spread throughout the chaos magic community, did that change the character of it? Did it reorient people? I think it did. I think it has. I mean, I resigned from the IoT in 2020. So, you know, I've not had any contact with the chaos magic scene since then. But, you know, I imagine it did. And, you know, I hope that the work that me and Alan have done has, you know, made an impact too, you know, at least, you know, to present the idea that you don't have to throw out mysticism and magic. You don't have to throw out mysticism and spirituality from magic, you know, and you can use all the techniques of chaos magic, you know, they're valid. They're totally valid. I mean, I remember me and Alan used to do magical workings in order to experience transpersonal states of consciousness. One that always sticks in my mind was once I made a black monolith out of cardboard and shiny black plastic tape and took it to a magical meeting. So, there was a room full of naked chaos magicians cavorting around a fake black monolith to the sounds of, you know, the theme music from 2001, a space holiday. So, we were reenacting that scene where the apes receive, you know, that, you know, the influence from the black monolith that spurs their evolution, you know, and this was with the intention of experiencing transpersonal states of consciousness. And we all had a great time and it was a great laugh. We never expected it to work, but it did. You know, so days later, sitting meditating and then getting into these, you know, sort of formless jhanas, you know, and it became apparent that you can do magic in order to experience transpersonal states, mystical states, contact with the divine. You know, there really are no limits to magic. There really are no boundaries between mysticism and sorcery. You would go on to both of you claim full enlightenment. But you laugh about now you write in introduction to Baptist head, the new introduction you wrote for the Compendium. The Baptist head is the story of two white, western, working-class blokes who undergo spiritual awakening. They have their minds blown and the time of their lives. Yet they lack the good sense to avoid declaring publicly the reality of their enlightenment and the decorum from refraining from making fun of everything and everyone they encounter along the way, including themselves. This text is riddled with silly jokes and the most outrageous claims. I wonder if you might take us back then to okay, you've encountered Daniel Ingram's work, you've teamed up with Alan Chapman, you're invoking the Holy Guardian Angel. And you're going to go through these four stages of enlightenment from stream entry to our hat in Daniel's, according to Daniel's model, with correspondences to magical systems, for example, you described already Crowley. So what was, could you take us through that whole process that must have been quite a right? You recall each of those four path moments? I do, I do, yeah, and yeah, I can describe them. So lots and lots of meditation and I'm doing this in the paradigm of the Holy Guardian Angel. So the outcome of this work will be knowledge and union with the Holy Guardian Angel. So I remember that first experience, that first moment. Leading up to it, there were lots of these strange experiences of the angel presenting itself to me and it would sort of pull me, pull me over to its side and then I would sort of pull it back. And this odd sense of a kind of to and fro going on between us. But the resolution that that came to was one day I was sick meditating and suddenly there was a vision and I was in this hot country and there were these shelters made out of white stone and I was walking down this avenue with these sort of white stone houses, shelters and all of them were dark inside. And I had this sense that I was a journalist and I was there to interview somebody. In fact, I was there to interview ultimate truth and ultimate truth was waiting for me in one of these houses. I reached the house where I knew ultimate truth was inside and I stepped through the door and then there was this moment where on the one sense, the room was empty. There was nothing there. But in the next moment, I realized ultimate truth was actually present and it was me and I was actually interviewing myself. And so it was that sort of classic kind of non-dual experience where there's suddenly no separation between self and other, you know, and the universe is all one and everything you know, collapses, collapses into that, you know, that non-dual experience. You know, what Daniel will call, I think, a classic fruition through the door of no self, although I didn't recognize that at the time. So that was the first one and I knew that that was union with my holy guardian angel, the ultimate truth that I come to interview was the angel and me and the angel were one. And of course, you know, like all these experiences, it lasted a while. It had a kind of afterglow to it and it faded away. So that was what I took as first path, stream entry, repeated that a few times, you know, again, sort of transitory experiences of that non-dual state. But then after our encounter with this guru, a guy called Andrew Cohen, something shifted. Now to say a little bit about Andrew Cohen. Back in the day, he was head of an organization called Enlighten Next and they had headquarters in London and Andrew Cohen was renowned for being somebody who could transmit experiences of enlightenment to people. You know, students would sit in his presence and get these non-dual states, you know, supposedly as a result of his presence. So me and Alan thought to ourselves, well, we want a bit of that. That sounds good. So we went to see him give a lecture and right from the start, he struck us as a bit of an old character, you know, something not quite right about him. Now it later transpired that Andrew Cohen had, you know, been abusing students in various sorts of ways. And all this came out into the open and he's admitted this. He's talked about it in public, you know, he's made amends of various types, I think, you know, and tried to rehabilitate himself from this. And when you look back at his career and, you know, his upbringing and life, you know, there may be reasons that it's possible to see, you know, why that situation might have ended up occurring. But it was clear to me, now, and right from the beginning, that this was maybe someone that, you know, you might not want to get too close to, you know, you might not want as a friend, perhaps. But after this talk on the way home, both of us started to have this strange experience. And how I describe it was something appeared in my consciousness that shouldn't have been there, that I shouldn't have been able to perceive. It was like, you know, taking a moment to introspect, and instead of finding your mind, you find a brick, or, you know, some sort of physical object, you know, that can't be in the mind, that it's impossible to be aware of. You know, I would describe it as nothingness, but it was a nothingness that I could see. And it was radiating bliss and impossibility. And it was there all of the time. So having had before those experiences of sort of transitory moments of non-duality, you know, now it was right in my face. And it was there all of the time, it was constant. Now, after a couple of days of this, it started to fade off, it started to fade away, which was absolutely devastating, absolutely awful, this thing that was pure nothingness, and that was, in a sense, absolutely perfect because of that, was now retreating. And it just felt awful. And it did depart, and I was left absolutely bereft. But over time, it came back again. And it stayed, and it didn't go away. And it was always available to consciousness. You know, I could just kind of tune into this, to this nothingness. However, and again, although it's strange to describe the nothingness always seemed to occupy a certain position in awareness. So it would, I would have to look to a certain place for it to be there. And there was the over time, there was something not quite right about that, because if that was emptiness over there, then what was the rest of it? You know, the rest of it was non-emptiness. So there was still a duality there. So the way this turned around and finally resolved was I went to a day school with a teacher called Christopher Titmus, who's a lovely, lovely man, still around, I think, hopefully still teaching. And, you know, Daniel mentions him in his book, and, you know, Christopher Titmus is obviously the real deal, although it's generally quite hard to get him to talk about stuff, or it was back then. So I went up to him and managed to get him to one side and talk to him about it, you know, what I'd experienced, you know, this, this thing that wasn't anything. And yet I could see it and it was impossible. And he was sort of nodding and saying, you know, this is good, this is good. So I said to him, but, but it's over there. You know, there's stuff that isn't empty still. So he sort of looked at me and he only said one thing, but it sort of changed everything. He said to me, he said to me, attend to that, which is not emptiness. So that's what I did in my practice for the next couple of weeks, just really, really pouted it, you know, so instead of concentrating on the thing, the impossible thing, I focused on the other stuff that wasn't the impossible thing. And then one night, woke up in the middle of the night, and I'd had this dream. Now I'm a, I've always been a very big Gary Newman fan. I've followed Gary Newman since 1979, and he's always been a bit of a hero of me possibly in a slightly ironic way, but I really, really do like Gary Newman. So I was having this dream that I was on stage, dressed in black PVC, you know, really giving it, singing this song "Bombers by Chew by Army." And when I woke up from this dream, suddenly it had gone, suddenly it had shifted. So what formerly had been emptiness over there, now was over here. There wasn't any separateness anymore between me and the emptiness. Before it had seemed like there's me here, and there's the emptiness over there. But now it was apparent that everything was empty, that the emptiness was in me also. In fact, by the time I could see the emptiness, I'd already come from a place of emptiness, if that makes any sort of sense. So I thought to myself, well, that's four paths, that's four shifts, you know. Surely that's it. So I'm an arrow hat now, shortly. You know, and when I went through the heart sutra, you know, the thing about form is form, emptiness, emptiness. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form, you know, it seemed to map on to the experiences I'd had, you know, form is emptiness. So there's stuff, and there's the emptiness over there. And then finally, emptiness is form. Well, this is empty to begin with before I even start seeing stuff over there. So, yeah, that was my conclusion. Is that the case? You know, was my attainment the same as Daniels? I don't know, I don't think so. I mean, I noticed that when I listen to certain teachers, you know, they come out with stuff that I don't think I've seen. I don't think I understand yet. You know, I think there's more to do. And I think of the opinion these days that it probably doesn't stop, that there's always something over the horizon, you know, some realization, you know, that's that's waiting for us. I wonder whether it's just a kind of infinite infinite process. I think I'll tend more towards a kind of Rudolph Steiner kind of view of, you know, constant evolution of human nature, you know, from stage to stage to stage onwards and onwards and upwards forever and ever. What do you think, Steve? About what? About enlightenment. Is it done? Is it ever done? I suspect not, but I have no basis for that suspicion, having not even reached the end of the claim dens. I have no particular, even stream entry myself. So I can only really hypothesize about that. But so I don't know, it's really the better answer. I should have said, I should have started with I don't know. Yeah. Did any of my descriptions make sense? Yes. Right. Yeah. Did any of them seem familiar? Well, you're describing them from a very interesting point of view, starting with this union of the Holy Guardian angel with the Holy Guardian angel, which if one stretches, it could resonate with various experiences of union, non-dual union, or even perhaps states of absorption. Yeah. And who hasn't had one of those, if even by accident. But I think there's a significance, but that I think would be a superficial association. There's a significance there are deeper than merely a sense of union or an absorption for you to consider it to have been first path. Just thinking, well, that sounds like an absorption. I think I've had absorption before. Maybe it's the same. I think that would be superficial of me to read it that way. So it seems familiar, but I'm not sure if that's a feature or a bug. Yeah. Of the process of attempting to find some sort of connection. But I'm curious about Alan Alan's pace and your pace, two of your working together on this enlightenment, awakening, the four paths and so on. Did you keep pace with each other? One of you pull ahead? Did you assess each other's senses of having progressed to this four path model? Well, I got to first path before he did. But after that, I'm afraid it was catch up, catch up with me all the way. He was ahead from that point onwards. And I think these days, Alan comes out with stuff that I think to myself, yeah, I think I don't think I've seen that for myself. I feel that he's managed to get through to high rounds of understanding than I have. I mean, I think one of the things to say as well is I never had one of these awakening experiences without some sort of vision that came along with it. And that troubled me because the vision was always a gateway to a moment where self disappears. I mean, I probably should have made that clear when I was describing it. So that first vision of going to interview ultimate truth, yes, there's the going into the building and the realization, but there is also a moment where there's a nothingness, a hiatus, a cessation. And that was there in all of those experiences that are described. But now it doesn't trouble me too much. I mean, there's in Daniel's work, there's that kind of infamous chapter on the three doors where he talks about, you know, entry into fruition through the three characteristics, no self impermanence and suffering. And he talks about them in very sort of abstract turns, you know, like donuts turning inside out and things stuttering into non-existence and so on. And it was only fairly recently that I discovered that every time I've had a vision leading up to a fruition, it kind of maps on to those aspects, to those abstract patterns that he talks about. So I remember once I set out, because I've never had a fruition through the door of suffering as far as I was aware. So I set out once to have one. So what I did was I changed my practice to focusing on whatever was the most unpleasant sensation in my body that I could find. Let me give a moment. So this went on for weeks to sit in there finding the most awful sensation in the body that I could. And then suddenly I saw a high rise building. And on top of the building was a weird abstract statue, like a kind of mushroom shaped thing. And it was sort of glinting in the light. And I was looking at this strange statue like a mushroom and sort of thinking, well, that's strange, what's that? And then suddenly something wrenched it away, pulled it away. And something quite scary and weird, you know, what could have done that with such force and the fact that it was invisible. And it felt really kind of quite strange and weird. And then I went and read Daniel's description of fruition through the door of suffering, you know, and he talks about a sense of something being ripped away, and having a kind of creepy feeling, creepy kind of residue to it. You know, so always for me, these sorts of experiences, they're not formless, you know, they have some sort of vision that leads up to a cessation, you know, there was a cessation in that experience too, after the wrenching away of the statue thing. I understand that you've subsequently become friends with Daniel and you've attended some of his famous fire casino retreats. In fact, one in the castle with Florian and Daniel in yourself. Yeah, so that's interesting. How did that relationship begin? Did you discuss your perspective? I mean, Alan and yourself that you bring up your experiences with him and did he assess them or did he put you through the arising and passing away test, you know, in a way? So I'm curious how that went. Yeah, I mean, I think we did have some contact with him in the back to say Compendium. There's a chapter that's an interview between Alan and Daniel. But I came into contact with him because, you know, to begin with mastering the core teachings of the Buddha, you know, is just this PDF online, you know, I mean, I remember printing it out on an old dot matrix printer, you know, took up a whole reamer paper. I used to carry around this, this wedge of sheaves of paper tied up with a shoelace, you know, and I'd sort of be pouring over it and it sort of almost disintegrated by the time I'd finish with it. But I was working as a copy editor for Eon Books and the, the director of Eon Books, you know, became aware of Daniel's work through me. And, you know, that was how that was how it got published in the end. He offered Daniel a contract and I got the very lovely job of working as copy editor on the on the first edition and the second edition, actually. So I got into communication with with Daniel through that. And the first time I met him in person was when we did the Farkasina retreat at the at the Tower of Holbar, a kind of freezing medieval stone tower up in the up in the worlds of Scotland. And yeah, that was, yeah, that was one of the greatest experiences of my life, I think. Yeah, and he's such a lovely person to be with. That's the other thing, you know, he's such a such a nice man. I think he's always been very sort of, you know, circumspect when I've talked to him about my attainments, you know, he's always always been helpful, but never, never passed any, any judgment. So you, as you mentioned in the excerpts from the intro to the Baptist head compendium, and I read earlier, Alan and yourself, you were not shy of publicly declaring your enlightenment. Yeah. Why did you do that? Number one, what was behind that? And what was the response? Did you receive your vision, critique, deference? I didn't think of deference, maybe you would. Yeah. No, death threats. Oh, death threats. Yeah. Well, I think one reason for doing it was because we thought it was true. And I think there was a fair degree of provocation to it, but hopefully provocation of the type, you know, saying, look, this stuff is real, this stuff is possible, you know, if we can have these experiences, then you can have them too, you know, and the lovely thing about the Baptist head was people did, you know, follow it and do the work and have the same experiences. So that was one reason. But yeah, there was a lot of, a lot of outrage and incomprehension. And it's a difficult one, isn't it? Because I mean, I've always aired on the side that it's better to talk about these things and be wrong than not to talk about them. You know, and I think as well with magic, there is this idea in magic that there is an occupational hazard of ego inflation, you know. And if you practice magic, I think it's the case that you will, that you will get that from time to time. You know, it will happen. But the, the aim of the game is to come back from that. You know, maybe, you know, if it didn't happen in the first place, then maybe you're not in the zone. You know, I think it's a similar thing in Jungian thought, you know, Jung got out this idea that if you get too close to the archetypes, you know, you'll be destroyed by them. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he's saying that that shouldn't be a possibility, that that shouldn't be a risk. You know, it's called to be a possibility. Otherwise, you're not doing the work. And I suspect it may be similar in magic. You know, if you never get ego inflation, then maybe, maybe you're not doing enough magic. So what kind of responses did you receive? Just people telling us that it wasn't true. But never in a particularly helpful way, which was the problem. If, you know, if people have said this is not true because X, Y and Z, you know, then, then, you know, then there's something to investigate there. But it was just just the fact that, you know, no, this can't be true. You know, it can't be possible. You know, it takes lifetimes to do this or. Yeah. I mean, what happened after the Baptist head was we started a short-lived project called Open Environment, where we, you know, basically, you know, focused on, you know, environment, the nature of it. And we had to shut it down because it was just so, so fractious. So fractious, you know, we got so heavily trolled. It was, yeah, we closed it down in the ended. It wasn't helpful. You know, it obviously wasn't helping. Why do you think that attracted so many trolls, right? What are you going to say? Well, I imagine it's because if claiming enlightenment attracted criticism, then setting oneself up as a kind of purveyor of open source enlightenment would presumably amp that criticism up. Yeah. As we discovered, it was pretty naive, wasn't it? Yeah. Why do you think it is that some people can set themselves up as enlightenment gurus and seems to be fine, at least until the scandals start happening? But you, the two of you, could seem to get that off the ground, in terms of the response you got? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Again, there's a feeling that that's not what we were meant to do. I think, you know, this is something Alan talks about quite a bit. After you have an awakening experience, there's often a compulsion or some sort of sense of obligation that you have to do something with it. You know, that you have to find some way to express it in the world. But it's ridiculous when you think about it. I mean, how could you even do that? You know, and I think we both took different decisions, different paths at that point, like Alan set out to find a way to be able to be a spiritual teacher and where that has taken him in the long run is to find his own teaching, you know, a new tradition. I mean, he went through all sorts of detours, you know, in order to find that, you know, sort of, you know, through hell and high water, really, trying out various types of things, none of which worked. But then really, in a sense, coming back to the origin of everything, where the two of us did some magic together, received a vision, and he was given instructions in this vision that he needed to find what was described as a dodecahedron in the vision. And he did a retreat in Greece, where he was giving talks, and it suddenly occurred to him that there were 12 talks, you know, just was falling out that way. And the talks turned out to be the teachings. And, you know, he took videos of these. And, I mean, I don't think he sees it quite in these terms, but when you watch the videos, it's almost like he's channeling something. They're quite inspired, these talks. And yeah, and then he arrived at Magia, by that means, you know, which is, you know, a new expression of, of, you know, the ancient wisdom. Whereas, you know, I took a different path where deciding to train as a counsellor, precisely because it's something that's recognised as a thing in our society that people do, you know, so got a qualification, I've got insurance, you know, what I do is a recognised thing. If people bring their spirituality or their magical practice to that, then we can work with that. Or if not, then we don't. Something that I've heard you reflect about in the past is generational, I suppose, like geists and just cultural attitudes and things like that, which are more or less open to certain kinds of things. And location too, I mean, the two of you are in the UK trying to set something like that up doesn't seem like fertile soil. Whereas I imagine, once again, perhaps this is just my imagination. So if you think this is not the case, please say so. I imagine if you'd been in, I don't know, San Diego or something like that, perhaps the results would have been different. Maybe that's, maybe it's not a bad thing within the UK, but I'm curious, do you, do you, do you reflect a much on that, the particular UK zeitgeist or the UK container, culturally speaking, versus any other regarding magic and awakening? That's interesting, you should say that. I mean, it would never occur to me to try to transplant myself to another culture. And I wonder if this is where our backgrounds come into play me and Alan. I mean, I would imagine Alan would have very different views about this from me. But you know, I wonder if that's partly to do, we're coming from a working class background. I mean, I've done research into my family tree and nobody moved anywhere for generations in my family. You know, it's just not something that would occur to me. I'm not a traveler. I mean, I've always had a sense that magic is big, you know, in this part of the world. Always has been, you know, doesn't show any signs of decreasing. And, you know, also have a sense that people around the world associate magic with the UK. You know, it's such a strong tradition there. I think one of the things as well, you know, and again, maybe this has to do with our backgrounds is when I talked about going away to university and encountering middle-class people for the first time, you know, the thing about middle-class people is they're always networking. Everything they're doing is often about building contacts and connections. You know, and that as well, it pretty doesn't come naturally to me. I don't think it does to Alan either, although he might have a different perspective on that. So it's not like we've, you know, found ourselves building sort of communities or anything like that, or making connections with other occult practitioners. You know, we've always just done our own thing, really. That's my perception anyway. Yeah, you know, maybe Steve, I mean, imagine you're more qualified to comment on this than I have, you know, because I'm aware that you have travelled. Relentlessly, yes. Yeah, yeah. I live on a boat, which I come from a long line of travellers. Yeah. So the Viking is not just metaphorical. I think it's mostly metaphorical. I don't think I come for a long line of Vikings, but I come from a long life travellers. Right. Yeah. So I think we're quite different in that regard. Well, this has been very fascinating indeed. We had originally loosely planned to get together to talk about entities, ontologies of entities, workings like Goesha and other systems, and we haven't even gone there. So perhaps I might petition you for a sequel someday to deal with that. In particular, I know you've had many fascinating experiences and experiments at home and otherwise with Goesha and those sorts of systems. I'd love to discuss them with you in the future. Yeah. I mean, entities is a fascinating topic. I mean, what I tend to do is, you know, see, it's a kind of spectrum. Now, I think, I think there's, if we have demons at one end, and if at the other end, we have gods, you know, I think there are an interesting array of things in the middle, like the elementals and the dead and angels, you know. So yeah, it's been fascinating, you know, exploring all of those, you know, trying to come to grips with them and what the differences between them are. And like I was saying earlier, it's all in the nature of the relationship that it's possible to have with these entities that their nature presents itself. So yeah, certainly, certainly something, something it might be interesting to talk about if you wanted to, Steve. Yes, I'd love to. That would be great. So perhaps a sequel. I'm wondering as we wrap this up, this has really been fascinating. Thank you for being generous with your time and also your experiences. Is there anything we ought to say or anything you want to discuss or, I needn't be, if there is? Well, one thing I would like to say, I noticed you've got a copy of the Baptist's head compendium. Yes. You know, that's available now. It's quite expensive. So what I wanted to say to your listeners was that if they purchase a copy through the publisher's website, eonbooks, and at checkout, they enter the code BHC20, they will get 20% off. That's valid until November 2024. Other than that, thank you for having me, Steve. I mean, I'm a regular listener to the podcast. You know, really enjoy what you do and really enjoy your very gentle genuinely curious style of interviewing. Thank you. Thank you, Duncan. That's very kind of you. I look, thank you for today and I look forward to the sequel. Duncan Barford. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye bye. Thank you for listening to another Guru Viking podcast. For more interviews like these, as well as articles, videos, and guided meditations, visit www.guruviking.com.