An excerp from the book by Robert Masters

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We are at the threshhold of times and events such as no one now living has experienced or
perhaps is even able to imagine... Our world will change... not just in foreseeable ways,
but mentally and spiritually in ways no one has been able to forsee. What is most reassuring
is the definite fact that the Dragons are in charge.

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There used to be a variety of literature sometimes called Travelers' Tales. These were writings of travelers and explorers, describing flora and fauna and peoples and behaviors quite unfamiliar and strange to the reader. Those were times when most people stayed close to home and it was rare that they ever left their towns or villages and the areas nearby. Exceedingly rare were those who had gone to strange lands where the people and customs were strikingly different from their own, or into wild places harboring creatures formerly unheard of.

As often as not, there was no way to know if the travelers' tales were true, or were just tantalizing fictions invented by the tellers of the tales. In some cases, long periods of time would have to pass before travel to such regions became common enough that the stories could be confirmed, or possibly rejected for lack of supporting evidence.

Now our world has become one where not many places remain inaccessible, and almost everything on earth has been filmed, videotaped, or otherwise brought within reach of anyone who is curious. As a result, travelers' tales have largely ceased to be told. Even Outer Space has been approached in such a way that rather few people any longer think of that territory as being particularly marvelous or intriguing.

For now, it would seem that only Inner Space remains as fertile ground for tales about wondrous places, alien beings of all sorts, and Powers and Principalities remaining largely uncharted and feebly described. Inner Space is a territory of indescribable vastness, a whole universe of experience that lies far beyond the present reality consensus forged by brains and minds with potentials only slightly used as we have evolved for a brief period of time within the space of our little planet.

The book you are holding contains many examples of experiences that challenge our present understandings of reality and that involve in one way or another aspects and elements of Inner Space. These are the Travelers' Tales of today. Like the older variety, they will, in some cases, be verified or disclaimed by future travelers. For now, they awaken a sense of wonder, causing us to reach beyond the known and the knowable.

In varying degrees we are, all of us, Inner Space travelers. In our dreams while sleeping we go sometimes to worlds unknown to us otherwise, and our bodies in dreams are not necessarily the same as our bodies when awake. There are also, for many, vivid daydreams that overwhelm and replace, for a time, the normal reality. There are states experienced when ill that remove us from that normal reality. Some people spontaneously move in and out of trances of varying depths, not always knowing what is happening to them. Everything from prolonged massage to prolonged sex, or prolonged concentration on, or absorption in, almost any activity, will alter consciousness and provide experiences not normally accessible. However, except for extreme cases, the reality consensus allows for those sorts of deviations and takes little notice of them. It is deviations that threaten in some way the consensus, the accord about what is real, the accepted understandings of cause and effect, and beliefs about human capabilities--those are the aspects of Inner Space described in these travelers' tales.

There are experiences and capacities that are considered normal and a part of the consensus in some times and places, but not so in others. Alcohol intoxication is one example. The person who is high, or drunk, on alcohol is not presently thought of as having stepped outside the norms of reality. Drug experiences, too, are fast coming to be brought into the consensus as comparable to alcohol intoxication. In the past, however, when alcohol was used with different expectations, and for different purposes, it could provide entry to the presence of Gods. These divine intoxications gave access to paranormal powers, such as prophecy and other knowledge not available apart from the intoxication. According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the ancient Persians, when faced with making decisions of importance, considered each problem from two perspectives: they looked at it sober, and they looked at it drunk, and then took the best from both states in making their decision. If a matter was important, it was too important to be left to only ordinary consciousness. Evidently alcohol was the intoxicant, but it was used quite differently than we use it today, and their drunkenness, some of it when dedicated to special purposes, was not the same as present-day versions. It was, or could be, a portal to Inner Space. That potential is undoubtedly still there if we want to avail ourselves of it.

The great American psychologist William James, in his classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience, cautioned against any premature closing of our accounts with reality. Our normal waking consciousness, he wrote, is only one special type of consciousness, while separated from it "by only the filmiest of screens" are many other potential forms of consciousness entirely different. Apply the requisite stimulus, he said, and there they are. They are "definite types of mentality," and have their own areas of application. Those definite types of mentality, as James called them, provide access to worlds and abilities that still belong to Inner Space, but at least some of which eventually will be a part of the reality consensus. That consensus is not stable, but is added to and subtracted from, as time goes by.

There are those persons whose everyday worlds are partly within the consensus, partly outside it. Persons who are naturally gifted, or cursed, with paranormal abilities, and those diagnosed as mad, are examples. There are also those who have acquired the ability to live at the same time in different realities by means of prolonged dedication to spiritual disciplines. In this last category, some regarded as saints might be included. None of these kinds of people have any choice about being in two worlds. It is naturally, or has become, their way of being, and often is immutable.

There are also those, like myself, who have decided to explore Inner Space. Such an explorer is akin to an astronaut exploring Outer Space. He or she will journey there, but with the intention of returning to the normal reality, the consensus. As with the work of the astronaut, there are hazards most importantly, the possibility of being unable to return. But the intention is to remain fully able to exist and function sufficiently well within the normal or earthly reality.

My interest in such exploration arose out of the recognition that, as a psychologist, I was getting only warped fragments of an understanding of the mind-body system and human potentials. Such a spiritual Teacher as G. I. Gurdjieff, for example, offered a far more profound and comprehensive psychology than any contemporary psychologist, psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. The psychology of Freud, alongside that of Gurdjieff, seemed mainly to shrink and pathologize. It tended to draw everyone within a framework of psychopathology, while Gurdjieff's work pointed towards making possible what he called human beings not in quotation marks. Among the analysts, Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich offered larger views of psyche and soul, but they still could not take into adequate account the realities of Inner Space and human potentials. The Magical Renaissance, effected mainly by the eccentric genius of Aleister Crowley, brought back into consideration, and the need for exploration, Inner Space realms that had been almost banished from human consciousness. Psychedelic experience opened up Inner Space with a force that simply swept away the B. F. Skinners whose rat-inspired behaviorism had dominated psychology for much too long.

My work has been kept as scientific as it can be in such areas as those where I have mainly worked--sexology, psychedelic research, hypnotic and other trance research, psychotherapy, and neural and sensory reeducation--but it has also included explorations into some of the farther reaches of Inner Space where by no current definition is the work scientific. In that connection, I have especially tried to re-create a system of ancient Egyptian magic associated with the Goddess Sekhmet and the Gods Ptah and Nefer-tem: the Triad of Memphis. There have been other explorations just to determine, so to speak, some more of what is out there. This book of travelers' tales has to do, in its way, with some of that exploring, my own and that of others.

Keep in mind that no permission is needed for such adventures. Anyone can go and do likewise.

CHAPTER ONE

SENSORY AND SUPERSENSORY ORGANS

The Sufis, some of whom are among the most advanced of all now having access to the more remote, subtle and powerful Inner Space regions, speak of fantasy, "that cornerstone of fools," and of "cognitive imagination." The unduly harsh first reference is to the ordinary imagination of a person. The second reference is to a faculty by means of which the worlds that lie beyond the reach of the ordinary senses may be known with all the fullness of the being of a person. This is where the Gods are and, at one place or another along the continuum of consciousness, all of the other Powers and Principalities lying outside of the "reality consensus."

From the earliest times, the religions and spiritual traditions have insisted on the reality of worlds beyond the everyday world, and have described the human being as possessing a number of "subtle bodies" for experiencing those worlds. The human being is always said to have a gross material body and other more subtle bodies with which to sense and to be able to function in the more subtle and also "higher" worlds. It is the task of most esoteric Schools and other psychospiritual systems to enable a person to gain awareness of, and to be able to use, these more subtle and higher bodies.

In my efforts to re-create the ancient Egyptian magic of the Triad of Memphis (Ptah, Sekhmet and Nefer-tem), I have made a prolonged and thorough study of subtle bodies, and most particularly the Way of the Five Bodies of the Goddess Sekhmet. I have written about this in my book The Goddess Sekhmet, and have enabled some students to gain awareness of subtle bodies and to function with respect to them. To a lesser extent, I have also explored subtle body phenomena in the magico-religious Ways of the Goddess Kali and the Hawaiian Goddess Kapo. There is no real School where such Work is not done.

Virtually all of the great sages of humanity have agreed on the reality of other worlds and intelligent nonhuman beings who populate them. Goethe, for example, who was said by his contemporaries to exemplify better than anyone else the actualized human, spoke of the spiritual eyes and ears and other spiritual senses we possess. Those who fail to learn to use those senses are blind and deaf and otherwise closed off to meaningful experience in all of the many existing worlds except for the most densely material and transient one, that of everyday reality.

To the countless human beings who have experienced the higher worlds it is evident that these worlds could not possibly be the products of their imaginations, but rather are experienced as being more real than the everyday reality. As Aldous Huxley once said, when a person first experiences these other worlds it is not as if they were somehow imagined, but rather the veil has been lifted so that one is able to see what always has been there.

Beyond the everyday world, there are hierarchies--if you will--of worlds, ranging from the less to the more subtle, from the lower to the higher, or however one should put it. Qualities of these worlds such as color and light differ from one world to the next, as do experiences of duration and of the "eternally existing" as compared to the more fleeting

It is only in the everyday world that time moves so quickly and the duration of things, human life included, is so short. One can, in fact, return to some of the Inner Space worlds again and again, over the course of most of one's lifetime, and nothing will ever seem to have grown older, to have decayed, or to have died. It is not that there is no change in those worlds, but it is rather that we live our lives so quickly as to have no time to observe it. It is as if, for example, some kind of being like ourselves had a life span of only a few minutes, or even seconds. Then, if that being were to visit our world, she or he would not observe such processes as aging and the transiency of material forms either.

It is the proper business of every human being to go beyond that everyday world which calls for the use of just so small a part of what we are. As we come to know ourselves better, and more largely, then we gain access to senses we possess, but which were unknown to us before. A vastly larger reality opens, and we begin to awaken from the somnambulistic—or sleepwalking—state that philosophers and Teachers of humanity have always told us is the fate of everyone who remains trapped in the lower regions of existence by the crippling reality consensus prevailing in their particular place and time.

CHAPTER TWO

BEING INVISIBLE AND BEING UNSEEN

In many magical and shamanistic traditions, there are techniques by means of which the magician or shaman becomes, in some way, invisible.

Popular books and legends often give the impression that invisibility is achieved by dematerialization. Actually, there are few serious traditions that hold that a true dematerialization ever occurs. To dematerialize the body it would have to pass out of existence so that there would be no foundation for rematerialization later on.

The magician is able to become invisible, if at all, only after very prolonged training. The techniques by which he achieves this are highly secret ones, and if described would not in any case be useful to a person who has not received the necessary training. There are, however, much more readily accessible means of becoming, for most practical purposes, invisible or, perhaps more accurately, of being unseen.

The distinction between being invisible and being unseen is essentially this: that to be invisible implies some degree of transmutation of the physical body, especially in what would appear to be a radical change in the condition of the gross material body. That body can be hidden from view by what magicians refer to as an "extrusion of subtle bodies" that then surrounds and conceals it. To be unseen, however, requires no such radical change in the magician's gross material body, although it does require some significant changes in the functioning of its nervous system.

That it is possible for a person to become invisible or to be unseen by another person is easy to demonstrate by means of certain simple hypnotic procedures. I have in mind the phenomenon known to at least some hypnotists as "negative hallucination." Most people are familiar with the idea of a "positive hallucination," or just "hallucination," meaning that the hallucinating person sees or otherwise senses something that is not physically present. In the case of the negative hallucination, the person does not see, or otherwise sense, what is physically present. It is about as easy to create one of these types of hallucination as it is to create the other. A true magician or shaman, let it be known, is always, among other things, a master hypnotist.

To illustrate negative hallucination, let us say that my assistant and I are sitting in a room conversing with a patient who is in a deep trance. I ask the person to close her eyes for a moment and then I say to her that when she opens her eyes, she will just observe that she and I are in the room. When she then opens her eyes, my assistant will have disappeared. My assistant will be unseen because I have said to the patient that she will observe that just she and I are in the room, and the patient will interpret that to mean that only she and I are in the room. And since only she and I are in the room, she will be unable to see my assistant or to otherwise perceive her.

By similar, or slightly more complicated, means, I myself can be negatively hallucinated by the patient or research subject and so vanish. Similarly, through direct or veiled suggestions I can take on almost any appearance I choose (positive hallucination), becoming an animal, for example, or a child; or aging, or growing younger a few years at a time, or very quickly, decades at a time, before the patient's eyes.

The magician, as a master hypnotist, can covertly induce trances and give effective suggestions to people who will then experience whatever is suggested. It is more rare, but not at all unknown, that such a hypnotist can covertly induce deep trances in even large numbers of people, becoming invisible to them, or becoming unseen.

Not long before World War II, a Russian hypnotist demonstrated that he could walk into a bank, hypnotize a teller, who would then give him a large sum of money, and walk out unseen by the guard or anyone else in the bank. This demonstration was of great interest to the Soviet Union's dictator, Josef Stalin, who was always fearful of being assassinated in the Kremlin by someone who had managed to penetrate its elaborate defenses. Stalin challenged the hypnotist who, despite the most extreme precautions, did manage to enter the Kremlin, pass by many different guards, and then appear in Stalin's own office without anyone later having any recollection of having seen him pass. While this feat required some extraordinary skills, obviously what one person can do is within the reach of others.

A very difficult way of being unseen is taught in various of the Oriental martial arts, and old reports suggest something similar was practiced by some American Indians. Essentially this method consists of quieting one's nervous and muscular systems to the point that no signals are transmitted to another person, so that the other person's perceptual apparatus is rendered ineffectual. According to this view, living organisms have to signal in some way their presence to other organisms in order to be perceived.

In the Old West, it was often remarked that some Indians could remain so still that people passing even within inches of them remained unaware of their existence. This is the way of being unseen that is most often taught in the martial arts, also in Yoga and in other spiritual disciplines. In Japan, martial artists called Ninja are famous for becoming virtually invisible.

There is one other method I have encountered, but I know of no instructions for achieving it. Twice, at dinner parties I have attended, where I found the conversation and the company especially boring, I was later told by those present that my chair had appeared empty throughout most of the dinner. I was unaware of this occurrence and would still like to know exactly how I managed it.

CHAPTER THREE

BODY MYSTERIES

To discover and catalog the unexplained abilities of the human body is to come to the conclusion that all of the studies devoted to the subject thus far have barely scratched the surface of what is to be known. And it seems as if the acquisition of one kind of knowledge about the human body casts much of the earlier knowledge into oblivion.

When one travels the world seeking out examples of bodily phenomena that should not be possible according to conventional Western allopathic medicine, it soon becomes evident that quite a number of lifetimes would be needed to adequately carry out the search. In many places in the world today, it is common to encounter "impossible" demonstrations of resistance to injury. One such example, fire-walking, has even come to the contemporary workshop circuit. And one can go further to find examples of men driving sharp-pointed daggers against their chests without piercing the flesh as the Balinese do, or running metal spikes through vital organs without pain, and with instant healing upon withdrawal of the object, as certain groups of Sufis can do.

In the case of Yoga, it has been demonstrated that control of virtually all "involuntary functions" can be achieved. This includes stopping the heart, altering the blood flow, self-regulating brain-wave activity, and much more. Around the world, there are to be discovered many effective healing practices that could not possibly work according to our understanding of the human body.

Most such extraordinary phenomena occur in the context of religion, spiritual disciplines and esoteric Schools. Often they work with souls, subtle bodies, "centers" and bodily energy systems, and with Gods and Goddesses, angels and demons, elemental spirits and spirits of the dead, and with many other forces.

I once came upon a school in Marrakech, Morocco, claiming continuous existence over many centuries which maintained that it worked with spirits whose special task it was to care for insane human beings. In this connection, they claimed that the spirits protected some of those who were mad by giving them access to various paranormal capacities.

It is an interesting fact, and has long been known, that madness can liberate in a person powers like the siddhis of Yoga. For example, the generation of sufficient heat in one's body to keep it warm in even subfreezing temperatures is a siddha. A Yogi should be able to sit naked in a snow bank using his body heat to dry off one wet towel after another as it is draped over him. In the old asylums, it was often noted, and written about in medical journals, that even in subfreezing weather, some inmates would sleep naked on the stone floors without suffering either discomfort or damage. Similarly, "hysterical" patients in mental hospitals were observed to handle live coals and to put their hands on hot stoves--again without discomfort or damage. This has been compared to the fire-walking done by some practitioners of martial arts.

Among the mad, the most accomplished "natural magicians" are the group of patients called schizophrenics. Schizophrenics are known to sometimes have extraordinarily strong immune systems and to exhibit abnormally rapid healing of wounds. In the so-called "fourth stage" of schizophrenia there may be little or no experience of pain. Such a patient might sit against a very hot radiator without any feeling of pain. In the reports I have seen, it is not mentioned whether the person was burned or not. (Of course, if the patient was reported not to have been burned, then the article probably would not be occurring in a contemporary scientific journal. Such journals today have much more fixed notions about what is possible than did their nineteenth and early twentieth-century predecessors. That which is regarded as "impossible" does not get published.)

Schizophrenics can be "energy vampires," draining anyone and everyone around them. They can also somehow manufacture a variety of stenches. I once had a patient, a very good-looking woman, who maintained, as some schizophrenics do, that her body had died. She was able, though not voluntarily or with conscious knowledge about how she did it, to make herself smell like a rotting corpse—a stink that somehow hovered just slightly this side of the intolerable.

I had an interesting experience with this woman. The fact that she was able to get in and out of a car and walk to my office, did not at all suffice to persuade her that her body was not dead. Neither could any other argument I could advance. I had been told that one psychiatrist had put ice cubes on her skin, held a candle flame close to her arm, and pricked her with a pin. She made no response and continued to insist that her body was dead. He was afraid of attempting any stronger stimulation.

I put her on a massage-type table and worked on one side of her body until it was different in almost every way from the other side. The side I worked on became substantially longer due to the lengthening of the muscles and the increased space in the joints, and lay flatter and lower than the other side. She was even breathing differently on the side I had worked on. On that side, if I picked up a leg or an arm, it was light as a feather, while the other side felt much, much heavier when I did the same thing. I kept this up for more than an hour and was pleased to note that she stopped smelling like a corpse.

Finally, the two sides were so differentiated that she could not deny that she felt a great difference between the two sides of her body. I helped her off the table, and when she walked, she became ever more aware of the difference between her two sides. She walked so much more quickly on one side that the other side had trouble keeping up. One arm moved much more freely than the other. One foot made much better contact with the floor. The breathing was much fuller on the side I had worked with and, when I showed her a mirror, she acknowledged that the eye on her "good side" was more vital looking than the other one.

As we talked about all this, she admitted for the first time that she could not be feeling what she was feeling if her body was dead.

Schizophrenics gain access to many other ordinarily latent capacities. They can be very telepathic and thus often become a threat to psychiatrists who have to deal with them. The mad, too, can be a valuable resource in exploring human potentials and some of the farther reaches of soma, soul and psyche.

I have tried to interest several psychiatrists who profess a strong interest in the paranormal and in human potentials to establish research projects to study the extraordinary phenomena some psychotic patients manifest. But psychiatrists in general are not interested in such phenomena as other than "pathological symptoms,' and thus are unable to recognize the value of looking at the possible potentials of the "wild talents" they observe. One psychiatrist who, at my urging, proposed such a project not only was turned down by his hospital but his sanity was called into question!

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