THE O MANUSCRIPT

While describing various paths of initiation, this extraordinary book is an initiation in itself as it plumbs the depths of the essential spiritual agenda of our time. Lars Muhl is a former musician and also a scholar in Aramaic with a particular historical interest in Mary Magdalene, who forms a central theme in his journey. We are living at a time when inner work is critical if we are to achieve a real shift of consciousness, transforming darkness into light, matter into spirit, power into service and fear into love. These dramas are going on at some level within each of us.

Struck down with a debilitating illness, Lars is put in touch with the 'Seer', who gives him an appointment in Montsegur - a long way from his native Denmark. He arrives in Foix very early in the morning and mysteriously gets a lift to his destination where he meets the Seer and begins his initiation. He discovers that he has much to let go of, symbolised by rocks that the Seer puts into his rucksack and casts off the mountain as they are making their steep ascent. We do not discover the exact identity of the Seer, but it is very clear that he is an advanced initiate able to travel and work freely in various dimensions. He works with clients remotely and on one occasion explains how he has to 'reset' the organs of a man in order to get them functioning properly again. A widow also asks him to accompany her husband on his journey beyond death, which he describes partly through the fascinating concept of the Shaft of the Soul, representing the tunnel in the near death experience. The task is to acknowledge each experience and let it go, otherwise the pattern will be reconfigured into another life. The Seer is apparently able to help in this process.

He speaks at length about dissolving the old patterns and thought forms in order to allow the new to flow through so that we can express a more embracing consciousness. This involves facing ourselves and questioning our motives, releasing the need to control while opening ourselves up to the universal and making ourselves available for service. In this way 'man is a transformer, a channel for the universal, where the energies are transformed.' Lars undergoes many adventures with the Seer, including a fascinating journey in Toledo, which had been a centre of mediaeval Kabbalism and where he finds a coin bearing the image of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, with whom the Seer has an inner connection. Book 2 continues the story while introducing the feminine archetype represented by Mary Magdalene.

Lars reconstructs her life and the powerful initiatory processes that she might have experienced at the time, culminating in her meeting with Jesus when they become lovers and she initiates him into the mysteries, including that of sacred sexuality where the holy of holies represents the man entering the woman and achieving mystical as well as physical union. This new understanding of her status is a major and controversial theological theme that sets a new agenda of the unification of masculine and feminine principles. This is beautifully written and expressed, and the dramatic narrative begins to alternate between different scenes and time periods. Another important figure is a woman called Sylvia, who herself had undergone a dissolution of the ego and an initiation some 50 years ago. The feminine archetype is also represented by Shekinah, who is all-embracing, containing and reconciling the opposites. Later in the book, Lars describes the spiritual journey of a woman he calls Ishatar from prostitute to initiate and the transformation she brings about in a lecherous merchant on her quest to meet Mary Magdalene. And Lars himself has a mysterious encounter with a woman towards the end of the book, who finishes up by vanishing as suddenly as she had appeared.

A further theme is that of the Grail, also associated with Montsegur (I now live only half an hour away). Symbolically, the Grail represents a higher state of consciousness as well as the eternal spiritual quest and the heart, whose content is love. Lars sees this new energy as inclusive, healing and altruistic – the carrier of both the cosmic fire and the living water as symbols of spiritual renewal. This is what we each need to embody within ourselves, recognising the image of God in everyone. Sylvia reminds Lars of the importance of Sophia or intuitive wisdom, and assures him that she will remain in touch telepathically during his subsequent adventures that take him back to Montsegur, this time actually inside the mountain by a very difficult route. Throughout the book, his outer journeys are mirrored by inner ones that are just as significant, for example in the Bethlehem Cave near Tarascon, where we attended a winter solstice celebration last year. He finds that, like all of us, he may not always get what he wants, but rather what he needs.

If our current world is the outcome of a thought process, then a new world can only be created in the same fashion, from the inside out by people who are prepared to take the responsibility for helping dissolve the old and co-create the new. An essential component of this process is forgiveness and giving up personal judgement as another form of limitation. By integrating the vertical dimension we can bring heaven and earth, matter and spirit together in our own being - Lars describes a parallel process within an ancient context, but the work is the same. At the end of the book the reader is invited to step into an enlightened consciousness that is the NOW of all eternity, realising that 'deep in your being you are already the eternal, unchangeable joy that you seek outside of yourself.' The Divine dwells in stillness within. He adds Sylvia's message: 'Remember, the door is on the inside. Remember that the key is on the inside. As of today there is no intermediate stage between man and God.' This powerful and transformative book invites readers to deepen their own inner journeys and participate in the alchemical process of our time.