Puzzles, ciphers and encodings

All the techniques to get spiritual experience aim to still the Reason, squash Desires, minimise the input from the 5 senses and the Nervous system and try to reduce the input from Memory.

For someone of a simple disposition – childlike or not very bright, emotional and perhaps not old enough to have vast store of memories – this is not too difficult.

But what on earth do you do for the person with an Ego the size of an elephant and the Reasoning capability and intelligence of Star Trek’s Dr Spock? 

You have to beat them at their own game and devise a set of games or  puzzles, visual patterns and problems so complex it totally defeats them, they think and think trying to work out the code and the cipher, puzzling over the rules and the meaning until they can no longer think …. And voila we have the result we want.

Better if the game is made so obscure that it almost has no meaning, better if the rules are not consistent, or that the rules are changed during the process, or not only do you have one set of ciphers, but ciphers which cipher the cipher.

I give no examples, because what is the point – if I give you an example you will know what it is.  The puzzle and cipher has to be very clever to beat the really clever because the really clever have a habit of twigging as to what is going on. 

Magic needs a very clever magician.

Depending how complex the game is and how absorbing, the process either works via befuddling or attrition.  Voluntary attrition is most effective as long as the person does not go nuts first! 

Aleister Crowley was a master at this game but one of the finest examples of this in action is to be found in the history of John Dee.

I have often wondered whether it wasn’t this process that was in action with Alan Turing, Frank Morrell and Tommy Flowers – the cipher was so complex that it wore them out mentally and they got help from ‘elsewhere’.