The Everyday Mystic: an interview with William Bloom by Barbara Finn Several years ago, at the end of a course on spirituality (which I attended), David Spangler gave participants a book called First Steps: An Introduction to Spiritual Practice by William Bloom (Findhorn Press, 1993). The book outlined practices that William had distilled from his years of study and experience with the inner dimensions of self and life. He wrote the book to enable readers to develop their own practice based on three "interwoven dynamics": self-reflection and transformation, alignment with the sacred, and service. I found the book to be a stunningly simple summary of the essence of spiritual living. In 1995, at the Western Mysteries Conference at Findhorn, Scotland, I had an opportunity to meet William Bloom. He is delightful, witty, occasionally outrageous, and works in a friendly, relaxed style. Born in 1948, William has been a successful publisher, novelist, and community activist. He has a doctorate in political psychology from the London School of Economics, and has been on the faculty of the Findhorn Foundation for over twenty years. He co-founded the Alternatives Programme of St. James' Church, Piccadilly where he teaches numerous courses. His books have been translated into 12 languages and he teaches internationally. He is married and lives in Glastonbury with his family. Barbara: How would you describe yourself and your work? Your good friend David Spangler has spoken of you as an adept, but also as one who has a special ability to make the esoteric accessible to everyone. William: Like nearly everyone, I had experiences of life's real magic as a child. I was very sensitive to atmospheres and could feel energy moving and changing. I could also sense consciousnesses without bodies, but my dad was a Freudian psychiatrist and my mom a New York journalist, so I kept quiet! It seems I've always had these two sides to my life: awareness of inner energies and involvement with mainstream intellectual and political life. For the last thirty years I've worked to integrate the two. This has meant educating myself in both fields — and then finding ways of communicating between the two. I also use humor and movement. One of my problems is that I have been an academic. I suffer from wanting educated people to find New Age approaches intelligent and accessible. Another of my challenges is that I have expertise in the field of energy work. I love energy work, but I dislike intensely some of the illusions and psychological power traps that can surround it, so I have put a lot of focus into clarifying it so that people generally can have confidence in this field. Barbara: Both the name and the concept of your Open Mystery School intrigue me. William: This is a series of talks and a one-year course I teach every year. Its purpose is to familiarize students with energy work and help them get into a very personal groove of regular spiritual practice. I called it the Open Mystery School, acknowledging the ancient mystery schools that had previously taught these same things. All the different schools had their own symbolic system teaching the same realities about invisible realms, their inhabitants, and how to work with the energies, but what I really want to do is strip away the symbols and metaphors and speak in a simple "modern" language. The global village communications revolution means that everyone now has access to mystic information that was secret only a few hundred years ago, and which was taught under threat of persecution. In the Open Mystery School we have been experimenting with language and forms, and have had some spectacular success in achieving simplicity and clarity. Barbara: Could you tell us about your early years and what led you to seek a spiritual path? William: I never sought a spiritual path. The veils just started melting around me, giving me tantalizing glimpses of true reality. Anyone who glimpses true reality wants to explore it, so I explored. The major influence was that I had a natural sensitivity to atmospheres and telepathy. Then, in my early twenties, I was an editor at Macmillan's and someone sent me a manuscript on astral travel. My intellect rejected it, but my soul started ringing huge bells of recognition. The truth is that I had thought I was mad. There were no maps for my kind of sensitivity. Suddenly I found maps. It was exciting: so many maps, all using different symbols, all charting the same inner territory. Some people attack the "supermarket" of New Age spirituality, but I celebrate that as a free man I can explore where I want. Barbara: You explored a number of paths in your early years. What led you to the Western Mystery path? William: You go with what suits you. I loved Qabalah, the Sufis, and mystic Christianity — especially the Gnostics. Working with these systems, I felt myself getting excited and illuminated. My consciousness would dance and sing. They worked for me. I hardly work with them now, but they were fundamental pieces in my psychic jigsaw. Barbara: You went on an extraordinary retreat, which you wrote about in your book The Sacred Magician. Could you describe that process and how it affected your life? William: I took a two-year retreat in the High Atlas Mountains of southern Morocco. I built a small chapel in a house with no running water or electricity. I then spent six months on my knees praying that I might be granted communion with my guardian angel. The ceremony, plus my time in the mountains, opened up my consciousness and sensitivity. I do not joke when I say that it took almost twenty years to integrate and understand this experience, and I've just recently finished a book that clarifies the nature of spirits and angels. Barbara: Is there a spiritual lineage that you would identify as most operative in your inner guidance and practice? William: Well, I am usually very shy about answering a question like this, but the truth is that in my early twenties I began to experience a consciousness in my meditations and psychic experiences. This being was very friendly and affectionate toward me, helping and encouraging. I telepathically and intuitively accepted him as a kind of father, and named him Christian Rosenkreutz. I knew a lot intuitively about him. It was only several years later that, reading other material, especially the Alice Bailey books, that I found out he was quite well known in occult circles as the Master R or the Compte de Saint Germain. His ashram is well known for being interested in occultism, ceremony, psychology, and international politics. To a degree, this integrated for me when I was teaching a course called "Psychological Problems in International Politics" at the London School of Economics. Barbara: You wrote a book on the relationship among economics, psychology and spirituality, Money, Heart and Mind: Financial Well Being for People and Planet. Is this an area in which you are continuing to work and teach? William: I believe that spiritual practice has no meaning unless it expresses in goodwill to the communities in which we live. If we do not express our spirituality in generosity and service to others, then we become smug, fat cats purring over the milk of bliss. In my life, I like to be politically engaged, and this expresses through an active interest in social concerns. I do not want New Age spirituality to be isolated. If it is, then it will never integrate and mature. Everything is sacred and interconnected. Everything is moving toward fulfillment. You need to keep the skeptical mind alive. This is a difficult balance for some people. You have to surrender fully to the new experiences. Barbara: I liked your comments in your book First Steps about learning to switch on the "bullshit antenna." William: My experience is that you need to keep the skeptical mind alive. This is a difficult balance for some people. You have to surrender fully to the new experiences. At the same time, you have to be watching, assessing, discriminating. The spiritual path is partly experience, partly consciousness expansion, and partly becoming more "wise." Wisdom only comes if you keep the discriminating mind alive and healthy, without sabotaging experience. All of this is in the context of receiving and communicating more love. Barbara: Your most recent book, Psychic Protection, has just been released in the U.S. I liked the overall context of consideration of blessing and cleansing practices as well as the calm and clear manner in which you address the question of evil. Can you say anything more about your hopes for the application of the teachings in this book to everyday situations? William: There are very simple techniques that anyone can use to cleanse and change atmospheres. It's almost as easy as just changing your mood. However, in modern civilization there is a tendency for us not to feel our physical bodies and not to feel our connection to Earth. Without these feelings, it is impossible to experience safety or a sense of true location. Without safety it is almost impossible to fulfill yourself, to feel good or successful, or to feel connected to the beauty of the universe. If you can experience yourself in your body, connected to Earth, you can begin to receive and transmit — naturally and with no effort — harmonic vibrations that feel good. Another enormous clue is to understand that healthy, "good" energy is energy that is moving. Nothing in this universe is static, but when energy gets stuck in our bodies, through reaction or anxiety, it feels like we've been attacked. All we have to do is shake it out, physically, emotionally, mentally, and get it moving again. To sum up psychic protection quickly: get fully into your body and allow the energy to move. That is 95 percent of the strategy. Shields and other protective devices, and doing purposeful blessing, then follow easily. Barbara: I recall a workshop at Findhorn at which we created an "etheric talisman," and I remember the delightful manner in which you brought a sense of play and the need to be in our bodies. William: Again, healthy energy is energy that moves. Growth is the expansion in size and complexity of moving energy. To have stuck psychic energy is to be pompous. It is also very human to get addicted to the patterns of who we think we are. We need to do anything and everything we can to keep our minds, emotions, and psyches shaken up, stirring, and moving. The moment something feels understood, it can become dangerously static and complacent — and then, nothing grows again. Don't misunderstand me. We also need times of rest, assessment, and integration, but then we need to get things moving again. In this way, we replicate and harmonize with ways of the cosmos. We experience ourselves as more than just static human personalities in a thin sliver of reality. We become wise beings with the playful flow of children. William will present a workshop on psychic protection on February 7 in Seattle. He will also lead a workshop in the Being at Home in the Cosmos series hosted by David Spangler the weekend of February 13-15. The weekend workshop is called "Spiritual Freedom and the Modern Mystic." For more information, call Stonehouse at (425) 883-7825. For more information on William Bloom and his work, check his web site: <http://web.ukonline.co.uk/mystic/>.