The vision is testimony, and the argument is offered to your reason.
Central Doctrine, Clarification
Sitting down to write
In February 2022, just after I first met Timothy Desmond, I sat down to formalize the Central Doctrine. The work of that year was to gather the essays and short articles of many years into one Doctrine that a student could open at its ground and follow to its end.
In ordering them I kept the voice in which they were given. My testimonies, my visions, my poems, my prayers and the arguments that are distinctly my own stayed in my own words, edited for spelling and grammar, for accuracy and for the names we later settled. Through those essays I set out to give voice to all that our School knows to be true. There is one reality, which we call Our Divine Infinite Being, the totality state of existence. Mind and matter rise from a single root, as Jung and Pauli found in the exchange of their letters. The gods are living, and theurgy, the work of the gods, is the way by which the soul is restored to them.
Some of the principles go back as far as my teaching goes. From my earliest years as a teacher I taught that the zodiac is the celestial pageantry of the Sun through the seasonal year, and for that reason our astrology is tropical, reckoned from the equinoxes and the solstices, where the astrology of India reckons its signs against the fixed stars. From the beginning I also taught that the Sun is a conscious being. We prayed it in the Invocation, where a consciousness peers into the vastness, and we sang it in the Threshold poem, where the Sun blazes as a sovereign intelligence.
Later I gave that teaching its full argument in an essay prepared for our students of ritual praxis, The Conscious Sun: The Enthroned God of Our Sector of the Cosmos. It runs from the established physics of the Sun to our own knowledge of it as a living god. The Sun's interior rings with millions of modes of oscillation, its fusion regulates itself, and its magnetic field reverses about every eleven years and returns to its first orientation about every twenty-two, a rhythm that tree rings and polar ice carry back through more than ten thousand years. Beside that physics I set Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory and Susskind's picture of information held on boundaries. Our solar system has such a boundary, the heliopause, and a central engine that defines its informational state, and so we read the Sun's cycle as a rhythmic archive, its self-regulation as homeostasis and its storms as the coherent dynamics of a living interior. We say that the Sun thinks, holding its own past, governing its own fire and bringing forth the new from within its order, and we name that thought the Solar Logos. I remember hearing it said that on Roger Penrose's view of consciousness, in which conscious moments are tied to an objective reduction of the quantum state, even the Sun might hold consciousness, and his vision points toward the place where our teaching on the conscious Sun already stood.
Other principles came to me through seeing. I saw that what the astrologer reads comes from the whole boundary of the Sun's domain at once, flowing inward toward the center, and not from the planets one by one like messages from separate senders. Years ago I saw the first shell of that boundary just past Pluto. Later I came to see the second shell far beyond it, and that second shell is the one on which WaveForm Astrology is founded.
The rest came from the temple, where I had met the planets as gods in rite after rite. All of this lay across journals, class notes, PowerPoint slides, handwritten pages and the margins of books. WaveForm Astrology is new as a written system, and its pages were set down recently and in a short time, from material gathered, practiced and corrected over many years. The work from 2022 on was to bring those notes into one order, to test that order against the rite and against the chart, and to correct it wherever it failed.
Lannah and the years of writing
I credit my time with Lannah as the space I truly needed to formalize the system our School has today. When I sat down in February 2022 to bring the journals and the short articles into one doctrine, her steadiness, her planning and her care for our family's future held our household together while I wrote. I often shared my ideas with her as a sounding board, and she gave some input along the way, but above all she was deeply supportive of the work, as she has been ever since. Those conversations also led to many ideas about working with children together.
She has also been my deepest inspiration. While I was developing the School her own interests took a turn, and she went back to college to finish a master's degree in education and her Montessori certification, both to educate our children and to teach. She taught at a local Montessori school from 2022 to 2026, and she completed her degree and her certifications in 2025. Through those years we talked often about the education of children, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching her grow as a teacher, which is something I greatly admire in her.
It was because of her that I turned to the education of children within the mystery tradition, something you rarely see in other orders. Together she and I developed Little Suns, the teaching guide we use to teach our own children.
The founding paper
The first written step toward WaveForm Astrology was a paper. I titled it The Solar Microcosm and the Expansion of the ochēma, with the subtitle Dual-Aspect Monism, Mass-Frequency Equivalence, and the Planetary Operators in Theurgic Practice, and I wrote it in the language of its ancestry and of its physics. It has three parts, The Process of Expanding the ochēma, The Architecture of Admission and the Companion Definitions. In them I described a solar microcosm, an expanding ochēma, a sequence of planetary operators and an architecture of admission, and that paper is the founding paper of our method.
Its picture begins with the human being as a solar microcosm, a small Sun-centered world within the larger one. The ochēma, the luminous vehicle of Iamblichus and Proclus, is the boundary of that world, and the work of the theurgist enlarges it. The planets are the operators that do the work inside it, in a fixed order. Mercury, Venus and Mars are the internal operators. Jupiter and Saturn are the boundary operators, the one enlarging the sphere and the other densifying what it holds, so that what enters can be received without contraction or leakage. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto make up the ambient field. When the operators work in their order, the volume of influence expands, and conditions, persons and resources become stable in a life.
Several teachings that are now central to our School first appeared in that paper. The thread I taught there as any intended outcome, whether an agreement, a resource, an encounter or a scale of work. A thread is a configuration that already exists in the already-structured continuum, and it becomes accessible when its conditions fall within the life's present volume of influence. Threads are selected and admitted, and in our School the theurgist locates the thread, aligns with it and becomes the place of its admission.
The heliopause came into the paper from my study of the cosmic horizon, where I had come to see that the chain of influence passes from the galaxy to the heliosphere before it reaches the Earth. In the founding paper I gave that step its name, the heliopause as the "immediate sacred key", where the larger horizon is lowered into the Sun's own frequency and gravitational order, with the planets' motions as its local expression.
The dual presence I also first taught there. In the bulk of spacetime the self is temporal, as it is born, ages, meets resistance, forms relationships, undertakes its work and dies. At the same time, at every point of the spherical boundary of the self, there resides an encoding that is eternal, outside the linear flow of time and complete. That boundary record holds all that the microcosm has ever been, is now and can become, and the unchanging record at the rim of the sphere is what our School now calls the Divine Double.
Many of the paper's examples concern money and contracts, as these were the clearest illustrations when I first set the method down. One of them follows a consultant who stops chasing a large contract and begins speaking and writing from the position that the agreement is already settled. Competing options fall away, negotiation shortens, and the signed contract and the transfer of funds arrive on a timeline the person no longer has to force. The manual that came after carries the same sequence into love, health routines, creative work, vocation, the repair of family bonds, relocation, study and the deepening of a spiritual life.
The paper left the Moon implicit, and I corrected that in the manual. There I gave her the place I had long felt she held, as the reflective medium of the microcosm, the surface through which the solar frequency becomes felt and habitual life. She takes in what the operators do and colors each of their steps while commanding none of them. The root of that teaching is in Israel Regardie's distinction between the solar, divine astral and the lunar, gross astral. In the Doctrine I now teach it as a ladder, with the gross astral named the reflective medium and the divine astral the solar reference.
Two books out of the practice
Out of the Doctrine our practice grew, and out of the practice grew two further books. The astrology I had taught in our classes since my turn to the sky, reading the Sun as the reference of a life and the planets as the functions of the gods within it, was gathered and formalized as WaveForm Astrology. The rites we performed in the temple, the Theurgic Ritual of the Pentagram, the Grand Invocation and the work along the solar axis, became Ritual Praxis and Instruction.
Our students made both books necessary. In the years after the first edition of the Doctrine, their questions in class and their persistence in the work showed me very clearly where the spoken teaching was not enough. Their questions about the order of the Names, the turnings at the stations and the holding of the light came back to me so often that my answers began to form chapters of their own.
For many years we taught the Theurgic Ritual of the Pentagram the way craft has always been taught, in person, by demonstration and correction. The written instructions served as a reminder of what the student had already seen done, and we have many recordings in which the pronouncements are demonstrated. For years I invited my students from the Doctrine into this second work, which was then given as a series of teachings on our website under the name Ritual Praxis and Instruction. As the School grew beyond the reach of one teacher's voice, the rite grew as well. My turn to astrology gave it a Planetary set, a Zodiacal set and a Celestial set, a rite for the Solar Return, a method for meeting transits and the Decan Year of the thirty-six decans, and a body of practice that large needed a book.
WaveForm Astrology took the founding paper's picture into the working chart, and it gives the astrologer four things to add to a reading. The first is the Operator Audit, a seven-step natal procedure that moves from the solar reference through the Moon, the inner operators, the boundary pair of Saturn and Jupiter, the ambient field and the chart's patterns of interference to a synthesis. That synthesis names the native's characteristic weak operator, their characteristic failure mode, their easiest or "lead" operator and the order in which restoration should proceed.
The second is a synastric grammar for romantic partnerships, business alliances, families and the bond between teacher and student, which tells which operator each partner supplies to the other. The third is a way of reading time that turns every transit, return and progression into a question of cost, with the craft of election among its chapters. The fourth is practice itself, protocols of resonant holding keyed to the chart, to the lunation cycle and to the solar year. The whole method gathers into one diagnostic sequence of five steps, from the absent signature to the responsible operator, the chart correlate, the transit window and the restoration.
Beneath all four lies a teaching from the summer of 2022, that the personal ochēma is a reflected image of the cosmic horizon itself, and the manual teaches with it that our future is embedded within the past history world line of the causal diamonds larger than us.
Each of those four grew from something I had done before I wrote it down. The questions the audit asks are ones I had begun asking of every chart after 2020, my own first, then the charts of students and clients. The grammar of partners comes from the charts I read for students, clients, friends, family and the people in my business. The reading of time as cost comes from my own transits, met in the temple one by one, and the protocols of holding come from the rite and its long cycles of daily practice.
Writing the books also settled the names. In the second edition of the Doctrine I gathered the whole teaching into the names by which our School now speaks of it. The Sun is the solar center, the stable reference of the whole microcosm, held at the Sun within us and never at the ego. The planets, the visible bodies of the gods, are the operators, and the Moon, both goddess and luminary, is the reflective medium. The ochēma is the boundary that encloses the microcosm, the possible futures of a life are threads in an already-structured continuum, and their entry into a life is admission. The eternal self is the Divine Double, and the aim of the work is Solar Salvation.
Some of these names first appeared in the founding paper, and others came in the years after it. Several stand beside the older literature I had read for decades, the ochēma beside the luminous vehicle of the Neoplatonists, the personal daemon, the oikeios daimōn, beside the Holy Guardian Angel of the later Western orders, which we keep as a comparison only, and Solar Salvation beside what Iamblichus called the unbinding of fate.
The writing that came through
From 2022, as the writing of the books began, the realizations came more and more through the concepts I was studying in physics, in theurgy and in philosophy. The dual-aspect monism of Jung and Pauli, the information held on the boundary of the cosmic horizon, the causal diamonds of the physicists, the luminous vehicle of Iamblichus and Proclus and the Platonic doctrine of the soul's descent and return were the concepts I worked with day after day. In these experiences they merged into entire experiential truths that arrived suddenly. The study and the preparation of many years conditioned them, and their arrival was still sudden.
When I gave these experiences my attention, they tended for a time to increase in volume, at times until they became fervent writing. Their measure had grown with the years of work behind them, and much of the literature of our School was first set down in that state.
The nearest comparison in the literature of our field is Crowley's Book of the Law, received from the voice he named Aiwass, or any other highly inspired written work. In the work I have done over time I have reached those heights. I was most certainly an instrument of a higher being, who wrote through me and drew visions of incredible understanding to the front of the mind, and I could not deny the nature of that presence while I wrote, at times frantically, to capture the rapture of the experience.
Many times it was as if my Divine Double opened a window into the unknown. The Divine Double is that infinite self who knows every instantiation of my being through the past and the far future, who is myself and who is interwoven with all that exists at the boundary. Through that window poured what I can only describe as a revelatory communication between myself and the Cosmos. The books of our School carry what it gave.
This is a divine communication with higher beings, and I hold that this is an absolute truth after the way of Iamblichus. In On the Mysteries he teaches that true inspiration descends from the gods, who illuminate those who have been made ready to receive them. For him the gods, in divine measures perfect beyond those of men, refine the visionary and transconscious experience of the theurgist and transform the theurgist in a sudden breakthrough of consciousness. This entire Mystery Tradition, to which I have dedicated myself and will until death, is an instantiation of that divine communication.
I could have done what some have done, and bragged and boasted that others should follow me because I have been in deep communication with the divine. In this I realized where so many traditions missed the mark. They carried a desperate need for a savior, an icon of one so high above the rest that no one could reach him, someone who had spoken with the Secret Chiefs, or someone such as Crowley, through whom Aiwass, the master of what was written, gave the Book of the Law. I do not doubt that much of what has happened through history is the pageantry of real human contact with higher beings. The error of all their ways lay in the claim that the contact belonged to the one, and that everyone else was sheltered in that one's grand vision of the world and might never reach it.
Our doctrine is published whole, the counts of every grade are written down, and the work that opened this communication to me is the same work every student is given. I teach what came to me as testimony beside argument, and I ask each student to receive in their own measure from the same gods.
Light as instruction
One question sat under all of this, and students asked it most often in the silence after a rite. They wanted to know how words spoken in a small room can touch the gods and touch the course of a life.
For many years I answered it in many images, the probe and the answer, the thread admitted, the version of the self kept in the hat. The condition that joins all those images into one I named only late, in a primer at the end of my first volume. That condition is light, which carries the instruction whole and resolves it where it lands.
The physics of the null path has a consequence for the life of the soul, and I taught it to my students many years before I knew the name John C. W. McKinley gave to the principle. When I found his work, "The Principle of Delayed Resolution: A Teleological Framework for Unifying Physical Mechanics", his principle confirmed what I had seen and taught. McKinley builds it on the zero proper time of the null path, the path of light. Read that way, the star that sends and the eye that receives are two poles of one relation, the relation is delivered whole, and its final resolution waits until the light meets something that receives it, an atom, an eye, a leaf or a living cell. What we live as the flow of time is the order in which those wholes are resolved. The light of our Sun carries an instruction as well as energy, whole on its path and resolved at interaction, and in the rite the dialogue of self and world is the reading of that instruction as it resolves.
For a long time McKinley's light lived in a few paragraphs of that primer, beside the physics of boundaries and the theory of integrated information, which I had used for years to prepare students for the operative works. In the second edition of the Doctrine it grew into a whole chapter, The Light That Is Instruction, where it carries our account of manifestation as the realization in time of a relation already whole.
That chapter also records my correction of the old language of attraction, and in the same edition I added McKinley's work to the teachers I credit in the Appreciations.
The body of light went through the same growth. For years I taught the student to enter the instruction stream "from" the body of light, to stop looking at the vehicle and start seeing from it. In recent years I gave the vehicle a name of my own, the actual ontic light-body of the theurgist, where the word ontic says that the body of light belongs to what is, beneath everything that is merely thought or felt. Seeing from the vehicle has become the organizing principle of our whole doctrine of the luminous vehicle.
Our teaching on light, on the conscious Sun and on gravity as the carrier of consciousness is my own synthesis, and I say so in the books. In physics our structural ideas come from three directions. Henry Stapp gave us his account of attention in quantum process, Leonard Susskind his holographic physics and the multiverse interpretation he developed with Raphael Bousso, and McKinley his reading of light as an instruction delivered whole.
Holding
The deepest principle in WaveForm Astrology comes from the temple, the holding of a state once it opens. Behind Stapp stands William James, who taught that the will is the effort of attention, and in WaveForm Astrology that becomes concrete, as the will is attention held.
I have long told my students that more effort in the wrong place only makes the trouble larger. WaveForm Astrology sets this down as a rule, that the remedy is diagnostic, and that adding force to a problem only feeds it. When something in a life will not come, the first question is which operator is weak and what it costs the native to keep that operator steady. In the manual's terms, more drive applied to a sequence violation simply produces more of the violation.
Cost in our astrology is the attention needed to keep a frequency sounding. A weak operator is expensive to hold, a transit can make it cheaper for a season or test it, and a native who knows which is happening can use the window. I learned this first as a ritualist. A planetary presence opened in the rite fades if I stop holding it, and it takes a particular kind of effort, steady and unforced, to keep it present through the Names and into the silence after the rite.
Holding also asks patience at the start. If you expect holding to be effortless from the first session, you will take the difficulty for failure and abandon the practice just as it begins to work. I have told this to my students many times, and I wrote it into the manual, where James gives this stage its name.
For the whole of a life read in the Sun's light I use a name of my own, the solar register.
The Decan Year and the deck
The Decan Year is the clearing of the thirty-six decans, which I call the preparation of the temple. It has no practice outside our School, and its support is my own record and the School's counts.
The Divine Arcana Tarot grew out of the same long work. We began it about 2020, and after four years of work, more than three of them in design, we finished the deck in its final form in late 2024. Its images were drawn by our Executive Artist Raju Sarkar and his team, and its Eastern scholarship was given by Subhra Bitan Ghatak, my collaborator and guide. I brought to it nearly thirty years of work with the Tarot archetypes in ritual, and the project took countless hours of study, collaboration and development, with occultists and philosophers of both the Eastern and the Western traditions. I hold great respect for Crowley's Thoth Tarot, the first deck I owned, and it remains a companion to the symbolism of our own.
In my teaching on the daemons of generation the small cards are the daemons' own forces. In our deck each small card bears the name of its daemon with the glyph of the decan's planetary ruler and the glyph of its sign, so that each card shows a god, in a House of the Sun, through its minister. Together we joined the archetypal and mythic language of Indian philosophy, Platonism, Western occultism, Jungian psychology and the gods and daemons of Greece and Rome into one symbolic unity aligned with the wheel of ROTA. The Divine Arcana Tarot is now one of the School's major works, and a student of the first grade reads it with the Doctrine. In its book my thanks go to Raju Sarkar, to Subhra Bitan Ghatak, to Timothy Desmond for the image of Jñāna yoga that opens its guide to scrying, and to the students who will work through these cards in the first grade.
The teaching meets the data
The Science of Astrology came last among the works on astrology. It gathers the measured record, from the registries of births to the long quarrel over the Mars effect, and sets our teaching beside it. We teach that the tropical signs are the Sun's modulation as the Earth receives it. When I first set that teaching beside one of the tables in that book, I found the two in agreement.
The book also checked my own arithmetic. When this work began, the odds against chance I had worked out from Gunter Sachs's figures for our Proof of Astrology videos were the first question I put to our researchers, and I asked that every one of them be checked. The method held, with one slip, and it ran against my own case, as for the crime table I had written one in 625 where Sachs's own figure gives one in 6,250. The larger correction lay in my inputs. About half of the probabilities I had carried on the Sachs slides turned out to be absent from Sachs's book, having reached me through secondary reports of his work, and one pairing I had shown as favored stands among his under-represented pairs. The book prints every one of these corrections, item by item, beside what my slides had said.
I have taught for many years that the sky can be read because psyche and Cosmos are one world, the teaching of Jung and Pauli. I have never been more moved by that teaching than in seeing it written in the records of millions.
Teaching the Thelemites
In the final two years of developing the system, my friend Anibal Alvarez became the body master of the O.T.O. in Salt Lake City, and he gave me the privilege of teaching his members in our system. I taught them over five trainings, each of three to four hours. Those sessions gave me the opportunity to sit with Thelemites, practitioners trained in Crowley's rites and in the Law of Thelema, and to grapple with how others understood my work, where it came through to them clearly and where it did not.
I took what I learned at those tables back into the books. Teaching trained ceremonialists in their own lodge greatly shaped how the work was finalized, and it showed me in practice what One Architecture argues (§13.2), that a Thelemite can take up our work without setting down the Law.
The works of 2026
The work of writing ran in one line from February 2022 to today, from the Doctrine through the deck to all the supporting works, and in 2026 it came into print. In that year the School's major works were completed, the Central Doctrine in its second edition, WaveForm Astrology, Ritual Praxis and Instruction and The Divine Arcana Tarot. A fifth followed them, The School Layman Explanation, the book of the School's composite symbol, which a student reads beside the rites in the second grade.
Beside them came the Sacred History, a history of astrology, theurgy and the priestly rites across the world, and One Architecture, which sets the system I teach beside the Golden Dawn, Thelema and the other orders. The Science of Astrology came in the same year, together with Little Suns and Dream Theurgy, the book of the night, which came straight out of my own dream journals. Divine Manifestation, my treatise on manifestation and the choosing of times, I took a great deal of time to write.
My own view of the whole of that sacred history is that the draw toward the infinite and the structure of the sky acted on one another over the centuries like a breathing, as the sky gave the pull its form and the practice of the pull kept that form in use. As an engineer I also wrote the developer specifications, the WaveForm Engine Specification and the Theurgic Manifestation Specification, for our engineers.
Election in the business
Since my turn to the sky I have also used the rite and the astrology in my working life, in my traditional engineering business. Over the last four years I have practiced divine election for myself and for my partner, Tom Langland, in that business. I have performed more than twenty operations for it, and they have produced very solid results. I have performed other operations as well, outside the business.
The method I teach and use is the one set out in our works. Theurgic alignment comes first, and in our method you enter the state of union with the immortal self and the macrocosmic order before any question of timing is touched. Election without that alignment is little more than mechanical astrology.
In The Architecture of Admission, the second part of the founding paper, I gave the doctrine of election five rules. Timing is assistance and not cause, and election is diagnostic before it is calendrical. The sequence of the operators must still be performed, the gains outlast the window, and the heliopause remains the local key. In practice this means that I name the thread in one sentence first and find which god's function it will most tax, and only then open the ephemeris. The commonest error is to elect for the god who is already strong, as such a window is exhilarating and produces rapid motion, and the thread approaches and then reverses. So I elect for the weak god first, and I use the strong god's window afterward, when the weak function can hold what the strong one brings.
Then the hour is chosen by the sky. In an election our method looks for the window in which the planetary god who governs the matter is strongest, and the rite is performed in that window.
The aim has to be sharp, as a vague objective spreads its force across too many possible futures, while a clear statement narrows the petition until it can meet the one thread it is meant for. In my own work I invoke every planet of the configuration, each in its sign, I speak the relation between them in the declarations, and I speak the purpose once, in the Pronouncement of the Election. I have found this powerful.
I keep the matters themselves between my partner and me. One of my favorite illustrations of Mercury in WaveForm Astrology, given there as a general example, comes from business, the clear target held while the vehicle is allowed to change. A person may hold a definite revenue figure as the intended result and stop insisting on the channel, and then a different client type, a joint venture or a licensing arrangement appears and delivers it.