Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Travelling in the Spirit Vision
Convert passive inner viewing into active first-person experience: notice a figure moving in the imagined scene, recognise it as your own figure, then deliberately look out through its eyes and direct its movements so you can explore the scene from inside rather than watch it from outside.
Travelling in the Spirit Vision: Open a scene and relax.
(1) Notice a distant figure moving in it — you’re watching “through a telescope.”
(2) Recognise it is your own figure.
(3) Look through its eyes and feel its sensations — flip from watching to being inside.
(4) Direct its motions with small deliberate moves, then explore from inside. Observe more than you steer; test what’s autonomous; return through the figure, ground, and journal. Read honestly, it’s a third-person→first-person imagery switch — powerful for embodiment, not a window onto an outer world.
What it is
Where Brodie-Innes’s Dewdrop Vision is about opening an inner scene, this practice is about entering it. In Flying Roll No. XXV he describes a precise four-stage progression by which a practitioner stops being a spectator of an inner landscape and becomes a participant moving inside it.
You first become “dimly conscious of a figure walking among the scenes of the new country,” then realise “it is my own figure I am looking at,” then learn “to look through the eyes — and feel with the sensations of this doppel ganger,” and finally “consciously to direct its motions, to control it, to inhabit it, and in this body to be able to visit the scenes and persons I had previously only looked at, as it were, through a telescope.” Stripped of its metaphysics, this is a clean, teachable shift of imagery viewpoint — from watching yourself at a distance (third-person / observer) to seeing and feeling from inside the figure (first-person / field) — the same perspective switch used in mental rehearsal, exposure imagery, and method acting, and the felt engine of Neville-style “living in the end.”
The Method
A faithful working of Brodie-Innes’s account (short quotes from Flying Roll XXV):
- Open a scene first. Settle, relax toward the quiet hypnagogic edge, and open an inner landscape by your usual route — a known symbol, a Tattva doorway, a remembered place. (Use the Dewdrop method to get there; this practice begins once a scene is present.)
- Spot the figure in the distance. Do not yet try to be anywhere. Simply notice, as he puts it, that you are “dimly conscious of a figure walking among the scenes of the new country.” At this stage you are watching, “as it were, through a telescope.”
- Recognise the figure as your own. Let the recognition arrive — “gradually to become conscious that it is my own figure I am looking at.” You are seeing a second self, a “doppel ganger,” moving in the scene.
- Cross into its senses. Gently transfer your point of view into that figure: “to be able to look through the eyes — and feel with the sensations of this doppel ganger.” The view flips from outside to inside; you now see from where it stands and feel what it would feel.
- Take the controls. Once the viewpoint holds, add volition: “consciously to direct its motions, to control it, to inhabit it.” Walk it, turn its head, reach out — let small deliberate movements confirm you are inside, not merely overlaid.
- Travel and observe. From inside, visit the scenes and figures you could before only watch from afar. Move slowly; observe more than you stage-manage (over-directing collapses it back into ordinary daydream — see the spectator test below).
- Return the way you came. Step back out of the figure, withdraw your viewpoint to your seated body, return to the breath and the room, ground (light, movement, water), and journal at once. (Sourcing note: a faithful paraphrase with short attributed quotations from Brodie-Innes’s Flying Roll XXV; the four-stage progression — distant figure → recognised as one’s own → looking through its eyes → consciously directing it — is his own first-person description, including the “doppel ganger” and “telescope” phrasings.)
Source & Lineage
John William Brodie-Innes (1848-1923) was a Scottish lawyer and senior Golden Dawn adept who led the Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh and remained loyal to MacGregor Mathers through the Order’s schisms. Flying Roll No.
XXV is the Order’s clearest first-person account of how a seer crosses from passive clairvoyant looking into active astral travelling. Brodie-Innes was himself unsure of the mechanism — he wrote that it was “as though my Consciousness had extruded from my own body to take possession of a body which I had either created for the purpose, or invoked out of the Astral Sphere” — an honesty worth preserving: he could not tell whether the travelling body was made or found.
The technique sits between Mathers’s Tattva scrying (which opens the doorway) and the structured pathworking of Knight and others (which supplies a route).
The Traditions' versions
The decisive move — switch from watching an imagined self to seeing and acting from inside it — recurs wherever imagery is used seriously; Brodie-Innes’s signature is staging it as an explicit, gradual crossing-over:
- Building / inhabiting a magical image (Butler, Conway) — constructing a figure and then stepping into it.,
- Assumption of the godform — overlaying and looking out as a deity-form, the same first-person merge applied to an archetype.
- Stabilising and exploring the out-of-body state (Ziewe, Buhlman) — modern projection literature describing the same shift into a mobile second body.,
- Acting “as if” / first-person mental rehearsal — adopting the field viewpoint to recruit emotion and behaviour.
Common refinements
Trying to jump straight to control. The power is in the gradual crossing. Skipping from “I see a scene” to “I am marching around it” usually snaps back to flat daydream. Honour the stages: distant figure → recognise → look through → then direct.
- Forcing the viewpoint flip. The observer→field switch is allowed, not wrenched. Soften, intend to be “behind the eyes,” and let it settle; straining blocks it.
- Over-directing. Once inside, observe more than you script. Heavy stage-management dissolves the autonomous feel that made it worth entering.
- No grounding loop. Always exit through the figure and back to the body; don’t just open your eyes from “inside.” Re-anchor in the room and journal while it is fresh.
- Skipping the discernment check. Pair with the spectator test to tell genuine, self-consistent material from wishful steering, and banish obvious projection before trusting a scene.