THE Rockwax Foundation

Tag: Duncan Fleming

  • My Face Is Outer Space

    “My Face Is Outer Space” is a track from the 2023 War Against Sleep album Mysteries of the Impossible. It is about an unusual experience I had in the Central Library shortly after moving to Bristol in my early twenties.

    The lyrics tell the story:

    When I was 23, just moved to the city
    I was clean and I was pretty
    Hanging around in the library
    When the Spirit came upon me
    Said do you wanna see my face?
    My face is your face
    My face is outer space

    Although it can happen spontaneously to anyone at any age, it’s an experience often described by people who meditate, or who have just done a load of mushrooms etc. It can occur by surprise while they are simply going about their everyday lives.

    Briefly, the artificial boundary between oneself and the outside world dissolves, and our limited sense of self temporarily expands to vast proportions, leaving a profound sense of being all that is. “I see a tree” becomes “As a tree, I see myself.” We become everything looking at everything.

    Detail from Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi

    After a while, you can deliberately slip into this state by just allowing yourself to relax and become aware of your surroundings, then letting yourself disappear into an awareness that you are the place watching itself. This gets easier with practice. But sometimes it just happens spontaneously. I once had an intense experience of this kind while I was standing in the queue at a chip shop! I suddenly became everything watching itself, and the experience lingered for quite a while.

    In my own encounters with this state, it tends to last until my ego concerns reassert themselves. These concerns, usually focused on a desire to draw aspects of the external world closer to me or push them away, i.e. likes and dislikes, presume a separate self, and so I’m pulled back into differentiated ego perception. The boundaries of the ego are like an elastic band that can be stretched but will eventually snap back to its usual tension. So it is an altered state rather than a permanent change in one’s stage of consciousness. It’s an interesting phenomenon but not that much of a big deal in the long run.

    Sometimes, this experience of oneness deepens into a sense of great vastness. It’s no longer just the immediate physical environment that is unified, but everything, everywhere, for all time. Hence, “my face is outer space!” type experiences.

    These flashes of a heightened reality can be really intense, especially when they happen in the context of love. While being caressed, you might spontaneously feel as though you are entering the caress as eternal life. If you are kissed, and the kiss is given with love, then you are truly being kissed by love, not just by the lips.

    Following an experience like this, a residual awareness can persist in everyday life. We carry a background sense that all phenomena occurring within time and space, the entirety of our existence, unfold within an expansive, boundless space. This is definitely an experience, not a belief. Importantly, this sense of boundlessness includes “I”, “it”, “you”, and “that”: everything, just ourselves. We are all part of this limitless unity.

    Staying with this background awareness can cause shifts in the psyche. First, a new kind of duality appears: a simple, fundamental knowing that everything is essentially okay in some ineffable way, despite external circumstances that are clearly not okay. Our previous existential crises and dark nights of the soul find a partial resolution through this really odd intuitive understanding. For some, this is dislocating, but for others it can make them feel more connected with the core of their being.

    There’s also a moral dimension to this experience, which I will not go into in any depth here, although I will say more about it at some point. A heightened sensitivity can develop towards the suffering of others. Recognising that they, too, are part of the same interconnected whole, we realise that our wellbeing is intrinsically linked to theirs. Normally, we place ourselves at the centre, and a toothache in our own mouth is always more of a big deal than a famine on the other side of the world, because we have to look after ourselves as living creatures. But this shift from “us and them” towards a shared “us” is, I think, the basis of compassion.

    Although that might sound lofty and pretentious, like those people who enjoy broadcasting the fact that they are “empaths”, it’s just part of the experience. Unfortunately, it does not always produce any corresponding increase in kindness or considerate behaviour.

    There’s also a potential pitfall in this temporary non-dual awareness. If I identify with all that exists, including what you call yourself, then, in some sense, I am you. Boundaries dissolve and appear artificial and arbitrary. From this vantage point, I might feel that any act is permissible, even one considered harmful or evil from another person’s perspective, since we’re not truly separate, but one being with many faces. Why do I need your consent if I am you? The danger is that, unless I have an inherent respect for individual boundaries, I can do whatever I please at the expense of everyone and everything else.

    Also, when expressed clumsily, all this can come across as a banal platitude: “Love is everywhere, so stop worrying.” To someone who is suffering and has not had this experience, such a statement will probably feel shallow and insulting. It can’t be proselytised or recommended as advice, let alone offered as a panacea for someone else’s anguish or material hardship. In fact, doing so can become a kind of cosmic conceit. Ironically, the experience itself arises only when the immediate conceit of the ego dissolves. Would you rather have banality disguised as cryptic wisdom, or cryptic wisdom disguised as banality? Either way, both carry a cost.

    As for the rather silly recording of “My Face Is Outer Space”, like most of my War Against Sleep output, nearly everything was tracked separately rather than recorded by a whole band playing together. Most of it was recorded in my attic studio, except for the drums, which we recorded in a friend’s cellar rehearsal space.

    Andy Sutor, who I played with in the Emily Breeze band, is a very talented drummer with great taste, which I encouraged him to jettison completely so that he could make the drums fills as lavish as possible for this track. Rob Norbury needed no such encouragement. I only had to say things like “more Nile Rodgers” and “more camp” to get the electric guitar solos as ridiculous as they are.

    The song began as an instrumental, essentially trying to emulate an unusual recording called “Emma” by Hot Chocolate, which I was a bit obsessed with at the time. The chords and some of the musical DNA of “Emma” are still there, but everything else is quite different.

    The clarinet is played by my mum, Sheila Fleming. She plays very simply and clearly, and I have to write the notes out for her. There is no vaguely humming a tune and expecting her to copy it. The backing vocal chord clusters are inspired by “Candy Says” by the Velvet Underground.

    Anyway, here are some links to the recording of “My Face Is Outer Space”, which I hope you do enjoy.

    https://music.apple.com/gb/album/my-face-is-outer-space/1703621370?i=1703621381

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  • On making incense

    Duncan Fleming 8/8/2026

    Beyond luxuriating in pleasant fragrances, certain aromatic resins, herbs, oils, and other ingredients are traditionally associated with aspects of the Divine. Incense burned on charcoal can purify space, evoke particular energies, and improve focus during ritual. Our sense of smell evokes deep memories and can more readily bring us back to a previous state of consciousness, especially when the same scents are used repeatedly in a particular context.

    Good Sephirotic incense blends are hard to find. Trevor Jones made excellent incense, sold in Glastonbury, and Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Leeds also produced interesting Sephirotic blends – perhaps they still do. Towards the end of the twentieth century, I was advised to write to the reclusive Margaret Bruce, who had largely retired but was still supplying her remarkable incense by post to existing customers. I bought several of her ‘Qabalah’ blends, which I used for many years in personal practice and group work. (See The Magick and Mystery of Maurice/Margaret Bruce by for a fantastic account of her life and work.)

    Margaret Bruce ‘Qabalah’ incense

    What is remarkable is that these incense blends retained both their fragrance and their potency for decades. Margaret Bruce extolled the virtue of leaving her incense to steep for several years, on the basis that incense blends, like whisky or wine, improved with age. Sadly, when she died, her recipes appear to have been lost to the mists of time. I have concluded, with independent advice, that her blends were exceptionally complex and could not be reproduced in practice.

    Like the ashes of the Red Heifer, once they are gone, they are gone forever. So the only thing to do was start again from first principles. In much the same way that it is usually better to make your own magical tools, even if they are not as slick or professionally finished as something bought off the shelf, they benefit from having been crafted by you. The process of making them is a magical act of will in itself, and I think the same is true of incense.

    Crafting your own incense for ritual use does require careful observation, patience, and plenty of trial and error. It is as much a practical craft as a symbolic one, and understanding how aromatic materials behave in real-world conditions is essential to using them effectively.

    A word of warning about traditional correspondences. Biblical, Agrippa, and Crowley’s 777, etc., all provide useful hints, but they shouldn’t always be taken as definitive recipes. Sometimes the exact botanical or animal product referred to is uncertain. Sometimes it may no longer exist, or only a particular plant strain produces the aromatic extract originally intended.

    Take Dittany of Crete, for example, traditionally associated with the Sephirah Malkuth. It is an aromatic herb, but when burned it just smells like a bonfire. It’s pretty much unusable in incense, except in the tiniest pinch, simply out of respect for the correspondence. It does, though, produce a great deal of thick smoke, and there may be some association with making spirits visible in the rising plumes. Personally, I think that connection is tenuous, as there are other, much better-smelling substances that produce just as much smoke.

    More Dittany of Crete than I will ever need

    When I first started making incense, I accumulated quite a collection of books. They were a useful starting point, but I would take many of the published recipes for Sephirotic incense with a huge pinch of salt. Some books contain hundreds of formulas, and one has to wonder whether the author has really spent time testing each one. It is all too easy to throw together an incense by following correspondences that make sense on paper, but does it actually smell good? I have tried some that were theoretically right but, in practice, were really horrible.

    There’s also a temptation to think that the rarer and more exotic the ingredients, the more profound the result will be, which I don’t think is true. Every ingredient has a cost, not just financial. Frankincense, myrrh, and other resins are the dried tears of wounded trees, sometimes sourced from war-torn regions. The quality of ingredients varies enormously, though there can be a certain amount of snobbery, as though only one impossibly rare variety will do. It is also worth remembering that some aromatic substances simply do not agree with everyone. Not necessarily because of full allergies, but because of unusual physical reactions. They might make some people sneeze or make their eyes sore. That is not what we want during group work.

    Some traditional incenses also use animal products such as ambergris, produced by sperm whales, and musk. I once accidentally bought a small amount of castoreum for a recipe before discovering it comes from beavers’ scent glands. It is certainly very pungent and adds a persistent animal note to a blend, but I won’t be buying it again.

    Asafoetida is another interesting ingredient. On its own, it smells repugnant, but in tiny quantities it seems to work like MSG in cooking, adding a punch that brings out the other ingredients. Traditionally, it is associated with dispelling unwanted or unredeemed spirits, and you can tell why when you use too much.

    Finding ingredients is so much easier now than when I first began, thanks to internet shopping, although there is still no substitute for buying them in person if you can. Being able to see and smell the raw materials before buying them tells you a great deal. My favourite place remains Star Child in Glastonbury, which consistently stocks good-quality raw ingredients. I have used their individual ingredients for years, although I have much less experience with their pre-mixed incense blends.

    I’m particularly interested in Sephirotic incense, since Kabbalah is central to my working tradition. They are not exactly the same as the planetary correspondences associated with the Sephiroth, although there is some overlap. I have been working towards creating a set of Sephirotic incense recipes, and this is what I have learned.

    The aromatic gum forms the foundation. Essential oils, herbs, spices, or seeds may be included, but the main body of the incense will usually consist of one of the principal resins: frankincense, myrrh, opoponax, and so on. In practice, there is often surprisingly little essential oil or herb in the finished blend.

    Incense blend

    Like a liquid perfume, blended incense benefits from having top, middle, and base notes. The brighter top notes usually come from essential oils, but they also disappear first when heated. As a general rule, the longer a blend is left to mature, the more thoroughly the oils combine with the other ingredients and the more gradually they are released, rather than simply burning off in the first few seconds. You can also, to some extent, control how quickly the incense burns by adjusting the size of the resin pieces and degree of grinding for other ingredients. Crushing them more finely with a pestle and mortar increases the combustible surface area and alters both how the fragrance develops and how quickly it burns.

    Whenever I make a new blend, I prepare very small test batches, no more than a teaspoon in total, and burn them on a single charcoal disc. I take notes, adjust the proportions, and try again. It sometimes takes half a dozen attempts, or more, before I arrive at something practical, pleasing, and genuinely evocative of the Sphere it is intended to represent.

    There is also the more complex question of how the individual Sephirotic incenses work when combined together. Ideally, they should harmonise when used in pairs or triads. I want them to chime together like different instruments in a piece of music, complementing rather than competing with one another. No single fragrance should dominate the others.

    I am by no means an expert. I can only share what basic practical experience has taught me. Use your hands and your nose, and experiment – a lot. Trust your senses and your intuition. Keep a notebook and fill it with observations, however strange they may seem. Record what ingredients smell like when they burn, because this is often very different from how they smell at room temperature. Sometimes the most wonderfully fragrant materials become acrid on charcoal, while ingredients that hardly smell at all before burning become quite extraordinary. Adapt and keep refining. Incense making is much more an art than a science. Use your incense as often as you can in ritual. It will gradually become associated with particular states of consciousness, and years later a familiar fragrance can transport you straight back to where you were before.

  • Why I don’t charge for teaching

    Duncan Fleming 1/8/2026

    I don’t charge for teaching Kabbalah, and I never have. This is partly because I wasn’t charged for being taught myself. It is a bit like an intergenerational model of care, where you receive something from one generation and, in time, pass it on to the next. This approach lends itself very well to one-to-one teaching, which works rather like an apprenticeship. You work closely with someone for a few years, showing them everything you can about the Tradition, and then they either go on to practise and teach it successfully themselves, or they bail out.

     

    I started teaching in the late 1990s, and over the years this apprenticeship model has remained the foundation of my practice. It is a traditional model, with an individual teacher and pupil. Sometimes a small cohort approaches for teaching at the same time. If the timing is right, I can teach them some basic theory and practice together and hold small group discussions up to a point. But people learn at different paces. They have their own quirks and special interests, and the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t really work beyond the absolute basics.

    The tradition I teach uses a graded system, with formal examinations and aptitude tests along the way. This teaching is iterative and needs to build on what has come before, so I need to know that students have a firm footing and can do the basics well before I teach them anything more specific and pokey. Having a higher grade doesn’t mean you have any moral superiority. It is more like learning a martial art or a musical instrument.

    As well as passing on the theory and techniques of practical Kabbalah and ritual magic, including making and consecrating tools and devising magical operations, teaching is about helping people develop a working relationship with the Spheres of the Tree of Life.

    The most important thing people need to learn right at the beginning is how to open up and close down properly. By opening up, I mean entering a vastly expanded, semiotically aroused state of consciousness. Closing down means returning safely to everyday consciousness, with your feet firmly back on the ground. When I’m passing on techniques with practical intensity, I am concerned about aftercare and any subsequent repercussions. Yes, people have to learn from their own mistakes, but some of this stuff can be like dynamite.

    The teaching is not just cerebral theory, or even just theory combined with technique. There is also an emotional, moral, and spiritual aspect to it. When we learn to work with and relate to the Spheres of the Tree of Life, we contact and energise those Spheres within ourselves. We then need to balance and integrate them into our being more deeply than before. Otherwise, we can end up lopsided and distorted, and even more inert, idle, dishonest, selfish, and arrogant than we were before we began.

    Teaching Kabbalah is not psychotherapy. I’ve worked as a psychotherapist, and it’s quite different. It can, however, be an intimate relationship. There is no expectation that a student will bare their soul to you and tell you all their hopes and dreams, but at some point, if they are doing the work with any conviction, things get a bit real. There is a requirement to be more honest about motivations, rather like peeling away the layers of an onion.

    For this reason, the Tradition I teach requires extensive interpersonal contact between teacher and student. That contact is difficult to maintain in a group setting, as the teacher’s attention is divided and each student brings different needs, capacities, and areas of difficulty. Some basic teaching can be done collectively, but the deeper work usually requires a more individual relationship.

    After the very first stages, I think my relationship with a student is more like that of a sponsor in a mutual aid group. Instead of presenting myself as some kind of all-wise hierophant, I can be honest that I am just a person who has been as broken and confused as anyone else by life’s challenges. I have found a spiritual tradition that has been very helpful to me, so I will show anyone who is genuinely interested how it works and help them build the spiritual contacts and personal framework they need to sort out their own mess.

    So why not charge? It would seem reasonable to take a fee for teaching. If I did, I might be able to devote more time to it. But charging is not in keeping with the spirit of the Tradition in which I was raised. It simply goes against the grain.

    That said, I have no objection to charging for items that genuinely cost money to produce, such as books or music. Printing books, recording albums, manufacturing them, and getting them into people’s hands all involve real costs. Teaching, as I understand it, is a different kind of relationship.

    There are other good reasons for me not to charge. When we take money, people quite reasonably expect a product in return. That might be a defined package of teaching, such as a certificate of attendance, or a series of achievement badges, as in the Scouts or Guides. I am keen to emphasise from the outset that there are no prizes. The Crown is hollow. Attainment is an illusion, and the only reward for hard work is more of the same. I don’t want to enter into a transaction with students. I just want to help them and teach them.

    Any projection of the teacher archetype onto me might help in the very early stages, when someone is building enthusiasm and perhaps seeking approval or secret knowledge, but it needs to fall away quickly as we move into the intermediate stages. In my experience, the stronger the projection of the teacher archetype onto a living teacher, the greater the disappointment and resentment when the student realises what they have been doing. As in a Drama Triangle, the rescuer can seem to turn into the persecutor overnight, while the student becomes the victim. When this happens, the student may simply move on, join another group, and seek another teacher, but there is no opportunity to go further until this projection is overcome.

    I also don’t run workshops or weekend experiences. This is not intended as a critique of those who do, as these can be excellent ways for people interested in occult matters to sample different traditions. It is easy to cock a snook at the spiritual marketplace. Of course, there are grifters, as well as eternal joiners who flit from one thing to another without ever getting to grips with the basic ontological and spiritual conundrums of their lives. That doesn’t mean everyone who offers or attends a workshop falls into either category.

    I have also made a commitment to teach in the most inclusive way I can, which means not allowing fees to become a barrier for those who cannot afford them. Of course, it is possible to charge and then say that the fee will be waived or reduced if someone cannot afford it. But there is often stigma attached to that, and it can be very difficult to ask for a fee waiver or reduction when you are hard up. I certainly would not have been able to pay for teaching when I started.

    Still, there are some inevitable expenses. Practical equipment costs money. It is not extortionate, but certain materials may cost a few quid. Unless activities are confined to spare rooms in people’s houses, there will also be costs such as venue hire and travel. These can be handled in the same way as in any small group, with people chipping in what they can, without anyone having to pay subs.

    We started the Rockwax Foundation as a registered charity in 2011 to provide a public face for the teaching offered by me and two other experienced teachers who work closely together within the same Tradition. Charitable status helps with practical matters, such as receiving donations. It also provides a relatively respectable public face and a website. The website has brought in a trickle of enquiries from potential students over the years, serving much the same purpose as a postcard in an occult bookshop did before the internet.

    I suspect this is both the strength and the precariousness of this particular way of teaching. There is no great funnel effect, with a large cohort taught through a weekend workshop or correspondence course, followed by more specialist teaching for those who show greater dedication and interest. The numbers are always esoteric, in the sense that they are for the few. But that’s all right. I only have so many spare hours.

    I also don’t really want to play shopkeeper or sell teaching. Life is complicated enough. I am happy earning money in more straightforward and reliable ways. I don’t need another part-time job.

    The real cost of teaching, of course, is people’s time and dedication. Nobody has to put in the time required for the practical work, meditation, and everything else. But if they don’t, there’s little point in me continuing to teach them, as my time is too valuable to waste on people who are not dedicated. In that sense, there is a cost, but it must be paid willingly. It cannot be paid in advance, only in the present moment, through an ongoing commitment to the Work.

    I nearly didn’t write this because I know quite a few serious and responsible teachers who work in a very different way, and I don’t mean to disparage or criticise them. This is not an argument that nobody should charge for spiritual teaching. It is an explanation of why, for me, teaching must always be free and freely given.

    For more information on the Rockwax Foundation teaching charity, visit www.rockwax.org.uk.

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