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Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: psychedelic_hermetics on May 09, 2013, 11:26 pm
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Psychedelic Hermetics is an ongoing experiment that I am working on. I have been studying for over ten years and I am looking to increase the data-set. If you have an interest in meditation, psychedelic drugs, mysticism, or magic, then this is the thread for you. Initiation into Hermetics by Franz Bardon is the most complete spiritual training course available in print. As can be seen below, it is my hypothesis that Psychedelic Drugs can, and do help one in spiritual pursuits.
Everyone is invited to participate. What follows below is a guide that I made for myself a while back, and hopefully it will help you too. Also, I'm looking for corrections, for practical applications of the theory, for anything at all really...whether it supports my theory or not. Let's find out if I'm right, wrong, or somewhere in between!
I copied and pasted the following text from a Word document I put together, so the formatting is not quite right, but it will have to suffice.
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Psychedelic Hermetics
An Ongoing Experiment
By
Pseudonym
Program to follow:
1.) Get Initiation into Hermetics by Franz Bardon and the books of Rawn Clark. They are on Amazon and reasonably priced. All exercises have been taken directly from them. What follows is my outline of their material and my experiences with it.
2.) Step I of IIH, master each exercise without cannabis then master the exercise with cannabis before moving to the next exercise.
3.) With the cannabis, start with a low dose (erowid dosage listing) and then go higher. Don’t move on to the next exercise until the present exercise has been mastered using the highest dosage from the erowid dosage chart.
4.) Once per week do the current exercises at whatever level of the Psychedelic Experience I am currently at, whether the exercises have been mastered or not.
5.) During the course of Step I, learn and use Empowered Remembering.
6.) During Step I, learn and use Know Thy Self.
7.) During Step 1, learn and use Mental Discipline of the Emotions.
8.) During Step 1 learn and use Bruce’s deep relaxation.
9.) For the actual 1 hour twice daily practice, devote 20 min to Spirit, 30 min to Soul, and 10 minutes to Physical (air).
10.) Use free time for Know Thy Self and Emotional Exercises.
11.) Step II of IIH, master everything with the highest dose of cannabis from Step I and add larger and larger amounts of kief.
12.) Learn and use Center of Stillness for Spirit exercises.
13.) Learn and use the TMO Self-Healing guide for Soul exercises.
14.) Use the last emotions exercise, creating emotions, just like creating with the senses in the Step II Spirit section.
Introduction
Psychedelic Drugs without Hermetic or Yogic training is like playing a guitar without any training, without any guitar lessons. There has been quite a bit written about psychedelics and yoga, and psychedelics and shamanism, but I have found nothing which relates psychedelics with Bardonian Hermetic practice, so this is my feeble attempt to fill the void.
If you haven’t read about the five levels of psychedelic experience, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_experience#Levels_of_psychedelic_experience
If you don’t know anything about Bardonian Hermetics, you can go to both http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiation_into_hermetics http://www.abardoncompanion.com
I believe that psychedelic drugs can awaken a desire for the spiritual, and more than this, I have long thought that there may be a correlation between the five levels (or ten, i.e. Level 1 and Level 1b, etc.) of psychedelic experience and the Ten Steps of Bardonian Hermetics. My current hypothesis is twofold and quite simple.
First, I believe that Level 1 correlates with Steps I and II, Level 2 with Steps III and IV, and so on. For instance, Level 1 promotes introspection, which occurs at Step I of IIH. Level 4 effects include “Out-of-body experiences and ESP type phenomena,” which coincide with Steps VII and VIII. These are just two examples of correlation, but there are many more at every Level and Step. Second, I also believe that the proper use of psychedelics will not only increase the rapidity with which one can complete the exercises in IIH, but will also increase the depth and quality achieved in mastering the exercises.
I believe that the psychedelics have two major functions in regard to the Hermetic practice. First, it would seem that after mastering an exercise, or after at least achieving a certain degree of skill, the drug(s) may increase one’s abilities. It may offer the practitioner greater insight, greater power, and a greater facility with that with which he is working.
Second, if one cannot seem to achieve any success with an exercise, the drug(s) may allow one to experience what is meant by success with an exercise. This will give the practitioner the certain knowledge that he can achieve what he is attempting and give him inspiration and a target to shoot for. This is a perfect application of the Art of Empowered Remembering.
So, to summarize my hypotheses:
1.) Psychedelic drugs can both catalyze a desire for spiritual growth and increase the rapidity with which this growth may be achieved.
2.) The levels of the Psychedelic Experience correspond with the Steps of Hermetic Initiation.
3.) The proper use of psychedelic drugs can decrease the amount of time required to complete the course and increase the knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and abilities acquired during the steps.
4.) Psychedelic drugs can increase one’s facility with already mastered techniques and show one the way toward mastering new techniques.
Chapter 1
First, here are a few preliminaries. The spirit, soul, and physical exercises are to be worked on concurrently. So, while beginning the first exercise from the spirit section, you also begin the first exercise from the soul section, and the exercises from the physical section.
Each of the three sections is designed to be finished at roughly the same time. So, when you have completed all the mental exercises, you should have also completed the soul exercises around the same time.
Step I in its entirety should take roughly 4-6 weeks depending on natural aptitude and the amount of time and effort that one has put into regularly practicing. The rest of the Steps seem to take about 3-6 months to complete.
The most ideal amount of practice per day is 1 hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. This may not be possible for you at this moment, but it is better to start with something small than to not do anything at all. As the exercises become more and more interesting, you will naturally prioritize them over watching TV and other less productive pursuits.
So, while two hours a day is ideal, start with 5 or 10 minutes and go from there. Nothing will ever be ideal, so use what you have to the best of your ability.
Here’s my final tip: There is a quote I heard some time ago, and I'm not sure who said it, but the gist of it is, “Seek not after results.” When I first started, I was always disappointed because I wasn’t getting the results right away. Also, I realized that we tend to overestimate what we can do in a week and underestimate what we can do in a year.
I found that the best way to go through these exercises and to achieve the desired results is to simply do the exercises. In other words, put the future out of your mind and focus on doing the exercise. Treat the exercises the way a child treats a bike: Riding the bike is good exercise, but children ride them for fun. Think of the exercises themselves as something you enjoy doing, and in the same way that a child gets exercise from riding a bike, you will reap the rewards of the Hermetic exercises. Then, all of a sudden one day you will realize that you have mastered the exercises and it will be quite exciting for you. Day by day you may have ups and downs, successes and failures. Instead of magnifying the day by day, look at the larger perspective and realize that if one does the exercises daily, he will over the course of time come to master the exercises.
Over the course of 10 years, one should be able to completely master all 10 Steps of Bardonian Hermetics when the rate and frequency of practice is 2+ hours per day. Steps I-VIII can probably be accomplished in 4-5 years if one practices 2 hours a day. Steps IX and X will take considerably longer than the others—probably 5-6 years to complete, if not longer.
I do Sun-Thurs regular practice, Fri, mundane chores and the like, and Sat practice with drugs. Here is a rough outline of practice for Step I:
Week 1
-Mental exercise 1 with Bruce’s deep relaxation
-Black Mirror List
-Air, food, water, and morning routine.
-Emotions exercise 1
-KTS meditation 1 with recording
Week 2
-Mental exercise 1 with Bruce’s deep relaxation and mental exercise 2
-Black Mirror Elemental groups
-Air, food, water, and morning routine.
-Emotions exercise 2
-KTS meditation 1 without recording.
Week 3
-Mental exercise 3 with Bruce’s deep relaxation
-Black mirror groups 1-3
-Air, food, water, and morning routine.
-Emotions exercise 3
-KTS meditation 2 with recording
Week 4
-Mental exercise 3 with Bruce’s deep relaxation
-White Mirror list
-Air, food, water, and morning routine
-Emotions exercise 4
-KTS meditation 2 without recording
Week 5
-Mental exercise 4 with Bruce’s deep relaxation
-White mirror elemental groups
-Air, food, water, and morning routine
-Emotions exercise 5
-KTS meditation 3 with recording
Week 6
-Mental exercise 4 with Bruce’s deep relaxation
-White mirror groups 1-3
-Air, food, water, and morning routine
-Emotions exercise 6
-KTS meditation 3 without recording
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Step I—Spirit
A.) Thought Observation
1.) Sit or lie down. A recliner would be the most ideal, half sitting, and half lying. You’re very comfortable, but not so much so that you fall asleep. If the recliner is overly relaxing and you find yourself slipping in and out of consciousness and having difficulty concentrating and focusing, get a chair with good back support. Sit straight up with the chair against the wall to support your head. This quite effectively prevents any nodding off or being lost in the mental jungle of thoughts. It helps keep you grounded and focused.
2.) Relax your entire body* (See Appendix A.)
3.) Close your eyes
4.) Observe your thoughts
5.) Do this exercise for at least 10 minutes twice per day. Start with just a few minutes, then when you are able to do a full 10 minutes, move on to the next exercise.
--Notes on Thought Observation
1.) Take the position of a silent observer, completely free and independent of these thoughts
2.) Do not forget yourself and do not lose the train of thoughts.
3.) Observe attentively.
4.) You are observing your unintentional, reactionary awareness with your intentional awareness.
5.) The object is to keep from getting sucked in by these thoughts and to simply observe. It’s like watching a bird fly from tree to tree, or watching a car pass by on the street
6.) Do not let the thoughts influence or excite your thinking.
7.) The goal here is to separate yourself from your own surface mind.
B.) Discipline of Thoughts
1.) Do everything with complete awareness and full consciousness.
--Notes on the Discipline of thoughts
1.) When you tie your shoes, you tie your shoes; when you drink tea, you drink tea.
2.) When you’re at work, think only about work. When you’re at home, think only about things related to the home.
3.) Do this whether you are dealing with something major or with something minor.
4.) Pay attention to everything as if you are trying to remember every detail perfectly.
5.) Make your thoughts pertain only to the task at hand.
6.) It is about focusing your attention where you want it to be focused.
7.) Keep your attention focused on what you are physically doing in the present moment instead of involving yourself with the mind chatter.
8.) Practice this for the rest of your life.
9.) A very practical application of this technique is in learning lucid dreaming. If you are very aware of your surroundings, it just takes one small step to do some reality checks to see if you are dreaming. By doing reality checks throughout the day it will become a habit. Once it has become a habit, you will do reality checks when you are dreaming. Lucid dreaming can be very helpful for Step II Soul exercises.
C.) One-pointedness of Thought
1.) Sit or lie down.
2.) Relax your entire body.* (See Appendix A.)
3.) Close your eyes.
4.) Hold on to one thought or idea for at least 10 minutes.
5.) Suppress, resist, and reject all other thoughts that come up and try to obtrude on you.
6.) Keep your attention focused where you want it, on the thought or idea. Each time your attention wanders, bring it back to the chosen subject.
D.) Emptiness of Mind
1.) Sit or lie down
2.) Relax your entire body* (See Appendix A.)
3.) Close your eyes
4.) Dismiss and reject any thought that comes upon you
5.) Nothing is allowed to appear or happen in your mind
6.) There must be absolute vacancy
7.) Hold on to this emptiness without digressing or forgetting yourself for at least 10 minutes
--Notes on the Emptiness of Mind
1.) Focus your intentional awareness directly on the silence of the emptiness. Do not focus on your breathing or similar. Focus solely upon the empty mind itself.
2.) Focusing on breathing or similar diverts the mind but does not directly address the problem.
3.) Your mind should be empty of not only thoughts, but emotions, physical sensations, and any other distractions as well. You should be focused entirely inside your own mind. You’re going inside yourself, like when you’re dreaming. When you’re dreaming, you’re not really aware of anything but what’s in your mind.
4.) Exclude thinking, feeling, and physical sensation. Focus exclusively upon pure perception without interpretation.
5.) Turn your attention away from distractions-such as thinking, feeling, and physical sensation-and turn it toward the silence.
6.) Shift your attention completely away from its involvement with thoughts and thinking and focus it instead on the peaceful silence that exists in the absence of thought.
7.) Practice this exercise for the rest of your life, deepening it.
Step I—Soul
A.) Introspection and self-knowledge
1.) Examine or observe one’s own characteristics.
2.) Record all your negative characteristics.
3.) Be pitiless and very strict with yourself when it comes to your shortcomings, failings, habits, passions, urges and any other negative character traits.
4.) Be unrelenting towards yourself and do not glorify any of your failings and shortcomings.
5.) Think about yourself in quiet meditation, put yourself back into different situations of your past, and remember how you behaved then and what mistakes, failures, and shortcomings occurred in the various situations.
6.) Record all weaknesses in their finest nuances and variations. The more you discover the better. Nothing should remain hidden; everything should be unveiled, whether the failings and weaknesses, faults or frailties, be significant or insignificant.
7.) Wash your soul perfectly clean; sweep all the dust out of it.
8.) Through very deep and intensive contemplation, try to assign each of your negative characteristics to one of the four elements, Fire, Air, Water, or Earth. If you are unsure where to put a trait, put it in a category labeled unknown.
9.) Meditate on each characteristic in the above mentioned categories and divide them again into three groups and record them in your journal.
a. Group 1: Those negative characteristics that influence you the most and create
the greatest problems, even under the most trivial circumstances.
b. Group 2: Negative characteristics that occur less frequently and have less of an
influence.
c. Group 3: Negative characteristics that occur infrequently and have very little
influence on you.
10.) Do all of the above exercises for your positive character traits as well.
--Notes on Introspection and Self-Knowledge
1.) Work conscientiously at all times; it is worthwhile.
2.) What is required here is a radical self-honesty. One must ruthlessly
penetrate through all of his/her illusions regarding who they are and how they act in
the world, and excavate the unadorned root of the matter.
3.) Remember that the unsavory parts that you uncover are simply who you are at this
moment in time -- never forget that you have the power to change these parts of
yourself!
4.) The point of this exercise is not to simply make you feel bad about yourself, but
rather, it is to clearly define where you must begin in the process of self-change. If
you do not have a clear grasp upon who you really are, then you have no reliable
means of knowing what you wish to become, nor little means of getting there.
6.) In this process of self-change, one transforms what is already present into
something better. It is not a method which simply rids your personality of its negative aspects. Instead, it takes the energy of a negative aspect and changes it into a comparable positive manifestation. Here nothing is discarded or lost -- it is all transformed.
7.) Simply observe how you feel about each aspect of your character, not what you think about your traits, but what you feel in the immediate moment without thinking.
8.) Emotions are the medium you are working with, just as the mind was the medium you were working with in the section of mental exercises.
9.) When assigning traits to the elements, don’t overanalyze and go with what feels correct.
10.) Look at Appendix B for more on journalizing.
Step I—Physical Body
A.) Part I
1.) Eat a balanced diet, get good sleep, fully wake up and refresh yourself in the morning, get a reasonable amount of exercise.
2.) Live a healthy and balanced lifestyle.
3.) Here are some quotes to give some guidance on which physical exercises will suffice:
4.) "...practice morning gymnastics...to keep your body flexible...What matters chiefly is to get your body elastic."
"...do stretching exercises every morning to keep your body supple...The main purpose here is that your body should become flexible."
"...the important aspects being the maintenance of flexibility and bodily vitality."
B.) Part II
1.) Formulate a wish or desire such as peace, contentment, success in your endeavors, personal improvement, deeper understanding, a stronger will, to be more loving, to remedy insomnia, etc. This should be a very specific goal, one that is very strongly imagined and focused upon. This has to be of a higher caliber than normal day to day thought.
2.) Now, imagine that the beverages you drink, the food you eat, and the air you breathe absorbs the idea or thought that you formulated.
3.) While eating the food and drink that has absorbed your idea, thought, or wish, be fully conscious and completely aware that what you are eating or drinking contains your ideation, wish, or desire, which will be passed on to your entire body through digestion and the blood’s circulatory system, and from there to you soul and then your spirit.
4.) Do not throw out any of the food and drink containing your ideation as this tells your subconscious that you don’t really want what you are wising for.
5.) While eating, it is best not to read, watch TV, or have conversations, etc. so that you are entirely focused on what you are doing. This is an ideal situation which may not easily translate in some real world situations. Do not be concerned with trying to reach the ideal. Just do the best you can in every instance.
6.) For air, spend about 10 minutes twice per day in eyes-closed meditation. First formulate a strong, concrete ideation. Then, imagine that a quantum of air has absorbed your idea and that when you breathe in the air, you also breathe in the idea.
7.) Feel it circulating throughout your body with the oxygen in your blood.
8.) Do not alter your normal breathing cycle; breathe completely normally.
When doing the exercises with food, air, and water it is absolutely key that you imagine, to the point of belief, that in your ideation, you feel as though it is already true, already a reality. One thing I found to help me was to do these exercises with something I already have. I meditate on the feeling of having something I already have and then transfer that feeling of already having it to what I am working toward achieving. That is to say, I think and feel from the perspective of already having the quality or circumstance I wish.
Another exercise is as follows: Pick up a rock. Hold it in your outstretched palm. Now, think very intently on the feeling of absolute certainty that when you drop that rock, it will fall down. You would be utterly flabbergasted if it fell up. You need to cultivate this level of certainty when doing the exercises involving air, water/beverages, and food.
C.) Part III
1.) Before you shower, rub your entire body with a soft brush until your skin turns faintly reddish or pinkish. This helps open your pores which is helpful to the body.
2.) Every time you wash your hands, wash with cold water, and if you can stand it, also your body when you shower. I do recommend trying a cold shower at least once before making your final decision.
3.) Imagine that not only are you cleaning you physical body, you are also cleaning your soul (personality and character), and you spirit (your mind).
4.) Imagine that the entirety of the gunk from all three of your bodies is being washed away by the cold, magnetic water. All the blackness is gone and only pure white is left.
This concludes the exercises of Step I.
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*Appendix A: Here is the most complete relaxation technique that I have come across. I recommend that each time you sit down to meditate you do only the first relaxation step, then the next, etc. So, the first time you sit down to meditate you do the full-body stretch, and then with your next meditation you do the full-body stretch and the affirmation, and so on until you have the entire routine memorized. After that, you will begin to be able to relax by your will and imagination very quickly without following every step of the routine.
Full-Body Stretch: Before starting the following exercises, take a long, deep, yawning breath while stretching your arms and legs and arching your back and neck. Then relax and feel the tension draining from your body.
Affirmation: Verbally repeat an affirmation expressing the deeply relaxed state of body you wish to achieve. This should be present tense, active, and as if it were already so. “My body is calm and deeply relaxed.” Repeat this a few times.
Seven Breaths: Sit comfortably and close your eyes and relax, letting yourself settle. When you are ready, take seven long, slow, deep breaths. Focus on filling your lungs comfortably full and then emptying them completely. Feel the tension draining away with each breath. Take your time over this part and let yourself settle.
Feet and Calves: Stretch back all toes and tense both feet and calves at the same time for five seconds, then relax. Curl toes downward and repeat, tensing both feet and calves, then relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Thighs: Tense both thighs, hold for five seconds, then relax. Press down with both heals and tense them again, then relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Hips and Buttocks: Push buttocks back into the chair and tense them, hold for a few seconds, then relax. Rock hips forward slowly and tense for a few seconds, then relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Whole of Legs: Tense all the muscles in the whole of both your hips, legs, and feet. Hold for a few seconds, then relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Stomach and Lower Back: Push out your stomach and tense all stomach and lower back muscles. Hold for a few seconds and then relax. Suck in stomach and tense lower back muscles. Hold for a few seconds, relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Chest and Upper Back: Arch shoulders forward while exhaling and caving in your chest. Tense all upper back and shoulder muscles, tense for a few seconds, then relax. Push shoulders back and take a deep breath while pushing out your chest. Tense all upper back and chest muscles. Hold for a few seconds, then relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Arms and Shoulders: Tense your shoulders, arms, and hands, making tight fists. Tense and hold for a few seconds, then relax. Curl your forearms and fists in towards shoulders, wrists curling in. Tense and hold for a few seconds, then relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Face and Head: With eyes closed, roll head back, open mouth wide, and screw up your face, tensing all the muscles in your head and face. Hold for a few seconds, then relax. Smile widely while screwing up your whole face and eyelids, tensing all facial, scalp, and jaw muscles. Hold for a few seconds, and then relax. Frown deeply while screwing up your face and tensing all scalp, jaw, and facial muscles. Hold for a few seconds, then relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Jaw: With your head in its balanced resting position, push lower jaw straight out. Tense jaw and hold for a few seconds, then relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Neck 1: Without tensing, arch your neck forward slowly and press your chin down onto your chest. Hold it there for several seconds, breathing normally. Then slowly relax it back to its normal resting position. (If you have neck tension problems, hold chin on chest for longer.) Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Neck 2: Without tensing, slowly let your head roll back and push your chin straight up. Keep pushing your chin up, but do not tense any neck muscles. Hold for several seconds or more, breathing normally. Then slowly relax back to your balanced resting position. (If you have neck tension, hold for longer.) Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Neck 3: With your head in its normal resting position, slowly grit your teeth and tense all your neck muscles, feeling the tension spreading through your neck and up into your skull. Hold for several seconds, and then relax. Pause and feel the tension draining away.
Full-Body Stretch: Perform a full-body stretch. Gently stretch and tense as much of your body as you can. Tense and hold for a few seconds, then deeply relax your whole body. Pause and feel the tension leaving your body, like fluid draining away. Take your time over this. Moving slowly, check your posture and readjust your resting position at this point, as need, but while holding on to your relaxed state.
Affirmation: Verbally state “My body is calm and deeply relaxed” a few times.
Seven Breaths: Take another seven long, slow, deep breaths. Feel the tension leaving your body with every OUT breath. Feel your body sinking into your chair or bed, getting heavier, warmer, and more relaxed with every OUT breath. Relax and take your time.
*Appendix B: Tips and extra exercises.
1.) Jounalizing
2.) Emotional Observation
3.) Empowered Remembering
4.) Know Thy Self
1.) Journalizing is absolutely critical, in my opinion. I would recommend that in addition to the soul mirror journal where you record the good and bad aspects of yourself, you also record your experiences with each exercise as you go along, including successes, failures, duration of the exercise, if you took any drugs, time of day, environment, etc. This will help you gauge your progress and it will aid the memory; it well help to keep you from forgetting possibly important things. Another benefit to journalizing is that you can compare your success with an exercise to your failures with that same exercise and by using the information in your records you may be able to piece together why sometimes you achieve success and other times failure. I would also recommend recording your dreams as this strengthens recall of events which transpired in a non-ordinary state of being. Lucid dreaming can also help you defeat and transform negative character traits and fears.
2.) Just as you observed your thoughts in the mental section of the exercises, it is a good exercise to observe your emotions. Just as you learn to separate yourself from your surface mind, you must learn to separate yourself from your emotions. In other words, you need to establish an observer perspective both with thoughts and feelings.
3.) One of the goals to shoot for when dealing with feelings/emotions, is to understand and cultivate the difference between a reaction (involuntary and automatic) and a response (which is thought out, voluntary, and under your will instead of under the power of the automatic reactions we have been conditioning ourselves with since childhood.) The experience of the emotions should be fully experienced and observed, but the expression of the emotion is where we need to focus.
4.) So, here is the practice as quoted from the source material:
Exercises in Mental Discipline of the Emotions
One important issue which Bardon didn't speak about directly in IIH is the necessity for control and discipline of the emotions. Although such emotional discipline is a direct result of both the mental discipline and the soul mirror work, it is still worthy of specific attention since so many budding magicians fall prey to their own habitual emotional reactions. Emotional discipline is also an important part of attaining the astral Equilibrium of the Elements that, if ignored, can lead to years of frustration. While the experiencing of our emotions must not be suppressed, they must still be examined and understood, and their expression must be within our conscious control. Just as an initiate's thinking must be reshaped into a useful tool, so too must our emotions be transformed from knee-jerk reactions, into conscious choices of expression. As with the transformation of the thinking processes, this transformation of the emotional processes begins with detachment and observation. Here then are series of exercises which will lead from observation, through to discipline and ultimately, to the conscious use of emotion as a means of clear Self-expression.
Exercise #1:
Choose a piece of music that is very sentimental and which you know can stir up a strong emotional response within you. Play it through once and let its sentiment play with your emotions. Just go with its emotional flow. Abandon yourself to it and really get into the emotions it makes you feel. Now play it a second time and, as before, go with its flow.
After a few moments, step back from that flow of emotions and separate yourself from them. Observe them exactly as you observed the mind's chatter in the first mental exercise of Step One. Listen to the remainder of the piece of music from this detached perspective and observe how your emotional body is being manipulated by the music. Now play it a third time and resist involvement with the sentiment of the music. Refuse to involve yourself in the emotions that result from the music's manipulation of your emotional body. With a fourth playing of the musical piece, alternate between giving in to the experience of the piece's sentiment and stepping back from involvement. Work at gaining that power of choice to participate or not, as you wish. Now choose other, equally sentimental pieces of music and practice your ability to engage and disengage at will. As you're practicing that ability, take careful note of the ways in which this mechanism works. What sort of input results in what sort of emotional result? Why? What parts of you are involved in that process? Etc.
Exercise #2:
Repeat exercise #1 but this time, with a piece of music that gets your foot tapping and your body dancing, something that stimulates and cheers you. As before, work to gain that power of choice to participate or not, and examine the workings of this mechanism as well.
Exercise #3:
Now repeat the same exercise, with the same aims, but this time, view a beautiful painting or picture that moves you deeply. Also view images that disturb you. As always, work to gain the
power of choice to participate or not in the emotions that images elicit and examine the mechanism.
Exercise #4:
Now apply the same exercise to poetry and to stories that move you, both favorably and unfavorably. Gain that power of choice and examine the mechanism by which ideas affect your emotional body.
Exercise #5:
Now watch a movie or television program that you know will stir deep emotions with its strong sentiment. Exercise your power of choice and examine the mechanism by which images and sound and ideas affect you when they are combined.
Exercise #6:
Now extend this exercise to your everyday encounters and the emotions that they generate. Gain that precious power of choice and examine very closely the mechanism by which live interaction affects your emotional body.
Exercise #7:
This exercise is a departure from the first six. Here you must create an emotion within yourself. This is really an extension of the Step Two sensory concentration exercise, except here, the feeling one creates is emotional instead of tactile. Practice this in private meditation until you can invoke any emotion you wish, at will.
Exercise #8:
Now put these abilities into action and make your emotional expressions conscious acts of will. During your everyday encounters, first note the emotion as it naturally arises. Before you express it, examine it and see if it exists as you would choose to express yourself. If it does match your true will, then consciously and willfully express it as it is. If, on the other hand, it does not match your true will, then modify it and express an emotion that does.
The Art of Empowered Remembering
This is a VERY helpful technique. It allows you take one success with an exercise, and use it to empower future success. This technique is also extremely helpful in Psychedelic Hermetics since it allows one to remember and integrate their psychedelic experiences more fully.
For a complete description of the Art of Empowered Remembering please read the full article at http://www.abardoncompanion.com/AER.html or http://bardon.dnsalias.net/AER.html
Here is a brief outline:
This technique can be used to strengthen old memories and to powerfully impress new memories.
The basic technique is as follows:
Meditate on what you are trying to remember, whether that be the strengthening of an old memory or creating a memory of something currently occurring. Quite simply, concentrate intensely on what you are thinking, feeling, and physically experiencing or sensing. Then, impress this on your memory with all your willpower.
Here's the technique of Empowered Remembering applied to success, in a nut shell:
1) Work like hell to achieve that first true success with the exercise. There's no getting around that part!
2) At the moment of that first true success, apply the Art of Empowered Remembering. Take VERY careful note of the details of your mental state, your emotional state and your physical state. Savor the moment and impress these details *with all of your will* upon your memory.
3) After your successful exercise is complete, recall this Empowered Remembrance for the first time. Bring it into clear focus and savor it for a few moments. Then release it and go about your business. Recalling an Empowered Remembrance for the first time, so shortly after its formation, will increase your ability to recall it in the future.
4) Just prior to the next time you engage in said exercise, recall this Empowered Remembrance of your past success. Sit with it and savor it for several seconds, letting your three bodies adjust to its vibration. Then begin your exercise, drawing upon your memory of success as needed.
5) Each time you succeed with this exercise, add that experience to your template-of-success memory. This will further empower the Remembrance and increase its effect upon the acclimation of your three bodies.
6) For those exercises in which progress is especially slow and which require a significant acclimation on the part of your triple-body, I suggest that at night, just before falling into sleep, you recall your Empowered Remembrance and savor it for a few moments. This functions in a manner similar to Bardon's auto-suggestion technique (i.e., it influences the sub-conscious psyche), while simultaneously acclimating the triple-body to the needed vibration.
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Know Thy Self
These exercises are designed to help you differentiate your unintentional awareness from your intentional awareness, and to eventually help you to keep rooted in your intentional awareness. The intentional awareness can be roughly equated with the conscious mind and the unintentional awareness with the subconscious mind. The goal of these exercises are to show you what parts of perception come from the objective details of the thing itself and what comes from your own subconscious.
Rawn Clark, who wrote these exercises, has audio guided meditation tracks for free on his website. I highly recommend using them until you have the practices memorized, then stop using the audio guides.
Know Thy Self: Part 1
1.) Assemble one thing for each physical sense to perceive. An object to look at, a sound to hear, something to taste, and something to smell.
2.) The best position for this exercise is as follows: reclining, with your head slightly elevated above your chest, and your chest slightly elevated above your abdomen.
3.) However, do what works for you. This is the condition you are trying to achieve: sit or recline comfortably, without having to expend any energy to keep yourself upright.
4.) Focus your eyes on the object you have decided to view.
5.) Take a few minutes and try to observe every detail about the object, including size, color, shape, etc. Focus solely on the objective details relayed to you by your eyes.
6.) Now that it’s been a few minutes, focus inward on what emotions and thoughts the perception of this object stirs in you.
7.) Next, look at different aspects of your chosen object, one aspect at a time, and note what spontaneous emotional reactions occur.
8.) Now, look at the object as a whole and objectively note your emotional reaction to it.
9.) Your emotional reactions to the object come from past experiences with objects that have similar details. Try to go back and trace where in the past your current emotional reaction is coming from.
10.) Now, once you’ve observed your emotional reactions, view and focus on your object again and observe your inner dialogue.
11.) Now, observe your emotions and the inner dialogue that is there with it.
12.) Now, compare the objects purely objective details with your emotional input and your intellectual input. In other words, when you perceive the object, determine how much your subjectifying has distorted your perception of the object’s objective reality.
13.) Repeat this process with sound, smell, and taste.
14.) With the tactile sense, experience how things physically feel on the outside, like air temperature, and how things feel inside, like feeling the air go through your mouth, through your throat, and to you lungs.
15.) As with the previous exercises, observe objectively, then subjectively, then observe your subjectifying objectively.
16.) Make use of these techniques in day to day life.
Know Thy Self: Part 2
1.) Get comfortable in the same position as the one described above.
2.) Focus your awareness in one of your feet. Note both the objective sensations in your foot and the subjective emotions and thoughts that come along with it. Experience your foot deeply.
3.) Now, do this for each separate part of your body.
4.) Now, expand your awareness so that it fills your entire body. Really feel your entire body, feel yourself being inside of your body. Feel it in its entirety, but also in all its parts.
5.) Focus your awareness upon the subjective emotional aspect of your perception of your physical body. Perceive the ways that you feel emotionally about your body as a whole and about each of its parts.
6.) Now, imagine that a layer of thick, cocoon-like pure emotion-substance surrounds your entire physical body. For now, let it be colorless and without any details. For now, imagine it as pure, raw emotion-substance.
7.) Now focus your awareness upon your own personality traits, both positive and negative. Name them to the best of your ability and as you name each one, imagine that it gives form to a portion of the emotion-substance surrounding your physical body.
8.) Eventually, all of the emotion-substance surrounding your body is taken over by your character traits. The result is a very complex shell filled with the symbolic colors and shapes of your specific personality traits.
9.) Now focus upon a specific trait-form that exists within this body of emotion-substance. Use your intentional-objective awareness to perceive this character trait and objectively note the subjective content inherent to this perception. Now focus your attention upon the experience of this trait. Really place yourself within the experience of what it feels like to be this trait.
10.) Now shift your focus to an adjacent trait within your emotion-substance body and follow the same perceptual and experiential process in its exploration. Perceive it and note its subjective content, then experience what it feels like to be this trait.
11.) Continue in this manner, shifting your focus from one trait to the next until you have perceived and experienced all of your personality traits reflected within your emotion substance body.
12.) Now expand your awareness to include your entire emotion-substance body and all of your character traits simultaneously within your field of perception and truly experience what it feels like to be in it.
13.) Now gently open your eyes and expand your perceiving awareness to include an external examination of the room you are in. Simultaneously, retain your awareness of your astral body.
14.) Now take note of the ways that your astral body reacts or interacts with the details of the room. Note which details your astral body experiences resonance with and which it experiences dissonance with. Note which details give you emotional comfort and satisfaction, and which elicit a sense of repulsion and emotional discomfort.
15.) Focus your awareness into your astral body’s experience of resonance and dissonance as it occurs.
16.) Note the degree to which these astral perceptions of your surroundings inform you primarily of your reaction to the objective details you are observing.
17.) Aside from your subjective astral reaction, there is also the emotional state of the object itself which is in no way dependent upon your emotional reaction. It is this objective emotional state of the object itself to which your astral body reacts. Focus your intentional-objective awareness upon the direct perception of the emotional state that each object itself possesses separate from your astral reaction to it.
18.) Make use of these abilities in your day to day environment.
Know Thy Self: Part 3
1.) Get an object to look at.
2.) Get in the same comfortable meditation position as described earlier.
3.) Become deeply relaxed. (See Appendix A)
4.) Now focus away from the physical body towards your mind.
5.) Consider the word “warrior.”
6.) In response to this word, your mind automatically generated a series of images, emotions and thoughts, all somehow related to the concept of “warrior”. All of these arose spontaneously from your unintentional awareness and were rooted in your past experiences and in the thoughts you have integrated over the course of your life.
7.) Your response to this word was unique in as much as the content of your own unintentional awareness reflects the unique circumstances of your life. A different person will experience somewhat different images, emotions and thoughts than you did.
8.) Try this again but with a new word -- and this time, take note of what transpires as it occurs. The new word is “Elephant.”
9.) As before, your unintentional awareness will have generated an image, or series of images, related to “Elephant”. Using your intentional objective awareness, try to discern where these images came from. Do they come from a personal encounter with an Elephant? Or from a film about Elephants? Or from a book?
10.) Now, again using your intentional objective awareness, examine the emotions that accompany these images. How does the image of “Elephant” make you feel? Is this feeling related to your emotional state at the time when the image of “Elephant” was originally formed? For example, if the image comes from when you saw an Elephant at a zoo as a small child and you were having a pleasant day with your parents visiting the zoo, then odds are that the emotions that arise now, carry with them the imprint or flavor of that childhood happiness.
11.) Once again using your intentional objective awareness, examine the thoughts and ideas that arise in unison with the images and emotions in response to the word “Elephant.” As before, try to discern the origin of these thoughts. Are they your own original thoughts or are they thoughts you’ve learned or heard from others?
12.) Overall, what percentage of your automatic response to the word “Elephant” comes from your own personal interaction with an Elephant and how much of it comes from secondhand sources such as things you’ve heard or read?
13.) The mental body is capable of two basic approaches or techniques for the integration of essential meaning. The most common, default mode is ruled by the unintentional awareness and consists of modifying the essential meaning so that it fits within our own ideology. This prevents the encounter from significantly altering the ideological content of the unintentional awareness. Your automatic reaction to the words “warrior” and “Elephant” are examples of this mode in action. You drew content from your unintentional awareness which limited your experience to the predictable and comfortable. You didn’t learn anything from your initial reaction and you were not in any way changed by the encounter.
14.) The second mode of approach, ruled by the intentional awareness, is to open yourself to change and modification so that you achieve greater affinity with the manifest essential meaning you have encountered. This means setting aside your resistance to change and your inclination to subjectify, and instead, exercising your power to truly explore the essential meaning for what it is. In other words, to truly open yourself to an experience of its essential meaning.
15.) One way we go about this is to think about an idea. When we do this with an open mind, free of assumptions and preconceptions, then the idea will exert its attractive force over us and draw illuminating thoughts into our awareness. This can be a long process of looking at the idea from every angle imaginable and letting the mind follow the meanings that reveal themselves. A brief example of this was your objective examination and analysis of your automatic response to the word “Elephant.” The drawback of this method of thinking about something is that the process of thinking is itself influenced by the unintentional awareness. In other words, it occurs within the arena of our basic mind-set, that array of fundamental ideas which shape our every experience. Thus it is incapable of directly experiencing the essential meaning.
16.) To directly perceive essential meaning is to experience it. Direct perception of essential meaning is never achieved through interpretation or through thinking. It is only achieved through becoming. By this I mean that you completely open yourself to being affected by the essential meaning. Thinking and interpretation come after direct perception and are not in any way a part of the act of perceiving. When approached in this way, essential meaning opens itself to your awareness and shares itself with you, creating the deepest sort of mutual affinity or similarity. This experience of essential meaning increases your scope of affinities within the mental place and grants you easy access to a broader variety of essential meaning than before the experience. In other words, it increases your objective Understanding.
17.) To illustrate, I will now guide you through a technique for experiencing the essential meaning contained within an abstract idea. The first step is best described by one of my favorite poets as “resting with the question”. This is a time during which you simply let the words which describe the idea float in your mind. You just sort of sit with them quietly and let them crystallize in your awareness. So, rest with the following words for a few moments: “The Universe is infinite.”
18.) In order for a thing to be infinite, it must encompass all space, all time and all meaning. Imagine now that space stretches without end in all directions from where you are reclining.
19.) You are at the exact center point of this infinite expanse. No matter where you move, space still stretches infinitely in all directions from where you are.
20.) Now feel how time stretches infinitely behind you and ahead of you.
21.) You exist at the exact center point of time in a bubble of now-ness and time always stretches infinitely in both directions.
22.) And now feel the infinite variety of essential meaning that fills this infinite space and time. There is no end to the variety.
23.) Your own essential meaning exists in context with all of the infinite variety of essential meaning that surrounds you and no matter how you change, you are always surrounded by an infinite variety.
24.) Within this infinite Universe, no matter how much or how little space, time and meaning you yourself encompass, you are always at the exact center of space, time and meaning.
25.) This is true for each and every point in space, each and every moment of time and each and every bit of meaning, not just those that you occupy. There are an infinite number of centers in an infinite Universe.
26.) Now spread your awareness outward infinitely and become the whole. Feel yourself spatially infinite. Feel yourself temporally infinite. Feel yourself manifesting an infinite variety of essential meaning. BE the infinite Universe.
27.) Essential meaning is manifest in all things, ideas being just one type of thing. To illustrate, I will now guide you through a technique for experiencing the essential meaning contained within an object. Specifically, the essential meaning manifest within the object you chose at the beginning of this meditation.
28.) Please note that just by my mentioning your object, a series of events were initiated in your mind. In a flash of less than a second, you most likely pictured your object, experienced your usual emotional feelings about the object, and named or described your object.
29.) However, in order to directly perceive your object’s essential meaning, you must now leave all of that behind and use only your intentional objective awareness. If you start thinking about your object then you are not perceiving. Instead, you are thinking and interpreting and trying to shape its essential meaning. So keep this in mind as we proceed.
30.) Now open your eyes and fix your gaze upon your chosen object. Set aside all of your thinking and feeling about the object and just observe objectively for a moment. Rest with it for a moment and let its objective details crystallize in your awareness.
31.) Now open your awareness to the object itself and objectively perceive how it affects your awareness.
32.) If you find your internal dialogue thinking about the object then let your go of your thinking and refocus your awareness upon simply perceiving.
33.) Try to experience for a moment what it would feel like to be your object.
34.) Now let your mind think about your object and objectively observe the meaning that those thoughts express.
35.) To what degree and in what way do your thoughts express your experience of the object’s essential meaning?
36.) Now objectively perceive your emotional responses to your object and ask yourself to what degree and in what way they express your experience of the object’s essential meaning.
37.) Now objectively examine the physical details of your object and observe how they manifest and communicate the object’s essential meaning.
38.) Now close your eyes again and turn your awareness inward. Take a few moments to review your direct encounters with essential meaning and examine the unique qualities of your experience with essential meaning that make its direct perception different than any other form of perception. Try to fix this difference in your mind so that you can recall how it feels in the future.
Sources:
--Relaxation exercise is directly quoted from Robert Bruce’s Astral Dynamics 2nd ed.
--All Hermetic exercises are directly taken from Franz Bardon’s IIH and Rawn Clark’s works. For more detailed descriptions of these exercises and of the theory, please read IIH by Franz Bardon and visit Rawn Clark’s website.
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I am hopefully going to be starting group work no later than 5/26.
Take a look at my avatar image. You can easily find a larger picture on Google. Once you've examined the picture, the course of IIH is designed to bring you from the bottom of the picture to the top.
Feel free to ask any questions.