The next exercise again returns to strengthening the spiritual senses, but this time, we finally combine all of them to create a scene all around us. We imagine being in a forest, engaging all the senses, perhaps walking around, feeling the breeze on our face, tasting some berries, hearing the birdsong, smelling the pine. All the senses are experienced spontaneously. Firstly this is practiced and mastered for an unbroken five minutes. This exercise is preparing one for what is coming, which is full projection out of the body and entering the astral plane.
The second part of the exercise is to do the same thing, be in the forest, using all the senses, but with the eyes open, and again, this is strengthening the ‘double-vision’ and ability to ‘refute the world’, i.e. orientate feelings and experience from the inner-world. Remember, in a way, both within and without, there is NOTHING BUT IMAGINATION. Even when we are ‘looking’ into the world and ‘seeing’ it, it is recreated in imagination from sense impulses (it might not actually be ‘out there’ at all). If there is nothing but imagination, that’s great news because we have complete control over imagination. If the world might be fake, we can be and see and feel whatever we want, and it is real.
At this point in the book, the tack of the training changes somewhat and a series of exercise is presented to firstly continue the elemental pore breathing, and then to move the location of ones consciousness around from it’s usual location (around the eyes in many people) to different locations around the body, and then out of the body – and so again, we are heading towards astral projection.
So initially, the pore breathing instruction is to pore breathe in each element, accumulating the energy each time. Fire is red. Air is blue and it gets lighter with each breath. Water has a cold feeling (colour unstated). Earth is yellow, grey or black and has a feeling of heaviness. So each element is accumulating with each breath for seven breaths, and then when exhaling on the seventh breath, all of the accumulation leaves within that breath. With this exhalation, the energy can leave either through every pore of your body simultaneously, or you can practice it going through the hands to direct it. As a personal instruction I would add to make sure you are feeling the energy leaving it as much as you are visualising it (feeling the physical sensation I mean).
Next there are instructions for ‘room impregnation’. Here, with each outbreath, the energy is expelled to fill a room and you state an intention for this energy to ‘hold’. For example, you could impregnate a room with water energy and leave it with the stated intention that a certain person will not want to enter this room. So now the previous exercise of surrounding yourself with a ghostly-dark-matter-idea comes into play. At the end of the current exercise, you are surrounded with the element of water impregnated with an intention that you can feel (and will have an effect). Get creative with the intentions. For example, fill a room with air and have the intent to inspire creativity in the place where you like to paint watercolours for example.
Next, the consciousness moving exercises are presented. In the same way that you can look for a mental picture or the spiritual sense of touch in relation to the physical body (location), it’s also possible to do the same for consciousness itself. When you look into your mind, where do ‘you’ exist? For many people, again, it’s around the eyes (though not all) and this is merely because the physical eyes and vision is the strongest sense and carries this feeling of existing in that actual location, somehow attached to the flesh there, although this is a complete illusion.
The instructions are to have an object before you and place consciousness within it (and take its shape), say an apple on the table. You locate that feeling of ‘youness’ and transfer it to the apple, imagine being it’s shape and see from its perspective. There are different variations of this presented, stationary objects, then moving objects, then human (strangers) and then humans you know, and then the text reverts to another elemental exercise.
At this point, the instructions revert to the pore breathing, but this time the instruction is to breathe in an element as either cold (water) air (lightness) earth (heaviness) or fire (warmth) and accumulate them in a body part, accumulating them with seven in-breaths, and then dissolving the compressed energy back into the universe with the eight breath. Try each body part but avoid the heart or brain.
Next, the exercise is the same, but the energy is specifically sent out (on the eighth breath) via the hands, which will practice the skill of directing it.
Breath in the element, (fire = hot; water = cold; air = light and earth = heavy) seven times to accumulate in the body (part), then dissolve the compressed energy back into the universe via breath. Avoid the heart or brain. Spend extra time on the hands and feet. Then discharge accumulation but through both hands specifically rather than through the whole body.
Next, Bardon now assigns each of the four elements to a zone of the body, So, earth rules the feet to the genitals, the legs basically, which is logical as we stand on the earth. Water rules the abdomen to the midriff. Air the chest to the neck and fire the neck upwards. The instruction is to breathe in one element seven times to the corresponding region, e.g. earth to the legs, and then release all on the eight breath. This exercise, to be powerful, needs to be as much kinesthetic as visual, and there is no reason not to involve all the senses, but kinesthetic is MOST IMPORTANT because it is an energy your body can directly feel, both the physical body and the mental/astral body. The former feels the movements in the latter. It blends perfectly with the NEW energy techniques espoused by Robert Bruce and I will incorporate this practice elsewhere.
Again, the text jumps. Now what is presented is essentially a form of NLP, although I don’t think that had been invented at the time (luckily no one told Bardon this!). Essentially, when performing some kind of ritual or magick, you can associate a gesture with it. So say it is a Jupiter ritual to attract financial abundance, and so at the climax when you feel the gnosis, you have a specific gesture (mudra), way of pressing your thumb to your index finger for example. Now you repeat this over time and eventually your mind links the gnosis of financial abundance to the gesture. The gnosis, is a pure ghostly-dark-energy-knowing of the substance of things yet unmaifest, with a radiating energy attached.
Then, going forward into life, the gesture (mudra) is an aid in thought replacement. If you notice a poverty thought, a worry about not having enough, you use the mudra and spark the gnosis until that thought is reset with ghostly-dark-energy-knowing of financial abundance, perhaps allowing it to radiate a few positive pictures of abundance, before continuing the day and allowing the stream of consciousness to continue it’s now positive course. So the whole thing is an aid to the earlier instruction of living with a disciplined mind, of every thought and feeling being chosen.
Now we return to the exercises experimenting in changing the location of consciousness. This time, consciousness/awareness is put into an object and shrunk down to nothingness. Then a similar exercise puts consciousness in the solar plexus and again shrinks it down to the size of a pinprick. Then the element of fire is pore-breathed to the location of the solar plexus and breathed out to accumulate and impregnate a whole room with the element. This is then dispersed.
Then, pore breathing is used to accumulate a sphere like the sun in the solar plexus, and when it exists, say after five minutes, it’s then moved it out the body and dispersed into the world. So this exercise, or series of exercises, is combining the fluid location of consciousness with moving and condensing energy. Later exercises will combine intent with this exercise and the process becomes more magickal in nature. As a precursor to this, the last instruction in this series teaches you to form the spheres outside of the body.
The instructions now advance towards purer magick, i.e. a more practical application of what went before. Firstly, there is the instruction to exteriorize the ghost hand and move it around. What that means is, rest your hand on the table, become aware of it, feel its sensations and observe it. Visualise it while you are looking at it, so now you are exercising double-vision on it, you are seeing it in two realms, this world and the mental realm. Then you keep the physical arm still but move the mental out, away from the physical. So it’s a type of limited astral projection, you are detaching a part of your mental/astral body from the physical but not all of it, nor consciousness.
An instruction is given to go into a trance now, and access the wisdom of the higher self using a pendulum, which I won’t cover here as it’s not in keeping with the focus of this particular commentary, though I might cover it in later work. There’s also an instruction about automatic writing here, before the text returns to the mental/astral body. The instruction is to essentially be aware of your mental/astral body while you are walking around and living life. So really, it is an instruction to practice double-vision. So while you are waiting in line to be served in the supermarket, you might become aware of the astral body. What that means is, you can look down and see your physical body (as it is reported by the senses and recreated in the mind) and you are simultaneously aware of the corresponding imagination body in your mind, the imagined body in your physical body.
You’re not trying to project it out here or move your ghostly hand around or anything like that, it is simply an exercise in double vision. You are aware of your consciousness in two overlapping bodies in two overlapping realms and what this will do, over time, is shift the usual location of consciousness, to a constant, say 99.5% physical and 0.5% mental/astral to 80/20 or 50/50 or whatever. Not as a constant. Sometimes, say splashing around in the ocean on a day at the beach, 99.5% physical world is pretty good. But bored, standing in line in a supermarket, 50/50 might be more productive.
The exercise can be extended to training spiritual senses simultaneously, which I call a spiritual senses mindfulness. So say you are eating an orange, and you get the smell, the physical smell, and there is also the spiritual sense smell. So you can sit alone somewhere and use the spiritual sense alone and smell an orange, whether there is one there or not. But when it is there, you are smelling orange smell 100% physically. When it is not there, you are smelling it 100% astrally. The instruction here will again strengthen double-vision, but also points one towards not just the strength of the spiritual senses, but the frequency of their use, which ideally should be always (spiritual mindfulness), i.e. you should always be living in two worlds… until you ‘die’, then you can forget this bs one we are all here trapped in! The instruction is quite specific, to focus on each sense (in separate practice sessions) and then two senses at the same time, then three etc. (it’s ultimately an invitation to another world!).
Things now take a decidedly practical slant. Bardon explains that elementals can do specific things. So, when you use pore breathing to collect elemental energy outside a point of the body, then you dissipate it, … but you don’t have to just dissipate it. This is a sphere of neutral energy, but it can also be conscious, it can be created as a lifeform, given a name, a form/body and an intention, a magickal act to go and perform. Your intent can create a time limit for it to exist, before it dissipates and rejoins the ocean of it’s source.
What can it do? Whatever you want, and I’ll give a hint at a practical application. Say, with your black soul mirror, you have uncovered this negative memory, for example example, being falsely accused of cheating, and it is held in your energy field over the years in some way and it keeps creating mental pictures in the form of bad memories and bad feelings whenever it is triggered — and sometimes even when it is not. So you have been practicing pore-breathing and accumulating an antidote elemental energy to try and counter this energy, and put out the fire as it were.
What you can also do is create an elemental that lasts beyond a single practice session, specifically to work on healing and dissipating this knotted energy containing the bad memory. This is going to get quite deep at this point, so I’ll just touch on it now. But one way to look at this bad memory, or any bad memory that keeps resurfacing, is that it is an energy that is knotted and trapped and keeps recreating these memories, but you can also consider these memories of realms, of the past actually existing and being played out now as the present of another realm. There is another version of you in an alternate reality living your past as their now and you can send back an elemental into this world with an instruction to change what is happening, to change outcomes, transform hate into love.
The practical instruction in this is to imagine being surrounded by an ocean of the elemental energy you are working with, and you use breathing to accumulate this to a ball of around 30cm before you, which you them name and give a purpose/instruction (don’t forget an expiry date) before re-releasing it back into its source where it will go and do it’s job (see it glide into the distance, not dissipate at this point, obviously).
Bardon now covers a little energetic theory and explains larva and phantoms. Larva are caused by emotion, and once they exist, they keep recreating phenomena to keep the emotion resparked and alive. They can carry a symbolic shape, like a heart. So to take the ‘cheating accusation at exam’ example, you can view this as a larva composed of bitterness and anger, and when it needs energy to keep existing, it recreates memories to fuel more emotion.
This sounds a little airy-fairy, or downright crazy, but it’s a reasonable way to look at it and you might understand it intuitively if you’ve been engaging with the exercises up until now. Energy is infinite and neutral, and consciousness is fluid and changing, you’ve seen for yourself that you can change the shape and location of your consciousness, and also direct energy around, within and without your body. You are not always conscious, and when you are conscious you are conscious to differing degrees. So you are existing in an energy-field that intersperses a physical body, you have volition and dominion overwhelming body and the energy doesn’t seem particularly linked to the physical body, nor consciousness. And how did your consciousness become conscious and exist in the first place within this energy?
So to draw elemental energy and give it a consciousness, it’s weird and unbelievable, and who is the skeptic here, this skeptic talking monkey standing on a cooled fireball spinning through space, a ghost energy moving a skeleton of flesh who is having trouble believing in fairies. Yes, likely a load of old hogwash!
Bardon clarifies that a ‘phantom’ is the repeating mental pictures caused by larva. So the larva is the energetic component, and the phantom is the ghostly pictures (memories and speculations) it keeps recreating to fuel itself.
I think of your inner universe as you as a God at the top of your own creation, an awareness of all within your conscious, and composed of I AM statements of self-concept. I AM bitter and angry when I was falsely accused of cheating. I AM a female. I AM a Kiwi, I AM healthy and whatever. Under the power of your own awareness is an inner universe of beings, living as little knots of emotions and creating their own little worlds of phantom thoughts and memories, and when they are getting too knotted or unbalanced, the conscious power of your self can consciously create these elemental beings to solve the problems on an energetic level, and so the awareness of your source consciousness can know I AM HEALED.
I have no idea what Franz Bardon would think of what I have just written as an interpretation of his work, but I hope he isn’t spinning in his grave. In case he is, then I will point out that much of this work is based on my practice and interpretation of it, and likely he was a far better practitioner than me, and so I urge you to read the original source material and form your own conclusions.