To continue with the book. The next instruction is to impregnate food with your desire, and then be very certain (knowing) that you are taking in that energy while eating. So here, we are repeating this, ‘feeling the knowing’ on a regular basis, morning and night, and then at meal times, say three times a day. When you do this food part, then you are having the same ‘knowing’, it externalises to the food as energy, and you bring it back into yourself. The point of it is that it is the frequency that matters. Like with anything. What makes weight lifting work?… Lifting weights. What makes positive thinking work?…. Having positive thoughts. What makes magick work? Abiding in the right knowing.
The next exercise presented is a practice to breathe in elements to heal uncovered imbalances in the mind. To have this here seems an odd structure to me, and there is another part later in the book that seems to relate to it. I’ll try and explain it as a single piece.
Earlier, the instruction was to record your thoughts, the contents of your mind, all the stuff that comes up. Then you have a white and black mirror. In other words, you separate all of these thoughts into good and bad. Now the instruction is to further classify them according to the traditional elements, although the actual classification is provided much later in the text (making it even more confusing).
So traditionally, there are four elements. Air, fire, water and earth. Each one represents different abstract concepts.
So, for example, fire is about expansion, passion, tempers, jealousy, hate, enthusiasm. So some of these things are either positive or negative but are ruled by the same element, fire, which represents pure energy expanding, which is what fire does, as does passion, enthusiasm etc.
So you return to the written record of your thoughts, and start to classify them. Perhaps there is some pure, lustful sexual fantasy, so this would be ‘passion’ which is ‘positive’ fire (or white mirror fire).
Taking another thought, perhaps you spend quite a bit of time reliving a bad memory of being falsely accused of cheating on a test years ago and you feel furiously angry. Well anger is pure energy expanding, and it is negative, thus this memory is: fire black soul mirror.
To look at the other elements:
Air is something that flows freely, and also has pressure dynamics, finds equilibrium between high and low pressure. It’s also intangible, and so represents ideas, abstract concepts. So it rules emotions and thoughts which are intellectual, lofty, boasting, freedom, communication, inspiration, clarity, anxiety, disconnection, inconsistency, superficiality etc.
Water is fluid and can take any shape, it can be very deep (representing hidden depths or mysterious things) many things can be contained within it, and so it represents interconnectedness. It can react to other elements like strong wind and so become stormy, and represents emotions and changeability. In the mind it represents feelings, intuition, and sensitivity, adaptability, calmness, fear, sadness, instability and feeling overwhelmed etc.
Earth is the unmoving ground we stand on and so it represents stability and being grounded. As all grows out of it, it is nourishing and fertile. It’s enduring and resilient (like permanent rocks) and tangible and practical and material (materialism). It rules opulence, luxury, physical abundance and a connection to nature. In the mind it represents: stability, grounding, security, and reliability, nourishment, growth, fertility, sustenance, strength, resilience and endurance, practicality, realism and a down-to-earth approach. Black soul mirror (earth): inflexibility and resistance to change, materialism, excessive focus on possessions and wealth, isolation, fear of change, anxiety regarding new experiences etc.
So the exercise presented now is actually the counterpart to the construction of black and white soul mirrors. The whole thing is presented, in the original text, in three separate parts. But here, say you uncover some repeating thought in the mind. Let’s use the example that I gave earlier, of being angry over a false accusation. So this is ruled by the element of fire. Even though it happened years ago, it comes back into consciousness every now and again. Sometimes it is triggered by something in the world, say some story about injustice in social media, and this theme sparks the mental sequence. Then the fact that this memory is being held in consciousness over time means that it is representing an imbalance, on an energetic level, of fire. Therefore you use the antidote. The antidote to fire is water (and vice versa (and the antidote to earth is air (and vice versa)).
With the black and white mirror practice, you realise that there is this unhealed part of your mind, and so resolve to now heal it. You might combine it with affirmation and visualisation. Say, once a day for a week, you can start by affirming that you are letting go, sending love and forgiveness to the person who falsely accused you, perhaps send them some good energy. Then consciously choose to recreate this thought, which usually comes up by itself and causes this anger, and play it in the mind, but have … vague knowingness of water, feel the essence of water all around you, a ‘spirit of the invisible concept of water’ all around you, which you breathe in through every pore in your body while replaying the mental picture of the false accusation.
The mental picture/memory, will be existing somewhere in relation to your physical body (as it is in the cohabiting mental body as energy), perhaps it is like on a mental screen that seems to exist somewhere around the eyes — or whatever it is for you. Thus as the elemental energy accumulates it will be engulfed in the antidote. It will fade out, and anger will dissipate and you will be left in the afterglow of a sublime abiding of the element of water.
It’s not so different, in a way, to a Metta (loving kindness) meditation in Buddhism. That practice doesn’t use elements as an antidote, but it does use a contrary emotion to quell hate, and then ends in a transformed moment-to-moment sublime abiding.
Now with any training, as progress is made, the line between training and life becomes blurred, and life itself is the training. Once you have dissipated the memory and its energy in meditation using this method, then whenever you are triggered in the day and it comes up, or it just spontaneously comes up, it can be dropped and immediately replaced with a sublime abiding of the essence of the element of water. Your mind enflames itself, you take a deep breath in of the recalled knowing of the coolness of the water element and you hold that sublime abiding as a replacement for the memory. This is maintained until the pressure that is trying to wind and respark the memory unravels and unwinds and the thought pressure goes. Then the fire is out and you sublimely abide in the calmness of elemental water, while you are making toast or driving your car or wiping your bottom or whatever you were doing.
I think, from my own practice, the way to do this is, hold the mental picture. Say in this case the accusation, while ‘pore breathing’ in the contrary element. When this memory stored itself in your energy, it did so as an imbalance, in this case of fire, the image itself is within the fire element. Ultimately, the energy that makes up your inner body is balance but contains four elements that ‘cancel’ each other, like white light. White light goes through a prism and splits into rainbow colours. So each time this memory comes up or is triggered, that it comes with an angry emotion is an indication/manifestation of the fire element being excess and holding this memory within it. So recalling it while imbuing another opposite energy into your body is literally putting out the fire.
Eventually, these memories can be recalled without all the angry emotion. This is to be healed, as when they are simply mental pictures like any other, then they won’t rise as triggers, will rarely be created as memories and when they are or do, they won’t hang around for long as the fire is out.
There are other ways to heal images not based on the pore breathing antidote. For example, you could spend thousands on therapy and talking it out, which would involve deliberately sparking the pictures (recalling the painful memory) so that you can talk about it with a therapist, and doing this again and again until all the emotion (energy) trapped in the picture burns itself out and you can consider them similar to any other memory (mental picture). So this method is more akin to just letting a fire burn out rather than pouring water on it, but really it takes a lot longer… and costs a LOT more, plus relies on an outside ‘expert’. With magick, YOU are the expert.
You could always just ignore this and not work on it either way, and then the analogy is to have a smoldering fire within you. It’s like when a fire has technically gone out but the glowing embers are there, and as soon as anything alights on it, it will burst into flames (triggers).