Initiation into Hermetics by Franz Bardon
- My personal take on Initiation into Hermetics simplifies the complex mystical practices for easier understanding and real-world application.
- I break down Hermetic philosophy, focusing on mental, astral, and physical development through spiritual senses and imagination.Discover how training concentration and imagination can lead to deeper realms and influence the astral world in a practical way.
The Hermetic/Occult Training – Part One
- Observation of Thoughts
- Duration: 10 minutes
- Goal: Master concentration on the stream of consciousness.
- Focused Thought
- Duration: 10 minutes
- Goal: Concentrate on one thought without distraction.
- Thoughtlessness Meditation
- Duration: 10 minutes
- Goal: Achieve a state of no thoughts.
- Thought Journaling
- Duration: 2 weeks
- Goal: Record and analyze recurring thoughts to identify imperfections in the mind.
- Element Assignment
- Task: Assign elemental associations (e.g., water for emotions) to thoughts recorded in the journal.
- Elemental Meditation Practice
- Duration: 1 week per element
- Goal: Meditate on water element (emotional) thoughts followed by fire element (energetic) thoughts.
- Black and White Mirror Exercise
- Goal: Examine the good and bad aspects of the mind separately.
- Daily Magickal Practices
- Visualization of Abundance:
- Task: Imagine being surrounded by the qualities of your desires (e.g., financial abundance) and breathe in this essence.
- Visualization of Abundance:
- Creative Visualization
- Goal: Create a strong mental image of desired circumstances and maintain the feeling of abundance.
- Emotional Awareness and Creation
- Task: Identify, isolate, and create emotions at will, moving them through the body.
- Sublime Abiding
- Goal: Maintain a consistent feeling of kindness or abundance in consciousness, replacing self-referencing thoughts.
- Seven Breaths Practice
- Goal: Accumulate the energy of desired emotions or intentions by imagining their essence and breathing it in.
Hermetics Training Part Two
- Infusing Food with Desire:
- Impregnate food with your intention.
- Consciously absorb this energy while eating.
- Practice “feeling the knowing” regularly, especially at meal times (ideally three times a day).
- The frequency of this practice is essential for effectiveness.
- The Nature of Frequency:
- Like weightlifting builds strength through repetition, positive thinking works through consistent positive thoughts.
- Effective magick relies on a deep understanding and awareness of your intentions.
- Breathing in Elements to Heal Imbalances:
- This exercise is introduced as a way to address uncovered mental imbalances.
- Earlier, you recorded your thoughts, separating them into good (white mirror) and bad (black mirror).
- The next step is to classify these thoughts based on the four traditional elements: Air, Fire, Water, and Earth.
Classification of Elements
- Fire: Represents expansion and passion but can manifest as jealousy, hate, or enthusiasm. Thoughts related to passion are considered positive, while anger or resentment is negative.
- Air: Represents freedom and ideas, embodying clarity and inspiration, but can also include anxiety and superficiality.
- Water: Symbolizes interconnectedness and emotional depth, associated with feelings and intuition. It encompasses calmness but can also represent fear and instability.
- Earth: Represents stability and nourishment, but can also signify inflexibility and excessive materialism.
Healing Process
- Identifying and Classifying Thoughts:
- For recurring thoughts (e.g., anger from a past event), identify the elemental association (in this case, Fire).
- Recognize that holding onto this memory signifies an energetic imbalance.
- Using Antidotes:
- The antidote for Fire is Water. To heal the imbalance:
- Affirm your intention to let go and send positive energy to those involved in the negative memory.
- Consciously recreate the memory while visualizing and breathing in the essence of Water.
- The antidote for Fire is Water. To heal the imbalance:
- Transformation of Memories:
- As you accumulate the healing energy of Water, the anger associated with the memory will dissipate, leaving you in a state of calm.
- This process resembles Metta (loving-kindness) meditation, which also uses contrary emotions to transform negativity.
Integrating Practice into Daily Life
- Blurring Lines Between Practice and Life:
- As you progress, the distinction between training and daily life fades; both become intertwined.
- After healing a memory through meditation, practice replacing it with the calming essence of Water whenever it resurfaces in daily life.
- Maintaining Balance:
- Hold the mental image of the triggering memory while breathing in the opposite elemental energy (Water).
- Over time, you will be able to recall the memory without the emotional charge, allowing it to exist neutrally.
Alternative Healing Methods
- Other Healing Approaches:
- Traditional therapy involves repeatedly confronting painful memories until emotional energy dissipates, which can be time-consuming and costly.
- In contrast, with magick, you are your own expert, managing your healing process.
- Ignoring the Issue:
- Choosing to ignore unresolved issues leads to a lingering, smoldering emotional fire.
- This fire may seem extinguished but can reignite with new triggers.
– A spiritual training that revolves around concentration as the key to unlocking higher consciousness and spiritual growth.
– Explore how unhealed parts of the mind, like embers of a fire, can disrupt your ability to focus, creating a “chicken and egg” dilemma for progress.
– Learn the strategy of taking baby steps to break this cycle and move forward on your spiritual journey, even if the progress is slow—forward is forward.
– Discover the concept of holding an idea for ten minutes, not by following a stream of related thoughts, but by grasping the pure essence of an idea, like a quiet but profound knowing.
– Understand the importance of this “ghostly knowing” as the root of all mental processes and self-concept, influencing spiritual practices and self-awareness.
– Apply this technique to practical manifestations, such as financial abundance, where the focus is not on visualizations or affirmations but the deep-rooted understanding of the idea.
– Connect this practice to ancient spiritual traditions like Momento Mori in the West or Buddhist corpse meditations, which both aim to instill a deeper insight into mortality and the urgency of spiritual awakening.
– Learn how the same method can be used for positive goals, such as manifesting wealth, by cultivating the pure knowing of abundance during spiritual exercises like rituals or creative visualization.
– Discover how spiritual teachings and rituals across different cultures emphasize this idea-holding, from Western magic to Buddhist Nembutsu practice, all aiming to reach a state of wisdom or GNOSIS.
– Use these practices to build concentration, heal inner imbalances, and continue moving forward in your spiritual journey.
– **Master the Art of Mental Discipline**: Learn how to clear your mind for 10 minutes, banishing both inner conversations and spontaneous thoughts.
– **Unlock the Power of Thought Control**: Explore the difference between a repressed mind and a disciplined one—no more unwanted, self-sabotaging thoughts!
– **Strengthen Your Mental Muscles**: Discover how concentration, letting go, and visualization are trainable skills that lead to mental mastery.
– **Apply the Skills to Manifestation and Beyond**: Use these techniques not only for magic and manifestation but also to open the path to spiritual attainment.
– **Solve the Mystery of the Zen Koan**: Dive into the concept of the unanswerable question and learn how it relates to awakening and enlightenment.
– **The Balance of Self-Power and Other-Power**: Understand how spiritual progress comes from disciplined practice and moments of surrender to the infinite.
– **A Pathway to Peace and Clarity**: By holding an idea for 10 minutes and practicing “no thinking,” transform your mind into a space of clarity and abundance.
– **Harness the Power of Affirmation While You Sleep**: Discover the transformative practice of using beads to affirm as you fall asleep, carrying positive intentions into the unconscious.
– **Master Emotional Influence**: Learn how the mood you fall asleep with directly impacts your waking emotions and find out why resetting your mood before bed is crucial for success.
– **Wake with Purpose and Power**: Wake up with affirmations and a high mood, ensuring your day starts with positivity and momentum.
– **The Power of the ‘Letting Go’ Muscle**: Strengthen your concentration by practicing mental discipline—allowing thoughts to dissolve instead of fueling them.
– **Use Everyday Moments for Spiritual Growth**: Incorporate practices during toilet breaks and everyday life to reset your mood and create lasting positive changes.
– **Double Vision for Spiritual Mastery**: Learn to see the physical world and spiritual realm simultaneously for increased focus and manifestation.
– **Engage All Spiritual Senses**: Train your spiritual senses—sight, sound, taste, and touch—through immersive exercises to sharpen your inner perception.
– **Manifestation Meditation**: Combine high moods and visualization to reinforce your goals and create a positive cycle of focused intention and concentration.
– **Advanced Visualization Practices**: Take your training further by combining multiple senses and moving scenes, strengthening your ability to master both mental and physical realms.
– **Harness Your Intentions**: Discover how to breathe in your desires, whether it’s financial abundance or any other goal, through the unique technique of “pore breathing.”
– **Master the Art of Focus**: Learn how to hold an idea long enough for it to become more than a fleeting thought—turn it into a powerful, persistent force that shapes your reality.
– **Visualize for Success**: Use mental images, like radiating green light and symbols of abundance, to kickstart your intentions, gradually transitioning to the pure essence of “I AM abundant.”
– **Empower Water with Energy**: Turn everyday rituals, like drinking water or showering, into opportunities to reset negative patterns and imbue yourself with positive intentions.
– **Break Negative Thought Patterns**: Understand the science behind resetting your mind—switch your focus for 90 seconds and watch bad moods or lingering doubts vanish.
– **Train Your Mind Like a Pro**: This isn’t just about “thinking positive”—it’s about gaining mastery over every thought and emotion, replacing negativity with chosen, empowering states of mind.
– **Expel Doubt, Breathe in Confidence**: Learn to expel doubt with every out-breath while accumulating your intentions with each inhale, reinforcing your self-belief.
– **Achieve Self-Mastery**: With consistent practice, you’ll reach a point where you can instantly shift from negativity to positivity, making success and enlightenment an ongoing journey.
– **Engage Your Spiritual Senses Fully**: Imagine walking in a forest, feeling the breeze, tasting berries, and hearing birds. This immersive exercise strengthens your ability to use all your senses spontaneously, preparing you for astral projection.
– **Strengthen Inner Vision with Eyes Open**: Practice “double-vision” by combining your physical sight with inner awareness, learning to orient yourself in the inner world. Experience how imagination shapes both your inner and outer realities.
– **Master Elemental Breathing**: Learn to breathe in and accumulate elemental energies like fire, air, water, and earth through your pores. Exhale to release this power, training yourself to direct these energies.
– **Imbue Spaces with Energy**: Fill a room with elemental energy and set intentions, from inspiring creativity to keeping unwanted visitors away, by mastering the “room impregnation” technique.
– **Expand Your Consciousness**: Move your consciousness beyond your physical body, practicing how to embody and become one with objects, strangers, and even the elements, paving the way to deeper astral work.
– **Magickal Gestures (Mudras)**: Use gestures to reinforce your spiritual practice. Link a gesture to a magickal moment and use it to reset negative thoughts, transforming them into powerful positive energy.
– **Double Vision for Daily Life**: Train to be aware of your astral body alongside your physical body in everyday moments, deepening your connection to both worlds and enhancing your spiritual mindfulness.
– **Create Lifeforms from Elemental Energy**: Learn to form and release conscious elemental beings to perform tasks, such as healing emotional wounds or altering past memories in alternate realms.
– **Tackle Negative Memories**: Dissolve lingering negative memories with energy work, or even send an elemental to alter past outcomes in alternate realities, transforming negative emotions into love.
Each exercise invites you to not only refine your spiritual practices but also to actively shape your reality with newfound power. Explore these mystical techniques to deepen your connection to both the physical and astral planes.
Last exercises, and a bullet summery of the entire program. This version is my list, taken from my own notes about the book and informed by my own experience and practice (and possibly not as good as the original, but easier to understand).
‘Pure’ list of Initiation into Hermetics Exercises – as they are presented in the original book
List of exercises as presented in Initiation into Hermetics.