Right, so let’s look at the actual training in the book.
The first instruction is to observe thoughts, the stream of consciousness, whatever comes up, for ten minutes, until you can maintain concentration for the duration.
When you can do that daily, and it’s mastered, then you focus on one thought. Practice daily until you can do ten minutes with unbroken concentration.
Next, you concentrate on having no thought at all, until you can do so for an unbroken ten minutes.
So this initial part establishes basic concentration, watching what is there, and then creating something and holding it there.
The next instruction is to keep a journal, and record the thoughts, the stream of consciousness, over a period of time to find out what is ‘wrong’ with you, i.e. all the imperfections of the mind that keep coming up.
Once you have a record of all these thoughts (he suggests around two weeks of ‘thought journaling’), you assign each one an element. So, for example, a thought of not liking someone, of being indifferent to someone as a memory, would be ascribed to water (as water rules emotions and relationships).
So then spend one week meditating on one rubric, all the water element (emotional) ones and the next week all the fire element (energetic) ones. (I’ll cover what aspect of the mind each element covers later).
Then make a ‘black and white’ mirror, i.e. the good and the bad parts of your mind, are considered separately.
Next the focus changes to daily magickal practices, i.e. exercises to change reality.
Firstly, you imagine you are surrounded by the qualities of your dream (the worldly objectives you are trying to manifest, like abundance or whatever), and can breathe in and out this essence seven times, morning and night.
So by this time, if the exercises have been done in sequence, then the ‘mental’ world has been inhabited somewhat. What I mean is that, someone would have had the experience of the inner-world taking on a strong degree of reality (because it is real), and when it does that (as consciousness is withdrawing from the physical), then the physical world loses it’s reality somewhat. It’s hard to explain this, but if you do the exercises, then you should experience it to at least some degree.
So if you imagine you are surrounded by a cloud and can breathe in the vapour, it, somehow, feels a lot more ‘real’ than before you started the training, and this is something you can only experience, rather than have me try and explain it to you.
So how do you imagine you are surrounded by the essence of your wish, and that you can breathe it in? It sounds a bit bizarre.
Let’s say the goal is money, you want to be a bit more affluent. So you can visualise various scenarios of having more money, how it would be, how it would feel. As your spiritual senses are more powerful by now, then it’s easy for this exercise to take on a degree of ‘naturalness’ i.e. it feels real, and this causes the emotion, of happiness. Then when you look at the sensations in your body, the physical sensations of happiness or joy or whatever, and then the totality of that experience, the feelings, sensations, mental pictures, has an underlying essence, an invisible sense of ‘upliftedness’, a ‘dark matter’ of some intangible ”abundenceness’, it is and is not there.
I ascribe this ‘abundenceness’, the will to see the pictures of abundance, the dark matter behind it all, a colour. I see it as dark green (as I associate this colour with money) and imagine this all around me. It has this vague feeling, a knowing and sensing that as it surrounds me, I am surrounded by the essence of abundance, the unbounded will to create the images of abundance within me but as a pure energy which is now around me. I take a deep breath and it is sucked in through every pore in my body like I am a sponge, but it doesn’t leave when I breathe out. Then I breathe in again and more is drawn within me, and so I am accumulating the energy.
I do this for seven breaths. It’s not only a green light of money I do. I am also performing this with a white light, and a feeling, a knowing and have a special symbol that represents the totality of my positive desires. It will take a bit more explaining elsewhere, but I think you have enough for the gist of it here. I also combine this with the occult LVX ritual, but again, I’ll write it up elsewhere, this is just an overview for now.
You can do this exercise for an extended period as a focus of concentration, as well as a seven breaths practice. What you are doing, on some level, is learning to ‘tune out’ of the physical, to ‘disavow the senses’. So, you can be in a situation of poverty, sitting in a crappy apartment smelling mould, and you could use traditional creative visualisation to try and manifest something better. You close your eyes and imagine opulent surroundings, rather than smelling mould you can smell potpourri and new furniture, rather than the lumpy easy chair with broken springs, you can feel the soft cushion of high end furniture supporting your buttocks. If it becomes realistic and believable then it will cause ‘happiness’ in some form, or that vague feeling, a knowing, that you have this. What you have mentally created is reality, and when that feeling of naturalness arises, it’s a very real thing.
Then you can open your eyes and it’s a slight shock to still be in the crappy apartment, but your ‘will’ is still maintaining the mental creation of the luxury apartment, there are two of you now. There is you in the crappy apartment, and the inner you in the good one, and perhaps when your eyes were closed you were 90% ‘there’ and 10% ‘here’, and when your eyes open it switches to 50/50, but THAT FEELING OF ABUNDANCE, OF THE MENTAL WORLD BEING REAL remains, and as you are now trained, you can maintain it going forward.
This new practice is beyond that traditional creative visualisation, as once you can focus on that vague ‘knowing’, the ‘knowing the inner is real’, or ‘having’ or ‘certainty’, I hesitate to say ‘faith’ as we may have different understandings of that word and I don’t want you to think I am saying ‘hope’, as I am not, I am saying ‘reality’ and ‘now’ and… you need to just do this and master it – that is what I am saying.
Once you can identify, isolate and know this feeling of ‘abundance’ for a better word, then you can create it at will, like anything on the mental plane. A sound, mental picture, taste – your WILL is a God there. WILL is desire, for something to exist, an intention, and it is so, sometimes consciously, and sometimes unconsciously.
The same is true for emotions. They can also be created, willed, just like anything else. When you look for ‘feelings’ or ’emotions’ mindfully, what you will find are that they are, essentially, labelled sensations. Technically, they are not even that, as the label and the sensation it refers to are actually two separate things. The label is a semantic, a sound that associates with a concept, an experience. The sensation of emotion is the sensing of the mental body.
The sensing of the physical body is touch, feeling the warmth of a fire, being hit by a baseball and feeling the bruise, physical sex, headaches. Emotions have a component in the physical body. Like the feeling of excitement is adrenalin being produced in the body, a physical thing which the physical nerves of the body can feel. But the ‘pure’ emotion is in the mental body, it is a non-physical energy moving around the body, generally unconsciously, though it can be willed.
The two bodies exist in overlapping realms, perhaps like Russian dolls (although this is a limited analogy). They interact. When you feel excited, the adrenalin is pumped and you physically feel this, plus there is an energetic feeling that is felt both in the mental body and the physical body.
Maybe feeling ‘in love’ is another example. This might be associated with a lot of physical sensation around the chest. Some of this will be caused by changes in the physical heart, but there is also a pure energetic component.
This energy can be created and moved around the body using will. I’ve written comprehensive instructions on this, based on the work of mystic Robert Bruce elsewhere, so I won’t go into it now. The point of my whole digression is that, when you are mindful, then it is possible to isolate the pure energetic feeling of an abstract concept, like financial abundance, create it at will, and then associated semantic labels or mental pictures are not needed, and we are edging towards what the Buddha referred to as a ‘sublime abiding’.
The reference to ‘sublime abiding’ appears in the Metta Sutra, the teaching of loving kindness, which is chanted by Buddhists of most sects and is a central component of all the flavours of Buddhism. The instruction is to have this feeling of kindness, existing constantly in consciousness, and the result is, they say (as well as not ageing and being protected) is being ‘not born again into this world’. Now, it can mean, perhaps to be fully enlightened and so break the cycle of reincarnation, but my personal understanding of that verse is that it means not to be born on a moment-to-moment basis. I.e. when you are holding that essence of kindness at the stream of consciousness, it replaces the stream of consciousness, which would usually include self-referencing thoughts and concepts. When these are not experienced for an extended period of time, then the sense of being a separately existing consciousness (from creation) starts to dissolve and one heads towards Nirvanah.
Well the Buddhist instruction is to use loving kindness, but I think sympathetic joy would also work in this context, for ‘permanent abidings’, but it can actually be anything. So the Buddhist practice is chanting (in a style akin to singing) the sutra (teaching) itself. Now in this practice that Bardon is presenting, the ‘sublime abiding’, the feeling, is ones actual magickal intention, what you want to happen in the world, financial abundance perhaps. You don’t want to make this a permanent aspect of consciousness, because it might lead to grasping. So seven breaths is the practice.
To do this, I imagine some symbols of abundance, or a small mental sequence that implies I have abundance (for example, giving a cash gift to a friend who is struggling) and I repeat until I feel … that feeling, of having it, of it being real. The closest way I can describe it is a ghostly upliftedness around my chest… although that also doesn’t come close, it’s a vague, SUBLIME thing, wispy and dreamy. But once it is there then I can maintain it, I can keep it going without the mental pictures. Nowadays, I can just will it to be there directly, without mental pictures in the first place. I imagine it as a green cloud around me, and I take seven breaths, pulling it in all my pores with each in-breath and watch it accumulate and strengthen this feeling, this knowing.
A key with this is, as I said, to disavow the world, to disassociate your feelings, your ‘abiding’ (where your consciousness is LIVING in the mental world) from what is happening in the physical world. When I say ‘key’, I don’t want to understate this, as it is a kind of masterkey really. Life manifests from the top down, the world your physical eyes see is already dead. The practice of magick, in one sense, is maintaining a feeling and a discipline of thoughts based on the present of a world you are not seeing here (physically).