So, by now you're well aware of The Principle of Fire, The Principle of Air, The Principle of Water, The Principle of Earth, the Akasa, and Karma.
Learning to influence your subconscious mind on demand
By now you also know the significant impact that your subconscious mind has on you. Know better than to go to sleep in a very emotional state. You have to work out your emotions before you go to bed or will affect your subconscious mind.
Your subconscious mind has a tendency to have a negative influence on your behavior if that negativity is all you're feeding your subconscious. The subconscious mind is where all of your undesirable impulses live, making it your own personal opponent of sorts.
How many times have you had a dream or even a daydream of you or your loved one doing something malicious that you wouldn’t believe in real life? Those dreams your darkest thoughts in your subconscious coming to light.
Thoughts: From the Causal World to the Subconscious Mind to Reality
The subconscious mind uses time and space to bring forth thoughts from the causal world into reality. For example, a strong mind can persistently instruct their subconscious that they will not do a certain behavior, like eat fast food or take prescription medication.
With a strong mind, the subconscious has time to put a hindrance in the way to prevent you from indulging in the negative behavior. If the mind is weak and feeble, you'll notice that the person almost always puts hindrances in their own way.
We also call this self-sabotaging behavior- this happens because the conscious mind is weak. As a Hermetic initiate, at this point you want to train your thoughts in order to concentrate your willpower.
** These exercises approach your subconscious mind as an opponent that must be conquered.**
Materials you’ll need for the exercise:
- Timer
- Small tabletop objects
- String of 40 beads (or knots)
The object exercise
To do this exercise you want to put some objects in front of you such as a pen, a book, paper clip, matches-that kind of thing. Then concentrate on the image of all of those individual objects and concentrate enough so that when you close your eyes you can still hold that image in your mind.
Try to remember the exact colors and shapes. In the beginning you might get some disappearance and reappearance of the objects in your mind and you might be only able to hold that image for a few seconds.
However, if you keep at it you'll find that you're able to hold the image of all of these objects in your mind. Start out with a few minutes working your way up to 10 minutes and then finally work your way up to 30 minutes of concentration.
You can use beads as a way to keep track of momentarily losing your concentration. For example, if you have a string of 40 beads you would engage in your mental exercise, only move a bead when your attention has been diverted. That way, at the end of the exercise you know exactly how many times you lost focus.
Visual Imagination
So, in this exercise your viewing object on a table. Once you've gotten to the point of holding a single object in your mind with your eyes closed for 5 minutes, you are ready to progress forward. The next step is holding the object in your mind for five minutes with your eyes open. You need to be able to imagine a tangible, synthetic object hanging in the air in front of you.
Auditory Imagination
The next job is working on your auditory imagination and separating it from the pictorial imagination. You want to engage in the same exercise for your hearing. Imagine the ticking of a clock without Imagining the clock itself, only imagine the sound. You can experiment and imagine the sound of an orchestra, the sound of a thunderstorm, or piano. Work on holding the sound without any image in your imagination for 5 minutes. If an image pops into your mind while imagining sounds, banish the image immediately.
Sensory Imagination
Next, you'll move on and conduct that same exercise in regards to your senses. Work on concentrating on individual senses; hot, cold, lightness, gravity, hunger, thirst, and so on. Once you can hold any sensation that you like within your body for at least 5 minutes you can move on to the next exercise.
Sense of Taste
Repeat the aforementioned exercise with your sense of taste. Work to produce a range of tastes; bitterness, sweetness, sourness and so on. Develop yourself to the point where you can imagine the of taste any given flavor you desire for 5 minutes.
Every individual is different but will experience some difficulty in producing one of these exercises in the imagination. This is because this area of the cerebellum may be underdeveloped or has been neglected up to this point.
These individual exercises will help enable a magician to strengthen their willpower, strengthen the mind, and truly control all of the senses. These exercises are essential to magical development.
In the next article we will explore magical psychic training and exercises for the initiate magician.
I'd like to leave a special thank you for @jeremycrow and @sindo for commenting and showing love on my last Hermetic post. I think you'll enjoy this series! And also, I'd love to tell you guys that I'll be upvoting your posts. If anyone else would like an upvote from me, let me know and I'm happy to do it!