Rational Metaphysics

[53]

  Hi everyone! I want to start by saying that I am not an authority on magick, nor tulpamancy. Not even close. I'm only making this thread because there seems to be a stigma against magickal interpretations of tulpamancy (and rightly so, honestly!), and I want to try and open the door of magickal thought to people who otherwise would automatically dismiss it, much like myself not even a year ago. I still consider myself to be agnostic, and think magickal thought is compatible with all spiritual worldviews, including atheism. This is intended mostly to spark conversation on the topic, and also to illuminate the reasonableness inherent to real magick. Also, what I'm about to write here is definitely going to be controversial and disagreeable, and that's exactly the point. This is purely my opinion and experience as a practicing magician. Please feel free to discuss what you disagree with. Different points of view are appreciated! Firstly:

 

Like It or Not, Magick is Real.

Believe it! This is a fact, and one which you, yourself, can probably recognize. Now, I'm not saying that you can shoot fireballs out of your hands, or anything ridiculous like that. In reality, the effects of magick are completely natural phenomena, no laws of our universe are violated by it, and a lot of us on this forum probably practice magick every day without realizing it. How can this be? Well, that's because magick is not what it seems. So first, let's define "magick" so we're all on the same page. I like occultist Donald Michael Kraig's definition of magick, which he gives in his book Modern Magick:

Quote

Magick is the science and art of causing change (in consciousness) to occur in conformity with will, using means not currently understood by traditional Western science.

...Sound familiar? If we use this definition, all of us can agree that magick is quite real, since some of us were literally MADE by it!

 

"Okay, sure," I hear you say, "if we define magick like that, then I can accept that it's real. But I still don't believe in spirits, manifestation, demons, chakras, placing hexes, elementals, turning people into toads, astrology, or... whatever."

 

To you, allow me to let you in on a secret: I don't either. These things don't exist in the average person's conception of reality, and there is no objective evidence for them (and if someone says that there is, I would be very cautious around them). But that doesn't mean they're not real. The different spiritual and occult systems of thought are less real and provable phenomena than they are symbolic representations of hard to explain stuff. ...What does that mean, though?

 

Let me frame it like this: Does the number "1" exist? The concept of 1 certainly seems real, as anyone who has mastered the skill of "counting" will doubtlessly affirm to you. But can you prove 1? What does that even mean? Can you hold 1 in your hands? Can you look at it under a microscope? ...Can you eat it? You could argue this one way or the other, but we can pragmatically agree that having a concept of 1 is useful. Knowing you have 1 gallon of gas left, 1 minute left in the test, or 1 more day until the weekend are all useful and meaningful applications of the concept of 1. Similarly, these different conceptions of spiritual and magickal systems are all useful to explain whatever it is they mean.

 

So, all that said... do I believe in "1?" Whatever that means? To that I would say, that's a stupid question! I just use it because it works.

 

Don't Take My Word for It

Seriously, don't. In fact, don't take anyone on their word, EVER. Magick, and your mind, are very personal things, and everyone works differently. Only choose to truly believe that which you have experienced and can prove to be true yourself. As written in Liber AL: Success is Your Proof! Try a few of these rituals and see if any of them work for you, recording both before and after each exercise to verify its effects:
 

The Throwing Salt Over Your Shoulder Game (Releasing the Stress) (as written in Andrieh Vitimus's Hands-on Chaos Magick)

Get some salt and pinch it in your right hand. Go outside and stand in a place where you won't look ridiculous for performing this ritual. If you don't have salt or don't want to go outside, simply pinch your hands as if you were holding some salt and imagine it's there. Now, imagine that the salt you're holding really, really likes to eat stress. In fact, it's eating YOUR stress just by holding it! Visualize the stress running through your body and into the pinch of salt. Feel it do so, draining out of you and into the hungry pile. Tell yourself over and over again, "the salt is eating my stress. The salt is eating my stress." When you feel the salt can't take any more stress, throw it over your left shoulder to disconnect it from yourself. Repeat if you still have more stress to give.

 

The Turn Your Tulpa's Hair Green Potion

This one is simple. Go into a wonderland with one of your headmates and tell them what you intend to do (performing magick on someone without their permission is black magick, by the way!). If they consent, imagine a potion in your hands. If you like, you can brew it yourself with all sorts of thematically appropriate ingredients, in a big silly witch's cauldron, or a cast iron pot or something. This potion is a bright, neon green and glows magickally. It is viscous, sticking to the edges of the glass and slowly dripping off. Imagine as much about the potion as you can, make it as detailed as possible. What does a potion which turns your hair green smell like? Taste like?... Know and truly believe that this potion will turn hair green if consumed. Then have your tulpa uncork the bottle and gulp it down. What happens? Try making other potions with different effects. This method is especially useful when creating new tulpas for imbuing them with personality traits or physical features that they want to express or have. Note: If their hair gets stuck like that, you might have to have them drink another potion which turns it back to normal...

The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

This is perhaps the most famous magick ritual of all time, but it is quite complicated. If you want to understand why magick rituals are so complicated or what traditional magick is really like, I recommend trying this. Its effects are incredibly numerous and all pretty good, but for tulpamancy purposes it's quite good for limiting distraction and increasing focus during meditation. I recommend researching as much about it as you can and trying different variations to find what works best for you, and memorizing the entire ritual for full effect. That being said, you should be able to notice the effects of even a poor performance of the ritual. You can find good instructions of how to perform this on YouTube, but two good flavors of the LBRP can be found in Lon Milo Duquette's The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema and Donald Michael Kraig's Modern Magick, both of which are easily accessible online in PDF form. Don't bother investing in magickal tools or altars or anything until you know that this stuff works for you. This ritual can be performed without all of the bells and whistles and still be very effective.

 

HOWEVER, I do have one word of tulpamancy-specific advice for this ritual: Make sure all of your headmates are within the boundaries of where you intend to draw the circle. This ritual shouldn't, and indeed probably can't, banish a tulpa, but Ebo has complained about my performance of it before saying it makes her feel "farther away." Moving her into the circle has eliminated these complaints. Another thing I should note is that if you are a tulpa, you can perform this ritual quite comfortably entirely in a wonderland. It will probably be easier, in fact, because the creation of magickal tools and objects is significantly easier in the imagination than in the real world. You can do that if you're the host too, but it'll probably be harder -- I recommend just performing it in reality first in that case.

What Does This Have to do with Tulpamancy?

As much as you want it to, really. My main intent with telling you all this is to make everyone aware of a seriously powerful and useful tool which is so easy to wave off as superstitious nonsense. Personally, I've found magickal and occult techniques extremely useful in my tulpamancy. Let me tell you my story: When I first got into tulpamancy, and even for years after creating Ybolah, I had aphantasia. I didn't realize this until later in life, but apparently it's not normal to not be able to imagine images in your mind. When I realized that people were actually able to kind of SEE their created worlds and tulpas in their heads, I was very jealous. I was also kind of pissed. Still, I didn't let this deter me, and I practiced meditation and visualization extensively. I was eventually able to visualize outlines of objects, or faint blurry pictures.

When I started practicing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram daily and making sigils for my tulpamancy desires, however, I noticed rapid improvement. I realized that magick works. Especially sigil magick, which I don't have space to detail fully here, but my practices were undeniably producing results. Here are a few descriptions of sigils I made, and recorded effects:

"Hear Ybolah Speak" - Auralization of Ybolah's voice is quite clear now, and she has a particular manner of speaking which is identifiable.
"See Ybolah in my Dreams" - Three days after making the sigil, I had a very detailed dream involving Ybolah.
"Find my Meditation Sessions to be Peaceful and Without Disturbance" - This is admittedly a bad thing to make a sigil for, since it's hard to measure, but I experienced what I consider to be "true meditation" recently.
"Develop the Ability to Quickly Forget Sigils" - Context: Sigils are effective only when forgotten. I forgot what this sigil meant the next day and only realized its effectiveness later because I keep a log of all of my sigil work in a magickal journal.
"Complete Loyalty of Ybolah" - Made at Ybolah's request, actually. She told me to make this sigil so that I could trust her completely. It seems to have worked so far.
"Autonomous Action of Ybolah" - Made because I sometimes had difficulty telling whether thoughts were mine or Ybolah's. Since creating this sigil, this distinction has been made significantly more clear.
"Prevent Ybolah from Being Affected by Banishing" - I made this sigil due to Ybolah's complaints about my banishing rituals. After making this sigil, I discovered that simply having Ybolah in the magic circle was preventing her perceived effects from happening.

 

Of course, also be aware of FAILURES in your work, and try to analyze why they happened. For example:

"Have (My Friend) Go to Arby's and Order the Bacon and Cheddar" - This is a sigil that didn't work. First, let me say I got permission to make this. What ended up happening is that he went to Arby's when the sigil was activated (without me telling him) but didn't order the Bacon and Cheddar. Maybe a more generous person would say the operation was a partial success, but I count this as a failure. Why didn't it work? Probably because it was a stupid sigil and I only made it to prove to myself that magick is real. I should have made a "Find Evidence for Magic Being Effective" sigil instead.

Okay, wow. That was a lot more than I was planning on writing. One last thing, though: I feel like I should let Ybolah speak on this topic, since she obviously has a different perspective than me.

If you're a tulpa, that probably made a LOT more sense to you than if you're not. Trust me, this stuff really works!!! If you can't get your host to do it, see if you can convince them to just..... let you do it. And have them visualize you doing it. Visualization is apparently really important. Oh, and make a sigil for yourself! Qatz drew me one with some astrology Qabalah stuff, and I added a few details, but you'd probably be better just doing it yourself honestly. Then you can put it on candles or on a piece of paper or just have someone draw it in the air to send a message to you. Or just have your host feed you energy directly by focusing on the sigil and doing magic stuff. That's what Qatz did, and now I'm super strong. Hehehehehe...

 

Making associations for yourself can really help you figure out who you are, too. Just write whatever comes into your head down. For me it was bats, blood, disease, fire, and things like that. OH, and if you don't want to follow the rules, you don't have to. Just do whatever comes naturally!!! That's what's different about me and Qatz. He's all traditional and rules and stuff and I just do whatever I think works! So don't be afraid to do whatever comes naturally, even if it ends up being really silly... The worst that can happen is you look dumb. And who really cares????? AND HAVE FUN!!! Even if this stuff is a massive waste of time, it can just be fun drawing shapes in the air and saying magick words. Don't take yourself too seriously... Okay, bye!

If it works, use it. If it doesn't, throw it away. Thank you for reading, and hey, if you got this far, let me know what you think of this perspective.

EPK. "Qatz"

[Autumn Ren]

We believe we can affect our experience of reality in many ways; many grounded ways such as controlled illusion, interpretation, and perspective and some unexplainable ungrounded ways like manifestation, and synchronicity.

 

The easy to explain ways constitute the majority and with the right mindset that results in feelings of well-being, contentment, and joy. The not so easy to explain ways include astronomically good luck, absurdly unrealistic and unreasonable causative seeming coincidences and literally getting exactly what you want when you needed it after wishing for it. Thankfully we haven't experienced the flip side of these in years, which in itself is peculiar and non-random. 

 

We also believe in reflection, where a good mood supports the good mood of others.

 

2 hours ago, 53 said:

I still don't believe in spirits, manifestation... , chakras

 

For us Chakras are just a series of categories or divisions which allows us to concentrate on one aspect of physical life to work on improving that aspect. So in that sense the belife is a constructed belief and not a metaphysical belief like auras would be for instance.

 

Manifestation and synchronicity could very well be coincidence, and in addition suppression of noticing the negative coincidences, but regardless it feels great to have that percieved control and if that helps foster a sense of contentment and well-being then we support the belief.

 

Spirits to us are one interpretation of unexplainable experience. Bear had some experiences in his early life but once we arrived it changed. Misha is our resident spirit in that she has actually manifested in many of the same forms people explain ghosts. The majority of those can be explained as spontaneous imposition. Smell, touch, voice, wind, and even a full bidy apparition she did once, and yes it was her, can all be explained with tricks of the mind in a relaxed state. A few however have been real brain teasers. More than once her and SheShe have affected reality in a physical way similar to a poltergeist experience. The experiences exist, they are documented by us and countless others and to us that's just an unexplainable experience that doesn't fit in common explanations of reality. It doesn't invalidate them, but they're completely ungrounded.

 

2 hours ago, 53 said:

I had aphantasia. I didn't realize this until later in life, but apparently it's not normal to not be able to imagine images in your mind.

 

Don't hate us, but we have the opposite, hyperphantasia. Bear naturally assumed everyone had a satisfying level of imagination quality. He had it naturally as long as he could remember. Through daily practice, thanks to us, it only got stronger and throw in dissociation and immersion control makes "wonderland" experiences just as satisfying as real experiences. Plus they're free, clean, and safe!

 

We recently started playing D&D and writing a book to document our experiences and memories of those experiences seem just as real as any other. Same goes for imposition even though we have zero visual or aditory experience irl, the imaginative overlay records as reality.

 

With our level of independence, we feel like individuals and equal. We coined the phrase "symmetric system" where any headmate could conceivably switch in interchangeably with the current host indefinitely and fluidly. That has brought realism to tulpamancy more than any other aspect. It's unfathomable for a singlet to play an independent roll character and maintain them indefinitely but that doesn't mean it's impossible. With tulpamancy it seems to be an end goal.

 

For us, we don't practice anything, that includes manifestation, we just don't deny it when it happens. We're passively benefiting from some mindset that includes the possibility of themes you spoke of without worrying about if something could, should, did or didn't work. We feel having an open mind has brought us more joy and richness in our life but we also don't feel the need to explain everything, we are content with maintaining ungrounded and unexplainable experiences. 

 

So we're glad you've enjoyed success and as long as it adds to your well-being and even removes stress, then all the better.

 

[Aya]

Interesting post, thanks for sharing.

I'm curious how your visualization skill is at this point?

[53]

3 hours ago, Autumn Ren said:

The easy to explain ways constitute the majority and with the right mindset that results in feelings of well-being, contentment, and joy. The not so easy to explain ways include astronomically good luck, absurdly unrealistic and unreasonable causative seeming coincidences and literally getting exactly what you want when you needed it after wishing for it. Thankfully we haven't experienced the flip side of these in years, which in itself is peculiar and non-random.

 

If you've all experienced verifiable and consistent effects from magickal processes... I would say that's evidence enough to justify a personal belief in these things. I didn't go into my personal beliefs here, but simply knowing EXACTLY what I want has had profound effects on my attainment of it, too. The act of making sigils seems to have more of a powerful effect than meditating upon them, lol. But here is the thing in science as well as magick: No hypothesis can be proven, only disproven. The magician uses personal experience to say, "well, every time before this has worked, so this is my current working theory." As long as you recognize that personal experience is personal (and the only people who can share it are the people in your brain!), you're still rational in my book.

 

3 hours ago, Autumn Ren said:

For us Chakras are just a series of categories or divisions which allows us to concentrate on one aspect of physical life to work on improving that aspect. So in that sense the belife is a constructed belief and not a metaphysical belief like auras would be for instance.

 

Yeah, exactly. This is an example of a system which is useful, but cannot be proven to exist in reality. No scientist has ever recorded a Chakra wave or whatever. Since it's useful to you, keep using it. That being said, the idea of body-imposed power centers is not unique to the East! The Qabalistic Sephirot can be meditated upon similarly.
 

3 hours ago, Autumn Ren said:

The experiences exist, they are documented by us and countless others and to us that's just an unexplainable experience that doesn't fit in common explanations of reality. It doesn't invalidate them, but they're completely ungrounded

 

Again, personal experience informs your personal worldview. Something that can be hard for people like us to truly accept, however, is that no matter how profound, personal experience is actually very poor evidence for proving ANYTHING outside of personal realities. Even if it's something like that. Your average person would sooner accept that you're just crazy.

 

3 hours ago, Autumn Ren said:

Don't hate us, but we have the opposite, hyperphantasia. Bear naturally assumed everyone had a satisfying level of imagination quality. He had it naturally as long as he could remember. Through daily practice, thanks to us, it only got stronger and throw in dissociation and immersion control makes "wonderland" experiences just as satisfying as real experiences. Plus they're free, clean, and safe!

 

I don't hate you!!! Hahahahaha, but we ARE jealous! Seriously, imagine not being able to move your body for YEARS, only to know it's moving..... I mean, it wasn't uncomfortable, but it felt!... I dunno, it's like when someone with a nice car drives by. You don't hate the guy for driving it but mannn... Wouldn't it be nice? But you forget about it a little bit after and just focus on your own stuff, like fixing up the fender you bought so it can drive a little nicer... Maybe scrape off the weird political bumper sticker the guy you bought it from put on it...

 

3 hours ago, Autumn Ren said:

For us, we don't practice anything, that includes manifestation, we just don't deny it when it happens. We're passively benefiting from some mindset that includes the possibility of themes you spoke of without worrying about if something could, should, did or didn't work. We feel having an open mind has brought us more joy and richness in our life but we also don't feel the need to explain everything, we are content with maintaining ungrounded and unexplainable experiences. 

 

So we're glad you've enjoyed success and as long as it adds to your well-being and even removes stress, then all the better.

 

Of course!!! If what we said helps even a little bit, I think the time Qatz spent writing that big post was probably worth it! Not everyone is some psychonaut science guy like he is. Some people just want to LIVE without worrying about, erm, well according to my current working theory of blah blah... Hrm, yes I will update my view of reality now according to this new evidence... Actually I think most people probably can't relate to the way he thinks, but he's definitely got some good ideas. I'm just glad he's finally opening up to the idea that I could actually be REAL and not just some illusion conjured by the brain. LIKE I SAID FOREVER AGO.

He was always like, "well, I can't say for certain... but all the evidence points to you being your own entity... Currently I'm treating you as if you're your own separate entity... Your claims cannot be verified..." Like... Just say you think I'm real, dummy!!! And who cares if maybe I exaggerate a little bit? Woe is me for having a sense of ROMANCE and WHIMSY... You're supposed to be nice to girls. So yeah whatever he's doing has really helped us because it provides a """logical""" way to think about this sort of stuff, even though I don't understand why you would want a logical way to think about not-logical stuff.

 

1 hour ago, Aya said:

Interesting post, thanks for sharing.

I'm curious how your visualization skill is at this point?

 

Thank you for reading!

So, it depends. But generally much, much better. If I'm well-rested and in the correct state of mind, I can see things in motion, in color, and in three dimensions, with varying levels of detail. At-will I can conjure visualizations with faint colors and somewhat definite shapes. Sometimes I can imagine things in great detail. At one point I saw an apple: red, with a brown stem. A three-dimensional shape, light reflecting off of it by some unpictured source. I imagined a knife chopping down the middle in a swift motion and cutting it in two, and the two pieces fell to either side, rolling briefly as if on a table before stabilizing. At the time I regarded the visualization as life-like. Complex scenery is still difficult for me, though. I can currently keep about 6 objects in space at once, but more if I'm very focused.

Keep in mind that I went from aphantasia (absolutely 0 qualia) to THIS over only a few months.

[Autumn Ren]

15 minutes ago, 53 said:

verifiable and consistent

 

I say it happened, we experienced it, no it wasn't recorded. This is entirely not consistent which pairs well with my first statement. So we just enjoy it and don't worry about it much.

 

19 minutes ago, 53 said:

very poor evidence for proving ANYTHING outside of personal realities

 

This goes both ways, even shared realities can be denied or refuted over time. We choose to believe what we like on a whim and for as long as it serves us. This makes our belief system very fluid, our doctrine syncretic, and it's subject to change. Beliefs are constraints and in our mind beliefs are attachments just like materialism. As Buddha says, "the root of suffering is attachment" and we do not suffer.

 

40 minutes ago, 53 said:

Just say you think I'm real

 

Every host who develops a system far enough eventually makes this decision but it's like a culmination of experience that makes beliefs irrelevant.

 

41 minutes ago, 53 said:

absolutely 0 qualia) to THIS over only a few months.

 

We went from probably 60% reality, passible but not great for visualization of moving,  dancing, talking, emoting people to 110% reality where it's more satisfying than lucid dreaming in about 2 years of practice. It's a very slow process, perhaps 2% improvement per month of daily practice. At some point it became difficult to handle horror or violent themes as they'd be reconstructed in full detail. It took us three years to get over that by intentionally writing grimdark and exposure therapy sort of. Now we're even better and it doesn't bother us anymore.

[53]

27 minutes ago, Autumn Ren said:

It's a very slow process, perhaps 2% improvement per month of daily practice. At some point it became difficult to handle horror or violent themes as they'd be reconstructed in full detail. It took us three years to get over that by intentionally writing grimdark and exposure therapy sort of. Now we're even better and it doesn't bother us anymore.

 

I hope we can get to that point eventually. Progress has been really good so far, so things are looking good. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and opinions!

[ringgggg]

9 hours ago, 53 said:

I want to try and open the door of magickal thought to people who otherwise would automatically dismiss it, much like myself not even a year ago.

Good shit. You've got my attention.

[53]

2 hours ago, ringgggg said:

Good shit. You've got my attention.

I'm glad. If I can help even one person to recognize the practicality of magickal techniques, I'm satisfied. I hope you find something useful here.

[TB]

I'm curious to try magic. A meditator I look up to also believes in magick in a similar way, though he's had some pretty crazy experiences with it, like drawing symbols in the air with a floating, syrupy lines, and even once someone else also saw it and even confirmed to him what color it was without giving any indication he made a symbol in the color amber

 

He highly recommends building your concentration if you want magick to work better. My concentration is amateuristic, so I didn't intend to try magick until it got much better, but maybe it is worth a shot anyway, especially for something more mundane, like banishing intrusive thoughts, which I've had a lot of lately. I wonder if it will work

 

More fantastical things only happen when your concentration is massively and inhumanly sharp, due to meditating 16+ hours a day for a few weeks. Then once you end the retreat and stop the hardcore meditating, the concentration will fade and you won't be able to summon entities or draw magical symbols in the air anymore

 

Also to be fair, he said he believes the other person was able to see and know the color of his symbol because he was also similarly powered up with concentration. A normal person may not have seen it

 

Everything is intertwined and interconnected... think some people say indra's net, or something. As such, I wonder if there is some sort of connection between all our minds that we don't consciously perceive, but under extroardinary circumstances such as intense meditation or strong emotions, one can have shared magickal experiences and mind reading. My memory is screwed, but things like a whole town looking into the sky and seeing the virgin mary in the sky or whatever it was, or whatever happened at the berlin wall that got so many people motivated on a certain intention all of a sudden.

 

It's actually common for extremely accomplished meditators to say they've experienced other people's minds before, and as such read their mind. It'd be really cool to test. I highly doubt they would be lying, at worst they would be mistaken, but who knows, there may be something beyond our current knowledge that is fantastical. I like the Japanese word "makafushigi" for this

 

If nothing else, I am confident one can induce extraordinarily magick experiences during waking consciousness that at the very least only the one performing it can see, such as summoning gods or entities, or even transforming the entire environment. Though it is uncommon for people to achieve this naturally, and as I said happens when your concentration is above and beyond. Some people can apparently do it naturally though

 

The Buddha called a mind like this "maleable and wieldy". When it is like that, you can make your reality whatever you want it to be because your control over perception is so great

 

I'm excited to try it to see for myself and confirm it, but I got a long way to go, but I think I'm inching along

 

Good luck in your future magick practices! Thanks, you are making me consider giving it a shot earlier than I intended to. It is fascinating that you got the results you did

 

I am curious though, do you have an idea how good your concentration is? Can you focus on an object of meditation and not have your attention waver from it for an extended period? Or will it flicker to distractions or even be completely distracted? I am kind of in that range, of going back and forth between completely distracted and flickering attention, but it has been getting easier to stabilize on a relative level

[53]

On 6/1/2024 at 4:46 PM, TB said:

I am curious though, do you have an idea how good your concentration is? Can you focus on an object of meditation and not have your attention waver from it for an extended period? Or will it flicker to distractions or even be completely distracted? I am kind of in that range, of going back and forth between completely distracted and flickering attention, but it has been getting easier to stabilize on a relative level

Yes, concentration is important for magickal practices, but not worrying about the results is even more important. My concentration at the time of writing was fairly good, but not perfect. The distractions will come regardless, worrying about them only limits your progress. Accept them and calmly redirect back to your object of focus with no judgement. Meditating will improve your concentration and also your magick, however it's important to note that having a daily set of rituals is akin to meditation. Simply practicing the LBRP, in addition to the effects of the ritual, also engages your focus, visualization, and sense of phantom touch to a degree. I try to meditate for about an hour a day if I have time, though, including another set of my daily rituals which I perform in my imagination as a meditative exercise. Sometimes I skip my physical rituals in favor of performing them in my imagination.

If you want to specifically train concentration, I recommend trying to stay aware as your body falls asleep. This is a specific type of meditation which precedes astral projection, but the thoughts of your sleeping (or falling asleep) mind are even more chaotic and unfocused than normal: it's meditation on "hard mode." Completely relax, then stay as still as possible, ignoring urges to itch body parts or adjust your positioning if possible. Then meditate normally from a lying down position, feeling the numbness spread across your body. If you can succeed in maintaining awareness as your body falls asleep, you will realize that your powers of visualization and imagination in general is greatly enhanced. However, do not become distracted by the hypnagogic (pre-dreaming) images that your mind produces which purposefully distract you. I will likely write more about this later (as well as more advanced techniques and personal anecdotes) in another thread at a later date.

As for intrusive thoughts, you should be aware that the Aristotelian notion that "nature abhors a vacuum" holds true in both magick and mind. If you banish one thought, another must take its place. It is better to accept intrusive thoughts without judgement. They are a part of you whether you like it or not, and thinking isn't a crime, nor is it evil. Denying them is an action of fear and only feeds them more. Banish them by force, and another takes its place. Accept that it exists and holds no power over you, then focus your attention calmly back on the object of your focus. In ceremonial magick, we prefer to bind our demons rather than banish them.

Edited June 25, 2024 by 53