Suggestions for hard-headed individuals

[Lightlindside]

I have three suggestions, and should clarify that this is advice based on what has worked for me. I'll list them in the order of what would logically come first before progressing:

1. Carl Jung's active imagination technique. This is more a practice for your own mind, but it's helpful in getting used to talking to aspects of your psyche, and thus getting used to having a conversation with something 'other' than yourself. It's actually quite helpful in self-work to imagine different aspects of your psyche as 'other' than yourself to learn about them. Start by imagining a scene with perhaps whatever comes up, or even a specific character from your own imagination that comes up. Pause the scene, insert yourself, and start talking to the imaginary being. It might seem hard at first, but let the being say whatever it 'wants' to say. Some beings will show up with a specific visual presence or voice in your mind, so getting used to this format of 'self'-conversation will get you used to conversing.

A little context; in various occult/esoteric systems, the body and mind are seen as a small scale model of the universe. To me, this effectively means that you can use different parts of your body and mind to talk to different parts of the universe. You can research this by looking it up, or just getting used to what kind of 'voice' a part of your body or mind seems to have. Talking to your 'self' is a very useful way to get used to talking to any conscious entity imo.

2. Meditating on the being. After figuring out what sort of entities or forces resonate with you, sit or lay down and spend a significant amount of time 'calling' to the being by saying a mantra (you could be repeating something like "I seek to commune with the presence of x"), visualizing the presence of the being, or 'feeling' what the being feels like in your body. A combination of the first two suggestions will often lead to the feel of an entity. Do this until something happens. Literally. It might be that you get information on how your mind conceptualizes the being. It might be that you get a visualization of something the being experiences, or wants to show you. It might full on show up and start having a direct internal monologue with you. Any number of responses could arise.

3. Casting a circle and calling a being. Research the traditional method for casting a circle, perhaps after using the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram or a variant cleansing to clear the space. Having researched a being you want to talk to, along with the appropriate offerings if relevant, call the being to your circle. If you are jumping into this right away, it's possible you'll be 'reached' in a more subtle way than you'd expect. A lot of spirit contact relies on training your psychic senses like a muscle. You are on the right track with the development of your own personal system of ritual Magick to act as a way to train. Simple drills like visualization, the psychometry post from earlier in this thread, or just sitting help. When you complete this practice, make sure you dismiss whatever presence shows up with appropriate respect.

Supplementing your practice with one of or any number of these practices will help you start getting a sense of the experience of having a conversation with consciousness as outside of yourself. Note that I said the experience of, because this is important. I grew up on the west coast of Africa, so I had the experience of very intense spiritual activity by virtue of the location having a more locally embedded openness to spiritual experience, but when I came over to North America I had to retrain my 'spiritual' senses. If you are living in a 'First World' (hate the term, but eh) country, you have to remember that you aren't just resisting your own 'lack of belief', but a collective thought-form that actively resists the presence of the supernatural.

My opinion, the spirit world is just as active in the 'West' as it is anywhere else, but you'll experience its effects as primarily mundane things as a result of the 'psychic censor' that Western society has collectively fed. Train your sensory apparatus enough, and eventually you'll have experienced too much actual dialogue with consciousness outside of yourself to deny it. Like learning a language, practice speaking the language and it'll leave an impact.

 

[jzatopa]

Hi,

I want to start out by saying I speak this in the most respectful way possible and mean no offense to anyone, it’s just my current mindset I’m trying to actively change. Ive experimented with a lot of religions and occult practices ranging from energy work, nlp, and hypnosis all the way to order of the golden dawn, demonology, and . Point being, over the past 15 years, I’ve read/experimented a lot in the field of the supernatural. However, I have been unable to convince myself of anything existing outside of the realm of physical reality, despite my best efforts to for a lack of a better term, “brainwash.” it seems my whole goal in life for quite some time now has Simply been to have a spiritual side and have a knowing that something exists that I cannot see.

With that being said, would anyone have any suggestions on how to train yourself to feel/see/hear/know non-physical world does exist? I’ve went as far as to travel to known “haunted” sites and graveyards after midnight etc to try to hunt ghosts down and even do superstitious things like walking on cracks and under ladders just to try to get a feeling that something will happen. I would say my biggest enemy is my mind itself. I’ve tried my best to perform method acting when actually performing magick but it seems I’m not able to fake the unconscious part of the mind to really believe.

How would one actually “trick” themselves into believing something that they feel like is not actually real/true despite how much they tell themself consciously it is? Because each time I try something and nothing happens, it feels like it just reinforces that “ spirituality doesn’t exist and is just self-delusion of the mind” mentality.

You have a denial or your technique is wrong. You do not want to trick anything, you want to discover what is real and experience it.

Here is what I would have you do if you were my student.

1. Read Bardon's IIH and start on step one
2. Begin Qi gong training alternated with Kundalini or AYP Yoga and Ophanim Yoga - if you have time one in the am and the other in the PM
3. Once Bardon is read and you are practicing regularly read the Sefer Yetzirah, Torah (you must see the hebrew for it to work after the Sefer Yetzirah) and then the Zohar + New Testament/Book of Thomas/Book of Andrew
4. Continue to practice for at least 6 months every day then we start focusing on the next part while you have this down
5. Focus your intention before each practice to remove your earliest and deepest wound as well as bring forth your deepest love
6. Review and see what you've experienced and achieved in one year.

In a year, if you do this, you will have basic mastery of Qi, kundalini and the Ketheric light will be experienced.

This is the basic recipe I teach from and help students grow with. Also, if you aren't training with a teacher, coach or guru, it can make a world of difference. If you want results its about practicing every day, not dabbling and just hoping for the best (not saying thats not fun but we are talking about results here).

Mindset is also key BTW. So set your mind to be one with Christ's and achieve the same as that being and then the world will open up more for you. Then the easiest part is just being love and giving love to everyone and everything as you go <3

 

[abernathy]

Hi,

I want to start out by saying I speak this in the most respectful way possible and mean no offense to anyone, it’s just my current mindset I’m trying to actively change. Ive experimented with a lot of religions and occult practices ranging from energy work, nlp, and hypnosis all the way to order of the golden dawn, demonology, and . Point being, over the past 15 years, I’ve read/experimented a lot in the field of the supernatural. However, I have been unable to convince myself of anything existing outside of the realm of physical reality, despite my best efforts to for a lack of a better term, “brainwash.” it seems my whole goal in life for quite some time now has Simply been to have a spiritual side and have a knowing that something exists that I cannot see.

With that being said, would anyone have any suggestions on how to train yourself to feel/see/hear/know non-physical world does exist? I’ve went as far as to travel to known “haunted” sites and graveyards after midnight etc to try to hunt ghosts down and even do superstitious things like walking on cracks and under ladders just to try to get a feeling that something will happen. I would say my biggest enemy is my mind itself. I’ve tried my best to perform method acting when actually performing magick but it seems I’m not able to fake the unconscious part of the mind to really believe.

How would one actually “trick” themselves into believing something that they feel like is not actually real/true despite how much they tell themself consciously it is? Because each time I try something and nothing happens, it feels like it just reinforces that “ spirituality doesn’t exist and is just self-delusion of the mind” mentality

Hi,

I want to start out by saying I speak this in the most respectful way possible and mean no offense to anyone, it’s just my current mindset I’m trying to actively change. Ive experimented with a lot of religions and occult practices ranging from energy work, nlp, and hypnosis all the way to order of the golden dawn, demonology, and . Point being, over the past 15 years, I’ve read/experimented a lot in the field of the supernatural. However, I have been unable to convince myself of anything existing outside of the realm of physical reality, despite my best efforts to for a lack of a better term, “brainwash.” it seems my whole goal in life for quite some time now has Simply been to have a spiritual side and have a knowing that something exists that I cannot see.

With that being said, would anyone have any suggestions on how to train yourself to feel/see/hear/know non-physical world does exist? I’ve went as far as to travel to known “haunted” sites and graveyards after midnight etc to try to hunt ghosts down and even do superstitious things like walking on cracks and under ladders just to try to get a feeling that something will happen. I would say my biggest enemy is my mind itself. I’ve tried my best to perform method acting when actually performing magick but it seems I’m not able to fake the unconscious part of the mind to really believe.

How would one actually “trick” themselves into believing something that they feel like is not actually real/true despite how much they tell themself consciously it is? Because each time I try something and nothing happens, it feels like it just reinforces that “ spirituality doesn’t exist and is just self-delusion of the mind” mentality.

getting yourself into trouble is an effective method of convincing yourself that this world exists. for me my first experience with beings in this realm happened in a proper haunting after i swindled a native american pendant. ended up giving that back, but since then have been "poking bears" every once in a while to just see what happens. calling beings over. practicing unsafe magic without circles/protection to become a beacon. dangerous, but aye at least you get to explore what's out there!

 

[MorganBlack]

Damn good topic! I grew up in a 'hard-headed' scientific household with a geologist father. He often used that exact term ' hard-headed' for what we'd probably now call a data-driven investigations. He also intuited the materialist worldview was a trap and was always looking for an exit.

In my opinion, magic and creativity are manifestations of the same faculty. Learning to let go is a good suggestion. I would also say take up imaginative play in table top RPG games, books, movies, and comics. Take a creative writing class.

See also John Cleese's 1991 talk on creativity and Open vs Closed thinking.

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It helps just pretend you are a kid again playing a game of "what if." The story is important becasue it shapes your expectations. Your expectations will shape your experience to an enormous degree , and the Phenomenon will take those forms: UFOs, angels, demons. fae, cryptids, pagan gods , chi-balls, energy, flashing lights, or astral chat-bots with gods or space aliens. I feel there is a reality behind the Simulacra, but that is another conversation.

For those low on the Big Five personality trait of Openness breaking the default stories of our childhood can be extremely hard. I am high Openess, and did it with meditation, some self hypnosis and Goetia early on. Others may need the extreme and total mind-fuck of a replacement religion to read-write very early bad conditioning. I am not a fan of that technique myself.

I am not sure why but as a kidI KNEW there was something more to what I was being told. Again I'm High Oneness, which has a propensity for the other derided "magical thinking" of the materialists. That was for me what the spark that lights up the exit sign from the locked-down universe looks like. Yours may be something else.

 

[acornandbone]

I started off a strict materialist, data-only decision-making, etc. so I hear you on your perspective. I still rely on data-informed decision-making, I'm just more tolerant for subtle data.

Subtle data is a very useful way of expressing subjective existence that I hadn't previously thought of. I will be stealing that and using it from now on.

The short version is you need to have an experience that shakes your worldview and cracks it open enough to set you free from how you think currently.

I would agree with this, and I would also add for OP's benefit that it may very well be a long time for that worldview-shaking experience to occur. There is also the possibility that it might never happen at all, or at least not to the magnitude that you expect or that other practitioners have recounted to you. Your experience may come in the form of many smaller, more subtle experiences. Rather than one large crack forming suddenly and violently in your worldview, there will be many small cracks. Many small moments that stick in your mind long after they have occurred, and that you might have dismissed were you not keeping your mind open to possibility.

It is very discouraging to want a worldview-shaking experience to come, to do what you feel you can to invite it to happen, but for life to simply go on as it always has. You may start to feel that there is something that other people possess that you lack, or that they are somehow special or chosen by powers unknown to possess secret knowledge. Am I not good enough? If this is real, and it is happening to others, why can't it happen to me? Why hasn't what happened to them happened to me? These are thoughts that can sneak in, and it's embarrassing to admit that they have. But the point is to not let them become your truth, and to keep your eyes and your mind open for your moment.

 

[MorganBlack]

I often think those of us who grew up in a scientific materialist worldview have the mirror image problem of those who grew up in a nasty Evangelical turbo-Protestant Nightmare religion. My friends who did have that unfortunate childhood usually overwrite those patterns with a replacement religion like Paganism.

I grew up a Unitarian, loved sci-fi, comics, Dungeon and Dragons (think the kids in Stranger Things, that was my generation, the 1980's proto-geeks) , but with an extended Catholic maternal side of the family. It’s hard to find something I need to rebel against in there. The worst thing about Unitarians is a sort of being a bland, milquetoast ultra-liberal who believes in hand-wavy "You know, all the good things." Catholicism, and here I mean Mexican Catholicism of the left-wing Liberation Theology school, which was about helping the downtrodden, being kind, and folk necromancy with saints. Kind of hard to rebel against that either.

The first task, I think, for those of us with simialr backgrounds, is to "break materialism - although I did not call it that at the time. Joseph Chilton Pearce's The Crack in the Cosmic Egg was a huge step in letting me know I was not totally insane ( "Insanity" is the mirror image "sin" to the nightmare religions who try to control others through fear and fake morality). :

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This is imporant becasue with the Grimorium Verum you will have amazing and spooky experiences that if you tell people would have gotten you locked up with men in white coats and put on a heavy routine of Thorazine.

Lyall Watson's books like Supernature were a huge influence, as was Colin Wilson's The Occult. Although I'm Gen-X, this stuff was still floating around , left over from the weird 1970s, into the late 1980s when I read it:

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I knew the thing called "Magic" from reading Paul Huson's Mastering Witchcraft , which made the impression on me at age 11, and I knew it was a way out of Plato's Cave, but reading Crowley at 13, fuck if any of what he said made any sense. The 1980s Robert Anton Wilson era was fine, but it again was too academic. This was pre-Intenet so I was on my own.

What clicked for me was a 1990's cheesy super-cringe book called Pacts with the Devil, a decent-for-the-time effort by a couple of Thelemites to rehabilitate the diabolical blue book grimoires of France, and Italy.

Book – PDF - Pacts With the Devil: A Chronicle of Sex, Blasphemy and Liberation - S. Jason Black & Christopher S. Hyatt

For the first time, a genuine manual of the dreaded "left-hand path." Braving the new Witchcraft Panic that has swept the world, S. Jason Black and Christopher S. Hyatt have written a book that places the Western magical tradition--and the Western psyche--in perspective. Sweeping aside both the...

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While I do not use any pentagrams anymore, the section of the book of Jason Black's personal experimentation and results of his working made a huge impression on me at the time. I like to think now they worked (in part) like what Ivy Corvus suggested doing with String Theory in her excellent essay in This is Chaos, it changed my expectation in such a fundamental way I basically shifted quantum realities (universes) to where the daimons exist, and out of one where they don't exist.

(Not that I take that literally either.)

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You know, I wonder if this can still work, or if it really had to hit at a more innocent time and place, before the internet.

As an exercise in "Goetic reality shifting" (to totally just MAKE UP a thing), try putting on some Cryo Chamber (below), turning down the lights, and pretend you are out camping in the woolds one dark night, with someting loose out there, then read and re-read Jason Black's experiences in Goetia.

Although terrifying, his misadventure with Sorath has percolated over time onto the internet as a modern horror story and fear of that demon has spead far and wide. Story is important and shapes the manifestations we get. We had the story of Catholicism, of damnation and salvation, and the Faustian gambit of putting your very soul on the line for wealth, power, love, and wisdom... what has replaced it? The internet.

The daimons will show up for me as Eldritch Horrors in my game room because , I suspect, that is how I expect them to. The horror is part of it for me. And unless you enjoy horror movies, you probably can't relate. Other people will have different experiences based on their own unconscious expectations.

Wiht the internet the main replacment story is Plastic Shamanism, where the demons show up as an astral chatbot, because that is all the internet lets them be in the universe of the people who believe that is the one true thing.

As magicians, we need better shared stories than Scientific materiaialsism bookened by Instagram and WitchTok on the other. How are they better than the old stories for magic, exactly? I like some of it, but kinda iffy on a lot of it.

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[acornandbone]

I often think those of us who grew up in a scientific materialist worldview have the mirror image problem of those who grew up in a nasty Evangelical turbo-Protestant Nightmare religion. My friends who did have that unfortunate childhood usually overwrite those patterns with a replacement religion like Paganism.

This has been my experience. Even more so for people who came originally from religion but transitioned to a hard scientific materialist view as a part of growing up. It's especially hard to move on from that stance as most of us considered it to be a personal victory (a natural next step towards self-improvement at best, a mark of higher innate intelligence and overall superiority over 'the masses' at worst).

 

[MorganBlack]

Even more so for people who came originally from religion but transitioned to a hard scientific materialist view

Holy shit! I had totally forgotten that combo, even though I am around it all the time! Many of my friends are that way. They're either escaping from fundamentalist Protestant nightmare world, or are just Reddit atheists. Both just flip side to the other of the coin, a locked down fundamentalist materialism, without ever considering a softer stance like, say, Zen Buddhism, Idealism or Panpsychism.

I have two good friends who are both 2010-era Harris-Dawkins New Atheists: one a VFX artist who played in a San Diego punk band, and the other a Appalachian "ex" Baptist military brat Republican turned game artist. I do not talk magic, let alone Goetia, with either them, but I know the worldview inside and out and can speak it like a native, becasue I am.

Chaos Magic is the tool I use to flip back and forth, by emphasizing in my awareness to find the things I can agree with them through "paradigm shifting" ( and can slide into and wear a skin ) - then just speak from that view. It's good camouflage, and encourages empathy. Nobody is 100% wrong, I feel. With the 'ex" Baptists I can hide the mysticism inside in Judaism and Kabbalah. Catholicism is verboten to each, though, and really seems to trigger the Anglo worldview's immune system.

 

[acornandbone]

Catholicism is verboten to each, though, and really seems to trigger the Anglo worldview's immune system.

I think many who hold fast to this worldview would better be classified as anti-theist rather than atheist given the immediate rise in blood pressure they experience at the very mention of religion of any kind. I can think of a few examples in my own life and it always seems to go back to Evangelical or Catholic religious trauma.

Following their mindset, any belief (or lack of disbelief) in the numinous or the immaterial or the Mystery (be that the Abrahamic God or any number of pagan gods or simply in magical thinking) opens the door for abuse. Either belief causes one to be led into harm or belief causes one to inflict harm upon others, because that which cannot be seen or proven cannot be held accountable for influencing violent, oppressive or abusive action. That openness to spiritual experience boils down to a simply choice to ignore reality, to our own detriment and the detriment of others.

I saw a debate once between two Youtubers that while ultimately futile demonstrated that worldview - "....something something what is stopping Thor from telling you to kill a bunch of people?"

I'm obviously not going to sit in front of my friends and attempt to invalidate their experience. But it's difficult to clarify the differences between a non-materialist worldview and a religious (code for Abrahamic) worldview to people who see it all as the same and therefore bad.

 

[MorganBlack]

"....something something what is stopping Thor from telling you to kill a bunch of people?"

Wow! Damn. Talk about logical fallacy - and from people who worship "logic" as a dumb cargo cult. I feel like I've lost 15 IQ points just from knowing about it. In logic that is a Slippery Slope fallacy, and assumes that a relatively small step will inevitably lead to a chain of disasters - like becoming a divinely-inspired serial killer. So dumb!