4. Try this with a few more objects, such as a blue cube, a shimmering diamond, a pair of sneakers, and an elephant. Try to really notice the differences between your conscious and subconscious productions. For the most part, you will want to have your subconscious take an active role in visualization with the guidance and direction of your conscious mind throughout this book, because it is much more powerful at it than your conscious mind. Your subconscious will add energy to your visualizations.
5. Now, notice the feelings in your body. Take a few very deep breaths consciously. Then let your subconscious take over your breathing again. Notice the difference between the quality of your breath when it is controlled by your subconscious as opposed to your conscious mind. Also, notice the feelings in your body right now, after the deep breaths. You will find that physiological changes are taking place. One of the easiest ways of changing our emotions is by changing our breathing to deep breaths. Our subconscious minds react to the change. It is an easy and effective means of communication to the subconscious that you want to relax.
6. Take a few more deep breaths, then turn breathing back over, noticing how it changes the way that you feel. Repeat a few more times.
7. Think about something that makes you angry. Now ask your subconscious to come up with something that makes it angry. How are these different? Are they different things or do they just feel different? Try this with happiness, sadness, fear, and excitement.
8. When you are finished, write down your observations in your journal.
In this exercise, hopefully you have noticed that these tasks actually somewhat require the assistance of your subconscious mind even when your conscious mind is the active worker, and that you are really constantly communicating back and forth between these two aspects of your mind. But by directly communicating with the subconscious and through the subconscious the super-conscious you can easily and quickly cause transformations in your life. If you wish to develop psychic and magick abilities, the very first thing you need to do immediately is to form a solid friendship with your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind runs your energy body, and through your energy body connects with the superconscious. Take a moment now, and perform this next exercise.
I also hope you will have noticed that your subconscious is much more powerful at producing these phenomena directly than your conscious mind. By describing what you would like to experience, and allowing your subconscious to produce the experience you will greatly enhance your imaginative capabilities. You may also wish to try combining multiple sensory modalities when using your imagination. If you are seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting your visualizations, they will become much more rich and dynamic.
Exercise 5 – The Subconscious and the Pendulum
Time Required: 10 to 15 minutes
You are already in constant communication with your subconscious every moment of each day, through the methods that you've just explored in the previous exercise. However, it is sometimes useful to isolate this communication, so that you are sure that you are giving your subconscious a voice, and not simply speaking for it. This simple method just allows you to remove most doubt from the process, by allowing your subconscious to communicate directly in an exterior form that you can view with your eyes. Of course, it's still possible for you to move the pendulum consciously, but if you allow your subconscious to control the pendulum, you will have an easy method of back and forth communication. This method mostly limits the communication to yes and no questions, but it is still of great value, and there are plenty of ways to expand its possibilities.
You will need your pendulum for this exercise, so if you have not yet obtained one, now is the time to get it. Your subconscious is very childlike, and enjoys playing games. The following should be done in the spirit of fun.
1. Sit holding pendulum, so that it dangles about three inches from your fingers, comfortably.
2. Talk directly to your subconscious, telling it that you are going to be playing this game with it. Tell your subconscious that a back and forth motion means yes, and a side to side motion means no. Then demonstrate the motions with the pendulum, again going over the meanings with your subconscious clearly.
3. Now, ask your subconscious if it understands these rules, telling it to show you a yes with the pendulum. Do not move the pendulum, but allow your subconscious to use the involuntary muscles of your hand to create the movement.
4. Now ask your subconscious to show you no.
5. Ask your subconscious a few simple yes or no questions that it will know the answers to (it does not necessarily have much more knowledge than you)
6. This simple exercise has now opened the door of communication directly with your subconscious mind.
7. When you are finished, write down your observations in your journal.
DELETION, GENERALIZATION AND DISTORTION
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) provides us with a couple of interesting models that you will find useful in your work. As I mentioned previously, over the course of our lives we have limited our awareness, and glued together the energy patterns of the universe into a rigid set of physical objects. The way in which we have done this is a threefold process of modeling: deletion, generalization and distortion. These are the three tools we humans use to model reality into chunks that are easily understandable for our conscious minds. These tools are not bad in any way, we need them to get through our everyday lives, but we must learn to at least partially circumvent them in order to experience alternative information and psychic realities.
Deletion
It is simply not possible for our conscious minds to process all the bits of information that surround us. We are constantly experiencing millions of pieces of information every second. In order to have meaningful relationships and negotiate our way through consensus reality, we must delete huge portions of potentially available information. Out of the millions of potential pieces of information, our conscious minds can handle just a few at a time. Our subconscious can handle vastly more, and tends to help us sort through what we may find useful at the time, giving us all that we can handle. Occasionally, the subconscious feels that we are ignoring something important, and gives us a little pang or internal pressure to become aware of something. It is fairly easy to instruct the subconscious to make new and different information available that we have previously ignored, and the trainings in this book will help us to do just that.
Generalization
We use generalization positively to access pieces of past information when we are presented with similar problems in the present. For instance, when we were first learning to write the letters of the English alphabet, we were equally struggling with the shapes, and the physical process of holding the pen or pencil. But, a few years later, when we learned to write in cursive, we were able to apply our previous experience with the writing instrument, and just have to learn to create the new shapes. If you have ever ridden a skateboard, it makes riding a snowboard much easier in the future and vice versa. On the negative side, we often simply don't really notice the things around us, because they are similar to things we have already seen. When we see a chair, we don't really notice that specific chair, but just generalize it as a thing we may or may not sit on. We often do this with people and experiences. “Yes, I’m making love to Betty again, I have done it a million times, and this is how it always feels.” Thus we do not allow spontaneous new experiences to enter our lives, and we must always consider everything new if we are going to develop real power.
Distortion
Distortion is our mind's ability to take something that is one way, and transform it into something else altogether. This can happen with both objects and situations in our lives. It can be a very positive tool, as in the “suspension of disbelief” that we engage in while watching a movie, play or looking at a painting. It is also the way in which we create new things and new ideas. All dreams and fantasies are distortions. All inventions are based on distorting possib
ilities. One hundred years ago, the idea of information traveling through the air was impossible, but a few dreamers were capable of thinking outside this paradigm and we now have a global information network that is truly astounding. On the other hand, distortion can be extremely negative because we humans can transform the meaning of anything into a totally disempowering mess.
Exercise 6 - Observing Reality
Time Required: 2 to10 Minutes
To get a little bit of a practical idea about these processes, take a moment right now and do this brief exercise.
1. Gather a few small objects from directly around you. It doesn't matter what they are. They do not need to be anything meaningful to you. Pens, jewelry, remote controls, any objects that you have near at hand, that you recognize and know well, but that you haven't ever given much thought to.
2. Take one of the objects in your hand, and really look at it. I mean really look at it, as if you've never seen anything like it before. Notice the shapes, textures, colors and ways that it reflects or absorbs light. Try to discern every detail of the object. What is the object made of? How was it gathered from the earth, and shaped into the object you now hold? What was it like in its natural state? Is it completely man-made? Where did the chemicals come from? Truly, it is a fascinating object. Do you understand it? Do you really know what the meaning of this object is? Does it have a meaning? Is it a meaningless object? Now look at it intensely, allowing your eyes to defocus a little, and staring intently, until the object begins to have a bit of a halo around it. Is it now a magick object?
3. Repeat this same process with the rest of the objects you have chosen.
4. When you are finished, write down your observations in your journal.
You may not understand exactly why you are doing this exercise, but that is unimportant right now. As you become less and less connected to the surface deletions, generalizations and distortions you use to define the things you see, you will become more and more connected with reality. As reality begins to dawn in your life, you will notice that you begin to have power over yourself, and the situations of your life.
It is our subconscious minds that really run these modeling patterns, so we must persuade our subconscious that it is okay to view the world in novel new ways. The easiest way to do this is through altering our state of consciousness, which we will cover in a few moments.
VISUAL, AUDITORY, KINESTHETIC
NLP practitioners consider our senses to be of utmost importance in communication and change. Each of us has favorite sensory modalities for processing information, and by understanding which of these modalities we prefer, it makes the process of communication much easier. Some of us are very visual. We like to see diagrams and pictures and read instructions, we like to look at how things work, we are attracted to bright colors, attractive images, and we process information largely through visual pictures in our minds. Some of us are more auditory, we like things explained to us verbally, we are attracted to soothing tones; we process information with words in our heads. Some of us are more kinesthetic, we like a hands on approach, we like to touch things, are attracted to textures, sensations, and enjoy processing information with our feelings. These senses, Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic, form the building blocks of our waking consciousness.
The senses of taste and smell are of equal importance, but most of us do not use these senses to actively process information. Instead, our subconscious uses them primarily to decide whether we like or dislike something or someone. We all of course use all of these senses to a greater or lesser degree, but each of us has sense modalities that we use more often than others. What's more, the sense modality that you favor most likely indicates the psychic modality that you will find easiest to develop. For instance, if you tend to be visual, you will probably favor clairvoyance (psychic seeing) above clairaudience (psychic hearing) or psychic empathy (psychic feeling) and so on.
Exercise 7 - Are you VAK?
Time Required: 5 to 10 minutes
Take a look at these lists, and you will notice that you favor one of them at least a little above the others, especially in times of stress. Keep in mind that we all favor different modalities in different situations, so you are not strictly one or the other. This is just to give you a simple idea of which one you tend to favor most. These are again just tendencies, and certainly not hard and fast rules. You will of course find that you have tendencies associated with more than one modality, but try to get an idea of which one dominates your cognitive processes.
Take a moment and notice which of these items seem to apply to you.
Visual:
You like to write things down
You like movies and TV
You read billboards
You like written instructions or diagrams
You like to daydream fantasize
You follow written recipes for cooking
You like to draw and doodle
You are good at planning, visualizing problems and solutions
You memorize things with pictures or writing things down
You like to read
You like maps for finding your way in new places
Auditory:
You prefer verbal instruction
You work out math problems aloud or with words in your head.
You repeat things over and over to remember them
You use rhymes to remember things
You like to talk over plans and decisions
You like to ask for driving directions
You like talk or news radio
You are a good listener
You are a good talker
You love to ask questions
You want to be understood
Kinesthetic:
You like to make things
You like to get hands on things
You sway to music
You like to move
You like to touch textures
You like to be touched
You love hugs
You like to learn by experiencing
You like to take things slow
You are sensitive to others feelings
You like comfort
You like to make people happy
You seem to just know when others are sad, happy or angry
Write down your observations in your journal. Are you more visual, auditory or kinesthetic?
Exercise 8 - The Importance of the Imagination
Time Required: 10 to 15 minutes
The power of subjective experience is amazing. Whatever you pretend to be true is considered your truth to all parts of your consciousness except in many cases for your conscious mind. So, if you are thinking positive and empowering thoughts, your subconscious and superconscious minds will believe these things to be true, and these things will start to manifest in your life. If, on the other hand you are constantly thinking limiting negative thoughts, your subconscious and superconscious will believe that is what you want to experience, and bad things will continually happen in your life. As we explored a short while ago, our imagination directly connects our conscious and our subconscious. By using our imaginations alone, we can profoundly affect our emotions, physiology and ultimately our experience of life. “When a man imagines he actually creates a form on the Astral or even some higher plane; and this form is as real and objective to intelligent beings on that plane, as our earthly surroundings are to us.”[1 ]Explore the following brief subjective experience exercises and you will see what I mean.
1. Find a comfortable place where you can relax for ten minutes or more without interruption.
2. Now, close your eyes, and begin to imagine that you are in a supermarket, in the produce section. Try to imagine this as vividly as possible. In front of you is a shelf of bright yellow, juicy lemons. One of them has been conveniently cut in half for you. Pick up this lemon half in your imaginary hand, and look at its sections, examining the juicy corpuscles, and feeling the cool, bumpy texture. Squeeze it a little, imagining t
he juices flowing into your hand. Now stick the juicy part right in your mouth, and squeeze. Taste the incredible sourness of the lemon juice flowing into your mouth, and running down your chin. How does it taste?
3. Now imagine that you are being whisked away into the recent past in India, and you are on a dusty street in a very poor village. You can smell animals, and in the distance you can see a small crowd of very hungry looking children. In the center of this throng, you can see Mother Theresa handing out bread to the children from the bag. Walk up to Mother Theresa, and see her smiling at you kindly. Then punch her in the stomach and steal the bag of bread. How does this make you feel?
4. Now imagine that you are in a dark and gloomy old house. We all have secret fears, things that scare us unreasonably. As you turn a corner in the house, find yourself face to face with something that you truly fear. Choose something that you really find horrible and scary, your most secret and awful fear. Allow yourself to get close, to look this fearful thing right in the face. How does this affect you?
5. When you are finished, write down your observations in your journal.
If you've really done the preceding exercise you will notice that these brief reveries set off all sorts of physiological, electrochemical responses in your body. Your salivary glands produced saliva, you felt guilt or perhaps mischievous pleasure, and you produced adrenaline. But none of these experiences were technically “real.” Your subconscious behaved as if these experiences were real even though you were just pretending, and produced the appropriate emotional and physiological responses. How many unreal things have you made real with this same power? How many times have you avoided doing things you wanted to do because you allowed this power of imagination to negatively limit yourself? You can now use this incredible power for good, imagining great things for yourself, and making them happen easily and naturally.
The Book of Magick Power Page 5
