Part Two

The mind cannot discover the mind; that is the role of the spirit, which exists in the highest realm that is known as enlightenment. However, we can intellectually prepare for the discovery and moreover become aware of the metaphysical geography of the mind and methods known to have aided others in its explorations. Because all magick starts with a desire for something I will start there, but know that no aspect of the mind or soul is lesser or simpler than the others- some are merely subtler. There exploration of each part and their interplay provides the foundation to successful magick. There are of course issues that will arise when spiritual refinement is used for attaining lesser things, but they are small when one knows how to handle them.

A desire and a Will gives intent; emotional attachment or force provides a way to anchor the intent so it does not waver; spiritual refinement gives power and wisdom to use it effectively; action on this plain will help it along; and working with the way of things will further aid your chances. It seems to my experience all are needed to use magick well for practical results. But there is a contradiction in that to gain spiritual refinement one must avoid attachment to the material world. I believe this is best overcome by not wanting occult powers for the sake of having them, but to sublimate them to a “higher cause”. All too often people who seek occult powers for their own right do not have the endurance to attain them for they are looking to an aid to life and must then have an aid to magick. The Occult powers one needs to have practical results are gained or at least made more potent by spiritual refinement but working on spiritual refinement is dreadfully dull. Finding a better motivator than “I want it” or “it will make life better” will make the long hours of training bearable.

To further resolve the contradiction between spiritual refinement and practical results concentration is needed. Developing concentration will be hard and long but allows one to perform magick and train occult powers without thinking about being able to do fun tricks. Concentration is something that is often forced in magical training; “suppress any other thoughts” and “hold onto his visualization with all your will.” I am unconvinced on this point, for concentration in this exercise is a manifestation of will. To make the Will responsible for both making your intent and keeping your mind on the task at hand splits its effect: maintaining focus on both the ends and means. While the will is needed to make intent, it is not required for concentration. People often believe it is, because too often concentration is understood as a type of work. Concentration is only the act of focusing on a task. A person can be completely absorbed in the task or they can be shallowly involved. The more completely one is involved in the task the easier it is to concentrate on it. The brain has a lot of power and needs a lot to keep it occupied. If any available attention is uncommitted then that part of the brain will find something else to occupy its time.

Your brain manages your breathing, heart beat and automatic functions, coordinates waling and talking, filters the millions of sounds, images, feelings, sensations, and tastes we in counter every day, and still has plenty of power to think about randomness and have it pop in to your head at odd moments. The brain can do a lot, so is it any wonder that sitting and doing nothing is so hard to keep up? How dull it must be, and how foreign. I liken it to posttraumatic stress. You go off the war, get shot at for three years, then come back and now you have to remember that no one is trying to kill you. That takes a while. A long while. So too will relaxed concentration take a long time, for you must remind yourself over and over that for the time of your practice nothing is important. Dismiss all thoughts as unnecessary. It is not so much trying to keep thoughts away as realizing that they are not important when they do arise. After a time many thoughts that once seemed dreadfully important do not even arise. When you are quite happy with the few thoughts that then remain, concentrating on the complex magickal rites by which you seek occult power becomes very simple. Because they are important thoughts that arise about the rite need not be brushed away. Much harder are the Zen type of exercise where you simply don’t think at all. I am not a fan of this type of exercise, even though a few popular western occult manuals recommend it.

Zen has two very useful functions. First, attaining a very deep relaxation, and second it is an intermediary step to understanding the way the mind works. Esoteric Buddhist meditation holds that you are not your body, emotions, mind or a few other things I forget. To realize this each one in turn is stopped until only you remain. This is a useful proof of concept and will indeed help you to develop siddhis (occult powers), but its goal is enlightenment not power. Granted, a certain level of mastery over each of these is needed for magick, but the level is much less than to attain Buddha-hood, so there are better ways to go about it. For most people, it will suffice to accept the intellectual concept that you are not this that and the other things. Forewarned and informed you can conduct your training more quickly because you need not spend time coming to one new enlightenment after another. No, only concentration is truly required of the mage and that is hard enough.

Read about concentration and more often than not you will see sergeant training manuals requiring you to simply focus on something for hours at a time to build up your abilities at “one-pointed-ness”. That is very hard, but it will work. A more direct approach, however, is simply to see the thing you’re trying to concentrate on (work, magickal rite, what have you) for what it is, not what you think it is. We like to dismiss things not in our heads as this generic figure or that idea of a thing. We "know” what a pencil is and what a tree looks like so we give it a glance to assure ourselves it fits more or less in to a category of generic objects then move on. We all know what a tree is, but when asked to describe a particular tree – one we are looking at – it tends to be very similar to the idea of a tree. “It has green leaves and a trunk.” Forgetting the idea of a tree and looking at what is there in all its detail and many facets make it much more interesting. A tree, much like a painting, is unique to itself; try looking at a particular tree as you would a particular painting, then it will be just as interesting as a Rembrandt. Approaching a magickal rite in that manner makes even the dullest “stare at the sky and wait for enlightenment” exercise worth doing.
Having given some strategies which make the training of spiritual refinement and there by occult powers more congruent we are still left with the opposing ends. The classical occult powers (clairvoyance, clairaudience, passing unseen, reading thoughts, and the like) are linked to the development of something; will power, or soul, or faith, are common and depend on the system from which they came. While I don’t scribe to non-dualistic view of reality per se, I do see how it is useful. Being that all things are one, it is a simple matter to alter yourself, so by changing the world. But bothersomely enough this refinement requires and giving up some of the worldly pleasures that are the presumed ends of occult powers. I heard once that the progression of the spirit is a process in which one will find the some of the classical occult powers rather annoying. To be sure this is the case. More than one bad sifi show has shown that hearing peoples thoughts all the time is unpleasant. I can also see why the occult powers which are dualistic in nature (clairvoyance requires both a person to see and the seen) are bothersome to someone seeking the non-dualism. Conversely for the rest of us, who would not mind seeing the future, it is bothersome to strive for non-dualism when it is not what we want.

If one assumes that the universe is non-dualistic then the only thing one needs to know is oneself. I realize that many are not sold on non-dualism, as am I, but the approach works. Again the hang up is in opposing ends. You either want power in this “illusionary” world, or you want enlightenment. Yet enlightenment is useful to gain powers.
From my own experience I can tell of a few experiences with occult powers gained via minor enlightenment which might further clarify the point. There are seven elevators in the building I work in, and they take forever to get to any floor. They also are unpredictable and the one that is two floors away will still be there when the one 20 floors away gets to you. Yet, I always find myself in front of the door to the elevator going my way that opens first. More than once I have been talking and then tossed off “you would call it…” and the person responds that I named the word they were thinking. With I very close friend of mine I will often have a dream about her and know I should call. The last time this happened, the day before she experienced very bad relationship issues and was distraught. More particular to my own magickal tradition are the odd happenstances that contentiously make my life easier, which I attribute to living close to the Tao. For example, I will occasionally miss schedule and double book, then one appointment calls to cancel; afterwards I happen to run into that person later that day at a bar. More telling perhaps is that I live pleasantly in a bad part of town. I share a building with a group of hookers and the building next to mine has a crack dealer. We have a shooting/stabbing/mugging/brake in/theft every other week. Yet, in the two years I have been here I have never been bothered, packages have sat outside my door just off the street over a weekend away and not been touched, no one has even bothered to cut my window screens- something of a hobby for the local youth.

Occult powers make things easier, but can also be applied to make proper magick- what with spell and such- work better. The development of empathy which lies behind most of the occult powers is very useful as one can feel in a visceral sense what something means. Whether it is the desired outcome of a spell or the energies of someone standing around, feeling and being able to conjure within yourself the same, will allow you to understand and thereby alter what exists.