Hello

I'm pretty new to Magick, and I have a few questions about trances in meditation. I've done a bit of reading on Magick and have actually decided to stop for a while and start practicing, as I wasn't doing so before. But, I've found remarkably little information about how to get into a trance through meditation. I'm introverted, so meditation is my preferred modus operandi, and also I haven't gotten any results from the classic sigil visualization at orgasm technique.

In Franz Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics, he mentions that the practitioner can get into a trance by focusing his awareness into the center point of his body, aiming for an atomic point in space. In Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners, I found a breathing exercise involving alternate nostril breathing. I have yet to try these two techniques, but I'm surprised that I haven't found more.

So, what techniques have you been using to achieve a trance in meditation? I would greatly appreciate your advice.

Trance and meditation are two related but non-congruent states of consciousness. You can be in a trance or you can meditate but not both at the same time. Normally people move from trances into meditation so it is not surprising a search for meditation to trance techniques did not turn up much. Meditation will help more for magick in the long run (2-5 years) but trances are more useful now.

Trances are also easier to induce. A trance is a state of consciousness where the active-waking-mind is beaten into a stupor so it wont get in your way. Just do something over and over again until you forget you are doing it. Simply reciting an mantra you made for the sigil until the sound reverberates in your mind all on its own will do. Now empower the sigil via the normal ways and your done.

Meditation is harder. The classical definition is 'sustained one-pointed concentration for more than six seconds'. Yes, seconds. It really is that hard that it has to be measured in seconds. Both books you cite are good and will help a lot with meditation, but until you reach the point where you can maintain meditative focus for a few minutes, it is not directly applicable to things like sigils. Alternate nostril breathing or Nadi Shodhana Pranayama cleans the channels by which solar and lunar energies travel. When clear and balanced the central channel opens and meditation is much easier. Chapman's book is good but he is a little easy on requirements. I had to do the breathing exercise twice as often as suggested for a few months before I got a benefit. He also leaves out supplementary pranayama such as Kapalbhati and Bhastrika. Youtube has useful instructions on all the pranayamas.

To add to the above, you can say that Trance might lead to Meditation but Meditation will not, ideally, lead to trance.

Look up some information on hypnosis, like 'hypnosis faq' or some such, as the trance state is identical to the hypnosis state. In the course of a day you go in and out of trance states constantly. You spend the majority of the day in a trance state. Mystical Trance states are simply states of self hypnosis during which your aim is to focus on some mystical end. Any time that you are visualizing chakras and doing inner energy work, focusing on breathing in elements, etc., this is proactive use of the trance/hypnotic state of mind.

Meditation is rather about obtaining a state of focused clarity, the object of which is ultimately to reveal the true nature of self.

This is a fairly recent distinction for me, but I have found that hypnotic states can lead to meditation as the mind can be given suggestions during a hypnotic state that lead the conscious mind to relax and become calm so that the subconscious mind can be bared a bit at a time, allowing for the 'mud' in the water to gradually clear. In fact, one can go so far as to say that psychologically, the process of meditation is one of clearing the subconscious mind of the things which ultimately obscure the true self. And there are various ways to go about this but they all ultimately rely on allowing the conscious mind to relax rather than remain active and distracting the attention from the innermost being.

The best encouraging advice I have received regarding meditation is that if you sit still and focus your attention inwards, towards the 'source' of who/what you are, and your thoughts begin to distract you, when you remind yourself not to be distracted and return your attention to the source of awareness within, you are successfully meditating. It is when you lose sight and forget to direct your attention there that you have failed; having stray thoughts arise does not mean that you are failing, only that the mind/ego is trying to distract you.

Here's a great way to start - nostril breathing, etc., are preparations to meditation, not meditation itself, so this does not include those things; do them if you want.

Get a timer, like an egg timer for instance, or set one on your phone, whatever. Start with 30 seconds. Aim to meditate twice a day, and each time add 10 seconds. When you get to one minute, maintain that one minute for several days, then add 10 seconds again each time until you reach two minutes, maintain for several days, increment up again, etc. It is very helpful this way as your mind becomes very gradually trained.

In terms of sigils and trance, first of all remember that the trance state is incredibly natural and easy to get into. People usually have the wrong idea about what being in a trance state feels like, and expect something excessively mystical. This isn't the case. There are shallow and deep levels of trance, but even the deepest trance simply feels like profound relaxation, not fixation, per say, although fixation can lead to trance. It's important to know this going in, so that you understand not to expect something 'occult' and miss the state itself or not realize you got there.

If you've ever been reading a book and then stopped to check the time and realized that you've been reading for hours when it seemed like only minutes, this was a trance state and a fairly deep one. If you've ever been startled when someone 'woke you up' from a trance and said they'd been talking to you/calling your name for a while, that was a deep state of trance. If you've ever been driving and gotten to your destination - or driven on autopilot to somewhere else! - and realized you couldn't recall the intervening time, that was a trance state. It happens to us all the time, like when we listen to music. Two people having an intense conversation that goes on and on for hours is a state of trance for both of them and we often have these experiences and feel like 'time flies when you are having fun'. It does, because those kinds of experiences lull us into the focused state of trance in which our critical mind isn't counting seconds for us.

Trance states relax the 'critical mind' - the part of you that sorts, filters, and rejects information. Sigil work is about implanting the sigil - a suggestion - into the subconscious mind. The point of orgasm is to make the mind hypersuggestible for the few moments during and immediately after orgasm so that fixating on the sigil implants the suggestion into the subconscious mind. Another method would be to make yourself a self-hypnosis tape to do the same thing; in fact, I am currently developing audio tracks for this very purpose but for the purpose of self-hypnosis it is not difficult to make your own tracks - leading yourself into a hypnotic state is very easy and there are thousands of methods you can research online.

Making the mind suggestible/reaching a trance state is different for everyone; not everyone will go down the same way. So find what works for you.

peace

Well my answer is going to be short and sweet compared to the two responses. Clear your mind and relax then focus on something rhythmic such as quiet nothingness or soft music and a trance like state will happen naturally. Be careful not to fall asleep but also avoid doing stuff such as asking "am I in a trance yet" ever few minutes because the point is to set that part of your mind aside.

Thanks for the replies. I think I finally understand that a trance is equal to a hypnagogic state, as well as the difference between that and meditation.

With that said, you guys might want to check out something called brainwave entrainment. It's a technology that can be used to induce a specific frequency of brainwaves. Research has shown that when one is hypnotized, or in a trance state, the brainwaves oscillate within what is called the theta range, which simply means around 4 - 8 hertz (hertz meaning oscillations per second). In fact, the only success I've had with sigils thus far has been with the use of this technology. I would recommend Neuro Programmer 3 by Transparent. If you're interested, you can download a free trial to experiment with. The help documentation that comes with the program is thoroughly informative on its use.

To explain how I used it: I created a standard sigil on white paper using a black marker, and placed the paper on my computer screen. In a dark room, I listened to 6.5 hz for just under 30 minutes. At the 29 minute mark, a small countdown from 3 to 1 was used, and at 1 the screen lit up brightly for a few seconds. At this point I would open my eyes so that the sigil is cast. Once the session was over I discarded the sigil without looking at it. By the way, 6.5 hz has been shown in research to be a significant frequency for hypnosis.

Hope that helps someone.

The hypnagogic state can take place in either Alpha or Theta, and for that matter even Delta with a great deal of training. Theta would be 4-7 hertz, 7-14 would be alpha, and there are even higher bands which are considered highly abnormal, but are associated with whole brain cooperation and thinking, and have been measured from veteran meditators, mostly monks, during 'loving kindness' meditations and other such types of unity states.

Brainwave entrainment happens more easily and more commonly than you might expect, actually. You can reach a deep delta state by listing intently to your own heart beat. The use of binaural beats, for instance, in one artificial method, but there are also isochronic tones and monaural beats, for instance, which amount to a 'tapping' kind of sound which doesn't have to be heard over headphones like binaural beats.

I incorporate binaural tones into my own meditation and self-hypnosis tracks, but there is a practical limit to the use of these kinds of technologies. If you are going to use them, I would suggest that you go in with the intention of paying special attention to how your mind and body feel while entrained to a particular wavelength, and then attempt to return to that state without them, perhaps alternating sessions with and without them. Additionally, although brainwave entrainment technologies can be helpful in assisting you in meditation, for instance, or trance work, there is a common misconception that if you listen to them, then you will go into that state. This is not precisely accurate.

If you let your mind continue to wander about, and cannot control your thoughts enough to focus, then you will not entrain. The entrainment tech is only a kind of strong suggestion, but your brain doesn't have to accept it if it is too distracted. They can also be hindered by having too much sugar or caffeine in the system as this will 'lock' your brain into beta.

A good way to understand these states is to understand the hallmarks that indicate what brain state you are in. Anytime that you are focusing on a task to the exclusion of all else, you are in alpha. You cannot focus on one task in Beta, because this is the state necessary for awareness of one's surroundings. There are few physical signs of alpha but normally your awareness of your body will be primarily limited to the parts you are using in your task. For instance during meditation you may become acutely aware of your face and head because this is the place that most people 'feel' their awareness.

In Theta things change a little, awareness of the body tends to recede and the body itself is felt in a kind of hazy generalized way, although in this state you can experience analogous sensations - for instance in hypnosis this is the state necessary to intense kinesthetic hallucinatory suggests; when you suggest to a person that their hand is getting hot, etc., you need to be in Theta for that kind of suggestion to really take because the 'body' that your mind is experiencing there is not actually your physical body, but the imago of the body that is in the brain.

Most people will be unconscious in Delta but it doesn't have to be so with training. If you train yourself to maintain awareness in low theta, then high delta, and decrement yourself overtime by fractions of hertz until you reach low delta you can remain aware even in a deep delta state, but you will be looking at the withdrawal of all senses and in a state of intense focus on a single ideal. Whereas in Beta you can maintain at the most nine 'parcels' of sensory information, in alpha perhaps five, in theta no more than about two or three, in delta maintaining even a single parcel of sensory information is nearly impossible, but that is the key to maintaining awareness in that state. It is purely self-awareness, not external at all, but that one parcel of information - the self - becomes magnified to an incredible degree and this is the level at which you can more or less rewrite your subconscious. Hence, much of the deep, deep, deep Tibetan Buddhist meditation techniques that are often considered the most difficult and dangerous take place at this deep delta level.

Use the tech, but use it to learn. Also look into a program called gnaural to make your own tracks and learn about the Oster Curve, which is a data set describing the optimum base frequencies for the average brain configuration for each level of oscillation entrainment. Start with the average base frequencies described, and over time lower the base frequency by a bit at a time and your brain will, for lack of a better term, become more 'connected'; the neural pathways more dense as the brain works harder to entrain at the lower base frequencies. You cannot start off with much lower than average base frequencies and a lot of people working on their own make this mistake thinking that a lower frequency will be somehow more 'subliminal' - brainwave entrainment doesn't work like that. Virtually everyone new to the idea will need to start of with the average oster curve base frequency set, or, again, the entrainment just won't take.

Good luck!

peace