Headquarters For The Conscious... In The Unconscious Options

For a while I've been working on making a place for my conscious mind to have a "headquarters" in my unconscious. Progress has been great and I would like to share my experiences so far because even though the whole thing is simple it's pretty cool and has a lot of potential for magical applications. Basically I'm talking consciously creating a place in your memory that you can mentally interact with and store different forms information. I've heard about this sort of thing every once in a while but hadn't ever put it into real use until a few months ago.

I currently have a really cool memory structure where I can "put" information, such as text or images, and simply go back to later and review it whenever I want.

I started by choosing a location where I could start visualizing. By mentally walking through this place daily, it became easier to access and clearer over time. A problem I had early on was I had chosen an enormous castle in Ireland to use as a model, but it was unrealistically difficult to walk through it all on a regular basis so I ended up choosing something much smaller, a house in a video game I had played growing up. It was much easier to visualize a space I had already been through mentally a million times than some huge castle somewhere. Also I found the floorplans for the house I used online with some searching around, which is something that helps conceptualization of the structure a lot.

I started by trying to visualize the house complete with furniture and land around it, but that again was difficult so I went back to just visualizing a barren house with some furniture until eventually I included more details, such as the surrounding landscape and various views from windows, something that came much more naturally over time.

I have placed desks and filing cabinetry in locations used to store very interesting things. For example, although it is easy to store a few lines of text and then reviewing them (even if you do not consciously remember them), it is much more interesting to have a drawer which contains a specific feeling, which is about as advanced as I have currently gotten. In the future I will try to place entire memories and scents into storage, or even taste. Even though it's pretty easy to store certain things, storing other things, much less creating them, is more difficult. For example, I wanted to create a human "servant" to organize, or perform tasks, hoping that things could be completed without my conscious even being present! So I could say, ask this "servant" to find out what "x" is when x+5=1, and then come back to be given the answer -4, as well as other tasks. There is however, a difficulty in creating and, I assume, maintaining something like that and I have had very limited success even though I think this is possible, which is exciting.

I have also wondered if I could create a "mirror" of my own living conscious to be alive and aware, yet apart of me, and have it assume the appearance of a humanoid figure to perform tasks, but even if that is possible I have decided it could be risky given the unpleasant state of people with Dissociation Identity Disorder (DID aka multiple personality disorder, or MPD), which I personally believe might be more likely to occur with one of us than other people, because we practice forms of magic. Obviously I'm just guessing about most of this stuff now but I think it's exciting so it's hard not to speculate ha.

Anyway, despite the mundane memory sort of functions that anyone can use this for, I think that magicians can make even more use of this. I think that this level of interaction with the unconscious is more influential on it that interacting with it at a normal level, similar to meditation. Creating a "base" or "sanctuary" in the unconscious is much more private than it would be in the astral, or even under lock and key in our physical world. I might be paranoid, but I believe that as privacy is a more and more difficult accomplishment in the modern world, that the mind is the best alternative. Obviously I don't need to store tons of top secret data, but I think it's just another bonus to creating this construct. I have considered the possibility of evocations but assume that since you would be basically summoning anything directly into an otherwise inaccessible place of your mind, that even if it were possible, it is not something that should be done.

Finally, I have outlined a procedure for anyone that wants to do this without reading a bunch of books that can be confusing, misleading, and even make the whole thing more difficult than it really is.

Procedure:

1) Choose a small or medium sized location to be the model for your mental construct.*

2) Mentally visualize your model as vividly as you can on a daily basis. Slow and steady is better than too much too fast and then feeling burnt out about the project.

3) When it feels easy and natural to be in your construct, start adding a few images. Try to consciously forget these images and then go back to them and see if they hold up. After a while your memories will last even in their place even after your conscious forgets them.

4) After a few weeks of practice, the whole process should feel very comfortable and will be open to your long term use in both magical and non-magical matters! This is the point where you would be experimenting with your own ideas.

5) (optional) I had access to the floor plans of the model I used and temporarily kept a folder to make notes of the construct and record my progress. I think that was helpful for times when I didn't have either the time or desire to sit down and visualize my construct. A quick review, I figured, was better than nothing.

That's basically it as best as I know and can describe. The process is probably a little different for everyone but is really easy. I hope this is useful to someone and if anyone decides to try this out, or already does this then I would love to hear about it.


*The mental construct should be significantly different than any real place, so that you can always distinguish the two, which is another reason that my original model, the Irish castle, besides being too big, was a less than ideal choice. Ideally, the construct should be as vivid as this world, or a lucid dream.

This post has been edited by ☞Tomber☜: Feb 24 2012, 03:36 PM

I remember building an astral temple a few years ago with a group of people. Essentially we discussed how many rooms and what they looked like, reaching a group consensus, then tried to visit it regularly to keep it in existence. Unfortunately I lost track of it after about a year. It may be that some of the others have kept it up, but I would have to go back to our descriptions in order to remember and find its location again. I would clue in within reading a few lines, but I'd need to do that to use as a triggering mechanism. In any case, it can be done by a group and of course it has uses.
Memory experts use these constructs--or something very similar-- as tools for remembering complicated, disconnected or large amounts of information. I think they call them memory palaces.