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

Congratulations! You've created an astral temple without expressly calling it such. Well done.

That having been said, your method is a good one. This is a skill that frankly a lot of people should have as it does indeed make any sort of magical work far easier. As for having an assistant or guardian, I also would not recommend a human shape for the simple reasons you described. There are a million ways you can do this, though, and if the construct is strong enough, something may just want to pop by, stick around a while, and help you out. I've had it happen before, so be open to that possibility.

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This post has been edited by Darkmage: Feb 24 2012, 04:50 PM

Congratulations! You've created an astral temple without expressly calling it such. Well done.

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Astral temple? I have worked with the astral occasional (when I could it's difficult for me to get there) but this is a mental place. I assume an astral temple would be in the astral plane, so that multiple people could visit it, like a few people did around here a while back I think. I think this is very similar, but in the mind instead of astral. Is that what you mean? Maybe I misunderstand you. I think an astral creation of this would be more difficult ha. Thanks though.

This post has been edited by ☞Tomber☜: Feb 24 2012, 08:01 PM

Astral temple? I have worked with the astral occasional (when I could it's difficult for me to get there) but this is a mental place. I assume an astral temple would be in the astral plane ... I think an astral creation of this would be more difficult ha.

The astral is not that far removed from the mental plane and they touch in a few places - your body in fact represents an interaction between the two and several more besides. Creating an astral temple requires one to visualize it for weeks in every detail you could think of. Only after do you go about doing it in the astral. So while for your usage you might not want to add the astral wing, so to speak, it is available to you.

For a while I've been working on making a place for my conscious mind to have a "headquarters" in my unconscious.... Basically I'm talking consciously creating a place in your memory that you can mentally interact with and store different forms information. 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.

You might have something in mind for your construct already, but sense you are using it to store information anyway, you might consider storing other things there as well. For a while I took to making "jewels" from condensed emotion and trauma. Each jewel of one particular instance tied to something you are trying to assimilate. Normally these would be considered energetic blockages, a point where emotional or physic energy has stopped circulating. But because you consciously create them you can place them in your construct (away from any organs) and form a critique. For me at least, it was useful to sort out all the mental junk and work with it piece by piece rather than one unpleasant memory leading to others. Sorting things out also leads to more understanding of each piece and give you a chance to look at it objectively and analytically.

This post has been edited by fatherjhon: Feb 24 2012, 09:27 PM

@Tomber: what Fatherjhon said. The mental and the astral are actually very close to each other, and the boundary between the two is very porous. I've never been able to wander around the astral plane, far as I could tell, but my own mind is a different story, and seeing as I've bumped into entities that were completely alien to me, I suspect I stumbled into the astral on more than one occasion.

Even if you don't want to make it a full blown astral construct, be aware that the boundaries between that and the mental plane are very fluid and any sort of sustained effort can act like a beacon to whatever entities happen to be in the neighbourhood. Like will very much attract like here, so be careful as to what sort of things you're storing away in there, and make sure that your construct is sealed well.

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.

These comments are very interesting. Fatherjohn and Darkmage, you seem to emphasis the connection between this memory place and the astral much more than I would have thought. I will be sure to watch out for anything which would indicate this in the future.

@Goibniu, the memory palaces was what I was going for here basically. I've used other memory methods before, such as associating one thing with the next to create a linear sequence of memory... and it worked well, but I thought it was annoying and disorganized. I prefer the memory palace sort of deal much more.

This post has been edited by ☞Tomber☜: Feb 25 2012, 03:14 PM