Meditation – A Guide

Introduction

I want to put up some articles about channeling and mediumship. I’ve stayed away from these articles because most of the techniques involve deconstructing boundaries, and that can be problematic and psychologically harmful if not handled correctly, especially when you’re trying to develop a one size fits all method instead of tailoring the instruction to a particular person. There’s also a fear that someone might try to ‘teach’ my methods, but with additions and omissions for the sole purpose of exploiting someone sexually. I prefer giving this information out on a person-to-person basis, that way I can give the person the exact information they need and make sure they understand it and aren’t harmed by it. However I now want to put the information out there for people, because I haven’t been able to find any good publicly available instructions, and these are very cool things that people want to try, and, especially in regards to channeling, these are extremely valuable tools for acquiring spiritual information.

Also a lot of jack-offs, and this is especially true in the New Thought Movement but it happens in other places as well, make themselves into spiritual leaders because they’re supposedly channeling basic spiritual information from something. I say supposedly because they could be channeling this stuff, but it’s all so basic and has been written down so many times already that they could just be reading books. One thing that I never see the jack-offs teaching, at least to all their followers, is how to channel, which is the one really important spiritual thing they’re doing. For these leaders being a spiritual guru with dependent followers, and all of the emotional and financial validation that comes along with that, is more important than being an actual spiritual leader and teacher and passing down their spiritual techniques to empower others. That’s assuming they even know how to channel and aren’t, like I said, just reading books and slightly rewording things like a teenager plagiarizing Wikipedia for their English paper. Either way, I fucking hate those people, and I want to make it so anyone who wants to learn how to channel can.

The problem I have is that when I talk about intermediate and advanced subjects, like Channeling and Mediumship, or really any magic that isn’t basic beginner exercises and theory, I always come back to the same bit of advice: ‘If you’re having trouble with this, spend more time practicing Energy Manipulation, Meditation, and Visualization.’ Those three things are the basic pillars of magic. Every kind of magic, whatever it is, requires you to have some degree of competency in those three things. Getting better at any of those things will make all of your other magic stronger. If you’re just starting out and you don’t know what magic you should be doing, those three things will pay the biggest dividends and make you a better magician faster than anything else. If you’re an experienced adept, it’s still important to practice those things every day, because getting better and better at those things is going to make you even stronger.

I’ve written about Energy Manipulation and I have some very good beginner exercises for it. I’m hoping to expand on that and finish those exercises soon, but even right now there’s enough there to get someone to a point where they can continue to develop on their own. I haven’t posted much about the other pillars, Meditation and Visualization. That’s because there’s already lot of good information out there, and also they’re kind of boring to write about and I’m lazy, but I’m finally doing an article on each before I get into channeling so I have a resource I trust to point folks towards.

If you’ve already been taught meditation, this article might still be useful to you. Most people never get past the early stages of meditation, and so when most people teach meditation, they teach it as if the early stages are all there is to it. If you’ve been doing meditation for a while and you can’t achieve a meditative state almost every time and a trance state a majority of the time, this article can help you figure out what you’re missing.

Preparing For Your First Meditation

The first few times you meditate, you should try doing it under the best possible conditions. You’ll want to make yourself comfortable and eliminate any distractions. What’s comfortable and what’s a distraction is going to be different for everyone, so it’s important to find what works for you instead of following someone else’s guidelines. I’m going to offer some suggestions, but ultimately you have to figure out what you need to be comfortable and free from distraction.

To start you want a space where you’ll be alone and no one will bother you for at least a little while. It’s best if this is a familiar space that you already feel comfortable in. Like maybe your bedroom, or your living room, or outside in your yard if it’s private.

Next you’ll want to be comfortably dressed. For most people this is going to be loose fitting clothes that don’t restrict movement or cut off circulation. Ideally you want clothes that you won’t feel on you. You may feel more comfortable and less distracted in your underwear, in a bathing suit, or completely naked, but if you feel self conscious not wearing enough clothes, or you’re going to stress about someone walking in on you or peeking through a window and seeing you undressed, wear more clothes. Some people find that a heavy blanket, or a comforter, helps with not getting distracted by physical sensations, and it also relaxes them and helps them feel more comfortable. However if you happen to be that rare person that only ever feels at ease in formal business attire, then wear that because it’s what works best for you.

Whatever you decide to wear, make sure it fits the temperature of where you are. You don’t want to feel hot or cold.

As for lighting, you’ll want some light, but less is better. If it’s daytime, draw the curtains or shut the blinds. If you’re outside in your yard, maybe sit in the shade or something and don’t face the sun. If it’s night, dim the lights. A pitch black or near pitch black environment is going to be counterproductive to learning meditation, and that kind of sensory deprivation is going to open up a whole different can of worms spiritually speaking. A lot of people prefer candlelight for meditation.

Finally you’ll want to get the sounds right. You’ll probably want to find someplace quiet. Of course nothing is completely quiet, so what you really want is someplace with no distracting noises. Some people do best with some kind of white noise or maybe nature sounds or some relaxing music. Other people find all that stuff incredibly distracting. The important thing is to find the environment that suits you, whatever it is.

Keep in mind that these are preparations you’ll want to take when you’re first learning how to meditate. You want to give yourself as much of an advantage as you can, because learning how to meditate, and learning how to do it well, can be difficult. Once you get meditation down, the next step is learning how to meditate in situations where you may not be so comfortable, or where there may be distractions. Eventually you’ll want to be able to meditate in any kind of situation you might find yourself in. That might seem difficult and overwhelming when you’re first learning how to meditate, but don’t worry about it. Once you know how to meditate, teaching yourself to meditate quickly or meditate when you’re distracted is a lot easier than learning how to meditate in the first place.

Your First Meditation

For your first meditation find a position that’s comfortable for you. That can be sitting in your favorite chair, on the floor, or lying in bed. Pretty much any position you could potentially fall asleep in. Next close your eyes, and then try not to think about anything. You’re going to get intrusive thoughts, because you’re trying not to think about things, and that’s what happens when you try not to think about things. That’s okay. This stuff takes practice, and this is your first time. Don’t try to fight the intrusive thoughts too hard, because that will just create a cycle that makes the situation worse. Maybe let the thoughts run their course and then move past them. Also try not to feel anything. Try not to be happy, or sad, or angry, or anything else. Just try to be calm and relaxed. If you can’t do that yet, that’s okay.

Just stay like that for a while. Don’t think about anything, but if you are thinking about things, just think about them. Stay like that for as long as you can. The longer you can stay like that, the better. But if you start to feel restless or bored and it ceases to be relaxing and starts to be a chore, then go ahead and stop.

Now that I’ve gone over your first meditation, maybe reread the last few paragraphs once more, than go meditate right now before you read anymore of the article. I know you have the time to get everything ready and do it for at least a little bit, because this is a really long article. If you have the time to read this, you have the time to meditate. If it’s between reading the rest of this article and meditating right now, go meditate, and you can finish reading this later when you have more time.

Seriously, after you finish this paragraph, go meditate! If you can’t get things perfect so you’re comfortable and free of distractions, just make yourself as comfortable and free of distractions as you can right now and meditate. If you don’t meditate right now, you won’t understand the rest of this article, and even if you plan on doing it later, everything I write after this is going to be worthless to you and won’t help you in any way. There’s no point in reading the rest of the article if you aren’t meditating after this sentence ends, so if you’re not meditating you should do something else that’s more productive or fun.

After Your First Meditation

Congratulations on meditating for the first time. Did you reach a meditative state? Did you reach trance? Was it an amazing spiritual experience that completely changed your life and your perception of the spiritual universe? If you answered yes to any of those questions, that’s awesome, but you probably answered no. If you felt relaxed and managed to clear your mind a bit you’re ahead of the curve. If you felt bored, thought you weren’t doing it right, or felt stupid because some guy on the Internet tricked you into sitting still for a few minutes and is trying to pass that off as a significant spiritual experience, that’s how most people feel the first time they meditate. The important thing is you did some practical work today and took the first step to learning meditation.

Having meditated today you’re 1000 times more spiritually advanced than anyone who has never meditated, which from my experience is most of the magical community. You’re 10 to 100 times more advanced than all of the people who have meditated before, but haven’t meditated today, which is most of the rest of the magical community. Your spiritual advancement is now somewhere in the top percentile of the magic community, so you should be really proud of yourself.

Magical Theory of Meditation

So let’s talk about what meditation is and what we’re trying to achieve when we do it. And we’ll start with altered states of consciousness.

The Meditative and Trance States

So there are a lot of different states of consciousness we can be in. The one we’re all most familiar with, because we spend a lot of time in it, is our sober and awake state. This is the state you’re probably in right now, and it’s the one most people use as their reference point when comparing other states. The other state of consciousness everyone’s really familiar with is the dream state. Arguably there are at least two different dream states, the one where you’re asleep and full on dreaming, and the one where your mind drifts off into dreams as you start to fall asleep. Doing drugs or drinking alcohol can also bring you into other various altered states of consciousness.

There are two altered states of consciousness that are achieved through meditation, the meditative state and the trance state.

The meditative state is hard to describe. In fact it’s sometimes hard to even notice you’re having it if you’re not used to identifying it. It’s a state of heightened clarity, focus, and awareness. In a meditative state you may find it much easier to think and draw conclusions. You may also find it much easier to feel energy, both your own and what exists around you. The best way I can describe it is it’s kind of like being in a deep sleep, except you’re awake and not dreaming. I have to point out that I don’t mean you’re actually asleep. You’re awake in every sense of the word. If you’re literally asleep you’re not in a meditative state, you accidentally fell asleep while meditating and are no longer meditating.

Even though it can be hard to identify the meditative state the first time you reach it, it does feel distinctly different from both your normal awake state and your dreaming state. Ultimately you’re going to have to trust you’re instincts a bit, but you should be able to figure out that you’ve achieved it after you’ve done it a few times.

The second state is the trance state, and you reach the trance state after you reach the meditative state. The trance state is very distinct, and unlike the meditative state you’ll probably know it when it happens. The trance state is a state of hyper-awareness, hyper-focus, and hyper-clarity. In a trance state you’ll probably feel very empowered. You’re going to have a much easier time feeling your own energy, and without all the normal emotional and mental barriers and distractions that hold you back and a singular focus, your energy is going to be turned up really high, so much so you’ll probably feel it bursting out of you. Not only will you feel these strong energies bursting out of you, but you’ll also have a lot of control over them.

Much like the meditative state, the trance state is great for thinking things over. It’s also great for doing magic. The heightened awareness that comes with it makes it much easier to see spirits and what the energy around you is doing. All that energy that’s bursting out of you and all of the focus you now have is going to make your magic a lot more powerful, and you’ll be a lot more successful with it. In a trance state it’s not unheard of to find previously unknown reserves of energy that can be tapped into and magical abilities that you weren’t even aware you had.

The meditative and trance states are excellent goalposts for when you’re first starting to learn meditation. Your first goal should be to reach a meditative state. Then try to repeat that success several more times. Next you should try to consistently achieve a meditative state when you meditate. That means that almost every time you meditate you achieve a meditative state, and its an expected outcome of meditation. After that, the next goal should be reaching a trance state, and then you should aim to hit a trance state a few more times, and after that have trance be a fairly regular outcome of meditation. Once you reach that point there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but there’s also a lot of different things you can focus on improving.

The Steps of Meditation

There are five parts, or steps, to meditation. They are Clarity, Awareness, Focus, Self-control, and Trance. Typically you go through them in that order, and it’s usually easiest to do it in that order, but they don’t have to be done in that order. They can happen in any order, and you can skip back and forth between them. You can do a little bit of Clarity, and then a little bit of Awareness, and then come back to Clarity and do that some more. They can also be done simultaneously.

When you’re first starting out, it’s best to try doing them in the easy order first:

Clarity—>Awareness—>Focus—>Self-Control—>Trance

When done in that order, when you do well on one step it will naturally lead to doing better in the next step creating a flow that will make it easier to get to Trance. It’s okay to dedicate an entire meditation session to just one step. The first thing you should be doing is spending your meditation sessions working on Clarity and getting it down. Once you feel like you’re doing well with Clarity, move on to Awareness. Move through each step, and once you have all four down you should naturally hit Trance. If you hit a wall with a step, go back to the beginning and strengthen each of the preceding steps. If you get through the first four and aren’t hitting Trance, start over from Clarity and strengthen each step.

Step 1: Clarity

Put simply, Clarity is the process of clearing your mind. It is typically the only step of meditation that’s taught, and often it’s the only step the instructor knows. It is, however, only the first step in a larger process, and even if you master it, you won’t be seeing the results you should if you never work on the proceeding steps.

There is, of course, an argument to be made that a student only needs to be taught Clarity. Because the steps flow from each other, once the student has mastered Clarity they have the necessary skills to discover and improve upon the proceeding steps and eventually reach Trance. However in practice, as proven by numerous forums, blogs, reddits, and con-men selling spirituality, if you only teach Clarity what you end up with is a bunch of people who think that Clarity is the end goal of meditation, because that’s all their instructor ever told them, or that’s all they read about in a book, and if an authority figure didn’t explicitly state something it can only be because it doesn’t exist. So I’m going to teach all the parts of meditation.

Going back to Clarity, ourselves, or more accurately the bunch of bodies that make us up, is the only tool that we need to do a magical operation. Other tools can be helpful, but we don’t need them, and any kind of magic can be done without those tools. In contrast, we need ourselves to do any kind of magic. Also we suck at being magical tools. Everything affects us, and we in turn pollute our magic with all the crap that’s affecting us. If you’re doing a spell and you think, “Did I leave the oven on?”, that thought is now wrapped into your spell. Even thinking about the spell you’re doing wraps your thought about the spell into the spell. If you’re happy, sad, excited, angry, nervous, whatever emotion you’re feeling, that emotion pollutes the spell as well. There are, of course, steps we can take to lessen the impact of these stray thoughts and emotions and other things that influence our spells, and at the end of the day our spells don’t have to be perfect, they just have to work. If a spell produces the desired outcome, even if it’s sloppy and has some superfluous crap about the state of my oven in it, it’s good enough.

Clarity is us recalibrateing our bodies. What we’re trying to do is bring each of our bodies to a neutral state. Perfect Clarity is the goal, but we don’t need to reach a state of perfect Clarity to achieve Trance. Perfect Clarity is likely impossible to achieve, and if you dedicate yourself to reaching perfect Clarity before moving on to the later steps, you’ll never move on. Instead try to do Clarity well, and once you feel you’re doing it well enough move on to Awareness.

To explain Clarity, it’s easiest to break ourselves down into five bodies, the physical, the astral, the mental, the emotional, the creative, and the spiritual, and explain how we achieve Clarity in each one. And yes, I realize I said five bodies and then listed six. That was intentional. You can, if it bothers you, either count the physical and astral bodies as a single body, or just eliminate the spiritual body from the list. The number of bodies isn’t important, and I’m doing it this way because I have other articles I may write in the future, and I don’t want those articles to contradict this one, because if I do sometime after I’m dead middle-aged armchair magicians will argue about what great secret I was hiding by making the contradiction, or they’ll argue about whether or not everything I’ve ever written is wrong because of one small contradiction they found, instead of doing magic so they might actually know a god damn thing. And nobody wants that.

So anyways, body Clarity both in the order of importance and the order you should work on them:

Mental Body: This is the act of clearing your mind and not thinking about anything. That seems like it should be really easy, but for most people it’s not. It is however something that gets easier with practice. Usually if you try to think about nothing you’ll get an intrusive thought, or a thought about thinking about nothing, or you’ll imagine what nothing is. If you try to push the thoughts out that just makes you think them harder, and think other thoughts about pushing them out, and at that point you’re also expending a lot of energy on what should be an effortless process.

If you’re having trouble clearing your mind, the best thing to do is not focus on the thoughts and just let them play themselves out. Intrusive thoughts become less of a problem when you stop giving them energy by trying to get rid of them. The more you relax yourself and fall into meditation, the less likely it is you’ll have them. With practice it gets easier to clear your mind, and eventually this will be a non-issue. Until then remember, the point isn’t to be perfect. The point is to practice and improve yourself so that you’re always getting better at it.

Some people focus on their breathing or a sound in order to help clear their mind. If you’re really struggling that may help, but it’s going to make the later steps harder and you’ll have to come back later and relearn Clarity in order to get through them.

Emotional Body: You don’t want to be feeling any emotion, you just want to be in a state of emotionless calm. That’s actually a lot easier than not thinking any intrusive thoughts, and it’s especially easy when you’ve already cleared your mind. If you’re really emotional you may need to spend some time calming yourself first, but for most people, especially when you’re meditating in an ideal environment, this one’s usually pretty easy to achieve. This one gets more difficult to do when the environment isn’t ideal, or if you’re already very emotional before you start meditating, and those are things you can work on as you get better at meditation.

Physical Body: If you try to meditate and you find yourself getting distracted by your clothes, or the sounds around you that you didn’t even hear before you started meditating, or you start having itches, that’s your physical body acting up. This is actually an easy one to fix if you’re having problems with it, and it’s easy because all of us are very practiced at overcoming it. When you go to bed at night these same annoying issues can keep you from falling asleep. Figure out how you’re dealing with it when you go to sleep, and apply those same techniques to meditation.

If you’re really struggling with this one, you may have to start thinking about what you can do differently before you start meditating to improve your environment. Would you be more comfortable in different clothes? Would you be more comfortable lying down? Is there a source of noise you can eliminate so you can focus better?

Eventually you want to get to the point where none of that crap matters, because you want to be able to meditate in an environment that’s uncomfortable, but the goal for now is just to get to the meditative state, and then the trance state. If you struggle to meditate when you’re uncomfortable, that’s something you can come back to and work on later.

Astral Body: If you’ve also been practicing Energy Manipulation, it’s a good idea to spend some time balancing your energy during meditation and bringing it to a neutral state. If you’re not skilled enough at Energy Manipulation that you can easily do that, don’t worry about it. Clearing your mind of thoughts and calming your emotions is going to naturally balance your energy to a degree anyways.

Creative Body: This mother fucker is the reason you’ll never achieve perfect Clarity. The Creative Body is a doer, it’s about what you’re doing. If you’re meditating, you’re not doing nothing, you’re meditating, and the better you’re meditating the more your meditating. It’s a good lesson that the endgame isn’t achieving perfection, the point is to aim for perfection to constantly improve ourselves even though we know we’ll probably never get there. To get what Clarity you can out of the Creative Body, do as little as possible when you meditate, and expend as little effort as possible on meditating and anything else you’re doing.

Spiritual Body: If you’ve got all the other bodies doing well, this one will naturally take care of itself, so you don’t really need to worry about it.

Step 2: Awareness

The second step is Awareness, both External Awareness and Self-Awareness. Once you’ve achieved Clarity in all of your bodies, Awareness becomes much easier to achieve. It’s almost a natural consequence of Clarity.

By External Awareness, I mean the energies, and maybe spirits, that are flowing around you, how it feels to exist in a physical space, as opposed to when you dream (or astrally project if you’ve done that), and just the general way the area feels.

By Self-Awareness I mean being able to feel the energies flowing inside of you, how it feels to be you and to exist and be meditating, how it feels in your mind and your body especially now that they’re in a state of clarity.

In addition to External Awareness and Self-Awareness, you should also be able to feel how your internal energies and the external energies around you are interacting with each other.

To achieve Awareness, all you have to do is sit there, and while maintaining Clarity, feel everything around you.

The trick is you have to just feel everything around you, and not do anything else. Don’t think about how everything feels, don’t think about the energy, and don’t try to identify the energy. You know how I talked about the physical space and how it feels different from dreaming or the astral plane earlier? Don’t think about that, and don’t try to figure out how these places feel different and start comparing and contrasting them. Definitely don’t try to manipulate the energy.

If you do any of that stuff, you’ve messed up your Clarity and you need to go back to step one.

Just feel everything and let the sensation wash over you, don’t interact with it, don’t think about it, don’t analyze it, and don’t think about yourself and how you’re doing it.

That’s the trick, and it can be hard. And the thing is if you try really hard to get Awareness down and not think about these things or pay attention to them and do your best and put your all into it, you’ve fucked it up, because now you’re putting effort into things and your making conscious decisions and you have intent and you’re doing something. If that happens, you have to go back and work on your Clarity again.

If you get Awareness right away and it comes naturally to you, that’s great, you’re awesome, but most of us struggle with this, because it’s a difficult thing to do. It takes time and practice, but you can definitely get there. If you mess it up, you can always go back and do Clarity again, and then give Awareness another try. If no matter how many times you try you still can’t get it, that’s okay, the important thing is you’re practicing it, and if you’re practicing it you’re definitely improving, even if you don’t notice the improvement.

The goal here, with Awareness, is to get to a point where you feel yourself and everything around you spiritually, but you don’t think about it or analyze it, and you also don’t put any effort into not thinking about it and not analyzing it. Pretty much you want to be able to do it without trying so you can preserve your Clarity.

–The Meditative State–

If you do the first two steps well, there’s a good chance you can achieve a meditative state either with just those two steps or with a little bit of work on Focus. If you’re not achieving a meditative state, don’t worry about it, just keep working on all the steps, but be aware that you could potentially fall into it, and if you analyze your meditation after you finish and you believe you were in a meditative state after only doing the first two steps, you probably were.

Step 3: Focus

There’s actually two different ways you can focus in a meditation. The easier way is focusing on a particular thing, and the difficult way is to just focus but not focus on anything in particular. Both have their advantages.

If you’re going into a meditation because you want to ponder something spiritually, like why are red candles good for love spells, you can just go in with that question to ponder it. If you reach Trance, you will probably realize a bunch of new spiritual insights on the subject. Even if you don’t reach Trance, being in a meditative state will give you a lot of Clarity to make new connections and develop new insights. Even if you don’t reach a meditative state, meditation may still help you think about it and reflect on it more clearly.

It doesn’t have to be a spiritual thing either. You can meditate on if your romantic relationship is healthy, if you’re really happy at your job, or if you’re better off buying Skyrim or Witcher 3. In regard to the last one. both games are awesome and both offer things the other doesn’t, so if you like those sorts of games and can afford both and have the time to play them, get both, but if you have to choose go with Witcher 3, and get the GOTY edition because the expansions add a lot of additional content.

The other way, focusing but not focusing on anything, is hard because if you think about doing it or if you put some effort into doing it, you’re failing other parts of the meditation while also losing focus. Additionally you don’t have a specific thing to focus on, which is so much easier, you just have this abstract idea of focusing.

A lot of time the advice is to meditate on a question, even if it’s unimportant, just to help you learn how to focus and retain Clarity while you do it. There’s a couple problems with that approach. First off, if you go into meditation with a question, and you happen to figure out the answer to that question, you have nothing left to focus on and the meditation will probably end there and you’ll miss out on some practice.

One work around to this is using a koan, which are from Zen Buddhism. The most famous is probably, ‘What’s the sound of one hand clapping.’ Koans don’t have direct answers, and even if you do find an answer, they have deep layers that go on and on so there’s still room to continue meditating and expand upon it.

The second issue with going in with a question is it makes focusing easier, and it even makes the next step a little easier too, but it makes getting into Trance harder, and if you aren’t already in a meditative state when you start focusing it makes that more difficult too. You’re making it so Focus is easier to get through, but you’re making the rest of the process more difficult.

Also if you can only get through Focus and reach Trance by using a question, that’s a very big limitation on your ability to meditate and reach Trance.

Much like Skyrim and Witcher 3, both approaches offer advantages the other doesn’t, and I would recommend learning and practicing both in tandem.

The first few times you work on Focus, don’t come in with a question. Try to do it without focusing on anything at all.

After you’ve attempted doing it a few times and have some experience, then try it with a question. It will most likely be easier to do this way, and you’ll hopefully get a better grasp on it. It’ll also force you to learn some new skills with your Clarity and Awareness to get to that stage with a question in your head.

Then take what you’ve learned and go back to trying it without a question. Alternate between the two so you can learn both approaches and get the benefits each has to offer knowing that getting better at one approach will make you stronger when you attempt the other approach.

Ultimately you should aim to be able to achieve Trance with either approach. The approaches have different uses, and either one may be a better fit for a particular situation. Overall, you’ll probably use meditating without a question much more frequently on your spiritual path.

Step 4: Self-Control

Once you have the first three steps down, the next step is to hold on to them as long as possible. Eventually you’ll have intrusive thoughts, or boredom will set in, or your mind will wander, or you might even fall asleep and take a nap. In any case, when those things happen your meditation is broken and you need to go back and do the earlier steps again or end the meditation.

Once you get the first three steps down you may find that you can’t maintain it for very long before you break yourself out of it. Maybe you can only manage for a couple minutes. That’s okay. Just keep meditating and holding it for as long as you can. With practice the amount of time you’re able to hold it will increase.

Step 5: Trance

Trance is the end goal, and when you get there you’re going to feel it and it will be a distinct feeling. All you have to do to get to Trance is get the first three steps down, and then hold it long enough in Self-Control, and you should just slip into it.

You should be hitting a meditative state in the second or third step. If you’re not, you’re weak in at least one of the first two steps, and if you’re not sure which one than work on improving both of them. Likewise if you do the first three steps well, reach a meditative state, and hold it long enough you should reach Trance, and if that isn’t happening it means you’re weak in at least one of the four steps. If you don’t know which one you’re weak in, work on all four.

Coming Out Of Meditation

Before you get really good at meditation, it’s important to learn how to come out of meditation. The first few times you meditate it probably won’t matter and you can just stand up when you’re finished, but once you get better at meditating, and especially once you hit a meditative state, it’s a bitch to come out of meditation wrong. So practice coming out of meditation correctly from the start, and that way once you need it you’ll already have developed the skill.

You want to come out of meditation slowly and carefully, like slowly waking up from a deep sleep.

Stay relaxed, make sure you’re breathing, and slowly let yourself come out of it. One trick is to just concentrate on your breathing and pay attention to how you’re breathing. Pay attention to when you inhale and when you exhale. After you’ve done that for a bit, change your breathing. Take a few deeper breaths and then let it out. When you feel comfortable slowly open your eyes. Take it easy for a few minutes, and then start to move your body and slowly get up.

Give yourself a little bit of time after meditation to relax and be in the moment so you can fully process the meditation you’ve just finished.

If you have to, of course, you can jolt yourself out of a meditation, and if like your house is on fire or something else important is happening you should jolt yourself out of the meditation, it just won’t feel very good.

Eventually, with some experience, you’ll be able to come out of meditations quicker and it won’t feel so bad when you jolt yourself out of one.

Stepping Up Your Game

Now that you’re meditating, here are a few things that might help you improve your meditation a little bit.

Yoga

If you’re able to do it, yoga is a wonderful aid to meditation. Many yoga poses are designed to help energy flow through your body more freely and to clean out your energy a bit. Several common poses, Lotus being the most well-known and probably best, make it easier to get through the steps of mediation if you’re already good at doing the pose.

If holding a pose is causing you discomfort or pain, that’ll negate a lot of the positive benefits of the pose. If a pose hurts, you’ll probably get better results lying down or sitting. However if you can comfortably manage a partial pose, like half-lotus or even sitting crossed-legged, you’ll still get some of the benefits of the pose.

Incense

Incense can help you raise energy, help you redirect your energy, help you with Focus, and just, in general, make meditation easier. You may wish to use incense that you have a particular affinity for, or you may choose one that is tied in to what you’re trying to accomplish with the meditation. A few common ones that are generally good for meditation are sandalwood, vanilla, frankincense, and nag champa.

Although incense can help with meditation, I’d recommend against using it so often that it becomes a crutch. If you’re really struggling with meditation, it can help you break through to the next level, but once you get there you should start working on meditating without incense. Otherwise I would recommend using incense infrequently. Definitely try it out so you have the experience, definitely use it if it’s a special occasion or something really important or you just want a deep meditation that day, but also make sure you’re practicing doing meditation without the help of incense.

Where do you go from here?

So you’ve gotten good at meditation. You always hit a meditative state when you try, and you usually hit a trance state. Maybe you always hit a trance state. Does that mean you’ve mastered meditation?

Well, no. We never master anything, and there’s always room for improvement. In particular the meditative and trance states, although very useful on their own, are far more useful when you can fall in and out of them in seconds and in any environment. If you can fall into trance before doing any kind of magical operation, and hold it for the entire operation, your magic is going to be quite a bit stronger. If you’re just starting with meditation going into Trance like that might seem difficult, and something you’ll only achieve after decades of practice, but once you start getting better at meditation it actually isn’t that hard to learn.

Below are some advanced meditation exercises you can try once you feel like you’ve gotten the hang of meditation.

Speed Meditation

One thing to work on is to practice meditating faster. As you go through the five steps, try to do them as quickly as you can. Set a goal of reaching either a meditative state or a trance state and work on going through the steps as fast as you can to get there. Only count the speedrun as successful if you reach a meditative and/or trance state. If you’re not able to reach an altered state, slow down the individual steps and practice them until you’ve improved some more, and then try to speed them up again.

Meditate While Standing

Instead of lying down, or sitting down, or being in any kind of comfortable position, or gaining the benefits of doing a yoga pose, meditate while standing up. Once you’re able to achieve Trance while standing, try to achieve Trance without closing your eyes. Once you’re able to achieve Trance without closing your eyes, try to achieve Trance while standing with your eyes open. If you want, you can even try to achieve Trance while walking or running.

Meditate While Distracted

Try meditating while you’re distracted. Maybe turn on the TV, or the radio, or go someplace noisy to meditate. Try meditating in uncomfortable clothes. Try meditating in public places with lots of active people around you.

It’s actually difficult to come up with good general exercises for this, because all of us have different things that distract us. Ultimately you’re going to have to come up with your own situations that make you, personally, feel distracted and uncomfortable, and then try meditating in them. Once you become good at meditating in a particular situation, find one that’s even more distracting and uncomfortable.

Multitasking And Meditating

Once you can meditate while standing with your eyes open, and while walking (hopefully also with your eyes open), and while distracted, try meditating while also doing something else. Start with something that you already know how to do and is mostly physical and doesn’t require a lot of thought or attention. Domestic chores, like sweeping, mopping, and scrubbing are good fits. So are physical exercises, like lifting weights or doing sit-ups. From there move on to things that require more thought and attention. Try meditating while playing a video game, while reading a book, while building furniture, while doing a hobby. Then try meditating while doing very complicated things like having a conversation with someone.

Instant Trance Trick

So this is a pretty common trick to drop into Trace very quickly. Unlike a lot of other meditation shortcuts, this one isn’t a crutch and it won’t make it more difficult for you to meditate or get into Trance when you’re not using it. In fact, in my experience, this trick usually opens the practitioner up to a lot of new revelations about how to quickly get into Trance, making it easier to develop other methods.

So in order to do this, you need to be really good at Clarity, because you have to be able to finish Clarity quickly and move right into Awareness. In fact, you need to be pretty good at all the steps to get this to work.

Remember when I talked about feeling all that energy during Awareness? What you’re going to want to do is let that energy wash over yourself and lose yourself in it. Now remember when I said each step of meditation naturally leads into the next step, and there’s a flow to it? If you have all the steps down, and you do this right, the forward momentum of the flow of meditation should naturally push you into Trance without much effort.

You want to practice doing this a lot: Feel the energy —> Go to Trance / Feel the Energy —> Go to Trance, ect.

After you’ve done it a bit, it should be happening pretty fast. The next thing you want to do is setup a metaphysical trigger. Basically when A happens, you automatically do B.

There’s a few different ways to go about this depending on how experienced you are with magic. One way is to just practice this frequently, like several times a day, and to always push yourself into Trance as soon as you feel the energy. Eventually you’ll internalize the process like with muscle memory.

The easier way is to just hide a trigger in yourself so that when you feel the energy, you do the process. It’s pretty much putting a strong trigger in the back of your head so you never think about it, and it sets your metaphysical bodies to do X whenever Y happens.

I don’t want to get into an indepth explanation about how to set up a metaphysical trigger, because even though I know how to do it, it’ll take me months to figure out how to explain it from scratch, and I want to get this article posted.

If you know how to set a trigger, you should already understand what I’m talking about, and if you don’t know how to do it, you might be able to figure it out from what I said. If you can’t figure it out, just use the first method.

Once you have that down, the next step is learning some muscle memory. Whenever you feel energy, or a spike in energy, drop into meditation and do Clarity. And this is why I say you have to be really good at Clarity. You want to be able to go from not meditating, to meditating, to finishing Clarity in less then a second. Ideally you want to do all of that in a lot less than a second. And you’re going to want to be able to do it while you’re standing up, while you’re distracted, while you’re doing other things.

Putting all of it together you should end up with a process where energy rises, or there is unfamiliar or aggressive energy maybe, and by muscle memory you drop into meditation and complete Clarity in less than a second, then you feel all the energy more intensely in Awareness, and that triggers you and you’re in Trance.

Here’s the fun part. Typically when you do a magical operation, one of the first things you do, if not the very first thing, is raise energy. If you’re at a public ritual, if it’s being done right, there should be a lot of energy around. If you’re about to be attacked spiritually, typically you’ll feel some extra or aggressive energy first. If you’re doing energy manipulation, you’re probably going to start by feeling out the energy. If you start talking about or even thinking about spiritual topics, a lot of times energy will just start rising up.

You’ve now trained yourself so that just about any time something magical is happening around you, even if you’re the one doing it, you immediately slip into Trance.