Ask any experienced practitioner what a beginner should acquire first, and the answer will not be a wand or a pack of cards. It will be a notebook. The magical diary is the written record of everything done in the course of the work and everything that followed from it. It is what separates practice from daydreaming, and no part of the art survives long without it.
In brief
- The diary records what you did, in what conditions, and what you observed.
- It is written at once, in plain words, with facts kept apart from interpretation.
- Its value appears on review, when months of entries are read together.
- Begin it today. Nothing else needs to be in place first.
Why keep a record
There are four reasons, and each would be sufficient alone.
Memory is unreliable. It keeps the striking and discards the ordinary, and it quietly revises the past to agree with the present. Without a record you will remember the one working that seemed to succeed and forget the nine that did not, and you will be unable to learn from either.
The work is slow. Changes in attention, temperament and circumstance take place over months and cannot be seen from one day to the next. The diary makes them visible. Reading back over a year is often the first moment a student realizes that anything has happened.
The mind deceives itself. An art that deals in imagination and meaning is open to wishful thinking at every step. Writing down beforehand what you intend, and afterwards what actually occurred, is the simplest protection there is.
The writing is itself a practice. To record an experience exactly, without decoration, demands the same attention and honesty that the rest of the work is trying to build.
What to record
Every entry should allow you, a year later, to reconstruct what was done and in what circumstances.
| Heading | What to write |
|---|---|
| Date and time | The date, the hour of starting and of finishing |
| Place | Where you worked, and anything unusual about it |
| Conditions | Health, mood, how you slept, what you last ate; the weather; the day's planet and the phase of the Moon if you follow them |
| Practice | Exactly what you did, in order, and for how long |
| Observations | What happened during the practice: sensations, thoughts, images, interruptions, lapses of attention |
| Comment | What you make of it, kept separate and marked as opinion |
| Later notes | Dreams, events and afterthoughts, added with their own dates |
Six rules
- Write at once. Make the entry immediately after the practice, before doing anything else. An hour later half of it is gone.
- Write plainly. Short factual sentences. Mind wandered eleven times is worth more than a paragraph about the nature of distraction.
- Record the failures. The missed days, the dull sessions and the workings that came to nothing are the most instructive entries in the book. Write no practice and the reason.
- Keep fact and interpretation apart. First what occurred, then what you think it means. The second will change. The first must not.
- Never tear out a page. Do not erase or rewrite. If you were wrong, say so in a later, dated note.
- Keep it private. The diary is written for one reader. An entry composed with an audience in mind is already less honest.
A sample entry
Tuesday 6 October. 6.40 to 7.05 in the morning. Spare room. Slept badly, slight headache, rain. Day of Mars, Moon waning.
Rite of the center, then fifteen minutes of breath counting, seated. Lost the count nine times, mostly to planning the day. Around the tenth minute the breath became very slow of its own accord and the body felt heavy and warm for perhaps a minute. Lost it when I noticed it.
Comment: better than yesterday in spite of the headache. The heaviness has now appeared three times, always after the count has gone well for a while.
Added 7 October: dreamed of clearing out a flooded cellar.
Notice what the entry does not contain: no theory, no grand claims and no judgment of success or failure. It is a set of observations that can be compared with others.
The review
A diary that is never reread is half used. Set aside an hour at the end of each month to read the month's entries in one sitting, and write a summary answering four questions.
- How many days did I practice, and what caused the gaps?
- What changed over the month, in the practice and outside it?
- What patterns recur: times of day, conditions, moods, difficulties?
- What, specifically, will I do next month?
Once a year, read the whole. The rhythm of your own work, with its regular advances and dry spells, is visible only at that scale.
Practical matters
Use a bound book with numbered pages, so that nothing can be removed without trace, and write by hand if you can. A paper diary cannot be edited invisibly and does not interrupt you with messages. If you must type, keep dated files that you do not alter. Leave a margin for later notes. Keep the book somewhere safe and close to where you practice, with a pen that lives beside it.
Some students keep a second book as a commonplace: a place for quotations, tables, diagrams and thoughts on their reading. Keep the two apart. The diary is for what was done.
Practice
Begin tonight
- Take a notebook. Number the first twenty pages.
- On page one write today's date and one sentence on why you are beginning.
- Sit still for five minutes. Then write an entry under the seven headings above, however little there is to say.
- Do the same tomorrow.