Modern Magic

I

Modern Magic

The magical practitioner of the 21st century must assume all responsibility for his actions, and therefore he must always call himself a thinker. He chooses his path and his method, even though the rest comes from a personal teacher or from the influence someone else’s writings. In the past, the responsibility of the magical path was exclusively on the teacher; even the student-teacher relationship was primarily determined by the teacher.

The fact that today the disciple of magic has total responsibility over his actions, makes it important that his individual steps on the path are transparent and comprehended in advance, at least to such an extent that he can anticipate the effects of his individual steps before he is entering this path for the very first time.

In earlier times, this was an unnecessary requirement, because the student adopted an existing dogmatic view of man’s mental, spiritual and physical structure. Nowadays, the abilities of each individual are necessary and in demand – a time of study, in which the task of knowledge indicated by the teacher can be mastered by constantly new, intuitively created concepts.

Since, the “modern human being” (in contrast to the archaic) has no other consciousness than the thought consciousness for now, each one of the first exercises will serve to the purpose of connecting with the thinking consciousness. The thinking consciousness should not be bypassed with the “Westerners”, because otherwise there is the danger of neglecting the brightest consciousness function of man and leaving it unchanged.

For specifically these reasons, there can be no direct breathing exercises, no mental mantram, no sound meditation for the “modern human being” at first, but only after a new sensitivity, a new consciousness once it has been acquired through an introductory developmentness.

II

Present

At first, the student of the magical arts is biased on his thinking about concepts on daily objects produced by man. On the basis of the formation of such concepts and ideas the student learns selfless thinking. Once he has succeeded to some extent, he can begin to practice thought meditations, i.e. sentences and contents that do not refer to the world of sensory perception, but to wordless thinking. The immediately comprehensible sense of the meditation theme, for example, can be grasped as a starting point for mental thinking; their inherent sense, on the other hand, is inexhaustible and accessible only to the act of meditation.

III

Practice

The essence of “immersion” in the object of so-called “meditation” (in a term, a sentence, usually an aphorism, a physical object), or “resting” on it, can be described approximately as wordless thinking. A meaningful sentence, carrying a new meaning, arises in human beings without words, the meaning of sense comes to life in words immediately before embodiment, only then it is expressed and formulated in words. In the contemplative phase the aim is now to intuitively grasp the meaning and to remain in the intuitive experience, to experience it.

After practicing the thought meditation, imaginative and visual meditations can then be carried out, later perceptual meditations on natural objects whose sense of everyday consciousness is inconceivable. For perceptual meditations, the practitioner must have some control over the gestures of thought and imagination meditation. The aim of the consciousness exercises is to overcome the mirrored everyday consciousness and to become conscious in the sphere of living consciousness – in life. Whereas in the past this goal was pursued by eliminating the still weak everyday thinking (ascetic exercises), today it is a matter of orienting everyday thinking according to its sources and leading it to them.

IV

Consciousness & Subconscious

The fact that these sources today lie within the sphere of everyday thinking is the result of the preceding stages of development, which is shown by the fact that today’s human beings are able to think and speak about their manifestations of consciousness. The possibility of overcoming everyday consciousness was once given by the fact that the human being had other abilities of consciousness, e.g. the recognizing feeling, which the training could tie in with, even if everyday thinking had been dampened.

In addition to the more direct exercises for developing a higher consciousness, there have always been others with the aim of dissolving habits, mechanisms and soul forms of consciousness. They helped people to carry out otherwise unconsciously habitually or instinctively exercised gestures of consciousness and life with consciousness.

It is therefore characteristic of today’s magical training path that the first exercises basically begin in the so-called “painterly” everyday consciousness. He understands what is being done, the transparency is never lost in the exercise steps. This ensures continuity in the course of the training and thus also the continuity of orientation.