Have a Stable Ship

Your life is like a sea voyage. Your elemental equilibrium is your ship. Those who sail must endure storms. Sometimes, you can avoid storms by sailing around them or sailing out of their way if they are coming towards you. Other times, you can dissolve storms using magical or non-magical methods. However, there are many storms you should pass through because many storms are good teachers. The magician relies on his wisdom to tell him which storms he should sail around, which storms he should dissolve if he can’t sail around them, and which storms he should pass through. The sorcerer, on the other hand, tries to dissolve or banish away every storm with his spells, and therefore never learns anything.

A bad ship will rock violently during a storm. A really bad ship will be overturned by the storm, representing a breakdown of some sort. A good ship will hardly rock during a storm. The passengers in the ship may not even notice they are passing through a storm. Because of the way the ship is designed, the passengers experience smooth sailing, even in the midst of a storm. Unstable boats rock a lot and are easy to overturn. Stable boats barely rock, even in the middle of storms. You must have a stable boat – a solid elemental equilibrium. In this way you will be fine, even if your life is stormy.

Stable and unstable ships both sail well in calm seas. It’s when the stormy weather comes that it become clear which ships are the stable ones and which are not. The adepts all say that life is the ultimate test of how good your elemental equilibrium is. If you can pass through the storms of life without being rocked and overturned, then you have a good elemental equilibrium. The personality that carries you through life is stable, and therefore strong and balanced. You cannot avoid storms forever. Even the best sorcerers eventually must face them when the universe forces them to learn. Therefore, it is wiser to work on making your boat more stable than to worry about dissolving or sailing around every storm you see on the horizon.

Do Not Neglect the Mundane Aspects of Life

Those who walk the path of magic must understand that balance is key. You cannot spend all your time practicing magical exercises and neglect other more “mundane” aspects of your life, such as your family, your job, and your social life. Those mundane aspects are just as magical as the exercises of IIH because magic is comprehensive and balanced. To be a magician requires that you have a balanced and well-developed personality. If the “mundane” aspects of your life are in a bad state, this is indicative of some major defects in your personality. An inability to hold a job could be indicative of laziness. An inability to make friends could be indicative of poor interpersonal skills or a lack of charisma. An inability to have a healthy romantic relationship could be indicative of poor listening skills. Problems in all aspects of our lives, including both the “magical” and the “mundane” aspects of our lives, often arise from negative personality traits. You must discover what those negative personality traits are through introspection and record them in your black soul mirror so you don’t forget them. Then, you must root them out one by one using the six-pronged attack. When you do this, the problems should disappear.

The idea that balance is important in magic, and that a balanced life must involve being attentive to the mundane, can be found in the following passage from Bill’s essay on the spirit Emrudue. Recall that after the student works through IIH, he travels to the Earthzone and then to each planetary sphere to learn from their ruling genii. Emrudue is one of the ruling genii of the Sphere of the Moon.

But if this distinction between higher and lower somehow implies that material desires are somehow of lessor importance in life, some of the lunar spirits would immediately stand up and object. From their point of view, the material universe has been created in order to celebrate love. You are going against the laws of the universe and generating karma if you leave physical happiness and gratification out of your equation for the meaning and purpose of life. If you seek the physical and ignore the spirit, you generate horrible karma. If you seek the spirit and ignore the physical, you generate horrible karma. This is because the two are a part of the same design.

For example, in the scheme of things, enjoying sex is just as important as communing with God. If you do the “higher” at the expense of the “lower” you have a demon waiting for you behind a door and he is slowing prying out the hinges and picking the lock in order to get to you. This is because God created that demon to remind you of the importance of sexuality as a key to discovering who you are. The demon’s authority and commission are activated by your act of repression. The demon represents your blind spot–an essential area of life which you have written off as unworthy of your attention.

If you pursue sex at the expense of communing with God, there is another demon waiting for you. His power derives from the creativity in life you have left behind because if anything God is creative and that power is the essence of your being. This demon haunts an abyss of chaos. He is authorized to bring that chaos into your life. The reason is that divine creativity is unafraid of emptiness and any abyss. It seeks them out because that is the space of the imagination which it requires to create. The creator is unafraid and freely and willingly enters the unknown in order to make something new.

This is real magic here. It’s not practicing random exercises because you want to move a candle flame with your mind. It’s not dabbling in different systems because you don’t have the discipline to stick to one and master it. It’s not studying tables of correspondences all day or performing inert theatrics disguised as rituals. It’s not feuding between orders or boasting about ranks and lineages. It’s a lifelong discipline in which you develop all aspects of your personality so that it becomes balanced and strong enough to engage potent inner forces and wield them to recreate the world. So yes, your sex life, your finances, your social life – all these “mundane” aspects of your life and more are worth just as much of your attention as the magical exercises of the magical training system you are working through.

Be Present-Minded

You make your mind completely empty of thoughts so it is reflective like a mirror, receptive like the ocean, empty like a void, open like the sky, intense like air the moment before lightning strikes, serene like moonlight, fragile and responsive to suggestion like a dream, and solid and enduring like a mountain.

~William Mistele

The magician’s mind is one of his greatest tools, and magical training involves a long process of refining this tool and learning to use it. By the time the aspiring magician has completed his training, he will have achieved a high level of mental maturity and mental discipline.

The level of mental maturity and mental discipline required to stay continually present-minded is relatively low compared to the level of mental maturity and mental discipline the magician will have acquired at the end of his training. However, learning to be continually present-minded is an important beginning step on the road to mental mastery. Those who have not taken this beginning step are not very far along in their mental training, and therefore not very far along in their magical training in general.

So, what does it mean to be present-minded? Have you ever gotten into a car to drive to a location and found yourself at that location with no recollection of how you got there? Clearly, you weren’t present-minded while you were driving. You were absent-minded or distracted. When you first begin the practice of present-mindedness, you have to try to be present-minded. Later, you no longer have to try because present-mindedness becomes your default state of being.

There are many benefits to be gained from being present-minded. It improves your ability to focus. It helps you learn more from your life experiences; after all, you can’t learn anything from your life experiences if you are absent-minded while going through them. It makes it possible for you to “carefully observe your routines and seize opportunities as they occur to improve on what you are doing.” Finally, being present-minded will improve your life because the present-moment is the only moment that truly exists, and therefore the only moment when you can consciously make changes that will transform your life. This isn’t possible if you are absent-minded and running on autopilot.

Listen to Your Conscience

The problem of morals and ethics is difficult to tackle in the world of philosophy, but not in the world of magic. Your intuition is the voice of Divinity speaking to you to give you guidance. When your intuition gives you guidance in moral issues, it is often called your “conscience” or “moral compass.” When you are faced with moral issues and ethical dilemmas, just listen to your conscience and you will know what to do.

There is a big trap that some people fall into called the “rationalization trap.” This is when you don’t like what your conscience is telling you, so you use logic to convince yourself that your conscience is wrong. For example, let’s say you are really tempted to cast a love spell on a woman you desire and your conscience tells you this is wrong. You could use logic to convince yourself that your conscience is wrong and then cast the love spell. This is a common example. Another common example involves curses. A person will be tempted to curse someone he doesn’t like. His conscience will tell him this is wrong, but he will use logic to convince himself that his conscience is wrong and send the curse anyway.

Logic uses deductive reasoning to draw conclusions from what we know. However, we don’t know everything, and oftentimes, what we think we know is false. Therefore, logic is fallible. Divinity, however, is omniscient and infallible. When Divinity speaks to you through your intuition, you should listen. Oftentimes, our intuitions can tell us things that logic can’t tell us. If your intuition has ever warned you against going to a seemingly safe place or dating a seemingly ok person, then you already know this.

Another common trap is confusing one’s emotions with one’s conscience. If you are angry at someone and this anger is compelling you to curse that person, this doesn’t mean your conscience is telling you to curse that person.

Be Open-Minded

When you finish your training and magician, you will often find yourself working with energies, powers, and entities that the human mind really wasn’t designed to comprehend. This might seem like a problem, after all, it is difficult to grasp or engage with an energy/power/entity if you have no understanding of it, and even if you do, you will be working with it from a position of ignorance, which is dangerous.

The human mind, however, can evolve/adapt to understand these energies, powers, and entities, but only if it is flexible. A rigid mind cannot bend, and therefore cannot change, develop, or evolve in any way. Narrow-mindedness is a sign of a rigid mind, while open-mindedness is a sign of a flexible mind. When you come across an aspiring magician who is narrow-minded, you can be sure that he is a long way from adepthood.

Open-mindedness is not a quality you cultivate when you are an adept and need to have a flexible mind to comprehend the strange forces you are working with. It is a quality that we begin developing at the very beginning of our training, and that we cultivate with each step we take as we walk the path of magical training. In fact, when it comes to magic, open-mindedness is not just a quality that allows our minds to be more flexible, and therefore more versatile and useful tools. It is also a quality that is imperative for survival. When you are narrow-minded, you see little and you see from one angle only. Therefore, you miss seeing dangers and warnings. When you are open-minded, you see much and you see from many angles. Therefore, you are more likely to dangers and warnings. You are also more likely to see solutions and opportunities.

Note:

i The quote from Bardon that I give in the second epigraph of this chapter illustrates this well. I do want to make a few comments about this quote, however, because it is easy to misinterpret it. Bardon is not saying to hate yourself or be abusive toward yourself. Such behavior is not conducive to one’s mental or physical health, and it is important for the student to remain mentally and physical healthy. I remember reading a study some time ago in which various artists from different fields were interviewed. Some were actors. Others were violin players. Others were dancers. The study showed that the artists at the top of their field always hired coaches who gave them lots of (constructive) criticism, constantly challenged them, and constantly forced them to test their limits. Since magic is an art, and since Bardon anticipated that many students would work through IIH alone, he urges the student to act as his own coach. This is what he means when he says to “be relentless and hard” with yourself.

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