Pre-Bardon warm-up material?

[Cybernetic_Jazz]

I get a funny feeling that Bardon's IIH is one of those systems that people would have a much better success rate with if they started with a year or two worth of Pre-Bardon primer material. I consider for example how many people were bouncing off of the A.'.A.'. system and their coming up with College of Thelema as something of a A.'.A.'. preschool. Does anyone think that there are any adequate precursor plans or books to Bardon's IIH that would help a person hit the ground? Things like One Year Manual etc.?

I know a lot of people would love to take a jump at getting into the system and I would start out by saying this - I have a copy of Bardon's Universal Master Key and aside from having read it cover to cover I'm enjoying reading it daily as part of my work these days (it's broken into 168 1 - 1 1/2 page headings which are perfect for daily meditation and study). It takes a shot at the four elements, even if on equally abstract terms as what's offered in IIH, and I'm thinking it's a good place to get a foothold on at least that component over time.

[Shinichi]

A lot of people approach Bardon incorrectly and get this feeling, but there is almost nothing that is more absolutely basic than Step One of the IIH. You meditate, do Introspection, and start working on making better physical daily habits. How much can you possibly do as a pre-requisite for that? Remember that the IIH is the prerequisite training, and the real "Practice of Magic" comes in his more advanced work. Everything after Step Nine, including Evocation and Kabbalah, require the pre-requisites of the first Eight Steps. No previous training is necessary.

Now, for Theory, there is a hell of a lot that should be studied and read alongside the IIH if you want a thorough understanding of Hermeticism and Magick in general. But, that is a work meant to be done while practicing daily, so it doesn't really qualify as pre-requisite work either.



~:Shin:~

[Rin]

On top of what Shin has recommended, I would say, firstly, to take basic meditation classes at a local meditation center or Buddhist temple, as the process of learning to meditate is infinitely easier when you have someone standing there in person to correct any mistakes, adjust things like posture and breathing, answer any questions etc. It doesn't have to be intense, you don't have to become a Buddhist or a monk or join an ashram, just have an experienced meditator to guide you through the first 6 - 12 months and help you with all the stuff that Bardon doesn't address, like proper posture, regulated breathing, and so on. I can't emphasize enough how much of a difference this makes. Small mistakes you would never pick up learning to meditate without a teacher can hold your practice back tremendously.

Secondly, I'd recommend taking up some form of physical-spiritual practice, like Hatha Yoga or one of the internal martial arts (I'm partial to Tai Chi, but Baguazhang comes excellently recommended as well). There's a reason that most of the Eastern spiritual traditions combined physical practices with seated meditation - it improves health and physical energy levels, opens up the vital pathways of the body and aids in the cleansing of blockages and stagnation, and maintains the limberness of the body so that you can manage seated meditation for longer periods of time and use more beneficial postures. You don't have to get into the more advanced aspects of these systems (although you can if you have the time), but 15 - 30 minutes of such a practice will increase the benefits and speed up the progress of your IIH practice enormously.

Another good idea is undertaking regular psychotherapy, even if you don't suffer any major or overt mental illness. Firstly because everyone has their own issues to a lesser or greater degree, and dealing with these issues will speed up your progress, and secondly because the cleansing and balancing process which takes place during the first few years of magical training will bring any issues you do have buried in your subconscious to the fore and force you to deal with them, and this will be infinitely easier if you have a trained therapist on hand to help you with them. You don't have to tell them you're there because you're training to become a wizard (in fact, I would recommend not doing so, at least not until you gradually probe your therapist for their feelings on spiritual issues - but there's no harm in saying you practice meditation and what not), just that you're dissatisfied with life (which most spiritual students are, otherwise they wouldn't be taking up spiritual training) and looking to improve yourself - which is what Step 1 is all about.

[Desecrated]

I just finished reading IIH and it's basically just rehashed theosophy.
The exercises are good and are based on earlier writings, but I honestly don't understand why this book gets so much hype.

[Rin]

Because it's the only book which gives a complete A - Z of magical training, so to speak (or at least as much as can be conveyed in a single book). It's an in-depth and thorough system of training which doesn't confuse the student by bogging them down in multitudes of complex rituals spread out over dozens of texts, it's very well grounded and balanced so as to avoid one-sided training (assuming the student is diligent and precise in their practice - and many are not, which is why many people start IIH and few complete it) and because it fills many of the gaps in Western magic by providing techniques which straight up just weren't publicly taught or even known at the time. It also avoids attaching itself to a particular institution, ideology or mythology as much as possible, making it widely accessible regardless of one's beliefs. It furthers this accessibility by being easy to read and not bogging itself down in excessive mystical prose (although the translation isn't perfect, especially in the older edition which is the pdf form found online and read by most students, and the use of certain terminology which has since become outdated causes confusion for modern readers).

* seriously, whatever your thoughts on the piracy of books, the translation in the hard copy is infinitely better and well worth the cost of ordering the book.

As for the exercises being based on earlier writings, that's just straight up not true. While some of them (primarily those in the first two Steps) appear in earlier writings in one form or another just by nature of their universality (more or less every system of mysticism starts with learning to control your thoughts, clear your mind, visualize, etc. for example), there is a lot in IIH, especially as you go further into the book, which had never been published in the West previously, and certainly there were no previous publications which contained such a sheer density of practical knowledge laid out in a way that it could be easily applied by the dedicated student.

[Cybernetic_Jazz]

I think for me there's about three reasons that my 'docking' with a system so-to-speak gets disrupted:

1) Certain things bluntly claimed about the realities of what I'm doing - for right or for wrong - still seem specious, partly because I haven't experienced the effects and haven't yet researched them to triangulate that person's ideas with enough other authorities to verify that there's something to their claims (this is the easiest one to fix - I typically just read as much as I can and eventually get that triangulation - this way my subconscious BS-detector is satisfied and won't be a plague unto my efforts).

2) You're asked to put a significant amount of work into something in particular and then when it comes to the next part of the process directions and clarification is particularly bad ( for instance coming up with 100 traits for my white mirror, 100 traits for my black mirror, and then finding out that there was no place I could find a satisfactory offering for what fire, water, air, and earth - add positive and negative - meant or where the overlaps stopped, certain synonyms were used across several elements at a time and there was really no way of un-muddying it).

3) Any time someone tells me, after doing exercise X for a certain period of time I should have already experienced metaphysical effect Y. Lol, that plants a hard line - what if you didn't? I've experienced this with some AMORC exercises where they say 'You should have seen X' when you do something, I'm able to overlook it because I can still get a lot of good learning and doings from the monographs, but if that gets added to requirements of progress, especially if someone is setting time-tables for me, it's a significant snag because it indicates my progress isn't and perhaps can't meet their requirements - which means I'm back to fudging it and making whatever system I do conform to me rather than vice a verse.


I'm actually enjoying the start of Israel Regardie's One Year Manual right now and may trudge through that to see hos much I can get done. My preference really is to slow-cook this stuff, make sure the progress is authentic, and make sure that what should be happening is happening. The philosophy for me is to stick with things, enjoy the wok of getting there rather than demanding result, and most importantly don't want to spend motivation I don't have - that happens the quickest if I find myself trying to pound a square peg into a round hole by forcing suppression of doubts or questions with blind faith. I might end up after all just using Bardon's book as a mile-marker for my progress from other things and perhaps when I see that I've made the requirements by way of other systems and am down to maybe one of his exercises from a particular step that I haven't done yet I might throw that in for good measure to round things off. I've noted before that I'm in two WMT systems and yes, I probably don't want to do three systems but at the same time I can't imagine that it's all that different and at the same time I know that AMORC and BOTA don't do anything like elemental polarization in grades so I don't see where backfilling the gaps in Bardon's IIH would b

[magari]

I have to repeat what Rin said.

Make it a part of your schedule and if you can find other people at a temple nearby that will encourage you to practice, go there as often as possible.

[Cybernetic_Jazz]

I might just continue my additional meditation practices on my own, work with the One Year Manual and see where that leads by the time I'm finished. Already have been doing martial arts for seven years and even seeing a counselor on the side so that's three legs of the table.

I wrote my OP really considering that a lot of people run at the Bardon system and get brick-walled somewhere in the process. If it was just laziness and lack of discipline that would be easy but, then again I don't consider that a particularly common trait among occultists.

[magari]

Laziness and lack of discipline is rampant amongst modern society, including occultists.

[Rin]

At the end of the day, I think the lifestyle required for magical development is just incredibly antithetical to the lifestyle encouraged by modern Western society, and that's where the problem comes from. Western society puts people down a very narrow life path with very specific expectations of what they will do and how they will behave, and all of this becomes deeply ingrained from an early age. Magic requires discipline, a structured routine, the ability to make short term sacrifices for long term (sometimes extremely so) gains, it is often (almost exclusively in the case of IIH and other self-training manuals - that is after all their purpose) practiced in isolation, with nobody to share your interest, bounce questions off, encourage you when you're feeling tired or discouraged. All of this is a real uphill battle in a world which tells us that we should go to school, go to university, start a career, engage in casual relationships until we feel the need to "settle down" and procreate, at which point we are to marry, have children and divide our time between raising them, working to gain money to provide ourselves and our family with an ever increasing stream of expensive material goods, and spend our free time in trivial pursuits, indulging in sensual pleasures or staring with eyes glazed at a screen which serves to sedate with meaningless entertainment and shove the beliefs we're supposed to hold down our throats in equal measure.

It also requires a great degree of faith - faith that the universe is more than the dead atoms we're told it is in our modern materialistic/reductionist scientific education, faith that the system you're practicing will indeed lead to the proclaimed attainments, faith that you yourself have the ability to undertake the extensive and difficult training. All of this faith is extremely hard to summon up and maintain, even for students who have teachers to guide them and to serve as living examples of the reality of magic and the attainments provided by practice. It's exponentially harder for those who don't, which is why self-training is such an enormous up-hill battle and so few manage it (and those who do tend to undergo a long and rocky road).

[magari]

I joined the military, infantry to be specific

One of the best decisions I ever made in regard to my personal development

[Cybernetic_Jazz]

Very good analysis. I think thankfully that the internet is helping us a lot, both by means of different groups having discussion forums and also plenty of Youtube adepts and semi-adepts of various disciplines or even just people with past-life adeptship who have internet presence and end up explaining and reinforcing a lot of the finer points of what we see in the story between the QM level of things and where these planes would be on the map of science/materialism if instrumentation was available to make the connections.

It also requires a great degree of faith - faith that the universe is more than the dead atoms we're told it is in our modern materialistic/reductionist scientific education, faith that the system you're practicing will indeed lead to the proclaimed attainments, faith that you yourself have the ability to undertake the extensive and difficult training. All of this faith is extremely hard to summon up and maintain, even for students who have teachers to guide them and to serve as living examples of the reality of magic and the attainments provided by practice. It's exponentially harder for those who don't, which is why self-training is such an enormous up-hill battle and so few manage it (and those who do tend to undergo a long and rocky road).

I'd fully agree - particularly faith and motivation are part in parcel. My own spot is realizing that I can't just run at a think whole heartedly if I'm not fully sold on not only its efficacy as a system but whether or not my own nervous system and structure will let me ride it through.

In addition to having faith that there's more than dead matter I think there's a whole additional layer of faith needed even after one realizes there's more. One realizes quickly that if thoughts simply created reality and it were one to one then there'd be no such thing as deluded people nor getting chin-checked by life, even far more often than many people wish for something better than or positively contrary to what they get. Similarly another corner notched out of it is that your higher self, source, HGA, etc. if it has one path in mind for you and what you're shooting for is getting stubbed at every corner there's also the possibility that you're own inner is stopping that advancement. That really leaves one with the question - yeah, all of this is here and in theory I can do a lot but what exactly is it that I'll be allowed to do? One doesn't feel particularly special either weighing ones self against millions of people around the world who've lived in terrible countries, even been rounded into prison camps and abused awfully, martyred, etc. and one tends to wonder if it were so doable wouldn't these people even have easier access? It's also like seeing adepts with physical disabilities or noting that Bardon was taken to prison twice, harassed by both Nazi's and communists, and eventually died in prison under the communists - when one tries to apply 'God speaking' style paranoia to every event that one sits rather strangely when one weighs out that if one creates their own reality and gets better at it as an adept that something unusual happened there. Clearly there's a lot more to all of this and any one idea in isolation (like "thoughts create reality") ends up being incredibly naive.

There's also the world of huge cosmologies. The first in-depth one I ever read was Alice Bailey's Initiation Human and Solar, found that fascinating, then read Rudolph Steiner's Outline of the Occult Sciences - was even more impressed, but as I saw increasingly more of these huge strapping cosmologies and saw more and more of them clash with each other on significant points or like in Steiners case realizing they seemed to hold water if painting outside of what I could examine but then crashed if what they said about earth evolution didn't check at all with what we know of history (like age of the planet or something that would imply Lemurian age as billions of years and Atlantean as thousands or that Lemurians were half etheric floating over lava) - I started realizing that a lot of big occult cosmologies, while seemingly credibly profound in their own rite, needed to be taken with a huge lump of salt. It's also a big part of my first point made earlier - ie. that I need a lot of triangulation across different authors before I feel comfortable buying into certain kinds of endeavors and their values; it gets really tough to tell in the beginning of one's magic and mystic studies what's actually 'real' in the higher vibrational planes vs. what's simply a set of learning tools and thought creations that are used in various systems that they're quite dogmatic in asserting as real for the sake of creating a scaffolding.