I. Modern Magic

The magical practitioner of the 21st century must assume full responsibility for their actions, and therefore they must consider themselves a thinking being. Nobody but ourselves chooses our path, even though we learned how to walk it from a personal teacher, books or other sources. In the past this used to be different: Often times the responsibility for one’s magical path lay with one’s teacher, and even the disciple to teacher relationship was primarily determined one sidedly by the teacher.

The fact that today the student of magic holds full accountability over their actions, makes it important that the path itself is transparent and as far as possible comprehended in advance. At least this should be the case to such an extent, that the student can anticipate the impact of their actions before they are beginning to make first steps.

In earlier times, this was not considered a necessary requirement, as the student adopted an existing dogmatic view of man’s mental, spiritual and physical constitution. Nowadays, the abilities of each individual are required and in full demand – as tradition and orthodoxy are replaced with personal integrity and responsibility.

Since the modern human being (in contrast to the archaic) has no command over a more illuminated consciousness than their cognitive mind, the first exercises on IMBOLC’s training path will serve the purpose of allowing one to reconnect with one’s thinking consciousness. Despite the existing over-emphasis of the cognitive function in the Western Hemisphere, it should not be neglected in magical training. Quite the opposite, its early integration is even more critical, in order to avoid dysfunctional dichotomies such as between mind and intuition or logos and eros at a later stage of the work.

This is the reason why we do not offer any kind of breathing exercises, no mudras or mantram until initially a novel and more well rounded consciousness of how to understand and perceive these exercises has been established within the student.

II. Presence

At first, the student of the magical arts has a hard time to think of anything else then natural or man-made objects. To perceive how their own mind’s presence is colouring and often distorting such thoughts is quite hard initially.

Once the student has succeeded at least partially in separating their own cognitive images from the objects of their reflection, they can begin to practice thought meditations. These are trained through meditation on sentences or contents that do not refer to the world of sensory perception.

III. Practice

The essence of immersion into an object of meditation (i.e. often into a single sentence, an aphorism, or an abstract object), can be described as 'resting' on it, a way of wordless presence, of silent communion with the object of one’s meditation. A meaningful sentence revealing a new meaning. Realisation arises without words, the meaning of sense comes to life an experience immediately before its embodiment, only then is it expressed and bound into words. In the contemplative phase the aim is tointuitively grasp the meaning, and meanwhile to keep the hands of one’s cognitive mind still, and not to turn over such intuitively perceived meaning with words.

After practicing the thought meditation, imaginative and visual meditations can then be carried out, later perceptual meditations on natural objects whose purpose is inconceivable to everyday consciousness. – For successful perceptual meditations the practitioner must have some control over the gestures and dynamics of their cognitive mind.

The aim of such consciousness exercises is to overcome the passively reflected everyday consciousness and to become aware of a sphere of living, unmediated consciousness, which can be found and accessed right in the middle of one’s life. In the past the same goal often was pursued by eliminating influences of everyday life (ascetic exercises); yet, today we can work with and through our everyday thinking in order to reorientate it back to its source.

Practices like these are broken down into accessible and pragmatic exercises and steps in our Study Course curriculum. They do not require any previous knowledge, skills or degrees. Despite their inherent complexity, you might be surprised how much progress you will be able to make in developing such capabilities with simple daily practice over a period of three to six months.

These are the essential foundations to all of the ritual and spirit work that we are teaching in practice and theory in later modules of the course.