This afternoon I was working on my Greek homework.\u00a0 In particular, on memorizing the alphabet.\u00a0 To aid with this, I turned to my Tower of Memory*, pulling one of the many blank books from the shelves.\u00a0 I placed the book on the table, pulled as pen from the air, and opened the cover to the first page.\u00a0 Or tried to anyway.\u00a0 The book refused to cooperate, pages flapping until it was open to the middle.
I tried putting the book back on the shelf and starting over.\u00a0 I tried leaving my trance state, casting a circle, and entering a deeper trance.\u00a0 I could feel the pebbled texture of the cover, smell the leather and paper. Still, the book insisted on opening to the the middle.\u00a0 One of the spirits I work with was there the whole time, laughing at me.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been some time since I started a new \u201cbook\u201d in my Tower of Memory.\u00a0 As I think on it, though, I\u2019ve had this problem before.\u00a0 I\u2019m better at visualization now than I\u2019ve ever been, but there are still times when my mind refuses to cooperate with me.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
I know that my visualization needs work.\u00a0 I have had enough experiences where my body and the mortal world were simply gone to know that I am capable of full, six-senses visionary work.\u00a0 (Though I also know that this is simply not going to happen every time no matter how good I get.)\u00a0 But I also know that the mind and the Otherworlds have rules (largely unwritten, which is part of why I keep this blog: in the hopes that someone else will be aided by my fumbling experiences) different from those of the mortal world.\u00a0 Which, of course, beg question: is this a failing on my part, or something about the nature of this particular visionary technique that I don\u2019t know? <\/p>\n
<\/a> <\/p>\n * In his Temple of High Witchcraft, Christopher Penczak talks about using a portion of the Inner Temple as a \u201cTower of Memory\u201d.<\/a> This, of course, is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination. It\u2019s not even new to me: I\u2019ve been using both techniques for as long as I\u2019ve practiced magic. I couldn\u2019t even begin to cite my original sources, cribbed as they were from message boards and FTP sites back in the Cretaceous Period of the Internet, when HTTP was shiny and new, everyone\u2019s homepage was on lysator, and geocities hadn\u2019t happened yet. (I mention these things first, so that if you haven\u2019t heard of the technique you can go look it up; and second, to re-establish that Penczak is not my first or only source by any stretch of the imagination, just one I\u2019ve been drawing on recently.)<\/p>\n If I can\u2019t find a good link on the subject in the next few days, I\u2019ll post an instructional write-up of my own.\u00a0 It\u2019s strange that, though I\u2019ve been working with these techniques since I was sixteen years old, I still don\u2019t feel confident to impart them to others.<\/p>\n ETA:<\/p>\n A basic instruction for creating the Inner Temple in the first place: http:\/\/www.plotinus.com\/exercise_temple_of_light_copy%281%29.htm<\/a><\/p>\n A non-occult conceptualization of the Palace of Memory: http:\/\/litemind.com\/memory-palace\/<\/a><\/p>\n These are adequate, but I think, however, that I will still refine my decade-plus-old write-up of the Inner Temple and House of Memory.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This afternoon I was working on my Greek homework.\u00a0 In particular, on memorizing the alphabet.\u00a0 To aid with this, I turned to my Tower of Memory*, pulling one of the many blank books from the shelves.\u00a0 I placed the book on the table, pulled as pen from the air, and opened the cover to the … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[124],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scholarship","category-witchcraft","tag-inner-temple"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-1H","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}