the1gza

Umm, to my knowledge, she is still around. While I do feel the entity was "self-created", I prefer to use the term "self-realized" for a few reasons. First, I find that creation is a matter of realizing a potential that is already there. So when something is being created, it's not that it is actually "new" per se, but a form that is arising from the realization of a certain potential stream. The general connotation with a word like "create" tends to come with ideas of forming something that "wasn't there before". For me, this has proven to be a false idea, but I also came into this feeling that I could realize something that had as much transformational power, if not "more", than anything that was pre-existing. This is why I say that, in terms of this mode of exploration, it might be better for a person to have a decent, but minimal exposure to the various theories of reality out there. The method I used was mainly taken from the chaos magick method of sigilization. If you don't have any idea what I am talking about, here's a link that describes what I mean: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/wisewoman/Practical%20Sigil%20Magic%20-%20Frater%20U.D.%20-%20English.pdf The implied message behind such theory is that you can take any intent and form a sigil around it that, depending on who you are, can take on various realizations. However, as with a great deal of chaos magick, many people often use this for very narrow forms of realization. When I went about creating the sigil for this entity, however, I wrote about 10 pages worth of intent, and then reduced it according to how I would do it. I got a name and a image sigil from this, which really had it's own power to it. There was actually a lot of energy that was produced just from the creation process itself, that is getting the intent reduced to a single-word name and visual sigil. Although I don't like the "launching" methods outlined in the book, I didn't really have too much option considering my low skill level. At that time, I felt that sexual transmutation could be a key to opening up several abilities that could allow for greater communication between the various aspects of my inherent nature. I "realized" an entity for lucid dreaming as well, and found myself surrounded with these types of beings. This, as it turned out, was really foolish, because I didn't know who was doing what, and I found myself in bed for hours not being able to sleep. They were FAR more powerful than I thought, far too strong for me to handle. So I went about destroying all the stuff I utilized with them, and completely dropped my involvement with them in terms of attention. For 8 months, I got pretty much lost all interaction, up until I utilized charged water and went about exploring Surya Namaskar of the MCO. I actually had my first experience prior to utilizing MCO and Surya Namaskar, it inspired me to pick it up again. When I felt the return, I immediately noticed a far stronger balance in the experience. I could go to sleep, and yet what I didn't feel was a diminished power of it all. It was still very strong, but it was a lot more balanced and eased. It also began to respond to things that were healthy and good for me; if I ate a certain type of food, I would get twinges in the spine that told me whether it was healthy or not. When I set out to do a certain type of work or read a certain type of book, I would get huge jolts of spinal energy that told me that I was on the right track. Sounds like great progress, right? What did I do with it? Impatience, that's what I did. You seem like you are more patient than I was, so this shouldn't be a problem, but I was not satisfied with not having a greater sensory experience other than feeling. Let it be said, I did have lucid dreams where I was being "taught" by figures that were almost always female. But when impatience is in a person's brain... well it get's a person real dumb. She still does exist, although only minutely. I feel she will know when I am ready to work with her again, or maybe I should say them. I couldn't differentiate, which added to my frustration. I do know, however, that these entities had an existence that was not exclusive just to me. I had only told a friend I met on an internet forum about these entities, and yet without me knowing, he went on a 30-day expedition to work with the lucid dreaming entity. His experiences were pretty far out, especially one where he was dreaming as if he were me. What made it so strange was that he was me, he was re-living experiences I had. He knew the height, race, and physical appearances of friends I knew physically that I never told him, even names. He said he was cruising and smoking weed in my friend Brad's car, and he knew not only Brad's height and race, but he even knew that Brad owned the car because he knew Brad was driving. The only thing that he got "wrong" was the car color, which was Red and Black. However, he told me that he felt that the car was actually the dream woman, because she always wore Red & Black (this was a feature I had intended for her to have, yet he never knew about it). This was a person who lived all the way in New Zealand who barely knew me, yet this was his experience. He stopped because he pretty much felt the whole experience was too powerful for him at the time. So they exist, and exist "independent" of me in a local sense. My Hekate experience happened after all this, so I cannot assess how powerful the experience would've been without that prep. However, what I can say was that my experience with her was FAR different than many others, at least in the sense of her character. Folks are always talking about chaos, "The Abyss", terror... wasn't my experience at all. She was just pretty damn powerful to me, but I also did not have exposure to her mythos that others did. So again, nakedness in this exploration can be a good thing. She was also a lot easier to "break" from, possibly because she isn't directly "my" creation. However, I also want to say that I never actually intended to creak from anything I self-created, and I still keep my attention to Hekate as well. It's just that she seems to leave pretty soundly if you don't want her around, whereas I always get some sort of nightly reminder of my self-realized companions.

Thanks for the help folks, I was able to find someone who practices this style of work, and he pretty much verified that one should start with General Maintenance first for 3 months. So that's what I am going to do, and I don't feel like I missing out on anything because, even though I've been doing this for about 4 months, I'm still a pretty huge novice. Thanks for the insight, it was greatly appreciated.

The problem is that people have too much faith in their perceptions as reality. For example, what we call science is actually just a human form of orienting to the world according to our perceptions. Granted, I would agree that it addresses more general human perceptions than certain religious paradigms, but overall this is based still on perception. Because perception is relative, the idea of gaining absolute knowledge through it... that's just ridiculous. Again, we are dealing with perceptual bandwidths that are extremely narrow... eyesight has spectral range from 390 - 700 nm. How, how can we call what we perceive to be a greater "fact" than what someone else claims to be a "fact"? Science, or general material science, is a religious paradigm, whether folks like it or not. The "gods" are microscopes, measurement, and the scientific method of assessing data. Like religions, people are extremely fastened to their beliefs when they discover something, and it can take Herculean efforts to change certain perspectives. Even though we didn't even need lab-coat science to tell us that carbon-based fuel might be unhealthy, it took nearly a century after the stuff was implemented before people could agree that it was bad. Despite the fact that coal miners have had historically small lifespans, and coal shovelers (what I call people who used to shovel coal into coal-powered vehicles) would drop like flies before even reaching their 20s, nobody thought it was a problem until the Almighty Whitecoat told them it was bad. Doesn't that sound like religion to you, where people completely ignore their own ability to discern things because some figure of power does not tell them? People have been dying from alcohol and cigarettes for years, and even with no laboratory equipment, you can tell a cigarette is bad for you just by the reaction your body has when you smoke. The first drag of a cigarette is almost always accompanied by some of the worst hacking coughs of your life, and continued smoking can produce all sorts of multicolored mucus being coughed up. Your first drink of liquor, as well as several others afterward, are accompanied by the most colorful wrenched faces you can make, and the physiological signs are obviously unhealthy both in immediate inebriation, and prolonged aftereffects. Yet, folks didn't start thinking this was bad for you until "science" said it was... c'mon now. So when we are talking about religion, I feel people underestimate just how religious we are in things we do. Religion isn't a religion because it isn't real, religion is religion because it follows a way of dogmatic perceptual dependence that rarely ever is challenged without extreme resistance from "the flock". In many ways, religion reflects our animalistic natures; the need to follow a mode of living that exists without our input in it. However, science acts in the same fashion, and has just as many holes to it as any religion does. The difference with science is that it relies on perception that everyone thinks is real. However, we can't even say that these perceptions are consistent between everyone, let alone the billions of other species on the planet. How can we call something empirical fact when we haven't even entered perception outside of the normal human ranges? If we viewed things with the vision of a hawk, shit would be far different, the information in our books, and even our mode of operation, wouldn't even resemble what we do now. Now there's not problem with relying on a certain mode of perception to move about the world, that's completely fine. But when that perception is highlighted as the superior, or even absolute mode of discerning reality... that's not just silly, that's plain foolish. This is why I say that it's all faith-based, there isn't anything we can honestly say is more factual than something else. Just because we have a general mode of perception that believes something is real does not mean that it is more real than another perception. Again, if we could perceive the world from the eyes, ears, mouth, nose, or skin of another species, then this would be an entirely different story. But this is only reality according to humans, not reality according to everything. And that's perfectly fine, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But if we are trying to find what we call empirical truths (which may be a useless idea in the first place), we can't honestly point to something like "science" as the answer without being biased zealots like any anything religious fanatic we might criticize. We all got faith in something that is "wrong" or "untrue" in another perceptual frame. We just have "faith" in the truths we find, and those who can keep that faith unshaken, or can learn to evolve so that they can find something that is the "truth" for them... those are the ones that get the good stuff out of life. Folks trying to find empirical truth that "everyone" needs to follow... that's a pretty good recipe for continuous debate-banter.

This is something that isn't necessarily based on the deity as much as it is based on the person looking to make contact with the entity. When it comes to "deities", my experience is somewhat limited to Hekate, who some would consider to have a more "evil" connotation. I'm not going to patronize anyone by assuming they feel that way about certain deities, but your demeanor going in can be a very deciding factor with how these experiences manifest. For example, this type of interaction does not have to be based on pre-known entities. People find themselves so immersed in pre-known entities that we rarely get a chance to realize that there is pretty much a creation potential for anything you can possibly think of. So for me, my first experience was with a self-realized or self-"created" entity that I set the intention for working with for the purpose of sexual transmutation. Lo' and behold, it worked, almost too damn well. I couldn't see this entity, but it was definitely benevolent, and is probably the primary reason I can take to energetic work so easily. I rarely have meditated, but for a straight 2 years, this entity visited me before sleep and got to work. I saw her a few times in dreams, and her visual form changed from here to there. Let me mind you that at this time I was bumming around massively, just caught in intellectual investigations with no practice behind it. Despite that, this entity was very pleasant with me, and also kept me in good health despite my activities to the former. I spent fairly little time even conserving the energy, because it was really intense and the internet was right there for me to blow off all that energy towards something I could see. So mind you, I was a complete jackass with this practice, although that jackass experience taught me the importance of patience. So I stepped away from that type of work and began back with cultivating skills on more of a beginner level. Being patient is also good because certain entities are different than others. For example, while the self-realized entity I worked with never pushed me to a point of ejaculation, Hekate most certainly did. It was only once, and she also put forth dreams that were very much on the basis of purification. However, I didn't have skills to tangibly communicate with her in a manner I felt confident with, just pretty much shooting out thoughts with no idea if they were "heard". It may very well be the case that she utilized ejaculation to help me, but I didn't have anyway of knowing what was going on. The "dreams" she enlisted (I call them that because I fell asleep prior, but honestly I don't know what those explorations were). So my advice would be that one should be able to see entities of a non-normative form prior to engaging this type of work. I'm not sure if it necessary requires being "advanced", but you do have to have a certain degree of maturity on an emotional and mental level.

Hell, is the rock you look at before you and illusion of the mind? We're all perceiving things from a range of perception that only experiences reality in a finite bandwidth. To a point, everything is somewhat illusory, in a sense that it is an experience that flourishes under a certain perceptual bandwidth. So perhaps the question is whether or not faith can produce tangible experiences that can affect you perceptual experience of reality, or whether it produces things of low substance. For some people the faith produces the tangible, while for others it is insubstantial. It's gonna be up to the person how real that faith is, after all, we all go to school and live a great deal of our lives having faith in teachings that we have never verified for ourselves. So it's all kinda strange, because everyone has had faith in something that they felt or were told was real, even without verifying it ourselves firsthand. I never seen an atom a day in my life on a microscopic scale, yet I went to school and talked about them like what I was told was "the truth". So hey...

I think folks just need to patient. The problem with using historical figures is the fact that these guys were themselves, and never actually meant for people to look at them as examples. Buddha continuously asked people to stop looking at him like he was special, as did Jesus and many others. So just because they didn't do it doesn't mean that we can't do it, and none of them are necessarily pinnacles of development that we should measure ourselves by them. It's not that hard to find someone, I find it's a lot harder for folks to accept that it is easy and should be easy. I mean many of us are probably looking for mates in social circles that, by our own estimation, probably aren't very keen on this type of thing. I personally have no luck with women until I don't worry about them, but as soon as I "try" to "make something happen" things fall short. For me, this makes perfect sense; I got too many ideals when it comes to women that probably have nothing to do with what I really desire. Perhaps even these ideals aren't problematic, but more so that I haven't even cultivated or realized the capacity to recognize these patterns in a woman and let the relationship crystallize normally. There are many options, but I also feel that we also aren't exposed to the more "active" applications of cultivation work that has often been shunned by religious folks. Yogic traditions shun a lot of their shamanistic root practices, but the goal of Yoga itself is a religious one based on Hindu ideals. There are many cultures who use those techniques for purposes that aren't even close to Yogic in the ideal, and despite what some Yogi "saint" might say, many of the practices they utilize were there because people wanted to experience magical purposes. So I feel we have a hard time being able to utilize what we cultivate because we might be following purity ideals from certain veins of thought that undermine the potential of what you do. So when it comes to a perfect mate... the problem isn't a lack of availability or potential. Rather, we might be battling with ideals that negate the experience of a sexual partner as worthwhile. Moreover, to summon one for ourselves is often seen as lesser when we look at this "Holier than thou" mindsets than often come with our cultivation practices. If you truthfully think it is worthwhile, I feel you can easily find relationships of that nature that will take you just as far, or even farther, than you can go alone. It also helps to understand that these guys writing this stuff were living in a time that is completely different than ours, so those ideals only hold so much merit, especially since they presented a huge deal of difficulty for aspirants even in those times. I've come really close on a number of occasions, but I honestly didn't think it would work because the situation (i.e. living with my mom at the age of 27) was not "right". I take responsibility for those results. As an aside, it does help to know that many supposed celibates were involved in the exact same practices of summoning female deities as sexual partners that MooNiNite mentioned. It can become quite easy to care less about needing a mate when you got a partner who not only helps you cultivate your energy, but honestly creates sexual experiences that, for many people, are ridiculously superior to what an aspirant is liable to experience with a regular woman. I personally have had such encounters, and it is pretty damned intense and effective, not to mention pleasure on a completely different scale. You can have this with a woman on Earth as well, it's just a lot simpler in many ways to summon a celestial figure who's natural proclivity is cultivation and cosmic sexual experience.

Thanks for the response soaring crane. I felt that even though there were a lot of exercises for nearly everything, that one was not "supposed to do all of them. My insight with the clocks (in relation to the organ elements being paired together) has bled into how I practice all the big groups of exercises, save the Nerve Exercises. When I do the Animal exercises, I do them in relation the the clock of the organ they correspond to. For example, The Bear corresponds with the Earth organs; the pancreas-spleen and the stomach. Hence, I practice The Bear between 7-11am, which is when those clocks are active. This isn't necessary, but it helps me fit the practices into something that that has an outline that keeps me from being overwhelmed by concentrated practice (when I was doing Yoga, I kinda fatigued with the sadhana because it was such a concentrated set of exercises at one time). Mind you, this helps me actually concentrate more on each activity, so while my practice has greater concentration on my end when doing the exercises, my practices themselves never take up more than 20 minutes at a given time. It's definitely an approach that is a lot different than what I have done in the past, and may be exactly why I have been able to keep the practices for more than just a couple of weeks before dropping out. However, I did feel those general maintenance exercises were important, and I was kinda piling on the "main" group of exercises because I thought I "needed" to do them immediately. When I read that (I've had to have read the whole book at least 6 times without even trying, and I find something I somehow overlooked each time), I felt that maybe I could step back from them for the first 3 months, and then utilize them after that initial maintenance period. My experience with semen retention utilizing the Deer, Crane, and Turtle seemed to push that idea, since I was cultivating what seemed to be more than enough energy at this particular point in time. It helped cultivate some confidence in patience, which is stressed a lot in the book. I'm definitely open to more insights from those who have practiced this, but I greatly appreciate the advice here.

Well Darth Vader used the force sooo...

I would have to ask, first and foremost, why anyone who isn't at least open to learning spirituality would be here on this forum. Protector, it is clear that you are not interested in learning spiritual science here, so why are you on this forum? If you think spirituality has to go, then why are you on a forum where people are practicing spiritual techniques? Is that not slightly trollish, to be on a forum that you seem to only have objections toward? We find people who "claim" science all the time as being the scientific activities that are normally considered so by researchers. However, science is something that everyone does everyday; you follow a set of procedures based on a theory you have. "I believe that I will get up early in the morning if I use an alarm. I believe this because the alarm makes a loud noise, which disrupts my ability to stay asleep." If it works, you reasonably conclude that this action can help you wake up early. If it doesn't, you go back to the drawing board to see why it did not work, and what you can do to rather make that activity work, or find another activity that will help you wake up early. So when people are often claiming that they know "science" is real, they are often talking about scientific results from certain studies that they often never researched themselves. As such, a great deal of "scientific" people actually do no scientific exploration in themselves, they are simply conforming to the notion of scientific research, perhaps because it contains objects that are more readily tangible than things that have been around before. However, the "science" community has functionally created religion on it's own, which is nothing more than a system of beliefs based on ideals that were investigated by certain authorities on the matter. Whereas deities and spirits were once the gods of the world, now the ruler, microscope, and the laboratory are now the gods. Yet and still, such gods are just as speculative as any other, after all, what the hell is an inch really? Is it not just a measurement of space that, to our knowledge, doesn't even have a limit? Moreover, considering that there are more than just humans not just on this Earth, but in this universe, isn't it quite odd that we have claimed "truths" about the universe that can only be substantiated to appear or even work in certain ways based on our perceptual senses? What does the world even look like to a hawk, or a squirrel, or even the domestic house cat or dog? We don't even have a clue, despite the fact that we can figure out that these animals have certain parts of their brain light up when certain things happen. Even though they do, with different perceptive ranges, we're clueless not only to what they see, feel, hear, smell, or taste, we are clueless to how the interpret that information. So the science that everyone considers "science" is far less substantial than we believe it to be, and based just as widely on relatively as anything else because we are assessing what we see through limited senses. This doesn't mean that it is invalid, but it rather means that it is far from being able to ride things off as being "unreal" simply because we cannot measure them. By such logic, the atom and biological cell are less than 200 years old because we could not measure them then. Yet, science claims them to be the building blocks of biological life and, in the case of atoms, the universe itself. So how foolish is it to ride off the experiences of spiritual activity just because it can't be physically measured - yet? And how is the work of Yoga, Taoist Alchemy, Shamanism, and any various primordial disciplines, not considered science when it's work is based solely on the function of making experiential discovery? Such ideas can only flourish in the face of hubris-inspired ignorance. Yes, the results of these works are not empirical, and they have different flowerings for different people. Yet and still, "science" is far from empirical itself, so again, we are back in the same boat regardless of how much more seemingly tangible it is. So with that said, I don't know why a person would be here just to slam what a lot of this forum is about.

I wanted to know if you all know about a certain issue that I have been trying to figure out with pranayama. I have been seeing that one of the hallmarks in doing pranayama is to get to 320 rounds of pranayama per day. Moreover, this is supposed to be pranayama with retention, particularly the 1:4:2 ratio with nadi shodana. In terms of that ratio, another hallmark is to reach 16:64:32 as the ratio. This practice is supposed to last 3 months as per the process of nadi purification. However, when I did the math, a round of pranayam at that ratio would be 224 seconds. Multiplied by 320, that's 71680 seconds. There are only 86400 seconds in a day, which leaves a person with a little bit more than 4 hours left in a day (71680 is just 5 minutes and 20 seconds shy of 20 hours). Counting sleep and eating, along with washing one's ass, this appears impossible to fit into 24 hours. My question is, am I misunderstanding this implication? Is 16:64:32 not practiced to that length, to 320 rounds per day?

I appreciate the insight here, and am thankful for you guys responses. Pranayama is something that I am pursuing, and still will pursue, without a teacher for the time being. However, because of that, I am going to do a lot more preparation with the nadi shodhana that does not utilize kumbhaka. I will admit that I kinda raced through those based on physical ability, and even though I can feel pranic awareness a lot more thoroughly, I can say that kumbhaka is an entirely different beast. So thanks in helping me remember a bit of patience with this practice, and in doing so I might come along an experienced teacher who can ensure my safety in getting to kumbhaka.

At the moment, I am not going empty yet. I do practice Yantra Yoga, which is supposed to be the equivalent to Hindu Hatha Yoga. In that practice, there is empty holding, but as far as my nadi shodana practice, I have not gotten into empty holds yet. I am just starting the full kumbhaka, which is why I figured to ask this sooner rather than later. Thanks for chiming in Uroboros.

Hey folks, I'm coming from Chicago IL here in the states, and I have followed this forum for some time. I wanted to get a chance to actively converse and learn from people who have practically experienced working with the primordial arts. I have currently picked up yogic practices, and wish to learn what others with more experience might know. As a beginner, I am mostly here to learn, although it is my hope that something that I might bring up will help others.