Last Words on Practice Mode

We’ve now reached the end of the Practice Mode section. While these practices are simply for establishing a certain baseline, if you have no previous experiences, you should have your hands quite full in just engaging with these practices. If you have already some kind of an established practice regimen, feel free to supplement whatever you are doing at the moment with the practices presented here. Before we close this chapter, there’s a few more things to say.

Cultivation of qualities

Many people interested in spiritual practices seek big, flashy experiences. Without consistent practice whatever it is that the seeker is searching for risks becoming just occasional, fleeting moments. There is nothing wrong in itself with just having these experiences. Modern humans often desperately need to have some kind of experiences that validate the existence of numinous for themselves as our culture has alienated itself from subtler aspects of reality. Experiences can be great catalysts for further progress and change.

The promise of every single spiritual tradition however isn't some collection of unusual experiences, but rather being able to interact with the numinous side of reality in meaningful ways. Being able to interact with this side of reality is however challenging for most. Some have more of a natural talent for it, while others have to train hard to reach it. It could be compared to becoming a deep sea diver or a mountain climber, or perhaps an astronaut.

To become such a person, you need to cultivate a set of qualities that facilitate interaction with the numinous. The point of these practices is to get you started on that journey while also offering some more “coarse” benefits.

Consistency is the Key

As with the construction of more mundane qualities in humans, consistent practice is the key. Just like you can not perform an extremely demanding deadlift, run a marathon, climb a mountain or dive into the bottom of the ocean without preparation, it is quite the tall order the interact with the numinous without preparation.

Sometimes people have spontaneous strange experiences. They can be difficult and terrifying. Perhaps the analogy would be getting dragged to a top of a mountain – or the bottom of the sea. Sometimes they are less traumatic and perhaps more like climbing a steep hill when you are not very fit. The insight and capabilities gained from fleeting experiences tends to be rather limited, and practice will bring context and tools for putting these experiences into service.

With every training regime, we are aiming for consistent, in our case, daily practice. This consistency of practice is an extremely powerful life skill in itself to cultivate. Rather than pushing quickly for the extremes, you should do a bit daily and every day if just possible. Quality of practice is important too, not just numerical factors like length of meditation sessions.

Finding time and letting go

The results you get from practice tend to be more or less proportional to the time and energy you put into it. Presumably you have found some other ways to fill your 24 hours of a day before taking up these practices. This means inevitably that you will have to drop something else from your life.

For some of us, our days are generally filled to the brim with productive and necessary activities. In such cases it can be extremely difficult to find the time to practice, and it would be best to focus on relaxing, regenerative forms of practice like progressive muscle relaxation and meditation aimed at calming down. Body-oriented energy work can be very good if it's possible to squeeze out 10-15 minutes of garbage time from social media.

For those with more time on our disposal, it genuinely is a choice of what to do. Do we spend our time doomscrolling, endlessly playing videogames, hanging out on social media or Discord and watching porn, or do we carve out the time required? It ultimately boils downs to sacrificing short-term enjoyment (or ”enjoyment”) for long term results.

This all might seem very self evident, but managing to fit in the practice can be a genuine challenge. It's much easier if you make a firm decision to throw something away to begin with.

Don't be like Tenshi, think ahead a bit about how you will incorporate the practice into your life.

How much should you practice, then? If we take up building up to a 20 minute daily meditation regiment and then start adding to it, reaching about 40-60 minutes of daily practices is probably a reasonable early daily maximum.

Wait, Nothing’s Happening?

Some people will take up spiritual practice with very elevated expectations, and come off disappointed when they don’t get strong results quickly. These kind of experiences partly stem from overall degradation of attention span and ability to commit, and partly from how becoming aware of the results is an art of it’s own.

There is a reason why focused attention meditation is seen as the core practice, and I think if you build up a schedule of meditating 20 minutes daily you will inevitably get results. They can be very subtle, but they are there, and sometimes people only notice if they stop meditating.

As this about a process of internal change, it takes time, and as you change, you constantly adjust to the new baseline. This can make it very, very difficult to perceive the progress. This is why journaling is recommended. Over time you will also become more capable at perceiving subtle changes, both in yourself, and in the world at large.

Ultimately, you need to take a kind of leap of faith and commit to practice. Not everyone finds every form of practice as suitable or fruitful, and what kind of practice is needed also changes over time. I am very fond of forms of practice that engage the body as they also have very noticeable coarse body benefits. Some might find them a better standpoint than meditation, as they force a point of focus.

Help, I Am Having A Really Bad Time!??

Sometimes people can have a really bad time with spiritual practices. There are several reasons for this: as the practice sensitizes you to different aspects of reality, you might also become more and more sensitive to some very dislikeable parts of it. These parts can be found in the external world, or then within you. If these negative aspects are within you and they are some kind of personal failings that you can reasonably work with, you should work with them. Sometimes these negative aspects are various traumatic experiences that you have not earned through your actions. As hard as it is, you will have to find ways to let go off them. Thankfully, these practices give you tools for emotional self-regulation.

Sometimes however people rapidly discover they are much more sensitive or skilled with these practices than expected. This can lead to a few challenging things. The first one is a kind of rapid ontological shock, an unexpected challenge to sense of reality as unusual phenomena start unfolding. With these it's best to acknowledge to the largest extent possible that yes, this is all real, there are aspects of reality that the materialist paradigm refuses that nevertheless exist and yes, it is happening. Not everything extraordinary is either threatening or makes you special compared to the billions of spiritually sensitive humans that have come before you. Once again, the regulative techniques help with freakouts. Another good technique is remembering grounding, and forcefully, with full intent, focusing on feeling the pull of the Earth.

Getting harassed by local garbage entities is another possible cause for bad experiences that is caused by people getting ”lit up”. These beings ultimately are very powerless, but they will try to scare you with noises or apparitions. Sometimes these apparitions even appear outside the mind's eye. Spiritual hygiene and cleansing practices keep them at bay. You need to cultivate a certain kind of spiritual backbone and learn to ignore them. You must avoid getting sucked into some kind of spiral of fear, which will only empower them. If all else fails, turn to higher powers. Attracting a drove of parasitic local entities is usually a good lesson in why taking care of negative energies is really important.

I would say that sporadic brush-ins with unpleasant entities is part of our existence, just as brush-ins with unpleasant people are. You might come to realize that you’ve occasionally been having such experiences, but lacked the ability to recognize them for what they are. The vast majority of such encounters are completely meaningless and you should not get too scared of such.

Oh Yeah, It's All Coming Together

These practices cannot promise some kind of astonishing instant results from what will probably round out to 40-60 minutes of daily practice. Instead, it will help you cultivate a baseline of mutually supporting practices that will allow you to progress further on your chosen path later on. You might find that you want to focus on divination, or perhaps meditation, or perhaps you discover you want to focus on more traditional forms of religion. Maybe you will do something out of the left field, like become interested in conventional martial arts via qigong.

At some point of doing these practices you should start noticing this mutually supporting aspect. Meditation will make you more present when you do energy work, body practices or divination. Body practices should have an impact on your meditative experience. Visualization and energy work can directly feed into each other, as can body practices and energy work. Divination and study will open you up to symbolic systems and new perspectives to reality, which you will find in your other practices and dreams. Dreamwork can improve your visualization skills. And these are only some of the potential connections.

There are probably a near infinite amount of connections between these practices, and none of the work you put into developing these skills will go to waste even if you emphasize some form of practice more than the others.

Where to next?

At some point you will have to go forwards on your own. This is merely an introduction, although a fairly comprehensive one, I think. Especially when it comes to meditation and energy work, there are much more advanced techniques and approaches out there. These advanced approaches also require considerable groundwork and practice.

There also entire families of techniques that are related to or derived from things presented in this document, like astral projection, trance states, various shamanic techniques, and of course straight up magical techniques which try to direct the subtle forces of reality… These are much more advanced techniques that are outside the scope of this section. However, the practice put in here will most certainly also benefit these practices too.

If you have any access to legitimate and reputable local groups or resources, I encourage to seek them as soon as you get a feel for it. You can use the other things in this document to support these practices.

Hopefully this has been a useful starting point or source of supplemental practices for you.