|
What I'm about to share with you is a technique that is known
traditionally as "evocation," or more popularly, "summoning
spirits." Don't believe in "spirits," "demons," "angels" and other
such hypothetical, archaic, or newagey entities? That's okay.
Belief is not required and you are free to call your outcomes from
this process by any more appealing name you choose.
Evocation has long been considered a dangerous and difficult art -
an opinion that I shared for many years. I was of that opinion
when I wrote my first book, "FutureRitual: Magick for the 21st
Century," and therefore didn't include much about evocation in
there. My opinion has changed - radically. I now believe that the
dangerous and difficult part of evocation was simply the
half-understand and archaic methods that have been passed down
from medieval times and earlier. That stuff is interesting as
historical documentation... but very messy to work with. Some neat
NLP, however, ties this stuff up into a package that anyone can
learn to work with, and get amazing results from, in just one
session.
The basis of the technique is something that might be familiar to
some of you - the techniques for accessing kinesthetic states
sometimes referred to as the "drug of choice pattern" - combined
with some elements from the old "parts therapy" routine. However,
set in a new context and framed somewhat differently, the outcome
may be quite surprising.
Most traditional magick rituals begin with a banishing ritual. If
you have studied this subject (or read FutureRitual, for instance)
then you can substitute a more powerful or more familiar banishing
- but the one included below will do the trick, if you put some
intent behind it.
1) Banishing - Imagine a circle around you, where you sit. Take a
deep breath. As you inhale, let your awareness fill the circle. As
you exhale, let your awareness contract to as small a point as you
can, in the center of your chest (or in your hara, if you've
practiced similar techniques as a martial artist). After 5 or 6
cycles of this, take a really, really, really deep breath, filling
the circle with your awareness, then exhale forcefully and fully,
letting (or imagining that) your breath is sweeping through your
personal circle, chasing out anything contrary to your purpose.
2) Invocation of your "Perfected Self" - In classical magick, the
novice was forbidden from practicing evocation (summoning of
demons) until s/he had achieved "knowledge and conversation of the
holy guardian angel" - that part of one's unconscious mind that
formed the connection to the "collective unconscious" or to
divinity. I don't think that's necessary to the extent that it was
dogmatically employed in the old days, but some invocation of your
own power or resource states prior to the evocation rituals is
necessary. In short, you need a much wider than usual perspective
of consciousness than is normally available. My own take on this
is found on my web page under the name "The Perfected Self."
Almost every writer on the subject has some variation of this.
Again... If you haven't practiced something of this type before,
practice and get comfortable with it before you continue on to
evocation. With that said, the quick method is simply this... do
whatever you need to contact what you consider your higher self,
your connection to the infinite, your best possible nature, your
ultimate future self, your full potential, or however you want to
frame it. Visualize how that connection would be, hear how it
would sound, feel how it would feel, all from an associated
position - as if you WERE that ultimate aspect of yourself.
IMAGINE you are contacting that part of yourself. Create a word,
sound, or gesture that reflects that experience.
3) Evocation - If you've worked with points 1 and 2 above, this is
really, really simple. Identify something that makes you feel bad.
Pay very careful attention to HOW it makes you feel. Where does
the feeling start? What kind of feeling is it? Where does it go as
it develop? Does it continue to move? Is it static? Follow it
through to its worst... Then decide "If this feeling had a color,
what would it be?" Imagine the color (or colors) in your body in
exactly the areas where the feeling was. Then imagine that you are
taking the colored shape out of your body, flip it around to face
you, and breathe deeply, feeding it breath and energy on each
exhalation. If you want, you can trap it in a triangle as in a
classical evocation. Keep breathing and feeding it energy until it
transforms (it will, probably soon, too). Once it has transformed,
imagine you are communicating with it... Ask it what it wants to
be called. Ask it what it wants. Ask if there's a way to
accomplish that goal in a less stressful manner. Negotiate. Find
out what it can do for you that it hasn't done before. Find out
what you can do for it. Keep breathing to feed it energy. It may
transform again, if your negotiation is successful... in which
case, flip it back around and draw it back into your body. If it
doesn't change again, you have a couple of choices... 1) draw it
back into yourself, but reversed from its original position, or 2)
breath and draw some energy off it with your inhalation until it
has diminished somewhat, then reabsorb it back, flipped around to
its original position.
4) Balance this out with a resource state. Find something that
makes you feel good and go through the same procedure as above
with the good feeling. (An "angel," rather than a "demon.") It's
helpful to follow each demon evocation with an angel.
5) Close with a banishing.
Note that this is similar in essence to the exercises in which you
take a bad feeling, find out how it cycles, then reverse the cycle
or flip it around. The main difference here is that by allowing
this "energy flow" to attain the status of an "entity" gives a
surprising amount of new information and experience (you have to
do it to understand what I mean here, of course!). As a method of
evocation, it is just the beginning, just a bit of what can be
accomplished along these lines, a convincer that there is
something much weirder and more wonderful going on in your
unconscious mind than you may have considered! You can take this
in many, many direction, exploring and cataloging your own
consciousness, or developing "entities" that can serve you in a
variety of ways, and much, much more.
I would be very interested to hear any results that you have with
this technique, or comments about ways you found to modify it or
incorporate it into your own work. |
