Hands-On Chaos Magic: Reality Manipulation through the Ovayki Current - Andrieh Vitimus 2009

Beginning Astral Work

Introductory Astral Work Exercise

First, you should have practiced the visualization and energy work discussed previously in our adventure. Mental control and visualization will be critical to successful astral work and, as you progress, energy work will assist you a great deal in getting results from astral workings.

Now sit on the floor, relax, breathe, and clear your head. Sit and continue to clear your head until you have entered into a slight trance. Banish by your preferred method. Evoke a protective servitor or entity into your space to protect your physical body. Banishing and evocation were also covered earlier in our adventure.

Sigilize a mantra with the intent, "It is my will to separate my consciousness from my body temporarily." Once the protection entity is in your space, stand up and start spinning. Chant the mantra until you hit the point of extreme dizziness, where you fall to the ground nearly unconscious. Try to increase the velocity of the spinning as you are going further into the working until you fall. As you fall down to the floor (please do this with appropriate padding, as concrete floors will approach fast when you are falling), know with as many of your five senses as possible that you are separated from your body. You are spinning yourself out from your body consciousness. Visualize yourself staring at your body from outside of it. When you are ready to (or forced to because you cannot hold the trance), visualize your own self-image over your body and try to reattach it to your body. Try to at first wiggle your toes and fingers, and then move a leg or arm. Finally, get up and walk around.

This exercise takes practice, but once you have successfully jumped out of your body in this manner, you may find that you no longer need to spin-just concentrating on moving your self-image away from your body and looking at the room may be sufficient. Relaxing your body will still be a necessary step. This technique is known as "spinning out your double." It has appeared in more than a few sources, but here it is important to realize that the process of stepping outside of yourself might take some practice.

Try to continue to separate your consciousness from your physical body until you can get to a good twenty minutes or more outside of your body, and separating you from your body comes relatively naturally. Some people may interpret the sensations like a movie or a collection of images. That is perfectly acceptable.

Building an Astral Temple

As you are gaining skill in the first exercise, you might be tempted to skip the banishing or the protective evocation. You might even decide that you can walk around your neighborhood as an astral visage. This adventure, however, does not go into details about astral work. I cannot at first recommend wandering. In the astral space, your thoughts can cause and bring unwanted spirits (or obsessions), since your thoughts more easily control the visualizations and information around you. You will attract entities in line with your thoughts, and the surroundings in the astral space will also mirror your thoughts and moods. Additionally, your thoughts and mood have much more control over the astral environment than they do in the physical world. In this case, it's better to start going to a place where you are safe and protected.

Now, the safest place I can think of to start doing astral work is a place that you build for yourself. The process of building an astral temple is covered in numerous books and websites, but I will give you the methodology I use for myself. The critical part of building an astral temple occurs before you ever spin out the double or enter the astral plane.

First, as the experimenter, you should think about what type of work you will be doing in the astral temple. Now, a person primarily interested in angelic work might design a small temple built out of white clouds, with beaming light everywhere. Another person might prefer to do earth-based magic and might use a cavelike temple. Figure out what types of magic you actually like to do. If you like working with anime characters and large robot servitors, your astral temple should look a lot different from the temple of someone who is traversing old grimoires looking for the darkest denizen of the deep pits.

You will need to write down the thematic ideas of how your temple is decorated. At first, recommend a black-walled room with minimal equipment and perhaps a glowing chaos sphere or a pentagram on the floor. The five-sense visualization exercises are strongly related to this process. You should try to write down, draw, or otherwise describe every aspect of your temple in excruciating detail. By writing about your temple, drawing it out, or even providing scents to describe it, you are mentally creating it. It is not always important to remember the exact details when you finally get to the temple, because your subconscious mind has those details. The more details that you can give your temple, the more real it will feel to your mind. For me, this is especially true when I give the temple nonvisual sensory data (of course, I first answer the question of what the astral construct looks like).

Show another person the writing and/or diagrams of the temple. Tell that person you are working on background information for a story or sketches for an animation. See if the individual can clearly get a vibe, or "see" or "feel" the temple. Test the idea on a couple of people; see if they get a great feeling from the sketches and writing. It is a good sign if the temple can stir the imaginations in other people and cause them to have a reaction. When you get to the point where people can almost touch and see the temple, then it is just about ready for you to visit. Of course, it's easy to get wrapped up in continuously designing a temple and then not doing any work to go there and make it. Again, when starting out, try to keep the temple minimal.

I have good luck describing my temple in a light trance state, so I can just write and draw the temple out from some ideas or sketched notes. Essentially, you are using some of the automatic drawing/writing techniques to map out your temple.

In the process of setting out to build an astral temple, you should keep track of your dreams. You could well have dreams in your temple, as you have spent enormous amounts of effort to write about it. If you happen to have those dreams, it is a good sign.

Before trying to go to a new astral construct, I will also spend several hours reviewing all my notes from any previous visits to constructed spaces. I will also create a verbal name and sigil for the astral construct before trying to travel there. These serve as anchors to the process of visiting the temple. When you are first starting out, a good intent to sigilize is simply "Visit my astral temple." Of course, before visiting the space, you could do a ritual where you attempt to find the name of the temple in a method similar to the Ganesh ritual, with the random speech while in gnosis. I will then redraw my sketches and the sigil clearly on a wall or on the floor. This sigil then serves as a link to the astral construct, so that it is easier to create and access the temple.

After you have spent hours thinking about your temple and your mind is filled with images and ideas about it, it is time to move on to visiting the space for the first time. Now, like most things in this book, the temple is a process, not an instant success ritual. Initial successes might be slow, but just keep trying.

First, separate your consciousness from your body, by using either the spinning method or your preferred means. Instead of staring at your own body, start to visualize yourself in the temple space you have written about. If you are using the spinning method, sigilizing the intent "It is my will to visit my astral temple" into a mantra may be helpful as a replacement for the introductory mantra. At first, you might only be able to get flashes of what your temple will look like, and you might not be able to pull the temple into your imagination in its full glory. The better your imagination skills are across all five senses, the better you will be at creating the temple.

For each section in the temple that seems unfinished, you should add different sensory details while imagining the space to make it seem more real. While in that trance state, you might not remember all the details you wrote down. You might invent new ones on the spot, but your imagination should try to make every aspect of the temple seem more embedded with sensory information. I usually visualize and feel the sigil of the temple on a floor or wall and imagine that it has deep purple flames with associated crackling tonal sounds (insert your favorite color here-purple is my favorite color). I will repeat this until I don't have to work at visualizing or hearing the temple sigil anymore; it is automatically there every time I go to the temple. This gives me a solid link to get back to the construct. Often, I will burn a specific pleasing and unique incense combination while working on the temple to provide an additional olfactory anchor to it.

It is a good idea to work on one aspect of the temple until that part of the temple is so ingrained in your thinking that it is automatically in the temple when you visit it. Then move to the next aspect of the temple. I will keep doing workings and visualizations of the temple while in that separated state of consciousness until every detail of the temple is solid in my imagination. The more information you can create, the more real you can make the temple seem to you, and that will make it more empowered for your workings.

Once you have all the temple details set, then you must decide which items you will need inside it. Traditional ceremonial magic requires a wand, chalice, sword, robes, pentacles, and other assorted props. You should not feel limited or forced to use those concepts, but you should understand how the items you place in your temple assist your magic outside of the temple. Remember to keep the number of items at a reasonable level. In deeper trance states, you simply won't be able to remember what you have there to rely on, but you can go into your temple knowing ahead of time which specific tools you will need for an astral working. Going back to the anime temple described earlier, a tool could be a mega-hyper-computer with a transdimensional teleporter attached.

As with each detail of the temple, each tool created in astral space has to be molded, created, and used until you can use it in your astral temple with little or no extra effort. As you get better at this, you will be able to do it on the fly. A very similar methodology can be used for the temple items as for the temple itself. Describe the item in excruciating detail, as if you were a master craftsman designing a tool for yourself, and then share the description with friends, in the context of fiction or art. If they can get a feel for the item in a really clear way, then it is time to bring forth the item into your astral temple.

Practicing in Your Temple

It's time to start getting used to practicing in your temple. Go back to the energy exercises in the earlier chapters of the book. While not moving any parts of your body, practice the various energy exercises in your temple. Try to get results similar to those that you were achieving in the real world. The exercises probably will feel different in the astral temple as opposed to the physical world. Of course, you can add special effects while you are doing the exercises in your temple. Once you have mastered the energy exercises in your temple, start practicing banishing in your created space, without losing concentration or getting jolted out of your temple.

The First Ritual Working in Your Temple

At this point, try to do an evocational working. Review the tools you need for an evocation, and try to do a magical working in a style of magic you are very familiar with, using only the tools in your temple. Now, since this is an astral space as opposed to a real space, spirits can clearly manifest. For the first working, choose an entity you have both created and used several times, or an entity you have a great working relationship with. Fully write out the ritual you will be performing before going into your astral space. Try to keep the ritual as simple as you can. If it is possible, redo a simple ritual you have done in the physical world, and note any results you get from the astral temple.

Using your astrally created tools, and with as many senses as possible, imagine going through the motions of the ritual in your astral space. At each step, understand and concentrate on the sensory information you are reproducing while paying attention to the energy you are generating in your astral space. Earlier in the book we talked about tactile/gestural imagination. Try to feel the motions of going through the ritual while visualizing, hearing, and sensing the effects. Be sure to banish and then come out of your astral temple. Note any body sensations you get from the experience. Keep trying different rituals in that astral state, and see what happens.

After you get the hang of evocation while in your temple, you should create a permanent guardian for your astral complex. This entity should keep anything out while you are gone and while you are doing workings. Strictly speaking, this is not needed, but it will be helpful once you open the temple to other people.

Empowering Your Astral Items with Magic, and Astral-to-Material-World Bleeding

While in your temple, try empowering your astral items using some of the energy techniques we discussed earlier. I have found that they will become more useful in that space. Once you have worked with the items in your astral temple for a little bit, try calling the items to you in the physical space, and know with all five of your senses that they are in your presence.

Start performing physical rituals with items created in the astral realm. Of course, you have to imagine that you are holding an item. While in trance, use your five senses to know that the item is real (even though you created it). If any voices tell you that it's not real, you are not deep enough in trance. When you start creating entities in your astral temple, you will find that you can evoke them into physical space through traditional methods and have them get the results you need.

As you work with your temple and your nice creations, you can imbue them with perceived magical abilities through ritual and focus. Once they seem to have the magical abilities you desire in the astral construct, use them in the physical world to manifest similar abilities. You should be able to do this with practice. What happens when you imagine that you have the astral item on you?

Shape-changing and Invocation

Astral spaces don't exactly fit the same set of rules as the material world. As you progress in your astral work, realize that you can change your astral temple as you see fit. You can create new items or change items as needed. In addition to the items, however, you can change your own representation of yourself in your astral temple to any visage you desire.

For a start, change the color of your skin while doing work. Match the color of your skin to the mood you associate with the ritual. Give yourself different hair, clawed hands, or an entirely different look. It is helpful to write or draw out what you want to change in yourself before attempting to do experiments in your temple. As time goes on, you will be able to do this on the fly as well. Make small changes that you can accomplish each time while you are practicing, and work toward increasingly complex representations of yourself. Changing yourself in your astral space may produce subtle changes in your perception of yourself in the material world. For some people this is tremendously easy, but for other people it takes a bit of practice. This is very similar to the auric shapeshifting exercise we did. The difficulty is to keep going with the imagined changes while staying in your astral temple.

Keep practicing the shape-changing in your astral temple until you imagine looking like other people who are radically different from yourself. Take baby steps in the process. Once you have mastered changing your human form, pick other nonhumanoid forms to try to change yourself into. These can be mythological beings, animals, or even plant forms. The point of these exercises is to weaken the mind's reliance on a static physical form as a crutch within the astral construct. Loki from the Norse pantheon is of course a great shapeshifter. Papa Legba from Vodou has numerous paths. Most trickster-type spirits can help you learn shapeshifting, depending on which pantheon of spirits you like to work with.

Invocation in the astral space is slightly difficult, since there is a lot to concentrate on. First you are imagining a space, and then you are imagining an entity coming into you at the same time. The shapeshifting practice, however, will help you with the invocation process, because you can imagine yourself as the form of the entity before invoking it. It is wise to start doing this with spirits with whom you have working relationships and whom you trust. It is also a wise idea to make sure you evoke a protective spirit to break you out of trance if the process starts going into a negative place. We covered entity creation extensively earlier.

Start with calling forth the entity into your astral complex as if it were a standard evocation. Once you know via your five senses that the entity is present, step forth into the same space as the entity. Allow yourself to feel the energy of the entity flowing through you and vice versa, since you are in the same space. The first time you try this, it may shock you out of your astral temple altogether. I have always had intense physical sensations as a result of these workings. Be absolutely sure to banish afterward, since it's fully possible that your mind will drag the spirit back with you to this world in the process of getting jolted back to your body. Try to share your space with different entities in your temple experiments, and make sure you banish after each attempt. I find that information will flow across to me from the spirits when I am sharing space with them.

When it is clear that you can hold yourself in your astral temple and share the space (along with information and energy) with another entity, then it is time to take the next step. Invoke the entity while you are in the astral temple. If the entity in question is a willing participant in the process, and you have been practicing the shapeshifting exercises in your astral temple, you should be able to lock yourself and the entity together in a deep invocation where you are sharing the same space and the same form in your created astral temple. Do this a few times. You will definitely find yourself becoming better at possession (deep invocation) rites in the physical world. Once you can share the same space and form as another entity, go do some things as the combination. In some ways, you are forming a temporary gestalt entity of you and the entity together. Remember to banish after attempting such combinations. Any successful combination of space and form of this nature in your astral temple will alter your perception in some ways (often in radical ways). Information from the entity will bleed into your subconscious, so please be careful.

Learning to Shield and Defend

Continuously strive to translate your work in your temple to material-world results or self-evolution. Often as you get better at working with entities and concepts within your astral space, you will be able to receive more information, and possibly training, from them. Eventually, you should seek out some sort of training in astral self-defense. Psychic defense, emotional control, and thought control take on far more importance when you are wandering around the astral "plane" Even if these concepts are merely in your head, they can still hurt you. Since you can attract spirits to yourself, it is critical to practice emo tional control and thought control before wandering out of your astral temple.

The bubble exercises can serve as basic shielding exercises, which you should practice within your astral temple before wandering out. Even the energy ball exercises can be weapons in the astral domains. Familiar servitors and spirits can protect you, but if you decide to wander and you have gotten this far in working with your astral temple, you should learn how to defend yourself.

To me, the astral plane is a lot like the Matrix that Neo works in. Your physical body should not constrain you, and I tend to use a very cinematic method of defending myself when I am wandering. Remember, while your physical body may be limited, you are not limited in the astral plane. As Morpheus said in The Matrix, "Do you think that's air you're breathing?" In fact, take cues from pop culture magic, and use Neo and Morpheus. They are not bad fictional entities to evoke and learn from. Personally, I watch a lot of anime, and I try to replicate some of the anime martial arts moves and special effect techniques in my astral temple in order to defend myself. The key to defending yourself is the force of will you place in your intent to force an entity away from you, or to forcefully destroy the entity. Martial artists will find that their skills give them a background in specific moves to channel their will on the astral plane. Shamans who shapeshift into animal forms should at least figure out how to use the animals' natural defenses to defend themselves in their astral work. In fact, just pulling yourself out of the astral space is usually enough to end any confrontation, but confrontations are often a test of worth for several entities before they will teach or work with you in any way.

Generally, a simple rule of thumb with astral work is that if a presence or situation generates a certain emotional response, using the opposite emotional response will be a suitable defense. As with the other energy exercises, let the memory, alphabet of desire, or state of mind completely overwhelm you (while you retain the astral vision). If you project out that informationally colored energy while in the astral vision, it will be an attack. This does not always work, but in most encounters it will be an effective tool of self-defense. This is not a book on astral combat or even astral work; however, at least strengthen your aura (through the bubble exercises) before wandering out of your temple. In situations and encounters you are uncomfortable with, the goal at first is to simply get enough distance from the spirit or entity in question to safely come out of trance. Once you get back to the physical world, your job is to not obsess over the experience. You might note that you can make astral items to help you defend yourself and channel your will. I myself have a propensity for laser blasters and lightsabers.

Walking Out of the Temple

As stated, this is not a full book on the methods of astral work or astral walking, but I have had good results visiting entities in their own realms. There are two effective hints I will give you from my experience. First, if you are working in your temple, an evoked entity can guide you on the astral plane or the area of ideas and concepts in which that entity seems to dwell. Essentially, an entity's astral constructions will mirror the entity itself. Evoking a Cenobite, from Clive Barker's Hellraiser, or a Goetic spirit as a guide might lead to a set of gruesome and troublesome visions. Of course, you personally might like those types of surroundings. Evoking an angelic presence would probably lead to a very different type of journey. Of course, all of these things can merely be visions from your own subconscious, but that does not make it any less powerful or dangerous. The real danger isn't that you will die; the most realistic risks are dangerous obsessions over a vision or scene you cannot clear out of your head. Before you ask any spirit to guide you, and before you even contemplate visiting said concept or entity in its conceptual settings (which again could just be pulled from your subconscious), you should have worked with the spirit, and you should have some sort of arrangement, either written or via a bond of trust. This is really just common sense, as people would normally be hesitant to enter into a stranger's house.

Of course, try to match the entity to the concepts you are trying to explore. Usually after the entity is evoked, I will simply visualize myself holding on to the entity as it flies/runs/dematerializes away. At first this will take some practice, since you might only get a glimpse of other areas and then lose concentration. The new area may have a radically different feel. I don't recommend having a servitor used in this capacity (although it's possible), because the servitor is too close to you personally. Part of the reason for doing this sort of work is to expand your perceptions and consciousness.

Another technique is to invoke the spirit and act as a combined gestalt entity exploring different regions. Once you master the shapeshifting and invocation within your astral temple, this is a highly effective technique. The beauty of this is that it allows the entity in question to influence your perceptions of events to make sure that the events are interpreted in ways consistent with the exploration of concepts in the astral walk. This also happens to be the bad side of this technique. Once you can hold the form and the same space as the entity while moving around your astral temple, you probably have enough skill to go exploring with the entity in question.

Once you have been to a place, or a conceptualized dreamscape, you can go back to that space by using your memory in the same way we used memories to generate energy before. Relax and then remember where you were, with as many details as you possibly can, and then visualize it around you. Now you can use interesting techniques, such as creating servitors/entities and transferring your consciousness to them using the techniques of melting with the servitor in your astral temple just like we were doing earlier in the chapter. This can have the benefit of not appearing to be you. I leave the details of this as an exercise for you.

More Astral Bleeding into the Physical World, or Vice Versa

In addition to using items from the astral world in the physical world, it is possible to start to bring talismans from the physical world into the astral world. In fact, if you do the previous exercises in the book, you might be able see your talismans or treasured items when you spin out and look around. Try it. Put an item that you have used while you have done magic in a location where you can easily find it. Once you try to spin out the double, look at that item. Does it look different after you spin out the double? For me, the answer has always been yes. In fact, you might notice that in the astral plane, an item such as a pentagram necklace-or, in my case, my chaos star ring-is with you when you do work on the astral plane, even without any conscious or magical effort to force it to function in your astral complex. This item is so attuned to you that it seems to come with you into the astral complex as almost part of you.

One way of pulling physical items that have meaning into the astral space is to use similar methods to what we have been discussing earlier in this adventure. While meditating in your astral complex, simply visualize the item in the astral location. Give the item weight, texture, appearance, sounds, and even feeling. Try to match the feeling of the item in the physical world to your astral simulation of the item. If the item has distinguishing glyphs or sigils, make sure to apply those sigils in the astral vision of the item. Make any items, glyphs, or sigils glow with power in the astral complex through using all five of your senses. You can also push energy into your astral representation of your physical talisman. Use the item or artifact in astral workings in the same way you would use the item in the physical world. After a couple of rituals with the item in the astral complex, it should be easy to pull the item into astral space. As the last step of your working, visualize holding the item, and then visualize it over the physical representation of the item right after coming into your body. Try to visualize yourself holding the item as you come back into your body. In the same way you would spend a few minutes re-cementing your self-image to your body, spend time cementing the visualized item to the physical item. Keep visualizing the "astral" image over the physical item until you feel it is completely reattached to the physical item. There is no push-button way to explain how long this will take. Simply use your intuition. See how the item feels to you in the physical world after using it in the astral world. Generally, while it might not feel charged in the same way as an item charged by a physical ritual, I have found that the item in question will have more magical resonance.

Likewise, astrally constructed items can be linked and cemented to physical talismans through repeated visualizations. It is helpful to find or make a physical item that is similar to the astral item. Additionally, carve any glyphs or sigils that the astral item has into the physical item. Once you have that, the item should take on a magical feel in the physical world. Once you intuitively feel that you have cemented the astral item to the physical item enough times, try using the physical item in a ritual or two. How did the item feel?

Of course, as you continue with the experimentation, you might find that the astral item and the physical item it is linked to might have very little in common, but that the linking process still works fine. Experiment away. Likewise, evoked spirits in your astral complex might give you items that have an astral presence that you can then link and use in the physical world. The process of binding the item can be very similar.

An Example Astral Working: Some Sympathetic Magical Ideas

Now that you have practiced all of these steps to start learning astral magic, what can you do in your temple? The answer is simply anything, if you are capable of holding the visualization for it and can produce the energy for it. Keep in mind that some tasks will be far more difficult to achieve. For instance, I still have not won more than two dollars in the lottery!

However, I have had good luck using my astral temple to practice sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic is the type of magic used with voodoo dolls. The principle is simple: establish a link to a person or place. At this point, depending on the type of ritual, carry about different actions you mean to do to the person while imagining with as many of your senses as possible that the doll is the person. Typically, you have to get into a deep enough trance state. From here, use various herbs, pins, and energy work on the doll, which will often resonate out and affect the person in the real world. Earlier in our adventure, we covered this extensively.

In the astral complex, the process is very similar, except that you spend the time building the astral doll of the person. Unlike the puppet example, the astral doll of a person can look exactly like him or her. Unique quirks or motions of the person should be included while creating the astral doll of the person in your astral space. Again, the point is to include as many details as possible in your astral construct, so that you believe your astral construct is the person. Like other similar astral tools, this can be built over time or, in this case, in a single session. Once you have the astral construct, you can do things to it that should have some resonance with the real person. Now, again, the better you know the person, the better you will be able to make an astral doll that links to him or her. The stronger the link you have with the person, the easier it will be to do this sort of working. Again, I mostly use this technique in healing, but it is only limited by your imagination.

From here, just repeat any of the ideas in the sympathetic magic chapter to your astral visage of the person. If you want to evoke an entity into this visage, go right ahead. For Reiki healing, send the energy. If you want to cast a sigil magic spell at a person, his or her astral visage is a sympathetic link, and you can imagine it right in front of you.

Refocusing Consciousness InwardOther Temples Exist Even in Your Body and within the Bodies of Others

As an important note, while you are improving your visualization skills and astral walking skills, it is also possible to travel within or into another temple, which could be another consciousness, your own body, or even a physical place. Taylor Ellwood, in his book Inner Alchemy, talks a lot about using and journeying inward to meet neural transmitters (Ellwood 2007). It is possible to journey into your body and talk to any single part of it, from your ailing knee to your very DNA. Your interpretation of these concepts might not be the same as a micro-camera pushed down your veins, but you still can get good results.

Try this exercise. Pick a part of your body you would like to talk to. Meditate until you can reach some stillness. Then visualize yourself walking down your arm or up your leg as a small micro-you. Let yourself conceptualize the body part into a form you can talk to, and listen to the name that conceptualized body part gives you. Ask it what it needs and try to either give that energy to it in the visualization or make the changes it is asking for in your life. Attempt this several times with the same body part. Does it start to feel better? Thinking about the body in this way opens the entire body to be an infinitely complex astral-like world to explore that is literally right at your fingertips. Of course, equally interesting is exploring the world of another person, or a tree, or even a rock. Truly, you are only limited by your imagination and willingness to keep trying things till you get the results you desire.