Contemplative Practice

I’ve concluded after more than two years of experience of daily “silent sitting” meditation that it may well be impossible (or, at least, very unproductive) to seri­ously engage in the practice of ceremonial magick without also engaging in some sort of non-conceptual contemplative practice on a regular basis. By “regular”, I mean more than the cursory five- or ten-minute session once or twice a week. The rule of thumb for physical exercise, two or three times a week for at least twenty minutes each time, doesn’t seem like enough to overcome the poor attentional habits most of us have built up over the course of our lifetimes.

In Liber Librae it is written: “To obtain Magical Power, learn to control thought…” For most of us, even five or ten minutes of concerted effort to avoid thoughts of any sort should convince us that this is a harder task than it may seem on the surface. In fact, if you try this simple experiment for a bit longer — twenty or thirty minutes, for example &mdash you will likely conclude that the harder you try to banish thoughts, the less likely you are to succeed. And it’s hard to get a clear image of your chosen god form, or to form a clear intention during a ritual, if your mind continually wanders off to contemplate where you’re going for dinner afterward or whether you remembered to feed the cat.

It is important in ceremonial magick not to think of the proverbial Pink Elephant in the middle of a ritual (unless, of course, you are intentionally trying to manifest said pastel pachyderm). The evolutionary purpose of our conceptual minds is to alert us to potential danger in our immediate surroundings … and constantly analyzing those surroundings is part of how that purpose is carried out. If you observe your mind while taking a casual walk outdoors, you might notice that it constantly locks onto objects and people and in rapid succession, assigning each one a “name” of some sort. In Sanskrit, this activity is called nama-rupa (which means “name and form”) and is an integral part of the conceptual process. For most of us, it happens without our even noticing. Our conceptual mind is always on the prowl, so to speak, and doesn’t feel comfortable when doing nothing at all — but that’s what we need to train it to do if we expect to be able to focus completely enough on the purpose of a ritual to accomplish the desired change.

When I stated at the beginning of this article that I have had two years of experience with daily meditation, I was excluding the two decades I spent sitting for up to forty-five minutes a day before realizing what I was doing. Not long ago, I was listening to a recorded lecture by B. Alan Wallace when he said that what most people do when they claim to be meditating amounts to more like “sitting and thinking.” That hit home to me because that’s exactly what I was doing: sitting and thinking. To be fair, I did get some really good thinking done during those sessions. Quite a few construction projects were planned out in great detail during those sessions. However, it didn’t seem to make me any more effective at magick (at least not the kind that didn’t involve construction projects).

One of the problems, in my case, is that I wasn’t working directly with any teachers who had a deep experience of non-conceptual contemplative practice. It seems that, for many Thelemites, sitting quietly for long periods simply isn’t as “sexy” as dressing up and waving one’s arms around. And unless you have had significant experience sitting quietly for long periods, it’s not always obvious how directly that can affect your magick.

In my case, I was working mostly from Crowley’s Liber E, mainly working up to the point where I could balance a saucer of water on my head for an hour. Needless to say, I not only didn’t accomplish even that much but I also wasted a lot of time that I could have been working more on my concentration. Asana is a good physical practice but the practices given in Liber E do not have to be treated like a linear progression, only moving on to the next practice after you perfect the previous one. As a relatively famous teacher of magick often says: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. One’s practice time could easily be divided between several of the initial practices from Liber E — perhaps in sequence, at different times of the day, or on subsequent days on a rotating basis.

Asana and pranayama are important exercises for practicing control, in general, but neither is aimed directly at learning to control thought. Dhyana is better in that respect … but it could tend to reinforce our attachment to form and, in so doing, fail to create the mental spaciousness needed to manipulate forces on the subtle planes. Samadhi, as described in Liber E, is ideal but few people can reach that point without significant practice.

It turns out that in the initial stages of practice, we can borrow a simple silent-sitting practice from the teachings of Buddhism. This practice is called śamatha in Sanskrit or shi-né in Tibetan and it can be described most simply as “remaining uninvolved”. It is a way to train the conceptual mind to relax and let go of the continual obsessive need to constantly identify objects in our environment. Concentration exercises (such as dhyāna) accomplish this by giving the conceptual mind a task whose difficulty precludes any other activity. But once the practice is over, our conceptual mind returns to its default mode with a vengeance. Silent sitting practice can help the conceptual mind realize that the world will not come to an abrupt end if the process of constant vigilance is dropped. For some, this may take a while *hellip; but the good news is that incremental improvement can usually be seen fairly quickly.

Silent sitting in conjunction with concen­tration practices should bring one’s conscious mind under total control of one’s Will and would make a powerful combination if only more magicians would take the practice seriously.