The following exercises use abstract images or complex scenes of one or more senses to help you learn. They take more time than the simple exercises, and should be done alone or with a partner when possible. It’s a good idea to start doing one of the more advanced exercises right after you finish your basic exercises. Make sure to spend anywhere from five to fifteen minutes on it.
These exercises have value because of how much sensory or extrasensory reality they make you feel, not because of how long they take to do. It doesn’t matter how long you work on an exercise if you don’t do it right the first time. A strong desire to do the exercises at all costs will only make you hate them, and you will stop after a few weeks. if you do the exercises more often for a shorter amount of time each time, you will be more likely to get better results.
Geometric Visualization
Close your eyes now. Imagine a tiny point floating in a featureless, empty space that has no shape or color. The void is neither dark nor light. The point is so small that you can’t see it, but you know that it is there even though you can’t. Direct your attention to it. Experience how small it is. You make the point seem smaller as you move your mind closer to it, so it looks like it’s getting smaller. Your mind keeps moving toward it, but you can never get close enough to see it.
When you stretch this point, make it into a thin line that goes on and on through the void. Imagine it as a fine thread with no more thickness than a strand of spider silk. But, like the point, it has no real thickness and isn’t there. As for its straightness and how long it is in both directions, you can feel it with your mind. All of it should be at the same time. If you think about the line in your mind, it will always go outside of the boundaries you have set. This is not possible.
Now, keep going to make this line go on and on in both directions so that it forms a plane that is invisibly thin and flat. This plane is like the plane that goes between the surface of a lake and the air above it. In your mind, you can think of it as a very thin pane of glass. It is so thin that it doesn’t even have a thickness at all.
Feel how thin and flat it is with your mind. Try to keep it all in your mind at once. You can’t, because the plane is like the line that made it. It goes on forever in every direction. As long as you try to keep your mind open for a few minutes, you’ll get a real sense of how big it really is. The edges of the plane move faster than your mind moves, so you can’t get around it.
You can think of a second plane that cuts through the first one at a right angle. As with the film that forms when two soap bubbles bump against each other, it is also invisible and never-ending, but it’s even thinner than that. These two planes divide the void into four equal parts. Your mind should move through the planes in such a way that your consciousness moves through each of these four zones. When two planes cross through each other, a line that is never ending is formed. If you can, try to feel how equal the four right angles that are between the sides of the planes that go out from this line are.
Finally, imagine a third plane that is at right angles to the first two and joins them in the middle. This third plane makes two new lines. From the point where all three planes meet, they branch out into six rays that go up and down, to the left and right, and to the front and back. In conjunction with the first line, they go into all six directions of space. When you think about the eight parts of the void that are defined by the three intersecting planes, think about how they are all different. Then shift your attention to the planes themselves, then to the three intersecting lines they make, and finally to the point where they meet.
These simple mathematical shapes should be seen as things in their own right without giving them any characteristics like color or brightness. This isn’t possible, but remember that when you picture the point, the line, and the plane, they don’t have any thickness and aren’t visible to the naked eye. If you can’t see them in your mind, try to feel or sense them as ideal forms.
Square the Circle
You can think of a black dot on a featureless piece of white paper. With a thick, felt-tip marker on a big drawing pad, think of it as a dot you would make. Draw a circle with your invisible magic marker around the dot in a clockwise direction. Make sure the dot is in the center of the circle, and then erase the circle. At the same time, try to keep the whole circle in your mind at the same time, without distortions or breaks in its circumference.
In your mind, draw a thick, straight black line across the circle from left to right, so that it passes through the dot at its center and divides the circle into equal upper and lower crescents, as shown. Draw another thick, black line that goes from top to bottom through the middle of the first one. This makes a black cross with arms of equal length inside the circle. Hold this circle-cross in your mind for a while. Try to picture it all at once, rather than switching your attention from one part to the next.
When you think about the image a little, it will seem to get smaller. Draw a triangle around the circle so that the circle touches the middle of its three sides. This makes the image appear to get smaller. In this triangle, the sides are all the same length, and it points up. In the end, draw a square around the triangle. The bottom of the square is made up of the base of the triangle, which makes up the bottom side. Notice that the triangle isn’t tall enough to reach the upper side of the square, but it’s close.
Memory Visualization
A scene from your childhood that you remember well should come back to you now. You might think about the house you lived in when you were little, or a favorite toy you played with, or how the family car looked when you were a child. Some people might want to recreate a walk through the hallways of their school, or a trip to their summer vacation home. Stick with one memory for several days, trying to make it more real and complete each day. Then switch to something else and work on it for several days.
Fantasy Scene
Make up a picture in your head of something you have never seen before. You could imagine that you are on a hillside and look up at a white castle on top of a low, wooded mountain. Take a look at the flags flying from the flagpoles on the conical roofs of its corner towers, its tall gothic windows, and its wooden gate. Take a look at the helmeted guards with their pikes ready as they walk along the serrated battlements. Or, you could think of a dragon that is alive and well. Find out about its sinuous twists and turns, its gleaming scales, its curved black claws, and its golden snake eyes and sharp white teeth. Take a look as it moves forward on its pale belly and stands on its hind legs. Take a look at how the hue and green fire shoots up from between its jaws like the jet from a broken gas main.
Full Sensory Submersion
You are at the circus. Do this with all five of your senses, as if you were in the stands under the big top. Clowns and acrobats are among the performers. There are also elephants on the left, lions in an iron cage on the right, and trapeze artists swinging high above. There are a lot of different types of performers. Everything is going on at the same time. You have to move your attention from one thing to another to see them all.
Feel the popcorn, peanuts and cotton candy mixed with the musty smell of people who are sitting near you. It sounds like a lot of people are having a good time. There is music from the organ, drumbeats, people cheering and shouting, elephant trumpets, the clop of a horse’s hoofs in the center ring, and the ring-voice master’s coming through the speakers of the electric sound system. It’s hot outside in the summer, and you can feel the sweat on your upper lip and on your back between your shoulder blades. A bare bench is hard, and the base drum sounds in your chest. The circus scene is a great place to go again and again. If you try everything it has to offer, it will take you weeks or even months to get through it all. Each time you think about it, try to make it more real and complete by making it more real. As time goes on, you should be able to tell the faces of the people who are performing. There is no need to be surprised if some of them look your way and wave or wink at you.
Creating an Astral Place
Close your eyes and picture what is around you right now. It doesn’t matter where you do this exercise, so long as you do it. Create a physical space in your mind and look at its details. Imagining that you turned your head with your eyes open, look to each side and see what you would see. Next, picture what is behind you in your mind. Turn your attention to the sky or ceiling. In your mind, tilt your head down and picture the floor. After you’ve spent a few minutes building this mental picture, open your eyes and look around to see what you’ve missed. In this case, you might want to close your eyes and think about the place in your mind with these missing features added in.
Complex Tactile Perception
Think about what it would be like to be blind. Feel your way through the dark as you walk around your house or apartment in your mind. Remember the cool tiles on your kitchen floor, the polished wood of your kitchen cabinets, the smooth countertop, and the metal of the fridge. In your living room, move your hands around your sofa and chairs and the surface of your coffee table. Take in the carpet under your feet, the cool glass of your picture window when you lay your face against it, the rounded screen of a TV, your curio shelves, and your stereo.
Feel your way to the bathroom as you move through the hall. Shower curtain, tiles on walls, sink, toilet back, edge of tub, and taps in cold metal: touch them. This is a bathroom. Water your hand with some water. In your bedroom, you can go on. It’s easy to open the closet door if you touch and feel your clothes hanging from the rod. Touch the things on the top of your bureau that you know. Open a drawer and touch the things inside. Finally, you can rest on your bed. Take a look at the spread and the softness of your pillow. As long or as short, you can do this exercise as long or as short as you want. Each time you do this, pay attention to the textures and shapes in a different room of your home. A single piece of furniture or a single object may be the only thing you want to look at. It’s a good idea to close your eyes and move around your house by touch a few times to get a sense of what you will feel.
Evoking Personal Guardian
Sit back and close your eyes. Feel like someone is standing a few feet away behind your chair, looking down at the back of your neck from behind your chair. In this exercise, you must not use any of your usual five senses at all, which is very important. Do not think about or smell the person behind you, or feel the heat coming from their body. You can’t hear them, picture them in your mind or smell them. Try to use your inner sense, or sixth sense, to tell if there is someone there. Feel the prickle at the base of your neck where the eyes of the visitor who isn’t there look. Experience the other person in itself, without any sensory clues of any kind.
Love and protection are shown by the presence. It keeps an eye on you as you go about your day-to-day business. Whenever you need help getting into a receptive state, your guardian angel will be there to help you. He or she will help you get into your deep mind while you’re scrying, too. An angel wants to come into your life, so project a strong emotion of love behind you and show the angel that you love and accept them. It’s like the angel is getting closer behind your chair and gently putting two hands on your shoulder. Because these hands are warm and soft, you should be able to feel their touch and shape.
