The Seven Types of Magic

By George A. Boyd © 2018

In keeping with the upcoming Halloween holiday, I have decided to compose this week’s blog post on a theme that discusses the magical traditions of the Subtle Realm.

There are seven major types of magic:

Two of them are well known to most people, what we might call popular applications of magic.

Five of them are hidden secrets of the esoteric branches of the magical and occult schools of the Lower Astral Plane.

The two types of magic that have been popularized in modern culture include stage magic and divinatory magic.

Stage magic uses illusion, sleight of hand, and attentional misdirection; utilizes ingenious props; and creates a background of dramatic music and stagecraft to entertain people. The popular magic shows performed in theaters and on television feature this type of magic.

Divinatory magic uses structured divinatory methods such as the Tarot cards or the Ouija Board to evoke guidance and elicit information from the subconscious and unconscious bands of the mind. In some divinatory magical systems, they may invoke the spirits of the dead—the Ouija Board used in séances is of this type. Others may have cards that invoke the angels—for example, the angel cards. Tarot cards draw upon powerful archetypes of the unconscious mind. Carl Jung attributed the ability of divinatory magic to mirror psychological states to synchronicity.

There are five “hidden” forms of magic that are utilized on the Lower Astral Plane.

  1. Ritual magic – Ritual magic enacts a series of structured actions coupled with affirmations or spells to provide protection or invoke powerful forces. The candidate for occult training learns ritual magic on the Magicians Subplane of the Lower Astral Plane. Examples include Building the Armor of Light, used for protection from psychic attack; and the Greater Banishment Rite, employed to clear a ritual space to perform the rites of magic.
  2. Suggestive magic (spells) – This is a verbal statement or intentional suggestion that activates the creative ethers of the Lower Astral Plane. This type of magic is featured in the television show, “Merlin,” and the popular Harry Potter series of books and movies. Wiccan groups of the first Subplane of the Lower Astral Plane primarily practice this type; Celts and Druids also tap this level to do their own forms of suggestive magic.
  3. Spoken word magic (fiat) – In this form, the Soul Spark declares a command that directs the entities of the Lower Astral Plane. The anchoring phrase, “And so mote it be,” can be added to ordinary spells to empower them and magnify their power. This type of magic draws upon the power of the octave of volition we call the Magical Will. Occult initiates draw upon this power of the spoken word when they intone the secret names of God and angels in the Third Occult Initiation.
  4. Intercessory magic – This type of magic is applied in traditions that bind and control spirits on the Lower Astral Plane. Through the practice of magical containment or entrapment, spiritual entities can be made to carry out certain actions at the magician’s command. The popular image of the genie in the lamp derives from this type of magical intervention; the jinn magic of Arab cultures makes use of this type of intercessory magic. A wide variety of entities can be made to carry out the magician’s bidding. This type of magic is typically first encountered in inmost circle surrounding the presence of the Hermit, which dwells at the doorway to the occult mystery schools.
  5. Hypnotic magic – This anchors suggestion into the minds of other people without their consent. This can make them do specified actions, speak selected words, believe suggested content, or alter their perception. While clinical hypnotherapists use hypnosis for therapeutic purposes with the consent of their patient, occult initiates do not. Varieties of this ability to bypass the conscious mind and implant suggestions in the unconscious mind of others during the First Occult Initiation, where the candidate learns the method of controlling others through anchoring suggestion in their unconscious mind; the Second Occult Initiation, where the occult initiate is trained in using sexual attraction, seduction, and temptation to control others; and the Fourth Occult Initiation, where the advanced occult initiate can use fear, coercion, and intimidation to control an entire nation.

If you are doing your spiritual development beyond the Lower Astral Plane, you will normally not encounter these occult forms of magic. Those who are doing their spiritual work in the Middle Subtle Band and the Lower Astral Plane, however, are susceptible to these forms of magic.

There are four major types of defenses against these forms of occult magic.

  1. Shielding – This create an impenetrable barrier that magical suggestions cannot enter. Building the armor of light is an example of this type of defense.
  2. Deflection or mirroring – This deflects the magical force back to the sender, so they become the target of the spell they cast.
  3. Transformation – This transforms the suggestion into something benign or silly, so the suggestion is neutralized and becomes harmless.
  4. Destruction – In this scenario, a great force overwhelms the perpetrator of the magical attack, which neutralizes the magical spell, may paralyze or entrap him or her, or in rare cases, he or she may even be slain. This mighty power becomes activated when the Soul Spark migrates onto the Subtle Illumined Mind: the inner wizard becomes empowered to counter magical attempts to control you.

The marker of occult work is to force one’s will upon others through fear, intimidation, physical violence or psychological coercion, torture, or uninvited, unwanted magical suggestion.

To become a Light Worker, you must abandon all attempts to force others to do your bidding, and instead, serve their Soul through ministry and sharing your God-given gifts. To pass beyond the Lower Astral Plane, you must renounce these means to control or coerce others for your personal gain.

We point out that suggestive means—temptation, seduction, exploitative persuasion, misleading advertising, subliminal messages, and distortion of the truth to make you do what someone else wants—don’t work if there are no karmic impressions in your unconscious mind that can respond to these attempts to induce craving and desire in your mind. For example, if you have lost the craving for sugar, you are not tempted to go into a doughnut or pastry shop.

Through the use of transformational meditation, many of these karmic desire impressions are removed from the unconscious mind. When this occurs, these suggestions no longer have any effect, and you can no longer be manipulated covertly. For those of you that are interested in removing these karmic impressions, we teach these transformational techniques in our intermediate meditation courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program.

We encourage you to have at least a cursory knowledge of these two popular and five occult forms of magic. You need to know how avoid the influences of occult magic. You need to be able to align yourself with the Forces of Light, and stop engaging in any occult practices that cause harm to others.

Persistence of Elements of a Kundalini Syndrome

Persistence of Elements of a Kundalini Syndrome After Dynamic Rebalancing

By George A. Boyd © 2018

Since 2006, we have been offering Kundalini Syndrome Readings for members of the meditation community. Those of you who may be suffering from a Kundalini Emergency Syndrome can obtain our Kundalini Recovery Services through sending us an email with your picture, a description of the symptoms you are experiencing that you believe might arise from this energetic syndrome, and giving us some background of your condition.

When people have a Kundalini syndrome, one of the options we offer people is to have a dynamic rebalancing. This moves the seed atoms, nuclei of identity, or ensouling entities that have been moved off the axis of being from spiritual practice, which are producing the Kundalini syndrome, back into alignment with that axis again.

Dynamic rebalancing can sometimes dramatically improve the symptoms of a Kundalini syndrome. It does so through shifting several parameters that contribute to the symptoms the person is experiencing:

  1. Identity – The rebalancing shifts your identity from the essence activated via the imbalance to the essence on the cutting edge of spirituality, which is grounded in human life. This helps you overcome depersonalization.
  2. Perception – It moves you from the perception that you are above human life—where you view it from a detached perspective and view it as unreal or dream-like—to re-owning your life, as you re-identify with your Soul, your personality, and your unique human life. This combats derealization.
  3. Awareness – It lowers your awareness, backs it down from fixation in the essence that is awakened through the imbalance to returning it to the waking state of awareness, where you are fully grounded again. This may wean you from floating and spacing out.
  4. Volition – It changes you from passively witnessing the unfolding your life in the present time—the state of being—to again functioning as the actor in your life, where you have the capacity for choice, decision, and directing your life direction again. This empowers you to be able to make your own decisions again.
  5. Thinking – It alters your mindset from watching thoughts arise and pass away, as if they didn’t belong to you, to the capacity for directed thought, including: intelligent problem solving; analysis; using creative pathways of thinking, imagination, and visualization to look at problems in a new way; and tapping intuition and listening for its guidance. This enables you to think for yourself again, and not simply repeat the doctrine or teaching of the spiritual group to which you belong.
  6. Emotions – It changes your emotional set from dissociation from your emotions and regarding them with dispassion and detachment to ownership of your genuine feelings and rehabilitation of your ability to feel your emotions again. This overcomes dissociation and emotional numbness.
  7. Actions – It reorients you from trance-like and automatized behavior of doing religious rituals or pilgrimages; following an established schedule, like the daily schedule of an ashram or monastic community; and remaining fixed in somnolent altered states of awareness to self-initiated, goal-oriented, personally relevant purposive action again. This allows you to set the course of your own life again instead of acting on the agenda of your religious group.
  8. Energy – It brings the Kundalini energy down from remaining fixed in the essence of consciousness awakened through the imbalance to return to its fully grounded state. This stops the physical symptoms of your Kundalini syndrome.
  9. Experience – It modifies your experience from floating in an altered state of consciousness, detached from human life, to re-identifying with your life and the meanings you derive from your human experience. This lets you heal the split between your spiritual being and your ego [once you discover that your authentic cutting edge of spirituality expresses in your life and your ego plays a role in enacting the units of behavior that actualize your plans].
  10. Attention – It refocuses your attention from continual association with the essence of consciousness that has been awakened—or fixation and absorption in it—to returning to the waking state of awareness again, in its fully grounded state. This terminates living in a trance.
  11. Memory – It reorients you from the stage of union with the wave of the present time or the experience of eternity to reconnection with your lived human present, with access you your actual remembered life experience. This remediates memory blocking, problems with recalling what you did in the past
  12. Senses – It re-engages your sensory channels from union with the void with no mental content to full sensory contact with the environment and re-establishing relational connections to the people around you. This brings you back to the world instead of hanging out in oblivion.

When dynamic rebalancing is successful, there is little persistence of the symptoms of the Kundalini syndrome or of the consequences of moving selected essences of consciousness off the axis of being. However, we have noted in several instances, this full re-orientation does not occur. We speculate that that this may be linked to several discrete factors:

  1. There is more than one spiritual essence generating the imbalance – This occurs when someone has moved several spiritual essences off of the axis of the axis of being, so the non-rebalanced essences perpetuate the symptoms of the imbalance. This happens when, for example, a Yogi Preceptor has initiated someone and has moved cosmic consciousness off the axis of being; this person has also received initiation from two separate Supracosmic lineages and transferred both of these unique seed atoms off of the ground state. [Many seekers follow this pattern of taking multiple initiations in different spiritual traditions, leaving the spiritual essence of each tradition only partially developed—and each of these spiritual essences continues to subtly pull on consciousness.]
  2. There is a desire to continue to dissociate from painful feelings – Some aspirants continue to associate their attention with the essence that was moved out of alignment with the axis of being because they do not want to confront the pain, fear, and shame that awaits them, were they to return to full re-orientation with their human life and personality.
  3. There are various triggers that lock someone into continued identification – Aspirants may continue to follow the lifestyle that locks them into continued identification with that lifestyle. For example, they may have changed their name and their new spiritual name reminds them of the spiritual essence that was awakened. They may continue to have objects or pictures in their home that takes them back to the feelings they had being in the group that promulgated identification with this spiritual essence. They may continue doing meditations or practice hatha yoga that lifts their attention into that essence again.
  4. The karmic stream behind the essence has been activated – Once aspirants engage with the karmic stream behind a spiritual essence, it may continue to generate impressions, desires, and fantasies even when the essence has been returned to realignment with the axis of being. If these impressions that arise from this alternate karmic stream are of greater intensity than those arising from the spiritual essence at the cutting edge of spirituality, aspirants may continue to be locked in that focus. [The karmic stream behind the cutting edge of spirituality is connected with their unique spiritual destiny, which we call the intrinsic Soul Purpose. We can assist you identify your Intrinsic Soul Purpose with a Soul Purpose Reading.]
  5. Ongoing relationships with those who maintain that altered state of consciousness continue to exert influence – Many aspirants continue to have regular, ongoing relationships with those who continue to do the spiritual practices that have produced the imbalance, and they may place pressure on aspirants to continue the practices and “make progress on this Path.” Friends, relatives, romantic partners, or co-workers—people with whom aspirants have regular contact—can exert these continual demands upon aspirants to resume practice and return to the fold.
  6. Spiritual relationship with the aspects of the Divine that are part of the cosmology in which the spiritual essence dwells – Aspirants may have come to rely upon the aspects of the Divine, the spiritual Master, or other spiritual beings that inhabit the inner horizon in the worldview of the awakened spiritual essence to continue to help them, guide them, strengthen them, or comfort them. They may continue to invoke these beings through prayer, chanting, or mantras, and this lifts their attention to union and re-identification with that spiritual essence again, and to induces them to remain in that state of consciousness.
  7. Continued habits of thinking, relationships, and action – Extended relationships with members of groups that did spiritual practices that unfolded aspirants’ spiritual essence outside the axis of being and promoted attentional union and identification with that essence may have established habit patterns. These habits of thinking, emotional relating, and daily activities may continue to lock aspirants into that spiritualized perspective, and make it difficult for them for them to return their attention to waking awareness and to re-engage with their life again.

If you have recently left a religious or spiritual group, but you notice that you continue to float in the altered state of consciousness that you cultivated in it, there are several things you can do:

  1. Return your attention to the grounded state of awareness. Don’t continue to keep it in union with the spiritual essence you cultivated in the group.
  2. Invite your Soul and your Self to take dominion over your life again.
  3. Consider you are now an ex-member of that group. Remove objects or pictures that remind you of the altered state of consciousness you maintained while you were in the group.
  4. Re-identify with your Soul, your Self, and your life. Set active goals and make plans for your future.
  5. Stop practicing meditations that take you to that altered state of consciousness.
  6. Establish a connection to the forms of the Divine that operate at your cutting edge of spirituality.
  7. Consciously develop habit patterns that reinforce operating from your authentic Self. Take ownership of your life, thoughts, feelings and experience. Commune with the ensouling entity that is embodied and expresses through your personality.

Through using remedial strategies such as the ones we suggest here, we expect that in time—those who experience persistence of elements of their Kundalini syndrome or continued sequelae from spiritual imbalance—can experience normalization of their experience and re-identification with their authentic human nature and fully embody their genuine spiritual nature once again.

What is a Nucleus of Identity?

By George A. Boyd © 2017

Q: You use the term, “nucleus of identity,” frequently in your writing. I’m still not clear what this is.

A: We often refer people to our article, “Understanding Nodal Points and Nuclei of Identity,” to define what a nucleus of identity is. The easiest way to understand this is that the Soul has four quadrants of activity. You can visualize this as a pie cut into quarters.

We call these four quadrants, the Poles of Being.

Pole One

On the first pole, at zero degrees, is the Soul. When you meditate upon this pole, you are contemplating the essence we generically call the ensouling entity, on its own Plane. Depending on where on the Continuum of Consciousness you place your attention, you will encounter one of 13 ensouling entities.

For example, if you put your attention in the Planetary Realm, you will encounter the ensouling entity that is called the Planetary Soul. We simply refer to this essence as the Soul, since this is the cutting edge for so many people. Some refer to the Planetary Soul as the Higher Self, the God Immanent, the Transpersonal Self, or the Atma.

If you put your attention in the Cosmic Sphere, you’ll encounter your Astral Soul on this pole. Please see our article on the Great Continuum of Consciousness to learn about the 13 ensouling entities.

In Mudrashram®, we teach our students to meditate on their ensouling entity that is infused with the animating force of the Divine Spirit—this is what we call the cutting edge of spirituality.

In the stream of light where the ensouling entity exists are the nodal points of the Path that the ensouling entity has awakened, and it dwells in a nodal point. By identifying where the ensouling entity is on its Path, we can determine how far it has to go to reach Liberation.

People who meditate on the ensouling entity typically meditate on the brain chakra—or on the Transcerebral chakra, which is the center above the top of the head—to encounter this essence. The path of unfolding the ensouling entity has been called the brain path.

Pole Two

If you rotate your attention 90 degrees to the right (clockwise), you come upon the second pole. Here you identify as the spirit. People also call this spiritual essence the spiritual heart, inner spiritual awareness, the loving heart, or Surat.

If you were to drop your attention into the inner streams of light and sound we call the Nada, you would ride up this current into the spirit that is associated with your cutting edge of spirituality. [This technique is called Surat Dhyan. We teach it in our intermediate meditation courses.]

But like the ensouling entity, you can focus on this spiritual essence at different levels of the Continuum. We call these discrete segments where the Nada begins and ends, domains—we have mapped twelve domains on the Continuum. [Please see our article on the Great Continuum of Consciousness about the 12 domains of the spirit.]

People usually associate the spirit with meditation upon the area of the heart, but some domains begin where you feel your spirit at the point between the eyebrows or even the navel. The practice of opening the channels of the Nada through moving your spirit along them, ultimately to the source of the spirit, has been called the heart path.

Pole Three

If you rotate your attention another 90 degrees to the right to 180º, you encounter the pile of being of the vehicles of consciousness of your Superconscious mind. It is on this pole that you encounter the integration centers we call nuclei of identity.

We have located nuclei of identity in the first through fourth Planetary Initiations, the first through fifth Cosmic Initiations, and on each Supracosmic Path. People who meditate on the spinal axis, sometimes called the cerebrospinal axis, the spinal tube, Sushumna, or the chakras typically come to identify with a nucleus of identity, instead of the Soul or the spirit.

Probably the three most common nuclei of identity with which people identify are:

  • The nucleus of identity of the First Planetary Initiation, which has been called the Christ Child, Christ Consciousness, or nephesh. [In our writings, we commonly refer to this nucleus of identity as the Moon Soul.] Christians and Jews focus their attention on this center and commune with the forms of God that can be known in the First Exoteric Initiation and the First Mesoteric Initiation.
  • The nucleus of identity of the First Cosmic Initiation, which has been called cosmic consciousness or the Atman. Disciples of Yogi Preceptors identify with this center.
  • The Supracosmic seed atom of each active Supracosmic Path: Buddhists, Shaivite and Vaisnavite Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Jains—among others—typically identify with the seed atom of their Supracosmic Path. [For a full listing of these Supracosmic Paths, see our article “Faiths of the Supracosmic Sphere” in the Library section of our website. If you haven’t done so already, sign up for a free Library membership. For a full listing of nuclei of identity, read the article on our website, “Nodal points and nuclei of identity,” which you can access on our Open Stacks page.]

Pole Four

Finally, if you rotate another 90 degrees to 270º, you come to the fourth pole. This is divided into an upper and lower zone.

The upper zone contains your attention, the thread of consciousness, and the principle of intention and consciousness, which we call the attentional principle. This essence has been called the inner witnessing consciousness, the third eye, or Nirat.

The lower zone contains your personality and your life. This is where you encounter the two personal integration centers, the ego [the personal identification center that is embedded in your experience of your life, in what we call the Conscious mind] and the Self [the personal identification that governs your entire personality; it dwells in the Metaconscious mind]. This zone also includes the bands of the unconscious mind that express in your life—this is the level of the mind that psychologists call the shadow.

The attentional principle dwells in the system of chakras of the Subconscious mind slightly above the point between the eyebrows. It is from this perspective that you behold the thread of consciousness that travels through each band of the mind. It is from this perspective of the fourth pole that you view the map of the Great Continuum of Consciousness.

We encourage aspirants to familiarize themselves with the perspectives on each of these four poles of being. In the Mudrashram® system of Integral meditation, we uniquely train you to work on all four poles of being and give you meditation tools that actualize you personally and spiritually. You learn these methods in our intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation or the by-mail or online Accelerated Meditation Program.

The Fulcrum of Transformation

By George A. Boyd ©2018

Q: What transformation changes the ground perception of the way people see the world?

A: This is transformation that actually moves the Soul from one nodal point to another, and expands the Soul’s consciousness as a result.

You can locate the level at which this happens through examining the different types of transformation that you experience. For example, you experience:

  1. Physical transformation – you watch matter change from one form to another. You heat ice and it becomes water; heat it further and it becomes steam.
  2. Emotional transformation – You change your beliefs, your attitudes, and your emotions: this translates into behavior change.
  3. Life transformation – You find a way to attain your dreams through overcoming obstacles and/or doing something in a new way, and this allows you to do, be, and have what you have wanted.
  4. Perceptual transformation – You move your attention from its ground state and you look at the world and your life from a new perspective in which things you feel were not possible become possible.
  5. Cognitive transformation – You turn information and insights into a finished product: e.g., a report, an article, a book, a speech, a recording, a video, or a webinar, which you can share with others.
  6. Identity transformation – You experience yourself as the Soul and experience enlightenment; you merge with a nucleus of identity and experience rebirth. In this type of transformation, you realize that you are something greater than the ego.
  7. Spiritual essence transformation – You use a transformational technique that burns up the karmic accretions in your unconscious mind and allows your ensouling entity and your spirit to move closer to its Source. You spiritually evolve; you make conscious spiritual progress.

While both identity and spiritual essence transformation radically change the way you see the world, only spiritual essence transformation actually changes your state of intuitive knowledge, your capacity for love, and bestows new abilities. In identity transformation, you realize a higher essence within you, beyond the ego. In spiritual essence transformation, you unfold that essence and activate its dormant potentials.

We teach you how to achieve identity and spiritual essence transformation in our intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program. We encourage you to find examples of each type of transformation, so you can truly grasp what drives this core process of change—in the environment and within you.