I have been doing the Soul Travel “Preparation” exercises for a while. It’s hard sometimes to keep the practice going with my job that just sucks the life out of me. As a General Laborer in a Warehouse I find that some days I just have no energy or drive to sit and meditate, but it is those days that I feel like I really accomplish something if I just give it 5 minutes despite the fact that it feels like I’m literally starting over. I will say this though, after initially doing the work persistently and getting the feeling like “Yeah, I practice” vs just reading and wanting the experience, I’ve arrived at the point where everything that I attempt feels like a success right off the bat due to my understanding of the process involved. E.A. Koetting says that it might just feel like it’s happening in your mind, or that it’s just your imagination because that’s where it starts. Magick is the art and science of causing change with accordance with will, and just about every exercise that seems like fantasizing is actually working that muscle and there is a CONSEQUENCE, which is the change. I remember a popular Sadhu (Sadguru, as mainstream as he is, he’s right) saying that when you meditate, the consequence is that you are meditative. Usually, that progress is minuscule and that’s where people give up because they might not see results.
I have to come clean though. After a while of watching the course, I decided to edit the video into routines. Chopping up the entire section 4 into various things for various occasions. For example, I would typically save all of the exercises for a good half our session before I go into work if I had time, but that’s just E.A. demonstrating the exercises and not myself working them 3-5 times or 5 minutes. Other video’s I made of him walking through the Cycling Light exercise and the Chakra Meditation which takes up about 10 minutes which is perfect for a lunch break or even a normal break if I can find a private place to hum the mantras. Of course, I can’t just bring candles to work and set up a ritual in the break room at work so I leave the Blu-ray Meditation for at home. Lastly, I made a video that lasts about an hour with things being repeated a few times so that I was in fact visualizing a river or a pendulum swing for 5 minutes even if it involved E.A.Koetting say the same dialogue repeadtedly. It just kept me on track.
After doing these things over and over being guided by E.A.'s recording I am at the point where I’m using a meditation timer and I just go through the exercises on my own, occasionally pulling up the videos if need the support (sometimes it’s just more effective in tuning out daily disturbances). After all of this though I find that it still seems like I’ve made no progress and have to start over. For example I could be sitting there and putting forth the effort to visualize a pendulum, but it will appear and swing a few times and disappear, but I would keep applying the effort even if I didn’t see a pendulum for the remaining 4 minutes and 50 seconds. After that 5 minutes there would be a consequence in using my mind that way. My most recent achievement is a bi-location or remote viewing of a location that I was able to experience a clear and realistic movement of turning around and seeing the surrounding landscape as it is in the actual location as if I would turn around in my body. I remember when I started out exploring the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram but doing it at the astral-mental level, I was unable to clearly experience turning around at each quarter. I couldn’t decide if I was to just to imagine doing it at each direction of my body or to just keep facing my attention forward and imagine my vision to experience moving in a circle like watching a computer monitor display the first-person view. Either way, I think both experiences are worth having and the experience I had was a pleasant reward after some dedication to the exercises.