If you’ve been following my posts (I don’t blame you if you haven’t, I’m new) you’ll know that I don’t have tools for magick and I can’t get them so I’m a very limited person who has to find my own way around. In my research I have come across visualization techniques, things like “when you are in the astral plane, do this and you will be protected” or “if you want to do a cleanse and you have no materials, just imagine the following”, it would be great if I could do things like this with just my imagination but I honestly doubt the usefulness of it. How do I know that what I am doing is real and not something I am just imagining? If I end up believing I am more powerful than I really am just because I think I can throw energy balls or create light shields, things could end very badly for me. The same applies to guided meditations where you are asked to visualize something. How do you know that you are actually going to another plane of existence or unlocking abilities rather than just fantasizing? Don’t get me wrong, I would love for this to be real, because if it is, it would get me out of a lot of trouble, but I just find it hard to believe. I’ve always heard, read and seen that magic requires tangible things, with the research I’ve been doing now, I realize that’s not always necessarily true but there’s something about visualization that just doesn’t quite add up for me. Using these techniques, what would be the difference between making change happen and imagining change happening? I have another thing to comment, I have been trying to communicate with my HGA (I have told it in previous posts) and for that I am studying things like clairaudience or divination methods, I have read things like visualization can help a lot in this but I find it even more complicated to believe that a being that is outside of me is doing something just because I imagine it is doing it. They always warn you to make sure that you are actually communicating with an entity and not just conversing with your thoughts but then I wonder again what would be the difference between visualizing to make things happen (supposedly) and just daydreaming? This is very confusing and I hope that you can somehow convince me that this is real and does work because it would really help me out to know that I can accomplish so much with so little. Really, I need answers, but I also need honesty, don’t lie just to put me to work, just tell me the truth, please.
It’s a bit of both. You can imagine a location: completely make it up from nothing… and remote viewers can see it and facing it accurately as if it was a real place, and they won’t know it’s not a physical place.
When you image you are building structures in the astral, which is the mental plane.
Do it well enough and that helps that imagined stuff manifest down into the physical. It can be shared with others and consensus agreement obtained.
Do it poorly or in a place that’s purely personal and not in shared astral levels, and all you get is ineffective self entertainment that nobody else can experience with you.
This is also to avoid impostors and parasites looking for a free lunch.
So, what you are telling me is that the astral plane is a place where, apart from entities, we can find places that people have imagined because what happens in their minds is reflected there, right? Therefore, if for example I imagine a shield of light that is protecting me during a ritual and I believe it, then actually that shield will be protecting me because my thought (as well as anything people think or imagine) has been reflected in the astral, right? I think that you have managed to convince me of the effectiveness of visualization, thank you very much because now I feel quite relieved. Although I have one last question: what would be a place that is NOT on shared astral levels? If I create one how do I make sure it is private? And if it has always been private but at some point I want to bring someone there how do I accomplish that? If it somehow becomes “public” after that how do I make sure I still maintain control over who can enter?
Well, yes, to that I know, but even if it’s an imposter, at least I know I’m communicating with something and it’s not just my imagination. Not that that’s a good thing anyway
With the caveat that this is only one way to describe, or model, how it works, yes.
Other system use other models that might work better for you, this one is mine and “the astral” is a such a widely understood concept at least in the western occultism that I can use it without usually having to define it too much. My models are heavily influenced by taoism.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” - George Box, Mathematician
The underlying reality to this view is very likely way more complicated, but this is the bit I can access and understand, and use, as a human. This is why different models are not wrong exactly, but none are perfect. The measure of a good model is how well it lets you make predications that are usable and end up being accurate. So far, “the astral” as a model of the mental layer of being works reasonably well, imo.
Yes that’s exactly right. The astral is made of energy, you are an energy being, you manifested - created - a change in that energy to provide a protective shield.
Humans have highly complex bioelectric bodies that are capable of absorbing and emitting energy and hence interacting with the energy around them, and we can control that via thought. We’re pretty cool that way, and I see this as a kind of tech that physics hasn’t advanced enough to explain yet. This is the mechanism of magick, imo as usual 
Awesome! Glad I could help! 
There’s a few ways to make astral locations private. Mostly it’s a game of either secrecy - people can’t easily access what they don’t know about - or a battle of wits.
Even a private astral temple, that you’ve told nobody about, can be accesses if the astral despite protections - if a traveler is looking for you specifically regardless of where you are. They can just show up, but they may not realise that the location is your astral temple or other personal build in the astral.
Another way to avoid visitors is to plan it in an out of the way and unlikely, dare I say boring location. The subconscious tends to notice interesting, flashing things much more and be attracted to them. You can use this further by setting up decoys, flash interesting things that look like something that would be searched for, like yourself, but are just distractions.
You can also set up barriers and shields, which will stop many who don’t realise that all they have to do is ask “what would I see if I could get past this barrier” to see it and teleport there. But most people are heavily into the physical world and use the astral as if material physics applied, which lets you fool them with fake physics like “barriers”. There are no real secrets but you can hide that fact that you have secrets so nobody thinks to go looking for them.
I don’t think you can, depending on who you’re dealing with and what they know and how easily they can be convinced of what they can’t do. Personally I abandon it and make a new one or a copy elsewhere. In this case though I would leverage the old one as bait - leave it there, add a thoughtform that looks like you doing interesting you things, and let them knock themselves out messing about with a fake. 
One person kept showing up at one of my astral temples, kind of like they’d sent a servitor to observe, (for some reason, no idea why). I could “see” a portal they used, and would close it, clear it, blow it up, banish this avatar, urn it, and they’d keep coming back - new ones not the one I’d destroyed. Until I had a pile of “bones” messing up the corner. Eventually I tried something else - took the avatar, give it a chair and faced it out the other direction away from the happenings in the center with a “TV” screen in front of it. No more regens and the watching stopped.
But I find these places kind of get messy over time anyway - this is probably a problem I have to figure out in my energy, not sure - it’s vestiges of energy from old workings, old form I’d created and wouldn’t completely disappear afterwards, like memories but ones I can see. For some reason I’ve been having trouble cleaning them up nicely, so I also abandon old astral temples or this reason, when they get too old and cluttered. I may start creating temples for specific currents or workings to help avoid this better.
Don’t worry, in fact what you said fits quite well with ideas and theories I had made up to now.
Thanks again, you have solved all my doubts, except for one that I forgot to ask:
This, I still have my doubts about this. I understand that I could manipulate the actions of a being that I myself have created with my mind but I don’t know how that would work with an entity outside of me. For example, once a person who practiced angelolatry said that Michael helped him in the gym and for that he imagined that he was helping him lift the weights. I am sure he was in contact with Michael because I have seen his altars and all that but how is it that an entity that he did not create or control (even though they have a close relationship) can be doing something just because he imagines that the entity is doing it? I for example am looking to get in contact with my HGA and for that I have thought that during my clairaudience exercises it would be good that my angel is “stimulating” my ears with his hands or magick, for that visualization could help but being an external being to me and out of my control, I do not know if he is doing something specific just because in my mind I am imagining him doing that, the only thing I have left is to pray asking him to do it but it is unidirectional communication and I do not know if he really does follow my request.
Yeah me too actually, and that’s why I’ve not really tried to do this operation. I don’t understand it and it doesn’t fit with my current worldview.
In my mind, this one that is typing now IS my HGA. There’s no “higher”, but what there is is the animal, the intelligent primate I’m incarnate into. So I have two minds that are integrated into one, in a sense. The quiet voice inside I hear as my subconscious is that of the primate. It’s the one that is empathic, and we’re both psychic and telepathic.
This is an idea I’m “trying on for size” as the usual way of thinking about it is the opposite - that the consciousness is the animal and the quiet inner voice is the “higher self”. But that doesn’t always work, meaning the model is insufficient so I’m trying an updated one, basically.
I found an online summary of what a Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) is for reference, as not everyone knows this term or uses Crowley’s work:
In Thelemic belief, the HGA is seen as a manifestation of one’s truest self, a divine entity that communicates one’s True Will, the fundamental purpose of one’s existence. Unlike traditional guardian angel concepts that suggest an external protector, Thelema posits the HGA as an intrinsic part of the individual’s higher consciousness.
So in my current thinking, I might not have a place in my models for this definition of an HGA. Certainly not something personified that I could talk to as if it was human-like. It could be mapped to what I call “spirit”, which is that spark of consciousness that is part of the tao. But I don’t see that thing as being something you can communicate with, because all the tools it needs to communicate with ate in the successive layers of bodies that it’s using, which it does for the express purpose of using them to interact with different levels of reality.
What if, that spirit looking out of your eyes right now IS your HGA, in the context of using all it’s bodies in tandem to have a human experience. And that’s why you can’t find it - it’s like looking for your glasses when you’re on your head - you are what you are looking for.
I’m not a follower of Thelema and maybe I completely misunderstood the finer points of the argument and that’s all mixed up, though.
Maybe I could understand the HGA as a form of us that is using the causal layer of being. It’s not human yet by several layers - this is outside of the qi, emotional or mental layers and into a level of reality that’s very hard to access and understand. All our human tools for understanding are in those lower layers. If so, I can see why learning to communicate with that layer of yourself is so difficult. It’s completely inhuman and not designed to be understood, but it probably knows quite a lot that would be helpful. I have never tried to talk directly to any level of my being higher than the emotional level, not yet anyway.
This would actually work just with qigong. Whether or not Michael was involved, if you as a human use qi to help you perform physical feats those feats are easier and you can do more. I use qigong when running to let me run longer and harder and be less out of breath - if I cultivate qi on the in breath and direct it to a stick on the out break the stick goes away, if my legs are tired I can direct energy to them and they feel fine again, if I run y torus and suck in heaps of energy my breathing calms down, get was and regular again. All humans can do this, because all humans have a qi body and can learn qigong.
So in this case it didn’t matter if he was or wasn’t, but when you have a relationship with an energy it become easy to reach out and touch that entities energy, communicate telepathically and ask for help. Most religions call this praying but have rules around what you’re allowed to ask for that preclude help like this, because its self serving or something, but it’s possible.
We talk about the concept of what I call the “personal astral” and the “shared astral”. So entities can share experiences in the shared astral. Imagination rests in the personal astral, it’s n ot shred, entities and other humans aren’t aware of what you are experiencing, so it’s isolated and nota group effort. It’s private. You can make a private thing shared by just exposing the knowledge of it though and then were back to shared locations and experiences.
So, blue skying here: lets say this chap did contact Michael - then Michael and he may have shared that astral space where Michael helped him by influencing his qi to perform better. I wasn’t there, but that’s my guess at a mechanism that would work.
I am actually not having any problems with attempts to contact my HGA, in fact I have received possible signs that he has noticed my intention. I just wanted to be able to communicate with him in a fluid way and for that I first wanted to document what would and would not work for me, so I wanted to know if just by visualizing him doing something, he would actually be doing it. Anyway, I guess your answer about qi and telepathy satisfies my curiosity. And by the way, thanks for getting me interested in the concept of qi, I’m sure it will be useful to me.
A fascinating topic… I must study peoples Brains 
Your right to question things. But let me help you out a little here. In the metaphysical field people like to attribute so many labels to all these energies and different things. But the physical body is a collection of forces that works at least pretty harmoniously.
So you can think of your brain (Visualizations) as “Ultra-Low Voltage.” Your Body then has varying levels of power beyond Low Volts. One interacts with the other to optimize performance. You then have Auric emanations that interact with other people.
So your basically trying to create and push energy out into the Universe of Others in the hopes that your intent in the form of energy will Smother them and change their Minds and Hearts. So is it magickal visualization or mental masturbation? It depends on your performance =) The easiest way to do this magick is to get into a desired emotional state, then add a visualization to shape the emotion and merge them and release. Very basic magick.