
“All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind.” - Aleister Crowley
The way I look at it, we don’t become a good chess players or martial artists by accident or random chance, or just simply we don’t get good at anything by not doing anything about it, that’s fairly obvious, some people belief though that their mind is an exception, that it will just work really well without any conscious effort or that it’s impossible to train it, I have no idea from where they get these ideas, they don’t seam to be able to point at any information on it, anyway, I want to point in another direction.
I think it’s pretty obvious that the source or close to the source of all that we can do is found in the mind, and it works outwardly from there, the brain, nervous system, arms, keyboard.. from that reasoning, if we can train the fundamentals of the mind to become thousand times more useful/optimized/powerful, it will have a chain effect to every area of our lives, working from the source and outwards, or in other words working inwards and in turn outwards.
I have little doubt in my mind that people throughout history have realized this and created science and arts on perfecting the mind, we have all heard about turning lead into gold right?
“Alchemy traditionally of course revolves around the refinement of the base material of consciousness into ‘gold’” - Zac
If we look at martial arts, or in other words training the body to become the ultimate battle machine, the core of it is very old and very efficient. We should see a similar science/art form that has been created to train the mind to it’s ultimate potential.
The literature that I have identified so far that contain the training for the mind are Yoga, Buddhism, Thelema and Hermeticism, but really anything that fits under the hat of spirituality and magick will probably contain explanations on training the mind amongst other things, these two categorize both have a strong history like martial arts, there are of course other places to look but I think these are the essentials, most of the other stuff I’ve seen is still pretty experimental, very little information on what you can actually do to train the mind and the little that does exist only helps in small areas, that’s at least the feeling I get at the moment.
Also there is allot of bullshit out there disguised as spirituality and magick, so there is something to be said about that, for example what most people here in the west consider Yoga is what I would call a fashion form of Yoga, which might get you something but I think it’s like getting one bite out of 50 divine cakes, not sure what to say about that other then just do your research.
Yoga proposes to start from the internal world, study internal nature, and through that, control the whole, both internal and external. It is a very old attempt. India has been its special stronghold, but it has also been attempted by other nations. In Western countries it was regarded as occultism, and people who wanted to practice it were either burnt or killed as witches and sorcerers. In India, for various reasons, it fell into the hands of persons who destroyed ninety per cent of the knowledge and tried to make a great secret of the remainder. In modern times, in the West, one finds many so-called teachers, but these are worse then those of India, because the latter knew something, while these modern exponents know nothing.
For those who shun the religious-like underpinning of spirituality and therefor avoid it I would say who cares? If God or spirit is of no interest to us and we’re offered a million dollars and a bible, would we not take it? Of course we would, the bible shouldn’t matter to us if we are “that way”, ignore it, who cares, it’s just stupid to make that stop us. Take what you can use and throw away the rest.
You can also look at it like this, you and your friends can work on training your minds your own way from scratch which you are already doing even if you don’t know it, or use tried methods that span throughout history as the base to work from, do we really think we can become the ultimate martial artist, engineer, painter or whatever without ever looking at what has been done so far? That’s like being in the stone age my friend.
“The reason most people in our society have such ridiculous ideas about what our minds can do is simple: our minds are ridiculously weak. If you think five hours staring at a wall is a ‘long time’ you don’t get a opinion in the occult powers debate. Thanks for comin’ out.” - Zac