and other ugly character traits, you have to observe a hard and severe attitude towards yourself. Be merciless towards yourself and do not embellish any of your failures and deficiencies. Think about yourself in quiet meditation, put yourself back into different situations of your past and remember how you behaved then and what mistakes or failures occurred in the various situations. Make notes of all your weaknesses, down to the finest nuances and variations. The more you are discovering, all the better for you. Nothing must remain hidden, nothing unrevealed, however insignificant or great your faults or frailties may be. Some especially endowed disciples have been able to discover hundreds of failures in the finest shades. Disciples like these possessed a good meditation and a deep penetration into their own souls.
Wash your soul perfectly clean; sweep all the dust out of it.
This self-analysis is one of the most important magic preliminaries. Many of the occult systems have neglected it, and that is why they did not achieve good results. This psychic preliminary work is indispensable to obtain the magic equilibrium, and without it, there is no regular progress of the development to be thought of. Therefore you ought to devote some minutes’ time to self-criticism in the morning and at night. If you have got the chance of some free moments during the day, avail yourself of them and do some intensive thinking,
whether there are still some hidden faults anywhere, and if you discover them, record them on the spot so as not to forget a single one. Whenever you happen
to find out any deficiency, do not delay to note it immediately.
If within a week you do not succeed in discovering all your faults, spend another week on these inquiries until you have definitely established your list of offences Having achieved this problem within one or two weeks, you have reached the point to begin with a further exercise.
Now by intensive thinking, try to assign each fault to one of the four elements. Appoint a rubric in your diary to each element and enter your faults into it. You will not feel sure of which elements some of the faults are to be assigned. Record them under the heading of
“indifferent”. In the progressing development you will be able to determine the element corresponding to your deficiency.
For instance, you will ascribe jealousy, hatred, vindictiveness, irascibility,
and anger to the fiery element; frivolity, self-presumption, boating, squandering, and gossiping to the element of air; indifference, laziness, frigidity,
compliance, negligence, shyness, insolence, and instability to the watery element; laziness, lack of conscience, melancholy, irregularity,
anomaly and dullness to the element of earth.
In the following week you will
meditate on each single rubric, dividing it into three groups.
In the first group you will enter the biggest failures, especially those that influence you strongest or happen at the slightest opportunity. The second group will embrace faults occurring less frequently and in slighter degree. In the last group you are recording those faults that happen only now and again. Go on doing so with the indifferent faults, too. Work conscientiously at all times; it is worth while!
Repeat the whole procedure with your good psychical qualities, entering them into the respective categories of the elements. Do not forget the three columns here as well. For example, you will assign activity, enthusiasm firmness, courage, and
daring to the fiery element, diligence, joy, dexterity, kindness, lust, and optimism to the air element, modesty,
abstemiousness, fervency, compassion, tranquility,
tenderness, and forgiveness to the watery element, and respect, endurance, conscientiousness, thoroughness, sobriety, punctuality, and responsibility to the earth element.
By doing so, you will get
two so-called psycho-mirrors, a black one with the evil qualities,
and a whit one with the good and noble character traits. These two magic mirrors are correct occult mirrors, and none but the owner has any right to look into them at all. Let me repeat once more that the owner must endeavor to elaborate his magic mirrors precisely and conscientiously. If, in the course of the development, he should remember any good or bad quality, he can still record it under the respective heading. These two magic mirrors will allow the magician to recognize rather exactly which of the elements is prevailing in his black or white mirror. This recognition is absolutely necessary to attain the magic equipoise,
and the further development depends on it.
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