Vacancy of mind

What is the vacancy of mind
Vacancy of mind is a state of awareness when no side thoughts are produced and the infinite mental chatter is stopped. It is also a form of gnosis and chaotes reference it as a gnostic state as the psychic censor is switched off together with the chatter.

Vacancy of mind is hard to enter and usually the early attempts can keep up just a couple of seconds. The process of entering this state is also often made harder by many mistakes people tend to do in the beginning of the practice, some of these mistakes will be mentioned later.

What is the vacancy of mind good for
As mentioned before, vacancy of mind is associated with deactivating the psychic censor. From this state you can either switch into the absolute awareness, which is a way how to shift your focus fully on a certain object and "charging" it this way (absolute awareness is good for sigil charging and I refer to it as the inhibitory gnosis in the book Liber Azag: The Book of Sigils or as Fragment #4 in Oath Breaker: Meditation).

Another use of the vacancy of mind once again lies in the deactivated psychic censor. Psychic censor is the filtering mechanism between your consciousness and your unconsciousness. If this filtering mechanism is deactivated and you are able to sit still with closed eyes in such a state, you will enter the state of high lucidity, granting you visions. The nature of visions is very similar to the nature of dreams. Not every vision is prophetic, prophecies are actually not so common. Your visions will often just be the reflection of your subconsciousness, affected by the food you ate, experience you had, movie you watched or book you just read. There are practices to make prophetic visions or dream more often, but more of that later.

How to enter the vacancy of mind
A good way how to enter this state of awareness is to progress into it from the focal meditation. A focal meditation is the type of meditation where you concentrate fully on one object. This object can be a symbol (trataka), your breathing pattern (pranayama), your posture (asana), gesture (mudra) or even a repetitive sequence of movement (like dancing). But gesture, symbol, posture and chanting (mantra) are the most common ones, usually in some combinations.

This method also includes the famous black egg meditation. Visualize a big empty room where everything is absolutely and completely white. In this room there is a black egg on a completely white table, and this egg is completely black and a little bit distorted as it emits the blackness to its surrounding, emitting the darkness as if it were a light.

Another good way was presented in the article Oath Breaker: Meditation, where the Vacancy of Mind is presented as the fragment #3 and is entered from the state of absolute relaxation. The relaxation is important in any case, as the mind affects the body just like body affects the mind, it's even harder to enter the vacancy of mind state when your mind is occupied with the inputs from your body and it's hard to relax and let go of your body when you feel something poking to your side or your nose is itchy. That's why you first need to find a comfortable position to relax fully (Fragment #1 in Oath Breaker: Meditation).

Common mistakes during the practice of the vacancy
First very common mistake is that people are unaware of their constant mental chatter. That's where thought observation and thought recollection comes handy. Be present at the moment and be aware of your thoughts, recollect them a couple of times during your day. This will help you to become fully aware of your mental chatter plus your memory will improve drastically.

Another mistake is ignoring the chatter. When a thought arrives, you should accept it and move on, recall this thought later and resolve it. Else this thought will reappear later, but stronger and with some consequences, you shouldn't ignore your thoughts same as you shouldn't ignore your problems else they can overgrow you. The void meditation is also associated with the reappearance of memories, especially the negative one. This process is natural and helps you to resolve your problems and better understand who you are. Same as with thoughts you shouldn't ignore these but accept them, else they will reappear later or worse, turn into phobias, nightmares and will make you emotionally lethargic or easy to get angry.

Another very common mistake is the self-trolling. I call it this way because during the void meditation you will tend to e.g. repeat the instructions of the meditation process, thinking about not thinking and few other cases. This actually isn't the psychic censor preventing you your progress, it's just your own mind making fun of itself. If you recognize it as your own doing and own responsibility, it's much easier to get rid of it.

Yet another mistake is to get frustrated when you are lacking results. Don't be strict on yourself, this isn't a race. Be fine with whatever progress you have and remember it works as a wave, sometimes it's naturally better and sometimes it's naturally worse, everyone has good and bad days. If thoughts are rushing too much and you need a little bit of rest, eat some heavy food (fast food works great in this great), when the body got hard time digesting food, less energy is spent on the higher functions of the brain).

Few fundamental mistakes in Magick

Only my tradition is the real one
Nope. People of different traditions and practices can easily achieve same results. It's not even true that some traditions are better for something and worse for something else. If you find some tradition that really suits you, you will be able to do anything with it.

Only chasing enlightenment is the right path
Well, reaching enlightenment is possible only through selfless and devoted practice, I am sorry but that's not really possible if you are consciously chasing the enlightenment because that's selfish, practicing to gain the ascension is a selfish act. Not helping others because you are saving energy for you enlightenment is even more selfish. Rather than that do stuff for yourself, it will have better results in means of enlightenment than this.

Magick is based on the subconsciousness
Simply no. All worlds, whether physical, mental, emotional, astral or spiritual, are merged together. Is Magick part of the subconsciousness? Yes, same as of everything else.

Casting a circle is for the means of protection
He he, no. The circle is casted because its energy shines with a very bright light and is visible in great distances like a lighthouse.
Point of the circle is to drag attention, to say to nearby spirits and forces: "Hey, something's happening over there, come closer".
Also, the circle lifts its energy up in a tornado like manner, that can effectively destroy anything above it. Cups and dishes falling from the shelves, glass is cracking, smaller objects "disappearing". One fellow Magician e.g. reported that his favorite chinese tea cups were broken when they fell from the middle of the table while he was performing a ritual in the floor just below the table.

If you want a protection, then banish, then enclose yourself within a Magickal chain, or bubble, or whatever.

Banish before every ritual
Congratulations, you have just effectively made your ritual useless, banishing equals to no energies around, which means no spare energies for the ritual.
It's important to banish time by time to get rid of negs or whatever you call these, but banishing once or twice per month is good enough.

Banish after every ritual
Take a following scenario, your friend kidnaps you from your home, threathens you to do his bidding and then tells you to piss off his house before he grabs his shotgun. That's what banishing after the ritual looks like.

To do it right, use a license to depart, where you give an allowance to leave to the nearby spirits, you also remind you of the bidding and request them not to bring any harm to you and your family. Also, don't be scared if they don't leave right away, sometimes they like to stay around for an hour or two before leaving. Use the banishing just only when the sh*t hits the fan.

I can use any practice of any tradition without the knowledge of its background
Just no, same as you cannot and should not pilot a plane without a proper training and tests, you shouldn't borrow practices from traditions you know nothing about. Same goes with the mixing, you can analyze and take the core of some practice and create new method based on the core that you will put into your custom system, but don't mix different practices from different traditions unless you want your life to become a misery.

Everything in grimoires must be done exactly as it is written
He he. Grab your grimoire and check the language it is written in and it was translated from. Chances are that these two are completely different, which means someone had to translate it for you, and trust me he could had translated it in hundres different ways, each and every sentence.

Words of power that should be kept in its original manner should be kept in the original language, which means that everything that WAS translated can be considered as "do something like this, say something like that" instead of "do this, say that".

Modifying procedures to suit your needs is also fundamental to the healthy occult practices, it helps you to develop intuition, reasoning and also understanding of the matter. But really, take grimoires only as a inspiration, not as the only possible strict procedure.