LESSON 26
The Inner Garden
This will be the first stage in your work to establish an inner magical temple. Even though the ceremonial elements of the IHC system will continue to be an important aspect of your practice, it will also be very useful to have a mental space in which to perform magical acts. There will be times when you will simply not have access to your Oratory, or perhaps you will find that certain types of magic simply work better when you are free from the material contingencies of ceremonial rites. Whatever personal reasons you may discover for valuing the development of a mental temple, you will, for now, have to simply accept that it is a worthwhile component of your magical training.
The magical space you will, from now on, work to build, maintain, and improve can be described as having three basic areas, one leading into the other. The outermost area is called the Garden; from the Garden, you will eventually learn to enter the Vestibule, and from there the Temple itself. These three areas are increasingly more conducive to magical work, but they also increasingly demand more mental energy to interact with. That is why not only your interaction with these areas, but also your work to establish them, is going to be gradual. You will begin by building your inner Garden, a mental place where you can both ease yourself into your magical spaces and cultivate your feeling of "being there" in a relaxed way. The Garden is the gateway into your mental magical space, so you will profit from giving careful and regular attention to it. Like any gateway, the Garden will not only admit you into your magical space but also keep out all undesirable influences. It is a safe, relaxing and engrossing environment that you will have many uses for over the years.
The first thing to keep in mind regarding your inner Garden is that it must be a rather isolated space. You need to be able to trust this mental space to not allow entrance to any intelligences, entities, effects or phenomena that could be detrimental to your goals. In fact, over time, your Garden will become (among other things) a heaven for you to retreat when pressed by intrusive thoughts of any kind. So, you will start your conception of the Garden with the thing that isolates it from undue external influence.
You can imagine your Garden as being surrounded by a common fence, or maybe simply enclosed by a continuous row of trees. If those images do not convey to you a sufficient impression of impenetrability, you can imagine walls or force fields around the Garden. Another possibility is conceiving this space as physically separate from any other spaces; it could rest upon a patch of earth completely surrounded by deep chasms, or exist in the middle of a vast wilderness on a secret spot that no one could possibly find. The important thing is to make sure your Garden always impresses upon you the certainty that no one but yourself can get entrance into it, and that nothing can exist there unless it is place by yourself.
Spend some time (a few weeks) imagining how your Garden's defenses look like, and also imagining yourself inside the protective barrier. Make notes on your diary about how you feel when you visualize yourself there. Do not be shy about changing the look and feel of the Garden's borders. Look for the imagery that will make you feel the most secure and in command of this inner reality. If you skimp on this part of the work, you may expose yourself to danger later! Just as you would never neglect to perform certain magic rites in the material world without a Rite of Protection, you should never neglect to establish a solid protection buffer around your Garden.
After you feel that this initial part of the work is done to your contentment, you can take a step further. Start to slowly 'build' the details of your Garden, the things you'd see if you were standing there. Try to keep things simple at first. You want your Garden to have a few well defined features that you can remember vividly instead of a flurry of mental images that keep changing (sometimes against your will!). One of such features, and arguably the most important one, will be the entrance to a further area. Work slowly and carefully to establish this entrance. It could be anything you can conceive that would serve you as a passage to another place: a portal, an arch created by touching tree branches, a pool of water into which you could dive, a building with an impressive doorway. Do not bother about what may lay beyond this passageway; for now, your work will be to establish it as an entrance of some kind, one which only you can use to access what lies beyond.
The two tasks in this lesson should not take you less than a couple months to complete. Take your time and remember to only take a step further after securing the previous step. In this way, you will manage to build a powerful and safe magical space that you can access anytime and anywhere.