Category: Western Traditions

Introduction

Welcome. What follows is a detailed transcript of our recent interview with Bob from Sixty Skills. He answers questions here from various sources, discord channel, private emails as well as some of my own personal questions. As you can see this isn’t just theory—it’s a practical roadmap to take you from square one to true magical independence. In this post, he is answering some serious questions about how it all works, from the five phases to blending traditions and real-world results students are seeing.

You can see the video version of the interview below:

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The Five Phases of the Sixty Skills Curriculum

PAA: Can you break down the five phases of development in your curriculum and explain how each stage maps to Bardon’s blueprint from the Empress card in what ways does this alignment guide the progression from basic skills to advanced magical independence?

Quite simply, the master course is basically the 60 fundamental skills you need to perform the work contained in Bardon’s canon. The main additions to this involve the use of pranayama and body training, which are largely absent from Franz Bardon’s original work Initiation into Hermetics. That said, once you have those Sixty skills down, if you look at what I call Bardon’s mandala, this inner part represents the elements, then you have the planets, then you have the zodiac, and then you have the sephiroth. The coursework in the Sixty Skills curriculum consists of the master course, again those basic skills. Then a course on letter magic or cabala, which is really elemental work fully expanded to the 27 letters. Then when we’re done with that, we move on to the planetary meditations. Then we move on to the zodiacal meditations, and then we move on to the sephirothic meditations.

This is the path of enlightenment or the upward arc, if you will. I’m currently working my way through the path of manifestation or what some would call the downward arc of that. But as you can see, the curriculum matches directly to what is contained in this drawing. By virtue of doing that, it takes you from more gross forms of reality to more refined forms of reality, i.e., enlightenment, and back down again. This in turn increases your ability to interact with your environment on your own terms as effectively as possible.

(You can see a video on the Sixty Skills curriculum here or read the transcript here)

Integrating Diverse Traditions

PAA: How have these very traditions influenced the design of the Sixty Skills curriculum, for example, where do Daoist energy practices or yogic techniques show up alongside the core hermetic exercises inspired by Bardon? Can you discuss how you’ve blended these influences to create a coherent system and why this eclectic approach enhances a practitioner’s development?

Here’s the thing. The big thing that we get from Franz Bardon’s hermetics is a series of definitions. These definitions allow you to clearly identify what phenomenon you’re dealing with meditatively or yogically. This is generally lacking in most other traditions where you’re expected to figure things out. So you might work with a lot of energy in, say, a Chi Kung system, but they’re not breaking that down into vital or etheric, astral, mental, akashic forces, or non-dual light. They kind of expect you to figure that out. If you look at the actual techniques that Bardon employs, they’re all derivative. You can find them someplace else.

He did a tremendous service to us by putting them all in one place. But this is the key, and it’s something a lot of people tend to have issues with. Nothing original has been done in the hermetic or yogic or magical field in thousands of years because the techniques are all the same, and you can find them throughout antiquity. They’re just not well organized, and they’re frequently very poorly defined. What I’ve done is I’ve taken all of the best approaches to these individual techniques that I’ve seen, regardless of tradition, and I’ve included them in one set system. The actual techniques involved don’t change a whole lot. How you perform them can.

As I’ve said many times before, I take a clairsentience or subtle sense of touch approach to teaching. Why? Because this is the easiest of these subtle senses to develop. There are other ways to do this, but this is the way I’ve chosen to do it. Where do Daoist energy practices show up? Well, most clearly in the chi circulation form, which, as far as I can tell, comes out of various southern Chinese Daoist lineages. Where exactly? Hard to say, but you see a lot of this in things like white crane or vibrating crane type techniques. Also, I would say I’ve blended these influences because there are definite shortfalls in Bardon’s curriculum. The most notorious of which is, of course, body training. It basically doesn’t exist.

Without this or having already accomplished it through another medium like military service, a professional-grade athletics, this kind of thing, you tend to get stuck being able to generate energy only at the mental or higher levels. You don’t have the pipes in the body, if you will, to bring it down very far into the astral or the vital. So that’s the reason why I’ve included this material amongst a bunch of others. It’s simply a more efficient way of doing things.

Accelerated Training and Spiritual Maturity

PAA: How do you ensure the depth of character, self-transformation, ethical understanding keeps pace with the fast skill development? What is your response to those who are skeptical that genuine enlightenment can be accelerated this way?

First of all, most of what you hear about spiritual masters in terms of their personal behavior is, to be blunt, complete bullshit. Every spiritual guru that I’ve met has had severe character flaws of one kind or another. All of them. I can’t think of a single exception. What they do all have in common, however, is the ability to overcome those in their quest for enlightenment. The path of ennoblement, as some would call it, is really a matter of losing the more destructive of your bad habits over time in order to facilitate your practice. But this only tends to occur in terms of losing those things that directly interfere with your practice. If it’s something you can overcome and still practice, people generally retain that bad habit.

Now, that said, I’ve never met anybody who can shoot heroin or do meth and get anything done esoterically speaking. But again, people have allowed pop culture to incorrectly influence their view of what an enlightened master is. These are frequently not very nice people. They are frequently people who have a variety of problems. But through sheer force of will, they’ve managed to make contact with the divine. That said, the more bad habits you have, the harder it is to do all of this. So generally speaking, most people lose the, let’s call them, grosser of their negative behaviors over time because it simply interferes with practice too much to do so.

Now, that said, this takes a while. This is not a fast process. I’m going to be very critical of most lay practitioners. What is your response to those who are skeptical that genuine enlightenment can be accelerated in this way? Simply put, they’re using suboptimal methodology. Look at athletic performance. Every generation, we find better ways of doing things. In engineering, we generally find better ways of doing things. People have this strange religious attachment to something wrote in the past as the only way to do something. This is complete and utter nonsense. Process improvement has been severely lacking in esoteric circles. Rights of secrecy, not the least of which, being responsible for this garbage.

If what we are dealing with is in fact in your nature as a human being, and if the phenomena we deal with are forces in nature, the idea that this should take decades to do is just complete garbage and gatekeeping by other people. I say this as someone who grew up in a time where the microcosmic orbit was like a really super secret technique. Yeah, it’s really not that hard to do. If you want to learn that, go talk to Tao Semko and Santiago Dobles. They have a wonderful system involving that technology, but it took them decades to put it together because the people who knew how to do it were being a bunch of jerks. Keep in mind, when it takes you 10 years to learn how to do something, that’s not because it takes 10 years to learn how to do it. It’s because people are being selfish regarding the methodology.

None of this requires anywhere near the amount of time people apply to it. People waste way too much time on suboptimal training or antiquated techniques that simply aren’t that effective. The Sixty Skills curriculum was designed to remedy a lot of this.

The Goal of Magical Independence

PAA: Why is self-sufficiency so critical in your system? How do you prepare students to reach that threshold of power, for instance, what ensures that they can produce akasha at will? Once achieved, how does being magically independent transform a practitioner’s relationship to magic? Do they still benefit from rituals and external aids, or does their practice become fundamentally different at that point?

First of all, self-sufficiency is critical because it reinforces yourself, your free will. If something creates dependency, it’s probably not good for you. This is true if you’re talking heroin, cigarettes, highly processed foods, bad relationships, or bad terms on a loan. It’s not any less true when it comes to your magical ability. Listen, I’m not negative on all ritual work. I’ve said it before. If the goals of egregore surrounding a ritual match yours, party on. That’s a great thing. But ultimately, enlightenment is about being free. You can’t do that if your ability to access the godhead, God, the true Dao, the Buddha nature, is dependent upon something or someone else. That’s why it’s important.

How do you prepare students to reach that threshold of power? Well, generally speaking, through the process of equilibrium, you know, using the four elements to establish equilibrium. If you do this often enough, over and over again, akasha will spontaneously arise. From a dawn to a light isn’t that big a jump. Now, in the beginning, this will be a fairly slow process, but with practice, you can do it instantaneously, which is true of any other skill you have, be it driving a car, for example, or cooking a meal. In the beginning, you have to think about the steps, and then with practice, it just becomes automatic.

Once a being magically independent transforms a practitioner’s relationship to magic, do they still benefit from rituals and external aids, or does their practice become fundamentally different at that point? It tends to be a couple of stages. You’ll have the ability to do it, but it’ll be slow. So you’ll use rituals, mostly self-created, to skip steps. Then, at a higher level of performance, you’ll just be able to will it to happen. That’s where your life can get pretty interesting. That’s the true nature of magic. Again, these things represent forces in nature, and you learn how to harness those. Why would you need anything intermediate in order to work with it? That said, being human beings, it takes a while to get there.

Addressing Character Development and Mirrors

PAA: What are your thoughts on the view that Sixty Skills does not take character development and ennoblement seriously as it does not cover the mirrors in the master course? Also, the idea that going through Initiation into Hermetics should be some arduous task and that anyone that makes it easier is somehow doing it wrong?

First of all, I don’t do the mirror exercises because, as I’ve said many times before, in a modern era, most people don’t know what their actual weak points are. We’re not a very critical society the way Bardon’s was, where in the 1930s in Bavaria and the Czech Republic, people made sure you knew what you were bad at. That’s not true today. Also, on a practical basis, the mirrors are incredibly slow for what you get, and people waste a tremendous amount of time on them. Just going to be blunt, I think it’s a waste of time.

If you work with the elements and you establish equilibrium long enough, over and over again, you will not only get the same effect, you’ll get a much stronger effect because the mirrors really only work at the mental level. Whereas equilibrium, when done properly, at a minimum, additionally works at the energetic level or astral level. It’s a deeper effect. So the short answer is people are generally not aware of what their actual faults are. So they don’t really work on the right things. But a more nuanced answer is it’s an easy way to spend a lot of time on something that’s not very effective that should be spent on other things.

Any idea on going through Initiation into Hermetics should be arduous, and one that makes it easier is somehow doing it wrong? Yeah, they’re just full of crap. The one thing you do not have more of in life is time. So anyone who gives you a suboptimal training methodology that requires hours a day for decades on end to work with is a bad person. They’re wasting your life. Period. Again, if these are phenomena in nature that we’re working with, it shouldn’t be that hard to do.

That doesn’t get into the issue of process improvement. Every other endeavor of human behavior—engineering, medicine, some would argue the arts—all of these things have gotten better over time. Why shouldn’t that happen with yogic practice? This is insane, this concept that things should be hard just to be hard. No, things that are hard need to be hard because there is no other way of doing it. That’s simply not true with most of this yogic training. The experience of going through it is difficult enough without a bunch of self-serving jerks limiting access to the good stuff to maintain position.

Quabalistic Training and Transmissions

PAA: Given this perspective, how does Sixty Skills incorporate Bardon’s cosmic letter magic into training? Do you guide students to work with the creative letters, the tetragrammatonic sounds early on, or only after they’ve built a foundation? For example, are they eventually learning to form multi-letter formulas and divine names as Bardon hinted they must, or intone the word in a practical way? Essentially, how far into Bardon’s Kabbalah does your curriculum take a student, and how do you make such high-level work possible?

First of all, we start with letter magic on day one. You, with the elements, S for fire, A for air, M for water, and loud A for earth. We’ll work all the way through four-letter combinations, and you’ll also learn after time how to tune things and come up with your own at various levels. Now, Bardon did us a good favor in that he gave us half of the two-letter combinations out there. Well, actually, no, that’s not true. About a fifth of the possible ones. But there’s a lot more work out there that you have to do on your own.

If you follow the training system I’ve set forward, you will learn how to decode these things and figure out what they do. From that standpoint, the system is in itself complete. Essentially, how far into Bardon’s Cabala does your curriculum take a student? How do you make such high-level work approachable? Again, if you look at letter magic as a tuning fork system, right, you’re learning how to generate the various elements. The hard part of this is actually bringing it down to the right level of reality. That takes a lot of body training, and there’s really no way to cheat that. But again, as elements, these represent fundamental forces in nature. They’re just not that hard to work with once you know how. From that standpoint, I’d like to think what I have is fairly complete.

PAA: Can you elaborate on how on what happens during these group transmissions and why they are so effective? How have attendees benefited? Do you see significantly faster or safer progress with the letters compared to those who practice alone? Also do you think Bardon intended for students to receive such external help since they didn’t explicitly mention it, or is this a modern adaptation you found necessary for success?

It’s a weekly class. Usually, we do one letter or one planet or one force per week, depending upon what we’re working on. There’ll be a brief Q&A where we go over the previous week’s work. I go through about a 10-minute read on just the theoretical background, what we’re going to do, show people how to do it. Then we lead them through the akashic, mental, astral, and vital aspects of the letter before projecting into the sphere, or, if you will, elemental sphere of that letter to interact with the various entities that live therein. So, from that standpoint, that’s kind of the mechanics of what we do.

The advantage in doing it this way is it takes away the guesswork of working by yourself where you’re going, did I get that right, did I not get that right? You know, again, Bardon’s book, third book, is pretty good. But if you don’t have a teacher to walk you through the process initially, it can be a little confusing. The main thing is you don’t miss nuance. People have practiced alone. I’ve frequently seen an issue with a failure to counterbalance that, causing problems over time or not understanding how the letters fit together globally in terms of a greater system. That’s generally where I’ve seen the problems come in. Also, because we have a lively online discussion forum for this kind of thing, it allows people to compare notes, and it allows people to progress much faster because, as I’ve said before many times, I only know what I know. I only experience these things through the lens created by my personal development.

If someone’s a musician, something that I’m very weak at, or has other training that I don’t have, which is pretty common, they’re going to have a slightly different experience with these forces, and that’s valuable. But you only know about these things if you work with other people. Otherwise, if you’re doing it by yourself, you only know what you know. First of all, Bardon learned this material from the Martinists. Let’s just get that out in the open. If you go into Martinism, they have their own kind of system of Cabala. I don’t think it’s taught very often, and I don’t think many people have much depth to it. But the idea that Bardon purely conjured this out of the ethers is complete garbage.

Letter magic was an underground minor phenomenon or skill set in Germanic and Eastern European magic in the region Bardon was in at the time. We’re not exactly sure who he learned from, but it’s very clear he got at least part of this from the Martinist and probably from a few other related groups. So the idea that you’re supposed to do this on your own is just garbage. Bardon set up the order of the books he did, we think, keeping in mind the second and third book were published after his death by his secretary. Bardon didn’t put those together because, if you can’t find a teacher, in theory, if your clairvoyance and clairaudience are good enough, you can make contact with a cabalistic entity at the planetary level. Radina happens to be a good one who can teach you Cabala. But as a practical matter, the vast majority of people who’ve ever learned this learned it from another human being who was alive and wore pants.

Post-Curriculum Achievements

PAA: Once someone completes the Sixty Skills course curriculum, what kind of real-world magical results have you seen them attain? What are some of the most noteworthy experiences or successes your students have had in the past year? For instance, has a student made verified contact with a particular spirit or accomplished feats like healing, influence, or clairaudience, clairvoyance that really stands out to you?

Well, first of all, an element of character. You know, I’ve seen people radically change who and what they are and their circumstances in life. Obviously, I can’t get too descriptive regarding this, but overcoming long-term dependencies, radically changing their relationships with other human beings, frequently becoming quite wealthy as a result of improvements in their work life. Pretty common. What I will say is the best magicians out there, you will probably never meet because there’s no incentive for them to be public figures. Only weirdos like me or Mark Rasmus or some of the other more common names out there try to make a living at this stuff. For most people, it simply greatly enhances their work and personal life.

I can’t really get too explicit about that because then you’d know who they are. But I’ve seen people reenter work spaces they’ve been gone from for a decade. I’ve seen people invent things. I’ve seen people radically clean up their personal lives. I mean, this is kind of what magic is supposed to do, right? You know, I’ve got one student who has some of the best internal clairvoyance and clairaudience of any human being I’ve ever met, who occasionally relays messages to me that other entities, mostly cabalistic entities, would like me to know. That’s pretty interesting because I’d worked with those entities years earlier.

PAA: So kind of curious how do these outcomes reflect on the effects of the training, and how do you advise students to stay grounded and responsible with their new abilities?

Well, again, as I’ve said many times before, the thing about being a magician that differentiates you from being just a normal person is you’re held to a different standard. You know the difference with being a magician is you know what you’re doing. You know the ramifications for taking shortcuts, cheating others, treating other people poorly. So, you get punished for that much more severely. I can give lots of examples of that, but suffice to say, the universe does not like anybody getting a free ride. So, if you think the path of the magician is the easy way of doing things, you’re wrong. It does put you in a much larger fishbowl, which allows you to accomplish much greater things.

If you look at a lot of figures from history, magicians tend to be pretty notable. You know, Newton, good example. I’ve given others. But it comes at the cost of your being liable for the decisions you make that most people get off easier on because they make them out of ignorance versus knowledge.

Spontaneous Enlightenment Cases

PAA: In hindsight, what do you think enabled that person to progress so rapidly? Were there specific qualities, prior training, karma, intensity of practicing, divine grace that made this spontaneous enlightenment possible in your program? Did it teach you anything about how quickly the techniques can work or the human potential more broadly? Do you believe others could replicate the pace under the right conditions, or do you view it as a one-off outlier that shouldn’t be deliberately aimed for?

He was built like a brick house. Yeah, semi-pro athlete. Really, really, really solid guy. Came from a deeply religious, faith-based background. Had the ability to focus like nobody’s business, and he just hit it running. It was pretty amazing. I really, really didn’t expect to see something like that. But, hey man, he made it work. That says to me that, again, if your enlightened nature really is your true nature, why should this take years and years and years?

PAA: Do you believe others could replicate the pace under the right conditions, or do you view it as a one-off outlier that shouldn’t be deliberately aimed for?

Again, if enlightenment is our true nature, it shouldn’t take very long to do.

So I look at the Sixty Skills program, if you will, as a continual loop of process improvement. If people are watching these videos 90 years from now and the material is exactly the same, I’ve failed. There has to be a better way of doing these things. If you look at the classical Buddhist and yogic universities in Northern India, from what we gathered, they were rarely longer than three or four years in length. Interesting point to contemplate.

Energetic Dangers of the Outer Planets

PAA: Were you expecting such a severe side effect, and what was it like managing that crisis in real time? Going forward, what precautions do you take or advise others to take when exploring extreme cosmic realms like Pluto or beyond so the practitioners stay psychologically safe? Has this changed how you approached the teaching of the astrospheres?

Well, first of all, know how to invoke Emnisut before you begin that training. I highly, highly, highly advise that. Two, don’t wait. The second that comes across your plate, the second you get that idea, immediately invoke Emnisut and start counterbalancing with solar energy. This isn’t something you want to gut check your way through. Initially, I thought this might have just been an oddity associated with me and my group. But I was contacted by various other practitioners who had worked with the outer planets. Many of them, to be blunt, said their survival of that process was seemingly random.

So learn how to invoke Emnisut. Do it frequently before you start working with the outer planets. That’s my most sincere advice, and that’s the best advice I can give. You know, when working with the extra-solar region, there are a couple of other precautions you can take, and I talk about them in the coursework. Mainly, you can contact some entities I detailed in there that will provide you protection in that realm and will teach you how to generate, generally, what I found to be a three-letter combination that’s specific to you that allows you to traverse those areas. Otherwise, when you look back historically at things like Lovecraft and the creator of the Cthulhu mythos, I suspect that’s what happens when somebody has an accidental ejection into the outer planets or extra-solar region. You notice a lot of those guys died. Yeah. So caveat Empor, right.

The Living Crystal Device

PAA: Can you share more about the living crystal, about what the living crystal does, how it aids one’s practice? Is it an amplifier of ambient energy, a tool for focus, or something else? Also, what have been the reactions or results among those who have used it in training, and does it significantly boost certain exercises or experiences?

Geometry for the living crystal is really important. The way we currently have it set up, it primarily generates mental and a little bit of astral energy. But that’s the thing, it actually generates more of it. One of the first discoveries we made in working with it was we found that most people, it takes a while to learn how to do the single-pointed focus exercises. We thought this had something to do with the body learning how to do it. No, it turns out the body needs a specific kind of energy to do that, and it doesn’t have much of it naturally. The living crystal device allows people to drop into those highly focused states and trance states almost immediately by providing something that closely resembles that energy that you can work with.

It’s really quite remarkable, and we’re continuing research on it to this day. Like I said, it’s not an amplifier so much as an addition. It gives you more of something. Now, what it can also do is you can take a sigil where you can project an energy into the crystal ball above the device, and it will begin mimicking that energy, and it will continue to do so until you shut it off. That’s another interesting thing that we found.

PAA: What have been some of the reactions amongst those who used it during training?

Everybody appreciates it. There are some people for whom it takes them a while to begin to feel the energy. It’s pretty rare and surprising. A lot of these people are really good at ChiKung. But everybody who’s worked with it long enough begins to feel the energy that it’s developing and then can use it to aid their other practices.

What I recommend in most cases is I recommend practicing with it one session and then not practicing it for another. That way, you don’t create a dependence on it. But it’s really quite remarkable.

This is the difference between an internal and external power practitioner. Both schools draw upon the body to generate the effects they do. With an internal power practitioner, you’re doing it intentionally, and you’re making efforts to strengthen that. So yeah, the body as a talisman describes exactly what we do.

Vibrating Letters Without Sound

PAA: How did this ability manifest in your group, and what does it indicate about the relationship between physical training and magical skill? I recall you noted it seemed linked to excessive to extensive ligament tendon training, strengthening the antenna of the body. Does the internal vibration technique change the way you teach letter magic now? For example, do you foresee new exercises that specifically train this skill used in the body as a talisman for the cosmic language?

We learned how to do this on Pluto, where you’re essentially vibrating the letters at a cellular level. I don’t know any other way to describe it than that. This ends up strengthening the overall ability at letter magic as you combine that internal vibration with all of your other techniques, be that breath holds or external vibration through voice or what have you. It simply makes things much stronger and allows you to draw on the resources of the body much more effectively, which can be a big help if you’re in a place where there isn’t much elemental basis for what you’re doing to allow it to function.

But again, it was largely a Plutonian invention that we found this.

Does it change the way you teach letter magic now? No, it’s an addition to it, and when people learn how to do that, they simply get much stronger. This is the thing about the body as a talisman is important. This is the difference between an internal and external power practitioner. Both schools draw upon the body to generate the effects they do. With an internal power practitioner, you’re doing it intentionally, and you’re making efforts to strengthen that. So yeah, the body as a talisman describes exactly what we do.

Advanced Planetary, Zodiac, and Sephirothic Work

PAA: Which of these discoveries surprised you the most, and how they expand our hermetic understanding of these spheres? For example, Pluto being the stepping-off point to realms beyond our solar system is a profound insight. What does working with Pluto and beyond entail for a magician, and did it require you to develop new methods of protection or perception?

The biggest surprise to me was probably Pluto. Aside from being a home from the dead, which you could guess from classical works, it’s the home of a Egregores. Any Egregore that’s ever been and will ever be, you can find there and work with directly. I don’t think this changes their ability to influence you. But on a certain level, it would allow you to resurrect things that are not extant in our current timeline. Now, whether this is a good idea or not is another question. I also think it would allow you to join a community of practice very quickly in a way that otherwise might take significantly longer. Again, whether that’s worth doing or not, well, that’s up to the practitioner.

But that, I think, was really the biggest surprise of all, and just the generic disinterest of Plutonian entities, you know, are being there. They all recognized that our being there was unusual and rare, but their kind of take on all of it is everybody shows up here eventually, so what’s the rush? The magic we learn inside our solar system is unique to each of those solar systems. The extra-solar realm is literally where you get into things like universal cabala, universal letter magic, universal forces. They’re typically pretty harsh. They’re generally not very safe to work with. You never want to bring them inside your body.

I don’t clearly understand yet what the ultimate point of that is because, again, by definition, the magic you need to influence things in our world is unique to our world, but it’s certainly an interesting point for consideration, and hopefully, a brighter student out there can get you a better answer on that one. But, as I’ve talked about before, you need specific protection for that because these forces are literally alien to our evolution.

PAA: Can you explain what the stacking involves, and what it might look like? Is it, for example, invoking a planetary force through a specific letter formula all at once or sequencing energies together in a single meditation? What kinds of results did you observe when you started stacking forces, and were the effects exponentially stronger or qualitatively different than working with one energy at a time, and ultimately did this inform how you approached the later stages of the curriculum, such as stacking zodiac signs or sephiroth in advanced practice?

At the end of the day, you’ll end up with an akashic force, a sephiroth, a zodiac force, which is mental, planetary force, which is astral, and a letter force, which is vital or etheric in nature. This is four-letter magic. This is why you learn four-letter combinations so you could combine these forces. Now, the reason why you want to do this is when you learn how to establish equilibrium using the letters and then the planets and then the zodiac and then finally the sephiroth, it results in a far more refined access to those energies. You get much stronger, and everybody who’s done this has recognized this.

You also develop a much higher ability to tune into a specific effect that you want. Man, there are some surprises out there. You know, when I generate the letter K through Gemini, you get this off-white colored energy that represents what most people would think of enlightenment if they haven’t experienced enlightenment. It’s this very high mental level aspect of non-dual light. Well, that makes it very easy to jump over to non-dual light itself because you’re that much closer to it. That’s one such example. Physical effects, such as, you know, weather control and the like, get much easier.

So yeah, there are lots of reasons to learn how to do this, but the way you want to look at it is it’s simply teaching you to tune your access to something much more specifically. Interestingly, the better you get at this, the less energy it takes to pull off a given effect. Because now, instead of painting with a really broad brush, right, using lots of energy, if you will, to cause an effect, now you’re using a laser-like focus to do it. You can be very specific.

PAA: How does working with the zodiac differ from planetary work? What will the upcoming zodiac course offer to students in practical terms as they are learning to enter each sign’s influence and gain specific abilities and insights from it, and have you found the zodiac forces are gentler or more beneficent than the planets since you noted the zodiac can temper the harsher planetary aspects? Any interesting experiences so far from the zodiac meditations you can share?

First of all, it’s very mental, and the planets are very energetic or astral. It’s the big note. From your blog, it appears that each zodiac sign’s meditation involves a combination of a constellation symbol sigil, its related planetary power, and an elementalist sensation, effectively creating a three-part formula. Combine the three, and you get letter magic with direction. So, as you wrote, yeah, you get a three-letter combination. This is why, again, when you’re learning letter magic, you want to learn the primary letters and then the two-letter and then the three-letter and four-letter combinations so you can do this work more effectively.

The zodiac is largely mental in nature. Now, whether it’s the source of mental energy writ large or simply something so similar that it works as an equivalent, that I can’t answer to you. But it allows you to access things directly at the mental sphere without having trained any of the other spheres, which is why we’ll be offering a short course in the zodiac meditations that people without a background in any of the other Sixty Skills work can access directly, and you can use it for all normal things to use magic for—healing, wealth, martial arts, you name it—because that dribbles through.

One of the interesting things that we found that we didn’t expect was that, in some ways, astrology gets it wrong. The planets don’t control the zodiac. The zodiac tempers the planets. So, after doing the zodiacal meditations, the planets become much softer, and the higher nature of the zodiac essentially guides the rougher or cruder or more astral forces of the planets. This, in turn, makes them much easier to work with, which also makes you, as a magician, much more effective. The entities at the planetary level essentially look up to the entities at the zodiacal level as being their gods or their leadership, if you will.

It’s definitely a hierarchy, and they look up to those entities. So, if you’ve worked with them, the planetary beings tend to be much more receptive to your needs in a much softer manner. Maybe this is because you’re simply able to tune in with more fidelity now regarding those planetary forces, but everybody’s noticed this, and as an adjunct, you also get stronger at it.

Any interesting experiences so far from the zodiac meditations that you can share? Yeah, basically, my suspicion as to why Buddhism did so well with the ancient Greeks is because they were already doing these high-level mental meditations on the zodiac. So, it really wasn’t that big a shift for them. Additionally, the tempering effect of the zodiac on the, let’s call them, lower forces or more terrestrial forces is really quite profound. Pretty amazing, actually, and makes everything much easier to do afterwards.

PAA: Can you outline your approach to the sephirothic series? Are you activating multiple sephirothic spheres in consciousness simultaneously or moving up the tree in secession and then combining their influences? I’m also curious about any surprises you’ve encountered. For example, you mentioned that during Daath work, you had to go back a little due to something involving Sirius, perhaps an insight that Daath connects to the star Sirius? What was this about, and generally, how do the sephirothic meditations compare to the previous planetary, zodiac ones in terms of intensity and outcome? Will there eventually be a dedicated sephiroth course for students, and what prerequisites would you require someone tackling the tree of life through your method?

Actually, we’re doing both. We start with Malkuth, then go to Yesod, Hod, so on and so forth, on up to Kether as part of the path of enlightenment. Once you’re there, there’s an exercise you’ll learn where you invoke all of the sephiroth at a time in a kind of circle, generating an akashic level equilibrium that’s quite profound and makes that skip to non-dual light pretty short. By basically stacking all these forces—first at the vital with the letters, then at the astral with the planets, and then at the mental with the zodiac, and then at the akashic level with the sephiroth—you take all these independent pieces of reality, disparate pieces of reality, and you combine them back together again.

This creates an intense light sphere that you end up projecting into. But that’s not the end. Once there, you’ll notice this almost band of reality. It’s hard to describe that the light can’t go past. Then, using single-pointed focus, you bore a hole through that and punch your way to the other side. That’s where you experience non-dual light in true form. What that is, I can’t really tell you because it can only be experienced by definition. Anything that’s not bound by physicality, time, or space would be something that human beings would have a hard time describing. But this is certainly the fastest and most reliable way I’ve found to experience that state.

When we got to Daath, did that meditation, we were instructed to meditate upon Sirius. We went there. We were given a specific set of yogic exercises that seemingly activated some latent magical potential in the body. Everybody discovered that they were much stronger energetically after that, by the way. Then we went on to Binah. So that was an important part of that that was completely unexpected. I don’t know where any of that came from, but it was important. We learned a lot of valuable lessons there. So good stuff. Yes, there will eventually be a sephiroth course out when I finish with the zodiac course.

Magic Camp and Future Projects

PAA: What do these immersive camps provide that is different from solo or online study? Can you share any memorable transformations or feats achieved by attendees during Magic Camp, for example, breakthroughs in concentration, energy work, or evocation that happen on site? Also, what are your future plans for Magic Camp? Do you envision increasing their frequency, doing region-specific themes, or perhaps creating advanced alumni-only camps for deeper work?

Basically, we focus a lot on physical techniques—rebounding. Rebounding will be a part of the basic course for Magic Camp every single time because it’s hard to learn that from video. It’s not a terribly difficult technique to implement, but it does take a couple of hours typically for most people to kind of get it, and people will see how quickly that improves their practice. It’s really quite remarkable. Rebounding is by far the best body training technique I found anywhere. In terms of what happened at camp, spontaneous examples of weather control, you know, rain during a dry season location. Huge breakthroughs with many people, some people actually hearing spirits for the first time.

One individual who had struggled with clear sentience for about a year and a half, by day three, he had it, you know. So, these are all things that you can expect there, specifically because when you work in this intense one-on-one environment, you get the etheric or near-physical energetic effects that you’re not going to get from video working by yourself, and they’re quite profound, and it just gives you another tool to work with. Future plans for Magic Camp? Yeah, plan on doing this four to five times a year. It’ll be regionally based. Ideally, you’ll have US-based events for North America, probably in Mexico mostly, although we are having one in Maryland this year, so you can check that out.

We’re going to be doing one every year in Europe, probably Spain or Portugal. We’ll be doing one every year in Southeast Asia, again probably Bali. Then we’ll also be doing one every year probably in Antalya in Turkey. So students who are from Eastern Europe or Russia who have trouble getting visas elsewhere can come join in and all the fun. So that’s the goal. We’ll probably have advanced coursework an additional one to two times per year just based upon desire. Unfortunately, that’ll probably be limited to a single session a year for things like evocation or stellar magic or the zodiac just because the number of people involved in that level of practice aren’t that big. Hopefully, that’ll change, and it’ll be something that we can do on a regular basis. But that all depends upon you good people joining the show.

PAA: Do you still plan to roll out these teachings? If so, what can students expect from the Emei training? Will it be integrated into Sixty Skills as a module or internal martial arts or offered as a standalone for energy cultivation? As for the alchemy course, are we talking about internal alchemy, external laboratory alchemy, or a blend of both? These areas are quite extensive. How will you condense and structure them for practitioners already familiar with the rest of the Sixty Skills curriculum?

First of all, the breath retention part, which is the most important part of the course, will be included in the various levels of the master course, the planetary and zodiacal courses, and the sephiroth course. But the Emei course itself will get into all of the chikung and the energetic healing and the hands-on work that will not be included in the other hermetic training. So, from that standpoint, it will be quite valuable. Additionally, the Emei system is a healing system, but it didn’t come about as a healing system. It was a more complete system of magical practice from Emei mountain in western China.

I teach the medical portion of it because that’s what I know. An enterprising individual out there might be able to find the missing parts of this. My suspicion is this is one of the surviving portions of one of those defunct Vajrayana systems everybody talks about in Vajrayana Buddhism, but that is up to you to determine because I only know what I know. But it’s quite profound, and yes, that will be coming out at some point. As for the alchemy course, we’re talking about spagyrics, which some people argue isn’t alchemy at all, but essentially, it will be a short course on the seven basics where you learn to use plant-based alchemically derived liquids suspended in alcohol mostly to improve your magical progression.

I’ve done these. I’ve had several of my students do these, and it’s very helpful at the mental and high astral level for developing a lot of those abilities. The idea being you take one of these every day for a year as it opens these things up within you. It’s pretty profound stuff. It’s taken longer because I’ve just been busy. Kind of the way it goes, guys. But have no doubt, it will be forthcoming.

The Four-Part Quest and Beyond

PAA: Without asking you to divulge anything premature, can you give us a glimpse of what the remaining two parts might involve? Are there higher tiers of reality you intend to explore, perhaps the realm of fixed stars and constellations beyond the zodiac or the primal elemental chaos or even something like direct work with divine providence and unity? Alternatively, is the latter half more about integrating everything achieved so far, for example, combining elemental, planetary, zodiacal, and sephirothic magic into a single universal mode of operation? Essentially, what do you foresee as the next frontier for your personal practice and teachings once the current curriculum is fully mapped out?

Once you finish that path of enlightenment, the upward stroke, if you will, going from letters to planets to zodiac to sephiroth into non-dual light, which is all covered, will be covered in coursework. You then have what’s called the path of manifestation, what some would call the path of return. This is where you take this now very diffuse unified energy and you start breaking it down into individual pieces so it can be utilized in the phenomenal world. So far, we’ve just about finished the downward arc of the sephiroth and are about to start our year work with the zodiac. Pretty profound, you know, a lot of magic triangle work. Learning how to focus and clear the mind in increasingly interesting ways.

A far different understanding of the role of akasha. As one, a couple of the entities mentioned, when it came to understanding akasha, me and my compatriots were basically, in their words, we were missing half the point of what was involved. Whether this will eventually result in our being able to do physical magic or not, I don’t know. What I will say is, increasingly, we can leave out the steps when doing things and simply will things to happen. It’s pretty remarkable how that works. But this also leads to needing to be in control of yourself. That’s a whole other discussion.

Publications and Legacy

PAA: Do you have plans for any new books or written works? For instance, as your curriculum reaches its culmination, do you intend to publish a detailed explanation of the entire Sixty Skills system or perhaps a memoir-style account of these extraordinary experiments—outer planets, etc.? The community would greatly benefit from your insights in print. Additionally, how do you approach writing versus video or in-person teaching? Do you find the writing allows you to capture nuances of these teachings differently?

There will be books. In fact, I’ll basically end up rewriting all three of Bardon’s first three books. There’ll be a book on unified letter magic, absolutely. The upcoming planetary magic book is almost done. So expect to see that sometime, hopefully, before the end of this year or probably the beginning of 2026. There will be a memoir at some point, just discussing how various things unfolded. Upon my death, all of my personal journal practice journals will be published as well. Those aren’t very exciting, I’m afraid. They just basically list techniques that I discovered when doing things.

The writing is very time-consuming versus video, which is kind of amazing to think about, but it allows for being specific in a way that video sometimes does not. That said, video is, generally speaking, a far better teaching medium than writing is. So, you know, mixed bag, right? But there’ll be something there for everybody because, ultimately, when I die and reincarnate, I don’t want to have to go through the trouble of spending 30 years of my life to figure out a bunch of things that I could have done in a year and a half. Call me selfish, but, of course, everybody gets to benefit from that, so why not?

The Adept’s Path Forward

PAA: Finally, what do you see as the endgame for a Sixty Skills trainee? Suppose someone has worked through the master course and all the advanced courses—Cabala, planetary, zodiac, sephiroth, whatever comes next. In your eyes, what level of adeptship will they have reached? What capabilities should they have mastered at that point, for example, full command of elemental energy, the ability to converse with any spiritual entity, profound realization of their own divine nature? What would you advise such a graduate to do thereafter? Is it simply a matter of pursuing one’s personal spiritual missions with the skills acquired, or are there specific higher goals like true enlightenment, service to humanity, or joining the ranks of the inner planet adepts that you encourage them to aim for? In essence, when someone combines the entire Sixty Skills journey, how do you envision them contributing to the world or the tradition, and what is next on the horizon for them?

First of all, at that point, they will definitely have encountered non-dual light. Hopefully, they’ll have some ability to fully project into that non-dual state on their own with reliability. With me right now, it’s about one session in eight and one session in nine. But that’s been improved from a whopping three experiences with that over a 30-year period previously. So I think that’s pretty good. What I’m beginning to see is the ability to generate magical effects, strength strictly through force of will. You think about it, and it happens.

Now, there’s still the energetics and all the other stuff that have to go along to support that. That’s what we spend a lot of time building up to in the system. But increasingly, what I’m seeing is people have the ability to impact the reality around them by simply thinking about it. It’s pretty amazing. Absolutely true. All three—full command of elemental energies, the ability to converse with any spiritual entity, profound realization of their own divine nature. You will end up pursuing your spiritual mission. You may end up changing what that is. There will typically be an aspect of service to what you do because people need help, and you have the ability to give them help in a way that most can’t.

So all of that’s true. What I will say is people who have been through this process are remarkably grounded and remarkably physical at the end of the day. So it’s not this airy-fairy kind of mental-level imagination kind of phenomenon. People who’ve gone the distance are remarkably real and remarkably devoted and connected to the here and now. If someone isn’t, well, that’s probably a warning sign. Really, that’s up to them and the divine, but everyone who’s done this that I’ve met has led a most remarkable life. They are not, as I frequently mention, grandma basement dwellers. They are vigorous participants in reality. If someone isn’t, well, you might want to think about that. But otherwise, as per usual, train hard and be well.

PAA: Thank you so much this I think is one of the best looks at the scope of the Sixty Skills curriculum. The depth, logic and interconnectedness of it all is clear to see, and as we keep saying completely in line with Franz Bardons description of the 3rd Tarot Card. For clarity I list it below showing all 5 stages of the curriculum, check your copy of KTQ.

The Symbolism of the Third Tarot Card

The picture on the opposite page is the graphic representation of the Third Tarot Card.
The first (or outer) circle has ten sections symbolizing the ten quabbalistic keys.
These ten quabbalistic keys (v. their color symbolism) are identical with the ten
Hebrew Sephiroth.

Since these ten keys, or Sephiroth, comprise the knowledge of the whole universe
with all its ways of existence, methods and systems, they are placed in the outer
circle.

The fact that these ten keys refer to the micro- as well as the macrocosm becomes
evident also by the fact that the next, i.e., the second circle, reflects the signs of the
zodiac of the whole universe, again in the relevant color symbolism.

The third circle (going from the outside to the inside) is the planetary circle, which is
identified by the planetary symbols and the colors analogous to the planets.
All three circles enclose a large square symbolizing the four elements represented in
the relevant color symbolism. This square, indicating the realization of the elements,
symbolizes the material world.

The inner, smaller square signifies the tetragrammatonic mystery, the Jod-He-Vau-He
or quabbalistic fourfold Key necessary for mastering the elements and their
influences.

The sun in the center of the picture represents Divine Providence, the Akasa Principle,
the origin of all that exists.

Thus not only man (i.e., the microcosm), but also the whole macrocosm is graphically
represented by this picture. Furthermore, all keys are drawn in it, the fourfold key
being especially dominant, since it is the key to the realization, the materialization of
things. Everything that the quabbalah teaches us, i.e., its whole system, all analogies,
follows clearly from this picture and its clear symbolism. The meditating quabbalist
will therefore deduce all analogies from the Third Tarot Card.

Key to the True Quabbalah

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