---
title: "Higher Guardian Angel Contact, Bardon, Sixty Skills, Akasha and Non-Dual Light"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/higher-guardian-angel-contact-bardon-sixty-skills-akasha-and-non-dual-light/
date: 2026-07-25
modified: 2026-07-25
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction What does it actually mean to make contact with the Higher Guardian Angel—and how can a practitioner distinguish a vague impression from a clear, direct encounter? In this episode..."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
tags:
  - "Franz Bardon"
  - "Hermetics"
  - "HGA"
  - "Magic"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/ChatGPT-Image-Jul-17-2026-05_13_42-PM-1024x576.png
word_count: 10550
---

# Higher Guardian Angel Contact, Bardon, Sixty Skills, Akasha and Non-Dual Light

## Introduction

What does it actually mean to make contact with the Higher Guardian Angel—and how can a practitioner distinguish a vague impression from a clear, direct encounter?

In this episode of Perseus Conversations, James speaks with Fred, known in the Perseus and Sixty Skills communities for his detailed accounts of magical practice, energy work and direct experience.

Fred explains the difference between soft contact and hard contact with the Higher Guardian Angel, why he regards the HGA as an external spiritual intelligence rather than simply a higher aspect of the self, and how his earliest experiences eventually led him toward Franz Bardon’s system and the Abramelin operation.

Fred also discusses how his background in esoteric martial arts shaped his approach to magical training. For him, spiritual practice should produce something practical and observable—not merely interesting ideas, symbolic interpretations or vague experiences.

This is a wide-ranging conversation about what can happen when years of martial arts, energy cultivation, Hermetic training and direct magical practice begin to converge.

The conversation explores:

- Soft and hard contact with the Higher Guardian Angel

- Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics — IIH

- The Practice of Magical Evocation — PME

- The Key to the True Quabbalah — KTQ

- The Abramelin operation and Knowledge and Conversation

- Sixty Skills and continuous energy practice

- Martial arts, qigong and practical demonstrations of force

- Clairvoyance, clairaudience and mental wandering

- Elemental equilibrium and the generation of Akasha

- Non-Dual Light and divine authority

- Meeting gnomes and working with elemental beings

- Why disciplined practice matters more than natural talent

- How different systems can support and strengthen one another

Table of Contents

- Introduction- Interview- Introduction and Fred’s Background- Early Contact with the Higher Guardian Angel- What Is the Higher Guardian Angel?- Objective Esoteric Abilities and Martial Arts- Soft Contact, Hard Contact and When to Begin- Bardon, Sixty Skills and the Abramelin Operation- Equilibrium, Akasha and Non-Dual Light- Streaming Energy Through Daily Life- Mental Wandering and the Gnomes- Final Advice and Closing

## Interview

## Introduction and Fred’s Background

**James:** Welcome to Perseus Conversations. Today I’m speaking with Fred, whose detailed writing in the Perseus and Sixty Skills communities has helped make difficult-to-describe experiences much more concrete. A recent Discord discussion inspired this conversation. Fred, welcome.

**Fred:** Hey there. Hope you're doing well. Thank you for organizing this and indulging me a little bit and yeah here we are.

**James:** Your reports are genuinely useful because they give practical detail to experiences that are often described vaguely. Before we begin, could you introduce yourself and explain the training that brought you here?

**Fred:** Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so I'm Fred. I'm on the Discord as well as the Perseus community as Utabishtam. In terms of my background and so forth, so I came to the magical training relatively late in my career, my career of practice. My first training was probably around 2006 or so is when I started training some esoteric Japanese martial art called Kaza Rasheru. A style of Japanese monastic martial arts. And then over time I was introduced to the writings of one grandmaster Wongq Kit of the Shaolin Wanam Institute. And you know, one thing led to another and I got to train with him face to face. That kind of skyrocketed my martial arts and my energy work attainment and training.

**Fred:** And then over time I learned from some other teachers almost always from the esoteric I'm sorry from the energy work and martial arts side of things. So that's one of the primary lenses through which I focus my training. How can I make something immediately practical in the here and now sort of thing and with you know some of our mutual acquaintances and teachers like Bob Smith at 60 skills and so forth about the grounding energy into you know physical reality for practical benefits that's the main way that I evaluate am I going to spend the time on this sort of thing basically in terms of you know the magical experiences and so forth outside of the energy training.

**Fred:** Back in 2015, I had my first I guess this is something we'll talk about more soft versus hard contact with the holy guardian angel, which kind of put me on the path that eventually, you know, 10 freaking years later got me into Initiation into Hermetics and then meeting the 60 skills in the Perseus community and other things. Such as getting hard contact and so forth that led to the conversation we're having today.

**James:** I had not realised this went back ten years. Your martial and energetic background seems to explain why your approach is so practical and grounded. How did that first light contact arise? Was it connected to the energy work you were already doing?

## Early Contact with the Higher Guardian Angel

**Fred:** Oh yeah. So in terms of getting that first like obvious but light contact with the holy guardian angel. So back in I want to say 20 thou yeah 20 the 2015 2016 time period or so. I was training in a particular martial arts school. Almost all my stories relate to martial arts because that's what I've done a lot. So I was training in a particular martial arts school called low tiger count and it is an particular martial art from Indonesia which has a heavy Chinese as well as Indonesian influence in terms of the energy work and the martial art fighting technique. And one of the things that you wind up doing once you're moving from that to like, okay, you've been around, you're an intermediate level student, I'm starting to trust you with some of the good stuff, so to speak.

**Fred:** And the part of the training that my then master taught me was if what we would call clairvoyance training. Essentially it was assume a particular static posture. If you're for the audience, if you're understanding a martial arts, it's related to the horse riding stance and then like looking holding your arms in a certain way and then just like looking at your arms until you can start seeing the energy basically and you know because of the prior training you know I had a sensation of energy the clairsentience training that was very well established by that point but I couldn't really see or hear the energy worth a damn at all. So, so my master then shows me that exercise and I start developing the ability to see the energy much faster than expected.

**Fred:** So I ask my best friend who got me into you know magic and esoterics and stuff in the first place and he does what we would call some scrying some mental wandering some divination all those like information seeking things and then he says oh hey it looks like there might be an angel watching out for you sort of thing and I'm like the hell are you talking about sort of thing so he's like all right here so Now, a very common thing you'll hear in my silly life stories is I don't know what the heck is going on. I ask someone smarter than me. He gives me an exercise to do and then I do the homework basically. So, he tells me, hey, you should do this stuff. And at the end of the day, it turns out it was a form of pathworking basically.

**Fred:** And through the pathworking basically mental wandering meditating on the presence of the angel praying and so forth and just trying to get information I'm able to delineate the sigil of the angel in question and then I start having some very vague contact and loose contact with this particular being and eventually that grows into full actual visual appearance of it. As well as conversations as well. And then again, this is back in 2015 2016. And then I don't really do a whole lot with it unfortunately because I didn't know what to do with it essentially. I didn't have the background knowledge to know like hey, how do I deepen and cultivate this relationship? Like what's in it for me? What's in it for the angel? What's in it for other people? Will this turn into something bad in the future for me? I didn't know.

**Fred:** Therefore, I didn't really do a whole lot with it other than just, you know, practice my clairvoyance and clairaudience a little bit here and there and, you know, sometimes asking that being some questions related to my spiritual cultivation, which was all very vague stuff, frankly. I had a bit of a Buddhist background in terms of the meditation and energy cultivation and so forth, like a lot of people in the esoteric martial arts community. And eventually over time, you know, fast forward almost 8 years after that, so like 2020, no, actually not sooner than that, maybe 2021 or so. This is going to sound like a silly anime fantasy, frankly. I was, you know, it was my birthday. I was just sleeping basically. And I had a dream. The angel was in the dream.

**Fred:** And the angel very explicitly said, "Hey, you should do this exercise I'm going to show you." And the exercise turned out to be what I realized in retrospect was a form of kundalini awakening. Basically like, hey, you should sit down or stand in whatever posture in these postures I'm going to show you and you should focus on this energy center for, you know, a month and then build up to the next energy center and so on and so forth and then you'll know what to do next afterwards. Yeah. So I did the thing and eventually I started getting more signals as to hey you should practice this thing over here or hey you should spend more focus on this sort of thing and then eventually the angel checks in a couple of times and that ultimately leads to me finally taking a look at Initiation into Hermetics you know France Bardon's works and so forth.

**Fred:** Now, to give you an idea of how long it takes me to get anything freaking done, the aforementioned friend who told me what was going on, like, hey, it's an angel. Like, you should probably do something about that sort of thing. He had actually told me about Initiation into Hermetics, Agrippa's three books of occult philosophy, Qabbalah, he told me about all of this stuff back in 2011. So, so it took me a very long while, including the an esoteric, you know, punch in the face basically it to finally get around to doing any of the stuff that my very generous friends and teachers had told me about a decade ago essentially. So, what a great stop. Yeah. So that very long- winded tale is what got me into soft contact and so forth over a much longer period of time than it should have.

**James:** That gives important context. What began as light contact developed over many years into something much more specific. Let’s turn to the nature of that contact.

**James:** A community question asks whether you understand the Higher Guardian Angel as an external entity, a higher aspect of the self, or something else entirely. What is the nature of our connection to the HGA in daily life?

## What Is the Higher Guardian Angel?

**Fred:** Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm going to be very opinionated about this. I'm very opinionated about a lot of things. I very strongly believe and accept the position that the holy guardian angel is a separate entity. It is not just who you are sort of thing. Sorry, I'm so I'm 41. I watched Lion King back in the day as a kid. I'm just imagining people saying like when like Mufasa shows up in the clouds and it's like, "Ah, Simba, remember who you are sort of thing." I'm not that kind of guy basically. For me coming from primarily these like orthodox systems and like established systems and so forth of how to get in contact with the HGA and what do you do with the HGA and so forth.

**Fred:** The holy guardian angel is very thoroughly so an external entity that is in the divine plan if you want to use that terminology or something else that's more palatable depending on your beliefs about how the universe works and so forth. The holy guardian angel is a piece of divinity, a facet of divinity whose greatest quest and goal in the divine plan essentially. And I know this is like ridiculously over the top of religious terminology. It certainly I know it sounds that way. It is the entity that is most thoroughly invested and involved with your spiritual cultivation and maturity. It is there a lot of different cultures.

**Fred:** Basically every culture that has a religious and mystical and magical system has the idea of the very powerful and wise tutelary spirit whose entire purpose is to bring your bring you closer to enlightenment closer to spiritual fulfillment closer to spiritual cultivation and to make you the best version of you that is possible. Now every culture has its own ideas as to the nature of this being and that's where you have a lot of different means of contact in different magical systems. Certain systems which I completely disagree with have the idea that oh the knowledge and conversation and contact of the holy guardian angel is you awakening to the higher aspect of yourself. I see where they're coming from.

**Fred:** I also know historically human historically speaking that is that idea primarily came about during that strange time period of the of the 19th and 20th centuries where people were emphasizing the biologic and psychologic paradigms of magic and esoterics like oh spirits are just a part of your own brain or oh a mystical experience is just you committing therapy on yourself sort of thing. I completely disagree with all that thanks to my experiences and experiences that will be completely unexplainable in the purely psychological paradigm of magic. So, I don't believe in that stuff. I also like trolling these people by doing objective acts of esoteric ability and they don't know what the hell that's going on sort of thing.

**Fred:** So, I'm not enlightened enough to not troll some people every so often kind of thing. But it's all for the sake of everyone's enu enlightenment and cultivation. So, I don't feel too bad doing that.

**James:** You mentioned objective esoteric abilities. What kinds of abilities or demonstrations do you mean?

## Objective Esoteric Abilities and Martial Arts

**Fred:** So, yeah. So, in terms of the martial arts side of things, one of the reasons I love martial arts is you can't martial arts. You either won the fight or you didn't win the fight. Basically, to steal a line from a movie, one person is standing and one person's on the ground. You can pretty well tell who's got it, basically. So, there are a couple things that we do in martial arts to test our ability, test our force that doesn't involve, you know, punching someone so hard in the liver that they develop internal bleeding and, you know, poop blood. Basically, it's very impolite to make your classmate poop blood in the classroom sort of thing. So, we have other ways of testing skills.

**Fred:** One of the things that I've been able to do, for example, is this is going to sound very silly and stupid, but what you do is you take some eggs and you also have like two chairs basically and it's like you're standing in the middle of the chairs. One chair is right to your left and one of them is just off to your to your right. You take a step back and you balance an egg on each one of those chairs or like a small table. And then on top of the eggs, you balance a length of sugar cane or bamboo or some plank of wood basically. Then you focus energy at your palm and then you slash the bamboo with your palm. And then if you do it correctly with the right level of speed and force, you cut through the sugar cane or the bamboo or whatever, without crunching the eggs, basically.

**James:** I see.

**Fred:** Yeah. So, you know, for most people, they can't understand how that works at a physical level. Now, if you want to get into the actual pulley and pin mechanic of, you know, mechanical physics, yeah, once you've severed the severeds the length of bamboo, for example, maybe at a mechanical weak point or something, that bamboo is no longer one piece of wood and therefore doesn't crunch straight downward onto the eggs. Energetically what's happening is that your single-pointed concentration and your ability to focus force at one particular striking point of your arm or your palm or whatever and what is what gives you the overall physical wherewithal to be able to do something like that.

**Fred:** And you know that's something that most people can't do on a regular physical basis. Another thing that can that I've done in the past, accidentally actually, so I'm I'm 5 foot five. I'm a very short person, especially for Americans. People don't expect me to be able to like jump very far or lift up very heavy things or anything of the sort. I have in the past, from a standing position jumped straight up to the point where my feet were about, four feet off the ground. That was a purely energetic thing done completely by accident. And you know, I haven't really been able to reproduce that regularly. I know how to train it, but it's also a very obvious thing that hey, you're standing on the ground and then without going into a big windup, now you're four feet in the air sort of thing as a jump. Not levitation, just as purely a jump basically. So, that's that's a really fun one to make people question what they think is possible.

**James:** That is the kind of practical qigong demonstration people will find interesting.

**Fred:** Exactly. Yep.

**James:** At what point in a practitioner’s development is it best to pursue soft or hard contact? First, how do you distinguish the two? And should access to Akasha and Non-Dual Light be established before contact with the HGA, or afterwards?

## Soft Contact, Hard Contact and When to Begin

**Fred:** Yeah, absolutely. So those are really good questions and those are some of the questions that kind of motivated this whole conversation actually. So in terms of the getting some definitions on board, which I realize I kind of blitzed over in my last ramble there. So the way that I define soft contact and a couple people that I used to know well as well, soft contact is relatively vague sort of things. It's maybe you give a prayer or you put out your request for aid into the cosmos for example and then you get this like vague prickle on your conscience that says hey you should do this or you should probably avoid that situation sort of thing. It's it's very vague.

**Fred:** Sometimes you mistake it for yourself and your own thoughts but regardless it is not very solid. You can't like point across the room and say, "There's my angel. He's talking to me right now and this are the exact words that I'm hearing." Sort of thing. So, so that's soft contact and that is the sort of thing that anyone can develop very well and I'll get to that right after this part. Hard contact on the other hand is very solid. It is extremely unambiguous and it is to the point where you can effectively do what I just said that you can't do in soft contact. Like you can point across the room and say my holy guardian angel has manifested over in that corner over there and these are the exact words they are telling me sort of thing.

**Fred:** It is effectively to the point where you have absolutely no doubt in your mind as well as your internal andor external vision and hearing and so forth. That is your clairvoyance, clair audience etc. There is no doubt in your mind that this conversation is happening. That being is right there and you can communicate with them at any moment in time without any interruption whatsoever using the methods that the holy guardian angel teaches you to communicate with them.

**James:** That distinction is very clear.

**Fred:** Yeah. And then getting to the next to another part of the u the community question there. So when do you do it essentially? And that is a question that has plagued so many people across millennia basically. So if you want to look at the classical sources, you know, we're talking a Grippa's books of occult philosophy for example, you're talking priestly initiation rituals. You're talking shamanic rituals and so forth and means of initiation. Pretty much all of them say that you should start aiming at soft contact as soon as possible essentially. I in some situations even before you formally start any like magical slashthomegical training like for a lot of these different systems getting that soft contact like that ability to you know link to the divine and start getting advice directly from the being whose entire role in this universe is your spiritual fulfillment and so forth.

**Fred:** Like ideally you get that on your radar as soon as possible sort of thing like before you're trusted with you know the magical version of a gun and a rocket launcher basically. And in terms of how you do that it's it's actually very simple and it's one of the things that one of a particular ritual magician I used to chat with every so often he does very good work. So his YouTube channel is Amateur Magus. He is a predominantly Golden Dawn style ritual magician and he has the running joke which we kind of both believe is actually a thing that there is effectively what he calls a demonic public relations campaign trying to keep people away from the divine essentially. Like why would you seek out the holy guardian angel? It's so freaking hard. You've got to live like a monk for a whole year or whatever stuff. Why don't you just watch TV instead? Why don't you just, you know, have a beer instead? You know, crap like that essentially.

**Fred:** That all being said, even if you read the most dry and technical, boring, magical literature out there, by which I mean Agrippa's books of oult philosophy, I will rag on Agrippa for the rest of my life. I've read his books multiple times and the guy needed a freaking editor, but that's a rant for another time. He straight up spells out how anyone can get soft contact with a holy guardian angel. What it basically entails is you find a quiet place and you pray every day for the divine to help you and to send you the holy guardian angel. And by the end of a month, you will have soft contact with the holy guardian angel. Any average human being. Again, you don't have to be a genius for any of this stuff. You don't have to be particularly intelligent or anything.

**Fred:** You just need the dedication and discipline to sit down or kneel down or whatever position you want to take and have the wherewithal to pray for 15 minutes every day for a month basically and you will get soft contact with the Holy Guardian Angel. That is a 100% guarantee. Your pizza is free, etc., etc., kind of thing. That's really all that it takes. You have to put in the bare minimum work of showing yourself and showing the cosmos in general that you are putting in the work to get contact with the holy guardian angel. And it takes a month if that.

**James:** So soft contact can begin well before work with Akasha or Non-Dual Light.

**Fred:** Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is one thing that I know a lot of people don't like Franz Bardon's IH and so forth. They're always trying to find a way to shortcut the process or they don't like the fact that he was, you know, a dude in the 1950s and60s who, you know, survived World War II and so forth. They don't like this, they don't like that about him. He's straight up step one and step two are effectively the hermetic version of doing this where you learn how to meditate, you learn how to pay attention to your conscience. Divinity will in its earliest fashion to the most even, you know, magically immature consciousness of a human being will make itself known by your conscience by what you realize is a good thing to do and what is a bad thing to do in its most basic form. And you know, for various reasons, people don't like to accept that. And those people are not going to have a good time.

**Fred:** They're they're going to get fooled by a lot of things that they otherwise would not have been fooled by if they had just sat down and done the work, which you know is a sad thing, but as you and I both know, the occult occults itself. If someone's not ready to put in the work, attain the level of humility, attain the mental, physical, and spiritual state necessary to engage with the divine, they're they're not going to succeed at engaging with the divine or Akasha or non-dual light, etc.

**James:** Once you began working with Franz Bardon’s system and Sixty Skills, particularly with Non-Dual Light, did that deepen or change your experience of the Higher Guardian Angel?

## Bardon, Sixty Skills and the Abramelin Operation

**Fred:** Oh absolutely. So the all these different things that I've trained, you know, the chiong and the kung fu and so forth. The friends bardon material and the 60 skills material together as well as the way that I achieved hard contact with the holy guardian angel by means of the Abramelin ritual. All those things have come together extremely well. And one of the nice things is also realizing like what I possess versus what someone else possesses from their different experience. So as an example, I don't know very many people who've done the Abramelin. I know maybe five people personally all across the internet basically and I know about 20 or 30 people who have done the Abramelin and gotten hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel through that way and most of the people that I know who have achieved who've done the upper melon and acquired hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel and the various benefits of the upper melon.

**Fred:** All of those people have been ritual magic practitioners. Not really internal power practitioners, but all of them have generally done some means of initiation into usually hermetic ritual magic which generally means for most pe most of them either golden dawn style initiation or they've initiated into another magical grimoire such as the u lameen the goetia of Dr. Rudd and like the, you know, the classic quote unquote Solomonic grimmooire material. And then once they've spent some time doing that material, then at some point they elected to or they were guided to or told to do the Aubberlon. And then that gives them one heck of a bonus and boost to their ritual magic procedures and so forth.

**Fred:** Like a lot of the stuff that they have to do to ensure a safe goetic, you know, that is a demonic magical evocation and so forth. A lot of the material that you see inside of those grimoires is aimed at basically maximizing your Non-Dual Light as much as possible. Essentially, you've got your time period of purification. You've got the various talismans that are used and consecrated in a certain way. You are, this is one thing that makes a lot of people mad as well, especially in the modern magical community who may or may not really have a positive view of organized religion and so forth.

**Fred:** Those grimoires are assuming you are living the lifestyle of an observant religious person from that time period which means you're going to church on Sunday or you're going to synagogue on Saturday you are partaking of the Eucharist you're doing the shem prayer every so many times per day etc to have that foundation so that you can on top of that take in the divine authority that is entrusted to you by the image through the image of God so that you can then compel the spirits to do what you want them to do basically. And once you have for those guys, once you have acquired hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel, either by doing the Abramelin or something else like the merk of a descent to the throne for example or otherwise, then you kind of always have the access to the divine authority within you because now you have the holy guardian angel with you at all times.

**Fred:** So you no longer have to do some of that stuff because the protocols and rituals and effects of the Abramelin or other modes of hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel basically supersede a lot of the stuff that most ritual practitioners have to do to ensure a safe ritual operation.

**James:** Sixty Skills also teaches a conscious way of generating and directing Non-Dual Light. Does having deliberate control of that process change the Abramelin work or contact with the HGA?

**Fred:** Oh absolutely. Knowing how to do something well will always make that thing work better. So going to the cultural and knowledge framework of the Abramelin for example straight up that is an Abrahamic style ritual going by the book. Going by the book itself it assumes you are a medieval observant Christian or Jewish person doing all the things a medieval Jewish or Christian person would be doing on a day-to-day basis. That is the assumption of the book. That book does not assume that you already know how to draw down the non-dual light, the heavenly energy, the energy of grace, the light of God, whatever you want to call it. Basically, that book does not even know that skill exists essentially. Now you and I, we both do 60 skills material. We both do material from Franz Bardon as well and so forth.

**Fred:** And if you can do that stuff explicitly on your own without the need of ritual, it's going to work that much better sort of thing. So as an example, I was going through Initiation into Hermetics. I was about step five or so when I got the signal, hey, you need to do the Abramelin now. Like it's been long enough. You've done the homework and so forth. Now you can like really work on not just having the hard contact of the HGA, but also the full knowledge and conversation part as well as the binding of the demons part. That way you're going to have the rest of your cultivation is going to be way easier that way sort of thing. Now, at that point, you know, I knew how to establish equilibrium of the elements. I knew how to generate Akasha that way. I knew how to generate non-dual light in that fashion.

**Fred:** And I also knew how to separately invoke and call down non-dual light through that ritual process. There isn't a lot of like ritual steps in the Abramelin. A lot of it is literally just you're going to kneel down in front of the altar and pray until God tells you otherwise kind of thing. But it in the beginning the generating and accessing the non-dual light is were separate skills and then over time you learn with any skill set you know be it martial arts or physical therapy or exercise or meditation methods and so forth.

**Fred:** Those kills will gradually merge with one another as you realize hey if I enter into a meditative state of mind before I start my prayers the prayers are that much more effective or oh hey if I follow those mental cues that Bardon mentions in The Practice of Magical Evocation when you enter into the ritual space and you enter into the circle and you realize you are the image of God that enters the center of the universe And when you light the candle, you are bringing the light of divinity and the light of enlightenment into this world. And like all those little steps here and there, you will with experience realize, hey, these things work synergize very well with one another.

**Fred:** And these other steps maybe are superfluous now that you've learned something from there versus its original source sort of thing. It's a very long-winded answer to say yes to your question.

**James:** So hard contact and the Abramelin operation are not identical. The operation adds Knowledge and Conversation and the binding process. You began it around Step Five, but because you were guided to do so—not because Step Five is a universal starting point.

**Fred:** Yeah. Like you know again I had my first contact with the HGA at this point like 11 years ago basically and it took me a while to freaking get around to it kind of thing. The this whole part as you because thanks to various historical factors the Aubberlon is a very famous grimmooire. It's a very famous ritual. A lot of people have talked about it. A lot of people have talked about the benefits of it as well. So, it's a natural question. Hey, I'm a random dude who's interested in magic and interested in the proclaimed benefits of the Abramelin. When should I do it? Basically, now if you actually read IIH, Initiation into Hermetics step five, if you're going by the book, that is the wrong time to do the operation basically.

**Fred:** I absolutely skipped a couple of stages there because, you know, I'm I'm very slow and I did some really stupid basically. If you actually read step five, step five is actually more explicitly about getting soft contact with the holy guardian angel. Yes. There's the ritual. I'm sorry, not the ritual. There's the skills training of like using the pendulum and you know making the ghost hand and that sort of thing or like doing mediumistic writing and automatic writing and so forth and basically using all these different techniques to gain the skill of getting that soft contact with the HGA.

**Fred:** Now as with all of initiation and hermetics you know a lot of people who actually do the work of IH they're going to start getting some benefits and abilities before that actual step like really solidifies things because it's step five that introduces different techniques for soft contact and it's like I don't know step seven or something like that before he explicitly and purposely introduces the training of clairvoyance and clairaudience and clairsentience for example. But if you've been going through the curriculum, you know, as intended, you're already going to have some clairvoyance and clairaudience and clairsentience way before step seven actually happens.

**Fred:** And likewise, it's actually step 10 in Initiation into Hermetics where you're where you're explicitly told and shown how to get the hard contact of the Holy Guardian Angel through Franz Bardon's method which is to put it as plainly as possible mental wandering until you find it and the Holy Guardian Angel introduces itself to you essentially. And then if you do things right, then you you get a lot of the experience kind of thing.

**James:** Soft contact in Step Five is important because it makes the work tangible. It is often the point where practice stops feeling theoretical and begins to feel undeniably real.

**Fred:** Oh, yeah. Exactly. It's like you realize, all right, have I really been able to like put air into my hands? Can I really do this sort of thing? And then you're you open your eyes, your real is your hand is like, you know, floating in the in the air essentially like your physical hand like when did my arm move? I didn't do that kind of.

**James:** Another community question asks whether daily hard contact with the HGA is equivalent to establishing elemental equilibrium each day. Are they the same process?

## Equilibrium, Akasha and Non-Dual Light

**Fred:** the answer is no to that one there. The ax. So this is one thing that I know that I personally fell into the trap thereof is that we especially in the 60 skills school and especially in just bardon in general we all understand the importance of equinimity. We all understand that equilibrium is important. Like Bob has even explicitly said that much of the system that he teaches is based on if on you operating from a position of equilibrium. We all you know vaguely understand that oh it's it's probably good idea that I don't have you know 10 points of fire and like one point of earth for example. Like we know that bad things are going to happen if you're that unbalanced kind of thing.

**Fred:** That all being said, equilibrium has some very specific benefits depending on how you achieve it because this is something that I've posted ad nauseam on the on the Perseus forum as well as on the discord. There are many different ways to achieve equilibrium of some sort. Now from the bardon and especially from the 60 skills side of things how do we judge the success of someone attaining equilibrium now we generally do so or at least I perceive that we do so that based on have you generated Akasha the void energy and have you been able to access non-dual light as a result of that sort of thing like sure you can put a lot of earth in your legs and water in your abdomen and air in the in the chest and fire in the head and you might not generate any Akasha whatsoever. You might not generate that eruption of non-dual light after that either. And that's I went through that process.

**Fred:** I know that I've that mistake can be done because I've done it myself. But eventually once you know how to really balance out those energies you click into the balance and it's like oh hey I have generated Akasha and non-dual light through the elements and then you know fast forward some time and it's like aha I can now do that with the electric and the magnetic fluids and then later on in the Qabbalistic letters aha I can generate Akasha through the letter B for example I can generate Akasha non-dual light and equilibrium and so forth now through the letter G. I'm I'm sorry, not G, the letter F for example. And those are some of the major benefits of having the skill of equilibrium, balancing out energies, putting them in their place, generating Akasha, and generating the access to non-dual light.

**James:** A practitioner can fill the four bodily regions with the elements and still only feel heavily charged rather than balanced. How can someone tell whether genuine equilibrium has actually been established?

**James:** What is the transition from merely filling the regions, to equilibrium, and then to the recognisable signs of Akasha?

**Fred:** Yeah absolutely. So this is a part of the story where I'm basically gonna flagrantly plagiarize Bob from 60 Skills because frankly speaking, like practicing the way that he taught me was how I got it essentially. So in Initiation into Hermetics, I think it's like step four. I'm pretty sure it's step four, maybe step five, where he formally introduces the equilibrium of the elements exercise. And you know for the longest time I was filling up the various bodily regions with you know earth here, water here etc. And then I was just sitting around like you know four inflated balloons on top of one another essentially like I just assumed oh equilibrium must be this like hyperelementally charged state and I just assumed that was it.

**Fred:** That was not it of course don't do that basically but eventually you know you want to call it divine providence dumb luck whatever I ran into you know Bob's YouTube channel and he talks talked a lot about equilibrium and then he also talked about oh it's actually not that you feel hypercharged with all four elements it's they actually balance one another out and at some point you might actually feel all the elements disappear from one another sort of thing like there's a sudden emptiness so to speak as everything perfectly balances everything out and then once I started paying attention to that I realized oh hey I actually did put a little bit too much water over here or I actually do feel the fire up top is pulling too much on the water below I need to balance that out a little bit and then eventually more and more I'd feel the elements canceling one another out rather than just like rubbing friction against one another so to speak.

**Fred:** And then once those experiences of balance and almost canceling each other out started getting more common then I started noticing the visual appearance of the Akasha that he talks about like those flashes of purple energy in the periphery of the vision and so forth and over time started hearing the shearing of metal and that penetrating dissolving sensation. And then once that started happening the majority of times of my attempts of establishing equilibrium then I realized aha this is it. I have I have the experience. I have the Akasha. I can use the Akasha itself as an energy. I must be moving along in my experience.

**Fred:** And then you know fast forward some time after that once I was in the Akasha I started realizing oh hey that dark purple is now giving way to this brilliant white beyond white energy and then I realized over time oh wow that's that's the non-dual light that's the heavenly energy sort of thing and yeah then it was off to the races.

**James:** My own experience is that the perception develops gradually, rather like the eyes adjusting to a dark room. The practitioner may need to remain in that state long enough for the spaciousness and dark-purple quality to become apparent, rather than declaring the attempt a failure too quickly.

**Fred:** Absolutely. Like that is one of the things that I will wholeheartedly kind of like you know crap on Bardon so to speak there is that you know he lived in a time and a place where people had a certain background understanding of esoterics or maybe they didn't they lived a particular lifestyle that made their bodies you know in a certain way and they also had a certain understanding of language. Yeah. Now, Bardon, you know, I'm I'm an English speaker. I've got English and Spanish and that's it basically. I don't know German. I don't know Czech. So, I don't know how Bardon may have written in his mother language. However, I've got the Merker publishing edition of Initiation in Hermetics, which again is a physical book in a different language that requires an economy of space. Mhm.

**Fred:** So, you know, Bardon naturally and his translator and editor, they had to skip a lot of material. They had to say, "Hey, you've only got, you know, I don't know, 200, 300 pages of text, and that's all we can publish for you." So, you know, quite naturally, he had to leave some stuff out. So in like step five or step six, I forget which step when he is explicitly talking about entering into the Akasha and like doing the center point exercise that he talks about. Yeah. Like you know he basically says like hey imagine yourself in the middle of a infinite dimensionless space and you know most people aren't gonna know what the hell he's talking about there.

**James:** One of the strengths of Sixty Skills is that Bob fills in the missing steps. That allows newer practitioners to progress much faster than many of us did.

**Fred:** I mean, you know, you flown. I mean you started I started in 2008 you know and it took me a good 15 years to get rolling and I feel the same way about the people coming after me. It's like, oh damn, that guy just like for example, there's one member of the u of the 60 skills community that I talked with them about qigong, for example. It took me six months before I had my first like yes, this is absolutely energy kind of experience. He did he pulled it off in like two days essentially and I'm like dude

**James:** I see people who began only months ago producing work that took others years to reach. Better instruction can shorten the path considerably.

**Fred:** Oh yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The fact that you know I make mistakes. You've you've made your decisions. I've made my decisions. I've made a lot of mistakes. Like one of my big things not just in the magical community but also in my like regular day-to-day job and everything is I feel very strongly about education and I also understand the importance of time and I don't want people to waste as much time as I did being able to do what I can do basically like I feel very strongly about that being an ethical obligation of teachers and anyone who shares their experience like you should be better than me kind of

**James:** That is one of the reasons Perseus exists: too much time is wasted through poor teaching and missing information. Let’s move to another practical aspect of your work.

**James:** In your reports, you often describe allowing an energy or letter to continue running for hours while you go about daily life. For readers outside Sixty Skills, what does that mean, and how does continuous practice contribute to your progress?

## Streaming Energy Through Daily Life

**Fred:** Oh, absolutely. So, yeah. So, in terms of definitions, again, I'm I'm gonna heavily plagiarize Bob just because he's done a lot of great work and like why reinvent the wheel, so to speak. And so, I'm I'm going to, like you said, I don't want to, you know, financially steal from him or anything. So, I'm going to stick to like what he's already said publicly, basically. So when we talk about you know streaming energy through the day essentially for the for the folks who have not read Bob's articles on Perseus or on his blog or on it or watched his videos on the Perseus YouTube channel and on Bob's own YouTube channel he talks extensively about a methodology called the ball above head method or the BAH method. Sometimes the ball overhead method.

**Fred:** And in energetics the esoteric anatomy of someone includes not just you know the meridians the energy channels that people talk about especially in Tibetan and Chinese traditional medicine but also energy fields like natural collections of energy in the body. In the Chinese u terminology you might hear the term dantian for example elixir field. So different energy fields of the body and different meridians of the body are very well suited for channeling focusing gathering and otherwise using various forms of energy. Like for example, the ball above head method is great for collecting energy from the overall cosmos, the overall universe, especially at an Akashic level, like the level that is beyond time and beyond space sort of thing.

**Fred:** For further details, you're going to have to look at Bob's specific meth materials there for the audience.

**Fred:** And eventually you know that energy flows and streams down through the body accessing different subtle bodies including the mental body, the astral body etc and you know eventually making it to the physical body where you can have your physical effects and so forth or effects in the physical world or if you look at The Key to the True Quabbalah by France Martin for example also effects in the astral world the mental world etc Now for most orthodox schools of energy cultivation and so forth generally they get their benefits during the actual formal training session and maybe for a little bit afterwards and then when they're in their dayto-day whatever they do on a regular basis if they want those benefits back sometimes they have to you know go off to the side and form normally do an exercise to like reactivate those benefits as an example.

**Fred:** Or maybe they have to go into a deep state of meditation, breathe in a certain way, you know, focus on a sigil or whatever, whatever. And that like reactivates the energy of their previous training or it unlocks some energy they have stored in their body already. Now what we do with the 60 skills training and so forth is we are allowing this energy to flow and stream through the body continuously even if you're not explicitly paying attention to it. So as an example right now I'm working on the Qabbalistic letter F as an example with a part of the Sunday cabala practice group and so forth. Like even right now I'm streaming the energy of the letter F. I have been doing that all day since I woke up basically.

**Fred:** There's the particular exercise that you do, you know, you're like formal quote unquote exercise and then you let the energy continue streaming in the background through the day. You know, it is a skill that can be trained. It's funny thing. Someone just yesterday on the u on the Discord server actually DM'd me asking me like, "Hey, hey Fred, how do you stream it in the background?" so I guess I'm going to talk about it again right now. The long and short of it is that almost any skill can be trained. There are very few things that are accessible only to like a natural prodigy or a natural talent. I am a living example of that. I don't have natural talent at anything.

**Fred:** Everything that I've developed has been through, you know, the long way of, you know, headbutting a wall until the wall breaks down essentially. I learn a lot that way, but it's also very slow. So, so I've benefited greatly from my various teachers who have shown me a better way of doing things. Like Bob as an example. And basically the skill of running the energy in the background can be built as a and trained as a skill like anything else. You know, first you are formally doing the exercise and then you know maybe after your formal exercise you know you walk around your training room you're not doing anything complicated. You're not paying attention to anything.

**Fred:** You're just making sure that the energy you cultivated is still going on while you're walking around doing nothing interesting. You know, something very easy and basic like that. And then maybe you take it a step further. You walk in a place that's a little bit more visually interesting. You go through for a walk in the garden. You go through the park. You walk outside. There's more things that can possibly distract you. But then you use that as an opportunity to train to keep that energy running in the background. And then you move on to something more complicated like having a very boring conversation about the weather with someone as an example or whatever else.

**Fred:** Or maybe you run the energy while you're doing another kind of exercise like when you're going for a jog or you're lifting weights or you're cooking a basic meal or you're watching television. You just check in every so often. Ah yes the energy is still running in the background or oh wait I lost it I have to restart it kind of thing and then you know over time the skill gets built up and it is it is a thing that can and will be achieved as long as someone puts in the effort for it.

**James:** That continuous approach is crucial. When a practice requires ten or twenty hours of exposure, streaming allows the practitioner to use ordinary daily time rather than relying only on formal sessions.

**Fred:** Oh, absolutely.

**James:** Before we finish, I want to discuss one of your reports in particular: your encounter with the gnomes.

**Fred:** No, we can share it. It's fine.

**James:** Could you describe how clearly you perceived them, whether the experience occurred through inner vision or clairvoyance, and what distinguished the encounter from imagination? This was also one of your first experiences with gnomes, and something significant was given to you during it.

## Mental Wandering and the Gnomes

**Fred:** Sounds good. But yeah, the so part of that whole like the context behind that whole experience is I'm I'm still going through Initiation into Hermetics. I'm still on step 10 right now. And step 10 part of the training involves you know projecting yourself to the various other realms plains of existence especially the elemental planes. And you know, Franz Bardon gives a particular way of doing things. And the long and short of it is he recommends that you essentially mentally shapeshift yourself into the form of whatever entity exists in the location you're going to go to. Which is one of the reasons behind the mental and astral shape-shifting of the previous steps.

**Fred:** Building up a lot of the energy of the location you're going to go to like earth energy for the earth plane and then you get yourself over there kind of thing and when I got there u you know I followed his procedure I popped on over to the earth plane and when I got there this was all eyes clo like physical eyes closed so to use some of the terminology the internal or eyes closed osed clairvoyance like seeing things, hearing things, not with the physical sensory organs, but rather like it's in your own head sort of thing. For the people who I know this is going to make people mad and everything, but it's like you're imagining a scene in your own imagination kind of thing.

**Fred:** Like that degree of seeing something, hearing something, or even just remembering a memory and like living through a memory, like that kind of hearing and seeing things. We'll get to like, you know, vetting the information here in a little bit if we still have time. Regardless, you know, the way I generally appear in the Earth plane is usually in some various underground caverns, there may or may not be light. Sometimes the only light, you know, quote unquote present is lanterns and torches being carried by other beings inside of the earth plane. At least that's how I've noticed things when I do my mental wandering to the earth plane. And at that point, you know, I've already done I've already had hard contact with a Holy Guardian Angel for some time at that point and whatnot there.

**Fred:** And I had realized that if you just show up to another plane, and you're just like blazing with the light of divinity and so forth there, it's kind of like you just showed up with a disco ball and it's like, "Hey everyone, look at me. I've got the light of God with me," etc. Kind of thing. It it can make some of those beings very uncomfortable to suddenly have like, you know, America's July 4th happen in their backyard, basically. So that's that is one reason why, you know, Bardon and some other people recommend, you know, changing your mental shape to the shape of the beings in your target location kind of thing because you want to be a good neighbor, so to speak, and you want to be polite.

**Fred:** So I'm doing my wandering around the around the Earth plane and so forth, and I start getting the impression, hey, I should I should do some stuff. Maybe I should introduce myself to some of the like the quote-unquote nobility and like the lords of the earth plane and so forth. And eventually I get introduced to one gnome who introduces me to another gnome and so forth. And one of these gnomes was like, "Hey, part of the conversation, this is going to sound, you know, very religious and so forth. It's like, oh, I see that you're a human. I see that you have the an angel with you, the light of the divine with you. Can you teach me like how I can access this heavenly light basically? And I'm like, okay.

**Fred:** So, you know, I taught him I taught the gnome a couple of things and the gnome's like, "Ah, thank you so much. Here's here's a gift for you." I'm like, "Oh, cool." And you know, I checked with the holy guardian angel first because, hey, this is a gift from a spirit entity. Do I have to be suspicious about this kind of thing? Which is one of the major benefits of having hard contact with the holy guardian angel? Just being able to straight up ask a being, "Is this a good idea? Yes or no?" kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, they give me the stone. It's like a small stone. It looks red and so forth. And I got the impression, oh, this is a grounding stone.

**Fred:** It is very good for, you know, establishing earth and, you know, bringing things down back into focus and back into balance and so forth there. As a hilarious thing I literally just now realized telling the story. It has the idea of the letter F like pulling things back into back into balance and back into focus and so forth. So yeah, I didn't see that coming. Anyways, so now I have this stone. Now I have this rock that provides balance and so forth. It is a purely energetic object. Is it is not a physical object like a physical rock did not suddenly appear in my training space for example in my home here and that'd be funny but yeah but then you know eventually the that earth noble gnome introduces me to a couple other beings I teach them also how to how to generate the heavenly light the non-dual light and so forth and they we some fun conversations and I return back to my physical form, my physical location and so forth. And now I have this magical rock in my inventory that I don't know what to do about it basically. So I start experimenting with it because Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

**James:** Please continue. It is a remarkable account.

**Fred:** Yeah. Yeah. So, this is one of the other things that I also got from the holy guardian angel is that one of the things just as background that a lot of people are not like they're like, "Oh, I can't do magic. I can't I don't have a temple altar. I don't have a wand made of this special wood. I don't have the funny hat and the funny robes and the funny belt and everything like that." so, they're like, "Oh, I can't do this stuff." one of the things that the Holy Guardian Angel gave me among other things was essentially you know I call it teaching the lesson of the object so to speak. For example, in The Practice of Magical Evocation, Bardon goes over like pretty much every form of ritual object you can think of, like the sword, the wand, the crown, etc., etc., and like this is what the crown means, this is what the wand means, and so forth.

**Fred:** And getting hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel really helped me utilize those lessons quote unquote so that now I can benefit from you know having such a magical object even if I don't actually have the physical object basically like Alexander Moore for example talks about when you generate the body of light and so forth you know making you know astral weapons and astral objects and so forth that your subtle bodies can benefit from and so forth. It's kind of like that in a way.

**James:** It is valuable to hear the account in your own words after reading your written report. We are approaching the end of the conversation.

**Fred:** Oh, yeah. I went over. Sorry about that.

**James:** Your answers have addressed the community’s questions in much greater depth than a simple question-by-question format would have allowed. Before we close, is there anything you consider especially important for practitioners to understand about the work we have discussed?

## Final Advice and Closing

**Fred:** Yeah. There's a lot that I want to say honestly, but I can always rant more on the Discord later on, but the this going to I want to end on a on a high note basically rather than like my usual negative note. But that all being said, if you're going to follow a process, do the process appropriately and buy the book. Don't try to change things without having a damn good reason to do so kind of thing.

**James:** That is an important point.

**Fred:** At least, I guess.

**James:** Slow and steady often becomes the quickest path.

**Fred:** Oh, exactly. I like that.

**James:** Trying to force progress can lead to doing twice the work and ending up back at the beginning.

**James:** Bardon’s system and Sixty Skills complement one another extremely well. Together they provide a broader and more detailed method than either may offer alone. Fred, thank you for such a thorough and inspiring conversation.

**Fred:** Sounds good.

**James:** That was Fred. I hope you found the conversation as useful as I did. Even when practitioners work with similar methods, hearing how another person experiences and understands them can reveal both important overlaps and meaningful differences. Details of the material discussed are included below. Fred is active in both the Sixty Skills Discord and the Perseus community. Thank you for reading or watching, and please share the conversation with anyone who may find it useful.

https://youtu.be/3yuNCRpzL-8?si=oQfnTdM8GRtjjyvN