--- title: "It’s Training Time! by André Consciência" url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/its-training-time-by-andre-consciencia/ date: 2024-10-06 modified: 2026-07-03 lang: en author: "Perseus Arcane Academy" description: "I have often and for long been asked about the time one should spend daily to progress well in magical training, or the number of times a certain exercise should..." categories: - "Guest Post" - "Western Traditions" tags: - "Franz Bardon" - "Magic" - "Meditation" image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/9edcfe0e-0dfd-4c45-825e-3502af2b7163.jpg word_count: 2524 --- # It’s Training Time! by André Consciência I have often and for long been asked about the time one should spend daily to progress well in magical training, or the number of times a certain exercise should be repeated for success. When I thought of addressing this issue in an article, my first contemplation was that the answers felt so common sense that it would turn into a boring article both to the reader and to the writer. However, since I have been asked this question often, I am compelled to change my thinking and realize that there must be a common ground from which this question arises and that it is not an exception, and the answer is not common sense. Both questions, how many hours of practice per day and how many times should an exercise be repeated, cannot be answered quantitatively if we are to remain honest. However, we can begin to try. --- ***[Read other posts by Andre Consciencia as well as interviews here.](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/?s=andre)*** --- Table of Contents - How many hours should you practice daily?- Do you practice during the morning?- Do you practice during the night?- How many times a day?- How many days a week?- Is the stomach full or empty?- Emotions and Mood- Novelty and Routine- Attention and Focus- Age- Trance and Memory- Finally, how many times should I repeat an exercise?- Relationship with time- Synchrony- Time in Depth- Agency- Encoding of Time- Time Distortion- Temporal Fragmentation- Perspective- Language Shapes- Time Awareness- Introduction to Magic ##### How many hours should you practice daily? Firstly, if I were to follow the premise that you should practice an exact amount of hours daily, I would have to assess which time of the day, how many times a day, how many days a week, if the stomach is full or empty, what you ate and drank, if you have defecated and urinated, the amount of hours you slept, the amount of hours you need to sleep, what is your physical condition, weight, what sicknesses you have, if you smoke, if your temperature is usually high (time feels faster) or low (time feels sluggish), the speed of your metabolism, if the space where you practice is subject to constant distractions or quiet, the specific exercises, etc. ##### Do you practice during the morning? Do you sleep through the morning? Or do you wake up early? That changes the meaning of morning for you. ##### Do you practice during the night? Do you tire and sleep early, or do you bash on the vitality of the stars? Again, this changes the meaning of nighttime. ##### How many times a day? If your time is completely free you can practice twelve times and it will just build up. If your time is completely taken you can practice twelve times and you will manage to build up a lot of stress instead. ##### How many days a week? Do you work at home? Is your work schedule always rotating? Do you have a constant job or are you a freelancer? ##### Is the stomach full or empty? Some people will tell you it is bad to practice on a full stomach. Others will tell you nothing important should be done on an empty stomach. Who is right? You get relaxed after eating. You build static when not eating. Advantages and disadvantages? Wait… What was the exercise again? We are not getting anywhere with this. Not if we try to address all the quantities that come with the original question, and let alone if we do not. Now, let us try to address the issue qualitatively. # Theory ##### Emotions and Mood When we are having fun, as they say, time flies by. Positive emotions lead to a state of “flow” and this “flow” is the nature of the Dao, the only state capable of making magic occur, as I try to transmit in [Introduction to Magic](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/23Nwq). In other words, magic only starts when we lose track of time, and conversely of our sense of space as attached to time. Then, removed from time, the magical space activates. When we are stressed (which includes boredom, discomfort, and anxiety), on the other hand, time drags. We can conclude that if we spend two hours training during stress, it will not achieve as much as 10 minutes in a state of flow, and yet it will still look like you have spent four hours training. Maybe it is a much better idea to enjoy your time training and fully engage than to stress yourself with the clock. ##### Novelty and Routine Is there a sense of novelty in your training? The more information you process, the more time you light up. The less information you take in, the more time burdens. Novelty has your brain processing information at high speed, even if the information is simply the silence of a mind empty of thoughts. So, maybe bring with you to the training that feeling of endless childhood summers when everything was new and an adventure. In 10 minutes you will process as much as in those two hours. Weeks blur together when adults compress repetitive experiences into a single memory, and yet time feels slow and heavy. Be careful that routine may not cut you from life, the only true master, and leave you a student who has been stuck for a decade on the same step. ##### Attention and Focus If you look at the clock enough when you are training, or try to listen to the alarm, every minute feels significant. So maybe spend all your training looking at that clock, and you will have trained these two hours for 120 meaningful minutes. Sarcasm aside, intentional focus is the objective, nothing else. This is why Franz Bardon for instance gives you timers like ten minutes. It is enough to create focus, and not enough for you to make time the objective. With enough focus your consciousness enters an altered state where a few minutes can feel like hours or a few hours like a few minutes. This is what you are aiming for. Time cannot teach you magic and you do not need it, instead you learn magic by being above time and time needs you. ##### Age Back to quantity, just for a little while, and where we can be both generalist and objective enough: if you are young you need to practice less because every time you practice it will fill more of your life experience than it would for an old person. The older you are, the longer you should practice daily, so magic has enough space to occupy a significant part of your life experience. ##### Trance and Memory Trance can freeze time in memory, one minute in trance becomes an hour with a hundred divinely intelligent reactions. You may be fixing your thoughts on a single subject for one hour and constantly forcing yourself back to it without much success, or you may surrender to your task so much that you enter a trance state: then not only have you mastered thought control as transference of consciousness, depth point and what else in a single blow. But you will still come back to these later in your training, see another angle in the appropriate time, because your devotion tells you so, your love and enjoyment for the craft, not that Saturn’s tyrant called time. When entering the temple, leave that wild race of today’s life at the door. I have given just a few examples of how quality should be prioritized over quantity when it comes to training. A lot more could be said. Let us also not forget that each person is different and each practice is different and this consequently affects how quantity should be considered. Mostly, Hermetics is not a race through time, but against time, leaving only a present now. You are never “out of time”, but outside of time, from where you can access “all the time in the world”. None of this is to say that, for instance, staying one minute in vacancy of mind is enough to master the exercise if well done. Staying ten minutes puts your willpower to the test. However, you will for time to stop being a resource and become pure rhythm. ##### Finally, how many times should I repeat an exercise? At this point, we can come to a satisfying answer. If the practitioner has mastered the qualitative key and, consequently, the exercise, he can choose to repeat it the number of times he or she sees fit for a certain outcome- and I mean quabbalistically, since the quality will have been imprinted on the decided number. # Practice Here are some exercises to help you change your view of time during your practice. ##### Relationship with time 1 Set the timer to 7 minutes. Wait for the 7 minutes to pass. There is the past where you started the chronometer, and the future, when the chronometer will hit seven minutes. The past and future feel split, and the present disoriented. 2 Set the timer to 7 minutes. During these 7 minutes, engage in your imagination with a deep, flowing and growing conversation with your most loved one. 3 Notice the difference. Every time you are training, you are engaging with and getting closer and closer to the Loved One, to the Divine you wish your union with. If it does not feel like it, review your motives to practice. ##### Synchrony 1 Set the timer to 5 minutes. Loosely wait for these 5 minutes to pass. You may notice that while you wait for these 5 minutes to pass your mind engages with different concerns regarding the past or future or about something going on in the present within the distance of space. All the while, something feels disconnected. There is a sense of isolation. 2 Repeat, but before you set the timer, have your mind synchronize its internal sense of time with you, the observer, creating a "time bubble," where both the observer and the thinker experience time similarly. 3 Notice the difference. If your practice does not make you feel like you are becoming whole you are only feeding a bad habit. ##### Time in Depth 1 Set the timer for five minutes and simply wait for it to pass. When it ends go about your life and then, the next day, recall these five minutes you experienced the day before. You may notice this meaningless task has shrunk in your memory, appearing void and fleeting. 2 Set the timer for five minutes, use them to celebrate intimately with yourself the most significant event of your life. 3 Notice the difference. If you train like it is meaningless, if you don’t know the meaning behind your training, or if it does not hold great meaning, there is no good reason to train. In fact, you are not training but wasting time. ##### Agency 1 Set the timer to 3 minutes. Get passively stuck with them. These simple 3 minutes are a dead end, a procrastination. 2 Set the timer to 3 minutes. During these 3 minutes, feel in control of all your actions and decisions. 3 Notice the difference. When you are training to master a certain skill, the training is about getting to know how you already master it. As they say, “you don’t know it until you feel it”. ** **1 Set the timer to 5 minutes. During these 5 minutes, reflect about your past experiences and the uncertainty of your future. 2 Set the timer to 5 minutes. During these 5 minutes, reflect about the uncertainty of your past and the certainty of the future magician in you. 3 Notice the difference. It is this magician you want to bring with you to the practice. It is he who practices. You are him. ##### Encoding of Time 1 Set the timer to 2 minutes. Count the seconds and minutes. 2 Set the timer to 2 minutes. You won’t likely be able to think of the numbers, but you will still be able to focus on the milliseconds. Do just that, leaving seconds and minutes out. 3 Notice the difference. During your practice, you want to engage the cerebellum (as in 2), it will feed you with a power that the basal ganglia and cortex (1) can often inhibit. ##### Time Distortion 1 Go spend some moments on social media. Let it go on indefinitely. After you finish, notice how the constant stream of updates and new content can make it difficult to form clear temporal boundaries. Also notice the "time gaps" when scrolling through endless feeds, where nothing of significance is registered by our memory, leaving a sense of amnesia. 2 Go spend time with your own mind. Let it go on indefinitely, engaging with it but not attributing any meaning to its manifestations. You will see that the mechanics are the same at play in step 1. This is the automatic mind you are to bring to your practice, it has been eclipsed by itself and time went with it. Any content that comes to the practice is not a manifestation of your automatic mind now, but a direct and undistorted manifestation of your willpower. ##### Temporal Fragmentation 1 Spend a couple of hours multitasking, like you probably do already if you are a busy person. Notice how time feels disjointed and how, with this, your focus is fragmented. 2 Spend a couple of hours doing a single one of the many tasks you quickly performed during your multitasking. Perfect it, savor it, be intimate with it. 3 Notice the difference. The magician is cyclopic in nature. Whatever task he or she has ahead, it is the absolute task. Apply it to your practice. ##### Perspective 1 Go do your practice. For the sake of example, let us say you are performing passive communication with the invisible ones. Imagine what it would be like if the spirit took your hand in order to write, or what it would be like if the spirit spoke through your mind, etc. 2 Go do your practice. In the same example, imagine that the spirit is taking your hand and writing, until there is no other possibility and to the point of experiencing it. I suspect why some practitioners get stuck in IIH is because they did not realize everything Franz Bardon states about autosuggestion in the beginning is to be diligently practiced in every single exercise from there on. ##### Language Shapes 1 Describe out loud what you did today and yesterday, then what you will do today and tomorrow. 2 After a while, repeat, but without using the past or future tense, as if your language only had the present moment. 3 Notice the difference. During your practices, all must be holistic. ##### Time Awareness 1 Set the timer to 5 minutes. Look forward to the 5 minutes to pass and time to move past you. 2 Set the timer to 5 minutes. Look up for the five minutes to pass and time to move below through you. 3 Notice this difference between horizontal and vertical time. You want to move through your practices, you don’t want them to move past you. # Conclusion No amount of time practicing will change your attitude toward practice and lead you to success. Without the right attitude, all you can do is collect countless hours of failure.